Episodul 195 · Stone That Floats

The man had stepped back to the edge of the broken place and was looking at it the way he had looked at the kitchen, taking measurements.

— You don’t know what you’ve got, he said. Do you.

Soles said nothing. His foot was burning now, which was better than nothing at all.

— It came in all at once, the man said. It comes in all at once for all of us, the first time. Most of us break something we love with it.

He looked up at Soles.

— You chose a place with no walls, he said, almost kindly. That was clever. But you forgot something.

He crouched, and put his bare hand flat on the ice.

— Ice, he said, is stone that floats.

His hand went into it.

Not through it. Into it, the way it had gone into the plaster of a kitchen wall, without a crack, without a sound. His wrist followed. His arm. He leaned forward as if into water, and his shoulder went under the surface of the ice, and his head, and the rest of him after, smoothly, until there was nothing on the shelf but a pair of footprints in the frost and, beside them, a faint wrong seam in the ice already closing.

Soles stood alone on the river.

The reeds hissed. The broken star at his feet creaked and settled. Behind him, a kilometer away, the town had all its lights off.

He let his attention go down through his boots.

The ice was carrying its own weight, and his, and the river’s pull on its underside.

And something else. Something under the surface. A weight that was not resting, but moving, slowly, inside the ice, toward the place where he stood.

The weight inside the ice went around him once, slowly, the way a shark goes around a boat.

Soles turned with it. He did not look down. Looking down would tell him nothing; the ice was gray and blind and as thick as a doorstep, and whatever was moving in it was moving where no eye could follow. He kept his chin up and his left hand loose and let his boots do the listening.

Left. Behind. Left again. Closer.

The man was not hurrying. Soles could feel that too. The weight moved, stopped, moved, the way a hand moves along a shelf in the dark, feeling for the thing it wants.

Then it stopped directly under his right foot.

Soles lifted the foot.

A bare hand came up out of the ice where his ankle had been, closed on nothing, and stayed there for a moment, fingers open, white with cold, like something growing out of the river. Then it sank back into the surface without a ripple and was gone.

Soles put his foot down a meter to the left and breathed out.

He can’t see me either. He’s feeling for me the same way. Through the ice. Good. We’re both blind. I’m the one standing up.

The weight inside the ice slid toward the bank. Soles turned after it, trying to keep it in front of him. He felt the return too late: it rose through the shelf behind his right side while he was still turning.

The Hunter’s open palm struck him low in the back. The force folded his legs and drove him onto his knees and left hand, sending the impact through his shoulder.

He rolled onto his back because the instinct was older than him and it said never stay on your face.

Kidney. Maybe just a bruise. You’ll know tomorrow, when you piss. Get off your knees.

He tried, and the breath he took to do it caught low on his right side, like a belt on a seized pulley, and let go only when he stopped pulling.

The man was standing over him. Frost on his coat. Not even out of breath.

— That’s the thing about blind men, he said. They listen to one sound at a time.

He crouched and reached for Soles’s chest.

Not for the throat. Not for the face. For the left side of the coat, where the inside pocket was, and his bare hand did not bother with the buttons. It went into the cloth the way it had gone into the ice. Soles felt it pass through wool and lining like a cold breath, felt the fingers arrive against the hilt of the blade through the pocket from the wrong side. The fingers pressed the hilt against his ribs.

— Take it out, the man said. Give it to me.

He grabbed the wrist with his left hand.

He grabbed it with everything he had, and the strength came, the whole flood of it, and the man’s face changed. Only slightly. Enough. His wrist was half inside Soles’s coat and Soles’s fingers were around it like a vise, and for one second neither of them could do anything else at all.

Then the man’s free shoulder drew back.

Soles knew that movement. He had watched Tesa make it until watching had begun to hurt. His knees were bent, his heels on the ice, and the wrist in his grip was the only thing keeping the man close.

Pull him. Move.

He dragged the captive wrist toward his left shoulder and shoved with his heels. His back slid across the ice. The bare hand came out of his coat, and the man’s weight followed it, farther than Soles had meant to pull.

The glove came down where his head had been.

It passed his ear and struck the ice so hard that the shelf jumped under both of them. Soles’s grip broke. He rolled over his shoulder, keeping his arms close, and came up on his knees with his left hand flat on the ice and his heart going like a hammer in a tin.

The man stayed where he was, crouched, with his fist buried in the shelf up to the wrist. A white crack ran from beneath his heel toward the bank. Soles moved another half meter away from it before the man drew his fist out.

The man looked at the hand. Then at Soles.

— You moved before I struck.

Soles’s mouth tasted of blood. His back felt as if a door had been slammed on it.

— I’ve been practicing.

— You pulled me off balance. Then you held on too long.

Soles opened his left hand. It was still trying to close around the wrist.

— Who taught you to do that?

He thought of the ring. Of Tesa telling him to move his feet, and of the patient thing inside him that always seemed to know which movement came next. He had practiced standing up. He had never practiced this.

— Nobody, Soles said.

— Then something is teaching you, the man said quietly. And it isn’t asking your permission.

He stood, flexing the hand that had been inside Soles’s coat, as if checking it was still his.

— Do you know what happens to people like you, when they don’t know what they’ve got? They break something with it. A cup. A wall. A friend. And then a man in a gray coat comes and offers to keep them somewhere safe, where they can’t break anything else. Somewhere with very good walls.

The guard. That’s what they’re doing with the guard.

— Is that what they did to you? Soles said.

The man did not answer. For a man who answered everything, it was an answer.