The Gates of the Makers

They found Valdris Kahl at the bottom of the world.

It took them most of the day to get there. The gate chamber was not on the stair that Teo had climbed. It was deeper. Far below the Outflow, far below the level of the river, in the very roots of the Spillway, where the Makers had sunk the foundations of their wall into the living rock of the valley floor. Hesk had described the way from memory, from drawings he had last seen forty years ago, and Teo had written it down, and they followed it. Down the dry Outflow tunnel. Through the grey door. Down, instead of up. Past landing after landing of roaring brown water and groaning stone, to where the stair ended in a long, low, sloping tunnel that went down, and down, and down, into the earth.

It was hot down there. That surprised Teo. Hot and wet and close, like the inside of a mouth. Water ran everywhere. It ran down the walls and along the floor and dripped from the ceiling in a constant pattering rain. And it was loud. A deep, enormous, continuous roar, from somewhere above them and around them and below, so loud that it was less a sound than a pressure, squeezing his chest, making his teeth ache.

They were under the Still Sea now. Teo knew that. He could feel it. The weight of all that water, above and behind them, pressing down on the stone.

And then the tunnel opened out, and they were in the gate chamber.

It was the largest room Teo had ever seen inside the earth. It was a long, high hall, cut deep into the black rock of the valley floor, its ceiling lost in darkness far above the reach of their lamps. And along one side of it, set into the wall, side by side, there were four gates.

They were colossal. Each one was a vast, flat slab of dark, rust-scaled iron, as tall as four men standing on each other's shoulders and as wide as a street, set into a deep slot in the rock. Behind them, Teo knew, were the great pipes that ran out under the foundations of the wall, from the bottom of the Still Sea to the open air below the Outflow. If the gates were raised, the Sea would pour through those pipes and out into the river, the way the Makers had meant it to.

The gates were raised by machines.

Above each one, on a platform of iron grating, there stood a great frame of iron girders, rising to the ceiling. And inside each frame, there was a screw. A single, colossal screw of iron, as thick as a tree, running straight up from the top of the gate into a great iron box at the top of the frame. And from the side of that box, there came a shaft. And on the end of the shaft, at the height of a man's chest, there was a wheel. A great iron wheel with spokes, like the wheel on the door at Mount Selk, but larger. Much larger.

And at the foot of the first gate, standing alone in the lamplight, with his white and gold robes soaked through and filthy with mud and rust, was Valdris Kahl.

He had a lamp. He had a bucket of tallow, and a brush, and a heavy iron bar. He was greasing the great screw of Gate One, alone, with his own hands, in the dark, at the bottom of the world.

He turned when he saw their lights. He looked at them for a long moment... at Teo, at Bram and Dane and Garrow and Tobin and the three blacksmiths, and the forty men behind them, Ashwardens and Sump men and Fell's warehouse hands, with ropes and chains and bars and buckets of tallow... and something moved across his face that Teo could not read.

"Ah," he said. "So you came."

"So did you," said Teo.

The Archdeacon looked down at his own filthy hands, at the brush and the bucket. Then he laughed — a short, cracked, tired sound — and set the brush down.

"I have been here three days," he said. "I moved it a quarter turn. Then it locked again." He looked up at the great wheel above him. "As it always does."

Teo walked up onto the iron platform and stood beside him, and looked up.

The wheel was enormous. It towered over his head. Its rim was as thick as his arm and scaled with rust, and its spokes ran down into a great iron hub, and the hub was fixed to the shaft that ran into the box at the top of the frame. He could see where someone had greased it. He could see the marks of hammers on the spokes, old ones and new. He could see the long iron bar lying on the grating, where the Archdeacon had used it as a lever.

"Tell me how it works," he said.

Valdris Kahl looked at him in surprise.

"You've seen the drawings."

"I've seen pictures," said Teo. "You've seen the book. You've been reading it for twenty years. So tell me. And tell them." He nodded at the men crowding into the lamplight behind them. "All of it. Everything you know. Don't leave anything out."

The Archdeacon was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, he began to speak.

He told them about the screw. How the great iron screw ran up from the top of the gate into the box at the top of the frame, and how inside the box, there was a great nut, as big as a barrel, that the screw ran through. When the nut turned, the screw went up, and the gate went up with it.

He told them about the box. How the nut was turned by a great toothed wheel, and that wheel was turned by a smaller one, and that by a smaller one still, and so on, through a long chain of toothed wheels inside the box, each one smaller than the last, until the very smallest was fixed to the shaft of the great hand-wheel on the outside.

"Gears," said Tobin suddenly. The brewery foreman was staring up at the box with a strange expression. "It's gears. Like the mash-mill in my brewery. A big wheel turned by a little one." He frowned. "But backward. The little one's on the outside. So you have to turn it a great many times to turn the big one once."

"Yes," said the Archdeacon. "The drawings say six hundred turns of the hand-wheel for each turn of the nut. And three hundred turns of the nut to raise the gate fully." He looked at the brewery foreman with something like respect. "Why would the Makers build it so?"

Tobin opened his mouth, and closed it again, and looked at Teo.

And Teo, who had stood on a heap of rubble in Glass Bones with a steel bar in his hands, understood.

"Because it's a lever," he said slowly. "It's the same thing. A lever, but wound around in a circle." He looked up at the box. "Archimedes. Force times distance. If you push on the end of a long lever, your hand goes a long way, and the weight on the other end only goes a little way... but it goes with much more force. It's the same with gears. When you turn the little wheel, your hands go round and round, a long way, and the big wheel only creeps... but it creeps with all the force of every turn added together." He swallowed. "Six hundred turns of the hand-wheel for one turn of the nut. That means every pound you push on that wheel becomes... six hundred pounds on the nut. More, maybe, with the size of the wheel."

"And the screw is another lever on top of that," said one of the blacksmiths. "A screw's just a ramp wound round a post. That's what my father always said. Pushing something up a long gentle ramp is easier than lifting it straight up."

Teo looked at him, and nodded slowly.

"So the Makers built it so that one man could open it," he said. "One man turning a wheel, all day, round and round. Slow, but strong. Strong enough to lift a gate the size of a house against the whole weight of the Sea."

"When it was new," said Valdris Kahl quietly. "When it was greased. When the gears were clean and the screw was smooth." He looked up at the rusted wheel. "Not after six hundred years."

"No," said Teo. "Not with one man."

He turned and looked at the forty men behind him.

"But the law works both ways," he said. "If one man pushing on a long lever moves a stone that six men can't lift... then twenty men pushing on the same lever move something that a hundred and twenty men can't lift." He looked at the great wheel, and its eight thick spokes. "How many men can get their hands on that wheel at once?"

Bram looked at it.

"Sixteen," he said. "Two to a spoke."

"And if we lash bars to the spokes," said Dane, "to make them longer... like you did with the door at Selk..."

"Then each man is pushing with more leverage," said Teo. "And there's room for more men on the bars."

He took a breath.

"And the rust. The rust is the problem. It's in the screw, and the nut, and the gears. It's jamming them. But rust is just iron that's been eaten by water and air. It's not strong. It's brittle. It's like the black spurs in the rye... the threads looked like they held together, until you cut one open." He looked at the blacksmiths. "If we heat it, it'll expand, and crack. If we hammer it while it's hot, the rust will flake. If we pour tallow into the cracks while it cools, the tallow will go into the gaps the rust left. The Archdeacon tried that." He looked at Kahl. "With twenty men. In secret. For a few hours at a time, once a year."

"Yes," said Kahl.

"We're going to do it all at once," said Teo. "All four gates. Every hand at once. Fire and hammers and tallow and bars, in shifts, day and night, until they move." He paused. "Starting now."

Nobody said anything.

Then Garrow, the pyre-man, who had spent his whole life lifting things, stepped up onto the iron platform beside Teo, and spat on his palms, and set them on the rim of the great wheel of Gate One.

Bram stepped up beside him. Then Dane. Then the blacksmiths. Then Tobin, and the Ashwardens, and the Sump men, and Fell's warehouse hands, crowding up onto the four iron platforms and around the four great wheels, two to a spoke, three to a bar, setting their hands on the cold scaled iron.

Teo looked at Valdris Kahl.

The Archdeacon of the Undying Flame was standing at the foot of Gate One, in his ruined robes, looking up at them. At the forty men from the Sump and the Shelf and the Crown who had come down to the bottom of the world because a cart-man had asked them to, and told them why.

"You asked me," said Teo quietly, "what they would do. If they knew."

Kahl did not answer.

"This," said Teo. "This is what they do."

He turned to the wheel, and set his own hands on it beside Garrow's, and shouted over the roaring of the water:

"Now!"

Forty men pushed.

The wheel did not move.

They pushed harder. Teo felt his arms tremble, his shoulders scream, his feet slip on the wet iron grating. Beside him, Garrow's face was purple. Bram's teeth were bared. The blacksmiths were roaring.

And from somewhere deep inside the iron box at the top of the frame, there came a sound. A long, deep, grinding shriek, like a giant gritting its teeth.

The wheel moved.

A finger's width. Then a hand's. Then, with a lurch and a crack and a sudden shower of rust and old tallow raining down on all of them from above, a full eighth of a turn.

They stopped, gasping.

Teo looked up at the gate below the screw. It had not moved. Not a hair. Six hundred turns of the wheel for a single turn of the nut. Three hundred turns of the nut to raise it fully.

'...A hundred and eighty thousand turns,' he thought, a little dizzily. 'And we've done an eighth of one.'

Beside him, Garrow was grinning. A wide, ghastly, lime-burned grin that Teo had never once seen on his face in two years.

"Again," said the pyre-man.