Chapter 49: The Bait

"Yes."

Roderick’s face didn’t change. He stood in the doorway with his bone blade in his hand and looked at Aren without blinking.

Then he stepped aside silently and let him in.

"Tell me how."

Aren sat on the stone floor with his back against the barred door, and Roderick sat across from him with the blade across his knees.

"It can’t leave the giant. It speaks through the hounds, but only for two hundred paces around the square. Past that line they’re just animals. So we walk to the square together. I leave you at the edge and walk away, like it asked. It’ll watch me go, because it wants to see me leave. It doesn’t like me."

"Why not?"

Aren pressed his hand flat against his left side. "The hound that talked to me smelled this, and backed away."

Roderick looked at his hand and said nothing.

"Once I’m past the line, it’s blind to me. The packs walk the same loop every time, four hundred breaths a loop. If I come back down the east streets right after a pack goes by, I get about half that before the next one. Enough to reach the square without any eyes on me."

"And then?"

"Then it leaves the giant to climb into you, and it has to cross the open air to do it." Aren kept his voice level. "I saw it come out of Leon Harrow. It’s a thread. For a few seconds, between the giant and you, it won’t be inside anything. I grab it, and I take away the one thing that makes it what it is." He paused. "And then something eats it."

"The thing in your side."

"Yes."

"You’ve never let it out."

"No."

"Do you know what it’ll do?"

"No. I know it’s hungry. I know it eats what I take away."

Roderick studied him, and then, for the first time since they had met, he laughed. It wasn’t the broken laugh from the room with the seven hundred marks. It was short and dry and almost normal, the laugh of a boy from the lower city hearing a very bad plan.

"You’re as mad as I am, ghost."

"Probably."

"If it gets into me." Roderick’s voice dropped. "If it gets in and you can’t get it out. What then?"

Aren held his eyes.

"Then I kill you. Before it can climb."

Roderick nodded slowly, as if that was exactly the answer he had wanted.

"Good. That’s fair."

[Roderick. Hostility: 93% → 90%.]

’The only time he’s ever liked me, and it’s because I promised to kill him! I’m never telling Mira about this.’

They went on the seventieth day, the long way along the ceiling. Roderick climbed ahead silently. Aren fed the cold in his side twice on the way, the hardness of a loose stone and the grip of a crawling grey thing he found in a crack. He wanted it full, though he had no idea if that was how it worked.

They climbed down into the Furnace by the cracked tower on the north side, into the heat and the heavy ember light, and the hounds came.

They didn’t attack. They simply gathered. Dozens of them came out of the burning streets and fell in behind the two boys at a distance, a slow glowing crowd of cracked black backs and coal eyes, and every mouth spoke with the same calm voice.

You came.

Thank you.

This way.

The square opened in front of them. The giant knelt at its anvil in the center, black and enormous, chained to the burning ground. Above its headless shoulders the smoke was already rising and drawing itself into Leon Harrow’s polite young face, and it smiled down at them.

"Thank you. Truly. You are a sensible man."

Aren stopped at the edge of the square, and Roderick stopped beside him. Aren could feel the smoke face watching his left side.

"Go. All the way. I’ll be watching."

Aren turned and walked steadily away.

He walked up the wide avenue without looking back, and the hounds parted for him without a sound. At two hundred paces, a hound at the side of the avenue jerked its head mid-step, shook itself, and looked at him with the bright, empty eyes of an animal.

He walked calmly on to two hundred and fifty, then turned left into a narrow street, out of sight of the avenue.

Then he ran hard.

He ran east around the outside of the circle, counting his breaths, and found the narrow street on the east side that ran back toward the square, pressed himself against the wall at its mouth and waited.

A pack came down it, five hounds walking slowly and talking politely to nobody. Blessed. Truly. They passed the end of the street, turned onto the avenue and kept going.

He started counting.

He went down the narrow street with the Moonlit Step carrying him half a step farther each time, his feet silent on the hot stones. Fifty breaths. A hundred. The street opened onto the square, and he stopped behind a fallen wall at its edge, ten paces from where Roderick stood.

A hundred and twenty breaths, and he had already used most of what he had.

He pressed his back to the wall with his hand flat on his side, and listened. Roderick’s breathing, quick and shallow. The creak of the giant’s chains.

Then the smoke moved.

It made a sound like a long breath let out, the sound of something trapped in a heavy body for too long and finally lifting free. He felt it more than heard it, a hook in the air, the same pull he had felt on the sand of the arena when the song began. It came off the giant’s shoulders and across the square, low and fast, toward the boy standing alone at the edge.

Roderick screamed.

Aren came swiftly around the wall.

The thread was halfway into him. Roderick was on his knees with his head thrown back and his mouth wide open, and the black thread was pouring into it, thicker and wetter now, like a rope of dark water. His hands clawed at it and his eyes rolled white. Behind him the giant had slumped forward over its anvil, empty, and around the square the hounds had frozen where they stood.

Half the thread was still outside, hanging in the air between the giant and the boy, twisting.

Aren grabbed it with his bare hand.

It was colder than the Abyss, colder than his scar. It writhed in his fist like an eel, and for one terrible moment he felt it notice him. He felt the patient, polite thing inside it turn from the boy to the hand that was holding it.

Oh, it said, inside his head. You came back.

’Zero.’

He didn’t aim at its strength or its hardness or its grip. He aimed at the thing itself, at whatever made it want and reach and climb. At its will.

The thread went limp in his hand, all its fight gone at once, half outside Roderick and half in.

And in that same second, Aren’s own will went with it.

He felt it drain away, the thing that had kept him walking down the hill to the healer house every night and holding still at the edge of the sand. For one second he wanted nothing. Not to live, not to fight, not to hold on. He knelt on the burning stone with the black thread in his hand and didn’t care about anything at all.

Then the cold in his side moved, and he felt the scar open.

It didn’t tear. It opened like a letter unfolding, and something white came out of his left side.

He saw it from the corner of his eye and his mind simply didn’t know what to do with it. It was a beast, long and lean, with six thin legs unfolding out of his side one after another like the legs of a heron stepping out of a pond. A long curved neck. A narrow head with no eyes and no mouth. It wasn’t the white of bone or snow. It was the white of an empty page. It cast no shadow in the light of the Furnace, its edges were so sharp it looked cut out of the world, and wherever its feet touched the stone, the glow went out and left it grey.

It turned its blank face toward the black thread.

Then the head split, from the tip of the snout all the way down the neck, and the inside was covered in thin black lines of ink, row after row, like numbers written in a careful hand.

It made no sound at all. It simply bit.

The white head closed neatly on the thread between Aren’s fist and Roderick’s mouth and pulled. The half inside Roderick slid out of him in one long smooth motion, like a thread pulled from a needle, and went into that open white head, writhing, and was gone.

The other half got away.

The second ended. The will came back into what was left of the thread all at once, and it tore out of Aren’s fingers like a rope snapping in a gale and whipped back across the square into the giant’s shoulders.

Aren’s own will came back in the same instant. He fell heavily forward onto his hands on the hot stone, gasping.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.][Consumed: Will of the Hollow Choir (fragment).][Familiar of Nothing has grown.]

The white beast stood beside him with its head closed again, smooth and blank. Along its flank, from shoulder to hip, ran a new line of black ink, longer and thicker than all the others. Then it folded, six legs and long neck and blank head, smaller and flatter, and slid back into the scar like a letter into an envelope. The cold settled along his ribs, heavy and full.

Around the square, the hounds had stopped talking. They shook themselves one after another, and their coal eyes went bright and wild. Nobody was looking out through them anymore.

Then the giant lifted itself off the anvil.

Above its shoulders the smoke rose and tried to gather into a face, and couldn’t. It came together and fell apart and came together again, a face that no longer remembered how to be polite. The half that had been patient and careful and sensible was gone.

What was left was only hungry.

The giant pulled against its chains. The stone of the square split from the anvil to the edge. The great chain on its left wrist made a long, deep sound like a ship’s hull giving way, and one of its links cracked from end to end.

Aren grabbed Roderick roughly by the collar and ran.

He remembered very little of it afterward. Narrow streets, the Moonlit Step again and again until his legs shook, Roderick stumbling beside him, the cracked tower and the long upside-down dark. And behind them the whole way, the hammer falling on the anvil, slow and heavy, like a heart.

They stopped on a ledge high on the ceiling, far from the heat, and Roderick lay on his back and stared blankly up at the black stone.

His eyes were different. For the first time since Aren had met him, they were not wide or bright. They were just eyes, tired and very young.

"Ghost," Roderick whispered.

"I’m here."

A slow smile spread gradually across his face, one Aren had never seen there before.

"It’s quiet. She’s gone. They’re all gone." He closed his eyes. "It’s so quiet."

[Roderick. Hostility: 90% → 62%.]

Aren looked back down at the Furnace. Far below, in the middle of the burning city, the giant was still pulling at its chains.

[Hollow Choir (fragment). Bound.][Hostility: 100%.][Hostility threshold met.][Anchor slots: 3/3. No slot available.]