Chapter 224: Threads

Solveig brought them up slowly.

He rose through the dark with a long beat of his wings, and then another, until his feet were level with the ledge.

Then he set the old man and the girl down on the stone between Terry and Link, carefully, the way a man sets down two full cups.

Vina’s knees gave. She sat down on the ledge with Rishin’s hand still in hers and did not get up.

Link was back on his feet. He did not say anything. He hooked his hand into the old man’s belt again and stood there, and his knuckles were white on the leather.

"I am sorry, Grandfather," he said at last. "My foot went."

"I know." Rishin did not look round at him. "It was the bird. Not you."

Nobody moved for a little while after that.

Logan sat on the ledge behind Terry with his shoulders to the rock. His hands had started shaking as soon as Solveig landed, and he could not make them stop.

Alice sat down beside him and took one of them in both of hers and held it until they did.

"I could not get past him," Logan said. He looked at Terry’s broad back. "I tried. My feet would not go."

"I know."

"If Solveig had not been there..."

"He was there." Alice pressed his hand. "You sent him. First. Like you promised."

Logan looked at her. Then he leaned his head back against the rock and shut his eyes.

Vina had not let go of the old man’s hand. She was looking at it, and not at him.

"You said it," she said again. Her voice was hoarse from crying. "Above the Silver. If you fall down, I fall down with you, and Solveig picks up the pair of us. And then I said it back to you on the lip. And you let me."

"I did."

"So you knew. When we came in here. You knew I would have to."

Rishin was quiet.

"Yes," he said.

Vina looked up at him then. Her face was red and wet. Logan saw her open her mouth to say a hard word, and then shut it again.

She put her other hand over his, so that she was holding it with both.

"Then do not fall," she said. "Promise me you will not fall."

Rishin looked down at their joined hands.

"No," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because here it would be kept, little one." He rubbed his thumb slowly over her knuckles. "And I do not know that I could keep it."

Vina stared at him. Then she bowed her head over his hand and stayed like that, and she did not ask again.

They slept on the next wide stretch of the ledge, where it bent round a jut in the wall.

Logan’s count dropped by one while they slept, the way counts did now. So did everyone’s.

[ Time remaining: 321 days ]

Link did not sleep. He sat by the rock with one hand in Rishin’s belt, and the red flame of his staff burned all through the dark. Every time Logan woke, Link was looking at the edge.

The ledge reached the bottom of its spiral on the next waking.

"Boss," said Billy from the front. "The ledge stops."

"I know."

"I am telling you anyway. That is my job now."

It did not reach the floor. There was no floor. The ledge simply ended, at a place where it widened into a broad shelf of rock with the rock behind it and the dark below.

A bridge went out from the shelf.

It was a single arch of grey stone, as wide as two men walking side by side, with no rail. It went out over the dark in a long curve, toward the middle of the pit.

In the centre stood a pillar.

It rose out of the dark below and went up into the dark above. It was so wide that its far side was lost in the gloom.

Halfway across its face, where the bridge met it, there was an opening in the stone like the mouth of a cave.

Daniel crouched at the foot of the bridge and laid his palm flat on the stone.

"Old," he said. "Older than the Well. But it is sound."

"How can you tell?" asked Helen.

"Same as a wall." He kept his hand there. "You listen to it."

"There," said Rishin. He was standing behind Vina on the shelf, with Link’s hand in his belt. "That is the way down."

Logan opened Sword Intent.

He did it out of habit. He wanted to see what held the bridge up, and whether it would hold the units.

The color went out of the pit.

The bridge was sound. Its stone was laid in threads of grey that ran clean and unbroken from the shelf to the pillar. He saw that much first.

Then he saw the rest.

There were threads everywhere.

They were thin and pale and fine as hair. They hung from the dark above, hundreds and hundreds of them, from the places where the villages were.

They hung down into the pit like the strings of a harp. Some of them ran straight down past the shelf and on into the dark below. Some ran across the pit to the far wall.

’Promises,’ Logan thought. ’The ones who are waiting. Every one of them.’

He looked at the family.

There was a thread from his chest. It was bright, and short, and it ran from him to Alice.

There was a thread from Bram, and it did not go to anyone. It went to all of them at once. It spread out from the dwarf like a net and touched every member of the family.

’Four lives,’ Logan thought. ’He owes them to all of us at once. It does not know which of us to drag him toward, so it holds him to all of us.’

There was a thread from Vina to the old man.

And there were two threads from Rishin.

One of them ran forward to Vina. It was short and taut and bright, like Logan’s.

The other went down.

It ran from the old man’s chest, over the edge of the shelf, into the depths under the bridge. It was thicker than any thread Logan had seen. It was older.

It had the dull shine of a rope that has been pulled tight for years.

Logan knew it. He had seen it once before, in the Seam.

He did not look away from it fast enough.

Down the thread, deep under the shelf, a shape was moving.

At first it was only a smudge on the thread, far down. Then it was larger. It was climbing.

It went up the old man’s thread hand over hand, the way a spider climbs a strand of silk, and it was coming fast.

Logan closed Sword Intent.

Without it, he could see nothing below the shelf but dark. No thread. No shape.

He opened it again. The shape was halfway up.

"Rishin," he said. "Get back from the edge. Now."