The Jaw

“No,” said Creed.

The envoy with Benedek Arral’s face stood on the floor of the drive-house beside the cage it had come down in, with its hands folded, and smiled.

“No,” said Creed again. “We’re not coming up in your cage.”

The face turned on the front of the white shape. Slowly. Like a mask on a pin. It looked at him for a long time.

“Noted,” it said.

And it didn’t move. It didn’t step back into the cage. It didn’t go. It stood on the floor of the drive-house, smiling Arral’s joyful hundred-day-old smile, with its hands folded in front of it, and waited.

“Is it just going to stand there,” said Wick. In a whisper. From behind Ollo.

“The guide will wait,” said the envoy. The voice from everywhere. Flat. “The guide has nowhere else to be.”

“Kill it,” said Snake. In the black arm. Low. “Mule. It’s wearing the old man’s face. The one who walked in smiling. Kill it.”

“Not yet.”

“Why NOT —”

“Because it doesn’t lie,” said Creed. Out loud. To the envoy. Not to Snake. “Does it.”

The face smiled at him.

“We do not lie,” said the envoy. “We note.”

Creed looked at it for a long time. Then he pulled an iron crate from the corner of the drive-house — something the Concord had left, rivets and spare plate — and turned it over, and sat on it. Facing the envoy. Three meters away.

“Then I’ve got questions,” he said.

“Ask.”

They all came. One by one. Into the drive-house. Ferrin with the ledger. Mirelle with her tablets. Dorne, square, standing beside the door with her arms folded. Brann, grey and weak, sitting against the wall. Rell and the Lancers. The Discarded. They stood around the walls of the drive-house in the dim, and watched Creed sit on a crate and talk to a dead man’s face.

“The Drip,” said Creed. “Where’s it made.”

“Beneath the Palate,” said the envoy. “In the Engine. We call it the Engine. The Concord called it the Sleep Works. The Kept call it the Gardener’s Well.” Arral’s face didn’t change. “It is where the blood that comes down the vessels — before the dam, when the dam is open, at the measured rate — is drawn off and divided. The waking fraction is refined. The sleeping fraction is separated. Concentrated. Sent down.”

“Into the water.”

“Into the water. Into the tabs. Into the Bells. Into the tanks that went down the ribs before you broke the lines.” A pause. “Into you. For nine years. One tab a shift.”

“Why.”

“Because waking blood in sleeping bodies kills,” said the envoy. Simply. “You have seen it. Fourteen couriers. The priest’s experiments. The first months in the Belly after the refinery fell.” The face tilted. “Without the sleep, the god’s blood is death. With the sleep, it is power. Measured. Controlled. Given to those who can carry it through channels, and denied to those who would burn with it.”

“You decided who burns.”

“We kept everyone from burning,” said the envoy. “For nine hundred and eighty years. There are four million people in this god, Vessel. Four million. Every one of them alive because of the sleep.”

Silence in the drive-house.

“If the dam opened,” said Creed. “Now. Today. What happens.”

“The blood comes down,” said the envoy. “Into four million sleeping bodies. And boils them.” Arral’s joyful face smiled. “All of them. In a day. You know this. Your cousin read it to you last night from a bone tablet. We heard.”

Mirelle’s hands went tight on the tablets in her lap.

“And if the Drip stopped first,” said Creed. “Everywhere. And people woke on their own. Slowly. And then the dam opened.”

The envoy was silent for a long time.

“Then they would wake,” it said. “Into the god’s blood. All of them. Four million. With nothing to hold them in their places.” A pause. “You have seen what one woke man does. You have seen the Rib Seven primaries cut. You have seen Halden fall. You have seen the priest grow a hand with seven fingers. You have seen what your own blood did to Jory Tamm, with your knuckles. Four million of you, Vessel. Waking. All at once. Hungry. Afraid. With no Bell and no Drip and no light to make them kneel.” The face smiled. “You have seen what you are. Imagine four million.”

Creed sat on the crate. He didn’t move.

“Jory Tamm was twenty-two,” he said. “He didn’t want to be there.”

“Noted,” said the envoy.

“The face,” said Creed. “Arral’s. Why that one.”

“Because you saw him go up. Because it was the last face you watched rise into the light before the Hall. Because you followed his heart with your blood and felt us take it.” A pause. “We wished you to know that we know what you felt.”

“And what did he feel? At the end? When you took him?”

The envoy was quiet.

“Understanding,” it said. “You felt it. For a moment, before you lost him. He understood.”

“Understood what?”

“What he was for,” said the envoy. “He had waited forty years to know. We told him.”

“What was he for?”

The face turned. Slowly. Looked at each of them around the walls of the drive-house. Then back.

“Food,” it said.

Behind him, somebody made a sound. One of the Discarded. Creed didn’t turn.

“You eat them,” he said.

“We eat what they were,” said the envoy. “Their waking. Their channels. Whatever of the god’s blood they carried. And their minds, a little. What they knew. What they remembered.” A pause. “The god’s mind is nearly grey. You were told this. Your Lamp told you. We drink from it, but there is little left to drink. So we drink from those who come up. And we keep their faces, so that they are remembered.”

“And the rest goes to the Forge.”

“The rest is not wasted. Nothing is wasted.”

He sat with that for a while.

“My mother,” he said. “You said she sang to you. For thirty-one hours. What did she sing?”

The envoy was silent for a very long time. Longer than for any other question.

“A verse,” it said at last. “In the old script. The script we copied in cycle twelve and could never read. We did not understand it. It was only sound.” Arral’s face didn’t change. But something in the voice — very far down — did. “Until we heard it again. Sung by your cousin on the Long Bridge, through the ears of a Choir-born captain. And again in the Collar’s well, hummed by seven hundred. And again at the Neck Gate, when the bone moved.” A pause. “When the bone moved, Vessel, the god turned in its sleep. We felt it. For the first time in nine hundred and eighty years, the god moved. And we understood what she had been singing.”

“What.”

“An instruction,” said the envoy. “To the bone. To the blood. To the dreamer. Her verse is a key, as the Pale Key is a key. It tells the pattern in your marrow what to do when it is close enough.” The face smiled. “It tells you how to open the door.”

Creed sat very still.

“And we will not let you,” said the envoy. “Noted.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you asked,” said the envoy. “And we do not lie.” A pause. “And because it does not matter. You will come up. You will see the Gallery. You will see what we are. And you will understand, as the old man understood, what you are for.” The face tilted. “And then you will choose. Every one who has come up has chosen. Most choose the light. You will choose too.”

“Choose what?”

“To be kept,” said the envoy. “Or to be a house.”

He left the envoy standing in the drive-house.

He didn’t kill it. Snake raged at him for an hour about it, low and hot in the black arm. He didn’t kill it. It stood by its cage with its hands folded and Arral’s face smiling and it watched everything they did, and noted it, and he let it.

“Why,” said Snake. On the third day. Tired of raging. Just asking.

“Because it’s not a person,” said Creed. “It’s a slate. It’s a tray coming down a shaft. You don’t kill a tray.”

“You burned the tray in the Forge.”

“That one had someone in it.”

Snake was quiet for a long time.

“This one has the old man’s face,” it said.

“I know.”

“Doesn’t that count?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know.

Sabine came up the Seven Stairs on the third day.

He felt them coming for a day before they arrived. Six hundred hearts, on the stair below, climbing. Slow. Careful. On the bone. Quiet. Wick had sent them the rules on the net from the Seventh Stair onward, and Tamsin had drilled them into the army at the Collar before it ever set foot on the first step. Stay on the bone. Don’t sing. Don’t gasp. And they’d climbed. Three days. Six thousand steps. Past the Seventh with its carved procession. Past the Sixth, where they’d stopped one night in the bone rooms with Sefa Orne and eight hundred and thirty-six Kept — twelve more had said yes, and the guiders were working. Past the Register, where Ossian of the Ink Rows had looked up from his slate and watched six hundred people go through his hall, and blinked, and gone back to writing, slowly, in his own words. Past the Forge, cold now, its furnaces out. Through the sanctum of the Third, where the sixty-two sat with their faces lifted and the army went through in silence, every one of them looking up at the faces, and some of them touching the bone of the lowest tier as they passed, the way you touch a grave.

They’d lost eleven.

Three to a stair-dog above the Fifth — there’d been a third one, after all, and it had come down on the column at night. Two to a fall on the steep scribes’ stair inside the bone. Six to the stair itself. Exhaustion. Old Belly lungs that couldn’t take six thousand steps, and old Belly hearts. They’d sat down on the stair to rest and not got up.

Sabine came up the last spiral of the peg onto the Atlas at the head of what was left, with her two-fingered hand on the bone and a blasting bar across her back, and saw him.

She stopped.

She looked at him for a long time. At his black arm. The script in it. The ember eyes. The spurs. The grey on his arms that was still there, faded now to the elbows. At the burnt sleeve. At his face.

Then she came across the flat top of the Atlas and stood in front of him.

“You look like hour nineteen,” said Sabine Kettle.

“So do you.”

She almost smiled. It didn’t come off. It never did, with Sabine. She looked past him. At the drive-house. At the envoy standing in its doorway with its hands folded and Arral’s face smiling.

“What’s that,” she said.

“A guide.”

“Whose?”

“The Archon’s.”

Sabine looked at the envoy for a long time.

“Why’s it still standing,” she said.

“Because it answers questions. And it doesn’t lie.”

She turned back to him. Her flat grey eyes on his ember ones.

“What did it say?”

He told her. All of it. The Engine under the Palate. The four million. If the dam opened now, the blood boils them all. If the Drip stopped first, they’d wake. All of them. Four million of you, Vessel. Imagine. His mother’s verse. An instruction. It tells you how to open the door. And we will not let you.

Sabine listened without moving.

When he finished she was quiet for a long time.

“Four million,” she said. “Waking. All at once. With nothing to make them kneel.”

“Yes.”

“It thinks that’s a threat.”

He looked at her.

“It thinks that’s the worst thing it can say,” said Sabine. “Four million people, awake, that nobody can make kneel.” Her two-fingered hand closed into a fist. “I’ve been trying to get six thousand people to stop kneeling for a year. In the caverns. On the Ninth. In the Gardens.” She looked up. At the underside of the god’s head. At the great openings in the bone. “Four million. Good.”

“It says they’ll burn the ribs down.”

“Maybe,” said Sabine. “Some of them. For a while.” She looked back at him. “You didn’t. You had everything in you. Snake in your bones. Every chance. You put your hand on Wick’s throat and a one-armed man talked you out of it.” Her flat eyes didn’t blink. “People can be talked out of things. People can talk each other out of things. That’s what people do.”

She looked past him at the envoy.

“It’s never seen that,” she said. “Has it. It’s never once seen what people do when nobody’s making them kneel. It’s had them asleep for nine hundred years. It doesn’t know.”

“No,” said Creed. “It doesn’t.”

“Then it’s guessing,” said Sabine Kettle. “And we’re not.” She turned and looked at the six hundred coming up onto the Atlas behind her. Grey and canvas and Gilt plate with the gold scraped off. Tired. Afraid. Looking up. “We know what we do. We’ve been doing it a year.”

The way in was up the throat.

The Atlas was the top of the neck. Above it, the head. The stair didn’t stop at the Atlas — it went on, around the outside of the peg, up into the dark between the peg and the skull, and then out, along a ledge of bone, forward. Away from the spine. Toward the front of the head.

Toward the throat.

It opened in front of them like a cave. A vast curving tunnel of bone, ridged, rising, going up and forward into the head. The god’s throat. Where the neck met the mouth. And at the top of it, far up, the grey-gold light came pouring down — the light that had come down the inside of the neck all the way up, the soft old light that didn’t look at you. It came from up there. From the mouth. From between the teeth.

They could see the teeth from the bottom of the throat.

Up at the top of the long slope of bone, where the throat opened into the mouth, they stood in a ring. Huge. Pale. Each one the size of a tower on the Collar. Molars, broad and flat-topped. Further round, narrower ones. And at the front, just visible past the curve — two great curving points, longer than all the others, like the horns of something.

The canines.

And built onto them, into them, over them —

Iron. Black. The Heads’ iron, the Concord’s iron, bolted onto the god’s bone the way it was bolted onto everything. Platforms on top of the molars. Gun-ports cut into the sides. And on the platforms, things.

“Guns,” said Ferrin. Beside him. Very low. “Big ones. Old. Look at the barrels. Concord made, first-era. Before the Lumens. Before anything.” He squinted. “And something else. On the canines. That’s not Concord.”

On the two great canines, at the front, the iron was different. Not bolted plate. Smooth. White. Like Warden armor. Like the stair-dogs’ enamel. And from the smooth white, turning slowly on great bases, discs. Wide. Shallow. Like ears.

“Listeners,” said Snake. In the arm. “Big ones. The biggest. They put ears on the teeth.”

And on the platforms around the guns, small figures, moving. Silver scale. Flower-staffs.

“Lancers,” said Rell. Beside Ferrin. His ruined hand strapped. “The ones that went to the Collar. With Lund. And the ones that went up from the Collar, after.” He counted. Lips moving. “Eighty. Ninety. They came up here.”

“Who leads them,” said Sabine.

Rell watched them. A long time.

“Varro,” he said at last. “Isolde Varro. The Senior of the Third’s daughter. Captain of the Third Rib Lancers.” His young face was grim. “Her father went up the light at the Collar. Lund said. First night. He said Here.” He looked at the teeth. “She watched him go. She came up here anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the last place,” said Rell. “Where anybody’s still telling her what to do.”

Sabine planned it on the bone of the throat, at the bottom, with Ferrin’s charcoal and Rell’s eyes.

“The listeners on the canines,” she said. “They’ll hear us the second we start up the slope. Six hundred. No way to be quiet. They’ll hear, and the guns will turn, and the Lancers will come.” She drew. “So we don’t try to be quiet. We go loud. All at once. Everything.”

“The guns’ll cut us apart on the slope,” said Ferrin.

“The guns are first-era Concord,” said Sabine. “You said. Old. Slow traverse.” She looked at Ferrin. “How slow?”

Ferrin looked at the guns for a long time.

“Thirty seconds to swing across the throat,” he said. “Maybe forty. They were built to fire down the neck. At something coming up the stair. Not across. Not at something coming up the walls.”

“Then we come up the walls,” said Sabine. “Not the slope. Both sides of the throat. Two columns. On the bone. Up the ridges.” She drew two lines, curving up either side of the throat. “The guns swing to one, the other closes. They swing back, the first closes.” She looked at Rell. “And the Lancers.”

“Ours meet theirs,” said Rell. “In the air. In the mouth.” He looked at his ten. Silver scale, the Ninth’s blue stripe. Haske’s. “Ten against ninety.”

“Ten and blood rounds,” said Ollo. From the back. “Got two hundred and forty left.”

“Blood rounds don’t do anything to Lancers,” said Rell. “Lancers aren’t Wardens. No seams. No worms. Just channels.”

“They do something,” said Creed.

Everyone looked at him.

“My blood,” he said. “In a Lancer’s channels. Through a wound. It’d go in hot. Hotter than anything their rigs can take.” He looked at his black arm. “It’d burn the channels out.”

Rell looked at him for a long moment.

“It’d kill them,” he said.

“Maybe. Or just empty them. Like I used to. Drink the channel dry and leave the man.” He didn’t know. “Maybe.”

Rell nodded slowly.

“And the canines,” said Sabine. “The listeners.”

“Mine,” said Rell.

Nobody said anything.

“The left one,” said Rell. “The upper left canine. The big ear on it. That’s what tells the guns where to point. Kill the ear, the guns on the left go deaf. They’ll have to aim by eye. In this light.” He looked up at the great curved tooth, its smooth white disc turning slowly. “There’s a gun-port in the base of the disc mount. I can see it from here. Where the ear plugs into the tooth.” His young face didn’t change. “Somebody flies a charge into that port, the ear goes.”

“It’ll hear you coming,” said Ferrin.

“It’ll hear everything coming,” said Rell. “That’s the point. It’ll be listening to six hundred people screaming up the walls. One kite won’t stand out.”

Sabine looked at him for a long time.

“Rell,” she said.

“I’ve got one hand,” said Tobin Rell. Simply. “Can’t climb. Can’t shoot. Can’t fight a Lancer in the air one-handed, not for long.” He held up his ruined right hand, strapped, the fingers that Brann had unbent one at a time on the stair still curled. “Can fly. Can carry a charge. Can let go of it.”

Nobody said anything.

“Haske pushed me off a roof,” said Rell. Very quietly. “On the Shelf. With a Warden’s hand on her. Pushed me off into the yard. I broke my arm. She froze.” He looked up at the canine. “I’ve been flying her kites for twenty-four days. Every one. Every run. Since the Shelf.” He lowered his hand. “Let me fly this one.”

Sabine looked at him. Then at Creed.

Creed looked at Rell. At his young grey face. At the ruined hand.

“Your call,” he said.

“It’s mine,” said Rell.

They went up at the end of the second watch.

Not quiet. Sabine stood at the bottom of the throat and lifted her two-fingered hand, and dropped it, and six hundred people went up both walls of the god’s throat at once, roaring.

He’d never heard anything like it. Not on the Long Bridge. Not at the Snag. Not at the Collar. Six hundred voices, after six days of silence on the stair, after six days of not singing, not gasping, not breathing too loud — all of it, all at once, coming out of them in one huge raw wordless sound that went up the throat ahead of them and hit the teeth like a wave.

The listeners on the canines spun.

Both discs. Wheeling. Toward the sound. Toward everything. And on the molars the old Concord guns began to turn, slowly, grinding on their bases, their great barrels swinging down toward the throat.

The first one fired.

It was louder than the roar. A flat enormous crack that went through the bone of the throat like the Atlas lift’s drum dropping. And on the right wall, where the right column was climbing the ridges, a piece of the wall exploded. Bone. Dust. People. He saw them go. Six. Eight. Thrown off the ridge into the air of the throat.

The right column kept climbing.

The gun on the right molar swung toward them — slowly, grinding — for a second shot.

And the left column reached the left molar.

Dorne first. Always Dorne. Up the last ridge and over the lip of the molar’s iron platform in one movement, onto the gun-crew. Six of them. Concord gunners, old men in faded Higher Rib uniforms who’d been sent up to the teeth with Lund and never sent back down. She went through them like a press through a sheet. And behind her, the left column, pouring over the lip. Blasting bars. Wrenches. Pipe.

The left molar’s gun stopped turning.

Then the Lancers came.

Down off the canines. Off the platforms. Ninety of them. Silver scale. Flower-staffs. Lift-rigs screaming. Down into the mouth of the god in a wheeling glittering flock, firing, bolts cracking blue-white across the throat, into the columns on the walls.

And ten kites went up to meet them.

Haske’s. The blue stripe. Ten silver figures against ninety, going up out of the throat into the light, firing. Not bolts — they had bolts, their rigs were full — rounds. Long Lancer rifles, Ollo’s rounds. Blood rounds. Two hundred and forty of them, split ten ways.

He saw the first one hit.

A Third Rib Lancer, wheeling over the left molar, firing down at Dorne. A round took him in the thigh. The tip broke. The drop got out. Into the wound. Into the channels in his leg.

He lit.

Every channel in his body. All at once. Not blue. Red. Furnace-red. Running up from the thigh through his hip, his spine, his arms, his rig — lighting up through the silver scale like the veins in a leaf held up to a lamp. And the Lancer screamed. And his rig died — the lift went out, the staff went dark — and he fell.

Not burning. Not boiling. Just empty. Like Creed used to leave them, when he drank their channels with the sword. The god’s blood, hot, pure, in a channel built for frosted Catalyst, burning out every line it touched and leaving nothing. He fell into the throat with his rig dead and his channels black and his body untouched, and hit the bone of the slope, and rolled, and lay there. Alive. Gasping. Empty.

“It works,” said Snake. In the arm. Wondering. “Mule. It empties them. Your blood. Like you used to. Like the sword.”

“I know.”

“You’re doing it through Ollo’s rounds. From down here.”

“I know.”

He was climbing. The center. Not a wall. The slope. Straight up the middle of the throat, on the bone, toward the teeth. Alone. Because Sabine had said draw them, the way she’d said it on the Collar. That’s what you’re for. And the guns on the molars that hadn’t been taken yet — three of them, on the right — saw him.

They swung.

Slowly. Grinding. Thirty seconds. Forty.

He ran.

The first shot missed him by ten meters. The bone of the slope blew apart behind him and the blast picked him up and threw him forward and he landed on his hands and his spurs drove into the bone and he was up again.

The second shot was closer.

He didn’t see it. He felt it. The air in front of him went hot and then the slope in front of him wasn’t there, and he went into the crater it made and out the other side, and the black arm was burning and the cold in his blood was singing and he didn’t stop.

The third gun didn’t fire.

He looked up. Ran. Looked up again.

On the right molar — the one with the third gun — the right column was coming over the lip. Sabine. Her blasting bar. The gunners going down. And Ferrin, one-armed, on the gun. On the barrel. Straddling it. With a shaped charge in his hand — Sabine’s, from her pack — jamming it into the breech.

He jumped off. The gun went up.

The right molar was theirs.

And above him — above everything — the air of the mouth was full of kites.

He saw Haske’s ten. Wheeling. Firing. Seven, now. Six. Three had gone down. He saw a blue-striped Lancer take a bolt full in the chest and fold and fall past the molars into the throat. He saw another collide with a Third Rib kite and both of them tangle and spin and go down together into the dark between the teeth. He saw a round take a Third Rib Lancer in the arm and light him up red and drop him empty onto the left molar where Dorne’s people were. He saw the Lancers of the Third turning, wheeling, scattering — because the ones that were hit didn’t come back up, and they could see it, and they didn’t know what it was.

And he saw one kite going straight up. Away from the fight. Toward the left canine.

One-handed. With something strapped to its chest.

“Rell,” he said. Out loud. Running. “Rell —”

The listener on the left canine turned.

Not toward the fight. Toward Rell. The great white disc swinging on its base, slowly, smoothly, hearing him — one kite, climbing, alone, away from everything else — and on the canine’s platform below the disc, Lancers. Five of them. Turning. Lifting their staffs.

And one Lancer in front of them. Taller than the rest. In silver scale with a gold band across her helm.

Isolde Varro.

She lifted her staff and fired at Tobin Rell.

The bolt took his kite’s left wing. The membrane tore. The kite lurched, spun, dropped — and caught itself. Rell. One-handed. Fighting it. Climbing again. Crooked. Trailing torn silver.

Varro fired again.

The bolt took him in the leg.

He kept climbing.

“SNAKE,” said Creed.

“Here —”

“Up. I need to get UP —”

He was at the top of the slope. At the base of the left molar. The left molar was Dorne’s — the gun silent, the platform full of grey and canvas — and above it, a hundred meters across the open air of the mouth, the left canine. Rell, climbing toward it. Varro’s five, firing at him.

He couldn’t fly. He’d never flown. He went up the side of the left molar instead, the way Dorne had gone up the terrace walls, fingers and spurs in the bone, and over the iron lip of its platform, through Dorne’s people, to the far edge, where it faced the canine across the gap.

A hundred meters. Too far to jump. Too far for anything.

“Snake,” he said. “The column. Like the Collar. Can you —”

“At her? At the Lancers?” Fast. Hot. “I can. It’ll cost. You’ve been bleeding into bowls for a week, mule, and you ran the slope, and —”

“Can you.”

“Yes.”

“Lamp.”

“I am telling you,” said Lamp. Fast and cold and shaking. “If the serpent fires, I will have to cool everything after. All of it. At once. I can. I am bigger now. I can.” A pause. “I am telling you it will hurt.”

“Okay.”

He raised his black arm toward the canine.

And on the canine, Isolde Varro fired a third time, and the bolt took Tobin Rell in the chest.

He felt it.

He’d learned Rell’s heart. On the kite up from Hesk’s Rest to the Shelf, forty minutes in the harness, Rell’s heart going hard and young behind him. On the clavicle, three hundred meters straight up. On the stair, when Rell had gone off the edge after Ennis Rook. He knew it.

He felt it take the bolt.

Felt it stumble. Felt the channel-fire of the bolt go into it and the heart seize, the way Haske’s had seized under the Warden’s hand.

And felt it keep going.

Not for long. A few beats. Hard. Uneven. Like a man taking the last steps of a long climb.

Rell’s kite didn’t fall. It went forward. One-handed. Crooked. Trailing torn silver. Straight at the canine. Straight at the platform. Straight at the base of the great white listening disc, where Rell had seen the gun-port from the bottom of the throat, where the ear plugged into the tooth.

Varro’s five scattered.

Varro didn’t.

She stood at the edge of the platform in her silver scale with the gold band on her helm and her staff raised and watched the kite come at her. Didn’t fire again. Didn’t move. Just watched.

He saw Rell let go of the charge.

He saw it fall from the harness on Rell’s chest. A small dark shape. Falling the last three meters into the gun-port at the base of the disc. And Rell’s kite going past it, past the platform, past Varro, over her — close enough that his torn wing brushed her helm — and on, out over the edge of the canine, into the open air of the mouth beyond.

And falling.

The canine went up.

Not the tooth. The tooth was bone. It held. The ear. The great white disc on its base. It lifted off the canine on a column of fire and smoke and white enamel, spinning, and broke in half in the air, and the two halves fell, slowly, turning, into the dark between the teeth.

On the molars, the guns that were left went deaf.

He felt it. Through the bone. Through the iron. The guns on the right side of the mouth — still Concord-held, still swinging, still hunting — stopped. Wavered. Their barrels sweeping slowly back and forth across the throat, blind, as if the gunners had been struck deaf in the middle of a sentence.

He looked for Rell’s kite.

He found it. Far below. On the slope of the throat, among the craters. A small silver shape, crumpled, with a torn wing. Not moving.

He didn’t need to go down to know.

He felt for the heart, anyway. The way he’d followed Arral’s, and Marchetti’s, and Taavi’s. The way he’d felt Haske’s stop on the roof.

There was nothing.

He crossed to the canine.

He didn’t remember how. Ollo said afterward he’d gone down the molar and across the bone of the gum between the teeth — the great ridged floor where the teeth were rooted — and up the canine on the far side, the way he’d gone up the molar. Ollo said it took him two minutes. Ollo said nobody tried to stop him.

He came over the lip of the canine’s platform.

The five Lancers were gone. Scattered. Flying. Away from the mouth, toward the dark of the Palate beyond the teeth. The platform was empty.

Except for Isolde Varro.

She was sitting on the iron, by the scorched black base where the listening disc had been, with her legs out in front of her and her flower-staff across her knees. Her helm was off. She was perhaps thirty. Fine-boned. A Verbous face, done once, well. Fine blue channels faintly visible at her temples. Short dark hair. She was looking at the edge of the platform where Rell’s kite had gone over.

She looked up when he came over the lip.

At his eyes. His arm. His spurs. The smoke coming off his burnt sleeve.

She didn’t lift the staff.

“He flew right over me,” she said. Her voice was very calm. Verbous-calm. Higher Rib-calm. The voice of someone who had been taught since birth never to let anything show. “Over my head. His wing touched my helm. He could have flown into me. Taken me with him. Into the port.” She looked at the edge again. “He went over me.”

“His name was Tobin Rell,” said Creed.

“I know who he was. He was Haske’s. Ninth Rib.” A pause. “I shot him three times.”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t stop.”

“No.”

She looked down at her staff.

“My father went up,” she said. “At the Collar. In the well. The light called his name, and he went out on the balcony and said here. And I watched him go up. Screaming. Like the Senior on the screens.” Her calm voice didn’t change. Her hands, on the staff, were white at the knuckles. “And then I came up here. With the ones who’d come. Because the light was up here. Because — because I thought if I came closer, I’d understand. Why it called him. What he was for.”

Creed looked at her.

“Food,” he said.

She looked up.

“That’s what it said,” said Creed. “Downstairs. The guide. With Arral’s face. I asked it what Arral was for. It said food.” He crouched. Across from her. On the iron. Not close. “It doesn’t lie. That’s what it said.”

Isolde Varro looked at him for a long, long time.

Then she put her flower-staff down on the iron of the platform. Carefully. And pushed it away from her. It rolled, a little, and stopped against the scorched base of the dead ear.

“Noted,” she said. Very quietly. And then something happened to her calm Verbous face, and it stopped being calm.

He didn’t stay to watch it. He stood up and went to the edge of the platform and looked down.

Below him, the mouth of the god.

The teeth, in their great ring. The molars, all four on the left and two on the right, theirs. The guns silent. The throat behind, cratered, littered with the bodies of the Unbanded who’d fallen off the walls and the Lancers who’d fallen empty out of the air. And Rell’s kite, small and silver and crumpled, among the craters.

And ahead — through the gap between the canines, the gap Rell had opened — the Palate.

The roof of the mouth. Vast. Arched. Ridged like the inside of a shell. Lit by the grey-gold light that came from somewhere deeper in. And on it, in it, hanging from it, built into its curving bone — a city.

White.

Towers hanging from the arch like icicles. Walkways strung between them. Windows. Lamps. Thousands of lamps. And moving among them, along the walkways, in the windows, small figures in pale robes. Not looking up. Not looking down. Not looking at the teeth, where the guns had stopped and the ear had burned and an army had come through the mouth of the god.

Kept.

A city of them.

Behind him, Sabine came over the lip of the canine with her blasting bar across her back. She stood beside him and looked at the white city on the roof of the mouth.

“How many,” she said.

He counted. He couldn’t help it.

He couldn’t count them. There were too many.

THE JAW
LISTENERS: 1 DESTROYED
GUN EMPLACEMENTS: 6 OF 8 TAKEN
CASUALTIES: 47
FOOTHOLD: THE PALATE
NOTED