SIMURIA · THIRTEEN MONTHS AFTER LANDFALL
Gin had built a great many rude things in his life. He had never before had to build a prayer.
Four levels down inside the mountain, a chip of live vein sat in a stone dish, no bigger than a thumbnail.
A vein was the god's own body where it came up through rock. The same grey-gold that ran under a worshipper's skin.
The difficulty was Aizen. Everything on this planet listened for wanting, and he had kept his shut for thirteen months.
A prayer is a want said out loud. He could not say one without handing over his name.
So somebody else had to kneel at a shrine and ask, in a grammar eleven hundred years old.
"They don't hope," Gin said, to a man who had not asked. "Hoping's got a gap in it and the gap reads like a hole. They ask the way you put your foot on a stair."
So he built a thing that could not hope. Five layers of it, and only the innermost one did anything. The other four were manners.
It knelt. It had no knees and nothing to kneel with, and it knelt anyway.
Then it wanted, with the patient shapelessness of an old woman thanking a wall.
The dish went hot, and Sawicki got a glove under it. The smallest scrap of the god had taken a forgery for a real prayer.
"A little paper soul that knows how to say please."
"Does it know what it's asking for?"
"It doesn't know anything. It hasn't got the parts."
Gin put it in its case and stopped at the door.
"Piotr. Two thousand years, and nobody's ever once lied to it." A pause. "Do you suppose a thing like that ever grew the part that catches one?"
Nothing in the room said anything.
"Mm," said Gin, and went up to tell Aizen it was finished.
* * *
Nadia Ferreira's map had begun as a wall and was a room now. Aizen let the four of them look at it before he began.
"I have spent a month being irritated by one sentence. Forty-one thousand six hundred and nine mouths, opened in the same instant, or the whole of it drains back into the rock."
"Then I noticed I had been reading the wrong half of it. I cannot be in forty-one thousand places. The thing I mean to rob is in forty-one thousand places, and always has been."
"Being everywhere at once is not an obstacle here. It is a service on offer."
"So we do not build forty-one thousand spheres. We build one, and we do not carry it anywhere. We ask the god to carry it for us."
"Gin's forgery kneels at a shrine and asks, in the proper grammar. What it asks for is my sphere, with every address on this planet cut into its face."
"The want goes down into the warm floor. The answer comes back at every vein of that body in the same tick, because that is the only way it answers."
"The sphere is Chronostasis. It stops a thing in time and takes it away in the same motion. I have used it on hands. It will do for veins."
Which was the plan entire. The god itself would carry the theft out to every mouth it had, in the same instant, and every one of them would stop.
One condition, met by the victim. For free, because it had been asked politely.
"There's a tolerance," Gin said from the corner. "You'll want it before you enjoy yourself further."
"The ask and the sphere have to be one event. Not close together. One." His eyes were open. "The sphere has to be inside the prayer when it goes down."
"If it lands even slightly behind, the finest ear on this planet hears somebody want something that isn't there."
"Nothing has ever asked it for nothing before, Aizen-san. My theory is that's what waking up feels like."
"Your margin."
"Zero. Nothing in this base can hold a zero." He passed a sheet across upside down, the way Aizen read fastest. "So I've written it a vow instead."
A vow bought accuracy no instrument could. You promised to lose something you could not stand to lose, and the technique came out tighter than your hands could make it.
"If the cast slips by any amount our instruments can find, I lose the technique. A year to the day."
"A year without the cuts," Ferreira said. "You wouldn't be able to read a door."
"I'd be a very charming houseplant." Gin's smile did not move by a millimetre. "Sign it or don't."
Aizen read it twice and handed it back. "Very well."
He did not thank him or query a clause. Gin folded the sheet away, looking as pleased as a man gets who has mortgaged himself for somebody else's arithmetic.
Ferreira stayed behind.
"An inquisitor out of Khersa." She set a paper down. "She writes to district offices about bells. Which shrine rang hardest, on which night, across nine provinces."
A god could not say where it hurt. But a thing that hurts leans.
"Her name."
"Iresh Ukhan Vey."
"Front of the file," Aizen said. "Not with the others."
Ferreira had her at four hundred kilometres, then two hundred, then at a stone house where the road bends round a hill.
Then at the foot of the mountain, at first light, and not alone.
* * *
Gin went down the eastern slope with his hands in his sleeves and the frost still on everything.
Eight soldiers stood in the old mine spoil. Behind them, out of the way, a woman of about fifty with a writing board.
He had felt them from up at the wall, the way you feel an oven through a door.
Saddled was the word. A soldier who had climbed high enough for his god to come down inside him.
While it was in there he was four times as strong, quicker than a horse over ten metres, and no man of this world had ever made one die.
Gin was not strong. He had stopped being fast at about thirty, and he had never carried much.
"Morning," he said, in their language. "Awful road, isn't it."
Nobody answered.
One fact was good. A god answers wanting, and it has to find the thing wanted first. Nothing on this world had ever found Gin.
So the eight could not have it done for them. They would have to use their hands.
The other fact was the difficulty. A god inside a man when the man dies knows exactly what killed him.
A god that knows can be asked. A god that is asked, answers.
So the sum was not eight men. It was eight gods, out of eight men, before a single man stopped breathing.
He shut his eyes. It changed nothing about what he could see and a great deal about how it looked.
The first came at a speed that would have finished anybody honest.
Gin moved his shoulder eleven centimetres, let the arm go past, and put two fingers on the forearm going through.
A scratch across the bone, a hand above the wrist, one millimetre deep. It drew no blood worth the name.
The man came round for a second swing. His arm broke in the middle of it, in two places, with nobody touching it.
A bone is a beam. You do not break a beam by hitting it harder.
You put a notch across it where the bending is worst and let the load do the rest. A notch is where force goes to stand.
The god had made him four times as strong. It had not sent a thicker arm to put it in.
So the strongest thing on that hillside broke the arm, and it belonged to the man wearing it.
"That's the trouble with borrowing," Gin said. "Nobody ever sends the frame with it."
One of them made a noise. He was nineteen at the outside and his voice went up at the end.
"He isn't even looking at us."
"No," Gin agreed. "You broke that collarbone at about eleven, didn't you. It set crooked. Somebody kind did it and they weren't a surgeon."
The boy's mouth stayed open.
"You've been standing near me," Gin said. "That's all it takes. It isn't a trick."
Behind them the woman said, "Again. All of you," the way somebody reads the next line off a list. She was writing while she said it.
Three came together, which was correct, and which was what he had wanted.
Where a god sits inside a man there is a seam. Only the line where two things have been talked into being one.
Three years up the ladder it is still there and not even hidden. Thirty years up there is nothing left of it.
He had done it once before, nineteen kilometres underground, on a woman he was fond of. He had been two threads late, and he had not stopped counting them since.
He did it three times in about a second and a half. No light, no sound, no wound anywhere.
The grey-gold went out of three sets of wrists like water out of a bath, and three enormous men fell over being ordinary.
He got the one with the broken arm on the way past, because it seemed unkind to leave him in it.
Those were the expensive ones. Each cost more than everything else he had done that morning put together.
Three more left in him, if he was lucky in them.
The old one had been watching, and the old one was not stupid.
"Hands," he said. "Nobody swings. Get hold of him and hold on."
The correct answer, four men late.
Two of them took his arms. There is nothing clever available about being weak while men who can lift a cart have hold of you.
The third came in and did it properly. Three ribs on the left. Then his shoulder came out of its socket with a sound he felt in his teeth.
A hand went across his mouth and the back of his head into the spoil. He tasted stone.
He did not stop knowing anything. That was the one part of him that had never yet switched off.
Nobody was swinging now, so there was no load anywhere to borrow.
But a hand is not a fist. A hand is ropes running down the forearm, and they only pull straight because a strap holds them against the wrist.
Cut the strap and the ropes stand off the joint. The muscle behind is as strong as ever and can do nothing useful with it.
He cut two straps, one on each wrist of the man on his right.
The grip came off him like a coat off a hook. The man looked at his own open hand and could not make it into anything.
"It'll keep you alive all day," Gin said, from the ground, with blood in his mouth. "It won't put your pulleys back."
Then he spent the last three seams, and knew while he was doing the third that it was the bottom of him.
That left the old one.
Dhemal Ael Sur had been on the ladder thirty-one years. Gin read him from the ground and did not enjoy the answer.
There was no seam. The man and the thing in him had stopped having a border, the way the soldier at the gully had stopped having one.
He could still see where the man came apart. He always could. He had never once looked at anything and failed.
It sat high in the neck and would have cost about as much effort as opening a jar. It would also have killed him instantly with a god still inside him.
Which was the one thing on that hillside Gin was not allowed to do.
So he had the answer and was forbidden it, which he thought was very nearly funny.
A god stays in a man the time his covenant sets, and then goes home, finished or not. Aizen had put a number on that five months ago, with a watch.
Gin had read the descent from the wall, every rung of it, when Dhemal's ground went warm.
Eighty-six seconds. He could not beat the man. He could be a nuisance for eighty-six seconds.
So he spent none of it fighting and all of it moving the man's feet.
He gave ground backwards through the spoil. Each time he was about to be caught, he was standing somewhere fractionally worse to catch him.
He knew what every stone on that heap would do under a boot. He got hit twice anyway, and the second put him on one knee.
Then the ground went cool, and Dhemal Ael Sur stopped being four times as strong as he had ever been.
He stood in the dust with his hands shaking. Fifty-one years old and out of breath, in front of a foreigner on one knee.
"You never once hit me," he said.
"No."
"Then what have you been doing."
"Arithmetic," said Gin.
He got up. It was not graceful.
Eight men in the spoil, and no god in any of them at the end. It would know where. It would never know what.
The woman had not run.
"How many more could you have done?" she asked.
"None," said Gin, and grinned at her with blood on his teeth, because it was true and because it was the funniest thing he had heard all week.
She wrote that down as well.
* * *
Aizen came down out of the wall while Gin was still getting his shoulder back in. He came down because Gin was empty.
"You brought eight."
"I brought eight so that I would know what you had." Her voice did not shake and she did not put the board down. "I have spent them well."
She was the second person ever to find this mountain on her own, and she had come at first light, which Aizen thought almost discourteous.
She had done it with a pencil, and that was the part he intended to keep.
Every other inquisitor had ridden at the Rumelians for five months. Iresh Ukhan Vey had read the shrine censuses.
Nine gods were grieving and not one could say what for. But grief rang the bells, and each god rang its own country unevenly.
The shrines nearest the wound rang hardest. That was a direction, and nine grieving gods gave her nine of them.
So she marked where each god's grief ran thickest, drew a line out of it, and stood where the nine lines crossed.
"You have been wrong before," Aizen said.
"Not this year. I told the tribunal I would bring back a bearing or nothing at all."
"That was well done," Aizen said, and meant it, and wrote it down that evening under her name.
"You never took two under the same god. Nine gone, nine gods, nineteen days." She said it the way a clerk reads a total. "Nobody born here would plan around that. You had to learn it."
"And nothing hears you."
"I asked my god who he had lost instead of where it hurt. He carries eleven of us. He carried twelve." Her jaw set. "That gave me a name."
"Then I sat in Tessek's kitchen. The fire was banked. A man riding out in a temper does not stop to bank a fire."
"So he never rode out. Somebody polite did it on his way through, so a sleeping child would not burn."
She looked at his face for the first time. "It is the only kind thing I can find that you have done here. It is how I knew you would come down and talk to me."
Then she turned the board over.
"Your man took eight of mine apart in five minutes and he never once touched a god."
"Every cut was in a soldier. An arm. A wrist. The seam where the thing sits. Not one was in the grey-gold itself, and he had it under his hands eight times."
"He is the finest thing I have ever watched, and he cannot cut it. Which means neither can you."
Aizen did not answer her.
"So you did not come to take it off us." She looked up at the mountain. "You came to be given it. You mean to ask."
Four levels down inside that hill lay a month of his work, folded into the shape of a kneeling man. She had got to it off a spoil heap in five minutes.
"I posted a letter at Khersa before I rode," she said. "It says you will be at a shrine."
Then he understood the other thing, about a second later than he should have.
The ground had been warm for some while.
She had been climbing the whole time they spoke. Under the talk, a rung at a time. Every promise she had made her god since she was seven.
He had given her the hour because she was the most interesting thing on the planet.
Stop her halfway and a prayer would be left standing in the air with nothing under it, which was the exact noise Gin had spent a month warning him about.
Let her finish and a fifty would come down into a twelve and look at him. She was a twelve. He was thirty-five.
He took the second. He could pay for it and could not price the first.
She said the last rung the way a woman says a thing she has said ten thousand times. The ground came up warm from a long way off, and the grey-gold went out along her jaw and both wrists.
He did not tear it out of her. A god torn out screams, and a scream goes along every vein on the planet at once.
Nor could he throw. A sphere leaving the hand makes a shape, and there were two shrines inside forty kilometres.
So he waited until the god was the whole way inside her. Then he took her wrists where the grey-gold ran deepest, and stopped what stood in them.
All he had to do was hold it still until it left of its own accord. Four minutes.
None of it looked like anything. A woman with her arms lit from the inside, and dust hanging where the wind had left it.
Twelve he could have held all day. But the fifty in her wrists was not hers. It was still attached to the thing under the continent.
He had both hands on one finger of what he meant to rob.
At two minutes it began to lean on him.
At three the right hand went. There was no pain worth the name. It simply stopped being an instrument and became an object he happened to be carrying.
He left it where it was. Taking it off her would have been the same as being seen.
At the fourth minute the god went home, on schedule. It took with it an hour it would never be able to account for, and nothing else.
Which meant it had not felt him. He had to stand there the whole four minutes to find that out.
He killed her there on the slope. It was quick, and he was not discourteous about it.
The east face let go while he was walking back up. A hundred and forty metres came down as grit. Something enormous had been held out of time in the middle of it, and the ground had been standing too close.
Gin was still sitting in the spoil when the dust reached them.
He looked at the grit, and then at the two fingers of silver at Aizen's left temple that had not been there at dawn.
His eyes went once to the right hand, in its pocket, and did not go back.
Then he asked whether the eastern survey markers had gone down with the face, and got up to reset them, holding his left arm against his ribs.
Aizen wrote the encounter up that night with his left hand. The right would not quite close, and did not for a week, and after that never entirely again.
On this world the price came out in the same three places. Temples, knuckles, the corners of the eyes.
It had taken Aizen four minutes to start paying it.
Out on the northern hills a god had grieved five months without ever being able to say where. Now it could. It could not say what had happened on that slope, but it could say where.
* * *
The ship came out of the mountain in nine hours, the way a splinter comes out.
They cut her up and stood the pieces in a rectangle forty metres on a side. That was the frame the sphere would be cast in. Nothing else was big enough.
"That is the last of her," Ferreira said. "There is no other way off this planet now."
"Go on."
"She left the nine lines with the tribunal at Khersa before she rode. And a god that could not point for five months is pointing east now."
"They are raising Saddled to ride on the bearing. Two hundred, when it is done. Five weeks."
Two hundred of the thing Gin had spent a morning on eight of.
"Assume five weeks," Aizen said. "Note that you said it out loud, and the date."
The register lay under the frame, three metres of grown ore-glass like a window. Ferreira's whole year was cut into it in columns, every address a place where the god's body broke surface.
That list went on the face of the sphere, and the sphere would go wherever the list sent it.
Sawicki brought the last correction on a slate.
"Forty-one thousand six hundred and ten. A family on the dry shelf roofed a seam and consecrated it. As of the eleventh they are a shrine."
He turned the slate round. "Gratitude, the district office wrote. Their well stopped failing."
One mouth left off the list and the whole theft drained back into the rock.
"Gratitude." Aizen said the word the way another man might say a friend's name in an unexpected town. "They have built me a door out of gratitude."
He cut the address in himself, at the foot of the last column, out of order.
Gin arrived at his elbow and watched the frame instead of the glass.
"You have gone grey, Aizen-san."
"Yes."
"Is it coming back?"
"No," Aizen said.
"The hand?"
"No. There are healers at home, and a technique that runs a thing backwards. Neither is any use here."
"Rewind gives a thing back what it still owns. Reverse cursed technique mends what is torn." He put the dead hand away in its pocket. "Nothing in that hand is torn, Gin. It is not damaged. It is spent."
"Mm."
"A price paid is not an injury. Nothing puts it back."
Gin said nothing about his own ribs, and Aizen did not ask, and that was the whole of that conversation.
"It has answered every request ever made of it. Two thousand years and not one refusal." Aizen stood back and looked at his machine. "That is not generosity, Gin. That is a specification."
"And we are going to ask it for something."
"We are going to ask it for the only thing it has never been asked for." The smile arrived, the small courteous one. "And it will do what it has always done, and put itself to sleep with its own hands."
Gin looked up at the frame, and down at the forty-one thousand addresses, and did not say any of the three things available to him.
"Has it got a name?"
"The prayer it cannot answer," Aizen said.