The Count

The Spillway woke before the sun did.

It rose out of the valley like the edge of the world, a vast curved wall of grey stone that had been poured, not built, by hands that had been dust for six hundred years. It was taller than any tower the living knew how to raise — or rather, taller than any tower they would have dared to raise, even if they had known how. It was wider than a man could walk from end to end in a morning. Its face was scarred by centuries of rain and frost, streaked black where water had found its way through the cracks, crusted white with salt and lime, and yet it stood, holding back the weight of an entire mountain sea that no one in Calder Reach had ever seen from below.

The city clung to it the way moss clings to a boulder.

At the top, on the broad back of the wall, was the Crown, where the bells of the Cathedral of the Undying Flame were already ringing and the great blue-gold fire roared at the edge of the sky as it had roared for four hundred and twelve years. Below that, the Shelf, terraces of merchant houses and guildhalls and granaries cut into the ancient stone, their roofs red with tile. And below that, at the very foot of the wall, where the outflow of the Calder River came hissing out of the dark mouths of the Makers' tunnels and every kind of filth in the city rolled downhill to meet it...

The Sump.

Teo Brask was pushing a cart full of corpses up Tallow Row, and he was counting.

"...Twenty-six," he muttered.

The cart was a narrow thing of grey wood with two tall wheels that shrieked at every turn. It belonged to the Mercy House, as did the canvas sheet stretched over its contents, as did, in a sense that the Chantry made very clear to him at every opportunity, Teo himself. He was nineteen years old, thin in the way that all Sump boys were thin, with dark hair that the damp had plastered to his forehead and a pair of hands that had cracked open at every knuckle from the lime the pyre-men threw on the bodies.

A woman was waiting for him in the doorway of a narrow house near the end of the row. She did not say anything. She only stepped aside.

Teo went in, and came out a little while later with a small bundle wrapped in a blanket, and laid it on the cart as gently as he could.

"Twenty-seven."

The woman flinched, as if the number had struck her.

Teo grimaced and lowered his head.

'Damn it. Not out loud, idiot.'

Counting was a sin. Not a large one... no one had ever been burned for it, as far as he knew. It was the sort of small sin that the deacons mentioned in their sermons the way one mentioned a draught under a door, as something mildly unpleasant that a decent household would see to. The Makers had counted, after all. They had measured the stars and weighed the mountains and numbered the grains of sand on every shore, and in their pride they had tried to measure the Flame itself, and the Flame had burned their world to glass. That was the Canon. Every child in Calder Reach learned it before they learned their letters, if they ever learned their letters at all.

So, one did not count. Not the stars... and not the dead.

Teo counted anyway. He could not help it. He had been doing it for as long as he could remember, quietly, inside his head, the way other people hummed. Steps on a stair. Rats in a gutter. Coins in a purse that was never his. Bodies on a cart. Numbers were the only things in the Sump that did not lie to him, and so he kept them close, like a coward keeps a knife.

He bowed awkwardly to the woman, which was all the Chantry rules allowed him to do, and pushed on.

The grey flux had come to the Sump eleven days ago.

It had started the way it always started, with a few cramps and a little sickness, nothing unusual in a ward where half the people drank from the river and the other half drank from wells that were not much better. And then, within a day, the cramps had turned to agony, and the sickness had turned into something terrible, an endless rice-pale torrent that poured out of a person until there was nothing left inside them. Teo had seen men who had been strong in the morning lying shrivelled and blue-lipped by nightfall, their eyes sunk deep into their skulls, their skin so dry that it stayed pinched where a healer had touched it. They died thirsty. That was the worst of it, somehow. In a city built at the foot of a mountain sea, they died of thirst.

The Chantry said it was a judgement.

...Of course it did.

The Sump was a sinful place, the deacons said, and sin festered, and the Flame purified. Pray, they said. Fast. Repent. Bring offerings to the Mercy House, and the Flame might look kindly on you.

Teo pushed the cart around a corner and into the next street, and stopped.

There were three bodies waiting for him on Brine Lane, laid out on doors that had been lifted off their hinges for the purpose. A family, by the look of it... or what was left of one. A man, a woman and a boy who could not have been older than twelve.

"Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty."

He loaded them one by one.

By the time the sun had finally climbed over the rim of the Spillway and spilled its pale light down the wall, the cart was full, and his arms were shaking, and the shrieking of the wheels had become the only sound in the world. He turned it toward the Mercy House and the pyre-yard behind it, and began the long, slow push downhill.

That was when he noticed it — or rather, when he noticed that something had been bothering him for days.

It was nothing, at first. A small itch at the back of his mind, the kind he got when a merchant's change came up short by a copper and he could not yet say why. He frowned and kept walking. Brine Lane. Tallow Row. Coopers' Yard. Saint Orlen's Square. His feet knew the route without him.

...And then it occurred to him that his feet knew the route a little too well.

Teo stopped in the middle of the street. The cart creaked and settled.

Thirty-one bodies today... Twenty-four yesterday. Nineteen the day before that. He had collected them, all of them, with his own two hands, and he remembered each one, because he could not stop himself from remembering. And now that he thought about it, really thought about it, he realised that he could not remember a single one from the Riverside wards. Not one from the Rope Walk. Not one from the tanneries or the ferry docks or the hovels beneath the Old Bridge, where people lived ten to a room and the filth was so thick you could walk on it.

The Sump was full of sin. Everyone agreed on that... even the sinners. But it seemed that the Flame, in its wisdom, was only interested in judging four of its streets.

Teo looked down at his cart for a long moment.

'...That's not right.'

Far above him, on the Crown, the bells of the Cathedral began to ring again, calling the faithful to the morning prayers.

He counted the strokes without meaning to. Then he grasped the handles, leaned his weight into the cart, and kept walking.

Thirty-one. All of them from the streets around Saint Orlen's Square.