The salt took her feet the way the cinder of the final expanse had taken them, without a mark.
The eldest walked behind the camp's last lorries onto the flats outside the city. She had walked behind them for longer than she could reckon in the upper world's hours, since the place where the devil told her what she was. The lorries ground through the crust ahead of her and left two dark wet lines behind them. Water came up into the lines and stood there, and by the time she reached it there was grass at its edges. The ground did that for him. It had been doing it all the way down the old road from the north.
Around her the camp's devils went about their work. They passed her as the one she freed had passed her, as a traveller passes a post. Some of them knew what she was. One had told her so, early on, working at a bone with his side teeth. The rest had stopped looking. She was a thing that walked behind the lorries and did nothing.
She did not mind it as much as she had expected to. In the long interval nobody had looked at her at all.
She did not know where the six were. She had felt them go at the dispersal, one by one, thinning out of her reach like sounds down a gallery. Since she woke among the nameless in the village and remembered herself, she had reached for them once in every one of the camp's estimated days, out of the habit of twenty thousand years. She found nothing. She reached anyway.
The camp spread itself over the salt the way water spreads over a floor, finding the low places first. Tents went up. Pens. The water trucks drew up in a ring. Green came out of the crust in rows, then in orchards, faster than the upper world's things were made to grow. By the third of the camp's estimated days the near edge of the flats looked like the valleys she remembered from before the chastening, wet and dark and heavy with fruit. The humans walked in it with their mouths open.
He stood at the edge of it.
Every estimated hour he walked out to the eastern edge of the green and stood where the salt began again. It was about the time the humans in the camp lifted their heads from whatever they were eating and looked toward him. He looked across the lava field at the city. She could not read him any better here than she had at the boundary. What she had of him was weight and height and nearness, and the patience coming off him, unchanged since the boundary. But she could read the line of his attention. It went one way. It went to the city and stayed there. It did not once come back across the salt to the thing that walked behind his lorries.
She had stood in that attention at the Prison. It had gone through her then and out over the whole world. Here it went over her head.
The city sat low on the far side of the black rock, white and brown, with its towers standing up out of it. She had no name for it in her own tongue. The devils called it by the human name and did not say it often. At the city's heart there was a place she could not look at for long. Her sight slid off it, as an eye slides off the sun.
On what the camp called the fifth morning she walked to the edge of the lava field to see why the devils did not go further.
She had noticed it from far off. The camp's devils went everywhere he sent them, over every road from the north, through every village that had said yes and every village that had said no. They went into houses. They went into people. Here they went as far as a certain distance from the city and stopped, all of them, and came back. They did it without being ordered. She had watched a pack of them go out at a run along the road toward the city's last houses, laughing. She had watched the laughter stop.
At the edge of the black rock the road came out of the city and went west across the flats. A tall post stood beside it with a lamp on top that did not need to be lit. The humans' traffic went past the post in both directions.
In the dust at the edge of the road, she found the tracks.
They were the devils' tracks, which humans do not see. They were pressed into the salt crust in the shapes the devils had worn when they came here, clawed and bare and shod. Some had come at a run. All of them stopped. They stopped at the same distance from the post, in a row, as neat as a line drawn with a cord, though nothing had drawn it. Beyond the row the dust was smooth.
She walked out to the row.
The pressure met her a pace before it. It stood in the road at the height of a man, many of them, shoulder to shoulder. It did not push. It held. Her body knew it before her mind did. Her body knew it from a time before her mind had words in the tongue she now thought in. It knew it from the age when her kind had held the earth and corrupted it, and the angels had been sent down to them, rank on rank. The old arrangement of the unseen had come apart under them.
She had felt this standing in the road on the day of the chastening, and at her shoulders while her halls came down. With the six, she had chosen then to refuse it. For twenty thousand years she had told herself the refusal was a kind of victory.
She tried to take the next step. Her body would not lift its foot.
Humans came out of the city past her. Most were on foot, carrying bags and pulling children by the hand. They walked quickly with their heads down toward the green. One old man was wheeled in a chair. A young one went by alone with a bag over his shoulder. His face was set, and he did not look back. They walked through the pressure as if it were not there. It had not been set across the road for them.
Nor had it been set there for her. She understood that a moment later, standing with her foot that would not lift. The rows held the road against him. Against the one at the edge of the green with his attention fixed on the city. Everything that served him stopped where he stopped. Her own body had stopped her here because it had walked behind his lorries and counted itself his.
"Further than you thought?" said a devil behind her, one of the ones that had laughed on the road. It did not wait for her answer. It turned back to the green.
She looked down.
Her own tracks had come out from the camp across the salt among the others, and stopped. They stood in the row with the claw marks and the bare prints, at the same distance from the city, as neat as if someone had placed them.
She had thought of herself, all down the long interval, as the hands that would turn the door. At the Prison she had learned that the door did not open back onto the hands. On the road a devil had told her the Seven were a key, and that men had been kneeling on the rocks to take what the key let out. Both were too large. A key is chosen and held and used again. The men on the rocks had at least been used for a year. A pair of hands decides. She had decided nothing. Something had come through her to the world, by a decree she had never read to its end, and gone on. She stood where she had been hung, at a line she had not drawn, with her feet among the devils' feet.
She had been a door, and nothing more.