Chapter 339 Where to Dig

Sera slept for two days.

Halloway said she would, and she did. In her clothes, on top of the covers, the way she'd fallen when she came up the stairs from the forge. Nobody moved her. Luna put a blanket over her and Risa opened the window so the room wouldn't get too hot, because even asleep Sera was giving off heat, the last of a burning world's worth, a little at a time, like a stove going cold in the night.

I sat with her.

Not all the time. There was too much to do. But every few hours I came up the stairs and sat on the edge of the bed and put my right hand on her arm, because my left one was still cold to the elbow and I didn't want to put it on her.

On the second evening she opened her eyes.

She looked at the ceiling for a long time. Then she looked at me.

"The keeper," she said.

"Gone."

"The queen?"

"Home," I said. "On the red glass. Beside the heavy queen. Very small. Very dim. But home."

Sera shut her eyes.

"The young?"

"Four hundred and thirty."

She didn't say anything for a long time. She was counting. I could hear her silver doing it. Six hundred and twelve, minus four hundred and thirty.

"I gave it everything," she said. "All the heat on that world. And it took it. And it kept coming." She opened her eyes. "I've never put heat into anything that didn't get hot, Lucas. Not once. Not in my whole life."

"I know."

"It just went in. And nothing came back."

She reached out without looking and found my left hand on the blanket. The cold one. She took it before I could move it away.

She held it for a long time. Her hand was very warm.

My hand didn't get any warmer.

Sera looked at it. Then at me. And didn't let go.

Halloway looked at my arm the next morning.

On the ward. In the small room at the end with the window, where she saw the ones she didn't want anyone else to see yet. She had me sit on the edge of the table with my sleeve rolled up and she looked at the arm for a long time without touching it. Then she touched it. Then she put the ring scanner over it, the one I'd made her, and watched the silver come up on the glass.

The right arm was bright. Branching. Every path lit.

The left arm, from the elbow down, was dark.

Not grey. Not hurt. Not quiet, like the slivers when they were sung down. Dark. As if the paths were still there, all of them, every one, exactly where they'd always been, and nothing was in them.

"Can you feel it?" said Halloway.

"I can feel my hand," I said. "I can move it." I moved it. "I just can't feel the silver in it. It's like—" I stopped. "It's like a room I know is there, and the door's shut, and when I open it there's nothing on the other side. Not even dark. Just nothing."

Halloway wrote that down.

"Genny," she said. Without looking up.

Genny was in the doorway. She was always in the doorway now, when it was me. She came in and put her hand on my arm, flat, and listened. Twice.

"There's nothing to ask," she said. Very quietly. "I asked it which way it went. There isn't a way. It didn't go anywhere." She took her hand off. "It's not closed. It's empty."

"Garnet?"

Garnet came in behind her. She put her hand on my arm. She didn't say anything. She didn't touch the silver, because there wasn't any to touch.

She took her hand off and looked at me.

"I can't open nothing," she said.

It was Dory who did something.

Not on purpose. She came down to the ward at noon with Pebble, because Ruth had said I was there and Dory had decided that wherever I was, she was too, for the moment, and climbed up on the table beside me without asking and sat with her legs hanging over the edge.

She looked at the arm.

Then she put her hand on it.

She didn't ask anything. She didn't listen. She did the thing she did. The thing she'd done the day she was born, when the whole of the house went still. She held.

Not the arm. Not the silver. The place where the silver had been. The shape of it. All the paths, exactly where they'd always been, empty.

She held them open.

And very slowly, from the elbow down, from the bright side, something began to come in.

It took all afternoon.

Dory sat on the table with her hand on my arm and didn't move. Pebble lay at her feet. Halloway pulled a chair up and sat beside us with the ring scanner and watched the glass, and wrote down every few minutes what it showed.

The silver came in very slowly. From the elbow. A path at a time. Not flooding. Seeping. The way water comes into a dry field along the channels when you open the gate at the top. Into the forearm. Into the wrist. Into the palm. Lighting each path as it went, faint, then less faint.

By dusk it had reached my fingers.

Three of them.

The first two, the thumb and the one beside it, stayed dark. Dory held them open for another hour, with her face going very white and her small jaw set, until Halloway put her hand on Dory's shoulder and said, "That's enough, love. That's enough for today."

Dory took her hand away.

She looked at my two dark fingers for a long time.

"They'll come," she said. "Tomorrow. I'll hold them again."

They didn't come tomorrow. Or the day after. She held them every afternoon for a week, and they stayed dark.

I can move them. I can hold a pen. I can feel the paper.

I can't feel anything else in them at all.

The twelfth world didn't move.

Wren listened to it every hour. From the corner of the map room, with her eyes shut and her back to the wall. The gap where the silver wasn't, sitting at the edge of a tower on a world on the ninth line where a keeper was kneeling over a heart.

Not moving. Not coming on. Not going back.

Sitting there.

"They're waiting," said Wren. On the third day. "That's all. They're not doing anything. They're just there."

"For us," said Okafor.

"The Overseer says so."

Okafor looked at the Overseer. In the doorway. It had stopped coming into the map room. It stood in the doorway now, with the dog, and looked in, as if it wasn't sure it was allowed past the frame.

The houses know what was done on the fire world, it said. A fault that folds correctors. A fault that takes queens out of the black. A pause. The houses do not fear faults. Faults are corrected. But a fault that comes when correction comes—

It stopped.

That is a new kind of fault, it said. And the houses would like to see it.

"So they're sitting at the twelfth world with a keeper on its knees in front of them," said Okafor. "And waiting for us to come and save it."

Yes.

"And if we don't come?"

The Overseer looked at the floor.

Then they will correct it, it said. When they are tired of waiting.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then Luna said what everyone was thinking. Because Luna always did.

"We can't go," she said.

Okafor didn't look up.

"We can't," said Luna. Very steadily. With her arms folded. "Two hundred of them waiting in a ring for the one person they've never seen before. On their world. On their ground. With the black under them and nothing we can fold." She looked at me. At my left hand, on the table, with its two dark fingers. "One walked into him. One. And look."

"There's a keeper," I said. "On its knees. Over a heart."

"I know."

"It knelt because the voice stopped and listened. Because we sang. Because Tally answered." I looked at her. "It knelt because of us."

"I know," said Luna. And her voice cracked, which it never did, and she stopped, and put her hand over her mouth.

Nobody said anything.

Then Okafor put her pencil down.

Very straight.

"We don't go to the twelfth world," she said.

I didn't argue.

I wanted to. I sat at the great table with my cold fingers in my lap and listened to the twelfth world, to the keeper kneeling there, to its heart, slow and steady, and the heart under it, slower, and the gap at the edge of the tower, waiting. And I wanted to stand up and walk to the landing field and take the Scarecrow and go.

I didn't.

Because Luna was right. Because Okafor was right. Because there were two hundred of them and one of me, and I couldn't fold the black, and if they took me there'd be nobody on Avalon who could do what I did except Garnet, who was fifteen, and whom Okafor had sat in the map room three days ago and forbidden to set foot on a ramp.

Because the houses wanted me to come.

And Father used to say: when someone sets a table for you, look under the cloth before you sit down.

"The eight," said Okafor.

She turned Garnet's sheet round. Eight black circles. Each with a small white dot rubbed out of the middle.

"They're still there," she said. "The queens. Wren can hear them. Down under the black. With as many young as they could carry." She looked at Wren. "Are the correctors still on those worlds?"

Wren shook her head. "They left. All of them. When they went to the twelfth. There's nothing on those eight now but the black." She was quiet. "And under it."

"Then that's where we go," said Okafor. "Not where they're waiting. Where they've been." She put her finger on the first white dot. "We can't fold the black. We can't ask it. Sera can't heat it. Can anyone dig it?"

The heavy queen answered that one.

At the long table, at noon, with her great head through the doors of the hall and the reed queen, very small and dim, curled in the hollow under her jaw. When Luna put the question, the heavy queen didn't make a sound at first.

She looked at her young.

There were a handful of them on Avalon now. Grey and wide and low, so dense that it had taken one of them all morning to cross the square to sit on the council. They lay along the edge of the red glass beside her. They didn't do much. They didn't sing much. When one of them fell into a trench, it had taken Garnet a day to work out how to get it out, because nothing could lift it and nothing could cut it.

Nothing could cut it.

The heavy queen made a sound. Low. Through the floor.

Dot listened.

She says the black takes fire, said Dot. And light. And silver. And whatever lives. A pause. She says it does not take weight. Another pause. She says her young are made of weight. She says on her world they dig for a thousand years before they learn to stand.

Nobody said anything.

She says, said Dot, send them. They will dig.

They didn't want to go.

That was the thing nobody had thought about. The heavy young had come to Avalon from a world where standing up was a thing that took a thousand years to learn, and they'd lain down on the red glass beside their mother, and they had not moved more than they had to since.

They didn't fly. They didn't climb ramps. They didn't, Genny wrote in the brood book, see any reason to go anywhere they were not already.

The heavy queen told them.

I heard it. Not the words. The weight of it. A sound so low it came up through the red glass and into the soles of my feet and up my legs into my chest, and every one of the heavy young lifted its head at once.

And slowly, very slowly, got up.

It took them most of the afternoon to cross the plain to the landing field.

We took the Harness.

Nothing but iron could carry them. The Ground stayed on the red glass where it always sat, because the heavy queen wouldn't leave the keepers, and the Ground went nowhere without her humming in its heart. So it was the Harness, the second of the iron ships, with her name in gold on her side. Her hold was built for weight. She'd carried people out of Carver. It groaned when the first heavy young came up the ramp. It groaned more when the last did.

It held.

Anja went. She said if anything came out of the black while the heavy young were digging, someone would have to stand in front of them, and she was the only one whose silver hadn't gone cold when a corrector touched her, and until somebody worked out why, it was going to be her.

Liam went because Anja went.

Toby went, for the hearts. Mother went, for the holding. The General went, for the freezing, though there was nothing to freeze, because he said he'd rather stand on a black world and freeze nothing than sit on Avalon and wait.

And I went.

With two fingers that didn't work. Because Okafor said if there was anything at the bottom of the hole that needed folding, it had better be someone who could fold.

Luna didn't stop me.

She came to the foot of the Harness's ramp at dawn and straightened my collar and said, "Not the twelfth."

"Not the twelfth."

"Promise."

"I promise," I said.

She looked at me for a long time.

"Say it," she said. "Now. In case."

So I said it. And she said it back. Not in that order. At the same time.

The first black world had been a forest.

You could tell. From above. From the shapes. Long straight lines on the black that had been trunks, fallen all one way, the way trees fall when something walks through them from one side. Round shapes that had been the hollows round their roots. A long winding line that had been a river, and was now a long winding line of black, very flat, very still.

Nothing moved.

Nothing glowed. Nothing grew. Nothing was there.

And under it, very deep, so faint that Toby stood at the window with his eyes shut for a long time before he said anything, a heart.

"There," said Toby. And pointed. "Under where the tower was. Deep. She's very slow. Slower than the fire one. Slower than anything." He swallowed. "And round her—"

He stopped.

"Round her what?"

"Small ones," said Toby. "Lots. Packed in. Very close to her." He opened his eyes. "Some of them have hearts. Some of them—" He stopped again. "Some of them were too far from her. At the edge. Where the black could reach."

"How many have hearts?"

Toby didn't answer for a long time.

"I don't know," he said. "Enough that I can't count them. Not enough that I can't count the ones that don't."

The heavy young went down the ramp onto the black.

Slowly. The way they did everything. One after another. Grey and wide and low. And the black was all round them and under them, the black that had taken the fire out of a burning world and the glow out of a keeper and the silver out of my hand.

It didn't take anything out of them.

It couldn't find anything to take. They were weight. All the way through. Dense and slow and heavy, made by a world where nothing could stand. The black lay against their sides and slid off them like water off stone.

They walked to where the tower had been.

And began to dig.

I can't tell you how they dug. I watched for two days and I still couldn't. They didn't have claws. They didn't have hands. They lay down on the black, flat, and pressed, and the ground under them went down. Slowly. The way a stone goes into mud. And when they'd gone down as far as they could, they moved over, and lay down again beside the hole they'd made, and pressed again.

The black didn't stop them.

It closed in behind them, a little. It tried to fill the hole. And then the next heavy young pressed down on top of where it had filled, and pushed it down further.

They went down a foot in the first hour.

Twenty feet the first day.

Sixty the second.

On the second night, something came out of the black.

Not a corrector. Smaller. A handler, Anja said after, though it wasn't like any handler we'd seen. A thing that had been a handler, once, on that world, before the correctors came. That had been under the black too. That had gone down, the way the queen went down, but not far enough.

It came up out of the side of the hole. Very slowly. Grey gone black at the edges. With its collar still on.

And reached for the nearest heavy young.

Anja stood in front of it.

She didn't fold her arms. She didn't push it down the ramp and let it sit in the rain. There wasn't any rain. There wasn't a ramp. She stood in front of it at the edge of the hole and it reached for her and she put both hands flat on its chest the way she'd put them on the correctors.

And it broke.

She sat down after.

On the black. At the edge of the hole. With the heavy young pressing down behind her, slowly, steadily, not looking up.

She sat there for a long time with her hands in her lap.

Liam came and sat down beside her.

"It had a collar," said Anja. "It had been something. On this world. Before." She looked at her hands. "I didn't ask it anything."

"There wasn't time."

"I know." She didn't look up. "It used to be I'd push them down the ramp and they'd sit in the rain. That was all. That was what I did." She turned her hands over. "I don't think I'm going to get to do that any more."

Liam didn't say anything.

He put his arm round her. And she let him.

On the third morning, at a hundred and four feet, they reached the queen.

She was curled.

All of her. Round and round herself in a hollow in the deep rock, very tight, the way a fern is curled before it opens. Dark green and brown and grey, the colours of a forest floor. Very cold. Very still.

And packed against her, all round, in the hollow, in every space between her coils, her young.

Small. Green and brown, like her. Curled too. Pressed so tight against her that at first I couldn't tell which was her and which was them.

The heavy young lay along the edge of the hollow and stopped pressing.

And Toby, who'd climbed down the side of the hole with a rope round his waist and his hands bleeding, knelt at the edge, and put his hand on the nearest coil, and listened.

"She's alive," he said.

We got her up.

Mother held her. All the way up a hundred and four feet of hole, with the black trying to close in from the sides and the heavy young lying in a long ring round the top pressing it back. Mother stood at the bottom of the hole with her hands flat on the queen's coils and held her, the way she'd held the reed queen's light, and I asked the air to lift and it lifted, slowly, with my two dead fingers aching, and Liam saw where the air was and put it there before I asked.

The young came up with her. In her coils. She didn't uncurl. She wouldn't, Toby said. Not until she was somewhere she couldn't hear the black.

I don't know how many came up with her. We didn't count on the black world. We counted on the Harness, in the hold, after, with the ramp up and the black outside the window and the queen lying in the middle of the floor still curled round on herself like a fist.

Six hundred and eighty.

There'd been more. At the edge of the hollow. Where the black could reach. Toby went back down for them on the rope, with Mother, and came up with nine more, and then went down again and came up with nothing, and sat on the floor of the hold and didn't speak for a long time.

Six hundred and eighty-nine.

Mother said there had been about a thousand, from the size of the hollow.

On the Harness, going home, the forest queen uncurled.

Very slowly. A coil at a time. In the hold. In the dark between worlds, where she couldn't hear the black. Her young came out of her coils one after another and lay on the floor of the hold round her, small and green and brown, blinking.

She lifted her head.

And looked round the hold. At the heavy young lying along the walls. At Mother. At Toby, with his bleeding hands. At me.

And made a sound.

Not mine. Not a song. Very small and very hoarse, like a voice that hasn't been used in a long time.

Dot was on Avalon. A whole world away. But I didn't need Dot for that one.

Thank you.

Garnet was on the landing field when the Harness came down.

She'd been there since dawn, Okafor said. With her drawing board and the dog. Sitting on an upturned crate at the edge of the red glass where she could see the sky, because she wasn't allowed on a ramp, and nobody had said anything about crates.

She watched the forest queen come down the ramp. Slowly. Uncurled now. Long and green and brown, moving the way water moves over moss, with six hundred and eighty-nine young following her in a long untidy line. Some of them stumbled. Some of them lay down on the red glass as soon as they reached it and didn't get up. Toby went to every one that lay down and listened, and every one he listened to, he nodded, and moved on.

Garnet didn't get up off the crate.

She waited until the last of the young was off the ramp. Then she opened her drawing board on her knees and took out the sheet, the one with the eight black circles, and found the first one. And looked at the small white dot in the middle of it, where she'd rubbed the black away with the corner of her eraser.

She took out a green pencil.

She didn't colour the whole circle. She coloured the dot. Only the dot. Very carefully. Green, in the middle of the black.

"The rest's still black," she said, when I sat down on the ground beside the crate. Without looking up. "The forest. Nothing's growing. Toby says the young that were at the edge of the hollow—" She stopped. "So the rest stays black."

"Yes."

"But she's green." Garnet looked at the dot. "So that's green."

She closed the drawing board.

"Seven more," she said. "Where to dig." She looked at me. At my left hand, with its two dark fingers. "Okafor says the heavy young can go again in three days. When they've slept." A pause. "She says you're not going next time. She says Neve can do the folding if there's folding, because Neve's been practising on the ward with Genny." Another pause. "Neve can't fold. She can only ask. I told Okafor that."

"What did Okafor say?"

"She said she knows," said Garnet. "And she said the heavy young don't need folding. They need someone to stand in front. And somebody to count." She stood up. "And somebody to say it, after, to whoever comes up out of the hole. Whatever it is." She tucked the drawing board under her arm. "She said Neve's good at that."

The keeper on the twelfth world stood up on the fifth day.

I heard it. On Father's roof, at dusk, the night after we got back from the forest world with the queen and her six hundred and eighty-nine. I was listening to the ninth line. To the twelfth world. To the keeper, kneeling, and the heart under it, and the gap at the edge of the tower.

And then something came down the thread.

The thing I'd heard go down on the night of the fire world. Very faint. Not a push. Not a song. From the middle.

To the keeper.

I didn't hear what it said. I couldn't. But I heard the keeper hear it. And I heard the keeper's heart change.

And then I heard it stand up.

"It told it to stand," said Tally.

In the map room. At midnight. With everyone there. Wrapped in her blanket, white to the lips.

"The voice," she said. "I heard it. It came down the thread. It's never said anything like it." She held the blanket tighter. "It said stand up. Look up. Be a keeper. Keep." Her voice shook. "It wants it to look like it's not a fault any more. So they'll leave it alone."

"Will they?" said Okafor.

Nobody answered.

The Overseer, in the doorway, with the dog, shut its pale eyes.

No, it said.

It took them an hour.

The gap moved. From the edge of the tower. In. Wren said it all, flat, from the corner, with her eyes shut and her hands in her lap. Counting.

The keeper standing at the foot of its tower. Looking up. The way the voice told it to. Keeping.

The gap coming in.

The keeper not moving.

The gap reaching it.

"It's not gone," said Wren. Very suddenly. Her eyes opened. "Lucas. It's not gone."

I listened.

The keeper was still there. Its heart. Slow and steady. Moving. Not falling. Not going cold. Moving away from the tower. Up. Fast. Out along the ninth line, the wrong way, away from us, toward the dark past the middle, faster than anything I'd ever heard move on a thread.

And under the tower, the heart. The queen's.

Moving too.

Up out of the ground. Fast. After the keeper. Out along the line. Into the dark.

"They're taking them," said Wren. "Both of them. They're not correcting them. They're—"

Taking them home, said the Overseer.

Nobody said anything.

Queens are not wasted, said the ash keeper. It had come up the hill behind the Overseer. Very slowly. With the red scarf in its hand. I told you. The houses take them. It looked at the floor. And a keeper that kneels, and then stands up when it is told— A pause. The houses will want to know what made it kneel.

"What will they do to it?"

The ash keeper didn't answer.

The Overseer didn't answer.

Nobody answered. Because nobody knew. And the ones who might have known had been made, very carefully, a very long time ago, not to.

At the twelfth world, after the gap was gone, there was nothing.

No correctors. No black. Wren said they hadn't touched the ground. They'd come for the keeper and the queen, and taken them, and gone. The young were still there. Three hundred and forty of them. In a ring round a tower with nobody at its foot. Lying on the ground. Not feeding anything. Not being told anything.

Alive.

"They left the young," said Okafor.

Young are not worth taking, said the Overseer. Young can be grown.

Okafor looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked at me.

"Not the twelfth," she said. "That was the promise. Because they were waiting." She put her finger on the circle. "They're not waiting now."

We went at dawn.

Mother and Neve and Corwin and me. On the Scarecrow. Fast. And came down on a world of long grey grass with a tower in the middle of it and nobody at the foot of the tower, and three hundred and forty young lying in a ring round it in their collars, looking up at nothing.

They didn't move when we came.

They didn't know they could.

I opened the collars. One at a time. With my right hand, mostly. Corwin opened the tower, a crack at a time, with his bare hands, and asked it what it had been, and it told him, and he sat down in the grass and cried for a while and then got up and opened it some more. Neve walked among the young with her chart and wrote down every one, because Ruth would want to know, and because she'd started doing it and couldn't stop.

Mother stood at the foot of the tower.

Where the keeper had stood. Where it had knelt. Where it had stood up again, when it was told, to make itself look like something that wouldn't be taken.

She stood there for a long time. In her dark coat. With Father's ring. Looking up the thread. At the dark where they'd gone.

"I asked it who it came out of," she said. Not to me. To the thread. "The voice. On the fire world." A pause. "It doesn't know. It's never had anyone." Another pause. "And it's just tried to save one of its keepers the only way it knew how. By telling it to be what it was before." She looked at her hands. "And it didn't work. Because nothing it's ever been told works on the ones who made it."

I didn't say anything.

"That's not a voice," said Mother. "That's a child."

We brought home three hundred and forty young.

All of them. Every one. On the Scarecrow. To the red glass. Where the heavy queen lifted her head as they came down the ramp, and looked at them, and made the sound she'd made for the keepers.

She says she doesn't know whose they are, said Dot.

She says it doesn't matter.

She says lie down.

I said it that night.

On the porch. To everyone. Oldest to youngest, with Dory checking. With my two dark fingers. Sera was awake now, and sat on the rail with her hand round my left wrist the whole time, warm, as if she could heat it back by holding on.

Dory, when I got to her, didn't let me go on.

"Your fingers," she said.

"They're all right."

"They're not," said Dory. "I can't hold them open. I've tried." She looked at them, very seriously. "I'll keep trying. Every day."

"You don't have to."

"I know," said Dory. "That's why it counts." She took my two dark fingers in her small hand and held them. Not the silver. Just the fingers. "Now say Ash's."

So I said Ash's.

Then I went up on Father's roof.

And listened. Out along the ninth line. Past the twelfth world, where a tower stood with nobody at its foot now and the long grey grass was already growing up round it. Past the middle. Into the dark past the middle, where I'd never listened before, because I'd never had a reason to.

Somewhere out there, two hearts. Very far. Very faint. Going away.

And somewhere out there, past them, more. Far more. Queens. I couldn't count them. Wren couldn't. Slow and deep and very far down. Not singing. Not pointing home. Kept.

The ash keeper's queen. Taken a long time ago.

Every queen the houses had ever decided not to waste.

Days 2752–2760. Where to Dig.

Sera woke on the second day and held my cold hand and it didn't warm. Dory held the empty paths open all afternoon until the silver seeped back, except two fingers, which stay dark however long she holds them. We kept the promise and didn't go to the twelfth world. The black takes fire and light and silver, not weight: the heavy young dug a hundred and four feet into a dead forest, and Anja broke a collared thing that came out of the side of the hole and sat a long time after. The forest queen was alive, curled like a fist round her young: six hundred and eighty-nine of about a thousand. On the fifth day the voice told the twelfth keeper to stand and keep, to save it. The houses took it and its queen anyway, out past the middle, and left the young; we brought home all three hundred and forty. Mother: that's not a voice, that's a child. Out past the middle there are more queens than anyone can count. Kept.