Nigredo: Non Est Finis

The corridor gave out under an arch, and the air changed before the light did. One step it was the Athanor’s air, warm and dry with a mineral edge to it, like the inside of a kiln someone had only just switched off. The next it was green and wet, and it smelled of cut stems.

With a name like the Preserved Garden, Summer had pictured a few plants in pots. This was not a few plants in pots. The vault went up and up. High in it a crystal glowed with a light that was doing a very good impression of the sun—warm, even, a little gold at the edges—and under it everything grew. Fig trees, their fruit split purple at the seams. Something with narrow gray-green leaves and small hard olives clustered along the twigs. A pomegranate bent low under its own weight. Thin rivulets of water ran across the floor in channels of pale stone, crossing and recrossing. In the branches overhead, birds she couldn’t see were singing as if somebody were paying them by the hour.

It looked, Summer thought, like the photo that comes inside a frame at the store, the one nobody ever takes out, because whoever staged it did a better job than you were ever going to.

They crossed the grass together. It was soft and springy as hotel carpet, and it gave under them and came back. Autumn’s step and hers fell into the easy rhythm they always found when neither of them was trying to steer. A rivulet crossed their path in its stone channel, no wider than a hand. They stepped over it without breaking stride.

Nebet-Hedj was at the far side, past the main channel, kneeling at a raised bed of dark soil boxed in old timber. A row of green cuttings stood in it, each about a hand high and evenly spaced. Beside the last of them she was working another one in, her thumbs pressing the earth down around its stem in short, firm strokes. Her bronze forearms were dark to the wrist with soil. Her silver eyes were on the soil and stayed there.

Summer slowed them a few paces short of the bed, without quite deciding to. Autumn let her.

“Hi,” Summer said. That sounded like a kid at a lemonade stand, so she tried again. “Hey. Hi, Nebet-Hedj.”

“Good afternoon, Summer.” The thumbs kept moving. “Autumn.”

“Good afternoon,” said Autumn.

Up close, the daytime Nebet-Hedj was exactly what Chiara had described at that first breakfast: polite, present, and somewhere else entirely. A house with every light on and nobody home. It had been hard to watch at a crowded table. Out here, with the birds going and the water running, it was just strange.

“Would it be okay if we sat for a bit?” Summer said. “We wanted to ask you something. A question. Two, actually, I guess. And you can totally say no, if you’d rather not. I mean that. We can just go.”

Nebet-Hedj firmed the last of the soil and laid her palms flat on the earth on either side of the cutting, to test whether it would stand. “The bed is mine,” she said. “The grass is anyone’s.”

They sat down together. With one pair of legs between two people that was a small negotiation every time, though by now it mostly negotiated itself—a bend, a lean, a shared drop onto the grass. Then they were down with their legs folded under them, a few paces from the bed, the channel running quietly between them and the soil.

“Okay,” Summer said, as the grass took their weight. “Best seat in the house.”

Somewhere in the fig branches a bird sang four notes, each a little lower than the one before it, and stopped.

“Do you come here a lot?” Summer asked.

“By day.” Nebet-Hedj kept her eyes on the soil. “It is quiet, and there is work for the hands.”

“Quiet’s good. We like quiet.”

“Summer doesn’t do quiet,” Autumn said.

“I do quiet. I just do it out loud.”

Autumn laid her right hand flat on the grass beside them and looked past Nebet-Hedj at the row of cuttings. Apart from those two lines she had been quiet since the corridor, the deep-water kind of quiet. Summer had lived beside it long enough to read it. Autumn had already said what she had to say, to Summer, and was waiting now to see whether Summer would say it out loud to anyone else.

Nebet-Hedj took a fresh cutting from a damp cloth beside her knee and laid it ready. With two fingers she began to open a hole for it in the soil, a careful little well beside the last stem in the row. She did it the way she seemed to do everything by day, without hurry and without pleasure.

Summer turned her hand over on her knee, palm up, and then back again.

The trouble was that she had rehearsed it in the corridor. In the corridor it had sounded like a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. Here, with the water ticking along its channel and the bird gone quiet in the tree, she could hear what it actually was: asking a woman who had been lifted out of her own tomb why she, of everyone, had been worth the lifting.

But that was the part Summer couldn’t leave alone. Adrien had been alive for twenty-three hundred years and change, if the stories at the table added up, and a man didn’t live that long without meeting a lot of women. He had loved some of them. A few were eating breakfast with him every morning. Amabilis had gone and fetched those, and you could at least see the thread that ran from him to each of them. Then she had gone to Ashcombe Vale for two people who had never laid eyes on him in their lives, and brought them too.

“This is going to be kind of a weird thing to ask you,” she said. “Like, objectively weird. I’m aware.”

“Ask,” said Nebet-Hedj.

“Okay.” Summer looked at the cutting on the cloth and not at the silver eyes, which weren’t on her anyway. “Out of all the women he’s—Adrien’s—known. In his whole life. Why you? Did she ever tell you? Amabilis, I mean.” Her hand turned over on her knee again. “Because with you, at least, there’s a reason you can point at. You knew him. We’d never even met the guy before she showed up in Ashcombe Vale. And I thought if anybody here would know how she… picks…”

She ran out of sentence. Autumn didn’t pick it up for her.

Nebet-Hedj took her fingers out of the soil. She sat back on her heels and rubbed her palms together until the dry grit fell away, then brushed the last of it from her fingers, one at a time, with the side of her thumb. Only then did she lift her eyes, to a point somewhere between the two of them.

“I can answer for myself,” she said. “Not for you.”

“That’s fine. That’s—yes. Okay.”

“I was made for what I must do.” Her voice was even and unhurried, a voice for reading out a list of supplies. “There is a rule on me, and I follow it, because that is what I was made for. In the house where I worked, each of the seventy days had its rule, and the body on the table did not need to agree with any of them. It only needed to be there.” She paused, and the water filled the pause. “Why the Host took me, and not another woman Andronikos knew, she has not said. Perhaps because he loved me. Perhaps because I was already in a tomb, and the dead are easy to carry. I do not know which. Why she took the two of you, I cannot say. That is beyond what I can see from here.”

Andronikos. It took Summer a second to remember that she meant Adrien.

Summer let out a breath. It came out closer to a laugh than she meant it to.

“Okay,” she said. “That’s—honestly, that’s the straightest answer anybody’s given us since we got here. Everybody else either knows and won’t tell us, or doesn’t know and won’t say so.”

“There is no reason to lie about it,” said Nebet-Hedj. “It would not change the rule.”

“No. I guess it wouldn’t.”

Summer’s shoulders came down a little. Not because the answer was good. It wasn’t, really: a rule nobody had asked her about, a Host who never gave reasons, and the bodies on the table didn’t get a vote. But she had said it like a person telling someone the stove was hot, with no interest at all in how they took it. After days of watching people choose their words around the two of them, that was almost restful.

She opened her mouth to ask what the rule was, and closed it again. It felt like reading somebody else’s mail over their shoulder.

Beside her, Autumn’s fingers had gone still on the grass. Summer could feel the attention in them, through the shared body, like someone leaning forward in the seat behind her at a movie.

After a moment, Autumn spoke. Her voice was low and level, and she was looking at Nebet-Hedj now, not at the cuttings.

“If you could go back to your life before the Athanor,” she said, “would you?”

Nebet-Hedj considered it. Her eyes stayed where they were, on nothing in particular. The water had time to fill the gap, and the birds overhead went on with whatever they were saying to each other.

“That question is for someone who wants,” she said. “To go back, you must want to be somewhere other than where you are. The woman sitting on this grass does not have that. If you handed it to her, she would not know where to put it.” She turned her right hand palm up on her knee—not a shrug, but something exact and almost courteous, as if showing them that it was empty. “The woman who comes at night would answer you differently.”

The woman who comes at night. She’d said nearly the same words at the Refectory table yesterday, about the long wait between her nights, and it had sounded like a ghost story then. It sounded like one now.

Autumn’s right hand closed on a fistful of grass and held on.

Summer turned the answer over and couldn’t make it lie flat. It was an answer—there was nobody here who wanted anything, so no. It was also a door shut very politely in their faces. The real answer was standing somewhere on the other side of it, in the keeping of a woman who wasn’t in the room. Summer had come in here wanting one of those two things. She found, sitting on the soft grass with her hand gone still on her knee, that she honestly couldn’t have said which.

“That’s still an answer,” Autumn said quietly.

“Yeah,” Summer said. “I guess it is.”

Nebet-Hedj picked up the cutting from the cloth. She bent to the bed again and set it into the well she had made beside the last stem. She drew the soil in around it with the edges of her hands and began to firm it with her thumbs, short even strokes, the same as before. Her eyes went back to the earth and stayed there. The row was one cutting longer, and every stem in it stood exactly as straight as the one beside it. Summer found herself counting them and stopped halfway. She had no idea how many there had been yesterday, and she didn’t want to ask that either.

In the fig tree above them, the bird sang again.

Four notes, falling. Summer heard the first and knew the rest before they came: each a little lower than the last, the final one clipped short in exactly the same place, as if somebody had set the whole thing back to the start and pressed play. That phrase, note for note. That bird, or one that sang exactly like it.

She looked at Autumn. Autumn was watching the cuttings again, her hand still closed on the grass.

Neither of them made any move to get up. With one pair of legs between them, that settled it for both. While Nebet-Hedj worked her thumbs into the soil at the end of the row, they stayed where they were, on the soft grass, a few paces from the bed.

---

The golem had walked half a step ahead of him the whole length of the corridor, and it had not once looked back to see whether he was following. It didn’t need to. Adrien could have stopped it with a word. He had let it lead him anyway, because a golem sent to fetch him was an answer of a kind and he wanted to see the question.

It brought him out onto the floor of the Athenaeum and stepped aside.

The late light came down through the crystal dome and lay across the long tables and the couches sunk in their hollows around the daises, honey-colored, unoccupied. Nobody was reading at the far table by the window. Nobody was playing anything. On the wall the standing turned its rings and colored dots for no one. The golem took a place against the edge of the floor and went still, its black obsidian face turned toward nothing, the flat amethyst of its eyes catching the light.

Amabilis stood at the far end, her hands folded in front of her.

He felt the night on him as he crossed toward her, a grit behind the eyes that no amount of daylight had rubbed out. His shoulder was whole. The rest of him was taking longer. He had meant to spend the day paying attention, and he hadn’t expected the first thing worth his attention to be this—an empty hall in the afternoon, and a Host who had sent for him rather than coming herself.

A second golem came in from another corridor with Oudemia a pace behind it. She wore the off-white chiton, pinned at the shoulder, and her feet were bare on the stone. She gave him one look and Amabilis none. She stopped at the edge of the nearest couch and looked along the walls instead, at each corridor mouth in turn. She looked at every room like that when she entered it, as if counting the ways out.

Then a third golem, and behind it Summer and Autumn, walking as they always walked, in a step so evenly shared that it took a second look to see that there was any negotiation in it. Their shirt had twisted a little at the seams, as all their clothes did now. Summer’s face was pale. Autumn’s was carefully nothing.

“Hi,” Summer said, to him and to the room. “Um. Are we in trouble?”

“I don’t think so,” Adrien said.

“You don’t know,” said Autumn.

He could have hedged it. He found he did not want to, not with them. “No,” he said. “I don’t.”

Three golems along the edge of the floor, then, and the four of them gathered at one end of it, and the Host waiting with her hands folded. He had seen enough rooms arranged for a purpose to recognize one.

“Amabilis,” he said.

“Catalyst.” She inclined her head, very slightly. “Thank you for coming.”

“I don’t think I was given much choice.”

“You were given an escort,” Amabilis said. “It is not the same thing.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong. Something is arranged.”

She waited until all four of them were looking at her. Then she turned her attention to the four of them together, and when she spoke it was in the voice she kept for rulings, the kind of voice that made people straighten without knowing they had done it.

“Adrien Moore. Oudemia. Summer and Autumn Weaver. You will attend a wedding. It is to be held in another season of the Work.”

For a moment nobody said anything at all. Oudemia’s face did not change; she took the word in the way she took in everything that was new to her, without letting it show whether it was new. Summer’s left hand had stopped halfway to her mouth. Amabilis stood with her hands folded and waited, as patient as the stone behind her.

“A wedding,” Summer said. “Like—a wedding wedding? With a cake?”

“In another season,” Autumn said slowly. “Another one of these.”

“Like this one,” said Amabilis, “and not like it.”

Adrien was hardly listening. He was hearing something else.

He had read about this: a Host gathering a few of her own and announcing them as guests for somebody else’s game. The accounts differed in everything except the one thing that mattered. The guests went. Nobody refused, and nobody was excused. Whatever the Hosts called it, and however politely, a crossover was not an invitation.

He had known it from her first sentence. It helped with nothing.

And no one else would know. Selene, Magda, Drosia, Chiara, Nebet-Hedj in her garden: they would come to the Refectory tonight and find the places empty, and nobody would tell them why.

Autumn glanced at him. Only a glance, and then away again—but she and Summer were the only two in the room besides the Host who had been told where his knowledge came from. He had told them himself, here, yesterday morning. Whatever Autumn had seen in his face, she didn’t like it. Oudemia, beside them, was looking at the corridor mouths again.

Oudemia had told him on the Axis Path last night that he hated this more for the twins than for anyone, because for them there was no reason, only the taking. She hadn’t been wrong. He could not say that to her face, and he could not say the rest of it at all. So he said the smallest true thing that was left.

“Do they have to go?” he asked. “Summer and Autumn. Oudemia. Is there any way they can stay?”

Amabilis turned her eyes to him and held them there. “Each guest is selected for a reason.”

Adrien looked at the twins. Then at Oudemia, who had stopped counting doors and was watching Amabilis with the unblinking calm she gave to anything new.

“Of course they are,” Summer said, under her breath. “Of course there’s a reason. There’s always a reason.”

“What is it?” Autumn asked. Her voice was quiet and very clear. “The reason.”

“That would anticipate the result,” said Amabilis. “You will learn it, or you will not, as the Work requires.” She let that settle, and then went on exactly as before. “The bachelor and bachelorette parties come first. The wedding follows. At the end of the reception, you will be brought back.”

“Brought back,” Autumn repeated. “Not ‘allowed’ back. Brought.”

“That is the language,” Amabilis agreed.

Summer had gone still. Adrien saw it happen. Her eyes went from Amabilis to him and back, and the color came up her neck all at once.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait. Tonight’s—tonight is supposed to be ours. Our night. With—” Her eyes slid away from him. “It’s our turn. You said nobody gets to swap.”

“Nobody does,” said Amabilis. “The night you spend at the wedding will not be counted as your date night. On the evening of the day you return, you will spend the night with the Catalyst, as the order requires.”

Autumn’s right hand found her sister’s side of the shirt hem and rested there, and after a moment Summer let out a breath.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Fine.”

Amabilis watched her a moment longer than she needed to, and her face, for once, did not look like a ruling. Then she looked away. The order was the order. “Clothes will be provided,” Amabilis said. “For each event.”

Summer’s left hand came up and plucked at the front of the shirt, at the place where the seam had pulled sideways across their shared ribs, and let it go.

“They’ll burst,” she said. Her voice had gone flat and tired, the joke worn off it entirely. “Or they’ll hang wrong. Whatever they give us. They always do.”

“Then everyone will see what we look like,” said Autumn. “They’ll have seen worse. It’s a wedding.”

“Do we pack?” Summer asked.

“Everything you need will be provided.”

“That’s what you told us about this place.”

Amabilis let that pass. She turned to the wall beside her, a little to her left, and Adrien’s eyes went with her.

There was a corridor mouth there.

Every other opening in the room had a carving over it. This one had none. It was the same pale stone as the rest of the wall, cut to the same height and the same width as the others, and beyond its threshold it ran straight back into an even, sourceless light until it was too far to make out. It had not been there yesterday. He was nearly sure it hadn’t been there an hour ago. Beside him he heard Summer’s breath catch, and understood that she was as lost as he was. Oudemia, who measured every room she entered, had looked along this wall when she came in, and she was looking at it now as if for the first time.

“This way,” Amabilis said. She stepped aside from the opening and held one hand out toward it, palm up, as a hostess might indicate the dining room. “You will be briefed on whom you are meeting.”

“When?” said Summer.

“When it is time.”

“That isn’t a time,” Autumn said.

“It is the only one I will give you.” For an instant, something in Amabilis’s voice was almost gentle, and then it was gone.

Oudemia moved first. She crossed from the couch to the wall without hurry and stood in front of the corridor mouth, and she looked it over the way she had looked at the others, up to the lintel, across from edge to edge, down to the sill, as though she were taking its measure for a door she would have to come back through in the dark. She put out one hand, not quite touching the stone, and held it there in the colorless air at the threshold, the way she might have tested water before stepping into it. Then she took the hand back and turned her head and looked at Adrien.

“You go first?” she said.

It was not a request. It never was, with her. It was a question about the order of things, asked by somebody who had once been carried into a hole in the ground by strangers and had come to prefer knowing who would be standing where.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll go first.”

Along the edge of the floor the three golems stood where they had been set, black and still, their amethyst eyes on nothing. None of them moved to follow.

He walked past Amabilis to the threshold. Up close, the light inside the corridor had no color at all, and it cast no shadow from him. The air that came out of it was neither warm nor cold, and it smelled of nothing, which in the Athanor was its own kind of strange. He kept his eyes ahead. He had no wish to see the long tables and the dome-light from the wrong side of a door, and no reason to think they would not be there when he came back.

He stepped in.

The floor under his feet was the same pale stone as the hall, smooth and dry, and the walls ran straight ahead with nothing on them, no carving, no lamp, no seam that he could see. Ten paces in, the sound of the Athenaeum had already thinned to almost nothing, as if the corridor were swallowing it.

Behind him he heard Oudemia’s bare feet on the stone, light and even, and then the twins’ shared step, a half-beat heavier, and then, last, a fourth tread that he knew without turning: unhurried, exact, never once out of time. No other footsteps followed. The golems stayed where they had been set, at the edge of the empty floor, and Amabilis walked into the corridor behind Summer and Autumn.

---

Chiara had decided, somewhere between the Fixation Chamber and the second turning of the corridor, exactly how she would ask him.

Not in front of anyone—not as a reproach. She would find him, she would wait until whoever he was with had found a reason to be elsewhere, and she would say, pleasantly, that he had made her a promise on the Upper Walks and that she had come to see whether it had fallen due. He had told her yes, he would tell her if he learned who the warning was for, and she had said she would hold him to it. A day was long enough for a man like Andrea to learn something. A day was certainly long enough for her to have stopped sleeping well.

So: whether he knew yet. Whether it was her.

The difficulty was not the words. She had been choosing words for men since before she could put her hair up, and she could make this question sound like idle curiosity, or like a courtesy, or like nothing at all. The difficulty was everything else. Whatever her mouth said, the rest of her would be saying something different, and he would hear it. He always heard it now. Her mouth could still lie for her, beautifully. Her body had turned informer, and it reported to him.

She would ask anyway. If he was going to read her fear off her like a bill of lading, he could at least do her the courtesy of answering it.

The corridor opened, and she walked out onto the floor of the Athenaeum.

It was nearly empty, which she had not expected at this hour. The crystal dome let down its late light over the long tables and the couches in their hollows, and no one was on any of them. The golems stood along the edge of the floor, three of them, black and motionless, as though they had been set out with the furniture. Chiara looked along the couches, and along the tables, and over to the window table where Magda liked to work, for the particular set of shoulders she was looking for.

She found him at the far end of the floor.

He was not alone. Oudemia stood beside him in that pale Greek dress of hers, and next to Oudemia stood Summer and Autumn, the two heads close together over their one body, and in front of all of them, half turned away, Amabilis. All five had their backs to Chiara. All five were facing the wall beside the Host, where there was an opening Chiara didn’t know.

She stopped walking for half a step. She knew the corridors of this room. She had made a point of knowing them on the first day—which led to the baths, which to the kitchens, which nowhere she cared to go—and she had been through most of them since. That one she had never seen. It was cut into the pale stone like the others, the same height and the same width, but nothing was carved over it, and the light inside it was the wrong color, or no color at all.

As she watched, Andrea stepped into it.

He did not hurry, and he never once looked back. One moment he was a dark shape against that colorless light, and the next the light had taken him, and Oudemia was walking in after him, bare feet silent on the stone, without so much as a glance at the room she was leaving.

Chiara began to walk again, faster.

Summer and Autumn went next, together, in the careful matched step they used for everything. Chiara was halfway across the floor by then and walking as quickly as she could without running. She would not run. A woman who ran in a room like this was a woman with something to lose, and everyone who saw her would know it, and in any case it would not have helped. They were too far. The floor between them was suddenly very long, and very bright, and very empty.

Amabilis stirred, and for a moment Chiara thought the Host would turn her head and look at her. The Host’s eyes stayed on the opening. She walked into it behind the twins, unhurried and exact, the last of the five to go in, and the colorless light closed over her as if she had stepped into water.

“Andrea.”

Chiara heard her own voice cross the floor. It was not a shout, but the voice she would have used for a name across a crowded salone—clear, pitched to carry. She had never in her life shouted after a man, and she was not going to begin now. It carried. It reached the far wall. It went into the opening in the stone.

Nothing came back out of it.

The corridor mouth stood open, and empty, but the light had dimmed. There was no one in it, and no shadow, and nothing at all to show that five people had walked into it a breath ago, except that they were no longer in the room.

She listened as she walked, because it seemed impossible not to. A footstep, a voice, Summer’s bright nervous laugh echoing back along the stone, the Host’s level tones explaining something to someone. The silence in the opening was complete. It was not the silence of a long passage with people walking away down it. It was the silence of a wall.

Chiara stopped in the middle of the floor. Her right hand came up to her chin, and she let it stay there, because there was no one left to see it.

Her heart was going hard and fast, and there was a heat at the back of her throat that she disliked. She made herself breathe through her nose, slowly, in and out, and counted four on each breath, and on the third the heat began to go. Then she looked at the empty mouth in the wall, and spoke to it, quietly, since there was no longer any need to be heard.

“You were going to tell me,” she said. “We had an arrangement.”

The words went nowhere. Along the edge of the floor the golems stood as they had stood when she came in, their faces turned toward nothing. The couches kept their places in their hollows, and the long tables kept theirs, and the light went on coming down through the dome as though the room hadn’t lost anything at all.

She could have asked one of them. The thought came to her and she turned it over and set it down. A golem would answer her or it would not, and either way she would be standing here asking a servant where her—where Andrea had gone, in front of a room that was keeping score. She would not give it the satisfaction.

In Venice the galleys went out from the Arsenale with a date of return written into the contract, and a woman could do her sums against it. This had no date. It had an opening in a wall where there had been none, and a light with no color, and five people who had walked into it without turning around.

Instead she lowered her hand from her chin, and turned her back on the wall and the empty opening in it, and walked back the way she had come, toward the corridor at the near end. She kept her pace even. She kept her shoulders straight, though there was no one now to read them.