Chapter 49: The Last Brave Thing

THERE ARE THINGS I have never told anyone, not even myself, in the quiet hours when there is nothing left to hide behind.

Still, I will tell it now, because Simmon deserves to have his story told properly, and because the world ought to know what he did.

Because he was my friend.

It happened on our last night at the University.

We had planned to leave at moonrise. The texts were packed and the supplies gathered, and Devi had quietly arranged horses at a stable in Imre, paid for with coin I was careful not to ask about. Everything was ready.

The four-plate door had other plans.

The breach started with a sound.

A crack. A single sharp report like a stone splitting, and after it a low shuddering that ran outward through the foundations of the University, a struck note travelling slowly through still water.

I felt it in my teeth and down my spine and in the sleeping part of my mind that had been half awake since the fire.

We were in the lower corridors beneath Mains, using the tunnels to move unseen toward the Imre bridge, and when the sound reached us we all stopped.

None of us wanted to say it. Sim said it anyway, because Sim always said the things no one else would.

“The door,” he said softly. “Something’s happening with the door.”

“We should keep moving,” Devi said flatly, in the voice she kept for sums. “The horses are waiting. Whatever’s happening with the door, it’s not our problem anymore.”

“It’s everyone’s problem,” Fela said sharply. She had gone pale, and her hands shook hard enough to make the lamplight jump on the wall behind her. “The seal just cracked. Not all the way. But it cracked. I can feel what’s pushing through it.”

“What does it feel like?” I asked.

She looked at me, wide-eyed in the tunnel’s lamplight.

“Wrong,” she said. “It feels wrong.”

We should have left.

We should have walked those tunnels, crossed the bridge to Imre, mounted those horses, and ridden south without looking back. The University had expelled me, and the four-plate door was no longer ours to mend.

But Simmon.

Simmon, who tutored struggling students for free and once spent three days cheerfully brewing a remedy for a stray cat’s infected paw. Simmon, who saw the world as it ought to be and could never forgive it for being otherwise, and could not walk past a gap without trying to close it.

“There are students in the Archives,” he said. “The lower study rooms. People study there overnight during admissions season.”

With the upper reading rooms shut since the fire, Lorren’s scrivs had sensibly opened the lower study rooms to the admissions candidates, since they were stone and cool and the fire had never reached them.

“Sim, wait.”

“If the door breaches, they’re right there. Twenty feet from whatever comes through.” He shrugged his satchel higher onto his shoulder. “I’m going.”

“Then we’re all going,” I said.

“No.” And here his voice changed, going quiet and stubborn. “You need to get the texts out. The sealing protocols, the construction documents, if those are lost, there’s nothing to rebuild with. Nothing to fix this.”

“We’re not splitting up.”

“We have to.” He looked at me. At Fela. At Wil and Devi. “I’ll get the students out. Clear the lower levels. It’s just an evacuation. I can handle an evacuation.”

“You don’t know what’s coming through that door.”

“Neither do you.” He smiled, that gentle Simmon smile that had disarmed a hundred of my arguments. “I’ll be fine, Kvothe. I’m not the hero type. I’m just going to knock on some doors and tell people to leave.”

I should have stopped him.

“Be careful,” I said.

“Always am.” He kissed Fela lightly, the quick easy kiss of two people who assumed they had all the time in the world. “Meet you at the horses. Save me the good one.”

He turned and jogged back up the corridor toward the Archives.

I let him go.

I let him go.

The breach widened while we moved.

We felt it in stages. First the shuddering deepened into a low note that shook dust from the tunnel walls and set the lamplight jumping. Then came the cold, as if something behind the wall were drinking the warmth out of the world a swallow at a time and using it, patiently, to pry the crack wider.

“Faster,” Devi said curtly. She carried two satchels of texts, her small frame bent under them, her feet quick and neat on the broken stone. “Whatever’s happening, it’s picking up speed.”

We came up out of the tunnels at the University end of Stonebridge and climbed onto the span, and from its crown the sky above the University was wrong. A cold pale light seeped up out of the ground itself, turning the buildings black against it, as if dawn had come from under the world instead of over the edge of it.

The four-plate door was opening.

I learned afterward that it had opened only a hand’s width, and only slowly, but that was enough.

“Kvothe.” Wil’s voice was sharp. “Look.”

He was pointing back at the Archives, a quarter mile off, at the black bulk of the ruined building where the four-plate door sat beneath the stacks.

Figures were coming out of the lower entrance. Students, stumbling and confused, some in nightclothes, some still carrying books they were too dazed to set down.

Behind them, herding them along, his voice carrying across the open ground with surprising strength.

Simmon.

He stood in the lit doorway of the lower study entrance, a slight figure I would have known at any distance, waving people steadily through. I did not need to be close to know he was calmly counting heads.

“He’s doing it,” Fela whispered. She stood beside me at the rail, the texts at her feet, gripping the stone so hard her knuckles stood out white. “He’s getting them out.”

For a little while I let myself believe it would be fine. Sim would clear the building and come jogging back with that sheepish grin of his, and we would ride south together, and the night would become a bad hour we laughed about later.

Then the door opened wider.

I don’t know how to describe what came through, and I have had years to find the words.

It was a wrongness, a place where the world had been torn and something on the far side leaned into the gap. It came up through the paving of the courtyard as cold comes up through a cellar floor, and the air above the stones shimmered and buckled, and the sounds of the night went out one by one, like candles when a door opens somewhere in a house. The silence that replaced them was full, and it wanted in.

The students in the courtyard screamed and ran. Some fell. Some simply stopped, going stiff as fence posts when the wrongness touched them.

Simmon was still in the doorway.

A dozen more were still inside behind him, I learned later, in the study rooms, and the courtyard in front of him was dropping people where they stood. He looked back into the building, and then slowly out at the courtyard, and even at that distance I saw his shoulders square, as they always did when he had made up his mind about something and did not mean to be argued out of it.

“Run!” His voice came across the courtyard to us on the bridge, clear as a bell in that dead air. “The west stair! Everyone run!”

Then he turned and went quickly back in, as if he had only forgotten something, and the doorway stood empty with the lamplight in it.

Simmon was no Namer. But he was brilliant in his own quiet way, patient and careful, with an alchemist’s understanding of how things combine and change.

He closed the door.

I did not see him do it. I pieced it together afterward, from Kilvin and from the students and from where I found him. I do not mean the four-plate door, which was beyond any mortal’s power to shut. I mean the heavy oak door between the study rooms and the corridor where the four-plate door stood, ten paces inside the entrance. He ran back to it, took hold of it with both hands, pulled it firmly shut, and set his slight body against it from the study side, with the last of the students behind him and the wrongness coming up the corridor on the other side.

From the bridge I saw only this: frost burst suddenly white out of the lower entrance and across the courtyard stones, and the lamplight in the doorway where Sim had stood went blue, and then it went out.

“SIM!” Fela’s scream split the night. She was already moving, off the bridge toward the courtyard, toward him, and Wil caught her and held her, his face terrible with the effort of holding back someone fighting him with all her strength.

“It drops people where they stand,” he said roughly through his teeth. “You feel it worse than any of us. You would not reach the steps.”

I was running.

Down off the bridge and along the river road, across the courtyard and down the six steps. My legs burned and my lungs burned and the wrongness pressed against me, cold as wind from an open grave, but I ran. Behind me Fela screamed again, and this time it was not Sim’s name. “Kilvin! The lower door!” Off to my right a sympathy lamp turned up to full had come out of the Fishery and was making for the ruined main doors, where there was nothing now but rubble. At her voice it swung about and came on toward the lower door, slower than I was, and heavier.

When I reached him, the oak was shuddering violently under his hands. Frost went racing across it in shapes that hurt to look at directly, and the iron hinges groaned like something alive and in pain. And Simmon held.

He was a slight man, with an alchemist’s hands and a poet’s heart, and the thing pressing against that door had been imprisoned since the world was sealed. He held because he was spending everything he had. I did not understand how until Kilvin and Elxa Dal put words to it afterward, and even then I understood only half: sympathy and alchemy braided together, knotted into the iron in the hinges and the carbon in the oak, half science and half sheer stubbornness, with his own warmth for a wall against the cold. What I saw was his skin. It had gone white, then blue, and while I watched it went on to a clear grey that showed the shadows of the bones beneath. The heat was leaving him, pouring through his bindings into the door, and the cold was pouring back, and his body was the place in between, where warmth became wall.

Behind him the last of the students were still stumbling blindly along the passage toward the far exit.

“Sim! Let go! You have to let go!”

He looked at me through the frost on his eyelashes. There was no fear in his face, only peace, and that frightened me worse than anything else that night.

“Can’t.” His voice was a whisper under the groaning of the door. “It’s tied to me. And they’re still… twenty feet…”

I reached for his hand, the right one, pressed flat against the door. The water in his flesh had frozen hard, and when my fingers touched his the shock of it reached all the way to my heart. I closed my hand over his and felt along the binding for the other end of it, meaning to pull it into myself, and he turned his hand under mine, slowly, like a man turning over in his sleep, and set it flat against the oak again.

“This way,” he breathed, “it counts.”

The door shuddered. The wrongness behind it surged, and Sim’s body arched against the oak, every muscle rigid, every tendon showing through skin gone as clear as poor glass. Something cracked. It was not the door and it was not the stone. It was something inside him, and I learned later that it was his ribs, giving way under a strain they were never made to carry.

Then, distantly, from the far side of the building: a shout. Voices. The far exit banging open and students pouring out into the night, free and alive and running.

Sim heard it.

Something in his face loosened. The pain did not go out of it, but it stopped fighting him.

His lips moved without any sound, and I could read the word off his frost-covered mouth easily enough.

Good.

One last breath. A shudder went through him, slow and final. And then the stiffness left his body all at once, like tension going out of a bowstring when it breaks.

Then: voices. Footsteps, heavy and urgent, coming down the entry steps. A light, warm and orange, nothing like the cold glow of the breach: the sympathy lamp I had seen swing about, still turned up to full.

“Kraem! Hold on, Re’lar!”

Kilvin. His enormous frame filled the entry passage behind us, Elxa Dal at his shoulder. They had been working late in the Fishery, I learned later, packing it up grudgingly under the new regime, and had felt the crack come up through the floor as I had felt it in my teeth. Kilvin had sent a runner for Arwyl and dragged something out of one of the Jakis crates on his way to the door, and he had it in his hands now: a device from the Fishery I had never seen, all copper coils and spinning glass that hummed with held-in force.

“Get him away from the door,” Elxa Dal shouted. “The seal is closing itself, the breach is knitting shut. If he’s still linked when it snaps to…”

I didn’t need to hear the rest. I grabbed Sim’s shoulders and pulled.

The binding fought me. It had wound itself all through him, into his blood and his bones and the deep frame of his body, and pulling him away was like trying to separate a flame from the wood it burned. Sim screamed, a thin cracked sound that barely got past his frozen lips, and for one sickening moment I was certain I would tear him apart.

Then Kilvin was there, pressing the copper device to the door, and the humming became a roar, and the binding shifted, dragging itself off him and into the device, which drank it whole. The copper coils glowed white. The glass spheres shattered one by one, and Kilvin held on with his bare hands, taking through his artificing what his student had been taking through his body.

Sim’s hands slid from the door and he fell, and I caught him. He weighed no more than a child.

Sim was not dead.

His skin was grey-blue, the color of lake ice. Frost still clung to his eyelashes and the corners of his mouth, and his breathing was so shallow I had to press my ear to his chest to hear it, a thin reedy whisper, the sound a bellows makes when it’s nearly flat.

His hands were the worst of it. Both had been pressed flat against that door for minutes that felt like hours. The skin was white and waxy and stiff as tallow, and the frostbite ran so deep the flesh underneath had frozen through.

Elxa Dal knelt beside us, his face set grimly. He put two fingers to Sim’s neck and held them there a long while.

“Alive,” he said at last. “Barely. We need Arwyl. Now.”

“Already sent for,” Kilvin said. His hands were burned from the copper device, red and blistered, but he did not seem to notice. He was staring at the door, at the thin line of dark still showing around its edges, the last trace of what tried to come through. “Re’lar Simmon held it. Alone. No artificing. No schema. He is using own body for a thermocouple, and he is holding it. All summer I tell him his heat ratios are impractical.”

“He used himself as a source,” Elxa Dal said hoarsely. “Channeled his own heat into the binding and kept it flowing against an active draw, bound into the door’s own oak and iron. I have never seen anyone sustain a counter-flow like that, Kilvin, with nothing but his own body to draw on.”

Kilvin said nothing. His eyes were very bright, and he nodded slowly to himself, as though Elxa Dal had only said aloud what he already knew.

Fela arrived at a run, with Wil a step behind her.

She fell to her knees beside me. Beside him.

She touched his face, his grey-blue, impossibly still face. She touched his hair, then his hands, and drew her fingers back sharply from the cold of them, from the waxy stiffness of the frostbitten skin.

“Is he…”

“Alive,” I said. “He’s alive, Fela.”

She pulled his head into her lap. Cradled him. Whispered things I couldn’t hear and didn’t try to.

Master Arwyl came with two medica students and a stretcher.

They worked quietly and quickly, checking Sim’s pulse and breathing and how far the frostbite had gone. Arwyl kept his face carefully empty, but his eyes widened when he came to Sim’s hands, and the look he gave Elxa Dal said everything. Elxa Dal nodded stiffly and said nothing.

They lifted him onto the stretcher. Fela walked beside it with one hand set firmly on Sim’s shoulder.

I watched them carry him toward the Medica. In the moonlight, the moonlight Sim always insisted had properties nobody believed in, his face looked peaceful.

He was alive. He was alive, and the students were alive, and the door was sealed again, and everything that mattered had been saved.

PRESENT DAY — WAYSTONE INN

Kote paused.

Chronicler waited, pen lifted. Bast had not moved.

“He survived,” Kote said evenly. “Sim survived the University. The hands healed, mostly, and Arwyl was brilliant, but there was nerve damage and scarring, and he never did fine alchemy work again. Still, he could hold things. He could hold Fela’s hand.”

Another pause.

“He came south with us, eventually, though not at first. Sim spent weeks mending, first in the Medica and then in Severen, where the Maer’s physicker finished what Arwyl started, while we made ready. When he finally caught up with us he was thinner, and quieter. But he came, because Fela was going, and he said cheerfully that he had not frozen half to death at that door to read the rest in her letters.”

The silence settled, and the story waited.