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The watchroom at the top of the stairs was still intact, though the concretion was off-color, the damage becoming visible as well as background-sensible. Karlathi picked her way around the shards of the sending sphere, kicked aside several now-useless diamond discs, sank down against the wall under the pinhole window, and stared at the view of Ochiga on the opposite wall. "Absent gods."
"If they weren't already, they are now." Hielmo collapsed by her. "How can the city look worse from here than it did when we were crawling through the middle of it?"
Because from here we can perceive what it used to be, Karlathi did not say.
As yet there was no sign of the Accretion, the abomination that had once been Aruvem the High King. Karlathi hoped, again, that Aruvem was truly dead and not still conscious of what she had become.
She opened her bag and took out the bone blade. Making the bone had been far harder than she had expected; with a full team of trained mages, it would have been a simple and painless afternoon's work of persuading her body to grow the length of bone, separating it from the supporting tissues, and opening and closing her muscles and skin for removal. With only herself, Hielmo, Serepon, and forty-seven surviving apprentices, it had taken too many days, and her side still ached from the hurried retrieval. But they had formed it; Serepon had sharpened it; and soon, they would find out whether it would work.
To Karlathi's eyes it seemed a fragile thing, though her background-sense reassured her that it was sturdy. "I still think that you should do it," she said.
Hielmo shook his head. "And I still think that you should. It's already your bone providing the structure."
"You're still hypothesizing." The pinhole view showed a distant tower vibrating. Not hers; that edifice had indeed been one of the first to collapse when Aruvem and the greatest mages of her court had performed the strongest magic ever known in the wide green world. "But then, we're all hypothesizing that this will work."
"The theory is sound. Aruvem took all the forces in the depths of matter and tried to bind them to halt the steady decay of the world. She hoped to create immortality and instead bound her entire collaboration into deathlessness. To break apart the binding and dissolve the accretion, we charge this blade with the emergent effects of a human death and stab the Accretion, transferring death back into it." He slumped back against the wall. "And if Serepon's theory is correct—"
"Which his theories tend to be."
"—then the...units won't collapse with the Accretion; we'll have to destroy each one the same way."
The units that had once been individuals, tens of thousands of individuals — many of whom Kalathi had known and worked with; most of whom she could no longer remember the background shapes of. "So even if we succeed, these months have only been the opening flares of a war."
In the view, the tower finally crumbled, replaced by a rising cloud of dust.
They sat in silence, both conserving their energy and background against the tasks ahead.
Tens of thousands, Karlathi thought. Tens of thousands of units in the Accretion, that when broken apart would require tens of thousands of bone blades to destroy; tens of thousands of their deaths to be shared with the units. The effort it had taken to grow one bone, the even greater effort to prepare that one bone to accept a death, the longest and hardest of all to rear and train a life that could willingly contribute its ending.... A year ago, it would have been easy to create ten thousand — a hundred thousand! — blades that could be stored away until needed. A year ago, they would not have been needed.
Hielmo finally spoke again. "Do you remember the song of Vrota Negenvingers?"
"Yes. 'I have saved the world for you—'"
"'I have lost it for myself.' I keep thinking about that."
Karlathi nodded. "We've already lost it. With all the mages Aruvem's working destroyed, and all the greatest mages at that, who's left? The mediocre ones like you and me. Serepon is the best of us who remain, and he's good, but he's no Merliam or Eront." She picked up one of the discs that would never again reveal its stored information, flipping it between its blue side and its yellow. "I should be proud that I had early misgivings and that I evacuated my tower to all the directions. But there aren't enough of us left to rebuild the city. There aren't even enough of us to rebuild the diamond disc transcribers, and without those, even if we had the people, we don't have our knowledge. We can't build creches; our descendants will have to grow in our daughters' bodies. We can't build our food from coal and water; we'll have to plant seeds and wait. Once the generators break, we won't be able to produce lightground currents. We can't extrude fabric; we can't even grow any art. We'll hardly be able to live human lives; we'll live like farmers. I keep wondering if it would be better to have left my collaboration and children at home to die quickly." She sighed. "And that's why I think you should do it. Then I know I won't live to see us crumble away. Besides, I'm Aruvem's sister in both rearing and genes. My death is more likely to break her binding spell than yours."
"Serepon's calculations were clear; all of us share enough genetic affinity that any of our deaths could break the spell. An animal wouldn't work; a farmer wouldn't work. But my death should work just as well as yours." Hielmo half-smiled. "I don't especially want to die, even now. But I want to kill you even less. And even with what she's become, I'm not sure I can kill Aruvem."
Another tower crumbled, and another. The distant sky was suddenly filled with an enormous figure, a structure of gray rods and sickly brown outgrowths, sheathed in a pale mist. The Accretion was a thing of horror to background-sense, siphoning the structure of matter into some place unknown — perhaps into the home of the missing gods that myths said an ancient king had separated this world from. To eyes, though, the Accretion was strangely beautiful, almost as beautiful as Aruvem had been when she hoisted a shimmersail and rode laughing across the lake.
Karlathi said softly, "It was her greatest work, though it failed."
"It was," Hielmo murmured. He stood. "So. Which of us shall it be?"
Karlathi rose and held up the disc. "Blue, I die, yellow, you?"
He nodded and extended his arm. "Whatever comes next, I am glad to have known you."
She grasped his upper arm, where his and Aruvem's marriage cords were still knotted. "And I you. Whatever comes next, may neither of us regret this day."
She flicked the disc into the air; it spun so quickly as to appear a sparkling green.