Chapter 160: The Drowning God

I came up the rungs faster than I'd gone down them.

The cave was cracking behind me. I could hear it, through the stone, through my hands on the iron: long splitting sounds, like ice on a pond in a thaw, and under them the heart, beating so fast now that the beats ran together into one long roar. Water was coming up the shaft after me. Not much. Enough that my boots were wet to the ankle when I came out through the grate into the palm.

Green light everywhere. Fifty-eight gray faces at my father's wall, turned toward the grate, mouths open on a word they hadn't been allowed to finish. Brannoc standing over Brother Ostrand, who had his arms over his head.

And beyond the gate, to the north, the sea.

* * *

It was standing up.

I'd seen it once before, from the north pier at Westmere, on the night of the fleet. A wall of gray water taller than the north tower, horizon to horizon, rolling slowly toward the shore with the sunset glowing through the top of it like light through a green bottle.

This was worse.

There was no sunset. There was no moon. There was nothing to see it by except the green light coming up out of the heart behind me, and that only reached so far. So what I saw was the bare black sea floor running away north from the gate, glistening, with the twelve blue ships lying on their sides on it like dead fish, and then, two miles out, where the green light gave out, a darkness that went up.

Up and up. Blacker than the sky. Blotting out the stars from the horizon to halfway up the dark. And moving. Not falling yet. Still rising. Still gathering itself, the way a man draws in a breath before he shouts.

All the sea that had gone out from under the ice. All of it, piled into one place.

* * *

My father was at the gate.

He'd been standing for two days. He had frost to his shoulders now, and his face was gray under it, and his hands were shaking. Brannoc had left the priest to Thor and come to stand behind him. Evelyn was on his other side with her hand flat on his back, between the shoulder blades.

"I can't freeze it," said my father, without turning around. He said it very calmly. "Not while it's going up. You can't freeze a thing that's still gathering. There's nothing to take hold of." He breathed out, and the breath came out white. "When it falls, I'll take hold of it. I'll hold it. I held it once."

"You've been standing for two days," said Evelyn.

"I know," said my father. "I'll hold it anyway."

Nobody said what we were all thinking. That the last time, he hadn't been standing for two days first. That the last time, it had nearly killed him.

* * *

"The voices," I said. "The fifty-eight. They're still trying to say it."

"I know," said my father. "I can feel it. Every time they get close, it goes up faster."

"I answered first. It's my door. It shouldn't—"

"It's your door," said a voice above us. "But it's still his hand."

* * *

Kessavel.

He was at the parapet of the thumb, right over the gate. He'd stood up. I don't know how. His hands were still at his throat, both of them, white-knuckled on the thread, and he was leaning on the stone with his shoulder because he couldn't use his hands to hold himself up. His face in the green light was the color of old paper.

"The fist," he said. "On the heart. The iron. As long as it's there, his hand is on Draum's heart, and the voices go through it. You hold the door. But he's still squeezing. He can't open it. But he can squeeze until Draum comes through the crack anyway. Half of him. Enough of him." His voice cracked. "That's what that is. Out there. Half of Draum, squeezed out through a crack in a kind door, like water through a fist."

"Then the fist has to go."

"Yes."

"Can you undo it? You built it."

Kessavel laughed. It was a terrible sound. "My hands are busy," he said. "Garrick Grey. If I let go of this to undo that, he takes me. And then he has my voice too." He shut his eyes. "Burn it. It's mine. I made it. I'd like it gone."

* * *

I looked up at the sky.

And it wasn't dark anymore.

* * *

They came over the island from the west like the sun coming up in the wrong place.

Hundreds. Hundreds and hundreds. Old ones the color of embers, red and gold, and young ones bright copper, and in front of them all, so dark a red she was nearly black at the edges, like a coal that's been burning all night, Ashenne. The sound of them was the sound of a great fire breathing. The light of them was gold, and warm, and it poured down over the black stone of the palm and the fifty-eight gray faces and my father's wall and the white of my father's frost, and turned all of it, for a moment, the color of a kitchen at suppertime.

On the bare sea floor north of the gate, the light ran out over the wet rock and the weed and the dead blue ships, and reached the wall of water two miles out, and showed it to us.

I'd rather it hadn't.

* * *

Ashenne came down onto the thumb tower beside Kessavel.

She was bigger than I remembered. The whole parapet glowed under her claws. She folded her wings and looked down at me, and then at the black wall of water to the north, for a long time.

"Door-boy," she said. Her voice was like ash settling in a grate. "That's what he calls you. We heard it on the way. All the way across."

"That's what he calls me."

"Three hundred years ago," said Ashenne, "he stood up the sea like that, over the twelve islands where we nested. Every egg. Every nest. Every one of us that stayed on the eggs." She looked at the water. "We have never once fought him. We only ever ran."

"I know," I said. "I'm not asking you to fight him."

Ashenne turned her head and looked at me with one eye. It was the color of the heart of a coal.

"Then ask," she said.

* * *

So I asked.

"Two things," I said. "First. There's a hand made of iron, under this rock, closed around his heart. Kessavel made it. He wants it gone. It has to burn all the way, so nothing's left to hold with. I need some of you to go down and burn it."

"And the second?"

I looked west. Past the island. Past the shoals. Out over the open sea, where the phoenixes had come from. Where there was nothing now but dark.

"The second is harder," I said. "And you can say no."

* * *

I told her.

She didn't move while I told her. Neither did Kessavel, beside her, with his hands at his throat. When I'd finished, Ashenne was quiet for a long time.

"You want us to go back to that water," she said.

"Yes."

"And stop over the place where he drowned us. And burn there. In the dark. Over the deep. With him underneath."

"Yes," I said. "I need to see where I'm putting him. I've only got one eye. And there's no moon."

Ashenne looked at me for a long moment.

Then she laughed. It was the sound of a whole hearth settling at once.

"We crossed that water a few weeks ago," she said. "For the first time in three hundred years. Because Selvane asked." She spread her wings, and the light came off them like heat off a forge. "We can cross it again for her door-boy."

* * *

Serevan took the first thing.

He came down into the palm like a falling coal, with thirty young copper phoenixes behind him, and went straight down the grate without stopping, one after another, like sparks going down a chimney the wrong way. The green light from the shaft went gold.

And then white.

I felt it through the stone. Through my boots. A heat so fierce that the black stone of the palm steamed. And under the heat, from far below, a sound I'd never heard before and never want to hear again: iron, very old iron, iron that had been told it was a hand and believed it, screaming as it remembered it was only iron after all.

On the thumb tower, Kessavel bowed his head over his hands.

* * *

And then the fifty-eight at the wall spoke.

All at once. All together. But not the word they'd been trying to say. Not come out. They'd been holding it in their mouths for an hour, that word, waiting to be allowed to finish it. And the hand that was going to let them finish it was running away down the cracks of a cave under the sea, melting.

So what came out of their mouths instead was whatever was underneath.

"Teodor—"

"Margit, I'm Margit—"

"Hal. Hal Brennick. Hal—"

"Mother—"

Fifty-eight voices. Fifty-eight names. All shouted at once, cracked and hoarse and strange, voices that hadn't been used for years, in Kethran and Avarran and the old hill-talk of the Ash valley and one, I think, in elvish. And fifty-eight padlocks fell out of fifty-eight gray oath-shadows and broke on the black stone like dropped plates.

Nobody had named them. We hadn't been able to.

They'd named themselves.

* * *

Through the middle, from a mile away, Carol said, very quietly:

Caitlin says none. None left. Except one.

On the thumb tower, Kessavel didn't lift his head. But his hands, at his throat, tightened.

* * *

Then Draum roared.

There's no other word. The whole sea roared. The wall of water two miles out, which had been rising, rising, gathering itself, stopped rising. And bent. Toward us. I watched the top of it curl over, black in the phoenix light, very slowly, like the lip of a jug tipping. The hand was gone from his heart. Nobody was squeezing anymore. But half of him was out already, through the crack, and the half that was out was angrier than anything I have ever seen.

It began to fall.

* * *

My father went down on one knee on the threshold of the sea gate and put both hands flat on the wet stone.

Frost went out from his hands. Not a road this time. Not a wave of it. A carpet, white and thin and wide, running out across the bare sea floor north from the gate, under the blue ships, toward the falling sea. It reached the foot of the wall of water at the same moment the top of it began to come down.

And the wall stopped.

Not frozen. Not yet. Just stopped. Held. Leaning over us like a cliff about to go, a mile high, with the phoenix light glowing through the top of it, green and gold, and the whole weight of the sea pressing down on my father's hands.

Brannoc knelt beside him and put one hand flat on his shoulder.

"Holding," said Brannoc.

"Holding," said my father. His voice was very quiet. "Garrick. However you're going to do it. Do it now."

* * *

I went up the thumb tower.

A hundred and six steps. I ran them. I don't remember them. I remember coming up through the hatch onto the parapet into the heat of Ashenne's wings, and Kessavel, standing against the stone with his hands at his throat, and beyond him, west, the dark.

And in the dark, the lights.

* * *

Ashenne had taken the rest of them west while I was talking to my father. All of them. Hundreds. They'd strung out across the black sea like beads on a thread, the way the old ones remember the Hearth Isles: twelve warm islands across the western sea, a day's flight apart. Too far to see. Too far for anyone to see.

But not too far for the phoenixes. They'd gone in a long line, a relay, one bird every mile or so, each one burning bright enough to see from the one behind it. Fire passed from bird to bird across the dark, west and west, so that from the top of the thumb tower I could follow it with my one good eye, a road of small gold lights going out across the sea and down over the curve of the world.

And at the end of it, far out, very small, where the deepest water in the world lies over twelve drowned islands, there was a ring of fire.

Ashenne. And the oldest ones. Burning in a circle over Draum's deep, three hundred years after he'd put them there.

So that I could see where I was going.

* * *

I've folded things before. I folded a fleet that wasn't there, eighty miles across the sea, borrowing from Loki. I've folded Carol, and myself, and dragons, and once a whole red ship.

I have never folded the sea.

I didn't think I could do it alone. I knew I couldn't. So I didn't try.

* * *

"Carol," I said. "Borrow?"

Through the middle, a mile away, my sister said, Take.

"Father. Borrow?"

From the foot of the tower, from the threshold of the gate, with his knee on the stone and the whole sea leaning on his hands: Take.

"Iselle?"

She was in the palm. I didn't know she could hear me. She did. Take, she said, in Kethran, and I felt the opening she was made of come into my hands, the thing in her that makes whatever is held let go.

And then I turned around.

* * *

Kessavel was looking at me.

His hands were at his throat. They'd been at his throat for two days. His face was the color of old paper, and his eyes were the color of the iron I'd just heard screaming under the island, and he looked at me the way he'd looked at me through the slot in the wrist door.

I held out my hand. Open.

"Borrow?" I said. "You can say no."

* * *

He didn't say anything for a long time.

The sea leaned over us. The light ran away west in a thin gold road. Far below, my father made a sound, very small, like a man lifting something too heavy.

"I'm a lock," said Kessavel at last. "That's all I am. That's all I've ever been. I keep things where they're put. I don't know what good that is to you."

"I'm about to pick up the sea," I said. "And put it somewhere else. And I need it to stay in one piece while I do. I need it to stay where I put it."

Kessavel stared at me.

Then, slowly, without letting go of his chain, he took one finger off it. Just one. The little finger of his left hand. And held it out to me.

"Take," he said.

* * *

I took his finger in my hand.

And everything he was came into me, all at once: every lock he'd ever made, every key, every door closed against a blow, every line that faced outward. The whole stubborn holding strength of a god of locks. The strength of things that keep their shape.

And then I took everything else. Carol's storm-turning. My father's frost. Iselle's letting-go. Mine. My own small thing, the only thing I've ever really been good at.

I opened my hand toward the sea.

* * *

I took hold of it.

All of it. The whole black leaning mile-high wall of it, with half a god inside it, angry. I felt Draum in it the way you feel a fish on a line, huge and cold and twisting. I felt him feel me. I heard him, the way you hear the sea in a shell.

Door-boy—

I folded it.

* * *

Not across the island. Not across the bare sea floor. Not anywhere near Westmere or Sallow Point or the ships pulled back two miles out with my sister and Caitlin and Tamar on them. I folded it west. Along the road of lights. Bird to bird to bird, a hundred miles, two hundred, I don't know how far, down over the curve of the world, following the phoenixes with my one eye. And Kessavel's holding kept it in one piece the whole way, every drop, the way a lock keeps a door shut. It didn't spill. Not a drop of it spilled.

And at the end of the road, the ring of fire. Ashenne. Burning over the deep.

I put the sea down there.

Inside the ring. Over the twelve drowned islands. Into the deepest water in the world.

And then I let Iselle's letting-go into it, and it let go of being a wall, and it was just the sea again. Just water. Falling, very gently, into the place where it had always been. And going down, and down, into the deep. Into his own deep.

And taking Draum with it.

* * *

I felt him go.

Down. Further down than the bottom of the sea. Through the crack in the kind door he'd squeezed half of himself out of, back into the dark behind it. Back into his own deep. I felt him fight it, the whole way. And then, near the bottom, I felt him stop fighting.

And I heard him say, very faintly, from a long way down, in a voice like a wave going out over shingle on a quiet beach:

Door-boy.

"I'm here," I said.

There's something under me. A long silence. Under the deep. Under the dark. I can feel it. Another silence. It's warm.

I knew what it was. I think he did too.

Twelve islands. Volcanic islands, where the phoenixes nested once, a long time ago. Drowned for three hundred years. And still, after all that time, under all that water, very faintly warm.

"Yes," I said. "It is."

* * *

I took out the Lockwarden's key.

I'd had it in my fist the whole time. I opened my fist and looked at it in the light of Ashenne's feathers far away. Knock. And around the ring of it, very small: Any who come and ask.

I didn't lock him in. I don't think you can lock anybody in with that key. That's not what it's for.

I closed the door. That's all. Kindly. The way you close a door on a room where somebody's asleep.

"When you're ready," I said, "knock. And ask. Somebody will answer. Somebody always does."

From very far down, there was no answer at all.

And then, after a long time, so faint I wasn't sure I'd heard it, one knock. Very soft. Not a demand. Not a fist on a door.

More like someone checking that the door was still there.

* * *

I let go.

I gave Carol back her storm-turning and my father back his frost and Iselle back her letting-go. And I let go of Kessavel's little finger, last, and he put it back on his chain, and closed his hand, and leaned his head against the stone of the parapet, and didn't say anything at all.

Then my knees went, and I sat down on the parapet beside him.

* * *

The tide came back in at dawn.

Not as a wall. Not as a wave. Just as a tide. The ordinary sea, from the open ocean to the north, coming in over the bare sea floor in long low lines of foam, the way it's come in every morning for twenty thousand years. It lifted the twelve blue ships off their sides, one by one, and set them upright, and floated them. It came up around the foot of the thumb tower and into the sea gate, very politely, and stopped at my father's knee.

My father took his hands off the stone.

He'd been holding something for two days. I watched him look at his hands as if he didn't know what they were for. Then Evelyn sat down on the threshold beside him and pulled his head down onto her shoulder, and he let her, and the frost went slowly off him, from the shoulders down, the way frost goes off a window when the sun gets to it.

He didn't get up for a long time. Nobody asked him to.

* * *

Ashenne came back an hour after sunrise.

She came alone, ahead of the others, low over the water, flying slowly. Her feathers had gone dull, the way a coal goes gray on top when it's burned all night. She landed on the parapet beside me and folded her wings.

"Twelve," she said.

"Twelve?"

"We each took one," said Ashenne. "The oldest ones. One over each island. We burned over them all night. We've never seen them. Not since we were eggs." She was quiet for a moment. "They're still there. Under the water. Under him. Still warm. We could feel it through the sea."

I didn't know what to say.

"We were not afraid of the water this time," said Ashenne. "I'd like you to know that, door-boy. Not once."

* * *

Down in the palm, Serevan and the thirty young copper ones came up the grate, black with soot and very pleased with themselves. Behind them, in the cave, there was nothing left of the iron hand but a puddle, cooled now, gone the dull dark gray of old pewter, lying around the foot of the heart like a spilled thing.

The heart was bare. Black and smooth and wet, the size of a hay cart. Beating once a minute. Slow and easy, like someone asleep.

Ashenne went down after a while, and sat on it, the way she'd sat on Cindrel's ash at Westmere. She said a heart that had been squeezed for a month ought to be kept warm for a while.

Nobody argued.

* * *

I should say one more thing, because it matters for what came next.

When the tide came in and the blue ships floated, their crews came up on deck. Most of them looked over at the island, at the sea gate, at the gods sitting on the threshold, and then sat down on their own decks, and put their weapons down, and waited. The way people wait when they know a thing is over.

Most of them.

On the fourth ship from the gate, the one with the gilded stern, a man stood at the rail alone. Tall. Gray-bearded. A gold chain around his neck with a closed hand on it. He didn't sit down. He didn't put anything down. He stood at the rail of his ship and looked across the water into the palm of the fist.

Not at me. Not at my father.

At Iselle.

I saw it. And I was too tired to do anything about it except see it. And I've wished every day since that I'd done more than that.

* * *

Mary's book. Sunday. Written at Westmere, in the evening, after Green brought Garrick home asleep and laid him on the kitchen bench, where Helena put a blanket over him and said nobody was to wake him for anything, including the end of the world, which she said had already been once this week and could wait.

Midnight. The sea stood up. Two miles out. Taller than anything.

Kessavel said the iron hand on the heart was still squeezing. He said burn it. He said it's mine and I'd like it gone.

The phoenixes came. All of them. Ashenne asked Garrick to ask. He asked for two things. She said they'd cross the water again for Selvane's door-boy.

Serevan and 30 young ones went down the grate and burned the iron hand. It screamed.

The 58 at the wall said their own names. All at once. Nobody named them. They named themselves. Teodor. Margit. Hal Brennick. 55 more. Caitlin says none left except one.

The sea fell. Uriah held it. On one knee. Brannoc said holding. Uriah said holding.

The phoenixes made a road of lights west across the sea, one bird every mile, to where the twelve Hearth Isles are. Ashenne and the oldest ones made a ring of fire over the deep. So Garrick could see where to put him.

Garrick borrowed from Carol, Uriah, Iselle. And Kessavel. Kessavel took one finger off his chain and said take. Garrick said he needed the sea to stay in one piece. Kessavel is a lock. It stayed in one piece.

Garrick folded the whole sea west and put it down in the ring of fire. Draum went down with it into his own deep. Draum said there's something under me. It's warm. It's the islands.

Garrick closed the door with the key. Kindly. He said knock when you're ready and ask. Draum knocked once. Soft. Like checking the door was there.

The tide came in at dawn like a tide. Uriah sat down for the first time in two days. Evelyn.

Ashenne sat on the heart to keep it warm.

Garrick is asleep on the kitchen bench. Helena says nobody is to wake him.

And under that, not in ink at all, but in small dark scorch marks, as neat as stitching, burned into the page with great care by the very tip of a claw that had been allowed to cool for a long time first, and still left the paper warm:

Ashenne. Twelve. We lit them all. I'd like it noted we were not afraid of the water. Not once.