Chapter 82: Iron Remembers

[Reduce to Zero.]

Aren set the strength of the priest’s grip to nothing, and the nail fell out of his fingers.

[Cost: the Host’s grip. 1 second.]

And in the same instant, Aren’s own hands opened.

He had known it would come, but knowing didn’t help in the slightest. For one whole second he couldn’t close his fingers on anything, not the wall, not the eel blade, not the ground, and in that second Ansel turned and hit him with the back of his hand, almost carelessly, like a man brushing a fly off his sleeve.

Aren’s ribs broke under it, and he actually heard them go before he hit the wall, and he slid down it with blood in his mouth and lay there while his heart beat once, slow and enormous, and the ends of the bones began to pull toward each other. They moved slowly, far too slowly.

[Perfect Blood. Ribs: healing.]

’Worth it, probably. Ask me again when I can breathe!’

The nail was rolling across the stone toward the edge, toward the dark.

A thin black chain shot out of the floor of the ledge, quick as a snake, and caught it. It coiled around the nail, drew it back across the rock, and laid it gently in Kaela Voss’s bleeding hand.

She closed her fingers on it.

Ansel looked at the nail in her hand, and then up the tunnel.

There was light up there now, torches and boots on stone and a lot of voices shouting the same word over and over. Captain! Her soldiers had seen her run from the yard and followed her into the mountain.

The priest stood on the ledge and weighed it, and Aren watched him do it. He had no blood and no nail, there was a Blooded captain with the mountain under her hand, and somewhere behind those torches, sooner or later, there would be a Crown Prince.

Ansel smiled, and some of the kindness came back into it, like paint going back on a wall.

"Keep it, Captain, since iron remembers." He glanced down at Aren on the floor. "So do we, I promise you. Until next time, little eater."

He stepped backward off the ledge into the dark of the Rift, and he didn’t fall. He was simply not there anymore, as if the dark had swallowed him whole.

’Little eater? That’s the nickname you’re going with?’

Kaela didn’t get up.

She knelt with her hand still on the seam and the nail in her other fist, her breath short and thin and her face the color of ash, while the chains slowly went quiet. Then she let go of the wall, turned, and crawled the three paces to where he lay.

He couldn’t move, because the bones in his side were still knitting.

Without a word, she put her bleeding hand on the edge of his mask and pulled it off.

Her lamp was out, and the only light was the faint grey glow of the nail in her fist. In that light she looked down at his face: the dirty hair and thin cheeks of the boy who carried her water up the iron stair every morning, the boy who had stood in her yard and said, I watched some knights, Captain, in the north.

She was silent for three long breaths.

"Ren," she said.

He looked back up at her, because there was nothing to say, and there never really had been.

’Well, that’s that, then. It was a good run while it lasted.’

The torches were close now, and he could hear the soldiers on the last turn of the tunnel, twenty paces away and then fifteen.

Kaela looked at the light, and then at him.

Then she pulled the mask back down over his face with her own hand, stood up, turned her back on him, and faced the tunnel with the nail in her fist and blood running down her wrist.

"Run far," she said, without looking round. "Because I will find you."

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

He got his hands under him, and then his knees. The crack in the wall behind the ledge was still there, the narrow one that was too small for armor, and he went into it sideways with his ribs screaming and pulled himself up into the dark.

Below him the soldiers burst onto the ledge, and her voice rose over all of them, flat and cold, telling them the priest had gone into the Rift and she hadn’t seen anybody else.

’She lied for me! Kaela Voss just lied to her own men, for me!’

He climbed.

The crack twisted up through the mountain, sometimes wide enough to crawl and sometimes so tight that he had to breathe all the way out to fit. Every handhold sent a bolt of pain through his side, and twice he stopped, pressed his forehead against the cold rock, and waited patiently for his heart to finish its slow work on the bones.

On the second stop, the blue window opened in the dark in front of his face.

[Anchor progressed: Kaela Voss has commanded the iron of Kharn.][Source: Investment recorded. Hidden aid: Blooded blood, reclaimed.][Mirror Return triggered.]

The small wheel spun in the narrow crack, so close it nearly touched his nose.

’Now? You seriously want to do this now, while I’m wedged inside a mountain?’

It didn’t care, and it never did. The pointer flicked past x2 and past x5, and settled firmly on the wide, plain band of x10.

[Result: x10.][Return: the Anchor’s bond with iron, x10.][Skill acquired: Iron Sense (Grade C).][Effect: The Host can feel worked iron within 30 paces, and any blood bound to it.]

At first nothing happened at all, and then the mountain around him suddenly came alive.

He could feel all of it. The old pick heads rusting in a side tunnel to his left. The nails in a rotten ladder far above. The great chains across the Rift below him, every single link, humming with one voice now, Kaela’s voice. And in her fist, at the very bottom of it all, small and cold and furious, the black nail.

He could feel the blood in it too. It was old blood, not hers, something that had been sealed into the iron a very long time ago.

’Thirty paces isn’t much, but next time a priest walks past me with a box, I’ll know exactly what’s inside it.’

Smiling for the first time in hours, he started climbing again.

Somewhere far beneath him, under the chains, the knocking began again, once, soft and slow.

And under his ribs, for the first time since it had come to him, the Familiar of Nothing answered it.

It didn’t move or pull at him. It purred, low and deep, toward the dark at the bottom of the mountain, like a cat purring at a voice it knows well.

[Something below has noticed you.]