The Trap

The singing-stone woke Wren a little before dawn.

It lay in the pocket of her coat, against her hip, and it began to hum: a thin, high, steady note, like a wet finger going round the rim of a glass. Wren felt it before she heard it, and she was sitting up with her hand over the pocket before she knew she was awake.

The workshop was dark. The Remnant’s fire had burned down to a red eye, and round it lay the shapes of sleepers. The great book lay on the bench where Mira had closed it, with her hand still resting on the cover. Up through the broken roof, the sky was the colour of a dirty slate.

Cinder was standing in the doorway.

She stood stiff-legged, with her nose pointed out into the dark and every hair along her back standing up, and from deep in her chest came a low, rattling growl. Her tail-spark had gone very small and very hard, like a nail-head in a fire.

“Hollows?” whispered Wren.

Cinder did not look round.

Wren got up without a sound; Gristle Mott had had a temper in the mornings. She stepped over a snoring farmer, and over the old clerk, who slept with his spectacles on, and knelt beside Mira.

Mira opened her eyes at once. She did not ask what was wrong. She tilted her head, and listened, and then, very softly, she clicked her tongue — tk — twice, out towards the door.

Her face changed.

“There are a great many of them,” she breathed. “All round. On every side of the hill.” She clicked again. “The ash is eating the sound. But not all of it. They are walking the way the hollowed walk in the mines. All at once. Like one person with a hundred feet.”

The singing-stone hummed louder.

I should like to tell you that Wren was surprised. She was not. The ash-crows had sat on the workshop roof all night, listening the way a pawnbroker listens to you telling him what a thing is worth.

“Course,” said Wren under her breath. “Course they let us get here. Came all this way and walked straight into the bag.” Then, to Mira: “Wake them. Quiet as you can. I’ll find the old girl.”

Sister Hale was already awake. She was sitting up against the cold forge with her crutch across her knees and her one bright black eye wide open, and she did not look in the least surprised either.

“Morning, duck,” she said. “Is it the knights?”

“All round,” said Wren. “Mira says.”

“Then Mira’s right. She’s got ears like a bat in a bell-tower, that one.” Sister Hale hauled herself up, crutch and all, with a grunt like a gate opening. “Well. I did wonder. You don’t walk this many of us up a bare hill in the Queen’s own country without somebody noticing.”

Wren glanced at the far side of the fire. The place where Tobin had lain down last night, as far from her as the walls allowed, was empty, and Ash’s pole was gone from where it had leaned. Course, she thought, and did not let herself think anything else.

The Remnant were waking now, all round the workshop, in a hush of whispers and creaking boots. Nobody cried out. Not one of them was a soldier; but they had been hiding from the Guild all their lives, and they knew how to wake quietly in the dark and reach for their boots.

Wren went to the doorway, beside Cinder, and looked out.

The sky in the east was going from slate to the colour of old dishwater. Below the brow of the Hill the slopes fell away, black and bare and round, into the great grey plain of the Burned Country. And all the way round the Hill, about halfway down — so still that at first Wren took them for a line of the old memorial stones — stood grey figures.

They stood a few yards apart, in grey armour and grey cloaks, and did not move at all. Their faces, under their open helms, were the colour of wet ash, and their eyes did not look at anything. Hollow Knights. Dozens of them. More. The ring went right round the Hill and out of sight.

Down on the plain beyond them there were tents: grey tents, a great many, with grey smoke going up from them in thin straight threads. They had not been there at dusk.

“Rot,” said Wren softly. “Oh, rot and blast.”

“Language, duck,” said Sister Hale, coming up beside her. She looked out at the ring of knights for a long moment with her good eye. Then she said, “Bother,” with such tremendous feeling, as if it were the worst word in the world, that Wren was astonished into very nearly laughing.

“There,” said Sister Hale. “Now we’ve both said something. Listen to me.” She put a small brown hand, dry and strong as a root, on Wren’s arm. “The north side. Behind the workshop, where the old wall’s come down. There’s a gully runs off that way, deep enough to hide a cow in. I saw it coming up. If it isn’t stopped at the bottom, we can get most of them down it before the light’s full.”

“And if it is stopped?”

“Then it’s stopped, and we’ll think of something else.” She smiled at Wren. It was a real smile, wrinkled right up to the milky eye. “We’ve been running from the Guild for sixty years, duck. We’re very good at it. They’ve only caught us twice.”

They went out through the gap in the back wall, a few at a time, bent double. The ash was warm underfoot and swallowed the sound of their boots, but it went up in little puffs at every step and hung in the still air behind them.

The gully ran down off the north shoulder of the Hill, steep and narrow, choked with ash and crumbled black rock. At the bottom, where it opened onto the plain, two of the grey figures stood a stone’s throw apart, staring at nothing.

“They’re not looking,” whispered the cobbler. “They’re not even looking.”

“They don’t need to,” said Mira. Her face was very pale. “I don’t think they look with their eyes. I think they — feel. The way the cold feels for a crack under a door.”

The Remnant went down the gully in a long, crouching, scrambling line. Wren stood at the top of it, by the broken wall, with the lamp hidden under her coat and her heart going like a trapped bird, and counted them past. Four. Seven. The farmer, with a child on his back. The old clerk, with his spectacles in his fist. Ten. Eleven.

At the very end came Mira, with the Chronicle in her arms.

She had wrapped it in her shawl and tied the ends round her neck, so that it hung against her chest like a baby in a sling. It was so heavy it made her stagger.

Behind her came Sister Hale, last of all, with her crutch.

And it was then — just as Sister Hale reached the lip of the gully, and Wren began to let out the breath she had been holding — that the ring of knights turned round.

All of them. At once. Like one person with a hundred feet.

There was no shout and no horn; only a sound like a great many people breathing in. Then they were coming up the slope. They did not run. Hollow Knights never run. They walked, the way the tide comes in over flat sand: you look away, and look back, and it is nearer.

“Go!” shrieked Sister Hale down the gully. “Down! Run, the lot of you! Run for the rocks!”

The line of the Remnant broke and ran, slithering and stumbling down towards the plain. The two knights at the bottom of the gully turned to meet them, slowly, with their grey hands opening. And Wren, at the top, saw what was going to happen as clearly as if it had already happened, and she did the only thing she could think of.

She pulled out the lamp and held it up over her head.

It was not much of a light. But on that bare black hill it was the only warm-coloured thing for a hundred miles; and every grey head on the slope swung round towards it, slow and heavy, the way hounds lift their heads at a scent.

“Here!” yelled Wren. “Here! This is what you want, isn’t it? Come and get it, then!”

And she turned and ran the other way, along the brow of the Hill, away from the gully, with the lamp held high.

I will not tell you every step of that run, because Wren could never remember most of it afterwards. She remembered the ash dragging at her boots like wet sand, and Cinder streaking along beside her, and the knights turning to follow. She remembered, once, looking back.

You should never look back when you are running from something; any sweep could have told you that. But she did, and so she saw.

She saw the Remnant scattering out across the plain towards a tumble of black rocks, and Mira, with the great book bumping on her chest, nearly at the bottom of the gully.

And she saw Sister Hale.

The old woman had turned round on the narrow path and planted herself, small and crooked, in the way of the last knight coming down behind the others. Wren saw her lift the crutch. She saw the grey arm swing. She saw Sister Hale go down sideways into the ash, all at once, like a coat falling off a peg.

“No!” Wren heard herself scream it. “No — Hale—“

Mira had heard. Mira had stopped at the bottom of the gully and turned, and was starting back up.

But Sister Hale was getting up — slowly, one-armed, holding the other arm tight against her side. And her voice came up the slope cracked and loud and, astonishingly, very nearly laughing.

“Go on, duck! It’s nothing — it’s my shoulder, that’s all. Go on! I’ve had worse from a goose!”

And the knight who had struck her did not strike again. He turned his grey head away from her, uphill, towards the gold light on the brow; and he walked past her, as if she had stopped being there.

He was coming for the lamp. They all were. That was all they wanted.

They would walk straight past an old woman in the dirt, and a girl with a book, and a dozen frightened farmers, to get to one small flame.

“Mira!” she yelled. “Mira! Don’t come back! Get her up and go!”

Mira was halfway up the gully to Sister Hale. She stopped, and looked up at Wren across all that grey slope, and Wren saw her face, white and wet.

“Wren — I can’t — you can’t hold them all—“

“I’m not holding anything! I’m running! I’m good at running!” Wren’s voice cracked. “That book’s the only one there is! The only one in the whole world! If they get it, it’s gone, and his last night’s gone with it, and nobody’ll ever — go! Mira, please! It’s the only one! Go!”

For a moment Mira did not move.

Then she turned. She got her shoulder under Sister Hale’s good arm, and the two of them went down the gully together, lurching, the old woman leaning on the girl and the girl leaning on the book, and out across the plain towards the rocks. Mira was crying. She did not look back again.

Good, thought Wren. Good girl. And she found that her own face was wet, and she did not have time to wonder why.

They caught her at the workshop.

She had gone right round the brow of the Hill, thinking that if she could only get inside, among the forges and the racks of lamps, there would be roof-beams to climb. She was a sweep. She could climb anything. But when she came round the end of the long low building there were knights in the doorway, and knights behind her, and knights on the slope below, standing as still as stones in a burial ground.

Wren put her back against the workshop wall. Cinder stood in front of her with her lips drawn back and her spark burning hard and red, and growled at the whole grey army as if she could eat every one of them.

The nearest knight reached for the lamp.

He did not reach for Wren. He reached past her face, with a grey hand, and closed his fingers round the little brass body of it, where she held it against her chest.

And snatched them back.

He did not cry out. But his whole arm jerked, the way your hand jerks off a hot stove, and he stood there holding up his grey fingers; and where they had touched the brass there was a mark across them, red and raw — the only colour anywhere about him.

The next knight reached. The same. And the next.

They stood round her in a half-ring, a dozen grey men, and none of them would come closer than an arm’s length. And Wren, with her back to the wall and the lamp held tight against her chest, began — she could not help it — to laugh. It was high and wild and wobbly, and it hurt.

“Go on, then,” she said. “Have another go. Who’s next? Bit hot for you, is it? Should’ve brought your gloves.”

“I did,” said a voice.

The grey ring parted.

Captain Varrick came through it on foot, in grey armour, with the ash of the Burned Country all down the skirts of his grey cloak. He looked exactly as he had looked on the lighthouse at Vaelport, and in the dark of the Forge: tall and pale and tidy, with grey eyes and a voice as smooth as oiled iron. He was drawing a grey gauntlet onto his right hand as he walked, finger by finger.

“Good morning, Miss Ashby,” he said. “You’ve led my men a very pretty dance. I’m told the others got away. All of them, with the book. That was well done.” He seemed to mean it. “But you knew we’d let them go, I think. We don’t want them. We never did.”

“You killed him,” said Wren.

She had not meant to say it. It came up out of her like the laugh had, from somewhere underneath.

Varrick stopped pulling on the gauntlet. For one moment — no more — his left hand went to his right palm, under the grey leather, and pressed it, as though it ached. His face did not change at all.

“The roof killed him,” he said. “Or the dark did. Or the old fool did it himself, standing in a doorway where he’d no business to be.” He finished with the gauntlet and flexed his fingers. “Her Majesty sends her greetings. She has been looking forward to meeting you.”

“Tell her she can come and get it,” said Wren. “Same as these.”

Varrick smiled a little.

“Her Majesty,” he said, “doesn’t want it.”

Wren stared at him.

“Oh, she wants it gone. Make no mistake about that. But she has no wish to take it from you. Nobody can take it from you, Miss Ashby. You’ve seen that this very morning.” He nodded at the knights and their burned grey hands. “Drop it down a well, and it finds its way back. It knows who it was given to.” His grey eyes rested on the little flame. “But a gift can be given up. That’s the one thing that can be done to it. And it can only be done by one person.”

He took a step forward, and reached out with the gauntlet, and took Wren by the collar of her coat.

He did not touch the lamp. He did not even look at it again. He simply took a handful of her collar, and Tobin’s long scarf with it, the way you might pick up a kitten by the scruff, and turned her round towards the slope and the grey tents.

“Keep it,” he said. “Hold it as tight as you like. Her Majesty wants you to put it out yourself.”

Tobin watched them go.

He was lying in the ash under the workshop wall, on the south side, where it had drifted against the stones in a long soft heap. He had been sitting there since long before dawn, with Ash’s pole across his knees, because he could not bear to lie by the fire with his eyes open while she slept on the other side of it. He had felt the knights before anyone — the cold of them, like a door opening somewhere behind him in a winter house.

And he had not called out.

He had meant to. He had opened his mouth. And then his hands had begun to shake, and his breath had gone small and high the way it went in the dark, and he had slid down into the ash until it was over his legs and his chest and Ash’s pole, and he had lain there, grey in the grey, and not made a sound.

He had heard Wren shout Come and get it, then! He had heard her running. He had heard the old woman scream Go! and the scuffle on the gully path. And he had lain there.

Now he watched through a gap between two stones as Varrick walked Wren down the slope by the collar.

She was not struggling. She was walking quite straight, with her chin up, the way she always walked when somebody was hurting her and she did not want them to know, and the lamp’s small gold light went down the hill with her, getting smaller.

Halfway down the slope, she turned her head.

Tobin never knew what made her do it. But she looked straight back up the hill at the workshop wall; and for one heartbeat, through the gap in the stones, her eyes met his.

She did not call out. She did not look angry. She did not look surprised.

She looked at him the way you look at a thing you always knew would happen, and are only tired of being right about. Then she turned her face away again, and went on down the hill.

Course, that look said. Course you didn’t.

Tobin lay in the ash and watched until the little gold light had gone in among the grey tents and he could not see it any more.

He did not cry. He could not. He lay there with his face in the dust and his hands, with their round scars, flat in the ash on either side of him, and he thought: You did it again. You did it again. Just like before. Just like the Chronicle. Just like him — the friend he loved best. He thought it over and over, in time with his heartbeat.

Something warm pressed against his side.

It was Cinder, grey with ash from ears to tail. She did not sneeze sparks in his face, or nip his ear, or sit on him, the way she had in the Greywaste when he had wanted to lie down and stop. She only lay down beside him in the warm dust, close, with her back against his ribs; and she put her chin on her paws, and looked down the hill at the grey tents, where the light had gone.

Her spark was very small. But it did not go out.

And the two of them lay there together, the boy and the fox, under the wall of the Lampwright’s workshop, while the pale sun came up over the Burned Country and laid its thin, cold light on everything, and warmed nothing at all.