It looked at him, and he was a bucket with the bottom out.
That was the whole of it, for a while. The six threads went through him and through Aldo and into the open dark, and the dark drank them without asking, and what it drank it kept. He could feel it keeping. Every Current that passed through his hands left a little of him behind in the cold, and the cold was so complete that there was no room in him for anything else, not fear, not Aldo, not his own name. His hands were white to the wrist. Then the elbow. He watched the white go up his arms the way the frost had gone up the posts in the pen, in ferns, and could not stop watching, and could not stop.
Slack, said some small part of him that still had words. This is slack. This is what the Quiet feel.
Only it did not stop at an hour.
Somewhere a long way off, in the dark that was a place, something was whispering.
It did not have a voice. It had his. It took the sound of the cold going through him and shaped it, gently, the way a hand shapes wet sand, and what it shaped was a woman kneeling in mud with her face very close to his, frightened, and trying not to let him see it.
Wicky.
He knew it was not her. He knew it the way he had known the stag was not a stag.
Wicky. You’re so tired. Come in out of it. Come and rest.
It was not her, and he wanted it to be more than he had wanted anything, and the white was past his elbows.
You’ve carried it long enough. Put it down.
He thought: I have nowhere to put it down.
And then, from a long way down, in a voice like something said from the bottom of a well: Seven, on a swept floor, with a leaf on his chest.
Taken, it bites. Given, it warms.
He had grabbed. A bottle, a river, a warden’s face, his own brother. The dark was only doing to him what he had always done to the air.
He had asked once in his life, by an oak, with a knife in Ilsa’s hand, and it had cost him more than the river. He had never asked all of them. He had never asked for himself.
He opened his mouth. It was full of cold. He made it work anyway.
“Give,” he said.
It came out a croak. Nobody could have heard it. He dragged in a breath that felt like swallowing the Marrow and tried again, and this time it was not a croak, it was the voice he used for carrying ale through a brawl, the one that went to the back of a taproom.
“Don’t let me take it. GIVE it. Everything. For me. NOW!”
Brakka went first, because Brakka always did.
She was standing over Vosk with her thigh bleeding and Auntie in her good hand, and she heard him, and she did not ask what he meant. She set her feet on the stone of the dig, and drew breath, all of it, and she looked across the broken ring of braziers at a boy on his knees with his arms white to the shoulder, and she gave him the war-cry.
Not at the rock. To him. She snapped it with her eyes on his face, and the floor of the cavern rang like a bell under a hammer, every stone of it, and the grit-hum went into Wick’s teeth and his bones and the hole in the middle of him, grey-gold and warm as a hearth, and for the first time since the gate opened he felt the floor under his knees.
Oswin was next, and Oswin did not throw one thing.
He stood in the coals with his coat open and both webbed hands going into his pockets, every pocket that would burn, which was most of them, and he threw it all at once into the dead Ember brazier at his feet, flash-eggs and cartridges and glue-pots and the pink camphor smoke and things Wick had never seen him take out, in one great double armful, and struck a sulphur-stick on the iron and dropped it in after. The brazier went up in a gout of yellow to the cavern roof, and the shimmer that came off it was hot iron and burnt sugar and camphor, and it came to Wick gold-red and did not bite at all.
And on his shoulders, from behind, two hands that burned.
Veyra Sel’s. Bare, the colour of iron in a forge, pressed flat to his shoulders through his wet shirt so that the cloth smoked, and she said in his ear in her clipped cold voice, “This is given, child. Take it as given,” and the Ember that came down through her hands into him was not a curtain and not a river. It was a hearth. It was the thing her people said to each other at a door.
Ilsa threw.
He did not see her draw. He heard her, behind him and to the left, say “Wick,” flat and quick, the way she had said it in the hollow, and then the knife went past his ear.
It went past so close that the wind of it lifted his hair, and it was the throw, the perfect one, her whole body in a line from heel to fingertip, snapped, and the knife went into the open dark beyond the gate and was gone, and the Gale came off it grey-white and full, like a door kicked open, and it went into him like a shove between the shoulder-blades, and he found that he was no longer kneeling. He was up on one knee. He did not know when that had happened.
Skritch dived.
The dig had a channel. The drain, the one that ran under the pens, came out at the foot of the gate in a stone trough with a foot of black water in it, and Skritch went into it from the top of a fallen scaffold-pole head-first, without a splash, the way he had gone into the harbour under the fishmongers’ pier with a satchel in his teeth. He was under for the length of a breath. Then the trough exploded. He came up out of it in a fountain, a column of black water as high as the braziers, spinning, with his whiskers streaming and the tin button flying on its string, and the Tide came off him in a sheen Wick could taste, grey-green and thick as a rope, and it was his.
A cask of cold with a chain on it.
He looked down at his brother’s hands in his.
“Aldo,” he said. “Give me the year.”
The hands did not move.
“It’s yours. It’s not his, it never was, you never gave it him, you kept it. A year of cold. Give it me.” He was shouting into a grey face with its eyes shut. “I’m your brother. You said you’d make sure I never went on the boats. Give me the cold, Aldo, I can hold it, I’m a bucket—”
The eyes opened.
They looked at him from a long way down. And the hands in his hands turned, slowly, with the stiffness of rust, and closed, and Aldo Marsh gave his little brother a year of Rime.
It came up out of him in a flood. Twelve months of it, every trip to the door, every bite, every cross on the wall; the whole cask, all at once, blue-white, so much that the air round their joined hands went solid with glitter and the coals of the braziers hissed and whitened. And it did not bite. It came into Wick like a brother coming through a door after fifteen months, cold and tired and home, and the white on his arms stopped at the shoulder, and went no further.
Five.
He had five. He could feel them in him like five colours of fire in a ring, given, warm, and the sixth brazier was a heap of cold iron, and the sixth ring of the gate wanted light, and there was none in the air.
“Seven,” he said.
The Lumen was standing at the edge of the coals with its grey arm hanging and its face turned to him, copper and gold and grey, with the leaves falling from it now in a steady drift, not one at a time but a shower, grey-stemmed, settling on the black stone of the dig and on the coals and on Aldo’s hair. It had been standing there, he understood, waiting to be asked.
“Spring, little flame,” said Seven, and smelled, for one breath, of cut grass.
And went to seed.
It did not fall. It did not fade. It closed, like a flower at dusk: the arms folding in, the head bowing, the whole tall copper-and-gold length of it drawing down into itself and hardening as it went, bark to husk to a thing the size and shape of a great brown seed-pod standing on end in the coals. And out of the closing, as it closed, came everything Seven had ever held.
Light.
Gleam, white, the brightness at the edges of things, only it was not at the edges now, it was everything. Three hundred years of it. It came out of the seed-pod in a flood that lit the cavern from floor to roof and made the open gate a black hole in a white world, and it came to Wick. Not past him. To him.
Six.
Six Currents, given, in a bucket, and the bucket had a bottom after all.
He did not weave it. He had never known how. He put his two hands round his brother’s two hands, and the thread went white, and he thought of the only form he had, which was stop.
Stop. Stop. STOP.
And this time it was not a river that stopped. It was a tide.
Six threads went out of the brothers’ hands, not into the dark but against it: the way Brakka had swung a bench across the whole front of the Gilded Blades on the first night. Not at anyone. Just across. The black-bright tide that had been coming in over the floor of the dig stopped where it was. It stood. And it went back.
The rings turned.
Six. Five, silver, going dark. Four, with the ice going off it. The great black disc began to swing on its hinge nobody had seen, slowly, and the cold that was a place behind it narrowed, and narrowed, and in the narrowing dark there was still the thing that had looked at him, vast and patient, turning its head away now, the way a dog turns from a door that is being shut.
Benedek Quill walked toward it.
He had not run. He had stood through all of it with his staff in both hands and his Carrovan robe hanging off him like a sheet, and now he put the staff down, carefully, and took off his spectacles and folded them and put them in his pocket, and walked across the dig toward the closing gate with the white light throwing his thin shadow out behind him forty feet. Nobody stopped him. Nobody could have. He went between the third ring and the fourth, into the narrowing dark, an old man in a borrowed robe going into the Under after the thing he had read about for forty years.
At the edge he looked back. Once. At Wick, on his knees in the coals with his arms white to the shoulder and his brother’s hands in his, and his face in the white light was the face from the taproom, mild and tired and fond.
“Tell them I was careful,” said Benedek Quill.
Then the gate shut.
It shut with no sound at all.
Twenty times Brakka’s height, a disc of black stone that had cracked the world opening, and it closed on an old man and a cold that was a place like a book being shut by somebody who loved it, and the rings went dark, outermost to innermost, one, two, three, four, five, six, and the frost in the carvings went from grey to white to nothing.
Silence.
The Quiet that were left on the dig, the few that had come up out of the crack after the Thunderclap and had stood frozen in Seven’s light, did not fall. They went. Grey to ash, from the middle out, all at once, the way the fourth wolf had gone, and the ash blew across the black floor in the draught from the windlass shaft and settled, and the song-stone in Wick’s pocket was a stone again. A grey smooth thumb-end of stone, humming faintly against his leg, like a bee in a jar. Happy.
He let go of Aldo’s hands.
They were warm.
Not very. But they were hands, with blood in them, and the white had gone back from the wrists to the fingertips, where it would stay, and his brother was lying on his back in the coals breathing, in and out, with his eyes shut and the grey gone out of his face, and his mouth moved, and what it said was “Wicky,” and nothing else.
Wick looked at his own hands.
White. Dead white, to the shoulder, both arms, and they did not ache at all. That was the last thing he noticed before the floor came up: that they did not hurt, and that somewhere behind him a Varr was roaring his name, and that there was a brown seed-pod standing in a bed of grey leaves at the edge of the fire, and that it was warm, he could feel it from here, warm the way a hearth is warm from the next room.
Then it was dark, and it was an ordinary dark, and he went into it.