Chapter 2

They were halfway across the seabed when the first channel moved.

At four, while they were lacing their boots in Imogen’s office, the night’s notice had come into everyone’s eyes at once.

Gus had read it and said nothing at all. He laced the other boot.

They had left the hall at half past four, past the bottom of Chapel Hill, where the screaming had been in the night. There was nothing there now but a car on its roof, a dropped slipper and a long dragged smear across the tarmac going down towards the sea. Neither of them said anything about it.

It was ten past five and not yet light. The mud between the southern boat ramp and the city was grey under a greyer sky, scored with channels of black water that ran out towards the hollow like the cracks in an old plate. Rosamund’s scouts had marked a route along the firmest ground with bamboo canes and strips of hi-vis tape. Nora had been counting the canes to keep herself from looking at the water. Behind them, along the curve of the shore, lights were coming on at the ferry terminal slip, and a line of torches was forming up there in a disciplined column.

“Six o’clock, my arse,” Gus said. “They’re early.”

“So are we.”

That was when the water in the channel ahead of them bulged and broke, and three hookjaws came up out of it onto the mud.

They came the way they had on the slipway: fast and low, spreading out. But Nora had spent a night lying awake running that fight in her head, and this time she was already moving before the first one was clear of the water. She went left, onto a hump of firm shingle the scouts had marked, where the mud would not take her feet. Gus went right with the axe up. The three creatures did what she had hoped they would do and split to follow them.

Her first Bolt took the leading one in the joint of its foreleg, and the leg folded. Her second missed. She swore and put a third into its face as it came on dragging the leg, close enough that she smelled its plates scorch. It went down and lay twitching at the edge of the shingle.

“Hookjaw,” Nora read, frowning. “That’s Jamal’s word.” She looked at it a moment longer than it deserved.

Across the channel Gus had two of them on him. He did not look like a man who had been a marine fitter until the night before last. He looked like a man who had decided something. He took the first bite on his Guard and let it skid off the axe-head, then stepped inside the second creature’s reach where its jaws couldn’t close on him and put the axe into the back of its neck with Edge burning white along the blade. It died without a sound. The other one hit him from the side and knocked him flat in the mud.

Nora’s Bolt hit it as it reared over him. It wasn’t enough. It turned its head towards her, the sideways mouth opening, and Gus came up off his back under it and drove the axe up into the soft place under its jaw with both hands.

They stood in the mud breathing.

“Twenty,” she said, reading it. “It was fifty on the slipway.”

“I’m worth more now,” said Gus. “They’re worth less.”

“It’s paying for difficulty.” She didn’t mind that at all. It meant the thing was keeping score honestly. And it paid them the same, she’d noticed, to the point: whoever landed the blow, both of them got the whole of it.

“Consequential,” said Nora. “It means it has to matter.” She thought of the second Bolt, the one that had missed.

“You only missed once,” Gus said. “That’s better than last night.”

“I still missed.”

“Better,” he said again, and she let him have it.

He looked at the air beside his face for the first time since the slipway. She watched him read his sheet and watched his mouth go tight at the corners.

“Two empty slots,” he said. “Two empty slots and a fire axe.” He frowned at the sheet. “What does Might actually do? I’ve got eighteen of it. Eighteen what?”

He must have asked the right way, because the interface told him.

“Rating plus Might,” he said, satisfied. “Axe is twelve, I’m eighteen, so thirty a swing before armour. That’s just physics with a spreadsheet.” He looked at the two empty slots a moment longer.

“You’ll fill them,” said Nora.

“I know I will.” He wiped the axe on the mud, which made it no cleaner. He looked back along the shore at the column of torches, which had started down the terminal slip and onto the seabed. “Come on. I want to be inside before he’s out of his car.”

The city did not look drowned in daylight. That was the first thing.

Nora had expected weed. She had expected the bearded green skin that every stone on the Greyhaven front wore up to the high-water line, the barnacles, the black crust of mussels, the little round holes that piddocks bored into anything soft enough. The city’s outer wall rose out of the mud ahead of them, pale and close-jointed, and it was clean. A smear of sand along its foot. A plastic bottle wedged in a carved gutter. A length of orange rope draped over a stone finial where the falling water had dropped it. Otherwise nothing: no growth at all, not a single barnacle, on stone that had supposedly spent a thousand years under the sea.

She put her palm flat on it to make sure. Cold, gritty, dry under the grit.

“Gus. Feel that.”

He did, dutifully, and looked at his hand. “Clean.”

“That stone’s never been under our sea. Not for a year. Not for a week.” She looked along the wall at the bottle and the rope, Greyhaven’s litter sitting on top of all that clean stone like snow on a car. “Everything on it is ours. Everything underneath is new.”

“So it wasn’t here.”

“So it wasn’t here,” she said. “It came. The night the sea went. With all of it.” She wrote it down, because it was the first thing about the place she was sure of. Her pencil shook only slightly.

The arch stood at the city’s near edge. From the flat it had looked like a single tall shape on the mud. Close to, it was only the top of a gateway: the arch rose a little above the seabed, and the rest of it ran down into a cutting, six or seven storeys deep, into the hollow where the city sat.

They stood at the lip of the cutting and looked down, and for a while neither of them said anything at all.

The city went down into the hollow in terraces, the way a hill town goes down to a river. Roofs below roofs, pale and close-set, with broad stairs between them and narrow streets that ran with bright moving water. Bridges crossed the streets at every level, light and many-arched, some of them broken. There were towers, slim and square, and long low halls with rows of slots along their roofs. In places there were whole districts where the roofs were glass, green and dark, catching the dawn. Everything was very quiet. Water fell everywhere: from gutters, from the mouths of carved fish, down stairs in long glittering sheets. The sound of it came up out of the hollow like the breathing of something asleep.

And at the bottom, in the middle, where every stair and street and channel seemed to lead, stood a dome of dark glass inside a cage of bronze ribs. The light did not go into it. It sat at the heart of the city like the pupil of an eye.

“If there’s protection,” Nora said at last, “it’s there.”

“How do you know?”

“Because everything goes to it. Look at the water.” It was true: every channel she could see ran down towards the dome, as if the whole city were a basin draining into it. “A whole city doesn’t run downhill to one place by accident.”

Something moved on a far terrace, beyond the glass district. It was too far to see properly, a long way off and half hidden by towers. It was tall. It moved slowly from one roof to the next, the way a person might step over a wall, and then it was behind a tower and gone.

While they watched, the light came up over the edge of the hollow and went down into the city terrace by terrace, the way a tide comes in over a flat beach. It found the wet roofs one after another and lit them; it found the falling water and turned it white; it went down the stairs and along the streets. Last of all it reached the dark dome at the bottom and stopped there, as though it had come to a wall. Nora had the feeling, quite strongly, that the place was not empty. That it was only quiet, the way a house is quiet when everyone in it is asleep upstairs.

Gus let out a long breath. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t see that.”

“So am I,” said Nora. She wrote it down anyway: something big, west terraces. Walks over roofs.

The plaque was where Rosamund’s scouts had said, plain and dark. The letters on it were meaningless until she stood squarely in front of it, and then the words were simply there in her head, the way the notices were.

“Recorded,” Gus said. “By who?”

“Same people who apologise.”

Through the arch, water reflected a low ceiling held up on square pillars. A dry ledge ran along the right-hand wall into the dark. Just inside the threshold, set into the wall at waist height, was a small iron wheel with three finger hollows worn smooth in its rim, shining against the rough metal.

Gus looked at it for a moment. “Someone used that a lot.”

For a second, despite everything, Nora wanted to put her own hand where those other fingers had been and feel how often that wheel had been turned, by someone doing an ordinary job in this extraordinary place. Then she heard the column’s voices, still far off on the mud behind them, and went past it.

The ledge ran for twenty metres beside black water and ended at a grille.

It was a heavy iron lattice across the ledge and the channel both, its bars thick as her wrist. Beyond it she could see two shallow steps, a dry platform, a passage going deeper. Something blue covered the far wall in overlapping curves.

Something was caught on the grille.

Gus saw it before she did. He went down on one knee on the wet stone and unhooked it from a bar at the waterline with great care: an orange plastic whistle on a frayed lanyard, the kind every lifeboat crew carried. He turned it over. Someone had scratched two letters into its side with the point of a knife, years ago, the scratches worn shiny.

DH.

He didn’t say anything. He looked at it in his palm and then at the grille, and Nora looked where he was looking. Under the water, in the silt at the foot of the bars, there were marks: long, parallel, dragged. They went under the lowest bar of the grille and on into the dark beyond.

“They came through here,” he said. “They pulled him through here. Through the bars.”

“Under them. There’s a gap at the bottom.” She crouched beside him. “Too small for us.”

Gus put the whistle in the breast pocket of his jacket and buttoned it. “Open it.”

She used Trace. The world went faintly luminous: lines of old working ran through the stone like veins in a leaf. The grille lit along a thin conductor that ran up into the lintel and back along the wall to a small brass box at shoulder height, with a coil in it and two dry contacts under a lip. A lock. A lock that wanted electricity.

“Hall door,” Gus said, watching her face.

“Same idea.” She stood back three metres, lined up her hand with the contacts and paid for a Bolt.

Spark cracked across the gap and into the brass. The coil inside jumped. Somewhere above them a counterweight dropped with a long iron groan, and the grille rose streaming out of the water on its chains and locked open on a stop.

“That,” Gus said, “was very satisfying.”

“Don’t tell me. Tell it.” Nora kept her hand raised until the counterweight stopped moving. Then she went under it, grinning, which surprised her.

They went through.

The gallery beyond was long and high and full of water.

Stone cabinets rose out of it in rows, each with a little sloping roof, their doors standing open below the surface. Bars of daylight fell from high slots in the ceiling. Nora put her light into the nearest open cabinet as they passed along the ledge, and the shelves inside were bare. Nothing lay broken in the water below them: no pots, no rotted sacks, nothing at all.

“Cupboards,” Gus said. “Somebody’s going to be livid about the damp.”

“Nobody’s livid. That’s what bothers me. They took everything off those shelves.” She moved the light along the row. “No broken crockery. Nothing too heavy to carry. Somebody packed.”

“Or somebody was packed,” Gus said. She looked at him. He had his hand over the buttoned pocket where the whistle was, and he didn’t seem to have meant anything by it.

The things came out of the cabinets.

There were five of them, pale-backed and ridged like overlapping shells, no higher than her knee. All at once, as though someone had pulled a cord, they came out of the open doors under the water and up onto the ledge ahead and behind. The blue-white insides of their narrow mouths showed when they opened them. Behind them, heaving itself out of the deepest cabinet of all, came a sixth that was the size of a pony. Nora didn’t need Trace to know it was worse. Trace told her anyway, in the same polite type: Brinefang prowler (matriarch) · Level 4 · Armour 8. And she and Gus were level two.

“Back to the grille,” Nora said.

“Can’t.” Gus jerked his chin. Two of the small ones were already on the ledge behind them, between them and the gate. “Wall. Get your back to the wall.”

The ledge was two metres wide, with the gallery wall on one side and the water on the other. An iron rail ran along the water’s edge, rusted and old but sound, fixed into the stone every few metres. Nora looked at the rail and at the small pale creatures climbing up onto the ledge, using the rail to pull themselves out of the water with their forefeet. She had the first idea down here that she would later call a trick.

She dropped to one knee, put her hand flat on the stone where the nearest rail-fixing went into it, and inscribed. Three seconds. The anchor took. She fed Spark through it.

The rail lit.

Not much: a hand’s span of blue crawl along the old iron, spreading out from the fixing in a thin flickering web, the way frost spreads across a windscreen. But the two prowlers that had their forefeet on the rail went stiff and fell back into the water, and the one behind them, halfway out, shrieked and let go.

“Ha,” Gus said. “Ha! Do that again.”

“I’m doing it. It costs me every minute. Kill something.”

He killed something. He killed two things in the time it took her to count to five, the axe going down in short brutal strokes on the ledge in front of them. Then the pony-sized one came along the ledge at him like a falling wardrobe.

He Guarded it. The Guard held, a sheet of light across the axe-head, but the impact drove him back into the wall so hard that she heard the breath go out of him. Its jaw was pinned against the haft. It pushed. He pushed back, his boots skidding on the wet stone. She couldn’t fire past him without hitting him, and she couldn’t let go of the rail working without letting the small ones climb.

She let go of the rail.

Two seconds. Gus was losing; she could see it in his shoulders. She stepped out to the very edge of the ledge, where the water was right there under her heel, found the angle past his hip and put a Bolt into the big creature’s eye from a metre away.

It reared back screaming. Gus got the axe free and put Edge into the side of its head on the backswing, then again. The second time it went down across the ledge with its tail in the water and did not get up.

The small ones fled. They poured back off the ledge into the cabinets like water going down a drain, and the gallery was suddenly very quiet, apart from Gus’s breathing and the drip of water off the cabinet roofs.

Nora leaned on the wall and watched her mana come back. She timed it on her phone: about a twentieth of the whole every minute, steadily, as long as nothing was trying to kill her. Stamina came faster. Health didn’t come back at all.

Gus was crouching beside the big one’s head before she had got her own breath back.

“Nora.” His voice cracked like a boy’s. “Nora, it’s bindable.”

“Then bind it,” she said. “I’ll watch the water.”

He sat down with his back to the wall and the creature’s long head across his knees. She watched his face as he paid for it. It was an expression she had seen on him before, in junk shops and at boot sales, the absolute stillness of a man who has found the thing he did not know he was looking for. It lasted five minutes. She stood over him with her hand up and her eyes on the black water, and nothing came.

“One,” he said. He closed his hand slowly, as though he could feel it in there. “One.”

Then the selections came, for both of them at once, and she forgot to watch the water.

She thought about the rail and the small pale things climbing it, about the way her hand had been tied to that working while Gus lost a shoving match with something the size of a pony. Fork would have helped. Lance would have helped. But she would have been standing in the same place, choosing between holding something and shooting something. Next time that choice might be Gus’s life.

Snare meant she could leave something behind that would do the shooting for her.

She took Snare.

“Sweeping Edge,” Gus said beside her, reading his. “Half the Edge goes into the next one along. Sundering Edge, Rare, ignores ten armour while the Edge is on. Hook Step, Step that ends in a hit.” He looked at the cabinets, at the little doors under the water where the small ones had gone. “They come in packs. Everything here comes in packs.” He chose. “Sweeping.”

Then the points. Each level gave five. The class put two of them where it wanted, one into Arcana and one into Perception for her, Might and Vitality for him. The other three were theirs to place. Nora put two of hers into Arcana, because the hookjaw on the shingle had taken two Bolts and a miss to kill. She put the last into Vitality, because she had watched the matriarch drive Gus’s Guard into the wall and she was made of considerably less than Gus.

“Arcana,” Gus said, doing his. “Two. Guard comes out of Arcana, I read the small print. And one in Vitality, because apparently I’m the wall.”

She looked at hers for slightly longer than she meant to. Fifty points of mana she had not had two nights ago. It felt like finding a room in your house you had not known about.

“Don’t,” Gus said, watching her.

“Don’t what?”

“Pretend you don’t like it. I can see you liking it. It’s all right. I like it too.” He stood up, slower than usual, a hand pressed to his side where the big one had driven him into the wall. “I like it a lot, and I hate everything about why we’re here, and those are both true. My nan used to say you can cry and eat cake at the same time. She did it at every funeral.”

The fish were on the wall beyond the next steps, and so was the man.

The wall was a mosaic: hundreds of fish worked in small pieces of glazed stone, dark-backed and pale-bellied, each with one bright tile for an eye, swimming in a great curving shoal round a drinking spout shaped like a larger fish. Frost whitened the spout’s lip, though the gallery air was well above freezing. Nora touched it and drew her finger back, wet and stinging. Whatever cooled it was buried in the wall. Someone had mended a missing patch of mosaic with plain white squares that interrupted the shoal. The grout round the white squares was hard, pale and new, nothing like the soft dark old grout around it.

“That’s recent,” Nora said, before she could stop herself. “Somebody mended this not long before they left.”

“Unless you didn’t know you were about to,” said the man sitting on the edge of the drinking spout.

Gus had the axe up. The man lifted both hands, unhurried. One of them held a half-eaten Twix.

He was in his early thirties, thin and weathered, in a rope-access harness hung with carabiners and a stained red helmet pushed back off a sharp, amused face. A coil of blue rope lay beside him, and a crowbar, and a box of school chalk.

“Morning,” he said. “Don’t hit me, I’m the friendly sort. You’ll be the couple. Rosamund’s scouts said a big lad with an axe and a woman who shoots lightning. I’ve been down here since three. Voss’s lot’ll be at that grille of yours in about forty minutes, so you’ve got time for a chat.” He took a bite of the Twix. “Sebastian Rook. Rope access. I inspect sea walls for the harbour board’s contractors, or I did. I came in over the rocks at the north end. Took me two hours and I nearly died twice, so you’re welcome to the front door.”

“You’re on the ranking,” Nora said. “Fourth.”

“Am I? Lovely. My mum will be thrilled.” He looked past them at the gallery, at the big dead prowler on the ledge. “Nicely done. I went round that lot. I’m not built for fighting. I’m built for going round.”

“What are you doing down here?” Gus said.

“Same as you. Looking.” The amused face went careful. “My sister’s lad. They took him off the beach at Saltings. Turned eighteen in August. He was out with his mates, being an idiot.” He put the rest of the Twix in his mouth. “So. Looking.”

Gus lowered the axe a few centimetres.

“I’ll trade you,” Sebastian said. “I’ve been further than you. I’ll tell you what I’ve seen, you tell me what you’ve seen, and we’re all a bit less dead. Fair?”

“Fair,” said Gus, before Nora could open her mouth.

Sebastian told them. The drag marks went on through the next three galleries and then down: down a sluice too narrow for a person, into somewhere lower. And something came up from the lower place. He had seen it twice in the night from a high window and still didn’t know what it was.

“Tall,” he said. “Legs like a crane, stone and bronze. Walks like a heron. It’s got a sort of basket on its back, a cradle. It goes along the channels and picks things out of them.” He paused. “People. It picks people out. I saw it take one at four o’clock and carry it off down a shaft at the far end of the next hall. The person was moving.”

“Alive,” Gus said.

“Moving. Wrists glowing. Some sort of band on them.” Sebastian shrugged. “That’s mine. Yours?”

Gus told him about the grille and the whistle and the drag marks, and the clean stone. Nora stood there and listened to him give it all away and said nothing, because he was Gus and he talked to strangers and it was too late. Sebastian listened with his head on one side and asked two sharp questions about the grille’s lock.

When it was done he stood up, coiled his rope over his shoulder and walked to the doorway at the far end of the fish hall. On the frame, at shoulder height, he chalked a small sign: a circle with a stroke through it, and beside it the figure 2.

“What’s that?” Gus said.

“Manners. Circle-and-stroke means careful. The number’s how many. Two packs between here and the big hall, both small, both asleep when I passed.” He tipped his helmet. “If you see my marks, you’ll know I’ve been. If I see a big dead thing, I’ll know you have. Good luck finding your brother, Gus.”

Then he was gone into the passage, quick and light and quiet, and the chalk dust was still settling on the sill.

“Forty minutes,” said Nora after a moment.

“What?”

“He said Voss would be at the grille in forty minutes. Not soon. Forty minutes.” She looked at the chalk. “He’s been down here since three, by his own account.”

“Maybe he guessed,” said Gus.

Nora didn’t answer.

She looked at the little white circle on the door frame. Then she looked back at the fish wall.

There was one, in the middle of the shoal: a little yellow fish no longer than her thumb, swimming the other way from all the others. Whoever had made the wall had put it there on purpose and must have expected people to spend time looking at it while they waited to drink.

She took the notebook out and wrote, under Danny and clean stone, new here:

Fish wall mended recently. Find an exposed cold working.

The two small packs were asleep where Sebastian’s chalk had said. Gus wanted to kill them for the experience. Nora wanted to go round them. They went round, which meant a wade to the thigh through cold black water with her teeth set and her light on the surface. Gus held her pack over his head and complained in a steady, cheerful undertone about the temperature of his own testicles, until she laughed so hard she nearly went under.

Then the passage climbed, and turned, and opened onto a window.

It was a long slot in the wall, high up, overlooking a hall so big her light didn’t reach the far end. Daylight came down through rows of narrow openings in the roof and lay in bars across great stone basins, half full of water, connected by walkways at different heights. A channel ran down the middle of the hall to a dark square shaft at the far end.

Something was walking along the channel.

It was exactly as Sebastian had said, and worse. It was tall, three metres at least, on long backward-jointed legs of bronze and pale stone, and it walked with the slow high-stepping care of a heron in shallows. Its body was a squat drum of stone plates. On its back, slung between two bronze arms, was a cradle like an open basket woven out of metal.

There was a woman in the cradle.

She was alive. Nora could see her moving, slow and weak, one hand coming up over the edge of the basket and falling back. A band of soft white light glowed round her wrist. She wore a carer’s tabard, the kind the Harbour estate care agency gave out, pale blue with a white logo.

The thing walked on down the channel towards the shaft, unhurried, carrying her.

“That’s where they take them,” Nora said.

Gus was already running.