The pulling-apart had eaten six days.
Not straight through. In bites—each one boxed by how long the tools could chew before they wanted rest, and by how much Gepetto could hold in working eye before the stack of bits started spitting noise instead of signs. He'd grown a beat: three hours of live chewing, one hour of letting it settle—the settling made of sitting still with what he had and letting the strings tie without yanking them.
On the sixth day, what he had was fat enough to pull ends.
Not full ends. Full ends would've asked for the whole body of the Children of Medusa's papers across ages, and what Alaric had pulled was heavy but not whole. What he had was enough to bite the asks that bit and to name, with fair sharpness, the asks still hanging.
He stacked the ends by box.
The working word was the most right-now useful and the least pulling.
Name-rolls running back four lives. Money-nets tying the order to seventeen high houses across Elysion—three with straight working touch, fourteen with strings of different weights of knowing and sharing. The Guild ties in full: sharp names, sharp spots, the how of the paper-grab that had held for lives. Writes of calls that had been turned, digs that had been buried, the stacked paper-bones of a body that had been steering its own see for longer than anyone still breathing had been burning eye.
This stuff would be handy. It wasn't why he'd burned six days in the under-level.
The god-talk and teaching papers were more pulling and a lot more broken.
What the crack-panel had spit from the highest-key snake-tongue was a part-picture—enough to aim a way without aiming a stop. The order's grip on the Star-World was fatter than the hard signs of their work let on. They'd drawn the tie between planes with the stacked sharp of ages of watching—the papers laying out not just the being of more than one key of real, but the sharp how of things stepping between them, how god-push bit the hard world from out, how the dying of a god in the hard plane sat against their still-being in the Star.
Medusa hadn't been wiped when she quit. She'd been pulled from the hard plane. Her body sat in the hard world because her hard-shape had been ended here. What still sat in the Star, the crack-panel couldn't lock from the bits in hand—but the order's still-there and still-burn said they'd been running on the lean that she still was, in some shape they couldn't touch and couldn't talk to.
They'd been holding the hard string with no Star string to match.
Whether that was knee-bend or something harder, the papers didn't clean.
The papers on tie-down were the catch he hadn't seen coming.
He'd hit them in the third batch—the one with the lowest crack-panel trust-marks—and had first boxed them as rite-teach, which was what the grammar-bones looked like. On a nearer chew they were something else. Not rite-teach. How-to. The kind of writing that was aimed to let you do, not to remember—burned for working hands, not for show.
Tie-down was the word the crack-panel locked on after three passes through the right cuts—a turn it threw as likely, not sure, but one that bit the drawn run better than any other. The shape was this: gifts, at their born roof, could be shoved past that roof without stepping into god-ness. The how was chaining. You tied the gift to something—nailed it to a fixed spot—and the tie, backward, blew open what the gift could chew inside its ground while shrinking the ground itself.
He chewed this a few times before he full-swallowed what it aimed.
A gift tied to something unbreakable—something that couldn't be cracked—spit a chain that was, for all real use, forever, and a lift that bit as fat. A gift tied to the user's own self spit a chain that could be cracked at a price, but the price was paid by the user, not the gift, and the lift was smaller for the same cut of wall.
The thinness of the post bit. The thinner the post, the harder to crack—and the harder to crack, the fatter the lift. A gift nailed to a sharp hard spot was fairly soft. A gift nailed to a thought was a lot less so. A gift nailed to something that couldn't be said-no to because its being was stitched into what real was—that was, in working words, uncrackable.
He laid this down and chewed what it aimed for what he held.
His own gifts were fat enough for his wants. Anonymous Presence killed his weight to outside eye. Arcane Threads handed him swing and space-grip past his body. Actor gave the skin that kept what he felt from touching what he showed. Metamorph let him swap skin when Anonymous Presence alone fell short. Synthetic Soul was the bones that turned his puppets into more than far-off sticks. Co-localization—which let him step to any puppet's spot at the price of leaving a mark at both the leave-point and the land-point—had grown less handy as the work had grown more thin-skinned to that mark. And Split-Thinking—the gift that had let him ride Alaric in the under-city, chew the paper-pull in the under-level, hold Seraphine's sends from Insir, and trail Elysion's money-rot all at once without any of those strings eating the others—was the gift that made the rest open at the size the ground asked.
None of them wanted tie-down. He didn't want tie-down for himself.
His puppets sat a different count.
Alaric's space-gifts already sat at the floor where straight push from things of same or fatter weight asked him to eat hurt he shouldn't have been eating. What the Children of Medusa's thing had spun into his meat—sliding a break into runs that had never broken—had shown a roof Alaric's now-shape couldn't wall. A tied-down space-gift, if the post was picked right, might shut that hole.
Seraphine's life-ground gifts were climbing toward a roof she hadn't yet hit, but the climb was seeable and the roof would land. The tie-down shape threw a road for what walked after that roof in a way that didn't ask for god-step.
The Illusionist sat untested. He hadn't thrown him into any ground that had shoved his walls. The ask of whether tie-down bit for him wanted knowing where his walls sat—which he didn't yet have.
He put tie-down away as a high-worth tool with a fat working wall: he didn't know how to run it. The papers drew the what and the bits that swung it. The how was gone.
He turned this for a beat.
The box of stand-panels and deep stores that had been there since the world-jump was itself a thing that chewed through want, not through hard move. He'd learned to touch it by aiming want instead of doing move. The panels showed when he meant them to show. The stores answered his push before his hands stirred. It was, in every seeable way, a box lit by want at a level under awake picking.
If tie-down chewed on a near rule, the hole of a hard how in the papers might not be a hole. It might be a given. That the reader would know want was the how because want was already how the reader chewed all else.
This was a guess. He didn't bite it as more. The box wasn't born to this world—he'd caught no signs of anything like it in any of the papers he'd chewed—and leaning that not-here rules spilled onto here rules was the kind of wrong he couldn't eat. He put the guess down as a kick-point for later trying, not as a working lean, and walked on.
The papers hadn't been burned for the Children of Medusa.
He was locked on this the way he was locked on things that had come together from enough split ways to shove off luck as the why. The key was off for in-house stuff. The grammar-bones took a reader not already sunk in the order's frame—someone who'd need root-ground that any long-member wouldn't need. The being of some lays that would be flat to anyone who'd been in the order more than a year.
These papers had been burned for someone outside the order who would chew them later.
Two maybe-names.
The first was him. A player from outside this world, landing without the ground-knowing that born hands held, chewing papers that had been stacked waiting for that land. If this held, it aimed that god-things had known about players longer than the Church's now-grip said—had seen their coming sharp enough to cook stuff for them—and had done it in the wrap of a cult working a god who was now dead and whose tie to the players wasn't clean no.
What this spit for everything he thought he had down about his spot in this world was fat. It would mean the board was older and readier than he'd been counting. It would mean the looking-like blank about players at the house-floor in Elysion—the Church's fairly new catch, the hole of paper in the Church shelves—was itself maybe a built skin, not true not-knowing.
It would mean he'd been running with a map someone else had drawn.
The second maybe-name was the Sworn Child. Ouroboros. A thing stacked toward god-ness from the jump—whose god-rise had been a wrap-up, not a want—whose shape he was still stitching from bits. The papers being burned for the Sworn Child made a lot more bone-sense: a god stacking a tool toward a sharp point would flatly cook papers the tool could hit when it touched the right step of growth. How-to papers for a thing that would need to grip tie-down would be exactly what Medusa would've stacked for a blade she was raising to swing at god-size.
He bit the odds.
The Sworn Child read was more in-one-piece, asked fewer wild jumps, and bit the known stuff cleaner. It was the more likely read.
He put the other away as a second guess with low now-odds and fat maybe-fallout.
Then he wrote—with the sharp truth he aimed at his own chew—that the speed he'd put it away was itself a pick. He'd shelved it fast because he had no tools to swing on it, and chewing on it with no tools spit only hum. That count was right. It was also easy. There was a split between putting something away because it couldn't be swung on and putting it away because it sat wrong in the hand.
He sat with it another thirty breaths.
If the papers had been burned for players, then someone with god-level far-see had caught his coming—or the coming of things like him—far enough ahead to cook stuff. That aimed the board was older and readier than he'd been counting. It aimed the looking-like blank at the house-floor in Elysion was maybe a built skin. It aimed he might've been running with a map someone else had drawn and dropped where he'd catch it.
He couldn't swing on this. He didn't have the signs to lock it, the tools to dig it, or the spare eye to feed a guess this fat without starving the bits that were right-now and swingable.
He put it away.
Putting away wasn't forgetting. He'd learned the split early, and the split bit.
The last thing he did before walking out of the under-level was burn twenty minutes with the two papers the crack-panel had thrown as un-turnable—spitting no tongue-bones it could chew, no grammar it could draw.
He stared at them twenty minutes.
They didn't spit the feel of staring at something he couldn't read. They spit the feel of staring at something that was staring back—which wasn't a feel he tied to papers as a box, and which he therefore wrote with the sharp eye he gave things his frame had no clean box for. The crack-panel had caught no grammar. What he caught, after twenty minutes, was the push that the hole of grammar wasn't the same as the hole of shape. The shape just wasn't word-shape.
He laid them in a shut-hold box and dropped them in the deep cut of the stores, behind all else.
Some bits got put away not because they were shut but because pulling at them with no tools to swing was a kind of eye that spit only hum. This held for these papers. It also held that whatever they were, they'd been in the third room, next to the body of a god, and they'd been burned in something that wasn't tongue.
He shut the stores-mark.
He didn't think he'd seen the last of them.
The Domus Memorion in the early dark had the feel it always had when he walked back to it after long off: the sharp still of a space that had been there without him—chewing its own drifting being—and hadn't yet caught his step back.
The puppet at the counter was running the end-of-day tidy with the step-by-step smooth of something doing a job it had been handed. It moved right. It spit no wrongs. It was, by every seeable stick, doing what it had been dropped here to do.
He watched it from the back hall a beat.
The Soul bones were the well of its own-moving work. The same bones that let it run the shop, bite asks clean, hold the skin the Domus Memorion asked for. It was also the bones that sat at the edge of what he could full-trust—the odds-hole he'd been chewing more than the work called for, for reasons he caught some of and not all.
He'd been chewing, over the past six days, on what the papers had shown him about tie-down. About chaining and lifting. About the tie between what a tool could chew when it ran its own pick-bones against when it ran as a clean stretch of its maker's push.
A puppet with a Soul burned a cut of its reach on the bones themselves. On holding the skin of own-move that made it handy in ground where straight hold was too seen. That cut wasn't fat. But it was there, and its being there aimed that the puppet was never full-stretching what it could chew in the way he needed it to stretch.
He'd stacked the Soul bones because he needed puppets that could chew without his steady straight hold. That need still held for Alaric in the field, for Seraphine in Insir, for any puppet chewing in ground where his seen hold would crack the run.
It didn't still hold for a puppet standing at the counter of his own shop.
He pulled the Soul.
Not the way you pull a tool from a shelf. The way you pull something from inside something else—the taking asking sharp, not shove, the bones splitting from the frame in the sharp way of things that had been sewn, not hung.
He held the bones in the string a beat before scattering them.
The puppet had chewed with these bones for weeks. It had run the shop, bit asks, held the skin the Domus Memorion asked for. It had done all this because the Soul had handed it the skin of own-move—the cut of reach burned on holding itself as something that looked like a person picking, not something running orders. That cut had never been fat. It had been enough for the point.
The point had turned.
He scattered the bones.
What stayed was the puppet without its own-move, without the skin of person-shape, without the cut of reach that had been burned on steering its own still-there instead of stretching his. The thing standing in the back hall of the Domus Memorion wasn't less than it had been. It was cut different. The reach that had been shared out to hold own-move was now full open for the ways he aimed.
He handed it a plain order and felt the run through the string with the cleanness of something not making up for anything.
It was the split between a hand and a glove pulled over a hand. The glove could near-match the hand's work in most spots. The hand, bare, was just the hand.
He walked it to the back room and left it there.
The shop sat empty. The counter hung waiting. The shelves stood stacked the way they always stood stacked.
He'd known Adrian was coming since two days back—when a second hand in Aurelia's house-quarter had passed word that the younger Vale had cut three set sits and laid a ride to Vhal-Dorim. The hand bit this as trade-word. Gepetto had bit it as the straight end of the road Adrian had been walking since the Storm Sit's guts had hit Aurelia.
He'd picked to be at the counter when Adrian hit, not in the back room—because being at the counter when someone hit was the move of a shopkeep who'd been open and hanging, and the move bit.
Three minutes after he took his spot, the door swung.
Adrian Vale walked in with the weight of someone who'd picked a fat road before stepping and had burned the ride swallowing the pick, not chewing it back. He looked at the shop the way he'd always looked at it—checking if it had stayed what it was since the last step.
It had.
"I need to talk," Adrian said.
"I know," Gepetto said.