Chapter 373 Slow

Ilka said she didn't know what frightened houses do.

We found out on the fourth night after Okafor told us. At the second hour after midnight. In the long ward.

Tally woke up screaming.

She'd been asleep on the floor. In the middle of the nine trays, the way she sleeps most nights now, curled round the place where Bell's tray is, with Moon beside her and Reed at her feet. Genny was there, on night watch, with volume fourteen. And Brock, reading to the trays, very quietly, because it was late. And Saska beside him, asleep against his shoulder with her training wraps still on.

Tally sat straight up off the stone floor with both hands over her ears and screamed.

Not a word. Not a name. Just sound. The way a child screams when something's too loud and she can't make it stop.

Genny was on her knees beside her before she'd finished.

"Tally. Tally. What is it? Where does it hurt?"

Tally took her hands away from her ears.

Her face was white.

"It's singing," she said. "The voice. It's singing the note."

"It always sings the note," said Genny. Very carefully. "Under the teaching. You told me."

"Not like this." Tally was shaking. "Not to the children. To the towers." She looked up at Genny. "It's singing to every counting tower at once. On every world. It's telling them all the same thing."

"What?"

Tally swallowed.

"Everyone," she said. "It's telling them to take everyone."

Okafor came through the arch from the map room in her nightclothes.

I came through the courtyard arch with Andraste behind me. Barefoot. With her long blade in her hand, which she sleeps beside, and grass still in her hair from the roof.

Tally was sitting up on the stone with Genny's arms round her and Moon holding her hand. Saska was standing over all of them, awake, a heartbeat ahead. Brock was at the door.

"Tell me," said Okafor.

So Tally told her.

The houses had never taken everyone.

That was the thing. For as long as anyone had been listening, for as long as the tithe had been the tithe, the houses took some. A number. Counted by the towers. Sent up the thread. So many children from so many births, every six years, now every two. Enough to fill the sorting. Never everyone. Because if you take everyone, there's no one left to have children. And then there's no tithe the next time.

The houses were patient. That was what Konrad said, the night he read the ledgers. The houses are the most patient thing in the universe. They farm.

They weren't being patient now.

"Every tithe world," said Tally. "All the ones that are left. Every counting tower. The voice is singing it to all of them at the same time." She pressed her hands against her ears again. "And the towers are singing it back. To the people. To every child under the—" She stopped. "Under the age. I don't know what age. The voice won't say. It's too loud."

"How many worlds?" said Okafor.

Tally didn't answer.

Garnet did.

She'd come through the arch behind me. In her nightgown. With her drawing board. She'd known, she said afterward; she'd woken up and known; Genny had woken her without meaning to, eleven minutes apart. And she'd gone straight to the map room and taken the sheet.

She put it down on the floor of the long ward. Beside Tally.

The sixty-four tithe worlds. In blue round the edges. The ones we'd been to, crossed out in green. The shallow seas. Ammaru. Caddoc. Four others, from the month after the Barrow.

"Fifty-seven," said Garnet. "Fifty-seven left."

Nobody said anything.

Fifty-seven worlds. Every child on every one. All at once.

"How long?" said Okafor.

Tally put her hand flat on the stone floor. Toward the thread. The way she'd taught herself. And listened.

"The towers are singing it now," she said. "To the people. The note's going into them. Into the children." She closed her eyes. "When the note's all the way in, they'll walk. To the towers. Like the Lir on the reef. Like on Ammaru." She opened her eyes. "And then the carriers come down."

"How long, Tally."

"The voice says—" Tally stopped. And her face did something very strange. Very still.

"What?"

"The voice says it's going to be slow," said Tally.

I'm going to write what Tally told us next exactly as she told it. Because it's the most important thing anyone said that night, and because Genny wrote it down word for word, and I've read it a great many times since.

It says the houses told it to sing everyone. To every tower. Tonight. All at once.

It says it has to. It's taught. It can't not. The teaching is very loud tonight; the houses are standing on it; it can feel them.

It says they have never stood on it like this. Not once. Not in all the time it has been the voice. It says they have never needed so many, so fast.

It says it does not know what for.

But it says it doesn't have to sing it fast.

It says there are nine quiet places in it where the teaching doesn't reach. Snow. Red. Wind. Moss. Grass. Three more. And where Bell was, Rain. It says it's going to sing the note through the quiet places. All of it. Every word. To every tower.

Slowly.

It says the quiet places are very slow. It says that's what they're for.

It says: tell the boy who said hello. Tell him I am going as slowly as I can.

"How slowly?" said Okafor.

Tally listened.

"Three days," she said. "Maybe. It says three days before the note is all the way into the first world. Longer for the far ones. A week, for the furthest." She opened her eyes. "It says it can't promise. It says if the houses notice what it's doing they'll correct it. And then it'll be fast."

Okafor didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she stood up. In her nightclothes. On the stone floor of the long ward. And looked down at the sheet. Fifty-seven blue circles.

"Then we have three days," she said. "For the first one."

She wrote the slate at dawn.

It was the longest slate she'd ever written. It went onto the back. And onto a second slate. And onto Garnet's sheet, in pencil, in the margins, round every blue circle, one name or two names or a task force number, until the whole sheet was covered.

Fifty-seven worlds.

"We don't have fifty-seven anything," said Holt.

At the long table. At sunrise. With everyone round it. Every task force lead. Every wing commander. Every queen, through the arch from the hall under the house on the rise. Andraste. Kyria. Teshka, standing, on her own two feet, for the first time at the long table.

"No," said Okafor. "We don't."

"Fifty-seven worlds. We've got the Harness. The Steady. The Meridian. The Long Legs. The Ground. The Marian." Holt counted on his fingers. "Six ships. Four if you leave the Ground to the heavy queen and the Meridian on relay. We've got the arches—"

"To seven worlds," said Doctor Bell. "Only seven. The ones we've been to. An arch needs an arch on both sides." She took her spectacles off. "I can't cut an arch on a world I've never stood on."

"So fifty worlds with no arch," said Holt. "And six ships. And three days for the first one." He put his hands flat on the table. "Maris. We can't."

Okafor looked at him.

"I know," she said.

That was when Andraste stood up.

At the end of the table. In her plain dark cloth. With her blade on her back. Five weeks carrying, and you couldn't see it yet unless you knew, and she didn't care whether you knew.

"Hyrran has arches," she said.

Everyone looked at her.

"Not to the tithe worlds," said Doctor Bell. "Not to—"

"Hyrran has arches," said Andraste, "to every world the houses have ever come down on Hyrran from." She looked round the table. "For a thousand years we followed them home. Not all the way. Never all the way. But when the houses came down on our mountains, we broke them, and then we went to look where they'd come from. And where we stood, we cut an arch." She put her hand on the table. "So we would know the way, if they ever came again."

Nobody said anything.

"How many?" said Okafor.

Kyria answered. From beside her daughter.

"Two hundred and eleven," she said. "On two hundred and eleven worlds. Most of them dead. Some of them taken. Some of them—" She looked at Garnet's sheet. At the blue circles. "Some of them on that."

Garnet put her finger on the sheet.

And Kyria came round the table and stood beside her and looked at the blue circles. One at a time. With her scarred finger. Touching each one.

"That one," she said. "We were there. Four hundred years ago. There's an arch on the high plain, by the river." She moved her finger. "That one. Not that one. That one. That one, I went to myself. When I was nineteen. The arch is in a cave." She moved her finger. "That one. That one."

Garnet marked each one. In red.

When Kyria took her finger away, there were twenty-three red marks on the sheet.

"Twenty-three," said Okafor.

"Twenty-three arches," said Doctor Bell. Very quietly. "On tithe worlds. That nobody on those worlds knows are there."

"They'll be overgrown," said Kyria. "Some of them. Buried. Broken. We haven't been through most of them in a hundred years." She looked at Okafor. "But the stone remembers the song. If a queen sings it from Hyrran, they'll open. Most of them."

"Most," said Okafor.

"Most," said Kyria.

So it was twenty-three worlds through the arches. And thirty-four with none.

Six ships. Thirty-four worlds. Three days for the first.

Okafor sat at the long table and looked at the sheet for a long time.

Then she said, "Lucas."

I knew what she was going to ask.

I'd known since Tally said slow.

"The thread," she said. "You've been up it. Scattered. Once. To the far queen, with Dory holding and the voice holding the other end."

"Yes."

"The voice is singing to every counting tower on every one of those worlds," said Okafor. "Through the quiet places. Slowly. On purpose." She looked at me. "If the voice can reach every tower, Lucas, can you?"

Andraste put her hand on my shoulder.

Not hard. Just there. Flat.

The way she does.

"I don't know," I said.

That was true.

"I can feel the moon. I can feel a whole world if I'm standing on it. I went up the thread once, scattered, and it nearly—" I stopped. "It took Dory and the voice and every queen on Avalon to hold me together."

"I know," said Okafor. "I was there."

"Thirty-four worlds," I said. "At once."

"Not at once," said Okafor. "Not all the way. I'm not asking you to go to them." She put her hand flat on the sheet. "I'm asking you to go to the towers. Through the voice. The way it's going. Through the quiet places. And do what you did over Ammaru." She looked at me. "Ask them."

"Ask the towers to stop?"

"Ask them to be slow," said Okafor. "Like the voice. Slower. As slow as you can make them. Every hour you buy is an hour a ship gets closer."

I looked at Andraste.

She was looking at me. Crooked. With the scar. Not smiling.

"If I go," I said. "Up the thread. Into the voice. To thirty-four towers—"

"You will go small," said Andraste.

"Yes."

"Smaller than you have ever gone."

"Yes."

Andraste was quiet for a long time.

"Then I will hold the door," she said.

So that's what we did.

I'm going to write it in two halves. Because it happened in two halves. Mine, which I barely remember. And everyone else's, which Garnet drew, and Genny wrote, and Okafor counted on the black slate, and which I've had to learn afterward like history.

Mine.

I lay down on the floor of the long ward.

In the middle of the nine trays. Where Tally sleeps. With Tally on one side of me and Dory on the other, both with their hands flat on the stone. And Andraste at my head. Kneeling. With her hands on either side of my face.

And the queens.

Not in the long ward. In the hall under the house on the rise, through the arch, every one on Avalon. And through the Hyrran arch on the ridge, the Hyrrani queen, very old and very strong and never once taken. And through the Ammaru arch, the rain queen. And through the shallow seas, the tide queen, with Brock's beans growing in her window.

All of them singing.

Not the war song. Not not still. Something I hadn't heard before.

Dory told me afterward what it was.

The one they sing to the young, she said. When the young go out of the nest for the first time. So they'll know the way home.

I went up.

I don't know how else to say it. I went out of myself the way I go when I scatter, like a breath, and I didn't come back together. I went up the thread. Through the door Dory was holding. Into the voice.

And the voice knew me.

Oh, it said. The boy who said hello.

"I've come to help," I said. "With the slow."

The voice was quiet for a long time.

It is very loud in here, it said. The teaching. The houses are standing on it.

"I know. I can feel it."

Can you go through the quiet places?

"Show me."

It showed me.

The nine quiet places. Snow. Red. Wind. Moss. Grass. Three I didn't have names for. And Rain, where Bell had been. Small pieces of nine queens, hidden very deep in the voice, where the houses had never looked because they'd built the voice out of pieces so that no piece would know it was a queen.

And through each of them, a thread. Very thin. Going out. To the towers.

The voice was singing down every thread. Slowly. On purpose. The note. Everyone.

And I went down them too.

I don't remember most of it.

I remember towers. Grey. Very tall. On worlds I'd never seen and couldn't see now, because I wasn't there; I was in the thread, very small, smaller than small. I remember the made things at the top of each tower, listening, the way the one on Ammaru listened. Counting. Waiting to be told to take everyone.

And I remember asking them.

One at a time. Thirty-four times.

Not stop. They couldn't stop; the voice couldn't stop; the teaching was too loud. But slow. Could you be slow. Could you take a little longer over each word. Could you sing the note the way the voice is singing it, through the quiet places, one syllable at a time, as if every syllable were very heavy and you had to carry it up a hill.

Some of them said yes.

Some of them didn't understand.

Some of them, I think, had been waiting a very long time for someone to ask them anything at all.

And I remember going smaller.

Every tower. A little smaller. Because I was spreading out. Thirty-four worlds. Thirty-four threads. And I was only one of me, and there wasn't enough of me for thirty-four of anything, so every tower I went to, I was thinner. Smaller. Further down.

Until I could feel the hearts of the atoms in the towers. Very small. Very tight. Held.

And the hearts of the atoms in me.

That's where I nearly didn't come back.

I won't pretend it was anything else. I was very small, and very far, and spread across thirty-four threads, and I could feel every heart of every atom in me, and they were all holding on very tight, and I was so tired.

And they were tired too.

And it would have been very easy to let them go.

Hands on my face.

Not in the thread. On the floor of the long ward. A very long way down. But I felt them anyway. Every atom. Scarred. Warm. Flat on either side of my face.

The fifth wife guards the door.

And her voice. Not through Dot. Not through the thread. Just her voice, in our language, very close, saying the thing she'd said on the porch on the night we moved into the house on the rise. That she'd never said out loud until then.

Me too.

Over and over.

Me too. Me too. Me too.

I came back.

Everyone else's.

I was in the thread for two days and nine hours.

That's what Genny wrote. She sat beside me on the floor of the long ward the whole time, with Father's pen. Andraste didn't move from my head once. Not to eat. Not to sleep. Kyria brought her water and held the cup to her mouth because Andraste wouldn't take her hands off my face. Hana sat at my feet and gave the room air, because Genny said my breathing had gone very slow, as slow as the towers.

And everyone else went.

Through the arches.

Twenty-three of them. On Hyrran. Kyria's arches, cut over a thousand years by First Blades who followed the houses home and stood where they'd come from.

The Hyrrani queen sang them open. One at a time. With every queen on Avalon behind her.

Nineteen opened.

Four didn't. Kyria said they were broken, or buried too deep, or the stone had forgotten. She stood at each one on the ridge and put her hand on it and waited and nothing happened, and she said a word in Hyrrani that Dot wouldn't translate, and went to the next.

Nineteen.

The Hyrrani went through all nineteen.

Forty thousand of them. Split nineteen ways. With the walking engines. With the Vaeli on Keir's wings. With Holt's people. With the Mom Squad, all five, Teshka walking on her own two feet and refusing a litter, through the arch to the first world, the one the voice said would be first, where the note would be all the way in by the third day.

And they found the arches.

On the high plains. In caves. By rivers. Overgrown. Buried. One of them in the middle of a town square on a world of grey towers, where nobody had known for four hundred years that the strange old stone ring in the middle of the market was anything but a stone ring.

The Hyrrani came through it at a run.

And the people of that world, standing in the market square with the note going into their children very slowly, one syllable at a time, looked up and saw women in iron coming out of the stone ring they'd been walking round for four hundred years.

And Kyria at the front, saying, through Dot: We're here for the children. Don't be afraid. We've been here before.

Mother told me about the first world. Later. On the porch, when I could sit up.

It was the world the voice said would be first. A world of terraces, she said. Green steps going up and down every hill, as far as you could see, with water running down them from step to step, and a people who farmed them, small and brown and quick, with long ears that turned toward any sound. The note had been going into their children for two days and a half when the Mom Squad came out of Kyria's arch, which was at the top of the highest terrace, in a ring of trees that had grown up round it over three hundred years.

The children were standing in the terraces. Thousands. Not walking yet. Standing very still, with their long ears turned toward the counting tower in the valley, listening.

"Their mothers were holding them," Mother said. "Every one. By the hand. By the shoulders. Some of them had tied them to the posts of the terraces with rope." She turned her cup. "They didn't know what else to do. They knew the note. They'd heard it every tithe. But they'd never heard it go in so slowly. They said it was like hearing someone come up the stairs one step at a time and not being able to lock the door."

"What did you do?"

"What we do," said Mother. "Ingrid hushed the tower. Kyria and Teshka went down to it with the Hyrrani and took it apart. And Maura and I went into the terraces."

She was quiet for a moment.

"One at a time," she said. "That's the only way. You kneel down in front of the child and you put your hands up and you feel for the note. It's in them like a splinter. Very thin. Very deep. And you take hold of it, and you pull, very slowly, the way you'd pull a splinter, so it doesn't break. And Maura puts her hands on them after. So the place it was gets warm."

"How many?"

"Eleven thousand," said Mother. "Over two days. Maura and me. And then Ingrid, when the tower was down. And Kyria. She can't feel the note. She said she couldn't. So she held the children while we pulled. One after another. Eleven thousand." She almost smiled. "She said it was the hardest fight of her life."

"And Teshka?"

Mother's face changed.

"Teshka walked," she said. "Down eleven terraces to the tower. On legs that were grey three weeks ago. With a blade. And when the tower was down and the correctors came out of it, she stood in front of the terrace where the smallest children were. Like she stood on Ammaru." Mother put her cup down. "She didn't need to throw anyone this time. There were five of us."

The ships went to the others.

Thirty-four. Six ships. Okafor split them. The Harness to the nearest, with Genny on board until the second morning, when she said she was coming back to the long ward and nobody was going to stop her. The Steady, with Brock at her door and Saska on her deck. The Marian, with Dennis at her heart, saying weight on the left the whole way up the thread, her first time going anywhere for anyone. The Long Legs. The Meridian, off relay, with Ruan singing the rope and Ilka listening for the towers. And the Ground, with the heavy queen carrying it, because she said she'd rather carry it than sit in the hall and listen.

And the other Hand.

The one that had hung over Ammaru, grey and still, for a month. That had never come down. That Dennis sat beside every day in the Marian, saying the freight song.

On the first night, it moved.

Down. Into the clearing on Ammaru. And opened its ramp. And waited.

And Dennis came down out of the Marian and walked across the wet forest floor to its ramp and stood at the bottom of it with his hands in his pockets.

"Are you coming?" he said.

Ruan heard it answer. On the thread.

Weight on the left.

Seven ships. Thirty-four worlds.

Risa's wing took eleven of them. Not the interceptors; there wasn't time for the interceptors. Risa went up the thread as lightning, and Ingrid with her, and every Vaeli on Keir's wings who could keep up, and the Vey twins in an interceptor strapped to the Meridian's hull, launching off it at the edge of every world.

Luna went with the Long Legs. Elin stayed with the General.

Sera went with the Marian. Goldie stayed with Rory.

Hana stayed with me. On the floor of the long ward. Breathing for me.

I'll write the counts. Because Okafor counted them. Because Genny wrote them. Because I owe them that.

Of the nineteen worlds through Kyria's arches, sixteen were in time. The note was still going in, one syllable at a time, slow; the children hadn't walked yet. The Hyrrani took the counting towers down. The Mom Squad pulled the note out of the children the way Mother pulls the black off a tree. And the children stood up in the squares and the fields and the caves and looked round at women in iron and old women with their hands up and didn't know what to do. And then their mothers picked them up.

Three weren't in time.

Not because the arches were slow. Because those three towers didn't listen. When I asked them. In the thread. They didn't understand, or didn't want to, and they sang the note fast, the way the houses taught them, and the children walked, and the carriers came down.

The Hyrrani got there as the carriers were going up. They broke two. Kyria went up the ramp of one herself with her long blade as it lifted and came down it again with a child under each arm.

The third got away.

Of the thirty-four worlds with no arches, the ships reached twenty-two in time.

Eight they reached late. The carriers already down. The children already walking. Seven ships, and Risa's wing, and the Vaeli, and Okafor making things heavy and light on worlds she'd never stood on, through the Meridian, through Ilka, through the thread. They broke carriers on the ground and carriers going up and in one case, Rowan told me afterward, a carrier that was already in the thread, which Risa followed in and went through as lightning and came out of with its doors open.

Some they got back. Not all.

Four they didn't reach at all.

Four worlds. The furthest. Where the voice said a week and it was five days and the towers sang fast and the carriers came down and went up and nobody from Avalon was there.

Okafor's black slate. The left column and the right.

I'm not going to write the numbers. I've thought about it for a long time and I'm not. They're in volume fifteen, which Genny started on the second night, and which is the first volume of the brood book that's mostly not brood.

I'll write that the left column was much longer than the right.

I'll write that the right column was longer than it had ever been.

Both.

Konrad read them.

On the third night. In the map room. Not the numbers. The names of the worlds. All fifty-seven. The ones the towers called by number and the ones the people on them called by name, which Dot had found, one by one, in the voices that came back through the arches and down the thread.

He stood at the end of the long table in his coat, with Garnet's sheet in front of him, covered in pencil, and read them out loud. One at a time. Very slowly. The way he'd read the four thousand one hundred and twelve person-line codes with Garnet, the year before, so that somebody would have said them.

When he came to the four that nobody had reached, he stopped.

And read them again.

And then a third time.

Okafor, beside him, with the black slate in her hand, didn't say anything. She just stood there until he'd finished.

Then she said: "We'll go back."

"There's nobody left," said Konrad. Very quietly. "On those four. The voice says."

"There are grandmothers," said Okafor. "There always are. Somebody's always too old for the tithe." She put the slate away. "We'll go back for them. And we'll tell them where their children went. And then we'll go and get them."

Konrad looked at her for a long time.

"You keep saying that," he said. "We'll go and get them."

"Yes," said Okafor. "And then we do."

I came back at the ninth hour of the third day.

I opened my eyes on the floor of the long ward. In the middle of the nine trays. With Tally asleep against my side and Dory asleep against my other side, both with their hands still flat on the stone.

And Andraste's hands on my face.

And Andraste's face above mine. Upside down. With the scar. Very tired. Very grey. With her eyes red.

"You came back," she said.

"You held the door."

"Yes." She didn't move her hands. "I said I would."

"You said me too."

"Yes." She closed her eyes. "Seven hundred and nine times. Genny counted."

Genny had counted.

It's in volume fourteen. In the Brood: Dask section. On a page of its own.

Andraste: me too. 709. Didn't stop. Wouldn't eat. Kyria gave her water. She kept saying it.

And under it:

He came back on the 709th.

Tally woke up.

She sat up off the stone floor and looked at me for a long time. And then put her hand flat on the stone again. Toward the thread.

And listened.

"The voice wants to talk to you," she said.

Thank you, said the voice. Very faint. Very far. Through Tally. For the slow.

"I couldn't do all of them."

No. Neither could I. A pause. The houses noticed. On the second day. They found out what I was doing. That I was singing through the quiet places.

I went very still.

"What did they do?"

The voice didn't answer for a long time.

They took Wind, it said.

The way they took Bell.

Out of the voice. One of the nine quiet places. The piece of a queen of wind, hidden very deep, that had been singing the note slowly to eleven towers on the far side of the empire. The houses reached in and found it, and took it, and took it back up the thread to wherever they keep the pieces of queens they take.

And the eleven towers she'd been singing to went fast.

Three of them were the three Kyria's arches didn't reach in time.

"Is she—" I said.

Not dead, said the voice. Queens don't die easily. The boy who said hello taught us that. A pause. Taken. Like Bell. Somewhere up the thread. Another pause. I can still feel her. Very faint. She's singing slow. Even now. Even there.

I didn't say anything for a long time.

"We'll find her," I said. "And Bell."

Yes, said the voice. I think you will. A pause. I think that's why they're frightened.

I said it that night.

Not on the porch. I couldn't get to the porch; Halloway wouldn't let me off the floor of the long ward, and Andraste wouldn't take her hands off my face for more than a minute at a time. So everyone came to the long ward. Through the arches. From everywhere.

The five of them. The children. The grandparents, all of them, Kyria and Teshka with the Mom Squad, Taveth with bread. Genny and Garnet and Pip. Rowan and Callum. Brock and Saska. Okafor, last, with the black slate in her pocket.

They sat on the stone floor round the nine trays, very quietly, all of them, and I said it from where I was lying. In order. Very slowly. Because I didn't have very much voice.

It took until morning.

When I got to Andraste, at my head, I said it upside down. Looking up at her.

She didn't say anything for a long time.

Then she said, "Seven hundred and ten."

Days 3981–3990. Slow.

Tally woke screaming: the voice is singing every counting tower to take everyone. Fifty-seven worlds. But it's singing through the nine quiet places, slowly, on purpose; tell the boy who said hello. Kyria's arches: two hundred and eleven worlds where First Blades followed the houses home; twenty-three on the sheet; nineteen opened. Seven ships for thirty-four more; the second Hand came down and said weight on the left. I went up the thread into the voice and asked thirty-four towers to be slow, and went too small; Andraste held my face and said me too seven hundred and nine times. Sixteen of nineteen in time; twenty-two of thirty-four; eight late; four not at all. The houses took Wind. She's still singing slow.