The Rain Wedding

Chapter 11: One Line Each

**One Line Each**

He caught it in the air.

It came off the coach flat and white with its arms and legs clapping at each other, and he got two fingers around one of those legs before it went over the edge of the dark for good.

Then there was nothing under him that was not also falling, so he used what was falling. A stone. Another. The third rolled out from under his boot and gave him nothing at all, and he took the last of it fast and came out of it on his feet at the bottom, knees bent, the paper man still shut in his fist.

He stood a moment and took stock of himself. Nothing broken. His right wrist had the burn on it that it had had coming down out of the coach, five points of cold and then the cold turning under the skin, which was a subject he had no intention of broaching while he was standing alone in the dark. He got moving.

He called the guide-lamp, and it came into his hand and gave him its one thin brown arm of light. The wick was gone out of it — lost somewhere up above, on the road, in the wet, he did not know where — and that one arm was the whole of what it had left: his own fingers, a yard of ground, and a suggestion of something past the yard.

He held the paper man up into the light and looked at him.

White, flat, palm-sized, and cut the common way. He had seen them three for a copper at the year's-end stalls, with faces inked on and a red dot for a mouth. This one had nothing inked on it at all. The face was blank where the drawing should have started, and there was no writing anywhere on him, and nothing sewn into him, and no fold that was not a fold.

It was cheap work. He had seen better cut by children. That was the thing sitting wrong in his hand: there was no godscript in the six districts cut as old as what was cut into that coach, and nobody cuts a coach like that one to hold down a paper man.

"May I ask this gentleman—"

He stopped, because the paper man had gone soft against his fingers, the way a thing goes soft when it is about to faint, and Judah had the clear impression that one more word in that tone would finish him.

He waited. Then he finished the question. "—what he answers to."

The paper man said nothing. Whether he had understood anything was a question Judah had no way of putting to him, so he turned him over instead. Front, back, both edges, the border on the coat, the join at the collar. Nothing.

"All right," Judah said. "You can come along, and we'll find out what you are."

He looked around him then, and stopped looking in a hurry, because there was nothing to see.

It was not a cave. Somebody had cut this. The walls went up smooth and square to a height the guide-lamp could not reach, and there was no stair in them and no bracket for a lamp and no rail along the floor. The stone was worked flat and worked true. Bigger than the scholar's nest by a long way, and he had thought that nest was a good-sized room.

He tipped his head back and got black, and more black, and no ceiling.

"Well," he said to the paper man. "Here the two of us are, and neither of us is going back the way we came."

He went on, because a hole is a hole and standing in one has never yet been a plan.

He had no idea which way led out. He took the way that led down — the way he had come being up and closed — and went along it at the pace of a man walking home from a house where he had not been asked to stay. There was a door down here somewhere. Somebody had cut all of this, and a man who cuts a hole this deep leaves himself a way down into it and a way back out, and a way in and a way out is a door and nothing else, and Judah only had to find it. That was the whole of his plan. He had gone a long way on shorter ones.

And while he walked, because his mind would not sit still in the dark, he went over what he knew about the kind of people who cut holes like this one.

Everyone in the six districts knew the shape of the story. In the first age the tangle had borne two bodies out of itself. One was Ysme, the First Mother, out of whom everything that breathes came. The other was Amaranth, the Deathless Coil, and something had gone wrong with him before he was finished. He had more strength in him than he had sense to hold it with. He put a hole through the tangle, and the sky came down through the hole, and the world nearly went under the water and stayed there.

Ysme stopped it. She fought him, and she did it with her hands, and she killed him with them. Then his hide and his flesh lay down across the country and became the mountains and the woods, and his bones went into the ground and became the earth-lines that run under the six districts.

That was the part Judah had heard told once in a warm room, with wine in his hand and a fire going, and in a warm room it was a good story.

Down here, in the wet, with a lamp that gave him a yard and no more, it bothered him, some.

At some point nobody could put a date to, a family had taken up the worship of the snake. The Urnfolk. Cutters of colossi, drivers of snakes, teachers of every ghost-master under the sky — that was the boast, and Judah had never seen it proved. When the districts went to war with each other, Queen Verity Ash had driven them off their ground and broken them, and after that they were never much. Then, twenty years ago, the Chancery went through what was left of them. There was no more Urnfolk after that. It was finished, and it was written down, and that was the end of it.

Judah had never had a reason to care one way or the other. He cared now, because he was walking in their work.

And there was one thing more that he knew, and it came back to him about then, with his boots getting wet. Every Elder of the Urnfolk, when he died, was put down into one of Amaranth's earth-lines. Not a hill. Not a field. An earth-line, with the ground opened over it for him and shut again.

He stopped and looked at the wall beside him, and then up, and then at the paper man, who was giving him nothing.

"Nothing to worry about," he told him. "Wrong rock, wrong country, and I'm not even sure it's the right hole."

The paper man did not argue.

The ground turned wet under him about the better part of an hour along.

Water came off the ceiling somewhere to his left. Then it came down in front of him. Then it was all around him, a slow irregular tapping that moved each time he stopped to listen for it, and the cold came up out of the floor and got into his boots and stayed there. Under the wet there was a smell, thin at first and then not thin, a smell of meat left out in a warm room, and it got stronger the further he went.

Then the walls opened out, and it was black ahead of him, and he brought the lamp up, and there was water.

Flat, still, no light in it anywhere. He held the lamp along the left wall and then along the right, and there were two figures cut into them, one on either side of the water, worked so close into the rock that they might have been the rock. He could see the feet of them, and that was all. He knew colossi when they were feet.

He knew the practice, too. You do not stand a watching figure at a gate or on a road. You stand it where something is meant to stay put.

"Now then," Judah said.

The water turned.

It turned without any hurry in it, one slow ring and then another, and then there was a hole in the middle of it that went down, and the hole began to move. Earlier in the night he had stood in front of a man with a dead god's name in his mouth and had not been moved an inch. He was moved now. His coat started to travel, and his hair, and the paper man lifted off the palm of his hand, and Judah took him back out of the air and shut his fist on him.

He got a boot braced and leaned against the pull.

The walls began to drop stones.

The two figures came off the wall.

The left one: "What man is this—"

"—that dares to trespass?" from the right.

They had a blade between them and they had an axe, and they brought both of them down on him together.

Judah swept the fan open across his face. "Come on, then. No Wound."

His No Wound had to borrow. It always did. He had no sword and never had one, which was the joke of the house he came from — a Hollow-born raised on the first form with nothing to put it on — so the working went and got what it needed, and what it got was the house's own fire, and it stood that fire up behind him as a long burning blade of debtfire and took the axe and the sword exactly, both of them, right where they had to be taken.

The two of them stopped and looked at it.

"Debtfire of the Hollow—"

"—that burns all wicked things!"

Then, and it came out of them like something rehearsed:

"Of all the things that live—"

"—we hate the Hollow-born!"

And both together, at last: "Kill him!"

They put their weight down.

A borrowed blade cannot hold a pair like those two. The debtfire went out the way a lamp goes when the wick comes out of it. The shape of the sword came off it, and Judah was standing there with a fan and no more.

He had a great many words to hand and no time for any of the long ones. There was Rend, which brought the sky down on a thing — no use to him here. He was too far under the ground for the sky to hear him, and if it heard him it would arrive a breath or two after the axe did.

The pull got worse.

He got one boot heel onto the rim of the water and shouted, "Shift."

He was twenty yards back along the floor when the axe and the blade came down where he had been standing, and the stone split there, and kept splitting after.

He got his breath back. "That was rude," he said. "And I'm only lost."

The two of them took hold of the wall behind them and pulled their bodies out of it, and the floor shook while they did it, and then they came for him.

"Turn back—"

"—and trespass no more!"

"Nobody's listening," Judah said. "And it wouldn't help me if you were. Here is what happened: I came down a hole. I stopped to look at a thing. And the pair of you, who are as big as barns and not a great deal quicker, take a blade to me for it. Your scholar sat up over your heads and ate people for years—"

"Smooth words—"

"—and a false mouth!"

"And heaven above—"

"—and earth below, the both of them, be the death of you!"

Judah had never once thought he would be sentenced to the death of heaven and earth for being lost. He put a hand on his chest.

"I'm the injured party here," he said. "Did either of you stand up? Did either of you say one word about it?"

He did not bring up what had become of the scholar. It did not seem like the moment.

"Cut the talk!"

"You came down—"

That was as far as the right one got. Judah had put his hands behind his back a while before, and the word he said, he said quietly, and the word was "Hush."

The right one's mouth was open. The sound was not there. It stood with its mouth open and got nothing out of it, and the eyes above the mouth turned and fixed on him, and it lifted one foot and put it down hard enough to crack the floor, and then did it again.

Judah looked at it. Then he looked at the left one, which had shut its mouth and was not saying anything either.

"Oh," he said. "That's the shape of it."

He walked a few steps closer, so he could see them properly.

"You two can't speak out of turn," he said. "One of you first, then the other, and neither of you says a word while the one ahead of you is finishing. One line each."

Neither of them said anything at all.

"That's a hard way to live," Judah said.

Then they both stepped at him, and he was sorry he had said a thing.

He shook his cuff and gave them both words.

"Shift. Drop."

They came down onto ground that was not ground any more. The floor went soft as paper under them, both feet, all four, and their own weight did the rest, and they went into it sideways and together, and the dust came up, and then there was quiet, and two heads above the floor.

"Deceitful!"

"Cunning!"

"Kill him! Kill him!"

It could not put them away entirely. They were too big for that. Drop will only take what it can take.

Judah walked over and stood between the two heads.

"This Hollow-born is going to trespass now," he said.

"You would not—"

"—you cannot!"

"I would, though," Judah said. "I can, and I will. But here's a bargain, and it's the last one I've got. You tell me what's in that water, and I'll consider not going."

They stopped.

"Say nothing," said the left one.

"A little might be said," said the right one.

They turned their eyes on each other and neither of them blinked.

"The Elder gave his orders—"

"—we're not to disturb him."

Judah crouched down between the two heads and considered them.

"So there's an Elder of the Urnfolk down there," he said.

They both spoke at once, which by then he knew they were not permitted to do.

"Don't guess!"

"That's a pack of lies!"

"Mm," Judah said.

He looked at the water, and put it together out loud, because he thought better that way and because it annoyed them.

"Mister Sable's chapel sits under the river," he said. "Under the Coil. The scholar's hole sits under the chapel, and this hole sits under the scholar's. You're stacked. One thing on top of another, the whole way down."

The two heads went quiet.

Then their teeth started. No word, no warning — a small dry clicking, both of them at once, and a shaking in the jaw that went down into the stone under them.

Judah looked at them.

Then he turned his head and looked behind him, because that was where they were looking.

There was nothing behind him. Then there was wind, and then there was not, and it took him off his feet.

The water was moving again, and this time it was not turning.

Then the hissing.

It was thin and dry and there was a great deal of it, and it came along the floor and up the walls and all around him, and the pool was not a pool. The pool was a pit, and the pit was coming out.

Black snakes, thin as a line drawn in ink, thousands of them, over the floor, over his boots, up into the wet, and the scales of them shone cold under the guide-lamp.

He put his heel down and shouted the word he had shouted twice already.

"Shift."

Nothing.

The pull had him low, under the ribs, and it was not letting go, and it took him across the floor on his back with his heels dragging, and the snakes drew open in front of it like a door being drawn. Some part of him went on making the map the whole way, layering level under level, because that part of him had never once been asked what it wanted to do.

Then something came off his fist.

The paper man went up.

He went up on his edge like a leaf going up a chimney, turned over once in the air, and came down across Judah's eyes.

Judah went into the dark. No pit, no snakes, no ceiling, no lamp — just the brown smudge of it on the inside of his own eyelid with a hand's breadth of nothing beside it, and the floor still going past underneath him.

Then it stopped.

The pull was gone the way a rope is gone when it is cut, and the hissing went away from him in every direction at once, and the snakes went down into the pit and out of it, and whether that was because of him or because of what had him, he did not know and did not ask. He was not on the floor. He was not in the pit. He was not anywhere he could have named.

The lamp was still in his hand. He could not see it, or anything else.

He was off the ground. There was an arm across his back and an arm under his knees, and nothing of either one of them that a hand could find.

The burn came up through his wrist and took the forearm with it.

Under the coach it had been a hand on him for half a breath, and then it had let go, and he had known what it was the moment it did. This was worse by a long way and it did not stop, and it was not only the wrist. It went up the arm and into the shoulder and lay flat along his side, hot the way an iron is hot when it is standing near a fire you cannot see.

It hurt.

Nothing let go.

Whoever it was, it was real, and it had him up off the floor, and he could not see one inch of it.