There were thousands of them.
They grew out of cracks in the black stone, from the floor to the ceiling. They hung in loops and curtains, crossing over each other, so thick in places that he couldn’t see the wall behind them. Once, they had been green. Now they were dry and gray and brittle, like dead roots. When Mav touched one, it broke into dust.
He knew what they were. He had seen them growing in the cracks around his own Heartstone, on the day that he first woke under the sea.
They were seaweeds. They had been someone’s seaweeds, a long time ago.
Ronald came in behind him and stopped in the doorway. Tamsin came next, holding her slate against her chest. She looked at the walls, then at Mav’s scarf, and she covered her mouth with her hand.
"Mav," she whispered. "Are these yours? I mean, are these like yours?"
"Yes."
Nobody else came in. The young had heard stories of the master all their lives, and none of them seemed ready to see what was left of him. Tova stood outside the door with her sister in her arms, and the young waited behind her on the rock. None of them seemed to want to cross the threshold.
At the back of the hall, there was a chair of stone.
Someone was sitting in it.
-----
He had been dead for a very long time. There was nothing left of him but bones, and a few rags of cloth that had once been a coat. He sat upright in the chair, with his skull resting against its high back and his hands on its arms. His hands were very large, larger than Mav’s.
A gray thread came out of the back of his neck.
It was thicker than the others, as thick as Mav’s wrist. It came out between the bones of his neck, curled once around the back of the chair and went down into a crack in the floor. It was dead too, dry and gray, like everything else in the room. But it was still there, after 300 years.
Mav stood in front of the chair and looked at it. He felt One move against his own neck, very slightly, as if it had seen something too. A strange grief came over him. He had never known this man, but it hurt to see him like this.
"He was like you," Ronald said quietly behind him. "Wasn’t he?"
Mav didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
There were two things on the dead man’s knees.
The first was a key. It was as long as Mav’s hand, made of some black metal that didn’t shine. It had no rust on it. Its teeth were sharp and strange, cut into shapes that didn’t look like any lock that Mav had ever seen.
The second was a stone. It was clear, like glass, and shaped like a small anchor, with a ring at the top and two curved arms at the bottom. It was cold when Mav picked it up, colder than ice, and it felt much heavier than it looked.
-----
The wall behind the chair had been carved.
There were no seaweeds growing on that part of the wall. Someone had cleared them away, a long time ago, to make room. The carving was in the same neat letters as the door on the forest island, but smaller, as if the hand that made it had been tired.
The first line was a row of numbers. Tamsin read it aloud, slowly, then stopped.
"Those are coordinates," she said. "Mav, these are the coordinates of this World."
Ronald whistled softly. "So if we ever get home, we can come back."
"Through an arch, from the Nexus, like anyone with coordinates." Tamsin was already copying the numbers onto her slate, and then she checked every one of them against the wall. Her voice was very quiet. "The Speaker’s people have been waiting 300 years for someone to come. All this time, the way in was written on this wall."
Below the numbers, there were a few short lines.
Tamsin read them aloud too. Her voice grew quieter with each one.
"I came down to kill the Old One, and I failed. It took my best. I came here because nobody can find this place but me. I won’t go back up. They would see what it did to me."
"The anchor keeps my ground where I put it. Wind, water, a stronger man pushing against it. It doesn’t move. I made it in my first year."
"The key isn’t mine. I found it in the deep, a long time ago, and I never learned what it opens. Someone will."
"I was not the first. I hope that I am not the last."
That was all.
Tamsin lowered her slate. Nobody spoke.
-----
Mav read the last line again in his head. Then he looked at the dead walls, at the thousands of gray threads, at the bones in the chair with the thick gray seaweed still growing from their neck.
He had always believed that he was alone. He had spent 30 days at the bottom of a sea with nobody to tell him what he was. He had thought that the Genesis had made a mistake when it gave him Host, that there had never been anyone like him, and that there never would be.
But someone had sat in this chair 300 years ago. He had raised an army of seaweeds and builders with wings. He had made a World and a stone that held ground in place. Then he had died here alone, because he didn’t want anyone to see what had happened to him.
’I was not the first.’
Old Hesk had said it too, on the terrace. I knew your kind once.
He thought of his mother, of the old man in black who had asked for her by name, and of the deep cuts across her body. He didn’t know why he thought of her. He only knew that something in his chest had gone very tight, and that he was suddenly afraid of a question that he didn’t know how to ask.
Ronald put a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t say anything, and Mav was grateful for it.
Outside the door, Tova had come closer. She was looking past them at the chair, at the bones and at the gray thread, and her eyes were wide.
"That is him," she said. Her hollow voice was almost a whisper. "Our master. Hesk said that he wore something green around his neck."
She looked at Mav’s scarf, then at his face.
"You’re the same as him," she said. "Aren’t you?"
He couldn’t lie to her, not here. So he pulled the scarf down and let her see One, green and alive, glowing faintly in the dark hall.
"I don’t know yet," he said. "I think so."
Tova didn’t kneel, as Hesk had. She only nodded slowly, as if he had confirmed something that she had already guessed.
"We will come back for him one day," she said. "When the Old One is gone. He shouldn’t sit here alone forever."
"I’ll help you," Mav said. He felt a deep, quiet sorrow for the man in the chair, as if he had lost someone that he had never met.
Mav put the key in his pocket and the anchor inside his shirt, against his chest. It was so cold that it burned.
Then he stood in front of the dead man a moment longer, as if there were something that he should say. He couldn’t think of anything.
Whoever he was, he had been like Mav.