Chapter Two
Three Nights
There was no time in the dark, so he can’t say how long it took. Later, working backward from the state of the sheep, he’d settle on three nights. It felt like a year. It felt like the year the sun didn’t set.
It started in the teeth.
Not the long ones — those came later. It started in all of them at once, a pressure in the roots like his jaw was a fist closing on itself, and he lay on the black floor with his cheek in the cold and pressed his hands against his face and felt the bones under his hands move. Not much. A grain. A settling. The way a house settles in the night, except the house was his skull and the night was in it.
Then his heart said one, and the pain went everywhere.
He’d been hurt before. He’d broken his arm at nine falling off the byre roof and it had gone white and then the colour of a plum and Widow Cassel had set it with a sound he still heard sometimes. He’d been kicked by the miller’s mule. He’d had the winter fever in ‘43 that took the Vautrins’ youngest, lying in the loft with his mother’s hand on his forehead and the whole world made of heat and the smell of onions. He had a boy’s stupid confidence about pain, that he’d met it and it was survivable.
This wasn’t that. This was every bone in him being taken out, one by one, and looked at, and put back in slightly better.
He screamed. The hall ate it. He screamed until his throat tore and tasted blood and the blood was the only good thing in the world, the only warm thing, and he swallowed it and it went down into the fire and the fire said more.
He vomited. Bile, then bread, then bile again, then something black and stringy that he didn’t want to think about and that he could see, somehow, in the perfect dark, steaming faintly on the stone. The candle was gone. He should have been blind. He could see the pool of what he’d brought up, and his own hand beside it, and the hand was shaking, and the nails on the hand were —
He looked away from the hand.
His heart said one. His old heart, the rabbit, was gone. He kept reaching for it the way you reach for a tooth with your tongue after the barber’s had it, and finding the hole, and in the hole this other thing. Slow. Certain. Beating not like something that was afraid of stopping but like something that had never once considered it.
The fever came up under him like a tide and took him out.
A ring in the sky, whole. Not the Girdle — not the chalk scar he’d been born under — a ring, unbroken, silver, filling a third of the night, so bright it cast shadows, so bright the stars beside it were embarrassed. Something in him that had never seen it looked up at it and wept with a homesickness so old the word didn’t cover it.
Nine figures kneeling. He saw them from above — from a chair, from the chair — nine backs bowed on the three steps, and the backs were beautiful the way the corpse’s face had been beautiful, and they were shaking, and the shaking was love and terror and there was no distance between the two. One of them was a woman with hair like a wound. One of them was a man with no face, only the shape where one should be. He knew all their names and he didn’t know any of them and both were true.
An eye. Gold, slit-pupilled, wide as a cartwheel, and around the throat below it a collar of dark stone, and in the eye a hatred so total it had gone all the way around into something like worship. A voice — not a voice — said down, and the eye went down, and the ground shook.
A city, at night, seen from a height. Lamps in windows. Thousands of them. Then all at once, in every window, the lamps going red, and flowing, and running down the walls, and the streets filling, a slow tide of it, and the silence after — a silence like this hall’s, a silence that had been made —
A word.
He heard it once and it went into him like a nail into wet wood and he knew that he would never in his life be able to get it back out. Vhassar. It meant father. It meant thirst. In the mouth of the thing that said it — the thing that had said it to him, at the end, in the dark, the way you’d say the name of a son — it meant mine.
And under the word, the thing he’d know for certain when he woke and would spend the rest of his life turning over: that the one who’d said it wasn’t here. Wasn’t a passenger. Wasn’t a voice in his ear. He’d felt it go — the dust out of the jaw — and what it had left behind wasn’t itself. It was the blood. The blood was his now. The memories came with the blood the way the smell of Rodric came with the cloak, and they were his the way the cloak was his, and there was no one left to give them back to.
The old one had tried to wait out time and time had won. That was in the blood too: two hundred thousand years of one beat, then nothing, then one beat, and the body curing on the chair, and the mind behind the eyes wearing down to a single point, and the point was: it must go on. Not I. It.
He was it, now.
He woke.
He knew it was waking because the pain was over, and that was so strange that for a while he simply lay there with his cheek on the stone and paid attention to the absence of it. Then he paid attention to other things.
The dark was not dark.
He could see. Not the way you see by candle, with the light making a room and the room’s edges lost; he saw the way you see by noon, except there was no sun and no source and no shadow, as if the world had decided to skip the light and go straight to being seen. He saw the hall.
He’d been right about the cathedral. He’d been wrong about the number. The Sunspire could have stood in here four times over, nave to nave, and left room for the bishop’s palace. Pillars marched off into the distance in rows, each as thick as a mill, each carved from floor to a ceiling so high the carving up there was too small to read. The floor was smooth as still water. Down the length of the hall, where the far end should have been, was a wall with a door in it, and the door was shut, and it was as tall as the Sunspire’s tower, and he looked at it for a while and decided that was a question for a different night.
He turned his head and looked at the chair.
There was a shine of black leather draped over the arms and seat, cracked and collapsed into itself. There was a fine grey drift in the folds of it. There was a long white hair caught on the stone at the back, moving faintly in nothing.
There was no one in it.
He sat up. His body did this easily, without the click of the shoulder he’d had since the byre roof, without the ache in the lower back that came free with reaping. He held up his hand.
The red was gone from under his nails. That was the first thing. Seventeen years of the Acres, the clay ground into him like a stain, and his nails were clean and pale and very slightly longer than they’d been, and the skin of the hand was — he turned it over — it was skin. It didn’t have anything on it. No calluses. No cracks. The white line across the ball of the thumb where the sickle had gone in when he was nine and Abuela had sewn it with linen thread while he screamed — gone. As if it had never been cut. As if he’d never been nine.
He touched his face and his fingers came away and he didn’t know his own face by feel anymore.
His tongue found his teeth. They were even. All of them, which they hadn’t been. And at the corners, top, where the corpse’s had been long —
He took the tongue away.
Well, he thought, and the thought was clear and quick and dry as a stone in the sun. That’s happened, then.
He waited to be frightened. He’d been frightened on the stair. He’d been frightened at the ewe, and at the Sisters, and every day of his life in the small animal way of a farm boy who knows how many things can kill him. He reached for the fear now the way he’d reached for the rabbit heartbeat and found, in its place, something else — an attention. A cold, wide, interested attention, looking at everything, sorting it. Hall. Chair. Door. Hands. Teeth. No fear. That’s interesting. Note it.
He noted it.
Then the hunger came, and he stopped noting anything.
It wasn’t like hunger. Hunger was a thing in the belly, a want, an ache you could put off with water and stubbornness. He’d been hungry for three days in the winter of ’45 and it had been a dull, grey, patient thing that made you tired.
This was in the veins. It was in every part of him that had a pulse, and every part of him had a pulse now — his hands had one, his eyes had one, the roots of his hair. It was a thirst the way the sea is wet. He was on his feet and didn’t remember standing, and his head was up and turning, and something in his chest that had never had a use before was reaching —
And found it.
At the bottom of the steps. Just outside where the candle’s light had reached, three nights ago, when there’d been a candle.
He’d have called it a man, once, if he’d been generous. It was crouched — no, folded, the way a spider folds — on the black floor, knees up past its ears, arms wrapped around the shins, head down. Grey. Not grey like a stone; grey like something that had been white a long time ago and had been in the dark ever since. Hairless. The skin looked wet and wasn’t; it looked like paper that had been soaked and dried a hundred times, laid over a frame of cable and knot, every tendon standing out like rope under a tarpaulin. Its hands were long. Its fingers were longer. The nails were black and thick and curved, and there was wool caught under two of them.
It lifted its head.
No eyes. Not shut, not gone — never there. Skin where they should be, smooth and slightly sunken, and beneath the skin something moving, tracking, following him the way a blind dog’s nose does. The mouth beneath was a slot. It opened. It had teeth the way a saw has teeth — small, many, backward-leaning — and as it opened, it made a sound.
Click. Click-click. Click.
Wet. From somewhere in the throat. He’d heard the Lanterners’ stories at the Cracked Bell and had thought the men telling them were performing. They hadn’t been. It was the sound of something trying to speak with a mouth that had forgotten how, and it went into him under the skin.
He should have run. The thing that used to be Archas De Sangre would have run, and would have made it perhaps three steps.
He stood on the top step and looked down at it and felt the string.
That was the only word. A thread — thin, taut, disgusting — running from somewhere behind his breastbone, down the steps, into the folded grey thing at the bottom. He could feel it the way you feel a fishing line with something on the end of it. And on the end of the line was —
Hunger. Its hunger. Old. Older than anything. A hunger that had eaten itself down to the bone and kept going. And under the hunger, pointed at him like a compass needle, something so simple and total it made him want to be sick again:
Master. Master. Master. Master.
It came up the steps.
Not fast. Crawling — it went on hands and feet, belly low, the way he’d seen a dog go to a man with a stick. The clicking never stopped. It came up the three steps to the chair and it stopped a yard from his boots and it put its forehead on the black stone and stayed there, and it was shaking — he could see the tendons jump under the paper skin — and the shaking was the same shaking he’d seen on the nine backs in the fever, the same terror-that-was-worship, and he understood, standing over it with the thirst screaming in his veins, that he was looking at the last surviving subject of the oldest empire in the world, and that it had been waiting at the bottom of these steps for two hundred thousand years for someone to tell it what to do.
He pulled the string.
He didn’t know how. He did it, the way you’d make a fist. And the thing’s head came up off the stone like he’d lifted it by the hair.
“Down,” he said. His voice came out wrong — deeper, and with an edge on it, a burr, as if the sound had passed over something sharp on the way out.
It went down. Forehead to the stone. Instantly.
“Up.”
Up.
“Left hand.”
The left hand came up off the floor and hung there, palm out, black nails spread, trembling. He looked at it. He looked at the wool under the nails. Sir Gauvain’s ewe. Two obols, living. One, dead. The thought came from the old Archas and the new one looked at it the way you’d look at a child’s drawing, fond, briefly, and set it aside.
“Down.”
Down.
He crouched, then, so his face was level with where its face was, and it turned toward him with that blind, seeking motion, and the mouth opened and the clicks came faster — click-click-click-click — and he realized it was trying to say something, had been trying since it came up the steps, and the thread told him what. It wasn’t a word. It was older than words. It was the thing dogs say.
Please.
“I know,” he said. “I’m hungry too.”
And then, because the thirst was going to kill him if he didn’t and because there was a question in the blood that had an answer in this thing’s throat, he took its head in both hands, and turned it, and bit.
The skin gave like wet bark. The blood under it was cold and thick and slow, and it tasted like the bottom of a well, like coins, like rot that had gone so far past rotting it had come out the other side into something almost clean. It was foul. He drank it anyway, and it was still — even this, even the dregs of the dregs — better than anything he’d ever put in his mouth in his life, and the thirst took one step back from the edge of screaming and stood there, arms crossed, waiting.
And the memory came.
A harness. Leather and stone. A man’s hands doing up the buckles, a man’s hands — his hands — and someone above him on a horse that wasn’t a horse, someone with red eyes and a kind laugh, saying good, good, *and the joy of it, the whole world made of that one word — *
A balcony. The sky white. Not bright — white, *the colour gone out of everything, the sun standing in the middle of the sky like a nail hammered in and not moving and not moving and not moving, and the one with the red eyes standing at the rail looking up at it, and the smoke starting to come off his hands — *
The hunger after. The stair. The dark. Waiting for the string to pull. The string never pulling. Sheep, sometimes. Once, a man with a lantern, who’d tasted of salt and terror and pipe-smoke. Waiting. Click. Waiting.
He let go.
The thing sagged. He hadn’t taken much — there wasn’t much to take — and it lay on the stone with the wound already closing, the paper skin knitting itself, and the thread between them hummed with a gratitude so abject he had to look away from it.
A Scion’s thrall, he thought. The word had come with the blood. A kennel-thing. Not his. One of the lesser lords kept this place, and kept this, and burned on a balcony when the sun stood still, and this has been down here since with nothing to do but be hungry. Two hundred thousand years. He tried to hold the number and it slid off.
He stood up.
The clever, cold thing in his head was already working. It’s mindless. It’s not useless. It knows this hall. It can’t leave it — it can’t take the sun, it’d never make the village. It killed a ewe and it’ll kill a shepherd, and a dead shepherd past the Sisters is a Dawnwarden in Vireille within the month. He turned this over and found, at the end of it, that he’d made a decision without noticing.
“You stay here,” he said. The burr in his voice. “This hall. The stair. Nothing comes down that isn’t me. Nothing goes up. If you’re hungry, you wait. If something comes down that isn’t me, you eat it, and you leave nothing.” He paused. “Do you understand?”
Click.
It understood. He felt it understand — felt the order go down the thread and lodge in whatever was left in there, and lock. It would have died before it disobeyed. It would probably die anyway, sooner or later, of nothing but time, and the cold thing in his head noted that and filed it under later.
My first subject, the old Archas said, faint, from somewhere far back. A skeleton that eats sheep.
Everyone starts somewhere, said the new one, and went to find the stair.
He took it three steps at a time. The steps were too tall for a man and he was not a man and his legs didn’t care. Halfway up he found that he’d started running — not decided to; found that he had — and the curve of the stair was going past him in a smear of black, and the wind of it was in his hair, and something in his blood was burning to do it, drinking itself to make him faster, and he let it, laughing, the sound bouncing off the stone and coming back to him strange, until the thirst tapped him on the shoulder and he remembered that the burning came out of the same well the drinking filled and stopped.
At the top the sky was black, and the Girdle lay across it.
He came up out of the Gullet’s throat onto the red rock and stopped and looked at it, the chalk scar, the ring that wasn’t a ring anymore, and felt the fever’s homesickness lean on him like a hand. It was whole once. He knew it the way he knew his own name. Whole, and silver, and I —
Not I. He caught it. He.
The sheep had not done well.
Two of them were gone — the rope chewed through, a scatter of wool and a dark stain on the boulder that said wolves as plainly as writing. The third was still there. Tangled. On its knees in the scree with the rope wound twice round its neck and its tongue out and its sides going in and out like a bellows with a hole in it. Three days of that. It rolled an eye at him as he came — a wet, white, uncomprehending eye — and its heart was going like a drum in a barrel, and he could see it, the heart, a red lamp in the barrel of the chest, throwing red light through the ribs, the whole animal lit up from inside like a lantern of meat.
Oh. Oh.
The thirst took a step forward.
He knelt. He took the ewe’s head the way he’d taken the Gaunt’s, gently, one hand under the jaw, and it bleated at him — once, thin, pathetic — and he said, “I know,” and put his mouth to the throat under the jaw where the lamp was brightest and the teeth at the corners of his mouth did what they were for.
Hot.
That was the whole of it, for a while. Hot. Not the well-water dregs of the thing below; this was alive, it came up out of the animal in a pulse, and the pulse was in his mouth and then in his throat and then in him, and the thirst that had been standing with its arms crossed threw its head back and drank, and he drank, and the ewe’s legs kicked twice in the scree and went still and he didn’t stop, he didn’t stop until the lamp in the ribs guttered and the pulse in his mouth was gone and he was sucking at a throat that had nothing left in it, and then he sat back on his heels with his chin wet and his hands wet and the red going cold on him in the night air and breathed.
It hadn’t been enough. He knew that already. Thin. Like small beer after wine. Like the thing below had been the memory of a meal and this was a meal, and what he wanted — what the blood wanted — was a feast, and he knew exactly what kind, and the knowing sat in him quiet and patient and did not go away.
He looked at the ewe. The throat was a ruin. The wool was black with it. Somewhere the old Archas said one obol, and he almost laughed.
Then he looked up, and the world was lit.
The hills were full of lamps.
Not one lamp — the lantern-of-meat that had been the ewe. Hundreds. Small ones, pinpricks, scattered across the slopes in the heather: hares, in their forms. Something larger moving down by the quarry road, low and quick — a fox. Up in the crags, two, three, a dozen soft red points, dim, slow, banked down for the night: the kestrels, in their roosts. He could see every one of them through the dark, through the gorse, through the rock. He could see the two wolves that had taken the sheep, a half-mile off across the ridge, lying up in a hollow with full bellies, the lamps in them bright and lazy.
And down the slope. Where Vireille was.
Forty-one hearths. He’d never counted the people. Now he didn’t have to. They lay below him in the dark in a loose cluster of red, close-packed, banked low for sleep — two hundred lamps, dim and steady, each one a chest going up and down in a bed he could have walked to blind. And he found, without trying, that he could tell them apart. Not by sight. By rhythm. The way you’d know a voice in another room. A slow heavy beat, like a man carrying something: his father. Beside it a quicker one, lighter, that hitched and stuttered even in sleep: his mother, who did the accounts in her dreams. Above them in the loft a small fast flutter, a bird’s — Mirelle. And by the hearth, thin, slow, uneven, a candle almost out, a beat that had seen more Dimmings than he’d seen breakfasts.
He stood on the hill with sheep’s blood on his chin and looked at his family’s hearts and felt —
He waited to see what he’d feel.
Love. It was there. He could reach in and touch it. It was just — it had moved. It had been in the middle of him, once, where the rabbit heartbeat had been, the thing everything else was arranged around. Now it was off to one side. Where he could see it clearly. Where he could look at it, and know exactly what it was and what it was worth, and decide.
And below the village, beyond it, down the long slope where the Sorre wound: Aurèze. Forty thousand. A bonfire. A glow on the horizon like a city burning, a heat he could feel on his face from here, and the thirst looked at it and the cold thing in his head looked at it and for one moment they were the same thing, and the moment was —
He turned away. Deliberately. That, too, went in the file.
There was a pool in the old quarry sump below the Sisters, rainwater over rust, black and flat and still. He went down to it. He didn’t decide to; his feet were curious. He knelt at the edge and the Girdle was in it, a bar of frost-light on the black water, and then he leaned over it and the Girdle had company.
He looked for a long time.
It was his face. That was the terrible thing. It was the face he’d shaved in Sabine’s father’s bit of salted glass, the dark brows, the Castrenne bones, the white hair falling over the forehead — and it had been finished. Everything it had been trying to be for seventeen years, it now was. The jaw had decided. The mouth had decided. The skin had no history in it — no sun, no wind, no byre roof, nothing. And the eyes were his eyes, dark, and behind the dark was something else, a depth, the way there’s a depth in the sky behind the Girdle, and looking into them for too long was like looking into the Gullet.
He knew — the old one’s memory told him, dry, certain — that a girl would cross a room to this face without knowing why. That a bishop would look at it and think of saints and then be ashamed. That a Dawnwarden would look at it and stop, and think, and reach for a writ.
“Well,” he said aloud, to the water, in the new voice with the burr on it. “That’s going to be a problem.”
The cold thing was already working on it.
No one can know. That was the first thing, and it came so fast and so complete that he understood it wasn’t a decision, it was a fact the blood had handed him ready-made. The word doesn’t exist. They call it the Drinkers and they think it’s a sermon. That is the most valuable thing you own, and you own it once. The day one person says it aloud and is believed, the whole world turns on you at the same time, and there are more of them than there are of you, and the sun is on their side.
So: no one. Not Father Anselm, who’d pray. Not Widow Cassel, who’d know. Not Sabine. Not your father. A beat. Not your mother.
He let that one sit. It hurt. He noted that it hurt and noted that the hurt didn’t change anything, and that was the strangest thing yet, stranger than the eyes in the water.
Not Mirelle.
Abuela, the cold thing said, after a moment, may already know. Watch her.
He stayed at the water until the water changed.
He felt it before he saw it. A greyness, in the east, where the Cinder Hills went down toward the Sorre — not light yet, the promise of light — and everything in his veins turned away from it the way a snail turns from salt. The thirst shrank. The lamps in the heather dimmed, or his seeing of them did. The cold, wide attention that had been holding the whole hillside in its hand pulled in, and in, and in, until it was the size of a boy again, a boy kneeling at a rusty pool with his mouth full of the taste of sheep, and he thought, very clearly: I have perhaps an hour, and I cannot go home.
He stood. The ewe he left; the wolves would have it by noon and the Reeve would have wolves to blame. Rodric’s cloak he took. He went back up the scree to the red throat of the Gullet, and looked once more down the hill at the two hundred lamps and the four he knew, and then he went over the edge and down the stair into the dark, three steps at a time, with the greyness coming after him like a tide and stopping, as it had always stopped, at the top.
At the bottom the grey thing was waiting on the steps where he’d left it, and it lifted its blind face at his coming and made its one sound, and he said “Stay,” and it stayed.
He climbed the three steps. He looked at the chair, and at the shine of leather in it, and the grey drift, and the single white hair.
Then he brushed the leather off onto the floor and sat down, and put his hands where the hands had been, and crossed one ankle over the other, and settled in to wait for night.
His heart said one.
He’d tell his father he’d found the sheep.