Haskin had a well.
Sarn had known it would. Anyone who lived on a leaf that moved had to have one. Teska took her to it at dusk on the twenty-first, through the crowded grey lanes of the village toward the tipping end, where the houses leaned and the grinding was loud, to a square no bigger than a room with a stone ring in the middle of it and a ladder going down.
Isaut came. She didn’t ask. She just came, the way she’d come to the Seam, and stood at the top of the ladder with a coil of rope and looked at Sarn, and Sarn nodded.
It wasn’t deep. Forty rods. A shaft cut down through the leaf-stone, wet, cold, with iron rungs worn bright by bare feet. At the bottom, a floor of rock, and water lying in the low places, and the lamp’s light shivering on it.
It was the same as Ninety-One.
That was the first thing Sarn thought, coming off the last rung. The cold. The wet. The smell — iron, stone, old water. The dead still air. She’d come down Ninety-One once a month for two years with nobody to go down with, and lain on the bottom, and listened to the world break, and come up and drunk gin under a ropemaker’s until she couldn’t hear it.
Teska was already lying down. On the rock. Arms out. The insides of her forearms flat. Forehead down between her hands. Bare feet.
Sarn looked at her forearms in the lamplight. Pale shiny scars, wrist to elbow, both arms. Worn. The way a rope wears a groove in a post.
She lay down beside her.
It was loud.
Louder than Ninety-One. Louder than the Lip. Louder than anything since the night at Vell when the tower sang one note. It came up into her forearms and her forehead like a hand pushing. The groan. The grinding. The leaf — this leaf, Haskin, the one she was lying on — dragging itself against the foot of the rock and going under. She’d heard it from the barge, from the shore, from Teska’s floor. She hadn’t heard it like this. With nothing between.
And under it, the knocks.
She didn’t count them. She couldn’t. They were too close. Knock. And before the groan had finished shuddering from it — knock. And again. Not far away, at the Lip, forty leagues off, the way they’d been under Orme. Here. Under her. At the far end of the leaf, where the houses leaned. Pieces of Haskin breaking off against the rock and going down.
And under the knocks — under everything — the thing she’d heard at the Seam. The heart. The push. Faint, here. Very far. But there.
She lay with her forehead on the rock and her eyes shut and heard all of it at once, and for a moment it was too much, it was the way it had been when she was twenty-three and first licensed and didn’t know yet how to let it go past her — the whole of it coming up into her at once like water into a well —
A hand on hers.
Teska’s. Thin. Cold. Flat on the back of Sarn’s hand on the rock, the way Sarn had once put Oriel’s hands on the backs of her own at the bottom of Ninety-One. Don’t listen. You’ll only hear yourself. Let it come up.
Sarn let it come up.
They didn’t have a word between them. Sarn had thought, coming down the ladder, that that would matter.
It didn’t.
Teska lay beside her with her hand on Sarn’s, and after a long time she lifted one finger. Just one. And tapped it, very lightly, on the back of Sarn’s hand. Once.
Knock.
Sarn heard it a breath later. Through the rock. A knock. At the far end of the leaf.
Teska tapped again. Sarn heard the knock. Again. The knock.
She was calling them. Before they came. A breath before. The way Sarn had called the Lusk line, pace by pace, with her palm on the cobbles. The way Sarn had shouted from the barn at Strand’s, north, it’s going north, a breath before the crack ran across the barley.
Sarn turned her hand over under Teska’s. So their palms were together. Flat. On the rock between them.
And when the next knock was loading — she could feel it, the way you feel a cart-spring tighten — she pressed. Once.
Teska’s fingers jumped against hers.
Knock.
They lay like that for a long time. In the dark. On the rock at the bottom of the well under Haskin. Two Listeners from two wheels, from both sides of the line of fire, who’d never heard of each other’s worlds until four days ago, calling the breaking of the ground to each other through their palms, a breath before it came. Over and over. Never once wrong.
At some point Sarn realized she was crying. She didn’t stop.
When they sat up, Isaut was sitting at the foot of the ladder with the lamp and her arms round her knees, watching them.
“How long,” she said. Very quietly.
Sarn looked at Teska.
Teska held up her hand. And folded down every finger but one. And then touched her own forehead — the place where it had lain on the rock — and pointed up. Through the shaft. At the sky they couldn’t see. And made a slow shape with her hand. Rising. Arching over. Coming down.
The sun. Going across.
And then she folded the last finger down. And made the shape again. Rising, arching, coming down.
And then — slowly, looking at Sarn — she closed her hand.
“One day,” said Isaut. “She’s saying one more day. Tomorrow. And then —”
“Tomorrow night,” said Sarn.
She put her palm back on the rock. To check. She didn’t need to. She’d felt it. She’d felt it loading the whole time, under the knocks, under the groan, the way she’d felt the ridge loading at Vell — the low note climbing, the breaths getting close. The whole leaf. The whole of Haskin, half a league of it, pushed against the rock by the Seam behind it the way the Rise had been pushed against the ridge. And the rock not moving. And something having to give.
“Tomorrow night,” she said again. “After dark. When the gate’s shut.” She looked up at Isaut. “The whole leaf. All of it. Like Strand’s north field. It’ll tip and slide under the rock. Everything on it.”
Isaut didn’t say anything for a long time.
“How many people,” she said finally. “In Haskin.”
“Neve’s counting,” said Sarn. “She’s been going house to house since this morning with the old woman from the bench.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. “Thousands.”
Teska was watching them. She’d understood some of it. The numbers. The shapes. She looked at Sarn’s face and then at Isaut’s and then down at her own palm on the rock.
She said something. Low. In her own language. It wasn’t a question.
Sarn didn’t understand the words. She understood it anyway. She’d said it herself, on the floor of Strand’s farmhouse, on the night after the north field went. I told him tomorrow. I said not tonight.
She took Teska’s hand off the rock and held it. In both of hers.
“We’ll get them up,” she said. In her own language. Teska couldn’t understand a word. “We’ll get them up the stair. I swear. We came over the fire for this. We’ll get them up.”
Neve had the number.
She was sitting on the stone of the shore by Vell’s mooring with the ledger open on her knees and the old woman from the market bench beside her, both of them grey with exhaustion, when Sarn and Isaut and Teska came up out of the lanes.
Oriel was there. And Bastian. And Calloway, with Brack’s rope over his shoulder. And Mags Callan, and Dace and Ennet, and Hesper with her arm in its sling. Waiting.
“Six thousand, two hundred and forty,” said Neve. “In Haskin. Every house. The old woman knew every name. She’s lived here sixty years.” She looked at Sarn’s face. “How long?”
“Tomorrow night,” said Sarn.
Nobody said anything.
Then Bastian, who never asked anything, asked.
“The stair,” he said. “How many an hour?”
They all looked at him.
“It’s a hundred and fifty rods,” said Bastian. “Narrow. Two can pass, not three. I carried Tash up it. An hour. With her. Half that, a fit man alone. But not six thousand at once. You’d jam it.” He looked up at the cliff in the dark, at the stair they couldn’t see. “Lines. Like a chain. Steady. Nobody stopping. Nobody running. Nobody going back.” He was quiet. “If the gate’s open. All night. That’s — maybe two thousand an hour. Maybe. If it’s open.”
“Three hours,” said Neve. “Three hours of open gate.”
“It shuts at dusk,” said Calloway. “It’s barred. From the top. By the Holders’ guard. Every night.” He looked at Oriel. “They’re not going to open it because a woman from over the fire says the leaf is going. They’ve been told that every year by their own Listeners. They send the sun-counter to the needle and sell more places.”
“Then we give them something they can’t send the sun-counter to the needle about,” said Oriel.
They all looked at her.
She was sitting on the stone with her bad knee out and Imbert’s star-glass in her lap and her field book open on top of it, and the lamplight on the page.
“Ammet Sol has forty years of plugs,” she said. “And tablets. Every noon. And a needle and a water-clock and a floor ruled in bronze a quarter-league across. Everything he needs to show them where the edge is.” She closed the book. “He’s never done it in public. Neither had Penhallow. Until somebody asked him to, on the Meridian, at midnight, with the whole city watching.”
“The Holders won’t let him,” said Calloway.
“The Holders have a ceremony,” said Oriel. “Every year. At the needle. At noon. Where the whole of Ardun comes up to the plain and the sun-counter tells them the rock is forever.” She looked at Teska. “When is it?”
Calloway asked. Slowly. In the borrowed words. Teska listened, and then laughed — short, sharp, not a nice laugh — and answered.
Calloway was quiet a moment.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “At noon. It’s always the first fair day after the spring cold. She says the Holders announced it this morning. Ammet’s to give the word.” He looked at the cliff. “Tomorrow, at noon, on top of the rock, in front of everyone, he’s going to say the leaves are safe for generations.”
“Then tomorrow morning,” said Oriel, “we go and see the Holders. With Neve’s numbers. And if they won’t listen —” She put her hand flat on the star-glass. “— at noon we ask Ammet Sol to count the sun out loud.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH (WITH S. IVO’S NOTES)
HASKIN, 21st Fourthmonth C.418
HASKIN WELL: 40 RODS. S. IVO + TESKA AT THE BOTTOM. CALLED THE KNOCKS TO EACH OTHER THROUGH THEIR PALMS, A BREATH BEFORE. NEVER WRONG.
TESKA: ONE MORE DAY. S. IVO: “TOMORROW NIGHT. AFTER DARK. THE WHOLE LEAF.”
HASKIN: 6,240 (N. ASHER + THE OLD WOMAN FROM THE BENCH, EVERY NAME).
STAIR (B. COYLE): ~2,000/HR IF STEADY. 3 HRS OF OPEN GATE.
THE GATE IS BARRED AT DUSK.
THE NEEDLE CEREMONY IS TOMORROW AT NOON.