Chapter 203: Signs

Rishin was in front of her before she had taken two steps.

He did not touch her. He only stood in her way on the bare stone, with Vina’s hand still in his, and he looked down into her face.

Edda’s mouth was already opening. Logan saw her chest rise to call.

"If you call him now," said Rishin, "they will come to you before you are halfway there. And he will stand in that place and hear his voice sing your name while they take yours."

All of it carried. It was low and plain, and it was meant for her.

Edda’s mouth closed.

She stood shaking in front of the old man with her knives in her fists. Then her shoulders came down, and she looked past him at Alice.

Alice went to her and took one of her hands, knife and all.

"We are coming with you," Alice said softly. "All of us. But we go without a sound."

They went down the river without speaking.

It was harder than Logan had expected. He had not known, until he could not do it, how much of every waking he spent talking.

He wanted to tell Halden to take the front. He wanted to ask Alice whether her bowstring was dry.

He wanted to say a dozen small, useless things about the mist and the moss and the river, and every one of them stuck in his throat before he tried it.

’Nothing I say just to say it will carry,’ he thought. ’And anything that does carry will bring them.’

So he walked, and he kept his mouth shut, and he listened.

The singing never stopped. It came up the river out of the mist ahead of them, so faint that he lost it whenever the water grew loud. Then it came back.

It was Garen who solved it.

He stopped the column with one raised fist. Logan nearly walked into Isolde’s back.

Garen turned round to face them. He pointed two fingers at his eyes, then at the mist on the left of the path. He opened his hand flat and pressed it down toward the ground, twice. Then he made a fist again.

Isolde nodded at once. She answered him with three quick movements of her fingers that Logan could not follow.

Garen grinned. It was the grin of a man who had been waiting a long time to be useful without saying a word.

He showed everyone else, slowly this time. Eyes, left. Down. Wait.

Logan understood. He saw Alice understand beside him.

’They have done this before,’ he thought. ’Somewhere a long way from here, in some match where they could not speak either. And they never forgot how.’

They learned the signs as they walked.

There was not much to learn. A raised fist meant stop. A flat hand pressed down meant get low. Two fingers at the eyes and a point meant look there.

A hand drawn across the throat, which made Helen wince the first time Garen did it, meant one of them.

Vina learned them faster than anyone. By the third time Garen used the sign for stop, she was making it back at him before he had finished.

Daniel was slowest. He kept making the sign for look when he meant wait. Helen corrected him each time by gently folding his fingers into the right shape, and each time he smiled at her.

The units watched all of it. Logan saw Halden’s gauntlet close into a fist, very slowly, as if he were trying the shape of it.

Twice that waking, Hollowthroats passed them in the mist.

The first time, Logan saw only one of them. It was a tall pale shape among the columns, drifting along with its great ears turning, and it passed within a stone’s throw of the path.

Garen’s fist went up. The whole line stopped. The Hollowthroat went on into the mist without slowing, and the rustle of its long feet faded behind them.

The second time, there were three. They came straight across the path ahead, so close that Logan could see the smooth grey skin where their mouths should have been.

Vina sneezed.

It was a small, sharp sound in all that quiet. Logan’s heart lurched. Every one of the family went rigid.

The Hollowthroats did not turn. Their ears did not so much as twitch. They crossed the path and went away between the columns, listening for words.

Vina stood with both hands clapped over her nose and her eyes huge. Rishin looked down at her. Then, very slowly, the corner of his mouth went up.

’Only words,’ Logan thought. ’They are deaf to everything but words.’

He made his shoulders come down.

They came to the village a little after that.

It stood in a ring of columns beside the river, where the stone had been cut back to make a clearing. There were houses built between the columns, low and grey, with doors of woven reed. Smoke went up from a few of them.

People were moving among the houses. They were all in pairs, and none of them was speaking.

They saw the family step from the mist, and they stopped what they were doing. A man splitting reeds put down his knife. Two women carrying water set their buckets on the ground.

Nobody ran this time. They only stood and watched.

Then an old woman came out of the nearest house. She was small and bent, with a shawl round her shoulders, and she was carrying a square of grey slate in one hand and a stub of chalk in the other.

She stopped in front of Rishin. She looked at him, and at the girl holding his hand, and at the long line of strangers behind.

Then she wrote on the slate, and she held it up.

YOU ARE LOUD.

Logan stared at it.

Then he understood, and he could have laughed.

’Writing,’ he thought. ’The panel said words that are spoken. It never said anything about words that are written down.’

Alice had seen it too. She dug in her storage ring and came out with a stick of charcoal from the cookfire, and a flat white stone from the riverbank.

She wrote on it, slowly and carefully, and held it out to the old woman.

WE ARE LOOKING FOR THE PLACE THE VOICES GO.

The old woman read it. Her face did not change. She wiped her slate clean with her sleeve and wrote again, and she turned it round for all of them to see.

THE CHOIR. DOWN THE RIVER, WHERE IT ENDS.

ALL WHO LOSE THEIR VOICES WALK THERE.

NONE COME BACK.

Edda made a small, choked sound. The old woman’s eyes went to her, and then to the knives in her hands. She studied the girl’s face.

Then she wiped the slate and wrote one more line, more slowly than the others.

THE WAY DOWN IS UNDER IT.

They slept in the village, in an empty house at the edge of the ring.

Nobody wrote to tell them whose house it had been. Nobody needed to. There were two cups on the shelf, and two pairs of shoes beside the door, and the shoes were thick with dust.

Logan lay on the reed floor with Alice in the dark. The singing still came faintly through the walls.

"Are you awake?" she whispered.

He heard it. He smiled in the dark.

"Yes," he whispered back.

She found his hand. Neither of them said anything else. They did not have to. Everything they had was already in it.

Across the room, Edda lay on her side with her back to the wall and her knives within reach. Her eyes were open.

Alice let go of Logan’s hand and crawled over to her. She lay down beside the girl, close, so that their shoulders touched.

"We will get him back," Alice whispered.

Edda heard it. Logan saw her hear it. Her face crumpled for an instant and smoothed out again. She opened her mouth to answer, and nothing came, and she shut it.

Then she found Alice’s hand in the dark and held on to it, the way Vina held the old man’s.

Vina was not asleep either.

She was lying with her head on Rishin’s knee, the way she had on the landing behind the falls. Logan could just see her face in the last of the blue light from the door.

"Grandpa," she whispered.

"Hm."

"Can you say it to me?"

Rishin tipped his head toward her. "Say what, little one?"

"That you love me. You never say it. But here it has to be true, or I cannot hear it."

Rishin was quiet.

Logan thought he would not answer. He saw the old man’s hand move on the girl’s hair, slow and careful, the way he had once retied the Hearthstone’s string.

"I love you, little one," said Rishin.

All of them heard it, in the dark of that borrowed house. Across the room, Logan heard his mother make a small sound.

Vina smiled. She shut her eyes.

"I knew it," she said. "Now it is written down."

[ Time remaining: 336 days ]