Into the Void

Gron went up like a thrown spear, and the Ridge fell away beneath her in a single sickening lurch.

She lay flat along his scarlet neck with both fists wound in the ridge of his spines and her cheek pressed to hot scale. The wind tore at her torn gown. The ash streamed off the wreckage below in long gray banners, and through it she saw the whole broken crown of the mountain shrink to the size of a plate: the black scar where the Fortress had stood, the dark thread of the ramps, the hundred thousand faces turned up like pale coins. She saw Crane's armored figure kneeling in the dust. She saw a gray scatter of Ashborn on the northern slope, and one old woman with a staff, who had lifted her free arm high above her head and was not waving, only holding it there, as one holds up a lamp.

And at the center of it all, small, dark, alone in the ash, a man on his hands and knees.

Don't look, said Gron, very gently. It will not help.

"I know."

She looked anyway.

…

The seam in the sky was no longer a line.

It had opened while she climbed, a long blade of gold slicing the dark from one horizon to the other, and it was widening with every wingbeat, peeling back the night as a knife peels back the skin of a fruit. Beyond it lay a country she knew without ever having seen it. The light there was thick and sweet and slow. It fell in sheets, not rays. It moved. And somewhere in the heart of it, very far off, something enormous turned over in its sleep.

Obsyra rose on her left.

She had not understood, in the ash, how large the old dragon was. Gron was the size of a cathedral. Obsyra made him look like a colt. Her wings blotted out half the sky, and each slow stroke of them sent a thunderclap rolling down the plain. The silver rings in her horns caught the light of the seam and threw it back in bars. She flew with her head low and her great jaw slightly open, scanning the dark below them, and the voice she sent into Solaia's mind was patient and tired and very kind.

Hold on, little one. The Void is not like the sky. It does not push you up. It pulls you in.

"Where does it go?"

Everywhere. And nowhere. And between. The golden eye swung round. You will see.

"Will he be all right?"

The old dragon was silent for a long time.

He is not alone in there, she said at last. That is both the worst of it and the hope. The Night is old and hungry and very clever. But it is also, in its way, lonely. It has never been loved. It does not know how to want anything except what it has been taught to want. A slow beat of wings. Do not mistake that for mercy. But do not forget it.

"I won't."

Good. The vast head turned back toward the seam. Now. Close your eyes.

…

She did not close them.

She had not shut her eyes before anything in nineteen years, or in five thousand, and she was not going to begin now. She watched the gold wall rush toward her. She watched the dark of the sky go thin as a curtain and tear, and the edge of the seam sweep over Gron's snout and his horns and his shoulders. She felt the air change. It went warm and thick as honey and began to hum.

Then the world turned inside out.

It did not hurt. That was what she would remember, afterward, when she tried to describe it to anyone, and failed. It was only a vast, silent, tender unmaking. The sky she had known came apart in her vision into its threads, and the threads unwound, and for a long moment there was nothing under her but a soft gold dark with no top or bottom. Gron's scales were warm beneath her palms. She held to them as to a rail on a ship. And in the dark, one by one, she began to see the times.

They hung around her like lanterns on a string. A girl of nine kneeling on a hatching floor, laughing, with a violet egg cracked in her lap. A boy in a kitchen, sneaking a honey cake. A queen crowned in a gown of white fire. A man in a black coat in a candlelit study, lifting his face to the light. A woman in a rain-dark ditch. All of them hung together in the gold, and they did not seem past or future. They seemed simply there, the way mountains are there, to be walked toward or around.

Three hundred days, said Obsyra's voice, from somewhere very close, for every one that passes on the other side.

She understood, then, what she was carrying out of the ash.

"The child," she whispered. "It will—"

It will grow in a night, as the world counts. A sound like a sigh. It will be born before the dust settles. That is the price of the door, and the gift. We cannot go back for a very long time.

She shut her eyes at last.

…

Kieran did not know how long he knelt there.

He knew that the sky had been gold and was now black. He knew the ash was cold under his palms, and fine as flour, and that it clung to the blood on his wrist. He knew there were people shouting, a long way off, and the bark of orders, and a woman's voice that said his name over and over, uselessly, like a prayer. He knew that something was wrong with the inside of his skull.

It was quiet.

That was what frightened him most. For six years there had been a sound in him, so constant that he had stopped hearing it, as one stops hearing the sea in a house by the shore. A murmur, a pressure, a low cold susurrus at the base of his thoughts. He had called it his father's ghost. He had called it nerves. He had learned to talk over it, and work around it, and sit very still in rooms where it grew loud, and he had thought for most of his life that everyone had one.

Now it was gone, and the silence where it had been was so complete that he could hear the ash settle.

He lifted his head.

The sky was empty. High above the broken ridge there hung a long fading scar of gold, narrowing as he watched, like a wound closing. Two dark shapes were just passing through it, the great black one and the small red one, and as the last of the light drew shut around them he saw, or thought he saw, a white hand lifted from the red one's back.

"Sol," he said.

His voice cracked on it. It was not a shout. He had not the breath for a shout. He said it again, hoarsely, to the empty sky, and put out his hand, as one does to a person already far past the end of a road. His fingers closed on nothing. The seam narrowed to a thread, and to a spark, and went out, and the stars came back, small and cold and unconcerned.

He stayed like that for some time, with his arm out.

She has gone, said something in his head.

It was not the Hollow. He knew that at once; it was far too quiet. It was only his own voice, flat and reasonable and very tired, saying the thing that had to be said. She has gone. She had to. You would have hurt her.

"I know."

You were going to.

"I know." He put his arm down. It shook. "I know, I know."

He bowed his head until his forehead touched the ash. He had never in his life wept where anyone might see. There were a hundred thousand people on the slopes and he did not care, any more than he cared about the crown that lay somewhere in the dust or the blood drying on his wrist. He wept without a sound, with his shoulders heaving and his fingers curled in the cold gray ground, and what he wept for was not the Fortress, or the Pontiff, or the five thousand years of a curse paid out in the blood of his house.

He wept because he had had a house, once, on a cape by the sea, with a dog and a girl and a window that faced the morning. It had never existed. He had lain awake in a gold bed in the Black Citadel for six years, building it in the dark. And she had stepped into it for a little while, with her bare feet and her terrible cooking and her wicked tongue, and made it, for one winter, real.

A hand closed on his shoulder.

It was Crane. The big man's face was gray, and his armor was split at the shoulder, and he stood looking down at his Emperor with the stunned, helpless care of a soldier who has been given an order that no regulation covers. "Majesty," he said hoarsely. "Majesty. We must get you off the Ridge."

"Where?"

"Anywhere. The Citadel. The camp. Anywhere with walls." A pause. "Sire. They're asking what to do. The army. The Church. The—the people. They want to know who is in command."

Kieran lifted his head.

He looked at the Commander of the Black Guard for a long moment. Then he looked at the sky where the seam had been, and past it, north, where a great pale river of spirits was still streaming toward the mountains, and at last at his own hands. They were gray with ash. The black lines had faded from his wrists. He turned them over, slowly, and saw that the palms were unmarked, and the pulse in them was his own.

He thought: I am free.

He thought: And she is gone.

"Get me a horse," said the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom. His voice was quite steady. "And paper. And pen."

"Sire?"

"I have a great many letters to write." He rose, unsteadily, to his feet, and stood swaying in the cold wind with ash in his hair. "To the Ashborn. To the Church. To the thirty-one houses of the north. To a woman called Kessa, who I think has been waiting a very long time for me to say I'm sorry."

"And then, Majesty?"

"Then I am going to find a way through that door."

He looked up at the stars again, a long searching look. They were very far away. It was a long way to the nearest of them. But he was Aldren's blood and Marenne's pupil and the man who had once burned a dragon's chains out of a mountain with his bare hand, and he had never in his life been told that a road was too long.

"Three hundred to one," he said, to nobody. "Very well. I'll be old."

Behind him, in the dark of the ruined Ridge, something that had been sleeping for a thousand years in the ash of a pale-haired man's bones stirred, and opened its eye.

Not yet, it whispered, in a voice like a held breath. Not yet, little prince. But soon.

He did not hear it.