Chapter 81: The Rift

She heard him before she saw him.

Kaela spun in the tunnel with the lance already level, and the point stopped a finger’s width from his throat. The lamp on her belt swung on its hook and threw their shadows hugely across the wet rock. Behind her the tunnel went down into the dark, and behind him the old man lay on the stone with his hands folded on his chest.

"You," she said. "Again! Of course it’s you again!"

He could see exactly what she thought. Her blood was gone, carried off in a silver bowl, and here was the man who had already stolen it once, following her down into the mine.

’Fair enough. From where she’s standing, that’s completely fair.’

He kept still and slowly lifted one hand, and pointed past her, down the tunnel, at the grit on the floor where the prints of sandals ran away into the dark, fresh and even and unhurried.

She looked at them, then back at him.

"Walk in front," she said. "If you touch my back, I kill you."

He walked in front of her, slowly, with his hands where she could see them.

They went down fast, much faster than was safe, her lamp jumping on the walls. Nobody had touched him today, but his whole body felt hollow, just as it had on the first day in the Abyss, when he had gone so long without food that his hands shook. The Familiar lay under his ribs like a stone. It was awake, but it couldn’t move, because there was nothing left to pay for it with.

[Essence: 0%.]

He kept walking anyway, because there was nothing else to do.

Somewhere past the turn to the deep pool, the heat in his veins finally began to move. It came slowly at first, his heart beating less than once a second, heavy as a fist, pushing something back into him with every beat.

[Essence: 0% → 4%... 7%...]

Perfect Blood recovered twice as fast as anyone else’s, and he hadn’t expected that to matter quite so soon.

’Come on, faster. Please, faster!’

The tunnel split in two, and the left branch led toward the old workings, where the miners never went, and the sandal prints went left. The air rising from it was cold, but it wasn’t the cold of stone. It was exactly the cold under his own ribs.

[Essence: 13%.]

Thirteen, and each bite cost twelve, which meant he had precisely one.

The Rift wasn’t a cave at all. It was a wound in the mountain.

The tunnel opened onto a ledge, and beyond it the mountain had split from top to bottom, a crack so tall that Kaela’s lamp couldn’t find the top and so deep it couldn’t find the bottom. Across it, from one side to the other, ran dozens of chains. Each one was as thick as a man’s leg, black iron carved all over with the same marks Aren had seen on the nail in the shop on Lantern Street and on the chain in the dark below the Academy, and they crossed the opening like stitches across a cut.

One of them was broken, and its two ends hung down into the dark on either side, swaying gently.

Somewhere in the dark, something was knocking.

It came from far below, slow and patient, a deep soft sound like a fist on a door in another house, and every time it came, the chains shivered.

Brother Ansel knelt on the ledge beside the broken chain.

The silver bowl was in his hands, and he had already poured almost all of it. A dark line ran along the nearest chain, link after link, from the ledge out over the drop, and wherever it had touched the iron, the links had gone loose and soft-looking, like old rope. The black nail lay on the stone beside his knee, and Aren could hear it humming from where he stood.

Ansel looked up at them without any hurry.

"Captain," he said warmly. "You found your way, naturally, since it’s your mountain." His grey eyes moved past her to the mask, and something in them sharpened. "And you’ve brought a friend. Oh, but I know you!" He tilted his head curiously. "You’re the one who eats. We’ve been wondering what happened to our brothers."

Kaela didn’t bother to answer. She charged.

It was a good charge, Blooded and fresh, with all her weight behind it, the very best she had. Ansel didn’t even bother to get up from his knees. He reached out with two fingers, caught the shaft just behind the head and turned his wrist, and Kaela flew past him and hit the wall of the ledge so hard that the lamp at her belt went out.

The only light left was the nail’s faint grey glow.

Aren stayed exactly where he was.

There was nothing he could do, and he knew it as surely as his own name. He had no Ward and only thirteen percent, and a black crescent against a Rank B would be a pebble thrown at a cliff. If he walked forward, the priest would kill him without standing up.

’So don’t fight him, you idiot, think!’

He looked at Kaela instead of the priest.

She was slowly getting up, one hand on the rock. Her palm was still bandaged from the knife at the signing, but the bandage had come loose and the hand was bleeding again. She looked at it, and then at the wall under her fingers.

A vein of iron ran through the rock there, a dark seam climbing the wall of the ledge and running out across the face of the Rift, into the anchors where the chains were set into the stone.

Aren saw her understand.

The iron of Kharn answers to Blooded blood.

A few stolen drops in a bowl, poured out and cooling on the links, against the woman who held Kharn, alive and bleeding two paces away.

Kaela drew the small knife from her belt, opened her palm all the way across, and slammed her hand flat on the iron seam.

The mountain answered her.

It wasn’t a sound so much as a weight, as if the whole mass of rock above them had leaned in to listen. Every chain across the Rift jerked tight at once with a crack like a hundred whips, and the soft links on the nearest chain went hard again. Out of the wall beside Ansel, out of the floor under his knees and the seam of iron in the rock, thin dark threads of metal crept from the stone like roots and wrapped around his arms, his legs and his throat.

He broke them.

It took him two seconds. He rose out of them like a man standing up in long grass, and they snapped and fell away around him. But the floor was already sending more, and then more again. Kaela was on her knees with her hand pressed to the seam and her face going white, and every time the iron reached for him she paid for it in blood, and every time it took him two more seconds to tear free.

She couldn’t hurt him, or even slow him for long. But she could hold him.

Aren looked at the chain.

The dark line was still there along the links, the priest’s stolen blood, and he could feel it now just as the Familiar felt it: two voices in the same iron, the stolen one and the living one, pulling against each other. As long as the stolen blood sat on the chain, the mountain was arguing with itself.

’One bite, just one. Make it count!’

He pointed at the chain.

’Eat.’

The cold went out of him along its thread, over the edge of the ledge and into the dark above the drop. It found the line of blood on the links and ran along it like a tongue along a blade, and the blood went into it and was gone.

[Familiar of Nothing: Reach. Essence: 13% → 1%.][Ledger entry added: Blooded blood (Kaela Voss). Stolen.]

The chains sang.

There was only one voice in them now. They pulled tight with a sound that came up through the soles of Aren’s feet and into his teeth, and the crack in the mountain actually closed, only a hand’s width, maybe less, but it closed. Far below, the knocking stopped.

Ansel turned and looked at him.

For the first time since Aren had seen him in the chapel, the priest’s face wasn’t kind. It was simply empty, the face of a man who had spent years carrying something across a kingdom and had just watched a child spill it on the floor.

He tore free of the iron in one movement, bent down and picked up the nail.

He didn’t need the blood now, and he plainly didn’t care. He took three quick steps to the broken chain, to the empty place where the old nail had been, and raised the black iron spike to drive it in by hand.