The first thing was the sound stopping.
The one note. The tower’s single enormous held note that had filled the square and the city and the ridge — it stopped. All at once. Not faded. Cut off, as if somebody had put a hand over the mouth of the bottle.
In the silence afterward Oriel heard the barge-bell, a league down the ridge, ringing and ringing.
And then the ground went up.
Not a shudder. Not a crack. Up.
The whole square rose under her. Smoothly. Like the deck of the barge on the night of the breath, the black water swelling into a hill with no crest. The paving under her feet lifted, all of it, all at once, and kept lifting, and her stomach went the other way, and her knee buckled, and she was on the stone on her hands with her stick gone.
Round the square people were falling. Lanterns going down and rolling. Somebody screaming.
The square tilted.
West. Down toward the shore. The paving that had been flat a breath ago was a slope now — a gentle one, a roof’s pitch — and it was getting steeper. Lanterns slid across it. A bundle. A tin deed-case, rattling, skidding past her hand.
Bastian had her under the arms.
She didn’t see him come. He was there, and she was up, off the stone, against his chest, and he had his good arm round her and the crooked hand pressed flat against her back holding her there, and he was moving. Not running. Bastian didn’t run. He walked fast, heavily, straight, down the tilting square toward the head of the first switchback, the way he walked a chain on a long line, never letting it sag.
“Isaut —“ she said into his coat.
“Behind.”
She twisted her head. Isaut Fenwright was behind them, on her feet, on her bleeding feet, with the hammer still in her hand, and she had somebody by the arm — one of the settlers, an old man in a good coat who’d fallen — and was hauling him up and pushing him ahead of her down the slope.
The tower was moving.
Oriel saw it over Bastian’s shoulder. Black against the dusk, against the steam. Standing up on the crest of the ridge where it had stood for six hundred years under the sea and four days in the air. Leaning. Very slightly. West. The flag on its pole at the broken top swinging out. Its long shadow in the lanterns swinging across the square.
“Calloway,” she said.
He was on the carved stone. Still. In the middle of the tilting square, with the Company map in his hand, standing on the step of the stone with Vell cut at its top, looking up at his tower. He wasn’t moving. People were running past him on both sides, sliding, falling, getting up, and he wasn’t moving at all.
Brack went back for him.
She saw it. Over Bastian’s shoulder. Brack, at the head of the switchback, already through, already safe, with his coil of rope over his shoulder. Stopping. Turning. Looking back across the tilting square at the man on the stone.
Then going back.
Up the slope. Against the people running down. With his crooked arm and his road-brand and his rope. He got to the stone. He took Calloway by the collar of his good plain coat the way Treddick had taken him by the collar in the gold, and pulled. Calloway didn’t come. He held on to the stone. Brack hit him. Once. Flat. In the face. The way Treddick had.
Then he had Calloway over his shoulder, like a sack, and he was coming back down.
Then the switchback took them out of sight.
The ridge shrugged.
That was the only word for it. Sarn had said it on the swell above the shore and Oriel had heard it and not understood, and now she understood. The ridge didn’t break. It didn’t crack open. It shrugged. The whole long hump of grey stone, from north to south as far as she could see, rose — heaved — like a shoulder lifting under a coat — and rolled. West. Toward the sea.
And the city slid off it.
Not all at once. The way Hob Strand’s field had gone. Too slowly to see and then you looked again. The houses on the high switchbacks first. She saw them go, over Bastian’s shoulder, as he went down the black street with her in his arms. Rows of them. Black-crusted walls, square windows, doorways with their stone doors shut and their way-marks pointing west. Tipping. Leaning out. Coming apart at the corners. The crust cracking off them in great black sheets. And then sliding — the whole row together, house after house, down the slope of the ridge, over the switchback below, onto the next row, and the next row sliding too.
The noise of it was enormous. Stone on stone. Six hundred years of walls coming down at once. And under it, from everywhere, from the ground and the air and her bones, the sound Sarn had walked three leagues to hear. Not the breath anymore. The heart. Pushing.
People were running down the switchbacks. All round them. In front of them, behind them. Settlers with bundles. Laborers. Company guards with their swords gone. The red-bearded foreman, Hollin, carrying a woman. Falling. Getting up. Running.
“Down,” Bastian was saying. Over and over. Not shouting. Steady. In his quarry voice. “Down. Down. Keep walking. Don’t stop. Down.” To everyone. To nobody. The way Corran had held the Weaver Bridge. “Down.”
They came out at the foot of the city where the streets ended and the long swells of stone ran down toward the shore, and Oriel looked back.
The tower went.
It had stood leaning for as long as it took them to come down the ridge, and now it went. Not falling. Sliding. The ridge-top it stood on had tipped so far west that the tower simply — went with it. Upright. Still standing. Leaning out over the slope of the ridge at an impossible angle, with the flag on its pole swinging out over nothing, and the whole hump of stone it stood on rolling under it. And then the stone underneath it broke away in a long sheet, and the tower went down the slope of the ridge on its base like a man going down a hill on his heels, and hit the lower city, and came apart.
The broken top went last. Oriel saw it. The ragged black ring of wall where the roof had broken off six hundred years ago, where the pier stood and the walls were carved floor to ceiling with seven hundred and forty turns of the Wheel. With the white flag and the brass Star bolted to it.
It went down into the dust and the steam and was gone.
The swells were moving.
The long frozen waves of grey stone between the foot of the ridge and the shore — they weren’t frozen anymore. They were rolling. West. Like real waves. Slow, enormous, each one lifting as it came and passing under them and lifting the next, the whole of the Rise between the ridge and the sea rippling like a blanket shaken out. And the cracks between them opening, closing, steam blasting up out of them in long white jets.
Bastian walked across it.
She would never understand how. He walked with her in his arms across a sea of moving stone, in the dark, with the steam blasting and the cracks opening, and he didn’t hurry and he didn’t stop. When the swell under him lifted, he leaned into it. When it fell, he leaned back. When a crack opened in front of him, he stopped, and waited, and it closed, or it didn’t, and he went round. People were following him. She could hear them. Behind. Close. Settlers. Laborers. Following the big slow man who wouldn’t hurry, because he was the only thing on the whole moving Rise that looked like it knew where it was going.
“Bastian —“
“Shh.”
“Brack. Calloway. Isaut —”
“Behind,” said Bastian. “I heard them. Behind.” He leaned into a swell. “Keep still, Tash. You’re heavy.”
The shore was gone.
Not gone. Moved. The long tongue of grey stone they’d landed on, the slipway, where Look at the Water had run up onto the rock on the first night — it was still there, but it was higher. Much higher. The shrug had lifted the whole west edge of the Rise, and the slipway that had run down into the black water at a gentle slope now ran down at the pitch of a roof and ended in a drop. Two men high. Three. Ragged. Steaming. And below the drop, the Deep.
Moving.
The black water that didn’t move — that had lain like oil for four days under the oars, that hadn’t rippled when Hesper went into it — was moving. The shrug had pushed it. The whole west edge of the Rise had heaved up out of it and rolled, and the water had to go somewhere, and it was going. Out. West. In a long, low, smooth swell, like the one on the night of the breath but bigger, with no crest, rolling away from the Rise across the Deep toward the Lip. And coming back. Slapping against the foot of the new drop. Black water. Splashing. For the first time.
And the Company’s barges —
Two of them were on the rock. Thrown up. Lying on their sides on the tilted slipway, high and dry, broken-backed. The third was in the water. Upside down. Its black hull turning slowly in the swell at the foot of the drop like a dead fish.
And Look at the Water was out on the Deep.
A hundred rods off. Square and black and tarred. With people on it. Packed. Standing on the deck, crouched on the cabin roof, clinging to the rails. And Mags Callan in the stern with the steering-sweep under her arm and her knitted cap gone, shouting, and Dace and Ennet and Mallory and two settlers at the oars. And the barge-bell in the bow, ringing.
Sarn was in the bow. Standing. Not lying. Ringing the bell with both hands.
“She took them off,” said Oriel. “When she rang. The ones on the rocks. Mags took them off before it —”
“Yes,” said Bastian.
He’d stopped. At the top of the slipway. At the edge of the new drop. He stood there with Oriel in his arms and the people who’d followed him across the swells coming up behind him, stopping, crowding at the edge, looking down at the black moving water three men below. Twenty of them. Thirty. More coming.
The water was full of people.
Oriel saw them in the last of the light. Heads. Arms. In the black swell at the foot of the drop. People who’d come down the ridge faster than Bastian, or by a different way, and come out onto the slipway as it lifted, and gone over the edge, or slid, or jumped, or been thrown off the Company barges when they turned over. Ten. Fifteen. In the black water. Swimming, some of them. Most of them not. Going under and coming up. Reaching.
The black water was cold here, still, near the shore. Cold enough to stop your heart.
There’s no bottom, Isaut had said, lying on the deck with the water running off her. I opened my eyes and there was no bottom.
“Rope,” said Oriel.
Bastian put her down.
He put her down on the warm tilted stone at the top of the slipway, very carefully, the way he’d put down the Chainguard beside the Standard on Charter Eve, the way he’d laid her on the cobbles at the end of the roofs. And he stood up. And he looked down at the black water full of people. And he looked at his crooked hand.
“Rope,” he said.
Behind him, out of the dark and the steam, coming down the last of the swells with a coil of rope over one shoulder and a man in a good plain coat over the other, staggering, bleeding from the head, came Brack.
He saw the water. He stopped.
He put Calloway down on the stone. Calloway sat there. His face was cut and his eyes were open and he wasn’t looking at anything.
Brack looked at the black water. At the heads in it. At Bastian.
He took the coil of rope off his shoulder.
“I can hold a brake,” he said.
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH (WRITTEN AFTER)
VELL, DUSK, 29th Fourthmonth C.415
THE TOWER’S ONE NOTE STOPPED. THE RIDGE ROSE, TILTED W., AND ROLLED.
THE CITY SLID OFF IT. ROW BY ROW.
THE TOWER WENT DOWN THE SLOPE UPRIGHT AND CAME APART. THE WALLS. THE PIER. THE FLAG. THE STAR.
THE SWELLS MOVED LIKE WAVES. B.C. CARRIED ME ACROSS. PEOPLE FOLLOWED HIM.
THE SLIPWAY LIFTED 3 MEN HIGH. THE DEEP MOVED.
COMPANY BARGES: 2 BROKEN ON THE ROCK, 1 OVERTURNED.
LOOK AT THE WATER: AFLOAT, 100 RODS OUT, FULL. MAGS TOOK THEM OFF WHEN SARN RANG.
IN THE WATER: ~15.
BRACK BROUGHT CALLOWAY DOWN.