They went back up without stopping.
Mav didn’t let anyone rest. He was desperate to get out, more than he had ever been to leave anywhere. Every hour that they spent in here was most of a day outside, and he couldn’t stop doing the sum in his head. How many days had passed since the white room alone? When the young spitters slowed down in the dry rings, he carried them himself, inside the rope of water, with his own Telekinesis. When Sela’s water movers started to shake, he took the whole rope on himself. His head pounded, but his new body was stronger than it had ever been. It ached, but it held.
Sela walked beside him through the dry rings, with her hands raised over the water.
"You’ll make it right," she said. "Whatever happened up there."
He didn’t answer, because he didn’t know whether it was true.
The ruin was different now.
The dead hosts lay where they had fallen when the old seaweed died. They were everywhere, in every ring: hollow crabs on their backs, bone eels in long gray heaps, things that Mav had never seen walking, lying still in doorways where they had stopped. The threads were gone. In the cracks of the walls, where they had run, there was only dust. Mav looked at the still bodies as he passed them. Someone had cared for them once. At least now they were allowed to rest.
Nothing moved anywhere, except them.
Twelve’s needlefish swam ahead in a silver line, as always. They were faster than they had been before the light, much faster, and Mav could feel how much they liked it. Even now, tired and hungry, they kept turning tight circles at the front of the line, as if they couldn’t help it.
"Show-offs," Puddle said.
"We could show off too," Pip said. "We boil things."
"Not in front of everyone."
Mav almost smiled.
-----
They passed the room of the first light on the way up. The white column still stood in the middle of it, soft and still.
Moss stopped in the doorway.
She didn’t say anything. Moss had never said anything, because her seaweed wasn’t old enough yet. But she stood there with her flat head turned toward the light. Mav felt the same slow pull in her that he had felt in Twelve and in the spitters.
He wanted to let her go in. He would have liked nothing better than to see what the light would make of her, and he felt guilty refusing her.
But he had seen the price now, carved on a white wall. He thought of nine suns crossing the sky for every hour that the fish had slept.
’Not now,’ he told her. ’We’ll come back.’
He meant it. He would come back with time to spare, bringing Fern, Reed and anyone else who wanted to go in. But not today.
Moss looked at the light a moment longer, but she didn’t fight him. She turned away and followed him up the steps.
-----
The gold door was exactly as they had left it.
It stood at the top of the first long hall, smooth, cool and glowing, with no handle or line down the middle. Mav swam up to it to put both hands on it, as he had when it first closed.
Then he tried everything that he had.
He pushed with Telekinesis, harder than he had ever pushed anything, but the door didn’t move. He used Drill on it with the harpoon. The steel turned in his hands, then slid off the stone without leaving a mark. He hit it with Water Jet, then with Boil, then with both at once. The water in front of the door screamed white with steam. When it cleared, the door was the same.
He stopped to breathe, with his hands flat on the stone.
None of it surprised him. He had known it since the white room, really. Nothing that he could do with his hands or his borrowed skills would open this door. It hadn’t opened for anyone’s hands. It had opened for a thread.
A dead master’s thread, in the neck of a kraken.
He thought about the carvings in the story hall: the masters, one after another, each with the same thing coiled around the neck and the same thread running into the ground. He thought about the white room, the bell, the chair that someone had walked away from. Whoever had built this place hadn’t built a door that only opened from one side.
It opened for the line.
’Does it open for a living one too?’ he thought.
-----
He let One out.
It slid out from under his shirt, the way that it had beside the serpent, slow and green, with its root still in the back of his neck. This time, there was no hesitation in it. One went straight to the door, as if it had been waiting for him to ask, and it laid itself flat against the gold stone.
The pain came at once.
It started at the back of his neck, where One’s root went into him, and it spread down his spine like fire. It was the worst pain that he had felt since the Speaker’s claws went across his chest. His hands closed into fists on the stone. His eyes went white.
He didn’t let go.
Behind him, he felt the others go still. Sela said his name, sharply. Twelve came close, too close, and he sent her back without a word.
One was burning. He could feel it burning, the whole length of it, like a rope held in a fire. Still, it didn’t pull away. Instead, it pressed harder against the door, and Mav pressed with it. He held on with everything that he had left after the serpent and the climb. He held on the way that he had held Cedar’s lock, Willow’s and the dozen ropes in the storm.
The door made a sound.
It was low and deep, stone moving against stone. Mav felt it in his teeth. A line appeared down the middle of the door, as thin as a hair.
Then the line grew wider.
It opened a hand’s width, as it had for Willow. It stopped there. Mav screamed into the water without a sound. He pushed again, and One pushed with him.
The door opened farther. It opened as wide as his shoulders, then wider, until there was room for a crab or a stalker or a very tired boy to pass.
One slid away from the stone and went back around his chest, slowly, very heavy. It was shaking. So was he, with pain and with relief.
-----
’Go,’ he told the others. ’Everyone, now.’
They went. Twelve’s needlefish first, a silver stream through the gap. Pip and Puddle with their young. Sela’s water movers, holding hands. Sela, who looked back at him once. Moss, low and flat.
Mav went last.
He pulled himself through the gap with his arms. The door was already starting to close behind him, slowly, now that One had let go of it. He felt the edge of the stone touch his heel as he came through.
Then he was out, in the dark basin, and the gold light was behind him.
Something huge and red lay across the door, its arms curled around the frame, its great golden eye half open. It was Willow, lying where she had always lain.
And beside her, hanging in the black water, exactly where Mav had left him, there was a single long gray needlefish with jaws like swords. Joy went through Mav so hard that it hurt.
Two was waiting beside her.