Chapter 187: The Price of Clasp

Vina looked at the keeper after she had finished. Then she looked down at her two free hands.

"Everybody?" she said.

"Everybody," said Tamsin.

Vina put her hands behind her back, as if somebody might try to take them. Rishin set his bowl aside and moved his foot on the stone until it was against hers.

Logan looked at the gold lying over the hilltop. He looked at the men and women walking through it with full arms, and at the great wheel of sitters on the crest with their backs to the black.

’They built all this,’ he thought, ’so that they would never have to walk down that stair. And here we are, asking them how.’

"You said everyone gives the ring a sleep in three," Garen said. "We will pay it while we are here."

Tamsin looked from him to the crest, and back.

"You cannot," she said.

"We are not proud. We can sit on a hill."

"Anybody can sit on a hill." The keeper nodded toward the crest.

"Look at them. Every one of them is holding two hands, and every hand they hold loves them back. If one pair in that ring does not, the light breaks there, and the dark comes into Clasp through the gap."

She put her bowl down.

"Nobody here loves you yet," she said. "Not one person. Stay a year, and some of them might. Then you could sit."

Garen had no answer to that. Isolde put her hand on his knee.

"Then what can we give?" Helen asked.

Tamsin considered the question honestly. Her eyes went past the family to the units standing behind them in the light, and they stopped on Martha’s broad back and the pot hanging from her shoulder.

"What do you have that cooks?" she said.

They had three.

Martha and Winsmoke came forward at once. Garen whistled, and Baldrun Ironhearth stumped out of the crowd of units with a cleaver through his belt.

He had been arguing with Martha about salt since the rim, and he looked at the hilltop full of hungry strangers the way Billy looked at a pike.

"How many?" Baldrun asked.

"All of Clasp," said Garen.

Baldrun rubbed his hands together.

It took the rest of that waking. The three cooks set up in the lee of the black door, where the stone outcrop made a wall, and they sent for everything Clasp had.

Clasp had pale roots and dried fungus, and a kind of flat grey grain that grew in the cracks of the hilltop, where the light lay. The family’s storage rings had the rest.

Logan watched the people of Clasp come one by one to the fires. They came cautiously at first and then less so. He saw a woman cry over a bowl of Martha’s stew, and he did not know why, and he did not ask.

The sitters on the crest could not come. So the units carried it to them.

Billy rolled along the whole ring of sitters with a tray balanced on his rim, and he did not drop a single bowl. None of them had a hand free, so Wren went behind him and held each bowl to each mouth.

He told every one of them his name as he went. By the time he had gone round once, half the ring was calling it after him.

Vina found a friend by the second pot.

She was a girl about her height, with a pinched brown face and hair cut close to her head like the boy in Bide.

She had been staring at Vina since the family came under the arch of hands. When Vina finally walked over to her, she stopped staring and held out half a root.

Her name was Pell. Logan heard Vina ask it.

They sat together on the stone by the fire and ate, and talked about things that Logan could not hear.

Once Pell pointed at the grey line on Vina’s wrist, and Vina held it out to be looked at. Pell nodded gravely and pushed up her sleeve.

There was a grey mark on her arm too. It was the size of a thumbprint, and it was very old.

"She was little," Helen murmured beside him. "She let go of somebody when she was very little."

’And somebody came and got her,’ Logan thought. ’Before it reached anywhere that mattered.’

He looked around for whoever that somebody was, and could not tell.

The man who had walked the stair found them after the meal.

He did not walk. He was carried. Two men brought him across the hilltop in a chair made of poles and leather, and they set it down beside the family’s fire and stood back.

He was not old. His beard was still dark and his eyes were sharp. But from the hips down, he was grey stone.

His legs rested on the chair in front of him like two pieces of a statue that somebody had set there for safekeeping.

"Harl," Tamsin said. She had come with him. "He went down the stair, and he came back up it. He is the only one I know who has done that."

"Back up," said Harl. "Never to the bottom. I went eleven turns. Then I turned around."

He looked at the family, and at the child sitting by the fire with Pell.

"Tamsin says you are going down it," he said. "All of you. With her."

"Yes," said Logan.

"Then I will tell you what is in it."

He told them plainly. He had told it before, Logan thought, to a great many people who had gone down anyway.

"The stair is cut in the side of a crack," Harl said.

"It goes down in turns, tight as the inside of a shell. You cannot see the step in front of you. You go with one hand on the wall, and the wall is the only thing you have."

"And the dark?" asked Garen.

"The dark is in the walls." Harl put his hand flat on his grey thigh.

"There are hands in them. As soon as you are alone on that stair, they come out of the stone and take hold.

"They do not pull hard. They do not need to. They only hold on, and where they hold, you start to go grey."

"How fast?" said Alice.

"Walk it quickly, and you will reach the bottom grey to the knee. Walk it slowly, and you will not reach the bottom. Grey to the knee, you will still walk after, stiff as a man on stilts. Above the knee, you will not."

"I walked it slowly. I was frightened, and I stopped to fight the hands. By the eleventh turn I could not feel my feet."

"So you came back," said Daniel.

"My wife was still at the top, holding her brother’s hand." Harl’s mouth twisted.

"She had not gone in yet. I climbed back up eleven turns on two legs I could not feel, and when I came out, she took my hand. It stopped at my hips."

He looked down at the stone legs in front of him.

"Everything above my hips is still mine," he said. "I am told that I am lucky."

"And at the bottom?" Isolde asked. "What is at the bottom of it?"

"The people who went before you, if they are quick enough to be waiting," said Harl. "You come out at the bottom grey to the knee, and somebody who loves you takes your hand, and it stops."

He paused.

"That is why you go in a line," he said.

"As close together as the stair lets you. The first one down waits for the second. The second takes the first one’s hand, and they stop each other. Then the two of them wait for the third."

Logan saw the shape of it at once. He saw Alice see it too.

’Because he waits the longest,’ Logan thought. Rishin had said it in Bide, about the Sink. ’Grey and getting greyer, in the dark, until the second one comes out.’

"And the first one?" he said aloud. "The first one has nobody waiting."

"No," said Harl. "The first one has nobody. So you send the fastest first, and you send the second right on his heels."

He looked at the fire. Then he looked at Vina.

"And you put the slowest where somebody fast is in front of her," he said. "And somebody who will not let her stop is behind."

Alice found him beyond the cooks’ fires after Harl had been carried away.

She did not take his hand this time. She folded her arms and stood in front of him, and he knew from her face that she had worked it out before Harl finished.

"You are going to put yourself in front of her," she said.

"Yes."

"So you come out of that crack grey to the knee," Alice said. Her voice did not shake. "And then you stand there in the dark with your hand out for a girl with short legs."

"Somebody has to be in front of her."

"I know." She unfolded her arms. "And when you come out, somebody has to be standing there to find your hand. That is going to be me. Then the two of us wait for her together."

Logan opened his mouth to argue. She put her fingers over it.

"I am not asking," said Alice.

Nobody slept much in Clasp.

They lay down in the light inside the ring with their hands free. Logan found that he could not sleep with his hands empty.

In the end he reached over and took Alice’s, and she was awake. She laughed at him without a sound and held on.

Vina slept between Helen and Daniel with her marked wrist under her cheek. Pell had gone home to whoever was waiting for her.

Rishin did not sleep at all. Logan saw him sitting up near the black door with Stay across his knees, looking out past the sitters at the dark.

He was looking downhill, toward the stair.

[ Time remaining: 343 days ]