Chapter 231: Set Down

The Keeper came down the path toward Hob, and the stones it was made of ground together as it walked.

Vina did not move.

She stood before the kneeling aurochs, holding the old man’s hand. Link was ahead of her with his staff raised and the red flame burning in its cage. Solveig dropped out of the air beside them with his wings spread.

None of them could lift what was on Hob’s back.

Logan knelt in the dust with Alice’s stone dragging his arm down, and he studied the third stone in Rishin’s fist.

’Mine,’ he thought.

He made himself look at it properly.

He looked at the bent back and the white hair and the hand pressed shut over three stones. He thought of the shelf above the Silver, and the stair in the Third Layer, and the Seam.

He thought of the old man walking backward down a crack in the dark, held up by a child.

He remembered the thread going down, and how Rishin had said not to cut it.

’He has carried all of us,’ he thought. ’Every layer. And whatever he is carrying for himself, he has never once asked me to help with it.’

’He will tell me when he tells me.’

He let go of it.

He did not say it aloud. He felt it go, the way he had felt the splinter come out when he cut his promise to Alice. It was a small sharp loosening somewhere under his ribs.

On Hob’s back, the third stone fell out of the old man’s fingers.

It dropped beside the aurochs’s knee and lay there, small and dark, as light as a pebble.

Rishin lifted his head.

He looked down at the stone in the dust. Then he looked over at Logan, kneeling with his burden.

His mouth worked. Then he nodded once.

Alice was beside Logan. She was looking at the stone in his hand.

"I told you to cut it," she said. "I meant it. I still mean it. That voice is lying about me."

She put her hand over his.

The stone went light. Logan opened his fingers, and it rolled out of his palm into the dust.

He got up.

Across the path, Edda was on her knees in front of her father.

"You went into the white without me," she said. She was crying. "On the rope. You untied yourself and you went, and you did not even think what it would do if I lost you too. After Grandmother."

"I went for you," said Bram.

"I know. I know you did." She laid her hands on the stone he held. "I know. I am not angry any more. I do not want to be."

The stone tumbled from his arms. Bram stood up in one movement and put his arms round her instead.

The Keeper had reached Hob.

It loomed over the kneeling aurochs, tall as a house, with its long stone arms hanging. The crack across its head was moving. It was whispering, louder now. Logan heard his voice in it again, faint and far away, and he did not listen.

Link swung the iron staff at it. The red flame struck its chest and the stones there blackened and cracked. It did not stop.

It lifted one long arm over the old man.

"Hob," said Daniel.

The aurochs could not get up. The weight on his back held him down.

Rishin saw it.

He took his hand out of Vina’s. He put it on Hob’s neck. Then he slid off the aurochs’s back sideways and fell into the dust on the far side, with the two stones still closed in his fist.

Hob came up off the ground like a wave.

Garen was still on his knees.

He had his stone in his lap, as big as a loaf again. He was watching the Keeper’s arm come down. Isolde was standing behind him with her chakram in her hand, and the arm was coming down on both of them.

"Isolde," said Garen.

She looked down at him.

"I am asking this time," he said. "Let me fight it. Please."

Isolde looked at the arm coming down, and then at him.

"Yes," she said.

The stone went out of his lap like smoke.

Garen surged to his feet with both pistols in his hands, and he fired before he was fully standing. The shots hit the Keeper’s arm at the elbow, and the rock there burst apart.

The arm swung wide. It missed them both by the width of a hand.

Logan opened Sword Intent.

The Keeper was a tower of grey threads, stone stacked on stone. Every thread in it ran up to one place.

It was the head. It was the round stone with the crack across it, the mouth that whispered. In Sword Intent, the crack burned.

"The head," Logan said. "The crack. Everything goes to the crack."

"I cannot reach it," said Alice. She had an arrow on the string. "It keeps turning."

"Then we bring it down."

The Keeper swung its other arm at Vina.

Daniel stepped in front of her.

[ Rooted Stance (Lv1) ]

The arm hit him in the chest. It was like being struck by a falling wall. Logan saw his father’s face go white. His boots did not move from the dust.

Behind them, Helen cried out.

The Keeper leaned on its arm, pushing, and Daniel held it.

The great round head came down, low over Daniel’s shoulder, the crack whispering.

"Hob," said Daniel through his teeth. "Horns."

Hob hit it from the side.

He came across the path at a run with his head down and the iron spear bound along his flank. His great horns went into the Keeper’s head on either side of the crack.

The spear went into the crack itself.

The whispering stopped.

It did not fade. It stopped, all at once, the way a voice stops when a door is shut on it. The round stone of the head split in two along the crack. The two halves fell away to either side.

The rest of the Keeper came apart after them. It came down stone by stone into a long rattling heap across the path, until it was only another cairn.

[ Hollow Grudge Keeper slain. ] [ Daniel Wolf: +800 Tower Points ] [ Warden of the Ninth Layer slain. ] [ The Last Cairn is open. ]

Daniel stared at the panel.

He was still standing in Rooted Stance. He did not seem to know he could move. Hob came round in front of him and pushed his great head against his master’s chest, gently, until Daniel put his hands on the horns.

"Well," said Daniel. "Look at you."

Helen reached him. She laid her palms on his chest, where the arm had hit, and green light poured out of them.

Across the path, Halden was dragging stones off the fallen cairn with both hands. Terry sat up out of the heap, shook the dust off his shoulders, and picked up his shield.

Rishin was sitting in the dust where he had fallen.

Vina was kneeling beside him with his hand in hers. Link stood over them both.

The old man’s fist was still closed. Logan could see the two small grey stones between his fingers.

"They did not go," Vina said. She looked up at Logan. "The others all went. Those did not."

"No," said Rishin. "They will not. Not on this layer."

"Then on which?"

The old man looked past her, across the plain, to the dark opening at the foot of the Last Cairn.

"Lower," he said.

Logan crouched down in front of him.

He did not ask. He looked at the old man’s face, and at the stone lying by Hob’s knee, small and dark and light as nothing now.

"I felt it go," said Rishin. "Thank you, boy."