CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN #2
“You’ll want to understand the shape of it,” Sarn went on, pleasantly. “The bell in that dome rings on the hour and my people go back down the stair when it does. Between now and then the stair is yours.”
“How long.”
“Ten minutes. Until nine. It’s a generous bell.”
“I’ll have it entered as a courtesy,” Sarn said, “and the entry will outlive every person standing in this hall.”
Everything in the Thronehall is hung off it, the clerks and the doors and the men on the stair, and Sarn had put a price on the space underneath it.
“Name the price out loud,” I said. “This hall can hear it or it didn’t happen.”
The channels beneath his table had the same thin outward pull as the white room. It went toward the nine seats. Not down a drain. Not away as waste. Into the people who had called cutting a mercy.
“I’ve named it. I said I admired his hands.”
He said that the way he had said the fire and the dry wool.
Ten minutes. Two hands, for the span between a man’s voice and a bell, and the arithmetic was so stupid I heard myself pull the room’s air in one long breath.
“Vaughn—”
He did not look at me. He put both palms flat on the pale metal, side by side, fingers spread, and he said it to Sarn.
“Take them. I have no more use for hands. Everything I ever wanted to hold is standing behind me.”
“Put out the oil on the lower run,” Vaughn said. “Your men off the stair. Every door stays open until the bell. Say it in front of them.”
Sarn repeated it, and sent the command down in his own voice. I heard the answering call come back up the stair before Vaughn moved his wrists onto the edge.
“Hold him, please,” Sarn said to his own men. “He won’t need holding long.”
Vaughn looked at me once. I felt his thread narrow until almost nothing could come through it. He had told me pain could be held back for a little while. I had never understood what it cost the person holding it.
It took two of them to pin him and it was not quick and it was not clean. The table rang like a struck pan, twice, and there was a sound after each one that I am going to hear for the rest of my life.
The blood went out across white stone and kept going. Nine wedges of the Court watched it travel and not one of those people stepped off the wall.
A clerk at the wall wrote the hour down.
That is what the Shelf is. I had wondered. I do not wonder now.
I did not look away. I did not stop it.
While it was happening I measured the distance to the east door, thirty feet. If I stopped measuring I would go to him and never leave him. Blood ran off the table in two separate streams. I counted the seconds because he had bought them for me.
His face had no color left. I wanted to stay. I wanted to waste everything he had given me by refusing to move. Instead I held my hands under his arms when Corvin called for them.
?
Vaughn’s knee came down inside the ring and the rest of him stopped dead at that height and stayed there.
Corvin got to him one-armed, on his knees in it, and did the field work with his good hand and his teeth.
“Strap. Give me the strap off your coat—no, the other one, the one with the buckle. Now hold there.”
“Corvin. His forearms. Above the wrist, both, and pull it tight until he hates you.”
“He already hates me,” Corvin said. “It’s load-bearing.”
Vaughn’s breathing got longer instead of faster. That is what it does.
My palms were full of Vaughn’s blood and they stayed that way. It was hot and then it was cold and it went between my fingers, and I did not wipe it off anywhere.
“Don’t you dare go pale on me. Sword. Door. Stair. In that order—go on, take it, he’s watching you take it and it’s the only thing keeping him up.”
“I’m watching him,” I said.
My thumb went across my own knuckles and I could feel it drying in the cracks of them.
“You’re shaking. That isn’t fear, that’s the body doing arithmetic—hands, sword, door—and you’ll thank it later.”
“Nine wedges of the finest people on the Shelf,” Corvin said, louder, out at the hall, “and not one of them has moved. Somebody get them a cushion.”
Half the Court of the Shelf looked at him instead of at me, which is what he does, and it is the only way he has ever known how to put a coat over somebody.
“Go,” Vaughn said. “The stair drops four floors and there’s a turn at the bottom. Don’t stop on the turn.”
“I’ve counted it from the other side. Four floors, and the turn goes left, and there’s a draft coming up it that smells of nothing at all.”
“In a minute,” I said.
I went to Sarn’s table and took the gray sword off it with both red hands, in front of the Chancellor of the Nine Thrones, and he stood a foot away and let me.
I got it balanced against my forearm. It is heavier than it looks and it was never made for my hands.
Inside my coat, against my ribs, there was a weight that had been there since the white room, and Sarn never put a question to me about it, and I did not offer.
“Ten minutes buys a stair and a white room and a woman who’s been awake all night. It doesn’t buy the walk back.”
“Then don’t plan the walk back,” Corvin said. “Nobody’s ever paid me for one of those.”
“If the bell goes while we’re on that stair—”
“It won’t have gone yet,” Vaughn said, from one knee.
He was gray to the lips and upright and he had not made one sound since the table.
I turned for the east door with his sword in my hands and my hands the wrong color, and I got two steps.
“Seren Vale. She’s been down there since dawn with the doors off their pins, and she isn’t going to hurry for you.”