They went up.
He’d gone up the god before. Twice. Once on an army’s back, in a war, with the white light coming down and the Gilt on the landings. Once alone, or as near alone as he’d ever been, with Ollo and Wick and two hands in his blood that wanted different things. Both times he’d counted. He couldn’t help it. Every stair, every rung, every landing, every hour. Line C put the count into you so deep that you counted in your sleep. Four hundred and twelve from the Collar to the Seventh Stair. Two thousand and ninety to the Gardens. He knew the numbers the way he knew his own hands.
This time he didn’t count.
He tried not to, the first day, and it was like trying not to breathe. The numbers came up in him on their own, one, two, three, the way they’d always come, and he let them come and let them go past without holding on to them, the way you’d let people go past you in a crowded gallery. By the second day it was easier. By the third he’d go a whole flight of the spine-stair and get to the top and realize he didn’t know how many steps it had been.
He didn’t mind.
The spine-stair went up the inside of the god’s back. Thirty-one hours, Brann had said, the time he’d walked it down from the Second to get away from Sere’s pull. It was longer going up. They didn’t hurry. They stopped when they wanted to stop. They slept on landings, in the warm glow of the bone. Ollo carried the food. Wick carried the comm-set, and every evening at the hour the horn used to go he stood on a landing and called down the relay to the Car, and somebody answered — Sabine’s people, mostly, because Sabine was with them — and told him what was wrong today, and he wrote it in the tally-book.
“You don’t have to,” said Creed, on the third evening.
“I know,” said Wick. “I want to. Somebody should be asking.”
Sabine climbed beside Creed most of the way. She didn’t talk much. She’d been thrown away once, through the Breach, and climbed back out of the Void, and made the caverns into somewhere people could live. She climbed the god the way she did everything, steadily, as if it were a thing that needed doing and complaining about it would only slow her down.
Once, on the fourth day, at a landing where the spine-stair passed a crack in the god’s vertebrae and a line of real yellow light came slanting in from somewhere very far above, she stopped and stood in it.
Just stood. With her face turned up into it. Her eyes closed.
He waited.
“Warm,” said Sabine, after a while. Surprised. As if nobody had ever told her.
Ilka Dorne was waiting at the Collar.
She was sitting on the edge of the landing at the top of the well, where the neck met the shoulders and the whole of the skeleton fell away below in rings of light. Her legs over the drop. Big. Scarred. Her right arm still faintly red to the shoulder from Sere. Seven small round scars in a line across her left shoulder, where his seven fingers had gone in. She’d been carrying Wheel-Kept up and down the Axis for forty days, and she looked it, and she looked better than he’d ever seen her look.
Brann was beside her. Thin. Young. Choir-born. His eyes gold-ringed, and steadier than they’d been.
And between them, on the landing, sitting with her bare black-soled feet tucked under her and her slate on its cord and her robe in rags to the knee —
Mirelle.
“You walk slow,” said Creed.
She took out the slate.
I walked fast, she wrote. I wanted to be here first.
He sat down beside her on the edge of the landing. Their shoulders touched. Below them, the god went down and down, ribs and spine and the great dark bowl of the Belly, all of it glowing. Gold and red and white and clear, in rings and lines and threads, like a city seen from very high up at night. Like the map of a city drawn in light.
“Did you finish?” he said. “The wall?”
She nodded.
Ossian has it. He cried. He says it’s the best first chapter anybody ever had. He says your mother’s hand is better than his.
He’s started on chapter two.
“What’s chapter two?”
She looked at him. Then she looked down, at the god glowing below them.
Everything else, she wrote.
Tamsin had had herself carried up to the landing to see them off. She sat in her Concord chair with her splinted leg out in front of her and looked at the seven of them — Creed and Wick and Ollo, Sabine and Dorne and Brann and Mirelle — and then at the eighth, who’d come up on the last crawler from the Ninth with a drawing-board strapped on her back and her almost-brown eyes on everything.
“Asa,” said Tamsin. “From the Palate.”
“Yes,” said Asa.
“You’re going too.”
“I asked,” said Asa. “He said yes.” She looked at Creed. “He said, ask. So I asked.”
Tamsin looked at her a long time. Then at Creed.
“You came back last time,” she said. “Late. But you came back.”
“I’ll come back.”
“I know,” said Tamsin. “Go and look. Then come back down and tell us what you saw. Tell all of us. On the relay. Wick’ll do it.” She settled back in her chair. “I’d come. I’d come if I had two legs. I want to know what it looks like.”
“I’ll tell you,” said Wick.
“You’d better,” said Tamsin. “You’d bloody better.”
The neck was full of people.
He hadn’t expected that. He should have. Two months ago the Seventh Stair had been the most frightening place in the world — a spiral cut in the inside of the hollow neck with open air on one side and a white needle in the air that would find you if you stepped off the bone and pull you up into the teeth. Nobody went up it. Nobody came down it except the Kept, taken. He’d climbed it with a sword.
Now there were people on it all the way up.
Going up. Coming down. Sitting on the steps. Kept from the Palate coming down slowly with faces wrapped in cloth to take home, and Mids from the Ribs going up to see the Gardens of the Sixth, and Belly mules — Belly mules, on the Seventh Stair — with packs on their backs, going up to the Sixth because Sefa had said come and learn. A woman from Line D sitting on a landing with a basket of small red fruit in her lap, eating them one at a time, looking at each one before she ate it. Two old men from the Collar, arguing about something, slowly, all the way up.
The light in the neck was the god’s light now. The two great vessels on either side of the stair glowed like rivers, clear and gold and red and white, and down the open middle of the hollow came the line of sun from the crown, slanting, moving across the far wall through the day as the world turned.
Nobody was afraid of the open middle anymore.
People leaned out over it. Put their hands out into the line of sun. A Ninth Mid on a landing near the Seventh Stair was dropping bits of paper into it to watch them fall, slowly, turning, gold where the light caught them, all the way down.
On the Seventh Stair, somebody had carved the zigzag and the sun into the procession on the wall. The Skull, cracked open. And somebody else, since, had carved little figures coming out of the crack. Standing on top of it. Very small.
Asa stopped and drew them.
They slept at the Sixth.
Sefa met them on the stair, in her green headcloth, with a basket of fruit over her arm and soil to the elbows. She looked at the eight of them coming up the stair and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said, “You asked,” to Creed, as if it were the end of some conversation they’d been having since the day the water stopped.
“Everybody’s asking,” he said.
“Yes,” said Sefa. “I know. They come up the stair every day. They ask me how to grow things. I tell them I don’t know. I tell them I’ll show them what I do and they can see.” She almost smiled. She’d got better at it. “It’s very tiring. I like it.”
She gave them fruit. She gave them a terrace to sleep on, on the soft soil between the fern rows, under the vines, in the glow of the channels that ran with the god’s blood instead of water now. There was a slate of names hung on the rail at the top terrace, by Taavi’s face. Forty. She said them in the mornings.
Wick asked her about the seed.
She listened. She asked what dust it was in and what water and how deep and how warm the bone was there. Then she was quiet for a long time.
“Some seeds wait,” said Sefa. “Some seeds wait for fire. Some wait for cold. Some wait for something to eat them and carry them somewhere else. Some wait years.” She looked at Creed. “Some seeds aren’t waiting for anything you can give them. They’re waiting for the right time. And the right time isn’t yours.”
“So what do I do?”
“Keep it damp,” said Sefa. “And come back.”
At the Axis, Dorne showed them the Wheel-Kept walking.
A hundred and thirty-one of them, who’d sat in the glowing grooves of the Axis wheels on the day the god woke, with their legs worn to the shape of the turning. They walked now. Some of them. Slowly. With sticks, with each other, with Dorne’s arm. Some of them would never walk well. Some of them were walking up and down the Axis ring just to be walking, round and round, the way they’d turned the wheels for years, except nobody was making them and they could stop when they liked.
“They don’t know what else to do yet,” said Dorne. “So they walk. I walk with them. It’s fine.”
Brann had taught a dozen of them Liss’s song. They sang it at night.
The lift was at the base of the hollow peg.
Dask Ferrin’s lift. The Atlas lift. A cage of old iron on a cable, running up through the great hollow bone peg that rose through the god’s first vertebra into the base of the Skull. The Wrights’ old water-counterweight drive, that the Heads had broken and Ferrin had fixed, on a night a long time ago, with the whole Stewardship trying to stop him. He’d held the brake on the way up. On the way down there’d been nobody to hold it but him, and the car had come down fast and the brake had held and the car had not jumped, and Dask Ferrin had died at the bottom with his hand on the lever.
His name was on the cage bar. Carved small.
DASK FERRIN. LINE C. HE HELD THE BRAKE. IT DIDN’T JUMP.
Ollo went to it. He put his one hand on the bar beside the name.
“I’ll take it,” said Ollo.
Wick looked at him. “Take what?”
“Brake.”
Nobody said anything. Ollo had never driven a lift. Ollo had one arm. Ollo had been logged at thirty-eight percent by a Kon sorter and put on sort and then purged, and he’d walked out of the Void, and he’d stripped Haske’s breech for an hour and found it clean, and he’d stood in a burning skull and told the oldest thing alive to look up.
Ollo got into the cage and put his hand on the brake-lever.
“Matthis taught him,” said Ollo. “Fast as it can and no faster.”
They got in. All eight. It was crowded. Dorne had to stoop. Wick held the comm-set against his chest like something that might break, and Mirelle held Asa’s drawing-case, and Sabine put her back to the cage wall and folded her arms.
Ollo eased off the brake.
The water moved somewhere in the dark of the peg, heavy and slow. The cage shuddered. And rose.
Up through the hollow of the Atlas. Up through the dark peg of bone, in the faint glow of its walls. Ollo’s hand on the lever. Easing. Holding. Easing. Listening to the cable with his whole body the way he’d listened to the presses on Line C, the way he’d listened to Haske’s breech, the way he’d always listened to machines, as if they were saying something only he could hear.
Fast as it could and no faster.
It didn’t jump.
At the top, the cage came up into the root chamber and stopped, exactly level with the floor, so gently that Asa, who’d had her eyes shut the whole way, didn’t know they’d stopped until Ollo said, “Here.”
He set the brake. He took his hand off the lever and looked at it.
“Huh,” said Ollo.
The root chamber was full of sun.
He hadn’t seen it like this. He’d left it the day after the beat, fifty days ago, when the sun had only just begun to come down the shaft. Now it came down all day, every day, through the crack in the crown and down the long hollow shaft where the tree had been, and lay on the floor of the chamber in a long moving bar of yellow, warm and thin, crossing the floor through the day.
The Lock was still there. The great spiral of grey-gold bone in the floor where the Key had turned. Cold now. Just bone. And around it, where the roots of the tree had gone down into the god’s mind, the bone had healed over, smooth and pale, the way skin heals.
Creed knelt by the Lock.
He put his hand on it. Cold. Nothing. No pulse. No dream. He’d known there wouldn’t be.
“It’s gone,” he said.
“It’s gone,” said the voice. Glass and ember. “It’s all right. It wasn’t meant to be here. It was meant to be finished. It is.”
He stood up.
Mirelle was standing in the bar of sun with her face turned up. Her eyes closed. The light on her face.
Dorne stood just outside it. At the edge. Looking at it. As if it might be a trick. As if, if she stepped into it, a Bell would ring.
“It won’t,” said Creed.
Dorne looked at him.
“No Bell,” he said. “There aren’t any. Not anywhere. Quill wound the last clock and sat in the chair and nobody’s rung a Bell since.”
Dorne looked at the sun on the floor.
She stepped into it.
She stood there. Big and scarred and still, in the bar of yellow light, with her red arm and her seven holes and her face turned slightly down out of a lifetime’s habit. Then, very slowly, as if it hurt — and maybe it did; it had hurt him the first time — she lifted her chin.
And kept it lifted.
Nothing rang.
The shaft went up from the root chamber to the crown.
Where the tree had been. The great hollow white trunk that had stood up through the god’s skull from the Lock to the folds, with the four faces on it and Corvane’s roots running down its middle. It had gone to ash on the beat, the trunk and the roots and the folds and the pods and everything the Stewardship had grown in the god’s mind for nine hundred and eighty years, and the ash had fallen, and what was left was the shaft. A long round hollow up through the bone of the god’s head, the walls ridged and pitted where the roots had gripped. Open at the top.
Sun coming down it.
They climbed. Up the ridges, the way he and Ollo and Wick had climbed the trunk fifty days ago, except there was no trunk now and no white light and nobody trying to stop them. Just the bone, and the ridges, and the sun getting brighter as they went. Dorne went first, because she was strongest, and let down a rope at the hard places. Ollo climbed with one arm and his knees and didn’t take the rope once. Wick took it every time and said thank you every time. Asa climbed with her drawing-board on her back and stopped every twenty meters to look.
The folds went by on either side. Empty now. The great curved caverns of the god’s dreaming mind, where the pods had hung and the Stewardship had lived inside the god’s sleep, feeding. Ash on every surface. Lines of yellow light through every crease, from the crack in the crown. The walls still faintly gilt. Like a cathedral after a fire.
He didn’t look at them long.
He looked up.
The suture was open.
He’d opened it. On the last day, with the Key in his black hand pressed to the seam, and the light going down his arm, asking, and the oldest bone of the god — the bone that had grown shut when the god was young, before it ever ate — knowing the Key and letting it in. A quarter-turn. And the teeth of the seam letting go of each other, like two combs pulled apart, and unpicking themselves stitch by stitch in both directions along the whole crown of the skull.
It had stayed open.
A long jagged crack across the very top of the world. Wide enough, in the middle, for a crawler to drive through. Narrowing at either end to a hand’s width, then nothing. The edges were the god’s old bone, the zigzag teeth of the suture, still interlocked in their shapes like a seam somebody had unpicked and laid flat. Pale. Sun-bleached already, after fifty days. Warm.
And beyond it —
Blue.
He’d seen it before. From inside. The day he’d opened it. A blue so pale and clean it had looked like a lie, with white clouds moving across it. He’d stood at the bottom of it with Corvane’s skull in its pod and the root uncoiling toward the light and Wick crying in the ash. He’d looked up at it. He hadn’t gone out.
Nobody had gone out.
Not even Fenn’s Lancers. They’d flown up to the edge, Asa said. They’d looked out. And they’d come back down and sat down.
He stood at the bottom of the open suture with his hand on the warm edge of the bone and looked at the blue.
Behind him, nobody said anything. Wick. Ollo. Sabine. Dorne. Brann. Mirelle. Asa. Standing on the last ridge of the shaft, in the sun, waiting.
He thought: somebody should go first.
He thought: it doesn’t have to be me.
He turned round.
“Together?” he said.
They went out together.
Up the last of the bone, where the suture’s teeth made a kind of stair. Eight of them, side by side, as many as would fit. Hands on the warm bone. Up. Up into the blue.
And out.
Wind.
That was the first thing. Before the light, before the sky, before anything. Wind. He’d never felt wind. There was no wind in the god. There were drafts, in the Belly, up the gallery shafts, and the hot breath of the presses, and the cold breath of the Breach. There was no wind. This came from everywhere at once. It came across the top of the god’s skull like a hand across a table, cold, enormous, steady, and pushed at him, and pulled at his coat, and filled his mouth and his nose with a smell he didn’t have a word for. Clean. Cold. Far.
Wick grabbed his arm. Dorne grabbed Brann. Sabine went down on one knee on the bone and stayed there.
And then the light.
The sun was in the sky.
Not a line of yellow. Not a bar on a floor. The sun. A round white-gold fire in the blue, a long way up and a long way over, so bright he couldn’t look at it, so bright it put green and purple shapes on the inside of his eyes when he looked away. It was warm on his face. The whole of his face. His hands. The back of his neck. Warm, with the wind cold over it, both at once, everywhere.
He’d been warm before. He’d never been warm like this. From the sky.
And the sky.
It went up.
He’d known it would. The hands had told him. Teo’s book had told him. He’d seen it through a crack. He’d known. It didn’t matter. It went up. It went up from the edge of the bone under his feet and kept going, blue, paler at the bottom and deeper at the top, deeper and deeper, until right overhead it was a blue so dark and clean it was nearly something else. There was no roof. There was no top. There was no bone. There was nothing up there at all, except the sun and a few white clouds moving slowly across it, very high, very far, and past them, more blue. Going back.
Forever.
Wick, beside him, made a sound.
He didn’t look at Wick. He couldn’t look away from the sky. But he felt Wick’s hand on his arm, holding on, very tight, and he felt Wick shaking, and he heard Wick say, very quietly, into the wind, “It goes back. It goes back forever. Teo said. Teo said it goes back forever.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s better than the book,” said Wick. “It’s so much — it’s better than the book.”
They were standing on the top of the god’s head.
He looked down, finally, because he had to know what he was standing on, and the top of the god’s head went away from him in every direction in a great pale curve. Bone. Weathered bone, outside bone, that had been under the real sky for longer than anyone had a count for. Pitted and grooved and bleached white, with lichen on it — lichen, grey-green and orange, in round crusts like coins — and little pools of rainwater in the hollows. Rain. There’d been rain. On the outside of the god. All this time.
The curve went down. And down. And at the edge of it, where the crown fell away into the god’s face and the god’s shoulders, there was nothing. Air. And beyond the air —
The world.
He went to the edge.
Not right to it. Near enough. On his hands and knees, the last few meters, because the wind was strong and the bone was smooth and he had never in his life been somewhere he could fall off the world. The others came behind him, slowly. Dorne on her feet. Sabine on her knees, like him. Ollo walking, upright, as if the wind wasn’t there, because Ollo had decided it wasn’t. Wick crawling flat on his belly with the comm-set dragging, saying oh no oh no oh no under his breath and not stopping.
He looked over.
The world was very far down.
That was the first thing. Further than he’d known anything could be. The god stood on it — had died standing on it, a thousand years ago, its feet on the ground — and he was on the top of the god’s head, and the ground was so far down that the god’s legs went away below him and got thin and faded into a kind of blue haze before they reached it. Clouds were down there. Below him. Little white clouds floating between him and the ground, with their shadows moving across the land under them.
And the land.
It was brown. Mostly. Brown and grey and dun, rolling, ridged, cracked, a great dry plain going away in every direction under the haze. Old. Scarred. Dead-looking. The dying world. The one the hands remembered, the one Corvane had climbed into the god to get away from, with the sun swelling red and the seas going brown and the air you couldn’t breathe in the afternoons.
But it wasn’t all brown.
There were lines in it. Threads. Winding through the brown in long slow curves, from the hills to the low places. Green. Dark green, along the bottoms of the valleys, where water must be. Thin, most of them. A green thread, a green smudge. And here and there, where the threads came together, a wider green — a patch, a stain, a soft dark spreading green, like the green that comes up through the crack in a floor.
And far away, past the plain, past the hills, at the very edge of everything, where the world met the sky — a line of something that wasn’t land. Flat. Silver-grey. Shining where the sun hit it.
“Water,” said the voice. Very quiet. It hadn’t spoken since the shaft. “That’s the sea.”
“It’s not brown.”
“No,” said the voice. And then, in a way he’d never heard it, glass and ember both breaking at once: “No. It’s not brown. It’s not — oh. Oh, it’s not brown anymore.”
He felt them. Both of them. The hands. The white and the red, the holding and the hungry, the kind and the enough, that had been old when the god was young, that remembered the dying world because they’d been in it. Looking out through his eyes at the sea. He felt them see it. He felt them understand it.
It had healed.
On its own. Without them. While they’d been asleep in the god and fighting in the god and holding and hungering in the god for a thousand years. The world had gone on. And the sea had gone back to the color of the sky, and the green had come up in the valleys, slow, slow, a thread at a time, the way the fern had come up at the foot of Hesk’s pump.
Nobody had planted it.
Nobody owned it.
“We remember it brown,” said the voice. Hardly a voice at all. “We remember the last of the green going. We remember the sky going red. We remember — we thought — we were the last. The god was the last. We were the ark. That’s what it was for. That’s what it was for, Creed.”
“I know.”
“And it didn’t need us. The world. It didn’t need saving. It just needed — time. It just needed somebody not to be standing on it.”
He looked at the green threads in the brown.
“It’s not finished,” he said.
“No.”
“It’s mostly brown.”
“Yes,” said the voice, and it was laughing now, or crying, he couldn’t tell, glass and ember, white and red, kind and enough. “Yes. It’s mostly brown. It’s not finished. It’s going. It’s just going.”
They stayed all day.
There was no reason not to. Nobody was waiting for them. Nobody would ring a Bell. They sat on the top of the god’s head in the sun and the wind, in a line along the edge where the crown curved down, and looked.
Sabine sat with her knees up and her arms round them and her face turned up and didn’t say anything for an hour. Then she lifted her hand. Two fingers. Toward the sky. Her sign. The one she’d given in the caverns a hundred times, received, I see you, I’m here. The one the militia on the Eighth gave each other in the street now without knowing whose it was.
She held it up to the sky for a long time.
Dorne sat a little apart. She looked at the sun. Straight at it. And had to look away, her eyes streaming. And looked again. And had to look away.
“It’s too bright,” she said.
“That’s allowed,” said Creed.
She looked at him. Her scarred, heavy face. Her eyes running.
“Is it?”
“Nobody’s going to tell you to stop.”
Dorne looked back at the sun. She didn’t look straight at it this time. Next to it. At the blue around it. She kept her chin up.
Brann sat beside her and didn’t look at anything for a long while except his own hands, gold-ringed, in his lap. Then he looked up. Then he didn’t look down again.
Mirelle stood. The whole time. At the edge, in the wind, her rags blowing, her bound hands at her sides. Her face turned out toward the sea. After a long time she took out her slate, and the wind tried to take it, and she held it against her chest and wrote, slowly, and then turned it round and held it up. Not to Creed. Not to any of them.
To the sky.
HELLO.
The same word. The one Aurel the First had said, at the seat, a thousand years ago. The one he’d carved in the sanctum. SHE SAID HELLO.
Mirelle held it up until the wind took the chalk off the slate, letter by letter, and it was blank. Then she put it away.
Asa drew.
She sat cross-legged at the edge with her board on her knees and the wind tearing at the paper and drew. Everything. Fast. The sea. The plain. The green threads. The clouds below them, with their shadows. The god’s own shoulders falling away beneath them, ribbed and white, with the tiny glowing lights of the Collar landing very far down in the shadow of the neck. Sheet after sheet. She didn’t stop. She didn’t speak. Every so often she held a drawing up beside the real thing and looked from one to the other and made a small sound and put it down and started again.
And she took out the drawing of the crown. The one from the Seventh Stair, with the bare paper at the top where the charcoal stopped.
She filled it in.
It was Ollo who saw it.
He’d been sitting a little way along the edge from the others, by himself, the way he did. His one hand on his knee. Looking out. Not at the sea. Not at the green. East, where the sun had come up from, where the plain went away under the haze toward a line of low brown hills.
“Another one,” said Ollo.
Wick looked round. “Another what?”
Ollo pointed.
They looked.
At first Creed couldn’t see it. The haze. The distance. The brown hills going away into blue. And then he could, and once he’d seen it he couldn’t stop seeing it, and he didn’t understand how he hadn’t seen it before.
Past the hills. Very far. So far it was blue with distance, pale, almost the color of the sky. Standing up out of the plain.
A shape.
Long. Upright. Narrow at the bottom, where it met the land, and widening as it went up. And at the top, a curve. A round curve. Like the top of a head. And across the middle of it, very faint, thin pale lines, curving out and down, in pairs. Like —
Like ribs.
Nobody said anything.
The wind blew across the top of the god’s head. The sun was warm.
“There,” said Asa. Very quietly. She was pointing too. Not east. North. Past the sea. On the far side of the silver water, at the very edge of the world. “There’s another.”
Smaller. Fainter. Almost nothing. A pale upright smear on the horizon, past the sea. Standing.
“And there,” said Dorne. South. Her voice was flat and odd. “I think. There.”
He couldn’t see that one. He looked where Dorne was pointing and couldn’t see it. But Dorne had the best eyes of any of them, and she said there, and he believed her.
Three.
Three of them. Standing. On the edge of the world. Like the god. Like their god. Skeletons. Kilometers high. Standing on the healing world, with the sky going back forever behind them.
“Did you know?” he asked the hands.
The voice didn’t answer for a long time.
“No,” it said at last. Very small. Smaller than he’d ever heard it. “No. We never knew. We were in this one. We were only ever in this one. We thought — it was the only one. We thought it was the last.”
“Are there people in them?”
“We don’t know.”
“Are they asleep? Like ours was? Is there somebody in the top of them, drinking?”
“We don’t know.”
He looked at the far pale shape in the east, past the hills, with its ribs.
“Somebody should go and see,” said Wick.
They all looked at him.
He was lying on his stomach at the edge of the god’s skull with the comm-set under his chest and his chin on his fists, looking out at the shape in the east. His face was white. His eyes were wet. He looked more frightened than Creed had ever seen him — more frightened than on the Seventh Stair, more frightened than in the folds, more frightened than on the Fourth with Maddox Reave standing over him.
“Not now,” said Wick. “Not — I don’t mean now. I mean somebody. Sometime. Somebody should go and see. And ask.” He swallowed. “Somebody should go and ask them if they’re all right.”
Nobody said anything.
“I’d be bad at it,” said Wick.
Ollo looked at him.
“Mostly,” said Ollo.
Late in the day, with the sun going down the sky toward the sea, he took Kon’s eye out of his pocket.
It was a small thing. A sphere of dark glass, the size of the end of his thumb, cold, heavy. It had been gold, once. A camera-aperture iris that ticked and refocused when it moved, in the face of a man who’d sat in a black lacquer carriage behind glass with a fern on the table and told a mule on Gantry Three to keep his eyes down on his way out, because the Head sees.
He’d taken it from Kon’s face in the Costal vault, when the light had gone out of it. He didn’t remember deciding to. He’d carried it ever since. In the jacket. With everything else.
He’d never known why.
He held it up now. In the sun. It was dark. Nothing moved in it. Nothing ticked. It was just glass.
“He never looked up,” he said. “Not once. His whole life. He went up and up and up, he went higher than anybody, he had a carriage and a fern and a house made of glass and the best eyes money could buy. And he spent it all looking down. At people like us. Making sure we were looking down too.”
“Yes,” said the voice.
“He’d have hated this.”
“He’d have been afraid of it,” said the voice. “Which is not the same. Most of what looks like hate is that.”
He looked at the eye for a moment longer.
Then he leaned forward, into the wind, and set it down on the bone at the very edge of the crown. In a little hollow, where the rainwater had worn a cup in the bone. He turned it so that the dark iris faced out. Away from the god. Out at the sea, and the green threads in the brown, and the far pale shapes on the edge of the world, and the sky.
Up.
“There,” he said. “Look.”
He left it.
The sun went down into the sea.
He hadn’t known it would do that. He’d known it went across and down — he’d watched the line of light move across the floor of the root chamber — but he hadn’t known where down was. It was the sea. The sun came down the sky slowly, getting bigger, getting redder, until it touched the silver line of the water at the edge of the world, and then it went into it, slowly, a red-gold half-circle sitting on the sea, then a sliver, then a line. Then gone.
And the sky did things he hadn’t known skies could do.
Orange. Red. Pink — a color he’d only ever seen in the wet inside of a cut. Gold, along the edges of the clouds below them. Purple, high up. And over all of it, slowly, from the east, from behind them, from where the far pale skeleton stood past the hills with the last light on its ribs — blue going deep. Deeper. Dark.
The wind dropped.
The cold came up off the bone.
And the stars came out.
Not through a crack this time. Not a thin line of them, through the top of a dead god, from the bottom of the world. All of them. Everywhere. The whole of the sky, from one edge of the world to the other, coming out one at a time and then in handfuls and then in drifts, white and gold and faintly blue, more and more, until the dark between them was hardly dark at all. And across the middle of it, from one horizon to the other, a long pale band of light like a river of dust, like the glow of the Belly seen from the Collar — made of more of them. So many more that they ran together.
He lay on his back on the top of the god’s head and looked up at them.
He didn’t count.
He thought about it. He felt the numbers come up in him the way they always did, one, two, three. He let them come up and he let them go past.
He didn’t count.
Beside him, Wick was lying on his back too, with the tally-book on his chest. Ollo on the other side, sitting up, his arm on his knee. Sabine. Dorne, with her chin up, looking. Brann. Mirelle, sitting with her bound hands in her lap and her face lifted. Asa, still drawing, by starlight now, by feel, sheet after sheet of black paper with white marks on it, the way you’d draw a thing you’d only ever be able to draw by feel.
Nobody was asleep.
“Creed,” said Wick.
“Yeah.”
“Do you think it’s going to be all right?”
He didn’t answer straight away.
He thought about Maddox Reave, standing on a junction on the Fourth, with old channels round his neck like a collar and new blood under them, saying give it a year. He thought about forty thousand people coming off the Drip, shaking. About six thousand two hundred and twelve names, and the carvers in the caverns with their nails, and Joss Merrin at the end of the Halden glass, one name and then the next, with eight thousand to go. About a seed at the foot of a wall under his aunt’s name, in dust from a crack at the foot of a pump, that hadn’t come up and might not, not this year, not for a long time.
He thought about a fern with three fronds that nobody owned.
He thought about the Car on the Flats, full of people who didn’t know what they were doing, asking each other. About Sefa, tired, good, teaching Belly mules to grow fruit. About Alis Fisk at the Breach with her bell, counting people in. About a pump on the basin dunes with its door propped open, thudding, that would run forever if somebody greased it every shift. About a lamp on a pole on the Fall-Field that didn’t need an old man to work it anymore, and an old man who sat under it anyway.
He thought about the sea, which wasn’t brown. And the green threads in the brown, a thread at a time. And three pale shapes on the edge of the world, standing, that nobody knew anything about yet.
And about a woman with ochre under the grey of her skin, at a pump on Line C, at hour nineteen, humming something under the noise of the line so quietly that nobody heard it but the bone. Every shift. For nine years. Without ever saying why.
“It’s not finished,” he said.
“I know. But is it going to be all right?”
Above them the stars went back. Forever. More than you could count. That was the point.
“Mostly,” said Creed.
THE CROWN
ALTITUDE: UNMEASURED
SKY: OPEN
BELLS: NONE
EYES: UP (ALL)
DISTANT STRUCTURES: 3 (UNIDENTIFIED)
STARS: UNCOUNTED
STATUS: MOSTLY
—
END OF BOOK THREE
END OF THE MARROW CHOIR