Chapter 215: Behind the Falls

Tavin left before they did.

He waited where the wide canyon opened into the bowl, with his broken sword at his hip and the clawed shield on his back. Helen had healed the worst of his cuts.

Martha had filled him with stew until he could not eat any more, and Isolde had given him a waterskin from her ring.

He looked back once at the family, standing in the bowl beside the Seam.

"I will tell him," he said. "About all of you. About the girl who knew my name."

Vina waved at him with both arms.

He laughed, a little shakily, and lifted his hand. Then he turned and went up the wide canyon toward Stitch. He walked slowly at first. By the first bend he was nearly running.

Rishin had not moved from the crack.

Logan went and stood beside him without speaking. He looked where the old man was looking, into the dark below the falls, and he waited.

"You saw it," said Rishin at last.

It was not a question. Logan did not pretend it was.

"Yes."

The old man nodded slowly, still watching the dark.

"Then you know as much as I am able to tell you," he said. "For now."

He turned away from the crack. Vina was coming toward him across the gravel with Edda, and her new braids were swinging. He held his hand out for her before she reached him.

Logan stayed at the edge a little longer. Then he went back to Alice.

The stair behind the falls was where Tavin had said it would be.

It began on a ledge a step inside the lip of the crack, hidden by the sheet of falling water. They had to go through the fringe of the falls to reach it.

The water hit Logan’s shoulders like a cold fist, and then he was through, standing on wet stone in a roaring dark.

Link came through behind him with the iron staff held high. The red flame hissed in the spray, and it did not go out.

The steps went down ahead of them. They were cut into the back wall of the crack, behind the curtain of the river, and they went down a long way.

They went down all that waking.

The roar of the water never stopped. It filled the stair so completely that after a few turns Logan stopped hearing it, the way he had stopped hearing the singing on the Fifth Layer. It became the shape of the air.

Light came through the falls in a pale red shimmer at first. Then the red faded, and there was only Link’s flame and the white of the water beside them.

Alice came down beside him on the next stretch, where the stair was wide enough for two.

"What did you see?" she asked. She did not have to say where, or with whom. "When you looked down with him."

Logan kept walking. He thought about not answering, and then he thought about how far down they still had to go.

"A thread," he said. "Like the ones between us. His went over the edge and down into the dark."

"To whom?"

"To nobody I could see."

Alice walked beside him for several steps without saying anything. The roar of the falls filled the space where her answer should have been.

"Not Vina," she said finally. "We do not tell Vina."

"No," Logan agreed. "We do not tell Vina."

They slept on a wide step where the stair turned back on itself. Helen checked every one of them for cuts before she lay down. There were none.

[ Time remaining: 329 days ]

The stair ended at the bottom of the crack.

The river came down beside it in a last long rope of white and struck a black pool. The spray hung over everything. Beyond the pool, the crack opened out, and the family walked out of it into a new place.

It was white.

That was all Logan could see at first. White air, soft and cool and close. Then a gust came through it, and the white thinned, and he saw that it was fog.

It lay over everything in great slow drifts. Under it, the ground was grey stone, flat and smooth. Out of the stone, in every direction, rose standing stones.

They were tall and grey and plain, each one about the height of two men. They stood alone and in clusters, close together and far apart, with no pattern Logan could find. The fog moved between them like water between the posts of a pier.

There was no roof that he could see. There was only more fog, going up and up into a pale glow.

The panel opened as the last of them came out of the crack.

[ You have entered the Seventh Layer. ] [ Blessing of the Seventh Layer: Together ] [ Curse of the Seventh Layer: Together ] [ While one who loves you can see you, time waits for you. Out of their sight, it runs. ]

Logan read it twice. Then he read it a third time, more slowly.

"Time waits," said Daniel. "What does that mean, time waits?"

"The count," said Garen. He had gone still. "It means the count."

Logan opened his panel. The number was where it had been when they woke.

[ Time remaining: 329 days ]

He looked up. All around him, the others were doing the same. He saw Alice’s lips move as she read hers. He saw Isolde close hers and look at Garen.

"Mine has not moved," said Helen.

"It would not," said Rishin. "We are all standing in a heap. Every one of you can see somebody who loves you."

He looked out at the fog moving between the stones.

"That is the blessing. You will not like the other half."

They set out across the stone in a close group, with the units round them.

There was no path. There was no river to follow, because the river ran into the black pool and did not come out. Rishin chose a direction and walked, with Vina’s hand in his, and Link walked in front of them both.

The fog came and went in waves.

Sometimes it was thin, and Logan could see fifty paces across the grey stone to the next cluster of standing stones. Sometimes it thickened until he could see only Alice beside him and the shapes of the others ahead.

Each time it thickened, everyone drew closer together without being told.

"Keep the person in front of you in sight," said Isolde. She said it to all of them, low and clear. "Always. Whatever happens."

They walked. Logan kept his eyes on his mother’s back and Alice’s shoulder, and he counted the standing stones as they passed.

He had counted forty-one when the wind came.

He felt it first on the back of his neck. It was cold, and it came from behind them, and it was much stronger than any wind he had felt since the Silver.

The fog in front of him moved. It did not drift. It rolled, all at once, the way a wave rolls up a beach.

"Close up!" Garen shouted. "Close up, now!"

Logan reached for Alice.

His hand found her sleeve. Then the fog came over them both, thick and white and cold, and her sleeve was pulled out of his fingers as if somebody had yanked it.

He grabbed again. He grabbed at nothing.

"Alice!"

The fog swallowed his voice. He could not see his hand in front of his face, or the stone under his boots.

He stood still and listened. He heard nothing at all but the wind.

Then, in the corner of his sight, a panel opened by itself.

[ Time remaining: 328 days ]

He stared at it.

While he stared, the number changed again.

[ Time remaining: 327 days ]