Chapter 51: The Chain

"It’s nothing." Roderick waved it off when Aren caught him rubbing his throat on the eighty-first day. "It only hurts when the hammer’s loud."

The hammer was always loud now.

Aren had counted carefully. The giant broke a chain every four or five days, and there were three left. Ten days, maybe twelve, and it would be free.

And the window had stayed open for two days.

He never closed it. He deliberately let it hang in the corner of his sight while he ran the bridges and fed the cold in his side and swung the eel blade at the walls of empty towers, and every time he stopped to breathe, it was waiting.

[Release an Anchor to free a slot?]

He worked it through in the dark of the storeroom while Roderick slept on the floor with his back to the barred door.

Vivienne was the Primary, so she wasn’t even a question.

Rook was on the surface, a world away. Whatever Rook did up there, whatever he grew into, Aren would see none of it until he climbed out. It was a dormant account. If he had been advising someone else, that was the one he would have told them to close. Cheap, safe, nothing lost that anyone could see.

Roderick was here, and he was the only Anchor still paying. One black eel had pushed Roderick into Bone and pushed Aren out of Skin in the same breath. There was still Blood ahead, and Marrow, and the rest. Years of returns were sleeping soundly on the floor.

And the number was falling.

Fifty-five, and it would be lower tomorrow. Aren knew, because he had watched Roderick cook his own fish and laugh at his own bad jokes and talk fondly about a girl who had called him Roddy. Somewhere under that number there was a line, and the only way to keep Roderick above it was to keep him hating someone.

Two months ago he would have done it without thinking. A sharp word here, a small humiliation there. Keep the fire banked.

He lay in the dark and listened to Roderick breathe, slow and even, as he had on the twenty-eighth night, the first time he had slept lying down.

’My old boss would have fired me for this! Then he’d have framed the letter.’

Then, finally, he chose.

[Anchor released: Roderick.][All future returns from this Anchor are lost.][Anchor slots: 2/3. One slot available.]

He felt it go, a thread he had not known he was holding, somewhere behind his ribs, loosening and sliding away into the dark. That was all. Roderick didn’t wake, and nothing in the room changed.

It was the first asset he had ever willingly let go of for nothing.

He told Roderick in the morning. He left out the System and told him only the part that mattered.

"I’m going back to the Furnace. And I’m going to make it worse before I make it better."

Roderick listened to the whole thing with a strip of cooked eel halfway to his mouth. When Aren finished, he put the eel down.

"You want to break its chains." He said it slowly. "For it."

"One of them."

"So it gets free faster."

"So it gets free on my day instead of its own." Aren pressed his hand flat against his side. "It’s going to break them anyway, one every few days, and I can’t stop that. I can’t kill it either, not as I am now. You’ve seen it. One swing of that hammer and there’s nothing left of either of us." He paused. "But if I help it grow, I grow too. That’s how it works for me. Don’t ask me why."

Roderick stared at him.

"That thing was inside my throat."

"I know."

"And you want to help it."

"I want to help it once. Then I want to kill it."

Roderick picked the eel back up and chewed, looking out past the blocked window toward the faint heavy glow on the horizon.

"I’m coming."

"It wants you. That’s the whole..."

"It wants me either way." Roderick touched his throat. "When it’s loud, I can still feel where it went in. If it gets free while I’m sitting in Varn, it’ll come up the ceiling to find me, and I’ll be on my own." He shrugged. "I’d rather be standing next to you when it does."

The Furnace was a different place without the voice.

Aren saw it from the ceiling, lying flat on the same hot ledge where Roderick had heard his mother. The hounds no longer walked in loops, or anywhere in particular. They roamed aimlessly through the burning streets in ones and twos, snarling at each other, fighting over the crawling grey things in the gutters and sleeping wherever they dropped. Nothing was watching through their eyes, and nothing was keeping them in order either.

In the square, the giant knelt at its anvil and struck it. Once. A pause. Again. Its left arm was free now, the broken chain still hanging from its wrist and dragging on the stone each time it moved. Above its shoulders the smoke rose and gathered and fell apart.

[Hollow Choir (fragment). Bound.][Hostility: 100%.][Hostility threshold met.][Anchor this target?]

’Yes.’

[Anchor established: Hollow Choir (fragment).][Anchors: 3/3.]

Something cold slid into place behind his ribs where Roderick’s thread had been. It felt nothing like the others. Vivienne’s anchor was a stretched wire, humming. This one was like holding the end of a rope with something very large on the other end of it, deep underwater, that hadn’t noticed yet.

Then the smoke above the giant’s shoulders turned toward the ceiling.

It had definitely noticed.

"Ghost." Roderick’s voice was very quiet. "Why is it looking at us?"

"I may have just made it my business partner."

"I hate you so much."

They went down by the north tower, as they had last time, Roderick first with his bone blade and Aren behind with the eel blade cold in his hand.

The first hound found them in the second street.

It came out of a doorway low and fast, with no welcome and no voice, just a beast as tall as a horse with its jaws open and heat pouring off its cracked crust. Rank C, a full rank above them both.

Aren left Zero alone. He had one use of it today, and he knew exactly where he would need it.

He breathed in, reached in for the cold, and swung.

The black crescent crossed the street without a sound and touched the hound’s front legs. For one heartbeat they had no strength at all. The hound’s own weight folded them under it and it went down chin first on the burning stones, and Roderick was already there. The bone blade went in behind its skull, through the thin place where the crust met the neck.

It stayed down permanently.

[New Moon. Mastery: 47% → 48%.]

The second hound took two crescents, because the first one missed. The third Aren didn’t fight at all. He took the grip out of its back legs as it leaped over a broken wall, and it slid off the far side into a glowing crack in the street and never came out.

Three. The cold in his side tugged at him hard, and he fed it on the run, the heat from a wall and the hardness of a loose stone.

They reached the square, and the giant stopped hammering.

It turned on its knees to face them, ponderously, the way a mountain would turn if a mountain could. The broken chain dragged across the stone behind its free arm. The smoke above its shoulders twisted, trying to become a face, and for a moment it almost did. It wasn’t Leon Harrow’s face anymore. It was something with too many mouths, all of them open.

"Left side. Keep it looking at you."

"Lovely," Roderick muttered, and ran.

He went wide across the square, shouting loudly. Aren had never heard him shout like that. It wasn’t the screaming from the wall of seven hundred marks. It was the way boys in the lower city shouted at each other across the river, rude and loud and alive. The giant’s head of smoke swung after him, and the hammer rose.

Aren went the other way.

The chain on the giant’s right wrist ran down from the iron cuff into the burning ground, each link as thick as a man’s waist. He reached it just as the hammer came down on the far side of the square, and the whole floor jumped under his feet.

He looked at the link nearest the ground. The old iron there was pitted and dark, worn thin by three hundred years of pulling.

He breathed in, all the way down, and reached in.

The black crescent touched the link, and for one heartbeat the iron forgot that it was hard.

The giant pulled, and the chain parted like wet bread.

[Anchor progressed: a chain has broken.][Source: Investment recorded.][Mirror Return triggered.]

The small wheel appeared in front of his eyes, and he had no time to watch it. The giant’s right arm was free, and it was swinging around toward the place where the chain had held it, toward him, an armored fist the size of a cart.

The wheel crawled past x10, into the wide band of x100.

He threw himself flat. The fist went over him so close that the wind of it tore the breath out of his chest.

[Result: x100.][Return: Limit broken.][Reduce to Zero (Lv. 1 → Lv. 2).][Uses per day: 1 → 2.]

’Two a day! Now we’re talking.’

The heat hit him from the inside, quick and sharp, like a door kicked open somewhere in his chest. He was on his feet before the fist came back.

"Ghost!"

Roderick was on the far side of the square, backing away. Behind him, drawn by the noise and the heat and the smell of their dead, the hounds were coming out of every street at once. Dozens of them.

The giant rose.

For the first time in three hundred years, it reared up on its knees with both arms free, the broken chains swinging from its wrists, the hammer in one hand and nothing in the other. Only two chains held it now, one on each ankle, stretched taut into the ground.

Above its shoulders, the smoke finally gathered. It made no face at all this time. It made a mouth, just one, enormous and open, and from it came a sound that wasn’t a word, and wasn’t polite, and wasn’t patient.

It reached hungrily for him with its empty hand.