Chapter 208: The Throat

Nobody hurried him.

Logan sat on the lake bed with his back against Alice’s shoulder until the pounding in his head had eased. It was slow. His MP came back the way water comes back into a well, slowly and from far down.

Link stood in front of Vina with the iron staff upright beside him. He did not move from that place.

When Vina went to look at the Throat, he went with her and stood between her and the edge. When she came back, he came back.

Vina put up with it for the length of a meal. Then she put her hands on her hips and looked up at him, and she told him he was in her way.

Nothing came out. She was cross with him, and cross was not love.

Link looked down at her. Then, without a word, he pointed his iron staff at Rishin.

Vina looked at Rishin. The old man looked back at her and did not help.

She sighed, very loudly, and went to sit with Edda.

Bram came to Logan while the others were eating.

The dwarf planted himself before Logan with his hammer hanging from his belt and the shield slung behind him. He looked at Logan, and then at the Throat, and then at his daughter sitting on the wet stone with Vina.

He opened his mouth and shut it again. Logan saw him decide how to say it.

"My girl," said Bram, "would like to walk with Alice a little longer. If you will have us. Down there, wherever it goes."

It carried. Bram looked faintly surprised each time that happened.

"She would be welcome," said Logan.

He found he meant it, so it carried.

Bram nodded once, gruffly, as if a bargain had been struck. Then he went back to his daughter and sat down beside her. He did not try to say anything else.

The old woman from the village came down the rings before they left.

Logan did not recognise her at first. She was coming down the steps of the basin very fast for somebody so small and bent, with her shawl slipping off one shoulder. The slate was tucked under her arm.

She was holding an old man’s hand.

He was thin and white-haired, and he walked as if he had been walking for a very long time. His eyes were clear. He was looking at the old woman as if he could not stop.

She brought him all the way down to the lake bed. She stopped in front of Edda.

She opened her mouth, and then she closed it. Logan saw her try to say it and know that it would not carry, because it was not love. It was thanks.

So she took the chalk out of her shawl and wrote it on the slate, and she turned the slate toward Edda.

THANK YOU.

Edda read it. Then she laughed, and she cried at the same time. She put her hand flat on the slate, over the words, and held it there.

The old man beside her found his voice.

"Brenna," he said to the old woman, very gently. "Brenna. Let us go home."

They went down the Throat after that.

The steps wound down the inside of the shaft beside the falling stream. They were wide enough for two to walk abreast, and they were slick with spray.

The stream went down past them on the open side in a long pale rope. It roared at first, the way the falls of the Fourth Layer had roared.

As it fell further and further below them, the roar softened into a hiss and then into a whisper.

Link went first, ahead of Vina, holding the iron staff high. The red flame in its cage lit the steps far below them.

Logan watched it slide down the wet wall turn after turn, and he did not think he would ever get used to it.

’On the shelf above the Silver it showed three paces,’ he thought. ’Now it lights the way for all of us.’

The cold blue light of the moss fell away above them. Soon there was only the red flame and the whisper of the water.

The singing had stopped long ago. Logan kept listening for it anyway.

He realised he was waiting for it, the way a man waits for the creak of a stair he knows. He looked up the shaft. There was only darkness and the falling stream.

"It is gone," said Alice beside him, softly.

He heard it. He took her hand.

"I know," he said. "I keep listening."

"So do I."

They went down together, and the walls of the shaft changed as they went.

The grey of the columns gave way to a darker stone, and then to stone with a reddish tinge in it, like rust in water. The air grew warmer. The spray on Logan’s face stopped being cold.

They slept on a wide turn of the stair, where the steps broadened into a ledge.

Martha cooked. They fed each other again without thinking about it, and nobody bothered to remark on it any more. Edda let Alice feed her a spoonful, and then took the bowl and fed Bram, and Bram ate it with his face perfectly straight.

Link did not sleep. He sat at the edge of the ledge between Vina and the drop with the staff across his knees, and the red flame burned steadily all through the sleep.

Every time Logan woke, Link was in the same place, and Rishin was asleep against the wall with his hand on the girl’s head.

[ Time remaining: 334 days ]

The bottom of the Throat came on the next waking.

The steps ran out at the floor of the shaft, where the stream fell into a pool of steaming water. The heat came up off it in waves. Beyond the pool, an opening led out of the shaft into a red light.

They came out through the opening one after another, and they stopped.

They were standing on a ledge high up on a wall of rock. Below them and on every side as far as Logan could see, there lay a land of red stone.

It was broken into a thousand pieces. Deep canyons cut through it in every direction, and narrow ridges ran between them like the edges of knives. Every ridge and every wall glittered.

Logan looked closer and saw why. The red rock was not smooth. It was jagged and glassy, like the inside of a broken bottle, and it caught the light along every edge.

Far overhead, the roof of the cavern glowed a dull deep red, the color of a fire that has burned down to embers.

The ledge they stood on ran down along the wall to the left. It was the only way.

Vina took the first step down onto the ledge.

The stone under her boot was loose. It turned. She threw out her hand to catch herself, and her palm came down flat on a glassy ridge of red rock.

She snatched it back with a gasp. There was a thin red line across her palm.

At the same instant, behind her, Helen cried out.

Logan turned round. His mother was holding up her left hand and staring at it. A cut ran across her palm too. It was in exactly the same place as Vina’s, and it was just as long.

Then the panel opened in front of all of them.

[ You have entered the Sixth Layer. ] [ Blessing of the Sixth Layer: Shared ] [ Curse of the Sixth Layer: Shared ] [ Every wound is shared with the one who loves you most. ]

They all stayed quiet, and this time it was not because the words would not carry.

Vina looked at her palm. She looked at her mother’s.

"It is only half as deep," she said slowly. She held her hand out to show them. "It should hurt more than this."

Helen was looking down at her hand. The cut on it was shallow and already beading red. She closed her fingers over it, very slowly, and when she looked up her face had gone soft and strange.

"I have the other half," she said.

Logan looked at the red land below them, at the canyons and the glittering knife-edged ridges going on and on under the ember-colored roof.

Then he looked at Alice. She was already looking at him.

’Every wound,’ he thought. ’Every cut and every blow. Whatever lands on her lands on whoever loves her most.’

’And whatever lands on me...’

He did not finish the thought. He did not have to.

Behind them, a little apart from the rest, Rishin stood in the opening of the Throat. He had turned his hands over and was looking at the palms of them. They were unmarked.

He closed them and put them in his sleeves. Then he followed the girl down.