Episode 273 · Cut

The slit was wider.

Soles lay on the stone with Krista’s hands around his wrist and watched it breathe. A hand’s width after the charge. Two now. The heat came out of it in long pushes and went back in, and every time it went back in, it took a little more of the room with it. Dust. Light. The sound of the water overhead.

Nothing he had done had closed anything. He had only shaken the root, and the root had fed.

Krista lifted her head.

She was listening past him, through the rock, with the same stillness she had used on the stair. Whatever had changed in her, that had not.

— They’re setting another one, she said. Two men. Same place. They’re arguing about how much.

Tesa said a word Soles had never heard her use.

He sat up. The hole under his collarbone opened and closed with the movement, and he felt it as something far away, happening to a man he knew.

Another charge. Into a root that drinks force. Twice as wide. Then four times.

He did not need anybody to tell him what came after four times.

He looked down at his hands. The pale blade in the left. The dark one hanging from his right wrist on its chain.

Both together, and the threads would jump again. More people on the bank would lose something they had not offered. Maybe Noct. Maybe Zora. Maybe Krista, again.

The dark blade alone, and he would see nothing at all. He would put it into the root the way he had put it into the root under Vineward, and it would close, and he would not know what it took until afterward.

He thought of Vineward. Everyone who had stood in that temple had gone down a step that night. And afterward, warm water in a river in another town.

It doesn’t close. It goes somewhere else.

There was no way to make the two of them one tool. Not tonight. There was no time to learn to hold two.

He slid the pale blade inside his coat, where it had no business being. It lay there, cold, and did not push him away.

Krista was still listening through the rock.

— They’ve got the wire out, she said.

Halloran came through the grating on his knees, saw the three of them, saw the slit, and stopped where he was.

— Help me up, Soles said.

They did. Tesa on the side of the wound, Krista on the other, and this time Krista did not take his wrist. She held his belt. He noticed that and did not know what to make of it.

At the edge of the slit he took the dark blade into his hand and stood there a moment, getting his breath.

Across the floor Varren watched him. He had stopped counting.

— If you close it, Varren said, what happens to them?

— I don’t know.

— You said you could see.

— Not with this one.

Varren looked at the dark blade, and then at Soles’s face, and whatever he was looking for, he did not seem to find it.

— Then don’t miss, he said.

Soles drew in.

He did it the way he had done it on the washroom tiles: everything he had, from his feet and his hands and the back of his skull, pulled into one place under his ribs. Only there was less of it. Much less. He gathered and kept gathering and came up short, like a man reaching into a pocket he knows was full this morning.

He reached for the slowed time, and it came, and it was thin.

The dust slowed in the air. Not enough. The slit’s next breath went on at nearly its own speed, and he had to put the blade in before it came, while it was still drawing back.

His heel went down. His hip came around.

He drove the dark blade into the root.

It went in like a knife into wet rope, and then into nothing.

The light went out the way a filament goes out. White, then red, then a line of nothing hanging in the air where the slit had been. The heat dropped off his face so fast that his skin hurt. The breath of the root stopped in the middle, and did not finish.

Soles went down on his knees.

The floor was cold. He put his hand on it to be sure, and it was cold, all the way through, the way stone is supposed to be.

He felt the pull go.

It did not stop. It left. He felt it go out of the chamber through the rock in every direction at once, like water finding the drains of a whole street when one is blocked, thinning as it went, until it was too far away to feel. Toward other towns. Other rivers. People who had no idea yet.

Because of me.

He knew it the way he knew his own hands. And under it, worse, the thing he had known since the first night down here and had not let himself say. Somewhere there was a way to do this cleanly. Two halves, one tool. A man who knew how to hold it would have closed this root and nothing would have run.

He did not know how to hold it.

Krista knelt beside him and took his wrist again, two fingers on the inside of it, and he felt her count under her breath.

— Fast, she said. But there.

Tesa stood over both of them, blood on her hand, looking at the place where the slit had been as if it might change its mind.

Varren had sat down on the edge of the stone table. His hands hung between his knees, the hands the blade had pushed away, and he was looking at them.

On the stairs Noct had sat down at last, in the middle of the tread. Zora sat beside him.

— Well, Noct said. Warmest I’ve been all winter. Gone.

Nobody laughed. Zora put her shoulder to his, and he let her.

Through the rock, the men had stopped arguing. Somebody put a hand on the stone on the far side. Soles heard it, a small flat sound, and then a voice he knew.

— It’s gone cold, Corvin said. Tell them it worked.