The first thing the Bloom took was the sound.
Creed noticed it about forty meters into the crack. Behind him, the gate had screamed shut, and the scream had gone on bouncing off the walls of the fissure for a while, getting smaller and smaller, the way sound did in the Belly. And then it simply stopped. Not faded. Stopped, as if someone had closed a door on it. When he scuffed his boot against the floor, the scrape came back to him flat and close and wrong, a sound with no room around it.
The haze did that. It was thicker in here than it had looked through the bars of the gate. It hung in the crack in slow, drifting sheets, and every sheet was made of motes, and every mote was lit from the inside with a faint, sick glow — a color somewhere between bruise-violet and the yellow-green of an old wound — so that the whole fissure seemed to be breathing light in and out. The motes caught on his sleeves. They caught on the lenses of his mask and slid across them like slow rain. When he wiped one lens with the back of his glove, the glove came away smeared with a fine glowing dust that went on glowing for a long time.
Spores. Twelve years after the Bloom had come up out of the basin and killed every living thing in Vesper Hollow, the spores were still drifting. Nobody in Sump-Nine knew what the Bloom had been, exactly. A fungus, people said. A gas. A judgment. A refinery accident somebody up the cable had paid to have called a fungus. The warden at the gate had a different theory every time someone asked him, and he’d only ever been asked by people who weren’t coming back.
Creed’s chit-band glowed on his wrist, green on green in the haze.
AIR ALLOTMENT: 71:52:09
SPONSOR: KON RECLAMATION
STATUS: FIELD
He watched the seconds tick down for longer than he should have. Then he made himself stop. Counting was a comfort. Counting was also how people in the Belly made themselves crazy, staring at the quota board, at the shift clock, at the band, waiting for the number that meant the end. He had seventy-one hours and fifty-two minutes. He would have seventy-one hours and fifty-one minutes in a minute whether he watched it or not.
He tightened the strap on his back where the sword rode, felt the familiar hard line of it against his spine, and walked.
The crack opened out after an hour, and the world fell away in front of him.
He’d known, in the way you know things you’ve only been told, that the god’s pelvis was a basin. He hadn’t understood what that meant. He was standing on a shelf of bone high up on the western blade of the ilium, and below him the inside of the pelvis curved down and away into the dark like the inside of a bowl the size of a district. Bigger. The size of every district in the Belly put together. The far side of it was lost in haze. Across the whole vast curve of it, the Bloom lay glowing in drifts and pools and long slow rivers, pale violet, so that the basin looked less like a place than like the inside of an eyelid when you pressed on it.
And down there, somewhere, was the Hollow.
He found the old road where the warden had said it would be: a ledge cut into the bone, switchbacking down, edged in places by a guardrail rusted to lace. Somebody had built this once. Somebody had driven crawlers down it, hauled things up it, lived at the bottom of it and thought of it as the way home. Halfway down the first switchback he passed a crawler, or what was left of one, nose-first against the inner wall where its driver had stopped and never started again. The cab was full of spores. They drifted in and out of the broken windows in slow tides, glowing, like the crawler was breathing.
He didn’t look inside the cab. That was a rule he made right then and kept for the rest of the crossing: you don’t look in the cabs.
The basin floor was dunes.
Not sand. Bone. Fine white powder, drifted into long smooth ridges by some wind he couldn’t feel, so that every step sank to the ankle with a soft dry creak and the powder puffed up around his boots and hung there in the haze, mixing with the spores. He understood after a while that the god had been shedding itself. Down here, at the bottom of the bowl, flake by flake, for a thousand years, the bone of the basin had been flaking off and drifting and piling up, the way dead skin did. He was walking on the god’s dust. It got into the joints of his boots and the hinges of his knees and the corners of his mouth around the mask seal, and it tasted of nothing at all, which was somehow worse than marrow.
Every half hour, the mask’s breath got heavier. Every half hour, he stopped, unscrewed the filter canister, knocked it against his palm, and watched a little cake of glowing dust fall out and break apart in the air. Then he screwed it back in and breathed again, and the breath came easier, and he walked.
The filter was cheap. He’d known that the moment he’d felt its weight. The kind of thing you issued to someone you expected to write off. It would get him there. Whether it would get him back was a different arithmetic, and he didn’t do it yet.
To keep himself from counting the seconds, he counted other things.
Dunes crossed: eleven. Crawlers passed: three, not looked in. Times he’d thought about Hesk: he lost count of that one early, which annoyed him.
He kept thinking about her hands. About how they’d had to pry her fingers off the pump bar one at a time. About the little hollow clack of her band landing in the bin. About how she’d said mule the way some people said a name, and how he’d never once, in nine years, asked her where she’d learned the tune. He’d have liked to know. It seemed like a stupid thing to want, out here, with the god’s dust in his teeth. He wanted it anyway.
He thought about Ollo’s arm, and that was easier, strangely, because he’d done something about Ollo’s arm. He’d cut it off. That was a thing he could hold.
He thought about the fern.
He found he was angry at the fern. Not at Kon — he was angry at Kon the way he was angry at the recycler, or the press, a deep, old, structural anger that was too big to feel all at once. But the fern was small enough to hate. A plant in a white pot. Leaves. Green. Sitting in clean air, drinking clean water, under a light that existed so it could grow. Down in Sump-Nine, nothing had ever been allowed to grow, not even mold, because mold spoiled rations and spoiled rations cost money. The Works scrubbed it off the walls every month. And all that time, a few kilometers up a cable, there had been a fern.
He realized he had stopped walking. He was standing on top of the twelfth dune with his fists clenched, breathing hard into the mask, and the filter had clogged again without him noticing, and there were black spots crowding into the edges of his vision.
He knocked the canister clean. He breathed. The black spots went away.
Arithmetic, Kon had said. You can do arithmetic.
Anger cost air. He’d learned that in the galleries — that the body burned more of everything when it was angry, sweat and breath and the little store of strength you’d need for hour nineteen. You saved it. You put it somewhere cold and you saved it, and one day you found out what you’d been saving it for.
He came down off the twelfth dune and kept walking.
He heard the pipe-forest before he saw it, which in the Bloom should have been impossible.
It was a sound like the stack at night: long, low groans, rising and falling, a hundred voices that weren’t voices. He stopped. He listened. He unslung the sword from his back and held it, wrapped, across his body in both hands, because it was the only thing out here that made him feel taller than he was.
The haze thinned ahead of him, and the forest came up out of it.
Pipes. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Old marrow-lines, from back when the basin had been worked — the same thick-walled pipes he’d spent nine years filling on Line C, except these ones stood upright, rammed vertically into the basin floor as anchor-posts for some long-gone pipeline gantry, a grid of rusted columns ten meters tall stretching away into the glowing dark in every direction. Most of them were cracked. Some had fallen. The ones still standing had split along their seams, and the faint movement of the air through the basin — the wind he couldn’t feel — was moving through the splits and making them sing. Low, wavering, endless. A pipe organ played by a dead god’s breath.
Creed stood at the edge of it for a while, letting the sound settle into him so that he could hear past it. Then he went in.
Inside, the spores were thick and the light was strange. It came from everywhere and nowhere, soft and sourceless, throwing a hundred faint shadows off every pipe so that the shadows crossed and wove and made the space between the columns look like a room with no walls. The bone-dust was thinner here. Underfoot was old metal grating, half-buried. He walked on the grating where he could, because it was quieter, though it was hard to tell what quiet meant with the forest groaning all around him.
He was perhaps a third of the way through when he smelled the dead thing.
Even through the mask. Even through the filter. A sweet, heavy, rotten-meat smell that crawled in past the seal and coated the back of his throat. He gagged, swallowed it down, and followed it, because when you smelled a dead thing in the Belly you always went and looked, in case it was somebody you knew.
It was not somebody he knew. It was not, he thought, somebody at all.
It lay at the foot of a fallen pipe, in the angle between the pipe and the grating: something about the size of a man, curled up. It had been grey once, or a grey thing had grown over it. It was covered in a fine pale fuzz like mold on old bread, and the fuzz was glowing, faintly, the same bruise-violet as the haze. Its limbs were too long. Its fingers were too long. There was a face, or the front of a head, but it had no eyes — not empty sockets, just smooth fuzzed-over skin where eyes ought to be, as if the eyes had been grown over a long time ago and the body had stopped needing them.
And the whole of it was moving.
Not breathing. Moving. A slow, constant, rippling motion across the surface of it, as if the skin were crawling. Creed crouched — not too close — and the rippling resolved into a thousand small shapes. Pale. Flat. Palm-sized, with too many legs. They were packed over the dead thing in a shifting crust, and under them, where they’d been working longest, the body was not a body anymore but a kind of lace.
Marrow-mites. He’d heard of them. They lived in the dead galleries, people said, the ones that had been worked out and abandoned, and they ate whatever was left. He’d thought they were a story to keep you from going into the dead galleries.
One of the mites turned. It didn’t have eyes either. It lifted the front half of its flat body off the meal and held it there, waving, tasting the air.
Tasting him.
Creed stood up slowly and backed away, and he did not turn around until he was four pipes distant, and then he walked much faster than he wanted to, and the forest groaned around him the whole way out.
He thought about the long fingers of the dead thing. Too long. Too many joints.
He thought about the warden saying nobody’s come back, and for the first time it occurred to him to wonder whether that was quite the same as saying nobody’s alive.
His body quit on him at a little after hour thirty-nine.
He’d been walking for seventeen hours on top of a twenty-hour shift and two hours and forty minutes of something the contract called rest, and he hadn’t eaten anything but a ration brick and a half, and he’d been breathing through a filter clogged with god-dust, and somewhere on the far side of the pipe-forest his legs simply stopped agreeing to be legs. One knee folded. He caught himself on the other, and that one folded too, and he knelt in the bone-dust with his hands on his thighs and his head hanging and the spores drifting down around him like slow snow, and he thought, very calmly, Oh. This is how it happens.
Not the press. Not a foreman’s lash. Not the Void. You just stopped, out in the dust somewhere, and the mites came.
That was when he saw the pump-house.
It was a box of corrugated sheet-metal on a concrete pad, maybe forty meters off, half-buried on its windward side by a long drift of bone. The door was shut. Shut — not hanging, not torn away. Somebody had shut it once, and nothing had opened it since.
He got there. He didn’t remember most of it. He remembered the handle being cold, and the door sticking, and putting his shoulder into it, and then he was inside and the door was shut behind him and he was lying on his back on a concrete floor in the dark, breathing.
When he got his glow-strip cracked, he saw why the door had stayed shut. The inside was clean. No spores, or almost none — just a faint glowing dust in the corners. The pump-house had been sealed: the old pumping crew must have sealed it themselves, with gasket tape around the frame and the vents plugged with rag, back in the first hours of the Bloom when there’d still been someone here to try. There was a chair. There was a desk with a logbook on it, gone soft and swollen. There was a cot.
On the cot, there was a crew-jacket, folded. Neatly. As if its owner had folded it before going out.
The owner had not come back to it. Creed knew that without being told. Whoever had sealed this place had sealed it and then gone outside, for some reason, into the Bloom, and left their jacket folded on the bed for when they got back.
He didn’t touch the jacket. He lay down on the floor beside the cot. He pulled the mask off — carefully, and only after he’d watched the air in the beam of the glow-strip for a full minute and seen no motes moving in it — and breathed real air for the first time in seventeen hours. It was stale and thin and tasted of old rust, and it was the best thing he had ever put into his lungs.
He ate the other half of the ration brick. He drank a third of his water. He set his band’s alarm for two hours.
Then he unwrapped the sword and laid it on the floor next to him, within reach of his hand, the way he’d seen the old blasting-crew hands sleep with their charge-keys.
He thought about the warmth. The blood running the wrong way in the groove.
He reached out and laid two fingers on the flat of the blade, across the carved lines.
Cold.
Of course it’s cold, he thought. It’s metal. You’re tired.
He fell asleep with his fingers still on it.
He dreamed about humming. A low, wandering tune with no words. He couldn’t see who was humming it. He tried to follow it, and it went down, and down, through the floor, through the bone of the basin, into a place where something enormous and very old lay sleeping, and the tune was coming from inside it. Like a heartbeat. Like a heartbeat that had forgotten how.
He woke with the alarm going and his fingers still on the steel, and the steel was warm.
He took his hand away fast, as if it had bitten him.
When he touched it again, a few seconds later, it was cold. But on the concrete beside it, where his hand had lain, there was a smear of something dark. His fingertips were raw. He’d had marrow-cracks in them for nine years, the deep splits every long-timer got across the pads of the fingers, and they bled sometimes when the skin got soft. He must have bled in his sleep. On the blade.
He looked at the blade for a long time in the light of the glow-strip. There was no blood on it. Not on the flat, not in the grooves. Not a trace.
He wrapped it up again. He put the mask back on. He did not think about it, very deliberately, all the way to the door.
He found the relic case three hours later, half-buried in the lee of a dune.
He’d almost walked past it. It was the same make as the one on his back: hard-shelled, padded, with the Kon Reclamation seal stamped on the lid — a stylized pair of hands holding a cog. The seal on this one was scratched almost through. The case lay on its side with its lid open and its padding spilled out and gone grey with dust, and it was empty.
Creed knelt beside it.
There was blood on the handle. Old blood, long dried, gone the color of rust and crusted into the grip. A lot of it. A handprint, smeared, as if somebody had held on to this case with a bleeding hand for a long time before they’d let it go.
He dug in the dust around it with his fingers. He found a ration-brick wrapper. A filter canister, cracked, choked solid with glowing cake. A boot, a single boot, still laced. He didn’t look inside the boot.
And a chit-band.
It lay in the dust beside the boot. Steel, scuffed, its little display dark. It had been bolted shut, the way every band was bolted shut. It had not been unbolted. It had been cut — clean through, on both sides, the steel sheared in two straight bright lines.
He turned it over in his hands.
He’d seen a lot of bands come off. He’d seen them cut with bolt-snips in the galleries, and the snips left a crushed, pinched edge, steel mashed and torn. This wasn’t that. This was a single clean stroke, through hardened steel, so clean the cut edges caught his glow-strip and threw it back like a mirror. Whatever had done this had gone through the band and the wrist inside it without slowing down.
There was a name stamped on the inside of the band, the way there was a name stamped on the inside of every band. He tilted it to the light.
THANE, JORY
KON-RECL
SUMP-FOUR
22-H
Kon’s last courier. About a year back, the warden had said.
Creed sat in the dust with the cut band in his palm for a while. Then he put it in the inside pocket of his coat, next to Wick’s four rounds, because it seemed wrong to leave it lying out here for the mites, and because whoever Jory Thane had been, somebody ought to know where he’d stopped.
He looked around. Dunes. Haze. The faint groan of the pipe-forest, far behind him now.
No tracks. The dust had drifted over everything a year ago. But Jory Thane had come this way, on this line, toward the Hollow, and somewhere around here, he’d lost his case and his boot and his band and his hand, and he hadn’t gone back. And the band had been cut, not chewed.
Squatters, Kon had said. Scavengers. Some nonsense about bleeders. Bring a weapon.
Creed unwrapped the sword.
He did it properly this time. He took the rubber and oilcloth off it completely and stuffed them in the satchel, and he swung the cylinder out and checked the four rounds in it, and swung it shut again. He flicked the emitter switch on the guard, and the edge whined up into its high, thin song, and he counted — one, two, three — and it died, exactly on time, the cell spent. Twenty minutes, now, before it would sing again. He’d wasted it. But he’d needed to hear it.
Then he walked on with the naked blade in his hand, point down, the way the old pictures on the dormitory walls held them.
He felt a little ridiculous. Then, as the dunes went on and on and the haze closed in around him, he stopped feeling ridiculous at all.
There were six of them, and he never saw them coming.
He’d been watching for something like the dead thing in the pipe-forest — something curled, something slow. He’d been watching the dunes. He’d been listening, and the Bloom had taken the sound away, the way it took all sounds. So the first he knew of them was a weight, very sudden and very heavy, landing on his back and driving him face-first into the bone-dust.
He went down hard. The sword went out of his hand. Something was on him, something with too many joints in its arms, and it was digging at his shoulders, at the straps of his satchel, at the back of his neck where the mask harness crossed — not trying to kill him, he realized, not yet. Trying to get the mask off.
Fingers. Long ones. Prying at the seal.
He drove an elbow back, hard, and felt it land in something that gave like wet bread. The weight shifted. He rolled. He came up on his knees with dust pouring off him and saw it, for the first time, clearly.
It might have been a person once. That was the worst of it. That was the thing that would come back to him later, in the dark. It stood on two legs, mostly, hunched forward, and it had the bones of a person under it — he could see them, the line of the collarbones and the knobs of the spine — but it was grey, all over, furred grey with a pale glowing mold, and its arms were too long and its fingers were far too long, and it had no eyes. Smooth fuzzed skin, from forehead to cheekbones. And a mouth.
The mouth was very human. That was worse than anything.
It turned its eyeless face toward him and opened the mouth and made a noise — not a growl, not a word, a kind of thin wet clicking — and out in the haze, all around him, other mouths answered it.
Five more shapes came up out of the dunes. They came on all fours, mostly, fast and low, their long fingers splayed in the dust, and they came at him from every side at once.
He didn’t have time to be afraid. He would be afraid later. Right now there was only the sword, three meters off in the dust where it had fallen, a dark line in the white, and the shapes converging on him, and his body moving before his mind could tell it anything.
He dove. His hand closed on the hilt, on the rubber grip cut on the bias, and it bit into his palm the way it was supposed to, and he rolled onto his back with the blade coming up and the first of them already in the air above him, falling on him, long arms spread —
He pulled the trigger.
He had fired it exactly once before, into a slag heap, braced, with both hands. He had not been braced now. He was on his back in loose dust with one hand on the hilt, and the gun-sword went off like the end of the world.
The sound came back to him even through the Bloom: a flat hammering crack that he felt in his teeth and his chest and the bones of his face. A yard of muzzle-flame lashed out along the spine of the blade. The recoil tore the hilt out of his grip and slammed the back of the blade into his own shoulder, numbing his whole arm to the fingers.
And the greyling above him came apart.
The slug took it in the center of the chest at a distance of half a meter. There was a burst of grey — grey blood, thick and grey and spore-shot — and something that had been a ribcage was suddenly a cavity, and the thing folded in the air and came down on top of him, heavy and wet and twitching, and its long fingers closed once on his coat in a dying clench and then didn’t open.
He shoved it off. His right arm didn’t work right. He switched the sword to his left hand and rolled to his knees, and the other five were on him.
He thumbed the emitter. Twenty minutes, he’d thought. It had been sixteen. But the switch clicked and the edge whined up, thin and high and singing, and he swung.
The relic blade had always been sharp. Sharp enough to groove a whetstone. Sharp enough to cut his thumb without his feeling it. With the emitter singing through it, it was something else. It went through the first greyling’s outstretched arm at the elbow, and through its neck behind that, in one flat swing, and he barely felt resistance — just a faint, high change in the note of the edge as it went through bone, like a wet finger round the rim of a glass.
One.
He reversed it. The second one was low, on all fours, coming for his legs. He brought the edge down across its back, and the spine parted, and the long body went in two directions.
Two.
He was counting. He wasn’t counting the greylings. He was counting the seconds, and the seconds had already run out. Three, he’d counted, in the dust where he’d found Jory Thane’s band. Three seconds, and then the cell died.
But the edge was still singing.
He didn’t have time to wonder. A third greyling hit him from the side and took him off his feet, and this one was the biggest, and it didn’t go for his mask. It went for his throat. Its mouth — that human mouth — opened wide, much wider than a human mouth should, and he got his left forearm up in front of his face just in time, and the teeth went into it.
He screamed. He couldn’t help it. The teeth went in through the coat and through the skin and into the meat of his forearm and ground there, and he felt them catch on the bones, and blood ran hot down into his sleeve and out of the cuff and over his hand. Over the hilt. Down the blade.
The grooves drank it.
He didn’t see it. He was too busy dying. He’d only understand later, putting it together in the dark. But he felt it: a sudden flare of heat through the hilt, up into his palm, up his wrist, like he’d closed his hand around a pipe with live steam in it. And the singing note of the edge, which had been fading, starting to stutter, the cell going — the note leapt. It rose. It went up into a sound he’d never heard the emitter make, a clean high ringing tone that was almost like a voice.
He didn’t swing. He couldn’t. His arm was pinned in the thing’s jaws. He just turned his wrist and pushed, and the blade went into the side of the greyling’s head and through the other side and out, as easily as pushing a finger into water.
Its jaws went slack. He wrenched his arm free — the teeth tore coming out, and that was worse than going in — and rolled away and came up on one knee with his left arm hanging and running red and the sword in his right hand, which he could feel again now, and two greylings left.
They had stopped.
They stood in the haze, three meters off, crouched, their eyeless faces turned toward him. Not toward him, exactly. Toward the sword. Their heads moved, both at once, the same small tilting motion, the way a dog tilts its head at a sound. Their mouths opened and closed. Clicking.
He looked down at the blade.
For one heartbeat — less — he thought there was something in the grooves. A light. A thin, deep-red line of light, down in the bottom of the carved channels, like an ember seen through a crack in a furnace door. Then he blinked, and his vision swam with blood loss, and there was nothing. Just dark steel, wet with his blood and grey with theirs. The emitter whined down into silence. Spent. Finished, finally.
The two greylings looked at the sword a moment longer.
Then they turned, both together, and went away into the haze, fast and low on all fours, and were gone.
Creed knelt in the dust for a long time.
He bound the arm with the oilcloth from the sword, cut into strips with the sword itself. He thought, for a moment, of the crew-jacket folded on the cot back in the pump-house, and was glad, without quite knowing why, that he’d left it alone.
The bite was bad. The teeth had gone deep, and when he peeled back the sleeve to look, the edges of it were ragged, and the flesh around them was already going a strange color, pale and puffy, and there was a faint glowing grey in the wound that he didn’t want to think about. He poured water into it until it ran clean, or cleaner. It hurt more than the bite had. He bit down on the strap of his satchel to keep from screaming again, and when it was done there were tooth marks in the leather, and his face was wet inside the mask.
He tied off the bandage. His left hand opened and closed. Stiffly. But it worked.
Then he made himself look at them.
He didn’t want to. But the rule in the Belly was that you looked, in case it was somebody you knew, and the rule was older than he was, and he found he couldn’t break it even out here. So he went to each of the four dead ones in turn and looked.
The first, the one he’d shot, was mostly cavity. The second and third had come apart along the lines he’d cut, and the cuts were so clean that the grey blood had only begun to well up from them, slowly, like the bodies hadn’t noticed yet. The fourth, the big one, lay on its side with a hole through its skull, in one temple and out the other, and the edges of the holes were burned. Not cut. Cauterized, black and crisp, as if the blade had been glowing hot when it went through.
He looked at the blade again. Cold. Dark. He touched it, carefully, with the back of a knuckle. Cold.
He crouched by the big greyling and made himself look at its hands.
Long fingers, furred grey. But under the fur, across the palm of each hand, there were scars. Old ones, white and raised, dozens of them, crossing and recrossing. Neat. Deliberate. The kind of scars you got from cutting your own palm open, over and over, in the same place, on purpose.
And on its chest, under the grey fur, half-hidden, someone had painted a mark. Long ago, in something dark that had soaked into the skin and stained it. A curl. A hook. A branching line, like a vein.
Creed stayed crouched there for a long time, looking from the mark on the dead thing’s chest to the grooves on his blade. It wasn’t the same. It was clumsy and smeared, a copy of something seen once from far away — the kind of copy you’d make if you’d been told about a thing a hundred times by people who’d been told about it a hundred times themselves, and none of you had ever seen it.
But it was the same kind of thing. It was trying to be the same thing.
Bleeders, Hesk had said. Folk who do it the other way.
He stood up. He wiped the blade on the dust and the grey and his own red came away together. He checked the cylinder. Three rounds. He took one of Wick’s from his coat and thumbed it into the empty chamber and swung the cylinder shut. Four loaded. Three in his pocket.
Seven, then. Seven and a sword that didn’t work the way he’d built it to.
He thought about telling himself it was the emitter. Residue, static, a fluke in the cell. He thought about it seriously, as an option, the way you thought about which of two bad pipes to crawl through.
Then he let it go.
He didn’t know what the sword was. He didn’t know what the grooves were, or why they drank, or why the edge had sung past its three seconds and burned a hole through a skull. He didn’t know. And not knowing was a thing he could carry — it weighed less than lying to himself would. He’d carried worse.
He walked on, toward the low center of the basin, where the warden’s directions said the Hollow would be.
His arm throbbed with every step. Under the bandage, something in the wound itched, deep, in a way that wasn’t quite like healing.
The ground rose under him, slowly, for an hour, and then it stopped rising and fell away, and he was standing on the lip of a second, smaller bowl inside the first one, looking down into it.
Vesper Hollow lay at the bottom.
From up here it was small. A cluster of houses — maybe sixty, maybe eighty — built of pale stone that must have been cut from the basin bone itself, crowded together in the bottom of the bowl the way people crowd together in the cold. Narrow streets. Low roofs. A few taller buildings near the center: a well-tower, a granary, something with a smokestack. Gardens, once. He could see the shapes of them, the neat rectangles of old plots marked out with stones, gone grey and furred with Bloom.
And in the middle of it all, rising up over the roofs, a chapel. A real one, like the painted ones on the dormitory walls. A steep roof and a narrow spire and a round window high up in the front wall, like an eye.
The Bloom lay over the whole village like a held breath. It pooled in the streets. It drifted against the walls. It glowed in every window.
Every window but one.
High up in the chapel’s front wall, in the round window like an eye, there was a light. Not the bruise-violet of the Bloom. Not the green of a glow-strip.
Red. A deep, steady, living red, like an ember seen through a crack in a furnace door.
Creed stood on the rim and looked at it.
The Lantern of Saint Aurel, he thought. Glass and silver, dead-world make. Said to hold a flame that has not gone out since the world outside the bones died.
Kon had said it was almost certainly a fake.
The light in the round window didn’t flicker. It didn’t waver. It just burned, steady and red, in the middle of a village where nothing had lived for twelve years.
Behind him, far away across the basin, the pipe-forest groaned. The sound came to him faint and broken, and then the Bloom took it, and there was nothing.
Against his palm, the rubber grip of the sword bit into the skin.
He checked the band on his wrist. Thirty-eight hours of air. Seven rounds. One arm, and most of another.
He went down into the Hollow.