What the Archdeacon Knew

Valdris Kahl was sitting by the fire in his study, exactly as he had been on the first night, with his hands folded in his lap. But the room was different. The long table had been cleared of scrolls and Leaves. Instead, it was covered with drawings.

Great sheets of them, yellowed and brittle, weighted down at the corners with books. Drawings of the Spillway. Not from the outside, the way a painter would draw it, but from the inside... cut open, like the drawings of the human body in Hesk's Leaves... with every gallery and stair and pipe and chamber laid out in fine, precise lines. Teo recognised the stair he had climbed. He recognised the hall of the sleeping giants. And he recognised, at the very bottom of the wall, deep in its foundations, something he had never seen: a row of great square shapes, side by side, labelled in the old script of the Makers.

LOW-LEVEL OUTLET GATES. 1 THROUGH 4.

"Sit, please," said the Archdeacon. "You've had a long climb. Again."

Teo sat.

'Nine hundred and twelve stairs, twice in one life. And I came up the hard way both times.'

He had come up through the Galleries alone, as the letter asked. Mira had argued. Dane had argued. Bram had said nothing, which was worse. But Teo had read the letter a dozen times, and every time, he had come back to the same thing. Bring your numbers. I will bring mine. That was not a trap. That was a man who wanted to know if he was wrong.

And no one had stopped him. The guards at the top of the prison corridor had stood aside, without a word, and let him pass.

Valdris Kahl looked at him across the fire for a long time. He looked older than Teo remembered. Much older. There were deep lines around his eyes that had not been there two years ago, and his hands, folded in his lap, were very thin.

"Fifty-nine," said the Archdeacon at last. "Three weeks ago."

"Yes."

"I measured it again last night. After you'd gone." He paused. "Seventy-one."

Teo felt the floor tilt under him.

"Three weeks," he said hoarsely. "From fifty-nine to seventy-one in three weeks."

"Yes. The melt has begun. The Sea has risen four feet since the new year." The Archdeacon's voice was perfectly calm. "I suspect it will be over a hundred by the end of the month."

Neither of them said anything for a while.

"How long have you known?" Teo said at last.

"About the leak? Since I was raised to the Crown. Thirty-one years. Every Archdeacon is shown the bucket on the day he is raised, along with the vault and the old script and the Wrath of the Flame. The Keepers have kept that count for sixty years." Kahl looked into the fire. "About what it means... about the doubling... perhaps fifteen years. I am not as quick as you, Teo. I did not have a blind archivist to teach me. I had to work it out for myself, from the Maker books, one page at a time."

"Fifteen years," Teo said. "And you never told anyone."

"No."

"Why?"

The Archdeacon was silent for a long moment. Then he rose from his chair, slowly, like an old man, and walked to the long table, and laid one thin hand flat on the yellowed drawings.

"Do you know what these are?"

"The Spillway. From the inside."

"From the people who built it. The Chantry has had them for three hundred years. And these..." He touched the row of square shapes at the bottom of the drawing. "These are gates. Great iron gates, in the foundations of the wall, behind the Outflow. The Makers built them so that, if they ever needed to, they could open the bottom of the wall like a tap and let the Sea out. Lower it. Relieve the pressure. Do you understand?"

Teo stared at the drawing. His heart had begun to pound.

"If you opened them..."

"The Sea would drop. Slowly. A foot a day, perhaps, with all four open. Less water behind the wall. Less weight. Less pressure on the cracks." Kahl nodded slowly. "Yes. I worked that out too. Twenty years ago." He lifted his hand from the drawing. "The gates are behind the Outflow, in a chamber at the very bottom of the Galleries. They are opened by wheels. Great iron wheels, turned by hand. Twenty years ago, I took the four oldest Keepers and twenty Ashwardens down into that chamber, in secret, and we tried to turn them."

"And?"

"Rust," said the Archdeacon simply. "Six hundred years of it. We turned the first wheel perhaps a quarter of a turn, with twenty men pulling, before the shaft locked solid. The other three would not move at all." He looked at Teo. "We went back eleven times, over five years. We greased them with tallow. We heated them with fire. We beat them with hammers. Nothing."

He returned to his chair and sat down heavily.

"So, then. Let me tell you what I did know, Teo Brask. I knew the wall was failing. I did not know when. Perhaps in my lifetime. Perhaps in my successor's. Perhaps never... walls are strange things, and the Makers built this one very well. I knew the gates would not open. And I knew that there were forty thousand people living on this wall, who had nowhere else to go."

He leaned forward.

"So tell me. What should I have done? Gone down to the Burning Square and told them that the Spillway, which their great-grandparents' great-grandparents were born on, which the Flame itself burns upon, might fall one day — soon, or in a hundred years, I cannot say — and that they should all leave, and go... where? To the Fens, which can feed perhaps a tenth of them? To the Ashlands, where nothing lives? Do you know what that would have done?"

"Saved their lives."

"No," said the Archdeacon. "It would have ended them. Not all at once. Slowly. The Shelf would have fled first, with their silver, and bought every barge and every cart and every sack of grain in the valley. The Sump would have been left behind, as it always is. The Fens would have closed their borders against the flood of starving people, and there would have been war on the river. The Chantry would have broken apart, and with it, the only order this city has ever known. And in ten years, there would have been five thousand people left alive in the valley, scrabbling in the mud... and the Spillway would still be standing, perhaps, empty, mocking them." He sat back. "The Makers had a word for it, in one of the Leaves. Panic. They say it killed more of them, at the end, than the sickness."

Teo did not answer.

He was thinking. Not about what the Archdeacon had said — he had expected most of that — but about how he had said it. Calmly. Carefully. Every step laid out in order, every cost counted. It was the same way Teo thought. The same way Hesk had taught him.

And it was wrong.

'...I think.'

He could feel it was wrong. But it took him a long moment to find the place where it went wrong, the way it had taken him a long moment to find the brewery on the map.

"You did the sum," he said slowly, "for the wall falling sometime. In a hundred years. Maybe never."

"Yes."

"But it isn't sometime anymore. It's seventy-one buckets." Teo leaned forward. "You said it yourself. Over a hundred by the end of the month. And the Sea rising every day. Archdeacon... you're not choosing between a panic now and a wall that might fall in a hundred years. You're choosing between a panic now and forty thousand people dead in the spring."

Valdris Kahl was silent.

"And there's another thing," said Teo. "You said the gates wouldn't open. You tried with twenty men and tallow and fire and hammers." He pulled the red book from his coat and laid it on the table, on top of the drawings of the Spillway. "Did you try with this?"

The Archdeacon looked at the red book for a long moment.

"I have read the Makers' books for forty years," he said. "What can a primer tell me that the vault cannot?"

"Nothing," said Teo. "Probably. You know more than I do. You've read more than I ever will." He paused. "But you read it alone. In a vault. In secret. With four old Keepers and twenty Ashwardens who weren't allowed to ask what they were doing or why." He shook his head. "I've got a ferryman who knows more about water and stone than any book in your vault. I've got blacksmiths from Coopers' Yard who forge iron every day of their lives. I've got a pyre-man who's carried more weight than any Ashwarden on the Crown. I've got a whole Sump full of people who've been told for four hundred years that they're too stupid and too sinful to understand anything." He took a breath. "And every one of them who's had the cow-scratch knows now that they're not."

The fire crackled.

"There was a Maker," said Teo quietly. "The last keeper of the archive under Mount Selk. Her name was Ruth Anand. She lived through the Fall. She lived alone on that mountain for twenty-three years afterward, and she spent them trying to work out why it happened." He reached into his coat and took out the twenty-seventh notebook, and opened it, and laid it on the table beside the red book. "She wrote that the Makers didn't fall because they didn't know enough. They fell because they stopped sharing what they knew. Because they stopped trusting each other. Because some of them decided that ordinary people couldn't handle the truth, and needed to be told what to think." He paused. "She said knowledge that isn't shared isn't knowledge. It's just power."

Valdris Kahl looked down at the open notebook. At the neat, slanting hand of a woman who had been dead for six hundred years.

He did not pick it up. But he did not look away from it, either, for a very long time.

"You think," he said at last, very quietly, "that I have made the Makers' mistake."

"Yes."

"And you think that if you tell the city the truth — all of it — the wall, the gates, the bucket... they will not panic. They will not burn. They will listen, and work, and save themselves."

Teo hesitated.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "But I know what happened when they didn't know. They drank from the pump. They ate the black bread. They burned the old woman with the cats." He looked at the Archdeacon. "I'd rather find out what they do when they do know. Wouldn't you?"

The Archdeacon was silent for a long time.

Then he laughed. It was not the dry, amused laugh Teo remembered from their first meeting. It was quieter than that, and much more tired.

"Do you know," he said, "I almost believe you."

'Almost,' Teo thought. 'The most expensive word in the world.'

The Archdeacon rose from his chair once more, and stood looking down into the fire. "Almost. That is the trouble with you, Teo Brask. You make an old man want to believe things."

He turned.

"Very well. You want the city to hear the truth, and choose. Then it shall. Tomorrow, at noon, in the Cathedral of the Undying Flame, before every soul in Calder Reach who can climb the stairs, you will stand trial for heresy. As the Canon requires." His grey eyes were very clear. "And at your trial, you may say whatever you like. The cow-scratch. The kite. The wall. The bucket. All of it. I will not stop you."

Teo stared at him.

"And you?"

"I will say what I have always said." Valdris Kahl smiled faintly. "That the Flame keeps us. That order keeps us. That the truth is a fire, and that the city will burn if you give it to them." He paused. "And then the city will choose which of us to believe."

He turned back to the fire.

"Bring your numbers, Teo," he said quietly. "I will bring the Flame."