A Place to Stand

"Out!"

Teo did not know who shouted it. Perhaps it was him. He was on his feet before he was fully awake, grabbing Mira's arm, hauling her toward the door, and the whole temple was shaking around them, dust pouring down from the broken roof in pale ribbons, the coloured glass in the high windows rattling in its frames.

The groaning had become a roar.

They burst out into the street, into the cold starlight, and Teo turned and looked up.

The leaning tower to the north was moving.

It had stood for six hundred years, tilted at its terrible angle against its neighbour, and now, tonight, for no reason at all, it had decided it was tired. It was turning. Very slowly, the way a sleeping man rolls over, its whole vast bulk was twisting and sliding sideways along the face of the tower it had been leaning on. Steel screamed against steel. Sheets of glass broke loose and came spinning down out of the darkness, catching the starlight, and smashed into the street like falling stars. Great chunks of grey stone tore free and tumbled after them.

And it was sliding toward the temple.

"Run!"

They ran.

Turnip the mule was already gone... it had torn its rope out of the stone and bolted into the dark the moment the groaning started, wiser than any of them. Teo ran with Mira's hand in his, across the wide street, toward the shelter of a low building on the far side, and he could hear Bram's heavy footsteps behind them, and the roar growing louder and louder until it was not a sound anymore but a weight, pressing on his skull...

Then the tower hit the temple, and the world turned white.

When Teo could see again, he was lying face down in the sand, and the air was so thick with dust that he could not breathe. He coughed and coughed. His ears were ringing. Somewhere very close, someone was coughing too.

"...Mira?"

"Here." A hand found his shoulder. "I'm here. I'm all right. Teo... where's Bram?"

Teo pushed himself up onto his knees and looked around wildly.

The dust was settling. Slowly, in the grey starlight, he began to see. The temple was gone. Where it had stood, there was a mountain of broken stone and twisted steel and shattered glass, still shifting and settling with small sliding sounds. Beyond it, the great tower had come to rest at last, lying across three streets like a felled giant.

And at the edge of the rubble, not twenty paces from where Teo knelt, Bram Tull was lying on his side in the sand.

A slab of grey Maker stone lay across his left leg.

Teo was beside him before he knew he had moved. Bram's face was grey with dust and grey underneath it, too, and his teeth were clenched so hard that the muscles stood out in his jaw like ropes. He was conscious. He was not screaming. That, somehow, was the most frightening thing of all.

"Bram... Bram, can you move?"

"No," said Bram, through his teeth.

Teo looked at the slab.

It was a piece of a wall, or a floor... a flat slab of poured stone, perhaps as long as a man and half as wide, and as thick as Teo's forearm. It had fallen across Bram's leg just below the knee, pinning it to the ground. Teo could not see how badly the leg was hurt. He could only see that it was trapped, and that the stone was enormous.

He crouched, got his fingers under the edge of it, and heaved.

Nothing. Not an inch. Not a hair. It was like trying to lift the Spillway.

Mira knelt on the other side and pulled with him. Nothing. Bram set his hands against it and pushed, his whole body shaking with the effort, a low groan forcing its way out through his clenched teeth. The slab rocked very slightly... and settled back, and Bram's groan became something much worse, and he stopped.

Teo sat back on his heels, gasping.

He knew how much stone weighed. He had loaded enough rubble onto his cart in the Sump to know. A slab that size — a slab of Maker stone that size, dense and heavy — weighed as much as six men. Perhaps eight. Bram, on a good day, might lift two men. He and Mira together might lift one, if they were lucky.

It was not enough. It was not anywhere near enough.

'Think. Think. Panic is only thinking that has forgotten where it was going.'

He made himself breathe. In. Out. He looked at the slab, and the sand, and the rubble around it, and the stars above.

And he remembered the spanner.

That night in Saint Orlen's Square, with the rusted nut that would not turn. He had moved his hands to the very end of the spanner, as far from the nut as he could reach, and pulled, and the nut had turned. Leverage. The Leaf with the drawing of the man moving a boulder with a long pole. He had not understood it then. He had only known that it worked.

But he had read the rest of that Leaf later, in the cellar, to Hesk. He made himself remember it now. Slowly. Word by word.

It was about a man called Archimedes. Another of the ancients, older than the Makers, like Eratosthenes, from the same sea. And Archimedes had worked out the law of the lever. It was very simple. You took a long, stiff bar, and you rested it on something solid, a rock or a block, close to the weight you wanted to lift. That was the fulcrum... the turning point. Then you pushed down on the long end of the bar. And the law said that the force you needed, times its distance from the turning point, equalled the weight, times its distance from the turning point. Which meant that if your end of the bar was ten times further from the turning point than the stone was... you only needed a tenth of the stone's weight to lift it.

Archimedes had said, the Leaf claimed, that if someone gave him a place to stand, and a lever long enough, he could move the whole world.

Teo had laughed at that, the first time. He was not laughing now.

"I need a bar," he said. "A long one. Long and strong. Metal, if we can find it."

Mira did not ask why. She was already scrambling over the rubble in the starlight, searching. Teo searched too. There was metal everywhere in the ruins of the temple — twisted rods and bent sheets and tangled wire — but most of it was too thin, or too short, or too rusted, and bent when he tried it against his knee.

It was Mira who found it. A long, square bar of dark steel, sticking out of a heap of broken stone at the edge of the rubble... part of the frame of the fallen tower, perhaps, or of the temple's roof. It was as long as two men lying end to end and as thick as Teo's wrist. It took both of them, pulling and wrenching and swearing, to drag it free.

"Now a block," Teo panted. "Something solid. To rest it on. Close to the slab."

They found a chunk of stone the size of a small barrel and rolled it, inch by inch, across the sand until it sat right beside the slab, almost touching it. Then they lifted one end of the steel bar and worked it under the edge of the slab... just a hand's width under, no more... and laid the bar across the top of the block.

Teo stepped back and looked at it.

The bar ran from under the slab, across the block, and out the other side, long and dark, its far end sticking up into the air at an angle above their heads. The block was perhaps a forearm's length from the edge of the slab. The far end of the bar was — he paced it — perhaps twelve forearms from the block.

Twelve times further. Which meant they needed only a twelfth of the weight to lift it.

A twelfth of eight men was less than one man.

'If I'm right. If I've remembered it right. If the bar doesn't bend. If the block doesn't crack.'

'...If, if, if.'

"Mira," he said. "When I say, pull down on the end of the bar. All your weight. Hang from it if you have to. Bram, when it lifts, pull your leg out. Don't wait. Don't think. Just pull."

Bram looked at him with dull, pain-dark eyes. Then he nodded once.

Teo and Mira climbed up the rubble, reached up, and took hold of the far end of the steel bar together. It was cold and rough under Teo's hands. He could feel Mira beside him, her shoulder pressed against his, her breathing fast.

"Now."

They pulled.

For a moment, nothing happened. The bar bent, very slightly, under their weight. Teo's heart stopped.

And then, with a long, low, grinding scrape of stone on stone, the edge of the slab lifted off the sand.

A finger's width. A hand's width. Two hands.

Teo hung from the bar with all his weight, his arms burning, his feet leaving the rubble, and could hardly believe it. It was so easy. He and Mira together weighed perhaps as much as one big man, and the slab that had not moved for three of them pulling with all their strength was rising... slowly, steadily, as if it weighed nothing at all.

"Bram, now!"

Bram dragged his leg out from under the stone with a single, terrible roar of pain, and rolled clear.

Teo let go of the bar. So did Mira. The slab came down onto the sand with a dull, heavy thud that Teo felt through the soles of his feet, and was still.

They stood there, panting, in the starlight.

Bram was lying on his back in the sand, staring up at the sky, his chest heaving. His left leg was soaked dark with blood from the knee down. But it was straight. It was not bent the wrong way. When Mira knelt beside him and ran her hands over it, very gently, Bram gasped and swore... in a long, colourful string of Fen words that Teo did not know but whose meaning was perfectly clear... and then lay back, and said, quite calmly:

"Not broken."

Mira let out a breath that was half a sob.

"No," she said. "Not broken. Cut. Badly. Down to the bone. But not broken."

Teo sat down heavily in the sand beside them. His hands were shaking. He looked at the long steel bar, still lying across the block, its far end pointing up at the stars.

'A place to stand,' he thought, a little hysterically. 'And a lever long enough.'

'...Archimedes, you magnificent bastard.'

Somewhere out in the dark city, a long way off, something howled.

It was not the wind. The wind did not howl like that, rising and falling, and then breaking off, and then being answered by another howl, and another, from different directions, closer.

Bram turned his head on the sand.

"Dogs," he said quietly. "Wild ones. They smell the blood."