Chapter 54: Dead Men

Roderick stopped breathing, and Aren put a hand on his arm and kept perfectly still.

"Something came up out of my Abyss," said the dark. The voice was so deep he felt it in his teeth. "Something that eats. I felt it wake." The eye narrowed. "What are you?"

Aren had lied to a great many people in two lives. He looked at the eye and knew, without knowing how, that it would taste every lie like smoke.

"An investor."

The silence went on and on. Then the breath washed over him, hot and dry, smelling of rain on grass that grew nowhere in this world, and he understood that the thing in the dark was laughing.

"Vaelgrith. That is my name. No one has heard it in three hundred years." The eye came closer. "You climbed past my door, little investor. Nothing climbs past my door for free."

"What do you want?"

"The people who cracked my seal. The singers. You smell of them." The eye never blinked. "Find out who they are. Then come back down these stairs and tell me."

"And if I don’t?"

"Then I will find the little girl whose name you keep thinking," the dragon murmured, "and I will ask her where you went."

Aren kept his face carefully blank, but it made no difference, because the eye had already seen.

"I’ll come back."

"Yes. You will."

The eye closed, and the chains settled. On the far side of the chamber, a stair went up into the rock, old and wide and carved all over with Valdris marks. They climbed it for most of a night, and at the top of the last step, under a low stone door, a thin line of lamplight was waiting.

Aren pushed the door open.

Crane sat on the steps of the platform with a scroll in his lap and a lamp beside him, and he looked at Aren. Then his eyes moved past Aren’s shoulder, to the low stone door standing open in the wall behind the Measure, and to the tall shape in the black cloak of petals coming through it.

Roderick stopped abruptly in the doorway. The lamplight fell on the cloak, the gloves, and the black strip wrapped across his face with two narrow slits for his eyes.

"Who," Crane asked quietly, "is that?"

Roderick said nothing. Aren saw his gloved hand drift toward the bone blade at his belt.

"Don’t."

The hand stopped.

Then, slowly, Roderick reached up and pulled the black strip down from his face. The lamplight showed the matted hair, the patchy beard, the scars across his cheeks, and the eyes, tired and young and very much his own.

Crane stood up so suddenly that the scroll fell off his lap onto the floor, and he left it there.

"Mister Ashby."

Aren had never heard Roderick’s family name. It had never occurred to him to ask.

’Two months living with the man, and I never once asked.’

"Roderick Ashby." Crane repeated it more quietly, as if he were reading it off a list. "Team Four. The Training Rift. Taken by Gravemaw on the first-year examination." His thin face had gone white. "I wrote your name on the list of the dead myself."

Roderick looked at him.

"I know. I’ve been told."

Crane sat back down on the steps, slowly, like an old man whose legs have made the decision for him.

"Close the door. Please."

Aren carefully pushed the low stone door shut. It fit back into the wall without a sound, and the hall was dark again except for the single lamp.

"How long have you been sitting here?"

"Nine nights." Crane picked up his scroll at last, rolled it, and set it beside him. "Since the morning after the Festival, when the Headmaster and I went down that stair to look at the seal. It had cracked, but it held. Something had broken the ring." He looked at Aren. "The Headmaster has been guessing for two months about who left a poisoned vial on her desk and a note about Valdris gold. She guessed it was someone small. Someone nobody looks at. Someone who carries things." A pause. "And then that someone fell into the Abyss in front of ten thousand people."

"So you came here every night."

"The stair goes down to the dragon’s chamber, and the dragon’s chamber goes down to the Abyss. If anyone was going to climb out, this was the only door they could climb out of." He tilted his head. "I thought the odds were very poor. But I’m a patient man, and I sleep badly."

Aren had no idea what to say to that.

"Did it speak to you?" Crane asked.

He didn’t need to say what it was.

"It told me its name."

Crane stopped breathing, just as he had in the shadow of the pillar when the black line rose beside Leon Harrow on the Measure.

"In three hundred years," he finally whispered, "it has never told its name to anyone. Not the founders, not the Headmasters, not me." He looked at Aren. "It will want something from you, Servant."

"It already does."

Crane closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, his face was bored again. Aren had learned by now that this was what Crane’s face did when he was most afraid.

"Who are you?" Aren asked.

Crane looked mildly surprised, as if it were a strange question.

"An instructor. Of basic combat. In the basement." He paused. "And one of the people who have spent their lives making sure the thing at the bottom of that stair stays at the bottom of that stair. There aren’t many of us. There used to be more."

He said nothing else, and Aren wisely didn’t push. Some answers were worth more if you waited for them.

There were no mirrors in the Great Hall except the Measure, which reflected nothing. So Crane carried the lamp to one of the tall dark windows along the side of the hall and held it up, and the glass showed them both, faint and wavering against the night outside.

Aren stared at himself.

He had not seen his own face in ninety-eight days. It was thinner than he remembered, and harder, the jaw sharper and the cheeks hollow, the skin pale and smooth in a way that wasn’t quite natural, like polished wood. His eyes looked much older. They looked like eyes that had counted a great many days on a rock.

And in his dark hair, falling across his forehead from the left side, there was a streak of white.

It wasn’t grey, or silver like Vivienne’s. It was the flat, perfect white of an empty page, running from his left temple back over his ear in a wide sharp-edged band, as if someone had cut it out of his hair with scissors.

He lifted a hand and touched it gingerly, and it felt like ordinary hair.

"That wasn’t there," Crane observed quietly, "when you carried Lady Ashgrave’s sword case."

"No."

Crane lowered the lamp.

"You have a choice to make. Tonight, before anyone else knows you’re here." He set the lamp on the sill. "The world believes you’re dead. Both of you. There’s a stone with your name on it in the paupers’ field, Aren. The Ashgraves paid for it."

Aren waited to feel something about that. It was like hearing a story about someone else.

"You could come back," Crane went on. "Walk into the Headmaster’s office tomorrow morning and tell a story. A pocket of air in the Rift. Luck. A miracle of the Light. People would believe it. People love miracles." He paused. "And everyone who wants you dead would know exactly where to find you."

"The Choir."

"The Choir lost their song, their champion and one of their treasurers in the same night. Brother Ansel hasn’t been seen since. The Archdeacon says he went on a pilgrimage." Crane’s voice was dry. "I don’t think the Choir is finished. I think they’re very angry and very quiet, and looking for the person who broke their ring." He looked at Aren. "Right now that person is dead. It’s the safest thing he has ever been."

Aren took his time answering.

"And Roderick?" he asked.

Crane looked at the tall shape in the black cloak, standing silent by the stone door.

"Mister Ashby has been dead for nearly three months. He’s very good at it, I imagine."

"I’ve had practice," Roderick said dryly.

Crane turned back to Aren. "I’m not asking you to stay dead forever. I’m asking you to stay dead until you know who you’re hiding from. The Headmaster will know. I’ll tell her tonight. No one else." He hesitated, which Aren had never seen him do before. "Not even your sister."

Aren looked down at the bundle on his back. Twenty Abyss Lilies wrapped in eel skin, soft and cool through the leather.

"No," he said.

Crane waited.

"I’ll stay dead. For the Choir, for the Academy, for the whole city. But not for her." He met Crane’s eyes. "She’s twelve. Right now she thinks she’s alone. I’m not leaving her thinking that for one more night."

Crane held his gaze, and then, slowly, he nodded.

"At night. Alone. And no one else."

"No one else."

"Then go." Crane picked up his scroll. "The kitchen gate is still unlocked at this hour. I imagine you know the way." He paused at the edge of the lamplight. "Welcome back, Servant."

The lower city was dark and quiet. It smelled of fish and smoke and the river, and after ninety-eight days of the Abyss it was the most beautiful smell Aren had ever known.

’Fish! I’m nearly crying over fish. Pull yourself together.’

Roderick waited in the shadow of the old rope-makers’ sheds, a tall black shape the dark swallowed whole. Aren went up Salt Lane alone.

There was one light on in the healer house, on the second floor, in the room at the far end by the window where the bed was.

He stood in the street and looked up at it.

Someone was sitting up in that bed in the lamplight with a book in her lap, a small shape wrapped in two blankets. As he watched, she turned a page.

He had no idea how long she had been staying up like that, or whether she did it every night.

He thought about the bandage on her left arm, and the window that had opened over the Furnace. One other person. He didn’t know yet what it would cost him. He only knew that it would.