Chapter 181: The Ones Who Came Down

The two flames did not move.

Logan stood in the Silver with it up to his knees and watched them. They leaned up the white column toward the mouth in the roof, side by side, and they stayed exactly where they were.

The pool rose around him. It came up past his knees and over his belt. The column of Silver fell out of the dark overhead and spread without a sound, and still the two flames held their place.

’They are on the lip,’ he thought. ’They have been on the lip since the ebb began.’

He tried not to think about what they were looking at.

"Boss." Billy had rolled down the slope behind him until his rim was in the Silver. "How long does it take?"

"I do not know."

"How long did it take you?"

Logan tried to remember. He could remember every face, and every word each one had said. He could not remember how long any of it had lasted.

"I do not know that either," he said.

Billy thought about this, and then he rolled back up onto the shelf without another word.

Bram did not come down off the dry rock. He stood at the edge of it with his arms folded, a pace behind Logan’s shoulder.

"Ours felt like a dozen strokes," he said. "Edda says it was longer."

The pool went on rising. It came up to the edge of the shelf a hand’s width from the dwarf’s boots. Bram did not step back. He went on watching two candles that were not his.

Then they moved.

They did not drift. They swung, both together, and leaned straight up the column over his head. They were coming down the long white slide in the dark above him, and they were coming fast.

Logan was already wading out into the pool.

They came out of the column like stones dropped into a pond.

He saw the candles first, two rings of seven tumbling out of the white overhead and plunging into the Silver a stone’s throw from him.

Then he was beside them, in Silver to the chest, and he had Alice by the arm before she had found her feet.

She came up out of it fighting. Her bow was in her fist, and at first her eyes went past him as though he were one more face on a wall.

Then they found him.

"Logan," she said.

It was her voice, and it was not asking him for anything.

He pulled her against him and held on. Seven small flames burned over her head in the white, and one of them leaned straight down at him from a hand’s width away. He could feel her shaking all the way through.

"It asked me to come," she said into his collar. "You never ask. You just come."

His mother rose out of the pool an arm’s length away.

She did not fight. She stood up very slowly, with the Silver to her chest, and she looked at him.

Her face was white and set under her seven flames. She held her hands in front of her, open, as if they were wet and she could not wipe them clean.

"Mother," Logan said.

Helen looked at him a little longer. Then she reached out and touched his face with the tips of her fingers.

"I did yours," she said. "I want you to know that. Alice did most of them. But I did yours myself."

He did not know what to say to that. He covered her hand with his and held it against his cheek.

"It said you were hurt," Helen said. "It said it in exactly your voice. And I put a Spring Lance through its mouth."

Her face crumpled then, finally, and she put her forehead against his chest and cried.

They brought her up onto the shelf between them. Alice’s units came down the column after them and landed in the pool one after another.

The Thistlemaw came first, and then the flame-furred cat and the walking garden, and Maren with a bundle of bright-rock arrows held over her head.

Edda had come to the edge of the shelf. She looked at Helen, and at Alice, and she had the sense not to offer them words. She only held out a pale bead from Bide in her palm.

Helen took it, and ate it, and her hands stopped shaking.

"Which one?" Logan asked Alice under his voice.

"Which one what?"

"Which face was the hard one?"

Alice looked at him, and he thought she would not answer.

"Vina’s," she said. "It always was going to be Vina’s. Your mother walked toward it. I put her down on the stone and held her there with my knee, and I shot it before she could get up."

She leaned her head on his shoulder.

The Silver had reached the turn. The pool stopped rising, and the column gave out.

Bram picked up his hammer.

"We are going down," he said.

Logan looked up.

"Now?"

"Now." The dwarf jerked his chin at the dark stair.

"I watched your face when they came out of that column.

"I have been sitting at the top of this stair since before you came down, telling myself I am waiting for my legs. I am not. I am waiting for her to come back up it."

Edda came to stand beside him with her knives in her belt. Her knuckles were white on the hilts.

"She will not come up," Edda said. "So we go down."

Bram held out his hand, and Logan took it. The dwarf’s grip ground the bones of his hand together.

"Thank you for the food," Bram said. "And for the voices on the rock. And for not saying anything stupid to me in the white."

"I hardly said anything."

"That is what I meant." Bram let go. "If you find her before we do, tell her I cut it. Tell her I did what she said."

"I will."

They went down the stair together. Edda went first, because she was quicker on her feet. Bram went after her with the hammer.

Their two broad shapes went out of the glow of the Silver and into the dark below the shelf.

Logan heard their boots on the steps going down and down. Then the hiss of the turning flood began overhead, and he could not hear them anymore.

The Silver rose out of the cave and back up into the Sink.

The dark came down again. The family sat together on the shelf in Tinkerbell’s blue light, with Alice’s units along the wall beside Logan’s. Helen had fallen asleep against Alice almost as soon as the light went.

Alice did not sleep. She sat with Logan’s arm around her and looked up at the place where the Silver had gone.

"Mother and your father next," she said.

"I know."

"She will be faster than we were." Alice’s voice was steady. "She does not hesitate. She never has."

’She will be standing on that lip,’ Logan thought, ’with your face on that thing over her.’

He did not say it. He thought Alice was thinking it too.

[ Time remaining: 349 days ]

At the ebb, the column came down out of the roof and the Sump began to fill again.

This time three of them waded down into it together. Logan stood in the middle, and Alice was on his left, and his mother was on his right with her hand in his.

Their candles came up over their heads. Each of them had five flames leaning up into the falling Silver. Two of each five leaned close together toward the lip far above, and those two were Daniel and Isolde.

The two flames held still.

They held still while the pool rose to Logan’s chest. They held still while Alice’s breathing went short and careful beside him.

They held still while Helen’s hand closed tighter and tighter on his, until he lost the feeling in two of his fingers.

The column was thinning.

Logan felt the change in the Silver around him before he understood it. The fall out of the roof was lighter than it had been. The pool was rising more slowly.

The ebb was running out.

"Logan," his mother said. Her voice was very calm, and it frightened him more than if she had screamed. "The wrong end of an ebb."

"I know."

"If they are still on the lip when it turns..."

"Then it sinks, and it gives them their candles back, and the flood throws them off the lip." Logan made himself say it plainly. "They walk back up the slope, and they try again at the next ebb."

"Alone," said Helen. "The two of them, alone again."

"Yes."

The column thinned to a rope. Then the two flames dipped, and came plunging down toward him.

They came out of the white with the very last of the ebb.

Isolde came first, with Andrivida and her slender healer dropping into the pool behind her.

She hit the pool already moving and came up with her chakrams in her hands, burning with their pale light, and she turned at once and reached back into the falling thread of Silver.

Daniel came out into her grip.

She had him by the back of his coat. She hauled him out of the column, and the two of them went under the surface together and came up short of the shelf.

Helen let go of Logan’s hand. She was out in the pool before he could stop her, and then she had Daniel by both arms, and she was saying his name over and over.

"I am all right," Daniel said. His voice was hoarse. "I am all right, Helen. I stood still."

Isolde waded past them to the shelf. Alice met her at the edge of the Silver and put her arms around her mother’s neck. Isolde held on to her with her eyes shut.

When she let go, her lashes were wet.

"I took too long," she said. "Over you. I knew it was not you, and I still took too long."

Daniel told it on the shelf in the dark, after the flood had gone back up the Sink.

He told it the way he told everything, slowly and without decoration. He sat with Helen against his side and his rock on his knee, and his big hands turned the rock over while he talked.

"It called me in Helen’s voice," he said. "It said my feet were cold and I should come and warm them. And my legs wanted to go."

"What did you do?" asked Logan.

"I rooted them." Daniel shrugged.

"Snaring Roots. I put it on my legs, and it held them for three seconds, and then I put it on them again.

"I kept on doing that. And I stood still, the way Isolde told me to in Bide, and I let it come to me."

Isolde laughed. It was a short, startled sound in the dark.

"He tied himself to the lip," she said. "Every three seconds, for the whole of the time I was cutting. I have never seen anything so stubborn in my life."

"I cut one," said Daniel. "Only one. It had her face." He looked down at the rock in his hands. "I told it I knew where she was, and she was not there."

Helen put her face into his shoulder.

Logan sat back against the cold wall with Alice beside him. In the blue light of the fairy, he could see his whole family on that shelf except for three.

’One more ebb,’ he thought. ’Garen, and the old man, and Vina.’

He slept at last with Alice curled against his side.

[ Time remaining: 348 days ]