Chapter 34: Broken Promises

He went to Crane that night, because it was the last thing left to try.

He did not go as the Rag, or as Wraps, not with a note in capital letters slipped onto a desk in the dark. He went as exactly what he was supposed to be: a Servant from Class D knocking on his instructor’s door at the end of a long day with a small, confused question.

Crane’s rooms were on the ground floor of the old building near the basement classroom, and a thin line of light showed under the door. Aren knocked twice, politely. After a long pause, it opened.

Crane was still dressed, his desk behind him buried in papers, a cup of tea going cold beside a candle. His face was bored, as always, but his eyes were deeply tired.

"Servant."

"Sorry, Professor." Aren kept his head humbly low. "I was in the courtyard today watching the Measure, and I saw something strange, and I didn’t know who to ask."

Crane waited.

"The paint at the bottom of the platform. The gold blessings the deacons put there." He hesitated awkwardly, like a boy afraid of sounding stupid. "Every time someone touched the glass, the paint glowed, and when they came down they looked tired. And at the end, when the champion touched it, the paint didn’t stop glowing. Is that how it’s supposed to work?"

Crane looked at him for a long, careful moment. It wasn’t how he usually looked at students. It was the measuring look Aren had felt from the Headmaster and from Rook, and Aren kept his face confused and slightly embarrassed and didn’t look away.

"I saw." Crane finally spoke.

"Then..."

"Stay out of the Great Hall, Servant." His voice was very quiet. "The Headmaster’s orders were clear. Stay out of the hall, stay out of the arena, and stay away from anyone in white and gold. You’re Rank F, a Servant, and whatever is happening in that hall is not something a Servant can touch." A pause. "Do you understand me?"

"Yes, Professor."

Crane studied him a moment longer and then closed the door firmly.

Aren stood in the dark corridor. So Crane had seen it too, and Crane was afraid of it, and Crane had just told him in the plainest words possible to stay out of the way.

’I would love to! Nothing in the world would make me happier.’

Tiller woke him an hour before dawn, tapping on the window from the ivy outside. Aren had never seen Tiller look anything but bored, but now his small grey face was terribly pale and there was blood on his sleeve that wasn’t his.

"They came for the fence," Tiller whispered. "Middle of the night. Six of them, and not the two big ones from before. Different. Quiet. They didn’t climb over, they just walked through the gate like the paper wasn’t there." He swallowed. "Benn and Little Corr were on the gate. They tried to stop them. They’re dead."

Aren sat up quickly. "The guard?"

"Came at the noise, a sergeant and four men, but the grey ones were already leaving. The guard chased them to the river and caught nobody." Tiller wiped his face with the back of his hand. "But they were in that cellar for maybe a quarter of an hour, Aren. I saw lantern light under the water."

"Did they finish?"

"I don’t know. That’s why I came."

Aren looked out at the dark city. It was the second day of the Festival, and in three hours, in the training yard behind the Great Hall, Mira would step into a circle of white sand to fight a girl from Class C. Day two. Morning. You promised.

If the Choir had driven a new nail into that cellar, the ring was whole again, and in two days, in front of ten thousand people, they would sing.

He was already pulling on his boots hurriedly.

The dye house was quiet in the grey dawn, the new gate hanging open on one hinge and two shapes lying in the lane beside it under sacking. Rook’s men, who had been told they were guarding a ruin for an easy week’s pay. Aren did not look under the sacking. He didn’t need to.

The cellar looked the same as before, the fallen floor and the black, still water, with no red light and no shimmer, only cold dark water where a Rift had been. He took off his coat and boots and wrapped a strip of plain black cloth around his face. No bandages, not anymore, because the Choir knew all about a man in bandages. The System settled over him anyway, cold and slippery, and he stepped down into the water.

It closed over his head, so bitterly cold that his chest locked and for a moment he couldn’t think at all. He pushed down, feeling blindly along the bottom through broken stone and old mud toward the middle of the cellar where the platform had stood inside the Rift, and his fingers touched iron.

He couldn’t see a thing, so he read it with his hands. A stake, like the one he’d sold on Lantern Street, thick and cold and covered in tiny raised runes. It was driven into the stone, but only halfway, and the top was rough and uneven, as if someone had been hammering it in and stopped in the middle.

’They were interrupted. The guard came, and they ran before they finished.’

His lungs were starting to burn. Thirty seconds, maybe.

The easy thing was to pull it out. He had done it before and could easily do it again, carry it up into the dawn and break the ring the way it had been broken for a month. And the Choir would know, again, that someone had broken it. They’d come back with more men, quieter ones who walked through gates like paper, and make another nail and another, as many as they needed, and every time someone would die guarding a fence for an easy week’s pay.

If you want to beat a man who’s cheating you, you let him think he’s won.

He drew his knife and felt along the runes with his left hand until he found the place where they were thickest, a ring of tiny scales just below the top. Then he pressed the point firmly into the iron and dragged it hard across the ring. Black iron didn’t cut deep, but it scraped, one line through the middle of a hundred little marks, the way you’d strike a line through a word in a contract.

His lungs were screaming. He kicked up toward the grey light, broke the surface, and dragged himself clumsily out onto the broken floor, gasping and shaking with cold.

He had no idea if it would work. He didn’t know the first thing about how the runes worked, or what one scraped line would do to a song he’d never heard. But a nail that looked finished and wasn’t was better than a nail that was missing. The Choir would come back to finish their hammering, see their marks, and go away satisfied, and on the last night, when they sang, maybe the ring wouldn’t answer.

’Maybe. Worst trade I have ever made! It is all I’ve got.’

He got back to the Academy at noon, soaked to the skin, hair still wet and hands still shaking, and he heard the noise from the training yard before he reached it. Cheering. The morning duels were over, and students were spilling out in laughing groups, arguing about who’d won.

"...the Hearthwarden girl from Class D, did you see? She just walked through the lightning..."

"...knocked her flat, the Class C girl didn’t even get up..."

He stood still in the middle of the path and let them go past.

Mira was sitting alone on the low wall at the edge of the yard with her hair loose, her face flushed, and a bruise coming up on her cheekbone. People stopped to congratulate her as they went by, and she smiled at each of them and said thank you, and when they’d gone the smile went away.

Then she saw him, his wet hair and the mud on his trousers.

"She kept her left hand low," Mira said quietly. "After every strike. Just like you said. I walked right into it." She looked down at her own hands. "It was the best fight of my life."

"Mira..."

"I looked for you." Her voice did not shake, which was the worst part. "Before the duel. I looked at the stands the whole time they were reading the rules. I thought maybe you were just late. Then the instructor dropped his hand and I just..." She stopped. "You promised."

He had nothing to give her. Every true thing he could say would get her killed, and every lie he could tell her, she’d see straight through.

"I’m sorry."

"I know you are." She stood and brushed off her trousers without looking at him again. "You’re always sorry, Aren."

She walked away briskly toward the dormitories.

He stood in the path with water dripping from his hair, and somewhere behind him a clerk was calling out the afternoon duels.

"...Class D, Servant, against Class B, Aldous Penrose. The white circle. Now."