Chapter 10 — True Magic

WELSH — The Novel (Coda's Perspective)

— Outside the Seventh Gate, a little before midnight —

For most of the night the Unmade had not hurried.

That was the thing the Guard on the Seventh talked about afterwards, when they talked about any of it. Not the size of them, not the fraying, not the shapes that walked where no shape should walk. The patience. The humanoid kind came on at the pace of something invited, and behind them the serpents moved under the packed earth in long shallow lines, and none of it was in any rush, because nothing on the wall had given it a reason to be.

Then the nearest of them stopped.

It stood on the old road with its back to the gate. The one beside it turned. Then a whole length of the line turned at once, away from the wall they had been pressing at all night, toward the southwest, where a single figure was coming up the Hathren road at a walk.

Earlier that night a few of them had looked at him and lost interest.

They did not lose interest now.

The serpent-kind went down first. The ground outside the Seventh lowered in a dozen lines together, and every line ran the same way, fast and straight at the road. And the walking ones stopped walking. They dropped forward onto the ends of their arms and came across the dead country on all fours, low and quick and wrong, faster than anything that shape had any right to move.

Nobody on the wall had seen them run. Nobody had known they could.

The figure on the road stopped.

He did not reach for anything. He did not brace, or raise his hands, or step back. He simply stopped walking — and went on rising where he stood, off the road and up into the dark, the way a leaf goes up on warm air, until he hung above the whole charging mass of them with nothing under his boots at all.

Then the light came down.

Not a flash. Straight lines, dozens of them, falling out of a clear night onto the field the way sun comes through a gap in cloud — except there was no sun, and no cloud, and no gap. It made no sound whatsoever.

It lasted about as long as a held breath.

When it stopped, the Unmade nearest the Seventh were gone.

Not cut. Not broken. Not settled into grains on the ground, the way they settle when a Warden cuts a tear. There was nothing left of them to settle. Where each one had been, the ground was only ground, and looked as though it had never been anything else.

Up on the parapet, four hundred men forgot to breathe out.

And the figure in the air turned, unhurried, and drifted in over the Seventh — over the wall, over their heads, low enough that the lamplight caught the underside of a travelling coat — and was gone into the dark above the city.

Rosse Sinclair had not seen his face. She had not needed to.

She had both palms flat on the parapet again, the way she had kept them half the night, asking the stone where the Unmade came from and hearing nothing back. And for the length of that silent light the stone had answered her — not about the Unmade. About him. The whole field outside the wall pressing up through her hands like a held note, a spell so large she felt it in her teeth.

She knew one man who asked the ground for things like that.

Rosse: Him?

Rosse: Why is he here?

The Guard beside her had his crossbow half-raised at an empty sky.

Guard: "Warden. What was that?"

Rosse: "A High Mage."

Then she was up on the stone again, in full view of everything below.

Rosse: "HOLD!"

Rosse: "Reinforcements have come!"

— Rook's Training Yard —

Adam had put Damien through the dirt four more times by then, and every time Damien got up grinning.

The fifth time he got up slowly. He brushed down the front of the coat of four colours, and looked across the yard at Adam the way you'd check a clock.

Damien: "Bhahaha."

Damien: "You're a little slow, Warden."

It was the first thing he'd said all night that wasn't true. Adam had crossed that yard in under a second. I'd watched him do it.

But the next part wasn't a joke. The grin was still on him. It had just stopped meaning anything.

Damien: "This is getting boring."

Damien: "So I'll be taking the kids with me."

Damien: "Goodbye, Mister Blue and Green."

Damien: "Hehe."

Mister Blue and Green. He could see it. Of course he could. He'd read the two of us off like a shop sign.

Then he opened his hands, and something came up.

I want to be exact about this.

It came up the way magic comes up — out of the dirt around his boots, and off him, off his arms and his shoulders, both at once. The way Adam's had. The way nobody but Adam's ever has. So for half a second I thought: fusion. He can do it too.

Then I looked at it.

They were the shape memories are. But they had no inside. You could look straight into one and there wasn't a cart wheel in it, or a window, or a wet spring — and there wasn't nothing in it either, which would at least have been something. It was like reaching for a word you know perfectly well, and finding the place where the word should be, and the place is smooth.

There were more of them every heartbeat.

My stomach turned over. I put a hand flat on the wall behind me, and the wall was the only thing in that yard I was sure of.

Beside me, Wick had gone white.

Wick: "What is that?"

Wick: "Is that magic?"

Wick: "Something about it isn't right."

Coda: "Just watching it makes me sick."

Adam didn't turn round. He never turns round.

Adam: "Don't look into it."

Adam: "Don't try to reason it out."

Adam: "What he's using is forbidden."

Adam: "Forbidden magic."

Don't look into them. Everyone does, once. Venn said that on the first day, about ordinary memories, and it had sounded like a joke.

Nobody was joking now.

Then he moved, and it was not at Damien.

One arm round me, one round Wick, and the yard floor went away. I didn't feel him jump. I felt the landing — a roof, a slate cracking under his boot — and then another, and another, the whole of the Learning House falling away behind us and the city going past underneath in pieces. A chimney. A washing line. A lamp still lit in a window where somebody had left it when they ran.

He was carrying two of us, and he wasn't breathing hard.

Coda: He can't fight him like this.

Coda: Not with us here. Not with all of them down there.

He came down in an alley off Lantern Row, so narrow the walls nearly touched overhead, and set us on our feet, and didn't let go straight away.

Then he opened his hand, and his own came up.

Off his forearms, his shoulders, his palm. Dozens of them. Glass, the way they always are, bending the brick behind them — and to me, the way it had been on the wall a week ago, green and blue, close as breath. He closed his hand and they came round us. Not into one sphere. Round us, the two of us, a shell of them, turning slowly.

And when I looked out through them, the alley was empty.

Not dark. Empty. The alley exactly as it must have been a minute earlier, before three people came down into it. Wet cobbles, a broken crate, nobody there at all.

Adam: "Hide."

Adam: "This should make it so he can't find you."

Adam: "I need to focus on him."

And then the alley was empty of him too.

— The alleys off Lantern Row —

Neither of us said it. We didn't have to.

We'd been in the way.

Not in a cruel sense. Nobody had said it and nobody ever would. But there was a man fighting something forbidden in the middle of our city, and first he'd had to stop and carry two schoolboys over the roofs, and find somewhere to put us, and wrap us up, before he could go back and do the thing only he could do.

And under that — and I'm not proud of which one was louder — I was glad. I was so glad there was someone.

We ran.

Down the alley, across Lantern Row where it was quickest, into the next dark gap, and the next. People were still out: Guards running for the walls, a woman pulling her shutters to, a boy about Elan's age with a bucket. They went past us close enough to touch, and not one of them looked. We ran straight past the tanners' with the spheres turning round us, and the tanner, still black to the elbow, looked right at the place where we were and saw the street behind us.

It was the strangest thing that has ever happened to me, and I've had a strange year.

Coda: "This magic."

Coda: "It feels nice."

Coda: "Like I'm floating."

It did. Inside Adam's spheres everything weighed a little less — my feet on the stones, my breath, the fear. As if the ground had agreed to hold on to me a bit more gently.

Wick wasn't looking at the spheres. He was looking back the way we'd come.

Wick: "Did you see Damien's magic?"

Wick: "It was wrong."

Wick: "I hope the Warden's going to be okay."

Coda: "He'll be fine."

Coda: "Wardens are the strongest there are."

Wick: "I hope so."

He said it like somebody who'd already decided to worry anyway.

— Rook's Training Yard, and above it —

Damien stood alone in the yard with his hands open, and the shapes with no inside kept coming up around him until the air over the yard was thick with them.

He turned his head slowly, one way and then the other, the way a man listens for a tap dripping in another room.

Damien: "Tsk."

Damien: "I can't sense them."

Adam came back over the wall and landed in the middle of the yard, and did not look toward the place he had come from, so that the looking would not tell anyone anything.

Then he looked at what was hanging in the air over the yard, and for the first time all night his face showed something.

Adam: Forbidden.

Adam: It was lost. It was supposed to stay lost.

Adam: So who taught him?

Damien considered him for a while.

Damien: "Well."

Damien: "Guess I'll have to kill you, Adam."

He closed his hands around something. Not a sphere. He held nothing at all, carefully, the way you would carry water without a cup.

Then every sound in the yard went away.

The bells, still going across the city. The noise off the walls. The wind in the eaves. It went out from Damien's closed hands in a ring, and wherever it passed there was simply no sound, as though the yard had been asked to forget that sound had ever been in it.

Then a line went from his hands to Adam.

It was not light. It was not darkness either. It was a place in the air where nothing was, drawn straight, and it crossed the yard faster than Adam had.

Adam did not step out of the way.

The alley was behind him, somewhere, and a whole city behind that. He set himself — one foot back, weight down through it — and took it across both forearms, and was pushed back, boots ploughing, three yards, four.

And held.

The fused light along his arms went thin where the line touched it, the way ice goes thin. He held anyway. When the line was gone and the sound came rushing back into the yard all at once, the man standing in the furrows he had made was not quite the man who had walked into them. There was more grey at his temples than there had been an hour before. His hands were shaking, and this time he had not decided anything about hiding it. He simply hadn't the room.

A voice came from above the yard wall. Mild. Almost disappointed.

Traveller: "This isn't like you, Adam."

And then Adam was not in the yard.

He was high over the rooftops beside a stranger in a travelling coat, the two of them hanging in the night above the Learning House as easily as if they stood on a floor. I won't tell you how. He wouldn't either.

Traveller: "I suppose this is a bad match-up for you."

Adam: "Why are you here?"

Traveller: "I'll tell you later."

Traveller: "For now, I'll deal with this one."

Down in the yard, Damien Obsidian looked up at the pair of them against the stars and, for the first time that night, looked genuinely put out.

Damien: "Another pain in the neck."

Damien: "Far too many big shots in one city."

Then he ran.

Not at them. East — over the yard wall, across the roofs, toward the eastern wall and what lay outside it: the bare patch at its foot where no grass grows, and down the middle of it a thin white crack, like paper showing through where a drawing has split. The tear. The door he had come up through in the spring, and never closed.

He was very nearly fast enough.

— Outside the eastern wall, at the tear —

The stranger came down out of the dark and landed between Damien and the tear, lightly, one boot either side of the white line, with his hands in his coat pockets.

Traveller: "Hey."

Traveller: "Did you know?"

Traveller: "Long before anyone walked this earth —"

Traveller: "this whole world was covered in ice."

Damien stopped.

And the ground began to give.

Not under the stranger. Everywhere. Out of the dead country beyond the eastern wall, as far as the lamps on the parapet could show and a great deal further, spheres were coming up — thousands, then tens of thousands, until the counting stopped meaning anything and the whole dark plain looked like water just before it boils.

Every one of them held the same picture.

Ice. Not frost on a sill, not a hard winter. Ice to the horizon, a white world with nothing on it at all — the ground outside Vell Ardour remembering, all at once and everywhere, what it had been before anything lived on it.

Tens of thousands of memories, and not one of them was a cart wheel.

Traveller: "Ice Age."

He closed his hand.

They came in. All of them, across the dead country toward his closed fist the way raindrops run together on glass, two into one into one, until a single sphere hung in front of him, heavier than anything that size should be, and so cold the air around it had begun to ring.

Then the glass let go of what it was holding.

Damien Obsidian had just enough time to bring his forearm up.

— The alleys off Lantern Row —

It started to snow.

In the alley, at night, in a season when it has never once snowed in my life. One flake on the back of my hand, inside Adam's spheres, and then more of them, falling straight down out of a clear sky past the lamp at the end of the alley.

Wick stopped running.

Wick: "Is that snow?"

I didn't answer. I was looking east, over the rooftops, where the sky above the eastern wall had gone a colour I don't have a name for. Not green and blue, nothing like. Just white, as if the whole east were a window somebody had breathed on.

And drifting back toward us over the roofs on the cold air, loose ones. Stragglers. Spheres that had come up too far away to be gathered, turning slowly in the dark.

I have watched memories come up in Venn's room and in Rook's yard. Most of them are nothing. A cart wheel. A wet spring. You call, and what comes, comes.

Every single one of these held the same picture.

Coda: He didn't call.

Coda: He asked for one thing.

Coda: And the world didn't have anything else to give him.

The snow kept falling. The lamp at the end of the alley kept burning. And for the first time since the bells, I noticed I was cold.