The Rains

It rained for six days.

Not the soft, grey, patient rain of a Calder Reach spring. This was something else. It came down off the mountains in great dark walls, one after another, driven by a howling wind that tore the tiles off the roofs of the Shelf and flung them down the face of the Spillway like leaves. It hammered on the Crown. It turned the switchback road into a river and the stairs of the Crown into a waterfall. It filled the gutters and the drains and the narrow alleys of the Sump until the brown water was running knee-deep through the streets, carrying rubbish and furniture and drowned rats down toward the Calder, which had risen over its banks and was roaring past the ferry docks in a wide, churning, muddy flood.

And behind the Spillway, the Still Sea rose.

Teo watched it from the top of the wall, from the edge of the Crown beside the basin of the Flame, where the fishermen of the Crown had cut marks into the stone of the old Maker steps that ran down into the water. Every Archdeacon for four hundred years had kept those marks. The Sea rose a little every spring, with the melt, and fell back every autumn. There were marks for the highest springs in living memory — a line for the year of the Great Thaw, a line for the year the fishing boats broke loose — and the highest of them was nearly three hundred years old.

On the second day of the rain, the water passed it...

On the fourth day, it was a full arm's length above it, and still rising. A hand's width every hour. The surface of the Sea was no longer still. It was grey and wrinkled and restless, heaving against the inner face of the wall in long, slow swells that broke against the old stone with a deep, dull boom that Teo could feel through the soles of his boots.

He went down into the Galleries every day.

Bram came with him, and Dane, and on the third day, Mira, who refused to be left behind. They went down the stair inside the wall to the landing where the bucket had been, and set the bucket in its channel, and turned the sand-glass, and counted.

On the first day of the rain, ninety-four buckets.

On the second, a hundred and thirty.

On the fourth, two hundred and sixty.

On the fifth day, Teo did not need to count. He could hear it from three landings above. The crack in the wall, which had wept a steady, cloudy stream into the channel when he first saw it, was no longer weeping. It was pouring. A thick, brown, roaring jet of water and mud as wide as his wrist, gushing out of the stone with a sound like a broken pipe, spraying across the landing and down the stair in a muddy torrent. The channel could not hold it. The bucket was gone — swept away down the stair — and the brass sand-glass with it.

And it was not only that crack.

They found new ones on every landing. Long, thin lines in the grey stone that had not been there four days ago, branching and spreading like the roots of a tree, and from every one of them, the brown water seeped and trickled and ran. The walls were wet everywhere now. The stair was a stream. The air was full of a low, endless, groaning sound that came from everywhere and nowhere, from the stone itself, like the wall was in pain.

Teo stood on the landing in the roaring spray and the lamplight, and found that he was no longer afraid. It was a strange feeling. As if he had been afraid for so long that something inside him had simply worn through.

'It's not doubling anymore,' he thought, quite calmly. 'It's past doubling. It's eating itself.'

"How long?" Dane shouted, over the noise.

Teo did not answer. He did not know...

'Days,' some cold part of him said. 'Maybe hours. Stop asking.'

But he knew it was not weeks anymore.

The trial had ended on the first day of the rain. It had not ended with a verdict. It had simply... stopped. The storm had broken over the Crown in the middle of the Archdeacon's question, and the great doors of the Cathedral had been flung open by the wind, and the rain had poured in across the floor of the nave, and forty thousand people had stood in the howling dark under the white stone pillars and looked at one another. And then, slowly, in twos and threes and dozens, they had begun to leave.

Not in panic. Not running. Teo had watched them go, and it was not what the Archdeacon had said it would be. They did not burn anything. They did not fight. They went down the nine hundred and twelve stairs in the pouring rain, in silence, holding onto each other, and went home.

And then they waited, to see what would happen.

The Chantry was... gone.

Not destroyed. Gone. The deacons had vanished into the inner halls of the Cathedral on the first night and had not come out. The acolytes stood in the corridors and wept. The Ashwardens stood at their posts on the Crown and the switchback road, because nobody had told them to stop, and stared at the rain, and talked among themselves in low voices. Some of them went home. Many of them went to find Captain Dane.

...And Valdris Kahl had disappeared.

He had walked off the altar on the first day of the rain, in his robes of white and gold, without a word to anyone, and gone down through the side door of the Cathedral, and nobody had seen him since. His study was empty. The fire in the grate had gone out. Dane sent men to search the Cathedral from roof to vault, and they found nothing.

"He's gone down," Hesk said, when they told him. The old man was sitting in his chair in the Mercy House storeroom, with Nell on the floor beside him, listening to the rain hammer on the roof. "Into the wall. Where else would he go?"

"To the bucket?"

"To the gates," said Hesk.

Teo stared at him.

"He told you he tried to open them," said Hesk. "Twenty years ago. Eleven times, over five years. Do you think a man like Valdris Kahl stops trying, just because something is impossible?" The old man shook his head slowly. "I knew him, boy. Long ago. Before the Crown. Before the eyes. We were young together, in the library. He was the cleverest man I ever met. And the most stubborn." He smiled faintly. "Almost as stubborn as you."

Teo did not answer. He was thinking about the drawings on the long table in the study. About the four great square shapes at the very bottom of the wall.

LOW-LEVEL OUTLET GATES. 1 THROUGH 4.

On the morning of the sixth day, he called them all together in the Mercy House.

All of them. Not just Mira and Bram and Hesk and Dane and Nell. Garrow. Cobb. Tobin the brewery foreman. The three blacksmiths from Coopers' Yard who had forged the lightning rod. A dozen of Dane's Ashwardens, without their masks. A score of Sump men and women who had carried the cow-scratch from street to street and house to house all winter. And Osric Fell.

That had surprised everyone, Teo most of all. The Shelf merchant had come down the switchback road alone, on foot, in the rain, soaked to the skin in his fur-lined coat. He had walked into the Mercy House without a word, and stood at the back of the room with his arms folded, and said nothing. Nobody had asked him why. Teo thought he could guess. Osric Fell had stood at the front of the Cathedral, three days ago, and seen the slab of rock with its column of black lines, and done the arithmetic. Fell had always been good at arithmetic.

Teo stood in front of them all, by the wall where the count of the flux had once been drawn, and laid it out.

He did it plainly. In steps. The way Hesk had taught him.

The wall was failing. Not in years. Not in months. Perhaps in days. He did not know how many. He could not know. Nobody could. But the leak had gone from fifty-nine buckets to more than they could measure in less than a month, and the Sea was still rising, and the rain had not stopped.

When the wall failed, it would not crack gently, like a pot. The Still Sea would come through it. All of it. And everything on the face of the Spillway, and everything below it, would be gone.

So there were two things they had to do. Both of them. At once.

The first was to get everyone off the wall.

Not into the valley. Down the valley was where the water would go. Off the wall, onto high ground. Teo had looked at the Maker drawings in the Archdeacon's study, and at the country around Calder Reach from the top of the Crown, and there was only one place. The Shoulders. The great rocky flanks of the mountains on either side of the valley, where the ends of the Spillway were set into the living rock. They were steep and bare and cold, and nobody lived there except goats. But they were high. And they were stone. And they would not fall.

Forty thousand people. Off the wall. Onto the Shoulders. In the rain.

"And the second?" said Dane.

Teo looked at him.

"The second," he said, "is to open the gates."

There was a long silence.

"The Archdeacon tried that," Mira said quietly. "Eleven times. With twenty men and fire and hammers."

"I know."

"And it didn't work."

"No," said Teo. "But he tried alone. In secret. With men who weren't allowed to know why." He looked around the room. At the blacksmiths. At Bram. At Tobin, who had spent his whole life working with wheels and valves and pipes in the brewery. At Garrow, who could carry a man on each shoulder. At Osric Fell, who had more rope and tallow and iron in his warehouses than anyone in the city. "And he didn't have all of you."

Nobody said anything.

"If the gates open," Teo said, "the Sea goes down. Slowly. A foot a day, maybe. Less weight on the wall. Less water pushing through the cracks. It won't fix the wall. Nothing can fix the wall now. But it might slow it down. It might buy us time. Enough time to get everyone off." He paused. "And if it slows it down enough... maybe the wall doesn't fall at all. Maybe it just... cracks, and bleeds, and stands."

"And if we're down there," said Garrow, "in the bottom of the wall, behind the Outflow, when it goes?"

Teo looked at him for a long moment.

"Then we're down there," he said.

Garrow considered this. Then he nodded slowly, and said nothing else.

"I'll go," said Bram.

"And I," said Tobin.

"And us," said the eldest of the three blacksmiths. The other two nodded.

Dane did not say anything. He simply took his iron mask off his belt, where it had hung all winter, and laid it on the table, and left it there.

Osric Fell, at the back of the room, unfolded his arms.

"My warehouses on Tanner's Terrace," he said, in a flat, tight voice. "Six hundredweight of tallow. Rope. Chain. Iron bar. Whatever you need." He paused. "And my barges. For the Fens. For the sick, and the old, who can't climb the Shoulders."

Everyone turned to look at him.

Osric Fell looked back at them, very pale, with rain dripping from his hair.

"I can count, too," he said.

Teo did not trust himself to speak. He nodded.

Then he turned to Mira. She was already looking at him. She had been looking at him the whole time, with her grey book clutched against her chest and her face very still, and he knew that she already knew what he was going to say.

"The Shoulders," he said. "Somebody has to get them there. All of them. Somebody who knows the Sump, and the Shelf, and the Mercy House, and who the people will listen to." He swallowed. "Somebody who can count."

"And you'll be in the bottom of the wall," said Mira.

"Yes."

"Opening gates that haven't moved in six hundred years. In the dark. While it falls."

"Yes."

Mira looked at him for a long time. Then she stepped forward, and took his face in both her hands, and kissed him, hard, in front of everyone, in the middle of the Mercy House, with the rain hammering on the roof.

Then she let go of him and stepped back.

"Come back," she said. "Or I'll never forgive you."

She turned to Nell.

"Get the chalk," she said. "And every child in the Sump who can write their numbers. We're going to count forty thousand people."