The dwarves of the Hitlaro Bank do not count time in years, but in keys. A vault whose key has not been in the lock for fifteen winters is called a sleeping vault. It is good manners to put something into a sleeping vault, but never to take anything out. Who puts something in, the dwarves do not ask.

From a guide for new customers of the Hitlaro Bank, Tés Aváir

Chapter 28

The Way the Water Goes

I didn't know how long I had stood with my forehead against the stone.

Long enough for the cold from it to go into my head and settle behind my eyes. Long enough for Lynx's growling deep below to stop. The night air smelt of frost and dust and crushed stone and nothing else. Not Retia's roses behind me. Not Nihil's iron. Where scents used to be, there was the same silence as in my chest, and the mountain probably smelt the way it smelt to everyone else. Of what was there.

My palm throbbed. The wreath of hawthorn sat white in the red, and every time my heart beat, it prickled, the way a foot does when the blood comes back after it has gone to sleep.

The sword was still in my belt. I drew it.

It wasn't a plan. It was a hand doing something because it couldn't bear not to. The stone had taken my blood once and closed. It could take it again and open. I had no Dherak left to give it, but I had blood. It was the only thing I had enough of.

I laid the blade against the hand that was already cut.

Arcanus's fingers closed around the blade. Not around my wrist. Around the steel itself, with his bare hand, and he held on.

"No," he said.

"Let go."

"If you open this one, you open all of it." His voice was low and calm, but blood was running between his fingers and down the blade and dripping into the frost. "It's the same stone all the way down. The same closing. You felt it go."

I had felt it. The hand closing, and the fingers following.

"The heart opens with it," he said. "And the first thing that comes out meets whoever is in there."

He didn't say Ahra's name. He didn't need to.

I stood with the sword between us and looked at his hand around the steel. He wouldn't let go until I did. I could see that in him. So I let go. He let go at the same moment, and the sword fell into the frost and lay there. There was blood on the blade again. It cut. That was still the only thing it did.

Arcanus picked it up and wiped the blade on his robe and handed it to me hilt first. He didn't say anything else.

I sat down with my back against the stone. Retia sat down next to me. She didn't touch me, but her shoulder was there, a centimetre from mine, and it was shaking. Nihil sat a little way off with his arms round his knees and Brúma on a stone by his foot. His breath came out of his mouth white and fast.

The raven was in there. The thought just came, and I didn't know why it was that one that came. It lay by the wall in the chamber, black on black, and no one knew whether it was breathing. Maybe Ahra knew. If he could see anything in there.

"It was me," I said. Not to anyone.

Retia didn't answer. Her shoulder moved the last centimetre.

I saw the eagle before I heard them.

It came in over the ridge, dark against the stars, and circled above us. Broad wings. Slow, heavy circles, and it didn't scream. It just went round and round, like someone looking for a place to land and not finding one.

Then there was light down on the path. Bluish, not orange. Footsteps, heavy and fast, and gravel crunching, and something running ahead on four legs.

Fenris came first. Black in the dark, with yellow eyes that found us and stayed on us. It ran to Nihil and sniffed his hand, and Brúma rose on her hind legs but stayed on the stone. Behind the wolf came Haltora in his thick combat robe with a light in his hand. Behind him came Edrin with Nix on his shoulder and a robe that was white with rime at the hem.

I couldn't smell them. That was the strangest thing. Haltora without iron and embers, Edrin without candles and parchment. Two men in the dark breathing hard after the climb. That was all I knew about them.

Haltora stopped in front of the stone. His black eyes went from the blood in the frost to Arcanus's hand to us. I saw him count. I saw him get to three and start again.

The eagle landed. On top of the stone, right above the place where the passage had been. It folded its wings and dug its talons into the rock and drew its head down between its shoulders, and it didn't look at any of us. It just sat.

Edrin looked at the eagle. Nix's tail stopped moving.

Arcanus went over to them. They stood close together, three men and a wolf in the blue light, and the wind took most of what they said. I heard Kalmin's name. I saw Arcanus lift his bleeding hand and point into the rock and let it fall again.

"Four children," said Haltora. He wasn't shouting. That was worse than shouting. "Four children on the mountain, Edrin, and we were standing in the cellar looking for..." The tremor had come from below, under the castle, and that was where they had looked. None of them had thought of the path up the mountain.

Edrin said something I didn't hear.

"No." Haltora took a step forward, and Fenris laid its ears back, and I didn't know which of them the wolf was growling at. "Not tonight."

Arcanus put a hand on Haltora's arm. Haltora looked down at it. Then at Arcanus. And something in his shoulders gave, not much, and he pulled his arm away and turned his back on them both.

Edrin stayed where he was. His hands hung at his sides, open and completely still. Then he looked at me. At the hand in my lap, white and red, and at the sword beside me in the frost. Something crossed his face, and then it closed again, like a door you hear shut in another room.

"Chris," he said.

He said nothing more. He went and stood beneath the eagle and stayed there with his back to us.

Haltora went over to Nihil and lifted him up without asking. Nihil said, "I can walk," and Haltora said, "No," and that was the whole conversation. Brúma jumped down from the stone and followed them, silent and low over the ground.

"Down," Haltora said to Retia and me. "Both of you. Now."

"No," I said.

He turned round with Nihil in his arms. His black eyes held mine, and I knew that look from combat lessons. It was the look he had just before he let me hit the floor.

I had said something in the little room behind the library nine days ago. That I was tired of other people keeping me alive. That I'd like to do it myself. I had meant it, and now Ahra was sitting inside a mountain because I had meant it.

I got up. My legs were weak, and my throat tightened around the words, so I had to push them out.

"I can't find him on my own."

It wasn't a long sentence. It felt like handing over something I had carried for so long that I had forgotten it was heavy.

Haltora looked at me. For a long time.

"No," he said. "You can't." He turned his head slightly. "Fenris."

The wolf was already gone, along the side of the mountain, with its nose to the rock and its tail low.

"We'll search," said Haltora. "The whole mountain. You go down and eat something, and then you sleep. That's an order, Godrand."

"And if you find him?"

"Then I'll wake you." A pause. "Myself."

Halfway down the path Alôpex stopped.

She stood completely still with one foreleg raised and her ears turned back towards the mountain. The hoarfrost crunched under my boots as I stopped, and Retia stopped behind me. The branches above us were white and stiff, and somewhere down in the valley water gurgled under the ice.

"Lynx," said Alôpex. "He's walking."

"Where?"

"Away from the wall. Down." She turned her head slowly, as if she were following something through the stone. "He's not waiting any more."

I stood on the path and felt something in my chest that was neither relief nor fear but both at once and too much of each. Of course he was walking. It was Ahra. He couldn't even sit still for an hour in the First-Year Room without getting up to fetch more tea.

"He's walking," I said to Retia.

She nodded. In the glow from Haltora's light further down, I saw her jaw tighten.

Then Alôpex lowered her foreleg. "I can't feel him any more," she said. "He's too deep."

The castle was dark and cold and full of the silence there is only in empty castles. Retia went into the First-Year Room and sat down at the table with the map with Ahra's red lines spread out in front of her and a candle beside it. I went up to the room. Nihil had been carried to the infirmary, and his bed stood made and untouched. I didn't take my boots off. I sat on the edge of my bed with the sword across my knees and Alôpex pressed against my thigh and looked at his.

Some time in the night Retia came up to the doorway. She had ink on her fingers and a blanket round her shoulders, and she looked at me, at the boots and the sword, and nodded, as if it were the answer to something she had been thinking of asking. Then she went back to the map.

The room smelt of cold stone and of the frost that came in through the window, which was ajar. Alôpex's heart beat against my leg. Out in the corridor a beam creaked in the frost, and every time it did, she lifted her head, and every time, she laid it down again.

I didn't lie down. I knew what happened when I lay down.

I hadn't decided to go to the river.

The sky had only just begun to turn grey above the east towers, and my feet simply went. Down the stairs, over the seventh step from the top, out through the great door and down across the lawn, where the rime lay so thick that my footsteps made dark holes in it. Alôpex ran ahead of me and didn't turn round. She knew before I did.

The river was three metres wide. Maybe less. The ice along the edges was thick and grey and cracked, and the water in the middle was black and slow, and a thin mist hung over it that smelt of stone and winter.

I pulled my clothes off. The cold of the air went into my bare skin straight away, and my teeth were chattering before I had reached the water's edge.

Then I stepped out.

It hurt the way it always hurt. First in my feet, then in my shins, then everywhere at once, as if my body couldn't work out where to scream from. The water came up to my hips. The mark on my palm burned as it went under, as if someone were holding an ember to it, and I clenched my hand and left it down there.

Four. Hold. Six.

I searched. Of course I searched. I closed my eyes and reached out for the mountain, for the chamber, for something that was warm and green and smelt of bark, and there was nothing to reach with. The place where my Dherak used to sit was still emptied, and I scraped at the bottom of it like a spoon in an empty bowl. The harder I tried, the colder the water got.

Four. Hold. Six.

I stopped.

Not because I decided to. Because I had nothing left to try with. I just stood in the river with my hands under the water and my feet on the slippery stones at the bottom and didn't do anything at all.

"Feel the water," Maka had said that evening, with his feet in the river next to mine. "Not the cold. The water itself."

It was there. Faint. The old, cold current beneath the real current, the one that ran from the mountain in the north down towards the sea in the south. I had nothing to meet it with, so I didn't meet it. I let it run through me, and because there was nothing in me to stand in its way, I could feel it better than ever.

And then I smelt it.

The first thing that came back wasn't a thought. It was a scent. Copper and stone that had never seen light, and dry dust, and something that was old in the way only the chamber under the mountain was old. The water had been in there. Some of it, at least. It had seeped down through the mountain, through cracks and holes no one had ever walked in, and it remembered.

"Water remembers," Maka had said. And Surain had said the same, with my hands down in the river and his own round my wrists.

I didn't follow it. I just let it show me the way. And the way didn't go up the mountain and down the path, the way I had expected. It went under. In beneath the foundations of the castle, through the dark under the cellars, under the north tower, and only from there out into the river where I was standing.

I opened my eyes. Something warm was running down over my upper lip. I wiped it off with the back of my hand, and my hand came back red, and a thin red thread drifted away from me in the black water, towards the south.

My legs wouldn't carry me up out of the river. I got out anyway, on my knees for the last metre, with my hands in the ice along the edge.

Retia was sitting in the grass on the bank.

She didn't have a cup of tea with her this time. She had the map with Ahra's lines. It lay rolled up across her knees, and her fingers were holding it so tightly that the paper was bent, and Fulmen sat on her shoulder with its feathers fluffed up against the cold. She hadn't been in the water since the attack. She didn't go in now either. She just sat there and waited for me, the same way she had sat over the map all night.

I pulled my clothes on with fingers that couldn't feel the buttons.

"The north tower," I said. "The cellar."

She unrolled the map on the rime-white grass and held it down with both hands. Ahra's red lines ran back and forth across the castle, all those evenings in all those corridors, and the little crosses he had drawn, and the line she had seen herself a month ago, the one that ran from the north tower down through the cellar and towards the mountain. Her finger followed it. It stopped in the cellar under the north tower. After it there was nothing. Just Retia's pencil marks and a wall.

"This is where his line ends," she said.

We ran.

The cellar under the north tower smelt of mortar and damp and old barrels. The stairs down were narrow and slippery, and the blue stones in the walls glowed so faintly that Retia had to lift a torch from the holder by the door. Our breath hung white in the light. Somewhere water was dripping, slowly, in a rhythm that didn't change.

I smelt my way forward. The faint, metallic note of old Dherak, the one I had followed for weeks with Ahra and Retia in November. It was everywhere down here, in the joints and under the flagstones, and I went from wall to wall with my nose and my hands. Alôpex sniffed at the foot of the stones. Retia held the torch high and said nothing.

At the end of the cellar was the wall where Ahra's line stopped. Grey stone, wet at the seams. I pressed it. I knocked on every stone I could reach, and I laid my hand flat and waited for the warmth and the pulse and the click, and nothing happened. It was a wall. My fingers got sore, and my nose started dripping again.

"Chris," said Retia. Just the name.

I stopped. My legs were still shaking from the river, and I leant against the wall next to it, the one no line led to, just to stay upright.

It gave way.

A small click, deep inside the stone. Then another. Then a part of the wall slid backwards with a sound of stone on stone, slowly, and there was darkness behind it, and a staircase going down, and air streaming out.

Cold air. Copper and dust and stone that had never seen light. And under that, faintly, so faintly that I thought I was imagining it, warm bark. Grass. Honey, only greener.

I hadn't been looking for it. I had just leant against the wrong wall.

Alôpex stood completely still at the opening. Then she said the one word: "Lynx."

We heard them before we saw them. Claws on stone, light and ticking. And behind them, footsteps. Slow and heavy, and with too long between them, like the footsteps of someone who has been walking for a long time and has learnt not to count on the next one.

Lynx came first. He was grey with dust, and his yellow eyes were narrow in the torchlight. He looked at me. Then he turned round and waited.

Ahra came up the stairs with his brother over his shoulder.

He carried him the way he had carried him in the tunnel, bent under the weight, with both hands around Kalmin's legs and back, carefully, the way you carry something that mustn't wake. His face was grey with dust and streaked where the tears had run too many hours ago. His trousers were wet to the knees. His robe was tied tightly around him, and there was something inside it at his chest. Something that bulged, black at the edge of the cloth. As he came closer, I smelt it. Not much. A trace. Home.

His blue eyes found mine. He didn't stop.

I felt a handshake in my fingers from the first evening, in a corridor a month and a half ago, and a ring round my wrist that was no longer cold. I don't know if that was what it was. It might just have been the cold.

Ahra walked three steps into the cellar. Then he knelt.

It took a long time. He laid his brother down on the stone floor so slowly that I could see his arms shaking with it. First the legs. Then the back. Then the head, with one hand under it until the very last, so it wouldn't hit the stone. Kalmin's hair fell across his forehead. Ahra brushed it away with two fingers and put it straight.

Kalmin's scent was still there. Dry oak bark and ink, faint in the cold air of the cellar. There was just no one underneath it any more.

Ahra sat down beside him with his back against the wall. He put his hands in his lap, and they lay completely still. Lynx went over and lay down across Kalmin's feet and rested his head on his paws.

Retia stayed by the stairs with the torch. Fulmen sat on her shoulder with its head drawn in. The light flickered over the walls and over Kalmin's face and over Ahra's hands, and the water somewhere in the dark went on dripping in the same rhythm.

I sat down next to Ahra.

I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say, and I knew from three days in a bed that words weren't what you needed. I just moved so close that my shoulder touched his, and I felt the cold from his robe through my sleeve, and under the cold something that was shaking.

Alôpex lay down in my lap. Her fur was still wet from the grass.

After a long time I reached out my hand. The one with the mark. I laid it on Ahra's hand in his lap, and it was ice cold and covered in dust.

He didn't take it away.

We sat like that while the torch burned down, and somewhere above us the castle began to grow light.