The Hall of Hands

POV: Josiah

There were six hundred hands in the Hall of Hands, and every one of them was reaching for him.

They were cast in glass. They grew from the walls in rows, floor to vaulted ceiling, a forest of pale transparent arms, each ending in a hand, each hand frozen in some small human gesture: an open palm, a pointing finger, a fist, a pair of fingers raised in blessing. Some were child-sized. Some were a giant's. Between them ran a faint green light that came from nowhere, and the whole chamber trembled with it, like the inside of an aquarium. It was a hundred feet long and forty wide, and the air in it was bitter-cold, and utterly silent.

He had walked through it a hundred times with a lamp in his hand. He had never before been afraid of it.

"Wait," said Josiah.

They stopped on the last step, in a bunched cluster at the foot of the stair. Above them, the footfalls were louder now, a ringing, ordered clatter that came down the spiral like a rock rolling down a pipe. He did not look back at it. He looked at the floor.

It was a checkerboard of black and white glass tiles, each the size of a table. They gleamed. They looked perfectly innocent. He had seen a man die on them once, a clerk who had been careless with his shoes.

"Do not step on a white tile," he said. "Not one. Do not step on the edge of a black one. The floor listens to weight. It is tuned to the Charter. A Chartered foot does not wake it; an Unchartered one will."

"What happens if we wake it?" said Felix, in a very small voice.

"I will show you," said Josiah, "if you would like."

Felix did not.

"Follow my feet. Exactly. One at a time. Put your foot where mine was." He went out across the glass. The first tile took his weight with a faint hollow note. The second, the third; the pattern went black, black, black, one to the left, black, in a rhythm he knew in his bones like a prayer. Behind him he heard them coming: the tap of Viv's soft shoes, the heavy anxious tread of Felix, the cane. Dex came last again. His step was dragging. But it came true.

Seventy-three, thought Josiah. Seventy-four.

It was not until the halfway mark that he realized he was counting under his breath, in the Order's meter, and that it was the Litany. Keep the hand that does not tremble. It was the sort of thing the body did. He let it.

…

The patrol came out of the stair at forty feet.

He heard the gate first, a dull iron clang, then a ragged shout, then the full bright cascade of boots on glass, and then the sound that he had known would come and had hoped, against all sense, to avoid: a clear, clean, careful voice, calling out in the old formal cadence.

"Halt, in the name of the Council!"

He turned.

Seven men had come down the stair. They stood on the lowest step in two ranks, rifles at the ready, bayonets fixed, lamps lifted. Dove-gray coats. Polished buttons. Faces gone hard and steady under the shakos, glazed with the evening's Lamp. And in front of them, a little ahead, with a pistol in his right hand and a lantern in his left, stood a tall sandy-haired man with a freckled face that had gone the color of paper.

"Captain," said Marcus Dray.

Josiah stood very still.

"Lieutenant."

It was the voice of the barracks, the voice of a man addressing a superior across a table in the mess. Neither of them seemed to know how to stop. The lamp hissed. Up and down the Hall, six hundred glass hands caught the light and threw it back in long green bars.

"I had a feeling," said Dray. His voice was rough. "At the gate. Something about the way the viola player sat. I told myself I was wrong. I went to the Crestwood at nine to check. The Brandywine Quintet is in the dining room, Captain. They are eating oysters. They have been eating oysters since Tuesday."

"I am sorry to hear it," said Josiah, "that they have been so long at one dish."

"Don't." It cracked. "Don't be clever. You were in the Palisade. They said you hanged yourself in your cell."

"They were misinformed."

"I prayed for you." The lantern shook. "I stood in the chapel and I said the Litany, for you, because I thought you were dead, and I thought, he was the only one of us who ever asked."

"Marcus—"

"Don't." The pistol came up. It trembled in a way that Josiah knew, and recognized, and did not like. It was the tremble of a man who has not yet decided. "You've gone over to Tarnish. Look at them. A cripple, a, a, a Docks girl, a boy in a mask. Thieves. You're with thieves. Come away from there, Captain. Come to me. I'll say you were taken. I'll say they forced you. I swear to God I will."

Josiah felt the whole Hall hang on that one word.

He could have done it. It would have been so easy. A step, a nod, a lowering of the eyes. Yes, Lieutenant. Thank you. The old obedient reflex was alive in him still, deep as a root, and it rose now like a tide, soft and warm and reasonable, and said: Go home.

"No," said Josiah.

Dray's face did something terrible.

"Take them," he whispered.

…

It went very fast after that.

He heard the order, and the click of seven hammers drawing back, and had time to think, with perfect clarity, they have been told to shoot. Then Hollis's voice came from somewhere above and behind, laconic, bored, and fatally calm: "I wouldn't, gentlemen."

The soldiers looked up.

He was standing on the top step of the stair, a good thirty feet back, with the cornet case open at his feet and a long rifle at his shoulder, pointed at the middle of the Lieutenant's back. He looked tired. He looked like a man who had been waiting a very long time for a train.

"There's a lot of hands in this room," said Hollis, to nobody. "Some of them are glass. I'd hate to see anyone make a mess."

"Now, Felix!" cried Viv.

The cello case burst open.

It was a small, dry, almost courteous sound, a pop, and then a long hiss. A fat white serpent of smoke rolled up out of it, spreading and curling and billowing across the floor. It poured out over the tiles and up the glass arms. In a breath, the soldiers were wading in a milky tide. The lamp went dim. A man coughed. Another swore. Shapes lunged in the fog and vanished.

"Do not step on the white!" Josiah shouted. "Do not step on the white!"

Too late.

A soldier had run forward, blind, and put his boot on a white tile. There was a sound like a sheet of ice cracking underfoot. The glass flashed. And from the floor, in a split second, with a chiming tinkle like a hundred crystal bells, a thicket of long glass spikes sprang up.

The man did not even have time to scream. He had time to fall. He went down on his back on the black tile, white-faced, clutching his thigh, and a long thin spike of glass stood out of his boot top, and he began to howl.

They were told to shoot.

Josiah moved.

…

He did not remember deciding to. He remembered the weight of the first man's rifle, the clean smooth shape of the stock in his palm, the feel of it turning in his hand; the tiny shock of impact as he struck with the butt behind the ear, short and exact. The man dropped. A second came out of the smoke with the bayonet leveled, and Josiah turned his hip and took the wrist and the weight went over his shoulder like a sack of meal. He put two fingers to the nerve at the back of the neck, as the Order had taught him, and pressed. The man went limp.

Rule three. He said it silently. No killing, unless a gun is pointed at you.

Guns were pointed at him. He did not shoot back. He had no gun.

He saw, in the white, what was happening to the others. Hollis was firing from the stair, steady as a clock, and each shot struck a rifle, a shako, a boot-heel, a lamp, with the precision of a man throwing darts. Felix, on hands and knees, was throwing something that popped and glowed. Viv slid out of a glass hand and into the fog like a fish, appearing and vanishing, so that no man could point at her. And Roz had gone for the one with the lantern.

She was fast. She was very fast. She went through the white in three long strides, her gray skirt snapping, and took the soldier at the wrist with both hands. He dropped the lantern. It fell, and shattered, and the burning oil ran across the glass floor in a bright running tongue.

And she stepped back to avoid it.

She stepped on a white tile.

He saw it happen. He saw it as a man sees an accident in a dream, slowly, with perfect clarity, down a long dark tube. Her foot came down on the pale glass. A note rang out, high and sweet and cruel. Her head came up. And the floor beneath her sprang to life with a rustling, whispering shiver, a thousand thin glass blades shooting up at once, in a ring, around her ankle.

She cried out.

It was not a scream. She did not scream. She made one short sound, like a breath being struck out of her, and went down on one knee. He saw the blood come, bright against the white. Three spikes had gone through the hem of her skirt and into the leather of her boot. One had pierced the meat of her calf. They stood out of her leg like a bouquet of daggers, cold and transparent, tinged pink to the tips. She had her hand on the nearest. She was staring at it.

"Roz!"

It was Felix. He was too far.

Josiah looked at the Lieutenant.

Dray had been standing in the smoke, at the edge of it, with the pistol drawn. He had not fired. He was looking at the glass spikes, and the woman, and the blood, and his face was open, appalled, a boy's face. He seemed to see Josiah. He took a step back. And then, with the awful deliberation of a man deciding to go through with a thing he already hated, he lifted the gun.

Choose, Josiah thought.

It was perfectly clear. The Lieutenant was two paces away. If he moved now, he could take him. He could have the pistol out of his hand in a second, and put him on the floor, and be done. Dray would shoot at the nearest target. The nearest was Roz. She was kneeling, immobile, pinned by the leg, with her back to him.

But the spikes would not wait. He could see them growing. Slow, slow, a hair's breadth at a time, spreading through the leather, closing on the bone.

Choose.

He knew what the Order would have said. The enemy first. The wound after. The soldier does not kneel while the field is lost.

He dropped to his knees beside her.

…

"Hold still," said Josiah.

"Get away from me."

"I cannot. You are pinned."

"I told you." Her voice was a wire. Her face was gray; sweat stood on it. "I told Dex. If you touch me—"

"Then stop my heart," said Josiah, "after."

He took the nearest spike in his bare hand.

It was glass. It was hard, and cold, and thin as a knitting needle, and the edge of it, where it had been formed, was sharp as a razor. It cut at once. He felt the skin of his palm open and the heat come, wet, quick, bright. He did not let go. He set his other hand on the next and bent them together, outward, away from her leg. A creak. A thin high crack, like ice. The first spike snapped off at the base.

"Josiah—"

It was the first time she had said his name.

He broke the second. The third. They cut him as they broke: a line across the thumb, a gash along the heel of the hand. Blood ran down his wrist and dripped on the black tile and went dark. He heard a shot, a flat sharp crack, and the whine of a ricochet; he heard Dray's cry, hoarse, "Captain! Captain!" He did not look up.

The fourth spike was set in the boot. It had gone through the leather and the flesh and was holding the whole leg against the floor. He knelt in front of it, and took it in both hands, and said, "This will hurt."

"It already does."

"Breathe out."

She breathed out.

He wrenched.

The glass snapped. Roz gasped, a low ragged sound, and her leg came free, and the spikes shivered and fell away in a chiming rain, melting, collapsing back into the floor as though they had never been. She fell back against him. Her weight was hardly anything. He caught her under the arms. Her hair was in his face, and it smelled of rosin and carbolic and some sweet far thing, like a garden.

Behind them there was a last flat crack.

Dray's pistol clattered across the tiles.

Hollis had shot it out of his hand. The Lieutenant stood staring at his empty fingers, his face working. Then he turned, with the blind wild courage of the very young, and flung himself at Josiah.

He met him halfway.

It was a clean blow. It was the first blow of his life he had ever hated. His fist caught the man under the jaw, short and precise, and Dray's head snapped back, and the lamp-bright eyes rolled up. He fell, all at once, like a puppet with its strings cut, and Josiah caught him in his bloody hands before he reached the glass and lowered him down.

He knelt for a moment with the young man's head in his lap.

"Sorry," he whispered. "Marcus. I am sorry."

The Lieutenant's eyelids fluttered. His lips moved. It was barely a sound, a ghost of a breath. "You were," he said, slurred, "the best of us."

His head fell sideways. He was out.

Josiah laid him gently on the tile, on the black, in the one square that would not wake. He folded the freckled hands across his chest. He looked at his own.

…

The smoke was thinning.

It rose from the floor in long, slow, milky ribbons, and hung beneath the vault in a ceiling of pale cloud. The six remaining soldiers lay in a ragged ring, groaning or silent, tied at wrist and ankle with Felix's braided wire. The one with the spike through his boot sat rocking, white to the lips, while Felix, with surprising competence, wound a bandage about his thigh and murmured: "There, there. It's only a little hole. It'll make a marvelous story."

Hollis came down the stair, rifle slung, one hand lifted in a salute that was almost ironic. His face was gray. "Nobody dead?"

"Nobody," said Viv.

"I thought not. I was careful." He looked at Josiah's hands, and away. "Might want those seen to."

"Later."

Roz was sitting on the edge of a black tile with her leg stretched out in front of her. She had torn a strip from her petticoat and bound the calf, tight and expert. She did not look at him. She was looking at the glass, and the dark smudge where his blood had fallen.

"I told you not to touch me," she said.

"You are bleeding."

"I told you," said Roz, quite evenly, "that if you did, I would stop your heart."

"You did."

"I could have."

"Yes."

"I could have done it at any moment in the last four minutes. I could hear it. You were right there. It was beating so hard." She turned her head, finally, and looked at him. Her eyes were dark and wet and fierce. "Why did you come for me? You had a pistol on you. You had the Lieutenant in reach. It wasn't the sensible thing."

He had no answer. He found, to his surprise, that he did not need one.

"I do not know," said Josiah.

She held his gaze for a long moment. Her lips parted. He thought for a second that she was going to say something else, something that might have undone him altogether. Then she closed them, and shook her head, and turned away.

"I still haven't forgiven you," said Roz.

"I did not ask."

"No." A pause, so small he nearly missed it. "You didn't."

Neither of them said anything more. Hollis cleared his throat. Felix, bent over his patient, became very interested in a knot. Somewhere in the vault of the ceiling a drop of water fell, and rang, and was still.

Josiah looked down at his hands.

They were a ruin. Both palms were laid open in long ragged lines, from the base of the thumb to the pad of the little finger, and the blood ran down in bright threads between the fingers and dripped from the knuckles. They were shaking. For the first time in his life, he did not tell them to stop.

I chose.

It had been so simple. That was the astonishing part. He had spent twenty years being told that there was a right place to stand, that the Lamp saw all, that the soldier did not kneel. And at the moment of choosing, with a pistol in front of him and a woman pinned behind, he had simply knelt. No rite. No litany. No light on the wall to tell him he was right.

He had chosen a person. He had chosen her over the field.

And the Order, which had trained him to the last muscle, the last prayer, the last turn of the head, had not come to take it back.

No lamp could make him choose again. He knew it now with perfect clarity. He closed his bleeding hands, slowly, into fists, and felt them sting.