Glass Bones

It took them four days to reach the glittering thing on the horizon, and every day it grew larger, and every day Teo understood it less.

At first, it looked like a range of hills. Then like a forest... a strange, sharp-edged forest of tall grey trunks, catching the light. Then, on the third evening, when they camped on a low ridge with the sun setting behind them and its last rays striking full on the eastern horizon, it caught fire.

That was what it looked like. Teo stood up from the campfire with a bean halfway to his mouth and stared. The whole horizon was burning... a long, jagged line of gold and orange and blinding white, flaring and glittering and throwing great shafts of reflected sunlight back across the plain toward them. Then the sun dipped below the edge of the world, and the fire went out, all at once, and the thing on the horizon became a black silhouette against the darkening sky.

Towers.

Hundreds of them.

"Glass Bones," Bram said quietly. "My grandmother's stories. A city of glass, in the east, where the Makers' ghosts live."

Teo did not answer. He could not.

They walked into it the next afternoon.

Afterward, he would try many times to describe the city of Glass Bones, to Nell, to Hesk, to the people of the Sump. He never managed it. There were no words in the language of Calder Reach for what the Makers had built there. There was nothing to compare it to. The Spillway was the largest thing Teo had ever seen, and the Spillway was a wall. This was a world.

The towers rose out of the plain like the trunks of colossal trees, grey and black and glittering, so tall that he had to tilt his head all the way back to see their tops, and even then, some of them vanished into the haze. They were made of steel and stone and glass... above all, glass. Whole sheets of it, larger than the side of a house, set in frames of dark metal, rising floor upon floor upon floor. Most of them were shattered now, and the empty frames gaped like the sockets of a skull. But here and there, high up, whole walls of them were still intact, and they caught the sun and blazed like mirrors, and threw the light back down into the streets in long, slanting golden beams.

There were hundreds of them. More. They stood in rows, and in clusters, and in great ranks marching away into the distance, until they blurred together into a single jagged grey forest stretching from one side of the horizon to the other. And between them ran streets... wide, straight streets, wider than the Maker road, canyons of stone and steel with walls a hundred floors high.

And it was dead.

All of it. Utterly, entirely, absolutely dead.

Sand had drifted into the streets in long, pale dunes, piled up against the feet of the towers like snow against a wall. Grey trees had grown up out of the cracked road, and died, and still stood, their bleached roots wrapped around the rusted husks of the metal beetles. Some of the towers had fallen. Teo saw one that had toppled sideways into its neighbour, and the two of them leaned together, frozen in the act of collapse, a great crooked arch of twisted steel and broken glass, as if they had been holding each other up for six hundred years. Others had simply crumbled from the top down, and lay in vast mountains of rubble that filled whole streets.

The wind moved through the empty windows with a long, low, endless moan.

And there were bones.

Not many. The sand had buried most of them, and the centuries had scattered the rest. But Teo had hauled corpses for two years, and he knew what a human skull looked like, even half buried in pale dust at the foot of a staircase. He saw a few. Then more. Then he stopped looking.

They walked for an hour without speaking. Even Turnip the mule was quiet.

'How many people lived here?' Teo thought, staring up at the towers. 'How many people lived in just one of these?'

He tried to count the windows on the nearest tower — the floors, and the windows on each floor — and multiply them, the way he would have counted the stairs of the Crown. He got to a number so large that he did not believe it, and stopped, and counted again, and got the same number.

More people had lived in that one tower than lived in the whole of Calder Reach.

And there were hundreds of towers.

Teo sat down on a slab of broken stone in the middle of the street, quite suddenly, because his legs would not hold him anymore.

Mira knelt beside him.

"Teo?"

"The Archdeacon said billions," he said hoarsely. "That there were billions of them. More people than grains of sand on the riverbank. I didn't... I didn't believe him. I thought he was exaggerating. To frighten me." He looked up at the dead towers. "He wasn't. Mira. He wasn't. And they all..."

He could not finish.

Mira did not say anything. She sat down beside him on the slab of stone and took his hand and held it, and they sat there together for a long time in the middle of the dead city, while the wind moaned through the empty windows above them, and Bram stood nearby with the mule and waited, and the light slowly turned gold.

Later, they explored.

They did not go far. Bram did not like the look of the towers, and neither did Teo. Some of them creaked, deep inside, with a sound like a great ship in a storm. But at the street level, there were doorways, and some of them led into places that the sand had not reached. A great hall with a ceiling of shattered glass, full of rows of small rooms with glass fronts, all of them empty. A long, dark tunnel leading down under the street, with a staircase made of metal that had once, Teo guessed, moved by itself. A room full of small, flat, black glass panels, hundreds of them, standing in rows on long tables, all of them blank and dead.

Teo could not guess what any of it had been for.

And then, near the end of the day, in a small building tucked between two of the great towers, Mira found something she understood.

It was a temple.

Not a temple of the Flame. Teo could see that at once. There was no basin for the fire, no flame painted on the walls. But it was a temple all the same. It had a high, pointed roof, mostly fallen in, and rows of long wooden benches, rotted and broken, facing a raised platform at the far end. The windows had been made of coloured glass, and some of it was still there, high up in the walls... red and blue and gold, catching the setting sun and throwing patches of coloured light across the dusty floor. And on the wall behind the platform, made of dark metal, there hung a symbol that Teo had never seen before. Two crossed lines. One long, one short.

Mira walked slowly down between the benches and stood in front of it for a long time.

Teo did not follow her. He stayed by the door with Bram and watched her. She did not kneel. She did not pray... or if she did, she did it silently, standing, with her head tilted back and the coloured light falling across her face.

When she came back, her eyes were wet.

"They had faith," she said quietly. "The Makers. The Canon says they had none. That they worshipped only their own cleverness, and that was why the Flame burned them." She looked back over her shoulder at the dark symbol on the wall. "But they built this. In the middle of all those towers. They built a place to pray."

Teo said nothing.

He did not know what to say. He had spent his whole life believing that the Chantry was wrong about almost everything, and that the Makers had been right about almost everything, and he was beginning to suspect, uncomfortably, that the truth was much less tidy than that.

'They had faith. And they had the Leaves. And they had towers that touched the clouds. And they still fell.'

'...So what does that make us?'

They camped that night inside the temple, out of the wind. Bram built a fire in the middle of the stone floor, under the broken roof, and the smoke curled up through the gap toward the stars. Nobody talked much.

Teo lay awake for a long time, listening to the city.

It was never quite silent. The wind moaned. Somewhere, far off, a loose sheet of metal banged slowly against something, over and over, like a bell. Small things scuttled in the dark. And from somewhere much closer, from the great tower that leaned over the temple from the north, there came every so often a long, deep, grinding groan, like an enormous animal shifting in its sleep.

He was still awake when the groan came again, louder.

And then it did not stop.