The road to Khazrund went up.
That was all it did. For the first three days it climbed gently, through pine forests and high meadows where the grass was already going gold, and the ponies trotted and the dwarves sang and I wore my new coat open at the collar and thought the mountains were overrated. On the fourth day the trees thinned. On the fifth they stopped. After that there was only stone, and wind, and a road cut into the side of the mountain, and a drop on the left-hand side that I tried very hard not to look at.
I looked at it anyway. I am made that way.
"Don't look down, lad," said Hagen, walking beside me. "Look at the pony's backside. A pony's backside never killed anyone."
"That isn't true," said Bolli, behind us. "My uncle Gunnar..."
"Your uncle Gunnar was drunk."
"He was still kicked."
I looked at the pony's backside. It helped, a little.
We camped on the seventh night in a hollow below a pass, where the wind could not quite reach us. The dwarves built a fire from dried dung and a bundle of wood they had carried up from the valley, and sat close around it with their beards tucked into their coats. The stars came out over the peaks, more of them than I had ever seen, so many and so bright that they looked like spilled salt.
I sat a little apart with the ledger on my knee, the way I did every night, and wrote by the firelight.
Day 528.
Level: 14. XP: about 8,400.
Altitude: high. Breath: short. Knee: complaining.
Coat: good purchase.
I stopped. I looked at the page for a while, and then up at the stars, and then back down at my own small, careful columns, written in charcoal.
It was the priest who had started it. I had not been able to stop thinking about the square in Halvard, or the frame, or the tired woman in the glowing chains. But mostly, for some reason, I kept coming back to a single phrase he had used. The Registry is the Creator's own ledger.
I had never thought of it that way. I should have. I have spent my whole life with ledgers. And the Registry was nothing but a ledger, when you stripped it down: a vast and patient record of every deed done by every living thing in the world. A slime killed, five points. A fish, five. A goblin, twenty. A puppet carved, nothing, but noted. Survived 400 days alone. It wrote everything down, in neat pale letters, and it added it all up, and when the sum was large enough, it gave you a promotion.
I laughed. Out loud, by myself, at the edge of a mountain.
Hagen looked over. "What's funny?"
"Nothing," I said. "Just something I was writing."
Because it was funny. Here I was, a clerk from accounts receivable, who had fallen through a wall into a world where God kept the books. And what had I done, the moment I arrived? I had started keeping books of my own. Charcoal on bark. Day one, day two, wire remaining, putty remaining, open questions. A little ledger beside the great one, as if I did not quite trust the figures.
Perhaps I did not.
I thought about it as the fire burned down. Every ledger I had ever kept had someone behind it. Someone who wrote the entries, and someone else who checked them. That was the whole point of a ledger. You did not keep books for yourself. You kept them so that somebody, someday, could audit them.
So who kept the Registry's books? Who checked them? Had anyone ever audited the figures? Had anyone ever found eighty-one marks a year missing from the copper?
I did not know. I was not sure anyone did. But it seemed to me, sitting on that cold mountain under all those stars, that it was a very large ledger to leave unaudited.
I added a line, at the bottom.
Question: who audits the Registry?
Then I closed the book and went to sleep with my back against a pony, which was the warmest thing on the mountain, and only slightly less likely to kill me than the drop.
In the morning, at the top of the pass, Hagen stopped the caravan.
It was a high, bleak, windswept saddle between two peaks, with snow lying in the shadows even at the end of summer. A second, narrower track branched away to the right, climbing higher, toward a jagged notch in the ridge where the snow lay thick and blue.
The dwarves did not look at it. They looked very hard at everything else.
"Where does that one go?" I asked.
"Nowhere you want," said Hagen.
"Witch Gap," said Bolli, and the gray-bearded dwarf cuffed him across the back of the head.
"Ow! What? It's what everyone calls it."
Hagen sighed. "Some years back," he said, not looking at me, "Inquisitors chased something up that way. A runaway. Out of Halvard, I think, or one of the villages. Chased it into the high snow in the middle of winter." He shrugged, heavily. "They came back down. It didn't. Nobody's gone up to look. Nobody's going to."
"Bad luck," said the gray-beard. "Touching what a witch leaves behind."
I looked up at the notch in the ridge, white against the hard blue sky. I thought of the woman in the square. I thought of the lantern on the priest's chain, and the fifty silver marks, and the word blot.
Then Hagen clicked his tongue at the lead pony, and the wagons rolled on, and the side track fell away behind us. I did not think about it again for a long time.
We reached Khazrund on the fourteenth day.
I did not know we had arrived until we were already there. I had been expecting a city, like Halvard, with walls and towers and smoke. What I saw instead, as we came around a shoulder of the mountain, was a face.
The whole cliff had been carved. It was the face of a dwarf, bearded and grim-browed, so enormous that his beard spilled down the mountainside for a hundred feet and his eyes were two dark windows the size of houses. In his open mouth, at the bottom of a long flight of steps cut into the stone, stood a pair of iron doors. Each one was taller than the tallest building I had seen in this world. Hammered into each, in iron the size of a cart wheel, was the anvil inside a circle.
The chapter was taken from the author's publication without permission; reading it on the official page supports the person who wrote it.
I stopped walking. I stood there in the road with my neck craned back until Torvi came and stood beside me.
"Durgrim Ashhand," she said. "Or a likeness of him. He's the oldest runesmith in the world, and the first. They carved him into the mountain eight hundred years ago," Her mouth twitched. "He said the nose was wrong."
"Is he still alive?"
"Oh, yes." She said it lightly, the way one mentions the weather, and walked on.
I stood there a moment longer. Then I followed her up the steps and into the mouth of the mountain.
I will try to describe the Hold, but I know I will fail to do it justice.
Inside the iron doors was a hall so vast that its ceiling vanished into shadow. Its floor was polished stone, black and veined with silver, and it shone under the light of a thousand lamps. The lamps were not fires. They were small stones set into iron cages along every wall and every pillar, each one carved with a single, simple, glowing line, and they gave off a steady, clear white light without heat or smoke.
"Runes," said Torvi, when she saw me staring. "Light-runes. The first thing an apprentice learns to carve. The last thing a master stops getting wrong."
From the great hall, roads ran away into the mountain in every direction: wide stone avenues, stairways spiraling up and down, galleries stacked one above another along the walls like the tiers of a theater. And everywhere there were dwarves. Dwarves hauling carts of ore. Dwarves carrying bundles of tools. Dwarf children chasing each other between the pillars, their little beards braided with ribbons. An old dwarf woman with a beard to her knees sitting on a bench with her eyes closed, listening to something. A pair of young dwarves arguing furiously over a sheet of paper covered with diagrams.
And under it all, so deep and steady that I felt it in my bones before I heard it with my ears, there was a sound.
Clang. ----- Clang. ----- Clang.
It came from everywhere and nowhere. It came up through the floor, and down from the ceiling, and out of the walls. A thousand hammers, falling on a thousand anvils, somewhere far below us in the heart of the mountain. It did not stop. It never stopped. I would learn later that in eight hundred years, it had never once gone silent.
"The Deep Anvil," Torvi said, when she saw my face. "It's the Hold's heartbeat. You stop hearing it after a month or two." She shrugged. "Then one day you go up to Halvard, and it's gone, and you can't sleep for the quiet."
I stood in the middle of the great hall with Clara on my back and my mouth open.
I have stood in a great many rooms in my life. I have stood in train stations in Tokyo, and in museums, and once, on a company trip, in the great hall of a temple in Kyoto, with sunlight coming through the eaves. I had never in my life stood anywhere that felt so much like the inside of a living thing.
The Hold-masters met me in a stone room with a long table, three hours later, once I had been fed and washed and given a dwarf's idea of a clean shirt, which reached my knees.
There were five of them. They were old, all of them, with beards gone white and iron-gray, and they sat behind the table like a board of directors, which in a sense they were. Torvi stood at my shoulder.
The one in the middle, a broad dwarf woman with a white beard braided into a crown around her head, studied me for a long time. Her tag read:
Dwarf Lv. 41 Master Mason
Forty-one. I felt the number before I understood it. It pressed on the air very faintly, nothing like the skeleton, but enough to make me want to stand up straighter.
"Ragna Ironbraid," she said. "First of the Hold-masters. You're the human."
"Yes," I said.
"The Puppet Maker."
"Yes."
"The one who keeps accounts." She tapped a letter on the table in front of her. I recognized Oskar's anxious, spidery hand. "Oskar says you found eleven years of theft in four days. Oskar says you should be keeping a king's purse."
"I'd rather make puppets," I said.
One of the other masters snorted. Ragna did not.
"Torvi says the same," she said. "Torvi says you've a hand like a master a head like an abacus, that you can feel elderheart's magic, and that you lived a year and a half alone in the goblin woods." Her eyes were very sharp. "Torvi says a great many things, when she's excited."
"I'm not excited," said Torvi.
"Your gears are clicking."
Torvi went faintly pink above her beard.
Ragna turned back to me. "You'll be an apprentice of the Hold," she said. "Under Torvi Greymantle, in the Ticking Hall. You'll sweep. You'll carry. You'll learn the dwarven way to sharpen a chisel, which is the right way. You'll learn runes for light, and for warmth, and for nothing more than that until a master says so. You won't touch ether. If you touch ether, you'll die, and we'll be very sorry, but we won't be surprised."
"Yes," I said.
"And you'll hunt."
I blinked. "Hunt?"
"He doesn't know," said one of them.
"He's human," said another. "They don't."
Ragna leaned forward. "How did you get your class, lad?"
"I reached Level 10," I said. "Killing things in the forest. To eat, mostly. And to stay alive."
"And how do you mean to reach Level 25? By sweeping floors?"
I opened my mouth, and closed it.
"A craft is a class," Ragna said, "and a class is levels, and levels are deeds, and the deeds that the Registry pays best for are the ones that nearly kill you. Every smith in this Hold has hunted. Every mason. Every brewer, every miner, every runesmith. Torvi has hunted since she was thirty." She pointed a thick, blunt finger at me.
"Humans let their crafters sit in shops and never climb past ten. That's why human craft is what it is. We don't. Once a month, you'll go down into the deep galleries with a hunting party, and you'll kill what lives down there, and you'll come back up with more levels than you went down with. Or you won't come back up."
There was a silence.
"What lives down there?" I asked.
Ragna smiled for the first time. It was not a reassuring smile.
"All sorts," she said.
Torvi took me down to the Ticking Hall that evening.
It was not far below the great hall, on the third gallery, behind a door carved with a clockface. Inside, it was the most wonderful room I have ever seen.
It was long and low and warm, lit by dozens of light-runes, and every inch of every wall was covered in clocks. Clocks with pendulums and clocks without. Clocks with faces of brass and silver and polished stone. Clocks with little doors in them, and little figures behind the doors: a smith with a hammer, a soldier with a drum, a dancer, a bird, a tiny dwarf who came out on the hour and drank from a tiny tankard and fell over. Along the benches lay half-built music boxes, and spring-wound toys, and mechanical hands with fingers that curled and uncurled on their own when you wound them. A clockwork crow on a perch turned its head to watch me come in.
And the sound of it. A thousand clocks, all ticking. Not in time with each other, but not out of time either, a great soft murmuring rain of ticks that filled the whole room like water fills a glass, under the deep slow heartbeat of the Anvil.
I stood in the doorway and could not move.
"Breathe, lad," said Torvi, and her voice was very gentle. "It's only a workshop."
It was not only a workshop. It was the tea party on my bookshelf. It was every doll I had ever mended, every figure I had ever painted, every small, careful, patient thing I had ever made in a cramped apartment in another world, with no one to see it. It was proof, somehow, that the thing I loved best had a place in the world. That it mattered here. That other people had spent their lives on it.
I did not cry. I want to be clear. But it was very close.
Torvi showed me a cot in a corner, behind a screen, between a grandfather clock with the moon on its face and a shelf of tiny brass birds. It was small, and narrow, and the mattress was straw, and it was the best bed I had ever been given.
I set Clara down on the end of it, sitting up, facing the room. The clocks ticked. The clockwork crow watched her with one bright glass eye, and she watched it back with both of hers.
"Well," I said to her. "We're home."
I was not sure, when I said it, if I meant the Ticking Hall, or the Hold, or the strange world beyond it. Perhaps all of them. Perhaps none. But it was the first time I had called anywhere home since the wall opened, and I found that I meant it.
I opened the ledger.
Day 535.
Level: 14. XP: about 8,400.
Location: Khazrund, the Deep Anvil. The Ticking Hall. A cot between a moon clock and the birds.
Rank: Apprentice of the Hold. Master: Torvi Greymantle.
Duties: sweep, carry, sharpen (the dwarven way), light-runes, warmth-runes. No hands on ether.
Hunting: once a month. The deep galleries. "All sorts."
Durgrim Ashhand: still alive. Eight hundred years. Didn't like the nose.
Question: who audits the Registry?
Question: what lives in the deep galleries?
I looked at the page for a while. Then, because I could not help myself, I added one more line, at the very bottom, in small letters.
Clara likes the crow.
I did not answer for her. I just wrote it down. >.>
The clocks ticked. Far below, the Anvil beat on, slow and steady, like the heart of something enormous and very old. I lay down on my straw cot and listened to it, and for the first time in five hundred and thirty-five days, I fell asleep at once.