Chapter 120: Thank You, Zero

[Day 39 of 40.]

The ice broke from the bottom.

It started in the center of the ring, where the Hollow had sunk, and it ran outward in long black cracks that moved faster than a man could run. Aren felt it through his boots before he heard it, a deep shudder rising out of the drowned city, and then the whole middle of the lake lifted, a hundred paces of ice tilting up into the air like a door kicked open from underneath.

Chains came up through the gap.

There were hundreds of them, black iron carved with marks he had last seen in a crack in the mountain under Kharn, and every one of them was broken. They came flying up out of the water in a storm of links and shattered ice and rained down across the ring, ringing off the frozen dead.

Then a hand came up.

It was grey, and long, and thin as a dead branch, and it was bigger than the ship. It caught the edge of the broken ice and held there. A second hand came up beside it, and with a slow, terrible patience, the prisoner pulled himself out of the White Hollow.

He was taller standing than Aren had ever imagined. He unfolded out of the hole joint by joint, gaunt and grey and naked, with the last broken chains still hanging from his wrists and ankles, until he stood on the ice of the lake as high as a tower. Five black holes marked his body, two in his hands, two in his feet and one in the center of his chest, where the nails had been. None of them were bleeding, and none of them would ever close.

He breathed in, very slowly, as if he had forgotten how.

[Unknown entity.]

[Rank: ???]

[Status: Unsealed.]

Beside Aren, Kaela made a small sound and brought her lance up, but she didn’t attack. Aren didn’t think she could have made herself move if she’d tried.

The prisoner looked down at them with his golden eyes.

Then he bent, slowly, until his long grey face hung over the fool and the lancer and the small freckled girl in the fool’s arms. His breath came down over them, warm and dry, smelling of old stone and something that might once have been flowers.

"Little masked thing," he murmured. "You kept your word."

"You asked me to eat them," Aren said. His voice came out steady, which surprised him. "I ate them."

"All of them." The prisoner smiled with every one of his long teeth. "Three hundred years I hung in the dark and listened to them sing. Three hundred years, and the thing that set me free was a boy with a bell on his hat."

He leaned closer, until his face filled the whole sky.

Then he spoke, so softly that nobody but Aren could possibly have heard it.

"Thank you, Zero."

The Familiar went completely still under Aren’s ribs, but Aren didn’t. He kept his face blank behind the cracked mask and his arms around the girl, and he said nothing at all.

The prisoner straightened up, slowly, joint by joint. He looked around at the lake, at the broken ring and the sinking Hollow and the ten thousand frozen dead, and something in his golden eyes looked almost sad.

Then his gaze moved west, across the ice, to a small grey figure stumbling toward the shore.

Ansel had nearly reached the black pines. He was running badly, with half his face frozen and the stump of his arm pressed to his side, and he left a thin line of red behind him in the snow. The prisoner watched him go for three of his own slow breaths.

"That one sang to me every night for twenty years," he remarked. "Lullabies, so I would stay asleep."

He reached out.

He didn’t step after Ansel. He simply reached, and his long grey arm went across half a mile of ice without any hurry at all. His fingers closed around the priest from behind and lifted him off the snow.

Ansel screamed. It carried all the way back across the lake, high and thin, and the prisoner brought him closer, unhurried, until the little grey figure dangled in front of his golden eyes.

"Please," Ansel babbled. "Please, I fed you, I kept you, the Choir kept you alive, we only ever wanted to..."

"I know what you wanted."

The prisoner closed his hand.

It made a sound like a fist closing on a ripe fruit. Something red ran down between the long grey fingers and dripped onto the ice, a very long way down, and when the hand opened again, nothing in it was shaped like a man anymore. The prisoner shook it once, carelessly, and what was left of Brother Ansel scattered across the snow.

’Twenty years of lullabies, and that’s the review he gets.’

Aren didn’t laugh. He held Freckles tighter, so she wouldn’t turn her head.

"You should be careful about the void you just made in this place," the prisoner said, loud enough for everyone now. "Something will fill it."

He turned his back on them.

"Farewell, little masked thing."

He took one step, and the step took him a mile. He took a second, and he was only a grey shape on the far shore. On the third, he was gone over the mountains, and the only sign he had ever been there was a long line of footprints in the snow, each one the size of a house, leading south, toward the Empire.

Nobody moved.

Then the lake began to fall in.

It started where the prisoner had stood. The hole he had climbed out of didn’t close. It widened, slowly, the edges of the ice crumbling into it, and as it widened it changed. The black water went out of it. In its place there was nothing at all, a perfect empty circle in the middle of the lake, so dark that Aren’s eyes kept sliding off it.

The System opened a window, and its letters had changed. He couldn’t see red anymore, but he knew that was the color they had turned.

[Warning.]

[A Rift is forming.]

[Grade: SS.]

[Rift anchoring in progress. Time to completion: unknown.]

[The void must be filled.]

Under his ribs, the Familiar began to purr.

He had heard it purr at Kharn and on this lake, but never like this. It wasn’t hunger or warning or contentment. It was something closer to recognition, a dog lifting its head at a familiar voice coming home, and it was looking straight at the empty circle in the middle of the lake.

’No, no, no. I know that circle!’

He had seen it before, stamped on nothing and everything, the symbol the Tallymen had bowed to.

"What," Kaela whispered, "did you do?"

He turned slowly. She was standing three paces away with her lance at his chest, and her face had finally broken. It was white with fury, and underneath the fury was something that looked a great deal like grief.

"Do you know what that is?" She jabbed the lance toward the circle. "The Guild rates every Rift in the world, from F to S. There are three it never managed to rate, because nobody who walked into them ever walked back out to be measured. The archives of the Iron Throne call them Black Gates." Her voice shook. "Two of them ate kingdoms. That one is the fourth, and it’s three days’ ride from my father’s capital."

’And the System calls it SS. So the Guild’s scale stops one letter too early.’

"Kaela..."

"And the thing you let out was a prisoner of the Iron Throne. My family kept it under this lake for three hundred years!"

"Your family fed it children," Aren said.

She went white.

He didn’t stop, because he had promised her chains, not lies. "Fifty this year, and fifty the year before. Ivo’s brother, the Haldane boys, every gold name on the wall in the Hall of the North. The order is in writing, Captain, under the crowned tower. Ask Ivo to show you."

The point of the lance came up to his throat, and he felt it break the skin. A thin warm line ran down under his collar. He didn’t raise a hand. He had told her he wouldn’t fight, and the fool kept his word or he was nothing at all.

For three breaths, Kaela Voss stood on the ice with her lance at the throat of the man who had robbed her, saved her and shamed her family, and he watched her decide whether to push.

"You think I don’t know what my father is?" she whispered. "I’ve known since I was nine. I’ve spent my whole life making sure that when he finally falls, there’s something left standing behind him that isn’t him." Her hands were shaking on the shaft. "And you just walked a monster out of his prison and opened a door to the end of the world in his own backyard. Do you know what he does now? He doesn’t send me. He sends the Hounds of the Throne, and they burn every village you ever slept in and every family that ever sold you bread."

He hadn’t thought of that, and it showed on his face. She saw it.

"So I’ll hunt you myself," Kaela said. "Every road, every port, every city, for as long as it takes, because if it’s me on your trail, at least it isn’t them." The lance point didn’t move from his throat. "And when I find you, I’ll bring you to him in chains, exactly as you promised."

"And the mouth?"

Something cracked in her face.

"You had one shield, and you shouted my name." She pulled the lance back a finger’s width, then a hand. "I will never forget what you did in that mouth, Blood Thief. And I will never forgive what you did after it. Don’t ask me to choose between them, because I won’t."

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

[Status: Life debt recorded.]

The circle went on growing all day.

By noon it was three hundred paces across, by dusk it had swallowed the whole iron ring, and the dead at its edge were sliding into it, rank by rank, without a sound. Things were coming up out of it. They weren’t monsters, not yet, only stones. White stones, carved, square and smooth, pushing up out of the nothing like teeth through a gum, the tops of walls and the edges of roofs and the corner of something that might have been a throne.

A city was coming up through the void, a city from somewhere else.

Kaela had brought her last soldiers down from the rock at noon, without a word, and they stood on the deck now with everyone else. Aren stood at the rail of the ship with Freckles asleep in a blanket at his feet and the others gathered behind him, all twenty-two of them, and watched it rise.

They couldn’t leave, and he had tried. Every path off the lake ran past the circle now, and the circle was pulling, a slow tide of cold and dark dragging everything on the ice toward its center. The ship itself had begun to move, groaning, an inch at a time, sliding across the ice toward the white city.

[Rift anchoring: 91%.]

The sun came up on the fortieth day.

It came up red, or so he guessed, and on the ridge to the south, black against the dawn, a line of sledges appeared, with banners flying over them that showed a crowned tower. The Crown’s convoy had come to collect its heroes, exactly on time.

At the same moment, the void breathed out.

[Rift anchoring: 100%.]

It came across the ice in a wave of black, a ring of nothing spreading outward from the white city, and wherever it passed, the world simply stopped being there. Ice went, and dead men went. The rock where Kaela’s camp had stood went, all at once, without a sound.

It reached the ship’s stern, and the stern wasn’t there.

Kaela was already moving.

She went over the rail and down onto the ice with her lance in her hand, straight toward the wave, and Aren understood what she meant to do a heartbeat before she did it. She planted her feet, drove the butt of the lance into the ice, and the Iron Guard answered her blood one more time. A wall of black iron came up out of the lake in front of the ship, forty paces wide and twice the height of a man, the old metal of her ancestors standing between the void and the people on the deck.

The void touched the wall, and the wall simply wasn’t there.

Kaela was standing right behind it.

’That’s the stupidest, bravest thing I’ve ever seen, and she’s going to die doing it.’

He had no Ward left, because he had spent it on her in the Hollow’s mouth, and the System had stamped thirty days on it. But a cooldown was only a number, and he had learned on this lake what happened to numbers when he put his hand on them. He reached for both uses at once.

[Reduce to Zero: Ward of Zero, cooldown. 29 days → 0.]

[The value exceeds a single use. Uses today: 2/2.]

[Cost: Reduce to Zero enters cooldown. 29 days.]

It hurt. It went out of him like a tooth being pulled, a month of something torn loose all at once, and he didn’t wait to feel the hole it left.

"Kaela!"

[Ward of Zero activated.]

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

[Essence: 64% → 0%.]

The void went over her.

For five seconds, Kaela Voss stood alone inside nothing. The black wave passed around her and over the place where she stood, and the world on every side of her vanished, and she stayed exactly where she was on a small disc of ice that nothing could take, untouched, a woman with a lance standing in the middle of the end of the world. Aren saw her face through the dark. Her eyes were open, and she was looking at something far away in the direction of the white city, something he couldn’t see.

Then the wave was past her, and coming on toward the ship, and he had nothing left at all.

[Investment recorded: Kaela Voss. A life, twice.]

[Return pending.]

[Note: Some debts can be collected later.]

He turned to the people on the deck behind him and opened his mouth to tell them to run, though there was nowhere to run to.

Then, from the ridge above the lake, a voice he had known since he was eight years old shouted across the ice.

"Get down! All of you, get down behind me!"