Chapter 114: Names

[Day 24 of 40.]

The merchant girl was the second.

Her name was Tessa, which he only learned when she told him, at dawn on the eighteenth day, with her own voice. She had spent nine nights in the hold throwing Frost Needles at the inside of the hull in her sleep, and when the song came out of her, she sat up, looked at her blue fingers and burst into furious tears.

"My father is going to kill me," she sobbed. "I sold his best mule to buy these furs!"

’Of all the things to cry about, the mule!’ Then he thought about the price of mules in the north. ’Fair enough, actually.’

The Corvane twin was the third. He came out of it swinging, and Aren had to catch his wrist again, exactly as he had on the ice, before the boy understood where he was and who was holding him. Then he sagged against the hull and asked for his brother, and Aren had to tell him that his brother had never come out of the second ring.

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 27% → 29%.]

The fourth was the older Merrow girl, and that one nearly went wrong.

He knew it the moment he touched her. Her verse was wound tighter than the others, pulled hard around the place where her sister had been, as if the song had found the empty room in her and moved in. The edges blurred under his palm. The Familiar went in, touched the coil, and kept going, straight past the song into the grief beneath it, and he felt it open its jaws on something that wasn’t the Choir’s at all.

"No!"

He tore it back so hard that he fell over on the planks.

The girl screamed. It was a terrible sound, raw and high and entirely her own, and it went on until Sigrid came down the ladder with a lamp and held her. Aren lay on his back in the dark with the Familiar snarling under his ribs and his heart going like a hammer.

[Verse extracted. Bearer intact.]

[Familiar of Nothing: Hunger 0% → 34%.]

It had been close, much closer than he liked, and he sat in the dark afterward, listening to the girl breathe, counting each breath as he had once counted days on a rock. He had nearly eaten a girl’s sister out of her head!

’Slower. Even slower than that, you greedy thing.’

He didn’t free anyone the next night. He sat on the deck instead, in the cold, and fed the Familiar what he could find, the frost on the rail and the chill of the wind and the slow cold breath that came up from the lake at midnight. It ate everything sullenly and wanted more.

On the twentieth day, Sigrid sat down beside him.

She hadn’t done that before. For almost two weeks she had fed the hold twice a day, carried water and emptied buckets and never once complained, and she had spoken to him only when she had to. Now she sat on the frozen deck with her knees drawn up and her eyes on the white lake, and kept her silence.

"My uncle went in nine years ago," she finally murmured. "Ivo’s younger brother. He never came back."

Aren waited, and let the silence ask the question for him.

"Ivo says the lake took him. Everyone in the family says the lake took him." She looked down at her hands. "I’m beginning to think the lake had help."

He thought about the Crown’s letter, folded inside his shirt beside Ivo’s map, with its neat official hand. Let it feed. He could show her right now, and he nearly did. But a letter like that didn’t stay between two people, and he didn’t know yet who else would read it.

"When this is over," he promised, "I’ll show you something. Just not today."

She turned her head and studied the fool’s mask.

"You’re very strange, Naught."

"So I’ve been told, mostly by people trying to hit me."

"I mean it." Her voice didn’t change, but something in her face did, very slightly. "You could have left them on the rock. Nobody would have blamed you. Nobody would even have noticed."

"I would have noticed," he said.

Sigrid didn’t answer that. But the next morning she brought him bread before she brought it to the hold, and that was new too.

[Sigrid Varken. Hostility: 33% → 22%.]

The fifth was a boy from a lesser house in the south, who woke up, asked what day it was, and fainted when he heard the answer. The sixth was one of Kaela’s soldiers, a big quiet man named Brenner who came out of the song and immediately asked for his captain. The seventh was a girl of fourteen who never spoke a word. She simply took his hand when it was over and held it until she fell asleep.

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 29% → 34%.]

The nights fell into a rhythm after that. He fed the Familiar at dusk until it was heavy and slow, went down into the hold an hour before midnight, chose one sleeper, and worked until the lamp burned down. Then he climbed back onto the deck and lay there shaking until dawn.

Every dawn, the count rose up through the ice, and every dawn the grey voice from the hold grew smaller and the chorus of cracked, scared, real voices grew louder. On the twenty-third day, Kaela walked down from the rock, which she hadn’t done once since the hummers came, stood at the bottom of the gangway with her lance, and watched Brenner come up out of the hold into the light.

The big soldier saw her and went down on one knee on the ice.

"Captain," he said, and his voice broke on the word.

Kaela looked at him, and then up at the fool on the deck. Her face showed nothing at all.

"Whatever you’re doing to them," she called up to the fool, "keep doing it."

Then she looked at him a moment longer, at the cracked mask and the cap and the bell, and her eyes narrowed slightly, as if she were trying to remember where she had seen something.

She turned and walked back to the rock without another word.

’That’s not good. That look is really, really not good.’

He went down to the prisoner on the twenty-fourth day.

The Lung-Stone gave him an hour of air, and he spent the first ten minutes of it in the dark under the ice, swimming down through the drowned city past roofs and towers and the frozen dead, until the blue light of the cavern opened beneath him. The iron pillar stood where it always stood. The chains hung from it in their hundreds, and among them, gaunt and grey and enormous, the prisoner sat with his golden eyes half closed.

Two of the nails were still driven deep. Three stood out from his body a finger’s width, black and loose.

"Little masked thing," the prisoner rumbled without opening his eyes. "You’ve been busy. I can taste it on the water."

"Three lungs so far."

"Three lungs, and you’re picking songs out of children like a monkey picking fleas." The golden eyes opened. "How many have you freed?"

"Seven, so far."

"And how many have you nearly eaten?"

Aren said nothing.

The prisoner smiled with all of his long teeth. "Yes. It does that. It always did that." He shifted, and the chains rang softly against the pillar. "Hungry books are all the same. They don’t understand the difference between a word and the page it’s written on."

The Familiar went completely motionless under Aren’s ribs.

"Books?" Aren repeated carefully.

"Old men ramble." The prisoner waved one enormous grey hand, and three chains swung with it. "I’ve been talking to myself for three hundred years. You learn to say strange things."

’He knows something. He knows something about it, and he isn’t going to tell me.’

"The fourth lung. Where is it?"

"Where the singers sing." The prisoner leaned back against his pillar and closed his eyes again. "You’ll know it when you hear it. They’re very proud of their voices."

"That’s not an answer."

"It’s the only one I have, little masked thing. Go and find out." His voice dropped to a low, cracked murmur. "And when you get there, be careful. Someone up there has noticed that his songs are going missing. He’s not a patient man anymore."

[Lung-Stone: 31 minutes remaining.]

Aren swam back up through the dark city with his lungs aching and his head full of hungry books.

He came out onto the ice at dusk and stood there dripping, looking out across the lake. Something had changed while he was under. It took him a moment to understand what it was.

The wind had brought a sound from the west.

It was faint and far away, a thin thread of music coming across miles of ice and frozen men. It wasn’t the patient grey hum of the hold. It was something higher and brighter and far more beautiful, a dozen voices at least, rising and falling together in perfect harmony.

Somewhere out on the White Hollow, the Choir was singing.

And through every one of those voices, he could hear the same warm, patient, grey voice he had heard coming out of Freckles’ mouth on the eighth night.

"Little eater," it sang, very softly, across the ice. "Come and take the next one, if you can."