Chapter 73: Dead Blood

The pool lay perfectly flat.

There was no ripple and no bubbles. The black surface sat under the steam like glass, and somewhere beneath it, at the bottom, a heart had stopped.

He didn’t think. He set the lantern down quickly on the stone, pulled his shirt over his head, and went in.

The heat hit him first, then the blood. It closed over his head and pressed against his skin from every side, fierce and thick. He couldn’t see anything. Everything around him was black, and he couldn’t tell the wall from the floor.

But the cold in his side certainly could.

He felt it turn in his ribs like a needle swinging north. It knew exactly where she was. It had been pointing at her since the count of forty. He let it point, followed it down through the dark with his arms out, and his fingers touched hair.

He found her shoulder, then her arm, and he got his hands under her arms and pushed off the bottom with both feet.

They came up together into the steam, and he dragged her to the edge and over it, onto the wet stone, and laid her on her back.

She wasn’t breathing at all.

Her face was black with blood. Her eyes were half open and saw nothing. The iron heart lay on its chain against her chest, cold, and the crack through its middle had grown. It ran all the way to the edge now.

She wore the same thin linen bathing shift as before, soaked black and freezing cold now that she was out of the heat. He grabbed her officer’s coat from the stone beside the pool, threw it over her to keep in what warmth she had left, and pulled it straight with hands that weren’t quite steady. After that, he looked at her face and nowhere else.

The cold in his side rose.

He felt it climb through his ribs as it had in the Furnace, on the night it first opened. This wasn’t the hunger from the forest. It was worse. It had found her again, lying open on the stone with nothing to protect her, her heart silent, and every month of tempering left in her body was right there under his hands.

The scar on his side began to part.

"No," he said.

He pressed his palm flat against his ribs, and it pushed back. He felt the skin of the scar lift under his hand, felt the first cold edge of something long and white start to unfold out of him toward her.

’I can’t hold it and save her. I need both hands.’

So he deliberately gave it something bigger.

He turned on his knees and laid his bare hand flat on the surface of the deep pool. Not on the liquid. On what was in it. The thing that made it worth guarding with forty soldiers: the fierce, angry, living essence of a dozen great beasts from the high snows, poured in night after night for months. The thing that went into your veins and changed them.

He had felt it go into him every time he bathed. He knew exactly what it was.

Zero.

All of it left the pool instantly.

He felt it go, just as he had felt the will go out of the black thread in the Furnace. One heartbeat. The whole deep pool, every drop, emptied of the thing that made it alive.

And in the same heartbeat, his own essence dropped to zero with it. His tempered body, his Bone stage, the slow grinding heat of the Blood in his veins, all of it simply stopped. For one second, he was nothing but a thin boy kneeling on a cold floor, too weak to hold up his own head.

The cold in his side didn’t care. It had what it wanted. The whole huge flood of essence poured into the scar like a river into a hole, and the scar drank, and drank, and couldn’t drink fast enough.

[Familiar of Nothing has fed.][Consumed: the essence of the Deep Pool.][Familiar of Nothing is sated.]

The second ended, and his strength came back all at once, too much of it, prickling painfully.

The cold sank back into his side, heavy, slow, almost sleepy, like an animal that’s eaten until it can’t stand. The scar closed.

Beside him, the deep pool had changed.

It was still blood, but it was dead blood now, and the steam had stopped rising. The surface had gone dull and flat and thick, like old paint in a pot, and even without seeing its color, he could tell there was nothing left in it at all.

’Later. Panic about that later.’

He put his hands firmly on her chest, over the coat.

In his old life, in a grey room on the fourth floor of an office building, he had spent one afternoon kneeling on a carpet beside a plastic doll with no face while a bored woman counted out loud. Everyone on the floor had to do it once. He had thought it was a complete waste of an afternoon.

’I take it back. Best afternoon of my life!’

He remembered all of it clearly. Heel of one hand on the middle of the chest. Other hand on top. Arms straight. Push hard. Push fast. Don’t stop.

"Don’t bother with the breathing," the woman had said, near the end. "Nobody does it right anyway. Just push. Keep the blood moving until the heart remembers how."

He pushed hard.

She was strong. Her body was tempered almost to the end of Blood, and her ribs felt like iron bars under his palms. He had to put his whole weight behind every push. He counted under his breath, as he had counted at the door, and didn’t stop at thirty or at a hundred. He kept going.

His arms began to burn, and his knees were bleeding on the wet stone. The hall was going cold around them now that the steam had stopped. The guards at the iron door hadn’t heard anything yet.

’Come on. Come on, Captain. You’re too stubborn to die in a bathtub.’

Somewhere past two hundred, her body jerked under his hands.

She coughed violently, blood and water and something black, and her whole body arched off the stone. He rolled her onto her side, still under the coat, and held her shoulder while she choked and heaved and dragged in air with a sound like tearing cloth.

Then she was breathing.

They were short, ugly, broken breaths, but she was breathing.

He let go and sat back wearily on his heels, and found he was shaking so hard he couldn’t stand.

[Kaela Voss. Rank D: Blood. 49% → 81%.]

Thirty-two percent.

She had gone far past the line this time, much further than last night, with no iron heart to catch her. She’d stayed under until her body gave up, it had nearly killed her, and she had made more in one night than in the last two months.

She lay on her side for a while, breathing raggedly. Then she pushed herself up on one elbow, turned her head, and looked at him.

She looked at his face, at his bare chest and his bleeding knees, and at the coat lying over her.

He watched her understand it, piece by piece: where she was, what state she was in, and who had put the coat there.

She yanked the coat up to her chin so fast it made a sound.

"Turn around."

He turned around so fast he nearly fell over.

He heard her ragged breathing behind him, then cloth moving. He stared very hard at the far wall and thought desperately about buckets.

"What did you do?" Her voice was a rasp.

"You weren’t breathing, Captain. I pushed on your chest until you did."

"Pushed on my..." She stopped and coughed again. "Where did you learn that?"

"My mother."

It wasn’t true. He was too tired to make up anything better.

She didn’t answer. Then he heard her stop moving.

"The pool."

He didn’t turn around.

"Look at it." Her voice had changed completely. "Water boy, look at the pool."

He looked.

So did she. He could feel her staring past his shoulder at the dull, dead surface where the steam had been, and he felt her understand that too.

"It’s dead." She said it slowly. "The whole deep pool. Three months of hunting. Dead."

Somebody knocked hard on the iron door.

"Captain?" A man’s voice, muffled. "Captain, the steam’s stopped. Is everything..."

"Get out," Kaela said.

For a moment he thought she meant the guard.

"You. Out. The back way. Now, before they see you."

He picked up his shirt and his lantern and went quickly to the small door at the back of the hall.

"Water boy."

He stopped in the doorway.

"If you ever tell anyone what happened in here, I’ll kill you."

"Yes, Captain."

"I mean it."

"I know, Captain."

He went out. The corridor was dark and cold. Behind him, the iron door opened, and the guard’s voice came again, louder, then cut off. A second voice joined it, then a third, rising.

He didn’t need to hear the words. He knew what they were looking at.

The Imperial garrison had just lost its deepest pool, overnight, on the commander’s watch. By morning, only one story would be told about it on that side of the wall.

The Blood Thief had come back.

’Now I’ve got a reputation.’

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.][Investment recorded: Hidden aid. Her life.]

He leaned against the wall in the dark and put his hand over the scar on his side. It was quiet, full and heavy and fast asleep.

For the first time since the forest, it wasn’t hungry at all.