The Ash

A brick well with a bone windlass over it and a chain going down into the dark. There is no water under the ash. The shaft opens into a hollow at the bottom, and in the middle of the hollow the floor is gone: whatever is poured in here goes on falling. The blue fire round the hole is kept lit so that the ones on the ledge can see where not to step.

Two giant bones set upright on brick plinths with a rib arched between them, and a paved road running through the gap. Four paces past the gate the road stops. Nothing was walled in and nothing was kept out: on either side of the gate there is the same desert, and the lanterns are lit for whoever is going through anyway.

The nomads of the Ash say the giants were the hearth of the world, and the cold came when they fell. Keepers dug three levels under a fallen giant to light it again: crypts where pilgrims laid their dead beside its bones, the barrows of chieftains buried with their iron, and the halls under its ribs, where the blue marrow was cut out and poured back into its chest year after year, until the chest caught. The giant got up. Its fire warmed no one: it drew the warmth out of everyone near it, and they froze where they knelt. It lay back down under the floor of its hall, and it gets up again whenever someone brings it fire.

Stumps of soul cinder standing on a patch of baked ground, blue fire on every third one. Something grew here once and burned, and the coals never cooled and never warmed: they only glow. The skulls at the roots belong to those who mistook the glow for a fire.

Three sledges on heatproof runners, chained one behind the other and sunk to the runners in soul ash. The lead sledge has a cabin, the second carries the stores, the third is on its side with its load spilled. They went across the ash with fuel enough and a fire at every stop; the fire gave no heat, and they stayed in the ash.

The same ring as on Earth, on a dais of the local stone and in the colors of this world: whoever set the gates out did it on every world at once. This one sleeps. It answers only one who has brought down the master of this world and lived through its trial; then lay the master's heart, the dust of the road and what this world gives into the ring, and it will join the other gates that are awake.

A skull thirty blocks across, lying on the back of its head in the soul ash with its face turned up to the vent. The back of it is broken open down to the ground and there is a crack across the brow; the inside is black with packed ash, and one eye socket burns blue and gives no warmth. The skeletons go on to the horizon, but skulls are rare: whatever took the giants took their heads first.

A chewed-through piece of giant bone lying in the ash, and under it a hole going down. The den at the bottom is floored with bones and lit by the cinder in its walls; the bone above hangs through the ceiling, gnawed from below. They eat the marrow out of the giants and drag in anything that shines. The nest in the corner is warm, which nothing else here is.

A paved ring with a crib of giant bone in the middle and blue fire inside the crib. There are benches of vertebrae facing it, a pot over it on a chain, and two skulls on the benches: those who sat closest sat longest. The fire has not gone out, and nobody has got warm at it yet.

A long barrow of packed ash with curb stones round it and a dolmen at the east end. The passage goes down under the mound to a corbeled chamber, and the brick of the chamber is shot through with wraith iron: they buried the iron with those who had worn it, and left a store of it behind bars. The capstone has fallen in. Those who lie here get up.