The Rise was not flat, and it was not dead, and it was not quiet. Oriel learned all three in the first hour.
It went up from the shore in long low swells of grey stone, like frozen waves, each a few rods high, with hollows between them where the black water had pooled and steamed. The stone was warm everywhere. Warm and wet and crusted, in places, with a white mineral bloom like frost, that crunched under their boots and smelled of struck matches. In the hollows there were vents — holes in the rock a hand across, or an arm, from which steam came up in thin hissing jets and the stone round them was stained yellow and orange and a strange deep green.
And it moved.
Not like the Lip. Not breaking. You’d be walking up a swell of stone and feel it, under your boots, very faint, a long slow lift, as if you were standing on the back of something breathing in its sleep. Then it would settle. Then, a few minutes later, again.
“It’s growing,” said Sarn. She walked barefoot, as she always did, slowly, with her hand trailing out at her side. “All of it. It’s not one piece. It’s a lot of pieces. Coming up at slightly different speeds. Pressing on each other.” She stopped and knelt, and put her palm flat on the stone. “Like bread rising in a tin. It cracks on top.”
There were cracks. Fresh ones. Clean-edged, like the one in the Lusk boneyard wall, running across the swells. Most a finger wide. Some a hand. Bastian walked ahead of them with the chain and an arrow, and wherever there was a crack he stopped and looked at it and stepped over it and planted an arrow on the far side, and they followed the arrows.
Isaut Fenwright walked beside Oriel. She hadn’t said anything since the camp. She had her hammer in her hand, and every few paces she’d tap the stone and listen to it ring.
“It’s like the Shield,” she said finally. Low. “The ring. It’s the same stone. Or nearly.” She tapped again. “Younger. Wetter. But the same.”
The walls began a league inland.
They came on them suddenly, over the crest of a long swell, and stopped. The ridge rose ahead, steeper than the swells, a long hump of grey stone running north and south. And on its flank, climbing it, were buildings.
They were black. That was the first thing. Every wall, every roof that still stood, every step and doorway, was coated in a thick black crust like the scale inside a kettle — hard, glossy, faintly lumpy, the Deep’s mineral laid down on them over centuries in the dark. It gave them a strange soft look. As if they’d been dipped in tar and left to set.
But under the black, they were walls. Square. Straight. Stone, cut and laid. Houses — small ones, two rooms, three, with flat roofs, mostly fallen in. Doorways. Square windows. Steps going up between them. Streets, narrow, climbing the ridge in switchbacks. Dozens of houses. Hundreds. All the way up the flank of the ridge to its crest, where they crowded together round the foot of the tower.
The tower stood on the very top. Round. Tall — taller than the Lusk church, taller than Coldharrow had been — black with crust, its top broken off ragged. Steam drifted past it.
Nobody spoke for a long time.
“How old,” said Neve Asher, finally. Whispering.
Oriel didn’t answer. She didn’t know. She looked at the black walls and thought about the Lip. About Strand’s north field going down in a long slow slide into the haze. About Esker Bay. About the slabs of the Eastern Pale she’d seen from the edge, going down one after another into the black water and disappearing without a ripple.
They went down at the Lip. And they went under. And they went — somewhere. For a long time.
And then they came up.
“Old,” she said.
They went up into the city.
Slowly. Carefully. Bastian first, with the chain, testing every step. The streets were stone-paved under the crust, and the crust was slick in places, and cracked in others, and once a whole flight of steps gave way under Brack and he went down to his waist into a hollow full of warm black water and came out swearing and steaming.
The houses were empty.
That was the second thing. Oriel had braced herself, coming over the ridge. She’d thought — a drowned city. She’d thought of Esker Bay, of eight thousand people, of what the Deep might have done to them. She’d expected to find them.
There was nobody.
They went into the first house, Oriel and Neve and Isaut, bending under a doorway black with crust. Two rooms. A stone floor. A hearth against one wall, square, with a stone chimney going up. A stone shelf. On the shelf, pots. Clay pots, crusted black like everything, but whole. Three of them, in a row. A stone bench along one wall. A stone bowl on the floor by the hearth, with something in it that had been a wooden spoon once and was now a black twisted shape.
Nothing else. No bones. No clothes. No bodies.
“They left,” said Neve.
“They left,” said Oriel.
The next house was the same. And the next. Pots on shelves. Hearths. Stone benches. Empty. Swept, almost. As if somebody had tidied before they went.
“They took everything they could carry,” said Isaut Fenwright. She was standing in a doorway, looking out at the steep black street. “And left what they couldn’t. And went.” She looked at Oriel. “They knew. Didn’t they? Before it went down. They knew it was going.”
“Look at the doors,” said Bastian.
He was standing in the street below, looking up. At the row of houses climbing the ridge. At their doorways.
Every door was shut.
Not every doorway. Most of the doors had been wood, and the wood was long gone, rotted in the Deep to black stumps in the hinge-holes. But the doorways that had had stone doors — slabs, set on pivots — and there were a lot of them, every third house or so — were shut. Closed. Pulled to.
“Like they meant to come back,” said Neve Asher.
“Or like they wanted somebody to know they’d gone on purpose,” said Bastian. “Not run. Gone.”
He was looking at something on the nearest doorpost.
It was cut into the stone of the doorpost at the height of a person’s eye, on the right-hand side of every doorway. Under the black crust. You could see its shape through it, the way you could see the shape of the walls. A small carved mark, a hand across, cut deep and clean.
Isaut Fenwright took out her hammer and a fine chisel from her belt, and, very carefully, chipped the crust away from the nearest one. It came off in black flakes. Under it, the stone was grey and clean and the mark was sharp, as if it had been cut last week.
A star. Eight points. And under the star, a line. An arrow. Pointing.
Isaut stood very still.
Oriel didn’t understand, at first. She looked at the mark. Then at Isaut. Then at the mark again. The Canton woman had gone white under her stone-dust.
“What is it?” said Oriel.
Isaut didn’t answer.
She went to the next house. Chipped the crust off its doorpost. The same mark. Star. Arrow. The next. The same. She went up the street, house after house, chipping, and the same mark came out from under the crust on every doorpost, sharp and clean, star and arrow, and she was going faster now, and her hands were shaking.
“Isaut.”
The Canton woman stopped. She stood in the middle of the black street with her chisel in her hand and her back to them.
“That’s a way-mark,” she said. Without turning round. “On the Shield. A Canton way-mark. A star, and a line under it, and the line points the way you went.” She put her hand flat on the doorpost in front of her. On the mark. “You cut it on a stone when you move your flocks, or when you leave a high pasture for the winter, or when your family leaves a valley. So anybody coming after knows you didn’t die there. You went. And which way.” She was quiet a moment. “I’ve cut that mark a thousand times. On the Shield. My great-aunt taught me. Her grandmother taught her.”
She turned round. Her face was very strange.
“The arrows,” she said. “Look where they point.”
They looked.
Every arrow, on every doorpost, up and down the black streets of the drowned city, pointed the same way.
West.
At the top of the ridge, at the foot of the tower, there was a square.
Small. Paved. Black with crust like everything. With the tower on its east side going up and up into the steam, and houses round the other three sides, and in the middle of the square a stone. A single upright stone, chest high, square, crusted black.
Sarn was lying beside it.
She’d gone up ahead of them while they were in the streets, alone, barefoot, the way she did. She was lying on her side on the black paving with her palm flat on the base of the stone and her eyes closed. She didn’t move when they came.
“It hums,” she said. “The tower. Listen.”
They listened. Nobody but Sarn could hear it at first. Then, as they stood very still in the square, Oriel thought she could — a very faint high note, under the breathing of the Rise. Thin. Steady. Like wind across the mouth of a jar.
“It’s hollow,” said Sarn. “Right up. And the steam comes up through it from somewhere underneath. A vent. It sings.” She opened her eyes. “They built it on a vent. On purpose. So it would sing.”
Isaut was at the stone in the middle of the square. She’d taken out her chisel again. She was chipping the crust off its face. Carefully. A flake at a time. Oriel came and stood beside her.
It was a stone-mark.
Not a way-mark. Bigger. More. The whole face of the stone was carved, under the crust, in lines and figures, close and careful. A ring of eight-pointed stars round the edge. In the middle, a long straight line running across the stone from edge to edge. And along the line, at intervals, small marks. Ticks. Numbers, maybe. A kind of writing Oriel had never seen, very angular, very simple, cut in short straight strokes like a stone-cutter’s tally.
And at the very top of the stone, above the ring of stars, alone, a single word. Or a name. Four strokes. Cut deeper than anything else.
Isaut put her finger on it.
“Canton script,” she said. “Old. Very old. The oldest stone-marks on the Shield have letters like this. Nobody uses them anymore. Only on the deep marks, the very old ones, at the heads of the high valleys. The ones my great-aunt’s grandmother said were cut when the Cantons came.” She traced the four strokes with her finger. “I can read it. Just. It’s a name.”
“What name?”
“Vell,” said Isaut Fenwright.
Nobody said anything.
“The Cantons,” said Oriel slowly. “Where did they come from? Before the Shield. Do you know?”
Isaut looked at her. Her flat grey eyes were wet.
“From the east,” she said. “That’s all. That’s all anybody knows. The oldest songs say it. We came from the east, across the leaves, when the leaves were breaking, and we found the rock that didn’t move, and we stayed.” She looked down at the name under her finger. “From a place called Vell.”
They camped in the square that night. In the steam, by the singing tower, in the drowned city, with the black empty houses all round them and their doors shut and their arrows pointing west.
Oriel sat by the stone in the middle of the square with the lantern and her field book and copied it. All of it. Every stroke. The ring of stars. The long line. The ticks along it. The four strokes at the top. Neve held the lantern. Isaut sat on the paving beside them and read out what she could, slowly, letter by letter, in the old script.
“That’s a number,” she’d say. “That’s — seven. Seven something. Seven hundred? And that one’s a star name. I think. The old name for Varro’s Lamp. And that —“ She stopped. She traced it with her finger. “I don’t know that one. Turn, maybe. Or round.”
Oriel copied it.
Across the square, Sarn lay against the foot of the tower with her ear to the black stone, listening to it sing.
Bastian sat on the step of an empty house with his arms folded and his crooked hand tucked into the crook of his elbow, looking south. Brack sat beside him. They’d started doing that, the two of them, on the barge. Sitting together without talking. Nobody had said anything about it.
“Smoke,” said Brack. Low. “South. They’re coming up the shore. I saw lanterns on the second ridge. Three leagues. Maybe less.”
“Toward here?”
“Toward the tower,” said Brack. “You can see it from anywhere. It’s the highest thing on the Rise.” He was quiet. “If I was Calloway, and I had a map with a town on it called Calloway, and I came up the shore and saw a city on a ridge with a tower on top —“
“You’d want it on your map,” said Bastian.
“I’d want to put my flag on the tower,” said Brack. “And call it mine.”
Oriel looked up from the stone. At the tower, black, going up into the steam over the square, singing.
“Then we’d better find out what’s in it,” she said, “before he does.”
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
THE RISE, 25th Fourthmonth C.415
INLAND: SWELLS OF WARM STONE. VENTS (STEAM, YELLOW/GREEN STAIN). FRESH CRACKS. IT LIFTS UNDERFOOT.
A CITY ON THE RIDGE, 1 LG INLAND. HUNDREDS OF HOUSES. BLACK MINERAL CRUST. EMPTY. POTS ON THE SHELVES. NO BONES.
DOORS PULLED SHUT. ON EVERY DOORPOST: A STAR OVER AN ARROW. ALL POINT WEST.
I. FENWRIGHT: “A CANTON WAY-MARK.”
THE SQUARE: A CARVED STONE. OLD CANTON SCRIPT. THE NAME: VELL.
TOWER: HOLLOW, BUILT ON A VENT. IT SINGS.
THE CANTONS CAME FROM HERE.
COMPANY LANTERNS, 3 LG S.