Chapter 217: Chapter 217: Green Sky (1)
Chapter 217: Green Sky (1)
It was five in the morning.
Halvers had come out of the Command tent and found 206 people already standing in the fog. All of them were facing the tower.
No order was issued for them. They had just come out.
Three hundred feet above them, at the top of a Star-Iron lattice that had not existed thirty hours ago, four figures moved on the seating platform.
Cole had kept the case safe with him all the time.
He slept with the case, ate with the case and refused to let go it even when asked by his fellow engineers.
It was now the time to open the case. He knelt on the platform to open the case.
The cradle came out into the gray morning light and the Star-Iron caught what little there was of it.
It didn’t feel like a part of a machine. The metal ran in overlapping curves that folded inward on themselves, and every surface of it was faintly, constantly moving, on a scale too fine to see and impossible to miss.
Lyra crouched beside the housing with four instruments, which were laid out on a cloth. Her hands were constantly shaking with nervousness.
"Lattice is green across all nine harmonics," she said.
"Third and seventh are running hot but they are inside tolerance, and do not ask me to further defin the tolerance! We are good to go!"
"Nobody is asking," Cole said.
The Warden had come with them.
The old spirit hovered at the edge of the platform, deep green shot through with veins of gold, and it held the leaf in both hands the way a person carries water in cupped palms.
It had said nothing since the base of the tower.
"Warden," Cole said.
The spirit drifted forward and set the leaf into the cradle.
The leaf went in without any resistance. The Star-Iron closed around it in a slow flex. The curve settled against stem, and then the whole assembly went still.
’Like a hand closing,’ Cole thought.
He did not say it out loud.
He seated the cradle into the housing, locked the four collars, and stood up.
"Master Halvers," Cole called down the scaffold.
Three hundred feet below, Dorn Halvers stood at the base of the tower.
He was fifty one years old and he had never once given the order to start something that had never existed before.
"Master Halvers," Cole called again. "It is your tower."
Halvers put the clipboard down on a crate.
"Feed the lattice," he said.
HUMMM.
The sound was not loud.
The sound made them all nervous. It was the moment their efforts were about to bear fruit.
For a moment nothing else happened.
Then Petta said, "The fog stopped."
She was right, and she was the first to see it, because she had spent the entire previous day looking up.
Everybody on that site had spent thirty hours watching the Miasma move.
It came across the ground in slow waist high drifts, and it moved when the wind did not, and it moved against the wind when there was one, and that wrongness had been sitting at the back of two hundred skulls since the convoy stopped.
Now it was still.
Perfectly, completely still, out to the limit of what anyone could see.
"Look at the pressure gauge," Lyra whispered, three hundred feet up.
"Look at it. Look at it."
Then the fog thinned.
It did not blow away.
It simply came apart, the way frost comes off a window from the inside, edges first and then the middle, dissolving into nothing at all and leaving air behind it.
The gray peeled back from the tower in a ring.
Twenty meters. A hundred. Half a mile.
The ring kept going.
And underneath it, the land came out.
Petta made a small sound and sat down hard in the ash.
She had never in her life looked at anything more than four thousand meters away, because there had always been a wall in front of it, and out here for thirty hours there had been fog.
Now there was neither.
The ground ran away from the tower in every direction and it did not stop.
There were hills to the northeast. Low and rounded and clearly old, with a fold between them that had to be a valley.
There was a dry riverbed running east to west a kilometer out, wide enough to be a river once, cut deep into the ash.
There was a road.
Cracked, buckled, half swallowed, running dead straight from the southwest to the north and vanishing over a rise. Somebody had built that road. Somebody had needed to get from somewhere to somewhere else, badly enough to pave it.
Four kilometers out, something enormous lay on its side. Ribs the size of ship masts, curving up out of the ash into the open air.
Odran, forty years a rigger, stood with his mouth slightly open and his hands at his sides.
"There is a shape to it," he said.
Nobody answered him. He tried again anyway, because he could not stop.
"It has got a shape. It has always had a shape. It has been sitting out here having a shape for a hundred years and nobody has seen it."
Nobody had.
Fifty miles of the world came out from under a century of fog, and two hundred and six people stood in the middle of it and did not say very much at all.
The ground took longer.
It was almost an hour before anyone noticed, and when they did it was not dramatic and that was the entire point.
A mason knelt down to pick up a dropped chisel and stopped with his hand on the ground.
"Sella," he said. "Sella, come here."
In the shadow of the trench line, where the ash had stayed damp under the frozen raft, there was moss.
It was not much. A patch the size of a hand, thin and pale and half of it still gray. But it was green in the middle, and it was spreading while they watched, slow enough that you had to look away and look back to be sure.
The word went across the site faster than any order had.
They found specks of it everywhere once they knew to look. In the trench shadows. Along the seams where water had pooled. A thread of it running up the north face of a mortar barrel like a crack going the wrong way.
Somewhere near the kitchen, a stalk of something with a bent white head was standing up out of the ash that had definitely not been there at midnight.
Aegon Logcheville stood in the middle of the site turning slowly in a circle.
"I have hunted out here," he said. "I have been past the wall eleven times. I have killed things in this fog."
He crouched down and touched the moss with two fingers, carefully, as if it might come off on him.
"I did not know the ground under it was still alive."
Reina had walked out to the edge of the frozen raft she had made herself and was standing there looking at the ice.
There were green threads coming up through her ice.
Through it. Not around it. Growing through a nine meter block of frozen ash she had personally set at negative eighty, because whatever the tower was doing, the ground had decided it was not going to wait.
"Twenty years," Reina said quietly. "I have spent twenty years learning to make things stop."
She was still looking down.
"I do not think I have ever made anything start."
The bird came at midmorning.
Sella saw it first, because Sella was at the field kitchen where she had been since four in the morning and where she intended to remain until somebody carried her out.
It landed on an empty mortar barrel eleven feet from her.
It was small. Brown.
It had two eyes and one head and its feathers were the color of nothing in particular, and it turned on the rim of the barrel with a series of small ordinary movements and looked at the stew pot with obvious interest.
Sella stopped with the ladle halfway out.
’Everything past the wall eats,’ she thought. ’That is what my father told me. Everything out here eats and the things that do not eat are already dead.’
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