Chapter 161: The Measure

Logan sat down on the bench, and Alice sat beside him.

The Long Table was quiet. The hearths had burned low, and most of the family still lay asleep between them.

Rishin came in from the terrace and took the end of the bench without a word. Garen and Isolde had woken at the sound of Hesper’s voice, and they came over as well.

Hesper waited until they had all settled. She turned her cup a quarter turn on the stone.

"There were seven of us," she said.

"My brother Tolm and his wife. Their two sons, who were grown. My man Edrik, and me." She counted them on the rim of the cup with one finger.

"And Edrik’s mother, who should never have been in this place. She was no player. She was pulled in because she loved him."

Logan thought of Vina asleep on the floor behind him.

"Tolm was Tier-6," Hesper went on. "Where I come from, that is a name people know. The rest of us were Tier-2."

"We did everything the rim tells you to do. We walked slowly, and we did not fly, and it took us a long time to get down to the place where the path ends."

"The Narrows," said Garen.

"The Sill, first. That is the last ledge. The Narrows is what you see when you look over it." Hesper’s silver eyes stayed on the cup.

"The Abyss is honest at the Sill. I will give it that. It puts the rule in front of you in plain words."

"What rule?" Alice asked.

"That the wardens rise to meet the highest Tier that sets foot on the Ribs."

Isolde’s shoulders went stiff.

"Tolm read it out to us and laughed," Hesper said. "He said that was good, because he had been getting bored."

She turned the cup another quarter turn.

"We stepped onto the first rib. She came off the top of the wall. She was a hookwing the size of a barn, and she never touched one of us. She looked at Tolm, and she screamed, and both walls emptied at him."

"He ran," Daniel said quietly. He and Helen had woken, and they were sitting up in their blankets.

"He did not run. He stood still. He stood as still as that pillar, exactly the way the rim teaches you." Hesper looked up at last. "It made no difference. When she has looked at you, the wall does not care how slowly you move."

Logan felt Alice’s knee press against his under the table.

"A Tier-6 does not die quickly," Hesper said. "It took the wall a long time. When it was finished, she turned her head and looked at his wife."

Garen’s cup had stopped halfway to his mouth.

"Four of us got back up to the Sill. I did, and Edrik, and one of the boys. Edrik’s mother came too, because he carried her."

Garen leaned forward on his elbows.

"And the birds themselves?" he asked. "There must be tens of thousands on those walls. For people like my wife and me, each one is a point or two for nothing."

"Tolm thought the same. He killed thirty of them on the way down, to see what they paid." Hesper shook her head.

"The panel told him nothing, thirty times over. The wall is not a monster. It is weather. It pays nothing, and it never gets any emptier."

"And the second warden?" Rishin asked. It was the first time he had spoken.

"I never saw it. Nobody in Tarry has." Hesper spread her hands.

"There are eleven ribs. I counted them going down, and I counted them again from the Sill afterward, because I could not stop. We never got past the first. The ones who got further did not come back to tell us what they met."

Alice had been frowning at the table.

"Why did you not go down again without him?" she asked. "Before the walls took him, I mean. If Tolm had stayed on the Sill, the wardens would have met the six of you at Tier-2."

"Two wardens at our measure, and six of us to fight them, with an old woman in the middle." Hesper smiled without any warmth. "And my brother left alone on a ledge for the rest of his life. Would you have done it?"

Alice did not answer.

"That is not the worst of it," Hesper said.

She nodded toward the entrance, and the lamplit terraces beyond it.

"We came back here to wait. Everyone in Tarry was waiting. We all thought that a stronger party would come down the path in the end, and that we could walk the Ribs behind them."

Logan saw it before she said it. His stomach turned over.

"A stronger party wakes stronger wardens," he said.

"A Tier-8 came through with his family, a long while after us. Forty people begged to follow him." Hesper’s voice was flat. "He was a decent man. He took twelve. None of the thirteen came back."

She finished what was in the cup.

"So now you know what Tarry is. We are the ones who would not leave somebody behind, and could not carry them through."

Rishin had been looking at his hands.

"The Abyss weighs a party by its strongest," he said, "and it kills it by its weakest. It has always been so."

"It is the cruelest thing about the first layer, and it is why I told you the first layer was gentle. Everything before the Narrows is."

Hesper looked across the table at Isolde and Garen. Then she looked past them, at Helen and Daniel in their blankets.

"You two are Tier-9," she said. "What are they?"

"Level 4," Helen said.

Hesper closed her eyes.

Garen was the first to say what all of them were thinking.

"Isolde and I go down alone," he said. "We meet them at Tier-9 and we kill them. Then the rest of you follow."

"The wardens will be waiting again for the next feet on the Ribs," Rishin said. "Logan and Alice are Tier-4. The rest of you would meet two wardens at that measure, without a single Tier-9 beside you."

"We killed a hundred Warlords at that measure," Alice said.

"In the open, where you could move." Rishin’s voice stayed gentle.

"The Ribs lie between two walls of hookwings. They are close enough that you can count their eyes. Every fast step and every arrow wakes the wall, and it does not need a warden’s leave to come for anything that moves quickly."

Logan understood where the old man was leading them.

"We need a roof," he said. "On the wall, I mean. The only reason I could move in the gallery was the rock over my head."

"And how many of you can make one?"

Logan looked at Isolde. He thought of the wall of pale light she had stood up across the gallery with one hand.

"One," he said.

"One," Rishin agreed. "She cannot be in two places. So you go together, under her roof. The wardens come at Tier-9, and two Tier-9 players answer them."

Isolde’s shoulders came down. She reached over and took her husband’s hand.

"He is right," she said. "And I would not have sat on that ledge and watched them go down without us. You know I would not."

"No," Garen said heavily. "Neither would I."

Before they left, Isolde did one thing in the open.

She climbed to the second terrace with her healer walking behind her, and she knocked at a door with an ember-colored fox asleep on the step. Corin opened it. His face went white at the sight of a Tier-9 unit on his threshold.

The healer went in. It was not inside for long.

When it came out again, a small girl came with it. She stood in the doorway in her nightshirt and took a deep, careful breath. Then she took another one, and she laughed out loud at the sound of it.

"It will come back," Isolde told Corin. "Hesper says it always does in this place. But she is clear of it today, and you did not have to open that door for it."

Corin could not speak. He sat down on his step beside the old grey fox and put both arms around its neck.

Alice had watched from below with Logan.

"That one we could do where people can see," she said.

"Yes," said Rishin behind her. "It is a good habit. Keep it for the times you can afford it."

Xairon was waiting for them at the gate with a bundle over four of its arms.

"I said I could do better than shirts," it announced.

It had made four coats. Each was cut from the Elder’s grey hide, and each was lined with a layer of shaved dripstone no thicker than a fingernail. They looked like plain travelling coats. They weighed about as much as a blanket.

[ Elderhide Coat ] [ Rank: Epic ] [ Reduces physical damage taken by 30%. ]

One was for Helen and one was for Daniel. The third was small, with the sleeves cut short enough for a child. Vina put it on and spun around twice to make it flare.

Xairon held the fourth out to Rishin.

"I did not ask for one," the old man said.

"No," Xairon agreed. "You are Level 1 and you walk in front. I did not need to be asked."

Rishin looked at the coat, and then at the many hands holding it out. He took it and put it on over his robe.

Hesper had come down to the gate to see them off. So had half of Tarry. Nobody cheered. They stood along the terraces in the lamplight and watched the long file of units go out through the gap, and several of them were holding children.

"If you come back up," Hesper said to Helen, "there is a place at the table."

"Thank you," Helen said. "We are not coming back up."

The watchman moved his stool aside.

The path below Tarry ran down across three more ledges.

Nothing came out of the stalks at them. Nothing dropped from the overhangs. The walk was so quiet that Logan found his hand resting on his sword the whole way.

As they went down, the far wall of the Abyss came closer.

It had been a grey cliff lost in haze ever since the rim. Now Logan could make out the separate holes in it, and then the small shapes sitting in the holes. By the third ledge he could see the curve of every beak.

The path came around a last shoulder of rock, and it ended.

[ New area: The Sill ]

The Sill was a broad shelf of bare stone, wide enough to hold all of them and their units.

A Summoning Circle lay in the middle of it. Old fire rings were scattered across the rock, dozens of them, and every one was cold. A black door with an amber lantern stood in the wall at the back.

Logan walked to the edge and looked over.

The two walls of the Abyss leaned toward each other below him. They closed until there were no more than forty paces of empty air between them.

Then they plunged straight down, side by side, in a slot so deep that the bottom of it was only a pale glow.

Both walls were honeycombed from top to bottom. He was looking at more hookwings than he had seen on the whole way down.

Between the walls hung the Ribs.

They were arches of natural stone, each as wide as a cart, and each one spanned the slot from one wall to the other. They did not lie in a neat stack.

Each started a little lower than the last one ended, joined to it by a few rough steps, so that the whole line of them zigzagged down the slot like a ladder laid on its side.

He counted eleven.

A panel had opened at the lip of the Sill. It hung there for anyone who came to read.

[ The Narrows ] [ Hazard of the First Layer. ] [ Wardens: 2 ] [ The wardens will rise to meet the highest Tier that sets foot upon the Ribs. ]

"Honest," Garen said under his breath. "She was right about that."

Daniel had come up beside Logan with his rock in the crook of his arm. He looked down the slot, and at the walls, and at the eleven thin bridges of stone.

"Well," he said. He did not say that it worked.

They made their camp among the dead fire rings, and Rishin made them sleep.

"You do not walk onto that tired," he said. "It has been there a long time. It will be there when you wake."

Logan did not think he would sleep at all. He lay on his back with Alice’s head on his shoulder and listened to the faint, dry rustle that rose out of the slot. It was the sound of a great many feathers shifting.

He slept anyway.

[ Time remaining: 359 days ]

When he woke, Isolde was standing at the top of the first rib.

She had put her hair up. She stood with her feet apart and both hands raised, and light was pouring out of her palms.

It did not make a flat wall this time. It rose over the Sill in a dome, thirty paces across and clouded like frosted glass.

Through it the walls of the slot were only grey shadows. From outside, Logan knew, the people within it would be shadows too.

"There is your roof," she said. Her voice was strained already. "It moves when I move. Stay inside it, all of you, and do not make me stretch it."

They formed up the way Rishin placed them. Terry and Billy went to the front. The family walked in the center.

Rishin had Vina’s hand, with Daniel on one side of them and Solveig on the other. Garen walked at his wife’s shoulder with both pistols drawn.

Isolde stepped down onto the first rib, and the dome went with her.

[ Highest Tier present: 9 ] [ The wardens have risen. ]

The rustling in the slot stopped.

In the stillness, far above them, a single section of the wall peeled away from the rest and spread its wings.