Mirelle came down in the night.
He didn’t hear her come. He’d fallen asleep on the ground under Teo’s lamp, beside Matthis’s crate, with his back to the pole and his coat pulled round him and the stars going across the crack at the top of the world, uncounted. When he woke the line at the top of the god was grey going yellow, and Matthis was gone from his crate — someone had walked him home — and Mirelle Marrow-Vane was sitting on the crate instead.
Watching him. The way she watched things. Grey eyes. Bound hands in her lap. Her Cantor’s robe grey with the dust of the stair, the hem in rags. Bare feet, cracked and black on the soles. She’d come down the god on them. All of it. The Seventh Stair, the neck, the Collar, the ribs, the spine-stair, the Belly. Eleven days.
She had a bundle on her knees, wrapped in a strip of white Register-cloth.
He sat up.
“You walked,” he said.
She nodded.
“Ossian?”
She took the slate out of her robe. She’d hung it round her neck on a cord — a little flat square of grey Register-slate, and a stub of soft white stone to write with, and the side of her hand to wipe it. She’d been doing it for a month. She’d got fast.
Still writing, she wrote. He says the book will take him the rest of his life. He says that’s the right length for it.
He nearly smiled.
“And you came down.”
She looked at him for a moment. Then she wiped the slate and wrote, slowly, so he’d see each word arrive.
You said, going home. The pump-house.
I said I’d come.
She hadn’t. Not in words. She hadn’t had words since the root chamber, since she’d sung Ione’s verse into the tree until her voice tore and didn’t come back. But she’d stood at the Register door when he’d left, with the three faces in her arms, and she’d looked at him. And he’d known.
He looked at the bundle on her knees.
She unwrapped a corner of it.
A face. A woman’s. Young — twenty, maybe — with short rust-colored hair and eyes that had been open, staring, on the white trunk for five hundred years, and were closed now. The mouth soft. Ennor Hesse of the Hip-Caves, who’d heard the god singing in the marrow-pits and come up the god with a knife to find out why.
The hip-caves are on the way, wrote Mirelle. Vaila went with the Fifth’s Lancers. They’re taking her to the Lumen where she cracked her Bell. Tamar is for the Leg. Nobody has been to the Leg in four hundred years. Someone will go.
She wiped the slate.
Not yet.
“Not yet,” he agreed.
Behind her, down the edge of the Field, there were eight people in grey robes sitting together on a fallen girder, eating something out of a tin. Faces unwrapped. Palms still bound. The Hollow Choir. What was left of it. There had been a dozen, the night they’d sung the Long Way Down at the Wall of Names and come out of the caverns behind a mule with a sword. There were eight. Four were on the walls.
They’d come down the god with her.
“They’re going home too,” he said.
Mirelle nodded.
Wick was waiting at the edge of the Field with a pack on and his mask hanging round his neck.
“Don’t,” said Wick.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were going to say, you don’t have to come. You were going to say, you’re the Speaker now, Wick, you’ve got a council, you’ve got a car full of people waiting to be asked things. You were going to be all —” He waved a hand at Creed’s whole face. “— reasonable.”
“I was going to say, morning.”
“No you weren’t.”
Ollo came across the Field behind him. His pack was bigger than Wick’s. It clanked. A short-hafted hand-pick was strapped across the back of it, the old kind, the kind mules used in the tight seams where the pneumatics couldn’t reach, its head wrapped in sacking.
Creed looked at the pick.
Ollo looked at him.
“Digging,” said Ollo.
That was all. He didn’t explain how he knew. He’d known Creed nine years in the Belly and five months out of it, and he knew what you carried two faces down a god to do, and he’d gone and found a pick.
“Sabine says go,” said Wick. “I asked. That’s my job now. I asked her could the Speaker leave for three days on his first day and she said —” He did Sabine’s voice, which he was bad at. “— ‘Go. Ask the dunes something.’ So I’m going. To ask the dunes something. And I’m not — I’m not reasonable about it, all right, I know it’s the Basin, I know what the Basin is, I know you went across it on a card with fifty hours of air on it and nearly didn’t come back, I’m not —” He stopped.
He took a breath.
“I’m coming,” said Wick. “Obviously. I’m scared of it. I’m coming.”
“Okay,” said Creed.
“Okay.”
They went.
The road went down the god’s hip.
He’d come up it once. Five months ago, with Sabine’s people behind him and the Choir in their grey robes, out of the Basin and up through the Breach and into the Belly to start a war. And before that he’d gone down it. Alone. Discarded. A Kon band on his wrist and an air card in his pocket and a sword in oilcloth on his back. A ledge cut into the bone, switchbacking down the inside of the great curve of the ilium, edged in places by a guardrail rusted to lace.
He’d gone down it in a violet haze.
He remembered it the way you remember pain. The haze. The motes. Glowing faintly, drifting, thick enough in the low places that the air had looked like dirty water with light in it. The sound going flat and close. The Bloom. Spores in the air of the whole Basin, thick as weather, for thirteen years. One breath without a mask, a doctor at the Breach had told him once, and you’d cough for a week. Ten breaths, and you’d cough until you stopped.
The haze was gone.
He stopped on the third switchback and looked out over the Basin and couldn’t make his eyes believe it.
The air was clear.
Grey. Dim — the Basin was deep, and the line of light at the top of the god was very far up, and the light that came down to the bottom of the god’s pelvis was thin as water. But clear. He could see across it. All the way across. The great pale bowl of the Basin floor. The dunes of bone-dust rolling away in long low ridges, white-grey, like snow he’d only ever heard about. And on the far side, under the curve of the other hip, very small, a cluster of pale shapes and a dark needle rising out of them.
Vesper Hollow.
And the bone of the Basin glowed. Faintly. The way everything glowed now. Clear and gold and red and white, very low, very soft, in long thin lines through the dunes where the bone underneath was closest to the surface. Like the veins on the back of a hand.
“Where’d it go?” said Wick. Through his mask. He’d put it on at the top of the road and hadn’t taken it off.
Creed crouched.
At the side of the road, where the bone met the guardrail, there was a crust of something on the bone. It had been blue once. He remembered blue. A thick soft fur of blue, glowing, growing over everything in the Basin — over the road, the rails, the crawlers, the dead. The Bloom’s body. The thing the spores came from.
It was grey now. Grey and dry and thin, like ash on the end of a burned-out wick.
He touched it.
It fell to powder. The powder lay on his fingertips for a moment and then a little draft came up the road from the Basin and took it, and it was gone.
“The beat,” said the voice. Glass and ember. Low. “The flood came into this bone too. The Bloom was living in it. Eating at it. When the blood came through, it did what you taught the blood in the Hollow to do. Turned it. All of it. At once.”
“Like in the Hollow. When I —”
“Like your hand on the back of a sick man’s neck. The way Hesk showed you the pick. Except it was everywhere, and it was the god’s, and it only had to do it once.”
He stood up. He wiped his fingers on his coat.
“It’s gone,” he told Wick.
Wick looked at him through the mask’s two round dirty windows.
He didn’t take it off.
Creed didn’t ask him to.
They walked on. Down. And on the next switchback Wick pulled the mask down under his chin, and breathed in, once, carefully, like a man testing ice. And breathed out. And didn’t cough.
He didn’t say anything about it. He just walked with the mask round his neck after that, and every so often breathed in again, deep, as if he were checking.
The crawlers were still on the road.
Three of them. Big tracked slag-haulers, the kind that had carried Belly waste down to the Flats in the years before the war, abandoned where they’d stopped. The first two were empty, he knew. He’d gone past them twice. He’d made himself a rule about them, the first time, on an air card, alone. You don’t look in the cabs. He’d kept it.
The third crawler had stopped half across the road on the second-last switchback, its nose against the guardrail, its tracks gone to rust. The Bloom’s grey ash lay thin over its cab. Its cab window was cracked.
He stopped.
Mirelle stopped beside him. She looked at the cab. She looked at him.
“There’s someone in it,” he said.
She nodded.
“Do you know who?”
She nodded again.
He stood in the road for a long moment. Wick behind him, not saying anything. Ollo behind Wick, the pick on his back.
You don’t look in the cabs.
He went and looked in the cab.
The door was rusted shut. Ollo came up beside him and put his one hand on the handle and his foot on the step and his whole weight back, once, the way you’d haul on a jammed press-guard, and it shrieked and gave.
Bones. Old bones, in the driver’s seat, under the remains of a grey robe gone to rags and a mask of painted cloth gone brown. Slumped forward. One arm across the wheel. And the other arm reaching — still reaching, thirteen years later — to the dashboard. To a lever on the dash with a brass knob on it. The bones of the hand were still closed round the knob.
The horn.
Mirelle took out her slate.
OSRIC DALE, she wrote. He drove the slag crawler for the Hollow. Traded for us at the Breach. Grey-caps and tins and thread.
He was on the road when the Bloom came. He could have gone up. Through the Breach. He was nearly there.
He turned round.
She wiped the slate. Her hand was shaking.
He came back down to warn us. With the horn. All the way down the road. We heard it in the square. My mother heard it and started singing people in.
It stopped here.
Creed looked at the bones of the hand closed on the knob of the horn.
He had passed this cab twice. On the way down, alone, on a card. On the way up, at the head of an army. Twice. And kept his rule.
“We’ll take him,” he said.
Ollo was already unstrapping the tarp from the top of his pack.
They took him out of the cab together, carefully, Creed and Ollo, and laid him on the tarp on the road, and Mirelle folded his hands across his chest — all but the one that was still closed on the horn-knob. That one wouldn’t open.
Ollo looked at it.
Then he took a wrench out of his pack and undid the four bolts on the horn-lever’s bracket, one-handed, kneeling in the cab, while the rest of them waited on the road. It took him a long time. When it came free he brought it out, lever and knob and bracket and all, still in the bones of the hand, and laid it on Osric Dale’s chest.
“His,” said Ollo.
The hip-caves were a kilometer past the last switchback, where the road ran along the inside of the ilium before it came down onto the Basin floor.
You wouldn’t have known they were there. A line of low black openings in the wall of the bone, half-buried in dust, each one no bigger than a drawer-mouth. Old. Older than the road. Older than the count. The edges worn smooth by hands.
Mirelle went into the third one on her knees.
He went in after her. Wick held the lamp at the mouth. Ollo stayed with Osric Dale.
Inside it was a pit. Round, two meters across, cut down into the bone of the god’s hip in a smooth bowl, and at the bottom of the bowl the bone was a different color. Darker. Porous. Like the inside of a loaf. Marrow-bone. Very old. Long since emptied.
And it glowed. Faintly. More than the bone outside. In the dark at the bottom of the pit, a soft four-colored light, like the last coal in a hearth.
He put his hand on it.
It was warm.
Very, very faintly — not a sound, not even the memory of a sound, just something worn into the shape of the bone the way the Axis grooves were worn by a thousand years of feet — he felt it. The Long Way Down. The god’s song. The real one. Worn into the marrow here so deep that even dead, even with the god gone and the dreaming over, the bone remembered the shape.
She heard it first, Mirelle wrote. Here. Five hundred years ago. In the marrow-pits. She put her ear to the bone and heard the god singing, and went up to find out why.
Mirelle laid Ennor Hesse’s face in the bottom of the pit. On the warm marrow-bone. Face up. Eyes closed.
Looking up.
Then she put her bound hand flat on the bone beside it, and moved it, three times, in the rising shape. The shape of the verse. The way you sang when you had no voice.
He knelt beside her. He sang it for her. The Long Way Down. Quietly. Into the pit.
When he’d finished, Mirelle pushed the old bone-dust from the edges of the bowl down over the face with her hands, gently, until it was covered. Until there was only the bowl. And the faint light at the bottom of it, coming up through the dust.
They went out on their knees.
“How many is that,” said Wick. At the cave-mouth, with the lamp. Very quiet. “This month. That we’ve —” He couldn’t find the word.
“Not buried,” said Ollo. From the road. Sitting beside the tarp with one hand resting on it. “Put back.”
Wick looked at him.
“Put back,” Wick said. “Okay.”
They came into the Hollow at the end of the day.
The inner bowl, where the Basin floor sank in on itself under the curve of the far hip. The houses. Sixty, seventy, pale bone-stone, low and square, with flat roofs and round windows, set in curved rows down the sides of the bowl like seats in a hall. The well-tower. The granary. The smokestack building. The old garden plots, terraced, black. And at the bottom of it all, the chapel. The roof fallen in. The spire gone. And the round window, high in its one standing wall, like an eye.
The last time he’d been here, there had been a light in that window. Blue. First-draw, burning in the ruins, steady and cold. Sere’s lantern. The light that had pulled him across the Basin on an air card toward a slab and a needle.
The window was dark.
The Hollow was dark. All of it. Grey and quiet and still, the ash of the Bloom lying in drifts against the doors.
And the greylings were in the garden plots.
He stopped at the top of the bowl.
Mirelle stopped beside him. The eight of the Choir stopped behind her. Nobody said anything.
They were lying down. All of them. In the old terraced plots where the Hollow had grown its grey-caps and its marrow-beans before the Bloom. Forty or more of them. Lying on their backs in the black soil. Side by side, some of them. One with its arm across another.
He’d fought them. The first time. On the road into the Hollow, with the sword, on an air card, in the haze. Eyeless. Grey-furred. Glowing mold growing over their skin like a pelt. Fingers too long and jointed wrong. Mouths very human. Clicking to each other in the dark. Pulling at his mask.
Sere’s first experiments, Mirelle had told him afterward. Bloom survivors — people of the Hollow who’d breathed too much and lived — dosed with first-draw on a slab to see what the Bloom and the Catalyst would make together. They couldn’t be cured. Sere had let them graze in the Basin.
He went down into the plots.
The fur was gone. The glowing mold. It had gone to grey ash on them, like the Bloom on the road, and fallen away, and what was under it was skin. Grey-pale. Thin. Old scars across the palms — ritual scars, the Hollow’s bleeder-scars, the same as the Choir’s. And the faces —
They had faces.
Not the blind grey masks he remembered. Faces. Human faces. Eyes closed — eyes, where he’d have sworn there’d been none. Mouths closed. Lying in the soil of the plots they’d grown food in, with their faces turned up toward the line of light at the top of the god, very far away.
Still.
Peaceful. He didn’t know another word for it.
“On the beat,” said the voice. Very gently. “The god woke and took back its dead. And gave its blood. These were half of each. Dead and not. The Bloom had them, and the first-draw had them, and they couldn’t wake and they couldn’t stop. When the god woke, it took the Bloom out of them. And the first-draw. And gave them back what they were. For a heartbeat.”
“And then?”
“And then they lay down. Here. Where they’d been people.”
He stood among them.
Mirelle came down into the plots behind him.
She walked among them very slowly. Looking at each face. Stopping. Looking. And at the fourth one she stopped, and went down on her knees in the soil, and put her bound hand on its cheek.
She took out the slate.
TEMMA HOLLIS, she wrote. She mended the Choir’s robes. She sang alto.
She went to the next.
AREN OSK. He kept the granary. He gave his last sweet-roots to the crypt the winter the stores ran out.
The next.
I don’t know.
The next.
BRIN TALLOW. She was my mother’s friend. She went out to help my mother bring people in from the square.
She knew eleven of them. She wrote each name on the slate and showed it to him, and showed it to the Choir, and the Choir said each name aloud — the first time those names had been said aloud in thirteen years — and then she wiped the slate and went to the next. The ones she didn’t know, she wrote I don’t know, and the Choir said nothing, and she knelt a moment longer by those.
When she’d been to all of them she stood up in the middle of the plots with the slate hanging on its cord and her bound hands at her sides and her robe black with soil to the knee.
She looked at him.
He sang.
He didn’t decide to. It was the only thing there was to do, and it came out of him the way the counting used to. The Long Way Down. The god’s song. Hesk’s tune. In the dark at the bottom of the Hollow, in the dead garden, over forty people who’d been people again for one heartbeat and then lain down.
The Choir sang under him. Eight voices. Thin. Cracked from the stair.
And then Wick.
Wick, standing at the top of the plots with the lamp, his mask round his neck, his voice cracking on every second note because he’d never been able to sing and everybody on Line C had told him so. Singing anyway. He’d learned it on the relay, on the beat, with the whole god. He sang it badly and loud.
Ollo didn’t sing. Ollo never sang. He stood beside Osric Dale on his tarp, at the edge of the plots, and kept the time with his hand on the tarp. Like the line used to keep time to Hesk.
When it ended, it ended. They let it.
They buried them in the plots.
All night. The Choir dug — they had spades in the granary, rusted, still good — and Ollo dug one-handed with the pick, and Creed dug, and Wick carried soil in a bucket from the plots to the pile because he couldn’t dig without getting blisters and didn’t care that everyone knew it. Mirelle carved. She’d found a nail in the granary and a flat stone, and she sat at the edge of the plots under the lamp with the stone on her knees, scratching names into the bone-stone with the nail. Eleven names. And under them:
AND OTHERS. WE DON’T KNOW.
THEY WERE PEOPLE OF THE HOLLOW.
THEY CAME HOME.
They put Osric Dale at the head of the plots, nearest the road. With the horn on his chest.
Near dawn the Choir’s eldest came and stood beside Creed at the edge of the turned soil. A tall thin woman, grey to the bone, her palms bound in clean cloth. Edda Varn. She’d been in the crypt in 414. She’d been in the Choir under Sere and under Mirelle. She’d come up the switchback road behind him and fought through the Belly and climbed a god.
She was looking at the well-tower.
“The well’s dry,” she said. “It went dry the year after the Bloom. The pumps stopped. There was no one to run them. We carried water from the caverns after that, through the Breach. Ten hours each way. In masks.”
He looked at the well-tower.
“We’re staying,” said Edda Varn. “The eight of us. Mirelle said you’d know. She said you’d understand that more than anybody.” She turned and looked at him. “Somebody has to be here. When the others start coming back. And they will. Two families came out of the crypt alive. Their people are on the Flats and in the caverns and on the Ninth and the Fifth. They’ll come back when they hear the haze is gone.”
“They’ll need water,” he said.
“They’ll need water.”
He looked out over the Basin. East. Across the dunes. Toward where the light was coming yellow into the crack at the top of the god, very far up, and falling down the inside of the god’s pelvis thin as water, and lying on the long white ridges of the bone-dust.
On the third ridge, very small, there was a square shape. Pale. Alone.
“I know where the pump is,” he said.
Before they went, Mirelle took him into the crypt.
Down a stair under the chapel’s fallen floor. A long low vault cut into the bone under the Hollow. Benches along the walls. Lamp-niches, empty. The place where the Hollow had come when the Bloom came, singing, following Liss Marrow-Vane’s voice in from the square. Thirty of them, saved by one voice, before it faded.
The place Mirelle had lived for twelve years. In the dark. With her grandmother, until her grandmother died. Then with Sere.
She didn’t show him any of that. She went straight to the end of the vault, where there was a narrow slit cut through the wall at head height — a ventilation cut, or a watching-cut, a hand’s width wide and an arm’s length long, angled up and out through the bone of the bowl — and stood aside from it.
He looked through.
The Basin. The dunes. The long white ridges going east under the thin light. And on the third ridge, very small, framed in the slit as if the slit had been cut for it —
The pump-house.
Mirelle wrote on the slate, and held it up beside his face so he could read it without looking away.
She stood here. My grandmother. In 402. She watched the light come down onto the dunes.
She said it was white and it didn’t make any sound.
She said they were holding hands.
He stood at the slit for a long time.
When he turned round, Mirelle was sitting on the bench under it, looking at the floor. He sat down beside her. Their shoulders touched. Neither of them moved away.
After a while she wrote again. Smaller. Just for him.
I didn’t come down for them. Not only.
I came down because I had nobody to come home with. And neither did you.
He looked at the slate.
“Now we do,” he said.
She wiped it. She didn’t write anything else. She leaned her head, for a moment, on his shoulder, and then she sat up, and stood, and went up the stair into the morning.
The dunes were a long walk.
He’d walked them once before on a card, the first time, with his legs going and the haze in his mouth, and they’d seemed to go on forever. They went on almost as long in clear air. Long white ridges of bone-dust, soft underfoot, shifting, giving. You walked two steps up and slid one back. Down the far side in a rush. Up the next.
The bone under the dust glowed where the wind had scoured it thin.
Wick kept up. He complained the whole way, about the dust and his boots and how there was nothing to look at, and kept up, and every so often breathed in through his nose, deep, checking.
Ollo carried the pick.
Mirelle walked a little ahead. Barefoot in the dust. Not complaining.
Creed walked with his hand inside his coat. Inside the jacket. On the inside pocket.
He’d carried them a long way.
From the Hall of the Basin, at the bottom of the Stewardship’s tower, in the god’s dreaming skull. Down the Seventh Stair. Down the neck, four hundred and twelve steps and four hundred and twelve again and again. The Collar. The ribs. The Second, the Eighth, the Belly. Two weeks. Two faces. A man’s, calm, eyes closed. A woman’s, eyes closed, smiling. Light. So light. Thin as masks. He’d felt them against his chest the whole way down, every step, the way you feel a cut that won’t close.
He’d stopped noticing the weight around the Eighth.
He’d never stopped noticing that they were there.
They came over the last ridge.
It was the same.
It was always the same. That was the thing about it. He’d been here twice now, and both times it had been exactly the same, and it was exactly the same again. A low square shed of grey bone-concrete on a poured pad, half-buried on its windward side in a drift of dust. One door. One small high window, frosted with grime. A rusted pipe coming up out of the pad on the far side and going into the wall. And on the door frame, still, the curling grey edge of the gasket tape where he’d torn it the first time to get in, and where his father had laid it the last time to seal it.
The handle was cold. It stuck.
He put his shoulder to it and it gave and he went in.
The concrete floor. Faint dust in the corners — glowing now, very faintly, four colors, not blue. The rag in the vents. The desk with its swollen logbook. The chair. The cot.
Nothing on the cot.
He stood in the middle of the floor.
Mirelle came in behind him and stood by the wall. Ollo came in and set the pick down by the door, gently, so it didn’t clank. Wick came in last and stood in the doorway with the light behind him and didn’t come any further.
“It’s small,” said Wick.
“Yeah.”
“I thought it’d be —” Wick stopped. “You talked about it like it was big.”
He looked round the pump-house. Four meters by five. A desk, a chair, a cot.
“It was,” he said.
He’d never opened the logbook.
Twice he’d been here, and both times it had been on the desk, swollen with damp, its cover warped up at the corners like a dead leaf, and he’d never opened it. The first time he hadn’t thought to. The second time he’d been sitting on the cot with his face in his hands while Mirelle told him who he was, and then there’d been the hatch, and the lab, and a seed in a disc speaking in his mother’s voice.
He opened it now.
The pages were stuck. He peeled them apart with his black fingers, carefully. Columns. Ruled by hand. Dates down the left side. And readings. Pressure. Flow. Bearing temperature. Hours run. Day after day after day, in a small square careful hand that leaned slightly backwards. An engineer’s hand.
No. 1 pump. 41 m³/h. Pressure nominal. Bearing 38. Greased.
No. 1 pump. 40 m³/h. Pressure nominal. Bearing 39. Greased.
Nine years of it. Every day. The same careful columns.
He turned to the last page that had writing on it.
Year 402. Cycle 4. Day 19.
No. 1 pump. 41 m³/h. Pressure nominal. Bearing 40. Greased.
Station sealed for inspection.
And under that, a line ruled across the page. And under the line, in the same small backward-leaning hand, the thing a pump-chief writes at the end of his last shift, for the relief:
HANDOVER. No. 1 bearing runs hot past 40, has done since 398. Grease it every shift and don’t let anybody tell you it can wait. She’ll run forever if you grease her.
Relief:
And then nothing. A space. Where the name of the next pump-chief should have gone.
He stood at the desk with the book open and read it three times.
She’ll run forever if you grease her.
He didn’t know what he’d expected. A last message. Something for him. Look up, maybe. His father had already said that, in the disc, in the dark under the floor, with the Warden-tone humming behind his voice. He didn’t need it again.
This was better.
This was a man who’d known the Wardens were on the road. Who’d known he was going to walk out of that door and up into the light and not come back. Who’d burned his lab and wiped every record of what they’d done and sealed the door with gasket tape. And before he did any of it, he’d sat down at this desk and written the readings. And greased the bearing. And written the handover. For whoever came next.
Because the pump would need greasing.
Ollo was standing at his shoulder. Reading it. Ollo read slowly, his lips moving a little.
When he’d finished he looked at the rusted pipe going into the wall.
“Where’s the pump,” said Ollo.
The hatch was where it had been. Under the desk. A square of concrete in the floor with the seat-mark carved small in its center — the curl, the hook, the vein splitting into three — and when he cut his palm on the edge of the desk and put his hand on it, the mark lit gold, the way it had before, and the square sank and slid aside.
The door is shut, the door is sealed. It opens for the blood it healed.
The ladder. The lab.
It was the same too. Cut into the bone of the Basin under the pump-house pad, bigger than the room above. The shelves of black melted glass. The twisted instruments. The charred bench in the middle. Ash, soft and grey, a hand deep on the floor. And on the far wall —
The Rosetta.
He’d seen it before. By glow-strip, the first time, half-mad with what Mirelle had told him. He saw it now by Wick’s lamp and by the light of the bone itself, which glowed down here as it glowed everywhere. And it was more than he remembered. The whole wall. Floor to ceiling. Rows of god-script, the old sigils, each one copied exact. And beside each one, in fine black paint, in a small quick upright hand that was nothing like his father’s — letters. Numbers. Notes. Branching diagrams like the roots of the tree in the Skull. Four years of a clever woman reading the god’s own handwriting, written on a wall in the dark.
His mother’s hand.
Mirelle went to it. She stood with her face a hand’s width from it, the way she’d stood with her face a hand’s width from Aurel the First’s on the trunk.
She took out her slate. She looked at the wall, and looked at the slate, and he understood. The archive. Ossian’s book. A book people can pick up. There was a wall here that would be the first chapter of it, and nobody had ever copied it, because nobody had ever come back.
Later, she wrote. I’ll stay. I’ll copy all of it.
After.
In the middle of the wall, at heart height, there was a niche. Palm-sized. Empty. Where the message-cylinder had been. Polished bone, with the seat-mark on its end. It had opened to his blood along a gold seam and given him a seed in a disc, and his mother’s voice, and his father’s, and then gone dark. He still had the disc. He’d given the cylinder to Mirelle.
He stood in front of the empty niche.
“Here,” he said.
Ollo unwrapped the pick.
The floor of the lab was the god’s bone under the ash. Basin-bone. Old and dense and hard as poured stone, the way the bone near the gallery walls had always been hard on Line C. You didn’t dig it with a spade. You didn’t dig it with a pneumatic either, not here, not in a room with his mother’s handwriting on the wall. You dug it the old way. By hand. With a short pick, in the tight seams, the way the long-timers had done it before the pneumatics came, the way Hesk had shown him the first week he’d been on the line.
Ollo held out the pick.
Creed took it.
He hadn’t held one in five months. Since the morning he’d gone down the switchback road on a card. He’d held a sword since, and a Key, and the god’s whole heart. He took the pick and felt the haft settle into his black hand and his pale one, and something in his shoulders went back nine years.
He knelt in the ash in front of the Rosetta wall, below the empty niche.
He swung.
Badly. Too hard. The pick bit, jarred, bounced, sent a shock up both arms into his teeth. Chips of bone flew. He swung again, harder, and it was worse.
Stop swinging it, said Hesk.
Not the voice. Not the hands. Just memory. Hesk, at the number-two pump, the first week. Marrow-skinned to the elbow, watching him try to break his own wrists on the wall. Taking the haft out of his hands. Putting it back in them a different way.
Your arms are for aiming. Not for hitting. Let it fall. Put it where it wants to go and let it fall.
He stopped swinging it.
He lifted it and let it fall. And it bit. Clean. And he lifted it and let it fall. And it bit. A rhythm. The old rhythm. The one the whole of Line C had cut marrow to, shift after shift, for nine years. He’d forgotten that it was a rhythm. He’d thought it was only a count.
He found himself humming.
He didn’t stop.
He dug for an hour. Then Ollo knelt beside him and held out his hand, and Creed gave him the pick, and Ollo dug. One-handed. Left-handed. He’d been a pick-man on Line C with two hands before the press took his right, and he’d never dug one-handed in his life, and he set the end of the haft against his hip for a pivot and let it fall, and it bit. Clean. Ollo didn’t say anything about it. He just dug.
Wick held the lamp. And talked.
He didn’t decide to, Creed thought. It was what Wick did when he was scared and there was nothing to do with his hands. He talked. But he didn’t talk to Creed, or to Ollo, or to Mirelle. He crouched by the edge of the hole with the lamp, and he talked down into it. Quietly. Like there was somebody there.
“He’s all right,” said Wick. To the hole. “I don’t know if anybody told you. He’s — mostly he’s all right. He counts things. He counts everything, he can’t help it, it’s a Line C thing, we all do it, but he does it worse. He counted the steps up the neck. Four hundred and twelve. He counted the stars last night. Lost count. He minded at first and then he didn’t.
“He doesn’t eat enough. Ollo makes him.
“He’s got a black arm. That’s new. It’s got writing on it. It’s fine. It glows. He’s got two — he’s got some voices in his blood. They’re fine too. Mostly. One of them used to be angry and the other one used to be sad and now they’re — I don’t know what they are now. Kind, he says. Enough. They help.
“He woke the god up. You probably know that. He sat in a chair in the top of the world and didn’t take anything. Everybody felt it. Everybody. My whole — everybody I know. It was the best thing I ever felt.
“He took your faces off a wall. He’s carried them down two weeks. He put his hand on his pocket every time we stopped. He thinks nobody saw. We saw.
“He’s not a good singer. He’s better than me.
“He’s —”
Wick stopped. He wiped his face with his sleeve, the lamp swinging.
“You did all right,” Wick told the hole. “Is what I’m saying. If you were wondering. You did all right.”
Nobody said anything.
Ollo let the pick fall. It bit.
Mirelle, at the wall, with her slate, had stopped copying. She was standing with her forehead against the Rosetta, among the sigils and the small quick painted letters. Her shoulders were moving.
The hole was a meter deep when they stopped. Not long. Not wide. It didn’t need to be. Faces were small.
He took them out of his pocket.
He’d done it before — at night, on the stair, in the Collar, at Hedda Dorne’s table on the Eighth, once — taken them out and looked at them by whatever light there was. But not in front of anyone. He did it now in front of everyone, kneeling in the ash in his mother’s laboratory, and nobody looked away.
His father’s face. Long, plain, a Mid’s face, Rib Six. Calm. Eyes closed. A crease between the brows that might have been from squinting at pressure gauges for nine years.
His mother’s face. Wide flat cheekbones. Deep-set eyes, closed. Ochre under the grey, the color of Hesk’s marrow-skin, the color he’d voted for once on a civic ballot without knowing why. Smiling. Just slightly. As if somebody had just told her something she’d known all along.
Light. Thin as masks.
He laid them in the bottom of the hole. Side by side. Face up.
Looking up.
He took the slate out of the pocket — the 402 slate, the Register-slate he’d carried from the skull, with the two lines on it in the Stewardship’s tiny pale script. YEAR 402. CYCLE 4. BASIN. VESS, AUREL. PUMP-CHIEF. EXILE. INTEGRATED. YEAR 402. CYCLE 4. BASIN. MARROW-VANE, IONE. TECHNICIAN. ABSCONDED. INTEGRATION RESISTED. The record of what had been done to them. The only one.
He looked at it a long moment.
Then he laid it face down in the hole beside them.
“That’s theirs,” he said.
He put his hand flat in the bottom of the hole, between the two faces. On the bone.
He felt for it. He didn’t know what he was feeling for. The song, maybe, worn into the bone the way it had been worn into the marrow-pit at the hip-caves. The god taking back its dead. He knew it wouldn’t. The god was gone. He’d been there. He’d felt it turn itself down like a lamp at the end of the night.
The bone was warm. That was all. Warm, and faintly lit, and still.
“It can’t take them,” said the voice. Gently. “Not the way it would have. It’s gone. There’s no one to take them now.”
“I know.”
“So you put them back yourself. That’s all it is now. People put them back. Into the bone. And the bone keeps them warm. And the people remember the names.”
“That’s enough?”
“That’s enough.”
He didn’t sing the Long Way Down.
He’d thought he would. He’d thought about it, on the stair, on the Collar, every night for two weeks. He’d sing them the Long Way Down, the god’s song, the oldest thing there was. Or the hidden verse — his mother’s verse, the one she’d written to hold the pattern asleep in him. Hush now, the lamp is lit. Hush now, the god is near. Sleep in the bone till the key is turned, and wake when the blood is here.
But the key had been turned. And the blood was here. The verse was for waking. They didn’t need waking.
He sang Liss’s song.
The crypt-song. The one with no words, or words so old that nobody knew them anymore. The one Liss Marrow-Vane had made up for frightened nights in the dark under the Hollow, that only Mirelle had known, until she’d sung it to him once, on a bad night, when his blood wouldn’t stop looking for something. The verse wakes. This puts to bed. Not the frost. Not the white. Just sleep. The way people used to sleep. Before.
He sang it into the hole. Very quietly. Badly. He didn’t have the voice for it. Liss had been the Hollow’s best singer, and he was a mule from Line C.
Mirelle turned round from the wall.
She came and knelt on the other side of the hole. Across from him. She couldn’t sing it. She’d never sing it again. Her mother’s song, that she’d carried alone through twelve years in a crypt, and given to him, and then lost her voice in the top of the world.
She put her bound hands together over the hole and moved them. Not the rising shape. Another one. Slow. Down and in and still. Like a hand drawing a blanket up.
He sang. She moved her hands.
When it ended, they let it end.
Then Ollo, without being asked, began to push the bone-chips and the ash back into the hole with his one hand, gently, the way you’d tuck something in. And Wick put the lamp down and did the same. And Mirelle. And Creed. The four of them, kneeling, pushing the ash in over his parents’ faces with their hands until the hole was full, and the floor was level, and there was nothing to see but ash and the faint four-colored light of the bone coming up through it.
He took the nail from Mirelle. He stood. And under the empty niche, on the Rosetta wall, below his mother’s last line of fine black painted notation — whatever it said; he couldn’t read it; Mirelle would — he cut:
IONE MARROW-VANE. AUREL VESS.
THEY WALKED OUT TOGETHER. YEAR 402.
THEY CAME HOME TOGETHER. YEAR 427.
He looked at it.
Then, smaller, underneath, because it was true and somebody should know:
HESK CARRIED HIM UP THE ROAD.
HE CARRIED THEM DOWN IT.
The pump was in a pit behind the pump-house, under a rusted steel cover that Ollo and Creed got up between them with the pick for a lever.
It was big. Bigger than the pumps on Line C. A squat black iron housing the size of a crawler’s engine, bolted down to a concrete footing, with the great rusted pipe going down from it into the dark of the bone — a hundred meters down, the logbook said, two hundred, to wherever the water was — and the other pipe going up and across, under the dunes, toward the Hollow. A flywheel taller than Wick. A drive-belt, rotted. A hand-crank for starting.
Ollo looked at it for a long time.
Then he took off his pack and got the grease out.
He’d brought grease. Of course he had. He hadn’t known about the logbook. He hadn’t known about the handover. He’d just known you didn’t go to a pump-house without grease, the way he’d known you didn’t carry two faces down a god without a pick.
It took the rest of the day.
The bearing was seized. Twenty-five years. Ollo got the cap off it with the wrench, one-handed, and Creed held the light, and they packed it, and worked the shaft back and forth by hand a few degrees at a time until it moved, and packed it again. The belt was gone. Ollo cut a new one out of the tarp they’d carried Osric Dale in, doubled, and laced it with wire. Wick ran back and forth to the pump-house fetching things from Ollo’s pack and complaining and fetching them. Mirelle sat on the edge of the pit with her slate and read the pump’s specification plate aloud to them in writing, because Ollo asked.
At the end of the day Ollo stood back from it and wiped his hand on his trousers and looked at Creed.
“Crank,” said Ollo.
Creed took the crank.
It was stiff. He leaned on it. His black arm lit, white and red down the script, because he didn’t know how not to anymore when he leaned on something. The flywheel turned. Once. Grinding. Twice. Something deep in the housing knocked, and caught, and knocked.
And caught.
The pump started.
A deep slow thud. Then another. Then another. Iron on iron, steady, heavy, like a heart — not the god’s, he’d felt the god’s and this wasn’t it, this was smaller and slower and made by people — and the great pipe going down into the bone shuddered, and gurgled, and a long way down something answered.
They stood around the pit and listened.
It took a long time. The pipe was long. The water was a long way down and the Hollow was a long way across. But after a while, Wick, who had the best ears of any of them from years on the comm-net, lifted his head and said, “Listen,” and they listened, and they heard it. Very faint. Very far. Across the dunes, from the bottom of the inner bowl.
Someone shouting.
And then more than one.
He went back into the pump-house as the light went out of the top of the god.
He sat at the desk. In his father’s chair. He opened the logbook to the last page.
Relief:
He took the stub of soft white stone from Mirelle’s slate-cord — she gave it to him without asking why — and wrote, under his father’s handover, in letters that came out large and square and badly made, because he’d learned to write late and from a Kon crèche slate, and had never had much call for it since:
Year 427. Day 136 after the Fall.
No. 1 pump. Running. Bearing greased.
He stopped. He looked at the line his father had left blank.
Relief:
He thought of writing his own name. He thought of writing Edda Varn, who would be here; or Vesper Hollow; or whoever comes.
He wrote:
Relief: Creed. Line C. One shift.
Next relief: whoever comes. Grease it every shift. She’ll run forever.
He closed the book. He left it on the desk where it had been.
Then he stood up, and took off his coat, and took off the jacket.
He hadn’t taken it off in a long time. Not to sleep. Not to fight. He’d worn it buttoned to the collar under his own coat through the whole of the war, through the Ribs and the neck and the Skull and the dreaming, through Corvane and the Archon and the core and the god’s one heartbeat. Heavy pump-crew canvas, stiff with five months of blood and dust and Catalyst and sweat. Patched where the Wardens’ light had burned it. The name in the collar.
VESS. A.
He folded it.
He didn’t know how his father had folded it. Mirelle hadn’t said. He did it the way Kon crèche had taught them to fold a work-shirt, in thirds and then in half, sleeves in, collar up, so the name showed. He laid it on the cot. On the bare canvas of the cot, where it had lain for twenty-four years before he came.
He sat down on the cot beside it.
Mirelle stood in the doorway. Wick and Ollo behind her, outside, in the dusk. The pump thudding beyond them, slow and steady.
She wrote on the slate and held it up.
He folded it so somebody would use it.
He looked at the jacket.
“Somebody did,” he said.
He sat there a while longer. The pump thudded. A long way off across the dunes, in the inner bowl of the Hollow, somebody had lit a lamp in a window — yellow, not blue — and then somebody lit another.
Then he picked up the jacket, and unfolded it, and put it back on.
He buttoned it to the collar.
“Somebody still is,” he said.
Mirelle wiped the slate. She didn’t write anything. She just nodded, once, the way she’d nodded on the crate at the edge of the Fall-Field that morning. A long time ago. Yesterday.
They went out into the dusk.
He stopped at the door.
The gasket tape was still on the frame. Curling. Grey. His father had laid it there, all round, in the last hour, so the Wardens would find a sealed pump-house and nothing else. So the lab would be safe. So the door would stay shut, and the secret with it, until somebody came with the right blood.
He took hold of the end of it, and pulled.
It came away in one long grey strip, all the way round the frame. Brittle. Light. He wound it round his hand and put it in his pocket.
Then he took the rag out of the vent.
And he left the door open.
Wide. Propped with a lump of bone from the dunes. So the next relief could get in without putting their shoulder to it. So the air could go through. So that anybody walking the dunes — anybody at all, from the Hollow, from the Flats, from anywhere — would see a pump-house with its door standing open and a light inside, and the pump thudding, and know that somebody had been here, and somebody would be again.
They walked back across the dunes in the dark toward the lights in the Hollow.
Behind them the pump thudded. Slow. Steady. Like something that would run forever, if you greased it.
He didn’t count the beats.
He listened to them.
“Kind,” said the voice, very quietly, as the last ridge took the pump-house out of sight behind them. Glass and ember. Gold and red and white. “That was kind.”
“It didn’t feel kind,” he said. “It felt —”
He didn’t know.
“Like putting something down,” said the voice. “That you’ve carried a long way. And finding out you can still feel where it was.”
He put his hand inside his coat. On the inside pocket. Lighter now. The Lumen shard. Ferrin’s note. Kon’s dark glass eye. A curl of gasket tape. And a little flat disc, clear as water, with a seed in it.
“Yeah,” he said. “That.”
THE BASIN
BLOOM: NONE DETECTED
VESPER HOLLOW: RESETTLED (8)
NO. 1 PUMP: RUNNING
RETURNED: HESSE, E. (HIP-CAVES); DALE, O.; 43 (HOLLOW PLOTS)
PUT BACK: VESS, A.; MARROW-VANE, I.
DOOR: OPEN
—