Rain of Iron

POV: Hollis

Hollis Quade had a rule about walking into rooms: look for what would kill you first, and then look for what you could use.

The corridor beyond the Mirror Room was forty yards long and eight feet wide, and it was a very good killing room. He gave it that. Someone had put real thought into it. The walls were dressed black stone, smooth as slate, set with narrow slots at about the height of a man's chest, every six feet on both sides. Each slot had a faint rim of brass. The ceiling was low enough to make a tall man duck, and lit from within by a dim red glow that came from nowhere, so that everything in the passage seemed seen through a drop of wine. The floor was glass. Not the black-and-white checkerboard of the Hall of Hands, but long flat panels, laid end to end, each exactly a yard long, and under each one, he noticed, a faint line, like the groove of a scale.

He stood on the threshold and did not step out.

"Pressure plates," he said.

"Yes," said Josiah, beside him.

"The whole floor."

"Every panel. The Founders did not trust a man to walk the same way twice." The Captain spoke in the flat dry voice he used for facts, but there was a bandage on each hand now, strips of white linen wound tight and already spotted pink, and he held them a little away from his sides like a man carrying two hot dishes. "Each panel is tuned to a weight. Too light, and nothing. A step of ordinary weight sets off the nearest slots. Iron bolts. A crossbow's worth, from both walls, at chest height."

"And a Chartered foot?"

"Is lighter by some measure I never understood." A short pause. "I have never walked it. I only know that it is a door nobody has ever come back through, except by being carried."

"Wonderful," said Hollis.

He looked at the slots. He looked at the panels. He looked, last, at the long red throat of the passage with its lacquered shine, and he felt, very distinctly, the old tightening in the belly that he had been trained out of by six years of Wild West shows and ten thousand cheap drinks. The feeling a man had at the top of a bad stair. It was a thing like hunger. It was the feeling he'd had in Cheyenne when he was nineteen, standing in a smoky back room with a knife on a silk thread and a stranger's money on the table, and thought: there is no way out of this but straight through.

He had been very good at straight through.

I'm not that man anymore, he thought. I told myself I wasn't.

His right hand, down at his side, tingled faintly. The two dead knuckles on his first and second finger stung with cold. They did that, now, whenever he thought about what he could do.

…

They went in the way they'd gone through the Hall: one at a time, in single file, with a yard between. Josiah led. He had a trick, he said, a way of walking on the edges of the panels, where the weight could be spread across the grooves. He demonstrated. His narrow boots touched down so lightly that the glass did not so much as whisper. One. Two. Three.

"It is a matter of the heel," said Josiah, over his shoulder. "Do not roll. Place."

"Place," repeated Felix, with the strangled earnestness of a man memorizing a prayer.

"Place the foot, do not drop it. Keep the weight back."

"Back. Right. Back."

Hollis went fourth, behind Roz, who limped but did not complain, with her left hand pressed to the black wall and her right on the shoulder of the girl before her. He watched the glass under his boots. He watched the slots on either side. He was aware, in some quiet working chamber of his head, of every man and woman in the file: of Josiah's careful shoulders, of Roz's breath, of Viv's step, so light that she seemed not to touch the panels at all, and of Dex's cane, ringing, in the rear.

Ten yards.

He let his mind go out ahead of his body.

It was a thing he did when he was alone. He did not like to think of it as a gift. It was more like a sense, a knack, a long cool feeling in the fingers, like putting your hand into a stream and feeling which way it ran. He could tell where the iron was. He could not have said how. There was a kind of hum to metal, a faint silent dense presence in the back of the mind, like a crowd in the next room. And down both walls of the corridor, behind the slots, in the dark, he felt it: forty-eight iron bolts, each the length of his forearm, each racked and sprung and waiting. Forty-eight small cold weights, pointing inward.

He was aware of every one.

I could bend them, he thought. If I had to.

All of them.

He did not finish the thought. His fingers had gone cold.

…

Fifteen yards. Twenty. Twenty-five.

He had begun to think they might do it. The red light hung steady. Josiah's feet touched down, lifted, touched. Felix, behind him, was breathing out in sixes, like a child following a count. Somewhere ahead was a doorway, and a door, and the end of the passage. He could just make it out: a lintel of black stone with a faint blue glimmer at the top.

"Nearly," whispered Viv.

"Don't speak," said Josiah. "Not on the panels."

"It's not the sound, it's the—"

And Felix sneezed.

It was a very small sneeze. It was the sort a man gives when a feather tickles his nose. But the smoke from the Hall of Hands was still in his coat, and the dust of the stair was in his hair, and he was twenty-one and exhausted and had been holding his breath for half an hour. The sneeze exploded out of him like a firecracker. His whole body jerked. His arms flew up. And his left foot, which had been placed carefully on the very edge of a panel, came down flat.

A sound like a bell rang through the glass.

For one tiny second nobody moved. Hollis heard the click. It was a small bright mechanical thing, like the cocking of a revolver, and it came not from one place but from everywhere at once, a ripple of soft brass clicks running down the length of the corridor, wall to wall, forty-eight in a row.

"Down!" Josiah shouted.

Nobody went down. There was not time.

…

He had always known it would happen like this.

Not the corridor. Not the bolts. But the moment itself: the long drop between the thing and the thing after, when the world went quiet and slow and clear, like glass on a table. It had come to him in the Widow's Wager, with the knife on its thread. It had come to him in the Wild West ring, on the afternoon a drunken cowhand had raised a revolver at the back of the lady sharpshooter's head, and Hollis had put a bullet through the barrel at forty yards. He did not decide. He simply was already doing it. He felt his body stop being a man's body and become an instrument for something larger, an attention, a clear cold wide-open eye.

He threw up both hands.

The first volley came out of the walls with a shriek like tearing sheet-iron.

Forty-eight bolts, black and spinning, from both sides at once, converging on the center of the corridor, where seven people stood in a line. He saw them. He saw them all. He felt each one in its own trajectory, a fine bright thread of cold in the dark, each with its own weight and speed and slender iron mind. They were beautiful. They were the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

Not you, he thought. Not you. Not you.

He reached.

It was like closing a fist on forty-eight strings. It hurt in a way he had no word for: not in the hands, but in the bone of the wrist, and behind the eyes, and in the roots of the teeth. He held on. He bent them. Each bolt jerked in the air, a hair's breadth, a quarter-inch, a hand. A curve. A graceful, unnatural lean. They rushed past Josiah's ear and Roz's shoulder and Felix's frozen face, and struck the stone in a long spitting stitch of sparks, and rang away down the corridor, and clattered on the glass.

The second volley came before the first had finished falling.

He bent those too.

He couldn't count them. He had no breath for counting. He stood with his arms spread and his face white and his hands hooked like claws, and every nerve in him sang with a high thin note. The bolts came in sheets, in rains, in black glittering whips, and each one swerved around the little knot of people in the red light as though a wall had been drawn about them, and slammed into the far stone with a scream of metal.

He held it for eleven seconds.

He knew because he counted the clicks as the racks emptied, one by one. Forty-eight. Forty-eight more. A last stuttering few, and then the silence.

The passage was filled with a bright blue smoke. Bolts lay scattered on the glass like spilled matches. Some stood quivering in the walls. One had buried itself, point first, in a panel six inches from Felix's boot, and he was staring at it with his mouth open.

"Is that all?" said Felix, hoarsely.

"That's all," said Hollis.

He tried to lower his arms. They would not come down.

…

It was the hands.

He had expected that. He knew the shape of the price. But he had not known how much. He looked at them, spread out before him in the red light, and could not feel them. The tingling had gone. The cold had gone. There was only a blankness from the wrist to the fingertips, a smooth wax-doll numbness, as though the hands were made of something that did not belong to him. He tried to close his right. It closed. He did not feel it close. He looked at it as at a stranger's.

All ten, he thought. All of them. Not two knuckles this time.

And something else, deep in him, had gone quiet.

He stood very still. He reached back into himself for it, the way a man puts his tongue to the place where a tooth was. It was a sound. It was a high thin sound, three notes, a falling and a rising, sweet and sly, the kind a man makes through his front teeth when he is walking a horse down a hill at dusk. A tune with no name. His father whistled it. His father had whistled it every evening of his life, coming across the yard with the lantern and the mare, in the long gold light, and Hollis, at seven, at ten, at fifteen, had always known by the sound that he was home.

He could see the yard. He could see the lantern.

He could not hear it.

Say the price out loud, said Dex's dry voice, in his head. Hollis nearly laughed. All right, boss. All right.

"My father's whistle," he said, quietly, to the red air.

…

For a long moment nobody spoke.

He did not look up. He was looking at his hands. He was looking at them because he did not dare look at anything else. He could feel their eyes. He could feel the weight of it, and the thing that would come next, the thing he'd lived in dread of for ten years, since the day a boy in a Dakota livery stable had seen him pull a horseshoe straight out of the air.

They're going to say it. Whatever they call it. Freak. Witch. Tarnish.

They'll say it, and they'll be right.

He heard a movement.

It was Josiah. Hollis could hear the creak of a belt, the faint scrape of leather. He lifted his eyes in spite of himself and saw the Captain's right hand drop, quick and automatic, to a pistol at his hip. It was a soldier's pistol, taken from the field in the Hall of Hands. His bandaged fingers had closed on the grip. His face was perfectly white. For one terrible half-second the long slate eyes were fixed on Hollis's hands, and in them, unmistakably, was the whole old catechism: Unchartered. Tarnish. A thing that takes from the dead.

Hollis did not move.

He thought: Well.

He thought, quite coolly: It's not as if I wasn't expecting it.

"Call me what you like, Captain," he said. His voice came out light, dry, ordinary. He was rather proud of it. "I won't argue. But I'd take it kindly if you did it after."

The Captain looked at him.

He looked at the hands. He looked at the bolts, scattered across the floor in their hundreds like straw. He looked at Felix, who still stood rigid, and at Roz, who had put her palm to her mouth. At the cluster of iron points sunk in the glass an inch from a boy's boot. He looked at the wall, at the forty-eight slots in the black stone, at the thousand spent bolts that ought, by every law of the Founders, to have been standing in seven bodies.

Slowly, quite slowly, the hand left the pistol.

"You have saved," said Josiah, "every one of us."

His voice was rough. It sounded like a man who has been handed a stone and told that it is bread. "I was taught that to do what you have done was a theft. I was taught it by people who lie." A pause, in which the red light seemed to thicken. "I do not know what you call it. But I know what you did. I will not be the man who calls it a crime."

Hollis stared at him.

He was aware that his mouth was open. He shut it.

It was not what he had expected. It was so far from what he had expected that for a moment he could not find the next word. He had braced for the knife and been offered a hand. He felt the ground go out from under him and come back, a little to the left.

"Well," he said. "That's, ah. That's decent of you."

"It is accurate."

"Then, thanks."

"Thank you," said Felix.

He said it in a very small, very odd voice. He had come across the glass at a stumbling run, the bolts crunching beneath his shoes, and he was standing in front of Hollis with his glasses crooked and his chin working. His eyes were wet. He was staring at Hollis's face, and then at his numb dead-white hands, as if they were something he had never seen before and could not put down.

"You, you bent them. All of them. I saw them go. I saw every one, they went right round, it was the most, the most—" He gulped. "I thought I was dead. I thought, this is it, this is the end, and I never even had the chance to apologize to Father. And you just, you just stood there, and—"

"Felix."

"You didn't say. You never said."

"No," said Hollis. "I didn't."

"Why not?"

"Because people usually run."

Felix stared. He looked, for a moment, so completely baffled, so honestly, helplessly puzzled, that it was almost funny. "Why would I run? You saved my life."

Hollis opened his mouth. And discovered, to his horror, that there was nothing in it.

…

Felix took his hands.

He did it without asking, the way he did everything. He simply reached out and gathered Hollis's two numb hands in both of his own, and turned them palm up. They lay in his grip like fish. They were scarred and gray with the cold. The dead knuckles stood out white. Hollis could see them, but he could not feel them being touched. He watched Felix's thumbs move over the skin, gently, from the wrist to the fingertips. He watched the bent head, the untidy hair.

"They're freezing," said Felix. "You're, they're like ice."

"It's all right. It's, it passes."

"It doesn't look all right." He bent closer. Then, with a total lack of self-consciousness, and the earnest, scientific, absorbed expression of a boy testing a theorem, he lifted Hollis's hands to his mouth and breathed on them.

Warm air. Soft. Damp.

Hollis did not feel it. Not in the skin. He felt it somewhere else. It went up through the numb arms like a rising tide, past the elbow and the shoulder, and arrived in the middle of his chest, where it did something that he had no name for, and could not afford.

He said nothing. He had not a word in his head.

Felix breathed on them again.

"There," he said, in a low, anxious murmur. "That's better, isn't it? I read that heat's the right thing. For frostbite. I mean, it's not frostbite, I know that, but it's, the principle's the same. Does that help?"

"Yes," said Hollis.

It came out cracked. He cleared his throat.

"Yes. It helps."

Behind them somebody coughed. Viv, probably. It was a polite and very carefully neutral cough. Someone else, further off, was suddenly interested in the roof. A dry voice said, from the rear of the file, "We have no time for a vigil, Mr. Whitcomb," and then, a half-beat later, in a different tone, "However. Take a moment."

Hollis closed his eyes.

He had spent ten years betting his life against the chance that someone would look at what he was, and turn away. He'd wagered it on every card. He had laid it against bullets, and knives, and the sweet slow ruin of the bottle. He had never once, in all that time, thought to wager it on a boy with chemicals on his hands who would breathe on his fingers, to warm them, in the red light at the end of the world.

I'm going to lose, he thought.

It did not feel like losing. It felt like the opposite.

…

The door at the end of the corridor was a slab of black stone twenty feet high.

It rose from floor to roof, polished as a mirror, set in a frame of heavy dark bronze. Three round plates of different metals were let into its face in a line, one above the other: one of pale gold, one of silver, one of copper, each the size of a dinner plate. Each plate glowed with a steady light in its own color, and beneath each was a keyhole, black and narrow and cold.

They stood before it in the blue smoke, all seven, bandaged and bloody and breathing hard.

"Three locks," said Josiah, softly. "The Triple Seal."

"Three colors," said Felix.

"Three keys. Three Houses." The Captain looked at the slab for a long moment. "The Founders did not trust any one man with what lies beyond."

Hollis flexed his fingers. He felt nothing. He flexed them again and watched them move, pale and foreign, like the hands of a man in a painting. Then he looked up at the door, and at the three round eyes that glowed in it, and then, without meaning to, at the boy standing beside him, still breathing out in sixes, with his glasses crooked and his bright, frightened, brave brown eyes fixed on the lock.

All right, he thought. All right. Straight through.

But for the first time in his life, it did not feel like a bet.