"The Sorting"

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The horns woke the barracks in the dark. They were older and lower than the thin, bright watchtower calls of the Mountain, carved from a throat that had long since stopped being a throat. The sound rose through the floor before it reached the ear---into the boards, into the soles of the feet, into the spine.

Two hundred and sixty-three Given woke at once, and no one spoke. The horns had taken the language out of the sleeping-hall and did not give it back.

Guards came down the rows with a single skin of water, one drink for each of them, the last before the salt. Agan took his. The water was warm and tasted of leather and old iron, and he had it halfway to his mouth when a shoulder drove into him from the side, hard, on purpose, and the skin went out of his hand and into the dirt.

A Forest boy stood over it. Tall, unhurried, one of the ones who had drifted around Deka in the Yard the night before. He set his sandal on the skin and leaned his weight into it, slow, and watched the water run out into the clay floor where no one would drink it now.

"Problem, dog-boy?"

A guard turned toward the sound. The Forest boy was already stepping back with his hands open, already moving off, before the man had finished turning his head. There was nothing left to see by the time there was someone to see it.

Agan crouched and picked up the skin. It was flat and split and there was no reason to pick it up. He picked it up because to leave it in the dirt would have been a way of saying the thing had happened, and he did not intend to say that. He laid it empty on the bench and did not look at the boy again.

His mouth was already dry. It would get worse across the hours to come, and he knew it, and there was nothing to be done about it.

The guard at the barracks door was Canyon, a memory-cord knotted thick as a fist at his wrist, and he said it once to the room.

"Leave everything but your skin. Beasts to the rope. Iron to the rack. Whatever you carried in, you carry no further."

They began stripping themselves of things. Packs, blades, small beads of their own, carried gods and charms wrapped in cloth. Agan had nothing to set down. He had come into the Gate with a bead and a set of another man's rags, and he went out of the barracks with the same, empty-handed into the horns and the dark, while all around him men and women handed over the weight of who they were---and he had none of it to hand over. The emptiness had a different texture out here than it had carried in a compound full of servants. It was a kind of nakedness. He kept his hands still at his sides, and even that did not help, because there was nothing in them to hide.

The Yard had been remade in the night.

The training posts were gone, torn out of the ground. The troughs had been dragged back against the walls. Where the packed dirt had been there was salt now, raked out fresh and white into a vast ring, and what little torchlight there was caught in the crust and threw it back up cold, so that the ground seemed to hold more light than the sky. At the ring's center stood one post of black stone, waist-high, worn to a mirror down all its sides by more hands than Agan could stand to count.

The guards moved the Given into four loose arcs around the circle. They did not tell anyone where to stand; they pressed at the edges of the crowd the way a man presses a flock, a step here and a shoulder there, until the shape was the shape they wanted.

Agan came to rest on the eastern arc. On one side of him stood the tektek girl. On the other stood the quiet Canyon boy he had marked late the previous day. Agan noticed his scar was moving faintly on his bare chest without his breath. Agan looked once and made himself look at the salt.

The beasts were penned at the far end of the Yard behind a rope, and they would not settle. All of them, all down the line, shifting and turning and throwing their heads, ears working at a thing that was not there. They knew something the two hundred and sixty-three did not. The tektek kept starting to laugh---that high, broken chatter---and choking it off, and starting again. The girl beside Agan watched it do that. She did not look amused. She looked at it a moment too long, and turned her face away.

The five Masked Elders sat along the low wall of the Keep, carved faces turned to the circle, and did not move.

The East Obi came to the edge of the white. He carried nothing.

"You will stand shoulder to shoulder," he said. "You will not speak. You will not leave the circle until your name is called or your body is carried out of it." His scarred legs held him at the salt's edge as though standing there cost him. "The Sorting shows the Land what you are willing to lose. There will be no appeal."

He let his eyes go over the whole cold ring of them.

"You can buy your way clear of most things under the five Lands. Debts. Duties. A soft posting for a hard one, if your father knows the right man." A pause; he had earned it. "The salt was never for sale."

He stepped back.

The elders began to hum.

It did not come from their throats. It rose from the ground, through the salt and into the soles of Agan's bare feet, finding the places the journey's vibration had already found---the back teeth, the hinge of the jaw, the cold hollow behind his chest that the Nest he refused to remember had opened in him and never closed. The white ring began to shimmer with heat, like a road at midday, a haze standing over the crust that had no business being there at this hour, in this cold.

The first of them walked into it.

Not a single hand touched her. A name went across the salt, low, and she walked as though it had reached in behind her ribs and taken hold and pulled. She crossed the white to the black stone, and she pressed both hands flat against it, and she screamed---a raw, climbing sound with no hurt in it, the sound a person makes meeting a thing they have always known was coming and had spent a whole life praying was a lie. It held for the length of thirty heartbeats. Then it stopped. She took her hands from the stone, and her face had gone empty, and she walked to the cracked shield at the northern edge and sat down beside it and did not move again.

After that the salt kept taking them, and the pattern held. A name. A walk. A hand pressed to stone. Somewhere in the arcs, a boy chose his vessel without making a sound. Somewhere a girl's hands shook so badly she could barely set her bead into the bowl of water. Somewhere one of them screamed while another, still waiting their turn, began quietly to weep into the cold. It went on. The torches burned lower. The haze stood over the stone and the beasts wore a track into the ground along the rope, and the salt kept its tally and gave nothing back.

The name that took the girl beside him was one he did not catch.

She walked into the salt without a pause, and her bare feet crossed the white crust and left no print on it. One of the masks on the wall, the Delta one, wet-eyed under its carving, had already turned to follow her before she moved.

A guard near the rope reached for her as she passed, then stopped. His hand hung in the air a moment, forgotten, as though he had meant to check for a weapon or a writ and found neither, and then found he did not know what else to look for. She did not glance at him.

She put her hands on the stone.

She made no sound.

Her eyes stayed open the whole thirty heartbeats, open and level on the middle distance, and when she lifted her hands away her face was the same face she had worn walking in. Whatever the stone had shown her, she had come to Muru already knowing it was there.

She crossed to the cupped wooden hands at the western edge and sat, and the tektek at the rope went still.

The Canyon boy was called next.

He walked in with his arms loose at his sides, and the scar down his chest was pulsing before he reached the stone---Agan could see it from the arc, a slow throb on his chiseled chest, keeping a time of its own. He pressed both hands flat.

The scream came out of him from somewhere lower than a throat should reach, and the seam of the scar came open, and threads poured out of it.

Agan had no name for what he saw. Dark lines, shadow and something like breath twisted into one thing, unspooling out of the boy's chest into the white glare and reaching, and the wrongness of it went straight through Agan's own chest---a cold pressure behind his own ribs, in the place where there was nothing, where there had never been anything, as though the thing tearing out of the Canyon boy had found the place where Agan's beast should have been and pressed on it, briefly, on its way past. The boy's hands clamped down. The threads snapped back into the scar and were gone. The scream ran to the end of its thirty heartbeats and cut off clean.

He took his hands from the stone. He crossed to the cracked shield at the north---the Wall---and sat, and pressed his fist hard to the center of his own chest, and dropped his eyes to the salt, gone somewhere the stone had sent him and not yet come back from.

The guard reading names off the clay-tally had spoken his when the pull took him. Agan had heard it.

Kadrimani.

Then the salt called him.

He heard his own name go out across the white, and there was no choosing to walk and no way not to; the sound reached in the way it had reached into all of them, and he went. The crust was cold under his feet, then colder, and the humming climbed out of the ground and up through his legs and into his skull until it stood behind his eyes and pushed them outward from inside.

He reached the black stone. He set his hands flat against it.

It was warm with every hand that had held it before his, worn smooth under his palms, and the warmth ran up his arms---

And the Yard went out like a snuffed wick.

He was standing in the Nest.

He knew it before he knew anything else. The living tree grown into black stone. The ribs of old beasts arching overhead. The skulls set into the walls, the same skulls, watching. He was standing on the furs---and the furs were unnatural. They had been deep and dark, the pelts of a hundred conquered things laid down as tribute; they were grey now, all of them, the colour drawn clean out of them, as though something had come through in the night and drunk it out of the hair.

The throne was empty.

The thorn-throne, black and hollowed and undulled, the seat where a man sat alert or bled sat empty.

And on the seat lay the circlet, the low ring of obsidian thorns his uncle wore across his brow, set down on the polished wood, its points dark and wet.

One.

He counted it because it was the only thing his body sought to do. His own heart, a single beat, loud in the silence of the empty hall.

He went to the edge, where the summit fell away into the drop, and he looked down.

Two.

Far below, at the foot of the mountain, on the black rocks where the meltwater ran in spring, there was a body. He recognized the body in the first half of a heartbeat. The heavy brow. The long jaw that was the family's jaw. The summit wrap wound three coils deep and darker than blood. The amber eyes open, turned up, looking at nothing.

Three.

Did he fall. Was he thrown. Or did he step off the ledge himself into the cold and the long drop.

Agan did not know which, and the not-knowing opened under him worse than the drop had opened under his father, because a fall you can grieve, and a question you carry.

Four.

Five.

The body on the rocks. The empty throne. The circlet set down by a hand that would set nothing down ever again.

Six.

Seven.

He stood in the Nest alone. No one at his shoulder. He put his hand flat to his own chest, and there was no scar under it, and no beast at his side, and no weight at his back, and the throne stood three steps behind him and might as well have stood on the far shore of the Boiling Sea, because the Nest did not open for a man who came to it empty-handed, and he had never once in his life come to anything any other way.

Eight.

The last of the line. The mountain had made an heir and then made him Nameless, and there was no one behind him, and the thorns would go on waiting in an empty hall on a dead mountain for a man the mountain had itself made certain would never climb to them.

Nine.

Ten.

Eleven.

He lost the count somewhere in there. The images came without him now, faster than heartbeats: his father's open eyes. The grey drunk-out furs. His own hands held up in the thin summit air, scarless, empty. The thorns. The drop. His father. The thorns again. The count came apart in his hands, and the vision poured in through the gap where it had been, and there was nothing of him left to hold it back, and he was going to stand here in the ruin of everything he had been bred to be, alone, with the cold pouring off the empty seat and into the place where a beast should have been---

Thirty.

The stone let go of him.

He was on his knees in the salt. He did not remember falling. His hands were still flat against the black stone, still warm under his palms, and the humming was still in his teeth, and the cold hollow the Nest had left him with all those seasons ago was not cold now.

It was burning.

He got his feet under him. His legs held, barely. The salt-glare and the long, dry hours and the thing the stone had shown him had left his head full of white noise and his mouth like the flats themselves. He stood at the center of the ring with two hundred and sixty-three-odd faces turned toward him and the four vessels waiting at the edge of the white.

The cracked shield to the north. The bowl of water that would not go still, faces turning in it that belonged to none of the living who leaned over it. The cupped empty hands to the west. And to the east, driven upright into the salt, a spear---short, dark-hafted, its blade weeping a slow red sap that ran down the metal and dripped off the point into the crust.

He walked.

Past the shield.

Past the water and the faces moving in it.

Past the open hands.

He did not decide it in words; his feet had chosen before the rest of him caught them up, and they carried him across the white and stopped him in front of the spear.

The sap on the blade smelled of pine resin, and under the pine, of something older---the smell of the throne room, the old blood gone so far into the wood that the wood had become it. He had walked all the way down from the mountain, and across the dying savanna, and out onto the edge of the world, to stand in front of the one vessel that smelled like the place he had left.

He took the bead from the cord at his throat. He pressed it into the wound at the spear's foot, where the blade met the salt, and the sap ran warm and thick over his fingers and closed around the stone and held it. It sealed the bead to the spear. It sealed him to the East.

The Spear. The ones who go first into the worst of it. The ones who break the enemy before the enemy can break them.

He had no beast. He had just watched the whole of what he had been made to become burn down to grey furs and an empty seat, and he had walked past three vessels to choose the cadre that runs hardest at the thing most likely to kill it. He did not know whether that was courage or the other thing. He suspected the salt did not care to tell them apart, and had never once pretended it could.

He walked out of the ring and sat down near the spear. His legs gave the moment he let them. His hands were sticky with drying sap, and the bead sat warm in the crust where he had sealed it. It was not the burning of the vision now, it was only the steady pulse of a thing that was not finished with him.

Across the circle, in the western arc, Deka watched him. He was not yet called. His kavu paced the length of its rope behind him, unquietly.

"The beastless chose the Spear."

The laughter came up through the Mountain cluster around him. Agan sat in the middle of the white with the sap stiffening on his hands and let the laughter pass over him.

The girl with the tektek looked at Deka. Then at Agan. Her face did not change at either of them. She looked away first.

The Canyon boy---Kadrimani---had not moved. Fist to his chest, eyes on the salt, still down inside whatever the stone had shown him. Perhaps he had not heard Deka, or the laughter. Perhaps he had not heard anything since he took his hands off the stone.

Agan did not look at Deka. He did not look at the cluster. He looked at the spear, and the red running down it, and the bead sealed into the salt at its foot.

The beastless heir had chosen the Spear.

In the morning he would have to begin making himself into something that could lift it.

Across the ring, where the southern arc ran up against the wall, a Delta girl stood watching the circle. He had marked her the night before, praying at the wall with her thumb pressed to her wrist; she stood the same way now, that same particular stillness, as though she were listening to something under the salt the rest of them couldn't hear. She was not looking at him. She was looking at the black stone he had just left. For half a breath he wondered what it would show a girl who stood like that. Then a name went out over the salt and took someone else, and he let the thought go.

The humming did not stop. The Sorting went on around him.

Agan sat on the cold white crust, sap hardening on his hands, his father's open eyes still burning behind his own.

The burning behind his ribs found its shape.

Only then did he understand that the fall had not been the worst thing the stone had shown him.

The worst thing had no body and shed no blood. It was three steps of black wood and a ring of undulled thorns, standing in an empty hall on top of a dead mountain. It was patient as the salt, drunk grey like the furs, waiting for an heir who would never climb to it.

It had all the time there was.

It was waiting for him.