The room behind the door was small.
He’d expected a hall. Another Register. Shelves and shelves going back into the bone. It was a room no bigger than the room three doors back on the Sixth, where Sefa had screamed for an hour. Round. Domed. Cut into the deepest bone of the Fifth Vertebra by hands so careful that the walls were as smooth as the inside of an egg.
And on the walls, tablets.
Not slates. Bone. Thin plates of pale god-bone, each the size of a hand, set into the curved walls in rows like the scales of a fish, overlapping, from the floor to the top of the dome. Hundreds. Each one carved, on its face, with Wright script. Curls. Hooks. Branching lines. Dense. Tiny. The same script as the sanctum in the Hollow. As the risers of the stair. As his arm.
In the center of the floor, a seat.
Not a chair. A seat, cut out of the bone of the floor itself, low and broad, with a back that curved up like a cupped hand. Empty. And carved into the back of it, at the height of a seated man’s heart — the seat-mark. Curl. Hook. Vein splitting into three.
His mark.
He stood in the doorway and looked at it and felt the mark on his own chest go warm, and the script on his arm brighten, and something in the bone of the room answer — a faint hum, a resonance, like the hum of a struck cable dying away.
“Don’t sit in it,” said Lamp.
Fast. Sharp. Not a whisper. The loudest he’d ever heard it.
He stopped.
“Lamp?”
“I am telling you. I am not choosing. I am telling you.” The cold in his blood was rigid. “Do not sit in it. Please. I do not know why. I only know that if you sit in it, something will happen, and I do not know what, and I am more afraid of it than of anything since the reliquary.”
“More than the Wardens?”
“Yes.”
“More than the light?”
“Yes.” A tremor. “More than the serpent.”
Snake, in the black arm, went very still.
“Huh,” it said. Very softly.
Creed stood in the doorway for a long moment. Looking at the seat. Feeling the hum.
Then he stepped around it. Carefully. Along the curved wall. And let Mirelle go past him into the room with her hand-lamp, and stood with his back to the tablets, as far from the seat as the round room allowed, and waited.
Mirelle read for three hours.
Not all of it. Not close. She went along the walls with the lamp, slowly, tablet by tablet, tracing the script with her bound finger a hair above the bone, her lips moving. Sometimes she stopped for a long time on a single tablet. Sometimes she passed a whole row without pausing — I can’t read those, they’re different, older, I don’t know the hand. Sometimes she sat down on the floor with her back to the wall and closed her eyes and was silent, and nobody disturbed her.
The others waited in the Register outside. Under the blue lamps. With Ossian and the five Kept scribes, who had gone back to writing. Ferrin with the ledger. Dorne and Brann by the tray-shaft, watching it. Wick by the door, where he could see Creed.
Creed stayed in the room. Against the wall. Away from the seat.
At the end of the first hour, Mirelle said, in her thread of a voice, without turning around: “It’s a history. The first tablets. On this side.” She touched them. “How they came. Into the god. From outside. From the dead world. Through the foot. How they walked up the leg. How they found the marrow.” A pause. “How the first of them drank it. A drop. And woke.”
“Saint Aurel.”
“It doesn’t say saint. It just says Aurel. The first. The eldest.” She moved along the wall. “She woke. And she could hear it. The god. Dreaming. And she — it says she sang to it. And it —” She stopped. Traced. Frowned. “I don’t know this word. Turned? Answered? Something. The god did something. When she sang.”
He thought about the Neck Gate. The humming. The bone flowing back. The slow vast pulse, pausing, like something turning over in its sleep.
“Answered,” he said.
Mirelle looked back at him over her shoulder. Then went on.
At the end of the second hour, she stopped at a tablet near the floor on the far side of the room, and crouched in front of it, and didn’t move for a long time.
“This one’s about the hands,” she said.
“Hands?”
“The god’s hands.” She traced the first line. “The god has two hands. One holds. One hungers. Neither is the god.” She moved down. Slower. “The holding hand keeps things in their places. Keeps the — the balance, I think. The order. The way the stars go around. The way the dead stay dead. It holds.” Her finger moved. “The hungering hand eats. It wants. It takes what it needs and more than it needs. It makes room. By burning.” A pause. “When the god was alive, the two hands — worked together. One held and one hungered and between them, the god —” She stopped. “I don’t know this word either. Made? Kept? Was?”
In his blood, Lamp had gone so still that he couldn’t feel it at all.
In his arm, Snake was very, very quiet.
“Go on,” said Creed.
“When the god died,” Mirelle read, slowly, “the hands — let go. Of each other. They stopped working together. The holding hand held nothing. The hungering hand hungered for nothing. They scattered. Into the bone. Into the blood. Into everything that lived inside the god after.” She traced the last line. Twice. Her voice dropped. “And when one wakes who carries the god’s blood, the hands will come back. To that one. One to hold, and one to hunger. And they will each try to make that one into a hand.”
Silence in the round room.
“Into a hand,” said Creed.
“That’s what it says. Into a hand. Into — one of them. Holding, or hungering.” Mirelle sat back on her heels. “It doesn’t say what happens then. The tablet ends. The next one’s in the old hand. I can’t read it.”
He stood against the wall.
“Lamp,” he said. Quietly. Out loud.
Nothing.
“Lamp.”
“…I am here.”
“Is that you? The holding hand?”
A long, long silence.
“I do not know,” said Lamp. And its voice was so thin. “I came into being in the reliquary. When you changed. I came out of — out of the balance of things. That is what I have always known. That I am the balance. That I was made to hold you to the light. To keep you in your place.” A pause. “I did not know there was a god’s hand. I did not know I was anything but — what I am.”
“Snake.”
“Told you,” said Snake. Low. In the arm. Not lazy now. Not anything he’d heard before. “Told you the first night. I’m the hunger in a god that died standing up. I always knew that much.” A long pause. “I didn’t know there was a second hand.”
“Did you know you’d try to make me into one?”
Snake didn’t answer.
Neither did Lamp.
And that was answer enough.
At the end of the third hour, Mirelle stood in front of the seat.
She hadn’t gone near it before. She’d gone around it, the way Creed had. Now she stood in front of it with her lamp held up and looked at the carving on its back. The seat-mark. And under the seat-mark, smaller, a line of script.
She read it three times. He watched her lips move.
“What does it say,” he said.
Mirelle didn’t turn around for a long moment.
“It says,” she said, “the seat is not a throne.”
He waited.
“It says, the seat is not a throne. It is a door.” She traced the line. “And then: the one who sits —” She stopped. Traced it again. “— the one who sits is neither hand. The one who sits wakes the sleeper.”
The hum in the room — the faint resonance, like a dying cable — rose. Very slightly. He felt it in his chest. In the mark.
“The sleeper,” said Creed.
“The god,” said Mirelle. Very quietly. “It means the god.”
In his blood, Lamp made a sound. Not a word. A sound like glass under weight, starting to crack.
“Creed,” it said. “Creed. We should go. Now. Please. I am telling you. I am not choosing. I am telling you. We should go up to the Forge and do what we came to do and leave this room and never come back to it. Please.”
“Why?”
“I do not KNOW —” Its voice broke. Rose. “I do not know, I do not know, I only know that every time she reads a line I am more afraid, and I have never been this afraid, not in the reliquary, not on the dock, not on the clavicle with the frost in me, I have never —” It stopped. Breathed, if a thing in his blood could breathe. “Please. I am asking you. I have never asked you anything. I am asking.”
He looked at the seat.
At the mark on the back of it. At the line of script. The one who sits is neither hand. The one who sits wakes the sleeper.
He thought about the Lamp on the dock, in front of everyone, screaming I DID NOT KNOW HOW. He thought about it staying in his frozen blood on the clavicle, waiting, not choosing, while his heart stopped. He thought about I am sorry about Garrow Fisk. And tell him I am sorry about his throat.
It had never asked him for anything.
“Okay,” he said.
The cold in his blood went loose with something that might have been relief.
“Mirelle,” he said. “Can you take any? The ones you can read.”
She looked at the walls. At the hundreds of bone tablets, set like scales.
“Six,” she said. “The history. The hands. The two after the hands that I can almost read.” She looked at the seat. “Not the seat. The seat’s part of the floor.”
“Take the six.”
She took them. Easing them out of the curved wall with her bound fingers, one at a time, where they’d sat for a thousand years. They came out clean. Light. She wrapped them in the hem of her robe.
He went out of the round room without looking back at the seat.
But he felt it, all the way down the Register under the blue lamps, all the way to the tray-shaft and the passage beyond. The hum. In his chest. Faint. Patient.
Like something that had waited a thousand years, and could wait a little longer.
The passages went on up from the Register. Inside the bone. Ossian showed them.
He’d stood up from the long table when they came out of the Archive and set his stylus down very carefully and said, in his soft even voice: There is a way. To the Fourth. Inside. The scribes used it, once. Before the tray. When the slates went up by hand. And he’d walked to a door at the back of the Register that none of them had noticed, and opened it, and there was a stair. Narrow. Steep. Cut into the bone. Going up into the dark.
“Come with us,” said Creed.
Ossian looked at him.
“No,” he said. Gently. “I am Ossian of the Ink Rows. I keep the Register.” He looked back at the long table. At the five Kept, writing. At the shelves going away into the blue. “Someone should. Even now. Especially now.” A pause. “I would like to copy what happens. When you go up. I would like to copy it in my own words. Not the tray’s.”
“They’ll come for you.”
“Perhaps.” The old scribe’s smooth face didn’t change. But he blinked. Slowly. Deliberately. As if practicing. “My hair is going white. They will come for me anyway.”
They left him there.
The stair inside the bone went up a long way. Longer than the great stair outside, because it was steeper, and narrower, and turned back on itself every forty steps. No light but the two hand-lamps. No sound but boots and breathing. The rule holding, even here.
Wick climbed behind Creed. Every step.
At the top of the third turn he said, very quietly: “What did it say. In there. Mirelle wouldn’t tell me.”
Creed thought about it.
“It said there’s two hands,” he said. “The god’s. One holds. One hungers. When the god died, they let go of each other. And when someone wakes with the god’s blood, they come back. And try to make that one into a hand.”
Wick climbed in silence for a while.
“The ball of light,” he said at last. “And the snake.”
“Yeah.”
“They’re trying to make you into one of them.”
“Yeah.”
Another long silence.
“Which one?”
“Both,” said Creed. “Each one wants me to be it.”
Wick climbed. His breathing was loud in the narrow stair.
“That’s what they were fighting about,” he said. “On the dock. Wasn’t it. Not just about you dying. About which — which one you’d be.”
“Maybe.”
“And what did it say about the seat?”
Creed didn’t answer for a long time.
“It said the one who sits isn’t either hand,” he said. “It said the one who sits wakes the god.”
Wick stopped climbing.
Creed felt him stop. Felt his heart go up, and up, like a man climbing a ladder very fast.
“Wakes the —” said Wick. “Wakes the god? The god’s dead. It’s — we live in it. It’s a skeleton. It’s —”
“It’s dreaming,” said Creed. “I felt it. At the Neck Gate. With my hand on the bone. It’s not dead. It’s asleep.”
Wick stood on the stair in the dark for a long time.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, I hate that.”
“Me too.”
“No, I really hate that.” His voice was going up. Cracking. “I’ve been living in a dead thing my whole life. That was bad enough. You’re telling me I’ve been living in a sleeping thing. That could — that could wake up —“
“Yeah.”
“— and you’re the one who —”
“Maybe.”
“Oh,” said Wick. “Oh, god. Oh, god.”
“Probably,” said Creed.
Wick made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob and entirely too loud for the rule, and clapped his own hand over his mouth, and they both stood very still in the dark of the stair, listening.
Nothing.
“Sorry,” whispered Wick, through his fingers.
“Keep climbing,” said Creed.
The stair inside the bone came out into the Fourth Vertebra through a crack.
Not a door. A crack. As if the passage had once ended in a door, and the door had been sealed, and then something on the other side had broken the seal open from outside, long ago, and nobody had ever closed it again. A jagged slit in the bone, tall and narrow, barely wide enough to turn sideways through. And through it, light.
Not grey-gold. Not white. Red.
And heat. A wall of it, coming through the crack. Dry. Metallic. Like the air at the mouth of the refinery’s forge-floors. Like the air over the press-beds at hour twenty. And a smell. He knew the smell. He’d smelled it on the Collar, when the Wardens burst on the clavicle bone. Old rope. Dust. And under it, something else. Something wet and sweet and rotten.
He went through the crack sideways.
The Fourth Vertebra had no gardens.
It had been hollowed out. The whole inside of it — the great ring of bone that on the Sixth and the Fifth had been terraced with green — had been cut back, and back, and down, into a single vast round pit. Like a quarry. Like a sump. And in the pit, in tiers going down the sides, machines.
He didn’t have a word for most of them. Black iron, riveted. Furnaces with their doors open, glowing red — that was the light. Vats. Long ones, low ones, tall cylindrical ones, full of something that steamed. Tables. Racks. Frames hung with chains. Cranes on rails along the tiers, swinging slowly. Pipes everywhere, black iron and pale bone-white, running between everything, hissing.
And on the tables, and in the vats, and hung from the chains on the frames —
White.
Warden armor. Pieces of it. Chest-plates. Arm-pieces. Legs. Long smooth featureless heads. Laid out on tables. Hung on racks. Half-assembled on frames. Hundreds of pieces. And going into the armor, being packed into it, by things he couldn’t see clearly from the crack — grey stuff. Fibrous. Dry.
Rope.
He knew what the rope was. He’d seen it on the Shelf, spilling out of a cut Warden. On the Collar. In the Clock Hall, when the envoy folded. The remains of an integrated person.
“Oh,” said Wick. Very quietly. Behind him in the crack. “Oh, no.”
“What goes up,” said Creed. “Comes down here.”
The others came through. One at a time. Sideways. Into the red light. Onto the narrow ledge of bone at the top of the pit, where the crack opened out. Dorne. Brann. Ferrin, with his pinned sleeve and the ledger. Ollo. Mirelle with her six tablets wrapped in her robe. Rell and the Lancers. The Discarded. They stood on the ledge and looked down into the Forge, and nobody said anything.
The things working the Forge weren’t Kept.
He saw them now. Moving among the tables, at the vats, on the cranes. They were the size of men, more or less. White, like Wardens, but not Warden-white — dull, scuffed, stained. Shaped like Wardens, but wrong. Hunched. Arms too long, ending not in hands but in tools. Clamps. Hooks. Blades. Needles. No halos. No faces. Where the faces would have been, there was nothing — smooth white — and at the back of each head, at the base, a dark seam.
Parasites. Wearing husks. Working.
Making more husks.
“How many,” said Ferrin. Very low.
Creed counted. He couldn’t help it. “Forty. Fifty. Working.”
“And —” Ferrin nodded down. At the frames. At the half-assembled Wardens hanging on their chains.
He counted those too.
Two hundred.
They went down the side of the pit on the bone.
There were stairs — iron, bolted, switchbacking down between the tiers — but iron wasn’t bone, and Creed didn’t know whether the Forge’s things could see the way the light could. So they went down the bone of the pit wall itself, the old curve of the vertebra under the iron, finding handholds, Dorne leading the way she’d led on the terrace walls. Quiet. The Forge was loud — the furnaces roaring, the cranes grinding on their rails, the vats bubbling — and the noise covered them. Mostly.
The Forge’s things didn’t look up. They worked. The way the Kept worked. Bent over their tables, their tool-arms moving, packing grey rope into white armor with slow careful precision.
Halfway down, on a tier where the bone of the wall jutted out over the pit, Creed stopped and looked into a vat.
It was one of the long low ones. Open-topped. Full of something that steamed. Not water. Thicker. Pale. Milky. White. He could taste it from here. The Drip. Concentrated. The same white scum that rose in Taavi’s cistern — but this was not scum. This was the whole vat. Pure.
And in it, floating, half-submerged, turning slowly in the slow convection of the heat: bodies.
Not bodies. What was left. Long, pale, grey, fibrous shapes, roughly the length of a person, roughly the shape. Shrunken. Dried, in some places, and in others soft, soaking. Faceless. Where the faces had been — smooth. Cut. Clean. Taken.
He looked at them for a long time.
“Steeping,” said Snake. In the arm. Very low. “They steep them. In the white. To make the rope. That’s what the rope is. That’s what’s left of a person when you’ve eaten what you wanted and taken the face and steeped the rest in sleep.” A pause. “That’s what a Warden’s packed with. That’s what walked down onto the Shelf and froze Haske.”
He didn’t answer. He was looking at one of the shapes. Near the edge of the vat. Turning slowly toward him in the white.
It was wearing clothes.
Most of them weren’t. Most of them were bare grey fiber. This one still had cloth on it. Scraps. A strip of something that had been a shirt, once — canvas, patched, the patches sewn in a pattern he knew. A Sump-Twelve pattern. A Discarded pattern. The way the people in the caverns sewed their patches, in the long squares, because that was how the women in Sump-Twelve had always done it.
And beside it, turning, another. Smaller. With the same patches.
Haddon Teague. Orla Teague. Sump-Twelve. Fourteen years in the Void. Together.
He made a sound. He didn’t know what sound. Behind him, Wick put a hand on his back.
“Creed,” said Wick. “Creed. Don’t look. Don’t —”
He looked.
They turned in the white together. Side by side. The way they’d stood on the stair against the wall. The way they’d fallen.
“Snake,” he said. Very quietly. Inside.
“Here.”
“You said you’d burn whatever I point you at.”
“I did.”
“I’m pointing.”
He didn’t decide to do it. Afterward, he would try to remember deciding, and he couldn’t. He just went off the bone.
Off the ledge. Down. Six meters, onto the iron of the tier below, and the iron rang under his boots like a bell, and every faceless head in the Forge turned toward him at once.
He didn’t care.
He put his black hand on the edge of the vat with the Teagues in it, and Snake came down his arm like a furnace door blown open.
The vat boiled.
Not the white in it. The vat. The black iron of it went red, then orange, then white, and the concentrated Drip in it — the sleep, the frost, a vat of it, pure — didn’t boil so much as ignite. It went up in a column of white fire, a roaring sheet, and the shapes in it — the steeping grey shapes, the Teagues, all of them — went up with it. Burning. Clean. Gone. In seconds. Ash going up in the heat into the red light of the Forge.
He felt Lamp in his blood lunge.
Toward the vat. Toward the white going up in flames. The want in it — the hunger it had found on the stair and in the gardens — rearing up like something on a chain. All that frost. All that white. Burning. Wasted. Mine.
“LAMP —”
“I know —” A gasp. “I know, I know, I am not, I am not taking, I am telling you I want it, I want it so much, I am not —” A shudder through his blood. “I am not taking it. Burn it. Burn it. I am telling you to burn it.”
The Forge’s things came for him.
All of them. Fifty. From every tier. Off the tables. Off the cranes. Down the iron stairs. Their tool-arms up. Clamps and hooks and blades and needles. Faceless. Silent. Fast.
And the two hundred on the frames —
He saw it. From the tier. With the vat burning beside him and the heat on his face. The half-assembled Wardens hanging on their chains on the frames. Two hundred of them. Their armor open, half-packed, their featureless heads hanging.
At the base of each head, in the seam, something moved.
One. Then ten. Then all of them.
Collection prepared. Forge. Await.
They hadn’t been waiting to be finished. They’d been waiting for him.
The chains let go.
All at once. Two hundred. Dropping off the frames onto the tiers. Hitting the iron. Half-packed, half-armored — some missing an arm, some missing a leg, some with their chest-plates hanging open and the grey rope spilling out of them — and getting up. Faceless. Seamed. Moving. Toward him.
No halos. They weren’t finished. They had no halos.
That was the only thing that saved them.
“BLOOD ROUNDS,” Ferrin roared from the ledge. The rule gone. Everything gone. “LANCERS! SEAMS! FIRE AT WILL —”
The ledge above lit up.
Tobin Rell’s Lancers. Twelve. And the twenty-nine Discarded who were left. Every long-gun Ollo had trusted. Every satchel of the six hundred and seventy-two rounds, of which there were still four hundred and something. They knelt on the bone of the ledge in the red light and fired down into the Forge, at the backs of the heads, at the seams, and the tips broke and the drops of his blood got out and the white armor burned —
And the things fell. Screaming. Parasites coming out of the holes thrashing and burning and shriveling to black flakes on the iron.
Ten. Twenty.
Not enough.
They came up the tiers at him. The workers with their tool-arms. The half-Wardens with their spilling rope. He was on the iron tier by the burning vat with the sword in his right hand and his black left arm and nothing at his back but fire.
He fought.
He didn’t remember most of it, after. He remembered the way the clamps came for his arms — the workers trying to hold him, not kill him, recover intact — and the way he went under them and came up behind them and put the sword into the seams. He remembered the spurs going into a seam and the parasite coming out on them, screaming, and burning it with a thought. He remembered a needle-arm going into his side, deep, and the cold that came out of the needle into him — the Drip, pure, injected — and Lamp eating it, instantly, ravenously, before it could spread an inch, and the needle-arm going slack in surprise.
He remembered Dorne.
She came down off the ledge onto the iron the way she’d come down the stairs in the Clock Hall. In a flat line. And she went into the half-Wardens the way she’d gone into Sere — with her hands. She caught one by its featureless head and twisted, and the head came off, and she reached into the neck-seam with her bare fingers and pulled out the thrashing pale thing inside and crushed it in her fist and threw it into the burning vat.
Then another.
Then Brann was beside her. Square. Silent. Doing the same.
They went through the half-Wardens like Ollo went through a tray of casings. One. Twist. Reach. Crush. Throw. Next.
The frost didn’t touch them. The half-Wardens had no halos, and their hands — the ones that had hands — reached for the two Choir-born and found the drops of Creed asleep in their blood, and slid off.
He remembered Ollo.
On the ledge. Kneeling. The long rifle braced against his stump. Firing. Working the bolt flat-palmed. Firing. Not fast. Never fast. But every round he fired, a seam burned.
He remembered Wick.
That was the thing he remembered most, after. Wick. On the ledge. Behind Ollo. Behind. Where he’d said he’d be. With no gun. Wick had never once fired a gun. He was on his knees on the bone with a satchel of blood rounds in his lap, loading. Taking rounds out of the satchel and pressing them into the magazines of the Lancers and the Discarded as they emptied, one after another, his hands shaking so badly he dropped every third round and picked it up and loaded it anyway. Not looking down into the Forge. Not looking at anything. Just loading. Loading. Loading.
He remembered the moment it turned.
He was on the tier by the vat with three of the workers on him — clamps on his left arm, his right arm, a hook in the back of his jacket — and a half-Warden coming at his face with its hands out, and he couldn’t get the sword up. And the half-Warden’s hand landed on his forehead.
The cold came in.
Not a halo’s cold. Not a finished Warden’s. Weaker. Rawer. But in. Through his skin. Into his skull. Reaching for his blood, for the frost in it — and there was no frost in it. Lamp had eaten it all. Lamp had eaten everything. There was nothing for the cold to grab.
So it grabbed Lamp.
He felt it happen. The same as on the clavicle. Cold recognizing cold. The half-Warden’s touch reaching into his blood and finding the thin silver threads that ran through every vessel — thicker now, so much thicker since the Sixth, fat with Sefa’s frost and the stair-dogs’ frost and the channel and the needle — and closing on them.
And Lamp —
Lamp didn’t freeze.
He felt it not freeze. Felt the half-Warden’s cold close on it like a hand on a wire, and Lamp — fat, strong, hungry — bite back. Felt it reach up through his forehead into the hand that was touching him. Into the half-Warden. Into its cold. Into the frost that was all a Warden was, under the armor: the white, the steeped rope, the sleep.
And eat it.
The half-Warden shrieked. Its hand came off his forehead as if burned. It staggered back, and the grey rope spilling out of its open chest-plate went dark — the pale fiber going grey, then brown, then black, like a wick when the oil runs out — and it folded. Not from a wound. From emptiness. From having the cold eaten out of it.
The parasite at the base of its head came out of the seam on its own. Writhing. Starving. And died on the iron before anyone touched it.
He stood there with the clamps on his arms.
“Lamp,” he said. “What did you —”
“I ate it.” Fast. Wild. Exultant. Terrified. Lamp’s voice like he’d never heard it, high and ringing and huge. “I ate it, Creed, I ate the Warden, I ate the cold that was in it, the cold is what it is, the white is what holds it together, and I ate it, and it —” A gasp. “— it is so much, it is so much, there is so much here, there are two hundred of them, there is a vat —”
The workers holding his arms let go.
Not because he made them. Because they felt it. Whatever Lamp was, whatever it had just become, the faceless things of the Forge felt it, and let go of him, and backed away. The way the stair-dog’s hearing had backed away from silence. The way the Kept had never looked up.
And the rest of the half-Wardens — a hundred and something, still coming, up the tiers, across the iron — stopped.
Turned their faceless heads toward him.
And wavered.
“Creed,” said Lamp. “Creed. I am telling you. I can eat them. All of them. I can feel them. Every one. All the white in them. I can reach it. If you let me, I can —” A pause. The want so huge that it filled his whole body, every vein, cold and enormous and rising. “I am TELLING you. I am not taking. I am telling you I can. And I want to. And I am asking.”
He stood on the iron tier of the Forge with the burning vat beside him and a hundred half-made Wardens wavering in front of him and the Lamp in his blood rising like a flood.
“What happens to you,” he said. “If you eat a hundred.”
“I do not know.”
“What happens to me.”
“I do not know.” A tremor. “I will be very big. And very cold. Colder than the serpent is hot. Maybe. I do not know.” A pause. “I would cool you. I would cool everything. I would —” It stopped.
“You’d hold me,” said Creed. “Wouldn’t you. Hard. In my place.”
Silence.
“Yes,” said Lamp. Very small. “I think I would.”
He looked at the half-Wardens. At the burning vat. At the Teagues’ ashes still going up in the heat.
At Ferrin, on the ledge, roaring. At Ollo, firing. At Wick, loading.
“No,” he said.
The flood in his blood shuddered.
“Not all of them. Not like that.” He lifted the sword. “We do it the slow way. Seams. Rounds. Dorne’s hands. One at a time.” He breathed. “You can eat the ones that touch me. That’s all. The ones that come for me. Not the rest.”
A long, long pause.
“Yes,” said Lamp. “Yes. I — yes.” Shaking. “Thank you. Thank you for — for saying no. I am telling you. I am glad you said no.”
“So am I.”
“Snake.”
“Here,” said Snake. In his arm. Very quietly. Watching. It had been watching the whole time. “I’m here, mule.”
“Burn the vats. All of them. Every one with the white in it.”
“With pleasure,” said Snake.
It took two hours.
They did it the slow way. Rounds and seams and Dorne’s hands and Brann’s. The half-Wardens came, and fell, and came, and fell. The ones that reached Creed, Lamp ate — seven of them, eight — and every time he felt it grow, and felt it want, and felt it hold itself back with a kind of shaking discipline he’d never felt in it before. Like a man on a diet standing in a bakery.
And Snake burned the vats.
All of them. One by one. He went along the tiers with his black hand out and touched each one, and each one went up in a column of white fire, and the shapes steeping in them went up too, and the Forge filled with smoke and ash and a smell he would never be able to describe and never forget.
At the end of the second hour, there was nothing left moving in the Forge except the cranes, swinging slowly on their rails, and the furnaces, roaring, and the people.
They’d lost four.
Two Lancers. Ninth Rib men, Haske’s from the start, brothers — Corlo and Bede Asher. A half-Warden had come up the iron stairs onto the ledge while the others were firing down, and caught them from behind, and frozen them where they knelt. They were still kneeling. Frozen solid. White-skinned, rimed, their rifles still at their shoulders. And two Discarded, women from the caverns, Peck — who’d carried the second hand-lamp up the stair inside the bone — and a woman named Dalla Firth, who’d been pulled off the ledge by a worker’s hook-arm and fallen into the pit.
Creed went to the frozen Lancers.
He put his hand on them. The black one. And reached. Into their blood. White. Rigid. Frost, risen and grown and set. The way Haske had been, on the roof.
“Lamp,” he said. “Can you —”
“I can eat it,” said Lamp. Very quietly. “The frost. But they are — Creed, their hearts. Their hearts stopped. When the cold took them. I can eat the frost and they will still be —” It stopped.
He took his hand away.
Wick was standing behind him. Behind. Where he’d said. His hands black with gun-oil and ash and blood from the rounds. Shaking. He looked at the two frozen Lancers.
“I loaded their guns,” he said. “Five times each. I loaded them.”
“I know.”
“They said thanks. Bede said thanks. Every time.” Wick’s voice cracked. “He said, thanks, Moraine. Five times.”
Creed didn’t say anything.
He went to the bone wall of the pit, at the top of the tier where the ledge was, beside the jagged crack where they’d come through. And set the spurs of his right fist against it. And carved.
CORLO ASHER. BEDE ASHER. LANCERS OF THE NINTH. HASKE’S. THEY KNELT AND FIRED.
PECK. SHE CARRIED THE LAMP.
DALLA FIRTH. SUMP-NINE. SHE FELL.
HADDON TEAGUE. ORLA TEAGUE. WE FOUND THEM HERE.
He stood back.
Behind him, Ferrin was looking at the frames. The empty frames, with their chains hanging. Two hundred of them. He had the ledger against his chest. He was very quiet.
“Brann,” he said. “Come here.”
Brann came. Ferrin pointed with his chin at something at the end of the nearest row of frames. A rack. Iron. Small. And in the rack, glass vials. A dozen. Upright. Glowing. Not white.
Red-gold.
Brann looked at them for a long time.
“His,” he said. Flat. “The Prior’s. That’s his glass. That’s his hand on the labels.” He picked one up. Turned it. “He sold them. To the Head. Some of the vials. From before the slab. From the reliquary.” His square face was very still. “He said he made four of us from the last of it. He didn’t. He sold the rest. Up the line.”
“What were they doing with it,” said Creed.
Brann turned and looked down the row of frames. At the last one. At the very end. Separate from the others. Bigger.
There was something still hanging on it.
Not a half-Warden. Not white. Red. Red-gold. A shape in a frame of chains, the size of a man, packed — not with grey rope — with something that glowed. Faint. Pulsing. Like the branches of light in Sere at the end. Like the veins in Dorne’s arms. And at the base of its head, in the seam, something pale and segmented, coiled, very still.
Asleep.
Waiting.
“Trying to make a Warden,” said Brann, “out of you.”
THE FORGE
FOURTH VERTEBRA
ACTIVE UNITS: 0
VESSEL-PATTERN PROTOTYPE: DORMANT
NOTED