The System Chose the Weakest Man

Chapter 031: Tomas Reads

"I finished the second half last night," Tomas said.

He sat cross-legged on the bed at the Rusty Ladle with the old book open across his knees and a single lamp burning on the sill. It was late. Outside, the wind off the Rift whined in the shutters. On the other side of the room, Rhea was oiling her sword. Mira had curled up in the corner with her knees under her chin, still wearing her stolen-papers face, half angry and half not sleeping. Ethan sat on the pallet with his back to the wall.

"I wasn't sure I'd tell you," Tomas went on. "Part of me hoped I'd mistranslated. I went through it three times." He cleared his throat, and his dry voice dropped to a murmur. "I'll read it as plainly as I can. The old tongue is dense. Where I'm guessing, I'll say."

"Go on," Ethan said.

The old man bent over the page.

"In the age before the Concord, the Kings came through the Rifts. They were not beasts. They had names, and thrones, and tongues that could unmake a mountain. Seven armies fell in a single season. The cities of the plain were ash."

"The Sundering," Rhea said.

"Yes." Tomas turned the page. "Listen."

"Then the Concord forged a Seat. It was not a throne of stone. It was a chair of consequence, built so that one hand might bear all that the Kings had borne, and answer for it. They searched the broken world for a hand that would do it. They found only one that was empty."

Ethan felt the cold slide down his spine, slow and exact.

"The first to sit was a man with no gift. He had no mark, no fire, no name worth keeping. When the Seat was lit, it asked him what he would pay. He said, 'All of it.' And the Seat believed him."

"A null," Mira said quietly, from the corner.

"The First Host." Tomas looked up. "That's what the text calls him. The First Who Paid."

He read on.

"He paid in memory. He paid in sense. He paid in bond and in years. For each price, the Seat gave him a shape to hold, and the Kings fell one by one. He closed the Rifts of the east with his left hand. He broke the Throne of Ash with his right. When the war was won, he went to rise from the Seat, and found that there was no one left to do the rising."

The lamp flickered. Nobody spoke.

"What does that mean?" Mira whispered.

"I think it means he'd paid so much that nothing remained," Tomas said. "Not even the part that wanted to get up." He cleared his throat and read the last lines of the page slowly. "So he sat. And the Seat held him. And the world was quiet."

Ethan's mouth had gone dry. He lifted his hand and found that it was trembling, and pressed it flat against his knee.

There were more pages.

Tomas read them with his eyes half shut, his finger moving from right to left across the cramped columns. It told of the long peace after the war. Of the Concord's fear of the thing it had made. Of the first Council, which had been twelve and was now eleven, though the book did not say why. Of the Hosts who came afterward.

"The Seat does not keep its own. When the First fell still, the Ledger sought another. It has found seven since. Each was empty. Each was kind. Each sat down before the tenth price."

"Seven," Rhea said.

"Seven Hosts in three hundred years. Seven failures." Tomas rubbed his eyes. "It doesn't say what the tenth price is. Only that none of them paid it."

Ethan stared at the floor.

Two. He'd paid two. A memory he couldn't name. The taste of everything he'd ever eaten.

"Eight more, then," he said. His own voice sounded very far away. "If I'm lucky. Eight more, and then I find out."

"You don't have to pay them," Rhea said sharply.

"I know."

"You could stop. Right now. You could refuse every Evolution Gate for the rest of your life and be a Level 20 hunter who killed a Slug and broke a collar."

"I know." He met her eyes. "And in a year the Council finds someone else to put in the chair. Or it finds me."

She didn't answer.

"There's one more thing." Tomas hesitated. His finger rested on a line near the bottom of the page. "It's a warning. Not a prophecy. A warning. It's written very small, as if the scribe was afraid." He drew a breath.

"The Seat does not take a vessel by force. It takes a Host by choice. The men who pull the empty to its door do not understand this. They think it is a lock. It is a table, and the one who sits is the one who agrees to eat."

"The Council," Rhea said slowly.

"The Council has been forcing the lock for three hundred years with the wrong key," Tomas said. His voice cracked. "Nine vessels. Dozens of nulls. All of them dragged to the door. None chosen. And then, five weeks ago, in a tower, a boy with a dark crystal is trapped in a corridor and the Seat chooses him."

Everyone looked at Ethan.

"They want you alive," Tomas said. "Not out of cruelty. Because for the first time in three centuries, there is a Host. And they are afraid of what you'll do with it."

"Or afraid of what I won't."

"Possibly both."

Ethan's hand had slipped into his bag without his noticing. It closed around the cover of his mother's recipe book, the soft leather worn smooth at the edges. He didn't take it out. He just held it, the way he'd held a hundred things in the dark.

Later, when the others had settled and the lamp burned low, he lay on the pallet and opened the book anyway.

He'd read it so many times. The recipes were simple. Barley soup, brown bread, fish stew on a Friday. In his mother's cramped hand, at the foot of a page, he found the entry for Sunday stew.

Brown the onions. Add salt a pinch at a time. Wait until it smells right.

He read the line. He read it again.

Then he realized that he could not remember what "right" had tasted like.

He tried. He closed his eyes and called up the kitchen, the iron pot, the low yellow lamp. He called up her hands. Her four flat notes, humming. But the stew in the pot was a picture, only a picture, with no taste behind it.

One cost, the system had said. One memory.

It had never said it was the only thing that could be taken.

He put the book down. He lay awake a long time, listening to the wind, and when the knock came it was so soft he thought he'd imagined it.

It came again. Three taps, slow and heavy.

Stalker's Instinct had already found the breath on the other side of the door. Slow. Steady. Enormous.

He sat up.

Rhea was on her feet, one hand on her sword. Ethan crossed the room and opened the door a hand's width.

Bram Holt stood in the corridor, with his shield on his back and his hat in his hands. His face was grey with fatigue. He looked at Ethan for a long moment.

"I've decided," he said.