Every Hand

Meanwhile, far above, at the top of the world, Mira Solenne was counting.

She had a grey book in one hand and a stub of chalk in the other, and she was standing on the dry trough of the dead pump in Saint Orlen's Square in the pouring rain, and she had been standing there since dawn.

It was Nell's idea, at first. Nell had looked at the problem the way Teo would have looked at it, and come up with an answer so simple that Mira had laughed out loud. Forty thousand people could not be told what to do by one woman shouting in a square. They could not be told by a hundred. There were too many of them, and the Sump was a maze of crooked alleys, and the Shelf was a maze of terraces, and the rain was too loud.

But every street had children.

So Nell had gone through the Sump with a bag of chalk stubs from the Mercy House, and found every child she knew who could write their numbers... and since the cow-scratch, and the long nights in the boathouse, and the red book, that was a great many more children than it would have been two years ago... and gave each of them a stub of chalk and a street. And the children had gone down their streets, door to door, and knocked, and counted.

How many in this house? How many can walk? How many can't? How many are sick, or old, or very small?

And they had chalked the numbers on every door.

By noon, the doors of the Sump looked as though they had broken out in a strange white rash. Every one of them carried a little column of chalk marks. And the children came back to Saint Orlen's Square, one by one, and climbed up onto the trough beside Mira, and told her their streets. And Mira wrote it all in the grey book.

Brine Lane: four hundred and twelve. Three hundred and sixty walking. Fifty-two who can't.

Tallow Row: six hundred and eighty-one. Six hundred and nine walking. Seventy-two who can't.

Coopers' Yard. The Rope Walk. The tanneries. The Old Bridge. The ferry ward. Street by street, until the Sump was a list in her book, and she could see it all at once, the way Teo had once seen the flux on the wall of the cellar. Not a crowd. Not a mob. Not a panic. A number. A number she could work with.

Fourteen thousand, two hundred and six people in the Sump. Eleven thousand, nine hundred and eighty who could walk.

And on the Shelf, where Dane's Ashwardens had done the same thing, terrace by terrace, with their masks off and their swords left at home... twenty-three thousand, three hundred. And the Crown, three thousand, if you counted every priest and acolyte and servant of the Cathedral. Who would not leave. Not yet. Not without a word from the Archdeacon.

And the Archdeacon was in the bottom of the wall.

Mira stood on the trough in the rain and looked at the numbers, and made herself breathe.

Then she did what Teo would have done. She broke it into pieces.

There were two ways off the Spillway onto the Shoulders. On the eastern end of the wall, where the Crown met the mountain, there was the old Maker road... broad and paved, but steep, climbing in switchbacks up the bare rock to a high, flat shelf of stone that the goatherds called the Table. On the western end, there was only a goat track, narrow and rough and dangerous, up the side of a steep gully. Nobody would take that unless they had to.

So. The Maker road.

Mira had walked it the night before, in the rain, with Dane, and Bram's sister, and a lantern, counting her steps. It was two thousand, one hundred paces from the eastern end of the Crown to the edge of the Table. It was perhaps eight paces wide, for most of its length, narrowing to five at the worst of the switchbacks. She had stood at the narrowest point and counted how many people could pass in the time it took the sand-glass to run... Dane's men, walking past her, four abreast, steady and unhurried, again and again, until she was sure of the number.

Sixty people a minute. A little more, if they hurried. A little less, if they were old or frightened or carrying children.

Thirty-eight thousand people, at sixty a minute...

She had done the sum by lantern-light on the road, with rain dripping off the end of her nose, and stared at the answer for a long time.

Ten and a half hours.

That was if they went in a single steady stream, without stopping, without crowding, without panicking, without the road being blocked by a fallen cart or a frightened mule. That was if everyone came when they were called. That was if the Sump, which had to climb all nine hundred and twelve stairs to the Crown before it could even reach the Maker road, could climb them fast enough to keep the stream full.

It was too long. She knew that at once. And she knew what Teo would say.

Then what would be true if you were wrong? What else could you do?

So she broke it down again.

The sick and the old and the very small — the ones who could not climb — would not go to the Shoulders at all. They would go down the river. Osric Fell had forty barges at the Shelf docks, and Bram's people had a dozen more at the ferry ward, and the Fens were three days downstream. If the wall fell, the flood would follow the river... but it would follow it hours behind the barges, if they left soon enough. And the Fens were wide and flat, and the water would spread out over them and lose its strength, and the round reed houses on their low green islands had stood through floods before.

Two thousand three hundred who could not walk, from the Sump and the Shelf together. Forty barges, fifty people each, with room for the ones who carried them.

That was the first piece.

The Sump would go next. Not up the stairs. Up the stairs was too slow, and they would choke the road. Instead, the Sump would go along the foot of the wall, east, to where the old Maker drains came out at the base of the eastern Shoulder, and climb the goat path up the gully from there. It was dangerous. It was steep. But it was a second road. A second stream. And the people of the Sump had been climbing things they should not have been able to climb their whole lives.

Garrow's pyre-men knew the gully. They had hauled firewood down it for years. They would go first, with ropes.

That was the second piece.

And the Shelf and the Crown would take the Maker road. Terrace by terrace, from the top down. In order. With an Ashwarden at every switchback and a child with a stub of chalk at every corner, counting them past.

Twenty-four thousand, at sixty a minute.

Six and a half hours.

Still too long. But not ten. And with two roads instead of one, and the barges...

Mira lowered the grey book and looked up through the rain at the face of the Spillway, at the city clinging to it, tier upon tier, the Sump and the Shelf and the Crown. At the long dark streaks of the Weeping Stones, which were not streaks anymore but streams, brown and roaring, pouring down the face of the wall from a hundred new cracks.

She did not know how long they had. Nobody knew. But it was not six and a half hours. It was not ten. It might be days. It might be this afternoon.

'Then we start now,' she thought. 'And we count as we go.'

She raised her voice, and called the first street.

They went.

Teo would hear about it afterward, in pieces, from a hundred different people, and he would never quite be able to put all the pieces together. But he would remember one thing, because so many of them told him the same thing, in the same words, with the same strange look on their faces.

Nobody ran.

Not on the Maker road. Not on the goat path up the gully. Not on the docks, where the barges were loading. Forty thousand people climbed off the Spillway in the rain, through a day and a night and the morning after, with the wall groaning and weeping and pouring brown water from every crack behind them... and nobody ran.

They had been told. That was the difference. Not the Flame commands you. Not the Archdeacon says. They had been shown the slab of rock with its column of black lines. They had been told how many buckets, and how fast it was doubling, and why. They had been told that nobody knew exactly when it would fall. They had been told how many people could walk up the Maker road in a minute, and how many hours it would take, and which street would go when. And the children who had counted them stood at every corner with their chalk, and called their streets, and the streets came.

They went in order. They carried each other. When a cart overturned on the third switchback of the Maker road, forty people lifted it off the road and threw it down the mountainside without waiting to be told. When an old woman fell on the goat path, the man behind her picked her up and carried her the rest of the way on his back. When the barges were full, the people on the docks who could still walk turned around, without complaint, and went back up to the gully.

Nell stood at the top of the Maker road, at the edge of the Table, with a stub of chalk and a long board, and counted every single one of them as they came over the rim. She did not stop for food. She did not stop for sleep. When Mira came up the road at last, in the grey dawn of the second day, with the last of the Shelf behind her, Nell was still there, swaying on her feet, grey with exhaustion, making marks.

"How many?" Mira said.

Nell looked down at the board in her hands. It was covered in tally marks, so many of them that they ran together into a grey smudge.

"Twenty-four thousand, one hundred and nine," she said hoarsely. "And the gully says eleven thousand and something. Garrow's men are counting there. And the barges said two thousand three hundred and fifty." She swayed. "That's nearly all, Mira. That's nearly everyone."

"Nearly," said Mira quietly.

She turned and looked back down the Maker road. At the long, grey, empty switchbacks, winding down the bare rock to the eastern end of the Crown.

The Crown was not empty.

She could see it from here. The Cathedral of the Undying Flame, with its white spires and its red and gold windows, standing at the edge of the wall. And in front of it, on the broad stone plaza... people. Hundreds of them. Perhaps more. Priests in red and white, kneeling in the rain in long rows. Acolytes. Servants. The faithful of the Crown, who would not leave the Flame. Who had been told for four hundred years that the Flame would keep them, and believed it, and would not move without the word of the Voice of the Flame.

Three thousand of them.

And beyond them, at the edge of the Crown, in its basin of black stone, the Flame was burning.

Mira frowned.

It was not burning the way it always had. It had always roared upward in a great steady pillar of blue and gold, as tall as five men, never flickering, never wavering. That was what made it holy. That was what every child in Calder Reach knew.

This morning, it was shorter. Much shorter. And it was flickering. It leapt up, and fell back, and leapt up again, guttering and sputtering, like a candle in a draught.

Like something deep in the earth beneath it was changing.

Beneath her feet, on the Table, the stone trembled. A long, deep, grinding shudder that went on and on, and made the people around her cry out and grab at each other.

And from far below, from somewhere deep inside the Spillway, there came a sound that Mira had never heard before. A sound like the whole world groaning.