Chapter 7

The door had no lock at all. That was the first surprise.

When Nora knelt on the top step above the black channel and used Trace, the iron door woke in faint lines. Not wiring this time: weight. The bar across the door was chained over a pulley to a bronze tank hanging in a slot in the wall, a counterweight as big as a chest freezer. The tank was empty. Fill it and it would drop, and the bar would lift. A dry channel ran along the wall to it from the culvert at the far end, where the water poured in. At the culvert’s lip she could see where something had once split the fall, and the clean broken edge where it had gone.

“It’s a cistern,” she said. “A flushing cistern. Somebody built a door you open by filling a bucket.” She laughed, a little wildly. “It’s beautiful, and it’s broken.”

“Can you mend it?” said Gus.

“Maybe. If I could turn some of that fall into the channel.” She looked at the bottom of the empty tank, where its slot met the black water. There was a bronze plate there, half an arm’s length below the surface. In Trace it was threaded with working, fine lines running from it up into the tank. An intake, she thought. A valve. “Or there’s a valve. If I can open that and let the sump in—”

“Under the water.”

“Under the water.” She held Trace over the channel first and counted: nothing living within fifteen metres, nothing moving in the black. At the foot of the wall, under the dark mouth in the roof where the shaft must come down, a head torch lay on its side on the ledge, still lit, pointing at nothing. Nobody went to pick it up. She pushed her sleeve up to the shoulder and lay down on her front on the cold stone of the ledge. Gus knelt on the backs of her knees without being asked, and Beatrice stood over them both with Rosamund’s hockey stick and a face that said she had opinions.

“Rook said don’t kneel by the edge,” said Gus.

“I’m not kneeling. I’m lying down. Pull me clear if you see anything.”

The water was so cold it was like putting her arm into a wall. She found the plate by feel, laid her fingers on it and inscribed. Quickscript: one second. The anchor took.

And the channel lifted it off.

She felt it go, the faint sign unravelling into the dark as easily as rain lifts chalk off a pavement. Twenty mana for nothing. She swore and pulled her arm out, and the water ran off it in sheets.

“It won’t hold under water. It just—”

The surface of the channel bulged.

“Nora!”

Gus had her by the back of her jacket and was hauling her up the steps before she understood what she was seeing. Something came out of the black water where her arm had been: a blunt grey head as broad as a car bonnet, with a mouth like a split in rock, and behind it a back made of overlapping plates of stone-coloured shell. It came up onto the ledge with a sound like a skip being dragged across concrete. Nora’s Trace was still lit. It told her what it was: Sump wallower · Level 14 · Armour 30. More than twice their level.

“What the hell,” said Gus.

“It’s a newt,” said Beatrice, in a high, astonished voice. “It’s a giant armoured bloody newt. Gus, it’s coming round your left!” She backed up the steps, pulling Nora’s pack out of the way.

Gus put himself between it and Nora. Interpose: the Guard went out wide from his blade like a door opening. The head swung into it and the Guard held, but the impact still drove him back up the steps onto his heels. She heard the breath go out of him. He kept the blade up.

Nora rolled onto one knee and lifted her hand. Two seconds. Trace never showed health, but a level-fourteen anything would take more Bolts than she had mana for. She didn’t try to kill it. She aimed at the thick foreleg braced on the ledge.

Frost hit it in a burst of white. The leg stiffened. For a moment the whole animal stalled, its weight on a limb that wouldn’t answer.

“Back,” she said. “Along the ledge. There’s a door.”

There was: halfway down the chamber, a doorway with a heavy door standing open inward. They went. Gus backed with the sword up, Beatrice ahead of him, Nora between them with her hand raised. Behind them the leg came back to life, and the animal lurched after them two heavy steps, three. Then it stopped at the edge of the ledge, swung its head once towards them and slid back into the channel. The black water closed over its back as if it had never been there.

They were inside with the door barred before anyone spoke.

“One,” said Gus, leaning on the door. “Rook wrote one.” He laughed, not very steadily. “One of that.”

He breathed in to laugh again and stopped halfway. He rubbed his new-knitted side.

It was a small square room, dry, with a slit window high in the back wall and a stone trough under a dripping pipe. Gus kept his back to the barred door until his hands stopped shaking. Then he made himself look at the room properly, because looking at things was the easiest way he knew to stop them being frightening.

Somebody had worked here too. A rack along one wall held measuring rods, long and pale and banded in black. Beside it stood a cupboard with its doors missing and one shelf still sound. A slate-topped table under the window was scored with fine lines and arcs that had been rubbed out and drawn again many times. The frame of the door they had come in by was gouged at the height of a big animal’s head, and the threshold was worn into a groove, as if something had tried to get in here many times and never quite fitted.

“Site office,” said Nora behind him. She had gone very still, the way she did in other people’s buildings. “She measured this chamber from in here. Look at the rods.”

“First,” said Gus. He looked at the door frame, which had no chalk on it. “Nobody’s been in here. Not Rook. Not anyone.” It was a stupid thing to feel good about, with a newt the size of a van outside. He felt good about it anyway.

“I want all of them,” said Nora, behind him, very low. He looked round. She was looking at the notice, not at him. “Every room in this city nobody’s been in. Before Voss. Before anybody. I want to be first into every one.”

Because he couldn’t stand still, he went to the slate and traced the rubbed-out lines with his finger. After a minute he laughed.

“She drew it,” he said. “Look. Tank, chain, bar, door.” He tapped a small arc at the bottom of the drawing. “That’s your plate. It’s got a flap on it, hinged on the inside. It’s not an intake, it’s a drain. It’s the flush. You could open it all day and nothing would come in.” He tapped again, at a mark on the inner side of the door. “And there’s a lever for it the far side. Fill the tank, it opens. Pull the flush, it shuts behind you.”

Nora looked at the slate.

“Trace showed me the lines,” she said. “It didn’t tell me which way the water went.”

“Nothing ever does,” said Gus. “Ask any plumber.” He tilted the slate towards the window and stopped smiling. Cut small into the corner of its frame was a mark. When Nora saw it she stopped moving.

“That mark,” he said. “Your rule. The bench. The cup. The wall with the counting.”

“Yes.”

He waited. She sat down on the floor with her back to the trough. He thought she wasn’t going to answer, and then she did.

“I think she was the city’s surveyor,” Nora said, to her knees. “Her rule, her bench, her gloves, now her office. And the wall in the workshop is hers. Forty-eight, and then nothing.” She looked up. “I think there was nobody left to count her. I didn’t want to say it, because if I’m right, it’s a person. A real one. And I’m not handing you another person to lose.”

“Nora.” He crouched beside her. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”

She looked at him. Then she nodded once, as she did when a survey came back wrong and she accepted it. “No,” she said. “That’s fair.”

“So the plate’s no good,” said Beatrice, from the trough, “and your anchor won’t stay on anything under water, and the only way to fill that tank is from the culvert, which is where the newt eats.”

“Yes,” said Nora. “We could time it. It feeds at the culvert and patrols the rest. Wait for it to go past, run the wrong way, build something at the lip, hold it as long as I can—”

“With it coming back every four minutes,” said Gus. “Or we kill it, and it isn’t there at all.” He looked at the gouges in the door frame. “Then we can get something solid under the fall. Those rods, maybe, with that cupboard shelf across them.” He ran his thumb along the sword’s guard. “And I get whatever it’s got on its back. I can feel it from here, Nora. Like an itch I can’t reach.”

“That’s greed,” said Beatrice. “And you’ve only just got your breath back.”

“That’s greed,” Gus agreed. “It’s also sense. If we run past it, we’ll be hauling rods when it comes back. I’d rather have the sword in my hand.” He glanced at Nora. “And it’s the XP. At fourteen. I’d bet you anything it’s more than the whole gallery paid.”

He watched Nora’s face change and knew before she did that she wanted it too.

“It’s level fourteen,” she said, but she was already looking at the gouges in the frame.

“It’s a newt,” said Gus.

“It’s a newt with armour thirty. Your sword does fifteen through that.” He could see her working it out. “Magic ignores armour. My Bolts do eighty-three, your Edge does twenty-nine. Trace won’t show me its health, but nothing that size has less than a thousand. I’ve got three hundred and seventy mana. Twenty-four Bolts if I do nothing else, and it won’t sit still for twenty-four.”

“Then make it sit still.”

She looked past him at the door frame: the gouges, the groove worn in the threshold. “It’s been trying to get in here for years,” she said slowly. “It can’t. It gets its head through and not its shoulders.” She got up and stood over the threshold and looked down at it. “Dry stone. Two anchors. Two Frost snares, right where its forelegs come down when it puts its head in. It locks itself into the doorway.” She looked at Gus. “And then somebody has to stand in front of its face.”

“Is that what you want?” he said. “Me there?”

He had never asked her that before. Not once, in six years, in any fight or any argument. He had always just been there.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I want.”

“And who’s the bait?” said Beatrice.

“Rook told us,” said Nora. “Don’t kneel by the edge.”

That morning, up in the great hall, Alistair Voss could not open the door.

He stood beside the broken cage of the shaft with his palm flat on the narrow door the three of them had gone through an hour before. The stone stayed cold under his hand. Gethin Lloyd stood a few paces behind him and watched, because that was what Gethin did.

Voss took his hand away. He did not hit the door, or say anything, or look at Gethin. He took a small black notebook out of the breast pocket of his fleece and opened it at the first page, where three names were written in his precise capitals: SAM THEWLIS. ANDY PRYOR. MARCUS BELL. Three of his officers, killed on the terminal slip on the first night, holding the line while the rest got the generators running. He read them every morning. He read them now, closed the book and put it away.

“How does a member of staff become senior?” he said, to the air.

The interface answered at once. It always did, for him. Gethin had noticed that it seemed to like being asked things.

“What does the wardstone protect?”

“How many nodes are there?”

Gethin saw Voss’s face go still. It did that when something fitted.

“The whole node,” Voss said quietly. “Not this hall. Not the terminal. The town.” He looked at the air. “And what brings it to full capacity?”

“Integration of what?”

“Can a member of staff request that the installation be secured?”

“Then log one,” said Voss. “Mine.”

“Sir,” said Gethin. “We don’t know what integration means.”

“We know what coverage: Greyhaven node means.” Voss turned from the door. There was nothing cruel in his face. He looked tired, and very certain. “It means everyone, Gethin. Every street those things came up last night. Every street they’ll come up tonight. I’ve got fifteen trained people and a ferry terminal, and a town of nine thousand that thinks a hockey stick is a weapon.” He glanced back at the narrow door, and then, almost idly, at the air. “Where are Ellis and Hale now?”

It would tell anyone anything about anyone else, Gethin thought, if they asked it nicely. It was only about itself that it kept quiet. He thought of every question he had asked it in three days, and of who else might be asking it about him.

Something came up out of the shaft.

It was a hookjaw, a big one, hauling itself over the lip of the broken cage with water streaming off its plates. It came at Voss because he was nearest. Voss did not step back. He had a short heavy blade from the terminal’s emergency kit, a thing for cutting mooring lines, and he went forward to meet the animal with a single straight Lunge that put the blade through the plates behind its head and out the other side. He stepped back before its legs had stopped moving and wiped the blade on its flank.

Then he turned his sheet so Gethin could read it. He had told Gethin on the first night that a second should know exactly what he had.

“Seven,” Voss said, and nothing else. He had been killing things down here since dawn, while other people talked, with fifteen people inside his Command (twenty-six by the afternoon, when eleven came down from the hill, a Breaker with split knuckles among them). Every kill any of them made inside it paid him in full, as if he had made it himself. That was how he did it. He closed the sheet. “Get rope down that shaft. And find out where they go.”

“Sir,” said Gethin.

Voss went to see about the rope. They sent Kieran down it at noon, because Kieran was the lightest and had asked to go. At two o’clock the rope came back up the shaft by itself, cut clean through at the end, and Kieran didn’t. Gethin wrote his name in his own notebook that evening, under the other three, in capitals, as the Commander did.

Down in the sump, they let an hour go by first, for the mana. They ate what was left of Bernadette’s sandwiches sitting on the office floor.

“God bless Bernadette,” said Gus, with his mouth full.

Nora didn’t waste the hour. If offers reflected practice, she was going to choose her practice. She had Gus stand in the middle of the room and swing the sword in slow arcs while she tried to put an anchor on the flat of the blade as it went past.

It wouldn’t take. Twice, three times, the sign slid off the moving steel like a fingerprint off glass. Then she said, “Stop,” and he stopped it dead in front of her. She laid two fingers on the blade, and one second was enough.

“One second,” she said. “It only has to be still for one second.” She looked at his hands on the hilt, then at nothing, thinking about the Grip.

Then the number was at the top and staying there, and the thin light that came down the slit window from somewhere far above had gone from white to grey. She got up and knelt in the doorway and inscribed the threshold.

Quickscript, one second. A Frost Bolt fed into the mark, and the knot went white and waited. Again, a hand’s width to the left. Seventy mana. Three hundred left.

Then she walked out onto the ledge and knelt at the edge of the black water, three metres from the door, with her hands on her knees. Gus stood at her shoulder with the sword low. Beatrice stood inside the doorway with the hockey stick, her hands already shining. They waited.

It didn’t take long. Kneeling things were what it ate.

The water bulged. “Now,” said Gus, and she was up and back and through the doorway between the two white knots without touching either. Gus came after her backwards, and the wallower came out of the channel and up the steps in one long surge and put its head through the door.

Its forelegs came down on the threshold.

The cold went up both legs in white spikes and froze them to the stone. The wallower’s head was in the room and its shoulders were jammed in the frame. Its mouth was a metre from Gus’s face. It roared. In the little stone room it was like standing inside a drum.

Warden’s Grip took the jaw and held it open, and Nora put a Bolt into the soft pale inside of its mouth from two metres, where shell meant nothing.

Gus cut, Edge blue along the blade, into the place under the jaw.

”Fifteen,” he said, outraged.

“Just do the magic.” Two more Bolts, into the mouth, into the eye. Two hundred and fifty-five.

It bit. The Guard took it and it wasn’t enough.

Gus went back half a step, and Beatrice’s hand was flat on his back before he’d finished moving. The frost on the wallower’s left leg cracked like a frozen puddle. Nora was already down: Quickscript on the stone under the leg, where the fired anchor had come free, and a Frost Bolt into it, thirty-five mana, two hundred and twenty. The leg came down and locked again.

Bolt. Bolt. A hundred and ninety. The head thrashed in the frame and stone came off the jamb in pieces. A swing of the jaw came sideways at Gus like a slammed door.

“Oh, come on,” said Gus, delighted.

Then it pulled out. It tore one leg free of the ice, dragged its head back out of the doorway and turned for the water.

“Don’t let it get to the water!” Nora shouted. If it went down now it would come back in an hour with everything mended, and nothing in them would be.

Gus Stepped. Four metres, out of the doorway and onto the ledge, and he was beside its hindquarters as it slid for the edge. Warden’s Grip on the hind leg, Edge into the joint, Brinefang cold in the cut.

The leg went slow. Nora put a Frost Bolt into the other one from the doorway, and the wallower stopped with its front half on the steps and its tail in the water. It swung its head round at Gus.

He went down on one knee on the wet stone and stayed there with the sword up.

Nora walked out of the doorway towards its face. Four metres. Three. A hundred and seventy-five mana. She put a Bolt into its open mouth, and another. A hundred and forty-five. As its head came round at her, slow on its slow legs, Gus got up off his knee and drove the last Edge in under its jaw from the side.

She put the last Bolt she was going to need into its eye.

It took a long time to stop moving. When it had, Nora sat down on the steps, because her legs had made the decision for her. She found that she was shaking, and that Gus was laughing, on his knees on the wet stone with his forehead against the sword’s crossguard, and that Beatrice was saying “Hold still” to him in her driest voice, with her hands on his ribs.

“It’s off the list,” Gus said. “It’s off the list.”

The interface, which did not care how anybody felt, had a question for Gus. Nora saw it come up in his eyes.

He bound it sitting on the steps with his hand flat on the dead thing’s back. It took him all of the five minutes. Harder than Brinefang or the Grip, he said afterwards: broader, slower, like keeping a hand flat against a moving wall. Then the interface asked him which to keep. He passed over Gutterhook, came back to it, and moved it into the stowed list. He had bound it by the yard doors with Rosamund lying under a fleece three metres away, and taking it out was turning her photograph to the wall. When the three equipped slots settled, he checked that the crab was still there.

“They go together,” he said. “Stone and warden. And it says one of four.” He grinned at Beatrice like a schoolboy. “There’s a table. There’s a whole table, and I’ve got one square.”

The wallower had come from the culvert. Behind the culvert’s fall, when Nora put her light through the spray, there was a hollow in the wall.

It was the animal’s den, and it stank. But at the back of it, above the waterline, someone long ago had cut a shelf into the stone and put things on it to keep them dry: a bronze level, a coil of rotted cord, and a pair of boots, grey, with the same fine dark stitching round the welt as her gloves and a small empty metal surround worked into the outer side of the left heel. The little sign was stitched inside the tongue.

She wiped the mud from the mark with her thumb. The left heel had been repaired with darker thread; the right tongue was nearly worn through where the owner had pulled it on. She sat down on the ledge and loosened the laces.

Gus whistled behind her, very low. He didn’t say anything at all.

Once the boots had settled, she put a plain anchor on a loose stone and lowered it into a puddle. It held. She rolled the stone with her boot, watching the mark glow through the water from either side, until Gus came out of the office carrying two rods and a cupboard shelf.

“You can play with it afterwards. Give us a hand.”

Their first attempt washed away. The shelf flipped broadside into the fall and tore one rod out of Gus’s hands. Beatrice caught it at the ledge, but the end was split. They cut it shorter and tried again, wedging both rods into old sockets above the culvert. Gus lashed the shelf across them with their rope while Nora braced the dry outer joint with Frost. A third of the fall struck the sloping wood and slewed off into the channel.

The ice creaked. She kept her attention on the dry joint and fed it cold, watching the tank fill at the far end of the chamber. The shelf sagged in the middle. Four minutes, and something heavy dropped with a boom. Forty metres away the bar rose out of its brackets and the iron door swung slowly open. Nora let the working go. The ice gave, the shelf swung loose in the fall, and the bright ribbon in the channel thinned to nothing. The tank was full now and would stay full until somebody let it out. Gus cut away the free length of rope and coiled it, leaving the lashings behind, and they went along the ledge to the door.

On the far side, set into the wall at hand height, was a plain iron lever worn smooth by use, with an arrow cut beside it. Gus hung on it with both hands. Somewhere in the wall a flap banged open and the tank emptied into the sump with a roar. He held the lever until the last of the water had gone, and behind them the door swung shut and barred itself.

“If Voss wants it,” he said, “he can fill his own bucket.”

Beatrice made them sit down on the top step for ten minutes before anybody went anywhere, and nobody argued with her.

The level came while they sat there. The selections came with it. Hers sat in the corner of her eye, three lines of text, and she left them there. Gus didn’t.

“Cleave’s the fun one,” he said. “Pursuit, I’d have had it on the ledge just now.” He tapped the third line. “And Sundering’s come round again. I turned it down in the gallery.” He looked back at the barred door. “Armour thirty, and I was doing fifteen. Fifteen. Everything in charge of all this is going to be wearing armour.” He chose. “Sundering. Never again.”

“Spread it,” he said, when Nora looked at his free points. “Everything I’ve got is holding something up.” Pressing on his own first line, the way she did, he read it out. “Two paths. Relic Duelist, Rare: fewer things, held harder. And one I can’t see. Conditions: resonances found, 1 of 2.” He touched the two imprints that had resonated. “I need another one. I want the one I can’t see.”

The thread from Lorraine’s band, which Nora could see again when she took up Trace, ran away from the door and down the steps into the cold. It was not alone. Down there, where the steps turned out of sight, the dark was full of them: fine bright lines going up, dozens of them, straight as harp strings, every one of them humming very faintly, like the fridge in an empty house.

The three lines were still waiting in the corner of her eye. She opened them now.

Reroute one connection. She looked down the stair at the threads. You could not cut them; she would have bet her life that you could not cut them. But you might, if you understood them well enough, change what they were connected to.

“Why these?” she said to the air. “Why always these?”

She looked back at the cistern door. The brake and the baffle had been plumbing: water pushed about by hands and wood and a little ice. Nothing in either had joined two marks together. This offered to reroute a connection between two anchors, a connection she could barely see. She had never done anything like that in her life. She had looked at the threads and wanted to, that was all. It was an answer, and it wasn’t true, and that frightened her more than no answer would have. She read the description again, looking for something that limited what counted.

She took Linked Working anyway, then turned back to the lever.

Trace showed a fine exposed line between its bronze collar and a small light in the jamb. The light had gone dark when the tank emptied. She pulled the lever partway down; it lit again. A signal, then. She put one anchor on the lever, another on the dry step, and tried to turn the line between them.

The light stayed on. Her first mark was on the iron handle, which had shifted under her hand as she made it. She erased it and tried again on the fixed collar. This time the line bent. The step glowed faintly and the light in the jamb went dark. When Gus called her name, her concentration slipped and both went back to how they had been.

“It goes back,” she said. “As soon as I let go.”

“Useful?”

“For a signal. I don’t know about anything else.”

She crouched over it again. Gus and Beatrice waited while she learnt how to keep it held when someone spoke, and how to let it return without a flicker. No living thing was attached to either end. When she looked down the stair at the threads, she kept her hands by her sides.