The Hunger Wakes

It is a strange thing to sit down in front of the end of the world.

Isolde had expected to feel brave. She felt, instead, extremely ordinary. She sat cross-legged on the black flags with her skirts bunched under her and her notebook in her lap, six feet from a chained door that breathed, and the principal sensation in her body was that her left foot had gone to sleep. It was an absurd thing to be thinking about. She thought about it anyway. She flexed her toes inside her boot, and found that her hands were shaking, and folded them, and looked up.

The black door looked back.

It had no eyes. But she had the feeling, quite clear and quite certain, of being regarded by something that had not been looked at directly in a very long time.

"You've sat," said the voice.

"Yes."

"Nobody sits."

"I know. You said." She tried a smile. It felt tight and stiff on her face. "I'm told it's unusual."

"They usually do the other thing. They stand. They shout. They read me my sentence. Once there was a woman who sang, very badly, for two hours." The chains chinked. "But nobody's ever put their back to the floor and said nothing."

"I haven't said nothing."

"No. You've said, 'Yes.' And, 'I know.' It's a beginning."

She felt Valerian settle beside her on the stone. He did it stiffly, a man unused to sitting on floors, and his shoulder came against hers and stayed. Behind them she heard Brannoc drag a Lantern's coat over the sleeping boy, and mutter something unprintable, and take up a post at the foot of the stair with his arms folded and his one eye on the dark.

"What do I call you?" said Isolde.

The door was silent.

"I'd like to know," she said. "I've been calling you it for twelve days. The Hunger. The thing. The Door. It seems rude. I've read about a great many things in my life, but nobody ever told me what to call this one."

"I don't think," said the voice, "I've got one."

"Everything has a name."

"I had one, I think. A long time ago." It sounded surprised. "It's quite gone. They keep me in a very small room. I don't think I've said it since before the salt."

"Who gave you the salt?"

"Ah."

The chains stirred. A thread of white crept across the nearest link, a creeping fur of crystal, and the voice behind the door drew a long breath, and let it out, as a man does who has a tight collar.

"That's the question, isn't it," it said. "I can say a little. The salt's very exact. It lets me tell you what I am, and what I did, and what I want. It won't let me say who put it on. Every time I come near, it tightens." A rueful laugh. "Eight times I've tried to tell a reader. Eight times they've picked up a knife before I got to the end of a sentence. I find I'm a poor storyteller."

"I've time."

"You've a day."

"Then you'd better be quick," said Isolde.

…

It told her what it was.

It did it slowly, in pieces, like a man taking a thorn from a thumb. She sat with her pencil in her hand and did not write. There was a time when she would have scribbled the whole thing down, every phrase and gloss, and then gone away and sorted it into columns. She did not. She only listened, with her back straight and her face lifted, the way she had once listened to her mother tell her the names of the stars.

"I'm not a beast," said the voice. "I want that understood. The Order tells everyone I'm a beast. I'd like to be. A beast has teeth and a nature. It does what it was born for. I'm much less than that."

"What are you?"

"I'm a grief."

The word hung in the cold.

"That's the best I can do. A grief, with nowhere to go. There was a field, once, before any kingdom. A great many people died in it. Not in battle. Of a winter, I think, or a sickness. They were buried quickly and no one wept." The voice grew soft. "It isn't that they were forgotten. They were remembered, a little, for a little. But there was so much to do, and so few left to do it, and everyone had to go on. So they put it down. All that sorrow. They set it in the ground with the bodies, and walked away, and said, 'We'll mourn when it's easier.'"

"And it never was."

"It never is." A sigh. "And the ground was very patient. It kept it. For a thousand years the ground kept that sorrow, and it grew. A little each winter. As sorrows do. Each time someone buried a child and said, 'It's for the best.' Each time a soldier was sent home and nobody asked what he saw. Each time a mother was told to be brave. They all went into the ground. I was what it became."

Isolde had her hand at her mouth.

"I was very small at first," said the voice. "Then I was hungry. I'd lie in the dark and think: Someone is crying. I would like to go and see. And I'd put out a little thread of myself, up through the stone, toward the sound. And everything I touched…" It stopped. "Well. You know what happens. I'd only meant to go and look."

"The Bloom," said Isolde.

"Is what it looks like when a sorrow reaches a person who has no room for it."

…

She did not say anything for a long while.

She felt Valerian's hand find hers on the stone. It was ice cold. She did not look at him. She stared at the black door, and at the glittering chain, and at the little wavering flame of the candle; and she thought of a ward on Candle Street, and a girl in bed forty-one, with a petal in her arm.

It's a grief.

It's the grief of the whole kingdom, that nobody had time for.

"And then," she said, "Magister Draycott found you."

"Yes. He was a kind man. He came down with a lantern and a notebook. He was a scholar, like you. He sat on the floor for an hour, a few feet from where you're sitting, and said nothing at all." The voice trembled. "It was the nicest hour I'd ever had."

Valerian made a small sound.

"And then he said: 'I think I understand. I think I could help. But I can't do it alone.' And he went away, and told the others." The chains crawled with white. "And they said: 'We can't heal it. But we can hold it. We can take it into one man, and keep him sealed, and nothing will ever hurt again.'"

"That wasn't what he meant," said Valerian.

His voice was hoarse. He was staring at the floor, with the candle-flame in his eyes. "I think that was not what I meant. I think I meant— I think I wished to stay. To sit with it. To call— To call it—" His breath caught. "I cannot find the word."

"No," said the Hunger. "You couldn't, Val. They took it out of you."

"Who?"

"The salt," said the voice, very tenderly. "The salt, and the key, and the woman with the long kind face. She took your word away and gave you a lock in its place. I've never been able to tell you. It would have broken your heart."

The chain went white from end to end.

It cracked. A fine sharp sound, like ice on a pond in the first frost. The black door shuddered in its frame, and a draught of cold air, thick with the smell of old stone and wet earth and something that was not a smell at all but a grief, rolled through the chamber and out past the stair.

…

"Do not," said a voice.

It was not a new voice. It was Valerian's own. But it had changed; the hoarseness had gone, and in its place was a level, bleak, formal tone she had not heard since the Crossing. She turned her head.

He had risen to his feet.

He stood a yard from her, very straight, with his hands at his sides, and his face had the cold clean look it had worn in the first days: a mask of white marble, with gray storm-eyes that saw nothing. The shadow at his heels did not move. He was looking at the door with an expression of dispassionate calm.

"Valerian?" said Isolde.

"It is the Overseer," said the cold voice, politely. "I regret the intrusion. I shall be brief."

She went still.

"This has gone far enough. The reader has been admirable. I do not dispute it. She has defeated the Order's guard, refused the rite, and brought the Hunger to speech, and I am grateful. But it is my office to keep the thirteenth door. I did not fail eight times to fail on the ninth." He took a step. "Miss Hale. I must ask you to rise and stand away from the chain. I have no wish to use force."

"You're the one who made the covenant," said Isolde.

"I am the one who keeps it."

"Then keep the second clause. You'd put your strength between me and anything that did me harm."

"Wholly and without delay," agreed the Overseer. "And in this case the harm is the Hunger. You are being deceived. It has told you a sad story. It has a great many. It is quite the most sympathetic thing in the Threshold, and it has eaten every reader who sat down to hear it." The marble face did not change. "The ninth is not different. I cannot allow it."

"Val," said the Hunger, wistfully.

"Do not use that name."

"It's the only one you've got."

"I have a name. It is Overseer."

"Isolde," said Brannoc, from the stair, in a hard low voice. "He's reaching for the black."

She had seen it. She had seen the thumbless hands begin to rise from the floor behind him, one by one, and the cold begin to creep out along the stone in a ring. They were not curling toward her. They were curling round the chain, with the gentleness of a man preparing to bind a wound, and in their grip the salt gleamed like teeth.

He means to tighten it.

He means to keep it shut.

She got to her feet.

"Valerian," said Isolde. "I'm not talking to you."

The marble face blinked.

"I'm talking to the other one. The one who read the pigs. The one who held my hand in a hole." She took a step toward him, with her hands open. She did not look at the shadows. "I know you're in there. I know there are three of you. I've met two, now. I've seen the boy with the candle. I've seen the man in the gloves. I'd like very much to speak to whichever one of you is going to open that door."

"That is not possible."

"Then I'll wait."

"You have a day."

"I know," said Isolde. "I'm very good at it."

…

It was the Sealed Self who answered.

She had not known he could. He had never come through into the chamber; he was a thing of white walls and one candle, a voice at the back of a skull. But as she stood there, with her hands open and the shadows rising round her like a hedge, she saw a change come over the marble face. The cold gray eyes went wide. The mouth twisted. A hand went to the white scar at the left brow, and clenched there.

"No," said Valerian.

It was the other voice. It was warm and hoarse and cracked, with a laugh far down in it, and it came out of the Overseer's mouth like a man coming up from under water. "No. No, you do not— Let go. Let go of the— I am not— I— Isolde—"

The shadows jerked.

"It's me," said the voice. "It's me. It's the one who— the one that— Oh God, it's so loud—"

"I know." She was beside him. She did not remember crossing the floor. She took his face between her hands, as she had in the Aviary, and felt it burn and freeze beneath her fingers. "I'm here. Look at me. Which one are you?"

"All of them," gasped Valerian. "All three. They won't— He wants to shut it. The other one wants it open. And the one behind the door says nothing, he only listens— and the boy, the boy with the candle— he said— he said—"

"What did he say?"

"Say yes to her."

His eyes found hers.

They were gray. They were clear. They were not the Overseer's, or the boy's, or any one man's; they were the eyes of someone who has been pulled apart for three hundred years and has, in the last extremity, taken hold of the pieces with both hands. They were afraid. And they were looking at her with a love that was the most naked thing she had ever seen.

"Yes," said Valerian. "Isolde. Yes. Do it. Open it. Whatever you mean to do."

"I don't know what I'm doing."

"I know."

"I might be wrong."

"I know." A cracked bright laugh. "I find that I do not mind. I would rather be wrong beside you than right in the dark."

And the thumbless black hands, which had been gripping the chain, opened.

…

The salt came away in a sheet.

It fell from the black door like frost from a window when the sun strikes it, in a long glittering slide, and shattered into dust on the flags. The iron links parted. They did not break; they simply stopped being chains, and slid, one after another, to the floor, a heap of rusty rings that smoked and crumbled as she watched. The oak frame cracked from lintel to sill with a sound like a sigh.

The door opened inward.

There was nothing behind it.

That was the thing she would remember. There was not a room, or a pit, or a monster with teeth. There was a darkness, plain and absolute and slowly stirring, like the darkness inside a closed eye. It came out into the chamber without haste. It rolled across the black flags, and the candle bent toward it, and the last of the Lanterns' dead lamps went out in their sockets. The cold deepened. The silence deepened. And in the heart of the dark, rising, she saw that something was beginning to take shape.

It had no face.

She had expected a face. She had steeled herself for it. What rose was only a great soft height of nothing, grown out of the black like a tree, leaning over the chamber with a patience older than the stone. It had no mouth, and yet she felt it breathing. It had no eyes, and yet she had never in her life been so completely looked at. It filled the roof. It filled the room. Brannoc cried out. Wick, in his coat, began to scream, and went on screaming, thin and high.

The Hunger stooped.

"Hello," it said, and it was not Valerian's voice any more. It was a smaller, plainer voice than any it had used before. It was the voice of a child, a very old child, who has been alone in the dark for longer than there have been words.

"Hello," it said. "I'm sorry. Is it still today? I'm so sorry. I've forgotten what to do."

She stood with her hands out, in the dark, in the cold, with the man she loved holding her up on one side and a pot lid knocking at her hip.

"That's all right," said Isolde, and her voice came out steadier than she had any right to. "Neither have I."