Chapter 172: Bide

Garen turned his head and looked at the old man by the door.

"Senior," he said. "You knew."

"I knew." Rishin did not pretend otherwise. "I meant to tell you at Bide, where you could see for yourselves what the Sink does to people. He has saved me the walk."

"Fifty-nine," said Isolde. Her voice was very steady. "And it rises to meet every one of them."

"Every one that comes to the lip at the same time." Rishin laid his sword down on the floor beside him.

"Nothing you decide at this flood will be wiser than what you decide once you have seen Bide. Rest until the ebb. All of you."

Garen lowered himself onto the floor beside his wife. Logan sat down with his back to the cold wall and Alice against his shoulder, and he found that he could not stop counting.

’Seven each,’ he thought. ’Eight for Vina. Nine for him. It was never a large number until somebody told me what it buys.’

Alice’s hand found his in the torchlight.

"Stop it," she whispered. "I can hear you counting."

Halden’s voice came from the sigil at the ebb.

"It is going out, Lord. The push has turned."

Xairon opened the slab. This time nobody held the Silver back. It came in over the threshold in a slow white tongue and filled the room to the ceiling, and the candles lit one ring after another in the brightness.

Ansel had stood up to meet it.

Logan watched his face as the flames came on around him. The pale man turned slowly in the middle of the room, and his eyes went from ring to ring. He looked like somebody standing in a warm kitchen after a long road.

"Fifty-nine," he said softly. "I have not stood this close to a family’s light since Merel."

Then he came to Rishin, and he stopped.

He was near enough to see the nine. Logan saw him count them and come to the two that lay over flat. He saw Ansel follow them down with his eyes to the floor.

"You came back for them," Ansel said, very low.

"Yes."

Ansel bowed his head. When he straightened, his eyes were wet. He picked up his staff.

"Then let us go and walk," he said.

He walked inside the ring, between Rishin and its edge.

He did not hold anyone’s hand. He swept his hooked staff ahead of him through the white instead, low along the grit. Every so often he tapped it twice and stepped around an obstacle none of them had seen.

"A hole," he said once. "A deep one. The grubs of some great thing used to live in it."

Vina had worked her way to his side. Rishin let her, so long as her fingers stayed locked in his.

"Mister Ansel. If you have no candles to walk by, how do you find your way?"

"With this." He tapped the staff. "And with my feet. I have walked the line from the cliff to Bide more times than I have counted. The ground is the same every time, even if nothing above it is."

"Do you walk it because you are lonely?"

Helen’s candles twitched as she turned her head. Ansel only laughed.

"I walk it because Bide is hungry," he said.

"The hunters cannot see me, so I can hunt them. There are four of us who walk at the flood, and we feed the rest. It is a good use for a man with nothing over his head."

"Four," said Vina. "Like your four candles."

Ansel did not answer that. After a few steps he reached down without looking and touched the top of her head, very lightly, the way a man touches a thing to be sure it is real.

The first seam came on the left.

"Thin and fast, boss," Sonic said from the sigil. "Straight at the candles."

"Mine," said Alice, before Logan could open his mouth. "Emberlynx."

Nyriel laid the line across Logan’s sight. Somewhere on the left of the ring, the flame-furred cat that Logan had made for Alice heard her and moved onto the line.

Logan caught none of it with his eyes.

There was a snarl, and then a second snarl from a different place an arm’s length away, and then the crackle of fire meeting wet glass twice at once.

The Emberlynx had split itself in two, as it always did. The pike had run in between the halves.

[ Glassjaw Pike slain. ] [ Alice Rezvolt: +150 Tower Points ]

"Two hundred," Alice said, with deep satisfaction. "I was beginning to think this layer did not know my name."

Ansel had stopped walking. He stood with his staff planted, listening to the white on the left.

"Your beasts have no candles," he said.

"No."

"Neither do ours, the few we have. It is the only reason Bide eats." Ansel began to walk again.

"When the four of us bring in enough points, somebody summons. The beast hunts at the flood for a year, or until the door takes it."

"The door?" said Helen.

"There are sicknesses in the Silver. Only the door sells the cure." He said it without bitterness. "Most of what Bide summons goes through that door in the end."

Logan thought of a man in Tarry crouching at the top of a ladder with a fox’s head between his hands. He did not say anything.

"Did you have units, when you came down?" Alice asked.

"We had six. The last of them died on the Ribs." Ansel’s staff swept on through the grit. "By the time we reached the Silver, there was nobody left to stand in it for us."

When the push between their shoulders slackened, Xairon raised the house again.

Ansel listened to every block of it go into place. He laid his palm on each wall as it rose, as if he did not quite believe in walls below the flood, and he was the last of them to duck through the door.

The Seed Courier moved its root into the new floor before the slab closed, as it would every time they roofed.

They ate. They slept.

[ Time remaining: 356 days ]

The second ebb carried them further out across the floor of the bowl. The grit gave way to long reaches of flat stone, and then to grit again.

They passed more ribs, and a skull that Ansel steered them around with one tap of his staff.

The ebb had already begun to weaken when Sonic spoke from high overhead.

"Boss. There is a stone ahead that is taller than all the others. It has trees on top of it, and there are people walking under the trees."

"Bide," said Ansel. He sounded pleased in spite of himself. "We have come in on the last of the ebb. Good."

They found the foot of it by Ansel’s staff.

It was a wall of dark rock that went up into the white and did not stop. Ansel walked them along it until the staff rang against a step. The step had been cut into the rock, and there was another above it.

"Up," Ansel said. "And keep to the wall side. The steps were not cut for so many feet at once."

The stair wound around the outside of the column like the thread of a screw. Logan climbed with one hand on the rock and the other in Alice’s.

Then his head came up out of the Silver.

It was as sudden as surfacing from a lake. Below that step there was only white. Above it there was clear grey air. The roof of the layer hung far overhead, and the shining surface spread away below him in every direction.

The Silver still lay around his chest. Seven small flames stood over him in the open air.

He climbed another step and another. When his boots came clear of the Silver, his candles went out. Behind him, ring after ring of them went out in the same way, as each of the family climbed free.

The last to come up were Ansel and Rishin, with Vina between them. Rishin’s nine went out on the step below Logan’s. The old man did not look up at them as they went.

The stair ended at the edge of the column’s flat top.

[ New area: Bide ]

It was perhaps three hundred paces across. Coral trees grew all over it, white and leafless and hung with glowing beads, so thick in places that their branches knotted together overhead. Between the trees stood houses.

They were built from the dark stone of the column itself. They were low and round, with roofs of flat slabs, and smoke from small fires drifted out of holes in the slabs.

There were people under the trees.

A man was knocking beads down from a branch with a long pole. A woman sat on a doorstep, carving a comb out of a pike’s clear jawbone with a knife. Two children were playing a game with pebbles in the dust.

They all stopped what they were doing.

The children got up first. One of them, a boy with a shaved head, walked right up to the head of the stair and looked at the strangers climbing toward him. He looked at the knight with wings of light behind them, and he swallowed.

"How many candles?" he asked.

"Fifty-nine," said Ansel, before anyone else could answer.

The boy stared at him.

Then he turned around and ran back into the trees, and Logan heard him shouting the number as he went.

Bide came out to look at them.

There were perhaps eighty people. They came out of the round houses and out from under the trees, and they stopped a long way back from the stair.

Logan counted only two units in the whole of the town. One was a squat clay figure with a water skin on its back. The other was a long-legged bird made of wire, standing on one foot in a doorway. Both of them looked old.

The people did not stare at the units, as the people of Tarry had. They stared at the family, and they kept their distance from it.

A woman came through them to the front.

She was short and broad, with grey hair cropped as close as the boy’s. One of her eyes was clouded white. She carried a stick, and she walked with it as though it were a weapon she had decided not to use yet.

"Ansel," she said. "Is it true? Fifty-nine?"

"I counted them myself, Saba."

Saba looked at the family one face at a time. She took longest over Vina. Then she looked at Rishin, and her good eye narrowed. She did not say what she saw. She turned back to the rest of them.

"Here is what you need to know," she said.

"You are welcome in Bide. There is a circle in the middle of the town, and the black door is where it always is, in the rock at the north edge. There are beads on every tree, and Ansel will show you which are ripe."

She glanced past them at the stair, where Billy’s great rim and Terry’s helm had just come up over the edge.

"Your beasts stay on the steps," she added. "Bide has no room for a wheel the size of a cart, and no wish to find any."

Billy opened his mouth. Logan looked at him, and Billy shut it again and rolled two steps down out of sight.

"But none of you goes down to the water while you are on this stone," Saba went on. Her voice did not rise.

"Not one foot. Fifty-nine candles at the Watch would bring every great one in the Silver to this column as soon as the turn was over."

"The Watch?" said Helen.

"You will see it at the top of this flood. Until then, eat."

Bide gave them an empty house beside the stair. There were a good many empty houses in Bide.

Martha and Winsmoke came up the steps far enough to hand the pots in, and then went back down to the rest of the ring.

Ansel brought an armful of ripe beads and showed Vina how to tell them from the green ones by the color of the light inside.

By the time the pots were empty, the Silver had turned.

Logan saw it from the doorway. The shining surface had crept back up the column while they ate, and it was still climbing.

Saba was standing outside, looking past the house and over the edge of the column. All of Bide had turned to look the same way.

Somewhere among the trees, a bell began to ring. It had a flat, tinny note, like a pot struck with a spoon.

All over Bide, people put down what they were holding. The man with the pole leaned it against his tree. The woman on the doorstep set down her knife and her bone. The children left their pebbles where they lay.

They began to walk together toward the far side of the column.

Ansel touched Logan’s elbow.

"That is the Watch," he said. "Come and see what we do here."