Chapter 185: Grey

They walked in one line behind the old man, with nobody’s hands empty.

The light went with them. It lay over the eight of them in a long gold pool, and it slid across the black stone a step ahead of Rishin’s bare feet.

Wherever it touched, the handprints rose out of the dark in their pairs. Ridge after ridge of them came up and fell away behind.

Beyond the light there was nothing. A step past the old man’s toes the black began, and none of them could see the ground there until Rishin walked into it.

The units came behind them in the dark. Logan could hear them more than anything else. He heard Hob’s slow hooves and the creak of Terry’s plates, and Billy’s rim grinding on the stone a pace behind his heel.

"Boss," said Billy, very low. "I cannot see my blades again."

"Keep touching Terry."

"I am touching Terry. Terry is touching Halden. Halden says he is touching the fairy, but the fairy does not count." A pause.

"Pebble says every one of us can feel his cairns. That is the only reason nobody has rolled off the edge of anything yet."

"Is there an edge?"

"Boss." Billy’s voice was full of dignity. "How would I know?"

Vina walked at the front with her right hand in Rishin’s left and her marked left wrist tucked against her chest.

Logan could see the mark on her wrist whenever she lifted it. It was a thin grey line across the skin, no wider than a thread.

Helen had put Mending Spring on it twice already. The green light had sunk into it and done nothing that any of them could see.

"Does it hurt?" Logan asked her.

"No." Vina turned her wrist over and looked at it. "It is cold. It is cold like when you hold a stone in your hand until it is warm and then put it down, and your hand is still cold where it was."

Rishin’s grip on her tightened. He did not look down.

"It will not grow," the old man said. "It only touched you. It did not have time to hold."

’He knows what holding does,’ Logan thought. ’He knows, and he has not told us.’

He did not ask. He thought the layer would tell them soon enough.

They stopped to eat when Helen said that her legs were done.

It was strange to eat on that layer. They broke the line into pairs to do it, which was as far as Rishin would allow.

Logan kept Alice, Rishin kept Vina, Garen kept Isolde and Helen kept Daniel. Each of them had one hand left, so every bowl was held by one of a pair and eaten from by both.

Martha found them by their light. They never saw her. A pot scraped across the stone out of the black and came to rest in the gold beside Alice’s knee.

Logan held the bowl. Alice fed him and then herself, one spoonful each, and at one point she laughed so hard that she nearly let go.

She did not let go.

When they slept, they slept in their pairs, in a heap. They lay down with their hands still locked, and Logan found that the light did not go out when they shut their eyes.

It burned on, soft and low, as long as their fingers were laced.

The units made a ring around them in the dark. Every one of them had a hand or a hoof or a rim against the one beside it.

[ Time remaining: 345 days ]

Halden woke him.

"Lord," said the voice from his collar. It was pitched very low. "A thing has been touching us."

Logan came awake all at once. The light was still there, gold and steady. The family still lay tangled together inside it.

"Who?"

"All of us, Lord. Down the whole ring. It came in out of the dark and went along us one by one, like a hand along a fence."

Halden paused. "It touched my gauntlet and my helm. It touched Terry’s back. It went across Billy’s rim, and Billy has asked me to tell you he was very brave."

"Did it hurt anyone?"

"No, Lord. It did not stop on any of us. It only went past." Another pause. "Pebble says it felt like somebody looking for a thing they had lost, and finding only furniture."

Logan lay there with his heart going hard.

’It came right up to the edge of the light,’ he thought. ’It went all the way around us, looking. And it did not want them. They have no one to let go of.’

They found the first statue on the next stretch of ridges.

The edge of the light slid onto a grey boot. Rishin stopped so suddenly that Logan walked into his back. Then he took three slow steps forward, and the light climbed the rest of it.

It was a man.

He was standing on the top of a ridge, half turned away from them, with his right arm stretched out in front of him and his fingers spread.

He was the grey of old ash from his boots to his hair. His coat was grey, and the pack on his back was grey, and his face was grey and smooth and perfectly still.

It was not carved. Logan could see the stitching on the coat, and a tear in one sleeve, and the fine lines at the corners of the man’s eyes.

His outstretched hand was reaching for nothing at all.

"He let go," said Daniel.

"Or the dark took hold of him first," said Rishin.

Nobody wanted to go near it. They went near it anyway, because the ridge ran that way and there was no other way to go.

Vina stared at the statue as they passed it. Then she looked down at the grey line on her wrist, and she looked up at Rishin.

"That is what it does," she said. "When it holds."

"Yes."

"Is he dead?"

The old man did not answer her at once. He walked them past the statue and down the far side of the ridge, and he did not let any of them stop.

"I do not know, little one," he said at last. "Nobody does."

Logan looked back once, over his shoulder. The gold light slid off the grey man as they went down the slope, and the black closed over him, and he was gone.

After that they saw more of them.

There was a woman sitting on a ridge with her knees drawn up and her arms around them. There were two figures lying a little apart, with their hands reaching toward each other across a gap no wider than a finger. There was a child.

Rishin drew Vina in against his hip by the hand he held, and he turned her face into his coat before they reached that one.

Another light sat across a wide shallow hollow.

It was very faint. Logan thought at first that it was another pair of walkers, like Bram and Edda. But it did not move. It sat in one place on the slope ahead of them, a small gold glow no larger than a cupped hand.

They walked toward it across the whole of the hollow, and it did not grow much. When they reached it at last, Logan understood why.

It was two people. One of them was a woman.

She was sitting on the black stone with her legs folded under her. Below the knee, both of them were grey stone. She was so thin that her coat hung on her like a sack on a post.

Her hair had gone white and grown long and wild, and it lay over her shoulders in a tangle.

Both her hands were wrapped around the hand of a grey man.

He was kneeling in front of her, stone to the last hair on his head. He was reaching out to her. She had his hand.

Between their fingers, where her living hand met his grey one, there was a glow of gold no bigger than a candle flame.

The woman lifted her head when their light reached her.

Her eyes were sunk deep in her face. She looked at the family without speaking, at the old man and the girl at the front and the long line of joined hands behind them.

Then she smiled, and the deep lines around her eyes turned upward.

"Oh," she said. Her voice was cracked and dry. "Oh, look at you all. Look at how many of you there are."

Rishin stopped at the edge of her light. He went down on one knee, slowly, still holding Logan’s hand and Vina’s.

"How long have you sat here?" he asked her.

"I do not know." She looked down at the grey hand between hers.

"Since before my year ran out. Since before that. He let go to pick up our pack, and he was only three steps away. I heard it get him. Then it got me, while I crawled to him."

"I found his hand in the dark," she said. "When I took it, the light came back, and the grey on me stopped at my knees."

She stroked the stone fingers with her thumb.

"So he is still in there," she said. "The light says so. It only comes for two who love each other. If he were gone, it would not come."

Helen bowed her head against Daniel’s shoulder.

The tiny gold glow between her hand and the grey one burned on, steady and small.

"What is your name?" Alice asked her.

"Nessa." The woman smiled again. "This is Corwin. He is not very talkative these days."

Helen made a sound in her throat. Then she let go of Garen’s hand and went down on her knees beside the woman, with her other hand still in Daniel’s. Her light came with her, and Nessa flinched at the brightness of it.

"Have you eaten?" Helen asked.

"Sometimes people pass," said Nessa. "They leave things."

A bowl slid out of the dark across the stone, and Helen caught it.

She held it to the woman’s mouth, and Nessa drank from it with her eyes shut. She did not let go of Corwin’s hand.

Logan watched her drink, and he thought about the grey line on his sister’s wrist.

’Three steps,’ he thought. ’He was three steps away from her.’