Elegy

Andy was still on his knees. He didn’t know how long he had been there. The stone under him was bare where the ash had been scuffed away, and cold, and he could feel every grain of it through the knees of his trousers. His right hand was still closed. When he made it open, a little gray came loose from the creases of his palm and sifted down onto the stone. The rest stayed in the lines of his hand. There was more on his knees, and on the stone in front of him, a low soft drift of it where she had stood.

Nothing moved in it. There was no wind.

There was nothing else of her. No scrap of the dress, no strand of hair, nothing he could have picked up and held on to. Everything she had been standing in had gone the same way she had.

Laura knelt beside him. Her hands were still up in front of her face, cupped and empty, where they had held Arabella’s hand against her cheek. There was gray in them, and a smear of gray on the cheek. The other two of her stood at the edge of the bare stone with her mother.

He knew he should get up. His legs didn’t seem to know it.

A few paces off, the Verant stood where they had stood, upright in their moonwhite light, lighting nothing but themselves. The light had stopped rippling. It was still inclined, the suggestion of a head bowed over the place where she had been. Past them Ereshkigal stood straight-backed in her crown of bone-white gold, and her face was wet. Her hands hung at her sides. She didn’t wipe anything away.

At the rim, behind Mildred, the eyes were still open. A great many of them, in the dark at her back where there shouldn’t have been anything at all. None of them blinked. Every one of them was turned toward the ash.

Behind Andy, Herman stood where he had stepped back to, at his shoulder, with the lantern hanging from his hand and the caduceus in the crook of his arm. At the end he had been saying her name under his breath, over and over. He had stopped. Andy didn’t know when. He could hear him breathing, slow and careful, as somebody breathes who is holding himself still on purpose and doesn’t trust what will happen if he stops.

And a step short of it, Anna was on her knees in Marissa’s arms.

She had fallen there. Andy had heard her fall—had heard her cry out and wrench free and come across the stone on legs that wouldn’t hold her, and go down a step too soon. Marissa had come around her from behind and caught her, and was holding her there still, both arms locked across Anna’s chest, her cheek against Anna’s hair. Chloe and Dawn knelt just behind the two of them, where Anna had torn loose from them. Chloe had both hands pressed over her mouth, as if she were holding something in that would come out if she let go. Eden was close by, perfectly still, with tears running down her face and nothing to wipe them with.

Anna’s arms were still out, still reaching. Andy watched her stretch one hand past Marissa’s arm, slowly, as far as it would go. It shook. Marissa didn’t stop her. Anna’s fingertips touched the edge of the ash, and stopped there, and stayed.

“Ara,” she said. Her voice was hoarse, almost gone. It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be. Andy heard it as if she had said it next to his ear. Then she said something else, and it wasn’t English.

It was the old language, the one she had spoken to Arabella earlier tonight, full of soft stops, older than anything he had a name for. It came out of her low and uneven, broken in places, starting again in places, and it went on for a long time, and she didn’t lift her eyes from the ash once while she said it. Whatever it was, it was meant for one person, and Andy found that he was glad he couldn’t follow it. It wasn’t his.

She stopped. Her breath went in, and caught, and went in again.

“I’d give it again,” Anna said, in English. Her voice cracked straight across, and she went on through the crack. “The piece. The piece of me. I’d give it— Ara. I’d give it again. A thousand times. A thousand times over. You hear me? A thousand—”

It went out of her. She bent forward over her own arm, and her fingers stayed where they were, in the ash, at the very edge of it, as if they were holding on to a hand.

Marissa didn’t loosen her grip. She put her mouth against Anna’s hair, and Andy heard her, though her voice was barely more than breath. “I know,” Marissa whispered. “I know. Stay here with me. Just stay here. I know.”

Herman went past Andy without a word and crossed the stone to where Anna knelt, and got down on one knee at her side. He set the lantern down on the stone. He laid the caduceus across his knee. Look after Anna, Arabella had said to him, a few minutes ago, with almost nothing left in her voice, and he had told her she knew he would.

After a moment Anna’s free hand came off Marissa’s arm and found his wrist, and closed on it, and held. She didn’t look at him. Her other hand stayed where it was, at the edge of the ash.

“I’ve got her,” Herman said, very low. It wasn’t to Anna. His eyes were on the ash.

Behind him, very quietly, Sarah said, “She stayed.” She stood at the edge of the bare stone with two of Laura around her, as they had been since Andy crossed the ash to Arabella with the other one at his side. Marie was close behind them. Sarah had been awake for a few hours, and in those hours she had crossed the Ring on legs that had forgotten how, and thanked the woman who had watched over her baby, and forgiven her. When Arabella’s knees gave in the ash, Sarah had gone down with her and held her. And at the end, she had learned just how much Arabella had done to keep her promise, to watch over Laura.

Now there was no one to thank anymore. Sarah said it to the stone anyway, to the place where Arabella had been standing when she answered, and her wet eyes didn’t leave the ash.

Nobody answered her. The ash didn’t move. Andy found he had been waiting for it to. For a voice, low and level, to say I stayed one more time from somewhere just past his shoulder. He didn’t know how long he would go on waiting for things like that. A long time, probably.

Behind Sarah, Marie had both arms folded hard across her chest. She stood there and let her sister hold on to her daughter, and didn’t say a word. The nearest of Laura turned and put her arms around her mother. Sarah’s hands came up and took hold of her, in the back of her dress, both fists, and held on. Andy heard Sarah’s breath break, once, against Laura’s shoulder. She didn’t let go.

Then the other of the two let go of her mother and came to him.

He sensed her before he saw her, of course. She came across the Ring and knelt down on his other side, close, and the one of her already beside him leaned in at the same moment, so that her shoulders pressed against his from both sides at once. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t take his hand. She only knelt there and leaned in, and stayed.

Her grief came down the bond. It was as sharp as his own, and for a moment he couldn’t tell where hers stopped and his began. He didn’t try to. Then, along the bond, she spoke to him.

She stayed out there all night. It came quietly, in the voice she used when she was trying to keep it level and couldn’t. I heard the story a hundred times. At your mom’s table. I laughed at it, Andy. Every time. A pause, and something in it wavered. Now I’ve got it from where she stood. And I only got to— I only got to thank her once.

Andy breathed. It hurt to do it. He thought about the maple, and the lit window, and Arabella standing just outside the reach of the streetlight with her hands at her sides, not going any closer. He had felt her decide to stay.

She wanted it that way, he sent back. She didn’t want anyone to know. Not you. Not anyone. He closed his eyes. But you thanked her. Out loud, to her face, before she went. And she got to hold you one more time.

For a while Laura sent nothing. The two of her against him didn’t move. Then, very faintly, down the bond, something came back up it that wasn’t words at all. He thought it might have been her trying to say thank you, and not getting there.

A step behind the two of Laura, Claire bent down. Her notebook had fallen shut at her feet when Arabella began to come apart, and it had been there since, face down on the bare stone, with a little ash drifted against its spine. Claire picked it up. She brushed the cover off with the side of her hand, carefully, once and then again, and opened it. She turned through it without reading, page after page of her small, quick, slanting hand, until she came to one that was clean.

She uncapped her pen. At the top of the clean page she wrote one word.

Arabella.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she touched the first letter with the tip of one finger, lightly, as if to be sure the ink had taken. Her pen came down to the next line, and stopped there. It didn’t move. Claire stood with the notebook open against her forearm and the nib resting on the paper, just under the name, and nothing came out of it. Her ears had gone flat to her head. Her tail hung straight down behind her, still.

Andy felt it through the bond the two of them shared. At the end, when Arabella went, Claire’s grief had come down it so hard it had doubled his own. This was quieter. It had stopped crashing. It had gone down to the bottom of her and settled there, deep and steady and heavy, and he understood that it was going to stay.

She had told him once, in the early weeks, about a dream she’d had. Arabella and Anna, and a tall man in a hard hat, standing around an altar in a stone room lit by lanterns. A basin of dark water, and a white feather, and Claire herself at the fourth place, stirring. A blue rose at the end of it. She’d written it all down for him, and he had told her the man in the hard hat was real. Neither of them had ever put the rest into words. It hadn’t been a dream. Out of everyone in the house, Arabella had chosen Claire to stand there and witness it.

Past Claire, Sumiku was still on her knees. Now, slowly, she bent forward until her forehead touched the stone. Her four hands went flat on the stone on either side of her head, fingers spread, and her wings drew in tight against her back, and her tail curled around behind her. Andy had seen her bow like that once before, in a corridor in the Hotel, on the day she was freed. She had made herself that small in front of the woman she called Amaterasu-no-Ōkami, and begged forgiveness for a failure that had never been hers. This was the same bow. It was not a plea this time, but an offering, and he could see the difference in how her hands lay on the stone: open, not pressed white at the fingertips.

She began to pray. Aloud, this time. It was Japanese, low and even and very formal, and to Andy’s surprise, he found he could follow it. “Amaterasu-no-Ōkami,” Sumiku said into the stone. “This one gives thanks. For the long sleep, when this one could not bear to wake. For the blade, kept safe all those years. For the words in the corridor.” Her voice did not shake. Her shoulders did. “You told this one that Toranosuke’s road had ended long ago, and that nothing in its ending belonged to her. This one did not believe it, then. She believes it now.” A breath. “Your road has ended. Nothing in its ending belongs to anyone but you. This one will remember that it was yours.”

She didn’t lift her head when she finished. She stayed down, her forehead against the stone, her four hands flat, and went on in a murmur too low to carry, and Andy let her have it.

Nothing in its ending belongs to anyone but you.

Beyond Sumiku, Emi knelt beside Emily. She still hadn’t woken. She lay on her side where they had laid her, her gold-and-pink hair spread over the stone, her breathing slow and even under everything. When Arabella went, Emi had been crying into Katherine’s shoulder with four of her arms wrapped around her. She had turned back since. Two of her six hands rested on Emily’s shoulder now, keeping her there. The other four hung open in her lap. Katherine knelt at her side, close enough that their knees touched.

Andy remembered the night the women had each named what they would do with the Wish, with the cameras on them. Emi had sat with her hands knotted in her lap. I promised Arabella I’d remember her, she’d said. If they come for Arabella, I’d lose her and I wouldn’t even feel the shape of the hole. She had wanted for it to hold. Arabella, and her eleven brothers and sisters. The record would stand, and nobody would get to reach in and take it.

Off to Andy’s left, Sam was on her feet. At the end she had gone down on her knees beside Thrustworthy with both hands over her face. Now she was standing again, and Liesa was beside her, and Sam’s jaw was set so hard he could see the muscle in it. She wasn’t crying. Her eyes were moving. They went from Anna and Herman to Sarah, from Sarah to Claire, from Claire to Myra, to Emi, to Norah, around the whole Ring and back again, one woman after another, and none of them seemed to hold her for long. Andy knew why.

Watchtower gave her every woman in the harem who was hurting, wherever she was, and the more it hurt, the harder it came. Tonight it would be every one of them at once, all of it, coming from every side. Andy didn’t know how she was still on her feet under it. He thought she probably didn’t know either, and had decided not to ask. His friend was the strongest person he knew.

“First time I ever saw her scared,” Sam said. She said it low, to Liesa, not to the Ring. Andy heard it anyway. “That temple. You remember? Out in the jungle, right at the start, before the first challenge. The marble one.” Her voice was rough, and it didn’t sound like hers. “She came out of it barefoot. Hair all over the place. Hanging on to that iron box like it was the only thing holding her up. I said she looked like she’d crawled out of a tornado.” Her mouth worked. “She wasn’t scared tonight. Not once. Not even at the— she wasn’t scared.”

“No,” Liesa said. “Was not afraid.” She was quiet a moment. “That morning, she was alone, I think. Tonight she was not alone.” She leaned into Sam’s side. Sam’s arm went around her without Sam looking down.

Andy had never heard about any temple. Neither of them had ever said a word about it, not to him. He thought of Arabella the first week, before he knew anything about her—the Host with her unshakeable smile—stumbling out of the trees with her hair wild and something iron clutched to her chest. Sam and Liesa had seen it, and kept it, all this time. He wondered what had been in the box. He wondered if there was anybody left now who knew.

Everyone else on the Ring simply wept where they stood, and held on to whoever was nearest.

Myra stood with her blind eyes wide open and streaming, her face turned toward the ash. Her hand was pressed flat against her temple. Andy knew what she was seeing: grief, from every side, everywhere she turned, all of it at once and too much of it, burning on the Ring like light that hurt to look at. Riley had her arms around her from behind, and Riley’s hair had come up off her back and wound around the both of them. Her face was buried in Myra’s shoulder.

Norah had sat down hard in the ash when Arabella made her offer, and she hadn’t got up again. She sat with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, rocking a little, and Erin had come down beside her and got an arm around her shoulders. Erin’s other hand was out, low, palm down over the ash, fingers spread, as if she meant to ask the ground for something. There was nothing on this stone she could have grown that would have helped, and she knew it. After a while she drew the hand back and pressed it against her mouth.

Behind Marie, Sandra stood with her new hands open at her sides, as if she still didn’t trust them to hold anything. There were tears on her face. She didn’t seem to have noticed them.

At Riley’s feet, Samson Drei sat up. He had been lying pressed against Meatball since the Ring went quiet, with his chin on his paws and his eyes on the ash. Now he sat back on his haunches, put his nose up toward the night over the hollow, and howled.

Andy had never heard him howl. It came up out of him long and thin and wavering, much too big for a dog that size, and it broke at the top, and he drew breath and sent it up again. He had known her as long as he had known Andy.

Meatball lifted her head and whined under it, low, and pressed in against him. Nobody told him to hush. One lock of Riley’s hair came loose from around Myra and went down and lay along his back, and stayed there.

When it was done he lay down again, with his chin on his paws, facing the ash.

Andy looked from one of them to the next, as Sam had. He couldn’t stop himself. Every one of them had known her. Every one of them had had something with her that was theirs and nobody else’s, and every one of them was standing in it now.

His eyes went on past them, past the household, to the rim.

Mildred stood where she had stood when Arabella died. She hadn’t moved. Her hands still hung open at her sides, where they had come loose from each other at the end, and she was looking at the ash as if she were waiting for it to tell her what came next. Andy reached for her with the new sense, as he had at the end, and found her unchanged since then: warm, and grieving, and still unsure what to do with any of it. Behind her, in the dark where there shouldn’t have been anything, the eyes were still open.

Arabella had bound her here. Arabella had defeated her and bound her and kept her—first as a passenger shut inside a body of black stone, then as a maid who poured tea, and then, over more years than Andy could hold in his head at once, as Mildred. A name. A little room to move in. Nobody had ever asked Arabella why she gave her even that much. Andy didn’t think Arabella could have told them.

The eyes behind Mildred began to close. They went one after another, slowly, all through the dark at her back, like lamps going out along a street late at night. When the last of them had closed there was nothing behind her but the blasted trees at the rim and the night over them.

Mildred brought her hands together in front of her and folded them. It took her a moment to do it. Then she looked up from the ash, and found Andy. “She asked me once what I would do, Master Andy.” Her voice was warm and low, and it carried across the stone without her lifting it. “If the seal ever came off. She sat me down in her office and asked me to argue my own case.”

Andy waited.

“I told her I did not know.” Mildred’s eyes went back to the ash. “I told her I would not make up an answer just to be let out. She said she did not want a promise from me. And then I asked her if she was well, and she said she did not have an answer either.” Her folded hands tightened, and stayed tight. “We sat there till the room went dark. She thanked me, when I went out. For everything. I didn’t ask her what she meant.” She hesitated, and Andy saw in her eyes what he had never once thought he’d see there. “I should have asked,” she whispered.

Andy’s throat had closed. He had to wait for it to open. “She kept things,” he said. It came out rough. “All the time. She didn’t always know what she was keeping them for. She kept them anyway.”

Mildred looked at him a long moment. “She did,” she said softly. “She did, Master Andy.”

A few paces off, Ereshkigal had not moved. She stood straight-backed in the bone-white crown, a little apart from everyone, with the cold of her lying on the stone around her feet. The tears were still running down her pale face, and she was still letting them. Her eyes were on the place where Arabella had stood. She hadn’t looked away from it since the last of the ash came down—not to Anna, on her knees a step short of it with her head bowed into Marissa’s arm, not to the Verant, not to anyone.

“She was my Host once,” Ereshkigal said. Her voice was as level as it had been all night. It only went out across the Ring and stopped, and nobody answered it.

A step short of the ash, Anna’s head didn’t lift from Marissa’s arm. But her fingers, still resting at the edge of the ash, closed slowly into the gray, and stayed closed. Andy saw her back go rigid and then, a breath later, give. She didn’t look around. Ereshkigal didn’t look at her. Whatever lay between the two of them lay there still, across a few yards of bare stone, and neither of them reached for it.

At Anna’s side, Herman’s free hand came down over hers where it held his wrist. He looked up at Ereshkigal then, and held her eyes for a moment. Two very old faces, and nothing that Andy could see passed between them. Then Herman looked back at the ash.

Andy looked down at his hand. It was open on his knee, palm up. There was ash in every line of it, gray in the creases, gray along the side of his thumb where her fingers had been.

He wept. He didn’t decide to. It came up out of him all at once, and his shoulders folded over it, and he bent forward over his own open hand with his breath coming in pieces. It made a sound. He let it. On both sides of him Laura pressed in closer, her shoulders hard against his, and one of her hands came up and spread flat between his shoulder blades and stayed there. She didn’t say anything. Down the bond her grief came and met his, and neither of them tried to hold the other one up. They just went down into it together.

He couldn’t breathe for a while. Then he could, a little.

It was in him. He couldn’t get past it. The thing that had come up in him when Laura said always was still there, quiet, under all of it, and it was the power of the First Gate. Divinity, larger than anything he could imagine. By tonight Arabella had had almost nothing left of her own. He had felt it in her across the Ring, that thin banked warmth, almost gone. And from the moment she turned to Alla and offered herself, he could have walked out onto that stone and stood between her and the Law. He could have stopped it.

He hadn’t tried. It had been her choice. For as long as she had existed, everything that happened to her had been decided somewhere else, and tonight, once, she had decided. He had let it stay hers. Nothing in its ending belongs to anyone but you. He had thought it, too, kneeling there with her hand going to ash in his, and he still thought it now. It didn’t help. He hadn’t expected it to help.

He didn’t know if he would ever stop asking himself whether he should have walked out anyway.

He had a memory that kept almost everything, whether he wanted it kept or not. He knew already what it would keep of tonight. Her hand coming apart in his, a little at a time, and the stone showing through her fingers. The ash going through his own fingers when he closed them. Her voice, almost nothing and everywhere at once. Thank you. For understanding that this was always the ending.

On the beach she had asked him to remember her. Not the Host. Herself. He would. He would never be able to do anything else.

Laura’s hand moved, once, on his back. He made himself breathe. In, and out. In.

And under the grief, under all of it, he could still feel the island.

It hadn’t stopped. The blooming that had started in him tonight had continued, and he could feel every living thing on the island at once: the breaths on the Ring, every one; the seeds asleep in the stone under the ash; the trees at the rim, blasted and not dead. Farther out, the Hotel, the gardens, the long slopes going down to the sea. And around all of it, standing up out of the water on every side, the ward.

Seshat’s ward, around the whole island. Nothing on the island could leave it, and nothing on it could reach past it with any power it had, until the power of one of the twelve first Hosts chose otherwise.

The twelve were gone. All of them, now. And what the ward was waiting for was in him.

Andy lifted his head. His face was wet. The Verant’s light still stood off to his left, bowed over nothing, and the thin high cold that came with them lay on the back of his neck. He looked past it, across the stone, at Ereshkigal, standing apart in her crown with her tears still running, inside the ward with the rest of them. Nothing she was could reach past it.

And far below all of it, below the island and the sea and everything he could feel, in a gray hall full of written clay, there was one small tablet on a ledge of its own. A man had pressed his own name into it with a hand that had never held a stylus. He was still down there.

Arabella had given her life to bring him up.

Andy looked down at the ash in his palm. Then he closed his hand on it, gently, the last of it, and held it. He decided to let the ward down. He felt Laura feel it—the two of her pressed against his shoulders went still at the same moment, and the third, across the stone with her arms around her mother, lifted her head.

Andy?

The ward, he sent. I’m letting it down.

She didn’t ask him why. He felt her look where he was looking—at the Queen standing apart in her crown, and past her, at the stone, and at the long way down beneath it—and he felt her understand, and stay quiet. One of her hands found his closed fist on his knee and covered it, ash and all.

He didn’t have to reach far for it. It was there, the power. It was quiet. It always was. It didn’t feel like strength, or like anything he had a word for. It felt like something very large that had been lying still in him and was his to be asked.

He turned it on the ward. He didn’t push. He only told it, as plainly as he knew how, that it could come down now. And it obeyed.

Nothing showed on the Ring. There was no light, no sound. The Verant’s light didn’t waver, and the blasted trees at the rim didn’t stir. But all around the island, out past the beaches, where the ward had been standing up out of the sea on every side, it thinned, and thinned, and was gone. He felt it go as plainly as he could feel the stone under his knees.

And his sense of the island ran on out past the sand into the dark water, a long way, cold and wide and moving, over eleven dark islands, and beyond them, to the wide open sea, until it got too thin to follow for now, and he let it go.

A few paces off, Ereshkigal lifted her head.

Her black eyes went past all of them to the rim of the hollow, to the blasted trees standing up against the night. She didn’t say anything. She only looked out at the rim for a long breath, as if she were listening to something none of the rest of them could hear, and he knew she had felt it open.

Beside Anna, Herman’s head had come up too. The small wings at his heels stirred once against the stone, and settled again.

Andy reached for Mildred. There was no chain around her anymore. Nothing held her on this island, or would hold her on it again; he could feel that as clearly as he could feel where she was standing. She could go anywhere she liked now. She could have been gone between one breath and the next.

Mildred stayed where she was, with her hands folded in front of her, and her eyes on the ash. When the ward first closed, she had told him she was staying anyway. He had believed her then. He believed her more now.

Ereshkigal turned from the rim. She looked at the ash where Arabella had stood. She looked at it for a long moment, and her wet face didn’t change, and then she turned one hand palm up at her side. It was a small movement. If he hadn’t been watching her, he would have missed it.

“Dumuzid,” she said. Just that. One word, level, no louder than anything else she had said tonight. Andy felt her reach go out.

Earlier tonight he had felt her attention go down into the Tablets she carried, searching for Laura’s name, the dense, cold weight of them turning over row by row. It was not the Tablets this time, but something that went out past the stone and past the hollow and past the shore, and then down—down past the roots of the island, past anything he could follow, farther than he had known there was a down to go. Her eyes had closed. Her palm stayed turned up at her side, and nothing else about her moved at all.

He wondered how far down it went. He had stood at the bottom of the Irkalla stair, inside a memory, and he had thought that was the bottom. He wasn’t sure anymore that it had been.

Then it came back.

He heard every breath on the Ring. He had heard them all night, one at a time, every woman, Sarah and Marie and Sandra, the Queen’s slow cold breath and Mildred’s, which he wasn’t sure was really breath at all. He knew how many there were.

Now there was one more. A man was standing on the bare stone in front of Ereshkigal, where nobody had been standing a moment before.

Andy got to his feet. He didn’t decide to. The two of Laura rose with him, one on either side, without letting go of him.

Around the Ring, the weeping caught and stopped. Norah gasped. Sam’s hand went to Thrustworthy’s grip before the rest of her had caught up, and then stayed there, not drawing, only holding. At the edge of the ash Sumiku lifted her forehead from the stone and stayed like that, on her knees, her four hands still flat. Nobody spoke. Mildred didn’t move at all. The Verant’s light stood exactly as it had, bowed over the ash, unchanged.

Anna hadn’t lifted her head. She was still bent forward over Marissa’s arm, her fingers closed in the edge of the ash. She hadn’t seen.

Herman had. He knelt at her side, with her hand still closed around his wrist, and looked at the man in front of Ereshkigal, and didn’t say a word.

The man looked to be in his middle thirties. He was lean, and built like someone who had spent his life working land or following herds, with a workman’s broad square hands. His skin was brown from the sun, warm by any measure, and a short close-cropped beard covered his jaw. He wore a plain woven wrap belted at the waist, nothing dyed and nothing ornamented, and his feet were bare on the stone.

Andy knew the face. He had seen it step out of empty ground, in the wasteland under the island, with the wrong red sky over it. A man with this face had walked beside him through the Liminal, through ruins and replaying shades and every forgotten thing, and up the mountain to the door of Arabella’s Memory Palace.

Andy looked at the man in front of Ereshkigal now, and line for line it was the same face. The same set of the shoulders. The same hands.

Only what was in it had changed. Under this guise, Horun had looked at Andy all night with something held back behind his eyes, a patience that had seen a great deal and wasn’t in any hurry to say so. There was nothing held back in this face. It was younger than the guide’s had been, somehow, though not by a single line. It was the face of a man who had just woken up somewhere he didn’t know.

But it was the face. Horun had borrowed it. The face Andy had taken for Dumuzid’s had truly been Dumuzid’s own. He wondered why Horun had chosen it. Out of every face he could have worn down there, that one. He would never be able to ask.

Laura. He sent it without meaning to, and then had to go back and start somewhere she could follow. Down there. In the Liminal. A man came out of nowhere and walked me through it, all the way to her Palace. I thought he was Dumuzid. I asked him. He swallowed. It was Horun. That was the face he had on. This one.

He felt it land in her, all three of her at once, and felt her look. In front of Ereshkigal, Dumuzid looked down at his own hands.

He turned them over, slowly, palms up, then palms down. He looked at them as if they were something he had put down a very long time ago and forgotten he owned. His chest rose, and fell, and rose again, and he looked down at that too. It seemed to surprise him more than his hands had.

Then he lifted his eyes to the night over the hollow, and stayed there a long moment, as if the sky were the strangest thing he had ever seen. They came down to the blasted trees at the rim. To the stone under his bare feet, and the ash. To the faces around the Ring, one after another, women with horns and wings and green skin and six arms and cat’s ears, all of them wet-eyed, all of them staring at him—and nothing in his face said he found any of them stranger than the sky. Last of all his eyes found the Verant’s light, standing bowed over the place where Arabella had been. He looked at it longer than at anything else. Then he looked away from it, quickly—not afraid of it, Andy thought, but as a man looks away from the sun.

He turned to Ereshkigal.

“My queen.” His voice was rough with disuse, and it caught on the second word. “My queen—what is this? Where— I’m breathing. Why am I breathing?”

Andy understood him. He understood every word. For a breath it didn’t seem strange at all. Dumuzid had asked the Queen of the Great Below where he was, and why he was breathing, and that was all.

Then, from the edge of the stone, Sarah said, low and bewildered, “What did he say?”

“What is that?” Marie said. “What language is that?”

Sandra didn’t say anything. She was frowning at Dumuzid, her new hands half lifted, as if she were trying to catch something going past too fast.

The nearest of Laura, with her arms still around her mother, turned her head. “He asked her where he—” she began, and stopped. Andy felt it go through her. Then he felt it go through himself. It hadn’t been English.

He played it back, and he could hear it now that he was listening for it: the soft stops, the long vowels, the shape of a language nobody anywhere had spoken for thousands of years. It was the same language Anna had spoken to Arabella earlier tonight. The same language Anna had spoken into the ash not ten minutes ago, while Andy knelt beside her and heard every syllable and understood none of it.

He had understood every syllable of this.

Along the harem bond he felt the same thing land in the others, one after another, a startle passing from woman to woman like a dropped stone sending rings across a pond. Sam’s head came around. Claire’s ears went straight up. Emi’s mouth had fallen open. At his shoulder, Claire’s pen moved on the facing page of her notebook, quick and small, and she tipped the page so he could see.

That’s Sumerian. Under it, a second later: We understand Sumerian?

Andy didn’t know when it had happened. Arabella’s legacy continued to expand in all of them, and he had no idea where it ended, if it even did. He let it be. There was no room in him right now to wonder about anything else.

Ereshkigal didn’t answer him. She looked at him for a moment, with her wet face and her level black eyes. Then her eyes went past him, across the stone, to Anna. Dumuzid turned to see what she was looking at.

Anna’s head had come up.

She must have heard him. Not the words—the voice. She was still on her knees a step short of the ash, in Marissa’s arms, where she had fallen when Arabella came apart, and she had lifted her face from Marissa’s sleeve and turned it toward the sound. Her eyes found him.

She went still.

Andy had heard her breathing all night, ragged and fast, through every part of it. He couldn’t hear it now. She had stopped. Her face had gone white to the lips, and she knelt there in Marissa’s arms and looked at Dumuzid standing in front of her sister, and didn’t breathe at all.

Dumuzid saw her. In the Liminal, the man with this face had stood at the edge of a ruined household and watched Alla’s shade for as long as it took her loop to run, and never once looked at Anna’s. Andy had noticed that. It was one of the things that had told him the guide wasn’t who he had thought he was. This man didn’t look at anyone else, not even the Queen. Suddenly he had eyes for nobody on that stone but Anna.

Anna scrambled to her feet. Her legs had been weak since Nergal’s blow, and she pushed herself up off the stone with one hand and nearly went down again. She let go of Herman’s wrist and pulled free of Marissa. Marissa’s arms opened to let her go.

Herman let her go as well, and Anna went to him around the edge of the ash, not through it, unsteady, one hand out in front of her. Dumuzid came the rest of the way across the stone to meet her.

They fell into each other’s arms.

There was nothing graceful about it. Anna hit him hard enough to rock him, and he caught her and staggered half a step and held on, and she had both fists in the back of his wrap and her face against his neck, and he had one arm around her back and the other hand in her hair, and neither of them made a sound for a long moment.

“Dun,” Anna said. It was barely a word. “Dun. Dun.”

Behind them, Ereshkigal stepped back. One pace. Then another. She did it carefully and without a sound, as someone steps back from a door they have just opened, so as not to be standing in it.

Andy heard Dumuzid’s breath shudder. He heard it go in and out against Anna’s hair, fast and shallow, the kind of breathing that doesn’t yet trust there will be any more of it. “Your hands,” Dumuzid said, in the old language that Andy could understand now. “Anna. Your hands are warm. And mine—feel them. Mine are warm.” He held one of them up between them, and looked at it again, and his voice broke. “They were never warm. All that time. Where is this? Why am I—”

He couldn’t finish it either. Over Anna’s head his eyes kept going around the Ring—to the strangers, to the light, to the stone—and coming back to her, and going out again. None of it would hold still long enough for him to look at.

Anna tried to tell him. She answered him in the same old language, and Andy understood all of it now, and it came out of her in pieces, the right words in the wrong order, starting and breaking off and starting again somewhere in the middle.

“Dun. Listen. You’re up. You’re up, you’re—Alla brought you. She brought you up. Not— she did it, Dun, she—” Anna’s hand came off his back and reached out behind her, toward the ash on the stone, and hung there. “That’s her. That was her. She gave— she gave herself. So you could— for you, Dun. All of it. For you.” Her hand moved, shaking, from the ash to Ereshkigal, standing apart. “Alla took it. A life. A life for a life. And she— she—”

At the edge of the stone the nearest of Laura bent her head to her mother and said something low, in English. Sarah’s hand went up to her mouth. Dumuzid looked where Anna’s hand had gone. He looked at the ash for a long moment. He looked at Ereshkigal, apart in her crown, with her face wet. Then he looked back down at Anna.

“Who?” he said. “Anna. Who gave?” And then, slower, as if something old had come up out of the dark with him and he was only now finding it: “The Host? The one at the gate?”

“Yes,” Anna said, voice breaking. “She— yes. She—” It went no further. Her face went into his shoulder, and her back began to shake under his hands, and the sound she made against him had no words in it at all.

He held her. Over her head his face was bewildered. Andy could see him trying to put it together, the ash and the Queen and the Host at the gate, and not managing it—not yet—and holding Anna anyway, because that much at least he understood.

Andy remembered Arabella telling him that Dumuzid had asked her for two things before he went. To look after Anna. And to remember his name, because he didn’t want to vanish.

He looked from the two of them to the ash. She had done both. Seven thousand years, and she had done both.

Ereshkigal stood apart now, a few paces off, alone on the bare stone in her crown of bone-white gold. Her eyes were on Anna and Dumuzid. Her face was wet, and she let it be. And under the regret there was the other thing. He had seen that on the seat in Irkalla too: a flash, behind her eyes, there and gone, the moment before she said she was sorry. He saw it now. It didn’t go.

Her hand, the one she had turned up to bring him, closed slowly at her side.

She took half a step toward them, and stopped. It was the same half step she had taken earlier tonight, when Anna first stirred on the stone, and stopped. She didn’t take the other half.

She stayed where she was, apart, with her hand shut, her eyes on Anna weeping in Dumuzid’s arms.

Anna and Dumuzid were still holding each other at the edge of the ash. Her face was pressed into his shoulder, and his arms were locked around her back, and neither of them looked as if they meant to let go of the other again.

Andy stood a step back from the stone where Arabella had been. He hadn’t moved since he got to his feet. The one of Laura who had been holding her mother had come across at some point—Sarah was in Marie’s arms now, and Sandra’s—and all three of her were beside him, close around him, one of her hands in his. He held on to it. There was still ash on his palm. She didn’t seem to mind.

Beside Anna and Dumuzid, Marissa had an arm around Dawn and another around Chloe’s waist, and Chloe leaned into it with her eyes shut. Herman stood a pace behind them with the lantern hanging from his hand, near enough to Anna to reach her if she needed him.

He looked back at the ash.

The Verant were standing over it.

They had been a few paces off a moment ago. He was sure of it. He had seen their light standing bowed at the edge of the stone the whole time Anna was trying to tell Dumuzid what had happened, and now it stood over the very place where she had come apart, and he hadn’t seen it move.

Their moonwhite light lay on nothing but themselves. It didn’t touch the ash under them, or the stone. They threw no shadow. The thin, high cold that came with them reached Andy where he stood and settled on his face and the backs of his hands, the kind of cold that belongs to mountaintops on clear nights, when the stars look closer than they are.

He found he could see them better now than he had been able to at the start. Head-on they were one shape, upright, the suggestion of a figure. When he let his eyes go a little to one side, they were two. At the very edge of his sight there were three, standing so close together they didn’t quite overlap and didn’t quite separate, and the moment he looked straight at them again they were one.

Around the Ring the women were still wet-faced, all of them, and most of them were crying again. The Verant’s light held as even as it had been since they came, and they didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

Andy. Laura’s voice came along the bond, small. They moved. I didn’t see them move.

Nobody did, he sent back. I don’t think they’re done.

The Verant looked down at the ash. Andy couldn’t have said how he knew where they were looking, without a face to watch, but he knew.

“Arabella,” the Verant said. Three voices, as one. They came from nowhere on the shape and arrived everywhere on the Ring at once, level, unhurried. It wasn’t grief in their voices, Andy thought, but something older and steadier, that he didn’t have a name for yet.

“We made her,” they said. They weren’t speaking to anyone on the Ring in particular. They spoke as if to the whole of it, and the night over it, and the stone. “Her, and alongside others, her eleven brothers and sisters. All twelve of them out of the First Gate, in one making, as a potter takes the clay of one riverbank and throws twelve vessels from it before the water rises. We meant them to hold what they were given. We did not mean them to hold anything else.”

Nobody moved. Even Dumuzid had gone still, with Anna in his arms, and turned his head toward the light. Behind them, Ereshkigal hadn’t looked away from her sister. But Andy saw her jaw tighten at eleven, and stay tight.

Around the Ring, heads came up. None of them had known, Andy realized—not Sam, not Claire, not any of them. Sam’s eyes had narrowed. Myra had turned her eyes toward the light as if it were burning her, and didn’t turn it away.

“Horun was the first,” the Verant said. “He stood at the Gate and watched each of the others come out of it after him, and he gave every one of them a name, because We had not thought to. Arabella was the third.”

Behind Anna, Herman shut his eyes.

Horun had told Andy, in the Palace, that Herman had come through the Gate after him. The day I met you, Herman had said to her a few minutes ago, you were already telling everybody where to stand. Andy looked at him standing there with his eyes shut and the lantern hanging from his hand, and wondered whether he had been there when she was made. Whether he had stood and watched it. He didn’t ask. He didn’t think Herman could have answered him just then.

“We knew her as a maker knows a thing,” they went on. “Every joint of her. Every seam. We have watched her as one hears a song played ten thousand times, and knows each note before it comes.” The light was very still. “And still she surprised Us. Again and again, at the end most of all. We had not thought anything We made could do that.”

“And then they ended,” the Verant said, in the same level voice. “That is what a contract does. We wrote that into them as well. Anor was the first of them to finish. The others followed her, one by one, across more aeons than this world has had kings. When Aru-Thes went, there were two of them left. Horun was the last. He finished more than a thousand of your years ago, and everything he had carried went to her. Every one of them. And there was no one left to carry it with her.”

Andy’s throat closed. He had heard those words before. He could see Horun at the threshold of the Heart, looking past him at the table with those strange silver eyes. I watched every one of them made. I gave every one of them a name. And then I watched every one of them go. A pause, and his voice so level it must have cost him. It never got easier. I thought it would, and it didn’t.

“We were present for every one of them,” the Verant said. “We do not grieve as you do. What We feel moves slowly, and it goes a long way down. But We have now watched all twelve of them go. She was the last.” A pause, so slight he might have imagined it. “We find that We are not unchanged by it.”

Down the bond Laura said something to him, very quietly—Andy, breathe—and he did, because she had asked.

The Verant were silent over the ash.

It went on for a long time. Long enough that Andy found himself listening to Emily breathing, slow and even, where she still lay unconscious beside Emi. Long enough that the wind came over the rim and stirred the blasted trees and went out again. Nothing about it was empty. It was the silence of someone choosing what to say next, and choosing carefully, because it mattered more than anything they had said so far.

When the Verant spoke again, they spoke more slowly. And they spoke only of her.

“Arabella learned what We did not put in her,” they said. “Compassion. Grief. Sorrow. Love. Regret.” They let each one stand by itself before they set down the next. “None of it was in the making. We know, because the making was Ours. Many of her brothers and sisters learned of them as well, before the end. She learned more of it than many of them. She learned more of it than We had known there was to learn.” The light did not move, but the voice slowed further, and each word came by itself. “She learned it as a river learns its valley. Slowly. Against the grain of the stone. With no one to tell it where it was meant to go. We watched every turn of it, and We did not interfere, because We do not. But We watched.”

At the edge of the ash Anna lifted her face from Dumuzid’s shoulder. She turned it toward the light. Her eyes were red and swollen, and her face was wet, and for a moment it was entirely still. “It was always hers,” she said, in English. Her voice was hoarse and very quiet. “It was always hers. I only— I only stood close enough.”

The Verant didn’t answer her. But their light leaned, a little, toward where she stood. Andy saw it. Anna saw it too. Her mouth shook, and then she turned her face back into Dumuzid’s shoulder, and her hands found the back of his wrap again and closed there, and held on. Dumuzid bent his head over hers. Andy didn’t think he had understood a word of what she said to the light. He held her anyway.

The Verant went on to where she had learned it. “We watched her come to this world,” they said. “Her last one. Horun was beside her, until he was gone.”

Andy remembered Horun at the threshold of the Heart, his hands closed at his sides. At the end there were two of us. Her and me. Half of them each, more or less, and neither of us trusted ourselves to carry it alone. And then the thing Horun had said looking down at his own closed hands: Then I finished, and she had all of it. Every one of us. And nobody left to hold it up with.

“She carried all of them here,” the Verant said. “Alone. For longer than any of you have names for. For more than the thousand years since..”

Andy thought of the beach. Arabella beside him on the sand, naming the eleven islands for him one by one. He had thought then that she was only telling him their names. He knew now what she had been holding up.

The Verant let a moment pass. “On this world, Inanna came to her. After Inanna, Arabella began to understand what she felt.”

At the edge of the ash, Anna’s hands tightened on Dumuzid’s back. Andy saw her knuckles go white in the weave of his wrap.

“She hid from it,” the Verant said. “For a long time she hid. She put names in front of it, one after another, and seasons, and rules. She built her Hotel on this island, more than once, and stood inside it and called what she felt by other names, or by none.” The light didn’t move. “Horun ended, and she was left alone, with all of their memories, and no one to share them with. And then she chose to let those feelings stand. Whatever they cost her.”

The newest of the three voices was close to the front now, Andy thought; it hadn’t come ahead of the others yet, but it was near. “We watched her bring back a girl the river had taken, when everything We knew said it could not be done. We watched her stand at the edge of this stone tonight and let herself be forgiven, which was harder. We watched her weigh what she had left, with her thumb on an old scar, and give it away. Tonight cost her everything she had, and she paid it standing up.”

Off to Andy’s left, Sam said something under her breath. “Standing up.” It was rough, and barely there. “Yeah. She did.”

Liesa’s hand found hers. Sam didn’t look down at it, but her fingers closed, hard. Her other hand had gone back to Thrustworthy’s guard, and Andy saw her lean on it hard, as though she needed something under her that wouldn’t move.

The Verant turned from her to the rest of them.

Nothing about the light changed that Andy could see. But he felt them turn, the whole vast weight of their attention lifting off the ash for the first time since the Verant came, and moving outward, and away—to the eleven islands out past the rim, he thought, and to the twelve chairs at the bottom of the Palace, and to whatever was left of the ones who had sat in them.

“The first of them were made to run the Harem Hotel,” the Verant said. “Nothing more. That was the whole of what We wrote. We did not write them to be kind, or to be cruel. We wrote them to keep the game, and they kept it.”

A pause.

“Va-Tihs showed Us they could be more,” they said. “She was gentle. She was kind. When the seasons she was given turned cruel, she would not run them, and she argued for every kinder way there was, and when there were no kinder ways left she ended her own contract rather than become what she was asked to be. We had not written that into her. She wrote it herself.” The light held very still. “We remember her.”

Andy had seen Va-Tihs, at the table in the Heart, her robes almost entirely white, with a light hand resting on Aende’s arm while Aende half rose out of her chair to point at something across the room. Horun had stood behind her chair and looked at her for a long time. She argued for every kinder way there was, every time, with anyone who’d listen. His voice had stayed level, and it had cost him to keep it there. Then she ended her contract instead. I understood why she did it. I wanted her to stay anyway.

“And even so,” the Verant said, “no first-generation Host ever gave their life for a mortal man.” The words went out over the Ring and stopped. “Not Va-Tihs,” the Verant said. “Not one of them. Not in all the time there has been. Until tonight.”

Andy’s eyes went to Dumuzid.

He wasn’t the only one. All around the Ring, one after another, eyes went to the man standing at the edge of the ash with Anna in his arms. Sam’s. Claire’s. Emi’s, from where she knelt by Emily. Myra turned her blind face to him, her eyes still streaming. Even Sarah, who couldn’t have understood a word Dumuzid had said, looked at him.

Dumuzid felt them look. Andy watched him feel it, and lift his head, and look around at all of them, bewildered. Then he bent his head to Anna’s and said something low, in the old language.

Andy heard it, and understood. “Why are they looking at me?” Dumuzid said. “Anna. What did they say?” Anna didn’t take her eyes off the Verant’s light. Her face was wet and very still.

“They said none of them ever did what she did,” she said, in the same language, so quietly Andy barely caught it. “None of the twelve. Gave herself, and all of them with her. Everything she had of them. For a mortal man.” Her breath caught, and she let it. “For you, Dun.”

Dumuzid didn’t move.

Andy watched it reach him. He watched it go into him slowly, like water into dry ground, deeper and deeper, until there was nowhere it hadn’t gone. Dumuzid’s face had been bewildered since he came up out of the dark. It wasn’t bewildered now. He looked down at Anna, and then over her head at the ash on the stone, and his arms tightened around her until Andy thought it must hurt, and his mouth opened, and nothing came out of it at all.

Across the ash Ereshkigal’s eyes moved. They went from Dumuzid, slowly, to the bare stone where Arabella had stood, and stayed there. Her mouth pressed tight. She didn’t speak.

The Verant were silent over the ash.

It was longer than any silence since they came. Longer than the one after the endings, longer than the one before they spoke of her alone. The wind came over the rim and went out again, and the Ring breathed, every breath by itself, and the Verant said nothing at all. Their light stood bowed over the place where she had been, and the thin high cold lay on all of them, and Andy waited, and found he couldn’t have said what he was waiting for.

Beside him, Laura’s hand tightened on his. He felt her through the bond, all three of her, holding her breath. He held his too.

Then one of the three voices came a little ahead of the other two.

Andy had heard it once before, tonight, just before the end: softer than the others, and newer, as if it had been made a long time after them and still remembered what being new was like. The other two came in behind it a half beat late, catching up with something it had already begun to say.

“Arabella,” the Verant said. It was only her name. Andy had heard them say it before tonight. It had not sounded like this. “There was no test,” the Verant said. Fondly. There was no mistaking it now; it was in every syllable. “We set her none. There was never anything she had to prove to Us, or earn, or pass.”

The light leaned over the ash, very slightly.

“But if there had been one,” the Verant said, “she would have passed it.”

Nobody on the Ring said anything.

At the edge of the stone Sumiku bowed her head down to it again, slowly, her four hands flat. Anna had turned her face up out of Dumuzid’s shoulder toward the light, and she was weeping openly now, and not trying to stop. Behind them Ereshkigal’s eyes had closed. At the rim, Mildred stood with her hands folded and her head a little bowed. Beside Andy, Claire’s pen hung over the white space under the name, and didn’t come down.

Behind Anna, Herman said something under his breath. Andy heard it. “You hear that, Ara?” It wasn’t meant for anyone else on the Ring. Nobody answered it.

Andy stood with Laura’s hand in his, and looked at the place where she had stood. He thought about her hand in his, a little while ago, coming apart. He thought about her walking out across the stone to Alla with her shoulders straight. He thought about everything he could have done tonight, and hadn’t, because it had been hers.

He didn’t know whether he had been right. He thought he might never know.

But she would have passed it.

He believed that.

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Author's Note

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