“You’re going out again.”
Fenn had his boots half on.
Across the dead fire-ring Fell was sitting up in his cloak with his eyes open, and had been open for some while.
“Twelve hours before we move.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“It’s the whole of the answer, though.” Fenn stood.
“Sleep.
Your ribs want it more than your curiosity does.”
“My ribs are fine.”
“Your ribs split every time you mount, and you’ve been getting up on the off side for three days so nobody watches you do it.” He pulled his cloak straight.
“Sleep.”
Fell came with him to the edge of the camp anyway and stopped where the gorse began.
“At the steading you stood over a bucket a quarter of an hour.”
“I did.”
“And afterwards you knew the thing came from the east.
Out of a bucket.”
“Out of the ground under the bucket.”
“That’s worse, not better.”
Fenn said nothing.
“I’m not asking what it is,” Fell said.
“I’ve worked out you won’t tell me, and I’ve mostly worked out why.
I’m asking whether it’s going to kill you.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Then why go off and find out alone, up a hill, in the dark, where there’s nobody to carry you down?”
“Because that’s the safest ground for it.” Fenn looked at him.
“If it goes badly, it goes badly a quarter-mile from twelve men instead of in the middle of them.
Go back to the fire.”
“There is no fire.”
“Then go back to where the fire isn’t.”
He found a hollow a quarter-mile out where an old stream had cut a channel through the rock and left still air and clean sight-lines.
He sat with his back to the stone, the camp hidden behind the hill’s shoulder, the star a cold point of silver at the left edge of his vision.
The planner’s register took over.
He had been putting this off, and he was honest enough to name it.
The sight had woken slowly since the slope, a pressure, a pull, a wrongness-sense that arrived and departed like weather, and he had handled it as a man handles a tool he does not trust.
But the cold seam under the herders’ steading had forced the question, and he needed the thing’s limits before it found them for him.
First rule of any system: test the input.
He looked at a patch of gorse ten feet off and asked nothing of it.
The plant was a plant.
He looked again, pushing as he had pushed at the well, and the sight flickered and resolved: a faint silver mark low on the stem where a frost-crack had weakened the wood.
Invisible to the eye.
Clear as a signature to the new one.
Flaw-reading.
It showed weakness, damage, the seam in a thing where it would break.
He tested stone, wood, the worn leather of his own boot.
Everywhere the same, a glimmer of silver where the material was compromised, information a strategist could spend.
His blade carried a hairline crack near the hilt he had not known was there and would now have to replace before it killed him.
Second rule: test the limits.
He turned it on the camp, three hundred yards off behind the hill’s shoulder, and pushed.
The silver flickered and dimmed.
Distance weakened it, or obstruction, or both.
He turned it on the sky and got nothing whatever.
He turned it inward, on his own body, and it recoiled.
Not from pain.
From category.
It read objects, materials, the physical seams of the world.
Not the self.
Not the future.
Not the minds of other men.
A flaw-reader, a truth-glass, a tool for finding the weak point in armour or argument or ancient stone.
Not an oracle.
Third rule: don’t look into the deep dark unless a life depends on it.
He knew that rule before he broke it.
The cold seam was visible from the hollow, a silver thread running east toward the Downs, fainter than at the steading and still legible, still pulling.
He had read it once and paid a headache for it.
He wanted the source now, the thing at the other end, the wight-work the recruit’s memory whispered of in the old stories of Angmar’s fall.
He turned the sight east and pushed.
The recoil was immediate and total and physical.
The seam brightened, not silver now but a cold blue-white, the colour of old ice and older malice, and the brightness ran back along his reading like a spark along a fuse, and at the far end of it something ancient and patient turned its attention toward a hollow in the Weather Hills where a recruit sat with blood starting from his nose.
The nosebleed was the body’s warning.
The pressure behind his eyes was the sight’s.
The cold rolling back along the seam was no temperature at all.
It was presence, weight, a thing that had lain under the barrows since the Witch-king fell and was now, with enormous deliberation, registering that something had knocked at its door.
Fenn broke the connection as a man breaks a bad grip, fast and hard and without caring what it cost.
The thread snapped.
The cold withdrew.
The blood dripped onto the stone between his boots and the star at the edge of his sight burned brighter than it had since the slope.
Some things look back.
The thought arrived cold and clean and was filed as Rule Four before the bleeding stopped.
The sight could read the deep dark, and the deep dark could read the reading, and it was older and stronger and stupider in exactly the fashion that made it more dangerous.
A wight does not think as a man thinks.
A wight is hunger and memory and a cold will set into the earth centuries ago and left to grow.
And it was a wight-lord under those mounds, a fragment of Angmar’s old malice given shape and purpose; he knew it now with the certainty of a man who has just been looked at by something he cannot outrun.
It had not learned his name from the reading.
It had learned that a watcher existed, and watchers in the North were the precise thing the old dark had been made to unmake.
He sat against the rock until the star dimmed to its patient silver, and wrote the ledger out in his head.
The sight showed flaws and lies and the true nature of things.
It was blind to the future.
It recoiled from anything of Maia rank or near it; the wight-lord was no Maia, but it carried enough of Angmar’s old sorcery that the sight had treated it as kin to one, and the recoil had come within a breath of putting him out.
He could read the crack in a blade, the lie in a face, the cold seam of a sickness in the ground.
He could not read a Nazgûl without losing consciousness.
He could not read the future at all. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
═══ THE LAY ═══
Sight, opened.
The flaw in a thing; the seam where it breaks.
Reach, stone, steel, wound, lie.
Not the future.
Never the future.
Toll: a pressure behind the eyes.
The deep dark looks back at the looker.
Verse: the First Line, kindled and unconfirmed.
═══════════════
That was the tool and those were its edges.
He stood, cleaned his face with a handful of cold earth, and started down with a working knowledge of his own eyes and one rule he would never break again unless the cost of keeping it ran higher than the cost of being seen.
The wight-lord knew a watcher walked the North.
It did not know his name, and that difference was the whole of his life.
Fell was waiting where the ground levelled out.
“Your nose has been bleeding.”
“Cold air.”
“It isn’t cold.” Fell fell in at his shoulder.
“Was it worth the price?”
Fenn considered a lie and could not be troubled to build one that would hold.
“Yes.”
“Good,” Fell said, and let it lie there, which was the second time he had done that, and Fenn was beginning to read it as loyalty.
Randir was waiting at the camp’s edge.
The grey eyes went to the blood Fenn had not quite got off his lip, and then to the hollows under his eyes that had not been there an hour before.
The captain did not ask.
He had said once that a man’s secrets were his own until they endangered the company, and the blood was Fenn’s own and the weariness was Fenn’s own, and neither, yet, endangered anybody but Fenn.
“We move at dawn.”
“Aye.”
“Whatever you were at on that shoulder, be finished with it by then.
I need a recruit who can see straight.”
“I can see straight.”
“Hm.” Randir turned away, then stopped.
“You’ll ride second file.
Behind me, not on the flank.”
“May I ask why?”
“You may ask.”
“Then why?”
“Because on the flank a man rides where I cannot see his face, and I have decided I want yours where I can.” Randir hitched his belt round.
“Get your horse.”
It was true and not true, what he had told the captain, and the truth lay in the middle where most truths live.
He could see flaws and lies and the cold seam of a waking evil.
He could see the trap he had been put inside without anyone asking his consent, and that the road out of it ran through, and that the running through wanted him bright enough to fight the dark and dark enough to survive the brightness.
He went to find his horse, careful now where he looked.