Chapter 63: The Pools

The mine sat in the valley below the northern wall of Kharn, on the Imperial side, cut straight into the foot of the mountain.

Aren watched it from a crack in the rocks above the valley for a whole night and most of a day, lying on his stomach in the snow while Roderick slept under his cloak behind him. He learned its shape patiently, as he had learned the Furnace from the hot ledge.

There was one gate, black iron twice the height of a man, set into the rock under a heavy stone arch, and there were never fewer than six soldiers in front of it. More stood watchfully on the walls above. Lanterns burned on both sides all night, so there wasn’t a scrap of shadow to hide in.

There were also, interestingly, the wagons.

They came down from the high passes after dark, pulled by teams of shaggy mountain oxen, and every one of them carried something dead. On the first night Aren counted three. A great grey bear with plates of stone growing out of its back. A long-necked thing like a heron, as tall as a house, with feathers of ice. Something with too many legs that he had no name for. Rank C, all of them. Soldiers walked beside the wagons with long spears, and some of them were limping badly.

The wagons went in through the iron gate and came out empty.

"They’re feeding it." Roderick had woken on the second evening and crawled up beside him. "Whatever’s in there."

"The blood," Aren said. "They drain it into the pools. The soldier at the fire said the whole garrison bathed in it last month."

Roderick watched another wagon roll through the gate. "How much blood is in a bear like that?"

"Enough."

"And you want to get in there."

"Yes."

"Through forty guards."

"Not through them."

Aren pointed, not at the gate but higher up, at the bare face of the mountain above the mine where the black rock was streaked with old rust. In three places a thin line of steam rose out of the stone and drifted away on the wind. On the first night he had taken it for mist. By the second he had realized that it never moved. It came out of the same three places every hour, steady as breath.

"The mine is hot. You can see the glow from here. All that heat has to go somewhere, or the men working inside would cook. There’ll be shafts. Old ones, probably, cut straight up through the rock to let the air out."

Roderick looked at the lines of steam, then at Aren.

"You want to climb down a chimney," he said, "into a pool of blood, in the middle of an enemy fortress."

"Yes."

"You know, ghost, every time I think I’ve met all of you, there’s more!"

They went the next night, when the wind had dropped and the sky was black.

The way to the nearest shaft ran across the open face of the mountain above the lanterns, along a slope of loose black stone that slid and rang under every step. In daylight, from the crack, it had looked merely hard. In the dark Aren couldn’t see his own boots.

Roderick went first.

He didn’t feel his way. He simply walked. He crossed the slope like other people cross a room, putting each foot exactly where it needed to go, never sliding or hesitating, and twice he stopped dead and pressed himself flat against the rock without a word. Both times Aren heard absolutely nothing. Both times, a few breaths later, a patrol passed on the path below, three men with a hooded lantern talking quietly in the Imperial tongue.

The second time, when the lantern had gone, Aren stayed where he was. He lay against the cold rock and looked at Roderick, really looked, the way he looked at strangers.

In the Abyss it had never occurred to him. Roderick had been a broken boy with a bone blade, and then a friend, and you didn’t read your friends.

The window opened anyway.

[Roderick Ashby. Rank D: Bone.][Class: Pathfinder (Grade C) → Darkwalker (Grade B).][Rewritten by: the Abyss.]

’Grade B! And he’s been carrying it around for two years without anyone telling him.’

"Roddy."

"What?"

"What was your class? Your first one, at the Academy."

Roderick frowned at him in the dark. "Pathfinder. Grade C. It’s for scouts. You find the way through forests and over rivers and you never get lost." He shrugged. "My father said it was a good honest class for a boy with no money."

"It’s not your class anymore."

Roderick went very quiet.

Aren told him what the window said, all of it: the new name, the grade, the four words at the end.

Roderick looked down at his own hands, grey and scarred, three fingers on the left. Then he looked out at the dark valley, where he could see every rock and every patrol and every sleeping ox, and Aren could see nothing.

"So that’s what it did to me. Down there. All those days." His voice was very flat. "It gave me a name."

"It gave you a better class."

"It took me apart and put me back together and didn’t ask." Then, slowly, the corner of his mouth went up. "Darkwalker. That’s a stupid name. It sounds like a story my mother would tell to scare me into bed."

"It suits you."

"Shut up, ghost," Roderick muttered, and went on across the slope, and Aren thought he was walking slightly taller than before.

The shaft was a crack in the rock no wider than a man’s shoulders, and the air coming out of it was so hot it made their eyes water.

They went down on the rope, Roderick first again. The walls were black and wet and smooth, worn by a hundred years of rising steam, and they smelled of iron and of something heavier underneath, thick and sweet, that caught at the back of Aren’s throat. He knew that smell. He had smelled it on the moor by Brask’s fire, when it was over.

It went down a very long way, and the heat grew steadily with every length of rope. By the time the shaft opened out under his boots, Aren’s clothes were soaked through, and the scar along his left side had gone cold in a way that had nothing to do with the air. The Familiar had smelled it too.

He fed it on the rope, hanging in the dark. The grip of the stone under his left hand. Then, when that wasn’t enough, the heat of the air around his face, which went cool for one breath and came back. He could feel it under his ribs, awake and turning and interested.

The shaft ended in the roof of a great chamber, and he hung at the end of the rope and looked down.

It was a hall cut out of the black rock, long and low, its ceiling held up by thick stone pillars. Steam filled it in slow drifting layers. Lanterns hung from iron hooks on the pillars, but the steam swallowed most of their light, so the room was full of a dim heavy glow like coals under ash.

And on the floor, cut into the rock in a long curving line from one end of the hall to the other, there were pools.

There were a dozen of them. The nearest were small, no bigger than a cart, with stone steps leading down. Farther along they grew larger, and at the very end of the hall, under the thickest steam, there was one great pool, round and deep, with no steps at all.

He knew what they held. Soldiers in the Imperial camp told stories about the lake of blood, steaming and dark and bright in the lantern light.

He saw ink.

Every pool was black and smooth and still, as if someone had filled the floor of the hall with the inside of a closed eye. The lantern light lay on the surface without going in. He couldn’t see an inch below it.

’Red. It’s supposed to be red. I’ll have to take their word for it.’

Roderick dropped silently to the floor and went to the doorway at the far side of the hall, where a passage led away into the mine. He crouched there in the shadow with his cloak pulled close and his head turning slowly from side to side.

"Nobody close," he whispered. "Some in the tunnels, far down. Asleep, most of them. If anyone comes, I’ll know before they do."

Aren let himself down carefully.

He chose the smallest pool, the one nearest the shaft. He took off his coat and boots and shirt, wrapped the scarf tighter around his face, and went down the stone steps into the dark.

The heat hit him first. Then the blood.

It went into him through his skin, through every pore at once, like water into dry sand. He felt it reach his veins and move inside them, thick and fierce and alive, and it wasn’t his. It belonged to something huge that had lived in the high snows and fought for every year of its life, and it was angry, and it didn’t want to be inside a small soft human being.

It burned exactly the way the Skin had burned on the grey shore of the Abyss in the first days, when every breath had been a fight.

He sat down on the bottom step with the black blood up to his chin and breathed as the grey book had taught him. In, slow, all the way down, past the burning. Out again. In.

After a while the burning was still there, but he was holding it, instead of it holding him.

[Rank D: Blood Tempering begins.][Progress: 0% → 4%.]

He stayed until the lanterns had burned down a finger’s width. When he climbed out his whole body was shaking violently.

Four percent in one long hour. He counted it while he dried himself with his shirt. The Summit began in four days and lasted ten, and the man with the grey eyes wasn’t going to wait for him to be ready. If he came here every night and nothing went wrong, he might be halfway done by the end of it.

He looked down the length of the hall, through the drifting steam, to the great round pool at the far end.

Even from here he could feel the heat coming off it, ten times stronger than the one he had sat in. The blood of something much larger, or much more of it, or both. The soldiers had said only the officers went in there.

He walked past the other pools to the edge of it. It was perfectly still, black and smooth as glass, with steam curling off its surface like breath on a cold morning.

Roderick turned his head from the doorway and said nothing. He didn’t need to.

"Just for a minute. To see."

"That’s what people say right before I have to dig them out of something."

Aren stepped off the edge.

There were no steps. He went straight down into heat so great that for a moment he couldn’t think at all. The blood closed over his head and he sank, slowly, holding his breath, and felt the fierce strange life of it pour into him from every side, much faster now and much harder, and somewhere far away a number began to climb.

Then the scar on his left side went cold.

It wasn’t the restless cold of hunger. It was colder than it had been since the Furnace, the cold of something that has smelled food after a very long winter.

He felt it open.

He hadn’t told it to, or even thought it. The scar simply parted along its whole length, as it had in the burning square, and something long and white and thin unfolded out of him into the black blood. Six legs. A long curved neck. A narrow head with no face.

He couldn’t see it and didn’t need to. He felt every part of it like his own hands, and he felt it turn in the dark toward the center of the pool, toward something he hadn’t known was there.

Something warm. Something alive. Something that had been sitting at the bottom of this pool in the black, perfectly motionless, for longer than any human being should be able to hold their breath.

And it was full. Full of months of blood.

The white head began to split.