Chapter 191: The Foot

Nobody tried to make the old man get up.

Vina sat down on the bottom step beside him, still holding his hand, and the gold lay over the two of them in a small round pool. Logan stood in front of them with Alice.

Then his mother and father came with Garen and Isolde behind them, until all eight of them were gathered at the mouth of the stair in one wide, warm light.

Around them stood the ring of grey figures that had been the colossus.

They were not moving. Nothing in the cave was moving now. The grinding had stopped and the dust no longer sifted down. The only sound was Hob somewhere among the statues, breathing like a bellows.

"Is it over?" asked Helen.

"This part is," said Rishin, without lifting his head.

They rested where they were.

It was not much of a rest. The floor was bare rock, and nobody could lie down without keeping hold of somebody else.

They made pairs again and lay in them, close together in a heap at the foot of the stair, with their grey legs stretched out stiff in front of them.

Logan could not bend his ankles at all. He could bend his knees, a little, if he did it slowly. The stone below his knees did not hurt.

It did not feel like anything. It was like wearing a pair of boots that went up to his shins and could never be taken off.

He looked at Alice’s legs beside his and then at his mother’s. Garen’s were grey all the way to the knee.

’Every one of us,’ he thought. ’Every one of us will walk the rest of the Abyss like this.’

He did not say it aloud. He did not have to. He saw Alice look down at her feet and then look away.

Rishin saw it from the step. "Sleep," he said. "Ask me about your legs at the far end of the Foot."

The units made their ring around them in the dark. Halden reported the thing in the dark going along it once while they slept, the same as every sleep before.

Somewhere in that ring, Synthia was at work. Logan could hear her. He heard the small tap of her hammer and Terry’s slow, patient breathing, and now and then a grunt as she leaned her weight on the plate.

"What is she doing?" Alice murmured.

"Fixing his chest plate," said Logan. "The colossus caught him on the dent from the Race, and it bent the rest of the way."

"In the dark?"

"By feel." Logan listened to the hammer. "She knows where every rivet is on every one of them. She does not need to see them."

The tapping went on, steady and unhurried. When it stopped at last, Terry’s voice rose from the ring, low and pleased.

"It is straight, Lord," he said. "I can breathe again."

Daniel lay with his free arm stretched out on the stone beside him, inside the gold, his palm resting on a thing that stayed hidden in the black. He could hear Hob’s great breaths close by.

Every so often his father’s hand moved, slowly, as though it were scratching a broad head between two horns.

One of the horns, Daniel said afterward, had a chip out of it the size of a thumb.

[ Time remaining: 341 days ]

Vina was awake before any of them.

Logan woke to find her sitting up in the gold with her hand in Rishin’s. The old man was asleep, which Logan had not seen often. His mouth was a little open, and his stone feet lay crossed at the ankle like a statue’s.

Vina was looking out past the edge of the light, into the middle of the ring.

"Big brother," she whispered. "There is a light between their hands. Like Corwin’s."

Logan looked. Far out in the black, at about the height of a kneeling man’s hands, there was a spark of gold no bigger than an ember.

"Can we see?"

He thought about it. Then he woke Alice with a touch on her shoulder, and the two of them got up stiffly and walked over to the kneeling pair.

Vina shook the old man’s hand until he woke. He got up and came with her, swinging his stone legs, and she did not let go of him.

The light came with them. It slid across the floor of the cave and climbed the two grey figures, and it lay over their faces and their shoulders and their locked hands.

The broad man knelt there with his sailor’s plait, and the tall woman knelt across from him. Between their locked stone fingers, the spark was still burning.

Close up, it was the smallest light Logan had ever seen on that layer. It was gold, like all the others, and no wider than a fingernail.

But it was there. It sat between the two stone palms where they pressed together, and it did not go out.

Vina made a sound in her throat.

"They are," she said. "They are both in there."

Rishin stood looking down at the two kneeling figures with his face perfectly still. Then he turned away from them and looked at the dark beyond the ring, toward the end of the cave the colossus had come from.

"Come away, little one," he said. "There is nothing we can do for them."

"There must be."

"There is not. Not with anything we carry." He said it gently. "They have each other. That is more than most of the people on this layer have. Come away."

Vina let herself be led back to the stair. She looked over her shoulder twice.

Isolde was sitting up when they came back. She had her panel open in front of her, and she was frowning at it the way she frowned at a letter in a language she could not read.

"Eight hundred," she said.

"Congratulations, dear," said Garen sleepily.

"I have not had a single point to my name since we came in." Isolde closed the panel. "I do not know what to do with them."

"Spend them," said Garen. "Before it learns what you spent them on. Senior says so."

"Senior said that to Logan."

"Senior says it to everybody eventually."

Rishin had sat down on the step again. He did not deny it.

Logan looked out past the statues.

"Halden," he said. "Is there a way on?"

"There is, Lord." The voice came out of the dark not far away. "We have walked the whole of the Foot while you slept. It is a long cave, and the far end of it narrows. At the narrow end, there is a way through."

"A black door?"

"No, Lord. That one is here too, near the stair. I found it with my hand. There is a cold lantern beside it, and a circle cut in the floor."

A pause. "The way through is at the far end. And there is light on the other side of it."

All of them turned to look down the cave at once.

"Light?" said Daniel. "Our kind?"

"No, sir," said Halden. "Nobody is holding anybody out there. It lies there by itself."

They went to look.

It was a long walk on stone feet. They went in pairs, with the units moving through the dark around them, and Pebble set his cairns as they went out of habit.

The floor of the Foot sloped gently down. The air grew a little warmer, and then a little warmer again.

Then Logan saw it.

At the end of the cave, the rock walls drew together into a passage. A little way inside the passage, a line ran across the floor.

It was not carved. The rock simply changed there, from dark grey to a pale gold-brown, as cleanly as if somebody had laid two cloths side by side.

Beyond the line, there was light.

It was pale gold, the color of a field of wheat, and it lay on the floor and the walls of the passage on the far side as plainly as daylight lies in a doorway.

On the near side, where they stood, there was nothing but the black and the gold of their hands.

It was not their light. It came from somewhere else.

Garen stopped. So did the others. They stood at the mouth of the passage with their hands locked, looking at it.

Billy was waiting at the line. Logan could not see him, but he could hear the wheel’s rim ticking against the stone, a hand’s width short of the light.

"Boss," said Billy. He did not turn around. "It is warm over there. I can feel it on my face. Nobody is holding anybody, and it is warm."

Rishin walked them up to the line. He kept Vina’s hand.

He stood there with his stone toes a finger’s width from the pale gold-brown rock, and he looked down at it. Then he looked back at the family.

"The Third Layer ends at this line," he said. "Step over together. Past it, you can let go."

Logan looked at Alice.

She was already looking at him. She lifted their joined hands between them and studied them, as if she wanted to remember exactly how they fitted.

Then the eight of them stepped over the line together.