The pin was bent.
Oriel saw it first. She was sitting on the tilted stone at the top of the slipway where Bastian had put her down, and she put out her hand to push herself up, and her hand closed on iron. A hand’s width of iron rod standing up out of the grey stone, warm, with a cap on it. D.S. 415. CHECK IT.
It wasn’t straight anymore.
It leaned. West. Bent over at the base where it came out of the stone, a long smooth curve, as if somebody very strong had taken hold of the top of it and pulled. The cap was a hand’s width west of where the rod went into the rock.
She sat there with her hand on it for one breath. Two.
It stopped on something deep, she’d said, the first night. Something under the leaf. The Rise is sitting on the same thing the leaves slide across.
The Rise had shrugged. The Rise had moved. And the thing under it hadn’t. And the iron rod that went down through the one into the other had been caught between, and bent.
Check it.
Somebody had. The ground had.
“Bastian,” she said. “Here. Tie it here. It goes down to the deep rock. It won’t pull out.”
He tied it.
One-handed. His good left hand and his crooked right, the two stiff fingers that wouldn’t close, used like a hook. A bowline round the bent pin, close to the stone, tight. Then the rope over the edge of the drop, three men high, down the ragged steaming face to the black water. Brack’s rope. Forty rods of it.
Brack went down it.
Nobody told him to. He didn’t ask. He took off his road-gang smock and dropped it on the stone beside Calloway, and took the end of the rope, and went over the edge, hand under hand, with his badly-set arm and his good one, down the steaming rock. At the bottom he went into the water.
Oriel heard him. A gasp. A word she didn’t catch. The cold.
Then: “Haul.”
Bastian hauled.
He’d taken a turn of the rope round his own waist and set his heels against a ridge of stone and leaned back, and he hauled with his good arm and the crook of his bad one and the whole weight of his body. And on the rope, coming up the face of the drop, streaming, gasping, clutching at the rope with both hands — a woman. A settler. In a good coat, soaked black.
Hands reached down and pulled her over the edge. Hollin’s. The red-bearded foreman. And two others. They laid her on the stone.
The rope went back down.
“Haul.”
A man. A laborer in Company canvas.
“Haul.”
Isaut Fenwright went down too.
Oriel didn’t see her go. She looked round and Isaut wasn’t there, and then she heard Isaut’s voice at the foot of the drop, flat and hard, in the dark. Here. Take my hand. Not the rope — my hand. I’ve got the rope. Kick. Kick, damn you. She’d gone down the face of the rock without a line, the way she’d gone down the Lip, finding holds in the steaming stone with her raw bleeding hands, and stood now on a ledge at the waterline the width of a boot with one hand on the rock and the other reaching out into the black, hauling people in to Brack.
Brack was in the water.
He’d tied the end of the rope round his own chest, under the arms. He was in the black water at the foot of the drop, in the swell, with the rope taut above him to the bent pin and Bastian, and he was reaching. Swimming out a stroke or two from the ledge. Catching whoever was nearest. An arm. A collar. Hair. Pulling them back to him. Getting the rope round them, a loop, a hitch, one-handed, in the cold, in the dark, with the swell lifting and dropping him. Haul. And Bastian hauled, and they went up the face of the drop, and the loop came back down, and Brack reached out again.
Out on the Deep, Look at the Water was coming in.
Mags Callan had turned her. Square and black and overloaded, low in the water, with people packed on her deck. Coming in toward the foot of the drop. Slowly. Carefully. On the swell. The sweeps going in and out. Sarn in the bow with a lantern held out over the water, calling. Left. There’s one on the left. There. And Dace leaning out over the gunwale with a boat-hook, catching a coat, hauling.
Between the two of them — the barge and the rope — the people in the water came out.
Oriel counted. She couldn’t help it. Sitting on the stone with her hand on the bent pin, she counted every one.
Six. Seven.
Mallory went over the side of the barge into the water with a line round his waist to get a woman who’d gone under. He got her. He came up spluttering, his thin pale face streaming, and Dace hauled them both in.
Nine. Ten.
Neve Asher, on the barge, with the field book in its oilcloth inside her coat against her chest, holding a lantern so Mags could see.
Twelve.
The Rise moved again.
Not like before. Smaller. A shudder. A short sharp heave, the whole west edge of the Rise lifting a hand and dropping back. Aftershock. Sarn had said there’d be some. Oriel felt it go through the stone under her, through the bent pin under her hand, through the rope.
And the water heaved.
A swell. Out of nowhere. Black. Smooth. Bigger than the others. It came in from the Deep and lifted Look at the Water high on its back and swept on toward the foot of the drop, toward the ledge, toward the people in the water.
“HOLD ON,” Isaut screamed. From the ledge. “HOLD ON TO SOMETHING —”
The swell hit the drop.
It came up the face of the rock. Black water, a man high, two, smashing against the stone and breaking white — the first white water anybody had ever seen on the Deep — and Isaut on her ledge vanished under it, and came out of it still clinging to the rock with both hands, and the rope went taut as a bar.
Bastian went down on one knee. The rope round his waist dragged him toward the edge. He set his heels. He leaned back. He held.
The bent pin held.
The swell went back out. Sucking. Pulling. Everything in the water at the foot of the drop going out with it.
Brack was on the end of the rope with somebody in his arms.
Oriel saw them in Sarn’s lantern-light from the barge. In the black water, at the end of the taut rope, being dragged out by the backwash. Brack. And in his arms — clutched to his chest, held up, out of the water — a woman. Short. Square. In a patched blue coat.
Cora Grebe.
She’d come down to the rocks with her bundle the first night. She’d been on the barge. She’d been on Look at the Water, safe, with the first fifteen. And she’d gone over the side when the swell came, or been thrown. Oriel never knew which.
Brack had her.
The backwash pulled. The rope stood out taut and humming from the bent pin, over the edge of the drop, down into the black water, to Brack. With Cora Grebe in his arms. He couldn’t swim with her. He couldn’t climb. He couldn’t do anything but hold her up, and hold on to the rope, and let the backwash take them out to the end of it, and wait.
“Haul,” said Bastian. Through his teeth. To nobody. To himself. He leaned back. The rope didn’t move. The backwash had it. “Haul —”
Hollin had the rope behind him. And two laborers. And Mallory’s friend, the young man who’d put his mallet down. All of them, hauling. It didn’t move.
Out on the end of it, in the black, Brack looked up. At the drop. At the rope. At the barge, coming round on the swell, Mags Callan screaming orders, the sweeps digging.
He got the end of the rope off his own chest.
Oriel saw him do it. In the lantern-light. One-handed, with his badly-set arm, in the cold, in the backwash, holding Cora Grebe up with the other. He got the loop off over his head. And put it over hers. Under her arms. And pulled it tight.
“Haul,” he shouted. His voice cracked. “She’s on. HAUL.”
Bastian hauled.
And the rope came. Easier now. Lighter. One person on it instead of two. It came up out of the black water and the backwash let go of it, and Cora Grebe came in across the swell on the end of it toward the foot of the drop, toward Isaut on her ledge reaching out, and Isaut caught her by the collar of her patched blue coat and dragged her in.
Brack was in the water.
Without the rope. At the end of the backwash. A head. An arm. In Sarn’s lantern-light from the barge.
Look at the Water was coming round. Mags Callan leaning on the sweep with her whole body, Dace and Ennet and Mallory pulling, Sarn in the bow with the lantern out over the water so far she was nearly in it. There — there — left — he’s there —
Dace had the boat-hook out. Reaching.
The swell came back.
Smaller. Smooth. Black. It lifted the barge, and lifted Brack, and the boat-hook went into the water where his arm had been, and caught nothing.
Then it went down.
And the water was flat.
Black. Smooth. Glossy, like lacquer. Like the inside of an ink-pot. Like it had been for four days under the oars, when Hesper went into it and it closed over her like oil. Not a ripple.
Sarn’s lantern moved over it. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Nothing.
They looked for an hour.
The barge went up and down the foot of the drop with the lanterns out, and Dace with the boat-hook, and Sarn lying flat in the bow with her palm on the deck, listening, the way she’d listened for Hesper. Isaut stayed on her ledge at the waterline with her hand out over the black. Bastian stood at the top with the rope round his waist and didn’t move.
Oriel sat with her hand on the bent pin.
When the hour was over, Sarn lifted her head from the deck of the barge and looked up at the top of the drop. At Oriel. In the lantern-light. She didn’t say anything. She shook her head once.
Then she put her face down on the planks.
Oriel looked at the rope. Still tied to the bent pin. Still going over the edge of the drop and down into the black. Slack now. Nothing on the end of it.
Bastian began to pull it up.
Slowly. Hand over hand. The good hand and the crooked one. It came up out of the water and up the face of the rock and over the edge, wet, coil by coil, and he laid it down on the stone beside the pin the way he laid a chain, neatly, without a kink. Forty rods. When he got to the end, the loop was still tied in it. The one Brack had taken off his own chest and put over Cora Grebe’s head.
Bastian held it in his crooked hand. He looked at it for a long time.
Then he sat down on the stone beside Oriel, heavily, all of him, with the end of the rope in his lap.
“He held the brake,” said Bastian Coyle.
They counted, later. On the stone at the top of the slipway, in the steam, by lantern-light, with everybody who’d come off the ridge sitting in rows on the warm rock. Mags Callan counted the ones on the barge. Hollin counted the Company’s. Mallory had the settlers’ list from the Company’s papers. Oriel wrote it down.
Sixty-one had been on the Rise at dusk. The Company’s forty laborers and twelve guard, and Calloway, and the settlers, and the Drift Survey.
Fifty-four sat on the stone.
Gil Pruett, the Company’s second surveyor, had been on the tower stair when the tower went. Two laborers had been in the high houses on the north switchbacks. A settler, an old man, had gone back for his deed-case. One of the guard had been on the overturned barge. One of the women in the water had gone under before anyone reached her.
And Brack.
Seven.
Joss Brack, Mallory said, when Oriel asked. He had it on the Company’s list; Brack had signed on with the Drift Survey, but he’d come down the Lip on the Company road two years ago in a road-gang, and his name was on everything. Joss. Nobody had ever called him anything but Brack.
Cora Grebe sat on the stone with a blanket round her shoulders and her square face grey and her hands in her lap. She’d lost her bundle. She’d lost her deed. She’d lost everything she’d sold her life for. She sat there and stared at the black water.
“I didn’t know his name,” she said. To Oriel. When Oriel came and sat beside her. “He had me. In the water. He held me up. And I never knew his name.”
“Joss Brack.”
Cora Grebe said it. Quietly. Twice.
“Who was he?”
Oriel looked at the rope. Coiled on the stone beside the bent pin, with the loop still in it.
“He carried rope,” she said.
Calloway was sitting a little apart. On his own. On the stone at the top of the drop, with his back to everyone, looking at the black water where Brack had gone under.
He hadn’t moved since Brack put him down. Nobody had gone near him. His face was cut where Brack had hit him, and the blood had dried, and he hadn’t wiped it.
Oriel went and stood beside him. She didn’t sit. Her knee wouldn’t let her get down again.
He didn’t look up.
“He came back for me,” said Corwin Calloway. To the water. His good warm reasonable voice was gone. It was just a voice. “I was on the stone. I was going to stay. I’d decided. I wasn’t going back to Orme with nothing. I’d rather go with the ridge.” He was quiet. “And he came back up the square, against everyone, and hit me in the face, and carried me down the hill on his back. And then he went into the water. And now he’s gone, and I’m here.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Oriel thought about it. About Treddick, in the gold, at Lusk, putting his shoulder under a man who’d have robbed him. About Penhallow holding Marta Ness over his head in the brown flood. About a message on a relay slip, folded small, inside a smock. Tell him it was a clean line. Tell him he can’t have it back.
“Somebody came back for him once,” she said. “In Lusk. He’s been carrying it ever since.”
Calloway sat with that for a long time.
Then he put his hand inside his coat and took out a folded paper. The Company map. Wet. Torn at one corner. The grid. The harbor. The town called Calloway. The Rise Star in the middle, where there was nothing now, where the tower had been, where the ridge had shrugged its city into the sea.
He looked at it.
He held it out over the edge of the drop. Over the black water. And opened his hand.
It went down, turning, into the dark, and lay on the water for a moment, white, and then the Deep took it, without a ripple.
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
THE RISE, W. DROP, NIGHT, 29th Fourthmonth C.415
PIN D.S. 415: BENT W. A HAND’S WIDTH AT THE STONE. THE RISE MOVED. THE DEEP ROCK DIDN’T. CHECKED.
RESCUE LINE TIED TO THE BENT PIN. B. COYLE HAULED. I. FENWRIGHT ON A LEDGE AT THE WATERLINE. LOOK AT THE WATER CAME IN.
AFTERSHOCK. A SWELL. FIRST WHITE WATER ON THE DEEP.
J. BRACK PUT HIS OWN LOOP OVER C. GREBE AND SAID HAUL. HE WENT UNDER. NOT RECOVERED.
ON THE RISE AT DUSK: 61. NOW: 54. LOST: PRUETT, 2 LABORERS, 1 SETTLER, 1 GUARD, 1 WOMAN IN THE WATER, BRACK.
CALLOWAY LET THE MAP GO INTO THE DEEP.
HE CARRIED ROPE.