Fading Connections

Greg’s season ran out a little way past the nursery. The rooms went on burning on either side, but the people in them stopped being anyone Andy had grown up next to. Then Horun turned aside.

It was another low arch, plain stone, no taller than the door of an ordinary house—the twin of the one he had ducked under on the way to the first memory. He bent his head under this one the same way, without breaking his stride. Andy went through after him with one hand still flat over the breast pocket of his jacket. The paper crackled under his palm once and went quiet.

On the far side the corridor ran on as before. Pale walls, pale floor, the torches burning white in their pairs. Only the rooms had changed.

The clothes went first. Andy watched it happen from the corner of his eye without meaning to. A man in a high, stiff collar sat writing at a desk under a lamp. Two women in skirts that swept the ground walked arm in arm down a wet street. A room full of candles, and a man in a powdered wig laughing at something nobody in the corridor could hear—the kind of laugh that had knocked his wig crooked and that he hadn’t stopped to fix.

For a while, the doors showed landscapes and architecture from Japan, and men and women coming and going, living in a Japanese-style village on the slope of the volcano, which Andy took for the Takamahagara set. He saw Sumiku once or twice, but didn’t have time to stop. He could still sense Laura’s fear, and it acted as a counterpoint to his own.

Every now and then, a door would show a short redhead with golden eyes—Scarlet, Andy recognized her from the wedding, Matt Hawkins’s Host. On a balcony, overlooking a city he didn’t recognize. In shadow, only her eyes flaring golden, in a bedroom. Andy quickly averted his eyes.

Clothes changed again. Wool. Cloaks pinned at the shoulder, bare forearms, a long hall with rushes on the floor and smoke going up through a hole in its roof.

The voices went with them. They came out of the openings late, the way sound did in this place, each word arriving a little after the mouth that had made it. For a while he could still catch English in them, old and stiff in the joints. Then he couldn’t. Then it was languages he had no names for, one after another, sliding past like stations on a car radio on a long drive at night—there and gone before he could find the dial.

The first of the veils went by without his noticing what they were. A woman in black at the edge of a crossroads by torchlight, with three roads running away from her into the dark. A dark robe at the far end of a feast, so still among the guests that he took it for a hanging. A figure in a doorway, watching a man load a cart. He didn’t look long at any of them, and none of them looked back. He was tired of looking into rooms where he couldn’t do anything.

He couldn’t have said how far they walked. Once he looked back and the arch stood right behind them, close enough to touch, though he’d have sworn they had come a mile. When he looked ahead, the light only went on getting older.

Horun walked half a step in front, his bare feet silent on the stone, and didn’t look back to see whether Andy was keeping up. He never did. Andy kept up. Every so often the letter shifted against his chest when he breathed. Each time it did he saw the cottage, the gold window and the rocker in it, and made himself look at the walls again.

In many rooms, now, he continued to see glimpses of Scarlet. He understood by now, and he didn’t seek those memories out. Some things belonged to Arabella alone.

Further on, one of the rooms was green. The light in it came through glass, thick panes of it, uneven and bubbled, the color of old bottles. It lay over everything inside like water lying over stones.

It was a small room, and all of it was wood. Wooden walls, a wooden floor worn pale down the middle, and shelves to the ceiling packed tight with books and bound files. None of them had anything written on the spine. Someone had kept every one of them and labeled none.

A woman sat in a chair in the middle of it with her back to the glass. She wore a dark robe that fell all the way to the floor, and her face was hidden entirely behind a veil of black mesh.

Andy stopped.

He had been in that room. Not here, not in this corridor. In the Suite, three days before the wedding, with Erin’s hands on his arm, falling out of one vision and into the next. A wasteland. The Hollow Garden in full sun. Then green light through bottle-glass, and a woman in a black veil talking to him across a small room as if he had been sitting there all along.

He had never seen her face—only its shape, moving behind the mesh, young and then so old it hardly looked human. He had tried to ask who she was, and the words had stuck in his throat. She had answered him anyway. I am only the one who keeps the door.

The cold went down him from the back of his neck and settled in his hands. He had sat across from her with that light coming green over her shoulder, and hadn’t been able to get his own voice to work.

“I’ve sat in there,” Andy said. “Across from her. That chair, right there.”

Horun had stopped at the sill. The green light reached as far as his bare toes and no farther, as though it had been told where the room ended. He looked at the woman in the veil, and then at Andy, and waited.

“Who is she?”

Horun’s eyes didn’t leave the room. “These are the seasons she was Hecate.”

He said it the way he said everything about this place, plainly and all at once, and he didn’t add to it. Andy looked back into the room. At the long dark robe, and the hands lying still on her knees, and the black mesh where a face should have been.

“Hecate.” It came out of Andy barely above a whisper. Horun let it stand.

The sill was the same plain step as all the others. Andy looked at it a long moment, and at the green light lying across the floor in front of his boots. Then he stepped over.

The body was cold.

He hadn’t been ready for that. He had been in her on the beach with the sun on her forearms and her eyes stinging. He had stood in her under the maple across from his parents’ house through a whole night, and silent in a dark nursery doorway. There had always been warmth in her somewhere, even when she held perfectly still.

There was none here. Her hands lay on her knees, light as paper, and did not move. Her breath went in shallow and slow, barely lifting the robe, and came out the same way. The air she drew through the mesh tasted of dust and old paper. It wasn’t the stillness of someone waiting, but of someone who had decided, long ago, to be still.

Across from her sat a man. He was forty or so, with a short dark beard and a pale wool cloak wrapped over one shoulder and pinned there. He sat forward in his chair with something heavy across his knees. A ledger—thick, its pages cut from stiff yellowish stuff and crowded edge to edge with writing.

Andy had it before he could make out a single letter. He had seen that ledger with Laura in the museum wing, the glass between them, one of her bending close to it and the other hanging back half a step. Here the spine hadn’t been scuffed raw yet, and the corners hadn’t gone blunt. No water had run through the ink. But the columns were the same. The names were packed so close down every page that they made a texture, the Greek letters marching in rows like a roll call.

Kallias’s Ledger, the plaque had said.

Her voice was already going when the world caught up to it, just as it had been the first time, in the Suite—as if he had come in partway through.

“…you think harm given on someone else’s authority is less your debt, but the law does not agree,” she said. “What you do for another, you still answer for. The hand raised answers to the law before it answers to the will that raised it.”

It came up through the chest he was sitting in, cold and even, each word set down on the one before it like stone laid on stone.

Kallias opened his mouth. Andy felt her see it. Her eyes went to his mouth through the mesh and rested there, and she went on as if he hadn’t, unbothered. Andy had done that. He had sat in that chair and tried to speak, and she had gone straight on over him in just this way.

“The mistake is to think the ledger is a single column. There are debts of action and debts of overreach. A hand raised too far, on any authority, creates a new entry all its own.”

Kallias’s hand lay open on the page. Then it was lying somewhere else, further down, and the green light had crept across the floorboards by the width of a board, and Andy had no idea what had gone by in between. Nothing in the room seemed to have noticed the gap. Her voice simply picked up on the far side of it.

“There is a difference the law keeps, that you do not,” she said. “Between a debt paid, and a debt merely offered. A soul that gives itself to escape its own guilt has not paid the ledger. It has only tried to. Guilt is a coin that rings false no matter how sincerely it is spent. The door has never opened for it.”

Kallias’s jaw worked under the beard. He did not answer. He looked down at the ledger, and up again at the veil, as if the book might hold some answer to her that she hadn’t thought to look for.

Then her voice changed. It went softer, and Andy felt it happen from the inside, and there was nothing giving way in it.

“Marriage,” she said, “is not just a binding of two. It is a web of debts. If you injure the wife, you owe the husband. If you injure the husband, you owe the wife. The network is fractal. Even those who have no interest in each other, when bound by this contract, create a shared ledger.”

In the Suite he had felt, more than understood, that she was talking about the harem. From behind her eyes he could see where they rested while she said it. Not on Kallias’s face, but on the book in his lap, on the crowded columns. Every name in them was a woman in this man’s house.

“And the ledger,” she went on, “was built to weigh what already has a name. Love has never been given one—not a debt, not a payment, nothing the ledger was built to enter in its columns. Thin and scattered, it changes nothing; the cosmos simply moves around it, the way water moves around a stone. But hold enough of it in one place, with no way out, and it stops being a small thing scattered wide. It becomes a single thing, and a large one—dense enough to matter on its own terms, whether the ledger has a column for it or not.”

She stopped. The room was so quiet that the gauze seemed to hum.

Kallias shut the ledger. He did it slowly, and laid his palm flat on the cover, and lifted his eyes to the veil. Nothing in the body Andy sat in moved while he spoke—not her hands, not her breath.

“My accounts are exact.” His voice was low and sure of itself. “I have gone over every line in this book a hundred times. Every name in it owes me.” He was looking at where her face would be. “You talk as though you were the law yourself.”

“I am only the one who keeps the door,” she said.

He waited, as if there might be more. There wasn’t. After a moment he stood, and settled the cloak on his shoulder, and tucked the ledger up under his arm. He went out through the low door at the side of the room without looking back. The door swung to behind him. She didn’t watch it close. Her eyes stayed on the empty chair across from her, and on the dent his weight had left in its cushion. She didn’t mean to stop him. She meant to see what he did with it. The memory ended there.

He was standing in the corridor with the green room small and bright in the wall beside him, and his own breath came back to him all at once, too deep. For the whole time he had been in there, he’d been allowed half of it. He put a hand on the cold stone at the side of the opening and kept it there until his fingers stopped feeling strange.

Horun wasn’t looking at the room. He was looking at Andy’s hand on the wall, and at nothing else.

Andy’s voice came out rough. “It was her. The woman in my vision. The keeper of the door. It was Arabella.”

“She wore that veil a long time,” Horun said.

Andy looked at the empty chair, gray-green through the old glass. “I thought she was talking to me. That whole time. I thought it was meant for me.”

Horun said nothing to that.

In the Inner Garden, with the dog asleep in the grass and three paths running off between the trees, Arabella had told him about a Master in the early centuries of the Greek era. Kallias. He came to the game with a ledger, and every woman in his harem had, in his accounting, wronged him. None of it was so. One had never said the thing he believed she’d said. One had simply not been drawn to him. One had chosen someone else, and he had never even crossed her mind.

He came to the season to be repaid, and the season gave him what he asked for, and two women were eliminated before its midpoint. He did not enjoy it, she had said. He believed it was justice, and that belief made it worse.

Then one of the others found his accounting and laid it out in front of him, his stories beside the truth. He spent an hour believing she was lying. Then he summoned Hecate and asked her. Hecate never lied.

Did you tell him? Andy had asked.

No.

Did you know? When you built the cast?

Yes.

It was the closest she would come, she had said, to admitting that Hecate had been wrong. When he asked her why, she had answered him flat, with no remorse in it at all. Because I wanted to see what happened when a man who believed himself the wronged party was given everything he asked for.

He’d heard that across a garden bench, in daylight, from a woman he liked. Now he had felt it from the inside: the cold hands, the breath kept small, the eyes staying on an empty chair after the door had shut. She had set the whole law out in front of that man, every word of it true, and let him carry it out of the room under his arm. To see.

I watched, she had told him, and he hadn’t asked her then what she had watched. He thought he could guess it now—an hour of a man believing someone was lying to him, and then the rest.

Andy looked down at the stone between his boots.

If you injure the wife, you owe the husband. Claire had drawn him the shape of it once, at a table in the Archive, with the notebook open between them. The nearest soul bound by marriage or blood. Laura at the top of the page. Andy under her. And then a fan of names spreading out from him, every woman whose bond ran through him, colored in pink. And if you go, so does everyone else. He had looked at the fan and thought it was almost funny, how plain it was once she’d drawn it.

That had been before he married seven of them on one day. Laura, and Myra, and Emily, and Dawn, and Erin, and Claire, and Emi—seven brides on one dais, and every other woman in the household bound to all of them through him. The web that woman had drawn for Kallias didn’t stop at the edge of one book. It ran through every room of Andy’s house, and out the other side.

He reached for the bond without deciding to. Laura was there, here and impossibly far at once, and her fear sat where it had sat all night, at the very top, not moving.

When Andy looked up, Horun had already turned and gone on, deeper, his bare feet making no sound on the stone, not looking back to see if Andy would come.

Andy took his hand off the wall. He had carried those words out of the vision without the faintest idea whose they were, and now he had the speaker and not much more. He didn’t know what a thing would have to be, to be dense enough to matter on its own terms. Maybe nobody did. He looked back once at the green room, at the empty chair with the dent still in its cushion, and then he followed Horun down.

The Hecate seasons went on around them, and Andy let them go by: more veils, more doorways, a dark robe standing perfectly still at the edge of one stranger’s night after another. A man on his knees in a courtyard. A woman holding a lamp up to a face that wasn’t moving. He didn’t want to see which of those nights she had built on purpose, to watch. Under the walking, the last thing she’d said to Kallias kept turning over in him. Dense enough to matter on its own terms. It turned and turned and never came to rest on anything.

Then something in the corridor hurt to look at.

---

It was a spot in the air ahead, no bigger than a coin. It wasn’t dark. It wasn’t any color. His eyes went to it and slid off, and went back and slid off again, and behind them a dull ache started up, as if he had been staring at the sun. Then it was gone. Andy stopped beside the opening it had come from.

It was a beach, under a hard white sun.

Most of it was wrong. The sand had been blasted in long gouges down to something black, and in places the black had run and set into glass, glossy and rippled, as sand does where lightning strikes. And all over the beach, on the ground and in the air above it at no height that made sense, there were more of those places. Holes. Not in the sand—in the beach itself, in the light, in whatever the beach was sitting on. His eyes wouldn’t stay on any of them.

Two people stood in the middle of it.

One was a woman in a long white sheath of linen, with a leopard’s pelt thrown over it and knotted at one shoulder, its empty paws hanging at her hip. Her hair was a heavy black wig cut square at the shoulders, and on top of it, on a short stem, stood a star of seven points, with a bow bent down over the star like a pair of horns. In one hand she held a palm rib, notched all along one edge. She stood very straight, and that was enough to tell Andy who she was.

The other was a man, taller than she was by a head and more. He was wrapped from his shoulders to his feet in white linen so close that it looked like a shroud, and only his hands came out of it, in front of him, closed around a tall staff. A close blue cap fitted his skull. His beard was narrow and perfectly straight.

As Andy watched, the holes closed.

They went one at a time, from their edges in. The ache behind his eyes eased with each one, as if a hand were being taken off his skull. When there were only two or three left, the woman put out her arm.

It went somewhere. It didn’t go forward, or up, or to either side. It went in a direction Andy’s eyes had no name for, and his stomach turned over trying to follow it, and then it came back, and her hand was closed on something, and she threw it down on the sand.

It lay there and was larger than the beach.

It also lay there small, curled in on itself like a dog that has been kicked. Andy’s eyes couldn’t hold both at once and kept trying. It was long and it was many, and none of it bent the way anything with bones bends. There were eyes in it—more eyes than it had room for—and most of them were shut, and the few still open were looking at nothing. Where it touched the sand there was no edge to it, only a place where the beach stopped being there. Every part of it that could still move was drawing in, away from the two who stood over it, and finding nothing to hold on to. A sound came out of it and leaked into the corridor late: a dozen throats beginning the same word, and none of them finishing it.

The man in white looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at the woman, and stepped back half a pace, and lowered his head to her.

She spoke. Andy saw her lips move. One sentence, maybe two. None of it reached him.

The thing on the sand began to go dark. It started at the places where its edges should have been and went inward, slow, black and hard and glassy. The eyes closed as it reached them, one after another. The long parts drew in, and in, until there were only four of them, and then they were two arms and two legs, and something stood up out of the sand that was the height of a tall woman and made all of black glass. The sun lay along its polished shoulders. Its face had no expression in it at all.

It didn’t move again.

Andy was gripping the edge of the opening. He’d seen those eyes before. He had seen that reaching—long, and many, and from everywhere—go behind him in a field in the wasteland, gathering a thread of light in like something small and alive. He had seen too many teeth in that smooth face once, and heard her one voice turn for an instant into a choir, because he had asked how she was.

“That’s Mildred,” he said. “That’s when Arabella bound her. Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Horun said.

He was looking at the man in white. “That’s me with her. Ptah was the name and the face I wore there. There’s no one else in it because there was no one else left. Of the twelve, by then, it was the two of us.”

“And her.” Andy’s eyes were on the black figure. “What is she?”

“Myl’dreath-Soth’ka. The Deep Behind the Stars.”

Myl’dreath. Andy heard the other name inside it, the one on a gold badge, and his chest went tight. “I thought her name was Yagthural.”

“It is,” Horun said. “Yagthural is her name. Myl’dreath-Soth’ka is as near as a mouth can come to her title. The Deep Behind the Stars.”

The rest came plainly, as if there had never been any reason to keep it back. “The Gate was torn out of her. When it was used up, making the twelve, she woke, and she woke angry. She isn’t held to one time, any more than we were. She came for that set to eat it, and my sister’s power with it, and take back a piece of what was torn out of her. She didn’t know what my sister was carrying by then. When each of us died, what we’d carried went to the ones still living. By then that was two of us. Half of the Gate each.” He looked at the woman with the star on her head. “She lost. It wasn’t close.”

“And you?”

“I came in at the end. I found my sister binding her. The Deep couldn’t be killed, not safely. So I let her finish.”

“What did she say?” Andy asked. “Just now. I couldn’t hear it.”

“That the Deep would stay bound until my sister chose to release her. Or until the Forbidden Resolution.” Horun’s eyes came to him. “If the Deep ever eats a Master’s animus, after his death, the binding falls away. That was written into it.” He went on before Andy could answer. “And my sister warded the island. If the Deep ever breaks loose, by that road or any other, the ward goes up. Nothing on the island leaves it, and nothing on it reaches past it with any power it has, until the power of one of us chooses otherwise. And the ward goes on wounding her until there’s nothing left of her but her core.” He let a breath go by. “It’s still there. Under all of it, waiting. Neither gods nor anything like her could get through it.”

Andy looked at the figure of black glass. “And then she kept her.”

“Inside that, first. She rode in it and couldn’t do anything else. Later my sister gave her a little room to move in. A name. Mildred.”

For thousands of years. Andy swallowed. “What happens when Arabella dies?”

“She stays bound. The choice was only ever my sister’s.” Horun said it without any weight on it. “And she can’t leave the island unless whoever owns it lets her go for a while. So she stays. Here. Alone, for as long as there’s a here.”

It landed harder than Andy had expected—not on Arabella’s account, but on Mildred’s. He thought of a vial pressed into his hand at his own birthday, and her flat voice telling him nobody ever asked how she was. He thought of that field, and a thread of light that had gone out of a vial as one thing and come back as something else, and Mildred holding out her hand to it. That makes it mine. Not me. Mine. And I keep all the warm things. And something has been added. I have never had anything added. She had only had things taken away, before this night.

“What if she changed?” His voice came out rougher than he meant. “One of her already has. You saw it.”

“I saw it,” Horun said. He was quiet a moment. “What my sister said over her on that beach doesn’t look at what she’s become. A binding never sees what’s inside it. Only the one who made it can.”

Andy stood with his hand on the stone. Out on the beach, the black figure stood where it had been made, with the sun on it and nothing at all in its face. He tried to picture the island with everyone gone, the Hotel empty, every window in it dark—and her still there, somewhere, carrying trays to nobody. He didn’t know what you did with that. He didn’t know if there was anything to do.

Horun had already turned away. Andy took his hand off the wall, and after a moment he went too.

---

The smell reached him before the rooms did. It came down the corridor from somewhere ahead, faint at first and then not faint at all. Oil, burning in a great many small lamps at once. Under it, a green, wet smell, like reeds cut and left in the sun at the edge of a river. Nothing in the corridor had ever smelled of anything. Andy breathed it in twice before he noticed he was doing it, and then he lifted his head.

He had been walking with his eyes on the floor since the beach. More of her Seshat years had gone by on either side, and he hadn’t looked into any of them.

Under the walking he kept seeing a figure of black glass standing on the sand, with the sun along its shoulders and nothing at all in its face, and Mildred somewhere inside it, unable to so much as turn her head.

Now he looked at the walls properly. The floors in the rooms were laid with reed mats. The walls were plaster, painted in bands of blue and ochre and a green like copper gone old. Along the bands ran rows of small flat figures, all walking the same way. The people in the rooms wore white linen, pleated fine, and went barefoot, and lined their eyes in black. There were lamps everywhere, little flames in clay dishes on every ledge and table. So many of them burned that the light in those rooms was gold and soft and never quite still.

Horun slowed beside an opening on the left. Through it lay a long hall, lit from end to end by lamps set in rows along the floor. At the far end something tall stood up out of the gold—narrow, and very still.

“Still her Seshat years,” Horun said. “Earlier in them.” Andy came up beside him at the sill, and Horun looked down the length of the hall a while before he went on. “There’s a scale at the end there. The one who stands at it is Anubis. He weighs the hearts of the dead. The one with the record is Thoth. He writes down what the scale says.” He was quiet a moment. “And the one beside her is Rusat. In those years Rusat was the nearest thing she had to a sister.”

He gave it the way he gave everything he was willing to give, unhurried and complete. A hall of the dead might have been one more place on a road.

Andy’s eyes went to the far end of the hall. “She told me about Rusat. In the sunroom, the day she told me about all of them. She said Rusat didn’t die. She just left one day, and the world was less for it.” He was still looking at the tall thing standing in the light. “She said Rusat was the only one who ever made her want to break a measure.”

Horun did not say anything to that. He let Andy look as long as he wanted. The lamps in the hall burned on, row after row, and none of their light came out past the sill onto the corridor floor. Only the smell did.

Andy stepped in.

He was standing. The floor was cool and smooth under bare feet. The air was warm and close and thick with the smell of the oil, and the body he stood in held itself straight and still. Linen lay light against her skin. At her side, near enough that he could feel the warmth of another arm an inch from hers, someone stood with her and didn’t speak.

In front of her was the scale. It was taller than she was. A post rose from a broad, heavy foot, and a beam lay across its top, and from either end of the beam a pan hung on four cords. The pans were bronze, and the lamplight slid around inside them.

Seshat’s eyes went to the beam and stayed there, and everything she wasn’t looking at went soft. The tall figures at the edges of the hall were shapes and nothing more. A dark arm. A long hand. The white stroke of linen at a shoulder. Somewhere to the right there was a dry, quiet scratching, like a reed drawn over something rough. Then it stopped, and stayed stopped, as if whoever held the reed had lifted it and was waiting.

The other thing she let stay sharp was the man.

He stood in front of the scale, a little way back, where someone had told him to stand. He was not young. He had a farmer’s shoulders and a farmer’s hands, big at the knuckles and scarred across the backs—the kind of hands that had closed around a hoe for so many years they had half forgotten how to lie open. His face was brown and creased from a lifetime of squinting into sun. Dust was still on his shins from whatever road had brought him. He wore a plain linen kilt and nothing else, and he stood with his hands hanging at his sides, waiting.

It took Andy a while to see what was wrong with him. His chest didn’t move. He stood in the warm gold light as patient as a fence post, and looked at the scale, and never once blinked.

A dark hand came in from the soft edge of things. It held a lump the size of a fist, dark and wet-looking, and it laid it in the left-hand pan carefully, the way you’d set down an egg. The pan dropped under the weight. The beam tipped.

Andy understood what it was a moment after it had settled. His own heart, wherever he had left it, gave one hard knock.

In the right-hand pan lay a single feather. It was white, and large, longer than her forearm, and it lay flat against the bronze. At the edges of the barbs, where the lamplight touched them, there was a faint sheen of gold.

The beam swung.

Seshat held still. It wasn’t the stillness from the green room, the cold one she had built and gone on choosing. Every part of the body Andy stood in was listening. Her breath had gone in and stopped high in her chest, and it stayed there. Her hands hung open at her sides. Her eyes didn’t leave the beam for an instant, and he could feel what it cost her to keep them there. She would not so much as glance away.

It swung for a long time—longer than anything that size could swing. The left pan sank and rose. The right pan rose and sank. The cords creaked a little at the top of each stroke. The lamps along the floor burned without a flicker, and the man who wasn’t breathing stood and watched it with her. His face did nothing while the beam swung. If he had been afraid of this once, the road had taken it out of him, or he had left it somewhere along the way, like the rest of what he’d carried.

Andy wanted to tell him it would be all right. He didn’t know whether it would, and nothing he had in here could have said it.

He lost count of the swings, and then found he had never been counting. The lamps nearest the scale had burned lower than the rest. He couldn’t remember watching them burn down.

Then it slowed. It rocked a little, and less, and less again. The beam lay level, the heart in one pan and the feather in the other, and neither of them moved.

Rusat spoke. The voice came low and close, from just past Seshat’s shoulder, in a language Andy had never heard in his life and understood every word of.

“There,” Rusat said softly. “Level. You can breathe now, you know.”

Seshat’s breath went out of her all at once. Andy felt it go. The chest he was standing in loosened, and the shoulders came down a fraction from wherever she’d been holding them, and a warmth rose under the breastbone that hadn’t been there a breath before. She didn’t turn her head. She didn’t need to. Her right hand drifted an inch toward the arm beside it and stopped there, not quite touching, and the warmth stayed.

From the right, the scratching started again. A man’s voice said a name, not loudly, but so that it carried to the far end of the hall.

“Senbi.”

It came dry and clear. The reed scratched as it went down, and Andy heard the name go into the record mark by mark, each one cut into something meant to outlast the hall.

The man in front of the scale turned. He went past it and on down the hall, walking without hurry on his dusty bare feet, toward a doorway at the far end that was darker than anything else in the room. He didn’t look back at any of them. He went through it, and was gone, and the memory ended.

Andy was standing in the corridor with his hand pressed flat against his chest, over the letter and over whatever was under it. It was as if he had to make sure both of them were still where he’d left them. It took him longer than it should have to take the hand away.

When he could, he turned to Horun. “That feather. I’ve seen it.”

Horun turned his head.

“Not that one. One like it.” Andy looked back into the hall, at the scale standing level at the end of all those lamps. “There’s one behind glass in the museum wing. White, the same size, with gold at the edges like that. I stood in front of it with Laura. There was a card under it. Feather of Ma’at (gift of Rusat).”

He could see the card, the neat black letters on it. He could see Laura’s two faces bent over it together, reading it aloud at the same time. Ma’at? As in, the Egyptian goddess? He had told her who Rusat was, standing there on the thick carpet—as if he’d known her, when all he had was what Arabella had told him three days before. One of Arabella’s oldest friends, from back when she was Seshat. Close as family, almost, until she withdrew from the world.

“Rusat gave her one,” Horun said.

Andy breathed out slowly. “And she used it.” He was quiet a moment. “She used it to bring Laura back.”

Horun didn’t move on. He stood beside the sill with the gold from the hall lying across his bare feet and the white half of his robe.

Andy thought of Rusat’s voice, low and close and a little amused. You can breathe now, you know. Arabella had said Rusat would break a rule if it kept someone from being crushed. She’d said Rusat never had to say anything. She would only look, and Arabella would know what had to be done, even if it wasn’t allowed.

He hadn’t thought until now what it would be like to stand next to someone like that for a thousand years, close enough to feel the warmth off her arm, and then have her leave. He didn’t know how you carried a thing like that. He didn’t know whether Arabella ever had set it down.

She had talked about the others that day too, in the same even voice. Thoth, the keeper of the records, who tracked every move and every word and every outcome. Her measures had to be precise enough to stand up to his audit. And Anubis, a simpler soul, who weighed hearts and wasn’t looking for loopholes. Only the truth. Andy had liked the sound of him, that day in the sunroom.

He looked at the far door, where the man had gone.

“What does the writing do?” he asked. “When Thoth said his name and wrote it down. What did that do?”

“Once Thoth has written the name,” Horun said, “the man belongs to that hall.”

Andy turned that over. Senbi in front of the scale, not breathing, with his big scarred hands hanging at his sides, waiting for the beam to make up its mind. The beam lying level. The reed going down, mark by mark. Then the man turning as if someone had called him in from a field, and walking away down the hall without a backward glance. Whatever ground he had worked all his life, whoever had washed the road off his shins on other evenings—none of it had turned his head.

Andy shook his head slowly. “He didn’t even look back.”

“No,” Horun said.

He let that be all of it. His eyes stayed on Andy a moment longer. Then he walked on down the corridor, past the hall of lamps and the next room and the next, toward wherever the light went after gold. Andy stood a little while with the oil smell still in his clothes. Then he went after him.

Horun stopped.

Andy went on a step before he noticed, and turned. He had been walking with Senbi in his head, the big scarred hands and the dusty shins and the back going away down the hall, and the rooms had been sliding past him for a long time without his seeing them.

There was nothing beside them yet that he could see. Then he saw that the light had been going for some time, and he hadn’t been watching it. The gold had gone out of the walls. What was left was brown and dim, the color of river mud with the sun behind it, and the rooms in it were small and low. Mud brick. Reed. Roofs of bundled reed laid over poles.

The people in them wore skirts of fleece that hung in tufts, layer under layer, and their voices came out of the openings slower than any voices yet, as if they had a long way to travel.

The memory Horun had stopped at was almost dark.

It showed a stair. Someone had cut it straight down into the ground, steep and narrow, no wider than one person, and dust lay thick on every step, gray and soft and undisturbed. A little light fell on the top few steps from somewhere overhead. Below them there was nothing to see at all. Every other memory had let something out into the corridor—a voice, a smell, a little of its light. This one gave nothing back.

“This is from before she had a face of her own,” Horun said. “Her first season here had just ended. Alla wasn’t hers to host anymore. She had no more say over her than anyone else did.” He looked at the stair, and at the dark it went down into, and didn’t hurry. “She’s going down to Irkalla, to ask.”

Andy looked at the dust on the top step. It lay so smooth that it seemed nobody had come down that way in a long time, as if the stair had been waiting for her.

His mouth had gone dry. “She went down there once. For Anna. She told me on the beach. She said she went down without a persona, just the function. And she tried everything, and none of it moved.” He swallowed. “It was like arguing with physics. That’s what she said.”

The rest of it had come after. Dumuzid had found her at the gate and told her he meant to go in, and she had called him a fool. He’d asked her to look after Anna. He’d asked her to remember his name, because he didn’t want to vanish. Then he had stepped through, and Anna had come out.

Horun stood beside the sill the way he always stood—hands loose, bare feet together on the stone—and let it be Andy’s to decide.

Andy stepped in.

The body he was in was walking down.

There was no top step. He was already well down the stair, and the light was already behind and above, a gray square going small. The walls came close at both shoulders, packed earth, cold, dry. Her bare feet went down into dust as fine as flour, and it rose with every step and got into everything. Into her mouth. The back of her throat. The corners of her eyes. She didn’t stop to wipe them.

One hand went out to the wall once, for balance, and came away gray to the wrist, and she let it fall and went on down.

The cold climbed as the light went. It came up through the soles of her feet first and then up the legs and into the hands, and by the time the gray square overhead had gone out altogether it had reached her chest. Andy could feel her breath getting shorter in it. She didn’t slow.

At the edge of what she could see, her sleeve moved with her arm. It was white, and past the white it was black, the same robe Horun wore. Andy saw it and lost it again in the dark.

She was a long time on the stair. He couldn’t have said how long. The steps went on past the point where steps could still have been going on, past all sense, and the dust never thinned, and there was only her breath and the cold and the soft fall of her feet. Then there were no more steps.

The hall at the bottom was low, and dark, and very wide. Its roof hung just above her head and its far side was a long way off. What light there was came from nowhere he could find. It lay on the floor and on the walls in a gray that was hardly light at all, and the walls were lined, from the floor to the low roof, with rows of clay tablets standing on their edges. Hundreds of them. Thousands.

Each one was pressed close with small, sharp marks, wedge after wedge after wedge, and Andy couldn’t read a single one. The air down here smelled of cold stone and of water standing somewhere in the dark, still and deep.

At the far side of the hall, on a seat cut from the same dark stone as the floor, sat Ereshkigal.

Andy knew the face.

It was Alla’s. The jaw, the eyes set wide apart—the face he had seen crying on a reed mat in the middle of a knot of paired women, too hard to finish a braid. The face he’d watched lean over a cold hearth and smear ash over the small mole at the outer corner of her left eye, so that she could walk out of a door in her sister’s place. The mole was there. It was bare.

But the face had gone pale. Paler than any face he had ever seen on a living woman, white with blue underneath it, and her eyes had gone black all the way through. Her hair hung down past the seat in straight black sheets.

He had seen that paleness once before, standing beside Arabella on a beach in his vision—a woman built along the same lines as Anna, he’d told Erin afterward, but harder. This was before the hardness had finished. It was still Alla’s face. It hadn’t had time yet to become anything else.

Since the doorway and the ash he had thought of her as a girl, almost a child. He had never once pictured her sitting here, in the cold, at the bottom of all those steps, as if she had been put down there and left.

Ereshkigal sat very straight in a plain dark robe, her hands resting on the arms of the seat, and she didn’t move at all while the woman came across the hall toward her. She only watched her come.

Ama-Bila stopped before the seat, a little way back from it, with her hands at her sides. Andy felt her stop there. She didn’t kneel. Her hands were cold and empty, and the dust on the one that had touched the wall had begun to itch, and she left it.

“I have come to ask for Dumuzid,” she said. “Give him back.”

Dumuzid. Andy’s pulse jumped, and it was his own. Hers stayed where it was. He had come down this stair braced for Anna: a woman asking for her, and a seat that wouldn’t move. He knew how that went. Arabella had told him on the beach, one descent and how it ended, with a man stepping through a gate and Anna walking out. This was after. She had come down a second time, for Dumuzid, and she had never said a word of it.

It was her voice, coming up through the chest he stood in. And it wasn’t. It was a plain voice, careful and exact, and young in a way he had no word for.

He had heard her cold, in the green room, through a veil. This was older than that, and it had never learned to be cold yet.

“Inanna was never dead. You took her down living. Her body, her breath, all of her. She did not die and come to you. She was carried. When I came down for her, the Law told me she could leave only if someone took her place. I believed it. I should not have. A place is owed for the dead, and she was not dead. No one needed to give a life to return a life that was never taken. There was no death to pay for. His sacrifice paid for nothing. It is void.” She drew a breath, and Andy felt it catch against the cold. “Let him go up.”

What she meant by it came to Andy as far as it would come and no farther. She meant to bring him back to Anna.

And Andy, standing behind her eyes, wanted to say something to the woman on the seat. He didn’t know what. Her name, maybe. That he had seen her on the mat with the braid in her hands, and in the doorway with ash on her face. There was no mouth here for any of it, and nothing changed.

Ereshkigal did not move. She had listened to every word of it without once looking away, as still as the seat she sat on, and when it was done she went on looking at the woman in front of her. Then her mouth changed, and the black eyes with it, and what had come into them stayed. It wasn’t anger. It was regret, plain enough that even Andy, looking at her through someone else’s eyes, could not mistake it for anything else.

When she spoke her voice did not rise. It did not need to.

“You are not wrong,” Ereshkigal said. “Inanna did not die. I took her living. It is an edge case. There has never been another. It is mine to settle, and no one else’s.”

The body Andy stood in changed when she said it, though not by much. Ama-Bila’s breath went in a little deeper than it had since the stair, and her hands, which had been shut at her sides, came open. What she meant came to Andy as far as it would come: she meant to hear the rest of it. He felt her weight shift forward onto the balls of her feet, very slightly, toward the seat.

He had heard that voice before. He hadn’t placed it until it said mine. Once before, at the masquerade, with every other mouth in the room held silent, a masked woman had danced him through a whole song without missing a step and spoken to him in exactly this level, unhurried way, as though every sentence were a gate she was opening or closing. I have no quarrel with you, Andrew Cooper.

He hadn’t known whose face was under the mask until the end. He hadn’t seen the mole. The mask had covered it.

“But Dumuzid had already written his own name in the Book of the Dead,” Ereshkigal said.

Ama-Bila’s breath stopped.

Ereshkigal lifted one hand from the arm of the seat and turned it, palm up, toward the wall at her side. Ama-Bila’s eyes went where it pointed, and Andy’s went with them.

One tablet stood a little apart from the rest, on a ledge of its own at the height of the seat. It was smaller than the others, and newer. The clay had dried paler. The marks pressed into it were few, and large, and not as clean as the marks around them—as though the hand that made them had never held a stylus before and had pushed too hard, trying to get it right. Andy couldn’t read a single wedge of it. He didn’t need to. It was a name, and a man had written it himself.

Every tablet on every wall of the hall was crowded with marks, row on row of them, and this one had hardly any, and it was the only one either of them could look at.

At the gate, Dumuzid had asked her to remember his name, because he didn’t want to vanish. And then he had come down here, down that stair and across this floor, and pressed it into the clay with his own hand, where it would never be anything but remembered.

Ama-Bila looked at it for a long time. The dust stung in her eyes. She didn’t blink it away. Then she took one step toward the seat, only one, and the dust came up around her bare foot and settled again, and she stopped.

“He wrote it because he believed a life was owed,” she said. Her voice had gone lower, and it caught once, and she went on through the catch without stopping for it. “None was. You know that none was. He gave it for a debt that did not exist. He was told it existed, and he believed what he was told, and he came down. Strike it out. A name written for nothing can be struck out for nothing.”

Ereshkigal did not answer at once. She looked at the tablet on its ledge, at the clumsy marks, for long enough that Andy felt the cold come back into Ama-Bila’s feet. Then she looked back at the woman in front of her. The regret was all still there in her face. None of it had gone.

“His sacrifice stands,” she said. “It is lawful. It returned a goddess to the world. For that, a life may be given, and he gave his.” She paused, and in a softer voice, pained, she said, “It is not just. I know the difference.”

Ama-Bila did not move. Andy felt her not move. Every part of her held where it was.

Ereshkigal’s eyes went to the tablet on its ledge and came back. “He wrote his name with his own hand before I could settle it. A name I rule on first, I can keep from the tablets. A name written in this hall cannot be struck out, by you or by me. I can only decide what it means.”

She paused. “He did not give his life for that alone. From this day,” Ereshkigal said, “no death-god may take the living to the underworld and hold them hostage against someone else’s sacrifice. That is the Law now. It was not, and it is.”

The words went down into the hall and stayed there. Nothing answered them. Her hands had gone back to the arms of the seat and rested there, and she did not look away.

“His name is written,” she said. “He is dead. He is mine to keep. My sister will hear what I ruled here, and she will not forgive it. I have known that since I saw the name.” She hesitated, and Andy saw something flash behind her eyes. “I am sorry.”

The body Andy was in went heavy.

It started in the chest. Then it was in the arms, and the hands, and then the legs, all the way down into the dust. It wasn’t the cold. The cold had been there all along. This came down over the cold and settled on it, and it didn’t lift. Her breath went in, and stopped partway, and went out again. Her eyes stayed open. She stood under it with her hands hanging open at her sides, and it stayed.

Then she was on the stair. There was no turning away from the seat, no crossing of the hall; she was simply climbing, and the dark was below her now and the gray square far above, and every step up was heavier than the one before it. Her hand went to the wall and came away gray. Her breath came short in the cold. The weight hadn’t lifted. It had come with her, and it climbed with her, one step and then the next, and she didn’t look back down.

The memory ended.

Andy was in the corridor.

The weight came out with him. It sat in his own arms and his own chest, and for a long moment he couldn’t lift his hands. He stood with them hanging, and breathed—short, and then deeper—and the stair in the wall beside him went on going down into the dark with its dust lying smooth on every step. Nothing came up out of it.

The dust on the top step lay as smooth as it had before he went in, as if nobody had ever gone down at all.

When his hands would move again, one of them went to his chest without his sending it, to the letter under the mantle, and stayed there.

“Alla,” Andy said.

It came out barely louder than a breath. He didn’t know who he was saying it to. His throat was raw with dust that had never been in it.

“She had only just become Ereshkigal, then,” Horun said.

Andy kept his eyes on the bottom of the stair, where the dark began. “She didn’t raise her voice. Not once. Not even at the end.”

Horun did not answer. He let it be the last thing said for a while.

I do not negotiate, she had told him at the masquerade, with her hand cold in his. I do not regret. He had believed her. He had taken it for the plain truth about her, as if she had been reading it to him off a tablet, and carried it around with him ever since. And he had just watched her face while she said he is mine to keep, and every bit of what she said she didn’t do had been in it.

The girl on the floor of the mudbrick room had wiped her fingers through the cold ash and rubbed it over the one mark that told her from her sister, so that whatever waited outside that door would take her instead of Anna. The woman on the stone seat had the same mark bare at the corner of the same eye. She had said it in that level voice, to the one person who had come all the way down to ask.

It was the same face. He couldn’t make it be two people. He didn’t think she had ever been able to either.

She had named it herself: lawful, and not just. Dumuzid had put his name in the clay before anyone could rule. No hand could strike it out, not even hers, and the most she could do was make it count for something. So she had made it the Law. She had known what that would cost her, too. Anna would hear what had been done at the bottom of that stair, and whatever was left between the two sisters, Alla had spent it on that stone seat.

She had wished to become a goddess, Arabella had said on the beach. Not to rule. Just to be untouchable. To never be ruled again. And she had got her wish, and this was where it had set her down: on a stone seat at the bottom of all those steps, with the Law in her keeping.

From somewhere further along, in one of the reed rooms, a child laughed. The sound came late, the way everything came late in here, long after the mouth that made it, and thin, as if it had come a long way down a stair to reach him. Andy listened to it until it was gone.

His hands were shaking. He looked at them until they stopped, and then for a while after, and the weight went on sitting in his chest and didn’t go anywhere. He wondered what you did with a thing like that, once it had been handed to you, and whether Arabella had ever found out.

Horun waited. He didn’t walk on, the way he always walked on. He stood beside the sill, just inside the dim brown light, with his hands loose at his sides, and he didn’t look at the stair at all. He looked at Andy and waited for as long as it took, and said nothing to hurry him. He never had.

When Andy finally looked up, Horun turned. This time he didn’t go on ahead. He walked at Andy’s side, close enough that the white hem of his robe nearly brushed the mantle, matching his pace to Andy’s instead of the other way round. They went on together, down into the older dark. The reed rooms thinned on either side, and the brown light went browner. For a long way, neither of them said anything at all.