Chapter 5841: Clues! II

Noah sat down on the hunter’s frozen shoulder, closed his gold eyes, and let his Dream go wider.

It had already been resting over the region like a cloud. Now he opened it all the way. It poured out of him in slow blue-gold tides, rolling outward across the plain and over the city and down through the ice beneath it, and it did more than spread. It dreamed! Everything it touched began, very faintly, to dream with it, and everything that dreamed, Noah could read.

The Dreaming Human Origin saw, and more than saw. It understood!

Information came back to him in a flood!

|Your Dream has spread across the outer reaches of the Evergrave.|

|Beneath it: the Rim-City, the outermost land of THE Gaunt Regent. Night Lifeforms kept here: more than forty million. Among them, Root-holders: some six hundred thousand. The rest hold less than a Root. They are only remembered shapes, kept awake.|

|Immense Ones within your Dream: six. Five are Newly Risen, the heads of Night Provenance Lineages. One is Established: THE Gaunt Regent, a Night Lord, on its throne at the heart of the city.|

|Of the five Lineage heads, two serve the Regent directly. The Lineage of the First Flame, its head the Regent’s executioner, is already preparing to move toward you.|

|The Draining runs in nine hundred lines across the Rim-City. Each line is fed to the Regent. From the Regent, the warmth goes inward, toward the Heart.|

...!

He let it keep coming.

|Beneath the city: a hollow.|

|It is the skeleton of a First Lifeform, larger than the city above it, dead since before THE First Sundering. Its bones have been carved into tunnels.|

|Within the tunnels: two thousand three hundred of the kept, Root-holders all, weak and hidden. They steal warmth back from the Regent’s jars a drop at a time, and carry it to the dying. They call themselves the Lanterns.|

|Six hundred of them are dying.|

|At the heart of the tunnels: THE Ember-Keeper. An Established Immense One. Once the first helper of THE Caretaker of the Long Night. Its Immensity: Kindling. It is failing.|

|It carries a single coal. The coal is warm. Its source: the last fire lit by THE Caretaker of the Long Night.|

|The Lanterns have been following your army from below since the plain.|

...!

Noah’s eyes opened a crack.

The Caretaker’s last fire, carried by an Immense One who had once worked at her side?

He closed his eyes again and went deeper.

His Dream sank into the tunnels, past the hidden band of dead, into the place where they slept. The dead of the Evergrave slept differently from the living. But they dreamed. Every kept thing down here had been holding the same few memories for Ages, turning them over and over in the cold, and under his Dream, those memories lay open.

He read them!

He saw the Evergrave as it had been once: quiet, cold, safe. A place of rest. He saw a tall figure walking the frozen halls with a lantern, bending over the sleeping dead one by one, and he saw her lift the oldest of them, very gently, and carry them up a long stair of light and out of the Evergrave and back into life. In her other hand she held something small and bright that hummed against the grain of IT in his chest.

A Shard!

He saw her keep doing it after the sky above went wrong.

Then her steward. Gaunt, thin, quiet, carrying her keys, sweeping her halls, Age after Age. He saw it open a door one night for slender pale shapes with no faces. He saw the faceless ones take her, and the chains close, and her Shard fall from her hand and roll away across the ice, down and down, into the light at the center of the Evergrave.

And her last act before the chains closed: a small fire, lit on the floor of her hall, and a hand made of cracked black iron reaching into it to take one coal.

|Within your Dream, the dreams of those beneath it are open to you.|

|Read from the kept: the taking of THE Caretaker of the Long Night. The Faceless took her. Her steward opened the door. Her steward now sits on her throne.|

|THE Gaunt Regent.|

...!

Noah opened his eyes!

A Caretaker who sent the dead home; a part of existence that had wanted that stopped; a steward who had sold her for a throne.

A part of existence. He turned the words over. The Judgments that came for him had said much the same thing: a portion of existence objects. A portion, rather than the whole.

So existence had sent the dead home through her hands, and existence had chained her for it. Here it raged; here it had healed; and it judged him every time he grew.

Just how many faces did existence have? And how was all of it connected to the Long Night getting worse and worse?

He had learned more about the Evergrave in a few breaths than its dead could have told him in a year!

At this time.

The ice beside him split open!

Grey hands reached up out of the dark, thin and shaking, each one cupping a tiny warm light. They beckoned, rather than grabbing.

They didn’t try to attack, so Noah didn’t wipe them out even as his cloudy dreams rolled over them.

Noah left the Huntsman in charge of the army, and went down.

The tunnels were exactly as his Dream had shown him: the inside of something enormous, ribs for arches wider than city walls, vertebrae for stairs, long bones for floors worn smooth by Ages of frozen feet. The Lanterns who led him were hill-sized and thin and wrapped in rags, each one carrying a single drop of stolen warmth sealed in a bead of glass. They kept glancing back at him, afraid, and then at the warmth coming off him, and then quickly away.

They brought him to the chamber at the heart of the bones, lined with skulls, where six hundred dead lay dying on beds of bone and others moved among them, pressing one drop of warmth to each chest in trun.

At the far end sat the Immense One his Dream had found.

Vast even sitting down, a cloak of ash over a body of cracked black iron, a dim flame guttering in its chest. And in its two great hands, a small cage of bone holding a single coal.

Red.

The only red thing in the whole Evergrave.

The old Immense One straightened as far as its cracked body would let it, and its flame rose a little, as if gathering itself for something it had rehearsed for a very long time.

|"Warm one,"| it said. Its voice was a draft through a broken lantern. |"I am called the Ember-Keeper. Long ago, before the sky above went wrong, I kept the fires for the one who tended this place. The Caretaker of the Long Night."|

Its flame flickered.

|"You will not know her. Few above ever did. She kept the dead of every turning of existence in this place. Our Caretaker here. And when the time was right, she..."|

Noah lifted a hand, and waved it.

"She sent the dead home," he said. "She kept doing it after the path above broke. Then her steward opened her door for the Faceless. They chained her and took her down below the Heart. I know all of this..."

HUUM!

He shrugged.

"I know."

The chamber went silent!

Every Lantern stopped where it stood, glass beads frozen in their grey hands. On their beds of bone, the dying turned their faint faces toward him. The Ember-Keeper stayed perfectly still. Its flame went very low, then very high, so high that for a moment the whole chamber of skulls lit up red and gold.

|"No one should know that..."| it said slowly.

Its cracked iron head tilted, and the flame inside it searched him. |"How?"|

Noah said nothing.

The Ember-Keeper answered itself as it mumbled.

|"She told me once,"| the Ember-Keeper said, |"that existence is too vast for any of us to know. That it can be grand, and it can rage, and it can heal, and that its Weavings move as they will, and answer to no one. I have kept these fires through more Ages than I can count, and in all of them, I have never seen existence send anything down into the cold."|

Its flame shook.

|"Were you sent by the Weavings of Existence?"|

He looked at the old Immense One bowing to him, and at the Lanterns frozen around the chamber, and at six hundred dying dead staring at him from their beds as though a door had just opened in a wall they had been facing for Ages.

Him, sent by existence?

He considered correcting it. It would take one sentence.

But...nah!

So Noah smiled, very slightly, and said nothing at all.

He let it stand exactly where they had put it.

The Ember-Keeper’s flame burned brighter than it had in Ages!

Around the chamber, one by one, the Lanterns knelt. The dying on their beds pressed their glass beads to their chests and closed their eyes, and some of them were smiling.

|"Then you must know this,"| the Ember-Keeper said, its voice steadier now, as if it had found the ground under it again.

|"The Long Winter is a mission, but also an inescapable cycle. The Caretaker...was among those who wanted to guide its rage on those who needed to die. Those who wounded Existence the most. Others...dont want that. They want everything to burn. Existence has many faces and sides as right now, different sides seem to be fighting."|

...!

BOOM!