Chapter 852: A Place at the Table

"Then what do we do?" Rudra asked.

Nobody answered him. The heart beat once, slow and deep, and the hollow shook with it. Then came the long wait for the next one.

Rudra counted it. Fifteen.

He looked up at the great golden body hanging in the dark.

Last time there had been a knot to find and threads to cut. Almond had climbed up and opened it with a blade. Now there was only a dull gold shape, and a gray poison in every part of it.

"Ainen," he said.

Ainen was standing with his eyes shut, still tasting.

"I’m thinking," Ainen said.

"Think out loud. I can’t follow you otherwise."

Ainen opened his eyes. He looked tired, and he looked like a man standing over a pot that had gone wrong.

"You ever oversalt a soup?" he asked.

Rudra stared at him. "No. I’ve never cooked a soup in my life."

"Well, I have. Lots of times." Ainen rubbed his face. "Once the salt’s in, you can’t pick it out. It’s in every spoonful. You can’t fish it out with your fingers."

"So what do you do?"

"Depends how bad it is." Ainen looked up at the gatekeeper. "If it’s a little, you add more of everything else, until the salt doesn’t matter."

Rudra followed his look. The gold was the color of old brass. The heart was failing.

"And if it’s a lot?"

"Then you need something that draws it out."

Rudra did not understand. But he had sailed with stranger plans than this, and most of them had been his own.

"First thing," he said. "You said add more of everything else."

"Yes."

"I can do that part."

He walked out across the warm, dark floor of the heart until he stood under the great golden body. He put his blistered hands flat on the soft flesh.

The gatekeeper’s eye turned to him.

"You’ve been robbed," Rudra told it. "For weeks. A little at a time, every day, so you’d barely notice."

He kept his palms flat. "That thing has been eating you the way a leak sinks a ship." He set his jaw. "You’re my brother’s guest. That makes you mine. And everything it’s taken from you is owed."

Owed Back.

"I’m calling it in."

The heart shook.

It was not the slow beat. It was something else. Rudra felt it go out of his hands and into the gold flesh. Weeks of strength, taken a crumb at a time, came back in one rush.

The gold brightened. It went from old brass to the color of a coin in sunlight, and the great eye opened wider.

The heart beat.

Rudra counted. Twelve seconds.

It beat again. Twelve.

"Rudra," Ainen said. "It’s working."

"For now," Rudra said. He did not take his hands away. Sweat was running down his face. "But it’s still in there. It’ll start eating again."

He was right.

The hollow went cold around them. It was not the Stillfrost’s cold. It was a cold of attention, of being noticed. Through his palms, Rudra felt the gray poison stir. It had felt the strength come back, and it did not like it.

"It knows you are here," the gatekeeper said. Its voice was stronger now, but strained. "It is taking faster. It is angry."

The heart beat. Thirteen.

Then fourteen.

"I can’t call in more," Rudra said through his teeth. "There’s nothing left to call in. That was all of it."

"I know," Ainen said. "You bought us time. That’s all I needed."

Rudra looked back over his shoulder.

Ainen was kneeling on the floor of the heart with his pack open. He was laying out a cloth.

It was an old cloth, white with blue edges, worn thin from use.

Ainen had carried it out of the bottom world. He had spread it on tables on the Shelf, at the Door, and in the square at Brightwater. He smoothed it flat on the soft dark floor with both hands.

Then he set out two bowls.

"What are you doing?" Rudra asked.

"Something that draws it out," said Ainen.

He built a fire in the middle of the heart. He had a little wood left in his pack, and the dried end of a loaf, and a handful of the roots the Duskspire foragers had brought him at the Door.

Hearth.

The fire caught. It was small. In the vast red hollow, it was the size of a candle. But it was warm, and it smelled of smoke, and it was real.

John was watching from a little way off. He had not moved since they arrived. He had his hands back in his pockets, and his face gave away nothing.

"You’re going to feed it," he said.

Ainen did not look up from the pot.

"It’s been eating for weeks," he said. "Before that, it ate this gatekeeper for thirty-seven years. Before that, at Year-End, and who knows how many other worlds."

He stirred the pot. "It’s been eating its whole life. And I’ll bet you anything nobody has ever once fed it."

"It won’t come."

"It will," Ainen said. "It can’t help it. Nothing that eats has ever learned how to refuse a meal. Not a Gorger. Not a Lull. Not a starving gatekeeper at the bottom of the world."

John was quiet.

"No," he said slowly. "I suppose it hasn’t."

Ainen filled the first bowl. He carried it across the heart to Rudra, who still stood with his hands on the gold flesh.

"For our host’s guest," Ainen said, and set it down at Rudra’s feet. "Rudra, put your hand in it. It can eat through you, I think."

Rudra looked at the steaming bowl. Then he took one hand off the gatekeeper’s body and dipped his fingers into the stew.

The gatekeeper made a sound. It was low and deep, like a great breath let out after a long time.

The heart beat. Twelve.

Ainen went back to the fire. He took the second bowl, the empty one, and set it at the far end of the cloth, across from where he sat. He filled it to the brim. He tore the dried loaf in half and laid one piece beside it.

He sat down cross-legged at his end of the cloth. He looked at the empty place across from him.

"I know you’re in there," he said.

His voice was not loud. It did not need to be. The heart carried it.

"I tasted you. You’re in everything. You’re careful now, and you’re quiet, and you’re patient. You learned from last time."

He picked up his own piece of bread. "But you’re still hungry. You’ve been hungry your whole life. You’ve eaten worlds, and you’re still hungry, because nobody ever set a place for you."

He held out the bread toward the empty side of the cloth.

"So I have," he said. "There’s a bowl. There’s bread. It’s not fancy. I didn’t have much left in my pack. But it’s hot, and it’s yours." He paused. "Come and sit down."

Host.

Open Table.

For a long time, nothing happened.

The heart beat. Thirteen. Twelve. The fire crackled on the floor of the hollow. Rudra stood with his fingers in the bowl and his other hand on the gold, and did not breathe.

Then he saw it.

It came out of the gatekeeper’s flesh like frost forming on a window. It was a fine gray film, rising from the gold all at once, everywhere. It drifted up off the great body like smoke and hung in the red air.

The gatekeeper shuddered. The gold under Rudra’s palm went warmer, and brighter.

The gray drifted across the hollow. It did not hurry. It moved the way mist moves over a field at dawn, slow and patient, and it was all going one way.

Toward the cloth. Toward the empty bowl.

John took one step back.

The mist gathered at the far end of the cloth. It thickened. It drew in on itself, the way it had once drawn into a knot. But it did not make a knot this time. It made a shape.

It was small. That was the first thing Rudra saw.

It was not the tall, thin figure they had fought at the Year-End Convergence, or the thing that had stood up out of the heart.

It was no bigger than a child. It sat cross-legged on the far side of the cloth, the same way Ainen sat. It was gray all over, and it was wrapped in something like cloth that moved like smoke.

Where its face should have been, there was a smooth gray plate.

And down the middle of the plate ran a single seam.

The heart beat behind them. Rudra counted without meaning to.

Eleven.

The gatekeeper let out a long, slow breath that filled the whole hollow. It was the sound of something that could breathe again.

Ainen did not move. He sat across the cloth from the small gray thing with his bread still in his hand. His face was calm. Only Rudra, standing behind him, could see that his other hand was shaking in his lap.

The gray thing looked down at the bowl in front of it. It looked at the bread on the cloth. It looked at the small fire burning on the floor of the heart.

Then it looked up at Ainen.

The seam opened, a little.

"Host," it said.

Its voice was the same voice. It was calm, patient and old. But it was quieter than Rudra had ever heard it, and there was something in it he had never heard before.

"In every world I have opened," it said, "nobody has ever set a place for me."