Chapter 206: The Silent Mouth

"Grandpa Rishin!" called Vina.

Her voice was small and high, and it went out across the basin as clearly as a bell over snow.

"You said you would be behind me all the way down. You promised on the stair. So you have to come back. You have to come back right now."

Across the water, Rishin’s mouth on the hill stopped singing.

It closed. Then it opened again, and it did not sing. It strained, the way Bram’s mouth had strained, with its white beard trembling round it.

Both great pale ears at the top of the hill turned toward the second ring.

The arms came for her.

More of them came than Logan had seen yet. They rose off the island’s flanks and swept out over the water in a grey wave with their hands spread.

Solveig came down out of the air over Vina before Logan could reach her.

He landed astride her with his wings of light flung wide, and the first hand struck them and slid off in a spray of sparks. The second hand struck, and the third.

He did not move. He stood over the girl with his blade drawn and his back to her, exactly as he had stood on the lawn at home every time the old man said down.

Logan came in on Solveig’s left side with the lance. He took one arm through at the elbow and another at the wrist. A third came in under his guard, and he had to throw himself flat to let it pass.

Then Bram was there.

The dwarf charged up the steps with the split shield on his arm and his hammer swinging, and he made no sound.

He met the third arm as it turned back toward Vina and broke it across the shield’s rim, and the hammer came down on the joint so hard that the stone of the ring cracked under it.

Edda was behind him with both her knives. She went for the fingers.

Vina had not stopped calling.

She was on her knees under Solveig’s wings, holding on to Rishin’s hand with both of hers. The old man still strained toward the lake against Logan’s grip and hers. His eyes were far away.

"Come home," Vina called. Her voice was cracking now. "Grandpa, please. I cannot carry you down by myself this time. You are too heavy. You have to walk."

Logan risked one look at the island.

Rishin’s mouth on the hill was pulling against the grey flesh. The skin round it was stretching. Small tears were opening at its corners.

He looked down the ring for Alice.

She stood three rings below them, well back from the fighting. She had an arrow nocked and her bow half drawn, and her eyes were fixed on the top of the hill.

She was not waiting for the scream this time. Logan saw it in the set of her shoulders.

’She is waiting for the tear,’ he thought. ’She is going to loose before it screams, so the arrow will be there when the mouth opens.’

The mouth tore free.

It made the same tearing noise as before. The grey flesh split round it, and an old man’s voice came out of the split.

It came across the water low and fast. It went over Solveig’s wings and past Logan’s head, and it went into Rishin’s open mouth.

"Vina."

Alice loosed in the same instant.

[ Arrow Intent: Puncture ]

Logan did not watch the arrow. He watched the crown.

The scream began. All the mouths on the island opened together, and the noise hit the basin like a wall falling.

At the crown, between the two great ears, the dark slit opened. It gaped wide and black and silent in the middle of all that screaming.

The arrow went into it.

[ Critical strike. Fatal point struck. ]

The scream stopped.

It did not die away. It stopped as if it had been cut, in the middle of every voice at once. The basin rang with the quiet it left behind.

The arms fell.

They dropped all over the rings and into the lake, long and grey and slack. The hand that had been closing over Solveig’s wings went limp and slid off them onto the stone.

On the island, the great ears at the crown folded slowly over. Then the hill began to sag.

It went down the way the keeper had gone down on the Fourth Layer, from the top. The crown sank into the shoulders. The flanks bulged and slumped.

The grey flesh sloughed down the trunk of the stone column it had grown round, and the column stood clear of it, black and wet and bare.

And all over the sagging hill, the mouths opened.

[ Many Mouthed Cantor slain. ] [ Alice Rezvolt: +800 Tower Points ] [ Warden of the Fifth Layer slain. ] [ The Throat is open. ]

The voices poured from it all at once.

They lifted from the dying hill like a flock of birds going up from a field. There were hundreds of them, then thousands.

Logan could not see them. He heard them as a great rushing of sound with no words in it, sweeping out over the black water in every direction.

They went up the rings.

Each voice found the mouth it belonged to. Logan heard them go home one after another, ring by ring.

Each made the same small sound as it arrived, the gasp of a person filling their lungs properly at last.

On the third ring, the young woman with the chipped tooth shut her mouth. Then she opened it again.

"Ilse," she said. She turned round, looking for somebody. "Ilse!"

Further along, a man’s voice called a name, and then another man’s. A child began to cry. All round the basin, in every ring from the lake to the lip, the silent people were waking up and speaking.

Every word was a name, and every name was heard.

Rishin had stopped pulling toward the lake.

He stood with Vina’s hands round his and Logan’s hand still on his arm. His eyes had come back. He was looking down at the girl at his feet.

His lips parted. He seemed afraid to try.

"Little one," he said.

It came out in his low, dry voice. It was a little hoarse, and all of them heard it.

Vina let go of his hand. She put both her arms round his waist and pressed her face into his coat, and she shook.

The old man put his hand on her head and kept it there. Logan saw his face and looked away from it.

Solveig had folded his wings. He stood looking down at the girl and the old man with his blade still drawn, as though he was not yet certain he could put it away.

Logan let go of Rishin’s arm. His legs did not want to hold him. He sat down on the edge of the ring with his back against the step above and felt the blood drying on his neck.

Helen found him there. She knelt and put her glowing hand over his ear without asking, and the throbbing in it eased and faded.

"Hold still," she said.

He heard it. He smiled, and held still.

Alice climbed the steps and sat down beside him.

She had put the bow away. Her ears had stopped bleeding, though the blood had dried in two dark lines down her neck. She leaned against his shoulder and looked out at the lake.

In the middle of the water, the last of the grey flesh sank away from the column. The black water began to turn.

It turned slowly at first, round the foot of the bare column, and then faster. A whirlpool was forming there, pulling the lake down into the stone where the Cantor had stood.

"The Throat," said Alice softly.

She said it to him, so it came out.

"You did it," he said. "You saw it from the first scream, and you waited."

"I had to tell you where to look." Her mouth twisted. "And I could not. It was not love. It was a target."

"You told me anyway."

"With my fingers." She shut her eyes. "I think I like this layer least of all of them."

Bram came up the rings last, with Edda’s hand in his.

He stopped in front of Logan and looked down at him. The dwarf’s face was streaked with grey dust and sweat. His beard was full of chips of stone from the ring he had cracked.

He opened his mouth. It moved. Nothing came out.

Bram shut his mouth again, and his face darkened. He tried a second time, and once more it went nowhere.

Edda looked up at him. Then, for the first time since Logan had met her in the white, she laughed out loud.

Bram glared at his daughter. Then he tried it a different way.

"My girl would want you to know," he said slowly, "that Coppervein owes you four lives now."

Every word came out. Bram looked astonished. Edda laughed harder, and she hid her face against his arm.

"Tell her," said Logan, "that we will hold you to it."