Chapter 64: The Blood Thief

The head opened, and the white thing ate.

Aren felt it exactly as he had felt it in the square of the Furnace, through every inch of the long cold body as if it were his own. The split head closed on something in the dark. This time it wasn’t a thread or a will. It was something warm and thick and heavy, woven all through a living body like roots through soil. Months of it. Night after night of burning, sitting at the bottom of this pool, holding on.

It came loose. It poured out of the warm thing in the dark and into the white head, and the white head drank it, and drank it, and kept drinking.

’Stop.’

He genuinely didn’t know if he thought it or said it. His mouth was full of blood. He grabbed at his own side with both hands, at the open scar, and pulled, not at his skin but at the thing behind it, like pulling a dog back by the collar when it has its teeth in something.

It didn’t want to come.

He pulled harder, desperately. He felt it turn on him, the blank head swinging toward him in the dark, hungry and offended, and he understood that it could eat him too if it wanted to, and that it was thinking about it.

He held on grimly.

The white thing gave. It folded slowly and sulkily, six legs and long neck and blank head, back into the scar, and the scar closed over it like a mouth.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.][Consumed: Blood Tempering (Kaela Voss), 61%.]

He had no air left, so he kicked frantically for the surface.

He came up into the steam, gasping, blind with blood, and grabbed for the edge of the pool. His hand closed on stone. He wiped his eyes with his other arm, and when he could see again, there was someone in front of him.

She had come up a moment after him, an arm’s length away, in the middle of the pool.

She was a young woman, a year or two older than him, her dark hair plastered flat to her head and her face streaked black with blood. She wore a thin linen bathing shift, soaked dark from neck to knee, and she wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at her own hands, held up out of the pool in front of her face, turning them slowly in the lantern light.

They were shaking badly.

[Kaela Voss. Rank D: Blood. 97% → 36%.][Class: Ironvow Lancer (Grade A).]

She made a sound. It wasn’t a word. It was the sound people make when they reach for a step in the dark and it isn’t there.

Then she looked up and saw him.

At first her face stayed perfectly blank. She looked at the scarf over his mouth and nose, at the blood running down his bare chest, at the long white scar along his ribs, still faintly open at its lower end. Her eyes stayed on that scar. He watched her understand it piece by piece, the way he would have understood a set of numbers that didn’t add up.

"You." She spoke in the Imperial tongue, very quietly. "What did you do to me?"

There was nothing he could say that would be true and would also help.

"I was there. I was there! I felt it. One more breath. One more." Her voice didn’t rise. It got quieter. "Four months. I’ve been coming down here for four months. And you..." She pressed a hand flat against her own chest, as if she could feel the empty place where it had been. "You took it. You came here and you took it."

"Blood thief," she whispered.

Then she came at him.

She crossed the pool through chest-high blood as if it were air, and her fist hit him in the side of the head before he had finished turning, and the hall went white.

He went under, came up, and she was already there. This time, for a single horrified heartbeat, he saw her properly in the lantern light: an Imperial officer in a soaked shift with her hair in her eyes, crying with rage at a masked stranger.

She realized it in the same moment he did. He saw it cross her face under the blood: the pool, the hour, the stranger, and the fact that she had come down here alone to be weak where nobody could see, and somebody had seen. Her arm came up across herself. Her eyes went wide, then narrow, then something far worse than narrow.

"You," she said, in a voice that could have cut stone, "are looking."

"I’m not," Aren insisted, and shut his eyes tightly.

It was easily the most stupid thing he had ever done in a fight. It was also the only thing he could think of.

’Fighting a Rank D lancer blind. Mira would laugh herself sick.’

She hit him in the ribs. He felt it coming half a breath before it landed, just as he had felt Roderick’s blows on the moor, the instinct reading weight and breath and the twist of a hip, and he turned with it. The next one went past his ear. He caught the one after that on his forearm, and the bone hummed.

"Open your eyes!"

"No."

"Open your eyes and fight me properly, you..." She said a word in the Imperial tongue that he didn’t know and didn’t need to.

He kept them stubbornly shut. He fought her blind, chest-deep in blood, by the sound of the water and the rush of air before each blow and the slow, steady reading of her body that had become as natural to him as breathing. It mostly worked. She was faster and stronger than him, even emptied, and she had been trained since she could stand by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Every third blow got through. One cracked something under his scar. Another split his lip behind the scarf.

But she couldn’t finish him. He felt her understand that he was fighting her with his eyes closed and was still standing, and he felt her rage climb to a place where there was nothing else left in her at all.

Something dark began to gather in the blood around her arms, a faint pressure like iron drawing itself together. Her class.

He put his palm flat against the floor of the pool, under her feet.

’Zero.’

The stone under her had no grip at all.

Her feet went out from under her with her whole weight behind the blow she was throwing, and she pitched forward and under. He didn’t think. He did what his hands had been doing since he was ten years old, hauling Nell out of a gutter, hauling Vivienne up out of a seam in the sand. He reached down into the black, found her wrist, and pulled her up.

In the same second his own feet went too. They slid backward together and hit the stone edge of the pool hard, and stopped there, tangled, with his hand still clamped around her wrist so she wouldn’t go under again.

The second ended, and the floor was stone again.

"Let," she hissed through her teeth, "go."

He let go instantly.

She bit him.

She didn’t bite hard enough to tear, but hard enough to mean it, right in the meat of the shoulder, through the blood. He yelled in a way that wasn’t dignified at all, and she shoved herself away from him with both hands and sank to her chin in the pool, her eyes blazing at him over the black surface.

"Ghost?"

Roderick was in the doorway with his bone blade in his hand. He looked at the pool, at Aren against the wall bleeding from the shoulder with his eyes still screwed shut, and at the young woman up to her chin in blood, looking at Aren as if she were deciding which part of him to remove first.

Roderick’s face did several things in a row.

"I can feel her now. I couldn’t before. She wasn’t anything before." He paused. "Ghost, why did she bite you?"

"Not now, Roddy."

Aren went out of the pool in one heave over the stone lip, keeping his face turned firmly toward the far wall. His hand landed on folded cloth, an officer’s coat, black, with a small iron badge at the collar. A piece of paper slid off the top of it onto the wet stone, and he accidentally read the first line in the lantern light before he could stop himself.

Mother. If I don’t come up, it isn’t your fault.

Behind him, the blood moved.

He grabbed his own things from beside the small pool and ran. Roderick was already on the rope. Aren went up after him one-handed, boots and coat and shirt crushed against his chest, and he didn’t look down until he was twenty feet up the shaft.

She hadn’t followed.

She stood at the bottom wrapped to the neck in her officer’s coat, black with blood from her hair to her bare feet, and looked up into the dark where he was climbing.

"I will find you." She said it deliberately in the common tongue, so he would understand. Her voice shook once, and then it was perfectly steady. "I will find you, and I will take back every drop you stole from me." A pause. "And then I will take your eyes. Both of them. For what they saw."

"I didn’t see anything!" It was out before he could stop himself.

The silence from the bottom of the shaft was the most frightening thing he’d heard since the Furnace.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.][Hostility threshold met.][Anchor slots: 2/3. One slot available.][Anchor this target?]

He hung on the rope in the dark with her blood drying slowly on his skin and looked down at the woman who’d just promised to take his eyes. The most dangerous person he’d met since the Furnace, and someone whose whole life he’d just knocked off its feet.

In his old life he would have called that an opportunity. He wasn’t sure what he called it now.

’Yes.’

[Anchor established: Kaela Voss.][Anchors: 3/3.]

She turned and walked out of the light. Somewhere deep in the mine, a bell began to ring.