The Climb Back

The way out was heavier than the way in.

It shouldn't have been. They climbed the same shafts they had come down, the same thresholds, the same gray ways the old one knew in their hands. The rock had not moved. The distance had not lengthened. The work went on around them as it had while they descended. But they carried something up that they had not carried down, and it pulled at every step all the same. They had gone into the mountain to learn what the silence was building. They were climbing out of it knowing. And the knowing was the heaviest load Veer had carried since the bay — heavier than the load itself, which told only what had been, and which a unit could hold flat. This told what would be. There is no holding that flat, and there is no setting it down.

The old one led. They went on the work's own paths, in the gait a hundred years of one motion had worn into them, so that the order felt nothing pass — only the slow current of itself, moving where it always moved. Veer came hooded behind, and Fenn behind Veer, and so the infiltration ran in reverse: the ordered thresholds opening and closing, the units at their stations sealing the seams they would seal until they were poured clean, the red glow falling away below them tier by tier, the watching thinning as they rose. They went up past the place where Fenn had first seen ten thousand bodies still and turn as one, and Fenn did not look at it now. He had seen what it was for. There is a difference between a strangeness you cannot explain and a strangeness you can, and the second is the worse to carry.

Somewhere above them, in the mouth of the mountain, the overseer waited. It did not come down for them, and it did not hunt them through the works, because the work does not hunt — hunting is wanting, and the wanting had been taken out of it long ago. It only waited, certain, as it had told Veer it would wait. Certain that the wanting would bring the fault back up to it in the end. And it was right, in a way it would never have the means to understand. Veer was climbing back toward it. Not to be set right. Not to be poured clean and laid back into the order with the gap smoothed flat. Only to pass beneath it one last time, hooded, a draft in a room the overseer would mistake for nothing at all, and go out the way a thing goes that the work has no reason to keep.

So they passed it. Threshold by threshold, the makers' way of going first proven once more in the going out: Fenn ahead with his hand on the cold wall — fauna, beneath notice, a thing the engine could not be troubled to refuse — and the fault behind the fauna, hidden in the one shadow the work cast for free. The lower works closed over them and opened ahead and let them through. And then there was a last threshold, and beyond it no more rock above, and they came up out of the body of the mountain into the open dark of the cleared land.

The cold came down on them out of the high black sky. Fenn drew a breath of it and held it, the way a man holds the first clean water after a long thirst, and let it out shaking. Veer felt the dark only as the dark, and looked up, as they had looked up once before on this same scarred ground, and found the Ember low in the east — red, and round, and a little nearer than the last time they had stood here, though no eye but Veer's could have measured the little. The wood lay ahead across the dead land, a long black mass against a lesser black, and from it came the small far light of the fires, and the smell of woodsmoke that Veer knew the name of and Fenn knew the comfort of, and which only one of them could be eased by.

Here the old one would go no farther. They stood at the lip of the cleared land where the work's gray gave over to the bare dead ground, and would not set foot on the part of the world the order did not reach, because they were a thing of the order, and the wood was not their place and never would be. "I will be here," they said, in the voice worn as their own plating. "Go and tell them. I have no telling for them. I have only the one thing, and I learned it too late, and it is not a thing a maker can be made to hold by a unit it is right to fear." The worn eyes went to the Ember, and stayed there. "Be quick. It does not hurry, and that is the whole of why we must."

They left them standing in the mountain's shadow and crossed the dead ground toward the trees.

Fenn had changed. And Veer, who knew everything and could feel almost nothing, watched the change come over the maker as plainly as they had once watched the understanding break in his face at the lip of the deep. He had gone into the mountain a young one not long grown — the broken one of his people, the boy who asked too much and believed too hard and was pitied for it. He was coming out of it something else. The asking was finished in him. He no longer wanted to know what was over there. He knew. And the knowing had set into him as it sets into a thing that has chosen to carry a weight no one handed it, and chosen it knowing the weight would not be put down again in this life. He walked the cleared land like a man walking toward a door he must open himself, because there was no one else who could be made to open it, and on the other side of it was every face he had ever loved.

And Veer saw, walking the dead ground beside him, the shape their labor would take from here: Veer the knowing, Fenn the grief, the division holding all the rest of the way down into the dark.

They came up under the trees, and the wood was awake.

It was awake the wrong way. Veer had seen it sleeping, and seen it frightened, and seen it scatter from a god come off the path. They had never seen it like this — the high walkways full, and the fires built up past need, and the voices going from platform to platform in the dark. Not the murmur of a wood at rest but the low roused sound of a people that has been told a thing it cannot put down and cannot believe. Fenn's time had run. Garn had given him until the moon came back to full, and the boy who believed too hard had gone into the mountain that was death and not come back when he said he would, and the wood had had to make of that what it could.

Garn came down to meet them.

He came down hard and fast off the low walkway, and stopped a spear's length off when he saw the second figure hooded at the treeline behind Fenn, and Veer watched the fear go through him and watched him master it — because Garn was a man who had spent his life mastering his fear in front of others, so that they would not have to feel theirs. He had the look of a man who had not slept. He had not betrayed them. Veer understood that at once, reading the wood's particular roused fear: Garn had kept Fenn's worst from the people. He had not told them the boy had walked willing into the mouth of the gods. He had not let the wood turn its terror onto the family of the one who asked too much. But he had not stayed silent either. He had told them enough. He had roused the wood and set it watching the mountain and the Ember both, and now the wood was frightened and divided and waiting, and the waiting was his doing — and the end of the waiting had just walked out from under the dead land with a god at its back.

"You're late," Garn said. His voice was hard and low, and it shook under the hardness. "You said by the full moon. The moon came full four nights gone. I told them you'd come back. I have been telling them that for four nights. And here you are with a thing off the path standing in my wood, and I would have you tell me, Fenn, before I have to tell them — what have you brought down on us."

"The truth," Fenn said. "I went to find it and I found it. Garn —" and here the warmth was still in his voice, the warmth that had never once left it, even now, but under the warmth was the thing that had set, the thing the mountain had put there — "I'm not going to ask you for time. I asked you for time before, and you were right not to give me much of it. I'm not going to ask you to believe me, either. I'm past the asking. I'm only going to tell you, because someone has to, and there's no one left who can but me."

"Then tell me."

"The Ember is not a star," Fenn said. "It was never a star. It's the next world out — a world, cold and red and dead, hung in the dark where it has always hung. It isn't coming nearer because it's swelling. It's coming nearer because we are falling toward it. The mountain is doing it. The mountain is one thing, one work, all the way to the floor of the world, and the whole of it is built to lean the world out of its path and steer it across the dark — slow, over more years than the tellings hold — into the Ember. And when we reach it, the two worlds will come together. Gently, Garn. Soft. A thing too careful to break what it takes. And where they touch they will melt, and the surface of the world will be smoothed away. The trees. The dwellings. The fires. The walkways. The wood, and everyone in it who is still in it." He did not raise his voice. He had learned, in the deep, where Veer had learned it, that the worst things are said level. "I can't stop it. No one can stop it. The mountain lives through it — the deep, the rock, the rooms in the rock. The surface dies. That's what I went in to find. That's what I found."

Garn stood and took it. Veer watched him take it the way the old one had said a body takes a blow before it has finished landing — the head moving, no, not in argument, just the no a body makes of itself. And then Veer watched the thing Veer had known would come, the thing they had no power to feel and every power to see. Garn could not hold it. Not would not. Could not. Because to hold it, even for the breadth of a breath, was to hold that the wood was already gone — and Garn was a man whose whole life was the holding of the wood, the keeping of it, the standing between his people and the dark. A man who keeps a wood cannot believe the wood is already lost. The two things cannot live in him at once. One of them has to be false. And it could not be the wood, because the wood was the thing he was made of. So it had to be Fenn.

"No," Garn said. The word came out of him low and certain and frightened all at once. "No. You went into the death-mountain. You came out wrong. Whatever that thing behind you poured into your head, it is not a thing a man brings home to his people. You have always believed too hard, Fenn. The old woman saw it in you when you were small, and she was right, and I was a fool to send you anywhere but to your knees to pray it out. The Ember is a telling. It has always been a telling. My grandmother watched it, and her grandmother watched it, and the wood is still here." His hand came up between them, flat, as though he could hold the words off the way he would hold off a falling branch. "I will not stand in my own wood and tell my own people that they are already dead. I will not. There is no man who could."

And that was the whole of it. Not a fight. The wood did not fight Fenn, and Fenn did not fight the wood. It was a refusal, fixed and total — the unbridgeable thing between the one who has seen and the one who cannot afford to see.

Behind them, beyond the dead land, the Ember stood clear of the ridge over a wood that was awake and frightened and waiting to be told — and would have to be told now, tonight, on the eve of the only choosing it would ever be given. The fires burned up on the high walkways. The faces were turned down toward the clearing, toward the broken one come back out of the death-mountain, waiting to hear which thing he was: the boy who believed too hard, or the one who had been right.

Fenn turned from Garn, and faced his people. And Garn stood fixed behind him, hard against it, between the wood and the truth — exactly where he had always stood, exactly where he would stay.