Chapter 171: Unlit

Logan kept his hand on the hilt.

"Do we open it?" he asked.

Rishin did not get up. He sat with his back against the wall beside the slab and his sword across his knees, and he looked at the stone as though he could see through it.

"A man with no candles is the only kind who can walk at the flood and bring nothing behind him," he said. "If we leave him outside, he will only walk on. Nothing in the Silver will ever touch him."

"Then why let him in?"

"Because he walks at the flood, boy. He knows things about this layer that I have forgotten, and things that were not true when I was last here." The old man got to his feet. "Open it. Quickly, and from the back of the room."

He crossed to the far wall himself.

Logan woke the others with a hand on each shoulder. Helen was up before he reached her. Soon the whole family stood pressed against the far wall, and Vina was standing on Solveig’s boots so that she would take up less floor.

Skyveil went to the door and spread her wings.

"Xairon," Logan said into the sigil. "The slab. A gap the width of one man, and no wider. Draventh, be ready to seal it again as soon as it shuts."

"Ready," said Xairon through the stone.

The slab ground sideways.

The Silver was there at once. It stood in the gap like a wall of packed snow, and then it leaned inward, curling over the threshold.

Skyveil’s wind met it. The gust held the white at the doorway in a soft bulge that churned and pressed and came no further.

A figure stepped through the wind.

It came in with its head down and one hand raised against the gust. Behind it the slab was already grinding back.

One wisp of the Silver slipped past Skyveil’s wing. It ran low along the floor, as quick as a cat through a gap, and it reached Garen’s boot.

Seven flames stood up over his head.

Garen stepped back. The wisp thinned away, and the flames went out.

"A great one has turned," Logan said. Nyriel had laid the warning across his sight before he could ask for it. "It is coming down toward the house."

The slab met the wall. Blue runes ran around its edge and faded one by one. Skyveil let her wings fall.

Logan counted silently against the wall, and he had reached forty when the next word came from Nyriel.

"It has lost us," Logan said. "It is circling. Now it is going away."

Garen let his shoulders down.

"That was me," he said. "Seven candles for one breath."

"It was enough to make it look," said Rishin. "Remember that."

"The wind that let him in has changed your air as well," Xairon said through the stone. "You have another sleep in it, and a little over."

Rishin went back to his place beside the door and sat down again, with Stay laid over his knees.

Link had lifted his small flame from its notch. He held it up so that it shone on the newcomer’s face.

The man was tall and very thin. His skin was so pale it was nearly the color of the Silver, and so were his eyes. They were not blind. They moved from face to face along the wall, and they took their time about it.

His hair had been cut short and ragged, as if with a knife. He wore a long coat of patched grey hide.

In one hand he carried a staff as tall as himself, with an iron hook at the top. There was a coil of rope over his shoulder and a cloth bag at his hip.

He counted them with his eyes. Logan watched his lips move.

"Eight," the man said. His voice was low and dry, and he sounded faintly amused. "Eight of you, in a house where there was no house when I walked this line at the last flood."

"We built it," said Logan.

"I gathered that, from the beast who built it. It is very proud of the joins." The man leaned his staff against the wall and set down his bag.

"Forgive me. I have not stood inside walls down in the Silver since my year ran out. I have forgotten how one asks."

He looked along the wall at all of them, and then he asked it anyway.

"How many candles?"

Garen answered him.

"Fifty-nine," he said.

The man sat down.

He did it slowly, folding his long legs under him on the bare stone floor. He put his hands on his knees and looked hard at Garen.

"Fifty-nine," he repeated. "I have not heard a number like that since I came down the Ribs."

"Do you know what it means?" Logan asked.

"Do you?"

"They know some of it," Rishin said.

Ansel’s gaze turned to the old man. It rested there a little longer than it had on anyone else.

"Ansel," the man said, and touched his chest. "I have no candles, as your sentry told you. That is why the flood is safe for me."

Daniel had already found the food.

He brought over a bowl of whatever Martha had sent in and held it out. Ansel looked down at it as if bowls were a thing he had once known about.

Then he took it in both hands and ate, quickly and neatly, the way a man eats who has learned not to waste a crumb.

When he had finished, he reached into the bag.

"I can pay for that," he said.

What he took out was a white bead the size of a plum. It shone faintly, like the beads on the coral trees at the tops of the columns.

Vina stared at it.

"The trees on the stones," she said. "I wanted one of those, and they told me no."

"They were right to tell you no. The beads on the trees are still green inside, and they will make your belly ache until your next sleep."

Ansel turned this one over in his long fingers. "This one has been dried. It will not hurt you. In Bide, it is what we eat."

He looked at Helen, not at Vina, as he held it out.

Helen looked at Rishin. Rishin nodded once.

Vina took the bead and bit into it. Her eyes went wide.

"It tastes like pears," she said thickly. "Pears and snow."

"That is exactly what it tastes like," said Ansel. "I have never heard it said so well."

Vina finished the bead. She licked her fingers. Then she looked at the pale man sitting on the floor, with the directness she used on everything.

"Why don’t you have any candles?" she asked.

"Vina," said Helen.

"No. Let her." Ansel smiled for the first time, and the hard lines around his mouth went soft. "Children ask the only questions worth answering down here. The rest of you only ask the polite ones."

"There were five of us," Ansel said.

He was talking to Vina, but he was looking at the wall above her head.

"My wife was Merel. We had a son, Joss, and two girls younger than him."

"We came down the rim and the Ribs together. We came out under the Narrows at the right time, with the ebb. We walked the Silver all the way to the Sink."

"What is the Sink?" asked Vina.

"It is where the Silver goes, at the ebb. It is the hole in the bottom of the bowl." Ansel moved one hand in a slow circle.

"At the flood, it all comes back out again, very fast. We reached its lip at the wrong end of an ebb. The four of them were over the edge and on their way down when it turned. I was ten steps behind them."

"And the flood came back out," Logan said.

"And it took me off my feet. It carried me back across half the layer." Ansel shrugged.

"I walked back. It took me three ebbs. When I got to the lip again, my candles were pointing down into the Sink, all four of them. Whatever rose out of the Sink to meet them, they had gone through it."

"Without you?" Vina’s voice had gone small.

"They waited. I saw that too." He rubbed his thumb along the iron hook of his staff. "For six ebbs, all four of my candles held still and pointed into the Sink. They stayed where they were. They were waiting for me to come."

"Why didn’t you go?"

"Because I was alone, child, and the Sink would not let me by. I tried twice." He did not say what had happened on the two tries.

"Then their year was going, as well as mine, and on the seventh ebb they went on. I watched my candles move away down into the dark."

Logan could hear Alice breathing beside him. It was slow and careful.

"So you have none because they are gone," Vina said.

"I have none because they made it."

Nobody understood him at first. Then Rishin’s head came up.

"Near the end of our year, my candles went out," Ansel said. "All four of them went out together in the same instant. Every one was pointing straight down when it did."

"How do you know that means they made it?" Alice asked.

"Because that is what going out means. A candle goes out when the one it burns for leaves the Abyss. There is only one way out of the Abyss, at the bottom."

He looked at her. "Four at once, together, pointing down. They reached the end, and they went through."

Helen’s fingers had gone white around Daniel’s sleeve.

"Then you were alone," she said, very low.

"Then I was alone, and I had no candles at all. I am one of four men on this layer that the hunters cannot see." Ansel smiled again, crookedly. "It is very restful."

Logan asked the next question before he could stop himself.

"And when somebody dies down here? Does the candle go out then too?"

Ansel’s head came round.

"No," he said. "It does not go out."

Helen’s hand closed on Daniel’s sleeve again.

"It burns on, and it points where it always pointed. It is the cruelest thing in the Silver."

"People in Bide have sat at the water for ebb after ebb with their feet in it, watching a candle that will never come back up the stair to them."

Logan remembered the stair below Tidemark, and Vina holding up a small blue shell. ’Then she is alive,’ the old man had told her.

He saw Alice remember it at the same instant. Her eyes went to Rishin. Rishin did not look back at her.

Beside the door, the old man’s thumb had stopped moving on the grip of his sword. That was all. His face did not change.

Vina had turned to look at him. She got up from the wall, crossed the room, and sat down against his side. She put her small hand on his knee.

Garen cleared his throat.

"You said Bide," he said. "Twice now. What is Bide?"

"Bide is home to the ones who stopped." Ansel picked up his staff and laid it across his lap. "There is one column on this layer tall enough that the flood never covers its top. Bide sits on it."

"How far?"

"Two ebbs, if you walk with the Silver and do not stop to hunt." He glanced at the slab, as if he could see the units waiting beyond it. "Although I think the hunting comes to you."

"It does," Logan said.

"Then I will take you there, if you will let me walk inside your ring. You will want to see Bide before you try the Sink. And you will want to hear what the people there can tell you about it."

Rishin lifted his head.

"What does Bide say about the Sink, these days?"

Ansel looked at him across the small flame. His eyes were not unkind.

"You have been there," he said. "You do not need me to tell you."

"It has been a long time. Things change."

"Not that." Ansel turned the hooked staff slowly in his hands. "The Sink is guarded, like the Narrows. But the wardens of the Sink do not rise to meet your strongest."

"Then what do they rise to meet?" asked Garen.

"Your candles." Ansel said it simply.

"They are made from the candles that come down to the lip. Every candle that comes to the lip with you is one more piece of what waits there."

"A man alone with four meets a thing that turned me back twice," he went on. "A family with twenty meets a thing that few families live through."

"And a man with none?" Garen asked.

"Walks through it as if it were a doorway." Ansel’s mouth twisted. "I could have, by the end. I had eleven days left by then, and nine layers under me. I went to Bide instead."

His eyes went over the eight of them in the light of one small torch.

"Fifty-nine," Ansel said softly. "I would not like to meet what fifty-nine makes."