The Hollowkin

The creature did not attack. It stood at the edge of the pale rock with its long arms hanging and its blank face tilted toward her, and after a while it did something she had not expected at all. It sat down.

It folded itself, joint by joint, like a ladder being laid on the ground, until it crouched with its knees by its ears and its hands clasped around its shins. The wide mouth closed. The smooth oval above it, which she had taken for the absence of a face, was not blank after all. There were features in it, only very faint, as if they had been pressed in wax and then worn almost away by a thumb: the shallow hollows of eyes, the ghost of a nose, a brow that had once frowned.

"It wants to be understood," said Obsyra, very low. "Put the fire away, child. You will frighten it."

Solaia looked down. She had not realised that she was holding the ring so hard it hurt, nor that a thread of white flame had run up her wrist and was crawling along her forearm like a vine. She breathed out. It sank. The creature, which had flinched, let its shoulders loosen by a fraction.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't know."

"Sol-ai-a," said the Hollowkin again, with infinite care, and then, as if it had spent its whole strength on the effort, it put one hand to its throat and bowed its head.

It was only then that she saw what was on its wrist.

A cuff. A narrow band of tarnished silver, worn to a thread, hanging loose on a wrist so thin that the whole hand might have slid out of it. There was a mark stamped on the inner face, a tiny coiled serpent biting its tail, and she knew it. She had seen that mark on a hundred collars, under the Cathedral, in the tank-room, on the chains that fed her own stolen fire to the people who prayed to it.

"Oh," she said softly. "Oh, you poor thing. You were one of them."

…

There were forty of them, in the end.

They came out of the dark in ones and twos over what might have been an hour, tall and gray and soundless, and they did not crowd her. They sat down at a careful distance and arranged themselves in a ragged half-ring, with their long hands folded and their worn faces turned toward the little fire she had been persuaded to light. Gron lay with his eyes slit open, watching them. Obsyra had not moved. But the low bell-note in her chest had stopped.

They were, Solaia saw, very old. Not in body. In the way a stone is old that has been rained on for ten thousand years. One had the remains of a priest's robe about its shoulders, a rag of white with a gold hem. One wore a soldier's belt with an empty scabbard. A small one, no taller than her hip, had the tatters of a child's smock, and she looked at it for a long time and then made herself look away.

The tallest rose.

It came forward on its long stalk-legs, bent, and set something down in front of her. A shallow bowl, of pale stone, with a crack down one side. In it was water. It was clear and still and perfectly cold, and when she bent over it she saw that it held no reflection.

"For you," said the Hollowkin.

It was the first sentence it had managed. It came out in pieces, in that dry reed voice, each word separated from the last by an effort that was nearly visible. "For... the child. To... drink. Is... safe."

"Thank you."

"We... do not... have... much."

"It's more than I've been offered in a long time," said Solaia, and drank.

It tasted of nothing. It was only cold, and wet, and clean, and when she had finished she found that her hands had stopped shaking and that some of the tight bright fear in her chest had gone slack. The child within her gave a sigh of satisfaction. Good, it said. I like them.

"They like you," murmured Obsyra. "That is rarer than you know."

"Who are they?"

The tall one answered, haltingly, with the old dragon translating where the words failed. They had come from the Cathedral, once. Not the one she knew. An older one, buried beneath it, where the first collars had been forged. They had been priests, and soldiers, and scholars, and some of them, the small ones, had been none of these. They had all been given. That was the word. They had been given in rites, in small ceremonies, to the first Pontiff, on the understanding that their lives would feed the working that kept the Church alive.

"Fed," said the Hollowkin. "Fed... and fed. Until... nothing."

"And then?"

"Thrown. Through... the door." A long, shuddering pause. "To here. Where... things... go."

She looked around the half-ring of worn gray faces and understood, with a sick lurch, what the Pale Mist was going to be. It would not be weather. It was going to be these. The leavings of five thousand years of a god with a very large appetite, dumped on the far side of the sky where nobody had to look at them.

"We... forget," said the Hollowkin. "That is... the... mercy. It does not hurt... to forget."

"It does if you're the one who's forgotten."

"Yes." It tilted its head. For the first time something moved in the pressed-wax face. "You... still... know... what... that is."

…

The law of the place was simple, and she learned it in pieces.

They told her not to count the days. There were none to count, and the attempt only made the numbers heavy. They told her not to look too long at the seeds of light, for the seeds were times, little fragments of other lives passing, and to hold one was to forget something of your own. They told her, with a gentleness that did not soften it, not to say the names of the people she loved.

"It's what holds me," she said.

"It is... what... takes you." The tall one shook its head. "A name... is a door. You say it, you... open it. Everything... comes out. And then... you are... emptied."

"I need him."

"You... want him." Another pause, patient. "Not the same."

She was too tired to be angry. She sat with her chin on her knees and watched the small fire, and thought about the difference, and decided that she disliked it exactly because it was true. The Hollowkin were not cruel. They were just very, very old, and they had learned to survive by wanting nothing. It was not a thing she could do. She did not want to do it. But she could see how a person might arrive there, one small surrender at a time.

I will say it, she thought. Once at waking. Not more. That is the only price I will pay.

She did, that night, though night was only a word. She said it into her knees, silently, with her eyes shut. She felt the door in her mind open a hand's breadth and a warmth flow through it, and the slow grey creep of the Void withdraw, and she said it again, in her heart, to be sure.

Kieran. Kieran Aldren.

The warmth came. It was the warmth of a hand on her waist. It was a man's low laugh in a dark kitchen. It was a long grey stare over the rim of a teacup, and a mouth that said Wench in a voice that meant something quite different.

Kieran.

She slept.

…

The small one came to her before she woke.

She knew it only afterwards, from the weight of it: a presence at her side, light as a leaf, that had crept up while the others dozed and settled down against her hip in the dark. It was the child in the tatters of a smock. It did not speak. It had not got a mouth to speak with, only a faint pucker in the wax where one had been. But it had brought something, and it laid it in her open hand with a tenderness that made her chest ache even in sleep.

It was a button.

A little horn button, chipped and brown, with two holes. Whatever coat it had once been sewn to, whoever had once done up that coat in the cold of a morning and told a small person to keep still, was gone past recall. But the child had kept the button. Through whatever the Void had taken, through names and faces and years, it had kept one small thing it could not have said why.

It is a gift, said her own child, softly, in the dark. It wants you to keep it.

Then I will. She closed her fingers. Tell it I will.

It knows.

When she woke, the little fire had gone out, and the child was asleep, and the half-ring of the Hollowkin had thinned to a handful. Obsyra's great side rose and fell. Gron breathed slowly in his dull-gray dream. The light of the Void was exactly as it had been, neither dawn nor dusk, and she lay for a time with her eyes open, counting nothing, thinking of nothing, in the clean empty peace of a woman who has been very frightened and is now only tired.

It was a long while before she noticed that she was smiling.

She did not know why. It was a small, private, fond smile, the sort you wear when you think of someone who has just done something foolish and dear. It was there on her face as she sat up, and it was still there as she took her hand from her belly and looked about her for the thing that had put it there. Some name. Some face. Some phrase.

She searched for a long time.

It was the oddest sensation. It was like reaching for the bannister in a familiar dark stair and closing her hand on air. The warmth was there, she could feel it, a great steady glow in the middle of her chest like a banked fire. She knew that it belonged to someone. She knew it had a shape, and a voice, and a long jaw, and a way of standing in a doorway. She could see his hands.

She could not see his name.

What is it? said the child, waking. Mama? What is wrong?

"Nothing, sweetheart."

You are cold.

"I'm—" She stopped. She pressed her fingers to her lips. "I'm just trying to remember something."

Papa?

"Papa," she said slowly. "Yes. Papa. Yes."

She knew that word. She knew who it meant. She turned it over in her mind like a smooth stone, and under it, beyond it, in the great warm place where the name should have been, there was only a blank white space the shape of a door.

The tall Hollowkin had risen beside her. It stood very still, its wax face turned toward her, with an expression in it that she would have called compassion, if it had had any more face to show it with. It reached out one long gray hand and laid it, very lightly, on her shoulder.

"An hour," said the creature softly. "That is... not... bad. Most... take... a day."