Mags Callan said no.
She said it standing in the long grass ten paces from the edge of the world, with her arms folded and her back to the drop, a short broad weathered woman of forty-eight in a tarred bargeman’s coat with her grey hair scraped back under a knitted cap. She’d come from Hythe in the Shield valleys — the reeve’s new valley, Ketter Bayle’s, where four thousand of the Bay’s survivors had been given land by the Moot and were three years into their labor — in a cart with two of her old barge-wrights and a load of tools, because Bastian had asked her in the winter and she’d said maybe, and she’d looked at the Lip, and at Oriel’s plan, and at Harrowgate’s warrant, and said:
“No. Ten days? No. Three barges, flat-bottomed, decked, forty feet, to carry a party and a season’s stores across thirty leagues of black water nobody’s ever crossed? No. In ten days, I could build you one. Badly. And it would sink.”
“Then build one,” said Oriel. “Badly.”
Mags Callan looked at her.
“It would sink, Surveyor.”
“Then build one that doesn’t, and do it in ten days, and I’ll find somebody to carry the stores in something else.” Oriel leaned on her stick. “Calloway sails from Hythe falls in nine. With three barges and forty men and a brass plate he’s going to nail to the Rise and call the middle of the world. If he gets there first, every acre of it’s measured from wherever he decides to put his plate, and everybody who bought a deed off him goes out there with their life’s money expecting a town called Calloway, and finds black rock coming up out of the water, moving. And when they come back, they’ll have nothing. Again.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“No,” said Oriel. “You’ve had your problem. I know.”
Mags Callan didn’t say anything for a while. She turned round. She looked over the edge, east, at the broken staircase of the old Eastern Pale going down in tipped and tumbling slabs into the haze, and the black flat glossy water at the bottom of it a league below, dead still. And out on the water, far, very far, a long pale grey line.
“I was on the last barge,” she said, with her back to them. “At the Bay. In the night. Ketter came back for his books. He was on the hall steps with his arms full of ledgers telling the last of them to get aboard. And I looked down and the water was going out. Fast. East. Like a tide that wasn’t a tide.” She was quiet a moment. “I said Ketter, look at the water. That’s all I said. And he dropped his books and got on. And we went west, and the town went east, and I’ve been looking at the water ever since. Every night. In my head.”
She turned back round.
“One barge,” said Mags Callan. “Forty feet. Decked. Flat. Tarred. I’ll have it ready in nine days. It’ll carry ten and stores for a month. You’ll need to get it down there.” She jerked her chin at the drop. “That’s not my problem either.”
“That’s mine,” said Bastian.
It was a quarry face. That was how Bastian saw it, and after a day Oriel saw it too.
A league of it. Not straight down — that was the thing about the Lip, it wasn’t a cliff, it was a staircase. The tipped slabs of the old leaf, each one a field or a farm or a stretch of salt-meadow once, lying at steep angles one below the next, cracked and jumbled, the soil long since slid off them, bare grey leaf-stone, wet, going down into the haze. Some of them were nearly flat, great tilted tables you could stand on. Some were near vertical. Between them, gaps, cracks, black shadows going down into nothing.
You couldn’t walk it. But you could rope it.
Bastian walked the edge for two days, ten paces back, with his chain and his eye, choosing. Then he chose: a line straight down from a place half a league north of Oriel’s pin, where the slabs lay at their gentlest, like the steps of a giant’s stair, in long runs of forty and fifty rods with short drops between. Eleven steps. Eleven slabs. Eleven drops. And at the bottom, the black water, lapping at the foot of the last slab like oil against a jetty.
“Rope down each drop,” said Bastian. “Fixed. Iron anchors in the stone at the top of each. A winch at the top of the whole thing. A sling-chair for people. A cradle for stores. And a slide for the barge — greased timbers down the long runs, lowered on the winch, slab by slab.” He looked at Oriel. “Ten days.”
“You need someone to set the anchors.”
“I need someone who can hang on a rope over nothing,” said Bastian, “and cut a hole in wet leaf-stone with a hammer and a star-drill, and not fall off.”
They both looked at Isaut Fenwright.
She was sitting on a rock a little apart, as she’d sat for two days, watching everything and saying almost nothing. She’d looked over the edge once, on the first morning, for a long time, and then sat down on the rock and not looked again.
She looked at them now.
“No,” she said.
“You’re the best climber in the Cantons,” said Oriel. “Your aunt said so.”
“My great-aunt said so. On rock. Shield rock. Rock that doesn’t move.” Isaut Fenwright stood up. “That isn’t rock. That’s a ruin. That’s what’s left of somebody’s field, falling into the sea under the world. It could go any time. You said so yourself. That’s what the leaves do.”
“Sarn says it’s resting,” said Oriel.
“Sarn,” said Isaut, “is a drunk from the leaves.”
Sarn, who was lying flat on her stomach in the grass at the very edge with her arms out and her forehead down on the turf, didn’t lift her head.
“Was,” she said, into the grass. “And the Lip’s resting. Has been for eight weeks. It’ll rest another four at least. Loading slow. I’ll know a day before it moves. I’ll know an hour before. I’ll know before the first crack.” She lifted her head and looked at the Canton woman. “I called every pace of the Lusk line. Ask anyone who was there. Ask the reeve. I’ll lie here on the edge every hour you’re on the rope, and if it so much as breathes wrong, I’ll shout. And you’ll be off it before it knows you were there.”
Isaut Fenwright looked at her for a long time.
“You’d lie there,” she said. “On the edge. All day. For me.”
“For the rope,” said Sarn. “But you’ll be on it.”
The Canton woman stood very still in the long grass with her stone-cutter’s arms at her sides. Then she looked over the edge again. At the first drop. The first slab. Forty rods of wet grey stone, tilted like a roof.
“Give me the drill,” she said.
They built it in eight.
Isaut Fenwright went down the face on a rope from the top of the first slab on the morning of the thirteenth with a star-drill and a hammer and a bag of iron anchors on her hip, and Bastian paying out the rope from above with his good hand and his crooked one on the brake, and Sarn lying flat at the edge with her palm on the turf.
Oriel watched from the top. She couldn’t help it. She stood at ten paces with her stick and watched the Canton woman go over the edge and hang there, against the wet tilted stone, and set the drill, and swing the hammer. The ring of it came up thin and clear through the haze. Tink. Tink. Tink. Turning the drill between strokes. A hole a finger deep. Two. An anchor in. A ring. The rope through the ring. Then down. To the next.
She didn’t hurry. She didn’t talk. She went down that league of broken stone in eight days, slab by slab, setting anchors, rigging ropes, and every evening she came back up the fixed lines with her hands raw and her face grey with stone-dust, and sat on her rock, and ate whatever Mags Callan’s cook put in front of her, and said nothing at all.
Except once.
On the fifth evening, coming up off the last fixed line onto the turf at the top, she stopped beside Sarn, who’d been lying at the edge all day as she’d promised, and stood looking down at her.
“You didn’t shout,” said Isaut.
“It didn’t move.”
“I felt it once. Today. On the seventh slab. A sort of — shiver. In the stone. Under my hands.”
“That was the Rise,” said Sarn, without lifting her head. “Not the Lip. Far east. It does that. It’s breathing. You felt it through thirty leagues of water and stone.” She was quiet a moment. “Most people can’t.”
Isaut Fenwright stood there a while longer. Then she sat down in the grass beside the Listener, and lay down on her back, and put her raw palms flat on the turf, and closed her eyes.
They stayed like that until it was dark.
The man came on the sixth day.
He came on foot, along the road from the west, alone, with a pack on his back and a rope coiled over his shoulder. A man of forty, thin and hard and sun-darkened, in a laborer’s smock with the Council’s road-gang brand stamped on the shoulder, and a right arm that hung a little wrong from the elbow, as if it had been broken once and set badly.
Bastian saw him first. He was at the winch, at the head of the rope-way, with Mags Callan’s barge-wrights. He straightened up. He stood very still.
Oriel saw Bastian’s face, and turned, and saw the man, and knew him.
Brack.
He stopped twenty paces off. He didn’t come closer. He stood in the road with his pack on his back and his rope on his shoulder and looked at Bastian, and then at Oriel, and then at the ground.
“I did my two years,” he said. “On the roads. The Westerly road. Captain Corran’s. She let me off a month early.” He swallowed. “For work. She said I worked.”
Nobody said anything.
“I heard you were going down,” said Brack. “To the Rise. I heard you’d need rope-hands. I’ve carried rope. On the roads. Bridges. I can splice. I can haul.” He looked at the winch. “I’m not asking for anything. I’ll carry rope. That’s all.”
“Why?” said Oriel.
He didn’t answer for a long time. When he did, he spoke to the ground.
“Treddick,” he said. “In Lusk. He came back for me. I was on my knees in the gold. I’d have robbed him. I’d have robbed anybody. He hit me in the face and dragged me to the edge and put his shoulder under me and pushed me up. And then the stones came away in his hands.” He looked up. His face was very still. “Corran told me about the engraver. Pike. The hand. She told me in my first month on the road. She said, I want you to know whose it was.”
Bastian hadn’t moved from the winch.
“I can’t give him his hand back,” said Brack. “I can’t give Treddick anything. I can carry rope.”
Oriel looked at Bastian.
Bastian looked at the man in the road for a long time. Then he said, slowly: “It’s not mine to say.”
“No,” said Oriel. “It isn’t.”
She went to the relay.
They’d brought a lamp-box, a small one, and set it on a pole at the top of the rope-way, and it could reach the Fennick’s Cross tower, which could reach the Westerly line, which could reach the Shield and the Drift House at Grey Gate. She wrote out the message herself. Short. It had to be.
TO D. PIKE, DRIFT HOUSE. BRACK IS HERE. ASKS TO CARRY ROPE ON THE EXPEDITION. YOUR CALL. — O.T.
They sent it at noon. It went west, tower to tower, lamp and shutter. They waited.
Brack sat in the road. He didn’t come closer. He didn’t go away. He sat on his pack in the sun with his rope across his knees and waited with them.
The answer came back in the third hour of the afternoon. The young Canton clerk at the Drift House would have taken it down, and walked it across the room to the long table where Deverel sat these days, teaching left-handed engraving to anyone who’d learn, and put it in front of him, and waited while he read it. And then Deverel would have taken a long time. And then said something, loudly, and the clerk would have written it down and taken it back to the tower.
Oriel read it off the Fennick’s Cross relay slip and stood for a long moment with it in her hand.
Then she walked across the grass to Brack in the road and gave it to him.
TO O. TASH. LET HIM CARRY ROPE. TELL HIM IT WAS A CLEAN LINE. THE LAST ONE. TELL HIM HE CAN’T HAVE IT BACK. — D.P.
Brack read it.
He sat on his pack in the road and read it four or five times. Then he folded it very small and put it inside his smock, against his chest, the way Sarn kept her eleven words.
He stood up. He shouldered his rope. He walked to the winch and stopped in front of Bastian Coyle.
Bastian looked down at him. At the crooked arm, set wrong. Bastian’s own right hand was tucked in the crook of his left elbow, with its two crooked fingers.
“Can you hold a brake?” said Bastian.
“Yes.”
“Then hold this one,” said Bastian, and stepped back from the winch, and let him.
Mags Callan’s barge went down on the ninth day.
She’d built it at the top, on the turf, on rollers, in eight days and two nights, with her two barge-wrights and Brack and anyone else who could hold a plank. Forty feet. Flat-bottomed. Decked fore and aft with a low cabin amidships. Tarred black inside and out until it gleamed. It wasn’t beautiful. It was square and heavy and blunt at both ends like a brick. She’d named it, on the last night, with a pot of white paint and a brush, in big uneven letters on the bow.
LOOK AT THE WATER.
They lowered it slab by slab. On the winch. On greased timbers down the long runs, with ropes fore and aft and Bastian calling the hauls in his quarry voice and Brack on the brake and Isaut going down ahead of it on the fixed lines to clear the way. A day and a half. Eleven slabs. It ground and slid and once, on the sixth drop, swung out over a black crack on its ropes and hung there turning, and Mags Callan said a word Oriel had never heard a barge-master say, and Bastian and Brack and four others hauled it back.
At dusk on the tenth day, it floated.
Oriel went down last. In the sling-chair. Her knee wouldn’t do the fixed lines. She sat in a canvas seat on a rope and was lowered down a league of broken land a slab at a time, past the wet grey stone, past the cracks going down into the dark, past Isaut Fenwright clinging to a rope at the sixth drop who reached out a raw hand and steadied the chair as it went by without a word.
At the bottom, the black water.
She’d seen it from the top. She’d seen it at Strand’s, at the Bay. She’d never been close to it. The last slab of the Lip went down into it at a slant and the black water lay against the stone without a ripple, like oil in a jar, and there was no sound from it at all.
The barge sat on it. Square and black and tarred and gleaming in the lantern-light, with LOOK AT THE WATER on its bow.
Mags Callan was on the deck. She held out her hand.
Oriel took it.
“Calloway sailed from Hythe falls this morning,” said Mags Callan. “Corran’s relay. Three barges. Bigger than this. Faster, probably.” She helped Oriel down onto the deck. “Thirty leagues. He’s got a day.”
“We’ve got a Listener,” said Oriel.
Sarn was already lying on the deck in the bow with her palm flat on the tarred planks and her eyes shut.
“Due east,” she said. “It’s loud tonight. It’s singing. Follow it.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
THE LIP, N. OF FENNICK’S CROSS, 11th–20th Fourthmonth C.415
ROPE-WAY: 11 SLABS, 11 DROPS, ~1 LEAGUE. ANCHORS: I. FENWRIGHT (8 DAYS). WINCH: B. COYLE.
BARGE: 40 FT, FLAT, TARRED. M. CALLAN. 9 DAYS. NAME: “LOOK AT THE WATER.”
BRACK: CAME ON FOOT. D. PIKE: “LET HIM CARRY ROPE. TELL HIM IT WAS A CLEAN LINE.”
CALLOWAY SAILED FROM HYTHE FALLS THIS MORNING. 3 BARGES.
WE SAIL TONIGHT. 10 ABOARD. DUE EAST.