Chương 23: The Toll

They walked. Fast, off the road, down the back of the rise where the stone post and his own paper face couldn't watch them go.

"Bells behind us, bells in front," Kaito said.

"Road's got my face on it. So we don't use the road." He threw his Sight out across the land ahead, low, reading where the warm red clutter of people sat. A pair of farmers in a field to the left. A cart on the lane. A cluster of them at the town gate, and more spilling out of it now, drawn by the noise. He picked the gaps between them.

"There's a wood, that way, past the long field. We get into the trees, we're a story people tell instead of a man people see. Move when I say move."

"You're good at this," Red said, keeping low beside him.

"I had a lot of practice in the last two weeks. None of it fun." They crossed the long field in the open, fast and bent low, and the only thing between them and the eyes at the gate was distance and luck. Halfway across, his Sight caught it. A waystone at the field's edge, squat and grey, lit up red in his sight, a little registered marker that knew where it was and reported it. Anyone watching the System would see two shapes pass it.

'So don't pass it lit,' he thought.

"Red. The grey stone, dead ahead. Put your hand on it as we go by."

"Why."

"Because it's an eye, and you turn eyes off." Red didn't argue. As they came level with the waystone it reached out and laid one hand flat on the grey, and the red light in it guttered and went out, the way the lamps had guttered in the temple, the marker blinded for as long as Red was near it and a breath after. A man on the lane straightened up and looked their way, right at the patch of field where the waystone had just gone quiet in whatever sense a man like that felt it.

Kaito caught Red's sleeve and dropped, both of them flat in the cold stubble, and held there, not breathing, while the man frowned at the dead marker and the empty field behind it. After a long moment he shrugged and went back to his cart.

'And that's the catch with you,' Kaito thought, getting up slow once the man's back was turned.

'You don't just hide an eye. You put it out. And an eye going dark for no reason is its own kind of shout. The god won't see two men cross a field. It'll see one of its markers wink out, and a god that notices a thing wink out is a god that starts asking why.' He filed it. The list of ways Red was a problem kept getting longer, right alongside the list of ways Red was the only reason he was still on his feet.

They crossed the watched gap with the eye shut, and made the treeline, and went in under the bare branches and the cover, and only then did Kaito let himself stop and put his back against a trunk and breathe. His side was on fire. He'd torn the burn open again somewhere on the stairs and not noticed until now. He pressed a hand to it and felt the wet and decided not to look.

"You should eat," Red said.

"With what. The town's got my face. I'm not robbing a farmer, before you suggest it." He shut his eyes for one second, then opened them, because shut eyes was a luxury.

"Forget food. You've stalled long enough. You said decide while we walk. We walked. So tell me the toll. All of it. Right now, before I take one more step toward wherever you're pointing." Red leaned against the next tree and looked at him, and for once it didn't dance.

"The place I'm taking you has no System in it," it said.

"None. The god has never written a single line into that ground. That's what makes it safe. No eyes, no map, no bells, no paper with your face. The god cannot follow you there." A pause.

"And neither can anything else the god ever gave you. That's the toll, Architect. You walk into that place and the System stops, for you, the same as it stops for everyone in it. No more reading the seams of the world. No more breaking a wall with your eyes. No levels. No growing stronger. Cut a man, and the wound's just a wound, with no number on it to fix.

You'd walk in there the weakest you've been since you woke up dead, blind in the one sense that's kept you breathing, in a place full of things that grew up making their own rules, and you'd have to learn to live by your wits and your hands like everybody who was never an Architect." It let that sit.

"Freedom from the god and everything the god gave you come through the same door. You don't get one without paying the other. That's the toll." This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it Kaito stood with his back against the tree and turned it over, cold, and didn't like one piece of it.

'Blind,' he thought.

'No Sight. No reading the world. The thing that dropped a ceiling on Vorr and a wall on a temple, gone. I'd be a tired man with a cheap knife and a hole in his side. Which, granted, is most of what I am anyway. But it's the rest that's kept me alive.' He pressed his hand against the torn burn and thought about a wound that was only a wound, in a place with no numbers in it anywhere, and about learning to bleed the plain way again, like a man and not a thing the world kept a running tally on.

"There's one more thing in the toll you didn't say," he said.

"Say it." Red tipped its head.

"The voice in my head lives in the System," Kaito said.

"You know that. You've known it since the cell, you told me you know what it is. So if I walk somewhere the System stops, the voice stops too. I lose her. Completely. Not faded out like the deep road. Gone." He watched Red's face.

"And that's not a cost to you. That's a bonus. You'd love it if I went somewhere she can't reach. You've wanted my ear to yourself since I opened your door."

"I told you I don't do you kindnesses," Red said, even and unbothered.

"I'm not going to start by lying about whether I'd mind. Yes. I'd be glad of the quiet. That doesn't make the toll less true. Both things are real at once. You're old enough to hold two real things."

"Here's what I don't buy," Kaito said.

"You keep handing me two doors. The god's road, where it watches everything I do. Or your blind hole, where I can't see anything at all. Two doors, and you happen to own one of them." He pushed off the tree.

"Every power I've met since I woke up dead has run that exact trick on me. Two doors, both theirs, pick one. The lord. The guild. The god. Now you." He shook his head.

"I read the System. I break the System. You said it yourself, nobody's done that in ten thousand years. So don't tell me my only two moves are let it watch or go blind. Maybe there's a third. Maybe I learn to walk around inside its sight without it seeing me. Hide my own thread in all that noise. I don't know how yet. But 'I don't know how yet' is a different sentence from 'it can't be done,' and I'm done letting people swap the two on me." Red was quiet a moment.

"Maybe," it said.

"People have tried to fool the god from inside its own house before. I could tell you how that went for them, but it's a long story and you don't have a long anything right now." It didn't sound like it was mocking him. That was the strange part.

"The blind door is the one I know works. Yours is a thing you're guessing at with no time to guess in. So guess on your own clock. Choose on mine." In his head, Sable hadn't said a word the whole time. He waited for her don't. It didn't come. And the silence from her was louder than any begging, because she'd just heard exactly what going there cost her, and she had nothing to say, because there was nothing she could say that didn't sound like a thing pleading for its own life.

'Sable,' he thought, gentle, which surprised him.

'Talk to me.'

'... I heard it,' she said. Quiet.

'It's all true. Every word. I won't tell you it isn't. I can't follow you off the map. If you go where it's taking you, that's the last you'll hear of me, and I'll be alone in here again, the way I was for ten thousand years before you.' A breath that wasn't a breath.

'So yes. I've been telling you don't. And part of it has always been me. I never once said it wasn't. You can hate me for that if you want. It won't change that I'm also right.'

'Both,' Kaito thought.

'Same as it. Everybody down here's playing both.'

'Yes. Both.' And then her voice changed, dropped, went hard and fast, like she'd decided something and was racing to say it before the fear caught up.

'But here's the piece I've been too much of a coward to give you, and I'll give it now, because if you walk through that door I lose you anyway and I'd rather lose you knowing it. That place. The one with no System in it. You think the god failed to write it. You think it's a blank the god missed.' A pause.

'It isn't. The god didn't miss it, Kaito. The god won't write it. There's a difference, and the difference is everything. The most powerful thing in the world looked at that ground, and decided to pretend it isn't there, and has gone on pretending for ten thousand years. Ask your new friend why a god would do that. Ask it what's in there that even the god won't look at.' Kaito looked at Red across the cold little wood.

"She's telling you it's empty," Red said. It hadn't heard a word. It had read his face, the way it always did.

"Or she's telling you it's full of something worse than a god. One of the two. They're the same warning, dressed for different weather."

"Which is it," Kaito said.

"Empty, or worse than a god?" Red smiled, and it wasn't unkind, and that was somehow the worst it could have done.

"Yes," it said.

"Now. The bells stopped a while ago, which means they've stopped looking and started organizing, which is worse. We've got an hour before there are riders in this wood. So make your choice, Architect, and make it walking." It pushed off the tree.

"The blind door I'm offering, where the god can't follow and you can't see. Or the road, where you can see everything coming, and so can the god, all the way to whoever you finally lead it to." It held out its hand, the way it had in the cell. And in his head, very small, Sable said, 'Don't take the hand. Not yet. I have one more thing. But not here, and not in front of it.'