The grate was iron, and it was hinged on one side, and the latch on the other side was a simple drop-bolt, the kind they used on hopper hatches in the galleries. Creed hung under it with the fingers of his left hand buried knuckle-deep in the bone of the pit wall, and his boots jammed into two holes he’d kicked for them, and he looked up through the bars at the underside of the bolt for a long time.
He could see the lab through the bars. A slice of it. The vaulted ceiling with its carved climbing people. The tangle of glowing tubes. The jointed arm of the work-lamp over the slab, switched off now, so the only light was the blue from the vats — dim, steady, the way the stack went dim when the night cycle came on.
Night, he thought. Or what they call night down here.
He listened.
The hiss of the equipment. The slow breathing rhythm of something pumping, somewhere. The faint sound of liquid moving in the tall vats at the end of the room. And under all that, something else — something that wasn’t a sound at all, but that he heard anyway, the way he’d heard the sword listening on the slab.
A pulse.
It came from his left, beyond the grate, near the bottom of the stair. Slow and steady. Thud. Thud. Not in his ears. In his skin. He felt it the way you felt warmth from a lamp with your eyes closed — a small, steady glow of heat, out there in the dark, beating.
Somebody’s heart.
He knew it was a person the way he knew his own hand was his. Somebody sitting at the foot of the stair, about eight meters off. Somebody young — he didn’t know how he knew that, either, but the pulse was quick and light, quicker than his own. Somebody sitting very still, which meant somebody bored, or somebody dozing.
“You can feel it,” said Snake, warm in his chest. “Can’t you?”
He could. And not just that one. Now that he knew what to listen for, he could feel others. Fainter, farther. Up through the vault, up through the bone of the crypt ceiling, up in the chapel above: a scatter of small warm beating glows, eight of them, nine, ten, spread out across the nave, slow and deep. Sleeping. And one more, apart from the others, somewhere off to the right, at the end of the lab where the tall vats stood — a glow so faint and slow it was barely there at all. A heart that beat once and then waited a long time before it remembered to beat again.
Jory Thane.
“They’re all so warm,” said Snake. “Aren’t they.”
“It is blood,” said Lamp, from behind his eyes. “Your blood has woken to blood. You will feel it now, in every living thing, always. That is all it is. It is not an invitation.”
“Everything’s an invitation, if you’re hungry enough.”
Creed ignored them both. He took his right hand off the wall, reached up through the bars of the grate, felt for the drop-bolt with his fingertips, and lifted it. It came up stiff and grinding, a long rusty shriek that he felt in his teeth.
He froze.
Across the lab, at the foot of the stair, the quick light pulse stuttered. Paused. Went on.
Didn’t get up.
He let his breath out. He pushed the grate up, slowly, on its hinge, until it stood open, and he climbed out of the pit of the dead on his hands and knees onto the cool smooth floor of the crypt, and lay there for a moment in the blue light with his scarred cheek against the stone, shaking, alive.
The guard was young.
Creed crouched in the shadow of a settling vat and looked at him. Nineteen, maybe twenty. Sitting on the bottom step of the stair in his ash-grey robe with his hood down and his face-wrappings pulled loose around his neck, his head tipped back against the wall, his mouth slightly open. Asleep. His palms were bandaged, the way all of them were, and the bandages were dark, and one bandaged hand lay loose across his knees, and the other hung down by his side, fingers trailing on the step.
His face was ordinary. Thin, pale, the faint grey cast of the Bloom across his cheekbones like the marrow-skin the long-timers got on Line C. He looked tired. He looked like somebody who’d pulled a double.
Creed watched the pulse in his neck, the small warm glow of it, beating.
“One step,” Snake said. “He’d never even wake up.”
Creed turned away from him, and went to look for his sword.
He found it at the far end of the lab, past the slab where he’d died. There was an archway there, low, and through the archway a smaller room, a side chapel or a storeroom from the crypt’s old life. Somebody had made it a study. There was a desk, piled with paper — real paper, stacks of it, covered in neat close handwriting — and a chair, and a cot with a blanket folded square at the foot of it. And there were shelves. Floor to ceiling, on three walls, cut into the bone-stone.
The shelves were full of things.
He stood in the archway and looked at them in the glow of the single candle that was still burning on the farthest shelf. Old things. Broken things. A fragment of carved bone with sigil-curls on it, set upright on a little stand. A clay bowl, cracked, with a dark stain in the bottom. A knife with a blade of dull red glass. A bundle of hair tied with a cord. Rows of small glass vials, each one half full of something dark and labeled in that same neat handwriting. Mirelle, 3rd dose. Teague, 7th dose. Courier 9, final. A small brass bell with no clapper, very old, older than the Bloom, crusted with the white of bone-dust — a thing found in the ruins upstairs and brought down here and kept, for whatever reason Sere kept anything.
It was a collector’s shelf. The same as Kon’s, he thought. The same as Kon’s vaults in the Higher Ribs, the relics behind glass that people looked at who’d never been hungry. Sere had made his own little vault, down here at the bottom of the world, of the things he’d taken.
On a stool beside the desk, folded neatly, was his coat.
And on the shelf where the candle stood, on its white cloth, was his sword.
He went to the coat first. He didn’t know why. He picked it up and it was heavy, the weight of it so familiar that his throat closed up. He put his hand into the inside pocket and felt the small hard shapes there. Three rounds. Wick’s rounds, hand-pressed, crimped not quite as neat as his own. And a band. A cut chit-band, its display dark. THANE, JORY.
He put the coat on. It was cold from hanging, and it hung on him differently — loose in places it hadn’t been, tight in others, across the shoulders, as if he’d changed shape a little in the dark. It didn’t matter. He pulled it closed over the scars on his chest.
Then he looked down at his left wrist.
He’d known. Some part of him had known since he’d climbed out of the pit, since he’d first looked at his scarred arms in the blue light. He’d known, and he hadn’t let himself look. Now he looked.
The band was gone.
His wrist was bare. Where the steel had been, bolted tight, for nine years — since the morning he’d signed with Kon Reclamation and a clerk in a filter mask had bolted it on without looking at his face — there was only skin. Pale, soft, strange skin, a band of it, whiter than the rest of his arm, untouched by marrow dust, untouched by anything, for nine years. And across it, a thin straight line. Not a scar like the others. A cut. Clean and shallow. Where somebody had slid a thin blade under the edge of the steel, against his skin, and sliced the band through without slicing much of him.
On the desk, in a little tray, next to a sheaf of paper, lay his band. Both halves of it. The display dark. Under it, on the paper, in the neat close hand: Courier 15. Creed. Band removed, hand spared on Prior’s instruction. Logged for basin disposal.
He stood and looked at his bare wrist for a long time.
He’d imagined it, sometimes. In the drawer, in the dark. Everybody did. What it would feel like with the band off. He’d imagined it would feel like being able to breathe. Like putting down a weight.
It didn’t. It felt like falling. Like the floor of the cage lift dropping out from under you. Nine years he’d had that cold steel on his wrist, telling the world where he was and what he’d eaten and whether he was breathing, and now there was nothing there, and nobody knew where he was. Nobody up the cable. Nobody at all. He was nowhere. He wasn’t sponsored. He wasn’t anyone’s.
He picked up the two halves of the band and put them in the inside pocket of his coat, next to Jory Thane’s.
Then he turned to the sword.
The candle burned in front of it. Mirelle’s candle. Somebody had replaced it while he was dead; it was a new one, tall, and its flame stood straight up in the still air of the room.
The blade lay on the white cloth by itself, the way it had lain in the lab. Bare. Clean. The rubber strips of the grip had been unwound from the tang and laid out alongside it — in order, he noticed, every strip in the order it had come off, someone patient and careful having worked them loose one at a time. The breech was half apart. The cylinder lay to one side, empty, and beside it, standing upright, was the last round he’d had in it, the one he hadn’t fired. The barrel had been unclamped from the spine and lay a hand’s width off. Its three bands lay beside it in a row.
Sere had taken his weapon apart and laid it out like a body on a table.
And there, in the middle of it all, untouched — because there was nothing on it to unscrew, nothing to unbolt, nothing for even Calloway Sere’s careful clever fingers to take apart — lay the blade.
Dark steel. Slate in the rain. The edge a line so bright and fine it cut the candlelight. And down the flat, the carvings: curls and hooks and branching lines like veins, deep enough to lay a fingertip in.
He reached for it.
His hand was bleeding. He’d torn the tips of his fingers climbing the pit wall, digging into the bone, and he hadn’t noticed until now — they were raw and wet, every one of them, and blood was running slowly down between his fingers into his palm.
He saw it in the candlelight as his hand came over the blade. His blood. It was red. But under the red, down in it, the way the glow was down in the bottoms of his scars, there was a light. Faint. Deep. Like an ember seen through a crack in a furnace door.
He closed his hand around the bare tang of the sword.
His blood touched the steel.
And the grooves lit up.
It wasn’t like the dunes, where he’d thought he’d seen a flicker and then blinked it away. It wasn’t like the pump-house, a warmth that might have been his imagination. There was nothing to blink away. There was nothing to imagine.
Light came up out of the carvings. All of them. All at once, from the guard to the tip, every curl and hook and branching line — a deep, fierce, blinding crimson, the red of blood held up to a lamp, the red of the inside of an eyelid in sunlight, the red of the Lantern’s false flame made true. It poured up out of the grooves and filled the little stone room from wall to wall, and the shelves of Sere’s collection leapt out of the dark around him, every vial, every bone, every fragment, lit red. His shadow went up the wall behind him, huge, black, ten feet tall.
The candle flame bent. Toward the blade. Leaned, as if a wind were pulling it, until it lay almost flat.
And the steel got hot.
Not warm. Not the warmth of skin he’d felt in the drawer. Hot. In his hand, through his palm, a heat that came up out of the metal and into him and through him and back out again, like a current, like the hum of a cable under load. The air above the edge shimmered. It rippled, the way air rippled over the press when it had been running for twenty hours. The edge itself — that impossibly fine bright line — had gone from silver to a dull deep red to a cherry glow, all along its length, and it was getting brighter.
He should have dropped it. Any metal that hot should have burned his hand to the bone.
It didn’t burn him. It knew him.
That was the only way he’d ever be able to say it, later. He stood in Calloway Sere’s stolen reliquary with the crimson light pouring up out of the steel and the heat pouring through his arm, and the sword knew him. The way the press knew the shape of a marrow-knot. The way a lock knows a key. Something in the steel had been waiting a thousand years for a particular shape of blood to touch it, the right blood, woken blood, and now it had, and the waiting was over, and the whole length of the blade was singing.
Not with the emitter. The emitter’s cell was dead, and the emitter was half unwired anyway, its feed hanging loose from the tang. This was something else. A sound that wasn’t quite a sound, low and deep and huge, a note he felt in the bones of his arm and his chest and his skull, the note the god’s breath had made in the pipe-forest. It went on and on. It didn’t fade.
Three seconds, he’d had. Three seconds and twenty minutes. Eight months of half-hours in a drawer, filing and boring and wiring, and he’d gotten three seconds.
The blade sang, and sang, and sang.
Inside his chest, Snake was roaring.
Not words. Just joy. That furnace-door rush of it, wild and ravenous and huge, flaring up through him, through his arm, into the steel — and the crimson light in the grooves flared with it, brighter, hotter, so bright the shelves vanished in it, so hot the cloth under the blade began to smoke —
“Enough.”
Lamp’s voice. Cold and clear and absolutely flat. And with it, a cold that came from behind his eyes and went down through him like clean water, down his neck, down his arm, into his hand, and met the heat coming the other way, and pushed.
The light in the grooves dimmed. Not out. Down. From blinding to bright, from bright to a deep steady glow — the color of the scars on his own arms, he realized, exactly the same, an ember-red down in the bottoms of the carved lines. The edge cooled from cherry to a dull dark red, and held there. The note went on, but lower. Quieter. A hum, now, rather than a roar. Something he could hold.
The candle flame straightened up again, slowly, and stood still.
“Spoilsport,” said Snake, sulky.
“He would have burned the room down,” said Lamp. “And himself. And brought every one of them down the stair.” A pause. “Look at your hand, Creed.”
He looked.
His hand was still wrapped around the bare tang. The fingertips were still raw. But the blood that had been running from them was gone. All of it. Not dried. Not smeared. Gone, the way his blood had vanished into the groove on his chest in the drawer, the way it had gone down into the steel on the dunes. The sword had drunk every drop.
And he was tired. Suddenly. Really tired, in a way he hadn’t been since he’d climbed out of the pit — the deep, gutted tiredness of hour nineteen, as if somebody had pulled a plug in him and let a little of him run out.
“It is not free,” said Lamp quietly. “Nothing it does is free. The steel burns your blood the way an engine burns fuel. The brighter it burns, the more of you it takes. Remember that.”
“It’s worth it,” said Snake. “Isn’t it? Isn’t it worth it?”
Creed stood in the red glow and looked down the length of the blade, at the carvings lit from inside like veins full of fire, and didn’t answer either of them.
He thought about Wick, hanging upside down out of the drawer above, saying: Here lies Creed. It mostly worked.
It worked.
He’d known the guard would come. He’d felt the pulse change as soon as the light went up, felt it jump from the slow, light beat of sleep into a hard quick hammering, and then move — off the step, across the lab, toward the archway. Fast. Quiet. He didn’t turn around. He listened to the pulse come, and when it was two strides behind him, he moved.
He hadn’t known he could move like that.
He turned, and the turn was fast — faster than he’d ever turned in his life, so fast the world blurred at the edges — and the young bleeder was right there, in the archway, his face-wrappings still loose around his neck and his eyes huge, one bandaged hand already ripped open and the blood already rising out of the palm, hardening into a spike, and he was throwing it —
The spike came at Creed’s chest. He saw it come. He saw it the way you see a slow drip from a pipe in the galleries — every inch of its flight, the light running along its red length. He brought the sword up across his body, the burning edge leading, and the spike met the edge, and the edge went through it. Not shattered it. Went through it, the way it had gone through the bleeders’ blood-blades in the chapel — but this time there was a hiss, and a puff of red steam, and the two halves of the spike didn’t fall apart into blood. They burned. They flashed and crackled and fell to the floor as black flakes.
The bleeder’s face went slack with astonishment.
Creed stepped in.
He could have killed him. He knew that, in the moment, very clearly, the way you know the angle of a pick-stroke before it lands. The burning edge was right there, and the young man’s throat was right there, and the pulse in it was beating so hard Creed could feel it in his own teeth.
“Yes,” breathed Snake.
He turned the blade in his hand and hit the guard in the side of the head with the flat of the hilt.
The young man went down like a dropped sack. He lay at the foot of the archway with his eyes rolled up and his bandaged hand flung out, the half-formed blood of his next spike collapsing back into a red puddle on the stone. His pulse stuttered, and dropped, and steadied. Slow. Steady. Out cold.
Creed stood over him, breathing hard.
“Why,” said Snake. Not angry. Puzzled. Genuinely puzzled, the way you’d be puzzled if someone had a full ration brick and threw it away. “He’d have killed you. He’d have killed you and not thought twice about it.”
“He was asleep,” said Creed. “On a double. On a stair.”
“So?”
Creed didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure he had an answer. Only that he’d looked at the young man’s face on the step, thin and grey-cast and exhausted, mouth open, sleeping sitting up because sitting up was all he’d get — and he’d seen the stack. He’d seen the drawers. He’d seen every face on Line C at hour nineteen.
He knelt and took the rubber strips from the shelf — the old grip-wrapping, laid out in its careful order — and used them to tie the young man’s wrists behind his back, and his ankles, and to gag him, tight. He dragged him into a corner of the reliquary, behind the desk, where he’d be out of sight from the archway.
Behind his eyes, Lamp was very quiet. But it was a different kind of quiet from the one in the dark, when he’d said what he wanted. It was the quiet of someone looking at something they didn’t expect to see, and turning it over, and not liking that they didn’t understand it.
He felt that. He noted it. He didn’t have time for it.
He built the sword properly in the hour before the Choir woke.
He did it the way he’d done everything else in his life — fast, and with whatever was to hand, and without anyone watching. But this time what was to hand was a refinery chemist’s workshop, and a lab full of stolen refinery parts, and a pair of hands that didn’t shake anymore and didn’t get tired, and that could feel, through the tips of the fingers, the exact moment when a thread bit or a bolt seated true.
He went through Sere’s shelves and drawers first. Fast. Taking what he needed and touching nothing else.
Tools. A proper set, refinery-issue, every one of them better than anything he’d ever held: driver bits, a fine file, a reamer, a set of pipe clamps in graduated sizes.
Food. In a crate under the cot, he found a stack of the stolen ration tins, labels steamed off — and the hunger came up through him so hard he went down on his knees beside the crate and tore the first tin open with his fingers, not bothering with a knife, and ate what was inside with his hands. Some kind of mash. Salty. Cold. He didn’t taste it. He ate six tins in a row, one after the other, until his stomach hurt, and the hunger didn’t go away, not quite, but it drew back enough that he could think. He sat on the floor among the empty tins with his hands sticky and his breath coming fast and felt the food go into him like coal into a furnace. Burning almost as soon as it landed.
“Better,” said Snake. “Not as good as it could have been. But better.”
He got up and went to work.
The barrel first. The old rail-steel barrel had been bored by hand, over weeks, with a stolen bit in a drawer, and the three steel bands that had held it to the blade’s spine had crept and loosened every time he fired. He ran the reamer through it now, with Sere’s tools, and felt it bite and smooth the bore, and then he took three of the pipe clamps from the drawer — graduated, precision-machined, refinery-grade — and fitted them to the spine of the blade one at a time. He couldn’t weld to the Wright-steel. Nothing could. But the clamps closed on it tight, and he tightened them tighter, and tighter, with his new hands, until the metal of the clamps groaned and he felt them bite against the dark steel and hold as if they’d been forged there. The barrel sat dead true along the spine. He sighted down it. True.
Then the breech. Sere had taken the rivet-driver breech apart down to the springs, and laid every part out in order, and Creed was grateful for it, in a cold sort of way. He put it back together better. He filed the cylinder’s bearing surfaces smooth. He notched the rims of the chambers, the way he’d thought about on Line C, so that the rounds would drop in faster. He reseated the trigger and the hammer, and wrapped the whole assembly back into the hilt, and tested it, dry, a dozen times. It clicked like a lock closing.
Then the emitter.
He looked at it for a long time, hanging loose from the tang where Sere had unwired it. The heart of a dead marrow saw. Three seconds and twenty minutes. Eight months of his life.
He didn’t need it. He knew that. The steel sang without it. The grooves burned without it.
But he thought about the way the edge had gone through the greylings on the dunes, with the emitter’s whine and his blood in the grooves at once — the note leaping up, climbing, ringing almost like a voice. Something that was neither the emitter nor the sigils, but both.
He took the emitter’s cell out. Threw it in a corner. Then he took the bare feed wire, the one that had run from the cell to the emitter for eight months, and instead of wiring it back to anything, he took Sere’s finest file and cut a channel in the bone-stone of the workbench — just to have something to hold the blade steady — and laid the blade in it, flat, and carefully, carefully, worked the bare end of the feed wire into the deepest groove at the base of the blade, right up by the guard, where the first curl of the carvings began. He pressed it in. He crimped it there, against the side of the groove, with the tip of a driver.
Then he cut his palm.
He did it with the edge of the sword itself, which was the only blade in the room sharp enough to do it without hurting, and he felt the coolness of it, and then the warmth of the blood. He closed his hand around the hilt, over the fresh rubber wrapping he’d just finished binding on, correctly, on the bias, so it bit.
The grooves lit. Ember-red.
And the emitter sang.
Not its old thin whine. Not three seconds. The emitter took the current running up out of the burning sigils through the feed wire — the current of his blood, burning in the steel — and sang, high and clean, and the low deep hum of the Wright-steel came up under it, and the two notes met and twisted together into one, a chord he felt in every scar on his body.
He held it for ten seconds. Twenty. A minute. It didn’t falter.
He let go. The light died down in the grooves. The singing stopped.
He felt the cost of it, a little hollowing in his gut, a little ache in the joints of his hand. Like after a hard pull on the pick. He breathed through it, and it passed.
“It will take more of you,” said Lamp quietly, “the more you use it. Remember.”
“I’ll remember.”
Last, the rounds.
He had four: the one Sere had stood upright on the shelf, and the three of Wick’s from his coat. Not enough. Not for nine bleeders and a Prior.
He found what he needed in the lab. A canister of steel shot — the small hard pellets they used for pressure-testing pipe — and, in a locked cabinet he simply tore the door off, a jar of propellant cake. Stolen from somewhere, like everything here. Enough for a dozen rounds.
He pressed the slugs from the steel shot, the way he’d pressed them in the drawer, using a die he made from a pipe fitting and Sere’s vise, and he made the cases from the brass fittings in Sere’s drawer, and he packed the propellant behind the slugs the way he always had. That much was old work. His hands knew it.
Then, on an impulse that came from somewhere he didn’t look at too hard, he cut his palm again, over the open cases, and let a drop of blood fall into each one, onto the propellant, before he seated the slug.
The blood didn’t soak in. It sat on top of the propellant, a single bright bead, and as he watched, it hardened. On its own. Shrank and darkened and set into a small hard crimson bead, like a jewel, like the Choir’s blood-spikes in miniature.
“Oh,” said Snake. Softly. Very interested.
He pressed the slugs down on top of the beads. Crimped the cases. Twelve of them. They looked like his old rounds, mostly. But when he held one up to the candle and looked at the base of it, there was a faint red glow down inside the brass, like an ember at the bottom of a cup.
Sixteen rounds. Four old. Twelve new.
He loaded the cylinder with four of the new ones and snapped it shut. He put the rest in the pockets of his coat, the old ones in the left, the new ones in the right, so he’d know them in the dark.
Then he stood up, and held the sword in front of him in the candlelight, and looked at it. Properly. For the first time since he’d pulled it out of the scrap sort.
It wasn’t the Problem anymore.
The rubber grip, cut on the bias, bit into his palm. The breech sat in the hilt, smooth and tight. The barrel ran dead true down the spine, gripped in three refinery clamps like a vein held in a fist. The emitter’s feed ran into the base of the carvings, crimped into the first groove. And the blade — the dark steel, the impossible edge, the sigils carved down its length — the blade was the same as it had always been. It didn’t need anything from him.
Except his blood.
He thought: A sword that eats.
“A sword that knows you,” said Snake.
“A sword that will use you,” said Lamp, “if you let it.”
Creed said nothing. He swung the blade once through the air, slowly, feeling the weight of it — heavier now, with the clamps, the barrel, but balanced; he’d balanced it — and the air hummed faintly along the edge as it passed.
Above him, through the vault, through the bone of the crypt ceiling, the scatter of warm sleeping glows began to stir. One. Then another. Then another. Hearts quickening, waking. Somebody moving in the nave above. Footsteps.
And voices, very faint, through the stone. A soft, reasonable voice, saying something he couldn’t make out. Another voice answering. And then, starting low and growing, the sound of the Choir beginning to hum.
Morning, in the Hollow. The bleeders were waking up, to come down the stair, and start the day’s work.
He looked at the young guard in the corner, bound and gagged, still out cold.
He looked through the archway, down the length of the lab, at the row of tall glowing vats at the far end. At the one where, very faintly, a heart was beating once, and then waiting a long time before it remembered to beat again.
He went and stood in front of that vat. In the blue light, Jory Thane floated, with his translucent skin and his glowing veins and his split, open, wiring-through-a-torn-wall arms. His blue eyes were open. They found Creed’s face through the glass.
They moved down to the sword in Creed’s hand. To the ember-red light in its grooves.
And for the first time since Creed had seen him, Jory Thane stopped mouthing his two syllables. His glowing eyes went back up to Creed’s face, and stayed there.
He nodded. Very slightly. Once.
“Soon,” said Creed quietly. “I promise. Soon.”
On the stair at the far end of the lab, a foot came down onto the top step. Then another. The humming grew louder. The soft voice said, quite clearly now, through the stone and the hiss of the vats:
“… and somebody check the pit, would you? Just to be thorough.”
Creed turned around to face the stair.
The grooves on the blade began to glow.