They broke his hand on the first morning.
Treddick didn’t do it himself. Bastian noticed that. Treddick stood by the door of the cell with his arms folded and his face like a nail and watched two of his Chainguard do it, and asked the questions in a flat, patient voice, as if he were reading them off a list.
“Where’s Tash?”
Bastian sat on the stone floor of the cell with his back against the wall and his right hand on the floor in front of him, where they’d put it, under a Chainguard’s boot.
“Don’t know,” he said.
“Where are the books?”
“What books?”
“Who gave her the Deputy’s key?”
“What key?”
The boot came down.
He’d had his hand broken before. At Saltreach, in his second year, a stone block had come off a sledge and taken two of his fingers with it and the quarry surgeon had set them crooked. He knew what it would feel like. He knew it would feel worse than he remembered, because it always did. He knew that the thing to do was not to hold his breath, and not to make a fist with the other hand, and to look at something. So he looked at the wall across the cell, where somebody a long time ago had scratched a tally of days into the stone, rows and rows of little lines in fives, and he counted them while the boot came down, and he didn’t make a sound.
Forty-three fives. Two hundred and fifteen days. Somebody had been in here two hundred and fifteen days and counted every one.
“Where’s Tash?” said Treddick.
“Don’t know,” said Bastian.
He’d counted the tally four times by the evening. He’d got the same number every time. That was something.
At night they left him alone.
The cell was at the bottom of the Chainhouse, under the river wall, the lowest of a row of six. The Chainhouse was the oldest building in Orme still standing, older than the Survey House, older than the Wells: a squat black tower of river-stone on the north bank where the old kings had kept their measures and their prisoners in the days before the Charter, and where the Chainguard kept theirs now. The cells were cut into the rock under it. Bastian’s was the deepest. It was round, and very old, and it had a floor of a single great slab of stone, worn smooth and dished in the middle, and an iron grate in the slab’s center the size of a dinner-plate, rusted solid, with nothing under it but dark.
There was a drip from the ceiling. It fell into the dish of the floor and ran to the grate and went down it. He listened to it for a long time. It never hit anything. Just went down.
His hand was a great hot swollen thing at the end of his arm. They’d splinted two of the fingers with bits of a broken stool, badly, because somebody had told them a prisoner who couldn’t hold a pen couldn’t sign a confession. He held it against his chest and sat with his back to the wall.
He thought about the hall. The long tables going over. The glasses. He’d held it nearly four minutes. He’d counted. Then one of them had got round the end of the last table with a cudgel and Bastian had turned to take it and a second one had come over the top with a short iron bar and hit him across the back of the head, and the next thing he remembered was the marble floor, cold against his face, and Treddick’s boots, and the brass line of the Meridian a hand’s width from his eye.
He’d been glad of the Meridian. He’d lain there with the Chainguard kneeling on his back and looked along it, the whole length of the dark hall, to the servers’ door. Shut. Nobody in it.
They’d got away. That was all he’d needed to know.
He sat in the cell and counted the drips into the grate, and waited for the morning, and the boot, and the questions, and don’t know.
“We have to get him out,” said Sarn.
She’d said it eleven times since the coal-chute. Oriel had counted. She said it again now, sitting on the brick floor of Tolley’s cellar with her back against the old press and her knees drawn up and her face grey under the coal-dust she still hadn’t washed off.
“We have to get him out.”
“I know.”
“They’ll kill him. They’ll break every bone he’s got. He’ll die before he says your name. You know he will.”
“I know.”
Deverel was at the bench. He’d come at dawn, from the Press, from a whole night of cutting corrections at the bench beside Penhallow’s. He’d come down the Ropewalk in his ink-stained apron and let himself in with his key and stood at the bottom of the brick steps and looked at the two of them on the floor, black with coal, with a canvas sack between them, and not said anything. Then he’d gone and looked in the sack. Then he’d sat down very slowly on his stool.
He’d told them what happened at the Press. Calloway bursting in at the first bell, shouting. Penhallow putting down his graver. Treddick sent for. Penhallow going up the east stair to the Hall and coming back an hour later with his face like grey paper and sitting down at his bench and picking up his graver again and cutting. All night. Every correction. Not a word.
“He finished it,” said Deverel. “The Settling. Every sheet. He cut it all. By morning. I watched him.” He’d looked down at his own hands. “And when the bell went at dawn and we all stood up to go, he stopped by my bench and looked at the copper I’d been cutting — the Lusk district correction, it was, your boneyard again, he’d given it to me on purpose — and he said, very quietly, so the young ones wouldn’t hear, That’s good work, Pike. You always did a clean line. And went out.” Deverel had shaken his head. “Thirty years he’s never said a word to me but thank you.”
Now Deverel was engraving. He hadn’t slept. He’d sat down at the long bench under the barred window with the water-globe and the great copper plate, and picked up his graver, and gone on with the Orme Leaf, as if nothing had happened. The curls of bright copper came up off the point. He didn’t look up.
Oriel sat with the first volume of the Settling Ledger open on her knee.
She’d been reading it all day. She couldn’t stop. Lanyon’s brown old hand. Columns. True-marks by name and number. Coldharrow. Lusk Church. Esker Reeve-Hall. Orme, Survey House, the Meridian. Their real positions, by the stars, year by year, and beside each one the correction to be cut that Charter Eve so the Register would show them where they’d always been. She could read it. It wasn’t a cipher. It was just numbers. It was just the truth, kept very carefully so that it could be hidden.
“We need help,” she said.
“From who?” said Sarn. “Orrel? He’s sixty with bad lungs and he’s done his brave thing. Pike?” She jerked her chin at the bench. “He’s got eight days of engraving left and if he stops we’ve got nothing. Who’s left? Ketter Bayle? He’s six days away and he wants a seal.”
Oriel closed the Ledger.
“Agathe Strell,” she said.
Sarn laughed. It went on too long and turned into something else and she put her hands over her face.
“Strell,” she said through them. “Strell signed my dismissal. Strell signed the Compact. Strell keeps her feet on the floor and never sends anybody anywhere.”
“Strell told me where to find you.”
Sarn took her hands away.
“Strell’s had sixty years of the Wells’ reports sealed in a room under the cloister,” said Oriel. “Every Listener on the east face. Every one of them writing quickening in the proper box. Penhallow told me. He said she sends him a note about everything.” She put her hand on the Ledger. “We’ve got the Survey’s half. The numbers. We haven’t got the Wells’ half. The sound. The proof that people heard it. And the Wells have got something else we need.”
“What?”
“Ears,” said Oriel. “Under the city.”
Agathe Strell was sitting exactly where she’d been sitting a month ago, in the bare stone room with no window, behind the plain table, with her bare feet flat on the floor and her hands folded.
As if she’d been waiting. As if she’d never moved.
She looked at Oriel, black with coal, leaning on her stick. She looked at Sarn behind her, in the doorway.
Something happened in her broad plain face that Oriel couldn’t read at all.
“Sit down, Sarn,” said the Mother-Superior.
Sarn didn’t move.
“Sit down,” said Agathe Strell. Quietly. “Please. You’re shaking. You’ve been on a roof, and in a strongroom, and up a coal-chute, and you haven’t slept in two days, and your feet are bleeding on my floor.” She unfolded her hands. “I can hear them, Sister. I’ve been able to hear you since the gate.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“No,” said Agathe Strell, after a moment. “No. You’re right. You’re not one of mine. You haven’t been for a long time. That’s what I did to you.” She looked down at her own hands. “Please sit down, Sarn Ivo.”
Sarn sat. On the floor, in the doorway, with her back against the frame. As if she wanted to be able to leave.
“I know about the Survey House,” said the Mother-Superior. “The whole city knows. Charter Eve, and somebody in the strongroom, and the Deputy’s key gone, and a big man taken in the Hall of Measure after he’d put six Chainguard on the floor. Penhallow sent me a note at noon.” She paused. “He’s never sent me a note before. I’ve sent him four thousand. He’s never once sent one back.” She reached into her robe and took out a folded paper and laid it on the table. She didn’t open it. “It says: Agathe. They will come to you. I am asking you, for once, to do what you think is right, and not what I’d want. — A.P.”
Oriel stared at the paper.
“He’s tired,” said Agathe Strell. “I think. I think he’s been tired for thirty years and he’s just found out.” She looked up. “What do you want?”
Oriel told her.
The Groan Registers. Every report. Sixty years. And then the other thing.
Agathe Strell listened to all of it with her feet flat on the stone and her eyes on Oriel’s face. When it was finished she sat for a long time without saying anything. The silence in the little room was very deep. Oriel could hear her own heart in it, and Sarn’s breathing in the doorway, and nothing else at all.
“I signed the Compact,” said the Mother-Superior, “eleven times.”
She said it to the table.
“It’s renewed every five years. The Survey-General comes here and sits in that chair and I sit in this one and we sign it. Fifty-five years I’ve been in the Wells. Twenty-two as Mother. I signed it the first time when I was fifty and I thought, they know what they’re doing. They have the figures. We only have the sound. What’s a sound against the Register?” She put her hand flat on the folded paper. “And every year the reports came up from the east face. Quickening. And I read them. Every one. And I sealed them in the undercroft and sent the Survey-General a note. And every year he sent back thank you, Mother, noted. And every year I thought, they know. They’re dealing with it. It’s their business.”
“It wasn’t,” said Sarn, from the doorway.
“No.” Agathe Strell didn’t look at her. “It wasn’t. It was ours. It was the only thing that was ever ours. We were the ones who heard it.” She closed her eyes. “Imbert Vale sat in that chair eleven years ago and asked me to open the undercroft. And I said no. And when Sarn Ivo filed her eleven words, I read them, and I thought: she’s right. She’s the best ear I’ve had on the east face in thirty years and she’s right. And I took her license away so that nobody would ever make me read those eleven words again.”
She opened her eyes.
She stood up. She was very small. She came round the table, barefoot, across the stone floor, and stopped in front of Sarn in the doorway, and looked down at her.
“I’m sorry,” said Agathe Strell. “I don’t expect you to forgive me. I don’t think I’d want you to. But I’m sorry.”
Sarn looked up at her with her red-rimmed eyes and her coal-black face and didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“Open the undercroft,” she said finally. Hoarse. “And then help us get him out. And then I’ll think about it.”
“Yes,” said the Mother-Superior. “Both.”
The undercroft was under the cloister, down a stair behind the First Well, and it was full of paper.
Not books. Paper. Loose sheets, in bundles, tied with grey tape, each bundle with a date on a card, stacked on wooden racks that went back into the dark further than the lamp could reach. Thousands of bundles. Tens of thousands. The racks were labeled by well, and by face, and by year, in Agathe Strell’s own small hand on the newer cards and older hands on the older ones.
Ninth Well. East face. C.352.
Agathe took down the first bundle on the first rack and untied the grey tape and handed Oriel the top sheet.
It was a printed form. The Wells’ report form, the same one, she’d find, that they’d been using for sixty years: a box for the date, a box for the well, a box for the face, a box for Character of sound, a box for Rate, a box for Remarks. Filled in, in pencil, in a careful round hand.
Groan, steady. Calving distant, east, 1 in 140 days. Rate: steady.
Remarks: none.
Agathe handed her another. A different year. A different hand.
C.371. Groan, steady. Calving 1 in 110. Rate: rising, slight.
Remarks: Recommend comparison with earlier registers.
Another.
C.389. Groan rising. Calving 1 in 75. Rate: quickening.
Remarks: Recommend comparison with earlier registers.
Another. And another. She stood in the undercroft with the lamp and read them. Sixty years. Hundreds of different hands. Different Listeners, on different faces, at different wells, people who’d never met each other, who’d come and gone and grown old and died. And every one of them, on the east face, sooner or later, had written the same thing in the same little box. Quickening. Rising. Recommend comparison with earlier registers. And every one of them had been tied up with grey tape, and stacked on a rack, and noted, and thanked, and forgotten.
At the end of the rack — the last rack, the newest — there was a single sheet on its own, not bundled, pinned to the card with a brass pin.
C.410. Ninth Well. East face. S. Ivo.
Groan, Ninth Well, east face. Rate quickening. Recommend comparison with earlier registers.
Eleven words. In pencil. In a sharp, fast, slanting hand.
And under it, in Agathe Strell’s small careful ink:
License withdrawn. For her own wellbeing. — A.S.
Sarn stood beside Oriel and looked at it.
She didn’t say anything. She reached out and took out the brass pin and took the sheet off the card. She held it. Then she folded it in half, and in half again, and put it inside her shirt, against her skin.
“That’s mine,” she said.
Agathe Strell bowed her head.
“Fourteen,” said the Mother-Superior.
They were in a carriage. Agathe Strell’s own, the Wells’ old black carriage with its blinds drawn, rattling down through the old quarter in the dark toward the river with the Mother-Superior and Sarn and Oriel and two Listeners Oriel didn’t know — a grey-haired man and a tall woman, both barefoot, both silent — packed inside it.
“Well Fourteen,” said Agathe Strell. “Cut when the Chainhouse was the king’s tower. Five hundred years ago. To listen to the river wall, because the river was eating it. They built the tower’s deepest cell right on top of the well’s cap, so the prisoners in it would have the cold coming up through the grate all night. A punishment.” Her voice was dry. “The Chainhouse forgot it was a well. The Wells didn’t. We’ve still got the shaft from the other end. From the river cellars, under the old fish-market. A long ladder and then a crawl. Nobody’s used it in a hundred and fifty years.”
“And the grate?”
“Rusted. Solid.” Agathe looked at Sarn. “But you heard him, didn’t you. From the coal-chute. On the floor of the Hall.”
“I heard them carry him down the river stair,” said Sarn. “To the cells. Six cells. The deepest one. I heard them throw him on a stone floor. I heard the door.” She closed her eyes. “I’ve been hearing him all day. Every time they come. He doesn’t make a sound. He just breathes.”
“Then he’s in the cell on top of Fourteen,” said the Mother-Superior. “And we’re going to come up under him.”
It was the worst place Oriel had ever been.
Worse than Ninety-One. Worse than the Lip. A ladder down from the river cellars under the old fish-market, slick with river-slime, forty rods of it, into a shaft so old its stones had gone soft and black. Then a tunnel, sideways, where the shaft had been cut through to meet the well under the tower — a crawl, on hands and knees, for a hundred paces, in water to the wrist, in the dark, with the river somewhere overhead and the weight of the whole Chainhouse pressing down. Her knee dragged through the water. She bit her lip until it bled.
Sarn went first. Then the grey-haired Listener, whose name was Oswin. Then Oriel. Then the tall one, Hesper, carrying a bag of tools. Agathe Strell stayed at the top, at the ladder, with her bare feet on the stone of the river cellar. Somebody has to listen to the tower, she’d said. I’ll know where every boot is. I’ll ring the bell-cord if they come.
At the end of the tunnel the shaft went up again. Straight up. Narrow. Old iron rungs in the wall, half of them rusted away to stubs. And at the top, twenty rods up, a little round circle of grey that wasn’t quite dark.
The grate.
Sarn climbed it alone. She went up the rusted rungs in the dark like a cat, testing each one, and stopped just under the grate, and put her palm flat on the stone beside it, and was still for a long time.
Then, very softly, she spoke. Up through the grate. Into the cell.
“Coyle.”
Silence.
“Bastian Coyle. It’s Sarn. Ivo. The drunk. Don’t say anything. Don’t move. We’re under the floor.”
A long silence. Then, from above, through the grate, so low it was barely a sound at all — a breath. A long slow breath, let out.
“Took your time,” said Bastian.
They had to cut the grate.
Hesper had brought a saw — a thin, fine, tempered blade on a frame, the kind jewelers used, that Agathe Strell had made her fetch from the Wells’ own workshop — and she passed it up the shaft to Sarn, and Sarn, clinging to the rungs with her knees and one hand, began to cut.
It took an hour.
An hour of the thin high whine of the saw in the old iron, so faint it was almost nothing, so loud in the shaft that Oriel, at the bottom, flinched at every stroke. An hour of Sarn’s breath, ragged, above. An hour of listening.
Twice, Sarn stopped. Froze. Pressed her palm flat on the stone.
“Boots,” she breathed, the first time. “Corridor. One. Walking. Toward —” A long silence. “Past. Gone.”
The second time she didn’t say anything at all. She just stopped, and stayed stopped, for so long that Oriel, below, thought something had gone wrong. Then Sarn said, very quietly, “Someone’s at the door. The cell door. Standing. Looking in.”
Nobody breathed.
“It’s the woman,” said Sarn. “The sergeant. Corran. From Fenner’s Row. She’s — she’s just standing there. She can see him. She can see the grate. She can hear the saw.” A long pause. “She’s not moving.”
Oriel, at the bottom of the shaft, in the water, with her knee screaming, closed her eyes.
“She’s turned round,” said Sarn. “She’s — she’s standing with her back to the door. Like a guard. Like she’s guarding it. From the outside.” Her voice cracked. “She’s standing in front of the door so nobody else can look in.”
Sarn went back to cutting.
The last bar came through near the fifth bell of the morning. Sarn passed the grate down — a heavy round disc of rusted iron, the size of a dinner-plate, with four bars sawn through — to Oswin, who passed it to Oriel, who held it in her arms in the water at the bottom of the shaft like something precious.
The hole was a dinner-plate wide.
“He’ll never fit,” said Hesper.
“He’ll fit,” said Sarn. From the top. “Coyle. Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“The hole’s a hand-and-a-half across. You’ll have to come through it feet first. Arms up. Like going into a well. You’ll take the skin off your shoulders. Your hand —“ She stopped.
“Hand’s broken,” said Bastian. “Two fingers. They splinted them with a stool.”
“Can you do it?”
A long pause.
“Spent seven years in a quarry,” said Bastian. “Went through worse holes than that for a drink of water.”
He came through it.
It took a long time. Oriel would never know how. She heard it, at the bottom of the shaft: the scrape of cloth on iron, and then of skin, and his breath going out of him in short hard grunts, and Sarn above him, clinging to the rungs, talking to him the whole time in a low steady stream — that’s it, that’s it, left shoulder now, turn, turn, you great ox, turn — yes — — and then a long tearing sound, and a sound from Bastian that wasn’t quite a sound, and then the scrape of boots on the rusted rungs. Coming down.
He came down the shaft one-handed. Slowly. Rung by rung. His broken hand held against his chest. At the bottom he stepped off the last rung into the water and stood there, enormous in the dark, bent nearly double in the low tunnel, his shirt in rags across both shoulders and the skin under it raw and bloody, and his face bruised black and yellow down one side, and one eye swollen shut.
He looked at Oriel with the other one.
“Did you get the books?” he said.
She couldn’t answer him.
She put her arms round him instead, in the water, in the dark, at the bottom of a five-hundred-year-old well under the oldest prison in Orme, and held on. He stood there and let her. After a while he put his good hand on the back of her head. Just for a moment.
“Chain doesn’t lie,” said Bastian Coyle, very quietly, into her hair. “People hold it.”
Agathe Strell was waiting at the top of the ladder with her bare feet on the stone of the fish-market cellar.
She looked at Bastian coming up off the last rung. At his shoulders. His face. His hand.
“They’ll know by the sixth bell,” she said. “When they bring his water.” She looked at Sarn. “And they’ll know about the well. They’ll know it was the Wells. Nobody else could have found it.” She folded her hands in her sleeves. “The Survey will tear up the Compact. Treddick will come for me. They’ll take the undercroft.”
“Let them,” said Sarn. “It’s empty.”
Agathe Strell looked at her.
“Hesper’s been carrying the Ninth Well registers out of the back gate since midnight,” said Sarn. “In laundry baskets. Oswin’s been helping. The whole east face. Sixty years. They’re in the carriage.” She was grey with exhaustion. Her hands were cut to ribbons from the saw. She almost smiled. “I asked them. While you were listening to the tower. I said Mother says to do what you think is right.” She paused. “They did.”
The Mother-Superior stood very still for a long moment on the stone floor of the cellar.
Then she laughed. Once. A short, surprised, quiet sound, as if she hadn’t heard it come out of herself in a very long time.
“Well,” said Agathe Strell. “I suppose I did.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
25th–26th Tenthmonth C.412
B. COYLE: OUT. VIA WELL 14 (UNDER THE CHAINHOUSE DEEP CELL, CUT 500 YRS AGO). R. HAND BROKEN (2 FINGERS). SHOULDERS FLAYED. EYE.
HE SAID NOTHING.
SGT. I. CORRAN STOOD GUARD ON THE DOOR. FROM OUTSIDE.
A. STRELL: TURNED. A.P. TOLD HER TO. “FOR ONCE.”
GROAN REGISTERS, E. FACE, C.352–410: OURS. EVERY ONE SAYS IT.
S. IVO’S REPORT: HERS AGAIN.
PIKE: 7 DAYS OF ENGRAVING LEFT.