The water did not want her.
The eldest felt that at once, as she went out over it. The sea of the upper world lay flat and bright under the stopped sun, and it took her passing the way a cold floor takes a bare foot, without welcome. Her kind had been made in the deep strata, close to the ground of the world, and had never had cause to cross open water. Now she crossed it. She went low over the swell, west and then north by a bearing she did not trust, and the light came off the sea into her from every side.
She had tried the other way first.
On the day the long sun finally set, she had gone down from the line the angels hold around the city and reached for the Prison through the deep, as she had reached for it through twenty thousand years. She knew the road. She had walked it with the six behind her, through the Between and its dead hums and out onto the cinder of the final expanse. She went down that road again, and found the cinder, and found the place.
It was a place. That was all it was. The decree had let go of every record that it had been there, as she had felt it let go when the contained walked out. She stood on the spot and the ground under her was the same as the ground around it, and nothing in it answered.
So she had come up into the upper world and asked where he had been kept.
The asking took a long time. Men knew things about him that her kind had never needed to know: that he had been seen once, long ago, by sailors blown off their course, on an island, in chains. The devils on the road told the story with their own additions. She took what was plain in it and left the rest. An island. A chain. She followed what she could feel of his old weight in the world, which was faint, the way the smell of a fire is faint in a room the next day, and it led her out over the sea.
The island came up out of the glare as a darker line, and then as rock.
It was not large. A man could have walked round it between one prayer and the next, if anyone had ever prayed here. Black stone rose straight out of the water on the seaward side, streaked white by birds. On the landward side there was a narrow shingle beach and a path, and the path went up between boulders to the top.
She set herself down on the shingle. The stones were hot. She went up the path.
Men had been here. She had not expected that. Along the path the boulders were black where fires had been lit against them, ring after ring, and between the rings the bones of slaughtered sheep lay picked white and heaped, more than she cared to count. A torn carpet had been weighted at its corners with stones and left. A plastic cup was wedged in a crack of the rock. Nobody had cleared any of it, and nobody had come back for it.
At the top stood a house of stone with no roof. Its walls were thick, built of blocks larger than any man could have lifted, fitted without mortar, and the doorway faced the sea. The sun stood straight into the doorway and lit the floor inside from wall to wall.
She went in.
The room was empty. Sand had blown in and lay in drifts along the walls. There was nothing on the floor but the sand and, in the middle, set into the rock of the island itself, a pillar of the same black stone. The chain was there.
It came out of the pillar at the height of a tall man's waist. Each link was as thick as a man's wrist and as long as his forearm, and the iron of it was dark and pitted and cold even in that sun. It ran from the pillar across the floor in a long slack curve. She followed it with her attention, link by link, as she had once followed the eleven steps of the opening. Thirty links. Forty. At the end of the curve, close by the doorway, lay the last one.
It was open.
She looked at it a long time. The two ends of the link stood a hand's width apart, bent outward, the way the ends of a horseshoe stand. She put her attention on the ends, slowly, as a hand goes over cloth to feel the weave. There was no scar on them. There was no burr, no crack, no bright ragged place where a great force had pulled iron until it gave. The ends were as dark and smooth and pitted as the rest of the chain. The link stood open as if the smith had made it so, and had left it so, and had gone away.
In the final expanse nothing had broken. She had felt that with her whole nature on the night of the opening: the seal had come to its end, and the force that leaned on it had had no wall left to lean on. Here, in the upper world, on its fire side, there had been iron, and iron does not come to an end. Here someone had had to open it.
She did not know who. She did not know whether it had happened at the same moment as the walk across the cinder or a long time after or a long time before. She had believed for twenty thousand years that she and the six were the hands that would turn the door. She looked at the open link, clean, unmarked, and she could not find a single sign of any hand at all.
The third came first.
She felt him on the shingle before she heard anything: a lightness, a presence without the weight it had carried through the long interval. He came up the path the way he had drifted off the cinder after the opening, as if nothing held him to the ground now. He stopped in the doorway with the sun behind him. He looked at the chain. Then he went and stood at a place along the wall, a seventh of the way round from her, and was still.
She had not called him. She had no way to call him. She had not known whether any of them still kept to the world at all.
The fourth came at what would have been evening, if there had been evenings, and the sun had not moved. Her fixed line of attention came in through the doorway ahead of her, as it always had, and settled on the open link, and stayed there. The fourth took the next place along.
The second came. The fifth came after him, and the first close behind, the first who had gone off the cinder without even the brush of attention that might have served as goodbye. He did not offer one now either. He took his place.
None of them spoke or asked how the others had known to come. The eldest did not know how she would have answered. She felt in each of them, faintly, the same thing she carried: the long road ended in open ground, and what they had found on it.
The sixth came last.
She heard him on the path long before he reached the top. He was slow. The field at the boundary had cost him, and the cost had not gone. He came up the last of the path one step at a time with his weight held off the knee that had gone down there, and he stood in the doorway a long while getting his breath, if breath was what it was. Then he came in, and limped round the wall to the one place left, and stood in it.
The eldest looked round the ring.
Seven, as they had stood around the bell. Each a seventh of the way round from the next, in a roofless room on a rock in the sea, with the sun pouring in through the doorway onto the sand. In the middle, where the bell had hung, there was a pillar of black stone, and a chain lying slack across the floor, and at the end of the chain a link standing open, with no one in it.