Chapter 53: The Lily Field

They left the Furnace by its eastern rim, the long way round, through the outer ring.

The hounds didn’t care about them anymore. They lay lazily in the burning streets where they had dropped when the giant fell, flanks rising and falling, coal eyes half closed. One lifted its head as the two boys passed and watched them with the dull patience of an animal that has eaten. None of them stood.

Aren walked with one arm pressed to his ribs, and every breath scraped. Roderick walked close beside him and said nothing about it, which was exactly how Aren knew it looked bad.

Past the rim the stone ended. Beyond it there was only the long dark, and a bridge.

It was a chain, really, one of the great chains that ran through the Abyss, as thick as a man’s waist. It came down out of the black overhead at a long, gentle slant and passed below the rim of the Furnace on its way somewhere deeper. Its links were carved all over with fine lines of marks, and from inside them came a faint warm light like old gold, beating slowly. A heartbeat in the metal.

"That’s what I meant. The big ones that go up."

They walked carefully along the top of it, link to link, with nothing underneath. It took most of a day. Aren kept his eyes firmly on Roderick’s back the whole time.

"Don’t look down," Roderick warned, somewhere in the middle.

"I wasn’t going to."

"I’m just saying. I looked down once. I didn’t sleep for a month."

"Thank you, Roddy. That’s very helpful."

The white light grew as they went. At first it was a smudge, then a glow on the underside of the dark like dawn behind a hill, and then it was close enough to feel on his face. It was warm, nothing like the heavy heat of the Furnace. It was warm like a window in the morning.

The chain ran down into a hollow in a floating shelf of rock, and the hollow was full of flowers.

There were thousands of them, thin black lilies standing in the grey dust so close together that the ground couldn’t be seen between them, all the way to the edges of the shelf. Their petals moved very slightly, like the one under the merchant’s glass dome had moved, though there was no wind at all. Above them, where three chains came down out of the dark and crossed over the field, the white light fell.

It came down along the chains from very high above, from a crack, Aren thought, somewhere at the top of everything. It fell on the field in long pale shafts like light through a high window into a dusty room, and wherever it touched the flowers, they leaned toward it.

He stood at the edge of the field and simply couldn’t move.

One lily, the Headmaster had said, given at the right time, could push a mark back for years. One. Old Mag would have cut a throat for one. The merchant on Lantern Street sold them for memories.

’And I’m standing in a whole field of them! Nell, I’m going to bring you so many flowers you’ll be sick of them.’

He knelt and gently took the nearest one. Its stem was cool, and it came out of the dust without a sound.

[Abyss Lily. Grows only where the light of the world above reaches the Abyss.]

He picked twenty, very carefully, from the edges where the field was thickest, laid them on a strip of dried eel skin, wrapped them and tied the bundle with cord. He didn’t take more. It felt like the kind of place where you took what you needed and nothing else.

When he looked up, Roderick was still standing by the chain.

He was just outside the light, where the last shaft of it ended on the dust, holding his left hand out into it, as carefully as someone testing bathwater.

"Roddy."

"It’s fine."

It wasn’t fine. Aren could see the back of his hand from where he knelt. The skin had gone dark, then darker, and now it was rising in small blisters, like the skin of a man who had fallen asleep in the summer sun. Roderick watched it happen with no expression at all.

"Take it out."

Roderick took it out and looked thoughtfully at the blisters.

"Seven hundred days in the dark. I always wondered what it would do, when we got out. When I saw the sun." He turned the hand over. "Now I know."

Aren went over and looked at the hand. Then at the field, and at the light falling on the black petals and going nowhere. The flowers didn’t reflect it or shine. They drank it, just as the black sea in the bay below Varn had kept nothing for itself.

"Sit down. Out of the light. Give me your knife."

It took him the rest of the day and most of the night.

He didn’t cut a single living flower for it. Walking in, he had noticed that the dust between the stems was thick with fallen petals, old ones, dry and black and soft as ash, years of them, maybe centuries. He gathered them by the handful and laid them in rows on the eel skin, overlapping like slates on a roof. He made a needle from a splinter of Roderick’s bone blade and thread from the gut of the last eel in his pack, and he sewed.

He had never sewn anything in his life except the slit in his mattress where he had hidden a vial and a nail. He was terribly bad at it, and he kept going anyway.

A cloak first, long enough to reach Roderick’s boots, with a hood that came down over the eyes. Then a pair of clumsy gloves with the fingers too long. Then a strip for the face, wound twice, with two narrow slits to see through.

Roderick watched him from the shadow at the edge of the field, eating dried eel.

"You know," he murmured once, near the end, "that’s the first thing anyone has made for me since my mother."

Aren kept his eyes on the needle. "It’s ugly."

"It’s very ugly," Roderick agreed cheerfully.

When it was done, Roderick put on all of it, cloak and hood and gloves and the strip across his face. He stood up, a long black shape in the grey dust, walked into the white light, and stood in the middle of the field with the shafts falling on his shoulders.

He held out his gloved hand and looked at it.

"Nothing." His voice was strange behind the strip. "I can’t feel it at all."

Aren sat down heavily in the dust.

Only then, sitting there with the needle still in his fingers, did he notice that the warmth had gone into him too. He had spent a whole day in that light, and the heavy kneading in the muscles of his arms and back and legs, the slow burn that had lived in him since the thirtieth day, had been rising all that time without his noticing, like water rising in a jar left out in the rain.

It reached the top while he sat there. He felt it finish, like a knot pulled tight and cut. Then a new heat began, deeper and colder, settling into the middle of every bone he had.

[Rank D: Flesh Tempering complete.][Rank D: Bone Tempering begins.]

"Ghost?"

"I’m fine." He stood up stiffly, on legs that felt as if they belonged to somebody heavier. "Now we go up."

They followed the chain. It came down into the field and rose again on the far side toward the source of the light, so steep they had to climb it with hands and feet, link over link. Higher up the light grew stronger, then narrowed, and Aren saw why.

The chain was going into the rock.

It ran up a round shaft cut straight into the black stone of the ceiling, and the walls of the shaft weren’t rough. They were fitted with blocks of pale stone, each one carved with the same long lines of marks that ran around the links of the chain. Someone had made this. Someone had cut a road through the roof of the Abyss and lined it and carved every block by hand.

He had seen those marks before, on the faded coin from Varn that Rook had given him, and in the margins of the red Chronicle on the fourth floor of the library.

Valdris.

They climbed steadily for hours. The heartbeat in the chain grew louder with every link, until Aren could feel it in his teeth and in the new grinding heat of his bones. Some of the stones in the shaft were cracked, fresh cracks with sharp edges and clean dust, as if something had pulled very hard on this place not long ago.

’Fresh cracks! Nothing down here is ever old and harmless, is it?’

"There’s an opening," Roderick whispered above him. "It’s dark. And warm. Like breath."

They came out onto a floor of stone.

It was a room so big that the glow from the chain reached only ten paces before the dark swallowed it. A hot wind blew over them, slow and steady, then stopped, then began again the other way, pulling past them into the shaft.

In and out. Breathing.

It smelled of things Aren had never smelled. Smoke, but not wood smoke. Stone, but no stone he knew. And under both, faint and green and sharp, rain on grass in a field he had never walked in.

A window opened in front of his eyes.

[Investment Board.][Hostile individual detected.][Name: Unknown.][Rank: SSS.][Hostility: 100%.]

He had seen SSS written only once before, on a golden wheel in a frozen hall, beside names from stories.

Something in the dark moved. It wasn’t a step. It was the sound of a hill turning over in its sleep. Chains rattled, three at once, and dust fell from very high above in long grey curtains.

Then, high up, an eye opened.

It was larger than Aren was tall, a deep dull gold like embers when the fire is almost out, with a pupil like a long black crack. Grey scales ringed it, each one bigger than a shield, some split, some scarred with old pale marks, as if something even larger had once tried to tear them off. Beside it, where a second eye should have been, there was only a long scar, sealed shut.

It looked down curiously at the two small figures on the stone. At the one in a cloak of black petals. At the one with a bundle of flowers on his back and a long white scar along his side.

The cold under Aren’s ribs went absolutely motionless.

"You," the dragon said.

Its breath washed over them, hot and strange, smelling of rain on another world’s grass.

"You smell of the one who sang."