Chapter 93: The Skin Dancer

WITHOUT A knock, the door opened.

People knocked. Even in the emptiest corners of the world, a man knocked before he walked into a building at night.

The door was on the latch and not bolted, so a hand had only to lift it quietly, and the door simply opened, and a man walked in. Behind him the keening and the low hum were still at the walls, as they would be until the grey before dawn.

He was of medium height and medium build, brown-haired and brown-eyed, in canvas trousers and a wool shirt and a patched coat, the sort of man who could pass through any town without being remembered.

Kote saw him first, and his eyes followed the man with a stillness that was more than idle attention.

Chronicler felt it before he understood it: a sourness in the air, a pressure that pushed against the walls of the Waystone.

“Evening,” the man said. The word came out flat, drained of everything that made voices human.

“Evening,” Kote said, mild and measured, in the voice he kept for strangers. “Can I help you?”

“I need shelter.” The man stood just inside the threshold, and his eyes went slowly over Chronicler and Bast and Kote, one after another, taking an inventory.

“Of course,” Kote said. “We have rooms available. Let me—”

“Just the common room.” The man came forward. His walk was off, each piece of it correct on its own and none of it fitting together.

He sat at a table square in the middle of the floor.

“Something to drink?” Kote asked politely.

“Water.”

Kote poured a glass and set it on the bar, and when the man made no move to fetch it, Kote carried it to the table himself.

When he came back, his hands settled on the bar curled instead of flat, the fingers bent and the thumbs tucked under.

Bast had not moved from his chair.

He sat perfectly still, held in the Fae stillness of a thing wound too tight to move. His eyes never left the newcomer.

The glamour held, but underneath it Chronicler could feel something pulling hard against its leash, an instinct sounding its alarm.

“Cold night,” the man said. He hadn’t touched his water.

“Yes,” Bast said, lightly and easily, though he sat with the tension of a drawn bow.

“Heard something outside. On the road.” The man’s head came around toward Bast in one smooth motion, the neck turning as though on a spindle, without the small natural hesitations of muscle and bone. “Something in the dark.”

“The scrael,” Chronicler offered. “They’ve been getting closer. Dangerous creatures.”

The man looked at him. The brown eyes held Chronicler’s, and the black centers of them spread wide and stayed wide, an animal’s eyes in the dark, a thing of the flesh with nothing behind it.

“Yes,” the man said. “Dangerous.”

He smiled.

It used the right muscles and moved the right parts of the face, and it meant nothing at all, as if something had watched a man smile once and had copied it without ever feeling it.

Bast’s chair scraped against the floor as he shifted his weight, and the sound of it was very loud in the silence.

“You’re hurt,” Bast said suddenly.

The man looked down at himself. On the left side of his coat, near the hip, a dark stain had spread across the canvas, too dark and too wet for dirt, the deep red of fresh blood.

“Am I?” the man said. There was no surprise in his voice, and no pain, and no concern. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Kote came out from behind the bar.

“Let me look at that,” Kote said. He came toward the table with open hands and nothing threatening about him: the innkeeper, the helper.

He reached for the man’s coat.

The man’s hand caught Kote’s wrist.

The man’s arm was at his side, and then it was holding Kote’s wrist, and there was no moment in between.

His grip was too strong for the hand that gave it, the fingers digging into Kote’s flesh with a force that should have wanted bigger muscles and heavier bone behind it. And the skin was cold, colder than any living man’s, cold as turned earth in winter or deep water.

“Don’t touch me,” the man said flatly.

His voice had changed. The flatness was gone out of it, and what came instead was worse: two voices speaking at once, the first thin and reedy, the second rising out of the chest instead of the throat and settling in the bones of anyone who heard it.

Kote didn’t pull away. His body was still and his face empty, but his eyes had changed, and what looked out of them was alert and present. Awake.

“Let go,” Kote said, quietly and ordinarily, as a man asks for something reasonable.

The man’s grip closed harder. The bones in Kote’s wrist shifted.

“Let go,” Kote said again, in the same voice and the same tone. But the room changed around him, the air going tight and heavy as it does before a storm.

The man’s brown eyes met Kote’s green ones.

Something inside the man shrank.

The grip let go. The man’s hand pulled back, quick and jerky, and for just a moment the mask cracked: a ripple of motion running across his forehead and his cheeks and his jaw, the flesh sliding loose across the bone, tugged and kneaded by invisible fingers under the skin.

Then it was over, and the face settled, and the brown eyes cleared, and the man was just a man again.

“Forgive me,” he said. The flat voice was back. “I’m… not feeling well.”

Bast was standing.

Chronicler hadn’t seen him rise. One moment the Fae prince was in his chair and the next he was on his feet, between the stranger and the door, careful not to block it, present and ready.

“You should rest,” Bast said gently. But his eyes, above that warm voice, were cold and sharp.

“Yes,” the man said. “Rest.”

He stood. It was a seamless, uncanny rising, the body lifted on invisible strings rather than pushed up by muscle and joint. He swayed slightly, steadied himself, and started for the stairs.

He passed Bast without looking at him, and as he passed, Bast’s nostrils flared. His glamour rippled, and for just a moment the eyes beneath it showed, wide and blue and full of naked horror.

Over the man’s shoulder Bast’s eyes found Kote’s, and Kote shook his head, very slightly. He had known what the thing was since its cold hand closed on his wrist. It was wearing a living man, and there was nothing they could do to it in that room that they would not also be doing to him; upstairs, at least, it was away from the door and the threshold, and the stairs would buy Kote a little time.

The man climbed the stairs, each footstep set down exactly like the one before it.

A door opened and closed above them, and then nothing.

The three of them stood in the common room and said nothing for ten full seconds.

“That’s a skin dancer,” Bast whispered. His glamour was still flickering and his hands were shaking. “That thing upstairs is a skin dancer.”

Kote hadn’t moved. His right hand cradled his left wrist where the man had gripped it. Even in the dim light, Chronicler could see the bruises coming up, dark marks where the fingers had been.

“I know,” Kote said.

Bast went quickly to the hearth, wrapped his sleeve twice round his hand, and took up the iron poker. It burned him through the cloth, and Chronicler saw his mouth go thin, but he carried it to the foot of the stairs and laid it across the bottom step, where anything coming down would have to cross it, and came back slowly, shaking out his fingers.

“We have to go. Now. Right now. Before it…”

“No.”

“Reshi…”

“If we run, it follows.” Kote’s voice was calm. “Skin dancers track by sympathetic resonance. Once it’s been this close, it can find us anywhere. Running only spreads the danger.”

“Then we fight,” Bast said. “Iron did for the last one.”

“Iron did for the man the last one was wearing.” Kote’s voice stayed perfectly level. “Aaron beat that body to death with a bar from the smithy, and the thing went out of it when it died. I won’t do that to this one.” He looked at Bast. “Iron slows them. It doesn’t stop them. Fire hurts them but doesn’t kill them. The only way to drive it out and keep the man is…”

He stopped.

“Is naming,” Bast finished, barely audible. “You have to name what it truly is, speak its nature, and force it out of the body.”

Kote nodded. “Yes.”

“Can you do that?”

Upstairs, in a room they had given to a monster wearing a man’s skin, something was quiet.

“I don’t know,” Kote said.

They sat in the common room and spoke in whispers.

“The man it’s wearing,” Kote said. “He’s still in there. Skin dancers don’t kill the men they wear, they push them down and drive the body, and the man stays awake inside it, shut in his own skull.”

“Can you save him?” Chronicler asked.

“That depends on how long the dancer has been inside. A few hours, maybe. A day, unlikely. Longer than that…” Kote shook his head. “The man’s mind wears away. Even if you drive it out, what’s left isn’t always… anyone.”

“He hasn’t been in there long,” Bast said. “The movements are still wrong. A dancer in a body for more than a day learns to move properly. This one is still learning.”

“Then there might be time.” Kote rubbed his wrist absently, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. “The question is whether I can still do what needs to be done.”

“Reshi, you named the wind once,” Bast said. “You named—”

“That was before the road here.” Kote’s voice was flat. “I shut a door in myself on that road, and I’ve kept it shut for two years. I couldn’t call the wind now if the roof were burning, let alone name a thing like that.” He flexed his hand.

“You stopped it.” Chronicler’s voice was quiet but firm. “When it grabbed you. You said ‘let go,’ and the air changed. I felt it.”

Kote looked at him.

“I’ve been sitting in this room for three days listening to you describe impossible things. What I felt when you spoke, that pressure in my teeth, that wasn’t nothing.”

“Chronicler…”

“You’ve spent three days naming yourself. Your own story, spoken aloud, in full. If naming has power, you are not the same man who sat down at this bar.”

“That’s a beautiful theory,” Kote said finally.

“Is it wrong?”

There was a silence, longer than was comfortable.

“I don’t know,” Kote said again. But he said it differently this time, as though he were uncertain rather than beaten.

It came in the small hours.

The fire had burned low. Chronicler had dozed at his table, his head pillowed on his arms. Bast was awake; the Fae did not need sleep as men did, and his senses were stretched as far as they would go.

Kote stood behind the bar and had not moved in an hour.

The sound was a small one, and nothing like footsteps: a wet, sliding noise that feet and hands do not make.

A shape appeared at the bottom of the stairs, and stopped at the iron laid across the last step, and after a long, patient moment crossed it.

It had been the man not long ago, the same clothes, the same build, but the pretending had stopped. The body moved on all fours, the limbs bending in ways no human joint should bend, and the head tilted at an angle that suggested a broken neck, or that the thing inside had decided it did not need one.

The eyes were open, and they were no longer brown.

They were black, the flat black of the space between the stars, and something stirred inside that blackness, awake and hungry.

Chronicler woke to the sound of his own sharp breath, and his body moved before his mind did: the chair scraping back, his hands catching at the table’s edge.

He didn’t run. His hands were shaking badly enough that the pen rattled against the table. He pressed them flat and forced himself to breathe.

Bast had moved to the far side of the room. His eyes had gone Fae, wide and blue and bright in the near-darkness. His hands were empty: nothing iron, nothing that could do more than slow the thing at the bottom of the stairs, and anything he did to it he would be doing to the man inside.

The skin dancer turned its head in one long unbroken motion that carried the face across the room without the pause or correction of living muscle. The black eyes swept across Chronicler, across Bast, and settled on Kote.

It smiled, and this time the smile was real, full of recognition and eager waiting and hunger that had found what it wanted.

“Kvothe,” it said.

It was one voice now, low and deep, coming from everywhere at once, out of the walls and the fire and the darkness outside, a voice that belonged nowhere near a fire.

“Kvothe.” A wet sound, perhaps a swallow. “The doors are opening. We come through the thin places now.”

Kote stepped out from behind the bar.

He moved slowly and deliberately. His face had gone past the innkeeper’s practiced blankness into something further down, past expression altogether.

“You’re from beyond the Doors,” Kote said. His voice was quiet and conversational, a man confirming a suspicion about the weather.

The skin dancer made a sound that might have been laughter. “Your doors are cracking, did you know that? Every night the gaps grow wider. Every night more of us slip through.” The mouth worked briefly, tasting the words as it made them. “It is becoming so very easy.”

“And you came here.”

“For you.” The black eyes fixed on Kote hard enough to press the air flat between them. “We came a very long way to find the one who opened the way. The one who broke it…”

The mouth stretched wider, words tumbling out fragmented and strange. “Since the Sithe rode us down in their holly crowns, the quiet held. Perfect. Unbroken. And then…” A wet sound, half-laugh, half-hiss. “You. With your naming and your questions, and the doors, they cracked…”

“I didn’t break the world.”

Something crossed his face and was gone again, quick and private.

The body shifted, rising up out of its crouch with a crackling of joints, the limbs finding their places again, the head coming straight though the eyes never left Kote. “Break.” The word was patient, almost fond. “No. You opened. There is a difference, and it will not save you.”

The creature took a step forward, and then another.

Bast moved, fast and silent, putting himself between the dancer and Kote, his body low and ready, his hands empty but curled like claws.

“Bast.” Kote’s voice was quiet. “Please.”

“Reshi…”

“Anything you do to it, you do to him. Will you step back, and let me try?”

Bast hesitated. Every line of him refused. The voice that had asked was not the innkeeper’s voice; it was older, the voice he had crossed over from the Fae to find, but it had asked him plainly, and it had not bound him. Bast could have disobeyed. He chose, for once, to trust him.

He stepped back.

The skin dancer watched the exchange placidly with its black eyes, and its smile widened.

“There it is,” it whispered. “Under all the silence and the pretending.” Its head cocked at an impossible angle. It drew a long, slow breath, tasting the air. “We can smell it on you. The Cthaeh’s breath. The smell of the door you opened. You are so much bigger than this little room…”

“I know who I am,” Kote said.

Kote stood in the middle of the common room, his hands at his sides, his red hair dark in the dying firelight. He simply stood there, and the room went silent, and the silence was clean, emptied of everything false.

Through that silence Chronicler felt a pressure that went past the body entirely and settled in the marrow and the teeth, a name spoken hard enough to leave a mark on the world.

The skin dancer stopped.

Its smile vanished and the black eyes went wide with recognition, though it was not the innkeeper it recognized.

“You…” it began.

Then it pushed back. The creature lunged, the stolen body jerking and twisting, and Kote staggered with blood trickling from his left nostril. The room shook, the bottles rattled, the fire guttered sideways.

For a terrible moment, the dancer’s smile returned.

Then Kote set his teeth, and whatever he was doing redoubled, and the man’s body went into a single violent shudder that ran down him from crown to toes. The black drained out of the eyes and left brown behind it, ordinary and terrified, and the man’s mouth opened and a scream came out, high and ragged and entirely human.

He collapsed.

The skin dancer was gone. Whether destroyed or merely driven out was impossible to say.

The man lay on the floor of the Waystone, breathing in ragged gasps, fingers clawing at the wood. His eyes were wide and rolling and full of a horror that would take years to fade.

Kote knelt down beside him, gently and slowly.

“You’re all right,” he said. His voice was barely there. “You’re safe. It’s gone.”

The man’s eyes found his face and held on to it.

“What’s your name?” Kote asked him.

It took the man a long time to find it, as if he had to go a long way down to fetch it. “Garrett,” he said at last. “I’m a laborer, from a town two days south.” His mouth worked. “It took me on the road.”

“Garrett,” Kote said softly, as though he meant to keep it. Then he looked at the dark stain low on the man’s coat, where the thing had not let him touch. “Let me look at that,” he said, as he had said once already that night, and this time the man let him.

Later, Garrett slept on a cot Bast dragged down beside the hearth, where the three of them could watch him. “If it’s only out,” Bast had said while they settled him gently, low enough that Garrett would not hear, “it may try him again,” and nobody had argued. The thing had run him the two days’ road north in less than one, and his feet were torn and swollen in the ruins of his boots, and his legs would not hold him, as if they had been lent to him and taken back. Kote had carefully washed and bound the gash on his hip, and Bast had given him water and clean clothes and a blanket.

Kote crossed the room slowly and shot the bolt on the front door for the first time that night, and went back to stand behind the bar. A dried streak of blood still marked his upper lip. He kept his left hand in his apron pocket, and for the better part of an hour it shook there hard enough that Chronicler could see the cloth move; then, gradually, it eased back to the small tremor Chronicler had watched for three days, and it went no further than that.

“What did you do?” Chronicler asked.

“I’m not sure,” Kote said. He was quiet a while. “I stilled the room first, with a thimble of what I carry, no more. Then I pushed one name through a door I shut on the road here, and it went, and the door swung closed again behind it.” He looked down at his pocket. “That’s what the hand is paying for. I felt for the wind afterward, and it isn’t there.”

“But you can still—”

“Once,” Kote said. The words were gentle, and final. “I could, once. Don’t ask me for a second.”

Bast sat in his chair by the window, the roah ring gleaming faintly on his finger, and said nothing. But his eyes were bright with something that might have been hope.

A little later Chronicler went up to his room at last to sleep. Bast meant to walk the bounds at first grey, and Kote took up the broom.

The fire crackled. The night continued.

And in the Waystone Inn, the silence had changed again, and it was listening.