The water got cold again on the second day.
Oriel felt it come up through the planks of the deck the way it had come up near the Lip, three years ago, on Look at the Water. Slowly. A chill in the wood under her hand. Then a cold you could feel through your boots. By the third morning there was frost on the tarred rails at dawn — frost, on the Deep, where nobody had ever seen frost — and Hesper, with her burned arm in a sling, sat in the bow wrapped in two blankets beside Sarn and said, through her teeth, “It’s the same water. Isn’t it. Going round.”
“Going round,” said Sarn. “Cold at the edges. Warm in the middle, at the Seam. Cold again out here.” She had her palm flat on the planks. “It’s the same water as under the Lip. It’s just on the other side of the wheel.”
They rowed. East. Toward the fires.
They saw the fires every night, low on the eastern horizon, scattered along it in a long uneven line, steady and yellow, a little closer every night. In the day they couldn’t see them. The haze was thicker out here — thicker and colder and greyer, and the light came down through it thin as milk.
On the second day they passed the new stone.
The Seam’s eastern rise. A long low steaming back of grey stone, like the Rise but younger, wetter, rougher, still mostly under the water, coming up out of the Deep to the north of them and moving away east. Nobody had ever stood on it. Nobody would, for a long time. Isaut stood at the rail and looked at it going by for an hour without saying anything.
“It’ll take six hundred years,” she said finally. “To come round. To be old. To have a city on it.” She looked at Oriel. “And then it’ll go down somewhere. On the other side.”
On the third day they came to the leaves.
Not new stone. Old. Leaf-stone, grey and lichened and weathered, the way the leaves of the Shalemark were. Floating — you couldn’t see it but you knew — on the black water. Long, low, flat, with the haze over them, going away north and south in a broken line like the leaves on Penhallow’s map. And moving. Mags felt it before anyone. She put her hand on the steering-sweep and frowned and said current, and it was: a slow drift in the water, east, the same way the leaves were going.
“Like the Orme Leaf,” said Oriel. “Going east. Toward the Lip.”
“Toward their Lip,” said Neve. She had the clock and the compass and the field book. “The other wheel. Leaves come off the Seam and go east, the way ours go west. And at the end —”
“They go down,” said Sarn. From the bow. “At the rock. I can hear it.”
They could all hear it, by the fourth day. The groan. Not under Orme. Not at the bottom of Well Ninety-One. Here, out on the open Deep, coming up through the water and the planks from the east. The grinding sound Sarn had heard at the top of the Shield-edge well. A leaf moving against something that didn’t move, and going down under it.
It sounded exactly like home.
On the fifth day, in the morning, the haze lifted, the way it did sometimes for an hour, and they saw the rock.
Oriel was asleep. Bastian woke her. He didn’t say anything. He just touched her shoulder, the way he had on the Rise three years ago, and nodded east.
She sat up.
It came up out of the sea and didn’t stop.
That was all she could think, for a long time. A wall. Dark grey, nearly black, streaked with white where water ran down it, going up out of the Deep in front of them and on up into the haze, up and up, higher than the Lip was deep, higher than anything. Not broken like the Lip. Not a staircase. A cliff. Sheer, or nearly. Going north and south out of sight in both directions. The Shield, if the Shield had come up out of the sea instead of out of the fields.
A rock that did not move.
And at its foot —
The leaves. The ones they’d been rowing beside for two days. Coming up against the bottom of the cliff in a long ragged line, grey and flat and lichened, and going under it. You could see it. The edge of each leaf tipped down where it met the rock, the way the slabs of the old Eastern Pale tipped at the Lip, and slid down, slow, into the black water at the cliff’s foot, grinding, with a sound like a mill-wheel on a dry axle that came across the water and into Oriel’s teeth.
The rock didn’t move. The leaves went under it.
“Their Lip,” said Neve. Whispering. “It’s at the bottom of their Shield.”
And on the leaves, at the foot of the rock, there were people.
Oriel had the glass up. Imbert’s little brass one. She found them and held them, trembling a little. Houses. Low, grey, small, crowded on the tilting leaf-stone at the foot of the cliff the way the houses of east Orme had crowded behind the red lines. Smoke from chimneys. Boats pulled up on the stone. Washing on lines. People moving between the houses. Not many, at this distance. Dozens. More.
On the leaves. That were going down.
She moved the glass up the face of the cliff.
Terraces. Cut into the rock. Starting a hundred rods above the leaves and climbing, in long narrow steps, up the face of the cliff into the haze. Green on them. Gardens, maybe. Walls. Windows — square, cut into the rock face itself, dozens, hundreds, lit at night, she realized; those were the fires. Not fires. Windows. A city in the cliff.
And from the leaves at the bottom to the first terrace, one stair.
A single stair, cut into the face of the rock, zig-zagging up from the foot of the cliff to the lowest terrace, steep, narrow, like the switchbacks of Vell. And at the top of it, where it reached the first terrace, a gate. She could see it through the glass. A wall across the head of the stair, and a gate in the wall, and the gate was shut.
And at the very top of the cliff, where the haze was thinnest, catching the sun — a needle. A long thin spike of metal, bronze, enormous, standing up off the top of the rock against the grey sky like the gnomon on a sundial.
Oriel lowered the glass.
“Shut,” said Calloway, beside her. He’d been looking too. He had sharp eyes. “The gate at the top of the stair. It’s shut.” He was quiet a moment. “People on the leaves. Going down. And one stair up to the rock. And a gate at the top of it. Shut.” He looked at Oriel. “I told you. Somebody’s selling something.”
The haze came down again at noon. The rock vanished into it. They rowed on, toward the grinding sound, toward where the rock had been.
At the second bell of the afternoon, Sarn sat up in the bow.
“Boat,” she said. “Coming out. From the leaves. Small. Two oars.” She tilted her head. “Somebody in the bow. Lying down.”
They stopped rowing. They waited. Vell drifted on the cold black water in the grey haze, and nobody said anything.
It came out of the haze slowly. A small boat. Narrow, pointed at both ends, built of grey planks lashed with cord, nothing like anything on the Shalemark. Two people rowing, a man and a woman, in rough grey wool, with their faces wrapped against the cold. And in the bow, lying flat on her stomach on the planks with her arms out and her forehead down and her palms flat —
A woman.
Forty, perhaps. Thin. Dark-haired, cut short. Barefoot. In a cut-down grey wool robe.
She lifted her head and looked at Vell. At Sarn, in its bow, lying exactly the way she was lying.
The two boats drifted toward each other on the black water. Slowly. Nobody rowed. The woman in the small boat’s bow and Sarn in Vell’s looked at each other across the narrowing gap with their palms flat on their planks.
When the boats were close enough to touch, the woman said something.
It wasn’t any language Oriel knew. Short. Soft. A question.
Sarn didn’t understand it either. Oriel could see that on her face. She didn’t answer. Instead she did the only thing she could think of.
She took her palm off the planks and held it up. Flat. Toward the other woman. The way she’d held it up over the black water at the foot of the drop on the Rise, three years ago, with the lantern, looking for Brack.
Then she put it down again. Flat on the deck. And closed her eyes. And tilted her head, very slightly, east. Toward the rock. Toward the grinding.
The woman in the small boat watched her.
Then she put her own palm flat on her own planks. And closed her own eyes. And tilted her head the same way.
They lay like that, the two of them, in the bows of the two boats, on the cold black water beyond the Seam, listening to the same sound.
When the other woman opened her eyes, she was crying.
She said something else. One word. She said it twice, and touched her own chest, and then held her palm out toward Sarn.
“Teska,” she said.
Sarn opened her eyes.
“Sarn,” she said. And touched her own chest. And held out her palm.
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
BEYOND THE SEAM, 13th–17th Fourthmonth C.418
WATER COLD AGAIN BY DAY 2. FROST ON THE RAILS.
DAY 2: THE SEAM’S E. RISE, YOUNG, MOVING E.
DAY 3: OLD LEAVES, MOVING E. A CURRENT.
DAY 5: THE ROCK. A CLIFF FROM THE SEA, HIGHER THAN THE LIP IS DEEP. LEAVES GO UNDER IT AT ITS FOOT. THEIR LIP IS AT THE FOOT OF THEIR SHIELD.
ON THE LOW LEAVES: HOUSES, BOATS, PEOPLE.
ON THE CLIFF: TERRACES, WINDOWS (THE “FIRES”). ONE STAIR. A GATE. SHUT.
ON TOP: A BRONZE NEEDLE. A GNOMON?
A SMALL BOAT. A LISTENER IN ITS BOW. TESKA.