He slept in the root chamber.
He hadn’t meant to. He’d meant to start down. But he’d got up off the cold seat, and Ollo had smiled, and Wick had said did you just, and Ollo had said no — and then his legs had gone. All at once. The way they’d gone in the yard on the Shelf beside Haske’s body. He’d sat down on the floor of the root chamber with his back against the cold seat and the next thing he knew it was morning.
He knew it was morning because the light had moved.
The line of yellow coming down the shaft from the open crown. It had lain across the Lock last night. Now it lay across the floor near the wall. Further along. Slanting. The way light slants through a window when the sun moves.
The sun moved.
He’d never thought about that. He’d never had to. In the Belly, light didn’t move. Lamps hung where they hung. The Head’s glow sat at the top of the world and never shifted, one second a day, every day, the same. The light in the god had always been put somewhere.
This light moved on its own. Because the world turned under it. Because the sun went across the sky. He lay with his back against the seat and watched the line of yellow on the floor of the root chamber for a long time, and it moved, a finger’s width while he watched, and he felt something in his chest he didn’t have a word for.
“It does that,” said a voice. Glass and ember. Quiet. “The sun. It goes across. And then it goes down. And then it’s dark. And then it comes back.”
“How do you know?”
“We remember,” said the voice. “The god remembered. We were its hands. We remember the shape of it. From before. From the dying world.” A pause. “Every day, it comes back.”
He watched the light.
“Every day,” he said.
“Every day.”
Before they went down, they took the faces off the trunk.
Mirelle climbed it. Nobody asked her to. She’d been sitting by the Lock all night with her bound hands on the cold spiral beside the Key, and in the morning she got up and went to the hollow white trunk and put her hands on it and climbed. Slowly. Her robe hitched up. Her bare feet finding the ridges.
She went to the three first. Tamar of the Leg. Ennor Hesse. Vaila Cross. Closed-eyed. Smiling, and peaceful, and shut. She took them off the trunk one at a time. They came away easily. Whatever had held them was gone. They were just skin now. Light. Dry. She folded each one carefully into the hem of her robe, the way she’d wrapped the tablets.
Then she climbed to the top.
To the face at the mouth of the shaft. Aurel. Strong-boned. Wide flat cheekbones. Deep-set eyes, closed. The Marrow-Vane face.
Mirelle looked at it for a long time. Hanging from the trunk by her bound hands. Her face a hand’s width from her ancestor’s.
Then she put her forehead against it.
Just for a moment. The way you’d lean your forehead against someone’s at the end of a long day.
Then she took it down.
She came down the trunk with four faces folded in her robe and knelt on the floor of the root chamber and laid them out on the cold Lock, in a row, beside the Key. Tamar. Ennor. Vaila. Aurel.
She looked up at Creed.
She didn’t have her slate. She pointed. At the Key, in the Lock. At Aurel’s face.
“I know,” he said. “I was thinking the same.”
He took the Key out of the Lock.
It came out easily. It was cold. Just bone. A woman’s rib, carved for six months in the marrow-caves, every night. He held it a moment. Then he wrapped it in the scrap of cloth it had lived in since the crypt under Vesper Hollow, and gave it to Mirelle.
She took it. She wrapped it with Aurel’s face.
“The Third Stair,” said Creed. “Her niche. The empty one.”
Mirelle nodded.
“She sat in it,” said Creed. “On the beat. I felt it. Just for a second. With the others.” He looked at the face. “She should have something there.”
They went down through the folds.
The way Sabine had come. Wick’s directions. Seven branchings. Left at the fifth — right, Sabine said, it was right — and Wick said it was left from where I was standing, and Sabine said you’re standing in a different place now, Moraine, and Wick didn’t have an answer to that.
The folds were different.
Not grey-gold and pulsing. Not dark. Lit. The sunlight from the open crown came down through every crease and gap, broken into a thousand thin yellow lines, falling across the still grey-gold walls. And where it fell, the walls glowed. Faintly. Not from inside — the god’s mind wasn’t making light anymore — but the way gold glows when sun hits it. The way the gold dust on the Verbous glowed in Coronet’s lamps.
The pods were still there. All of them. Hundreds. Half-sunk in the walls. Tarnished. Furred. Cables running into the tissue.
The cables were dead. Every one. And in every pod, the skeleton lay on its back with its arms crossed and the hole in its skull, and the dry husk of the thing that had crawled out was gone. Ash. Lain down. The lids were dusted with it.
The light fell on them through the creases.
He stopped by one. Near the fifth branching. He rubbed the ash off the glass with his palm.
A long-boned skeleton. Old. Tea-colored. Arms crossed.
He didn’t know which one it had been. Hesper. Corra. Asa, who drew the leg. Teodric, who cut the six-hundredth step. He’d never know.
He took the scratching-stylus Ossian had given Wick for his slate, and on the tarnished chrome side of the pod, under the old defaced line — WE LAY DOWN IN THE PODS SO THAT WE WOULD NEVER HAVE TO GET UP AGAIN — he scratched, in square Line C capitals:
AND THEN THEY DID.
He went on.
The low grey door at the bottom of the Gallery tower was open.
They came through it into the Hall of the Basin, and the Hall was full of people.
Not faces. People. Kept. In torn pale robes, some of them, and some in nothing much at all, and some in clothes they’d found somewhere — a Lancer’s undercoat, a Gilt’s padded shirt, a Concord clerk’s grey jacket three sizes too big. With their hair loose. Dark, most of it, under where the white cloth had been. Walking slowly along the curved walls of the Hall, looking at the faces on the hooks.
Looking at them. Properly. One at a time. The way you’d look at a wall of names.
They turned when he came in.
Twenty, perhaps, in the Hall of the Basin. More in the Halls above — he could feel them, through the bone, hundreds, thousands, walking the Halls of the Gallery all the way up the tower. And more on the bridges, and in the towers, and on the floor of the Palate. Twenty thousand. Awake.
They looked at him.
He felt their hearts. Fast. Every one. Too fast. Frightened. Fevered, some of them — the waking was still in them, the blood looking, finding, catching. And under the fear —
Something else.
He didn’t have a name for it. It was the thing in Sefa’s face when she put her glowing hands on the ferns. The thing in Wick’s face when he saw the sky. The thing in Ilka Dorne’s face when she looked at her arm and said it’s not looking for anything.
One of them came forward.
He knew her. The beautiful Kept from the long white tables. Who’d welcomed them. Who’d walked them through the Halls. Who’d asked why. Who’d come through the folds with Sabine with a lance held wrong.
She stopped in front of him. Her hair was dark and loose. Her face was smooth still — the Kept’s faces would be smooth a long time, Mirelle thought, maybe always — but it moved. Her brow creased. Her mouth worked. Her eyes — no longer pale, no longer near-silver — had gone a deep warm brown at the centers, the color coming back into them from the outside in, like the green coming back to the dead world.
She blinked. Deliberately. Slowly.
“I picked,” she said.
He looked at her.
“A name,” she said. Her voice was rough. Uneven. Like Sefa’s had been after the waking. Not soft and even and clear. A real voice. “The Belly woman said pick. I didn’t know how. I listened. On the — on the thing. The net. When the frightened man read the names to the old scribe. All of them. Four thousand.” She swallowed. “I picked one.”
“Which one.”
“Asa,” she said. “The one who drew the leg. Every cave.” Her brow creased. “She wanted to see the brain. She wanted to draw it. She lay down so she could. And she never —” She stopped. “I want to see things. I want to see everything. And draw them. Is that — can I have that one? Is it allowed?”
He looked at her for a long time.
“It’s yours,” he said. “Nobody else is using it.”
Asa nodded. Slowly. Her face working. Then she turned and looked at the wall behind her. At the two faces on their hooks. 4,112 and 4,113.
“These are yours,” she said. “The man. The woman. The scribe said. On the net. He said the Vessel’s mother and father were in the Hall of the Basin. Four thousand one hundred and twelve and thirteen.” She looked at him. “We waited. Nobody touched them.”
He looked at the faces.
His father’s. Eyes closed now. Calm. The engineer’s lines on his forehead smoothed. Not looking sideways anymore. Just — resting. Tipped very slightly down on the hook.
His mother’s. Eyes closed. Mouth closed. The held note ended. And smiling.
He’d seen it from the seat. On the beat. He’d felt it. He hadn’t seen it.
He stood in front of them.
“Hey,” he said.
That was all.
He reached up and took his father’s face off the hook. Gently. The way Ollo had lifted Taavi’s. Light. Dry. Supple. He folded it once, carefully.
Then his mother’s.
He held them both. Against his chest. In his hands. The left one black, written, glowing white and red. The right one spurred.
Then he opened his father’s jacket — the heavy old crew-jacket, dark blue gone grey, VESS. A. stenciled inside the collar, sleeves sewn back on in cable-thread stitches like rivets — and put them in the inside pocket.
Beside the 402 slate. Beside the little brass hand-bell. Beside Kon’s dark glass eye and the seed-disc and Ferrin’s old note. Where the Pale Key had been.
Against his ribs.
“Going home,” he said. To them. Quietly. “The pump-house. On the dunes. Where you left the jacket.”
He didn’t take the others.
He wanted to. He stood in the Hall of the Basin and looked at the walls — CYCLE 266. BASIN. BLEEDER. PURGE. — and thought about every face in every Hall all the way up the tower. Nine hundred and eighty years of them. Hundreds of thousands. All with their eyes closed now. All tipped down. Resting.
I’m coming back for them. Every face in this tower.
He’d said it. To the Kept. To Asa, before she was Asa.
“We’ll do it,” said Asa.
He looked at her.
“We know the Halls,” she said. “We tended them. Nine hundred years. Our mothers’ mothers. We know every hook.” Her brow creased. “We’ll take them down. All of them. Carefully. And — and find out where they’re from. The tags. The scribe can read the old tags. And we’ll take them home.” She looked at the faces around her. “All of them. Wherever home is. Even if it takes years.”
“It’ll take years.”
“We have years,” said Asa. “We didn’t used to. When our hair went white, we went up.” She touched her own hair. Dark. Loose. “Nobody’s going up anymore.”
They went out through the teeth.
The army. All of it. What was left of it. Five hundred and some. Down off the Palate’s bridges and out across the ridged floor of the god’s mouth, past the long white tables — the cups were still upturned, a hundred days of dust on them — past the place where Sabine had poured the first cup out on the bone. Out through the gap between the canines that Tobin Rell had opened.
The Lancers stopped at the left canine.
Haske’s six. Fenn Arrowby, grey still, the color not all the way back in her face, but on her feet. And behind them — he hadn’t expected this — the Third Rib Lancers. Varro’s. The ones who’d scattered when the ear blew. The ones who’d fled into the Palate and been worn by the swarm and let go and fallen down and got up. Forty of them. In silver scale with the gold scraped off the bands. With Isolde Varro at their front, no staff, no helm.
They stood in front of the niche cut into the inner face of the canine. Where Rell lay with his torn kite folded on his chest and Fenn Arrowby’s blue scarf beside his head.
TOBIN RELL. NINTH RIB. HASKE’S. HE FLEW OVER HER.
Varro read it.
Then she took a knife from her belt — a Lancer’s knife, the little one they carried for cutting harness-straps — and knelt, and under the line Creed had carved with his spurs, she scratched into the god’s tooth, slowly, in the square careful capitals of someone who’d signed relay logs for six years:
I SHOT HIM THREE TIMES. HE DIDN’T STOP. — I. VARRO, THIRD RIB.
She stood up. She put the knife away.
Fenn Arrowby looked at the line for a long time.
Then she looked at Varro.
“Fly with us,” said Arrowby. Flat. Old Lancer’s voice. “Down. The Ninth’s kites. We’ve got spares.”
Varro looked at her.
“I shot him,” said Isolde Varro.
“I know,” said Arrowby. “So did Haske. Shoot people. She shot a lot of people. Before.” She turned to go. “Fly with us.”
They went down the stair.
It was lit.
Not by the Head’s light. The Head’s light was out. Not by the grey-gold glow from the teeth, the old soft light that came down the hollow of the neck from the jaw — that was gone too, because it had been the god’s mind glowing, and the god’s mind wasn’t glowing anymore.
It was lit by the vessels.
The great channels in the neck-bones. Running down beside the hollow of the neck, through every vertebra. The ones the god’s blood had flooded down when the Sluice broke. They’d been dry for nine hundred and eighty years. They weren’t dry now.
The blood was in them. And it glowed. Clear and gold and red and white. Through the bone. Faint. Warm. Like a lamp through a paper screen. All the way down the neck, on both sides of the stair, two long glowing lines going down and down into the dark, so that the stair spiraled down between them like a path between two rivers of light.
And from above, down the hollow of the neck, from the open crown — yellow. Thin. A line of sun, falling all the way down the inside of the neck, past the teeth, past the Atlas, past the stair, into the dark of the Collar’s well.
People were on the stair.
Not just the army. Other people. Coming up. He hadn’t expected that. Kept from the Gardens, in torn robes. Discarded from the Collar. A Gilt from the Second with his plate off. A woman from the Ninth with her hands glowing faint gold. Coming up the stair, slowly, on the bone, looking up at the line of sun.
They stopped when they saw him. They stood against the wall of the neck and let the army pass. And they looked at him.
He didn’t know what they saw. A Belly mule in his father’s jacket with a black arm and bone on his knuckles and brown eyes ringed white and red.
One of them — an old man, a Kept, with his white hair loose — white, really white, the hair of someone who would have gone up — stepped away from the wall as he passed.
“Is it true,” said the old man. His voice rough. Uneven. “That nobody goes up anymore?”
“It’s true,” said Creed.
The old man looked at him. Then up the stair. At the line of sun.
“Then where am I going?” he said.
Creed thought about it.
“Wherever you want,” he said.
The old man stood on the stair with his white hair loose and looked up at the light for a long time.
Then he sat down. On the step. Right there. With his back against the wall of the neck and the glowing vessel behind him.
“I’d like to sit,” he said. “For a while. If that’s allowed.”
“It’s allowed.”
The old man nodded. He closed his eyes. He turned his face toward the line of sun.
They went on down.
At the Axis, Brann stopped.
He’d been carrying Dorne. Not carrying — she could walk now, slowly, her wound closed, her arm glowing faint and quiet — but beside her, close, the way you walk beside someone who’s been very sick. And when they came down the peg-stair onto the Axis and he saw the wheels —
He stopped.
The six great bone wheels around the peg. Still. In their grooves, a hundred and thirty-one Wheel-Kept sat where they’d sat since the wheels stopped. Not walking. Not counting. Sitting. In the hand-deep groove worn into the rim by their own bare feet.
And the bone of the wheels was glowing. Faintly. Clear and gold and red and white. The god’s blood, in the bone, from the flood.
Brann went to the nearest wheel.
He climbed into the rim. Into the groove. And sat down. Beside a Wheel-Kept man with enormous calves and wasted arms and a face so smooth it barely moved. Who’d sat in this groove for six days. Who was alive. Barely.
The man looked at him. Slowly. Didn’t blink.
Brann started to sing.
Liss’s song. Around and down. In his militia-man’s voice. Low. The way he’d sung it to them for six days while the white thinned, before he went up the peg with Creed.
The man in the groove didn’t move.
But his chest moved. A breath. Deeper.
“I’m staying,” said Brann. Over his shoulder. Not stopping the song. “With them. Till they can walk. Or —” He stopped. “Till they can walk.”
Dorne looked at him. Square. Plain. Her arm glowing.
“Then I’m staying too,” she said.
“Ilka —”
“Somebody’s got to carry them down,” said Ilka Dorne. “When they can walk. You can’t lift a blasting bar.” She climbed into the groove beside him. Sat down. Looked at the man with the enormous calves. “I can.”
Creed looked at the two of them. Sitting in the groove of a stopped wheel at the top of the neck of the world, among a hundred and thirty-one people who had walked in circles their whole lives.
“I’ll send Sefa,” he said. “When she can come. She knows how to ask.”
“Good,” said Dorne. Flat. And then, after a moment, not flat at all: “Creed.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell my mother,” said Ilka Dorne. “When you go through the Eighth. Tell her I’m up here. Tell her I’ll come down. Tell her —” She stopped. Her square face worked. “Tell her I saw the sun.”
The sanctum was empty.
He’d felt it, on the beat. Sixty-two people lowering their faces and lying down into the bone of their niches. He hadn’t seen it.
He saw it now.
The great round chamber at the heart of the Third Vertebra. The dome rising out of lamp-reach. The tiers of niches going up and up the walls. Sixty-two of them, smooth. Empty. Warm, still, faintly, when he put his hand in one — the bone of the seat smooth and soft-edged, the way stone is soft-edged where water has run over it for a long time.
The army came through behind him. Silent. Every one of them touching the lowest tier as they passed, the way they had on the way up.
And at the top of the lowest tier, across from the door, the sixty-third niche. The empty one. With the seat-mark carved on its back.
Aurel, eldest, the first to wake. She did not sit. She went up.
The Ash-man followed her. The door was not opened.
Mirelle went to it.
She took Aurel’s face out of the hem of her robe. And the Key, wrapped in its scrap of cloth. She unwrapped the Key. She laid the face on the seat of the niche — the bone of it warm, the seat-mark above it — and put the Key on top of the face. On the closed eyes. The way you’d lay a coin on the eyes of the dead in the old Belly rite.
Then she stepped back.
She didn’t have her voice. She didn’t have her slate — it was in her robe, with the other three faces. She stood in front of the niche with her bound hands at her sides and looked at it for a long time.
Then she lifted one hand. And moved it in the air. Slowly. Not around and down.
Up.
A rise. And up. And not coming down where you’d think. The second line of the verse. The shape of it. Without a sound.
She did it three times.
Then she lowered her hand, and turned, and walked out of the sanctum without looking back.
Creed stood in front of the niche a moment longer.
Then he set the spurs of his right fist against the bone beneath the old inscription — The Ash-man followed her. The door was not opened — and carved, in square Line C capitals:
IT WAS OPENED. YEAR 427. SHE SAID HELLO.
Ossian of the Ink Rows was at his long table under the cold blue lamps — the lamps were dark now; the blue had been channel-grade, from the Engine, and the Engine was shut; Ossian had lit candles, Concord candles, from a storeroom, and set them along the table — with a stack of slates in front of him.
He looked up when they came in.
He was older. Or he looked older. His hair was white at the temples still — it would never go dark again, it had been going white for years — but loose now. No cloth. And his face moved. He blinked. Easily. Like he’d always done it.
“Four thousand one hundred and nine,” he said. “The last one is Corvane Ash.” He touched the top slate. “In my own hand.”
“Thank you,” said Creed.
“Don’t,” said Ossian. Gently. “It is what I am for.” He paused. Then he smiled. Slowly. A strange, careful, unpracticed smile. “No. That isn’t true. I used to be for copying. Now I am for this.” He touched the slates. “I chose it.”
Mirelle went to the table.
She took out her slate and her charcoal. She wrote. She put the slate in front of Ossian.
The Senior asked me to write it down. The archive. When I can read it. In a book. For anyone.
Ossian read it. Twice.
I can read some, Mirelle wrote. Not all. You can read the old tags. The Concord script. The old Register hands. She looked at him. Help me.
Ossian looked at the slate for a long time.
Then he looked past her. Down the long hall. Into the dark, where the candlelight didn’t reach. Toward the far end. Toward the round room behind the unsealed door, with the hundreds of bone tablets set in its walls like scales, and the empty seat in the middle of the floor.
“A book,” said Ossian. “Not a Register. Not a slate on a shelf.”
A book people can pick up, wrote Mirelle.
Ossian of the Ink Rows looked at her. And blinked. And smiled his strange careful smile.
“Yes,” he said. “I would like that very much.”
The Gardens of the Sixth were green.
Not the green they’d been. Not lamp-lit, water-trickling, Drip-fed, kept. The lamps were dark. The water had stopped. The channels in the terrace walls ran with something else now — the faint glow of the god’s blood, seeping up out of the bone, clear and gold and red and white, the way it had seeped up on the beat.
And the ferns had grown.
All of them. On every terrace. Uncurled. Spreading. Spilling over the walls in great green falls. The vines had climbed past their wire frames and up the inside of the vertebra. The fruit bushes were heavy. Small and red and round.
And in the soil, among the green — people. Kneeling. Tending. Not slowly. Not carefully. Not the Kept’s smooth silent work. Talking. To each other. Laughing, some of them. Arguing, two of them, about a vine. Singing, a row on the fourth terrace. Around and down. Badly.
Sefa Orne met him at the top of the stair.
Her hair was tied back with a strip of green cloth. Her eyes were grey-green. Her face was lined, a little, around the eyes, where it hadn’t been eight days ago. Laugh-lines, Wick said, later. She’d been laughing.
“Nine hundred and ninety-one,” she said.
He looked at her.
“In the bone,” she said. “Who said yes. And the eighty-one, on the beat, who looked up.” Her voice was rough. Uneven. Alive. “And the ones who — who didn’t wake. In time. Forty.” She swallowed. “I asked them every day. They didn’t say anything.” She looked down at her hands. “I have their names. I want them on a wall.”
“They’ll go on a wall.”
“Taavi’s wall,” said Sefa. “I want them on whatever wall Taavi’s on.”
Ollo stepped forward. He took the ledger out of his apron. Taavi’s ledger. Swollen. Cracked. With Taavi’s face folded flat inside the cover.
He held it out.
Sefa Orne looked at it.
“Ferrin wanted it,” said Ollo. Flat. “Ferrin’s gone. He gave it to me.” He held it out a little further. “It’s the Sixth’s. Should stay on the Sixth.”
Sefa took it. In her glowing hands.
She opened the cover. She saw the face.
Her breath went out of her.
“He finished,” said Creed. “The name. On the beat. In the Gallery. His mouth closed.” He paused. “He finished saying it.”
Sefa stood at the top of the stair of the Gardens of the Sixth with Taavi Lusk’s ledger open in her hands and his face inside the cover, eyes closed, mouth closed, the last name said.
Then she closed the book. Gently. And held it against her chest.
“He’ll go on the top terrace,” she said. “By the rail. Where he stood.” She looked at Creed. “And we’ll read his book. Every name. Out loud. Every year. On the day the water stopped.” Her voice cracked. “Somebody should.”
They went on down.
Past the Sixth. Past the Seventh, where a carved procession of small figures climbed toward a carved Skull with a carved row of teeth. Somebody had added to it. In the night, while they were in the Gardens. Scratched into the bone above the procession, crude, in charcoal and then cut in with a knife: a line. Across the top of the carved Skull. Zigzag. Like stitching.
And above it, a circle. With lines coming off it. Like the plate in Teo’s book.
The sun.
He stood in front of it for a long time.
“Who did that,” said Wick.
“Don’t know.”
“Somebody from the Gardens. Or the Collar. Or —” Wick stopped. “Does it matter?”
“No,” said Creed.
They went on down.
Four hundred and twelve steps from the Seventh Stair to the iron landing at the top of the Collar. He counted them. He couldn’t help it. But he noticed, about halfway down, that he’d stopped counting them to keep going. He was counting them because he wanted to know.
At the bottom, on the iron landing at the top of the Collar’s well, where the Neck Gate had been, there were people.
Hundreds. Standing on the iron, and on the balconies all the way down the well, and on the stairs. Looking up. At him. At the army coming down out of the neck of the world.
At the front of them, in a chair — a Concord chair, high-backed, carried up from somewhere — with her splinted leg out in front of her and a comm-set in her lap:
Tamsin.
She looked at him. At his eyes. His arm. His jacket.
“You’re late,” said Tamsin. Tinny. Precise. Shaking. “You said a week. It’s been twenty-five days.”
“I know.”
“Sabine said don’t go in without us. You went in without us.”
“She came.”
Tamsin looked past him. At Sabine, coming down the last of the stair with her blasting bar and two fingers on her right hand.
Then back at him.
“The Collar’s waiting,” said Tamsin. “Everybody. They’ve been waiting since the line opened at the top of the world.” She swallowed. “They want to know what happened.”
He looked at them. Hundreds. Down the well. On the balconies. Looking up.
Nobody was telling them to lower their eyes.
“Okay,” he said.
DESCENT LOG
PALATE: CLEAR
NECK: LIT (VESSELS)
RETURNED: 4 FACES (TRUNK), 2 FACES (BASIN), 1 KEY
REMAINING ABOVE: DORNE, BRANN (AXIS); OSSIAN, MIRELLE (REGISTER); SEFA (SIXTH)
NOTED