The market of places was in a hall cut into the rock, halfway up Ardun, where the green terraces of the Low-folk stopped and the fountains of the Holders began.
It was a long hall. Lamps in niches. A floor of polished black stone. Benches along both walls, and on the benches, Low-folk, in their grey wool, sitting very still, waiting. Old men and women mostly. Grey-headed. With their clay tokens round their necks and their hands in their laps — hands like Bastian’s, like Hob Strand’s, the hands of people who’d worked the same ground every day for their whole lives.
At the far end, on a step, a long table. Behind it, clerks in ochre robes. And on the wall behind the clerks, from floor to ceiling, from one side of the hall to the other, a map.
Bronze. Engraved. Enormous.
Oriel stood at the door of the hall on her stick with Calloway and Neve beside her and looked at it. She couldn’t help it. She looked at every map. It was beautiful. A plan of the whole of Ardun — the plain on top, the needle, the terraces going down the face in long narrow strips — cut into a wall of bronze plates fitted edge to edge, every line fine and clean and bright. And all over it, in their thousands, tiny squares. Numbered. Each square a place. A niche in the rock. A room behind a window. A strip of terrace.
Some of the squares were inlaid with a dot of silver. Some weren’t.
“Sold,” said Calloway. Quietly. He’d seen it before she had. “Silver’s sold. Plain’s for sale.” He looked at the old people on the benches. “They’ve finished their forty years. They’re waiting to be given one.”
They watched for an hour.
A clerk would call a name. One of the old people would get up from the bench and go to the long table, slowly, and hand over their clay token. The clerk would look at it, and look in a great book, and nod. And then he’d turn to the bronze wall and point with a long rod to one of the plain squares. Say a number. And another clerk would climb a ladder and set a dot of silver into it with a little hammer.
And the old person would stand there. Looking at the square on the wall. Their place. On the rock. Behind the gate.
Then they’d go out. A Holder’s servant in ochre would take them, by a different door, up.
“Forty years,” said Neve. Whispering. She had the ledger. She’d counted every one. “Eleven in an hour. Eleven people. Forty years each.”
Calloway wasn’t watching the people.
He was watching the wall. Oriel saw his eyes go back and forth across it. Not looking at the map. Looking at the squares. The silver ones and the plain ones. Counting. The way he’d have counted acres on the Company map at the old end bench under the north-light window.
“Neve,” he said. “Where do they put them?”
“What?”
“The places they give out. Watch the rod. Where does it point?”
They watched.
The clerk called a name. An old woman got up. The rod went up the wall — along the terraces — and stopped. At the western edge of the map. The western face of the rock. A plain square, right at the edge, where the bronze lines of the terraces met the bronze line of the cliff.
The next name. The rod went west again. The edge again.
The next. The edge.
“Every one,” said Calloway. Very quietly. “Every place they’ve given out this morning is on the west face. At the edge.” He looked at Oriel. “Where the plugs are. Where the cliff’s falling off.”
Neve counted the squares.
It took her all afternoon. She sat on the end of a bench among the old Low-folk with her ledger on her knee and counted them. Every square on the bronze wall. Silver and plain. In tallies. In fives. Row by row. Terrace by terrace. The old people watched her do it. Nobody stopped her. After an hour, the old woman beside her on the bench began to count with her, pointing, saying the Haskin numbers aloud, softly, under her breath, and Neve wrote them down.
Calloway went to the long table.
He talked to the clerks. In his borrowed words. Slowly. With his salesman’s smile — Oriel saw it come back onto his face, the old warm reasonable one, and saw what it cost him. He asked questions. How many places. How many sold. How many given. How many years. The clerks answered him — he was a stranger from over the fire with a star on a brass disc and Ammet Sol’s favor; they didn’t know what to make of him — and he wrote nothing down. He just listened. And nodded. And smiled.
When he came back, he sat down beside Oriel on the bench and didn’t smile at all.
“The book,” he said. “The great book on the table. It’s the roll. Every token. Every place sold, every place given. Forty years of it, at least.” He folded his hands. “They let me look. They thought I wanted to buy one.”
“And?”
“And the book says —” He stopped. He started again. “Every year, the edge comes back. The plugs. You saw them. Every year the cliff on the west face falls a little, and the places at the edge — the niches, the rooms, the terrace-strips — fall with it. Into the Deep. Gone.” He looked at the bronze wall. “So every year, there are fewer places.”
“Yes.”
“The book doesn’t say that,” said Calloway. “The book’s never taken a place off. Not one. In forty years. Every place that fell off the edge is still in the book. Still a square on that wall. Still for sale.” He swallowed. “They sell it again. And when the person who bought it goes up to find their place —”
“— it isn’t there,” said Oriel.
“They’re given another one,” said Calloway. “At the edge. Where the next ones are. The ones that’ll go next year.” He looked at the old people on the benches. “Forty years of work. For a room at the top of a cliff that’s falling into the sea. And when it falls, they’re told it was the will of the rock, and given another. Further along. Closer to the edge.” His voice cracked, very slightly. “Wheresoever the said Star may lie.”
Neve looked up from her ledger. Her face was white.
“I’ve finished,” she said.
“And?”
“Four thousand, one hundred and twelve squares on the wall,” said Neve. “That’s every place. Silver and plain.” She turned the ledger round so Oriel could see. “The clerk told Calloway how many places the book says are sold. Living. People in them. I asked him to ask.” She put her finger on a figure. “Four thousand, nine hundred and six.”
Nobody said anything for a while.
“More sold than there are,” said Oriel.
“Eight hundred more,” said Neve. “And that’s on the wall. The wall’s not counted the edge either. Ammet’s plugs say the west face has lost —” She did the sum. “— three hundred places in forty years. At least. Into the Deep.” She closed the ledger. “They’ve sold eleven hundred places that don’t exist. To people who worked forty years for them.”
Ammet Sol had a room at the top of the rock, by the water-clock, cut into the stone at the edge of the polished plain. They went there at dusk, after the market. He gave them a hot drink that tasted of smoke and some kind of root, and they sat on the floor round a lamp, and Neve showed him the ledger.
She didn’t need words. She had numbers.
She showed him the tally of squares on the bronze wall. Four thousand, one hundred and twelve. She showed him the tally of the book. Four thousand, nine hundred and six. She showed him his own plugs, counted, on a page, and the places they’d taken. And she drew a line under all of it, and wrote the difference, in Haskin tally-marks, so he could read it.
Ammet Sol looked at it for a long time.
He didn’t seem surprised. Oriel watched his face. He looked like a man being shown something he’d known for a long time and never let himself add up.
He said something. Very quiet. To the lamp.
Calloway translated it. He’d got better at it. Three days of listening.
“I count the sun,” said Calloway. “Not the places. The places are the Holders’. The sun is mine.” He paused while Ammet went on. “I put a plug every year. I write it on a tablet. I put the tablet on the shelf. Nobody reads the shelf. Nobody has read it since my teacher’s teacher.” He stopped. Ammet had stopped. He was looking at the shelf of stone tablets behind the hanging. Hundreds of them. Going back into the dark.
Then he said one more thing.
“They will not look,” said Calloway slowly. Translating. “So I keep looking.”
Oriel went very still.
She took her field book out of her coat. She opened it to the front. To the page where she’d copied, a long time ago, at Wenna Vale’s kitchen table by the light of one lamp, the last thing in Imbert’s last star-book.
They will not look. So I will keep looking.
She turned it round and held it out to Ammet Sol.
He couldn’t read it. Of course he couldn’t. He looked at it anyway — at the marks, at her face, at the brass star-glass beside her on the floor. And then she pointed at the words, and at herself, and then at the shelf of his tablets, and at him. And then at the words again.
He understood.
She saw it go across his face. The way it had gone across the Hythe salt-worker’s over the vernier. The way it had gone across Isaut’s on the Rise when the pin went down to the deep rock.
The old sun-counter of Ardun put his brown hand flat on the page of her field book, over Imbert’s words, and held it there, and closed his eyes.
They went back down the stair at dusk with the workers. Before the gate shut. Ammet came with them as far as the gate and stood in it, with the guards looking at him strangely, and watched them go down.
Teska was waiting at the foot of the stair.
She wasn’t alone. Sarn was with her — Sarn had stayed in Haskin, with Teska, all day, on the floor of the house with the wheel, listening — and Isaut. And Hesper. And a dozen Low-folk Oriel didn’t know, all barefoot, standing on the tilting stone of the leaf at the bottom of the cliff in the dusk.
Listeners. Haskin’s. Every one of them.
Sarn came to meet her. Her face was grey.
“They’ve been counting,” she said. “Teska and her people. For years. The knocks. The way I did. In a book. Tallies on a slate.” She held one out — a flat grey slate, scratched all over with rows of tally-marks in fives. “Look at the rows. Look how close the marks get.”
Oriel looked. Rows and rows. Spaced out at the top. Then closer. Then closer. Then, at the bottom, crowded together like the red lines on Penhallow’s map, like the C.-years on the streets of east Orme, like the ripples coming back to a dropped stone.
“It’s the Bay,” said Sarn. “It’s Strand’s north field. It’s Lusk.” She looked up the cliff at the gate. At the bronze glint of the guards’ breastplates in the last light. “Haskin’s going. Not five seasons. Not one.” She put her palm flat on the stone of the leaf. “Days, Tash. It’s loading. Like the ridge at Vell. Like the tower note climbing.”
Teska said something. Quietly. To Calloway.
He listened. His face went still.
“She says they’ve asked,” he said. “Every year. The Low-folk Listeners go up to the gate and ask to see the Holders and tell them. And every year the Holders send the sun-counter down to the needle to say the rock is forever and the leaves are safe.” He looked up at the gate. “And every year they sell more places.”
“Days,” said Sarn.
Oriel looked at the stair. A hundred and fifty rods. One stair. One gate.
How many people lived in Haskin? She didn’t know. Neve would. She’d ask in the morning. Thousands. On the last leaf, at the foot of the rock, with one stair up, and a gate at the top that shut at dusk.
“Then we go and see the Holders,” she said. “Tomorrow. And we take the numbers.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
ARDUN, MARKET OF PLACES, 20th Fourthmonth C.418
A BRONZE WALL-MAP OF EVERY PLACE. SILVER = SOLD.
PLACES GIVEN TODAY: ALL ON THE W. FACE. AT THE EDGE.
SQUARES ON THE WALL: 4,112. PLACES SOLD (BOOK): 4,906. LOST TO THE EDGE (PLUGS): ≥300. SOLD THAT DON’T EXIST: ~1,100. (N. ASHER, C. CALLOWAY)
A. SOL: “THEY WILL NOT LOOK. SO I KEEP LOOKING.” HE PUT HIS HAND ON I.V.’S LINE.
HASKIN LISTENERS: A SLATE OF KNOCKS. CROWDING. S. IVO: “DAYS.”
TOMORROW: THE HOLDERS.