Orme was smaller.
Not the city. The city was the same size; its walls and streets and copper roofs and hills were all where they’d been. But a third of its people had gone west over two winters, and it showed. Whole streets in the eastern quarter with their doors nailed shut and their windows boarded. Shops with no signs. The Ropewalk half-empty. Weeds in the cobbles of Aske Square, round the dry fountain, in front of the bronze doors of the Ledger House, which were chained and sealed with the Council’s wax.
But the people who’d stayed had done something Oriel hadn’t expected.
They’d painted lines.
She saw the first one on the Chain Bridge, coming in from the west road with Bastian at the fourth bell of the afternoon. A stripe of red paint across the bridge’s cobbles, from parapet to parapet, a hand wide. And beside it, painted on the stone of the pier where Mott Grebe had pasted the first map, in white letters: EDGE, C.430 (SLOW FIGURE). CHECK IT YOURSELF.
Then another, in the market. C.428. Then in Corn Street. Every few streets, going east, a red line across the cobbles with a year beside it, closer and closer, the years crowding together the further east you went, until in the boarded-up eastern quarter they were three streets apart.
“Orrel,” said Bastian.
“Orrel,” said Oriel.
He was still in it. The same office, second floor, north side, with the tall window over the copper roofs and the forty-one volumes of the Register of the Eastern Pale in red calf along one wall, and the true map pinned above them. He’d been made something in the reorganization — Recorder of the Orme Leaf, the Council had called it — and given a salary when the Council could pay it, which was about half the time, and he’d stayed in the same chair at the same desk with the same fern on the windowsill that never got any bigger.
He was greyer. His cough was worse. He got up when she came in and came round the desk and took both her hands, which he’d never done before.
“You came,” he said.
“You told me Calloway sends his regards.”
“He does. Every week. He sends a clerk up with a card.” Orrel went back to his desk and opened a drawer and took out a stack of small white cards, each with a gold edge, and dealt them out on the green leather. With the compliments of C. Calloway, Master, the Westerly Company. Seven of them. “He’s two floors down. In the east wing. Where the Press used to be. He’s put his office in Penhallow’s corner — the end bench.” Orrel’s mouth twisted. “He leased it from the Council for forty crowns a month. The Council took it. The Council takes everything. It hasn’t paid the Chainguard since Firstmonth.”
“And he’s selling the Rise.”
“By the acre.” Orrel took something else out of the drawer. A folded sheet. He opened it on the desk. “This is the Company’s map.”
It was well made. Better than well. Black lines only. A long irregular shape, like a leaf, labeled in elegant copperplate THE RISE, OR NEW LEAF, divided into hundreds of neat rectangular plots, each with a number. Roads. A harbor on its western side, drawn in. A town, laid out in a grid, called Calloway. And at its center, a small star.
THE RISE STAR. True-mark of the Westerly Company. All plots measured herefrom.
“Who surveyed it?” said Oriel.
“Nobody,” said Orrel. “That’s the beautiful part. The Company says it was surveyed from the Lip, by observation. By a glass. From Fennick’s Cross, looking out. They say the Company’s surveyors — two of my old clerks, Tash, two of the forty, Mallory and Pruett, they couldn’t get work anywhere else — sighted the Rise’s edges from the Lip with a great glass and drew it.” He tapped the star. “And then they put a star in the middle and drew plots from it. A star nobody’s set. On land nobody’s walked on. That’s moving every day.”
“How much is it?”
“Four crowns an acre.” He looked at her. “Do you know how many they’ve sold?”
She didn’t.
“Eleven thousand acres,” said Dunstan Orrel. “In nine days. To people from east Orme. People who lost their land in the first winter. People who are watching those red lines in the street come closer.” His voice was very tired. “They know the Register was a lie. They know the map you made was true. They’ve walked their chains. They believe the stars. And they’re buying deeds to land on the Deep from Corwin Calloway because it’s land, and it’s new, and nobody’s had it before, and he’s got a map with plots on it and a harbor and a town.” He folded the Company map. “They want it so badly, Tash. They want somewhere that isn’t going over.”
The east wing stair was the same. Stone, worn, going down from the Hall of Measure to the vaulted room where the Press had been. The Press was gone. The Council had sold the presses for scrap the first winter, all three hand-presses and the engravers’ benches, everything but the stone itself. The long vaulted room was bare and whitewashed now, with its tall north-light windows, and full of desks.
Clerks at the desks. A dozen. Writing deeds. Sealing them. And a line of people from the door to the far end, waiting, with purses in their hands.
At the far end of the room, at the old end bench under the last north-light window — Deverel’s bench, Penhallow’s bench, she’d sat on a stool beside it once and looked through a jeweler’s glass at a burnished six — there was a large desk of polished walnut, and behind it, a man.
Corwin Calloway had lost weight. He’d been heavy and pink and smooth, the Deputy, with his dark blue silk waistcoats. He was leaner now. Browner, from the Westerly sun. His fair hair had gone sandy-grey. He wore a plain good coat and no chain of any kind, and when he looked up from the deed he was signing and saw her coming down the long room, he smiled, and it was a much better smile than she remembered.
“Surveyor Tash,” he said. He stood up. “I wondered how long. Orrel’s been very conscientious about my cards.” He held out his hand across the walnut desk.
She didn’t take it.
He didn’t seem to mind. He took it back and gestured at a chair. “Please. Sit. Your knee. I remember your knee.” He sat himself. “You’ll have come about the Rise.”
“You’re selling land nobody’s walked on.”
“I’m selling land nobody owns,” said Calloway pleasantly. “Which is different. And which is, if you’ll forgive me, exactly what the Register was for, and what the Charter was for, and what deeds have always been for. Somebody has to say this is yours. Otherwise it’s nobody’s. And nobody’s land is just a fight waiting to happen.”
“From a star nobody’s set.”
“Yet.” He folded his hands on the walnut. “The Company sails from Hythe in eleven days. Three barges. Forty men. Rope, timber, iron, provisions for a season. The Company’s surveyors will go out onto the Rise and set the Rise Star — a brass plate, Survey pattern, very handsome — at the place on the map where it’s marked. And every plot will be measured from it. And every deed I’ve sold will be exactly what it says it is.” He smiled. “You see? Nothing dishonest at all. The map comes first. The ground follows.”
“The ground’s moving.”
“All ground’s moving,” said Calloway. “You taught everyone that. It’s on every wall in the city. It’s painted on the Chain Bridge.” He leaned back. “The Rise moves. Fine. So does Orme. So does everything except your precious Shield, which the Cantons won’t sell to anybody. Whoever owns land on a moving leaf owns it wherever the leaf goes. That’s what my deeds say. Read one. Plot 1147, measured from the Rise Star, wheresoever the said Star may lie.” He spread his hands. “It moves with the ground. Like your star-fixes. I took your point, Surveyor. I took it very seriously.”
Oriel looked at him.
She thought about Penhallow in the dome. The truth is a sum with no answer. She thought about Aske on the Moot-house bench, his deeds pointing at turnip fields and the inside of the Canton wall. She’d beaten Aske with a measurement. With the chain, from the Cantons’ own marks. She’d proved his paper pointed at land that wasn’t there.
Calloway’s paper pointed at land that would be there. That was coming up out of the water. That nobody had touched.
There was nothing to measure it against.
“The Rise is rising,” she said. “Sarn Ivo’s been listening to it for two years. It’s coming up out of the Deep a finger a day, maybe more. It heaves. It’ll crack. It won’t be the shape on your map in a month. Your harbor’s in the wrong place. Your town is somewhere it isn’t. Your plots —“
“— are measured from the Star,” said Calloway, “wheresoever it may lie. If the Rise heaves, the Star heaves with it. The plots go too.” He smiled again. “Surveyor. I spent thirty years in this building watching Penhallow make paper agree with itself. I learned a great deal. The most important thing I learned is that people don’t buy land. They buy certainty. They buy a piece of paper that says yours, with a seal on it and a number, and a map with their number on it. That’s what they want. That’s what they’ve always wanted.” He picked up his pen. “You gave them the truth. It was very brave. They’re grateful, I’m sure. And they’re still frightened, and they’ve still got nowhere to go, and the truth didn’t give them anywhere.” He dipped the pen. “I’m giving them somewhere.”
He signed the deed in front of him. Blotted it. Handed it across the desk to the clerk at his elbow, who took it to the front of the room and gave it to a woman in a patched shawl, who took it in both hands and held it against her chest.
Oriel watched her go.
“You can’t stop me,” said Calloway, not unkindly. “There’s no law. The Council abolished the Register and the Settling and Article One and didn’t put anything in their place but a resolution that every deed must name a means of checking it. Mine do. Measured from the Rise Star. Anyone may go and check.” He smiled. “In eleven days, so may I.”
Lys Harrowgate received her in what had been the Survey-General’s dome.
The Council had moved its offices into the Survey House the first winter, because it was cheaper than heating the Old Palace. Harrowgate had taken the dome. The great round oak table with the hand-colored map of the Shalemark was still there under the round window, but someone had taken a brush and a pot of red and painted the Lip in, in a thick wet line, much further west than the old black one, with dates beside it. Two of them. C.412. C.413.
Penhallow’s chair was gone. Harrowgate had brought her own, a hard plain one.
On the wall where the long flat drawers had been there was a hook, and on the hook, a pair of iron manacles with a short chain between them.
“You came about Calloway,” said the Regent. She didn’t get up either. She was sixty now, harder and greyer and smaller, with her spectacles on their ribbon, and she looked at Oriel across the round table with something that might, in a softer face, have been affection.
“Yes.”
“I can’t stop him.”
“I know.”
“I would if I could. He’s a thief. He was a thief when he was Deputy, he was a thief when he ran, he’s a thief now. He’s selling desperate people a drawing.” She put her hands flat on the old map. “But there’s no law for new land. There’s never been new land. Not in the whole history of the Charter. Nobody thought there could be.” She looked at the red line of the Lip. “I’ve asked the Council for a law. They’ve been arguing about it for nine days. Half of them have bought plots.”
“Bought —“
“Four crowns an acre,” said Harrowgate dryly. “It’s cheap. It’s a gamble. If he’s right, they’ve got land. If he’s wrong, they’ve lost four crowns.” She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. “There’s one thing I can do. One. It isn’t much.”
“What?”
“The Council’s resolution. No deed shall name a position without naming also the means by which any citizen may check it.” Harrowgate put her spectacles back on. “Calloway’s deeds name the Rise Star. If there’s another mark on the Rise — set first, set in public, fixed by the stars, with witnesses, recorded by a body the Council recognizes — then any citizen checking Calloway’s deeds can check them against that. And if his Star isn’t where he says, and his plots don’t land where his map says —“
“— then his deeds name land that isn’t there,” said Oriel.
“Then the Council can void them, under its own resolution, without a new law,” said Harrowgate. “The way the Moot voided Aske’s.” She took a paper from under the edge of the map and pushed it across. A warrant. Short. In her own hand. The Drift Survey is requested to survey the land called the Rise on behalf of the Regent Council, by such methods as it thinks fit, and its record shall be the realm’s. Signed. Sealed. “That’s all I can give you. No money. No men. No boats. A piece of paper that says your mark counts, if you get there first.”
Oriel looked at it.
“He sails in eleven days,” she said.
“Then you’d better sail in ten,” said Lys Harrowgate.
They walked back across the Chain Bridge in the dark, she and Bastian, over the red line painted on the cobbles. EDGE, C.430.
Mott Grebe’s eel-barrow was still at the north end. He was still there, square and bald, sixty now, with his paste-pot under the barrow among the eels. He nodded to her as they passed, the way he’d nodded every time for two years. Then he said, “Surveyor.”
She stopped.
“My sister bought one,” said Mott Grebe. “Of his. Calloway’s. A deed. Plot nine hundred and something. She lost her house on Tanner Row in Orme in the first winter, it’s past the C.426 line, she had to leave it.” He wiped his hands on his apron. “She’s going out there. When he sails. With her deed. She’s sold everything to pay her passage on his barges.” He looked at Oriel. “Is it there? The land? Will it be where the paper says?”
Oriel looked at the eel-man.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody does. Nobody’s been.”
“You’ll go,” said Mott Grebe. It wasn’t a question. “You’ll go and look. Like you did with the wall. And the edge. And the map.”
“Yes.”
He nodded slowly.
“Then I’ll tell her to wait,” he said. “To get off his barge at the bottom and wait. Till you’ve measured it.” He turned back to his eels. “She won’t listen. But I’ll tell her.”
They walked on. Off the bridge. Up the dark street toward the west gate, where Ilse Corran’s road-post had horses waiting for anybody with a Council warrant.
“Ten days,” said Bastian.
“Ten days.”
“Callan said in the winter she could build three barges in a month.”
“Then she’ll have to build them in ten days.”
Bastian thought about it.
“She’ll say no,” he said.
“Then I’ll ask her twice,” said Oriel. “I’m told that’s how it works.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
ORME, 9th Fourthmonth C.415
RED LINES PAINTED ACROSS THE STREETS BY YEAR. CHAIN BRIDGE: C.430 (SLOW). E. QUARTER: 3 STREETS APART. (D.O.)
WESTERLY COMPANY: OLD PRESS ROOM, E. WING. “RISE STAR” ON A MAP, NOT ON THE GROUND. SURVEYED BY GLASS FROM THE LIP (MALLORY, PRUETT).
11,000 ACRES SOLD IN 9 DAYS, 4 CR/ACRE. “WHERESOEVER THE SAID STAR MAY LIE.”
CALLOWAY SAILS FROM HYTHE IN 11 DAYS. 3 BARGES. 40 MEN.
HARROWGATE: WARRANT. “YOUR MARK COUNTS, IF YOU GET THERE FIRST.”
MOTT GREBE’S SISTER IS GOING.