The bean woman's hair had gone grey at both temples now, and she was holding the bowl out to the eldest with a hand that trembled.
"You'll want this," she said. "For the road."
The eldest took it. She still did not know how to eat. She held the bowl against her as the bean woman did, close to the body, and looked past her at the village.
It had changed. The light had not; the light in the village never changed. But the one who mends had a stoop now that he had not had before, and he had stopped mending, and sat on the bench by his door with the rope across his knees and looked at it. The thin one who never spoke had a cough. Two of the old houses had dropped stones from their lintels in the night, and nobody had picked them up, because nobody here had ever needed to pick anything up. The bean woman's cut was still open. It had gone white at the edges.
"Nobody goes up that road," the bean woman said. "People come down it. Nobody goes up."
"I know."
"Then why?"
The eldest did not have an answer that would fit in the bean woman's ears. She had only the newcomer's face as he came down out of the haze, the way it had filled up when he saw her, and the thing he had said. "You are the one who opened the door." He had forgotten it himself within the day. He sat now in a garden at the far end and shelled beans with the others and smiled at her when she passed, pleasantly, without knowing her. But she had not forgotten. She had arrived with nothing and he had given her one thing, and it would not lie down.
What door, she could not say. But somewhere at the end of that road was whoever had walked through it.
"I opened something," she said. "I should see what came out."
The road went up between its banks of pale stone into the white haze, and the haze closed behind her before she had gone fifty paces.
She climbed. The road was steep. Nobody had walked it this way, and it felt it; it pushed back against her feet like a current against a swimmer going the wrong way up a river. She leaned into it.
At the first bend the bell came back.
She had always had the bell. Now she had the rest of it: its weight, hung at the middle of a plain of cinder, and herself sitting at a seventh of the way round it, and six others sitting at the other sevenths, for longer than the upper world had kept any records. The long interval. She said it aloud, and this time it meant something. It meant the wait.
At the second bend she had the others. The second, who let go first. The fourth, who fixed the place where the steps went in. The sixth, who faltered at the field and carried it alone. The third, who carried the eleven. She stopped on the road with her hand pressed flat against the bank, because the knowing came so fast it hurt.
The substrate. The final expanse. The contained.
By the third bend she had the walk, and the boundary, and the eleven discharges counted out one by one, and the seal opening like a held breath let go. She had the one who walked out. She had his first step, and his fifth, and the moment he crossed the place where the seal had been.
And she had the thing she had not let herself hold when it happened. His attention had gone out over all the layers of the world at once, and it had passed through the seven of them where they stood as if they were air. Not once in the walking-out had he looked at them. She had told herself then that it was the hour, and that in such an hour nobody looks back. It had seemed a fair thing, in the hour. Out here on the road, with her memory coming back into her like blood into a numb hand, it did not seem fair at all.
She came up out of the haze at the top and stood on a ridge and looked down.
She knew this place. She had crossed it once, walking. Now it was full. Down below her, under a sky with no sun in it, the old empty expanse she had walked with the six was a road, and the road was crowded from edge to edge with jinn going one way. She could feel the tar of the devil's mark on most of them from here.
Out of old habit she reached for the six with the sense she had held them by through every age, as a hand goes to a rail on a stair. Nothing came back. Wherever they had gone when they dispersed, it was further than the sense would reach, or they had let go of it. For the first time since the bell was hung, there was nobody at the other sevenths.
She would go to him, then. She would stand where he walked, in front of him, and make him look.
The girl was sitting on a milestone at the side of the road, swinging her legs.
She was seven or eight, with two plaits tied with red wool and a school cardigan buttoned wrong. Her socks had fallen down. A ghul with long grey hands went past the milestone and patted her head without breaking stride, as you pat a dog you know, and she ducked away from it, scowling, and smoothed her plaits down again with both hands. Then she went back to swinging her legs and watching the road for someone. She sat in the stream of devils going past as calmly as a child sits on a wall at the end of a lane, and when the eldest came down onto the road she looked up and smiled with a gap in her front teeth.
"You're going to him," the girl said. Her voice was a child's voice, high and a little hoarse. "Everybody is. I can take you. I know the way to the front."
The eldest stopped in front of her. Around them the devils parted and went by.
"Whose face is that?"
"Mine." The girl laughed. "Now it is. It was a girl in a village by the river. Her mother wouldn't go out to the road. Her mother's going tomorrow." She swung her legs. "I sat on her bed and told her it's lovely where I am now, and there's rain, and the man by the road is kind. She cried and cried. She'll go."
"Who taught you to wear it?"
"Nobody teaches." The girl wrinkled her nose. "They hang at the back of a tent at the camp, on pegs. You take one down and put it on and it closes by itself. The old Ifrit says they were lying about in a hole somewhere, from before. Before everything."
The eldest was looking at the side of the girl's head.
The plait on that side had been pushed back over the shoulder. Behind the ear, along the line where a face meets the head, ran a seam. It was finer than a hair. Each loop was set at the same angle as the last, and the angle was the angle you set when you hold the needle in the left hand, close, and draw toward yourself. The thread was a colour that did not belong to any light in the upper world. It belonged to the light in a hall where she had sat once, long before the bell was hung, long before the made thing of clay was set walking on the earth, teaching her own young the patience it took to wear another's face so well that no one could tell.
She had made the first of these. She had made the needle.
"Come on," the girl said, and slid down off the milestone, and held up a small cold hand for her to take.