A goat came along the road in the grey before dawn, stopped a body's length from the eldest, and would not come any nearer.
It stood with its forefeet braced and its head down, and it shook. Behind it a boy with a stick came up the road half asleep, saw the goat, and swore at it. He did not see her. He hit the goat on the rump. It went past her in a wide frightened loop through the thorns at the roadside. The boy went after it, and neither of them looked back.
She had stood on this road for two days.
It was an old road. It left the plain where the camp lay and went south and west between low hills, toward the coast. It had been a road long before the humans paved it. She had felt that in the ground under her when she came to it: the grain of countless feet worn into the substrate. After the last of the six came apart on the devils' road, she had walked away from the walls at dawn. She had no bearing at all. It was the first time in twenty thousand years. Her feet had found this road. She had passed the green fields of the followers on the way, and a woman carrying water had walked straight through the place where she stood and shivered and gone on. She had passed a burnt-out truck and a dog asleep under it. The dog had woken and watched her the whole way past, and had not barked. Nothing else had marked her. She had stopped on this road because there was no reason to go on, and there was no reason to stop either.
Around her the stations ached. Seven places, each a seventh of the way round from the next. She still felt them wherever she stood, as if the ring had been cut into her and not into the ground. Six of them were nothing now. The seventh was where she stood.
She had believed, once, that the earth would come back to them. All seven had believed it. They had carried that belief through the long interval the way the bell carried its silence. It had been in the calibration of their perception, like the prophecy. She looked for it now in herself, and found the place where it had been, and found nothing in the place.
The call came from the city behind the hills, very faint at this distance. She had heard it every dawn of the siege. She paid it no attention.
Then the city went silent.
She could not hear the silence from here. She felt it. It came through the ground like the stillness that comes before ground moves. It spread out from the city over the plain and up into the hills, and the birds in the thorn stopped. The goat, far down the road with its boy, stopped too.
Then the devils came.
They came down the road from the plain in a stream, low and fast, and they were not hunting. She knew the way they moved when they hunted. This was the way a herd moves when the grass is burning behind it. They went past her on both sides. They did not look at her. Some still wore their faces, an old man in a white cap, a girl with wet hair. As they ran the faces slipped on them, sliding sideways, coming loose at the jaw. They let them fall. The faces lay in the road behind them like dropped clothing and dried at once to nothing.
One of them brushed her as it passed. It was hot and it smelled of scorched hair, and it was shaking.
She had sat beside a bell for twenty thousand years and she had never seen her kind's children afraid. She saw it now, a whole road of it, and she did not know what had frightened them.
The road emptied. The dust they had raised hung over it and settled.
She waited. Nothing else came for a long time. The birds in the thorn did not start again. A lizard came out onto a stone at the roadside, looked down the road toward the plain, and went back under. She watched the bend where the road came round the hill. She did not know what she was waiting for. In all the long interval her kind had always known.
She felt him before she saw him.
It came along the road through the ground, the weight she knew. She had felt it at the boundary through eleven discharges, leaning on the seal like water on a dam. She had felt it step out, once, onto the cinder of the final expanse. She had not felt it since. It had gone out into the world and left the Seven standing in an empty ring, and it had never once come back toward them.
It was coming toward her now.
It was wrong. She knew that at once. At the Prison the weight had been patient, a thing in no hurry at all. It had stood after its first step like someone listening. Now it came fast. It came unevenly, with gaps in it, the way a load comes that is slipping. And it was less. Every step of it that came to her through the ground was a little lighter than the step before.
Then she saw him, on the road, coming round the shoulder of the hill.
In the upper world he had a body, and she could see it. She had never been able to see it before. He was a broad, heavy man in plain clothes, running. He ran badly. He ran like a man who had never needed to run in his life. His arms were held out a little from his sides, his feet slapping down hard on the road. His thick hair was wet and plastered flat. There was a wetness all over him, a shine, and at his edges the shine was moving.
He was going soft, the way salt goes in water. His outline would not hold. The line of his shoulders, the backs of his hands, the heavy jaw: everything at the edge of him was rounding and running. It came away from him in a faint haze. Where his feet struck the road they left dark marks that steamed.
She did not move out of the road.
He came on. She saw the one eye in his face that was open and staring, and the other beside it standing out like a grape floating in water. She saw that he was afraid. She saw it as plainly as she had seen it in the devils, and it was the same fear.
He passed her at an arm's length.
His attention went over her as it had gone over her when he first walked out: through her, past her, as if the road were empty. It did not stop, or mark her, or turn toward anything here at all. It was turned behind him, back toward the city and the hills, toward whatever he was running from.
Then he was past, and going away from her along the road toward the coast, smaller with every stride. The dark wet marks of his feet led after him down the white road and steamed in the first sun.
A little later the boy came back up the road with his goat on a rope. He stopped where the wet marks began. He looked at the first of them for a long time, and then along the line of them going away toward the coast. Then he took the goat off the road and went home the long way, through the thorns, and did not step on any of them.
The eldest stood a moment longer at the seventh station.
Then she turned on the road, for the first time in all the long interval with no one at her side, and followed him.