Chapter 553 - 548: The Least of Them

Chapter 553: Chapter 548: The Least of Them

Location:Zhū’kethara — The Eastern Quarter

Date/Time:8 Sparkfall 9943 AZI, Hammerday, Late Morning

Realm:Upper Realm

The forge in the yard had been cold for longer than anybody had kept count of, and somebody had lit it.

Ren heard it before he came round the wall — the particular uneven roar of a fire being worked by a man who had not worked one in a long time and was refusing to admit it, and under that the flat ring of a hammer landing on something that did not deserve it. The sound carried down two streets. Half the quarter had found reasons to be at that end of it.

Ilvaren stopped at the corner without being told and stayed there.

Ren went in alone.

The yard belonged to a house that had stood empty since before the borders shut, and the man in it had been given it because nobody had wanted to argue about where else to put him. He was enormous. Not tall the way Theron was tall; wide, built like something quarried, white hair cropped down to nothing and shoulders that had been made by two hundred and fifty thousand years of picking things up. He wore no coat. The scars on his forearms were old enough that the jade had gone silver over them.

He did not stop hammering, and he did not look round.

"Whatever it is," Vorthen said, "no."

"You do not know what it is," Ren said.

"I do not need to." The hammer came down. "You have been into this yard more times than I can be bothered to count since you took me out of that mountain, and there has never once been a thing in it for me. You come to see how I am getting on." Another stroke. "I am getting on."

Ren stopped at the edge of the heat. "Not today."

"That is what a man says on his way to asking me how I am getting on." Vorthen turned the piece over without looking at it. "Well. Stand where I can see you, then, and do it standing, because I am not having the King of this realm hovering at my gate like a boy sent with a message."

Ashara was on the step. She had a bowl in her lap and a knife in it, and she had not looked up since Ren came through the gate, and she was going to keep not looking up, and Ren understood exactly how much attention that was.

He took the folded sheet out of his coat.

"I have something in my ground," he said. "I want a name for it."

***

He put it flat on the anvil, which was the only clean surface in the yard, and Vorthen set the hammer down beside it.

The drawing was poor. Ren had made it at a fire four days east with a dying man breathing badly across from him, and he was not a draftsman, and the whole of what he had learned about drawing was that a line you are unsure of should be left off. So there was very little on the sheet. The front edge, eight paces of it. The length behind. The underside ring, and the plates set round it in their inward spiral.

Kaelen had spent months in a cellar under the east tower going through every scroll the realm held on the lost world — entry conditions, terrain, what to carry, what came back out and what it was worth — and there was a great deal of it, and demons had walked in there and walked home again, and not one line in any of it described anything coming the other way.

So the paper had failed, and Ren had come to the oldest thing awake in his realm instead.

Vorthen looked at the drawing for about as long as it takes to look at a door.

"How deep."

"A thousand feet. Perhaps more."

"Gray ground or sand?"

Ren paused. "Sand, on the surface. The chamber was under it."

"Then you are lucky, and you do not know it yet." Vorthen turned the sheet a quarter around, which did not improve it. "Is it dead?"

"I killed it."

"You." Not a question, and no weight on it either. "How long did that take?"

"Under a minute."

"And what did it cost you?"

"Four seconds," Ren said, "in the wrong part of the room. And a Kael’thoren I nearly did not get back."

Vorthen made a sound that was not quite anything and put a thick finger on the ring at the center of the drawing.

"This does not bite. You know that."

"I found that out."

"It goes over a thing, and it stays on it, and it does not hurry, because nothing it was made for ever ran." He straightened. "There is no name. We never gave it one. You do not name what you sweep out of a room, and by the time anybody thought it might be worth naming, everybody who would have known what to call it was dead of something else."

Ren stood very still.

"You have seen it."

"I have killed more of them than you have men in that fortress," Vorthen said, "and I never once thought about it afterward, and that is the part you are going to want to sit down for."

+++

He went for his armor.

He did not announce it. He turned away from the anvil and crossed the yard and pulled a chest out from under the lean-to and opened it, and the smell that came up out of it was oil and old leather and the flat mineral cold of plate that has been in the dark, and Ren watched a man of a quarter of a million years begin arming himself in a courtyard in the middle of the morning without asking anybody’s permission.

Ashara went on cutting whatever was in the bowl.

"They are not from here," Vorthen said, working a buckle he had not worked in sixty thousand years and getting it right on the second try. "Nothing on this world is built like that. There is nothing for it to eat on this world either, which is why you found one asleep and not forty awake."

"Where."

"The lost world. They came out of it." He shrugged one shoulder into the harness. "When it was open. When it was a place you went and came back from, and half the realm had been through it, and my mother’s brother went in and came out with a sword I saw with my own eyes."

Ren said nothing.

"Nobody tells you that part any more," Vorthen said, "because everybody who went is asleep or in a wall. So I will tell you. It did not shut politely. The last time it was in reach of this world it came apart at the seams, and a very great deal came out of it that was never meant to be on the same side of a door as anything that dies." He pulled the second strap. "And we spent about four thousand years killing all of it. Give or take. I stopped counting somewhere during it, which I have regretted ever since, because now there is nobody left to check me and I sound like a liar." He looked up, and his eyes were the flat white of a man who has been angry so long it has become his resting weight. "Who was punished for it, do you think? For opening it. For standing there while it came out."

"I do not know."

"Nobody. Nobody was punished, and nobody was thanked, and it went into the rolls as a bad few centuries in the east." Vorthen reached back into the chest. "We did the largest thing this race has ever done, and it is not written down anywhere as a thing at all. That is what your archive is, boy. Four floors of who owned what."

Ren let the boy pass, because it was accurate.

"And this one," he said.

"That one." Vorthen laughed, once, without any humor in it whatsoever. "That one is a cleaner. It eats the dead, and it eats spoiled energy, and it does not fight, and it cannot be taught to. On the other side of that door it lives under the floor, and nobody looks at it twice." He stood up with the last piece in his hands. "It was the least of them. It was the very least of them, and it took four seconds off a demon king and nearly killed one of his own, and I want you to hold both of those in your head at once while you think about the rest of what came through."

The yard was quiet.

Somewhere past the wall a cart went by, and somebody shouted at it, and the sound arrived from a very long way off.

"They went to ground," Ren said slowly. "The ones you did not find."

"There was nothing to eat. They do not starve; they stop." Vorthen looked at the drawing again. "It will lie under a floor for as long as there is nothing on the other side of it. Fifty years. Fifty thousand. It makes no difference to them and never has."

And then Ren had it, and it went through him like water going into a boot.

"The worms," Ren said.

Vorthen’s head came up.

"That chamber was seeded. Nine thousand years and more ago, by an enemy that has never once in its history done a thing by accident. I do not know what went into the ground. A pair would have been enough, and a pair is what I would have used, and there is nobody left alive to ask." Ren’s voice had not changed at all, and his hands had closed. "It does not matter what went in. Whatever it was had all the time it needed, and by the end of it that chamber was a nest. And when I stood in the middle of it, there was not one of them left in it. No shed casing. No midden. Nothing had died down there. We have three circles in this realm, and my people have been standing on top of all three of them writing nothing living for more than two years, and being correct every time."

Vorthen laid the drawing flat on the anvil.

"Somebody put a nest down," he said, "on top of one of these."

"Yes."

"Then you did not lose your nests. Your nests were delivered." He picked up his gauntlets. "And there were three of these under your ground, and not one, and you have killed one of them, and the other two have been awake and fed for a very long time, and neither of them is asleep now, because a thing that has eaten does not go back down until the eating stops. Where is the well?"

"Four days east."

"Then I will need a horse."

***

Ren put a hand on Vorthen’s chest.

He did it flat, open, and without any essence in it at all, which was the only version of it that was not an insult, and it still stopped a man who had been walking.

Vorthen looked down at the hand. Then up.

"Take it off me."

"The well is gone." Ren did not move the hand. "It collapsed in the third hour after we came up. I was fifty paces off with my back to it, and I turned round, and there was a dish in the sand where a well had been since that holder’s great-grandfather. The field takes its door back. Every time, and while you watch."

"Then we dig another."

"There is no other. Not into that one and not into the two beside it. Wells, bores, old shafts — every way under a dead field is something a man cut for a different reason a long time ago, and each of them works exactly once."

"Then I will make one."

"That field closes holes. It is the only thing it does well," Ren said, "and you will do it at the bottom of a shaft with no draft in it, and you will be under two of them in the dark on your own, and I will have spent the only man alive who has ever fought one of these in exchange for nothing."

Vorthen took a step forward.

Ren did not give it to him.

It was not a fight, and neither of them pretended it was. It was a quarter of a million years of a man’s weight going forward and a demon king declining to be moved, and it lasted the part of a second it took Vorthen to establish that the ground under Ren’s feet was not going anywhere. Nothing broke. Nothing on this world had broken anything of Ren’s in a very long time, and this did not either.

What it cost him was that he had to do it in a courtyard, in front of a woman on a step, to a man he had woken up.

Vorthen stood down.

"You are stronger than me," he said, without heat.

"By very little, and not today."

"Today is when it counts." He rolled his shoulder out of the harness and did not take it off. "There is nothing to fight on this margin. My line is finished, so there are no grandchildren for me to be any use to, and every second person in this city is a half-breed who steps around me in the street like I am a cart somebody left out." He said it perfectly evenly. "And then you come into my yard with a drawing of something I killed before your house had a name, and tell me it is under your ground, and put a hand on me."

"Yes."

"Then find me a way in," Vorthen said, "and do not take a year about it."

***

Ashara set the bowl down on the step.

"He will not sleep tonight," she said, to nobody in particular, and went inside.

Ren stayed in the yard a moment after Vorthen had gone back to the chest, because leaving immediately would have been a kind of answer, and he had not decided which one he wanted to give.

The fire had gone down while they talked. Nobody had fed it.

Two of them, then. Awake and fed and a thousand feet down, and a third opened once and killed and its shaft filled in behind it, and no door into any of the three, and the only living authority on them standing in a courtyard buckling on plate he had last worn during the Sundering. Somewhere west of him, eight hundred thousand people who had come here with nothing were still being fitted into a realm that had never been built with room for them. Somewhere four days east, a man named Denvahr had a dish of sand where his well used to be, and Ren still owed him for it.

And in six years, or five, or whenever it suited the thing to arrive, a door was going to open again.

Everyone on this world was afraid of that door for what was behind it. Divine weapons, and every realm’s strongest queuing to go in, and Sharlin counting quarters against a clock. Ren stood in a cold yard in the eastern quarter and found that he had joined a very much smaller group of people, most of whom were asleep in a mountain, who were afraid of it for what had come out of it last time and had been dealt with by men nobody bothered to write down.

He put the drawing back in his coat.

Behind his ribs the Vor’kalth stood exactly where it had stood for months, head east, awake, aware, entirely turned away, busy with something on the other side of a wall it had built itself. He offered it the yard and the drawing and the four thousand years, and it took none of it, and he had stopped expecting it to and had not stopped offering.

"Da’Ren."

Vorthen had not turned around.

"Your archive will not have it," he said. "Any of it. I have watched three of these realms write their own histories now, and not one of them has ever recorded the part where somebody cleaned up. So when you go back down those stairs and find nothing, do not take it as evidence that I am mistaken."

"I had already found nothing."

"Good." The hammer went back onto the anvil, next to where the drawing had been. "Then you came here in the right order, which is more than the last king managed."