The Collar

Ollo set up the Press in a goldsmith’s workshop on the avenue below the house of the clocks, because it had good benches and a good forge and the goldsmith had gone to the First with his Senior.

He’d brought it up in pieces. The crimp-frame, the powder-measure, the bullet-mold, the jigs he’d made himself in the caverns out of salvage. Four men carried it up the line in a capsule, and Ollo rode with it, sitting on the crate with his bandaged hand in his lap, and when they set it down in the goldsmith’s he spent three hours bolting it to the bench before he let anybody near it.

His left hand — his only hand — was still wrapped. The burns under the wrapping were healing. He couldn’t close it all the way. He’d taken the crimp-handle off its old bracket and turned it ninety degrees and rebolted it so he could work it with his palm flat instead of his fingers curled.

“Learned it once one-armed,” he said. “Can learn it again flat.”

Creed sat on a stool by the forge and watched him.

“Rounds don’t do anything to Wardens,” Ollo said, not looking up. “Gold-cut, plain, frost-tipped. Haske’s bolts, they drank. Ours, they don’t even notice. You’ve got to get at the worm. In the seam. At the back of the neck. And it’s got to be hot.” He set a casing in the jig. “You did it with the sword. And those.” He glanced at the spurs. “Can’t give everybody a sword. Can’t give everybody those.”

“No.”

“But you killed the one in the Hall,” said Ollo, “with heat. You put the spurs in and they went white and the worm burned. And your blood —” He stopped. “Your blood’s hot now. Hotter than anything. I saw what it did to the tarp.”

Creed looked at him.

Ollo set the casing in the jig, and picked up a little brass cup from the bench. Empty. The kind he used to measure powder.

He held it out.

“A drop a round,” said Ollo. “In the tip. Sealed in with wax. When it hits, the tip breaks. The drop gets out.” He looked at Creed. “If it’s as hot as I think it is.”

The forge ticked. Outside, on the avenue, somebody was singing — one of the cavern people, badly, a work-song from Line D.

“Snake,” said Creed.

“Oh, I like it,” said Snake. In his bones. Pleased. “I like One-Arm. I’ve always liked One-Arm. Give it to him.”

“Lamp.”

A pause. The thin cold in his blood stirred.

“You are asking me,” said Lamp.

“Yes.”

“Then I will tell you.” Very careful. As if it were walking on a wire. “I am afraid of it. Not of what One-Arm will do with it. Of what it will cost you. A drop a round. How many rounds? Forty-four Wardens. They do not stand still to be shot. How many rounds to kill one? Ten? Twenty? A drop is small. Many drops is not. You are still making blood out of the serpent’s heat, and you are still grey to the elbow from the last time it made more than you could hold.” A tremor. “That is what I am afraid of. I have told you. I will not choose.”

“Thank you.”

“Do not thank me for that.” Something almost like irritation. “It is only what I swore.”

Creed held out his left arm. Pushed up the sleeve of his father’s jacket. The grey skin, the red scars running through it.

“How many,” he said to Ollo.

Ollo was quiet a long moment.

“As many as you can stand,” he said. “And not one more. I’ll be counting.” He picked up a thin steel lancet from the bench. Held it out, handle first. “I’ll be counting, Creed.”

They called them blood rounds. Nobody decided to. It was just what they were.

He sat on the stool by the forge every morning and every evening with his arm over a steel bowl and opened a vein on the inside of his left forearm with the lancet. Not deep. A nick. And the blood came out red — not ember, not glowing, just a deep furnace-red, so dark it was almost black in the bowl — and steamed. In the cold air of the Higher Ribs it steamed off the steel like water on a stove. The bowl had to be iron; the first time, Ollo had used a tin one, and the bottom had gone soft.

Ollo filled the rounds with a glass dropper, one drop a tip, and sealed each tip with a bead of wax that hissed when it touched, and set them in rows in a wooden tray. Then he crimped them. Flat-palmed. Slowly. Swearing under his breath when the new angle slipped.

They tested the first tray on a Warden’s armor — an empty one, off the Shelf, that Ferrin had brought up in a crate. Tobin Rell fired a blood round into the dark seam at the base of the white head from twenty meters with a Lancer’s long rifle braced on his good shoulder. The round hit the seam and the tip broke and the drop got out —

— and the white armor burned.

Not caught fire. Burned through. A hole, the size of a fist, eaten through the slick white stuff at the seam in a second and a half, the edges blackened and curling, and the grey rope inside going up in a puff of foul smoke.

Rell lowered the rifle and looked at the hole for a long time.

“There’d have been a worm in there,” he said.

“Yes.”

Rell looked at Creed’s arm. At the bandage on the inside of the forearm. He didn’t say anything.

The Unbanded drilled with them. Every Lancer of Haske’s company. Every long-gun in the army that Ollo trusted. Sabine picked forty shooters — people who’d been on the line at the Snag, at the Long Bridge, at the Shelf, people with steady hands and no frost in their blood, or almost none — and drilled them on the empty armor until they could hit the seam from thirty meters four times in five. Twelve rounds each. Forty shooters. Sixteen Lancers.

Six hundred and seventy-two rounds.

Six hundred and seventy-two drops.

He felt every one.

Not the drop. The drops were small. He felt the making. Every time he opened his arm over the iron bowl, the bones underneath had to make it back. Snake, in the bones, making it. Out of heat. Out of Snake. And every time, at the end of a session, he felt a little thinner. Not tired. Thinner. Like a cup that’s been washed too many times and gone thin at the rim.

The grey on his arms didn’t spread. But it didn’t fade, either.

“Six hundred and forty,” said Ollo on the fourth evening. Setting down the dropper. “Six hundred and forty in the trays. Thirty-two more for tomorrow.” He looked at Creed. “Then I’m done.”

“I can do more.”

“I know you can.” Ollo began wiping the bowl. “I’m done. I said I’d count. I counted.” He didn’t look up. “You went grey at the lips at five-ninety. You didn’t notice. I did.”

Creed touched his mouth.

“Thirty-two more,” said Ollo. “Then nothing till after. That’s the count.”

Creed looked at the steaming bowl. At Ollo’s flat-palmed bandaged hand, wiping it.

“Okay,” he said.

“He’s right,” said Lamp. Very quietly. “I wanted to say it at five-ninety. I did not say it, because you did not ask, and I swore I would tell you only when — I did not know if I was allowed to —”

“You’re allowed. You’re always allowed to tell me. You’re just not allowed to take.”

“Yes,” said Lamp. Uncertain. As if testing the shape of it. “Then I am telling you now: you went grey at the lips at five-ninety.”

“I know. Ollo said.”

“I know Ollo said.” A pause. “I am telling you anyway. So that it is said. By me.”

He almost smiled. He didn’t know what his face did when he almost smiled, now, with his eyes the way they were. He didn’t try to find out.

The First Rib was the shortest of the ribs and the highest, and it was dead.

Not dark. Dead. The Higher Ribs had been dark for thirteen weeks, but the Second and Third and Fourth were still cities, still houses with candles in the windows, still people. The First had been Benedek Arral’s, and Arral had gone up the light at the gala smiling, and after that, the First had simply emptied. Its Verbous had gone to the Second, or down the Ribs, or into their vaults to wait. Its Gilt had walked. Its houses were shut. Its great Lumen stood on the curve of the rib with its glass black and its doors open and the wind going through.

The army came up onto it on the ninety-seventh day. Seven hundred, now. More had come up from the Ninth and the Shelf and the Eighth since the Hall. More every day. Some of them Gilt — men who’d sat in the Lumen square of the Second and taken off their armor, and then sat there a day longer, and then picked up a blasting bar instead. Hedda Dorne had come up with the fighters from the lower Eighth. She was seventy. She had a militia baton from her husband’s time and a pack of field dressings and she went where the wounded were and didn’t ask anybody’s permission.

From the outer curve of the First, you could see the Collar.

Creed stood on the parapet of Arral’s empty Lumen with Sabine and Ferrin and Wick and looked at it.

The First Rib curved up and in, toward the spine. And above it — above all the ribs, above everything he’d ever climbed — two vast pale shapes went out to either side from the top of the spine into the dark like the arms of a crossbeam. Bone. Each one wider than the whole Long Bridge was long. Slightly curved. Ridged along their upper surfaces with a thousand years of cable-mounts and old scaffolding. They ran out and away to the far shoulders of the god, lost in the dark, and inward they came together over the top of the spine, almost meeting, a hundred meters apart.

The clavicles.

And between them, where they came together — built across the top of the spine, filling the gap, wrapped around the base of the god’s neck like a stone collar on a dog — the fortress.

It was old. Older than the Concord. Older than anything the Concord had built. Walls of grey stone and black iron, rising in tiers, the lowest tier set on the spine itself and the highest level with the tops of the clavicles, three hundred meters of wall, sheer, studded with gun-ports and ledges and the rusted stubs of old cable-mounts. At the top, a crown of battlements. And above the battlements — going up out of the Collar’s heart into the dark like the trunk of a tree — the neck. The god’s neck. Seven vertebrae, stacked, each one the size of a district, going up and up into the dim toward the base of the Skull.

And on the battlements of the Collar, in a ring, evenly spaced, white.

He counted them. He couldn’t help it.

Forty-four.

They stood motionless. Each with its halo glowing faintly behind its featureless head. Spaced exactly. Facing out. Facing down. At the First Rib. At the army on it. At him.

“They know we’re here,” said Wick. Not a question.

“They’ve known since the Second.”

“Then why haven’t they come down?”

Creed looked at the ring of white on the battlements.

“Because they don’t have to,” he said. “We have to come up.”

Ferrin drew it on the floor of Arral’s Lumen in charcoal.

The Collar had one gate. The Neck Gate. At the top. Facing up. Not down. It opened onto the first vertebra, onto the stair that went up the neck. Nobody had built the Collar to keep anyone out. It had been built to keep things in. To close the neck.

“So there’s no front door,” said Ferrin. “Not from below. The lowest tier sits on the spine. There’s a service lift in the spine — here — comes up through the bone into the bottom of the Collar. That’s how the Concord got up there. Lund. The Seniors. The supply lines. It’s held. Gilt. Lancers.” He tapped it. “That’s one way. Straight up the middle. Through them.”

“And the other?”

Ferrin drew two long lines out from the fortress. The clavicles.

“The bone,” he said. “The tops of the clavicles run level with the top tier. Here and here. The Collar’s built across the gap between them. Its east and west walls sit right on the bone. If you’re on top of a clavicle, you can walk to the wall.”

“And how do you get on top of a clavicle?”

Ferrin looked at Tobin Rell.

Rell looked at the sixteen Lancers of Haske’s company, sitting against the wall of the Lumen with their kites folded beside them.

“One at a time,” said Rell. “It’s three hundred meters straight up from the end of the First to the underside of the bone. Then you’ve got to go around the edge and up onto the top. With a passenger, the lifts’ll do it. Slowly. Two trips an hour each, maybe. Sixteen kites.” He did the arithmetic. “Thirty-two people an hour. Onto the bone. Under the Wardens’ noses.”

“They’ll see.”

“They’ll see,” said Rell. “And when they see, they’ll halo. And everyone on the bone without enough awake in their blood freezes.”

“The more awake,” said Sabine, “the less they can take.”

She looked down at the charcoal drawing. At the two lines and the fortress between them.

“Three groups,” she said. “One up the middle. Through the lift. Loud. Everyone who’s newest, everyone who’s still got frost in them, everyone a halo would freeze — they go there, inside the bone, in the shaft, where the Wardens can’t reach them with a halo without coming down off the wall. Ferrin leads it. Gilt who’ve turned. They know the Concord. They know the lift.” She tapped it. “Make them come down. Make them look down.”

Ferrin nodded.

“Two,” said Sabine. “The west clavicle. The shooters. All forty, with Rell’s Lancers carrying them up. Everyone on that bone has to be long-time Discarded or Choir-born or close to it. Nobody who’ll freeze. They get on the bone, they get within thirty meters of the wall, and they shoot every white thing on it in the back of the neck.” She looked at Dorne, who was sitting against a pillar with her left shoulder bandaged where the seven fingers had gone in. “Dorne and Brann go with the shooters. If a Warden comes off the wall onto the bone, they take its head off.”

Dorne nodded once.

“Three,” said Sabine. She looked at Creed. “The east clavicle. You.”

“Alone?”

“No,” said Ollo, from the back.

“No,” said Wick, a second later. Smaller.

Sabine looked at them both. Then at Creed.

“You draw them,” she said. “That’s what you’re for. They want you. The envoy said Vessel and looked right at you. Every Warden on that wall’s going to turn toward you the second you’re on the bone. Let them. Every one that’s looking at you isn’t looking at the west clavicle.” Her two-fingered hand closed. “And every one that comes for you gets a sword in the neck.”

“Or a spur,” said Snake. Pleased.

“And when they halo?”

Sabine held his eyes. His ember eyes.

“You tell me,” she said. “You’re the one who killed six on the Shelf.”

“With the gold,” said Creed. “And Snake burning. And I nearly —” He stopped. “I don’t have the gold. And Snake’s in the bone now. And I’ve been bleeding into a bowl for four days.”

The Lumen was quiet.

“Then you don’t go,” said Sabine. Flat. “We do it with two.”

“They’ll turn west. All forty-four. On the shooters. And the shooters will kill some. And then the rest will halo the west clavicle all at once, and everyone on it who isn’t Dorne or Brann will freeze.”

Silence.

“I go,” said Creed. “East. I draw them.” He looked at Ollo. “And you come. And Wick. On a kite behind me. Not on the bone. Behind. Where a halo won’t reach.”

“A halo reaches a long way,” said Wick. Very small.

“Then stay further back.”

Wick looked at him for a long time.

“No,” he said. “I’ll stay where I can see you. That’s — that’s what I’m for.”

Tobin Rell carried him up.

Straight up. Off the outer lip of the First Rib in the dark at the end of the third watch, three hundred meters, the lift-rig whining at the top of its register, Rell’s good arm locked through the harness and his broken one strapped to his chest. The bone of the clavicle came down over them out of the dark like a ceiling. Vast. Pale. Ridged. Rell went up under it and along it and then around the edge, the kite tilting, the gulf opening under them so far down Creed couldn’t see the bottom — just the faint gold glimmer, very far below, of the Ninth’s lamps — and then up, and over, and down onto the top of the bone.

Rell set him down and stood there gasping in his harness.

“Go back,” said Creed. “Bring the others to the west.”

“I can —”

“Go back, Rell.”

Rell looked at him. Then up, past him, toward the Collar.

From the top of the east clavicle, it filled the whole world. The bone ran in front of them, broad as a road, twice as broad, pale, ridged with old iron, for four hundred meters. And at the end of it, the east wall of the Collar went up. Not far now — the top of the clavicle was level with the top tier — but the wall still rose another sixty meters above the bone. Grey stone. Black iron. Battlements.

And on the battlements, white.

He saw them turn.

Not all at once. One. Then three. Then ten. Along the curve of the ring that faced the east clavicle. Featureless white heads turning, smoothly, on the battlements, toward him. Halos glowing behind them. And then the ones further around the ring — the ones facing south, facing the First, facing down — they turned too. Moved. Walked. Along the battlements. Around the ring. Toward the east.

Toward him.

“Go, Rell,” said Creed.

Rell went.

Behind Creed, a second kite came down onto the bone. One of Haske’s women, a Lancer named Oake. Ollo was in her harness. He unclipped, and stood on the bone in his burned apron with the long rifle on his back and two trays of blood rounds in a satchel at his hip, and looked at the Collar.

A third kite didn’t land. It hung in the air behind them and to the left, a hundred meters back, off the edge of the bone, out over the gulf. Lift-rig whining. A Lancer in harness. And clipped beneath her, in a second harness, with a comm-set strapped to his chest and his bandaged throat and a pair of brass Lancer’s spyglasses in both hands —

Wick.

“He said where he could see you,” said Ollo.

“I know.”

He drew the sword. The grooves lit red. Dark red. The color of the steam off the bowl.

On the battlements, the Wardens had stopped moving. Thirty of them, now, on the east arc of the ring. Thirty white heads. Thirty halos. All facing him. All perfectly still.

“Snake.”

“Here.”

“Lamp.”

“Here,” said Lamp. “I am afraid.”

“I know.”

“I will tell you when I am more afraid.”

“Okay.”

He started walking up the bone toward the wall.

They didn’t fire. They didn’t have anything to fire. They didn’t move at all until he was two hundred meters from the wall.

Then the first one came off the battlements.

It stepped off the edge. Sixty meters. It didn’t fall — or it fell and didn’t care. It came down feet-first onto the bone of the clavicle in front of him and the bone cracked under it, a long fault-line running out sideways across the pale surface, and it straightened up out of the impact, white, seamless, tall, a hundred meters from him, and walked toward him.

Then four more.

Then ten.

They came down off the wall in a white rain. Hitting the bone. Cracking it. Straightening up. Walking. Spreading out across the width of the clavicle in a line, the way the Gilt had spread across the Long Bridge, except these didn’t have lances, didn’t have bolts, didn’t have anything but their hands and their halos and the cold.

Eleven Wardens on the bone. Nineteen still on the wall above, watching.

“Ollo.”

Behind him, Ollo dropped to one knee on the bone. Unslung the long rifle. Braced it against his stump, the way he’d braced it on the drum-shed roof on the Eighth. Laid his bandaged palm flat on the stock. Put his cheek to it.

The first Warden was sixty meters away.

Ollo fired.

The round went past Creed’s ear with a crack like a whip. Hit the first Warden in the chest. Not the seam. The chest. The tip broke and the drop got out and the white armor burned — a hole in its chest the size of a fist, black-edged, smoking — and it didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow. No heart in there to hit. Just rope.

“Neck,” said Creed.

“I know.” Ollo worked the bolt. Flat-palmed. Slow. Swore. “They’re facing us. Seam’s at the back.”

“Then I’ll turn them.”

He went forward.

The first Warden reached for him. He went under the hand — he’d learned that on the Shelf, never let them touch you, never let the hand land — and came up behind it and put the sword into the seam at the base of its head. The grooves went white. The parasite screamed. The armor folded.

The second was already there. Its hand was already coming down. He turned his shoulder to it and the hand hit his jacket, his father’s jacket, the thick old crew canvas — and the frost came through. He felt it. Through the canvas. Through his skin. The touch. The cold, going in, finding his blood, reaching for the frost in it —

— and finding Lamp.

He felt the two colds meet. The Warden’s flat white scanner cold, reaching. Lamp’s thin silver cold, running in his blood. They met and recognized each other and for a moment he didn’t know what would happen, cold against cold, the Lamp had always been useless against the frost —

— and then Snake, in his bones, flared. The heat came up out of the bone into the blood and met the Warden’s cold and boiled it. The touch burned off. Steam came out from under his jacket in a gust.

He turned. Spurs. Seam. The second one folded.

The third was turning to follow him. Its back to Ollo for half a second.

Ollo’s round took it in the seam. The armor burned through in a second and a half and the parasite came out of the hole screaming and thrashing and burning and fell on the bone in black flakes.

“Three,” said Ollo. Behind him. Flat. Working the bolt.

They kept coming.

He heard it through Wick.

Wick, hanging off the kite a hundred meters back with the comm-set on his chest, was the net. Everything went through him. Sabine on the west clavicle. Ferrin in the lift-shaft. Rell and his Lancers in the air. Wick’s thin cracking voice relayed it all, in a stream, into the little speaker clipped to the collar of Creed’s jacket, and he heard it in pieces between blows.

“West’s on the bone, west’s on the bone, thirty-one up, nine more coming —”

A Warden’s hand, coming down. Under it. Seam.

“— Ferrin’s in the shaft, they’re — they’re fighting in the shaft, Gilt, Lancers, Ferrin says it’s tight, says it’s bad, says keep them busy up top —”

Ollo’s round, past his ear. A Warden folding in front of him.

“— the ring’s turning, Creed, the ones on the north side, they’re — they’re coming around toward you, all of them, Sabine says they’re all looking east —”

“Good,” he said. Breathing hard. “Tell her shoot.”

“She’s shooting.”

And he heard it. Distant. Across the gap between the clavicles, across the hundred meters of the Collar’s roof. A crackle. Then another. Then a ragged sustained popping, like fat in a pan, like the Press on a good day. Forty rifles. Blood rounds.

On the battlements above, a Warden that had been walking east along the ring toward him — its back to the west clavicle — jerked. Stopped. And a hole burned through the seam at the base of its head, and a pale thing came out of the hole screaming, and the armor folded and fell off the battlements onto the roof of the Collar.

Then another.

Then three together.

“They’re hitting,” Wick was saying. His voice cracking into pieces. “They’re hitting, they’re hitting, Sabine says eleven, twelve, Dorne’s got one on the bone, she — she took its head off, Creed, she just — fourteen —”

The Wardens on the wall turned.

He saw it. Saw them feel it. Saw the white heads on the battlements swing from him, from the east, toward the west, toward the popping and the screaming and the burning. Saw them realize.

And saw them come together.

There were twenty-two left.

Eight on the east clavicle around him, still coming. Fourteen on the battlements. And the fourteen on the battlements stopped walking, and stopped turning, and went still. And then they moved — all at once, in perfect unison, the way Maren Holt and Jory Tamm had moved like two fingers of Sere’s hand — along the battlements, closing up, closing in, until they stood shoulder to shoulder in a tight arc on the east side of the ring.

Directly above him.

Their halos touched.

“Creed,” said Lamp. Fast. Thin. “I am afraid. I am more afraid. I am telling you. Something is —”

The halos joined.

Fourteen rings of pale light, touching edge to edge, and where they touched they ran together. Like drops of water on a window. Like the two orbs over his chest on the dock. Fourteen halos became one. A long arc of white light along the battlements, sixty meters above him, humming. The tone. The halo-tone. But not one. Fourteen. In unison. The same note, fourteen times, layered, building, until it wasn’t a sound anymore, it was a pressure, it was in his teeth and his eyes and the long bones of his legs.

The eight Wardens on the bone around him stopped. Stood still. Faced him.

Waited.

“Ollo,” he said. “Get down. Get flat.”

“Creed —”

“Get FLAT —”

The arc fired.

It wasn’t a wave. On the Shelf the halo-waves had been rings, spreading out from a single Warden, thin, a pulse of frost-light that sank in through your skin and was gone. This was a column. A wall. A sheet of white falling straight down off the battlements onto the east clavicle, sixty meters wide, and it hit the bone and spread out across it like a flood breaking over a weir, and it hit him.

It hit him like the Long Bridge had hit him. Like Dorne’s shoulder. Like the press-bed. It knocked him flat onto the pale bone and it didn’t knock him — it pinned him, it lay on top of him like a slab of ice the size of a district, and it went in.

Not through the skin. Through everything. Through his clothes, his father’s jacket, his skin, his muscle, into his blood, into his bones. The cold. The Wardens’ cold. The flat white scanner cold. Fourteen times. All at once.

Looking for frost. Looking for the sleep in his blood. Looking for anything to freeze.

It found Lamp.

He felt it happen. Felt the white flood into his blood and find the thin silver cold that ran there, the Lamp’s cold, and seize it. Like a hand closing on a wire. And pull. And Lamp — Lamp, which was cold, which had always been cold, which had never been anything but cold, which was made of the same stuff — Lamp went rigid. Froze. In his blood. Every thin silver thread of it, in every vessel, at once, turning hard and white and still.

His blood stopped.

Not slowed. Stopped. In every vessel. Frozen in place, with the Lamp frozen in it. He felt his heart push, and nothing move. Push again. Nothing. Like a press pushing on a bed with the plate jammed.

“SNAKE —”

“I’m here, I’m here, I’m burning it, I’m BURNING it —”

He felt it. The heat. Coming up out of the bones. Into the frozen blood. Meeting the white. Boiling it. Steam coming off him. Off the bone around him. A cloud of it.

But it was fourteen. And he’d given six hundred and seventy-two drops. And the bones were thin, and the heat was thin, and the white kept coming, kept pouring down off the battlements in its sheet, kept pressing in. Snake burned it and more came. Snake burned that and more came.

He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe. His heart pushed against frozen blood. The edges of his sight went white.

“Creed,” said Lamp.

It was so faint. Frozen. A voice from inside a block of ice.

“Creed. I could — I could let go. Of your blood. I could go out. Out of you. Like on the dock. If I am not in your blood, it cannot find me in your blood to freeze. And the serpent could burn the rest. And you would — you might — live.”

He couldn’t answer. He had no breath.

“But you would be alone with the serpent. With nothing cold in you. With nothing to cool what it makes. And it would burn you. Like on the terminus. Like the tarp.” The frozen voice cracked. “I do not know which is worse. I do not know. I am telling you. I am not choosing. I swore. I am telling you. I can go, or I can stay. You must tell me. Creed. You must tell me.”

He couldn’t tell it. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think.

He felt Lamp wait.

It didn’t go. It could have. He felt it could have. It could have pulled itself out of his blood in an instant, the way it had come out on the dock, and saved itself from the freezing, and maybe saved him, and it would have been a choice. Its choice. For him.

It didn’t.

It stayed in his frozen blood with the Wardens’ cold closing on it like a fist, and waited for him to tell it what to do, and he couldn’t, and it kept waiting.

He felt his heart push once more against nothing, and slow.

“Mule,” said Snake.

Not in his bones. Not in his blood. Close. Right up against him. The way it had been in the dark of the terminus, when it made its bargain.

“Mule. Listen. It won’t go. It swore. You made it swear. Fine. It’s being good. Good for it. And you’re dying. Your heart’s got about four more pushes in it. And I can’t burn fourteen of them through your whole body at once. It’s too big. You’re too big. I’m spread too thin through all of you. Like jam on too much bread.”

The white pressed.

“So I’m not going to burn your whole body,” said Snake. “I’m going to burn one part of it. All of me. All at once. Through one place. And I’m going to throw it back up at them. And it’s going to cost you.” A pause. “I’m telling you too. See? Like the white thing. I’m not asking. Can’t ask. You can’t answer. But I’m telling you, so you know, after. If there’s an after.”

He felt it gather.

Out of every bone. Out of his thighs and his shins and his spine and his ribs and his skull. The heat, drawing in, pulling together, all of it, like the snake on the dock drawing back into his chest. Not into his chest. Down. Into his left arm. His left shoulder. Down the long bone of the upper arm. Into the elbow. Into the two bones of the forearm.

The arm he’d opened over the iron bowl six hundred and seventy-two times.

It went into his left forearm like molten iron into a mold.

He felt the bone of it go white-hot. Felt the skin over it — the grey skin, the slaggy ashen skin with the old red scars running through — blister. Then blacken. Then split. Along lines. Not random. Lines. He felt them go. Like the grooves on the sword had gone, in the reliquary, when his blood first touched them. Curls. Hooks. Branches. Splitting. A script. Writing itself, burning itself, into the skin of his arm from the inside, from the bone out.

His left arm came up.

He didn’t lift it. Snake did. The only thing in him that could still move. It came up off the bone of the clavicle out of the white flood, straight up, the fist clenched, the four spurs on the knuckles pointed at the battlements, at the arc of fourteen joined halos sixty meters above —

— and the fire went up.

Not a gout. Not a jet. A column. Like theirs. The answer to theirs. Red. Furnace-red. The red of the stacks at night. It went up out of his fist through the falling white like a bolt through rain, and the white boiled around it, and it hit the arc on the battlements.

It hit the joined halos dead in the center.

And the halos broke.

He heard it. Over everything. A sound like the biggest window in the world shattering. Like the dome of the Clock Hall cracking. The arc of white light along the battlements split in the middle where the fire hit it, and the split ran out in both directions, fast, cracking, along the whole arc, through every joined halo, and every halo shattered back into fourteen separate rings — and the rings went out. All of them. Fourteen halos. Out. Like lamps when the breaker trips.

The white flood stopped.

Fourteen Wardens stood on the battlements of the Collar without their halos, perfectly still.

Then they began to fall.

Not jump. Fall. Tipping forward off the battlements, one after another, stiff, the way the frozen Lancers had tipped off the roof on the Shelf. Falling the sixty meters onto the bone of the clavicle. Hitting it. Shattering. White armor bursting open on the pale bone like eggs dropped on stone, grey rope-dust going up in clouds, and out of each one a pale thrashing thing, writhing, screaming, blind, on the bone.

Around him on the bone, the eight that had stood waiting for the flood to finish him went over too. All at once. Stiff. Straight. As if a string that ran through all of them had been cut. They hit the clavicle and burst, and the pale things inside them came out blind and screaming.

He didn’t see the rest land. He was looking at his arm.

It was still up. Still pointing. The fire had stopped. And the arm —

It wasn’t grey anymore.

From the wrist to the elbow, his left forearm was black. Not burned-black. Not char. A deep, glossy, iron black, like the black of the old Collar walls, like the black of the Clock Hall’s dark glass. And through the black, everywhere, red. Lines of it. Glowing faintly. Curls. Hooks. Branches splitting into threes. Written into him. Not scars. Not the old Catalyst scars that had wandered across his body like cracks in a plate. These were made. Deliberate. Script. Covering the forearm from wrist to elbow in tight dense rows, like the sigils on the sword. Like the carvings on the Pale Key.

His arm came down.

He lay on the bone of the east clavicle in the cloud of steam and looked up at the sky — not the sky, the dark, the god’s dark, the dim glow of the Skull very far above — and his heart pushed.

And moved something.

His blood moved. Slow. Cold. Thawing. He felt it begin to go around again. And in it, thawing too, a thin silver thread. Shaking. Small. There.

“Lamp,” he whispered.

“…Here.” Cracked. Shivering. “Here. I stayed. You did not tell me. I stayed.”

“I know.”

“I did not choose.” Small. Desperate. “I swore. I did not choose. I waited for you. Even when — even at the end. I did not choose.”

“I know. I felt it.”

The cold thread in his blood shook and shook.

“I was so afraid,” said Lamp.

“I know.”

“Snake chose,” said Lamp. “Not me. The serpent. I want you to know. I did not — it was the serpent —”

“Yeah,” said Snake. In his left arm. Only in his left arm now, he realized. Banked there. Coiled in the bone of the forearm like a coal in a grate. The rest of his bones were warm, but not burning. Quiet. “I chose. I told you I’d never swear. Good thing, eh?”

He couldn’t laugh. He didn’t have the breath.

“Your arm,” said Snake. Something careful in it. Something almost like an apology. “That’s — that’s mine now. That’s where I live. Mostly. I’m still in the rest. But that’s — that’s my room.” A pause. “It won’t come off. Like the spurs. I’m sorry. I’m not sorry. Both.”

“What’s written on it.”

A long silence.

“I don’t know,” said Snake. And for the first time in a year, Creed believed it didn’t. “It wrote itself. When I went through. I didn’t — I don’t know, mule. I didn’t write it. It came out of the bone.”

Somewhere behind him, a voice.

“— CREED. CREED, ANSWER — oh god, oh god, please — Creed, if you can hear me, the wall’s down, Sabine’s on the wall, the west’s on the wall, they’re — the Wardens are down, all of them, the ones on the roof went over when yours did, Dorne’s killing the worms, she’s — Creed, PLEASE —”

Wick. In the little speaker on his collar. Crying.

He turned his head on the bone. It took everything.

Ollo was lying flat on his face a few meters behind him, where Creed had told him to get. Not moving. Frost on his back. A thick white rime of it, all over his apron, his hair, his one bandaged hand.

“Ollo,” said Creed.

Ollo didn’t move.

Creed got onto his elbow. His right elbow. His left arm lay beside him on the bone, black and red, and he couldn’t feel it, or he could feel it too much, he couldn’t tell. He dragged himself. One meter. Two. To Ollo. He put his right hand — the spurred one — on Ollo’s back. On the frost.

It hissed. Melted. Steamed.

He reached into Ollo’s blood. Ollo’s slow, tired, thin-frosted Line C blood, the blood of a man who’d stopped taking the tab when he was purged into the Void and hadn’t taken one since. The more awake, the less they can take.

It was slow.

It was moving.

He put his forehead down on the bone beside Ollo’s head and breathed.

“Creed,” said Ollo. Muffled. Into the bone. After a while.

“Yeah.”

“Counted twenty-two.” A long, slow, shuddering breath. “Rounds. I fired. Twenty-two.”

“Okay.”

“Hit eleven.” A pause. “Not bad. For flat-handed.”

Creed lay there with his face on the bone and Ollo’s frosted back under his hand and his black arm beside him, and laughed. It hurt. It came out of him in pieces. It hurt more than anything.

Above them, on the battlements of the Collar, there was no white anymore.

There were people. Small. Dark. Belly grey and Shelf canvas and Ninth blue. Standing on the crown of the fortress at the base of the god’s neck, looking down at the east clavicle. Looking down at him.

One of them lifted an arm. Two fingers on the hand.

Behind him, out over the gulf, he heard a kite’s lift-rig whine, and come closer, and come down onto the bone, and somebody unclip, and run.

“There you are,” said Wick Moraine, falling on his knees beside him. Crying. Laughing. Both. “There you are. There you are. There you are —“

THE COLLAR
WARDEN PRESENCE: 0
OUTER WORKS: TAKEN
NECK GATE: SEALED