The tower of the Halls hung from the center of the Palate’s arch like the heaviest icicle on the eaves, and it was bigger than he’d thought.
From the floor of the mouth, it had been a white spike among other white spikes. From the walkway that led to it — a broad white bridge, wider than the others, slung across the air from the nearest tower and swaying very slightly under his boots — it was a wall. A curving wall of pale grown bone, smooth as an egg, going up into the arch out of sight and down into the air below out of sight. Windowless. And in the middle of the bridge’s end, a door.
Tall. Narrow. Open.
The beautiful Kept from the tables was standing in it.
“Welcome to the Halls,” she said. And bowed. “You came.”
He didn’t say anything.
Behind him on the bridge: Ollo, one-armed, with the long rifle slung across his back and his bandaged hand resting flat on the strap. Wick, white, with his comm-set strapped to his chest and his pack on his back and his eyes on the drop below the bridge, which was very long. And Mirelle. With her six tablets wrapped in her robe hem. With her bound hands. With her face set and pale and her thread of a voice saved, he knew, for something.
Nobody else. Sabine had wanted to send twenty. He’d said no. It’s not a fight. It said it won’t fight. It wants me to see. And Sabine had looked at him for a long time and said: That’s what scares me.
“There are many Halls,” said the Kept. “Many floors. The Gallery is very large. It has been growing for nine hundred and eighty years.” She stepped aside from the door. “Where would you like to begin?”
“The Hall of the Basin,” said Creed.
The Kept inclined her head.
“It is far down,” she said. “Toward the root. The old Halls are at the top, near the arch, where the tower began. The newer Halls are lower. The tower grows downward, as the Gallery grows.” She turned. “You may wish to see the others, on the way. Many do.”
“Many?”
“Many come,” said the Kept. Simply. “Before. On their way up. The Stewardship shows them. So that they understand what they will become.” She smiled. “So that they are not afraid.”
Wick made a small sound behind him.
“Are they,” said Creed. “Afraid. After.”
The Kept considered this.
“Some,” she said. “Most are joyful. They see that they will be remembered. Forever. Kept very well.” She turned and went in through the narrow door. “Come.”
The first hall was the oldest.
He knew it from the light. Dim. Grey. Not the cold white of the Palate’s lamps, but an older glow, faint, coming from the bone of the walls themselves — the god’s own bone, faintly luminous, the way the Archive’s walls had been. And from the air. The air was dry. Very dry. So dry that his lips cracked within a minute of stepping through the door. So dry that it smelled of nothing at all.
And the walls —
He’d known. He’d read the Ledgers. Facial preservation: complete. He’d seen Adelind Marchetti’s face fall off the envoy in the Clock Hall and land on the polished stone, smiling. He’d turned it over.
He’d known.
He hadn’t known.
The hall was long. Curved. Following the outer wall of the tower around, out of sight in both directions. And from the floor to the ceiling, three times his height, on both walls, there were faces.
Rows of them. Edge to edge. Each one on a small white hook, the way the clocks in Marchetti’s hall had hung on their brass brackets. Each one with a small bone tag below it, scratched in a script he didn’t know — older than the Concord, older than anything. Each one a face. Skin. Thin. Supple. Pale. Perfect. Without a skull behind it, so that it hung slightly concave on its hook, like a mask.
Thousands. In this hall alone.
And every one of them had an expression.
He hadn’t expected that. He’d thought — if he’d thought at all — that they’d be blank. Smooth. Like the Kept. Like the Wardens. They weren’t. Each face had been taken at a moment, and kept at that moment, and the moment was still on it. A smile. A frown. Eyes closed. Eyes open. Mouths slack or tight or parted. Old faces and young faces. Faces with the fine tracery of channels at the temples — Verbous, the first Verbous, before there were Ribs — and faces without. Faces with scars. Faces done once, twice. A face with a tattoo on its cheek in a pattern he didn’t know.
He walked along the row. Slowly. He couldn’t help it. He read the tags without being able to read them. He looked at the faces.
They were all looking up.
Every one. Hung so that, if they’d had eyes that saw, they’d have been looking at the ceiling of the hall. At the arch of the Palate above. Toward the light. Every face, in every row, tilted very slightly up.
“Oh,” said Wick. Very small. Behind him. “Oh, they — they made them look up.”
“So that they are not afraid,” said the Kept. From the doorway. Softly. “The faces look to the Stewardship. Always. As the Kept do.”
Creed stopped in front of one face. An old man. A tag he couldn’t read. The face was smiling — the smile of a man who’d been waiting a long time for something and had just seen it arrive. Arral’s smile. The same smile.
He moved on. A woman. Middle-aged. Her face was — he looked for a long time — confused. Her brow creased. Her mouth half open. As if she’d been asked a question she didn’t understand the words of.
A man. Young. His face was screaming.
He stopped.
The face was screaming. Mouth wide. Eyes wide. Every muscle in it pulled tight, frozen, nine hundred years ago, at the moment it was taken. Tilted up, like all the others. Toward the light. Screaming at it.
“That one fought,” said the Kept. Softly. “Some fight. They are kept the same.”
He stood in front of the screaming face for a long time.
“Snake,” he said. Inside.
“I see it,” said Snake. Low. In the black arm. Very still. “I see all of them, mule.”
“Lamp.”
Nothing. The cold in his blood was rigid. Clenched. The way it had been in the sanctum. In the Archive. I am afraid. I do not know why.
“Lamp. Say something.”
“…They are all looking up,” said Lamp. Very faint. “Every one. Toward the light. Toward — me. Toward what I was made to hold you to.” A long silence. “This is the light, Creed. This is what the light does. Keeps things in their places. Forever. Looking up.” Its voice cracked. “I thought the light was — I thought it was good. I thought it was the balance. Order. The way the stars go. I thought holding you to it was —” It stopped.
He waited.
“I do not want to be this,” said Lamp. “I am telling you. I do not want to be the hand that does this.”
They went down.
There were stairs. Spiraling down through the tower, from hall to hall. Each hall a ring around the tower’s outer wall, each one lower than the last, each one newer. The light changed as they went down — the grey of the old bone giving way, slowly, to the cold white of the Palate’s lamps. The faces changed. The tattoos and the strange first-era scars gave way to the fine channels of the Verbous. The tags changed from the script he couldn’t read to the Concord’s square capitals.
He read them now. He couldn’t stop.
CYCLE 88. RIB TWO. SENIOR HAL MARCHETTI. INTEGRATED.
A man with Ilsa’s narrow jaw. Smiling.
CYCLE 211. RIB FIVE. LUMEN WARDEN ESSA PALL. INTEGRATED.
CYCLE 287. RIB TWO. SENIOR ADELIND MARCHETTI.
An empty hook. Just the hook. White. And the tag. And below the tag, newer, in different capitals, scratched:
RECALLED FOR SERVICE. NOT RETURNED.
He looked at the empty hook for a long time. He thought about a face lying face-down on polished stone in a vault of clocks, where he’d turned it over. Quill was standing beside it. Thirty-eight clocks still running.
They went down.
The faces changed again. Mids appeared — faces without channels, plain faces, Rib faces, the ones who’d been rewarded — a cable-master, a Lumen choir-leader, a Gilt captain with a white band tattooed across his forehead where a faceplate’s band would sit. And then, lower, Kept. Smooth faces. Beautiful. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Hall after hall of them. Garden-Kept and Wheel-Kept and Palate-Kept, row on row, each tag the same: KEPT. HAIR WHITE. INTEGRATED.
“Taavi’s book,” said Ollo. Quietly. “Every name in it. They’re in here.”
They were. Creed found the Sixth’s Hall. Gardens of the Sixth, cycles 300 to now. He found the Fern Rows. He found ADDA WREN and CORM ELLIS, cycle 381, side by side, both smiling the calm smooth smile of the Kept. He found HOLLIN ESSE, STEWARD, cycle 382, her face confused — as if she’d been asked a question she didn’t understand — because her hair hadn’t been white, because she’d rung the wrong row, because she’d been nearest.
And at the end of the Sixth’s Hall, on new hooks, newer than any others, the bone of the tags still sharp:
CYCLE 427. GARDENS OF THE SIXTH. FERN ROWS. JUNA FALE. MAER TOLLAND. IB COSS. NEAREST.
Three faces. Calm. Smooth. Kept. Their eyes closed.
And beside them, alone, on its own hook:
CYCLE 427. GARDENS OF THE SIXTH. TAAVI LUSK. STEWARD.
The face was talking.
Not moving. It couldn’t move. It was skin on a hook. But it had been taken talking. The lips were parted, shaping a word. The brow was creased with the careful, worried concentration of a man reciting something difficult and long from memory. The eyes were open. Looking up.
Cycle three hundred and eighty-one. Adda Wren.
He’d been counting them all the way up. And they’d taken his face in the middle of a name.
Wick turned away. Put his hand over his mouth. Went to the stair and stood with his back to the hall.
Ollo stood in front of Taavi’s face for a long time.
Then he reached up with his one bandaged hand and took the face off its hook.
Gently. The way he lifted a tray of rounds off the crimp-bench. The skin was light. Supple. Dry. It folded over his palm.
“What are you doing,” said the Kept. From the stair. Softly. Not alarmed. Just asking.
“Taking him to Ferrin,” said Ollo.
“The face is kept.”
“It’s kept,” said Ollo. Flat. “By me. Now.” He folded it carefully, once, and put it inside his burned apron, against his chest, flat. “Ferrin’s got his book. He’ll want the rest.”
The Kept looked at him for a long time. Smooth-faced. Unblinking.
“Noted,” she said.
The Hall of the Third Rib was two floors above the Basin. He almost didn’t stop. He was going down the stair, and he passed the door, and he saw the tag above it — RIB THREE. VERBOUS. CYCLES 380– — and he stopped.
“Creed,” said Wick. “You don’t have to —”
“I know.”
He went in.
It was a Verbous Hall. The faces were done. Twice, three times. Fine channels at the temples. Gold dust in the skin of some of them, where they’d had their channels gilded. Smiling. Almost all of them smiling. The smile of people who’d waited their whole lives for the invitation and finally got it.
He found it near the end. The newest hook in the Hall.
CYCLE 426. RIB THREE. NATHANIEL KON. KON RECLAMATION. DECEASED 426. ASCENSION APPROVED POSTHUMOUSLY. INTEGRATED. FACIAL PRESERVATION: COMPLETE.
Silver-white swept hair. An expensively smooth face. Fine Catalyst tracery under the skin of the jaw. The gold camera-aperture eyes were gone — just the soft hollows where they’d been, the lids closed over nothing.
The face wasn’t smiling.
He’d thought it would be. Ascension approved. Kon had wanted it more than anything. Had tried to buy it with the Pale Key. Had stood in the vault under the Costal Refinery’s tempering floor, waiting for an envoy, with a Catalyst shield in front of him like jewelry and his whole face lit blue.
The face wasn’t smiling. It was surprised. The brows up. The mouth a little open. The expression of a man who’d been leaning forward to say something and been interrupted.
Deceased 426. He’d been dead when they took him. Creed had killed him. In that vault, with the sword’s point through the hollow of his throat. And the Stewardship had come down afterward and collected him anyway, and integrated what was left, and kept the face.
At the moment of death. Surprised.
He stood in front of Nathaniel Kon’s face for a long time.
He thought about the drawers. The horn. Line C. Twenty hours. One tab a shift. The bin of grey bands. Hesk at the number-two pump with her deep marrow-skin and her tune, thirty-one years, dying at the pump on Kon’s line with nobody to write her name.
Who was Jory Thane? Who was Hesk?
I don’t know.
“Hesk,” said Creed. Out loud. To the face. “Line C. Number-two pump. Thirty-one years. She hummed the Long Way Down every shift. She kept something awake in me that her sister died to put there.” He looked at the closed lids over the empty hollows. “You never knew her name. You had it on a list.”
The face hung on its hook. Surprised. Looking up.
“Now you’ve heard it,” said Creed.
He went back to the stair.
The Hall of the Basin was near the bottom of the tower. Below it, there were only two more Halls, and then the tower’s tip, where — the Kept said — the newest faces were hung while the Halls above them were extended.
It was a small Hall. The Basin had never been big. A few villages on the dunes. The pump-station. The Hollow. The bleeder families, six of them, then four, then two.
The tags went back a long way. CYCLE 140. BASIN. PUMP-HAND. CYCLE 266. BASIN. BLEEDER. PURGE. CYCLE 301. BASIN. BLEEDER. PURGE. Purge, purge, purge. Faces of people from the dunes. Weathered. Wind-scarred. Faces that had never been done, never had channels, never been anything but Basin people. Most of them not smiling.
He walked along the row slowly, reading the numbers on the tags.
4,104. 4,105.
Mirelle was beside him. She’d taken his arm — his left arm, the black one — with her bound hand at the top of the stair, and hadn’t let go. He felt the heat of the script against her palm through the cloth binding. She didn’t let go.
4,108. 4,109.
Wick and Ollo behind. Not close. A few steps back. Wick’s heart going like a bird. Ollo’s flat.
4,110. 4,111.
He stopped.
YEAR 402. CYCLE 4. BASIN. VESS, AUREL. PUMP-CHIEF. EXILE. INTEGRATED. 4,112.
YEAR 402. CYCLE 4. BASIN. MARROW-VANE, IONE. TECHNICIAN. ABSCONDED. INTEGRATION RESISTED. 4,113.
Two hooks. Side by side. Two faces.
He looked at them.
His father’s face was calm.
That was the first thing. He’d been afraid it would be screaming, like the young man in the first hall. Or confused, like Hollin Esse. Or surprised, like Kon. It wasn’t. It was calm. A man’s face, perhaps forty. Lined — not done, not channeled, a Mid face, a Rib Six face, the face of an engineer who’d spent nine years in exile running pumps on the dunes in the wind. Strong brows. A long straight nose. A mouth that looked like it had smiled a great deal and wasn’t smiling now. Just — still. Steady. The eyes were open.
They weren’t looking up.
Every face in every Hall in the tower was hung tilted, looking up. Toward the arch. Toward the light. So that they are not afraid. Aurel Vess’s face was on its hook the same as the others. Tilted the same.
But the eyes weren’t looking up. They were looking sideways. To the left. At the face on the next hook.
At her.
Ione Marrow-Vane’s face was singing.
Mouth open. Not wide — not screaming — open the way a mouth is open on a held note. The jaw relaxed. The lips shaped around a sound. Her brow wasn’t creased with pain or fear. It was creased with concentration. With effort. The face of someone holding a note for a very long time and making sure it came out right.
Thirty-one hours.
Her eyes were closed.
She had the Marrow-Vane face. He knew it now. He’d seen it on Mirelle every day for months without knowing what he was seeing. The wide flat cheekbones. The deep-set eyes. The skin — marrow-skin, Hesk had called it, the deep brownish ochre of the Belly-born that went grey under the frost and came back warm when it lifted. Ione’s face, kept twenty-five years in the dry dead air of the tower, still had that color. Faintly. Under the pale.
Ochre. He’d voted for ochre, at the civic ballot on the Third Rib, months ago, laughing so hard he couldn’t stop. The color of Hesk’s marrow-skin under the grey.
It was his mother’s color too.
He didn’t know he’d made a sound until Mirelle’s grip on his arm tightened.
He looked at them. His father, calm, eyes open, looking at his mother. His mother, eyes closed, singing.
They’d hung them side by side because the numbers were consecutive. Because they’d been collected on the same day. Because the Stewardship catalogued things in order.
And somehow, in the integration, or the preservation, or the hanging — or before, at the end, in the folds, in the thirty-one hours — his father had turned his eyes to look at her. And they’d kept him that way.
“Lamp,” he said. Not inside. Out loud. Very quietly. “Snake.”
“I see them,” said Snake. In the black arm. And its voice was a voice he’d never heard. Low. Rough. Like something burning down to nothing in a grate. “I see them, mule.”
“She’s singing,” said Lamp. In his blood. Not rigid now. Not clenched. Soft. Very soft. “She is singing the verse. I can see the shape of it in her mouth. The second line. The rise. Where it goes up and does not come down where you think.” A long pause. “She held that note for thirty-one hours. In the folds. While they ate her.”
“I know.”
“She was trying to wake it,” said Lamp. “You were right. In the sanctum. She was trying to wake the god from inside. With the verse. With the instruction.” The cold in his blood trembled. “She was trying to open the door. For you. Before you were old enough to know there was one.”
He reached up.
He didn’t decide to. His hand went up — his right hand, the spurred one, carefully, the spurs turned out — and touched his mother’s face.
The skin was dry. Light. Cool. Supple, still, after twenty-five years. It gave a little under his fingers, the way paper gives.
He touched her cheek. The wide flat cheekbone. The marrow-skin.
He felt nothing. No blood. No heart. No pattern. No mark. It was skin. Just skin. Preserved. Kept.
He took his hand away.
He touched his father’s face. The same. Dry. Light. Cool. The lined forehead of a man who’d asked why the clean lines on Rib Six were rated for more than they carried, and been exiled for it. The eyes, open, looking sideways.
Nothing. Just skin.
He stood there with his hand on his father’s face and his cousin holding his black arm and two friends behind him, and he didn’t feel anything at all, and then all at once he did.
He didn’t know how long it was. He didn’t remember it, after. He remembered being on the floor of the Hall of the Basin on his knees. He remembered Mirelle on her knees beside him. He remembered her arms. He remembered a sound he’d never made, coming out of him, over and over, that wasn’t words. He remembered the heat coming off the black arm so fiercely that the bone of the floor under it began to darken and smoke, and Lamp pouring cold through him so fast and so hard that he shook with it, and Snake — Snake not fighting the cold. For the first time. Not fighting it. Letting it come. Banking itself down. Holding still in the arm and letting the Lamp cool everything, as if it knew — as if it understood — that this was not a thing fire was for.
He remembered Ollo’s hand on his shoulder.
Not his wrist. His shoulder. The way he’d put his own hand on Ollo’s shoulder at hour fourteen with the marrow saw on the floor and the press still cycling. You’re out. You’re out of it. Breathe.
Ollo didn’t say anything. He just kept it there.
And he remembered Wick. Kneeling on his other side. Not touching him. Just there. Close. Shaking. Crying too. Not saying anything either.
After a long time, he stopped.
He knelt on the floor of the Hall of the Basin with his face wet and his chest aching and the black arm smoking faintly on the darkened bone, and looked up at the two faces on their hooks. His father, looking at his mother. His mother, singing.
Mirelle let go of him.
She stood up. Slowly. She stood in front of the two hooks, in front of her aunt’s face. She looked at it for a long time.
Then she opened her mouth.
He knew what it cost her. He’d heard the bonesetter on the Shelf. Rest it. A week. More. If you sing, maybe it doesn’t come back. He’d heard her thread of a voice, the last weeks, saved and spent a word at a time. He’d watched her read the tablets in a whisper so she wouldn’t use it up.
She sang.
Not loud. She couldn’t have been loud. Barely more than a breath, cracked and raw and wrong on every other note. The verse. The hidden one. The one from the Long Way Down. The one Ione had written into the tune for her sister’s son before he was born, and sung into him, and sung to the thing eating her for thirty-one hours.
The second line. The rise. Where it went up and up and didn’t come down where you thought.
Mirelle held it.
As long as she could. Which wasn’t long. Her voice went on the high note. Cracked. Broke. Went to nothing. She stood there in front of her aunt’s face with her mouth open on the note she couldn’t hold, and no sound coming out, and her bound hands shaking at her sides.
And held it anyway. Silently. Mouth open. The same shape as Ione’s.
The mark on his chest went warm.
The script on his arm lit. Not red. Not gold. White. Then gold. Then red. All three. The way the mark had lit on the dock. And somewhere, very far down, through the floor of the Hall, through the tower, through the arch of the Palate and the bone of the skull — the slow, vast, sleeping pulse of the god.
Paused.
Like at the Neck Gate. A single beat, missed.
Like something a long way down, at the bottom of a dream, hearing a note it had heard before — for thirty-one hours, twenty-five years ago — and listening.
Then it went on.
Mirelle closed her mouth. She stood very still in front of the two faces. Then she turned around and looked at him with her grey Marrow-Vane eyes, and her face was wet, and she shaped two words with no sound at all.
She’s here.
He didn’t know if she meant Ione. Or the god. Or something else.
He didn’t ask.
The beautiful Kept was standing at the door of the Hall of the Basin when they turned to go.
She had been there the whole time. He knew that. He’d felt her heart, slow and white, at the edge of everything, the whole time he’d been on his knees. She hadn’t come closer. She hadn’t spoken.
She spoke now.
“You have seen,” she said. Softly. “Your mother. Your father. Kept very well.”
He didn’t answer.
“The Stewardship asks me to tell you,” said the Kept, “that there is a place for you. Here. Beside them.” She gestured, very gently, at the bare wall beside the two hooks. Beside 4,113. Smooth bone. No hook. Waiting. “The Basin’s Hall is small. There is room. The Stewardship has kept it. For twenty-five years. For the pattern-bearer of 402.”
Wick made a sound like he’d been hit.
“Not your face,” said the Kept. “Not yet. Not for a long time. The Stewardship does not want your face. The Stewardship wants you whole.” She smiled. Perfectly. “But when it is done — when you have been what you are for, for as long as you are for it — then here. Beside them. Looking at them. Forever.” Her pale eyes didn’t blink. “So that you are remembered.”
He looked at the bare wall.
He looked at his father’s face, eyes open, turned toward his mother.
He looked at his mother’s, eyes closed, singing.
“No,” he said.
“Noted,” said the Kept.
“And tell it something else,” said Creed. He stood up. All the way. He felt the black arm burning. He felt the cold in his blood. He felt Ollo at his shoulder and Wick at his back and Mirelle beside him. “Tell it I’m coming back for them. Both of them. Every face in this tower. Every one.” He looked at the beautiful Kept. “Tell it nothing here is kept anymore. Tell it I said.”
The Kept looked at him for a long time.
“I will tell it,” she said. “The Stewardship will note it.” She bowed. “There is one more thing. The Stewardship asked me to say it last. After you had seen.”
“What.”
The Kept straightened. She looked past him. Past the two faces. Down the curve of the Hall of the Basin, to its far end, where the outer wall of the tower curved away — and where, set into the inner wall, there was a door he hadn’t noticed. Low. Dark. Bone. Not white. Not lit. A door that went in, toward the tower’s core.
“There is someone who wishes to see you,” said the Kept. “She has been asking. For a long time. Since she came up.” A pause. “She has not stopped asking. The Stewardship has found it difficult to keep her.”
Before he could ask, he heard it.
Through the low dark door. From somewhere far in. Faint. Hoarse. Ragged. A voice. An old woman’s voice, worn down to almost nothing, cracked, but carrying, the way a voice carries when it’s been used to giving orders for fifty years.
“— is someone there? Is someone — I can hear — is it —” A cough. Wet. Terrible. “— is it the mule? The one in the borrowed armor?”
He knew the voice.
He’d heard it last screaming. Hanging by its hands from the pendulum of a clock. Going up a column of white light into the glow at the base of the Skull. Still fighting, as far as he could follow it.
“Ilsa Marchetti,” said the Kept, softly. “Senior of the Second Rib.” She inclined her head. “Integration resisted. Duration: twenty days. Ongoing.”
GALLERY OF FACES
HALL OF THE BASIN
VISITORS: 4
FACES REMOVED: 1
INTEGRATION IN PROGRESS: 1
NOTED