Echoes in a Vast Hall

Inside, the hall was larger than any room Andy had ever stood in, and it was quiet. Thirteen-sided, ringed with slender columns supporting a ceiling four stories in height.

His footsteps went out ahead of him across the floor and came back from somewhere high and far off, a long time later. The belt creaked at his hip when he moved. Those were the only sounds. There was no wind in here, any more than on the slope, but the air was cool and clean and smelled of stone—the kind of cool that a church keeps on a hot afternoon. He had the distinct impression of having entered a holy place.

Torches burned along both walls in plain iron brackets, one after another, each at the same height and the same distance from the next, until the far ones were only points. Their light was not the rust color that lay over everything outside, but white—a cool white that fell evenly on the floor and the walls and the backs of Andy’s hands. The flames moved like smoke. They rose off the torch heads slow and pale, folding over on themselves, and never went up any farther than a flame would.

Andy stopped beside the nearest one. After a moment he lifted his hand and held it up to the flame, palm flat, closer than he would ever have held it to a real fire.

Nothing. There was no heat at all.

The light lay across his fingers as if somebody had painted it there. The flame turned over on itself a hand’s width from his skin, and his skin didn’t know it was there. He took his hand back, looked at it, and flexed the fingers once.

“Okay,” he murmured, mostly to himself.

The man had come in behind him and stopped a few paces off, his hands loose at his sides. He did not look at the torches. He was looking down the length of the hall, the way he had looked up at the palace from the foot of the stair, as if there were nothing in it that needed checking. Then he stepped forward, heading to the center of the hall. Andy followed.

The hall took a long time to cross. The floor was one kind of stone the whole way, pale and smooth, laid in slabs so wide and so closely fitted that he kept losing the seams between them, and the sword rode quietly at his hip now that the ground was level, for the first time since the lake. He walked with his palm over the pommel anyway; the habit had set in on the climb. Excalibur, a myth he had read about as a boy. Back then, he had never thought the sword was real, let alone that he would one day carry it. Behind him the hem of the mantle slid over the stone.

Twelve corridors opened off the hall. They were spaced evenly, one for each wall, each one exactly as wide as the next, their mouths all the same height and every arch turned by the same hand that had set the windows outside at one level. He counted them as he walked toward them. His eyes did it before he asked them to. Each bore a keystone with a glyph on it, something in a language he could not understand.

All but one of the corridors stood in twilight. It was not darkness. He could see a little way into each—the first few yards of wall and floor going away from him, and then the dimness closed over them like still water over a dropped stone, gray and soft and without any end he could make out. No torch burned in any of them. Archways on both sides of each corridor each gave off a little light, as far as the eye could see.

Only the third from the left was lit.

The same cool white light ran down it from the mouth, torch after torch along both walls, on and on, farther than Andy could see. It only got smaller, until the last of it was a pale thread somewhere far ahead, and then he couldn’t tell where it ended.

Behind him, the man’s voice was quiet and even. “One for each of the twelve. The third is hers. It’s the only one with any light in it.”

Arabella had told him the number one morning in the Inner Gardens: twelve of them, the first Hosts, made rather than born, and she was the third. Later, on the terrace, with Claire beside him and the eleven dark islands out on the water, she had told them both that the other eleven were gone. He’d carried that around since. It was something else to stand in front of it, in a row, eleven doorways with nothing burning in them and one that went on and on. Eleven sets of memories for those who had long since passed away.

“Because she’s the only one still alive,” he whispered. The man only looked down the lit corridor with him.

Andy went closer. He stopped at the mouth of the lit corridor, close enough to feel the floor change under his shoes where the hall ended, and looked down it. The walls ran straight and even. A long way in, he thought he could see breaks in them, places on either side where the light seemed to gather and pool, but they were too far off to tell what they were. He looked along the row at the others, standing in their twilight on either side of this one. He could feel the sense of Arabella’s presence emanating from the corridor, as if she were close. His fear stuttered a moment, but recovered quickly as he thought of the household on the island, alone, facing Nergal.

He took a step to his right and leaned into the mouth of the next one over. The air in it was the same cool, clean air as the hall’s. The floor ran on into the gray, pale stone like the rest, and the walls ran on with it, and after a few yards he lost both. He listened, and heard nothing. The twilight didn’t stir when he leaned into it, and it didn’t thin, and he had the odd feeling, standing on the sill of it, that it had been exactly this dim for a very long time and would go on being this dim whether or not anyone ever looked in. He stepped back into the light.

He had come up the slope with a guess. Her memory of the Gate might be in here somewhere. He still thought it might be. But here were twelve ways in, and a guess was no help at all in choosing between them, and he had already stood in front of one door tonight and turned his back on it. He didn’t want to choose again and find out afterward that he had chosen wrong. Andy turned to the man. “If I go down one of these, does that shut me out of the rest?”

“No.” The man came up beside him. “Choosing one doesn’t close anything off. Inside, they all connect.”

Andy let out a breath he felt all the way down to his stomach. “Good. I’ve had about enough of doors for one night.”

The corners of the man’s mouth moved.

Andy turned around slowly—taking it in a piece at a time. The twelve doorways at his back. The long corridor in front of him, with its two lines of pale fire running away toward the great door at the other end. Beyond the door, though he couldn’t see them from here, the stair and the slope below it, the whole side of a mountain built over with wings and towers and terraces—mudbrick and black stone and dark tile, all of it laid by one patient hand. He had climbed beside it for what felt like half the night, and stood at the foot of it unable to take it in. Seven thousand years of Earth in it, and hundreds of thousands more, maybe millions, across countless worlds, countless Earths, and every stone of it hers. Hers, and the others’.

“What happens to all of this,” he asked, “when she dies?”

The man did not answer right away. He looked at Andy, and then back down the length of the hall toward the door, and then at Andy again. “I don’t know of anything that keeps a place like this, once the one who keeps it is gone.” He held Andy’s eyes while he said it, steady. “I don’t know more than that.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m sorry.”

It hit Andy under the ribs—low and hard, with nothing to brace against. For a second he couldn’t get any air past it. Seven thousand years. Every season she had run and every name she had worn and every face she had decided to keep, from the very first one on. Every Master, every Contestant, she had ever Hosted. And before that, all she had seen and experienced in her long, long life. And under hers, everything the other eleven had carried before it came to her, all of their lives, laid stone on stone up the whole side of the mountain. The jasmine courtyard. The one who had loved the ocean. The gentle one who had chosen to end rather than be made cruel. The girl with ash on her cheekbone, and the man on the shingle holding out his sword in his hands. All of it would go when she went. His heart clenched.

And she had told him. She’d told him plainly, like she said most of the things that mattered, that her generation was being replaced, that this contract was the end of hers, that this was her last season. Later, on the terrace, she had as good as told him that finishing it would end her. He had never realized there would be this much to lose with her.

“She told me,” Andy said. His voice came out wrong, and he let it. “Weeks ago. That this was her last season. She just— said it, like it was nothing. I never knew…” Andy looked back at the lit corridor, at the long white line of it running away into the dark. He wondered whether she had known what she was telling him, that morning in the garden. Whether she had ever stood in this hall herself and counted the doorways, and looked down the only one still burning, and thought about the day it would go out.

Andy pressed the heel of his hand against one eye and then the other, and found them dry. He had thought they wouldn’t be. When he lowered the hand, the man was looking down the lit corridor too.

Andy looked at him properly then. He was standing easy beside the third doorway with the white light laid along one side of him, his weight on both feet, his hands loose at his sides, the same way he had stood at the edge of the mudbrick room and on the shingle and at the top of the stair. The plain wrap. The sandals. The short beard and the sun-browned face. Andy had followed all of that across half the night without once stopping to ask himself what he was following.

He asked himself now. The answers came up one after another, as if they had been standing in a line behind him, waiting for him to turn around.

The man had known the Moongem on sight. He had looked at a bead lying in a crack in the dirt and said what it was, and then he had said where it came from—a star that fell, a man beside a river, a woman he loved, a setting of gold made after she was gone. He had known what this palace was made of. He had told Andy, standing on the stair with his eyes on the terraces, that when each of the others died what they had carried came to her, and that all of it was here.

He knew which of the twelve corridors was hers. He hadn’t needed to count them, either. He had crossed the whole length of the hall a few steps behind Andy and come to rest beside the third doorway as if there had never been any question of which one it was.

On the lakeshore he had held out a scabbard on a belt. Andy had buckled it on over Dawn’s sash. He had never once seen the man go up to the horses, or anywhere else, to get it. As far as he could tell the man had not left his side.

And in the mudbrick room he had stood just inside the broken wall through both turns of the loop, with his eyes on Alla. On her fingers in the ash. On her back going out through the doorway. He had not looked once at the frightened girl pressed into the corner with her knees drawn up to her chest. That girl had been Anna. Dumuzid’s wife.

Andy went still.

Did you really keep sheep, he had asked on the climb, mostly to get the room out of his head. I’ve watched a great many shepherds, the man had said. Andy had laughed, because it had sounded like a joke about walking in front. It had been one. The man had never said he’d kept any.

Andy tried it the other way, to be fair to it. A man who had been dead long enough might pick things up. Seven thousand years of walking these ruins, with nothing to do but look at what fell into them—maybe Dumuzid had learned every stone of this place, every bead and every corridor, the way a night guard learns a museum. Maybe. But a night guard didn’t pull a belt out of nowhere on a lakeshore. And a husband didn’t stand in a room with his wife in it, frightened half to death in a corner, and look only at her sister.

Andy went back over every word the man had said to him tonight, looking for the lie, and he couldn’t find one. The man had never told him he was Dumuzid. Andy had said the name himself, in the ruins, watching his face for the flinch, and the man had only asked him what the name would change. He had said he was sorry when he didn’t know a thing, and that he wouldn’t guess when he could have, and Andy had trusted him for it. None of that had changed. Andy had just kept hearing the answers as Dumuzid’s, because Dumuzid was the name he had brought down here with him.

Heat came up into his face, slow and thorough. Of everything he had been unsure of tonight, the name had been the one thing he thought he had, and nobody had given it to him. He had picked it up himself, in the ruins, and carried it all the way up the mountain. His fingers had gone cold. He flexed them at his side.

“You’re not Dumuzid,” he said.

The man did not move. He was not going to deny it. Whatever this man was, he didn’t say things that weren’t so.

“You never were. You never even said you were. I did that.” Andy’s throat had gone tight around it, and he pushed the rest out anyway. “So who are you?”

He could have recited the answers by now, all of them. Someone who knows the way. I’m here to guide you. That much is true, whatever else I leave unsaid. He braced for one of them. He thought, if it came, he might actually sit down on the floor.

The man smiled, a little. It was a small smile, with something held back behind it, and it stayed on his face while he looked at Andy, as if he had been waiting on this question a long while and saw no reason to hurry now that it had come.

Then the herdsman’s shape thinned around him like heat off stone. It did not fall away or break. It went thin—the face, the beard, the wrap, all at once. Andy could see the corridor’s white light through it. Then he was seeing past it. Then there was something there to block his view again.

Andy took half a step back before he knew he had. The sword knocked once against his leg. There had been no sound. No flash, no wind. The torches hadn’t so much as leaned.

The man who stood in its place was taller than Andy by a few inches. Seven feet of him, lean, barefoot on the cold stone. His hair was short and tousled—black on his left side, white on his right. His robes hung long and loose, cut close to a kimono, white on the left and black on the right. His eyes were black at the rim. They brightened toward the center into silver, and they had no pupils at all.

Andy was struck by how similar the man’s look was to Amabilis, Ama-Bila, Arabella’s baseline form. The eyes were different, but the hair, the vestments, were the same.

The silver was looking at Andy. There was no pupil to follow. Still Andy knew exactly where it rested: on his face, steady, as the herdsman’s eyes had rested there all night. That much hadn’t gone. The face around them held still and let him look.

“My name is Horun,” he said.

Andy had heard the name first in the Sky Archive, in a list Arabella said held only the nearest a human mouth could come to the real ones. He’d heard it again the day she told him about Hecate, when she came to the last of her siblings to die, and her voice had changed on it. And on the beach, at the very end, she had told him who had given her her true name. Her brother. The oldest of the twelve, the one who had been there from the beginning, before any of the others. The one who had given all the others their names, because he was the oldest, she’d said, and those were his to give.

Andy’s breath went out of him and didn’t come back right away. He could feel his own pulse going hard in his throat, and the cold of the floor coming up through the soles of his shoes, and neither one seemed to have anything to do with him.

“Horun,” he said. It didn’t come out steady.

Horun inclined his head.

For a while after that the hall was quiet. Andy thought of Arabella in the garden, steadying her voice after his name and moving on to the next thing. He had wondered at the time what it cost her. Here was the name she had said that way, standing barefoot on her floor. The torches burned on along the walls without a sound, and the light ran away down the third corridor behind Horun, white and cool and on and on, the way it had been running when Andy first walked in. It looked exactly the same. Andy stood in front of him with his cold hands at his sides and his breath still not quite his own, and he couldn’t think of one thing to say that wouldn’t be smaller than the name.

He had to lift his chin to meet the silver in Horun’s eyes. Now there was nothing left of the man he had grown used to looking at. No beard, no sandals, no plain wrap. Nothing of the sun-browned face he had followed across the ruins and up the whole side of a mountain. The man standing in front of him was a stranger from the bare feet up, and he had been walking beside Andy all night.

The torchlight fell on him unevenly. It caught the white half of the robe and the white half of his hair and made them almost too bright to look at, and the black halves took it in and gave nothing back, so that he seemed to stand half in the light and half outside it although nothing stood between him and the walls. The hem of the robe lay on the floor around his feet. His toes were bare on the stone. Andy’s own feet were cold through his shoes, and he wondered, absurdly, whether Horun’s were.

Andy’s right hand had found the hilt at his hip. He had not decided to put it there. Still neither of them moved. The torches burned along the walls and made no sound, and the white light came out of the third corridor and lay across the floor between them, and Horun stood in it, barefoot, and waited. He did not seem to need anything from the moment. He had never seemed to need anything from any moment, Andy realized. Even now.

Andy found his voice somewhere. He wet his lips. “Arabella said you died. Centuries ago.” She had told him in the Inner Gardens, with Samson Drei there too: that the last of her siblings had gone sometime in the ninth or tenth century, and that after that she was the only one left.

“That’s true,” Horun said.

Andy felt it go into him, cold and quiet. He had walked all night beside a man who did not say things that weren’t so. He had found that out the long way, and he had leaned on it, and here was what it was worth: a dead man telling him simply that he was indeed dead. Then Horun turned his head, not far, toward the end of the row of doorways. Toward the first one.

“That one is mine.”

Andy went and looked properly, two doorways along to the end of the row, with Horun’s eyes on his back the whole way and his own footsteps coming back to him from somewhere up near the ceiling. The white light from the third corridor fell away behind him as he went, so that by the time he reached the end of the row he was standing in the hall’s softer torchlight. He stopped at the mouth of the first corridor, where the hall’s floor ended and the corridor’s began.

It stood in twilight, like the other ten. It looked exactly as the one beside the lit doorway had looked when he leaned into it: a few yards of pale floor and pale wall going away into gray, and then nothing he could make out. No torch. No sound. Andy looked into it for a long moment, and for a second—he couldn’t have said how long, not more than a second—the twilight in it seemed a shade brighter than in the others, though nothing in it was lit, as if somebody far down it had opened a door onto a gray morning and then thought better of it.

He blinked hard. When he looked again, it was the same as all the rest.

He put it down to his eyes. He had been staring into cool white fire for long enough that anything without it would look strange for a while. That was all it was, probably. He walked back along the row. Horun hadn’t moved.

Andy swallowed. If this Host had died a thousand years ago, then what was standing here? He thought of the shades. The woman in the ruins with her hands cupped around nothing. The girls braiding each other’s hair on the reed mat until one of them broke down crying. Alla, with her fingers in the ash. Artorius, coming down the shingle with his empty hands. He had stood close enough to touch every one of them tonight, and spoken to some of them, and not one of them had ever turned its head toward him. They looked at whatever they had been looking at when they were kept. They answered nobody. This man had looked at him from the first second, from the moment he stepped out of empty ground in the ruins and said hello.

“You’re not one of the shades,” Andy said. “The shades never look at anyone. I’ve watched them. They don’t even know I’m there.” He made himself hold the silver eyes. “You’ve been looking at me since the ruins.”

Horun let that stand. He did not agree, and he did not argue.

Andy’s hand tightened on the hilt. He did not think Horun was going to hurt him. It was not fear that kept his fingers where they were, but something less sensible: the plain animal wish to be holding on to something solid while he asked.

He had been turning the possibilities over since the slope without letting himself say any of them, and now they all came up at once. A ghost was what you called a dead man who walked around. But Arabella had built this place out of what she kept, and his corridor was here, so his memories were here, and maybe a memory could walk if it was kept well enough. Or maybe she had needed someone down here to bring people up the mountain, and made one.

He had trusted this man for hours. He had followed him past every kind of wreckage there was, on the strength of nothing but how he talked: what he would say and what he wouldn’t, and the way he said sorry for the gaps. Now he was going to ask him straight out for the one thing he had never once given, and he knew it before he opened his mouth. He asked anyway.

“What are you? Are you really here? Are you a ghost? Is this your soul, standing here, or is it a memory of you she kept, like all the rest of it?” The words were coming faster now, and he let them. “Or are you something she built, to walk around down here on its own? To come and find people like me?”

Horun heard all of it. He held Andy’s eyes through every word, his head tipped a little to one side, and his face did not change at any of them. He stood in the white light with his hands loose at his sides and listened as if each word deserved to be heard to the end, and when Andy ran out of them he answered none.

Neither of them spoke. It wasn’t the silence Andy had learned to read on the climb, when the man had something he wouldn’t say and said so, or something he didn’t know and said he was sorry. This was only silence. It stood there between them like a third person in the hall.

A few hours ago he would have pushed. He had pushed, in the ruins—don’t do that, he had said, I’m not satisfied with it. He still wasn’t satisfied with it. He found he didn’t have the push left in him. Somewhere between the mudbrick room and the lake he had stopped needing every answer before he would take the next step, and he couldn’t have said when.

“You’re not going to tell me,” Andy said. It had stopped being a question somewhere in the middle.

Horun let that stand too.

Andy breathed out. He looked down at his hand on the hilt, and up at the silver eyes, and back to the hand. A ghost or a soul or a memory with its feet on the floor; whatever it was, it had walked him here, and it was still standing in front of him, waiting, as if the next thing were up to Andy. He supposed it was.

Horun looked him over. He took his time about it. His eyes went first to the sword at Andy’s hip, to the plain leather of the scabbard he had handed over on the lakeshore and the worn grip with Andy’s hand still around it, and stayed there a moment. Then they went to the white mantle hanging from Andy’s shoulders, dusty now along the hem from the slope, the lining showing green where it had fallen open—the green of Myra’s foxfire. Erin's cuff, glittering in the torchlight. Claire's locket, hanging below Emily's clasp. Then up, to the circlet. Emi’s circlet, with Laura’s blue rose set into it, which Andy had stopped feeling on his head somewhere around the bottom of the stair. Horun’s eyes rested on the rose. Then they came back down to Andy’s face and stayed there.

Andy had never liked being looked at for long. He had spent most of his wedding day being looked at and had got through it by looking back at whoever was in front of him. He did that now. He stood still under it, with his hand on the hilt and the mantle hanging crooked from one shoulder, and he looked back.

It was not an inspection. It was something slower than that, and Andy, standing under it, knew the shape of it from somewhere. It was the kind of look that had ended, the last time anyone gave him one, with his father’s hand at the back of his neck. That had been at the first bridge, a few minutes after the ceremony, with the circlet still new on his head. His father hadn’t said much then, either. One line about his mother wanting a picture, and the hand, and that was all, and Andy had carried it with him the whole rest of the day.

“My sister chose well,” Horun said.

Andy heard the word before he heard the rest of it. Sister. All night it had been her, and her island, and hers—never anything closer than that. Now Horun had said it as if it were the most ordinary word in the world, as if he had been saying it since before there were words, and maybe he had.

And there was fondness in it. Andy didn’t have to go looking for it. It was plain in the voice, plain enough that it warmed the two words from inside, and under the fondness there was something that sounded to Andy a great deal like love, and like pride. An older brother’s love and pride. Andy’s throat closed on him a little.

“I don’t know about that.” It came out rougher than he meant. “She chose a lot of people. Ask me again when this is over.”

Horun’s head tipped a little to one side—the way it had in the ruins when Andy asked him what he was—and there might have been something at the corners of his mouth. It was hard to tell, under the silver gaze.

Andy looked back at him and tried to see past it. He wanted to believe the fondness. He wanted it more than he would have expected to, standing in a dead man’s company in a hall full of fire that gave no heat. But he had spent the whole night among things that carried feeling without anyone being there to feel it. Artorius had held out that sword with real care in his scarred hands, every time, and there had been nobody behind his eyes. Alla had pressed her sister back into the corner with a tenderness Andy had felt in his own chest, and she had done it again and again, the same way each time, for nobody. A loop could carry love. He had watched it happen.

So he didn’t know. He didn’t know whether there was anyone behind those silver eyes to be fond of anything, or only something that remembered how it was done and did it well. Horun would not tell him. Andy was beginning to think nobody could.

He let go of the hilt, finally, and found he had been holding it hard enough that his fingers ached. He opened and closed them a few times at his side until the feeling came back. It came slowly, a prickle in the tips of his fingers, the small ordinary ache of a hand that had held on too long to something. It was the one thing in the hall he was sure of.

The word stayed with him. Sister. Arabella had a brother standing in her house, or something that looked and sounded like one, and whatever he was he had said it with all that warmth in his voice, and Andy thought of who he had. He thought of the women up above him somewhere, in a world where time ran tighter than it did down here, and before he had decided to do it he was reaching for Laura.

Right here, close enough to touch in every direction, and farther than he had a word for, both at once. And afraid. It sat where it had sat since the Dance Hall, pinned at the top of what the bond could carry, flat against the ceiling, not moving. He couldn’t tell from it whether things up there had got worse. There was no higher for it to go.

He held on to her a moment longer than he needed to.

The last he knew, from Emi and Claire and Dawn in the ruins, everybody up there had been alive. Laura and Sam had a plan, and the household was carrying it out up at the Verdant Arches. That had been hours ago, by his own count, and he didn’t trust his own count anymore. He felt the anger he had been carrying since Nin-Imma turn over once in his chest, slow and heavy, and settle again. Nergal was going to answer for every minute of this. Andy hadn’t stopped meaning that. He had only stopped needing to say it.

You have more time than they do, Horun had told him on the slope. He hadn’t said how much more. And Andy didn’t have it to spend standing in a hall.

He looked up at Horun. He had asked about the Gate at the door, and got nothing. He had taken that as a man who didn’t know, or wouldn’t say. Now he knew who the man was. The oldest of the twelve. If anyone had ever seen the First Gate with his own eyes, it was the one standing in front of him.

“Take me to the First Gate.” His voice was steadier than it had been since the name. “Whatever’s left of it. Wherever it is in here. Please.”

Horun did not hesitate over it. “I’ll show you the way,” he said. “The walking will be yours.”

He had heard that before, or near enough. Arabella in the Inner Gardens, telling him about Hecate and the law she had kept for centuries: you can light a crossing for a thousand years, and you can’t cross it for anyone. She had said it as if it had been carved somewhere before it ever came out of her mouth. Andy wondered, now, where she had first heard it said.

Andy almost laughed. It caught somewhere under his breastbone and came out as a breath. He shook his head a little. “I know. The good ones walk in front.”

Something moved in Horun’s face at that, and was gone. He turned away from Andy, toward the third doorway—the lit one, hers—and walked toward it. He did not say come on or look back over his shoulder to see whether Andy had heard, or whether he would follow. He walked into the mouth of the corridor at the same unhurried pace he had kept up the whole slope—barefoot now, the black and white of him going away down the long line of torches.

Andy stood alone in the hall for a moment, with the dim doorways along the wall on either side and the one bright one ahead. He looked along the row to the first of them, at the end. It was as dim as the rest. He looked at it until he was sure of that, and then a little longer, and it stayed as dim as the rest.

Behind him, at the other end of the hall, the great door stood where they had left it. He did not turn around to look. Out there were the stair, the slope, the rust-colored light, and a long way down and back, a doorframe in the ruins with nothing on either side of it.

Then he settled the sword at his hip, and went after him into the light.

---

The corridor ran on ahead of them, long and lit, the same cool white light along both its walls.

Andy caught Horun up a few yards in, and after that he walked beside him instead of behind. He hadn’t decided to. His legs had simply done it, and Horun shortened his stride without a word so that the two of them kept level. Even shortened, it was a long stride. The sword knocked against Andy’s leg every few steps. The torches came at them in pairs, one on each wall, and slid by, and the next pair was already waiting.

It was as quiet in here as it had been in the hall. Quieter, if anything—the walls were closer, and gave back less. Andy could hear his own breathing, and the creak of the belt, and the soft drag of the mantle’s hem behind him. He couldn’t hear Horun at all. Without looking, he would not have known there was anyone beside him. But he could feel Arabella around him, and found that he wished she were there too.

The walls were pale stone, like the hall’s, smooth and plain. Far ahead the breaks Andy had seen from the doorway were still too far off to make out, places on either side where the light seemed to gather. He kept his eyes on them for a while as they walked. Then he looked over at Horun, at the black half of him and the white, and the long bare feet going on over the stone without a sound.

“What was it?” Andy asked. “The First Gate. What was it, really?”

Horun answered him the way he had answered every question about this place since the ruins: plainly, at once, as if there had never been any reason to make a secret of it. “It was torn,” he said. “Not opened. Torn.”

Andy waited. Torn. You opened a thing that was meant to be opened—a door, a gate, a box with a lid. You tore a thing that wasn’t. A seam. A sheet. The sky, maybe. He did not ask what had torn it. Horun was already going on.

“Things came through it. The ones you’d call gods.” Horun’s eyes stayed on the corridor ahead. “I was there before most of them came. The one you call Herman came through after I was made.”

Andy stopped walking. He did not decide to do that, either. Horun went on another pace and then stopped too, and turned, and waited. Andy’s heart was going hard. He couldn’t have said why it was Herman, out of all of it, that had stopped him in his tracks.

Herman. Herman was Hermes. Andy had known that for a while now, and he had never once got used to it. He doubted he ever would. A maintenance man with callused hands and a badge on his shirt, who had turned up unannounced to install a touchscreen. Who had led the bachelor party down into the dark and set its one rule and thrown a coin at a voice to make it stop.

Hermes had been old for as long as people had had a name for him. And he had come through after the man standing in front of Andy now.

“Herman.” It came out flat, because he had nothing to put into it. “Herman came after you.”

Horun inclined his head, once.

“He’s—” Andy stopped, and started again. “He ran my bachelor party. He married Sam and Liesa, at the bonfire. There are stories about him older than anybody can date.” He shook his head slowly. “And you were already standing there when he showed up.”

He made himself start walking again, one foot and then the other. Horun turned and fell in beside him again, at the same shortened stride. Andy went over it while they walked. Gods had come through the Gate, Herman among them. Horun had been there before most of them. And Arabella had told him once, plainly, that only Hosts and gods had ever come out of the First Gate. He had always heard that as one thing: the Gate, and things coming out of it. Hosts and gods, side by side.

“So you came through it too,” Andy pressed. “Same as them. You, and her, and the others. She told me Hosts and gods came out of it. I always figured that meant the same way.”

“No.” Horun said it without any weight on it at all. Then he went on, in the same even voice. “The gods came through it, and went on their way. The twelve never came through it. We were made out of it.” He looked at Andy then, sidelong. “Out of the Gate itself. What it was made of, we were made of.”

Andy felt the floor go strange under him, though it hadn’t moved. His mind went to the bead in his Inventory, for no reason he could have named, and stayed there.

He had pictured it a hundred different ways since Arabella first said the words to him: a door, an arch, a crack in the sky, something that stood somewhere and could be walked through. He had never pictured it as something you could be made out of. Arabella was made out of it. The woman who ran the Hotel, who had sat across from him in the Inner Gardens and on the beach and told him about every name she had ever worn, was built out of the thing he had spent weeks trying to find.

“Made.” Andy heard how it sounded, and didn’t care. “Made out of a door. By who?”

“The first of the Producers,” Horun said. “J and the Verant were among them.”

“The Verant?”

“That’s hers to tell you, if she wants to.” Horun’s voice didn’t change. “I’ll leave it there.”

Andy let it go, for now. There was no getting past that tone, and he had stopped trying. But the other word stayed with him. Producers. Arabella had used it on the terrace, the day she told him about the eleven islands. Va-Tihs, the gentlest of them, had been told by the Producers to do something cruel, and had ended herself rather than do it. Andy hadn’t liked the word then. He liked it less now, knowing they had been there at the very start, with their hands on the Gate. Arabella had answered to them, somewhere up the line, for as long as he had known her. He had never thought about how far back the line went.

Horun went on as if he had only paused for breath. “Each time one of us was made, there was less of the Gate left. I was the first. I was there for each of the others when they were made.” It came as flatly as a man giving the distance to the next hill. “I gave each of them a name.”

Andy thought of Arabella, the third. Somebody had stood there on the day she was made, and given her the first thing she ever owned.

“After the twelfth,” Horun said, “there was nothing left of the Gate. Only us.”

Us. Andy heard it go by. Eleven of the twelve were dead, and their islands lay dark out on the water off the Hotel, and the one saying it had been dead for a thousand years himself. He said it anyway—as if he were still one of them. Andy supposed that he was.

They walked a few steps in silence, side by side. The torches went by, pair after pair. Andy turned it over, and the old riddle turned over with it and came up the other way.

“That’s why she said it doesn’t exist anymore.” The words came slowly. “When she told me to look for it. A place that doesn’t exist anymore. It doesn’t, because it’s all—it went into you. Into the twelve of you. There’s nothing left of it to stand in.”

“Yes,” Horun said.

Andy let out a breath. “She told me that weeks ago. I’ve had it written down in my head ever since, word for word. A place that doesn’t exist anymore, yet still exists, if you know how to find it.” He shook his head. “I thought it was a riddle. I thought she was being Arabella about it.”

Horun’s mouth moved at the corner, the way it had in the hall. He didn’t say she had been.

They walked on. Andy’s mind had gone back, without his sending it, to the Sky Archive, and Claire at the long table with her notebook open between them and her pens laid out by color. She had been chasing the First Gate for days by then and getting nowhere. One secondhand account, and a handful of words out of old texts that didn’t agree with each other: a threshold, a mouth, a limen. And one phrase she had copied out and underlined twice, because it was the only thing all the fragments seemed to share. Erased from reality. She had tapped it with her pen and looked at him, and he had shrugged, because neither of them had known what to do with it.

He knew now. It hadn’t been erased. It had been used. Every last piece of it had gone into making twelve people, and one of them was walking beside him with his feet bare on the stone.

But there had been more than that in the Archive. It had come later, after weeks of nothing. Claire had pieced it together with Arabella listening and not arguing, and he had laid it out for Laura and Emi in the Suite: that the First Gate was never really a place at all, but a threshold, and that whoever passed through it carried it with them afterward. Forever. He had leaned on that one. It was the one thing about the Gate that had ever sounded like something a person could hold.

“Claire found something,” Andy offered. “A while back. She worked out that the Gate wasn’t really a place. It was a threshold. And whoever passes through it carries it with them afterward. That’s what she found.”

Horun shook his head, once, without any hurry in it, as if he were correcting the way to a well. “A faulty translation. Not whoever passed through it,” he said. “Only whoever was made of it.” He glanced at Andy. “Hermes walked through it. He carries none of it.”

Andy walked a few steps on that, his eyes on the floor.

So Claire had been close. She had been close the way she was nearly always close—with half the pieces on the table and the shape of the rest guessed at from the edges of them, and she had been wrong about the one part Andy had built the most on. Herman had come through it and carried nothing. A god had walked through the First Gate and come out the other side with empty hands—and Arabella, who had never walked through it at all, was made of it.

“She was so close.” Andy rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “She’s going to hate that she was close.” He could see her face when he told her. The ears going flat, and the pen coming out, and the line drawn through whatever she had written on that page weeks ago, firmly, so nobody would ever mistake it for something she still believed. It almost made him smile. It went out again before it got there.

Because it didn’t add up. He walked on with it, turning it, and it came out the same each time.

“Then how does it still exist?” he asked. “If it was all used up. If you used all of it, making the twelve of you, and there wasn’t any left. She told me it still exists, if you know how to find it. She didn’t say it the way she says riddles. She said it like it was true.”

Horun was quiet for a few steps. It wasn’t the long silence from the hall; it was only the kind he took when he was choosing the plainest way to say a thing. “When one of us ended,” he said, “what we were made of went to whoever was left. When I ended, everything I was carrying went to her.”

When I ended. He said it the way he said everything else. Andy was looking at his face when he said it, and there was nothing there to show it had cost him anything, then or now.

Andy heard himself say it back, low, mostly to the floor. “Everything you were carrying.” He already had the rest of it. He had been sitting on it for weeks without knowing what it was.

“She told us,” Andy said. “Me and Claire, on the terrace, with the islands out on the water. Every time one of you died, it came into the survivors. Your memories, your power, whatever you’d carried. A little more each time.” He swallowed. “And then the last of you went. You. The oldest. And all the rest came to her at once. Eleven whole lives, she said, in a single moment.”

She had told it so evenly, as if she were reading it off a list. Claire’s tail had gone still against the railing. Andy had heard it as grief. He had never once heard it as the Gate.

The torchlight ran on along the walls, steady, pair after pair. He couldn’t feel his feet on the stone. He was aware of his breath going in and out of him, short, and of nothing else much.

“Then all of it is in her now,” he said. He stopped walking. Beside him, Horun stopped too. “Everything that’s left of the Gate. All of it. It’s in her.”

“Yes,” Horun said. He stood there in the white light and did not soften it. “She keeps her oldest things at the bottom.”

Andy did not move. He breathed in, and it caught, and he let it out slowly.

The Gate was in Arabella.

All night he had been walking toward it. For weeks, if he was honest. A place that didn’t exist anymore, yet still existed if you knew how to find it, and he had pictured it a hundred ways and every one of them had been somewhere else. Somewhere you could go. And it had been sitting across from him in the Inner Gardens. On the beach. On the terrace, telling him about her dead, with Claire beside him taking notes. It had stood up at his wedding, in front of everyone he loved, and told them the story of his season.

“She’s had it the whole time,” Andy said. His voice had gone thin. “She’s been carrying it around the whole time, and she sent me looking for it.” He waited to be angry about that, and the anger didn’t come. She had told him as much as she was allowed to—he understood that now, standing here. She had pointed, and said the words, and stepped back. He had taken the stepping back for caginess at the time. He didn’t think so now.

Horun only waited—the way he had waited at every turn of the night—until Andy was ready to go on. After a while, Andy was. He started walking again without seeing the walls. He saw her instead, in every place she had ever sat down across from him and told him something true, and never quite all of it.

She had sent him looking for it. He hadn’t forgotten a word of that conversation, any more than he forgot anything. When he pushed her about Laura and the debt, she had told him there was one way through the Law that had never been used. One. Not ever, in all the time there had been a Law. And it had to be found and chosen freely, she’d said, without her or anyone who knew the rules putting it into his hand. Then she had pointed him at the First Gate, and said he would understand there.

He had gone back to the Suite that night and told Laura all of it, both of her. Wait for it, or make it—that was where the two of them had left it. They’ll make sense later, she had said another night, with her fork in her hand. They always do. Laura was up there now with her fear pinned to the top of the bond, and the one way through the Law that anyone had ever told him about was down here, at the bottom of somebody else.

He thought of the hall behind them, and the twelve doorways, and Horun standing in the cool light telling him he knew of nothing that kept a place like this once its keeper was gone. He did not let himself finish that thought. He set it down where he could find it again, and kept walking. Horun kept pace beside him, the black half of his robe on Andy’s side, his bare feet going on over the stone without a sound.

The breaks in the walls that he had seen from the hall were nearer now, gathering their light a little way ahead on either side. He did not look at them.

Partway along the corridor Horun turned aside. There was a low arch in the wall on the left, plain stone like the rest, no taller than a doorway in an ordinary house, and Horun bent his head to pass under it and went through without breaking his stride or saying a word, as if he had come this way more times than anyone could count. Andy followed him through it, ducking his head under the stone. He did not look at where they were going. His eyes were on the floor in front of his feet, on the pale stone going by under the hem of the mantle, and his mind was a long way down, at the bottom of something. For a while there was nothing but the sound of his own steps, and Horun beside him, keeping pace.

On the far side the corridor ran on, the same as before. The same pale walls, the same cool torches, pair after pair.

Andy lifted his head when the light ahead of them changed. It wasn’t torchlight. It came from the wall itself, from an opening in it.

A little way along, set into the wall on the right like an open room, the first memory waited in its own light.