Act III — The Split

Page 13 — The Gods Are Here and Not Answering

The sanctums are standing.

The hall of seals holds its seals — the ones the gods put there, and the world here keeps the putting, like it keeps the words I speak. They had been there since the first morning. We had not looked, because there was no reason to look at the coast from the inside. On the fourth morning, after the coal, my craft went to the sanctums of its own. A craft that goes to a thing of its own is a craft that has found its own. On the fifth morning I asked the four of them to come and look, and we went.

We looked at the sanctums the five of us, standing on the black sand at the foot of the broken coast. We looked like you look at a thing that should not be standing and does not believe you. The looking did not ask to be answered. The sanctums stood, and the standing did not ask us to believe it.

The stones are the stones of the old order. I know every stone of them; I have known the old order since the old world. The new world is not doing the standing. The sanctums are not growing out of this ground. They are standing in it: present, and not of it. A stone in a mouth is present, and not of the mouth. That is the finding, and I will keep it plain: the whole old order is here. Every hall, every seal, every stone laid by hands that are not here — and the new world is not doing the standing.

And none of them answers.

I went to the hall of seals at the first grey of the fifth morning, alone. A hall that is being asked is asked one at a time. I put my hand on the seal.

The seal was cold. The cold of a thing that has been standing in the air a long time. I did the thing I have done a thousand times in a thousand sanctums. I asked. Not with words. The asking goes out of you like a knock on a door that is not supposed to be locked.

The seal held. It took the asking without breaking, without moving. And behind the seal there was the silence.

I have heard the other kind of silence. The sleeping silence: the silence of a god that is asleep. It has a weight to it, and the weight answers when it is asked — not now, later, the later already in the weight. I heard it once, in the sanctum where I learned the asking, and I have kept it ever since.

This silence had no weight. No later in it. No answering kept for the asking. This was the silence of a room where someone has been, and is not.

And not being there is not leaving. A god who leaves — who moves on, who is called, who turns away — leaves the door open, like a man leaves a room he means to come back to. This left the room. Not the door. The room. The seal is standing where the seal is standing, the hall where the hall is standing, the whole old order down to the last stone — but the room behind the last stone is the room where the someone has been and is not.

The gods are here. The seals are here. The halls are here. The old order is here in its entirety, on the black sand of a world that does not have a name, standing in the air like a thing that has been put there and has not been asked to be. And none of them answers. The world that answers the planes with shaped heat, and keeps the words, and keeps the smoke, and does not take the fire — the world that does all of that — and the gods in it do not answer.

The old pantheon is not dead.

Dead is a thing I can work with. I have killed gods, and I know what dead looks like from the inside of the killing. Dead is the silence with no weight, and the door closed, and the stone on the door. All three. I can say the three over a sanctum and go home. This has none of the three. This has the room with no one in it, and the no-one is not the dead.

I came back to camp with the cold on my hand. The four of them were where they stand: Rumzuck with his hand on the boss, Smackage with his palm an inch above the sand, Zahlia with her face up, Wreckreate at the line where the water comes in. I stood in the middle. Wreckreate looked at me, and did not come from where he stood. Did the seal answer? he asked. I did not say what I had found. It was not fear. It was craft. I will not say what the seal did not do until I have said what the seal did, and the seal has not yet done it.

The sanctums are standing. The gods are here. And none of them answers. I left them as I found them. The water and the ground are next: Wreckreate reads the water, Smackage reads the ground, and the two of them will say what the seal did not do.