The smoke was a pyre, and the pyre was trees.
They came up to Greystep in the middle of the morning with the Thornwood standing black over everything, and in a cleared field between the last house and the first oak a dozen people were feeding logs into a fire the size of a cottage, and it was not for warmth. The logs were black oak, thick as barrels, and every one was shot through with grey. Not rot; rot was brown and soft and smelled. This was grey like ash, grey like the dogs in the cellar, and it ran through the wood in veins, and where the fire caught it the veins did not burn so much as go out, like a lamp.
“Oh,” said Oswin, very quietly. “I don’t like that.”
Greystep was perhaps thirty houses, all stone, all low and square and grey, built into the slope so that the roofs of one row were the yards of the next. Every door had a lintel, and every lintel had faces carved into it, a row of them, old and new: a woman with a heavy jaw, a bald man, a child with its mouth open. The families, Wick guessed. Looking out. It would have been friendly in sunshine. There was no sunshine.
A man came down from the pyre to meet them with a long-handled hook. He was broad and stooped, with stone-dust in every crease of him, and there were streaks in the skin of his neck, above the collar, grey as the wood.
“Company?” he said.
“Lantern Company, out of Saltmire,” said Brakka. “Contract with the Compact. We’re going into the wood.”
“Then you’re fools,” the man said, without heat, “but you’ll be fed first. I’m Petrie. I keep the quarry, or I did when there was quarrying.” He looked at Seven, and his eyebrows went up, and came down again as if it were not the strangest thing he had seen this season. “Come up. Mother Hobb’ll want to look at you.”
Mother Hobb was so old that her age had stopped being a number and become a texture.
She sat by a hearth in the largest house, under a lintel with eleven faces on it, small and brown and folded like a leaf, with her hands in her lap palm-up. The hands were smooth. Not soft; smooth, as if fifty years of chisels had polished every line off them. The grey was in her too. A streak of it ran down one cheek from the corner of her eye, like a tear that had set.
“Varr,” she said, when Brakka ducked under the lintel. Her voice was a dry little rustle. “I’ve not seen a Varr in forty years. And a Lumen. Well. Sit, sit, you’re making the room dark.”
They sat. The house filled up: Petrie, two women with the same grey at their wrists, and a girl.
The girl was eight or so, with a slate hung round her neck on a string and chalk in her fist, and she did not sit. She came and stood directly in front of Wick with her feet planted and looked at him the way the ferry-woman had looked at the river.
“You’ve got white fingers,” she said.
“Nell,” said Mother Hobb.
“He has. Look.” She grabbed his hand before he could hide it. Her own hands were scraped raw across the heels, stone-cut. “Did you hold ice?”
“Something like that,” Wick said.
“Hm.” She let go. “You’re not very big for a company.”
“No.”
“I’m not very big either,” said Nell Hobb, and apparently decided that settled something, because she sat down on the floor next to his boot and stayed there.
Brakka told it short: the contract, the Grey Hounds, the road. Mother Hobb listened with her eyes shut, and then she said:
“The summer before last, the stone started singing wrong.”
Nobody asked what she meant. She opened her eyes and made a small dry sound that might have been a laugh.
“You don’t know stone-listening. No. Why would you.” She held up one smooth hand. “We’re quarry-folk. Before you cut, you listen. Cheek to the face, and tap, and the stone tells you where it’ll split. It’s not weaving. It’s only listening. But it’s a thing the body does, and the body pays for it.” She touched the grey on her cheek. “Two summers back, something a long way under here started singing, and it sings all the time, and it’s not a song you want to hear. The ones who listen best heard it first. It gets into you. It’s getting into the trees now.”
“Men came with picks,” said Petrie, from the door. “Out of the wood. A year back, more. Big crew, masked some of them, buying rope and lamp-oil and not saying why. They were digging down.” He shifted his hook. “They took five of ours, over the year. A few at a time. For listeners, they said. Said it was work. We’ve not seen any of them since.”
Brakka’s face had gone very still.
“Masked how?”
“Leather. Half the face.” Petrie touched his own cheek. “The one who did the talking wheezed like a bellows.”
Wick thought of Burl, and the Crossing, and there’d be a man, and said nothing.
Nell showed him the stone in the afternoon.
She appeared at his elbow while he was helping Oswin re-pack the handcart and said, “Come on,” and Oswin said, “I’d go. She’s very definite,” so he went.
The quarry was a great grey bite out of the hillside above the village, with cut blocks lying in rows like loaves and chisels left where they had been dropped. Nell went to the face, a wall of stone three times her height, and put her cheek flat against it, and tapped. Once. Twice.
“Do it,” she said, with her eyes shut.
He put his cheek to the stone. It was cold and gritty.
“Tap.”
He tapped. He heard his own knuckle.
“No. Listen. There’s a thing underneath the sound. Like when you put your ear to the floor and someone’s walking in the next house.” Her voice was patient and bossy, and for a moment she sounded so exactly like Aldo teaching him sixes that he could not breathe. “Go on. Underneath.”
He shut his eyes. He tapped. And underneath, so faint he thought he was making it up, there was a hum. A grit in his back teeth, like Brakka’s hand on the ground. Loam. The whole hill was Loam, and it was humming. And under the hum, very far down, there was something else, felt the way you feel a bell after it has stopped: a long low wrongness, like a note sung flat on purpose, going on and on.
He pulled his face away.
“You heard it,” Nell said, with her chin up. “Most big people can’t. It’s louder than it was.” She picked at the grey at her own wrist, a faint thread of it under the skin, and Wick’s stomach turned over. “I’m not scared of it. I’m going to be a listener. The best one.” She looked at him sideways. “You’re scared of something. You count. I heard you on the road.”
“Everybody counts.”
“Not like that.” She wrote on her slate and showed him. It was a six. It had a belly. “I can do my numbers. Can you do yours?”
“I can do my numbers,” said Wick, and his voice came out strange, and she was kind enough not to notice.
The thornwolves came at dusk.
Nobody saw them come. Thornwolves were lean and low and the colour of briar, and the only warning you got was the dogs, and Greystep’s dogs had been penned since noon because the grey logs made them howl. The light was going red behind the hill. Nell had gone to fetch chalk from her mother’s house, four doors up.
Then there was a scream, and a second one that stopped in the middle, and something grey-brown went over the wall of the top yard with a small struggling bundle in its jaws, and three more went over after it, and they were gone into the trees before Wick had got his feet under him.
Everyone ran. Petrie was roaring, there were torches, a woman was shrieking Nell’s name at the black wall of the wood, and Brakka stopped at the first oak and put her hand flat on the ground.
“They’re going fast,” she said. “Four. Into the thick. Petrie, how far’s the den?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody goes in.”
“Ilsa.”
Ilsa was already in the trees, crouched at the edge of the torchlight with one hand on the leaf-litter, and she said without looking up, “Blood. Not much. She’s alive, they carry them live.” She stood. “Captain, I can’t track with a crowd. Torches’ll scare them deeper and they’ll kill her to run lighter. Two. Me and one quiet one.”
“Me,” said Wick.
“I’m quiet,” he said, into the silence. “I’m small. I climb.” He put his hand on the trunk of the oak beside him and there was the hum, the Loam, and faint, very faint, along the ground into the dark, a thread of it going the way the wolves had gone, like a chalk line. Nell’s scraped hands. Nell’s fear, pouring out of her into the stone as she was carried, and the stone remembering. “I can feel where she went.”
Ilsa looked at him with the scar pulled tight.
“If you fall behind, I leave you.”
“I know.”
“Oswin. Flash-eggs. Two.” Oswin dug in a pocket and put two glass eggs into her hand with the air of a man signing away his children. “Captain, we’ll whistle. Three. You’ll hear it.” She turned. “Come on, then, Saltings boy. Try and keep up.”
The Thornwood at night was not dark. It was black.
Wick had never been in a place without a lamp somewhere. Ten yards past the first trees, the torches of Greystep were gone as if a door had shut, and there was nothing: oak trunks like pillars, briar in walls, mist lying along the ground at knee height, and a silence so total that he could hear his own blood. Ilsa moved through it like something that lived there. Twice she put out an arm and he walked into it, and she pointed, and he saw nothing, and then he saw it: a briar snapped at the height of a wolf’s back; a tuft of grey-brown hair on a thorn.
He followed the hum.
He kept one hand trailing on roots and stone, and the thread was there, a grit in his teeth, faint and getting fainter. Where Ilsa lost the tracks in a stream he found it again on the far bank, and she looked at him in the dark and went the way he pointed. Where the briar closed in and there were three ways through, he put his palm flat on each in turn and the third one buzzed, and that was the way.
“How?” she whispered once.
“She’s scared. It goes into the stone. It’s what they do.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yes.”
He counted trees. One, two, three, pillars in the black, and the mist came up to his waist, and the hum in the ground was suddenly loud, a buzz in his jaw, and Ilsa’s hand slammed flat on his chest and they stopped.
Ahead, the ground fell away into a hollow the size of the Lantern’s taproom, where a great black oak had come down long ago and its roots had torn up a wall of earth, and briar had grown over all of it until it was a cave of thorns. The mist pooled in the bottom. And in the mist, moving, were the wolves.
Four long shapes, low, with a ridge of quills down each spine that rattled when they moved, circling, nosing, waiting. One lifted its head and its eyes gave back a light that was not there, green.
And at the back of the hollow, under the root-wall, there was a crack in the torn earth where a slab of stone stuck out, and wedged in the crack as far back as she could get, with her slate still round her neck, was Nell.
She had her cheek pressed to the slab and both scraped hands flat on it, and the whole hollow was humming with her: not a thread but a flood, grit-grey, pouring off the stone into the mist. She was holding on to the only thing she knew, and it was listening to her, and it could not help.
A wolf put its head into the crack. She kicked it in the nose. It came out with a rattle of quills and went round again.
“Right,” breathed Ilsa, at his ear. “I go down the left side and crack an egg in the bottom, they’ll run from the flash, you go straight down the root-wall and get her out of that hole while they’re blind. Then up. Then whistle. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t do anything.”
“I won’t.”
She was gone. He waited with his back against an oak and his hands shaking, and the fourth wolf stopped circling and lifted its nose toward the left side of the hollow, where the mist had moved.
The egg cracked.
It went off in the bottom of the bowl like a yellow sun. The mist lit up gold from inside and every wolf was a black shape with a shadow thrown twenty feet up the thorns, and they screamed, a thin rattling shriek, and scattered. Wick was already going. He went down the root-wall on his hands and heels with earth in his mouth and ran for the crack and got his arms into it and said, “Nell, Nell, it’s me, it’s Wick, come on—”
She came out of the stone like a cork and climbed him, slate and chalk and all, and he turned with her on his back and the flash was dying.
Too fast. The mist had soaked it up. And the wolves had not run far. They had run to the rim of the bowl, and now there were four pairs of green eyes up there in a ring, and the ring was closing, quills rattling, and Ilsa on the far side had her second egg in one hand and a knife in the other and nowhere to throw either that would get all four.
“Wick,” she said. Just his name, for the first time, flat and quick, not even raised. “Egg. Catch.”
She threw it to him, not at the wolves.
He caught it with Nell’s arms round his neck. The hollow was still full of Nell’s Loam, humming grit-grey in the mist, and he looked at the glass egg, and understood what Ilsa had seen before he had.
He cracked it on the stone at his feet.
Ember. A gout of yellow, a warm shimmer, the smell of hot iron, right there in his hands. One thread gold-red; the other grey, thick as his wrist, coming up out of the ground on every side. He took them both, and the cold hit his arms like a wave, and he did not think stop. He thought about Hettie’s griddle on a market morning, black iron, spitting.
He put both hands flat on the floor of the hollow.
The ground went hot. Not on fire; hot like a stove-top, all at once, the whole bowl of it, the mist shrieking off it in steam. The leaf-litter curled and smoked. And the wolves, coming down the slope in a rush, hit it with their pads and screamed, and leapt straight up in the air, and came down on it again, and went up the slope in four directions like sparks off a fire. He heard them going. Rattling. Away.
He was on his knees in warm earth with a girl on his back and his hands white to the knuckles, and he started to laugh, and Ilsa came down through the steam and hauled him up by the collar.
“I said don’t do anything.”
“You threw me the egg—”
“I threw you the egg.” In the dying glow the scar through her eyebrow had gone slack, and the corner of her mouth was fighting something and losing. “I didn’t say it was clever. I’m just saying what happened.” She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled, three times, so loud it hurt. “Up. Before they decide they’re hungrier than they’re scared.”
Nell would not be put down.
She rode on Wick’s back the whole way out of the wood with her slate banging his spine, and at the edge of the trees, where the torches were, she said into his ear, very low, “I heard you coming. In the stone. I heard you,” and then her mother had her and was crying, and so was Nell, finally, and Wick stood with his arms empty and found that he was shaking.
Ilsa walked back down the hill beside him. The torches went ahead.
“My brother’s called Jem,” she said.
He said nothing. He had learned that much about her.
“He’s nine. He had the wet-lung two winters back, the kind that kills you. The physic comes from an apothecary on the Terraces, twelve marks a bottle, and he needed three.” She said it fast and flat, like reading a list. “I didn’t have thirty-six marks. I had Lucky Dan Harker, who’ll lend anybody anything at a rate. Jem’s fine. He’s upriver with my aunt, he’s got a dog. And I’ve paid Harker the thirty-six twice over and he says I owe twenty more by the new moon, and if I don’t, the arrangement changes, which means I work for the Gaffs instead of the Lanterns, and I’d rather be dead in a river.” She stopped walking. “So that’s why. Since you ask.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You’ve been asking with your face since the gate.” She started walking again. “Brakka doesn’t know. Now you do. It’s on you.”
“The thing from the gate,” Wick said, before he could stop himself. “What the twin gave you.”
Her face shut like a door.
“Don’t push it, Saltings boy. You got one thing tonight. Be happy.”
Mother Hobb was waiting up.
She was in her chair by the hearth with Nell asleep on a pallet at her feet, the slate still round her neck, and when Wick came in she looked at his hands, and said, “Come here, boy,” and he went.
“Hold this.”
It was a pebble. Grey, smooth, the size of his thumb-end, nothing to mark it out from any stone on any beach, and when it touched his white palm it hummed. Faintly. A grit in the teeth, a bee in a jar.
“Song-stone,” said Mother Hobb. “My mother gave it me, and hers gave it her. It’s a bit of the deep face, from before the quarry was a quarry. It hears better than I do.” Her smooth hand closed his fingers round it. “It hums when the stone’s happy. When the wrong song is near, it goes cold. You’ll know.” She let go. “I’d give it to Nell. But Nell’s not going where you’re going, and I think you’ll bring it back, because you brought her back.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s a stone.” She leaned back and shut her eyes. Then she said, not to him, but to the huge shape stooping under her lintel of eleven faces:
“Varr.”
“Mother,” said Brakka.
“You’re going down into it. Don’t tell me you’re not, I’ve heard the boy’s hands.” The old woman’s voice was a rustle of leaves. “Then listen, because I’ve listened fifty years and I’ve never heard this. Something below is singing a wrong song. And it is getting louder.”