He woke up because he was being counted.
That was how it felt. A cool, dry pressure at his wrist, and a soft voice somewhere above him saying numbers: “… sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy. Seventy-one.” A pause. “Strong. Even. Remarkable, given the blood loss. Write that down, please.”
A scratch of something on something. A pen. He hadn’t heard a pen in years. Up the cable, people still used them.
Creed opened his eyes.
Light. White, hard, flat light, from a lamp on a jointed arm directly above him, so bright it hurt. He shut his eyes again. Behind the lids the light burned red, and he lay there in the red and took stock the way you took stock after a cave-in, before you tried to move. Toes. Feet. Knees. Something across his shins, holding them down. Something across his thighs. Across his hips, his chest, his upper arms. His wrists, strapped flat at his sides, palms up. His forehead — a band across it, pressing his skull back against a hard cold surface.
He was lying on stone. Smooth, slightly hollowed, the way a step gets hollowed when ten thousand feet have walked on it. Cold through his shirt. Somebody had taken his coat.
His back, below the right shoulder blade, was a solid block of pain. Somebody had pulled the blood-spike out of it and packed the hole with something, and the something was stiff and itched. His left forearm was unbandaged. He could feel the air on it. And he could feel the bite, down in the meat of the arm, pulsing — not with pain, not anymore, but with that slow crawling waking feeling, stronger now, much stronger, like his arm had been asleep his whole life and was finally, painfully, coming round.
He opened his eyes again, and this time he made them stay open.
“Ah,” said the soft voice. “Good morning. Though I’m afraid I’ve no idea if it’s morning. One loses track down here.”
A face leaned into the light. Thin, mild, middle-aged. Grey hair cut short and neat. The vial of blue on its cord swung forward from his throat as he leaned, and caught the lamplight, and glowed.
“My name is Calloway Sere,” said the man. “You may call me Prior, as the others do, or Calloway, if you prefer, or nothing at all. It hardly matters. What’s your name?”
Creed said nothing.
“Mm.” Sere didn’t seem offended. He straightened up and took his fingers from Creed’s wrist, and wrote something on a slate-board on a clip — an actual board, with actual paper on it, the pen scratching. “The band said Creed. Single name. Sump-Nine. I suppose that’s enough. We’ll go with Creed.” He finished writing and smiled down at him, kindly. “Your arm is a wonder, Creed. Would you like to see?”
He reached out and adjusted something, and the band across Creed’s forehead slackened just enough that Creed could tilt his head and look down the length of his own body to where his left arm lay strapped against the stone.
The bite was glowing.
Brighter than in the chapel. A grey-blue light, deep in the ragged wound, spreading out from it in faint threads under the skin, like frost growing on a window — up toward his elbow, down toward his wrist. The threads pulsed in time with his heart. And the wound itself was closing. Not healed. But the ragged edges of it had drawn together, pink and new, sealing over the grey light inside like a lid on a lamp.
“Greyling teeth,” said Sere, with something like affection. “Our early failures. They carry a great deal of the Bloom in them, and a great deal of something else, besides — a little of what went into them, you might say. It gets into a wound. In almost everyone, it does nothing, or it festers, and the arm comes off, or the man does. But in you” — he touched the glowing threads, very lightly, with one fingertip, and Creed felt it like a spark — “in you, the blood took it in. It’s waking. Just a little. Just around the edges.” He took his finger away. “You don’t take the Drip, do you?”
Creed stared at him.
“I can tell,” said Sere. “I took a sample while you were under. Your blood is very nearly clean of it. Nearly everyone from the Belly I’ve had on this table has been soaked through with the stuff — you can see it under a lens, little blue-white flecks, like frost on everything. Yours is almost clear.” He tilted his head. “One a shift? At the very most?”
“Hour twelve,” Creed said. His voice came out cracked and dry, a stranger’s voice.
“Hour twelve.” Sere looked delighted. He wrote it down. “Discipline. How rare. How very rare.” He set the board down. “You know, I really do think you might be the one.”
While Sere wrote, Creed looked at the room, as much as he could with the band across his forehead.
It had been a crypt, once. He could see that. The ceiling was low and vaulted, built of the same pale bone-stone as the chapel above, and carved, the way everything here was carved: climbing people, up and up the ribs of the vault, reaching for nothing. Some of the carvings had been chiseled away, like the faces of the statues upstairs. Others had been bolted over.
Because the crypt wasn’t a crypt anymore. Somebody had filled it with refinery.
He knew refinery equipment. Not from seeing it — no Animatid had seen the inside of a refinery in thirty years — but from the scrap sort, where the broken pieces came down the cable to be stripped. He knew the shapes of things. Pressure valves. Coil condensers. Settling vats. Here they were, whole, or patched back into something like whole, ranked along both walls of the crypt and bolted to the old stone and joined together with a tangle of piping and tubing that ran up the walls and across the vault like vines. Gauges ticked. Something hissed, somewhere, in a slow rhythm, like breathing. And everything — every tube, every coil, every glass sight-port in every vat — glowed blue.
Not the bright clean blue of the vial at Sere’s throat. Darker. Deeper. A blue with something wild in it, a blue that moved — that shifted and roiled in the glass sight-ports, as if the stuff inside were stirring in its sleep.
“First-draw,” said Sere, following his eyes. “Untempered. Isn’t it beautiful?”
At the far end of the crypt, half-lost in the shadow beyond the lamp, there was a second row of vats. Taller. Upright, man-height, glass-fronted, like the specimen cases he’d seen in pictures. They glowed too, but faintly. There were shapes inside them.
He looked at the shapes for a while. Then he looked away, and kept looking away, and the effort of not looking at them was like holding a door shut against a weight.
On a stone shelf to his right, close enough that he could see it by rolling his eyes all the way over, lay his sword.
It had been laid on a cloth — a clean white cloth, folded double — and somebody had cleaned it. The grey greyling blood was gone, and the bleeder blood, and his own. The rubber strips of the grip had been unwrapped and laid out beside it, in order, carefully, like somebody had been studying how they went on. The cylinder had been swung out and emptied; the single remaining round he’d had in it stood upright beside the hilt like a small soldier. The barrel bands had been loosened. The rivet-driver breech had been half dismantled, its parts laid out in a neat row.
Somebody had been studying it. All of it. Learning it, piece by piece.
But the blade itself lay apart from the rest, in the center of the white cloth, by itself. And at its foot, on the shelf, somebody had set a stub of candle, and lit it.
“Cantor Mirelle did that,” said Sere, a little dryly. “She thinks it’s holy. I think it’s a sword. We’ve agreed to disagree.” He came around to the shelf and stood looking down at the blade with his hands folded behind his back. “But I’ll tell you what we agree on, she and I. It’s real. Not a copy. Not a bleeder’s scratching on a door. It’s the old steel, the actual Wright-steel, and it’s been asleep under the world for a thousand years, and you, of all the people in the Belly, picked it out of a scrap sort and put a gun on it.”
He laughed. It was a warm, genuine laugh, and it echoed under the vault.
“I’ve wanted to meet you,” he said, “for nine years. I just didn’t know it would be you.”
He pulled up a stool and sat beside the slab, close, like a man visiting a sick friend.
“I was a chemist,” Sere said. “At the Costal Refinery, at the bottom of the Ribcage, where your marrow goes when it leaves you. Twenty years. Tempering-floor supervisor, at the end. Do you know what tempering is, Creed?”
Creed didn’t answer. Sere didn’t seem to need him to.
“No, of course you don’t. Nobody does. I didn’t, and I supervised it.” He touched the vial at his throat. “When the marrow comes up from you, it’s sludge. We cook it, we press it, we settle it, and what we get out of all that, the first thing, the first draw, is this.” He gestured at the glowing vats along the walls. “Wild. Raw. The stuff of the god. And then we temper it. We pump it into the great sealed tanks on the tempering floor and we add the tempering agent — it comes down the cable from above, in sealed drums, from the Head, and nobody on the tempering floor is permitted to know what it is — and when it comes out the other side, it’s this.” The vial. Clean, bright, steady blue. “Tame. Biddable. It runs through a cyberware channel like water through a pipe, and it does exactly what the channel tells it. And it will kill you in four minutes if it touches your blood.”
He leaned forward a little.
“The first-draw kills you faster,” he said. “Usually. In about forty seconds. I’ve seen it. Everyone who’s worked the tempering floor has seen it at least once — that’s why we wear the suits. But once, eleven years ago, I saw a man on my floor go into a vat of first-draw up to the shoulder. Opened his arm on a flange, slipped, went in. And Creed — in the first second, before the screaming, before the boiling, before any of it — he lit up.”
His voice had dropped. His eyes had gone somewhere else.
“His blood. Under his skin. All at once, from the shoulder down, every vein in his arm, lit up gold. Not blue. Gold. Like there was something in him that had been asleep, and the first-draw had shaken it awake, and it had opened its eyes and looked at me — for one second. One. And then it went out, and the boiling started, and he screamed until he stopped.” Sere was quiet a moment. “Four minutes, it took. I didn’t count. But an old floor-hand told me afterward it was four. She’d seen it happen once before, she said, decades back, to somebody else. Exactly the same. Four minutes.”
Creed’s skin went cold all over. I saw it once, Hesk had said. Man slipped. They said it took him four minutes.
Not one story, then. The same story, over and over, decade after decade, a man going into the blue and screaming for four minutes. And nobody up the cable had ever once asked why.
“Everyone said it was the blood,” Sere went on. “Everyone always says it’s the blood. Catalyst and blood can’t mix. That’s why the channels. That’s why the metal. And I believed it, Creed. For twenty years I believed it, because it was true. And then I saw that one second of gold, and I thought — what if it’s not the blood? What if it’s something in the blood? Something that’s been put there? What if the blood and the god want to meet, and something’s standing in the way?”
He sat back.
“I asked questions. You’ll have gathered that one doesn’t, up the cable. I asked about the tempering agent, and I asked about the Drip, and I asked why both of them come down from the Head in drums that nobody may open. I asked one question too many, and a Halo Warden came to my flat to discuss it with me. I had nine minutes of warning. I spent eight of them filling a pressure flask with first-draw from the supply line under my kitchen, and the ninth going out of the window.” He smiled faintly. “I went down. Down the cable, down the spine, down through the Belly, out through the Breach. I’d heard the stories everybody hears. Bleeders, out in the basin. Folk who do it the other way. I thought, if the stories are true, they’ll know something. And if they’re not, well.” A small shrug. “I’d be dead either way.”
“And they were true,” said Creed.
“Some of them.” Sere glanced up at the vaulted ceiling, toward the chapel above. “There were bleeders here, in the Hollow. Not many, by the end — a few families who’d kept the old rites alive in secret, generation to generation, cutting their palms in the dark and singing the old songs, without really remembering what any of it meant. They could do little things. Harden a drop of blood into a needle. Warm a cold room. Party tricks. Scraps of the real thing, handed down so many times that most of the meaning had worn off.” He shook his head. “And then the Bloom came, and most of the Hollow died, and the few bleeders who survived it were hiding in this crypt with their candles when I walked in out of the haze with a flask of the god’s own blood under my coat.”
He touched the vial again.
“I gave them a little of it. Drop by drop, on the tongue, mixed with their own blood. Not enough to kill — I’d learned that much by then. Just enough to wake. And their party tricks became something else. You saw it upstairs. Blades. Fire. Cantor Mirelle can harden a whip strong enough to lift a grown man by the throat.” He smiled. “They made me their Prior. They’d been waiting a thousand years for someone to bring them the god’s blood. I was happy to oblige.”
“You made the greylings.”
For the first time, Sere’s smile went a little thin.
“I made the greylings,” he agreed. “The first ones. Before I’d learned how much was too much, and how fast was too fast. They weren’t bleeders, most of them — just Bloom survivors, half-mad from the spores, wandering the basin. I thought the god’s blood might clear the spores out. It didn’t. It — married with them, I suppose. Made something new. Not a very good something.” He looked at his own clean hands. “They can’t be cured. I’ve tried. So I let them out into the basin, where they can graze. It seemed kinder than the alternative.” He paused. “You killed four of them, I’m told. Thank you. They don’t know how to die on their own.”
Creed said nothing. His jaw ached. He realized he’d been clenching it.
“But the bleeders,” Sere went on, brightening again, “the bleeders were the key. Because they’d woken their own blood, by rite, over generations. And when I gave them the god’s blood, drop by drop, their blood didn’t fight it. Not the way a Mid’s does, or a Verbous’, or the blood of anyone who’s ever been dosed. It welcomed it. Not all at once — a drop at a time — but it welcomed it.” He spread his hands. “So, a hypothesis. If woken blood can take a drop, could it take more? Could it take all of it? Could a living human body take raw first-draw Catalyst straight into the bloodstream — no channels, no metal, no tempering — and become what that man on my tempering floor became for one second? Not for one second. For good.”
He let the words hang under the vault.
“A Vessel,” he said softly. “That’s what the Cantor calls it. That’s what the old songs call it, she says — in the parts of the old songs nobody remembers. A Vessel for the god’s blood. A human being who could carry it, and use it, and wake with it.” He tilted his head at Creed. “A human being the Head could not put to sleep.”
“But bleeders are rare,” Sere said, “and I have only so many. And woken blood isn’t enough. Strong blood is needed, too. A strong body. A body that doesn’t break.”
He got up off the stool. He walked to the end of the crypt, into the shadow beyond the lamp, to the row of tall upright vats Creed had been not-looking at. He stood in front of the first of them with his hands folded behind his back, the way a Verbous might stand in front of a painting.
“Which is where my generous friend up the cable comes in.”
He reached up and flicked a switch on the side of the vat, and a light came on inside it.
Creed had told himself he wouldn’t look. He looked.
There was a man in the vat. Or there had been. He floated in a thick, faintly glowing fluid, naked, with tubes running into him at the throat and the inside of both elbows and the hollows of his collarbones, and the fluid around him moved slowly, stirring his hair. His skin was translucent. Not pale — translucent, like wet paper, so that Creed could see through it to the veins beneath. And the veins were blue. Not the blue of a vein seen through skin. Glowing blue, every one of them, every capillary, a whole map of branching blue light laid out under the paper of the man’s skin like a city seen from a cable car at night.
In places, the skin had split. Long, neat splits, along the lines of the biggest veins, as if they had swelled up from inside until the skin couldn’t hold them anymore. The splits had not healed. They hung open in the fluid, and the glowing veins showed through them, raw, like wiring through a torn wall.
The man’s right hand was gone at the wrist. The stump had been capped with something smooth and pale.
“This was the last courier,” said Sere. “A year ago, nearly. Jory Thane, of Sump-Four. Strong boy. Stronger than he looked. I was hopeful.”
The man in the vat opened his eyes.
They were all blue. No white, no iris. Blue, glowing, end to end. They moved in the fluid, slowly, and found Sere, and then moved past him, and found Creed on the slab.
Jory Thane’s mouth opened. A slow string of bubbles came out of it and drifted up through the glowing fluid. His lips moved. Shaped something. Over and over. Two syllables.
Creed couldn’t read it. He didn’t need to.
“We had to cut the band, of course,” said Sere, regretfully. “Your bands send a signal up the cable, as I’m sure you know, and it wouldn’t do for the collector to have his asset’s band go grey somewhere in the Hollow, over and over, courier after courier. He might begin to wonder. So when they arrive, before anything else, the Cantor takes the band off. And the hand, I’m afraid. It’s faster, and it’s cleaner, and Wright-style bloodcraft has a way of cauterizing a stump that’s really quite remarkable. Then we leave the band out in the basin for the greylings to drag about, and when it stops transmitting, the collector logs his courier as lost to the Bloom.” He shrugged. “And sends another.”
He moved to the next vat. Flicked the switch.
A woman. Or most of one. The same glowing map of veins, but her skin had split so much it hung off her in strips, and the strips drifted in the fluid like weed. She didn’t open her eyes.
The next vat. A man with no splits at all, but whose veins had burned out — black, every one of them, charred, a map of a city after the fire. He was dead. He’d been dead a long time. They hadn’t taken him out.
The next.
The next.
Creed stopped looking at the vats. He looked at the vaulted ceiling instead, at the carved climbing people reaching up into the stone, and he counted them. Eleven people on the near rib of the vault. Fourteen on the next. He counted them because he had to count something, because if he didn’t he was going to start screaming and not stop, and he didn’t want to give the soft voice that.
“Fourteen couriers,” said the soft voice, from the end of the room. “Over nine years. Your collector — or whoever handles his acquisitions — has been very generous. My fence in the Mid Ribs plants the rumor of the Lantern in the right ears every year or so, and every year or so, a strong body comes walking down the old road, alone, looking for a light in a window. The Verbous never check. Why would they? It’s only a mule.” The footsteps came back up the crypt. “I’ve tried everything. Slower doses. Faster ones. Different veins. Bleeder blood, mixed in first. Some of them lived for hours. One lived for nine days. None of them took.”
Sere sat down on the stool again. He leaned over Creed, into the light, and his mild face was full of that terrible new thing Creed had heard in his voice in the chapel.
“And then there’s you,” he said. “Your blood barely touched by the Drip. A greyling’s bite in your arm, and your blood taking the Bloom in, waking around it, all by itself. And a sword of real Wright-steel on your back, that you found in a scrap heap and somehow knew to keep.” He shook his head, slowly. “If I believed in the old songs the way the Cantor does, I’d say you’d been sent.”
“I wasn’t sent,” said Creed. “I was sold.”
Sere looked at him for a moment. Then he smiled, and patted Creed’s strapped hand — gently, kindly, the way you’d pat the hand of someone in a stitch-bay.
“Well,” he said. “Aren’t we all.”
They brought the Choir down to sing.
They came down a narrow stair at the back of the crypt, one by one, in their ash-grey robes with their faces wrapped, and they ranged themselves along the walls between the glowing vats, and they unwound the bandages from their palms. Creed counted them. Nine. Fewer than in the chapel. He’d killed some. The thought gave him nothing. It was just a number.
Cantor Mirelle came last. She had the sword.
She’d wrapped the hilt back up in its rubber strips — not quite the way he’d done it; the bias was wrong — and she carried it across both forearms, flat, the blade bare, the way he’d seen people carry the dead out of a collapsed gallery. She walked the length of the crypt with it like that, slowly. Past the vats. Past the Prior. She stopped at the head of the slab, and she laid the sword down on the stone above Creed’s head, crosswise, so that the blade lay just above his hair.
“So it can see,” she said, to no one in particular.
Sere sighed, very faintly, but didn’t stop her.
The Cantor knelt. Through the eyeholes of her bone mask, her eyes found Creed’s. They were grey, and steady, and much younger than he’d expected.
“Do you know the tune?” she said.
He didn’t answer.
“You do,” she said. “I saw your face, in the chapel. When we sang.” She tilted her head, that small motion. “Who taught you?”
“Nobody taught me,” said Creed. “A woman sang it at the next pump. Every shift. For nine years.”
Something in the Cantor’s posture changed. He couldn’t see her face. But her scarred hands, resting on her knees, closed slowly into fists.
“What was her name?”
“Hesk.”
“And where is she now?”
“Dead,” Creed said. “Two shifts ago. Standing up, at the pump. They cut her band off and put it in a bin.”
The Cantor was silent for a long moment. Then she bowed her masked head, very low, until the bone of it nearly touched the stone of the slab beside his cheek, and stayed like that, and her shoulders rose and fell once.
Behind her, Sere cleared his throat.
The Cantor straightened. When she spoke again, her voice was perfectly steady.
“Then she’ll sing you down,” she said. “Like she sang you through your shifts.”
She took the knife from her sleeve and cut her palm.
All along the walls, the Choir cut theirs. And began to hum.
It filled the crypt. It went up into the vault and came back down. It was Hesk’s tune, the wrong-noted, smeared version, the version that had been passed through a hundred mouths in the dark and lost half its shape in every one. But it was Hesk’s tune. Rising and falling. Going down. Looking for the bottom of something.
The Cantor reached out with her bleeding hand and laid her palm flat on Creed’s chest, over his heart, through his shirt. Her blood soaked through the cloth, warm. She began to draw with it — he felt her fingertip moving, curling, hooking, branching like veins — and as she drew, she sang, the words under the humming, low, in a language he didn’t know.
Then Sere was at his left side, with a needle.
It was a big needle. Steel. Old, refinery-issue, the kind they used for drawing samples out of the settling vats, and it was attached by a long flexible tube to a glass reservoir hanging from a hook on a pole beside the slab. The reservoir was full. Glowing. That wild, deep, roiling blue, stirring in its sleep behind the glass.
First-draw. Raw Catalyst. The blood of the god.
Nine years, Creed thought. Nine years, he’d broken it out of the walls of the god’s spine with a pick. Shoveled it into hoppers. Pressed it. Pumped it up the cable. Nine years, and he’d never once seen what it turned into. He’d only seen it in other people, in their arms and their eyes and their spines, glowing.
“I’ll be honest with you,” said Sere, in his soft, reasonable voice. “Because I think you’d prefer it. This will hurt more than anything has ever hurt you. More than anything has ever hurt anyone. Your blood is going to try to fight it, and it’s going to lose, and when it loses, it’s going to boil. If you’re what I think you are, then somewhere in all that, something is going to wake up and stop the boiling. If you’re not, you’ll die, in about forty seconds, or about four minutes, or about nine days.” He found the vein at the inside of Creed’s left elbow — right at the top of the frost-threads spreading up from the bite — and pressed it with his thumb until it stood up. “I’m sorry,” he added. And Creed realized, with a cold sick lurch, that he meant it. “For what it’s worth. I really am.”
He slid the needle in.
It didn’t hurt. That was the first thing. The needle went in and there was a pinch and a pressure and that was all.
Then Sere opened the valve on the reservoir.
Cold.
It came in cold. Colder than anything. Colder than the bone of the basin, colder than the steel of the blade on the pump-house floor. A thin, impossible line of cold, sliding up the inside of his arm from the needle, through the vein, up toward the elbow, past it, up into the upper arm. He felt it go. He could have drawn it on his skin with a fingertip: here, and here, and here.
He looked down along his body and saw it. The vein in his arm was glowing. A single line of wild blue light, climbing up from the needle under his skin, toward his shoulder.
It reached his shoulder.
It reached his heart.
And his blood went to war.
There was no other way he could ever describe it, after. He tried, sometimes, in the dark. And it always came back to that. His blood went to war. Every drop of it, in every vein, at the same instant, turned on the cold blue thing that had come into it and fought — and the fighting was heat. It was all heat. It came up from his heart in a single surge, and it went out through every vessel in his body at once, to his fingertips and his toes and the roots of his teeth and the backs of his eyes, and it was fire. It was not like fire. It was fire. It was the hottest thing he had ever felt, hotter than the press, hotter than the cutting edge of a marrow saw, hotter than anything, and it was everywhere, and it was inside.
He screamed.
He didn’t hear it. The Choir’s humming filled the crypt, and the blood was roaring in his ears, roaring like the cable lifts, like the press, like the horn. But he felt his mouth open and his throat tear and he knew he was screaming. He bucked against the straps. They held. They’d been made to hold.
He saw his arm. His left arm, strapped palm-up against the stone. Every vein in it was glowing. Not blue — or not only blue. Blue and red, both at once, twisting around each other, fighting under the skin. And the skin was moving. Swelling. The veins were rising up under it, swelling, bulging, like they were trying to get out.
A vein in his forearm split the skin.
Not burst. Split. A neat long slit opened over it, from the wrist halfway to the elbow, as if someone had drawn a razor down his arm. Under it the vein lay bare, glowing, pulsing, and blood welled up out of the slit — his blood, but wrong, too bright, smoking. It smoked. Wisps of something pale curled up off the blood as it ran out of him and down his arm and onto the stone.
Another split opened on his upper arm. Another, on the back of his hand.
He felt one open on his neck.
The heat was in his eyes now. He blinked, and the blinking was wrong — wet, thick — and the world went red, and he understood that he was crying blood. It ran down out of the corners of his eyes and into his ears. It ran out of his nose into his mouth, and the taste of it was copper and smoke and something else, something cold and sweet and wild, like the air in the crypt had tasted when he first woke up. The taste of first-draw.
He was boiling. Hesk had said it. He’d heard it at the pump and he’d thought it was a way of talking. He was boiling. He could feel it, the small terrible bubbling in his veins, everywhere, a hundred thousand tiny boils, and every one of them hurt.
Count, said something in him. Something very old and very stubborn. The part of him that counted the recycler and the press cycle and the shift hours. Count. You always count.
He counted.
One. The fire in his heart.
Two. A split opening on his ribs.
Three. Four. The Choir singing, far away. Hesk’s tune.
Five.
He lost it. It went. He reached for the next number and there wasn’t one, there was only fire, and red, and the humming.
And then he found it again, from somewhere — forty — and he thought, forty seconds, he said usually forty seconds — and the fire didn’t stop. He was still here. He was still burning.
Forty-one.
From somewhere far away above him, beside him, in another world, a soft reasonable voice was talking. “— past forty. Past forty. Look at the arm. Look at the color. Cantor, are you seeing —“
“I see it.” The Cantor’s voice. Tight. Strange. “Prior. The steel.”
He couldn’t see the steel. He couldn’t see anything but red. But he could feel it. Above his head, on the stone, where she’d laid it crosswise, so that it could see. He could feel it, the way he’d felt the warmth of it in the drawer, on the pump-house floor, on the dunes. He could feel it listening.
Seventy. He’d lost more numbers. They came and went in the fire.
A hundred and something.
The splits on his arm were wider now. He could feel them. Long slits, open, smoking. The blood that came out of them was getting brighter. And brighter. And then, under the red of it, under the blue of the god, something else began to show.
Gold.
He didn’t see it. He’d only hear about it later, and wouldn’t believe it. But Sere saw it. Sere, leaning over him with his mild face gone white and his mouth open, saw it — a thin thread of gold, in the deepest vein of Creed’s forearm, under the blue and the red, glowing. One second. Two. Three.
“Yes,” Sere breathed. “Yes, yes, there —“
And the thread of gold flickered, and went out.
And Creed’s heart stopped.
He felt it stop. That was the strangest thing. He’d thought you wouldn’t feel it. But he felt it, like the press stopping mid-stroke — the great hammering engine in the middle of him, that had been slamming and slamming and slamming against his ribs for two hundred-some seconds, just stopping, all at once, between one beat and the next. A great silence opened in the center of his chest.
The fire went with it. Not out. Away. It drew back from his fingers and his toes and his eyes, all at once, and went inward, toward the silence, and the silence swallowed it.
He couldn’t feel the straps anymore. He couldn’t feel the stone.
From very far away — farther than the top of the skeleton, farther than the Skull — he heard a voice he knew say something.
“Four minutes,” said Calloway Sere, quietly. “Four minutes and eleven seconds.” A long breath. “Longer than any of them. Note it, please, Cantor. Note it down.”
The Cantor didn’t answer.
“… Cantor?”
“I heard you.”
A pause.
“Well,” said the soft voice. It sounded tired. It sounded, very faintly, like it was grieving. “Put him with the others.”
And the humming stopped.
Dark.
Not the dark of the drawer, or the gallery, or the Breach. Those were darks with walls. This one didn’t have any. It went on, in every direction, forever, and it was quiet in a way nothing in the god was ever quiet, and he was in the middle of it, and he wasn’t cold, and he wasn’t hot, and he wasn’t anything.
So this is it, he thought. Calmly. The way he’d thought it on the dunes, when his legs went. This is how it happens.
He’d always assumed it would be the pump.
He waited for the dark to finish him. He wasn’t sure what that would feel like. He waited a long time, or no time, and it didn’t come, and he started, very slowly, to be annoyed. Even dying, he thought, there was a queue.
And then, far away in the dark, something lit.
Two somethings.
Off to his right, in the endless black: a point of white light. Small, at first, a pinprick, then larger, larger, coming closer, until it was a sphere — a perfect, smooth, flawless sphere of light, white, so white it made his eyes ache even though he didn’t have eyes anymore. It hung in the dark without a sound. It was the cleanest thing he had ever seen.
And off to his left, in the endless black: a flicker of red. A spark, then a flame, then a coil of flame, twisting, turning in on itself, a long sinuous shape of fire that moved like a snake moves, looping and sliding, never still. It had no eyes. It didn’t need them. He could feel it looking at him.
They hung there in the dark, one on each side of him. White and red. Still and moving.
Then they both began, at exactly the same moment, to speak.