The Church Kneels

The girl rode in front of him all the way to the Cathedral, and in six days she said only one thing.

She said it on the second morning, when he had lifted her down from the saddle by the roadside and set a heel of black bread in her hands. She looked at it. She looked at him. Then she broke it in two, with great care, and held out the larger half, and said, in a voice like a cricket's, "You."

He did not take it.

"Eat," he said. "It's yours."

"You're thin."

He looked at his hands. He supposed he was. He had not eaten, in any sense that mattered, in a century; the Hollow fed him in other ways, through the long slow channels of the blood, and he had forgotten the look of food. He took the bread. It was dry and coarse, and he put it in his mouth, and his throat closed up on it so suddenly that he had to turn aside.

The girl waited with the grave patience of the very small.

"What's your name?" he asked her, when he could.

She shrugged.

"You must have one."

"Ash," she said, and pointed to the smoking valley behind them. "That's what they were calling me. When I was under the house." She considered. "Before that, I was Pip."

"Pip."

"It's short for something. I forget."

"Yes," said the Emperor. "I know the feeling."

He did not leave her. He had expected to; it would have been the sensible thing. He had thought that he would set her down at the next village with a coin and ride on. But when the village came, he found that he could not make his hand loosen on the reins, and Pip said nothing, and the Hollow in his chest laughed softly, inside, like a man watching a card trick he has seen before.

Sentiment, it said. How quaint.

"Be quiet."

She will die, of course. They do. And then you will hurt, and the hurt will make you useful. The voice was almost affectionate. Keep her, if you must. I can wait.

…

The Cathedral of the Light had not changed.

That was the first thing he saw, coming over the last rise at the head of the Black Guard, in the thin red light of a winter evening. It stood on its hill as it had stood in his boyhood, as it had stood in the memory of men who were dust: a vast white crag of marble and glass, its spires lit gold from within, its great doors open to the city like a mouth. The Holy Light still burned in the windows. The faithful still climbed the stair. For four hundred years he had burned the cities and the shrines and the little provincial chapels, and this one, the heart of it, he had left.

He had told himself it was because it was too well defended.

It was not. The Church had been gutted, the Orders broken, the Inquisition scattered. There had been nothing in it for a century but old men and incense. He had left it, he understood now, as one leaves a bruise one cannot stop pressing: for the small bright pang. For the proof that it was still there.

Because it holds her, said the Hollow.

He did not answer.

The tank. The Holy Light. All that fire. The voice was dreamy. You could hear it from the Ridge, if you tried. It sings. It has her voice.

"I know."

Then why did you not take it?

"Because," said Kieran, slowly, "I am afraid of what I'll do."

…

They were waiting for him at the doors.

He had not expected that either. A hundred priests in white, ranked on the steps in two long lines, with candles in their hands and their faces bowed. Behind them, in the shadow of the porch, a figure in silver robes, tall, thin, in the horned mitre of the Pontiff. The mask on his face was silver. It was smooth as a spoon. Two small holes marked the eyes.

Kieran drew rein.

He sat his horse with the girl in front of him, her small hands wound in the black mane. The Black Guard halted behind him with a single clash of mail. The wind lifted a few last dry leaves down the stair. In the silence, the figure on the porch descended one step, then another, and sank, with a slow rustle of silver cloth, to its knees.

"Majesty," said the Pontiff.

His voice was thin and cracked, an old man's, and it shook.

"Majesty. We beg for mercy. We beg for the sparing of the Light." The silver mask lifted. "We have no army. We have no gold. We have only the prayers of a few poor men, who have kept this house as best we could, and who ask, in the name of whatever remains of the kindness of the Empire—"

"Get up."

"—to be permitted to—"

"I said get up."

The old man hesitated. Kieran saw the thin hands tremble on the stone. Then, with great difficulty, he rose, and stood swaying on the lowest step, and the silver mask turned a little, as if to look at the child.

"Who is the girl?" he said.

"Nobody." The word came out sharper than he'd intended. "Nobody you need concern yourself with. I have come for the tank."

"The... the Light?"

"The Holy Light. All of it." Kieran swung down from the saddle. He lifted the girl down after him, and set her on her feet at his side, where she stood with her fingers hooked in his coat. "Is it still burning?"

"It has never ceased, Majesty." There was a quaver of horror in the old voice. "It is the life of the Church. It is the— the Pontiff Valerian's gift. It cannot be—"

"Valerian is dead."

"The Light is not."

"No," said Kieran. "I know."

He climbed the stair. The priests drew back from him as water draws back from a hot iron. He passed between their ranks and under the great arch, into the nave, where five hundred candles shone on the carved columns and the flagged floor, and the incense lay thick and sweet on the cold air. The girl trotted at his heel. The Black Guard remained at the doors, with the old man in silver standing wringing his hands between them.

He walked the length of the Cathedral. His boots rang. At the far end, beyond the altar, beneath the great rose window, a door of beaten bronze stood ajar, and from beyond it, up a narrow stair, came a light.

It was white. It was the white of milk and moonlight and the center of a candle. It poured down the stair like water, and he felt it break against his face like a wave against a rock. And in the center of it, thin and clear, rising and falling like a woman humming at a distant task, he heard a voice.

He stopped.

It is her, said the Hollow, softly. It is her, Kieran. It is all that remains.

He stood quite still.

Take it, it whispered. Take it into you. Be whole again. You need only touch it.

He put out his hand.

…

The tank was a vast cylinder of crystal, forty feet tall, standing in a round white chamber under the dome. It was filled with light. Thick, slow, heavy light, like milk poured through sun, turning in on itself in great lazy spirals. Long silver cables ran from its base into the stone of the floor. A thousand others ran from its top into the roof, and out through the walls, and to every shrine and chapel on the continent that had once drunk of its fire.

He stood in front of it with his palm raised, an inch from the glass.

It sang. She sang. It was not a song, exactly; there were no words. But he knew it. He knew it as he knew the beat of his own heart. It was the sound she had made in the kitchen of the Citadel, on a winter evening, when she thought no one could hear, over a pot of something burning. A tuneless, cheerful, distracted hum. He had stood in the door and listened to it and not said a word.

Touch it, said the Hollow.

"No."

Why not? You want to.

"Yes."

Then—

"Because I know what you'll do." He kept his hand where it was. It did not shake. "You'll take it. You'll use it. You'll wear her voice and her fire like a coat, and I'll let you, because it'll be warm. And then there will be nothing left for her to come back to."

The Hollow was silent.

That is not true, it said, after a moment.

"It is."

I do not wish to harm her.

"You wish to keep her. It is the same."

He drew his hand back. He did it slowly, an inch at a time, and the effort of it was greater than any he had made in four hundred years. He lowered it to his side. The light flickered, as if in disappointment. The humming went on.

Behind him, a small voice said, "Is it a lamp?"

He turned.

Pip was standing in the doorway, with her sooty fingers in her mouth, looking up at the great pale pillar of fire with round, unfrightened eyes. She took her hand out. "It's pretty," she said. "Who's singing?"

"A woman."

"Is she in there?"

"No," said Kieran. His throat hurt. "Yes. A part of her."

"Can she get out?"

He looked at the tank. He looked at the cables, the thousand silver threads, running out through the walls to the shrines and the chapels and the dying faithful. He thought, with sudden vertiginous clarity, of a girl in a ditch. Of a hundred thousand collars, and a dragon on a tower, and a column of fire on a ridge.

"Yes," he said. "I think she can."

He lifted his hand, and the Hollow in his chest, with a snarl of fury that he felt in every bone, began to pull.

It was the Night. It was the cold, the hunger, the old black Gift. It poured out of him through his arm and his palm and into the glass, and where it touched the Light it did not extinguish it but drank. The white fire bent toward him. It shivered. And the crystal cracked from top to base with a sound like a bell, and the Holy Light of the Church of the Dawn went streaming into the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom in a thin white river, sweet and fierce and utterly familiar.

He cried out.

He had forgotten what it was like. He had forgotten how much of her there was. It filled him to the brim, a warm tide, scouring through every cold and shuttered room of him, and with it came a thousand things at once: a laugh, a breath, a taste of honey on the tongue. A woman's cracked voice in a barn at midnight saying Be small. A white gown in a spring field. The weight of a hand on his waist. His own voice, saying I love you, and her silence after, and his lie.

Sol, he thought. Sol. Sol.

The Hollow howled.

…

The old man in silver came running.

Kieran barely heard him. He was on his knees on the cracked floor of the chamber with both hands pressed flat on the stone, and a river of white fire was pouring out of him, out of his eyes and his mouth and the ends of his fingers, spilling over the floor and up the walls. It lit the cables. It ran along them into the dark. Somewhere above, he heard the great bells begin to ring, one by one, all over the city, by themselves, in a crashing sweet tumult, and the Black Guard shouting, and the thunder of a thousand priests on their knees.

He felt the fire go out into the world.

It was not his to hold. He understood that, as he knelt. It went out through the cables to every shrine, every chapel, every little hidden lamp, and where it touched, the silver collars on the necks of the faithful, the thin invisible threads that Valerian had hung there in the long dark centuries, parted like wet paper. He felt them go. Thousands. Tens of thousands. A long ragged sigh went up from the whole continent. And at the very end, thin and bright and impossibly far away, he felt something turn its head, in a place without time, and listen.

Sol?

Kieran?

It was no more than a breath. It was the faintest brush of a thought across a very great distance. But it was hers, and it was warm, and he heard in it, for the space of a heartbeat, such wonder, and such terror, and such joy, that he laughed aloud, with the tears running down his face.

"Sol!" he shouted. "I'm here! I'm here! Sol, I'm—"

A hand closed on his shoulder.

It was cold. It was very strong. It dragged him round, and he saw above him the silver mask, and the horned mitre, and the thin robes of the Pontiff of the Church, and he saw, in the same instant, that the old man was not afraid at all. The robes were shaking. The hands were shaking. But the shaking was not that of fear.

It was laughter.

"Thank you, Majesty," said the Pontiff, in a voice that was no longer cracked. "Thank you so very much."

And he reached up, with a long pale hand, and took off the mask.

Kieran stared.

There was no face under it. There was nothing under it at all: no skin, no bone, no eyes. Only a smooth, soft, endless gray, like the inside of a shell, and in the center of it, slowly opening, a mouth. A thin silver ring glinted at the corner of it. And from somewhere in the hollow of that dreadful absence, in a voice he had last heard on a platform in the sun, the thing that had been Valerian said, with infinite fondness:

"I told you I would be waiting, little prince."