Chapter 164: Tidemark

They crossed the eleventh rib under Isolde’s roof.

The stone was only stone, and it carried them without a tremor. Through the clouded light on either side, the walls of the Narrows were only grey shadows.

Logan had no wish to see them more clearly. He knew that every hole had its bird again.

A panel had been hanging at the edge of his sight ever since he pulled himself up onto this rib. He had been too glad of solid rock to read it. He read it now.

[ Logan Wolf: Level 40 → 46 ]

Logan stopped so suddenly that Alice walked into his back.

’Forty,’ he thought. ’I have been Level 40 since Star Hunters. Floor Four stopped everyone there, and I carried that number through the whole of the Warlord match without it moving once.’

"Six levels," he said aloud. "From the Leviathan."

"Six." Alice came around to look at his face. "For one kill."

"It was scaled to your parents."

"I put half a quiver into that thing’s throat, Logan. What did I get?"

"The killing blow takes all of it. You know how this place pays."

"I know how it pays," Alice said. "I am not required to like it." She narrowed her eyes at him. "So I am forty and you are forty-six. You are going to be unbearable."

"I had ten Tower Points for three days. I have earned a little unbearable."

Garen was walking ahead of them at his wife’s shoulder. He turned his head.

"It gave me one as well, for the bird," he said. "The first since Floor Nine put a lid on me. I had forgotten what it felt like."

"Floor Ten has no lid," said Rishin. He walked in the middle of the dome with Vina’s hand held in both of his. "Not one that any of you will reach in a year."

Every level past forty had brought him forty points to place, ten more than the levels before it. He put all two hundred and forty into Constitution. On the tenth rib he had learned exactly how little of him there was to hit.

The steps at the end of the rib did not lead to another arch.

They went down into a notch in the far wall, and within ten steps the notch had become a stair inside the rock. It was the first roof of real stone they had stood under since Tarry.

Isolde let her hands fall.

The dome went out like a blown lamp. Her knees went with it. Garen caught her around the waist before she had dropped a hand’s width, and Helen took her other arm.

"Eleven," Isolde said hoarsely. "I held it down eleven of them. I am going to sit on this step, and nobody is going to speak to me."

She sat. Alice sat down beside her without a word, and Isolde leaned against her daughter’s shoulder with her eyes shut.

Garen stood in the mouth of the notch and looked back up the slot. The Ribs climbed away above him in their zigzag, pale and empty.

"Eight hundred apiece," he said thoughtfully. "Senior. Suppose we walked back up to the Sill and came down a second time."

"Then you would have a long climb and a peaceful walk," Rishin said. "A warden pays a party once. After that, the Ribs are only stone to you. I knew a man who went back up four times to be certain of it."

"And the next party?"

"For the next party they rise again, at that party’s measure."

Xairon had pushed several of its eyes out past Garen’s elbow.

"I was not permitted a single plate of either one," it said. "The second fell. The first was lying in open air beside ten thousand birds. I did not ask, because I knew the answer, and I would like that noted."

"It is noted," said Logan.

"Look at the first rib," Rishin told it.

Xairon looked, and so did Logan. The Matron had come down across that arch with a body the size of a barn.

Her wings should have been hanging off both sides of it. Nothing hung there. The highest rib was as bare as the other ten.

"The Abyss takes its wardens back," Rishin said. "It will need them again."

The stair turned twice inside the rock.

At the second turn, the grey light of the Narrows gave out behind them. The silver light was coming up the steps from below. It was far stronger here than it had been in the slot, and it threw their shadows back up the stair.

They came out onto the face of a cliff.

[ You have entered the Second Layer. ] [ Blessing of the Second Layer: Heartlight ] [ Curse of the Second Layer: Heartlight ] [ Within the Silver, every bond of care you hold is given a flame. ]

Logan read all four lines. Then he went back and read the second and third again.

"It has written the same word twice," Garen said.

"Yes," said Rishin.

"Is that a mistake?"

"The Abyss does not make that kind."

"Then which is it, Senior? A blessing or a curse?"

Rishin looked at him for as long as it took Vina to tug twice on his hands.

"On my mountain, I told most of you what the Abyss is hungriest for," he said.

"I could explain that panel now, and every one of you would nod at me. You would still not understand it until you were standing in it. So look first."

They looked.

The walls of the Narrows ended above them.

For six days, Logan had been walking down the inside of a well. Now the well had come to its bottom, and the bottom had no floor.

The two walls that had pinched together to make the slot stopped in a ragged edge over his head.

Beyond that edge they curved away on both sides, back and outward, and became a roof of black rock. He could not see where the roof ended. He could not see a far wall at all.

Far beneath it lay the Silver.

It stretched from the foot of the cliff to the limit of his sight, as flat as a lake and the color of the moon.

It was neither water nor cloud. Its surface lay in long soft ridges, and all of it was sliding slowly to the right, the way a wide river slides.

The light was coming out of it. Everything on the stair was lit from underneath. Alice’s chin was bright and her forehead was dark, and her shadow lay on the rock above her head.

Here and there, columns of dark stone stood up out of the Silver like the piers of a bridge that had never been finished. Each one had a flat top. On each flat top, a pale thicket was growing.

"Is it snow?" Vina whispered.

"No, little one. That is the Silver, and it is the second layer." Rishin’s voice was level. "All the ground of this layer lies underneath it. So does everything that lives here."

Sonic was not looking at the Silver. He was looking at the cliff.

"Boss," he said. His voice shook slightly. "There are no holes."

Logan turned. The rock face below the Narrows was smooth and black from the ragged edge all the way down. He searched it for a single dark opening or a single grey shape, and he found neither.

"There are no hookwings below the Narrows," Rishin said. "Nothing on these walls cares how fast you are."

Sonic turned his whole body toward Logan. Logan looked at Rishin.

"Stay above the Silver," the old man said. "Do not put so much as a foot into it. Other than that, do as you like."

Sonic was gone before the last word.

The crack of it rolled away under the roof and came rolling back.

A line of white lightning went out over the Silver and climbed. It folded over on itself twice and dropped into a dive that made Helen gasp. Vina shrieked with joy and did not cover her ears.

"Boss," Billy said urgently. "Boss, when there is flat ground."

"When there is flat ground, Billy."

Burr had lifted his left wrist. The briar falcon on it was staring at Alice with one bright eye, and every white feather on him was standing on end.

"Go on," Alice told him.

Whistle went up off the wrist like a thrown knife. His one thin note followed Sonic’s thunder out across the Silver, and Burr watched him go with his empty hand still raised.

’They have placed every foot since the rim,’ Logan thought. ’Not one of them broke the rule.’

The stair went down the face of the cliff in long flights, and nobody told them how to walk it.

Halden had taken the front beside Terry at the first step. He had not asked. He walked with his halberd on his shoulder, and a fairy no bigger than a hand rode on the plate beside it with her legs crossed.

"Halden," Logan said. "I should have had you at the front on the Ribs."

"There was a roof to stay inside, Lord, and I was holding the back of it." Halden did not turn around. "There is no roof here. So I am at the front."

"Yes," Logan said. "You are."

Tinkerbell patted the side of Halden’s helm, as one pats a horse.

The stair ended on a shelf of rock as broad as the Sill had been.

[ New area: Tidemark ]

A Summoning Circle lay in the middle of it, shining its usual pale blue. Against the silver glare from below, the blue looked thin. A black door stood in the cliff at the back with an amber lantern beside it.

Logan counted the old fire rings out of habit. On the Sill there had been dozens. Here there were three.

’That is how many parties got through and stopped to light a fire,’ he thought. ’Three, in however long this place has been here.’

He walked to the lip of the shelf, where a second stair led on down.

The rock changed four steps below him. Above a line as straight as a ruled edge, the cliff was dull black.

Beneath that line it shone like the inside of a shell, and the steps ran on across the bright stone until the Silver swallowed them.

"It rises," Rishin said behind him. "And it falls again. It turns about once between one sleep and the next. When it is in, it stands as high as that line, and you could put your hand in it from where you are standing."

"And now?"

"Now it is out, nearly as far as it goes."

Logan looked down the long drop to the shining surface. Then he looked at the dull rock under his boots.

"It never comes above the line?"

"It never has," Rishin said. "That is the only reason there are fire rings up here."

Sonic came back with frost on his shoulders.

He landed on the shelf harder than he meant to, and he stood there with the static snapping along his arms. He was grinning so widely that Logan could see every tooth.

"Boss. It is cold on top, like the air over a frozen pond." He pointed back the way he had come. "And there are things in it. I saw their backs come up. One of them was longer than Billy’s big shape."

"Did any of them come up after you?"

"No, boss. I do not think they saw me at all." Sonic frowned. "I flew right over one. It did not even turn."

"It would not," said Rishin.

He offered nothing more. He had not looked at the stone columns or the roof since they reached the shelf.

He stood at the top of the lower stair with his hands tucked into his sleeves, and he was watching the place where the steps went under.

Logan could see his fingers moving inside the cloth. They were moving the way Hesper’s finger had moved on the rim of her cup.

’He is counting,’ Logan thought. ’What is down there that he has to count?’

They made camp around the cold fire rings.

Martha and Winsmoke lit one of them. Baldrun lit a second, out of principle.

Thistlemaw walked the edge of the shelf, a hulking shape of bark and river stone. Wherever it stopped, a waist-high hedge of thorn pushed up out of the bare rock. Vina was told to stay on the camp side of it.

Rishin went to find Synthia.

Logan was too far away to hear what the old man asked her. He saw Synthia look him up and down, from his thin wrists to his bare feet.

He saw her hold her two hands a certain distance apart. He saw Rishin reach out and move them a little closer together.

It was the length of a short sword.

’He said he was going to get some of it back,’ Logan thought. ’He is starting with a blade that a Level 1 can lift.’

Synthia nodded once. Then she went to fetch Vulkarn, and the two of them walked off toward the cliff with a cloud of Ore Grubs wriggling ahead.

Logan stood at the edge of the Summoning Circle with his panel open.

[ Tower Points: 810 ]

"Eight pulls," Alice said at his shoulder. She had fifty, and they both knew it. "The stone wants sixteen."

"I can count."

"So can I," said Garen.

He had come up on Logan’s other side with his hands in his pockets. He rocked on his heels and studied the circle as if it were a horse that somebody was trying to sell him.

"I have eight hundred Tower Points," he said.

"I looked at that number the whole way down the Ribs. My wife and I have eighteen Mythics between us, boy. Eleven of them have not left their cards since your garden."

"Nothing down here has been worth waking them for," he went on. "What am I going to do with a spearman?"

"Garen," Logan said.

"I summon eight. I put the cards in your hand. You do whatever it is you do." Garen shrugged. "My daughter once handed you a hundred of them, as I heard it. I can manage eight."

"That is everything you have."

"I am a Tier-9 player. I had no Tower Points at all until that bird, and I was perfectly happy." His voice dropped.

"I cannot think of one thing in that circle I would rather have than the sight of your sister wearing that stone."

Logan found that he could not answer. He nodded instead.

Helen had heard. She crossed the camp, took Garen’s face in both hands, and kissed him on the forehead. Garen Rezvolt, thirteenth on Earth, went red to the ears.

"Sixteen hundred," Rishin said. He had finally come away from the stair. "From two wardens."

Logan had already seen it.

’Sixteen pulls for a stone,’ he thought. ’And the Abyss stood exactly two wardens between me and it, at eight hundred each. It is the same number.’

"It is not a gift," Rishin said, watching his face. "Do not look for kindness in the arithmetic. Take what it paid you, and spend it before it learns what you spent it on."

"Now?"

"After you have slept. Tired men choose badly at a circle. They choose worse at that door."

So they slept on the dull black rock, behind a hedge of thorn, with the silver light coming up over the edge.

Logan woke with a cold draft on his face.

[ Time remaining: 358 days ]

He sat up. The light had changed. It was no longer rising from far below. It was level with him, and it lay across the camp as white as milk.

He went to the hedge and looked over it.

The columns were gone. The lower stair was gone. Four steps beneath his boots, at the ruled line where the black rock ended, a shining floor lay flat and silent from the cliff to the end of the world.

As he watched, a long ridge rose in it a stone’s throw from the shelf. A body beneath the surface turned over slowly, and it was as long as a ship. Then the ridge sank, and the Silver closed over the place.