Chương 178: Chapter 174. The Halls Of Time

The park did not so much stop as forget, all at once, to keep going. Between one breath and the next the whole soft evening simply… held. Ada beside him with her sticky hands lifted and a sentence dying half-spoken on her mouth, Bennu's cup tilted in his grip with a bright drip of mustard-gold ice cream hung off the spoon, fallen still in the air as though the world had only just now decided that it would not, after all, be falling.

Even around him, off among the trees, a fiddle had stopped between two notes and left the second of them waiting somewhere in the air while a moth stood open-winged in the lamplight, pinned there like a specimen to velvet. And in all that held stillness, only two things were left moving. Beth. And Adom. It took him a moment to place himself in it, and what he saw when he did was strange.

Because he had worn this feeling once before, a long lifetime ago, in the failing dark after his heart had stopped, when his soul had slipped its housing and hung above the wreck of him to wait on Death and their old appointment. He was loosed like that again now. Not wholly — there was a thread still, somewhere behind his breastbone — but loosed all the same.

Adom turned slowly where he stood and let his eyes move over all of it, and for a while there were simply no words in him for the size of what he was looking at. When at last a word did come, there was only the one worth saying.

"... How," he asked, very softly, "did you do that?" Beth stood facing him, and she was no longer the bent old woman of the bench; the years had straightened out of her, and the same faint shimmer that blurred his own edges ran through her as well, though hers was steady where his swam, worn smooth by what he somehow understood to be a great many crossings before this one.

She looked at him with such enormous and patient fondness that he half expected to be patted on the head, as though he had just asked her why the sky should put itself to the trouble of being blue.

"Patience, child," she said.

"You will learn how. In time." She then proceeded to laugh at her own joke, both hands folding over her middle, a crackling sound that here, in this place, seemed to send faint rings spreading outward into the dark." In time," she said again, dabbing at the corner of one eye.

"Oh, you must forgive an old woman her small amusements. I so seldom get to use that one anywhere a living soul can hear me." And as her laughter thinned and trailed away, he understood that it did not, quite, end. The sound of it went on past her, multiplying and folding down into a vast and rising murmur that had been there, he realized now, beneath everything from the first instant, and had only been waiting for him to grow quiet enough to hear it. There were also voices.

Thousands of them, then tens of thousands, layered over one another until no single voice could be picked out of the rest; just one vast wash of sound pressing in from every side. Adom tried to follow a single voice, but the moment he caught it, it slipped under the others and was lost, and the effort of chasing it only pulled a hundred more in over the top of it. The murmur climbed toward a roar, and an ache began to spread behind his eyes.

"Gently, now." Beth's voice reached him through the whole of that flood without once rising over it, as though she stood at his shoulder and the roar stood somewhere else.

"You'll drown, trying to catch hold of them all. Everyone does, their first time inside. Let them wash past you. Not one of them is speaking to you."

"What are they?" His own voice came back thin and far, hauled up as if from the bottom of a deep, cold well.

"Everything that touches this moment." She said plainly.

"Turn behind you and they're the past — every word ever spoken on this spot, finished and fixed, still sounding because the past doesn't vanish. It only goes quiet. Turn ahead and they're the futures. Every word that might yet be said here, in every way the next breath could fall. Most of them never will be said at all. Down here, the ones that happen and the ones that don't sound exactly alike." Her hand turned slowly in the dark.

"A moment isn't one thing, child. It's a knot. Everything that led here pulls on one side of it; everything that might come of it pulls on the other. Stand beneath the moment, the way we are now, and you hear the whole knot pulling at once." She gave a faint smile.

"It's a great deal to hear, but in time you'll learn to quiet it down to the few strands that matter."

"And where is beneath the moment?"

"The place under the place. I've always called it the Halls. The Halls of Time." Adom had read every text on divination the academies would let him open, and a fair few they wouldn't. He knew the theory down to the bone: the meditations, the flow-states, the threshold a true diviner was meant to cross to glimpse the threads of time from the safety of his own skull.

But none of it, on any page, had ever mentioned this: a soul prised loose and made to stand bodily inside a stopped instant, the whole roar of what-was and what-might-be pouring past its ears. Still less one living person reaching across that threshold to pull another through by the hand.

"This is in none of the books," he said.

"No." She seemed quietly pleased by that.

"Reaching this place alone is the very thing that makes a true diviner, child; one soul in a generation, if that. Carrying a second soul through with you is written down nowhere, for the simple reason that almost no one who's ever lived has been strong enough to do it." Her eyes settled on his.

"You're out of your depth here, Adom. Wholly and completely. I wanted you to feel that before we began; so you'd set down, for once, the certainty that you already understand." He did feel it fully for the first time in more years than he could easily count. Adom stood inside the workings of the world and hadn't the faintest idea what he was looking at. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. It was, to his great surprise, a kind of relief.

Because there was so much left to discover, even for him.

"Now," Beth said.

"Look to your hands. Stop fighting the noise. There's a shape beneath it, if you let yourself see." He looked, and found that there was. The futures he'd been hearing were suddenly there to look at. The frozen moment wasn't one picture after all. It was a trunk — and ahead of it, in the direction he knew without being told to call forward, it forked.

The forks forked again, two becoming four, four a hundred, a hundred more than he could ever number, until the air past the present breath opened into a wide, brightening delta of pale light. Every strand of it was a road the next instant might take.

"Each one a future," Beth murmured.

"A true one. A way the next breath might fall." Her fingers drifted near a cluster of them without quite touching.

"Here, close to now, there are only a few, and they're alike as sisters. Ada lifts her hand, or lets it fall. The boy's spoon reaches his mouth, or stops halfway. Small things. Easily read." Her hand swept outward, to where the strands multiplied past all counting and lost themselves in a far haze of light.

"But look further. Five minutes on from this bench, and more futures branch away from it than there are stars over Arkhos tonight. A sneeze spends one. A wandering thought spends another. Every parting breeds its own partings, on and on, until I lose them in the crowd."

"Can you see all of those infinite possibilities one by one?" Beth chuckled at that, as if his question was naive.

"Five minutes. That's about as far as I can look ahead and still trust what I find. Past that, even I am only guessing." Her eyes came back to his.

"And here's the thing no one understands about my art, Adom. They believe a diviner sees the future, but we don't. No one can. Past a handful of minutes there's simply too much of it; reading the whole would be like reading every book ever written at once, every one of them shouting."

"Then how do you read the future?"

"We don't read the future." She closed her hand, and a single thread drew taut and bright between her fingers.

"We choose it. The greatest of us were never the ones who saw furthest. They were the ones who learned the one small thing to do, so that out of all those thousand roads, the one they wanted quietly becomes the one that happens." She smiled again.

"Not sight, child. Steering. The seeing is only how a body finds the wheel." Adom looked at the bright thread held fast between her fingers, and the whole shape of it came down over him at once. There it was — the secret the texts had never held, because for a thousand years they'd all been asking the wrong question. Not how do I see what will happen. But how do I make what I want happen.

"... Oh," he said, almost to himself.

"There it is." Beth opened her hand, and the thread sank back into the shining tangle, lost among the rest.

"I knew you'd be quick." The light fell away. The roar rose to fill the space it left, and the question he'd carried since the bench finally surfaced.

"Then explain Nox." He watched her face.

"Before that duel, Merlin swears you told the whole council exactly how it would end. That was more than five minutes ahead, Beth."

"That," she said, "was a little bird."

"... A little bird?"

"Yes. A little bird told me." Adom looked at her, trying to be offended by the obvious mockery, but he just couldn't find any mocking intention in her tone.

"When you can reach this place on your own two feet, and stand here a while without your skull threatening to split, then I'll tell you what those words mean. Not a moment sooner. Tell a man the end of the story and he sets the book down, and I've great need of you turning the pages." What a confusing old woman.

"Enough, for a first taste." She raised her hand.

"You'll ache tomorrow, in a part of yourself that's never been given a name. That's only to be expected. Drink water, and sleep, if it'll come."

"Wait, I have a hundred—""You have a thousand questions. I know it well." The roar was already drawing back, the threads guttering out one by one, the frozen park beginning to thaw along its edges.

"Patience, child. Between us, we've got all the time there is." The world came rushing back. Sound came first with the fiddle finding its second note at last, the fountain, the ordinary murmur of the park. Then movement, as Bennu's spoon finished its small journey to his mouth. Ada's sentence arrived at its end somewhere off to his right — a verdict on the flowers — and she was already up and tugging at his sleeve about the next thing entirely. Adom didn't move at all.

He sat with his hands on his knees, the whole bright roar of it still ringing behind his eyes. The park in front of him looked flat and far away, like a painting of a place he'd just been standing inside.

"Brother?" Ada peered up at him.

"You're doing the face." He couldn't have explained "the face" just then. In fact, he wasn't sure he could have found the words for anything. Beth then leaned over, and snapped her fingers once in front of his nose. The park suddenly snapped back with them. As if reality had only now reasserted itself.

"... Huh?" Adom blinked hard.

"What—""There he is." Beth settled back over her sewing.

"It took me that way as well, the first time. You'll learn to come and go without leaving half of yourself in the doorway. Eventually." He dragged a hand down his face.

"That was… that was insane."

"Why, thank you." She sounded genuinely pleased, then, watching him more carefully: "Though I did wonder, a little. You spent the whole of it gaping about you like a child at a fair. I half feared you'd been too busy staring to take in a single word I said."

"No. I got it." He assured.

"I got all of it." And he had. The branching, the thousand roads, the trick of nudging the present until one chosen future quietly came true, none of it was new to him. He'd met the shape of it before, in the cave, among the things Law had left carved there for whoever came after: the futures fanning out endlessly from every choice, growing more numerous the further ahead you looked, and the diviner's whole art bent not on guessing which one would happen, but on steering the world toward the best of them.

He'd held the idea in his head for years. He had simply never stood inside it and watched the roads spill out in front of him by the thousand, never felt in his own chest how small a thing it took to send the next moment down one of them instead of another. The concept and the thing itself, it turned out, were not remotely the same.

And somewhere in the last few minutes, without his quite noticing it happen, the one school of magic he'd spent two lifetimes being quietly hopeless at had become, against every odd, the one he most wanted to learn. Still. A question sat under all the wonder, and it would not be moved. Five minutes. That was Beth's ceiling, by her own word. The finest diviner alive, and five minutes was as far ahead as she could look and still trust what she found. So how had Law seen three thousand years?

If Beth had told him the truth — and he didn't think she'd lied, not quite — then it should not have been possible. Not by any rule she'd just set in front of him. His gaze drifted, without his sending it, across the dark grass to the far end of the park, where the statue stood. Law, cast in bronze, robed and grave, looking out over a city that hadn't existed when he died. The Farmer Mage. Who had somehow seen all the way to here. Adom looked at him a long while, and wondered.