Chapter 50: New Moon

You could hear the hammer from everywhere in Varn.

It came across the dark from the Furnace, slow and heavy: one blow, a long pause, then another. During the day, under the soft knocking of the jellies against the towers, Aren could almost forget it completely. At night he lay in the barred storeroom and counted the pauses between the blows, and they were getting shorter.

Roderick slept peacefully through it, and that was the first strange thing.

The second was that he talked.

For fifty days, Aren had known him as a voice that came in pieces, cracked and wild and always half turned toward someone who wasn’t there. Now he talked like a person. He asked questions and waited for the answers. He made jokes, terribly bad ones, and laughed at them himself. He cooked his fish without being asked and complained that Aren burned his.

"Team Four." He brought it up on the seventy-sixth day, while they sat under a bridge eating eel. "Did they all get out? The day I fell?"

"Most of them. Tam’s leg was hurt. He’s fine now." Aren hesitated. "Mira carried him out on her back."

Roderick stopped chewing.

"Mira Hale. The Hearthwarden girl. With the loud voice." He looked at Aren. "You know her?"

"Since we were eight."

Roderick turned the eel over in his fingers. "She used to share her bread with me at lunch, the first week. I didn’t have any money. She said I looked like a starving cat." The corner of his mouth went up. "She called me Roddy. Nobody had ever called me that."

He said nothing else for a while. When he finally looked up again his eyes were wet, but they were the eyes of a boy remembering something, not a boy seeing ghosts.

[Roderick. Hostility: 62% → 55%.]

Fifty-five. It had been ninety-three a week ago.

Aren had no idea what happened if it kept falling. The System had never told him. He only remembered the words it had shown him on the night he anchored Rook, and again in the room with the seven hundred marks, and a third time above the Furnace with no slot left to put them in. Hostility threshold met. So there was a threshold, a line somewhere, and he didn’t know where it was or what happened to an Anchor who crossed back under it. Maybe nothing. Maybe the returns shrank. Maybe the thread simply broke, and Roderick would just be a boy again, worth nothing to the System at all.

Two months ago he would have found out. He would have tested it carefully, like thin ice with the end of a stick. A sharp word. A favor that stung. Keep the number high, like a fire banked through the night.

He went quietly back to his eel and did nothing at all.

’Look at me, being a decent person! It’s terrible for business.’

He trained every day instead.

In the mornings he ran the bridges, underneath them, hanging by his hands and swinging from one rusted support to the next, then dropping onto the underside of a street and running along it with the Moonlit Step, upside down, with the black sea far below his head. He fell twice the first day. Roderick laughed so hard he nearly fell too.

In the afternoons he worked on the crescent, and that was the problem. In the jelly light it came, small and silver and quick, and he could keep five of them turning around him now. He could cut a crab in half. He couldn’t have cut through a Cinder Hound’s crust, and he knew it. Borrowed light only went so far, and in the Furnace there would be no light to borrow at all.

[Crescent Moon Blade. Mastery: 47%.]

It had not moved since the night by the black sea. A whole day of swinging until his shoulders burned, and not one percent.

On the seventy-eighth day, the jellies went dark.

It happened every few days. All over the city the jellies dimmed together, like a crowd going quiet when someone important walks in, and for a few hours Varn was as dark as the bottom of a well. Roderick called it the long night. He said you couldn’t climb in it. He claimed that in his first year he had lost two fingers to something that only hunted in the long night, and he still didn’t know what it was, because he had never seen it.

Aren went out onto the bridge anyway.

"You’re mad!" Roderick called after him from the storeroom door.

"You keep saying that like it’s news."

He couldn’t see his own hands or the eel blade. He found the middle of the bridge by counting steps and stood there with the blade held out in front of him, in a darkness so complete he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open.

He reached for light, and there was none. It was the Furnace again, the hand closing on air, except here there wasn’t even a glow to pretend with.

He kept going stubbornly.

He thought about the grey book and the breathing, and Vivienne in the arena with her cheek in the white sand, pulling the full moon down into her body like water into a bowl. The moon had answered her because it was hers. Her family had cut with it for three hundred years. It was painted on her armor and her carriage and her flags.

Nothing had ever been painted on anything for him. On the morning of the Genesis Wheel, the crystal had looked at him and found a zero.

The cold in his side had been heavy since the Furnace, full and quiet like a snake after a large meal. He could feel the new line of ink along his ribs, thicker than all the others.

He breathed in, slowly and all the way down, and this time he didn’t reach out for anything.

He reached in, for the cold, for the place where things went when he took them away.

The eel blade grew cold in his hand, then colder, then so cold his fingers ached around the grip, and he swung.

Something left the blade. There was nothing to see, but he felt it go, a curved shape cut out of the dark and darker than the dark around it, like a hole in black cloth. It crossed the gap in front of the bridge without a sound.

Ten paces away, it reached the wall of the nearest tower.

He heard stone falling, but it wasn’t cracking or breaking. It was pouring softly and steadily, like sand out of a split sack.

He stood on the bridge in the dark until the jellies woke.

When the light came back, slowly, blue and green, drifting out of the empty windows, he saw what he had done. There was a curved cut across the face of the tower, as long as he was tall and as deep as his arm, with clean edges. On the street below it lay a small heap of fine grey dust.

The stone hadn’t been cut. For one heartbeat, along that curved line, it had stopped being hard and simply let go of itself.

[The Host’s class has rewritten a skill.][Zero does not accept the moon.][Crescent Moon Blade → New Moon (Grade S).][A crescent with no light. Along its edge, one property of what it touches is reduced to zero for one heartbeat.][Mastery carried over: 47% → 44%.][What belonged to the moon stays with the moon.][Cost: the Familiar’s hunger.]

The cold in his side shifted, hungrier than before. He fed it before he did anything else, the grip of a grey crawler from the gutter and then, when that wasn’t enough, the warmth of the fire Roderick had left burning in the storeroom.

"Hey! My fire." Roderick was standing at the end of the bridge.

Aren hadn’t heard him come out. Roderick was looking past him at the cut in the tower.

"That’s not what the Ashgrave girl does."

"No."

Aren thought about it, standing there. Everyone in Highcrest knew the silver crescent. It had been on every flag at the Festival. If a Servant from Class D had ever cut with it in the street, half the city would have known by morning whose secret he had stolen. But nobody had ever seen this. It didn’t shine and it didn’t come from the sky. It belonged to no House at all.

"What do you call it?" Roderick asked.

Aren looked at the dust on the street.

"New moon. The night there isn’t one."

He spent the next two days learning what it could do and what it couldn’t.

It could take one thing, and only the thing he chose before he swung. Hardness from stone. Weight from a falling chandelier, which drifted to the street like a leaf. Grip from the claws of a crab, which slid off the wall and fell. It lasted one heartbeat, the same as Zero, but unlike Zero it didn’t come back to him. Nothing went light or soft or weak in his own body.

The Familiar paid instead. After three crescents the cold in his side began to pull at him, sharp and insistent, like a child tugging at a sleeve. After five he felt it reaching for something inside him, and stopped at once.

’Three, then. Feed it. Three more. Don’t get greedy.’

[New Moon. Mastery: 44% → 47%.][Moonlit Step. Mastery: 31% → 34%.][Rank D: Flesh Tempering. 59% → 63%.]

On the eightieth day, the hammer stopped.

He noticed it the way you notice a clock that has stopped ticking. He was hanging under a bridge halfway through a swing when he realized the silence had been there for some time.

He climbed up onto the street. Roderick was already there, staring across the dark at the faint smear of heavy light where the Furnace was.

"It stopped." Roderick’s voice was barely a whisper.

They waited tensely.

Then a new sound came across the dark. It was a long, slow tearing, iron screaming against iron, going on and on and ending in a crack so loud it shook dust from the ceiling of the hanging city.

Roderick’s hand went to his throat, to the place where the thread had gone in.

[Hollow Choir (fragment). Chains: 4 → 3.][Hostility: 100%.][Anchor slots: 3/3.][Vivienne Ashgrave (Primary).][Rook.][Roderick. Hostility: 55%.][Release an Anchor to free a slot?][Warning: A released Anchor can never be anchored again.]

Aren looked at the last line. Then he looked at Roderick, standing at the edge of the street in the jelly light, holding his own throat.

Across the dark, the hammer began again. Faster now.