Chapter 113: The Whiteout

[Day 17 of 40.]

The storm came down off the mountains on the morning of the sixteenth day, and by noon the White Hollow had disappeared.

Aren stood on the deck of the ship and watched it come. It wasn’t snow, exactly. It was a wall of white moving across the lake at the speed of a running horse, and the frozen soldiers vanished into it rank by rank, as if somebody were wiping them off a slate. Then it reached the ship, and he couldn’t see his own hand in front of his mask.

Ivo found him by the rail the next morning, following the sound of the fool’s bell.

"You can’t go out in that," the scout shouted over the wind. "Nobody goes out in a whiteout. You walk ten paces and you’re lost forever."

"The third errand is in there."

"How do you know?"

Aren didn’t answer. He knew because the Familiar had been pulling him toward the storm since dawn, the same patient tug it had given him on the day of the Barracks, and because the storm wasn’t moving like weather. It had been circling the same patch of ice for a whole day, slowly, never drifting.

Something in the middle of it was breathing.

’And whatever breathes out a storm this size has a very big pair of lungs.’

He went down into the hold before he left. Sigrid was coming up the ladder with an empty bread basket, wax still in her ears, and she pulled one plug out to hear him.

"How many?"

"Fourteen," she said flatly. "The Merrow girl went last night. The younger one."

He had known it would happen. The priest had told him so, through a fifteen-year-old’s mouth. Knowing didn’t help.

"Keep them warm," he said. "I’ll be back tomorrow."

"You keep saying that."

"I keep coming back."

Sigrid studied him silently, then put the wax back in her ear and went to the galley without another word.

The storm swallowed him twenty paces from the ship.

He had expected cold, and the cold was there, the deep white cold of the Hollow that went through furs and skin and straight into the marrow. What he hadn’t expected was the silence. The wind screamed all around him, but under it there was nothing at all, no ice cracking, no distant hum from the hold, no frozen soldiers turning their heads. His eyes were useless, and so were his ears.

So he stopped using them.

[Iron Sense (C). Range: 30 paces.]

The world came back as iron.

It was everywhere under the ice, the old armor of ten thousand dead men, and he could feel all of it within thirty paces: breastplates, buckles, spearheads, the rivets in a helmet, the nails in a pair of boots. They made a map in the dark behind his eyes, a field of small cold points, and he walked through it carefully, from one point to the next.

After an hour, the points began to move.

He stopped dead. Something was walking toward him through the white, and it was made of iron, a great deal of it. It was shaped like a man, but taller than any man had a right to be, and it carried something long and heavy across its shoulders.

Then another one appeared to his left, and a third behind him.

’Wonderful! The storm has guards.’

The first one came out of the white an arm’s length away. It was a soldier, or it had been one, frozen solid and coated in a thick crust of rime, with an iron flail as long as a cart hanging from its fist. Its eyes were two holes full of snow, and it didn’t need them any more than Aren did.

The flail came down where his head had been.

He was already gone. Moonlit Step put him half a pace to the right, and the iron head of the flail buried itself in the ice with a crack he felt through his boots. He knew exactly where the second one was, eleven paces behind him, its weapon rising, and the third, which was circling wide to cut him off.

He didn’t bother running away.

The eel blade came out of his coat. New Moon went out flat and low through the whiteout, invisible even to him, and he only knew it had landed because all three iron shapes in his head suddenly came apart. Their hardness went to nothing along the edge of the crescent for one heartbeat, and the storm did the rest. The wind tore them to pieces and carried the pieces away.

[New Moon. Essence: 100% → 82%.]

More shapes came after that, a dozen of them, then another dozen. They came out of the white one after another, flails and axes and long hooked spears, and every one of them walked straight into a mind that could feel iron from thirty paces away. He broke them with his fists and the eel blade without ever seeing them. Most of the time he didn’t even stop walking.

By the fortieth he had stopped counting, and the storm had begun to change.

The wind was dropping. The white was thinning into long grey veils, and through them, at last, he could see the ice under his boots, and a dark shape rising out of it ahead.

It was a bell tower!

It stood alone in the middle of the lake, black stone sheathed in ice, the top of some drowned temple that had been too tall for the water to swallow. A great iron bell hung in its open arch, and it was moving. It swung slowly, back and forth, without a sound, and every time it swung, the storm breathed out around it.

Iron Sense told him the rest. The bell was hollow, and inside the hollow, where the clapper should have been, something hung on a chain.

He climbed the tower quickly in the eye of the storm, hand over hand up the ice. Nothing tried to stop him. The guards had all been out in the white, and the white was gone.

The lung hung inside the bell like a pale blue heart, beating slowly. It was wrapped in a verse, he could feel it, a little coil of the Choir’s patient song wound tight around it, so that every beat of the lung pushed the song out into the storm and the storm out over the lake.

He reached up and touched the iron.

’Eat.’

The Familiar poured up into the bell and closed around the lung.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Ledger entry added: The Hollow’s third lung.]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 75% → 86%.]

[The lung was wrapped in a verse of the Choir.]

[Verse extracted. Bearer destroyed.]

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 12% → 25%.]

The bell stopped swinging. Far behind him, back across the lake, the last grey veils of the whiteout fell out of the air as snow, softly, all at once, and after two days of white, the sky above the White Hollow was clear and blue again.

He sat on the edge of the arch with his legs dangling over the drop and read the last line again.

Twenty-five percent!

He had no idea what number was enough. He only knew that at one percent he had nearly torn Jory in half, and that at twelve he had been afraid to try. He looked back toward the ship, a dark speck on the white, and felt the weight of fourteen people sleeping in its hold.

’There’s only one way to find out what twenty-five buys!’

It was dark when he reached the ship. He went straight down into the hold, past Sigrid, past the two Tallymen at the hatch, who turned their round iron faces to watch him go by. The fourteen lay in rows on the tilted planks under their blankets, humming softly in their sleep.

Jory was on the end, nearest the ladder.

Aren knelt beside him and laid his palm flat on the boy’s chest.

The verse was there, the same small, patient coil he had felt on the ice, tucked behind the heart and rooted in everything. But this time he could see its edges. They weren’t sharp yet, and they weren’t clear, but they were there! He could feel where the song ended and the frightened, stubborn warmth that was Jory began.

The Familiar uncoiled under his ribs, hungry.

’Only the song. Only the song, and you leave the rest of him alone, or I swear I’ll starve you for a week.’

He let it go, one thread at a time.

It was easily the slowest thing he had ever done. He felt the Familiar touch the verse and stop, felt it want to keep going, and held it there, at the edge, while it picked the song loose from the boy’s heart one strand at a time. Twice it slipped. Twice he pulled it back before it could bite, and Jory’s breath caught and his back arched off the planks.

Then the last strand came free, and the song went into the Familiar and was gone.

[Verse extracted. Bearer intact.]

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 25% → 27%.]

Jory stopped humming.

He lay there in the dark of the hold with his eyes open, staring up at the planks. Then he turned his head and looked at the fool kneeling beside him, and Aren saw his face crumple.

"I could hear everything," the boy whispered hoarsely. "The whole time. I could hear myself, and I couldn’t stop."

"I know."

"I tried to break your ribs."

"You did a terrible job of it!"

Jory laughed weakly, and then he was crying, and Aren sat back on his heels and let him. Around them, thirteen voices went on humming the same low tune, patient and grey, and none of them noticed that one voice was missing.

Sigrid was standing at the bottom of the ladder. She had taken the wax out of both ears, and she was staring at Jory.

"How long," she asked quietly, "for the rest?"

"One a night, if I’m careful." Aren got to his feet. His hands were shaking, and he put them in his sleeves. "If I’m careless, none of them."

"Then be careful," she said simply.

The sun came up over the eastern peaks the next morning, and the count rose through the ice into the soles of his boots.

Sixteen.

On the rock, faintly, the others answered. From the hold beneath his feet, thirteen voices answered all at once in a single warm, grey voice that wasn’t theirs.

"We’re here."

And then, a heartbeat later, alone and cracked and completely his own, a fourteenth.

"Jory. I’m here!"

Far below the ice, under the drowned city and the iron gate with the empty circle, something slid out of a black iron pillar with a long, thin scrape, and a cracked old voice spoke to the dark.

"Two," said the prisoner, and smiled.