Chapter 13: Every Last Shard

Every Last Shard

He sat with his back against the bed until the lamp burned out. Then he sat a while longer, in the dark, with the bag standing between his feet where he could feel the weight of it through the leather.

The dark was not dark anymore. That was the part he had not caught up with, and was not going to catch up with tonight.

He could feel the room the way he could feel his own hands. The boards going cold under him. The draft coming in under the door, crossing the floor, going out at the window. Past the wall the trees stood where they had always stood, and he could feel every one of them at once, and not one of them knew he was there.

Six years in this room, and the ley of the world had gone around him like water around a stone. Tonight it had come to him instead. He did not know why, and there was nobody left he could ask.

His master was lying somewhere with a hurt in him nobody had been able to close — a man going grey above him on a ladder Ren had never got off the bottom of, and nothing Ren could sell or steal or beg that would close a hurt like that any faster.

He had heard something on the road. A thing with a date on it. It was going to need more than he had, and that was the whole of why he was sitting on the floor in the dark with a bag of money and a star in him he did not understand.

He got up and cleared the floor.

The stool went onto the bed. The basin went under the stool. He took one of the rough shards out of the bag — everyday money, the small stuff an apprentice carried loose in a pocket — and used the corner of it to cut a ring into the boards. Then a second ring inside the first. Then the marks between them, which were the part that did the work.

He did it from memory. The memory came back whole, and his hand went all the way around the ring with the shard in it before he had time to be surprised he still knew it.

Then he turned the bag out into the middle of the ring.

Rough, mostly, in a heap, dull as stones out of a riverbed. Cut underneath it, a hundred and some, with a face worked onto every one. And three flawless on top, set apart from the rest by a hand that still knew what they were worth, and which he had not once taken out to look at since he came off the road, because looking at them felt like something a man did just before he lost them.

He sat down in the middle of it. Cross-legged. Hands on his knees.

That was how the man on the stone had sat all night — back straight, hands on his knees, being spent a piece at a time — and Ren did not think about that. He turned on the old breathing instead. First-day stuff. The one they handed every apprentice before they were allowed near anything else, the one that had never done a thing for him in six years, the one he could do in his sleep.

It caught on the first breath.

The marks lit. The ring pulled. And the shards in the middle of it began to go.

For six years the ley had gone around him like water around a stone. Now it came in. It came up through the boards and off the shards in ropes of it, thick and fast, more than he could have carried an hour ago, and his body — his ordinary, useless, six-years-of-nothing body — took all of it and reached for more.

And it was filthy.

That was the first thing he learned about the ley of the world. It came with grit in it: rust and old water and leaf rot and whatever had died in the wood that season and been left where it fell. There was no sorting it and no being delicate about it. He would have taken it any way it came. Nobody at his level got a choice.

But he had the iron.

It sat low in him, under the navel, doing whatever it did and never once explaining itself. The dirty ley went into it and came out of it changed. What came off the iron was thin and cold and pale — the same pale blue his own blood went, which was not a color blood was supposed to be — and it went everywhere the raw ley had been, and stayed, and went around again, and his arms ached, and his legs ached, and his back ached, and then the aching stopped, and he understood that something in him had been rebuilt while he sat there.

He kept pulling, and the heap went down, and the room went cold. Time stopped being made of anything except his own breathing and the pale stuff coming off the iron, one pass after another, until a current of it came the whole way around him and came back and did not go in again.

It stopped. It lay down in the low place above the iron and settled there, going up and down, up and down, with the iron sitting in the middle of it like a stone at the bottom of a cup.

He opened his eyes. There was purple in the room, fading as he looked at it, and he tipped his head back and shouted — no words in it, nothing he had decided to do — and the sound came off the walls and out over the yard, and every living thing he could feel out there stopped for one second, and then went back to being alive.

Kindling. First degree.

He knew exactly what it was worth. It was the rung every child in the Order climbed before his voice changed. It was the floor. Men said first degree the way they said boy.

Which made it his, and there was plenty else in the ring.

He pushed, and the second rung should have stopped him.

Everybody said so. He had heard the rule so many times it had worn smooth in his head like a coin: there were two of you, the power and the mind that held the reins on it, and they were supposed to come up together, one step at a time, the way a man and his own two legs come up a hill.

The walls between the great stages were real walls. Nobody came through one of those whole. You stood at one until something inside you moved, and men had stood at those walls for years, and some of them were still standing at them.

The small steps were guarded too, and that was the part people forgot, because the guard was invisible. If the power got ahead of the mind, the power did not sit down and wait to be caught up with. A man who carried more than he was went on carrying it for a while, and then one night it turned around inside him and came back the wrong way, and they buried what was left and used the polite word in the letter home.

There was a story they told so that nobody would try it. A house, once, somewhere — the story never said where — that decided to buy the walls. They took a boy with no gift at all and fed him shards the way you feed a fire, night after night, year after year, and he went up faster than anybody had ever gone up, and he went through every wall that house had and came out on the far side of them. His foundation never did come up underneath him. Something got in through the soft place. And whatever walked out of that house at the end of it, it was not the boy, and it took a long time and a great many people to put it down.

Ren sat in the middle of his own floor and heard the story out.

It was not his story.

Six years in a cold room with the door shut — the iron working on him, the ley going around him, nothing, nothing, nothing happening — that had been a kind of climbing, and it had grown him in the wrong direction for a place like this. And then tonight a man with no name and not much left of him had put a star in Ren, and the star was for the mind and only the mind, and it had pulled his mind up through levels he had not earned and could not have named.

So the wall was down before he reached it. He sent his power up the stairs and found his mind already standing at the top, waiting for him to catch up.

That was all. It was not a promise about anything else, and he did not take it as one.

He looked at what was left in the ring.

Rough, and not much of it. The cut in a heap behind that. And past the cut, three flawless, sitting apart from everything else like three words in a language he did not speak.

He thought about being careful. He gave it exactly as long as it takes to think about being careful, and then he said, out loud, to a room with nobody in it:

“Screw it.”

The third came on the heels of the second, and the fourth came slower, because the fourth was where the rough ran out — the pull went thin under him, and he looked down, and the cheap stuff was gone, the whole floor of his savings, spent while he was still feeling for the rhythm.

He swept the dead ones out of the pattern with the side of his hand. They had gone the color of ash, and they clicked against each other like dry leaves.

Then he put his hand on the cut.

That was different. Rough came quick and dirty, all at once, like water out of a cracked jug. Cut came slow, and it came cold, and each one went into him with a weight to it, the way a coin feels leaving your hand when you know how many of them there are.

Fifth.

He held his arm up in the light coming off the ring, because that light was the only lamp left in the room, and what he saw made him stop for a moment. The arm had gone clear — not glass, not yet, but the way a leaf looks held up against a lamp. And under the surface of it the blue was moving, going around and coming back and going around again, patient, like something pacing a small pen.

He had watched a hundred men work and he had never seen an arm do that.

He put the arm down and kept pulling.

Sixth.

He did not notice it happen. He had stopped noticing a while back — not out of scorn, but because by then there was nothing in it but work. Pull, filter, wash, settle. Pull, filter, wash, settle. The room had gone cold and he had not noticed. The lamp had gone out a long time ago and he had not noticed that either. Past the wall the wood had gone quiet around him, the way a wood goes quiet when something in it is doing a thing nobody can name.

He came back to himself when the light changed.

The heap was down to almost nothing and the light off the shards had gone hard and white, and he understood, the way a man understands things at that hour, that he had spent most of it without counting.

He looked at the three flawless.

He laid them out in a row in the middle of the ring. The last of everything he owned. Worth more than the contents of this room, and the room next door, and the room past that. Then he put the first one under his hand and pulled.

It did not come like the others. It came slow, and it came heavy, and it came clean — there was almost nothing in it for the iron to take out, and what came through was so pale it was nearly white, and it hurt going in. Not the ache of a stretched muscle. It hurt the way standing up hurts after you have been sitting a long time, like something in him had been waiting to be used and had stopped expecting it.

The second of the three went over the top of the sixth rung like water going over the lip of a bowl, and kept going, and he held it there.

The third stone he spent on the seventh.

Then there was nothing under the pull. It reached and found nothing, and he let it go, and the ring went dark.

He sat there with his eyes open in a room with no lamp in it and no light coming off anything. He did not need anybody to come and tell him what he had done. He could feel the whole of it sitting low in him, settled and quiet, level with the rim and not a drop over. He had been saying the name of it about other people since he was a boy.

“Seventh,” he said, out loud, to prove he could say it about himself.

Some corner of his mouth had gone up while he was doing it, and he left it there. He made a fist and looked at the closed hand.

Then he said the thing he had been carrying up from the first rung, and he said it quietly, because it was not for this room.

“Master. I did it. Seventh.”

There was nobody there. The man it was meant for was lying down somewhere with the life going out of him a piece at a time, and would not hear about it until morning, if there was a morning for either of them, and Ren had known all of that before he opened his mouth, and had said it anyway.

Then he did the accounts, because that was what you did when a thing like this was over. Nothing left under the pull. Nothing left in the bag. The month’s allowance a long way off, and his master still dying by inches in the dark.

And the iron lay under his navel with the pale blue piled around it, quiet. As quiet as it had been for six years.

He did not know what it was.

That was the oldest question he had, older than the star, older than the man on the stone, and he was no closer to it tonight than he had ever been, and he was cold, and his hands were shaking a little from being used, and there was nothing left in the ring to pull on.

He got up off the floor and lay down on the bed with his boots on.

The iron sat under his navel and kept whatever it kept, and he left it there.

He says the news out loud to an empty room, knowing it won’t reach the man it’s meant for until morning — if there’s a morning. Would you have said it anyway?

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