Getting Stronger By Marrying And Investing In Abandoned Villainesses

The bells rang again, thirty yards down the road, and Wick’s hand had not moved.

Somebody under the stone stood up to go to them.

Theo got an arm across the mouth of the shrine and put the man back into the rock hard enough to hurt him.

”Nobody answers that.”

”That’s Hallam’s—”

”That’s not Hallam.”

He kept his forearm where it was.

”Hallam went in with a lamp four days ago and this thing’s had four days to learn what a bell sounds like and it’s just proved it. Anything you hear tonight that you love, you leave where it is.”

The bells stopped.

Then a woman’s voice out of the dark, perfectly clear, said Berrin’s name once.

Berrin was on the ground with his mother’s coat in his fists and he did not move at all, and Theo stood over him with his arm out across nine feet of rock and made himself listen to it happen.

’It learned her in an hour. It’s been down there since before we came round the spur, sitting with her, learning the shape of her mouth.’

They got two hundred yards up the road in the next twenty minutes and Theo stopped them in a cut where the rock came in on both sides and left one way in.

By then he had decided.

Wick argued for the pass. Straight up, all fourteen, run for the top and out the far side.

Theo answered him from the mouth of the cut.

”It walks faster than us and it can see, and the only reason any of us are standing here is it hasn’t wanted to finish yet. We’re not outrunning a thing that’s been giving us a head start.”

”Then what.”

Theo took the boning knife out of the roll on his hip, where it had been since four o’clock in a kitchen, and turned it over once in his fingers.

”Then somebody has to go and stand in the field with it.”

He went out eleven times over the next six hours and he got better every single time.

The first time he learned breath. His own fog came back onto his face when there was rock in front of him and went away when there was not, and a man could walk a wall by his own mouth if he was patient.

The second time he learned the crust. Wind-packed under a lee, sugar in the open, and boot-broken where a column of forty-one had gone over it, and he could read the whole night’s history in a mountainside by the sound his heel made.

The third time he learned the cold patches, and that they were not patches. They were a trail. Wherever the thing had stood the air stayed cellar-cold for a while after, and the cold went out of it slowly, and if you found one and turned your face until the cold was even on both cheeks you were looking the way it had gone.

The fourth time he came back and there were twelve.

He reached for the shadow on the fifth.

He was flat behind a boulder with his heart going and forty feet of open snow in front of him and the cellar-cold coming across it, and his hand went down to the ground beside his hip the way it had gone down a hundred times in two years, and he asked.

Nothing came.

’You’re the same dark I’ve been putting my hands into since I was nineteen, and you’re standing all around me, and you won’t give me six inches of it.’

He asked again, which was undignified, and lay in the snow with his palm flat on a mountain and got back precisely what the panel had been giving him all night.

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’...Right. Then I’ll do it with a kitchen knife.’

He went over the boulder.

By the seventh sortie he could put a hand on the thing’s trail within a minute of leaving cover, and by the ninth he could tell how old the cold was to about a quarter of an hour, and the count in the cut was down to eight.

Every time he went out, it went in.

That was the arrangement and he understood it perfectly by then.

Not past him. Never past him. It let him get close, and it let him hear it, and then it was four hundred yards behind him at a place he had left eight people standing in, and by the time he got back down the cut there were six, and Wick was holding somebody’s hand and telling them a lie about a lamp.

Theo stood in the mouth of the cut with the knife in his fist and his lungs burning and did the sum for the fourth time that night.

’It’s not hunting them. It’s charging me. It’s set a price on getting close, and it’s taking the payment out of a rock four hundred yards behind me, and it’ll keep letting me in for exactly as long as I keep paying.’

He knew that at about three in the morning.

He went out again at ten past.

Wick died rigging the last of it.

He had spent two hours in the dark on his knees making something out of the toolroll and eleven feet of twine and every bell and buckle and tin cup in the column, a line of noise strung across the whole width of the cut at ankle height, so that anything crossing it would say so.

Theo had warned him about that before he started:

”It copies sound.”

Wick, working entirely by his fingers on a frozen road at four in the morning, answered him without looking up:

”It copies sound it’s heard. It’s not heard this.”

He was tying off the last knot at the rock face when the cold came down the cut and Theo, twelve feet away, felt it arrive on the left side of his face and got one word out.

The line went off all at once, every bell and every cup, exactly as designed, and it was the most useful thing anybody did that night. It told Theo where the thing was to within four feet. He went in on the noise with the knife and he got a hand on it, and what he got a hand on was cold and had a grain to it like wet bark and it turned under his palm with an awful ease.

Then it was gone and the noise was gone and Wick was on the ground at the base of the rock with the twine still round his fingers.

Five.

Berrin came out with him after that and Theo let him, because he had run out of arguments and because the boy had stopped asking.

They went down the road together roped at the wrist, four feet of line between them, and Theo taught him the cold trail in about ninety seconds and Berrin had it.

He was good. Nineteen years old, no rank worth the panel it was written on, and he could hold his breath and put his heel down soft and turn his face until the cold sat even, and he did it all inside two minutes of being told.

They found it in the open at the foot of the spur, and Theo went in low with the knife and it took him across the chest and put him twelve feet into a drift.

He came out of the drift with three ribs gone and no Adaptive Evolution to hand them back, and he heard Berrin go past him in the dark, shouting, going the wrong way on purpose.

’No, that’s the—’

Berrin was drawing it off. He had been in the cut when Theo explained how it charged him and he had understood the arrangement perfectly well, and he was nineteen and he was making it charge somebody else.

He got about eleven seconds.

Somewhere in the middle of those eleven seconds, out of the black, at the top of his voice, he shouted the only thing he had ever said to Theo that Theo would repeat afterwards:

”THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE FOR—”

Then the road was quiet.

Theo got up out of the snow with three ribs floating and went and did his job.

He put the whole of the night into it. The cold on both cheeks. The crust under the heel. And his own breath coming back off a rock face he could not see.

He went up the trail at a walk with his ears open, and he found the thing standing in the middle of the road eighty yards up with its back to him doing absolutely nothing at all.

It was waiting for him. He knew that, and he went anyway, and he was correct to.

Two years of Attendant’s Hands putting things exactly where he meant them to go. Plates, pins, pots, a needle in a lamplit room.

Theo came off the shoulder of the road at the run, put his left hand flat on the thing’s back to find the spine of it, walked his fingers up four inches to the gap he could feel under the bark, and put nine inches of boning steel into it to the handle.

It went in. All of it. He felt the resistance change three times going through and he knew, with a butcher’s certainty, that he had put it through the middle of something.

The thing made a sound he had not heard yet.

Then the dark closed over the wound.

He felt it happen with his hand still on the haft. The black came in around the steel like water going into a hole, unhurried, and the bark knitted, and the knife came loose in Theo’s fist with nothing at all on the blade.

He fell back into the snow and got the eyes open, because he had to know.

It was empty. A clean field where the world should have been.

And behind him, four hundred yards down a dead mountain road, Rill was the only person left alive in the cut.