Ilka Dorne went back up to the Eighth on the sixty-first day, and came back down on the sixty-fifth, and brought an invitation.
Not for him. For herself.
She laid it on the table under the colored-glass dome. A card. Heavy, cream-colored, with a gold edge. Real paper. Creed hadn’t seen paper like it since the stack of Sere’s notes in the reliquary. On it, in fine black letters:
THE CONCORD OF THE HIGHER RIBS
REQUESTS THE PRESENCE OF
CAPTAIN ILKA DORNE AND ESCORT
AT THE REMEMBRANCE GALA
THE LUMEN GALLERY, CORONET, SECOND RIB
END OF THE FIRST WATCH, DAY 67
TONIGHT WE REMEMBER THOSE WHO ROSE. TONIGHT, ONE MORE WILL RISE.
“One more will rise,” said Wick, reading it upside down. “That’s — that means —“
“Ascension,” said Dorne. Flat. “In front of everyone. At the gala. A Senior.” She sat down at the table, heavily. The red-gold under her skin was steady, soft; Mirelle had sung to her for an hour that morning. “They do it once every few years. In the old days, when the Ribs were lit. To show the Head still favors the Concord. Everybody comes. Everybody watches the light come down and take somebody up.” She looked at the card. “The Senior’s paying for it out of her own reserve. Every Verbous with a tank of channel-grade left is lighting their house for it. The whole of Coronet, lit, for one night. In the middle of the dark.”
“To show they still can,” said Sabine.
“To show the Head they still can.” Dorne tapped the card. “And to show the Mids on the Seventh and the Eighth, looking up out of their dark windows, that the Higher Ribs are still the Higher Ribs.”
“Why did they invite you?” said Wick.
Dorne looked at him.
“Because I’m the Prior’s girl,” she said. “Because I’m the first stable one. Because the Senior wants to show me off to the Verbous. Look what the Concord has. Look what we made, to fight the Belly Thing.” Her plain face didn’t move. “They don’t know I’ve been to the Fall-Field. They don’t know I’ve been down here. They think I’ve been on the upper Eighth, training.”
“And the Prior?”
“The Prior’s been in his workshop on the Second for a week. With his vials.” Her jaw tightened. “I haven’t asked him yet. Why he told me it would pass.” She looked at Creed. “I’m going to ask him at the gala.”
Creed looked at the card.
Captain Ilka Dorne and escort.
“Oh,” said Snake. Slow. Delighted. “Oh, mule. You’re thinking it.”
He was thinking it.
The armor came from the Shelf.
There were dozens of sets of it, now. Gilt plate, gold-lacquered, taken off the men he’d stopped and the men who’d run and the men who’d walked home across the Long Bridge. Piled in the tram-shed’s back room, waiting for somebody to think of a use for it. Sabine had been melting some of it down at the Press for casings.
Ferrin picked out a set. A sergeant’s, with a white band across the faceplate. He laid it out on the floor of the dome piece by piece, the way Ollo had laid out the breech.
“It’s heavy,” said Ferrin. “Without a rig. Gilt armor’s built to be worn with channels. The rig drives it. The joints are servo’d — they push when you push. Without channels, you’re carrying sixty kilos of dead plate on your bones.”
“I can carry sixty kilos.”
“I know you can.” Ferrin looked at him. “But you’ll move wrong. Any Gilt who sees you will know. You’ll move like a mule in borrowed armor. Not like a man the armor’s moving.”
“Then I’ll stand at the back,” said Creed. “Behind her. And not move.”
Ferrin looked at him for a long moment. Then down at the faceplate in his hands, with its white band.
“This was Corran Vel’s,” he said. “Sergeant, Rib Eight. He was on the Long Bridge. He was one of the sixty who walked home.” He turned the faceplate over. “He walked into the Shelf yesterday. Without it. Asked Sabine if we had any work.”
Creed looked at the faceplate.
“Ask him if I can borrow it,” he said.
Coronet was lit.
He saw it from the kite. Haske flew him up — up the gulf from the Shelf in a long climbing spiral on the Catalyst lift, the way she’d flown him to Halden, past the dark Eighth, past the empty anchorage of the Seventh, past the dark Sixth, the dark Fifth, the dark Fourth, dark Gildmark on the Third — black shapes hanging on their cables in the dusk of the Skull’s light.
And then the Second.
Every window. Every lamp. Every street. The whole city, hung on its rib in the dark of the Higher Ribs, blazing. White-gold. The old light. The light he’d seen from the capsule window on his way up to Kon’s glass house, before the Tenth Works, before the Strangle. Like nothing had happened. Like the Higher Ribs had never gone dark at all.
“Every tank,” said Haske, above him, through her helm. Quiet. “Every Verbous on the Second has opened every private reserve they’ve got. For one night.” A pause. “They’re burning a month of light. To look like they still have it.”
“Wasteful,” said Snake. But it said it with something like admiration.
They came in low. Below the city, in the dark under its terraces. Haske set him down on a maintenance gantry under the Second Rib’s anchorage, where Dorne was waiting with four others in Gilt armor — Unbanded fighters, the best Sabine had, who’d spent two days in the tram-shed learning to stand still in borrowed gold.
And Wick. In a long grey coat. A technician’s coat, Concord-issue, with a relay-crew badge on the lapel that Ferrin had made at the Press. A comm-pack on his back. His thumbnail at his mouth.
“I’m going to be sick,” said Wick.
“Not in the coat,” said Dorne.
“Not in the — right.” Wick swallowed. “Right.”
Creed put on the faceplate.
The Lumen on the Second Rib was not like Halden’s, or the Ninth’s.
It was enormous. A great hall of colored glass, gold and white and a blue so pale it was nearly silver, built into the bone of the rib on a terrace near the top of Coronet, with a dome so high its point was lost in the light. And the gallery — the long arcade that ran round the inside of the dome, under the colored glass — was lined with portraits.
Faces. In gold frames. Hundreds of them. Seniors of the Second Rib, going back a thousand years. Painted, all of them. Old-fashioned, some, stiff and dark. Newer ones bright. Each with a little brass plaque underneath.
Ascended.
Ascended.
Ascended.
He walked under them in Corran Vel’s gold armor, behind Ilka Dorne, sixty kilos of dead plate on his bones, trying to move like a man the armor was moving. He didn’t look up at the faces. He looked at the floor. Like a Gilt. Like everybody.
The gallery was full.
Verbous. Hundreds of them. More than he’d ever seen in one place, more than he’d known existed. In clothes he didn’t have words for — colors, silks, gold at the hems and cuffs, jewelry that glowed. Their faces smooth and expensive, ageless, the way Kon’s had been. Their channels — he felt them through the armor, through the faceplate, with the thing in him that felt hearts — webs. Laced through every one of them. Jaws, temples, spines, hands. Fine. Expensive. Bright.
And frost. In every one. The fine rime, like breath on cold glass. Even here.
They were talking. Laughing. Too loudly. He felt their hearts as he walked past behind Dorne, and every one of them was hammering. Under the silk and the jewelry and the laughter. Afraid.
They’d seen the Ribs go dark. All of them. From their glass houses.
At the center of the gallery, under the highest point of the dome, there was a dais. White stone. And on it, three things.
A clock. Tall. Brass and dark wood and glass, its pendulum swinging. Tick. Tick. Tick. He’d never seen it, but he knew it. The clock that had put Kon in a foul mood for nine days.
An empty space. A circle on the stone, polished white, three meters across. Nothing in it.
And between them, on a plinth of black velvet, in a pool of white light — a silver birdcage.
Its vines straight. Its little silver leaves bright, every one, the black gone from the crevices. Its little silver flowers. Restored. Perfect. Empty. A brass plaque beneath it:
THE LANTERN OF SAINT AUREL. DEAD-WORLD. RESTORED BY THE HAND OF SENIOR I. MARCHETTI.
He stopped walking.
Just for a heartbeat. Dorne felt it, ahead of him. Her shoulders tightened.
He went on.
“Kon was going to melt it,” said Snake. Very quietly. “She fixed it. By hand. Look at it. Every leaf.”
He didn’t look at it. He looked at the floor. Like a Gilt.
She was on the dais, by the clock. He knew her before Dorne said anything.
Sixty-seven. Silver eyes. A face done twice. A single fine channel, spine to hands, so faint in his blood-sense he almost missed it among the webs of the others. She wore dark grey, plainer than any Verbous in the gallery, with no gold at all. Her steady hands were folded in front of her.
She was watching the crowd.
Not the way Kon had watched things, bored, from behind glass. The way Sabine watched a gallery face. Looking for the leak.
Her silver eyes went over the gallery, over the Verbous in their silks, over the Gilt at the walls, over Dorne coming through the crowd with her escort —
And stopped. On Dorne.
Then moved. To the escort. To the sergeant at the back, with the white band on his faceplate, standing very still.
And stayed there.
He felt it. Through sixty kilos of gold plate. The way he’d felt the envoy’s eyes at the end of a thread. Ilsa Marchetti looked at Corran Vel’s faceplate for a long, long moment.
Then she looked away. At her clock.
“She knows,” said Lamp. Very faint. The first thing it had said all night.
“She can’t,” said Snake.
“She looked for the leak,” said Lamp. “And she found it.”
Ilsa Marchetti, on the dais, by her clock, didn’t look at him again. She didn’t call the Gilt. She didn’t do anything. She stood with her steady hands folded and watched the gallery.
Creed stood at the back of Dorne’s escort with his heart hammering under the gold, and didn’t understand.
“Captain.”
Soft. Educated. Reasonable. All its edges smoothed off.
Dorne went still.
Calloway Sere came out of the crowd. In a plain grey coat, very clean, among the silks. His grey hair cut short and neat. His glass hand, held a little in front of him, the blue Catalyst channels in its fingers glowing, moving like blood. He was smiling. The mild, kind smile of a clerk checking a delivery.
“Captain Dorne,” he said. “You came. I’m so pleased. The Senior was anxious you wouldn’t.” He looked at her. At her face. His mild eyes narrowed, very slightly. “You look — well. Remarkably well. Your color’s good. Your —“ He stopped. His glass hand came up a little. “Your blood. Captain. It’s quiet.”
Dorne didn’t say anything.
“It’s never been quiet,” said Sere. Softly. Wondering. His glass fingers flexed, and the blue in them pulsed. “Not since the slab. I’ve watched it. Every night. It burns. It’s supposed to burn, it’s the stabilization, it —“ He stopped again. Leaned closer. “What have you done?”
“Prior,” said Ilka Dorne. Flat. “You told me it would pass.”
“It will pass. In time. With refinement. With more of his blood, I can —“
“It wasn’t passing.” Not loud. Every word laid down like a brick. “It was getting worse. Every night. Every fight. It was burning me down. And you knew. You watched it. Every night. You said so. You watched.”
Sere’s mild face went very still.
“Who,” he said. Slowly. “Who quieted it, Captain?”
Dorne didn’t answer.
And Sere’s eyes moved. Past her. To her escort. To the four Gilt standing at her back. To the sergeant at the rear with the white band on his faceplate.
His glass hand flared.
The blue in it — the Catalyst in its fingers — leapt. Brightened. Pulled. Toward the back of the escort, the way the candle-flame had leaned toward the sword in the reliquary. As if something in the glass hand knew what was standing there under the gold.
Calloway Sere looked at Corran Vel’s faceplate.
And smiled. Slowly. The terrible thing coming into his face. Hope.
“Courier fifteen,” he breathed.
The light came down before anybody could move.
From the dome. From the very top of it, so high its point was lost in the white — a shaft of light, falling straight down, into the empty circle on the dais. White. Blinding. Humming the thin high pure tone of a struck glass.
Every head in the gallery went down.
All at once. The Verbous in their silks, the Gilt at the walls, the servants, the Seniors on the dais. Chins to chests. Even Sere — his head jerked down, his mild eyes squeezing shut, his glass hand dropping to his side. Even Dorne. Habit. A lifetime of it. When the light comes, you bow.
Creed bowed. Inside the gold armor. He didn’t decide to. The armor’s weight did it, and the crowd did it, and thirty years of it did it.
But he didn’t close his eyes. He never had.
Down the shaft of light, out of the white, a figure descended. Standing. Feet together. Arms at its sides. Tall. White. Jointless. A halo humming behind its head.
And a face.
The same face. Beautiful. Still. High cheekbones, a long straight nose, fine lines at the corners of the eyes, a small pale scar on the upper lip. Set into the white helm like a picture in a frame.
He’d seen it in the vault, a meter from his own face, looking at him over Kon’s body. He’d heard Dorne describe it, in the Clock Hall.
And he saw now, on the wall of the gallery behind the dais — among the hundreds of painted faces in gold frames — the same face. Painted. Stiff, old-fashioned. A small pale scar on the upper lip.
SENIOR ADELIND MARCHETTI. SECOND RIB. ASCENDED, YEAR 287.
The envoy settled into the white circle on the dais. Its white shell-eyes opened. They moved, smooth, slow, over the bowed gallery.
And stopped. On an old man.
Benedek Arral. Senior of the First Rib. Ninety. His skin faintly glowing blue all over with the fineness of his channels. He stood at the edge of the dais, bowed over his bone cane, and when the envoy’s eyes found him, Creed felt his heart leap.
Not in fear. In joy.
“Benedek Arral,” said the halo. Thin. High. Pure. “Senior of the First Rib.”
The old man lifted his head.
His face was wet. Shining. Forty years of it, in his face. Forty years of candidacy. Of waiting. Of pending.
“Ascension,” said the halo.
Benedek Arral let go of his bone cane. It clattered on the white stone of the dais. He didn’t look at it. He walked forward — slowly, an old man’s walk, ninety years — into the white circle. Into the shaft of light. Beside the envoy with the borrowed face.
He was smiling.
The envoy put one long white hand on his shoulder.
And they rose.
Everybody in the gallery watched it, bowed, through their lashes. The old man rising up the column of light beside the white figure. Smiling. Into the white. Up through the dome. Gone.
Everybody saw that.
Creed felt it.
He’d reached for the old man’s heart without deciding to, the way he reached for everything. Through the gold plate. Across the gallery. And held on to it, as it rose. Up the light. Up through the dome. Up, past the top of the Second Rib, into the white-gold dark above, toward the First, toward the neck.
It beat. Fast. Joyful. Rising.
And then, very far up — so far he could barely feel it, at the very edge of what he could reach — it changed.
Something touched it.
He felt it the way he’d felt the parasite coiled in the Warden’s skull in Lumen Square. Slick. Wet. Cold. The cold of something that had never once been warm. It touched the old man’s rising heart, far up in the white — and went in.
Not a blow. Not a wound. Like roots. Like the legs of the pale thing in the dream, sunk into the gold folds of the god’s mind. Fine. Many. Rooting.
And the old man’s heart, joyful, rising — stuttered.
Slowed.
The joy went out of it. All at once. Like a lamp. And what came into it instead — he felt it, at the very edge of his reach, before it went out of range entirely — wasn’t fear. It was worse than fear.
It was understanding.
Then he couldn’t feel it anymore. It was too far. Gone.
He stood at the back of Dorne’s escort in sixty kilos of dead gold plate, bowed, with his eyes open, shaking.
“They ate him,” said Snake. In his chest. Very, very quiet. “Mule. They ate him. Like they ate the god. Like they’re eating the god.” A long, shaking coil. “That’s what Ascension is. That’s what it’s always been.”
Behind his eyes, Lamp said nothing at all.
The light went out. The dome was just glass again. The gallery lifted its head.
The Verbous applauded.
All of them. Hundreds. In their silks. Their faces bright, wet, shining. Applauding the place where Benedek Arral had gone up the light.
On the dais, by her clock, Ilsa Marchetti did not applaud.
She was standing very still with her steady hands at her sides, looking up at the place in the dome where the light had been. And her face — her face that had been done twice, that gave away nothing — had gone the color of the bone.
She’d watched, he thought. Through her lashes, with her silver eyes that saw better than any eyes had ever seen.
She’d watched her great-great-grandmother’s face put its hand on an old man’s shoulder.
And maybe she’d seen something.
“Got it,” said Wick.
In his ear. Through the comm-plug under the faceplate. Thin. Shaking. Exultant.
“Got it, got it, I’ve got it — the Concord archive, the Senior’s ledgers, it was all in a vault under the Clock Hall like Ferrin said, the relay crew badge got me through two doors and the third one I just — I just told the Gilt on it the Senior wanted the Bell schedules checked and he let me in, Creed, he just let me in —“ A breath. “I’ve pulled everything. Every ledger I could reach. Eighteen years of them. It’s on the pack. I’m in the service corridor. I’m coming out.”
“Get to Haske,” said Creed. Under his breath.
“Going. Going. Creed — there’s something in here. In the ledgers. About the Hollow. About four-fourteen. I only saw the heading, I didn’t —”
“Later. Go.”
“Going.”
Creed lifted his head.
And Calloway Sere was looking at him.
Sere had lifted his head when the light went out, like everyone. And turned. And was standing three meters away, in his plain grey coat, with his glass hand held up in front of him, blazing blue, pulling toward Creed like a compass needle toward north.
“Courier fifteen,” said Sere softly. Under the applause. “Creed. You came to the gala.” He smiled. “You came to me.”
Creed didn’t move.
“Take off the helm,” said Sere. “Please. I’d like to see your face. I haven’t seen it since the slab. Since you got up out of the pit.” His mild eyes were shining. “Do you know how long I’ve waited? To see what you became?”
“Prior,” said Dorne. Beside him. Very quietly.
Sere didn’t look at her. He took a step toward Creed. The glass hand reaching. “The Senior wants you alive. The Head wants you alive. I want you alive. More than anything. Just one day, on a slab. One day of your blood and I can make a hundred like the Captain. Stable ones. Quiet ones.” His smile widened. “I can make them all quiet. Do you understand? Whatever it is you did to her — I can learn it. From you. I can —“
Ilka Dorne hit him.
Not hard. Not the way she’d hit Creed on the bridge, on the cable. Not to kill. One square fist, short, flat, into the glass hand. Into the wrist. Where the silver band met the seared stump.
The glass hand came off.
It flew out of the band and across the gallery floor, spinning, blazing blue, and hit the white stone of the dais and shattered. Into a hundred pieces. The Catalyst in its fingers spilling out across the stone, bright, tame, glowing. Going out.
Calloway Sere stared at his stump.
For the second time in his life, he made that small sound. A breath. Like a man who’s stepped on a stair that isn’t there.
“That,” said Ilka Dorne, flat, “is the hand you write with.”
The gallery went silent.
“GILT!” Sere’s voice. Cracking. High. Not soft anymore. Not reasonable. “GILT! The sergeant! The Anomaly! HE’S HERE —”
Creed took off the faceplate.
He didn’t need it anymore. He tore the gold plate off his chest with his bare hands — it came away like the jacket of a pipe, like wet paper — and stood in the middle of the Lumen Gallery of the Second Rib in his father’s crew-jacket with his scars lit, red-gold, blazing, in the white-gold light of a hundred private reserves burning for one night.
Hundreds of Verbous, in their silks, saw him.
Some of them screamed. Most of them didn’t. Most of them just stared. At the scars. At the light coming off him. At the mark on his chest, under the open collar, gold.
The Gilt came off the walls.
He didn’t fight them. He didn’t have the sword. He didn’t need to. He went for the door — the great doors at the end of the gallery, where the terrace opened out over the gulf — and Dorne went with him, and the four Unbanded in their borrowed gold, and the Gilt came at them and he stopped them, hand on breastplate, hand on breastplate, down, down, and Dorne hit the ones he didn’t reach, and they went through the crowd of screaming silk toward the doors.
He passed the dais.
He didn’t mean to look. He looked anyway.
Ilsa Marchetti was standing by her clock. She hadn’t moved. She hadn’t called the Gilt. She was standing with her steady hands at her sides and her face the color of bone, looking at him as he went past. At his scars. At the gold on his chest.
Their eyes met.
Silver. And whatever his were now. Red, Dorne had said. Like a furnace.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t move.
Behind her, the clock ticked.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
And beside it, on its plinth of black velvet, in its pool of white light, the silver birdcage sat. Restored. Perfect. Empty.
Then he was past, and at the doors, and through them, onto the terrace, over the gulf. And the silver kites were there — Haske and three of her Lancers, swinging in out of the dark below — and Dorne caught the line of one and he caught another and they went off the terrace of the Lumen of the Second Rib into the dark.
Below them, Coronet blazed. White-gold. Burning a month of light in a night.
Above them, the Skull.
Behind them, in the gallery, nobody fired.
“She let you go,” said Lamp. Faint. Wondering. “The Senior. She could have called the Lancers. She didn’t.”
“I know,” said Creed.
He didn’t know why. He’d think about it for a long time.
He thought it had something to do with a face on a wall.
Wick was already under the dome when they came in. Sitting on the floor with the comm-pack in his lap and a dozen slates spread out around him and his face grey in the gold light.
He looked up when Creed came in.
“I read it,” he said. “Some of it. On the way down. On Haske’s kite. I couldn’t wait.” His voice was very strange. “Creed. The ledgers. It’s — it’s everything. Eighteen years. Every order the Concord ever gave. Every allocation. Every —“ He stopped. “There’s things in here about the Bell.”
Creed sat down across from him.
“And about the Hollow,” said Wick. “About four-fourteen. About the Bloom.” He held up one slate. His hand was shaking. “It wasn’t an accident, Creed. It wasn’t a fungus. It wasn’t a refinery spill. It was ordered.”
The dome was very quiet.
“By who?” said Creed.
Wick looked at the slate for a long time.
“It doesn’t say,” he said finally. “Not in the Concord’s ledger. The Concord just — carried it out. Delivered it. It says by direction from above.” He swallowed. “And there’s something else. About you. About why they want you alive. Not the Concord. Them.” He looked up. His eyes were red. “It’s going to take me days to read it all, Creed. Days. But I already know enough.” He set the slate down. “I know enough to know I don’t want to.”
Creed looked at the slates spread out on the floor of the dome. Eighteen years of the Concord’s ledgers. In Wick’s lap. Under the colored glass.
“Read it,” he said. “All of it.”
“Creed —”
“All of it. And then tell me.” He looked up. Through the cracked colored glass of the dome. Up, past the gold light, into the dark. “I need to know what they know.”