Chapter 158: The Merging

"You took your time," Alice said.

Logan stepped up onto the rock beside her. The pools around the circle lay flat and still, and the reeds leaned left in the draft from the windows. Every one of them leaned the same way this time.

They were not alone for long.

Rishin came up the lane with his hands in his sleeves, walking the way old men walk before their knees have warmed. Garen and Isolde followed him. Billy rolled in behind them and parked at the foot of the rock, and his blades were humming.

"Nobody told me there was going to be a merge," Billy said.

"Nobody told you because you would have woken the whole gallery," said Logan.

"I would have woken them quietly."

Alice opened the circle, and then she stopped with her hand above it.

"Say it once more," she said. "I want everyone to hear exactly what we are testing before I spend two hundred points on it."

Logan nodded.

"Every unit that enters the Abyss gets one year. A unit summoned in here starts with a full three hundred and sixty-five days, the way Pebble did."

He held up two fingers. "Alice summons two fresh units. I merge them. One of them carries on with a stronger body, and the other becomes part of him."

"And then we read his lifespan," Alice said.

"And then we read his lifespan. If it says three hundred and sixty-five, the curse does not care what I do. If it says anything else, we learn what a merge costs or what it buys."

Rishin had lowered himself onto the same dry hump of stone he had used before. He did not speak, but he was watching Logan’s hands.

Alice pressed her palm to the circle.

[ Summon: Combat Unit x2 ] [ Cost: 200 Tower Points ] [ Remaining Tower Points: 50 ]

Two columns of light rose out of the ring, side by side.

The first one widened into a lean figure about Alice’s height. He was wrapped from throat to ankle in briars and thorn-vines, which grew over him the way ivy grows over a wall.

He carried a short bow of dark wood. As the light left him, a vine at his wrist curled outward and stiffened into an arrow, and he set it to the string without looking.

[ Thistleblade Ranger (Uncommon) Summoned ]

The second column never took a standing shape at all. It shrank instead, and it burst upward in a flurry of pale wings.

A small falcon shot toward the roof and began to circle between the stone icicles. Its feathers were nearly white, and the edges of them caught the light like knife blades.

It made one thin, clear sound as it flew, like a boy whistling through his teeth.

[ Whistling Falcon (Uncommon) Summoned ]

"Away from the windows," Alice called up to it at once. "Stay under the roof."

The falcon tilted on one wing and came around. It landed on top of the nearest pillar and looked down at her with one bright black eye.

’Two Uncommons,’ Logan thought. ’Two of the same rank make one of the next. That gives her a Rare.’

Alice opened both panels, one after the other. Each of them said three hundred and sixty-five days.

She looked across the pool at Rishin.

"You told Logan to name every one," she said. "Even these?"

"Especially these," Rishin said.

Alice turned to the ranger. He stood very straight with his bow held low, and he was waiting for her the way Terry waited.

"You are Burr," she told him.

"Lady," said Burr. He had a quiet, scratchy voice, like wind through a hedge.

She looked up at the pillar. "And you are Whistle."

The falcon whistled.

"Now listen, both of you, because I am not going to do this without telling you." Alice’s voice was steady, but Logan saw her fingers knot together behind her back.

"He is going to merge you. One of you carries on. The other one becomes part of him. That part is good, and I have watched it a hundred times."

She swallowed.

"What I do not know is what it does to your year. It might cost you days. I will not pretend otherwise."

Burr thought about it. Then he lifted his left arm and held it out level, with the wrist turned up.

Whistle dropped off the pillar, crossed the pool in one glide, and landed on the offered wrist. He folded his wings and settled there, and he looked at Alice as if the matter were closed.

"I think they have decided," Garen said softly.

"Burr carries on," Alice said. She had to clear her throat first. "I know what to do with an archer."

Logan opened Boundless Genesis.

[ Boundless Genesis ] [ Effect 1: Merge ] [ Select two units. ]

He chose Burr first, because the unit he chose first always stayed himself. Then he chose Whistle.

Five hundred MP left him in a single cold pull.

The outlines of the ranger and the falcon turned gold. Their feet left the rock, and they drifted toward each other as if a slow current had caught them both.

Light closed around the pair of them and folded inward until there was only a bright seam hanging in the air.

Isolde’s hand had closed on Garen’s sleeve. Even Billy’s blades had gone still.

Then the light cracked open.

[ Merge Complete ] [ Thistleblade Ranger (Uncommon) + Whistling Falcon (Uncommon) ] [ Thornwing Falconer (Rare) Created. ]

Burr stood on the rock.

He was still lean, and he still had the same narrow, patient face.

But the briars had thickened across his shoulders into a short cloak, and every thorn along it had flattened into a pale, sharp-edged feather. The bow in his hand was half again as long as before.

A falcon sat on his left wrist. It was made of living briar, woven as tightly as a basket, with white feathers where the leaves should have been. It turned its head toward Alice and whistled the same thin note.

"Whistle," Alice said, and her voice cracked on it.

"He is here, Lady," Burr said. He sounded a little surprised. "I can feel him thinking. He thinks I am slow."

Alice laughed, and she wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. Then she opened his panel.

Logan watched her read it. He watched her read it a second time.

"Alice," he said.

She turned the panel around so that all of them could see.

[ Thornwing Falconer ] [ Name: Burr ] [ Rank: Rare ] [ Lifespan: 730 days ] [ Lifespan may be exchanged for Abyss Points at any Relic Shop. ]

"Seven hundred and thirty," Alice said.

Logan sat down on the edge of the rock. He had not meant to. His legs had simply decided.

’It adds,’ he thought. ’Both years went in, and both years came out. Nothing was lost.’

"Boss," Billy said. Then, considerably louder, "BOSS."

"I see it, Billy."

"Seven hundred and thirty! That is two of them! That is two whole years on one unit!"

"I can count."

Garen let out a long, low whistle. Isolde had pressed her fingertips against her lips, and above them her eyes were very wide.

Rishin had not moved from his hump of stone. He was looking at the briar falcon on Burr’s wrist.

"I wondered," he said.

Logan turned. "You wondered?"

"Since your garden." The old man’s voice was low.

"I told you once what I know of talents like yours. They are tied to the Tower itself, and to whatever authority runs it."

"The curse is only a rule of the Abyss, and the Abyss is only one floor of the Tower. I wondered which of the two would give way."

"And you did not say anything."

"I did not know the answer." Rishin finally looked at him. "I do not tell people things I do not know. It is how hope kills them down here."

He got up off the stone, slowly, and came around the pool to stand in front of Logan.

"Now hear the rest," he said. "Every relic in every shop is bought with a unit’s days. The Abyss is the only seller of time in this place, and it has been since long before I first came down. You have just become the second."

Logan thought of the amber lantern beside the door in the wall.

"A hundred Tower Points is a year," he said slowly. "For any unit I merge. I can put a year on Billy for every fresh unit I fold into him."

"More years than this place will ever let him use," Rishin agreed.

"And a unit carrying two years can spend one at a shop and still see the end of ours." Alice had worked it through just as quickly. "Tower Points go in, and Abyss Points come out. Nobody has to die for a relic."

"Nobody of yours," said Rishin.

That stopped both of them.

"People have killed each other down here over a single relic," the old man said. "I have seen it done. For a boy who can make years, they would do a great deal worse than kill him. They would keep him."

Isolde lowered her hand from her mouth.

"Then nobody outside this gallery hears of it," she said. Her voice had gone flat and cold, and Logan remembered that she was ranked ninth on Earth. "Not in that town below us. Not on any layer."

"No merging where a stranger can see," Garen said. "Not once. If it needs doing, we put a roof over it and a wall of my units around the roof."

"And be careful at the shops," Rishin added. "Whoever keeps them can see exactly what they are being paid with."

Helen and Daniel arrived a little later with Vina between them. Pebble walked at Daniel’s side.

Vina saw Burr first, and then she saw what was sitting on his wrist. She let go of both her parents and ran.

"Is that a bird? Is it made of sticks? Can I touch it?"

"His name is Whistle," Alice said. "Ask him."

Whistle considered the small hand that was held out to him. He leaned down and ran his beak along one of her fingers, the way a real falcon preens a feather.

Vina made a sound too high for words.

Logan watched his sister, and he watched Pebble crane his neck to see. He opened Pebble’s panel. It read three hundred and sixty-four days. Billy’s read three hundred and sixty-one.

’Ten Tower Points,’ he thought. ’I have ten, and a year costs a hundred. I have never wanted points so badly in any match I ever played.’

They left the gallery by the second arch.

After so long under a roof, the open drop seemed wider than ever. The path picked up where the rock ended and ran on down the face of the Abyss. Rishin stopped a few paces along it to let them look.

Far below them, the wall was split by a deep cleft, and the cleft was full of lights.

They were not the green of the glowing caps or the blue of the rim lanterns. They were orange and yellow, and there were dozens of them.

They were the lights of fires and lamps, stacked one above another up the sides of the cleft, with thin threads of smoke rising between them.

"Is that another rim?" Vina asked.

"No," Rishin said. "That is where people stop. Every layer has a place like it, because the ones who stay have to live somewhere."

Logan thought of Oddren on the edge of Hollowreach with his line running into the dark, and of Tavi sitting down beside him.

’There is a whole town of them down there,’ he thought.

The path took its time reaching it.

It switched back and forth down the wall in long, careful legs. With every turn the lights grew larger, and the smell of woodsmoke grew stronger. Under the smoke there was a smell of frying fat, and Logan’s stomach turned over at it.

At the bottom of the last leg, a wall of piled stone had been built across the mouth of the cleft. It stood twice the height of a man. There was one gap in it, just wide enough for a cart.

A man sat on a stool in the gap with a lamp at his feet.

He was grey-skinned and heavy, with four fingers on each hand, like the fisherman on the rim. He watched them come down the final stretch without getting up. His eyes went along the whole line of them, and Logan saw his lips move.

He was not counting the people. He was counting the units.

"New," the man said, when Rishin stopped in front of him. "How many days?"

"Three hundred and sixty-one," said Rishin.

The man nodded. His eyes had gone back to Billy and Terry, and to the knight with wings of light. They lingered there with an expression that Logan could not read at first. It was not fear, and it was not greed.

It was the way a hungry man looks at bread through a window.

"That is a great deal of time you are walking around with," the watchman said.

He picked up his lamp and moved his stool aside.

[ New area: Tarry ]

"Welcome to Tarry," he said. "Everybody here meant to leave."