Outside it had stopped.
That was the first thing.
The sound of the ward had dropped to the ordinary sounds of a ward that has been finished with, which is people calling names and beams settling and somebody, a long way off, working a handcart over cobbles.
The chandler’s row was down.
The counting house was still going up.
Dain stood on the step with volume two under his arm and turned around to look at the shop.
The frontage was grey board.
Shuttered.
No sign, no glass, no light.
The door he had come out of was a door in the way that any door in a storage annex is a door, and when he put his hand flat on it, it felt like old wood in the sun.
He stood there for a while.
Then he went down the street to where the Silvered survivors had pooled up around the horse trough, and there were nine of them, which he had known and had not wanted confirmed.
“Verrow.” Haldis had a rag around her head.
“We thought you were in the granary.”
“No.”
“Where have you been, then?
It’s been most of the morning.”
Dain opened his mouth.
He had a cold in his teeth that had not been there since he was a boy in his father’s house in the north.
He had a book under his arm about a man climbing a stairway out of the bottom of the world.
He had, sitting somewhere behind his breastbone, the thing that had happened when he lowered a glass and found he was in a room that had sixteen hundred of them.
“The grey building,” he said.
“On Marrow.
Between the chandler and the wool merchant.”
“The store annex.”
Haldis looked at him.
He heard it, as he was saying the rest of it, the way it was coming out.
The cold air.
The white light with no fire under it.
The four thousand books, which was a true number and sounded like a lie.
The woman in the doorway with the sign pinned to her coat, which he tried to say and could not make sound like anything.
“Dain,” Haldis said, carefully, “when did you last drink something.”
“An hour ago.
It was cold.”
“Right.”
“It was cold, Haldis.”
Someone behind her laughed, and then stopped, because laughing was not the thing today.
Dain went back up Marrow Street on his own.
The grey front was where it had been.
He stood in front of it and the door was a door and the boards were boards, and he stood there long enough that a woman with a bucket went past him and gave him the look people give a man standing in front of a wall.
He thought: I have lost my unit and my captain in one morning, and I am standing in the road arguing with a building.
He thought: the book is under my arm.
He looked down.
The book was under his arm.
Black spine, red lettering.
He had read it in a cold room and had not stopped where a sensible man stops.
He had read to the end of the thing the first book was about, which was a man at the bottom of a black well who is told he will never climb, and who spends the whole of it learning to set his feet and breathe from under his ribs, and who at the last, on the final page before the paper changed to a different trouble, sets his foot on the first step and holds it.
Dain had read the whole of that and then shut the book, because that was where the story had breathed out, and he had read it the way he read a drill order, which is to say as a thing you do.
Standing in the road, he did the breath.
He did not decide to.
His body did the breath from under the ribs the way the last pages had it, once, before he caught himself doing it, and the cold went out of his teeth and down into his left hand, and the left hand, which had not closed past halfway since the granary, closed.
It made a fist.
Dain stood in the middle of Marrow Street looking at his own ruined hand in a fist, and then he opened it, and it opened, and he closed it again, and it closed, and the second time it hurt in the ordinary way a cold hand hurts and not in the other way, the way it had hurt for nine days.
He looked at it for a while.
Then he decided, the way a man decides not to step on a snake he is not sure is dead, that he had not seen it.
He put his hand on the door and it opened, and the bell rang, and the cold came out over him like water out of a jug, and inside, somewhere up on the third floor, a shelf light was still buzzing.
“That was quick,” Rurik said from behind the counter.
Something happened at the edge of his sight that had not happened before, a line of the dry grey text sliding in low where only he could see it, at the counter, on his side of it.
[ VERROW, DAIN.
NINE GATES OF THE ASHEN FIST — FIRST ASCENT, COMPLETE.
] [ FIRST FORM, FIRST BREATH.
ENTRY.
] [ HE READ TO THE END OF IT.
THEY USUALLY STOP SHORT.
]
Rurik read it twice.
“Know what?” he said, out loud, and then wished he had not, because Dain was still in the doorway and had heard him talking to nobody.
Dain stood in the doorway.
“Nobody can see it.”
“Yeah, I’ve been getting that.” Rurik had the tablet out and a pen behind his ear and he did not look up.
“Took me a while to work out what was happening.
You want water?”
“Nobody can see it.”
“Dain.
Do you want water.”
Dain came in and sat down at the table against the wall, and put volume two on it, and pressed both hands over his face, and left them there.
Rurik brought the glass over and set it down and went away again, because when a customer goes quiet you let them go quiet.