The trunk had gone hollow.
Every branch of it had split apart and come down and lain down. Every fused body had said its name. What hung over the Lock now was a shell — a white rigid casing, like the husk an insect leaves on a branch, still in the shape of a trunk, going up into the shaft. And on its surface, where the branches had met, the four faces: Aurel at the top, the three below. Closed. Peaceful. Worn on nothing.
And through the hollow of it, up the middle, the roots.
Corvane Ash’s own. White. Thick. Coming down from somewhere above, through the empty trunk, to the Lock. Pressing on the carved spiral like a hand pressed flat over a mouth.
Creed put his black hand on the outside of the trunk and climbed.
He didn’t know how else to go. The shaft went up through the ceiling of the root chamber toward the deepest fold, and the trunk went up the shaft, and the trunk was hollow and rigid and pale and ridged like the bark of a tree. Handholds everywhere. He climbed it the way he’d climbed the side of the left molar in the Jaw. Fingers and spurs in the ridges. Up.
Ollo came behind him. One-armed. Slowly. Swearing. The bent rifle slung across his back. Using his one hand and his knees and his feet, the way he’d learned to climb on the stair inside the bone of the Fifth.
Wick came behind Ollo. With the comm-set. With ash still in his collar. Reading names.
“— Thane. Sallow. Dunmore. Hesper —” A rasp. Into the set. Climbing. “Ossian, did you get Hesper. That was the first one. He said it was the first one.”
Static. Then, faint, an old man’s careful voice: “I have Hesper. I have all of them. Four thousand one hundred and eight.” A pause. “Are there more?”
“I don’t know,” rasped Wick. “We’re going up. To the — to the core. To the one who’s left.”
“Corvane Ash,” said Ossian.
“Yeah.”
“Will he say his name?”
Wick didn’t answer. He looked up. At Creed, above him, climbing. At the shaft going up into the gold.
“I don’t know,” he rasped. “We’ll see.”
Mirelle stayed below. With Dorne, who couldn’t climb, who was lying against the base of the seat now with her head in Brann’s lap and her face the color of the god’s bone. With Brann, who couldn’t lift anything. With the Lock and the seat and the ash.
She’d written it on her slate before he went up. Held it out to him.
I’ll keep the seat warm.
He’d looked at her for a long time.
Don’t sit in it, he’d said.
She’d rolled her eyes. Wrote: I’m not neither. I’m just a cantor with no voice. And then, under it: Go.
The shaft went up a long way.
Through the ceiling of the root chamber. Through the tissue of the god’s mind, soft and grey and folded, the trunk running up the middle of it like a spine. And as they climbed, the light changed. The grey of the root chamber, where his beads had spread gold across the floor, giving way — not to grey. To gold.
More gold. Thicker. Brighter. Coming down the shaft from above like the light came down the neck from the teeth.
The deepest fold.
He’d seen it from the top of the slope, in the vault of seven. A slope of soft grey and gold going down, and at the bottom, gold so thick it was almost solid, so bright it hurt. That was where the tree had been rooted. That was where it had drunk.
They were coming up into it from below.
The trunk ended. He felt it end — the hollow shell of it, rigid under his hands, going suddenly soft, and then not there at all. And his hand went up past it into gold.
Warm. Thick. Not liquid. Not solid. Dream. The stuff of the god’s mind, so thick here that it was almost a substance. He pushed his hand up into it, and it gave, like warm wax, and closed around his fingers.
He pulled himself up through it.
He came up out of the gold onto a floor of gold.
He knelt there. On his hands. Breathing. Ollo came up beside him. Then Wick. Gasping. Gold on their faces, their hands, in their hair, drying in fine flakes like gilding on a Verbous channel.
He looked up.
The deepest fold was a cavern. Not like the vault of seven, where seven folds met under a high soft dome. This was inside a fold. The deepest one. The one that went down — he could feel it — to the very bottom of the god’s mind, to the root, to the place where the two great vessels came up and the god’s blood began. The walls were close and curved and warm and gold. Not veined with gold. Gold all through. Glowing. Pulsing. In time with the god’s dream. And the light from them was so bright that he had to squint, the way he’d squinted at the Ninth’s tanks the first morning.
The last of the gold. The last of the god’s mind that hadn’t gone grey.
And in the middle of it —
He’d thought it would be a tree. Marchetti had said a tree of worms, all grown together. He’d seen it from the top of the slope — a vast pale branching shape, branches of fused bodies, a trunk.
The branches were gone. Lain down. The trunk was a hollow shell below them, in the shaft, over the Lock.
What was left was the root.
It lay in the middle of the deepest fold like something coiled at the bottom of a well. Huge. Pale. Not white like the trunk had gone — pale. The pale of the god’s bone. Segmented. Chrome-banded, the chrome so old and grown-in that it had gone the color of tarnished pewter. Coiled. Around and around itself. Around something in the middle.
He couldn’t see what was in the middle. The coils were too thick. But he could see where the roots went out of it — the white ones, the ones going down into the gold of the floor, down the shaft, down to the Lock. And other roots. Many. Going into the walls. Into the gold. Deep. Pulsing. Drinking.
And at the front of the coil — where a head would be — there was no face.
There was a pod.
It was half-sunk in the gold. The way the pods in the outer folds had been half-sunk in the grey. Tarnished chrome. A long rounded capsule, the size of a person lying down. Furred — not with grey mold, here — with gold. Fine gold growth, like moss, over every surface. Cables coming out of the head-end. Dozens. Thick ones, thin ones. Into the gold. Into the coils of the root wrapped around it.
The lid was glass.
Not cracked. Not fogged. Clear. Clean. As if someone had polished it every day for nine hundred and eighty years.
He went to it.
He didn’t decide to. He walked across the gold floor of the deepest fold toward the coiled root with Ollo behind him and Wick behind Ollo, and the root didn’t move, and he knelt beside the pod and looked through the glass.
A skeleton.
Lying on its back. Long-boned. Longer than a Belly person’s. The bones the color of old ivory, not tea — better kept than the ones in the outer folds. The arms not crossed on the chest. At its sides. Hands open. Palms up. Like someone lying down to rest who meant to get up again soon.
The skull was open at the base. The fist-sized hole. Neat. Like the others.
But there was no husk.
In every other pod, a dry empty worm-shape had led out of the hole in the skull into the cables. A skin. A thing that had crawled out and left.
Here there was nothing. Just the hole. And through it — into the cables — pale. Segmented. Alive. Thicker than his arm. Running out of the skull into the head-end of the pod and out through the cables into the coils of the root. Not a husk. Not a thing that had crawled out and left.
A thing that had never finished crawling out.
Still attached. Still rooted. In the skull. In the bones. Nine hundred and eighty years.
“I never left,” said Corvane Ash.
The voice came from the coils. From all around the pod. Dry. Careful. A man’s.
“The others left,” said the Archon. “Their bodies. They grew out into the wires, into the folds, and their bodies died behind them, and they let them. They let go.” A pause. “I didn’t. I couldn’t. I kept a root in. Here. In my own skull. I don’t know why. I told myself it was so I could find my way back. If I ever needed to. If I ever wanted to get up.”
Creed knelt by the glass.
“I polished the lid,” said Corvane Ash. “Every day. With a root. Nine hundred and eighty years. So I could see in. So I could see myself. Lying there. Waiting to get up.” A long pause. “I never got up.”
“You could.”
“No,” said the Archon. “There’s nothing to get up into. The bones are bones. I’m the thing in the cables. I’ve been the thing in the cables so long that I don’t remember being the thing in the bones.” The coils shifted. Slowly. Around the pod. “I remember the shape of it. Like your hands remembered the shape of their doors. I remember lying down. I remember connecting the leads. I remember thinking: I’ll go in, and understand, and come back out, and tell her.” A pause. “I remember the gold coming in.”
“And you understood.”
“I understood the hunger,” said Corvane Ash. “I told you. I went in and I found the hunger and I was so afraid that I stopped. I never went deeper.” The voice cracked. “And I’ve been afraid ever since. For nine hundred and eighty years. Holding. Drinking. Keeping. Because I was afraid of what I’d found. And I never went back in to see if there was anything else.”
“There is,” said Creed. “I went. So did she.”
“I know,” said the Archon. “I felt you. In the root chamber. On the seat. I felt the dream catch when you gave it the gold. I felt something in it I’d never felt. Under the hunger.” A long pause. “I didn’t let myself feel it long enough to know what it was.”
“Do you want to know now?”
The coils were very still.
“Yes,” said Corvane Ash. “And no. Both. At once.” A sound like a laugh. Dry. Broken. “Like your hands. Both at once. Tearing.”
The gold on the far side of the fold opened.
Not from below. From the side. A gap. A crease in the gold-veined wall, where the deepest fold met the slope from the vault of seven — the slope he’d stood at the top of, two days ago, and seen the tree at the bottom of. It opened. And people came through it.
Grey. Canvas. Silver scale with a blue stripe. Gilt plate with the gold scraped off. Belly faces. Ninth faces. Kept faces — Kept, in torn pale robes, with their hair loose, carrying lances.
And at the front, with a blasting bar across her back and two fingers on her right hand and gold drying on her face in flakes —
Sabine Kettle.
She stopped at the edge of the deepest fold and looked at it. At the gold. At the root coiled in the middle. At the pod. At him, kneeling beside it.
“Moraine,” she said. Flat. “Your directions were terrible.”
“I was being chased,” rasped Wick. “By worms.”
“Left at the fifth branching,” said Sabine. “You said left. It was right.”
“It was left from where I was standing.”
Sabine looked at him for a long time. Then something happened at the corner of her mouth that might, on anybody else, have been a smile.
“We got here,” she said.
“How,” said Creed. “The Palate —”
“Emptied,” said Sabine. “An hour ago. They all left. Every worm on every bridge. Let go of what they were wearing and went back into the Halls. Up through the tower. Through the low door. Into the folds.” She looked at the coiled root. “Coming here. For you.”
“And the worn ones.”
Sabine was quiet a moment.
“Some of them died,” she said. “When the worms let go. They’d been worn too deep. Like the Gilt you killed on the bridge.” Her two-fingered hand closed on the blasting bar. “Most of them didn’t. Most of them fell down, and lay there, and then got up.” She tipped her head at the Kept behind her. In torn robes. With lances. “And some of them came with us.”
Creed looked at the Kept.
One of them was looking back at him. A woman. Smooth-faced, still, but not Kept-smooth. Moving. Her brow creased. Her hair loose and dark. A lance in her hands, held wrong, like someone who’d been shown how an hour ago.
He knew the face.
The beautiful Kept from the long white tables. The one who’d welcomed them. The one who’d taken them through the Halls. Noted. Why?
She looked at him. Blinked. Slowly. Deliberately. Like Ossian practicing.
“I asked her name,” said Sabine. “She said she didn’t have one. She said the Kept of the Palate don’t. She said she’d like one.”
“What did you call her?”
“Nothing,” said Sabine. “I told her to pick.” A pause. “She hasn’t yet.”
“So many,” said Corvane Ash.
The coils moved.
Not toward Creed. Toward the army. Toward Sabine and the Ninth and the Belly and the Kept with their lances at the edge of the fold. The coils shifted, slowly, the way the trunk had leaned toward him in the root chamber. And the roots in the walls — the ones going into the gold, pulsing, drinking — came out.
Not all of them. Some. A dozen. Pale and thick and tarnished-chrome-banded. Coming out of the gold walls like snakes out of a bank. Toward the army.
“All awake,” said the Archon. “All of them. No white left. I can feel it. Nine hundred and eighty years I’ve drunk from the people who came up. The waking in them. The god’s blood they carried.” The roots reached. “And you’ve brought me hundreds. Awake. Full.”
“Cor —”
“I’m still hungry,” said Corvane Ash. Very quietly. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how not to be. I lay down in a pod and I’ve been drinking ever since and I don’t know how to stop.”
The roots reached the army.
He saw it. A Ninth Rib Lancer, at the front, silver scale, blue stripe — Fenn Arrowby, the oldest of Haske’s six. A root went around her. Around her chest. And she didn’t go rigid. She didn’t go blank. She wasn’t Kept, wasn’t thinned — she’d been awake for weeks, months, since the Long Bridge. The root couldn’t wear her.
It drank her.
He saw her face go grey. Not frost-grey. Drained. The color going out of it. The waking going out of her, up the root, into the coils, into the thing in the pod. Like Arral at the gala, his joy going out of him in the light. Like the gold going out of the folds.
She screamed.
Sabine’s blasting bar came down on the root. It bounced. The root was chrome-banded, nine hundred years old, as thick as a man’s leg. It didn’t care.
“CREED —”
He was already moving.
He put his hand on the root.
Not the black one. His right. The spurred one. He grabbed the root where it went around Fenn Arrowby’s chest, and he didn’t burn it — he didn’t have burning anymore, not the way he’d had it; the Snake was the enough now, the red rim of the light, and it didn’t roar the way it used to — and he didn’t eat it. He touched it.
Kind. Enough.
The root stopped.
Not the whole root. The part under his hand. He felt the light go into it. Felt it touch the cold endless drinking in the root and say enough. And the part of the root under his hand went still. Went soft. Went grey. Went to ash.
And the rest of the root — above his hand, still going around Arrowby’s chest, still drinking — jerked. Severed. Its end blackened where the ash had been. And let go.
Arrowby fell. Gasping. Grey-faced. But breathing. Her own.
“He’s not a worm,” said Creed. Out loud. To Sabine. To all of them. “He’s not like the others. He won’t lie down when he touches me. He doesn’t want to.” He looked at the coils. At the pod. “I can stop his roots. One at a time. Where I touch them. I can’t stop him.”
“Then how —”
The coils moved again.
More roots. Out of the walls. Twenty. Thirty. Toward the army. Toward the hundreds of awake people at the edge of the fold. Reaching.
“Back,” said Sabine. “BACK. Out of the fold. Back up the slope. Get out of reach —”
They went back. Not fast enough. The roots came. He went after them. Touching. Kind. Enough. Severing. Ash. Another. Another. But there were thirty and he was one and they were fast and the army was going back up the slope and the roots were reaching —
“Creed,” said the voice. Glass and ember. In him. Calm. “The walls.”
He looked at the walls.
At the gold. Glowing. Pulsing. The last of the god’s mind. And the roots coming out of it — out of the gold — and drinking. Not just from the army. From the walls. From the gold itself. The roots that hadn’t come out were still in it. Still drinking. He could see the gold going pale around them. Going grey.
“He’s drinking the last of it,” said the voice. “While you fight the roots. Every root you sever, he grows another out of the gold, and drinks more to grow it.”
“How long.”
“Not long,” said the voice. “The dream held when you stood up from the seat. It’s not holding now. He’s drinking too fast.” A pause. “If the gold goes, the dream goes. If the dream goes, there’s nothing to give. Nothing for the Key to open. Nothing.”
He stood in the deepest fold with ash on his hands and roots coming out of the walls and the gold going grey.
“Here,” said Ollo.
He was kneeling. By the pod. With his one hand flat on the glass lid.
Creed looked at him.
“He polished it,” said Ollo. “He said. Every day. So he could see himself.” Ollo looked down through the glass. At the long ivory skeleton. The open hands, palms up. The hole in the skull, and the thing still rooted through it. “So he could see where he got off.”
“Ollo —”
“Line C,” said Ollo. Flat. “When the press takes your arm. Hour fourteen. You know what the worst of it is?”
Creed didn’t answer.
“Not the arm,” said Ollo. “You’ve got another. Not the pain. You get through the pain.” He tapped the glass with one finger. “The worst of it’s after. When you’re on the cot in the med-bay and they’ve cauterized it and you look down and there’s nothing there. And you keep feeling it. The arm. Your fingers. You can feel your fingers. Every day. For a year. Two.” He looked at the skeleton. “You keep reaching with a hand that’s not there.”
The coils were very still.
“He’s been reaching for nine hundred years,” said Ollo. “With a hand that’s not there. That’s why he kept the root in. That’s why he polished the glass.” He looked up. At the coils. At the place where a head would be. “You were a man. You lay down. You lost the man. You’ve been feeling him ever since. Every day. Reaching.”
“Yes,” said Corvane Ash. Very quietly.
“Med-bay says,” said Ollo, “the only thing that stops it is you look. Every day. At the stump. Till you believe it.” He took his hand off the glass. “You’ve been looking at the wrong thing. You’ve been looking at the bones. Like they might get up.” He tipped his head at the walls. At the gold. “You’ve never once looked at what you are.”
The coils shifted.
“What am I,” said the Archon.
Ollo looked at him for a long time.
“Hungry,” said Ollo. “And scared. And holding on to a thing that’s gone.” He stood up. By stages. One-armed. “Like everybody. Like all of us were. On the line.”
He looked at Creed.
“He can’t see it,” said Ollo. “From in here. In the gold. It’s all he’s ever seen. Show him something else.”
Creed looked at the walls of the deepest fold.
Gold. Glowing. Pulsing. Going grey around the roots. The last of the god’s mind. Close and curved and warm, like the inside of a closed hand.
Closed.
He looked up.
The fold went up. Not a dome — a crease. A long narrow line in the gold, high above, where the two walls of the fold met and folded over each other. Like the line where two fingers of a closed hand press together.
And in it — along it — running the whole length of the deepest fold, from one end to the other, through the gold — a line.
Not a crease. A seam. Different from the gold. Darker. Thinner. Like a crack in a plate. Like the seams that had opened along his scars in the root chamber.
He’d seen it before.
On the outside. From the Atlas, looking up. The underside of the god’s skull, vast as the sky, pocked with openings. And across it, running from the back toward the front — he hadn’t thought about it, then — a line. A ridge. Zigzag. Like stitching.
The suture.
Where the plates of the god’s skull had grown together, when the god was young. Before it died. Before it bent over the dead world. Before anything. The line where the god’s head had once been open, and had closed.
“Mirelle,” he said. Then remembered. She was below. In the root chamber.
“It’s on the tablet,” rasped Wick. Behind him. He had his comm-set in one hand and something else in the other. A bone tablet. One of the six. Mirelle had given it to him at the base of the trunk. Pushed it into his hands. In case, she’d written. “Number five. She said — she wrote — she said she couldn’t read all of it. She said it’s about the crown.” He held it up. His hands shaking. “She said there’s a line on it that says —”
He looked at it. At the script. He couldn’t read it. Wick couldn’t read it.
But the script on Creed’s left arm could.
He felt it. The moment Wick held the tablet up in the gold light. The three sigils near his elbow — the ones that matched the Pale Key — burned. White at their centers. Red at their edges. And beside them, on the tablet, a line of script lit up in answer. Faintly. The same three sigils. And after them, more. Curls. Hooks. Branches.
And he knew what it said. Not read it. Knew it. The way his blood knew Brann’s. The way the dream in his marrow had known the seat.
The crown opens along the first line. Where the god was closed, it can be opened. The Key that opens the blood opens the bone.
He looked up at the suture.
At the dark zigzag seam running along the top of the deepest fold, through the gold, where the god’s skull had grown together before anything.
Where it could be opened.
“Show him something else,” said Ollo again. Flat.
Creed reached into the inside pocket of his father’s jacket and took out the Pale Key.
DEEPEST FOLD
CORE: CORVANE ASH (POD 1)
GOD-DREAM: FAILING
SUTURE: LOCATED
KEY: DRAWN
NOTED