Count

Some time later, in the first week of the month of the Long Days, the Mercy House opened its doors again.

It was not called the Mercy House anymore. Nobody had decided that. It had simply happened, the way most things happened in the new Calder Reach... someone had painted a name over the door, and nobody had painted over it, and after a while, that was what everyone called it.

Hesk's House.

It had taken them most of the spring to dig it out. The mud had come up to the windowsills, and inside, it had filled the long low hall knee-deep with stinking brown silt that had to be carried out a bucket at a time. Half of the Sump had helped. Then half of the Shelf. Then, toward the end, when the work was nearly done, a dozen priests from the Crown had come down the switchback road in their red and white robes, and stood at the door for a long time, uncertain, until Mira handed them each a shovel.

They had stayed.

The Sump was coming back. Slowly. Most of it was still mud, drying now into great cracked grey plains under the summer sun, with the tops of the old tenements poking out. But the people of the Sump had been building on rubble and mud their whole lives, and they knew how. Bram's barges brought down timber and reed from the Fens. Osric Fell's warehouses gave rope and nails and grain... at cost, which had caused a sensation on the Shelf that was still being talked about. And on the dried mud, along the foot of the Spillway, in the sun, there were small squares of green again. Beans. Peas. Clover. Turnips, because Nell had insisted.

The wall was still standing.

It was being watched now. Day and night. Teo had seen to that. There were twelve measuring stations inside the Galleries, on twelve landings, from the bottom of the wall to the top, and at every one of them, there was a bucket, and a sand-glass, and someone to count. Not a Keeper. Not a priest. Anyone. Captain Dane drew up the list, and every grown person in Calder Reach who could count to a hundred took their turn, a day at a time, the way they had once taken their turn on the wheels at the bottom of the world.

And every evening, the numbers went up on the wall.

Not in the dark, inside the Spillway, in a column of black paint that only an Archdeacon was allowed to see. Outside. In the middle of Saint Orlen's Square, on a great board of smooth black slate that the blacksmiths of Coopers' Yard had set up beside the bell tower, where the dead pump had once stood. Twelve stations. Twelve numbers. Every day, in white chalk, where anyone could see them.

The Sea had stopped falling a month after the gates opened, at the level of the Makers' drowned town. The broken corner of the wall still poured, a steady white cataract out of the wound at its foot. But the other leaks were falling. Slowly. Every week, a little less.

Teo had no idea how long it would last. He had written that on the board too, at the very top, in letters as large as his hand. WE DON'T KNOW HOW LONG IT WILL HOLD. THAT'S WHY WE COUNT.

People read it every day, on their way past. Some of them argued about it. Teo thought that was exactly right.

The red books came in the last week of the Sowing.

Bram brought them. He had gone east with Sefa's people at the end of the Thaw... the salt grandmother had sent her grandson to fetch him, with a string of twenty camels and a message that the old woman refused to explain, except that she was tired of being the only person in the Ashlands who knew where the hill that looks at the sky was... and he came back three months later, sunburned and thinner and almost cheerful, at the head of a long line of humped, complaining beasts, each one carrying a load of grey crates on its back.

Forty-four crates. Fifty books in each.

Two thousand, two hundred red books.

START HERE.

A Primer for People Who Have to Begin Again.

They gave them away.

All of them. Not to the Shelf. Not to the Crown. Not to anyone who could pay. To anyone who asked. One to every street in the Sump. One to every terrace of the Shelf. One to the Cathedral... which a white-haired deacon accepted in both hands, with his eyes closed, as if it might burn him... and one to every barge that went down the river, for the Fens, and one to Sefa's grandson for the salt people, and one to every child in Calder Reach who could read, and one to every child who could not but wanted to learn.

And one for Hesk's House.

It sat on a table by the door, in the long low hall that had once been the Mercy House. A plain wooden table. And beside it, someone had pinned a sheet of paper to the wall, with a single line written on it, in a careful, square hand.

Please, whatever you do, give it away.

Teo stood in the doorway of Hesk's House on the first morning, and looked at it, and was very afraid.

He had not been afraid at the bottom of the world, with the water roaring and the wall breaking. He had not been afraid in the Cathedral, with the Wrath of the Flame charged and gleaming at his back. He had been afraid, of course, in the moment. Everyone was. But not like this.

The long hall had been cleaned and whitewashed. The cots were gone. In their place, there were benches. Rows and rows of rough wooden benches, made by the blacksmiths and the barge-builders out of driftwood from the flood. And on the long wall at the far end of the hall, where the altar had been, there was a great board of smooth black slate, like the one in Saint Orlen's Square. Clean. Empty. Waiting.

And in front of it, on the benches, there were people.

Teo did not know how many. He had not counted. That was strange enough by itself to unsettle him. There were children, mostly. Sump children and Shelf children, side by side, bare feet and polished boots, elbowing each other and whispering. But not only children. There was a row of old women at the back, who had come, they said, because they had never been allowed to learn their letters and did not intend to die without them. There was Cobb, with his arm healed, looking shy. There was Garrow, the pyre-man, sitting very straight at the end of a bench with his huge lime-scarred hands folded in his lap, looking as if he were waiting to be struck by lightning. There were two of Dane's Ashwardens, without their masks. There was a young priest from the Crown in red robes, trying to look as though he was not there.

And there was Mira.

She was sitting at the side of the hall, by the door, in a plain brown dress, with the grey book in her lap. She had been asked to lead the Mercy House... what was left of the Chantry had asked her, the deacons and the acolytes who had come down off the Crown... and she had said yes, on the condition that it be a Mercy House where anyone could come and ask questions, and where the healers boiled their water and washed their hands and kept a count. She still prayed. Every morning and every night. Teo had stopped wondering whether that was strange. He had decided it was not.

She caught his eye across the hall, and smiled. Just slightly.

'...All right,' Teo thought. 'All right. You've done harder things than this.'

'Name one.'

He walked down the aisle between the benches, slowly, to the front of the hall, and picked up a stub of chalk from the ledge under the black slate.

He did not know how to begin. He had thought about it for weeks. He had thought about making a speech — about the Makers and the Fall and the flux and the bread and the wall — and every time, he had heard Valdris Kahl's quiet voice in his head, filling the Cathedral, telling forty thousand people what to think. And he had put it aside.

So, in the end, he did what Hesk had done for him, in a cellar below the river, a long time ago.

He turned to the black slate, and wrote three lines on it, in large, plain letters.

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

WHAT WOULD BE TRUE IF YOU WERE WRONG?

HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?

Then he turned around, and looked at them.

The hall was very quiet. Forty or fifty faces looked back at him. More, perhaps. He still had not counted.

A small boy in the front row put up his hand. Teo did not know him. He had a runny nose, and a ragged coat, and a small dark scar on his arm above the elbow. Teo thought, perhaps, he had been the boy at the bottom of the steps of the Mercy House, on the night of the grey book, who had come for his cow-scratch because his mam said he had to.

"What if you're wrong?" the boy said.

There was a ripple of nervous laughter from the benches. Somewhere at the back, someone hissed at him to be quiet.

Teo looked at the boy for a long moment.

Then he smiled.

"Then you'll prove it," he said. "That's the whole point."

The boy considered this, frowning. Then, apparently satisfied, he put his hand down.

Teo turned back to the slate. And then he stopped, because he realised that there was one thing he had not done. One thing he had always done, every day of his life, in every room he had ever stood in, without even thinking about it. And today, for the first time, he had forgotten.

He turned to the girl standing by the door.

She was twelve now. Taller. Her hair had grown back, short and ragged and fierce, and she was holding a long board under one arm and a stub of chalk in her hand, the way she had stood at the edge of the Table for two days and a night counting forty thousand people over the rim. She had been waiting, Teo realised. She had been waiting for him to ask.

"Nell," he said. "How many?"

Nell grinned at him. Then she turned to the benches, and lifted her chalk, and began to count, out loud, her clear high voice ringing down the long white hall of Hesk's House, one face at a time.

"One. Two. Three. Four..."

Teo stood at the front of the hall, by the black slate with its three questions, and listened. Past the windows, in the summer sun, the Spillway rose up into the sky, vast and grey and ancient, weeping from its cracks, still standing. Somewhere far above, on the Crown, a bell was ringing.

He did not count the strokes.

"...forty," said Nell. "Forty-one."

She stopped. She looked at Teo. Then she pointed her chalk, very deliberately, at him.

"Forty-two."

Teo laughed.

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