Chapter 91: The Shard Hall

They took the candidates down before dawn.

They went down, not up, through a gate at the back of the sixth terrace and along a tunnel cut deep into the mountain, then down a long spiral stair lit by iron lamps. There were four hundred of them in a column two wide, with soldiers at the front and soldiers at the back, and nobody said a word. The air grew colder with every turn of the stair, and by the third turn Aren knew it was not the cold of stone. It was the other cold, the one that lived under his own ribs.

The Familiar knew it too. It had been restless since they entered the tunnel, and by the bottom of the stair it was pulling hard.

Sigrid Varken walked beside him, because the column went by house and they were the only two Varkens in it. She had not looked at him once. She walked with her hands in her sleeves and her eyes fixed on the back of the candidate in front of her, and the fool at her elbow might as well not have existed.

’Good morning to you too, my lady.’

At the bottom, the stair opened into a hall.

It was perfectly round, with black stone walls and a black stone floor, and high above them a gallery ran all the way around under the ceiling, crowded with lamps and benches and people. Aren saw the five examiners in grey. He saw the Crown Prince wrapped in a fur cloak, and Kaela Voss standing at her brother’s shoulder in her armor with her hands behind her back.

And in the center of the hall, on a low iron plinth, stood a cage.

It was small, a cube of black iron bars with each side no longer than his arm. Inside it, held up by nothing at all, a piece of stone hung in the air. It was the size of a fist, rough and broken on one side and smooth on the others, and it was somehow white and black at the same time, in a way that made his eyes ache if he looked at it too long. It neither moved nor spun. It simply hung a hand’s width above the floor of the cage, as if it had been falling for a very long time and had finally decided to rest.

The Familiar pulled so violently that he nearly took a step forward.

[Unknown object (fragment).][Origin: Above.][Do not let your Familiar eat it.]

’Oh, wonderful, a warning! The System never gives warnings. That’s so comforting.’

He set his feet and held on.

Up on the gallery, a man in grey stood up. It was Ivo Varken. He spoke quietly, and yet his voice reached every corner of the round room without the slightest effort.

"Thirty years ago," he said, "an expedition of the Iron Throne walked into the White Hollow and broke a piece off the stone that does not fall. Eleven men went in. Two came out. They brought this." He did not look at the cage. "It does what the stone does: it drinks heat, out of the air, out of the walls, out of you."

Nobody moved.

"The White Hollow is a thousand times worse than this room," Ivo went on. "If you can’t sit beside a fragment, you’ll die beside the stone, so you’ll sit beside it. The doors will close. You may leave whenever you wish. When fifty of you remain, the doors will open, and those fifty will go to the Hollow." He paused. "The rest of you will go home. Some of you will go home on carts."

He sat down.

Behind them, the great doors at the top of the stair swung shut with a heavy, final boom!

For the first hour, it was only cold, the kind of cold a person could live with. The candidates sat on the black floor in their furs, in little clusters by house, talking in low voices and laughing a little too loudly. Their breath smoked, somebody’s teeth chattered, and his friends teased him mercilessly for it.

Aren sat with his back against the wall, as far from the cage as the room allowed, and kept quiet.

In the second hour, the frost began.

It crept out of the walls first, thin white feathers spreading slowly across the black stone, then out of the floor, and then onto the candidates themselves. Aren watched it grow on the shoulders of the boy in front of him, on his hood and on his eyebrows. The talking stopped, and so did the laughing. Somewhere on the far side of the hall, a girl began to cry very quietly.

The first candidate stood up and walked to the doors. A soldier opened a small hatch in them, let him out, and closed it again. Then another went, and then six at once.

In the third hour, Aren finally understood what Ivo had meant.

The cold was only the beginning; the real danger was the drinking. He could feel it now, something pulling the warmth out of him steadily and patiently, and not just from his skin but from deeper down, from his blood, from the place where his Perfect heart sent out heat with every beat. His heart beat, the heat went out, and the fragment took it before it ever reached his hands.

His fingers went white, and then grey.

So the fool got up.

He got up because sitting still was death, and because a fool sitting quietly in a corner was no fool at all. He broke two icicles off the wall behind him, each as long as his forearm, then a third, and started juggling them. He did it terribly badly. He dropped one on his own head, fell over, got up, and started again.

Up on the gallery, somebody laughed, and then somebody else did. It was the first sound in an hour that wasn’t crying, and it spread around the benches like warmth.

He kept juggling. It kept his arms moving and his blood moving, and it kept his face turned toward the gallery and away from the cage, because every time he looked at the cage, the thing under his ribs lunged at it.

[Familiar of Nothing: Hunger 9% → 34%.]

The strange part was that it wasn’t really hungry. He had fed it on the road for twenty days, and it was full. But it wanted that stone desperately, beyond hunger and beyond reason, and the wanting went through Aren like a second cold.

He dropped an icicle on purpose, fell down, and lay on the black floor with his arm across his face.

’No.’

He said it inside, just as he had said it in the deep pool when the Familiar reached past him for the essence. It was not a shout, only a door he quietly refused to open.

The pulling eased a little, and he got up and started juggling again.

Around him, the hall was emptying. Three hundred were left, then two hundred and fifty. They went out through the hatch in twos and threes, some walking and some carried, and the soldiers at the hatch never once looked at them.

The Flesh-tempered went first, and then the weaker Bone. Aren watched the lines between the ranks draw themselves across the room in white frost and blue lips, more plainly than any test could have drawn them.

And then he watched the classes.

Across the hall, Cassian Haskel sat cross-legged with his eyes closed and his hands open on his knees, and the air around him shimmered. He was burning, though there was no fire, only a steady glow that came off his skin like heat off a forge, and the frost could not touch him. Five or six of the weaker candidates had crawled closer to him without a word, just to sit at the edge of it.

Haskel opened one eye and looked at them.

"Mine," he said pleasantly, and the glow drew in tight against his skin, and the warmth was gone.

One of them, a thin boy in brown, didn’t get up. He stayed exactly where he was, at the edge of where the warmth had been, with his arms around his knees. After a while the frost covered him completely. A while after that, a soldier came through the hatch, looked at him, and called for two more, and they carried him out stiff and silent.

Haskel never opened his eyes again.

’I’m adding that to your bill, Haskel. With interest!’

Sigrid Varken had not moved since the doors closed.

She sat with her back very straight and her hands on her knees, and the frost grew on her as it grew on everyone, white on her shoulders and in her short dark hair. But it didn’t bite her, and Aren could see it clearly. Her lips weren’t blue and her fingers weren’t grey. The cold flowed over her and around her without ever taking hold, her breath came slow and even, and every so often a faint pale light moved under the skin of her wrists.

[Sigrid Varken. Class: Rimeguard (A).]

It was her family’s blood, and now he understood why House Varken came back from the Hollow when nobody else did.

She opened her eyes once, in the fourth hour, and looked across the hall at the fool, who was lying on his back balancing an icicle on his nose. Her face stayed completely blank, and she closed her eyes again.

A hundred and twenty were left, and then ninety.

In the fifth hour, Aren stopped juggling, because his hands wouldn’t close anymore.

He sat down against the wall. He couldn’t feel his feet, or his face behind the mask. His heart was beating slowly and heavily, every beat sending heat out into his body, and with every beat the fragment drank it before it got anywhere. He could feel the space between the beats getting longer.

Perfect blood and four hundred and seventy points of endurance, and this little stone in its cage was going to kill him slowly, sitting on a floor, without ever lifting a finger.

’This is so stupid! This is such a stupid way to die.’

The Familiar pushed toward the cage again, harder this time. It knew what was happening to him, and it knew the one thing in this room that could stop it, and it simply could not understand why he wouldn’t let it eat.

Do not let your Familiar eat it.

He held on grimly.

Between one heartbeat and the next, he counted to six.

Then to nine.