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Chapter 89 — The Deep Stair / Victor
The way up was down, of course. By now Cole expected nothing else.The Underfolk walked them to it in a long lamplit procession through the dead world's evening, the whole city of Wick-on-the-Pale turning out to see the pair off — not cheering, the Underfolk did not cheer, but standing in their doorways with their tallow-lamps raised, a corridor of small flames a mile long, every one of them lit for two strangers walking down into the deeper dark to do a thing nine hundred years of the dead had hoped for and never seen.The Deep Stair stood at the bottom of the world: a vast spiral throat of black stone winding down into a dark even the Underfolk's lamps would not enter, and at its head, the Lamplighter pressed something into Cole's hand — a single squat candle of grey tallow, cold and unlit."You can't light it here," she said. "It won't catch in our world; we're already burned. But it's poured from the last flame of the last hearth that was lit before the mouth ate us — the oldest l
Chapter 88 — What the Underfolk Remember
They took the two of them to the Pale King.He held no court that Cole would have recognized as one — no throne, no guards, just an old, old Underfolk in an unlit hall at the top of the city, sitting among a thousand cold candles he would not allow to be lit, because, the Lamplighter murmured, the King kept his dark on purpose: he was the one who remembered, and a man who remembers does not look away from the dark to make himself comfortable.He looked at the two of them a long time, his great sunless eyes moving over the space between them the way every Underfolk's had since they'd come down. Then he said, in the doubled half-beat voice, "You let it go. The grieving one. Nine hundred years we could not, and you did it in a night, by being the thing it could not be." A slow blink. "So I will pay you in the only coin my people have left. I will tell you the truth about the thing you are climbing. No one above the Pale has ever been told it. Sit."They sat, on the cold stone, in the dar
Chapter 87 — Two and One
It came up the street under the burnt-orange sky, and it had no face, and Cole understood the Lamplighter's word for it at last, because there was nothing else to call it: a hole. A tall man-shaped absence, grey as the Underfolk and stretched wrong, with a darkness where its features should have been that was not a mask but a missing, the exact size and shape of a person who was no longer there. It moved like weeping. It left the candles guttering in its wake.And when it saw them — saw the two of them standing together in the lamplit street, whole, paired, un-broken — it stopped, and the grieving sound climbed into something that wasn't rage and wasn't longing and was somehow both, the sound of a thing seeing, after nine hundred years, the only mirror that could still hurt it.It came at them. Of course it came at them. A hole goes toward whatever's whole.The fight was not like the others. Cole had fought monsters and Stowaways and a puppet's death-game, and he'd learned to read all
Chapter 86 — Tallow-Light / The One Who Came Before
There was a sky, and it was wrong, and it was the first thing Cole understood about the world below the gate.It was not black. He'd braced for black — for a cave, a vault, more of the dead dark. Instead the doorway let them out onto a hillside under a low burnt-orange ceiling of cloud that went on past seeing, lit by no sun, glowing faintly of its own accord the way the inside of a banked fire glows. There was weather. There was a wind that smelled of cold water and old smoke and something underneath both that Cole's animal brain read as people have lived here a very long time. And there was light — everywhere, in the valley below them, a thousand small warm points of it, steady and yellow, strung along streets and bridges and the flanks of a city built into the far hills.Candlelight. A whole world lit by flame, because it had never had a sun to lose."The Underfolk," Adrian said quietly, beside him, the giant-killer's stillness in him gone soft with something Cole didn't often hear
Chapter 85 — The First Pair
The black divide began to close.Cole felt it before he saw it — the hum in the meter of dark going down in pitch, the cold band narrowing — and then the impossible thing the whole floor had been built to forbid simply happened: the divide thinned to a seam, to a line, to nothing, and the two mirrored halls became one hall, and twenty feet away across plain ordinary stone, for the first time since the dark had let them go, Cole could see him.Adrian stood there in the pale light, the black coat the floor hadn't given back yet, the hawk-dark eyes, the straight back — real, whole, near, no glass between them, no two hundred miles, no wall. He looked the way Cole had spent six months failing to build him out of a voice and had got wrong in forty ways and right in the one that mattered.Neither of them moved for a moment. Then they crossed the dead seam at the same instant — on a count neither of them said out loud, because they didn't need to anymore — and met in the middle of a hall tha
Chapter 84 — The Trust Fall
They went into the moving hall on a count, and they did not flinch, and it nearly wasn't enough.It was the hardest thing Cole had ever made his body do, and his body had done a great deal. To walk forward at speed into a corridor he could see was empty — his own bright half, the one he himself was crossing, showing him nothing, no blade, no drop, safe — while every nerve screamed that empty was the lie, that the danger was here, was now, was the thing his eyes weren't showing him; and to keep his eyes instead fixed across the dark on Adrian's hall, on the blades sliding at Adrian, and to move not to save himself but to keep walking the count so that Adrian, watching Cole's hall, could move Cole's body for him through the deaths Cole couldn't see —— it was a kind of falling. It was stepping off a roof every single stride and trusting the voice in the shell to have built a floor where the ground should be."Left," Cole said, fast, flat, watching a blade scythe at where Adrian's hip wo
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