Chapter 236 What Falls

It was a thought.

He had been thinking it as the barge left the bank, and then it was gone. He reached for it and found nothing there, only the knowledge that he had been in the middle of it.

Then he saw it fall.

A small pale light slipped out of the front of his coat. It was no bigger than a fingernail and it glowed like the fallen leaves in the forest. It drifted down past the edge of the deck, touched the white water and sank.

Logan stared after it.

"Logan." Alice had hold of his sleeve. "There was a light. It came out of you."

"I know. I lost a thought." He turned his eyes to hers. "I do not know what it was. I only know I was thinking it."

All around the barge, pale lights were falling.

They slipped out of Garen’s coat and Isolde’s sleeves and Bram’s beard. One came off Edda as she turned her head. Each one drifted down like a leaf and sank into the milk-white water without a ripple.

Logan watched the units at the oars. Halden and Terry rowed at the front, and Solveig and Andrivida behind them. Nothing fell from any of them.

He looked at Rishin last.

The old man sat at the back of the deck with Vina in front of him. His fist was closed on his knee and his face was calm. He shed no light at all.

"Talk," said Rishin. "All of you. Now."

Alice pulled Logan round to face her. She held both his hands, and her grip was hard enough to hurt.

"Ninety-one," she said. "Say it."

"Ninety-one badges." Logan held on to her. "We cleared all hundred Warlords, and we finished with ninety-one."

"Who took the rest?"

"Kaevan Dross took four when he surrendered. Serai Vokh took two. Idresh Kaan two." Logan searched for the last one, and his heart lurched until he found it. "Vessa Quill. One."

"Good." Alice’s eyes were bright. "Now you ask me."

He asked her.

He asked her about the cafe, and about Terry and Winsmoke deciding they answered to her. He asked her about the wave when her Arrow Intent woke and what Puncture had felt like the first time. She told him, and he told it back to her, and the pale lights still fell from them both.

But they fell more slowly.

Logan could feel the difference. The things they were saying aloud stayed whole. It was everything else, all the small unspoken things around them, that kept slipping out of him into the water.

Across the deck, Garen was talking without stopping.

"And then the jaws closed," he was saying. "And it was white. It was white on every side and cold, dear. I knew you were out there, not looking at me."

"I was not looking," said Isolde. "I hated it."

"I know. I remember it, and so do you, because I have told you four times now." Garen squeezed her hands. "Tell it back to me."

She repeated it to him. She was crying a little as she did it, but she did not stop.

Bram and Edda were singing. It was the walking song, the one for the mine bridges, and they went through it verse by verse. When Bram faltered, Edda sang the line louder until he caught it again.

Helen and Daniel sat knee to knee.

They talked about home. Logan caught pieces of it over the sound of the oars. They spoke of the new house they shared with Garen and Isolde, and the kitchen there, and Rishin coming to the door. Then the pills, and the classes they had woken into.

"Say yours," said Helen.

"Ironroot Warden. Patient Stone."

"And mine?" She was smiling, but her voice shook.

"Wellspring Mender. Unbroken Hearth." Daniel held her hands tighter. "And Isolde’s healers fixed my leg before we came in. The limp is gone. I remember it. You remember it."

Vina talked to Rishin the whole time.

She told him everything. She told him about the rim and the Silver and the candles, and Ansel’s candle that pointed at her. Then she went on to the stair in the Third Layer, and how she had climbed back for him and walked him down backward.

The old man listened to every word. Sometimes he nodded. Sometimes he said, "Yes, little one. I remember." No light fell from him.

Every light that fell from Vina was small. Logan noticed it and did not understand it until he saw Rishin’s face. Rishin was holding all of it with her.

"Boss," said Billy.

He was sitting near the front of the barge with his blades tucked in, because a wheel could not row. He had been counting strokes aloud.

"That is two hundred," he said. "I still cannot see the other side."

Logan looked ahead. The mist lay over the white water without end. Behind them, the bank and the trees had already vanished.

"Keep counting," he said.

"I am keeping all of it, Boss. I am keeping everything." Billy’s rim hummed unhappily. "It does not go into you."

Logan watched the lights sink behind the stern, and a cold thought came to him.

"Nyriel," he said.

The answer came at once. Nyriel laid the water across his sight, the barge in the middle and the units along its sides as small bright points.

There was one more point. It was under them.

It was long, longer than the barge, and it lay deep below the stern. As Logan watched, it moved along with them at the same slow pace. It had followed them from the bank, and it stayed below the falling lights.

’Everything that falls,’ he thought. ’Marit said it feeds on what falls.’

Logan looked over the edge.

He could see nothing in the white water. Then a pale light fell from Garen’s sleeve and sank, and as it went down he saw the water darken under it. A long shadow passed, slow and smooth, and the light was gone.

He put his hand inside his shirt.

The bark strip was still there. He pulled it out and unfolded it, and he read his writing.

YOU LOVE ALICE.

YOUR PARENTS AND VINA ARE IN THIS BOAT.

RISHIN CARRIES TWO STONES. DO NOT ASK HIM.

He knew the stones. He could see them in his head, small and grey on the old man’s palm. But when he read the last three words, he could not remember why he had written them.

He knew there had been a reason. The reason itself was gone.

"Alice," he said. "Why should I not ask him?"

Alice looked at the strip in his hand. Then she looked at him.

"Because you let it go," she said. "On the Ninth Layer. You said he will tell you when he tells you. And the stone fell out of his hand."

It came back to him as she said it. It came back in her voice and not his. But it came back whole, and he held on to it.

"He will tell me when he tells me," he said.

From the stern end of the deck, Rishin had heard. He looked across at Logan over Vina’s head, and he inclined his head once.

The water beside the barge rose up.

It came up white and smooth and enormous. Water poured off it in sheets, and the barge rocked so hard that Terry lost his oar. The pale lights that had been sinking around them rose with it, caught in its skin like seeds in milk.

It had no eyes. It had a long blind head and a mouth that opened down the whole length of its throat, and the mouth was full of lights.

[ Paleveil Mere Gleaner ] [ Rank: Mythic ] [ Scaled to: Tier-9 ]

[ Attack: 46,000 ] [ Speed: 2,800 ] [ Constitution: 160,000 ] [ Arcane: 60,000 ]

Garen let go of Isolde’s hands and drew both pistols.

Isolde broke off halfway through a sentence. She looked at her husband’s back, and a light the size of a coin fell out of her and dropped into the open mouth.

"Do not stop talking!" Rishin shouted. "Fight and talk! Both!"

The Gleaner’s head swung toward the deck.