Chapter 178: Six Faces

The push at Logan’s legs died away.

For a little while the Silver lay still across the whole long slope. It no longer slid toward the edge. It sat there waist-deep and gleaming, and the fall at the lip thinned to a few slow ribbons, and then to nothing at all.

"The turn," said Ansel from far down the slope. His voice carried strangely in the open air. "Come back down to me. All of you, and quickly."

Rishin had already turned around.

"What happens at the flood?" Garen asked as they went.

"You heard Ansel’s story," said the old man. "It all comes back out again, and it comes out fast."

They went down the slope as fast as the Silver would let them. The dwarves came with them, Hulda last of all, and she kept looking back over her shoulder at the edge.

Ansel stopped them where the rise ended and the floor of the Race began.

"Here," he said. "The flood throws everything off the slope. Down here, it only shoves."

Xairon was already building.

The flood came while the slab was still grinding shut.

Logan did not see it. He felt it through the soles of his boots first, a deep shudder in the rock. Then he heard it, which was stranger still, because the Silver had never made a sound before.

It was not a roar. It was a long, low hiss, like air drawn in through the teeth of an animal the size of a hill.

The house shook. Grit sifted down from the joins in the ceiling. Draventh’s runes flared along every seam at once and held.

"Lord," said Halden through the sigil. His voice was as level as ever. "It is pushing very hard. Every unit has a hand on the wall, and Terry has both of his. We will be here."

"It does this at every flood?" Isolde asked.

"At every flood," Ansel said. He was sitting with his back pressed to the slab and his eyes shut. "That is what took me off my feet. I was ten steps short of the edge."

Isolde looked at the shaking slab and let the question go.

Logan did not sleep much, and he did not think anyone else did.

Hulda sat against the far wall with her axe across her knees and a whetstone in her hand.

She drew it along the edge, and turned the blade, and drew it again. The small grating sound went on and on under the hiss of the flood outside.

Edda had fallen asleep against her father’s shoulder. Bram was awake. He had his arm around her, and he was looking at his mother.

Vina crept across the floor in the torchlight and sat down beside Edda. She did not wake her. She only sat there.

At last Hulda looked up from the axe.

"What is that at your neck, child?"

Vina fished the grey stone out and held it up on its string.

"It is a rock that works," she said. "It says the bearer cannot be called."

Hulda looked at the stone for longer than she had looked at anything else in that room. Logan saw her lips shape the words twice.

"We had nothing like that," she said. Then she went back to her blade.

[ Time remaining: 352 days ]

The hiss had stopped when they woke.

When Halden reported the Silver running toward the Sink again, Xairon opened the slab, and they went back up the slope in the first of the ebb.

The Silver ran past their waists, gentle at first and then faster as the slope rose. Their heads were in clear air. Logan could see every candle on that slope, his family’s and the dwarves’, all of them leaning ahead toward the edge.

Rishin stopped at the same place as before, a long throw short of the lip.

"No nearer," he said.

Ansel stopped far behind them. The units spread out along the slope in a long line on either side of the family. Billy stood at Logan’s knee with his blades drawn in, and he did not make a single joke.

The three dwarves went on up the slope alone.

They walked abreast, with Hulda in the middle. She had her axe in her right hand, and her left was locked around her granddaughter’s wrist. Bram walked on her other side with his split shield on his arm and a short-hafted hammer in his fist.

He had not taken his mother’s arm. Logan remembered what he had said in the white.

A few paces from the lip, Bram looked back.

He found Logan among the faces on the slope. He did not wave, and he did not nod. He only looked, and then he turned around again.

Logan felt Alice’s fingers close hard around his.

The three of them stepped onto the lip.

The Silver streamed around their knees and over the edge. Above their three dark heads, six small flames leaned forward and stretched out long and thin, the way Rishin had said they would. They pointed past the lip into the dark.

Then they were gone.

There was nothing over the dwarves at all. They stood in a row on the edge of the dark, three short broad shapes with the Silver pouring around their legs.

At first nothing happened.

It came up out of the Sink against the fall of the Silver.

It rose the way smoke rises when there is no wind, slowly and straight.

It was the color of the Silver and it seemed to be made of it, a tall pale mass with no clear edges, about the height of a house. The Silver poured past it and over the edge without bending.

Six small flames burned on it.

They were scattered over its front like windows in a tower. Under each flame, there was a face, as clear and real as a face seen across a table.

Logan could see them plainly. He saw an old woman with iron-grey braids, twice. He saw a heavy-bearded man, twice. He saw a young woman with soot-black braids, twice.

Every one of them was looking at the three on the lip.

Then the voices began.

They carried to the family as clearly as if they had been spoken at Logan’s shoulder. They were not loud. They had no need to be.

"Edda," said Bram’s voice. It was warm and worried. "Edda, love, come here. I cannot see you."

"Grandmother," said Edda’s voice, very young. "Grandmother, it is so cold."

"Bram," said Hulda’s voice, and it was gentler than Logan had ever heard it. "My boy. Put that down and come to me."

Behind Logan, Helen made a sound like somebody who had been struck. She turned Vina around by the shoulders and pressed her face into her coat.

"Do not watch this," she said.

Vina did not fight her. Logan heard her breathing hard against the cloth.

On the lip, the real Edda had taken a step forward.

Her face had gone smooth and calm. Logan had seen that look before, on a little girl walking toward the edge of a ledge.

Edda was walking toward a face that wore her father’s beard. She did not seem to know that her grandmother had her by the wrist.

Hulda set her heels. She hauled back and Edda stopped. Then Edda pulled again and took another step.

"Bram!" the old dwarf roared. "The candles! The candles are the lies!"

Bram swung.

His hammer took one of his mother’s faces square in the brow. The face burst like a bubble on the surface of milk, and its small flame leaped off the pale mass and flew straight back to him.

It stood over his head again, leaning toward the old woman beside him.

He swung again and broke one of his daughter’s faces, the one his mother’s candle wore. That flame flew to Hulda.

Then he came to the face of his daughter that was left, and his hammer stopped in the air.

"Papa," it said, in Edda’s voice. "Papa, it hurts. Please."

Bram’s arm shook. He did not bring it down.

The thing leaned.

It came down over the three of them the way a wave leans before it breaks. Its pale front opened, and the faces on it all turned toward Edda. The one with her father’s face smiled at her.

Edda pulled toward it, and this time Hulda’s heels slid.

Logan saw what the old woman decided. He saw it as plainly as he had ever seen anything.

Hulda let go of her axe. She took her granddaughter by the collar with both hands, and she turned and flung her across her body into Bram’s chest, as hard as a dwarf can throw a grown girl.

Bram caught her. The two of them went down together on the edge of the lip.

Hulda was still standing between them and the thing. It was already over her, and the throw had cost her the last of her footing. She took the one step forward that it had been waiting for.

She did not turn around to look at it. She looked at her son.

"Cut it," she said.

Then the pale front closed around her, and she was gone.

Logan’s hand had closed on Alice’s so hard that she gasped.

Edda screamed. It was her real voice this time, raw and furious, and the calm had gone out of her face as if it had been slapped away. She came up off the stone with a knife in each hand.

Bram came up beside her with the hammer.

They went into it together. They did not stop to listen anymore, and they did not stop to look.

The face of Bram that Edda’s candle had made broke under her knives, and its flame flew back to her. Her father’s other face, the one her grandmother’s candle wore, fell to them next.

Its flame came to neither of them. It went over the lip and down after the old woman.

Then the face of Edda that had called her father Papa burst under his hammer, and that flame came home to him. One by one, their lights came back over the two of them.

The thing grew smaller as they cut. It sagged as it shrank, and the Silver ran through it toward the edge. In the end there was only one face left on it, low down near the stone.

It was Hulda’s.

"Edda," it said. "Come here, my girl."

Edda stopped. Bram stepped past her and looked at it once. Then he brought the hammer down.

The last flame flew home.

The pale mass came apart like fog under a wind, and the Silver ran straight through the place where it had stood. There was nothing inside it.

There was no old woman lying on the stone. There was only the lip, and the fall beyond it, and the two of them standing on the edge with their weapons hanging from their hands.

Over each of their heads, two small flames burned in the clear air.

One of each pair leaned toward the other dwarf beside it. The other did not lean toward anybody on that slope.

It pointed down over the edge, into the Sink.

Edda looked up at it. Logan could see her face from where he stood, and he wished that he could not.

Bram put his arm around his daughter. He did not look back at the slope again. The ebb was running hard now, and the Silver took them both off the edge, and they went over it together and down into the dark.

The units stood along the slope like posts in a fence. The family stood among them.

The Silver went on running past their waists. Over the edge it poured in a smooth unbroken fall, as if nothing at all had happened there.

Garen swore, low and savage. It was a word Logan had never heard from him.

Vina had turned her head out of Helen’s coat. She had heard every voice, and she was looking at the edge with her eyes huge and dry.

"She let go of her axe," she said. "To hold on to Edda."

"Yes," said Rishin.

"And then it took her."

"Yes."

Vina’s hand went to the stone at her collar. She pressed it flat through the cloth, the way she had in Bide. Then she reached out with her other hand and took hold of the old man’s sleeve, and she held on to it.

Rishin did not look down at her. He was looking at Logan.

"Now you have seen it," he said.

Logan’s seven flames still leaned toward the edge. He looked at them, and at the lip, and at the place where an old woman had stood with her back to a thing that wore her face.

’She held on,’ he thought. ’She did exactly what she said she would. And it was the holding on that it wanted.’

"The next ebb is mine," he said.