The elderheart came from Torvi, in the end. Of course it did.
She had been watching me work for a year. She knew I wanted it. She knew I had been saving for it, crown by crown, in my vault on the eighth gallery. And she knew I still could not afford it, because nobody sells elderheart by the sliver. The dwarves buy it by the tree, a whole trunk at once, from the few human foresters brave enough to cut it, and then they keep it.
That summer, a count in Thornvale commissioned a grandfather clock from the Ticking Hall. Not just any grandfather clock. A clock with a case carved entirely from elderheart, so that its chime would ring a little truer than any clock in the world. The Hold sold Torvi a whole log for it. She spent a month cutting it into panels.
One night, when the last panel of the case was cut, she set a block on my bench without a word.
It was the size of a brick. Pale and silvery, with a grain so fine it was almost invisible, cool and smooth to the touch. I put my palm on it and felt it at once: faint and patient, a held breath, the same presence I had felt on the road to Halvard.
I looked up at her. She was already walking back to her own bench.
"Offcut," she said, without turning around. "Too small for the case. Nobody wanted it. Don't make a fuss."
I did not make a fuss. I made a puppet.
It took me most of the summer. A brick does not go far, so I made him small: a little jointed figure the length of my hand, carved in a dozen pieces from that one block, pinned together at the joints with slivers of gnawer tooth. I strung him with gloomweaver silk. I had bought a small spool of it from a Kessarian trader in the spring, and it had cost me more than the boots, the coat, and the armor put together. It was thinner than a hair and stronger than wire, so fine I could only see it when it caught the light, and it was magical in its own right: spun by a spider that lives in the oldest, darkest trees, soaked through with the same quiet mana as the elderheart. I only bought it because I hoped it would help. If every part of him was magical, even his strings, I thought the Registry might be more likely to count him as made from a magical material. I gave him a simple, quiet face, with his eyes half-closed, as if he were listening for something.
I was careful. I went slowly. I followed the grain, the way the primer said you should lead mana, not push it. Even so, I could feel the wood bleed a little every time I cut. By the time he was finished, there was only a thin thread of mana left in him, like the last warmth in a cup of tea.
When I set him down on the bench, the Registry spoke.
Deed recorded: Crafted a puppet with a magical component.
With. Not from. I had bled too much of it away. The Registry had looked at what was left and decided it was not enough.
I was disappointed. I would be lying if I said I was not. But I picked him up and turned him over, and he was the best small thing I had ever made, and he moved in my hands as if he had a will of his own. I called him Icarus, because he was almost a success. He had flown very close to what I wanted, and fallen just short. I kept him on the shelf above my cot, beside Clara.
I liked having him close.
The idea came to me a week later, lying on my cot in the dark with my hands on my chest.
I could feel the warmth in my palms. I could feel the faint mana in Icarus's elderheart body, lying on the shelf above me. And between them, if I held him, there was the silk: magical too, a thread of the same quiet stuff. I had felt my mana move through mithril like a river. I wondered whether it would move through silk.
So I sat up, took Icarus down, wound his threads around my fingers, and did not pull them.
Instead, I found the warmth in my palms, the way I had learned to with the primer. I did not hold a circle. I did not say a formula. I just led a little of my mana down into the silk, gently.
The thread moved.
Not my fingers. The thread. It tightened on its own, very slightly, as if something had taken hold of it halfway down its length. And at the other end, Icarus lifted his small elderheart hand.
Deed recorded: Moved a puppet by mana through magical thread.
I sat there in the dark and stared at him for a long time.
It was clumsy, at first. Very clumsy. Leading mana into the silk was not like working strings with my fingers. It was more like trying to move a limb I had never known I had. I would think lift the hand, and his whole arm would jerk. I would think step, and he would topple over. I used up my mana in an hour and woke the next day with a headache like a hammer.
But I could do it. That was the thing. Nobody had taught me, and I had no book for it. But I could do it.
I spent the next two months practicing every night.
I spent most of my savings, too. I went back to the Kessarian trader and bought every spool of gloomweaver silk he had, which was not many, and paid far too much for it. Torvi watched me count out the crowns and said nothing, but her gears clicked very fast.
With more silk, I could give Icarus longer threads. A few feet, at first. Then a whole room's length. Then, one night near the end of summer, I stood at one end of the Ticking Hall and led him, by mana alone, down the full length of the hall, past the moon clock and the brass birds and the sleeping crow, all the way to the door and back. My fingers barely moved. The threads ran out from my hands across the dark like lines of light I could not see, and Icarus walked along them as if I were standing right beside him.
The silk carried my mana the way the mithril had, only much more faintly: a thin, steady trickle instead of a river. But it was enough. And the farther I sent him, the more I found I could feel him at the other end. Not just the weight of him on the threads. The stone under his feet. The edge of the bench when he bumped it.
Then I tried making him pick things up.
I started small. A brass button. A gear. A large thimble. He managed them easily, which surprised me, because he was the length of my hand and the thimble was nearly as big as his head.
So I tried something bigger. One of Torvi's chisels.
Then a block of linden as long as he was tall.
Then, one evening, a full mug of the bitter brown drink, which he lifted off the bench with both his small arms, carried six steps without spilling a drop, and set down in front of Torvi.
She looked at the mug. She looked at Icarus. She looked at me, standing across the hall with my hands at my sides.
"How strong is he?" she asked.
"I don't know yet," I said. "Stronger than he looks."
It was the elderheart, I think, and the silk, and the mana together. Something about being carved from a magical material and moved by magic made him much stronger than an ordinary puppet his size could ever be. I did not understand it. I only knew he could lift things bigger than himself, and that the more mana I led into him, the stronger he got.
I carried him everywhere after that, in the padded pocket inside my jerkin, with a coil of gloomweaver silk wound around my wrist.
Torvi came with us on the deep hunt that autumn.
She hunted every season, the way every crafting dwarf did, but she usually went with her own friends, other tinkers and clockwrights from the upper galleries. This time she came with Gudrun's party, because Harek had found something on our last hunt: a seam in the rock of the lowest gallery we had reached, a thin vein that shone pale and faintly blue under Ottil's lantern.
"Lunargent," Torvi had said, when Harek described it. Her gears had clicked very fast. "Moon-silver. It never wears. The best clock gears in the world are made of it." She had been fretting for weeks. The count's grandfather clock sat in the corner of the Ticking Hall with its elderheart case finished and polished and its insides still empty. A case that fine deserved a movement to match, she said, gears that would never wear, that would still be keeping perfect time in five hundred years. But the Hold's lunargent was spoken for years in advance, and she could not buy so much as a single wheel of it. The count had already written twice, she told me, and the second letter had not been polite. The clock was months late. "If I cut it myself, I get a share of it," she had said, sounding a little desperate. Then she had looked at Gudrun. "I'm coming."
Gudrun had not argued.
So there were eight of us that day: Gudrun, Harek, Fenna, Sigrun, Ottil, Bolli, Torvi, and me. We went down through the Bellows Gate before the first bell, past the dry fountain, past the gallery of worn faces, down a long, steep stair I had only taken once before, into a level of Old Khazrund where the air was warm and heavy and smelled of hot stone.
Harek found the seam again just after midday. It ran along the wall of a long, low tunnel held up by old stone pillars, a ribbon of pale metal no wider than my thumb. Torvi knelt in front of it with her pick and a small hammer, and her face, in the lantern light, looked the way mine had when I first saw the Ticking Hall.
The rest of us stood guard.
It was quiet. The gnawers had not come this deep. The stonelings had stayed above. Bolli was humming. Fenna told him to stop. Ottil set down his lantern to rest his arm.
Then the floor trembled.
It was very faint. I felt it in the soles of my feet first, a slow, deep shiver, like a cart going by on a road far away. I looked at Harek. Harek had gone very still.
"Rockmaw," he said quietly.
The trembling grew. Dust began to sift down from the ceiling in thin, pale streams.
"Drums," said Gudrun. "Ottil, the drum. Now."
Ottil fumbled at his pack. Torvi was still on her knees at the seam, with her hands full of moon-silver. Somewhere behind the wall, very close, I heard a sound like a mountain grinding its teeth.
The pillar nearest to Torvi cracked.
I do not remember deciding to move. I remember Torvi's face turning toward the sound. I remember the crack running up the pillar like a black lightning bolt. I remember shouting her name, and grabbing the back of her coat, and pulling.
I pulled her past me, toward the far end of the tunnel, where Fenna and Ottil and Harek were already running.
Then the ceiling came down.
It was not like a sound. It was like being inside a sound. The whole world went white with dust and black with noise. Something hit me across the back, hard, and the floor came up and hit my face, and then there was weight. A great, crushing, impossible weight, pressing me flat, pressing all the breath out of me, pressing down and down and down.
Then it stopped.
I could not see anything. I could not hear anything but a high, thin ringing. The air was so thick with dust that every breath was like breathing sand. I coughed, and the cough tore at my chest, and I tasted blood.
I tried to get up.
My right arm moved. I could feel it, scraped and stinging, pushing against loose stone. My left arm was trapped somewhere beneath me, pinned under rock. When I tried to move it, something ground inside it, bone on bone, and the fingers would not answer at all. It should have hurt. I knew it should have hurt terribly. Instead the pain came to me muffled and far away, like a sound from another room. I could feel my chest, my shoulders, my neck. I could feel my head throbbing.
Below my ribs, I could not feel anything at all.
I tried again. I tried to move my legs, to bend a knee, to wiggle a toe. Nothing. It was not that they were pinned, although I could tell from the pressure on my back that something enormous was lying across me. It was that they were simply not there. As if someone had cut a line across my body just below my chest, and everything beneath it belonged to someone else.
I lay very still in the dark, breathing sand, and understood that I might die here.
"Kenji!"
The voice was muffled. Close. To my right.
"Kenji! Lad, answer me!"
"Torvi," I said. It came out as a croak. I coughed and tried again. "Torvi. I'm here."
There was a sound like someone sobbing, very briefly, and then stopping it.
"You fool," Torvi said. "You stupid, long-legged fool. Are you hurt?"
I thought about how to answer that.
"I can't feel my legs," I said.
She was quiet for a long moment.
"Where are you?" I asked. "Who's with you?"
"Fenna. Harek. Ottil." Her voice was steadier now. "There's a pocket. The ceiling came down on both ends of it, but the middle held. We're... we're shut in. Gudrun, Bolli, Sigrun, they were on the other side. I don't know if they..."
She did not finish.
I turned my head, very slowly, toward her voice. I could not see anything. But I reached out with my right hand, along the rubble, feeling in the dark, and my fingers found a gap. A crack, between two great slabs of fallen stone. It was about as wide as my hand. Through it, faintly, I felt a breath of air move against my skin.
"There's a crack," I said. "Here. By my right hand. Can you feel it?"
A scraping sound. Then, a moment later, very faintly, the brush of fingers against mine through the gap. Thick, scarred, warm fingers.
"I feel it," said Torvi.
We held on to each other's fingertips through the crack in the dark for a long time.
I do not know how long I lay there before I remembered I could make light.
It was such a small thing. I had been practicing all summer. Light was on the third page of the primer, right after Spark. I had gotten it to work in the Ticking Hall a dozen times, a little floating globe of soft white, no bigger than an apple. I had used it to read by when the lamp oil ran low.
I had not thought of it once since the ceiling came down.
I held my right hand up in front of my face. I found the warmth in my palm. It was faint, shaken, but it was there. I held the circle in my mind. I said the formula, in a whisper, through the dust.
I led it.
A small, soft globe of light bloomed above my palm, and I saw where I was.
I was lying face-down in a narrow space between fallen slabs. A huge piece of the ceiling, as long as a cart, lay across my back and hips at an angle, resting partly on me and partly on a broken pillar beside me. That was the only reason I was not dead: the pillar was holding most of the weight. Most of it.
To my right was the crack, a dark, jagged gap between two slabs. Through it, I could see a faint, flickering glow. Ottil's lantern, on the other side, half-buried but still burning.
And beyond the pocket where Torvi and the others were trapped, there was nothing. Only rock. Tons of it. The tunnel was gone.
I let the light go out to save my mana, and lay in the dark, thinking.
"Torvi," I said. "How's the air?"
A long pause.
"Thick," she said at last. "Harek says... Harek says it's a small pocket. Four of us, breathing. And Ottil's lantern." Another pause. "He's put it out now."
I understood what she was not saying.
Dwarves carry a thing on deep hunts called breathmoss. I had seen it. It grows in the deep galleries in pale green mats on the walls, near water, and it breathes out clean air slowly, all day and night. Fenna had told me about it on a hunt: if you are ever trapped, she said, you put breathmoss in the air with you, and it keeps you alive while the others dig. Every party carries a little in a pouch.
Ottil had been carrying it. Ottil's pack was on my side of the crack. I could see it in the corner of my eye when I made the light: half-buried under stones, a few feet past my reach. Too far to reach. Even if I could reach it, the pouch was too big to fit through a crack the width of my hand.
But the moss itself was not.
And I had Icarus.
I reached inside my jerkin, very slowly, and found the padded pocket. The little elderheart puppet was still there. His joints were whole. His silk threads were tangled, but not broken. I drew him out and held him up in the dark, and felt the thread of mana in him, faint and patient.
I knew what I had to do.
It took me the rest of the first day just to untangle his threads and fix them to my fingers. I had only one hand to do it with, and it was shaking. Twice I nearly dropped him.
When I finally had him ready, I reached for the warmth in my palm and found almost nothing there. The light had taken most of it. What was left was thin as paper.
So I lay in the dark and waited for it to come back.
Mana returns the way your breath does after a long run: slowly at first, then a little faster, then all at once you realize you can breathe again. I lay on my face and felt it gather in my palm, a little at a time. I had nothing else to do but think.
I thought about the moss. I thought about the distance to Ottil's pack, and the size of the stones on top of it, and how many trips it would take. I thought about the air in the pocket, getting thicker. On the other side of the crack, Torvi talked to me, sometimes, in a low voice. About nothing. About clocks. About the count and his rude letters. I think she was trying to keep me awake. I think she was trying to keep herself awake, too.
It was the longest wait of my life.
When the warmth in my palm felt like enough, I set Icarus down on the stones beside my right hand, led my mana down the silk, and made him walk.
He went three steps and vanished.
I had not thought about that, either. I was lying face-down, pinned. I could turn my head a little to the right, toward the crack, and not at all to the left. The moment Icarus climbed past the edge of the slab beside my face, he was gone, out of sight, into the part of the rubble I could not see even when I made a light. All I had was the pull of the threads and the faint feel of his hands on stone.
It was like trying to thread a needle behind my back.
He fell. I felt him tumble and land badly, and had to haul him upright by feel. He got stuck between two stones, and I wasted mana dragging him free. Twice the threads snagged on a sharp edge somewhere out of sight, and I lost him entirely for a few terrible minutes, until I felt him again at the end of the silk, dangling. By the time he reached the place where I thought the pack was, my mana was gone again, and he was only a small wooden figure hanging from a thread in the dark.
I waited again.
And while I waited, I thought about the Ticking Hall. About the night I had walked him the length of the hall, and how I had begun, faintly, to feel things at the other end of the silk. The stone under his feet. The edge of the bench.
I had only ever sent my mana down the threads, to move him. I had never tried sending it all the way into him.
When the warmth came back, I did not make him walk. I led my mana down the silk, the way I always did, and then I kept going. Past the end of the threads. Into the elderheart itself. I felt the wood take it, the way dry ground takes water. I felt the little thread of mana still left in him rise up to meet mine.
And then I could see.
The pale letters hung in the black in front of my own eyes for a moment, while the gray world hung behind them. I read them once. I did not have the mana to spare for twice. Then I let them go.
I do not know how else to describe it. It was not sight, not the way my eyes see. It was more like a third eye, opening somewhere at the back of my head, looking out from a block of wood the size of my hand.
There was no color in it. None at all. Everything was gray: the stones, the rubble, the broken pillar, all drawn in shades of dull silver and charcoal, like a sketch on gray paper. But the dark did not matter. I could see every edge, every crack, every loose stone, as clearly as if someone had lit a lamp. And some things were brighter than others. The moss in Ottil's pack, when I found it, glowed very faintly, a pale smudge in all that gray, because it was alive. Icarus's own small hands, when I looked down at them through his eyes, glowed brightest of all.
Mana sense, I suppose. Pushed through a puppet.
It was a nuisance. I want to be honest about that. My own eyes were still open, staring into black, while this other gray world hung behind them. Two views at once, neither one quite real. It made me dizzy. It made my stomach turn over. A headache started behind my eyes within minutes and did not go away. And it drank my mana far faster than just moving him did.
But I could see where he was going.
After that, it went faster. Not fast. Faster.
I made him dig, with his tiny elderheart hands, into the loose rubble on top of Ottil's pack. Every stone he moved was a stone the size of his head. When the mana ran out, I stopped, and lay in the dark, and waited, and thought, and started again. It took hours.
When he finally found the pouch, he tore it open, pulled out a fistful of pale green moss as big as his whole body, and carried it back toward me, staggering, one step at a time.
I made him climb up the slab beside my head, into the crack, and through it.
On the other side, I heard Fenna gasp.
"What..." she said. "What is that? What... is that walking?"
"It's his," said Torvi. Her voice was very strange. "It's one of his."
I made Icarus set the moss down in Torvi's palm. Then I made him bow.
I heard her laugh. It was a cracked, broken, wonderful sound.
Then I let my mana run out, and lay in the dark, and waited to send him back for more.
I do not remember the second day very well.
I know it went the same way, over and over. Work until the warmth in my palm was gone. Lie in the dark and wait for it to come back. Work again. I stopped using Light; I did not need it anymore, not with the gray world behind my eyes.
I know that I sent Icarus back and forth through the crack twenty times. More. Breathmoss, a fistful at a time. Then Ottil's waterskin. It was soft leather, half empty, and when I had Icarus drag it to the crack and push, it squeezed through the gap like a fat fish through a net. Then strips of dried meat from the bottom of the pack.
I know that on the other side, someone was singing. Harek, I think. Very quietly, the dreadful song about Hilde and her anvil, over and over, to keep the others awake.
I know that I was badly hurt. I could taste blood when I coughed. Something in my left arm was broken, maybe more than one thing, and I could feel the wrongness of it whenever I shifted. My back had taken the weight of a cart's worth of stone. It should have been agony. A man with injuries like mine should have been screaming.
I was not. Whatever had broken in my back had cut more than my legs away from me. The pain was there, somewhere, but it reached me dulled and distant, wrapped in cotton.
And somewhere in the second day, I stopped feeling my own hand.
That is the part I remember most clearly. My one good arm had been stretched out for so long, my fingers holding the threads for so many hours, that they went numb. I could not feel the stone under my palm anymore. I could not feel my shoulder, or my back, or my chest, or my legs, which I had not felt since the ceiling came down.
But I could feel Icarus.
I could feel his small elderheart hands on every stone he touched. I could feel the rough edge of the crack as he squeezed through it. I could feel the softness of the moss, the cool weight of the waterskin, the warmth of Torvi's palm when he set something into it. I could see through his eyes, in gray, in the dark. Through the silk, through my own mana running down it and into him, I felt all of it more clearly than I felt anything in my own body.
I lay there in the dark, broken from the chest down, and I was not in my body at all. I was a small wooden figure the length of a hand, climbing over boulders, carrying moss to people I loved.
It was the most alive I had ever felt.
I did not think about what that meant. I did not have the strength to think about anything. I only kept going.
On the third day, I heard the drums.
They were very far away, at first. A slow, deep, steady beat, coming through the stone from somewhere above and behind me. Boom. A pause. Boom. The beat the dwarves use to drive off a rockmaw. It meant they were coming. It meant someone had gone for help.
Then, under the drums, I heard picks.
They were digging from the wrong side. I could hear it. They were coming down through the main collapse, toward the pocket, the way any sensible dwarf would dig, straight at the place where the trapped party had been. But I could feel the shape of the rubble around me. I had felt it through Icarus's hands, and seen it through his gray third eye, for two days. The main collapse was solid. A wall of fallen ceiling as thick as a house. They would be digging for a week.
But there was another way. Behind my left shoulder, where the broken pillar was holding up the slab that held up me, the stone was looser. Smaller pieces. Icarus had climbed over them a hundred times. If they dug there, they would reach me in a day. And through me, the crack. And through the crack, the others.
They could not hear me. I had no voice left.
I waited half the night for my mana to come back. Then I sent Icarus.
I made him climb up, past my shoulder, up the loose stone behind the pillar, higher and higher, until his strings were pulled almost taut, until I could feel through them a breath of cooler air on his little face, coming down from somewhere above. A gap. A way through.
And I made him knock.
Three knocks, with his small elderheart fist, on the stone. Then a pause. Then three more.
I made him knock until my mana ran out. Then I waited, and filled it again, and made him knock some more. I do not know for how many hours. Until, at last, far above, the picks stopped.
There was silence.
Then, from above, very faintly, three answering knocks.
I cried. I am not ashamed of it. I lay on my face in the dark with my numb hand full of silk and cried into the dust, while above me, the picks began again. In the right place, this time. Toward me.
They broke through a little before dawn on the fourth day.
I remember light. Real light, lantern light, spilling down through a hole in the stone above my head. I remember dust. I remember faces. Gudrun's, scarred and gray with rock dust, her eyes red. Bolli's, wet with tears, his ginger beard caked white. A dozen others I did not know.
I remember Gudrun's hand on my head.
"We've got you," she said. "Lad. We've got you. Lie still."
"The others," I said. "Through the crack. Torvi."
"We know. We'll get them. Lie still."
I remember them shoring up the broken pillar with timbers. I remember the great slab lifting off my back, very slowly, with a dozen dwarves straining at the levers, and a sound like the earth itself sighing. I remember not feeling it go. I remember thinking that was strange, and then thinking that it was probably very bad, and then not thinking anything at all for a while.
The next thing I remember is the stretcher. I was lying on my back on it, being carried up the long stair, with lanterns bobbing all around me. Someone had put a blanket over me. Someone was holding my hand.
I turned my head. It was Torvi.
She was filthy. Her beard was gray with dust, and the gears in it were clogged and silent. She was walking beside the stretcher, holding my hand in both of hers, and she was not looking at me. She was looking straight ahead, up the stair, with her jaw set very hard.
Behind her, I could see Fenna, and Harek, and Ottil. All of them walking. All of them alive.
"Icarus," I said. My voice was a thread. "Where is he?"
Torvi did not answer. She let go of my hand with one of hers, reached into her coat, and took him out. The little elderheart puppet, with his half-closed eyes and his tangled silk threads. One of his arms had come loose at the shoulder. His face was scraped. She put him on my chest, under my hands.
I held him there. I could feel him much better than I could feel my own body.
The stair went on and on. The lanterns swam. Torvi's voice was saying something beside me, my name, I think, over and over, but it was getting farther away, as if she were walking down a very long corridor. I tried to answer. My mouth would not move.
The last thing I felt was Icarus, small and hard, under my hand.
Then the dark came down.