There was no wind.
That was the first thing Mags Callan said, on the first morning, standing in the stern with the steering-sweep under her arm and her face turned up into the haze. She said it the way another barge-master might have said there’s a rock or there’s weather. Flat. A fact you had to work round.
“No wind. No current. No tide. Nothing.” She spat over the side. The spit lay on the black water and didn’t move. “Oars, then.”
So they rowed.
Eight long sweeps, four a side, worked from the deck by whoever could stand. Bastian took the stroke oar on the port side and pulled it one-handed, his good left hand on the loom and his crooked right braced flat against it, and set the pace. Slow. Heavy. Never stopping. Brack took the stroke oar starboard. The two barge-wrights, Dace and Ennet, brothers from the Bay with the same big shoulders and the same silence. Neve Asher, the youngest surveyor at the Drift House, twenty-five, who’d begged to come and been told no three times and come anyway on the cart with the stores. Hesper the Listener, tall and silent and barefoot. Isaut Fenwright, who had never held an oar in her life and pulled it like a stone-saw, steadily, with her eyes on the planks.
Oriel couldn’t row. Her knee wouldn’t take the brace. She sat in the waist with the field book and the compass and the clock and called the time, every half-hour, and the bearing, every hour, and wrote them down.
Sarn didn’t row either. Sarn lay in the bow.
She’d lain there all night and she lay there all day, on her stomach, on the tarred planks of the foredeck, with her arms out and her forehead down and her palms flat. Every so often she’d lift one hand and point. A little left. A little right. And Mags Callan in the stern would ease the sweep, and the square black bow of Look at the Water would come round a degree, and Sarn would put her hand down again.
“How do you know?” said Neve Asher, on the first afternoon, between strokes. Breathless. “Which way? There’s no landmark. There’s nothing. The compass says —“
“The compass says east,” said Sarn, without lifting her head. “East is a big place.” She was quiet a moment. “The Rise isn’t east. It’s there. It’s a sound. It’s got a middle. The middle’s loudest. I’m pointing at the middle.”
Oriel tried, later, to write down what it was like. For the Drift House. For the shelf. She tried several times and was never satisfied.
It was dark. Not night-dark. The sky was there, overhead, very far up — a pale grey haze, with the sun somewhere in it, like a lamp seen through oiled paper. But they were at the bottom of something. The broken staircase of the Lip went up behind them, west, a league of tipped grey slabs climbing into the haze until they vanished. And ahead, east, there was nothing but haze and black water, and the light came down through all that height thin and grey and tired, and lay on the water and didn’t go in.
The water didn’t reflect anything. That was what she kept coming back to. You’d look over the side and expect to see the barge, or the sky, or your own face. You saw black. Flat. Glossy, like lacquer, like the inside of an ink-pot. When an oar went in, it went in without a splash — a soft thick sound, thup, and the black closed round it — and when it came out, the water ran off it in long slow ropes and lay back down without a ripple.
It was cold near the Lip. Bone cold. It came up off the water through the planks of the deck.
It smelled of iron. Of stone. Of something very old.
And it was quiet. So quiet that the creak of the oars in their pins and the breath of the rowers and the click of Oriel’s clock were the loudest things in the world. Nobody talked much. When they did, they talked low, the way you’d talk in a church, or a mine.
On the second day Neve Asher dipped a cup over the side, on a cord, to see.
She drew it up and held it to the lantern. The water in the cup was clear. Perfectly clear. Colorless. You could see the bottom of the cup through it.
She looked over the side at the black. Then at the cup.
“It’s not black,” she said. “The water. It’s not black at all. It’s just — deep.”
Nobody answered her. They all looked over the side.
Isaut Fenwright, at her oar, looked down. For the first time since the Lip. She looked at the black water for a long moment, very still, and Oriel saw her knuckles go white on the loom.
Then she looked back at the planks, and pulled.
They saw the sails on the second evening.
Brack saw them. He’d stood up from his oar to stretch his back, and looked south, and said, “There,” and pointed.
Three of them. Far off. South and a little ahead. Pale square shapes in the haze, low on the water, like moths on a black cloth. Sails. And under them, small and dark, three barges. Bigger than Look at the Water. Longer. With rows of oars along each side, rising and falling together, sixteen a side, and a big square sail on each that hung slack, useless, from its yard.
“Calloway,” said Mags Callan.
She looked at them a long time.
“They’ve got more oars,” she said. “They’ve got more men. They’re bigger. They should be a day ahead and further every hour.” She looked at Oriel. “They’re not. They’re level with us. Further south.”
“They’re steering by the compass,” said Oriel. “A bearing from the Lip. From Hythe falls. Mallory and Pruett took a bearing on the Rise from the edge with their great glass, and they’re following it.”
“And?”
“And Hythe falls is ten leagues south of Fennick’s Cross,” said Oriel. “And the Rise isn’t a point. And they’ve been following a bearing for two days across water with no landmarks, and a bearing’s only as good as where you started it from. A degree out at the start is half a league out after thirty.” She looked at the sails. “They’re going east. We’re going there.”
In the bow, Sarn lifted her hand without raising her head, and pointed. A little left.
Mags Callan eased the sweep.
The third night, the Deep moved.
Oriel was asleep. She’d taken the first watch and given the clock to Neve and lain down on the deck in the waist under a tarpaulin, with her knee aching from the cold. She didn’t know how long she’d slept. She woke because Sarn was shouting.
“Hold on — hold on to something — it’s coming — NOW —”
And then the barge lifted.
Not much. Not like a wave. Like being in a bed when someone very heavy sits down on the other end. The whole of Look at the Water rose under her, slowly, smoothly, the black water swelling up beneath it in a long low hill that came out of nowhere and had no crest and didn’t break. Up. And up. Higher than a man. Higher than two. The lanterns swung on their hooks. Stores slid across the deck. And then the hill passed under them, and the barge tipped forward, and slid, very fast, down the other side.
Something went over the side.
Oriel heard it. A thump on the gunwale and a short sharp cry and then the soft thick thup of a body going into the black water.
“Hesper —“
The tall Listener was gone. Off the starboard side, by the bow. Where she’d been lying next to Sarn with her palms on the planks.
Oriel got to the gunwale on her hands and knees. The water was black. Flat again, already, as if nothing had happened. No ripple. No splash. No head. Nothing. Hesper had gone into it and it had closed over her like oil.
“Light —“ Somebody was shouting. “Light, get a light on the water —”
Isaut Fenwright went over the side.
Oriel saw her go. She didn’t dive. She didn’t jump. She swung her long legs over the starboard gunwale and went down into the black water feet first with one hand still on the rail, and her other arm reaching down, under, into the dark. To the shoulder. Her face was a hand from the water. Her eyes were shut.
“Rope,” she said, through her teeth. Very calm. “Somebody put a rope round me.”
Bastian did. He was across the deck in two strides. He got a line round her waist and took a turn round the bitt and held it with his good hand.
Isaut let go of the rail.
She went under.
The black closed over her. There was the rope, going down into the water over the gunwale, taut. Bastian holding it. And nothing else.
Oriel counted. She couldn’t help it. One. Two. Three. Four.
At eleven the rope jerked, twice.
“Haul,” said Bastian. And Brack was beside him, and Dace and Ennet, and they hauled. Hand over hand. And the black water opened, without a splash, and Isaut Fenwright came up out of it gasping, streaming, with her arm locked round something, and the something was Hesper, limp, her face white in the lantern-light, her mouth open.
They got them both over the side. Onto the deck. Isaut rolled away onto her back and lay there heaving, staring up at the haze. Hesper didn’t move.
Sarn was on her in a moment. On her knees. Turning her over. Pushing on her back, hard, with both hands, the way the Wells’ infirmarians did it, the way Agathe had taught all the Listeners in case one of them ever drowned in a well-bottom.
Water came out of Hesper’s mouth. Clear. Colorless. A lot of it.
Then she coughed.
Then she breathed.
Sarn sat back on her heels and put her face in her hands and Oriel saw she was shaking so hard she couldn’t keep her hands still.
“I heard it,” said Sarn. Muffled. “I heard it coming. I shouted. I was a breath too late. One breath.” She took her hands away. “It’s the Rise. Breathing. It comes up a hand, and the water has to go somewhere.”
Isaut Fenwright was still lying on her back on the deck, streaming wet, staring up at the haze.
“It’s cold,” she said. To nobody. Her voice was strange. “It’s so cold. And it doesn’t stop. There’s no bottom. I opened my eyes and there was no bottom. There was just — down.” She lay very still. “I’ve never been anywhere without a bottom.”
Oriel crawled over to her. Put a hand on her wet shoulder.
“You went in,” she said.
Isaut turned her head and looked at her.
“She’s a Listener,” said the Canton woman. “My great-aunt’s mother was a leaf Listener who came over the wall. Did you know that? Before the Moot shut it. Odila never says.” She looked back up at the haze. “I couldn’t just sit there.”
On the fourth day the water got warmer.
They felt it first in the deck. The cold that had come up through the planks since the Lip — it eased. Then went. Then, by noon, the tarred planks were faintly warm to the touch, like a stone that’s been in the sun.
The smell changed. Iron, still. But something else. Sharp. Like a struck match. Like the strongroom under the Hall of Measure.
Mist began to come off the water. Thin. Low. Lying on the black in long pale skeins that drifted very slowly, the first thing they’d seen move on the Deep in four days that wasn’t them.
And the sound.
Everyone could hear it now. Not only Sarn. A deep slow note, felt more than heard, coming up through the planks and the water and the air, rising, rising, holding, falling. Rising again. Like breathing. Like the groan Oriel had heard on her knees at the bottom of Well Ninety-One. But not a groan. Not grinding. Not breaking.
Like something very large drawing breath.
They rowed toward it. Sarn in the bow, pointing. Nobody talked at all.
At dusk on the fourth day the haze ahead of them thinned, the way it did sometimes at sunset, and they saw it.
The Rise.
It wasn’t a line anymore. It was a shore. A long low dark shape lying on the water across the whole of the east, from as far north as Oriel could see to as far south, grey and black and wet, gleaming in the last of the light. Not flat. Ridged. Folded. Lifted in long low swells and humps like the back of something enormous lying just under the surface, and the black water lapping at its edge. Steam came off it. Everywhere. Thin white plumes rising off the wet grey stone in the still air and going straight up into the haze.
And on it, inland, a league or more, something that wasn’t stone.
Shapes. Upright. Square. Dark against the steam. Too regular to be rock. A cluster of them, low, on a ridge. And among them, one taller. Thin. Straight. Like a tower.
Nobody said anything.
Neve Asher put down her oar.
“Those are walls,” she said.
Oriel had the glass up already. Her own little brass star-glass, Imbert’s gift, that she’d carried out of Fenner’s Row and to the Lip at Fennick’s Cross. She put her eye to it and found the shapes on the ridge and held them, trembling a little in the dusk.
Walls. Black with some kind of crust, like the scale inside a kettle. Broken, some of them. Doorways. Windows, square and empty. Streets between them, she thought. Going up the ridge toward the tower.
The tower was round. Tall. Its top was broken off.
She lowered the glass.
To the south, far off, the three square sails of the Westerly Company had seen it too. She could see them turning. Coming round. Their oars rising and falling faster, all sixteen a side, white water at last at their bows as they dug in. Making for the Rise. Two leagues off. Three, perhaps.
Look at the Water was a league from the shore.
“Mags,” said Oriel.
“I see them,” said Mags Callan.
She leaned on the steering-sweep. The square black bow came round. Straight at the nearest point of the Rise, where a long low tongue of grey stone ran down into the water like a slipway.
“Pull,” said Bastian. One word. In his quarry voice.
They pulled.
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
THE DEEP, 21st–24th Fourthmonth C.415
NO WIND. NO CURRENT. OARS: 8.
THE WATER IS CLEAR IN A CUP. IT IS ONLY DEEP. (N. ASHER)
2nd DAY: COMPANY SAILS S., LEVEL. STEERING BY A BEARING FROM HYTHE.
3rd NIGHT: A SWELL WITH NO CREST (“THE RISE BREATHING”). HESPER OVERBOARD. I. FENWRIGHT WENT IN AFTER HER. BOTH ALIVE.
4th DAY: WATER WARM. MIST. SMELL OF STRUCK MATCHES.
DUSK: THE RISE. A SHORE. STEAM. ON A RIDGE INLAND: WALLS. A TOWER.
SOMEBODY LIVED HERE.