A Little Pain

The lever was warm.

That was the first thing Kieran noticed. The handle of dark horn, rubbed smooth by hands he would never meet, was as warm as a living thing, and under his palm, as the arm came down, he felt a deep and distant shudder: the click of some vast mechanism turning over in the rock. He held on. He held on until the lever struck its stop with a dull iron clang, and then he took his hand away and stood looking at it.

The hand did not look like his. It looked like a hand in a painting, pale and still, with the black lines thinning on the back of it like the last of a retreating tide.

There, said the voice in his head.

It was gentle. It had always been gentle, he realized. For ten years he had thought of it as a cold thing, a weight, a predator at the back of his skull. But it was not cold. It was kind. It was the voice of a physician bending over a sickbed, patient and soft and sure.

There. That was not so hard.

"No," he said aloud. "It was not."

She is brave. She will be all right.

"Yes."

A little pain. Only a little. And then it will all be over, and you will be free.

He found that he was nodding.

He turned, slowly, on the black glass, and looked at the woman at the foot of the column.

…

She was beautiful.

She had always been beautiful, but he had never seen it as plainly as he did now. She stood against the black stone with her arms drawn out, in a gown like a fall of snow, and the pale light caught in her hair and made of it a dark halo. Her face was turned toward him. It was pale and still and very young. The gray of her eyes had a curious depth, as of water over a stone, and in it was a patience so complete that it frightened him.

He walked to her.

It seemed to take a very long time. Each step rang on the glass. He passed the old man's body, folded like a bundle of rags beside the base of the pillar, and did not look at it. He passed the broken spectacles that lay glinting on the stone. He passed the place where, a little while before, she had knelt and held a dying hand, and he thought, I will weep for him later. There will be time.

He stopped in front of her.

They were very close. He could feel the warmth of her. He could hear her breathing, light and fast, and under it the small unsteady flutter of her heart. The chains ran from her wrists to the iron ring, taut as bowstrings. A faint web of light had begun to crawl across the column behind her, thin red threads, like the veins in an eye.

"It has started," she said.

"Yes."

"I can feel it. In my feet." Her voice was perfectly level. "It's cold. Like standing in a stream."

"It will grow warmer."

"Will it hurt?"

He opened his mouth.

He had a speech ready. He had prepared it for months. It was a good one, plain and gentle and true: a little pain, my love, no more than a fever, you will sleep through the worst of it. He had said it to himself in the dark. He had said it into his pillow. He had said it so many times that it had worn smooth, like a stone in a river, and he knew that he could say it now without a tremor.

He said, "A little pain."

Her eyes did not change.

"That's all," he said. His voice was thick. "I swear it. It will be over in a moment. It is a thing the body does. It lets go. It is only... letting go." He heard himself going on, faster, the words tumbling out of him in a dry hurried whisper. "You will not remember. You will wake in a bed with the window open, and the sea in the distance, and I will be there. I will be sitting by the bed. And you will look at me and you will not know what you were afraid of."

"I'm not afraid."

"You will not have to be."

"Kieran."

"I have it all arranged. There is a house. On the southern cape. I had it built, in the spring. It has a garden. It looks over a bay. There is a little white dog, I thought you might like a dog, it is only a pup, I have not named it. I thought you might wish to name it." He swallowed. "You will have a window seat. And books. And no one will ever... no one will ever come."

"Kieran, look at me."

"I am looking."

"No." She said it very softly. "You're looking at the house."

He stopped.

His mouth was open. His lungs were working. A tear ran down the side of his nose and dripped from his chin onto the front of his coat, and he did not seem to be able to stop it. He stood in front of her, in the wind, with his hands hanging helplessly at his sides, and for one long moment he saw her.

He saw the white face, and the steady eyes. He saw the pearls on her collarbone. He saw the thin red web of light spreading over the black stone behind her, and the way it had begun to reach, with thin bright fingers, for the chains.

He saw that she was afraid.

She was afraid. She was terrified. She was holding it, as she had held everything, behind a wall of calm, but he saw it in the fine tremor of her jaw, in the whites of her eyes, in the pulse that beat in her throat like a captured bird. She was afraid, and she was not showing him, because she did not want to make it worse.

She is protecting me, he thought.

He almost laughed.

"I love you," said Kieran.

"I know."

"I love you so much." It cracked in the middle. "I would burn the world. I would burn it to the ground and salt the earth, if it would make you safe. I have come to the end of every road I know. There is nothing left. There is only this."

"There's always something left."

"Not for me."

"Yes, for you." She leaned forward, as far as the chains allowed, until her forehead touched his. "There's me."

Oh, he thought.

Oh, God.

It was like being struck. A huge soft blow, from the inside. He felt every wall he had ever built shudder, and for one wild and dreadful moment he knew that he was going to take his hand from the lever. He was going to tear the chains from her wrists and carry her down the stairs. He was going to put her on the dragon and fly until the world ended.

He knew it so clearly that it was almost a sound.

And then, from the top of the column, from a hundred feet above, came the voice.

"It is begun," said the Pontiff.

The wind dropped.

The whole ring of pillars lit.

…

It came from the bone.

It began in the base of the nearest pillar, a pale shimmer, as of heat on a road. It ran up the curve of the rib in a fine line, and then another beside it, and another. The whole ring was glowing. Thirty-nine pillars, each wrapped in a spiral of white fire, each humming a different note, all of them rising together into a chord so vast and sweet and terrible that it brought him to his knees.

The silver web blazed.

Every cable on the platform went from gold to white, and then to a clear searing blue. They sang. They sang like struck wires, a single high unbearable note, and the air between the pillars crackled and flexed. He felt his hair stand on end. He felt his teeth ache. Overhead, the haze split like a wound, and a shaft of pure red light came down out of it, thin as a thread, and touched the column.

"Kieran," said Solaia.

She had gone white.

He saw her stiffen against the stone. He saw the web of light creep over her feet, her ankles, her hands. It ran up the chains. It spread through the gold like fire through paper, and where it touched her skin, her skin glowed: a pale, shimmering, interior fire, as if a lamp had been lit inside a vase.

"It's all right," he said. He was crying. "It's all right. It is only the beginning. It will not hurt, I swear—"

"Kieran!"

"It will be only a little—"

The first bolt struck.

He did not see it coming. It was red, a hairline of crimson that leapt from the point of the shaft to the crown of her head, so quickly that he thought for an instant that he had imagined it. There was no sound. There was no flash. There was only her face, which went suddenly, utterly blank, and her mouth, which opened, and the long, thin, terrible note that came out of it.

She screamed.

It was not a cry. It was the sound of a thing being torn in half. It rang out over the Ridge, over the silent crowd, over the plain, and the pillars took it up and sent it echoing from rib to rib until the whole sky shook. Her back arched. Her hands clawed at the chains. Her hair, wound high, burst from its coil and streamed upward in the red light, and her eyes, her gray eyes, went violet from rim to rim.

"Solaia!"

He lunged for her.

The column threw him back.

It was like running into a wall. A wave of force struck him in the chest and flung him across the platform, ten feet, fifteen, and he hit the glass on his shoulder and skidded to the foot of the stairs. He lay there, gasping. The breath had gone out of him. He heard something crack in his ribs.

"Stay where you are," said the Pontiff, from above, calmly. "It cannot be interrupted now."

"Stop it!"

"I cannot."

"You said a little pain!"

"I said," said the old man, "what you wished to hear."

Kieran looked up.

She hung in the red light with her head thrown back and her mouth open, a white figure on a black pillar. A second bolt struck, and a third. They came faster, now. They ran down her spine like lightning down a mast. She was shaking in the chains, every muscle rigid, and between the bolts he heard her gasping, in a tiny hoarse thread of voice, not screams, but words.

"Kieran," she whispered. "Kieran. It hurts. It hurts—"

He had been lying.

He had always been lying. It rolled over him in a single huge black wave, the whole structure of his months, years, life: the little pain, the house on the cape, the dog with no name. He had built a cathedral out of it. He had told himself it would be gentle. He had told himself that the thing he was doing was an act of love, and he had believed it so wholly that he had never once looked at the thing itself.

He was looking at it now.

It was a woman, being killed, by his hand.

"No," said Kieran. He tried to rise. His ribs screamed. "No. No. No."

The red bolts struck, one after another, steady as a heartbeat. And from the throne, high above, in the shining dark, the old man said gently, "Hold her, child. It is nearly done."