The Weeping Stones

The door was there.

It was two hundred paces up the dry tunnel, set into the curved wall on the left side, exactly where Hesk had said it would be. A Maker door, like the one in the cellar on Brine Lane and the one under Mount Selk, made of the grey metal that never rusted. Some long-dead hand had painted letters on it, and most of them had flaked away, but Teo could still read the last word.

...GALLERY.

It was not locked. It was only stiff. Bram leaned his shoulder against it, and it groaned and gave, and swung inward, and beyond it, there was a stair going up into the dark.

They began to climb.

Teo would never be able to say afterward how long they climbed. Hours. He stopped counting the flights after the hundredth, and he stopped counting the steps long before that. The stair was narrow and steep, made of the same grey poured stone as the rest of the wall, and it went up and up and up in tight square turns, flight after flight, landing after landing, endlessly, into the darkness above the lamp. Every so often, it opened onto a landing with a door, and beyond the door, there was a passage leading off into the dark heart of the wall.

And at some of those landings — out of curiosity, or exhaustion, or a need to see what they were climbing through — they looked.

The Spillway was... hollow.

Not entirely. Not like the mountain at Selk. But it was not the solid wall of stone that everyone in Calder Reach believed it to be. It was full of rooms. Vast ones. Teo stood at the end of one passage, a third of the way up, and held up the lamp, and its light fell away into a chamber so large that he could not see its walls. It was filled with machines. Colossal shapes of rusted iron and dark metal, each one as large as a house, sitting in a long row down the centre of the chamber like a line of sleeping giants. Great curved pipes as wide as the Outflow mouths ran down into them from somewhere above, and out of them below, into the rock. Wheels with blades, taller than a man, frozen in place. Rows of strange cabinets with glass faces, dark and dead.

He did not know what they were. He could guess. The Makers had built the Spillway to hold back the Still Sea... but they had not built it only for that. They had built it to use the water. To make it pour through those great pipes and turn those great wheels, and make something. Something the Makers had needed so badly that they had poured a mountain of stone to get it.

And then they had fallen, and the wheels had stopped, and the river had found its own way out through the mouths at the bottom, and for six hundred years, the giants had slept here in the dark, inside a wall that a whole city lived on, and nobody had known.

'...Power,' Teo thought, staring at them. 'The red book had a word. They made electricity. Out of falling water. And sent it down the wires to every city.'

'The Wrath of the Flame, by the river-full.'

He did not have time to stand and stare. They went on climbing.

It was a little past the halfway point when he noticed the water.

There had always been water. The Spillway wept. Everyone in Calder Reach knew it. From the outside, its face was streaked with long dark stains where water seeped through the cracks and ran down the stone. The Chantry called them the Weeping Stones, and said the wall wept for the sins of the city, and people threw coins and flowers into the pools at the foot of the wall below the worst of them, to ask for the Flame's forgiveness.

Inside, the wall wept too. The stairwell was damp and cold, and in places, thin trickles of water ran down the grey walls and pooled on the landings, and they had to step around them. Teo had not paid them any attention. Water in a wall that held back a sea was not surprising.

But on the hundred and something landing, as he stepped around a pool, the lamplight fell across it at a low angle, and he stopped.

...The water was not clear.

He crouched down and looked at it. It was cloudy. A faint, pale brownish colour, like weak tea, or the water in the Calder after a spring flood. And at the bottom of the pool, where the water was still, there was a thin layer of something fine and soft and grey. He touched it with his finger. It was gritty.

Silt. Fine sand and clay.

He looked up at the wall above the pool. There was a crack there. Long and thin, running diagonally across the grey stone, from the corner of the landing up toward the ceiling. Water was seeping out of it in a dozen small trickles. And around the lowest part of the crack, the stone was stained a rusty brown, and there was a small, soft, wet fan of grey mud spreading down the wall below it, like the delta of a tiny river.

Teo stared at it for a long while...

He had read about this. He was sure of it. Not in the red book... the red book was about bread and soap and fevers. In the hall under Mount Selk, on one of the long nights, he had wandered into a section of shelves about building things. Bridges. Walls. Roads. And dams. Great walls of earth and stone and poured concrete that held back rivers. He had read only a few pages before Mira called him away. But he remembered one of them, because it had frightened him, and he had not known why.

The most dangerous sign of all, the book had said, is muddy seepage. Clear water leaking through a dam is normal. Every dam leaks a little. But if the water coming through is cloudy, or carries soil and sand, it means the water is no longer just passing through. It is carrying the dam away with it. Grain by grain. Hollowing out channels inside the structure, which grow larger as more water flows through them, which carries more material away, which makes them larger still.

In March 1928, a dam called St. Francis, in California, failed suddenly in the night, killing more than four hundred people in the valley below. On the morning of the failure, the dam keeper had reported new leaks, and noticed that the water was muddy. The chief engineer inspected it and declared it safe. The dam collapsed less than twelve hours later.

Teo stood up very slowly.

"Teo," Dane hissed from the stairs above. "Come on."

"There's mud in the water," Teo said.

"So?"

Teo did not answer. He did not know how to answer. He only knew that his heart was beating very fast, and that it had nothing to do with the climb.

He made himself turn away from the crack, and climb.

The next landing had a crack too. And mud... and the next.

...And on the landing after that, there was something else.

It was a mark. On the wall. A neat horizontal line of black paint, at about the height of Teo's shoulder, with a number written beside it. Below it, there was another line, and another number. And another. A whole column of them, running down the wall beside a long, wide crack that wept a steady, cloudy stream of water into a stone channel in the floor. The channel ran across the landing to a drain in the far corner. And beside the channel, on the floor, there was a wooden bucket, and a small brass sand-glass, the kind that measured the passing of time.

Someone had been measuring the leak.

Teo took the lamp from Bram and held it up to the marks, and read them, slowly, from the bottom to the top.

The numbers were years. Years of the Flame. And beside each year, there was a measure... a count of buckets. How many buckets of water the crack poured into the channel while one turn of the sand-glass ran through. Someone had been coming down here, all this way, for years and years, and sitting on this landing, and filling that bucket, and counting.

Year 352. One bucket.

Year 371. Two buckets.

Year 389. Four.

Year 401. Eight.

Year 408. Sixteen.

Year 412. Thirty-two.

The last line was very fresh. The paint was still dark and glossy. And beside it, in a fine, careful hand, someone had written a date only three weeks old.

Year 414, Month of the Thaw. Fifty-nine.

And beneath that, very small, a pair of letters.

V.K.

Teo stood on the landing in the lamplight and stared at the wall.

Dane came back down the stairs. So did Bram. They stood beside him and looked at it too. Dane frowned at the numbers. Bram's lips moved silently as he read them. Teo did not explain. He did not think he could have explained it if he had tried.

He was counting. Of course he was.

One bucket. Then two, after nineteen years. Then four, after eighteen more. Then eight, after twelve. Then sixteen, after seven. Then thirty-two, after four.

Doubling. Every time.

And every time, faster.

Then fifty-nine. In less than two.

'He knows,' Teo thought. It was a very quiet, very cold thought, and it sat in the middle of his mind like a stone. 'He's known for years. He comes down here himself. All this way, from the Cathedral, into the wall. And he counts.'

'...He counts.'

"Cart-man," said Dane. His voice was low and urgent. "Whatever that is, it'll keep. The guards change at the third bell. We have to be at the top by then. Now."

Teo tore his eyes away from the wall.

He climbed. He climbed with his legs burning and his breath sawing in his chest and the numbers turning over and over in his head. Fifty-nine. Doubling. Faster. And they were nearly at the top before the other thought came to him, the one that had been waiting behind the first one all along.

Hesk had said that the Galleries were built for the Makers' workmen. To walk inside the wall. To watch it.

And to mend it.

Nobody had mended the Spillway for six hundred years.

They reached the top of the stair as the third bell rang somewhere far above them, muffled through the stone. A short passage. A door, standing ajar, with a thin line of torchlight beyond it. Dane went first, sword drawn, silent as a cat. Teo followed. Bram came last, filling the passage behind them.

Beyond the door was the prison.

It was exactly as Dane had described. A long corridor cut into the rock, lit by smoky torches in iron brackets, with heavy wooden doors set into the walls on either side. At the far end, a hundred paces away, there was a table, and two Ashwardens sitting at it, playing dice by the light of a lamp, their backs half turned. Nobody was looking down the corridor toward the dark end where the stair came up.

Because there was nothing down there. Just more tunnel, going down into the dark.

Dane moved along the doors, quickly, peering through the small barred windows in each one. At the sixth door on the left, he stopped, and turned, and nodded.

Teo was beside him in an instant.

Through the bars, by the light of a guttering torch, he saw a small stone cell, with a heap of straw in the corner, and a figure sitting on it with her knees drawn up and her dark braid hanging loose over her shoulder.

She raised her head.

Her face was bruised. Her eyes, in the torchlight, were very wide, and very dark, and absolutely furious.

"You idiot," Mira whispered. "You absolute idiot. They'll kill you."

"Probably," said Teo. He found that he was grinning like a fool. "Mira. Listen. We have to get you out. And then we have to get everybody out."

She stared at him through the bars.

"Everybody?"

"The whole city," said Teo.

Behind him, on the other side of the wall, deep in the dark heart of the Spillway, he could feel it. He had felt it all the way up the stair, without knowing what it was. A faint, low, endless trembling in the stone under his feet. The weight of the Still Sea, pushing, pushing, against a wall that was slowly, grain by grain, being carried away.