Chapter 45: The Breath of a Sea Without a Moon

"What are you feeding it?" Roderick asked on the thirty-sixth morning.

Aren had his palm pressed flat on the glassy plate of a dead Bell-Eater. He thought one word, and the hardness in the plate went to nothing, and the cold in his side swallowed it and went quiet.

"My debts."

Roderick laughed for about an hour. Aren wasn’t entirely sure what was funny, but he was beginning to suspect that anything was funny after seven hundred days alone.

He fed it every day after the eel, without fail. Every morning, before anything else, he dutifully went down to the shore or up into the hanging streets and found something to touch. It might be a Bell-Eater’s plate, or the thick skin of an eel, or once, the edge of a jelly drifting low, its soft light going out under his palm like a candle pinched between two fingers. Then the cold went quiet again, satisfied, watching.

He didn’t lose anything else, as far as he could honestly tell. But every night he checked, like a man counting the coins in his pocket after walking through a crowded market. Blue. Green. The grey of the sand. The pale gold of the roofs. He said the names of the colors out loud, slowly, one by one, in the dark of the barred storeroom.

"You do that every night." Roderick’s voice came from the floor.

"I know."

"My mother used to count her rings like that. Before bed." He rolled over. "Someone stole one anyway."

’Thank you, Roderick. Very comforting.’

On the thirty-eighth day, he remembered the book.

He had gone through it twice in the Chronicles room on the fourth floor of the library, a lifetime ago, before he left it open on Vivienne’s desk. A thin grey book with a cracked spine. On the Tides of the Breath, for Those Who Draw the Moon. He had only read it so he would know what he was giving her. But he had always been good at remembering numbers and pages, and down here he had nothing else to do.

He sat on his rock with his eyes closed and pulled the pages back up one by one. Most of it was about breath. Long, slow breaths drawn down to the very bottom of the body and held there, then let out in one smooth line, like the tide going out. The moon doesn’t give its own light, the writer had said, two hundred years ago in Valdris. It returns the light of the sun. Those who draw the moon must learn to do the same. Take nothing. Return everything.

The first time through, he had thought it was poetry. The second time, he had thought it was complete nonsense.

Now he was sitting at the bottom of the Abyss with a Grade S technique he had taken from a girl who had no idea he had it, and he thought it might genuinely be the most practical advice he had ever read.

He called the crescent. It came, the size of his hand, silver and tight, but dim and thin, like a coin worn smooth by too many fingers. There was no moon down here, nothing to draw on, and the silver in his chest felt like a well with the rope cut.

He tried stubbornly for three days, and on the third he stopped trying to draw anything at all.

He went down to the place where the jellies gathered thickest, a wide shallow bay east of the hanging city where hundreds of them drifted low over the black water. He had noticed it in the first week without understanding what he was looking at, and he understood it now.

The black sea never moved, not by a single ripple, so it was the most perfect mirror he had ever seen. Hundreds of soft blue and green lights hung in it, the jellies above and the jellies below, so the whole bay seemed to float in a sky full of slow lanterns. And in the middle, where they were thickest, their reflections ran together into one pale disk on the water. Round, soft, silver.

It wasn’t the moon. But it was light, returned by a surface that kept nothing for itself.

He sat facing it and breathed as the book said. Down, all the way down, past the grinding heat of the Flesh stage in his muscles and past the cold sleeping in his side. He held it there. He made no effort to pull the light in. He only let it come, as the black sea did, and let it go again in a single smooth line.

The silver in his chest stirred.

It came slowly, a thread at a time, like water finding a new path through sand, but it came. And when he lifted his hand and called the crescent, it came off his fingers brighter than it had ever been, quiet and steady, and for the first time it wasn’t straining against him.

He made it deliberately small, the size of a fingernail, then as long as his arm. He made two at once, then three, then five, turning slowly around him in the dark like little moons around a planet. He sent them skimming out over the black water without a ripple, and they came back when he called.

[Crescent Moon Blade (Grade S). Mastery: 31% → 47%.][Moonlit Step (Grade A). Mastery: 22% → 31%.]

’Sixteen percent in one afternoon! I should have fallen into the Abyss months ago.’

Behind him, someone clapped.

Roderick was crouched on a rock, watching intently, his eyes enormous.

"You’re a moon class. You never said."

"I’m not. It’s complicated."

"Everything with you is complicated, ghost." Roderick hopped down and walked to the edge of the water and looked at the pale disk in the middle of the bay. "I sat here for a hundred days at the start, watching that. I thought it was a way home." He paused. "It isn’t, by the way. I swam out to it once. There’s nothing there."

He turned around, and for the first time since Aren had met him his face looked almost serious.

"You want to get out. I can see it. You sit on that rock and count, and look up at the dark like it owes you money."

"Yes. I want to get out."

"Then you need to see something." Roderick started walking toward the hanging city. "Come on. It’s a long climb."

It took them most of the day.

They went up through the inside of the tallest tower in Varn, climbing on the underside of the stairs through rooms where the furniture hung over their heads. When the stairs ran out they climbed the walls, and when the walls ran out they climbed the chains of old chandeliers. Aren’s arms burned horribly the whole way. Roderick climbed effortlessly, like a spider, and never once stopped.

"How much further?" Aren gasped, somewhere near the top.

"Not far."

"You said that an hour ago."

"It was true an hour ago too. Far is a feeling."

At the very top, where the tower met the black stone ceiling the whole city hung from, there was a crack, long and narrow like a split in old wood, just wide enough for a person. Roderick went in first, and Aren squeezed awkwardly in after him.

On the other side there was a ledge, and beyond the ledge there was the Abyss.

Aren had thought he had seen it already: the grey shore, the black sea, the hanging city and the jellies. He had been completely wrong. All of that was a pebble on its floor.

The dark went on forever beyond the ledge, up and down and out in every direction, and scattered through it like islands in a black sea were other places. Some were so far away they were only smudges of light. A forest hanging upside down, its trees made of something white and bony. A mountain floating on its side, with rivers pouring off it into nothing. A field of broken towers from a dozen different ages, tangled together like the bones of a hundred animals. A place where it was raining, with no sky to rain from.

"Everything the Abyss swallows ends up somewhere." Roderick spoke quietly. "Cities, forests. Whole kingdoms, sometimes. They break off and float down here and stay. Varn is just one piece." He pointed. "That forest, I went there once. Took me two hundred days to come back." He held up his left hand. Two fingers were missing. "The Bell-Eaters are the nicest things down here, ghost. Varn is the safe part."

’Wonderful. I’m living in the nice neighborhood.’

"And that one?" Aren asked.

He pointed at the nearest. It was much closer than the others, maybe a day’s climb along the underside of the great black ceiling, and it looked like it had been a city too. But it was burning. There was no fire, only a dull, heavy glow coming up from inside it, from cracks in its walls and the windows of its broken towers, as if the whole place were a coal that had never quite gone out. It was the color of embers, though he could no longer have named that color.

Roderick’s face changed abruptly.

"The Furnace. It glows red, all the time. Nobody goes to the Furnace."

To Aren it was only heavy light. "Why not?"

Roderick took his time answering, and when he did, his voice was very low.

"The day you came, a little before you, something fell from above. I saw it from here. It was black, like a hole in the dark, and it was screaming. It fell right into the middle of the Furnace." He looked at Aren. "Since then, the things that live there don’t sound like animals anymore. They sound like they’re talking."

The cold in Aren’s side went motionless.

He thought about a thin black thread rising out of Leon Harrow’s chest on the white sand, twisting in the moonlight. He thought about the Rift that had opened under Vivienne’s feet, and about what had fallen into it first.

"There’s one more thing. The flowers. The black ones that grow where nothing grows." He pointed past the Furnace, beyond its glow, into the deep dark. Aren had to squint. Very far away there was a faint, pale light, neither blue nor green but white and warm, like something leaking through a crack from a world that still had a sun.

"They grow there. Around the chains. The big ones that go up." He paused. "And the only way there is through the Furnace."

From the burning heart of the city, very faint on the hot wind, something answered them.