Chapter 198: Twice Over

"On this layer, a blow is given like bread," said Rishin.

He did not raise his voice. Every one of them had already turned to him.

"Strike for yourself, and it is ash before it lands. Strike for somebody you love, and it lands twice. The units cannot strike it at all. So do not think about killing it. Think about who you are standing in front of."

"And Oswin?" said Alice.

"It calls the ones who are alone. That is all it can do with its voice." Rishin’s eyes went to Vina, hauling on Oswin’s arm.

"It cannot call her. Nothing can. She is the one thing between him and that chair that it cannot move by talking."

Vina heard him. She set her heels against the stone and pulled harder.

"Nyriel," said Logan.

The panel opened in front of all of them.

[ Ashen Feast Keeper ] [ Rank: Mythic ] [ Scaled to: Tier-9 ]

The numbers came after it.

[ Attack: 9,000 ] [ Speed: 6,000 ] [ Constitution: 96,000 ] [ Arcane: 60,000 ]

"It does not hit hard," said Garen. "It does not have to."

The thing had left the Table. It came across the yard toward them with the brimming bowl held out in one long hand and the iron pot hanging from the other.

Its blank face was turned on Oswin, and it did not look at anyone else.

"Os," it said. "I filled it for you. Come and eat."

Oswin pushed against Bread’s shoulder again. The dog slid back half a pace on the stone, and Vina slid with him.

Daniel was already moving.

[ Snaring Roots ]

Pale roots burst up out of the cracks in the stone and wrapped Oswin’s legs from the ankle to the knee.

He stopped as if he had walked into a wall. He did not look down. He strained forward against them with his arms out toward the bowl.

"Three seconds," said Daniel through his teeth. "I can do it again. I can keep doing it."

"Terry," said Logan into his collar. "Halden. Take his shoulders. Hold him back. You can touch him, even if you cannot touch it."

The two units came up behind Oswin. Terry’s great hands closed on one of his shoulders, and Halden took the other. The roots fell away. Daniel cast them again before Oswin’s foot could come off the stone.

Billy did not wait to be told anything.

He went past them at the thing in a scream of blades. He hit it square in the middle, and he went through it as if it were smoke.

He came out the other side grey from rim to hub, coughing ash out of every joint.

"Boss!" His voice cracked. "Boss, I cannot touch it! I went right through!"

"Get back. Guard the bridge."

Billy went, scraping. The thing had not even turned its head.

Logan drew Grimlord’s Blade, and he went at it without a thought.

He was angry, so angry that his hands were shaking on the hilt.

It was wearing a dead woman’s voice to pull a starving man into a chair, and it was a warden, and it was worth eight hundred points.

He cut at its side with everything he had.

The blade went into the grey and through it. Ash poured off the steel in a soft grey cloud and coated it to the hilt.

The thing did not stagger. It did not even slow. Where his blade had passed, the grey closed over as smoothly as water closes over a dropped stone.

"Who was that for?" said Rishin behind him.

Logan stood with the ash dripping from his sword. He made himself answer honestly.

"Me," he said. "For the points. And because I was angry."

"Then it was ash."

Logan looked past the thing at Oswin, held between Terry and Halden. He looked at Vina at the end of Oswin’s arm.

She had both hands round his wrist now, and her boots were skidding forward a finger’s width at a time. The thing was three long paces from her, and it was reaching.

He did not think about the points again.

He cut at it a second time, and he cut for her.

It landed twice.

He felt it through the hilt. There was one stroke, but the blade struck as though two swords had swung side by side.

Two long wounds opened in the thing’s flank, a hand’s width apart. Grey ash ran out of them onto the stone like sand from a torn sack.

The thing stopped.

It turned its blank face on Logan for the first time. The voice that came out of it was still Lysa’s, but it had gone flat and puzzled.

"You were not called," it said.

"No," said Logan. "I was not."

It swung the pot at him.

The pot was iron and as broad as a cartwheel, and it came round on the end of that long arm faster than Logan could get his blade up.

A ring of pale light met it a hand’s width from his face.

Isolde’s chakram struck the rim of the pot and knocked it high. It went up over Logan’s head, and he heard the iron ring like a bell. Isolde caught her chakram as it came back to her palm.

"For the boy," she said shortly. "Not for the points."

Garen fired beside her, twice. Both shots struck the thing’s shoulder as four. Ash burst out of it in a grey spray.

"For you, dear," said Garen. "Obviously."

Alice had already drawn.

[ Arrow Intent: Puncture ]

She shot for Logan. He did not have to ask how he knew. The arrow went into the thing’s chest and opened two holes, and ash poured from both.

The thing swayed. It let the bowl fall from its hand. The bowl broke on the stone, and the ash in it scattered across the yard.

It did not go for any of them.

It went past them all on its long grey legs, faster than it had moved yet. It went straight for Vina.

Logan shouted. He could not reach it in time. Nobody could.

The thing bent over Vina. It laid its long grey hand on her shoulder, gently, the way it had laid it on every eater at the Table.

"Sit," it said in Lysa’s voice. "Sit down, little one. You must be so tired."

Vina looked up into the blank grey face.

"No," she said.

Her voice shook, but she did not move. She did not let go of Oswin’s wrist.

"I cannot be called," she said. "It says so on my rock."

The hand lay on her shoulder. Nothing happened. She stood under it with her chin up and her braids full of ash, and her feet did not move from the stone.

The thing took its hand away. Then it hesitated.

That was when Oswin stopped pulling.

He had been straining toward the voice with his whole body. Logan saw him go still in the units’ grip. His eyes, which had been fixed on the Table, came down to Vina.

He looked at her face, and at the grey hand that had just left her shoulder.

"Os," said the thing. It turned back to him, and its voice was low and coaxing again. "Os, I waited. You promised you would wait for me. Now it is your turn."

Oswin’s face changed.

The blankness went out of it all at once, like a fever breaking. In its place came a hard, clear anger.

"No," he said slowly. "She made me promise not to wait. On the top step. With her forehead on mine."

His voice rose.

"She never once asked me to wait for her. Not in her whole life. You do not know her at all."

He shrugged off Terry’s hands. He drew the sword from his back.

Rishin spoke from behind him, very steady.

"Not for yourself."

"No," said Oswin.

Logan opened Sword Intent.

It drained the color out of the yard and left the thing standing in it as a tangle of grey threads. Every thread in its long body ran back to one place.

They ran back to the iron pot. It was still in its hand, and in Sword Intent it burned like a coal.

’Everything it serves comes out of that pot,’ Logan thought. ’Every bowl it ever filled.’

"Oswin," he said. "The pot."

Oswin looked at it. He took his sword in both hands.

"Lysa," he said, very low. "This one is for you."

He swung.

The blow landed twice.

Logan saw it in Sword Intent before he heard it. It was one stroke, and the pot split in two places at once, from the rim to the base.

Every grey thread in the thing’s body came loose from it at the same instant, like the strings of a puppet when the hand lets go.

The Keeper did not fall. It came apart.

It slumped from the top down, the way a heap of sand slumps when the water reaches it. The blank face sank into the shoulders.

The apron folded in on itself. The long arms crumbled into the heap, and the heap spread out across the stone, wide and grey and flat.

The two halves of the pot lay on top of it. They rusted as Logan watched, and then they were ash too.

[ Ashen Feast Keeper slain. ] [ Oswin: +800 Tower Points ] [ Warden of the Fourth Layer slain. ] [ The Falls are open. ]

Oswin stood over the heap with his sword hanging from one hand.

He never glanced at the panel. He turned instead to Vina, who was still holding his wrist with both hands. Her knuckles had gone white.

"You can let go now," he said.

Vina looked at Rishin.

"Not yet," said the old man.

So she did not. Oswin let her keep it, and he did not try to take his hand back.

Logan wiped Grimlord’s Blade on his sleeve. The ash came off it easily, as the grey had come off his legs at the line. He sheathed it and looked across at the Table.

The eaters had stopped eating.

They sat along both sides of the long grey cloth with their spoons in their hands. One by one, they were looking down into their bowls as if they had never seen what was in them.

A woman near the end put her spoon down. She touched the ash with one finger and looked at the grey on her fingertip.

Then she began to cry, softly and helplessly, the way a child cries when it wakes and does not know where it is.

Along the Table, others were doing the same. Some just sat. A man at the far end laid his head down on the grey cloth beside his bowl and did not lift it again.

They were all so thin, and they were all alone. And there was nobody on the whole of the Fourth Layer who would hand them anything at all.

Oswin was looking at them too. Logan saw him look at every face along that table, one after another, the way he had once repeated each of the family’s names under his tree.

Then Oswin looked down at Bread, standing grey with ash at his knee.

"Logan," he said. "How many crusts are there in eight years?"