The door of the tower was stone, and it was shut, and it had the way-mark on its post like every other door in Vell: a star over an arrow, pointing west.
It opened.
That was the first surprise. Bastian put his good shoulder to it expecting nothing, and it moved — slowly, grinding, a slab of black-crusted stone as tall as he was, turning on a stone pivot set in the floor and the lintel — and swung inward, and a breath of hot wet air came out of the dark behind it, and the singing got louder.
“Balanced,” said Isaut Fenwright, looking at the pivot. “They balanced it. So one person could open it. Six hundred years ago.” She put her hand on the edge of the slab. “Canton doors on the old high-valley huts are hung like that. Exactly like that.”
Inside was a stair.
A spiral, going up round the inside of the round wall, stone steps set into the stone, black with crust, with the hollow middle of the tower open beside them all the way up. And up the hollow middle, from a hole in the floor at its center a pace across, the steam came. Thick. White. Hot. Rising in a column straight up the inside of the tower toward the broken top, and as it rose, it passed over the mouth of the hole and over the rough edges of the steps and through gaps cut in the stone at intervals up the wall — long thin slots, Oriel saw, deliberate, like the holes in a pipe — and the tower sang.
Up close it was louder than she’d thought. A deep, steady, breathy note, like someone blowing across the top of an enormous bottle. With a higher note over it, thinner, and a third, very faint, higher still. All three together. Holding. Not quite in tune, and not quite out.
Sarn stood at the foot of the stair with her bare feet on the black floor and her eyes closed and tears running down her face.
“It’s the Rise,” she said. “It’s the same note. The breath. They built a thing that sings the same note as the ground.” She opened her eyes. “So they’d always know. If the note changed. If the ground changed. They built a Listener out of stone.”
They went up.
Bastian first, testing every step with his weight. Then Isaut, with her hammer. Then Oriel, with her stick and her knee, slowly, one hand on the wall away from the open middle and the column of steam. Then Neve with the lantern and the field book. Sarn stayed at the bottom. I want to hear it from down here, she’d said. From where they put the hole.
A hundred and thirty steps. Oriel counted. She couldn’t help it.
The walls of the tower were carved.
Not all the way up. Not at first. The first forty steps, the walls were plain, under the crust. Then Neve, behind Oriel with the lantern, said wait, and held the light close to the wall, and there was something under the black.
Isaut chipped it clean. A row of small figures, cut in the stone at the height of a person’s hand on the stair, running up beside the steps. Stars. Eight-pointed. One every step. And beside each star, a short line of the old angular Canton script.
“Names,” said Isaut, reading. Slowly. “Star names. That’s the Wheel — the Pale Wheel. That’s the Shepherd. That’s — Varro’s Lamp, the old name. That’s the Lantern.” She went up a step. “They’re in order. The order they cross. Going round the year.” She looked up the stair, at the wall going up and up into the steam. “It’s a calendar. A star calendar. On the stair. You walk up it and you walk through the year.”
They walked up through the year.
At the hundred and twentieth step the stair came out through a hole in a floor — a stone floor, set across the inside of the tower, with the steam-hole in its middle and the column of steam going up through it — into a round room.
The top of the tower.
There was no roof. It had broken off, long ago, ragged, and the round room stood open to the haze, with the black-crusted stub of the wall going round it a little above head-height, and broken stone heaped against one side. The steam came up through the hole in the floor and went straight up into the grey sky, singing.
And in the middle of the room, beside the steam-hole, there was a pier.
Oriel knew what it was before she reached it. She’d seen one. Coldharrow’s had been like it: a solid upright column of stone, chest-high, a pace across, standing on its own in the middle of the floor, not touching the floor round it — there was a gap, a finger wide, all the way round, where the pier went down through the floor, through the tower, to the rock underneath, so that nothing that walked on the floor could shake it.
A star-glass pier.
Its top was flat. Polished, under the crust. And set into the top, in the middle, there was a ring of bronze, green and black, with holes round it for the feet of an instrument that wasn’t there anymore.
Oriel put her hand on it. She didn’t mean to. She stood beside the pier at the top of the drowned tower of Vell with her palm flat on its cold polished top and her knee screaming from a hundred and thirty steps and couldn’t say anything at all.
“Tash,” said Neve. Very quietly. “The walls.”
The walls of the round room were carved from the floor to the broken top.
All the way round. Columns. Close-cut, small, careful, in the old angular script, in rows and rows going up the inside of the wall like the columns in Imbert’s star-books. Isaut chipped a patch of the crust away, a hand across, and there they were, sharp and clean, and then another patch, and another, and there was no end to them.
“Figures,” said Isaut. Her voice had gone very flat. “Numbers. Star names. More numbers.” She traced a row with her finger. “That’s Varro’s Lamp. And a number — height, maybe? — and a number. And that’s a word. Turn. Another number.” She went along the row. “It’s the same every row. Star, number, number. And at the end of every row, a word I don’t know and a number. Over and over.”
Oriel knew.
She’d read forty years of it at a scrubbed kitchen table at Hollin End by the light of one lamp with an old woman’s bees outside the window. She’d copied it onto slips of paper for Deverel to cut into copper. She’d taught it on the back of a map. She’d watched Penhallow do it on the Meridian at midnight.
“It’s a star-book,” she said.
Isaut looked at her.
“It’s a fix,” said Oriel. “Every row. A star, its height as it crosses the meridian, the time it crosses. Seven stars, seven rows. Then a sum. The word at the end is the answer. Where you are.” She put her finger on the last figure in the row. “That’s a position. That’s where Vell was. On the night somebody stood at that pier and took this.” She looked up the wall. Rows and rows and rows. “And then they did it again the next clear night. And the next. And they cut every one into the wall.”
“How did they have the time?” said Neve. She was standing with the lantern held up, staring at the walls, white. “For the crossing. You need a clock set to somewhere that doesn’t move. We use the Shield. What did they —“
Oriel had already thought of it. She looked at the hole in the floor. At the steam going up.
“The note,” she said.
They listened. The tower sang. Three notes, the low one and the two over it, not quite in tune. Holding. And then — they could all hear it, now, up here, standing still — the low note rose. Very slightly. And held. And fell.
“The Rise breathes,” said Oriel. “Sarn’s been timing it for two years. It comes up every so long. Regular. A long slow breath. And they built a tower on a vent that sings with it. So you can hear it breathe from anywhere in the city. And at the top of the tower, by the glass —“ She looked at the steam. “— you’d hear it louder than anything. Every breath. Like a clock striking.”
“They used the Rise as a clock,” said Neve.
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know how they set it. I don’t know what they set it to.” Oriel was staring at the wall. “But they had a clock and a glass and a pier on the rock, and they took fixes, every clear night, and they wrote down where they were.” She put her hand flat on the carved wall. On the columns. “They had a Drift Survey. Six hundred years before the Charter.”
They read it for the rest of the day.
Isaut read the script. Oriel read the figures. Neve copied. Bastian chipped crust, very carefully, with Isaut’s second chisel, held in his left hand, patch after patch, as they needed it. Brack went up and down the hundred and thirty steps carrying water and food and news. Lanterns closer. Two leagues. They’ve stopped for the night on the second ridge.
It was a record. Not a fix. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Going up the wall in order, row after row, as many as Imbert’s forty years and more. Every row ended in a position. And when Oriel put the positions in order, the way she’d put Imbert’s in order at Wenna Vale’s table, they did what Imbert’s had done.
They moved.
“West,” she said. At dusk. Sitting on the floor with her back against the pier, with Neve’s copy on her knee by the lantern. “Every row a little further west than the one before. Steady. For a long time.” She ran her finger down the copy. “And then faster.”
“Like the Orme Leaf,” said Bastian. He was sitting against the wall across from her. “Speeding up.”
“Like the Orme Leaf.” She turned a page. “And then — here. Look. There’s a gap. No fixes. A long gap — I can’t tell how long, the dates are in a count I don’t know. And then they start again. Further west. Much further. And the figures are different.”
“Different how?”
“The fixes stop moving,” said Oriel. “They’re steady again. For a while. And then they start to move again — but the other way.” She looked up. “East.”
Nobody said anything.
“Vell was on a leaf moving west,” said Oriel slowly. “Toward — something. The way the Orme Leaf moves east toward the Lip. And it sped up. And then there’s a gap. And then they start again from somewhere else, much further west, on ground that’s moving east.” She put her finger on the copy. “That’s not the same ground. They moved. They left Vell. They went west, across the leaves, to somewhere new. And they kept taking fixes. And then, later —“ She turned the last page of the copy. The last rows on the wall, near the broken top, where the crust was thickest. “— they came back. Somebody came back. Here. To this pier. And took one more.”
“How do you know?”
Oriel looked at the top of the wall. At the last row, the very last, just under the ragged broken edge where the roof had been.
“Because the last fix,” she said, “puts the pier on the far side of where it started. East. A long way east.” She closed the copy. “Somebody climbed up here, after Vell was empty, after the people had gone west and found somewhere else and started their records again — somebody came back, across the leaves, to Vell, and climbed this tower, and set up a glass on this pier, and took one more fix. And cut it in the wall. And under it, they cut that.”
She pointed.
Isaut stood up. She went to the wall, to the last row, and reached up — she was tall; she had to stand on the heap of broken stone, and still reach — and chipped the crust very carefully off the stroke under the last fix.
She read it. Her lips moved. Then she read it again.
“Seven hundred and forty turns of the Wheel,” said Isaut Fenwright. Slowly. “We have gone four days west. The leaves are breaking. Vell goes down. We will go with the land.”
She stood on the broken stone with her hand on the wall and didn’t move.
“We will go with the land,” said Oriel.
Sarn came up at dark.
She’d been at the bottom all day, lying by the steam-hole with her ear to the floor. She came up the hundred and thirty steps slowly, barefoot, with her hand trailing on the carved stars on the wall, and stood in the round room at the top in the dark, by the pier, and looked at the walls in the lantern-light. At the patches chipped clean, the columns.
Oriel told her.
Sarn listened. When it was finished she went and sat down on the floor with her back against the pier, beside Oriel, and put her palm flat on the stone.
“They knew,” she said. “Didn’t they. They knew it was going round. They knew Vell was going to go down. They had six hundred years of figures saying so. And they didn’t settle anything. They didn’t burn anybody’s tower. They didn’t shoot anybody in a square.” She was quiet. “They cut a way-mark on every door and pulled the doors shut and went west. All of them. Together.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We know the houses are empty,” said Sarn. “We know there are no bones. We know every arrow points the same way.” She looked up at the broken top of the tower, at the steam going up into the dark. “We know the Cantons have a song about a place called Vell, and a rock that doesn’t move.”
Isaut Fenwright was sitting on the heap of broken stone under the last row of figures with her arms round her knees. She hadn’t said anything since she’d read it.
“My great-aunt,” she said now. Low. “Odila. When I was young — when I was learning to cut — she told me the first rule of a way-mark. She said: you never cut a mark that lies. If the arrow points west, you went west. Somebody’s life might depend on it.” She put her head down on her knees. “She said it was the oldest rule there was. Older than the Moot. Older than the wall.”
Down the ridge, south, through the broken top of the tower, they could see lights. Lanterns. A long line of them, coming up through the steam on the second ridge. Closer than Brack had said. A league. Maybe less.
Bastian was standing at the gap in the broken wall, looking at them.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Noon. They’ll be in the square.”
Oriel looked at the walls. At the columns going up into the dark. At the last row, under the broken edge. We will go with the land.
“Then they’ll see it,” she said.
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
VELL, THE TOWER, 26th Fourthmonth C.415
STAIR: 130 STEPS. A STAR CALENDAR CUT BESIDE IT, ONE STAR PER STEP, IN ORDER OF CROSSING.
TOWER BUILT OVER A VENT WITH SLOTS: 3 NOTES. THE LOW ONE RISES WITH THE RISE’S BREATH. A CLOCK?
TOP: A STAR-GLASS PIER TO THE ROCK. BRONZE RING. NO GLASS.
WALLS: THOUSANDS OF FIXES. THEY MOVED W., THEN FASTER. GAP. THEN FIXES FROM ELSEWHERE, MOVING E.
LAST FIX (I.F. READING): “740 TURNS OF THE WHEEL. WE HAVE GONE FOUR DAYS WEST. THE LEAVES ARE BREAKING. VELL GOES DOWN. WE WILL GO WITH THE LAND.”
VELL HAD A DRIFT SURVEY.
COMPANY: 1 LG S. NOON TOMORROW.