The column moved like a wound that had learned to walk.
Keffa held the survivors together on the slag shelves until the Spine eased enough to let people breathe without listening for falling. Ropes ran man to man, woman to woman, child to barrel; strength traveled along them faster than fear. When the cliff was only a seam behind and not a mouth above, she divided them—families to the lower folds south and west where water could be found in patient rock; runners in pairs ahead to test the drains; the old with the dogs because the dogs would not leave them and Emberfall had never been stupid about loyalty.
Dren watched long enough to know the choices would hold. He didn't say goodbye. Farewells are a crown and he has never worn one.
Raya and Mitan fell in beside him without asking permission, dust-gray and long-armed, eyes not leaving the north even to blink. Keffa met them at the fork where the Spine lifted like a knuckle. Her helm hung from two fingers; the burn-scar looked newer in the clean light.
"You cut north," she said.
"I do," he said.
"If it turns you into story, I'll kill you when you come back," she said. It wasn't a threat. It was a way of letting a friend keep his pride.
"Try," he said.
Her mouth almost found a smile and refused. "Find us a day," she said. "Not a legend."
He inclined his head by a degree that did not amount to deference, and stepped onto a line the land had tried to hide under ash.
The shelves went empty of men quickly. The wind's teeth grew longer. The glass in the drifts held slices of sky that cut your eye if you looked too long. They moved under the sun because night makes a noise here—low, constant, full of counting—and Mitan's face told Dren he did not want to hear it up close.
On the second day, the Observer returned.
It stood half a ridge above in its dark translucent cloth, a bruise against the slope, untouched by grit. When the wind leaned, it leaned with it, attentive as reed to river. Dren did not call. You don't summon omens and expect them to be helpful.
The figure lifted an arm and traced three lights on the air as it had before. The west spark died immediately, the east burned a heartbeat, the north stayed—a patient coal. When Dren took a step toward it the figure stepped back along the ridge without moving its feet and was farther away than it should have been.
"You still don't talk," he said.
The fracture hears you, the pressure answered inside his skull, faint, as if spoken in a room with too much stone. The arithmetic moves to account for you.
"Then the arithmetic should learn manners," he said.
The figure wrote nothing else in the air. It untethered itself from attention and was gone as if breathing had decided to pause. Dren hated it reflexively for making prophecy into work instead of weapon and let the anger sit one degree to the left again where it couldn't teach his hands bad habits.
They found the Chain Forge by smell—a sweetness like wet iron, a mineral tang that lives in magnets, the rank fatigue of men who have been told they are tools. The Forge lay in a crater too perfect to be volcanic, a circle where something large had tested falling centuries ago and decided to make a dent. Inside that bowl, sheds crowed around a central stack, and from the stack down into the pit ran a frame of ribbed metal like the skeleton of a bell turned inside out. Men in ash robes worked stations around vats where liquid dark rippled. Mirrors on tall stalks caught light and fed it into the vat-lips in narrow, disciplined rays. Coils hummed on benches. Chains came up from the dark the way eels come up from black water, slick with oil and memory, and were laid in loops on racks where masked auditors counted them by hand and by the weight of their attention.
"No walls," Raya murmured. "No banners."
"Only arithmetic," Mitan said. He had stopped chewing what remained of his bark. His jaw moved anyway, impatient with silence.
Dren stretched his palm along the rim rock. Pitch carried from the frames and the vats and the men. Crown: the mirrors—tight, clean, cross-fed to maintain discipline when one failed. Spine: the frame—over-braced at center, slack at the outer struts, tuned to sing obedience into the vats. Heart: the vats themselves—self-heating, magnet-wound, instructed to remember the hands that lifted chain from them and thereafter crave those hands again.
He began to hate it in the practical way.
"We break the mirrors," Raya said, hand already on a throwing loop.
"No," Dren said.
"We let the vats boil," Mitan offered, voice flat with the arithmetic of sabotage. "They eat themselves. They won't pour chain for a month."
"No," Dren said again.
Raya glanced at him with the small unsentimental contempt professionals reserve for men who are about to explain something obvious. "What then? Write your name on their door?"
"We take the memory," Dren said. "We don't give them fire. We give them forgetting."
He watched a looped chain rise from the nearest vat. As the iron touched air it shivered in a rhythm—six beats, then four, then three—the recipe for a throat. A masked auditor nodded into the rhythm and tapped the coil with a rod; the shiver settled into a hum only men happy with oppression find comforting.
"Chains that remember throats," Dren said. "I'll unwind the lesson."
They waited until the auditors' procession turned the bowl's attention toward the far racks. Dren and Raya slid along the inner rim where the slag had baked into ledges. Mitan moved opposite, into the sheds, to stand near the mirror stalk crank. Dren had given him one gesture—flat palm, curl fingers, left—and told him to use it if something turned into an order too loud to refuse.
They dropped into shadow behind the nearest vat.
Heat tried to teach Dren respect. He answered with a thin veil of current along his skin that made the air at his cheek sizzle almost imperceptibly. The vat's lip sweated the dark magnetic syrup; a low current ran around its rim, telling the liquid what to become. He put two fingers to the rim and let a hair-line pulse slip under the surface.
Not punishment. Correction.
This is not a throat, he wrote in the metal's patience. You are rope.
The dark rippled toward his fingers as if curious, then as if offended, then, gradually, as if wanting to learn. He pulled back before the current in the rim could notice his handwriting. The next loop that came up shivered once, uncertain. The masked auditor struck it with his rod and frowned behind ceramic because men who enjoy obedience hate being made to teach twice.
Dren set the second vat to the same lie. The third he tuned a degree off left—not rope, not throat, something with a memory for slack. In the fourth he touched the rim and changed the function of the coil's hum by a quarter tone, lazying it. The chain that came up from that vat failed to link end to end by the thickness of a thumbnail.
"Obvious enough," Raya murmured. "They'll smell this from across the bowl."
"They'll call it a flaw," Dren said. "Then a run. Then a bad batch. Then a purge. They'll waste a day proving the fault is themselves before they look at the rims. Take their hours. We only need hours."
A shadow fell across the lip. Dren slid hand, shoulder, blade along the frame and into the deeper cool without sound. Raya's left hand found a girder and her body disappeared into it. A man in a mask leaned over the vat, changed the angle of a mirror with the confident impatience of someone who believes physics works for him, and walked away counting under his breath.
Mitan's silhouette passed behind the mirror stalks. One crank turned a quarter. Another stuck. Dren let a thread arc across the stalk's rivets a breath long, and the stuck crank remembered it was allowed to move. Mitan's hands flowed. The mirror's pitch shifted a hair. He left it wrong enough to make the vats all sing a degree flat and right enough the auditors would argue about which of them had bumped something.
The forge felt their corrections. The air changed the way it does when a liar in a room realizes the lie will require new nouns. Men turned their heads in small, synchronized increments. Rods tapped coils. Mirrors tilted carefully, then less carefully. The central stack pulled harder, drawing heat down the frame like a jury deciding to return early. The chain coming up from the vats began to come up sometimes not at all, sometimes in shabby halves, sometimes in runs that looped wrong. The masked auditors lost their silence and discovered they liked shouting less than they had always pretended.
"Now," Dren said, and moved to the frame.
The ribs that ran from stack to vat were tuned to tell the vats how to believe. He slipped a sliver of iron—one he'd carried since Khar-Tor, old ship skin hammered flat—under the nesting of two ribs and let it hum. The hum traveled backward up the rib to the stack, asked a polite question of the crown logic there, and got a distracted answer; it traveled forward toward the vats singing, forget.
The nearest chain came up with no shiver at all. The auditor struck it with his rod and the rod vibrated like a man who has just remembered debts with interest. The chain lay on the rack like a length of metal that wanted to be something useful and had been refused a job.
A hush fell that wasn't reverence.
In that hush, a hand clapped.
Not polite. Proprietary.
On the bowl's far side a figure in an ash robe stepped onto a gantry. His mask was not ceramic. It was steel, polished to a toy reflection of a face, cheeks indented, mouth left blank. He carried a rod wrapped in braided magnet wire and a satchel heavy with something that moved in glass. Around him, auditors stilled and turned.
"Tallyman," Raya breathed, and her hand went to the hook at her belt where there had once been a knife and was now nothing at all.
"A Mouth that counts the counting," Mitan murmured from the shadows of the stalks. "They send them when arithmetic misbehaves."
The Tallyman touched the rod to the nearest chain and the chain screamed. Not out loud; in pitch. The sound carried into Dren's teeth and tried to pick a fight with his mark. The chain remembered throats. It tried to be a throat on the rack. The rack threw it to the ground with a clatter that sounded like failing.
"Find the flaw," the Tallyman said softly to his flock. "Then strike it until it calls you teacher."
He lifted the rod and pointed toward the stacks. The auditors turned in clean unison. The Tallyman's head did not move. Only the mask did, fractionally, as if it were its own animal sniffing hunger.
"Off," he said to the mirrors. "Off and balance. Walk."
Men ran. The stalks turned. The light scooped away from the rims. The vats shivered, eager not to be observed. Dren took his hand from the rib because the rib had begun to warm under his fingers.
"They're going to search for us," Raya said.
"Let them," Dren said, and slid into the frame like a shadow that had learned how to argue.
He worked fast now, because fast is the cousin of correct if your hands know the grammar. He slivered three more hum-shims between ribs and frame—not in the regular pattern the Tallyman would expect, but in the places where the frame's bad habits had made shortcuts. He retuned the coil hum by another breath toward lazy. He taught two vats rope, one slack, and one chain that holds itself—which is to say, useless for catching throats and very useful for tangling cogs. He whispered into the stack crown once, a spiteful word that he kept to himself, and the stack decided it had a headache.
The Tallyman felt every lie.
He came down the gantry steps one careful at a time, not looking at his feet. His rod hung by his side; the satchel bumped his hip. He moved as a man moves who has never been hit hard in the face because rooms teach themselves to give him space. He stopped under the frame and lifted the rod until the braid sang a single note that made the vats answer.
Dren dropped an EMP veil. The note died. The Tallyman's head tilted. The steel mask caught a small reflection of Dren where no one could have seen anything. The Tallyman's free hand wrote a sigil in the air with two fingers—two lines and a hook, the simplest invocation of the march: count.
Dren answered with his own sign, older, made on Khar-Tor when boys taught other boys how to breathe under smoke without coughing: cut.
Then he moved.
The Tallyman stabbed the rod forward and the air hard at Dren's sternum became heavy with instruction—stop—the same mirror-beam philosophy written as pressure. Dren slid under it at a lean that made bones into geometry. He closed and let his blade tap the rod just below the grip. A hair-fine thread of current slipped; the rod hiccupped; the coil remembered when it had been wire without a job.
The Tallyman was good. He let the rod go before it betrayed him and brought the satchel up and open in one motion. Glass clinked. He flung a fistful of beads into the frame and smashed them under his heel. The smell of burned tin and a medicinal something leapt. A cold greenish smoke filled the bowl's throat.
"Pitch blinder," Mitan said through his sleeve, coughing anyway.
Dren shut his seed-sense down a degree and let eyes carry him. The Tallyman moved in smoke the way men move in maps. Dren let his body choose for him—Volt Dash not far, not fast, just enough to reappear where the satchel's mouth had been an instant before. He seized the satchel's strap, ripped, and flung it into the just- cooled mirror trough.
He did not have time to enjoy correctness. The Tallyman had produced a second rod from somewhere robes hide tools and put the tip in the frame. The hum changed from headache to plea. Chain rose from the vats suddenly in a laughing shower, loops clattering, eager to be counted.
Raya hit the Tallyman from the side because she respected work. The rod kissed her ribs as she came; she took the cost and turned it into angle. Her knee found his hip and advised it to sit. He answered with the steel mask, forehead into her nose. She slid off him without grace and without apology and came back up with blood in her mouth and a borrowed rod in her hand.
Mitan cracked a mirror's pawl, let the stalk lean, and then stomped the crank he had freed earlier. The mirror turned; smoky light poured into the bowl where it shouldn't and made the chains on the racks show their false shivers to men who had believed themselves already certain.
Dren took the Tallyman's wrist—he does not like touching strangers—and wrote No into the path between hand and rod. The man hissed through steel and tried to bite. Dren shoved the face hard into a rib. The mask dented. Inside it something soft complained. He jammed the shortblade into the rod at the grip again, cut the coil, and the hum fell out of the frame like a floor with no nails.
Auditors were coming.
They moved clean. Machines in robes. You must respect competence in men you mean to kill, or you become the kind of thing you're killing.
"Leave," Dren said.
Raya did, already limping toward shadow. Mitan had two mirrors free and was shoving one down its stalk with a look of savage satisfaction he didn't let possess him beyond its usefulness. Dren took the chain on the nearest rack—cool, heavy, almost innocent now—and flung it over the Tallyman's neck because poetry sometimes is a weapon in rooms where no one wants to admit it.
The chain remembered nothing. The chain held itself.
The Tallyman clawed at it and found no memory inside to talk to. His rod twitched under Dren's heel and then decided not to anymore. Dren walked him backward into a vat frame with a calm cruelty, felt the steel mask scrape the rib, felt the man's throat search for an argument that would work inside chain that would not. He wanted to say something about arithmetic and throats and the way men choose to believe in easy counting over hard mercy. Pride told him that was a crown, and he did not speak.
He ended it. Clean.
The bowl changed its mind about being a room and became a noise. Auditors hit the frame in four places at once. Rods stabbed coils. Mirrors turned with sudden correct zeal. Dren threw his last sliver into a rib on the way out and told it to hum forget until someone came with patience and tools. It would hold for hours. Not days. Hours are cities.
They made the rim as the first mirror found their shadows. Dren threw a veil over his back and felt the beam lose interest in him by principle, a small joy he did not keep.
They ran until the crater was only a hot memory sucking at the wind. When they stopped, Mitan bent at the waist and spat the last of his bark on the ground and laughed once, breathless, without humor. Raya prodded the bruised place where the rod had kissed her and winced like a person discovering a new map of a country she'd thought thoroughly explored.
"You didn't kill them all," she said, professionally disapproving.
"I cut what we needed," Dren said.
"You took their memory," Mitan said wonderingly. "Chain in their hands will be rope in someone else's. The wrong throats will live. Some of the right ones too."
"We don't have 'right ones'," Raya said. She wiped blood from her upper lip with a furious swipe and swallowed the rest because Emberfall didn't waste anything. "We have time. We bought some."
They slept one hour against stone that considered keeping them and decided to wait for a better offer. The next shelf rose with the day. The wind pinned its own shadow to their backs.
By afternoon the land forgot about shelves and learned an angle. The Spine leveled, lifted, and went black. From that rim, the world ended.
The Black Meridian had always been a line Dren felt rather than saw—an ache in the mark, a frequency behind the teeth, a vector north dragging at the animal of the body. Standing over it turned ache into anatomy. The Meridian was a canyon a league wide and more, a gash chiseled in ages when the world had been obedient to gods or machines. The bottom moved. Not in waves—in decisions. Plates rose like slow teeth and sank. Distant structures extruded and withdrew as if the earth was practicing arguments. He could not call what burned down there fire or lightning or magic without lying to one of the words. It was pressure given voice and color, a bruised violet that sometimes cooled to blue, sometimes went all the way to black and stayed like a threat.
Across the canyon, on a spur of polished bone and fused slag, rose the Meridian's instrument: a spire not built but grown out of old Warden rib and the bones of dead engines, wrapped in bindings that had been etched so long and deep their lines made moiré with air. Bells hung in cages along galleries. Mirrors studded the spine of the spire to catch light that wasn't light at all and direct it into throats. Bridges of iron crossed from the far shelf to a central island like strands of web woven by a spider that had been shown geometry by a saint.
Between Dren and the spire lay the canyon floor and on it the March. Not in ranks. Not now. In work. Servitors hauled, auditors etched, choir-men moved between bells like doctors tending active sickness. Large shapes moved at the perimeter—Skullbacks, Spirebreakers, Choir-Lords—in patient patterns that had less to do with patrol and more to do with reassurance. Farther north, just in the corner of sight, a silhouette sat like a memory men had decided not to share with each other because sharing gives power to the thing named.
Raya freed a breath she'd been holding. "That's too many," she said with clinical understatement.
Mitan sank to a knee and put both palms to the black rock at the rim. He stayed like that long enough for Dren to begin to be impatient, then longer, until impatience learned it had no leverage here. When Mitan lifted his head his eyes were wet and not with tears; bell-sound had made them shine.
"They're indexing," he said hoarsely. "Every chain. Every mirror. Every bell. Names. Paths. Body counts. Graves they haven't dug yet." He swallowed, gagged once on nothing, and breathed like a man resuming participation in his own life. "If that spire finishes the count, it will play us like instruments. Not siege. Harvest."
"How long," Dren said.
"If we hadn't touched the Forge?" Mitan flicked his fingers. "Hours. With what you ruined? Days. Maybe a week if they fight themselves instead of us."
Raya squinted down-canyon. "There," she said, and pointed along the near wall where a ladder of old ore rails and cables had been bolted into the rock generations ago and then forgotten by men with better things to do. "Ore ladder. Vent cuts below it. The spire's third gallery sits just shy of a maintenance lip. If we can cross the floor and climb there unseen, we can put our hands on the binders that feed the bells."
"And cut," Dren said.
"And cut," she agreed, a professional's doctrine.
They lay flat under a lip of rock while the canyon's weather did whatever it is that passes for thinking in such weather. Sometimes heat walked up the walls in sheets; sometimes cold pooled in the low spots and inhaled men's breath. Sound came late here or early. Dren felt time slip and catch and slide again, like a gear whose teeth had been filed to points.
Bells across the spire spoke once—three chimes, low, low, lower—and a wave of attention moved across the floor as if the ground had been stroked by a god with a long, dispassionate hand. The silhouette at the northern edge of sight stood, as if answering a question he had not been asked aloud. Its head turned toward the spire. It did not hurry. It did not need to.
"Not a king," Raya whispered. "A man wearing the idea of one."
"We don't touch him," Dren said. "Not yet."
Raya accepted that like a woman not interested in dying because of someone else's pride. Mitan rubbed his arms like a man whose skin had found a hive of stinging time and tried to brush it off.
They watched until the pattern on the canyon floor convinced Dren it had limits. It had many. Auditors moved in loops that left gaps. Servitors rotated through rest that men who count pretend isn't necessary and machines admit only because breaking costs more than lying. Choir-men stopped to drink when they wanted to look pious. Every order, even perfect ones, frays where it touches bodies.
"Cross at change of shift," Raya murmured, eyes on the auditors at the base of the spire as they finished a page of characters and turned the slate. "They will look up to hear whether the next bell chimes on time. That is when men are blind: when the thing they love makes a sound."
Mitan pointed at the ore ladder with two fingers held close, a scout's way of writing certainty on stone. "Climb in thirds," he said. "Rest at the vent lip. If you breathe like a liar, the vent will make the bell throw its voice and you will be a lesson instead of a knife."
They planned without deciding that that's what they were doing. They said when and where and how and left why on the ground because it had already proved it could walk on its own.
Dren loosened the straps on his belt until his lungs could learn new manners quickly; tightened the sheath until the blade would not rattle against rib; touched the steel square from Emberfall and Ila's coin at once as if daring them to have an opinion. They did not. Good.
The shift turned.
Bells on the second gallery chimed the end of a measure and the beginning of competence. Auditors glanced up, as predicted, to hear if the next chime agreed with the chalk. Choir-men dipped heads. Servitors breathed. Dren slid over the rim and into the Black Meridian's air like a diver into water he has decided will admit him.
They ran bent, small, not stealthy so much as inconvenient to notice. Heat washed their faces and rolled away like a wave that has decided to be polite. A groaner coughed and then remembered it had no reason to. Raya checked her pace when a choirman's head turned and cut the angle a hair; the head completed its arc and forgot.
At the ore ladder the canyon tried to learn their names by taking breath; Dren refused to teach it. He put hand over hand on rust that had learned patience and forearm over rib along rock that wanted to be knife. Mitan climbed like a man with an argument with gravity from long ago; gravity, undecided, let him have this one. Raya's bad rib found the rung and advised it to be kinder next time; the rung, being metal, forgot the lesson immediately.
They reached the vent lip and lay inside a cut in the wall where ancient air had once gone to prayer. Heat moved past like congregation. Dren put his palm to the stone and let pitch take him precisely to where the binders ran under the gallery. Crown: the bell cages. Spine: the rib-lattice that moved instruction from bell to mirror to mouth to machine. Heart: a column in the spire's center, not hollow, full of a slow pressure, the color of a bruise when it's almost done hurting and about to start itching.
Raya pointed once, minimal. A patrol of servitors clanked over the bridge, rods tucked neat. Their steps fit a measure and the measure made the bridge hum. When their weight left the bridge the hum stayed one second too long. The bridge remembered being asked to hold too much. Bridges are sentimental like that. Dren smiled, without joy. Weakness is grammar if you know how to read.
"Third gallery," Mitan breathed. "Binder bank just there. Two coils per bell. Mirrors slaved to the coils. A man could retune ten in a breath if his fingers moved like good lies."
"Mine do," Dren said.
They moved when the bell above chimed again. Sound carried badly and beautifully here; everyone looked up to be sure the spire agreed with their belief about the world. In that collective attention, three small lives poured across the last of the ladder and under the third gallery. A cheek of fused slag had buckled there sometime in the last century. Dren wedged fingers into the buckle's shadow and pulled. Stone remembered being molten and yielded an inch. Enough. They slid inside the spire's under-skin.
It smelled like dust trapped in a harp.
Binders lined the slit, fat with charge, humming on a chord that loved obedience and hated art. Wires thin as hair looped back from them to bells whose clappers were wrapped in a leather that had been kissed with oil and prayers. Mirrors studded the rear of the slit, angles adjusted by rods that rusted into their sockets and were struck when adjustment proved inconvenient.
Dren laid two fingers on the nearest binder and felt all the bells touch his palm at once.
The seed's mark went cold.
He remembered the grove and the liar who called himself Creator; the flaming bat; the false laughter. He remembered Emberfall's wall insisting on its right to exist in a world actively offended by the concept. He remembered the Tallyman's mask dent under his hand. He pushed all of it a degree to the left where it could snarl without touching his wrist.
Three strokes.
Open. Silence. Truth.
He did not write them on the Heart—the column would notice and reply with teeth. He wrote them on the bindings, one by one, in a pattern that looked like a man tuning a harp while the house burned. Bell by bell, the obedience note lost authority; coil by coil, the mirror slaving shuddered and released like a jaw opening after a long clench. He left none slack enough to trip and fall on their own. He left all of them honest enough that when the spire demanded a chord the chord would answer with No.
Mitan stood at the slit's end, watching meeting points of steps, eyes closed to listen to bells that hadn't sounded yet. He lifted two fingers. "Now," he whispered.
Raya's hand found a rod and knocked a mirror one tooth out. The tooth should not have mattered. It mattered. Light that wasn't light cut through the gallery wrong; the bell above answered with the next chime and missed, just enough for every auditor on the floor to realize something had moved while they were counting.
The spire shuddered like a man whose teeth suddenly ached.
Dren turned the last binder a quarter breath and the chord that tried to gather lost itself and began to harmonize by accident with the canyon's own ugly pitch. He felt the far chains the Forge would have sent—had he not taken their memory—reach for throats and find rope. He felt the ledger under the spire skip a line and add a column that had never existed for men who believed they could make death tidy.
"Go," he said.
They went.
They climbed backward down the ore ladder with the light above turning indecisive—the canyon losing interest in being dramatic and becoming merely dangerous. Halfway, a beam of instruction from a mirror they had not noticed yet wrote Stop across Dren's calves and his muscles forgot he owned them. He dropped. Pride grabbed the rung with his hands and made the body obey. Raya hissed a word that was mostly air and hit the beam with the rod she'd kept—the lash of her strike touching it in just the right place to turn an order into a suggestion. Dren's legs returned and he did not thank her because gratitude is a crown and he keeps his head bare.
They made the floor as the bells mis-chimed. The canyon's weather took offense and gusted; the spire retuned and failed to; auditors shouted; servitors discovered their coils had opinions. The silhouette far north had walked a quarter of the distance it had not intended to walk today. It stopped. It turned its head toward the spire. It did nothing else. Sometimes that is the most violent act available.
They ran crosswise, zigzagging through the way servitors forget to look down and the way men in robes forget to look anywhere but at objects. Heat stumbled them. Cold made their knees think they were older. They reached the rim at the third breath after the bells forgot what came next and hauled themselves into the honest wind like swimmers onto a pier.
They did not speak until the spire chimed again and this time got it mostly right—wrong enough to matter, right enough to go on pretending.
Mitan pressed both palms to his face and slid them down. "You turned ten instruments into liars."
"I turned them into dissenters," Dren said. He slumped back on the stone and felt the canyon's pitch push up into his spine and try to negotiate. He left it talking to itself.
Raya lay on her back and watched a small hawk cut the high air above the rim, indifferent to gods and machines and men. "A day," she said. "Two, if they argue."
"Enough to move the column away from being harvested," Mitan said. "Not enough to win. What is enough to win."
Dren did not answer. He remembered Amberfall's terraces cooling in their own shadow. He slid the steel square in his pocket against Ila's coin. The steel warmed. The coin stayed a coin. He looked north where the silhouette had gone back to being idea instead of action.
"We cut deeper," he said. "Binder banks were fingers. This place has a wrist. We cut the wrist and the hand drops what it's holding. Maybe it doesn't pick it up again in time."
"And if we find the elbow," Raya said.
"Then we break our teeth on it," he said, noncommittal, which for him was optimism.
They made a shelf-camp under a lip of fused slag. No fire. No talk. The canyon sang to itself like a drunk remembering a hymn and Dren let the song run around his bones without touching his mark because that mark had its own hymn and he didn't want them harmonizing until he chose the key.
At some hour that thought refuses to recognize, thunder spoke somewhere no clouds existed. Bells answered, then contradicted themselves, then went quiet as if embarrassed. A patrol of Skinners came up the far wall and went down again after realizing the geometry did not permit their usual opinion of gravity. A child cried in the black where no child should be and the echo turned it into a laugh; a mother shushed the echo as if shushing ever worked on the world.
Dren did not sleep so much as let time pass across his body like a hand. When he opened his eyes again, dawn had come in an argument—two directions at once, two colors in disagreement—and the spire wore a ring of whatever passes for dew in a place like this.
He stood, ribs adding a line to the ledger, shoulder settling for functional. Raya rolled to her feet with a professional's contempt for discomfort. Mitan stared north and then away, as if not looking there could make there delay noticing him.
"Next," Raya said.
"Under," Dren answered, and pointed at a seam along the canyon wall where fused slag met old earth and a darker darkness breathed. "The spire has a wrist. A conduit into rock. It's hidden because men don't like putting their hands where the world can chew. We'll put ours there."
Raya checked the edge of her borrowed rod with the pad of her thumb the way a woman checks her own lip for blood and makes a decision about dignity. "And if it chews."
"Then we pull back what it takes and call it a trade," Dren said.
Mitan smiled, a thin bend of mouth that didn't involve happiness. "And if we find the elbow."
Dren looked at the spire while the canyon tried to count his breath.
"Then I'll show it a knife," he said, and started down.