Nerith had brought six kinds of pick to open the black door. By the time she reached it, she had thought of three people who would pay to watch.
The door stood without a wall in the lowest cut of the abandoned quarry. Evening lay blue in the chisel marks. Down the pale slope came a river too bright to look at directly, branching around stones and rejoining in colors that remained separate even where they crowded together. They flowed into the foot of the frame, climbed its sides, and curled over one another along the lintel. There was no keyhole. No handle, either.
She unrolled her picks against the frame, and the steel clinked on the black edge. She drew out the thinnest.
“You'll scratch it,” Bozren said from behind the door.
He came around the frame with his pack on one shoulder. A twist of yellow detached itself from the river and followed his boot, then hurried back to the other colors.
“How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to walk round it.”
“I found the map.”
“So did I.” He unfolded a little square of paper. The same triangular tear, the same grease mark where the quarry road forked. Nerith had paid extra for that grease mark. The seller had called it a bloodstain.
Bozren looked from his map to hers. She turned its face against her leg.
“How much?” he asked.
“I'm going to recover my expenses.”
“That much?”
She put the pick away. Perhaps the colored stuff was a seal. She crouched beside the river and laid two fingers across a red strand. It swelled under her touch, warm and firm as a tongue. A little loop curled around her smallest finger. Then it let go and ran up the frame.
The black slab swung outward into the quarry.
Heat drove them back. Beyond the sill, a plain of flame heaved under a sky of thicker flame. White ridges rose out of it, broke into streamers, and rebuilt themselves farther away. There was nothing beneath the fire that she could see. Even the shadows were dark red flames, leaning against the brightness.
Nerith's first thought was that the jewel merchants would come in carriages.
Her second was that her eyebrows were burning.
She clapped a hand over them and moved sideways. On the far side of the quarry, through a gap between the frame and its open slab, lay an ordinary heap of stone. Straight through the frame lay a world on fire.
Bozren bent to look along the sill. A ribbon of red ran around its inner edge. Across the burning plain something like a herd leapt, each shape pulling itself out of the blaze and falling back before she could count it.
“Did you see those?” she said.
“Yes.”
“They had legs.”
“Some of them.”
She wanted a better look. She also wanted the last of her eyebrows. When a hot gust snapped the little hairs on her wrist, she caught the cool edge of the slab and pushed it shut.
Bozren was grinning at her over the top of his collar.
“A silver piece to look,” she said. “Two if they want the front.”
“You were meant to find buried plate.”
“I can change what I sell.”
But she was already reaching past the red toward blue, and his hand got there first.
The door opened above an ocean. Its sill lay barely a hand's breadth over the moving surface. The air tasted of salt; the heat left her face so suddenly that she shivered. No coast interrupted the horizon. Behind that horizon was more sea, and more beyond it, an entire world with nowhere for a wave to break except another wave.
Then one broke against the frame.
Cold water slapped their boots and spread across the quarry floor. Nerith gasped. Bozren laughed with his mouth wide open and got a mouthful. She enjoyed that until the sea darkened.
A translucent back slid beneath the doorway. Through it she saw branching organs blue as veins in milk glass, and, much farther down, other enormous bodies swimming at different depths. The nearest rolled. A round eye, larger than the door, rose level with them. Its pale lid drew sideways. The water between its lashes held miniature rainbows.
Nerith had once spent nine days getting a thumb-sized blue stone out of a dead queen's shoe. Here was blue wide enough to swallow the hill, looking at her.
She lifted her wet hand. The eye did not blink again. After a while the creature sank, drawing the others after it, and sunlight filled the water it had occupied.
“We'd need a boat,” Bozren said.
Nerith laughed before she could stop it.
“I was seeing the hired boats on the lake at home,” she said. “The little ones with the bench. Tipped over in the corner of its eye like a bit of grit.”
He touched green on the upright. Nothing happened. The ocean continued lifting toward their feet.
Nerith closed the slab. He touched the same green strand, and this time the door opened into leaves.
A branch lay flush with the sill, broad enough for ten people abreast. Moss made ridges along its bark. Far below, treetops crowded against treetops until the whole green surface curved away under a rim of luminous haze. The forest clothed a planet, and they were looking out from a tree so tall that they could see the roundness of the world beneath it. There were forests upon the limbs of that tree, smaller trees rooted in its crevices, and smaller ones upon those, their crowns spangled with yellow flowers.
The scent made Nerith hungry: split fruit, pepper, the hot resin she used to mend her specimen boxes. A winged thing no longer than her hand flew through the doorway, turned in the quarry's chilly air, and flew straight back.
Bozren followed it.
“You've had your turn,” she said.
He was already on the moss, walking with his arms out. His boots sank and released with a soft tearing sound. He went six paces, turned, and returned through the opening. Green sap strung itself between his sole and the sill.
“There,” he said. “You can come back.”
Nerith stepped through before he could offer advice. The branch moved beneath her, a slow rise she felt first in her knees. Above her, a leaf unfurled. Its edge traveled across the sky for so long that she stopped trying to guess where it would end. She went back into the quarry with her neck aching and her heart running hard.
Bozren had sat down to retie his boots. He was looking past her at a yellow flower on an upper bough.
She knew that look. He had worn it while crawling out of a bear's winter den with a piece of antler. He had thought he was following a rumor about ivory stairs. She'd laughed for half an hour; afterward, when he showed her the scratches, she'd wanted to see the den.
“That's your bear-den face,” she said.
He lifted his chin toward the bough. “I like that one.”
“We haven't even opened half of them.”
He got up reluctantly and moved aside. She shut the door, and for the first time saw how much quarry stone showed through the river.
Red was no longer coming down the slope.
Its last length was winding itself up the frame. She put a finger to it. The slab opened, the heat returned, and the red flowed over the sill into fire. She watched its trailing end slide through. The white ridges flattened, grew transparent, and disappeared.
Through the empty frame stood Bozren's shadow on a heap of broken limestone. The slab remained open at her left.
“Do that again,” he said.
She shut it. On the frame, blue and green flowed past violet, yellow, orange, and a narrow dark color she had no name for. She pressed the place where red had been. Then she touched the red cuff of her coat to it, hard enough to rub quarry dust into the wool.
Bozren said her name.
“I know.” She pulled the cuff away.
Far up the slope, orange had begun contracting. Its tributaries drew inward, leaving dry white stone behind. Nerith took a collecting jar from her pack and tried to scoop a little into it. The color divided around the glass. When she put the jar across its path, the strand climbed out of reach along a stone. It waited there until she moved aside.
“They're leaving,” Bozren said.
She could see that. She didn't see why they had started just as she arrived.
She jerked her chin at the frame. “Then open something.”
He caught orange. Beyond the door lay a terrace of honey-colored pillars, all the same height, all slowly revolving. A dry wind rattled between them. Bozren stood across the sill with one foot on a pillar's broad top and one in the quarry, peering down into the spaces.
The orange strand shortened. It slid along the frame toward his ankle, where its tip curled and uncurled. The terrace grew faint. Bozren leaned farther out, and Nerith caught the back of his belt.
“Look at your ankle.”
He looked at the color, then drew his foot into the quarry. Orange swept through the opening as soon as he was clear. The pillars vanished.
Neither spoke for a moment. Nerith was still holding his belt. He looked over his shoulder at her hand, and she let go.
“It waited for you,” she said.
“I wasn't going to find out how long.”
She looked back up the white slope. She could remember colors there that she could no longer name accurately. The river was thinning everywhere, different strands moving at different speeds. She had been imagining a queue of carriages, a roof against the rain, her own journeys in the hours when nobody was waiting. She had not even thought to hurry.
Bozren closed the slab and reached for green.
“No. Mine now.”
His hand stopped. She touched violet.
The door swung onto a slope of hollow mineral shells. Their curled edges protruded from the sand like the mouths of trumpets, some small enough to fit her jar, others large enough to shelter a house. Violet shadows pooled inside them. Beyond the nearest ridge, pale stems carried drops of moisture which gathered, shone, and fell with extravagant slowness.
The air was cool and breathable. Something hummed deep in the shells. Nerith picked up a pebble and threw it. It traveled much farther than she intended, dwindling to a speck before it struck.
A clear note sounded. Another shell answered, then another, until a chord rolled out across the dunes. The pressure of it fluttered the front of her coat. Where the pebble had landed, one enormous spiral raised itself on little articulated feet.
Nerith laughed. It came out too loud. She had spent her first gold on a bronze bowl she'd heard singing in a temple, only to discover that at home it sounded thin and mean. She'd carried it all the way back and sat there striking it until they made her leave. Now she leaned into the opening, waiting for the next note.
Bozren was opening his pack.
“Listen,” she told him. “That's all from one pebble. One. Think what a handful would do.”
“I heard.”
“It moved. The big one by the ridge stood up. It's got feet. Did you see?”
“I saw.” He pulled his climbing cord free of the bedroll. “I want green again.”
She put her boot on the sill. A violet thread touched its leather toe and pulled away. The nearest shell vibrated against the sand. A drop hung above a delicate stem, falling so slowly she could watch it turn.
Behind her came the click of Bozren's pack buckle.
“What are you doing?”
“Going into the tree.”
“For another look.”
He tightened the strap with both hands. “With my things.”
She took her foot off the sill and shut the door. The chord stopped halfway through a descending note. She could still feel it in her ribs.
“You saw what happened to orange.”
“Yes.”
“You can't leave a rope through. What happens when the opening goes? And you can't stand in it and get anywhere.”
“I'm taking the rope to climb.”
His pack was the one he had carried for as long as she'd known him, the canvas patched with pieces of older packs. A tin cooking cup swung from its side. His provisions would last weeks; she had seen him take that pack into the hills and come back at the other end of a season. Once she'd found him still camped beside a stone beast three weeks after they had sold the jewels from its eyes. At night, he told her, moths came out of its empty sockets. She had stayed one night. It had been worth staying.
“Let me see yellow first,” she said. “You might like it more.”
“I'm not asking you to choose for me.”
“I know. Just look at it with me first. It won't take long.”
He opened his mouth, then shut it as yellow suddenly slid away from her reaching hand. It ran up the frame and into the seam. No one touched it in time.
Bozren said, “Move, Nerith.”
She was standing between him and green. She had not meant to put herself there. Her hands were on the frame, one above the other, gripping the hard black corners where no color passed. Beside her left hand the last length of blue went up into the seam, and the narrow dark strand close behind it.
“Wait with me.”
He stopped pulling on his gloves.
“Until when?”
She wanted to say until she was ready. Until she'd seen them all. Until she had worked out how a person chose a place to stay when there were still places they had never seen. In the light from the river his face looked younger than it had when he came round the door, eager and offensively hopeful.
“I don't know,” she said.
“I could miss it.”
Green was still thick enough to lay a palm across. Upstream, though, it was gathering its little branches into itself.
Nerith stepped aside. Bozren touched it, and the forest opened. A rain of pollen drifted past, grains big as barley, yellow dust brushing the sill. On the distant bough, the flower he had watched was loosening another petal.
“I used to climb the ash behind my mother's house,” he said, watching it. “I thought it would get taller while I was up there. If I waited.” He rubbed pollen off his nose. “Stupid.”
She had never heard him say that of himself. “How long did you wait?”
“Till she came out with a ladder.”
He stepped across the sill with his pack. Nerith's chest hurt. She wanted him back where she could pull faces at him when he said something she didn't believe. They had met by chance in more miserable places than she could count. She'd come to rely on the nuisance of him appearing.
Bozren paused with his heel still in the doorway.
“You can come,” he said.
She looked past him. The broad limb rose toward a fork, and there were paths among the little trees growing in its bark: openings where leaves had been pushed aside, distant patches of moving brightness. She could follow him. She could see what he saw and complain about his cooking cup, and it would be a life no one in her town had imagined.
Beyond her shoulder, violet slid softly against stone.
“I want to hear the shells,” she said.
He nodded, once. She crouched to put her jar away. Its glass was unmarked; not even a smear of orange had stayed on it. She wrapped it in its cloth and packed it between the dried figs and her spare shirt.
Green had drawn its whole remaining length down from the quarry slope. It circled the frame once, and its tip reached Bozren's heel.
“Go,” she said. “I'll watch till you're through.”
He took two steps, turned, and lifted his hand. She lifted hers. The green flowed after him, unrolling along the moss. Through the fading opening she saw him turn toward the fork and break into a clumsy run beneath the weight of his pack. She laughed, and wanted to be running there herself, and kept her feet where they were.
Then there was only the quarry behind the frame.
Nerith stood with her hand up a little longer. Evening had reached the bottom of the cut. The wet patch left by the ocean had dried at its edges, and the pollen was sticking to the middle of it.
She could go back down the road. She knew how far it was to supper, knew which of the merchants would listen without interrupting, which would offer her money for the map. There would be pleasure in making them believe her. Someone would ask about Bozren. Someone always did.
Violet was the last color left.
She put on her pack. For a moment the weight steadied her into the familiar business of leaving a place she had searched. Then she shut the empty door and crouched beside the violet strand.
It stopped under her fingers. She felt it gather, a small living firmness. It had somewhere to go.
When the door opened, she stood on the sill and listened. The shells were quiet now. Across the slope, the drop she had watched earlier was gone; another was swelling in its place. She could see little tracks where a spiral had crossed the sand. She looked back once, all the way to the lip of the quarry, then hitched her waterskin higher on her belt.
She stepped out. Her usual stride carried her too high, too far. She hung for a startled moment with both feet off the ground, her pack lifting against its straps. She twisted to look back. Violet slid across the sand below her; the rectangle of quarry light narrowed and went out.
Nerith came down on the side of a shell.
Its note threw a ripple through the sand. Spirals stirred along the ridge, opening their many feet. She tried to recover her balance, stepped onto another curved lip, and rang a second note, deeper than the first. The shell bucked under her boot and sent her tumbling upward. Three dunes away something huge began to rise.
She tucked her knees up and watched where she was going to fall.