The Procession

Silence has a texture, and this one was made of a hundred thousand held breaths.

She felt it settle on her skin as she walked. It was nothing like the hush of the Measuring Hall, where two hundred people had held their tongues out of fear. This was thicker, heavier, more intimate. It was the silence of a crowd that had been told to be quiet and was obeying with its whole body, every man and woman packed shoulder to shoulder along the ramps and ledges of the Ridge, faces tilted toward the white-clad figure moving slowly between the pillars. She heard the rustle of her own train. She heard the small clink of her pearls. Somewhere far behind, a child coughed, and was hushed.

Kieran walked at her right hand. He did not touch her. He had offered his arm, and she had shaken her head, very slightly, and he had accepted it with a courtesy that cost him something. His face was set. His eyes were fixed straight ahead. But she could feel him, a half-pace off, like the heat of a banked fire, and when she glanced sidelong at his profile she saw that he was breathing through his mouth.

He's afraid, she thought. Good. He should be.

The thought surprised her. It had no heat in it. It was merely a fact, laid down on the table, cold and clear.

They passed between the first two pillars.

She had not been prepared for the size. From the air they had seemed merely tall. Standing at their feet, she understood that each was the height of a cathedral spire, and as broad at the base as a house, and curved inward with a grace that was almost unbearable. The surface was not smooth. It was ridged, in long fine lines, like the whorls of a fingerprint, and she saw as she passed that the lines were not decoration. They were the grain of the thing. They were the pattern of a living material, laid down in layers, which had once been part of a body.

She put out a hand.

"Do not touch it," said Kieran, quietly.

"Why not?"

"It is consecrated."

She withdrew the hand. But not before she had felt it. The faintest hum under her glove, a tremor of warmth, a tiny sad flutter like the memory of a pulse.

Oh, she thought. Oh, you poor things.

…

The clergy lined the inner ring in ranks of white and silver, row upon row of them, with their hands folded and their eyes lowered. She searched their faces as she passed. She could not help it. She was looking for something to hold to, and in the third row, near the end, she found it.

Marenne stood among the Cardinals, small and stooped, with his scarred right hand pressed flat against his chest. His eyes met hers. They were red-rimmed. He gave the barest nod.

It's out, said the nod. I told them. I tried.

She looked away, quickly, before anyone could see.

In the fifth row, Verre stood with his notebook closed in his fingers. He did not look up. But as she went by, he lifted one ink-stained thumb in a gesture so tiny that she almost missed it: a thumb pressed to the first joint of a finger. She had seen the Ashborn make it. It meant the torches are lit.

And further on, at the very end of the line, a woman in the gray cord of the inner order stood alone.

Hester.

She had changed. She was thinner. There was a sharpness in her cheekbones that had not been there at the banquet, and her hair, under the white cowl, had begun to go gray at the temples. She did not look at the Empress. She looked, with a kind of painful intensity, at the black column at the heart of the ring. And as Solaia passed, she raised her head, once, and her lips moved.

No sound came out. But Solaia read it, plain as print.

Run.

Her stomach turned over.

Not yet, she thought. Please. Not yet.

She kept walking.

…

The steps were wide and shallow and made of black glass.

She saw them first as a reflection of the sky, a long upward-leading ladder of blue and white that dazzled in the sun. There were a hundred of them. Each one was a hand's breadth high, and so smooth that her slippers skated on them, and she lifted her skirts a little to climb. Kieran came behind. She heard his boots, steady and careful, on the glass.

At the foot of the stair, the Pontiff waited.

He wore white and gold. A mitre of pale metal rose from his brow in a long tapering curve, and from it a veil of fine silver mesh fell to his shoulders, so that the mask beneath looked like the face of a statue under water. His hands were folded on the head of his staff. He did not move as she approached. He stood perfectly still, in the shadow of the column, and she felt, as she came near, the cold pressure of his attention, vast and quiet and endlessly patient.

"Daughter," he said. "Welcome."

"Holy Father."

"You are radiant."

"I'm told it's the gown."

"The gown is a poor attempt." A dry breath of amusement. "I have waited a very long time for this day. I did not think I should live to see it. And yet here you are, all in white, with the sun on your hair, and I find that it is even better than I had imagined." The mask tilted. "It does an old man's heart good."

She said nothing.

"You are puzzled," he went on, gently. "You have been puzzled for some time. You have heard a great deal, in the last few months, and you have not liked it. That is natural. I should not like it myself." His voice dropped. "But I would ask you to put aside your doubts for an hour. Only an hour. Let the ceremony take its course. And at the end, if you are not satisfied, you may ask me anything you like."

"Anything?"

"Anything at all."

"And you'll answer?"

"I shall answer," said the Pontiff, "with perfect truth."

She looked at him.

She had no means of telling whether he lied. She had met him four times, in all, and in each of them he had worn the silver mask, and in each he had spoken to her with an unfailing, terrible kindness. She did not know how old he was. She did not know his name. She did not know, now, whether the thing she was looking at was a man or a very old and patient machine.

But she knew one thing.

She knew that the small voice in the back of her skull, the cold, quiet, clear one that had kept her alive under a wagon, was saying a single word, over and over, in the pattern of a drumbeat.

Trap. Trap. Trap.

"Very well," said Solaia. "An hour."

"Thank you." The Pontiff bowed. "Come."

…

They climbed.

It was a slow, strange ascent. The steps went up and up in a straight line toward the black column, which rose from the platform at the top like a tower of polished night. She could not see the summit. It disappeared into the haze. The sun was warm on her back, but as she climbed, a coolness crept down from above, a breath of damp stone and iron, and the silver cables that ran between the pillars began to hum in a rising chord.

Below her, the crowd had dropped to its knees.

She heard it go, in a long ripple, a vast soft rustle like wind in a field. A hundred thousand people sinking to the ground. The sound went out from the stair in waves, down the ramps, along the ledges, out over the plain, until the whole mountain seemed to kneel. And in the silence that followed she heard, far away and very faint, the sound of horns.

It came from the south. From the plain below the Ridge. A long, low, wavering note, repeated at intervals, rising and falling like the cry of some great bird. It was not an Imperial horn. It was too deep, too ragged. It had an old grief in it.

The Ashborn.

She did not turn her head. She did not slow. But something in her chest, which had been clenched for six weeks, loosened by a hair.

They came, she thought. They said they would, and they came.

"What is that?" said the Pontiff mildly, a few steps above.

"I don't know, Holy Father."

"A hunting party, perhaps." He did not turn. "It is of no consequence."

They climbed on.

At the fiftieth step she stumbled, and Kieran's hand shot out and caught her elbow. For an instant his fingers were warm and hard against her arm. She felt the whole of him in that touch: the fear, the love, the shame, the shaking resolve. She felt, too, the folded paper in his coat, a small dry crackle against her sleeve.

She looked at him.

He looked back, and for a heartbeat his face was entirely unguarded. She saw a boy standing at the edge of a frozen lake, who knew the ice was thin and had decided, for reasons he could not explain, to walk out onto it anyway.

"Do not stop," he said.

"Why not?"

"Because I am not sure I could begin again."

She took her arm from his hand.

She climbed.

…

The top was a platform of black glass, forty paces across, ringed by the points of the pillars where they curved in to meet. The air up here was cold and thin. The sky had gone dark, though it was noon. A shaft of pale blue light fell straight down from a hole in the haze, and in the shaft stood the column.

She had seen it from a distance. She had not understood what it was. It was a pillar, perhaps twelve feet across, rising to a height she could not judge. It was black as obsidian, and ridged like the others, and it hummed. A deep, slow, steady note, so low that she felt it in her teeth. At its base, set into the glass, a ring of iron gleamed.

She looked at the ring.

Then she looked at what lay beside it.

There were four of them. Chains. They lay coiled on the black glass like sleeping snakes, each as thick as her wrist, each ending in a heavy shackle of dull gold. They were old. They were the oldest things she had ever seen. The metal had a patina like a coin that has passed through ten thousand hands. And on each link, worn smooth by centuries of handling, was a faint pattern of tiny dragons, wings spread, mouths open, in a ring.

She knew them. She had worn them. In a gold bedchamber, in the first week, with a girl's mind and a beggar's hands.

"Dark Gold," said Kieran, very low.

She did not answer.

The Pontiff had stopped a pace behind her. She heard his staff tap once on the glass. She heard, with perfect clarity, the dry soft whisper of his robe as he turned.

"The Seat of the Throne," he said, "is the Pillar. It is the center of the world. It is where the Marshal Aldren stood to be crowned, and where every Emperor since has been anointed in his turn." A pause. "You will stand there, daughter. You will put your hands upon the stone, and your feet upon the iron. And you will receive what you are owed."

"With chains."

"With the Dark Gold. Which is the oldest sign of the Throne." The old voice was calm. "It is a symbol. It binds nothing. It is a courtesy to the dead."

She looked at the chains. She looked at the column. She looked, last of all, at the man beside her, who had not moved, and who stood with his hands at his sides and his gaze fixed on a point in the middle distance, as if he were counting.

"Kieran," she said.

He did not turn.

"Kieran. Look at me."

For a very long moment, nothing.

Then, slowly, as though each muscle of his neck had to be persuaded, he turned his head. His eyes met hers. They were wide and black and shining, and there was nothing in them at all but a vast and silent terror.

"Tell me it's a courtesy," said Solaia.

He opened his mouth.

Behind them, at the foot of the steps, a hundred thousand people knelt in the sun, and the horns of the Ashborn went on calling from the plain, low and desolate and far away, and the black column hummed.