Chapter 186: Clasp

Nessa drank the whole bowl. When it was empty, Helen set the bowl down on the stone and laid her free hand on Nessa’s shoulder. Nessa sat back with her eyes still shut.

"That was good," she said. "Tell whoever made it that it was good."

"Martha," said Logan. "She can hear you."

Out in the black, somebody gave a small, pleased hum.

Nessa opened her eyes. She looked at Helen kneeling beside her, and then down at the hand on her shoulder, and her mouth trembled and then steadied.

"Nobody has touched me," she said, "since he did."

Helen did not take her hand away.

Vina had been staring at the grey man the whole time. Now she held out her wrist.

"It touched me," she said. "Here. Grandpa pulled me back."

Nessa leaned close to look. She studied it closely, and when she sat back, her shoulders had dropped.

"Then he pulled you back in time," she said. "It is only a line. It will always be cold, but it will not grow."

"How do you know?"

"Because I have watched it grow on other people." Nessa’s thumb moved over the stone knuckles in her hands.

"If it touches you and nobody comes, it holds. Where it holds, you go grey, and the grey creeps. If somebody who loves you takes your hand before it reaches your heart, it stops where it is."

"And if nobody does?" asked Daniel.

Nessa looked at the man kneeling in front of her.

"I was three steps away," she said. "And it was dark."

Helen tried Mending Spring on the grey hand before they left.

Nobody asked her to. She simply laid her palm over the stone fingers, beside Nessa’s, and the green light ran out of her and into them. The green ran over the grey and off it like rain off a roof. The stone stayed stone.

Helen took her hand back. She looked at it as though it had failed her personally.

"Thank you," said Nessa gently. "Everybody who comes past tries a thing or two. It is kind of them."

"Come with us," said Alice. "We can carry you. We can carry him."

Nessa shook her head before Alice had finished.

"If I let go to be lifted, the light goes out between us," she said. "Then I do not know if it will come back. It came back the first time. I am not going to ask it twice."

Before they left, she told them the way.

"Downhill," she said. "Always downhill, along the ridges. A long walk from here, there is a light on a hill that is bigger than any light you have ever seen down here. That is Clasp."

"What is Clasp?" asked Garen.

"The ones who stopped." Nessa smiled. "Like me, only more of them, and better at it. They will feed you, and they will tell you about the bottom." The smile went. "Listen to what they tell you about the bottom."

Vina had nothing left to give. So she leaned out as far as Rishin’s hand would let her, and she laid her free palm over Nessa’s knuckles, beside the stone ones.

Nessa looked down at the three hands together. Her eyes were wet, and she let them be.

They walked on downhill.

Helen got up and found Garen’s hand again without looking for it. Then the next ridge was between them and the small glow.

Alice’s fingers were tight in his, and she did not loosen them on the next ridge or the one after.

They slept once more on the stone, tangled together with their hands locked. The units made their ring in the dark around them, and the thing in the dark went along it again while they slept.

Halden reported it in the same level voice. It had touched every one of them, and taken nothing, and gone.

[ Time remaining: 344 days ]

They saw Clasp a long way before they reached it.

At first it was only a brightness at the bottom of the dark, a little paler than the black around it. As they came down the ridges, it became a glow. Then it became a crown of gold set on a long low hill.

Vina stopped walking.

"Oh," she said.

It was the biggest light Logan had seen since the Silver. It was not one glow but hundreds.

They ran together around the brow of the hill in a ring so wide that its far side was a thin gold thread, and inside the ring the whole hilltop was lit as warm and plain as a room by a fire.

As they came up the slope, he understood what the ring was made of.

It was people.

They sat shoulder to shoulder all the way around the crest of the hill, facing outward into the dark. Every one of them was holding the hands of the people on either side.

Their light ran from one to the next without a break, a great wheel of gold with the black pressing on it from outside.

Inside the ring, people moved about freely. They walked alone. They carried things with both hands.

A man was chopping a pale root with an axe, and Logan watched him swing it two-handed and set it down and pick up the next, and the light lay on him the whole time.

"It is the ring," said Rishin. "A ring with no break in it holds everything inside it, so the light lies on all of it. They lit it so that the rest could let go."

The ring did not open for them. It could not.

Instead, two of the sitters on the crest above them lifted their joined hands high over their heads. They kept them locked together, the way children make an arch in a game. The gold ran along their arms and stayed unbroken.

The family ducked under it one at a time, still holding on to each other, and the units came after them in the dark. Hob had to go down on his knees to fit.

They were inside.

Behind Logan, Billy made a sound he had never heard from him before. The light lay on the units too, and Billy was turning in a slow circle on the stone with all six of his blades out.

"I can see them, boss," he said. "I can see my blades."

The light lay on everything. It lay on the black stone of the hilltop and on the people walking across it, and on a ring of carved stone at the very top of the hill.

Beside it, a black door stood in a low outcrop of rock, with an amber lantern burning beside it.

Rishin stopped just inside the ring. He looked down at Vina’s hand in his.

"You may let go here," he said. "Here only."

Vina did not let go at once. She looked at the light lying on her shoulders and her boots, and then at the dark beyond the sitters, and then she slowly opened her fingers.

The light stayed.

She stood in it by herself, in the middle of Clasp, and she held both her hands up in front of her face and turned them over.

"They are not grey," she said.

A woman came across the hilltop to meet them.

She was tall and heavy-set, with iron-grey hair cut short and a face like a closed fist. She walked with a long staff of black stone, and the sitters along the ring nodded to her as she passed them.

"Walkers," she said. Her voice was deep and flat. "And a great many of you. I am Tamsin. I keep the ring."

"Keep it?" asked Isolde.

"I say who sits beside whom, and when. A gap in the love is a gap in the ring." Tamsin looked along the family, and then at the units crowding in behind them. Hob was still getting up off his knees.

"Every one of these people gives the ring a sleep in every three. That is the price of Clasp. If you stay, you will pay it too."

"We are not staying," said Logan.

"Nobody ever is." Tamsin did not smile. "Come and eat."

They ate on the hilltop with both hands.

It was a strange, enormous relief. Logan held a bowl in one hand and a spoon in the other, and he found that his fingers ached from being laced through other fingers for two sleeps.

Alice sat beside him flexing hers, and she laughed when she saw him doing the same.

Tamsin sat with them. She had a bowl too and did not eat from it.

"Two dwarves came through," she said, before Logan could ask. "A man and his girl. They did not stay. They ate, and they asked about the bottom, and they went."

"Did they say anything?" Alice asked.

"The man asked me whether we had seen an old woman with grey braids." Tamsin turned her bowl in her hands.

"We had not. Then he asked whether anybody who was taken at the Sink ever came here. I told him what I tell everyone. Nobody knows where the taken go."

Rishin went on eating.

"Nessa told us to listen to what you say about the bottom," said Garen.

"Nessa." One corner of Tamsin’s mouth pulled in. "She is still there?"

"She is still there."

"Good." The keeper set her bowl down. "Then I will tell you, and you will listen, because Nessa does not send people to me for nothing."

She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees.

"At the bottom of this layer, there is a crack in the rock. A stair goes down it. It is the only way on." Tamsin set her two big hands on the stone a shoulder’s width apart.

"It is this wide. One person at a time. It turns so tight that the one behind you is always round the last corner, and there is no room to reach back past your shoulder."

Logan felt Alice go still beside him.

"So there is no light on it," said Helen.

"There is no light on it," Tamsin agreed. "And the dark knows that. Most of what waits in this layer for somebody to let go is waiting on that stair."

She looked around at all of them, one face at a time. She stopped at Vina, and she stayed there.

"Every walker who has gone down from Clasp has had to do the same thing at the end," the keeper said. "At the bottom of the Third Layer, everybody lets go."