Chapter 5: The Third Road
It answered, and the answer broke.
The sound came out of the floor and the ceiling and the wet stone behind my ear all at once. Thunder, and not a clean roll of it. It cracked, twice the way my hello had folded in the mouth of this place, then cracked again.
The pressure hit my chest like a palm laid flat on a drum. I went down on one knee.
The wedge of limestone jumped out of my fist and skittered off into the dark.
Dust came after. Grey and fine, tasting of old pennies, sifting off the ceiling in a sheet. Shards of crystal came with it, small as teeth, ticking on the floor. One of them nicked my ear.
Marsh had his forearms over his head and his back against the wall that still had light in it. He slid down it a few inches and stayed there.
Then the light died along the whole eastern seam. It went out the way a bulb goes out, with the afterglow hanging a second before it let go.
Marsh lifted his head. "What was that?"
"I asked it a question."
"That wasn't an answer."
"No."
He got his breath back. His carabiner had worked loose and swung on his belt, ticking on the buckle. He didn't fix it. He was looking at my hands, and whatever he saw in them made him forget to.
"Look at your thumb," he said.
I looked. The scar was back, pale and raised across the base of my thumb, the chainsaw tooth that took me in the winter I was twenty-six. It stayed for two breaths. Then it smoothed out again while I watched, the knuckles going young, the whole hand going back to being somebody else's.
I put it in my pocket.
"Speech costs me," the voice said. The hum was under it, gone small and wrong, like a wasp in a jar. "I have paid little of it in a thousand years. The thunder is what the words cost."
"That was you," I said. "This whole time. There was never an echo in here."
"There is no echo in here. There is me, and what I have taken, and what I remember of it."
"What do I get if I refuse?"
"Nothing. You keep what remains, which is a day. Then it is finished, and you are nineteen, and you walk out a free, young man."
Marsh made a low sound. He was doing arithmetic again, I could see it in his mouth.
"Give him his years," he said. "Bill mine."
The chamber went so still the hum thinned to nothing.
"You heard me," Marsh said. "He's fifty-five. I'm thirty-two. Take it off me and give it back to him."
"That's not a trade," I said. "That's suicide."
"It's a trade if it's accepted."
"I don't get to spend your life, for me."
"Somebody's spending it. Might as well be you." He wiped dust off his mouth with the back of his wrist. "I followed your ground for five miles because I wanted to see where it went. That's on me. This is the bill."
The voice had gone quiet, and the quiet bothered me more than the thunder.
"You have offered before," it said.
Marsh turned his head. "What?"
"Others. In other rooms, under other mountains, a long way back. They offered too. It is a thing the young ones do when they are frightened of the dark." A pause. The violet under the hand's surface moved slow, like something turning over in sleep. "I have not been offered anything in a very long time. You have made me a door, Russell Marsh. I do not often get doors."
Marsh's hand went to the carabiner. He didn't draw it or unhook it, just closed his fingers on the metal.
"Then take it," he said.
The second crack came before he finished the words.
Low and wide it came, and this time I felt it in my teeth first, a shudder that ran up both jawbones and met behind my eyes. The voice went through the ceiling like a fissure going through ice. A rib of crystal the length of my arm came down off the wall and shattered on the floor between us.
Marsh was thrown into the wall. When he straightened up, the hair at his temples had gone grey, and the skin on the backs of his hands had gone dry and loose, and he stood there looking at them like a man reading a bad page.
"Stop," he said. It came out hoarse.The limestone was still warm in my hand, and the Hand smiled at me from the dark end of the chamber.