Nathan surfaced in pieces.
The carriage had stopped. That was the first thing. The rocking was gone and the light through the canvas had changed, gone flat and grey and close, and there were walls somewhere near, because the sounds had edges now. Voices. Cartwheels. A dog. The ordinary noise of a street.
He knew that noise.
He’d grown up inside that noise.
’The district.’
He tried to move and his body was still a long way away from him, heavy and slow, the drug not done with him yet. He got one eye half open. Straw. Boards. A slice of the girl’s ragged hair in the corner where she hadn’t moved.
’We’re home. We made it. I just have to wake up.’
The canvas came back and hands took hold of his ankles and dragged him out of the carriage into the grey light, and Nathan’s head cracked off the edge of the boards on the way down and he still couldn’t make his arms work well enough to stop it.
He got a look at where they were.
Not a market. Not the low district he knew, with its washing lines and its shouting. A narrow yard behind a shuttered building, high walls, one door. A place chosen because it had no windows looking into it.
Perrin had him under the arms. Hask took the girl by the back of the neck and steered her ahead, and she went without a sound, the way she did everything.
They took them both inside.
The room was cold and it smelled of lye and something underneath the lye.
There was a long table. There were hooks in the ceiling beam that had no business being in a merchant’s storeroom, and a drain in the middle of the stone floor, and a shelf of jars along one wall that Nathan’s swimming eyes slid across and did not want to understand.
They put him on the floor with his back against the table leg.
They put the girl in the corner.
His head was starting to clear. That was the cruel part. Whatever they’d given him was wearing thin at exactly the wrong moment, and the room was coming into focus one hard detail at a time, and he could hear the two of them talking as they moved around behind him, unhurried, the way men talk about work.
"He wants the eyes for certain," Hask was saying. "Paid up front for eyes last time. And the heart, he always wants the heart, they all want the heart."
"The heart on this one’s worth double, look at the size of him." Perrin’s voice, warm as ever. A drawer opened. Something metal settled against something metal. "Liver’s good. Young liver, clean. The hands, maybe. He does like a pair of young hands."
"Mage work."
"Mage work pays. Let him carve his runes into whatever he likes, it’s coin to us." A pause. "We’ll do the boy first. He’s coming round and I don’t want to be wrestling him."
Nathan’s mind, sluggish and slow, finally caught all the way up to the room.
’Organs.’
’They’re going to—’
He tried to get his legs under him and they slid out from beneath him on the stone. He tried to lift his arm and the drug still had it. He tried to reach for the stone in his belt and the belt was gone, and so was the stone, and he had a single clear moment to understand exactly what kind of animal had smiled at him on the road and given him bread.
’You thanked them.’
’You thanked them for the bread.’
Perrin crouched down in front of him with the same creased, kindly face, and put a hand flat on Nathan’s chest to hold him still against the table leg.
"Easy, lad," he said gently. "You won’t feel much."
Nathan looked at the girl in the corner.
She had her arms over her head again. But she was watching him through the gap under her elbow, the same as the carriage, and this time he understood the look. He understood all of it. Why she wouldn’t take the bread. Why she wouldn’t speak. What she’d known, sitting three feet from him, while he told these men they were the first decent people he’d met in days.
’You tried to warn me.’
’By not saying anything. That was you warning me.’
Her eyes were wet.
Nathan held them.
’It’s alright,’ he thought, at her, uselessly, because he had no way to say it and no breath to say it with. ’It’s not your fault. You did what you could.’
Hask stepped in behind him.
Perrin kept the hand flat on his chest.
"There," he murmured. "Good lad. Nice and still."
Then his other hand moved, quick and practiced, and a line of cold opened across Nathan’s throat that turned to fire a heartbeat later. Something hot came pouring down his front, fast, more than seemed possible, and he heard it hit the stone.
He couldn’t scream. Whatever they’d cut had taken the scream with it. All that came out was a thin wet sound, and his good hand rose off the floor a few inches, reaching for nothing, before it fell back.
The pain arrived properly then. It bloomed up his neck and into his jaw and behind his eyes, huge and white, and Hask leaned in over Perrin’s shoulder and drove something into his side, low, under the ribs, and turned it.
Nathan’s whole body locked around it.
And through all of it, over the roaring in his own ears, he could hear Perrin laughing.
Not cruelly. That was the worst of it. Softly. Warmly. The exact same easy chuckle he’d given on the road when Nathan thanked him for the bread, while his hand held a dying boy against a table leg and the boy’s blood ran out across the floor toward the drain.
"Easy," Perrin was saying, somewhere above the white. "Easy, lad, easy. Nearly done. Nearly done now."
The cold room began to go.
The girl’s wet eyes went last, watching him through the gap under her elbow, and then they went too, and the floor and the light and Perrin’s warm laughing voice all dropped away at once, and Nathan fell backward into a place with no bottom.
He fell for a while.
Then he wasn’t falling. He was standing, or something like standing, in a dark that had no floor he could feel and no ceiling and no walls, a black that went out forever in every direction and did not have a single point of light in it.
The cold was gone. The heaviness was gone. His arm didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt.
Nathan turned in a slow circle, and there was nothing, nothing, nothing, the same black everywhere he looked.
"Where," he said, and his voice made no echo because there was nothing for it to come back off. "Where am I?"
The screen answered him.
It bloomed in the dark in that pale, jagged green, the only colour in the whole of that place, and Nathan grabbed onto the sight of it the way a drowning man grabs a rope.
[You have experienced your second death.]
[Cause: mortal wound.]
[Killers identified.]
[Soul Marked: Perrin]
[Soul Marked: Hask]
Nathan read it.
He read it again, and it settled into him slowly, the way everything had been settling into him slowly since the ceremony, one cold piece at a time.
’Second death.’
’They killed me.’
’The merchants killed me.’
The kind ones. The ones who stopped their cart. The ones who fixed the wheel in six minutes and knew he was from the low district before he said it and never once asked about the blood. Every clue he’d walked past came back to him at once and stood in a neat row, and he’d had all of them, he’d noticed half of them, and he’d been so tired and so hungry and so desperate for one single thing in the world to not be cruel that he’d eaten the bread out of their hands and thanked them for it.
And the girl.
Nathan’s face went still.
’She knew. She sat there and she knew, and she couldn’t say a word, because the last person who said a word didn’t get sold whole.’
’She warned me the only way she was allowed to.’
’And I called her timid and ate the bread.’
He thought about her wet eyes watching him through the gap under her elbow while a man held him against a table leg, and something in him that had been grief for three days quietly, permanently, turned into something else.
[Soul Marked: Perrin]
[Soul Marked: Hask]
’Yes,’ Nathan thought.
’Good.’
’Both of you. Wherever you go now. You’re mine.’
He didn’t know how long he stood in the black.
There was no time in it. His thoughts were his own again, clear and cold and unhurried, and the panic that should have been there simply wasn’t, because some part of him had done this before and knew the shape of it.
He didn’t know where this was.
That was the plain truth of it. He’d woken in a black with no bottom once before, the night his throat was first opened, but that time something had reached in and dragged him out by the collar before he could do anything but fall. He hadn’t looked at it. He’d been too busy dying.
Now there was nothing pulling at him. No forest waiting. Just the dark, and him standing in it, turning slowly, with no idea whether he was meant to walk or wait or shout.
’Is this where it ends?’
’Or is this where it sends me back from?’
He had no way to tell. So he did the only thing left to a man standing in an empty dark. He started to look.
And far off, further than should have been visible in a place with no light to see by, something was burning.
A flame.
One small flame, hanging alone in the dark, very far away.
It was the same pale green as the screen. It didn’t flicker like fire. It hung steady and patient in the black, a single point of cold light in a place that had none, and the moment Nathan saw it he felt something turn toward it inside his own chest, some quiet pull, like it and he were the same thing recognising itself across a distance.
He walked toward it.
There was no ground, but he walked anyway, and the flame came closer, or he came closer to it, and it grew as he approached until it hung at head height in front of him, steady and green and cold.
Nathan stopped in front of it and looked into it.
There was a shape inside the flame.
He leaned closer.
It was curled at the heart of the fire, small and clear and complete, every line of it rendered in that same pale light. Lean flanks. Oversized paws on legs too thin to fill them. A coat that stirred though there was no wind, and two points of light where the eyes should be, watching him.
Nathan’s breath caught.
’The wolf.’
The newborn. The one he’d killed with a river stone in a clearing, that had dissolved into grey dust and blown away and left nothing behind.
It hadn’t left nothing behind.
It was here. All of it, the whole animal, wound down into a single green flame in an endless dark, waiting.
Nathan stood in front of it, and the last piece dropped into place, and he understood at last where the two men had actually sent him.
’This is it.’
He turned his head and looked out at the black going on forever in every direction, one flame burning in all of it, with room for a great deal more.
’This is my Sea of Souls.’