There was one kite at Hesk’s Rest. One of Haske’s, left for the night runs to the Ninth. Its Lancer was a young man named Tobin Rell, Ninth-born, who’d stood up at the barricade on the Long Bridge with the other nine. He was already in his harness when Creed reached the landing ledge at the edge of the field, his silver scale half-buckled, his face white.
“I can carry you,” he said. “To the Shelf. It’s a long climb. The lift’s weak with two. Forty minutes.”
“Go.”
They went.
Up off the ledge into the dark, the Catalyst-lift humming in the kite’s frame, the silver fabric singing. Up the gulf past the Belly’s embers. Up past the stubby floating ribs, the broken stump of the refinery on the Eleventh, frost-white. Up past the Tenth, the dead Works on its root.
And all the way up, he watched the lights fall.
Fifty shafts. White. Thin. Straight. From the dark line at the base of the Skull, down through the black of the neck, past the black Higher Ribs, down. Some of them had already landed. He could see them — columns of white standing on the ribs below the Higher Ribs like the pillars of the Lumen Gallery. On the Sixth. On the Fifth. Three on the Ninth, among the gold patches.
And on the Eighth. On the lowest terrace. On the Shelf.
Six.
He felt the Shelf as they came up level with the Ninth. Hearts. Hundreds of them. The Unbanded fighters in the tram-shed. The Shelf people in the warehouses. Dorne. Sabine. Haske’s Lancers on the roof.
Hammering. Every one. And in the middle of them, six places where there was nothing. No heart. No blood. Only cold.
And around those six places, hearts going still.
Not stopping. Going still. One by one. The way hearts went still at the Bell. Slow. Heavy. Down.
“Faster,” he said.
“It doesn’t go faster,” said Tobin Rell. His voice cracked. “It goes as fast as the air.”
He cut himself loose ten meters above the loading yard and dropped.
He came down in the middle of it. In the yard, by the pole with the gold cylinder on it, under the cracked relay-disc. And he looked up, and saw them.
Six Halo Wardens. Standing in the yard of the Shelf among the tram-sheds and the warehouses. Tall. White. Seamless. Their halos humming behind their blank white heads. Not moving fast. They never moved fast. They moved the way water moves, poured, without hurry, without effort.
Among the people.
The Shelf people had come out of their doors when the light came down. Of course they had. They’d come out to look. And the Wardens had walked into them. Not attacking. Not striking. Walking. Among them. Reaching out with their long white hands. Touching.
A hand on a shoulder. A hand on a head. A hand on a back.
And everywhere a white hand touched, a person went still.
He’d seen it in Lumen Square. Arlo Venn. One hand on the shoulder, and Arlo went rigid, frozen, his face still lifted, his eyes still open, not seeing. He saw it now a hundred times. Shelf people standing in the yard, rigid, frozen, in the middle of turning, in the middle of running, in the middle of reaching for somebody’s hand. Like statues. Like the stopped Gilt on the Long Bridge, but worse. Because the Gilt had breathed.
These didn’t.
He felt their hearts. Slow. Heavy. Going still. Not stopped — not yet — but going, the frost in them growing, spreading, crusting, so fast he could feel it happen, like the dart on the depot floor but everywhere at once. The Wardens were touching them and the frost in their blood was answering the touch. Rising up. Taking them.
Putting them to sleep. All the way down.
“NO —”
He went at the nearest Warden.
It was standing over a woman. A Shelf woman, a tram-mechanic, in a patched coat, frozen on her knees in the yard with her hands up as if to push something away. The Warden had its long white hand on the top of her head. Its blank face turned down toward her. Its halo humming.
Creed hit it.
Not with the sword. With his hand. On its back. Flat. The way he put his hand on a Gilt’s breastplate. And reached in, the way he reached into a Gilt’s channels, to stop —
There was nothing to stop.
No channels. No Catalyst. No blood. He reached into the Warden and it was like reaching into the bone of the god before he knew how to talk to it. Cold. Dead. Smooth. Nothing in it that moved, nothing that answered, nothing he could take hold of.
Except, at the back of the skull, under the floating halo. The cold. Slick. Wet. Coiled.
He reached for that.
And it looked back.
Not with eyes. The way the thing at the end of the white line had looked down it at him on the Tenth Works tower. The way the envoy had looked at him over Kon’s body. The cold coiled thing at the base of the Warden’s skull felt him reach for it, and turned its attention on him, all at once, total, like the shaft of light falling onto the dais —
And the Warden turned round.
It let go of the frozen woman’s head. It turned, smooth, poured, without hurry. Its blank white face. Its humming halo. And it reached for him with its long white hand.
He got the sword out. He didn’t remember drawing it. The grooves caught — red-gold, crimson with gold through it — and the edge sang, and he brought it across the Warden’s reaching arm.
The Wright-steel went through the white armor like it went through everything. The arm came off at the elbow. It fell on the stone of the yard.
It didn’t bleed.
He looked at it. At the stump of the Warden’s arm, where the white armor had been cut through. Inside the armor —
Grey.
Not flesh. Not the red meat of a man, or the grey-blue mold of a greyling. Something else. Grey and dry and fibrous, like old rope, like the dried marrow-cake on the Flats. Packed tight inside the armor. And through it, threading through the grey, fine pale lines. Like roots. Like the legs of something, sunk deep, holding the grey together.
The Warden didn’t scream. It didn’t stagger. It looked down at the stump of its arm, its blank white face tilting, the way the greylings had tilted their heads at the sword on the dunes.
Then it reached for him with the other hand.
And its halo brightened.
He didn’t see it coming. Nobody would have. The ring of pale light floating behind the Warden’s head, humming — it just got brighter. All at once. White. Blinding. And the hum went up, and up, into a single high piercing tone —
And the light came off it. Not in a bolt. In a wave. A ring of white, spreading out from the halo in every direction at once, like the ripple from a stone dropped in a tank, across the yard —
It hit him.
Cold.
Not the dart. Not the drum. Worse. The frost came into him not through a wound but through his skin. All of it. Everywhere the white light touched. Into his face, his hands, his chest, through his father’s jacket, through his coat. Into his blood. And settled. And grew. Fast. So fast. Like the frost from the dart on the depot floor, but a hundred darts, a thousand, all at once, crusting, spreading, ice-ferns branching across the inside of every window in him —
And everything went far away.
The yard. The noise. The screaming. The frozen people. All of it going distant, going quiet. His arms heavy. The sword heavy. His eyes heavy. So tired. He’d been tired his whole life. Here was rest. Here was down. All he had to do was let it. Let his chin go to his chest. The Head watches, so that you need not.
He felt the gold.
In the middle of him. In the narrow place behind his eyes where Lamp was small. A filament. A hair. Flickering. The frost coming at it from every side, crusting toward it, closing in.
No Mirelle. No song.
The gold flickered.
Went dim.
“CREED.”
Not Lamp.
Snake.
It came up out of his chest like the furnace door opening.
Not singing. Not hungry. Roaring. Every coil of it, all at once, huge, hot, red, and it didn’t go out through his hands or his scars or the sword. It went in. Into him. Into every place the frost was settling. And where the fire met the frost, the frost didn’t melt — not the way the gold melted it, clean and quiet, like ice in sun. It burned. It boiled. It went up in steam inside him, in his veins, in his chest, a thousand tiny boils, the way his blood had boiled on the slab.
It hurt more than anything since the slab.
But it burned the frost out.
He came back. All at once. Like the cage-lift hitting bottom. On his knees in the yard, with steam coming off him, off his skin, off his scars — red, blazing red, the press-plate red, the Snag red — and the sword in his hand blazing with it.
“Get UP,” said Snake. In his chest. Huge. “Get up, get up, it’s touching them, it’s putting them DOWN, get UP —”
He got up.
The Warden with one arm was reaching for him again. Its halo dimming after the wave. Recharging, he thought, the way the old emitter in the sword’s tang used to need twenty minutes.
He didn’t give it twenty minutes.
He went past its reaching hand — fast, faster than he’d ever moved, the fire in him driving him like a rig drove a Gilt — and round behind it. To its back. To the base of its skull. Under the floating halo. Where the cold was coiled.
He put the point of the sword against the white armor there. And pushed.
The Wright-steel went in.
Through the white armor at the back of the Warden’s neck, below the blank white helm. Easily. Like everything. And into the grey, dry, root-threaded stuff inside. And then — deeper — into something that wasn’t grey.
Something that moved.
He felt it. Through the hilt. Through his hand. The point of the sword touching something wet, slick, cold, and that something recoiling. Thrashing. Away from the steel.
And the Warden screamed.
Not from its mouth. It had no mouth. From the halo. The thin high pure glass tone went up and up and up, past anything he’d heard, past the scream of the white line on the Tenth Works tower, into a sound that made his teeth hurt and his ears bleed. Every person in the yard who wasn’t frozen clapped their hands over their ears. The tram-shed windows cracked.
He pushed the sword in deeper.
And the sigils on the blade, blazing red, burned.
He felt the heat go down the steel into the thing at the base of the Warden’s skull. Into the slick wet cold. And the cold boiled. The way the frost had boiled in him. The way the first-draw had boiled in Jory Thane.
The thing came out.
It came out of the back of the Warden’s neck. Around the blade. Out through the hole the sword had made in the white armor. Fast. Thrashing. Pale. The color of something that had never seen light. Segmented. As long as his forearm. Its many legs — dozens of them, fine as hairs — flailing, scrabbling, the roots it had sunk into the grey stuff inside the armor tearing loose as it came. Wet. Glistening. Shrieking — he felt the shriek, not heard it, a high thin agony coming off it through the air.
It hit the stone of the yard and writhed.
He’d seen it before. In the dream through the key. Coiled in the gold folds of the god’s mind. Rooted. Drinking. He’d seen it carved on a wall, a thousand years old, at the ends of the cables in the skull.
He’d never seen one squirm.
The Warden’s body stood for a moment longer. Upright. Its halo flickering. Going out. Then it folded. Not fell — folded, the white armor collapsing in on itself like a coat with nobody in it, the grey stuff inside spilling out of the joints in dry crumbling fibers. It lay on the stone of the yard. Empty. A heap of white plate and grey dust.
The pale thing on the stone writhed, and thrashed, and turned its blind segmented front end toward him.
Toward the sword.
He brought the blade down on it.
The burning edge went through it, and it burned. Shriveled. Blackened. The way the bleeders’ blood-spikes had burned on the edge in the reliquary, into black flakes. It curled up on itself and smoked and stopped moving.
He stood over it, breathing hard, with the sword blazing red in his hand and the steam still coming off his skin.
“That,” said Snake. In his chest. Thick. Shaking. “That’s them. That’s what they are. That’s what’s in his head.”
“I know,” said Creed.
“I remember,” said Snake. “I remember them. In the dark. At the end. Crawling in. Rooting. Drinking him while he dreamed. I remember —”
“I know.”
He looked at the heap of empty white armor. At the grey dust spilling out of it.
Integrated, the ledger had said. Physical remainder: facial preservation. Remainder of body: consumed.
Not all consumed. Some of it was in the armor. Grey. Dry. Rooted through.
The Wardens weren’t Wardens. They were people. Once. Grey husks of people, packed into white armor, with one of the pale things coiled at the base of each skull, wearing them. Driving them. The way a rig drove a Gilt.
The way the Archon wanted to drive him.
There were five more.
He went through them.
It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t clean. Every one of them, when he reached for the cold at the base of its skull, felt him, and turned, and reached for him, and every one of them, when he got close, flared its halo and the white wave came off it and hit him and the frost came into his skin. And every time, the gold flickered, and Snake roared up and burned the frost out of him in a boiling agony that left him on his knees in the yard with steam coming off his skin. And every time, he got up.
And put the sword into the base of the skull.
And the pale thing came out, thrashing, and he burned it.
Two. Three.
He was on fire. He could feel it. Not the scars — him. The Catalyst he’d fed on at the Ninth’s last tank was gone, burned in the first minute, and the fire was burning something else now. Him. His blood. The frost in him boiling and the fire boiling with it, and every time Snake rose to burn the frost out he got bigger, and Creed felt the balance in him tip a little further, and a little further. Lamp, small, smaller, squeezed. The gold, a hair. Less than a hair.
Four.
He wasn’t alone. He’d known that, distantly, the whole time, but he didn’t see it until the fourth. Ilka Dorne, in the street beyond the yard, with a Warden in her square hands. She’d caught it from behind. Got her arms round its blank white head. And was twisting.
He felt the halo flare. Felt the white wave come off it, hit her, full in the face —
And nothing happened.
She didn’t freeze. She didn’t slow. Her heart — steady, strong, the red-gold all through her blood — didn’t even stutter. The frost came at her and found nothing to settle on. Her blood was his blood. Awake. Not asleep. There was no frost in her for the white light to grow.
She twisted.
The Warden’s blank white head came off its shoulders with a sound like a gallery prop going. The halo went out. The body stood for a moment, headless. And from the stump of its neck, out of the grey, the pale thing came thrashing.
Ilka Dorne stamped on it. With her boot. Again. Again. Until it stopped moving.
She looked up across the street and the yard and saw him.
“They can’t freeze me,” she said. Flat. Her militia voice. Almost wondering. “Did you see that? They can’t. There’s nothing in me to freeze.”
“Because you’re awake,” said Creed.
She stared at him.
And then she looked past him. Into the yard. At the people.
Not all of them were frozen.
He saw it now. He hadn’t seen it, in the fight, with the fire in him and the frost coming off the halos. He saw it now. The Shelf people — the ones who’d been frozen by a touch, rigid, still, statues in the yard — they were the ones who’d come up from the Eighth in the last week. New to the Shelf. New to the grey-caps. Still frosted thick from a lifetime of counter-bread and blue light.
But the Unbanded fighters in the yard. The ones who’d been in the Void for years. The long-time Discarded, who hadn’t eaten from a counter in three, four, six years. Whose frost was almost gone.
They were moving.
Slower. Heavier. Some of them on their knees, gasping, the white wave having hit them and left them half-frozen, swaying. But moving. Getting up. Going for the frozen ones, dragging them into the tram-shed, out of the yard, away from the Wardens. Three Unbanded women had a Warden backed against a warehouse wall with blasting bars, beating at its knees, and when its halo flared at them they staggered, and slowed, and went on beating.
“The ones who woke,” said Lamp. Very faint. From the squeezed, small place behind his eyes. “The frost in them is too thin to grow. The Wardens can slow them. They cannot stop them.” A long pause. “The more awake, the less the Wardens can take.”
He stood in the yard with the sword blazing red and the steam coming off him and looked at the Unbanded women beating the Warden’s knees, staggering, slowed, not stopped.
The more awake.
Five.
He went to help them.
Six was on the roof.
He didn’t see it go up. He saw it there when he came out of the yard after the fifth — on the roof of the tram-shed, where Haske’s Lancers had been all night, silver in the dark. Standing among them. Tall. White. Its halo humming.
And the Lancers were frozen.
Not all. Five of them. Rigid. Statues of silver scale, kneeling, crouching, half-turned, frozen where the white hand had touched them. They’d been Mid-born. Lancers. Channel-rigged. Living under blue light, eating Concord bread, all their lives. Their frost had been thick.
And Oriel Haske was standing between the Warden and the edge of the roof. With her flower-staff leveled. Her helm off. Her gauge-face grey.
Behind her, on the edge of the roof, the last of her Lancers — Tobin Rell, who’d carried Creed up from Hesk’s Rest — frozen, rigid, kneeling at the very lip, half over.
Haske fired.
The bolt hit the Warden full in the chest. White-blue. Bright. And went into it, the way bolts went into Creed’s sword. Into the white armor. Gone. As if the armor had drunk it.
The Warden kept walking.
Haske fired again. Again. Again. Crack-crack-crack. Every bolt going into the white and vanishing. And the Warden came on, poured, without hurry, across the roof toward her, its long white hand lifting.
Creed was on the wall of the tram-shed. Climbing. Hand over hand. Fast. Too slow.
“HASKE —”
She heard him. She didn’t look round. She stood between the Warden and the frozen young Lancer at the edge of the roof, with her empty staff leveled, and her heart — he could feel it — hammering, frosted, Mid-born, afraid.
“Captain Oriel Haske,” she said. To the Warden. Very calm. Her gauge-voice. “Ninth Rib detachment.”
The Warden reached her.
Its white hand came down on her shoulder.
He felt her go still. Felt the frost in her rise up to meet the touch, crusting, spreading, so fast — felt her heart go slow, and heavy, and down —
And she moved.
He’d never know how. He’d think about it for the rest of his life. Her frost was thick. Thicker than the Lancers who’d frozen. A lifetime of blue light and Concord bread. She shouldn’t have been able to move at all.
She moved anyway. One step. Backward. With the Warden’s hand still on her shoulder. One slow, impossible, frost-choked step. Toward the edge of the roof. Toward Tobin Rell, kneeling frozen at the lip.
She put her free hand on Tobin’s back.
And pushed him. Off the roof. Away from the Warden. Down. Into the yard. Where the Unbanded were.
The Warden’s other hand came down on her head.
And Oriel Haske went still.
Kneeling. On the roof of the tram-shed. With one hand still out, where Tobin had been. With her grey gauge-face turned up. Toward the Skull. Her eyes open.
Not seeing.
Creed came over the edge of the roof.
He didn’t remember the next part. He’d remember the yard after, and Dorne’s face, and Tobin Rell sobbing on the stone with his arm broken from the fall, thawing. He didn’t remember the roof. He’d only learn, from Sabine, that he’d taken the sixth Warden apart. Not just the base of the skull. All of it. With the sword and his hands and the fire. That when he was done there was nothing on the roof of the tram-shed but white plate in pieces and grey dust and a black smear where something pale had burned. That he’d been screaming, the whole time. Not words.
He’d remember kneeling beside Oriel Haske.
She was still kneeling. Frozen. Her heart — he reached for it, he reached for it with everything he had left — slow. So slow. Crusted over with frost so thick he couldn’t find the warm thing under it. One beat. A long, long pause. Like Jory Thane’s. Like the key’s.
He put his hand on the back of her neck.
He reached for the gold.
There was nothing there. Less than a hair. The fire had burned it down. Six Wardens, six white waves, six times the fire rising to burn the frost out of him, and every time the fire got bigger and the cold behind his eyes got smaller and the gold in the narrow place between them got squeezed until there was nothing left of it at all.
He reached for it anyway. Help me.
Nothing came.
He reached for Lamp. Help me. Please.
Behind his eyes, small, so small, the cold reached back. A thread of it. Down his arm. Into his hand. Into the back of her neck. The way it had cooled Wick in the crawlway.
It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t the right thing. Cold couldn’t melt frost.
Oriel Haske’s heart beat once more.
And didn’t beat again.
They took two hundred.
Not from the Shelf — he’d stopped all six on the Shelf. From the Ninth. The Sixth. The Fifth. The other forty-four Wardens, on the ribs that had cracked their Bells. They didn’t kill most of the people they froze. They collected them.
He saw it from the roof of the tram-shed. Kneeling beside Haske. Looking up.
The columns of light, on the other ribs, rising. Going back up. And in every column, beside every Warden, standing, feet together, arms at their sides, frozen, rising up into the white — people. Two. Three. Five. In every column. Going up past the black Higher Ribs. Up the neck. Into the glow at the base of the Skull.
Integrated.
He couldn’t reach them. Too far. Too many. Too high.
He knelt on the roof beside a dead Lancer captain whose mother lived on the Fifth, in a house with a window, and hadn’t looked up in sixty years, and watched them go.
“Two hundred,” said Lamp, very faintly, after the last column had gone up and the light had gone out. “Perhaps more.”
Snake said nothing. It was huge. It was hot. It was coiled around his heart so tight he could barely breathe. And it was silent.
He came down off the roof with Haske in his arms.
The yard was full. Unbanded fighters. Shelf people, thawing — the ones the Wardens had frozen, and who hadn’t been taken because the Wardens on the Shelf were dead before they could take them. Gasping. Crying. Shaking. Holding each other. Dorne, with blood on her boots that wasn’t blood. Sabine, against the wall of the tram-shed, with her two-fingered hand pressed to her side where a halo-wave had knocked her into a girder.
They looked at him as he came down. At Haske. At his face.
He didn’t know what his face was doing. He couldn’t feel it.
He laid Oriel Haske down on the stone of the yard, under the gold cylinder on its pole. Her eyes were still open. Still turned up. He closed them.
He knelt there.
He was so tired. He’d been tired his whole life. He’d never been tired like this. The fire had burned through everything. The Catalyst. His blood. The gold. He felt hollowed out, scraped down to the frame, the way he’d felt at the anchorage after holding bite number four. Except this time it wasn’t the gold that was gone. It was everything but the fire. The fire was still there. Huge. Coiled. Hot. Burning him from the inside.
His scars were red. Just red. He could see them on his hands. Press-plate red. No gold in them anywhere.
“Creed,” said Dorne. Somewhere above him. Her voice strange. “Creed. Your eyes.”
He didn’t look up.
He heard boots. Coming into the yard. From the street. Many of them. Fast. He felt their hearts.
Not Gilt. Not Wardens. Not Unbanded.
Steady. Strong. No channels. Almost no frost.
And red-gold. Threading through the blood. Like Dorne’s.
Four of them.
“Captain Dorne,” said a voice. A man’s. Flat. Militia. “Stand aside. By order of the Prior.”
Dorne’s heart went hard.
“Brann,” she said. Very quietly. “Brann, don’t —”
“Stand aside, Captain. We know you’ve turned. The Prior knows. He’s not angry. He says you were always unstable.” A pause. “He says to tell the Anomaly: the Prior sends his regards. And he’s sorry about the Wardens. He knows how tired that must have made him.”
Creed lifted his head.
Four of them. In the gate of the yard. Grey militia uniforms. Square. Thick. Their eyes red-gold at the whites, glowing. Their hands, the same.
The four Sere had made. From the last of the vial.
And Creed knelt in the yard beside Oriel Haske’s body with the fire burning him hollow and the gold gone and Lamp so small he could barely feel it and the sword in his hand, red, and he couldn’t get up.
He tried. His legs wouldn’t. The fire had burned through them too.
“Get UP,” said Snake. But even Snake’s voice was thin now. Even Snake was tired. “Creed. Get up —”
Dorne stepped between him and the gate.
“No,” she said.
And the four Choir-born came across the yard at her.
He watched it. From his knees. He watched Ilka Dorne fight four of her own kind in the yard of the Shelf, the way she’d fought him on the bridge. Fast. Hard. Square. She took the first one down. The second. And the third got behind her, and the fourth hit her the way she’d hit Creed on the bridge, with her whole body behind one shoulder, and she went down.
Sabine came off the wall with a blasting bar. One of them caught it and took it away from her the way you take a stick from someone who has just been knocked into a girder. And put Sabine down.
The fighters came. The Unbanded. Three to one. Four to one. The Choir-born went through them.
And the fourth one — the one Dorne had called Brann — came across the yard and stood over Creed.
He looked up at him. A square, plain face. Thirty. Red-gold eyes.
“Courier fifteen,” said Brann. And there was something in his flat voice that wasn’t flat. Something that wasn’t Sere’s hope, and wasn’t Dorne’s fury. Something tired. “The Prior says you won’t remember this part.”
“Creed —” Dorne. From the ground. Bleeding. Reaching.
Brann bent and put a square hand on the back of Creed’s neck.
And Creed felt his blood — his own blood, in Brann — reach into him. The way Creed reached into Gilt to stop them. His way. Learned. Copied. A drop of him, taught by Calloway Sere on a slab, reaching back into its source.
And it said: stop.
He stopped.
The yard went away.