Tamsin drew it on the floor under the dome, the way Ferrin had drawn the depot, with a stick of charred fungus-stalk on the cleared stone.
Not the Tenth Works. Everything.
“Here,” she said. Her thin precise face was lit gold through the cracked glass. “The Tenth Works. Tower, tanks, capsule dock, drum platform on top. Everything from the Skull comes down onto that platform. Every drum. The Works tempers it into first-draw they pump up from what’s left of the galleries — thirty percent, maybe less now — and sends it up Terminus Six to the Ninth depot.” She tapped the Ninth. “Which we have. So now they’re running it round. Up a second cable. Terminus Eight. Here.” She drew a line along the spine. “From the Tenth to a new depot on the Eighth. And from the Eighth, up. To everybody.”
“So we cut Terminus Eight,” said Sabine.
“We cut Terminus Eight. Three sheaves. Here, here and here.” Tamsin made three marks. “And Terminus Six, below the Ninth, so they can’t route round through us. And the capsule dock at the Works.” She looked up. “And the drum platform.”
“That’s five strikes,” said Haske. “At once.”
“At once,” said Tamsin. “Or they patch each one as we cut it. They’ve got two hundred Gilt on the Tenth now and a full Lancer wing. Thirty staves. They brought them down after the Snag.” She looked at Creed. “They know you’ll come back.”
“Of course they do,” said Snake. Quiet. Patient. Huge. “Everybody knows. You have to eat.”
He didn’t answer it. He was looking at Tamsin’s drawing. At the Tenth Works, a little charcoal tower on the stone.
He’d been eleven days without feeding since the Snag. Since the two tanks. He’d lifted the wreck of Halden with his hands for nine of them, and stood the Lumen dome upright, and dug and carried and built, and every day the hunger had come up through him a little more. Red. The Snag hunger. Bigger than the pit hunger, bigger than the caverns, bigger than anything. And every day the red in his eyes had gone down a little more, and his scars had gone dimmer, and he’d felt himself go thin.
Not thin like the caverns. Thin like a man standing at the edge of the gulf on a rotten rail.
“I’ll take the drum platform,” he said. “And the Works.”
“Alone?” said Sabine.
“With Mirelle.”
Everybody under the dome looked at him. Mirelle, sitting at the edge of the circle with her bandaged hands in her lap, looked up.
“I need to eat,” said Creed. “At the Works. There’s nothing else that’ll fill me enough to do it. Not grey-caps. Not one Gilt.” He looked at Tamsin’s charcoal tower. “And when I eat, I can’t —“ He stopped. “There’s frost in it. In all of it. Tempered. I used to burn it out as it came in. With the gold. I can’t, anymore. The gold’s —“ He didn’t finish.
Mirelle got up. She came across the circle and crouched in front of him and put her bandaged hand flat on his chest, over the mark, the way she had in the third cave.
She felt for a long time.
“It’s small,” she said quietly.
“Yes.”
“It came back a little. At the rows. When you sang. I felt it from across the field.” Her grey eyes were dark. “But it’s small.”
“When you sang the verse,” said Creed. “On the depot catwalk. On the bridge. It came up. It melted things.” He looked at her. “If you sang while I ate —“
“It might come up enough to melt the frost as it comes in.” Mirelle was quiet a long moment. “And if it doesn’t?”
“Then I eat the frost,” said Creed. “And the fire gets bigger.”
Nobody under the dome said anything.
“And you’ll like it,” said Snake. Very soft. “You know you will.”
They went up on the thirty-eighth day. Five crews, five routes, timed by Wick’s net to the minute.
Sabine took Terminus Eight’s three sheaves — three crews of her blasters, each with a Lancer of Haske’s to fly them in. Hanne Dray sent Ninth Rib crane-crews with them; the sheave-houses on Terminus Eight were the old kind, Ninth-built, and the crane-crews knew their wheels the way Teo had known the primaries. Haske herself took Terminus Six below the Ninth, with Pell Varrow and six of her Lancers, because Terminus Six ran through the Ninth’s own depot sheave and Haske said she’d be damned if anybody else touched it.
Creed and Mirelle went up the crawlways to the Tenth.
The fifth crew was Ferrin. He’d asked. He’d stood under the dome with his Catalyst arm glowing and said the capsule dock at the Works was a standard Concord build, he’d supervised two of them on the Eighth before he came down to Line C, he knew where the release-clamps were and the emergency brakes and the shear-pins. Give him four fighters and Wick on the net and he’d drop every capsule in the dock into the gulf.
Nobody argued. Not even Ollo.
It took nine hours to climb. The crawlways were cooler now. The marrow lines were barely running — a trickle of sludge, a fraction of what had gone up them when Creed was on Line C. Half the galleries in the Belly had stopped pumping. The other half were pumping for the Tenth Works, under Concord foremen who’d been brought down from the Mid Ribs with Gilt escorts, because the old foremen had walked off or been walked off.
He climbed with the hunger sitting in him like a stone and Mirelle two rungs below him, singing.
Not the verse. Not yet. Just humming. The Long Way Down. Low, under the sound of the trickle in the pipe. She’d started at the first hatch and she didn’t stop. It went up the crawlway with them, rung by rung.
He didn’t ask her why. He knew why.
It held the gold. Just a little. The filament, in the squeezed place behind his eyes where Lamp was small — every time she hummed the place where the hidden verse went, it flickered. Didn’t grow. Didn’t go out. Just — stayed. Like a lamp on a ledge, kept lit by someone walking past it now and then and cupping a hand round the flame.
“She can’t hum forever,” said Snake.
“She doesn’t need to,” said Creed. Under his breath. “Just till the Works.”
They came out on the bare spine above the Tenth Works at the end of the night cycle and lay flat on the bone, looking down.
It had changed.
The tower was still there, bolted to the spine at the root of the Tenth Rib. The tanks were still there — more of them now, twenty, a second row built since the Snag. The capsule dock, with three capsules in its cradles, loaded. But around all of it, now, a wall. Steel. Like the depot on the Ninth. Higher. With Gilt on the top of it every five meters, and lamps, and rotor-drones hanging in the air around the tower like flies around a carcass.
And on the platform at the top of the tower — the drum platform, where the white drums came down from the Skull — something he’d never seen before.
A cable.
Not a freight cable. Not carbon. White. Thin — no thicker than his wrist — and smooth and seamless and faintly glowing, like the Wardens’ armor. It came down out of the dark above, out of the white-gold glow of the Higher Ribs, straight down past the First Rib and the Second and the Third, down and down, impossibly long, impossibly thin, to the top of the Tenth Works tower. And at the top of the tower it ended in a ring. A ring of white light, flat on the platform, like a halo laid down.
“The drop-line,” said Mirelle. Barely a whisper. Beside him on the bone. “From the Skull.”
He felt it. Through the bone of the spine. Faintly. A thin, high, pure hum, running up the white cable from the platform, up, up, past every rib, into the dark at the top of the world. Like a halo’s tone. Like the tone of the Halo-glass in Kon’s garden.
And from the top of it, coming down — he saw it, high up, a speck of white in the dark, getting bigger — a capsule. White. Seamless. Sliding down the white line without a sound.
The day’s drop.
“Oh,” said Snake. Very low. “Oh, look at that. A road. Straight up. Straight to them.”
He watched the white capsule come down. It was the size of a man. Smooth. Egg-shaped. No windows, no seams, no markings. It slid down the white line past the Higher Ribs, past the Mid Ribs, past the Ninth with its gold patches, and settled into the ring of light on the platform at the top of the Tenth Works tower like an egg into a cup.
Its side opened. Not a door. It just opened, like a flower.
Inside, stacked in a ring, white drums. Twelve of them. Skull and closed eye on every lid.
Technicians in white coats came out onto the platform and began to unload them.
“Wick,” said Creed. Into his collar.
“Here.” Thin. Crackling. From four kilometers down.
“Everybody in place?”
“Sabine’s on the first Terminus Eight sheave. Second and third crews are thirty seconds behind. Haske’s on Terminus Six. Ferrin’s under the capsule dock.” A pause. “They’re all waiting for you.”
He looked at the white capsule on the platform. At the drums. At the twenty tanks inside the wall, glowing blue.
At the hunger sitting in him like a stone.
“Mirelle,” he said.
She was already singing.
He went down the spine onto the wall.
He didn’t go round the Gilt. He went through them. There were too many to go round, and he didn’t have the strength to be quiet. Stop — down. Stop — down. Every stop drew on the cold behind his eyes, and there was so little of it, and every stop he felt Lamp get thinner. He went along the top of the wall and down into the yard among the tanks, and the Gilt came at him from every side, forty, fifty, and the rotor-drones swung down out of the air with their blue-tipped arms, and the Lancer wing came out of the tower — thirty silver shapes, on the catwalks, on the tank-tops, flower-staves opening.
He had nothing to fight them with.
He knew it. He’d known it on the bone above. He was empty. Eleven days. The hunger was everything. His scars were barely lit. The sword on his back was dark. When he drew it, the grooves flickered and didn’t catch.
“Eat,” said Snake. “Now. Or die in this yard.”
He went to the nearest tank. Two Gilt got lances into him on the way, one in the back, one in the leg, and the blue tips crackled in his blood and he took that Catalyst, those two thin threads of it, without thinking, the way a drowning man takes air. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t anything.
He put his hands on the tank.
And behind him — from the top of the wall, where she’d come down off the spine after him, in her ash-grey robe, with Lancer bolts cracking past her — Mirelle sang the verse.
“Hush now, the lamp is lit —”
He pulled.
The Catalyst came. Through the steel. Into his palms. Tempered. Cold. Bright. And the frost with it, laced all through it like ice through water, coming into him in a flood —
“— hush now, the god is near —”
And the gold flickered.
Behind his eyes. In the squeezed place. The filament, the hair. It flickered — and brightened — not a flare, he had nothing to flare with — and the first of the frost coming in through his palms touched it —
And melted.
Not all of it. A little. The edge of the flood. The frost hit the gold and thinned and ran out of him in a wisp of white, through the skin of his wrists. And the Catalyst behind it came in clean. Woken. Calm.
“— sleep in the bone till the key is turned —”
More. He pulled more. The sight-port of the tank dimming. A quarter. And the gold held — barely, flickering, the frost hitting it and melting and hitting it and melting, a fight, a fight at the very edge of him — and Mirelle’s voice behind him, over the bolts and the shouting and the drones, holding the note, holding it —
“— and WAKE when the blood is HERE —”
Half.
He felt it. Half a tank. Clean. Woken. Calm. In him. Not the red flood of the Snag. Not the tame bright cold of the tempered Catalyst. His. The way it had been on the cable, before the Snag, before everything. The gold-in-the-red. The city’s windows at night.
His scars lit.
Red-gold.
Not red. Red-gold. Like before.
The grooves on the sword in his hand caught and blazed — red-gold, crimson with gold through it, the way they’d blazed on the depot catwalk — and the deep note of the Wright-steel came up through the hilt into his arm and the high emitter-whine with it, the chord.
“Enough,” said Lamp.
Faint. So faint. But there. And Creed felt it — for the first time since the Snag — felt the cold behind his eyes lift. Not much. A little. Like something that had been squeezed into a corner taking one breath.
He let go of the tank. At half.
“No,” said Snake. “No, no, more, there’s half left, there’s nineteen more, take it —”
He turned around to face the yard.
He’d remember the next ten minutes better than most fights. Because he was himself for them. Not the red. Not the pressing floor. Not the grating at Sump-Nine. Himself. Full, and clean, and lit red-gold.
He went through the yard.
The Gilt came at him and he stopped them. Hand on breastplate after hand on breastplate. And every stop drew on the cold, and the cold was there now — small, but there — and it held. The Lancers fired and he caught the bolts on the blazing blade and the sword ate them and the gold in him took them and they fed him and he didn’t let them feed him too much, he felt Lamp at the edge of it every time, and every time he listened.
The rotor-drones came down at him and he cut them out of the air.
And all the time, behind him, from the top of the wall, Mirelle sang. Not the verse now. The Long Way Down. All of it. Over and over. Low and wandering and going down and down.
“Creed,” said Wick, in his ear. “Sabine’s got the first sheave. Terminus Eight’s down. Second’s going — there — third —”
Far off along the spine, three dull thuds. He felt them through the bone.
“Haske’s on Terminus Six. She says the cable’s cut. She says Pell cut it himself with a crane-saw. She says to tell you he cried.”
A fourth thud.
“Ferrin’s in the dock. He says — he says watch the capsules.”
Creed looked.
The capsule dock was on the gulf side of the Works, a long steel cradle built out from the wall over the dark, where the three loaded capsules for Terminus Eight sat waiting on their trolleys. And as he looked, under the dock, he saw a figure in a grey coat with a blue-glowing arm hanging from the underside of the cradle by one hand, and doing something with the other to a great steel pin.
The pin came out.
The first capsule dropped.
Off the cradle. Off its trolley. Into the gulf. Turning slowly, full of tempered Catalyst bound for the Higher Ribs, into the dark.
The second.
The third.
Ferrin swung himself back up onto the dock, with his Catalyst arm blazing, and looked across the yard at Creed. Even from there, Creed could see his face. Not the gantry face. Not the lost face from the Root Gallery. Something else.
He’d seen it on Hanne Dray, the night the first gold lamp lit. On the old man in the shawl in the Ninth’s square, holding out his wrist.
He thought it might be what free looked like, on a foreman.
The tower was last.
He went up it. Not the stairs — the stairs were full of Gilt and technicians, coming down, running. He went up the outside, the way he’d gone up the spine. Hand over hand on the girders, on the pipes, on the bolts that held the tower to the bone. Up past the tempering floor — he felt it as he passed, the white tanks inside, the frost in them, dense, waiting — up to the top.
To the drum platform. And the white line.
The technicians had fled. The white capsule sat in its ring of light, open, with half its twelve drums still in it. The other six stood on the platform in a row, where the technicians had dropped them and run.
And the white line went up out of the ring into the dark. Thin. Seamless. Humming.
He stood at the top of the Tenth Works tower and looked up along it.
Up. Past the Ninth with its gold. Past the Eighth. Past the Seventh, where Halden had hung, and now nothing. Past the Sixth, the Fifth, the Fourth. Past Gildmark on the Third, white-gold. Past the Second, where a woman sat in a Hall of clocks. Past the First. Into the white-gold glow of the Higher Ribs.
And beyond that — he could see it, from here, more clearly than he’d ever seen it, even from Teo’s roof — the neck. The seven great vertebrae. The dark line across the base of the skull. The dam.
The white line went up past all of it. Up the neck. Into the glow. To the Skull.
A road. Straight up. Straight to them.
“Climb it,” said Snake. Barely a breath. “Climb it, Creed. It goes all the way. You could be there by the end of the shift. You could be in his head by tomorrow. You could put your hands on them —”
He thought about it.
He stood at the top of the tower with the sword blazing red-gold in his hand and the hum of the white line in his teeth and he thought about it. He thought about it the way he’d thought about leaving, in the square in the Hollow, before he walked into the chapel. Seriously. As an option. The way you’d think about which of two bad pipes to crawl through.
He thought about the Wardens coming down their columns of light. The envoy, with its borrowed face. The Gallery. Thousands of them. And him. Alone. On a white line a hair’s width wide, in the dark, halfway up the neck of the world.
And he thought about the six thousand at the rows.
“No,” he said.
“Why NOT —”
“Because I’m not going up alone,” said Creed. “Not ever.”
He raised the sword. And brought it down on the white line, where it came up out of the ring of light on the platform.
The Wright-steel met the white.
And the white line screamed.
Not a sound. He didn’t hear it with his ears. He heard it with the thing in him that felt hearts, and blood, and bone. A single high pure tone, like a halo’s, like a struck glass, rising and rising and rising — running up the line away from him, up and up and up, past every rib, toward the Skull — and the white of the line where the blade had bitten went dark, and the dark ran up the line after the scream, fast, like the blue had run out of Jory Thane’s veins, like the lights of a city going out.
The line went slack.
It fell. Not down — the top of it was still fastened somewhere far above. It just sagged. Away from the tower. Out over the gulf. A long thin dark thread, drooping, swaying, all the way up into the glow.
The ring of light on the platform went out.
The white capsule, sitting in it, went grey. Its open side, still open, like a flower, went still. Dead.
And from very far above — so far, so faint, that he would wonder for the rest of his life whether he’d felt it at all — something felt that.
Not heard. Felt. The way he felt hearts. Something enormous, and cold, and patient, at the end of a thread, somewhere in the white-gold glow at the top of the world, turning its attention — for one heartbeat, for less — down the dead line. To the top of the Tenth Works tower. To him.
He felt it look.
He looked back.
Then it was gone.
“The drums,” said Lamp. Quietly. “Creed. Don’t let them freeze.”
He’d seen what the drums did, on the tempering floor of the Costal Refinery, when the fuse-cord reached them. The white bloom. The frost of a whole skeleton, set loose, putting the blue fire to sleep. Rolling out over the gulf.
There were six on the platform. Six in the dead capsule. And below him, on the tempering floor, in the white tanks — more. How many, he didn’t know. Enough.
He went to the six on the platform.
He didn’t use the sword. He didn’t use a round. He put his hand on the lid of the first drum, flat, on the skull and the closed eye.
And Mirelle, at the foot of the tower — he hadn’t felt her climb the wall again, he hadn’t felt her cross the yard, but she was there, he could hear her — sang the verse.
“Hush now, the lamp is lit.”
He reached into the drum.
Through the white steel. Into the frost. Dense, crystalline, packed solid, reaching up through the lid toward his palm the way it had on the tempering floor, wanting to settle, wanting to grow.
“Hush now, the god is near.”
The gold flickered. Behind his eyes. Small. In the squeezed place.
He reached for it. Not for the Catalyst in him. Not for the red. For the gold. The filament. He reached for it the way he’d reached for Lamp in the crawlway, to cool Wick. Help me.
“Sleep in the bone till the key is turned —”
It came. Not much. A thread of gold, down his arm, into his palm, through the lid of the drum.
Into the frost.
“— and wake when the blood is here.”
The drum ticked.
Very faintly. Like a cooling pipe. And through the lid of it, under his hand, he felt the frost inside — not burn, not freeze, not bloom — melt. Slowly. From the top down. The way the frost on a window melts with a lamp held close to the glass.
It took a long time. A minute. Two. He held his hand on the drum, and Mirelle sang the verse, over and over, and the thread of gold went into the drum, and the frost went to water.
When it was done, he took his hand off. He was shaking. It had cost — not the Catalyst, not the red. The gold. A little of the gold.
He opened the drum.
Water. Clear. Nothing else. A drum of water with a skull and a closed eye on the lid.
He did the next one.
He did all six. And the six in the dead capsule. Twelve drums of the Head’s frost, turned to water, on the top of the Tenth Works tower, while Mirelle sang at the foot of it until her voice was gone and then kept singing, in a whisper, with no voice at all.
When he came down, his scars were barely lit. The gold behind his eyes was a hair again. The half-tank in him was a quarter. He’d spent everything.
But Lamp, behind his eyes — small, cold, faint — was there. A little bigger than at the top of the climb. Just a little.
And Snake, around his heart, was huge, and hot, and very, very quiet.
He saw it from the Tenth Rib, sitting on the bone at the edge of the Works yard with Mirelle asleep against his shoulder and the gold lamps of the Ninth glowing above them.
It took a day.
The Tenth Works was gone — not destroyed, but dead. The drum-line cut. The capsule dock empty. Terminus Six and Terminus Eight both cut, at five places. The tempering floor’s tanks still full, but there was nowhere to send them and nobody to send them; the technicians had fled up the spine and the Gilt had followed, and Sabine’s crews were in the Works now, opening valves, running the tempered Catalyst out of the tanks and into the gulf in long blue ropes, burning, falling.
And above them, the Ribs went dark.
Not the Mid Ribs. They’d been dim for weeks. Thirty percent. Brown.
The Higher Ribs.
He watched it happen. He’d never in his life seen the Higher Ribs anything but white-gold. Nobody had. They hung up there above everything, in the light of the Head, sparse and bright, cities spaced wide apart, the sky. And over the course of that day, one by one, they went out.
Not all at once. The way Halden’s windows had gone out, falling. One city. Then another. White-gold going to gold going to brown going to nothing. The Sixth. The Fifth. The Fourth. Gildmark, on the Third — he watched it go, Kon’s city, and thought of the glass house, and the garden under its dome, and the lights over the plants going out. The Second. Coronet. Where a woman sat in a Hall of clocks.
The First.
By the end of the day, the Higher Ribs were dark. For the first time in a thousand years. Black shapes, hanging on their cables in the dark, like the Mid Ribs, like the Belly.
And above them, the Skull.
Unchanged. Pouring its light down out of the god’s eyes, white-gold, onto the black cities of the Higher Ribs, the way it always had. As if nothing had happened.
But it didn’t light them. Not enough. It had never been the Skull’s light that lit the Higher Ribs. It had been the Catalyst. The Skull’s light just fell on them, and on everything, the same.
He sat on the bone and watched the dark come down over the Verbous.
“There,” said Snake, after a long time. Low. Satisfied. “Now they know what it’s like.”
“Now they know,” said Creed.
Mirelle stirred against his shoulder. Opened her eyes. Looked up at the dark Higher Ribs for a long moment.
“She’ll be in her Hall,” she whispered. No voice left. Just breath. “With her clocks. In the dark.” She closed her eyes again. “She’ll finally hear them.”
Ilsa Marchetti sat in the dark.
The Hall had gone dark at the end of the second watch. The lamps under the vault of dark glass, dimming. Then out. And the white-gold light of the Head, that had always come in through the dark glass soft as dusk — it still came. It was still there. But it was dusk now. Only dusk. Not enough to see the faces of the clocks by.
She could hear them.
A hundred and eleven. Sixty-three of them running. In the dark, all around her, in their cases and their cabinets, behind their glass.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Not together. Never together. Each at its own pace. A great slow tock from the tall one at the end of the Hall, the one she’d made run with her own hands. A quick light patter from the little ones in their velvet cases. And everything between. A hundred different speeds, a hundred different voices, in the dark, all counting the same thing.
She’d never heard them like this. Not in forty years. In the light, she’d always been looking at them. Their faces. Their hands. Their little painted suns and moons. In the dark, there was nothing to look at.
There was only the counting.
On the bench in front of her, in the dark, sat an empty silver birdcage. She’d been straightening its vines for forty days. She’d nearly finished. Her tweezers lay beside it.
A comm on the bench crackled.
“Senior,” said a soft voice. Educated. Reasonable. “I’ve had the reports from the Tenth.”
She didn’t answer.
“He cut the drop-line,” said Calloway Sere. “With the steel. And he did something to the drums. The technicians say they found them full of water.” A pause. “Water, Senior. He unmade the tempering. By hand.” Another pause. Something in the soft voice that wasn’t reasonable at all. “Do you understand what that means? What he is? If I could just — if I had him on a slab for a single day —”
“Prior,” said Ilsa Marchetti.
“Senior.”
She sat in the dark, among the ticking, with her steady hands folded on the bench beside the empty cage.
“Get me more of him,” she said. “Whatever it costs. Whatever you need. Get me more of him.”
“Senior —”
“Before they come down the light,” said Ilsa Marchetti, “and ask me why my Ribs are dark.”
She switched off the comm.
And sat, in the dark, with her clocks, listening to them count.