The Handle

Deacon Pruett of Saint Orlen's parish was a man of large appetites and small patience, and he listened to Teo for almost a full minute before he started to shout.

"...The Archdeacon himself blessed that pump! The Voice of the Flame! He stood in that square thirty years ago and poured the sacred oil into the well with his own hands, in front of the whole Sump! And you... you, a cart-boy, a pyre-yard rat... you come to my door and tell me it's poisoned?"

"Not poisoned, Deacon. There's something living in it. Small things. I can show you, if you look through this..."

Teo held out the button. Deacon Pruett looked at it as if it were a dead rat.

"What is that?"

"A lens. Like a... like a very small window. It makes things look bigger."

"A Maker thing?"

Teo hesitated a moment too long.

The Deacon's face, which had been red, went slowly white.

"...Get out," he said quietly. "Get out of my house, boy, before I call the Ashwardens and have them ask you where you learned to make Maker things. Get out, and thank the Flame on your knees tonight that I am a merciful man."

Teo got out — quickly.

He stood in the street outside the Deacon's house for a while, staring at the cobbles. Then he walked to the edge of Saint Orlen's Square and watched the people come and go from the pump with their buckets. Women. Children. An old man who could barely lift his. Each of them worked the long iron handle up and down, up and down, and the clear cool water gushed into their buckets, and they carried it home to drink.

Teo counted them. Sixty-three in the hour he stood there.

'...So. Telling them won't work.'

He walked back toward Brine Lane slowly, thinking.

The problem was not difficult to understand. It was only difficult to solve. The pump was killing people... perhaps fifteen or twenty a day now, the flux spreading more slowly as it ran out of new victims on the square, but still killing. Every day that the pump stayed open meant more cart-loads. Teo needed the people of the Sump to stop drinking from it, and he needed it to happen now.

So. What were his choices?

He could try to warn people himself. Stand in the square and shout. But he was a cart-man, and the Sump spat when cart-men passed, and nobody would take a cart-man's word over a deacon's. Worse, Deacon Pruett would hear of it within an hour, and the Ashwardens within two. Teo would be in a cell by nightfall, and the pump would still be open.

He could go over the Deacon's head, to the Mercy House, to the senior deacons, to the Shelf. But they would all ask the same question... where did you learn this, boy?... and there was no answer to that question that did not end with Hesk's cellar being found and burned, and Hesk with it.

He could poison the pump with something that would make the water taste foul. Lamp oil. Dead rats. People would stop drinking. But they would also tell the Chantry, and the Chantry would clean the well, and bless it again, and people would come back. And in the meantime, the Chantry would be hunting for whoever had befouled a blessed well, which was a far greater sin than counting.

He could break the pump. Smash it with a hammer, crack the iron, ruin it. That would work for longer. But it would take time and make noise, and a broken blessed pump would look like heresy, and heresy brought the Ashwardens out in force.

...Or.

Teo stopped walking.

He thought about the Leaf. About the last line, half eaten by the fire. Removed the handle of the pump.

Why the handle?

The answer came to him after a moment, and it was so simple that he almost laughed. Because a handle was easy. A handle could be taken off by one man in a few minutes with the right tool. It made no noise. It broke nothing. Without its handle, a pump was just a post in the ground... it could not draw a single drop. And if it turned out that the man who took the handle was wrong, then someone could simply put it back on again.

It was not a weapon. It was a question. The cleanest question he could ask.

If the pump was the cause... then without the handle, the dying should stop.

And if the dying did not stop, then he was wrong, and he would know it.

He did it on the third night after the Deacon threw him out, a little after the midnight bells, when the Sump was as dark and as quiet as it ever got.

Nell kept watch at the corner of Tallow Row. She had insisted on coming, and Teo had decided that he would rather have her where he could see her than have her follow him in secret, which she had certainly been planning to do. He gave her a short, simple rule. If she saw anyone at all, she was to whistle once, like a nightjar, and then walk away. Not run. Walk.

The pump stood in the middle of the empty square, black against the faint glow of the Flame high on the Crown. Teo approached it slowly, a heavy iron spanner wrapped in rags in one hand, and crouched down at its base.

He had studied it for three days. The handle was a long, curved bar of iron, attached to the top of the pump post by a thick iron pin that passed through both of them. The pin was held in place by a nut on one side, rusted solid. That was the only difficulty. Once the nut was off, the pin would slide out, and the handle would come free.

Teo fitted the spanner onto the nut, braced his foot against the post, and pulled.

Nothing happened.

He gritted his teeth and pulled harder. His arms trembled. The rust groaned softly... and held.

'Come on. Come on, you bastard...'

He shifted his grip, moving his hands to the very end of the spanner, as far from the nut as he could reach. The Leaves had a word for that... leverage... and a drawing, of a man moving a boulder with a long pole. The longer the bar, the less strength it took. He did not understand why, but he had seen it work on the pyre-yard gate more times than he could count.

He pulled again.

With a sudden, grinding shriek that seemed loud enough to wake the whole of Calder Reach, the nut turned.

Teo froze, his heart pounding. He waited, crouched in the darkness, listening. Nothing. No whistle. No shouts. No lamps flaring in the windows. After a while, he began to breathe again, and turned the nut once more, slowly, a little at a time.

It came off in his hand.

The pin slid out more easily than he had feared — a little grease of rust, a gentle tap, and it was free. The long iron handle came loose with a dull clank, and Teo caught it before it hit the stones. It was heavy, much heavier than it looked, and cold, and slick with damp.

He stood for a moment in the dark square with the handle in his arms, looking at the pump. It was just a post now. An iron post in the ground.

...It looked very small.

A nightjar whistled, once, from the corner of Tallow Row.

Teo turned and ran... which was precisely what he had told Nell not to do... across the square and into the black mouth of an alley, just as a lantern swung into view at the far end of the street. Two figures in long grey coats walked slowly into the square. The lantern light glinted on iron masks pushed up onto their foreheads, and on the hilts of their swords.

Ashwardens. On patrol.

Teo pressed himself against the wall of the alley and did not breathe.

The Ashwardens walked past the pump without a glance. Their footsteps faded slowly into the distance. After a long, long while, Teo crept out the other end of the alley, found Nell waiting on the riverbank where they had agreed to meet, and threw the handle of Saint Orlen's pump as far as he could into the black water of the Calder.

It sank without a sound.

The next morning, the Sump woke up to find its sweetest well dead.

There was shouting. There was weeping. There was a good deal of cursing, and a crowd that gathered around the pump all morning, staring at the empty hole where the pin had been, as if staring would make the handle grow back. Deacon Pruett came out of his house, saw it, and went the colour of curdled milk.

Then, slowly, grumbling, the people of Saint Orlen's Square picked up their buckets and walked to the river, or to the brewery, or to the old cistern on Coopers' Yard, to fetch their water from somewhere else.

Teo pushed his cart through the square at noon. He did not look at the pump.

By the evening, there was an Ashwarden standing guard over it. By the next morning, there were two, and a proclamation nailed to the post, sealed with the red wax of the Flame, which declared that whoever had desecrated the blessed well of Saint Orlen had committed a grave heresy against the Undying Flame, and that any who knew the culprit were bound by sacred law to name him.

And at noon, when Teo pushed his cart past again, he saw a tall man in a grey coat crouching beside the post, examining the hole where the pin had been. The man's coat had a silver collar. His mask, pushed up on his forehead, was painted with a single red line.

An Ashwarden captain.

The captain ran his thumb thoughtfully over the clean edge of the hole. Then he looked up, straight across the square, and his eyes met Teo's for a brief, cold moment.

Teo looked away and kept walking. His heart was pounding against his ribs.

Behind him, the captain said quietly to the Ashwarden beside him:

"No hammer marks. No broken iron. Someone who knew exactly what they were doing."