Chapter 826: The Warden

The warden of Greywatch came out to the line at midmorning.

She did not cross it. She stood just inside the ring of white stones with her hands folded behind her back, and she looked at the camp that had grown up outside her walls overnight.

It went on for a long way. Thirty-nine thousand people take up a great deal of grass.

She was a tall woman, older than Orla, with gray hair cut short and a face that did not move much. When Almond, Big D, Theo and Paloma came up to meet her, she looked at each of them for a long moment before she spoke.

"My name is Hessa," she said. "I keep this place. Orla tells me you killed a Husher and a Strayer on your first night."

"We did," Almond said.

"And that two of you are already at E."

"Three, now," Almond said. "Lily, Rudra, and as of an hour ago, Natalia. She found a small one in the grass at dawn."

Hessa’s face did not change. But she was quiet for a moment longer than she needed to be.

"I have fourteen hundred people behind me," she said. "Most are F. Some are children. For three hundred years this line has kept them alive, because nothing out there had any reason to come here in numbers." She looked past them at the camp. "Now there are forty thousand heavy souls sitting on my doorstep. Every Ender for fifty miles can feel you. Do you understand what you’ve done to us, by coming here?"

Nobody answered right away.

Then Paloma stepped forward. She had spent thirty-seven years talking to kings who wanted something from her, and she knew when to be gentle and when not to be.

"We understand," she said. "We didn’t choose to arrive at your door. But we’re here now, and you took in six hundred of ours without being asked twice. That matters to us."

"It was Orla’s choice. I let it stand."

"Then let us pay for it," Theo said. "We’ll hunt for you. We’ll stand between your line and whatever comes. Every Ender that comes for us has to come through us before it reaches your wall."

Hessa looked at him.

"And when you leave?" she said. "Because you will. You can’t live out here. Then every Ender you drew in is still here, and you aren’t."

"Then help us leave," Almond said. "Orla says there’s a place that could hold all of us. She said you’re the one to ask."

For the first time, something moved in Hessa’s face.

"Orla talks too much," she said.

"She said you lost someone there."

Hessa was silent for a long time. Behind her, on the wooden wall, a few of her people had stopped to watch.

"Come inside," she said finally. "Just the four of you. I’m not saying this through a line of stones."

Her house was small and very clean. There was one chair by the fire, and a second chair pushed against the wall, with dust on its seat.

Hessa did not sit in either one. She stood by the window.

"It’s called Brightwater," she said. "Three days’ walk north. It was the greatest sanctuary in this region. Its line held sixty thousand, and it was full."

"What happened?" Big D asked.

"A Lull came."

"What’s a Lull?"

"An Ender that ends waking." Hessa turned from the window. "It can’t cross a line. None of them can. But what it does reaches farther than its body. It came down out of the north two hundred years ago and lay down outside Brightwater’s stones. It curled itself all the way around the ring, and it slept."

Almond felt cold.

"And everyone inside slept too," he said.

"Sixty thousand people. They lay down where they stood, and they did not wake up. Not for food. Not for water." Hessa’s voice was flat. "It took about ten days. After that, the Lull had no reason to stay. But it did anyway. It’s still there. We think it likes the quiet."

Nobody spoke.

"Hunting parties have tried to clear it," Hessa went on. "Seven of them, in two hundred years. Good ones, C and D. They get within a few miles and they lie down in the grass. Sometimes you can see them from the hills, lying there. Then the grass grows over them."

Theo had gone pale. "And your husband?"

Hessa looked at the dusty chair by the wall.

"Tomas was the seventh," she said. "Twenty years ago. He was a C, the same as me. He said he’d found a way to stay awake. He’d made an orb from a Strayer’s core and he thought he could hold his mind on a single line and not let go." She paused. "I watched him from the north hill. He walked a long way. Farther than anyone before him. Then he sat down, as if he was tired, and he lay back in the grass."

She did not say anything else about it. She did not need to.

It was Big D who finally spoke.

"How far does it reach?" he asked. "The sleep."

"Four miles, give or take. It’s strongest at the stones."

"And it’s still lying there? Wrapped around the ring?"

"Yes."

"So to get in," Almond said slowly, "you’d have to walk four miles through the sleep, and then climb over the thing that’s making it."

"Yes."

"And kill it."

Hessa almost laughed. "You’d have to kill a region lord at F. Yes."

Almond looked at Big D. Big D looked back at him. Neither of them said what they were both thinking, because it sounded too stupid to say out loud in this room.

Then Almond said it anyway.

"Hessa," he said. "Do you have any idea what Get Up does?"

Silvester was not pleased to be the center of attention.

"I don’t know if it works on sleep," he said, for the fourth time. "I used it once. On a dog with too many legs. I was awake at the time."

"It doesn’t say get up if you’re awake," Hiroshi said. "It just says Get Up."

"That’s not how anything works!"

"Nothing here works how anything works," Ainen said. "That’s the whole point of this place."

They were sitting in a circle on the grass outside the line, with half the camp listening in. Hessa stood at the white stones with her arms folded. She had not said whether she believed any of this.

"It isn’t only Silvester," Almond said. "Marcus’s Voice reached forty thousand heads last night. If it can reach a sleeping head, he could call people back. Big D has Endure, which might mean he just lasts longer than the rest of us before he drops. And Rudra’s new orb holds a heading that can’t be turned."

"That’s what Tomas tried," Hessa said from the line. "A held course."

"Tomas held his alone," Rudra said. "True Heading holds for everyone who follows me. If one of us starts to drift, the others are still on the line."

Hessa was silent.

"We’re not going tomorrow," Almond said. "We’re not that stupid. We need more orbs first. We need to know what we’re carrying in there." He looked around the circle. "Three days of hunting. Everyone who can stand. Then we choose who walks north."

"And if it doesn’t work?" Hessa asked. "If your friend lies down in the grass like all the others?"

Silvester got to his feet.

"Then I’ll get up," he said. "That’s sort of my whole thing now."

Lily found Kayla at the edge of the camp, where she had set up a hospital under a stretched sheet.

There were not many patients. Most of the badly hurt had gone inside the line. But Kayla was there anyway, rolling bandages, because she did not know how to sit still.

"Almond says I have to tell you," Lily said.

Kayla looked up. Then she looked at Lily’s face, and put the bandages down.

"Tell me what?"

Lily held up her hand, and opened her status. She pointed at the faint line at the bottom.

Kayla read it. She read it again. Then she stood up so fast that her chair fell over.

"Lily."

"I know."

"Lily, you fought a Husher."

"I didn’t know then."

"And last night you used Hush from a quarter of a mile."

"From a quarter of a mile away," Lily said. "That was me being careful. Almond made me promise."

Kayla put both hands on Lily’s arms. She was not much for crying, and she did not cry now. But her hands were shaking a little.

Mend.

It was a soft, slow warmth. It went in through Lily’s arms and spread out, gentle and searching, the way Kayla’s hands had always searched for what was wrong.

After a long moment, Kayla let out a breath.

"It’s fine," she said. "Both of you. It’s very small. Smaller than small. But it’s fine."

"I could have told you that," Lily said. Her own voice had gone thick. "It says one."

"I don’t trust numbers. I trust my hands." Kayla let go of her arms and picked up the chair. She sat down in it heavily. "Who else knows?"

"Almond. You. That’s all."

"Big D is going to lose his mind."

"Big D is going to pretend he doesn’t care," Lily said. "And then he’s going to follow me around for nine months."

Kayla laughed. It came out unsteady.

"One," she said. She shook her head. "Out of everything in this whole camp, that might be the most important number we have."

The first real attack came that night.

The Enders had been gathering all day. Scouts had seen them in the long grass, pale shapes keeping their distance from the camp. At sunset they stopped keeping it.

They were Closers. Orla had warned about them. They ended distance.

One moment a Closer was a hundred yards out in the dark. The next it was simply there, standing inside the camp beside a cook fire, with nothing in between. It did not run. It did not cross the ground. It closed the space as if the space had never been there.

The first one appeared beside a family of Asuras. It was long and lean, like a heron made of bone. Its beak opened.

Big D was forty yards away. He would never reach it.

True Heading.

Rudra’s voice cracked across the camp. "On me! Everyone, on me! Hold the line where you are!"

The orb took hold of everyone who heard him and followed. The panic that should have run through the camp did not run. People who had been about to scatter stood where they were, shoulder to shoulder, because there was suddenly only one direction, and Rudra had chosen it.

The Closer struck at an old Asura man. Hiroshi was beside him, and he took the beak through his shoulder instead.

Kael was already moving.

Quickstep.

Six steps at full speed. He used the first four to cross the gap and the fifth to cut. The Closer’s long neck came apart. He used the sixth to get out of the way as it fell.

"Five more!" Natalia called. She was standing on a wagon, scanning the dark. "North edge, east edge, two in the middle!"

Mark.

Five red spots lit the night, one on every bony body in the camp.

Almond went for the nearest. It closed the distance between them before he got there. Suddenly it was right in front of him, and its beak was coming down at his eyes.

Deny.

The beak did not arrive. It hung there for one heartbeat.

Quiet Edge.

His cleaver went through the red mark without a sound.

The fight lasted less than ten minutes. By the end, six Closers lay dead in the camp, and eleven people were hurt. Hiroshi’s shoulder was the worst of it. Lily held him under Shelter while Kayla worked, and she did it from the middle of the camp, with a ring of spears around her.

Nobody died.

When it was over, Big D walked to the white stones. Hessa was still standing there on the other side. She had watched the whole thing.

"Six Closers," Big D said. "Our first full day."

Hessa looked at the bodies. Then at the faces of the people standing around them, tired and bloody and very much alive.

"Most new souls can’t kill one," she said. "Not in their first year."

"We’ve had practice," Big D said. "Just not with any of this."

Hessa was quiet for a moment. Then she unfolded her arms.

"Three days," she said. "If you’re going to Brightwater, I’m walking north with you. I know the ground. And I want to see it."

"See what?"

"Whether a man named Silvester can really get up."