Chapter 177: Coppervein

Rishin told her.

He told it more shortly than he had told it in Bide. He told her about the lip and the candles that left, and about the thing that came up wearing faces. He told her about the voices.

Hulda listened with both hands folded on the head of her axe. Her son sat against the wall below her with his split shield across his knees, and his daughter sat beside him with Helen’s green light still fading from her cheek.

When the old man stopped, Hulda looked down at the two of them.

"Faces," she said.

"Yours, on it twice over," said Rishin. "His twice. The girl’s twice. Every one of them calling to the other two."

Bram had gone grey under his beard. He reached over without looking and took his daughter’s hand.

"The stayer on the Sill told us it was a guard," he said. "He said it was small for small families."

"He was right about that. He did not tell you what it is small out of."

Hulda stayed on her feet by the slab.

"Then you would have us go three ebbs apart," she said. "One of us on that lip alone, then the next, then the next."

"Yes."

"And which of us goes first?" Hulda pointed the butt of her axe at her granddaughter.

"That one? She has two candles. One is her father and one is me. You would have her stand alone in the white while both of us call her by name?"

Edda lifted her chin. She had soot-black braids and a pink line on her cheek where the scrape had been, and she looked about Alice’s age.

"I could do it, Grandmother."

"You could not," said Hulda. "Nor could I, with you on that thing. Nor could your father, and he knows it."

Bram did not answer her. He looked at the floor.

"Together, I can hold her," Hulda said to Rishin.

"If she goes toward it, I have her by the wrist. If I go toward it, Bram has me. That is how Coppervein has always crossed bad ground. Three of us, and every one of us holding somebody."

"I have told you what the voices do to people who hold on," Rishin said.

"You have told me what they did to people who were not dwarves."

The old man studied her. Then he inclined his head, very slightly, the way Isolde had inclined hers to him in Bide.

"It is your lip," he said.

They slept.

Logan lay with his back to the cold wall and listened to the dwarves breathing on the far side of the room. Bram snored. Hulda did not, and Logan suspected she had not closed her eyes at all.

’She is not stupid,’ he thought. ’She has done the same sum I did. She just came out with a different answer.’

He did not like how much sense her answer made.

[ Time remaining: 354 days ]

The dwarves walked inside the ring when the ebb came.

They could see none of the units around them, and they did not like it. Bram kept his split shield up on his left arm the whole way.

Every so often Edda put out a hand into the white beside her and touched a plate of armor that she could not see.

"There is somebody there," she said the first time.

"That is Terry," said Alice. "He is the one your grandmother hit."

Edda took her hand back very quickly.

"I am sorry," she said to the white.

"It did not hurt," said Terry’s voice from the sigil on Logan’s collar. "Tell her I said so."

The family could see the dwarves’ candles only when they came within arm’s reach. Then two small flames would swim up out of the white over a braided head and fall away again.

It was strange to Logan, after so many ebbs of seeing every flame in his family at any distance, to walk beside people whose lights he could lose in a single step.

’That is what we look like to them,’ he thought. ’Six lights on a whole layer. Everybody else is dark.’

Edda found her way to Alice before the first cairn of the ebb had fallen far behind.

"The old one with the sword," she said in a low voice. "He has crossed it."

"Once."

"Alone?"

"Alone," said Alice.

Edda walked on in the white for the length of a cairn without speaking. Logan, a step away, could see the edge of her face under her two flames. Her jaw was set exactly the way her grandmother set hers.

"She will not change her mind," Edda said at last.

"She has never let go of anything in her life.

"When the Abyss took us, she had my father by the beard and me by the hair, and she did not let go of either of us until we were standing in the town at the rim."

Alice smiled despite herself.

"I would like to have met her before all this."

"You would not," said Edda. "She would have told you that your bow was too long."

She dropped back to her father. Alice’s hand found Logan’s again.

’She is frightened,’ Alice was thinking, ’and she is right to be. And she is going to stand on that lip beside them anyway, because that is what her grandmother would do.’

It was Bram who came to Logan.

He did it near the end of the ebb, when the push had begun to slacken. He fell into step at Logan’s right hand with the broken shield still raised, and for a dozen paces he only walked.

"She is wrong," he said then. His voice was so low that the Silver nearly swallowed it.

Logan glanced at him. Under Bram’s two flames, his broad face was set like his mother’s, but his eyes were not.

"Then tell her."

"I have never once in my life told her she was wrong." Bram shifted the shield on his arm.

"Not when I was a boy, and not when I was grown. She was never wrong when it mattered. She got us down the rim and through the Narrows with nothing but that axe and her temper."

"And this time?"

"This time I can feel it in my teeth." Bram looked ahead, toward the place where his mother’s flames were bobbing along beside his daughter’s.

"But if I tell her so, and she listens, then Edda faces it by herself. And if I tell her so and she does not listen, I have spent the last thing I could say to her on an argument."

Logan only nodded. Bram did not seem to expect more.

"I wanted somebody to know I thought it," the dwarf said. "That is all."

Then he dropped back into the white, and his two small lights went with him.

Sonic saw furrows, and Nyriel laid their lines, but none of them turned toward the candles. Ansel said that the Race was poor ground for hunting.

"The small ones do not like to swim against it," he said. "And the great ones like to be sure of a light before they come in. Out here, every light is hurrying past."

At the turn, Xairon raised the house. Fifteen of them slept in it again, packed close in the dark around Link’s acorn of fire.

[ Time remaining: 353 days ]

On the next ebb, the ground began to climb.

Logan felt it first as a change in the push. The Silver was still running past him toward the Sink, but it was running more shallowly now, and faster. It tugged at his legs and no longer at his shoulders.

Then the white thinned in front of his face.

It went from white to grey, and from grey to a bright haze. All at once his head came out of the Silver into clear air, and he could see.

He stopped walking.

They were on a long slope of bare black rock. It rose gently ahead of them, as wide as a plain.

The Silver lay across it only waist-deep now. It slid over the rise in one broad sheet, thin and fast, the way water thins as it runs over the crest of a weir.

Ahead lay a single line of black against the grey.

’The lip,’ he thought.

Behind him, heads broke into the open one after another. Their candles burned over them in the open air, plain and bright.

Alice’s seven came up at his shoulder, and then his mother’s and his father’s. Vina came up holding Rishin’s hand with nine flames over her braids.

The dwarves came up last, with Edda between her father and her grandmother, and Logan saw all six of the dwarves’ candles at once for the first time.

Each of their flames leaned toward one of the other two. They made a small, tight knot of light.

They walked up the slope toward the line.

Nobody told them to slow down. They slowed down all the same. The black line grew until Logan could see that it was not a line at all.

It was an edge. The slope rose to it and stopped, and the Silver poured over it in a long smooth fall. Beyond the edge there was nothing, only grey air and a darkness further out that the eye could not hold on to.

Logan could not see across the Sink. He could not see a bottom to it either.

Rishin stopped a long throw short of the edge, and the rest of them stopped with him. The Silver ran past their waists toward the fall.

"Here," the old man said. "No nearer than this."

Garen glanced up at the bare flames over all their heads. "And the hunters?"

"Nothing big swims on the rise," said Rishin. "It is too shallow for them, and too fast."

Logan looked up at his candles. All seven of them had swung round. They no longer leaned toward the faces around him. Every one of them leaned toward the edge. They had stretched a little long, the way a flame leans toward an open door.

Alice’s had done the same. So had everyone’s.

Over the old man’s head, two flat flames pointed past the lip and down into the dark. They had pointed that way since Tidemark. Now there was nothing between them and where they pointed.

The push at Logan’s legs was already weakening. The ebb was nearly spent.

"We came in at the end of it," Hulda said. "As I reckoned."

"As you reckoned," Ansel called from far down the slope.

He had stopped further back than any of them. His single flame was only a speck against the grey. He had his staff planted, and he did not come any closer.

Hulda looked at the edge, and then at her son and her granddaughter. She shifted her grip on her axe.

"At the start of the next ebb, then," she said.

Rishin did not argue with her.

Logan looked at the lip, at the Silver sliding over it and gone, and at the old man’s two flames pointing down into that dark. He thought of three dwarves standing there in a row, holding each other’s wrists.

He thought that he had never wanted so badly for somebody to be right, and that he did not believe she was.