Chapter 153: Three Hundred Fifty Six

Vina’s arm shot up before anyone could stop her.

She waved back with her whole body, bouncing on her toes, and the child below waved harder in answer. Helen caught Vina by the back of her jacket and drew her a full step away from the drop without a word. Vina kept waving anyway.

The ledge below was perhaps sixty meters further down the wall and a little way along it. From above, Logan could see the whole of it laid out like a lit stage.

A small fire burned near the back of the shelf, ringed with stones. The green stalks had been cleared away around it in a rough circle, and four bedrolls lay inside the clearing.

A pair of units waited at the edge of the light. One was a shaggy four-legged beast about the size of a pony, and the other was a squat brass construct with a lantern set into its chest.

The two tall figures had stopped what they were doing.

One of them was already on his feet.

He was big, broad through the chest and shoulders, and he moved to stand between the children and the wall without any hurry at all.

The other adult rose more slowly. She put one hand on the smaller child’s head and drew him back toward the fire.

The shaggy beast lowered its head. The brass construct’s lantern brightened.

From up on the bridge ledge, Logan understood exactly what they were seeing.

Two Tier-9 players stood on the ledge above them, alongside two more players and an old man, and behind them came a long file of units that included a knight made of light and a wheel the size of a cart.

’If I were down there with my family,’ Logan thought, ’I would be standing exactly where he is standing.’

"Units stay here," Rishin said. "All of them."

He turned to look at the rest of them.

"I will go down," he said. "Helen, you will come with me. And Vina."

Helen’s hand tightened on Vina’s jacket. "Vina?"

"They have children." Rishin’s voice stayed calm. "That man is deciding right now whether we are going to hurt his. Nothing will tell him the answer faster than a little girl holding an old man’s hand."

Helen looked down at her daughter. Vina looked back up with enormous hopeful eyes.

"And if he decides wrong?" Helen asked.

"Then Alice will decide faster," Rishin said.

Alice did not raise her bow. She simply moved to the edge of the ledge and stood where the man below could see her, with her bow held loosely at her side and an arrow resting against the string.

Helen pressed her lips together. Then she took Vina’s other hand.

The path dropped toward the lower ledge in a long, curving slope, cut in shallow steps. Rishin walked it slowly and kept both his free hand and Vina’s in plain sight the whole way down.

Logan watched from above.

At the bottom of the slope, Rishin stopped a few paces short of the cleared circle. He did not step into the firelight. He stood at the edge of it and waited for the big man to speak first.

Up close, the man was a head taller than Rishin. His skin was a smooth dark grey, like river stone after rain, and two short horns curled back from his temples above his ears.

His eyes were amber. He wore heavy leather and had a long-hafted axe slung across his back, but he had not reached for it.

The woman beside the fire had the same grey skin and the same curling horns, only smaller. Behind her, the little boy clung to her leg. The girl who had waved had not moved from the edge of the firelight. She was staring at Vina.

"You came down with a great many friends," the big man said at last. His voice was low and rough, like stones rolling in a stream.

"My family," Rishin said. "And theirs. They are waiting up there because they do not want to frighten yours."

The man looked up the wall at Alice. Then he looked at Garen and Isolde, who had sat down on the edge of the bridge ledge with their legs dangling over the drop, as if they had nothing better to do than watch.

He looked back down at Rishin and Helen, and finally at Vina.

Vina gave him a small, cautious wave.

The big man’s shoulders came down an inch.

"Orvan," he said, and touched his chest with two fingers. He gestured to the woman by the fire. "Ilse. Our son is Brin. That one is Teska."

"Rishin," the old man said. "This is Helen. And this is Vina."

Teska did not wait for anyone’s permission.

She crossed the cleared circle at a run and stopped in front of Vina.

She was a little shorter, with her parents’ grey skin and two tiny nubs of horn just visible above her ears. Her hair was dark and cropped short, and she had soot on her chin.

"How many days?" Teska demanded.

Vina blinked. "What?"

"How many days do you have? We have three hundred and fifty-six."

Ilse made a sound that was half a laugh and half a groan.

"She asks everyone," she said. "She heard it on the rim and now it is the first thing out of her mouth."

Vina looked up at Helen. Helen glanced at Rishin, and Rishin gave her a small nod.

"We have more than that," Vina said. "We only just got here."

Teska considered this. Then she grabbed Vina’s free hand.

"Come and see the snails," she said. "There are blue ones under the rocks here. Brin is scared of them, but they do not bite."

Vina looked back once at her mother. Helen let go of her hand.

Logan watched the two girls run to the back of the ledge and crouch down over a flat rock. Before long, they had their heads together and were turning stones over with great seriousness.

The boy, Brin, peered out from behind his mother’s leg at them. Slowly, he left his mother’s side and edged closer.

’Nine days,’ Logan thought. ’Three hundred and fifty-six means they have been in here nine days, and they are only this far down.’

He looked at the cleared circle and the careful fire. He looked at the units, which were few and plainly not strong, standing guard beside the fire.

’They have been walking slowly on purpose,’ he realized. ’They have two children and almost nothing to protect them with. So they have been doing exactly what Rishin keeps telling us to do.’

Orvan beckoned up the wall.

It was a large, slow gesture, the kind a man makes when he wants to be very sure nobody mistakes it for anything else. Logan raised a hand in reply. Then he turned to the units.

"Billy, Terry, Solveig. Martha and Winsmoke too. The rest of you stay up top."

Solveig was already moving. Logan had not finished saying his name before the knight had started down the slope toward Vina, with his wings folded tight.

The rest of the party came down in small groups after that. Orvan’s beast growled once when Billy rolled into view, and Orvan put a hand on its shaggy neck until it stopped.

Garen and Isolde came last. Orvan watched them walk into the firelight, and Logan saw him take their measure the way one strong man always takes the measure of another.

"Those two could have stepped down here and killed us before we stood up," Orvan said quietly to Rishin.

"Yes," Rishin agreed.

"But they sat on the edge and swung their legs instead."

"Yes."

Orvan rubbed his jaw with one big grey hand. Then he nodded slowly, as though something had been settled.

"Sit," he said. "There is enough fire."

They sat.

Martha and Winsmoke took one look at the pot hanging over Orvan’s fire.

Within a very short time they had added three things to it, and Ilse was watching them with the expression of a woman who had just been handed the best meal of her life and was trying to decide whether to be insulted.

Orvan sat across the fire from Rishin. He kept glancing at the old man’s face. Eventually he leaned forward with his forearms on his knees.

"You have been down before," he said.

It was not a question. Rishin did not answer it.

"There was an old woman on our rim who looked like you do," Orvan went on.

"She had been in this place a very long time. She said the Abyss teaches you to look a particular way, and that you can always tell the ones who have seen deep."

"What did she tell you?" Alice asked.

Orvan looked over at his children, who were crouched beside Vina near the back of the ledge.

"She told us to walk slowly," he said. "She told us not to fly, not to count the days, and not to trust anything that calls to you from below."

Logan felt Rishin go still beside him.

It was a small thing. The old man’s bowl stopped halfway to his mouth, and then it went the rest of the way, and he ate as if nothing had happened.

But Logan was sitting close enough to see the spoon tremble once against the rim.

"Calls to you," Garen repeated. "What does that mean?"

"She did not explain," Orvan said. "She only said it twice."

Across the fire, Ilse had gone quiet. Her eyes were on Teska.

"There was something else she said," Ilse added softly. "When she saw we had children."

Isolde glanced at Garen, and then at Helen. "The Abyss is fond of children," she said.

Ilse looked up sharply. "Someone told you too."

"A fisherman on our rim," Helen said. "He said it to us the first time he saw Vina."

The two mothers looked at each other across the fire, and then both of them glanced toward the back of the ledge at the same time.

Then Ilse got up, walked to the back of the ledge, and sat down on the rock beside the three children. After a few seconds, Helen got up and went to sit with her.

Logan watched them go.

At the back of the ledge, the five of them made a small cluster in the green light. Teska was holding up a glowing blue snail for Vina to see.

Brin had worked up the courage to touch one with a single fingertip, and he was giggling about it. Two mothers sat on either side of them, close enough to touch.

Solveig stood a pace away with his back to the children and his eyes on the drop.

Rishin had set down his bowl. He was watching the children too.

Alice saw his face in the firelight. It was not grief, exactly, and it was not happiness either. It was the look of a man watching something precious from a very long way away, through glass he could not break.

’Two little girls side by side, turning over stones,’ Alice thought. ’Whatever he is seeing, it is not this ledge.’

She did not say anything to him. She moved a little closer on the stone until her shoulder touched his, and she stayed there.

Rishin did not move away.