Chapter 48: Range

The hounds howled at night now, and you could hear them all the way from Varn.

They didn’t howl like dogs. They howled the word welcome, over and over, in a polite young voice that carried across the dark, and Roderick slept with his hands pressed tightly over his ears. He had not said a single word on the day they got back.

They couldn’t go through the Furnace. Aren had known it the moment he saw the hounds, and he knew it more every night after, lying awake in the barred storeroom listening to the voices. Dozens of Rank C monsters, a giant in the middle of them with a face made of smoke, and two Rank D boys with bone blades. It wasn’t a fight. It wouldn’t even be a particularly long death.

So he stopped thinking about fighting, and started thinking seriously about what he had seen from the ledge.

The giant was kneeling because it couldn’t stand. Its chains ran from its wrists and ankles into the burning ground. Whatever the black thread had become, it had climbed into a body that was fixed in place. It couldn’t come for them, and it could only speak through the hounds.

’So how far can it reach? That’s the only number that matters.’

He went back alone on the sixty-fourth day.

Roderick didn’t argue. He sat in the corner with his bone blade across his knees and his eyes on the barred door, and when Aren said he was going, he only whispered, "She says you won’t come back."

"She’s wrong."

"She’s never wrong. She just lies."

This time Aren left the ceiling long before the Furnace began and came at the burning city from below, clinging to the underside of its broken outer rim where the stone hung over the endless drop. The rock glowed dull and heavy in places, like coals under ash, and he had to choose every handhold very carefully. The air was so dry it hurt to breathe. He breathed as the grey book had taught him, slow and deep, and found the heat bit a little less when he did.

Eventually he found a place where the rim had cracked, a long split running up into the city like a chimney. He wedged himself into it with his back and his boots and climbed until his eyes were level with the street above.

Then he stayed there and watched patiently, for a whole day.

The first thing he learned was that the hounds walked in loops. They never wandered randomly. Each pack followed the same path through the burning streets, over and over, like guards walking the same wall: out from the central square along a wide avenue, around a ring of broken towers, and back. Every loop took the same time. He counted it, as he had counted his days on the rock by the shore. Four hundred breaths, more or less.

The second thing took longer.

Late in the day, a young hound broke away from its pack. It was smaller than the others, with a thinner crust and a brighter glow in its seams, and it had smelled something at the edge of the city, near the rim, near Aren’s crack. It came trotting eagerly down a narrow side street toward him with its nose low.

He stopped breathing entirely.

It was talking as it came, in that calm young voice. Welcome. Welcome to the Festival. Its coal eyes were dull and steady.

Then it crossed a line, and everything changed.

Aren saw it happen clearly, though there was nothing on the ground, no mark and no wall. But at one particular spot in the narrow street, about two hundred paces from the central square, the young hound stopped talking in the middle of a word. Its head jerked, and its eyes changed from dull coals to something bright and wild, and it shook itself all over like a dog shaking off water.

Then it snarled, an ordinary animal snarl, pounced on a grey crawling thing in the gutter and tore it apart.

When it had eaten, it looked around, confused, and trotted obediently back up the street toward the square. At the same spot, two hundred paces out, its head jerked again and its eyes went dull.

Welcome, it said politely. Welcome to the Festival.

Aren stayed in the crack with his heart beating wildly.

’Two hundred paces! You can’t leave your chair, and your voice only carries two hundred paces.’

Inside that circle, every hound was its mouth and its eyes. Outside it, they were only animals, dangerous Rank C animals, but animals all the same, and they didn’t plan, or watch for intruders, or talk.

He looked at the city with new eyes. The square in the middle, a circle of two hundred paces around it where the voice lived, and outside that a ring of broken streets and towers all the way to the rim, where the hounds were just hounds. The pale white light where the black flowers grew was on the far side of the city. To reach it you would have to cross the Furnace, but you wouldn’t have to cross the square. You could go around, through the outer ring, where nothing was listening.

He had to see the far side of that ring before he trusted it.

He climbed out into the outer streets, keeping low and keeping to the shadows of the broken walls, two hundred and fifty paces from the square at all times, counting every step. The hounds he passed were asleep, or eating, or wandering with the empty eyes of animals. Two of them lifted their heads lazily as he went by, and neither followed.

He was halfway around when he made his mistake.

He put his hand on a wall to steady himself, and the wall wasn’t stone. It was a crust over something molten, thin as an eggshell. It broke, and his hand went in up to the wrist, into something that glowed white.

The cold in his side moved before he did.

It ran down his arm as it had on the ninth day, fast as a thrown knife, but backwards. This time it wasn’t taking. It was giving. Something poured into the skin of his hand, hard and smooth and glassy, and for one heartbeat his fingers were pale plates, and the white fire slid off them like rain off a roof.

One heartbeat was enough, and he tore his hand free.

[Familiar of Nothing: entry returned.][Day 9. The hardness of a Bell-Eater’s plate.]

Then the hardness was gone, and the heat caught up.

He pressed his hand against his chest and bit down on his own sleeve so he wouldn’t scream, and the pain was so large that he couldn’t see. Without that heartbeat there would have been nothing left to pull out. With it there was still a hand, blistered and black from the wrist to the fingertips, but a hand.

He couldn’t climb back to Varn with it. He couldn’t even climb out of the Furnace.

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

He did it immediately, before he could think about it.

The burn was still there when he looked, but it was old now, pale shiny skin across the back of his hand, stiff and tight, like a scar from a fire years ago. The pain was gone, and his fingers moved.

And something else was gone too.

He crouched shakily in the shadow of the broken wall and went looking for it, as he had on the ninth day. Nell, Mira, the healer house, the trading floor. All there. He thought about Old Mag’s shop and the fish crates and the one bright eye, and the sword she’d sold him, and the bandages. He thought about the polished stones he had sold in the east garden before the ceremony, and the stone cutter who had sold him the quartz.

He could see the stone cutter’s yard, the white dust, the big slow man with the huge forearms.

He simply couldn’t remember his name.

He sat there trying. It wasn’t on the tip of his tongue, and it wasn’t hiding. It simply wasn’t there, as if it had never been written down.

’I’m sorry,’ he thought, to a man whose name he no longer had. ’You were kind to me. I think.’

When the shaking stopped, he pulled up his shirt and looked at his side. The thin ink lines ran along the scar in a neat column, one for every time it had fed. He had looked at them every night since the thirtieth day.

The first one, the oldest, from the ninth day, was gone. The skin where it had been was smooth.

He had kept books for most of his old life, and he knew what he was looking at. It didn’t just eat. It wrote things down. And what had been written down could be taken out again, once.

He was climbing back down the rim when the hound found him.

It came over the edge above him and looked down at him hanging from the underside of the stone. It was huge, its black crust glowing along every seam, and its coal eyes were dull and steady.

He was inside the circle. The crack he had chosen was closer to the square than he had thought.

[Cinder Hound. Rank C: Core Condensation.]

He hung there by his fingers and the toes of his boots over an endless drop, with no skill left for the day and no Write-Off either.

The hound didn’t attack. It tilted its cracked head and sniffed the air near him, once, twice, and something in its stance changed. It drew back very slightly, and its eyes went warily to his left side, to the scar.

Then it spoke in that calm young voice.

"We don’t need to fight. You know that. You’re a sensible man. I saw it in the arena. You stood at the edge of the sand and did nothing while she fell, because you knew you had to." The coal eyes glowed. "I respect that."

Aren said nothing.

"I can’t leave the square. You’ve worked that out, I think. I watched you counting today." The cracked head tilted. "This body is old and heavy and chained to its work. It’s no good to me. I need a new one. Something light. Something that can climb."

The cold in Aren’s side went motionless.

"The boy." The hound’s voice was soft. "The one who listens to his mother. He’s already half mine. He’s been listening to voices for seven hundred days. One more won’t make any difference. Bring him to the square. Leave him at the edge. Walk away, and I’ll let you pass, all the way through to your white flowers. My hounds won’t touch you."

It leaned a little closer over the edge. Then, slowly, it drew back again, as if something about him made it uneasy.

"One broken boy who was already lost," Leon Harrow’s voice said gently, "for your way home. Think about it."

It turned and walked calmly away into the burning streets.

He got back to Varn on the sixty-sixth day, with a hand that looked ten years older and a name missing from his head. He climbed to the barred storeroom and knocked twice, as they had agreed.

Roderick opened the door and looked at him with his wide, bright eyes.

"She told me. What it offered you."

Aren didn’t answer.

"Are you going to do it?"

[Roderick. Hostility: 88% → 93%.]