Wex casts the ritual. After a long silence, a voice. A man, mid-thought, like how people sometimes talk in sleep.
"Like everyone who lived near the hill, Mother said it would be warm. But the stone they laid me on chilled the depths of my soul, and by then it was too late to have learned that everything about this was wrong.
No one ever told me if Ela made it to our uncle's, although I begged Mother to send her right before they took me. The priests.
My people were not the old people. The old people were there first, and we lived among their stones and learned their songs as children without knowing what the songs were for. The old people had understood the hill. Whoever among them could reach the sleeper's mind had been told what it needed to stay asleep, and they had given it, freely, for as many generations as anyone could count. When the empire came, the old people made a bargain: the songs for their lives. The empire took the songs and killed them anyway. My grandfather's grandfather helped bury them, having been told by the empire's soldiers that this was the price of being allowed to stay.
The shape of the words is what the empire could not keep. The priests sing the noise now. The noise has been enough for a long time, but the shape is gone, and no one alive knows what is missing from what they sing.
Dawn, noon, dusk -- three times a day. A priest missed the dusk song once, from sickness, and I felt something beneath me turn over in its sleep before another priest sang it quiet again. I do not know how long it would turn before waking. I know only that the priests who think they are praising a god are holding a door shut they cannot see.
If any of them could see it, some would open it. There are always priests who would rather serve a waking god than a sleeping one, who think their faithfulness deserves an answer. They do not know what answer they would get. Not all of them. Some.
The temple on the hill made the empire. The priests grew strong on what they drained out of us, and the first emperor who understood this built his throne in their shadow and never asked it to move. Every emperor since has sat in the same shadow. What I know of this, I know because I have been in the stone a long time, and the stone listens. I have heard reactives speak as they were brought down -- of the throne and the temple as if they were the same thing. They are. Every emperor has known what he is built on. Every emperor has said nothing. None has been willing to be the last.
Erith was first. A young woman sold from a ship at the coast. She bit through her own wrist on the stairs down and bled out before they reached the bottom, and the priests were furious because they had to send for someone else.
They took a small boy whose twin brother had been left behind. He screamed for his brother the whole way down, until he didn't.
Third was a boy of perhaps eleven, who dreamed in a language no one knew. He wasn't afraid, and I hated him for it while I waited my turn on the stone. Only, he didn't understand where he was. I was wrong to hate him.
I was fourth. I was no longer a boy by then -- old enough to be running the house, old enough to know what was coming when the priests stood at the door. Mother said the word with her hand shaking, and I went, because if I didn't, they would take me anyway and she would have to watch.
They lay you on the stone above the soft place, the place under the temple where the sleeper is nearest, and they take what they want from you. They take the part that is power, the part that hummed in you all your life and that they had come for. They leave the rest, the way wine leaves a stain in the cup after the wine is poured out. The rest stays in the stone, faded, with the rest of us. The body gets up three days later, walks into a field somewhere, and falls.
I thought I was being given to a god. I was dinner for a man, and the man is still eating, though his name has changed three dozen times since mine.
Most of the priesthood does not know this. The ones who preach in the cities, who bring the reactives in, believe what they were told themselves: that the Coiled Sun has chosen them, that the blessed go willingly to a dreaming communion. I have heard reactives praying their thanks on the stairs down, and asking the priests to remember them. The priests answered yes, and meant it. Only the upper priests know. They are reactives also, taken once and spared, and they decide who gets the power and who gets the kris.
Twice the ritual has failed, that I know of. Once, long ago: a young woman was laid on the stone and the draining did not take. She walked out still herself, and a priest killed her weeping on the third staircase, and she is in the wall there. Once more, much later: I felt a woman begin to drain and then stop -- stop, like a candle going out by someone's hand -- and then she was gone. I do not know if she died or walked out. She is the only one who ever began and did not finish.
The man with the knife now has held it twenty-two winters, longer than any I have known, and he comes down between his rituals -- alone, with no work to do there. He stands in the lowest room and looks at it and goes back up. No ritual master before him has come down without purpose. I cannot say what he is doing. He keeps coming back.
And beneath him, beneath all of us, the thing that does not know we are here. It has not stirred in my time except for the once when a song was missed. I have lain above it for longer than my own life by forty times, and it has never noticed me. It will never notice me, unless it wakes. Then I think it will eat what is left of us when it eats the world. The old people knew this. They sang. We sing now without knowing, and badly, and someday it will not be enough. I am afraid of it, even like this. I am also grateful to it. It has been the only thing that has not changed.
I have been cold a long time. I keep waiting for someone to tell me about Ela."