Chapter 639: The Ninth Spire

There was no bridge to the Ninth Spire. There was a stair.

It began at the foot of the seventh stack, the tallest, and went up inside the rock in a spiral so tight that Vane could have touched both walls at once. There were no lamps. Every thirty steps or so a slot had been cut through the stone to the outside, and the wind came in through each one as he passed it, cold and salt and steady, and pushed him gently upward, as if the stair itself wanted him at the top.

He stopped counting at a thousand.

When he came out, the sun was just clearing the cape to the east, and he was standing in a round room at the very top of the Palace with no walls at all. There were only pillars, eight of them, and between the pillars the open sky. Below him the whole of Aelstrom lay spread across its seven stacks, and beyond it the Abyss, grey and endless in the morning light.

In the middle of the room sat a woman at a loom.

It was a tall frame of pale wood, and there was no thread on it that Vane could see. Her hands moved across it anyway, slowly, crossing and recrossing, and wherever they passed the air shivered and bent, as if she were weaving the wind itself into a cloth too fine for eyes.

She did not look up.

"You’re early," she said. It was the voice from the Hall of Wind, very old and very quiet. "Most people stop to rest at the six hundredth step. Sit down before you fall down."

There was a stool beside the loom. He sat.

Up close she was small, smaller than Mara, and so old that her face had gone past wrinkles into something finer, like paper that has been folded and unfolded a great many times. Her hair was white and very long, bound back in a plain cord. And her eyes, when she finally turned them on him, did not match. One was a clear emerald green. The other was a deep scarlet.

He had seen eyes like that every day for four years.

He reached for the Usurper out of habit.

The read came back the way it always came back for people like her, the way it had for Isadora and Evangeline and Ryuken: the rank flickering and dissolving as the framework tried to count something it had no numbers for.

[Authority: Loom of the Winds (SSS)]

[Danger: Error]

"Don’t," she said mildly. "It’s rude, and it only tells you what you’ve already guessed. And you’ll get a headache."

He let it go.

"Thank you." She went back to her loom. "You’re Vane. Of Oakhaven. You beat Ormond on a road, which I’m glad of, because I never liked him, and you told a valley your name, which I’m gladder of, because nobody has done anything that stupid in this part of the world in a very long time." She crossed a strand of nothing over another strand of nothing. "And you came to my gate with a hundred and ninety-one children and told my Stewards no."

"Yes."

"Good. They need telling. They’ve become accountants, and that’s my fault. I asked them to be careful."

The wind moved through the room. It moved through him too, he realized: through his coat and his skin and his channels, lightly, without asking, the way Nyx’s Dreamscape moved when she wanted to know where everything was. He felt it pass over the place where five Authorities ran together now in a single current, and stop there for a moment, curious.

"Interesting," said Thessaly. "Five people’s ways of fighting, all wearing one coat. And they all like each other." She sounded faintly amused. "That’s very rare. Usually they fight."

"They don’t fight."

"No. I can see that." Her hands slowed on the loom. "How old do you think I am?"

He thought about it.

"Older than Zenith," he said.

For the first time she looked at him with real interest.

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody. You built the first tower here, and Aelstrom’s older than most things in the west." He watched her face. "And you said careful the way Ryuken says it. Like someone who’s watched a lot of people not be."

Thessaly was quiet for a while.

"I sat at the table," she said at last, "when they built Zenith. Three hundred and eleven years ago. A scale had come up from the deep the year before, bigger than any ship. The Empire and the Kingdoms and the Palaces and the Church, all in one room, for the first and only time. We knew what it meant. So we agreed to put every gifted child in the world on one rock in the sky, and teach them together, so that when the sea came there’d be a generation strong enough to stand on the shore." Her hands had stopped moving altogether. "We called it the Accord. Eleven years later, the sea came. And they stood. And it went back down."

"And then?"

"And then we did what people always do," Thessaly said. "We forgot why we’d been frightened. The Empire wrote its statutes. The Kingdoms went back to their wars. The Palaces went back to their towers, and I went up mine." She looked out at the grey water. "There’s a story about the Unbound in there too, but it isn’t a story for a first meeting. Ask me another day."

"The scale’s come up again," Vane said.

"I know. And the ice is breaking in the north. And the Emperor of Aurelia has gone down to the coast with a harpoon, because he thinks it’s a fish." She turned back to him. "He won’t come to a table. He doesn’t need anyone, and he’s right, he doesn’t. But everyone else does. And none of the Palaces will come to a table because I asked. I’ve been asking for forty years."

He began to understand.

"You want me to ask them."

"I want you to carry my letter. North first, to the Glacial Palace. Isadora won’t listen to me, but she’ll listen to her son, and her son, I’m told, has been writing to you." She smiled very slightly. "Then the others. You owe none of them anything. You’re not a prince, or an heir, or a Palace’s creature. You’re the boy who stood on a road. They’ll open the door just to look at you."

"And the children?"

"Stay here. All of them. As guests of the Ninth Spire, not the Stewards. For as long as it takes." Her silver eyes were steady. "That’s my offer. It’s a good one. I’d take it."

He thought about Steward Cale, and the clear glass at his throat, and a cooper in a yard asking and if they won’t keep him?

"Taught," Vane said. "All of them. Not just the nineteen."

Thessaly laughed. It was a surprisingly young sound.

"Taught," she agreed. "All of them. Your Sol girl can write the terms. She’ll enjoy it."

He stood. At the top of the stair he stopped and looked back. She had already returned to the loom, her hands crossing the empty frame.

"The girl," Thessaly said, without looking up. "The one my envoy’s glass couldn’t see."

Vane went still.

"I’ve seen that once before," she said. "A long time ago. I didn’t understand it then either." Her hands kept moving. "Keep her close. That’s all. Go north. Isadora is setting a place at the table, I hear."

In a city built on the wind, he suspected, everything was heard eventually.