Taken

They came for Mira three days after the storm, at dawn, while Teo was down at the ferry docks.

He would think about that for a long time afterward. Where he had been. What he had been doing. He had gone down to meet Bram's barge, which was coming up from the Fens with a fresh pot of cow-blister threads from Hessa's cows... not because the Sump needed them anymore, with every arm passing the blister on to the next, but because the Shelf had begun, very quietly, to send its servants down to the Mercy House after dark, and then its children, and then, two nights ago, a frightened merchant's wife in a hooded cloak who would not give her name. The arm-to-arm chain could not keep up. And Teo had wanted to be there when the barge came in, to see the threads for himself, because he could never quite trust anything he had not seen.

So he was standing on the stones of the dock in the grey morning, watching Bram's barge come around the bend of the river, when Nell came running down the bank toward him.

She was barefoot. She had blood on her face that was not hers. And she was clutching Mira's grey book against her chest with both arms, the way Hesk had clutched the last Leaf on the floor of the burning cellar.

"They took her," she said. "Teo. They took her."

There had been twenty of them. Ashwardens, from the Crown, with their masks down and their swords drawn. Not Dane's men. Captain Varro's... a lean, hard-faced captain from the Archdeacon's own guard, who had marched up and down the switchback road all winter and never once set foot in the pox streets. They had come in through the front doors of the Mercy House while the sick were still asleep, and gone straight to the storeroom where Mira slept, as if they had known exactly where to look.

Cobb had tried to stop them. They had broken his arm. Nell had been asleep under a pile of grain sacks in the corner, and she had woken to the shouting, and seen Mira dragged out in her nightdress with her hands bound behind her — and seen the grey book on the floor by her pallet, where it always was — and grabbed it, and hidden under the sacks again, and stayed there, not breathing, while the Ashwardens turned the storeroom upside down looking for it.

"They wanted the book," Nell said. Her voice was shaking. "They kept saying, where's the book, where's the count. They didn't find it." Her face crumpled for an instant, and then went fierce again. "I didn't let them find it."

Teo took the grey book out of her arms. His hands were not steady...

Then he put his arms around her, and held her, very hard, on the cold stones of the dock, while Bram's barge bumped gently against the bank beside them and the big man climbed out and stood over them in silence.

The proclamation was read in Saint Orlen's Square at noon.

The Ashwarden who read it stood on the dry trough of the dead pump, under the shadow of the bell tower with its iron rod and its thick iron chain, and did not look up at it once. He read in a loud, flat voice, and the people of the Sump stood around the square in a dense, silent crowd and listened.

By order of the Voice of the Undying Flame. Mira Solenne, formerly an acolyte of the Mercy House of the Lower Wards, is found guilty of heresy, of the corruption of the pure flesh with the filth of beasts, of consorting with the condemned heretic Teo Brask, and of the blasphemous imitation of the Wrath of the Flame. She is condemned to be burned in the Burning Square at noon on the fifth day from this.

Unless the heretic Teo Brask presents himself at the gates of the Crown before that hour. In which case, by the mercy of the Flame, the woman will be released.

The Ashwarden rolled up the scroll, stepped down from the trough, and walked away. Nobody stopped him.

Teo stood at the edge of the crowd with his hood up and did not move for a long time.

They met in the Mercy House storeroom that night. All of them. Hesk in his chair, which Bram had carried up from the boathouse. Nell on her grain sack, with the grey book in her lap. Bram by the door. Cobb on a pallet in the corner, with his arm splinted and bound, white-faced but refusing to be left out. And Captain Sorrel Dane, leaning against the wall in his grey coat, with no mask, his face like stone.

Teo laid it out.

He did it the way Hesk had taught him, the way he had done it for the pump, a lifetime ago. Plainly. In steps. Every choice, and what it would cost.

He could give himself up. Walk up the nine hundred and twelve stairs to the gates of the Crown, and let them take him. And perhaps the Archdeacon would keep his word, and release Mira. Perhaps. Valdris Kahl had not lied to Teo, as far as he knew, in all the time they had circled each other. But he had not exactly told the truth, either. And even if he did keep his word... Teo would be taken before the Flame, in the Cathedral, before the whole city, and the Wrath of the Flame would be called down upon him. Eight jars, chained together. Perhaps more. The old man in the Cathedral had been thrown down by one.

...Teo did not think he would get up again.

And after that, the cow-scratch would be a heresy whose teacher had been struck dead by the Flame, publicly, before everyone. And the Shelf would stop sending its children down to the Mercy House after dark. And the next time the red pox came, there would be nobody who remembered how it was done, except a ten-year-old girl with a grey book.

He could refuse. Stay in the Sump, where the Ashwardens would not come. Let them burn Mira.

Nobody said anything about that one. Teo did not even say it aloud. He just let it sit there in the middle of the room for a moment, so that they all knew he had thought of it... and then put it aside.

He could rouse the Sump. March up the switchback road with every man and woman who had a dark scar on their arm, and storm the Burning Square on the fifth day, and take her back. There were thousands of them now. Thousands who owed their lives to the cow-scratch, who had stood in Saint Orlen's Square in the rain and laughed at the Wrath of the Flame.

"And the Ashwardens would kill them," said Dane flatly, from the wall. "Two hundred of them, armed and armoured, in the narrow streets of the Shelf. Varro would hold the switchback road with twenty men and a barricade. You'd lose hundreds before you even reached the square. And then the Shelf would rise against the Sump, the way the Archdeacon always said it would." He paused. "He'd want you to do it, cart-man. He's been saying for a year that the truth would make the Sump burn the city. Don't prove him right."

Teo was silent for a while...

"Or," said Hesk quietly, from his chair.

Everyone turned to look at him.

"Or," said the old man, "you could go and get her."

Teo stared at him.

"She's in the Galleries," Dane said. "Inside the Spillway. Under the Crown. The Chantry's prison is down there, in the old Maker tunnels. You can only get in from the top, through the Cathedral. There's one stair. One door. Guards on both, day and night. Varro will have doubled them." He shook his head. "Nobody gets into the Galleries without going through the Crown first."

"That's what the Chantry thinks," said Hesk.

The old man's blind face was turned toward Dane, and there was a small, sly smile on it, the same smile he had worn on the night Teo first brought Nell to the cellar.

"I was an archivist, Captain. For twenty years, before they took my eyes. Do you know what an archivist does? He keeps things. Every page, every scrap, every drawing the Chantry ever found and did not burn. And among the things I kept, in the great library under the Crown, there was a set of drawings of the Spillway. Maker drawings. The plans of the wall, from the people who built it." He tapped his own forehead. "Nobody had looked at them for two hundred years. Nobody cared. They were just old pictures of tunnels. But I was young, and curious, and I looked at them for a very long time."

The room was very quiet...

"The Galleries do not only go up to the Crown, Captain," said Hesk. "They go down. All the way. They were built for the Makers' workmen, to walk inside the wall and watch it, and mend it. There are stairs inside that wall, hundreds of flights of them, from the very top to the very bottom. And at the very bottom..." He smiled. "At the very bottom, they come out where the Makers' great pipes come out. Where the river comes out of the wall."

Teo's breath caught. The Outflow...

He knew that place. Everyone in the Sump knew it. At the foot of the Spillway, below the Mercy House, below the pyre-yard, where the Calder came hissing and roaring out of three great dark round mouths in the base of the wall. The Outflow. Nobody went near it. The water came out too fast and too cold, and the mouths were black and endless, and the Chantry said they were the throats of the Pit.

"The middle mouth is dry," said Hesk. "Or it was, when the drawings were made. It's a tunnel for workmen, not for water. It runs up into the wall beside the others. And somewhere inside it, there's a door into the Galleries." He paused. "Whether the door is still there, after six hundred years — whether it opens — whether the stairs still stand... I cannot tell you. I have not seen them. I have only seen the drawings, and I have not seen anything at all for thirty years."

Nobody spoke for a long time.

"And the prison?" Teo said at last. "Where in the Galleries is it?"

"High," said Dane slowly. He had pushed himself off the wall and was standing in the middle of the room, his face intent. "Near the top. Two hundred feet below the Cathedral floor, perhaps. I've stood guard there. There's a long corridor with cells cut into the rock on either side. Twenty of them. The guards sit at the top end, by the stair to the Cathedral. Nobody watches the bottom end, because there's nothing down there. Just more tunnel, going down into the dark." He looked at Hesk. "I always wondered where it went."

"So if we came up from below," Teo said slowly, "we'd come out at the end nobody watches."

"If," said Dane. "If the tunnel's there. If the door opens. If the stairs hold. If you can climb the whole height of the Spillway inside the wall, in the dark, and still have the strength to fight at the top." He looked at Teo. "That's a great many ifs, cart-man."

Teo looked at the grey book in Nell's lap. At Cobb's splinted arm. At the empty pallet in the corner where Mira slept.

"If, if, if," he said quietly. "I know."

He stood up.

Bram stood up at the same time, without a word. So did Dane.

They went in two nights later, when the moon was dark.

They went down past the Mercy House and the pyre-yard, along the narrow strip of slick black rock at the very foot of the Spillway, where the wall met the earth. The roar grew louder as they went, until Teo could not hear his own footsteps, until it was not a sound anymore but a trembling in the ground and the rock and his own bones.

And then they came around the last buttress of the wall, and there was the Outflow.

Three great round black mouths, side by side, each one taller than three men, set into the base of the colossal wall. Out of the two on the sides, the Calder came pouring, white and thundering, in two solid columns of water that hit the riverbed below with a force that shook the earth and threw up a freezing, endless fog of spray. The noise was beyond anything Teo had ever heard. It was the voice of the Still Sea itself, pushing against the wall, finding the only way out it had.

And the middle mouth was dark. And silent. And dry.

Bram lit the lamp. Dane drew his sword. Teo checked the coil of rope over his shoulder, and the steel bar, and the brass button inside his shirt.

Then the three of them walked into the Spillway.