Chapter 115: The Singing Ship

[Day 25 of 40.]

He followed the song west for most of a night.

It was easy to follow. It never stopped and it never wavered, a dozen voices rising and falling across the ice in perfect harmony, and the closer he came, the more beautiful it was. By midnight he could pick out each voice on its own. By the second hour after midnight he could hear the words, though he didn’t know the language.

The frozen soldiers were listening too.

They had turned in the ice to face the west, all of them, ten thousand dead men with their heads tilted and their hollow eyes fixed on the sound, as patient as a congregation.

’Even the dead like a good choir. Lovely!’

The ship lay in a wide bay at the western edge of the lake, where the mountains came down to the ice in black cliffs. It was bigger than his own, a three-masted warship from some forgotten navy, frozen upright with its sails still hanging stiff and white from the yards. There were lanterns on its deck, warm yellow lanterns, the first fire he had seen on the lake that wasn’t theirs.

The singers stood along the rail.

There were twelve of them, in long grey robes with their hoods thrown back, men and women of every age. Their faces were calm and their mouths were open, and their breath rose from them in silver threads that drifted out over the bay and sank into the ice. Iron Sense found nothing on them but a few buckles and a knife or two.

But under the ship, in the hold, it found a great deal of iron, bands and bars and a heavy cage, and inside the cage something beat slowly in time with the song.

[The Hollow’s fourth lung.]

’They put it on a ship. Somebody in the Choir has a sense of humor.’

He walked out onto the open ice of the bay, alone, with the bell on his cap ringing softly at every step.

The song didn’t stop. It changed.

The twelve voices dropped together into a single low note, and the ice of the bay heaved under his boots. All around him, the frozen soldiers broke free. They came up out of the ice in their hundreds, in rusted mail and broken helmets, with frost streaming off their shoulders, and they turned toward the little masked figure in the middle of the bay and began to walk.

They didn’t run, and they didn’t need to. There were far too many of them for running to matter.

At the rail, one of the singers stepped forward, an old woman with white hair and a kind, tired face. When she spoke, it wasn’t her voice.

"Little eater," said Ansel warmly. "How kind of you to come. I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you properly."

"You’re not really here."

"I’m wherever my verses are." The old woman smiled with his smile. "And you’ve been eating them, haven’t you? Picking them out of my children one by one, every night, like a thief in a pantry." The smile went away. "I’d like you to stop."

The dead were thirty paces away now. Twenty.

"And if I don’t?"

"Then you’ll find out what a choir is for."

The twelve voices rose again, all together, and this time the song came for him.

He felt it hit like warm water. It came in through his ears and his skin and the eye holes of his mask, a soft grey tide of patience and comfort, and it found the places in him that were tired and told them they could rest. It found the places that were frightened and told them nothing was wrong. It wrapped itself around his heart and began, very gently, to hum.

His feet stopped moving!

’Oh. Oh, that’s clever. That’s very clev...’

Then the Familiar woke up.

It didn’t uncoil or stretch or purr. It simply opened, all at once, every part of it, a starving thing that has just smelled meat. The song that was wrapping itself around his heart went straight into it, all of it, a dozen voices’ worth of verse pouring into the cold dark under his ribs.

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 34% → 36% → 38%...]

The twelve singers faltered.

It was only a stumble, a ragged half-beat where twelve voices didn’t quite land together. But Aren heard it, and so did the dead. Two hundred frozen soldiers stopped in mid-stride, swayed, and stood swaying on the ice while the song tried to find itself again.

He didn’t give it the chance.

The Familiar went out of him in a long black ribbon, thirty paces of hungry dark, straight across the bay and up over the rail of the frozen warship. It went down the line of singers like a hand down the strings of a harp, and every voice it touched simply stopped. The verse inside each singer, the deep old song the Choir had planted in them years ago, came out of them in one bite.

He didn’t bother being careful. These weren’t children in a hold.

[Verse extracted. Bearer destroyed.]

[Verse extracted. Bearer destroyed.]

[Verse extracted. Bearer destroyed.]

The singers fell one after another along the rail like candles going out. The old woman with the kind face was the last. She swayed at the rail with her mouth still open, and Ansel’s voice came out of it one more time, thin and furious.

"You don’t know what you’re eating!"

Then the Familiar took the last verse out of her, and she folded quietly onto the deck.

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 38% → 44%.]

Around him, the dead collapsed.

Without the song to walk them, they simply fell where they stood, hundreds of them, a long rolling clatter of old iron across the ice of the bay. Aren stood in the middle of it and let it finish. Then he walked across the bay, climbed the frozen anchor chain of the warship, and dropped down onto its deck among the bodies.

He stood over the old woman silently.

She looked smaller now, and older, and very ordinary. Her face was turned toward the eastern sky, where the first grey light was coming up over the peaks. He wondered how long the Choir had been inside her, and whether she had ever had a name of her own, and whether anybody, anywhere, was still waiting for her to come home.

He didn’t let himself wonder about it.

The cage in the hold was a cube of black iron bars as tall as a man, and the lung hung inside it from a chain, beating slowly, pale and blue and wrapped in its own coil of song. He put his hand flat against the bars.

’Eat.’

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

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

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 86% → 94%.]

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

[Verse extracted. Bearer destroyed.]

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 44% → 52%.]

Fifty-two percent.

He sat down on the frozen floor of the hold with his back against the cage and laughed softly, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do. Over half! Seven people still lay in the hold of his own ship, waiting, and he could free all of them now, two a night, maybe three, without the Familiar so much as twitching.

He searched the warship thoroughly before he left. It was a habit, and in the Hollow it had already paid for itself twice.

In the captain’s cabin, on a table bolted to the floor, someone had laid out a map. It wasn’t like Ivo’s. It was newer, drawn in black ink on good paper, and it showed the whole White Hollow from shore to shore. Five small circles had been marked on it in red. Three of them had been crossed out, very recently, in a careful, angry hand.

The fifth circle was in the exact center of the lake.

It was drawn right over the iron ring!

Beside it, in the same careful hand, somebody had written a few short lines.

The fifth sleeps under the ring. The girl goes with it. Day 38. I will come myself.

Aren read it twice. Then he folded the map carefully and put it inside his shirt with the Crown’s letter and Ivo’s notes, until his chest was a little library of other people’s plans.

’The girl. Freckles. He means Freckles.’

The thought went through him colder than anything on the lake.

He went home across the ice in the full light of morning, slowly, because his legs had finally remembered that he hadn’t slept.

Halfway back, he saw a figure on the rock by Kaela’s camp, standing alone at its western edge with a lance in her hand. She had heard the singing all night, the same as everyone. Now she had heard it stop. She watched the little masked figure walk out of the west across the ice, and she didn’t move until he had passed.

The dead lay where they had fallen, and the sky was clear and blue, and somewhere behind him, on the frozen deck of a ship in the west, twelve people who had once been someone lay facing the sun.

Sigrid met him at the top of the gangway with bread and said nothing about the look of him. Jory was standing behind her, and Tessa, and the Corvane twin, all of them awake, all of them watching him quietly.

The count rose to meet him there.

Sixteen.

From the hold beneath his feet, seven voices answered in a single warm, grey voice, smaller than ever. Then seven more answered on their own, ragged and cracked and real.

And then, under the ice, very far down, something slid out of a black iron pillar, and a cracked old voice laughed in the dark.

"One," said the prisoner.