Feeding him. Teaching him. Hiding him. Snuffing thousands to keep him safe. He had risked speaking, lest the boy’s ears forget how to listen and comprehend. He had even dared lantern light, lest the boy’s eyes forget how to see.
He, the one most burdened, would be the only one to survive.
For a time the Shriekers had seemed inexhaustible, a never-ending infusion of lives both crazed and disposable. More, always more, released in numbers so tidal they became incalculable, overwhelming even the most elegant of traps: concealed pits, rigged ceilings, abyssal chasms.
But then, as inexplicably as every other turn in the war, their numbers abated. The final dregs were abandoned altogether, left to wander howling until thirst and hunger claimed them. Fewer and fewer, until those he found simply gasped across the floors.
The last cry had been piteous, a screech so wretched as to sound human.
Then the Thousand Thousand Halls fell silent.
Perfectly silent.
The Survivor and the boy wandered the black with impunity after that. But they never dared the surface, even via those chutes they thought undiscovered. Too many had died that way. They wandered and the boy grew, hale despite his underworld pallor.
Only when the last of their stores failed them did they dare the long climb to the surface. They abandoned their underworld temple, their hallowed prison.
The Survivor had emerged in the obliteration of everything he had known, Ishu?l, his brow furrowed against an alien sun. For the first time in his life, he stood naked, utterly exposed to the indeterminacy of the future. He scarcely knew who he was, let alone what he should do.
The boy had gawked at a world he could not remember, stumbled and swayed for vertigo, such was the pull of empty space. “Is that the ceiling?” he had cried, squinting up at the sky.
“No,” the Survivor replied, beginning to realize that the obvious was the greatest enemy of the D?nyain. “The World has no ceiling …”
And he looked to his sandalled feet, stooped to pick a seed from a crotch in the debris. The nut of some tree he did not recognize.
“Only floors … more and more ground.”
Earth for roots. Skies for endless branching, reaching …
Grasping.
Using a black iron cleaver, he felled a tree that had been a sapling ere the Shriekers had come, so he might count the years of their entombment …
And so know the age of his son.
He was not who he was, the Survivor. Too much had been taken.
“What do we do now?” the boy had asked that first day in the sun.
“Tarry …” he said.
That which comes after, he now knew, determined that which comes before. Purpose was no illusion. Meaning was real.
“Tarry?”
“The World has not finished with Ishu?l …”
And the boy nodded in belief and understanding. He never doubted the Survivor, though he remained wary of the madness within him. He could not do otherwise, such was the screaming, the indiscriminate slaughter.
There was the day he told the boy to stop breathing, lest the clouds alert their enemy. There was the day he gathered a hundred stones, then wandered through the forest, killing ninety-nine birds.
There were many such days—for he could not stop saving … killing …
He was not who he was.
He was a seed.
And now these people …
They looked like D?nyain, but they were not.
The boy had fled to him immediately after spying the old man and the pregnant woman descend into the valley. Together they had followed the couple’s progress toward Ishu?l, tracking the bubble of silence their presence opened in the forest. They watched them wander forlorn through the ruins. When the two descended into the Upper Galleries, they closed the distance, hanging at the very limit of their inexplicable light. Soundless, they shadowed them, stealing what glimpses coincidence afforded.
“Who are they?” the boy had whispered.
“Us …” the Survivor had replied. “As we once were.”
Though he understood nothing of what the strangers said, the Survivor easily discerned the outlines of their mission. Ishu?l had been their destination. They had come seeking the D?nyain, and had found only desolation.
The old man had been stunned and heartbroken, but not the pregnant woman. She had come, the Survivor decided, for reasons she did not understand. And she fretted not for the destruction of Ishu?l, but for the ruin of the old man.
The father of the child within her.
These insights had anchored the scenarios that flashed beneath his soul’s eye, the possibilities. When he and the boy revealed themselves, she would be the one to intercede, to domesticate the old man’s fear and suspicion.
For the Survivor had glimpsed relief in the old man, as well. The loitering blinks, the slacking gaze, the slowing heart of a terror averted …
Terror of the D?nyain.
She would be the one to throw open the gates of their trust—that much, at least, had been obvious.
Then they entered the Fathering.