Chapter 78: The Long Noon

The stair to the fiftieth floor was the longest that Fel had ever walked.

It was cut into the living basalt in a slow, wide spiral, a hundred feet across, with a rail of dwarven iron along its outer edge and a long gray fall of dark beyond it, and it went down, and down, and down, for the best part of an hour. The air grew warm. It grew, to everybody’s surprise, clean. The ash had thinned behind them on the last of the forties, and now it stopped altogether, and in its place there came up from below a soft, steady, living wind, with a smell in it that none of them could at first put a name to, until Nerissa, who was walking behind Orrin with her hand on the rail, said in a small wondering voice, “Grass.”

On the last landing, over an archway of black stone, somebody had cut a line of dwarven letters, very deep, and long ago, in the large plain hand of a people who did not expect to be argued with. Torren read it by lantern-light, with his finger.

“Here ends the work of hands,” he said. “What lies beyond was made by something else.”

“That’s cheerful,” said Thara.

“It’s a dwarf. They’re not a cheerful people on the subject of masonry.” He shouldered Maude. “Everybody have their lines? Lad, you’re on the left, with me. Brek, you’re on the right. Veyra will call the order. And Fel.”

“Yes?”

“I’ll be at your shoulder the whole day. I’ll tell you what I see. But I’ll not touch it.” The old man’s eyes were very clear in the lantern-light. “It’s yours. You know the three things. Say them.”

“What goes out comes back,” said Fel. “What’s taken from one place must be put in another, and the only road is me. And…”

“And?”

“Don’t be a bucket. Be a pipe.”

“Aye,” said Torren, softly. “That’ll do.”

They went through the arch, and Orrin, who was in front, stopped dead.

* * *

It was not a floor.

That was the only word for it, afterward, that any of them could find. The Pits were a hole, and the first floors had been rooms, and the thirtieth had been a great cave; but this was a country. They stood on a ledge of white rock at the lip of a cliff, with the stair-door behind them, and below them and in front of them and away on every side, to a horizon so far off that it blurred into a pale blue haze, lay a land.

There was a sun. It was not a sun. It hung in the center of a high vault of luminous stone, so far above them that the dome of the roof was a pale gold sky, a great round lamp, white at the heart and amber at the rim, and it shone down upon the whole of the country with a warm, steady, perfectly motionless noon. No shadow moved. No cloud passed. It was the middle of the day, and it would be the middle of the day, said the old chart in Veyra’s hand, until the world ended. The Long Noon, the dwarves had called it.

Below the lamp, the plain ran away in long silver swells of grass, under a soft wind, in waves, like a sea. A white river wound through it, thick and slow as milk. To the left, a long way off, there lay a dark broad stretch of moss, quivering and green-black, with a mist on it and a few dead trees. To the right, an orchard climbed a low hill in a hundred straight rows, dark-leaved, heavy with black and golden fruit. And at the very end of it all, a day’s walk away, under a shelf of pale cliffs, there lay a long, low, quiet plain, speckled with small gray stones, like a field of teeth.

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, in a tiny voice, “that this is not a floor.”

“It is noted.”

“That is a horizon.” He had both his long blue hands wrapped round the staff, and his crest was standing straight up, and the gold lines in his skin were shimmering, very faintly, from nape to wrist. “And it is singing. Do you not hear it? It is all one note. Under everything. Like a bell that has not stopped ringing since the beginning of the world.”

“It’s pretty,” said Thara, in a thin voice. “I do not trust a thing that’s pretty. In my experience, it’s always hungry.”

* * *

The first thing they met was the herd.

They had been walking two hours, in long files, through the silver grass, with the lamp overhead and the river on their left, and Veyra had called a halt on the crown of a rise, and dropped flat, and held up a closed fist. Below them, in a wide bowl of the meadow, a company of deer was grazing.

There were fourteen. They were tall and pale and long-limbed, with white coats and soft dark eyes, and they moved among the grass with a dreamy, delicate, drifting grace. And on their heads they carried antlers of glass. They were crystal, faceted, branching, and every tine of them caught the light of the lamp and threw it about in rainbows, so that the meadow below was a slow, shifting, silent firework of colour.

“Prism stags,” said Veyra, very low. She had the chart open on her knee. “The dwarves had a note. Do not stand in the line of the antlers.”

“That’s all it says?”

“The man who wrote it did not come back to add to it.”

It was Nerissa who saw the first of them lift its head. A great stag, at the edge of the herd, with a spread like a chandelier, had turned his face to the sky, with his muzzle up and his antlers tilted, so that every tine of him, all forty, faced the lamp. There was a thin, rising whine, like a wet finger on a glass. And the whole of the crystal crown flared, white, and drew into its heart a single, hard, tremendous beam.

It struck the hill. It struck, in fact, a hundred yards to the right of them, a boulder the size of a wagon, and the boulder did not break. It went. There was a flash and a hiss, and a smoking trench in the meadow where it had been, and the smell of hot glass.

“Mm,” said Brannoch.

“Down,” said Veyra. “All of you.”

“There are fourteen,” said Veyra. “They take turns, and each needs a count of twelve to cool its crown. We cannot cross in that. And my arrows are…” She stopped. An arrow, loosed from the ditch, had struck a stag’s flank, and bounced. Nobody had seen it hit the antlers. They had. A beam had come out of a tine, thin and white, and cut it in half.

“They turn the light,” said Fel.

He was lying on his belly, in the grass, with his chin on his fists, looking at the nearest stag, and his eyes had gone a little unfocused, in the way they did now, when he looked at things that other people could not see. There was a thread on every stag, a thin gold line, running from the roots of its antlers to the glass. They were warm. They glowed. And there was a peculiar hard bright stiffness in them, like a drawn bow, at the very moment of the shot.

“They can’t turn their heads,” said Fel slowly. “Not when they’re charging. The antler’s too heavy. It has to point at the lamp and stay there.” He turned over. “Torren, if I made one’s head heavier…”

“Don’t ask me,” said Torren, with great serenity. “I’ve a bad memory.”

Fel looked at him. The old man was looking at the sky.

“Right,” said Fel. “I’ll need to be quick.”

He did not need to be told what to do with his feet. It was the first of the Four, and the one that he had done a thousand times: he laid his palm flat on the root of a clump of grass, in the ditch, and let a good part of what he weighed run down the line, into the earth, quiet as water into sand. The sensation that rose in him was one that he had come to love, a bright, tingling, lifting lightness, as of a man stripped of a pack, and the world came up to meet him on his toes. He went up out of the ditch in a single bound, and landed twenty feet off in the grass without a sound.

He ran. He ran as a leaf runs, in a high bright wind, skimming the tops of the silver blades with the bend of the grass hardly deeper than a kiss, and a stag on the left turned its head and fired, and he was not there. He was beside it. He had the black sword out in his right hand, point down, trailing, and as he came past he laid it, quite gently, against a tine as thick as his wrist, and let go.

It was the second of the Four. It was the one he had been proudest of, in the garden, which Torren called the Hang, and which had taken him a month to find. He had put a part of himself, a good deal of himself, a hundred and sixty pounds of weight, into the steel, and out of the steel into the glass. And the stag’s antler, with the head under it, dropped.

It did not fall. It could not; the beast was sound and strong. But the whole great crown of its head, with a hundred and sixty pounds of Fel hanging from one tine of it, sagged, in a long slow forward lurch, and the beam that was building in its heart, white and hard and singing, left its muzzle at a sharp downward slant, and struck, with a crack like a split mountain, a second stag, thirty yards across the meadow, full in the antlers.

It did not burn him. It did what glass does. It turned. The second stag’s crown took the beam in a thousand facets and flung it out, in a great fan, left and right, and the fan took the third, and the fourth. Fel had a glimpse, from the corner of his eye, of the whole herd lit up like a chandelier, with a roaring web of white lines going through them from head to head, and a smell like a smithy. And then he was running again, a hundred yards off, with the weight snapping back into him through the line like a loosened rope, and he tapered it, as he had been taught, with a long soft breath, and it came in warm and slow and went into his boots, and he did not even stumble.

When he looked back, nine of the stags were down. Three more were running. Two had turned toward the ditch, with their crowns lowered, white-hot and furious, and Veyra, who had sat up in the grass with her bow to her cheek, loosed twice into the soft, unglassed hollow under their jaws, and they went over, one after the other, like sacks.

“He did that,” said Thara, in a shaken voice, to nobody. “He did that with his sword!”

“He did it with his head,” said Torren Ballast, with such immense satisfaction that Nerissa gave him a sharp look. “The sword’s the pipe. That’s all it is. That’s the whole of the art. A man who thinks it’s in the steel is a man who thinks the roof is the rain.”

* * *

The bog was another thing.

They saw it for an hour before they came to it, a long, soft, green-black plain on their left, with a breath of cold mist on it, and as the grass thinned and the ground went from silver turf to black peat, the path, which was a thin white line of old dwarven pavement, narrowed, and turned, and ran out onto the moss like a pier into a sea. There was no other way. The cliffs ran down on the right to the water. The only road to the orchard was across the Marrow Moss.

Veyra put them in single file, on the stones, and it was not the sinking that she feared. They found that out at the third step.

Thara, in front, gave a sudden little cry, and sat down. She had put her boot on a tussock, quite lightly, and the whole of the moss under it had sighed. A ring of black water welled up round her ankle. And then, from the dark below the peat, there came the thinnest of sounds, like a plucked harp-string, and a long fine silver thread came up out of the moss, through the water, and touched her knee.

“Thara,” said Brek, urgently. “Don’t move.”

“Sinkwidows,” said Nerissa, very quietly. “I have read of them. They live under the peat, in webs, and they feel the weight of what walks above. They do not hurry. They wait until it is heavy enough.”

“Heavy enough for what?” said Thara faintly.

The thread tightened.

It came up, then. The whole bog heaved, with a long slow wet slurp, and out of the moss, a pace from Thara’s knee, rose a leg. It was as thick as a tree. It was black and bristly and jointed, with a hooked claw as long as a scythe, and behind it a second, and a third, and in a heave and a flood of black water the creature came out of the peat like a house getting up. It was a spider. It was the size of a wagon. It had eight small, glittering, wet red eyes, and a body as pale and swollen as a toad’s, and it came for Thara across the quaking moss without a sound.

She was gone before it struck. Brannoch had her by the collar and had flung her bodily over his shoulder, and gone down on one knee, with the shield up, and the claw struck the shield, and the shield rang, and Brannoch’s knee went into the peat to the thigh. A second leg lanced in. A third. They struck Brannoch’s guard like a drum, and every blow drove him a hand’s breadth deeper into the moss, and Veyra’s arrows, loosed with desperate speed from the pavement, bounced from the black hair as if from a hedgehog’s back, and she cried out, to nobody, “His eyes!” and could not hit them.

“Fel,” said Torren.

He went out on the moss with his heels together, and laid his hand flat on the ground, and sent all of it. Not a part, this time. Not a hundred and sixty pounds. Everything he had. It ran out of him through the peat like water poured from a bucket, and he went up, as light as thistledown, with a gasp like a diver’s, and stood on the quaking bog on the very tips of his toes.

The threads did not stir. The spider did not turn. Its eight red eyes, which had been fixed on Brannoch’s shield, passed over him once, and lost him, and went on.

He walked up the creature’s leg.

It was like walking along a bough. He ran, light and silent, along the shaft of it and over the great pale swollen belly, which gave a little under his foot like a skin of cheese, and stooped, and laid the flat of the gold saber, quite tenderly, against its back. He did not give it weight this time. He took it.

Pipe, said a voice in his head, in a deep warm growl. Not a bucket.

He reached down, down, into the peat, along a hundred of the bog’s own bright threads, and from the bog beneath the spider he drew the weight, a thousand pounds of dark wet moss, ten thousand, passing in a long slow river through his chest and his arm and the gleaming blade and into the back of the beast. The spider, in the space of a breath, became very heavy indeed.

It sank. It did not scream. It did not even seem to understand. It simply went down into its own bog, through the soft thin roof of its own tunnels, with all of its legs flailing, to the ankles, to the knees, to the swollen belly, and in the sudden terrible stillness the black water came bubbling up and closed round its head, with a long slow glug, and the peat sighed shut, and where it had been there was only a pool.

Fel sprang off the last of it a heartbeat before the water took him. And, mid-leap, over the pool, with the line still in his hand, he let go.

He did it as he had learned. He did it in a long, slow, rolling taper, and the weight went back where it had come from, into the bog, a thousand pounds of heavy wet moss sliding home into the place it had left, a good deal faster than the spider could have wished. A fat bubble rose. The pool went still.

He landed in a crouch on the white pavement, and there were a very great many people looking at him.

“Fel,” said Brek, in a voice of deep, reverent, proprietary awe. “You walked on it.”

The other two were not so quick. They came out of the moss together, a few minutes later, and one of them got Brek’s maul between its eyes, and the second got Brannoch’s spear, and Thara, white to the lips and shaking, cut the thread of the third with her hatchet and said a great many things that she afterward denied. But it was Fel that they were all looking at.

“That,” said Torren, softly, “is what I meant when I said it was art.”

* * *

The orchard they came to at what would, in the proper world, have been about the middle of the afternoon.

It was beautiful. It was beautiful in the way that a very sharp knife is beautiful. It ran up the whole of the hill, row on row, in a hundred straight lines, of low black crooked trees with glossy leaves, and every bough was loaded to breaking with fruit. They were the size of a man’s head. They were black, with a ripe red gloss in the rind, and a thin gold vein, and they hung quite still in the windless noon, from stems no thicker than a finger.

Fel looked at them. He stood with his mouth a little open, for quite some time. And at last he said, in a hoarse voice, to Torren:

“They’re CoalHearts.”

“Cousins,” said Torren. His eyes were very bright. “The dwarves called them widow’s anvils. Look at the stems.”

He looked. And there were lines. A thousand, ten thousand of them, gold and fine, running up from the fruit into the boughs; and every one of them, he saw, was strained. Every one of those fruits was a good deal heavier than it ought to be. They were as heavy as lead. They were held up by nothing at all but the thinness of the thread, and whatever they were waiting for.

“There is a path,” said Veyra, with the chart. “Down the center. It is a hundred and forty paces.”

And in the middle of the path, between the rows, on a short wooden post, with his arms spread, there hung a scarecrow.

It was the tallest that Fel had ever seen. It was nine feet, made of straw and bone and bound rope, in a rotted coat, with a sack for a head and a sickle in either hand. It did not move. The path, in front of it, was thick with a litter of broken black shells, and a great many human bones.

“Oh,” said Thara. “Oh, no.”

They went in. They did not make a sound, a file of eight, with the lamp overhead and the black fruit hanging all about them like the eyes of a congregation, and the whole of the orchard, in the noon, as quiet as a held breath. They had gone forty paces when the first of the fruit fell.

It fell behind them. It came down with a long falling hiss and a thump that jarred the ground, and a spray of pulped red, and burst on the pavement a yard from Orrin’s heel, and the whole company jumped. And from the post ahead, with a creak like a gallows, the scarecrow lifted its sack head.

It came down off the post like a spider off a thread. It was quick. It was nine feet of whipping straw and bone and rope, and its two sickles came round in a flat white arc that took the head off a row of shells, and Brek, who was nearest, threw himself under it, with the great maul over his head, and the sickles rang on the iron and flung him a step back. And with that sound, and the shock of it, the orchard woke.

They came down all at once. A hundred fruit. A thousand. They fell from every bough in a long, rushing, thudding, deafening black rain, and each one, as it struck, burst with a crack like a mortar. The party broke. Brannoch’s shield went up, with Nerissa under it, and a fruit struck the iron and rang it like a bell, and he went to one knee. Veyra was running. Thara was screaming. And on the path, in the very middle of it all, with the black rain falling and the great straw thing coming up out of the broken pulp with its sickles shining, Fel stood quite still, with a sword in either hand.

“Lad!” bellowed Torren, from somewhere behind. “Don’t dodge! They’re only weight! Use it! Use it!”

He looked up.

It was extraordinary. The whole canopy hung over him in a vault of falling fruit, and each trailed its bright gold thread, and the threads ran down all round him in a woven rain, and he understood, in a single instant, that he was standing in the middle of an instrument, and that all he had to do was play it.

The scarecrow came.

It struck at his neck. He took the sickle on the black blade, crossed, and the sickle rang, and he felt, as the two steels touched, the thread leap between them, quick and sharp as a spark, and he gave it a part of himself, not much, a hundred and ten pounds. The sickle dropped. It went down out of the straw hand like a hanged man, and drove its point into the pavement, and held. The other swept low, and Fel went up over it, light as a moth, with a long bound, and came down on the scarecrow’s shoulder.

It spun, with a hiss. He was already gone. He had gone off its shoulder, up, into the rain of the fruit, and there, in the middle of the air, with the black pods plunging past him on every side, he reached out with the gold saber, in his left hand, and touched one.

He did not make it heavy. It was heavy. It was a pound short of an anvil. He made it, by a long thin thread, a little lighter. A good deal. He drew the weight out of it, quite gently, with the tip of the blade, and into himself, and out again, through his boots, into the stone, and the fruit, which had been plunging like a falling stone, hung. It hung there in the air, round and black and gleaming, and began, with a small silly dignity, to float.

He kicked it. The fruit sailed, in a long slow arc across the path, like a lazy balloon, and bumped the scarecrow on the back of the sack. It turned. It looked up, and saw it, and did what anything would, and put up both its arms, and Fel, from forty feet away, with a single sharp pulse down a hair-thin line, gave the fruit back its weight.

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There was a very short silence.

It was the sound that a nine-foot bundle of straw and bone makes when it has an anvil dropped on it. The scarecrow went into the pavement to its knees. Its sickles flew. The whole straw frame collapsed, with a crunch, into a flat gray stain, and a sack with a face painted on it rolled slowly down the path and came to rest at Orrin’s boot.

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, quite faintly, “that I have never seen a man juggle a death.”

But there were three more of them, and for the next quarter of an hour the orchard was a hell of falling black fruit and flying straw, and the sound of Torren Ballast’s voice, bellowing in the din with a hoarse unholy joy: Pipe! Not a bucket! Taper it, boy! You’ve a debt, you’ll pay it when you like, but you’ll pay it! And Fel danced. There was no other word for it. He ran light along the boughs and came down heavy, he bent a falling fruit by a hair into a gleaner’s neck, he flung an anvil-weight at the sweep of a sickle with a tap of a blade. And when the last of the gleaners fell, with a sound like a barn collapsing, the hundred and forty paces lay quiet behind him, strewn with broken fruit and straw, and he stood in the middle of it with both swords hanging at his sides, grinning like a boy.

“There,” said Torren, in a cracked voice. “There’s the lad.”

* * *

It was in the last of the afternoon that they came to the field of the dead.

It lay at the end of the road, under the pale cliffs, in the endless noon: a plain, grey and flat, bare of grass, spread with a thousand low barrows and slate stones. The stones were tall and thin and tilted, as in an old churchyard, each cut with a dwarven name. A gate stood at the head of it, a lychgate of black iron, with a little pitched roof, and over its arch there was a rusty bell, and under the arch, on a tablet, in the large plain script of the stair, four words.

“What is dug must be filled,” said Torren, in a low voice.

“What does that mean?” said Fel.

“There is a note,” said Veyra, in a dry whisper. She had unfolded the chart. “In the Crown’s hand. Fiftieth floor. Boss unrecorded. The last company that entered, a party of nine.” She looked up. “None returned.”

They stood at the iron gate, eight of them, in the great still golden light, and the bell above them gave one faint, thin, hollow note, as if a wind had touched it. And somewhere, deep in the field, a spade began to dig.

Then it stood up, between two barrows, and he saw it whole.

It was thirty feet tall. It was lean and long and stooped, with a face like a hatchet, and it wore a long black coat of rotted cloth that hung from its shoulders in strips, and on its head a stovepipe hat of black iron, as tall as Brannoch. It had a spade over its shoulder, with a blade the size of a barn door, and on its belt, among a hundred keys, there swung a small brass hand-bell and a great coil of knotted white cord. Its eyes were two small flat lamps, burning a mild and tranquil yellow, and on the whole of its long gaunt face there lay a look of the kindest, saddest, most professional regret.

It looked at them. It took the cord from its belt, and shook it out, and bowed.

“Down!” cried Veyra. “It is going to…”

The cord went out like a whip. It was white and thin and it did not seem to move quickly, it went out in a long loop, over the field, without a sound, and it settled over Brannoch’s shoulders like a bride’s veil and drew tight about his waist. Then a second loop went round Nerissa. A third round Orrin. A fourth round Veyra, and Thara, and Brek, so quickly that Fel, who was reaching for his sword, saw it only as a white blur at the tail of his eye. And as each of them was measured, from crown to heel, a faint chalk-white line appeared on the grass at their feet, in the exact length of their bodies, and the bell on the Sexton’s belt, in his huge gray hand, gave a single, quiet, sorrowful ding.

“The count!” Veyra had gone white. She was tearing at the cord round her ribs, and it would not part. “It is counting! One!”

Ding.

“It’s measuring!” Thara shrieked. “It’s measuring us for… Oh, you villain, you absolute… Two!”

Ding.

And the Sexton dug.

He struck his spade into the earth, and every one of the chalk lines opened. They did not split; they simply softened, and the turf of the field went black and loose and wet, like a cake in a river, and where Brannoch had stood there was a hole, seven feet by three, and a heave of dark soil, and a large gray patient figure, going down. Brannoch got an arm out. He got, by some miracle, a foot on the edge. And the Sexton leaned on the spade, quite gently, and the whole of the hole slid.

Ding. Four.

“Maude!” roared Torren, in a vast voice, and leaped.

He took the spade on the iron maul. He struck it, aloft, with a clap like a falling mountain, and the shock of it flung the old man down on both his knees, and the great spade stopped, quivering, a yard above Brannoch’s head, and held. For three heartbeats. Then Torren’s breath went out of him, in a long, ragged, appalled wheeze. A weight had come into his arms that no man could have lifted, and Fel saw, in the thread, in the clear golden dazzle of it, what it was: that the spade was heavy, heavier than iron could be, loaded with the dead weight of a thousand graves. The old man’s boots went into the turf to the ankle. His knees went. And the Sexton, with a faint apologetic cough, leaned a hair harder, and Torren Ballast went into the ground like a nail, to the chest, with Maude still in his fists, and the earth poured in round him and set.

Ding. Five.

“Pops!” screamed Brek.

“Fel!” The old man could not move. He was buried to the armpits, and his face was dark with the strain, but his voice, as it rolled across the field, was perfectly clear. “Don’t come to me! Listen! It’s the bell! It’s nine! There’s nine tolls, and they’re all measured, all but you, you’ve the sense not to stand still! Cut the cords! Or stop the bell! You’ve four! Four! And lad, Fel! It’s a thing of weight!”

Ding. Six.

He had not moved. It was the one thing that he had done right. He stood, in the middle of the field, with both swords drawn, absolutely still, with his weight in the earth and his lines out, a hundred of them, a thousand, a great bright gold net, and he looked. It took a very long time. It took, in fact, less than the space of a breath. He saw the cord. He saw it lie, not as rope, but as a thread, a heavy, heavy thread of measure, running from the Sexton’s belt to each of the eight. He saw the bell. He saw the spade, and the heavy dark weight in it, that pulled at the earth like a hook. And he saw, a little way off, under the iron roof of the lychgate, a thin crooked file of slate headstones, forty or fifty, all tilted, with their roots deep in the soil and their weight, he saw, enormous.

Ding. Seven.

A pipe, thought Fel. Not a bucket.

He threw himself at the stones.

It was the Third of the Four, and he had never tried it in earnest. He laid the black sword along a slab, and the gold along another, and he drew. From a dozen headstones at once, a thousand pounds at a time, he pulled their weight out of the earth, in a slow, silent, tremendous rush, through his chest and his shoulders and the long arms of his steel, until the whole of his body sang. It was agony. It was a river, as thick as a man’s waist, forced down a drinking straw. His teeth were shut. The blood sang in his ears. The slabs rose off the ground, one by one, quite free, and drifted up, as light as paper, and turned lazily in the golden noon.

And he poured.

He sent it all, at once, up the line, into the spade.

It was like dropping a mountain on a mouse. The huge black spade-head, that had been resting so gently on Torren, went down. It went out of the Sexton’s hand like a thing alive. It struck the turf, and went through it, a full yard, and stuck, and the Sexton, who had never in nine thousand years let go of it, gave a long, soft, startled, whistling hiss, and bent, and stooped, and pulled.

Ding. Eight.

Fel was already running.

He went up the handle of the spade like a squirrel up a flagpole, with his own weight a feather’s, light as a spark, along the shaft and over the black hand and up the long gray sleeve, as the Sexton lurched upright, and the whole thirty feet of the creature swung, like a tree in a gale, and the little brass bell on its belt came round on the swing, quick and bright, to its last toll.

He saw it. He stood on the Sexton’s hip, in the roaring wind, with the whole plain wheeling below, and saw the bell, two feet off, with the clapper drawn back. He had perhaps half a heartbeat. He launched. He flew across the gap with the gold blade out, and touched the bell with its tip, just as the clapper began to fall, and gave it everything.

All of it. Every pound he weighed. He felt the last of himself run out of his arm like water from a basin, and a sudden hollow roaring emptiness came up in him, and for an instant, quite clearly, he was a thing without a body, a flake of ash on a wind. But the bell dropped. It went down on its own cord like a lead plumb, three hundred pounds, four, and hung there, quite dead, like a stone on a string, with the clapper pinned against its lip.

It did not ring.

Nine, thought Fel, in the blowing void, is a number you don’t get to.

The Sexton’s great face turned. The two lamp-eyes came round on him, small and yellow and wide, and the hand came up, slowly, to brush him off its coat like a fly. He had no weight. He did not try to dodge. He let it come, and it struck, and he went off the Sexton’s hip as a leaf goes off a branch, in a long high looping arc, through the air, above the field, in a wide turning flight over the whole of the burying-ground. And in the arc, in the long bright golden silence, as he fell, he drew the black sword, and crossed it with the gold, and he cut the cords.

He cut all eight. He did it with the lines, and not the steel: the thin white threads of measure, strung out across the plain like a web, taut and bright, hummed in his sight like harp strings, and he touched each in the course of his fall, once, in passing, with a feather’s weight, and severed them. They went off with a sound like a snapping of a bow. The chalk lines on the grass wavered, and went out. Brannoch rolled out of his half-closed grave with a hoarse roar. Nerissa came up streaming. A white line vanished from round Veyra, and she threw back her head and drew a great ragged breath, and Brek, who had not been in the ground at all, but who had stood the whole time over Torren with both hands on the maul’s head, hauling, with every muscle in his young back, at the old man’s collar, gave a sudden tremendous heave, and Torren Ballast came out of the earth like a cork.

And then Fel hit the ground.

The Sexton looked at his bell, hanging dead as a stone at his hip. He looked at his spade, that stood in the earth like a flagpole. He looked at his eight empty cords, fluttering on the wind. He looked, last of all, at Fel, and then he did a thing that nobody was ready for.

He took off his hat.

It was a very courteous gesture. He held it before him in both huge hands, as a man does in a church, and he bowed, and tipped it, quite gently, and out of the black iron mouth of it there came a sound like a long, slow sigh, and a crowd.

They came out as smoke comes out of a chimney. They were mourners. They were tall and thin and gray and veiled, in black rags, in hundreds, in rank on rank, with their hands crossed on their chests, and each had in its arms a small plain coffin, no longer than an infant’s, and they poured onto the field in a silent, shuffling, ghastly tide. They did not hurry. They filled the barrows. They came down the rows between the stones, with the lamp shining through their veils, and where they passed the earth opened, in little black mouths, and the whole plain became in an instant a field of freshly dug graves.

“Fel!” Veyra had her bow up. She was shooting, and each arrow went through a veil and out of the back of a skull, and the thing walked on. “There are too many! Fel!”

But he was not looking at them. He was looking at the Sexton.

What is dug must be filled.

He had opened a grave for each of them. He had opened nine. And Fel had cut his cords.

The grave that had been Brannoch’s, the great dark seven-foot slot in the turf, was still gaping, ten paces off. So were the others. They stood open all across the field, in a ragged line, like the stumps of a row of teeth, and every one of them was unfilled.

And a Sexton, thought Fel, slowly, has to close them.

“Veyra!” he shouted. “Don’t kill them! Hold them! Hold the line!”

“Hold?” cried Veyra.

“The graves! They have to fill them! If there’s nobody to put in, he’ll…” He did not finish. He had seen the Sexton’s face. A small, awful, helpless look had come over it, as of a man at the end of a very long day who has seen that there is a thing he has forgotten. The yellow lamps turned. They went from Brannoch’s grave to Nerissa’s, and from Nerissa’s to Orrin’s, one by one, and a great gray hand went out towards the spade.

He was going to do it himself.

Fel ran. He ran, light and low, over the open ground, toward the nearest grave, Brannoch’s, with a shout that went out over the barrows like a horn, and in his head, as clear as a bell, Torren Ballast’s voice, cracked and grim and joyous.

“Now, lad! Where’s the weight? Where’s the pipe?”

He took it from the stones.

It was the last of what he had. It was the whole field. A thousand slate headstones, a hundred tons of old gray dwarven rock, with their roots in the earth and their names on their faces; and the gold lines went into every one of them, out of his hands, in a vast bright fan, and he drew. It tore at him. It was the strain of a river forced through the eye of a needle, and he felt something in his chest begin, very faintly, to give; and he held, with a jaw like a rock and his heart going like a drum, and the stones, one after another, in a long rolling gray wave, rose off the field. They hung in the golden noon, a whole graveyard of floating names, quite light, turning slowly, like leaves.

And he turned the pipe on the Sexton.

He struck him with both fists.

It was the Fourth of the Four. It was the one that he loved best, and that Torren had called, with a snort, the kiss. He came in under the great gray arm with his weight at nothing at all, in a long low flying run, and drove his right fist into the Sexton’s hip, and his left, the instant after, into the rotted coat beneath the ribs, and the whole weight of the burying-ground, a hundred tons of drawn and stolen rock, went through him in a single howling, white, blinding rush, and out through his hands.

The Sexton staggered.

He stood very still, for a moment. His mild yellow eyes went wide. And then, quite slowly, with the faintest quivering creak of old hinges, his knees began to bend. His gaunt stooped shoulders sagged. The huge stovepipe hat, which was filled with a hundred tons of gravestone, went over sideways. He tried to lift his arm. It would not come. He tried to take a step, and the earth under his foot, which was soft, as all graves are soft, and dark, and loose, and wet, gave way like a wet cake, and the huge gaunt gray body, thirty feet of old black cloth and bone, with a long slow terrible creaking, sat down.

Into the nearest grave.

It went in feet first. It went in to the knees, to the waist, to the ribs, in a slow rolling avalanche of earth, with its arms flung up and the spade tumbling away from its fingers and its two yellow lamps fixed on Fel’s face with an expression that was not anger, or pain, or even surprise, but a kind of infinite, tired, and dreadful relief. And in that moment, above the sound of the sliding soil, Fel heard the oddest thing. It was a voice, very faint, and very far off, like the voice of a man in a well, and the voice said, in a flat dry weary courteous tone:

Thank you.

Then the earth closed.

The mourners stopped. All at once, in the middle of a stride, as a flock of birds stops that has lost its leader. The tide of gray stopped, and wavered, and seemed to lose its shape, and one by one the little coffins in their arms went soft and gray, and fell apart, and drifted, in a long thin silver dust, down on the breeze. A gray veil fluttered down on a barrow. And another. And then there was nobody on the field at all, but eight people in the golden light, and an old man leaning on a boy, and a long slow shower of floating slate settling, one by one, like ash, back into their places among the dead.

Somebody laughed. It was a cracked, breathless, wild, helpless laugh, and he did not know, until he looked up, that it was himself.

Torren Ballast was standing over him. He did not say a word. He put out his hand, and Fel took it, and was drawn to his feet, and held, for a moment, in two great scarred arms, and crushed.

“That,” said Torren Ballast thickly, into his hair, “is a Raskian. That is a thing that I never thought to see.”

* * *

They took the drops by the lychgate, and sat down in the grass.

There were not many. There was a hand-bell of gray-green metal, quite plain, that was warm to the hand and rang, when Orrin touched it with a fingernail, with a long soft clear note like a spoken hush. There was a coil of fine white cord, that Nerissa wound up round her wrist with great care and a certain look. There was a ledger, a great fat book bound in black, in which, in a thousand dwarven hands, over nine thousand years, nine thousand parties’ names had been written in rows; and the last of them, Veyra saw, as she turned the pages, was the Crown’s own Third Company, Lantern, and underneath it, in a new black hand, in an ink that was still faintly damp, eight names.

They were their own.

She closed the book, very quietly. She did not say a word.

“Well,” said Thara, flopping onto her back in the grass, with her arms flung out. “That’s that. That’s the fiftieth. Fifty. That’s the thing that no guild in the Wards has done in a century. We ought to be dead.” She stared up at the lamp. “And we haven’t found the thing.”

Nobody answered.

“The thing. The Amolite! The whole point! The thing that Orrin… The whole way down, every step, I’ve been saying, today’s the day, today we’ll find it, it’ll be behind a rock! And it’s not! It’s never behind the rock!” She sat up. “I’m very tired, I’m very singed, I’ve got a bruise the shape of a boot, and I am extremely disappointed in the Pits!”

“It is quite all right,” said Orrin, gently. He had sat down on the edge of the lychgate with the staff across his knees, and he turned the pale metal slowly in his long blue fingers, and the crack in the left prong caught the lamp.

“There are floors below,” he said. “It is a long way. There is no hurry. A staff that has waited a year will wait another.”

“It will not,” said Nerissa.

“It will if I ask it kindly.”

They rose. It was past, by every reckoning in the world, the end of the day, though the lamp above them had not shifted a hair. They gathered up their sacks, and their wounded, and the drops, and went back across the Long Noon in a slow weary line, through the orchard, where the fruit hung still, and across the moss, on the white road, and over the silver plain, where the stags lay in the grass with their glass antlers cooling, singing faintly, in the wind. They did not talk much. The day had gone out of them. They had the look, Fel thought, of a company that has won, and cannot yet feel it.

It was Brek who found it.

He did not mean to. He had been walking at the very back, with his maul across his shoulders, beside Torren, whose arm lay heavy on his neck, and as they came up at the last under the gray cliff, to the place where the white road ended in the ledge, and the stair-door yawned in the stone, he said in a tired, low, flat voice, that he had to sit down.

“My feet hurt,” he said. “Pops. It’s only for a minute.”

“Sit, lad. You’ve earned it.”

There was a boulder beside the stair. They had passed it that morning. They had passed it twice. It was a big smooth round gray-green stone, as high as a man’s waist and as broad as a cart, half-sunk in the white rock at the edge of the ledge, with a few tufts of dry grass in its crevices, and a little sheen on it, like the sheen on a pebble in a stream. It was the only place to sit. Brek took his maul off his shoulder, and put his hand on the top of it, and lowered himself, with a groan, onto the stone.

The stone hummed.

“Hm,” said Brek. “It’s warm.”

“Brek,” said Orrin.

He had stopped dead at the top of the ledge. He had one hand on the stair-door, and the other, quite slowly, had gone up to his mouth, and in the red-gold light, as Fel turned, he saw something that he had not seen on that long face in all the year, not at the Gate, not in the Pits, not even in the great hall at the supper table when the chimes had sung. It was a look of terror, with a most extraordinary, shining, helpless gladness at the bottom of it.

“Brek, please,” said Orrin, in a whisper. “Get off the rock. Very slowly.”

“Why?”

“Because,” said the last son of the last Chorister, in the tiniest and most reverent of voices, “you are sitting on its head.”

The boulder opened its eyes.

There were two. They opened in the face of the stone, in a gray-green, glassy, faceted brow, like two great round windows lit from behind, and they were the color of a morning sea. They were very slow. They were very old. They regarded the boy on its back with a long, grave, sleepy, puzzled attention, as a mountain might regard a gnat; and then, from somewhere in the depths of that gray body, there rose a note.

It was the same one. It was the one that Orrin had heard on the stair, the one that had been humming through the whole of the Long Noon. It rose through the ledge. It rose through their boots, and shook the grass, and rang in every bone, and all up and down the cliff the loose pebbles began to dance, and the great stone, with an awful, slow, deliberate, grating shudder, stood up.

It stood on eight short crystal legs, as broad as pillars. A ridge of faceted gray-green shards ran up its back, like the plates of an armadillo. It had a blunt wide face, and a mouth like a cellar door, and from the gaps between its scales, in its chest, there shone a steady inner glow of pale silver, as a lantern shines through a horn pane. It lifted its head and sang again, a tremendous ringing chord, and the wind of it knocked Thara flat.

It was Thara who shrieked it first, and every throat on the ledge took it up at once, in a wild, cracked, joyful, bloodthirsty roar:

“IT’S THE THING!”

“It’s the thing for Orrin!” “The AMOLITE!”

They went at it like children at a sweet-stall. Brannoch was first, with a great ringing bang of shield on crystal, and the Amolite swung its head, and its tail, which was a blunt pillar of stone, took him in the ribs and flung him a dozen feet. It did not stop him. He got up laughing. Veyra’s arrows rang from its brow like hail on a roof, and she cried, “Joints! The joints! Where the plates meet!” and put four, in swift succession, into the creases of its neck, and the creature roared, a vast bell-clanging roar that shook the cliff. Thara went up its tail like a monkey up a mast. Nerissa threw a lash of water in a flat bright arc and froze it across its legs. And the Amolite sang, a high rising killing note, and the shards on its back began to shiver, and burst, and rain across the ledge in a storm of crystal splinters, and Orrin, the Vessarine, who had been told by everyone for a year that he must not sing, drew himself up to his full seven feet, in the middle of the flying glass, and hummed.

It was very low. It was very quiet. It was not the song of a singer, it was the soft, cracked, unforced hum of a man humming in a kitchen, and where it met the great note of the beast, it did not fight it, it settled in under it, like a hand laid flat on a ringing bell, and the shattering stopped. The splinters hung. They dropped, one by one, in the quiet, like snow. And Brek, who had been thrown clear at the first note, who was a boy of eleven and as strong as a bull, who had no thread, and no gift, and had been told in the garden, in the lantern-light, by an old man on one knee, that he was a wall, came in under its jaw with Hilda, the small iron-shod maul that Torren had named for the sake of symmetry, in both fists and swung.

It was the best blow that anybody had struck all day. It took the Amolite under the chin with a crack that split a plate from ear to ear. Its head went up. It reeled, for the first time, on its eight great legs, with its pale eyes rolling, and it opened its mouth to roar.

“Fel!” bawled Torren.

He was already there. He had been waiting. He had leaped from the ledge, high, light as a spark, and as the great stone head came up, he came down on it, from above, with both fists, with the last of his hoarded strength, with the weight of the white ledge behind him, drawn up through his boots and run through the long fine golden lines of him into the beast like a river through a sluice, and he struck it between the eyes, with a kiss.

It did not fall. It sank. It sank into the white rock, a hand’s breadth, a foot, a yard, as a stone sinks into mud, with a long dying ringing chord, and a crack ran across its brow, and down its neck, and through its heart, and the pale bright shining in its chest flared, and dimmed, and went soft. The great eyes closed.

There was no sound at all, for the space of ten breaths, except the wind.

Then somebody whooped. It was not a thing that anybody had expected. It was Thara, who had been flung off the tail and was lying, at the foot of the cliff, flat on her back, with her hair in her eyes, and she let out a long, high, cracked, gleeful shriek like a kettle, and flung her hat into the air. And the whole of the ledge went up. Brannoch dropped his shield, and seized Veyra round the middle and swung her bodily off the ground, and she said “Put me down,” in a terrible voice, and laughed, and laughed, and could not stop. Brek stood stock-still, with the maul in his hand and his mouth open, and a look of such total, incredulous, overflowing delight on his round young face that Torren, who had come limping down the slope, took him in both arms, and lifted him clean off the ground, and bellowed into his ear, “A WALL! A WALL, YOU BEAUTIFUL BOY! DID YOU SEE HIM! DID YOU SEE HIM HIT IT!”

It took the best part of an hour to get it out.

The heart was about the size of two fists. It was not stone. It was a lump of pale shining metal, like silver, but softer, and clearer, and alive, with a delicate, tracery grain, like frost on a window, running all through it in tiny spirals, and it gave out, very faintly, as it lay on the ground, a single long, soft, pure, shining note. It was the note of the staff. It was exactly the note.

Orrin knelt. He did not touch it. He put out one long blue hand, and held it, an inch above the metal, trembling, and the crest on his head had gone quite flat, and the gold in his face ran up and down in great slow waves, like the northern lights on a winter sea. And his voice, when it came, was a thread.

“Do you hear it?” he said. “It is… it is answering.” He lifted the cracked staff, in his other hand, and it rang. The two notes met in the golden air, and held, and the crack in the left prong, with its binding of thread, glittered, a little, as if the light had caught. “It remembers,” said Orrin. “Oh. Oh, it remembers.”

Nobody spoke. And after a little, quite softly, from the back, somebody blew his nose.

It was Torren Ballast.

“It’s dust,” said the old man gruffly. “It’s the dust.”

* * *

They came up the Iron Pass in the last of the evening, in the long red light, with the wind off the plain, and Veyra laid the sheet upon the sergeant’s stone desk.

“Fiftieth floor,” he said at last, in a rather odd voice. “Clear.”

“Yes.”

“Boss. And the Amolite.”

“Yes.”

“The same day.”

“The same day,” said Veyra.

The old dwarf looked at her. He looked at the eight of them. He looked, last of all, at the tall dark-haired young man who stood at the back, with his swords at his hip and a boy of eleven at his elbow, who was leaning, rather heavily, on a rail. And, very slowly, quite without hurry, he stood, and put his helmet against his chest, and bowed.

“Seven Sorrows,” he said. “Logged.”

They went out into the dusk.

Fel stood for a long time on the bridge. The others had gone on ahead, with the cart and the voices, toward the gold light of the Wards, and the great dark mountain rose up behind him, with its wound of a gate, and the long still bridge ran away in front, like a thread of silver wire, to the lamps of the city. The wind came up out of the gulf. It tasted of rain, and of iron, and of a great deal of distance. He found that his hands were shaking. He found that he was, quite simply, happy.

Somebody came and stood beside him at the rail.

She did not say anything. She did not look at him. She stood a little way off, with her bow on her back, in the red light, and her violet eyes on the long wide hush of the sky, and for a time they were two people looking at the same thing.

“Tomorrow,” said Veyra, at last, in her low even voice, “you will be eighteen.”

“I know.”

“The Cup is in the Rotunda’s calendar,” said Veyra. “They have begun to hang the banners. I saw them, this morning, before we went down. It will be a good deal of trouble.” She paused, and the faintest, driest, most private smile crossed her face, in the dusk. “I thought you might like to know.”

“Is it?” said Fel.

“I believe,” said Veyra, “that it will be a very great deal of trouble.”

She turned. She went away, down the bridge, with her braid swinging, into the long gold light. And Fel, alone at the rail, with the great wind on his face and the city at his feet, and the fine bright threads of the whole wide world running out from him on every side, humming, in the dark, like a harp, stood a long time, looking at the lamps.

He was seventeen. He was six feet three. He weighed two hundred pounds. And in the morning, he would be a man.