Ketter Bayle didn’t laugh this time.
He sat at the long table in the reeve’s hall with his gold chain of office over his smock and his big salt-cracked hands flat on the wood, and listened to Oriel tell him about the north field, and Hob Strand, and the halter, and he didn’t say anything at all until she’d finished. Then he got up and went to the window and stood looking east, over the salt-pans, toward where the land went flat and grey to the horizon.
“Hob,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’ve known him forty years. He came in every quarter-day for his salt and his tea. Every quarter-day he’d sit in that chair and tell me it was faster.” Ketter Bayle didn’t turn round. “I’d give him a beer and tell him to go home and stop worrying.”
“Mr. Bayle —“
“How long?” He turned. His red face had gone a strange color, grey under the red. “You’ve done your sums. I can see it on you. How long for the Bay.”
She told him. The slow figure. Under four years.
He stood very still.
“Four years,” he said.
“Less. Maybe much less. I don’t know yet. I need —“ She stopped. I need the Wells’ registers, the Survey’s real numbers, somebody upstairs to look. “I need more figures. But you should start thinking about it. Now. Where twelve thousand people would go. How you’d move them. What you’d need.”
“Move them.” He laughed. It came out wrong. “Surveyor, this town’s been here three hundred years. Every brick of it’s mortgaged to the Ledger House of Aske. Every salt-pan. Every barge. You know what a deed’s worth on the Eastern Pale? It’s worth what the Register says the land’s worth, and the Register says the land’s nine leagues from the edge and always will be.” He spread his hands. “If I stand on the steps of this hall and say we’re going over in four years, the Aske agent’s on the next coach to Orme, and every loan in the Bay’s called in by the end of the month, and I’ve got twelve thousand people with no money and no salt and nowhere to go now, instead of in four years.”
Oriel looked at him.
“So you’ll say nothing,” she said.
“I’ll say nothing yet.” He came back to the table and leaned on it. “Bring me something I can show them. Not a field book. Not a story about Hob. Something with the Crown’s seal on it, that says the Survey has measured this and it’s true. Bring me that, and I’ll stand on the steps myself.” His voice dropped. “Otherwise I’m just another fool shouting about the edge. And I’ll be the one they hang when the money goes.”
They went back fast.
Six days to Orme, the way they’d come. Oriel’s knee had swollen to twice its size and gone purple and yellow and hot, and she rode the whole way in the back of the cart with it bound and propped on the chain-bag, and Sarn drove, badly, with her teeth set, because Bastian was the only one who could lift Oriel in and out and he wouldn’t let anyone else hold the reins on the bad stretches.
Sarn drove with her feet up on the footboard, off the cart-bed. She didn’t drink. She didn’t sleep much either. In the evenings at the inns she sat with her back to the wall and her eyes closed and her lips moving, very slightly, and once Oriel realized she was counting.
“Knocks,” said Sarn, when Oriel asked. “At the edge. I can hear them now. Even this far. Even up here.” She didn’t open her eyes. “Every one’s a field. Every one’s somebody’s barn.”
“How many?”
“Since Strand’s?” Sarn was quiet a moment. “Eleven.”
They came into Orme by the east gate at dusk on the tenth day of Tenthmonth, in the rain, with the cart’s lamps unlit and Oriel lying in the back under a tarpaulin.
It was Bastian’s idea. “Orrel said don’t come back to the House,” he’d said, on the last night, at the last inn. “He didn’t say don’t come back to the city. But somebody’ll be watching the gates for a Survey cart with a lame woman in it. So they won’t see one.”
They didn’t go to Oriel’s lodgings. They went to Wick Lane.
Deverel Pike’s room was over a chandler’s shop at the bottom of the lane, near the river, up an outside stair of slippery wooden treads. It was a single long low room under the eaves, smelling of candle-wax from the shop below and ink from everywhere, with a narrow bed and a stove and a table and every other surface covered in copper plates, proofs, burins, burnishers, jars, and a great many books. A large ginger cat sat on the bed and looked at them with contempt.
Deverel looked at Oriel’s knee, and at Sarn’s face, and at Bastian standing in his doorway soaked and enormous, and didn’t ask anything at all.
“Floor,” he said. Loudly. “Bed for her. The cat’ll move. Eventually.”
Imbert’s books were under his floor.
They’d brought them to him the day after Hollin End, all forty in a sack, and he’d taken up two boards by the stove and laid them in the space between the joists, in oilcloth, and put the boards back and his coal-scuttle on top. Oriel had been afraid to keep them in her own lodgings. She hadn’t, at the time, been able to say why.
She lay on Deverel Pike’s narrow bed with the ginger cat pressed sullenly against her bad leg and told him about the Lip.
He watched her mouth all the way through. When she got to Hob Strand, he looked away for a moment, at the stove. Then back.
“Four years,” he said.
“For the Bay. If it doesn’t speed up.”
“And you want to tell someone.”
“I want to tell everyone.” She pushed herself up on her elbows. “Ketter Bayle won’t move unless he’s got something with the Crown’s seal on it. Nobody will. Nobody believes a field book. Nobody believes a Listener with no license. They believe the Register. Where the Register says a thing is, there it is in law. So I need the Register to say it. I need the real numbers. Not mine. Not Imbert’s. Theirs. Whatever the Survey-General’s been using to cut the corrections every Charter Eve for sixty years. That hand in your copper. Somebody’s been writing down the truth so they know how much to lie. I need that book.”
Deverel was quiet for a long time.
“There’s a strongroom,” he said finally. “Under the Hall of Measure. Under the Standard Chain. Every Charter Eve the sealed correction case comes down from there. Two Chainguard carry it. The Deputy walks in front.” He shrugged. “I’ve never been in it. Nobody has, below Deputy.”
“Then I’ll go to the Deputy.”
“Calloway?” Deverel shook his head. “Calloway’s the one who walked your report upstairs. Calloway’d have you in a cell before you’d finished saying good morning.”
“Then I’ll go upstairs.”
They all looked at her. Even the cat.
“In the morning,” said Oriel. “First I need my instruments. My Survey commission. My own field books, the old ones — they’re at my lodgings. If I’m going to walk into the Survey House and say any of this, I want every figure I’ve ever taken in my hands when I do it.”
“I’ll fetch them,” said Bastian.
“They’ll be watching it.”
“Then they’ll see a chain-man fetching his surveyor’s bag,” said Bastian. “That’s all they ever see.”
They went together in the end, because she wouldn’t stay, and because Sarn said, flatly, that she wasn’t going to sit in a room over a chandler’s listening to the stone with only a deaf man and a cat, thank you.
Oriel’s lodgings were three rooms on the first floor of a narrow brick house on Fenner’s Row, in the clerks’ quarter on the south bank, where the Survey’s juniors had always lived because it was a short walk across the Chain Bridge to the House. Her landlady was a widow called Mrs. Hesketh, who did laundry, and had a lot of opinions about surveyors, all of them favorable as long as the rent came on quarter-day.
The street was dark. The rain had stopped. There was a lamp lit over the door of the Fenner’s Row inn at the corner and nothing else.
Sarn stopped at the end of the row.
She put her hand flat against the brick wall of the corner house. Then she crouched, in the wet, and put her palm on the pavement.
“There’s people in your house,” she said. Very quietly.
“Mrs. Hesketh —“
“Not Mrs. Hesketh. She’s heavy and she drags her left foot. Downstairs, at the back. Not moving. Sitting.” Sarn’s eyes were closed. “Upstairs. Four. No — five. Boots. Good boots. Standing still. One by the window. They’re waiting.”
Oriel’s stomach turned over.
“Chainguard,” said Bastian.
“Could be anybody.”
“Five men in good boots standing still in your rooms in the dark,” said Bastian, “aren’t anybody.”
They stood at the end of Fenner’s Row in the wet dark.
“Leave it,” said Bastian. “Leave the bag. Leave the books. Go back to Wick Lane.”
“My commission’s in there. My field books. Seventeen years of them. Every figure I’ve —“
“Leave it.”
She looked at him. In four years he had never once told her what to do.
She looked down the row at her own dark window.
She should have left it. She knew she should. She’d know it every day for a long time afterward. But it was seventeen years, and every number she’d ever written down, and the only thing she’d ever been any good at, and they were sitting in her rooms waiting for her to come home to it like a dog to its bowl.
“No,” she said. “They’ll burn them. Like they burned Imbert’s tower papers.” She turned to Sarn. “Is there a way in from the back?”
Sarn stared at her.
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Is there?”
Sarn closed her eyes again. Put her palm flat on the wet bricks.
“The yard,” she said, after a while. Unwillingly. “Mrs. Hesketh’s wash-house. There’s a door from it into the back passage. Nobody in the passage. Nobody on the back stair. They’re all in the front room, and on the landing.” She opened her eyes. “Your bedroom’s the back room?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody in it.”
Bastian said a word Oriel had never heard him say. Then he took off his coat and gave it to Sarn to hold.
They went in through the wash-house.
Oriel would remember it as a series of very small things. The smell of lye and wet linen in Mrs. Hesketh’s wash-house. The latch on the passage door, which she’d lifted a thousand times and had never noticed made a sound until now. The back stair, narrow, dark, every tread with its own creak that she knew by heart, which she climbed on her bad knee with Bastian behind her and Sarn behind him, putting her feet exactly where Oriel put hers. The dark in her own bedroom. The shape of the chest under the window where she kept her field books, and her commission in its tin case, and her own old theodolite in its box.
Voices, through the wall. The front room. Low. A man’s voice, bored. — told you, she’s gone west, the clerk said west — And another, sharper, older. — then we wait till she comes back east. Sit down, Brack. You’re dripping on her rug.
She knelt by the chest. Her knee went white. She opened the lid.
The field books were there. All of them. Seventeen years, in their brown cloth covers, in order, spine to spine. She began to take them out and pass them back to Bastian, two and three at a time, and he put them in the sack he’d brought, and the cloth covers whispered against each other in the dark.
Her commission. The tin case. She took it out.
Her hand touched something else, at the bottom of the chest. Cold. Brass. Her own first star-glass. The little one Imbert had given her, her first season, the one she’d never used since he died because it was illegal and because it hurt. She’d forgotten it was there.
She put it in her coat.
That was when the board creaked.
Not under her. Under Sarn, by the door. One board. One small, dry, old creak, the kind you’d never hear in the day with the street outside.
The voices in the front room stopped.
For one long second nobody in the whole house moved.
Then the sharp, older voice said, quite calmly, “Brack. Corran. The back.”
The bedroom door opened inward and a Chainguard came through it fast with a cudgel up, and Bastian hit him.
He didn’t hit him the way men hit each other in taverns. He hit him the way you’d drive an arrow into hard ground: one short, flat, heavy blow from the shoulder into the middle of the man’s chest, with all of Bastian’s weight behind it and none of it wasted. The Chainguard went backward through the doorway into the man behind him and they both went down on the landing in a tangle of grey coats and boots.
The second one got up first. He had a short sword half out. He came at the doorway and Bastian caught his sword-arm by the wrist in one hand and the elbow in the other and turned it, the way you’d turn a stiff tap, and Oriel heard the bone go. A thick wet crack. The man screamed and the sword hit the floor.
“Out,” said Bastian. Not loud. “Window.”
There was a lamp now on the landing. Somebody had brought it out of the front room. And in its light a third Chainguard, a woman, sergeant’s knot on her shoulder, broad and young and fair, stopped dead at the top of the front stairs with her own cudgel half-raised, and looked through the bedroom door at Bastian, and at Oriel on her knees by the chest with a tin case in her hands.
The sergeant didn’t move.
She stood there with her cudgel half up and looked at Oriel, and Oriel looked back at her, and something went across the young woman’s face — not fear. Something more like recognition. As if she’d been told who she was coming to arrest, and had expected somebody else.
Behind her, the sharp older voice. “Corran! Take her!”
Sergeant Corran didn’t move.
Oriel never knew, later, how long it lasted. A breath. Two. Long enough.
Then Bastian had the window open and Sarn was through it, onto the slates of the wash-house roof below, with a sound like a cat being drowned, and Bastian had Oriel under the arms and was lifting her out after, field books and all, and the last thing she saw through the bedroom door before the window-frame took it away was the sergeant still standing at the top of the stairs with her cudgel half-raised, and a tall man in a captain’s grey coat pushing past her with his face set like a nail.
The wash-house roof was slate, and wet, and steep.
Oriel came down onto it on her bad knee and screamed through her teeth. Then Bastian landed beside her, heavy, and the whole roof shook, and a slate cracked under his boot and slid away and smashed in the yard below.
“Up,” said Sarn. She was on her hands and knees on the slates, pressed flat, white as paper. She’d hated the cart-bed. She hated the ground floor of houses with cellars. She was on a wet roof in the dark, twenty feet up, and her whole body was shaking. But she was pointing. “Up. Across. Not down. They’ll have the yard. Next roof. It’s — it’s solid, the next one, brick, I can feel it, it goes all the way down —”
They went up.
Over the ridge of Mrs. Hesketh’s wash-house and down the other side onto the flat lead of the next house’s back kitchen, and across that, in the dark, with the rain starting again, and over a low wall onto another roof, slate again, steeper. Bastian carried the sack of field books over one shoulder and half-carried Oriel with the other arm, and she hopped and crawled and dragged her leg and didn’t think about anything except the next slate. Sarn went in front. On her hands and knees, mostly. Feeling the roofs. Touching every one before she put her weight on it, the way you’d test ice.
“Not that one,” she’d hiss. “Rotten. Hollow underneath.” And they’d go round. “This — this is good. Stone wall under it. Go.”
Behind them, voices. Boots in the yard. A whistle, shrill, three blasts, the Chainguard call. Lamps in the back windows of Fenner’s Row. Somebody on the wash-house roof behind them now, slipping, swearing.
The roofs of the clerks’ quarter ran together in a long jumble of slates and leads and chimney-stacks and gutters, all the way down toward the river. They went along them. Six houses. Eight. A chimney-stack that Bastian put his shoulder against to rest, gasping, for three breaths. A gap between two houses, a pace wide, with the alley black below, that Sarn looked at and said, flatly, “No,” and then jumped anyway, because there was nowhere else to go, and landed on the far side on her hands and knees and was sick in the gutter, and then turned round and held out her hands for the field books.
Bastian threw her the sack. Then he picked Oriel up — all of her, like a sack of meal, over his shoulder — and stepped across the gap.
He didn’t jump. He just stepped. As if the alley weren’t there.
On the far side he put her down, very gently, against a chimney, and stood there with his hands on his knees, breathing like a bellows.
“Getting old,” he said.
The boots behind them had stopped. Somebody back at the wash-house roof was shouting about ladders.
“They’ll go round,” said Sarn, from the gutter. She wiped her mouth. “By the street. To the river end. They’ll cut us off at the bridge.”
“Then we don’t go to the bridge,” said Bastian.
He looked out over the roofs of Orme in the rain. The south bank. The river, black, with the lights of the Chain Bridge strung across it. The north bank, and the copper domes and towers of the old city climbing its hill, and at the very top, lit from beneath by lamps in its great forecourt, the dome of the Survey House.
“Wick Lane’s north bank,” said Oriel.
“Wick Lane’s north bank,” agreed Bastian. “Barge-steps at the end of the Row. There’s always somebody with a skiff. They don’t ask, if you pay.” He looked at her. “Can you get down a ladder?”
“No.”
“Good,” said Bastian, and picked her up again.
The skiff belonged to an old woman who ferried night-soil and asked no questions and charged them four crowns, which was everything Sarn had. She sat in the stern and rowed them across the black river in the rain with her hood up and never once looked at their faces.
Oriel lay in the bottom of the skiff with her head on the sack of field books and her knee on fire and looked up at the rain coming down out of the dark.
“There was a sergeant,” she said. “On the landing. A woman. Corran. She didn’t take me.”
“I saw,” said Bastian.
“Why didn’t she take me?”
Bastian was quiet, rowing — he’d taken the second oar without asking.
“Maybe she looked,” he said finally. “Before she came. At what they said you’d done. Maybe she thought it didn’t sound like much of a crime. Looking at the stars.”
The old woman in the stern laughed, once, a short dry bark, and didn’t say anything.
Deverel was waiting up for them, with the stove lit and the cat on the bed and a pot of something on the stove that might once have been soup.
He took one look at them — soaked, filthy, Sarn grey and shaking, Oriel carried up the outside stair in Bastian’s arms like a drowned dog — and said, too loud, “Well. That went well, then.”
Then he came and helped.
It was nearly dawn before any of them sat down. Oriel on the bed with her knee bound in a cold wet cloth and the cat, grudgingly, pressed against her side. Sarn on the floor by the stove with her back against the wall, her bare feet on the boards — not good, she’d said, wood, and a shop under it, and a cellar under that, I can hear every cask — and a cup of Deverel’s soup in her hands that she wasn’t drinking. Bastian at the table, going through the sack of field books, one by one, checking each for damp, wiping each cover dry with his sleeve, laying them out in order on the table in a neat row. Seventeen years. He didn’t say anything. He just did it.
Deverel stood at the little window under the eaves, looking west.
He’d been standing there a while. Oriel noticed it the way you notice a clock has stopped. He was very still. He’d pushed the window open, and the rain had stopped, and the cold air came in, and he stood with his hands on the sill looking out over the roofs of Orme toward the west, where the sky was still dark.
“Pike,” she said.
He didn’t hear her. Of course he didn’t. She said it again, louder, and then Bastian, without looking up from the field books, reached out one long arm and tapped Deverel on the back.
Deverel turned round. His face was strange.
“There’s a light,” he said. “West. On the ridge. You can see it from here on a clear night. You can see the whole Westerly ridge from this window, I used to watch the lamp in his dome.” He turned back to the window. “There’s a light on it now.”
Oriel got up. She shouldn’t have. Her knee told her so in no uncertain terms. She got up anyway and limped to the window and stood beside him.
West, past the last roofs of the city, past the dark fields, a day’s ride off, the long black line of the Westerly ridge lay against a sky that was just beginning to go grey. And on the highest point of it, very small, very far, there was a light.
Orange. Flickering. Like a candle-flame seen across a field.
Coldharrow tower was burning.
They stood and watched it. None of them said anything. The light flickered on the ridge, small and steady, a candle on a windowsill a day’s ride away, and as the sky went grey behind it, they could see, very faintly, the smoke going up.
“Wenna,” said Oriel suddenly.
“She’ll be at her sister’s,” said Deverel. Too loud. “In Marlow. She went last week. She sent word to the Press. She said she’d had a feeling.” He was still looking at the light. “She said the bees were cross.”
The light on the ridge burned on. Then, as they watched, it flared — a sudden bright spark, brighter than before, as if something inside had given way, a floor or a stair — and then sank, and was a dull red glow, and then was only smoke against the dawn.
“There was nothing in it,” said Oriel. “They burned the papers nine years ago. There was nothing left in it but stone and an empty pier.”
“Then they didn’t burn it for the papers,” said Deverel Pike.
She looked at him.
“They burned it,” he said, “so nobody’d ever climb up it again and look.”
The cat jumped down off the bed and went and sat by the stove and began to wash.
Oriel stood at the window with her hand on the sill until the smoke on the ridge was gone into the grey sky. Then she turned round and looked at the room. Bastian with his row of field books. Sarn on the floor with her feet off the boards and her eyes closed and her lips moving, counting knocks. Deverel by the window. The cat.
“I’m going to the Survey House,” she said.
Bastian looked up.
“They’ll take you at the door.”
“No,” said Oriel. “Not if I go at night. Not if I go to the front door, and give my own name, and ask for him by his first name. Imbert’s name for him.” She put her hand in her coat and closed it round the little brass star-glass, still there, cold. “He’s been answering letters from the Survey for thirty years. Let’s see if he answers one from Imbert.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
ORME, 10th–11th Tenthmonth C.412
CHAINGUARD AT MY LODGINGS, FENNER’S ROW (5). WARRANT: ASTRAL FIXING, SEDITION.
RECOVERED: FIELD BOOKS C.395–412 (ALL), COMMISSION, STAR-GLASS (I.V.’S GIFT)
ONE CHAINGUARD ARM BROKEN (B.C.). SGT. CORRAN DID NOT ACT.
COLDHARROW TOWER BURNED, DAWN, 11th. NOTHING IN IT.
W. VALE SAFE AT MARLOW.
KNOCKS SINCE STRAND’S (S.I.): 14
NEXT: ALDOUS.