The threads led them to it.
Mav had stopped noticing them in the upper rings, the way that you stop noticing roots in a forest. But below the story hall, they were everywhere. They came out of the cracks in the walls and the floor, gray and dry, dozens of them, then hundreds. Every one of them ran the same way, toward a low round opening at the very end of the hall, past the last carving. In the opening, they came together into one thick gray rope, as thick as Mav’s body, and went down.
He stood at the edge of the opening and looked at it for some time.
Every dead host that they had cut had been on the end of one of those threads. Something down there had been holding all of them. What kind of thing could hold so many?
"We go down there?" Sela asked. She didn’t sound happy about it.
"Everything else here goes up," Mav said. "We’ve looked."
It was true. They had searched every ring for another door. There had been doorways for builders, halls, rooms of light, steps and shafts, but every way out led back up toward the gold door. The gold door didn’t open. If there was another way out of this place, it was below them.
He felt Moss come up beside him. She lowered her flat head over the edge of the opening, and her skin went pale and dull, the color of the thick gray rope.
Then she pulled her head back very quickly. Mav felt uneasy. Moss had never pulled back from anything.
-----
The chamber at the bottom was round and enormous, larger than his whole city.
Its floor was a long way down. Its walls curved up into a dome so high that the gold light didn’t reach the top of it. The chamber was flooded from the floor to the roof. In the middle of the floor stood a single column of white stone, as wide as a house. Every thread in the ruin ended there. They came down the walls and across the floor from every side, hundreds of them, gray and dry, to climb the column like ivy up a tree.
Something was wrapped around the column too.
Mav thought at first that it was part of the stone, because it was white, smooth and pale. It was coiled around the column from the floor almost to the ceiling, turn after turn. Then one of the turns moved, slowly, and he saw scales.
It was a serpent.
He had never seen anything so long. Its body was as thick as Cedar’s legs and as white as old bone. Every scale was as large as his hand, and some were cracked with age. Its head lay on the floor at the foot of the column, flat and narrow, as long as a rowing boat. Its eyes were closed.
Along its back, where the coils pressed against the stone, the white scales had worn thin. Small pale shrimp lived in the cracks between them. They moved in and out of the old scales like people moving in and out of houses. Nothing had disturbed them in a very long time.
Mav felt it the way that he had felt the captain’s rays, Willow and the eel that had killed Five. It was a heavy pressure in his chest, slow and deep, which didn’t stop growing as he looked. This beast was rank C. It was older than anything that he had ever seen, older than Willow, maybe much older.
The beast wasn’t what held his eyes.
Around its neck, just behind the head, there was a seaweed.
-----
Mav had never seen a seaweed so large.
It was wrapped around the serpent’s neck a dozen times, thick and tangled, like a nest of old rope. One was green, and the seaweed in his canteen was white, but this one was a sick gray-green, the color of water that has been standing for too long. From its coils, the roots went out in every direction: into the serpent’s skin, down into the floor, up the column. Mav followed them with his eyes, and his skin went cold.
The gray threads didn’t climb the column. They came out of it. Every thread that had moved a dead host in the ruin was a root of that seaweed.
It was alive. Mav could feel it. Like every seaweed that he had ever owned, it had a point, faint and far, at the very edge of his mind. When he touched it, he almost cried out.
There was nobody there.
There was hunger in it, fear too, but also something else that had no name, something very old and very lonely, turning in circles, like a dog that has lost its master and keeps going back to the empty house. It had been alone down here for a very long time. Mav didn’t know how long. Long enough that it had stopped knowing what it was. Long enough that it had held on to its dead hosts after they died, because they were all that it had.
Mav felt sick, but he also felt something that he hadn’t expected at all. It was pity.
’You were someone’s,’ he thought. ’Like mine. Like One.’
Around his chest, One had gone very still.
-----
The serpent opened its eyes.
They were small and pale, almost white, with no light in them. It didn’t lift its head. It didn’t need to. Mav felt the gray-green seaweed in its neck wake up, all at once, the way that he woke from a bad dream.
It reached for him.
Mav thought so, at first. A moment later, when he felt the first of his fish twitch, he understood that it didn’t want him.
The old seaweed was reaching for his seaweeds. It reached the way that One reached for a host, the way that he himself reached for a beast at the end of a hunt, with a long, slow pull toward the lock. It went past him into the water behind him, into the small points of his Subjects, and it pulled on every lock at once.
Mav felt the locks move.
He had felt locks slip before. He had felt Log’s slip for four nights, Cedar’s for two days, Willow’s for one long night. This was different. Something was pulling them from the outside, gently, patiently, like a hand slowly opening a door. Every seaweed in his party felt it: Pip and Puddle, Moss, Twelve and her needlefish. Twelve had brought only her oldest fish, the fastest, and every one of them was a host. Even Sela and her water movers lifted their heads, though their seaweeds held them by choice, not by force.
The young spitters didn’t move. They had no seaweeds of their own. They only stared at their parents, confused and frightened.
’Hold,’ Mav told all of them. ’Stay with me.’
He put his will on every lock that he could feel, the way that he had held Cedar’s. The pull eased for a moment. Then it came back, stronger.
Mav set his teeth. He had held one lock for two days without sleep, with a turtle as big as a hill pulling at the other end. But he had never held a dozen at once, while something else pulled on all of them together. How long could he do this?
Sela came up beside him, very close. Her large dark eyes were fixed on the serpent’s neck. She didn’t send him a picture this time. She spoke aloud, low and dry.
"That thing wants them," she said. "All of them."
"I know."
"It can’t have them."
"No," Mav said. "It can’t."
Mav didn’t have to look behind him to know what was happening. He felt it through their points, one by one, a slow turn.
Twelve’s needlefish were starting to turn toward it.