The first one down the stair was the fire-thrower.
Creed knew him by his shape before he knew him by anything else: the short wide body under the ash-grey robe, the thick bandaged hands. The one who’d clapped his palms together in the chapel and pulled a sheet of roaring flame out of the air between them. He came down the last few steps yawning, rolling his shoulders under his robe, the way the line crews came down off the cage lift at the start of a shift. Behind him, the Choir filed down, humming, one after another. Six. Seven. Eight.
He was three steps from the bottom when he saw Creed.
He stopped. The humming behind him faltered and broke apart as the others stopped too, piling up on the stair. For a long moment nobody said anything at all. The fire-thrower stood frozen with one foot on the last step and his eyes going from Creed’s face to his bare scarred chest under the open coat to the sword in his hand, its grooves glowing a deep steady ember-red in the blue gloom of the lab.
“You’re dead,” the fire-thrower said. He sounded almost offended. “We put you in the pit. I carried you.”
“Thanks,” said Creed.
The fire-thrower tore the bandage off his right hand with his teeth.
Creed was already moving.
He’d thought about it, in the hour before they came down. Where to stand. How to start. In the galleries, when a gallery wall came down and you had to dig a crew out, you didn’t think about the whole wall. You thought about the first rock. Then the next one. So he’d thought about the first one, and the first one was the fire-thrower, because the fire-thrower was the one who could make the most of them dangerous fastest, and because the stair was narrow, and the Choir were bunched on it, and if he was quick enough —
He was quick enough. He hadn’t known how quick that was until he did it.
He crossed eight meters of lab floor in the time it took the fire-thrower to get his bandage off. He felt the scars on his body heat as he moved, felt the two pulls inside him tighten and lean, felt the gold thread in the middle of him flicker — and then he was at the foot of the stair, and the fire-thrower’s palm was coming open, the blood welling, and Creed brought the sword up from below in a long rising cut.
The edge went in under the fire-thrower’s raised arm and came out at his collarbone.
It didn’t stop at the bone. It didn’t slow. The Wright-steel was singing, the deep hum and the high emitter-whine twisted together into one chord, and the edge was glowing cherry-hot, and it went through the man’s chest the way it had gone through the greyling’s skull on the dunes — easily, horribly easily, with only that faint change in the note as it passed through the hard parts. And where it passed, the flesh didn’t bleed. It seared. Black and smoking at the edges of the cut, the smell coming up thick and sweet, like meat dropped on a press plate.
The fire-thrower’s arm and shoulder and the top of his chest slid sideways off the rest of him and fell down the stair.
For a moment, the blood that had been rising from his cut palm hung in the air above the step where his hand had been. A curl of red, half-formed, already beginning to catch, flickering at its edges with the first flame.
Then it fell. Plain blood. It splashed on the steps.
The rest of the fire-thrower stood there for a second longer. Then he folded at the knees and went over backward into the ones behind him.
One.
The Choir broke.
Not ran — broke apart, the way a crew breaks apart when the cage lift jams, everybody moving at once in every direction. Some came down at him. Some went back up. Somebody screamed a name — not his. And over it all, from the top of the stair, from the chapel, Creed heard the soft voice rising, sharp for the first time, sharp and astonished.
“Alive? Cantor — he’s alive —“
Creed didn’t hear the rest. The first of the bleeders who’d come down at him was already on him.
They were faster than greylings. Smarter. They’d fought together before, against things he couldn’t guess at, out in the basin, and they knew how to work as a crew. Two came down the stair at him together, blood-blades growing out of both palms, one high and one low, and a third stood back on the steps above them with a whip uncoiling from his fist, waiting for an opening. He gave them one. He blocked the high blade and the low one went into his thigh.
It hurt. It hurt the way it should have hurt. But it went in and stopped, the way the spike had stopped against his rib in the chapel, and he felt his own flesh close around the edges of it. Grip it. Like a fist closing.
And he felt the blood in it.
Not his blood. The bleeder’s. The blade in his thigh was made of the bleeder’s blood, hardened — he could feel it, through the wound, the same way he felt the warm beating glows of their hearts. It was alive, still. Still connected. A red thread running back from the blade in his leg, up through the air, into the bleeder’s open palm, into his arm, his chest, his heart.
“Pull,” said Snake.
He didn’t know how. He did it anyway.
He reached — not with his hand, with whatever it was in him that felt the blood, the sense that had woken in the pit — and he took hold of that red thread, and he pulled.
The bleeder screamed.
The blade in Creed’s thigh came apart. Not into plain blood — it dissolved, flowed, ran up out of the wound in a red ribbon and back along the thread toward the bleeder’s palm — but Creed was pulling, and it didn’t stop at the palm. It kept going. It went into the palm, back into the cut it had come out of, back up the arm, and Creed felt it go and felt the bleeder’s blood flinch away from it, felt the whole red tide of the man’s body jerk and shudder like a cable when the load shifts —
And then it came the other way.
All of it. Toward Creed.
The bleeder’s palm split wide open, from the heel to the fingers, and blood fountained out of it. Not falling — flying. Straight at Creed in a solid red rope, pouring out of the man’s hand. And the man was screaming and screaming, staggering, trying to pull his arm back, and the blood just kept coming, out of the palm and now out of the wrist too, the skin there opening along the veins the way Creed’s own skin had opened on the slab —
“More,” said Snake. Breathless. Delighted. “More, more, more —”
“Stop.”
Lamp. Cold and clear as a blade of ice through the middle of him.
He stopped.
He let go of the thread. The red rope fell out of the air between them in a great splash across the floor of the lab, and the bleeder went down on his knees in it, clutching his arm, his ripped-open hand. The blood kept running out of it, but slowly now, dark, ordinary. His face was grey. He swayed. He didn’t get up.
Creed stood over him, breathing hard. Blood running down his own leg from the hole in his thigh. Already slowing. Already stopping.
He was shaking.
“You had him,” said Snake. “Why stop? You had him. You were feeding.”
He had been. That was the thing. That was the thing that made him shake. In the moment when the red rope had been pouring toward him out of the man’s hand, before Lamp had spoken — he had felt it coming in. Not into the wound in his thigh. Into him. The way the food had gone into him in the reliquary. Like coal into a furnace. And it had felt —
He didn’t let himself finish the thought.
“Stop,” said Lamp again, more quietly. “That is the other thing you can do. Remember it. What you can pull, you can also stop.”
The whip-wielder on the stair hadn’t waited. The lash came cracking down out of the air at Creed’s head, and he got the sword up just in time, and the burning edge took the lash a foot from its tip and the end of it fell away in black flakes. But the whip-wielder didn’t stop. He snapped the lash back, and it re-formed, the severed end growing out again from his fist like a new shoot, and he lashed again, and again, and each time it came faster, and on the fourth stroke it wrapped Creed’s sword-arm at the wrist and hardened, and held.
It was the collar from the chapel all over again. Hard, smooth, hot as a steam pipe, tightening. Pulling. The whip-wielder leaned back on the stair, hauling, and Creed felt his arm dragged out straight, his feet sliding.
He didn’t pull, this time.
He felt the red thread of the lash, running back up into the whip-wielder’s fist. And he felt the blood in it, moving — living, flowing, working to keep the lash hard and tight. And instead of pulling, he reached for it with something cold. Something that came from behind his eyes.
He stopped it.
The lash froze. Not hardened — it was already hard. Froze. The flow of blood inside it stopped dead, the way a pump stops dead when the power cuts. And a thing made of moving blood, with the blood not moving, is just a stick of red glass.
He twisted his wrist. The lash shattered.
The whip-wielder fell backward off the stair with the stump of it still in his fist, and his hand — his hand had gone white. Bloodless. Stopped, too, all the way down to the wrist where Creed had reached into it. He stared at it. He shook it. He screamed.
Creed shot him.
He didn’t decide to. His finger closed on the trigger in the guard, and the gun-sword went off, a flat hammering crack that filled the lab — and the recoil came up through his arms and his shoulders, and it was nothing. Nothing like the dunes, nothing like the chapel. His arms took it like a pick-swing taken a thousand times. The blade barely moved.
The round took the whip-wielder in the center of the chest.
And then it bloomed.
The blood-bead in the base of the round — the little crimson jewel he’d let fall onto the propellant — went off inside the man. Creed saw it. A flash of red light, from inside, shining out through the man’s robe, through his skin, through his ribs, so for one instant Creed could see the shadows of his bones laid out against it like the bars of a grate. And then the light went out, and the whip-wielder fell, and smoke came out of the hole in his chest, and out of his mouth, red smoke, curling.
Two. He was counting again. Three, with the one on the floor.
“Oh,” said Snake. “Oh, I like those.”
The lab had become a slaughterhouse. He’d learn, later, that it took less than four minutes. It felt like a whole shift.
He fought them on the floor of the lab, between the glowing vats, in and out of the tangle of tubing and the hissing equipment. He fought them with the burning edge, and with the rounds, and with the two things he’d learned in the first minute of the fight: pull, and stop. He pulled the blood out of a blade a woman was swinging at his head and let it splash across her face, and while she was blind he ran her through. He stopped the blood in a spike thrown from across the room so that it dropped out of the air and shattered on the floor. He fired, and fired, and the blood-rounds bloomed red inside whatever they hit.
He took wounds. A blade across the back of his shoulder, through the coat. A spike through the meat of his left forearm, through and out. He felt them land and felt them close, felt his body grip them and seal them and push the pieces out of him, felt the hunger come up in him after each one, deeper, hollower. The sword drank whenever his blood ran down over the hilt, and every time it drank the grooves burned brighter, and every time they burned brighter he felt a little more of himself go into the steel.
Snake was singing. That was the only word for it. Not words — just a sound, low and constant, from the middle of his chest, a deep hungry hum that rose every time the edge went in and every time a heart in the room went dark. And with every one, Creed felt the heat inside him lean a little harder, pull a little more. Felt the cold behind his eyes pull back against it. Felt the gold thread at the center of him flicker and strain.
And all through it, from the stair, from the archway, from wherever he was, he heard the soft reasonable voice.
“Look at him. Cantor, look at the speed — did you see the hand, did you see the whip — it’s stopping their blood, he’s stopping it, I never even imagined —“
Calloway Sere was not fighting. He was watching. He stood on the third step of the stair, out of the way, with his fine grey robe hitched up in one hand so it wouldn’t trail in the blood, and the vial of blue at his throat swinging, and his mild face lit up with that terrible thing Creed had heard in his voice in the chapel. Hope. Joy. Pride. He was watching Creed kill his Choir the way a foreman watches a new crew hit quota for the first time.
When the last bleeder on the lab floor went down — the fifth, a tall man who’d thrown two spikes at once and caught a blood-round in the throat for it — Sere actually applauded. Three slow claps, soft, in the sudden quiet.
“Remarkable,” he said. “Truly. Courier fifteen. Creed.” He came down off the stair, stepping delicately over the fire-thrower’s body, over the red-smoking corpse of the whip-wielder. “Do you understand what you are? Do you understand what you’ve just done? Nine years. Fourteen failures. And you —“ He stopped a few meters off, between the slab and the vats, and spread his hands, and his eyes were shining. “You took, Creed. You took the god’s blood and you lived and you woke. Everything I hoped. Everything the songs said. And more. More than I dreamed.” His voice dropped. Soft. Intimate. “Do you know what we could do, you and I? With your blood, and my work? We could make a hundred like you. A thousand. We could go up the cable and walk into the Head and they could not stop us —“
“You put me in a hole,” said Creed. “With the others.”
Sere blinked. “Well — yes. You were dead. Or appeared to be.” He smiled, a little apologetically. “It’s procedure.”
“Fourteen of them,” said Creed. “Down there. With the mites.”
“Yes, and I grieve for them, I truly do, but surely you see now that it was all worth —“
“And you’d do it again,” said Creed. “To make a hundred. A thousand. You’d fill a hundred pits.”
Sere looked at him. The hope in his face didn’t fade, not exactly. But something came into it alongside the hope — something wary.
“If that’s what it took,” he said quietly. “Yes. Wouldn’t you? To wake the world?”
Behind Creed’s eyes, Lamp was very still.
In his chest, Snake said, almost gently: “He’s right, you know. You would.”
Creed didn’t answer either of them.
He looked at Calloway Sere for a long moment, standing among the bodies of his Choir in his clean grey robe, with his bright eyes and his soft hands and his pen and his paper and his collection on the shelves in the room behind him. A man who’d seen the truth — or a little piece of it — and decided that the truth gave him the right to do anything at all to anyone who wasn’t him.
Just like Kon, Creed thought. Just like every one of them, all the way up.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”
He moved.
Sere was not a fighter. He’d never needed to be. But he’d lived nine years among bleeders and he’d watched every rite, and when Creed came at him he got his right hand up and open, and there was a scar across that palm too — Creed saw it, white, fresh, just one, not like the Choir’s dozens — and blood came out of it and rose and hardened into a small sharp shield, a disc of red, the size of a ration plate.
The burning edge went through the shield. Through the palm behind it. Through the wrist behind that.
Sere’s hand came off.
It fell between them on the lab floor with the shield still half-formed in its fingers, and the shield went soft and ran, and the hand lay there, palm up, clean, the nails trimmed neat. The stump of Sere’s wrist was black. Seared. It didn’t bleed.
Sere looked down at it. His face went perfectly white.
He didn’t scream. That was the strange thing. He made a small sound, a breath, like a man who’s stepped on a stair that isn’t there. He lifted the stump and looked at it. He looked at his hand on the floor. He looked at Creed.
“That was the hand,” he said faintly, “that I write with.”
Creed brought the sword back for the second cut.
“Prior!”
Something hit him from the side.
Not hard — not a body. A wave. A wave of hardened blood, a wall of it, red and glassy, coming across the lab at waist height like the edge of a press plate, and it caught him across the ribs and drove him sideways into the slab and pinned him there.
Cantor Mirelle stood at the bottom of the stair with both hands open and both palms streaming.
She’d been on the stair. He’d felt her heart there the whole time — the steady one, at the top, near the archway into the chapel, not coming down, not fighting. He hadn’t known why. He’d been too busy to wonder.
Now she came down the last few steps, and the wave of blood she’d thrown held him pinned across the slab, and she didn’t look at him. She went to Sere. She caught him under the arms as his knees went, and held him up, and the blood from her palms ran down over his robe.
“Go,” she said. “Prior. Up the stair. Go.”
Sere was staring at his stump. “Cantor — the work — the notes —“
“I’ll bring them. Go.”
She shoved him. Hard. He stumbled to the stair and went up it, clutching his seared wrist to his chest, his fine grey robe trailing in the blood after all.
Creed felt the blood in the wave across his ribs. He felt it moving, alive, flowing to keep it hard. He reached for it. Stop.
It stopped. It froze into red glass. He twisted, and it shattered across the floor of the lab.
He came off the slab with the sword up and the grooves blazing, and Mirelle turned to face him, and her bleeding hands came up — and stayed there. Open. Empty. She didn’t make a blade. She didn’t make a whip or a spike or a wall. She just stood there, between him and the stair, with her palms streaming and her bone mask turned toward him and her chest heaving.
“Move,” said Creed.
“No.”
“He’s going to do it again. Pits full. Hundreds.”
“I know.” Her voice was rough. “I know what he is.”
“Then move.”
“I can’t.” Her hands were shaking. He could see it. “He brought the god’s blood. He woke us. Whatever else he is — he’s the only one who ever came. A thousand years, and he’s the only one who ever came.” She drew a long, ragged breath. “I owe him the stair. I owe him that.”
“Kill her,” said Snake. Calm. Simple. “She’s in the way. She’ll come back for you one day. They always do.”
Lamp said nothing.
Creed stood with the burning sword in his hands and looked at the Cantor of the Hollow Choir. At her bone mask with the sigils carved in it and filled with red, wrong, smeared, reaching for something she’d never seen. At her open, empty, bleeding hands.
Then she’ll sing you down, she’d said, on the slab. Like she sang you through your shifts.
“The tune,” he said. “Hesk’s tune. What is it?”
The bone mask tilted. Surprised.
“It’s called the Long Way Down,” Mirelle said, after a moment. Quietly. “It’s how the Wrights sang their dead into the marrow. So the god would take them back.” She paused. “It’s the oldest thing we have. Older than the rites. Older than the bleeding. Everything else, we lost. That, we kept.”
Creed thought about Hesk at the number-two pump, for thirty-one years, humming the Long Way Down while the marrow went up the cable to be pumped and pressed and tempered and sold. Singing the god’s dead down into the god’s bone, every shift, with nobody listening. Not even him.
He lowered the sword.
“Take your people,” he said. “The ones who are still breathing. Take them and go. Out into the basin, up to the rim, anywhere. Don’t come back here.”
The Cantor didn’t move for a moment. Then she bowed. Low, the way she’d bowed over the slab when he’d told her Hesk was dead, until the bone of her mask nearly touched her knees.
“Courier,” she said, straightening. “The steel. The Prior could never open the old door. Below. Beneath the pit. He tried for nine years. Blood, fire, first-draw, tools — nothing. It doesn’t open for any of us.” She looked at the sword in his hand. “I think it was waiting for that.”
Then she turned and went to the bleeders on the floor who still had heartbeats — three of them, he felt, faint and ragged — and began to drag them toward the stair.
“Soft,” said Snake. Disgusted. “So soft. You’ll regret it.”
Behind his eyes, Lamp was utterly silent. But Creed felt it. That same quiet he’d felt in the reliquary when he’d tied up the guard instead of killing him. The quiet of something looking hard at a thing it had been sure it understood, and finding that it wasn’t sure anymore.
He went to get the guard. The young one, the one in the reliquary, still bound and gagged in the corner behind the desk, awake now, his eyes enormous. Creed cut the rubber off his wrists and ankles with one stroke and hauled him up by the front of his robe and pushed him toward the archway. “Stair,” he said. “Follow her. Run.”
The young bleeder ran.
When the Choir were gone, and the lab was quiet except for the hiss of the equipment and the slow breathing pump, and the bodies lay where they’d fallen with their blood running together across the stone in the blue light, Creed went to the tall vats at the end of the room.
He went to Jory Thane first.
The glowing blue eyes were waiting for him. They’d been watching the whole time, he realized. Through the glass. Everything.
He put his hand flat on the front of the vat. The glass was warm.
Jory Thane looked at him. His lips moved, in the glowing fluid. Not two syllables, this time. More. Slow, careful. Creed watched them, and this time he could read it, because he wasn’t trying not to.
Tell them my name.
“I will,” said Creed.
He drew the sword back and drove the point into the glass.
The vat burst. The front of it came out in a single great sheet and the fluid came with it, a wave of warm glowing blue, washing over Creed’s boots and across the floor and into the blood. And Jory Thane came out with it, all at once, his tubes tearing loose, and Creed caught him.
He weighed nothing. That was the first thing. He was a big man — strong boy, Sere had said — and he weighed nothing, nothing at all, like Ollo’s arm coming out of the press. His translucent skin was slick and hot, and the veins glowing under it pulsed against Creed’s hands, and where the skin had split, the raw glowing veins lay bare against Creed’s palms like wire. He was shaking. Every part of him. A high, fine, constant tremor, like the hum of the emitter.
His blue eyes found Creed’s face, close now. His mouth opened. Air went in. Real air, for the first time in a year. It made a terrible sound going in, wet and rattling.
“Jory,” said Creed. “Thane. Sump-Four. Twenty-two H.”
The glowing eyes widened.
“I found your band,” Creed said. “Out on the dunes. I’ve got it.” He shifted his grip to hold the man up with one arm and reached into his coat with the other and took out the cut band and pressed it into Jory Thane’s one remaining hand. The fingers closed on it. Weakly. But they closed. “I’ll tell them. Everyone. I’ll tell them your name.”
Jory Thane looked at the band in his hand for a long moment.
Then he looked up at Creed and said, in a voice like wet paper tearing, the only words he would ever say out loud in front of another living person after a year in the glass:
“Quick. Please.”
Creed laid him down, gently, on the floor of the lab, in the blue fluid and the red blood.
He knelt beside him.
He put the point of the burning sword against Jory Thane’s chest, over the heart that beat once and waited a long time before it remembered to beat again. He felt that heart, the faint warm glow of it. He felt it beat.
He pushed.
It was quick. The edge was very hot and very sharp and it went in clean, and the glowing blue in Jory Thane’s veins went out all at once, from the center outward, like the lights of a Suspension City going dark. And his eyes went out last. Blue, and then grey, and then just eyes. A man’s eyes, brown, looking up at the carved climbing people on the vaulted ceiling.
His hand was still closed around the band.
Creed knelt there for a while. He didn’t know how long.
Then he got up and went down the row of vats, and did the same for the woman with the skin hanging off her in strips, who did not open her eyes but whose faint heart he could feel, beating, still, after however long. And for the man after her. And the one after that. Seven, in the end, who still had hearts. He did each of them quick and clean and with his whole attention, and he didn’t count, and he didn’t let himself think, and when it was done his face was wet and he didn’t wipe it.
“Wasteful,” Snake murmured. But it said it quietly. Almost respectfully.
Lamp said nothing at all. But the cold behind his eyes was gentle, for once. The way clean water is gentle.
He found Sere’s notes on the desk in the reliquary. The stacks of paper, the neat close handwriting. Nine years of it. Every dose. Every courier. Every failure.
Mirelle hadn’t come back for them.
He stood over them for a long time. He thought about taking them — about what they might be worth, up the cable, to someone who could read what they meant. To Kon. To the Head. And he thought about what Sere had said, with his eyes shining: We could make a hundred like you. A thousand.
He swept the whole stack off the desk into a heap on the floor of the lab, by the biggest of the first-draw vats. He swept the shelves, too — the vials, the bones, the red glass knife, the clapperless bell, the labeled doses — all of it, into the heap.
Then he stepped back to the archway, and raised the gun-sword, and fired into the vat.
The blood-round went through the glass sight-port and into the roiling first-draw inside and bloomed.
He’d wondered what would happen. He’d thought the vat might crack. Might leak.
It didn’t crack. It answered.
The red flash of the blood-bead went off inside the dark wild blue of the first-draw, and the first-draw lit. All at once. From the inside. It went from roiling deep blue to a white-blue blaze so bright it turned the whole crypt into a single searing flash, and the vat came apart — not burst, came apart, the steel of it peeling open like the skin of a fruit — and blue fire came out of it.
Blue fire. Liquid. Pouring. It went across the floor in a wave and over the heap of Sere’s notes and they were gone in an instant, ash, nothing. It hit the next vat. That one lit too. And the next. And the tubes running up the walls and across the vault lit one after another like fuses, racing up into the ceiling, blue fire running in lines across the carved climbing people, so that for a second the whole vault was a map of burning veins.
“Run,” said Snake. And for the first time, there was something in its voice that wasn’t joy.
He ran.
He went for the stair. He made it four steps. Then the biggest vat at the center of the lab, the one that fed all the others, the one that held the most first-draw of all, went up.
It didn’t sound like an explosion. It sounded like the horn. A single deep enormous note that came up through the floor and the walls and his bones and his teeth. The floor of the crypt heaved under his feet like the deck of a cage lift when the cable catches.
And then the floor opened.
It split down the middle, from the slab to the stair, along a line he’d never noticed — a seam, a straight seam in the stone, carved, older than anything else in the crypt — and the two halves of the floor dropped away from each other, and the blue fire poured into the gap, and the pit of the dead went into it, and the slab went into it, and Creed went into it, falling, with the sword in his hand and the grooves blazing red and the blue fire roaring above him and the vaulted ceiling of carved climbing people breaking apart and coming down after him.
He fell a long way.
Down, past the bottom of the pit. Past the bone of the basin. Into a dark that was older than the Choir, and older than the Hollow, and older than anything he had ever seen.
The last thing he heard, before he hit the bottom, was the vault coming down above him and sealing him in.
The last thing he felt was the sword in his hand. Hot. Singing. Pulling him down, toward something below, the way a compass pulls north.
As if it knew exactly where it was going.
As if it had been here before.