Show Them

Nobody stopped him.

Teo had half expected the Ashwardens to drag him back the moment he turned around. They did not. He could feel them behind him, along the walls of the nave, two hundred grey coats and iron masks, and he could feel them not moving. Waiting. Looking, as everyone was looking, at the Archdeacon.

Valdris Kahl stood on the altar in his white and gold, and said nothing. He had given his word.

So Teo began.

He began with the button. He did not know why, exactly. It was the smallest thing he had, and the first. He took it out of his shirt... the little brass button from Hesk's coat, with its bead of glass no larger than a poppy seed... and held it up, and told them what it was. A lens. A window for very small things. The way a cloth-merchant called Leeuwenhoek had made them, in a Maker town called Delft, long before the Makers flew. And then he took a sliver of glass from his pocket, and a drop of water from a flask he had filled that morning at the old pump in Saint Orlen's Square, where the river seeped up into the dead well.

"Look," he said, to the man nearest him at the foot of the steps. "Hold it to your eye. Close. Closer."

The man was a merchant of the Shelf, in a fur-lined coat. He stared at Teo as if he were mad. Then, slowly, because everyone was watching, he took the button and the glass and held them to his eye.

It took him a long moment to find it. Teo saw the exact instant when he did. The man's whole body went rigid.

"...What is that?" he whispered.

"Small lives," said Teo. "In the water. The same small lives that were in the pump of Saint Orlen's, three summers ago, when the grey flux killed two hundred and fifty-four people in the Sump. They're in all water that hasn't been boiled. Most of them are harmless. Some of them aren't." He held out his hand for the button. "Pass it back. Let the next person look."

The merchant did not pass it back. He passed it to the woman beside him.

And then it was gone, into the crowd, from hand to hand, and Teo could hear it travelling... a little ripple of gasps and whispers moving slowly back through the nave, like the wake of a boat.

He did not wait for it to come back.

'I'm never seeing that button again, am I.'

He told them about the flux. About the map on the cellar wall, and the brewery, and the widow on the Old Bridge, and the physician called John Snow in a city called London, who had done the same thing six hundred years ago. He told them about the black spurs in the rye, and Ama Tull sorting grain on her knees in the Fens, and the count that showed who burned and who did not. He did not make speeches. He did not raise his voice. He said what he had seen, and what he had counted, and how they could check it for themselves.

And then he said: "Mira."

She came out of the crowd, from the shadows under the pillars, in a plain brown dress, with her dark hair loose and her bruised face lifted. A murmur went through the Cathedral... the acolyte, the one who spoke at the burning, the one who was condemned... and she walked down the long aisle between the packed bodies, slowly, and stopped beside Teo at the foot of the altar steps.

She was holding the grey book.

She opened it, and read the numbers aloud.

Two thousand one hundred and six people scratched in the first four weeks. Eleven of them caught the red pox afterward... all in the first few days, before the scratch could take hold. Three died. And in the same streets, at the same time, among those who had not been scratched, nine hundred and forty people, and two hundred and twelve of them had caught the pox, and sixty-eight of them had died.

"Since then," Mira said, her voice ringing clear in the silence, "we have scratched eleven thousand, four hundred and thirty people. In the Sump, and in the Shelf. Many of you are standing here." She lifted her head. "Raise your arm, if you bear the mark."

For a long moment, nothing happened.

Then, somewhere at the back of the nave, under the pillars, an arm went up. A thin arm, in a ragged sleeve, pushed back to show a small dark scar above the elbow.

Then another. Then three more. Then a dozen. Then a hundred.

Teo watched them rise. All across the back of the Cathedral, from the Sump, under the pillars, in the shadows... and then, slowly, hesitantly, from among the furs and silks of the Shelf too. A woman near the front, with her hood pulled up. A young servant. A merchant's son. Arms going up all through the nave, in their hundreds, in their thousands, until the Cathedral of the Undying Flame looked like a field of grain bending in the wind.

Mira's voice had begun to shake. She did not stop reading.

"Of those eleven thousand," she said, "twenty-six caught the red pox. All but three of those recovered. And of those of you who would not take it..." She closed the book. "You know. You buried them."

Nobody said anything. All those arms stayed raised.

Then a voice spoke from the side of the nave, from among the Ashwardens. Flat and hard and carrying.

"My son."

Captain Sorrel Dane stepped out from the line of grey coats. He was not wearing his mask. He was holding the hand of a thin boy of eight, whose face was marked with a dozen small, pale pits on the forehead and cheeks.

"His mother had the red pox," Dane said. "He sat with her for two days at the end. Four days later, I took him to the cart-man, in the night, and asked for the cow-scratch." He looked up at the altar, at the Archdeacon, and his face was like stone. "Every child in our street who sat with the sick that week is dead. Pell has twelve marks on his face. That's all."

He did not say anything else. He did not need to.

Teo turned around, then, and faced the altar.

Valdris Kahl had not moved. He stood behind the black stone with his hands folded, looking down at Teo with an expression that Teo could not read at all.

Beside him, the acolytes had stopped turning the crank. The glass wheel was still. But the eight jars stood ready in their box, charged and gleaming, their brass balls catching the light of the Flame.

Teo walked up the altar steps.

Nobody stopped him. The deacons in red drew back as he passed. He walked right up to the box of jars, and stood beside it, and looked out at the city.

"This," he said, "is the Wrath of the Flame."

He took a short length of chain from his pocket — thin iron chain, the kind that held a lamp from a ceiling — and fixed one end of it to the leg of the heavy iron candle-stand beside the altar, which stood on the stone floor of the Cathedral, which stood on the Spillway, which stood on the earth. Then he wrapped his hand in a thick fold of dry wool. Then he took the other end of the chain, very carefully, by the wool, and touched it to the brass ball on top of the nearest jar.

There was a crack like a whip. A flash of blue-white light. Then another, and another, all down the line of jars as the chain touched the rods — a sound like eight small thunderbolts in quick succession — and the smell of hot metal and lightning filled the air.

And then nothing.

Teo let go of the chain. He took the wool off his hand. And then, very slowly, so that everyone could see, he reached out with his bare fingers and laid them flat on top of the brass ball.

Nothing happened.

'...Thank you, Benjamin Franklin. Thank you very, very much.'

"It's empty," he said. "The fire's gone into the ground. Through the chain. Where lightning goes, when it strikes the rod on the bell tower of Saint Orlen's." He took his hand away. "It's a jar. Lined with foil, like the foil on your candles. You fill it up by spinning a glass wheel against a leather pad, and it holds the spark, and when something touches it, the spark jumps out. The Makers called it a Leyden jar. A blacksmith and a glass-maker in Coopers' Yard can build one in a week." He looked out at the silent city. "I know, because they did."

The silence in the Cathedral was a living thing.

"The Wrath of the Flame," said Teo, "is a machine. The Archdeacon knows it. Every Archdeacon has known it. They found it in a Maker book, in the vault under this floor, four hundred years ago. And they've been using it to frighten you ever since."

He turned, at last, and faced Valdris Kahl across the altar.

The Archdeacon was looking at him. Not at the jars. Not at the crowd. At him. And in his clear grey eyes, there was something that Teo had never seen there before.

It was not anger.

"And now," said Teo quietly, "the wall."

He did not say it to the Archdeacon. He said it to the city.

And he told them.

He told them about the stair inside the Spillway. About the hall of sleeping iron giants. About the cracks on the landings, and the cloudy water, and the fans of grey mud. About the dam called St. Francis in a Maker land far away, and the keeper who saw mud in the leaks, and the engineer who said it was safe, and the four hundred who died before midnight.

And he told them about the bucket.

He did not have the bucket. He had something better. Captain Dane had climbed the Galleries again the night before, alone, with a chisel and a lamp, and cut the whole column of painted marks out of the soft rock beside the crack, in a single slab the size of a door. It had taken him all night. Six of his men had carried it up the stair at dawn. And it stood now, propped against the foot of the altar, where Teo had asked them to put it, facing the nave.

One bucket. Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen. Thirty-two. Fifty-nine.

Seventy-one.

V.K.

Teo explained what doubling meant. He told them about the king and the game-board and the grains of rice. He told them about the snow melting in the mountains, and the Sea rising four feet since the new year. He told them about the gates in the foundations of the wall, which the Makers had built to let the Sea out, and which had not moved in six hundred years.

He did not tell them when the wall would fall. He did not know. He told them so.

"I might be wrong," he said, into the silence. "I want you to know that. I've been wrong before. I can't see inside the wall. Nobody can. Maybe it holds for years." He swallowed. "But I can count. And the count says that the leak is doubling, faster and faster, and the Sea is rising, and the Archdeacon has known for fifteen years."

He stopped.

There was nothing else to say. He had said it all.

For a long, long moment, the Cathedral of the Undying Flame was completely, utterly silent.

Then Valdris Kahl spoke.

He did not raise his voice. He did not look at the jars, or the slab of rock, or Teo. He looked out over the city... over the forty thousand faces, the forest of raised arms, which had slowly, one by one, begun to come down... and spoke, very quietly, as if to each of them alone.

"He is right," said the Archdeacon.

A sound went through the crowd. Not a gasp. Something lower and deeper and much more frightening.

"Everything he has told you about the wall is true," said Valdris Kahl. "I have measured it myself, with my own hands, for fifteen years. And I have not told you, because I did not know when it would fall, and because I did not know where you could go." He paused. "I still don't. Forty thousand people. The Fens cannot feed you. The valley cannot shelter you. The Ashlands will kill you." His grey eyes swept slowly across the nave. "So I ask you now. All of you. Now that you know. If the cart-man is right... what will you do? Where will you go?"

Nobody answered.

The silence stretched on and on.

And far above them, beyond the great round window behind the altar, beyond the roaring Flame, the sky over the Still Sea had gone dark. Teo had not noticed it happening. Nobody had. Heavy, purple-black clouds were rolling down off the mountains, swallowing the peaks one by one.

Thunder rolled across the Crown.

And the first drops of the spring rain began to fall.