After the Water

They came up out of the Spillway into the light of the Crown a little after noon, sixty filthy, bleeding, exhausted men, through the door at the top of the prison corridor, into the empty halls of the Cathedral of the Undying Flame.

It took them a long time. The stair was a river. Some of the landings had cracked and sunk. Twice, they had to go back down and find another way, through the hall of the sleeping giants, through passages that Teo had never seen and Hesk had never described. But the stair held. The wall held. And at last, they came out into the nave of the Cathedral, under the tall red and gold windows, and stood there blinking in the grey daylight, and did not know what to do.

The nave was empty. The great doors stood open. Rain had blown in across the stone floor and pooled in long grey puddles between the pillars.

And it was quiet.

Teo did not understand, at first, why that felt so strange. He had been deafened for three days by the roaring of the water in the gate chamber, and his ears were still ringing. But it was not that. Something was missing. Something that had always been there, every moment of his life, so constant that he had never once noticed it.

He walked down the nave toward the altar, slowly, and looked up at the great round window behind it.

The Flame was... out.

The basin of black stone at the edge of the Crown stood empty in the grey light. Thin wisps of pale smoke rose from it and drifted away on the wind. That was all. No blue. No gold. No roaring pillar of fire, as tall as five men, pouring upward out of the earth. For four hundred and fourteen years, it had burned there without once going out, and now there was nothing but a dark stone bowl and a little smoke and the grey sky beyond.

Teo stood at the foot of the altar and stared at it for a long time.

...He did not know why it had gone out.

That was the truth, and he made himself say it to himself, plainly, the way Hesk would have wanted. He did not know. He could guess. The red book said that some fires came out of the earth on their own... that deep in the rock, in some places, there was a kind of air that burned, and that it could find its way up through cracks to the surface and catch light and burn for centuries. The Makers had called it natural gas. And perhaps the weight of the Still Sea, pressing down on the rock beneath the wall for six hundred years, had been squeezing that air up through the cracks to the basin like a hand squeezing a bellows. And perhaps when they opened the gates, and the Sea began to fall, the hand had let go.

Perhaps. Or perhaps it was something else entirely. The ground had shuddered when Gate Four broke. Perhaps the cracks had simply moved.

He did not know.

'One day,' he thought, 'someone will find out. Someone with a red book and a stub of chalk and three good questions.'

'...And it won't be me. Not today.'

There were people on the plaza outside the Cathedral.

He saw them as he came out through the great doors. Hundreds of them. The faithful of the Crown. The priests in their red and white, the acolytes, the servants, the old men and women who had lived their whole lives on the top of the wall within sight of the Flame. They had been kneeling there in the rain, in long rows, for two days, praying, while the city climbed off the wall around them.

And they were not praying anymore.

They were staring at the empty basin.

Some of them were weeping. Some of them were simply kneeling there, very still, with their hands in their laps and their faces blank. A very old deacon, near the front, was rocking slowly back and forth, his lips moving without a sound.

One of them saw Teo.

It was Deacon Pruett. The fat, sweating deacon of Saint Orlen's parish, who had thrown Teo out of his house two years ago for offering to show him the small lives in a drop of water. He was not fat anymore. He was grey and thin and shaking, and he got to his feet very slowly, and looked at Teo, and at the filthy, bleeding men behind him, and then at the empty basin.

"The Archdeacon," he said hoarsely. "Where is the Archdeacon?"

Teo told him.

He did not dress it up — he did not make it a miracle, or a martyrdom, or a judgement. He told the deacon what had happened at the bottom of the wall, plainly, in order, the way he would have told Hesk. The gates. The pin. The box. The water.

When he had finished, Deacon Pruett was silent for a long time.

"And the Flame," he whispered at last. "Why... why has the Flame gone out?"

"I don't know," said Teo.

The deacon stared at him.

"You don't know?"

"No." Teo swallowed. "I have a guess. I can tell you what it is, if you want. But I might be wrong. I don't know."

Deacon Pruett looked at him for a long moment, with a strange, broken expression on his face, as if Teo had said something in a language he had never heard before.

Then he looked back at the empty basin.

"...What do we do?" he said, very quietly. He was not speaking to Teo. He was speaking to the bowl of smoking stone. "What do we do now?"

Teo did not answer at once.

He looked out past the deacon, past the kneeling rows of the faithful, to the edge of the Crown, where the old Maker road began its long climb up the bare grey rock of the eastern Shoulder toward the Table. He could see people up there. Tiny figures, in their thousands, crowding the edge of the high flat shelf of stone, looking down.

"Come down off the wall," he said. "For a while. Until we're sure it's safe. Come up to the Table with everyone else." He paused. "And then we'll work it out. Together."

They came... slowly.

It took the rest of the afternoon. They walked slowly, the old ones leaning on the young, the priests in their red and white among the Ashwardens and the Sump men and the warehouse hands, up the long switchbacks of the Maker road, in the thin grey rain that had begun, at last, to ease. Teo walked at the back. He did not look behind him.

When he came over the rim of the Table at last, Nell was there.

She was still standing at the edge, with her board and her chalk, the way she had been standing for two days. Her face was grey. Her hands were white with chalk dust up to the elbow. When she saw him, she dropped the board, and the chalk, and did not say anything at all. She just walked into him and wrapped her arms around his waist and put her face against his chest and stood there.

He held her for a long time.

Then Mira was there too. And she did not say anything either.

From the Table, you could see everything.

Teo stood at the edge of it in the evening, when the rain had finally stopped and the clouds were breaking up over the mountains in long ragged streamers of gold and red, and looked out over the valley of Calder Reach, and could not speak.

The Spillway was still standing...

It rose out of the valley below him like the edge of the world, exactly as it always had, vast and grey and ancient, curving from one Shoulder to the other. The city still clung to its face. The Crown, with its empty basin and its white Cathedral. The Shelf, tier upon tier of red tile, many of the roofs torn open by the wind. And at its foot...

At its foot, at the eastern end, near the Outflow, there was a wound.

A great ragged hole had been torn in the base of the wall where Gate Four had been, as tall as a tower, and out of it, the Still Sea was pouring in a vast, thundering, white-and-brown cataract, along with the water roaring out of the open gates beside it. The Calder below it was a wide, churning brown flood, spreading out across the valley floor, swallowing the fields and the roads and the reed beds, rolling away south toward the Fens in a long, slow, muddy tide. And the Sump...

The Sump was gone. Not destroyed. Buried. The flood from the breach had poured across it in the first hours, and drowned its streets and its alleys and its squares under a vast, glistening sheet of brown mud. Teo could see the tops of the tenements sticking up out of it, here and there, like the stumps of trees. He could see the bell tower of Saint Orlen's, with its iron rod and its iron chain, standing straight and dark above the mud. He could see the long low roof of the Mercy House.

Everything else was mud.

And behind the wall...

He turned and looked the other way, up the valley, past the top of the Spillway, at the Still Sea.

It had fallen. He could see the marks. A great pale band of wet stone and mud ran around its whole shore, between the old waterline and the new, as wide as a street. The Sea had dropped by three times the height of a man, perhaps more, since the gates opened. It was still falling. And all along its shores, where the water had pulled back for the first time in six hundred years, things were coming up out of the mud.

Roofs. Walls. The tops of trees, long dead, their branches black and dripping. A road, running down into the water. And far out in the shallows, rising out of the grey surface like the mast of a sunken ship, a tall, thin, square tower, with a clock face on it. Its hands were stopped at a quarter past four.

There had been a town there. Before the Spillway. Before the Sea. A Maker town, in the bottom of a valley, which the Makers had drowned on purpose when they built their wall.

'They put it under the water,' Teo thought, staring at it, 'and built a wall, and a city grew up on the wall, and nobody ever knew.'

'...What else don't we know?'

Mira found him there a little while later. She stood beside him without a word and looked out at the drowned town, and the wounded wall, and the brown flood rolling away down the valley in the sunset.

"Nell's finished the count," she said quietly.

Teo turned to look at her.

"Thirty-eight thousand, one hundred and twenty-six on the Table and in the gully," Mira said. "And two thousand three hundred and fifty on the barges. Bram's sister sent word from the Fens this morning... every barge got there." She paused. "Forty thousand, four hundred and seventy-six."

"And before?"

"Forty thousand, five hundred and twelve. From the street counts."

Teo closed his eyes.

"Thirty-six," he said.

"Thirty-six," said Mira. "Some old ones who wouldn't leave their houses in the Sump. A family on the Rope Walk who thought it was all a Chantry trick. Two men who went back for something, and the mud came." Her voice was very steady. "And the Archdeacon."

Thirty-six...

Out of forty thousand.

Teo stood at the edge of the Table and looked out at the valley and thought about the St. Francis dam, and the engineer, and the four hundred dead before midnight. He thought about the Archdeacon's forty years of silence, and his bucket, and his sand-glass, and his column of black lines on a wall in the dark. He thought about a city of forty thousand people who had been told the truth, and shown how to check it, and had climbed off a breaking wall in the rain in a day and a night, in order, carrying each other, and had not run.

He found that he was crying. He did not try to stop.

Hesk died nine days later, on the Table, in a tent made of barge sails, with the sound of the waterfall in the distance and Nell's voice in his ears.

He had caught a chill on the climb. He was very old, and very thin, and he had spent the whole winter going from house to house in the Sump nursing the pox, and when the chill went into his chest, he did not have anything left to fight it with. Mira did what she could. She knew it was not enough. So did Hesk.

...He did not seem to mind.

Teo sat with him every evening. He told him everything. All of it. Mount Selk, and the hall of shelves, and the red book. Ruth Anand and her twenty-three years alone. The Three Questions, printed on the first page of the red book, which had come to Hesk on a single torn sheet in the Chantry's vault forty years ago and which he had thought, all his life, were his own.

Hesk laughed at that until he coughed, and then laughed again.

"I thought I'd made them up," he wheezed. "All this time. I was so proud of them."

"You did make them up," said Teo. "Again. On your own. In a cellar." He took the old man's thin hand. "That's the whole point, isn't it? Anyone can."

Hesk was quiet for a long time after that.

On the last evening, he asked about Valdris. Teo told him. All of it. The gates, and the pin, and the box, and what the Archdeacon had said on the iron grating in the dark, about the library, and the Keepers, and Hesk's eyes.

Hesk listened without a word. When Teo had finished, he turned his blind face away toward the wall of the tent, and was silent for so long that Teo thought he had fallen asleep.

"He was always braver than he knew," the old man said at last, very softly. "And more frightened."

That was all he said about it.

Outside the tent, Nell was reading. She had found a dozen children on the Table who could not read, and she was teaching them, sitting in a circle on the bare stone in the last light, with the red book open on her knees. Teo could hear her voice through the sailcloth. High and clear and a little bossy.

"...What do you actually observe? If you were wrong, what would you expect to see instead? How could you check?" A pause. "No. No, you have to say it properly. All three. Again."

Hesk was smiling.

"Teo," he said.

"I'm here."

The old man's hand tightened very slightly in his.

"What do you see, boy?"

Teo looked down at him. At the thin, lined face with its two pale scars where his eyes had been, and the faint old pox-marks on his cheeks, and the small, sly smile.

He looked out through the open flap of the tent, at the Table in the evening light. At the forty thousand people of Calder Reach camped on the bare rock under the sky, cooking and talking and arguing and mending, the Sump and the Shelf and the Crown all mixed together. At the circle of children around Nell. At Mira, kneeling by a fire with the grey book, writing.

"Everyone," he said.

Hesk let out a long, slow breath.

"Good," he said. "Then we start there."

He did not say anything else. Some time in the night, with Teo's hand in his and the sound of the waterfall in the distance, he stopped breathing.