Chapter 106: The Fool’s Bell

[Day 8 of 40. Night.]

[Sleepless Watch: Night 5/5.]

By the time the third bell rang, half the rock was humming.

It had started with Freckles the night before, sitting against his side with her eyes fixed on the blue fire on the ship, and it spread outward from her. One of the Merrow girls picked it up, then a boy from a lesser house, then four of Kaela’s soldiers on the far side of the stone, until seven people were sitting bolt upright in their rings with their lips moving and their faces turned toward the ship.

It was a low, patient tune, the kind a mother might sing to a child who couldn’t sleep, and Aren had known it all his life.

Around the tenth wave, all seven of them stood up together and walked down off the rock and out across the ice toward the ship, in a neat line, with their arms hanging loosely at their sides. Kaela grabbed one of her soldiers by the collar, and he kept walking and dragged her two full steps across the stone before she let go rather than break his arm.

Aren caught Freckles thirty paces out. He turned her around by the shoulders, and she looked up at him with eyes that had nobody at all behind them, and smiled sweetly.

"It’s all right, little eater," she said, in the warm grey voice of a priest he had last seen stepping backward into the dark of a mountain. "It doesn’t hurt. We’re only taking her home, the same as we took your sister."

She turned out of his hands and walked on toward the ship.

Across the ice, at the top of the gangway, Cassian Haskel raised a fist wrapped in blue fire and called out cheerfully into the dark.

"Fool! Come and fetch her, if you like! Bring your bell!"

Aren stood on the ice and said nothing.

For eight days he had fallen over for these people. He had taken their slaps and their coppers and their laughter, and he had held back nearly everything, because a fool who held back stayed alive. He had let a priest’s puppet humiliate him in front of the whole lake.

’Took. He said took.’

He reached up and straightened his cracked mask, and tightened the strip of linen that held it together. He settled his cap until the bell hung just so.

Then he walked toward the ship, and the bell rang softly with every step.

Haskel had been ready for him.

He had spent the whole afternoon preparing. The four soldiers who had walked off the rock had gone ahead of the others and stood formed up at the foot of the gangway, Imperial escort, the best the Crown had sent, with their round shields locked together and their spears leveled. The song had taken their minds and left them their training. On the rail above them, one of the lesser-house boys knelt with a bow, and the other stood beside him swinging a length of iron chain in a slow, heavy circle. Fenn, Haskel’s last companion, waited at the top of the gangway with an axe in each hand, and Corporal Brann stood beside him, humming.

The hummers from the rock were climbing past them, one by one, toward the brazier. Freckles was halfway up.

Haskel leaned on the rail above them all, with blue fire crawling up both his arms.

"Grave-flame," he announced happily. "A gift from a friend. Your little pet can’t eat it, incidentally. I was told to mention that." His white teeth flashed. "Eight of us, fool. Eight trained Rank Ds against one clown with a bell. Do you know what you are? You’re a story we’re going to tell at dinner!"

Aren didn’t answer him. He was looking at the soldiers.

Street Fighter’s Instinct read them effortlessly. The sergeant carried his weight on his left foot, and the man beside him had a stiff knee. All four of them were Rank D in the first stage, Skin Tempered and nothing deeper, and he could feel what their bodies had in them. They were strong men, probably a hundred and fifty points apiece.

He had four hundred and thirteen, and his blood was perfect.

’They don’t know. Nobody ever looks at the fool.’

"Kill him," said Haskel.

The archer loosed first.

The arrow came out of the dark fast enough to go through a door, straight at the fool’s throat. Iron Sense felt the arrowhead the instant it crossed thirty paces, a bright cold point of iron, and Aren lifted his hand without looking and caught the shaft between two fingers.

The bell jingled.

He turned the arrow around and flicked it back, almost lazily, with a little snap of the wrist. It went up to the rail faster than it had come down, and the archer sat down hard with the feathers standing out of his throat.

On the rock, three hundred paces away, somebody screamed.

"Tortoise!" barked the sergeant.

The four shields slammed together into a wall and came at him at a run, spears out in front, a drilled, perfect charge that had broken bandit lines and beast packs and peasant riots all across the North.

Aren drew his right hand back as if he were holding a blade, and pulled the black power up out of his chest.

[New Moon.]

The crescent came off his hand as long as a man was tall and black as a hole in the sky. It went through the first shield, and the second, and the third and fourth, and the four men behind them, and kept on going into the hull of the ship with a tremendous crack!

The Tortoise came apart in eight pieces and slid across the ice.

The bell jingled.

[Essence: 100% → 82%.]

On the rock, Jory had both hands over his mouth. The Corvane twin was whispering something over and over. Ivo Varken stood at the edge of the stone with his blue-grey face gone white, and beside him Kaela Voss had stopped breathing altogether.

She had never seen that crescent before.

She had seen it once, at night, in a mountain that belonged to her, coming out of the hand of a masked thief.

The chain came for him from the rail.

It wrapped three times around his right arm and locked tight as the boy above hauled back on it with all his strength. Aren looked down at the chain, mildly curious, as if a moth had landed on his sleeve.

Then he pulled.

The boy came off the rail like a fish on a line. He sailed out over the ice with his mouth open in a perfect round O, and Aren stepped into him as he came down and hit him once, under the ear. The boy dropped onto the ice and didn’t move again.

The bell jingled.

Fenn came down the gangway with both axes.

He was a big lad, a full head taller than Aren and half again as heavy, and the skill turned all that weight into a battering ram. He hit the fool at full speed, chest to chest.

Aren didn’t move at all.

It was Fenn who stopped, all at once, with nowhere left to go. Something cracked in his shoulder, and the axes flew out of his hands, and he stood there blinking stupidly at the little masked figure in front of him that hadn’t so much as rocked back on its heels.

"Excuse me," said the fool politely. He picked Fenn up by the belt with one hand and tossed him over his shoulder, almost gently, onto the deck by the brazier, where the planks were oldest.

The deck took hold of Fenn’s hands. Next it took his arms, smooth and grey and patient, and Fenn began to scream.

The fool walked up the gangway, past him, and didn’t look back.

Corporal Brann stood at the top with his arms spread wide, humming, and the song came pouring out of him at Aren, warm and heavy.

[The Host is drowsy.]

Five nights without sleep pressed down on his eyelids.

[Sleepless Watch: Active. Drowsiness negated.]

They opened again.

"Not tonight," said the fool.

He laid his palm flat on Brann’s chest and sent the Familiar into the song, into the low patient tune coiled up inside the man, and it ate every note.

Brann’s eyes cleared for a heartbeat. He looked at Aren with an expression of enormous, exhausted relief. Then his knees folded, and he lay down on the deck and was still, and Aren understood, a little too late, that there had been nothing left of Corporal Brann underneath that song for days. The tune had been the only thing still walking him around.

[Ledger entry added: A verse of the Choir.]

The bell jingled.

Then there was only Haskel.

He had come down from the stern castle at some point and was standing in the middle of the deck with Freckles clutched against his side by a fistful of her collar. The blue fire had climbed over his whole body now, until he stood wrapped in it from head to foot, and the cold of the Hollow bent away from him on every side.

He wasn’t smiling anymore.

"Stay back!" His voice cracked. "Stay where you are, or I’ll burn her to the bone!"

The fool stopped.

"He told me," Haskel babbled. "He told me what you were, a nobody, a servant, a little gutter thief, he told me you’d be easy..." He threw out his free hand. "Burn!"

A spear of blue fire crossed the deck faster than any arrow.

Moonlit Step took the fool one pace to the left in a silver blur, and the lance went harmlessly past, and he was standing in the same posture as before, a little to one side, with his hands in his sleeves.

Haskel threw another, and another, and a fourth, each one faster and more desperate than the last. Each time the fool was somewhere else, one easy step to the side, and each time he was a step closer.

The bell jingled softly with every step.

Then he was close enough to touch.

Haskel screamed and shoved Freckles at him, and the fool caught her with one arm and set her down behind him, gently, as you might put down a sleeping cat. With his other hand he took hold of the grey shard blazing at Haskel’s throat.

He could feel the cord that tied it to Haskel. It wasn’t made of leather. It was made of song and promises and a great deal of borrowed power, and it ran straight into the middle of Haskel’s chest.

’Reduce it.’

[Reduce to Zero: the bond between Cassian Haskel and the Choir’s gift. Uses today: 1/2.]

The Grave-flame went out like a pinched wick.

All the borrowed heat poured out of Haskel at once, and the cold of the Hollow, which had been waiting outside his fire all week, came rushing in behind it. His knees buckled, and the frost came up thick in his hair, and his lips went from grey to blue.

The Familiar didn’t wait to be asked. It went into the shard now that nothing was protecting it, and it ate the cold blue fire, and the song inside the fire, and something else inside the song that tasted of a grey-eyed priest. It came back to him heavy and dark and gorged.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Ledger entry added: The Choir’s gift (Cassian Haskel).]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 19% → 34%.]

He felt the cold of it sink heavily into his bones.

Haskel was on his knees in front of him, clutching at the dead chip of stone on its cord, sobbing.

"Please. Please, I’ll go home, I’ll never come back, I’ll give you anything, my father will give you anything!"

The fool crouched down until the crack in his mask was level with Haskel’s frozen face.

"Knock knock," he said.

Haskel stared at him with wet, terrified eyes.

"You’re supposed to say who’s there," the fool explained patiently.

"W... who’s there?"

"Nobody," said the fool.

He stood up, took Cassian Haskel by the collar, lifted him off the deck one-handed, carried him to the rail and dropped him over it.

The ice at the foot of the hull opened to receive him, soft and quiet as a mouth, and closed again over his head. Through the clear ice Aren could see him, a boy in fine furs, tumbling into the dark. Then he stopped falling. He hung there, a hand’s breadth below the surface, with his arms flung out and his legs bent in the middle of a stride.

Running, like all the others.

Running toward the fool.

The bell jingled once, and then the deck was silent.

On the rock, three hundred paces away, Kaela Voss’s lips moved without a sound. Ivo, standing beside her, was the only one close enough to read them.

The Blood Thief.