Chapter 57: Collateral

Crane was waiting in the Great Hall when Aren came through the kitchen gate at midnight.

He was sitting on the steps of the Measure’s platform with the same lamp and a different scroll, as if he had simply never left. He didn’t look surprised. He looked at the grey scarf around Aren’s face, and the hood, and then he stood up, walked to the back wall behind the platform, and pressed his palm flat against one particular stone low down near the floor.

The low door swung open without a sound.

"The Headmaster knows. She’d like to speak with you. Not tonight."

"I’m leaving the city in two days."

Crane’s eyebrows rose very slightly. He didn’t ask where.

"Then she’ll speak with you when you come back. If you come back." He held out the lamp. "Take this. It’s a long way down. And, Servant." Aren stopped in the doorway. "When you talk to it, be very careful what you promise. It remembers everything. It has had a long time to practice."

The stair felt longer going down than it had coming up.

He went alone. Roderick had kindly offered to come, Aren had said no, and Roderick had looked relieved and tried to hide it. The lamp threw a small circle of yellow light on the old worn steps and the pale walls and the long lines of Valdris marks carved into every stone. He could see the fresh cracks now that he knew to look for them, thin and sharp-edged, running through the old marks like scratches through writing.

The air grew warmer as he went down, and then it began to move, in and out, slow and huge.

He came out into the great dark chamber and stopped at the edge of the lamplight.

The three chains ran across the floor into the dark. The heartbeat thudded through the stone under his boots, and the breath washed over him, hot and dry, smelling of smoke and old stone and rain on grass that grew nowhere in this world.

"You came back," said the dark.

The great golden eye opened high above him. It didn’t seem surprised either.

"I said I would."

"Many things have said that to me. Few of them meant it." The eye narrowed slightly. "Speak, little investor. What have you learned?"

He told it everything.

On the way down he had thought carefully about how much to say. In his old life you never gave anyone all of what you knew. You gave them enough to keep them interested and kept the rest in your pocket. He had meant to do the same here. But he had stood in front of this eye once already, and it had tasted his lies like smoke. So he stood at the edge of the lamplight and laid it all out.

The cathedral, rebuilt before the damage was done, its stone ordered two months early. The wool merchant who had bought every burned plot of the fish market at half price a week after the Night of Bells. The bag of Valdris gold changed on Gilded Row by a clerk in white and gold. The five hundred crowns bet against Vivienne. The gold marks painted under the Measure, drinking a little from every hand that touched it. The champion with a black line where his will should have been. And Brother Ansel, with his grey eyes and his silver box, gone out through the North Gate with three men in grey, toward the iron mountains.

Then the Furnace: the headless giant at its anvil, the voice that had worn Leon Harrow’s face and wanted Roderick’s body and known about the mark on Nell’s arm, and the white thing that had come out of Aren’s own side and eaten it, down to the last screaming thread.

When he finished, the dark was quiet so long that the lamp began to gutter.

"North." The dragon spoke at last.

"Yes."

"Toward the iron throne." The breath moved through the chamber, slow and thoughtful. "When I fell into this world, five hundred years ago, there was already a throne in those mountains. Smaller then. Hungrier. Its kings sent men to dig at the roots of the mountains, deeper every year, looking for the places where the world is thin." The eye shifted. "They found some."

"The Rift mines. I’ve heard of them."

"Then you have heard of the places where the walls of the world are weakest, outside of this one." The eye looked down at him. "Your singers did not go north to hide, little investor. They went north because north is where the next door is."

Under Aren’s shirt, along his ribs, the cold went completely quiet.

"I’m going after him."

"I know. I can smell it on you. You have thought of nothing else since you came down the stair." The eye narrowed. "And you have come to ask me to let you go."

"I came to tell you what I learned. As I promised."

"And to ask me to let you go." There was something almost like amusement in the deep voice. "Very well. Ask."

Aren took a breath.

"You told me that if I didn’t come back, you’d find my sister. You’d ask her where I went." He kept his voice steady. "I want you to leave her out of it."

The heartbeat thudded through the floor, once, twice.

"Why would I do that?" the dragon asked softly.

"Because she can’t tell you anything. She doesn’t know where I’m going or what I am. She’s twelve and she’s sick and she has nothing to do with any of this." He held the eye. "If you want something to hold so I come back, hold me. Not her."

"Your sister is your chain, little investor. Just as these are mine." The three great chains rattled faintly across the floor. "That is why I named her. A creature with no chains cannot be held. A creature with one can."

"Then take a different one."

"Such as?"

Aren had thought about this all the way down the stair. He had nothing a dragon could want. No gold that mattered and no power that counted. Nothing to put on the table except the one thing he had always put there, in every deal, in both his lives.

’Myself. Again! One day I’m going to run out of me.’

"Mark me. However you do it. Something you can follow. If I die, you’ll know. If I run, you’ll know. If I break my word, you’ll know exactly where to find me." He paused. "And you leave her alone."

The silence went on so long that he began to wonder if the dragon had fallen asleep.

Then the dark moved.

Something came down out of it, huge and grey and scaled, the color of ash. It came down slowly out of the black and stopped just over his head, so close he could feel the heat coming off it, and it took him a few seconds to understand what he was looking at.

It was a claw. One claw, on one toe, of one foot. It was longer than he was tall, its tip curved and dark and sharp, and it hung in the air in front of his face like the blade of a scythe.

"Hold out your hand."

Aren set the lamp down on the stone and held out his left hand, palm up.

The tip of the claw came down very slowly until it touched the center of his palm.

It didn’t cut or burn. It simply pressed firmly, like a seal pressed into wax, and he felt something go into his hand, small and hard and cold. It went in through the skin as if the skin were water, settled neatly in the center of his palm, and stayed.

The claw withdrew into the dark.

He looked down. In the lamplight, in the middle of his palm, there was a scale the size of a thumbnail, grey as old ash, set flat into his skin like a coin pressed into soft clay. It didn’t hurt. When he closed his hand he could feel it there, cool and smooth, like a pebble from a riverbed.

"If you die, I will know. If you run, I will know. If you lie to me, I will know." The eye looked down at him. "And your sister will never hear my name."

Aren closed his hand around the scale.

"Thank you."

"Do not thank me. It is not a gift." The eye narrowed. "It is collateral. I believe that is the word you would use."

’It’s learning my vocabulary. That can’t be good.’

He picked up the lamp and turned to go.

"Investor."

He stopped.

"When you go north," the deep voice went on, "you will pass through cold places. Very cold. Colder than anything in your soft little city." A pause. "Remember that I am made of fire. And that you carry a piece of me now."

Aren looked down at his closed hand. The scale in his palm was very faintly warm.

"What was your world?" He hadn’t meant to ask. The question came out of him on its own.

The eye gave no answer at first. Then, slowly, it began to close.

"A world with a sky," Vaelgrith said quietly.

The ember light went out. The breath washed over him one last time, hot and slow and smelling of rain on grass, and then the chamber was only dark, with the heartbeat and the small yellow circle of Crane’s lamp on the floor.

He climbed the stair slowly and alone, with a piece of a dragon in his hand.