[INTERLUDE] THE BACKLASH

The hospice of the Sisters of Mercy was a whitewashed barn of a building on the edge of the Falls, with a tin roof and thirty iron cots. It smelled of carbolic and boiled linen. In the mornings the sisters moved among the beds in gray habits, carrying basins. In the evenings they sang, softly, in Latin, and the sound drifted down the long dim ward like a sad, sweet wind.

Alden Whitlock lay in the last bed by the wall.

He did not know how long he had been there. It was the third week, or the fourth. The days had run together. He remembered the charcoal-burner's cart, jolting. He remembered the cold, and a red-faced sister who said, poor lamb, and a long hour with a hot knife. He remembered the weight of plaster on his arm and the iron wire that held his jaw. He had been fed through a tube. He had been bathed like a child.

He remembered, with perfect clarity, the beam.

It had been a great charred oak beam, fallen across the doorway of the muniment room. He had dragged at it with his bare hands. The wood had been hot. He had smelled his own flesh burning. And through a gap in the stones, beyond it, in the dark, he had heard a thin old voice, calm and quite untroubled, reciting the Twenty-Third Psalm.

Yea, though I walk through the valley.

He had not been able to move the beam.

…

The visitor came on the twenty-seventh night.

Alden was awake. He was always awake now. He lay on his back with his eyes on the beams of the roof, listening to the sisters' footsteps die away down the ward. The lamps had been turned low. A cough rattled somewhere. A cricket was singing in the wall.

He did not hear the door. He did not hear footsteps. He became aware, quite slowly, of a coldness at the side of his bed, and turned his head, and saw a figure standing there in the dimness.

It was tall. It was robed in black. It wore a mask of smooth silver, with a single vertical slit where the mouth should be.

Alden did not cry out. He found, with a kind of detached interest, that he was not afraid.

"Master Whitlock," said the figure.

The voice was a man's. It was soft, rather high, and very calm. The mask turned, with a faint creak of leather, to look at the thirty beds in the ward. Nobody stirred.

"I have put them to sleep. They will not wake until I wish it." A pause. "We have not much time."

"Who are you?"

It came out thick, through the wire in his jaw. The masked man bent, and laid a gloved hand on Alden's brow. The touch was cold and dry as paper. A warmth spread from it, and Alden felt the wire loosen, and the ache in his jaw dull, and he drew breath for the first time in a month without pain.

"A friend of Miss Fairchild's," said the man.

Alden closed his eyes.

"She is well," the masked man said. "She is with us. She has found a new purpose. She asked, before she left, that someone should look in on you. She was most insistent." The slit in the mask seemed to smile. "It seems that she is fond of you."

"Where is she?"

"At peace."

"I want to see her."

"In time." The gloved hand withdrew. "Master Whitlock. You have lost a great deal. Your House. Your mother. Your gift. You have been humiliated before a nation. You have been beaten in a ditch like a dog." The voice was very gentle. "I should like to offer you a way out."

…

It took three nights.

The masked man came back each one, at the same hour, and sat on the end of the cot, and talked. He did not press. He did not threaten. He spoke in a low pleasant murmur, like a physician describing a treatment, and Alden listened, because there was nothing else to do.

He spoke of the Hollow.

It was not, he said, a power in the ordinary sense. It was an absence. A hunger. A void at the bottom of the world that Mana flowed toward, as water flows down a drain. Those who learned to open themselves to it could draw it up, in small measures, and use it as one uses a spring. It had no rank. It had no ceiling. It could not be taxed, or sealed, or taken away by any Senate. And it was free.

"It has a price," said the masked man. "Everything does. But the price is small, to one who has already paid so much."

"What price?"

"A portion of the soul."

"Which portion?"

"Whichever one you can spare."

Alden was silent.

On the second night the man told him about the girl. Not Cordelia. The other one. He said the name quite gently, as one speaks of the dead. Reeve. He said that she had gone to Skyfall. He said that she would be an Archmage by the end of the week. He said that the Chancellor was afraid of her, and that the Choir was afraid of her, and that everyone in the Republic who had a name was afraid.

He said, "You loved her."

Alden turned his face to the wall.

"I do not judge. It is not a crime. It is the only interesting thing about you." The voice was soft. "You loved her, and you lost her, and you have spent a month in a cot, thinking about it. I should like to give you the means to put it right."

"How?"

"By becoming what she is."

"I can't."

"You can." The masked man leaned close. "She is a vessel of Cinder, which is the oldest of the arts. You are a vessel of Silver, which is the newest, and the weakest. But you have a sibling to her in one respect. You are both, at bottom, empty. She has been emptied by suffering. You have been emptied by loss. Both of you have a hole, where something was. The Hollow fills holes."

"I don't—"

"Master Whitlock." There was a smile in the voice, a faint one. "I am not asking you to understand. I am asking you to decide."

…

He decided on the fourth night.

He could not afterward have said why. It was not courage. It was not despair. It was something quieter than either: a kind of tired clarity, the clarity of a man at the end of a long road who sees that there is no longer anywhere to turn. He lay in the dim ward with the wire gone from his jaw and his arm out of plaster, and he thought of his mother's voice, and the beam, and a girl on a balcony saying, I remember the drain.

He thought: I did that.

He thought: There is no undoing it.

He thought: But there may be an ending.

"Very well," said Alden.

The masked man rose.

"Excellent." He drew a small object from his robe: a vial, no longer than a finger, of black glass. It held a few drops of something dark. "You will drink this. You will lie still. The rest will happen of itself." He set it in Alden's palm. "It will hurt."

"I know."

"It will hurt more than anything you have felt."

"I know that, too."

The man inclined his head. For a moment, the pale slit of the mask turned toward the window, where the stars were thick, and a thin wind stirred the curtain.

"Good luck, Master Whitlock," he said, and was gone.

…

It hurt.

It did not begin as pain. It began as a cold, a trickle of ice from the stomach outward, as though he had swallowed a mouthful of winter. It spread. It filled his veins. His limbs went numb, and then tingled, and then lost all sensation, and he lay in the dark like a statue carved in snow. His heartbeat slowed. His breath slowed. He felt the Silver Sigil on his breastbone, which had been his pride since boyhood, begin to burn.

It was a small bright pain. It sharpened. It deepened. It spread across his chest in a web of fire, and the Sigil began to come apart.

He did not cry out.

He felt it crack. He felt the lines of it fall away, one by one, the beautiful ornate lines of the Whitlock mark, as a lace curtain falls to ash. He felt the power in him, the borrowed, filed-down, tuned-to-perfection power that a girl in a white dress had given him, drain away into the dark. It went out of him in a rush. He felt the hole it left.

And into the hole, something came.

It was vast. It was cold. It was hungry beyond all words. It poured into him like water into a sinking ship, and he felt his soul, his actual soul, the small bright thing that had been Alden Whitlock for twenty years, begin to crack and split. He felt it divide. He felt a piece of it go, and then another. He felt them drift away from him, upward, into the dark, like sparks from a fire.

No, he thought. No, wait. That is too much. That is—

The Hollow did not wait.

It took what it wanted. It took the golden boy in the garden. It took the young man in the ballroom. It took a night in the autumn, and a girl's hand in his, warm and small and ink-stained, and a voice saying, you're so clever, Alden. It took the sound of her laugh. It took the smell of her hair. It took his mother's face. It took the twenty-third psalm.

He lay on the cot and felt himself emptied out.

When it was over, a long time afterward, he opened his eyes.

…

He was alive.

That was the first surprise. He lay on his back in the hospice, in the gray before dawn, and the beams of the roof swam in and out of focus. His head ached. His mouth was dry. He felt, in some distant way, that he had been very ill, and was now recovering.

He raised his hand.

It was shaking. The fingers were curled and clawed, like the fingers of an old man, and the skin was gray. He turned it over. He looked at the wrist. And on the inner side, where for eight years a delicate silver mark had gleamed, there was only a ragged white scar, like a burn.

The Sigil was gone.

He lay there for a long time, looking at the scar.

Then, slowly, with the dreamlike deliberation of a sleepwalker, he sat up. He put his feet on the floor. They were cold. He rose, swaying, and stood by the bed in his nightshirt, and looked down the ward. The sisters were still asleep. The lamps had burned low. In the beds around him, thirty sick people breathed in the half-light, and he realized, dimly, that he could hear every one of them, every cough, every heartbeat, and that none of them meant anything to him at all.

He found his coat on a peg. He put it on.

There was a slip of paper on the floor by the door. A telegram form, ruled and printed, with a few words scrawled across it in a nun's round hand. A message to someone. He picked it up and read it, without much interest. The young man Whitlock is dying. He has asked for you by name.

He did not remember asking.

He turned the paper over. On the back, in very small black letters, in a careful, flowing hand that was not a nun's, someone had written a single line.

Skyfall. She will be at the foot of the hill by noon.

Alden stood quite still.

He thought of the girl. He tried to see her. He tried to bring up her face, as he had a hundred thousand times, the dark eyes, the stubborn chin, the small straight scornful mouth. He found that he could not. There was only a blank, a gray, a hole. He knew that he had loved her. He knew it the way one knows the name of a town in a foreign country. It was a fact. It had no heat.

I'll see her, he thought. I'll tell her.

He did not know what he would tell her.

He folded the telegram, slowly, and put it in his pocket. He walked to the door. He pushed it open, and went out into the cold gray dawn, on his bare dead feet, and set off along the road toward the mountains.

He believed that if he could only see her once more, if he could just stand before her and say what was in his heart, everything would be different.

He had forgotten that he no longer had a heart to say it with.