Chapter 96: The Lake

They left Kharos in the dark, on the morning the snow stopped.

The fifty candidates walked out through the north gate in a column two wide, with soldiers at the front and the back. Nobody had told them to be quiet, and they were utterly quiet anyway. The only sound was the crunch of boots on new snow and, near the back of the column, a small bell.

The bell was on the end of Aren’s cap. A fool without his bell was just a man in a costume, and people looked twice at men in costumes.

Mother Grell was waiting at the gate.

She stood to one side of the road in her shapeless brown coat, with Tibbet beside her and the twins behind, and she didn’t wave. When the fool came level with her, she stepped out, grabbed him by the collar, and straightened it roughly, just as she had in the kitchen corridor on Patrons’ Night.

"You come back, you hear me? I’ve paid for the paint on that mask!"

"I’ll bring you the receipt."

She snorted and let go, while Tibbet said nothing at all. He only held something out, handle first, as the column carried Aren past him: one of his throwing knives, the plain grey one with the chipped pommel that he threw first in every show.

Aren took it and tucked it into his boot.

"Bring it back," Tibbet muttered, already turning away. "It’s my best one."

’He’s never once called any of them his best one. He doesn’t even like that one.’

He looked back just once. The three of them were still standing in the gate, small and dark against the white walls, and then the road turned.

It took three days to reach the lake.

They rode in open wagons over a high white plain where nothing grew, with the mountains closing slowly around them on every side. On the first night the water froze in the barrels. On the second, it froze in the cups between one sip and the next.

And all three days, the animals walked beside them: rimewolves, white hares, a lynx the size of a pony, and once, far off, something enormous with antlers of ice. None of them hunted or so much as looked at the wagons. They simply walked north, all in the same direction, patiently and steadily, toward something only they could hear.

The beasts walk north before the Hollow breathes.

Nobody in the wagons said it out loud, but Aren saw several of them watching the animals and moving their lips.

There was a girl in his wagon who kept close to him.

She was the smallest of the fifty, from some minor southern house, fifteen at the most, with a face so thickly covered in freckles that it seemed someone had flicked a paintbrush at her. On the first morning she had been crying into her sleeve. Then the fool had tripped over the tailboard, caught his cap on a nail, and hung there with his bell jingling, looking deeply offended, and she had laughed so hard she got hiccups.

After that she sat right next to him, because apparently being near the fool made the cold a little less serious.

In his head he called her Freckles. He decided it was safer not to learn her real name.

Across from them sat a thin boy with a shaved head who prayed. He prayed at dawn and at dusk and every time a new line of animals came out of the hills, his lips moving fast and silent over a string of wooden beads. The others laughed at him for it, but he didn’t seem to notice. In his head, Aren called him Priest-boy.

’Don’t do this, don’t name them! Naming them is how it starts.’

He knew that perfectly well, and he did it anyway.

Kaela Voss rode at the head of the escort.

The soldiers explained why around the fire every night, when they thought the candidates were asleep. After Kharn, the Crown Prince had needed someone to blame and someone he could trust, and he had chosen the same person for both. His sister had lost a peace treaty in her own yard, so his sister would lead fifty children to the edge of the White Hollow and watch them walk in.

"It’s not an honor," one of the older soldiers muttered. "It’s a lesson."

She rode past the fool’s wagon twice a day with her lance upright beside the saddle, and she never looked at him directly. Every time she passed, the back of Aren’s neck went cold anyway.

On the third evening, as the wagons slowed at the top of the last rise, she reined in beside his wagon and kept pace with it.

"Fool."

"Captain!" He swept off his cap, bell and all, and bowed so low in the moving wagon that he nearly fell out of it, and Freckles hastily grabbed his belt.

Kaela watched this without any expression.

"Ivo Varken has put you at the front of his group, at the very front, where he walks."

"I’m told it’s a great honor, Captain."

"It’s where people die first."

"Then I’ll die with a very good view."

Something moved at the corner of her mouth, but it wasn’t a smile; it was much closer to the opposite of one.

"I have orders to watch you," she said quietly, so that only he could hear. "I’m going to enjoy them." She lifted her reins briskly. "Don’t drop your bell."

She rode on to the front of the column, and Freckles finally let go of his belt.

"She likes you," she whispered.

"She wants to cut my eyes out."

Freckles considered this seriously.

"That’s a kind of liking," she decided.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

’It’s really, truly not.’

They came over the last rise, and there was the lake.

Aren had read about it in Varken’s papers and heard about it from Ivo in the dark beside the fragment, and none of that had prepared him.

The mountains formed a bowl, a perfect ring of black peaks with snow in every crack, and the bottom of the bowl was flat and white and so wide that he couldn’t see the far shore. Near the edges the white was snow. Further out, it was ice, so clear and so smooth that the setting sun lay on it like a second sky.

And under the ice there were soldiers.

At first he took them for rocks, until the wagon came down the slope and he saw the shapes properly: men, hundreds of them, standing upright in the clear ice in long uneven rows, their arms bent, their heads forward, caught in the middle of running. Some carried spears and some had their mouths open, but all of them were facing the same way, toward the middle of the lake.

Above the middle of the lake, very high up, something hung in the air.

From the shore it looked no bigger than a star, a dark point against the evening sky. It simply hung there over the center of the ice, as it had for three hundred years, and every animal that had walked beside them for three days had stopped at the edge of the snow and turned to face it.

Nobody in the wagons made a sound.

The stones stood at the shore.

There were three of them, tall slabs of grey rock leaning toward the lake, older than the Empire, covered in close lines of carving. Aren knew the marks at once. He had seen them on a dead kingdom’s coin and on the walls of a stair under the Academy that went down to a dragon: Valdris.

Ivo Varken walked to the stones and stood in front of them with his back to the fifty, his blue-grey hands at his sides. When he spoke, his voice carried effortlessly, just as it had in the fragment hall.

"These were here before us," he said. "Nobody knows who put them here. We know what they say, because men died learning it." He lifted one hand toward the first stone. "Do not burn the dead."

His hand moved to the second stone.

"Do not walk toward the center after the third bell."

Then the third stone, and his hand stayed up a moment longer than before.

"When the count is spoken, answer."

From the middle of the fifty, somebody laughed. It was Cassian Haskel, warm and easy, with his white teeth shining in the dusk.

"Answer what?" he called. "Answer whom, exactly?"

Ivo turned around and looked at him with his pale eyes.

"You’ll know. Or you won’t, and then it won’t matter."

Haskel abruptly stopped laughing.

They went in by groups, the way Ivo had planned it: the house groups, one after another, each walking out onto the ice behind its guide, with Varken first: Ivo at the front, then the fool, two paces behind him, exactly as promised. Sigrid Varken walked behind the fool with her hands in her sleeves and didn’t say a word to him, but Aren could feel her eyes on the back of his neck the whole way.

The ice was so clear that it made his stomach turn. Every step, he could look straight down between his boots and see the top of a soldier’s head, a helmet, a frozen hand, close enough to touch if the ice had not been in the way.

After ten paces, then twenty, he let Iron Sense open carefully, just a crack.

The ice was full of iron, helmets and buckles and spear points, so much of it that it hummed in the back of his teeth. And under the iron, faint and slow and unmistakable, he felt the other thing the skill had promised: blood bound to it. It wasn’t old, dead blood, either. It was moving, slowly, impossibly slowly, but it was definitely moving.

Aren stopped dead.

’They’re not dead. Oh, gods, none of them are dead!’

"Keep walking," Sigrid murmured behind him. "Whatever you just felt, keep walking, because fools don’t stop."

He kept walking.

Behind them the other groups came out onto the ice: Haskel’s, Merrow’s, the Corvane twins, Freckles holding the sleeve of the girl in front of her, Priest-boy praying. A few of the weakest hung back at the shore, staring at the frozen men and refusing to move, until Kaela rode out onto the ice herself with twenty of her soldiers and herded them forward.

The last candidate stepped onto the lake.

Under Aren’s ribs, the Familiar of Nothing woke all at once. It didn’t pull or bite; it purred, long and low, toward the center of the lake, the same way it had purred toward the dark at the bottom of the mountain at Kharn.

And then he heard it.

It wasn’t really a sound at all. It was in his bones, in his teeth, in the iron of the knife in his boot, in the blood of every frozen man beneath his feet. It was a voice that had never been a voice, very far away and enormously patient, saying one word, exactly as Ivo had said it would.

Ahead of him, Ivo Varken had stopped too, and his blue-grey hands had closed into fists. He had heard it as well.

Zero.

All around the edge of the lake, from every crack in the ring of black mountains, the snow rose.

It came up slowly at first, like steam off a bath, and then faster, a white wall climbing straight into the evening sky on every side, taller than the peaks, thicker than anything he could see through. The shore disappeared, then the stones, and the wagons and the waiting animals and the road back to Kharos vanished into white, and the light went with them.

Somebody screamed, and Kaela’s horse reared and she brought it down with one hand.

[Location: The White Hollow.]

[The Hollow has begun to breathe.]

[Day 0 of 40.]