Act I — The Crossing

Page 3 — The Unnamed Hand

Something pushed us. I want the word to be careful.

I have had a hundred years to find a better word, and I have not found it. I will give you the word I have, and the shape of the thing that went with it. The shape is the true thing. The word is not.

It had no face. I will say what I mean. No face is not the absence of a face — an absence is a place where a thing should be and is not. It had no face at all. There was only the white, and the white was not the thing, and the thing was not the white. The shape was in the between.

There was a part of the white that was not the white. A place where the light stood still instead of falling, and the stillness had the shape of a thing, and the shape was looking at us. Not at me. At the six of us. It was not a hand — I will not use the word, because a hand reaches, and this did not reach. It stood still, and it had a place, because a place is a thing you can put your hand on. I put my hand out toward it once, in the white. The hand found no place to put.

What it had was a will, and the will was the only part of it that was there. The will was not kind, and it was not unkind. The old world has a word for each of those two — warm, the thing you can put in a hand; cold, the thing you can feel in your throat. It has no word for the between. I have spent a hundred years with words, and I still do not have one for that between, and I will not invent one here, in a story that has already lost a man.

I did not ask it. I will say that plainly, because the asking is my first work, and the work does not lie. I did not ask this, because the asking was not what the moment was. I stood where the six of us stood, in the circle we had made of ourselves in the white, with my hands open. I will not call it fear, because afraid is not the word. I was careful.

The ogre did not look at it. He looked at the white, and he put his hands back over the shield's grip. A man who takes his hands off the grip in the white has not yet decided whether the fight is worth having. I will not call the ogre afraid. I will say that the ogre held.

Zahlia did not speak. She had not spoken since the old world went out under us, and I do not write that as a failure. I have watched her choose silence the way a mason chooses the stone she will not lay. She stood with her face turned up at the sky of the white. That was the decision: she would not give the thing the front of her. A face turned away from a thing in the white is the truest thing I have seen in that place.

Smackage knelt in the white. There was no ground under his knee, and he knelt anyway, and he put his palm flat on the nothing where the ground would be, and he read it. I do not know what he read. He read it the way he reads ground at home: with the whole ear of him, without speaking. A man who reads the ground before the ground is there has decided the ground is still worth reading.

The priest did not raise his ward. The ward was already around the six of us, low and even, without a color I could name. He had put it there before the white, at the last of the old world, with the whole of himself. He did not raise it. It did not need it.

The will of the thing was not on me. It was on the six of us. I felt it on the body, the way a weight sits on a thing that has been put down. I looked for the ogre's hand, and the hand was still there. The ward was still low and even. The six of us were still six, and the being-six was what the shape did not take.

I have not said who it was. I will not. Not because it is a secret I am keeping for you — I am not a man who keeps things. I will not say it because there is nothing to say. A story that gives a thing with no face a name has already lost, and I have lost enough. I will say only this: the thing had no face, and the thing had no name, and the thing pushed the six of us through the thin place, and we went through it as a word falls through a mouth, and the six of us were still six when the white let us go.