The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 007: The Quiet Box

The hum was low at first. A bee trapped in a jar.

Then it climbed. The band rattled on the table, a small angry tremble, and the lamp flame leaned toward it. The pear skin curled. Dust jumped off the nearest scroll.

"Move," Tomas said. He was already on his feet, which for a man his age was fast. "Don't touch it. Don't look at it. Bring your bag."

"Look at it? Why?"

"Because I don't know what it's listening to."

Ethan looked anyway. He couldn't help it. The system window slid open over the shaking metal.

[Binding Collar (fragment). Link status: ACTIVE. Linked key: 1. Direction: north-east. Distance: 3.1 km.]

North-east. Three kilometers. He worked it out on the fingers of his mind, the way he used to work out the way home from the academy. Past the river. Past the grain market. Up the long hill.

"The Ironkeep," he said, before he could stop himself. "The Wardens' hall."

Tomas's face went the color of candle wax. He didn't ask how Ethan knew.

The old man dragged a shelf stool across the floor, climbed it, and pulled a box down from the highest shelf. It was the size of a bread crock, dull grey, with a lid held by two iron clasps. He dropped to the floor with a grunt and opened it. Inside was a thick layer of white crystal, coarse as sea salt, over a lining of dark metal.

[Observe: Lead. Salt. Rune-etched. Purpose: sealing.]

"My quiet box," Tomas said. "For books that bite. Hold the lid."

Ethan held it. Tomas picked up the band with two folded rags, wincing, as if it were hot. It buzzed against the cloth. He laid it in the salt, shoved the crystals over it with the side of his hand, and Ethan slammed the lid down. The clasps snapped.

Silence.

Not total silence. The lamp hissed. The mouse in the shelves started scratching again. But the hum was gone from the air, cut off clean, and the room felt a size larger.

Tomas sat on the floor with his back against a stack of atlases, breathing through his nose.

"That," he said, "is the first time in thirty years I've been properly frightened by a piece of jewelry."

Ethan crouched across from him. His hands weren't steady. "What was it doing?"

"Talking." Tomas wiped sweat off his scalp. "To whoever holds the other end. That's the whole point of a binding. Two pieces, one for the beast and one for the hand. When the beast dies, the collar goes quiet, because nothing is wearing it. Then someone picks it up..."

"And it wakes up."

"And it says, here I am, come and get me." Tomas looked at the box. "Did the thing you took it from die in the tower?"

Ethan hadn't told him about the tower. He realized it a second after he realized the old man knew anyway. The bell had rung for an hour. Every window in the lower ward had been open. The whole city had heard.

"Yes," he said.

"Did you kill it?"

He considered lying. He was getting good at lying, which was a new thing about himself that he disliked. But Tomas had put a book-eating box between them and a thing that wanted to be found, and had done it without asking for a coin.

"Yes."

"With what?"

"A dagger. A guard's dagger."

"You."

"Yes."

"A boy with no magic." Tomas said it carefully, without any cruelty. He had heard the rumor too, apparently. Everyone had. "Who failed the crystal in front of the whole hall this afternoon. Killed a Rift Stalker with a knife."

"It had its mouth open," Ethan said. "I got lucky."

"No. You didn't." Tomas leaned forward and put a thumb under his lens and pushed it up onto his forehead. Without it, his eyes were smaller and blue and very sharp. "Luck would have left you dead on that floor. Something happened to you. I'd like to know what, because I think I know what it is, and I haven't been right about anything in a long time."

Ethan's throat was dry.

He had told no one. Not Rhea, who had practically begged him to. Not the Inspector, who had asked him straight to his face. The system was the only thing in his life nobody had ever laughed at, because nobody else could see it. Saying it out loud felt like opening a window in a room he'd kept shut for years.

He looked at the old man. At the stacks. At the lead box with a collar locked inside.

"There's a voice," he said.

Tomas didn't move.

"It talks inside my head. It says it's a system. It gave me a window to look at things, and it..." He stopped. Swallowed. "It took a memory from me. It didn't say which. In exchange, it healed me, and I killed the thing, and then I took its power. Like I ate it, almost. I don't know what that makes me."

The old man's expression changed, slowly, as if someone were turning a key.

"Describe the voice."

"Calm. Flat. It doesn't sound like a person."

"What did it call you?"

"Host."

Tomas shut his eyes. His lips pressed into a thin white line.

"Eat that," Tomas said, and nudged the half-eaten pear across the table. "You've been staring at it since you sat down."

Ethan hadn't known he was. The Hunger had been quietly working on him for ten minutes, a dull ache behind his teeth. He took the pear and ate the whole thing, core and seeds, and the ache eased. Tomas watched without a word. His fingers drummed once on his knee.

"Wait here."

He got up, joints popping, and went to the back of the shop. Ethan heard drawers. A cabinet door. A grumbled curse, a thump, then silence. When Tomas came back he was carrying a flat parcel wrapped in oilcloth and tied with string. He set it on the table and picked the knots apart with his thumbs.

Inside was a thin book. It had no title. The cover was cracked brown leather, older than anything in the shop, and it was warped as if it had been in water once and dried by a fire.

"I bought this thirty-one years ago," Tomas said. "From a widow in the river quarter. She had no idea what it was. I did, a little. I kept it because it was the only thing I owned that frightened my professors." He opened the cover. "They ended my career for asking about it."

The first page was covered in a spidery hand. The ink had gone brown. The writing was in the common script, though so old the letters leaned in odd ways, and Ethan could pick out a line.

It does not choose the strong. It does not choose the clever. It looks for hands that hold nothing, and when it finds one, it fills it.

He read it twice.

Then he noticed something at the bottom of the page. A small drawing in the margin, done in the same brown ink. A figure with arms outstretched. In front of the figure, floating in the air, was a plain rectangle.

Ethan's mouth went dry.

"Tomas," he said. "That's my window."