Carried-It-Sleeping (Pandoid, the deep networks)

Below, Carried-It-Sleeping kept the small ones from the squeeze, and it was not getting easier.

There were two of them, and they had been trying since the name, and they had got better at it. At first they had gone at the squeeze the way small ones go at everything, straight, and loudly, and Carried-It-Sleeping had only to be at the foot of it and say no. Then they had learned to wait until Carried-It-Sleeping was telling something, and go then. Then they had learned to go one at a time, so that whichever one was caught, the other was already halfway up the margin. Carried-It-Sleeping had not known that keeping a thing meant being outthought by it, a little more every telling. Nobody tells you that part either.

"When we fit," said the smaller one, at the foot of the squeeze, for the whole of a short telling, "you said. We fit. We fit better than you."

This was true, and Carried-It-Sleeping had no answer to it, and said so, because saying so is also manners, and it did not help.

"Then when?"

And Carried-It-Sleeping, who had said when you fit so many times that it had worn smooth, heard it properly for the first time, and found that it was not a reason. It was a thing said to make a small one go back. Stone-First had never said it. Stone-First had never said anything at all, the time the youngest went up; had felt the warm change shape, and let it, and waited at the margin to be told. That had been the hardest thing there is below the roof. Carried-It-Sleeping had understood that for some tellings now, from the outside. Understanding a thing from the outside is not the same as being able to do it.

"I don't know when," said Carried-It-Sleeping. "Go back."

The small one went back. Both of them did. They moved stones, loudly, and went down into the warm, and Carried-It-Sleeping stood at the foot of the squeeze a while longer, and then went down too, and lay in the amber, and told the first warm seep to whoever wanted it, which was most of the small ones, and did not sleep.

Some time before the telling was over, the warm changed shape.

It is a small thing to feel. A warm place has a shape, and a person leaving takes a piece of it with them, and Carried-It-Sleeping had felt the small ones take their pieces and bring them back so many times now that it should not have been anything. This time only one piece went. The smaller one. And it did not come back.

And at the foot of the squeeze, a stone moved.

Properly. A good one. The small one had moved a stone first, before going up, so that the ground would tell whoever was standing on it. Which the youngest, the first time, had not done, and had been asked about, and had never forgotten being asked.

Carried-It-Sleeping lay in the warm with the telling going on around them and the piece gone out of the shape, and did the hardest thing there is below the roof, which is nothing.

And waited to be told.