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

The small one came back fast.

You could hear it. Not a scrape; the small one was past scraping. Feet on the shelving, coming down the way small ones come down when they have stopped being careful, and a stone at the bottom moved so loudly that half the warm turned toward it. Then the small one came into the amber, breathing hard, and stopped.

Because Stone-First was there. Sitting in the amber, in the middle of a sentence about standing, exactly where Stone-First had been for the whole of a long telling, and everyone in the warm could have said so.

The small one looked at Stone-First for as long as it takes to say a name.

"You were on the line," said the small one.

The warm went quiet. Not the quiet of listening. The other one, which Carried-It-Sleeping had learned twice now and was learning a third time.

"I am here," said Stone-First.

"You were on the line. Between the stones. Standing the way you stand." The small one was not going round anything; the small one was going straight at it, the way small ones do, because the thing was too big to go round. "I moved a stone. At the top of the shelving. A good one. The ground said someone, and you heard it. You must have heard it. And you did not answer."

Stone-First always answers a stone. Everyone in the warm knew that. It was the first thing anyone knew about Stone-First; it was the name.

"I did not hear it," said Stone-First. "I was here."

"You were there."

Stone-First looked at the small one, and Carried-It-Sleeping saw the oldest of the people do a thing the warm had never seen Stone-First do, which was to not know what to say, and to say nothing, and to let the warm see that.

Then, from the far side of the amber, Went-Round.

"Tell it," said Went-Round. "From the stone at the top of the shelving. And leave out who it was."