The eldest came up through the ground of the world under a town that had emptied itself in the night.
She knew the way the upper layer gave as she rose into it. It was thin here, worn by people and roads, and it smelled of diesel and dry stone. She had followed him across the substrate since the morning before without once coming near him. He had kept to the roads of men. She had kept below them, where her kind went faster, and somewhere under the hills she had passed him without seeing him pass.
Now she stood on paving in the late light.
The town was low and pale and quiet. Doors stood open along the street. A plastic chair lay on its back outside a shop with its shutter half down, and a radio inside the shop was still talking to no one. Somewhere a dog barked twice and stopped. The people had gone in the night, north or west or into their cellars, she could not tell which. She could feel where they had been the way you feel the warmth left in a bed.
At the edge of the town the road went out through a gate.
It was older than anything around it. It was an arch of dressed stone in a wall that had mostly fallen, so that it stood across the road by itself, a door with no house. The road went through it, and the town's new buildings stood back from it as if they had been told to. She knew it before she reached it. The decree had marked this ground the way it had marked the boundary of the Prison, long before any town. She had not been made to read that mark, and she read it anyway, as a grain in the stone, a place where the substrate was folded and waiting.
She walked into the arch and stood under it, facing the road east.
She waited.
Waiting was the one thing her kind had been made for, and she found she still did it well. She let the light go long across the plain. She let the cold come up out of the old stone into whatever stood for her feet. The radio in the shop ran out of talk and played music, and then nothing.
She counted the six.
She had not meant to. The habit was older than the town, older than the plain's last sea. The sixth had gone first, outside the walls of Damascus, on the first night, with his knee down on the devils' road. Then the third, who had carried the count of the eleven discharges and had nothing left to carry when the devils came for him. Then the fourth, who held her fixed line long after there was nothing behind it to fix. Then the second, and the fifth as the sky greyed, and on the third night the first. She had felt each of them go out the way you feel a lamp go out behind you in a long gallery. There had been no one to tell. She had come on alone.
The count came to six, and then it came to nothing. Six of seven was a number for a formation. There was no formation now.
She found she was holding her station in the arch the way she had held it around the bell, out of nothing but the shape of herself. She did not let it go. There was nothing else to hold.
He came down the road a little before sunset.
She felt him first in the ground, as she always had. It was a weight on the substrate, moving. But it was a small weight now. At the boundary of the Prison his weight had gone up past where her sense could reach, and the patience had come off him like cold off a sea. On the road out of Damascus she had still been unable to measure him. Here she measured him without trying, and the measure was a man.
Then she saw him.
He was running. He ran the way a heavy man runs who has not run in a long time, with his arms working and his head back. Dust came up from the road behind him. His right eye stood out of his face like a grape floating in water, and the left was the one that looked. Between his eyes was the place where the word was written. She had never been able to read it, and she could not read it now. She could see that it was there.
He was smaller than he had been at the top of the road.
She watched it happen, step by step, and could not look away. Each stride took something off him. His shoulders came in. His height came down. It was like watching a block of salt set into a basin of water: it kept its shape for a while, and then it did not. Something ran off him into the dust as he came, and the dust did not keep it.
Around him, at first, there had been others. She could see them as smoke in the rough shapes of men, a crowd of it running at his heels and over his head and in front of him, as they had run with him across a year. One by one they fell away. They peeled off to the sides of the road like birds leaving a flock and went off over the fields without looking back. By the time he passed the shop with the talking radio he was running alone.
He came straight up the road toward the gate, and toward her.
He did not look at her. He had not looked at her at the boundary, or on the expanse, or at any hour since. His one eye was fixed on the arch, on the road beyond it, on the open ground past the town, on anything that was not behind him. She stood in his way and he did not see her there. To him she was a post. She had been a key, and she had known it for a long time.
She looked past him, east, down the road he had come by.
At its far end, where it came down off the hills, there was colour on the road: the yellow of saffron dye, very far off. Past the colour her sense could not hold anything.
She tried, once. She was the eldest of the Seven, and her kind had been made to stand beside the heaviest decree in the ground of the world without flinching. Now she put her sight down the road the way she had put it toward the one inside the Prison, and it came back with nothing she could measure, no height and no weight, only the colour and the fact that it was on the road, coming toward the gate.
She did not try a second time.
Far behind it, much further back, a line of men and machines had stopped on the road. She could see the small shapes of them standing on the roofs of their trucks. They had stopped a long way short. They were looking toward the gate.
The man who had been the contained was close now. She could hear his breath. It was a man's breath, ragged and wet, and there was a sound under it like a word he could not finish. His feet slapped on the road. He was the size of any man, and then a little less.
The decree had marked this ground. She stood on the mark. She had come here first because she had believed, with the last of the belief she had carried out of the long interval, that the decree would want its door to be standing in the gate when the end came, as the door had been standing at the opening. She had thought there was a station for her at the last as there had been at the first.
The arch was cold around her. The colour came on down the road. The man ran toward the gate with his eye on the far side of it, and nowhere in the stone or in the long fold of the decree under her feet was there a place shaped like her.
She had been the key, and the door had opened.
She moved her weight off the mark.
She took one step to the side, off the worn paving of the road and onto the dust beside the arch, and stood there with her back to the old stone. The gate stood empty across the road.