Chapter 657: The Stair

The green went down a very long way.

They hung above it in the Lark for most of the morning, looking. The sea here was so clear that it barely seemed to be there at all, and through it, far below, they could see the drowned city the chart had promised: pale stone terraces stepping down into the depths like the side of a sunken mountain, roads and columns and long colonnades, and at the bottom of it all, so deep that the green had gone almost black, a great round dome.

There were no ships. There was no harbor. There was no way down.

"It’s two hundred feet to the top of the dome," Isaac said. He was lying on his stomach at the rail with his chin on his folded arms, staring down. "Perhaps two hundred and fifty. The water’s cold. Not as cold as home." He was quiet for a moment. "I can make a stair."

Everyone looked at him.

"Mother made one," he said, a little defensively. "Down through the sea-ice under the Palace. That’s what the stair to the crack is. She cut it out of the ice. I can’t cut ice I haven’t got, but I can make it." He sat up. "It’ll take a while. And I’ll need to sit down afterward. For a day, probably."

"How long a while?" asked Valerica.

Isaac considered the green water.

"Until dark," he said.

It took until dark.

Sarai Vell brought the Lark down until its keel was a few feet above the surface and held it there, steady against the wind, while Isaac sat cross-legged on the deck with both hands pressed flat against the planks and his eyes closed. At first nothing happened. Then the sea directly beneath the ship went white.

Not a sheet of ice but a tube: a long, clear, hollow column of it, a little wider than a man’s shoulders, reaching down from the surface into the green, inch by inch, the frost spreading downward through the water in a slow glittering spiral. Inside the column, as it grew, Isaac shaped the steps. Vane could see them forming, one after another, each one perfectly level, each one a stride below the last.

The sun climbed and turned and began to go down. Isaac did not move. His breath came out of him white. Frost crept along his eyebrows and down his cheeks and into the collar of his coat. At noon, Isole knelt beside him and put her palm against the back of his neck and left it there, and something passed from her into him, light and dark together, and his breathing steadied.

By the middle of the afternoon the column had reached halfway. By sunset it was touching the curve of the great dome far below, a long white thread of frost running straight down from the Lark into the dark.

Isaac opened his eyes. Then he lay down on his back on the deck, very slowly, and stayed there.

"Done," he said to the sky. "I’d like to be very quiet for a while."

Ashe sat down beside him, lifted his head, and put it in her lap without comment. Isaac was too tired to object.

They went down at dusk. Sarai Vell stayed with the Lark, because someone had to, and because she said, with great dignity, that Palace envoys did not go into the sea for anyone.

The stair was cold and very narrow and lit only by the last of the daylight coming down through the ice, so that the green water outside the walls glowed faintly all around them like the inside of a bottle. Vane went first. Mara came behind him, with her ledger buttoned inside her coat and the ice falcon on her shoulder, and then the others, and Isaac last, leaning on Ashe.

Two hundred and forty steps. Mara counted them aloud.

At the bottom, the stair met the dome. And the dome, Vane saw, had a door in it, very small and very old, set into the pale stone. Isaac’s ice had grown around it and sealed against the stone, so that the water was held back. Beyond the door, through a round window of something clear and thick as glass, there was air. And light. A soft greenish glow coming from somewhere inside.

He put his hand on the door, and it opened.

The hall beyond was dry and warm, and smelled of salt and stone and something faintly sweet, like bruised grass. It was round and high, and its walls were lined with niches, and in the niches lamps were burning with a pale green flame. And standing in the middle of the floor, waiting, were people.

There were perhaps thirty of them. They were very pale, paler than Isaac, with large dark eyes that blinked slowly in the lamplight, as though even that much light was a great deal. They wore long loose robes of a grey-green cloth. None of them was armed. They did not look surprised.

An old woman stepped forward from among them. She was tiny and bent and leaned on a staff of white coral, and when she looked up at Vane, her eyes were very sharp.

"You’re the one who stood on the road," she said. Her voice was soft and dry. "The boy’s master told us you might come."

"He’s not his master," said Vane.

"No," the old woman agreed, unexpectedly. "I don’t suppose he is." She looked past him at the others, at Mara, at the falcon, and something in her face changed when she saw the ledger. "I am Ysra. I keep the Court. We tend the singers. We have done so for three hundred years." She bowed her head very slightly. "You may come in. But you will be quiet. Both of them are singing."

"Both," said Isole.

Ysra did not answer. She simply turned and led them across the hall, through an archway, and down a long curving passage lit with green flame.

At the end of the passage, sitting on the steps of a second, larger doorway, alone, with his coat folded beside him and his hands hanging loose between his knees, was Ormond.

He looked up as they came. He looked older. Thinner. The shoulder Vane had broken was bound in grey-green cloth. His pale eyes went to Vane, and then to the others, and then back to Vane, and for a long moment neither of them said anything.

"Usurper," said Ormond at last.

"Where’s Corin?"

Ormond did not answer. He tilted his head very slightly toward the doorway behind him.

"Listen first," he said. "Before you do anything. Just listen."

Vane listened.

From beyond the doorway, from somewhere far inside the dome, came singing. There were no words and no tune. Only a single low note, held and held, deep and slow and endless, so steady that it seemed to be part of the stone itself. And underneath it, wavering, unsure, but holding, was a second note.

A child’s.