Chapter 232 The Listening Ring

The queen went down on Day 661.

She'd been at the garden wall for thirty-nine days. Since the night before Dory was born. She hadn't gone back to her chamber once. She'd eaten what the attendants brought her, slept with her head on the stones, and lifted it every time Dory woke, so that the first thing Dory's check found every morning, after Risa and me, was the great warm weight of the queen just beyond the garden.

Then, on the morning of Day 661, she told me she had to go.

It is time, she said. The old one says so.

The mountain queen had been teaching her. For months, since before the Accord. I'd known that. Every night, after the dawn count, the two of them talked through the long thread under the world, the old queen and the young one, in a part of the brood-speech that I couldn't follow and Dot couldn't translate. Dot said it was like listening to someone recite a family tree in a language made entirely of verbs.

Time for what? I said.

To grow, said the queen.

She'd grown before. Twice, since I'd known her. The first time, after the Teeming stopped coming over the canyon rim, she'd gone down into the deep for nine days and come back larger, with new plates on her back and a voice I could hear without touching the ground. The second time, after the mountain, she'd gone down for fourteen and come back able to speak to the mountain queen without anyone in between.

How long this time?

I do not know, she said. Longer. The old one says it is the last of the small growings. After this, I will be what she is. A pause. Or the beginning of it.

What is she?

A queen who can hear the whole of the world, said our queen. If the world will speak.

Dory didn't like it.

She was five and a half weeks old. She could hold her head up, and turn it toward a voice, and follow Pebble across the porch with her eyes, and she checked on everyone she knew every four minutes, day and night. And one of the things she checked on, every four minutes, was the queen.

When the queen lifted her head from the wall that morning and turned it away, toward the meeting passage, toward the deep, Dory's check found her moving.

And went with her.

Down the agreed path. Through the meeting passage. Into the courts. Down. Further. I felt the thread stretch, the way it had stretched south to the old queen past the river. Thinner. Fainter.

Then, at the very bottom of the deep, the queen did something to it.

Not cut it. She'd never have cut it. But she folded it. Gently. Wrapped it round itself, the way you'd fold a letter, so it was still there but smaller. Quieter.

Dory's silver came back up to the house very fast.

And she cried. Properly. A real, furious, betrayed newborn wail that rattled the windows and brought Sera out of the bedroom at a run.

"What happened? What's wrong?"

"The queen's gone down," I said.

"Down down?"

"Down down."

Sera looked at Dory, red-faced and screaming in Risa's arms, and then at me.

"How long?"

"She doesn't know."

Sera took a breath.

"Right," she said. "Give her here."

It was Pebble who fixed it.

Not that day. That day, Dory cried on and off until dusk, and Sera walked up and down the porch with her, and Toby played every slow song he knew, and nothing helped for more than an hour. She'd stop. She'd check. She'd find the place where the queen should have been, the great warm weight just beyond the garden, and find the folded letter instead.

And start again.

But the next morning, the young came up the agreed path the way they always did. And Pebble, at the front, stopped at the bottom of the porch steps.

He didn't climb up.

He turned round and sat down, very deliberately, with his back to the house and his flat head facing the meeting passage. Facing the deep. The way the queen had faced, all those weeks, with her head on the wall.

And he hummed.

Not his own hum. The low chirring the young made when they were content. Something lower. Slower. Five notes.

Low, and lower, and a step up, and two steps down.

The hollow-song.

The young didn't sing it. Not usually. It was the queen's. But Pebble sang it, sitting at the bottom of our porch steps with his back to us, as well as a young Teeming could, which was not very well. He got the third note wrong every time.

Dory stopped crying.

She lay in Risa's arms and listened. And then, after a while, very faintly, her silver began to hum too.

The same five notes.

She got the third one right.

The queen was gone for fourteen days.

Pebble came every morning. Other young came with him, after the first few days, and sat in a row at the bottom of the steps, facing the deep, and hummed. Badly. And Dory hummed with them. Correctly. And after a while, Dot reported, the young had started getting the third note right.

"She is teaching them," Dot said. "This unit does not believe she means to. But she is."

"She's five weeks old," said Sera.

"This unit is aware."

On the fifth day, Dory reached for the folded thread again. Gently. Carefully. The way you'd touch a letter you weren't sure you were allowed to open.

It didn't unfold.

But it hummed back.

After that she didn't cry.

While the queen was gone, Luna wrote a treaty.

She'd been thinking about it for weeks. Since the quiet stones went south. Since Lantern's soldiers tore down the relay. Since every brood that kept a stone began to sing back up at the station, and every queen who sang could suddenly hear the others.

"They're talking," she said, at the kitchen table, on the third night. "All of them. Not just ours and the mountain and the four from the Accord. The queens in the south. The old one at the bowl. The ones past the river who'd never heard of us a month ago. They're talking to each other through the stones."

"About what?"

"Everything." Luna had her notebook open. "Where the voice is strongest. Where the relays are. Which broods have been driven, and where. Which human places they've passed and what they saw there." She tapped the page. "They're listening, Lucas. All of them. All over Avalon. And they're telling each other what they hear."

"That's good."

"It's very good," said Luna. "And it'll fall apart the first time two queens disagree about something. Because there's nothing holding it together except the stones and good manners."

She turned the notebook round.

At the top of the page, in her small exact hand:

The Listening Ring.

Underneath, eleven lines. Short. Plain. The way she transcribed the accord's terms, the night the General came, as he spoke them.

Any queen may join.

Any queen may leave, at any time, for any reason, without giving one.

What a queen hears, she may share or keep.

What is shared is shared with all.

No queen commands another.

No queen speaks for another.

No brood shall be driven by the ring.

The stones belong to the broods that carry them.

Humans may listen, if the ring agrees.

Humans may speak, if the ring asks.

Anyone who leaves may come back.

I read it twice.

"That last one," I said.

"Is the most important," said Luna. "Yes."

She asked me to take it to the mountain queen.

Not our queen. Our queen was in the deep, growing. But the mountain queen was awake, and listening, and older than any of them except the Spire. If the mountain queen thought it was right, the others would at least consider it.

So I sat at the wall, where our queen's head should have been, and put my hands on the stones, and reached through the folded thread to the mountain.

She was there.

You have something, she said.

I read it to her. All eleven lines. Slowly. Translating as I went, with Dot beside me catching the words I didn't have.

When I'd finished, the mountain queen was quiet for a long time.

Who wrote this? she said.

Luna.

The forager's daughter.

Yes.

She writes like a queen, said the mountain queen. Few words. Each one carrying weight. A pause. The last line. Anyone who leaves may come back. Why is that there?

I thought about it.

Because the General left, I said. And she wrote expected back.

The mountain queen hummed. Low and long.

Tell her, she said, that I will carry this to the others. And that I will be the first to put my name to it.

Fourteen queens signed.

Not signed. Queens didn't sign. But each of them, one by one, over nine days, sent a pattern through the stones that Dot said meant I am in this, and Luna wrote each one down in her notebook, with the day and the hour.

The mountain queen, first. Then Lantern. Then the Hollow, and First Garden, and the Spire, who took four days to decide and then said yes in a single dry word.

Then the old queen at the bowl.

Dory gave her a name, in the end. Not on purpose. But whenever her check reached the old queen, through the long line of stones, it called her by a brood-word Dot finally translated as the one who waited by the bowl. So we called her the Bowl Queen, and she didn't seem to mind.

Then eight more. Queens I'd never met. Queens I'd never heard of until the stones reached them. A brood in the river delta, far to the south-west, that lived half underwater. A brood in the white mountains where Toby had first landed, that Juno had felt every morning for eighteen months and never known. A brood in the eastern jungle, the nearest to the dead space, whose queen was very young and very frightened and asked three times whether she could really leave if she wanted to.

Yes, Luna said, through me. Any time. For any reason. Without giving one.

And come back?

And come back.

The young queen in the jungle was quiet for a day.

Then she said, I am in this.

Fourteen.

Luna wrote the last one down, and closed the notebook, and sat for a long time with her hand flat on the cover.

"My father," she said quietly, "spent thirty years trying to get four generals to agree on anything."

The first report the ring sent us wasn't about the Sorn.

It was about Port Ash.

Lantern sent it, on Day 671, through the mountain and into the stones at our garden wall, where the queen's head should have been. Dot took it down word by word.

Humans in the forest, Lantern said. Sixty-one. Walking north. Tired. Some carried. They came out of the red scrub four days ago, running from the broods the voice was driving. The broods have stopped now. They have stones. But the humans do not know that. They are still running.

Wren was at the gate before Dot had finished. She had the list.

"Port Ash," she said. "Approx. sixty. They asked if we were taking people."

What do they want? Lantern asked. Shall we let them pass?

Luna looked at me.

I thought about the first time the Teeming came over the canyon rim, and what I'd done to the first wave of them. I thought about Bryn Tolley in the caves, waiting to die. About sixty people walking through a forest full of something they'd been running from for two years.

Don't let them see you, I said. Not yet. They'll run harder. But walk beside them. Out of sight. Keep the other things in the forest away. Show them where the water is, if you can do it without being seen.

Lantern was quiet for a while.

We will shepherd them, she said. The way we shepherd young who have wandered from the hollow. They will not know.

Thank you.

It is not a kindness, said Lantern. They are small and lost. That is what we do.

Keir and Aster flew down for them two days later, with Sera and Juno and the long transport hold full of water and blankets. They found them at the edge of the forest, exactly where Lantern said, sitting in a clearing beside a spring that hadn't been on any map.

Sera told me afterward that the leader of Port Ash, a grey-haired woman named Odile Marr, met them with a rifle and a face like a locked door.

Then she asked a question.

"Somebody's been watching us," she said. "The whole way. Something big. We heard it in the trees at night. It never came close. It never hurt anyone. And every time we were lost, we'd find water." She lowered the rifle. "What is it?"

Sera said she didn't know how to answer. So she told the truth.

Odile Marr sat down very suddenly on the ground and didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she said, "Can I thank it?"

Wren wrote sixty-one names in the book that evening, under Port Ash, and crossed out approx.

Sera came to find me in the forge on the twelfth night, while I was cutting faces.

She didn't say anything at first. She sat on the bench beside me and picked up a finished stone and turned it in her fingers, listening to it, the way Holt did. She couldn't hear the tuning. But she liked the feel of it.

"Edda says it's too early," she said at last.

I stopped cutting.

"To tell," Sera said. She didn't look at me. "She says I'll know in a few weeks. Either way." She turned the stone over. "I asked her if she could tell any faster. She said I wasn't Risa, and she wasn't going to start guessing." A small, crooked smile. "I think she meant it as a compliment."

I put the half-cut stone down.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm impatient," said Sera. "That's all. I've decided a thing, and I want it to be done." She put the stone back on the bench. "I'm not good at waiting. You know that. I'm the one who walks into the fire first."

"I know."

"Luna's good at waiting."

"Luna waited eighteen months for me to notice her."

"Day 431," said Sera. "She wrote it down."

She leaned her head on my shoulder.

We sat there for a while, in the warm light of the forge, with two hundred quiet stones on the shelves around us, humming very faintly to themselves in the dark.

"A few weeks," Sera said.

"A few weeks."

"Fine," said Sera. "I'll tune stones."

She couldn't tune stones. But she sat with me until three, holding them, while I cut.

Our queen came up on Day 675.

I felt her coming hours before she arrived. A great slow rising through the deep, through the rock, through the long tunnels toward the courts. Bigger than before. Much bigger. Not just in size. In weight. In the way she pressed on the world around her.

Dory felt her too.

She was awake in Risa's arms on the porch, humming the hollow-song with Pebble and the row of young at the bottom of the steps. And the moment the queen began to rise, Dory stopped humming.

And her check went down. Through the folded thread.

And the thread unfolded.

I felt it happen. The letter opening. The thin bright line between Dory and the queen spreading out again, wide and warm, the way it had been before. And through it, very clearly, the queen's voice.

Small one. There you are.

Dory laughed.

Out loud. A real laugh. Her first. A small, startled, delighted sound, like a hiccup with joy in it.

Risa nearly dropped her.

The queen came out of the meeting passage at noon.

Half the city was there. They'd heard. Everyone heard everything in Scarecrow. They stood in the square and along the agreed path and on the porches, and watched her come up out of the dark.

She was enormous.

She'd always been big. Big enough that her head alone was larger than a cart. But she'd been our size, in a way. Something you could stand beside. Something you could put your hand on.

Now she filled the passage.

Her plates had changed. They were darker, and harder, and across them, very faint, ran a pattern I'd never seen before. Fine lines, branching, like frost on a window. Like the lattice I'd seen inside Dory. Not the same. But like it.

She came up the agreed path very slowly, so as not to crack the paving. She stopped at the garden wall.

And lowered her head onto it.

Exactly where it had been.

I am back, she said.

How do you feel?

The queen was quiet for a moment.

Loud, she said.

She could hear the whole of Avalon.

Not all at once. Not clearly. She said it was like standing at the top of the mountain on a clear day and seeing the whole land laid out below, every forest and river and plain, but too far to see any single tree. But she could hear every queen in the ring. Every brood that carried a stone. Every place where the voice pressed down.

And every place where it didn't.

There are gaps, she said, on the first night, with my hands on her head. In the voice. Places where it does not reach. Places where it reaches too strongly. And places where it is not coming from the sky at all.

The relays.

The relays, said the queen. Lantern found one. The ring has found eleven more. Most are like Lantern's. Small. Alone. On legs, in clearings. The broods near them are tearing them down. A pause. But three are not like that.

What are they like?

Deep, said the queen. Large. Buried. With many voices in them, not one. And something living.

Holt wanted it on paper.

Of course he did. Holt didn't trust anything he couldn't put his finger on. He took the great survey map of Avalon off the wall of the map room, the one with Scarecrow at the top and the great river across the middle and a great deal of nothing below it, and he spread it on the table and weighted the corners with Toby's failed stones.

Then he and Luna sat down and filled it in.

It took them three days.

The queen told me what the ring heard. I told Luna. Luna translated it into distances and directions and wrote it down. Holt drew it. Juno sat at the end of the table with her eyes closed and her head turning, slowly, from point to point, and said yes or no or further east or that one's wrong, it's on the other side of the ridge.

By the end of the third day, the nothing was full.

Fourteen queens, each in her hollow, each marked with a small circle and her name, in Luna's hand. The Bowl Queen in the dry valleys. The river delta. The white mountains. The jungle. All of them joined by a thin red line, Holt's red, that he said was the ring.

Every brood that carried a stone. Little dots. Hundreds of them.

Every relay the ring had found. Eleven small crosses, most of them crossed out again where the broods had torn them down.

And three larger marks.

Holt drew them last. In black. Heavily.

One in the far west, past the ice, on a chain of islands no human had ever seen.

One under the river delta, deep in the mud, where the half-underwater brood said the water tasted wrong.

And one in the east.

Past the jungle. Past where Sigmund had held his wall. In the middle of a dead space where no brood lived and no queen had ever been.

Juno's three.

Holt put the pen down and looked at it for a long time.

"There," he said. "That's where they are."

Holt hung the map that night.

Not on the wall where it had been. Over his table. On two hooks he had Gareth put into the ceiling, so that it hung flat above the table like a canopy, and you could sit underneath it and look up and see the whole of Avalon over your head.

"So nobody forgets it's there," he said.

"Nobody's going to forget," said Luna.

"People forget everything," said Holt. "That's what maps are for."

He sat down underneath it with his stick across his knees and looked up at the three black marks.

I sat beside him.

""Longer than any of you," Holt said quietly. "I've been on this planet longer than any of you. And I didn't know there was a relay in the east. I didn't know there were queens in the delta. I didn't know a damned thing about any of it, except that the Teeming came over the hill at night and the kits fell and Command sent more children." He looked at the red line. "Fourteen queens. Fourteen. Talking to each other. Telling us what they hear." He shook his head. "Hal would have given his right arm for this. Crane would have given both."

"Crane's got the station," I said.

"Crane's got a station and a voice and some grey boxes on legs," said Holt. "We've got this." He pointed up at the map. "He can make them walk. We can hear them talk. That's not the same thing."

Dot woke me at three in the morning on Day 679.

Not in the quiet room. In the bedroom. She'd rolled all the way through the house, scraping her lamps on every doorframe, and stopped beside the bed with her lamps turned down as low as they'd go, so as not to wake Sera.

Sera woke anyway. Sera always woke.

"Dask," Dot said. "Please come to the listening room."

"What is it?"

"The queen has heard something," Dot said. "And this unit has confirmed it. This unit would prefer to show you."

The listening room was dark. Toby was there, in his nightshirt, with his hair standing on end. Holt was on the stairs. Luna came down behind me, pulling on her coat.

Dot had every instrument she owned pointed at the flat south wall.

"At one in the morning," Dot said, "the queen told this unit through Toby that the ring had heard a silence."

"A silence?"

"In the sky. High. Very high. Higher than the station, much higher. A place where the voice goes round." Dot's lamps flickered. "The voice comes down from the station. But it does not only come down. It also goes up. Some of it. Very faint. Reflecting off the sky. The ring can hear it when it comes back." A pause. "Tonight, there is a place where it does not come back. A place where it goes in and stops. As if something very large is swallowing it."

"So Dot looked," said Toby.

"This unit looked," said Dot. "With everything."

She put it on the wall.

It was the sky. The night sky over the canyon, the way Dot saw it through the third wave's best lens, with the station a small bright spark moving slowly across the bottom of the frame. Stars behind it. Thousands of them.

And in the middle of the stars, high up, a patch where there weren't any.

A shape.

Long. Dark. No lights. Nothing. Just a place where the stars stopped, and started again on the other side. Like a hole cut out of the sky.

"This unit has measured it," Dot said, very quietly. "Against the stars it covers. Against the station's known size."

"How big?" said Luna.

Dot's lamps went almost dark.

"Ten times the Meridian," she said. "Perhaps more. This unit cannot see its edges clearly. It is made of the material this unit cannot see."

Nobody spoke.

Behind us, on the stairs, Holt said, very quietly, "Well. That's not on my map."

Days 661–679. The listening ring.

The queen went down to grow on Day 661, after thirty-nine days at the garden wall. The mountain queen says it's the last of the small growings. After this she'll be a queen who can hear the whole world, if the world will speak.

She folded the thread to Dory instead of cutting it. Dory screamed all day. Next morning Pebble sat at the bottom of the porch steps facing the deep and hummed the hollow-song, wrong on the third note. Dory hummed it with him, right. By the end of the week the young had it right too. Dot: she is teaching them. On day five the folded thread hummed back. After that she didn't cry.

Luna wrote the Listening Ring in eleven lines. Any queen may join. Any may leave, any time, for any reason, without giving one. What is shared is shared with all. No queen commands another. No brood driven by the ring. The stones belong to the broods that carry them. Anyone who leaves may come back.

The mountain queen asked why the last line. I said: because the General left, and Luna wrote "expected back." She said Luna writes like a queen, and signed first.

Fourteen queens over nine days. The Spire, in one dry word. The old queen: Dory calls her the one who waited by the bowl, so we call her the Bowl Queen. Eight more I had never heard of, including the river delta, the white mountains, and a very young, frightened queen in the eastern jungle who asked three times if she could really leave. Luna: "My father spent thirty years trying to get four generals to agree on anything."

Lantern's brood shepherded Port Ash north through the forest without being seen: sixty-one people, and water wherever they were lost. Keir and Aster flew them home. Odile Marr met Sera with a rifle, then asked: "Can I thank it?" Wren crossed out "approx."

Sera, at the forge: Edda says it's too early to tell. A few weeks. Sera isn't good at waiting. She sat with me until three, holding stones.

Day 675, the queen came up. The thread unfolded. "Small one. There you are." Dory laughed out loud. Her first laugh. Risa nearly dropped her.

The queen is enormous now. Darker plates, with fine branching lines like frost, like Dory's lattice. She put her head back on the wall exactly where it was. How do you feel? "Loud." She hears the whole ring.

Holt and Luna mapped it in three days, Juno at the end of the table correcting. Fourteen queens on a red line, hundreds of stones, eleven small relays (most torn down), and three large black marks: islands in the far west, under the river delta where the water tastes wrong, and in the dead space in the east. Juno's three. Deep, buried, many voices, and something living.

Holt hung it from the ceiling over his table so nobody forgets. "He can make them walk. We can hear them talk."

Day 679, three in the morning. The ring heard a silence high above the station, where the voice goes up and doesn't come back. Dot found a hole in the stars. No lights. Long. Made of material she can't see.

Ten times the Meridian. Perhaps more.

Holt: "That's not on my map."