Aros woke her with a hand over her mouth.
Gemma opened her eyes into darkness. The fire was out. Above the hollow the branches were black against a sky barely lighter than they were, and Aros was crouched over her, so close she could smell the smoke in his coat. He waited until she nodded. Then he took his hand away.
"Up," he whispered. "Quiet. We're going now."
"Now? It's..."
"I know what it is."
The others were already moving. Broko was loading the mule by feel, swearing under his breath every time a buckle clinked. Diana knelt by the cold ashes with her new charcoal map spread across her knees, tracing the line of stitches with one finger as if she could memorize it through her skin. Candriela stood at the lip of the hollow with her sword already on her back. Gemma hadn't heard her come back.
"He's at the edge of the marsh," Aros said, low, to all of them. "Where the circle was. He got there a day early and lit a fire big enough to be seen from here, which means he wants us to see it. He wants us on the road tomorrow, walking toward him in daylight." He looked at Diana. "So we're not taking the road."
"The causeway starts at Velde," Diana said. "Half a mile south of his fire. Maybe less."
"Then we go quietly."
"Twelve," Candriela said from the dark. Everyone turned. "Around the fire. I went down the road to count them. Twelve sitting, one standing." She paused. "They don't sleep. I watched them for an hour, and not one of them so much as scratched."
Nobody said anything to that. Broko finished the last buckle and patted the mule's neck, and the animal blew softly into his hand.
"You could leave her," Diana said. "She'll make noise in the water."
"I already ate one mule this week," said Broko. "I'm not abandoning the other. Bad for my reputation."
They went down through the trees in single file, with Candriela in front and Aros at the back. No one carried a light.
The marsh began without warning. One moment there was forest floor under Gemma's boots, roots and leaves and the soft give of old earth; the next, the ground was water, cold enough to make her gasp, and the trees were gone, and the sky opened up over them, huge and starless and grey with mist.
To the north, far off to their left, the fire burned.
She tried not to look at it. It was the only light in the world, and it was hard not to. It sat on the edge of the reeds like a coin on black cloth, steady, patient, much too bright. She couldn't see the figures around it from here. She didn't need to.
Velde was a row of stumps.
That was all that was left: low walls of fieldstone poking out of the water at angles, the outlines of houses drawn in moss and broken rock, a doorframe standing on its own with nothing on either side of it. Diana walked through the middle of it without slowing down. Gemma saw her hand go out once and touch the doorframe as she passed, then come back to the map.
At the far end of the village, under a hand's depth of black water, there was stone.
Diana stepped onto it, and didn't sink. She turned and held out her hand to Gemma.
"Single file," she breathed. "Put your feet where mine were. If you step off, you'll be up to your chest before you know it, and the mud doesn't give things back."
Gemma took it. She meant to let go once she had her footing. She didn't. Diana's hand was cold and rough with charcoal, and it held on without squeezing, like a rope you trusted, and somewhere around the second shrine Gemma realized she had stopped being afraid of the water and was only afraid of letting go.
The causeway ran out into the marsh like a spine. Most of the time Gemma couldn't see it at all. She could only feel it: a hard, slick surface underfoot, a little wider than her two feet together, with the water lapping cold around her ankles and the reeds whispering on both sides, taller than she was. Every few hundred steps the stone rose a little out of the water and there was a shrine.
They were small things, no taller than her waist. Pillars of grey stone with a hollow carved in the top where a candle might once have stood, and on the front, worn almost smooth, the shape of a hand held open.
The first time they passed one, Gemma put her palm against it without thinking. In Skariz the walls had hummed so strongly she could feel it in her teeth. She expected the same.
The stone was cold. Not just cold to the touch. Cold all the way down, like a hearth that hadn't seen a fire in years.
"There's nothing in it," she whispered.
Diana glanced back. "There used to be. When I came here to draw them, you could put your hand on one and feel it breathing. That's why the pilgrims came. They said the saint had left her warmth in the stones." She looked at the shrine for a moment longer than she meant to. "I thought the Priesthood took it, when they burned Velde."
Gemma shook her head slowly. She didn't know how she knew, but she knew. "Nobody took it," she said. "It just ran out."
Diana didn't answer. They walked on.
At first Gemma thought the marsh was quiet. Then she began to hear it.
The frogs, somewhere off in the reeds. Water dripping from the mule's belly. Broko breathing through his nose, slow and careful. And under all of it, so faint it might have been her own blood, the hum: the many voices that weren't voices, rising and falling together, the sound she'd lived with since Seborn. Out here it was thin, as it had been on the road. But it was there. It was everywhere. It came up out of the water and the mud and the roots of the reeds, and she let herself listen to it, a little, because it was better than listening to her own heart.
That was how she noticed the holes.
They were off to the left, in the direction of the fire. Places where the hum simply stopped. Not quieter. Gone. As if someone had cut small pieces out of a tapestry and left the frame behind. One. Then two. Then more of them, spread out through the reeds in a long loose line, and the line was moving.
Keeping pace with them.
Gemma stopped walking. Broko nearly walked into her back.
"Aros," she said. She didn't whisper. She didn't have to. Everyone had heard it in her voice.
He was beside her before she finished his name. "What?"
"There's something out there." She pointed into the dark. "I can't hear it. That's how I know it's there. It's like... there are holes in everything. And the holes are walking."
Aros looked where she was pointing. There was nothing to see. Mist, reeds, black water.
"How many?"
She counted the silences. "Twelve."
Candriela had already drawn her sword.
"How far to the other side?" Aros said, without taking his eyes off the reeds.
Diana held the charcoal map close to her face. "Two shrines. Maybe three. There's an island ahead, a big one, where the old chapel stood. After that it's..."
"Go," said Aros. "Fast. Don't run. If you fall off the stones, you're dead."
They went.
The holes moved with them. Gemma could feel them getting closer, the gaps in the hum widening, swallowing more and more of the sound until she was walking along a narrow corridor of noise with nothing on either side of it. The reeds on the left began to sway. There was no wind.
The mule stopped. It planted its feet on the stone and threw its head back and screamed, a long, high, terrible sound, and Broko hung off its halter with both hands, cursing.
The first one came out of the reeds ten paces from the causeway.
It had been a man once. It still wore what was left of a farmer's smock, grey with mud to the chest. It walked through the black water as if the water weren't there, without splashing, without sinking, and its eyes were open and there was light behind them. Not in them. Behind them, the way a candle shines behind a paper screen. The same pale blue-white light Gemma had seen running under the steel of a blessed sword.
It made no sound at all.
"Hollows," Candriela said. It was the only time Gemma ever heard her voice shake.
Then the others came out of the reeds, all of them at once, and there was no more time to be afraid.
It was the silence that was worst.
Broko's musket went off beside her head with a roar that made her ears ring, and the ball took the first Hollow in the chest, and went in, and came out the back in a spray of mud. The thing didn't even slow down. It reached the edge of the causeway and climbed onto the stone, and Candriela was there.
She hit it as she had hit the bandits in the ravine, with a long heavy stroke that should have taken it in two. It took the Hollow's arm off at the shoulder. No blood came out. Only a thin seep of pale light, like steam from a cracked pot, and the Hollow turned toward her with the stump still reaching and kept coming. She hit it again. This time it went down into the water and stayed there, and the light behind its eyes went out like a lamp being blown, and somewhere far away in the hum, Gemma heard a woman sob.
The same woman. The one from the sword.
There was no time to think about it. Two more were climbing onto the stones behind Diana. Diana had her short knife out and was backing up toward Gemma, step by careful step, and one of the Hollows reached for her with fingers that glowed faintly at the tips.
One point. One breath.
The ring came out of Gemma's finger like a struck spark and spread into a disc of pale light between Diana and the Hollow. The thing's hand hit it and stopped, just as the bolt had stopped in the ravine. It pushed. It didn't seem to understand why it couldn't go forward.
Gemma held it. She breathed, and held it, and raised her other hand toward Broko, who had dropped the musket and was hacking at a Hollow with a hatchet while the mule bucked and screamed behind him, and she breathed again.
A second ring, smaller, shakier, opened between Broko and the grasping hands.
Two. She could hold two. Her arms were trembling, and her nose was already running warm, and the hum was rising around her, louder than it had ever been out here, as if all the voices under the marsh had woken up and turned to watch.
A third Hollow came at Candriela's blind side.
Gemma reached for a third ring. She found the point. She found the breath. A thin line of light drew itself in the air, bent, started to close...
And broke. It came apart like a thread pulled too tight, and the other two rings flickered, and for a terrible moment all three were gone, and Diana cried out.
Gemma got the first one back. She didn't know how. She just did. But she knew, now, with a sick certainty that settled into her stomach and stayed there, that two was all she had. Two was the number. And there were still eight of them.
"Aros!" she screamed. "Aros, I can't..."
She turned to find him.
He wasn't fighting the Hollows. He was standing in the middle of the causeway twenty paces ahead, where it rose out of the water onto the island of the old chapel, with his gutting knife in his hand. And in front of him, between Aros and the far shore, stood a man with pale hair and a sword full of light.
Lukas looked different up close. Younger. Thinner. There were dark smudges under his eyes, as if he hadn't slept since Calad, and there was mud on his white robes up to the knee. But the sword was the same. It was lit from inside, so bright on the dark island that it threw his shadow out behind him across the water, and inside it, faint and far away, the woman was crying.
He wasn't looking at Gemma. He was looking at Aros.
"Kingslayer," he said. He sounded almost pleased.
Then he reached into his robe and took something out and tossed it underhand across the space between them. It landed on the stones at Aros's feet with a clink.
Aros's knife. His old one, the one he'd left standing in a Custodian's mask in the fish market. Someone had cleaned it. The blade shone.
"Pick it up," said Lukas. "I'd rather not kill a man with a fish knife in his hand. It wouldn't count."
Aros looked at the knife. Then he crouched, slowly, without taking his eyes off Lukas, and picked it up. He threw the gutting knife aside into the water.
"You polished it," he said.
"I've been looking forward to this."
Gemma had seen Aros fight before. She had seen him kill two Custodians in the time it took her to blink, and take a musket from Broko before Broko finished a sentence, and walk through a spear as if it were a curtain. She had never once seen anyone touch him.
Lukas touched him in the first exchange.
It was so fast she almost missed it. Aros went low and to the left, toward the blind side, and Lukas wasn't there anymore. The blessed sword came around in a pale arc and Aros twisted away from it and the very tip of it caught his coat, and the coat fell open across his ribs as if it had been unbuttoned. There was a thin dark line underneath. It was already bleeding.
Aros didn't look at it. He came back in.
This time he did what Gemma had seen him do to the second Custodian: he stepped inside the swing, too close for a long blade to work, and caught Lukas's sword arm by the wrist, and drove his own knife up hard against the flat of the blessed steel, right above the guard. It was a trick. She could see it was a trick. You hit a long sword hard enough on the flat, close to the hilt, and it snaps.
The knife rang against the sword like a bell.
The sword didn't snap. It didn't bend. It didn't even shiver. The light inside it flared, and there was a sound like ice cracking on a pond, and Aros's old knife came apart in his hand. The blade simply wasn't there anymore. Half of it spun away into the dark. Half of it stayed in his fist, a stub of metal with a clean, shining edge.
Aros stared at it for one heartbeat.
It was one heartbeat too long. Lukas freed his arm and turned his wrist and the flat of the sword hit Aros across the side of the head, and Aros went down off the edge of the island into the water.
He came up on his knees, chest-deep, blood running into his eye. Lukas stepped down onto the last stone above him and lifted the sword.
"He chose not to kill me," Lukas said quietly. He wasn't talking to Aros. It sounded like something he was repeating. "His Grace said not to give you another chance."
"No," Gemma said.
Nobody heard her. The Hollows were still coming. Diana was shouting. The rings were shaking in her hands, two thin circles of light, and that was all she had, two, and two wasn't enough, and the sword was rising over Aros's head, and the woman inside it was crying, crying, crying...
In Calad, Gemma had closed a door.
She had pictured it in the square, with Aros's cloak over her head: heavy oak bound with iron, and herself leaning against it with all her weight until the voices on the other side went quiet. She had been leaning on it ever since. Every day, on every road. She had never stopped. She hadn't known, until this moment, how tired she was.
She stopped leaning.
The door didn't open. It wasn't there anymore.
The hum came through all at once. Not the faint thread she heard on the roads. All of it. Every voice under the marsh and the reeds and the drowned stones of Velde, every voice under the island and under the sea beyond it, a chorus so huge it had no edges, and none of it was words, and all of it was singing the same thing. It poured into her through the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands and the roots of her hair, and it filled her up, and it kept coming.
The two rings in her hands didn't break. They grew. They spread out from her in a single breath, one inside the other, and then there were more of them, rings inside rings inside rings, rippling out across the black water the way rings ripple out from a stone, except that they were made of light and they did not fade.
The first ring reached the Hollow in front of Diana, and the light behind its eyes went out.
It didn't fall. It just stopped, like a puppet with its strings cut, and folded slowly down into the water. Then the next. Then all of them, one after another, as the rings swept out through the reeds, and each time one went out Gemma heard it: the woman, very far away, letting out a breath, as if something heavy had been taken off her.
The rings reached Lukas.
The sword in his hands screamed. That was the only word for it. The light inside it surged up to meet the light coming off Gemma, and the two lights hit each other, and for an instant the whole island was as bright as noon. Gemma saw Lukas clearly: his face turned toward her, wide-eyed, almost wondering. Then the light from his own sword ran back up into his hands and his arms and his face, and he cried out and fell backward off the stones.
And still it kept coming. She couldn't stop it. She didn't know how. The chorus was in her chest now, in her throat, behind her eyes, and it was so beautiful she thought she might die of it, and part of her wanted to. Part of her wanted to let it carry her out over the water with the rings and never come back.
Somewhere, very far away, someone was calling her name.
Not the chorus. A man's voice. Hoarse, ordinary, shouting.
Gemma. Gemma. Gemma.
She held onto it. It was the only thing she could hold onto. She held onto it the way she had once held onto a bent horseshoe in a field full of ashes, and she let it pull her back, out of the light, out of the song, down and down into the cold black water and the dark.
When she woke, it was morning.
She was lying on something hard and dry, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of mule. Above her the sky was white. Somewhere close by, water lapped against stone, and a man was swearing softly and steadily at a cooking pot.
Broko. Alive.
She turned her head. It felt very heavy. They were on the island of the old chapel, among broken walls, and the marsh stretched away on every side, flat and grey and glittering. In the water around the island, as far as she could see, the reeds had been laid down flat in perfect circles, one inside the other, like the rings in a cut tree.
There were no bodies. Or if there were, the water had them.
Aros was sitting against a fallen pillar beside her. There was a bandage around his head and another around his ribs, and his face was grey with tiredness, and his eyes were open, watching her. He looked as if he had been watching her for a long time.
"Everyone?" she whispered. Her voice came out cracked.
"Everyone." He didn't move. "Lukas is gone. Someone dragged him out of the water and took him north. We heard them go." He paused. "He was still screaming."
Gemma closed her eyes.
She was so tired. Every part of her ached. She wanted to sleep for a week. She wanted someone to tell her it was all right. And because nobody could, because there was no one alive who could tell her that, she did what she always did when she was frightened. She thought of home.
The bakery in Seborn, at dawn. The smell of the first loaves. The dogs waiting in the square for the burnt ends. Her mother's hands, white with flour to the wrist, pushing the hair back from Gemma's face. Her mother's voice, singing something with no proper words while she worked. Her mother leaning down to kiss her forehead.
Her mother's face.
Gemma reached for it. She reached for it as she had every night for a year, on every hard floor and in every cold barn, the last thing before sleep.
The hands were there. The flour was there. The voice was there.
Where the face should have been, there was nothing. Not darkness. Not a blur. Just a smooth, pale place, like a map that someone had scraped clean.