Kanlia. Three hundred and twelve years before the events recorded herein.
The puppet was the finest thing in the square.
Not the acrobats working the rope to the east, though the crowd had been generous with them. Not the spice-seller whose canopy threw amber light across the cobblestones, nor the boy with the trained finches, nor the old woman reading palms beneath the archway. The finest thing in the square was a puppet no larger than a child, suspended on eleven strings above a small wooden stage, and the reason it was the finest thing was not what it was doing.
It was the way it was doing it.
There was a grace to the movement that exceeded the mechanism. The puppet's hands — carved from pale ashwood, worn smooth by decades of handling — moved through the musician's pantomime with something that was not quite feeling and was not quite its absence. The fingers found the strings of the carved lute with a certainty that made it difficult to look away. As if the puppet had an opinion about the way it moved. As if it had always known this particular gesture.
In the front row, a child had stopped eating.
Behind the stage, in the narrow space between the back curtain and the alley wall, a boy of fifteen watched his father's hands. Not the puppet — the hands. The way the right hand carried the primary strings, the left managing the frame with the particular economy of a craftsman who has done a thing so long that the doing has become indistinguishable from the not-doing. His father's face was still. His eyes moved with the puppet's movement, reading it, correcting it, anticipating the next phrase of the silent music before it arrived.
His mother worked the secondary rig, the smaller mechanism that governed the puppet's weight-shifts, the barely perceptible lean that gave each gesture its conviction. She had her own stillness. The boy had inherited something from each of them: his father's patience, his mother's precision, and from some third source he could not identify, an attention that sometimes unnerved the people it was directed at.
"Look at the hands," his father had told him, the first time he had let the boy manage the primary strings. "Not where they're going. Where they remember going. That's where the truth is."
The boy had not fully understood it then. He was beginning to now.
The puppet had belonged to three families before theirs. His father had purchased it from a performer in Thallanosia who was retiring and wanted it to go to someone who would use it properly — who would understand what it carried. The first owner had been a woman in Thallanosia who had worked the strings for forty years, playing the same seven stories to different crowds until she had worn her own particular shape into the puppet's movement. Then her apprentice, for thirty years more. Then a man who had bought it at auction and used it for fifteen years and never quite understood why it continued to improve despite his middling technique.
"It remembers," his father said once, not as a philosophical statement — the way another person might say it, with wonder or unease — but simply as a craftsman's observation about a tool. An ash handle worn to the shape of the grip. A blade that had learned the angle of the cut. "Every hand that works it leaves something. You can feel it if you pay attention. The puppet knows things we haven't taught it."
The performance reached its ending. The puppet set down its carved lute. Took its bow — a deep, sweeping, slightly ironic bow that always made the audience laugh — and was still.
The crowd applauded.
The boy in the wings watched the puppet's ashwood hands, hanging loose now at its sides, and felt something press at the inside of his chest. A question that did not yet have words. A sense of something present in the carved wood and the worn strings that the Crumbling, which everyone said was coming, would take away.
He did not know, then, what he would do about that.
He was fifteen. He had time.
* * *
A year later, he learned that he did not.
The Crumbling did not come as fire. It did not come as earthquake, though he had expected one or the other — the stories all said devastation, said collapse, said the earth remembers nothing and so it shakes itself empty. What came instead was subtraction. He was in the market three days before his sixteenth birthday when the ley-lights in the public lanterns flickered once and went out. Not the way a lamp goes out when the oil is spent. The way a face goes blank when the thought behind it has been interrupted and cannot find its way back.
People in the street stopped and looked at their hands.
The portal at the city's center had been mid-crossing when it happened. He did not see this; he heard about it later, in the careful, flat voices that people use when describing things they would prefer not to have witnessed. A merchant from Astaria, half-transferred, dissolved back into nothing rather than completing. The portal closed. The stone went dark. It would not reopen for seven years.
His parents were mid-performance when the Crumbling reached the puppet.
It was a small indoor venue — a private engagement, a merchant's hall, forty people arranged on cushioned benches with wine and the particular self-congratulatory air of people who consider themselves cultivated. His father was working the primary strings. The musician pantomime, the same seven-story sequence he had performed a thousand times, the puppet's hands moving through the motions with the grace that three generations of use had built into it.
Between one moment and the next, something left.
The movement continued. The technique did not fail — his father's hands were still his father's hands, and forty years of craft did not dissolve in an instant. The puppet still moved through the sequence. Still struck its poses. Still performed the small ironic bow at the close.
But it was only movement now. The grace that had exceeded the mechanism was gone. What remained was the mechanism.
The audience did not notice. Most of them. They applauded as they always applauded, with the surface warmth of people who are being cultured at rather than moved.
In the front row, a child went back to eating.
His father finished the performance. He accepted the payment. He waited until the hall emptied before he sat down on the edge of the low stage and took the puppet into his lap and turned it over in his hands. The way you check something you love for damage. Methodical, slow, with the attention of a man who knows the object well enough to find what is wrong with it.
He found nothing wrong with it.
There was no damage. Nothing broken. Nothing missing that he could name.
The puppet was simply ordinary now. A well-crafted piece of ashwood and string. A good tool, competently made, carrying no particular weight.
His father sat with it for a long time. His mother came and put her arm around him and he let her and did not speak. The boy stood in the doorway of the hall and watched and did not go in.
He understood, with the specific clarity that sometimes comes at sixteen and rarely afterward, that there was nothing to say. That the thing that had been there was gone, and comfort was not comfort, and the right response to the loss of something real was not to move quickly past it but to sit with it and understand what it had been.
He stood in the doorway until the candles burned low. Then he went to bed.
He did not sleep.
* * *
Two years after that, he buried his father in a pauper's field outside the city walls.
Not a single death. He wanted to be precise about this, later, when he had occasion to think about it. Not a blow, not a night, not a single bad season. Poverty is patient. It does not arrive; it accumulates. Smaller venues, then no venues, then private engagements for diminishing fees, then the long, careful work of selling things — the spare stage, the secondary rig, the finch cage his mother had kept for reasons he never asked about. His mother first, in the third winter after the Crumbling, of the kind of illness that requires warmth and food to resist and is therefore not really an illness at all. His father eight months later, of the kind of grief that requires a reason to continue and is therefore also not really an illness, though it presents the same way.
He was eighteen. He had the puppet, his mother's stage notes in her small precise hand, and a rented room in the quarter of the city where people lived who had not yet admitted they were not going to recover.
He sat at the room's single table with the puppet in front of him for a long time. Then he began to take it apart.
Not to destroy it. He wanted to understand it. The way his father had understood it — not as a craftsman understands a tool, but as a craftsman understands a mystery. What it had been. Where what it had been had gone. Whether gone was the right word at all.
The external components came apart easily: the strings first, coiled and set aside; then the hand-rods, the shoulder frame, the counterweight system his father had modified for better balance in the musician poses. Inside the torso he found the internal armature — a lattice of ashwood struts and binding wire — and began to work through that too, each component set carefully on the table in the order it had been removed.
He found the bone fragment in the left shoulder joint.
It was not remarkable to look at. A sliver of old bone, no longer than his smallest finger, used in place of a wooden dowel to pin the joint. Common practice among the old makers — bone was lightweight, carved cleanly, lasted well. He had seen it before in antique pieces. He would not have looked at it twice.
He picked it up.
It was warm.
Not with the warmth of a thing that has been handled recently — his fingers were cold from the autumn air and the bone was warmer than his hands, warmer than the wood beside it, warmer than it had any reason to be. And with the warmth, something else. Not a vision. Not a voice. Not the kind of thing that could be described in the language he had available to him at eighteen, sitting alone in a rented room with his parents' puppet disassembled on the table.
A residue. A shadow of presence. The faintest suggestion that something had been here and was, in some sense that he could not name, still here.
He sat with it for a long time.
The earth had forgotten. Three years ago the ley-lights had gone out, the portal had gone dark, the puppet had become ordinary. The earth had forgotten, the way it always forgot, the way the stories said it had always forgotten, on its seven-cycle schedule, patient and indifferent and without malice. His parents had died of that forgetting as surely as if the ground had opened.
The earth forgot.
The bone did not.
He turned the fragment over in his fingers. Studied it in the low candlelight. Thought about his father's hands on the strings, and the way the puppet had moved, and the child in the front row who had stopped eating — and then, a year later, the child who had gone back to eating, because there was nothing there anymore worth stopping for.
He thought about what it would mean if the memory did not have to go. If grief was not the last word. If the thing that the earth forgot every three hundred and fifty years could, with sufficient understanding and sufficient will, be asked to stay.
The thought was very large. He was eighteen and alone and the candle was almost out.
He set the bone fragment carefully to one side — not with the other components, not to be reassembled, but apart — and sat for a while in the dark.
He had his father's hands.
He had his mother's patience.
He had a sliver of bone that remembered.
He had time.