The names began at step five hundred.
Mirelle found the first one. She’d been walking with her eyes on the risers since the Seventh Stair, the way she’d walked through the Hollow crypt reading the niches, and at the five hundredth step after the landing she stopped so suddenly that the man behind her walked into her.
Creed came back down.
On the riser of the step — the upright face of it, knee-high, worn smooth by a thousand years of shins and boots — there was a carving. Small. Neat. A line of script. And under it, smaller, a mark like a thumbprint pressed into the bone and then cut around.
Mirelle crouched and traced it with her bound finger. A hair above the surface.
“A name,” she whispered. “Someone who cut this step. Their name. And their mark.” She looked up at him. “Every hundred. I think. I think there’ll be one every hundred.”
There was.
Step six hundred. Seven hundred. Eight hundred. Each riser, a line of old script, a thumbprint mark. Different marks. Different hands. Mirelle read them as they climbed, in her thread of a voice, one at a time, and the company climbing behind her went quiet as she did it, the way the Choir went quiet when she sang. Teodric. Hesse. Aun. Short names. Old names. Marla. Ib. Corwen. People who had come up the inside of the god’s neck with tools in their hands a thousand years ago and cut a stair into it, step by step, and every hundredth step stopped and put their name on it.
“Like the wall,” said Wick. Behind Creed. Quietly.
“Like the wall,” said Creed.
At step nine hundred, Mirelle stopped again.
She crouched for a long time over the riser. The company bunched up on the stair behind her. Creed came down beside her and looked.
The script was longer. Two lines. And the mark under it wasn’t a thumbprint. It was a shape. A curl. A hook. A line splitting into three.
He felt the mark on his own chest go warm. And in his left arm, under the black, something in the script answered. A pulse. Once.
“What does it say,” he said.
Mirelle didn’t answer for a moment.
“Aurel,” she said. Barely a breath. “It says Aurel. And then —” She traced the second line. “— I think it says, first. Or eldest. Or the one before.” She looked at him. “Saint Aurel. The first one. The one the Hollow’s chapel was named for. The one whose seat was empty.”
Creed looked at the riser. At the mark. His mark. His mother and father’s mark, the one they’d written into his marrow. The seat-mark.
“She cut this step,” he said.
“Or she climbed it,” said Mirelle. “And marked it. When it was done.” She stood up slowly. “Nine hundred steps from the Seventh. Not the first hundred. Not the last. The ninth.” A pause. “Like she wanted to be in the middle. With the others.”
“Lamp,” thought Creed.
The cold in his blood had gone very still.
“I know,” said Lamp. Very quietly. Before he could ask. “I feel it. I do not know what it means. I am telling you the truth.”
“You’re afraid.”
“Yes,” said Lamp. “I am telling you that too.”
At step one thousand and fifty, somebody started to hum.
It was one of the forty. A woman from the caverns named Ennis Rook, who’d been eleven years in the Void before Sabine’s people found her, who had almost no frost left in her blood, who’d been at the Neck Gate when the bone flowed back and seven hundred people sang the Long Way Down. She was near the back of the column. Climbing. Tired. And she started to hum it without thinking, the way you hum a work-song on a long shift, under her breath, the plain tune, lift your eyes, lift your hands.
The man beside her joined in. Then the woman in front.
Creed heard it from the front of the column. He felt something in his chest lift at the sound of it, the way it had lifted at the gate. He almost turned around and joined in himself.
Then the light changed.
Not the light from above. That stayed the same. Grey and gold, coming down through the teeth. But on the far side of the neck — across the open hollow of the tower, on the stair where it spiraled around the opposite wall, two hundred meters away and fifty meters up — something moved in a band of shadow.
He felt it before he saw it. Not a heart. It didn’t have a heart. Something else. A thin, high, steady hum, under hearing, like the hum of a Lumen’s channels on a cold night. Catalyst. Channel-grade. Running through something that wasn’t alive.
“Stop,” he said. Not loud. Then louder. “Stop. Stop singing. Everyone. Stop.”
The humming died.
Too late.
It came out of the shadow on the far wall and he saw it.
It was tall. Taller than a Warden. Thin. White — not the slick seamless white of a Warden’s armor but an older white, enameled, chipped, stained yellow with age at the joints. It had too many legs. Six. Long, jointed, ending in hooked feet that gripped the bone of the stair like the feet of an insect gripping a wall. It had a body like a long narrow coffin hung between the legs. And it had no head. Where a head should have been, at the front of the coffin-body, there was a disc. Wide. Shallow. Like the bell of a horn. Like an ear.
The disc turned toward them.
Across two hundred meters of open air, across the hollow of the neck, it turned, and stopped, pointed straight at the back of the column where Ennis Rook had been humming.
“Oh,” said Snake. In the black arm. Very interested. “Oh, that’s old. That’s very old. I remember those.”
“What is it.”
“A listener. A stair-dog. The Heads built them, right at the start. When they took the Skull. To keep the Wrights from coming back up.” A pause. “They can’t see bone either. Same as the light. Same eyes, same blindness. So they listen.”
The thing on the far wall moved.
It didn’t come around the stair. It came across. It crouched on its six legs and sprang, out from the far wall, into the open air of the hollow neck — and it didn’t fall. It flew. Or not flew: glided, its legs spread wide, membranes of some thin white stuff unfolding between them like the webs between a bat’s fingers, and it came across the two hundred meters of air in a long flat arc, silent, its ear-disc locked on the back of the column.
“BACK TO THE WALL,” Creed shouted. “Everyone against the wall! Rell!”
Ennis Rook was at the edge of the stair. She was looking at it. Frozen. Not by frost. By the sight of it.
It hit her.
It came in out of the air and its two front legs closed on her the way a bird’s claws close on a fish, and it didn’t stop. It didn’t land. It took her off the edge of the stair, out into the air of the neck, and kept going — banking, turning, the white membranes spread — and she screamed, and it screamed back, a sound like feedback in a broken speaker, high and grinding, out of the disc on its front —
— and it opened its legs.
She fell.
He watched her fall. Down the inside of the neck. Past the stair. Past the spirals below. Small. Smaller. Toward the well of the Collar, far below, a grey cup.
A kite went off the stair after her.
Tobin Rell. He’d unclipped from the column and thrown himself off the edge with his lift-rig screaming and his one good arm out, and he went down after her like a stone — straight down, wings folded — and Creed saw him catch her. A hundred meters down. Two hundred. Catch her by the back of her jacket, one-handed, and the rig shriek as it took the weight, and the two of them swing out, away from the wall, into the open middle of the neck —
— into the light.
And the light looked.
He felt it. Everybody felt it. The whole column on the stair felt it at once. The shaft of grey-gold coming down through the teeth from above — the old soft light that didn’t look at you — changed. Went flat. Went white. Not all of it. A part of it. A narrow column inside the broad shaft, like a needle inside a sheaf of straw, came down the hollow of the neck and fixed on the two of them, Rell and Ennis Rook, hanging in the open air off the bone.
“Rell,” Creed said. “RELL. Back to the bone. Get back to the BONE —”
Rell was already moving. Banking hard. The rig screaming. Ennis Rook swinging from his fist. He hit the wall of the neck below them — not the stair, the wall itself, sheer bone — and grabbed for it with his strapped arm and his boots and clung, flat against it, with Ennis pressed between him and the bone.
The white needle of light held on them for a moment.
Then it went away.
Faded. Softened. Went back to grey-gold. The way an eye goes back to sleep.
On the far side of the neck, the stair-dog had landed. It hung on the far wall in its band of shadow, six legs gripping, ear-disc turning. Turning. Listening.
Nobody on the stair made a sound.
They stood with their backs to the inside wall of the neck, sixty people on a stair of bone, and didn’t breathe.
Creed could hear Wick’s heart behind him. Going like a bird’s. Like Marchetti’s in the light. He could hear every heart on the stair. He could hear the hum of the thing on the far wall. Thin. Steady. Channel-grade Catalyst, running through old enamel and old wire, turning the ear-disc a little left, a little right.
It couldn’t see them. They were on the bone.
It could hear them.
Far below, Tobin Rell clung to the wall of the neck with Ennis Rook pinned against it. He couldn’t climb. Not one-armed, not with her weight. And if he let go and flew, he’d be off the bone again. In the light.
“Creed,” said Lamp. Very low. “It is waiting for a sound. Any sound. It will come for the sound.”
“I know.”
“Rell cannot hold there long.”
“I know.”
He looked across the hollow of the neck at the stair-dog. At the ear-disc. At the hum of the channel-grade Catalyst running through it.
He hadn’t fed since the Ninth. Since before the Shelf. Since before the Wardens burned him hollow. Every drop of blood in him, since the slab, had been made in the bone, by Snake, out of heat. Six hundred and seventy-two of those drops were sealed into the tips of rounds in the satchels of the Lancers behind him. He was thin. He knew he was thin. The grey on his arms hadn’t faded since the Collar.
And over there, across two hundred meters of air, there was a thing full of Catalyst.
“Oh,” said Snake. Softly. “Oh, mule. You’re thinking it.”
He was thinking it.
“It’ll come for a sound,” he said. Not out loud. Inside. To both of them. “So I’ll give it one. Here. At the front. Away from everybody.”
“And when it comes?”
“I’ll eat it.”
Snake laughed. Very quietly, in the black arm. “Now you’re talking.”
“Lamp?”
The cold in his blood was still a long moment.
“I am afraid,” said Lamp. “You are thin. If it takes you off the bone, the light will see you. And I do not know what the light does to you, now, if it sees you. I am telling you.”
“I know. Thanks.”
“I will not choose,” said Lamp. “Go on.”
He went up the stair. Ten steps. Twenty. Away from the column. Alone, on the bone, at the front. He felt them watching him go. Wick, with his hand over his own mouth. Ollo, flat against the wall. Dorne and Brann, square, ready.
At thirty steps, he stopped.
He drew the sword. Slowly. The blade came out of the scabbard with a long thin ring of steel, and the grooves lit red.
On the far wall, the ear-disc snapped toward him.
He turned to face it. Stood at the edge of the stair, at the very edge, with the sword in his right hand and his left arm at his side, black, glowing.
And he sang.
Not the Long Way Down. Not the verse. Not Liss’s song. He sang the only other thing he knew all the way through, the thing every Animatid in the Belly knew, the thing that came out of the speakers at hour one every shift of every day of his life: the Kon Reclamation company jingle. Kon keeps the Belly turning / Kon keeps the Belly fed. Loud. Flat. Off-key. In his cracked mule’s voice, at the top of his lungs.
The stair-dog came off the far wall like a bolt.
It crossed the two hundred meters in a long white arc with its membranes spread and its ear-disc screaming feedback, straight at him, and he saw its two front legs come forward with their hooked feet open —
— and he didn’t move. He stood at the edge and let it come. And at the last moment, when the hooks were a meter from his chest, he stepped inside them. Toward it. Under the reach of the legs, into the space between them, against the long cold coffin of its body.
And put his left hand on it.
Flat. The black palm. The written arm. Against the old chipped enamel.
The stair-dog hit him and took him off the stair.
He felt the bone go out from under his boots. Felt the air. Felt them both go out over the drop, into the open hollow of the neck, the stair-dog’s legs closing around him, its membranes spread, gliding, banking — and felt the light, above, stir. Turn. Begin to look.
He didn’t care.
He drank.
It went into his hand like water into sand. The channel-grade Catalyst in the stair-dog’s body. Old. Narcotized. Thick with the frost the refineries put into everything that ran down the skeleton. A thousand years of it, maybe, cycling and cycling through the same old wire. He pulled it through the enamel, into his black palm, into the script on his forearm —
— and the script lit.
Every line. Every curl and hook and branch. Red, then gold. Gold. For the first time since the Shelf. Not much. A flicker. A thread of it running through the red like a vein of ore through rock. He felt the Catalyst go up his arm into his chest and meet the cold in his blood — Lamp — and the heat in his bones — Snake — and split. The frost in it went one way, into the cold, and the cold took it, and ate it, the way Snake had always eaten frost — Lamp eating frost, he felt it, he felt Lamp startle at its own hunger — and the Catalyst itself, the waking part, the god’s-blood part, went the other way. Into the bone. Into the heat. And came back out of the bone as blood.
His.
The stair-dog shrieked. Its legs spasmed. Its membranes folded. The hum in it went down, and down, and out, like a lamp when the tank runs dry —
— and they fell.
Together. Out of the middle of the neck. He felt the white needle of light come down from above and find them, find him, fix on him, falling, the flat white scanner cold reaching down into him —
— and stop.
He felt it stop. Felt it reach into him and find the heat in his bones and the cold in his blood and the fresh Catalyst splitting between them and the script on his arm burning gold-red — and hesitate. Like a hand closing on something it expected to be one shape and finding it another.
Vessel, he thought it thought. Or something like that. Not a word. A shape. A recognition.
And then — a pull. Up. The way the column in the Clock Hall had pulled Marchetti. A tug on everything at once.
“CREED,” said Lamp. “It is trying to lift you. I am telling you. It is trying to —”
He kicked off the stair-dog’s dead body.
Toward the wall. Toward the bone. He had nothing to push against but the falling enamel, and he pushed against it anyway, with everything Snake had in his legs, and the dead stair-dog went one way and he went the other, sideways, across the air, falling, and the needle of light tugged at him and he felt himself slow, slow, his fall slowing, the pull taking hold —
— and he hit the wall of the neck.
Not the stair. The sheer bone below it. He hit it face-first and his left hand slapped flat against it, the black palm, and the spurs on his right fist drove into it like pitons, and he held.
On the bone.
The light let go.
He felt it go. Like the pull of a current when you get your hand onto the bank. The flat white went back up the neck, and softened, and went grey-gold, and stopped looking.
Below him, the dead stair-dog fell. Turning slowly. Its legs folded. Its ear-disc silent. Down the inside of the neck. A long way down. He heard it hit, eventually, very faint, on the stair somewhere above the Collar.
He hung on the wall of the god’s neck by one hand and four spurs and breathed.
He was full.
Not full like the Ninth had filled him, three tanks a morning, gold and blazing. Not full like that. But for the first time since the Shelf, there was something in him that wasn’t made of Snake. Fresh blood. Waking blood. In the bones and the veins. The grey on his arms — he looked down at his right arm, spread against the bone, the sleeve torn back — the grey was still there. But at the edges, by the elbow, there was color coming into it. A little.
“Did you feel that,” said Snake. In his arm. Not laughing. Wondering. “Mule. Did you feel the white thing eat?”
“I felt it.”
“It ate the frost. The white thing. It ate it. Like I do. It’s never —”
“I know,” said Lamp. Very small. Very shaken. “I know. I did not know I could. I did not know I wanted to.” A pause. “It tasted — Creed, it tasted like —”
“Like what?”
“Like the Drip,” said Lamp. “Like what they put in everyone. I ate it. All of it. And I wanted more.”
He hung on the bone. He didn’t know what to say to that.
Above him, on the stair, he heard Ollo’s voice. Flat. Calling down. Not loud. Never loud.
“You there?”
“Here.”
“Rope coming.”
They got him up on a rope. Dorne and Brann pulled. He came up the sheer face of the bone hand over hand, spurs biting, the rope around his waist, and came over the edge of the stair onto his knees, and Wick grabbed his jacket and hauled him back from the edge and held on.
“You sang the Kon jingle,” said Wick. Shaking. “You sang the Kon jingle.”
“It’s the only other thing I know all the way through.”
“It’s the worst song —” Wick’s voice cracked into a laugh and something else. “It’s the worst song in the — you sang the KON JINGLE to a — in the — oh god. Oh god.” He let go of the jacket and sat down hard on the step. “Oh god.”
“Rell,” said Creed.
Ferrin was at the edge of the stair, looking down, his left arm in its sling. “Still there. Forty meters down. On the wall. He’s got her. He can’t climb.”
They got Rell up on two ropes. It took an hour. Ennis Rook first, on a sling Ferrin rigged one-handed with Dorne’s help — she came up the face with her eyes shut and her lips moving, and when she came over the edge she didn’t open her eyes for a long time. Then Rell. His good arm had been holding the bone for an hour and a half. When they got him onto the stair he couldn’t open his hand. Brann had to unbend the fingers one at a time.
Rell sat against the wall of the neck with his ruined hand in his lap and his strapped arm against his chest and looked at Creed.
“It looked at us,” he said. Hoarse. “The light. When I went off the bone. It looked.”
“I know.”
“It looked at you, too. When you went off with the dog.” Rell’s young face was grey. “I saw it. From the wall. It came down on you, and it — it pulled. It tried to take you up. Like the Senior. I saw it start.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t it?”
He thought about it.
“Because I got back to the bone,” he said. “Same as you.”
“That’s not —” Rell stopped. Shook his head. “It was slower. With you. It had you longer than it had us, and it didn’t take you. It hesitated.”
Creed looked at his left arm. At the script. Still gold-veined, faintly. Fading back toward red.
“Rule,” said Ferrin. Loud enough for the column. Flat. Foreman’s voice. “Two rules. Stay on the bone. Don’t sing.” He looked down the stair at the sixty people pressed against the wall. “Anybody goes off the bone, the light sees them. Anybody makes a sound, the dogs hear it. So: on the bone, and quiet. All the way up.”
People nodded. Nobody spoke.
Ennis Rook opened her eyes at last. She looked at the stair. At the far wall where the dog had been. At Creed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. In a whisper. “I didn’t — I didn’t know I was doing it. It was just — it was in my mouth. From the gate.”
“I know,” said Creed. “It’s in mine too.”
They lost two at step one thousand four hundred.
There was a second dog. There’d always been going to be a second dog. Creed had known it — Snake had said those, plural, I remember those — and he’d been listening for it since the first. For the hum of channel-grade Catalyst in old wire. And he heard it, at last, high above them, on the stair itself this time, not on the far wall. Coming down.
It wasn’t listening to them. It was just coming down. Patrolling. The way a Gilt patrols a gantry, every shift, the same walk, back and forth, for a thousand years.
They pressed against the wall and didn’t breathe.
It came down the stair toward them on its six hooked legs, the ear-disc turning slowly left and right, and the column stood flat against the bone in a long silent line, sixty people, and it came, and came, and its legs clicked on the bone, and it was ten steps above the front of the column, then five —
Creed was at the front. He had the sword out. He didn’t sing. He stood very still and waited for it to be close enough to touch.
It stopped.
Three steps above him. Its ear-disc pointed down the stair. Down the line of them. Turning. Listening.
Behind him, somewhere in the column, someone’s breath caught. A small sound. A gasp. The kind you can’t help.
The ear-disc snapped toward it.
He went up the three steps and put his black hand flat on the dog’s coffin-body and drank, and it shrieked and spasmed and its legs folded — but it had already moved. In the half-second between the gasp and his hand. One leg. One long hooked leg, lashing out sideways along the line of the column, toward the sound, the way a man swats a fly.
It took two of them off the stair.
A man and a woman. Cavern people. Standing together against the wall, where the gasp had come from. The leg swept them off the step like a broom sweeps dust off a ledge, and they went out over the edge into the hollow of the neck without a sound, both of them, and fell.
Into the light.
The needle came down. Found them. And pulled.
He saw it. Everybody saw it. Two people, falling, slowing, stopping — hanging in the middle of the neck — and then going up. Lifted. Rising. Arms out. Not screaming. Too far gone to scream. The white needle drawing them up the inside of the neck past the stair, past the column flat against the wall, past Creed with his hand on the dying dog. Up. Toward the teeth. Toward the light pouring through the jaw.
Rell’s Lancers went for their kites.
“NO,” said Creed. “No. Stay on the bone. Stay on the bone. You’ll go up with them.”
They stayed.
They stood on the stair, all of them, flat against the bone, and watched two people they knew go up the inside of the god’s neck into the light, smaller, smaller, until they were two dark specks against the grey-gold glow at the top. And then nothing.
The dog under his hand went still. Its hum went out. He’d drunk it dry.
He took his hand off it. It hung there on the stair on its folded legs, dead, empty.
He turned around.
“Who were they,” he said.
Nobody answered for a moment. Then one of the forty, an old man from the Shelf, said: “Haddon Teague. And his sister. Orla.” His voice was rough. “From Sump-Twelve. Fourteen years in the Void. Together.”
“Who gasped?”
Silence.
“Orla,” said the old man. “It was Orla. She saw the dog and she — she couldn’t help it. Nobody could have helped it.”
“No,” said Creed. “Nobody could.”
He looked at the dead dog on the stair. At its ear-disc. At the chipped yellow-white enamel.
Then he went to the wall of the neck, beside the dog, and set the spurs of his right fist against the bone, and carved.
HADDON TEAGUE. ORLA TEAGUE. SUMP-TWELVE. FOURTEEN YEARS IN THE VOID. TOGETHER. STEP 1,400. He did it in the square Line C capitals. It took a long time. Nobody told him to hurry.
When he was done, Mirelle came and looked at it. Then she crouched and looked at the riser of the step below his carving. Step one thousand four hundred.
There was a Wright name on it. Old. Worn.
She traced it. Read it. Looked up at him.
“Iben,” she whispered. “And under it, a second name. Same hand. Iben and Iara. Two marks. Side by side.”
He looked at it for a long time.
Then they went on.
Ferrin climbed beside him for a while, after that. One-armed. The other arm in Hedda Dorne’s sling. Swearing at every step under his breath, very quietly, because of the rule.
At step one thousand six hundred, the stair passed something set into the inside wall of the neck. A frame. Old. Pale bone, grown into the wall like the buildings on the landing, and set into it, wheels. Great wheels. Bone, too, or something like it. Grooved around their rims. And running from the top of the frame, straight up the inside of the neck, parallel to the stair but out over the hollow — a line. A cable. Not steel. Something pale and fibrous and enormously thick, like a rope plaited from the god’s own sinew.
Ferrin stopped.
He stood in front of the frame with his dented face working, looking at the wheels. Then up at the pale cable going up into the light. Then back at the wheels.
“Counterweight lift,” he said. Barely a breath. “Look at the sheaves. Look at the bearing. That’s a counterweight run. Straight up the middle of the neck.” He reached out and touched one of the great bone wheels with his left hand. “They built a lift. The Wrights. Up the neck. Beside the stair.” He looked up the line of the cable again. “It’ll go all the way. Up to the top vertebra. Maybe into the skull.”
“Does it work?”
“Don’t know.” Ferrin’s fingers moved over the bone wheel. Feeling the groove. The way he’d felt the sheaves on the Concord docks, the brake-houses on the Eighth. “Sheave’s dry. Cable’s — I don’t know what the cable is. Never seen anything like it. Looks sound. Looks like it hasn’t moved in a thousand years.” He was quiet for a long time. “There’ll be a drive. Up top. A wheel-house. Something that turns it. And a counterweight. Somewhere. Enormous. Has to be. To lift a cage up this.”
“Lund said Atlas,” said Creed. “The top vertebra. Where the head pivots. She said there’s a lift. The Atlas lift.”
Ferrin nodded slowly.
“That’s where it goes, then,” he said. “Atlas.” He looked at the cable a moment longer. Then he took his hand off the wheel. “I want to see it. The drive. When we get there.”
“You will.”
Ferrin looked at him sideways.
“Told you,” he said. “You need someone who knows lifts.”
They reached the Sixth Stair at the end of the second watch, at step two thousand and ninety, and it was green.
He smelled it first. Before he saw it. They came around the last turn of the spiral below the landing, out of a band of shadow into a band of light, and the air changed. It went wet. Warm. Thick. And it smelled like —
He didn’t have a word for it.
He’d smelled it once before. In Kon’s tower, at the top of the Third Rib, in the glass-domed garden room at the center of the Glasshouse, where Kon had kept his ferns. Wet. Green. Growing. A smell like nothing in the Belly, nothing on Line C, nothing in the sumps or the caverns or the Flats. A smell like the inside of something alive.
They came up onto the landing of the Sixth Stair.
It wasn’t a landing. It was a city.
The Sixth Vertebra was enormous. The stair came up out of the spiral onto a broad bone shelf that ran around the whole inside of the neck like the gallery of a theater, and on the shelf, and above the shelf — built up the inside wall of the vertebra in terraces, tier on tier, rising, all the way up to the next band of old pale bone a hundred meters above — there were gardens.
Real ones. Green. Terraces of soil held back by walls of pale Wright stone, with black Concord ironwork bolted over the top, and in the soil, plants. Long rows of them. Broad dark leaves. Climbing vines on wire frames. Low bushes with fruit on them, small and red and round. Ferns. Ferns everywhere, spilling over the terrace walls, curling, uncurling, green. Lamps on iron stalks among the rows, hundreds of them, burning a warm yellow-white, hanging over the plants like a second sun.
And water. Running. In channels cut into the terrace walls, trickling down from tier to tier with a sound he’d never heard before. A small, clean, endless sound.
And people.
Tending them. Moving among the rows on the terraces. Slowly. Carefully. In long pale robes, white and grey, with their hair bound up in white cloth. Kneeling in the soil. Lifting leaves. Pouring water from long-spouted cans. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
They didn’t look up.
The company stood at the top of the stair on the edge of the gardens. Sixty people. Out of the dark. Grey and canvas and silver scale and blood. Armed. Staring.
The people in the gardens didn’t look up. Didn’t stop. Didn’t turn their heads. They went on kneeling, and lifting leaves, and pouring water, slowly, carefully, as if the company were not there.
Then one of them did.
A woman. On the nearest terrace, five meters from the top of the stair, kneeling in a row of ferns with a long-spouted can in her hands. She looked up.
She was beautiful. He saw that first, and it was strange to see it — strange because it was the first thing. Her face was smooth and even and very calm. Not done, the way the Verbous were done. Just — smooth. Unlined. As if nothing had ever happened to it. Her eyes were large and pale and clear, and they were looking at him, at his ember eyes, his black arm, his spurs, and they didn’t widen. Didn’t change. Didn’t blink.
She didn’t blink at all.
He waited for it. He watched her face. Five seconds. Ten. Her eyes stayed open, pale, clear, calm, fixed on his, and she didn’t blink once.
“Creed,” said Lamp. Very quietly. “Her blood.”
He reached.
He found it. Her heart. Slow. So slow. Slower than any heart he’d ever felt — slower than Fisk’s, slower than old Matthis Ferrin’s, slower than the frozen hearts on the Shelf before the Wardens took them up. A heart that beat like a clock running down. And her blood —
White.
Not red with frost in it, the way the Belly’s blood was, the way the Ribs’ blood was. Not red-gold, like his. White. Almost. So thick with frost that there was hardly any red left in it at all. Like the white bags on the slab. Like the drums from the Works before he’d melted them. Frost so deep it had stopped being something in her blood and become her blood.
Somnoline-B. The Drip. He knew the taste of it. One tab a shift on Line C for nine years, never more, and none since the reliquary. He knew what it did. One tab a shift, on Line C, three tabs at hour sixteen in the deep sumps.
This was more. This was so much more. This was a whole life of it. Generations of it.
The woman set down her long-spouted can in the soil among the ferns. Slowly. Carefully. She rose to her feet, in her long pale robe, and folded her hands in front of her, and inclined her head toward him. A small, graceful, perfect bow.
“Welcome,” she said.
Her voice was soft and even and very clear. It didn’t shake. Nothing in it shook.
“Welcome to the Gardens of the Sixth,” she said. “You have climbed a long way.” Her pale eyes didn’t blink. “Have you come to be Kept?”
STAIR LOG
SIXTH VERTEBRA: REACHED
CLIMBERS: 59
TAKEN: 2
ABOVE: FIVE