Chapter 105: The Throat

[Day 6 of 40.]

Kaela found the footprints an hour after the count.

She didn’t call anybody; she stood at the edge of the camp with her lance in her hand, frowning down at the snow, until her sergeant noticed and went over to her, then Ivo, and at last the fool, because she turned her head and looked straight at him.

There were eight of them, Imperial-issue boot prints leading out of the camp toward the ship, eight steps pressed clear and even into the thin snow that lay over the ice.

Then there was nothing at all.

There was no ninth step and no tenth. The snow beyond lay smooth and unbroken for a hundred paces, right up to the ship, and on the far side of that untouched white stretch, at the foot of the gangway, the prints began again, coming back down.

"Corporal Brann," Kaela said grimly. "He stood the middle watch."

Her sergeant cleared his throat uneasily. "He’s in his ring, Captain, and he’s been there all morning."

They went and looked at him. He was a young man with frost in his beard, standing in his ring with the others and counting when it was his turn, perfectly ordinary. When Kaela asked him where he had gone in the night, he stared at her in genuine confusion and insisted that he’d been right here, Captain, all night long, and hadn’t moved an inch.

He believed it, and Aren could see that he did.

He could also hear something else, faint, under the corporal’s breath and between his words: a low and patient tune, the kind a mother might sing to a child who couldn’t sleep.

The Familiar heard it too, and it went quiet under his ribs, as it had in the yard at Kharn, and then, then it did something he had never felt it do.

It purred.

’No, not that song! Anything but that song!’

He knew it now, because he had recognized it in the yard at Kharn, coming out of the mouths of four priests in grey, and he had known it long before that, in a small room at the top of the Academy infirmary, where his sister sang it every night without knowing what it was.

It was Nell’s tune.

Kaela was looking at him, not at the corporal.

"You know that song," she said quietly.

"Every fool knows every song, Captain."

"You went white."

"Fools are always white. It’s the paint."

She didn’t press him, but she sent Corporal Brann to the far side of the camp and set two men to watch him, and afterward Aren saw her standing alone at the edge of the camp, staring at the eight footprints that stopped in the middle of nowhere.

[Familiar of Nothing: Hunger 58%.]

The soldiers in the ice took a step that night.

It happened at the twentieth wave, as it had on the second night: a long, deep cracking that came from everywhere at once, the whole lake groaning, and the rows of frozen men taking one long, slow step together.

This time, though, they didn’t step toward the center at all; they stepped toward the fool.

He felt it under his boots as a thousand frozen men shifted through the ice at once, every single one of them moving toward the spot where he stood. The ice around his ring cracked open. Long black seams split between the rings and breathed white mist, and the ring nearest his own lurched violently as the ice under it tipped, and somebody screamed.

Nobody fell in, not this time. But when the cracking stopped, every person on the ice was staring at the fool.

[Sleepless Watch: Night 3/5.]

At dawn, the count was twenty-one, and everyone answered.

Then Cassian Haskel came down from his ship with fire in his hands.

It was a different fire, and Aren saw that at once. It wasn’t the soft shimmer of heat that had rolled ahead of him across the ice before. This one burned close against his skin, small and blue at the edges, and it didn’t flicker in the wind. Something grey hung on a cord around his neck.

He didn’t come anywhere near the bow this time. He stopped well out of the fool’s reach, a long stone’s throw away, and he spoke to the rings instead of to Aren.

"You all felt that last night," he said. He wasn’t smiling, and that was new too. "Every one of those things under the ice turned around to face him, and last night they walked toward him." He let the silence do its work. "So ask yourselves what happens the next time they walk, and you happen to be standing next to him."

People looked nervously at the cracks between the rings, and nobody looked at the fool.

"I don’t know what he is, and frankly I don’t care," Haskel went on. "What I do know is that there’s a fire on that ship again, and nothing on this lake can drink it." He held up his burning hand, and the blue fire didn’t so much as waver. "Anyone who wants to be warm tonight, and far away from him, is welcome aboard. No price this time. None at all!"

He turned around and walked back to the ship.

By noon, four people had followed him: two of the lesser-house boys, the last of his old companions, and Corporal Brann, who strolled out of the camp in broad daylight while the two men set to watch him were looking the other way, humming quietly to himself.

’Four already! It’s a start, and he’ll get more.’

The worst part was that Haskel wasn’t wrong.

Aren sat down on the ice, unfolded Ivo’s map, and studied it until his eyes ached.

It was a remarkably good map, and Ivo had drawn it with the care of a man who fully expected to die before he finished it. The lake was a rough circle in faded ink with the center marked by a small black star, and around it, in rings, he had marked every crack that breathed, every patch of thin ice and every place where the frozen soldiers stood closest together. There were little notes everywhere in Ivo’s careful hand. Here the breath is worst. Here we lost Tamsin. Here, do not stop.

About three hundred paces in from the ship, a little to the east, there was a shape Aren hadn’t noticed before, an oval drawn carefully and shaded in. Beside it, Ivo had written a single word.

Rock.

He took the map straight to Ivo. "What’s this?"

Ivo looked at it for some time before he answered.

"An island," he said slowly, "or the top of a hill, from before there was any lake here. It’s bare stone, about a hundred paces long, and we passed it eight years ago." He rubbed his face wearily. "There were no soldiers under it. You can’t freeze a man inside a rock."

"Then they can’t walk under it either."

Ivo looked up at him sharply. "It’s three hundred paces closer to the center."

"Yes, it is."

"In daylight, that’s allowed, if we’re on it before the third bell." Ivo’s pale eyes moved over the map, over the notes in his own handwriting and the little drawing of a rock in the middle of a frozen army. "And if we’re not, we lose another third of them."

"And if we stay here, right next to me, the next time they walk?"

Ivo didn’t answer, and he didn’t need to.

They set off in the afternoon.

Seventeen candidates, Kaela, Ivo and ten of her soldiers went in a long line across the ice, with the fool at the front holding the map. Nobody argued with him, and even the ones who refused to look at him followed him, because the only alternative was standing still and waiting for the next time the ice moved.

It was only three hundred paces, but it took them three hours.

The ice changed as they went, growing clearer and harder, and the soldiers frozen inside it stood closer and closer together, until in some places Aren was stepping over helmets with every stride. All of them faced him, every single one, and he could feel their eyes on the soles of his boots.

Halfway there, he came to a crack in the ice that Ivo’s map called the Throat.

It was wider than a man was tall, and it breathed. Every three hundred heartbeats it let out a long white sigh of cold that rolled across the ice in both directions and frosted everything it touched, and there was no way around it for half a mile.

The Familiar woke up all at once, and it wanted that crack as badly as a starving man wants a loaf of bread on a table. It pulled at his ribs so hard that he staggered, and for a few heartbeats he couldn’t see the line of people behind him at all, only the black opening in the ice and the cold pouring out of it like breath out of a mouth.

’All right. All right! No more small bites, then.’

He held up his hand to stop the line. Then he walked to the edge of the Throat by himself and pointed down into it.

’Eat. All of it. As much as you like.’

The Familiar went, and he felt it leave him along its thread like a dog let off its chain, plunging down into the dark crack and the cold that came boiling up out of it, and it ate. It didn’t take a bite; it took a meal. It swallowed the next breath before it could rise, and then the one after that. It ate the cold out of the walls of the crack and the black water at the bottom, until the white mist died away and the Throat fell silent.

Then, on the far side, the ice began to close.

It didn’t close much, only a few inches, but without the cold pouring out of it the crack began to freeze over from the edges, slowly, as a puddle freezes on a winter night, until there was a bridge of new ice across the narrowest part, grey and thick and solid.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Hunger: 58% → 19%.]

[Ledger entry added: The Throat (White Hollow).]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 10% → 19%.]

He felt the cold sink into him, down past his blood and his bone and into the marrow, where it settled and stayed. Nine percent at once was so much that he had to put his hand on his knee to stay upright.

When he looked back, seventeen candidates, ten soldiers, a captain and a man with blue hands were staring at him across fifty paces of ice.

Nobody said anything.

Then the merchant girl walked forward, past him and onto the bridge of new ice, and crossed it. On the far side she turned around.

"It holds," she called back.

They crossed one at a time. None of them looked at him as they passed, but when Freckles reached him, she stopped, took his hand, and held it tightly until they reached the other side.

They reached the rock with the sun going down. Kaela came last, driving the stragglers ahead of her with the butt of her lance, and the third bell rang out across the ice at the very moment her boots touched bare stone.

For the first time in six days, nobody was standing on top of anybody.

The rock was black and smooth and bitterly cold, and there were no soldiers under it. That night, when the soldiers in the ice took another step toward the fool, they came to a halt at the edge of the stone, all around it, in a great silent ring. They stood there all night, a hand’s breadth beneath the surface, facing him.

[Sleepless Watch: Night 4/5.]

He sat on the highest point of the rock with his back against the stone and watched them, and watched the distant glow of the ship’s blue fire, and didn’t need to sleep at all.

Around midnight, he heard it. It was coming from inside the ring, his own ring on the rock, close enough to touch: a very soft tune, low and patient, of the kind a mother might sing to a child who couldn’t sleep.

He turned his head toward the sound.

Freckles was sitting with her back against his side, wide awake, with her eyes open and calm and empty, gazing across the ice toward the blue fire on the ship, and her lips were moving.

She was humming Nell’s song.