Bastian had been wrong. There weren’t four hundred by the morning.
There were two thousand.
Oriel saw them from the corner of Corn Street at the seventh bell, with her hood up, and stopped walking. Aske Square was full. Not crowded — full, the way a lock fills, to the edges, so that the people at the back were pressed against the shop-fronts on the south side and the people at the front were pressed against the steps of the Ledger House, and there was no space between anyone, and more were still coming in from every street. Quiet. That was the thing. Two thousand people, and hardly a sound. Just the shuffle of feet on cobbles and the creak of deed-cases and a low murmur like the river under a bridge.
Every one of them with a deed. Every one with a debt to the Ledger House of Aske. And most of them, she saw — in hands, in pockets, sticking out of baskets — with a folded sheet of black and red.
“Tash,” said Bastian, beside her. Very low. “Go back.”
“No.”
“There’s nothing you can do here.”
“I know,” said Oriel. “That’s why I have to see it.”
At the eighth bell the bronze doors of the Ledger House opened.
It went quietly, at first.
That was what she’d remember. How orderly it was. The doors opened and a line of clerks in grey came out onto the top step with a rope on brass posts and set it up across the doors in a channel, so that people would come in one at a time. And the crowd at the front came up the steps one at a time, in order, the way they’d stood in line at the Survey House the day before. And went in.
And came out again, a few minutes later, with a bag. A small leather bag. Their deposit. Their savings. Whatever they’d kept in the Ledger House of Aske, because everybody on the Orme Leaf kept their money in the Ledger House of Aske, because it was safe, because it was as safe as the Register.
They came out with the bag in both hands against their chest and went down the steps and pushed out through the crowd.
The crowd watched each one go.
And the line moved forward.
By the ninth bell the line was faster. People were pushing on the steps. Not hard. Just leaning. The clerks with the rope leaned back. By the tenth bell people weren’t coming out with bags anymore; they were coming out with slips of paper — promissory, Ledger House of Aske, payable on demand — and their faces were different, and the crowd round the steps saw their faces and the murmur changed its note.
At the tenth bell Mattias Aske came out onto the top step.
He was in dove-grey. He was smiling. He stood behind the rope with his white hands raised and spoke to the crowd in a warm, clear, reasonable voice that reached to the back of the square, and said that the Ledger House of Aske had stood for two hundred years and would stand two hundred more, and that every deposit was secure, and that the scurrilous forgery circulating in the city was the work of a disgraced clerk and a pack of madwomen from the Wells, and that the Survey-General himself would denounce it before the day was out, and that anyone who withdrew their savings today in panic would find themselves at the back of the line when they wanted to deposit them again tomorrow. He smiled. He said: Go home. Go to work. The Register is settled.
Some people laughed. Some people turned to go.
Then a man near the front shouted, “Then pay us!”
And another: “If it’s secure, pay us!”
And Aske kept smiling, and said the House was paying, in good order, and then a woman in the line at the top of the steps — a big woman in a baker’s apron — held up her slip of paper and shouted, “This isn’t money! They gave me paper! They’ve no coin left in there!”
And the crowd heard it.
The bronze doors closed at noon.
They didn’t close slowly. The clerks pulled the rope and its brass posts back inside, and the doors swung shut, both at once, with a boom like a bell that shivered through the cobbles under Oriel’s feet. And there was the sound of bars going across inside. And the lamps in the windows — the lamps that were always lit, to show the Ledger House never slept — went out, one by one, all along the front.
For a long moment, two thousand people stood in Aske Square in absolute silence and looked at the shut bronze doors with the scales and the key on them.
Then a stone hit the doors.
Oriel didn’t see who threw it. Nobody ever knew. A cobble, prised up from the square. It hit the bronze beside the scales with a flat dull clang. And then another. And then the crowd at the front surged up the steps toward the doors, all at once, like water through a broken sluice, and the people behind surged after them, and the square was moving, all of it, pressing in toward the north side, toward the steps, and the quiet broke into a roar.
Bastian had her by the arm. He was pulling her back into Corn Street. She let him. There was nothing else to do. The crowd went past the corner of the street like a river in flood, and she was pressed against the wall of a draper’s shop with Bastian’s body between her and it, and she could see over his shoulder the steps of the Ledger House full of people pounding on the bronze doors with their fists and with cobbles, and a ground-floor window going, and another, glass falling in long bright sheets.
And from the west side of the square, from Treasury Street, the whistles. Three blasts. Over and over.
The Chainguard came in at a run. Forty of them. Fifty. In grey, in a column, with their long guns at the port, and at their head, on a horse, a tall man in a captain’s coat.
Treddick.
He formed them in two lines across the west side of the square.
Oriel saw it from the corner of Corn Street. She saw him do it calmly, from his horse, with a raised hand: front line kneel, rear line stand. Fifty long guns. Pointed across the square at the backs of the crowd on the Ledger House steps. The crowd didn’t see them. The crowd was facing the other way, pounding on the doors.
“No,” said Oriel. She didn’t know she’d said it. “No — he can’t — Bastian —”
Treddick raised his voice. It carried. “Disperse! In the name of the Crown! Disperse or be fired upon!”
Some of the crowd at the back heard him. Turned. Saw the guns. Began to push away, sideways, toward the streets. But the square was too full and the streets were too narrow and the people at the front couldn’t hear and the people pushing back ran into the people still pushing forward, and the whole crowd heaved, and screamed, and went nowhere.
“Disperse!”
In the front line of the Chainguard, kneeling, third from the left, a broad young fair-haired woman with a sergeant’s knot on her shoulder lowered her gun.
Oriel saw it. Ilse Corran. She lowered her long gun until its muzzle pointed at the cobbles. And turned her head and looked up at Treddick on his horse. Said something. Oriel couldn’t hear it.
Treddick looked down at her. Then he looked away, back at the crowd, and dropped his hand.
The volley was a single flat enormous crack, like the whole square splitting.
Smoke. White. Everywhere. Rolling across the cobbles. And through it, screaming. And people running — now they ran, now there was room, because the people at the back of the crowd were down. Oriel saw them go down. She saw a man in a carter’s smock spin round and fall. She saw a woman in a blue shawl sit down suddenly on the cobbles with her hands in her lap, as if she were tired. She saw an old man in a threadbare coat beside an overturned folding stool lying very still at the foot of the Ledger House steps.
The front line reloaded. Kneeling. Steady. The way they’d been trained.
Corran was on her feet. She’d thrown her gun down. She was standing in front of the front line, between it and the square, with her arms out, shouting. Oriel couldn’t hear what. Treddick was shouting at her. Two Chainguard came out of the rear line and took her by the arms and dragged her back.
The front line raised its guns again.
They didn’t fire. The square was emptying. People were pouring out into every street, Corn Street too, past Oriel and Bastian against the draper’s wall, running, screaming, carrying people, dragging people. The square was nearly empty. There was nobody left to fire at. There were only the ones on the cobbles.
Treddick raised his hand, and lowered it, and the lines stood easy.
The smoke drifted away across Aske Square, slowly, and lay against the bronze doors of the Ledger House, and the scales and the key.
Eleven.
Oriel counted them. She went into the square when the Chainguard had pulled back to Treasury Street, with Bastian, against Bastian’s will, with her stick, and she counted them, because somebody had to and because it was the only thing she knew how to do.
The man in the carter’s smock. The woman in the blue shawl, who’d taken a map off the railings in the Survey House forecourt yesterday morning and put it in her basket. Her basket was still on her arm. The old man by the folding stool. A small shopkeeper of forty with grey at his temples. A stout farmer in his good coat, from the Westerlies, with a tin deed-case under him. She knew him. She’d seen him take the first map off the lamp-basket at the foot of the Survey House steps.
The baker in her apron, on the top step, against the bronze doors. With her slip of paper in her fist.
Eleven.
People were coming back into the square now. Slowly. To find people. Kneeling. Calling names. The baker’s husband, a thin man in flour to the elbows, sitting on the top step with her head in his lap, rocking, not making a sound.
Oriel stood in the middle of Aske Square with her stick, in the smoke, among the dead, with the map still in the inside pocket of her coat, against the brass star-glass.
Can you tell me how many you’ll kill by telling the truth tomorrow? Penhallow had said. In the dome. Under the round window. Can you do that sum?
Eleven.
“Tash.”
Bastian. Beside her. His good hand on her arm.
“Tash, we have to go. They’ll come back. They’ll be looking.”
She didn’t move.
“Oriel,” said Bastian. He’d never called her that. Not once in four years. “Come on.”
She went.
Sarn met them at the top of the Ropewalk, running.
She was white. Her feet were bare and bleeding on the cobbles. She’d been at the Wells’ carriage at the old fish-market with Agathe and Hesper and Oswin, loading the last of the Groan Registers and the six volumes of the Settling Ledger into the hidden compartment under the carriage-seat to take them out of the city, as they’d planned — out of the cellar, today, somewhere safe, before anyone thinks of the Ropewalk — and she’d heard the volley through the stone of the whole north bank, and then she’d heard something else.
“Tolley’s,” she said. She grabbed Oriel’s arm. “Boots. Twenty. On the Ropewalk. In the cellar. An hour ago. I heard them go in. I heard the press go over. I heard —” She stopped. “Pike was there. Alone. He wouldn’t come. He said he wanted to clean the plates properly before we moved them. He said nobody else would do it right.”
They ran. Oriel couldn’t run. Bastian picked her up.
The padlock was smashed off the door. The door hung open. The brick steps were scattered with paper, trodden, black and red, a whole drying-board of maps kicked down the stair.
The cellar was wrecked.
The type-cases were pulled out of their racks and emptied on the floor, thousands of little grey lead letters spilled across the bricks like gravel. The paper was slashed. The drying-boards were smashed. The iron hand-press had been pushed off its blocks and lay on its side. And the copperplate press at the back — the copper plates were gone. Both of them. The black and the red. Taken.
Deverel was on the floor beside the copperplate press.
He was sitting with his back against its iron frame, with his legs out in front of him. His face was cut and swollen. His shirt was torn. He was holding his right hand in his lap with his left.
His right hand was wrong.
Oriel saw it from the bottom of the stair and her stomach turned over and went cold. It was black with ink, the way it always was. But it was flat. Wrong-shaped. The fingers at angles. The back of it split.
“They put it in the press,” said Deverel Pike.
He said it loudly. Flatly. As if he were reading it off a proof.
“Under the rollers. Treddick’s sergeant — not the woman, a man, Brack, with his arm in a sling, you broke the other one, Coyle — he held it on the bed. Two others turned the wheel.” He looked down at his hand. “One pass. That’s all. Just the once. Like a sheet.” He looked up at Oriel. “They wanted to know where the Ledger was. I said I didn’t know. I didn’t. You’d taken it to the carriage.” He paused. “They said, then you won’t be cutting any more of these.”
Oriel was on her knees beside him. She didn’t remember getting there. Her knee had gone white and she didn’t feel it.
“Pike —“
“I couldn’t hear them,” said Deverel. “Isn’t that funny. They were shouting at me the whole time and I couldn’t hear a word of it. I just watched their mouths.” He looked at his hand again. “I’ve been cutting since I was nineteen. Fifty-two years.” He was quiet a moment. “It was a clean line. The last one. The Lip. C.414, along the near shore. I got it right.”
Bastian was kneeling on Deverel’s other side. He took off his own coat and wrapped it round the old man’s shoulders. He didn’t say anything. He put his good hand on the back of Deverel’s neck, and held it there.
Deverel leaned against him. Just slightly. And closed his eyes.
They carried him to the Wells’ carriage. Agathe was waiting with it at the bottom of the Ropewalk, at the river wall, with Hesper on the box. She took one look at Deverel’s hand and her plain broad face went very still and she said in, and they put him in, on the seat, on top of the hidden compartment where six volumes of the Settling Ledger and sixty years of the Groan Registers lay packed in oilcloth.
“Marlow,” said Agathe Strell. “Wenna Vale’s sister. Hesper knows the road. Out by the west gate before they close it. There’s a surgeon in Marlow I trained with.” She looked at the hand again. “I can’t save the hand. Not here. Maybe not there. But I can save him.”
She was about to get in when the bells began.
Not the hour. Not the Bell of the Wells, warning of a quake. The bells of the Survey House, on its hill, the great bronze proclamation bells that rang perhaps twice a year, for a royal death or a Charter Day. All of them. Ringing. Rolling out over the copper roofs and the river and the whole of Orme in the evening dark.
Everybody stopped.
Then the criers came. Running through the streets, down every lane, with lanterns, shouting the same words over and over, and in a moment one came down the Ropewalk past them, a young Survey clerk in grey with a bell in his hand and a paper in the other, reading it out at every corner.
“By order of the Survey-General of the Crown! Hear ye! The sheet calling itself The Orme Leaf As It Is is declared a forgery and a criminal fraud upon the realm! The Crown Survey has examined it and finds it false in every particular! Any person keeping, posting, or circulating it is liable to arrest! The Register is settled! Where the Register says a thing is, there it is in law! By the hand and seal of Aldous Penhallow, Survey-General!”
He went on down the Ropewalk, ringing, shouting.
Oriel stood at the carriage door with her hand on the frame and looked up the hill at the Survey House, at the dome, at the one lit window at the very top.
“He said it,” said Sarn beside her. Very quietly. “He actually said it.”
“He signed it,” said Oriel. “It’s his seal. He said it.”
“After eleven —“
“After eleven,” said Oriel. “Yes.”
Agathe Strell was looking up at the dome too. Her face in the lamplight was unreadable.
“There’ll be a hearing,” she said.
They looked at her.
“There has to be. Eleven dead in Aske Square. The Ledger House shut. A Survey proclamation. The Regent Council can’t sit on its hands. Lys Harrowgate won’t let it. She’ll call the Survey-General before the Council and she’ll want both sides.” She looked at Oriel. “Penhallow knows that. He’s always known how things go. He’s calling it a forgery tonight so that when he stands up in front of the Council he can say I examined it and found it false, and they’ll believe him, because he’s the Survey-General and you’re a fugitive with a bad knee.” She paused. “Or —“
“Or what?”
“Or he’s calling it a forgery tonight,” said Agathe Strell, “so that the Council will have to call a hearing. And so that there has to be somebody there to say it isn’t.”
They stood by the carriage in the dark with the Survey House bells still rolling out over the city, and Deverel Pike breathing short and shallow on the seat inside, and nobody said anything.
“Go,” said Oriel at last. “Get him to Marlow.”
Agathe looked at her.
“I’m staying,” said Oriel. “If there’s a hearing, I’m going to it.”
“They’ll arrest you at the door.”
“Then I’ll be arrested at the door.” She looked up the hill. “And then I’ll be inside.”
The carriage went. West, through the dark, toward the gate, with the Ledger and the Registers and the old engraver on the seat with his ruined hand in his lap. Oriel stood at the bottom of the Ropewalk and watched it go, with Bastian on one side of her and Sarn on the other.
The bells stopped.
In the silence afterward, very faint, Sarn put her hand flat against the river wall, and closed her eyes.
“Louder,” she said. “Every day. Louder.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
2nd Eleventhmonth C.412
LEDGER HOUSE OF ASKE: OPENED 8th BELL, PAID IN COIN TILL 10th, IN PAPER TILL NOON. CLOSED.
ASKE SQUARE, AFTER NOON: CHAINGUARD VOLLEY (TREDDICK). ELEVEN DEAD.
SGT. CORRAN THREW DOWN HER GUN. TAKEN.
TOLLEY’S RAIDED. PLATES TAKEN. D. PIKE’S RIGHT HAND PUT THROUGH THE ROLLERS (BRACK).
LEDGER I–VI + REGISTERS: SAFE, WELLS CARRIAGE, TO MARLOW.
A.P. PROCLAIMED THE MAP A FORGERY. HIS SEAL.
ELEVEN.