Riftborn

The Voice in the Ash

The wall moved the way a sleeping animal moves when something walks across its back.

I felt it in my heels first. A long slow shudder that came up through the stone and into the bones of my feet, and from my feet into my knees, and from my knees into the small of my back, where it stopped and stayed and started to grow. Hela's hands were still on my face. Her forehead was still pressed to mine. For one breath neither of us moved, because moving when the ground starts to move is the fastest way to fall.

"Down," she said.

I went down where I stood. My knees hit the parapet stone and the warm bone-pale rings under my palms went with me, and the whole shelf of the wall gave a second shudder, deeper this time, and a chunk of the merlon two paces to my left tipped out into the air and was gone before I heard it land.

"Down lower, Averyn. Flat. Flat as you can."

I went flat. The stone under my cheek was warm in the way the ash slurry had been warm — alive-warm, not sun-warm — and I could feel the hum in my teeth coming up through it, the same hum, the same rhythm, as if the wall and the thing in the air a half mile out and the thing in my chest were all parts of the same long body breathing in.

Hela went flat beside me. Her hand found my wrist and clamped down.

"Listen to me. The wall is going to do one of three things in the next minute. It is going to settle. It is going to c***k along the seam by the watch points and we go down with the inside half. Or it is going to come apart entirely and we run for the runner's stair. I will tell you which. You will not guess. You will not move until I tell you. Do you hear me."

"I hear you."

"Eyes on the stair."

I turned my head. The runner's stair was twenty paces back along the parapet, set into the inner face of the wall, a narrow black slot you would not see if you did not know to look for it. Twenty paces was a long way on a wall that was thinking about coming apart. I fixed my eyes on the slot the way she had told me to fix my eyes on the horizon, and I tried to make my breathing match hers, and I tried very hard not to think about my hands.

My hands were not cooperating.

The bone-pale rings had stopped spreading when I went down, but the warmth had not stopped. It had gathered. It was sitting in my palms like two small pools of water, and every time the wall shuddered, the pools answered — a small inward pull, the way a bowl of milk shivers when you set it down too hard. I could feel the answering. I could feel it the way you feel a string tied to your finger when someone picks up the other end of the string.

Something on the other end of the string was picking it up.

"Aunt." My voice was a whisper into the warm stone. "Aunt, it's—"

"I know."

"It's pulling."

"I know, child. Do not pull back."

"I'm not."

"Do not pull back. Whatever it is, whatever it sounds like, whatever it feels like — do not answer it again. Once was enough. Once was already too much."

The hum behind my teeth dropped a half-step lower. The wall shuddered a third time, smaller, and then a fourth that was smaller still, and then the shudders stopped altogether. The sleeping animal had decided to roll over and go back to sleep.

I let out a breath I had not known I was holding.

"Settle," Hela said, very quietly. "It's going to settle. Up. Slow. Stay low."

I came up onto my elbows. The parapet around me was a mess. Three of the merlons on the outer face had gone. There was a long pale c***k running across the stone where my palms had been, and the c***k was the same bone color as the rings, and I looked at it and looked away because looking at it made the pull in my hands stronger.

Out on the flats, the rift was still there.

It had not closed. It had not grown either. It sat in the air a half mile out the way a thing sits that has just finished doing the work it came to do, and the goat road below it had bowed up into a long uneven ridge of black stone, and the slag heap that had tipped was lying in pieces across the road, and the screaming had stopped, which was not the same thing as the people who had been screaming being all right.

"Aunt. The flats."

"I see them."

"The man who was screaming—"

"I see them, Averyn. Stay low. Eyes on the stair."

She was not looking at the flats. She was looking at the rift, and her face had a quality I had not seen on it before — not the working face, not the home face, not the third face from the kitchen. A fourth face. The face of a woman counting something she had counted before and had hoped never to count again.

"It's the wrong shape," she said, mostly to herself.

"What is."

"The rift. It's the wrong shape for an Ashveil rift."

"What's the right shape."

She did not answer me. She was already moving, low and fast, her hand still locked on my wrist. The runner's stair was twenty paces. We covered it on hands and knees and elbows, and the parapet held under us, and we went down into the dark of the slot and the stair took us down inside the wall and the air went cool and dry around us and the hum in my teeth dropped to a thread, a single high small note I could just barely feel, and I almost cried with relief at the smallness of it.

Almost.

Because the small note was still there.

It had not gone away.

The runner's stair came out into a storage cellar under the southern barracks that I had used exactly twice in two seasons of running, both times to deliver sealed messages I had not been allowed to read. The cellar smelled of grain dust and old leather and the particular cold mineral smell that lower-town basements get when they have been dug into the bones of the island. There was a single oil lamp burning in a niche by the door. By its light I could see Hela's face for the first time since the wall.

She looked older than I had ever seen her look.

"Sit," she said.

"The flats—"

"There are eighty trained men on the flats already and another forty coming down the south road and there is nothing you or I can do for the man who was screaming that those hundred and twenty cannot do better. Sit. Sit, Averyn."

I sat. There was a barrel against the wall and I sat on it and put my hands flat on my knees and tried not to look at my own palms.

Hela crouched in front of me. She took my hands in hers, turned them over, and looked at the skin.

There was nothing to see. The bone-pale color had not stayed. The warmth had not stayed. My hands were my hands — scraped at the wrists from the cliff, dirty with parapet ash, the small white scar on my left thumb from a knife slip last winter still in the place it had always been. Whatever had been in them on the wall was not in them now.

But the pull was still there. Underneath the skin. A small steady pulling toward something I could not see.

"Tell me what it feels like," she said.

"Like a string."

"Where."

"In my hands. In my chest." I had to think about it. "In my teeth, still. A little. The hum is still there, just very small."

"Pulling toward what."

"I don't know."

"Toward the rift?"

I closed my eyes and tried to feel the direction of the pull. It was hard. The pull did not have a direction the way a rope has a direction. It had a direction the way a smell has a direction — you knew there was a source somewhere, and you knew you were closer to it or further from it, but the moment you tried to point at it the pointing went vague.

"Not the rift," I said slowly. "Or — yes, the rift, a little. But also somewhere else. Past the rift. Further."

Her hands tightened on mine.

"How much further."

"I don't know how to measure it. Just — further. Past the flats. Past the southern reach. Off the island, maybe." I opened my eyes. "Aunt, what is it. What's pulling."

She did not answer me right away. She was looking at my hands the way a healer looks at a wound she has seen before and was hoping never to see again.

"Listen to me," she said. "I am going to tell you three things. I am going to tell you them quickly because we do not have long before someone comes down those stairs looking for one of us. You are going to listen and you are going to not interrupt, even though I know you will want to, because I know you and I know how your mouth works. Yes?"

"Yes."

"First thing. What you did on the wall is called a flare. It is the first time a Soulbound's power answers something in the world without their permission. Most flares happen between fourteen and sixteen years of age. Yours did not happen then because I made sure it did not happen then, and we are going to talk about how I did that another day, but the short of it is that I have been keeping you small for seventeen years and the wall is the first place I could not keep you small. Do you understand the first thing."

The bottom of my stomach did something I had no name for.

"Yes."

"Second thing. The thing you are feeling pull in your hands is not the rift. The rift is a door. The thing on the other side of the door is what is pulling. I do not know what is on the other side of the door. I have a guess. My guess is bad enough that I am not going to say it out loud in a barracks cellar where a wrong word can travel up a stair and into the wrong ear. Do you understand the second thing."

"Yes."

"Third thing. Your mother."

She stopped. She had to stop. I could see her finding the next words and not liking the shape of them.

"Your mother was Soulbound. Strongly. More strongly than anyone in the lower town has been Soulbound in five generations, and the lower town has had some strong ones. She was — she had a particular kind of bond. A rare kind. The kind that pulls toward things across the water. The kind that hears voices in rifts. She heard a voice in a rift once, when she was nineteen, and she went to find what was on the other end of the voice, and she came back changed, and she had you, and a year later she went to find the voice again, and she did not come back."

The cellar was very quiet.

"Aunt."

"I am not finished. The reason I did not tell you any of this is that I made a promise to her before she went the second time, and the promise was that I would keep you small, and that I would keep you in the lower town, and that I would not let you hear the voice. I have kept the first two parts of the promise for seventeen years. I have just failed at the third part. I am sorry, Averyn. I am sorrier than I have words for."

I could not speak for a moment.

When I could, what came out was: "Did she love me."

It was not the question I had meant to ask. It was the question that came up out of the bottom of me before I could choose a better one.

Hela's face cracked.

"Oh, child. Yes. Yes. She loved you the way a woman loves the only thing she has made that she is sure is good. She loved you so much she went looking for the voice a second time so it would stop coming for you. That is why she did not come back. Do you understand me. She did not leave you. She stood between you and it. For seventeen years."

The pull in my hands got a little stronger.

I put my hands flat on the barrel under me and pressed down hard, the way you press down on a wound to stop it bleeding, and the warmth started to gather in my palms again, and I made myself stop pressing.

"Aunt. The voice on the wall. It said my name."

"I know."

"It knew my name."

"I know, child."

"Then it's — then she didn't—"

"I don't know what it means that it knew your name. I don't know if she failed. I don't know if she succeeded for seventeen years and the thing has finally found a way around her. I don't know if there is more than one voice and she only ever stood against one of them. I do not know, Averyn, and I am telling you I do not know because the alternative is to make up an answer that feels good and hand it to you, and you deserve better than a made-up answer."

I nodded. I did not trust my mouth.

Above us, somewhere up in the barracks, a door slammed. Boots crossed a floor. Voices, two of them, fast and clipped. Hela's head came up and she went very still in the way she had gone still on the wall.

"Up," she whispered. "The back way. Now."

"Where—"

"Home. The kitchen. Door bolted. We are going to do exactly what I said we were going to do. You are going to put your hands in cold water and we are going to talk about what comes next, and I am going to tell you what your mother was called and where she went and what I think is on the other side of the rift. But not here. Up."

She pulled me off the barrel and toward the back of the cellar, where a low door I had not noticed was set into the stone behind a stack of grain sacks. She moved the sacks one-handed, with the kind of practiced quickness that meant she had moved them before, and she opened the door, and the door led into a passage I had not known existed under the lower town.

I stopped in the doorway.

"Aunt. How do you know about this."

"Later."

"How many things do you know about that I don't know about."

She looked at me. The oil lamp from the niche threw the shadow of her braid long across the stone wall behind her, and her eyes in the half-light were the eyes of a stranger I had lived with for seventeen years.

"All of them, child," she said. "All of them. And we are going to talk about every one of them tonight. Move."

I moved.

The passage went down before it went anywhere else. Three flights of rough-cut steps, the air getting colder and drier with each flight, the small mineral smell of the cellar giving way to something deeper and older — the smell of stone that had not seen a torch in a long time. Hela took the lamp from the niche on her way past and held it ahead of us, and the light bounced off the walls in long uneven shapes, and I followed her down with my hand on the back of her coat because the steps were uneven and I did not trust my knees.

The pull in my chest changed direction twice as we went down. I noticed it because I was paying attention to it now, the way you pay attention to a sound you have just learned the name for. On the first flight it pulled south — out toward the rift on the flats. On the second flight it pulled south and a little down. On the third flight it pulled south and more down, as if whatever was on the other end of the string was beneath us, beneath the lower town, beneath the bones of Ashveil itself.

That was wrong. The rift was on the flats, above ground, in the air. The pull should not have been going down.

"Aunt."

"Quiet."

"The pull. It changed."

She stopped on the steps. The lamp in her hand swung once and steadied.

"Changed how."

"It's going down. It was going south, toward the rift. Now it's going south and down. The deeper we go, the more down it gets."

She was very quiet for a long moment.

"Averyn. When I tell you to turn around and go back up the steps, you are going to turn around and go back up the steps without asking me why. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Good. Keep your hand on my coat. Keep walking."

We kept walking. The pull kept pulling. It was not stronger than it had been on the wall, but it was clearer — as if going underground had filtered out the noise of the world and left only the one note I was supposed to be hearing. I could feel it now without trying. I could feel the shape of it. It was not a single string anymore. It was two strings, very fine, twisted together, and one of the two was old and one of them was new.

The old one felt like my mother.

I do not know how I knew that. I had no memory of my mother. I had a name — Sera, Hela had said it once when I was six and never again — and a single image that was probably not even a real memory, an image of a woman bending over a cradle with her hair falling forward in a dark curtain, and that was the entirety of what I had of her. I had nothing to compare a feeling to. I had no business knowing what my mother felt like at the end of a string in my chest.

But I knew.

I knew the way you know your own hand in the dark.

I started to cry. Quietly, without sound, the way runners learn to cry on the long routes when there is no one to see and crying out loud will give you away to the things in the upper passes. The tears went into the corners of my mouth and tasted of ash and salt.

Hela did not see. She was watching the steps ahead of us and the pool of lamplight on the wall and listening for something I could not hear.

The steps ended.

We came out into a chamber that should not have existed under the lower town. It was round. The walls were smooth in a way Ashveil basalt was never smooth, the way a thing is smooth that has been worked by hands and not by heat, and the floor had a circle cut into it — a single circle, deep, the width of the chamber, with a smaller circle inside it and a smaller one inside that, like the rings in a tree, except that the rings were not in wood. They were in stone. And they were the same bone-pale color as the rings my hands had left on the parapet.

I stopped breathing.

The pull in my chest was not pulling south anymore.

It was pulling straight down, into the floor, into the center of the rings.

"Aunt."

She had stopped too. The lamp in her hand was shaking. I had never seen her hands shake. Not on the wall, not in the kitchen, not in any of the seventeen years I had lived under her roof.

"Aunt, what is this place."

She did not answer.

"Aunt."

"This," she said, very softly, "is what your mother was guarding."

She turned to look at me, and the lamplight caught her face, and her face had gone past white into the gray of a woman who is looking at the end of a long road she has been walking alone for a very long time.

"And we are not supposed to be here, Averyn. We are not supposed to be here. The fact that you can feel it pulling you means that the thing on the other side of the door has been awake for longer than I knew. Longer than I was told. We are standing on top of a door, child, and the door has been listening to your heartbeat for seventeen years, and tonight is the first night it has heard you clearly enough to call."

The bone-pale rings on the floor began, very slowly, to glow.