Chapter 6

The thread had gone down the shaft, and they had not. What Nora had instead was the model, copied into her notebook as carefully as she had ever drawn anything: out of the workshop’s far door, across the court with its trough of green water, and out into the open air.

They came out onto a bridge. It crossed a street seven storeys up, a single span of pale stone no wider than a pavement, with a parapet at waist height. For the first time since the arch they were outside in the drowned city rather than looking at it through a window. Below them the street ran with bright water from one end to the other, over steps, under arches, past doors standing open on empty rooms. The roofs of the glass district came right up to the far end of the bridge. Close to, the glass was green and thick and old. Through it Nora could see long rows of something underneath: benches, or beds, or troughs gone wild with pale plants that had grown up against the glass and died there pressed flat, like flowers in a book. On one of the long benches, under a skin of pale dead growth, lay something the length of a person. Nora told herself it was a sack. She wrote it down anyway.

At the top of a slim square tower beside the bridge hung a bell made of the same dark glass as the dome. As they crossed, the wind came up the street off the sea and found it, and it hummed: one long low note, so deep Nora felt it more than heard it, in her breastbone and her teeth. It was the first sound in the city that had not been water or something hunting, and it went on for a long time, out over the roofs and the empty streets, as if somebody somewhere were still being called to something.

Gus stopped in the middle of the bridge.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, as if it were a complaint. “Why is it so bloody beautiful? It’s trying to kill us.”

“It isn’t trying to do anything,” said Beatrice, beside him. “It’s just very old, and nobody’s been looking after it.” She looked down at the street, at the open doors. “I know that feeling.” She leaned a little way over the parapet. “Those plants under the glass. Do you think any are still alive?”

Across the hollow, on the terraces beyond the glass district, something stood up.

Nora had taken it for a tower. It had been standing among the towers, as still as they were, and now it was not still. It turned, slowly, the whole long dark height of it, towards the bridge and the humming bell.

“Down,” she said, and they were down, all three of them, flat on the wet stone behind the parapet.

The bell hummed. Nora lay with her cheek on the stone and felt the note in her teeth and counted. At thirty she heard it: not footsteps exactly, but a long grinding settle, like a lorry parking on gravel. Then another, nearer. Then one so near that the bridge jumped under her and grit pattered down into the street. At fifty the wind dropped. The bell’s note thinned, and wavered, and died.

Something was standing in the street below them. She couldn’t see it. She could see its shadow, laid up the wall on the far side of the street: long, upright, unmoving, the shadow of a chimney with nothing there to cast it. Gus’s breath caught on his ribs every time he drew it. He put his sleeve over his mouth to keep it quiet.

Nothing happened for a long time.

Then the shadow turned. The next step went away down the street, and the next. The one after that came down on the end of the bridge they had walked out from.

It didn’t stop to do it. It stepped through the span the way a man steps through a cobweb. The first twenty metres of the bridge went into the street in a long roar of stone. The parapet unzipped towards them block by block and stopped four metres short of Nora’s boots.

When the dust thinned, the shadow was gone from the wall, and there was nothing behind them but air.

“Well,” said Gus into his sleeve. “We’re not going back that way.”

“It came to the bell,” Beatrice whispered.

“It came to the noise.” Nora was writing, lying on her side, and her pencil was not steady. Walker. Hears. Stops when it stops. Doesn’t look where it puts its feet. “Keep your voices down on the bridges.”

They went the rest of the way bent double, and nobody called anything beautiful again. On the far side the drawing said a spiral stair went down through the bridge tower. It had. The walker’s shoulder had taken the corner of the tower as it turned, and the stairwell was a shaft full of broken stone.

That left the roofs.

The glass district’s roofs were glass: long green panes, thick and old, set in stone ribs a hand’s width across, running away in rows towards where the drawing put the water stair. Footing would hold her on the ribs. It would not hold her on the glass. She knew that without having to be told.

“Ribs only,” she said. “Don’t stand on the glass. Don’t drop anything. Don’t talk.”

“Don’t breathe,” said Gus.

“If you can manage it.”

Gus looked at Beatrice’s boots. “She hasn’t got the rune.”

Nora looked back at the broken span. No shelter, and no telling when the walker would turn. “Stay close enough to give her a hand. We should have changed it in the court.”

They went one at a time, Nora first, arms out, along a rib no wider than a kerb, with nothing on either side of it but green glass and a long way down. Gus came behind her with one arm clamped to his side and his face set. Beatrice came last, hockey stick through her belt, saying something under her breath that might have been a prayer and might have been a list of what she would do to Gus if he fell.

Below them, through the green, the long rows of benches went by, with the pale dead growth pressed flat against the underside of the glass. Under the growth, on the benches, were the shapes. On the bridge Nora had told herself it was a sack. From up here she could see that there were a great many of them, all the same length, all lying the same way, in rows, and that each one had something small and square set at its head end. She didn’t stop. She kept her eyes on the next rib and her feet where her eyes were.

Halfway across, Beatrice’s boot slid off the rib onto a pane.

It took her weight. It took it with a sound like ice on a pond in January, one long low creak that went out across the roof in a ring.

Somewhere behind them, two streets away, the grinding settle stopped.

They froze. Three people standing on a glass roof in daylight, with nowhere to hide and nothing to hide behind. Nora counted. At forty Gus’s breath caught on his ribs. He held it. At sixty the settle came again, and again, going away.

Beatrice lifted her boot off the glass. There was a crack in the pane now, white, the length of a hand, and none of them looked at it for long.

At the far edge, where the drawing had said, a stair went down the outside wall of the glass hall in a long iron zigzag. At the bottom of it was the water stair.

Nora heard it before she saw it. The water stair was exactly that: a long tilted hall where great stone basins stood one below another down the slope, each spilling over its lip into the next in a broad smooth sheet. Bronze sluice-gates stood half open between them. On one side a waterwheel as tall as a house stood motionless, water spilling uselessly over its buckets. At the bottom of the stair of basins a metal shutter in a high arch was jammed nearly shut. Water squeezed through the gap beneath it in pale, violent threads. The lowest basin was full almost to its brim and churning, weed drifting the wrong way, bubbles the size of buckets breaking at its edges.

The drawing stopped being much use here: the hall had more doors than the model had shown. Nora read the water instead. Everything ran downhill, and the sump was the lowest place on the map, so the way on was down, through an archway at the bottom of the far side. The only way to it was a broad stone shelf at the foot of the wall, just above that churning basin.

“The shelf,” said Beatrice.

“The shelf,” said Nora. “It’s the only way across without swimming.”

Halfway along the shelf, the water in the basin beside them stood up.

Trace lit it before she had decided to cast: Basin eel · Level 8 · Armour 4 · Resists: Spark (wet skin). It was not a wave. It was a body: a long pale body as thick as a tree trunk, rising out of the basin in a smooth rope of muscle and slick white skin, with a head at the top of it that was mostly mouth. Rows of thin teeth like a comb’s. No eyes at all. It hung over the shelf above them, swaying, as though it were listening.

Then it came down.

Gus got his sword up and his Guard with it. The whole weight of the thing hit the Guard and drove him to his knees on the shelf. The stone under him cracked. Nora heard it, a dry sound like ice in a drink. Under her own feet the shelf dropped a finger’s breadth.

“Off the shelf!” she shouted. “It’s going—”

The eel came up again, and the shelf went.

It went in a long slow tilt, the outer edge first. The paving slid towards the basin like a tray being emptied. Beatrice went with it, sliding on her back down the wet stone towards the water and the mouth with her hands scrabbling at nothing.

Gus moved.

He was on his knees on a tipping slab with broken ribs, and he Stepped across the sliding stone and landed beside Beatrice with his sword up in front of her face. Interpose. The Guard went out from his blade to cover her too, a sheet of pale light over both of them. The eel’s comb of teeth came down on it and stopped. Warden’s Grip closed. For one second the eel hung there with its face held in a fist of light, and Gus roared something wordless with the effort of it.

Nora’s boots held. The tilting stone should have thrown her off. Her soles stayed where she put them, as if the slab were level and dry. She got one hand on the jamb of a doorway three steps up the wall and the other on Beatrice’s collar as Gus shoved her up the slab. On the way she put two Bolts into its side over her shoulder and watched the Spark run off its wet white skin like rain off a windscreen, doing nothing at all. They went up the steps together in a heap. Gus came after them with the eel’s jaws snapping on the place he had just been. The whole outer half of the shelf went into the basin behind him with a splash that soaked them all.

They were in a small room. A bench, a cupboard, an archway onto the steps, a window with a stout iron grille over the basin. The eel hit the grille so hard that dust came down from the ceiling.

“Thank you,” Beatrice said, sitting on the floor with her hair over her face. “I’ve been in emergency medicine for twenty years and nobody has ever done that for me.” Then she looked at Gus properly, and her face changed.

He was sitting against the wall with his arm clamped to his side, and he was breathing wrong. Short, fast, shallow breaths that whistled. When he coughed, there was blood on his hand.

“Oh, you idiot,” said Beatrice. She was on her knees beside him. “You absolute idiot. You Stepped on that side.” Her hands were already shining. “It’s gone into the lung. The rib. It’s—hold still—”

“Saved your life,” said Gus. He coughed again.

“Yes, and now I get to save yours, and I’m not sure I can.” The light went into him. His breathing eased a little, then not much more. Beatrice sat back on her heels and looked at Nora with a face Nora had seen on structural engineers looking at a cracked beam. “The tear’s closed. The air in his chest is another matter. That needs a needle and a tube and an operating theatre, or it needs time and lying still, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better if he moves. We’ve got an hour, maybe, before he’s in real trouble. And we’ve got that.” She jerked her head at the window.

The eel hit the grille again. Then it withdrew. Through the bars Nora watched its long pale body slide back down into the churning basin and begin to circle, slow and patient, between them and every way out.

And the water was rising. Up the three steps outside the archway, a centimetre at a time.

She found the bowl because she couldn’t look at Gus any more.

It sat in a bronze frame above the bench: a small ceramic bowl with a row of stained cups beneath it, and a pipe running into the wall. It was white with frost. Moisture dripped from its rim into a gutter. As she watched, a fresh trickle of water came in through the pipe, and the frost spread across the bowl in a widening band, thinned, and spread again.

It was the twin of the bowl in the court: the same bronze frame, the same bands of working left bare. She had walked away from that one this morning because they hadn’t had an hour.

“It’s the same as the one by the workshop,” she said. “No power supply. Every time the water comes in, the cold comes with it. The water’s driving it.” She looked out at the basins, the sluice-gates, the great wheel with the water spilling over it. “The whole city runs on water going downhill.”

“Lovely,” said Gus, from the floor, with his eyes shut. “Can it kill an eel?”

“It can teach me.”

“You said most of an hour,” said Gus. “In the court.”

Nora looked at the water on the steps. “We’ve got one now.”

She sat on the bench under it and paid for Trace. The bowl lit. Lines of working ran round it in bands, from the pipe to the bronze frame to the gutter: a pattern she could see, cold made out of moving water, in steps. She followed it with her eyes. She followed it with her finger, a hair’s breadth above the ceramic, as the frost spread. She tried to hold the shape of it in the place under her ribs where Spark lived, and it slid away like a word on the tip of the tongue.

It took her forty minutes, and it cost her. Trace drained a little faster than rest gave back, every minute she held it. Every time the eel hit the grille rest gave back nothing at all, so that by the end the hollow under her ribs was far lower than when she’d started.

They were the longest forty minutes of her life. The eel hit the grille every few minutes. Between times she could hear Gus breathing and Beatrice talking to him in a low steady voice about nothing, about her allotment, about a registrar she’d once had who fainted at the sight of feet. Twice Nora lost the pattern and watched the number fall back, from thirty-four to twelve, from fifty-one to twenty. On the third time she stopped watching the white edge of the ice and started watching the change that made the white edge, the moment where water stopped being water. It was like watching a shadow move and remembering to look at the thing that cast it. The shape held.

She closed her eyes and found it again, from the beginning, without the bowl. It was there.

The water was over the top step.

“Got it,” she said. “Beatrice. I’ve got it.”

“Good,” said Beatrice. “Use it fast.”

Nora looked out through the grille at the water stair and made herself think about it the way she would have thought about a flooded basement. Not the eel. The water.

The lowest basin was overfull because the shutter at the bottom of the hall was shut. Everything above was draining into it and it couldn’t drain out. She used Trace again, looking through the bars. Thick old lines of working ran from the shutter’s frame up the wall along a heavy chain to the great waterwheel at the side of the hall. They stopped there, at a lever on the wheel’s axle platform: a brake, set hard on. The wheel wound the shutter, and the brake stopped the wheel. Somebody, at some point, had pulled that lever and walked away.

“It’s a brake,” she said. “On the wheel. Somebody’s put the brake on. Take it off, and the wheel turns, the chain winds and the shutter comes up, and the whole basin goes out through it. Like pulling a plug.”

Gus opened his eyes. “And the eel goes with it.”

“Towards it. There’s a grate across the outflow. If it goes down that, it jams, and then it’s out of the water. Spark runs off it while it’s wet, you saw. Out of the water, it won’t.” She looked at the axle platform: fifteen metres away along a walkway no wider than a plank, bolted to the wall above the churning basin. “Somebody has to walk out there and pull it.”

“Me,” said Gus. He tried to sit up, went grey, and lay back down.

“No,” said Beatrice. She was already on her feet. “Not you. Not her either; she’s the only one of us who can hurt it.” She looked at the walkway, and Nora watched her decide. “I’ve climbed Snowdon. Twice. I’ll be fine.”

“Take my rune,” said Nora.

“Or mine,” said Gus, from the floor.

“Five minutes, you said, either way.” Beatrice looked at the water lapping over the top step. “Next time.” She crouched to tighten her bootlaces.

“Beatrice—”

“Cover me,” said Beatrice Prothero, emergency consultant. She went out through the archway onto the steps and from the steps onto the walkway, with the water already lapping the stone at her heels.

Nora had never been so frightened for anyone who wasn’t Gus.

The walkway was iron, slick with spray. Beatrice went along it with her back to the wall and her hands flat on the stone, sideways, the way you would edge along a cliff path. Below her the basin churned. Nora stood at the window with her hand up and counted. A hundred and twenty mana. Eight Bolts.

Halfway along, the eel found her.

It came up out of the basin in that smooth white rope of muscle and reared over the walkway, swaying, listening. Nora put a Frost Bolt into it at twelve metres. Frost didn’t skate. It went in white and stiffened a metre of the eel’s body. It swayed sideways and fell back into the water with a crash that drenched Beatrice to the skin. A hundred and five.

Beatrice didn’t stop.

It came again at the platform, just as Beatrice reached it. Nora’s second Frost Bolt missed: it went past the eel’s head and into the wall in a puff of rime. Ninety. The third hit, low on its body. It slowed and slid back down. Seventy-five. Beatrice had both hands on the brake lever and was pulling, and it wasn’t moving.

“I can’t,” Beatrice shouted. “It’s seized. I haven’t got the—”

“Pawl,” said Gus behind Nora.

He had got himself up on one elbow, where he could see the platform through the grille. His face was grey and his eyes were wide awake. “There’s a ratchet on the axle. Little iron tooth by her left foot. It’s dropped into the teeth. She’s pulling against it.” He coughed and winced. “Fifteen years of trawler winches. Tell her to kick the pawl out first.”

“Beatrice! Your left foot! The little iron tooth on the wheel! Kick it up!”

Beatrice looked down. She kicked, and something rang. She kicked again, and the tooth flipped up off the ratchet with a clank. She threw her weight back on the lever. It moved a finger’s width and stuck.

Might seven, Nora thought, with a clarity that surprised her. It had been on Beatrice’s sheet in the hall kitchen. Beatrice’s arms were a doctor’s arms.

“Catch!” Nora yelled, throwing her staff-rule.

It went end over end across eight metres of churning water, straight over the corner of the basin, the surveyor’s banded rod. Beatrice let go of the wall with one hand and reached for it as though people threw things at her across emergency departments for a living, and missed. It struck her forearm and dropped across the platform; she went to her knees and caught the brass end before it slid over the edge.

“The eye of the lever!” Nora shouted. “Put it through! Make it longer!”

Beatrice understood. She jammed its end through the iron eye of the lever, doubling its length. Then she threw her whole weight on the far end of it.

The brake came off with a bang like a gun.

The wheel turned. The great chain along the wall jerked and began to wind, link by link, groaning. At the bottom of the water stair the shutter rose smoothly into its arch, the way a held breath is let go.

The basin went.

It went with a roar that shook the room. All that held water poured out under the risen shutter in a single smooth brown hump. The whole surface of the basin tilted and began to turn, and then it was a whirlpool. The eel was in it. It fought: Nora saw its long body arch and thrash, saw it try to reach the shelf, the steps, the window. The water took it anyway, dragging it in great slow circles towards the outflow and the iron grate beneath the shutter.

She put a Frost Bolt into its tail as it passed beneath the walkway, where Beatrice was clinging to the brake lever with both arms. Sixty. The white spread along it, stiffening a metre of muscle, and the tail stopped helping.

The eel went into the grate head first and stuck.

The water drained away round it, and it lay jammed across the iron bars at the bottom of an emptying basin, thrashing, half out of the water. Its slick white skin was drying in the air.

Nora went out through the archway and down the steps onto what was left of the shelf with her hand up.

“Nora,” said Gus behind her. “Nora, you’ve got sixty.”

“I know what I’ve got.”

She went down the side of the empty basin on wet stone that her boots held as if it were a pavement. Beatrice still had the rule, out on the walkway; Nora’s Bolts would be a tenth weaker without it. She felt the lack in her hand like a missing tooth. She stood eight metres from the jammed, thrashing thing and put Spark into its head. Forty-five. Again. Thirty. It didn’t skate. It went in, the way it had gone into the hookjaws on the slipway, and the comb of teeth lit blue from inside.

She put the third into it, and it stopped.

Fifteen. She looked at the number and found she was shaking so badly she had to sit down on the floor of the basin, in an inch of draining water, among the weed.

Beatrice came back along the walkway on her hands and knees, soaked to the skin. She climbed down into the empty basin, gave Nora back the rule without a word, sat down in the weed beside her and laughed until she cried. The rule’s brass end was bent where it had struck the platform. Nora sighted along it out of habit. The shaft was still true; only the cap had taken the knock, and when she closed her hand on it the focus answered as it always had.

When they climbed back up to the room, Gus was sitting against the wall with his eyes closed, breathing slowly and carefully. Beatrice knelt and put her ear to his chest for a long minute.

“It’s holding,” she said at last. “Just. I’m going to try something.” She put her hands on his side again. The light came, and then something else came with it.

Nora watched it go in: not the warm flat press of the first time, but something finer, threading in and out like a needle. The whistle in Gus’s breathing stopped between one breath and the next. Then, lower down, something in his side shifted and clicked. His whole face changed.

Beatrice took her hands away and looked at them as if they belonged to somebody else.

“I couldn’t do that an hour ago,” she said. “I told you six weeks.” She looked at the notice a moment longer. “Thirty-one in the siege, and Lorraine, and that boy at the checkpoint, and you, twice. I suppose that’s practice.” She listened to his chest again, eyes shut. “Sealed. And knitted, near enough. Knitted isn’t the same as healed.” She looked at him. “Next time you Step on a punctured lung, I’m going to let it kill you, purely for the satisfaction.”

“Fair,” said Gus. He sat up and turned from the waist, left and right, carefully, and nothing happened. He did it again, less carefully. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, that’s lovely.” Then, rubbing his side: “I passed on Second Wind for Interpose. I was on nine stamina on that shelf.”

“You’d take Interpose again,” said Nora.

“Yeah,” he said. “I would.”

Nora put another free point into Vitality. She looked at the number for a while. “Because the next thing that hits you that hard might hit me,” she said, “and I’d like to still be standing when you’ve finished being stupid.”

Gus put two of his into Arcana again. “Bigger Guard,” he said, looking at the shelf through the grille. “If I’d had a bit more on that, she wouldn’t have needed a miracle.”

Nora sat on the bench under the cold bowl. The frost was still spreading across it in patient bands every time the water came in. She could feel the shape of it without looking now: a new thing under her ribs beside Spark, cold and clear and slow. She looked at the stained cups on the rack beneath it. One of them, a squat one with a thumb-rest on its handle, stood upside down: the twin of the squat cup on the workshop bench. Somebody had come here to drink cold water, often enough to keep a cup. Somebody had sat on this bench and watched this frost.

She held it a while. Then she put it back on the rack exactly as it had been.

Gus was watching her across the room, with Beatrice’s hand on his chest. He didn’t ask. That meant he would ask later.

The way on went out of the far side of the water stair, along what was left of the shelf, and down.

They followed it down a long stair that grew colder with every turn, until Nora could see her breath, and at the bottom of it the stair opened onto a ledge above a long, low chamber full of black water. At the far end of the chamber, water poured in from a culvert high in the wall. At the near end, above three worn steps, there was an iron door with a bar across it.

And there, when Nora took up Trace, was the thread again. It came down out of the dark of the roof, where the shaft must open. It ran into the black channel and along the bottom and under the door, and on.

On the pier at the top of the steps, at shoulder height, someone had chalked a circle with a stroke through it. Beside it was the figure 1.

“Rook,” said Gus. “He’s been here.”

“One,” said Nora. “One of it.”

Out in the middle of the black channel, where nothing reflected at all, the surface of the water bulged, very slowly, and smoothed again.