Chương 9: What the Shard Says

"Sable." His voice came back off the broken stone and died.

"Sable. Answer me. What language was that." Nothing. He knelt in the dark of the room he'd built, a dead boy waiting by the door and a sliver of black glass warm in his fist, and the voice that hadn't shut up since the tower said not one word.

"Okay," he said.

"So we're doing a silent thing now. That's new. Love it." Still nothing. And that, more than the burns down his side or the hundred feet of ceiling he'd just dropped on his own monster, was what put the fear up under his ribs. He'd known Sable a handful of days and he already knew her shape, and her shape was talking. Quick, dry, never short of something to say. The quiet coming off her now had weight to it. He put the shard in his pocket. He got Joss up onto his good shoulder.

And he climbed up out of the Hollow Maw the slow, ugly way, one hand on the wall the whole climb, up into a morning that was far too bright after all that dark. The boy's sister was waiting at the mouth of the pit. She'd been there all night, by the look of her. When she saw what was over his shoulder her face came apart, and she didn't ask whether Joss was alive, because she'd known the answer before she sent him down.

She took her brother's weight off him, gentle, and sat down in the dirt with him, and Kaito stood there feeling like the wrong man to be watching. Pell had come too. The big baker had walked out from town in the dark, apron and all, to wait at a death-hole for a stranger he'd known three days.

"You went in," Pell said. He sounded almost angry about it.

"You actually went in and came back out."

"Don't make it a thing," Kaito said. His voice wasn't steady.

"Where do I—" The sister pressed four silver into his hand without looking up from her brother. Four coins, warm from being held all night. He nearly gave them back. He closed his fist on them instead and said he was sorry, which was useless, and meant it anyway. Off at the edge of the rocks, the girl in the cut-down coat was watching him again. She didn't come close. She just stood there, the way she always did, filing him away. Then Pell shifted, and she was gone.

"You can't stay near the town," Sable said. So she was back. She was right, so he went. He took the south road out of Ashfen, away from the runner and the crowd and the word miracle, and he walked until the town was a smudge behind him and the three suns had crawled down the sky. When his legs finally quit he climbed off the road into a stand of rocks and sat down with his back against one. He took the shard out.

"Talk to me," he said.

"You've been quiet half a day. That's not you. What did you hear down there?" A long pause.

"Play it again," Sable said. He didn't know how, exactly. But he hadn't known how to patch a bridge either, and his hands and his head kept knowing things he didn't. He closed his fingers around the shard and reached for it the way he'd reached for the broken values, gently this time, and asked it, without words, to do what it had done in the dungeon. The blue light woke. And the woman spoke. Nine seconds. He counted them later, over and over.

The first time through they were just nine seconds of a voice in the dark — a woman, not young, her words running fast and strange in a tongue with nothing in it he should have known. It wasn't a language he could place. It wasn't any shape a language had ever taken for him. And under the strangeness of it she was frightened, or sorry, or both, and one word came around again and again, three times, four, pushed out harder than all the rest. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

The light went dull. The nine seconds ended.

"I don't know that language," Sable said. She set each word down with care.

"Sable, you're ten thousand years old, you told me that yourself—""I have heard every language this world has ever made," she said.

"Every tongue, every cant, every dead dialect rotting in the System's deep records. I have had nothing to do for a very long time but listen. And I am telling you that I have never once heard that language, and I did not understand a single sound of what that woman just said." He sat very still in the dark. Because he had.

"I understood it," he said. The silence came back at once, total.

"Sable. I understood her. Not the way you understand a language you learned. I heard it and I just knew. The whole way down, no working it out, no guessing. There's a word — she said it four times—" His mouth had gone dry.

"Forgive. She kept saying forgive. Forgive me. It wasn't supposed to happen. Forgive me." He had to be sure. He played it again — a third time, a fourth, he'd lost the count — and made himself slow down and take the nine seconds one at a time. Every one of them meant something. Sorry. There was no time. We had to. And under all of it, four times over, that same broken word. Forgive. Forgive me. He understood every piece of it, and he'd have given a great deal not to.

"It's the same every time," he said.

"I'm not frightening words out of noise. I understand her, Sable. All of it." For a long time Sable said nothing, and this time he didn't fill it, because he had nothing left to fill it with. When she finally spoke, the dry edge was gone, and what was under it he hadn't heard from her once.

"Kaito. Think about what you just told me. There is a language older than every record I hold. A woman speaks it on a shard that has no name, that the System does not list, that fell out of a monster in a hole at the bottom of the world. I don't know it. The thing that knows everything in this world doesn't list it." A pause.

"And a man who has been alive here for barely two days understood every word."

"It's a recording," Kaito said. He needed it to be small. He needed it to be a thing with edges he could hold.

"Somebody recorded a voice once. People do that."

"You built a game," Sable said.

"And it grew up into a world. The thing that runs that world calls you Architect and can't work out what you are. You see the seams of it that no living person has ever seen. You reach in and move it with your hands. And now you understand a language that's older than everything I know." Quietly: "How many of those does it take? How many before you stop telling yourself it's all chance?" He didn't answer. He'd been telling himself one story since he woke in the grass.

The story was that he'd died, and something had gone wrong, and he'd fallen into the bones of the thing he used to build by pure rotten accident, and one day he might wake up out of it. He'd liked that story. It let him off the hook. He couldn't make himself believe it anymore.

'I'm not here by accident,' he thought, and it landed in him cold and final.

'None of this is an accident. I was put here. Somebody built me into this place on purpose.'

"Yes," Sable said softly, as if he'd said it aloud. Maybe he had.

"I think that's the size of it. I don't know who and I don't know why. But you weren't dropped here, Kaito. You were aimed."

"So what do I do with that," he said. He could hear how thin he sounded.

"Somebody aimed me at a whole world, and I don't know who, and I don't know why. What does a person even do with that?"

"Tonight, a person sleeps," Sable said.

"Because he's bled half himself into a dungeon and he's no use to me dead of exhaustion in a ditch." The edge was easing back into her, and he was grateful for it.

"And tomorrow he does the smartest thing he's got, which is to stop being the only man in the world with no class. You stand out. The scout saw it in a heartbeat. No class, no origin, a hole in the record where a person should be. You want the System to quit staring at you, you hand it a box to file you in. You become a Wanderer. A nobody. A tired man with a low grey class and nothing about him worth a second look. You hide where it's already looking." A beat.

"It's the same trick you pulled on the wolves. You stand on the ground that's already claimed." He almost laughed.

"Let the thing that's hunting me put a collar on me. To hide from it."

"Yes," Sable said.

"Welcome to the rest of your life. Now sleep." He didn't think he'd sleep. He slept. And he dreamed. He was somewhere with no floor and no walls, just the dark, and the woman was there, the one from the shard, except now he could almost see her — a shape at the edge of things that he couldn't quite turn his head far enough to look at. And she was talking, fast and frightened, in the language that wasn't a language, and he understood all of it now, every word, the way you understand a stranger in a dream.

She was saying she was sorry. She was saying it wasn't supposed to go like this. She was saying there had been no time, and no choice, and that they'd done the only thing left to do, and she would carry it the rest of her life. Then she stopped. And the shape of her turned toward him in the dark. And she said one more thing, slow and clear, in the language only he could understand, and this time the word wasn't forgive. This time it was his name.