The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 012: Breaking a Collar

Tomas arrived at dawn, smelling like herring.

Ethan heard him before he saw him. A wheelbarrow squeaked across the yard, a crate banged down on the planks, and Anselm's voice rose in a rough, tired groan. "Not another one. I'm running a boatyard, not an orphanage."

"I'm a fish seller," said Tomas, with great dignity.

"You're a hundred years old and you're lying."

"Seventy-three. Please keep your voice down."

Ethan slid out from under the hull and found the old man standing in a heap of sawdust, bent over a barrow, wearing a stained apron three sizes too big. His lens was cracked. There was soot on his beard and a long scrape down one cheek. Under a layer of dead fish, in the bottom of the barrow, sat the dull grey quiet box.

"They came at midnight," Tomas said, before Ethan could speak. "Four Wardens. They didn't knock."

"Tomas."

"Candle Lane is a disaster. They pulled down every shelf. The Treatise on Bridges is in pieces." He took a breath that shook. "I was in the coal chute with the box and the book when they came through the cellar. They held lanterns inches from my face and didn't see me. I'm told I was very brave. I don't remember. I think I was praying."

"I'm so sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Be useful." Tomas straightened, winced at his back, and gave Ethan a thin, fierce smile. "I have been waiting thirty years to be hunted for something that matters. Help me with the crate."

They worked in the cramped dark under the hull, with a stub of candle and a bucket of salt Anselm had sworn he wouldn't miss. Tomas poured a ring on the floorboards, thick as a thumb, and set the quiet box in the center of it. Rhea had left at first light for the tower. Anselm had gone to scowl at some customer's rowboat. Outside, gulls argued over the fish.

"Before I open this," Tomas said, "tell me what you know. Not what you guess."

Ethan told him. The Stalker's collar had been grown into its skin. The band hummed toward the north-east, toward the Ironkeep. Voss's breath matched the listener at the gate. The key seal on Garrick's letter matched the token.

Tomas listened with his eyes closed.

"A binding collar has two halves," he said, when Ethan finished. "The leash and the hand. The hand is the key. If you want to break the leash cleanly, you need the key, and you need to turn it the right way."

"We don't have the key."

"No." Tomas opened one eye. "But the book says there are exceptions. I read it six times last night in the coal chute. I'd like you to look at it with your window and tell me if it agrees."

He clamped a pair of iron tongs around the box lid and lifted. The clasps snapped. A pale hum rose from the salt like heat off a road.

Ethan knelt, held the candle over the open box, and let the system look.

[Binding Collar (fragment). Leash: ACTIVE. Bound will: Rift Stalker (deceased). Imprint strength: 22%.]

[Break conditions:] [1. The linked key.] [2. Absorption of the bound will by a host with Understanding of 50% or more.]

He read it twice. Then he read it out loud.

Tomas let out a long breath. "So the book was right. A mind can undo what a key can. If you understand the thing that was bound, you can eat the binding."

"I only understand twenty-two percent."

"Then we raise it."

"How?"

"Listen to it." Tomas nodded at the band. "Touch it. Slowly. If it starts to pull, pull back."

Ethan didn't like that. He thought of Rhea's shaking hands, and the Hunger rising out of his stomach like smoke, and the one terrible second in the tunnel when he had wanted to taste his own blood. But he set the candle down and reached into the salt with two fingers.

The band was warm. It hummed against his skin.

It pulled.

The sensation was a hook behind his belly button, steady and patient. It dragged him toward the north-east. He felt his body lean. Grains of salt stuck to his knees. In his head, a picture formed, not his own. Narrow, grey, wet with fog. A long stone corridor with iron rings in the wall. A smell of old meat and lamp oil. He knew without knowing how that it was the memory of a hunger so old it had stopped being a feeling and become a place.

Heel, said a voice that wasn't a voice.

The Stalker had obeyed. It had walked toward that voice for a long time, because it had no choice, and it had been fed from a hand.

Ethan saw the hand. A pale, long hand in a grey glove, holding a silver disc. A ring on the third finger, shaped like a key.

[Imprint strength: 41%.]

"I see it," he gasped. "I see the hand."

"Describe it."

"Grey glove. A ring. A key ring." The pull sharpened and he pushed back, hard, with everything he had. He felt the connection sag, like a rope going slack. "It's Voss. It's Voss's hand."

"Stop," Tomas said sharply. "Let go."

Ethan snatched his fingers away. The pull vanished at once, leaving a cold ache behind his ribs. He sat back on his heels. Sweat had soaked through his shirt. He felt like he'd run a mile with a sack of grain on his back.

[Imprint strength: 41%. Break threshold: 50%.]

"Nine percent more," Tomas said softly. "That's all."

"Not now," Ethan said. "I don't want to do that again for a week."

"No. Of course not." The old man tapped the lid back down. The clasps snapped. The hum died. "But you understand what this means. You don't need the key. You need the pain. If you understand how a creature is hurt, you can undo how it's held."

"That's a terrible thing to be good at."

"Yes." Tomas didn't smile. "I think it might be the thing you're for."

Ethan said nothing. He wiped his face with his sleeve. A thin trickle of blood ran from his nose, and he looked at it on his hand for a moment, surprised, then rubbed it off on his trousers.

He hadn't asked the system about Appraise this morning. He hadn't opened the Gate or looked at the cost, but he could feel it at the edge of his mind like a shut door. He thought about how close it had been. How easily the pull could have won.

"I need to be stronger before I try that again," he said.

"You need a lot of things." Tomas lifted the box carefully with both hands. "Stronger. Rested. Fed. Not hunted by two hundred crowns' worth of ambitious young men." He glanced at the candle. "Which reminds me. Your friend the Captain. Is she reliable?"

"More than anyone I know."

"Then why are the fishermen at the dock all looking toward the lane?"

Ethan went still.

He hadn't been listening. He opened Stalker's Instinct now, all at once, a flood of tiny pulses unfurling across the yard.

The gulls, a drift of them. Anselm, a steady beat near the road. A woman rinsing a pot somewhere.

And at the fence, four breaths. Young. Fast. Close together, the way people breathe when they've been running and are trying hard to be quiet.

One of them was laughing under its breath.