The Stair Home

The first sign was the candles.

Every one of them went out at once, the whole three hundred and nine, from the foot of the stair to the top; she saw it happen. A great ripple of darkness ran up the shaft like a hand passing over a row of keys, and the air in the chamber changed. It went thin and clean and sharp. It smelled of rain on a long-shut window.

"Door Thirteen is passed," said the pleasant voice, from the roof.

It sounded different. It had lost its sweetness. It sounded tired, and kind, and a little startled, like a servant at the end of a long service who has been told she may go home.

"None remain."

Isolde waited for the other voice. The hollow one that had counted, quietly, a number too high at each threshold. She waited for it to say Zero, or One, or Nine, or any of the dreadful true things it had whispered all the way down.

It said nothing at all.

There was only a silence, wide and tender, and in it the sound of the stone beginning to give.

…

"Up," said Brannoc.

"What—"

"Up! Up the stair! I've been in two collapses and I've no wish for a third." He had Wick under one arm and a Lantern's long coat in the other fist, and he was already moving, with the wild purposeful stagger of a man who has seen the floor go before. "That was the Threshold. That was the whole damned house. It was holding because he held it. And he's just put it down."

She looked at Valerian.

He was standing quite still, with his face lifted to the roof. A fine gray dust was sifting down on his hair. His eyes were open, and unseeing, and wet; he had the look of a man listening to music in another room; and as she watched, she saw the shadow that had hung behind him all these days like a torn black cloak go thin, and pale, and begin, in long soft strands, to come away.

"Valerian."

"I can feel it," said Valerian. His voice was a thread. "Isolde, I can feel it all coming down. Every door. I put them up. I built each one, in my sleep, with my own fear. And they are letting go."

"Then come on."

"I can't. My feet—"

She took his hand.

It was cold as a stone, and it was shaking, and for an instant she thought it would be too heavy to move. Then she felt something in it answer. A grip. Faint, and clumsy, and unmistakable. He turned his head and looked at her with those wide gray eyes, and he said, in a perfectly ordinary voice, "I should like very much not to die on a staircase."

"Then walk."

"I'm walking."

"You're standing."

"I am walking in my mind," said Valerian. "It is a distinction."

She dragged him toward the stair.

…

They ran up three hundred and nine steps with the world falling down behind them.

She would remember it ever after as a series of vivid, separate pictures, like the plates of a book. The first was the way the stair moved. It was not stone, any more. It was an idea of stone, a thing that had been solid because everyone expected it to be, and now that nobody did it shivered and drooped like wet paper. Every step she put her foot on sagged. Every one rose to meet her at the last second and held, just, as if the shaft itself were making an effort.

The second was the sound. It came up the shaft from below, from the plinth and the ring of names, and it was a low continuous crumbling roar, like a cliff going into the sea.

The third picture was the doors.

She did not know how it happened. At the turn of every dozen steps, where the niches had been, there were windows, and through each, as she passed, she saw a Door come down.

She saw the Harvest Hamlet, in its yellow wheat. The scarecrows bowed. The wooden dolls in the windows lay down quietly, one by one, and their painted faces smiled, and the Queen's mouth fell open and let out a small bright flight of moths.

She saw the Hungry Wood. The trees stood in their black ranks, and one by one, with a soft sound like the rustle of pages, they gave back what they had eaten. A word rose out of the bole of an oak and drifted away in the air. It was a small word, and a fat one. She thought it was cake.

She saw the Wax Cathedral melt. The saints ran down their pedestals in slow bright rivers. The young man with the laughing eyes stood in his chapel, quite unchanged, with his hand held out, and as the light went over him he turned his wax head and looked directly out of the window, and smiled.

She saw the Night Market fold its stalls. She saw the Drowned Ship slide, with a sigh, into the dark. She saw the Wolf Wood go to ash. She saw a vast white bird, made of porcelain, spread its wings in the high glass roof of the Aviary and break against the sky into a hundred thousand brilliant pieces that fell like snow. She saw pages blowing out of a Library, a million of them, all blank. She saw a garden of dead roses blossom, as she looked, one last time. She saw a dark city of bells that did not ring.

She did not stop. She did not dare. She held Valerian's hand so hard that her own ached, and ran.

…

"Rook!"

It was a woman's voice, cracked and cross and rusty with disuse. It came from the stair below them, from somewhere out of the dark, and Brannoc, who had been going up three steps at a time with a child under his arm, checked as if he had been hit with a brick.

"Rook, you old fool, wait for me!"

He turned.

They were coming up the stair. Not the Lanterns; those had fled long since. These were pale and ragged, in long white robes, hundreds of them, climbing in a straggling endless line out of the dark below. They moved like sleepwalkers. They clutched at one another. They had their hands out, groping for the rail that was not there. Their faces, as the dim light caught them, were the faces of people who have been woken in the middle of the night and have not yet remembered where they live.

And at the head of them, sturdy, square, with a belt of red-dyed cord round her waist and a dreadful bad temper in her face, came a woman of forty, leaning on the wall.

"Dora," said Brannoc.

"Who else?" She was breathless. She was gasping. She had one hand pressed to her side, and she limped, noticeably, on her left leg. "Whose bloody idea was it to put the exit at the top of three hundred steps? I've been standing in a hall for— for— How long was I in that hall?"

"Years, I think."

"Years." She spat. "I want a drink. I want my knife. I want to go and punch the man that put me there." She glared at him. She looked, for a moment, almost frightened. "I heard you, Rook. In the dark. I heard you say the name. Is that— was that—"

"Tam," said Brannoc roughly.

"Tam. That's it." Her face crumpled and righted. "I heard you, and I thought: I know that voice. I know that big ugly daft voice. And I woke."

"Dora."

"Don't you dare go soft on me." She seized his sleeve. "Go on. Up. Move your feet."

He went. He went up the stair with his mouth working and his hand locked on the child and the old woman at his side, leaning on his arm, and behind them, in the wan gray light, came the whole white host of the freed, a hundred and a hundred, helping one another as they could. Isolde saw a Lantern boy with a pin in his coat give his shoulder to a weeping gray-haired woman. She saw a girl in a drover's coat carry a man twice her size. She saw them come up, and up, and up out of the dark, stumbling and shouting and sobbing, one by one, alive.

They said yes, she thought. And it didn't take.

It only took them far enough away that they couldn't hear themselves cry.

…

The Sealed Self was waiting at the two-hundred-and-fiftieth step.

She nearly ran straight into him.

He was leaning against the wall of the shaft, in his ash-colored coat, with a candle burning in one hand. It was the only light on the stair. He looked tired and thin and very young, and the manacle on his wrist was gone. There was a red ring where it had been. He rubbed it absently with his thumb, and smiled at her over the flame.

"Hello again," said the boy.

"You're—"

"Free. Mostly. The salt's off." He glanced at the man whose hand she held. His eyes brightened, and then went wet. "Hello, Val."

Valerian had stopped.

He stood on the step with his lips parted and his gray eyes fixed on the other, a long thin man in a torn coat, face to face with himself. For a moment neither moved. They might have been two reflections in a pane, one a little older, the other a little warmer, with the same black hair and the same white scar through the left brow. Then the candle flame bent between them, and the boy held out his free hand.

"I heard you say it," he said. "In the hall. I would rather carry it until it kills me."

"I meant it."

"I know. That's why I couldn't stop crying." The boy laughed, a little wildly. "I've been waiting three hundred years for someone to say that. I thought it would have to be me."

"It was always you."

"It was always the three of us," said the boy. "And a girl with a pot lid."

He glanced at Isolde. His eyes shone. "Take care of him. He's an idiot. He thinks he's responsible for everything. He'll apologize to the furniture."

"I know," said Isolde. "I've met him."

"Of course you have." He put out his hand again. "Val. I think it's time."

Valerian took it.

…

She had thought it would be violent. She had a picture of it, from the old stories: two halves of a man forced together with a flash and a groan, sparks, thunder, a cry. It was not like that. They stood hand in hand on the stair, with the roar of the Threshold falling behind them, and the candle between their joined palms; and the boy simply stepped forward into the other like a man stepping into a river.

There was a warmth.

It went out from the two of them in a slow gentle wave, and she felt it on her face as one feels the sun come round a corner of a house. The black thread on her wrist glowed and let go. It did not burn away. It unwound, bright as spun gold, and drifted up and coiled round the candle, which flared, and steadied, and was a different color.

Valerian stood on the step alone.

He was breathing very hard. He had one hand to his chest and one to his eyes. The gray had come back to his face, but something else had come with it; there was a hot flush in his cheeks, and a crooked wide-awake look in the eyes, and the long mouth, even in that white and shaking face, had begun to curve.

"Well," said Valerian, in a voice she had never heard. It was lighter, and warmer, and a good deal more amused. "That was exceedingly peculiar."

"Are you—"

"I do not know." He lowered his hand. He looked at her. And his face, which had spent three hundred years learning to hold still, lit from within, all at once, as a house lights up when someone throws open the shutters. "I think I may be me."

"Oh," said Isolde. "Oh."

"I remember the pigs. I remember the courtyard. I remember—" His voice caught. "I remember her name. Isolde, I remember the woman with the key. I remember her name."

The stair gave a long, deep, groaning heave.

"Tell me at the top!" bellowed Brannoc.

…

The top was a lid of glass.

She saw it first as a gray smear in the dark, a faint pearly circle at the head of the shaft, which grew as they climbed to the size of a door, a table, a bed. It was sealed over with a skin of frost. Round its edge ran a band of silver, worked with a hundred tiny eyes. And beneath the silver, pressed against the glass from the other side, the shadowy shape of a man lay on his back with his hands folded on his chest.

She knew whose face it was before the dust cleared.

It lay still and white and perfectly composed, with a thread-thin scar through the left brow. It had not aged. It had not decayed. The dark hair lay combed on the pillow. The long black coat was buttoned to the chin. But the mouth was soft, and the lashes dark, and there was on it, even now, a faint trace of the smile that she had seen, on a stair, a moment ago, on a living man.

"It is the coffin," said Valerian, very softly. "It is the one in the crypt. I am looking up at myself."

"Is that—"

"My body. Yes. I have been lying in it for three hundred and twelve years." He swallowed. "It is a great deal smaller than I imagined."

The lid cracked.

It went with a long bright ringing sound, like a bell struck in a frozen church. A star of white lines raced out from the center, and the silver band shuddered, and a thousand glass eyes shut as one. The shaft shook. The last of the stair gave way beneath her boots. She felt herself falling, upward, or downward, or both, into a white blaze of cold; she felt Valerian's hand close hard over hers; she heard Wick shriek and Dora Mallow swear and Brannoc, with great clarity, say, "Mother of God," and then she heard nothing at all.

The pot lid, against her heart, was warm.

Something small and drowsy stirred in it, and murmured a word in a tongue that she had once been able to read.

And then the world went white.