Stone-First (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

This is told the way things are told below the roof, and this time nothing happens in it, which is a hard kind of telling to do well, and the Told are better at it than most.

Stone-First kept the line.

Here is what that was. Up through the shelving, the way the adults go, slowly, over ground that announces you. A stone moved at the top, a proper one, so that anything with ears in the upper levels would know, though nothing with ears in the upper levels could hear it, and Stone-First moved it anyway, because manners you only keep when somebody is listening are not manners. Then out onto the silt, to the line, and onto it, and stand. That was all. Stand, on all the times when nothing happens, so as to be there on the time when something does.

The light did not come. Stone-First had known it would not, most times, and it did not, all of them. The silt held the two shapes of feet side by side, the up-people's and Stone-First's, and every time Stone-First came up the shape was a little deeper and nothing else about it had changed.

But the sound came.

Stone-First had not expected that. The youngest had told it, standing up, and everyone had heard: at the end of each working time, one of the up-people turned to the deep dark and said a thing that went up at the end, and waited, and went. The youngest had heard it from the edge of the light, close. Nobody had said that you could hear it from the line. Nobody had known.

You could. It came a long way to get there. Down the long passage, and along it, and through the crack in the rock that is the squeeze, thinned by all that distance until it was hardly a sound at all, and then it was on the silt with Stone-First, rising at the end, the way a passage rises toward the cold. And then the waiting, which you could hear too, if you knew the shape of waiting, and Stone-First did. And then nothing, and the light going away up the long passage, which you could not hear but could tell.

Every working time. Stone-First stood on the line and the dark was asked, and Stone-First did not answer it.