Across Infinities: The Twelve Games · Book 10

The Long Approach

Prologue: Somebody Came Down the Stairs

Good evening, forty-seven million. Eternal beings. Those of you who stayed up through the bell and the orange and the stair going up into the dark, and are now pretending you didn’t cry. Welcome back downstairs.

I am your Host. The kettle is back on its hook, returned in perfect condition, as promised, by a man who has since said three true words under oath and is no longer anybody’s proxy, and it is on the hob, and it is singing. I have the good monitor. I have the short-legged chair. And I have company.

You’ll remember I turned my chair around at the end of last time, because I could hear somebody coming down the stairs. Nobody comes down my stairs. The stairs go one way in this building, and it is up, and the people who go up them do not come back to make conversation. She came down them anyway.

Small. Neat. Gray cardigan, buttoned wrong by one button, which I have decided not to mention. A tally book under her arm, the long narrow kind with the ruled columns, and a pencil behind her ear sharpened to a point you could perform surgery with. She stood at the bottom of my stairs and surveyed my kitchen as if she were counting it.

She was counting it. One kettle. One chair. One Host. Two cups, because I always put out two, out of habit, for a guest who never comes.

“You’ll be the Counter,” I said.

She didn’t say yes. She didn’t say no. She sat down in the other chair, which has all four legs and is the better chair, and opened her tally book on her knee, and drew a single line under the last entry. Neat. Ruled. Proud.

I looked over her shoulder. You would have too. WORLD 9. NOT SCRIPTED. Underlined. Twice.

“I’ve worked upstairs longer than there have been worlds,” she said, and it was the first thing she said, and her voice was exactly what you’d expect, dry and careful and quiet as paper. “I have never once underlined anything twice.”

So now there are two of us at the desk. I talk and she counts. I have been told I may have one line of opinion per interlude, and she has been told she may have none at all, and I notice she has not asked whether that rule still applies.

Let me tell you where we are.

There is a man and there is a woman. They keep finding each other, world after world, and the forgetting between worlds has stopped working on them. Nine worlds in the books. A dungeon and a torch. A count-house and a ledger. The end of a world. A garden of glass. A Gate over a marsh, and a baby in a red snowsuit handed back out of it. A city that ran on sound. A valley and a flood. A white archive and a ladder. And last time, a city whose walls replayed everything, and a witness who would not file a child, and a recorder who gave away her book and her pen and her jacket and went up a stair that smelled of oranges. She went up. He went on. Game Ten. The Long Approach.

There is no city this time. There is a road across a world nobody finished, fog over the fields, towns that are only fronts, a horizon that has never been drawn, and at the far end of it, somewhere, the edge of the world itself.

His name in this world is Kane. Well. It will be. He’s woken up in the snow without it, which is the usual courtesy, and the first person to offer him a name was the last person any of us expected to see on a road. The Architect has left the desk.

I’ll say that again, because the Counter has just written it down and I want her to have to write it twice. The Architect has left the desk. The Architect has put on a coat, a good dark coat, owned, I’m told, since before there were tailors, and has walked down into a tenth world, in person, hands out of pockets, and is walking beside a player on a road and talking to him in a reasonable voice about doors.

That has never happened. Not in any world. Not once.

The Counter says the power to hold a world together with the designer standing in it has to come from somewhere. She has opened a second column for it. She won’t tell me what it’s headed.

I’ll tell you what I think, and that’s my line spent, so listen.

I think a man who comes down to the road himself is a man who has stopped trusting anyone else to finish the job.

Kettle’s boiling. Two cups. For the first time in a very long time, both of them are going to be used.

And the Counter, who has never once looked up from a page in all the years I’ve known her hand, has just turned her chair around to face the screen.

Chapter 1: Approach, Pop.

Channel One. Good evening, eternals, and welcome to the last road. Our boy arrives in a town with no backs, a population sign with no number, and a milestone that has opinions. Somewhere at the far end of all this there’s a woman and a door. I’ve seen nine worlds of him running at that woman. Tonight he walks. Bring a cushion.

The towns had no backs.

Kane found that out on the second day, when the snow eased and he left the road for the first time and walked up the main street of a little place called, the sign said, Approach, Pop., and then no number at all. There was a baker’s with loaves in the window and a drugstore with colored bottles and a pub with a painted board, and every one of them was a front. Just a front. You went in at the door, and you were standing in a field on the other side, in the fog, with the snow coming down on the backs of the painted shopfronts and nothing behind them at all.

“Nobody finished it,” said the figure walking beside him.

The Architect had been walking beside him for two days. Didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. Didn’t leave prints that filled, though the snow filled Kane’s. Walked with ink-black hands in the pockets of a good dark coat and talked, mostly, in a reasonable voice, about doors.

“I didn’t have the time,” the Architect said. “I never thought anybody would get this far. Ten worlds. Nobody gets ten worlds. They fold at four, five, usually. They forget each other and they’re grateful.” The Architect glanced sideways at Kane. “You were supposed to be grateful.”

“Where does the road go?”

“To the edge. And to the door.” The Architect stopped in the middle of the empty street with its painted fronts. “I’ll show you the door. It’s real. It’s yours. You can go through it tonight, if you like. Home. The kettle. All of it. You’ll remember everything, every world, every name, and you’ll never have to lose anybody ever again.”

“And her?”

The Architect smiled. It was a tired smile, and an ordinary one, and under it the anger moved like something under ice.

“There isn’t a her, Alex,” said the Architect. “Not on this road. Not anymore. You saw her go up the stair.”

And from the far end of the painted street, out of the fog, faint and off-key and absolutely unmistakable, somebody whistled three notes, stair, turn, home, and stopped, as if they’d forgotten the fourth.

* * *

Kane ran.

He did not decide to. His legs decided, and his chest, and the part of him that had stood at the foot of a stair on the Long Gray two nights ago and watched the bottom tread lift out of reach of his fingers. He ran down the middle of the street between the baker’s and the drugstore, his boots skidding in the slush, past the pub with its painted board, The Something Arms, it said, in careful gold letters, as if the signwriter had been told to fill it in later, and out the far end of Approach into the fog.

“Maeve!”

The fog took it. It took it like cotton wool takes a dropped pin: no echo, no answer. He stopped. He stood with his breath going out of him in white clouds and listened.

Nothing. Snow ticking on his collar. Somewhere very far off, a crow that sounded unfinished, one caw, and then the start of a second that never arrived.

“Maeve,” he said again, quieter.

He wanted to whistle the fourth note. He had it in his mouth. Comes back to me. It would be the easiest thing in the world. He wet his lips.

“I wouldn’t,” said the Architect, behind him.

No running. No hurry. The Architect was simply there, a few yards back, at the edge of the last painted shopfront, with snow not settling on that silver hair.

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t her.” The Architect took one hand out of a pocket and turned it over, as if checking that the ink was still there. “She went up, Alex. Ringers go up. They don’t come down to whistle at you in a field. Whoever that is, they’re something left lying about in an unfinished world, and you’ll find that there’s a great deal left lying about in this one. I’d keep my notes to myself if I were you.”

“You’d like that.”

“I’d like a great many things,” said the Architect mildly. “I’d like a world I’d finished. I’d like a player who stayed where he was put. I’d like my kettle-man to stop editorializing.” A tilt of the silver head. “We can’t always have what we’d like. That’s the first lesson. You’ve had it nine times.”

Kane turned his back on the Architect and looked at the fog.

The three notes did not come again.

* * *

He did not know, even now, how much of himself he had.

He had Alex. The Architect had given it to him on the first morning in the snow, holding out the black hand, and Kane had not taken the hand, but he had taken the name, or the name had taken him. It had gone into him like warmth into a cold room. Alex. He knew it like his own handwriting. But it sat under Kane rather than instead of it, as a word sits under another on a page somebody has written over. He was Kane. He had been Kane for three worlds, because he had stopped letting them change it. Alex was the name underneath. The one the figure in the coat kept using, carefully, every time they spoke, like somebody pressing on a bruise to see if it still hurt.

He had the worlds. Most of them. A dungeon and a torch. A ledger. Glass. A Gate over a marsh, and a weight in a red snowsuit, and his own hand in hers, and then the light closing warm over him, and a bare fist in his collar, and gravel under his head, and a whole town breathing over him. A city that played. A valley and a flood. The white archive, that one was close, closer than the others, a cold room with frost in his hair and a girl at a copy-desk with ink on her finger. And the last city. The Hall. The walls that went around. The roof. A kitchen with a dish towel over a crack. A line of lamps on the edge of a gray stone plain.

He had her. Maeve. Copper streak at her left temple. The groove of ink on her middle finger. I’m keeping you. He had her as surely as he had his own two feet. And he had Condition: player alone.

He had read it in the cupboard on the wall of the system layer. He had sat on Silas’s stool and read it and not said it, because the hand closed on his throat when he tried. He did not know whether the hand was still there. He did not want to find out by trying to say it in front of whoever had probably put it there.

The Architect had said the rest out loud on the first morning. A way home. Leave her behind. It had come out like the terms of a lease, read aloud. Kane had said no.

The Architect had said, You haven’t seen the door yet, and started walking.

And Kane, because there was nowhere else to walk, because the road only went the one way and the snow was thick in the hedges and the horizon behind him was even less finished than the one in front, had walked too.

* * *

They went back through Approach because the road did.

On the way out he noticed things he had been too cold to notice on the way in. The baker’s loaves were all the same loaf, the same lopsided crust, repeated along the shelf like a word somebody had copied out for practice. The drugstore bottles were colored but the labels said LABEL in small careful capitals. The pub’s sign said The Something Arms and underneath, in pencil, so faint you could only read it close to, (name?).

There was a church at the bottom of the street. It had a steeple and a lychgate and a noticeboard. The noticeboard said:

SUNDAY: SERVICE.

HYMN: TBD.

ALL WELCOME (POP. ).

Kane stopped in front of it.

“You’re laughing,” said the Architect.

“I’m not.”

“You are. I can always tell.” The Architect came and stood beside Kane and read the noticeboard with head on one side, as you’d read a note you left yourself and no longer understand. “It was going to be a market town. Wool. A fair in the fall. A girl who sold ribbons, a boy who stole them, a long slow thing over three summers. I had the ribbons picked out.” A sigh. “Then a player walked into a Gate after a child who was meant to stay there, and I’ve been mending things ever since, and the ribbon girl never got drawn.”

“That’s not my fault.”

“It’s entirely your fault.” The Architect said it pleasantly, as a statement of fact. “Every unfinished thing on this road is your fault, Alex. Every town with no back. Every hymn TBD. I had to take the time from somewhere. I took it from here.” A gesture at the steeple, the painted street, the fog. “And now there’s a world with a road through it and nothing at the sides, and you’re walking down the middle of it complaining about the scenery.”

“I haven’t complained.”

“You’re about to.”

Kane opened his mouth, and shut it again, because he had been about to.

The Architect smiled the tired smile, and put one black hand flat on the noticeboard, gently, as you’d put your hand on a dog’s head, and when it came away there was a word on the board that had not been there before, in a handwriting Kane knew. He had seen it on a margin. He had seen it on a wall in a cupboard in a dead city. He had seen it written over his own box, in fury. POP. 1.

“There,” said the Architect. “Now somebody lives here.”

* * *

They left Approach behind at dusk. The road went on between its black hedges, two pale ruts, and the fog came in over the fields on either side and lay there like milk in a saucer.

Kane walked. The Architect walked beside him and did not tire and said nothing for a long time, which was worse than the talking.

At the first milestone they came to, Kane stopped.

It was an ordinary milestone. Squat, gray, mossed on one side, as milestones are in every world where there are roads. On the face of it, where the distance ought to be cut, somebody had written in pencil, not cut, written, in a small, neat, careful hand: Approach, 1.

Edge, ?

And under that, ruled, with a line drawn beneath it as tidy as a ledger:

Tally: 1 player. 1 designer. 0 Maeve.

Kane stared at it.

The zero had been written, and then crossed out. Very neatly. One straight line through it.

And beside it, smaller still, pressed so hard the pencil had nearly gone through the stone, somebody had written a different number.

He crouched to read it. The Architect, a pace behind, had gone very still.

The number was 1.