Chapter 159: Long Table

They walked through the gap in single file, and Tarry opened up around them.

The cleft was a crack in the wall of the Abyss, about fifty paces wide at its mouth. It ran back into the rock further than the lamps could show.

Far overhead, the two sides leaned together into a roof of bare stone, and the smoke of the town hung beneath it in a slow grey layer.

A stream ran down the middle in a channel that somebody had cut straight and lined with flat stones. On either side of it, the town climbed the walls.

Houses of fitted rock stood on terraces, one row above another, six and seven rows high. Ladders joined the terraces. Rope bridges crossed the open space between the two sides, and lamps hung from every bridge and burned a smoky yellow.

It smelled of woodsmoke and frying fat and too many people living close together. After the cold stone of the wall, Logan thought it was the best thing he had ever smelled.

Vina had stopped dead in the middle of the path.

She was staring up at the nearest rope bridge. Three children were crossing it, and they were not placing their feet with care. They were running flat out, shrieking, with the bridge bouncing under them.

"They are running," Vina said. She sounded as though she had seen them fly.

"There is solid rock between them and the far wall," Rishin said. "Nothing on the other side of the drop can see into this place. In here, a child may run."

Vina looked up at him. She did not ask. She only looked.

Rishin’s mouth twitched. He let go of her hand.

"To the stream and back," he said. "Solveig goes with you."

Vina was gone before he had finished. She tore down the path with her braids flying, and it was the first time Logan had seen his sister run since their garden. Solveig went after her in long, unhurried strides.

Helen pressed her knuckles to her mouth and laughed.

Alice noticed that the town had gone quiet.

A woman on the first terrace had stopped with a basket on her hip. Two men mending a net had let it fall slack between them.

All the way up both walls, faces had turned toward the gate, and none of them were looking at the people.

They were looking at Billy. They were looking at Terry coming through the gap sideways, and at Sonic with the static crawling along his arms. They were looking at the long file of Mythics still walking in behind.

’What is wrong with them?’ Alice thought. ’They live in the Abyss. They must have seen units before.’

Then she looked along the terraces, and she counted.

A small brass construct was carrying two buckets up a ladder. A lean grey hound lay asleep on a doorstep. That was all. In a town of several hundred people, she could find two units.

"Logan," she said under her breath.

"I see it." His voice was tight. "Their year ran out, Alice. That is what a stayer is. And every unit they walked in with was given the same year."

Alice felt it land in her stomach like a stone.

’Every unit these people brought is dead,’ she thought. ’All of them. They watched it happen on the same day.’

Rishin had come to stand between the two of them.

"Now you understand the watchman," he said quietly.

"You are walking through a town of the bereaved with more years at your heels than they have seen in one place since they arrived. Let them stare. Do not be ashamed of it, and do not be careless with it."

A woman came down the nearest ladder to meet them.

She was tall and spare, with a grey braid as thick as a rope and her sleeves rolled above the elbow. She would have passed for human anywhere on Earth, except that her eyes were the color of polished silver.

She stopped in front of Rishin, looked him over once, and then spoke to all of them.

"Hesper," she said.

"I keep the Long Table, which is the only roof in Tarry big enough for the lot of you. You will want a floor and a meal."

"I will want to know what you are paying with, since points do not pass from hand to hand."

"What do people usually pay with?" Garen asked.

"Work. Meat. Rope." Hesper shrugged. "Whatever they carried down that somebody here has run out of."

Martha had already pushed her way to the front. Winsmoke was right behind her, with steam leaking from the seams of his hull.

"Food," Martha said. "We pay in food."

Hesper looked at the two of them with open doubt. Winsmoke opened a hatch in his side, drew out a covered pot, and lifted the lid.

The smell rolled across the path. Hesper’s silver eyes went half shut.

She took the spoon Martha held out to her. She tasted the broth, and she stood without speaking for as long as it took to swallow.

"You can stay as long as you like," she said.

Hesper led them along the stream toward a wide, low opening in the left-hand wall. As they walked, her eye fell on the bundles that Xairon was carrying in six of its hands.

She stopped so suddenly that Daniel nearly walked into her.

"That hide," she said. "That is Elder hide. That is the old one from the gallery."

"It was," said Xairon.

Hesper turned around slowly. Her voice carried, and on the terrace above them the two men with the net had gone still again.

"Nine of ours went up into that gallery after waders," she said.

"They went one or two at a time, when they got hungry enough for points. None of the nine came back down. We stopped sending anyone." She looked from face to face. "Who killed it?"

Garen looked sideways at his daughter. Alice lifted her hand a little way, as if she were in a classroom.

"He held it still for me," she said, and she tipped her head at Logan.

Hesper looked at the bow on Alice’s back. She looked at the hand, which was small and clean and had no scars on it.

"Then you eat first," she said.

Behind Alice, Garen made a pleased sound that he tried to turn into a cough.

The Long Table was a cave.

It ran thirty paces back into the rock, and a single slab of stone stood down the middle of it, worn glossy by elbows. Fires burned in three hearths along one wall. The roof was black with old smoke.

The units that could fit came in. Terry and the others that could not fit settled in the open yard just inside the gate. Half the town’s children gathered there at a careful distance to look at them.

People began to drift into the Long Table almost at once. They said they had come for the smell. Logan noticed that most of them were limping.

A boy of about fifteen sat down across from Helen. He had a strip of dirty cloth tied around his thigh, and the skin above it was red and tight.

"Wader," he said, when he saw her looking. "A while back. It will not close."

Helen was already on her feet.

"Show me," she said.

Logan watched his mother kneel on the floor of a cave in another world and unwrap a stranger’s leg.

The wound underneath was a deep hole that had gone bad. Helen did not flinch. She laid both hands around it, and the green-blue light sank in.

It was slow. Mending Spring took its full ten seconds, and then she had to call it again, and a third time after that. But the red went out of the skin a little further each time, and at last the hole drew shut.

The boy stared at his leg. Then he stared at her.

"Our last healing unit ran out of days a long time ago," Hesper said from the hearth. She had gone very quiet. "Since then we have used moss and luck."

Isolde leaned close to Helen’s ear.

"I have a healer who could do this whole room in the time it takes you to do one," she murmured. "Shall I?"

Helen looked at the faces around the table. There were a great many of them now, and more were coming in at the door.

"Bring yours for the ones I cannot manage," she said. "But let me do the rest. I need the practice, and they need somebody who is not in a hurry."

So that was how they did it.

Isolde’s healer came out of its column of gold light, and every spoon in the room stopped at the sight of a Tier-9 unit.

It took the old man with the black foot and the woman whose hand had been crushed. Helen took everyone else, one at a time, and asked each of them their name.

Before long, Logan noticed that the people who were waiting had all moved their stools closer to her. They did not know why. They only knew that the ache eased when they sat near.

’Unbroken Hearth,’ he thought. ’Ten meters. She is healing half the room just by being in it.’

Daniel had gone missing.

Logan found him outside, at the foot of the right-hand wall. A wooden frame stood there with a drum and a crank.

A rope ran from the drum up past all seven terraces to a pulley at the top. It was a bucket lift, built to carry water from the stream to the highest houses, and it was not working.

A stayer with a face like creased leather was kicking it.

Daniel watched him for about as long as he could stand. Then he set his rock down on the ground, pushed his sleeves up, and crouched beside the drum.

"Your axle pin has sheared," he said. "See? It is turning in the block instead of turning the drum. Have you got a hardwood peg and a mallet?"

The stayer looked at him. Then he went and got a hardwood peg and a mallet.

Logan leaned against the wall and did not offer to help. Xairon could have rebuilt the entire lift before the peg arrived. He did not call Xairon either.

It was not quick work. He knocked out the broken pin and shaped the new one with a borrowed knife.

He seated it and tested the crank, and then he took it out and shaved it again. When the first full bucket rose past the third terrace, a woman leaned out of her door and cheered.

"What is your name?" the stayer asked him.

"Daniel."

"Daniel," the man repeated, as if he meant to keep it. He turned and shouted it up the wall. "His name is Daniel! He fixed the lift!"

By the time the bucket reached the top, four people had called down to thank him by name.

Daniel stood there with the mallet in his hand and a look on his face that Logan had never seen before. He picked up his rock, and he had to try twice.

The door was on the third terrace.

Alice saw it first, because the light was wrong. Every lamp in Tarry burned a smoky yellow. This one burned a deep, steady amber, like honey held up to a fire.

It hung beside a door of dark wood bound in black iron. There was no handle on the door and no keyhole.

It was set into the rock between two ordinary houses, and the people who lived in those houses had built their steps so that they did not have to walk past it.

"It is the same door," Alice said. "Not one like it. The same."

"It always is," said Rishin.

A man was climbing the ladder to the third terrace. He was thin, and his clothes hung off him. A small animal trotted at his heel.

It was a fox, or close to one, with fur the color of embers and a white tip on its tail.

At the top of the ladder, the man stopped. He crouched, and he took the fox’s head between his hands and pressed his forehead against it. He stayed like that until the fox licked his chin.

Then he stood up, and the two of them walked to the door.

It swung inward before he touched it. Amber light spilled across the terrace, and the man and the fox went in. The door closed behind them without a sound.

Nobody on the terraces had looked up.

"Corin," Hesper said. She had come out to stand beside them, wiping her hands on her apron. "His girl has the wet lung. The door sells a draught for it. One use, and then the sickness comes back."

"And the fox?" Logan asked.

"He hunts crawlers on the upper ledges until he has a hundred points. Then he summons, and he walks whatever he gets through that door." Hesper’s voice was flat. "That is the third. The first two were small ones. He spent them down to nothing."

Logan could not take his eyes off the door.

It opened again.

Corin came out holding a small stoppered bottle in both hands, as carefully as if it were an egg. The fox came out behind him.

It was walking more slowly than it had gone in. Its muzzle had been the color of embers. Now it was grey to the eye, and there was a stiffness in its back legs that had not been there before.

Corin did not look down at it. He climbed down the ladder with the bottle held against his chest. The fox waited at the top until he had reached the bottom, and then it picked its way down after him, one rung at a time.

Alice’s hand had closed on Logan’s wrist. Her nails were digging in.

"One fresh unit," she whispered. "Folded into that fox. That is all it would take."

"I know."

"A hundred points, Logan."

"I know." He made himself breathe. "And then Corin tells his daughter why the fox is young again. She tells one friend. By the next sleep the whole of Tarry knows, and so does every party that walks through that gate after us."

Alice did not let go. Her eyes were bright and furious.

Rishin had heard all of it.

"You cannot mend Tarry," he said, low enough that Hesper would not hear. "Not on this trip down. First you become strong enough that nobody on any layer can keep you. After that, you can afford to be kind where people can see."

"That is a hard rule," Alice said.

"Yes," said Rishin. "I did not make it. I only learned it."

They ate at the Long Table with half the town.

The stayers ate Martha’s cooking like people who had forgotten that food could taste of anything. They did not talk. Several of them wept and did not seem to notice.

When the pots were empty, Hesper settled onto the bench opposite Garen and Isolde with a cup in her hand.

"You are going on down," she said. "People with that many units always do."

"As far as it goes," Garen said. "What is below you?"

"The path runs on for a few more ledges. Then the walls of the Abyss close in, and it ends."

Hesper turned her cup around on the stone. "We call that place the Narrows. It is the end of the first layer, and there are wardens in it."

"More than one?" Isolde asked.

"More than one."

"What kind?"

Hesper looked down the length of the table. There were forty or fifty people sitting at it. Some had four arms, and some had feathers for hair, and some had silver eyes like hers.

"The kind that sent every person at this table back up the path," she said. "That is all Tarry is. We are the ones who went down to the Narrows and came back."

Logan remembered the watchman at the gate.

’Everybody here meant to leave,’ he thought.

"I will tell you what took my party," Hesper said. "After you have slept. It is not a story for the same meal as that broth."

They slept on the floor of the Long Table, between the hearths.

Logan woke before the others. The fires had burned down to coals. By their light he could see Burr sitting against the wall beside the entrance, with Whistle hunched on his wrist. Neither of them was asleep.

Alice was not asleep either. She lay on her side with her eyes open, watching him.

Logan opened his panel out of habit.

[ Time remaining: 360 days ]

"I am going to go and look," she said softly. "Only look."

"At the door."

"Rishin said it opens for anyone who is willing to pay." She sat up and pushed her hair out of her face. "I want to see what it charges, and what it pays for a day. I want to know what we are up against."

Logan got up with her.

Burr had risen without being asked. He fell in behind Alice as they stepped out into the lamplight, and the briar falcon on his wrist was silent.

They climbed to the third terrace. The amber lantern burned beside the black door, exactly as it had burned in the alcove on the wall.

The door swung inward before any of them touched it.