They brought Ferrin up out of the lift-shaft at the end of the first watch on a door.
It was the same door, Creed thought, or one like it — a plain grey service door off its hinges, the kind they’d carried Tamsin down the street-stairs on. Four of the turned Gilt carried it. Ferrin lay on it on his back with his eyes open, and his Catalyst arm was gone.
Not gone. Wrecked. The forty-thousand-chit rig that could lift a gallery hopper one-handed had been torn half off his shoulder at the socket and hung by its cables, and the channels in it were dark, and the casing was split open from wrist to elbow like a gutted fish, and the Catalyst that had been in it was in his shirt and his hair and on the door, faintly blue, drying.
He saw Creed and lifted his head.
“Shaft’s ours,” said Dask Ferrin.
“Lie down.”
“Shaft’s ours,” said Ferrin again, and lay down. “Took us six hours. They had the lift-cage jammed at the top with Lancers in it. We went up the ladder-rungs. Inside the bone. Three hundred meters of rungs, in the dark, with Lancers firing down.” His dented face worked. “Lost forty.”
Forty.
“Who,” said Creed.
Ferrin told him. Not all of them. He didn’t know all of them. Gilt whose names he’d learned that morning. Cavern people. Two of the Shelf mechanics. A Ninth Rib Mid named Corran Pell who’d been a cable-inspector before Halden and who’d gone up the rungs first because he said he’d done it a thousand times, and had, and had taken a bolt in the chest at the two-hundred-meter mark and fallen past all of them, and they’d heard him all the way down.
“I’ll carve them,” said Ferrin. “I’ll carve all of them. Same as the list. I’ll put my name beside every one.” He looked at his wrecked arm. “Might have to do it left-handed.”
“I’ll help.”
“You’ll hold the chisel,” said Ferrin. “I’ll do the hitting.” He closed his eyes. “That’s what I’m for.”
There were no Seniors in the Collar.
Sabine’s people went through it room by room at the end of the first watch. It was enormous. Bigger inside than it looked from the First — tier on tier of barracks and storerooms and old iron galleries, cut into the stone and the bone where the clavicles met the spine, all of it built around a great central well, round, open to the dark above, where the trunk of the god’s neck went up out of the fortress like a pillar out of a floor. The well was ringed with balconies. The balconies were ringed with doors.
Behind the doors, the Concord had been living for a week. Silk on the bunks. Wine in the stores. A table in a high round room on the top tier laid for seven, with seven chairs, and seven glasses, and food on the plates. Untouched. Gone cold. Gone grey.
Six of the chairs were empty.
The seventh was empty too. But under the table, against the wall, there was a box.
It was the size of a coffin, made of pale ridged stuff that wasn’t stone and wasn’t iron. Creed knew it when he saw it. He’d seen it in the Hollow. In the crypt, under the chapel. In the sanctum, where the sixty-two Wrights sat in their niches looking up. God-bone. A box carved out of the god’s own bone, with a lid of the same, and sigils on the lid, worn almost smooth.
Brann put his square hands on the lid and lifted it.
Inside, lying on her back with her arms crossed over her chest, was Cassia Lund.
She was forty. Sharp-faced. Catalyst vines running up both her arms under the skin in fine blue tracery, the way they’d run when she sat on the Concord and wanted Kon’s seat. Her eyes were open. She was looking straight up. She didn’t blink when the lid came off.
“Is it gone,” she said.
Nobody answered her.
“The light,” she said. “Is it gone.”
“The Wardens are dead,” said Creed.
She turned her head and looked at him. At his eyes. His black arm. She looked for a long time.
“Not the Wardens,” said Cassia Lund. “The light.”
She told them sitting on the floor of the high round room with her back against the bone-box and a cup of the Concord’s wine in her hands, which shook so badly she spilled most of it.
They’d come up on the night of the ninety-first. After the Hall. The six of them who were left. Herself, and the heirs of Kon’s seat on the Third, and the Seniors of the Fifth and Sixth Higher Terraces and the two from the outer curve of the Fourth. With their households and their Lancers. To the Collar. Because it was close. Because it was the nearest place to the Skull that wasn’t the Skull. Because the Wardens were there, the forty-four, standing on the battlements, and the Wardens were the Head’s, and the Head would protect them.
“We thought,” said Lund. “We thought — it was Marchetti who failed. Marchetti who didn’t deliver. Marchetti who wrote her own name on the directive. Not us. We’d done nothing. We’d done everything we were asked for a hundred years. We’d — we were loyal.”
She drank. Spilled. Didn’t notice.
“The light came down the night after we arrived,” she said. “Into the well. The middle of the Collar. Where the neck goes up. It came straight down the neck and filled the well and it — it asked for us. By name.” Her voice went very thin. “Varro. Of the Third. First. He went out onto the balcony. He thought — he was always the one who thought it was an honor. He went out onto the balcony and said, Here. And it took him.”
She looked at her wine.
“He screamed,” she said. “All the way up. Like her. Like Marchetti. We’d all seen the screens. We’d all seen her. And he screamed just like her and we heard him all the way up the neck.”
The room was very quiet.
“Then it asked for the next one,” said Lund. “And the next. One a night. Each one by name. Each one — they didn’t want to go, they hid, they barricaded the doors — and the light came through the walls. Through the stone. It came through stone like water through a cloth. It found them. Wherever they were.” She swallowed. “Five nights. Five of them. And last night it asked for me.”
“And you hid in a bone box,” said Wick. Very quietly.
Lund looked at him.
“It doesn’t see bone,” she said. “Did you know that? I didn’t. Not until the third night. I watched it come through the wall for Sarrow and I saw it — I saw it go around a beam. An old beam. A rib-strut, from when they built the Collar. Bone. It went through the stone on either side and around the bone. Like the bone wasn’t there. Like it couldn’t —” She stopped. “So I had my Lancers take the reliquary-box out of the old chapel on the fourth tier. It was there. It’s been there since before the Concord. Nobody knew what it was for. I knew what it was for.” Her eyes went to the box. “I got in it last night and had them shut the lid and I lay there in the dark and I heard it come through the walls and ask for me by name. Cassia Lund. Senior of the Fourth Rib. Ascension.”
She was crying. She didn’t seem to know it.
“It looked for me for two hours,” she said. “I could hear it. Asking. Then the Wardens started fighting on the walls, and it went away.” She looked up at Creed. “Is it gone?”
“No,” said Creed.
She closed her eyes.
“It doesn’t see bone,” said Lamp. Very quietly, in his blood. “Creed. The god-bone. The scanners read it as the god’s body. As background. The sword. The Key. And this. It does not see bone.”
“I know.”
“Then the neck,” said Lamp. “The stair. The vertebrae. They are bone.”
He looked up. Out of the high round room’s one window. At the great pale trunk of the neck going up out of the well, out of the Collar, into the dark. Seven vertebrae. Each the size of a district. Bone.
“Yeah,” he said.
Mirelle came up on the evening kites with Hedda Dorne and the wounded who could travel and a crate of Ollo’s tools.
She had a little voice back. A thread. A rasp. The bonesetter had made her promise not to use it, and she’d promised, and she’d come up the three hundred meters on Tobin Rell’s kite with her slate under her arm and her burned hands still bound, and the first thing she did when she saw Creed was hold out one of the bound hands, flat, palm-up.
He gave her his left arm.
She looked at it for a long time. In the lamplight of the high round room. The glossy iron-black from wrist to elbow. The red script in it, glowing faint, in tight rows. Curls. Hooks. Branches splitting into three.
She traced one of the lines with the tip of a bound finger. Not touching. A hair above the skin. He felt the heat come up off it into her finger and saw her wince and not stop.
She sat back and wrote on her slate.
Wright script. Not the crypt kind. Older. Like the sanctum. Like the niches.
“Can you read it?”
She shook her head. Wrote.
Some. Not words. Shapes. This — she pointed to a curl, a hook, a line splitting into three, small, near the inside of the wrist — is your mark. The seat-mark. It’s in here. Twice. She pointed again, near the elbow. And these three — a cluster of hooked branching shapes, tight together — are on the Key.
He reached into the inside pocket of the jacket and took out the Pale Key. Unwrapped it from its scrap of cloth. It lay in his right palm among the spurs, white and plain and carved, no longer than a hand. He turned it over in the lamplight.
There. Near the bit. The three hooked branching shapes. Exactly. The same three.
He held the Key against his black arm, beside them. They matched. Line for line.
“What do they mean,” he said.
Mirelle looked at him. Then she wrote, slowly, and turned the slate around.
Sere would have known.
Neither of them said anything for a while.
“Snake,” said Creed.
“Don’t know,” said Snake. From the arm. Quiet. It had been quiet since the clavicle. Coiled there in the black bone like a coal under ash. “Told you. It wrote itself. Came out of the bone when I went through. Like — like the bone remembered something. And I was the heat that made it write.” A pause. “It’s the god’s, mule. Not mine. The god’s bone. The god’s script. I’m the god’s hunger, and you’re the god’s blood, and that — that’s the god’s handwriting.”
“Lamp?”
The cold in his blood was quiet for a long time.
“I do not know either,” said Lamp. “I am telling you the truth. I do not know what it says.” A pause. “But I know what it looks like.”
“What?”
“It looks like a key,” said Lamp, “that has been cut to fit a lock.”
There was a wall in the Collar that faced up.
It was on the top tier, on the inner side, looking into the well where the neck went up. Old grey stone, smooth, two meters high and thirty long. Nobody had written on it. Nobody had ever thought of writing on it. It was just the wall that faced the neck.
Ferrin started at the left end, sitting on an upturned ration crate, with a cold chisel in his left hand and Creed holding it, and a mallet in his right.
No. Not his right. His right was gone. The rig was off. The Collar’s bonesetters — Hedda Dorne, two Shelf women, a turned Gilt medic — had cut it off at the socket and bound the shoulder, and Ferrin sat with his right sleeve pinned up and his left hand on the mallet, and swung, and swore, and swung.
They carved for two days.
The forty from the shaft. Corran Pell first. Then the eleven from the west clavicle, who’d frozen when the arc fired, before the halos broke — Sabine’s shooters, the ones with a little too much frost in them, who’d thought they were awake enough. Then the seven Unbanded from the upper terminus of the Eighth. Then the dead from the Shelf. From the Ninth, the Sixth, the Fifth, the two hundred the light had taken — not their names, they didn’t know all the names, but Wick had the lists from the relay-stations, people reporting family missing, and Ferrin carved every one that came through.
Oriel Haske. Captain of Lancers. Ninth Rib. She pushed one off the roof.
Garrow Fisk. Gate of the Void. Four thousand two hundred and six. And one back.
Creed carved two himself.
He did them with the spurs. He didn’t plan to. He’d taken the chisel from Ferrin to give his left hand a rest, and found he didn’t need it — he set the four bone points of his right fist against the stone and pushed, and the stone gave like soft wood, and he wrote with them, slowly, in the square Line C capitals he’d learned on a crèche slate twenty years ago.
MAREN HOLT. EIGHTH RIB WATCH. CHOIR-BORN. SHE MADE ONE SOUND. >> JORY TAMM. EIGHTH RIB WATCH. CHOIR-BORN. TWENTY-TWO. HE DIDN’T WANT TO BE THERE. Brann stood behind him and watched him carve them. When he was done, Brann put his hand on the stone beside Jory’s name and stood there a long time.
Then Ilka Dorne came, and stood in front of the wall, and looked at it. At the forty. The eleven. The seven. The two hundred. Haske. Fisk. Maren and Jory.
“Do we carve him,” she said.
Everyone knew who she meant.
Creed looked at the stone for a long time.
“No,” he said. “He’s not on this wall. This wall’s for the ones the Head took. He gave himself.”
Dorne nodded slowly.
“Her, then,” she said.
He knew who she meant too.
He set the spurs against the stone.
ILSA MARCHETTI. SENIOR OF THE SECOND RIB. SHE STOPPED WINDING. He stood back. And then, after a while, he stepped forward again, and set the spurs under it, and added a line.
SHE FOUGHT ALL THE WAY UP. Quill was on the Second, standing beside a high black chair in a vault of clocks. Wick said she’d sent one message on the net, two days ago, and nothing since. Fifty-one. Fifty-one clocks still running.
He thought she’d want to know the name was on a wall. He asked Wick to send it.
At the very end, the last evening, when the wall was full from end to end and Ferrin’s left arm was shaking so badly he couldn’t lift the mallet anymore, Ferrin took the chisel out of Creed’s hand and set it against the stone at the far right end himself, at the bottom, in the last clear space. And Creed held the chisel steady while Ferrin hit it, one-handed, twelve times.
DASK FERRIN. LINE C. HE LOGGED THEM. “You’re not dead,” said Creed.
“No,” said Ferrin. “But I’m on the list.” He looked at it. “I wanted to be on the wall that faces up. With them. Before I go up.”
“You’re coming up?”
Ferrin looked at him. With his dented face and his pinned-up sleeve.
“You need someone who knows lifts,” said Dask Ferrin. “There’s seven vertebrae up there. Somebody’s got to have built a way up them. Somebody’s got to know how it works.” He set the mallet down. “That’s what I’m for.”
The Neck Gate wasn’t a gate.
He’d thought it would be. Iron. Stone. Bars. A great door, like the doors of Kon’s vault, like the doors of the Clock Hall. Something you could break. Something Sabine could pack with shaped charges and bring down.
It was bone.
They climbed to it up the inside of the well, on old iron stairs bolted to the curve of the wall, around and around, up past the balconies of the Collar’s tiers, up to the very top, where the fortress ended and the neck began. And at the top, where the last stair ended at a broad iron landing, there was a wall.
A wall of bone. Pale. Ridged. Seamless. Stretching across the whole width of the neck, from one side of the well to the other, like a lid. Like a plug. Like a cork driven into the mouth of a bottle.
It wasn’t built. It had grown. He could see that. He could see the grain of it. The way it came out of the bone of the neck on all sides, lapping over itself in ridges and whorls, the way the bone of the Tenth Rib had swelled and gripped the cable knot when he’d told it to. Grown shut. A thousand years ago. Sealed. So that nothing could come up from below into the neck.
Or nothing could come down from above.
In the center of it, carved — not carved, grown, raised up out of the surface of the bone like a scar — a shape. A circle. With a smaller circle inside it. And in the smaller circle, a dot.
An eye. Open.
“The Open Eye,” said Mirelle. In her thread of a voice. The first thing she’d said aloud in a week. “The Hollow songs. The Head’s sign. The thing that watches.”
Sabine looked at the bone. Then at her charges.
“Won’t do anything,” she said. “Will it.”
“No,” said Creed.
“Then how —”
He went forward to the bone wall. He stood in front of the Open Eye. He was alone at the front, on the iron landing, with the others behind him on the stair — Sabine, Ollo, Wick, Dorne, Brann, Ferrin with his pinned sleeve, Mirelle with her slate, and below them, all the way down the curve of the well, on every stair and every balcony, the army. Seven hundred. Fewer now. Looking up.
He put his left hand on the bone.
The black one. The written one. Flat. Palm against the pale ridged surface. Fingers spread. The red script on his forearm glowing faint in the dim of the well.
“Snake,” he said.
“Here.”
“Lamp.”
“Here.”
“I’m going to ask the bone to move,” he said. “Like the Tenth. Like the cable knot. I’m going to tell it to open.” He breathed. “I don’t know if it’ll listen. It’s not my bone. It’s the god’s. And the Head grew it shut. It might be the Head’s now.”
“It’s not the Head’s,” said Snake. “Nothing’s the Head’s. The Head’s a worm in a dead thing’s skull. Everything here is the god’s. It’s just been asleep.”
“And if it does not listen,” said Lamp, “I am telling you: there are other ways. Slower ways. You do not have to —”
“I know. Thanks.”
He reached.
It wasn’t like the Tenth.
On the Tenth he’d reached into the bone of the rib and found it — not alive, not dead — waiting, and he’d told it grip, and it had gripped, and he’d felt it take the weight through his arms and his spine like a man takes a sack. The bone had been like a hand he’d borrowed.
This was not a hand.
He reached into the plug of bone across the neck through his black arm, through the script, and it was like putting his hand into a river and finding the river looking back.
Not the Head. Not the scanner cold. Not the Open Eye. Something else. Something huge. Something so big he couldn’t feel its edges, the way you can’t feel the edges of the dark in the deep sumps. Something very, very old, and very, very slow, and very, very far down.
Asleep.
Dreaming.
He felt it the way you feel a sound too low to hear. Through the soles of your feet. Through your teeth. A long, slow, enormous pulse, so slow that one beat of it would take an hour, a day, a year. Coming from everywhere. From the bone under his hand. From the bone of the neck around him. From the bone of the clavicles and the spine and the ribs and the Belly floor, from every pale ridged curve of the skeleton he’d been born in and worked in and climbed.
I can hear the god, Sere had said. On the white stone. With his gold eyes. Very far. Very faint. Under everything. Dreaming.
He could hear it too.
He didn’t know if it could hear him.
“Open,” he said. Not out loud. Into the bone. Through the script. “Please.”
Nothing.
The pulse went on. Slow. Enormous. Far.
He stood with his hand on the bone. He didn’t know what else to do. He didn’t know any words. He didn’t know any sigils. He was a mule from Line C. He’d learned to read on a crèche slate and he’d learned to fight on a sump catwalk and everything else he knew he’d learned in eight months of falling. He didn’t know how to talk to a god.
He thought: What would Hesk do.
And then, before he knew he was doing it, he was humming.
The Long Way Down. Not the hidden verse. Not Liss’s song. Just the tune. The plain one. The one Hesk had hummed beside him at the number-two pump at hour nineteen for nine years, every shift, every day, the tune he couldn’t remember the words to on the first page of everything, the morning the cult took him. He hummed it badly, in his cracked mule’s voice, with his black hand on the god’s bone and his ember eyes closed, and he didn’t know why.
Behind him, on the stair, somebody joined in.
Mirelle. In her thread of a voice. Barely there.
Then Wick. Thin, off-key, shaking.
Then Ollo, under his breath, flat, the way he hummed at the Press.
Then Sabine. Then Ferrin. Then Brann, who didn’t know it, and followed. Then Dorne. Then — down the curve of the well, on the stairs, on the balconies — he heard it go down, and down, and out, the army, seven hundred people who had learned it in the caverns and on the Long Bridge and at the Fall-Field and in the streets of Hesk’s Rest, humming it, singing it, the words, some of them, the Belly words, the Hollow words, all of it at once, going up the well toward the bone plug across the neck of the god.
Lift your eyes, lift your hands.
The script on his arm lit.
Not faint. Bright. Red, then not red — every line of it, every curl and hook and branching three, going from furnace-red to something else. To gold. To white. To all three at once, the way the mark on his chest had lit on the dock. He felt it in his arm like a struck cable. Like a horn blowing. And under his hand, deep in the bone, the slow, vast, sleeping pulse —
— paused.
For a moment. A single moment. As if something enormous, very far down, at the bottom of a dream a thousand years deep, had heard a tune it knew. And turned over in its sleep. And listened.
The bone moved.
It didn’t break. It didn’t crack. It flowed. Under his hand. Away from his hand. The way water moves away from a stone dropped in it. The pale ridged surface rippled out in a ring from his palm, and the ripple went out across the whole plug, and the bone drew back. Peeled. Rolled. Folded itself away from the center like the petals of something closing in reverse — opening — toward the walls of the neck, lapping back into them, ridges and whorls running backward into the bone they’d grown out of a thousand years ago.
The Open Eye stretched. Distorted. Went long, and thin, and pulled apart, and vanished into the folding bone.
And the plug was gone.
Light came down.
Not the white. Not the scanner light, the Wardens’ light, the column that had taken Marchetti. This was something else. It came down the inside of the neck from very far above in a long soft shaft, grey and gold and pale and old, like the light through a dusty window in an abandoned house, like the dusk of the Skull he’d looked up at one second a day for nine years from the floor of the Belly, except close. Except here. Except falling on his face.
He took his hand off the bone. There was no bone to take it off. He stood on the iron landing at the top of the Collar, at the edge of the open neck, and looked up.
The neck went up.
It was a shaft. A tower. A hollow column of the god’s bone, wider than the Collar’s well, wider than the Lumen square of Coronet, rising up and up into the soft grey-gold light. And on its inside walls, spiraling, a stair. A stair carved into the bone itself, broad, worn, ancient, going around and up and around and up, out of sight. And at intervals, up the stair, vast ridged rings in the walls, like the rings of a tree, like knuckles — the vertebrae. Seven of them. He counted. He couldn’t help it. Seven bands of thicker, older, paler bone, and between each band, the stair, and at each band, built into the bone, something — walls, towers, the dark shapes of buildings, of fortresses, lightless. Waiting.
The Seven Stairs, he thought. Lund had said the words. On the floor of the high round room. They call it the Seven Stairs, up there. Each one holds. Each one has its own.
And at the very top —
He had to tip his head all the way back. Further than he’d ever tipped it on the Belly floor, looking up past the ribs at the dim far glow.
At the very top of the neck, very far up, so far that the stair dwindled to a thread and the vertebrae to fine lines, the shaft opened out into something vast. A curve. A dome. A cavern of bone bigger than any cavern in the Belly, bigger than the Belly itself, lit from inside with that soft grey-gold glow.
The Skull.
And across the bottom of it, where the neck met it — like a gate, like a portcullis, like the bars of a cage — a row of shapes. Huge. Pale. Pointed. Each one the size of a tower. Jagged, broken, some of them, and others whole, and all of them set in two great curving ridges of bone, upper and lower, that met at the back of the dome and swept forward and around —
Teeth.
The jaw.
It was open.
The god had died standing, astride the dead world, and its jaw had fallen open when it died, and it had stayed open a thousand years, and through the gap between its teeth — far up — the light poured. Down the neck. Down the stair. Down onto his face.
He stood there.
He didn’t know how long. Behind him, on the stair, nobody said anything. The humming had stopped. Down the well, seven hundred people were silent. Looking up.
“Creed,” said Lamp. Very quietly.
“Yeah.”
“I can feel them.” The cold in his blood was trembling. Not frozen. Not afraid, exactly. Something else. “Up there. In the light. Behind the teeth. In the folds. So many. Like the parasites in the Wardens. But not like them. Older. Bigger.” A pause. “They are looking down the neck. They are looking at the place where the bone was.”
“At me.”
“At you.”
“Do they know what I am?”
“They know what they think you are,” said Lamp. “A house. A vessel. A body that can hold the blood.” The cold went still. “They do not know what you are. Neither do I. Neither does the serpent.”
“Nope,” said Snake. From the black arm. Low. Steady. Not laughing. Not afraid. Just there, coiled in the god-script, warm. “Haven’t got a clue, mule. Should be fun.”
He almost smiled.
He looked down.
Not up. Down. Over the edge of the landing, down the curve of the well, down past the balconies and the army on them and the tiers of the Collar. Out through the Collar’s lowest gun-ports, which looked south, down the length of the spine. Down past the dead First and the dark Higher Ribs with their candles. Past the Mid Ribs, where — he saw it — lights were coming on. Not gold. Not Catalyst. Candles, and lamps, and fires in barrels, and hand-lanterns, thousands of them, small, scattered, on the Fifth and the Sixth and the Seventh’s ruins and the Eighth and the Ninth and the Shelf and the Tenth and the Eleventh and the Twelfth. People, on their rooftops, in the streets, at their windows. Looking up.
And far, far below all of it, at the very bottom, on the Belly floor, on the Flats where Halden had fallen — so small he could barely see it, a single point of yellow light, steady, then dark, then light, then dark.
Flashing.
He knew the pattern. Teo had taught it to him. Long, short, long. Short, short.
LOOK UP.
Matthis Ferrin, eighty-three, cable-sick, half-lucid, on a crate at the edge of the Fall-Field with his hand on a dead man’s lamp. Working it. Every night. Since the twenty-fifth day after the Fall. Not knowing if anybody could see.
“Somebody tell Matthis,” said Creed. His voice came out strange. “Wick. When you’ve got the net. Tell him. Somebody saw.”
“I’ll tell him,” said Wick. Behind him. Very small. Very steady. “I’ll tell him you saw.”
Creed turned around.
They were on the stair. All of them. Sabine, with her two-fingered hand on the iron rail. Ollo, with his bandaged palm flat on the stock of the long rifle slung on his back. Ferrin, with his pinned sleeve. Dorne and Brann, square and still, side by side. Mirelle with her slate. Hedda Dorne, three steps down, with her husband’s baton.
And Wick. In front. One step below him. Thin and white, with his bandaged throat and his comm-set and his shaking hands. Looking up at him. At his eyes. Not looking away.
Creed looked back at them.
At what he’d come up the skeleton with. Fourteen weeks since the Fall. Eight months since the reliquary. Since a horn at hour nineteen and a woman humming a tune he couldn’t remember the words to.
“It’s a long way up,” he said.
“It’s a long way down, too,” said Ollo. “Done that one.”
Somebody laughed. Sabine. Short. Surprised. Then Wick, cracking. Then Ferrin.
Creed turned back to the open neck.
The stair went up into the grey-gold light, around and around, carved into the god’s bone, past the first vertebra and the dark shapes built into it, past the second, the third, out of sight. The teeth at the top. The jaw. The light.
He thought about Hesk.
About a woman at the number-two pump, hour nineteen, humming, who’d never told him. Who’d stood beside him nine years keeping something awake in him that her sister had died to put there. Who’d traded her Drip allocation to stand beside him. Who’d never once, in nine years, told him to lower his eyes.
He thought about a jacket folded on a cot in a sealed pump-house. And two people walking out into the dunes to meet the white.
Lift your eyes.
He lifted them.
All the way. To the jaw. To the teeth. To the light pouring through the gap between them from the top of the world. And he didn’t count. For the first time in his life he didn’t count the seconds. He didn’t wait for the horn. He didn’t wait for anyone to tell him he could stop.
He looked up for as long as he wanted.
Then Creed stepped off the iron landing onto the first stair of the neck of the world, into the light, and began to climb.
STEWARDSHIP
NECK SEAL: OPEN
VESSEL: ASCENDING
—
NOTED
END OF BOOK TWO