The Heart of the Twelve

The corridor went on through the oldest of this world’s rooms, and for a long time Andy didn’t see any of them.

They passed at the edge of his eye on both sides. Mud brick, reed, lamplight. The same few years over and over, in no order he could follow. Scarlet kept appearing in some of these rooms, and Andy wondered just how long Arabella had loved her. But there were many other scenes. A woman knelt at a grinding stone with her sleeves pushed up. A doorway was hung with a striped cloth. Then the woman at the stone again, three rooms on, older or younger; he couldn’t have said which. Somewhere inside the walls a dog barked. The torches burned white and level overhead. The light from the memories lay across the floor in low brown squares, and here and there it ran a little way out over the stone and stopped short, as if it had come as far as it was allowed.

In his mind, he was still in the hall at the bottom of the stair. The memory sat in his chest now, heavy and particular, as if someone had set a stone there and walked off. Nothing he did would shift it.

Horun walked at his side. Since the stair he hadn’t once gone on ahead, half a step in front, where he usually walked; he kept to Andy’s pace instead, with the white half of his robe on the side nearest him. His bare feet made no sound on the stone. He hadn’t said a word. Now and then he glanced into one of the rooms as he passed it—not for long, only as a man glances at a house he used to know.

Andy’s were the only footsteps in the corridor. His shoes, and the small knock of the scabbard against his thigh, and the swish of the mantle against the floor.

“Is it like that everywhere?” Andy said. His voice came out rough from going unused. Horun slowed, and turned his head, and waited.

“In Seshat’s hall,” Andy said. “Thoth wrote the guy’s name down, and that was it. He was theirs. And then Dumuzid—” He stopped, and started the thought over from the other end. “Arabella told me about him. On the beach. She said he asked her to remember his name, because he didn’t want to vanish. That’s what he asked her for. And then he went down there and wrote it in their book himself.”

“Yes,” Horun said.

“She said she never understood why he trusted her with Anna.” Andy could hear the rest of it, the short laugh she’d given and the water behind it. “She said she was just the engine behind the story. I told her maybe he figured she was the only part that would last.”

Horun was quiet for a few steps.

“She did last,” he said.

“So is that how it works?” Andy asked. “Everywhere? Somebody writes your name in a book, and then you’re theirs?”

Horun considered it. They walked on a few steps while he did. “Every afterlife I know of keeps a book of its dead,” Horun said. “One kind or another. You’ve seen two of them now.” The corner of his mouth moved. “And bureaucracy plagues every one of them.”

Andy laughed.

He hadn’t expected to. It came out short and surprised and much too loud for the corridor, and in the room on his left the woman at the grinding stone went on grinding without looking up. Horun’s face moved no further than that one corner. He didn’t look away, either, and for a second the corridor was only a corridor, and they were two men walking down it.

“Claire would love that,” Andy said. “She’d want to see the forms. All of them. In triplicate.”

He could see her doing it, too: the notebook open on her knee, three pens in a row beside it, her tail flicking once, hard, at the word plagues.

Horun inclined his head, as if he could well believe it.

Andy let himself keep it a moment longer, the first easy thought he’d had about any of them in hours. Then it went, as quickly as it had come, and the hall was still there underneath it where it had been all along—the long stair, the cold, and Alla’s face on the seat.

“She took Anna down there,” Andy said. “Arabella told me that, too. Alla won her season and wished to be a goddess, and the Curse took Anna up with her whether she wanted it or not. And then Alla took her down. By force.” He heard Arabella’s voice under his own, low and even, with her eyes black on the water. “Because Abi-Eshu was still alive, and Alla thought Anna wasn’t safe. I asked her if Alla had really kidnapped her own sister, and she said, ‘Exactly.’ Just that.”

Horun walked, and listened.

“And she said, ‘That’s the part Alla never forgave. She made her own heaven, but brought Anna in chains, and Anna hated her for it.’” Andy’s hands had come up in front of him to hold the shape of it. He let them drop. “And Dumuzid was Anna’s husband. They’d only just gotten married, before the island. He went down so she could come up.”

“Yes,” Horun said.

“And Ama-Bila had already been down there once,” Andy said. “For Anna, the first time. Arabella said she tried to reason, and she tried to cheat, and it was like arguing with physics. Nothing moved. So she comes all the way down there again, and asks for one thing. Anna’s husband back. And Alla says no. She keeps him.” He shook his head slowly. “She keeps him from Anna for good. And she had to know what that would do. Whatever was still left between the two of them, after all of it—she had to know it’d break.”

Horun did not answer at once. He walked on a few more steps first, his hands loose at his sides, and the brown light from the walls slid over the white half of his robe and off it again. “She knew,” Horun said, in the end. “She ruled anyway. The Law was hers to keep.” He let that stand. “It cost her her sister.”

He said it to the corridor ahead of him rather than to Andy, and his eyes stayed on the far end of it a little longer than they needed to.

Andy stopped walking. He hadn’t meant to; his feet simply quit on him. He stood in the middle of the corridor between two lit rooms with his hands hanging empty at his sides, as heavy as the rest of him, while a man in one of the rooms carried a jar across a courtyard, set it down, and carried it back. Andy couldn’t have said how long he stood there. Long enough for the jar to go across and back three times.

“Her sister,” Andy said. It came out barely above a breath.

Ama-Bila had gone all that way down to bring a man back to his wife. It was not the ruling that stayed with him, though, but the face of the woman who gave it. She hadn’t raised her voice once. She had told the one person who had come down to ask that the answer was no, in that flat, even voice, and the whole time her face had been doing what her voice wouldn’t. He had seen it plainly through Ama-Bila’s eyes. He didn’t think Ama-Bila had needed to see it to know.

Horun had stopped a little ahead and turned around. He did not come back for him. He stood where he was, and waited.

“They never made up,” Andy said. “Did they. Alla and Anna.” Nothing he had ever heard about the two of them said they had. “They’re still not speaking.”

Horun looked at him for a long moment, his strange eyes dark at the rims and silver at the center. “No,” he said. “They haven’t spoken in seven thousand years. Not a word, in all the time I lived after. And not anywhere in here.”

“Seven thousand years,” Andy said. Longer than anybody on his side of the water had been writing things down. He thought of Anna, the Anna he knew, and tried to fit that much silence inside her, and couldn’t make it go. In the room beside them a woman was laughing at something with her head thrown back, and none of it reached the corridor at all.

He had seen Alla twice out in the wasteland tonight before he ever saw the seat. Once on a reed mat among the paired women, crying too hard to finish a braid. And once on the floor of a mud-brick house beside her sister, with ash on her fingers, rubbing out the one mark that told the two of them apart before she went out of the door in Anna’s place.

“Those were hers too,” Andy said. “Out there. The girls on the reed mat, and the ash. Those were Ama-Bila’s.” He looked at the rooms on either side of them, the mud brick and the lamplight, the woman at her grinding stone. “So what’s the difference? Why are some of them out there, going round and round in the haze, and some of them in here?”

Horun considered the nearest room before he answered.

“In here she keeps what she lived and understood well enough at the time to put away,” he said. “Where it happened, what it was, what came of it.” He looked back at Andy. “Out there is what she saw and had nowhere to put. Love, mostly. People giving themselves up for one another. Small kindnesses nobody asked anyone for. She watched a great deal of that, in her early faces, and she couldn’t make sense of it. She was a long time learning what any of it was. In other people first.” He let a moment go. “In herself, last.”

“She couldn’t feel it?”

“That was never the limit,” Horun said. “Understanding was.”

Andy looked back up the corridor, toward the memory with the stair in it and the low hall at the bottom. “So the ruling, she could put away,” he said slowly. “The Law. That made sense to her.” He swallowed. “The ash, she couldn’t.”

“No,” Horun said. “None of us could. We weren't made for that. It took a long, long time for any of us to begin to understand.”

At the masquerade, before she ever told him she didn’t regret anything, she had said something else to him, with her cold hand in his and the bone-colored mask over the corner of her eye. You are not responsible, or culpable, for what is to come. He had taken it for a warning, that night, about himself. Now he turned it over and wondered whether anybody had ever once said it to her.

He stood with that for a while. The girl with the ash on her face, and the woman on the seat, and the voice at the masquerade that hadn’t bent once—he could hold all of them, he found, and none of them would sit still beside the others. He didn’t know which one to believe. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to pick.

Horun turned and walked on, into the brown light, without a word. After a moment Andy went with him, and the weight in his chest came too. Past the mud brick the walls changed again, and this time Andy didn’t know anything in them.

He had walked a long way down through the brown rooms with the weight still across his shoulders, not looking at much. It was still there. He had stopped rolling his shoulders against it some while back, as if they had agreed between them to carry it a little farther.

He saw it first as light. A little way ahead, the rooms on both sides stopped being brown and became colors he had no names for—not the gold of a lamp or the white of any sun he had ever stood under, but the kind of light that made his eyes want to slide off it and look somewhere else. It spilled out across the corridor floor in long shapes that didn’t match the openings they came from. There were skies in there, and rooms. He couldn’t make any of them into anything he recognized.

Horun stopped before they reached them.

He stopped at the last of the brown rooms, the last memory on the left, and stood beside its sill with his hands loose at his sides. The light from the strange rooms farther on lay across his bare feet and didn’t seem to touch them. He did not look at those rooms at all.

“This is the day Anna came back up,” Horun said.

Andy came and stood beside him, and looked in.

Daylight. Open ground, pale and dry, under a high white sky. In the middle of it a dark mouth went down into the earth, square-cut, with the top steps of a stair just showing inside it, and dust lying on the steps. Andy had walked down that stair not long ago, inside her. Or one like it. A figure stood a little way back from the mouth of it, with its back to the corridor. He couldn’t see it properly—only a shape against the light, its arms at its sides.

He had this one already. He had it word for word.

He found me at the gate, and told me he intended to go in. Arabella’s voice on the beach, low, with the islands out on the water in front of them. I told him he was a fool. I told him I’d find another way, I would lay waste to Alla’s underworld if I had to, but he said he had already made up his mind. And then: He stepped through, and she came out, holding the Edict that allowed her passage. And then the part she had mimed for him, her hands coming up as if to hold someone by the shoulders. When Anna saw me, she didn’t say anything. She just put her hands on my shoulders, and—she pressed her forehead to mine.

That was the first time I felt what humans call grief.

“She told me about this one,” Andy said. “On the beach. She said it was the first time she ever felt anything like that.” He swallowed. “She said Anna gave it to her.”

Horun said nothing. He looked at the shape against the light, and waited. Andy stood at the sill a moment longer than he needed to. He already had the end of this one. He wanted, a little, not to find out what it felt like from inside.

Then he stepped over.

He was standing on the open ground, and the body he was in already hurt. The sun was on the back of her neck. The air was dry and smelled of dust and of nothing else, and the ground under her feet was hard and faintly warm. Her breath went in shallow and stopped short every time, as if there were no more room for it.

He had braced himself for whatever Anna would bring. He hadn’t braced for this, for there to be anything here before she came. It was in the throat first: a tightness there, high and hard, as if the throat had closed around something and couldn’t get it up or down. Then the face. Her face was wet. He could feel it on both cheeks, cooling in the dry air, and more coming, slowly, without any sound at all. Her hands hung at her sides. They did not move to wipe anything. They did not move at all.

She was looking at the dark mouth in the ground. Everything else went soft at the edges—the pale ground, the sky, a low line of something that might have been a wall or might have been hills—and only the mouth stayed sharp.

A man had just gone down it. Andy had it from the beach, and he had it now from the body, which was still facing the place where the man had gone.

The dust on the top step moved. A sound came up out of the dark after it, late and small: footsteps on stone, from a long way below.

Someone was coming up. A head first, dark-haired, then shoulders, climbing out of the dark into the white light one step at a time, not hurrying. A woman, with dust to the knee and dust in the folds of her dress. She had something held flat against her chest in both hands. The Edict, Andy thought; Arabella had said she came out holding it. She reached the top of the stair and stood on the open ground and turned her face toward the body Andy was in.

It was Anna’s face, streaked with tears through the dust. Her own face, the one Andy knew, with nothing at the corner of her eye.

She looked at Ama-Bila for a long moment. She did not say anything. She came across the ground, tucked the thing she was holding under one arm, and put both hands on Ama-Bila’s shoulders. Andy felt them land. Warm hands, through cloth. Then she stepped in close and pressed her forehead to Ama-Bila’s.

Andy waited. He waited for it as Arabella had told it—for something to come across from Anna into her. He held still inside the body and waited for it to arrive.

Nothing came. The ache was there. It had been there before Anna came up out of the ground. It was there now, with her forehead warm against Ama-Bila’s and her breath on Ama-Bila’s face. It was no larger. It was no different. The throat was as tight as it had been. The face was as wet.

Then Anna stepped back, and Andy saw the grief in her face. Ama-Bila lifted one hand. It came up slowly and touched the wet on her own cheek, and stayed there. She meant to find out what it was.

The light went.

He was standing in the corridor beside Horun, and the open ground lay behind them in its own small square of daylight, far off, with two figures in it no bigger than his thumb. Andy’s hand had come up to his own face. He didn’t remember lifting it. His cheek was dry under his fingers, and he stood there with his hand on it anyway, as she had.

“It was already there,” he said. He said it to nobody in particular. “Before she touched her. It was already there.”

Horun did not answer. Andy took his hand down and looked at it. Then he put his shoulder to the wall beside the sill, because his legs wanted something to lean on, and let them have it.

Arabella had always told it as though Anna had given her a heart. She gifted me a tiny piece of herself, a kernel around which I built myself. At the end of that morning on the beach she had said it again, with her eyes back on the islands: Anna, and all the others afterwards who changed me and helped me grow, gave me the ability to be inside what I do. Not just to run it from above, but to care. She had believed it. She believed it now. Maybe Anna believed it too. He had heard it in her voice.

But he had been inside her before Anna came up the stair, and the grief had been there already. Her own words for it, even. Wanting something and knowing it would never come back. Her throat had held exactly that, while she stood staring at the hole in the ground a man had just gone down. Anna hadn’t put it there. Anna had only been the first person to stand close enough for her to notice it.

It hadn’t made the grief. It had let her see it.

That was never the limit, Horun had said in the corridor, about the things out in the haze she’d had nowhere to put. Understanding was. Andy had taken it for something about the shades. It reached further back than that.

Arabella had never called anything she felt by that name, either, not that he’d heard. On the terrace, with her hands spread on the glass and the eleven islands strung out on the water, she had told him and Claire what it was like when her brothers and sisters ended. We didn’t grieve properly, I think, because it didn’t feel like death. It felt like she had been distributed. And then she had told them how she and Aru-Thes used to meet at the edge of their waters when the seasons changed, to trade pieces of the ones who were gone. It was the closest thing we had to a funeral. On the beach she had named the islands to him one by one and said it was the only time it felt like they were still there.

She had called it everything but what it was.

He thought of her on the beach that same morning, explaining what she had been made to be. Not as a person. As a function. A memory array with a blank face. A drive to watch the game and referee it. The function had gone down into the dark for Anna, and stayed, and tried everything, and come back up with nothing. It had stood on that open ground with its face wet before anybody gave it anything.

Whatever she had been made to be, she had stopped being it long before Anna ever came up those stairs. Care, and love, and regret, and sorrow. All of it hers already.

And she didn’t know. All the time since, and as far as he could tell she still believed someone had handed it to her. Maybe she needed to. He pushed off the wall and looked at Horun. Farther on, the strange light shifted on the floor without anything there to shift it.

“She doesn’t know,” Andy said. “She thinks Anna gave it to her. She told me so. She told me she was shaped by it. By Anna’s grief. That’s the word she used—shaped, like she was clay until then and Anna molded her. But it was already in there. I felt it. She was standing there crying before Anna ever came up the stairs.”

Horun turned his head and looked back down the corridor at the small square of daylight, at the two figures in it.

“My sister never knew it,” he said. “Not in all the time I knew her.” He was quiet for a moment. “She won’t hear it from me.”

Andy looked at him, and Horun looked back at him, steadily, and said nothing more.

“She touched her own face,” Andy said after a while. His voice wasn’t quite steady, and he let it not be. “Right at the end. Like she didn’t know what it was.”

Horun inclined his head, once. Behind them the square of daylight had gone still. The two small figures stood in it without moving, one with her hand still raised to her face.

Then Horun turned and walked on a few steps past the sill, to where the strange light began, and stopped. Andy came after him and saw what he had stopped for. A stair went down into the floor there.

It hadn’t been there a moment ago, or he hadn’t seen it. It was plain stone, steep and narrow, no wider than his shoulders, and it went straight down through the corridor floor with no rail and no turning, farther than he could see. The white torchlight reached a little way into it and gave up.

“It’s a shortcut,” Horun said. “If you walked through all of Ama-Bila’s memories, it would take you years. They go back through every world she ran before this one, and before that one, all the way to the first. At the start of each new world there’s a way like this. Straight down to the Heart.”

Andy looked at the steps, and then at the strange light spilling out of the rooms beyond, and then back at the steps.

“The Heart?”

“Where the twelve of us met.” Andy waited for more. Horun gave him the small tilt of the head that meant there was more, and that it would keep. “You’ll see it when we’re standing in it,” Horun said.

Andy breathed out through his nose. He looked down the stair again, at the dark it went into, and settled Caledfwlch at his hip so it wouldn’t catch.

“After you,” he said. “You’re the one who walks in front.”

The corner of Horun’s mouth moved, in what Andy had come to realize was as close as he would come to a smile. He gathered his robe in one hand, the white half and the black, and started down. Andy followed him.

---

The stair went down a long way.

It was steep enough that Andy kept one hand on the wall the whole time, and narrow enough that the scabbard brushed stone on the other side whenever he turned his hip. Horun went ahead of him without touching anything, his robe gathered in one hand, his bare feet finding each step without looking down, every worn place where he expected it to be. The steps were hollowed in the middle, smooth as river stone. Andy started counting somewhere early on and lost the number before he had gone far. The light from the top never seemed to get any smaller behind them. His breath was loud in the narrow space, and Horun’s made no sound at all.

At the bottom the stair let out into a short corridor, plain and unlit, with no memories in its walls. It ran a dozen steps and ended in a doorway.

Andy looked back once, before he went through.

There was only wall. No corridor behind him, no stair, no light coming down from anywhere. Just the plain stone, close enough to touch, as if he had been standing with his back to it all along. He put his hand flat on it. It was cool, and it was there, and it didn’t give.

Horun had already gone through the doorway. Andy followed him.

The hall on the other side was small, a room he could have crossed in a dozen strides. It had twelve sides, and a pillar stood at every corner where two walls met, plain and pale. The torches burned in iron brackets between the pillars, and their flames went up white and slow, like smoke, with the same cool light as the hall of the twelve corridors and no heat at all.

In the middle stood a table with twelve sides, dark and plain and worn pale along its edges where hands had rested on it, and at each side, a tall chair.

Ten of the chairs were taken.

The people in them were talking. Andy saw that before anything else, and it stopped him in the doorway. Five men and five women, and every one of them was in the middle of something: leaning in, turning to a neighbor, laughing with a head thrown back. A woman had half risen out of her chair to point at something across the table. A man was counting on his fingers. And none of it made a sound. Not the laugh, not the scrape of a chair, not a single word. It was like watching a room through thick glass, or a film with the sound turned all the way down.

Their hair was black on one side and white on the other, and their robes were split down the middle black and white, like Horun’s. Amabilis had worn the same at the reception, when he crossed the room to her and she told him that two seasons did not share a clock.

Two of the chairs stood empty, with one of the women sitting between them.

None of the ten looked at Andy, or at Horun. They looked at each other.

He didn’t need anybody to tell him who they were. He had stood on the terrace with Claire’s hand in his and watched Arabella look out at eleven dark islands, one for each of them. He didn’t know a single one of these faces. He could see what he was looking at, though, and it went into him under the ribs before he understood why. This was how they had been. All of them at one table, talking over each other, somebody always laughing. Before they started to end, one at a time, and left her with the islands.

He hadn’t expected that to be worse than if they had sat still.

Horun walked in among them more slowly than Andy had ever seen him walk anywhere, and stopped a little way inside the room. His eyes went round the table from one face to the next, and didn’t skip any of them.

“This is the Heart,” he said. “It’s where the twelve of us met. It was the only place we could be a family.”

“She never told me about this place,” Andy said. It came out low. “Not once.”

“No,” Horun said. “She wouldn’t have.”

Andy looked at the table. The woman who had half risen out of her chair had sat down again, still talking, and the woman in white beside her had a hand on her arm. Across from them a man reached for a cup without looking, and his neighbor pushed it into his hand before he found it.

“What are they?” Andy said. “Up in the Liminal there were shades. They went round the same few steps over and over, as if somebody had wound them up. These aren’t doing that.” At the far side of the table one of the men leaned over and said something into his neighbor’s ear, and the neighbor shoved him away, grinning. “Are they memories? Hers, or yours?” He made himself say the rest of it. “Or is it them? Is this what’s left of them?”

Horun stood looking at the table for a while before he answered. “There’s no word for it in your language,” he said, softly. “Every word you have would be wrong somewhere. I won’t give you a wrong one.”

“But you know.”

“Yes,” Horun said.

“They can’t see me,” Andy said. “Can they? You can. They haven’t looked up once since we came in.”

“They aren’t looking for you,” Horun said. His eyes went from the table to the two chairs that stood empty, and came back. “They’re waiting.”

Andy didn’t ask who for. He was afraid he already knew.

He went to the chairs, and Andy went with him.

“We sat in the order we were made,” Horun said. He didn’t touch the first empty chair; he went past it, and stopped behind the woman who sat beside it. “This is Reh-Iori. She was the second. Hers was the first name I ever gave anyone.” He looked down at the back of her head. “She sang while she worked, and she worked all the time.”

Andy had heard the name once before, on the beach, in a sound Arabella made that was almost English and not quite. He had carried it since without knowing the first thing about her.

Reh-Iori’s lips were moving. She had a cup in her hands, turning it slowly, and her head was tipped a little to one side, and Andy could have sworn she was singing.

“What did she sing?” Andy asked.

“Whatever came into her head. She never sang anything the same way twice. We used to love listening to her songs.”

Then Reh-Iori turned toward the empty chair on her other side—quickly, as you turn to tell someone a thing you know they’ll like—and stopped, with her mouth open on it. Her face changed. Then she turned back to the table, and said something to one of the men across from her.

Andy blinked. When he looked again she was only turning the cup. He had imagined it. He was tired, and it was late, and he had been down here a long time.

Horun went past the second empty chair without a word, without looking at it. He stopped at the next one.

“This is Aru-Thes,” he said. “People called him Aten once. The sun’s eye. He hated the rules and he hated the games, and he was terrible at both, and everyone forgave him for it. If they had let him, he’d have spent every season he ever ran at the edge of the sea.” His voice didn’t change, but he stood there a moment longer than he needed to. “Ama-Bila liked him best of all of us, and everyone knew it. I knew it too. I never minded. My brother was easy to like.”

The man in the chair was leaning back, one arm hooked over the chair’s high back, grinning at something somebody had said. Horun’s hand came up a little from his side, toward that shoulder, and stopped short of it, and went back down.

“She told us about him,” Andy said. “Me and Claire. On the terrace. She said his name meant the sun’s eye. Or the bright wound. She said he hated it.”

“He did. He answered to it anyway.”

“His island’s the one furthest left,” Andy said. “With the ridge along it like a sleeping dragon. She said he told her he’d haunt it when he was gone, so nobody would ever forget it was his.”

“That sounds like him,” Horun said. “When he went, there were two of us left. Her and me.”

He moved on.

“This is Tir-Eph.” Andy had that one twice. Arabella had said it to him in the Inner Gardens, weeks before the beach—a few of their names in a list, almost in passing, as if they were towns he would never visit.

“He kept count of everything,” Horun said. “Steps, stars, the days left in a season. He never once lost his place. Every time we came down here, he counted us before anyone sat. As if one of us might have slipped away without telling him. We never did.”

Tir-Eph was doing it now. His finger went round the table, touching the air in front of each face in turn, his lips moving with it. Andy watched it travel the whole way round. At the empty chair between Reh-Iori and Aru-Thes it stopped—and hung there, for no longer than a breath. Then it went on.

Andy looked away. He was seeing things. He had to be. “I lost count on the stairs,” he said. His voice wasn’t steady. “Somewhere near the top.”

“He wouldn’t have,” Horun said, fondly.

At the next chair a man had his head thrown back, his shoulders shaking, one hand slapping the table without a sound. “Is-Khar,” Horun said, and something in his face eased. “He laughed louder than any of us, and at worse jokes. Usually his own. He was the one who could make her laugh when she didn’t think she could.” A pause. “When he finished, a piece of that laugh came to me. I could hear it, and there was nobody making it. I missed him more than I knew how to say.”

Andy looked at the silent laughing man for a long moment. “I’d have liked him,” he said.

“He’d have liked you,” Horun said. “He liked anybody who’d laugh with him.”

The next man sat back a little from the rest, his hands folded, watching the others talk. He turned his head to whoever was speaking, and then to whoever answered, and said nothing himself.

“This is Es-Kam,” Horun said. “He was the quiet one. He’d be down here first, every time, in that chair, before any of the rest of us came. He listened to all of us. I don’t think any of us ever told him something he hadn’t already worked out. He was the smartest of us all.”

Es-Kam’s eyes went round the table, from face to face, as if he were making sure of each of them. Andy watched them, waiting for them to reach the empty chair beside Aru-Thes, and then made himself stop waiting.

Horun moved on, and Andy went with him. His shoes were loud on the stone. He tried to set them down more quietly and couldn’t, and after a few steps he gave up trying. None of the ten turned to look. Behind them Es-Kam had leaned forward and said something at last, and every face at the table had turned to him.

At the next chair a man was leaning across the corner of the table toward the woman beside him, his cupped hands held out to her, as though there were something in them she ought to see.

“This is Hien,” Horun said. “He walked every road there was, in every world we went to. He always came back with something in his hands for whoever was waiting. A stone. A seed. A word nobody had heard yet. He would bring presents to us, whenever he would see something worth it. My sister loved listening to his stories.”

The woman beside him was bending to look into Hien’s hands, smiling already, the way you smile at someone who has never once come home with nothing. Andy looked too. “They’re empty,” he said, before he could stop himself.

Horun did not answer. He stood behind the chair a while, looking at the same thing Andy was looking at.

Andy’s own hand had gone to his chest, to the breast pocket under the mantle, where Laura’s letter sat folded against his heart. He was carrying something back, too. He didn’t know yet whether anyone at the other end of it would be able to hold out their hands for it. He let his hand fall.

“This is Anor,” Horun said, behind the woman who was still smiling into Hien’s empty hands. “The first of us to finish. She kept a courtyard full of jasmine, and anyone could sit in it.”

The island, at least, Andy could place: low and flat, near the edge of what you could see from the terrace, so close to the water it was barely there.

“She told me about the courtyard,” he said. “On the terrace. She said the morning Anor went, she was standing in her own garden, and all of a sudden she knew the smell of that courtyard as if she had been standing in it all her life. Stone and jasmine.” He gave Horun the last of it as it had come to him. “She said, ‘Hers. I had no right to it.’”

“Anyone could sit in it,” Horun said. “We all did, from time to time. Anor welcomed everyone.”

He said it as a plain fact about a courtyard, not as a correction, and then he went on looking at Anor. Andy thought of Arabella in her own garden with somebody else’s jasmine coming up around her out of nowhere, telling herself she had no right to it. He could almost smell it himself—sun-warm stone, and something sweet over it—though he was only making it up.

“None of us knew what finishing was, until her,” Horun said. “Nobody had ever done it. One morning she was gone, and within the hour she was in all of us. I was in the middle of a season, with a room full of people waiting for me to speak, and all I could think of was jasmine. I didn’t have a word for what I felt. I had a long time afterward to learn one.”

At the next chair a woman sat with one hand resting on the arm of the woman beyond her, lightly, as if to keep her where she was. It was the woman in white.

“This is Va-Tihs,” Horun said.

“She’s the one who wouldn’t be cruel,” Andy said.

“Yes.” Horun let a moment go by, softly. “She was the gentlest of us. She argued for every kinder way there was, every time, with anyone who’d listen. Her first Producers were kind. The ones who came after them wanted her to be cruel, and she bore it a long time. Then she ended her contract instead. I understood why she did it.” His voice stayed level, and it cost him something to keep it there; Andy could see that much. “I wanted her to stay anyway. We all did. We missed her every day since.”

Andy looked at her robe. Up close the black in it was no more than a thread, running down the seam from her shoulder to the hem.

“Hers is white,” he said. “Nearly all of it.”

“It wasn’t, when she was made,” Horun said. “We were all made the same, half and half. Hers went over a little at a time, one season and the next, every time she chose the kinder way.” He looked at the dark thread at her seam. “Nobody made her to do that.”

“She said she felt her go,” Andy said. “Right through her sternum, like a tuning fork struck against bone. She said she’d spend the rest of her contract hearing the silence where Va-Tihs had been.” He looked at the hand resting so lightly on the other woman’s arm. “Her island has a tree on it. One big dark tree. You can see it from the terrace, even that far out.”

Horun said nothing to that. After a while he moved on.

The woman under Va-Tihs’s hand was the one who had half risen out of her chair when they came in. She was half up again, leaning on the table, pointing at something on the far side of the room and talking fast.

“This is Aende,” Horun said. “She couldn’t sit still. In every new world she was first out the door, dragging Hien with her, and back again before the rest of us had found our feet, to tell us what was out there.”

Andy almost smiled. It didn’t get very far. More than a hundred thousand seasons, Arabella had told him on the beach, and she had lost count after that—and Aende first out the door in every one of them. Here she kept getting halfway out of her chair, and every time, somebody’s hand was there to keep her in it.

“This is Haet.” The last woman sat with her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands, listening to Aende with her head on one side. “She mended things. A cup. A quarrel. A season gone wrong. She comforted us all when the first of us began to go.”

A season gone wrong. Andy thought of Greg’s season, the one Arabella had called her deepest regret, the one at the center of everything she couldn’t undo. Haet had been gone a long time by then. There had been nobody left to sit down beside Arabella and mend it.

“I could have used her,” Andy said quietly.

“We all did,” Horun said.

Then there was nowhere further to go round the table but the chair beside Haet’s, standing empty, and the woman next to it, and the empty chair past her.

Horun stopped. He did not stand behind either of them.

Andy looked from one empty chair to the other, with Reh-Iori singing between them. He knew, but e asked anyway, because he wanted to hear it said. “Whose are these?”

Horun did not point. He looked.

“That one is mine,” Horun said. “I was first.” He looked past Reh-Iori, at the other. “That one is my sister’s. She was the third.”

“With Reh-Iori in the middle,” Andy said. The first three of them ever made: two empty chairs, and her singing between them.

“Somebody had to sit between us,” Horun said, with a wistful smile. “Reh-Iori used to say so. Often.” He was quiet for a long moment. Around the table the meeting went on without a sound—Is-Khar wiping his eyes, Aende up out of her chair again, Hien holding his empty hands out across the table to Haet now—and Horun stood at the edge of it with nobody turning to him. When he spoke again it was to the table, not to Andy.

“I watched every one of them made,” he said. “I gave every one of them a name. And then I watched every one of them go. Each time, what they’d carried came into the rest of us. Their mornings. Their roads. Is-Khar’s laugh. Anor's jasmine. Va-Tihs’s kindness. It never got easier. I thought it would, and it didn’t. Sometimes it felt like a curse, to get their memories, because the wounds stayed open. But I missed every one of them, more than I can say.”

Andy didn’t say anything. He didn’t think he was supposed to.

He looked at the table. Each place was worn a little differently: a shallow hollow where an elbow had rested, a pale ring where the same cup had stood season after season. Reh-Iori had set her cup down on its ring, a plain one, much used, and was singing with her hands free.

It was the only place we could be a family. Andy had heard that as a way of speaking. They had been made to run a game, and bound to it, and he had seen for himself what the game did to people. Inside everything they were bound to, they had found this room.

“At the end there were two of us,” Horun said. “Her and me. Half of them each, more or less, and neither of us trusted ourselves to carry it alone. She’d come to the edge of my water, or I’d go to hers, and we’d hold them up between us. Tir-Eph’s counting. Hien’s stories. Va-Tihs’s voice, Is-Khar’s laughter. So that neither of us had to keep any of it by ourselves.” His hands had closed at his sides, and he looked down at them as if he had only just noticed. “And then I finished, and she had all of it. Every one of us. And nobody left to hold it up with.”

He looked at her empty chair. “And now it’s her turn,” he said. His voice had a slight hitch. “I carried half of everything for her, once. I can’t carry any of this. There’s nothing I can do for her.” His voice went, then, for the first time Andy had ever heard it go, and he waited for it, and it came back lower. “I would give anything I had left to be able to.”

Andy found he couldn’t speak. He stood beside him and couldn’t do anything about that, either.

His eyes had begun to sting. He kept them on her empty chair, because that was easier than Horun’s face.

On the terrace she had told him there was no one left to call, and he had taken it for a single morning. I have not spoken any of their names aloud until today, she had said. Horun had given every one of them a name. He hadn’t thought about the years before that morning: Anor first, then the others, one at a time, and the table a little quieter at every meeting.

“I’m sorry,” he said, when he could.

Horun inclined his head. He didn’t say anything else, and Andy didn’t ask him to. Across the table Is-Khar was telling something with both hands, and the near side of the table was laughing before he got to the end of it, and none of it reached either of them.

Between the two empty chairs Reh-Iori had stopped singing. She was looking at the chair beside her, the one that was Arabella’s, with her mouth still a little open on whatever she had been singing. On its other side, Aru-Thes had taken his arm down off his chair back and was leaning toward it too, as if he had been about to make room.

Then they both turned back to the table, and Reh-Iori’s lips moved again, and Aru-Thes laughed at something without a sound. Andy told himself it was the light. He didn’t believe it, and he didn’t know what else to believe instead.

The quiet settled back over the room as though nothing had been said in it at all.

Andy stood beside Horun’s empty chair and made himself look away from the table. He looked at the walls instead, twelve of them, plain and pale, with a pillar at every corner. He looked at the doorway he had come in by, which wasn’t there. There was only the wall where it had been. He had known that since the bottom of the stair. He looked anyway.

He hadn’t come down here for this room. He had come for the Gate.

He had worked that much out up in the corridor, with Horun standing in front of him saying yes. Whatever was left of the First Gate was in her. All of it, everything the twelve of them had been made of, come down to her one death at a time. And she kept her oldest things at the bottom. Horun had said so. There was nothing older than this room. There was nothing under it.

His hand had gone to the hilt of the sword without his asking it to. He took it away.

“Horun. I’m sorry. I know this is hard, but I don’t have much time. Where is it?” Andy said.

Horun turned his head.

“The First Gate.” Andy’s voice was too loud for the room, and he brought it down. “You said she keeps her oldest things at the bottom. This is the bottom. So where is it?”

Horun looked at him for a long moment before he answered. He did not look at the chairs, or at the walls, or at anything but Andy. “This is the threshold,” he said. “I can’t take you any further than this.”

Andy heard it, and for a second he didn’t understand any of it but the last part.

“You’re not coming,” he said. It wasn’t a question. Horun did not answer it as one. He stood with his hands loose at his sides, as he had stood at the edge of every room Andy had stepped into tonight, and waited. “Then tell me where it is.” Andy heard his own voice climb, and couldn’t stop it. “You don’t have to come. Just— point me at it. Tell me which wall.”

“That isn’t mine to give you,” Horun said.

Andy opened his mouth to argue and found there was nothing to argue with. Horun had never once told him a thing that wasn’t so. He had never pretended to more than he had, either, and when he left something out he said he was leaving it out. He was saying it now.

For a second Andy was angry anyway, at the room and the stone and whatever rule had put the edge here and nowhere else. Then it went out of him, because none of it was Horun’s.

“Okay,” Andy said. He swallowed. “Okay. Then this is— this is where you stop.”

There were things he hadn’t asked. He had stopped asking what Horun was a long way back up, and he found he didn’t want to ask it now, at the end, with the answer probably still no.

Horun looked at him a while longer. His strange eyes were dark at the rims and silver at the center, and they stayed on Andy’s face as if he meant to keep it.

“Andy,” he said.

Horun had never once said it before. Andy hadn’t noticed until now. Ama-Bila’s boy, he had called him, the first time they met. Andy had stopped expecting anything else.

“My sister chose well. Take heart. Believe. And when you return, send my sister my love,” Horun said. “Tell her we’ll all be waiting for her.”

Andy’s throat closed. He stood there and couldn’t get anything past it. He breathed in, and it caught, and he breathed in again. “I will,” he said. It came out cracked down the middle. “I’ll— I will. I’ll tell her. Every word.” He had every word already. He always would. “I will remember everything you told me. About you, all of you. I won’t forget any of this. Thank you. For all of it. For—” He couldn’t find the end of it, and then he could. “For walking in front.”

The corner of Horun’s mouth moved.

He looked at Andy a moment more—his face, the circlet with the blue rose in it, the mantle, the sword—as if he were making sure of where everything had been put. Then he stepped past him to his own chair, the first of them, between Haet’s and Reh-Iori’s. He put his hand on the back of it, and drew it out from the table, unhurried, and sat down in it. He gathered his robe under him, the white half and the black. He laid his hands on the table in front of him, one beside the other, flat.

Reh-Iori turned to him. She said something without a sound, with the small, easy smile of someone talking to a brother who has only stepped out for a moment and come back, and slid her cup across the table to him. On his other side Haet lifted her chin off her hands and leaned toward him to listen.

Horun turned his head toward Reh-Iori. Andy couldn’t have said what happened then. Nothing did, that he could point to. Horun leaned in toward the table as the others leaned in. His lips moved, and nothing came out of them. His face had gone easy. He was one of them, at their table, listening to Reh-Iori sing.

Andy waited for him to turn back. He did not.

“Horun,” Andy said.

Horun’s eyes stayed on Reh-Iori. His hands stayed flat on the table. Across from him Is-Khar threw his head back at something, and the near side of the table laughed with him without a sound, and Horun’s shoulders moved as if he had laughed too.

“Horun. Hey.” Andy took a step toward the chair. “Don’t— not yet. I’m still here. You don’t have to— I can wait. Just—” His voice went out from under him. He waited for it, and it came back thin. “Please.”

The corner of Horun’s mouth moved. It might have been something Reh-Iori had said.

Andy crouched beside the chair so he could see Horun’s face from below. The eyes were open, dark at the rims and silver at the center, and they were on Reh-Iori, or near her, and they did not come to him. His hand had come up, toward the shoulder of the white half of Horun’s robe. It stopped short. He held it there in the air a moment, an inch from the cloth, and then he took it back.

He couldn’t tell. He crouched there and looked up at Horun’s face, at the hair black on one side and white on the other, and he couldn’t tell whether Horun had become what the other ten were, or whether he had only sat down among them so that whatever happened next would be nothing he had done. I’ll show you the way. The walking will be yours. Either one could be true. Nothing in the room would say which.

Horun had told him once that he wouldn’t guess at what he didn’t know. Andy didn’t guess now. He let it be both. The torches burned. None of them looked at him, not the ten and not Horun. “Thank you,” he whispered, “for everything.”

After a while Andy stood, and stepped back from the chair. Then he started on the walls.

He went to the nearest one and put his hand flat on it and walked it to the corner, and round the pillar, and on along the next. Plain stone, cool and dry and seamless. He pressed where the doorway had been and found nothing there but wall, no joint, no hairline crack, no place that sounded different when he knocked on it. He went round every one of the twelve walls and every pillar, and felt the backs of the pillars where they met the stone, and looked up to where the walls went into the dark above the torches, and couldn’t see where they ended. There was no door, and no arch. It was not that the stone had closed over the doorway, but that as far as the stone was concerned there had never been one.

He got down on one knee and looked under the table. Plain floor, and the hems of their robes, and the legs of one empty chair. He stood up again.

“Hello?” he said to the room.

His voice didn’t echo. It went out from him a little way and stopped, and nothing answered it. It was the kind of quiet that took a sound and simply kept it.

He couldn’t have said how long all that took. Long enough for his palms to go cold from the stone. Not long enough for the walls to change.

He went round the table, slowly, behind the chairs, past all of them talking without a sound. Hien showing Anor something in his empty hands. Aende sitting for once, her chin on Va-Tihs’s shoulder. Horun among them now, leaning in. Then Reh-Iori, singing again, and the one chair still empty, and Aru-Thes beyond it with his arm along its back, and on round again. He went round a second time. Things had moved while his back was turned, as things move in any room full of people talking, and none of it had moved toward him.

He stopped behind Horun’s chair, where he had started, and stood still.

He reached for Laura without deciding to.

She was there. She was right here and impossibly far, both at once, as she had been all night, and she was afraid, at the very top of what the bond could carry. He would have given anything to send her one word down it. It would take where he was and how frightened he was, and nothing else, and he didn’t know how this room would even read to her. He held on to her a moment longer than he needed to.

However much more time he had down here than they had up there, it wasn’t endless.

He let her go, and made himself think.

The Gate was inside Arabella. He had worked that out himself, and Horun had told him yes. When I ended, everything I was carrying went to her. She kept her oldest things at the bottom, and he was at the bottom, and there was nothing under this floor.

On a bench in the Inner Garden, with the paths splitting away in front of them, Arabella had given him the law she had kept as Hecate. I could bring someone to the edge, lay out every road in their name, and never once take a step on their behalf. And: You can illuminate a crossing for a thousand years. You cannot cross it for anyone. And one more thing, said almost in passing: If you don’t walk your own path, the path vanishes behind you.

He looked at the wall where the corridor had been.

The day she first said First Gate to him, she had made it sound like a riddle, and he had told her so. The First Gate is a place that does not exist anymore, yet still exists if you know how to find it. Its absence is not the same as inaccessibility. And: You’ll know it when you see it. And in the same conversation, with her eyes fixed on his, she had told him there was one way through the Law, and that it had never been used. He had caught the exact moment she bent the rules just by mentioning it. It can only work if it is found and chosen freely, without suggestion or intervention by anyone who knows the rules.

Nobody who knew the rules was going to tell him anything now. Horun had brought him to the edge, and stopped there.

There was no way back up. There was no way on. He couldn’t climb, and he couldn’t dig, and there was no door to look for that he hadn’t already looked for.

The only way out was through.

He turned slowly where he stood and looked at the room again. The walls. The pillars. The table, and the eleven of them around it, talking, and the one chair nobody was sitting in.

There was nothing in this room that was hers except that.

He didn’t know what it would do. He didn’t know whether he was right, or what would happen to him if he wasn’t, or whether anything would happen at all. Maybe he would sit down at her table and nothing would happen, and he would still be at the bottom of a room with no door in it, one more figure at the table that nobody could hear. He thought of Laura at the top of her fear, and of Arabella on the terrace with her hands spread on the glass, and of the letter in his pocket that had to get back up into the light somehow.

He went round past Reh-Iori to the empty chair between her and Aru-Thes, and stood behind it.

It was no different from any of the others. Tall, plain, high-backed, set square to the table. She had sat here. In whatever face she’d had at the time, or before she had any face at all. Ama-Bila. He had promised her on the beach that he would remember her real name, too, and he did.

His heart was going hard. He let it.

He put his hand on the back of the chair and drew it out from the table.

It was heavier than it looked. The legs scraped on the stone, loud in all that quiet, and nobody at the table so much as turned. Caledfwlch knocked against the seat as he turned, and he reached down and moved the scabbard aside so it would hang clear. He pulled the mantle round. The folded letter crackled in his breast pocket as he bent.

Reh-Iori, at his elbow, went on singing without a sound. Two places along, Horun was leaning in to listen to her, and did not look up.

Andy sat down in Arabella’s chair.

Everything went black.