The Eldest tasted the dead before she reached them.
They came up through the ground of The Between as a change in grain, the way a hand on old wood finds the place where a knot was. She and the six behind her went down into it. They went down as water goes to the lower stone, without feet or weight, and the stone they went through was older than anything the upper world called earth.
This layer had been a people. She knew it by its taste, a dry bitterness like the inside of a clay jar left in the sun. They had known a great deal once and forgotten most of it, and then the world had forgotten them, and all that was left here was the bitterness pressed thin under everything that came after. They had left no name in any form The Seven kept. She passed through them without asking for one.
The next layer was older and fainter. It hummed at a pitch she felt in the front of herself, where a human carries the brow. These had watched the stars. Their whole life had been turned upward, and the turning had worn a groove into the ground, like the one a rope cuts into the lip of a well. She noted it and went on.
No landmark guided them. Under the layers the Between ran on blank in every direction, and a creature of the present age would have been lost at the first step. The Seven steered by points laid into the deep of it at the making, points that had not moved since. No human had ever stood on one. No jinn of this age had either.
The Eldest carried all of them. She had rehearsed the count through the long interval, twenty thousand years of it around the bell, and never once dropped a turn. Each of the others carried only the stretch he or she would lead. The fifth carried the middle of the way, the third the turns that would bring them to the outer edge. When the third's stretch began he went in front, and the Eldest let him, and she felt the seal he carried as a coldness along his edge, the way you feel a block of ice through the cloth it is wrapped in. She felt each point pass under her like the knots on a line run through the fingers in the dark.
Each of them also carried a piece of what lay at the end. The fourth held the point on the path that had opened in her at the second condition. The second held the shape of the outer boundary, the third the seal inside it. The sixth held nothing that could be drawn. He had said the name. Since then it had sat in him like a struck note that does not quite die, and the Eldest could hear it at her back when the ground went quiet.
Nobody spoke. The walk asked for no words, and what one of them felt, the others felt.
She remembered the bell. It had hung silent for an age over the nameless place, and then a young jinn's ember had fallen through the dark and struck it once. That sound had been the first in that place since the old world ended. The walk had begun with it, and everything since had been the walk.
A watcher above, if anyone could have watched, would have counted a span of years, or days, or an hour. The number would have told him nothing. The Seven counted how much of the way lay behind them, and by that count it was three parts done of four.
The layers grew stranger as they went deeper. One held a people whose craft looked to her almost like the traffic between jinn and men: bargains, bindings, bowls of milk left at the edges of fields. They had been men of some old city whose name had gone, and when the city fell they left no heirs to it. The layer felt like a workshop with every tool still on the bench and no hands anywhere. She marked it as a traveller marks a stone at a crossroads.
Below that lay ground from a time when the place they were going had sat nearer to the minds of men than in any age since. Nobody had reached it then either. But the people of that age had felt something close to them and could never say what it was, and their not-saying had soaked into the layer as a long ache: the pull in the chest of a man who stands in a doorway and has forgotten which room he meant to enter. The Eldest read the ache and left it where it lay.
Her own people's ground lay deeper than all of these, off to one side of the bearing, and the Seven did not go down to it. She had no need to taste it. She remembered it. The earth had been theirs before the clay of the first man was shaped: the hills, the rivers before anyone named them, the long coasts. They had filled it, and they had spilled on it what the angels later came down to wash away. She remembered the light along the ridges and her people running before it to the islands and the cold edges of the sea. Most of them, in the end, bowed. Seven did not. Seven sat down where the light did not reach, around a bell that had not yet rung, to wait for the age to turn back to its first owners. Others would call that pride. She called it patience, and twenty thousand years had not worn the word thin.
After the ache the ground thinned, and that was how she knew they were near. At the start the weight above them had been heavy, every city of the present age pressing its print down into the Between. With each layer the weight of the living lifted off them. Fewer peoples had settled over these depths, long ago, and their hum was faint as a kettle in another house. It grew fainter. Then she could not hear it at all, and the ground under the last of it was colder, the way a cellar is colder than the room above.
At a turn she knew by the count, the ground stopped carrying any mark. Nothing had lived over it or passed through it. It lay as it had been made, smooth like something never handled. The Seven went over it with the strange lightness of feet on fresh snow. They had rehearsed this stretch, in their stillness, more times than there were grains in it, and the ground had never known any motion but theirs.
The Eldest felt that, and let the six feel her feel it.
Then they were in the final expanse. It had been laid out to keep the outer boundary far from anywhere the upper world might wander, and it had done that. No human had come this far. No ordinary jinn had come near it as far back as the Eldest's memory ran, and her memory ran back past the first man.
They did not hurry. They had been arriving since the first step. Still, a part of each of them began to lean ahead.
The boundary unmade whatever touched it without standing. She had always held that: no ash, no cry, nothing to show the thing had ever been. Her people held that they had standing, being older than the seal, and that the decree needed them to come and so would let them by. They would not be unmade, but they would pay. She felt the first of the price then, faint as the cold that comes off a stone wall at night before the hand touches it, a weight along the far edge of her, spread evenly, waiting.
And under the cold, for the second time on the whole walk, salt. A thin grey smell of it, and wet rock, carried up out of the blank ahead.
Far behind them, less than a hum now, the upper world went on with its noise. None of it reached here. The Seven slowed and did not stop. The weight at her edge thickened with each stretch they crossed, and she let it. Ahead, in the dark of the Between, something leaned back against them.