Chapter 119: Everything That Sings

[Day 39 of 40.]

Sigrid Varken saw them coming from the bow.

At first it was only a change in the light, far out on the white lake. A moment later the shapes resolved, and she understood that the horizon was walking. Ten thousand dead men had turned from the ring all at once, and now they came across the ice toward the ship in a single grey tide, without a sound, their frozen armor catching the sun.

"Everyone up!" she shouted. "Rings of six, on the deck, now!"

Everyone scrambled out of the hold and the galley and the shelter of the rail, and it was chaos until the drills took over. Forty days of the fool’s terrible rules took over, the rings and the counting and the shoulders touching, and by the time the first rank of the dead reached the foot of the hull, there were two tight rings on the deck and both of them were facing out.

He wasn’t here, she thought, gripping her sword. He had gone to the ring with the captain, and that left them.

The dead came up the ice and onto the slope of the hull, and they didn’t climb so much as pour.

Jory met them at the gangway.

He had been the worst of them once. The song had turned him into a stone fist, and he had nearly crushed the fool’s arm in the hold. Now he stood at the top of the gangway with his skin gone grey as granite and his arms spread from rail to rail, and the first dead soldier ran straight into him and broke. The second one broke too, and the third. He didn’t move at all. He stood in that narrow gap like a door somebody had bolted shut, and the dead piled up against him, and he leaned into them and roared.

"Is that all you’ve got? IS THAT ALL?"

Tessa was on the mast. She had climbed it during the night without asking anyone, and now she clung to the rigging twenty feet above the deck with a satchel of knives at her hip and frost already crawling up her fingers. She threw left and right, quick and flat, alternating knives and Frost Needles, and wherever they went, a frozen face lost an eye. A dead man with no eyes kept walking, but he walked in circles. By the tenth throw there were six of them stumbling blindly into each other at the foot of the hull, and the ones behind tripped over them.

"Port side!" somebody screamed. "Port side, they’re coming over the rail!"

It was the Corvane twin, who had stood at that rail every night for two weeks without missing a watch, and he was the one who saw the second column come around the stern while everyone else was looking at the gangway. Brenner was already moving, and the big soldier hit the first dead man over the rail with his shoulder and took him over the side with him, and for a terrible heartbeat they were both gone, until Brenner’s hand came back up over the rail, and the Corvane twin and the Merrow cousin hauled him onto the deck by his belt.

"Captain’s orders," Brenner said, gasping, though no captain had given him any. "Nobody takes this ship."

Sigrid fought where the rings were thinnest. She had been taught the sword properly, in a cold yard in the north by a master who hit her with the flat every time she dropped her guard, and she had hated him for six years. She thanked him now with every stroke. A dead man reached for the mute girl in the second ring, and Sigrid took the arm off at the elbow. Another came over the bow, and she put her blade through the gap in its old bronze helmet and twisted.

They were holding, and she could hardly believe it.

The ice moved under them in a slow, enormous sigh that ran through the whole lake, and the hull lurched under their feet. Far away in the east, over the iron ring, a white column rose into the sky. When it reached its full height, the dead around the ship lifted their heads toward it, all together, and then they came faster.

They came twice as fast, and there were a great many more of them now.

Jory went down on one knee at the gangway. A crack ran across his granite cheek. Tessa’s satchel was empty, and her fingers were blue to the wrist. On the port side, Brenner was bleeding from the scalp and laughing wildly, because there was nothing else left to do.

"Ivo, we need a way out!" Sigrid shouted.

The scout was at the stern with his maps. He had been staring at them since dawn, his old, careful maps with every safe path between the ship and the rock drawn in faded ink, and every path that wasn’t safe drawn in red. He looked up at her across the deck with a very strange expression on his face.

"We don’t go out," he said. "We bring them in."

He jabbed his finger at a place on the map, then at the ice to the south of the hull, where the snow lay smooth and white and perfectly ordinary.

"There’s rotten ice under the south side," Ivo said. "I marked it on the second day. It’ll hold one of us, but it won’t hold a hundred of them."

Sigrid understood, and she screamed it across the deck. "South rail, everyone to the south rail! Give them a target!"

They went. Every one of them ran across the tilting deck to the south side of the ship and stood there at the rail, shouting and clashing their weapons and waving their arms, the loudest, stupidest, most visible thing any of them had ever done. The dead turned toward the noise. The whole grey tide swung south, and two hundred frozen soldiers ran out onto the smooth white snow beside the hull.

The ice under them simply let go.

It went with a deep, wet boom, and two hundred dead men dropped into the black water all at once, armor and bronze and all, straight down into the drowned city, and they didn’t come up again.

On the deck, there was a moment of stunned silence.

In the silence, from the middle of the second ring, a thin, cracked voice began to sing. The Corvane twin was standing with his fists clenched at his sides and his eyes squeezed shut, and he was singing the dawn hymn of the little stone church in his village. It had nothing in common with the Choir’s song. It was clumsy and off-key and much too high, the kind of thing children sang in a cold nave on a winter morning while their mothers coughed in the pews, and it was entirely his.

The dead at the hull stopped climbing.

They didn’t fall, but they hesitated all along the slope of the ship and turned their frozen heads toward the sound, puzzled, remembering something they had owned once, a long time ago.

Even the dead enjoyed a good choir, the fool would have said, and laughed at his own joke.

Sigrid picked up the dawn hymn on the second verse. She didn’t know she remembered the words until she was singing them. Brenner joined in with a hoarse soldier’s bass, and the Merrow cousin, and Jory on his knees at the gangway. Tessa sang from the mast with tears freezing on her cheeks. Half-frozen children and soldiers sang a children’s hymn on the deck of a broken ship in the middle of a dead lake, badly, at the tops of their voices.

And the dead stood there, swaying in the cold, and listened.

Far away to the east, something enormous broke the surface of the lake.

At the ring, the Hollow came up out of the hole like a whale breaching.

Aren saw a ribcage first, vast and pale and hung with frozen weed, each rib longer than the ship. After it came a skull, long and blind and crowned with horns of ice, and a mouth that opened as it rose, and inside the mouth, deep in the throat, a pale blue light beating slowly.

[The Hollow.]

[Rank: ???]

[Status: Waking.]

’The fifth lung is inside it. The lake is the thing!’

It breathed out, and the cold came across the ring in a wall, and the dead at the edge of the iron shattered where they stood, hundreds of them, blown apart by the breath of the thing that had been keeping them alive. Aren’s mask cracked a little further and the blood Ansel had spilled across the ice froze into black glass under his boots.

Ansel himself was laughing, out at the edge of the ring, with smoke still rising off his burnt robe.

"There it is," he said. "Three hundred years of waiting, little eater, and it has been so very hungry."

The Hollow turned its blind head toward the warmest thing on the ice, and that was Kaela.

She stood her ground. She planted her feet on the iron of the ring and set her lance and lifted her chin, and Aren felt the Iron Guard wake inside her, the gift he had given back to her in the mountain. It answered only to the blood of the Iron Throne, and the ring under the lake had been forged by her family three centuries ago. Black threads of iron came up through the ice all around her, dozens of them, a hundred, and they wrapped around the Hollow’s jaw and hauled it toward the lake.

The iron held!

For three heartbeats, a woman with a lance held a mountain of ice in place by the strength of her ancestors. At last the Hollow shook its head once, and the iron threads snapped one after another, singing as they went, and the jaw came down over her like a falling gate.

Aren was thirty paces away. He didn’t have to decide anything.

"Kaela!"

[Ward of Zero activated.]

[Target: Kaela Voss. Duration: 5 seconds.]

[Essence: 100% → 0%.]

The jaw closed on her and stopped dead, a finger’s width from her armor. The Hollow’s whole vast body shuddered with the force of it, and its frozen teeth cracked against nothing. Kaela stood inside its mouth with her lance still in her hand, untouched, and turned her head to stare at the fool across the ice.

He had five seconds, and he ran.

He went up the frozen jaw tooth to tooth with the Moonlit Step and nothing in him but Perfect Blood. He went over the teeth on the fourth second and down into the dark of the throat on the fifth. Behind him the Ward ran out, and Kaela threw herself between the teeth and out onto the ice. Ahead of him the pale blue light was beating, and he put his bare hand flat against the last lung of the White Hollow.

’Eat everything, now!’

The Familiar went out of him all at once.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.]

[Ledger entry added: The Hollow’s fifth lung.]

[Essence: 0% → 100%.]

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 94% → 100%.]

[Marrow quality: Tempered → Perfect.]

The heat came up through him from the bones outward, a burning so deep it felt cold. He didn’t stop to feel it, because the thread was right there under his palm. It ran out of the dying lung and up through the skull into the air above the hole, where Freckles floated, and from Freckles it ran on across the ring to the man who held the other end.

Ansel was already pulling on it. Aren could feel him, out at the edge of the ice, drawing the thread in hand over hand to take the girl before the Hollow died.

’You want her that badly? Come and get her, then!’

He reduced the length of the thread to nothing.

There was no distance anymore between the two ends of it. One moment Ansel stood at the edge of the ring, and the next he was in the Hollow’s throat, slammed against the lung beside Aren with a crack of breaking bone, and his eyes were very wide. The same thing went out of Aren in the same instant. His own distance from the lung became nothing, and he was crushed against it so hard that his ribs bent.

[Reduce to Zero. Uses today: 2/2.]

The Hollow breathed its last breath, and the two of them were standing in its throat when it came out.

It was three hundred years of a lake’s cold, all at once. It went over Aren and found nothing to bite. His marrow had set an instant earlier, perfect and new, and the cold went through him and out the other side without finding a single thing to hold.

It found a great deal to bite in Ansel.

The priest’s right arm went white from the fingers to the shoulder. Aren heard it happen, a rapid dry crackling, and then Ansel threw himself backward out of the throat, screaming, and the arm hit the Hollow’s teeth and broke off at the elbow. It shattered on the ice into a hundred pieces.

Aren reached for the thread again.

[Devour Verse. Mastery: 55% → 60%.]

[Verse extracted. Bearer intact.]

Above the hole, Freckles stopped humming.

The thread came out of her in one long, clean pull, every mile of it, and out on the ice Ansel cried out a second time. He staggered with his remaining hand pressed to his chest, where something had just been torn out of him, and turned and ran west, with half his face frozen grey and the stump of his arm held against his body. He didn’t look back.

Freckles dropped out of the air, straight down past the Hollow’s teeth, and Aren caught her.

The dead were coming over the edge of the ring.

There were still thousands of them, the ones the breath hadn’t shattered, and with Ansel gone, they came on with nobody left to command them, blind and hungry and walking straight for the last warm things on the lake. Kaela came up beside him, kicked his fallen eel blade across the ice to him and set her lance. Aren put Freckles behind them both.

He let go.

He had a full bowl of essence and a body that had just been finished, and after forty days of rationing every drop, he didn’t have to hold anything back for tomorrow. The first New Moon went out flat and wide across the ice, and four hundred dead men came apart in a single line. The second went out before the first had finished, then the third, the fourth and the fifth, until the bowl was dry. After that he simply walked forward into them with the Moonlit Step and the eel blade, cutting.

It wasn’t a fight anymore, it was a harvest.

Kaela stopped trying to help after the first minute. She stood by the girl with her lance lowered and watched the fool go through the frozen army of the White Hollow like a scythe through dry wheat. When the last of them fell, he was standing alone on a field of broken bronze, three hundred paces wide, and his breath was hardly faster than when he had started.

Behind him, the Hollow sank.

It didn’t scream, it simply stopped, a mountain of old ice frozen halfway out of its hole, and then slowly, with a long, groaning crack that echoed off every peak around the lake, it slid back down into the dark.

Far away in the west, the children’s hymn on the deck of the ship faltered and stopped, because every dead man on the slope of the hull had just folded quietly onto the ice.

Freckles opened her eyes.

"Naught?" she whispered. "Naught, is it over?"

"Nearly," he said gently.

Beneath them, the iron ring began to sing. It wasn’t the Choir’s song. It came from under the ice, from every inch of the black iron at once, a deep, rising note that went up through Aren’s boots and into his teeth. Under the ring, under the drowned city and the cavern of blue light, something long and black was sliding out of an iron pillar.

It was the fifth nail, and he felt it go. The ring went silent, and then the whole lake went silent with it.

A cracked old voice spoke from very far below, perfectly clearly, and every living thing on the White Hollow heard it.

"Zero."