There was a square at the center of Halden where three streets met, and in the square there was a building made of glass.
Not like Kon’s house. Not clear. The glass was colored — gold and pale yellow and a white so thick it was almost milk — set in a frame of dark metal in a pattern of rays, like a sun, like the cracked sun in the Wright mural, except whole. The building was round, and its roof came up to a point, and on the point there was a disc of polished metal that caught the white-gold light pouring down from the Higher Ribs and threw it back over the whole square, so that everything there was a little brighter, a little warmer, than anywhere else in Halden.
The Lumen, Teo called it. “Where the Bell lives.” He said it the way he said the names of tram lines — plainly, without anything behind it. “Dela used to go. Every rest-day. I went with her, for a while. After she died I stopped.” He shrugged. “It’s nice inside. Warm. They sing.”
Creed went in.
It was warm. The colored glass took the light from above and broke it into gold and pale yellow and milk-white and laid it across the floor in long bright bands. There were benches, rows of them, curved, facing the center. People sat on them. Not many — twenty, thirty, on a weekday morning. Old people, mostly. A few young. They sat with their hands in their laps and their eyes on the floor.
In the center of the room, under the point of the roof, there was a column of light.
He didn’t understand it at first. It came down from a hole in the very top of the dome, a single shaft of white-gold, as wide as a man, falling straight down to a round plate of polished metal set in the floor. It didn’t flicker. It didn’t move. It just fell, steady and silent, like water poured from a height, and pooled on the plate, and the plate glowed. People had left things around the edge of the plate. Small things. A folded paper. A ring. A dried flower, brown, from a window box. A small carved figure, wooden, of a person with their head bowed.
He didn’t go near the light. Nobody did. The benches stopped a long way back from it, and there was a rope on brass posts in a circle around the plate, and nobody crossed it.
A woman in a long robe stood beside the rope. The robe was white, with gold at the hems and cuffs, and her head was shaved, and on her shaved scalp, at the very crown, a Catalyst channel glowed — not a line but a ring, a small circle of blue light set into the skin, like a halo laid flat. She was speaking, softly, to the people on the benches. Not reading. Speaking from memory, the way the Belly said the catechism.
“… and the light falls on the worthy,” she was saying, “as the marrow rises from the faithful. Each in their place. Each in their measure. The Head is above, and the Head is apart, so that you need not be. The Head carries the weight of seeing, so that you may rest. The Head watches —“
“— so that you need not,” said the people on the benches, together, softly.
“Rest, then,” said the woman in white. “Rest in your place. Rest in your measure. Lower your eyes and be at peace. Above you, all is seen. Above you, all is well.”
“All is well,” said the benches.
Creed stood at the back of the room by the door with his hands in his coat pockets.
The Head is above. The Head is apart. The Head is not for your eyes.
It was the same. It was the catechism. The same words he’d learned before he could count, standing on the catwalk with the EYES DOWN sign above him. Dressed up in colored glass and white robes and gold hems and said softly, warmly, kindly, like a song. So that you need not. As if not looking was a gift. As if it was rest.
“Same leash,” said Snake, very quietly. “Nicer collar.”
He went back out into the square.
He was still in the square when the noon Bell rang.
He’d planned it, a little. He’d told himself he hadn’t. He’d bought a paper cup of something hot from a stall at the edge of the square — he didn’t know what it was, it was brown and bitter and he liked it — and sat down on a low wall of bone at the edge of the plaza where he could see the whole of it, the three streets coming in, the Lumen in its colored glass in the middle, the people crossing back and forth. And he’d waited.
The Bell came from everywhere, the way it always did. But here, in the square, he could see where it came from: the disc on the point of the Lumen’s roof. It rang. The polished metal shivered, and the note rolled out of it, deep and slow and enormous, and the light it threw across the square shivered with it.
And the square stopped.
He’d seen it in the street. It was different here. There were more people. Two hundred, three hundred, crossing the plaza, sitting at the stalls, standing in doorways. Every one of them stopped where they were. Every head went down. Chins to chests. Hands still. The whole wide square of warm-lit bone went silent and motionless except for the Bell’s note, rolling, rolling, and three hundred bowed heads in the white-gold light like a field of something bent by wind.
He put his head down too. He did it at once. He’d learned.
But he didn’t close his eyes. And he didn’t stop looking. He looked through his lashes, sideways, along the square, the way he’d learned to look at the quota board without lifting his head on Line C.
And he saw that one man wasn’t bowing.
He was on the far side of the square, near the mouth of the middle street. Middle-aged. Thin. A tram-mechanic’s coverall, faded green, with a patch at one knee. A face like a lot of Mid faces — clean, ordinary, a little worn — except that it was wet. He was crying. Silently. Tears running down his face and dripping off his chin.
And his head was up.
Not defiantly. Not raised in a fist. He just stood there, in the middle of three hundred bowed heads, with his face lifted up toward the sky, toward the white-gold glow pouring down out of the god’s eyes, and looked at it. Steadily. With his wet face and his hands open at his sides.
Creed felt his heart.
He reached for it without meaning to, across the square, through all the others. And it was strange. It was warm, like all of them, and it beat steadily, and it was frightened — he could feel the fear in it, quick and hard. But the frost —
The frost was almost gone.
Every heart in Halden had the rime. Every one he’d felt in four days. Thin, most of them, but there, always there, a fine branching crust of blue-white. This man’s was nearly clear. Just the faintest shadow of it, at the very edges, like the last patch of frost on a window when the sun’s been on it all morning.
Creed stared at him through his lashes.
How, he thought. How is yours gone?
The Bell’s note rolled on.
And the light changed.
It came down from above.
Not from the Lumen. From above the Lumen — from the sky, from the white-gold dark above the rib, from somewhere up among the higher cities. A shaft of light, like the one inside the Lumen, falling straight down. But brighter. Much brighter. So bright that through his lashes, with his head bowed, it turned the whole square white, and every shadow in it went sharp and black and short, pooled right under everything, like noon on the painted grass in the old pictures.
It fell on the square near the mouth of the middle street. Near the man with his head up.
Nobody moved. Not one of the bowed heads lifted. Creed felt three hundred hearts around him jump all at once and start to hammer — he felt the terror go through the square like a pressure wave through a pipe — and not one of them moved. Not one looked.
And down the shaft of light, out of the white, two figures came.
They didn’t fall. They didn’t climb. They descended, slowly, standing upright in the light, the way the capsule had come up the cable — smooth, steady, their feet together, their arms at their sides. They came down out of the sky like that, out of the white, and touched the bone of the square without a sound.
They were tall. Taller than anyone in the square. Taller than Kon. Long, narrow, built in clean white armor that fit them close, every plate smooth and seamless and polished so that the light slid off it like water. Their hands were long. Their legs were long. They had no visible joints; they moved as if they were poured.
And they had no faces.
Where faces should have been, there was only the smooth curve of the white helm, a blank oval, unbroken. No eyes. No mouth. No seam where a visor might open. Just white.
And behind each blank head, a ring.
A halo. A circle of pale light, floating a hand’s width behind the back of the skull, not touching it, wide as a pair of shoulders, humming. He could hear it, under the Bell. A thin, high, pure tone, like a struck glass. Like the tone the Halo-glass had made in Kon’s garden when it turned blue.
He’d seen them before. Carved on a wall, a thousand years ago. Coming down the neck of the god, after the gold-veined people.
Halo Wardens. Servants of the Head. Do not obstruct. Do not address unless addressed. Do not look directly at the halo.
The two Wardens walked across the square to the man with his head up.
They walked between the bowed heads, among the stalls, past the people frozen mid-step. Nobody moved out of their way. Nobody had to. The Wardens simply went around them, smooth, unhurried, their blank faces turned toward the man by the mouth of the middle street, their halos humming.
The man didn’t run.
He saw them coming — he must have; he was the only one in the square who could. He watched them come, with his wet face and his open hands, and he didn’t run, and he didn’t lower his head. When they reached him he was still looking up.
One of the Wardens put its long white hand on his shoulder.
That was all. Just a hand, on a shoulder, the way a foreman puts a hand on a man’s shoulder to turn him toward a job. And the man went still. Not limp — still. His whole body went rigid, frozen, the way the bleeder’s whip had frozen when Creed stopped the blood in it. His head stayed up. His eyes stayed open. His face stayed wet. But he wasn’t looking at anything anymore.
The other Warden put its hand on his other shoulder.
And the three of them rose.
Straight up, into the shaft of light, the way the Wardens had come down. Smooth and slow, the man held upright between them like something carried, his feet leaving the bone of the square, his head still lifted, rising up past the colored glass of the Lumen and its shivering disc and up into the white, getting smaller, and smaller, until the light swallowed them.
The shaft of light went out.
The Bell’s note faded. Stopped.
For a long moment, nobody in the square moved.
Then, slowly, the square started again. The way the street had started after the Bell on Spindle Row. People lifted their heads. Resumed their steps. Picked up their conversations. A woman at a stall near Creed finished counting change into a man’s hand. Somebody laughed, somewhere, a little too loudly, and stopped.
Nobody looked at the mouth of the middle street. Nobody looked at the place where the man had been standing.
There was nothing there. Not even a mark on the bone.
Creed sat on the low wall with the paper cup in his hand. The bitter brown stuff in it had gone cold. His hand was shaking so hard it slopped over the rim and ran down his fingers.
He hadn’t seen the Wardens’ hearts.
That was what kept going round in him. He’d reached for them. Of course he had. The moment they came down the light, he’d reached for them the way he reached for everything now, without deciding to — for the warm beating glow that every living thing had, the bleeders, the greylings, the Mids, Kon. And there’d been nothing. No warmth. No beat. No blood. Not frost, not channels, not anything. The white armor was empty of everything he knew how to feel.
Except, at the back. At the base of the skull, just under the floating halo, where the blank white helm met the neck.
There’d been something there.
Cold. Not the clean cold of Lamp, or the cold of the frost. A different cold. A slick cold, a wet cold, the cold of something that lived in the dark and had never once been warm. And it had been moving. Small. Segmented. Coiled up tight in the hollow at the base of the skull like a grub in a fruit, like a mite in a dead thing — and moving. Pulsing. Shifting its coils. Alive. In a way that wasn’t any way he’d ever felt anything be alive.
He’d seen it before.
Carved on a wall, a thousand years ago. Small pale many-legged shapes, coiled in the god’s brain, at the ends of the cables.
“Those,” said Snake.
It wasn’t speaking to him. He didn’t think it was speaking to anyone. Its voice was nothing like he’d ever heard it — not warm, not amused, not hungry. It was low and thick and it shook. In his chest, the heat had drawn in, tight, every coil of it clenched, the way a hand clenches into a fist.
“Those things. Those things. I remember those.”
“Snake,” said Lamp. Sharp. A warning.
“I remember them. In the dark. At the end.” The heat in his chest was shaking now, the way his hand was shaking. “He was still dreaming. He was still — there was still something left of him, mule, at the end, in his head, dreaming, and they came in, and they —“
“Snake.”
Lamp’s voice cut through it like a blade of ice. Cold and absolute. And the cold came with it, down from behind Creed’s eyes, through his whole body, and it met the heat in his chest, and pushed — harder than it had ever pushed before, harder than in the reliquary when the sword had flared, so hard that for a moment Creed couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, the whole world went white and cold and still —
And Snake went silent.
Not quiet. Silent. The heat in his chest didn’t go out; it never went out. But it stopped speaking. It coiled there, tight and shaking and furious, and said nothing.
Creed sat on the wall in the square with the cold cup in his hand and breathed, slowly, until he could see again.
“What,” he said. Very quietly. “What was it going to say.”
Lamp didn’t answer.
“Lamp.”
“It does not remember clearly,” said Lamp. Each word placed exactly. Too exactly. “It is a fragment. A piece of an old hunger, from a dead thing. Its memories are not reliable. It would only confuse you.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Silence.
I do not know, Lamp had said, in the sanctum, holding the key. And it had been lying. I see, Lamp had said, in the dark, when he told it what he wanted. And it had been hiding something. And on the catwalk in Sump-Nine, when the river of frost went past, it had looked at the frost without surprise. As if it had always known.
And now it had pushed so hard to shut Snake up that it had nearly stopped his heart.
Find the seam, he thought.
He was very close to it now. He could feel it. The shape of the thing Lamp was keeping, under the words. He could feel the edges of it, the way you feel the edges of a marrow-knot through the haft of a pick.
He didn’t swing. Not yet. Not here, on a wall in a square, with three hundred people pretending nothing had happened.
He put the cup down on the wall and got up and walked home.
Teo knew. Of course he knew. Everyone in Halden knew by the evening Bell; it had gone through the district the way the news of a gallery collapse went through the stack, in low voices, in doorways, never quite said.
He was waiting in the hallway when Creed came up the stairs. Standing outside his own door, flat thirteen, in his house-slippers, with his cap in his hands, turning it around and around. His glass eye was whirring, focusing and refocusing on nothing.
“You were in the square,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “At noon. Somebody saw a provisional on the wall. Scarred hands.”
“Yes.”
Teo’s real eye was very bright. “Did you look?”
Creed thought about lying.
“I kept my head down,” he said. Which was true.
Teo let out a long breath. His shoulders came down. He nodded, several times, quickly, turning his cap. “Good. Good. That’s — good.” He looked at the floor. “Arlo Venn. That was his name. Tram mechanic, Line 2. I knew him a little. Not well. He came to Dela’s memorial.” He swallowed. “He’d been strange lately, they’re saying. Stopped eating at the counters. Bringing his own food from somewhere. Nobody knew where. His wife said he wasn’t sleeping. Said he’d started talking about the light. About wanting to see it.” Teo shook his head. “Just once, he kept saying. Just once.”
Stopped eating at the counters. Creed thought about Arlo Venn’s heart. The frost on it, nearly gone. Like the last patch on a window after the sun’s been on it all morning.
Bringing his own food from somewhere.
He didn’t say anything.
“Four times,” said Teo. Low. Fast. “Four times I’ve seen it, in thirty-eight years. Four times they’ve come down. Every one, the same. Somebody stops bowing, and the light comes, and they go up, and they don’t come back.” He looked up at Creed, and his face was the face of a frightened old man, nothing else, all the kindness and the talk and the cable-stories gone out of it, just fear. “Listen to me. Whatever you’ve seen. Whatever’s happened to you — and something has, I’m not a fool, I’ve seen your hands, I’ve seen the way you stand in a doorway — whatever it is. Don’t. Don’t wonder about it. Don’t ask about it. Don’t look.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s the Head.” Teo’s voice cracked on it. “Because it’s above. Because it’s apart. Because it carries the weight of seeing so that we don’t have to, and that’s a mercy, son, that’s the only mercy there is, and if you go looking at it you’ll find out what happens when it looks back.” He was gripping his cap so hard his knuckles were white. “Please. You’ve got three days. Three more days of soup and a window and a bed. Have them. Please. Just have them.”
He turned and went into his flat and shut the door, and Creed heard the lock go.
He stood in the hallway for a long time.
Son, the old man had called him. Nobody had ever called him that.
He dreamed of something feeding in the dark.
He knew he was dreaming. That was the strange thing. He was lying in the bed in flat fourteen, in the middle, with the edges far away, and he was asleep, and he knew it, and he couldn’t wake up. And while he lay there knowing it, he felt the key.
Far away. Up. Through the floor of the city and the bone of the rib and the dark of the gulf and up, up, past the Mid Ribs, past Gildmark, past Kon’s glass house. Not there anymore. Moving. He felt its beat — slow, huge, a single great pulse and then the long, long pause — and it was shifting, sliding away from where it had been, the way the hearts of the Belly had shifted under him as the capsule climbed. Somebody was carrying it somewhere.
And then he wasn’t feeling the key. He was in it. Or behind it. Or under it. He was looking out through it the way you look out through a window, and what was on the other side was dark, and enormous, and warm.
Not dark like the endless dark. Dark like the inside of a body.
He was in folds. Great soft heavy folds, grey and gold, curving and curving into each other, ridged and furrowed, going on in every direction further than he could see. Warm. Damp. Pulsing, very faintly, very slowly, with the same slow huge beat as the key. A single pulse, and then a long, long pause. Like a heart. Like a sleeper’s heart. Like a dreamer.
He was inside a mind.
And he wasn’t alone in it.
All through the folds, everywhere, there were cables. Thin, pale, branching, running in from far away and down into the grey-gold furrows, sunk deep, the way the anchorage blades were sunk into the rib. Hundreds of them. Thousands. And at the end of every cable, down in every furrow, coiled tight in the warm damp grey, there was something.
Small. Pale. Segmented. Many-legged.
Moving.
He watched one. It was coiled in a fold close to him, so close he could have touched it, and it was the length of his forearm, and it was the color of something that had never seen light. Its segments rippled, slowly, one after another, from one end to the other. Its legs — dozens of them, fine as hairs — were sunk into the grey-gold fold around it, deep, like roots. And where its legs went in, the gold in the fold was dimmer. Faded. Thin. As if it had been drained out.
And the thing was pulsing. In time with the great slow beat. A single ripple of its segments — and then a pause. A ripple — and a pause.
Drinking.
He looked out across the folds and saw them everywhere. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Coiled in every furrow, at the end of every cable, rippling in time, rooting, drinking. And all around them, all through the folds, in every place they’d sunk their roots, the gold was faded. Thin. Grey. A whole vast warm golden mind, dreaming, in the dark, slowly being drained grey by the things living in it.
And from far, far away — from somewhere so deep in the folds that it was barely a sound at all — he heard something.
Humming.
Low. Wandering. Going down, and down, and down, looking for the bottom of something. Not Hesk’s version. Not the Choir’s. Something older. Something the both of them had been trying to remember, all their lives, through a hundred mouths and a thousand years.
The Long Way Down.
Sung by the dreamer. To itself. Alone.
He woke.
He was on the floor. He’d come off the bed in his sleep. He was lying in the drawer-width gap between the bed and the wall with his knees drawn up and his back pressed against the side of the bed so hard it hurt, and his face was wet, and his whole body was soaked in sweat, and every scar on him was glowing so bright it lit the room red.
He lay there and breathed.
Neither of them spoke for a long time.
Then, very quietly, from the clenched heat in his chest, Snake said: “You saw.”
“Yes.”
“Through the key.” A pause. Its voice was still thick, still shaking a little. “It’s tied to him, mule. The key. To the god. To what’s left. That’s why it beats. That’s his heart you feel in it.” Another pause. “And you’ve got your hand on it. Even from here. Even after you gave it away.”
“Those things,” said Creed. “In his head.”
“Yes.”
“Are they the Heads?”
Snake didn’t answer. Not because it didn’t know. He could feel that. It knew. It just didn’t answer. And he understood, slowly, that it wasn’t Snake keeping silent this time. It was the cold behind his eyes. Not pushing — not like in the square. Just there. Present. Watching. A weight on the silence, like a hand laid flat on a table.
“Lamp,” he said.
Nothing.
“Lamp. Are those the Heads?”
The silence went on. Long. Cold. Perfectly still.
“Go back to sleep, Creed,” said Lamp at last. Very softly. “You have three days left. Have them.”
The same words Teo had used. Have them. As if it had been listening at the door.
Creed lay on the floor with his scars glowing red in the dark and his heart hammering and stared up at the underside of the bed. He didn’t go back to sleep.
Outside the window, through the wavy old glass, the white-gold light of the Head poured down out of the god’s eyes, the way it always did, the way it always had, onto the cities of the Ribs and the bowed heads of everyone in them.
He watched it until morning.
He didn’t lower his eyes once.