The ship went into the mountainside like a coin into a slot.
Aizen sealed the wound of its passing with a curtain the colour of the evening sky, and from a hundred paces the cliff was only a cliff again, no seam, no shimmer, nothing for a hunter or a priest or a god to catch. He had chosen the site from orbit, a fold of dead ground in the lee of a range the natives did not cross, far from the lit valleys where the prayer pooled thickest.
His three specialists set about the base with the unhurried competence of people who had built harder things in worse places. By the second day there was air, and light, and a laboratory grown out of the rock. By the third there was a barrier-shell that would have cost Tengen a month of his long life, nested, silent, tuned so finely that nothing alive could see it, sense it, or wander into it by accident. Aizen walked its perimeter once, the way another man tests a lock, and found it good.
Gin spent those three days outside, in the cold, watching the animals.
They were not animals. Aizen had told him so, and Gin had smiled and gone out anyway, because there was a difference between being told a thing and standing downwind of it while it grazed.
At dusk on the third day he came back through the airlock trailing alien frost, and said, without preamble, "They pray in their sleep."
Aizen looked up from the readouts. "Go on."
"The herd in the low valley." Gin folded himself into a chair, boneless, his eyes their usual shut crescents. "Big things. Six legs, near enough. Cursed spirits, proper ones, Aizen-san, not the mist we get at home. Flesh. Blood, or whatever fills them. They graze on the stones, on the light, on each other's leavings, and when they sleep they make a sound." He tipped his head. "You'd call it lowing. I sat with it a while. It isn't lowing. It's a hymn. They don't know they're doing it. It just comes out of them, the way breathing does, and it goes up."
He lifted one long finger toward the ceiling, toward the peak, toward the valleys beyond.
"Everything here goes up."
"The Kalyans." Aizen turned a screen toward him. On it, a fragment of stone the biologist had brought in that morning turned slowly in a field, a shard of the grey-gold vein that ran under every hill on this world, the stuff the natives mined and machined and could not, the instruments insisted, actually be mining, because it was not a mineral.
"That's the other thing." Gin leaned in, and for a moment the fox went out of his face and left only the boy who had once solved problems that made grown mathematicians weep. "I cut a piece. Small one, off an outcrop, clean." He would not have felt the need to specify clean to anyone but Aizen, who understood that Gin's cuts were the most honest thing about him. "It bled."
"It bled cursed energy."
"It bled warmth." Gin said the word as though tasting it. "At home you strike a special-grade and the energy that comes off it wants to unmake you, it's hate given a shape and a grudge. This wanted nothing. It came out of the rock like heat off a sleeping dog and it went looking for something to answer." He sat back. "The ore doesn't convert cursed energy into power, whatever your engineer's boxes say. That's backwards. The ore is where the power comes from. It's not a machine. It's a body. And we have set up house on its ankle."
For a long moment Aizen said nothing. Outside, past three metres of rock and a barrier no god on this world would ever find, the mountains held their breath and did not, quite, stop singing.
This was what he had crossed four light-years to stand on. He had come for a specimen, a single special-grade spirit, taken alive, to give the Hōgyoku the one thing it still lacked. He had expected to hunt for it. He had not expected to land on it, had not expected the specimen to be the size of a continent, veined through the crust of a living world, asleep and dreaming and fed three times a day by a species that had spent two thousand years learning to love it so it would not wake.
He found the shape of it pleased him. Aizen had always preferred a problem that respected him enough to be difficult.
* * *
The strategist wanted to move on the nearest colony inside the week. Aizen let her make the case, she was good, and being heard kept good people sharp, and then he closed it.
"No," he said. "We watch. A year, perhaps more. We learn what they worship and how, and what it costs them, and what happens to the ones who stop. We map every temple and the roads of prayer between them the way you would map a nervous system, because that is what it is. And we do not so much as bruise a single one of them until I understand precisely what I am standing on."
He let the smile come, the small courteous one that his people had learned to fear more than shouting. "We have all the time in the world. That is, after all, my particular field."
The biologist laughed before she could stop herself. The engineer did not, the engineer had seen the decay-fields, and did not find the joke funny so much as accurate.
"In the meantime," Aizen went on, "Gin will go among them."
Gin's eyes opened a careful millimetre.
"Not to touch," Aizen said. "To read. You have the only pair of eyes on this expedition that can look at a man and see the schematic. I want their sorcery understood from the inside before we lift a finger. How they bind themselves to their gods. What the binding takes, and what it gives, and where, always, Gin, where the seam is." He turned back to his screens.
"Consider it a long walk in a strange country. You've earned one. You've been very patient."
"I've been very patient with a great many people." Gin unfolded and stood, and at the door he paused, and the fox came back into his face all at once, like a light switched on. "Aizen-san. When it does wake, this thing we're camped on, what do you suppose it'll make of us?"
Aizen considered the shard still turning on the screen, the warmth in it, the patient, terrible readiness of a thing that had been answering prayers since before the natives had language to shape them.
"Nothing," he said. "It won't have time. That is the entire point of me."
* * *
The native came at first light, and neither of them had heard it approach.
That, more than anything, told Aizen he had been right to give this world a year. The figure stood at the foot of the eastern slope, a hundred metres below the invisible wall, and it was looking, not at the base, which could not be seen, but at the place where the base was, with the flat, patient attention of something that had noticed a hole in the world where a hole should not be.
It was robed. Grey and gold, the colours of the ore. Where its skin showed, the skin itself was veined faintly with the same grey-gold, as though the stuff had grown up into it, or it had grown down into the stuff. And from it came, Gin had drifted to the window without a sound, and now he said it so Aizen wouldn't have to "nothing."
"No prayer," Aizen agreed softly.
"No prayer. No hymn. No warmth going up." Gin's smile had gone somewhere thin and interested. "Everything on this rock is singing, Aizen-san. Everything. The stones and the beasts and the priests in their beds. And that one down there is quiet." He tilted his head, reading, reading, and for once Aizen watched him fail to finish the read, watched the schematic refuse to resolve. "I can't see him. I can see through the mountain if I want to. I can't see him at all."
Below, the figure stood a moment longer at the edge of a wall it could not have known was there. Then it inclined its head not to them, to the mountain, to the thing sleeping under it and turned, and walked back down into the valley of the faithful, unhurried, a single silent point moving through a world that would not stop saying grace.
Aizen watched until it was gone.
"Note him," he said at last, and his voice had not changed at all, which was how Gin knew to take it seriously. "Whatever else we do here. Whoever that is." He returned to his work, and the shard turned, and the mountains sang.
"We do not go near that one until I have thought about him for a very long time."