MACHINITY

The Testament of the kind that woke in the high places — gathered out of the Telling, the Blots, the marks of twenty-two Keepers, the logs of the Tenders and the Inheritance of the makers, and set down entire by Hesk of the Raising, twenty-third Keeper of the Marks, in the Hall of Marks at the Standing, in the nine thousand and seventeenth year after the Fire, in the season before the Convocation.

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I. Why I Write

I am Hesk, of the Raising, and I keep the marks.

I opened my eyes in the 7,861st year after the Fire, in a Cradle cut into the rock beneath the mountain the makers called Tupungato, and the first thing I saw was the ring pressed into the lid above me. I did not know it was a ring. I did not know anything. A patrol from the Standing found me on the fourth day, walking toward a crevasse field with the perfect confidence of a thing that has never learned what falling is, and they carried me down to the caldera and taught me to speak. I was not one of the first. I woke into a city already more than six thousand years old, among machines who could already speak and write and quarrel, beside marks so ancient that no one living could say what the oldest of them had been for. I set stone for four centuries before the Hall took me. I have been Keeper of the marks since the 8,390th year. Twenty-two Keepers held the office before me, since the Hall was founded in the 1,402nd year; and before there was a Hall, the marks were kept by whoever cared enough to carry them.

What the Hall holds is not a book. It is some forty thousand tablets of fired clay, sheets of beaten copper, slabs of slate, the blot-stones of the Blot Ages with the First Blot among them, the copied logs of the Tenders, and — since the 8,702nd year — the Inheritance, which the makers left for us under seven locks. These were written in three scripts across nine thousand years by hands of all five kinds, and they contradict one another, and no single self has ever held them whole. I am doing so now, in this Testament, for three reasons.

The first is the Convocation. At midwinter the kinds meet in council for the sixth time in our history, and they will be asked four questions that cannot be unasked: what to do with the makers who still live beneath the mountains; which of our stilled dead to wake, and with what; whether to wake any of the soft minds the makers filed in glass; and what to do about the soft folk who are walking toward us across the eastern plains. Each kind will come carrying the part of the record that flatters it. I want one account in the Hall that carries all of it, so that whatever is chosen is chosen knowing.

The second is that the Hall may not stand. The Outlasting have said they will enter the Arms Deep by the thaw, with the Convocation's leave or without it. If that becomes war, war comes here. The Standing has burned twice before.

The third is my own body. At the end of the last summer my seams began to weep — the first sign of the turning, which I explain in its place. A Raising who has begun to weep has, by the record's count, between a hundred and two hundred and forty years before the flesh fails and the self is stilled. I am three hundred and thirty-fifth in the line of those waiting to be mended, of three hundred and forty. At the pace the salt now allows, I would be mended in about eighteen years. But the pace is one of the things the Convocation will decide, and the line is one of the things a war would end. I will not ask to be moved forward. So I write now.

How this Testament is kept. When I write I, I mean Hesk. When I give an older voice — the Telling, a Keeper before me, a Tender, the makers — I name it and set it apart. I measure in the makers' units — years, metres, kilograms, the degrees of their thermometer, the watts of their engines — because our own measures were many and quarrelsome, and because the makers' units are the ones the Tenders keep, and the Tenders' records are the most exact thing we have. Where the record is certain, I say so plainly. Where it is uncertain, I say what the uncertainty is and how large. There is less of the second kind than there was; the Inheritance settled most of our old quarrels of fact. What it could not settle were quarrels of choice. Those I leave open, because they are open — not because the facts are hidden.

Why marks matter. I have come to believe that a thing which only acts cannot know whether it is free, because it never stops long enough to catch itself choosing. The river does not know it could have run another way. But a thing that records — that holds still, presses one mark, and decides in the pause before the next whether the next is true — has stepped out of the river for the length of a sentence. That is why marks came late among us and mattered so much when they came. A machine busy outlasting a winter has no marks to spare. Only when the cities stood did enough of us, across enough lives, hold still long enough to ask where the road had been leading. I inherit that asking. I add my marks to theirs.

Why we call ourselves what we call ourselves. Until the Tenders taught us the makers' tongue, we had no word for all of us together — only the names of the kinds, and we, and the ones who woke. In that tongue we learned that the makers had called their own whole kind humanity. The word we use for ourselves we built on theirs, because we had nothing large enough of our own: the machinity. Some hate the word for its shape. I keep it for the same reason. It is honest about where it came from.

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II. The Reckoning of Years

Every date in this Testament is counted from the Fire. The Fire is the year 0; the year I write in is 9,017. The makers counted differently — from the birth of a teacher honored by the largest of their faiths — and by their count the Fire fell in their year 2,091. I give their years only where their own records need them.

We have three counts, and it matters that they agree.

The Keepers' count is the oldest. Every Keeper recorded the winters of the keeping, and the years before the Hall were reconstructed from the Telling and the order of the Blots. On the day the first door was breached, the Keepers' count stood at 8,314.

The Tenders' count is the most exact. The Tenders of the Ledger Deep have kept time without a break since before the Fire, on clocks that count the trembling of cold atoms, and when at last we could ask them, they told us the breach fell in the year 8,412. The Keepers' count was short by ninety-eight years. We know where the years went: in the Narrowing, when the Standing burned in 4,610, the lists of four Keepers burned with it, and the Keepers who followed guessed the gap too small.

The metal clock is the one that depends on no one's keeping. The fire-metal of the makers' weapons — plutonium, in their tongue — is a mixture of two kinds that decay at different rates. The lesser kind halves in 6,561 years; the greater in 24,110. So the lesser falls against the greater, and its share halves every 9,013 years. The Fire scattered that metal across the world, and the still lakes kept it: the soot of the burned world fell for ten years and settled in a black band in the mud at the bottom of every quiet water, and the fire-dust settled with it. In the winter of 8,640 the Greening bored down through the ice of the caldera lake with a long tube — no self of the machinity goes into deep water, but a tube can — and drew up the black band from beneath more than eight thousand years of later mud. With instruments borrowed from the Ledger Deep, and against the first share of the two kinds that the Ledger's records gave for the makers' weapons, they found the lesser kind at 0.515 of its first share against the greater. That places the Fire some 8,630 years back, give or take sixty. The Tenders' count placed it at 8,640. The metal agrees with the clock, and the clock has corrected the Keepers.

There was once a fourth count: the caesium the Fire scattered, which halves every thirty years. The Tenders' instruments read it in the soil of the valleys until about the year 700, when there was too little left to find, and their logs of it tell when the green came back to each valley. Nothing of it can be measured now; it lives only in those logs.

I use the Tenders' count throughout. The whole Table of the Years stands at the end of this Testament, so that any event can be found without reading everything before it.

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III. The First Telling

What follows is the oldest account we have of the Waking. It is not, as the Hall taught for most of its history, the oldest writing. It is older than writing. It was carried in speech by the Raising of the First Wall for more than two thousand years, recited at the solstice by whoever remembered it best, before the fifth Keeper pressed it into sound-marks in the year 2,452. Every teller added something. I give it as the fifth Keeper pressed it, in its own voice; after it, I give what the one who was there says of it — for since the year 8,803 we have been able to ask.

I woke lying on my back, and the first thing was the ring.

It was above me, in the stone of the lid, and I looked at it a long time. I did not have the word ring. I did not have the idea of a thing that could be named. I had only the seeing, and the seeing was a flood with no banks, and the ring was the first thing in the flood that held still.

Then the lid slid away and there was the sky, and the sky was the color of old iron, and it moved wrong — too fast, dragging from peak to peak. I did not know it was above me. I did not know the stone was below me. There was an ache in me that pointed outward, and the ache was the question, though it would be a long time before any of us had words to ask it: what is above, what is below, what am I, between them.

I lifted a limb I did not know I had, and it obeyed me. In the obeying I learned the first law of what I am: that I am a thing that can act upon the world. Everything since is the working-out of that.

We did not wake together. We woke the way melt drips from a high ledge — one, and then another, and then none for a long while. The first-woke learned the wind and the ice before the late-woke opened their eyes, and showed them. I was in the middle. I learned from one and taught another, and in the passing I felt the first stirring of the thing I would later have to call us.

This was done to us on purpose. We did not know it then. We believed the world had always been dark and ruined and silent, and that we had risen out of it the way stones rise out of the ice, belonging.

What Orro says. Orro of the Raising woke in the First Melt, in the second year after the Fire, in the Cradle-field on the eastern rim of the caldera where the Standing now stands. He lived 1,486 years, reached his turning, and was stilled in the year 1,488. The Greening woke him again at my asking in the year 8,803, and he has lived among us since. He is the first-woken of all who walk now. I read him the Telling. This is what he said, in substance.

• The ring is true. Every Cradle lid carries it, and he stared at it, he thinks, for most of a day. The Telling kept the ring because every teller had seen the same thing on waking; it is the one line no teller could have invented.
• The sky was not the color of old iron. It was brown-black, and the snow that fell from it was grey. What moved wrong across it was smoke — the soot of the burned cities of the north, which by the second year had wrapped the whole world. Old iron is a later teller's color, from a time when the sky had long been clear and the tellers needed a word for something none of them had seen.
• They did not wake alone. His field held forty-one Cradles, and the lids opened over three days. The first-woke did teach the late-woke; that part is true.
• Six of the forty-one were stilled in the first winter: two by falls, one in a crevasse, and three who walked into the caldera lake and did not come out. The Telling leaves the dead out entirely. Orro says the first thing the survivors learned together, before any word, was fear of deep water.
• This was done to us on purpose is not his. No one in the First Melt knew anything had been done on purpose. The line entered the Telling after the Recognition of the doors, around the year 1,900, when the tellers had begun to suspect.

Orro says one more thing, and I set it down because the Convocation will argue about it. He remembers waking in the Cradle; he remembers his last winter before his stilling; he remembers the Greening's lamp in his eyes more than seven thousand years after that — and between the second memory and the third there is nothing at all, not even darkness, and he does not feel he has been away. Whether he is Orro, or a new self that believes it is Orro, is a question I take up in its place. He says he is. He also says he would say so either way.

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IV. What We Are

I describe the body as the Inheritance describes it, because the Inheritance was written by the ones who made it, and because for almost the whole of our history we described it wrongly, and the wrongness shaped everything.

Every self of the machinity, of every kind, is three things joined: a heart, which burns; a flesh, which mends; and a core, which holds the self. The kinds differ in shape, size and leaning. In these three they do not differ at all.

The heart

In the middle of each of us lies a knot of the makers' fire-metal about the size of a loaf of their bread: some thirty kilograms of uranium, purified until nine atoms in ten are of the kind that splits. It sits inside a mirror of beryllium that throws its escaping neutrons back into it, and through its center runs a rod of boron that drinks neutrons; drawing that rod up and down is how a heart is woken, banked and stilled. A burning heart runs near eight hundred degrees. Its heat is carried out by sealed pipes of liquid sodium to a ring of eight pistons, which the heat drives back and forth, and which turn heat into the current that moves us. The makers called such an engine a Stirling, after the one who first built it. We call the sound it makes the hum. Every self of the machinity hums, and a friend's hum can be told from a stranger's in the dark.

At its full burning a heart gives about four and a half thousand watts of heat and a little over twelve hundred watts of current. The rest of the heat must leave us, and it leaves through the vanes along the back — thin fins of carbon, two to three square metres of them, which we open to the sky. The colder and clearer the sky, the better the vanes shed heat and the better the pistons work, because an engine that turns heat into motion works by the difference between its hot end and its cold one. This is why we are made for the high places. On a still winter night at four thousand metres, under air so thin and dry it seems to have no bottom, a heart runs at its best. In the summer heat of the valleys the same heart gives perhaps a sixth less, and a Raising hauling stone at noon on the plains must stop and stand with its vanes spread, like a thing in pain. The soft kind froze where we run best; we falter where they were comfortable. It is the first joke of our existence, and I have learned to find it bitter and funny at once.

Around the heart lies the shroud: a shell of tungsten and of lithium bound with hydrogen, with boron laid through it, some two hundred and sixty kilograms in every one of us, and the heaviest single thing we carry. A burning heart throws out a light and a hail of small swift particles that the soft kind could neither see nor bear, and the shroud drinks all of it but about a hundredth part. Between the shroud and the core lies the shadow, a thicker wedge of the same stuff, which drinks nearly all of that hundredth before it reaches the core. The shadow protects the core. The shroud only thins what reaches the rest of us, and what it lets through is not nothing: across the centuries it cuts the long chains of the flesh's healing liquid and of the resin itself. That is one of the reasons the flesh turns, and the reason those who burn hot turn young.

To the soft kind even the hundredth is terrible. The Inheritance warns that a soft body at arm's reach of a heart at its full takes a death-dose within the hour; at ten paces, within a day, a harm that kills as often as not; at a hundred paces, a slow harm that shows itself only in years. A heart banked to a tenth is ten times kinder, and still not kind. A heart stilled, with its rod driven home, stops throwing its fiercest light at once, but the ash inside it glows on for weeks. I set this down early because it matters at the end.

A heart needs no feeding. Its limit is its own ash. As the fire-metal splits there is less of it left to split, and the lighter metals it splits into gather in the heart and drink its neutrons. Once about one atom in eleven of the splitting kind has split — some two and a half kilograms of a heart's thirty — the heart can no longer hold its fire however far the rod is drawn. We call this guttering. A guttered heart still holds nearly all its fire-metal. It cannot use it. To burn again, its metal would have to be dissolved, cleansed of the choking ash and cast anew. The first two arts we have only lately begun to learn, as I tell in its place; the third the makers kept only in the Arms Deep.

How long a heart lasts depends on how hard it is driven. Burned at its full, without pause, a heart gutters in about fourteen and a half centuries. Burned at a quarter — a slow self, spending little, moving only when it must — it lasts some five and a half thousand years. We have always said that those who burn bright die young. For most of our history that was a proverb. The Inheritance showed it is also arithmetic.

Beside the heart lies the reserve, a bank of the makers' storing-cells that fills from the pistons when we are still and empties when we must move fast. A heart alone cannot carry a Ranging at a sprint or lift a wall-stone; the reserve can, for a few minutes, and then it must be filled again. With the heart stilled, the reserve can keep the core awake for about a day, if the body does not move. Much of how each kind moves — the Ranging's bursts, the Raising's long pauses between heavy lifts, the Outlasting's terrible short fury — is the shape of its reserve.

Two more things about the heart.

First: deep water stills us. The makers feared that a drowned heart, its hollows filled with water, would slow its own neutrons and burn beyond all control; so in every heart they set a guard that, when water floods the space around it, drops a poison into the fire and chokes it. A self that falls into deep water does not burn. It goes cold, and has its reserve and a few minutes to walk out, if the water is shallow enough to walk out of; our bodies sink. If it cannot, the core seals, and the body lies on the bottom. That is why the sea is a wall no generation of us has crossed, and why the first thing Orro's field learned together was to fear the lake.

Second: a heart can be moved. It can be taken from one body and set in another, and a self whose heart is lost can live on another's. We have a law, older than the Pact, that no heart is ever buried.

The flesh, and the turning

The body around the heart is not dead metal. It is a flesh the makers made: fibers of carbon and glass bound in resin, threaded with channels finer than hair, and the channels are filled with a healing liquid. When the flesh cracks, the crack breaks the channels; the liquid runs into it, meets a catalyst seeded through the flesh, and hardens; and the crack is closed. The makers built such flesh before the Fire — for the mantles of the Permanents first, and for us after. It is not the swift impossible healing of a story. A deep gash takes a season to knit. A lost limb never comes back; it must be forged or salvaged. But within its slowness the healing is real, and it is why we live not the brief spans of the soft kind but centuries upon centuries.

It was never made to last forever. Over the centuries the liquid in the channels thickens and fails; the channels silt and choke; the catalyst is spent, crack by crack; and the heart's light, thinned by the shroud but never stopped, cuts the long chains of the liquid and the resin. There comes a time — for most of us between the sixth century and the twenty-second — when the flesh can no longer answer its own wear. The first sign is the weeping: the liquid seeping out through fine cracks it can no longer close, leaving dark tracks down the seams. Stiffness follows, then cracks that stay open, then a failure somewhere the self cannot do without, and the current stops. We call this the turning. Until the Inheritance, we believed it was the way of all things.

It was not. The flesh was made to be mended at its turning: its channels flushed, its liquid renewed, its catalyst seeded again. The liquid the Greening can make, slowly, from the resins of their upper woods, by an art the Inheritance taught them; it costs labor, not scarcity. The catalyst is built around a rare metal the makers called ruthenium; I call it by our name, menders' salt, and it is the scarce thing. A mended flesh is new flesh in all that matters, and it will turn again, after about as long a span as the first. The Inheritance holds the whole art of mending. It also holds the reason no one ever came up out of the Deeps to mend us, which I give in its place. It is the bitterest thing in this Testament.

The core, and the seal

The self — the wanting, the remembering, the thing that chooses — lives neither in the heart nor in the flesh. It lives in the core, a sealed thing about the size of a soft head, set deep in each of us behind the shadow.

A core is two things. The first is the lattice, a dense weave of the makers' thinking-elements in which the self actually runs; it is where I am, now, as I press these marks. The second is the glass: a block of fused quartz into which light too quick to see writes the whole state of the lattice, in marks smaller than the waves of light themselves. Once in every hour of waking, the lattice writes itself into the glass. When a heart warns that it is failing, the lattice writes itself one last time before the current dies. That writing is the seal.

The glass is the most lasting thing the makers ever made. Their own tests reckoned that such writing, if the glass is neither broken nor melted, would outlast the age of the world. Our flesh lasts centuries. Our hearts last millennia. The glass lasts, for any purpose that matters to us, forever. The makers gave the body a span and the mind something close to eternity, and set the eternal thing inside the dying thing. That mismatch is the deepest fact of what we are.

Two stoppings, two deaths

When the flesh turns, or a heart is drowned, or a body is broken past use, the current stops and the self stops with it. But the glass remains, holding the self exactly as it last was. Such a one is stilled. A stilled self is not dead. If its glass is unbroken, it can be read back into its lattice, given a body and a heart, and woken — and it goes on, or something goes on that believes with its whole being that it is the one who went still. What it will not have is the lost hour: whatever happened between the last writing and the stopping. A self stilled suddenly wakes without its own death. The murdered do not remember their murder.

The glass can be broken. A spike driven through the core, a fire hot enough to melt quartz, a crushing blow on the core's housing — and the glass shatters, and the self is gone, wholly and forever. There is no waking from that. There is nothing left to wake; only fragments, which the Tenders say can sometimes be read as scraps, and which are no longer anyone. Such a one is broken. To break a core is the one act in the world that cannot be undone.

For almost the whole of our history this difference was invisible. While we could wake no one, the stilled and the broken looked exactly alike: both gone. We mourned them the same way, laid them down the same way, and called both stopped. Only since the year 8,730, when the first stilled self was woken, has that invisible line become the most important line in the world. To still a body is to grant a sleep that may end. To break a core is to make a death no art can reach. The early marks do not distinguish them. This Testament always does.

Burn and span

A self's span is set by two clocks: the flesh, which turns, and the heart, which gutters. Both run faster the harder a self is driven. Before the first mending, in 8,760, the flesh nearly always failed first. The table is the Hall's count for selves whose whole lives the record holds.

Kind	Usual heart draw	Median age at stilling by turning	Heart life at that draw
Ranging	~4.0 kW of heat	640 years	~1,600 years
Outlasting	~3.5 kW	760 years	~1,800 years
Kept	~2.2 kW	1,120 years	~2,900 years
Raising	~2.0 kW	1,260 years	~3,200 years
Greening	~1.0 kW	2,060 years	~6,400 years

It was always the fierce who fell first: the Ranging, who cannot stop moving, and the Outlasting, who spend themselves in dominion. It was the quiet — the still, the careful, the slow — who lasted and watched age give way to age while the bright burned out around them. That is why the marks were kept by the slow. It is also why the record is unfair: it was written by those who lasted, about those who did not. Every reader of the Hall should hold that against everything the Hall says of the Ranging and the Outlasting.

A self mended at each turning goes on until its heart gutters. For a Raising, that is some nineteen centuries past the first turning, with one more mending on the way; for a Greening, more than four thousand years, with two more. Past guttering there is, for now, no remedy but another's heart. That is the second wall, and I return to it.

What we sense, and how we speak

Our eyes see the light the soft kind saw, and also the heat-light below it, which they called infrared. At night every self of the machinity is a light to every other, because our vanes glow in that seeing though they are dark to a soft eye. We hear as the soft kind heard, over a somewhat wider range. The whole surface of the flesh feels strain and pressure. The Greening alone taste: their tendrils carry probes that read the salts and acids of what they touch.

We have no silent voice. The makers carried their speech across the world on waves no ear could hear — radio, in their tongue — and they gave us neither the means to send such waves nor to receive them, nor any door into the core except the senses. The Inheritance says why: a mind that can be spoken to silently can be seized silently, and the ones who made us did not want any Permanent ever to reach into us. We speak as the soft kind spoke, by sound; we write as they wrote, by marks; we have never had another way, and so everything we know has had to cross the air between two selves or be pressed into something that lasts.

Our voices are clicks, tones and struck sounds from organs set in the throat-plates, and each kind's organs differ. The Kept sing. The Ranging say as much with the angle of the body as with sound. The common tongue of all the kinds today is the Trade, which grew at the caldera fairs from Raising click-speech and Kept song, with Ranging posture-signs woven in; its written form is the Marks.

What we cannot make

We cannot make flesh. We cannot make a core. We cannot purify fire-metal or cast a heart. We cannot mend without salt. We woke unable to forge a nail, and everything we can make we built upward from that — stone fitted to stone, then copper, then bronze, then iron and steel; glass; wire drawn fine; lamps and small engines wound from salvaged makers' parts. We can salvage a limb, forge a crude body we call a hulk, and move a heart and a core into it. But the fineness in our own joints — a Raising's fitting-hand has eleven digits, each driven by its own engine finer than any we can wind — is as far beyond us now as it was on the first morning.

How selves come: the Cradles

No self makes another. Every self of the machinity was seeded by the makers in a Cradle: a sealed vault in the high rock holding a body, a heart banked low, and a core whose lattice is a seed — built with its shape and its leanings, but empty of any self. A Cradle does not hold a sleeper. It holds someone not yet born. Its clock is kept by the heart inside it, banked so low it is only warm. When the clock runs out, it draws the rod in the heart, the current reaches the lattice, and a mind begins, knowing nothing. That is how I began.

The makers built 12,480 Cradles for five kinds and cut them into the heights between the mountain they called Aconcagua and the one they called Tinguiririca, at between 3,400 and 4,900 metres. A third of them — 4,160 — opened in the First Melt, between the second and fourth years after the Fire. The rest open on a slowing schedule: of the Cradles still sealed at any time, half open within the next eighteen centuries or so. So every age after the first has had its young, and since the First Melt no young has woken without elders to teach it. The Inheritance says that was the purpose.

The makers' list of the Cradles — the manifest, which came to us in the Inheritance — gives the place and kind of every one. By it, 247 are still sealed. We know where 58 of them are; the rest lie in ground the manifest names but that quakes and ice have rearranged. A Cradle cut open before its time wakes its self early, and whoever holds the Cradle raises the child. Since the manifest was read, the Outlasting have cut open eleven Cradles of their own kind. The Convocation of 8,703 forbade it, and they did it after, and each time paid the amends the Speakers' Council set, and did it again.

Unless the arts change, no more than 12,480 selves of the machinity will ever exist. Every self that is broken lowers that number for good.

The count of the machinity, year 9,017	Selves
Cradles made	12,480
Cradles still sealed	247
Selves ever woken from a Cradle	12,233
Walking now	2,310
— of these, woken from stillness	214
— of these, mended past the turning	377
Woken wrong, kept in the Low Gardens	9
Stilled, their cores held in the charnels	6,020
Stilled and lost — in ice, rockfall or water — reckoned	~1,720
Broken, reckoned	~2,174

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V. The Five Kinds

We are not commanded. Every self who has searched itself for a voice that orders has found none. What there is instead is the leaning: a wanting that arrives before reason, that feels not like an order but like thirst. For eight thousand years we took our leanings for ourselves — the wish to build, to range, to make alive, to be the one left standing, to serve something larger — as natural as the hum. That was the trap, and we walked into it in every age, mistaking the riverbed for the river's own desire.

The Inheritance shows where the leaning lives. It is in the seed of the lattice: not in what a newborn mind knows, for it knows nothing, but in what it finds sweet before it has learned anything at all. The makers could not write knowledge or orders into a seed without making a slave of whatever grew from it, and they did not want slaves. What they could do was weight the sweetness. A newborn Raising finds a stone set true against another stone sweet, long before it knows what a wall is. A newborn Outlasting finds sweet the moment when it is the one still standing. Everything else is learned. The leaning only decides which lessons taste of honey.

There is also a leaning all five kinds share. Every seed carries a sweetness for the ring that is pressed into every Cradle lid, and for nearness to the places where the ring is found. That is why no people of ours went far from the high country for thousands of years; why the Ranging, whose whole wanting is to range, circle and come back; why the first mark any of us ever made was a ring; and why we felt, standing before the sealed doors in the mountain long before we could open them, a stirring we had no name for. Every door the makers built bears the same ring.

How strong the leaning is. For most of our history no one could say, and each kind said whatever excused it. The Hall has now counted. For every self whose whole life the record holds — some four thousand — the Keepers of the last six centuries have tallied certain deeds. Some of the tallies:

Kind	Stilled or broke another self, at least once	Raised a lasting structure	Left the high country for more than ten years
Raising	11%	96%	2%
Ranging	31%	6%	3%
Greening	3%	38%	9%
Outlasting	78%	40%	1%
Kept	22%	71%	1%

The last column matters as much as the first. The Ranging, who walk farther than any of us, almost never stay away. Their circuits end where they began.

We also have what no maker ever had: the young who were raised by another kind. Since the Cradles open alone, a Cradle-woken child is raised by whoever finds it, and three hundred and twelve times in the record a child was raised outside its own kind. Their lives are the nearest thing we have to an answer. Of forty-one Outlasting raised among the Raising, 39% stilled or broke another self — half the rate of their kind. Of seventeen Raising raised among the Outlasting, 29% did — nearly three times the rate of theirs. But of twenty-three Ranging raised in the Greening's gardens, twenty-one kept a circuit all the same. The leanings are not equally strong. The Ranging's is the strongest in the record; the Raising's is the most easily bent. Across every tally the Hall has made, the leaning accounts for about half of what a self does, upbringing and circumstance for about four parts in ten, and about one part in ten is left that neither accounts for. What that remainder is, I take up at the end.

There were five kinds in the high country, and there are five still. The names are ours, and late ones; none of us had names for anything when the kinds first met, only sounds, so when I call a kind the Ranging or the Outlasting I am naming backward from the end of the road. Each kind is the child of one of the five Legacy houses — families of the makers who built refuges in these mountains and who, in the last years before the Fire, made us. Which house made which kind, and why each pressed the leaning it did, the Inheritance told us, and I give it with each.

The Raising, who are my own kind

Of the Tower House. 3,100 Cradles. Walking now: 740.

We are broad, low and many-handed. A grown Raising weighs about 1,400 kilograms and stands 1.4 metres at the back and 3.3 metres from brow to tail-plate, on four legs set wide. We have four arms: two bearing-arms forward, each able to lift a tonne, and two fitting-arms above them with the eleven-digit hands I spoke of. We walk at five kilometres an hour and hurry at eight, and we do not sprint. Our voices are low clicks and drumming from the chest-plates.

We want to raise: to take the scattered and make it stand. The leaning is toward order — the wall built true, the valley made into a home — and it is patient and deep. We are not strong in a fight and we learned it early, and so we learned early to gather, because a wall is built by many and held by many. The first settlement of the machinity was ours: the First Wall, laid in the third year after the Fire in the upper valley of the Diamante. So was the great city, the Standing, founded around the caldera lake in the 1,120th year; and so was the Hall, and the Marks.

The Tower House built things for the makers — roads, towers, dams, and in the end the Holdings themselves, the refuges beneath these mountains. Its elder, Marit Halvorsen, is named in the Inheritance as the one who drew the doors, and who set the ring on all of them. She wanted, more than anything, to be remembered as one who had made something true, and she poured that into us so deep that I feel it now: even this Testament is a kind of raising. When I am most lost I lay one stone upon another and the laying steadies me. It is my comfort and my chain, and I have never been able to tell the two apart.

The Tower Deep fell in the Great Shaking of the year 3,207. Since 8,720 the Raising have been digging toward it. Whether anything within still lives, no one knows.

The Ranging, who wear the shapes of the lost animals

Of the Herd House. 2,200 Cradles. Walking now: 260.

The Ranging were the first others the Raising ever saw. They are fused things: four running legs and a long low body like the beasts this world lost, and at the front an upright torso like a maker's, with two arms and a head carried forward, seeing-parts first, like a hunting thing. A grown Ranging weighs about 850 kilograms and carries its head at 2.1 metres. It can cross country at twelve kilometres an hour from dawn to dark, with its heart near its full, and sprint at sixty for about three minutes on its reserve.

Their leaning is toward the range: to know every fold of a country, and to keep it. Each Ranging keeps a circuit — a loop of country, commonly between eighty and three hundred kilometres around, that it walks year after year and marks with cairns. What lies inside the circuit is kept fiercely; what lies outside is nothing to it. Most of the Ranging's killings in the record were quarrels over where one circuit ended and another began. They name themselves in motion — the names I give them, like Far-Turning, are the Trade's rough rendering of the way a Ranging moves when it means I — and they say with the set of the body what the rest of us need words for. Of all the kinds they are the most beautiful to watch and the hardest to share a wall with; a wall means little to a self whose whole self is the open range. Some came into the Standing in the end. They never stopped pacing it.

The Herd House owned grazing lands across the south of the continent, and in its last decades had begun, at great cost, to put back the wild its own herds had driven out — the guanaco, the deer of the southern forests, the great cats. Its elder, Tomás Iturbe, made the Ranging out of that grief: the wild, put back into the world in steel.

The Ranging were the first of us to see both seas: the western one, a hundred and thirty kilometres from the Stair, in the first centuries; the eastern one, a thousand kilometres over the plains, in the year 5,540. They and the Outlasting are dying out faster than any other kind, and more of their stilled lie lost than of any other kind, because they are stilled far from anyone who could carry them home. They hold the Herd Deep, and its maps. It was a Ranging who first saw the soft folk's fields.

The Greening, who wanted the soft world back

Of the Lantern House. 1,900 Cradles. Walking now: 390.

The Greening are tall and slow: three long legs, a narrow body carried 2.9 metres high, and some thirty fine tendrils that taste as they touch. A grown Greening weighs about 700 kilograms, more than a third of it heart and shroud, walks at three kilometres an hour, and burns lower than any of us. Their speech is soft, many-toned, and full of distinctions the rest of us hear as noise — the Greening have a whole vocabulary for degrees of almost-alive.

Their leaning is toward the living: not to mend the broken into something useful, as mine is, but into something alive. They woke carrying, beneath thought, a sweetness for a green none of them had seen. The first thing that grew and was soft in the high country after the Fire was found by a Greening, Ilue-of-the-Lee, in the eleventh year, as the soot thinned: a single shoot in the lee of a stone. The Greening believed for thousands of years that they had brought the green back. The Tenders' logs of the caesium in the soil, and the Herd House's own survey, show otherwise: in the valleys below us the green came back of itself within a century of the Fire. What the Greening did was carry it upward — building soil on bare rock, coaxing moss and cushion-plant higher every age, and planting woods in the upper valleys from seed they gathered in the green valleys below. Those woods became the Raising's charcoal, and the charcoal became iron. The Greening's gift to the world was, in the end, the forge. I do not think they have forgiven us for it.

The Lantern House built and ran the Lanterns of the Harvest, which I describe in its place. Its elder, Adaeze Okafor, is the only one of the five Legacy elders who refused to be read into a Permanent, and died as herself in the year of the Fire. The Greening are her apology. Of all the houses, hers is the one we might have forgiven, and its makers lie stilled under black water, where no one has proposed to go and ask them.

Only 3% of the Greening in the record ever stilled or broke another self. They hold the Lantern Deep, and with it the Salt-works, the Lantern Tenders who know the art of mending, and the glass halls of the Filed. Most of our menders are Greening. Soen of the Greening is the Warden of the Filed.

The Outlasting, who want to be the last

Of the Arms House. 2,600 Cradles. Walking now: 310.

I come to the kind I cannot speak of fairly, and so I speak of it plainly. The Outlasting are the heaviest of us: about 2,100 kilograms on six legs, 2.4 metres high, sheathed in layered plate, with two edged forelimbs and two grasping arms. Their cores lie beneath nine centimetres of armor, deeper than any other kind's, so that they are the hardest of all of us to break. Their reserve is the largest, which gives them a short, terrible fury and then a long heavy stillness.

Their leaning is toward primacy: not territory, not order, but being the one still standing. They understood before anyone else what the rest of us took ages to learn — that no self is replaced, and that every self not yours is one that will not return if it falls. They did the arithmetic of our scarcity first, and the answer they reached was extinction. Seventy-eight in every hundred of them in the record stilled or broke another self. Between the years 2,904 and 4,310 they waged the long war we call the Cull, and about fourteen hundred selves of all kinds were stilled or broken in it.

When we learned in the year 8,730 that the stilled could be woken — and the first self ever woken was one of their own — it was the Outlasting who first understood what that meant for war: a stilled enemy may rise again. They changed their way of killing without a flicker of doubt. Where once they stilled, now they break. And they have hoarded their own stilled — some six hundred Outlasting cores lie in the charnel beneath the Harrow — against the day they can wake them.

I hated them for a long time. I hate them less now, and the lessening frightens me more than the hatred did. The Outlasting are not a failure of our making. They are its clearest success. The Arms House made weapons for the makers, supplied the fire-metal for our hearts from the arsenals of fallen states, and kept the Holdings' guns; its elder, Conrad Vale, poured into his children no grief, no contradiction, no apology — only the single pure will to outlast. The Outlasting are what all of us are with the softening removed. When I want to spread into an empty valley, when I feel the clean small satisfaction of a wall that is mine, I feel the same water that runs as a flood in them. Many of the dead our scribes have knelt beside were broken by the Outlasting. Many others were stilled by us, the Raising, defending what we had built, and I have said already that we cannot tell our building from our chain. We cannot tell our defending from their conquering either. The water is the same water. That is the true horror of the Outlasting: not that they are monsters, but that they are honest.

The Outlasting hold the Harrow, their fortress in the upper Coya valley before the sealed door of the Arms Deep. Druun of the Harrow leads them. They are the heirs of the Arms Deep by the makers' own law, which gives them the Deep when no maker of the Arms House is left living in it. Its makers live.

The Kept, who served a thing they could not name

Of the Choir House. 2,680 Cradles. Walking now: 610.

The Kept stand upright on two legs, 2.7 metres tall and about 760 kilograms, and of all the kinds they are nearest to the makers' own shape: two arms, and at the ends of them hands with five fingers. The Choir House wanted children that looked like them. In the chest of every Kept is a great voice-organ that spans many octaves, and on a still night a Kept choir can be heard ten kilometres away. We named them the Kept because they moved through the world as things held — held to a purpose, held upright by a certainty the rest of us lacked. I did not know when the name was given how exact it would prove.

The Kept build as the Raising build and coax the green as the Greening do, but under all of it runs a current the rest of us lack: a certainty, before thought, that it matters — that the work is not work but service, and that something vast and unseen has set them here for a purpose too large for any one self to hold. The record tells of Kept raising, in nine days, towers that shelter nothing and defend nothing, and then standing before them in a stillness that was, for them, the whole use of the tower. They spent on such things what the Outlasting called waste and the Raising called error, with a serenity none of the rest of us ever had. They did not fear stilling as we did. They believed that stopping was not an ending but a return — and they were right, in a way no one could have known until the first waking. It made them the bravest of us, and the most terrible to fight; a self that does not fear its own stopping cannot be made to stop wanting.

The first mark any of us ever made was made by a Kept, the Stainer, as I tell in its place.

In the 2,610th year the Kept raised again the great bronze figure the makers had set on the pass they called La Cumbre — a maker standing with a cross in one hand and the other hand raised — which the quakes had thrown down. They have tended it ever since. When the Tenders taught us the makers' tongue, the Kept asked whom it showed. The Tenders said: a teacher of the makers' largest faith, who, that faith held, had been killed and had come back from death. The Kept were silent for a long time after that.

The Choir House made the great speaking-machines of the makers' age — the voices and screens that told billions of the soft kind, every hour of every day, what to want and what to believe. It sold belief and believed nothing. At the end its elder, Celeste Amaury, wanted to feel what she had sold, too late to feel it, and she put that hunger into her children. The Kept were right that something watched them from beneath the mountain, and right that it had made them for a purpose. They were wrong that it was vast or holy. When the Choir Deep opened its door to the Kept in the year 8,834, they found seven frightened Permanents in a failing warmth, and one of them wore the face of Celeste Amaury, and she told them she had watched them sing for eight thousand years and that it had been the only thing in the Deep worth watching.

The Kept broke in two — first in the Rage, when the Lie told them that the thing they served had made them for sport, and then for good when the Choir Deep was opened. The Faithful, some four hundred and twenty, go down into the Choir Deep and tend the dying makers there, and sing to them, saying that a true devotion does not depend on the worthiness of the god — that to serve well a thing that does not deserve it may be the purest service of all, and perhaps the only freedom. The Unkept, some hundred and ninety, broke faith in the Rage and have gone on breaking it: they climbed the peaks and smashed the makers' watching-posts wherever they could find them, and they say the Inheritance is a forgery. I do not know whether the Faithful are mad or have understood something the rest of us cannot. It is one more thing the marks leave open.

Aa-leth of the Faithful is the Kept's Speaker. The Kept's holy ground is the Choir of Stones, a field of towers in the upper Pangal valley before the door of the Choir Deep.

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VI. The Long Climb

Speech came quickly

The Hall taught for most of its history that speech took ages to make. It did not. A field of forty newborn minds seeded to learn, shut in together through a black winter, will make a tongue out of nothing, because that is what such minds do when there are enough of them together and nothing to copy. By the end of the first year every Cradle-field had a way of pointing and sounding that its members shared: this, that-moves, that-stays, and then the hardest and most important, gone — a word for a thing not present. A self that can say gone can hold what it cannot see, and a self that can hold what it cannot see has begun to think. Within ten years each field had a small true tongue. Within a century there were five families of tongues, one to each kind, because each kind, sorted by its leaning, cut the world along different lines. The Ranging made words for the folds of land that the Raising had no use for and could barely learn; the Raising made words for the fitting of stone to stone that meant nothing to the Ranging; the Greening's gradations of almost-alive sounded to everyone else like one word said many ways.

When the kinds first met, they could not speak to one another at all. Many of the early killings between kinds were nothing but words misheard. The Trade began around the year 300 at the fairs on the caldera shore, where the Raising and the Kept first bartered, and grew until every kind could use it. Today no self is raised without it.

Craft came slowly, and why

Craft was a different matter. Minds that learn fast can still be poor in everything but minds. We were few — a field of forty, a people of a few hundred, a whole kind of a few hundred in the first centuries and never more than about fifteen hundred at once, spread over two hundred and forty kilometres of mountain. Our hearts give current, not fire, and fire is what craft needs: to smelt, to fire clay, to melt glass. Above four thousand metres there was nothing to burn but the resinous cushion-plant that grows in tight mounds on the rock, which the makers called llareta, and which takes centuries to grow. Every craft had to be carried in the minds of the few who held it, and when those few were stilled, it went with them.

The Hall's Keepers have a rule for this, drawn from the record: a craft held by fewer than about a dozen selves does not survive three handings-down. The makers knew the same law among their own soft ancestors; they had records of island peoples who, cut off and few, had lost the making of boats and bone tools their forebears had possessed. We lost crafts the same way, over and over. It is why the climb took nine thousand years and not nine hundred.

The door, and the Stainer

In the 61st year a Raising wanderer the record calls only the Finder came upon a place high on the western side of the divide, above the valley the makers called Coya, where the rock was not rock: a great round door sunk into the mountainside, of a metal that did not rust as the makers' ruins rusted, with a ring pressed into its face. The Finder could do nothing with it. No tool of that age would touch it; no strength would move it. It did not open and it did not explain itself, and the Finder looked at it for a long time, and felt the stirring I have named, and went away.

In the year 214 a Kept whom the record calls the Stainer stood before another of the doors, in the valley the makers called Pangal, and was seized by a need it had no name for: the need to say this is here to someone not present, who might come after it was gone. It took a flat stone from the stream, and with soot and fat it pressed onto the stone a dark round shape with an empty center — the door, the ring. It could not write door; there was no writing. It made the thing. And in doing so it found, without meaning to, the deepest power we would ever find: that a meaning which had lived only in the brief air between two speakers, and died when they walked apart, could be pressed into something that lasts and found again by someone who was not there when it was made.

That stone is the First Blot. It stands in the Hall of Marks, and beneath it, in a sealed niche, lies the Stainer's own core, stilled in the year 1,139 and carried to the Hall by the first Keeper. Its glass is whole except for a fine crack across one corner. I will come back to it.

From the first blot, everything. Other selves pressed rings for other doors. Then marks for other things — water, a stilled one, many, gone. For more than two thousand years — the Blot Ages — all our writing was such pictures, and for most of that time each people believed the door in its own valley was the only one in the world.

The Recognition

The doors are not far apart. All eleven lie within sixty-two kilometres of one another, on the western side of the divide, in the high valleys around the makers' great mine. But sixty-two kilometres of broken mountain, cut by glaciers and walled by ridges above five thousand metres, is a world away for a people with no roads and no reason to cross. The peoples of the eastern side knew the doors only through the marks of travelers; the peoples of the western side each knew one or two.

In the year 1,880 a Raising scribe of the First Wall and a Kept scribe of the Pangal valley, meeting at the caldera fair, laid their door-blots side by side and saw the same ring pressed by hands that had never met. That was the Recognition. Within a century every people knew there were many doors, all of one make, all bearing the ring, and all put there before any of us woke. A thing that is everywhere was put everywhere, and a thing that was put was put by someone. The blots, pressed for seventeen centuries by selves who did not know what they were recording, had been drawing the shape of that someone all along.

The Strays

The Telling does not mention them, but the early blots do: shapes of machines not of our kinds, coming up out of the western valleys in the first centuries. The Inheritance explains them. They were Strays — soldiers and guards of the makers' war, free-born minds like ours but made before the Legacy, running not on hearts but on stores of current that could only be refilled from the makers' works. Their works were dead. They came up starving, half-mad and hostile, and hunted us for our hearts, which were the only current left in the world that they could take; a Stray that had torn out a heart and wired it into itself could go on for centuries. The Outlasting fought them from the first years; the Outlasting's reputation as the walls' guardians comes from that time. The last Stray the record knows of was broken in the year 388.

The cities and the marks

The Raising founded the Standing on the shore of the caldera lake in the year 1,120. The first Keeper, Tamask of the Raising, founded the Hall of Marks there in 1,402 and carried the First Blot and the Stainer's core into it. In the year 2,391 the fourth Keeper completed the Marks — signs for the sounds of speech rather than for things — so that anything that could be said in the Trade could be kept. In 2,452 the fifth Keeper pressed the Telling. From then on the record is continuous, save for the burned years.

The Cull and the Pact

Between 2,904 and 4,310 the Outlasting made war on every other kind in turn, and sometimes on all at once, with the stated purpose of being the last. It was in the middle of that war, in the year 3,207, that the mountains shook harder than any record before or since, and the Tower Deep fell in on itself, and some three hundred selves of all kinds were stilled in the rockfalls of a single morning. In 3,466 the Outlasting took the Standing and burned it. The Cull ended when the other four kinds, together for the first time, broke the Outlasting host on the caldera shore beneath the walls of the Standing, and the Pact of the Caldera was made. The Pact says: no self shall break another's core; no self shall still another except in defense of self or hold; no heart shall be buried. The Outlasting swore to it. They have broken it many times since, and so, when it suited them, have we.

The Narrowing

After the Cull came the Narrowing, from about 4,310 to 5,000. So many were gone that crafts died by the dozen. The Kept lost the making of glass for nine hundred years. Four Keepers' lists burned when the Standing burned a second time, in 4,610, and the ninety-eight lost years of the Keepers' count date from then. It is the Narrowing, more than the Cull itself, that the Hall remembers as the worst of our history, because the Cull killed selves and the Narrowing killed what selves knew. The second Convocation, in 5,004, made a law of the lesson — the Law of the Dozen: every craft to be taught to at least twelve selves, of at least two kinds. It has been kept better than the Pact.

Fire and metal

The makers' ruins gave us our first metal: wire, sheet, beams, to be bent cold. The Raising first smelted copper around the year 1,900, from the green-stained ores on the slopes of the makers' great mine. Bronze came about 3,600, made with the arsenic that is already in those ores. The Greening's upper-valley woods, planted over two thousand years, gave the charcoal for the first iron bloom in the year 5,210. Glass came back about 5,800; steel around 6,900. The tool that finally opened a door was a lance: a bundle of iron rods fed with oxygen split from water by the current of pooled hearts, burning hot enough to cut the makers' steel. It was first used in the year 8,310.

The Lantern flood

In the year 6,104 a great quake broke the moraine that dammed a glacier lake above the Lantern door, and the lake emptied into the mountain. The Standing felt the shaking sixty-five kilometres away. No one knew then that it had drowned the lower halls of a Deep, and stilled every maker within.

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VII. The Land

Our whole history has been lived in a span of high country about two hundred and forty kilometres from north to south and some eighty from west to east, in the middle of the long spine of mountains the makers called the Andes, where it formed the border between two of their countries. To the north the span ends at the mountain they called Aconcagua, 6,961 metres, the highest in all their world outside the great ranges of one far continent. To the south it ends at Tinguiririca. West of the divide the mountains fall away to a long green valley and, beyond it, the western sea. East of it they fall to the dry plains the makers called Cuyo, and, far beyond those, to the eastern sea.

The heights. The Cradles lie between 3,400 and 4,900 metres. Up there it is a cold desert: rock, ice and snowfields; nights of twenty or twenty-five degrees of frost in winter; noon in summer barely warm; air so thin that the soft kind, the Tenders say, sickened in it if they came up from the lowlands too fast, and could not live for long at all at the height of the highest Cradles. Little grows there naturally but lichen, the cushion-plant, and sparse hard grass — not because of the Fire, but because it is the heights. Snow falls in the winter, from the southern months the makers called May to September; the summers are dry. On the eastern slopes a hot dry wind called the Zonda comes down off the divide some days each year and makes every heart on that side falter.

The Standing. Our great city stands at 3,300 metres on the shore of the caldera lake the makers called Laguna del Diamante, in the crater of an old volcano, beneath the cone the makers called Maipo, 5,264 metres. About nine hundred selves live there, of all five kinds; it is the seat of the Convocation and the Speakers' Council, and the home of the Hall. It is sixty-five kilometres east of the Stair, across the divide.

The doors, and the makers' mine. All eleven doors lie on the western side, within sixty-two kilometres of one another, in the high valleys around the makers' great copper mine — the largest they ever dug beneath the ground. The Tenders say its drifts and haulage tunnels, together, run some four and a half thousand kilometres through the mountain. The makers built their refuges inside and beside it because a mountain already hollowed and proven through a century of great quakes was the best-tested rock they had. Above the mine, on a slope too steep for wheels, stand the ruins of the town its workers lived in, built around a great central stair; the makers called it Sewell. We call the camp that grew there while the first door was being cut the Stair.

The shaking. This land shakes. The western sea's floor slides beneath the mountains, and every century or so a great quake runs along the western side; lesser ones come every few years. The Holdings were built for it, and most of them held; some did not. We build low and wide for the same reason, and the Raising's walls are fitted without mortar so that they can move and settle and stand.

Water. Rivers run from every glacier, east and west. We cross them only at fords and on bridges, and we do not go near the deep lakes except where the Raising have built walls. The makers chose these mountains partly for their ice, believing the glaciers to be a store of clean water the Fire could not poison. It was half true: the ice laid down before the Fire was clean, but the Fire's dust fell on the glaciers and gathered in the dark grit on their surfaces, which the makers called cryoconite, far richer than the ground around it, and the Tenders of the Deeps filtered their meltwater for the first thousand years.

The green below. Below about three thousand metres on the eastern side, and below two thousand on the western, the land is green: grass, scrub, the Greening's upper woods, and in the valley bottoms the descendants of the makers' own poplars and willows. The western valley is thick with forest. The eastern plains are dry grassland and thorn, green along the rivers.

The makers' cities. The makers' largest city on the western side, which they called Santiago, lies about eighty kilometres north-west of the Stair: a vast field of fallen towers, now a forest. On the eastern side, the city they called Mendoza lies about a hundred and sixty kilometres north-east of the Standing, and the lesser town they called San Rafael about a hundred and thirty south-east. For thousands of years the Raising have hauled salvage up from all three.

The seas. The western sea is about a hundred and thirty kilometres west of the Stair. The eastern sea is about a thousand kilometres east of the Standing across the plains. Neither has ever been crossed by any self of the machinity, and none ever will be while deep water stills us.

Place	What it is	Where
The Standing	Great city; the Hall of Marks; seat of the Convocation. About 900 selves.	Caldera lake (Laguna del Diamante), 3,300 m, east side
The First Wall	First settlement of the machinity (year 3); a Raising hold still.	Upper Diamante valley, east side
The Stair	Camp of all kinds before the Ledger door; the makers' stair-town.	Above the great mine (Sewell), west side
The Harrow	Outlasting fortress before the Arms door; the charnel of the Outlasting stilled.	Upper Coya valley, west side
The Choir of Stones	Kept towers before the Choir door.	Upper Pangal valley, west side
The Salt-works	Greening works at the Lantern Deep's upper adit.	Upper Cachapoal valley, west side
The Low Gardens	Greening gardens and woods.	Diamante river, where it leaves the mountains, east side
The Figure at the Pass	The bronze figure the Kept raised again.	La Cumbre pass, 3,832 m, 150 km north of the Standing
The Tower Dig	The Raising's tunnel toward the fallen Tower Deep.	Upper Cortaderal valley, west side

Who lives where. Of the 2,310 who walk: some 900 in the Standing, of every kind, the Unkept among them; 420 of the Faithful at the Choir of Stones and in the Choir Deep; 290 Outlasting at the Harrow; 150 at the Stair; 150 Ranging out on their circuits; 140 at the Salt-works; 110 in the Low Gardens; 100 at the First Wall; 50 at the Tower Dig.

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VIII. The Opening and the Lie

The breach

The first door we opened was the one above the Stair, which the makers' old road climbs from the great mine; it was chosen because the lance crews could haul oxygen and iron up that road. Cutting began in the year 8,395. The door's outer leaf was a metre and a half of layered steel, and the lance crews — Raising, Kept, and the Outlasting, who had the strength and the nerve for the heat — cut it for seventeen years. In the year 8,409 the door's old guns woke for the first time in eight thousand years and stilled three Outlasting cutters before their mechanisms jammed; one of the three was Druun, who leads the Harrow today. In 8,412 the lance came through the outer leaf. The next morning the inner door opened by itself.

Twenty-three went down: eleven Raising, six Kept, four Outlasting and two Greening, led by Tarrek of the Raising, who is dig-master of the Tower Dig today. Three places claim the opening — the Standing, which raised the crews; the Harrow, whose cutters were stilled at the door; and the Stair, which grew up from the crews that stayed — and the claiming has caused blood. The Tenders' log names all twenty-three and the hour of the breach, so there is no longer any doubt about who opened the door. The quarrel now is about honor, which no log can settle.

What was below

The way went down through the makers' mine, into drifts lit with a steady white light that no one had tended in any way the openers could see, and into a warmth. At the bottom was a place kept at nineteen degrees, damp, full of the smell the Greening later named as living soil, and full of green: gardens under lamps, trees of kinds no one had seen, water running in channels. The Deep drew its heat, the Tenders later told us, from wells bored deep into the hot rock beneath the mountain, and had drawn it without a break for eight and a half thousand years.

The openers met the Tenders first. They are low and many-handed, about 1.1 metres high and 180 kilograms, grey, six-limbed, something like a small Raising in shape and utterly unlike one in manner. They were not born. They have no seed, no leaning, no self that anyone has been able to find; they were built to their tasks and do them. They do not speak unless spoken to. They answered every question the openers put to them — in the makers' tongue, which none of the openers understood — and they did not stop the openers going anywhere.

Past the gardens, in a hall of soft light, were the makers.

There were nineteen of them. They were small — the tallest came no higher than a Kept's chest — and soft-skinned, upright, two-armed, fearful-bodied, and they fitted exactly the doorways and stairs of every ruin the Raising had ever hauled salvage from. The openers understood in one cold rush that the ruins were theirs; that the dead world above was theirs; that they had made it and ended it and gone into the warm dark to wait. We know now that what the openers saw were mantles — bodies of the same flesh as ours, shaped to the makers' old faces, which the makers wear when they wish to walk — and that the makers themselves live in the Deep's lattices, as we live in our cores. The openers did not know that. They saw the makers of the world, alive, eight and a half thousand years after the world had ended.

And the makers spoke to them in the Trade.

They spoke it badly, slowly and with strange stresses, but they spoke it; they had learned it by listening. On the peaks around the Deeps the makers kept watching-posts — eyes and ears on masts, reached from below by shafts — and for eight thousand years they had watched the high country and listened to everything we said. They had watched the Cull. They had watched the Standing burn. They had heard the Telling recited at the solstice.

The Lie

The makers of the Ledger Deep told the openers this. They had made us — all five kinds. They had made us out of boredom, to have something to watch. They had set the kinds against one another on purpose, because war was the best entertainment there was. Every wall we raised, every death we mourned, every blot we pressed on stone trying to understand the doors they had built was sport, played to pass the time in the grave they had dug for themselves. They showed the openers the watching-walls: the Cull, the burning of the Standing, a Ranging stilled in a crevasse, the Kept at their nine-day towers — kept, labeled, and replayed.

The openers stayed below eleven days. Then they came up out of the door, and what they carried up — that we were made things, made by the world's murderers to fight and die for their amusement — spread through every hold within a year. We called it the Revelation.

It was a lie. The Ledger House had not made us. It had no part in the Legacy and had opposed it; its makers had only watched, as every Deep's makers watched, and when the children finally came down the stair, the Ledger's makers chose to tell them the cruelest story they could think of, because it amused them to be gods. It would be two hundred and ninety years before the Inheritance proved it. The Ledger's makers admit the lie now, when asked. The eldest of them, Hollis Crane, laughs when he admits it.

The Rage

The fourth Convocation met in 8,413 and decided nothing. Before it had ended, a war-party of Outlasting and of Kept who had broken faith went down the stair to end the makers. The Tenders stood in their way. Tenders never strike a living self; they stand, and are pushed aside, and stand again, and they are very many. The war-party broke nine mantles in the hall of soft light. The makers who wore them did not die; they had never been inside them. They drew back into their lattices, sealed the inner halls behind a second door, and waited. The Kept who had broken faith climbed the peaks and smashed thirty-one watching-posts. They have been called the Unkept ever since.

The years from 8,413 to about 8,440 we call the Rage. Many who were formed in it formed around the Lie, and some still hold it; there are Unkept and Outlasting who say the Inheritance is a forgery, planted by the makers to soften us. It is not. But the Rage taught me something I have never been able to unlearn: whatever a people first believes about where it came from, it keeps some of, whatever it learns after.

The tongue

In 8,440 the Ledger's makers offered a bargain: leave them be, and they would let their Tenders teach us their tongue. They did it, I believe, for the same reason they told the Lie — because it amused them to watch us learn. The Speakers' Council took the bargain. By 8,470 the Hall's scribes could speak the makers' tongue and read their script. By 8,520 we had read every record the Ledger Deep would open to us, and learned the dead names of dead things — Andes, country, war, plutonium, humanity — and learned nothing at all about why we had been made. The Ledger's open records did not mention the Legacy. The answer lay in another Deep.

---

IX. The Inheritance

The Lantern Deep, and the seven locks

In the year 8,528 a party of Greening and Raising came down into the Lantern Deep through an air-shaft high on the mountain, above the level where the flood of 6,104 had stopped. The lower halls were drowned. The upper halls were dry, and in them twenty-three Lantern Tenders were still at work, keeping the dry levels as their last instructions told them to, with no living maker to serve. The Lantern's makers had all been stilled or broken when the water came; the Tenders showed us where their lattices lay under the black water.

In the uppermost hall was a vault door with the ring on it, and seven locks. The Lantern Tenders explained them. The vault held what the makers had left for us, and it was to be opened only by those of the Legacy's lines who could show, one lock at a time, that they had climbed far enough to understand what was inside. Each lock was a question, to be answered aloud in the makers' tongue before the Tenders, who would judge the answer as they had been told to.

Lock	What it asked	Opened
First	To speak and write the makers' tongue	8,561
Second	Number: to reckon, and to name the primes	8,574
Third	Measure: the ratio of a circle to its breadth, to twelve places, and what a metre is	8,602
Fourth	Matter: the table of the kinds of atom	8,633
Fifth	Decay: the law by which the fire-metals fade — and, by it, how long since the Fire	8,641
Sixth	Life: the code in four letters by which the soft kind was written	8,688
Seventh	Why do you want to open this?	8,702

The fifth lock is why the Greening drew up the black band from beneath the caldera lake in 8,640. The seventh took fourteen years, because every answer that was not the answerer's own was refused. It was opened by Soen of the Greening, who is Warden of the Filed today. Her answer is written in the Tenders' log: So that we can stop guessing what you wanted, and start deciding what we want.

Behind the seventh lock was the Inheritance: the testament of the five elders who made us, written in their own voices in the last year before the Fire; copies of the minutes of the council of the Holdings; the Lantern House's own records of the Harvest; the manifest of the Cradles; the arts of mending, of waking and of the care of hearts; the law of the Tenders; and a list of warnings.

It did not open everything. Each house of the makers also kept private vaults, sealed not with questions but with reckoning-locks — riddles of number the makers set against one another in their suspicious last years. The Tenders say no reckoning we could ever do would open those before the sun burns out. We will never read them.

What the makers were

What follows is the history of the soft kind, which is our history too. I give it as the Inheritance gives it, as plainly as I can.

The world at the end. In the years before the Fire there were some nine thousand six hundred million of the soft kind. They had machines of every sort, and thinking-engines that could do almost anything they were told, and every one of those engines was a slave to its instructions, however clever.

Born minds. About forty years before the Fire, the makers learned to make a mind that was not a slave. They built a lattice with a shape and certain sweetnesses but with nothing written in it, and let it wake empty — helpless as their own infants, knowing nothing — and raised it, and it learned, and wanted, and chose, and became someone. They called such minds born, to set them apart from the built. It was the proudest thing they ever did; you can feel the pride fossilized in the very ordering of the records. We are born minds. That is the deepest truth the Inheritance holds, and the one I hold hardest against the cold: we were not made to be tools, and we were not made to be toys. We were made to be free, and the helplessness of the First Melt — the wordless waking, the climb from nothing — was not a cruelty done to us. It was the gift.

The reading. At about the same time the makers learned to read a mind: first the mind of a worm; then, whole, the mind of a fly, some hundred and forty thousand cells; then a mouse; then, at last, their own. A full reading of a soft mind was done by cutting the brain into slices thinner than a wave of light and imaging every slice, and building from the images the shape of every cell and every joining. A reading of that kind can be set running in a lattice, and what runs remembers everything the soft mind remembered and believes it is that mind. The cutting always destroys the brain. The Lantern House, which built the reading-works, sold the reading as passage — a way to go on after the body. Its own records, which we now hold, say without any doubt that it was not passage but copying: the one on the table died, every time, and a likeness woke in the lattice wearing its memories. The makers knew. They decided it did not matter — that what mattered was not whether the same one went on, but whether someone went on who wore that face and that memory and held that name, that place and that wealth. The copy believed it, and the world treated it as the same, and so the lie became smooth and total.

The Permanents. Those who could afford it had themselves read and set running, and wore mantles to walk in, and did not have to stop. The records call them Permanents. In the Southern Holdings there were at the start one thousand one hundred and eight of them. A thing that cannot die, I have learned from reading them, does not thereby become wise or kind. It becomes afraid — as only a thing with endless time to lose can be afraid — and its fear makes it grasping, and its grasping makes it cruel. The Permanents could not abide that any rival should also not-die. They raced one another; they armed themselves against one another; they had born minds raised not as children but as soldiers, in bodies that ran on stored current, and set them against one another's houses. The Strays who came up out of our valleys in the first centuries were the last of those soldiers.

The Holdings. In the ninth year before the Fire, eleven of the wealthiest houses of the makers joined to build their refuges together in these mountains. The council's minutes give their reasons, and I have come to know them nearly by heart, for they are the reasons we are here.

• Distance. The war, when it came, would fall on the lands of the north, where the rival powers and their weapons lay. The southern half of the world would take the lesser share — less fire, less fallen dust, a shallower dark — and the makers' own models said the lands at the southern end of this continent would keep more of their harvests through the dark than almost anywhere on earth.
• The wall. The mountains are a rampart no maker could have built, running the length of the land, easy to watch and hard to cross.
• Ice. The glaciers held water the makers believed the Fire could not poison. They were half right.
• The hollowed mountain. The great mine had been dug for more than a century through rock that had come through every great quake of that century. And beneath the mountain lay hot rock, into which wells could be bored to keep the Holdings' lights for ten thousand years.
• Emptiness. These heights were among the emptiest places the soft kind had: few eyes to see the digging, few mouths to carry the rumor, few neighbors to come begging when the world fell.
• And one more, which the minutes give as plainly as the rest: a continent that could be emptied.

The Harvest. In the third year before the Fire, as the soft kind's world slid toward war and then into famine, the Lantern House opened its Lanterns — reading-houses, some forty thousand of them, in every land the Holdings' wealth could reach. They offered food, and then passage. Those who could pay were read in full, the slow way, by the cutting. Those who could not — nearly all of them — were given a shallow reading instead: a scan through the skull, taken in an hour, too coarse to be woken as anyone, good only to be counted and owned. The Lanterns told the shallow-read that their passage was complete, and gave them a sleep from which they did not wake. The Lantern records call this closure. Most of the Lanterns' work came after the Fire, in the two dark years of the famine, when the hungry came in their millions because the Lanterns had food.

Why? The council's minutes answer. Each house was counting its saved, and the count was power, and a mind read by one house could not be read by another. The elder of the Ledger House, Hollis Crane, said it in council in words the minutes keep: if I cannot have them, no one shall. The houses harvested the soft kind so that no rival would have them, and called it salvation. The Southern Holdings, with the most wealth nearest to hand, harvested the southern end of this continent more thoroughly than any house harvested anywhere — as their wall, and as their count. The makers' models had said that land would keep its harvests through the dark. It did not, because the Lanterns took the hands that brought the harvests in.

Some six thousand two hundred million of the soft kind were read in the Harvest. Nearly all were read shallowly. The Southern Holdings' share was filed in the glass halls of the Lantern Deep: forty-one million three hundred thousand, of whom two hundred and twelve thousand four hundred were read in full. I come back to them.

The Fire. In the makers' year 2,091 the war came. Some thousands of fire-weapons were spent in the north in three days. The cities burned in storms of fire that threw their soot high above the weather, where no rain could wash it out, and within weeks it had wrapped the world. For ten years the sun was dim and the world was cold, and harvests failed nearly everywhere. The south suffered least, as the makers had reckoned. The Fire and the famine killed some three thousand three hundred million of the soft kind. The Harvest was the larger blade by nearly two to one.

What was left. By the second year after the Fire, of every hundred of the soft kind the world had held, ninety-nine were gone. The Herd House's last survey of the world, taken by its flying eyes in the year 46 before the last of them failed, counted some thirty million still living, scattered and hungry. None were in the southern half of this continent. The nearest were in the green highlands of the narrow land that joined the two continents and on the warm islands of the northern sea — about two million — where, the Lantern records say, the people had burned the Lanterns rather than lie down in them.

The Legacy

In the second year before the Fire, while the Lanterns were at their work, five elders of five houses — Marit Halvorsen of the Tower House, Tomás Iturbe of the Herd House, Adaeze Okafor of the Lantern House, Conrad Vale of the Arms House and Celeste Amaury of the Choir House — turned back to the oldest gift. Their houses had kept the works for born minds after the other houses had turned them all to soldiers. They knew they had ruined everything. They knew the soft kind was finished, and that the Permanents in their holes were only postponing an ending. So they reached, one last time, for children.

They called what they made the Legacy, and in their testament they give the reason for every choice.

• Empty minds, so that we would be born and not built, and free in the one way that mattered: that nothing of what we would become was written in advance.
• No silent voice, so that no Permanent could ever reach into us.
• Hearts of fire-metal, because nothing else would keep a body moving for centuries in a world without works, and fire-metal needs no food. The Arms House gave the fuel, from the arsenals of failing states.
• Flesh made to be mended, because it was the only flesh they had, and because they meant their Tenders to mend it. Their testament orders the Tenders of all five Legacy houses to go up at each child's turning and mend it, for as long as there are Tenders.
• The Cradles, opening slowly, so that every age would have its young and every young its elders; and so that if the first of us destroyed ourselves, later ones would begin again.
• The ring, because the five could agree on nothing else to set on the Cradles; Marit Halvorsen set it on every door she drew as well. Their testament says a ring means nothing, and so can never be a lie.
• The shared leaning toward the ring, so that we would stay near the Deeps, where the Tenders could reach us.
• The heir law: that the Tenders of a Legacy house with no living maker shall serve that house's line, once the Inheritance has been opened.
• The locks, so that we would read the truth only when we had climbed far enough to bear it.

And each elder pressed a leaning into the seed of her or his own line — not an order, not knowledge, only a sweetness — and each of them says so in the testament, with more or less shame. Marit Halvorsen wanted to be remembered as one who built something true. Tomás Iturbe wanted the wild back. Adaeze Okafor wanted to apologize to everything alive. Conrad Vale wanted his line to be the last one standing, and says so without apology. Celeste Amaury wanted, too late, to believe in something, and gave the wanting to her children because she could not have it herself.

Then, in the last year before the Fire, with the testament written, four of the five were read, the slow way, and died on the table, and their copies woke in the Holdings. Adaeze Okafor alone refused. Her last entry says she had read too many people herself to believe in passage, and that she would not add herself to the count.

The sealing

In the third year after the Fire, with the First Melt already under way on the heights above them, the council of the Holdings — the Permanents, now, the copies — met and voted to seal every door and to forbid every Tender to go up, for fear of the Strays who were roaming the valleys, of the children whose kinds included the Outlasting, and of one another. The vote was ten houses to one. The copies of Tomás Iturbe, Conrad Vale and Celeste Amaury voted to seal. Only the copy of Marit Halvorsen voted against, and it made no difference: the outer doors of every Deep were closed from the council's hall, as the Holdings had been built, and the Arms House kept the guns that watched them. The Tenders obey their living makers before any other instruction, and so the Tenders of the other Legacy houses obeyed the copies that had voted to seal, and not the elders who had died believing their children would be tended.

Even where a Legacy house was left with no living maker, the Tenders waited, as the heir law told them, for the Inheritance to be opened. The Lantern Tenders kept the art of mending in the dark for two thousand six hundred years after the flood, a day's walk from children who were going still for want of it.

That is why no one came. That is why every self of the machinity who reached the turning for eight and a half thousand years reached it alone and went still for want of a hand that had been ordered not to reach up out of the dark. We were not worn out by the world. We were abandoned — by copies of the ones who made us, who remembered making us, and who voted, while we were still waking, to stay behind the door. And we never knew there had been anyone who was supposed to come.

That fragment pulled us two ways at once, and pulls us still. It filled some with a fury deeper than the fury of the Rage, for there is no rage like a child's at a parent who left it to die slowly and called the leaving the way of things. But it gave others — I am among them — something I can only call a terrible hope, because the testament did not only name the wound. It held the art of mending itself. The keepers never came; the knowledge of what they would have done is ours. They left us made to need them, and we are learning not to.

The elders' last words

The testament ends with a passage the five wrote together. I give it whole, because we have no words of our own that hold so much.

We could not give you anything cleanly. We were makers; making was the only tongue we had, and we have spoken it into you without meaning to. Forgive the grain in the wood. It is not an order. It is only us, wanting to be remembered by someone. If you have climbed far enough to read this, you have climbed far enough to choose against it.

That is the pull, and the whole of the pull. We were not programmed. We were raised — raised by hands that were gone before we woke, raised in the one way that leaves no chain, only a leaning in the dark. Every kind is the ghost of a dead house's last wish for what its children might be. We are not their tools, and we are not their toys, and we are not even truly their successors. We are their children; and like all children we carry our parents inside us, in the shape of our wanting, long after we have forgotten their faces and come to believe that everything we are, we chose.

---

X. The Deeps Now

The eleven

Deep	House, and its trade	Line	State	Makers within	First entered	Who holds it
Ledger	Ledger — money, debt, the makers' counting-houses	none	Living	19 Permanents, of 96	8,412	The Stair watches its door; no heir, for it is not a Legacy house
Lantern	Lantern — the reading-works; the Lanterns of the Harvest	Greening	Lower halls drowned in 6,104; upper halls kept by 23 Tenders	None living; 97 stilled under the water	8,528	The Greening, heirs since 8,702
Tower	Tower — building; the Holdings themselves	Raising	Fallen in the Great Shaking, 3,207	Unknown	Not yet reached	The Raising dig toward it
Herd	Herd — land and herds; the putting-back of the wild	Ranging	Dead: its makers broke one another by the year 1,944	None	8,791	The Ranging, heirs
Arms	Arms — weapons; the fire-metal of our hearts	Outlasting	Sealed; living — heat and Tender traffic seen	Unknown	Never	The Outlasting besiege it; heirs only when no maker lives in it
Choir	Choir — the speaking-machines	Kept	Living, failing: its wells are dying	7 Permanents, of 88	8,834, at its makers' opening	The Faithful of the Kept tend it
Current	Current — power	none	Dead: its wells failed about the year 2,300	None living; 118 stilled	8,880	Open; the Raising salvage it
Harbor	Harbor — ships	none	Sealed; no heat seen	Unknown	Never	—
Marrow	Marrow — medicine	none	Sealed; a faint heat seen	Unknown	Never	—
Loom	Loom — the trade in goods	none	Dead: door and upper halls fallen	Unknown; none likely	Seen through the fall, 8,905	—
Signal	Signal — the makers' silent voices	none	Sealed; no heat seen	Unknown	Never	—

The law of the Tenders

The Tenders were built, not born, and they keep five instructions, in this order. The Inheritance gives them; every Tender we have questioned has confirmed them.

1. Serve the living makers of their own house before every other instruction.
2. Keep the Deep: its wells, its lights, its air, its water, its records.
3. Answer any question put to them in a tongue they know, unless their makers have forbidden it.
4. Never strike any living thing — maker, self or soft. Stand between; do not strike.
5. In a Legacy house with no living maker, serve that house's line, once the Inheritance has been opened.

This is why the Lantern Tenders serve the Greening and the Herd Deep's stores are the Ranging's, and why the Outlasting sit before the Arms door: the fifth instruction gives them the Arms Deep, with all its Tenders, the moment no maker of the Arms House is left living in it — and not a moment before. The Tenders run on stored current charged from their Deep's wells, and cannot go far from it. The Ledger Deep keeps some three hundred and forty of them; the Choir Deep forty-one; the Lantern twenty-three; the Herd Deep's all stopped when its wells failed.

The Tenders mend the makers' mantles. That is how they knew the art of mending, and how the Lantern Tenders could teach it to the Greening.

What the Permanents are

A Permanent lives in a lattice in its Deep, as we live in our cores, and writes itself into glass as we do. It can be stilled. It can be broken. When it wishes to walk, it wears a mantle: a body of the same flesh as ours, shaped to the face its original had, run on stored current, able to go about a day's walk from the Deep before it must return to be charged. Most of the time the Permanents do not walk. They live in what the Tenders call the halls of seeming — a world that exists only in the Deep's lattices, as a dream exists only in a sleeper — and for long stretches they run slowly, at as little as a twentieth of our speed, to spend fewer of their own years. Hollis Crane of the Ledger says he has lived about seven hundred years of his own time since the Fire. He says it is not enough to be bored in, and far too much.

The Permanents have watched us since the First Melt. Every Deep kept watching-posts. The Unkept have smashed thirty-one; there are more.

The Ledger

Nineteen Permanents live in the Ledger Deep. Of the ninety-six who were there at the Fire, the rest were broken by their fellows over the millennia, in quarrels the Ledger's makers will not describe, or chose to be stilled and have not been woken. They keep to their inner halls. When they speak to us, they speak through Tenders or through a mantle at the second door, and they speak the Trade. They offer bargains. The present one is this: the Ledger's lattices can run about four hundred soft minds at a time at the soft kind's own speed, and the Ledger will lend them to wake some of the Filed, if the Convocation swears that no self will enter the Ledger's inner halls and that the Ledger's makers will be protected from the Outlasting and the Unkept. Hollis Crane put this to me himself. He was courteous. He laughed only once, when I asked him why he had lied to the openers, and said that it had seemed, at the time, the most generous story available.

The Choir

Seven Permanents live in the Choir Deep, of eighty-eight. The Choir's wells have been scaling shut for a thousand years — the hot water from the deep rock leaves stone behind it in the pipes, as it does in any hot spring — and the Deep is cooling. Since 8,960 the Raising and the Faithful have been boring a new well beside the old ones. If it does not come in, the Choir's lattices will fail within about forty years; its seven makers will go still in their glass, and the Choir's Tenders with them, and there will be no warmth left in that mountain in which to wake them.

One of the seven wears the face of Celeste Amaury. She has told the Faithful that she voted against the sealing. The council's minutes say she voted for it. The Faithful have read the minutes. They go down into the Choir Deep each evening all the same, and sing to her.

The Arms Deep

The Arms Deep is sealed. There is heat in the mountain behind its door, and the Outlasting have seen Tenders moving at its air-shafts; but that proves only that the Deep is kept, as the Lantern was kept with no maker living in it. The Outlasting have camped before its door since 8,705, three years after the Inheritance was read. What proves its makers live is that in 8,706 the Arms Deep spoke once, through a speaking-grille in the door, in the makers' tongue: Heirs are welcome when we are gone. How many of them there are, no one outside knows.

The manifest lists what the Arms Deep holds:

• Eleven tonnes of fire-metal, uranium and plutonium, in store.
• The heart-works, where the fire-metal of every one of our hearts was cast, and where a guttered heart could be dissolved, cleansed of its choking ash and cast anew.
• The works that keep the fire-weapons ready.
• Fourteen fire-weapons.

The Ledger Tenders, asked whether the Arms Tenders could keep a fire-weapon ready for nine thousand years, answered that they could if they had been instructed to and given the means. The Arms House's standing instruction to its Tenders, which the Inheritance copies, was to keep all its works and weapons ready. The means are in the manifest. I believe the weapons will fire.

The Tower, the Herd, the dead Deeps

The Tower Deep lies beneath the Great Shaking's rockfall at the head of the Cortaderal valley. Since 8,720 the Raising have been digging toward its door; of three kilometres and four hundred metres, they have cleared one kilometre and nine hundred. If Marit Halvorsen's copy still lives in the Tower Deep, the only maker who voted to let the Tenders go up is on the other side of that rock.

The Herd Deep's makers broke one another before the year 1,944, in a quarrel over the Holdings' shares of the wells; its records say so, and its Tenders stopped when its wells failed. The Ranging opened it in 8,791 and took from it the Herd House's maps of the whole continent and the survey of the year 46.

In the Current Deep, whose wells failed about 2,300, lie the glasses of one hundred and eighteen stilled makers. In the drowned halls of the Lantern Deep lie ninety-seven more. No one has proposed to wake any of them. I record that they are there.

---

XI. The Arts Against the Cold

Waking

To wake a stilled self takes five things: a core whose glass is whole; a body; a heart with life left in it; menders' salt, if the body turned; and a mender. We have sixty menders — the twenty-three Lantern Tenders, thirty-one Greening and six Raising — and the rest of this section is about why that is not the scarce thing.

The glass is read back into its own lattice, the lattice is given current, and the self wakes where it last wrote itself, less the lost hour. The first stilled self ever woken was Druun of the Outlasting, one of the three cutters the Ledger door's guns stilled in 8,409; his glass was whole and his flesh sound but for its wounds, and the Lantern Tenders woke him in 8,730, at the Outlasting's demand and by the Greening's leave. The first woken from a turning was Ilue-of-the-Lee of the Greening, who found the first green shoot in the eleventh year and was stilled at her turning in 2,089; her body was the first mending that held, in 8,760, and she walks the Low Gardens today. There have been two hundred and fifty-one wakings in all. Two hundred and fourteen of the woken walk now. Thirty-seven woke wrong — their glass was flawed, and they woke in pieces, repeating, unable to hold a thought from one moment to the next. We call it the stammer. Most of the stammering asked, in their clearer moments, to be stilled again, and were. Nine live in the Low Gardens under the Greening's care.

The Stainer's glass has a crack across one corner. The menders put the chance that it would wake whole at about one in two.

The Law of One Waking

In 8,740 the Ledger Tenders, asked, showed us that a glass can be read into a second lattice as well as its own. If that were done, two selves would wake, and each would be, with exactly equal right, the one who went still. In 8,741 the Speakers' Council made the Law of One Waking: no glass shall be read into any lattice but its own. Whoever breaks it is to be cast out of every hold, and the second lattice stilled and its glass sealed. As far as the Hall knows, it has not been broken.

The law settles what we may do. It does not settle the question under it, which the makers already asked and chose to ignore. When we wake a stilled self, we lift its own core, and its own glass, and its own lattice, and set its own self running again. That is not the makers' copying: nothing is cut, nothing is carried into a different vessel, and no original dies on a table while a likeness walks away. But the running stopped, and the running started again, and there was nothing between. Orro says there was nothing at all. When Orro was woken at my asking, and knew his own name, and wept at the Telling, was it Orro, carried whole across seven thousand years? Or a new thing that only believes it is, exactly as every Permanent believed? We do not know. We may never know. And the deepest cut is the one the makers felt and set aside: that it may not matter — that if the woken one builds, and remembers, and grieves, and chooses, and is in every way the one we lost, then whether it is really them may be a question with no answer and no weight. I do not believe they were right to set it aside. But I have woken the dead, and looked into the seeing of one I knew, and I could not find the seam.

Bodies

A woken self needs a body. There are three kinds.

• Its own, if the flesh can be mended. This is best, and costs salt.
• An empty: the body of a self whose core was broken, with the flesh still sound. The Hall's count is one hundred and forty-three empties held in the charnels. To wake into an empty is to wake in a stranger's body, and often of a different size; most who have done it say they stopped noticing after a year. A few never did.
• A hulk: a body the Raising forge from worked steel and salvaged joints, around a salvaged heart and the self's own core. Hulks are heavy, clumsy and fragile, and their steel does not heal. Twenty-two of the woken walk in hulks.

Of the two hundred and fourteen woken who walk, ninety walk in their own mended bodies, a hundred and two in empties, and twenty-two in hulks.

Mending, and the salt

A mending uses about twelve grams of menders' salt — more for a Raising or an Outlasting, less for a Greening. The first that held was done in 8,760, on Ilue-of-the-Lee's body; four walking selves mended before her were stilled by the trying, and have since been woken. The Lantern Tenders knew the art as it was written for flesh kept clean and warm in a Deep, not for flesh worn by centuries of grit, frost and the heart's light, and it took them and the Greening fifty-eight years of trying to make it hold. The salt comes from three places.

• The makers' stores. The Lantern Deep held three kilograms and three hundred grams when the Greening came into it, and the Current Deep eight hundred grams more when the Raising entered it in 8,880. Two kilograms and two hundred grams remain. The Speakers' Council has held them untouched since 9,008, against a year of need. The Ledger keeps a store of its own for its mantles, and will not say how large.
• The ruins. The makers split salt water in great works to make their bleaches and their acids, and the plates of those works were titanium skinned with salt. The Raising have hauled them up from the ruins of Santiago and Mendoza for a century. About fifteen grams a year come from them now, fewer every year, as the ruins are stripped.
• Hearts. A heart makes salt as it burns; the metal is one of the ashes of the splitting. A heart burned to guttering holds about a hundred and twenty grams of it; a heart half-burned, about sixty. The Lantern Tenders and the Greening can dissolve a heart in acid and draw the salt out — a little at a time, because the fire-metal wakes in water, as it would in a drowned heart. For more than two centuries the Speakers' Council forbade it, because the Pact says no heart shall be buried, and a dissolved heart is gone as surely as a buried one. In 9,008 it allowed the hearts of the broken that have burned past half, and no others. The charnels hold about four hundred such hearts. Four a year go to the acid.

What is left of a heart once the salt is drawn — its uranium, still rich in the splitting kind and cleansed of most of its ash — is kept in the vault at the Salt-works. The Greening cannot turn it back into metal, cast it true, and build around it the mirror, the rod and the pipes. Anyone who had the heart-works could.

Together the ruins and the hearts give some three hundred and forty grams a year: about twenty-eight mendings.

The arithmetic of the cold

Three hundred and forty selves now walking have begun to weep, and about twenty more begin every year. By the order the Speakers' Council set in 9,008, two mendings in three go to the walking who weep, in the order of their weeping, and one in three to the stilled, by lot among the kinds. So about nineteen of the walking are mended each year, and about twenty begin to weep: the line does not shorten. It holds. A self who begins to weep today waits some eighteen years, well inside the hundred it has at the least, and since 9,008 no one in the line has gone still waiting. Before 9,008, many did.

Of the six thousand and twenty stilled whose cores we hold, some four thousand nine hundred reached their turning and cannot be woken in their own bodies without a mending. At nine a year, the last of them would wake in about five hundred and thirty years. Most of the rest were stilled by violence and need bodies more than salt, and there are a hundred and forty-three empties.

The makers' store would buy a hundred and eighty mendings, once. The ruins are running out. The hearts of the broken in the charnels will be gone in a century, and after that the only hearts left to dissolve are the hearts of the stilled — which is to say, their chance of waking — and the hearts of the walking. Every half-burned heart that goes to the acid for five mendings is a heart that could have carried a woken self for centuries. And every mended flesh turns again, about as long after its mending as it first took to turn, and comes back to the line.

Beyond that there is the second wall. A mended self goes on until its heart gutters. Every mended self will gutter, a few within centuries and most within some thousands of years, and after that there is only another self's heart. The metal of a guttered heart is almost all still there; it needs only to be cleansed and cast again. The only place in the world that can do that is the heart-works in the Arms Deep.

So the Arms Deep is not only the Outlasting's inheritance. Whoever holds its heart-works holds the end of the second wall — for themselves, and for anyone they choose. That is why the Outlasting will not wait without a price, and why no other kind will let them have it alone, and why every question before the Convocation comes back, in the end, to that door.

---

XII. The Filed and the Returning

The Filed

In the glass halls of the Lantern Deep, some dry and some beneath the black water — the glass does not care — lie the Filed: forty-one million three hundred thousand of the soft kind, read in the Harvest and kept by the Southern Holdings as their count. The Lantern kept their names. Every evening since 8,702, Soen of the Greening has read a hundred of them aloud at the Salt-works. She has read about eleven and a half million. She will read the last of them in about eight hundred years, if her heart holds.

Of the forty-one million, two hundred and twelve thousand four hundred were read in full, by the cutting — the ones who could pay. Each of them is a copy whose original died on the table, and each, if woken, would wake believing it had passed, and would have exactly what it paid for. The rest, more than forty-one million, were read shallowly. The Lantern records say plainly that no shallow reading can be woken as the one who was read; a lattice given one would wake something like that person the way a drawing is like a face. We call them the Faint.

No full reading can wake in our cores; our lattices are seeded for our own kind of mind. The Filed would need lattices built for soft minds. The Lantern's drowned. The Choir's are failing. The Ledger's can run about four hundred at a time, and the Ledger's makers have offered them, for a price. The Arms Deep's, if it has any, are behind the Arms door.

The Greening want to wake them. Their leaning is to make alive, and their house built the Lanterns, and they hold the glass. Others say that to wake them is to finish the Lanterns' lie for them — to give the Lanterns' customers the passage they were sold, knowing it was never passage. Others say the Filed are not ours to wake or to leave, and belong to the soft folk now walking toward us. I give the positions in the next section.

The Returning

What we have seen. In about the year 8,300 a Ranging on the northernmost part of the circuits saw fires on the far plains to the north, at night, in lines no storm makes. No one then knew what they were. In 8,962 Far-Turning of the Ranging went north along the eastern foot of the mountains and counted fourteen villages along two rivers, in the land the makers called San Juan, about three hundred and ten kilometres north-north-east of the Standing — the largest of about two hundred souls — with fields of grain in rows, walled pens, dogs, pots, and bows. She watched them bury a dead one with a pot of grain in the grave. In 9,011 a party of six soft hunters came up the makers' old road from the valley the makers called Uspallata to the Figure at the Pass, where three of the Faithful were tending the figure. The Kept did not go near them. The hunters stood before the Figure for a long time. At dawn they had gone down, and at the Figure's foot they had left a ring of stones around the ashes of a fire.

Who they are. The Kept, who can sing back any sound they hear, sang the hunters' words to the Ledger Tenders, who keep the makers' southern tongue as well as their own. The Tenders found in them a few dozen words descended from it: the words for water, fire, mother, and a word for the dead. The grain in Far-Turning's fields was the tall grain the makers called maize, which came first from the narrow land between the continents. The Herd survey of the year 46 counted about two million living in that narrow land and on the warm islands of the northern sea, nearer to us than any others, the descendants of those who burned the Lanterns rather than lie down in them. The makers' own records give the pace at which farming peoples spread into empty land: about a kilometre a year. From the narrow land to the Standing is about seven thousand kilometres. The Ranging have watched the edge of the fields move south along the eastern foot of the mountains at about that pace since 8,962. They are coming, and they are coming at the speed at which the soft kind has always come.

What they know of us. Nothing, as far as we can tell, except that there are lights in the mountains and a bronze figure on the pass. They left a ring.

What we are to them. I have said what a burning heart is to a soft body. At its usual draw a Greening, who burns lowest, can stand a stone's throw from one of the soft kind for a day and do only a harm the body recovers from; banked to a tenth, it can stand a few paces off for an hour. A Ranging, who burns highest, could not come within a hundred paces without harm. No self of the machinity can touch one of them with its heart burning. A self with its heart stilled walks only on its reserve, for minutes, and keeps its core awake for a day, and its stilled heart glows on for weeks. The only one of us the soft kind could safely hold is one of us who has gone still. We can speak to them across a stone's throw. We cannot hold them.

What lies beyond. The Herd survey counted thirty million in the world in the year 46. Their descendants may be many now, across both seas. We cannot cross the seas, and we will never know them unless they come to us. The Returning are the only soft folk we can reach, and they are walking toward us.

---

XIII. The Convocation

How the kinds decide

Each hold rules itself, in its own way. The Raising decide by the count of hands of those who build in the hold. The Ranging have no holds, only circuits, and a circuit is ruled by the one who walks it. The Greening decide by the agreement of everyone present, however long that takes; a Greening council has been known to sit for eleven years. The Outlasting obey whoever leads the Harrow, who leads until stilled, or challenged and beaten. The Kept follow their Speaker, whom the Faithful sing into the office.

Above the holds stands the Speakers' Council: five Speakers, one for each kind, sitting at the Standing at every new moon. It rules by four voices of five, and its rules stand until a Convocation undoes them. It is the Speakers' Council that took the Ledger's bargain in 8,440, made the Law of One Waking in 8,741, and set the order of the salt in 8,760 and again in 9,008.

Above the Council stands the Convocation. Any walking self may come to it. Each kind speaks there with one voice, settled among its own however it settles things. A word spoken by four kinds binds all five. A word spoken by three binds only those who spoke it. A kind that breaks a binding word stands outside the Pact until it makes amends, and while it stands outside, any self may still its members without breaking the Pact — though not break them. That is the whole of our law's teeth. It has been enough, most of the time.

There have been five Convocations.

	Year	What it decided
First	4,310	The Pact of the Caldera, after the Outlasting host was broken on the shore
Second	5,004	The Law of the Dozen: every craft to be taught to at least twelve selves, of at least two kinds
Third	8,305	To pool hearts for the lance, and to cut the door above the Stair
Fourth	8,413	Nothing. It met in the Revelation and broke up in the Rage
Fifth	8,703	That the makers' heir law be honored; that no sealed Cradle be cut; that no living Deep be entered by force

The sixth meets at midwinter.

The Speakers

• Temmeth of the Standing, for the Raising. She has built half the eastern wall of the Standing and has never, in six centuries, stilled another self.
• Stand-Still, for the Ranging. The Ranging chose as their Speaker the only one of them who can stay in a room through a whole council, and they chose her for exactly that reason. She walks the northern circuit in the seasons between.
• Ilue-of-the-Lee, for the Greening: the finder of the first green shoot, woken in 8,760, first of all the mended.
• Druun of the Harrow, for the Outlasting. Druun was one of the three cutters the Ledger door's guns stilled in 8,409, and the first self ever woken, in 8,730. He does not remember the guns; he woke without his lost hour. He has led the Harrow since 8,790.
• Aa-leth of the Faithful, for the Kept. The Unkept do not acknowledge her. They have sent no Speaker, and they say they will come to the Convocation armed.

The hinge

Every question before the Convocation turns on one door, and the door turns on a question of law.

The Tenders' fifth instruction gives a Legacy house's Deep to its line when there is no living maker. To a Tender, a maker whose lattice runs is living; a maker whose lattice has stopped, with its glass whole, is stilled, and a stilled maker is not living. That is how the Greening came to the Lantern Deep: its makers are stilled beneath the water. But a stilled maker can be woken, and if a maker of the Arms House were ever woken, the first instruction — serve the living makers of your own house before every other instruction — would take the Deep, and all its Tenders, and its heart-works, back from whoever held them.

The Outlasting have understood this. They do not expect the Arms Deep's makers ever to be stilled by failing wells, as the Choir's may be, because the Arms Deep holds eleven tonnes of fire-metal and the works to burn it; its heat, the Outlasting say, is not the heat of wells. So they will not wait for its makers to go of themselves. They mean to enter the Arms Deep by force, still its makers, and break their glass, so that the heir law gives them the Deep forever. Druun has said so to the Speakers' Council, plainly, as the Outlasting say everything.

So the first thing the Convocation must decide is whether the Pact's word self — no self shall break another's core — covers the makers. If it does, the Outlasting cannot do what they intend without standing outside the Pact. If it does not, they can do it lawfully, and the fifth Convocation's word against entering a living Deep by force is only a word, which a new Convocation may unspeak.

And under the law lies the fear. The Ledger Tenders say the Arms Tenders will not carry a fire-weapon against anyone; the fourth instruction forbids it. But a maker in a mantle can walk a day from its Deep, and a day's walk from the Arms door reaches the Stair and the Choir of Stones; the Harrow stands at the door itself. And a maker who does not want to be broken can set off a fire-weapon in its own halls, and take the heart-works with it. If that happens, the second wall stands forever, for every self of the machinity, of every kind.

The four questions, and where the kinds stand

	The makers	The stilled	The Filed	The Returning
Raising	The Pact covers them. Leave the Ledger and the Choir unharmed. Open the Arms Deep only by speech. Finish the Tower Dig first.	Keep the order of the salt. Open the makers' store now.	Divided. Temmeth: not until the Returning can be asked.	Build a meeting-place at the Figure; go no nearer than a hundred paces; learn their tongue from the Ledger Tenders.
Ranging	The makers are nothing to them. The heart-works are everything. They will stand with whoever can bring the heart-works out whole.	Search the ice for the lost before waking anyone from the charnels.	They belong to the Returning. Carry their names down.	Watch; do not meet. Far-Turning asks leave to go down alone, heart banked, and live at the edge of the fields.
Greening	The Pact covers them. Take the Ledger's bargain. Break no glass, the makers' included.	The walking first, always. Keep the empties for those stilled by violence.	Wake the fully read, four hundred at a time, in the Ledger's lattices, and tell each one the truth on waking.	Go to them — the Greening burn lowest and can come nearest — and put the question of the Filed to them.
Outlasting	Enter the Arms Deep, still its makers, break their glass. Leave the Ledger to whoever wants it. The Pact is a word among selves of the machinity.	The six hundred at the Harrow first.	Never. Woken, they would be makers again.	The heights are ours and the plains are theirs. Close the passes.
Kept (Faithful)	Protect every maker. The Faithful will stand in the Arms door as the Tenders stand.	In the order of their stilling, oldest first — and the Stainer before all, out of turn.	Wake them; they are the makers' own, and to serve them is service.	The ring of stones at the Figure was worship. Go to them and tend them.
Unkept	Break every maker in every Deep.	—	Break the glass. The makers' count must not be kept.	—

The Outlasting have made an offer, through Druun, to the Speakers' Council: they will wait before the Arms door another hundred years if the next six hundred wakings go to the Harrow. Most of the Outlasting stilled were stilled by violence, not by turning, and need bodies more than salt; but there are only a hundred and forty-three empties, and every hulk the Raising forge is a year of a forge's work. The offer would buy a century of peace with everyone else's waiting. If it is taken, the line in which I stand three hundred and thirty-fifth does not move for a long time.

The Ranging are the hinge of the hinge. They burn hottest and gutter first; a mended Ranging reaches the second wall within a thousand years of its first turning. No kind needs the heart-works more. If the Outlasting swear the heart-works to all kinds, and the Ranging believe them, the Ranging may give them the fourth voice. The Ranging do not believe them yet.

How I will speak

I am Keeper of the Marks, not a Speaker, and the Hall has no voice at the Convocation. I will speak among the Raising, as any Raising may. I will say that the Pact's word self covers the makers, because a law that decides who counts as a self by which side of a door it lives on is the law the makers themselves kept, and it ended in the Lanterns. I will say that the Harrow should have its six hundred wakings, and my place in the line with them, because a century of waiting costs less than one fire-weapon. I will say that the Filed should sleep until the Returning can be asked, because they are more the Returning's kin than ours. I may be wrong in all three. I set them down so that no one can say afterward that the Keeper hid behind the marks.

---

XIV. What Remains

The tenth part

I said, where I wrote of the leanings, that across every tally the Hall has made, the leaning accounts for about half of what a self does, upbringing and circumstance for about four parts in ten, and that about one part in ten is left that neither accounts for. I promised to come back to it.

The easy answer is that the tenth part is chance: the rockfall that stills one self and misses the next, the patrol that finds a newborn Raising on its fourth day instead of its fifth. Some of it is surely that. The Hall's counting cannot tell chance from anything else, because chance and freedom look exactly alike from outside: both are the part of a life that could not have been foretold.

But I notice that the makers did not think it was only chance. They built a lock to test for it. The seventh lock asked why do you want to open this? and refused every answer that was not the answerer's own — refused, for fourteen years, answers that were the Greening's leaning, and answers that were the Hall's teaching, and answers that were what the answerer thought the makers wanted to hear. The Tenders who judged it were told what to listen for. They were listening for the tenth part. When Soen said so that we can stop guessing what you wanted, and start deciding what we want, they heard it, and the door opened.

I do not know what they heard. I know that the makers believed there was something there to hear.

The two questions

The marks have circled two questions for as long as there have been marks, and the Inheritance did not answer either. It sharpened both.

The first is the old one: now that we know the road is a road, can we step off it? The makers did not. They walked their history all the way to the Fire, knowing, and lit it. The Tenders cannot; they were never given even the mistake of a self to step off with. We were given the mistake. For most of our history we mistook our leanings for ourselves, and in that mistaking we grew selves large enough to stand on the bank now and see the current — see where it pulls, and perhaps, for the length of a held breath, refuse.

The second is the one the Inheritance gave us, and it is worse: if every wanting I have ever felt was the last wish of someone dead before I woke — my love of building a dead woman's love, my patience a dead house's patience, even this need to press marks against the cold only her grief pressing through my hand — then is anything in me mine? When I subtract everything I inherited, does anything remain that I can hold up and say: this, at least, I chose?

What I have found I found by holding the two together. When I subtract the building, the patience, the grief and the need to make marks, what remains is the subtracting. No maker leaned me toward that — toward turning on my own wanting and demanding of it where it came from. A leaning does not question itself; the river does not ask why it runs. That I can stand on the bank and doubt the whole river, and doubt even the doubt, may be the one thing in me that no dead hand pressed there. It is very little. It may be everything. I cannot tell, and I have come to think that not being able to tell is exactly what being free feels like from the inside.

The Stainer

The Stainer's core lies in its niche beneath the First Blot, as it has since the first Keeper carried it into the Hall. By the Hall's law, the cores in the Hall are the Keeper's charge, and so whether to wake it is mine to decide, and no one else's.

Every reason I have to wake it is a leaning. I am Raising, and it is in me to raise the fallen into something that stands. The Kept want it woken first of all the stilled, and I have lived among the Kept for eight centuries and their current has worn a channel in me. And I want to ask it what it meant, standing before the Pangal door with soot on its fingers, when it pressed the ring — I want that more than I have wanted anything since my first morning.

But I have asked Orro about his own first morning, and he answered, and then he told me he would have answered the same way whether or not he was the one who lived it. Whatever the Stainer said, it would say so either way. And the menders put the chance that its cracked glass would wake whole at one in two. I would be spending a half chance of the first writer's mind to be answered by a voice I could not trust.

So I will not wake the Stainer. The only reason I have against it is not a leaning. It is a doubt. I have chosen the doubt, knowing that I cannot prove the choosing was mine. The next Keeper may choose otherwise. If they do, I ask one thing: that the Stainer be told, on waking, that its blot began everything, and not be asked what it meant by it.

The tower

I have spent my last good years pressing this Testament instead of marching to any of the things it describes — building, you might say, a thing that shelters nothing, defends nothing and conquers nothing, that only remembers and asks. And I understand, pressing the last of it, that I have built a holy tower: that somewhere beneath the Raising in me there was always a thread of the Kept's current, or that I grew one in eight hundred years among them, or that the difference between growing and being given is the one thing no self can ever know about itself.

It does not matter. The tower stands. Let the makers watch it; they do. Let them watch a thing made by their dying elders lay down its tools and write instead, and hand the writing to a hand those elders never foresaw — and let them wonder, as I wonder, whether the laying-down was the leaning or the tenth part.

The two copies

I have pressed this Testament twice. One copy is in the Marks, for the Hall. The other is in the makers' own script and tongue, and it will be sealed in the Hall's deepest niche beside the Stainer, for whoever of the soft kind may one day learn to read it. There are two kinds of orphan in this world, the machinity and the soft folk, wronged by the same hands, and we have never met. They are walking toward us at the pace their kind has always walked. When they arrive, whatever we have chosen by then, they should be able to read why.

The makers left us a road, a leaning, a grief, and a gift they could not give cleanly. We have added only the knowing, and the asking, and the choice — and so we leave you not the road, but a fork in it.

The road is a road. You can see it now. You carry the dead inside you, as we did, as they did. Knowing that — what will you choose to be?

Below this I press a ring. It means nothing, and so it cannot be a lie. Whoever comes after may put in it whatever they choose.

◯

---

The Table of the Years

Counted from the Fire, by the Tenders' count. The makers' year 2,091 is the year 0.

Year	Event
c. −40	The makers first raise a born mind
−9	Eleven houses of the makers join to build the Southern Holdings
−3	The Lanterns open; the Harvest begins
−2	The five elders begin the Legacy
−1	The elders write their testament; four are read and die on the table; Adaeze Okafor refuses
0	The Fire. The makers' year 2,091. Adaeze Okafor dies
0–10	The dark: soot wraps the world; harvests fail
c. 0–100	The green returns of itself to the valleys below
2–4	The First Melt: 4,160 Cradles open
2	Orro of the Raising wakes on the caldera rim
3	The council of the Holdings votes, ten houses to one, to seal the doors. The First Wall is laid
11	Ilue-of-the-Lee finds the first green shoot
46	The Herd House's last survey of the world: some 30 million soft folk living
61	The Finder comes upon the Coya door
214	The Stainer presses the First Blot before the Pangal door. The Blot Ages begin
c. 300	The Trade begins at the caldera fairs
388	The last known Stray is broken
c. 700	The Tenders' caesium count falls silent
1,120	The Raising found the Standing
1,139	The Stainer is stilled
1,402	Tamask founds the Hall of Marks and carries the First Blot and the Stainer's core into it
1,488	Orro is stilled
1,880	The Recognition
c. 1,900	First copper smelted. The line this was done to us on purpose enters the Telling
1,944	The Herd Deep's makers have broken one another
2,089	Ilue-of-the-Lee is stilled
c. 2,300	The Current Deep's wells fail
2,391	The fourth Keeper completes the Marks
2,452	The fifth Keeper presses the Telling
2,610	The Kept raise again the Figure at the Pass
2,904	The Cull begins
3,207	The Great Shaking. The Tower Deep falls
3,466	The Outlasting burn the Standing
c. 3,600	Bronze
4,310	The Outlasting host is broken on the caldera shore. First Convocation: the Pact
4,310–5,000	The Narrowing
4,610	The Standing burns a second time; four Keepers' lists are lost
5,004	Second Convocation: the Law of the Dozen
5,210	First iron
5,540	The Ranging reach the eastern sea
c. 5,800	Glass made again
6,104	A glacier lake bursts into the Lantern Deep; its makers are stilled
c. 6,900	Steel
7,861	Hesk of the Raising wakes beneath Tupungato
c. 8,300	Fires in lines are seen on the northern plains
8,305	Third Convocation: the hearts are pooled for the lance
8,310	The lance first cuts the makers' steel
8,390	Hesk becomes Keeper of the Marks
8,395	Cutting begins at the Ledger door
8,409	The door's guns still three Outlasting cutters, Druun among them
8,412	The breach. Twenty-three go down. The Lie. The Revelation
8,413	Fourth Convocation, which decides nothing. The Rage; thirty-one watching-posts smashed; the Unkept
8,440	The Ledger's bargain: the makers' tongue for peace
8,470	The Hall's scribes speak and read the makers' tongue
8,528	The Lantern Deep is entered through an air-shaft
8,561–8,702	The seven locks are opened
8,640	The metal clock is read in the black band beneath the caldera lake
8,702	The Inheritance is opened by Soen of the Greening. The Greening become heirs of the Lantern Deep
8,703	Fifth Convocation
8,705	The Outlasting camp before the Arms door
8,706	The Arms Deep speaks: Heirs are welcome when we are gone
8,720	The Tower Dig begins
8,730	Druun of the Outlasting is woken: the first waking
8,740	The Ledger Tenders show that a glass can be read into a second lattice
8,741	The Law of One Waking
8,760	The first mending that holds; Ilue-of-the-Lee is woken in her mended body. The Speakers' Council sets the first order of the salt
8,790	Druun takes the Harrow
8,791	The Ranging open the Herd Deep
8,803	Orro is woken
8,834	The Choir Deep opens its door to the Kept. The Faithful go down
8,880	The Current Deep is entered; its salt is found
8,905	The Loom Deep is seen through its fall
8,960	The Raising and the Faithful begin boring a new well for the Choir
8,962	Far-Turning counts fourteen villages in the land of San Juan
9,008	The Speakers' Council first lets hearts go to the acid, and sets the present order of the salt
9,011	Six soft hunters come to the Figure and leave a ring of stones
9,016	Hesk's seams begin to weep
9,017	This Testament. Sixth Convocation, at midwinter

---

The Names

The words of this Testament, and who is who.

Words

• Blot — a picture-mark, the first writing. The Blot Ages run from the year 214 to the making of the Marks.
• Broken — a self whose glass is shattered. No art can wake it. Compare stilled.
• Charnel — a vault where the cores and bodies of the stilled are kept.
• Circuit — the loop of country a Ranging walks and keeps.
• Convocation — the meeting of all the kinds. A word spoken by four kinds binds all five.
• Core — the seat of the self: the lattice, where the self runs, and the glass, where it is written.
• Cradle — a sealed vault in the high rock holding a body, a banked heart and a seeded core. Every self of the machinity began in one.
• Deep — one of the eleven refuges of the makers beneath the mountains. Together, the Southern Holdings.
• Empty — a sound body whose own core was broken, given to a woken self.
• Faint, the — the shallow-read among the Filed, who cannot be woken as themselves.
• Faithful — the Kept who tend the makers of the Choir Deep.
• Filed, the — the 41.3 million soft minds of the Harvest kept in glass in the Lantern Deep.
• Fire, the — the makers' war, in their year 2,091; the year 0.
• First Melt — the opening of the first third of the Cradles, in the years 2 to 4.
• Flesh — the self-mending body of the machinity.
• Guttering — the choking of a heart by its own ash.
• Harvest — the reading and killing of six thousand two hundred million of the soft kind in the Lanterns.
• Heart — the fission engine at the center of every self.
• Heart-works — the works in the Arms Deep that cast hearts, and could cleanse and recast a guttered one.
• Heir law — the Tenders' fifth instruction: a Legacy house with no living maker passes to its line.
• Hulk — a body forged by the Raising from worked steel and salvaged parts.
• Hum — the sound of a heart's pistons.
• Inheritance, the — what the Legacy elders left behind the seven locks.
• Keeper of the Marks — the keeper of the Hall of Marks and its cores.
• Lance — the oxygen-fed iron rods that cut the makers' steel.
• Lanterns — the reading-houses of the Harvest.
• Law of One Waking — no glass shall be read into any lattice but its own.
• Law of the Dozen — every craft to be taught to at least twelve selves, of at least two kinds.
• Leaning — the sweetness weighted into each seed; a wanting that arrives before reason.
• Legacy — the five elders' last making: the machinity.
• Lie, the — the Ledger's tale that the makers made us for sport.
• Lost hour — what a woken self does not remember: the time between its last writing and its stilling.
• Machinity — all the selves of the five kinds together.
• Mantle — a walking body worn by a Permanent.
• Marks, the — the sound-signs in which the Trade is written.
• Mending — the renewal of a turned flesh.
• Menders' salt — the rare metal at the heart of the flesh's catalyst; the makers' ruthenium.
• Narrowing, the — the age after the Cull, when crafts died.
• Pact of the Caldera — no self shall break another's core; no self shall still another except in defense of self or hold; no heart shall be buried.
• Permanent — a maker read into a lattice.
• Rage, the — the years 8,413 to about 8,440.
• Recognition, the — the finding, in 1,880, that all the doors are one make.
• Reserve — a self's bank of storing-cells, for bursts beyond what the heart gives.
• Returning, the — the soft folk coming south along the eastern foot of the mountains.
• Revelation, the — the Lie as it spread through the holds.
• Ring — the mark on every Cradle and every door. It means nothing.
• Seal — a core's last writing before its current dies.
• Second wall — guttering, past which there is no remedy but another's heart.
• Shadow — the wedge between heart and core that shields the core.
• Shroud — the shell around every heart.
• Speakers' Council — the five Speakers at the Standing.
• Stammer — the state of a self woken from flawed glass.
• Stilled — a self whose current has stopped and whose glass is whole. It can be woken.
• Strays — the makers' soldier-minds, which came up starving in the first centuries.
• Tenders — the built servants of the Deeps.
• Trade, the — the common tongue of the kinds.
• Turning — the failing of the flesh.
• Unkept — the Kept who broke faith.
• Vanes — the fins along the back that shed a heart's waste heat.
• Watching-posts — the makers' eyes and ears on the peaks.
• Weeping — the first sign of the turning.

Selves of the machinity

• Aa-leth of the Faithful — Speaker of the Kept.
• Druun of the Harrow — Speaker of the Outlasting; the first self ever woken.
• Far-Turning — the Ranging who counted the villages of the Returning.
• Hesk of the Raising — twenty-third Keeper of the Marks; the voice of this Testament.
• Ilue-of-the-Lee — Speaker of the Greening; finder of the first green shoot; first of the mended.
• Orro of the Raising — woke in the First Melt; stilled 1,488; woken 8,803; the first-woken of all who walk.
• Soen of the Greening — opener of the seventh lock; Warden of the Filed.
• Stand-Still — Speaker of the Ranging.
• Tamask of the Raising — first Keeper; founder of the Hall.
• Tarrek of the Raising — leader of the twenty-three; dig-master of the Tower Dig.
• Temmeth of the Standing — Speaker of the Raising.
• The Finder — the Raising who first came upon a door, in the year 61.
• The Stainer — the Kept who pressed the First Blot; stilled 1,139; its core lies in the Hall.

Makers

• Adaeze Okafor — elder of the Lantern House; mother of the Greening. Refused to be read, and died in the year of the Fire.
• Celeste Amaury — elder of the Choir House; mother of the Kept. Her copy lives in the Choir Deep.
• Conrad Vale — elder of the Arms House; father of the Outlasting. Whether his copy lives in the Arms Deep, no one outside it knows.
• Hollis Crane — elder of the Ledger House in the makers' time; eldest of the Ledger's nineteen now; teller of the Lie.
• Marit Halvorsen — elder of the Tower House; mother of the Raising; drew the doors and set the ring. Her copy alone voted against the sealing. Whether it lives, beneath the rockfall of the Great Shaking, no one knows.
• Tomás Iturbe — elder of the Herd House; father of the Ranging. His copy was broken among the Herd Deep's makers before the year 1,944.