Something Blue

The blue was farther off than it had looked from the ruins.

It sat low on the broken ground ahead of them and stayed the same size, step after step, as if the distance were being let out to match his stride. Hall glass still gritted in Andy’s shoes. He could feel each sliver where it had worked down under his heel, with the sand from the Hotel’s wreck packed in around it, and he walked on it anyway. If he stopped to empty them, he’d be standing still while the blue got no nearer.

His guide had drifted a pace ahead of him somewhere along the way. He picked his footing over the cracked dirt without once looking down, stepping across the seams and the loose plates of dried mud with the ease of someone who had walked this ground every day of his life. His hands hung loose. His sandals made almost no sound.

The shades thinned as they went. Back among the walls there had been figures at every turn, standing or sitting or bent over whatever they’d been doing when they were kept. Out here there were fewer of them, and then Andy looked around and found there was nobody left at all—only the two of them, and the blocks of pale stone lying where they had fallen, and the blue point ahead. It never flickered. Everything else in this place wore the same rust-colored light from the same unmoving sky, and the blue sat in the middle of all that like the one thing down here with a light of its own.

Beyond it, low along the ground, lay a haze.

Andy frowned at it. He’d walked a long way since the bell, through more ruin than he could have counted, and he hadn’t seen haze anywhere. There was no wind in this place. Nothing moved the air, and there were no clouds in the rusty sky. But out past the blue a long gray bank of haze lay across the dirt, flat on top, and it wasn’t drifting anywhere.

The man glanced back at him once, over his shoulder, and went on. When they reached the blue at last, it was lying in a seam of the cracked dirt, at the foot of a toppled block of stone. It was smaller than Andy had expected. From the ruins it had looked like a lamp somebody had set down and walked away from; up close it was only a bead, lying half in the crack where the ground had split, and the light was coming out of it. He crouched, reached into the seam, and picked the bead up.

It was blue glass, about the length of the top joint of his finger, wrapped in gold filigree as fine as hair. Someone had worked the gold in tight coils and rows of tiny beads, close and careful, with not a wire out of place. The style looked Egyptian to him—or what he thought of as Egyptian, from museum cases and from the way Arabella’s stories sounded. The glass under the gold was a clear, deep blue, the color of the sky in the last few minutes before the sun begins setting. The light came out of the glass itself, from something embedded in the center, steady and its own.

It was cool against his palm. It was heavier than glass had any business being, too. It settled into the hollow of his hand like a coin of some dense old metal and stayed there.

He had seen its likeness behind glass. There was a wing of the Museum of Pleasures Past given over to Arabella’s seasons, every name she had ever worn, and he and Laura had walked through it together one afternoon, both of her, slowing at every case. Somewhere past the ring and the sword there had been a small case with almost nothing in it. A bead of blue glass in gold. A card underneath. Laura had leaned so close to read it that her breath fogged the glass, and he’d read the name on the card twice, because he had heard it before.

Andy stared at it in his open hand. “Moongem.” He said it aloud without deciding to. The man had come back and stopped beside him, close enough that Andy could see the dust on the hem of his wrap. He stood with his hands loose at his sides and looked down at the bead in Andy’s palm. “I’ve seen this,” Andy told him. “Not this one. A replica of it, in a case in the museum. Laura and I—there was a card. It said it was a Moongem.”

The man looked at the bead for a long moment. “That’s what it is.”

Andy sat back on his heels. “They had it in a case like it was lost. Like nobody knew where it ended up.” He turned his hand a little to the side, and the light inside the bead didn’t change at all. “Where did it come from? How does a thing like this end up down here?”

The man took his time. When he answered, he said it the way he said everything about this place, plainly and without hurry.

“It’s a piece of something very old. It fell, a long time ago. Down out of the sky, like a falling star. It came to the ground, and it stayed.”

“A star.” Andy looked at the bead again. It was easier to believe than it should have been; maybe that was only because of where he was crouching. “I’ve held a lot of strange things since I got here. I don’t think I’ve ever held one of those.”

The man went on in the same even voice, as if this were simply the rest of it. “A man found it beside a river,” he said. “He was with a woman he loved, and neither of them knew what it was. After she died, he set it in glass, and in gold, so he could keep it with him, in her memory.”

Andy looked up at him. The man was still looking at the bead. He had looked at a great many things tonight—the shades, the ruins, the doorframe, Andy himself—the same steady way, giving each of them room. This was longer than any of those. His hands stayed at his sides. He made no move to take the bead, or to touch it, and he didn’t seem to want to. He only looked at it, lying in the hollow of a stranger’s hand, as if it were enough that it was here.

“He must have missed her,” Andy said quietly.

The man let that stand. Andy looked back down at the bead, and he remembered what a Moongem was for. Sam had read it off the Commissary menu once, in passing, and the card under the museum case had said it again in fewer words. One Moongem bought the complete removal of a transformation. Not a softening, the way his own Coauthor could only soften what had been done, but the whole of it gone, for good.

He thought of everyone he knew who was carrying any. It was a long list. Why this, of everything in the world, should be the thing lying in the dirt down here where he could find it, he couldn’t begin to guess. The man had said that things ended up in this place when they fell through the cracks somewhere else. Maybe it had only fallen. Maybe not.

Andy closed his fist around the bead. For a second the light came out between his fingers, faint and blue across his knuckles; then he put it in his Inventory. He stood. The mantle came up with him, dragging, and he hitched it back onto his shoulder.

Past the toppled stone the haze lay thicker than it had looked from farther back, a gray floor laid over the dirt as far as he could see. Far off, out of the middle of it, something huge rose up. It was the size of a mountain. For a second that was all he could make of it, a dark mass standing up out of the gray with its top lost in the rust-colored sky. Then he saw the line of its slope, and he recognized it. It was the island’s volcano—the same long rise he’d looked up at from the Hotel every day since he arrived, from the beach and the terrace and the windows of the Suite, with the same easy shoulder on one side and the same steeper fall on the other. It stood exactly where the volcano would have stood, if any of this had been the island.

Near the top the lines went wrong.

They were too straight for rock. They stepped, and squared off, one above another, and broke into what looked like towers and long terraces half lost in the gray, like a town on a hillside seen from the water at dusk.

It looked like a palace.

Laura’s warning came back to him whole. They had been at their own table in the Suite, halfway through breakfast for dinner, both of her across from him with the eggs she’d cracked herself going cold on the plates. “If you’re ever lost, and there’s a door you have to cross, you should not do it,” she’d said. “She said to look for something blue, on the way to the palace. And those are her exact words.” She hadn’t smiled. She had looked straight at him while she said it, and then she’d picked her fork back up. “They’ll make sense later. They always do.”

He had stood in front of a door tonight with the Forest on the other side of it, and he had turned around. The blue was in his Inventory.

“What is that?” Andy asked.

The man had come up beside the toppled stone and was looking where Andy was looking. Nothing in his face said he was surprised by any of it. “Where we’re going.”

“A palace.” Andy heard his own voice go odd on the word. “Laura told me once—she had it from somebody else, and she passed it on to me—to look for something blue. On the way to a palace.”

The man looked at him then. The corners of his mouth moved, not much. “Then she told you right.”

“What is it?” Andy pressed. “Whose is it? What’s in there?”

“You’ll see it when we reach it,” the man said, and set off toward it.

He walked on without turning to see whether Andy was following. Andy stood a moment longer by the toppled stone. He reached for the bead in his Inventory and found it there. Then he lifted one foot and knocked the shoe against the stone until the grit ran out of it, and went after him, toward the shape in the haze.

The ground began to climb.

Andy felt it in his calves before he saw it. The cracked dirt tilted up toward the haze by degrees, and the ruins began again with it—ruin laid on ruin, a wall of fitted stone with a mudbrick wall built on its shoulders and older stone still underneath both—and the shades came back with the ruins. They stood thicker the higher the ground went, in doorways and on broken steps and out in the open, each of them busy with its own moment, as if the whole slope had been set aside for people who had stopped halfway through something and never finished it. The man kept his pace a step ahead and threaded between them without slowing. The mantle dragged at Andy’s shoulders on the climb. He let it.

Andy reached for Laura.

He’d done it every few minutes since the Dance Hall, every few minutes except the stretch after the door, when he hadn’t been able to make himself. He did it now without deciding to, the same way he kept checking his Inventory for the bead. The bond gave him what it had given him all night and nothing more. Where she was: right here, close enough to touch in every direction at once, and farther away than he had a word for, both together. And how afraid she was. That part sat as high as the bond could carry it, pinned flat against the top of the reading and not moving. He knew the feel of it by now, as if he had been carrying it in his hands all night. He couldn’t tell from it whether things were getting worse up there, because there was no higher for it to go. He held on to the thread of her a while longer anyway. Then he let it go and kept climbing, since climbing was the only thing he could do for her from here. He understood her fear. It was in him as well.

“How long have I been down here? And what does that mean up there? For them.”

The man answered without turning around. “Time runs looser here than it does up there. You have more of it than they do.”

Andy frowned at his back. “Emi said it was running level. When they came through. She said every minute down here was a minute up there.”

“It was, while they were here.” The man stepped up over a fallen lintel and down the far side of it. “It isn’t now.”

“How much more, then?” Andy pressed. “An hour down here for every minute up there? A day? I need to know how long I’ve got.”

The man did turn then, enough to look back at him over the lintel. “I can’t tell you how much,” he said. “I won’t guess at it, either. I’m sorry.”

Andy held his eyes. The man held his back, and there was nothing behind the apology but the apology. After a moment Andy nodded, once. “Then I’ll take whatever there is,” he said, and climbed over the lintel after him.

The haze opened around a low mudbrick room.

It had no roof. Its walls came up to Andy’s chest and stopped, ragged along the top where the brick had crumbled, and the rust-colored sky lay over it like a lid. A water jar stood against one wall with a crack running down its side. In the middle of the floor was a hearth, a ring of blackened stones with cold ash heaped inside it, and on the floor beside the hearth sat two young women in plain Sumerian dress.

They were so alike that Andy stopped dead.

One of them was Anna. He’d never seen fear on that face before—not once, not even tonight in the Hall with the glass coming down around her. But she was young, and terrified, and tears glittered on her cheeks. She was pressed back into the corner of the room with her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms locked around them, and her eyes were on the doorway. They didn’t leave it. The doorway was a gap in the wall with a beam across the top, and past it there was nothing but gray.

The other girl had a small mole at the outer corner of her left eye. Andy had seen her once already tonight, crying in the middle of a knot of paired women on a reed mat while the rest of them held her and rocked. Alla.

“Anna,” Andy breathed.

It was out before he could stop it. Anna stayed curled in her corner with her eyes on the doorway. She hadn’t heard him. None of them ever did.

Alla looked at her sister for a long moment. Then she leaned over to the hearth, wiped her fingers through the cold ash, and rubbed it over the mole beside her eye. She worked at it carefully with her fingertips, a little more, then a little more, until the mark was gone under the gray. It was the one thing on either face that told the two of them apart. With it covered, there was no telling them apart at all.

Alla put one hand against her sister’s shoulder and pressed her back into the corner. She held it there, as if to make sure it would stay. She said something, softly, and when her sister tried to object, she shook her head and Andy could see her love for Anna in her expression.

Then she stood up and walked out through the doorway, alone.

Andy took two steps after her before he knew he’d moved. He reached the gap in the wall and looked through it, and there was nothing on the other side. No road, no figure going away from him down it, no sound. Only the haze, close and flat and still. When he turned around, Alla was back on the floor beside her sister. The mole was bare. Her fingers were already reaching for the ash.

Andy stayed in the doorway and watched it go through again. The ash, the mark, the hand on her sister’s chest. Alla walked past him close enough to brush his sleeve, and didn’t, and was gone. The second time, he understood what he was watching. She was making herself into Anna. She was going out of that door in her sister’s place, to whatever had been waiting on the other side of it, so that it would get her instead, and spare her sister.

He remembered what came later. Arabella had told him on the beach, with the eleven dark islands out on the water: once Anna came through the other side of that season a goddess, Alla had taken her down into the underworld and hidden her there, afraid Abi-Eshu would come for her again and take her back and break her all over. Andy had heard it then as a story about a queen. This was the same girl, before any of that. Hardly more than a child, with ash smeared across her cheekbone, and already trading herself for her sister.

The anger came back up in him, higher this time. It was not the anger from the Hall, which had burned out in minutes, but the one that had settled at Nin-Imma and stayed, and it stood up in his chest now and kept standing. It was for Nergal—for Abi-Eshu, then. But under it came another thing. He’d already grieved for the girl on the reed mat. This was for the woman she had become: something close to pity, for Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Great Below, whom he’d danced with once, masked, at the Fifth Challenge, without ever knowing whose hand he was holding. He turned that over and couldn’t make it settle.

The man stood at the edge of the room, just inside what was left of the wall. He hadn’t come any closer than that. His eyes stayed on Alla through both turns of the loop, on her hand in the ash and on her back going out through the door. They did not go to Anna once.

“Did it work?” Andy’s voice came out rough. “Did she get away with it? Did he take her instead?”

“This is all of it that was kept,” the man said. “The ash. The doorway. Her walking through it.”

Andy let his breath out slowly. “That’s a hard piece to keep.”

On the floor, Alla was reaching for the ash again. Anna had not moved from her corner. Andy looked at the two of them, at the same face twice over, one of them gray along the cheekbone and one of them not, and the question came up out of him before he had decided whether he wanted the answer.

“What happens to them?” he asked. “People like this. Caught in one moment, over and over. What happens to them once nobody remembers them anymore?”

The man was quiet for a while. When he answered, his voice was as even as it had been all night. “Whatever isn’t remembered anywhere else ends up here,” he said. “What happens to it after here, I wouldn’t know.”

Andy looked back at the room. He had a memory that kept almost everything, whether he wanted it kept or not, and he’d never once been glad of it the way he was glad of it now.

“I’ll remember this one,” he said.

The man let that stand, too. He was already turning back to the slope.

Behind the low wall the loop started over. Alla sat on the floor beside her sister with the mole bare at the corner of her eye, looking at her, and her fingers went out toward the hearth. Andy watched until they touched the ash. Then he turned away. The man hadn’t waited for him—he never did—and he was already a good way up the slope. Andy followed.

The climb went on. Past the mudbrick room the shades thinned out again, and the ground grew rougher, loose stone over hard earth, so that Andy had to watch where he put his feet. He watched them gladly. Every time he looked up from them, he saw ash on a girl’s face.

He wanted the room out of his head. He went looking for something ordinary to put there instead, and came up with the first thing that wasn’t about anybody being hurt.

“Did you really keep sheep?” he asked. “Back in Sumer.”

The man walked on a few paces before he answered. He didn’t seem to mind the question. If anything, he seemed to be giving it a fair hearing.

“I’ve watched a great many shepherds,” he said. “The good ones walk in front. They leave it to the flock to decide to follow.”

Andy looked at his back—at the loose shoulders, the easy pace, the head that hadn’t turned once since the room to see whether anyone was coming along behind it—and a short laugh got out of him before he could stop it.

“You’ve been doing that all night,” he said. “Walking in front. I kept waiting for you to look back and check I was still there.”

The man walked on in front. A little farther on, where the ground leveled for a stretch between two long spills of rubble, Andy tried again. His legs were glad of the flat. His head was glad of the talking.

“What was she like?” he asked. “Arabella. Back then. Back at the start.”

“She asked questions,” the man said. “She still does.”

Andy snorted. “She does. Usually the one you were hoping she’d skip.” He thought of the fire pit in the Inner Gardens, and the beach with the eleven dark islands out on the water. Every one of those conversations had ended with him answering a question he’d walked in meaning to keep to himself. “I always figured that was a thing she learned. All those seasons. You do anything long enough, you get good at it.”

The man said nothing to that. But his head tilted, a little, toward one shoulder, and from the side Andy thought he might be smiling. It was hard to tell. It didn’t look like a man agreeing with him. Andy let it go. Ahead of them the haze had begun to pale, the rust going out of it toward a cleaner gray, and the air had a different weight to it.

The haze thinned over water.

Andy heard it before he saw it: a small, regular lapping, the first sound of moving water anywhere since the bell. Then the gray drew back from it, and a lake’s edge opened out in front of them. It was early in the day there, whatever day it was. The light lay thin and pale over everything, and none of it was the rust color of the rest of this place. A strip of shingle ran down to flat gray water that went out and out until the haze took it. Above the shingle the ground rose to a road of packed dirt, and the road ran past a walled hall on the hill—long and low behind its wall, with smoke going straight up from it into the still air. On the road a dozen or so women were loading packs onto horses, ready for a journey. They tied down bundles and checked straps and handed things up to one another, their cloaks pinned back out of the way, working the way people work when they have done a thing together a hundred times. Only a couple, he noticed, wore dresses. The horses stood patient under it. One of them blew, and shook its head, and the harness rang. The women looked wistful, but happy.

Down the shingle toward the water, a man was walking with a sword laid flat across his two palms.

Andy knew his face.

He was wiry rather than heavy, deep through the chest and thick through the forearms, and the hands under the sword were scarred across the knuckles and the palms. His hair was longer than Andy had seen it, black going gray at the temples, down past his collar and tied back at the nape, and he wore a beard. He was dressed for the road in a long wool tunic, belted, with a dark cloak fastened at one shoulder by a round brooch and leather bindings wound up his legs to the knee. Nothing he had on had been made in the last thousand years. But the face under all of it was the one Andy had met at the Roast. The gray eyes, deep-set under heavy brows. The stillness. It was Art, who had told Andy that day, without being asked, that the sword had never been the point.

Andy knew the sword too. He had seen its copy behind glass in the museum, the same afternoon as the bead. Laura had stood in front of that case a long time, both of her, talking about tests. And Arabella had told him by the fire pit, with the morning light coming down green through the stalks, that the copy was true to the legend. She’d taken the real one back where it belonged, she said, after Artorius died.

“Art,” Andy said. It came out half a laugh.

Artorius walked past him without a glance.

He passed close, close enough for Andy to see the frayed hem of the cloak and the worn leather wrapped around the sword’s grip, and went on down the shingle to the water, unhurried, his eyes on an empty stretch of stones at the bottom of the shingle. Andy stood and watched him go. This man had talked to him at the Roast like someone he had known for years. It was a strange thing to be passed by him now as if he were part of the shingle.

Up on the road the women had stopped loading. They stood by the horses, all of them, with their hands still on the straps, and watched him go down as if they already knew what he was going to do. They looked at him fondly.

At the waterline Artorius stopped. He turned the sword in his hands, slowly, until the hilt pointed outward, and held it out toward the empty shingle in front of him. He held it low, at the height of someone a good deal shorter than Andy, and spoke.

It was a few sentences, in a language Andy didn’t know. From where he stood up the shingle it was only sound: low and even, soft in the vowels and catching in the throat on the consonants, a voice that wasn’t raised and had no need to be. Andy caught one word in it and only one, and the word was a name: Caledfwlch.

Nobody was there to take it.

Artorius stood with the sword held out to the empty air for the space of a long breath. The water lapped at his boots and went back. Then the loop folded back on itself, and the women were tying down their bundles again, and he was at the top of the shingle, walking down toward the water with the sword laid flat across his palms.

The man had come to stand beside Andy. He watched Artorius come down the stones, and then he turned his head and looked at Andy instead. “Go and take it.”

Andy looked at him. “He’s just a shade. And it isn’t mine,” he said. “He’s not giving it to me. He’s giving it back.”

It was the truest thing he’d said all night. The sword was Art’s, and then it had been hers, and whatever this was—this lake, this morning, this one moment kept out of a whole life—it belonged to the two of them. To walk down there and put his hand out would be like reaching into somebody else’s grave. He had asked Arabella’s leave once just to borrow a sword out of the museum, and she had told him he could simply have taken it, and seemed glad he hadn’t. This was no sword in a case. This was the end of a man’s whole story, and he had never been part of it.

The man’s voice stayed mild. “It’s being held out.”

Andy looked down at the water. Artorius had reached the waterline again and stopped, and was turning the sword in his hands, and the hilt came around and pointed at the empty shingle, at nobody, just as it had the first time. His arms were steady. Up on the road the women had gone still again by the horses. Artorius would hold it out there, Andy understood, for as long as this place lasted, and nobody would ever come.

Andy walked down.

The stones shifted and clicked under his shoes, and the hem of the mantle dragged and caught on them behind him. Halfway down, cold came up off the water at him. It was not the flat, dead cool of the rest of this place, but the cold of real water early in the day, and it went straight through the wedding clothes and into his chest. He came to the waterline and stopped in the empty place. The stones there lay smooth and undisturbed, as if nobody had stood on them in a long time. Then he turned around, and stood there, and waited.

Artorius stopped in front of him and held out the hilt. His eyes were on a point below Andy’s chin, where a smaller woman’s face would have been.

Andy knew where he was standing.

Arabella had told him at the fire pit on the lawn, the day she told him about Camelot. She had run these seasons as Nimwen: the Lady of the Lake, the one who kept and tested. She had given a sword to the men who came to her, and the real trial had never been whether they could fight with it, but what they would use it for. One of them had turned it on the people who wronged him, and it failed him at the end. One had never once drawn it for himself. And when his story was over, she’d stood on this shingle and taken it back.

The water was at his heels. He could hear it behind him, lapping and drawing back over the stones. Artorius was close enough now that Andy could see the gray coming into his beard, and the fine lines at the corners of his eyes, and the rise and fall of his chest under the wool. He held the hilt out at the height of a smaller woman’s hands, and Andy, a head taller than whoever she had been, looked down at the top of it and felt too big for the place he was standing in.

Artorius spoke.

It was the same language as before. Andy could hear that it was—the same soft vowels, the same catch in the throat, the same low, even voice—and he’d never learned a word of it in his life. But this time he understood every word. Because he stood where Nimwen had stood, he heard it as she had heard it.

“I give you back Caledfwlch,” Artorius said. “It has been a stalwart guide and steadfast companion, but at the end of the story of my mortal life, the sword of kings must return to your hand. I have no more need of it. So I leave it for the one who will carry it next.”

The words were said to Nimwen. But Andy was the one who closed his hand around the hilt as they ended. The leather of the grip was warm from Artorius’s palms.

Artorius let go. He opened his hands, plainly, without any ceremony at all, and for a moment his eyes stayed on the empty place below Andy’s chin. Then he turned and walked back up the shingle toward the horses.

The whole weight of the sword came down into Andy’s hand.

His breath had stopped somewhere in the middle of the words. He made it start again.

It was real.

It was heavier than it looked, much heavier, and cold the whole length of the blade, a cold he could feel through the warm leather and down into the bones of his wrist. The blade was plain. It was long and gray and unornamented, without a stone on it anywhere, and it caught the thin light off the water and held it. It was beautiful. Andy stood with it in his hand and did not move. When he did, it was only to turn his wrist a little, to feel how the blade wanted to sit. It was the kind of weight that settled into the shoulder as well as the hand, and asked the arm holding it to mean it. Up on the road, Artorius had reached the women at the horses, and they made room for him among them.

Then the loop folded back. Artorius was at the top of the shingle again. He came down toward the water as he had each time before, unhurried, his eyes on the place where Andy stood. Only now there was nothing across his palms. He came to the water and stopped, and held out his two empty hands, low, to the place where Andy stood.

The sword stayed where it was, in Andy’s hand.

He looked at the empty hands for a long time. The scars across the palms. The fingers held a little curled, as if still curled under the blade. Artorius held them out and spoke the same few sentences, and Andy heard every one of them again, and the hands stayed empty. Then the loop took him back up the shingle and brought him down again with nothing.

“Thank you,” Andy said to him, quietly, though he knew it would go nowhere. Artorius looked at the place below his chin, as if someone smaller were standing there, and held out his empty hands. Andy hoped he would get to see him again, to thank him for the advice, for all of it.

The man came down the stones and stood beside him, a little apart, as he had stood at the edge of the mudbrick room, as if he were being careful of the place. He didn’t look at the sword. He looked at Artorius.

“Of everything he did,” the man said, “this is the moment she kept of him here. The day they left. When he gave it back.”

Andy looked from Artorius’s empty hands to the blade in his own. After Artorius died. Arabella had told him that she’d taken the real one back out of a lake after Artorius died. And here was the lake. Here was Art, handing it over himself, alive, on the morning the women loaded their horses for the road, and he’d gone on being alive for more than a thousand years afterward, long enough to meet Andy at the Roast and tell him what he’d learned. What had died on that shore was Arthur, the King. Whatever he had been to everyone who sang about him afterward.

“She kept the part where he gave it back,” Andy said slowly. “Not any of the rest of it. That.”

The man didn’t say anything. He was still watching Artorius come down the stones with his hands held out.

Andy thought of his own words in the ruins, with his voice gone flat and Emi and Claire and Dawn standing in front of him. Nergal was going to answer for every piece of it, and Andy was going to be the one who collected. He had meant it. He still did. And he thought of Art at the Roast, sitting back in his chair, telling him without being asked that the sword had never been the point. Art had said that trying to be the only shield for everybody broke a man, and that the thing to do was let the table carry its own weight.

Now Andy was standing on the shore of a lake with that sword in his hand, and Nergal’s name in his mouth. Maybe Art would have had something to say about that, too.

“He told me it wasn’t the point,” he said aloud. His voice came out rough. “The sword. The day I met him, he told me that, and I didn’t even ask him. And now I’m the one standing here holding it.”

Beside him, the man only waited.

After a while he held something out. It was a scabbard, on a belt of plain dark leather, worn soft at the buckle and darker along the edges where hands had gripped it. Andy looked at it, and then up at the man. He’d never seen him go up to the horses, or anywhere else, to get it. As far as Andy could tell, the man hadn’t left his side.

Andy took it. The mantle got in the way, and he had to shrug it back off one shoulder and hold the sword awkwardly against his chest while he found the buckle with his other hand. He buckled the belt on over Dawn’s sash, still wound at his waist where she’d tied it on the mound with her apron-tying hands, and slid the sword home. It went in clean, the whole length of it. The weight settled against his hip and stayed there.

The man stepped back a pace and looked him over. Andy watched him take it in: the white mantle across his shoulders with its lining the green of Myra’s foxfire, the circlet on his head with Laura’s blue rose set into it, and now the sword. His eyes rested on the rose a moment longer than on the rest.

“You look like a King,” the man said.

Andy let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Sam said I looked like a guy in a bathrobe with a hat.” He touched the hilt, as if to make sure it was still there. “I think she was closer.”

He stepped back out of Nimwen’s place. The shingle clicked under his shoes, and the cold of the water fell away behind him. Behind him, too, the loop ran on: Artorius walking down to the water with his empty hands, and holding them out to nobody, and the women waiting by the horses on the road above. Andy didn’t turn to watch it come round again. He rested his hand on the hilt at his hip and followed the man up the slope, away from the lake. The man was a step ahead of him again, walking in front, his hands loose at his sides, and he did not look back to see whether Andy was coming. The sound of the water went thin behind him, and then it was gone, and when he looked back once from higher up there was nothing below but gray. Ahead of them the haze had begun to thin.

The sword rode at Andy’s hip in its new scabbard, and he kept a hand on the hilt.

He’d never walked any real distance with a blade this size. Sam had carried Thrustworthy around for days as if it weighed nothing at all. On the flat the weight was only awkward. As the slope steepened it turned contrary, swinging against his leg every time the loose ground shifted under him and pulling him half a step off true, so that he learned to walk with his palm over the pommel and his elbow out like a man carrying a parcel he didn’t trust. The mantle dragged behind. The circlet sat where Emi had set it.

“The sword,” the man said, “grants skill to its wielder. When you hold it, you will know how to use it.”

The haze thinned as they climbed. It went from a wall to a veil, and from a veil to something he could see shapes through—the corner of a terrace, the line of a roof, a long dark wall that might have been rock and might not—and the ground under it went from loose stone to steps of bare rock and back again. There were no shades on this part of the slope. There was nothing moving anywhere above them. The man climbed ahead, as unhurried as he had been on the flat, his sandals finding each foothold without his looking. He hadn’t looked back since the lake. Andy had stopped expecting him to.

Then the last of the haze slid away off the slope above them, and Andy stopped.

A palace covered nearly the whole side of the volcano.

It went up from the foot of the slope where they stood almost to the summit, and it was made of many buildings at once. There were wings and towers, long terraces stacked one on another, stairs climbing between them and doubling back. There was mudbrick in it, like the room with the hearth, and timber over stone, like the hall above the lake. There was a run of pale columns, a squat tower of red sandstone, a long wall of black stone fitted so close he couldn’t have slid a blade between the blocks, and high on the left a roof of dark tile with its eaves turned up at the corners. A dozen kinds of stone, from a dozen different ages. Any one piece of it would have been a building on its own.

And every piece of it had been made by the same hand. He could see that from where he stood. It was in the proportions, and in the care. The windows sat at the same height in every wall, whatever the wall was made of, and every stair climbed at the same easy pitch, and every terrace was exactly as deep as the one below it. None of it should have fit together, and all of it did. It held together the way a big family does at a long table, every face different and every one of them plainly related to the rest.

Nothing moved on it. No figure stood on any of the terraces, and no smoke went up from any roof. The whole vast front of it stood in the rust-colored light, perfectly still, as if it had been waiting a long time for someone to come up the slope and look at it.

Andy’s hand had closed tight on the hilt without his telling it to. He stood there with it and forgot, for a moment, to breathe.

“What is this place?” he asked.

The man had stopped a few steps above him. He looked up at it too, the whole long height of it, the way he had looked at the bead. “Her Memory Palace,” he said.

“Her—” Andy’s voice caught on it. “Arabella’s?”

“Hers, and the others’.” The man’s eyes went along the terraces and stayed there. “When each of the others died, what they had carried came to her. All of it is here.”

Andy looked up at the towers. He’d stood at a railing with Claire beside him and the eleven dark islands out on the water, and listened to Arabella tell them about the ones who had gone before her, one name at a time.

“She told me that,” he said slowly. “Once. Every time one of them died, she took in everything they carried. Their memories, their power. All of it. And when the last of them went, it all came to her at once.”

“This is what that became,” the man said.

Andy let out a breath. A sum, not a start—that was what Arabella had called herself at the fire pit in the Inner Gardens, the same day she told him about Camelot. He’d taken it then for the kind of thing she said, half a riddle and half a confession. Eleven lives on top of her own. He had never once pictured them as anything he could stand in front of.

“She told me about it like it was a weight,” he said softly. “Like something she carried around inside her.” He looked at the long terraces, the stairs, the wall of black stone. “She never said it was a place.”

He knew the words, too. A memory palace was a trick, a way of keeping things. You built rooms in your head, a house you already knew, and set each thing you meant to keep in a room of its own, and when you needed it again you walked through the house in your mind and found it where you’d left it. He’d read about it once. He had only ever known it as a trick.

“I thought a memory palace was something you kept in your head,” he said.

“It’s the same thing,” the man said. “She’s had longer to build hers.”

Andy looked up the long slope at seven thousand years of it on his Earth alone, more, stacked stone on stone and age on age almost to the summit. “A lot longer,” he said.

The man started up the stair. It ran from the foot of the slope straight up to an entrance at the base of the palace, wide and shallow and long, and the stone of it changed as it climbed—gray at the bottom, then the warm color of sandstone, then gray again—without one step ever changing its height. The man went up it steadily. Andy followed with his palm over the pommel and the mantle sweeping the steps behind him, and the sword tapping his leg on every second step until he got the rhythm of it.

Halfway up, with his calves burning, he stopped.

It had been circling in him since the man said all of it was here. Now it came together, and he stood on the step and let it.

Arabella had told him once about the First Gate. A place that didn’t exist anymore, and still existed, if you knew how to find it. It had sounded like a riddle when she said it, and he’d carried it around for weeks as one. Then Claire had pieced something together out of the Archive, with Arabella listening and not arguing: that the First Gate wasn’t really a place at all, but a threshold, and that whoever passed through it carried it with them afterward, forever. And Arabella had said it herself, another day. Only Hosts and gods had ever come out of the First Gate. She had been made there.

“If she carries it,” Andy said. He said it aloud, to the man’s back. The man was still climbing. “If she carries the Gate,” Andy called after him, “because she came through it—and this place holds everything she carries—then her memory of the Gate could be in here. Somewhere. Couldn’t it?”

The man climbed the last of the steps. At the top stood a great door, as tall as three men and as plain as a barn door, set into the foot of the palace between two pillars of stone. Its planks were dark and close-grained and carried no carving at all, and the iron of its hinges had been forged by the same patient hand as everything else, each strap exactly as wide as the next. He set his hand flat against it and pushed, and it swung inward without a sound. He stepped through, and turned, and stood aside on the threshold to let Andy pass. He didn’t say anything at all.

Andy had learned the man’s silences by now. When a thing was past what he knew, he said so, and said he was sorry. When he wouldn’t answer, he told Andy he was leaving something unsaid. This was neither of those. Andy climbed the rest of the way with that in his chest and stopped again at the top, an arm’s length from the open door.

He looked back once. The stair fell away below him, long and pale, and below the stair the slope went down into the haze, and somewhere under the haze were the lake and the mudbrick room and the toppled stone where the bead had lain, and beyond all of that, a long way back, the ruins and the empty doorframe. It was farther than he’d thought.

He looked at the open doorway, and at the man waiting just inside it with his hands loose at his sides, as patient as he had been all night. Past him there was only dimness and the sense of a ceiling a long way up. Cool air came out through the doorway, faintly, and stirred the edge of the mantle against his leg, as if the place were drawing a slow breath. It was the first air he had felt move anywhere on the slope. Andy thought of the doorframe in the ruins, standing in the rubble with nothing on either side of it, and Emi’s hand on the latch, and the Forest’s blue twilight beyond it smelling of moss. The way home. Laura on the path. Every part of him had wanted to go through that one. And he had known he couldn't.

This doorway he had come looking for. The blue had brought him to it. This was the palace.

They’ll make sense later, Laura had said, with her fork in her hand. They always do. She had believed that at the table, both of her, and she was somewhere above him now, afraid, with no way of knowing whether any of it had made sense yet. He was terrified too , for her, for all of the others. There was no telling her. He could only go on and make it true.

He hoped he was right. He hoped it the way he had told Emi and Claire and Dawn, in the ruins, that this might be the only way through. He reached for Laura one more time. Right here, and farther than he had words for. Afraid, as high as the bond could carry it.

Andy settled the sword at his hip and stepped over the threshold.