The hollow legacy

The floor gave way under Nibby’s left foot with a sound like a bone snapping, and for one long, stupid heartbeat she was falling. Her hands found a beam before her mind found a thought. Splinters bit into her palms. Her legs swung over nothing, and from the dark below them rose a breath of cold, stale air that smelled of wet earth and old iron. Dust poured past her boots and pattered onto something far beneath. It was not a cellar floor. It was a hollow. "Don't let go," she told herself, in the flat voice she used whenever panic wanted to be in charge. "You are not dying in somebody else's kitchen." She hauled herself up, elbow, then chest, then knee, until she lay gasping on the sound part of the boards with her cheek against grit. The beam creaked once in complaint and held. Overhead, a slice of grey autumn sky showed through the broken roof, and a rain so fine it was barely more than mist drifted in to settle on her hair. For a while she did nothing but breathe. There was a scrap to find before the light went off, and winter was coming. She looked at the hole she had made. It was larger than she had expected, a ragged mouth in the floorboards where the rot had finally given up, and it did not open onto earth. She crawled to the edge and leaned over it with her heart still hammering. Below the broken planks she could see stone. Cut stone, laid in tidy courses, forming the walls of a narrow shaft barely wider than a coffin. Someone had built this. Someone had pulled up the original floor, dug a niche into the foundation, lined it, and then laid new boards over the top so cleverly that seven years of decay had been the only thing to betray it. "A smuggler's hole," she murmured. "Or a pantry for people who were very afraid of mice." Neither answer felt right. She tugged a loose plank free and let the grey light fall farther into the shaft. At the bottom lay a long bundle wrapped in oilcloth, bound with a cord that had gone black and stiff. It rested on a bed of straw so dry it crackled when the draught moved through it. The practical part of her mind spoke first, as it always did. *Leave it. Whatever it is, it's none of your business, and if somebody went to this much trouble to hide it, somebody may still be interested in it.* The rest of her was already climbing down. She used the beam again, then a protruding stone, then the shaft's rough wall, until her boots touched the straw. The air down here was colder, and it pressed on her ears. When she crouched, the hair on her arms rose, and she could not have said why. The bundle was heavier than she expected and longer than her arm. She slid the cord free with her knife, and the oilcloth fell open with a stiff sigh. It was a sword. Or it had been. The blade ended in a clean, jagged break a hand's span above the guard, as though someone had snapped it across a knee or a stone. The steel that remained was grey and unspotted, with none of the orange bloom of rust she had seen on every other piece of iron in Veyr Hollow. It had been oiled, and recently, or at least not very long ago. The grip was wrapped in black leather worn smooth by use. The guard was simple, a plain crossbar with ends that curled slightly inward, like fingers beginning to close. On the pommel, set into the metal in a ring of darker steel, was a crest. Nibby tilted it toward the light. It was a circle, perfectly round, divided by three narrow blades that radiated from the center and did not touch the rim. One blade pointed up. Two angled down and apart. It was so simple that a child could have drawn it, and so deliberate that she knew at once nobody had drawn it by accident. She had never seen it before. She would have sworn to that before any court in the kingdom. And yet something in her chest answered it. It was not a thought. It was lower than a thought, a kind of settling, like the moment a foot finds the last stair in the dark after you have been bracing for one more step that doesn't exist. Her breath went out of her. Her fingers, which she had meant to keep carefully away from the thing, closed around the grip as if they had been waiting for it. The leather was warm. That was impossible. The shaft was as cold as a well. The sword had lain in the earth for who knew how long, and the oilcloth had been stiff and damp. But the grip was warm under her palm, and it fit her hand so exactly that her fingers found their places without being told, the little finger curling beneath, the thumb resting along the guard. Somewhere far behind her eyes, a room opened. It was a quiet room, grey and long, with a window she could not quite see and a bed made with square corners. There was a smell of boiled barley. There was a voice somewhere in the hallway, speaking to someone who was not her, laughing at something that she was not part of. She was lying very still, with her hands folded, listening to the voice go away. She had been listening to voices go away for a very long time. Nibby pulled in a sharp breath and the room was gone. She was kneeling in the straw with a dead sword in her hand and rain ticking on the boards overhead, and her cheeks were wet, and she had no idea why. "No," she said aloud, roughly, wiping her face with the back of her wrist. "No. We are not doing that. We have a roof to patch." Under the sword, the oilcloth had folded into the shape of a pocket. Something small and flat lay inside it, wrapped in a second layer of cloth, no bigger than her hand. She reached for it with her free fingers, keeping the sword in her other fist, because letting go of it felt suddenly like a mistake. She slid the little flat parcel from the fold of the oilcloth, found it surprisingly light, and tucked it into the lining of her coat. Whatever it was, she would look at it somewhere with a door that was locked. That was when she heard the footsteps. They came from outside, from the lane, slow and even, and the sound carried perfectly through the broken roof. A boot on wet stone. Then another. Not the scuffle of a fox, and not the clatter of a loose slate shifting in the wind. A person, walking with the unhurried confidence of someone who believes they are alone. Nibby froze. No one came to Smith Row. That was the whole point of Smith Row. The scavengers had stopped years ago, partly out of fear of sickness and partly because there was nothing left to take. The Crown's inspectors came twice a year and never went past the gate. Dovrin would sooner have walked into the sea than set foot in the Hollow. The footsteps stopped. She held her breath, and the rain seemed to grow louder. Through the gap in the roof she could see only grey sky and the dark ribs of the rafters. Whoever stood in the lane could not see her unless they leaned through the window she had come in by. She knew that, and it did not help. Then the steps resumed. They moved away from her, down the lane, and she let out the smallest breath of relief she had ever managed. It was cut off by the sound of a door. Not any door. A heavy one, with a hinge that groaned like a dying animal. It came from the building across the lane, the old assay house with the iron-bound doors and the windows boarded from the inside. Everybody knew that building. It had been nailed shut by the Crown Physicians along with every other structure in the town. Nibby had tried the shutters twice in her first year of scavenging and found them solid as a cliff. Nothing had ever lived in that place since the evacuation. Nothing could. Someone had just opened it from the inside. Her whole body went cold. Something in her wrist twitched, and the broken sword slid out of her fingers. She did not decide what happened next. If someone had asked her afterward, she could not have explained it. The sword fell, tumbling hilt over guard in the dim light, and Nibby, whose eyes were fixed on the line of sky above her, whose attention was entirely on the sounds outside, moved. Her right hand dropped, turned, and closed on the grip in midair, a hand's breadth from the stones, and the blade came to rest flat along the inside of her forearm, pointed down, edge outward, in a grip that no peddler's orphan had any business knowing. Her weight had already shifted to her back foot. Her left shoulder was angled toward the shaft's opening. Her breath was slow and quiet and measured, as though she had done this a thousand times. She hadn't looked down. Not once. Nibby stared at the sword in her hand. "What," she whispered, "was that?" The sword, naturally, did not answer. But the three blades on the pommel caught a thread of grey light and gleamed, and for a moment, the gleam seemed almost like a small, patient smile. She released the grip in a rush, flung the sword onto the straw, and sat back with her heart battering her ribs. Her hand shook. Her forearm still held the shape of the blade, a faint line of cold along the skin where the steel had rested. Somewhere in the shaft's dark, the echo of her own breath came back to her. She listened to it. She listened to the rain. She listened to the whole silent, ruined street. Then she picked up the sword again. Her fingers shook, but they did not hesitate. She wrapped it in its oilcloth, tucked the long bundle inside her coat, and was halfway up the stone wall of the shaft when she heard the voice. It came from the room above her, from inside the house. "Elira?" It was soft, and uncertain, and almost gentle, the voice of someone speaking to a thing they were afraid might break. A man's voice, or an old woman's. She could not tell. It echoed strangely through the empty rooms, and it came closer with every heartbeat. "Elira, is that you? Please. I have been waiting such a long time." Nibby clung to the stones with the broken sword pressed against her ribs and the rain falling on her upturned face, and understood, with perfect and terrible clarity, that she had never in her life been called by that name. And that whoever was speaking meant it for her.