Scarecrow

On the third morning, it didn’t split.

Tiamat saw it first. Before the light. From the ninth station, with her ears pushed into the rock of every moon in Root’s sky.

“It’s pulling in,” she said. Over the silver. Very level. “All of it. Toward one place.”

I was awake. I’d slept about an hour, on the grass at the edge of the plateau, with Dory asleep against my shoulder and her hair lying down for once. I sat up. Dory didn’t. She was holding the net in her sleep, very quietly, the way she said she would.

“Where,” said Okafor. From the long table. Through Dory. Awake; I don’t think she’d slept at all.

“Here,” said Tiamat. “Root. The far side. Over the place where the range was.”

A pause.

“It’s getting smaller,” said Tiamat. “And heavier.”

I didn’t understand at first. Then I did.

It had lost a third of itself on the second day. To the salt and the lightning and the nothing, and the reef, and the moon, and the hills with white flowers on them. It had come at three worlds and been beaten back from all three. It had tried to take a moon and been held.

So it stopped trying to be big.

It pulled in. All of what was left of it. Off the north of Avalon’s sky, where the last of the arm was. Off Ister’s far side. In, toward the far side of Root, toward one place, closer and closer together, every flier and digger and plated thing pressing into every other, the way the heavy queen pressed the piece of it into a ball.

Only nobody was pressing it. It was doing it to itself.

By the time the light came up over Root’s plains, it wasn’t a body as wide as the sky any more.

It was a spear.

Black. Long. As long as the plains are wide, and narrow, narrower than the plateau, pointed at the end. Hanging over the far side of Root where the range used to be, very high, very still, pointing down.

At the plateau.

At her.

“Oh,” said Mother. Very quietly. Sitting up on the grass with her coat round her, looking at it.

That was all she said.

It has learned, said the eldest. Through the ground. Very calm. It cannot cover me. So it will try to go through.

“Through what?” said Holt. From the far edge of the green. Through Dory. He was already on his feet.

Through everything, said the eldest. The threads. The queens. The ground. Me. A pause. All the way down. To the heart.

“Can it?”

The eldest didn’t answer straight away.

I do not know, she said. Nothing has ever tried.

And behind it, Dory said. Awake now. Sitting up. With her black eyes open and the net suddenly very wide and very bright.

“Dad,” said Dory. “Everything’s coming. Behind the spear. All the grey ones that are left. And the Ashen. All four hundred and nine.” A breath. “And something else.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” said Dory. “It’s grey. It’s very big. It’s got the houses’ voice in it.” She looked at the Overseer, across the plateau. “Lots of voices. All at once.”

The Overseer had come up the plateau path in the night, with Holt. To sleep near the teapot, he said. He was standing at the edge with the dog at his feet and Holt’s cap in his hands, looking at the far side of the sky.

He’d gone very pale.

“They’re coming,” said the Overseer.

“Who?”

“The houses,” he said. “Themselves. Not their ships. Not grey ones with their voice in. Them.” He turned the cap round in his hands. “They’ve never come themselves. Not in all the time there’s been Sorn. They sit at the middle and they talk and other things go.”

He looked at me.

“They’re losing,” said the Overseer. “For the first time ever. And they’ve decided they’d rather be there when it ends than hear about it.”

Okafor, from the long table. Very steady.

“Right,” she said. “Everyone to Root. Everyone who can be spared from Avalon and Ister. Now. We have about an hour.”

They came through every arch.

I’ll write it short, because it was everyone. The Standing from Ister’s squares, through the arches Kyria’s cutters had cut between the worlds. The Standing from Avalon’s cities, except a ring round every hollow, which Okafor left, because she said she’d never once left a hollow without a ring and she wasn’t starting. The walking engines from Ister. Every Aldri fighter. Every station that could see Root turned its guns.

Halvane came. Through the arch from the deepest city, in his robe, very tall, on his own.

“The engine is quiet,” he said. When Okafor asked him through the net what he was doing there. “There is nothing on Ister to protect it from. So I came to stand where there is.”

Ingrid didn’t come.

She stayed over the hollows on Avalon. On her own. With the ring of the Standing round the north towns below her and Callum’s patrol beside her and Konrad on the step.

“I’m staying where I’m needed,” said Ingrid. Through Dory. Very tired. “If anything comes round the long way again, it’ll find me.”

Nobody argued.

The queens didn’t move.

They’d been at the foot of the plateau since the first morning. All of them. In the ring. They didn’t need to come anywhere. They were already where it was going.

But they changed.

I felt it. Through the ground. All of them, at once, as the light came up and the spear hung over the far side of Root. They stopped facing out. They turned. Every one of them. In toward the plateau. In toward the eldest. And put their heads down on the green ground, and pressed. Not singing. Pressing. Into her. The way you put your back against a door that something’s coming through.

The broods went in close round them. Every one. On their backs, round their feet, under them, so that the ring round the foot of the plateau wasn’t queens any more, it was a wall. A wall of queens and their young, all facing in, all pressing down.

Thank you, said the eldest. Very quietly.

Hush, said the Scarecrow queen. We are busy.

Dory stood up.

She’d been sitting at the edge of the plateau beside me since she woke. Looking at the spear. With the net going out of her in every direction, very bright, everyone in it, all three worlds, every queen.

“Dad,” she said. “When it comes down, I’m going to be here.”

I looked at her.

“The eldest asked me to stand beside her,” said Dory. “Yesterday she said I could go anywhere. Today I’m not going anywhere. When it comes, everyone in the net needs to be in the same place at once. All of them, holding. And they can only do that if someone’s standing still in the middle.”

She put Dusk on. For the first time since the first morning.

“You go where the wall breaks,” said Dory. “I’m the wall.”

Risa came and stood behind her. Of course.

Then Mother. Beside her. With her coat on and both teapots on the grass at her feet.

Then Luna, on the other side.

Then all of them. My wives. The Mom Squad. Kyria and Teshka. Rhiannon, with her crown lit. Aurelius, with his shield coming up over all of them, wider and wider, until it covered the whole top of the plateau and went down over the edges.

Dinraal and Isolde in front. Gilgamesh, with bread. Alexander, with his blades. Julius. Aramaeis came down out of the sky in his full silver and lay along the edge of the plateau like a wall with eyes. Tiamat came down from the ninth station. She hasn’t left her stations in a fight since Hearth. She lay down beside her brother.

The First Weapon sat at Dory’s feet. Enormous. Very straight. The way the General sits.

And me.

I went up.

It came down an hour after dawn.

I’ve thought about how to write this. I’ve thought about it more than anything I’ve ever written. I’ll just write it.

The spear fell.

Not fast, at first. The way a tree falls. It tipped, at the top of the sky, over the far side of Root, very slowly. Then faster. Then it was coming down at the plateau with everything that was left of the Hungry pressed into it, black, pointed, so heavy that the air in front of it went white with the heat of being pushed aside.

The stations fired. All twenty-six. Into its side.

It didn’t care. The holes closed as fast as they were made. It was too thick for holes now.

Aune’s fighters went along it. The Ground went at it, and the heavy queen made it heavier, and it came down faster.

The Meridian went at it, with the spine-queen laid along her middle. Ruan took her right into the side of it, Ilka told me afterward, the way you’d put your shoulder into a door. The spine-queen did something. Ilka doesn’t know what. But the spear bent. A little. Just a little. Off the line.

Not enough.

I met it halfway down the sky.

I didn’t hold back.

I’d learned what that meant on the second day. I learned what it meant on the third.

I went into the point of it.

Not at it. Into it. Through the hide of it, the plates, the mouths, the pressed-together bodies of everything it had ever eaten, faster than it could close round me. Down into the middle of it. Into the dark at the centre of the spear, where there was no light at all, and everything round me was Hungry, pressing, eating, trying to eat me.

It couldn’t.

The ring was right. My skin isn’t what it was. I could feel them trying. A thousand mouths at once, on every side. It felt like rain.

I looked.

With my eyes black. Down into all of it. Into every one of them, pressed together, at once. How they were held. Not one at a time; I didn’t have time for one at a time. All of them. The whole spear.

And underneath all of them, at the very centre, I found something.

I’m going to be careful about this. Because I don’t know what it was. Halloway doesn’t. The eldest says she does and won’t say. Dory felt it through me, through the net, and said afterward she never wants to feel it again.

At the centre of the Hungry, in the very middle of the spear, there was something that was hungry.

Not a mouth. Not a heart. Not a queen. Just hungry. The shape of wanting. The thing every one of them was, underneath, all the way down, pressed into a point at the centre of the spear like the stone at the centre of a fruit.

It noticed me.

It wanted me.

I could feel it. The way you feel heat on your face from a fire. It didn’t want to eat me. It wanted to be me. It wanted what I had. The asking. The way the ground answers. The way everything I looked at let go when I asked.

It had wanted that forever. It had eaten worlds looking for it.

And it reached for it.

I let go of it.

All of it. The whole spear. Every one of them, from the point to the end, pressed together, and the thing at the centre that wanted. I looked at how it was held together, and I let go of it, and I didn’t stop.

I didn’t stop.

That’s what Hana says. She says the spear went, all of it, from inside, white, the way the things over the south wall went, only a thousand times bigger, a flash across Root’s whole sky so bright that every queen at the foot of the plateau shut her eyes. She says the sky was clear afterward. Empty. Blue. For the first time since the first morning.

And she says I didn’t stop.

She says she felt it through the net. Through Dory. Me, at the centre of where the spear had been, very high over Root, still looking. Still letting go. Of the air round me. Of the light. Going outward. Wider. Looking for anything else to let go of.

Like the thing at the centre. Wanting.

I don’t remember that part. I want that written down. I don’t remember it.

I remember the spear going. I remember the sky clear. And then I remember Hana.

She breathed my name.

From the plateau. From inside Aurelius’s shield, with Dory behind her and Risa behind Dory. She stood up and took the air out of her own chest, all of it, and put it into one word, and sent it up to me through the net, through Dory, across the whole of the empty sky.

Lucas.

I heard it.

The way she said I would. Wherever I was. However fast.

I stopped.

I came down slowly.

I don’t know how long it took. Dory says a long time. She says everyone on the plateau watched me come down the whole way, very slowly, out of the clear blue, and nobody said anything.

Hana was standing at the edge with her hands out. She caught my face in them when I landed. Very cold. She’d given away all her warm with the breath.

She looked at my eyes.

“There you are,” said Hana. Dory’s word. The one Dory used to say to call me back, when she was small.

“Here I am.”

She didn’t let go of my face for a long time.

“I’m not proud of it,” I said. Later. To her. On the grass.

“I know,” said Hana. “That’s why I could call you back.”

The sky was empty.

Not empty. Clear of the Hungry. All of it. Every swarm and arm and body they’d ever had. Tiamat swept the edge of the Watch with her ears for an hour after, every moon, every stone, and found nothing. Not one flier. Not one new one.

“It’s gone,” said Tiamat. Over the silver. Very level.

Then she said it again. Not level.

“It’s gone.”

But that wasn’t the end of the third morning. I wish it was.

The houses came in while the spear was falling.

They’d been behind it. In its shadow. All the grey ships that were left, and the four hundred and nine Ashen above them, and in the middle of all of it, the thing Dory felt that was very big and had the houses’ voice in it.

It was a ship. The Overseer told me after. Not a grey ship. Older. Much older. Grey, but not the grey of the making; the grey of very old stone. Round. Very slow. As big as a city. With no windows and no guns and nothing on its outside at all.

The houses were in it.

They came down while I was inside the spear.

While Dory was holding the net, standing still in the middle. While the queens were pressing. While everyone who could be anywhere was on the plateau.

They came at the plateau. Of course they did. They always go for the plateau.

I’ll write what happened from what everyone told me. I wasn’t there. I was inside the spear, and then I was letting go of the sky, and then I was coming down.

So this is theirs.

The grey ships came down first. Finished ones. Thousands. On the plateau. On Aurelius’s shield.

The shield held.

Aurelius stood in the middle of the plateau with his armoured arm up and his face very calm, and the grey ships came down on the shield like hail on a roof, and it held. Rhiannon stood behind him with her hand on his back and her crown lit so bright you couldn’t look at her, and everything she had went into him. Into the shield.

“It’s very restful,” said Rhiannon. Through her teeth. “To share.”

The Ashen wave came down on the shield.

That’s the thing that ends things. It came down over the plateau from the four hundred and nine, slow, like dusk coming down a valley, all of it they had, all at once.

And Andraste stepped out from under the shield. Onto the very edge of the plateau. And put Holdfast up.

Into all of it.

I’ve seen Holdfast take the Ashen wave. On Hyrran. Over Root on the second day. It takes a lot. It doesn’t take everything.

This time it took everything.

Andraste says she doesn’t know why. Corin says he does.

Corin was in the hall under the house on the rise. Asleep, with Vessa’s hand in his and Tiri on his other side. And when the Ashen wave came down over the plateau, Vessa woke, and turned. Not north. Not east. Out. Toward the plateau. Toward her mother.

And Corin woke up. And felt it. The door in the middle of Holdfast. The one he made. The one that doesn’t shut.

And he opened it wider.

From the hall. On Avalon. In his sleep, almost. Trevor saw it. He says Corin sat up in the heap with his eyes half shut and put his free hand out in front of him, flat, the way he does when he’s mending a bird, and hummed. Two notes. Louder than Trevor’s ever heard him.

And the door in the middle of Holdfast, on Root, in Andraste’s hands, went as wide as the sky.

The Ashen wave went through it. All of it. Every bit the four hundred and nine had.

Away.

Andraste stood on the edge of the plateau with Holdfast up and the one white ribbon on the hilt pulled straight out sideways by the wind of it going, and didn’t move a step.

When it was done, she put Holdfast down. And turned round. And looked west. Toward Avalon. Toward a small boy in a hall, a long way off.

“Thank you,” said Andraste. Out loud. To nobody anyone could see.

Dory heard it. And passed it on. Through the net.

Trevor says Corin smiled in his sleep.

The four hundred and nine had nothing left.

They’d put all of it into the wave. And the wave was gone.

Dinraal looked up at them. Through the shield.

“Now,” said Dinraal.

The wall that moves went up.

All of them. Out from under the shield. Up Luna’s roads, white, into the sky over the plateau, faster than they’ve ever gone. Sera at the front, burning so hot that the ice under her feet turned to steam before it could melt. Risa’s lightning round all of them like a net, not touching anyone. Hana taking the air out of everything in front of them.

Dinraal fired the long gun. Into the nearest Ashen ship. And the next. Isolde’s leaves went up round them in thousands and every one of them unfolded and fired.

Aramaeis and Tiamat went up together. Two dragons. Breathing light. Along the line of Ashen ships, from one end to the other, the way they’d gone across the body on the second day.

Gilgamesh threw his axe. At an Ashen ship. I don’t know how high it was. It went through it. He made another one.

And Andraste cut them.

She’d cut one Ashen ship in half on Hyrran. The first anyone ever had.

On the third morning, she cut forty.

They ran.

The ones that were left. The Ashen. Two hundred and some, Tiamat says. They went up and out, past the edge of the Watch, into the dark, the way the grey ships went after Hearth.

Nobody went after them.

“Let them go,” said Okafor. From the long table. “Let them tell everyone.”

And the houses’ ship came down on the plateau.

It didn’t fire. It had nothing to fire. It came down. Very slowly. The size of a city, round, grey, old, with no windows. Down over the plateau, onto Aurelius’s shield.

And pressed.

The shield bent.

Aurelius went down on one knee. He’d held the whole sky’s worth of grey ships off for an hour and he went down on one knee under the houses’ ship, with his arm still up, and his face still calm, and the shield coming down closer and closer over all of them.

And the houses’ voice came out of it.

All of them. All the voices. At once. The way it comes out of the grey ones. Only more. Hundreds. Very old. Very tired. Very sure.

World-breaker, said the houses.

To Dory.

Not to me. I was inside the spear. To her. Standing in the middle of the plateau with Dusk on and the net going out of her to everyone.

You were made for us, said the houses. Like your father. Your grandfather. Every one of you. We have looked for you since before your world had a name. We have always waited. The shield came down closer. Come to the middle. All of you. You will be what you were made to be.

Dory took Dusk off.

She looked up. At the houses’ ship. Through the shield. With her black eyes.

“No,” said Dory.

You do not understand what you are, said the houses.

“I do,” said Dory. “I’m saying.”

And Mother put her hands up.

I wasn’t there. I’ll write it the way they told me. All of them. Every single one of them told it the same, which almost never happens.

Mother stepped out from behind Dory. To the middle of the plateau. Beside Aurelius, on his knee. Under the shield, with the houses’ ship pressing down on it.

She looked up at the ship for a moment.

“Excuse me,” said Mother. To Aurelius. “Can you let that down, love? Just for a second.”

Aurelius looked at her.

Then he let the shield down.

Mother lifted the houses’ ship.

All of it. The size of a city. Off the plateau. Up. Very slowly. With her hands out, palms up, the way she lifts the porch at the turn, and her face very calm, and her long brown coat blowing round her knees in the wind that came off it.

A finger’s width. Then a foot. Then up. A hundred feet over the plateau. Higher. With the houses’ voice coming out of it, all of them at once, not words any more.

Mother held it there.

She held it there for a long time.

She didn’t say anything. Then she did. Not loud. She never is.

“You took the Marrah,” said Mother. To the ship. “You took Lio’s mother and father. You took Ferrin’s three when they were small, and Ossel, and everyone on One. You took every child on every world you could reach, and you put them in lines, and you made them into yours, and you sat in the middle and talked while they did it.” She held the ship very still. “And you came here this morning to take my granddaughter.”

The houses didn’t say anything.

“No,” said Mother. “She said no.”

And from the long table, on Avalon, Okafor put her hand flat on the wood.

And the houses’ ship got heavy.

Mother let go.

It came down on the far side of the plateau. On the green plain where the range used to be, where the Scarecrow queen had broken the mountains and turned them over and left a flat white field.

It came down so hard the whole of Root rang. Everyone felt it. Halvane says Ister felt it, all the way round the sun.

And the eldest opened the ground.

She hadn’t moved in three days. She’d lain under the plateau and held the net through Dory and let her daughters press into her and her threads light up and her moons be pulled at, and she hadn’t once done anything herself.

She opened the ground under the houses’ ship.

All the way down.

And closed it again.

I ended worlds once, said the eldest. Very quietly. To everyone. To all three worlds, I think. Before I learned.

A pause.

I have not ended them, she said. They are not dead. They are in the ground. Deep. Where nothing can reach them and they can reach nothing. The plateau went very still. They have sat in the middle and talked for longer than anyone has been alive. They can sit in me and listen. For as long as it takes.

For what? said Dory.

For them to learn, said the eldest. The way I did. If they can.

The grey ships stopped.

All of them. The finished ones, the ones that were left, in the sky over Root and on the plains and round the plateau. All at once. The houses’ voice went out of them, Dory says, like a light going out of a window.

Some of them fell. Some of them just stopped in the air and stayed there.

And some of them, Dory says, started to sway.

That’s where I came down.

Into all of that. Out of the clear blue sky over Root, very slowly, with Hana’s breath still in my ears. Onto a plateau where my mother was standing in the middle with her hands still a little bit up, and Aurelius on one knee beside her, and Rhiannon holding him up, and Andraste with Holdfast, and the wall that moves coming back down Luna’s roads out of an empty sky.

And Dory, in the middle. With Dusk in her hand. Looking at me.

“Hi, Dad,” said Dory.

I’ll write the board. Crane says I should. Third day.

On Root: four hundred and twelve of the Standing. Nineteen Kasrai. Sixty Hyrrani. Twenty-two of Aune’s fighters, and Aune herself was hit, and came down on the east plain beside the reef, and walked out of her fighter, and sat down on the coral, and asked someone to tell Tiri she was cross with her fighter for not keeping still. Eleven of Hearth, under the grey ships before the shield came all the way up. Two of Risa’s wing.

The Meridian: thirty-one of her six hundred, in the compartments along her side where she went into the spear. The spine-queen was hurt. Not badly. Ruan says she’s humming again.

On Avalon: none.

On Ister: none.

No children. No queens.

Crane put the markers out. All of them. Then he went to sleep in his chair at the end of the line for fourteen hours, and Holt sat by the door with his cap on his knee, in case anyone tried to wake him.

Holt got his cap back.

The Overseer gave it to him. On the plateau. After. He held it out in both hands. Very carefully.

Holt took it. Looked at it. Put it on.

Then he took it off again. And put it back on the Overseer’s head.

“Keep it,” said Holt. “I’ve got another.”

The Overseer stood there in Holt’s cap for a long time. Looking at the far plain. At the flat white field where the ground had closed.

“They’re still there,” he said. “I can feel them. Under it. Very far down. Talking.” He scratched the dog’s ear. “Nobody’s answering.”

“Does that frighten you?” I said.

“No,” said the Overseer. He thought about it. “It’s the first time in my life I haven’t been in a room with them.”

At dusk, Mother poured.

The first cup out for the eldest. The second for Dory. Then everyone. All the way round the plateau. It took a very long time; there were more of us now. Halvane had a cup. Aune, with her arm in a sling, sitting on the grass with Risa. The tall one of the unfinished, who came up the path at dusk with his hand on his chest and didn’t know if he was allowed; Mother poured him one before he’d finished asking.

And then Mother did something she’s never done.

She poured a cup and walked to the edge of the plateau. And down the path. To the foot. To the ring.

To the Scarecrow queen.

And poured it out on the green ground in front of her.

Then the next queen. And the next. All the way round the ring. Every one. The heavy queen had come down out of the Ground by then; Mother poured for her. The coral queen. The ash queen. The moss queen, and the reed queen on her back, who wanted her own and got it. Our queen from the roots. The first queen.

It took her the whole of dusk.

Risa went down to the arch at the foot of the plateau with the big pot four times, and every time it came back full. Abbe. Abbe always knows.

No one has ever poured for us, said the Scarecrow queen. When Mother got to the end and came back to her.

“Well,” said Mother. “Someone has now.”

At the turn, Mother looked west.

On Avalon, on the porch, a small girl in a long brown coat put her hands flat on the boards. With Ingrid beside her, and Konrad, and Ione, who’d come up from the hall at dusk because she said she wanted to see the sky go on.

And lifted it.

Ione told me after. She said, when the porch went up, she looked at the sky. Past the town, past the hill, past everything.

And the stars were back.

All of them. Where the dark had been, the first night, at the edge of everything.

“It still goes on,” said Ione.

Konrad wrote it down.

“There she is,” said Mother.

Then Garnet’s voice came through the net. Through Dory. From the long ward. Very fast.

“Mum,” said Garnet. “Now. She’s started. She says she’s not waiting any more, she says you’ve had three days and that’s plenty.”

Mother put down the pot.

She looked at me. At Dory. At the plateau, and the queens round the foot of it, and the clear sky over Root with the stars coming out.

“Well,” said Mother. “Then we’d better go home.”

Day 7044. Hold On.

On the third morning it didn’t split; it pulled in, smaller and heavier, into a spear pointed at her. It has learned; it cannot cover me, so it will go through. Can it? Nothing has ever tried. Behind it, everything: the grey ones, the four hundred and nine, and the houses themselves, in a ship as old as stone; they’ve never come themselves; they’d rather be there when it ends. Okafor: everyone to Root, we have an hour; a ring round every hollow still. Halvane: there is nothing on Ister to protect it from. Ingrid stayed where she was needed. The queens turned in and pressed; hush, we are busy. Dory put Dusk on: you go where the wall breaks; I’m the wall. Everyone round her. Twenty-six stations fired; the Meridian put her shoulder into it and bent it, not enough. I went into the point of it. At the centre, the shape of wanting; it wanted to be me. I let go of all of it, and didn’t stop. Hana breathed my name with all the air she had: there you are. I’m not proud of it; that’s why I could call you back. Tiamat: it’s gone. It’s gone. The houses came down while I was inside. Aurelius held, and Rhiannon: it’s very restful to share. Vessa turned out, toward her mother; Corin opened the door from the hall and it went as wide as the sky; Holdfast took all of it; thank you. Now. Andraste cut forty; two hundred ran; let them tell everyone. The houses’ ship pressed Aurelius to one knee: world-breaker, you were made for us. Dory: no; I’m saying. Mother: can you let that down, love; and lifted the city off the plateau; you came to take my granddaughter; she said no. Okafor made it heavy. Mother let go. The eldest opened the ground, all the way down, and closed it: not dead; they can sit in me and listen till they learn. The grey ones stopped; some swayed. Hi, Dad. Four hundred and twelve, nineteen, sixty, twenty-two, eleven, two, thirty-one; Aune cross with her fighter; the spine-queen humming. No children. No queens. Holt gave the cap back: I’ve got another. The Overseer: the first time I haven’t been in a room with them. Mother poured for every queen in the ring; someone has now. Oona lifted the porch, and the stars were back; Ione: it still goes on. Garnet: now; you’ve had three days and that’s plenty. Then we’d better go home.