Chapter 117: The Eater

[Day 38 of 40.]

The dead stood up at dawn.

They didn’t do it all at once, as they had in the Barracks. They rose in a slow wave from the west, rank after rank, ten thousand frozen men getting to their feet behind the man in grey, and the sound of it rolled across the lake for minutes. By the time the sun cleared the peaks, they had made a ring around the ship three hundred paces wide, and they were still coming.

Ansel stood at the front of them with his hands in his sleeves.

He was smaller than Aren remembered from the mine, an ordinary man in an ordinary grey robe, with a narrow face and grey eyes and a kind, tired smile. He might have been a clerk on his way to work. Nothing about him looked dangerous, except that ten thousand dead men stood behind him and none of them moved until he did.

[Brother Ansel. Rank B.]

[Hostility: 100%.]

"Good morning, little eater!" he called pleasantly. His voice carried across the ice without any effort at all. "I’ve come for my girl."

On the deck behind Aren, eleven freed candidates and two soldiers stood with every weapon they owned. Sigrid was at the bow with her short sword. Ivo had climbed the mainmast with a crossbow. In the hold below, behind an iron hatch and two iron guards, Freckles was singing in a thin, sweet voice that didn’t stop.

"She’s not yours," Aren called back flatly.

"Everything that sings is mine." Ansel tilted his head. "You’ve eaten twelve of my brothers and sisters, a dozen of my children and four of the Hollow’s lungs. I’m quite sure you don’t know what any of them were for. So I’ll make you an offer, because I’m a reasonable man." He held out one hand, palm up. "Give me the girl, and walk away, and I’ll let every one of these people leave the lake alive."

"And if I don’t?"

Ansel smiled sadly.

"That’s your question? You already know the answer."

He lowered his hand, and the dead came.

They came from every side at once, a white tide of old iron and frozen flesh, three hundred paces of them closing like a fist. On the deck, somebody screamed. Tessa’s first Frost Needle went out and took a dead man in the eye, and he kept walking with the needle sticking out of his face.

Aren went over the rail!

He didn’t think about hiding it anymore, because there was no point. There were twenty-two people behind him on that lake, and none of them would live through the next hour if he fought like a fool.

The eel blade came out, and the first New Moon went out low and flat across the ice, and a hundred dead men in its path simply came apart. Their hardness went to nothing for one heartbeat, and their own weight did the rest, and they fell in pieces in a long hissing line that ran from the ship to the edge of the crowd.

[New Moon. Essence: 100% → 82%.]

The second one went out the other way, and another hundred fell.

The Familiar didn’t wait to be asked. It went out of him in a long black ribbon, thirty paces of hungry dark, and it moved through the dead without slowing. Everywhere it touched, the cold breath that walked them simply went out, and frozen men dropped to the ice in rows.

It was the Barracks again, only bigger and faster and far uglier, and he did it without stopping. He went through them with the Moonlit Step and Street Fighter’s Instinct and four hundred points of strength behind every blow. He broke them with his hands when the blade was too slow. He kicked a dead knight off his feet so hard that the man flew thirty paces and took six more down with him. The dead couldn’t touch him. They didn’t even come close.

’Keep them off the ship. Just keep them off the ship.’

It was working! On the western side, the tide was thinning rapidly. He could see open ice through the gaps.

Then the ship screamed!

It was the sound of iron giving way, a long tearing shriek from below the deck, and he turned in time to see the hatch of the hold burst upward in a shower of splinters. One of the Tallymen came up through the hole, backward, and crashed onto the deck. Its round iron face was dented in, and one long arm hung loose from its shoulder.

Ansel came up after it.

Aren hadn’t seen him move, and neither had anybody else. He had been standing at the front of the dead a moment before, and now he was climbing calmly out of the hold of the ship with Freckles in his arms, and the second Tallyman lay behind him in the dark, folded in half.

’He walked straight past me. He walked straight past me while I was busy with his toys!’

Sigrid reached him first. She came at him from the bow with her sword, fast and clean, a Varken blow that had been taught properly. Ansel didn’t even turn. He moved one hand, and Sigrid went backward across the deck and into the rail hard enough to crack it.

Jory went next, with his skin gone grey and hard as granite. Ansel touched him, almost gently, on the chest, and Jory dropped as if his strings had been cut.

Aren came over the rail.

He crossed the deck in two steps of the Moonlit Step, and the eel blade came down at Ansel’s neck with everything he had behind it. It was the best blow he had ever thrown, and it was perfectly placed.

Ansel calmly lifted Freckles into its path.

Aren stopped the blade a finger’s width from her hair. He stopped it so hard that his wrist cracked, and he stood there, frozen, with his arm shaking and the edge of the eel blade almost touching the small, freckled, humming girl.

Ansel looked at him over her head, and smiled.

"There it is," he said softly, almost fondly. "That’s the lovely thing about you. You care."

The Familiar was already moving. It went for the thread in Freckles’ back, the one that ran down through the ship and away across the ice, and it uncoiled out of Aren’s side to do it. It wasn’t the black ribbon this time. It came out of him all at once, long and white and thin, with six legs and a long curved neck and a narrow head with no face, and it reared up on the deck of the ship over the priest and the girl.

Ansel’s smile went away.

"Oh," he breathed. "So that’s what you are."

He stepped backward off the deck.

He didn’t fall. He simply wasn’t there anymore, and then he was standing on the ice a hundred paces away with Freckles in his arms, and the white thing came down on empty planks and slid back into Aren’s side with a sound like a page tearing.

[Familiar of Nothing: Hunger 0% → 61%.]

Around the ship, the dead stopped.

They stood where they were, all of them, with their weapons raised and their hollow eyes on the ship, and they didn’t move again.

"Tomorrow," Ansel called across the ice. His voice was as calm as ever, but his face wasn’t. "Come to the ring at dawn, little eater, and bring your hunger. The girl will be waiting. So will something that has been very patient for a very long time." He settled Freckles more comfortably against his shoulder. "It’s been wanting to meet you."

He turned and walked unhurriedly away toward the center of the lake, and the dead parted to let him through.

Aren didn’t follow, because he couldn’t. His wrist was broken, his essence was nearly gone, and the people behind him were bleeding.

Sigrid was sitting against the cracked rail with blood running from her hair. Jory was breathing, but his face was grey. One of the Tallymen was trying to get up and couldn’t. On the mast, Ivo had stopped climbing down halfway and was simply holding on.

And on the ice, at the edge of the frozen dead, two hundred paces away, Kaela Voss stood with her lance and stared at the deck of the ship.

She had seen it. He could tell from her stance. She had seen the white thing come out of the fool’s side, long and pale, with six legs and no face.

She had felt it once before, at the bottom of a pool of blood.

’Oh no. Oh no, no, no.’

Kaela didn’t move at all. She stood there in the cold with the wind pulling at her cloak, and she looked at the fool on the deck of the ship without blinking.

Then she turned and walked back to the rock.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

[Status: Suspicion confirmed.]