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

This is told the way things are told below the roof, by someone who was there, and this time the one who was there was in the warm the whole time, which turns out to matter.

Stone-First-Who-Waited was telling.

That does not happen often. Stone-First hardly ever tells a thing, on the grounds that a thing told is a thing you have been given, and a thing you have been given is not yet yours. But the small ones had asked for the line. Not nobody's stone, which was too new to be asked for; the line itself, the whole of it, from the first time Stone-First went up the shelving to stand on it. Nobody had ever told the line, because nothing happens on it. The small ones wanted it anyway. And Stone-First, who had three stones up there now and a question about the third that would not go round, came down into the warm and sat in the amber and told it.

It was a long telling. It was mostly standing. The warm listened the way it listens to the oldest of the people, which is with the whole body still, and Carried-It-Sleeping listened lying down in the middle, where the small ones were, and counted them from habit, the way you count the pieces of a shape.

One piece went.

Not the smallest. The next one up: the one who had said, after nobody's stone, that the ground was there. Carried-It-Sleeping felt the piece go out of the warm, toward the shelving, and knew where it was going, because there was only one place a small one would go while Stone-First was down here telling, and that was up to where Stone-First was not.

Carried-It-Sleeping had kept them from it once. Carried-It-Sleeping thought about getting up.

Then thought: Stone-First is here. The line has nobody on it. The worst a small one can find up there is three stones and a place with nobody in it, and come down with a telling about silt. Stone-First had let the youngest go, once, and had waited to be told, and it had been the hardest thing there is below the roof, and Carried-It-Sleeping had understood that from the outside for a long time now.

So Carried-It-Sleeping lay still, and let the piece go, and listened to Stone-First tell the line, and waited to be told.

At the foot of the shelving, a stone moved. Properly. A good one.