Bastian carried her up the stair.
She’d known he would. She’d told herself all night, lying on the floor of Teska’s house by the blue fire, that she’d manage. On the stick. Slowly. One step at a time with her hand on the rock. And at dawn, at the foot of the stair, with the line of grey-wool workers already climbing above them, she’d looked up at it — a hundred and fifty rods of narrow zig-zag steps cut into black rock, with nothing on the outside of them but air and, very far down, the grinding leaf — and her knee had said no so loudly that she’d sat down on the bottom step.
Bastian bent down and picked her up. The way he’d picked her up on the roofs of Fenner’s Row. Over his shoulder. And went up.
He didn’t hurry. He didn’t stop. He went up the stair of Ardun in the line of Low-folk workers with Oriel over his shoulder like a sack of meal, step after step, with his crooked hand flat on the rock beside him, and the workers in front and behind looked at him and looked away and kept climbing.
Halfway up, he spoke. Not to her. To himself, nearly.
“Same as the Lip,” he said. “Same as a quarry face. Somebody cut it. Somebody climbs it every day.” He breathed. “Nobody ever asks the man on the stair what he thinks of it.”
The gate was iron-banded timber, thick as a man was wide, in a wall of fitted black stone across the head of the stair. Open, now, in the morning. Two guards stood in it. In grey, with breastplates of bronze polished bright, and short spears.
The workers went past them in a line, showing something — a token, a disc of clay on a cord round the neck — and the guards looked at each one and nodded them through.
Then the guards looked at Bastian. With a woman over his shoulder. And a tall Canton woman behind him. And a Listener with bare feet. And a man with a coil of rope on his shoulder and a face that was very carefully smiling.
The spears came down.
Calloway stepped forward.
Oriel, upside down over Bastian’s shoulder, couldn’t see much. She heard. Calloway’s voice — the warm, reasonable, salesman’s voice that she hadn’t heard him use in three years — in the trade-words he’d gathered in Haskin. Slow. Careful. Strangers. From the west. From over the fire. Across the water. Pointing. Talk. To the man who counts the sun.
The guards looked at each other.
Calloway reached into his coat. He brought something out. Oriel twisted to see. A disc of brass, a hand across, with a star stamped in its middle and a ring of letters round it.
Not the Rise Star. That was at the bottom of the Deep.
A Drift House seal. The kind they stamped on every proved chain.
He held it out to the guard. Flat on his palm. And said a word — Oriel didn’t know it — and pointed up. At the top of the rock. At the needle.
The guard took the disc. Turned it in the light. Looked at the star.
Then he turned and shouted something up the terrace behind him, and a runner went.
They waited at the gate for a long time. The workers went past them. The sun came up into the haze over the Deep behind them, white and small.
Then the runner came back. With someone.
He was sixty, perhaps. Small. Spare. Very brown, with a shaved head and a short white beard and eyes that crinkled almost shut against the light. He wore a long robe of undyed wool belted with a cord, and over it, on a chain round his neck, a disc of bronze with a hole in its center. He was holding the Drift House seal in one hand, and turning it over and over, and looking at the star on it, and he walked down the terrace to the gate as if he’d forgotten where his feet were.
He stopped in front of them. He looked at Oriel — set down now, on her stick, at the head of the stair. At the little brass star-glass in her coat, the eyepiece showing. He looked at it for a long time.
Then he said a word. And held up the seal. And pointed at the star on it. And then pointed up — not at the needle. At the sky. Past it.
Oriel understood.
She took out Imbert’s star-glass. She held it up. And pointed at the sky too.
And then she did what Neve had done in the grit. She held up her hand and counted on her fingers. Seven. Seven stars. And pointed at the sky, and at the glass, and at her own eye. And then at the ground under her feet. Where.
The old man stared at her.
Then he laughed. Short. Astonished. Like a man who’s been told a joke he’d been waiting his whole life to hear. He said something rapid to the guards, and they stood aside, and he took Oriel by the sleeve — gently, the way you’d take an old colleague by the sleeve at a conference — and drew her through the gate.
“Ammet,” he said, touching his chest. “Ammet Sol.” And pointed up. At the needle. And at the sun. And said another word. And then, because she clearly didn’t understand it, he made a shape with his hands: a stick, upright, and the other hand moving across beneath it, slowly, like a shadow going round.
“Sun-counter,” said Calloway behind her. Quietly. “That’s what they call him. The one who counts the sun.”
They went up through Ardun.
Not by the stair now. Inside. Through the rock. Tunnels, cut and lit by lamps in niches, climbing in long ramps from terrace to terrace. And out onto the terraces themselves — narrow strips of soil walled with black stone along the face of the cliff, a hundred rods long, green with crops Oriel didn’t know, and Low-folk in grey wool working them with hoes. And doorways in the rock behind each terrace. Houses, cut into the cliff. Windows. Lamps.
The higher they went, the bigger the doorways. The finer the stone. The fewer the Low-folk. On the upper terraces there were fountains. Gardens that weren’t crops. People in dyed robes, blue and red and ochre, who stopped and stared at the strangers and the shaven old man leading them.
Bastian carried her up the ramps. He didn’t put her down once.
At the top, they came out into the sky.
The top of the rock was flat. A wide plain of grey stone, smoothed and polished, open to the haze, a quarter-league across. And in the middle of it, standing straight up out of the stone, the needle.
Close to, it was enormous. A spike of bronze, green-black with age, as thick at the base as a tower and tapering to a point thirty rods up. It didn’t cast much shadow — the sun was thin in the haze — but it cast some. A long faint grey line across the polished stone, going west.
And the stone was ruled.
Lines. Hundreds of them. Cut into the polished floor of the plain in long straight grooves, radiating out from the base of the needle like the spokes of a wheel, each one inlaid with a thin strip of bronze, each one marked along its length with small carved figures. And across them, curved lines — arcs — crossing the spokes at intervals. A net of bronze lines on the stone, a quarter-league across, with the needle in the middle.
A sundial. The biggest in the world.
Oriel stood at its edge and couldn’t say anything.
“Noon,” said Ammet Sol. Pointing at the needle’s shadow. And then at a particular bronze spoke, running due north from the base. And then at the shadow again. When the shadow lies on that line, it’s noon. He didn’t need to say it. She knew.
He took her by the sleeve again and drew her across the plain to a building at its edge. Low. Round. Stone. With a door. Inside, a vessel. A great stone basin, waist high, with water dripping into it from a spout in the wall, and a float on the water, and a rod on the float rising past a column of carved marks.
A water-clock.
“Set it at noon,” said Oriel. To nobody. To Neve, who’d come in behind her with the ledger. “Every day. By the shadow on the north line. And then it runs.” She looked at the dripping spout. “They don’t need the stars for the time. They’ve got the sun. Every day. Right here.”
“And the place?” said Neve. “Without the stars? How do they get the place?”
Ammet Sol was watching their mouths, the way Deverel watched mouths. Then he went to the wall of the round room, and pulled aside a hanging of woven wool, and behind it there was a shelf cut into the rock.
And on the shelf, tablets.
Stone. Flat. Each the size of a book. Stacked on their edges, side by side, like Imbert’s star-books in the hive-box. Hundreds of them. Going back into the dark of the shelf further than the lamp reached.
Ammet took one down and gave it to Oriel.
She knew what it was before she could read a single mark on it. Columns. Cut small and careful. Figures. A tally-mark she now knew meant five. And at the bottom of each column, a figure set apart. An answer.
“The shadow’s length at noon,” she said slowly. “Every day. Against the needle. That gives you how far north you are.” She looked at the tablet. “And —” She stopped.
Ammet was pointing at something else on the tablet. A second column. Different. Not the shadow.
He took her sleeve again. He took her outside. Across the plain. To its western edge.
The top of Ardun ended in a cliff.
Not the face they’d climbed. The other side. The western face, the face that looked back toward the Seam, toward where they’d come from. It dropped from the edge of the polished plain sheer into the haze, straight down, a thousand rods, more, to the black water and the leaves grinding at its foot.
And along the edge, set into the polished stone of the plain at intervals of a few paces, going back from the cliff toward the needle in a long line — marks. Bronze plugs in the stone. Each with a figure carved beside it.
Ammet stood at the line of plugs and pointed. At the nearest one. Then the next, further back. Then the next. Then the next. Going back from the edge toward the needle. Forty of them. Fifty.
He said a word for each. A number.
Neve had her ledger out. She was writing the tally-words as he said them, and working them out, and her pencil stopped.
“Years,” she said. “They’re years. Their years. Each plug is the edge — where the cliff edge was — in a year. And the edge has —” She looked at the line of plugs going back from the cliff. At the nearest one, on the very lip of the drop. “It’s come back. Every year. Toward the needle. The cliff’s falling off. A bit every year.”
“The Grinding,” said Sarn.
She was lying on the polished stone at the edge with her palm flat and her eyes closed. She’d been lying there since they came out.
“The leaves go under the rock,” she said. “And they take some of the rock with them. Every year. Grinding at the bottom. And the cliff falls down, a bit at a time, from the top.” She opened her eyes and looked at the line of plugs. “It’s not forever. The rock. It’s getting smaller.”
Ammet Sol stood at the line of bronze plugs and looked at them all. At Oriel. At the tablet in her hand. At the star-glass in her coat.
Then he walked back along the line of plugs. Slowly. Counting them. To the oldest. The furthest from the edge. Nearly halfway back to the needle. He knelt by it. He put his hand flat on it.
He looked up at Oriel. And said something. Short. Very quiet.
Calloway translated. Slowly. In his borrowed words.
“My teacher put this one,” said Calloway. “Forty years ago.” He paused while Ammet spoke again. “Every year, the Holders tell me what to say at the needle. ‘The rock is forever. The leaves are safe for generations.’ Every year I say it.” Calloway’s voice went flat. “Every year I put a new plug at the edge.”
Ammet Sol knelt on the polished stone at the top of the world with his hand on his teacher’s bronze plug and looked up at the strangers who’d come over the fire with a star-glass.
And said one more thing.
Calloway didn’t translate it. He didn’t need to. Oriel had heard it before. In a dome under a round window, from an old man with very good hands.
She knew exactly what it meant.
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
ARDUN, 18th Fourthmonth C.418
B. COYLE CARRIED ME UP THE STAIR.
GATE: CALLOWAY GOT US THROUGH WITH A DRIFT HOUSE CHAIN-SEAL.
AMMET SOL, SUN-COUNTER (~60): A BRONZE GNOMON, ~30 RODS, ON A POLISHED PLAIN RULED WITH BRONZE LINES. A WATER-CLOCK SET AT NOON BY THE SHADOW. STONE TABLETS OF FIXES.
W. EDGE OF THE PLAIN: BRONZE PLUGS, ONE A YEAR, WHERE THE CLIFF EDGE WAS. THE EDGE IS RETREATING. THE ROCK IS GETTING SMALLER.
A.S. SAYS “THE ROCK IS FOREVER” EVERY YEAR. HE PUTS A NEW PLUG EVERY YEAR.
HE KNOWS.