Hollin End was a day’s ride west of Orme, where the good farmland of the Orme Leaf began to fold itself up into the long grey ridges that ran toward the Shield.
They went on the Survey cart, because it was hers to use on the small work and nobody had yet told her she was off the small work. Bastian drove. He’d turned up at her lodgings at dawn with the cart already harnessed and the chain-bag already in the back, and when she’d come down the stairs and said, I didn’t ask you, he’d said, No, and held the reins out of her way so she could climb up.
She told him on the road. About the Press, and the burnished copper, and Deverel Pike’s twenty years of red circles. He listened the way he listened to everything, with his eyes on the horse’s ears and his big hands loose on the reins, and when she’d finished he didn’t say anything for nearly a league.
“Somebody in the Survey House,” he said finally, “came down in the night and cut your number out of a copper plate.”
“Yes.”
“With their own hands.”
“Pike says it’s a very good hand. An old one.”
Bastian nodded slowly. He drove on another half-league.
“When I was at Saltreach,” he said, “there was a man on the north face crew. Older than me. Been there twenty years. Knew the stone better than the overseers. One day the overseers told him to work a seam he said was rotten. He said so. They said work it. He worked it.” He was quiet a moment. “Next day the face came down. Eleven men under it. And afterward the quarry-master came round with the book, and in the book it said the seam had been sound. And the quarry-master had written that himself. In his own hand. At night.” He flicked the reins. “Because if the book said the seam was rotten, the quarry-master’d have to say why he worked it.”
Oriel looked at him.
“That’s why you went to Saltreach,” she said. “Isn’t it. Not for theft. You’d have been a witness to that book.”
“I went to Saltreach for theft,” said Bastian. “Before. That came after. I was in already.” He didn’t look at her. “That’s why I got seven instead of two.”
They drove on.
The country rose around them. The fields got smaller and the walls between them got bigger, grey drystone walls snaking up the hillsides, and the sheep got shaggier, and the sky got larger. And on the long ridge ahead, as the afternoon went over toward evening, she saw the stump of it.
Coldharrow tower.
It had been the finest observatory in the realm, once. Built by the Survey a hundred and fifty years ago, when the Survey still sent people up towers at night to look at the stars — a round tower of white stone on the highest point of the Westerly ridge, forty rods tall, with a copper dome on top that turned on iron wheels, and inside it a great brass star-glass on a pier of solid stone sunk to the rock. The Survey had stopped using it sixty years ago, when astral fixing was banned. It had stood empty for twenty years. Then a young surveyor called Imbert Vale had asked if he could live in it, rent-free, in return for keeping the roof sound, and nobody had cared enough to say no.
He’d lived in it for forty years. He’d died at the foot of it.
The dome was gone now. Somebody had taken the copper for scrap the winter after he died. The tower stood up on its ridge against the evening like a broken tooth, the empty windows black, the white stone streaked with rain.
“Doesn’t look like much,” said Bastian.
“It was,” said Oriel.
Wenna Vale lived in a stone cottage at the bottom of the ridge, at the end of a lane with grass growing up the middle, in a garden that was mostly bees.
There were eleven hives. Oriel counted them as Bastian drew up at the gate — tall white-painted wooden boxes in two rows along the south wall of the garden, among lavender gone to seed and the dry brown stalks of hollyhocks. The bees were going in and out in the last of the light, slow and heavy, the way bees went in the autumn when there wasn’t much left to bring home.
Wenna was among them. A small, bent, white-haired woman of eighty in a man’s old coat, with a veil of netting pushed back on her straw hat and a smoker in her hand that put up a lazy curl of grey. She didn’t look round when the cart stopped. She finished what she was doing at the end hive, and closed the lid, and put the smoker down on a post. Then she turned and looked at them over the gate.
“Oriel Tash,” she said. “I wondered when.”
“Mrs. Vale.”
“Wenna, at my age. Nobody’s called me Mrs. Vale since the funeral, and he’d have hated it then.” She looked at Bastian, up on the cart-seat. All of him. “Who’s that?”
“Bastian Coyle. My chain-man.”
“Does he talk?”
“Not much.”
“Good,” said Wenna Vale. “Imbert talked enough for three. I got used to the quiet after. I’ve come to like it.” She opened the gate. “Come in. Bring him. Mind the bees, they’re cross this time of year, they know what’s coming.”
She gave them tea in a kitchen that smelled of wax and smoke and honey, with a range in the corner and bunches of dried herbs hanging from the beams and a long scrubbed table that had been scored and burned and ink-stained by forty years of an old man spreading charts across it.
Oriel told her why they’d come.
She told it badly. She’d told it twice now, to Orrel and to Pike, and it hadn’t got any easier. It sounded worse every time. A wall, a pin, a crack. A copper plate. Twenty years of red circles. She heard herself saying I think the Register’s being changed across Wenna Vale’s kitchen table, and she heard how mad it sounded, the way Orrel had heard it.
Wenna listened to all of it without a word. She sat with her old hands round her cup and looked at Oriel with eyes that were very dark and very clear in her lined face. When Oriel finished, she sat for a while longer.
“He used to say you’d come,” she said at last.
Oriel’s throat went tight.
“Not you, exactly. Somebody. He’d say it at night, when he came down from the tower. ‘Somebody’ll come, Wen. One day somebody’ll measure something they can’t explain, and they’ll come.’ I used to tell him nobody was coming. I used to tell him nobody cared.” She turned the cup in her hands. “He’d say, ‘Then I’ll keep the books for nobody.’ And go back up.”
“The books,” said Oriel.
“The books.” Wenna put the cup down. “You know they burned the tower papers. After. The Survey sent two clerks and a cart. Took everything out of the tower that had writing on it and burned it in the yard. Said it was Survey property. Said a dead man’s private notes on Survey premises were a confidentiality matter. I stood at the window and watched them.” She looked at Oriel. “They didn’t look in the hives.”
The hive at the end of the second row wasn’t a hive.
It looked like one. The same tall white box on the same brick stand, the same sloped lid, the same landing-board at the bottom with a narrow slot. Bees went in and out of the slot. But when Wenna had smoked them quiet and lifted off the lid and the top two frames of comb and set them on the grass, and then lifted out a false floor of thin board that had been made to look like the bottom of the box, there was a second box underneath.
Tin-lined. Dry. Sealed round the edge with beeswax.
And in it, packed upright, spine to spine, like books on a shelf: forty small fat notebooks in black oilcloth covers. Each one had a year inked on its spine in white. The first said C.364. The last said C.403.
“He brought them down a few at a time,” said Wenna. “The last ten years. After the Survey took his commission and told him he was a pensioner now and should stop bothering people. He said the tower wasn’t safe anymore. I said, from what? He said, from tidiness.” She stepped back from the hive. “I haven’t opened them. I can’t read his figures. I never could. He used to say I was the only person in the realm he didn’t have to explain himself to, and that was why he married me.”
Oriel knelt in the wet grass beside the hive. Her knee screamed. She didn’t notice.
She took out the last one. C.403. She held it in both hands.
“Take the lot,” said Wenna. “That’s what they’re for. They were never mine.” She looked away, across the garden, at the stump of the tower on the ridge with the last red light behind it. “He wasn’t brave, you know. People will tell you he was brave, if anyone ever tells you anything about him at all. He wasn’t. He was terrified, at the end. He didn’t sleep. He just couldn’t stop. That’s all. He was a man who couldn’t stop looking at a thing once he’d seen it.” She pulled her veil down over her face, although the bees had gone in for the night. “I hope you’re not like that, Oriel Tash. I hope you can stop.”
She couldn’t stop.
She sat at the long scored table in Wenna Vale’s kitchen with the lamp turned up and the forty black notebooks stacked beside her in four piles, and she read them all night.
She knew what she was looking at. Imbert had taught her, that first season, up in the tower, in secret, the way he’d taught her the pins. Astral fixing. Finding where you were by the stars.
It was simple, in principle. That was what had always made her love it. At night, you set the star-glass on its pier, sunk to the rock, and you watched the fixed stars cross the meridian — the line straight north and south over your head — one by one. You measured how high each one stood when it crossed. That told you how far north you were. And you timed the moment each one crossed, by a true clock. That told you how far east or west.
The trick was the clock. The stars crossed the meridian at a different moment for every place in the world, a little earlier the further east you went. So if you had a clock that kept the time of some fixed place — a place that didn’t move — you could see, by how early or late your stars crossed, exactly how far east or west of that place you were. Not by the Register. Not by the chain. By the sky.
Imbert’s true clock had been a chronometer the size of a loaf, in a padded box, that he carried to the Shield-rock once every year. To the Canton border at Grey Gate, a hard week’s ride west, where the bedrock came up out of the ground in great bare grey shoulders that hadn’t moved since the world was made. He set the clock there, every spring, by the sun at noon on the Shield. Then he carried it back to Coldharrow on his lap in the cart, very carefully, and every clear night for the rest of the year he timed his stars by it.
Forty years of clear nights.
She read them in order. C.364, the first, in a young man’s hand, upright and eager, with a great many crossings-out. C.380. C.390. The hand getting smaller and steadier and more crabbed. Columns. Star names. Altitudes. Times. And at the bottom of each night, in a little box ruled in red, the fix: Coldharrow tower’s position, by the stars, in degrees and minutes, against the Shield.
And beside each year’s fixes, on the last page of each book, one figure, circled.
The tower’s distance east of where it had been the year before.
C.372: 3 rods. C.373: 3 rods. C.374: 4. Year after year. Three rods. Four rods. What the schoolbooks said. What the almanac allowed for. The leaves drift, everybody knows that. Imbert had written, beside the C.380 figure, in tiny letters: The almanac is right. Good. She could hear him saying it, pleased, the way he was pleased when anything turned out to be what it said it was.
C.385: 6 rods.
C.388: 9 rods.
C.391: 15 rods. And beside it, in the same tiny hand, but not pleased: Checked the clock. Checked the pier. Checked the glass. All sound.
C.394: 24 rods.
C.397: 40 rods.
She stopped there. She sat back. The lamp hissed.
Bastian was asleep in the chair by the range, his arms folded, his chin on his chest. Wenna had gone up hours ago. The kitchen was very quiet. Outside the window the stump of Coldharrow tower stood up black against stars.
She picked up the next book.
C.400: 61 rods.
C.401: 77 rods.
C.402: 98 rods.
And then the last book. C.403. Thin. Half-filled. The hand gone small and shaky, the columns crooked, ink blots. Clear nights until the autumn. Then the entries stopped on a night in Ninthmonth. The last line of figures broke off in the middle of a time, the ink trailing away down the page in a thin line, as if the pen had been dragged.
He’d fallen that night. She knew the date. She’d been at the funeral.
On the last page of the book, though — not after the trailing line, but before, on the facing page, where he’d been working out the year’s figure in pencil as the autumn went on — there was more.
A sum. Long, careful, in pencil, the way he’d done sums when he wanted to check them three times. The year’s drift so far. Doubled for the rest of the year, at the rate it was going. Then a column of the forty years’ figures, added. Then a total.
Coldharrow has moved east by the stars since C.364: near 2 leagues.
And below that, the rate. The yearly figures, compared. Doubling every 9 years, near enough. Was. Now faster.
And below that, in ink, not pencil. As if he’d gone back to it, later, at night, and written it in ink so it wouldn’t rub away.
The Register shows Coldharrow in the same place as C.364, to the link. Every true-mark on the Orme Leaf agrees with every other. They have all moved together. The map moves with the ground. The map is perfect. The map is a lie.
They are settling the Register to hide it. Every Charter Eve. I am sure of it now.
Aldous knows. He has always known. I wrote to him. He did not answer.
Ask the Wells. The Listeners can hear it. They have been told not to say.
They will not look. So I will keep looking.
— I.V.
Bastian woke at the fifth bell, the way he always woke, as if someone had pulled a chain. He looked at her across the kitchen.
She hadn’t moved. She was sitting at the table with the last book open in front of her and her hands flat on either side of it.
“Well,” he said.
She turned the book round so he could see the last page. He couldn’t read Imbert’s figures. He read the words. She watched him read them. He read slowly, the way he read everything, his lips moving very slightly. When he got to Aldous knows he stopped, and looked up at her.
“Aldous,” said Bastian.
“Aldous Penhallow,” said Oriel. “Survey-General of the Crown. They were apprentices together. Imbert told me once. They were the two best young surveyors in the realm, and one of them went up a tower to look at the stars and the other one went into the Survey House and never came out.”
Bastian looked back at the page. At the sums.
“Two leagues,” he said.
“In forty years. And doubling. Every nine years. Was.” She put her finger on the word. “Now faster.”
“Faster to what?”
She didn’t answer straight away.
She’d been doing it for an hour. In her head, in the dark, while he slept. She hadn’t wanted to put it on paper. She’d done it anyway, in the margin of her own field book, in her own small neat hand, the way she did everything.
Imbert’s figures said the Orme Leaf had moved two leagues east in forty years. Most of that in the last ten. And the rate was rising. Doubling, every nine years or less. The boneyard at Lusk said the ground wasn’t moving all together anymore — that the eastern part of the leaf was moving faster than the western, pulling away, stretching, cracking. One day it won’t move together.
And east of the Orme Leaf, at the far end of all that moving ground, was the Lip.
She’d never seen it. Hardly anyone had. It was on the sheets as a thick black line at the edge of the Eastern Pale, with nothing beyond it, and a note in the Register’s fine copperplate: The Lip. Leaf-edge. Calving zone. Not surveyed. Beyond it the land just stopped. Broke off. Tipped, slowly, a slab at a time, over the course of centuries, into the Deep, the black sea far underground that all the leaves floated on. That was what the schoolbooks said. Slowly. Over centuries. Esker Bay was the nearest town to it. A salt town, on the Esker Water. Nine or ten leagues from the Lip, the sheets said. A long way.
A long way, at a few rods a year.
“Bastian,” she said. “If the whole leaf’s moving east, and the east end’s moving faster than the west —“
“It’s going over,” said Bastian. Simply. “The east end’s going over the Lip. And it’s pulling the rest after it. Like a cloth off a table.”
She looked at him.
“I worked a quarry face for seven years,” said Bastian. “I know what it looks like when the bottom’s going and the top doesn’t know yet.”
He got up. He went to the window and stood looking out at the stump of Coldharrow tower, black against the grey beginning of the dawn.
“How long,” he said.
“I don’t know. Not from this. Imbert didn’t have the Lip. Nobody’s surveyed the Lip in sixty years.” She closed the book. “I’d need the Lip. Where it is now. How fast it’s moving. Whether it’s moving at all. And I’d need someone who could tell me what’s happening under the ground, not on top of it. Someone who could hear it.”
“The Wells,” said Bastian.
“They have been told not to say.” She stood up. Her knee had gone stiff in the night and she had to hold the table. “Imbert wrote to Penhallow. And Penhallow didn’t answer. And the Survey burned the tower papers, and somebody’s been cutting the numbers in the Press for sixty years. And the Wells have been told not to say.”
“So who do you tell?”
She looked at the forty black books on Wenna Vale’s kitchen table.
“Nobody yet,” she said. “First I find out if it’s true.”
Deverel Pike screwed the jeweler’s glass into his eye and bent over the last page of C.403 for a very long time.
He didn’t touch it. He looked. At the ink. At the pencil. At the place where the pen had dragged down the page. At the sums, line by line, figure by figure, with his long scarred hands flat on the end bench on either side of the book, the way he’d sat with the copper plate. The presses thumped at the far end of the room. Oriel sat on the stool and waited. Bastian stood behind her, filling the aisle between the benches, and the journeymen walked round him.
Finally Deverel took the glass out of his eye.
“Not one,” he said. Too loud. “Not a figure. Not a scratch. Not a burnish. Nobody’s touched this but him.”
He turned the book a little, under the water-globe, so the light lay across the page.
“He used a steel nib,” said Deverel Pike. “A cheap one. Bent at the left tine. You can see it in the down-strokes, every one, the left side’s heavier. Forty years, I’d guess, the same nib, or the same kind.” He touched, very lightly, the edge of the last line of ink, where it trailed away down the page. “And this one he didn’t finish.”
“No,” said Oriel.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then down at the book again. At the forty years of a man’s nights, in a bent nib, in columns.
“Then these,” said Deverel Pike, “are the only honest numbers in the realm.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
I. VALE STAR-BOOKS C.364–C.403 (40 VOLS), RECOVERED, HOLLIN END
COLDHARROW BY STARS VS SHIELD (GREY GATE CLOCK): NEAR 2 LEAGUES EAST IN 39 YRS
RATE: 3 RODS/YR (C.372) → 98 RODS/YR (C.402). DOUBLING ≈ 9 YRS. “NOW FASTER.”
REGISTER: COLDHARROW UNMOVED, TO THE LINK
PIKE: NO ALTERATION. ONE NIB.
I.V.: “ALDOUS KNOWS.” “ASK THE WELLS.”
NEXT: THE WELLS.