Chapter 78: Blooded

She came at him before he could even stand.

The lance went straight for his throat, and he was only alive because his body moved before he asked it to. Moonlit Step carried him eight paces sideways across the wet stone, his foot slid out from under him at the edge of the pool, and he went down hard on one hand.

His legs were shaking badly, because he had put everything he had back into the pool an hour ago, and there was simply nothing left to fight with.

She gave him no time to find any. The shaft came round flat at his ribs, he rolled under it, and his back slammed into the wall. When he looked up, the point of the lance was resting exactly one finger from his chest.

’Save her life, then leave her a note to meet me alone in a mine. What did I think would happen?’

"Get up," Kaela said.

He got up slowly, keeping his empty hands open at his sides.

She didn’t look at his hands for long. Her eyes went past him to the pool, to the steam lifting lazily off it, to the walls shining wet in the dark where yesterday there had only been a dry white crust.

"I stood here yesterday with my brother’s men, and it was dead. They told me you killed it." The lance stayed perfectly where it was. "How is it alive?"

He couldn’t answer her, because she had heard his voice in this room twelve nights ago, and she heard Ren’s voice every morning at the top of her tower. He had no idea how good her ears really were, and tonight was a bad night to find out.

So he lifted one hand and pointed at the pool, and then he pointed at her.

Her face didn’t change, but her grip did, tightening slowly until the leather of the shaft creaked.

"You stole four months of my blood. You made me stand in front of my brother like a girl who broke a vase." Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated that, he could see it. "And now you want me to get into the pool you poisoned and trust you not to put a knife in my back?"

He walked along the wall, away from her and away from the pool, until he reached the far corner. Then he sat down on the cold stone with his back to the rock and laid his hands flat on his knees.

Kaela watched him, and he could see her weighing it, just as he had weighed it for three nights: the treaty at noon, nineteen points still missing, every other pool in Kharn guarded by twenty of her brother’s men. If she walked out of here now, she would lose her name tomorrow, and nobody was going to hand her a second chance before then.

She swore quietly under her breath, one short soldier’s word. Then she drove the butt of the lance into a crack in the floor so it stood upright beside the pool, close enough to grab, and dropped her cloak. She kept her shirt and trousers on.

"Turn around."

He turned and faced the wall.

’That’s the second time this week. I’m getting very good at walls.’

The pool moved as she stepped down into it. Her breath caught at the heat, and then he heard her take control of it, carefully. Four counts in, hold, six counts out.

It was the breathing he had taught her. He made sure his own breath stayed short and ragged, nothing like it.

[Kaela Voss. Rank D: Blood. 81% → 82%.]

The pool was slow to find her at first, still half asleep after five dead nights. Then it found her, and the numbers began to climb far faster than he had expected.

[85%... 88%... 91%...]

Behind him, the pool grew louder, and so did she. The four counts became three and the six became four. He knew this sound, because he had heard it on the first night, just before she slipped under and stopped breathing at the bottom of this same pool.

’No, no, no, not again, not after all this!’

He couldn’t count out loud, so his fingers found a small round stone on the floor, worn smooth by years of dripping water, and he waited for the gap between two of her breaths and struck the rock in front of him.

Tock, and four beats. Tock, and a held beat. Tock, and six slow beats.

The first time, she breathed on the wrong count. He kept going steadily without speeding up or slowing down, and the dry little sound filled the chamber. On the fifth round her breath caught the rhythm, and by the eighth she was breathing with the stone and the pool had stopped churning. It only circled now, slow and heavy, as if a patient hand were stirring it.

[95%... 97%... 99%...]

At the top of the last breath, she held it. He heard her teeth come together.

For the first time all night, the pool went completely quiet.

[Kaela Voss. Rank D: Blood. 100%. Blood Tempering complete.]

He let the stone drop from his fingers.

He had been ready for that window. He was not remotely ready for the ones that came after it.

[Anchor milestone reached: Kaela Voss, Rank D Blood complete.][Source: Investment recorded. Hidden aid x3: The Iron Guard. Her life. The Deep Pool.][Mirror Return triggered.]

The small wheel appeared on the wall in front of his face, close enough to touch, glowing softly against the wet grey rock. He had nearly forgotten the sound it made when it turned, that low hum at the back of his skull.

It spun with a soft, rising hum.

The wide band of x10 went past, then the wider band of x100, and the wheel was still moving fast, much faster than usual at this point. It slid onto the narrow segment of x1,000 and began to slow. Beyond it, at the very edge, lay the thin sliver of x10,000. It had been red once, in the forest and in the Abyss. Now it was only a darker grey to him, like every other red thing in the world.

’Come on, come on, just one more tick!’

The pointer crawled across x1,000, reached the far edge one tick from the grey sliver, and stopped there.

’Of course it stopped there. Of course it did!’

[Result: x1,000.][Return 1/2: Tempering progress the Anchor gained through hidden aid, x1,000.][Deep Pool, first night: 49% → 81%. Gain: 32%.][The Deep Pool. Tonight: 81% → 100%. Gain: 19%.][Total gain: 51%. Return: 51,000%.]

’Fifty-one thousand, when I needed ninety-one. Okay, okay, I’ll take the consolation prize.’

It started somewhere just under his heart.

An hour ago he had felt a whole pool leave him through the skin. Now it came back from the inside, and it didn’t stop at the size of one pool. It kept rising, wave after wave, like a spring that had finally found a crack in the rock and meant to come up through it whatever the rock thought.

[Rank D: Blood. 9% → 100%.][Blood Tempering complete. Strength: 251 → 318. Agility: 189 → 241. Endurance: 288 → 362.][Surplus: 50,909%.][Marrow Tempering locked. Requirement: extreme cold.][Surplus redirected: Blood quality.]

The flood had nowhere else to go, so it went back into what it had just filled.

His veins pulled tight, then tighter, as if the same blood were being poured into him again and again and getting heavier each time. His heart slowed, and then it slowed even more. When it finally settled, it beat less than once a second, and every beat landed in his chest like a fist on a table and reached all the way out to his fingertips.

[Blood quality: Tempered → Perfect.][Perfect Blood: All physical stats +30%. Wounds that do not reach the bone close within minutes. Essence recovery x2.][Strength: 318 → 413. Agility: 241 → 313. Endurance: 362 → 470.]

Four hundred and thirteen strength! Kaela Voss had just finished the same stage in the same pool, and he didn’t know her numbers, but he was fairly sure they weren’t anywhere near four hundred.

[Surplus remaining. Absorbed by: Familiar of Nothing.]

The rest went where the hunger was.

Under his ribs, the Familiar had been lying curled and sulking ever since he refused it the pool. The flood found it there, and Aren felt the exact moment it understood this was food, felt it begin to eat greedily, and felt it grow.

It grew longer rather than bigger. The cold that had always sat in one small knot below his heart unrolled inside him like a cat stretching after sleep, and it kept unrolling, out past his ribs and out past his skin.

When he looked down, a thin pale shape lay on the floor beside him in the dark, the color of nothing, joined to his side by a line no thicker than a thread. Its tail reached three paces across the stone, then five. It stopped at ten and simply lay there, content.

[Familiar of Nothing: Infant → Juvenile.][Hunger: 61% → 0%.][Reach: 0 → 10 paces. It may now leave your body and eat what you point at. Each use costs essence.][It does not hunt alone. Not yet.]

The pale shape lifted what might have been a head and looked back at him. Then it slid quietly home along the thread, back under his ribs, and was only a cold knot again, heavier than before.

’Not yet? What do you mean, not yet?’

The wheel, however, hadn’t finished with him yet.

[Return 2/2: Giving back the Iron Guard and saving her life.][Return: Protection x1,000.][New Skill acquired!][Ward of Zero (SSS)][Type: Active][Effect: Grants absolute immunity to all damage to one target for 5 seconds. Ignores rank difference.][Condition: The caster must call the target’s name aloud.][Restriction: Cannot target the caster.][Cost: All remaining essence.][Cooldown: 30 days.][Note: This skill cannot be upgraded.]

The iron heart had taken one blow, once, for one person, and broken doing it. This would do the same for anyone he chose, against anyone at all, but only once a month, and only if he was willing to shout their name for the whole world to hear.

’So the System’s best gift is a shield I can only use by announcing myself. That’s very funny.’

Behind him, the pool stirred as she climbed out.

He put a hand on the wall and stood. His legs held this time without any argument, and he understood that they would keep holding now.

He walked toward the tunnel without turning his head.

"Wait."

He stopped with his back to her.

Her breath was still four in and six out. She probably didn’t even know she was doing it anymore.

"I know what you did tonight," she said. Her voice was hoarse from the heat. "It doesn’t pay for what you did before. Tomorrow I sign beside my brother. The day after, I’ll come looking for you, and I won’t stop." She paused. "And don’t think for one second that I’ve forgotten the first night!"

He sighed and nodded once at the dark tunnel in front of him.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 99%.]

’One percent for a whole pool, her life and her name. Still, it’s a start.’

He climbed the tunnel, and his feet made no sound on the stone, less than ever. He stepped carefully over the rope, past the old man still snoring on his stool, and out into the night.

Halfway down the slope he sat heavily in the snow, because his body had decided it was finished whether he agreed or not. The snow under his hands turned to slush and then to steam. He pulled off the mask, let the cold air hit his face, and sat there breathing until the heat in his veins sank down to something he could actually carry.