Chapter 14 - Felt

They sang on the way.

I stood on the gatehouse roof with the wind in my face and listened to them come. I had been ready for shouting. I had been ready for war cries and drums and men banging swords on shields, as the bandits did in the stories Maple’s regulars told when they were drunk. I hadn’t been ready for singing. It came across the flats ahead of the candles, sixty voices or more, high and low, in no key at all, a long slow hymn with no words in it that I could make out, and it sounded like a church full of people who had all been woken in the middle of the night and were thrilled about it.

The candles came out of the willows and across the flats and onto the old road, and stopped at the edge of the light from my gate.

I could see them now. I could see faces. They were the same people I had seen in the catacombs, or their cousins: fat merchants in fur, thin wives in good wool, a boy who couldn’t have been sixteen in a velvet cap, two old men holding each other up. I could have lived a year off the fur in the front row alone, and not one of them looked like they had ever taken a punch. They all wore crimson cuffs. They all held their candles up in both hands, crying and smiling at the same time, and every one of them was looking past me, past the gatehouse, at the dark window of the warm room above the kitchen, where the Tome lay on the table.

Behind them, at the back, there were men who weren’t singing.

There were twelve of them, maybe fifteen. They had no candles. They had leather coats and boots that had walked a long way, and axes and short spears and a ladder, two ladders, and one of them was rolling his shoulders to loosen them. They were hired. I’d have bet my boots on it. The singers had money, and they had paid these men, and all these men cared about was the gate. Sixty people singing I could handle. Fifteen men with axes made my balls crawl up into my belly.

“Felix,” I said.

“Mm?”

He was sitting on the parapet of the gatehouse beside me with his legs crossed, wrapped in his black coat, eating an apple. I hadn’t heard him arrive. I hadn’t heard him climb the gatehouse, which had no stair on the outside, and I hadn’t heard the gate, which was barred, and I didn’t ask.

“There are men with axes.”

“I see them.” He took a bite of the apple, and looked at the man with the beard on the left for a long moment, and smiled to himself, and didn’t say why.

“Are you going to fight?”

“I’m going to watch,” said Felix. “I came to see what you do with your house.” He looked out at the candles. “And to keep count. Someone ought to.”

Down in the yard, Kaniz stood at the cellar door with a carving knife from the kitchen in her hand and her chain looped twice round her wrist so it wouldn’t swing. She had refused to go down. She had told me the egg had the door and the ring and the dark, and she had me, and I had nobody, so she would stand at the top of the stair. I had told her to go down. She had said, “No, master,” and kissed me, and stood there.

Kit and Jory stood in the yard by the well, side by side, gray and thin in the dark, and I wished to every god I knew that they could hold an axe.

The singing stopped.

In the silence, one man walked out of the crowd to the front of the light. He was tall, thin and gray-haired, in a plain black coat with no fur on it and crimson cuffs, and he held no candle. His face was long and clean-shaven and patient. He could have been somebody’s tutor. He looked up at me on the gatehouse with his hands folded, and when he spoke his voice was kind. In my experience, kind voices always want something off you.

“Young man,” said the Deacon. “We’ve come for the book.”

“It’s not for sale.”

“Nothing is being sold. It is being returned to the people who can hear it.” He smiled at me. “You can’t hear it. Can you? You sleep beside it every night, and you have never heard a word.”

“I hear it all the time. It never shuts up.”

“That isn’t hearing,” said the Deacon, and nodded to the men at the back.

They came for the gate first.

Two of the hired men went at it with axes, and the sound of it went through the whole gatehouse and up through my boots. Kit’s hinge held. The bar held. The axes bit into the oak and stuck, and the men wrenched them out and swung again, and each blow shook the roof under my feet. While they were at it, the others ran the two ladders up against the wall, one on either side of the gatehouse, and climbed.

I took the left ladder.

I didn’t think. Ashara had spent a year beating thinking out of me with a switch, and she had mostly managed it. I ran along the wall walk in the dark, low, with my dagger in my right hand and one of the cult’s own ritual knives in my left, and the first man’s head came up over the top of the wall just as I got there. He had a short spear in one hand and his other hand on the top rung. He saw me. I put the ritual knife through the back of his hand into the ladder.

He screamed. I kicked him in the face while he was screaming, and he went over backward with his hand still nailed to the rung, and the ladder went with him, and two men below went with the ladder, and they all hit the frozen ground together with a sound I didn’t like.

“One,” said Felix, from the gatehouse. “Three if you count the fall. I won’t.”

The right-hand ladder had three men on it. I was too far away. I ran back along the wall toward the gatehouse, and the first of them was over the top before I got there, a big bearded man with an axe, and he swung it at me sideways along the wall walk with both hands. I went under it. I didn’t decide to; my knees went, and the axe went over my head so close it took hair, and I came up inside his reach with my dagger, and he was limping. He was putting all his weight on his right leg.

I kicked the left knee.

It went with a crack, and he went down on the wall walk with a howl, and I put my dagger into the side of his neck as he fell, and pulled it out, and his blood went all over the stones. It was black in the dark, and it steamed. It was on my hands, hot, running down my wrists into my sleeves. Any other night that would have had me puking over the wall. I didn’t have time.

“Two,” said Felix. “I saw the knee an hour ago. I wondered when you would.”

The second man off the right ladder hit me before I turned round. He hit me with the butt of his spear in the back, and I went down on my face on the wall walk in the bearded man’s blood, and the third man came over the top behind him with a club and stood on my dagger hand. I heard something in my hand go. I didn’t feel it yet. I rolled, and the spear came down where my back had been and struck sparks off the stone, and I got my second dagger out of my belt with my left hand and put it through the spearman’s boot into his foot, and he screamed and fell off the wall into the yard with it still in him.

The clubman hit me in the head.

I don’t remember that one well. I remember the stars coming out in the wrong place, all over the inside of my eyes, and the stone coming up against my cheek, and the taste of blood, and being on my back on the wall walk looking up at a man with a club against the sky. I remember thinking, clear as day, that this was my wall, and I had bought it, and I had paid nineteen hundred gold for the privilege of being hit on the head on it.

The clubman lifted the club high over his head with both hands, to make sure of it, and that left everything under it open. I got my knee up between his legs as hard as I had ever done anything in my life, and he folded over me, and I got my thumbs into his eyes.

“Three,” said Felix. “Slow.”

The gate went.

Kit’s hinge held to the end. But the old post that Jory had told me was sound gave way at the top where the axes had been chewing at it, and the whole gate sagged inward on its bar with a groan, and the hired men put their shoulders to it, and it came down into the yard face first with a crash that rang the bell over the inn door.

The singing started again.

They came through the gateway and over the fallen gate, all of them, sixty candles in sixty pairs of clean pink hands, singing, with the hired men in front of them with their axes and spears. I was on my knees on the wall walk with blood in my eyes and a broken hand. They poured into my yard. I watched them trample through the snow by the stables, over Lily’s garden square, and I watched her ribbons get torn off and trodden under their feet, one, two, three, and the fourth one, on the handle of her spade, go over sideways and disappear under a fat man in fur. Lily was going to kill me, if they didn’t do it first.

I got up. I don’t know how. I found my dagger on the wall walk where the clubman had stamped it out of my hand, and picked it up with my left hand, and went down the gatehouse stair into the yard with my right hand hanging, and I went for them.

I don’t remember all of it. I remember pieces.

I remember the Shadow Dance coming and going. It came when I didn’t try, and went when I did, and when it came everything slowed down and I could see where they were all going to put their feet. When it went I was just a boy with a knife in a crowd of people singing. I remember cutting a hired man across the back of the thigh so he went down. I remember a woman with a candle walking straight into my dagger with her eyes shut and her mouth open, singing, and sliding off it, still singing. I remember somebody hitting me with a candlestick. I remember falling back, and back, across the yard toward the inn door, with Kaniz’s voice somewhere behind me shouting master, master, and the candles closing in round me in a ring, and the faces behind them wet and happy.

And I remember Kit and Jory.

They did everything a ghost can do. The yard went so cold that the cultists’ breath froze white and their candles guttered. Every shutter on the inn banged against its bar, over and over, until the walls rang. The bell over the door swung and tolled. If I’d walked into that on a dark night, I’d have shit myself. Kit rose up out of the snow in the middle of them with his eyes gone to black holes, the bruise black round his throat, and his mouth wide open, howling, “Leeeeeave,” and they looked at him, and they smiled, and they walked straight through him. Jory stood in front of the cellar door, in front of Kaniz, with his arms spread and the wound under his ribs open, black and running, and a hired man with an axe walked through Jory without even noticing he was there and swung at Kaniz, and Kaniz ducked, and the axe went into the doorframe, and Kaniz put the carving knife into his armpit.

“Kit,” I said.

Kit was beside me. He was at my shoulder, gray, with his hands going through the men in front of me again and again, trying to grab them, trying to push them, trying to do anything, and his hands went through them every time. He was crying. He was a dead man crying in his own yard.

“I can’t,” he was saying. “I can’t, I can’t, Samuel, I can’t hold them, I can’t…”

My back hit the inn door.

There was nowhere else to go. I stood with my shoulders against the oak and my dagger up in my left hand, and the candles stood in a half circle in front of me, six feet away, singing, and the Deacon came walking through them with his hands folded. He wasn’t singing. He looked at my broken hand, and at the blood on my face, and at the door behind me.

“Vessel,” he said, kindly. “Step aside.”

Up above me, the shutter of the warm room banged open.

“BOY.”

The Tome’s voice came down into the yard and hit it. It was louder than I had ever heard it, louder than the singing, and the singing stopped, all at once, and sixty faces turned up toward the window, and on every one of them there was such love that it turned my stomach.

“Boy,” said the Tome, again, and this time it was speaking only to me. “It is your house. They are yours. I cannot do one thing in this house that you do not allow.”

Kit had gone still at my shoulder.

“So,” said the Tome. “What do you allow?”

I looked at Kit.

He was beside me at the door, gray and wet-faced, with his hair in his eyes and the bruise round his throat. He looked back at me. He had begged me for things in the wall the night before, every filthy thing he could think of, and now, with the yard full of candles and my blood on the snow, he didn’t ask me for anything at all.

“Everything,” I said. “I allow everything.”

The Tome began to read.

It read aloud. In eight months I had heard it shout and sulk and lecture and scream and gloat, and I had never once heard it read, and I knew at once that the cult had been right about how it sounded. It was somebody reading in the next room, low and steady, and it never stopped for breath. I didn’t know the language. I knew I’d hear it in my sleep for the rest of my life. It came out of the window and down over the yard, and every cultist went down on their knees in the snow. They didn’t decide to. They went down all together, sixty of them, with their candles in their hands and their faces turned up, weeping, and the hired men stood among them with their axes and looked at each other, and for the first time that night they were scared shitless.

The blood in the snow moved.

It moved toward the ghosts. It came from the bearded man on the wall and the spearman under it, from the woman who had walked onto my knife, from the man Kaniz had put the carving knife into, from my own face and my own hand. It ran over the snow in thin black lines, uphill and sideways, which blood doesn’t do. It ran to Jory at the cellar door and to Kit beside me, and it climbed them. It went up their legs and over their chests in little lines of writing, and wherever it went, they got thicker and darker and less see-through.

Kit gasped.

He was against my shoulder, and he went from cold to cool to warm, and he stopped being a tingle going through me and started being a man leaning on me, heavy, all of him. My body noticed that before I did. The writing sank into him and disappeared. His bare feet came down in the snow and left prints. His shirt moved in the wind. His hair stopped being gray, and went brown, and fell into his eyes, and the bruise round his throat faded away and was gone, and he looked down at his own hands, solid and warm, and at the snow melting under his feet, and he laughed.

At the cellar door, Jory picked the hired man’s axe out of the doorframe.

He did it with one hand. He weighed it, the way he must have weighed a hundred tools while he built this house, and turned round to the yard full of people kneeling in his snow, and all the patience went out of his face.

“You came in,” said Jory, “without knocking.”

They tore them apart.

I want to tell it properly. I owe Kit and Jory that. They had been dead three winters, and they had watched the gate and the road and the empty yard every day of those three winters, and they had been unable to lift a cup, and now they had bodies again, warm and heavy, and the people in the yard had come into their house with axes and opened a carter on four bowls.

Jory went through the hired men first. He took the first one’s head half off with the axe, one swing, and the man’s body stood there a moment after with the blood shooting out of his neck before it fell over. The second one ran at him with a spear, and Jory caught the spear in his free hand, and pulled, and the man came with it, and Jory broke his neck over his knee and dropped him. The third one tried to get back over the fallen gate, and Jory threw the axe after him, end over end, and it went into his back between the shoulders and carried him down onto the gate face first. That was three men in about four breaths, and Jory never said a word. I had never been so glad to own anybody in my life.

Kit used his bare hands.

He went through the kneeling cultists laughing. He picked up a fat man in fur by the front of his coat and threw him into the well housing so hard the stones moved. He took a woman by her elaborate hair, the plump woman with the rings from the willows, and she beamed up at him and said, “Oh, you,” and he swung her by the hair into the wall of the stable and she stopped saying anything. He tore the throat out of a man in a velvet coat with his fingers. He was laughing and crying at once, with blood up to his elbows and blood in his hair and blood running down his bare chest under his half-laced shirt, and I noticed the chest, which says nothing good about me, and every so often he looked back across the yard at me by the door to see if I was watching, like a boy showing off on a wall.

I was watching. I couldn’t look away. My stomach turned over and over and my cock was hard, both at once, sick and hard, standing up in my trousers, with a broken hand and a dagger in the other, and I didn’t understand it and I didn’t try to.

Most of the cultists stayed on their knees in the snow, weeping, with their faces turned up to the window and the reading coming down over them, while Kit and Jory killed them one after another. A few of them came to their senses and got up and ran for the gate, and the ghosts let those go. I couldn’t have chased a chicken by then. Jory stood in the gateway and watched them scramble over the fallen gate into the dark, and didn’t stop them, and turned back to the yard.

“Those can tell the others,” he said.

The Deacon was gone.

I looked for him. I looked across the yard, through the bodies and the candles lying in the snow still burning, and he wasn’t anywhere, and I knew where he was before I had finished looking. The inn door was against my back. It had been against my back the whole time. But the kitchen had its own door, round the side, by the woodpile, and it had a latch I had never once checked.

I went through the common room at a run.

I went past the egg’s empty place at the hearth and up the stairs with my broken hand against my chest and my dagger in my left fist, along the gallery, and the door of the warm room was open, and the Deacon was standing in the middle of the room with the Tome in his arms.

He had it cradled against his chest with both arms round it, and his long patient face was bent down over it, and he was crying. The Tome was still reading. It read on in its low, endless voice, with its eye shut, and the Deacon held it and swayed and wept. He looked happier than anybody I’d ever had in my bed, which I took personally.

“I can hear it,” he said. He didn’t look up. “I can hear it. All these years, all those nights. I can hear every word.”

“Put it down.”

“It’s so beautiful.” He looked up at me then. He was crying, and he looked about twelve. “It wanted to be shown we were serious. I only wanted to show it.”

“The carter,” I said.

“The vessel.” He looked down at the book again, lovingly. “He was a beginning. You were going to be the rest of it.”

The Tome stopped reading.

It opened its eye. It looked up at the Deacon from his arms, and the Deacon’s face filled with such joy that I thought he would die of it right there.

“You,” said the Tome, distinctly, “put the candles in WICK-FIRST.”

I hit him low, as Ashara taught me. I went in under the book with my shoulder in his stomach and drove him back across the room into the wall, and the Tome fell out of his arms onto Kit’s wide bed, and the Deacon’s head hit the wall and his hands came up, and I put the dagger into him. I put it in under the ribs and up, and he made a sound, a surprised sound, and stared at my hand on the hilt against his coat. I took it out and put it in again. He was still holding his arms curled for the book. I put it in a third time, and the third time I left it there and held him up against the wall by it, with his blood coming over my fist hot and running down to my elbow, and I watched his face while it happened. I made myself watch. He was the one who had pointed the carter’s hands at my room.

When it was over I let go, and he slid down the wall and sat on the floor with his legs out and my dagger in him, and his eyes stayed open.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I couldn’t stand up anymore. My hand hurt all at once, everything it had been saving up, and I was shaking, and the room tilted.

The Tome lay on the quilt beside me with its eye open.

“Rule five,” it said, after a while. Its voice was hoarse. “The book stays where you put it. I would like it noted that I stayed.”

“Noted.”

“He had a lovely voice,” said the Tome. “For a man who couldn’t tell one end of a candle from the other.”

The sun came up red over the river.

I sat on the step of the inn door with Kaniz’s shift torn into strips round my broken hand, and Kaniz beside me with her head on my shoulder and blood drying on her knife hand, and stared at the yard. I didn’t count the bodies. Felix had. He had sat on the gatehouse parapet all night with his knees drawn up, and at dawn he had climbed down, walked once round the yard with his hands in his coat pockets, said, “Forty-one, and you had four of them,” and gone out over the fallen gate without saying goodbye.

The candles had all burned out in the snow. Kit and Jory were dragging the dead out of the gate one at a time, toward the river, because Jory had said they couldn’t be left in the yard, it was bad for business. I could hear them grunting with the weight. I could hear their bare feet crunch in the snow.

Kit came back across the yard toward me.

He walked. He didn’t drift. He walked through the snow on bare feet that left prints, with the low red sun behind him throwing his shadow out long across the yard toward the door, and he had a shadow, and he stopped over me, and he was covered in blood, and his chest was going up and down. He was out of breath. He was a ghost, and he was out of breath.

The fire in the common room had gone out hours ago. The hearth was cold. Nobody was holding his hand.

He crouched down in front of the step. He put his hand on my knee, and it was warm, warm and heavy, real, with the calluses at the base of his fingers, and it stayed there.

“It hasn’t worn off,” said Kit.