The stair came out of the Third Vertebra’s tunnel back into the grey-gold light and climbed the last of the neck, and the last of the neck was different.
He felt it before he saw it. In the bone under his boots. The slow vast pulse of the dreaming god — the one he’d felt at the Neck Gate with his hand on the plug, the one he’d felt through the floor of the sanctum — was louder here. Not louder. Nearer. As if he were climbing toward the source of it. As if the neck were a pipe, and the pulse were water, and he was going up the pipe toward the tank.
And something else. A grinding. Faint. Rhythmic. Coming down the hollow of the neck from above. A sound like the big gears in the Line C drive-house, the ones that turned the main shaft, except slower. Much slower. One long groan of wood or bone or iron, then a pause, then another. Like something enormous breathing in its sleep.
“That’s a wheel,” said Ferrin. Climbing one-armed beside Ollo. His dented face lifted. “That’s a drive-wheel. A big one. Turning slow.”
At step five thousand and twelve, the stair came around the last spiral below the Second Vertebra, and they saw it.
The Second Vertebra — the Axis — wasn’t a ring, like the others. It was a ring with a tower in it. A great peg of bone rising straight up out of the center of the vertebra, through the open hollow of the neck, like the trunk of a tree growing up through the middle of a well. Pale. Ridged. Enormous. It went up past the vertebra, up past the next band of bone above — the Atlas, the First Vertebra, the last one, a ring of bone that encircled the peg the way a collar encircles a throat — and on up into the shadow of the god’s head.
“The pivot,” said Ferrin. Barely a breath. “That’s what it turns on. The head. Turns on that.”
And around the peg — on the inside of the Axis vertebra, in a great circle — were the wheels.
Six of them. Spaced evenly around the peg. Each one the size of a building. Wheels of pale bone, each with a broad hollow rim like a drum turned on its side, and in the rims — he squinted in the grey-gold light, and his stomach turned —
People. Walking.
Inside the rims of the wheels. In pale robes. In lines. Walking. Slowly. Steadily. Forward, forever, the way a mule walks in a treadwheel at a well, and their walking turned the wheels, and the wheels turned great bone shafts, and the shafts went up into the dark of the Atlas above, groaning.
Grind. Pause. Grind.
“Kept,” said Wick. Very quietly. Behind him. “Oh, it’s the Kept.”
“It’s a treadwheel,” said Ferrin. His voice was flat. Foreman-flat. The voice he’d used on the gantry. “Six treadwheels. Driving a main shaft. Up into the Atlas. Into a drive-house. That’s the Atlas lift.” He looked up the length of the peg. At the pale fibrous cable he’d first seen at step sixteen hundred, running up the middle of the neck — it ran up here, alongside the peg, into the Atlas. “The Wrights built the lift. The cable and the sheaves and the cage. They’d have had a counterweight. Something. A water-drive, maybe. Something clever.” He looked at the wheels. “The Heads took out whatever the Wrights had and put in people.”
The wheels turned. The Kept walked.
“How many,” said Ollo.
Creed counted. He couldn’t help it.
Forty to a wheel. Six wheels.
Two hundred and forty people, walking in circles, forever, to turn a lift.
They went in on the bone.
The Axis had rooms in it too — behind the wheels, cut into the curved inside wall of the vertebra, old Wright rooms the Kept didn’t go into. They went along the wall from room to room, quiet, on the rule, and came up behind the nearest wheel, and stood in the shadow of a doorway, and looked.
It was worse up close.
The wheel was bone. Pale, ridged, grown — not carved, grown, like the plug of the Neck Gate, like the buildings on the Seventh Stair. The Wrights had grown it. But the Heads had bolted iron to it. Rails along the inside of the rim, so the walkers couldn’t slip. A frame across the hub. And at the bottom of the rim, where the walkers walked, the bone was worn into a groove. Deep. Smooth. A groove a hand deep, worn by bare feet.
The Wheel-Kept walked in the groove.
They didn’t look like the Kept of the Gardens. The Kept of the Gardens had been beautiful — smooth-faced, calm, kneeling in the green. These were smooth-faced too. Calm too. Unblinking. But thin. Very thin. Their robes hung on them. Their legs were corded, enormous at the calf and thigh, and wasted everywhere else, and their feet were bare and hard as hooves. They walked with their heads down, looking at the heels of the walker in front, and their lips moved, all of them, together.
Counting.
He could hear it, faintly, under the groan of the wheel. One. Two. Three. Four. All of them. In unison. Five. Six. Seven. Up to some number he couldn’t make out, and then back to one.
He knew that count.
He’d counted it his whole life. The press-cycle. The recycler. The horn. Every number he’d ever counted on Line C had been someone else’s number, counted in his body, to keep him going.
“They count the steps,” said Mirelle. Barely a breath. “To keep time. All of them together. So the wheel turns even.”
“How long,” said Wick. “How long do they — do they ever stop?”
Creed looked at the groove worn into the bone of the rim. A hand deep.
“Lamp,” he said.
The cold in his blood was quiet. Shaky. It had been shaky since the sanctum. But it answered.
“Their blood is white,” it said. “Whiter than the Gardens. Whiter than Sefa. It is —” A pause. “Creed, there is almost nothing else in it. They have been given so much, for so long, that the white is doing everything. Moving their legs. Beating their hearts. If the white stopped, I do not think —” It stopped. “I do not think there is enough of them left underneath to wake into.”
He stood in the doorway and watched them walk.
One. Two. Three. Four.
“Snake.”
“Don’t ask me,” said Snake. In the black arm. Low. Not hungry. Something else. “Don’t ask me, mule. I know what I’d say, and you know what I’d say, and I don’t want to say it about these.”
He looked at Snake’s words for a while.
“Since when,” he said.
“Since the Sixth,” said Snake. “Since the fern woman asked you if you’d stay.” A long pause. “I don’t know. I don’t like it. Leave me alone.”
They camped in the rooms behind the wheels. In the bone. With the groan of the wheels coming through the walls, grind, pause, grind, and under it, so faint you had to stop breathing to hear it, the count.
Brann came to him at the end of the first watch.
He came with Dorne. She stood at the door of the little room Creed had taken — three meters of bone, a niche where someone had once slept — and Brann came in and sat down on the floor across from him, square, his militia-grey sleeves rolled up, the faint red-gold lines showing in his forearms.
“You know what I’m going to ask,” said Brann.
“Yes.”
“Ilka said you’d tell me first. Everything. And then I ask.”
“Yes.”
“So tell me.”
Creed told him.
He told him what Dorne had said. That the blood was grown through him. That it had been in him months now, copied through his whole body from a few drops, the way Sere’s notes said — into the long bones, the marrow, the muscle. That it was what made him strong. What let the Warden-cold slide off him. What let him tear a half-Warden’s head off with his hands in the Forge.
“If I call it out,” said Creed, “all of that goes. All of it. You’ll be what you were before the Prior. A militia man from Spindle Row. Strong for a man. Not strong like this.”
Brann nodded slowly.
“And maybe worse,” said Creed. “Maybe it’s grown through you so far that there’s no before left. Maybe I take it out and your bones don’t know how to hold you up anymore. Maybe your heart’s forgotten how to beat without it.” He held Brann’s eyes. “I don’t know. I’ve never done it. I called the blood out of the husk in the Forge, and the husk fell over. Empty. I don’t know if you’re a husk underneath.”
Brann was quiet for a long time.
“And if you don’t,” he said.
“Then you stay like you are. Like Dorne. Quiet. Asleep. As long as somebody sings to it.”
“And when nobody sings?”
Creed didn’t answer.
“It burns,” said Brann. “At night. Still. Not like before — not like the cellar, when it was screaming. But it’s there. Every night. In the long bones. Looking.” He looked down at his forearms. “It’s always going to be looking. Isn’t it. Even asleep. For you. For the pattern. For the thing it was copied from and isn’t.”
“I think so.”
“I don’t want to be looking for someone else my whole life,” said Brann. Very quietly. “I don’t want something in me that wants to be somewhere else. I’d rather be a husk.”
Creed looked at him.
“You’re sure.”
“No,” said Brann. “I’m not sure. I’m scared.” He almost smiled. It didn’t come off. “Moraine says that’s normal.”
From the doorway, Dorne said nothing. But Creed felt her heart. Hard and fast and square.
“Okay,” he said. “Give me your arm.”
He put his black hand on the inside of Brann’s forearm, over the faint red-gold lines, and reached.
It was easy to find. It had always been easy. His own blood, in someone else — it turned toward him like a face toward a window. He felt it in Brann’s arm. In his shoulder. In his chest, around his heart. In his thighs and his shins and his spine and his skull. Everywhere. Grown through him like the roots of a plant through soil.
“Lamp,” he said. Inside. “Snake. Help me. Gently.”
“I will hold him,” said Lamp. Very softly. “While it goes. I will put cold in where it leaves. So the gaps do not burn.”
“I’ll pull it,” said Snake. “Slow. I’ll be slow. I can be slow.” A pause. “I can, you know.”
“I know.”
He called.
Not loud. Not the way he’d called the husk in the Forge — here, come home — all at once. Slowly. Like guiding. Like going beside. Here. I’m here. You don’t have to look anymore. You can come back. Slowly. A bit at a time.
It came.
He felt it lift out of Brann’s bones. Out of the marrow. Out of the long bones first, the thighs, the shins — slowly, a thread at a time, the way water comes out of a cloth when you lift it. Up through his body toward his forearm, toward the black palm, toward home. And where it left, Brann shook. Every place it pulled out of, the muscle around it went loose and then tight and then shook, like a man coming off a long shift. And the Lamp went in behind it, a thread of cold, into each gap, to soothe it.
Brann’s face went white. Then grey. His jaw clenched. He didn’t make a sound.
The lines in his forearms went out. One by one. Like lamps going out along a street.
It went on for a long time. Ollo said, after, that it was forty minutes. He’d been counting from the next room.
At the end of it, the last thread came out of Brann’s heart.
Creed felt it. The last of his blood, coiled around the other man’s heart the way Snake had once coiled around his own — loosening. Lifting. Coming home.
And Brann’s heart stuttered.
Missed. Once. Twice.
“Lamp —”
“I have him,” said Lamp. Fast. Fierce. “I have him. I am here. I have his heart. It is learning. It is learning to go without. Give it a moment. Give it a moment —“
Brann’s heart missed a third time.
Then caught.
Beat. Slow. Heavy. Uneven. Like a man taking his first steps after a long time in bed. Then again. Then again. Steadier.
His own.
Creed took his hand away.
Brann sat against the wall of the bone room, grey-faced, shaking, with his arms in his lap. Plain arms. Thick. Militia arms. No lines in them. No red-gold. Nothing.
He looked down at them for a long time.
Then he put his face in his hands and wept. Huge, ugly, shaking sobs, his square shoulders heaving. The way Sefa had wept, after. The way Wick wept at the window on the Ninth.
Dorne came in from the doorway. She knelt down beside him. She didn’t touch him. She knelt there, square and silent, with her own striped arms and the drops of Creed still sleeping in them, and stayed.
After a long time Brann lifted his face.
“It’s quiet,” he said. Hoarse. “It’s — Ilka, it’s quiet. There’s nothing looking.” He pressed his hands against his chest. “There’s nothing in me looking for anything. It’s just — me. It’s just my heart.”
“How do you feel,” said Dorne.
Brann thought about it.
“Weak,” he said. “Like I’ve been sick a year. Like I couldn’t lift a blasting bar.” He looked at her. “Like Spindle Row. Like my mother’s kitchen.” He laughed. It broke in the middle. “Like hour nineteen.”
Dorne nodded slowly.
“Good,” she said.
Creed sat with his black arm across his knees. He could feel Brann’s blood in him now — a dozen vials’ worth from the Forge, and now this, a man’s whole body’s worth of copied threads, come home — settling. In the bone, where Snake took it. In the veins, where Lamp cooled it. He felt — more. Not stronger. More. As if something that had been scattered was coming back together.
“Thank you,” said Brann. To him. Grey-faced. “For asking first.”
“Ollo’s rule.”
“Thank Ollo, then.”
“I will.”
Ferrin wouldn’t wait.
He’d been staring up at the Atlas since they arrived. At the ring of bone around the peg, the last vertebra, where the shafts from the six wheels went up and disappeared into a structure built against the inside of the ring — black iron, bolted onto pale Wright bone, the way everything up here was. A drive-house. He’d been staring at it the way Matthis Ferrin had stared at the cables of Rib Seven.
At the first light of the first watch, he went up.
Not alone. Creed went with him, and Ollo, and Wick. Up the last of the great stair. It wound around the peg now, not around the inside wall — the peg was so huge that the stair had been cut into it, spiraling up the pale trunk of bone from the Axis to the Atlas. Past the wheels. Past the walkers counting. Up.
The Atlas was a ring.
It sat around the top of the peg like a collar around a throat, like a ring on a finger. Vast. Flat on top. And on top of it, above it, resting on it — the god’s head.
He couldn’t see much of it from here. Just the underside. A curve of bone so enormous that it was like standing under the sky. Pale. Ridged. Pocked with openings — great round holes, each the size of a city square, going up into the dark of the skull. And through the openings, faintly, the grey-gold light, and a smell. Warm. Wet. Like the Gardens of the Sixth, but older. Richer. Like something alive and sleeping.
The drive-house stood on the flat top of the Atlas, against the base of the peg. Ferrin went straight to it.
It was a Wright building with a Concord skin. Pale grown bone underneath — walls, columns, arches, the same smooth egg-curve as the Archive — and over it, bolted to it everywhere, black iron. Plates. Brackets. Rivets. Inside, the six shafts from the wheels came up through the floor and met at a great iron gear-train, and the gear-train turned a single vast drum, and around the drum ran the cable. The pale sinew-cable from the middle of the neck. Wound around and around the drum in a long fat spiral and then running up — straight up — through a slot in the iron roof, toward the skull.
And in the middle of the floor, under the drum, a cage.
Bone. Pale. Grown. A cage the size of a Belly drawer-room, open-sided, hung from the cable by a great bone hook. Empty.
Ferrin stood in front of the gear-train for a long time.
Then he went around it. Slowly. One-armed. Touching things. The gears. The iron. The bolts. The shafts. He crouched and looked at the joints where the iron met the bone. He stood and looked up at the drum. At the cable going up through the roof.
“They broke it,” he said at last.
“What?”
“The Wrights’ drive. There.” He pointed with his chin at the floor. At the base of the peg, where it came up through the Atlas. There was a pit there. Round. Deep. Dry. Lined with bone. “That’s where the counterweight ran. Down the inside of the peg. The peg’s hollow. I’ll bet you anything it’s hollow. Water, I think. They’d fill a weight-tank with water at the top and let it run down the peg and lift the cage. Then pump it back up. Or let the god pump it back. Something.” He touched the edge of the dry pit. “The Heads broke it. Drained it. Sealed it. Put people in wheels instead.”
“Why?”
Ferrin was quiet a while.
“Because a weight-drive works on its own,” he said. “Once it’s built. You fill the tank and it goes. Nobody controls it. Nobody owns it. Anybody who knows how can ride it up.” He looked at the six shafts coming up through the floor. “People in wheels, you control. You stop feeding them, the wheels stop. You decide who walks. You decide when the cage goes up.”
He didn’t say anything else for a while.
Then he crouched by the dry pit, one-armed, awkward, and put his hand flat on the bone lip of it.
“If I could get the water back,” he said. “Get the weight-tank working. The cage would go up without the wheels. Without the Kept walking.” He looked up at the drum. “They could stop.”
“Can you?”
“Don’t know.” He stood up. By stages. Swearing. “Need to see the top. Where the tank is. Where the water comes from.” He looked at the cable going up through the roof. “Need to ride it.”
They found the Sluice from the edge of the Atlas.
Mirelle found it. She’d come up after them with her six tablets, and she’d gone to the outer edge of the ring — the flat top of the Atlas ran out from the peg to a rim, and past the rim, open air, the hollow of the neck falling away below — and she’d stood there with tablet six in her hands, reading, looking up and down from the bone in her hands to the underside of the god’s head, and back.
Then she came and got him.
“Look,” she whispered. “Up. There. Where the bone comes down.”
He looked.
On either side of the peg — left and right, a long way out along the ring — the underside of the skull came down to meet the Atlas. Not flat. In two great columns. Two pillars of bone, curving down out of the base of the god’s head, each one as broad as the Collar, and where they met the Atlas they didn’t sit on it — they went through it. Through holes in the ring. Down into the neck.
“Vessels,” said Mirelle. “The great vessels. The god’s blood went up these. Into the head. Into the mind.” She held up tablet six. “It says. The god’s blood rises through the two pillars. Into the root of the dreaming.”
He followed the left pillar down with his eyes. To where it went through the Atlas.
And there, where it went through, something had been built across it.
A wall. Black. Not bone — iron, and something else, something dark and dull and smooth that wasn’t iron and wasn’t stone. A wall that went across the whole pillar, across the whole opening in the Atlas ring where the pillar passed through, sealing it. Like a cork in a bottle. Like a plug. Like the Neck Gate, but made, not grown.
A dam.
It was the size of a district. He’d thought the Collar was big. The Collar was a toy. The dam went across the whole great vessel of the god, and it was black, and it was riveted with iron bands as wide as streets, and in the center of it, raised in iron, enormous: the Open Eye.
And under the Eye — smaller, but still the size of a house — a plate. Bronze. Green with age. Set into the black. Carved.
He couldn’t read it from here. But he could feel it. In his arm. In the three sigils near the elbow that matched the Pale Key.
They were humming.
“The Sluice,” said Mirelle.
He went closer. Along the ring. Toward the dam. The others came behind him. The closer he got, the louder the hum in his arm, until the whole forearm was buzzing like a struck cable and the script was lit gold and red together and he could feel the Pale Key in his inside pocket, against his ribs, warm. Pulsing. In time with his arm.
And behind the dam —
He felt it.
Before he saw it. Through the black wall. Through the iron. A presence. Huge. Still. Pressed up against the inside of the dam the way water presses against a lock-gate. He reached for it with his blood-sense, without meaning to, the way you reach for a sound in the dark.
It reached back.
Not a heart. Not a mind. Blood. Blood like nothing he’d ever felt. Not frosted. Not narcotized. Not channel-grade. Not even the raw first-draw the Choir had pumped into him in the reliquary. Purer. The thing the first-draw had been a shadow of. The thing every drop of Catalyst in the skeleton had been cut from and watered down and frozen and sold.
The god’s blood. The god’s own. Pure. A reservoir of it. Behind the dam. Pressing.
It knew him.
He felt it know him. Felt it turn toward him — not like Brann’s blood, not like the husk, not like his own blood coming home — like something much bigger. Like the sea turning toward the moon. A pull. A tide. Toward the mark on his chest. Toward the script on his arm. Toward the anchor his mother and father had written in his marrow.
And both hands surged.
Snake, first. In the black arm. A roar. Not out loud. Inside. A sound like every furnace on the Third Rib opening at once.
“OH,” said Snake. “OH. Oh, mule. Oh, that’s — that’s it. That’s IT. That’s everything. That’s the god. That’s what’s left of it. All of it. Behind a wall.” The arm went so hot the sleeve of his shirt began to smoke. “Let me. Let me at it. Put your hand on the wall and let me burn through and I’ll drink it, I’ll drink all of it, I’ll be — you’ll be — we’ll be —”
And Lamp.
In his blood. Not a roar. A wrench. The cold in every vessel seizing, all at once, like a hand closing on a rope. Pulling him back. Not overriding — he felt it not override, felt it hold itself back from that by the thinnest thread — but pulling, with everything it had, the way a man pulls back from a cliff edge.
“NO,” said Lamp. “No. No. No. Creed. Creed. Do not touch it. Do not touch the wall. I am telling you. I am TELLING you. If you touch it, it will come to you. All of it. It knows you. It will come through the wall to you and you will be — you will not be — I am telling you, I am not choosing, I am begging —“
He stood on the Atlas ring three meters from the Sluice with his black arm buzzing and smoking and his blood clenched rigid with cold and the god’s last pure blood pressing against the inside of the dam toward him like a tide.
He didn’t move.
He couldn’t. Both hands had him. One pulling forward. One pulling back. And for a moment — a long moment — he hung between them, and felt his body begin to give. At the seams. The way it had given on the dock, when they fought over him. Something in him stretching. Between the heat and the cold. Between the forward and the back.
“Creed.”
Ollo’s hand on his wrist. His right wrist. The spurred one.
“Step back,” said Ollo.
He stepped back.
One step. Two. Three. Away from the dam. And the pull lessened. The hum in his arm dropped. The tide behind the dam pressed, and pressed, and he was out of its reach. Snake’s roar faded to a low hot rumble. Lamp’s grip loosened, shaking.
He stood on the Atlas, breathing.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Your sleeve’s on fire,” said Ollo.
It was. He beat it out with his right hand. The spurs tore the cloth.
Mirelle read tablet six to him that night, in the drive-house, by the light of the last hand-lamp, with the groan of the wheels coming up the six shafts through the floor.
“The Key turns where the sleeper’s blood begins,” she said. “That’s the first line. I’m sure of it.”
“Where the blood begins.”
“Not here.” She turned the tablet. “Not at the Sluice. The Sluice is where the Heads stopped it. The dam. But the Wrights didn’t build the Sluice. They built the Key before the dam. For something else.” She traced the second line. “For the place where the blood rises into the dreaming. The root. Where the two pillars go into the mind.”
“Inside the skull.”
“Inside the skull. At the root of the brain.” She looked up at him. “There’s a lock there. The Wrights’ lock. Older than the dam. The Key fits it. And when you turn it —” She stopped. Traced. “— I can’t read the next word. It’s in the old hand. But it’s something like — open. Or flow. Or wake.”
“And the dam?”
“The dam’s downstream,” said Ferrin. From the gear-train. He’d been listening. “If the Key opens something at the top — at the root — and the blood starts moving —” He looked at the floor. Toward the Sluice, out along the ring. “That dam’s iron and whatever that black stuff is. Holding back a reservoir. If the reservoir starts to move from behind —”
“It goes,” said Creed.
“It goes,” said Ferrin.
Everybody was quiet.
“Where does it go,” said Wick. Very small. From the corner. “If it goes. The blood. All of it. Where does it —”
“Down,” said Ferrin. “Down the vessels. Down the neck. Through the Collar. Down the spine. Into the ribs.” He looked at Creed. “Into the Belly.”
“Into everyone,” said Mirelle.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
“It’ll boil them,” said Wick. “Won’t it. Like the couriers. Pure Catalyst. Into people full of the Drip. It’ll —”
“Not if the Drip’s gone first,” said Mirelle.
They all looked at her.
“The water,” she said. “The pipe. Taavi’s cistern. It comes from above. From the Palate. From wherever they make it.” She held up tablet six. “If the Drip stops first — if the water stops, and the Bells are cracked, and the tabs stop coming down — then people start to wake. On their own. Slowly. Like the Belly did after Kon. Like the Kept in the bone on the Sixth.” She coughed. “And then, if the blood comes down after — into blood that’s already waking — it doesn’t fight. It just — wakes it faster. All the way.”
“Like the Lamp in Sefa,” said Creed slowly. “Eating the frost ahead of the wave.”
“Yes.”
“So the Drip has to go first,” said Ferrin. “Then the Key.”
“The Drip has to go first,” said Mirelle. “Everywhere. Or the blood kills everyone it touches.”
In his blood, the cold had gone very still. Listening.
In his arm, the heat had gone very still too.
At the end of the third watch, the wheels stopped.
All six. At once. He felt it through the floor of the drive-house before he heard it. The groan, the grind, pause, grind, that had been coming up the shafts for a day and a half — stopped. Mid-groan. And in the silence after it, so sudden that it rang, he heard the count stop too. Two hundred and forty voices, under their breath, five, six, seven — and then nothing.
Then the drum began to turn.
On its own. Not driven. The gear-train sat still and the six shafts sat still and the great drum turned anyway, slowly, the pale sinew-cable unwinding from it, the slack running up through the slot in the iron roof — no. Down. The cable was coming down. Something at the top was paying it out. Something up in the skull was lowering the cable, and the cable was running over the drum, and the drum was turning to let it.
The cage on the floor didn’t move.
The hook above it — the great bone hook that held the cage — rose. Lifted off the cage. Hung empty in the air. And the cable went on paying out, and the hook went on rising, through the slot, up —
No. Something was coming down the slot.
A second cage.
Smaller. Bone, like the first. Open-sided. Hung from a second hook on the same cable, coming down through the slot in the roof out of the dark of the skull, slowly, swaying, the cable groaning over the drum. And in the cage, standing very straight, with its hands folded in front of it —
A figure.
Robed in white that wasn’t cloth. Tall. No halo.
A face.
He’d seen the face before. Once. At a gala in the Lumen of the Second Rib, under a sky of gold and white and near-silver glass. Smiling. Joyful. Lifted toward the light after forty years of waiting. An old man’s face, with skin that glowed faintly blue all over from so many fine channels. Dropping his bone cane. Walking into the white.
Benedek Arral. Senior of the First Rib. Ascended, cycle 427.
The face smiled at him from the descending cage. The same smile. Joyful. Lifted. A hundred days old.
The cage touched down on the floor of the drive-house beside the first one, and stopped, and swayed.
The envoy in it unfolded its hands.
“Vessel,” it said. The voice from everywhere. Flat. Breathless. Not Arral’s voice. Not anyone’s. “We said we would not send the light. We have not. We said we would not send the Wardens. We have not.” The joyful face turned, on the front of the white shape, like a mask on a pin, and looked at each of them. Ferrin. Ollo. Wick. Mirelle. And back to Creed. “We send a guide.”
It stepped out of the cage onto the floor.
“Come up,” it said. “The Palate is prepared. The Gallery is open. Your mother and your father are waiting.” Arral’s face smiled, and smiled, and smiled. “Come up, and see.”
ATLAS DRIVE
WHEELS: HALTED
CAGE TWO: DESCENDED
PASSENGER: ESCORT
NOTED