The stair went up four hundred and twelve steps from the iron landing at the top of the Collar to the first place wide enough to stop, and Creed counted every one of them.
He didn’t mean to. He’d stopped counting at the Neck Gate. He’d looked up at the jaw for as long as he wanted, and he hadn’t counted, and he’d stepped onto the first stair thinking: that’s done, that’s over, I don’t have to count anymore. And by the tenth step he was counting again. Not seconds. Steps. His feet did it. His body did it. Nine years of Line C had put a counter in him somewhere under the heart, and it didn’t care what he’d decided at the top of the Collar.
Four hundred and twelve.
The steps were bone. Cut into the inside wall of the neck, broad as a tram-car is long, worn into a dip in the middle by feet. Not recent feet. Old ones. A thousand years of them, maybe more. The stair went around the inside of the hollow tower of the neck in a long, slow spiral, rising, with nothing on the open side but air and, far below, the dark well of the Collar getting smaller.
And above — always above — the light.
It came down the inside of the neck from the open jaw at the top in a long soft shaft. Grey and gold. Old. It fell across the stair in bands as the spiral turned, so that they climbed out of shadow into light and back into shadow and back into light, over and over, like walking past the windows of a long dark corridor. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t cold. It was just light. It didn’t look at you.
He’d waited for it to look at him. For the first hundred steps, every time they came out of shadow into a band of it, he’d felt his shoulders go tight, waiting for the press of the scanner white, the reaching cold.
It didn’t come.
“It does not see bone,” said Lamp. Very quietly. In his blood. “I told you. We are inside the bone. We are walking on bone. Above us is bone. Below us is bone. To it, we are part of the god.”
“Background.”
“Yes.”
“Like the sword.”
“Like the sword. Like the Key.” A pause. “Like the box Lund lay in.”
At the four hundred and twelfth step the stair came out onto a landing.
It was broad. Fifty meters long, maybe, and twenty deep, cut back into the wall of the neck. And at the back of it, built into the bone — grown into the bone, he saw as they came closer, the way the plug of the Neck Gate had been grown — were buildings.
Ruins. Old ones. Walls of pale stone that wasn’t stone, fitted and fused, with doorways that went back into the dark of the vertebra itself. And on top of the old walls, newer ones. Iron. Black. Riveted. Bolted onto the old stone with heavy brackets, the way the Concord had bolted its Lumens onto the ribs. Gun-ports in the iron, empty. Rust running down from the bolts in long orange stains.
And above the iron, on the face of the oldest wall, carvings.
Mirelle saw them first. She went across the landing with her slate under her arm and her bound hands at her sides and stopped in front of them and didn’t move for a long time.
Creed went and stood beside her.
People. Carved into the bone. Rows of them. Small figures, each the length of a hand, in a long line that went along the wall from left to right and up — climbing. A stair. A carved stair, going up the carved wall, and the small carved people on it, one after another, with their faces lifted. Some of them carried things. Bundles. Tools. A long thin shape that could have been a blade. At the top right of the carving, at the end of the line, a shape he’d seen before. A dome. With a row of points across the bottom of it.
The Skull. The jaw. The teeth.
The little carved people were climbing toward it.
Mirelle lifted one bound hand and pointed at a line of script carved under the procession. Old script. Curls. Hooks. Branches.
“The long way up,” she said. In her thread of a voice. It cracked on up.
“They built this.” Creed looked along the landing at the old pale walls under the black iron. “The Wrights. This stair. They built it.”
Mirelle nodded slowly.
“Before the Heads,” she whispered. “They climbed. To the Skull. They went up to the top of the god before anyone else.” She touched the carved procession, very lightly, with the tip of her wrapped finger. “And then the Heads came. And bolted iron on top.”
“Like everything,” said Snake. From the black arm. Low. “They find something somebody else made, and they bolt iron on top, and call it theirs.”
Sixty-one people slept on the landing of the Seventh Stair that night.
Creed. Wick. Ollo. Dorne and Brann. Ferrin, with his right sleeve pinned up and his left arm in a sling Hedda Dorne had made him wear for the climb, swearing at it. Mirelle. Tobin Rell and twelve of Haske’s Lancers, their kites folded, their silver scale dull in the grey-gold light. And forty from the caverns and the Shelf — long-time Discarded, people who’d stopped taking the tab years ago or never had it to take, people with almost no frost left in their blood. People a halo would slow but not freeze. Sabine had picked them herself.
Sabine wasn’t with them. Sabine was at the Collar, with six hundred people and the turned Gilt and Cassia Lund in a locked room and Tamsin on the comm-net with her leg in a splint. When you find the top, she’d said, send for me. I’ll bring everybody. She’d held Creed’s eyes, his ember eyes, with her flat grey ones. Don’t go in without us.
He’d said he wouldn’t.
They didn’t light fires. There was nothing to burn but the clothes on their backs, and they’d need those. The light from above came down through the open neck in its soft shaft and lay across the landing in a broad pale band, and people lay down in the shadow at the edge of it, against the old walls, wrapped in blankets, and slept the way Line C slept — instantly, completely, like a hand switching off.
Creed didn’t sleep.
He sat at the edge of the landing with his legs over the drop and his back to the camp and looked down.
The neck went down below him in its long spiral, the stair winding around the inside wall, around and down and around, to the well of the Collar, which from here was a small round grey shape like the bottom of a cup. He could see lamps down there. Tiny. Sabine’s people. And through the Collar, far below, through the gun-ports on the south face, if he leaned out — nothing. Just the dark of the god’s body. The ribs, the Belly, the Flats, Hesk’s Rest, Matthis’s lamp. All of it too far down to see.
He looked at his left arm.
He’d taken off the jacket. It was too warm on the stair. He’d rolled the sleeves of his shirt and sat with his arms on his knees, and the black forearm lay there in the grey-gold light, glossy, the red script in it glowing faint. Curls. Hooks. Branches splitting into three. The seat-mark, twice. The three sigils that matched the Key.
A key cut to fit a lock.
He flexed the fingers. The spurs on the knuckles lifted. The script on the forearm brightened very slightly with the movement, like coals when you stir them.
“You’re awake,” said Snake. From the arm. Lazily.
“So are you.”
“I’m always awake. Sleeping’s for things that get tired.” A pause. “You should sleep, mule. Long way up.”
“I know.”
He didn’t sleep.
Behind him, after a while, someone got up.
He felt the heart before he heard the feet. Thin, high, fast. Always fast. The fastest heart he knew. It came across the landing from the shadow by the old wall, slowly, stepping around the sleepers, and stopped behind him. Stood there.
“Can’t sleep either,” said Wick.
“No.”
Wick sat down beside him on the edge. Not close. A meter away. He let his legs hang over the drop, and looked down, and went white, and pulled them back up and sat cross-legged instead.
“Long way,” he said.
“Yeah.”
They sat.
Wick had the comm-set in his lap. He was turning the dial, slowly, back and forth, the way he did when he was thinking. Little clicks. The net was mostly silent. Tamsin, at the Collar, checking in every hour. Collar, quiet. Stair? And Wick clicking back. Stair, quiet.
At the end of the second watch, a different voice came through. Faint. Far. A relay of a relay of a relay. A woman’s voice, calm, cold, tired.
“Clock Hall to Hesk’s Rest net. Fifty.”
That was all.
Wick looked at the set for a long time.
“She sends it every time one stops,” he said. “Quill. Every time. Just the number. Fifty-one, yesterday. Now fifty.” He turned the dial. Click. “I asked her once. Why she sends it. She said, the Senior wanted to hear what it sounded like. Someone should hear.” He swallowed. The bandage on his throat moved. “So I listen.”
Creed nodded.
They sat.
The light came down the neck. Grey and gold. Above them, very far up, at the top of the spiral, at the top of the tower of bone, the jaw hung open. The teeth. Tower-sized. Some of them broken. He looked up at it. He couldn’t stop looking up at it. He’d spent his whole life looking up for one second a day, and now he couldn’t stop.
“Creed,” said Wick.
“Yeah.”
A long silence. Wick’s heart going fast. Faster. Creed could feel it climbing, the way it climbed in the crawlway, the way it climbed before every fight, every drop, every time Wick had to do something that frightened him — which was everything. Wick’s heart going up and up like a man climbing a stair.
“I need to tell you something,” said Wick. “About the dock.”
Creed didn’t move.
“You asked,” said Wick. “In the bed. On the Eighth. After. You asked what happened. And I said you stopped breathing and then you started again. And you let it go.” He wasn’t looking at Creed. He was looking straight ahead, at the far wall of the neck, at the stair spiraling up it. “You let it go because of this.” His hand went to the bandage on his throat. “I know you did. I could see it. You looked at the bandage and you let it go.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not fair,” said Wick. “To you.” He swallowed again. “Ollo said don’t. On the dock. He shook his head. And I didn’t. I didn’t tell you. And Sabine didn’t, and Ferrin didn’t, and Mirelle didn’t, and Dorne said she didn’t see anything —” A breath. “— and she did. She saw it. We all saw it. And we all just — we all just carried it. Up the line. Up to Coronet. Through the Hall. Up the Collar. All of us. Carrying the same thing and not saying.”
He stopped.
“And tomorrow we go up there,” said Wick. He tipped his head back. Looked up. At the jaw. “Into that. And I don’t know if we come back down. And I don’t want to go up there with it still — still sitting in my chest. Not said.” His voice cracked. “So I’m saying it.”
Creed looked at him.
“Okay,” he said.
Wick told him.
He told it the way he told everything. Too fast, then too slow. Stopping. Starting again. His hands moving. His voice going up when he was scared and cracking when it went up. He told it with his eyes on the far wall of the neck and his hands turning the comm-set over and over in his lap.
He told about the grey. Coming up Creed’s arms. Past the elbows. The tarp smoking. Ollo holding on with his hand blistering.
He told about Mirelle singing the verse with her hands on Creed’s chest and the mark lighting white, and the voice coming out of Creed’s mouth that wasn’t Creed’s — stop singing that — and Mirelle stopping.
He told about Creed’s heart stopping. About Ollo’s face changing.
And then he stopped for a long time.
“The light came out of you,” he said. Very quietly. “Out of the mark. On your chest. I was right there. I had my hands out, I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, and it came up between my hands. Out of your skin. Cold. So cold my hands went numb. Like a — like a bead of light on a thread. Silver. And then it got bigger. Fist. Head.” He lifted his hands from the comm-set, held them apart, a head’s width. They were shaking. “A ball of light. White. But not like the Wardens. Not that white. Soft. Like the inside of a shell. Turning. Slowly. Like a drop of water turns when it falls.”
Creed sat very still.
“And it looked at us,” said Wick. “I know that sounds — I know. But it did. It didn’t have eyes. It didn’t have anything. But it turned, and it looked at Ollo, and at me, and at Mirelle, and at Sabine, and Ferrin, and Dorne. One at a time. And I felt it look at me.” His hands came down. “Like standing in a window at night with the lamp on. Like you’re the only lit thing in the dark and something outside can see you and you can’t see it.”
“Lamp,” thought Creed.
Silence. In his blood. The thin cold, very still.
“And then the fire came,” said Wick.
He told it. The fire coming out of Creed’s mouth and eyes and spurs and scars. Gathering. Twisting. A snake. A snake made of fire, as long as the courier car, winding around Creed’s body on the tarp, its head as long as Wick’s arm, with Creed’s eyes in it. Ember. With the dark point.
“It was so hot I fell over,” said Wick. “I was on my back. On the iron. And it — it opened its mouth, Creed. It talked. Out loud. In the voice that had come out of you. It said, Get back in him.” He swallowed. “To the light. The ball. It said, get back in him, you coward, he’s dying, he needs you.”
“Snake,” thought Creed.
“Here,” said Snake. In the black arm. Very low. Not lazy now. “I said that. Yeah.”
“And the light talked back,” said Wick. “It had a voice like — like a glass when you ring it with your nail. Thin. And it was scared, Creed. It was so scared. It said, you did this. To the snake. It said, you went into his bones. It said if it went back in, they’d be fighting forever, in every — every vein, it said, a war in every vessel, it said that’s not living, that’s being a battlefield.”
His voice was going. He stopped. Breathed. Started again.
“And then the snake bit it.”
He told about the bite. The flare. The light going blinding and the snake’s head hitting it like a wall and steam coming off in a roar. The scar on the snake’s face, after. A dead black patch, like cinder. The snake shouting. You could have stopped me, you couldn’t help him, you jammed the sword and got the old man killed. The light shouting back. I had nothing. The gold was mine. The only warm thing I ever had. You burned it. And then the light screaming I DID NOT KNOW HOW — and the frost exploding out across the dock and over Wick, over his face, his hair, so he was lying in a shell of white with his breath crackling.
“I thought I was going to die,” said Wick. “On the iron. Between them. I thought, this is it, this is how it goes, I’m going to freeze on one side and cook on the other. I thought —” He laughed. It came out cracked and wrong. “I thought, at least I’ll be next to him.”
Creed couldn’t say anything.
“Ferrin was saying get between them,” said Wick. “Over and over. Somebody get between them. And nobody could. You couldn’t. You’d die. You’d die in half a second.” He stopped.
And then he said: “Ollo was there.”
Wick told him about Ollo.
He told it slower than anything else. Every word, like he was laying it down on the bone of the landing one at a time and making sure it was straight.
Ollo had never let go. That was the first thing. Through all of it. The fire and the frost. The snake’s coils around Creed’s legs and waist and chest, the light hanging over his heart. Ollo was between them. On his knees beside the tarp. One-armed. His burned hand on Creed’s wrist. One side of his face red like a sunburn, the other side raw and white with frost. His apron smoking on one side, frozen stiff on the other.
He hadn’t been looking at either of them. Not the snake. Not the light.
“He was looking at you,” said Wick. “At your face. Like they weren’t there. Like it was just — you, on a bench, at break, and him next to you.”
And Ollo had said: Hey. They’re arguing about you. Thought you’d want to know.
And the snake’s head had swung toward him. And the light had turned toward him. And Ollo hadn’t looked up. He’d said: Horn’s gone. Shift’s over. Wake up.
“And they both looked at him,” said Wick. “For a long time. Like they’d never — like they didn’t know what he was.” He turned the comm-set over. “And then the light looked at me. At my throat. At this.” His fingers went to the bandage. “It looked at it for a long time. I felt it. Like a hand on it. Cold. And then it looked at Mirelle.”
He told the rest. Mirelle asking what to do. The light telling her the thing in the marrow — the thing they wrote in him, it said, his mother and father — was written to make him wake, and didn’t know that waking wasn’t the same as burning, or freezing. Neither do we, it said.
And the snake, low over Creed’s face, saying: Sing the other one. The crypt one. He doesn’t need waking. He needs to sleep. Properly. Like people did. Before.
And the light saying Please.
And Mirelle singing Liss’s song with no voice. And the two of them going down. Into his chest. Getting smaller. Meeting over the mark.
“And for a second,” said Wick, “they were one thing.”
He was quiet a long time after that.
“A ball,” he said at last. “Small. White in the middle and red at the edges. Turning. Like an eye. Like — like the light was the middle and the fire was the edges and they were the same thing, and it was looking at — I don’t know. Nothing. Everything. It was the most —” He stopped. “And then the mark lit. Every color. White and gold and red. And I saw the shape in it. The curl and the hook and the thing that splits into three. Like the one on the niche Mirelle showed us. And the ball went down into it. Like a stone in water.”
He looked down at his hands.
“And you breathed,” said Wick Moraine.
For a long time neither of them said anything.
The light came down the neck. The camp slept behind them. Somewhere on the landing, one of the Lancers was snoring. Far below, the tiny lamps of the Collar.
Creed looked at his left arm. At the script in it.
“Why didn’t you tell me,” he said. Not angry. He didn’t know what he was.
Wick thought about it.
“Because of Ollo,” he said. “Mostly. He shook his head. And Ollo never shakes his head. Ollo never tells anybody anything. So I thought — if Ollo’s saying don’t, there’s a reason.” He turned the dial. Click. “And because Dorne said she didn’t see anything. And I knew she had. And I thought — if Ilka Dorne, who’s not scared of anything, is so scared of this she’s going to pretend it didn’t happen —” He shrugged. “And because of you. In the bed. With your hands up in front of your face, looking at the spurs. Looking at what you’d done to me. And I thought, if I tell him there’s a snake made of fire living in him that talks and bites and has his eyes, and a ball of light that’s so scared of him it screamed —” His voice wobbled. “I thought that might be the thing that — that made you stop looking at your hands like they were yours.”
Creed didn’t say anything.
“And I was scared,” said Wick. “I’ll be honest. I’m always scared. You know that. But I was scared of that. Of what I saw.” He looked at Creed. For the first time since he’d sat down. Straight into his eyes. Ember. The dark points. “I’m still scared of it. A bit. Of you.”
“Okay.”
“Not like the fighters on the terminus,” said Wick quickly. “Not like — not like you’re a Warden or something. Just —” He searched for it. “You know how, on the line. When you’ve been on a press for six years, and it’s never jammed on you, and you trust it. And then one day it jams. And it takes Ollo’s arm. And after that you still work it. Every shift. Because you have to. And it’s the same press. But you watch it. You never stop watching it. You can’t. You know what’s in it now.”
He looked down at the comm-set.
“That’s all,” he said. “I know what’s in you now. I’m going to watch it. I can’t help that. I’m sorry.”
Creed looked at the side of his face. Thin. White. Shaved head. Thumbnail bitten to the quick. The bandage on his throat, gone grey at the edges.
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Watch it. Somebody should.”
Wick nodded slowly.
“Lamp,” thought Creed. “Snake. You heard.”
“We heard,” said Snake.
“Yes,” said Lamp. Very faint.
“Anything to say?”
A long silence. From both of them.
Then Lamp said, so quietly that he almost lost it in the hum of the light: “Tell him I am sorry about his throat.”
He blinked.
“Tell him,” said Lamp. “Please. I looked at it, on the dock. I could not do anything. I wanted him to know that I looked.”
Creed turned to Wick.
“The Lamp says it’s sorry about your throat,” he said. “It says it looked. On the dock. It wanted you to know that it looked.”
Wick stared at him.
Then something happened to his face. It crumpled, and then it uncrumpled, and then it did something in between, and he put his hand over his mouth and looked away, out over the drop, at the far wall of the neck, and his shoulders shook.
“Okay,” he said, through his hand. Muffled. “Okay. Okay. Tell it —” He stopped. Breathed. “Tell it I know. I felt it. Like a hand.”
“It heard you.”
Wick nodded. Wiped his face with the back of his wrist. Sniffed.
“And the snake?” he said. Not looking. “Has the snake got anything to say?”
Creed waited.
“Tell him,” said Snake. Slowly. “Tell him I said he’s in the way.”
Creed’s jaw went tight.
“Tell him,” said Snake, “he’s always been in the way. And I told you on the terminus that it’d get you killed one day. And that was the truest thing I’ve said, and the stupidest, and I’d say it again. And —” A pause. Something in the voice he’d never heard in it before. Something almost awkward. “— and tell him if he’s going to be in the way, he should be in the way behind you, where I can see him. Not in front. Not anymore. I don’t want my hand on his neck again.”
Creed sat with that for a moment.
Then he told Wick. All of it. Word for word.
Wick listened. His face went through about six things. At the end he let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something else.
“That’s the worst apology I’ve ever heard,” he said.
“It doesn’t know it’s an apology.”
“No.” Wick shook his head. “No, it doesn’t.” He looked at Creed’s black arm. At the script in it. For a long moment. “Tell it — tell it okay. Behind. I’ll be behind.”
“It heard.”
“Good.”
Wick got up.
He didn’t go back to his blanket. He went to the old wall where his pack was leaning, the one Hedda Dorne had packed for him at the Collar with field dressings and a water-skin and three days of dried grey-cap and a spare battery for the comm-set, and he crouched down beside it, and opened it, and took everything out.
Creed watched him.
He laid it out on the bone of the landing in rows. The dressings. The water-skin. The grey-cap in its wax paper. The battery. A coil of thin cable. A screwdriver with a taped handle. A pair of Lancer’s spyglasses. A spare shirt. A small brass hand-bell, the kind the street-sellers rang on the lower Eighth, that somebody had given him on the stair at the Collar and that he hadn’t known what to do with.
He looked at it all for a while.
Then he put it all back. Carefully. In a different order. Dressings on top. Water-skin on the side, where he could reach it. Battery wrapped in the spare shirt. The spyglasses in the outside pocket. The hand-bell, after a moment’s thought, in the very bottom.
He buckled the pack shut. He sat back on his heels and looked at it.
“I thought about not coming,” he said. To the pack. Not to Creed. “At the Collar. When Sabine was picking. I thought, I’ll stay. I’ll run the net from the Collar with Tamsin. That’s useful. That’s — nobody’d think less of me. I’m the comm-man. Comm-men stay back.”
“I know.”
“I nearly did.” He touched the buckle. “I had it all worked out. What I’d say. And then I was standing there on the stair in the well, while you had your hand on the gate, and everybody was humming, and the bone moved, and I saw the light come down on you, and I thought —” He stopped.
“What?”
“I thought, he’s going to go up there alone,” said Wick. “Not alone. With Ollo and Dorne and everybody. But — alone. In the way that matters. Because nobody up there’s going to be scared. Ollo doesn’t get scared, he just gets flat. Dorne doesn’t get scared. Ferrin’s too stubborn. Mirelle’s too — she’s too Mirelle. And you —” He looked at Creed. “You don’t get scared anymore. Do you. Not since the Collar. I’ve been watching. You don’t.”
Creed thought about it.
“Not the way I used to,” he said.
“Right.” Wick nodded. “So somebody’s got to be. Somebody’s got to be up there being scared. Properly. All the way. Of all of it. The light and the teeth and the worms and the Archon, whatever that is, and the — the thing in your arm, and the ball of light, and all of it.” He picked up the pack and put it on. Buckled the chest strap. “Somebody’s got to be scared next to you. So you remember what it’s like. So you remember what everybody else down there is like. All the people looking up from the Ribs. They’re scared. All of them. Somebody up there’s got to be scared like them.”
He stood there in the grey-gold light with his pack on, thin and white, shaking.
“So that’s me,” said Wick Moraine. “That’s what I’m for.”
Creed looked at him for a long time.
“You know what you’re doing?” he said.
“No,” said Wick. “Never. Not once. Not in the Void, not in the crawlway, not on the Snag, not in the Lumen. Never.” He shrugged the pack higher on his shoulders. “Mostly it works out.”
“Mostly.”
“Mostly,” said Wick. And something that was almost a smile went across his face, and was gone.
He went back to his blanket by the old wall, and lay down with the pack still on, and closed his eyes.
Creed sat at the edge a while longer.
Then he got up and went across the landing to where Ollo was lying, on his back, against the old wall under the carved procession of climbing people. Ollo wasn’t asleep. Ollo was never asleep when you thought he was. His eyes opened as Creed crouched down beside him.
They looked at each other.
“Wick told me,” said Creed. Very low.
Ollo didn’t say anything for a while.
“About time,” he said.
“You told him not to.”
“Told him not to then.” Ollo shifted. His bandaged hand on his chest. “Not forever. Then. You were lying in a bed with your hands in front of your face. Didn’t need it then.” A pause. “Need it now. Going up.”
Creed looked at him.
“You knelt between them,” he said.
Ollo looked at the wall. At the carved people climbing.
“You were on the tarp,” he said. “Had your wrist. Said I wouldn’t let go.” As if that explained it. As if that was all there was.
“They could have killed you.”
“Could have.” Ollo seemed to consider it. “Didn’t.”
“Ollo.”
“What.”
Creed didn’t know what he wanted to say. He opened his mouth and closed it.
“When the press took my arm,” said Ollo, after a while, still looking at the wall. “Hour fourteen. You had the marrow saw. Wick held me down. You cut. Took you about a minute. Longest minute of my life.” A pause. “And then you put the saw down and you put your hand on my shoulder and you said, You’re out. You’re out of it. Breathe.”
Creed remembered.
“Didn’t have to,” said Ollo. “Line C. Nobody had to. You could’ve cut and gone back to your press. Kon’s men would have logged me and binned me and nobody’d have blinked. You put your hand on my shoulder.” He turned his head and looked at Creed. “So I put mine on your wrist. That’s all. Same thing.”
“It’s not the same thing. I didn’t kneel in fire.”
“Sawed through a man’s arm with the press still cycling a hand from your head,” said Ollo. “Bit of fire.”
Creed looked at him.
“Go to sleep,” said Ollo. And closed his eyes. “Long way up.”
He didn’t sleep.
He went back to the edge and sat. He didn’t look down this time. He looked up. At the spiral of the stair going up the inside of the neck, into the light. At the dark shapes of the next vertebra, far above — the Sixth Stair, its old walls and its black iron, waiting. At the teeth at the top.
“Lamp,” he said. Quietly. Out loud. Nobody to hear.
“Yes.”
“On the dock. When you came out. When you looked at everybody.”
“Yes.”
“What did you see?”
A long pause. The thin cold in his blood shimmered, the way it did when Lamp was thinking.
“I saw people who were afraid,” said Lamp. “All of them. Even the captain. Even the one-armed one, though he hid it better than any of them. Afraid of me. Afraid of the serpent. Afraid of losing you.” A pause. “And not one of them ran.”
“No.”
“I did not understand it,” said Lamp. “I was made to hold you to the light. I thought the light was — order. Balance. Things staying in their places.” Its voice was very soft. “And there was a man on his knees in the fire and the frost holding your wrist, who was not in his place at all, who was in the one place on that dock where nobody should have been. And I thought: that is the most — that is —” It stopped.
“What?”
“I do not know the word,” said Lamp. “I am still learning words.”
Snake, in the black arm, said nothing at all. But Creed felt it listening.
Above him, very far up, the light came down through the teeth.
At the end of the third watch, the comm-set on Wick’s chest, where he lay asleep against the wall with his pack still on, clicked once. Faint. A relay of a relay of a relay.
“Clock Hall to Hesk’s Rest net,” said a calm, cold, tired voice. “Forty-nine.”
Creed listened to it.
Then the camp began to wake around him. Boots. Low voices. Ferrin swearing at his sling. Dorne and Brann already standing, already looking up. Mirelle with her slate, tracing the carved procession on the wall with one bound finger. Ollo getting to his feet one-armed, the way he always did, in a single heavy movement, like a crane lifting.
And Wick, pushing himself up from the wall, pack on, white, shaking, looking up at the stair going on into the light, and swallowing, and looking at Creed.
“Right,” said Wick. “Okay. Right.”
Creed stood up.
He put on his father’s jacket, with its sleeves sewn back up in cable-thread stitches like rivets. He felt the weight of the Pale Key in the inside pocket. He felt the heat in his black arm, and the cold in his blood. He flexed his fingers and felt the spurs lift.
“Behind me,” he said to Wick.
“Behind you,” said Wick.
They began to climb.
STAIR LOG
SEVENTH VERTEBRA: PASSED
CLIMBERS: 61
ABOVE: SIX