The Last Gate

At the bottom of the world, the third gate was open.

It had taken them two days and a night. Teo did not remember most of it. He remembered heat, and fire, and the deafening clang of hammers on iron. He remembered rust raining down on him like red snow. He remembered the tallow, hot and stinking, running down the great screws in rivers. He remembered his hands, which had blistered on the first day and bled on the second and stopped hurting at all some time on the second night, which frightened him more than the pain had.

He remembered the wheels turning.

Slowly. So slowly. Twenty men on each wheel, pushing on the lashed bars until their legs shook and they fell back and twenty more took their places. A turn. Another. A hundred. A thousand. And then the first gate had begun to rise... a finger's width at the bottom, a black line of shadow opening up beneath it... and the Sea had come through.

Teo had never heard anything like it. It was not a sound. It was the world ending. A great white roaring column of water had burst out under the bottom edge of Gate One and into the huge pipe beyond it with a force that shook the whole chamber, that threw men off the platforms, that made the iron grating under his feet hum like a struck bell. Spray filled the air. The lamps went out. In the dark, men screamed and laughed and wept.

And somewhere far away, out beyond the foot of the Spillway, where the great pipe opened into the riverbed below the Outflow, the Still Sea had begun to pour out of the bottom of the wall.

Then Gate Two. Then, on the second night, Gate Three.

Valdris Kahl had worked beside them the whole time.

Teo had not expected that. He had expected the Archdeacon to stand at the foot of the platforms in his ruined robes and tell them what to do, the way he had told the city for thirty years. Instead, on the first night, he had taken off the white and gold robes and thrown them into a corner, and rolled up the sleeves of the black shirt underneath, and taken a place on the bars of Gate One beside a Sump tanner and an Ashwarden. He had pushed until he fell. Then he had got up, and greased the screw, and read from the Maker drawings by lamplight for the blacksmiths, and found the places where the gears jammed, and pushed again.

He did not talk much. Neither did Teo. There was no breath for talking.

But once, in the second night, when they were both sitting on the iron grating at the foot of Gate Two, gasping, with their backs against the girders and the water roaring through the pipe beside them, the Archdeacon said, without looking at him:

"Hesk taught you well."

Teo did not answer at once.

"He said you were the cleverest man he ever met," he said at last. "In the library. When you were young."

Valdris Kahl was silent for a long moment.

"I was the one who told them," he said quietly. "About the Leaves. About what he was reading. I was twenty-six, and newly raised to the Keepers, and I thought he was going to bring the whole Chantry down with his pages and his questions. I thought I was saving it." He looked down at his own bleeding hands. "I didn't know they would take his eyes. I thought they would only send him away." He paused. "That is not an excuse. I knew what the Chantry did to heretics. I simply chose not to think about it."

Teo said nothing.

"I have spent forty years," said the Archdeacon, "being certain that I was protecting this city from its own curiosity. That knowledge was a fire, and I was the hearth." He laughed, very quietly. "And it turns out the hearth was cracked all along. And the thing that saves it is forty men from the Sump with a pot of tallow." He shook his head. "Hesk would laugh at me."

"Probably," said Teo.

The Archdeacon looked at him then, and something in his tired face eased, very slightly.

"Yes," he said. "Probably."

Then he got up, and went back to the wheel.

Now, on the morning of the third day, Gate Four would not move.

'...Of course it wouldn't,' Teo thought. 'Three out of four. The world has never once let me have four out of four.'

They had done everything. Fire. Hammers. Tallow. Bars. Sixty men on the wheel at once, in three shifts, until the spokes bent. The hand-wheel turned — it turned freely now, round and round — but the gate below it did not rise. Something was broken. Somewhere between the hand-wheel and the great nut, something had given way.

"The pin," said the eldest of the blacksmiths, staring up at the great box at the top of the frame. He had climbed up there twice already, on a rope, in the dark, to look. "There's a great iron pin through the nut, holding it to the last gear. It's sheared through. Rusted, and then the strain broke it. The gears turn, but the nut doesn't." He wiped his face. "We need to drive a new pin through. By hand. In the box."

"Then we drive one," said Teo.

"It's not the box that's the trouble." The blacksmith pointed. "Look where it is."

Teo looked.

Gate Four was the last in the row, at the far end of the chamber, where the hall narrowed and the rock wall curved in close above it. And that wall was not dry anymore. It had not been dry for hours. It was weeping, and then streaming, and now there was a crack running across it, from the floor to the ceiling, just behind the frame of Gate Four. A long, dark, jagged crack, as wide as Teo's hand at the bottom, and from it, brown water was pouring in a thick, roaring sheet, carrying mud and gravel and small stones.

As Teo watched, a chunk of rock the size of his head broke loose from the edge of the crack and fell, and crashed onto the iron grating of the platform, and bounced off into the dark.

The crack was growing. He could see it growing. Getting wider at the bottom, a finger's width at a time, as the water tore at it.

The three open gates had lowered the Sea. Teo knew that. Dane had sent men up to the top of the wall at dawn, and they had come back down with the news: the water was falling. Slowly. A hand's width since midnight. The pressure on the wall was easing. Everywhere else, the cracks had stopped spreading.

Everywhere but here.

Because here, at the very bottom of the wall, behind Gate Four, was where the water had been eating its way through for sixty years. Here was the channel that had grown from one bucket to two hundred and sixty and then to more than anyone could count. And with three gates open and the fourth still closed, all the Sea that was left was pressing against this corner of the wall, against this one crack, trying to get out.

If Gate Four opened, the pressure would ease here too.

If it did not...

Teo did not finish the thought. He did not need to.

"I'll go," he said.

"No."

It was Valdris Kahl. He was standing at the foot of the platform in his torn black shirt, looking up at the box at the top of the frame. His face was grey with exhaustion, and his hands were wrapped in bloody rags.

"I know the drawings," he said. "I know where the pin goes, and how it seats, and which way to drive it. I have known for twenty years. You would have to learn it from me, in the dark, on a rope, with that wall coming down." He looked at Teo. "I can do it in a quarter of the time."

"You're sixty years old," said Teo.

"Sixty-one." The Archdeacon smiled faintly. "And you are nineteen. No... twenty, now. And you have a school to build." He paused. "And a city that will need someone to tell them how they survived. Not the Flame. Not the Archdeacon. Them." He looked out across the chamber at the forty men, filthy and bleeding and exhausted, slumped on the iron platforms. "Someone who can count."

Teo opened his mouth.

"Teo," said Valdris Kahl quietly. "I have spent forty years deciding what other people were allowed to know. Let me do one useful thing with my hands before I die."

He did not wait for an answer.

He took the new pin from the eldest blacksmith... a great iron rod as thick as his wrist, as long as his forearm, which the blacksmiths had forged that morning in the fire at the foot of Gate Two... and a heavy hammer, and tied a rope around his waist, and climbed.

Teo watched him go up the frame of Gate Four in the lamplight, slowly, hand over hand, like an old man climbing a ladder. Behind him, the crack in the wall roared and poured. Pieces of rock were falling more often now, crashing onto the platform, bouncing off the girders. One of them struck the frame beside the Archdeacon's hand with a clang that Teo heard over everything, and he flinched, and kept climbing.

He reached the box at the top, and opened its iron hatch, and disappeared inside.

They heard the hammer. Even over the roar of the water. A deep, ringing clang. Then another. Then another, steady and patient, like a bell tolling.

"Wheel!" shouted the Archdeacon's voice, faint and far away, from inside the box. "Turn the wheel!"

Sixty men threw themselves at the bars.

The wheel turned. The gears ground. And deep inside the box, there was a sound of iron biting into iron... and the great screw of Gate Four began, very slowly, to rise.

The gate moved.

A finger's width. A hand. A black line of shadow opening under its bottom edge. And then the Sea found it, and came roaring through, in a great white column of water that shook the chamber from end to end...

And the wall behind Gate Four broke.

It did not break all at once. Teo would remember that, later. It was not like the leaning tower in Glass Bones, which had simply fallen. It was slow. The crack behind the frame opened, and opened, and went on opening, and the brown water pouring out of it became a torrent, and then a flood, and then a solid, roaring mass of water and mud and stone that tore the whole frame of Gate Four away from the wall in a single scream of twisting iron.

The box at the top of the frame went with it.

Teo saw it go. He saw the great iron box tilt, and swing, and tear loose from its girders, and fall — down into the roaring brown water — and vanish.

"Get out!" someone was screaming. Dane. "Everyone out! Up! Up the tunnel! Now!"

Bram had Teo by the arm. Teo did not remember him getting there. The big man was dragging him backward across the platform, away from the flood, toward the tunnel mouth, and Teo was fighting him, trying to pull free, trying to go back...

"He's gone," said Bram. His slow deep voice was very close to Teo's ear. "He's gone, Teo. He's gone."

They ran.

They ran up the long sloping tunnel with the water roaring at their heels, sixty men in the dark, slipping and falling and dragging each other up, and the water came after them, and rose, and rose... and then, quite suddenly, it stopped rising.

Teo stood on the stair at the top of the tunnel, gasping, soaked to the skin, and looked back down into the dark.

The water was still roaring. But it was not chasing them anymore. It was going somewhere else. Out. Down. Through the broken corner of the wall where Gate Four had been, and the great open pipes of Gates One, Two and Three, into the foundations of the valley, out under the foot of the Spillway, out into the river.

All four ways open. The Sea pouring out of the bottom of the wall through four great holes instead of pressing against it.

The wall was still standing.

Teo could feel it. The stone of the stair under his feet. Trembling, groaning, weeping. But standing.

He stood there in the dark for a long time, with Bram's hand on his shoulder, listening to the water.

Far below him, somewhere in the roaring brown flood at the bottom of the world, an old man who had been the cleverest man Hesk ever met lay under a great iron box and six hundred years of rust and a gate he had opened with his own hands.

Valdris Kahl, the Voice of the Undying Flame, was no more.