Chapter 52: Terms

The hand came down exactly where he had been standing.

Aren was already gone, because the Moonlit Step threw him sideways, half a step farther than his body could go, and the giant’s fingers closed on the stone behind him and tore up a slab of the square the size of a door.

He rolled, came up, and ran, and as he ran he saw the shape of the fight. The two chains on the giant’s ankles were stretched taut into the ground, and it could reach only as far as its arms and those chains allowed. That gave it a ring of broken stone thirty paces wide, with the anvil in the middle. Inside the ring it could touch him, and outside it couldn’t.

But outside the ring were the hounds.

They came out of every street at once, drawn by the noise and the heat and the smell of the three that had died. There were no packs and no loops anymore, only a flood of cracked black backs and glowing seams and open jaws, pouring toward the square from every side.

Roderick was standing in the mouth of the narrowest street.

It was a gap between two fallen towers, barely wide enough for two hounds side by side, with walls too hot to climb. Everything coming from the east had to come through it, and Roderick stood in it with his bone blade in one hand and a broken length of iron chain in the other, swinging it slowly like a rope before a throw.

The first hound reached him. The chain caught it across the face and snapped its head sideways, and the bone blade went in under its jaw.

The second came scrambling over the body of the first.

Roderick held his ground stubbornly. He had fought monsters alone in the dark for seven hundred days, but he had never had anything to stand in front of before. He stood in the gap and shouted at them, rude and loud, and he didn’t give them an inch.

Aren turned back to the giant.

It had risen as high as it could on its knees, both arms free, broken chains swinging from its wrists. The hammer was in its right hand. Above its shoulders the smoke had become a wide dark mouth open over the stump of black iron, and the sound coming out of it was like a crowd screaming very far away.

[Hollow Choir (fragment). Anchor.][Hostility: 100%.]

He had two uses of Zero, the eel blade, the cold in his side, and whatever was written along his ribs.

’That’ll have to do. It usually does, right up until it doesn’t.’

He went straight in.

The hammer came around in a long flat sweep, low across the ground. He jumped it awkwardly, and it passed under his boots so close that he felt the heat of the iron through the soles. He landed inside the giant’s reach and ran straight at its knee.

The empty hand came down on him from above.

He didn’t try to dodge. Instead he breathed in, reached in, and swung upward, and the black crescent touched the giant’s palm a heartbeat before the palm touched him. For that heartbeat the hand had no weight. It landed on him like a sheet falling on a bed, soft and huge, and he shoved it aside with one arm and kept running.

[New Moon. Mastery: 48% → 49%.]

He reached the knee. The iron there was fused into one great scarred plate, glowing along its seams, and above it the giant’s body rose like a cliff. It was twenty feet of armor to the shoulders, to the stump, to the place where the smoke went in and out.

That was where it really lived, not in the hammer or the hands but in the hole where a head had been.

He started to climb.

The armor was hot, and his hands blistered and healed and blistered again. He went up the thigh hand over hand, using old dents and the seams between the plates, while the giant twisted and tried to throw him off.

Then the hammer came, straight down from above, aimed at its own leg and at him, like a man slapping an insect on his arm. He saw it coming clearly and had nowhere to go.

The cold in his side moved before he did.

[Familiar of Nothing: entry returned.][Day 70. The hardness of a loose stone.]

For one heartbeat, every inch of him was as hard as the rock he had fed it on the climb to the Furnace. The hammer struck him across the back.

He didn’t break. He simply flew.

He hit the ground on the far side of the anvil, rolled four times, and stopped against the base of a broken pillar with the breath knocked out of him and something wrong in his left side. It was ribs, two or maybe three, and breathing felt like breathing nails.

He got slowly to his knees.

Across the square, the mouth above the giant’s shoulders turned toward him. The screaming stopped, and slowly, like something drowning reaching for a word, it began to make shapes, wet and clumsy, that were words.

"Little... brother."

He went cold all over instantly.

"Your... little sister." The mouth stretched. "She hears us too."

Aren stayed exactly where he was.

"The mark on her arm." Every word came easier now, as if it were remembering how. "At night. When the hill is quiet. She hears us singing under the stone. She hums along." The mouth smiled, wide and wet. "She doesn’t know she’s doing it."

He remembered Nell in the bed by the window, the bandage on her left arm, and how she sometimes hummed while she read, a low tune he had never been able to place.

He stood up very deliberately.

His ribs screamed, and he didn’t even hear them.

He didn’t go around this time. He went straight across the open square with the Moonlit Step pushing him half a step farther with every stride. The giant swung the hammer at him. He cut the crescent across its path, the hammer lost its weight in midair and flew wide, and the giant’s whole body twisted after its own swing and nearly fell.

Then he was on its knee, on its thigh, on the plates of its stomach, climbing faster than before and not caring about his hands.

The empty hand came for him again. He put his palm flat against it as it closed around him.

’Zero.’

All the strength went out of the giant’s hand and the fingers fell open. In the same instant all the strength went out of Aren too, and he hung from the edge of an iron plate by nothing for one long heartbeat, his fingers loose, his arms like wet rope.

Then the heartbeat ended, his grip came back, and he held on grimly.

He climbed the last of it and came up over the giant’s shoulder onto a ledge of black iron beside the stump. Up close, the stump was a hole, wide and round, leading into the dark inside the armor. Smoke was pouring out of it, and above it the mouth was turning toward him and opening wider, so wide he could see nothing in it at all.

"She’s ours. Like the boy. Like you, almost."

Aren knelt at the edge of the hole and pushed his bare arm straight down into the smoke, up to the shoulder.

It was colder than the Abyss itself.

He felt it there inside: the thread, the rest of it, thick and wet and twisting, coiled through the armor like a root through a pot, gripping every plate and joint and rivet. It held the dead iron like a hand holds a glove.

This time he didn’t aim at its will. He aimed at its hold.

’Zero.’

The thread let go of the giant, all of it at once, every coil and every root. And Aren’s own hold on everything went with it: his knees on the iron, his hand on the plate, his grip on the thread in his fist.

He fell.

He fell off the giant’s shoulder with his arm still wrapped in the black thread, and the thread came with him, pulled out of the armor in one long wet rope, twisting and screaming. He couldn’t close his hand on it, or on anything, and the ground came rushing up at him.

The scar on his side opened.

The white beast unfolded out of him in midair, six legs and long neck and blank head all at once, like a sheet of paper snapping open in the wind. Its head split from snout to throat, the black ink shining inside.

It bit.

It took the thread out of the air, the whole long screaming length of it, just as it had taken the first half from Roderick’s throat.

The screaming stopped.

Aren hit the stone hard. The white beast landed beside him, light as a bird, and folded itself back into his side before he had finished bouncing.

Above him the giant stayed on its knees with its arms half raised. Then, slowly, like a tower falling, it tipped forward over its anvil. Iron struck iron with a deafening crash. The sound rolled out across the whole burning city and came back from the far walls again and again, one last blow of the hammer.

Then there was nothing.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.][Consumed: Hollow Choir (fragment).][Anchor liquidated: Hollow Choir (fragment).][Hostility record closed.][Final return triggered.][Result: x100.][Return: Write-Off (Lv. 1 → Lv. 2).][Write-Off may now be used on one other person.][Anchor slots: 2/3. One slot available.]

He lay on his back on the hot stone and stared at the window until the words stopped swimming.

One other person!

He thought of Nell’s arm.

It was quiet at the edge of the square. The hounds had stopped, all of them, everywhere, in the same moment the giant fell. They lay down where they stood, in the streets and the doorways and the narrow gap between the fallen towers, their coal eyes dimming and their cracked flanks rising and falling slowly, like dogs finally told they could rest.

Roderick walked out of the gap between them.

He was bleeding from his shoulder and both arms and one side of his face. The chain was gone, and the bone blade was notched in three places. He crossed the square without looking at the sleeping hounds and sat down next to Aren on the hot stone.

"You climbed it," he said eventually.

"Yes."

"With your ribs like that."

"Yes."

"You’re an idiot, ghost."

"So I’ve been told, mostly by you. Mira says it too."

Roderick looked at the fallen giant, then at Aren’s face.

"It said something to you at the end. I saw your face change from across the square. What did it say?"

Aren looked east. Past the edge of the burning city and the broken rim, across the long dark, there was a light. It was pale and white and steady, nothing like the flicker of the jellies. It looked like a window.

"It said my sister can hear it."

Roderick was quiet for a moment. "The white light. You told me once there were flowers there."

"Yes."

"For your sister."

"Yes."

Roderick stood up slowly and held out his bleeding hand.

"Then let’s go and pick them."

[New Moon. Mastery: 49% → 52%.][Moonlit Step. Mastery: 34% → 37%.][Rank D: Flesh Tempering. 63% → 68%.]