Chapter 167: Candles

They were only going four steps down, and Rishin made them prepare as though they were going a mile.

"Use every trick you carried in," he said. "The Abyss gives no marks for doing it the hard way."

So Alice called the Seed Courier.

It came across the camp on its long root legs with a pod in each hand. It knelt at the nearest fire ring and pushed its fingers into a crack in the rock. A pale shoot came up between them and put out two leaves.

"In the Warlord match, one of those pods folded us home from the far side of a map," Alice told Helen. "Break it in your fist, and you are standing beside that root."

"Could it take us back up?" Helen asked. "To Tarry? Or home?"

The Courier shook its head slowly. A panel had opened over the two leaves.

[ Home Root set: Tidemark ] [ A pod returns its bearer to this root from anywhere within the Second Layer. ]

"The root takes hold in the layer it stands on," Alice said. "No pod crosses from one layer to another, and nothing reaches outside at all. I asked it at Hollowreach."

"The same is true of the little one our daughter carries," Isolde added. "It will bring Garen and me to her from anywhere on this layer. It will not open a door onto Earth. We tested that on the rim as well."

"Nothing leaves that way," Rishin said. "People have tried cleverer things than seeds."

The Courier gave a pod to each of the family. Vina’s went into the pocket of her coat, on the opposite side from Teska’s shell.

Thessaris came next.

The walking garden had been picking glowing caps off the stalks ever since the first shelf, and nobody had asked it why. Now it opened the hollow in its chest and took out four small vials of cloudy green.

[ Greencap Draught ] [ Restores HP steadily for one minute. ]

It gave one to Helen and one to Daniel. It gave one to Vina, who tried to open hers and was stopped. It held the fourth out to Rishin until he took it.

"And you," Logan said to Pebble. "What can you do now?"

Pebble took a red stone from his pouch. He set it in the cradle of the long sling and swung once, lazily. The stone dropped onto the top of the stair with a click.

It did not lie where it fell. Four more stones rose out of the rock around it and stacked themselves on top, each a little smaller than the one below. The last one glowed at its heart like the first.

[ Cairnmark ] [ A slung stone becomes a standing waymark. The slinger and his allies always know the way to every mark he has set. ]

Logan shut his eyes and turned around twice. He could still have pointed straight at it.

"I do not know how I did that, boss," Pebble admitted. "Stump knew."

Thistlemaw laid one stone hand on the hedge. The thorns drew apart at the head of the stair, and the Silver shone through the gap.

The lower stair was broad enough for six people to stand abreast.

Its first four steps were dull black. The fifth was bright, and the Silver lay on it as flat as standing water. Beyond that there were no steps to be seen at all.

"Logan first," Rishin said. "Then Alice. Down to the third bright step, and stop."

Logan went down.

The Silver closed over his boots without a ripple. It was as cold as Sonic had promised, like wading into a pond in winter. But it did not wet the leather. When he lifted one foot clear, the boot came out dry.

He took two more steps. The cold climbed to his knees and stayed there.

"Logan," Alice said. Her voice had dropped to a whisper. "Look up."

He looked up.

Seven small flames stood in the air above him.

They were no bigger than candle flames, and they were pale gold. They hung a hand’s width over his hair in a loose ring. They gave off no heat that he could feel, and not one of them flickered.

All seven were leaning the same way. They bent back toward the top of the stair, where everyone he had walked in with was standing.

Alice stepped down beside him.

Flames woke over her head, one after another, like lamps being lit along a street. He counted seven. As the last one caught, a single flame in his ring swung around and pointed at her.

"That one moved," she breathed.

"Walk to the end of the step."

She walked. The flame followed her like a needle following a magnet. When she came back, it came back with her.

"That one is you," Logan said.

Alice looked up at her ring. One of hers was bent so far toward him that it lay almost on its side.

"Oh," she said, very softly.

They came down two at a time after that.

Garen and Isolde stepped in together, and fourteen flames stood up over the pair of them. Helen came with Daniel. She watched his ring take light, and she laughed aloud when she found the one that turned as she turned.

"Count them," Rishin said from the last black step. He had not moved from it.

"Seven," said Daniel.

"Seven," said Helen. "All of us have seven."

"Each one is a person inside the Abyss who cares for you, and whom you care for in return." The old man’s voice was even.

"It is the same measure that put all of you on one platform at the rim. Each flame leans toward the one it burns for. It does not matter how far off they are, or what stands between."

Vina came last, with her hand in Solveig’s gauntlet.

She went down slowly, because the cold made her squeak. Where the others stood, the Silver reached well above her knees. Her ring woke over her braids, and she stared up at it with her mouth open.

Then she started pointing.

"That is Mom. That is Dad. That is Logan, and that is Alice." She turned in a circle, and the whole ring turned around her. "Those two are Alice’s mom and dad. That one is pointing at Grandpa Rishin."

She stopped.

"There is another one."

Logan counted. She had eight.

The eighth pointed at nobody on the stair. It bent up and back, over the shelf and the camp, toward the black cliff and the bottom of the Narrows.

"Who is that?" Vina asked.

"Whom do you care for who is not standing here?" said Rishin.

Vina’s hand dived into her coat. It came out holding a small blue snail shell.

"Teska," she whispered.

"Then she is alive," Rishin said. "And she is that way."

Vina let out a shriek that rang off the roof. Helen had to catch her by the collar to stop her jumping.

"Garen," Rishin said. "Walk down until it is over your head. Then stand still."

Garen went down the stair one step at a time. The Silver rose to his belt and then to his chest. It covered his hair, and he was gone.

His flames were not.

Logan could see all seven of them through the Silver, as clearly as if it were a thin curtain. They had sunk with him. They hung in the brightness below the stair in their small ring, and one of them was leaning hard toward Isolde.

"I can see every one of you!" Garen’s voice came up muffled. "I cannot see my hand. But I can see you!"

"So nobody can be lost down there," Helen said slowly. "Not from the people who love them."

"That is the blessing," said Rishin.

The flame-furred cat at Alice’s knee flattened its ears.

It had not made a sound since the rim. Now a low growl started deep in its throat, and the Emberlynx turned its head toward the open Silver.

A long way out, the surface had begun to rise.

It was a ridge like the one Logan had seen on waking. This one was not turning over idly. It ran in a straight line with a soft furrow spreading behind it, and the line was aimed at the stair.

"And that is the other half," Rishin said. "Out. All of you, above the line. Garen!"

Garen came up the steps three at a time with the Silver streaming off his shoulders. Daniel lifted Vina bodily. Logan went up backward with his hand on Alice’s arm.

His flames went out the instant his boots touched black rock.

So did everyone else’s. Fifty lights had been standing over that stair, and then there were none.

The ridge slowed. It bent to one side and then to the other, like a hound that has lost a scent. It lay still, a ship’s length from the stair.

Then it sank.

They watched until the furrow had smoothed away.

"It saw us," Alice said. "From all the way out there."

"It saw fifty candles standing in one place." Rishin was still standing where the dry rock ended. "Everything that lives in the Silver hunts by them. It is the only light they know. One candle is a spark to them. A family is a bonfire."

"Candles," Daniel repeated.

"That is what the stayers of this layer call them. Below the Narrows, nobody asks how many days you have left. They ask how many candles you carry."

Logan looked at the bright floor, and at the place where the ridge had gone down.

’That is why it wrote the word twice,’ he thought. ’I can find my mother in that from a mile off. So can anything with teeth.’

"Sonic flew right over one of them," he said. "It did not even turn."

"He was above the Silver. And he is a unit."

Billy had been unusually quiet.

He rolled down the four black steps to the line and put the edge of his great wheel into the Silver. He waited. Then he rolled in until it covered half of him, and he tipped his rim back to look upward.

There was nothing above him but the roof.

"Boss," he said. "Where is mine?"

Logan had no answer for him. Terry walked down and stood in it to the waist. Sonic followed, and Halden, and Burr with the briar falcon on his wrist. The air above every one of them stayed empty.

"It does not count you," Rishin said.

"I count!" Billy’s blades had come half out. "I have been with him since his first match! I was a boy with a sling! Ask him whether I count!"

"He counts," Logan said. His throat was tight.

"I know it, and so do you. The Abyss does not." Rishin looked down at the wheel in the Silver.

"It has never given a flame to anything it means to buy. It is wrong about a good many things, and that is one of them."

Solveig had come out of the Silver with Vina, and he stood one step below her.

"I do not need a light to know where she is," he said.

Billy’s blades went slowly back in.

"Think past the insult," Rishin told them. "Nothing down there hunts by anything else. Your units can stand in the Silver to the neck, and the great ones will swim straight by them."

Logan saw it at once.

’They come for us,’ he thought. ’They cannot see what is standing next to us. An army that nothing in this layer can find.’

"Do not smile yet," the old man said. "The hunters cannot see your units. Under the Silver, your units cannot see one another either, past the length of an arm. You have candles to walk by. They have nothing."

"They have a few things," said Alice.

She looked along the line of her units and found the slight figure with wings of clear wind folded on her back.

"Skyveil."

The hum that Skyveil Cantor always carried rose and narrowed into a single note. It was not loud, and yet it did not fade as it went out over the Silver, and Logan found that he could have walked to it with his eyes shut.

On Halden’s shoulder, Tinkerbell stood up. A hard blue light came on in her chest, as sharp as a welder’s spark.

"One to hear and one to see," Alice said. "And Pebble’s cairns to tell them where the path is."

Rishin’s chin dipped a fraction. It was the same nod he had given Helen on the first shelf.

"Better," he said.

Vina had come to stand on the last black step beside him. She looked up into his face.

"Grandpa Rishin. You did not go in."

"No."

"Everybody else did. Even Billy."

"Yes."

She studied him with her head on one side. She was holding the grey stone at her collar in one fist, and Logan did not think she knew she was doing it.

"Are you scared?" she asked.

Garen’s head came up. Rishin only looked at her.

"Yes, little one," he said. "I am."

Vina considered that. Then she put her free hand into his.

"I will come with you," she said. "I have already done it once."

Rishin looked at the small hand. He looked at Solveig, and the knight stepped down into the Silver ahead of them without being asked.

The two of them went down together. The Silver took his bare feet and her boots, and they stopped where she had stood before.

Her ring woke first. Eight flames lit over her braids again, and nobody looked at them. Everyone was looking at the old man. He had tipped his head back to see what stood over him.

His flames lit one at a time, and Logan counted them as they came.

There were seven. Then there was an eighth, and a ninth.

One of them leaned down to the girl beside him. Six leaned back up the stair. The other two did not lean toward anybody Logan could see.

They lay over almost flat, the way a flame lies in a draft from above, and they pointed straight down the stair into the Silver.

Rishin’s knees folded.

He sat down hard on the step, with the brightness up to his chest. Daniel was in the Silver beside him before anyone else had moved, with seven flames over his head and one hand under the old man’s elbow.

Rishin did not seem to feel it. His mouth was working, and no sound came out.

Vina was counting on her fingers.

"You have nine," she said. "There are only seven of us." She looked up at his ring, and then down at where it pointed. "Grandpa Rishin, two of yours are pointing at the floor."

"Yes," Rishin said.

His face was wet, and he was smiling. Logan had never seen that smile on him before.

"Two of them are."