Chapter 230: The Keeper

They saw the Last Cairn on the next waking.

It stood on the far edge of the plain, grey against the pale glow, so large that at first Logan took it for a hill. Then they came round a bend in the path, and he saw it properly.

It was stones. All of it was stones, piled up and up into a heap the size of a mountain. Every stone ever set down on the Ninth Layer might have been carried to it.

At its foot, small at that distance, there was a dark opening.

"That is the way down," said Rishin from Hob’s back.

His voice was thin. He had not eaten when they woke. Vina had tried to put a spoon in his mouth, and he had turned his head away.

The cairns between them and the Last Cairn were the far cairns.

Logan knew them as soon as they reached them. They were taller and closer together than any before, and the paths between them were narrow and dark.

There were people sitting among them.

They sat with their backs to the cairns, or across the path. They had stones in their laps and in their arms and on their shoulders, more stones than any person could carry.

They were buried in them up to the chest. Some only up to the neck.

Not one of them moved as the family went past.

Their eyes were open. One old woman watched Hob go by with the old man on his back, and her lips moved. Logan could not hear what she said.

Vina walked faster. She kept her eyes on the path.

Link moved up beside her with his flame held low, so that its red light fell across the dust ahead of them and not on the faces.

Then Logan heard a voice.

It was low and quiet, right behind his ear. It was his voice.

’He knew,’ it said. ’All the way down. He knew where we were going. He knew what was waiting on every layer. And he let us walk into every one of them blind.’

Logan stopped walking.

’He knows what is at the bottom,’ it went on. ’He has known since the rim. Since before the rim. And he has never told you once.’

Logan put his hand over his ear. The voice did not stop.

’You saw the thread. You saw the stones. He will not even tell you whose they are.’

Behind him, Alice made a small sound.

He turned. She had stopped too. Her hand was pressed over her ear, the way his was.

She was hearing it too. He could not tell what it was saying to her.

All along the path, the others had stopped. Garen had his head down over his stone. Edda had both hands over her ears. Isolde stood with her eyes shut and her lips pressed together.

Helen stood straight in the path.

"No," she said aloud. She said it calmly. "No. I do not hold that against him. I never will."

She opened her eyes and looked at Logan. She did not tell him what the voice had said, and he did not ask.

Then the stones came.

Bram grunted and dropped to one knee. A stone filled his arms, grey and rough and as big as a man’s head.

Edda took her hands off her ears and stared at it.

"Papa," she said. "Papa, I did not... It is mine. I did not want it to be."

Bram looked up at his daughter. He nodded slowly, as if he had been expecting it since the Whiteout.

Garen’s stone grew in his lap. It swelled back from the size of a fist to the size of a loaf, and he went down onto both knees under it.

Isolde’s eyes came open. She made a sound like a hurt animal.

Logan’s hand closed round a weight.

He looked down.

A stone lay in it. It was smooth and dark and the size of an apple. It was so heavy that his arm dropped and his shoulder went with it, and he sank to one knee in the dust.

His eyes went to Alice.

She was staring at the stone in his hand. Her face had gone white.

"It said you cut it," she whispered. "The promise. It said the first time it got hard, you cut it. I told you to. I know I told you to. But somewhere I..."

She did not finish.

A sound came from behind them.

It was Hob. The great aurochs had gone down onto his knees in the path. His legs were folded under him, and his head was low, and he was blowing hard through his nose.

Rishin was still on his back. Daniel was on his knees beside the aurochs with both hands on his neck.

"Up, Hob," he was saying. "Up. Come on."

Hob tried. Logan saw the great legs strain under him. He got halfway up and sank down again.

The old man was bent so far over that his face was in the aurochs’s mane. His hand was pressed to his chest. Between his fingers, Logan could see stones.

There were three of them now.

Two were the old ones, smooth and grey and small. The third was new. It was dark and smooth, and it matched the one in Logan’s hand.

Logan understood.

He looked at the third stone between the old man’s fingers, and he knew exactly whose it was. He had heard every word of it behind his ear, in his voice.

’He let us walk into every one of them blind.’

’It is mine,’ he thought. ’That one is mine.’

He had not known he held it. He had thought he had put it down on the shelf above the Silver, and in the Seam, and on the bridge. He had told himself it was not his question.

It had been there all along. The voice had only found it.

Vina had seen the new stone. She was standing before Hob with the old man’s hand in hers, staring at it between his fingers.

"Whose is that one?" she whispered. "Grandpa, that one is new. Whose is it?"

Rishin did not answer her. Logan could not either.

The far cairns moved.

The tallest of them, ahead on the path, shifted. Stones slid off it in a rattle and a rush. It stood up.

It was tall. It was taller than Halden standing on Terry’s shoulders. It was made of stones, piled up into the rough shape of a man, with long arms of stacked rock that hung to its knees.

Its head was a single round stone with a crack across it like a mouth. The crack moved. Logan heard it whispering.

[ Hollow Grudge Keeper ] [ Rank: Mythic ] [ Scaled to: Tier-9 ]

[ Attack: 44,000 ] [ Speed: 3,000 ] [ Constitution: 170,000 ] [ Arcane: 55,000 ]

Halden and Terry stepped into its path. It never turned its head. One long arm of stacked rock swung, and Terry went backward into a cairn, and the cairn came down on top of him. Halden’s halberd struck its leg and rang like a bell.

The Keeper took no notice of either of them.

It turned its cracked head along the path. It looked at Garen on his knees, and at Bram, and at Logan.

Then it looked at Hob, kneeling in the dust with his rider bent over.

It went toward them.