Scarecrow

I tried a second one on the fourth day.

In the cave under the ridge, with the queen singing and Tavvan beside me and Halloway at the mouth of the tunnel with her arms folded, having said everything she was going to say about it on the way down. I picked the grey one nearest the dome’s old edge. A tall one, swaying a little more than the rest. And put my hands on it, and listened for the catch, and found one. Faint. Every thirtieth breath, maybe. Maybe less.

Tavvan didn’t know it.

He listened for a long time. Then he shook his head and sat back on his heels and said something Dot didn’t need to give me. Not from the hall.

I asked anyway.

The grey held. It held the way a frozen bolt holds. I asked again, and again, and something under it pushed back toward me a little, the way a word comes up to the edge of your tongue and won’t come further. And then the floor of the cave tipped, and I was lying on it with Halloway’s hand under my head and blood on my lip and no memory of falling.

”No,” said Halloway. To me. To the queen. To the cave. ”Not without a name. Not again.”

She was right, and I hated it.

Ossel came back because Tavvan had listened to him breathe every night for years and given him a name, and because the queen sang, and because I asked. Take away the name and there was nothing for the atoms to remember toward. Just grey, and under it a shape I couldn’t see.

Forty-four of them. And not one of them had a Tavvan.

The queen didn’t stop singing to them.

She sings every day now. Morning and evening. Not loud. The twelve old Hyrrani who keep her stand in their line with their blades across their chests and listen too, because Kyria says that’s what keepers do. And the forty-four sway.

Tavvan goes down every evening with Holt’s stick and sits on the black floor among them. He doesn’t try anything. He listens. He says if he listens long enough he might learn them, the way he learned the children in the hall. One breath at a time.

”How long did that take?” I asked him.

”Forty years,” said Tavvan. Through Dot. Without irony. He doesn’t have any.

Ossel remembered fire on the ninth day.

Not all at once. Halloway says it won’t ever be all at once. But he’d been working in Odra’s deepest forge since the morning after the gate, with the tongs she gave him. Doing what she told him. Holding things in the fire for her, mostly, because his hands don’t feel heat the way ours do. She says he’s the steadiest pair of hands she’s had at the anvil in forty years and she’d tell him so if he had more Hyrrani.

On the ninth day, she asked him to bank the fire for the night.

He didn’t know the word. She showed him. And halfway through, with the coals raked and the ash going over them, Ossel stopped.

And looked at the fire.

And said something in his own language, very fast, and then sat down on the forge floor with the shovel across his knees and started to cry.

Odra sent for Tavvan. Tavvan sent for Dot.

”Red,” said Dot. Afterward. In the kitchen of the house on the rise, at the long table, with everyone there. ”He says the sky was red. All the time. Not from a sun. From the forges. A whole mountain of them. His whole world.” A pause. ”He says they banked the fires every night exactly like that. With the ash. His mother showed him when he was small.”

She stopped.

”He says she wore a collar too,” said Dot. ”Everyone did. He says his mother banked the fires every night in a collar, and the iron went up the mountain on carts, and at the top of the mountain the grey ships took it.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Ithel, at the end of the table, beside Ione, put down his spoon.

He asked Isolde for paper. She gave him a page out of the notebook, which she has never done for anyone. And Garnet’s pencils, which Garnet handed across the table without being asked.

He drew a mountain.

A child’s drawing. Five, and a box for most of it. A triangle with lines going up the sides, and at the top a flat place, and over everything a sky he pressed so hard into with the red pencil that it went through the page in two places.

He held it up.

”Hot,” said Ithel.

Asha found it on the map that night.

Two thousand, eight hundred and six silver points over the long table in the map room. Ithel stood under them in his nightshirt and held his hand palm up under one, the way he did for One. Not pointing. Telling.

Nearer than One. Much nearer. Not past the edge of Okafor’s slate, but on it. In the grey part. In a cluster of a dozen points the houses had been working longer than anyone could say.

Ossel stood beside him and looked up at it for a long time.

He didn’t know maps. He’d never seen one. But he looked at the point under Ithel’s hand and his breath caught on the eleventh, and on the twelfth, and on the thirteenth.

”What’s it called?” said Okafor. To the Overseer.

It has a number, said the Overseer. From the doorway, with the dog. They all have numbers. This one is very low. It has been on the ledger a long time.

”What did they call it?” said Okafor. To Ossel. Through Dot. ”Your people. Before.”

Ossel said a word.

Dot was quiet. Then:

”The nearest is Kiln,” said Dot.

”We said we’d come back for the lines,” said Okafor.

Not to anyone. To the slate. Where Holt’s line is still written, small, under the circles. The lines. We come back.

”We can’t go back to One,” said Okafor. ”Not yet. Not with the front over it and the building and every grey ship there is.” She put the chalk on the table. ”But that’s not the only place there are lines. There are two thousand eight hundred and six.”

She looked at the silver point under Ithel’s hand.

”So we start with one,” said Okafor. ”Near. Small. Somewhere the houses think nobody would ever come for, because nobody ever has.” She looked at Ossel. ”Somewhere a smith who let go of Odra’s iron wants to go home to.”

Holt was at the end of the table. With Crane beside him.

He didn’t say first in. He didn’t need to. He just looked at Okafor, and she looked back, and wrote it on the slate.

Holt.

Risa told me on the porch, the night before we went.

”I’m going through,” she said. ”Not holding the end. Through.”

I didn’t say anything.

”Rowan can fly the wing from the arch,” said Risa. ”I’ve been teaching him since Isca. Badly. But he can.” She had Kesh on her knee, facing out, the way Andraste carries Vessa. ”I’ve stood on the red glass with my hands out for two days, twice. I’m not doing it a third time while you lot go through doors.”

”What about her?” I said.

Kesh was frowning at the courtyard. At the arch in it.

”Mother,” said Risa.

Ingrid took Kesh at dawn. On the red glass. In her thin arms, with Konrad beside her and Ione holding his hand.

Kesh did not approve.

Her cloud went grey the moment Risa handed her over. Then darker. Then it started to turn, the way storms turn, over the bench at the foot of the arch, and the wing on the field behind us all looked up at it.

Ingrid put her hand out over it. Flat.

And Kesh frowned at her grandmother’s hand. Hard.

And then, very slowly, the cloud stopped turning. Not still. Not white. But not turning.

”She’s letting me,” said Ingrid. Very quietly. ”She doesn’t have to. She’s letting me.”

Risa looked at her daughter for a long time.

”Come back fast,” said Risa. To me. Not looking away from Kesh.

”You’re coming with me,” I said.

”I know,” said Risa. ”I’m saying it for her.”

That was eleven days after Ithel drew the mountain.

Not the long way. We didn’t need it. Kiln was on the slate, near the Watch’s edge, close enough that a Hearth ship could reach it in two days. Arcturus took four of the long dark ones out past Root with Ilka’s ears on every hull, and Dinraal in the first, with Kyria’s cutters and a smith in each, and on the third day they sent back one word through the silver.

Here.

Then Dinraal’s frame went up in a ravine on the far side of Kiln’s mountain from the forges, and Kyria’s cutters cut toward it from the courtyard, and the queens sang.

And it opened.

The first thing I noticed was the heat.

Not like Sera’s. Sera’s heat is clean; it comes from her and goes where she sends it. Kiln’s came from everywhere. The ground. The rocks of the ravine, black and glassy and warm to touch. The air, which was thick and tasted of iron and smoke. And the sky.

The sky was red.

Ithel had pressed so hard it went through the page. He’d got it exactly.

Holt came through second, behind Andraste. Then Crane. Then Ossel.

Odra had told him he didn’t have to. Tavvan had told him, through Dot, very gently. Halloway had told him a great many things.

He came through anyway. With the tongs in his belt and a Hyrrani coat that didn’t fit, and stood at the foot of the frame in the ravine and breathed in the iron and the smoke.

And didn’t catch once.

We went over the shoulder of the mountain at dusk.

And looked down.

The mountain was hollow. Not like Halcro’s moon; open, on the near side. As if something had taken a bite out of it a very long time ago and the bite had filled with fire. Terraces going down the inside of the bite, hundreds of them, like Tor Isca turned inside out, and on every terrace, forges. Thousands. Red at the mouths. With people at them.

Ossel’s people. Tall and thin and soft-grey, with long hands. Working.

In collars.

And at the very top of the mountain, on the flat place Ithel drew, a landing field. Long grey ships on it. And carts going up to them, on rails, all the way from the bottom terraces, full of iron.

And on every terrace, between the forges, standing very straight in the red light, grey ones.

”Two thousand,” said Andraste. Quietly. Beside me. With Holdfast humming so low I felt it in my teeth more than heard it. ”Perhaps more. One on every terrace for every forge they watch.” She didn’t take her eyes off them. ”They know about the blade now. Look.”

I looked.

The grey ones on the nearest terraces had turned. Not toward us. Toward the sound. Very slowly. All the ones within a mile of us. Their heads coming round toward the shoulder of the mountain where Holdfast was.

”They learned it on Hyrran,” said Andraste. ”What it means when it hums.” She almost smiled. ”Good. Let them come to me.”

Okafor had planned it at the long table. Nobody argued with her. I’ll put it in one line, the way she wrote it on the slate:

Collars first. Then the grey ones. Then everyone, through the frame. Out before the Ashen.

Ingrid did the note.

There were pieces of queen in the forges. Asha’s instruments found them before we came over the shoulder. Set into the stone of every forge mouth, very small, singing the note into the people working there so they’d stay grey and keep working. Thousands of them.

Ingrid stood on the shoulder of the mountain in the red light with Konrad’s hat on and put her hand out over all of it.

And the mountain went quiet.

Ten thousand hammers stopped at once.

I’ll never forget that. Not the silence, exactly; there was still the roar of the fires. The stopping. Every forge on every terrace of a hollow mountain, all at once, as a whole world of smiths who’d been grey for longer than they could remember lifted their heads.

And the grey ones on the terraces turned toward them.

Andraste went down.

Not to the people. To the grey ones. Down the first terrace and into the nearest of them before it had finished turning, and Holdfast went through it and it didn’t get up, and she was already at the next.

The ones further off came toward her. All of them within a mile. Leaving their forges. Leaving the people at them.

That was the point.

And I went the other way.

Down the terraces behind her, where the grey ones had left. To the forges. To the people standing at them with their heads up and their hammers stopped, blinking in the red light, with collars on.

I didn’t do them one at a time.

On Avalon, after Imber, I’d learned I didn’t have to. A collar’s a small thing. The houses make them all the same. I put my hands on the stone of the terrace and found every collar on it, the way you’d find every key on a ring by touch, and asked them all at once.

Sand.

Down the whole terrace. Two hundred of them. Falling off a hundred throats in a fine grey dust onto the forge floors.

Then the next terrace.

Then the next.

Holt took the carts.

That was his idea, not Okafor’s. He looked at the rails going up from the bottom terraces to the landing field at the top and said one word to Crane, and Crane looked at the rails for a long time, and then went down to the nearest junction with his spanner.

”They’re house rails,” Crane told me afterward. ”Same as every sorting yard. I laid them, once. At nineteen.” He was quiet. ”You can turn every switch on a line from one box if you know which box.”

He knew which box.

Every cart on Kiln stopped going up.

And then started coming down. All of them. Full of iron. Down the rails from the top of the mountain, faster and faster, toward the bottom terraces, where there was nobody now because the people had gone up to the frame.

And at the bottom of the mountain, where the rails ended, the grey ones who’d come down after Andraste.

Hundreds of carts. Of iron. Coming down a mountain.

Holt watched it from the shoulder. With his coat collar up in the heat, because he says he’s not taking it off on a strange world for anyone, not again.

”Seemed a waste of the iron,” he said. When it was over. ”But they made it. They can have it back.”

And Odra.

She’d come. Of course. She hadn’t asked; she’d just been standing at the courtyard arch when it opened, in her apron, with Gilgamesh’s first sword, which he hadn’t asked for back.

She went down into the mountain with Ossel.

To the forges. To the smiths with the collars just gone from their throats, standing at their anvils not knowing what to do with their hands.

And she spoke to them.

Not in Hyrrani. Not in their language. In smith. That’s what Dot called it, afterward, when she couldn’t translate it. She said there wasn’t a language in it at all. Odra walked down the terraces with her bare scarred arms and her white hair and touched their hammers. Their tongs. The iron on their anvils. Nodded at some of it. Shook her head at some of it and showed them, with her own hands, why.

And they followed her.

Up the terraces. Toward the frame.

Because a smith knows a smith. Odra says it doesn’t matter what world.

Then the long grey ships at the top of the mountain lifted.

They’d been loading. All the while. Iron going up the rails into their holds, until Crane turned the switches. And now they came up off the landing field into the red sky and turned over the mountain, very low, with their ramps open.

And grey ones came out of them. Not walking. Falling. Hundreds. Onto the terraces from above, landing where they fell and getting up and coming on.

Toward the frame.

Toward everyone going up to it.

That was where my house fought.

All five, this time. Risa wasn’t on the red glass; she said she’d held the other end for two days at Isca and again on One and she was done standing still while other people went through doors. Rowan could fly the wing; she’d taught him. She came through the frame behind Holt, as lightning, and stood on the shoulder of the mountain in her leathers and looked up at the grey ships coming down.

”Mine,” said Risa.

And put her hands up.

I’d never seen her bring lightning down. She sends it. She goes as it. She flies forty ships with it from the ground. Down out of a sky is a thing a storm does, not a person.

The red sky over Kiln filled with cloud.

Out of nothing. In a breath. Black, piled up, with the forge-light coming up red underneath it. And Risa closed her hands.

And the sky came down on the grey ships.

Not one bolt. Thousands. All at once. A single long white stroke that started at the top of the cloud and split, and split, and kept splitting, until every grey ship over the mountain had a thread of it going into it. And the grey ones still falling out of the ramps had threads going into them.

Ossel’s people, on the terraces below, looked up.

Some of them had never seen rain. Kiln doesn’t have weather; it has the forges. And now it had Risa.

It rained on them. Warm. While the grey ships came down in pieces onto the top of their mountain.

There were children on the terraces. Not many; the grey ships took the children from the top of the mountain for the stock, Ossel says, as soon as they were old enough to carry. But some. The small ones. Too young to be worth the ship.

They’d been carrying water to the forges when Ingrid stopped the hammers. They were still holding the buckets.

The rain came down on them, and they looked up into it with their mouths open, and their big dark eyes went very wide. And one of them, a girl not much older than Ithel, put her bucket down on the terrace and held both her long hands out, palms up, to catch it.

And then all of them did.

A whole terrace of small soot-covered children with their hands out in the rain on a burning mountain, while the sky came down on the ships above them.

Risa saw it. From the shoulder. With her eyes open, for once.

She told me afterward it was the first time in her life she’d ever made weather for someone to play in.

She said she’d have to tell Kesh. She said Kesh would be furious she’d missed it, and then she’d want to try, and the north field would be under water for a week.

She said she was looking forward to it.

The grey ones that landed still came.

The ones Risa’s threads hadn’t reached, or had reached and not stopped. Down the terraces. Hundreds. Toward the frame, where Ossel’s people were going through, a hundred at a time.

Luna put down a road between them and the frame. Not for sliding. A road of ice a mile long and a hundred yards wide, glassy, laid straight across the terraces, and the grey ones coming down onto it couldn’t stand on it.

Sera stood at the end of the road.

She didn’t let go, the way she did in the valley. She didn’t have to. She just stopped holding it in, a little, at the far end of Luna’s road. And the ice went to water under the grey ones. And the water to steam.

And Hana did the rest.

Andraste came back up the terraces, through the steam, with Holdfast. Into what was left.

Ten minutes.

That’s what Asha said, afterward. Ten minutes from the first grey ship lifting off the top of the mountain to the last grey one on Kiln not getting up.

Andraste stood on the top terrace when it was over, with Holdfast in her hand. Not humming. With both ribbons wet from Risa’s rain.

Risa came and stood beside her.

They didn’t say anything. They don’t need to; they’re shield-sisters, Andraste says, and shield-sisters talk with their shoulders. Risa leaned hers against Andraste’s.

And then Luna came. And Sera, glowing faintly. And Hana, breathing.

And I came up the terraces through the steam and they were standing in a row on the top of a mountain on Kiln in the rain, and I stopped.

”Five,” said Andraste. ”All of us. For once.”

”You’d have done the sky,” Sera said to Risa.

”I did the sky,” said Risa.

Then the Ashen.

Vessa turned. On Dory’s chest, at the courtyard arch, a long way off. And Dory, who’s been carrying her through every arch since Hyrran because Andraste asked her to, called it into the silver in her clear high voice, the way she calls the names at the dawn count when Konrad lets her.

Ashen. Kiln. Soon.

”Out,” said Okafor. ”Everyone. Now.”

We were nearly out already. Asha had the count from Wren: eight hundred and seventy-one thousand of Ossel’s people through the frame onto the red glass, out of eight hundred and eighty thousand. The rest coming up the last terraces. Odra at the back of them with Gilgamesh’s sword, not hurrying, because she says a smith never hurries in front of other smiths.

And Ossel, at the frame. Not going through.

He was standing beside it. Looking back down the terraces. At the last of his people coming up. At every face.

Holt was beside him.

”Son,” said Holt. ”Ashen.”

Ossel didn’t move.

”He’s looking for someone,” said Dot. Through the silver. Very quietly.

She came up the last terrace with Odra.

Old. Older than Tavvan, maybe; it’s hard to tell with them. Thin. Small for her people. With soot all the way up her long arms and a pale line round her throat where the collar had been until an hour ago. Walking very slowly, with Odra’s hand under her elbow.

She stopped at the top of the terrace. Ten yards from the frame. Because a young man was standing in front of it, not moving, and she didn’t know why.

And then he breathed.

And on the eleventh breath, it caught.

She knew.

From ten yards off, in the rain, with the Ashen coming, she knew. Before he’d said anything. Before she could see his face properly through the steam.

She said a word.

Not Ossel. Something else. Longer. Softer.

Dot didn’t give it to us. She said afterward it wasn’t hers to give.

Ossel went to her.

And knelt down in front of her on the wet stone at the top of the mountain, in the rain, the way Tavvan knelt in the snow on Hyrran to catch him. And she put her sooty hands on his face. Both of them.

And then on his throat.

Where his collar would have been. If he still had one.

And felt nothing there. And then felt the catch, under her fingers. On the eleventh breath.

”Now,” said Holt. Very gently. To both of them. ”Now, love. Through.”

They went through together.

Then Odra. Then Holt, last, with Crane beside him. First in, last out.

And Dinraal let go of the frame.

And on the far side of a mountain on Kiln, in a ravine of black glass under a red sky that was raining for the first time in its life, the silver went back into the rock.

And the Ashen came down on nothing.

Wren counted at the next dawn count.

”Eight hundred and seventy-nine thousand, six hundred and four,” she said. ”Of eight hundred and eighty thousand.”

”Three hundred and ninety-six,” said Wren. ”On the bottom terraces. When the grey ones left the forges to go to Andraste. The ones nearest them didn’t get out of the way.”

”Nine of the Hyrrani. Two of Hearth’s.”

A pause.

”And one grey one,” said Wren. ”Who stopped.”

I hadn’t known.

Asha’s instruments had it. On the fourth terrace. A grey one, very tall, that had come down out of a ship in Risa’s rain and landed on the terrace by a forge where an old man was still standing, with his collar just gone, not knowing what to do.

And it had stopped.

By the forge. In the rain. Looking at the fire banked in the mouth of it. With the ash raked over the coals.

And hadn’t moved. Not when the steam came. Not when Andraste came up through it with Holdfast, and saw it standing there with its hands at its sides looking at a banked fire, and went past it.

She told me afterward that Holdfast hadn’t hummed.

It was still standing there when Dinraal let go of the frame.

We left it there. On Kiln. By a banked forge, in the rain.

I don’t know what happened to it. I don’t know if the Ashen found it. I know Ossel’s mother, when Dot told her, went very still, and then said something.

Dot gave that one to us.

”She says,” said Dot. ”Somebody’s.”

They needed heat.

That was the first thing Halloway said, on the red glass, at dawn, with eight hundred and seventy thousand of Ossel’s people standing in the cold of an Avalon morning with their long arms wrapped round themselves. Kiln never drops below the warmth of a forge mouth. Avalon in autumn felt to them like One felt to us.

Odra solved it before I could.

”Hyrran,” she said. To Okafor. At the long table, the same morning, with soot still on her apron. ”Under the ridge. The forges go down further than anyone’s ever used. There are halls down there my grandmother’s grandmother cut and nobody’s lit since.” She folded her arms. ”It’s warm under the mountain. And there’s iron.”

”You’d give them your forges?” said Okafor.

Odra looked at her as if she’d said something very stupid.

”I’d give them the ones I’m not using,” said Odra. ”And I’d teach them the Hyrrani way. And they’d teach me theirs.” She looked at the window. At the red glass, where Ossel’s people were standing. ”Forty years I’ve wanted someone at my anvil who knew something I didn’t.”

So they went to Hyrran. To the deep halls under the ridge, below the forges, where Ossel and his mother and the first of them lit a fire that night that Kyria says you could feel through the snow on the top of the ridge.

And a long way under them, in the cave, the queen who’s never been taken stopped singing for a moment.

And then went on. A little louder.

Ossel’s mother went down to the cave on the third night.

Nobody asked her to. She’d heard about the forty-four from Ossel, and from Tavvan, and she came down the forge stairs and the long tunnel very slowly on her own, with soot still in the creases of her arms, because her people don’t wash it off; Dot says it’s how they remember the day’s work.

Tavvan was there. On the black floor. With Holt’s stick across his knees.

She stood beside him and looked at them. Swaying. Under the queen’s singing.

She didn’t say anything for a while.

Then she walked out among them.

Tavvan told me the rest. He watched it all.

She went from one to the next. Not touching. Standing close. Listening, the way he listens, with her head on one side. Past the first ten. The first twenty.

At the thirty-first, she stopped.

It was one of the tall ones. Darker than most. Swaying a little more than the others, the way the one I tried and failed on had.

She stood beside it for a long time.

Then she put her sooty hand flat on its chest. And held it there. And breathed with it. In. Out. Matching it.

And Tavvan, who’s spent forty years learning children by their breathing, heard what she’d heard.

Not a catch. A rhythm. Under the even grey. Very faint. Three short and one long. Three short and one long.

”She says,” said Dot. When Tavvan called her down. ”It’s the hammer.”

Nobody understood.

”On Kiln,” said Dot, ”every forge has its own rhythm. Every family. You learn it from your mother. You strike it all your life.” A pause. ”She says this one’s breathing in the rhythm of the forge next to hers. Three short and one long. A family two doors down.”

Another pause.

”She says they had a girl. The grey ships took her from the top of the mountain when she was nine, for the stock, and nobody ever saw her again.”

Ossel’s mother didn’t take her hand away.

She stood there on the black floor of the cave under the ridge with her hand on the chest of a grey one, breathing with it, and said a word. Soft. Not the name she’d said at the frame. A different one.

Dot gave it to us.

Teel.

And the grey one’s breathing went three short and one long. And then, very faintly, three short.

And stopped.

And then started again.

I didn’t go down. Halloway wouldn’t let me; she said I’d be there in the morning or not at all. But I sat on the porch of the house on the rise until dawn, with Hana beside me watching my nose, and I could feel it through the ground. Through Hyrran, and the arch, and Avalon.

A breath, a long way off, that didn’t sound like a clock.

Konrad wrote it at the dawn count. On the front of the sheet. A new line, under Ossel.

Kiln. Home.

And under it, after a long time:

Teel. Listening.

And on the back, at the bottom, under Yet and And the room, very small:

1 of 2,806.

Days 4723–4752. Kiln.

A second grey one, with no name: the floor tipped, and Halloway said not again. The queen sings to the forty-four morning and evening; Tavvan sits with them, learning. Ossel banked Odra’s fire and remembered: a red sky, a mountain of forges, his mother in a collar. Ithel drew it so hard the red went through the page. Kiln, near, on the slate. Okafor: we start with one. Ingrid stopped ten thousand hammers. I did the collars a terrace at a time. Crane turned every switch from one box; the carts came down on them. Odra talked to the smiths in smith. Risa brought the sky down on the grey ships; it rained on Kiln for the first time. All five, for once. Ossel waited at the frame; his mother knew him by the eleventh breath. 879,604. A grey one stopped by a banked forge and we left it. Somebody’s. Odra gave Ossel’s people the deep halls under the ridge. His mother found the thirty-first by the rhythm of a neighbour’s hammer: Teel. 1 of 2,806.