The Blind Man of Brine Lane

Nell refused to go to the Chantry orphanage.

She said so loudly, several times, in the pyre-yard, in the street, and finally on the stairs of the collapsed chandlery on Brine Lane where Teo had lived for the last four years. She said that the orphanage sisters cut your hair off and made you scrub stone with sand until your fingers bled. She said that they sold the big girls to the Shelf as maids and you never saw them again. She said she would bite anyone who tried to take her there, and Teo, having seen her teeth, believed her.

"Fine," he said at last. "Fine. You can stay for a while."

"How long is a while?"

"Until I think of something..."

Nell considered this, and seemed to decide that it was an acceptable answer. Then she looked around his room... a damp, slanted space under the broken roof with a straw mattress, a crate, a candle stub and a bucket... and wrinkled her nose.

"It smells."

"It's the Sump. Everything smells... including you."

"It smells worse."

Teo opened his mouth to argue, closed it again, and sighed.

'...She's not wrong.'

The chandlery had collapsed long before he moved in. Half its upper floor had fallen into the cellar years ago, and the cellar, being below the level of the river, had promptly filled with water. Nobody wanted to live in a building that was slowly sinking into its own basement, which was precisely why Teo could afford it. The smell came from below. It was the smell of old water and wet paper and something else, something sharp and strange, like the inside of an old book left out in the rain.

Teo was very familiar with that smell — far more familiar than he would have liked to admit. He had been visiting its source for almost three years.

He looked at Nell, weighed the risks, and found, somewhat to his surprise, that he did not have the strength left to care.

"Come on," he said. "There's someone you should meet. Don't touch anything."

He led her down the back stairs, which ended halfway down in black water, and along a narrow ledge of stacked bricks that someone had built along the wall a long time ago. At the end of the ledge, there was a door. It was a Maker door, made of some grey metal that had never rusted, and it was set into the old foundations of a building much older than the chandlery.

Teo knocked twice, paused, and knocked three more times.

"Who is it?" a dry voice called from the other side.

"The cart-man."

"Is it Fifthday already?"

"No. It's Secondday. I brought someone."

There was a long silence.

"...Well, well," said the voice at last, sounding more curious than alarmed. "That's new."

The door creaked open.

The room beyond was small and very dry, which in itself was a kind of miracle. It sat on a raised shelf of the old foundations, above the waterline, its walls lined with crates and jars and bundles wrapped in oilcloth. A small lamp burned on a table in the middle. And beside the table, in a chair made of mismatched planks, sat an old man.

He was tiny and bent, with a halo of white hair and a face like a dried apple. He wore a faded blue coat with brass buttons, much patched. And where his eyes should have been, there were only two smooth, pale hollows of scar tissue, as if someone had pressed hot coins against his face and held them there.

Nell gasped and grabbed Teo's sleeve.

The old man smiled.

"Ah. A small one," he said. "I can hear her breathing. Don't worry, child. I don't bite. Not since I lost the last of my teeth, at least."

Teo cleared his throat.

"Nell, this is Hesk. Hesk, this is Nell. Her mother died of the flux this morning."

The old man's smile faded. He was silent for a moment.

"I'm sorry, Nell," he said simply.

Nell stared at him. Then, because she was ten and because it had been a very long day, she said:

"What happened to your eyes?"

"Nell!"

But Hesk only laughed, a soft, wheezing sound.

"No, no. It's a fair question. The Chantry took them, little one. A long time ago. I used to work for them, you see. I kept their books in the great library under the Crown, and one day, they caught me reading something I was not supposed to read." He tapped one of the scars lightly. "So they made sure I would never read anything again."

Nell's eyes went very wide.

"What were you reading?"

Hesk turned his blind face toward Teo, and his smile came back, small and sly.

"Shall we show her, cart-man?"

Teo hesitated. Then he went to one of the crates in the corner, lifted the lid, and carefully took out a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. He set it on the table and unwrapped it.

Inside were pages.

Not many. Perhaps sixty or seventy, of all sizes and colours, some whole, most torn, many stained with water and smoke. They were made of a material that was not quite parchment and not quite cloth, impossibly thin and smooth, covered in tiny, perfectly even letters that no human hand could have written. Some had pictures. Diagrams of strange machines. Drawings of the human body opened like a book. Maps of coastlines that existed nowhere in the world anymore.

These were the Leaves... the pages of the Makers.

The Chantry had decreed, three centuries ago, that every one of them was to be burned. Most had been. These were the ones that had not.

Hesk had spent forty years saving them, one page at a time, smuggling them out of the Chantry's library inside his coat lining before he was caught. And for the last three years, ever since a skinny cart-man had stumbled into his cellar while looking for a dry place to sleep, Teo had been reading them to him. Fifthday nights, by lamplight, in exchange for bread.

That was how Teo had learned his letters. That was how he had learned that the Makers had written not only about the stars and the mountains, but about blood and bread and fever and water. And that was also, he suspected, why he could not stop counting.

Nell reached out a finger toward the nearest page, then snatched it back.

"Is it magic?"

"No," said Hesk. "It's much more dangerous than magic. It's knowledge." He leaned back in his chair. "Now. The cart-man did not bring you here on a Secondday just to show you my treasures. Something is bothering him. I can hear it in his breathing as well. Speak, boy."

Teo sat down on a crate. He did not speak for a while, gathering his thoughts. Then he told Hesk everything. The bodies. The streets. Thirty-two dead today, all from around Saint Orlen's Square, and not one from the Rope Walk or the tanneries or the Old Bridge.

When he was finished, Hesk said nothing for a long time.

"Interesting," he murmured at last. "Very interesting. And what does the Chantry say?"

"That it's a judgement."

"Of course they do. And what do you say?"

Teo frowned.

"I don't know... That's why I'm here."

The old man smiled, and tapped the table with one bony finger.

"Wrong answer. 'I don't know' is where we start, not where we stop. Do you remember the Three Questions?"

Teo sighed. He did. Hesk had made him recite them a hundred times, until they had worn grooves into his skull.

"What do you see," he said dully. "What would be true if you were wrong. And how would you know."

"Good. So. What do you see?"

"People dying in four streets."

"And if the Chantry is right, and it's a judgement on sin, what would be true?"

Teo thought about it — slowly, the way Hesk had taught him.

"...Sinners would be dying everywhere. Not just around Saint Orlen's. The Rope Walk is the worst place in the Sump. The whores and the gamblers and the thieves all live there. If the Flame was punishing sin, it would start with them."

"And are they dying?"

"No."

"Then what does that tell you?"

Teo opened his mouth, and found, with some surprise, that he did not like the answer.

'That the Chantry is wrong.'

He did not say it out loud. In the Sump, there were some thoughts that one did not say out loud, even in a cellar below the river. But Hesk seemed to hear it anyway. The old man leaned forward, his blind face eager, and spoke in a low, quick voice.

"Then something else is killing them, boy... something real. Something that lives in those four streets, and not in the others. Something you can find, if you look properly." He smiled. "So. Tomorrow, you will bring me chalk. And we are going to draw a map."

Nell, who had been listening to all of this with her mouth slightly open, looked from one of them to the other.

"...Can I help?" she asked.