Stone-First-Who-Waited (Pandoid, keeper of the margin)

The smallest of the up-people came out of the crack the way they always did now, scraping less than they used to, the stone held to the front, the light held low, and something else on the front of them this time, small, that was not a light, that Stone-First noticed and put aside.

The light found Stone-First's feet. It always did; it came along the silt low and found the feet first and then went up, slowly, the way a person looks, and Stone-First had been looked at that way a hundred times and had stopped minding.

Then the light went to the side, and found the other one.

Stone-First saw it happen. The light lay on the silt and reached the place where the other stood, and did not go onto it the way it went onto Stone-First. It went round. A thin bright edge, all the way round the shape, and dark inside the edge, as if the light had been poured at it and had run off the outside of it and left the middle dry. And behind it, on the silt, where the light should have thrown the shape's shadow long the way it threw Stone-First's, there was no shadow at all. The silt behind it was lit as if nothing stood there.

The up-person's light stopped moving. The up-person had stopped.

Stone-First felt them stop, the way you feel the warm change shape, though there is no warm up there: by the light going still, and by the breathing, which the Told can hear at that distance and the up-people do not seem to know. For as long as it takes to say a name, nobody on the line did anything, three of them, and the light lay round the one and on the other.

Then the up-person did the thing they had come to do.

They knelt. They set the stone on the line, on the silt, a hand from Stone-First's feet. Not from the other's. From Stone-First's. They stood, and stepped back, one step, toward the crack, and said the thing, facing Stone-First, going up at the end, the way it always did, and waited.

Stone-First bent, and put a hand to a rock at the edge of the silt, and moved it. Well. Once.

The ground said so. The up-person heard it; Stone-First saw them hear it, the whole body going still in the way that means a thing has arrived.

The other one did nothing. Did not bend. Did not move a stone. Did not move. The light lay round it and it stood inside the light the way it had stood before the light came, and was asked nothing, and answered nothing.

The up-person went back through the crack, slowly, with the light held low, not running, and the light went with them, and the silt was in the light that never changes again, and there were still two on the line.