The pulling-apart had eaten six days.
Not straight through. In bites—each one boxed by the tools' capacity before they wanted rest, and by how much he could hold in working eye before bits started spitting noise instead of signs. Three hours of chewing, one hour of settling. 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. What he had was enough to bite the asks that bit and to name the asks still hanging.
He stacked the ends by box.
The working word was the most right-now useful. Name-rolls running back four lives. Money-nets tying the order to seventeen high houses across Elysion—some with sharp working touch, others with strings of different weights of knowing. The Guild ties in full: sharp names, sharp spots, the how of the paper-grab that had held for lives. The stacked bones of a body steering its own see for longer than anyone still breathing had been burning eye on.
This stuff would be handy. It wasn't why he'd burned six days in the under-level.
The god-talk papers were more pulling.
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 stacked sharpness of ages of watching. Medusa hadn't been wiped when she quit. She'd been pulled from the hard plane. 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.
They'd been holding the hard string with no Star string to match.
The papers on tie-down were the catch he hadn't seen coming.
Tie-down was the word the crack-panel locked on. 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 fixed, and the tie backward blew open what the gift could chew inside its ground while shrinking the ground itself.
A gift tied to something unbreakable spit a chain that was 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 user paid it, not the gift. The thinness of the post bit. Thinner meant harder to crack. Harder to crack meant fatter lift. A gift nailed to a thought was less firm than nailed to a place. A gift nailed to something that couldn't be said-no to because its being was stitched into what real was—that was uncrackable.
His own gifts were fat enough. Anonymous Presence. Arcane Threads. Actor. Metamorph. Synthetic Soul. Co-localization. Split-Thinking. 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 asked him to eat hurt he shouldn't have been eating. The thing in the under-city—what it had done, sliding a break into runs that had never broken—had shown a roof Alaric's 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 hit yet. Tie-down threw a road for what walked after that roof—a way forward without asking for god-step.
The Illusionist sat untested. He hadn't thrown him into ground that had shoved his walls. The ask of whether tie-down bit for him wanted knowing where those walls sat. He didn't have that answer yet.
He put tie-down away as a high-worth tool with a working wall he couldn't cross: he didn't know how to run it. The papers drew the what. The how was gone, and he couldn't reverse-engineer a how from nothing.
The papers hadn't been burned for the Children of Medusa.
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. These papers had been burned for someone outside the order.
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, god-things had known about players longer than the Church's now-grip said. The board was older and readier than he'd been counting. The blank about players at the house-floor—maybe a built skin, not true not-knowing. Maybe he'd 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.
The second maybe-name was the Sworn Child. Ouroboros. A god stacking a tool toward a sharp point would 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.
The Sworn Child read was more in-one-piece. It asked fewer wild jumps. It bit the known stuff cleaner.
He bit the odds. More likely read.
He put the other away. Not because he'd resolved it. Because he had no tools to swing on it, and chewing without tools spit only hum.
He didn't think he'd seen the last of them.
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.
He stared at them twenty minutes.
They didn't feel like something he couldn't read. They felt like something that was staring back. The hole wasn't grammar. The shape 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.
Whatever they were, they'd been next to the body of a god, and they'd been burned in something that wasn't tongue.
The Domus Memorion in the early dark had the feel it always had when he walked back after long off: the sharp still of a space that had been there without him 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.
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.
A puppet with a Soul burned a cut of its reach on the bones themselves—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. 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, and for Seraphine in Insir, where his seen hold would crack the run.
It didn't still hold for a puppet standing at the counter of his own shop. The point had turned. What it needed was reach. Full reach. No cut. No held-back.
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.
What stayed was the puppet without its own-move, without the skin of person-shape. 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. 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 spit 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 and everything after.
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, ready, waiting for the word that would move.
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.