They put his face on the quota boards.
Every gallery in the Belly had one. A great flat screen on the wall above the foreman’s gantry, showing the line’s numbers in amber and red, hour by hour, so that every mule on every pump could see exactly how far behind they were. Creed had watched the Line C board for nine years. He’d never seen it show anything but numbers.
On the first morning after the refinery fell, every board in every gallery in the Belly went dark at the same moment, at the start of the shift. And then lit again. White. And on it, his face.
He didn’t see it himself. He heard about it. Everybody heard about it. It went through the Belly the way the news of the pipe had gone through it, the way the news of the band in the sign had gone through it, faster than water through a crack. They’ve got his face on the boards.
It was the scan from the Glasshouse. From the decontamination room. They’d taken it while the servants in white masks were washing him, and he hadn’t noticed. His face, wet, his hair plastered flat, his eyes half-shut against the spray. And under it, words. White on black. Crawling.
WANTED BY ORDER OF THE CONCORD OF THE HIGHER RIBS
THE SUMP-NINE ANOMALY (“CREED”)
FORMERLY ANIMATID, KON RECLAMATION
BLEEDER. MURDERER. SABOTEUR.
RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ASSASSINATION OF NATHANIEL KON, SENIOR OF THE THIRD RIB, AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE COSTAL REFINERY
ANY CITIZEN PROVIDING INFORMATION LEADING TO CAPTURE WILL BE GRANTED FULL MID STANDING
ANY CITIZEN SHELTERING THE ANOMALY WILL BE REASSIGNED
Full Mid standing.
A window. Hot water. A bed. Soup from an old man across the hall.
For his face.
“They’ve priced you,” said Snake, when he heard. It sounded amused. It sounded proud. “First time anybody up there’s ever put a number on a mule that wasn’t a debit.”
The boards showed his face for the whole first shift. And under it, after a while, a second notice. Smaller. Easier to miss.
NOTICE: DUE TO DISRUPTION AT THE COSTAL REFINERY, LABOR-ENDURANCE ALLOCATIONS (SOMNOLINE-B) WILL BE REDUCED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. ALL LINES WILL MAINTAIN QUOTA.
The Drip cart came to Line C at hour four with half its usual load.
At hour eight, it came with a quarter.
At hour twelve, it didn’t come at all.
He’d known it would be bad. He hadn’t known how bad.
He felt it from the sacral caverns. Even from there, under the basin, under the bone, a kilometer from the nearest gallery — he felt it. A hundred thousand frosted hearts in the Belly, all at once, missing the thing they’d been fed every four hours their whole lives. Stuttering. Racing. Slowing. A wave of it, going through the Belly like a pressure surge through a pipe.
On the second day, the lines started stopping. Not on purpose. Mules on the pumps just — stopped. Stood at their bars, shaking, sweating, their eyes gone strange. Some of them sat down where they stood. Some of them screamed. Some of them walked off the line, out of the gallery, up onto the catwalks, and stood there, staring at nothing, and the foremen shouted, and lashed, and nothing made them go back.
On the third day, people started dying.
Not many. Not at first. The old ones. The long-timers. The ones who’d been taking three tabs at hour sixteen for twenty years, whose hearts were so crusted with frost that the frost was all that was holding them together. They lay down in their drawers at the end of a shift and didn’t get up for the next one. He felt them go. Little warm glows, going out, one after another, all across the Belly. He didn’t count them.
He counted them.
“It’s not you,” said Snake. Quietly. “It’s them. They did this. They put it in them. All you did was stop them putting in more.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He didn’t answer.
“It will pass,” said Lamp. Faint, still. Worn thin, still, the way it had been since the crawlway. “For those who survive the first days. The frost will thin. Their blood will begin to wake.” A pause. “As it did in the Discarded. Slowly.”
“And the ones who don’t survive the first days?”
Lamp didn’t answer.
On the fourth day, he went to the galleries.
He went alone. Sabine argued. Wick argued — loudly, for a long time, with his hands — and then gave up and just sat by the rope at the top of the first cavern with his arms around his knees, waiting, the way he’d waited at the top of the stairs on the refinery dock.
He went up through the drainage cuts under the basin and into the Belly at Lumbar Two, where Sabine had run her blasting crew for nineteen years. It was the gallery furthest from Sump-Nine, the one least likely to have Gilt on it — if there were any Gilt left in the Belly at all, which, from what the scavengers said, there weren’t many. Kon’s company had nobody to pay it now. Half had gone up the cables. Half had gone to whoever was buying.
The gallery was quiet.
Not stopped. The pumps were still going — he could hear them, thud, hiss, the rhythm of the line. But slow. Ragged. Out of time with each other. And the people at them —
He stood at the edge of the gallery floor in the shadow of a hopper and looked at them.
Forty mules on a line meant for sixty. Grey-faced. Shaking. Some of them working, slow, their arms trembling on the bars. Some of them sitting against the pump housings with their heads in their hands. One of them, a young woman, lying on her side on the gallery floor, curled up, her whole body shaking so hard her teeth rattled, and nobody near her, because nobody near her could stand up.
And all of them — every heart, every one — frosted. And the frost was wrong. Not a crust, not a rime. Breaking up. Cracking. Pieces of it coming loose and floating in the blood like ice in a melting pipe, and the blood underneath it, the warm blood that had been asleep their whole lives, starting to move — and not knowing how. Thrashing. Like a man waking up from a long sleep in a strange place, with no idea where he was.
He walked out onto the gallery floor.
They saw him. Some of them. The ones who could still lift their heads. He watched them see his bare wrist. The sword on his back. His face.
His face, from the boards.
Nobody moved for a long moment. Then one of the men on the pumps — big, grey, a long-timer, nearly blue with marrow-skin, shaking so hard he could barely hold himself up on the bar — said, hoarsely, “You.”
“Me,” said Creed.
“You did this.”
“Yes.”
The man stared at him. His eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot, wet. His whole body was shaking.
“It hurts,” the man said. His voice cracked in half. “It hurts. Make it stop.”
Creed walked across the gallery floor to the young woman lying on her side and knelt down beside her.
He cut his palm on the edge of the sword. He laid his bleeding hand on the back of her neck, the way he’d done for Wick, in the third cave. And he reached in.
Not to turn spores. To turn frost.
It was harder. Much harder. The spores had been foreign — something from outside, rooted in her lungs, that her blood could learn to burn. The frost was hers. It had been in her blood since before she could count. It had grown with her. It was part of how her blood knew how to be. Pulling it out was like pulling marrow out of bone.
So he didn’t pull it out.
He did what he’d done in the crawlway, cooling Wick. And what he’d done in the third cave, burning the spores. And what Hesk had done at the wall, his first week on the line. He went beside her blood. Next to it. And showed it. Not how to burn the frost. How to wake up. How to move, under the cracking ice, without thrashing. How to find a rhythm. How to let the pick fall.
Your arms are for aiming. Bone does the hitting.
Her blood flinched. Fought him. Thrashed. And then — slowly, the way a new crew finds the line — began to follow.
The shaking slowed. Her teeth stopped rattling. Her breath, which had been coming in short sharp gasps, lengthened. She opened her eyes. They were bloodshot, and wet, and terrified, and she looked up at him, and her heart under his hand, under the frost, was beating — steadily. Warm. Awake. Just a little. Just around the edges. Like the frost-threads that had spread from the greyling’s bite in his arm, before the needle, before everything.
“Oh,” she said. Very quietly. As if she’d just been told something she’d always known.
He took his hand away.
He was dizzy. He’d known he would be. It cost more than the spores. More than the cooling. He felt it come out of him — not the hunger, not the cold, but something else, from the middle of him, from the still place where the gold thread was. A little of that. A little of the gold.
When he looked up, the gallery was watching him.
All of them. Forty grey shaking faces. The ones on the pumps had stopped pumping. The ones against the housings had lifted their heads. The big long-timer on the bar was staring at him with his mouth open.
“Next,” said Creed.
They came by twos at first.
Twos and threes. Down through the old drainage cuts under the pelvic basin, or out through the Breach — which had no warden now, and no Gilt, and stood open, its rusted gate jammed half-way along its track where somebody had hauled the lever and then broken it. They came with nothing. In their shift clothes. Shaking. Withdrawal-sick, half of them, and Bloom-sick, the ones who’d come through the Breach without masks. They came because somebody on their line had told them. Because somebody had seen the man from the boards in Lumbar Two, kneeling on the gallery floor with his hand on a woman’s neck. Because somebody had seen the band in the sign at Sump-Nine.
They came with their bands on.
And at the bottom of the rope, in the first cavern, in the green fungus light, the first thing they saw was Sabine Kettle. Standing with her arms folded across her rust-colored blasting vest. And beside her, on a bone table, a crimping tool. The heavy kind. For copper det-cap tails.
“Wrist,” she’d say.
And they’d hold it out. And she’d put the jaws of the crimper over the band, and squeeze, with her huge blasting-crew arms, and the steel would crumple. And she’d draw it off over their hand.
And then she’d point.
At the pit.
They’d dug it in the middle of the first cavern on the sixth day. Not deep. A shallow round hollow in the bone of the floor, the width of a cage lift, where the dripping water had worn a dip over a thousand years. Somebody had thrown the first band into it — one of the four from Line D, Creed thought, though nobody remembered for sure — and then somebody else had, and then it was just where the bands went.
They’d throw their band in. It would land on the others with a little hollow clack.
By the ninth day, the pit was half full.
Creed stood at the edge of it, on the ninth evening, and looked down at it. Hundreds of them. Grey steel, scuffed, dead, their little displays dark. Crumpled. Cracked. Piled on each other in the shallow hollow in the green light. Like the reissue bin at the end of Line C.
But nobody was going to reissue these.
“Nine hundred and eleven,” said Tamsin Rook, beside him, reading off a slate she’d taken from the dock office. She kept the count. She liked gauges. “Since the refinery. On top of the six hundred we had.” She tapped the slate. “Eighty-four today. Ninety-one yesterday. The number’s going up.”
“How many can we feed?”
Tamsin looked at the slate for a long time.
“Not this many,” she said. “Not for long. The grey-caps grow fast, but not that fast. We’ve got people farming every cavern down to the fourth. We’ve got scavengers on the Breach day and night. But —“ She shook her head. “Not this many. Not if it keeps going.”
“It’ll keep going,” said Creed.
“I know.” She looked at him. “So what do we do?”
He looked at the pit of bands.
“We take,” he said. “From them. From the Ribs. The way they took from us.” He thought about the refinery’s clean lines, still running up the spine, carrying the last of the Catalyst. About the supply capsules going up and down the freight cable from the Belly. About the crates on the lower dock that nobody ever checked because nothing from the Belly was worth checking. “Ollo knows the codes. You know the cables. Sabine knows how to open things.” He paused. “We take.”
Tamsin was quiet for a long moment.
“That’s a war,” she said.
“It already was,” said Creed. “We just didn’t know we were in it.”
He asked Sabine for the names.
He’d been meaning to. Since the crawlway. Since the pressing floor. He’d been meaning to, and there’d been the Belly, and the withdrawal, and the galleries, and Lumbar Two and Lumbar Three and Lumbar Five, kneeling on gallery floors with his hand on necks, again and again, until he couldn’t stand. And every time he lay down in the third cave at the end of a day, empty, hollowed, with the gold thread in the middle of him burning low, he thought: I never asked.
So on the eleventh day he asked.
She knew them all. Of course she did. She’d looked at every one of the forty-one head to boots, looking for the leak. She’d turned away eleven and kept forty-one and she knew every name.
The two who’d fallen in the crawlway: Pell Ossary and Marn Tuve. Both from Sump-Six. Both put out the gate the same year, for the same foreman’s mistake.
The eight on the pressing floor. She said each name slowly, and he repeated it back, and she nodded.
And the woman with the marrow saw.
“Brisa Hale,” said Sabine. “Lumbar Five. Eight months in the Void. Her sister was on the line next to her when the saw jammed. Foreman said clear it hot.” Sabine’s burned face gave nothing away. “Saw went through her sister’s leg. Sister bled out on the floor. Brisa went for the foreman with the saw. Didn’t get him. Got reassigned instead.” She was quiet a moment. “She never put it down. Not once, in eight months. Slept with it.”
Creed thought about the dull, dead saw swinging into the back of the Gilt’s knee on the anchorage platform. Eight months of rage in it.
I’ve been going to ask, he thought. I was going to ask her.
He went to the wall of the first cavern. A smooth stretch of bone, near the pit, between two fungus beds. And with the point of the sword — which would cut anything, which had never once needed sharpening — he began to carve.
Not sigils. Letters. The plain blocky letters of a ration chit, the only letters most of the Belly could read.
JORY THANE. SUMP-FOUR. 22-H.
He stood back. Looked at it.
Then, under it: HESK. LINE C. NO. 2 PUMP. 31 YEARS.
He didn’t know her other name. He’d never asked that, either.
Then: PELL OSSARY. MARN TUVE. And the eight from the pressing floor. And: BRISA HALE. LUMBAR FIVE.
And then he stood there with the sword in his hand and the point resting on the bone, and didn’t know what to carve next. There were thirteen more couriers. Fourteen, with Jory. He didn’t know their names. There were the people who’d died in the galleries on the third day, in their drawers. He didn’t know theirs. There was the woman who’d gone over the catwalk rail at Sump-Nine with a lance through her chest. There were the two who’d died under his hands in the back caves, with the grey gone too deep.
There were the fourteen dead Vessels in the pit under the Hollow, with the mites.
There was everybody who’d ever been dropped in the reissue bin.
He stood there a long time.
Somebody came up beside him. Garrow Fisk. The old warden, leaning on a new lance — a pick-haft, really, with a sharpened bolt lashed to the end — with his clean-lunged rasp of a breath.
He looked at the wall.
Then he took the sword out of Creed’s hand. Gently. The way you’d take a tool from a man who’d been working too long. Creed let him. And the old man set the point against the bone, below Brisa Hale, and began to carve, slowly, in shaky blocky letters.
DUNMORE. WARDEN. 14 YEARS ON THE GATE.
And under it: ALIS FISK. SUMP-NINE. LINE A.
He stopped. His hand on the hilt was shaking.
“My wife,” he said. “Reassigned. Year four-oh-six. Before I took the gate.” He was quiet for a moment. “I let them all out, after. Nine years. Every allocation. I never let one back in. Till you. I used to think, every time I pulled that lever —“ He stopped again. Swallowed. “Well.”
He gave the sword back.
The next morning, there were more names on the wall. Carved with knives, with pick-points, with the sharpened edges of crumpled bands from the pit. Dozens. In the blocky letters of ration chits. Names, and lines, and years.
By the end of the week, the wall was covered. And they’d started on the next one.
The scavengers brought a packet from the Breach.
Oilcloth. Tied with wire. Left at the foot of the jammed gate, the way the scavengers said they sometimes found things there now — food, once; a crate of masks; a box of ration tins with the labels steamed off — left by somebody who didn’t want to be seen leaving them. This one had a name scratched on the oilcloth with a nail.
CREED.
Inside, there were papers. Maps. Real maps, printed, of the Mid Ribs. Anchorage diagrams. Cable schedules. The freight timetable for every capsule going up and down from the Belly for the next month. A list of every Gilt post on every rib below the Fifth, with numbers. And at the bottom of the packet, folded small, a note. In the same fast hand, with the same mistakes, as the message on Teo’s wall.
STOPPED FEEDING HIM FROM THE COUNTERS. GROWING GREY CAPS ON THE WINDOWSILL. A SCAVENGER SOLD ME SPORE STOCK.
DAY 9 HE SAID MY NAME. FIRST TIME IN TWO YEARS.
DAY 11 HE ASKED WHERE MY MOTHER WAS. I HAD TO TELL HIM. HE CRIED. HE REMEMBERED HER.
I DONT KNOW WHAT YOU ARE.
I DONT CARE.
— D.F.
Creed read it three times.
Then he folded it and put it in the inside pocket of his coat, next to the key.
“Ha,” said Snake. Softly. Not mocking at all. “A foreman.”
“A son,” said Lamp.
Neither of them said anything else.
“Who do you talk to?” said Wick.
They were sitting by the pit of bands, late, in what passed for night in the sacrum, when the fungus dimmed a little and the fires burned low and most of the two thousand people in the caverns now were sleeping, curled on pallets in every alcove and ledge, in the drawer-sized spaces they’d made for themselves without anybody telling them to. Wick had his knees drawn up, his arms around them, the way he always sat. His eyes were on the pit.
“What?”
“You talk to somebody.” Wick still wasn’t looking at him. “Not us. Not out loud, mostly. But sometimes out loud. You did it in the deep cave, with Sabine. I already am. You did it on the pressing floor. You said Lamp.” He was quiet a moment. “And sometimes when you’re healing somebody, your lips move, and you’re not talking to them.” He looked up, finally. “Who do you talk to, Creed?”
Creed looked at him.
At his thin face, shaved head, chewed thumbnail. Grey with the fungus light. His heart, warm, beating, the frost on it thinner than it had been in the stack — thinner every day, since he’d started eating grey-caps. Quick and light and frightened, the way it always was.
And he thought about telling him.
About the endless dark. The white sphere and the coiling fire. The two hands, pulling. The gold thread nobody would talk about. Lamp’s I see and Lamp’s I do not know, and Lamp’s cold locking his arm in the air on the pressing floor. Snake’s look at all that blue. The things in the god’s head that Snake remembered and Lamp wouldn’t let it say.
He thought about Wick’s face on the pressing floor, when he’d flinched.
“Tell him,” said Snake. Unexpectedly. “Go on. He’s earned it.”
“Not yet,” said Lamp. Faint. Firm. “He is not ready. You are not ready.”
And for once, Creed thought Lamp might be right. Not about Wick. About himself.
“Later,” he said.
Wick looked at him for a long time.
“Everything’s later,” he said. But he didn’t say it the way he’d said it in the deep cave, in the crawlway, at the bottom of the stair. Angry. Scared. He said it quietly. Like a man setting something down in a drawer to come back to. “Okay. Later.”
He looked back at the pit.
“I’m going to hold you to it,” he said. “You know that. Whenever later is. I’m going to be right there, being terrified, holding you to it.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
They sat by the pit of bands for a while longer, not talking. Then Wick unfolded himself and stood up, and stretched, and his joints cracked.
“You should sleep,” he said. “In a bed. If we had one.”
“I can do floors.”
“I know you can do floors,” said Wick. “Everybody can do floors. That’s the problem.”
He went off to his pallet. Creed sat by the pit alone.
The great cavern was the fourth one down. The biggest. A vault of bone so high the fungus-light didn’t reach the top of it, where the god’s sacrum was hollowest, where the great foramina opened in the walls like the mouths of cage-lift shafts and the cool air came up from the god’s roots, steady, smelling of stone and water.
On the fifteenth day, Sabine put the word out that Creed would be there, at the end of the shift that nobody worked anymore.
And they came.
He stood on a ledge of bone at one end of the cavern, a few meters up, where somebody had cut steps into the wall, and watched them come. Down the passages from the upper caverns. In from the side-caves. Up from the farms on the lower levels. Grey. Thin. Bandless. Some still shaking with the last of the withdrawal. Some still coughing with the last of the Bloom. Some carrying the ones who couldn’t walk yet. They filled the floor of the great cavern and kept coming, and filled the ledges, and the passages, and stood in the mouths of the foramina with the cool air at their backs.
Two thousand. More. He stopped counting. He’d learned, these last two weeks, that he could stop counting. That it didn’t stop being true if he stopped.
Sabine stood at the bottom of the steps with her arms folded. Tamsin beside her with her slate. Ollo, against the wall, his one arm around his knees. Fisk, leaning on his pick-haft lance. And Wick, at the very front, right at the foot of the ledge, looking up at him with his white face and his chewed thumbnail. Terrified. Right there.
The cavern went quiet.
He hadn’t prepared anything. He didn’t know how. He’d never in his life spoken to more than one person at a time, except on the catwalk, when he’d told them to write down the names. He stood on the ledge in his old coat over the crew-jacket that said VESS. A. inside the collar, with the sword on his back and the key against his ribs, beating, and looked out at two thousand faces in the green light.
“Say something,” said Snake.
“Say what is true,” said Lamp.
“I’m not going to tell you it’ll be safe,” said Creed.
His voice was hoarse. A gallery voice. It carried. In the great cavern, with the god’s breath coming up through the foramina, it carried all the way to the back.
“It won’t be. They’ve got my face on every board in the Belly. They’ve got Wardens. They’ve got the Gilt, or whatever’s left of them, and whoever bought the rest. They’ve got the light. They’ve got the cables, and the Ribs, and everything above us.” He paused. “And they’ve got the Drip, still. Some. In the Ribs. Running in their channels. In their lights.” He looked at the faces. “They’ll come for us. Not today. But they’ll come.”
Nobody moved.
“I’m not going to tell you what to do,” he said. “I’ve had people telling me what to do my whole life. Foremen. Contracts. Bands. Eyes down.” He touched his bare wrist. “I’m done with it. I’m not going to do it to you.”
He looked up.
Not at them. Past them. Up, at the dark of the cavern roof, where the fungus-light didn’t reach. Up through the bone of the sacrum, and the basin, and the Belly, and the Ribs, and the neck. Up at what he couldn’t see from here, and didn’t need to.
“I’m going up,” he said.
“Not to the Ribs. Not to be a Mid. Not to be invited. Up. To the top. To the thing at the top of the god that’s been putting the frost in your blood since before you could count.” He kept his eyes on the dark above. “There’s something up there. In the Skull. In the god’s head. It’s been drinking him for a thousand years, and it’s been keeping us asleep so we’d never look up and see it doing it. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen what it sends down. I’ve felt what it puts in you.” He breathed in. “I’m going to go and find it. And I’m going to pull it out of his head. And I’m going to give him back his blood. And you yours.”
He lowered his eyes. Back to the cavern. To the two thousand faces.
“That’s all I’ve got,” he said. “That’s the whole plan. It’s not much.” He was quiet a moment. “I’m going up. If you come, come because you want to look at it too. Not because I asked. I’m not asking.”
The cavern was silent.
So silent he could hear the drip of water, somewhere, into a tin. The god’s breath coming up through the foramina. The faint crackle of a fungus-stalk fire.
Two thousand faces looking at him.
And then, at the front, at the foot of the ledge, Wick Moraine tipped his head back.
He did it slowly. The way the man at the back of the crowd on the catwalk at Sump-Nine had done it, when Creed went down the stairs. Like it hurt. Like his neck didn’t know how. Like he’d been told his whole life that it was theft, and some part of him still believed it.
He tipped his head back, and looked up. At the dark of the cavern roof. At nothing. At everything above it.
And beside him, Sabine Kettle uncrossed her arms, and tipped her burned head back, and looked up.
And Tamsin, with her slate.
And Ollo, against the wall, his one arm still around his knees.
And Fisk.
And then the woman who’d brought Creed the bowl of grey-caps in the third cave. And the big long-timer from Lumbar Two who’d said you did this. And the young woman who’d been lying curled on the gallery floor, shaking. And the four from Line D. And the dozens, and the hundreds, one after another, a slow wave going back through the great cavern from the front to the back, every head tipping back, every face turning up —
Two thousand people, in the hollow bone at the bottom of a dead god, looking up.
Nobody had told them to.
Creed stood on the ledge and looked at them looking up, and his face was wet, and he didn’t wipe it.
And then somebody started to hum.
It came from the mouth of one of the foramina, at the back of the cavern. Low. Wandering. Going down, and down, and down, looking for the bottom of something.
He knew it.
Everyone in the Belly knew it, he’d learn later. Not the tune itself. The shape of it. Somebody’s mother had hummed something like it. Somebody’s grandmother. Somebody on the next pump, for thirty-one years. Bits of it, wrong-noted, smeared, passed through a hundred mouths in a thousand years of dark, and lost, and kept anyway.
But this wasn’t bits. This was the whole of it. Every note in its right place. The way he’d heard it in the dream, deep in the god’s folds, sung by the dreamer to itself.
He looked toward the foramen.
A woman was standing in its mouth, with the cool air of the god’s roots at her back. Narrow-shouldered. In a grey robe gone the color of old ash. Her face was bare — no wrappings, no mask — a young face, younger than he’d thought, with steady grey eyes. Her palms were bandaged, the bandages dark. And behind her, in the mouth of the foramen, in the shadows, ten or twelve others. Grey robes. Bandaged hands. And a thin young man, nineteen or twenty, with Bloom-grey cheekbones, who’d sat asleep on a stair once, on a double, and been tied up with rubber strips instead of killed.
Cantor Mirelle sang the Long Way Down.
All of it. Not humming, now — singing, the words, the old words in the old language he didn’t know, low and clear, and her voice went up into the great cavern and came back down off the high dark roof and filled it. And behind her, the remnant of the Hollow Choir took it up. Humming under her. Rising and falling. The way it had been meant to be sung, before it was ever stolen, by people who’d stood at the top of the god with gold in their veins and sung their dead down into his bone so he’d take them back.
Two thousand people, looking up, listened.
And somewhere in the middle of the cavern, an old woman who’d come down the rope on the tenth day, from Sump-Six, started to hum along. And then somebody near her. And somebody near them. Not all the right notes. Not most of them. But the shape of it. The shape they’d always known.
Creed stood on the ledge and listened, and for the first time in his life, he heard the whole of Hesk’s tune.
He learned it. Every note. He’d never forget it again.
When it was done, the Cantor stood in the mouth of the foramen with her bandaged hands at her sides and looked across the whole of the great cavern at him. Through two thousand upturned faces.
“You’ll need someone who knows the songs,” she said. Her voice carried, the way his did. “Up there. Where you’re going. There’ll be doors that open for songs. And dead to sing down.” She bowed. Low. The way she’d bowed over the slab when he’d told her Hesk was dead. “We’ll come. If you’ll have us.”
Behind his eyes, Lamp was quiet. In his chest, Snake was quiet. Both of them. Listening.
And in the middle of him, in the still place where neither of them pulled, the gold thread burned. Steady. Bright. Brighter than it had been on the roof of Block Nine. Brighter than it had been when he picked up the key.
Not flaring. Not straining.
Just burning. Like a lamp in a window. Like a light left on for somebody coming home.
“Yes,” said Creed. “Come.”
Far above the Belly, above the broken refinery and the flickering Ribs, above the neck and the dam at the base of the god’s skull, there is a long hall that no one from below has ever seen.
It is white. It is very old. Its walls curve up into the dark of the cranial vault, and they are lined — from the floor to as high as there is any light to see — with faces.
Thousands of them. Each in its own small niche, set into the white wall like a picture in a frame. Human faces. Preserved. Pale and smooth and still, their eyes closed. Men and women. Old and young. Some with lines at the corners of their eyes from smiling. Some with scars. All of them very beautiful, in the way that kept things are beautiful.
In one niche, near the bottom of the wall, low down, there is a face with silver-white hair swept back and a smooth expensive look about it, and fine faint traceries under the skin of its jaw, dark now. Its eyes are closed. It is very new. It was placed there this morning. Whatever came down the shaft at the Costal Refinery to collect it was very quick, and very quiet, and did not trouble anyone with its passage.
Seventeen years of candidacy. A white robe. A petition.
Ascended.
In the long white hall, in the silence, a sound.
A single word, coming down a thread from somewhere far away — from a face that had stood a meter from a man in a vault, and looked at him, and not taken the key. Passing from niche to niche. From face to face. Down the whole length of the hall, and up its walls, to the dark at the top of the vault, the way a pressure-wave goes through a pipe.
Noted.
And as it passes, the faces open their eyes.
All of them. At once. Thousands of white shell-eyes, without pupils, without irises, opening in their niches up and down the endless white walls of the Gallery of the Skull. And turning. Every one. In the same direction. Down. Through the white floor, through the bone, through the dam and the neck and the Ribs and the broken refinery. Down to the Belly.
Looking.
And far beneath them — far, far beneath, deeper than the Gallery, deeper than the folds where the pale things lie coiled at the ends of their cables, rippling, rooted, drinking — somewhere at the very bottom of the god’s dreaming mind, in the place where a slow enormous heart beats once and then waits a long, long time before it remembers to beat again —
Something that has been humming to itself, alone, for a thousand years, falls quiet.
Listens.
And very faintly — so faintly that not one of the thousand open eyes in the Gallery notices — begins to hum again.
Not alone, this time.
Answering.
END OF BOOK ONE
THE CATALYST AWAKENING