Chapter 221: The Well

Isolde would not let him get up.

Garen did not argue. He lay on the cold stone with his healed arm across his chest and his wife sitting over him, and every time he tried to lift his head she put her hand flat on his chest and pushed it down again.

"I am fine, dear."

"You were inside it."

"Only partly."

"Garen."

He shut his mouth. He lay still. In the end he reached up and took her hand off his chest and held it instead, and she let him.

Vina had come to stand at his feet. She looked at the slime drying on his clothes.

"Did it hurt?" she asked.

"Yes," said Garen. "Do not tell your grandfather. He will say I deserved it."

"You did," said Rishin, from behind her.

Garen grinned up at the pale glow. Isolde hit him on the shoulder, gently.

They walked to the Well when Helen said he could stand.

It was as wide as a house, as it had looked from far off. The low wall round its lip came to Logan’s knee. Inside it, the stair followed the curve of the wall down, turning and turning until it reached the dark.

The steps were worn into hollows in the middle.

"A great many people," said Daniel. He ran his boot along one. "For a great many years."

"Going down," said Bram.

"Going down," Daniel agreed. "I do not see any marks of anyone coming up."

The family went down in pairs, as they had in the Whiteout. Nobody had to tell them to.

The walls of the Well were grey stone, smooth and cold. After the first turn, Logan saw that there were marks on them.

They were cut into the stone at the height of a person’s hand. Some were neat and some were scratched with the point of a knife. Some were so old that the stone had worn nearly smooth over them.

They were names.

They were names in pairs, mostly. Some had words beside them.

I WILL WAIT FOR YOU AT THE BOTTOM.

BACK SOON. DO NOT MOVE.

ALWAYS.

Alice read them as they went past. Logan watched her lips move. She did not read them aloud.

Vina had stopped beside one of them. It was a single name, cut deep, with no second name beside it and no words at all.

"Grandpa," she said. "Did you write one? When you came down before?"

Rishin looked at the name she was touching. He looked at it for the length of two steps, and then he walked on, and she had to go with him.

"No," he said. "I never wrote mine down."

After the second turn, there were more of them. After the third, the wall was covered with them from the step to as high as a tall man could reach.

"Promises," said Helen. She had her hand on Daniel’s arm. "They are all promises."

They slept on the stair, in their pairs, face to face.

Logan lay with his forehead against Alice’s and looked at the wall above her head. There was a name cut there, and another name, and between them a single word.

HOME.

He had no idea whose names they were, or whether either of them had ever reached it.

He looked at his count when he woke. It held. Alice had been watching him the whole time.

[ Time remaining: 323 days ]

The stair came to an end on the next waking. It did not end at a floor.

It ended at a hole in the floor of the Well. The last step went down into it, and beyond the hole there was open air.

Logan went to the edge of the hole on his knees and looked through.

He was looking down from the roof of a pit.

It was round, like the Well, but the Well was a thimble beside it. Its far wall was so distant that it was only a grey haze. He could not see the bottom. Below him, the dark went down and down and did not stop.

There were lights in it. They were tiny and yellow, scattered on the walls of the pit far below him, in clusters. They looked like the lights of villages seen from a hill at night.

And there was a path.

It started beside the hole, where the last step of the Well ended. It was a ledge cut into the wall of the pit, wide enough for three to walk abreast.

It went round the inside of the pit in a long slow spiral, down toward the lights.

There was no rail.

The units went out first, as before.

Halden stepped out onto the ledge and put his back to the wall. Terry came after him, and Billy, and the rest. Link went out with his staff raised, and its red light went sliding along the ledge ahead of them.

Then the family climbed through the hole, one pair at a time, onto the ledge.

The panel opened before the last of them were through.

[ You have entered the Eighth Layer. ] [ Blessing of the Eighth Layer: Promised ] [ Curse of the Eighth Layer: Promised ] [ What you have promised in love will be kept. ]

Logan read it.

He read it a second time. Then he looked up and found Alice already looking at him.

"What does that mean?" asked Edda. "Kept by who?"

"By you," said Rishin. His voice was strange. "Whether you want it or not."

Logan did not understand him at first. He turned to go along the ledge to the front, the way he always had. He wanted to see the path ahead. He wanted to walk at the head of it, behind Halden.

He could not.

He took a step toward Halden’s back. His foot came down beside Terry. He took another, and it came down beside Terry again. His legs would not carry him past the last of the units. They simply did not go.

He tried a third time, slowly, with his hand on Terry’s arm. Terry looked down at him, puzzled, and pressed himself to the wall to let him by.

Logan’s feet stayed where they were. He stood there with his hand on the wall and stared at them.

Alice said it first.

"You promised me," she said slowly. "On the canyon floor. You said you would let the units go first."

Garen burst out laughing.

It echoed out across the pit and came back from the far wall a long time later, thin and strange. Isolde hit him on the shoulder again.

"It is not funny," said Logan.

"It is a little funny." Garen wiped his eyes. "You have been trying to walk in front of everyone since the first match. Now you physically cannot."

Logan did not answer him. He was looking past Garen, along the ledge.

Rishin had stopped.

He was standing with his back flat against the rock and Vina’s hand clamped in his. His face had gone the color of the stone.

His other hand was pressed against the wall, the fingers spread, as if he were holding himself up by it.

"Grandpa?" said Vina.

The old man did not answer her.

Logan watched his hand slide on the stone. He watched Rishin lean away from the wall, out toward the open edge of the ledge, as if somebody below in the dark had hold of his coat and was pulling.