29 · What No One Can Take Away

hand to his forehead. The gesture revealed a weariness he could not sustain as an argument.

“I'll see them when it's done.”

“Someone will always be missing. That's the first thing you told me at the hospice.”

Cael stopped looking at the opening. He remembered the night. Two bodies had been carried out one door while five sick people came through the other. Teren began crying beside the vessels. The man told him that if he waited to save everyone before resting, he would end by doing badly even what he could still do.

He had been right then.

“You learned the easiest part,” he replied. “To walk away without guilt.”

The cleric looked at Cael's burned hands. The accusation hurt because it held something he feared in himself. He had left the hospice after the fever. He asked for a post in the valley, among people who would need him in a way he could understand. He called a mixture of desire and flight a vocation.

“I didn't stop

feeling guilty,” he said. “I stopped believing guilt gives me a right over others.”

Ordan closed his eyes. Within the opening appeared something like a table. Neither knew whether it belonged to a memory or a presence trying to become visible. An apple lay on it.

The chancellor saw it.

So did Teren.

For an instant, the whole chamber became too small for the possibility that Adria stood one step away. The cleric could not prove it a trap. It would be easier if he could point to a falsehood and put it out like a lamp.

He thought of the sanctuary's accounts: remembering was not returning. Nor was it pretending. The table could be true without containing the girl. The girl could exist without waiting behind that table.

“If she's there,” he said slowly, “the rest don't need owners.”

Cael opened his eyes. The form faded and reappeared at a different angle. In the chancellor's mind, there was no longer a bearable difference between losing his daughter and accepting

that he could not decide where she was.

He took the stone in both hands.

Neris looked for Teren. She had heard the conversation without interrupting, knowing a song could become another way of not letting someone speak. Now she laid the Pact copy on the floor beside the portrait.

She left visible the names of those who had not survived to sign it.

The chancellor looked at the opening. For an instant he was only an exhausted father.

“I heard her,” he whispered. “Three nights ago. She called me the way she did when she couldn't sleep.”

Teren felt a sorrow that did not absolve him from choosing.

“It finds us through what we hold inside. A bell called Beran.”

Cael shook his head, once and again, with growing fury.

Neris opened the sheets.

“Hara stayed. Madruga wrote. The woman who returned said the voices didn't sing together. None can bring everyone. Neither can you.”

“I don't need to bring everyone today.”

He inserted the stone into the anchor.

The pulse took Teren before he could step back. He felt his childhood kitchen, unfinished bread, Lina's crying, Beran's lost hand as though it were his own. The opening grew to fill the space between two pillars. Within were presences that made no crowd: each was alone, yet all brushed his body.

Ivara and Beran arrived. The mage could barely see; he carried the three stones wrapped in his shirt.

“The outer recesses!” he shouted.

Beran put the first stone into Neris's hands. Teren stepped between the anchor and Cael, who tried to move him. He was no fighter. He pushed with all the desperation he had left.

Teren managed to seize Cael's sleeve. The chancellor pulled towards the anchor. He did not want to strike him, but had decided any obstruction was less harmful than stopping. The distinction lasted until the first tearing cloth.

Neris ran towards the outer recess. The floor vibrated. The stone slipped in her hands and struck a step. It did not break. The gnome

paused to examine it for a second that felt like betrayal. If it arrived broken, their whole journey would have served to bring a flawed possibility.

Beran shouted for her to go on. He had seen the blow. He knew the sound of a fracture. She trusted that knowledge and lifted the piece.

Ivara moved close against the wall. She had recovered enough sight to distinguish light, not detail. Moving letters overlapped the stone. Teren told her where the edge lay. The mage followed his voice.

Cael tried to snatch the portrait off the floor and away from the flow. Its frame broke beneath his foot. The image did not cause the accident or reveal a hidden power: it was a drawing someone would have to repair, one of many real things crushed by the haste to save the world.

Teren released the sleeve and tried to put himself between the man and the anchor.

The floor changed height.

Not much. A slab sank slightly. Enough for the cleric's wounded

leg to fail as he tried to recover his balance.

He fell onto a broken conduit. Metal entered beneath his ribs.

At first he did not understand. He tried to rise. He saw blood falling towards the stone and understood that he too was becoming part of the mechanism.

Cael caught him.

“Don't move.”

Cael knew how to press on a wound. He had worked whole nights in the hospice. He put his palm where he thought the bleeding was and ordered Neris to bring cloth.

The gnome did not move towards him. She held the outer stone, and Teren pointed to the recess.

Cael asked again for cloth, this time with a fury that needed a recipient.

“I'm trying to save him,” he told Ivara, as though the mage had questioned his intention.

She set the second stone beside its recess before approaching. She saw the conduit, the wound's angle and the blood. She did not need to be a healer to recognise the damage. Removing the iron would

make the loss faster.

Teren asked her to stay where he could see her.

The mage knelt on the other side. She had imagined his death many times since the journey began. In those images there was always one thing left to do, a line of fire that could change the ending. Now she could find none that would not hurt him more.

He was cold.

Cael covered him with part of his coat. The same hand that could send men to a deadly test was trying to stop another from shivering. The contradiction did not make him two people. He was one, and must answer for both kinds of conduct.

Teren sought air. He wanted to say they must let no one put his name in the seal to bring him back. There was not enough time to explain the whole sentence.

Neris heard him begin and understood.

“No,” she said. “We won't.”

The cleric stopped trying.

He thought of the plough boy, the hand he could not save.

He remembered the woman who did not say goodbye when he left the valley. He had not expected that memory to accompany him to the end. He wanted the chance returned to reach her door and admit that he, too, had wanted an easier farewell.

No vision of paradise came. There was Ivara's blurred face and a man asking him to breathe as though he could obey.

Cael kept pressing the cloth. The blood stopped being red where it mixed with dust.

Teren had no revelation to justify the pain. He had an instant in which he could recognise that his companions were still working. He held to that until he could hold nothing.

Cael ordered him to breathe again. Teren wanted to laugh. He had given that order many times, knowing it was not enough.

Neris fitted one piece. Ivara the second. Beran inserted the third and struck with the hammer once.

Nothing closed.

The name still had to be removed from the central anchor. Ordan still clung to

it.

Teren looked at the man trying to cover his wound with his hands.

“You can help me,” he said. “But you can't keep me.”

The chancellor heard him breathe once more. Then he had to accept that a dead man's weight was different from a man still fighting to sit up.