Chapter 94: Counting

Ivo Varken came for him after midnight.

Aren wasn’t asleep; he had been lying on his cot in the long barracks room, listening to forty-nine other candidates breathe and waiting for the side of his head to stop aching, when a shadow stood beside the cot. It said nothing at all, but simply waited until he looked up, then turned and walked silently to the door.

’Naturally. Why sleep, when you can be kidnapped by an examiner?’

He followed reluctantly.

They went down the same tunnel and the same spiral stair, lit now only by the single lamp Ivo carried, and nobody stopped them. There were guards at the bottom, and they took one look at Ivo’s face and stepped silently aside.

The hall was empty and dark except for the lamp. It was cold, though not the killing cold of the trial, and the fragment hung in its cage in the center of the floor, small and white and black.

As Aren came down the last step, it turned toward him.

He felt it at once: the Familiar woke under his ribs and pulled hard, and he set his feet and held it, just as he had held it for five long hours the day before.

Ivo watched the fragment turn, then set the lamp on the floor and sat down beside it, cross-legged, a few paces from the cage. After a moment, Aren sat down across from him.

The examiner said nothing at first. In the lamplight his skin was the color of ice over deep water, and his pale eyes rested steadily on the fool’s mask.

"For thirty years it has hung in that cage," he began hoarsely, like a man who rarely used his voice, "and it has never moved, not for the Emperor, not for the men who brought it out, and not for me." He paused before going on. "Yesterday it turned for you."

Aren kept quiet and let him talk.

"I told my prince it was the cold, that you were simply the coldest thing in the room." One corner of Ivo’s mouth moved. "Your fingers were pink, fool. I could see them from the gallery. I’ve never seen anyone’s fingers go pink in that hall."

’So much for the dying act. I really thought it was good!’

"Why did you lie for me?"

"Because I want something from you," Ivo replied, looking at the fragment. "Eight years ago I went into the Hollow, as everyone knows: five hundred paces, Perfect Marrow, the pride of House Varken," he went on in a flat voice. "Do you know why I stopped at five hundred?"

"Because you were dying."

"Because it spoke to me!"

The lamp flickered wildly.

"Not in words, at least not at first. At four hundred paces I could hear it, a faraway bell that never stops ringing. At five hundred, the bell became a voice." He looked down at his own hands, blue-grey in the light. "It was counting."

"Counting what?"

"I didn’t know, not then. It said a number, eight, over and over, in a voice that wasn’t a voice, in my bones and in my teeth." He closed his hands slowly. "When I came out, I couldn’t speak for a month. They thought it was the cold, and it wasn’t. Every time I opened my mouth, I could hear it counting in the back of my throat."

Aren waited for the rest of it.

"I went back every year, never into the lake, only to the edge, alone, on the night before the beasts started walking, to listen. Seven, then six, then five, every year one less."

A cold that had nothing to do with the hall settled slowly at the base of Aren’s spine.

"The army in the ice," he said. "They take one step every year."

"Yes."

"And it’s counting the steps they have left before they get wherever they’re going."

"Yes. And last year, at the edge of the lake, I heard it say one."

The fragment hung motionless in its cage, its smooth face pointed at the fool.

"And this year the beasts started walking a month early," Aren said.

Ivo didn’t answer, and he didn’t need to.

"What happens," Aren asked quietly, "when it gets to nothing?"

"I don’t know." The examiner’s voice wasn’t flat anymore, only terribly tired. "Nobody knows. The Crown doesn’t know, and the Crown doesn’t care. The Crown wants Perfect Marrow for a war, and it will send fifty children into that lake in two days whatever the beasts are doing, because Iron answers merit and there is a war." He looked at Aren. "I can’t go further than five hundred paces, however hard I try. It knows my voice now. Every time I go closer it gets louder, until I can’t hear my own heart."

"And you think I can."

"I think that in thirty years it has never turned for anyone, and it turned for you," Ivo answered, leaning forward. "Get to the stone, fool, all the way. Get close enough to hear it properly, and when you come back, you tell me what it says." His pale eyes held steady. "Not the Crown, not my house. Me!"

"And what do I get?"

"The way in." Ivo tapped his own temple. "Everything I learned out there, every step I took to five hundred paces, where the ice is thin, and where the four who didn’t come back are standing. You’ll have all of it once we’re on the ice. And I’ll put you in my group, at the front, where nobody will watch you."

Aren studied him thoughtfully in the lamplight.

’A guide who hears voices, into a lake that eats people, toward a stone that’s counting down. It’s a terrible deal. I should obviously take it immediately.’

"What do you want with it?" he asked. "Whatever it says, what are you going to do with it?"

Ivo was silent for so long that the lamp hissed twice.

"I want to know," he said at last, "whether to run."

Aren nodded once.

They climbed the stair in silence. At the top, before he turned toward the barracks, Aren looked back down the spiral into the dark, toward the hall and the cage and the small white-black stone hanging in it.

He couldn’t see it from here, and he didn’t need to. He could feel it under his ribs, in the place where the Familiar lay, like someone staring at the back of his neck in a crowded room.

[Status: Something below has noticed you.][Status: Something above has noticed you.]

Two lines, one under the other.

’Below and above. And me stuck in the middle, in a fool’s hat, with porridge in my hair!’

He stood at the top of the stair a little longer, between two things that had noticed him, and then went to bed, because in two days he was going into the ice.

Outside the narrow barracks window, something white drifted past in the dark, then another flake, then a hundred.

It was snowing softly on Kharos.

And far to the south, on the same night, over a city by a river that had forgotten him, the first snow of the year came down to the water.