The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 40: Volume 2: Chapter 38 — Death & Dreams

Read chapter 40 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 2: Chapter 38 — Death & Dreams The world narrowed to a dark, green seam and the ache of her own breath. Yara floated with it, inside it, as if the crack in the world had slipped under her ribs and made a river there. The current took her without a sound or a splash. When she tried to look up, the sky was a lid. When she looked down, there was only that seam-light, running like a vein. Breathe shallow. Let them work. Your heat is mine to keep. The voice did not come from above or below, but from the bruise-glow behind her sternum. The Gem. It tasted like salt when it spoke, a dry hunger that licked and withdrew. Somewhere outside the river, hands moved. “Give me the tongs, no, the other ones. We need to clean the wound and sew it. Steady.” A voice tight with focus. Metal clicked. “We’ve had to send Sam and Harry into the woods,” someone else whispered, apologetic and breathless. “They kept crowding the bed and whining so loud we were afraid she wouldn’t rest.” The river accepted these sounds the way a deep cave accepts the drip of water. They entered, made a small, honest ring, and were gone. Two figures came into the seam-light, back-to-back like carvings on a coin. They were enormous without being large, quiet without being still. One smelled faintly of iron soil after rain. The other smelled like an empty bowl. “You and I,” said the one with the empty-bowl voice, “we have always been mistaken for ends.” “We are,” said the iron-soil one. “Most of them are gone. We are some of the final ones.” Yara knew, without learning, which was which. Death spoke like soil and patience. Consumption spoke like absence and need. “Look,” Consumption said, and the seam-light grew, and under it lay fields of cities furrowed with roads. “They build. They keep. They name. The naming lets them keep. The keeping makes them want. The wanting makes them build. The circle is full.” Death did not answer for a time. The pause contained funerals and births and the long, blind sleep of stones. “Most of us are gone,” Death said finally. “Those that remain have already chosen their last arguments. If I do not end you, you will end what can be kept. If you do not end me, I will end what can be wanted.” Consumption smiled with its voice. “Brother. You speak as if we were separate. I sharpen the wanting so they will hold fast to what is theirs. You soften the holding so they will leave room to want again.” Outside the seam, the hands had become a crowd of precise motions. Cloth peeled. Hot water steamed. Someone’s breath hitched and steadied. “I have no idea what the gem glowing and blinking like that means,” a healer muttered. “Hold her, she’s seizing no, that’s… gods, that hum.” “It’s the hum,” another said. “It spikes the pulse, but it isn’t a seizure. Thread. Two more lengths.” “Where are the draughts?” Eliza’s voice cut through, sharp as a drawn bow. “What do you mean we don’t have any of the healing potions ready yet? I need one now. She used hers to save a baby and trusted us to make more. I won’t disappoint her!” The river’s current quickened. The seam pulled Yara between the two figures as if threading a needle. Let the pain teach. All prices remembered become law. Consumption held out its hands. They were clean, empty, terrible with generosity. “Names,” it said to Death, “are the only honest ropes. Without a name, a thing drifts. With a name, a thing can be kept. With enough kept, I can make a city sing.” “Or starve,” Death said. “Starvation is a kind of song,” Consumption answered, almost tender. The seam cracked open wider, and the vision turned. Yara stood at a height that wasn’t a height, above a place that wasn’t a place until it decided to be one. Below her rang a sky of cracked bells. Men and women moved like lines of ink across a page, and their weapons were not metal so much as vows hammered thin: oaths sharpened into spearpoints, promises quenched until they rang. “They’ve made law into a blade,” Death observed, not displeased. “They