Chapter 9: Two Hearts, One Light
Brynn Holloway climbed the tower of Lanternhall for the first time in her life without a spark of light in her hands, and for the first time in her life, she did not climb it alone.
They went in through the bell-ringers' door on the north side at two in the morning, because nobody had used it in forty years and Odette had never liked the noise of the bells. The rain came down so hard it bounced. Emrys went first on the narrow stair, which neither of them remarked on. He could see in the dark now. She could not.
Her hand was on his shoulder. Her other hand held a knife of salt-glass, the only weapon she had left that did not need a flame.
At the first landing, he stopped.
"Two," he said, very low. "Behind the door on the left. Chained."
"Can you cut them from here?"
"Yes." He was quiet for a moment. She felt his shoulder tense under her hand, then loosen, as if he had set down something heavy. Behind the door, someone gasped, and then there was the sound of two people sitting down hard on a stone floor and not getting up.
When the lamp on the landing flickered as they passed, she saw that the white at his temple had spread, a finger's width wider than it had been at the Kettle.
"How many more?"
"Forty," he said. "Give or take."
"And every one costs you that."
"Every one costs me a little." He started up the next flight. "I'm not going to leave any of them on a chain because it's expensive, Brynn."
She did not argue. She had known he would say it.
* * *
The Patrol office was on the third floor. Brynn made him wait at the corner while she went in alone.
It was empty. Harker's chair was pushed back from her desk; her coat was still on its hook. The drawer where they had locked Brynn's lantern-chain was locked. Brynn broke it with the heel of the knife, took out the chain, and buckled it back round her waist. The two small salt-glass lanterns left on it hung dark now; the third was still inside Emrys's shirt. Unlit, they were only glass. But salt-glass was salt-glass. It stung a Nocturne's skin whether a Wick's light was in it or not, and a chain was still a chain.
She came out to find Emrys standing very still in the corridor, and a Nocturne woman in a baker's apron sitting against the wall at his feet, weeping, rubbing her wrist where a silver scar had gone dull and grey.
"She came round the corner," he said. "I didn't have time to warn you."
"Can you walk?" Brynn asked the woman.
"Yes."
"Then go down the north stair, and keep going until you're outside, and don't come back."
The woman went.
On the fifth floor, three of them came down the stair at once.
Emrys was already cutting. She could feel it in the way he had stopped moving, his head bent, the way a man stops to listen for a sound very far off. Two floors above, somebody cried out and fell quiet. He did not have time for the three in front of him as well.
Brynn stepped past him onto the landing.
The first came at her fast, in the straight Nocturne rush that looked unstoppable if you had never seen it before. She had seen it perhaps four hundred times. She dropped under his arm, swung the lantern-chain low, and caught him across both ankles; he went down the stairs he had just come up, and landed hard, and stayed there. The second she let reach her. She turned with him, put her shoulder into his chest, and pressed two of the dark salt-glass lanterns flat against the bare skin of his wrist, over the silver scar. He hissed and pulled back, and in the half-second he spent looking at his hand, she had the chain around the stair-rail and his arm, and the knife's point resting under his jaw, not touching.
"Stay," she said.
The third had stopped on the step above, uncertain, the way the chained ones went uncertain when the thing in front of them did not match their orders.
"Now," Brynn said, without turning round.
Behind her, Emrys lifted his head. The third one's knees gave. The one in her chain went limp and began, very quietly, to cry. The one at the foot of the stairs sat up, looked at his own wrist, and put his face in his hands.
She unwound the chain. Her hands were steady. She had been doing this since she was fourteen, and it turned out that most of it had never been the light.
* * *
Deep in the base of the tower, in the pump room where the gas for every lamp in Vellmarch was pressed and sent out through the city's pipes, Pip Quill was lying on his back under a valve housing with a spanner in his teeth, and he was discovering that Odette Lark had thought of him.
Half of the main valves had been fitted with new locks. Brass ones, alchemically sealed, that no spanner would move. The other half were ordinary iron, and those he was turning, one after another, as fast as his arms would let him. Somewhere above him, in the south and east of the city, rows of Speaking Lamps were going dark as the gas ran out of them.
The north and west he could not touch.
"Half," he said to nobody, through the spanner. "Half will have to do."
* * *
In the great hall, under the painted ceiling, the Circle of Five sat in a row on the floor with their backs to the pillar where the betting slate still hung. Around them stood twenty Nocturnes with silver on their wrists and nothing at all in their faces.
Elder Corvin Thistlewood had been reading aloud for an hour and ten minutes.
"Article Forty-One," he was saying, in a voice like a rusty gate. "In the event of a seizure of the Circle by force, the Seat of Law shall read into the record the full text of the Emergency Articles, so that no act taken under duress may be claimed lawful. Sub-article one."
"Corvin," said the Seat of the Patrol, beside him. "She isn't listening."
"The record is listening," said Thistlewood, "and I have eighty-six articles to go."
* * *
The top of the tower was a round glass room around the great lamp, open to the storm on every side where the canvas had been cut away. The lamp itself was the height of three men. Around it, where the old brass fittings had been, now stood a ring of new prisms, dark salt-glass cut into facets, each one wired to the next. In the centre of the ring, in a cradle of copper, sat the flask.
It was glowing already, dark and pulsing, like a coal seen through smoke.
Odette stood beside it, her grey robe dark with rain, her silver hair coming loose from its key-shaped pin. She had her back to the door. She did not turn when they came in.
"I wondered whether you would bring him up the bell stair," she said. "You always liked the bells, when you were small. I never did."
"Mother," said Brynn.
Odette turned then.
She looked at Brynn's grey hands, the dark lanterns at her belt, the colour gone from her hair at the temples. Something moved in her face, quickly, and was put away.
"You burned yourself out for him."
"For the truth."
"Is there a difference, now?" Odette shook her head slowly. "Come away from him, Brynn. Come here. It's nearly over. By sunrise every one of them will have walked out into the light, and there will never be another night like the one I held Clara through. Not for you. Not for your children. That is all I have ever wanted for you."
"You taught me the Compact exists to protect people," Brynn said. She did not raise her voice. She had never needed to, with Odette. "You taught me that when I was five. You used to say it at supper. We keep the light so that people can live in it." She took a step forward. "They're people. Lisette. Oren. The baker on the third floor. Vesper, who cried because he wouldn't be king. Eleven Dusk-born you put on cots in the dark for a year. Him." She did not look at Emrys. She did not need to. "They're all people. You forgot. I didn't."
For a moment, Odette did not say anything at all.
Then, far to the east, over the harbour, the rain thinned and the black of the sky went grey along its edge.
"Then I'm sorry," Odette said, and she put her gloved hand on the flask.
* * *
The prisms lit.
Red light went up from the ring and through the great lamp and down, into the pipes, into the tower, into the city. Emrys felt it go. It went through every Speaking Lamp in the north and west of Vellmarch that Pip had not been able to reach, and every one of them burned suddenly red, and a sound came out of the brass horns that was not a voice, only a pull. The same pull as the chains. Stronger. Much stronger. His own blood, in the flask, used as a lever.
Go to the light.
Below them, through the cut canvas, he saw them come out of the houses. Nocturnes. Dozens, then more than dozens, walking out into the grey streets of the west side in nightclothes and coats, faces blank, all turning the same way. East. Toward the dawn.
On the tower steps, at the very foot of it, he saw a small figure in black lace stop, and turn, and begin to walk. Vesper. She had not gone down to the tunnels. She had stayed, to help. Casimir caught her round the waist from behind and held on, and she kept walking against his arms, her feet sliding on the wet stone.
Emrys understood exactly what it would take.
A chain could be cut. This was not a chain. This was his own first blood, amplified through a lamp the size of a house, giving an order to every one of his people at once. The only thing that could drown it out was the same thing, louder. A full Call, with everything he had. Everything the seal had held back for twenty-three years.
And he knew the price of that as well. Not a lock of hair. Not the taste of porridge. All of it. He would go into the Long Night and not come out. He would forget Lowmere, and the hymnals, and the stairs on Tallow Lane. He would forget her.
He opened his mouth.
A hand closed round his.
Brynn's fingers were cold and grey and they did not shake. She was standing beside him, not in front of him. Not between him and anything. Beside him.
"I'm not protecting you," she said. "I'm with you."
In the pocket of her coat, pressed against his hip where they stood, something began to glow.
He felt its warmth before he saw it. White-gold. Slow. Even. It was the Heartwick, both broken halves of it, and it was lit, and it was beating, though every light in Brynn Holloway had gone out the night before last.