Chapter 430 The Spokes

Forty frames went up at once.

I felt them. From the top of the crevasse, with my wrist on the ice and Suri's water round it, holding the place the long way for the first one, Dinraal's, behind me. And then, all across the plain of One, along twelve spokes, from the edge of the world to within a mile of the building, the others. Thirty-nine strands of Hearth's silver going up out of the ice in pairs, the way Dinraal taught them on the plain past the canyon, and meeting.

And on the other side of every one, Kyria's cutters. And the queens singing.

And Risa.

I'd never felt her do that.

Forty threads. One through each frame. Each one held at the near end by a pilot of the wing, standing on the red glass beside their interceptor with their eyes shut and their hands out, the way she taught them. Rowan at the first. Callum at the second, with his left hand that can flatten a crease now. Arcturus at the fortieth, with his wings folded, holding his badly and very hard.

And Risa in the middle of the field, holding all of theirs.

She told me afterward it felt like flying the whole wing at once from the ground, except none of the ships moved, and all of them were very heavy, and all of them were people.

They opened.

On every spoke at once. Forty doorways of silver light on the grey-white roads across the ice. And through every one, the red glass. Morning on Avalon. Gold.

And at the foot of every one, an old sweeper in her own coat, with no collar.

Standing very still. Facing the line.

The line didn't move.

I'd known it wouldn't. Tavvan said so. They've been walking toward a door their whole lives. Some of them won't know there's another kind.

They were standing on the spoke in front of the first frame, the way they'd been standing for days. Close. Touching, for the warmth. Heads down. Some sitting. Some lying on the ice. Not looking at the frame. Not looking at anything.

Tavvan walked out to them.

In Holt's coat. With Holt's stick. Out from the frame onto the spoke, very slowly, the way he walked down the rows in the hall. And stopped in front of the nearest of them.

A tall one. Grey-blue, with a face like a mask. Standing with its eyes shut.

Tavvan didn't say anything.

He reached up. And pulled down the collar of Holt's coat. So his throat showed.

And waited.

It opened its eyes.

It looked at Tavvan's throat for a long time. At the pale line round it. At nothing in the place where the black should have been.

Then its hand came up.

To its own collar.

I took it off.

Not that one. All of them. All the way down the spoke as far as I could reach from the frame, which was further than a terrace on Kiln and further than the room. Hundreds. Then thousands. With my hand flat on the spoke, on the grey-white glowing road worn smooth by a million feet.

Sand.

The tall one looked down at the grey dust on the ice at its feet.

At Tavvan.

At the frame behind him, with the red glass on the other side and the gold light coming through and an old woman in an apron on the far side of it holding out bread.

And walked.

Not toward the building.

The other way.

They came after it. The ones beside it, who'd been touching it for the warmth. Then the ones beside them. Slowly, at first, the way stock walk, heads down. Then faster. Then with their heads coming up, one after another, all down the spoke, as the people in front of them turned round and walked into a door that wasn't the one they'd been walking toward their whole lives.

And through.

Wren started counting.

From the long ward. Through forty doors. She told me afterward she'd never heard anything like it; she said it was like standing at the edge of the sea and trying to count the waves, all forty beaches at once.

She didn't stop.

It went like that at every frame. Holt planned it; it worked. An old sweeper with a bare throat, and a line that had stopped seeing faces, and then someone in the line seeing a throat with nothing round it. And reaching for their own.

And at every frame, someone taking the collars off.

Not me. I couldn't reach forty spokes. Odra's smiths did it. Hyrrani and Kiln, side by side, the way they work in the deep forges under the ridge now. Teel showed them on the plain past the canyon, the last week, with the collars she made in the Kiln way and the clasp that goes the other way.

You don't have to turn them to sand, she told them. Through Dot. You just have to know how they open. I made the hinges. Everyone in my family made the hinges. She held one up. Three short and one long. Then it comes apart in your hand.

Forty smiths at forty frames, with their hammers, striking three short and one long on the clasp of every collar that came to them.

And the collars came apart.

On the red glass, they kept coming.

I didn't see it; I was on One. Mother told me. Konrad told me. Everyone told me, afterward, the way you tell someone about weather they missed.

Forty doors onto the interceptor field and the north field and the plain past it. People coming through every one, all day, all night. Tall and small. Furred and feathered. Six-legged ones with riders. Ones with wings bound flat, who stopped on the red glass and stood still while Hyrrani cut the cords, and then didn't move for a long time, and then, very slowly, opened them.

Maura had every grandmother on Avalon at the forty doors. And then every grandmother on Avalon wasn't enough, so the grandfathers came. And the Kiln smiths, up from the deep halls under the ridge. And the yard people from Shell, who know what it is to come out under a sky that doesn't stop. And Ama Sollen, with the girl from Vantle on her hip, at the twelfth door, handing out blankets.

And still they came.

The interceptor field filled by noon. The north field by dusk. Then the plain past it, all the way to the canyon, and over Dinraal's bridge, and onto the plain past the canyon where Dinraal first showed me his silver.

Nobody had a roof. There wasn't time. There were seventy million people on the red glass and the fields and the plains of Avalon under the sky, and it was autumn, and getting cold.

So Sera lit the plains.

Not a fire. Sera doesn't make fires; she is one. She walked out onto the plain past the canyon at dusk on the first day with her hands open and let go, a little, the way she did on the north stair on Hyrran. And the air over the plain went warm. For miles. And stayed warm. All night.

She did it for two nights. Walking from one end of the plains to the other. Not sleeping.

Luna walked behind her with her hand on Sera's back, the way Sera puts her arm round me on the roof. Keeping her from going too far.

Then the Ashen came down.

They came out of the grey from the far edge of the plain. Where the outermost spokes start, at the edge of the world. Hundreds. No lights. Coming down low.

And their wave went out ahead of them.

Not at the frames. At the spokes. At the far ends of them, where the lines were longest and furthest from any door.

I'm going to write this.

On the outermost spokes, the ones that start at the edge of the world, where there were no frames because Holt had put every frame where it could reach the most people in the time there was, the lines were standing on the ice the way they'd been standing for days.

And the Ashen wave came across them.

And they stopped.

All at once. Standing. Sitting. Lying on the ice.

And then they weren't there.

I felt it. Through the ice. Through my hand on the spoke at the first frame. A long way out, at the edge of the world, a whole spoke of people going still. And then gone.

And then the next spoke.

Spoil, the middle said. The Overseer told us. Beside One, every hour. Spoil.

They weren't fighting anyone. They weren't coming for the frames. They were going down the spokes from the outside in, one at a time, ending everything on them. So that nobody else could have it.

Aurelius put his dome up.

Over the frames on the eastern spokes, the four he was nearest. Very wide. Without Rhiannon beside him, because she was at the twelfth frame with the Mom Squad, so it was only as wide as he could make it alone. Which, it turned out, was very wide. And the Ashen wave, coming in from the edge, met it.

It went black where it touched.

It held.

And under it, four frames' worth of people kept walking.

Hearth's three went out.

Not to the frames. Past them. Out along the spokes toward the edge, where the Ashen were coming in. Gilgamesh on the north, Alexander on the west, Julius on the south.

I didn't see what they did. Asha's instruments saw it. She told me afterward that the Ashen wave came down the north spokes toward the frames and Gilgamesh was standing on the spoke in front of it with the first sword in his hand, the plain one he made for someone, and the wave went round him.

Round. The way it goes round the Hungry. As if it didn't know what to do with him.

Asha says she doesn't understand that and isn't going to try. Gilgamesh says it's because he made the sword for someone, and the Ashen don't know what that means, so they can't end it.

He held the north spokes for six hours.

And Andraste went up.

The wing couldn't. Every pilot was on the red glass holding a thread. So she went up without it.

From the twelfth frame, nearest the building, where she was with Mother and the Mom Squad. She went up the side of a long grey ship that was standing empty at the edge of the landing field, one of the ones that brought the new grey ones out to the front and hadn't gone back, and stood on the top of it.

And Holdfast hummed.

Toward the Ashen.

And Aramaeis came down out of the grey, a dragon, alone, because his sister was on Avalon by a window in a grey stone house waiting for a grandson. And put his long dark body under the ship's nose.

And lifted it.

He flew it at the Ashen.

With Andraste on top.

I'm not going to write all of it. Asha has it. Ilka has it, through the ears. A dragon carrying a dead ship into the sky over One with a First Blade standing on it, and the Ashen wave coming off every dark ship at them, and going into Holdfast, and through the small door in the middle of it that doesn't shut.

Somewhere else.

And Andraste cutting.

Eleven of them. Before Aramaeis's silver went dark at the edges and he had to come down. Eleven Ashen ships, in pieces, falling onto the outer spokes where the lines had been.

It wasn't enough. There were hundreds.

But the spokes they'd been coming down toward, the ones next to go, the ones with the next frames on them, didn't go.

At the twelfth frame, the grey ones came.

From the building. From the roof, where they'd been standing since the room, not knowing which way. A mile away. Down the ramps. Onto the spokes nearest the hub.

Toward the frame.

Mother was there. All of the Mom Squad. Kyria and Teshka with their blades. Maura with bread. Rhiannon with her crown. Cleopatra's field over the frame and the line going into it. And at the foot of the frame, in her own coat, with no collar, the oldest of the three hundred and twelve sweepers.

She's called Ferrin, or something like it. Dot says the name means the one at the end of the row.

She didn't move.

The grey ones came down the spoke. Very fast. All in step. A hundred. More.

Kyria and Teshka went out in front of the frame. Back to back.

And the grey ones stopped.

Not at Kyria and Teshka. Twenty yards short. All at once. In the middle of the spoke.

Looking past them.

At Ferrin.

I didn't see it. Mother told me. At the dawn count, two days later, on the red glass.

She said the grey ones stood on the spoke in front of the twelfth frame and looked at the old sweeper at the foot of it for a long time. And Ferrin looked back.

And then one of them swayed.

"She swept the hall," said Mother. "For sixty years. Before Tavvan. She swept the floor round every one of them when they were small." She was quiet. "She said she knew three of them. By the way they stood."

Ferrin walked out to them.

Past Kyria and Teshka. Who let her. Onto the spoke. To the grey ones standing in the middle of it.

And said three words.

Three names. The ones she gave them, sweeping. Sixty years ago, and forty, and twenty.

Three of them came to the frame.

Not back. Not out of the grey; there wasn't time for that, and there wasn't anyone there to strike their rhythm or sing their song. Just came. Walking. Behind an old woman in her own coat. Past Kyria and Teshka with their blades up. Past Mother. Through Cleopatra's field.

And through the frame.

Onto the red glass.

The rest didn't.

They stood on the spoke and swayed and didn't move for a long time. And then the voice came out of one of them, the voice of the houses, very even, and they turned toward the frame.

And came.

Kyria and Teshka held them.

Mother lifted the spoke.

All of it. In front of the frame. A hundred yards of grey-white road, glowing, worn smooth by a million feet, with a hundred grey ones on it. Up. Off the ice. Fifty feet. A hundred.

And turned it over.

And put it back.

Mother doesn't talk about that one. She says she's not proud of it. She says some of them were somebody, before, and some of them might have swayed if Ferrin had had another forty years, and she turned them upside down onto the ice because there were a hundred thousand people behind her walking into a door and she didn't have forty years.

She says Father burned the field once. She says she knows how he felt.

At the thirty-first frame, Konrad wrote names.

On the spoke. In the cold. With Ingrid beside him. Sitting on a box Odra's smiths had carried out for him, with the sheets on his knee and the pen in his hand and his breath going white.

Not every name. There wasn't time. He wrote the ones who told him. Which was more than he'd thought; he says that was the thing he'll remember. That people coming out of a line on One with their collars just gone, walking toward a door with a red glass field on the other side, would stop. Long enough to say a word to an old man on a box.

My name is this. My daughter's is this.

And he'd write it.

Ingrid didn't hush anything.

She tried. On the first day. She put her hand out at the building, a long way off, black, going up into the grey, humming, and tried to hush the note coming out of every wall of it. So the stock on the spokes would wake faster. So they'd walk.

It didn't hush.

"It doesn't want to be quiet," she said. To Konrad. Very low. "The pieces on Morvane wanted to be quiet. This doesn't want anything. It's just a wall."

She put her hand down.

And then she did something else. She turned round, on the spoke, toward the line coming to the thirty-first frame. And put her hand out over them.

Flat. Palm down. The way she holds it over Kesh's cloud. Over Ione in the night.

And they went still.

Not stopped. Still. The way you go still when someone puts a hand on your head in the dark and makes the sound that isn't a word. The note was still in them. The building was still humming. But for one breath, every one of them in reach of Ingrid's hand stopped hearing it.

And looked up.

And saw the door.

She did it for two days. On the spoke. In the cold. Line after line. Not the building; the people. One breath at a time.

Konrad wrote down how many. He couldn't help it.

Suri's mother was on the seventh spoke.

I found her by the water.

On the second day. Late. When I'd been holding the place for Dinraal's frame for thirty hours, the long way, and taking collars off every spoke I could reach, and my nose had started.

Hana knew before I did. She always does.

She didn't say stop. Not yet. She put her hand on the back of my neck and breathed and said, very quietly: soon.

And the water round my wrist moved.

It had been there since the porch. Since Suri put her hand in mine at the edge of the heap and it went off her wrist onto mine. Cool. Holding. Hana had made it thicker on the red glass.

It moved.

Away from my wrist. Very slightly. A thin skin of water, on a dead world where it hadn't rained in longer than there had been houses, leaning toward something. The way a plant leans toward a window.

East. Toward the seventh spoke.

I followed it.

Scattered, a short way. Out along the seventh spoke, past the frame there, where one of Kyria's cutters and one of Odra's smiths and an old sweeper were standing, and a line was going in. Past the end of the line. Further out. Toward the edge.

Where the Ashen hadn't reached yet. Where the lines were still standing, the way they'd stood for days, close, for the warmth.

And among them, very small, a group of people with skin like dark water.

Sitting on the ice. In a ring. With their hands out, palm up, in the middle of the ring.

And in their hands, water.

Not much. A skin of it, on each palm. Held. The way Suri held it round her wrist.

And they were passing it.

Hand to hand. Round the ring. To the smallest of them, in the middle, children, lying very still. A little at a time. Onto their lips.

When it's not raining, Suri's mother taught her, you hold what you've got, and you give it to whoever's thirstiest.

I came back together beside them.

None of them looked up. Stock don't.

I held out my wrist.

And Suri's water went off it.

All at once. Off my skin, through the air, a thin bright thread of it, into the ring. To one of them. A woman. Sitting with a child's head in her lap, giving it the last of what was on her palm.

It went onto her wrist.

And she looked up.

She knew it.

She didn't say anything. She looked at the water on her wrist, that had just come out of the air on a world where it never rains. And held it up. Close to her face. And breathed in.

And her face did something I'm not going to write.

"Suri," I said.

She looked at me.

And I took the collars off the ring. All of them. One breath. And they fell onto the ice, and the people of the ring looked down at them. And at each other. And at the woman with the water on her wrist.

And the woman stood up. With the child from her lap in her arms.

And said something. Like water going into sand.

Dot gave it to me. Very faint. From a porch a world away.

"She says," said Dot. "Which way."

Not the way the keys said it. Not which way?, with the question in it, the way you'd ask someone who's going to tell you and make you hold it.

The other way.

Which way. Show me. I'm coming.

I showed her.

Back along the seventh spoke. With the whole ring behind her, carrying the children. To the frame. Where the line was going in. Where an old sweeper was standing with her throat bare.

And through.

Hana was waiting on the red glass.

She'd come back through when I scattered. She said she knew where I was going. She was standing at the foot of the seventh frame on Avalon with Suri, who she'd brought down from the house on the rise at a run.

Suri saw her mother come through the frame.

And it rained.

On the red glass. In the middle of the interceptor field. On everyone. A small grey cloud the size of two hands cupped together, out of nowhere, over a girl with skin like dark water and a woman with skin like dark water and a ring of people from a world that holds the rain, who hadn't seen any in longer than they could remember.

Warm.

They stood in it with their faces turned up and their hands out.

"Stop," said Hana.

I was on my knees. On the red glass. I don't remember coming back through the frame. Hana says I came through behind the ring, walking, and then wasn't walking.

My nose was bleeding. Badly. Into my hands.

"Stop," said Hana. Again. With her scarf already there.

"Dinraal's frame," I said. "I'm holding the place. If I stop—"

"Then it comes down," said Hana. "And everyone near it goes through another one. There are thirty-nine more."

"Hana—"

"You'll be angry," said Hana. "I told you. Be angry." She held the scarf to my face. "Stop anyway."

I stopped.

Dinraal felt it go. On One, in the crevasse, at the first frame. He said afterward it was like a rope going slack in his hands. He held it on his own for twenty minutes more, with his silver going dark at the edges, until the last of the line in front of it was through.

Then he came through himself.

And the first frame came down.

Dinraal told me what the twenty minutes were like.

On the porch, a week later, with his silver hands round a cup of Mother's tea that had gone cold because he forgot to drink it.

"The frame was mine," he said. In our language. Slowly. "The first one. The one you were holding the far end of." He turned the cup. "When you let go, it was like the rope going slack. And I thought: now it falls. Now everyone in front of it is on the wrong side."

He was quiet.

"And then I thought about my father," said Dinraal. "At the edge of the sky. Holding something. And not coming back." He put the cup down. "And I thought about Isolde. In the window. Saying don't you dare."

"What did you do?"

"I held it," said Dinraal. "Not for him. Not like him. For her." He looked at his hands. "He held the edge so nobody would come through. I held a door so everyone would." A pause. "That's the difference. I didn't know it until then."

The arm arrived at dusk on the second day.

I didn't see it. I was on the red glass with Hana's scarf on my face and Mother's hand on my back.

Asha saw it. Through Ilka's furthest ears. She said the far edge of the sky over One went dark, and the dark came down. Not like the Ashen. Not like a lid. Like a tide coming in over a beach, very fast, from one side of the world to the other.

The Ashen went.

All at once. Up. The way they always go when they've done what they came for, or when something bigger comes.

And the frames came down.

One after another. Holt called them. From the thirty-first, where he'd ended up beside Konrad and Ingrid because he said a captain goes where the most names are. Thirty-eight, down. Thirty-six, down. Every frame-maker letting go when the last person in reach was through, and coming through, and the frame falling behind them.

The thirty-first was last.

Holt saw to that.

Konrad came through it with the sheets.

He walked onto the red glass with Ingrid on his arm and Holt behind them and stopped, and looked down at the pages in his hand. Full. Both sides. Into the margins. Names, written in the cold, on a box, on a spoke, on One.

He sat down on the red glass.

Very suddenly.

Ingrid sat down beside him. Holt stood behind them both.

And behind them, through the last frame, as it came down, the dark came over the thirty-first spoke.

Risa let go of the threads one at a time. As the frames came down. Forty times. Each pilot on the red glass opening their eyes as their frame fell, and sitting down beside their interceptor, very suddenly, the way everyone sits down at the end.

Rowan last but one. Arcturus last, with his wings shaking.

Then Risa.

She didn't sit down. She stood in the middle of the interceptor field with her hands out, palms up, holding nothing, for a long time after the last frame was gone. As if she'd forgotten how to put them down.

Kesh, in the basket at her feet, frowned up at her.

And her cloud went up off her head. And across. And stopped over Risa.

And rained. Very gently. Warm. For about a minute.

Risa looked up into it.

Then she put her hands down. And picked up her daughter. And sat down on the red glass with her in her lap, in the rain, and didn't say anything at all.

Arcturus, beside his interceptor, with his wings still shaking, watched them for a long time. Then he said something in his own language that Dot, for once, translated without being asked.

"Her mother's daughter."

Wren counted.

At the next dawn. On the red glass. With Konrad on his stool, with the new sheets. In the voice that doesn't break, which broke, once, at the end, and then didn't.

"Seventy-four million, one hundred and eighteen thousand, six hundred and twelve," said Wren. "Home."

A pause.

"Of two hundred and twelve million."

Nobody said anything.

"The rest," said Wren. "The outer spokes. The Ashen." She didn't stop. "And the arm."

"Four hundred and six of the Hyrrani. Thirty-one of Hearth's. Nine of Odra's smiths. Two of the sweepers."

A pause.

"Ferrin," said Wren. "At the twelfth. And one other."

"And three," said Wren. "Who were grey. Who came through behind Ferrin. Who are standing on the red glass now, and haven't moved, and are swaying."

Konrad didn't write anything for a long time.

Then he turned the first sheet over. To the back. To the bottom. Under 213. Home.

And wrote:

One. 74,118,612.

And under it, smaller, the other number.

And under that, after a long time:

They'd been walking toward a door their whole lives. Some of them found another kind. Three swayed on the red glass and nobody knew their names. Mother: look at the house.

Tavvan sat with the three on the red glass.

The ones who'd come through behind Ferrin. Grey. Tall. All the same, except they weren't, because they were swaying, each a little differently, in the cold morning on the interceptor field, with seventy million people walking past them up the hill.

He sat with Holt's stick across his knees and listened to them breathe.

He didn't know them. He'd never swept for them; they were before him. Ferrin's. And Ferrin had gone back out onto the twelfth spoke for one more, Mother said, after the three were through, and the grey ones the voice turned had reached her before Kyria and Teshka could.

So nobody knew their names.

Ossel's mother came down from the deep halls on the third morning with her hammer. And struck, very softly, every rhythm she knew from Kiln, beside each of the three.

None of them answered.

"Not ours," she said. Through Dot. And sat down beside Tavvan on the red glass.

And stayed.

"Somebody's," said Tavvan. To nobody. "Somewhere."

"Somewhere," said Ossel's mother.

They sat there all day. Two old people from two worlds, beside three who'd been somebody, before, and swayed.

I found Mother on the porch that night.

In Father's chair. With the teapot. Looking out at the plains past the north field, where seventy-four million people were lying under a sky that Sera was keeping warm, and Luna was walking behind her.

I sat down on the step.

"You said I wouldn't bring them all," I said.

"Yes."

"I didn't."

Mother didn't say anything for a long time.

"A hundred and thirty-eight million," I said.

"Yes," said Mother.

She poured tea into a cup. And held it out. And when I didn't take it she put it on the step beside me.

"Your father burned the field," said Mother. "To save the house. He sat on this step after, where you're sitting. And he said: I couldn't save the field." She looked out at the plains. "And I said: look at the house."

I looked.

At the plains. At the lights, everywhere, all the way to the canyon and over it. Fires that weren't fires, where Sera had walked. Seventy-four million people. Lying down. Sitting up. Some of them, very far off, singing.

"Look at the house," said Mother.

Days 4858–4860. The Spokes.

Forty frames at once; Risa held forty pilots' threads. The lines didn't move until Tavvan pulled down his collar and let them see his throat. Teel taught the smiths: three short and one long and the clasp comes apart. The Ashen came down the outer spokes ending everything on them, so nobody else could have it. Aurelius held four frames; Gilgamesh held the north with the first sword and the wave went round him; Andraste rode a dead ship on Aramaeis's back and cut eleven. At the twelfth, Ferrin knew three grey ones by how they stood, and they followed her through; Mother turned the rest of the spoke over and isn't proud of it. Ingrid couldn't hush the building, so she hushed the people, one breath at a time. Suri's water leaned toward her mother; which way, show me, I'm coming. It rained on the red glass. Sera kept the plains warm for two nights and Luna kept her from going too far. Hana: stop. I stopped. Dinraal held the first frame twenty minutes alone: for her, not like him. The arm came at dusk; Holt called the frames down; the thirty-first last. 74,118,612 of 212 million. Some of them found another kind. Three swayed on the red glass and nobody knew their names. Mother: look at the house.