The Hollow had been abandoned in the middle of a sentence.
Creed came into it along what must have been the main road, a lane of pale fitted stone between two rows of low houses, and the first house on the left had its door standing open, and through the door he could see a table, and on the table there were bowls. Four of them. Set out with spoons beside them. Whatever had been in the bowls had dried twelve years ago into a dark crust and then furred over grey with Bloom, but the spoons were still lying where somebody had laid them down, neat, parallel, waiting for hands.
The next house had a loom in the front room with half a length of cloth still on it. The shuttle hung from the threads where it had been dropped.
The one after that had a pair of boots by the door.
He stopped looking in the doors after that. Not because it frightened him — though it did, in a slow, cold way that settled under his ribs and stayed there — but because it felt wrong. Like reading somebody’s ration chit over their shoulder. These people had been in the middle of something, a meal, a length of cloth, a pair of boots taken off at the end of a shift, and then the Bloom had come up out of the basin, and they had stopped. And the Hollow had kept everything exactly where they’d left it, for twelve years, like a held breath.
It was quiet the way the Bloom made everything quiet. His footsteps came back to him flat and close. The spores drifted in the lane in slow, glowing sheets, piling up against the doorsteps like snow.
And there were no bodies.
He noticed that at the fifth house, and once he’d noticed it he couldn’t stop. No bodies at the tables. No bodies in the doorways. No bones in the lane. Sixty houses, eighty, a whole village caught in the middle of an ordinary day, and not one of the people who’d lived here had been left lying where they fell. In the Belly, when a gallery collapsed, they dug the dead out eventually, when the quota allowed. Out here, there was no quota. Nobody to dig. And nobody had been left.
Somebody had come for them. Somebody had taken every one of them away.
He thought about the greylings. Their long fingers. Their very human mouths. The old white scars crossing their palms.
He stopped thinking about it.
He walked up the middle of the lane, sword low in his right hand, left arm held against his body. The bite under the bandage throbbed in time with his heart. The itching had gotten worse on the way down into the bowl. It wasn’t on the skin. It was deeper. It felt the way his fingers felt when they’d gone numb in the cold and were coming back — a crawling, prickling, waking sort of feeling, except it didn’t stop. It just went on waking.
He made himself not think about that, either.
The first fresh sign was a footprint.
It was in the lane, at the corner where the main road met a narrower street running up toward the center of the village. In the drift of spores against a doorstep — not twelve years of drift, but a few days of it, a thin glowing skin over the stone — somebody had stepped. Bare foot. The print was clear, the toes splayed. A big foot. Bigger than his.
Beside it, overlapping it, a boot print. Narrower. With a worn heel.
And beside both, running along the lane up toward the center of the village, a pair of long smooth grooves in the drift, side by side, a little more than shoulder-width apart. Heels. Somebody had been dragged up this street by the arms, recently, with their heels trailing in the dust.
He followed the drag marks.
They went up the narrow street past a dozen more houses, and at every house, now that he was looking, there were more signs. A door that had been forced and then propped shut again with a stone. A window with the spore-crust wiped off it from the inside, a clean smear about the height of a face, as if somebody had stood there and looked out. A heap of old ration tins in an alley — refinery-issue, the kind they sold to the Mids, with the labels steamed off — opened with a knife, scraped clean, and thrown aside, and the tins were bright and unrusted, and the spores had only just begun to settle in them.
Somebody lived here. Not twelve years ago. Now.
And on the doors, there was writing.
He’d been seeing it for a while before he understood what it was. Dark marks, on the lintels and the frames and the planks of the doors, that he’d taken for old stains, mildew, Bloom-rot. But at the top of the narrow street, where it opened into a small square around a dry stone well, the marks were fresher, and he went up close to one and saw that they weren’t stains at all.
Curls. Hooks. Branching lines like veins.
They’d been painted with a fingertip. He could see the whorls of the print at the start of each stroke, where the finger had been loaded heaviest. And they’d been painted in blood. Some of it was old, dark brown, flaking. Some of it was red. Some of it, on the door nearest the well, was still faintly tacky when he touched the very edge of it with the back of a knuckle.
He stood with his knuckle against the door and looked down at the blade in his other hand. At the carved lines down its flat.
They weren’t the same. The marks on the door were clumsier, smeared, the shapes not quite right, the lines wavering where the finger had run dry. But they were reaching for the same thing. The way the mark on the dead greyling’s chest had been reaching for it. Like a song you’d only ever heard hummed through a wall, being sung back by somebody who’d never learned the words.
Folk who do it the other way, Hesk had said. No channels, no metal. Just blood.
Above the roofs of the square, the chapel spire stood up into the haze, dark and narrow. Below it, he knew, though he couldn’t see it from here, was the round window, and the red light.
He thought about leaving.
He thought about it properly, the way he’d thought about which pipe to crawl through on the bone-dunes. He could turn around. Walk back up out of the bowl, back across the basin, back through the Breach with whatever was left of the air card. Tell Kon there’d been nothing here. Tell Kon the Lantern was gone, or a fake, or never existed. Kon would shrug, and eat a slice of fruit, and Creed would go back to his drawer and his pick and his one Drip tab at hour twelve, for another nine years, until his band went grey one shift at the pump and somebody cut it off his wrist with bolt-snips.
And Wick would still be in drawer thirty-one D. And Ollo’s reassessment would still be pending. And Kon would still be able to do arithmetic.
He took his knuckle off the door. He walked across the square, past the well, toward the chapel.
It was bigger than it had looked from the rim.
It stood at the head of the village on a raised platform of fitted bone-stone, with a broad flight of steps leading up to a pair of doors three times his height. The doors were wood. Real wood — he’d never seen so much of it in one place. They were carved, all over, every inch of them, with figures: people, dozens of them, small and stiff and old-fashioned, climbing. Climbing up the doors from bottom to top, up a ladder or a stair or a great curving spine, hands reaching, faces turned upward. At the top of the doors, in the arch, where all the carved people were climbing toward, there was a circle. Just a circle. Plain and smooth, with nothing in it.
He stood at the bottom of the steps looking up at the climbing people for longer than he meant to.
In the Belly, nobody carved people looking up.
The right-hand door stood open a hand’s width. Through the gap came the red light — a long thin bar of it, lying across the steps, steady and deep. It didn’t flicker. Flames flickered. This lay across the steps like something painted there.
He went up. He put his shoulder to the door. It swung inward without a sound — the hinges had been oiled — and he went in.
The nave of the chapel was long and high and dark, and the Bloom was thinner in here, just a faint glowing mist hanging up near the roof beams. Rows of benches marched away from him toward the far end, some of them overturned, some of them still in their rows. Pillars of carved bone held up the roof, and the carvings on them were more climbing people, spiraling up and up into the dark. Along the side walls there were alcoves, and in the alcoves there had been statues once, and the statues had been broken. Not by age. Smashed, deliberately, the heads knocked off, the faces chiseled away.
At the far end of the nave, under the round window, there was an altar of white stone. And on the altar, there was the Lantern.
It was beautiful. He hadn’t expected that. He’d expected something dusty and ugly, the kind of junk that the scrap sort turned up by the ton, made precious only because it had come from Outside and was old. But the Lantern of Saint Aurel stood on the altar in a pool of its own light, and it was the most beautiful made thing he had ever seen.
It was as tall as his forearm, a slender cage of silver — real silver, he thought, tarnished nearly black in the crevices and bright on the high places where hands had held it — with panes of thick old glass set into the cage. The glass was hand-blown. He could see the ripples in it, the tiny trapped bubbles. The silver of the frame had been worked into vines, and leaves, and small flowers, a whole garden twisting up around the glass. And inside the glass, burning, there was the flame.
Red. Steady. Not flickering at all.
He walked toward it down the length of the nave. His footsteps came back to him from the high roof, flat, close.
Halfway down the nave, on the floor between the benches, he passed a dark stain. Wide, and old, and soaked deep into the stone.
Two benches on, he passed another. Fresher.
He did not stop walking. His hand tightened on the hilt of the sword until the rubber strips bit into his palm.
At the altar, he looked down at the Lantern.
Close up, the flame wasn’t a flame.
It was a glass vial, sealed at both ends, standing upright in the center of the Lantern where a wick ought to be. And inside the vial, there was a liquid, thick and red, and it glowed. That was all. It glowed steadily, from inside, the way the Bloom spores glowed. A chemical light. Phosphor, maybe, dyed red. The kind of thing you could buy in the Mid Ribs for a few chits and hang over a door at festival time.
A flame that has not gone out since the world outside the bones died.
He almost laughed. It came up in his chest and got as far as his throat and stopped there, because something about it wasn’t funny.
The vial was clean.
The Lantern was old, the silver black in its crevices, the glass furred faintly at its edges with twelve years of Bloom. But the vial at the center of it was clean, and new, and sealed with fresh wax, and the light inside it was bright. Chemical light didn’t last twelve years. It didn’t last twelve weeks. Somebody had been coming into this chapel and changing the vial. Keeping the eternal flame lit. Keeping it burning in the round window, where it could be seen from the rim of the basin by anyone coming down the old road.
By anyone a Verbous collector had sent to fetch it.
Creed stood very still at the altar.
A fence of mine, who deals in this sort of thing, tells me that before the village emptied, the chapel held a relic.
Last one went through about a year back.
Squatters. Scavengers. Some nonsense about bleeders.
He looked at the dark stain on the floor of the nave behind him. At the fresher one, two benches on. At the drag marks in the spore-drift outside, which he now realized must lead here, to this nave, to this altar, to this beautiful thing on its white stone shelf burning its patient red light out into the dark like a lamp left in a window for somebody coming home.
It wasn’t a relic. It was a lure.
And he’d walked right up to it.
He had perhaps a second to understand that.
Then, from the dark at the back of the nave, behind him, somebody began to hum.
He turned around.
They were coming out of the alcoves.
He hadn’t seen them. He’d walked right past them, down the whole length of the nave, and he hadn’t seen them standing in the alcoves where the smashed statues had been, still as statues themselves, grey in the grey dark. Now they stepped down out of the alcoves on both sides of the nave, one after another, and came out into the aisle between the benches, and there were a lot of them. Ten. Twelve. More, at the back, near the doors. The doors were swinging shut. Somebody was closing them.
They were dressed in grey: long robes of rough cloth gone the color of old ash, hoods up, and their faces were wrapped in strips of the same grey cloth, so that only their eyes showed. Their hands were wrapped too. Wrapped around and around the palms in bandages, and the bandages were dark. Stained through. Old blood and new blood, layered, brown and red.
They were humming. All of them. Low and together, their voices folding over one another, rising and falling, a sound that filled the nave and came back off the high roof and filled it again. A tune. Wandering, wordless, going down and down like it was looking for the bottom of something.
Creed knew it.
He stood at the altar of Saint Aurel with a sword in his hand, and twelve robed strangers coming toward him down the aisle, and the hair rose all along his arms and the back of his neck, because he knew that tune. He had been hearing it every shift for nine years. He’d heard it at hour nineteen, low and wandering, rising and falling in time with the stroke of the number-two pump, until it had stopped and he hadn’t noticed.
It wasn’t quite the same. It was off, the way the blood-marks on the doors were off. Notes in the wrong places, the shape of it smeared. But it was Hesk’s tune. It was Hesk’s tune, being sung by a dozen strangers in a dead village at the bottom of the world.
Who’s been telling you stories? she’d said. And then: There’s folk who say otherwise.
He’d never asked her where she’d learned it. He’d never once asked.
The one at the front of the aisle stopped. The others stopped behind it, a few paces back. The humming went on.
The one at the front was a woman, or he thought so from her height and the narrowness of her shoulders under the robe. Her face-wrappings were different from the others’. Over the grey cloth, she wore a mask: a thin curved plate of carved bone that covered her face from brow to lip, and the bone had been carved with the same curls and hooks as the doors, and the carvings had been filled in with something red.
She looked at him. She looked at the sword.
She tilted her head, the way the greylings had tilted theirs out on the dunes. The same small motion.
“Another one,” she said. Her voice was low and dry and carried in the nave without being raised. “The collector sends us another one. Such a generous man.” She took a step closer. “Put the steel down, courier. You’ve come a long way. You must be so tired. We’ll take care of you now.”
“Where’s Jory Thane?”
It came out of him without his deciding to say it. The masked woman went still.
“You found his band,” she said, after a moment. Not a question.
“I found his band. Cut.” Creed lifted the sword a little, so that the red light from the Lantern ran down the edge. “I’d like to know who cut it.”
The humming had stopped. All of them had stopped, at the same moment. In the sudden quiet the nave felt enormous.
“Jory,” said the masked woman, gently, “is resting. He’s been resting for a very long time. You’ll see him soon.” She lifted her right hand, and with her left hand she began, slowly, to unwind the bandage from her palm. “Steel down, courier. This is the last time anyone will ask.”
Creed brought the sword up into both hands, the way he’d done in the drawer a hundred times with no one watching, and pointed it at her.
He thought: Four in the cylinder. Three in my pocket. Twelve of them, maybe more.
He thought: Arithmetic.
The masked woman sighed, as if he’d disappointed her. The last of the bandage came away from her palm, and he saw the scars there, white and raised, dozens of them crossing and recrossing, the same as on the greylings. She drew a short knife from her sleeve. She laid it across the palm.
She cut.
He’d heard the stories all his life. Every Animatid had. Bleeders. Mad things out in the dark past the Breach who cut themselves and did magic with what came out. You told the stories at the end of a long shift, to frighten someone, and everybody laughed, because it was stupid, because everybody knew that magic was Catalyst and Catalyst was channels and channels were metal and money and the Mid Ribs.
The masked woman cut her palm, and the blood that came out of it didn’t fall.
It welled up out of the cut, bright and red, and instead of running down her wrist it rose. It lifted off her skin in a long thin ribbon, curling, like smoke from a candle, and then it went taut, and hard, and straight. And then she was holding a blade. A thin, curved, glistening blade of solid red, as long as her forearm, growing out of her palm like a thorn.
All along the aisle, the others were unwinding their bandages.
Creed shot her.
He didn’t think about it. Thinking was for the drawer. He brought the gun-sword’s point up at her chest and squeezed, and this time he was braced, feet planted, both hands on the hilt, and the recoil still slammed up through his wrists and his elbows and his shoulders like a hammer-blow — but it didn’t tear the sword out of his hands. The slug went down the barrel along the blade’s spine with a sound like the roof coming in, and the muzzle-flash lit the whole nave white for an instant, every carved climbing figure on every pillar leaping out of the dark.
The masked woman was not where the slug went.
She’d moved. Not fast — not exactly. She’d moved before. As if she’d heard the shot coming. The slug went past her and into the robed figure behind her, and that one went backward over a bench with a hole in its chest the size of a fist and didn’t get up.
And then they came at him all at once.
They came down the aisle and over the benches and along the walls, a grey wave, and every one of them was bleeding. He saw blood go up into the air from a dozen palms in a dozen long red ribbons, and harden, and become things. Blades like the masked woman’s. Long thin spikes. A whip — a long, flexible, segmented lash of red, cracking out from a man’s fist toward his face. One of them, a short wide figure near the back, clapped its bleeding hands together and pulled them apart, and between its palms the blood caught fire. Not burned — was fire, a sheet of red flame stretched between its hands, roaring.
Creed fired again, at the whip. Hit. The man behind it spun and fell, and the lash went slack and collapsed out of the air, and splashed on the floor as plain blood.
Two.
He fired a third time, at the fire-thrower. Missed — the slug took a chunk out of a bone pillar, and carved climbing people burst into dust. The fire-thrower flung its sheet of flame at him, and it came down the aisle like a breaking wave, and he threw himself sideways over the altar rail and felt the heat of it roar over his back and singe the hair off the back of his neck.
He came up behind the altar. The Lantern was still on it, burning its patient red. A spike of hardened blood whistled past his head and shattered against the wall behind him in a spray of red droplets that pattered down over him, warm.
He thumbed the emitter. The edge whined up into its song.
One.
The first of them came over the altar at him. A blade of blood in each hand. Creed met it with the singing edge, and the relic steel went through both blood-blades as if they weren’t there and on into the bleeder’s forearms, and the hands came off at the wrists, both of them, and the blood-blades they’d been holding fell apart into plain red rain.
Two.
The second came from his left, low. He reversed the cut, the way he’d done on the dunes, and opened it from hip to shoulder, and the singing note of the edge didn’t even change.
Three.
The emitter died. Exactly on time. The song stopped as if a hand had closed over it.
He swore — one word, out loud, the first sound he’d made since the fight began — and swung again anyway, and the plain blade, unsinging, went into the side of a third bleeder’s neck and stuck. Lodged. In bone. He wrenched at it, and it didn’t come, and while he was wrenching at it something went into his back below the right shoulder blade.
A spike. A thin hard spike of somebody else’s blood, thrown from the aisle. It went in a hand’s width and stopped against a rib, and the pain of it was so total and so white that for a second he couldn’t see.
He let go of the sword.
That was the mistake. He knew it as he made it. He let go of the sword because his hands had stopped listening to him, and it hung there, lodged in the dying bleeder’s neck, and the bleeder fell, and the sword fell with it, and went clanging down the altar steps into the nave, out of reach.
He grabbed for the only other thing on the altar.
The Lantern of Saint Aurel was heavier than it looked. Real silver. He swung it by its ring like a flail into the face of the next one coming over the altar, and the old glass shattered, and the vial inside it burst, and the thick red phosphor sprayed across the bleeder’s face-wrappings and lit them up in a glowing smear, and the bleeder reeled back screaming, clawing at its eyes.
Then the whip took him around the throat.
It came from behind and above, from somewhere up on the altar steps. He felt it land, and curl, and harden. Not like a rope. Like a collar of solid stone, closing. It lifted him. It dragged him backward over the altar, and his heels went over the white stone and he came down hard on his back on the floor of the chancel, with the Lantern still in his fist and his throat closing, and the shattered pieces of the Lantern’s glass grinding into his shoulders.
He got his fingers under the edge of the collar. It was hard and smooth and hot, like a pipe running with steam, and it was getting tighter. He pulled at it. It didn’t give. His vision started going grey at the edges, the way it had on the dunes when the filter had clogged. Black spots crowding in.
Above him, a face came into view. A bone mask. Red-filled carvings.
The masked woman crouched over him. She had a shallow cut across the side of her robe, where his first slug had passed close enough to scorch the cloth. Otherwise, she was untouched. Behind her, somebody was holding the other end of the whip — he could see it rising, a long red line, taut, up into the dark. He couldn’t see who.
“Four,” said the masked woman, quietly. She was looking past him, at the floor of the nave. At the bodies. “You took four of mine. Five, if Teague loses those hands, and he will.” She looked back down at him. “None of the others ever took more than one.”
He tried to say something. The collar didn’t let it out.
She stood up, and went past him, down the altar steps into the nave. He heard her footsteps go a little way, and stop. He heard the scrape of steel on stone as something was lifted.
When she came back into his narrowing view, she was holding his sword.
She held it awkwardly, in both hands, by the blade and the rubber-wrapped hilt, the way you’d hold something you weren’t sure was safe. She was looking at it. Not at the bands, not at the barrel along the spine or the rivet-driver breech with its Kon Reclamation part number stamped on the side. She was looking at the flat of the blade. At the carved grooves running down it, from the guard almost to the tip.
She went still.
It wasn’t the stillness of somebody listening. It was the stillness of somebody who has been hit — a whole-body stillness, rigid. For a long moment she didn’t move at all. Then, very slowly, she lifted one hand off the hilt, and with the bare scarred fingertip of it, she traced the first of the curled lines down the steel. Gently. The way you’d touch the face of somebody who’d been asleep a long time, to see if they were real.
“Wright-steel,” she whispered.
Somewhere up in the dark, the whip-holder said something, a question, sharp. The masked woman didn’t answer it. She turned the blade a little in the red light that was still glowing from the smeared phosphor on the floor, and the light ran down the grooves, and she made a small sound behind the mask that Creed, with the last of his vision going, could not identify. It might have been a laugh. It might have been something very like grief.
“Where did you get this?” she said. She knelt again, beside his head, holding the sword across her knees. “Courier. Where did you get this?”
He couldn’t answer. The collar didn’t let him. He wouldn’t have answered anyway.
From the back of the nave, near the great carved doors, a new voice spoke.
“Cantor.”
It was a man’s voice. Soft, and educated, and kind. It had the kind of accent that Creed had only ever heard through speaker grilles and over gantry loudspeakers — a Mid accent, an upper-cable accent, all its edges smoothed off. It was the most reasonable voice he had ever heard, and somehow that was the worst thing that had happened in the chapel yet.
“Cantor Mirelle. Let him breathe a little, please. He’s no use to me with a crushed windpipe.”
The collar loosened. Not much. Enough. Air came screaming back into Creed’s chest, and he rolled half onto his side, coughing, retching, glass grinding under him, the Lantern still clutched in his fist.
Footsteps came down the nave. Unhurried. They stopped at the foot of the altar steps.
“Ah,” said the soft voice. “He’s broken our lamp.”
“Prior.” The masked woman — Cantor Mirelle — was still kneeling with the sword across her knees. Her voice had changed. It was tight and strange. “Prior, look at this. Look at the steel.”
A pause. Footsteps on the altar steps, coming up. Creed got his head turned, his cheek against the cold stone floor, and saw a pair of feet in soft boots, very clean, standing beside him. Above them, the hem of a long robe, grey like the others’, but finer — woven, not rough. Above that, he couldn’t see. His eyes wouldn’t focus that far.
He felt the man crouch down. He felt a hand, cool and dry and very gentle, take hold of his chin and turn his face up toward the round window.
A face looked down at him. It was an ordinary face. That was what he’d remember. Thin, middle-aged, clean-shaven, with fine lines at the corners of the eyes and a mild, interested expression, like a clerk checking a delivery against a manifest. The man’s hood was down. His hair was grey and cut short and neat. Around his neck, on a cord, hung a small glass vial, and inside the vial, something glowed a faint, clean blue.
Catalyst. Refined. The color of the inside of a lightning strike.
The man looked at Creed’s face for a long time. Then he looked at the sword across Cantor Mirelle’s knees. Then he looked at Creed again, and his mild eyes went to the bandage on Creed’s left forearm, where the greyling had bitten him, and where the oilcloth was soaked through dark. He reached out and peeled back the edge of it, carefully, with two fingers.
Under the bandage, the bite was glowing.
Faintly. A thin, grey-blue light, deep in the meat of the wound, pulsing a little, in time with Creed’s heart.
The man let go of the bandage. He sat back on his heels. When he spoke again, there was something new in the soft, reasonable voice. Something that hadn’t been there before, and that Creed would come to know very well, later, and to hate more than any other sound in the world.
It was hope.
“Well,” said Prior Calloway Sere. “Isn’t this a gift.”
He stood up. He brushed off the knees of his fine grey robe.
“Bring him down to the laboratory, Cantor. Carefully, please. Bring the steel, too — I’ll want to see it properly.” He turned away, toward the altar, and Creed heard him sigh over the smashed silver cage of the Lantern, the shattered glass. “And somebody find me a new lamp. Our generous friend up the cable will be sending another courier eventually. They always do.”
The collar tightened again around Creed’s throat.
The last thing he saw, before the grey closed in, was the round window high above the altar. It had gone dark. Without the Lantern, there was no light in it at all. From the rim of the basin, the Hollow would look just as dead as everyone had always said it was.
The last thing he heard was the Choir, starting to hum again. Low, and wandering, and going down, and down, and down, looking for the bottom of something.
It was Hesk’s tune.
He went down with it.