They came up the black streets in a long column, and the drowned city filled with noise for the first time in six hundred years.
Oriel heard them before she saw them. Boots on crusted stone. Voices — loud, cheerful, a lot of them — calling to each other up and down the switchbacks. Mallets on wood. Somebody laughing. Somebody singing a bargeman’s song, badly, out of breath from the climb. And under it all, a sound she didn’t at first recognize because she hadn’t heard it since Orme: a crowd of people who were excited.
She sat on the step of the carved stone in the middle of the square with her stick across her knees and waited for them.
Bastian stood behind her. Sarn sat on the paving at the foot of the tower with her palm on the stone. Isaut Fenwright stood in the tower door with her arms folded. Neve had the field book. Brack and Dace and Ennet and Mags Callan stood along the north side of the square, by the houses, saying nothing.
The Company came into the square.
Forty men first. Laborers, mostly, from the Westerlies and east Orme, in good new canvas the Company had issued, with the scales-and-key stitched on the breast. Carrying posts — squared timber, each one painted white at the top with a black number — and mallets and coils of line. Then a dozen in better coats, armed, short swords and two long guns, the Company’s own guard. Then two men in surveyors’ grey, with a theodolite on a tripod and a long leather case.
Then the settlers.
Twenty of them. Oriel hadn’t expected that. Men and women from Orme in their best clothes gone ragged from four days on the Deep, with bundles on their backs and tin deed-cases under their arms, coming up into the square slowly, looking round them. At the houses. At the black walls. At the doorways. At the tower.
Their faces.
“Houses,” said somebody. A woman’s voice. Wondering. “There’s houses. Already. Look —”
And then, coming up the last switchback behind them all, in a plain good coat, on foot, sandy-grey and brown from the Westerly sun and the Deep, smiling: Corwin Calloway.
He stopped at the edge of the square. He looked at the tower. At the carved stone. At Oriel on its step.
His smile didn’t change.
“Surveyor Tash,” he said. “I’d heard there was a boat.”
“We landed the night of the twenty-fourth,” said Oriel. “Two leagues north of you. We drove a pin and took a public fix by the stars at midnight against the Grey Gate stone-mark, with a witness for the Moot of the Cantons. It’s in the log.” She held it up. “The Regent’s warrant says the Drift Survey’s record of the Rise is the realm’s. Any deed on the Rise that names a position can be checked against it.”
“Of course.” Calloway walked into the square. Unhurried. He looked at the carved stone, and bent to look at the old script, with interest. “Mine name the Rise Star.”
“Where is it?”
“Here,” said Calloway. He nodded to the two men in surveyor’s grey. “Mallory. The plate.”
One of them — a thin, pale, balding man of forty with a clerk’s stoop, who wouldn’t meet Oriel’s eye — opened the long leather case and took out a brass plate. A disc, a hand and a half across, polished, with a star stamped in its center and a ring of letters round it. THE RISE STAR. WESTERLY COMPANY. C.415. And four bolt-holes.
“The map puts the Star on the highest point of the Rise,” said Calloway. “Which, as it turns out, is a ridge with a city on it and a tower on top.” He looked up at the tower with something like delight. “I couldn’t have asked for better. We’ll bolt it to the top of that, and every plot on the Rise will be measured from it, and the people who bought them can see it from anywhere.” He turned to the settlers, who’d crowded in behind him at the edge of the square. “Can’t you? There’s your star. Wheresoever it may lie.”
A murmur. Pleased. Somebody clapped.
“The tower’s six hundred years old,” said Oriel. “People built it. It has their records on the walls. Every one of those houses has a way-mark on the door saying they left it on purpose.”
“And they’re not here,” said Calloway pleasantly. “We are.” He nodded at the square, the houses, the black streets falling away down the ridge. “Land nobody owns. Houses nobody lives in. That’s not a crime, Surveyor. That’s a gift.” He turned to his foreman, a broad red-bearded man with a mallet. “Posts. Start at the square. Plot one’s the northwest corner. Mallory has the bearings.”
“Corwin,” said Oriel.
He looked at her.
“Your map was drawn from the Lip,” she said. “By glass. From Hythe falls. Thirty leagues off, through the haze. Your plots are measured from a star you hadn’t set, on land nobody had seen, that’s rising three hands a day and moving west.” She stood up. Her knee clicked. “Before your men put a post in, let Mallory set up his theodolite on the tower and take a bearing to my pin, and then to anything on his map he can see from here. Anything at all. And then let’s both look at where his plots land.”
Calloway looked at her for a long moment.
“No,” he said, smiling. “I don’t think so. I think my men will put posts in. And then my settlers will have their houses. And then, if you’d like to measure anything, Surveyor, you can do it from my Star like everyone else.” He nodded to the foreman. “Posts.”
They put posts in all afternoon.
Oriel watched. There wasn’t anything else to do. Calloway had twelve armed men and she had nine people and a warrant, and the warrant said her record counted, not that she could stop anyone driving a post into stone.
So she watched. She sat on the step of the carved stone and watched forty men with mallets go down the black streets of Vell driving white-painted posts into the crust at the corners of the houses, and the doorways, and the junctions of the streets, each one with a black number on top. 1. 2. 3. All down the switchbacks. 40. 41. And the settlers following behind them with their deed-cases open, reading numbers, calling out.
“Nineteen! Here’s nineteen! That’s mine —”
“Forty-two, where’s forty-two —”
A woman stood in a doorway three houses down from the square. A short square woman of fifty in a patched blue coat, with a bald man’s square face and a bundle on her back and a deed in both hands, looking at the house. At the black walls. The empty square window. The hearth inside, and the shelf with the pots.
She went inside. Oriel saw her put her bundle down by the hearth. Saw her stand there in the empty room with her hands at her sides.
Then she came out, and saw Oriel, and came over.
“You’re Tash,” she said. “The Survey woman. My brother sells eels on the Chain Bridge.”
“Mott Grebe.”
“Cora Grebe.” She held out the deed. “He said to wait. At the bottom. Till you’d measured it.” She looked back at the house. “I couldn’t. I’ve been waiting two years. Since the C.426 line went past my door on Tanner Row. I couldn’t wait any longer.” She looked at Oriel. “Is it mine? That one? Plot fifty-one? Will it be where the paper says?”
Oriel looked at the deed in her hands. Plot 51, measured from the Rise Star, wheresoever the said Star may lie. And a little drawing. A rectangle. On a grid. In the middle of a grid of a hundred rectangles, with a harbor drawn to the west and a road to the east.
There was no grid. There was a ridge, and a drowned city climbing it, and houses that were six hundred years old and pointed west.
“I don’t know,” said Oriel. “Nobody’s measured it.”
“He has,” said Cora Grebe. Nodding at Mallory, on the tower stair with his theodolite.
“No,” said Oriel. “He hasn’t.”
He came to her at dusk.
She was at the pier, at the top of the tower, alone, with the lantern, copying the last of the walls. She heard him on the stair — a long time on the stair, stopping, starting — and then he came up through the hole in the floor into the round room, and stood there, the thin pale balding surveyor in grey, with his theodolite case in his hand, looking at the walls.
“Tash,” he said.
“Mallory.” She didn’t look up. “You were one of Orrel’s.”
“I was one of his forty.” He set the case down. “He told me to close the book on a mill-race at Dunsel in C.404. I’d found it eight rods out. I closed it.” He looked at the walls. At the columns. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Star-fixes. Six hundred years of them.”
He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, very low: “We didn’t see the ridge.”
She looked up.
“From the Lip. From Hythe falls. With the great glass. We didn’t see this.” He gestured at the tower, the city, everything. “It was haze, the whole time. Four days of it. We saw a grey line on the water and the edges of it, north and south, now and then, and that was all. Pruett and I drew the outline from that. And then the Company wanted plots, so we drew plots. A grid. A harbor where it looked flat. A town in the middle.” He swallowed. “We put the Star in the middle because the middle’s where you put a star. We didn’t know there was a ridge. We didn’t know there was anything.”
“And now?”
“Now I’ve been on top of this tower all afternoon with my theodolite,” said Mallory, “trying to make the map land on the ground. Trying to find anything — the harbor, the coast, the north edge — that agrees with what we drew. So the plots fall somewhere.” He sat down on the heap of broken stone, heavily. “They don’t. They don’t fall anywhere. Plot fifty-one — the woman with the eel-seller’s face — plot fifty-one by our map is in the sea. Two leagues off the west shore. Half the plots are in the sea. A quarter of them are on a slope of rock that’s cracking open as I watch. The ones on the ridge — the ones with houses — don’t line up with anything. We’re putting posts in at random. Calloway knows. I told him at the third bell.” He put his face in his hands. “He said, put them in anyway. Possession is what matters. Once they’re in the houses, they’re in.”
Oriel put down her pencil.
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because you’ll write it down,” said Mallory. Into his hands. “Because you always did. Orrel used to read your reports out loud to us. The ones he made you close. As an example.” He laughed, short and wretched. “This is what not to do. He read them so we’d learn to close the book. I used to lie awake after. Thinking you were right.” He lifted his head. “I closed the book on Dunsel. I’ve closed it on every job since. I drew a town in the sea for four crowns an acre. I’m forty-three and I’m a liar with a theodolite and I’d like to stop.”
At the third bell of the night, Calloway’s men climbed the tower.
Oriel heard them on the stair. She was still at the top. She didn’t move. They came up through the hole in the floor, four of them, with a long pole and a coil of rope and a bundle of cloth, and stopped when they saw her sitting against the pier with the lantern.
“Master’s orders,” said the red-bearded foreman. Not unkindly. “Flag on the top. And the Star.”
“The Star goes on the top of the tower,” said Oriel, “and every plot on the Rise is measured from it. Wheresoever it may lie.”
“That’s right.”
“Then put it on,” said Oriel. “Carefully. Somebody might need to measure from it.”
They looked at her. Then they did it. They climbed the heap of broken stone and lashed the pole to the ragged top of the wall, and ran the flag up it — a big square of white canvas with the scales over the key in black — and it hung there limp in the still hot air, in the steam, over the broken top of the tower of Vell. Then they took Mallory’s brass plate and bolted it to the top of the wall beside the pole with four iron bolts in four drilled holes, and stood back, and looked at it, pleased.
THE RISE STAR. WESTERLY COMPANY. C.415.
They went down.
Oriel sat alone at the top of the tower with the walls round her and the steam going up past her and the flag hanging over her head.
Then, below, from the foot of the tower, Sarn’s voice. Calling up the hollow middle. Not loud. It didn’t need to be. It came up the column of steam as if the tower had carried it.
“Tash.”
“I’m here.”
“The note’s changed.”
Oriel went very still.
“The low one,” said Sarn. “It’s been the same for three days. Since we landed. Rising and falling. Steady.” A pause. “It’s higher. Since dusk. Every breath a little higher. And the gap between them’s shorter.” Another pause. “Something’s loading. Under us. Under the whole ridge.”
Oriel put her hand flat on the pier. On the cold polished stone that went down through the tower to the rock.
She couldn’t feel anything. She never could. Only Sarn could.
But the tower was singing. And now that she listened for it — really listened, the way she’d been taught at the bottom of Well Ninety-One with her forehead on the stone — the low note was higher.
She looked up. At the flag. At the brass Star bolted to the broken top of a six-hundred-year-old tower on a ridge on new land coming up out of the sea under the world.
At the last row of figures cut into the wall below it.
Vell goes down. We will go with the land.
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
VELL, 27th Fourthmonth C.415
COMPANY IN THE SQUARE AT NOON: 40 LABORERS, 12 ARMED, 2 SURVEYORS (MALLORY, PRUETT), 20 SETTLERS. C. CALLOWAY.
CALLOWAY REFUSED A CHECK. POSTS IN ALL AFTERNOON. NUMBERED. AT RANDOM.
CORA GREBE (MOTT’S SISTER): PLOT 51. BY THE COMPANY MAP IT’S 2 LG OUT TO SEA. (MALLORY)
MALLORY: “WE DIDN’T SEE THE RIDGE.” “I’D LIKE TO STOP.”
NIGHT: FLAG AND “RISE STAR” BOLTED TO THE TOP OF THE TOWER.
S. IVO: THE LOW NOTE IS RISING. BREATHS SHORTER. “SOMETHING’S LOADING.”