Ashes of the Leaves

Teo did not remember getting down the stairs.

One moment he was on the mattress with Nell's shoulder under his hand, shaking her awake. The next, he was halfway down the back stairs in the dark, barefoot, with the black water lapping at the step below him and the brick ledge stretching away along the wall toward Hesk's door.

The door was open. Torchlight was pouring out of it.

There were Ashwardens on the ledge. Four of them, perhaps five, in their long grey coats, their iron masks pulled down over their faces, their torches throwing wild orange light across the water. And they were throwing things into the water. Crates. Bundles. Things wrapped in oilcloth, which floated for a moment on the black surface before the torches reached them.

The Leaves were burning.

They burned on the water like little boats. Teo watched an oilcloth bundle catch and flare, and come apart, and watched the pages inside drift loose, one by one, blackening at the edges, curling, the tiny perfect letters glowing red for an instant before the fire swallowed them. A drawing of the human heart. A map of a coastline that no longer existed. A page about the stars.

Six hundred years. Gone in the time it took to breathe.

From inside the cellar, a thin, cracked voice was shouting.

"...No! Not that one! Not that one, you fools, you don't know what it is...!"

Teo ran.

He did not think about it. He went along the ledge at a dead sprint, barefoot on the wet bricks, and slammed into the nearest Ashwarden from behind before the man knew he was there. The Ashwarden went into the water with a tremendous splash and a muffled shout. Teo did not stop. He ducked under a torch that someone swung at his head, felt the heat of it sear past his ear, and threw himself through the doorway into the cellar.

It was full of smoke.

The table was overturned. The crates were smashed open. The lamp lay broken on the floor, its oil burning in a spreading pool, and the fire had caught the edges of the old oilcloth bundles stacked against the wall, and the whole room was lit by a flickering, dreadful orange glow. Two more Ashwardens were inside, pulling out the last of the crates.

And in the middle of it all, Hesk was on his knees on the floor, clutching a single torn Leaf to his chest with both arms, while an Ashwarden tried to drag him to his feet by the collar of his old blue coat.

"Hesk!"

The blind man's head jerked up.

"...Teo? Teo, no, get out, get out...!"

Teo did not get out. He grabbed the arm of the Ashwarden holding Hesk and pulled with all his strength. It was like pulling on a tree. The Ashwarden turned his iron face toward him, unhurried, and drove a gloved fist into Teo's stomach.

Teo folded up on the floor and could not breathe.

Through the smoke, he saw the Ashwarden reach down for Hesk again. Saw the old man curl tighter around his Leaf. Saw the burning oil spreading across the floor toward them...

And then the doorway darkened.

Something very large came through it. The Ashwarden who had hit Teo turned, and opened his mouth, and was lifted clean off his feet and thrown across the room into the wall, where he slid down among the smashed crates and did not get up. The second Ashwarden drew his sword. Bram Tull took it away from him, the way a man takes a stick from a child, and hit him with the hilt, once, and he fell down too.

Then Bram stooped, picked up Hesk in one arm as if he weighed nothing at all, picked up Teo in the other, and walked out of the burning cellar.

The ledge was chaos. The Ashwarden Teo had knocked into the water was clinging to the bricks, half drowned, shouting for help. The others were trying to pull him out. Bram walked straight past them, through the smoke, to the end of the ledge where the brick wall had crumbled... and stepped down into the black water up to his waist, and waded.

"Where..." Teo coughed. "Where are we..."

"River," said Bram. "Barge."

The cellar had an old Maker drain at its far end, a round tunnel half full of water, which ran down under the street to the Calder. Teo had never known it was there. Bram, apparently, had. He waded into it, ducking his head, with Teo and Hesk held above the water, and the torchlight and the shouting faded behind them into the dark.

They came out on the riverbank below Brine Lane, under a sky full of stars.

Bram's barge was tied to the bank. Mira was standing in it, in her brown cloak, holding a pole. And beside her, wrapped in a blanket, her face white and furious, was Nell.

"I bit one," Nell said, when she saw Teo. "On the stairs. He tried to grab me."

Teo laughed. It came out as a cough, and then as something that was not quite either.

Bram laid them both down in the bottom of the barge, under the oilcloth, and climbed in, and took the pole from Mira. The barge slid out into the black current without a sound. Behind them, above the rooftops of Brine Lane, a column of smoke was rising into the night. The old chandlery was burning. Teo watched it for a long while.

Then he looked down at Hesk.

The old man was lying very still in the bottom of the boat. His face was blackened with smoke. His hands were burned. And he was still holding the Leaf against his chest, the last one, with both arms, as if it were a child.

"...How many?" he whispered. "How many are left? Teo. Tell me."

Teo did not answer.

Hesk was silent for a long time. Then he made a small sound, very quiet, and turned his face away.

They hid in a boathouse on the far side of the river, at the edge of the ferry ward, where Bram's sister lived. Nobody slept. Mira went back across the bridge before dawn, in her white robes, to find out what she could. She came back in the afternoon, and her face told them most of it before she spoke.

"It was Fell," she said. "Osric Fell. He went to the Archdeacon a week ago. He told him that a cart-man and an acolyte of the Mercy House were trading with the Fen farmers outside the Guild, and that they had a heretic's den in a cellar on Brine Lane full of Maker pages. He'd had you followed." She sat down on an upturned boat, slowly. "The order came from the Crown. The Leaves were to be burned. And you, Teo... you're to be taken. For heresy. Captain Dane has your name."

"And you?"

Mira laughed shortly.

"They don't know yet. Fell didn't know my name. But the Mercy House ledger has my handwriting on the entries for the flux, beside yours, and Deacon Pruett has been asking questions." She looked down at her hands. "It's a matter of days."

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Hesk spoke. He had not said a word since the river. His voice was hoarse with smoke, but it was steady.

"Then you must go," he said. "Both of you. Tonight."

"Go where?" said Teo. "There's nowhere to go. There's the valley, and the Fens, and then there's the Ashlands, and nothing lives in the Ashlands."

"That's what the Chantry says."

Teo stopped.

Hesk turned his blind face toward him, and slowly, with his burned fingers, he held out the last Leaf.

"Read it to me, boy," he said. "One more time."

Teo took it. It was small and very old and much worn, as if it had been folded and unfolded a thousand times. On it, there was a map — not of a coastline, or a city... of mountains. A long range of mountains, drawn in fine lines, and a river, and a road, and at the end of the road, on the top of a peak, a small symbol like a dome. Beneath it, a few lines of text.

Mount Selk Observatory and Regional Archive. Established for the long-term preservation of scientific records, astronomical data and essential knowledge in the event of civilisational collapse. Sealed vault. Climate-controlled storage. Latitude 41° 12′ N...

The rest was faded beyond reading.

Teo looked up slowly.

"I stole that one first," Hesk said quietly. "Forty years ago. Before all the others. Valdris has eleven thousand pages, and he thinks that is everything the Makers left. It isn't. The Makers knew they were falling, Teo. At the end, some of them knew. And some of them tried to put what they knew somewhere the fall could not reach." He smiled faintly. "The Chantry never found it, because the Chantry never looked. It has never wanted to know what is out there. Only to keep what it has."

"Where is it?"

"East. Three hundred miles, perhaps. Past the Ashlands. Past the old city of glass." Hesk's voice dropped. "I always meant to go myself. Before they took my eyes."

Teo stared at the map in his hands.

"I can't leave you," he said. "Or Nell."

"Bram's sister will hide us. She has hidden worse." Hesk reached out and found Teo's arm, and gripped it, surprisingly hard. "Listen to me, boy. Every page in that cellar is ash. Every page in Valdris's vault is a prisoner. If there is anywhere left in the world where the Makers' knowledge belongs to whoever can read it... it is there. Go and find it. And then come back."

Nell said nothing. She sat beside Hesk with her arms wrapped around her knees and her jaw clenched, and did not cry, and did not look at Teo, and that was much worse than if she had.

They left an hour after midnight.

Bram took them down the river in the barge, past the ferry ward, past the last scattered huts of the Sump, out into the dark valley. He was coming too. He had decided this without telling anyone, the way he decided most things, and when Teo tried to argue, he only looked at him and said, "Three hundred miles. You can't pole a barge," which was true. Mira sat in the bow in her brown cloak, with a bag over her shoulder containing everything she owned. She had taken off her white robes. Teo had not asked her why.

He sat in the stern and looked back.

The Spillway rose up behind them into the starry sky, colossal and black, blotting out half of the heavens. The lights of Calder Reach glittered on its face in tier upon tier, a vast cascade of tiny golden sparks, from the dark smudge of the Sump at its foot all the way up to the Crown. And at the very top, at the edge of the world, burned the Flame. A small blue star. Steady and endless.

He watched it until the river bent and the valley walls closed over it.

Then it was gone.