Chapter 190: Greyhold

The units met it in the dark.

Logan heard them do it. He heard Halden’s halberd strike stone with a sound like a bell cracked down the middle.

He heard Terry set his feet and take a blow that drove him back across the floor of the cave in a long grinding scrape. Billy’s blades screamed against rock.

Nyriel laid every one of them across his sight as a small point, and the colossus as one huge one.

The small points struck the huge one and fell back and struck again. The units held it in the dark and gave ground, and held again.

The huge point did not stop.

"Boss!" Billy’s voice was shrill. "Boss, it is made of people! I can feel their faces!"

"Can you hurt it?"

"I can scratch it." A furious grinding, then a clang. "I have scratched it! It did not notice!"

’It cannot see them,’ Logan thought. ’It is the same as every hunter in the Silver. It does not know they are there. It is coming for the light.’

The harpy in dull steel struck her wire instrument somewhere off to the left. The chord went through the cave like tearing sheet metal, and the stone under Logan’s grey feet hummed with it. Out in the dark, the grinding faltered. Then it went on.

It came into the light.

It came in slowly, the way the tide had come into the Sump, and the gold climbed it as it came.

It was a mountain of grey figures.

’It is not the dark,’ Logan thought. ’It is the held. The light will lie on stone, and every one of them is stone now. The dark is somewhere inside them, holding them together.’

They were people. Every one of them was a person turned to stone, and they were fused together into one vast shape the way bricks are mortared into a wall. Logan saw a man’s back and a woman’s turned head.

He saw a child’s hand and a pair of boots and the curve of a shoulder under a cloak. They were all grey, all still, and all pressed into each other.

Hands stood out from every part of it. They reached from its flanks and its chest and its great sloping shoulders, open and grasping, hundreds of them.

Its head was made of faces. All of their eyes were shut.

"The ones who stopped on the stair," Helen whispered. "The ones the stair kept."

The colossus lifted an arm. It was made of a dozen bodies locked end to end. It rose slowly over the three pools of gold at the mouth of the stair, and it hung there.

Then it came down on Garen and Isolde.

Isolde’s free hand came up. The chakram winked out of her palm, and her dome rose over the two of them in clouded light, one-handed and thinner than Logan had ever seen it. The arm of bodies struck it.

The dome cracked from top to bottom like ice on a pond, and it held for an instant.

That was long enough. Garen fired up through the crack.

His pistol hummed and spat white fire, and the shot struck the arm at the joint where one grey body was locked to the next. Stone burst.

A forearm made of a man’s torso split away and fell, and the rest of the arm swung wide over their heads and struck the floor beside them.

The cave shook. Dust came down out of the dark.

Logan felt the blow through his stone shins and up into his knees, and he thought of the stair.

"Again," said Isolde through her teeth. "It is going to do that again."

Logan opened Sword Intent.

Sword Intent drained the color out of the colossus and left its threads standing in it.

He looked for the place where it was tied, the way Rishin had shown his parents on the pikes. He looked at the arms and the shoulders and the great head of faces.

It was not in any of them.

It was in the chest, deep in the middle of the mass, a long way above his head. A single knot burned there, no larger than his fist.

When he looked closer, he saw what it was.

Two grey hands were clasped together at the heart of the colossus. Every other body was mortared to those two.

Every arm and every shoulder and every face ran back to that one grip, the way the spokes of a wheel run back to the hub.

’Everything here is held,’ he thought. ’And this is where it holds on.’

"It is tied in the chest," he said. "Two hands, holding each other. I cannot reach it from here."

"Then make it come down," said Garen.

It came down without being made to.

It turned its head of shut-eyed faces away from the three pools of gold. It was looking past them now, past Daniel’s shoulder, at the black mouth of the stair.

Logan looked too.

There was light in the stair.

It was very small. It was coming round the last turn, low down, at about the height of a child’s head. It was the only light in the cave that was not standing still.

The colossus reached for it.

Daniel let go of nothing. He kept Helen’s hand in his left. He dropped the rock from his right, took a card out of his coat and threw it down on the stone between the colossus and the stair.

"Hob," he said.

The card split along its edge, and a huge shape came out of it into the dark. Logan could not see it.

He heard its deep huffing and the scrape of its great hooves, and then the crash as it threw its whole weight against the side of the reaching arm.

The arm did not stop. It swung wide of the stair by an arm’s length.

[ Rooted Stance (Lv1) ]

Daniel planted his grey feet in front of the stair mouth and did not move.

Helen stood behind him with her hand in his and Mending Spring pouring green into his back. The arm swung again, low along the floor.

Hob took it on his plated shoulder, with Daniel’s free hand braced flat against the hide behind him. The blow drove the aurochs back into his master and stopped there. Daniel did not move an inch.

The shock came through Hob into his arm and his teeth, and Rooted Stance took a fifth of it away. What was left was still enough to turn his face white.

The colossus leaned in over all of them, reaching. Its great chest came down out of the dark, and the knot burned at the heart of it, close.

Close enough.

"Alice," said Logan.

"I have you." Her grip in his left hand was iron. "Go."

He would not have to step.

[ Grimspire Lance ]

Grimlord’s Blade drew out to eleven feet and thinned to a needle.

Logan drove it straight up into the grey mass, between a man’s shoulder and a woman’s knee, through stone that ground and shrieked against the steel. It went in as far as the blade would go.

The point touched the clasped hands.

[ Broken Chain ]

The grip held. What broke was the cold wrapped around it. It had been holding those two hands, and through them everything else. Logan felt it through the hilt. It was a small and terrible loosening, deep in the stone.

All through the colossus, the mortar between the bodies cracked.

"Now," Logan said. "Isolde. Where my blade comes out."

Isolde could not see the knot. She saw his blade, and that was enough.

Her chakram left her free hand in a ring of pale light.

Logan tore the blade back out. The chakram went up along the line where it had been, into the hole the blade had left, and into the place where the two hands were held.

There was no sound at all.

Then the colossus came apart.

It did not fall. It loosened.

The bodies slid away from each other one at a time, slowly, the way a crowd breaks up when there is nothing left to wait for.

They came down out of the dark and settled onto the floor of the cave in a wide ring around the six of them. Most of them landed standing. A few sat. Some lay down.

They were all separate now. Every one of them was a single grey figure, alone.

[ Greyhold Stone Colossus slain. ] [ Isolde Rezvolt: +800 Tower Points ] [ Warden of the Third Layer slain. ] [ The Foot is open. ]

In the middle of the ring, where the chest had been, two figures knelt facing each other. One was a broad man with a sailor’s plait.

The other was a woman as tall as he was. Their hands were still locked together. They had never let go of each other. Only the dark had let go of them.

Isolde’s eyes stayed on them. Then she looked down at her hand in Garen’s, and she turned her palm so that her fingers lay laced through his.

The small light came out of the stair.

It came out backward. A girl came first, with her back to the cave and her right hand trailing along the last of the wall.

She was holding an old man’s hand in front of her with her other one, and she was stepping down very carefully.

The old man came after her. His feet were grey stone to the knee. He came down off the last step on them stiffly, swinging each straight leg out and down, and he did not let go of her.

Vina walked stiffly on her heels. Then she turned round.

She looked at the ring of grey figures. She heard Hob somewhere among them, huffing and scraping one hoof on the stone, though she could not see him.

She looked at her father with his feet planted in front of the stair and her mother’s hand in his, and at the others standing in their pools of gold.

Then she found Logan.

"I walked backward," she said. "All the rest of the way. He did not fall again."

Logan let the blade shrink back and pushed it into its sheath. Then he held out his free hand. She took it, still holding Rishin’s with the other, and the light ran between all three of them.

"Again," he said. Then he understood, and his voice cracked on her name.

Rishin looked down at the girl between them. His face was streaked with dust, and he was shaking from the climb.

"She carried me," the old man said. "Down all the rest of it. A child who cannot be called, walking backward in the dark."

Then he sat down on the bottom step, because his legs would not hold him any longer.