Chapter 28 Harvest

Audit of T. Marsh. Note 28. Arrived Marsh Hold, Thornfell district, Day 46, at sunset. Present on arrival: one Lord Chancellor; one Knight-Captain; forty-odd hired men; four wagons of illegal binding collars; one very large animal on a chain. Subject: emerging from a hole in a barn floor. I have stopped expecting things. H.Q.

"Four days," I said.

"Time runs oddly down there, I'm told." The tall man smiled. It was a pleasant smile, a tired one, the smile of a man at the end of a long meeting. "It's nearly winter up here, Mister Marsh. Frost tonight, by the look of the sky. Do climb out. You'll be more comfortable. Nobody will shoot you yet."

I climbed out.

There were crossbows on me from every side. A dozen at least. The men holding them were nervous. You could see it in how they held them, too tight, the way a man holds a rope over a drop. Sir Gareth stood a little behind the tall man with his hand on his sword and his face pale under the tan, and he wouldn't look at me.

The tall man held out his hand. He had a ring on it with a tower.

"Mordaine Kell," he said. "Lord Chancellor of Aldmere. We haven't met. I knew your father."

I didn't take the hand. After a moment he put it away again, without seeming to mind.

"I offered him a great deal of money for this farm," he said. "Twice. Once when you were small, once about five years ago. He refused both times. He didn't even let my agent into the yard. He stood at the gate with a pitchfork." Kell shook his head. "A remarkable man, in his way. Stubborn."

"So I'm told."

"Do you know what's down there, Mister Marsh?" He nodded at the hole. "Not the monsters. The monsters are the least of it. I mean what it is. What it's worth."

"Pretty rocks," I said.

He laughed. He seemed to like that.

"Pretty rocks," he said. "Yes. Calamity cores. Each one enough to light a city district for a year. Enough to drive a mill, or a forge, or a ship against the wind, or a binding strong enough to hold a dragon. Your family has been killing the things that make them for, oh, three hundred years? Four? And throwing the cores in a sack. Propping doors open with them." He spread his hands. "The greatest fortune in the realm, under one barn. And the Marshes nailed a plank over it."

"It's not a fortune," I said. "It's a hole. Things come up it and kill people."

"Only if you let them." He looked at the wagons. "I don't intend to let them. I intend to put collars on them, and bring them up one at a time, and take what's in them, and send them back. A harvest, Mister Marsh. Every season. The way you'd harvest wheat." He tilted his head. "I've done it before, you know. Six times, on six farms. It works. It's just that the other farms didn't have a Marsh on them, and they were so much smaller. Yours is the biggest seam on the frontier. Your father knew that. Every core your family threw in that sack proves it."

I thought about the Corran place and the Selby place, empty, and fourteen farms along the Greywild bought cheap.

"What happened to the farmers?" I said. "On the six."

Kell shrugged, very slightly.

"Harvesting," he said, "is a dangerous business."

* * *

"Here is my offer," he said. "It's a generous one, I think. I need the key." He looked at the cleaver in my hand. "Without it, I can't open the lock or close it. With it, I can do both, as often as I like. You can't use it. Not to harvest. You haven't the stomach. So give it to Sir Gareth, and walk away, and you'll be the richest farmer in Aldmere. A tenth of every harvest. A fortune a year, for doing nothing at all." His voice was very reasonable. "Or keep it, and die here, and I'll take it off your body."

"Nobody can lift it," I said. "Sir Gareth knows. He's tried."

Sir Gareth's face went red.

"Oh, I know about that," said Kell. "I've read every report on you, Mister Marsh. Hesper Quill's included. She's a fine auditor. She lied to her Guildmaster very well." He smiled again. "That's why I brought something to carry it for me."

He turned his head and nodded at the yard.

Out in the dark beyond the barn doors, something moved. Something very big. A chain rattled. Not a small chain. A chain like a ship's anchor chain, links as big as my head. And then a sound came out of the dark that I'd been hearing through the floor and in my sleep since I was nine years old.

The hiss of a big rat.

* * *

It came in through the barn doorway with its head low, dragging the chain behind it. Four men in grey were holding the end of the chain, and they weren't holding it, really, they were just running along with it. The grey-bearded mage from the river walked beside it with his black rod held up, and the crystal on the end of the rod was blazing.

It was a big rat. It was the biggest big rat I'd ever seen. Four cart-lengths, maybe five. Its plates were dark with age, almost black, and there were old white scars across them. And all round its neck, in a band as wide as a door, there were collars. A dozen iron collars, riveted together, and in every one of them a crystal, glowing yellow, pulsing all together in time with the mage's rod.

Its eyes were the wrong colour. Not milky yellow. Dirty yellow, the same as the crystals. All nine of them, blinking together, all at the same time.

That was the worst of it. Big rats don't blink together. They never have.

"From the Crane holding," said Kell. "Down the forest, a long day south of here. It took two years to catch it and a hundred and forty cores to bind it. It does exactly what Master Voss tells it." He stepped back, out of the way. "Master Voss. The key, please."

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The mage pointed the rod at me.

* * *

It didn't rear.

That's what I was waiting for, and it didn't come. Big rats always rear before they bite. It's the one thing you can count on. But this one didn't have its own head any more. It had the mage's. And the mage didn't know about the seam.

It came at me low and straight, like a battering ram, all that weight behind it, and hit me.

I went back across the barn floor and through the back wall. The boards went out behind me like matchwood. I landed in the home paddock on my back in the frost-hard ground and slid twenty yards and fetched up against the stump of a fence post the chewers had eaten down to the ground.

I lay there a second. Everything hurt. "Shit," I said, to the sky. It seemed the right word.

It came out through the hole in the wall after me. It didn't stop to look round, or sniff, or turn its head, the way a big rat does. It just came, straight, low and fast, where the rod pointed it.

I got up and threw myself sideways. Its jaws went past my hip close enough that I felt the wind. Acid spattered on the frosty grass and hissed. I put the cleaver into its side as it went past and the blade went in a hand's width and came out, and it didn't even notice. The collars, I thought. It's not feeling anything. It's not itself.

It turned, quicker than a big rat turns. The mage stood in the broken wall behind it, with the rod up.

It came again. I went sideways. It came again.

And over the sound of it, over the hiss and the chain dragging and the shouting from the barn, I heard hooves on the track. A lot of hooves. And a voice, high and clear and furious.

"Tobin! The collar! Cut the collar!"

* * *

It was Lys.

She came into the yard on her grey mare at a flat gallop, with the light going behind her and her red hair loose, and fifty palace guards at her back, and the mare stopped dead thirty paces short of me and nearly threw her and she didn't care. She was standing in her stirrups with one hand up. Behind her came Rusk and his twelve, and Hesper on a bay horse, holding on with both hands and both knees and an expression of grim, white determination. And past them all, roaring, came Brakka and the warband, on foot, running, faster than the horses.

"The collars!" Lys shouted again. "It's not the rat! It's the binding! Cut it loose!"

The big rat came for me again.

This time I didn't step out of the way. I stepped in. Not under its jaw. Along its side, past its head, the way you'd step along a bull in a crush. My shoulder took the side of its face and I felt something in it give and I didn't care either. I got to the collars. The great band of them round its neck, a dozen iron rings, riveted together, twelve crystals glowing dirty yellow.

I didn't hit the rat. I hit the collars.

Gristle went through iron the way it goes through everything, and through the first crystal, and the second, and the third. Every one it went through went dark. I worked down the band like you'd work down a row of fence posts with a maul, one, two, three, nine, ten, eleven, twelve.

The last crystal went out.

The big rat stopped.

It stood there in the frosty paddock with its head low and the broken collars falling off its neck. All nine of its eyes went from dirty yellow to milky. Then they blinked. One. Then another. Then three at once.

Out of time.

It lifted its head, slowly. It looked round. It looked at me. Then it turned its head right round on that long armoured neck, and looked behind it, at the barn, at the broken boards, at the grey-bearded man standing in it with a black rod that had gone suddenly very quiet.

It knew him.

The mage started to run.

He didn't get far.

* * *

I'm not going to tell that part. It's not a thing to tell. He'd chained it for two years and bound it with a hundred and forty cores and made it a thing that walked where he pointed. It remembered. That's all.

Afterwards, it turned back to me, and lifted the front third of itself off the ground, the way they do.

It reared.

I stepped in under it, and put Gristle into the soft seam under its jaw, the width of my hand, and pulled down, the way Dad showed me when I was ten.

It went down slow, like a tree going. It lay in the frosty grass of the home paddock and its eyes went dull, one after another, still out of time. I stood beside it for a moment with my hand on its plates. I don't know why. It wasn't its fault, what it had been made to do.

* * *

The hired men were running. Most of them. Lys's guards had come in through the barn doors and the warband had come in through the back wall where I'd gone out, and the men in grey had looked at Brakka coming through a wall at them with a cartwheel axe and decided, nearly all at once, that they weren't being paid enough.

I went back into the barn. Kell wasn't there.

Gareth was.

He was standing at the lip of the hole with his sword out, alone, while men ran past him. Down in the hole, the red light was brighter than before. Much brighter. I could hear something, down there, a sound like a very large thing turning over in deep water. Wrenna's voice, small and far off, shouting something I couldn't make out.

There was a notch in the black glassy stone at the lip of the hole, right where the drain had always started. I hadn't seen it when I climbed out. It was the size and shape of a cleaver. A broad blade, and a short handle, with two little lines cut beside it.

The lock.

I walked across the barn towards it. Gareth stepped in front of me.

"Kell says the key," he said. His voice was high and strange. "He said if I bring him the key he'll make me Lord Chancellor after him. He said."

"Where is he?"

"He said..."

"Sir," I said. "Stand aside. Please. There's something coming up that hole."

He looked at me. Then he looked at Gristle in my hand. And something went across his face, something I'd seen on it in the Guild hall, when he couldn't lift it off the bench in front of half the city. He reached out and grabbed the handle, above my hand, and pulled.

It was his last lift. I think he knew it was.

He pulled with everything. Both hands, all his weight, his feet braced on the barn floor, his face going purple, the cords standing out on his neck. And I let go. I don't know why. I just opened my hand and let him have it.

Gristle didn't move. It stayed in the air exactly where my hand had been, for a heartbeat, with Gareth hanging off the handle.

Then it came down. Not fast. Just down, the way a thing comes down when it decides to, and Gareth came down with it, and it lay across his chest on the barn floor and pinned him there like a beetle under a brick.

He screamed. Not from pain, I don't think. It wasn't hurting him. It just wouldn't let him up.

I bent down and picked it up off him with one hand.

Brakka had come up behind me. She looked down at Gareth on the floor, white and gasping. Her yellow eyes were very bright.

"Now?" she said.

"Not yet," I said.

She sighed. Then she bent down and slapped him, open-handed, across the face. His head went round and he went out like a lamp.

Brakka straightened up. She looked at him. Her face changed.

"Oh no," she said. "Grosh. Did I marry him?"

"Only if he lays you down, warlord," said Grosh, from the doorway. "You laid him."

Brakka let out a long breath. "Good," she said. "Good. He smells of liniment. No husband should smell that badly."

* * *

Outside, in the dark, something screamed. Not a screamy one. Something bigger, with wings.

I went to the doorway in time to see it go up off the far side of the home paddock. A wyvern. A real one. A cart-length long, grey and leathery, with an iron collar round its neck and a yellow crystal glowing in the front. On its back, in a long black coat, a tall thin man, holding on with one hand and holding a small iron strongbox with the other.

Kell looked back at me as it went up. He didn't wave. He just looked. Then the wyvern turned east, over the Greywild, and the dark took them.

A shape went after it across the paddock, black and fast, faster than any horse. The Countess, came with the dark. She went to the edge of the trees after him, and stopped there, and stood looking up into the sky. Then she turned round and came back.

"I can't follow that," she said. "Not while they are in the air. Don't know if you've noticed, I don't have wings."

From the hole in the barn floor, Wrenna's voice came up again, clearer this time, and not laughing.

"TOBIN! Any time you like!"

I turned round. The red light was coming up out of the hole like a fire out of a chimney. The barn floor round it was starting to shake.

I went to the lock.