Episode 125 · Every Voice Woke

Krista stood at the water’s edge with the stone tight in her hand, and she was not watching Varren’s face. She was watching his hands. She had seen them hundreds of times and never read them, because they were Varren’s. Now she read them. Before every blow, the thumb of the striking hand passed once over the knuckles of the other, brief, as if over a cord tied around the wrist.

Everyone hides something with their hands.

— His right arm, she said, quieter now, certain. Get low.

Tesa rose from her knee, eyes still closed, and moved under Varren’s right arm just as it came down. She did not hit him. She tied him up in a clinch, cast and good arm around him, forehead against his chest. Varren could have thrown her off at any time. For one moment, he stayed caught.

Maxim had risen onto one elbow and was looking at Varren’s sleeve, pulled up by Tesa’s grip. At the left wrist was a cord. Old, dark. Two knots.

— He has their cord, Maxim said hoarsely, like a man seeing at last the seal he had never asked for. Like the one at the pool.

Varren threw Tesa off him.

And the Hunters came out.

They came out of the old stones of the bank, three of them, the way a man steps from shallow water. The first had his arm bound where Soles’s blade had gone in by the pool. The second limped on the knee Krista had struck. The third was whole. They looked at no one. They looked at Soles’s hand.

Anger showed on Varren’s face for the first time that night.

— No, he told them. Not you.

He caught the first by the throat and slammed him into the bank. The stone cracked beneath the man in a star.

Soles felt the blow land under his own feet, lower than the stone. Beneath the bank, beneath the water, in a place he had never felt before and on which everything rested. Something down there gave by the width of a hair.

The second Hunter passed Varren and came toward Soles with open hands and a craftsman’s patience. He wanted the wrist.

Soles stepped back, and his heel slid on the wet stone. The Hunter closed the distance in the half step it cost him and took his right wrist in both hands, thumbs pressing between the bones, peeling.

Don’t cut him. Don’t give him a reason to make you.

Soles turned the blade flat against his own right forearm and pulled. He tried to brace the trapped wrist with his left hand, but the arm Varren had struck gave under the pressure. The Hunter pulled back. Their weight went into the bank through four feet, and deep down Soles felt a second hair’s width.

The water rose.

Not in waves. It rose behind the Hunter’s shoulder in thin, straight columns like threads pulled upward, and stayed there, trembling. The steam turned gold. Afternoon light, warm as honey, came from nowhere in the middle of the night and lay across the bank. It smelled of wax and old paper. Then salt and tar. Then pine smoke. Then snow.

At the edge of his sight, the others caught hold of things that were not there: Tesa a distant bell over a sea, Maxim something large and burning across the water, Krista a fresh ink stain between her fingers.

And all the voices woke.

He felt his four draw close: Leonatus, Decimus, Elias, Phenom. For a moment the garden’s light lay across the water. Beyond it came strangers who were not his: blackened hands, a man beneath a tall window, the sound of a sea he had never crossed. He had not entered anyone else’s garden. Something was pressing through the warmth, toward all of them, and he could no longer keep the impressions apart.

This is how a person is lost, Soles understood, with a terror that had no bottom. He does not die. He becomes a crowd.

For a moment he was not sure whose hand was holding the blade.

The Hunter felt it. One thumb slid under Soles’s first finger and lifted it off the hilt.

Soles let his knees go. He dropped onto the stones, and the man, holding his wrist with both hands, came down with him, bent over. Soles turned his wrist a quarter inside the grip, edge toward the Hunter’s own fingers. To keep holding on, the man would have to close his hands over it.

He let go and stepped back, limping, and looked at Soles with something like respect.

Every one of those movements had struck down there too. Each blow, each weight shifted through stone, went down into that place like drops on the same stone, over and over. And the stone, which had held for a thousand years, was beginning to give.

Varren stood in the middle of it and laughed.

Softly, face lifted into the afternoon light, eyes closed. The third Hunter came up behind him and struck him in the back with both fists, and Varren did not even turn. He had come here to be killed, not to kill, Soles understood, and he was keeping the rest of himself folded shut.

— Do you hear it? he said to no one. Nothing. You opened it for me, Soles.

— Soles!

Krista had gone along the waterline to where the golden light fell thickest. She stood beside an old slab leaning out of the bank into the water, a tilted stone no one had noticed beneath the silt. A tree was carved into its face, the same as on the slab in the temple. Roots, trunk, branches. One branch stopped before the end, before any fruit. Cut, straight and clean, the way a gardener cuts a branch so the tree will grow true. Beneath it were the temple signs.

Krista looked at the stone, then at the blade in Soles’s hand. Soles saw her do what she did with photographs: look for what was missing. And find it.

— The branch cut before fruit, she read slowly, in the voice she used for a difficult line. It isn’t a weapon, Soles. It isn’t for him. It’s a gardener’s knife.

She pointed with the stone toward the light rising from the water.

— Don’t cut him. Cut that.

Soles looked, with the sight he had used all his life to see where something carried its weight. The breach was not a hole. It was an arch of light and voices raised over the water, and all of it leaned on one point, just past the lip of Krista’s slab, where the threads were thickest. He knew it the way he had known the keystone of the temple vault the night he pressed it and brought everything down.

Now he did not want to bring anything down. He wanted to cut.

Six steps. Three across the stones to the foot of the slab, three up its tilted face to the edge. Between him and the first stood the limping Hunter, flexing his fingers. The third had left Varren’s back and was turning toward Krista. And at the foot of the slab, letting the first Hunter slide down the bank behind him, arms already beginning to open, stood Varren.