Chapter 98: Thin Ice

[Day 1 of 40. Night.]

The Hollow drew its first breath an hour after the bell.

Aren felt it coming before anyone else did. The Familiar went suddenly still under his ribs, alert and listening, and then the cold arrived. It didn’t blow in on the wind. It came up through the ice from the center of the lake in one long, slow wave, and as it passed under the circle, it pulled.

It pulled the heat out of everything: out of the furs, out of the horses, out of the candidates’ hands and faces and the breath in their mouths. A soldier’s water flask cracked open with a loud snap, and all around the circle people gasped at once in shock.

Then it was gone, and the ordinary killing cold came back, and it almost felt warm.

"What was that?" somebody whispered.

Ivo didn’t answer; he was looking toward the center of the lake.

Aren quietly started counting.

He counted heartbeats, just as he had once counted handholds on the ceiling of the Abyss, and at three hundred and twelve, the Familiar abruptly went quiet again and the second wave came through.

’Every three hundred heartbeats, all night long. That’s not weather, that’s lungs!’

It took the second wave to kill the first of them that night, a girl from one of the lesser houses who had been sitting alone at the edge of the circle. The third wave took two more, and after that people stopped looking when somebody went quiet.

He made a decision somewhere between the third wave and the fourth.

There were five of them in his corner of the circle by then: Freckles, holding his belt; Priest-boy, praying with beads so stiff with frost they clicked against each other; one of the Corvane twins, the one who had looked so bored in the hall at Kharos and didn’t look bored now, with a cut on his forehead and his brother nowhere in sight; and a big, slow girl from a merchant house who hadn’t said a word since the wall rose.

"Right," Aren said, in the fool’s voice. "Everybody stand up!"

They stared at him blankly.

"Up, up, up! We’re going to play a game."

"A game," the Corvane boy repeated flatly.

"It’s called Don’t Die, and it’s wildly popular in the south." He pulled Freckles to her feet and then Priest-boy. "Everyone in a ring, shoulders touching, facing in, like this. Whoever’s on the windward side counts to fifty out loud and then swaps with the person next to them. And nobody, nobody at all, closes their eyes."

"Why?" the merchant girl asked, the first word she had spoken all day.

"Because if you fall asleep in this," Aren replied in a perfectly ordinary voice, "you won’t wake up."

Nobody argued after that.

They stood in a ring with their arms around each other’s shoulders, and they counted, and they swapped, and when someone’s eyes started to close, the fool told them a joke. The jokes were terrible. He did it on purpose. Terrible jokes made people angry, and angry people stayed awake.

And inside the ring, very quietly, the Familiar ate.

He let it take only the cold within the circle of their shoulders, never more. He felt it drink the air between them, quick and careful, and every time the Hollow breathed in, he let it take the edge off that too, just enough. From outside, they looked like five half-frozen candidates huddled together. From inside, it was merely the worst night of their lives instead of the last.

’Small bites. Small bites. Don’t get greedy. Don’t let anyone see.’

It was harder than it sounded. The Familiar didn’t want small bites. Every wave that rolled under the ice was a feast it wasn’t allowed to finish, and it pulled at him harder and harder each time.

Sometime around the eighth wave, a shadow stopped beside the ring, and it was Sigrid Varken.

She had spent the first half of the night sitting alone with her back very straight, the frost flowing harmlessly around her. Now she stood looking at the five of them with her hands in her sleeves, and Aren saw her look at the air above their heads. There was no breath-smoke rising off them, and there should have been.

’She sees it. She sees everything.’

Sigrid didn’t say a word. She simply stepped into the ring between Freckles and the Corvane boy, put her arms around their shoulders, and stood there with them.

The cold bent around her, just as it had in the fragment hall, only a little, but enough. With the two of them working together, one drinking the cold and one turning it aside, the inside of the ring felt almost like an autumn night.

Freckles started to cry, very quietly, from relief.

Sigrid looked across the ring at the fool, and her face didn’t change.

"Count," she said.

"Thirty-one," the merchant girl obeyed. "Thirty-two."

Kaela walked the circle tirelessly all night.

She didn’t sleep, and she didn’t let her soldiers sleep. She went around and around with her lance reversed, tapping shoulders with the butt, kneeling to slap a face, hauling a candidate upright by the collar when he had slumped too far. She had taken off her helmet at some point, and her dark hair was completely white with frost from the roots to the tips.

On her fifth round, she stopped in front of the ring.

She looked at the six of them standing there with their arms around each other, swapping places and counting out loud. Then she looked past them, at the candidates sitting alone a few paces away, grey-faced and unmoving, two of them already gone.

"Why," she said, "are your people still alive, fool?"

"Bad jokes, Captain."

She waited, unimpressed.

"Nobody can die in the middle of a bad joke. It would be terribly rude!"

Kaela didn’t laugh. She looked at Sigrid Varken standing in the ring with her arms around a merchant girl and a Corvane, which was a thing that had never happened in the history of either House, and her eyes narrowed.

Then she turned her head and spoke over her shoulder to her sergeant, in a voice that carried.

"Get everyone on their feet, in rings of six, shoulders touching. Swap the outside every fifty." She paused. "And somebody tell them jokes."

She walked away without looking back at the fool, but Aren noticed that on every round after that, she slowed down a little as she passed them.

Dawn, when it came, was only a lighter kind of grey.

The breathing stopped with it. One moment the waves were rolling under the ice every three hundred heartbeats, and the next there was nothing, only the ordinary cold and the wind dropping away to silence. People stood in their rings and looked at each other, unable to believe they were still standing.

Then, slowly, they looked at the ones who weren’t.

Fourteen of them lay all over the ice, in among the rings, where they had sat down or fallen. Some still had frost on their eyelashes, and some seemed only to be sleeping.

As the light grew, the ice began to take them.

It didn’t crack or open. It simply softened beneath each body, and they sank slowly into it, settling, turning, until each one was standing upright just below the surface, running toward the center like all the others.

Nobody screamed this time, because everyone was far too tired.

Aren stood with Freckles’s face pressed into his coat so she couldn’t see, and he counted them, because he couldn’t stop himself: fourteen candidates, two of Kaela’s soldiers, and nine horses. Forty-five of them had sat down on the ice the evening before, and thirty-one were still standing.

A third, gone in one night.

The Familiar lay under his ribs, heavy and content and bitterly cold.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Ledger entry added: The breath of the Hollow (Night 1).]

[Cold threshold met.]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering unlocked.]

[Progress: 0% → 2%.]

He felt it begin in the middle of his bones, deeper than the Bone stage had ever gone: a slow, bottomless cold that settled into the marrow and stayed there, aching, like a word on the tip of his tongue that he would never quite remember.

’Two percent for one night of not dying. And sixteen people around me couldn’t do even that.’

He didn’t feel remotely like celebrating.

The voice came while they were still standing there.

It wasn’t the bell, and it wasn’t the count from the evening before. It was clearer and closer, standing right behind each of them at once, and it said a single word into the bones of every living person on the lake.

Thirty-one.

People jumped. Somebody dropped a pack. Freckles’s head came up off his coat, her eyes enormous.

On the far side of the camp, Ivo Varken was on his feet, his blue-grey face suddenly furious with fear.

"Answer it!" he roared. "It isn’t counting steps anymore, it’s counting us! The third stone! Say it back, all of you, now!"

"Thirty-one," Aren said instantly. Sigrid said it beside him, and Freckles, and the merchant girl, and all around the camp voices rose in a ragged, frightened chorus, thirty-one, thirty-one, thirty-one, ragged and desperate.

Priest-boy didn’t say anything.

He was standing with his eyes closed and his frozen beads in his fingers, praying, his lips moving silently. He hadn’t heard Ivo, or anything else.

Aren grabbed him by the front of his coat and shook him so hard his beads flew.

"Say it! Thirty-one, say it!"

Priest-boy’s eyes flew open, wild and blank.

"Thirty-one," he gasped.

At the edge of the camp, two candidates who had fallen asleep standing up in their rings, leaning against their neighbors, didn’t answer at all.

They opened their eyes. Both of them, at the same moment. Then they let go of the people beside them, turned, and began to walk toward the center of the lake, calm and unhurried, side by side, with the frost on their shoulders glittering in the dawn.

Their friends shouted after them. One of them grabbed the girl’s arm, and she shook him off gently without looking back.

Nobody else followed.

[Law of the Hollow observed: When the count is spoken, answer.]

[Laws confirmed: 2/3.]

Aren watched helplessly as the two small figures grew smaller across the ice, until the grey swallowed them.

Then he bent down, picked Priest-boy’s beads up off the ice one by one, and put them back in the boy’s shaking hands.

"Twenty-nine," he murmured to nobody.

Somewhere at the center of the lake, as if it had heard him, the bell rang for the second time.