Chapter 203: The World Beneath His Seals

(Alash Vortex POV)

The Hermit came to the gate an hour after dark.

I know, because the man on the gate came into the yard to tell Renn so, holding the gate book in both hands, well away from his body.

"He’s here, sir. He gave his name. I’ve written it down."

Renn took the book, read the last line, and looked at it for some time. His jaw moved once. Then he closed the book without a word and handed it back.

I never found out what was in that book. I have wondered since.

Renn checked the rest himself. He walked down to the gate and back with two of his men. He looked at the yard, and at the passage, and at the door of the room where the five of us were to sit. Then he went out to the gate again and brought the Hermit in, along the passage and through the right door, like anyone else.

The Hermit came in with his hands folded into his sleeves and looked round at us all.

"Four guards," he said. "A book, and a commander. All to make certain I used a door."

"Yes," said Renn.

"You do know I could have used any of them."

"Yes," said Renn. "You used that one."

The Hermit regarded him. Renn regarded him back. Neither of them seemed to feel the need to say anything else.

I laughed. I didn’t mean to, and it cost me a rib’s worth of chest, and Renn gave me a look that had no amusement in it at all. It was worth it.

***

They had set the room out with care, which the Hermit noticed at once.

The five of us sat in a row on the side away from the fire, so that it warmed us and not him. Valerian stood at one end of the row and Sorel at the other. Renn stood by the door. There was one chair left facing us, a plain one, with no arms.

The Hermit looked at it, and at us.

"This is a tribunal."

"You asked for it," said Valerian.

"I asked for a conversation."

"This is what a conversation looks like," said Sorel, "when the people you want to talk to are injured."

The Hermit sat. He didn’t argue it. I had the impression he had expected something of the kind, and was faintly annoyed to have been right.

"We’ve talked about your questions," said Elizabeth. "The five of us. We’ve agreed what we’ll tell you."

"What you’ll tell me."

"Yes."

"And what you won’t."

"Yes."

He looked along the row. He stopped on Daphne, who looked back at him without any expression at all, and moved on.

"Then tell me," he said. "I’ll listen."

***

He didn’t ask for the fight again. He seemed to have no further interest in the fight. He asked for the minutes either side of the moment our cores moved, and nothing else.

"When," he said. "Exactly."

"Near the end," said Elizabeth. "After the others had come through. Alash was treating me. Sophie was holding it in her ice."

"And you felt it."

"All of us," said James. "At once. My core went up two stages and my channels didn’t go anywhere. I’ve still got the same injury I had before. It didn’t touch that."

"None of it healed anything," said Sophie. "I don’t know why it was all five of us. I don’t know why it was then. It just was."

"And before it?"

There was a small silence.

"There was light," said Sophie. "Gold. Under our feet."

"Under each of you?"

"One under each of us," said Daphne.

The Hermit didn’t move, but his attention did. I watched it go along the row like a finger along a line of print.

"And during?"

"During, it connected us," said Elizabeth. "All of us, at the same moment, for as long as it lasted." She held his eyes. "What we each saw while it did is ours. We’ve agreed that between us. It isn’t for you."

"And afterwards?"

"Afterwards it didn’t entirely stop," I said.

The words were out before I had decided to say them, and the other four didn’t so much as glance at me. It was what we had agreed. It was mine to say as much as theirs.

"How?"

"We know where the others are," I said. "Roughly. If James is in the next room, I know he’s in the next room. If Sophie walks down the yard, I know which way she went."

"That’s all?"

"That’s all," said Daphne.

"Thoughts?"

"No."

"Feelings? Pain?"

"No," said James. "You’d think it would. It doesn’t."

"Distance?"

"Not far," said Elizabeth. "At Halden, when James and Sophie went across to the gatehouse, it stopped. It came back when they came in. It doesn’t let us talk to each other, if that’s what you’re asking. It doesn’t let us do anything. It just tells us where."

The Hermit was quiet for a moment.

"Show me," he said. "Not the knowing-where. I believe you about that, and I don’t need to watch five children point at doors. The thing that started it."

"No," said Valerian.

"I wasn’t asking you."

"I’m answering anyway." Valerian didn’t move from the end of the row. "There’s no safe way to make that happen again, and nobody in this room knows a dangerous one. Their cores outran their bodies two stages in an afternoon. Their channels are carrying more than they were built for, and they’ll go on carrying it for a long time yet."

He let that sit.

"Nobody is going to try to reproduce anything in them tonight, or any other night, until I know what it would cost."

"And I’m not handing their channels to you for an experiment," said Sorel. "I said so this morning."

The Hermit glanced from one of them to the other. He didn’t look surprised. I think he had asked in order to be told no, so that he could stop wondering whether he would be.

"Did it have a shape?" he said, to the row. "The connection. While it lasted. A beginning, an order. Did it go from one of you to the next?"

I felt my shoulders go tight. That question went straight towards the long room, and the small plastered room, and the training yard, and the hall with old beams, and a forest at night. If anyone started to answer it, all of those would come out after it.

Elizabeth answered before anyone else could.

"We’ve told you what we agreed to tell you," she said. "That’s all of it."

The Hermit looked at her for a long moment.

"Hm," he said.

He sat back in the chair with no arms. He didn’t ask again. Instead he looked at the fire for a while, as if it were the only thing in the room that wouldn’t refuse him.

When he spoke, it was in a different voice. He wasn’t asking any more. He was telling.

***

"You’ll have noticed my seals were gold," he said.

Nobody answered.

"There were five because there were five classes. They were gold because I made them gold. I liked the colour. I’d have made them blue if I’d been in a different mood." He looked along the row. "So if any of you have spent the last day thinking gold and five and feeling clever, stop. Five golden lights mean nothing. I can put five golden lights in this room before you finish blinking."

He didn’t. He looked as though he had considered it.

"That’s not why I’m here."

He was quiet for a moment, deciding, I think, how much of it to give us.

"I built that world," he said. "All of it. Every road, every wall, every monster and every wounded fool you carried. I made the rules it ran on, and I watched it run on them. When you broke a wall, I knew how it would break. When you lit a seal, I knew what the seal would do. There was nothing in it I hadn’t put there."

He paused.

"When the five of you came in under my seals, before any of you fed them, it moved."

Nobody breathed. I could hear Sophie not breathing.

"Underneath. Below the part you were standing in." He moved one hand, a small flat gesture, like a man smoothing a cloth. "The structure. The thing everything else stands on. It shook, once. Very faintly. If I hadn’t built it, I wouldn’t have felt it."

"What was it?" said Renn, from the door.

"I don’t know."

He said it the same way he had said it about the bread that morning, as a flat fact, and it sat oddly on him. I didn’t think he said it often.

"I went through every layer of it," he said. "While it was still running. Stability, perfect. Interference from outside, none. Foreign mana, none. Nobody had got into anybody’s head who shouldn’t have. Everything was exactly as I’d built it."

His mouth tightened.

"And it had moved anyway. It wasn’t a student pushing too hard on my illusion. Students do that. I can feel them do it, and it doesn’t feel like that. It wasn’t anything I’d hidden in the test for you to find. I hadn’t hidden anything there. It was an echo of something I didn’t make, from somewhere I couldn’t see."

"Your Headmaster was standing beside you," I said.

The Hermit looked at me.

"Yes."

"Did he notice?"

"He noticed my face. He asked if I’d felt something." The Hermit’s expression didn’t change. "I told him no."

"Why?"

"Because I didn’t know what I’d felt, and he’d have wanted it written down."

Renn made a small noise that might, in another man, have been sympathy.

I sat very still.

I remembered that first meeting. Five of us, inside his world, turning to look at one another for the first time, and a strange feeling I’d had at the time and had no name for. I remembered the seals, and the System’s voice going up, and the gold lines coming where there shouldn’t have been any. I remembered the whole world trembling round me, and something far beneath it seeming to shift.

I had thought, for most of a year, that I was the only one who had felt it. I had the System. Nobody else did. Whatever happened under the surface of things, I had always been the one who knew it was happening, and everyone else had been standing on the surface, getting on with their lives.

He didn’t have the System. He had built a world and felt it shake, with nothing to tell him why. He had felt it from the outside, and I had felt it from inside, and neither of us had known the other was there.

I didn’t know what to do with that. It mattered more than his reputation. It mattered more than his core.

"Did any of you feel it?" said the Hermit. "At the seals."

He didn’t say all of you. He asked each of us, one by one, with his eyes, and waited for each of us to answer for ourselves.

"No," said James. "We were busy. I was watching the monsters."

"I saw the seals light," said Sophie. "When we fed them. That’s all I saw. I’m sorry."

"Don’t be sorry. Be accurate."

"Then that’s all I saw," said Sophie, slightly stung.

"The formation was steady," said Daphne. "I was watching the lines between the seals. They didn’t change until the mana went in." She paused. "He stopped. Alash. I had to shout."

"Yes," said the Hermit. "I remember."

Elizabeth didn’t answer at once.

She looked at me.

She knew. I had told her three days ago, at Halden, because it had been her body and her decision and I had owed it to her. I had told her I’d seen gold like the ridge’s once before, under the five of us on those seals. She had never repeated it to anyone. I knew, looking at her, that she wasn’t going to repeat it now either.

It wasn’t hers to tell. It was mine.

"I saw the seals light," she said, to the Hermit. "Like Sophie."

Then she said nothing else, and the room waited, and I understood that she had left the rest of the silence for me.

I could have let it close. Nobody would have known. The Hermit would have gone away with four answers and one shrug.

I thought about Daphne by the door that afternoon. Nobody asked me. I thought about the gold under all of us, and four people who had spent a week not knowing what it was, because I had decided by myself that they didn’t need to.

It wasn’t the fragments. I couldn’t give him the fragments. I couldn’t give anyone those, not yet. But this was mine, a thing I had seen with my own eyes, and there was nothing in it that belonged to anyone else.

"I saw lines," I said.

The Hermit turned his head and looked at me properly.

"When we reached the seals. Before I’d touched mine, whatever it looked like from where you were standing. Gold lines, under us, where your seals weren’t putting any." I made myself go on. "Five points. For a moment, everything shook, and not where I was standing. Lower. Then the lines were gone, and Daphne was shouting at me, and I put my hand on my seal and fed it."

"That’s what you didn’t know how to describe."

"Yes."

"You described it quite well."

"I had the afternoon to think about it."

The Hermit was silent.

He didn’t ask what the lines were. He didn’t ask why I had seen them and nobody else had. He didn’t ask what the light under our feet on the ridge had looked like, though I could see him not asking it. He sat in his chair with no arms and looked at nothing.

He hadn’t found an answer. I could see that. He had found a second observation, from the inside of the thing he had only felt from the outside. Two people who had never compared notes had seen the same shape from opposite sides of it.

It made a coincidence a great deal harder to believe in.

I felt the four of them beside me in the row, close, not moving. Elizabeth’s hand had gone still in her sling. Sophie’s breathing had gone quiet. James was looking at me. Daphne wasn’t, which with Daphne can mean she is looking harder than anyone.

I had told a stranger something three of them had never heard from me, and I had told it with all four of them listening. I didn’t know whether that made things better or worse.