The Palate

They buried Tobin Rell in the god’s own tooth.

There was nowhere else. The throat was bone, the gum was bone, the teeth were bone, and none of it would take a spade. So Sabine’s blasters cut a niche. Into the inner face of the left canine, low down, near the root, where it came up out of the gum — a long shallow cut in the pale ridged bone, the length of a man, a hand deep. It took them an hour with chisels and a small charge. Nobody complained about the noise. The listeners were dead. The guns were deaf.

They laid him in it with his torn kite folded on his chest.

Isolde Varro carried one end of him.

Nobody asked her to. She’d come down off the canine platform after Creed, without her staff, without her helm, and stood at the edge of the gum while the blasters cut, and when they lifted Rell off the slope of the throat, she came forward and took his feet. Sabine looked at her. Varro looked back. Sabine didn’t say anything.

They laid him in the niche. Varro stepped back.

Creed set the spurs of his right fist against the bone above it.

TOBIN RELL. NINTH RIB. HASKE’S. HE FLEW OVER HER.

He stood back.

Isolde Varro read it. Her fine-boned Verbous face didn’t move. Then she turned and walked away along the gum, between the great roots of the teeth, and stood alone at the edge of the throat looking down for a long time.

“Is she ours now,” said Wick. Very quietly. Beside him.

“I don’t know whose she is,” said Creed. “I don’t think she does.”

Behind them, the six Lancers left of Haske’s ten — the blue stripe across their breastplates, scorched now, dented — stood in a line in front of the niche with their kites folded and their staffs grounded. They didn’t say anything either. After a while, one of them — a tall woman named Fenn Arrowby, the oldest of them, who’d flown with Haske since before the war — stepped forward and took the scarf off her own neck and tucked it into the niche beside Rell’s head.

Blue. Ninth Rib blue.

Then she stepped back into line.

The Kept met them at the gap between the canines.

He’d expected a fight. Guns. Lancers. Something. He’d expected the Palate to close against them like a fist. He walked through the gap Rell had opened with the sword in his hand and the black arm burning and Sabine on one side and Dorne on the other and the army coming behind, six hundred, five hundred and fifty, grey and canvas and blood —

And the Kept were waiting.

A line of them. Across the broad ridged floor of the mouth beyond the teeth, where the roof of the Palate arched overhead with its white city hanging from it. Twenty of them, perhaps. In pale robes. White. With their hair bound in white cloth. Standing very straight. Hands folded. Smooth-faced. Unblinking.

And beautiful. More beautiful than Sefa had been. More beautiful than anything. Their faces were so smooth and so even and so calm that they looked carved. Their eyes were so pale they were almost silver.

The one in the center stepped forward and bowed.

“Welcome,” she said. “Welcome to the Palate.” Her voice was soft and even and clear, and it carried across the whole mouth of the god without being raised. “You have climbed a long way. The Stewardship has asked us to make you comfortable.”

Creed stopped.

“There is water,” said the Kept. She gestured with one smooth hand. Behind the line, on the ridged floor of the mouth, long tables. White. Set with white cups. Hundreds of them. Full. “There is food. There are beds, in the lower towers, prepared. There are baths.” She smiled. Perfectly. “There are physicians for your wounded. Many of you are wounded. Bleeding is not kept. We would be glad to keep it.”

Nobody moved.

“And when you have rested,” said the Kept, “the Gallery is open. The Stewardship invites you to see it. All of you. Every face. There is no need to hurry. The Gallery has been waiting a long time.”

She bowed again.

Behind Creed, somebody started to laugh. A cracked, high, terrible sound. One of the Discarded. A man from the caverns who’d come up the stairs with Sabine. He laughed and laughed, and then he stopped, and put his hand over his mouth.

“Water,” said Sabine. Flat. “It’s offering us water.”

“It’s the Drip,” said Creed. “It’s all the Drip. Every cup.”

“I know what it is.” She looked at the long white tables. At the hundreds of white cups. “It’s offering us a tab. After all this. It walked us up six thousand steps and through the teeth and it’s standing here offering us a tab.”

“It’s not offering,” said Creed. “It’s asking.”

Sabine looked at him.

“It’s doing what we did,” he said. “On the Sixth. It’s asking. Seeing who says yes.” He looked at the beautiful line of Kept. At their folded hands. “It learned that from us. From watching Sefa.”

“Then the answer’s no,” said Sabine.

“It knows that. From us.” He looked at the white cups. “It’s asking the ones behind us.”

Sabine turned.

He watched her look at them. At the army. Five hundred and fifty. Grey and canvas and blood. Exhausted. Six days on the stair. Eleven lost on the climb, forty-seven in the throat. People who’d been off the tab for months, some of them — for a year, the cavern people — and people who’d been off it for weeks, the turned Gilt, the Mids from the Ninth and the Shelf, who still woke at night shaking. People who’d climbed further than anyone had climbed in nine hundred years, and seen the Forge, and the Teagues in the vat, and Rell fall, and were standing now at the end of all of it in the mouth of the god, looking at long white tables with water on them.

Some of them were looking at the cups.

He felt their hearts. Not many. Ten. Twenty. Going a certain way. The way a heart goes when it’s very tired and somebody’s holding out something that will make the tiredness stop.

“Oh,” said Sabine. Very quietly.

“Yeah.”

She turned back to the line of Kept. She looked at the beautiful woman in the center for a long time.

Then she walked forward. Past the line. To the nearest table. She picked up a white cup. Full. She held it up so that the army could see it.

And she turned it over, and poured it out on the bone of the god’s mouth.

“No,” said Sabine Kettle.

She didn’t shout it. She didn’t need to. The mouth carried. Everything carried.

She set the empty cup down on the table, upside down.

Behind Creed, a woman from the Shelf walked forward. Picked up a cup. Poured it out. Set it down upside down. Then a Gilt — one of the turned ones, from the Second’s square — with the gold scraped off his plate. Poured it out. Then three cavern men together. Then ten. Then the twenty whose hearts had been going the tired way — he felt them, felt them go forward to the tables, felt them pick up the cups, felt them hesitate, and hesitate, and — pour.

It took a long time. Five hundred and fifty people. One at a time. Walking past the beautiful line of Kept to the long white tables and picking up a cup and pouring it out on the floor of the god’s mouth and setting it down upside down.

The Kept watched. Smooth-faced. Unblinking. Not moving.

When the last cup was poured, the floor of the Palate between the teeth and the tables was wet. A shallow white-tinged pool, spreading slowly across the ridged bone, finding the grooves. The tables were covered in upturned cups.

The beautiful Kept in the center of the line looked at the pool for a long time.

“Noted,” she said.

The city hung from the roof of the mouth.

He’d seen it from the canine. He hadn’t understood it. Walking under it, he did.

The Palate arched overhead, huge, ridged like the inside of a shell — the roof of the god’s mouth, a vault of bone so high and so broad that it was like standing under the sky the Wrights had painted on Marchetti’s clock-faces. And from it, hanging down, like icicles from the eaves of a building in a picture in a book: towers.

White. Smooth. Tapering. Grown out of the bone of the Palate’s roof and hanging point-down into the air of the mouth. Some no bigger than a Belly drawer-stack. Some the size of Kon’s tower on the Third. Hundreds of them. And between them, walkways. Strung like rope bridges, white, swaying slightly, connecting tower to tower in a web that went up and up into the arch. Windows in the towers. Lamps — white, steady, a cold even light, not the warm yellow of the Gardens. And on the walkways and in the windows, Kept. Moving. Slowly. In their pale robes. Not looking down.

“Twenty thousand,” said Isolde Varro.

She’d come back from the edge of the throat. She was walking a little apart from the army, with no staff and no helm, looking up at the towers. Creed hadn’t asked her to come. Nobody had.

“The Lancers’ net had a count,” she said. “For the relay. Twenty thousand, three hundred and something. Kept of the Palate. They don’t tend gardens. They tend the Stewardship.” She pointed. Up. At the largest of the hanging towers, near the center of the arch. “The Halls. Where the faces are kept. The Gallery.” She pointed again. Further back. Deeper into the mouth, where the arch of the Palate curved down toward the back of the throat — the other way, up, into the skull. “The Engine. Under the Palate. Where the water’s made.” And again — to the very center of the arch, directly overhead. “And the Mother.”

He looked up.

At the center of the arch, hanging from the highest point of the Palate’s roof, larger than any of the towers, was a Bell.

He’d seen Bells. Every Lumen on every rib had one. Bronze discs, dull gold, hanging in their domes, ringing at noon. He’d watched them crack. He’d watched Ebbe Sallis stand under hers and go to her knees.

This was not a disc.

It was a bell. A real one. The shape of a bell — a great round-shouldered cup, flaring at the mouth, hanging mouth-down from the roof of the Palate on a chain of white bone links each the size of a tram-car. Bronze, but not dull. Bright. Polished. Gold-white, like the gala’s glass. And so big that the whole Lumen of the Ninth could have fit inside it.

Under it, hanging from its rim on thinner chains, a ring of smaller shapes. Cylinders. Tanks. Dozens of them. And from each tank, a pipe, running up the inside of the Bell’s chain to the roof of the Palate and away along the arch — into the bone — down.

“The Mother,” said Varro. “Every Lumen Bell on every rib is tuned to her. When she rings, they ring. All of them. On the hour. Wherever they are. The daughters answer.” She looked at the tanks hanging from its rim. “And when she rings, the tanks vent. The mist. Somnoline-A. Down the pipes. Down the ribs. Into every Lumen’s reservoir. That’s where it comes from. The Ledger said reservoir chambers behind the disc face. It didn’t say how they filled.” She looked down. At Creed. “They fill from here.”

“How do you know,” said Sabine.

“Because the Lancers of the Third rang the Bell schedule into every Gilt helm on the Concord net for six years,” said Isolde Varro. “I signed the relay logs. The signal came from here. From her. Through a relay in the Collar. On the hour. Three times a day.” Her calm face didn’t change. “I never asked what else came down with it.”

Sabine looked up at the Mother Bell for a long time.

“We cracked forty Bells,” she said. “On the Ribs. One at a time. Wardens standing under their own. Charges on domes. A carpenter’s hammer.” She looked at the tanks. “And the ones we couldn’t reach — the Higher Ribs, the Second, the Collar — still ring. Still vent.”

“Because they’re still answering her,” said Creed.

“Because they’re still answering her.” Sabine’s two-fingered hand closed on the blasting bar across her back. “Crack the Mother, the daughters go quiet.”

“Every one,” said Varro. “Every one still hanging. On every rib.”

Sabine looked at Creed.

“That’s the first thing,” she said. “Isn’t it. The Drip has to go first. Your cousin said. Before the Key. Everywhere.” She nodded up at the Bell. “That’s the mist. That’s half of it.”

“And the Engine’s the other half,” said Creed.

“So we split.”

He looked at her. At the army. At the beautiful line of Kept behind them, standing beside the long tables of upturned cups, watching.

“You take the Mother,” he said. “The blasters. Varro, if she’ll show you. Half the army.”

“And you?”

He looked up. At the largest of the hanging towers. Near the center of the arch. Where Varro had pointed. Where the faces were kept.

“The Gallery’s open,” he said.

Sabine held his eyes.

“It wants you to go,” she said. “It put that woman out with cups to ask the army. And it put Arral’s face in a cage to ask you. It wants you in that Gallery.”

“I know.”

“It wants you to see your mother’s face and break.”

“I know.”

“Then why —”

“Because she’s there,” said Creed. “Niche four thousand one hundred and thirteen. Beside him.” He looked at the tower. “They’ve been there twenty-five years. Kept very well.” His voice didn’t do anything. He didn’t let it. “Somebody should go and see them.”

Sabine didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Take Ollo,” she said. “And Moraine.”

“They were coming anyway.”

“I know,” said Sabine. “I’m telling you to let them.”

He didn’t go to the Gallery that day.

He went with Sabine to the Mother first. He couldn’t not. He stood on the ridged floor of the mouth under the arch and watched her people go up.

There was a way. There was always a way. The towers hanging from the arch were connected by the walkways, and the walkways went up, tower by tower, toward the center, toward the Bell’s great chain. And the Kept on the walkways didn’t stop them. Didn’t look at them. Moved aside, slowly, smoothly, the way water moves aside from a stone, and went on with whatever they were doing. Carrying white cloth. Carrying white cups. Not looking.

Sabine’s blasters went up the walkways with their charges on their backs. Varro led them. Without her staff. She went up the swaying white bridges tower to tower like someone who’d been on the Third Rib’s high walks all her life, which she had, and the blasters followed, and the Kept moved aside.

Dorne went with them. And Brann, grey and weak, who couldn’t lift a blasting bar anymore but could carry a coil of fuse-cable.

Creed watched them climb.

“It’s letting them,” said Wick. Beside him. Looking up. “Isn’t it. The Kept aren’t stopping them. Nobody’s stopping them.”

“It said it wouldn’t send the light. Or the Wardens.”

“It didn’t say it wouldn’t stop them other ways.”

“No.”

“So why isn’t it?”

Creed thought about it.

“Because it doesn’t think it matters,” he said. “Like the guide said. It doesn’t matter what we do. We’ll go to the Gallery. We’ll see. And we’ll choose.” He looked up at the Bell. “It thinks when we see the Gallery, everything else stops mattering.”

“Does it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

It took them two hours to reach the Bell’s chain. He watched them the whole time. Small figures on the white walkways. Then smaller. Then at the very top of the arch, at the great white bone links where the chain met the roof of the Palate. Then going down the chain. Hand over hand. On the links. Each one the size of a tram-car. Down toward the Bell’s shoulder. Toward the tanks hanging from its rim.

He felt Lamp in his blood. Watching. Through his eyes.

“The tanks,” it said. Very quietly. “I can taste them. From here. Through the air.” A tremor. “It is the mist. Somnoline-A. Concentrated. More than the cistern. More than the vats.” The want rose under the words. Huge. Cold. “I am telling you. I could —”

“I know.”

“I am not. I am telling you that I could, and that I am not.”

“I know. Thanks.”

“Do not thank me.” Something almost like a laugh. Shaky. “It is only what I swore.”

At the end of the second watch, Varro’s people reached the Bell.

He couldn’t see what they did. They were too far up. Small dark figures clinging to the great gold-white shoulder of the Mother. Moving along it. Stopping. Moving. Setting charges. Running fuse-cable back up the chain.

And the Kept on the walkways had stopped moving.

All of them. All at once. Twenty thousand. On every walkway, in every window, on every swaying white bridge across the arch of the Palate. They had stopped. And for the first time since the throat, since the line of beautiful Kept at the tables, since the walkways where they’d moved aside like water —

They were looking up.

At the Mother. At the small dark figures on her shoulder.

He felt it. Through the air. Through the bone. Twenty thousand hearts, so slow, so white, like clocks running down — all of them, at once, going faster. Not much. A beat. Two. Like a sleeper turning over when someone walks across the room.

“They know,” said Wick. Very small. “Don’t they. They know what’s happening.”

“They’ve heard her ring every day of their lives,” said Creed. “Three times a day. Their whole lives.”

“What happens when she stops?”

He didn’t answer.

Far up, at the top of the chain, a small figure waved its arm. Once. Twice.

Sabine, beside him on the floor of the mouth, lifted her two-fingered hand.

And dropped it.

The charges went off on the Bell’s shoulder in a ring of small flat cracks, like a Lancer’s staff firing, one after another, all the way around.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then the Mother rang.

Not on the hour. Not on purpose. The charges had struck her the way a hammer strikes a bell, all the way around her shoulder at once, and she rang. One note. Low. Enormous. A note so big that it wasn’t a sound — it was a weight. It came down out of the arch of the Palate like the falling sheet of light on the Collar’s clavicle and hit him like the press-bed, and went into his chest and his teeth and the long bones of his legs and the god-bone floor under his boots, and the whole Palate shook with it.

And the tanks around her rim vented.

All at once. White. A great ring of white mist bursting out of the tanks into the air of the mouth —

— and the note cracked.

He heard it. Through the weight. A sound like the ice on the Belly’s cold-pools at the end of the cold cycle. A long tearing snapping groan, going up the Mother’s side from the shoulder to the crown. The note broke into two notes. Then four. Then a jangle, a clatter, a sound like every bell in the Belly ringing at once out of time.

And then nothing.

He looked up.

The Mother hung from her chain at the top of the arch. Silent. Swaying, very slightly. And down her side, from shoulder to rim, a crack. Black. Jagged. Wide enough to put a hand in. And from the crack, and from the tanks around her rim, the white mist pouring down — not in pipes, not to the Ribs — out. Into the Palate. Loose. A great white cloud, sinking slowly through the arch of the mouth, through the hanging towers, toward the floor.

“Back,” said Creed. “Everybody back. To the teeth. Get to the teeth —”

The army ran. Back across the ridged floor toward the teeth, toward the gap Rell had opened. The cloud came down behind them. Slowly. White.

It reached the walkways first.

He watched it. From the teeth. From the root of the left canine, beside Rell’s niche, with the army pressed back against the great ridged bone behind him. He watched the white cloud come down through the hanging towers and over the walkways where twenty thousand Kept stood looking up.

It went over them.

And they knelt.

All of them. Every one. The way the Ribs knelt at noon when the Bells rang. The way Ebbe Sallis’s people had swayed on the Ninth’s Lumen steps. The cloud touched them and they went down onto their knees on the walkways and in the windows and on the bridges, slowly, smoothly, their heads bowing, their hands folding, postural compliance, cessation of movement, twenty thousand people kneeling in the air of the god’s mouth under a falling sheet of mist.

And then the mist went past them. Down. Thinning. Spreading. Settling on the floor of the Palate, on the long white tables with their upturned cups, on the pool of poured-out water. Thinning more. Going grey. Going clear.

Going.

Gone.

The Kept stayed on their knees.

For a long time. A minute. Two. The note was gone. The mist was gone. The Mother hung cracked and silent at the top of the arch.

And the Kept —

He felt it. Twenty thousand hearts. Waiting. The way a heart waits at noon for the Bell to stop. For the note to end. For the moment when you can stand up again and go on.

The note had ended.

But it hadn’t ended the way it always ended. It had cracked. Broken into a jangle and stopped. And they were waiting for the end they knew. The fade. The long slow hum dying away. The signal that said now you may rise.

It didn’t come.

It was never going to come.

They knelt on the walkways in the arch of the Palate with their heads bowed, waiting for a Bell to finish that would never ring again.

Wick’s comm-set started talking at the end of the third watch.

Not one voice. Many. On top of each other. Crackling. Relays of relays of relays. Tamsin, at the Collar. A guider on the Sixth. Someone on the Second. Someone on the Ninth. Someone on the Shelf. All at once. Wick turned the dial, click, click, click, and couldn’t find a clear one, and then found one, and held it.

“— the Collar,” said Tamsin’s voice. Tinny. Precise. Shaking. “Collar to Palate net. Do you read. The Collar Bell. It didn’t ring. Third watch. It always rings at the third watch, it — Lund’s people say it’s rung every third watch for four hundred years. It didn’t. Nothing. It’s just hanging there.”

Click.

“— the Second. Coronet. The Lumen. The Bell. It rang once and stopped. Wrong. Like it was —” A man’s voice. Ragged. “— like something cut it off. Then nothing. People are standing in the square. They don’t know what to do. They’re just standing there —”

Click.

“— First Rib, Arral’s Lumen, the Bell’s — the Bell’s cracked. On its own. Nobody touched it. It just cracked. We heard it from the —”

Click.

“Clock Hall to Hesk’s Rest net.”

Calm. Cold. Tired.

“The Second’s Bell did not ring at the third watch. The Senior always said it was the only clock in Coronet she never had to wind.” A pause. “It’s stopped.” Another pause. “Thirty-eight.”

Wick set the comm-set down in his lap. He looked up at the Mother. Cracked. Silent. Swaying.

“Every rib,” he said. “Every one. All of them. Every Bell that was still —”

“Yeah,” said Creed.

“The mist,” said Wick. “It’s not coming down. Anywhere. Not on any rib. Not anymore.”

“Not anymore.”

Wick stared at the comm-set.

“That’s half,” he said. “Isn’t it. Of the Drip. That’s half of it gone.”

“That’s half.”

“In one go.”

“In one go.”

Wick put his face in his hands. His shoulders shook. Creed couldn’t tell if he was laughing or crying. He didn’t think Wick could either.

Sabine’s people came down the chain at the end of the third watch. Down the walkways. Through the kneeling Kept. They didn’t move aside anymore. They knelt where they were, on the walkways, in the middle of the bridges, and the blasters had to step around them, over them, carefully, the way you step around a sleeper on a crowded drawer-floor.

Varro came down last.

She came across the floor of the Palate, past the long white tables, past the pool, to the teeth, and stood in front of Creed with her face streaked with soot from the charges.

“They won’t get up,” she said.

“I know.”

“They’re waiting for the end of the note. I spoke to one. On the bridge by the chain. A man. I said, it’s over, the Bell’s broken, you can stand up.” Her calm Verbous voice cracked, very slightly. “He said, the note has not ended. And didn’t move.”

“They’ve never heard it not end.”

“How long will they kneel?”

He looked up at the arch. At twenty thousand people kneeling in the air.

“Until something tells them they can stop,” he said.

He thought about Ollo, on the dock. Horn’s gone. Shift’s over. Put it down. About the horn at hour twenty on Line C. About the way your arms hung when you let go of the lever, and the noise of the line died, and you stood there for a second not knowing what to do with yourself.

Nobody had ever told the Kept the shift was over.

“Lamp,” he said. “Snake.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Snake. In the arm. Low. “You can’t. There’s twenty thousand of them. You can’t go round twenty thousand necks.”

“No,” said Creed. “I can’t.”

He looked at the Mother. Cracked. Silent.

He looked at the teeth around him. The great ring of them, pale, ridged, rooted in the bone of the god’s jaw.

He thought about the Neck Gate. Seven hundred people humming. The bone flowing back. The god turning over in its sleep.

“Wick,” he said. “Give me the bell.”

Wick looked up. Blinked.

“The — what?”

“The bell. The little one. In your pack. At the bottom. The one somebody gave you at the Collar.”

Wick stared at him. Then he slowly unbuckled his pack and took everything out — the dressings, the water-skin, the grey-cap, the battery wrapped in the shirt, the spyglasses — and at the very bottom, the small brass hand-bell. The kind the street-sellers rang on the lower Eighth. He held it out.

Creed took it.

He went out from the teeth onto the floor of the Palate. Into the middle of it. Under the arch. Under the cracked Mother and twenty thousand kneeling Kept. Alone. He stood on the god-bone in the dim cold light of the hanging towers with the little brass bell in his spurred right hand.

He rang it.

It was a small sound. Thin. Bright. The sound of a market. Of a street-seller on the lower Eighth with a tray of grey-caps. Of nothing important at all.

It went up into the arch of the Palate.

He rang it again. And again. Not on the hour. Not in any rhythm. Just ringing it. The way you ring a hand-bell when you want someone to look up from their stall.

And then he stopped.

And let the last ring fade. All the way. The long thin bright brass note going out, and out, and out, into the silence of the arch, slowly dying, the way the end of a Bell’s note dies — the fade, the long slow hum dying away —

— and ending.

He felt it.

Twenty thousand hearts. Hearing the end of a note.

A note had ended.

On the walkway nearest him, a man in a pale robe lifted his head.

Slowly. As if it hurt. He looked around. At the walkway. At the towers. At the cracked Mother above him. At the floor below him, where a man with fire in his eyes and bone on his knuckles stood holding a little brass bell.

Then he stood up.

Then the woman beside him.

Then the walkway.

He watched them rise. Not all at once. Not in unison, the way they’d knelt. Raggedly. One here. Three there. A bridge. A window. A tower. Standing up off their knees in the arch of the Palate, slowly, looking around — not at the Bell, not at the light — at each other. Like people who’ve been asleep on a crowded floor and wake and find strangers beside them.

And not going back to work.

He felt it. They didn’t pick up the white cloth. They didn’t pick up the white cups. They stood on the walkways and looked at each other and didn’t know what to do.

Nobody had ever told them they could stop.

He’d just told them.

He walked back to the teeth. He held out the little brass bell to Wick.

Wick looked at it. Then at him.

“Keep it,” said Wick. Hoarse. “You — keep it. That’s yours now.”

“It’s yours. Somebody gave it to you.”

“An old woman gave it to me,” said Wick. “On the stair at the Collar. I didn’t know her. She just put it in my hand and said, for when somebody needs to hear one end.” His voice cracked. “I didn’t know what she meant.”

Creed looked at the bell in his hand.

Then he put it in the inside pocket of his father’s jacket. Beside the Key. Beside the 402 slate. Beside Kon’s eye and the seed-disc and Ferrin’s old note.

“Okay,” he said.

Above them, at the top of the arch, the Mother hung cracked and silent. And on the walkways and in the windows of the white city hanging from the roof of the god’s mouth, twenty thousand people stood looking at each other, for the first time, not knowing what came next.

“Noted,” said a soft, even voice behind him.

He turned.

The beautiful Kept from the line by the tables was standing at the edge of the teeth. Alone. With her hands folded. Smooth-faced. Unblinking.

“The Gallery is still open,” she said. “The Stewardship asks me to tell you.” She bowed. “Whenever you are ready.”

THE PALATE
MOTHER BELL: SILENT
DAUGHTER BELLS: SILENT
SOMNOLINE-A DISPERSAL: TERMINATED
KEPT OF THE PALATE: STANDING
NOTED