Across Infinities: The Twelve Games · Book 9

The Witness and the Held Line

Prologue: Channel One

Channel One, live to the eternals, and welcome back downstairs. World nine. Before we begin I have a complaint, and I want it entered in the record, since this whole world is about the record.

Somebody has borrowed my kettle.

I came down after the bell, after the soot, after a copyist wrote three words over the first sentence anyone ever wrote about him, and the hook where the kettle hangs was empty. The chair with the short leg was where I left it. The pencil was where I left it. On the hook, tied neatly by a loop of string, hung a small paper tag of the sort they put on luggage and on the dead.

It said, in a careful, courteous hand: Borrowed. Returned in perfect condition. S.

I know that hand. You will too, soon enough.

For the new arrivals in the cheap clouds, here is all you need. 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. Everything else is weather.

Eight worlds are in the books. A dungeon and a torch. A count-house and a ledger. The end of a world. A garden of glass and iron. A Gate that was only light, low over a marsh, and a small weight in a red snowsuit handed back out of it into a woman’s arms by a man who lay down in it to pay, and was hauled back out by a bare hand, a chain, and a whole town. A city that ran on sound. A valley and a flood. And last time, a white archive, a bell, and a ladder.

Remember the ladder. At the bottom of the oldest stacks, under the last drawer, where an old Keeper and a young copyist were reading every name before they let it go, there was a ladder. Iron, cold, going down. Nobody in the white city had ever asked where it went. In an archive you don’t ask where a ladder goes. You file it.

He didn’t file it.

World nine is called The Witness and the Held Line. His name this time is Kane Ashe, as it has been the last few times, because he has stopped letting them change it. He is coming in carrying everything: every world, every face, every cost. His hands are full, and I’m the one who has to watch him try to hold anything else.

Her name is Maeve. Copper hair, green eyes, a habit of humming flat. She keeps the record in the Hall of Testimony with a pen that has worn a groove in her finger. She remembers too much to be safe and too little to be sure. Channel Two has her. I have him. We don’t speak.

The place is the Echo Chamber, a sealed city under a dome of curved stone, and the stone remembers. Every word spoken under it comes back. Every face that ever passed its walls comes back. Stand in a street long enough and you’ll see your own back walking away from you, a week ago, a year ago, carrying the shopping.

That isn’t the dangerous part. The dangerous part is the law. What the walls replay is testimony, and testimony is what happened. Anything said three times under the dome, and played back three times by the stone, becomes the record, and the record is the world. Make the walls say a thing and you make it true. Make the stone forget it and it never was.

There is a man in charge of the walls. He keeps a kettle he didn’t buy. He is very courteous and very patient, and he has a small offer to make, and he’ll make it so kindly you’ll want to say yes on their behalf.

Don’t.

The gap between the last fold and this waking is shorter than it was. I won’t tell you how much. You’ll feel it.

Lights down. Mind the walls. They listen. And if anyone finds a kettle, it’s mine.

Chapter 1: The Oath Before the Name

Channel One. Evening, eternals. He comes in at the bottom of a ladder with eight lives in his pockets and nobody has searched him. Write that down, you lot. Bloody write it down. In eight worlds nobody has ever let him keep a thing for free. Across the floor a woman is writing. Channel Two has her, and Channel Two will be pleased with herself tonight, because her girl hears a name before he says it. I’d give a great deal to know which name. Bets open.

He swore the oath before he knew what it was, and the room wrote it down.

Kane stood in a box of dark polished wood with his right hand raised and his left hand flat on a book whose cover was warm, as if someone had been holding it a long time before him. The room in front of him was round. It rose in tiers, bench above bench, and every bench was full, and every face on every bench was turned toward him with the patient, sleepy attention of people who had been sitting there a very long time and expected to sit there longer. Above them the ceiling curved up and over and down again into the far wall, one smooth shell of gray stone without a seam, and the stone was moving.

Not moving. Playing.

He saw it from the corner of his eye first, as a bird is seen. A shape crossing the curve of the ceiling high up to the left. A man in a coat, walking. Then a woman with a basket. Then, overlapping them, a child running the other way, and a dog. The figures were pale and soft-edged, the color of breath on a window, and they walked across the stone as if the stone were a street, and they didn’t look down. Under them, much fainter, voices. A hundred voices. A thousand. Talking about the price of bread and somebody’s wedding and the rain.

“The whole truth,” said a voice beside him, “and nothing but, as it was, as it is, as the walls will hold it.”

A clerk was standing at the foot of the box, a thin young man in gray with a tall book open on his arm and a pen in his other hand, and he was waiting.

Kane’s mouth was already open. The words came out of it as easily as his foot finds a stair he has climbed ten thousand times.

“As the walls will hold it,” he said.

And the walls said it back.

It came from everywhere. From the curve of the stone above his head and the stone behind the benches and the stone under his own feet, his own voice, a fraction late and a fraction softer: As the walls will hold it. And then, from further off, fainter, a second time: As the walls will hold it. And then, so faint he might have imagined it, a third.

The clerk wrote something in his tall book. The benches sighed, one long settled breath, as a congregation sighs when the hymn is over and they can sit.

“Very good,” the clerk said. “Name, please?”

Kane opened his mouth again, and here was the strange thing, the thing he would remember after, when he had remembered everything else: it wasn’t his own name that tried to come out. It was hers. It climbed up out of his chest like something that had been waiting at the bottom of a well for him to lower the bucket. It was in his throat. It was behind his teeth. He could feel its shape, one syllable, a stone in a pocket that he hadn’t taken out. He had no idea where it had come from. He knew nobody here. He had no notion where here was. He clamped his teeth on it.

Across the round room, on the lowest tier, at a long desk set apart from the benches with a lamp on it and a stack of paper and an inkwell, a woman stopped writing.

She had copper in her hair. Not all of it. Most of it was a dark, ordinary auburn, pinned up at the back in a knot that was coming down, but there was a streak of real copper running back from her left temple, bright as a new coin, and the lamp found it. She had a pen in her right hand and the side of her middle finger was dark with ink, worn into a groove. She had been writing steadily since before he opened his mouth. He knew that without having seen it. He knew the scratch of her pen as well as his own breathing, and she had stopped.

She lifted her head. Her eyes were green, and they found him across the whole round floor of the Hall exactly as if she had heard the name in his throat. As if it were hers. As if he’d shouted it.

The clerk cleared his throat. “Name for the record, sir.”

“Kane,” Kane said. His voice came out rough. “Kane Ashe.”

Kane Ashe, said the walls. Kane Ashe. Kane Ashe.

The woman at the desk had gone white.

* * *

There was a ladder. It came back to him standing there with his hand still up, the clerk writing, the walls still muttering his name around the curve of the dome like a rumor passing through a crowd. It came back as a smell does, all at once and in the body.

Iron rungs. Cold enough to burn. A shaft of white stone going down, narrow as a chimney, lit from somewhere below by a light that wasn’t lamplight and wasn’t daylight. His own breath going down ahead of him in puffs. Above him, a square of brighter white, and an old man’s face looking down over the edge of it, holding a card.

Go on, then, the old man had said. Not unkindly. Tired. Somebody has to see where it goes. I’ve filed enough.

And he had climbed down. Rung after rung after rung, with a card in his breast pocket that wasn’t the old man’s card, and something soft and small and red in the pocket of his coat, and the light below getting no nearer and no further, until he was so tired he stopped counting rungs and started counting other things. Faces. Names. Rooms he had lived in.

He had counted eight lives on that ladder. He’d been afraid, somewhere around the fifth, that he would come to the bottom and forget them. That was how it went. You went down, and at the bottom there was a door, and on the other side of the door you were somebody new with clean hands and an empty head, and nothing in you remembered there had ever been a ladder at all.

He had held onto them. Rung by rung. He had said their names out loud into the shaft to hear them come back off the stone. The dungeon. The ledger. The flood. The Gate.

And at the bottom there had been no door. There had only been this. A box of polished wood, and his hand up, and a voice saying the whole truth.

He still had them. All eight. He stood in the witness box of the Hall of Testimony with his hand raised and eight lives standing in his chest like people in an elevator, shoulder to shoulder, and he knew not a single person in the room, and he knew one.

* * *

“Thank you, Mr. Ashe,” said a new voice. “You may lower your hand. Nobody here will think less of you.”

It came from above and behind him, and it was the kindest voice he had ever heard.

Kane turned. There was a gallery behind the witness box, raised a little, with a rail of the same dark wood, and a man was standing at the rail. He was perhaps sixty. He was thin and very upright, in a gray coat buttoned to the throat, with gray hair brushed flat and a face that looked as if it had been carefully folded and put away and only just now taken out again for company. He had a cup and saucer in his left hand. Steam rose off the cup. He held it without a glance, as a man holds a thing so familiar it has become part of his arm.

“Silas,” the man said, and inclined his head. “I keep the walls. You’ll hear people call me the Witness-Master, which I find a bit grand. Silas does very well.” He smiled. It was a good smile. It reached his eyes and stayed there. “You’ve had a long climb. I expect you’d like to sit.”

“Where am I?”

“The Hall of Testimony. In the Echo Chamber.” Silas lifted the cup an inch, as if toasting the dome. “It’s a city. You’ll like it. Most people do. It’s the only place I know where nothing is ever lost.”

Nothing is ever lost, the walls said softly. Nothing is ever lost. Nothing is ever lost.

“You arrived in the middle of a session,” Silas went on. “I’m afraid that’s why you were sworn. The Hall swears anyone who stands in that box. It isn’t personal. It only means that what you say in here will be held, and played back, and become part of the record.” He took a sip of his tea. “So I would be careful what you say in here, Mr. Ashe. As a kindness. People new to the Chamber sometimes say things they don’t mean, and then of course they have to live with them, because the walls won’t let them go.”

Kane turned back to the desk on the lowest tier. The woman with the copper streak was writing again. Fast. Her head was down and her pen was going and he could see, even from here, that her hand was shaking so badly the nib kept catching.

“The recorder,” Silas said, following his look. “Miss Maeve. She keeps the written record, alongside the walls. A belt and braces arrangement. I like to have it on paper as well. The stone is very reliable, but it does tend to embellish.”

Maeve. The name in his throat turned over like a fish. It wasn’t the same name. He knew that at once. The name he’d been holding wasn’t Maeve. But it fitted around it. It fitted around it as one hand fits around another.

“Session’s adjourned,” Silas said, to the room. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The walls carried it. Adjourned. Adjourned. Adjourned. All around the tiers people began to stand, slowly, stiffly, stretching, gathering coats. A few of them looked at Kane as they went. Most of them watched the walls, where their own figures from an hour ago were still filing in, still sitting down, still taking off their hats. “Mr. Ashe, you’ll want a room. Someone will see to it. Miss Maeve, perhaps you’d...”

“No,” the woman at the desk said, without looking up.

Silas paused, the cup halfway to his mouth.

“No,” she said again. Then she raised her head, and it was Kane she faced, not Silas, and her face was furious and frightened and something else, something underneath both of those that he didn’t have a word for yet. “I’m busy. Someone else can take him.”

Someone else can take him, said the walls, in her voice. Someone else can take him.

She flinched at the second one as if it had hit her.

“Of course,” Silas said mildly. “Of course. Another time.”

He set his cup down on its saucer without a sound, and for the first time since Kane had arrived he didn’t smile.

* * *

They gave him a room in a long curving street behind the Hall, up a flight of stone steps, with a bed and a basin and a window that looked out on the inside of the dome. A boy took him there. The boy didn’t speak. He pointed at the door, and at the bed, and at a jug of water, and then he went away down the steps, and his footsteps went on coming back off the walls for a long time after he’d gone.

Kane sat on the bed. The wall at the head of it was playing. Not much: it was a quiet wall, a back wall, a wall nobody had said anything important in front of for a long time. A woman, very faint, folding a sheet. A cat on the sill. The woman shook out the sheet and folded it and put it on the bed and smoothed it and went away, and then she came back and did it again.

He put his head in his hands. Eight lives. He made himself go through them, in order, quickly, as a man checks his pockets after a crowd. Dungeon. Count-house. The end of the world, and the boat at the end of it. The glass. The Gate. The city of sound. The valley. The archive. Nine. He’d miscounted. No: eight before, and the archive was eight, and this was...

This was nine.

All there. All present. He had come down the ladder with his hands full, and nothing had been taken off him at the bottom.

That should have made him glad. It made him so frightened he couldn’t keep his hands still.

Because if nothing had been taken off him, then somebody had decided not to take it. And in eight worlds of being robbed at every door, he had learned one thing about people who decided to let you keep something.

They wanted something back.

He put his hand in his coat pocket to stop it shaking, and there was something in it. He’d known it was there all the way down the ladder, a softness against his hip, but he hadn’t looked. He took it out now. It was a mitten.

A child’s mitten. Knitted, red, with a hole worn clean through the thumb, as if something had been held very tightly in that fist for a very long time. The kind with no fingers, only a pocket for a fist. It was small enough to sit in the middle of his palm with room to spare. It was damp, as if it had been out in snow, and it smelled very faintly of something sweet and earthy that he knew and could not name.

Carrot. It smelled of carrot. He turned the cuff back. Inside it, in white wool, someone had stitched a name. The stitches were crooked. Whoever had done it had been in a hurry, or sewing by bad light, or both. Small, careful, crooked backstitch, the kind that is meant to last through washing.

Maeve.

Kane sat on the bed in the Echo Chamber with the mitten in his hand.

On the wall above him, faint as breath, the woman went on folding her sheet.

And then from somewhere outside his door, on the steps, or in the street, or in the curve of the stone itself, a voice he had never heard in this life said, in a whisper, so close he felt it on his neck:

Where did you get that?