Month 1, Day 5
Basha decided before the rest of us had finished staring up the road at what was coming. She turned and pointed her spear at the building with the wide stair.
"That one. Everyone up and inside, now. Block the door behind you. Move!"
We went. The doorway started above our heads and the steps ran too tall to take at a run, so Nikita got to the bottom first and turned and started grabbing arms and swinging people up onto the slab above him, one and then the next.
"Give me your arm. Up. Next." When Jonas's bad leg folded under him on the high step, Nikita took him by the belt and threw him up the last two. "Rafi. Top."
Rafi was already up there, hauling from above. I came near the end with the torch, because the torch had to go through last, and the things were close enough behind me that I felt the air move before Rafi's hand closed on my collar and dragged me over the lip.
Inside was a long room with furniture in it built for the wrong size of body. A table ran along one wall at the height of my shoulder, with benches under it too tall to sit on. At the back there was a hearth with a cold mouth I could have walked into without ducking, and shelves beside it that ran up out of reach, all of them empty.
"People lived in here." Rafi turned on the spot with the torch, taking it in. "I mean actually lived. Ate right there, sat on those... and then what, they just got up and left? Left all of it?"
"They left, is where." The dwarf had his hand flat on the wall, running it down the stone. "Here. Feel it. Go on. There's no tool marks on it, no... no seams, nothing cracked, nothing worn, it's just... I've worked stone my whole life and I couldn't tell you how this was even made." He said it low and kept his hand on the stone after.
We dragged the longest bench across the bottom of the doorway. It took four of us, and it came up only to my chest. The things could have come over it, but the torch sat in the gap above it, and they stayed out in the street and paced.
Basha set watches, two at the door, the rest told to rest, though nobody in that room could do it. We sat against the giant furniture in the dark and waited for nothing.
Jonas sat working his bad knee with both thumbs, and he winced when he found the spot. Mirae shifted over to him without a word and reached for his ankle. "It's fine, it's nothing," he said. "You don't have to... it's fine, really." She took the foot anyway and turned it slow, one way and then the other. "Hold still. Tell me where." He told her, and she pressed her thumb into it, and he breathed through it, and neither of them said a word about where we were.
After a while Rafi said it, low, because someone had to.
"Okay. Somebody talk to me, because the way in's sealed and this fire's not lasting the night, and right about now I'd really love to hear a plan."
"Keep your head. That's the plan," Basha said. "We hold the door, we wait for light, we find another way up. Now sit down."
"There's no other way up." That was Antoine, from the back, where he had put himself against the wall. He was not arguing. His voice stayed flat, almost bored. "You all walked through it on the way in. One gap, right at the top, the tree growing straight up at it, every road in here running up to it. We go up. Now, or in three days when we can't stand... but we go up. And I'd sooner do it fed, with a blade in my hand, than crawl it half-dead. But by all means. Sit."
"He's right," Viktor said, quick to stand with him. "We just sit here and we... we starve, that's what happens. We sit and we starve. He's right."
"Up," the dwarf said, talking past Viktor, to Antoine. "Up toward the big black thing none of us can even put a name to. ...Wonderful."
"I'm going where the door is," Antoine said. "I didn't hang it up there."
Old Ben had been quiet against the wall, watching the gap where the torch sat. He spat to one side. "Listen to 'em out there. No rush at all," he said. "That's what I don't like. No rush at all."
"Enough." Basha cut it off before it could spread. "Eyes on the door. Save the fire. We'll talk when there's light to talk by. Not before."
Later, when the talk had died, Nikita took the watch with me at the door. We fed the torch what little we could spare and watched the things move in the street, and he was the one who broke the quiet.
"You remember the first one." It was not a question. "The ruins. Our first night here, that thing throwing itself at the door till morning."
"I try not to," I said.
"I slept through half of it." He almost smiled. "You sat up the whole night with your eyes on the crack in the door. Never blinked."
"One of us had to."
"We walked out of that one." He went back to watching the gap. "We'll walk out of this."
It was hours later that Rafi found the room. He had gone into the back of the building looking for anything dry enough to burn, and he came back fast and got hold of my arm.
"Aleks. Aleks, get the torch over here, you have to see this."
There was another doorway off the back of the room, as high as the rest, and Rafi boosted me up and I swung the torch around inside. The walls were racked with weapons, floor to over my head. Hundreds of them, spears and short blades and long ones and heads cut to fit a haft, all of it the same hard blue-green stuff, clear along the edges. When the light crossed them every edge in the room shone at once.
The dwarf came up behind me and went still. Then he reached out and lifted down a short heavy blade and turned it over twice in his hands.
"Now hold on. Hold on a minute." He turned the blade over once. "This isn't... it's not iron. It's not glass, it's not stone, it's nothing I've got a word for. I've worked metal my whole life, and I've never... no. Never once had this in my hand." He set the edge against his thumbnail and it bit. "Still sharp. There's not a... not a nick on it anywhere." He looked along the full racks, and his voice dropped. "And there's hundreds of them. Look at it. Made, racked, ready, and never... never swung once, not one. You tell me. Why does an empty city leave a room full of these and just... walk out."
He did not get an answer, because there was no good one, and we started taking down what we could carry.
There was no ceremony to it. Nikita took a spear and a second for his back and weighed a blade and kept it too. Antoine pulled down a long blade, turned it once, and was done deciding. The dwarf knocked the old head off his hammer haft and seated one of the blue ones in its place, tapping it home with the heel of his hand.
"There. Better," he said, to himself.
Mirae took a short blade, and then she stopped at the wall above the racks, where a band of the cut marks ran along the stone, and put her fingers near them. "This one... it keeps turning up," she said, half to herself. "All through the city, the same... I think it's the same one. I don't... I can't read it. Not yet." Basha said her name twice before she came away. I reached up and took the shortest sword on the wall, and it still pulled my arm straight when I let it hang. Rafi watched me try to hold it level.
"Hey, you don't have to swing it," he said. "Keep it up, keep it between you and them, let the edge do the work. You'll be fine."
"I won't be fine," I said. "But thanks."
When everyone had something in their hands, Basha put it plain.
"We go up. Antoine had the one thing right, the gap's the only way out. So that's where we're going. Tight line. Torches at the front. Nobody strays off it, nobody. We move now, while we've still got fire to move by."
Antoine pushed off the wall. "Finally," he said, and we went.
The ramps between the rings were long and steep and the risers were cut too tall for us, so we climbed them hard with the torches swinging. The things came up after us in the dark, never closing, never falling back. The tree got no nearer for all the climbing. Rafi kept up a low count beside me, mostly to himself, one ring done, one ring at a time, one at a time. Twice a pair of them darted in at the back of the line, and twice the torches turned them back, and we kept climbing. We had crossed the first ring and started up the second when the wave hit.
It came at the whole line at once, a flood of them over the edge of the ring and out of the open doors on both sides.
"Tight! Torches out! Hold the line!" Basha had the front of it.
There were too many. They came in faster than the fire could turn them, three and four at a point, and the line stopped being a line and turned into people standing close together and swinging in the dark. Antoine met the first one and put the blue blade through it, and the cut did not close and the thing did not get up. He looked at the blade for a moment, then at the thing on the ground that was not getting back up.
"It works."
"Then quit staring at it and use it," Nikita said. He had already taken two, one and then the other, the points going in and the things going down for good.
But Antoine had already turned to the rest of us, and he was the one who put it into words for everyone, his voice up over the fight. "The glass kills them! Use the points! They don't get back up!" It carried down the line from him, and the people who had been giving ground stopped giving it and pushed back into them. Jonas got his back to a wall with the bad leg planted, swinging the short blade close and ugly, keeping two of them off himself. The dwarf and the elf woman held the right end of the line and gave nothing back.
I was no use with the sword. The things moved faster than I could swing it, and twice one got inside my reach before I had the point up, and both times Rafi put it down before it reached me.
"Stay on me," he said. "Right here, on my shoulder. Don't step off it, you hear?"
I stayed on his shoulder and kept the torch high and held my place, and I did not run, and that was the whole of my part in it.
Then the torch on the left went out. It had been dying since the building, and it dropped all at once to a coal, and the left of the line fell into the dark. That was the angle I had spent a day watching the edges for. A thing came out of it low and fast, and it did not come at me. It went for Old Ben, who stood nearest the dark on that side, and it had him on the ground before he could turn the blade onto it.
Somebody shouted his name. I think it was Rafi. Ben got one arm up. I saw the arm go up and I saw the thing come down over it and I saw the arm stop. He made no sound. By the time Nikita crossed and drove a spear through the thing and hauled it off him, Ben was not moving, and he did not start again.
Two more came through before anyone could push a light into the gap, and they took two of Squad 1, the reptilian and one whose name I never learned, down on the stone and gone. I stood there with the torch in one hand and the sword hanging from the other and I could not make my legs work. Ben lay three steps from me. I knew I should go to him and I knew there was no reason left to, both at the same time, and I did neither.
Then Rafi had a fist in the back of my collar.
"Aleks." He pulled. "Aleks, look at me. Move. Now."
I moved, because he made me.
Nobody said anything about it. There was no breath for it and no place to stop. The line closed over the space where the three of them had been and went on up the ramp, and the torches we had left held the things off our backs. I looked back one time. Ben was a dark shape on the white stone, smaller as the ramp carried me up, and then the turn took him out of sight, and that was the last of him.
The ramps ran out at the top. We came up onto the highest ring with fewer of us than had started the climb, and up there the buildings stood small and packed close, and past the last of them the ground ended at the foot of the tree. The things that had driven us up did not follow us out onto the open ground. They stopped in the mouths of the streets behind us and held there.
Up close the trunk took up everything in front of us. The bark stood dark and split with deep grooves, and it ran off to the left and the right past where the torches reached, and up past where I could tip my head to follow, with no edge and no top to it that I could find. Where it met the stone the roots stood up in great ridges, and the buildings had been fitted in around them. And down among the roots, at the foot of the trunk, there was an opening, a dark mouth cut into the base of it, high and wide, with steps going down.
Basha walked the foot of the tree with a torch, looking for another road, a stair, a crack, anything. There was nothing, only the wood going up and the one opening going down. She came back to the head of the steps and looked at the rest of us.
"Down it is, then," she said. "...There's nowhere else."
We stood at the top of the steps, and the cold came up out of them, steady and old, and there was no light anywhere below. Then something moved down in the dark, and the sound came up to us, slow and heavy, the weight of something setting itself down one step at a time. Whatever was down there had heard us come. And it was climbing up toward us, in no hurry that I could hear.