Chapter 42: The Hanging City

"Still east," Aren said to nobody on the morning of the ninth day. "Keep going."

He had started talking to himself somewhere around the fourth day, because nothing else down here made a sound and the silence had begun to feel like a hand over his mouth. The black sea never moved, the jellies never made a noise, and even his boots on the grey sand were quiet. So he talked, mostly giving himself instructions and occasionally arguing with them.

He had followed the shore east for a week, because east was where water dripped from the cliffs and where the glowing jellies gathered in bigger herds. The water tasted like iron and came out of the rock one drop at a time, and he had spent most of the second day lying under it with his mouth open. In that week he had learned which of the blind grey crabs were safe to eat and which ones made him sick for hours. He’d learned to sleep with his back against the cliff and his knife in his hand. He’d learned that the skin on his hands cracked and bled every time he made a fist, then closed again a few minutes later, a little harder than before.

[Skin Tempering: 19%.]

’Nineteen percent. Eighty-one more to go, and then I get to do it again with my flesh.’

He came around the base of a tall cliff and stopped dead.

There was a city hanging from the dark above him.

High overhead stretched a ceiling of black rock, farther than he could see, and from that rock, upside down, hung a city. It had white walls and towers with their roofs pointing at the ground, with bridges strung between them. Streets ran across the underside of the stone with houses built along them, their windows facing the black sea below. Some of the roofs still had gold gleaming faintly on them.

The jellies lived inside it. They drifted lazily in and out of the windows, glowing blue and green in the empty rooms, so the whole city gave off a faint light. The lowest towers came almost all the way down, and their roofs touched the grey sand at the foot of the cliff a hundred paces ahead of him.

He had seen a drawing of this place in a red leather book in the Chronicles room, a city with white walls and golden roofs.

"Varn."

The capital of Valdris, the kingdom that had disappeared in the Great Tide three hundred years ago. The Chronicle said the Tide had swallowed it. It had never said where to.

’Well. Now I finally know.’

He climbed cautiously into the lowest tower through a window.

Inside, everything was upside down. The floor was above his head, with old tables and chairs still stuck to it, and the chandeliers stood up from the ceiling under his feet. A spiral staircase ran through the middle of the tower, and he had to climb it on the underside of the steps, holding on with his hands and feet.

He was halfway up when something stirred in the room above.

He stopped and held his breath, hanging there motionless.

It came out of a doorway, walking upside down on the stone as easily as he walked on the ground. It was long and pale, the length of a horse, with a great many legs. Its body was covered in hard, almost clear plates, and through them he could see the glow of half-eaten jellies in its stomach. It had no eyes, only a ring of thin feelers around its mouth, tasting the air hungrily.

[Bell-Eater. Rank D: Bone.]

It was two stages above him, and its plates would be far harder than anything his knife could cut.

The feelers turned slowly toward him.

It came down the wall terribly fast, legs clattering on the stone. He let go of the stairs and dropped to the floor below, rolling, and his hardened skin scraped across the stone without tearing. The Bell-Eater followed him down. Its mouth opened, full of thin glass teeth.

He had a knife and one use of his skill for the day, and he was not spending it yet, so he ran.

Street Fighter’s Instinct showed him what he needed. The creature was fast in a straight line but slow to turn, because all those legs had to change direction together. So he made it turn. He ran between the old iron chandeliers, left, right and left again, until its long body jammed between them. Then he went straight at it with the Moonlit Step and put his bare hand flat on one of its plates.

’Zero.’

The plate went soft, and his knife went in to the hilt.

In the same moment, his own skin went soft too. The Bell-Eater twisted, and its glass teeth closed across his ribs and tore free. He felt the blood come, and he held on stubbornly to the knife.

Then the cold in his left side moved.

For nine days it had stayed quiet along his scar, and now it suddenly woke. He felt it leave his side and run down his arm into his hand, into the softened plate under his palm. The hardness he had just taken from the plate should have vanished, as it always had before. This time something took it. He felt the cold swallow it whole.

The Bell-Eater screamed, and it wasn’t because of the knife.

He finished it with the knife anyway. It took a long time, and when it was over he sat heavily beside its body with his hand pressed to his chest.

The bite across his ribs was deep and bleeding fast, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Around the edges of the wound, his skin was turning grey. The grey was spreading outward in thin lines like frost on a window, and everywhere it went he couldn’t feel anything at all. His fingers on that side were already numb.

Poison, then, probably something in those glass teeth.

There was no healer at the bottom of the Abyss, no potion and nobody to carry him anywhere. He gave himself an hour, maybe less.

[Write-Off (Lv. 1). Available.]

He watched the grey creep steadily toward his heart and didn’t spend long deciding.

He looked at the wound and called it what it was, a debt he would never pay, and in his mind he drew a line through it. The bite was still there, but it wasn’t a wound anymore. It was a pale curved mark on his skin, long closed, like a scar from years ago.

The blood stopped. The grey lines were gone, every one of them, and the feeling came back into his fingers. There was no poison in him. There had never been any poison in him.

And something else was gone.

He had no idea what, so he went looking for it carefully. He thought about Nell, and she was there. He thought about Mira, and she was there too. The trading floor, the rented flat, the rain in the courtyard. All there. But something was missing, a gap like a tooth gone from a smile, and he couldn’t find what had been in it.

’That’s the worst part. I can’t even miss it properly.’

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.][It is satisfied, for now.]

He pressed his hand gingerly against his left side. The cold had gone quiet again, and along the edge of his scar he felt something new under his fingers, a thin raised line like a single stroke of ink.

He climbed higher into the city after that. He crossed an upside-down bridge hanging by his hands, found a house where no jellies were living, climbed in through the window and lay down gratefully on what had once been the ceiling of a bedroom.

That was when he saw the wall.

Someone had scratched marks into it, small lines in groups of five, four straight and one across, the way prisoners count days. He had been doing exactly the same thing on his rock by the shore.

He started counting and eventually gave up at three hundred. The marks went on across the whole wall and onto the next one and all the way around the room. Seven hundred, at least.

Under the last mark, someone had scratched three words.

THEY NEVER CAME.

On the floor beneath the wall, in the grey dust, there were footprints. They were human, and they were very fresh.

He climbed back down to his rock by the shore before he slept, and scratched a new entry under the first.

DAY 9. SKIN 21%. USED WRITE-OFF. LOST SOMETHING. I DON’T KNOW WHAT. I AM NOT ALONE.