In the morning, Mags Callan walked round the two broken Company barges on the rock three times, with her hands behind her back, the way Bastian walked a quarry face, and then she stopped and spat on the stone.
“That one,” she said. Pointing at the nearer. “Back’s broken amidships. Keel’s cracked. Planking’s sprung on the port side for twenty feet.” She looked at Dace and Ennet. “Three days.”
“Three —” said Mallory.
“We’ve got the other one to take timber off,” said Mags. “And we’ve got fifty-four people who can hold a plank. And we’ve got no choice.” She looked out at the black water, flat again, glossy, as if nothing had ever happened on it. “Look at the Water takes fourteen. Packed. Four days each way across. That’s eight trips. Thirty-two days. And Sarn says the Rise isn’t finished shrugging.” She looked at Oriel. “Three days.”
They did it in three days.
Oriel would remember those days afterward as quiet. Nobody talked much. Fifty-four people on the steaming tilted stone at the top of the slipway, working. Pulling planks off the wrecked barge. Carrying them. Holding them while Dace and Ennet fitted them. Caulking with tow and pitch heated in a pot over a vent — the vents were useful for that, Mags said, best pitch-pot she’d ever had. Hauling the broken keel straight with ropes and a block lashed to the bent pin. Settlers who’d never held a tool. Company laborers. The guard. Mallory. Calloway.
Calloway worked.
He didn’t say anything. He took off his good plain coat on the first morning and folded it and put it on a rock and rolled up his sleeves and picked up a plank when Mags pointed at one, and carried it where she said. All day. And the next. He didn’t speak to anyone and nobody spoke to him. At night he sat a little apart on the stone, the way he had the first night, looking at the water.
On the second evening Cora Grebe went and sat beside him.
Oriel saw it from across the slipway. She didn’t hear what was said. She didn’t think much was. They sat side by side on the warm stone, the short square woman in a borrowed blanket and the lean sandy-grey man in his shirtsleeves, and looked at the water where Brack had gone under, for a long time.
Then Cora Grebe got up and went back to the fire. And Calloway sat there alone a while longer, and then put his face in his hands.
On the second night, Oriel took a fix at the bent pin.
She had to. She couldn’t not. She set up the old Survey glass on its stand on the tilted stone beside the pin, and Neve sat with the clock, and Isaut stood beside her as witness, and they did it again. The same seven stars. The same hour and a half.
The sum came out different.
Pin D.S. 415 (cap), the Rise: 33 leagues 38 chains E., 1 league 12 chains S., of Grey Gate stone-mark.
Three chains west. Since the night of the twenty-fourth. Most of it in a heartbeat, at dusk on the twenty-ninth, when the ridge shrugged.
She wrote it under the first. She wrote bent W. at the stone, 1 hand beside it. And under that, because she couldn’t think what else to write:
The Rise is moving west toward the Lip. The leaves are moving east toward the Lip. They meet there. One goes down. One comes up. It goes round. Vell knew.
“Sign it,” she said to Isaut.
Isaut took the pencil. She signed it. Then she wrote under her name, the way she’d written the first time:
I watched. It moved. Vell knew.
Neve Asher had the copies.
That was the thing Oriel kept coming back to, on the third night, lying on the warm stone not sleeping. The tower was gone. The walls with their seven hundred and forty turns of the Wheel in columns from the floor to the broken top. The pier. The lower room under it with the carved wheel on its floor and the instructions on its walls and the warning by the slot. All of it gone down the slope of the ridge in the shrug, under six hundred years of black-crusted stone, into the steam and the sea.
But Neve had copied it. All of it. In the field book and on loose sheets, by lantern-light, with her tongue between her teeth, while Isaut read the script aloud. The square stone. The star calendar on the stair. The columns at the top — not all, there’d been too many, but the first hundred and the last hundred and every fiftieth one between. The wheel on the floor of the lower room, drawn to scale with a compass and a rule. Every word on its walls. The warning by the slot.
She’d kept them in oilcloth inside her coat against her chest. On the barge. In the water when Mallory went in. In the dark at the top of the drop.
“I didn’t think,” said Neve. When Oriel asked her. Sitting on the stone with the oilcloth packet in her lap, turning it over in her hands. “On the barge. When the bell rang. I didn’t think about anything. I just put my hand on my coat to see if it was there.” She looked at the packet. “Is that bad? There were people in the water. And I put my hand on my coat.”
“No,” said Oriel. “It’s what Imbert would have done. It’s what I’d have done.” She was quiet. “It’s what Wenna Vale did with forty books in a hive-box under the bees. It’s what Agathe’s Listeners did with the Groan Registers in laundry baskets. It’s what Marta Ness did in the flood at Lusk.” She looked out at the black water. “Somebody has to keep the count.”
They sailed on the fourth morning. Two barges. Look at the Water, square and black, with Mags at the sweep and twenty aboard. And the repaired Company barge, longer, lower, its planking a patchwork of old and new, its keel scarfed and bolted and pitched, with Dace at the sweep and thirty-four aboard. Mags had named it on the last night, with the same pot of white paint and the same brush, in the same big uneven letters, on the bow.
BRACK.
Nobody had argued.
Four days back across the Deep. Westward. With oars, every one of them that could hold one, and no wind, and the black water flat and glossy under them, and the haze, and the cold coming back up through the planks as they went west. Sarn lay in the bow of Look at the Water with her palm on the deck, as she had going out, pointing. But not at the Rise this time. Behind them. East. Listening to it.
“Quieter,” she said, on the second day. “It’s done. For now. The ridge went and the pressure went with it. It’s breathing again. Slow.” She was quiet a moment. “It’ll do it again. Somewhere. Some year. The Seam doesn’t stop. It just pushes until something gives.” She looked back east, at the grey haze over the water where the Rise was. “And then it breathes.”
On the third day the cold came up through the planks, and they knew they were near the Lip.
On the fourth day, at noon, the haze thinned, and there it was. The broken staircase of the old Eastern Pale, going up and up into the grey. Eleven slabs. And on the eighth, small, swinging very slightly on its rope, a scrap of red rag tied to an iron anchor that Isaut had set there twenty days ago.
It took two days to get everybody up.
The rope-way was still there. Bastian had rigged it to last, and it had. The fixed lines down each drop. The anchors in the stone. The winch at the top, with two of Ketter Bayle’s barge-folk who’d stayed to keep it, sitting by a fire at the edge of the world for twenty days, waiting.
People went up on the fixed lines, who could. Isaut went up and down them all day, both days, with her raw hands bound in strips of canvas, helping, the way she’d gone down them setting anchors. Settlers who’d never climbed anything. Laborers. Mallory. Calloway, who went up the fixed lines alone on the first morning without a word and was waiting at the top when the rest came.
The rest went up in the sling-chair.
Oriel went last. She always did.
She sat in the canvas seat on the rope at the foot of the Lip, on the last slab, with the black water lapping at the stone below her like oil against a jetty, and looked back east. At the haze. At nothing. Thirty leagues of black water and a new land at the end of it, rising, breathing, moving west, with a bent pin in it and a drowned city gone back into the sea and a man called Joss Brack somewhere under the water with no bottom.
The winch took up the slack. The chair lifted.
She went up the face of the world a slab at a time.
At the sixth drop, Isaut Fenwright was on the fixed line beside the chair, as she had been going down. She reached out a canvas-bound hand and steadied it as it went past. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
Ilse Corran was waiting at the top.
Captain of the Westerly Road, broad and fair, with the sergeant’s knot cut off her shoulder two years ago and a captain’s knot on it now that she’d never asked for. She’d come out from the road-post at Fennick’s Cross when the relay tower saw the barges on the black water, two days ago, with twenty of her people and carts and food and blankets. She was standing at the head of the rope-way when Oriel’s chair came up over the edge, with her arms folded.
She looked at Oriel. Then past her. At the fifty-four people sitting and lying in the long grass at the top of the Lip, grey and filthy and exhausted, wrapped in her blankets.
At Calloway, sitting on his own, a little apart.
“Corwin Calloway,” she said.
He looked up.
“There’s a Council warrant. From two years ago. Fraud and flight. Harrowgate signed it. She said she wasn’t going to look very hard.” Ilse Corran looked down at him. “I’ve been looking quite hard. For two years. On the Westerly road.”
Calloway stood up. Slowly. He held out his wrists.
Corran looked at them. Then at his face. At the cut on it, where Brack had hit him, healing badly.
“I heard about the rope,” she said. “From the relay. Mallory sent it from the barge lamp, last night, when you came in sight of Fennick’s tower.” She was quiet a moment. “I put Brack on the Westerly road. Two years. I told him whose hand it was. He worked. I let him off a month early.” She looked at Calloway’s wrists. “Put your hands down. You’re not going anywhere. You’ll walk to Orme with my people and stand in front of the Regent and tell her what you did, and what he did. And then she’ll decide.”
Calloway lowered his hands.
“Yes,” he said.
The relay lamp was on its pole at the head of the rope-way, where they’d left it twenty days ago.
There was a slip waiting under its stone. Folded small. The Fennick’s Cross clerk had brought it out with Corran’s carts. It had come the night before, after Mallory’s message went west. From the Drift House. By the Westerly line, and the Shield line, and the Canton line, tower to tower, lamp and shutter.
Oriel unfolded it.
TO O. TASH, AT THE LIP. HEARD ABOUT BRACK. — D.P.
And under it, a second line. Sent a little later. A different relay hour.
TELL THE ONE HE PULLED OUT, WHEN SHE’S WELL ENOUGH: HE OWED ME NOTHING. HE PAID ANYWAY. THAT’S A CLEAN LINE. THAT’S THE CLEANEST I KNOW.
AND BRING ME HIS ROPE. — D.P.
Oriel stood at the edge of the world with the slip in her hand and the wind — there was wind up here, a little, coming from the west across the long grass, the first she’d felt in twenty days — the wind in her hair.
Bastian was beside her. He’d coiled the rope — Brack’s rope, forty rods, with the loop still tied in it — and slung it over his left shoulder, where he carried the chain. He was looking east. At the haze.
She gave him the slip. He read it slowly. His lips moved.
He looked at the rope on his shoulder.
“I’ll carry it,” he said.
FIELD BOOK · O. TASH
THE RISE → THE LIP, 30th Fourthmonth – 8th Fifthmonth C.415
COMPANY BARGE REPAIRED IN 3 DAYS (M. CALLAN, DACE, ENNET, 54 HANDS). NAMED “BRACK.”
FIX AT THE BENT PIN, 2nd NIGHT: 33 LG 38 CH E. 3 CHAINS W. SINCE THE 24th. I.F.: “IT MOVED. VELL KNEW.”
VELL’S RECORD: N. ASHER’S COPIES (OILCLOTH, INSIDE HER COAT, THROUGH THE WATER).
CROSSED W. 4 DAYS. UP THE LIP 2 DAYS. ALL 54.
I. CORRAN AT THE TOP. CALLOWAY HELD OUT HIS WRISTS. SHE WOULDN’T.
D. PIKE: “HE OWED ME NOTHING. HE PAID ANYWAY. BRING ME HIS ROPE.”
B.C. CARRIES IT.