Chapter 10: Those Who Come

The singing stopped sometime in the small hours. I do not know who ended it. Perhaps the singer slept. Perhaps the song found its own end, the way rivers find the sea: not by deciding but by running out of everywhere else to go. The valley was quiet after that. Forty-three weathers settling into sleep, one by one, the collective hum descending into the low, slow rhythm I had come to associate with mortal rest. Maretti's signal hummed at its usual frequency. Dani's brightness dimmed but did not go out, the way a banked fire dims but keeps its heat. The new arrivals produced the uneasy sleep of people in unfamiliar ground, the body resting while some deeper system stayed alert, cataloging the sounds and smells of a place it had not yet learned to trust. Hul did not sleep. I have mentioned this before. He sat by the river in the dark, and the water ran, and the stars turned, and whatever he felt about the twenty people who had knelt before him at dusk was behind the seal and would stay there. I sat with him. Invisible. Not watching. Just present. Holding the rule. Holding the silence. Holding the space between what had happened at dusk and what would happen at dawn, which was a space I could feel contracting, the way you can feel the air contract before a weather change that has already been decided by forces you cannot see. _Something was going to happen in the morning. I could feel it the way I felt the pilgrims approaching: not as information but as pressure. I did not know what. I knew only that forty-three people would wake, and the waking would require something from Hul that he had not yet been required to give, and…