Scarecrow

Corvan answered.

Dory had asked him, a long time ago now, on the same thin band his packet came on. Locked by shape, the way his was. Four words.

Thank you. Are you safe?

Nothing had come back. Not in all the months since. Not through Lantern, or the toys, or Luka’s candle, or the red hair, or the forty ships at Thole. Ilka listened every night. Dory checked every morning, before the count, with her glasses in her hand. And every morning Ilka shook her head.

Dory said it was either very good or very bad, and she didn’t know which, and she’d like to.

It came on the thirty-first night of Thole’s engine.

I’ll put down the engine first. Because it’s what everyone was doing, those weeks, and because I want it remembered that the miners of Thole did it.

Halvane went to Thole the morning after the Hedge said yes. With Asha, and Crane, and every Aldri engineer who’d built Lantern’s, which is most of the engineers there are. And the queens, singing it ready. And the Kiln smiths, with Odra’s iron.

He stood at the lip of the biggest pit with Mira Tannock and looked down into it. Three miles of blue.

“On Lantern,” said Halvane, “the engine took eight and a half months because we had to dig.”

Mira Tannock looked at him.

“We’ve been digging for four thousand years,” said Mira Tannock.

“Yes,” said Halvane. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

So the miners dug.

Not new holes. Old ones. Thole is a world that’s been hollowed out from the top for four thousand years, in pits and shafts and galleries that go further down than anyone’s ever charted, and Halvane walked them for a week with Asha and a lamp and found that half of what an engine needs was already there. The long deep channels. The chambers. The places where the heat comes up.

And the lumen. Everywhere. In the walls. In the floors. In the dust in the children’s soft ones.

Aldri engines run on lumen. Halvane says they always have. Ister has spent eleven thousand years buying it, a little at a time, at whatever price whoever had it asked. He said the engine that moved Ister the first time ran on a single block of it the size of a bread oven, that took his grandmother’s whole city forty years to pay for.

On Thole, the miners use blocks that size to prop open doors.

Halvane says it’s going to work.

He said it to the long table on the twentieth night, sitting on the bench, very carefully, the way you’d put down something that might break. He said he wasn’t sure yet. He said the sums were close. He said the eater was close too, and getting closer, and Bell came down from the Meridian every morning with the distance on a slate and it was always less than he wanted.

But he said it was going to work.

Mira Tannock, at the end of the long table, where she sits now when she comes through the arch, didn’t say anything. She put her blue hands flat on the wood.

The miners say that’s what you do, on Thole, when you hear something you’re afraid to believe.

Then, on the thirty-first night, Ilka came down from the Meridian with a packet.

Locked by shape. Addressed to Dory. On the thin band. The same one.

Ilka didn’t say anything when she gave it to her. She didn’t need to. Dory went white, and then put her glasses on, and then took them off again, and sat down at the long table in the middle of the bread.

“Get Senna,” said Dory. “And Mira. And Okafor. And Halvane, from Thole. Now. Please.”

They came. All of them. Senna Thale through the Ister arch in her grey, with Iolo and Mara Quell behind her. Okafor with her slate. Halvane from Thole, with blue dust on his robe. Mira Tannock behind him. The Overseer, from his house by the river, who came without being sent for, because he says he can always tell when someone’s about to read something about the houses.

Mother poured.

And Dory opened it.

It opened the way the first one did. Not like a lock. Like a question. It asked her the way we ask, and she answered, and it came apart in her hands into four pieces.

The first was a note. Very short. In the same hand as before. Small. Careful.

No. Nobody is. He doesn’t sleep any more. He walks in the long hall at night and talks to the walls, and the walls don’t answer, and he talks to them anyway. He isn’t who he was. I don’t know who he is. I’m sending what I can. I don’t know if I can send again. C.

Dory read it out loud. Twice.

Then she put it down on the long table, very gently, the way Mother puts down a cup, and nobody said anything for a long time.

“He answered,” said Sorrel. From the stairs, where she wasn’t supposed to be. “He said no.”

“He did,” said Dory.

“That’s still answering,” said Sorrel.

The second was a letter. From the Prime. To the same person as before. The head of whatever gives the Refined their seal.

Senna Thale read it. In her voice for the far hall. Very clear, very slow.

I have made contact.

A pause. Senna’s eyes went down the page.

With the houses. Under Root. As I hoped. It was not difficult, in the end. They have been buried a long time, and listened to by no one but the planet that buried them, and she does not hear everything. There are depths in her she has never looked into. They speak from there.

They were very glad to be asked. They have been waiting, they say, for someone who would listen to them and act. They have a great deal to tell. They are eager.

And they have given me what I asked for first.

Senna stopped.

“Read it,” said Dory.

Senna read it.

They have given me Root.

Where it is. Exactly. Its star, its turning, its arches, its distance from the others. Everything Dask has hidden. I have its coordinates.

Nobody moved.

Not at the long table. Not on the stairs. Mother didn’t move, with the pot in her hand. The Overseer didn’t move, by the door. He’d closed his eyes.

“The eldest,” said Dory. Very quietly. “He’s got where the eldest is.”

“And the queens,” said Kyria. Who’d come through the Hyrran arch at the end, in her armour, without being sent for either. “Every queen who goes to Root on her birthday. Every one who held the thread.”

“And the houses,” said Halvane. “Who he’s talking to.”

“From inside her,” said Dory. “From the bottom of her. Where she doesn’t look.” Her voice went odd. “She doesn’t know. She can’t know. She’d have told me.”

The Overseer opened his eyes.

“I told you,” he said. Not unkindly. To nobody in particular. The way he says things, very flat, like someone reading a ledger. “When the first letter came. I said they’d tell him gladly. Not because he’d pay them. Because he’d listen to them.” He looked at the floor. “Nobody ever listened to them. Not even us. We obeyed them. That’s different.”

“The eldest listened,” said Dory.

“The eldest listened so they’d learn,” said the Overseer. “He listens so they’ll help.” He shook his head, very slowly. “They’ll like his better. They always liked being useful better than being good.”

Lio was in the doorway.

She’s always in the doorway. With her hands in her sleeves. She’d come in behind the Overseer and stood there through all of it, the way she does, very still, and nobody had noticed, because Lio is very good at not being noticed. She learned it in the middle.

“They’ll tell him how,” said Lio. Very quietly. “Won’t they. How they made me.”

Everybody looked at her.

The Overseer looked at her longest. He knows what she is. He was there, in a way, the way all the Sorn were. He’s never once spoken to her about it.

“Yes,” said the Overseer. “They’ll tell him everything. They’ll be proud of it.”

Lio nodded. Slowly. As if she’d known.

Then Sefa, who’d come in on her arm and was sitting in the chair by the door, put her old hand up to Lio’s hair. And tied a knot in it. Very slowly. The way she does every morning.

“They can tell him how they made you,” said Sefa. “They can’t tell him how you stayed. They don’t know. They weren’t there for that part.”

Lio didn’t say anything. She leaned her head against her grandmother’s hand. And stayed in the doorway, the way she does. With everyone else.

Okafor wrote one word on her slate. She didn’t rub it out.

Root.

Then underneath it, smaller:

Now.

Senna Thale picked up the third piece.

She read the first line to herself. And then she put it down, and picked it up again, and looked at Mira Tannock at the end of the long table for a long time before she read it out loud.

To the same.

Our scientists have finished their study of the phenomenon, and of the creatures from the outer dark that the Sorn called the Hungry. The two are related. I will not trouble you with how. What matters is this.

They do not eat rock.

The phenomena take stars. The Hungry take life. Neither touches stone, or ore, or what lies in stone. When a star is taken, the worlds round it go cold and dark and empty, and the people on them die. But the worlds remain. Every seam. Every deposit. Every vein.

Untouched.

Mira Tannock’s hands were flat on the long table. I watched them. They didn’t move.

Senna went on.

You will have noticed, as I have, that the worlds the phenomena have taken in our space have all been worlds that guarded something. Worlds that exported to the family under the terms of the family, and would not export more. Worlds that, when asked for more, said they were giving all they could.

You will have noticed that the phenomena seem to prefer them.

Senna stopped. She put the letter down very flat on the table. Her hand was shaking. I’d never seen Senna Thale’s hand shake. Not in the far hall. Not in front of the Assize.

“Read the rest,” said Mira Tannock.

“You don’t—”

“Read the rest,” said Mira Tannock. “Please.”

Senna read the rest.

It is not chance. You and I both know it is not chance.

The scientists have learned that the phenomena can be guided. Not commanded. Guided. They go where the thing they want is, and they can be persuaded that the thing they want is in one direction rather than another. It is a delicate work, and slow, and costly. But it can be done. It has been done.

Imagine it done more widely.

There are a great many stars in the family with worlds under them that would give us a great deal more, if we did not have to ask. If the people who sit on what we need were simply no longer there to say no.

We send fleets. We grieve on every band. We let the phenomenon do what it does. And afterwards, when the dark has passed, we send the miners of our choosing to collect what was left untouched.

Nobody can say we did not try. Nobody can say we did anything at all.

Thole will be the first we do it to openly. Dask is there now, carrying them out. Let him. Let him carry every one of them through his holes in the air. He cannot carry the world.

When they are gone, it is all ours.

Nobody said anything.

For a long time. A very long time. Longer than any silence there’s ever been at the long table, and there’ve been some.

Then Mira Tannock stood up.

Very slowly. Short and broad, with her grey hair cut very short and the blue in the creases of her hands. She stood up from the end of the long table and didn’t look at anyone. She looked at the window. At the sill full of small things. At the soft miner the toymakers had sent her the week before, short and broad with a pick handle in its hand, that she’d put there next to the Scarecrow queen.

“Four thousand years,” said Mira Tannock.

Nobody answered.

“We gave them a fifth of everything that makes them go,” said Mira Tannock. “And when they asked for more, we said we were giving all we could. Because we were. Because there were children down the shafts with blue in their lungs, and old men who couldn’t climb the ladders any more, and we said, we can’t, not more, not without killing ourselves.” She stopped. “So they decided we’d die anyway. And they’d take it after.”

She turned round.

“They pointed it at us,” said Mira Tannock. “The dark. They pointed it at our sun.”

Bell, at the end of the bench, made a sound.

Everyone looked at her.

“The hesitation,” said Bell. Very quietly. “At the end. Lantern’s old sun. When it closed. As long as it takes to say good morning. Every time.” She had her instruments open on her knees. Her hands were moving on them very fast. “I couldn’t work out why. I’ve watched it forty times. I couldn’t work out why something that big would stop, right at the end, for that long.”

“Why?” said Okafor.

“Because it was looking for something,” said Bell. “Something else. Something it was promised. Something it was told was there.” She looked up. Her face was very white. “It hesitates because it gets to the star and the thing it was lured with isn’t there. And it doesn’t understand. And for about as long as it takes to say good morning, it looks.”

She shut her instruments.

“And then it eats the star anyway,” said Bell. “Because it’s there.”

Lantern’s old sun.

Lantern was on the list. Lantern’s world had nothing much on it but lamps and a lake. But past Lantern, Halvane said, very quietly, two stars outward, where the eater went next, there was a world the Collective had been trying to buy for three hundred years. Rich in something. He’d have to look up what.

He didn’t have to look it up. He knew.

“Every one,” said Halvane. “Every star on Mara’s list. Every one I drew a line through.” He put his long hands over his face. “I drew the eater’s path. I thought it was going where it wanted. It was going where they told it.”

“You couldn’t have known,” said Ilas. Beside him. Her hand on his knee.

“I should have,” said Halvane. “I’ve lived my whole life among a people who ran from things for eleven thousand years. I should have known what it looks like when something’s being chased.”

The fourth piece was a list.

Senna didn’t read it out. She put it in the middle of the long table where everyone could see it. Stars. Worlds. The things under them. And beside each one, a date, and a word in the Collective’s script that Ilka read for us.

Directed.

There were nineteen.

Thole was the last one on the list. The date beside it was the night the forty ships fired nine times and went home.

The word beside it was different.

Openly.

Dory went to Root that night.

I went with her. I always go with her. And Kyria. And Varra, who was at Root already, with the ring of the Standing round the plateau that Okafor sent the first time a letter came.

The eldest was waiting.

She knew something was wrong. She said she’d felt it from the moment Dory sat down at the long table. She said Dory’s net had gone very tight, all at once, the way a hand closes, and stayed tight, and she’d been waiting all evening on the plateau by the iron candle and the small round planet in its silver ring, to find out why.

Dory sat on the green ground and put her hand flat on it.

And told her.

I don’t know how to write what happened to the eldest. I’ll try.

She went very still. The whole plateau. The grass, which always leans towards Dory when she’s there, stopped leaning. The air stopped moving. Everything stopped. As if a world had held its breath.

Then the ground under us went cold.

Not very cold. Just a little. For the first time since the queens came to Root. For the first time since the green.

They spoke from my depths, said the eldest. From the places I have never looked.

“Yes,” said Dory.

To him.

“Yes.”

I gave them a birthday, said the eldest. The chance of one. I told them they could have one, the day they first gave something away. Freely. To someone who was not them.

A very long pause.

They gave something away, said the eldest. Freely. To someone who was not them.

She was quiet for a long time.

They gave him me, said the eldest.

Dory put her face in her hands.

Kyria knelt down on the cold green ground beside her. In her armour. And put one hand on Dory’s back and one hand flat on the ground. The way Andraste holds the post. And didn’t say anything.

Varra, standing at the edge of the plateau, put both hands on her chest.

And I put my hands down too. On the grass. And asked the eldest something I’ve never asked her.

I asked if she was all right.

No, said the eldest.

A pause.

But I am still here, said the eldest. That is the thing your mother says. When she is not all right. I have heard her. She says, I am still here, love.

Another pause.

I am going to look, said the eldest. Into the places I have never looked. All the way down. I have been afraid to. There are things down there from before the green, from when I was alone, that I did not want to see again. The ground got very slightly warmer. I am going to look anyway. Because they are in me. Because I put them there. And because something in my depths has been speaking to a man who points the dark at people’s suns, and I did not hear it.

“Do you want us to stay?” said Dory.

Yes, said the eldest. Please. While I look.

So we stayed.

All night. On the plateau. Dory and Kyria and Varra and me, on the green ground by the iron candle, with our hands flat on it, while the eldest looked into herself.

I could feel her doing it. Going down. Further than I’d ever felt her go. Down past the green, and the roots, and the rock. Down past the place where the houses sit, buried, listening. Down into the cold. Into the old dark at the bottom of her, from before, when she was alone and nobody came and nothing grew.

Dory says she found them there.

Not all of them. Some. A few of the houses, pressed down into the deepest dark, into the cracks at the very bottom of her that she’s never looked into. With the voice. The old voice. Very thin. Going out, through the cracks, through the old cold rock, very faint, out past the edge of her, out past Root’s star, out into the dark.

Talking.

That’s what Dory felt, at the edge of her net, the night Lantern moved. Past the Watch. Further than anything with a name. Something like the voice, talking to someone new.

It was this.

The eldest didn’t do anything to them. Not that night.

She told Dory she wanted to. She told Dory she wanted to close the cracks and press them down and never let anything come out of the bottom of her again. She said she could. She said it would be easy.

She said she wasn’t going to. Not yet.

If I close it, said the eldest, he will know. He will know I know. And he will know someone told me. And there are not very many people that close to him.

Dory went very still.

“Corvan,” said Dory.

The boy who said no, said the eldest. Yes.

So the cracks are still open. At the bottom of the eldest. And the voice still goes out through them, very thin, into the dark, to a man in a long hall who talks to the walls at night.

But the eldest is listening now. All the time. To every word.

She says she’s never had to listen to something she didn’t love before.

She says she’s learning.

We came home at dawn. Through the Root arch. Onto the red glass. Wren was there with her slate.

She’d written the stars already. Two hundred and eighty-three, all saying not yet. And under it: The ring hears nothing.

She looked at our faces. And picked up her pencil. And wrote, under the ring, very small:

Root is listening.

Mother found me on the porch, the next night, after the argument.

She had two cups. She gave me one. She sat down beside me on the top step, which she does slowly now, and less often than she used to, though she doesn’t get any older. We both know why, now. We don’t talk about it.

“You’re thinking about the boy,” said Mother.

“I’m thinking about all of them,” I said. “The nineteen. Thole. Mira’s grandson in the seventh shaft. Corvan in that long hall with his father talking to the walls.” I looked at the cup. “I’m thinking I could end it. I could go to the far hall and stand beside the Prime the way I stood beside the twelve.”

Mother didn’t say anything for a while.

“You could,” said Mother.

“And then?”

“And then there’d be a man in a chair who’d been made into what you are by things that were buried in a planet’s cracks,” said Mother, “and you’d have to find out whether he could be asked. Before you did anything you couldn’t take back.” She drank her tea. “That’s what the boy’s telling you. Isn’t it. He isn’t who he was. I don’t know who he is.”

I hadn’t thought of it like that.

“Someone’s doing something to that man,” said Mother. “Something’s walking up and down in him at night. You don’t put a person on a frame for what’s walking in them, love. You find out what it is first.”

She put her hand on my knee.

“Your father used to say,” said Mother, “that a field that won’t grow isn’t a bad field. It’s a field with something wrong in the soil. You don’t burn it. You dig.”

“Was that in the orphan halls?”

“It was after,” said Mother. “On the farm. But he’d been saying it his whole life. He said it about the boys’ halls, too. About the warden with the cupboard.” She smiled. “He said nobody’s born taking toys.”

The other things. I’ll put them down. They’re not quick, this time.

Okafor has moved every Standing company that isn’t on the Hedge to Root. Every one. Crane’s wall is going round the plateau first, before Avalon, before Ister. He says three weeks. He says he hasn’t slept and doesn’t intend to. The stations round Root are being doubled. The Cerens, the first ten, are on the plains below the plateau, in a ring, with Aune.

Senna Thale has the letters. All four. She says she could take them into the far hall tomorrow and the Assize would have to look at them. She says the small worlds at the back of the hall would see them, and the traders on the thin bands, and every miner on every world that’s ever been told it was in good standing.

Dory said not yet.

Mira Tannock said yes. Now. Tonight. Every band. She said she’d stand at the lip of the pit and read them out herself.

They argued about it at the long table for three hours. Dory said Corvan would be taken. Mira said nineteen worlds had already been taken, and Thole would be the twentieth, and they were all somebody’s son. Neither of them was wrong. Mother said so, at the end, and poured, and said that when two people are both right it usually means somebody needs to be asked who isn’t in the room.

So Dory’s going to ask Corvan.

On the thin band. Locked by shape. One question.

May we?

She sent it this morning. Ilka’s listening.

Halvane went back to Thole at dawn. He said there was nothing he could do about the letters and a great deal he could do about the engine. He said if the Collective wanted Thole’s blue so badly, it could watch it leave.

He says twenty-six days.

Bell says the eater’s twenty-nine.

He says that’s enough.

Bell says she’d like it to be more than three.

The toymakers have heard about none of this. Imre Oshan made sure. She came up the hill the morning after and sat at the long table and didn’t say anything for a long time and then said she’d never been more frightened of a thing she wasn’t allowed to write.

She said the toymakers have sent a soft Mira Tannock to Thole. Short and broad, with very short grey hair and blue stitched into the creases of her hands and a voice-piece in one of them. The card says: She said it on every band.

Mira Tannock looked at it for a long time.

Then she put it on the sill. Next to the soft miner. Next to the Scarecrow queen. Next to the chart with the oatmeal stain.

Mother didn’t say anything about the shelf.

Sorrel has started writing on her wrist again.

Not a name. She doesn’t know his name, not properly, only the letter he signs with. So every morning, before the count, she sits on the red glass next to Dory with Ilka’s pen and writes it on the inside of her wrist, very carefully, the way she wrote Hesta’s.

C.

Dory asked her why.

“Because nobody’s told me he’s all right,” said Sorrel. “Hesta’s all right. Somebody told me. So I rubbed her off.” She looked at the letter on her wrist. “He said no. When you asked if he was safe. He said no.” She blew on the ink, to dry it. “So I’m keeping him on. Until somebody says yes.”

Dory didn’t say anything. She put her arm round her.

The next morning, Fen had one too. On his wrist. C. In his very careful hand, slightly smudged.

The morning after that, Linnet. Then Teo, on one of his small wrists, because he said the big ones were for holding things. Then Kesh, then Ash, then Corin, who wrote it very small, on the inside, where nobody would see, and Tiri saw.

Now every child in the house has a letter on their wrist in the mornings. Mother hasn’t said anything. She just leaves the pen out by the bread.

And Brom has started school. Miss Pell’s, on Avalon, with the other children from the eastern plain. He brought his two blue soft ones on the first day and sat them on his desk, and a teacher said toys weren’t allowed on desks, and he said they weren’t toys, they were the reason he was alive, and Miss Pell, who was passing, said that was a very good reason and they could stay.

Now every child in the room has a soft one on their desk. Miss Pell says she’s lost that battle and doesn’t mind.

The long record’s Thole book has a hundred and thirty names in it now. Babies born on the eastern plain and the plains below Hyrran’s ridge and the Root plains, where Thole’s people are. Twelve of them are called Brom. Brom is very embarrassed. Ebb has told him he’ll get used to it, and it’s not as bad as it looks, and the trick is to pour a cup out on the ground every now and then and not explain.

Ilka’s still listening. On the thin band. For the answer to May we?

Nothing yet.

Dory sits on the red glass every morning before the count with her glasses in her hand, next to Sorrel and the letter on her wrist, and waits for Ilka to come down from the Meridian and shake her head.

Every morning, Ilka does.

Every morning, Dory says thank you anyway. And then goes to Root, and sits with the eldest by the iron candle, and listens with her to the thin cold voice at the bottom of her, going out through the cracks, talking to a man who doesn’t sleep.

She says it’s the hardest listening she’s ever done.

She says she’s going to keep doing it.

Days 9669–9700. Lure.

Dory had asked: are you safe? The answer came on the thirty-first night of Thole’s engine. Halvane at the pit: on Lantern we had to dig; we’ve been digging four thousand years; that’s what I was hoping you’d say. Half an engine already there, in four thousand years of shafts; Aldri engines run on lumen; Ister’s first engine ran on a block the size of a bread oven that took a city forty years to buy, and on Thole they prop doors with them. It’s going to work; Mira’s blue hands flat on the wood. The packet, locked by shape. Corvan: No. Nobody is. He doesn’t sleep; he talks to the walls; he isn’t who he was; I’m sending what I can. Sorrel: that’s still answering. The Prime: I have made contact with the houses, under Root; they speak from depths she has never looked into; they were very glad to be asked; they have given me Root: its coordinates. The Overseer: they always liked being useful better than being good. Lio in the doorway: they’ll tell him how they made me; Sefa tied the knot: they can’t tell him how you stayed. Okafor: Root. Now. The second letter: the phenomena take stars and the Hungry take life; neither touches stone or what lies in stone; the worlds remain, untouched; the taken worlds all guarded something and would not give more; it is not chance; the phenomena can be guided; we send fleets, we grieve, and afterwards we collect; nobody can say we did anything at all; Thole the first done openly; he cannot carry the world. Mira: they pointed it at our sun. Bell: the hesitation is the eater looking for what it was lured with, and not finding it, and eating the star anyway. Halvane: I drew the path; it was going where they told it; I should have known what it looks like when something’s being chased. The list: nineteen, directed; Thole: openly. On Root the eldest went still, and the ground went cold for the first time since the green: they gave something away, freely, to someone not them; they gave him me. Are you all right? No. But I am still here. She looked all night into the depths she’d never looked into, and found some of the houses in the deepest cracks with the old voice going out, talking: what Dory felt the night Lantern moved. She won’t close them yet, because he’d know someone told: the boy who said no. She is listening to something she doesn’t love, and learning. Wren: Root is listening. Every company not on the Hedge to Root; Crane’s wall round the plateau first, three weeks; stations doubled; ten Cerens on the plains with Aune. Senna has all four; Dory: not yet; Mira: now; both right; Mother: ask someone who isn’t in the room. On the thin band: May we? Halvane: twenty-six days. Bell: the eater’s twenty-nine. Mother on the porch: you could; and then you’d have to find out whether he could be asked; something’s walking up and down in him at night; you don’t put a person on a frame for what’s walking in them; your father: a field that won’t grow has something wrong in the soil; you dig; nobody’s born taking toys. A soft Mira Tannock with a voice-piece: she said it on every band. On the sill, and Mother didn’t say anything about the shelf. Sorrel writes C. on her wrist every morning until somebody says yes; then every child in the house; Mother leaves the pen by the bread. Brom’s two blue soft ones on his desk at Miss Pell’s: the reason I’m alive; now every desk has one. Twelve Broms in the Thole book; Ebb: pour a cup out on the ground every now and then and don’t explain.