Chapter 15 The Parting

They left the drowned quarter at the turn of the ebb with two hours of light in it, and Selka made them wait for it, and made them wait through the whole of it, and Corvin understood by the second hour that she was not waiting for light. "You are not coming." "No." "The culverts." "I have eleven dead in a wall and three rooms of my people in the Ninth's own cellars, and there is a woman on the fourth gallery with eleven of her cousins in it." She said it without any weight at all, the way she said everything. "If I go up the river, I am a woman with a light and a story. If I stay here, I am a woman who can open four doors." "Then you want somebody else." "I want Vael." Selka had said it before the flood turned and she said it again without embarrassment, which Corvin found harder than a refusal. "You can read a river by looking at it. She can read a river by looking at a bank. There are nine feet of silt on the Ninth's west apron and it has a shape, and the shape is the whole question, and you will not be able to see it, and she will be able to see it in an hour with a knife." Vael said, "I will need an hour and a boat and low water." "You will have two hours and a boat and whatever he takes off the Eighth." Selka put her hand flat on the chapel wall, on a slate, and Corvin did not ask which one and neither did she. "And you will come back through here, and if you have not come back through here by the next ebb I will close the tunnel and I will not reopen it for a light or a compass or a man." "Understood." "I have not said I will do it." "You do not have to say it," Selka said. "Say it after." The party was five. Corvin, Vael, and three river-kin: a poleman called Serr who had swum the culverts eleven times and been dead once for nine minutes, his brother Bain, and a girl of about sixteen called Teviot who could not swim and had been told three times that this made her useless and who had come anyway and who carried the lantern. They went up the water in a flat-bottomed punt that Ost provided and would not account for, and the punt had a Nine river-badge nailed inside the bow where it could be lifted out with a fingernail, and Corvin left it there. The Second River ran cold and fast and did not care what was on it. Twice a mile up, Serr put the pole hard over without warning and the punt went into a seam in the wall that was not a seam in the wall, it was a doorway, and they came out under the Eighth. The Eighth at low water is a room about the size of a barn, and it is the only gate on the Thorn with a floor you can stand on, and the floor is silt, and the silt is nine feet deep in the middle and banked to the walls. Vael got off the punt and went up the bank with the lantern and a knife, and she was gone a long time. Corvin held the light and did not go up. He sat on the punt with his hands on the pole and listened to the gate working overhead, which is not a sound people describe: it is a slow grinding in the roof of the world, the bar coming up out of its seat a foot and a half on the flood and going back down on the ebb, eight times a day, for a hundred and fifty years. When she came back her boots were black to the knee and she was not in a hurry. "It is not silt," she said. "It is ballast." "I did not ask you." "You were going to." She got down onto the punt and wrung her boots over the side. "Silt settles. It goes into the corners and it stays in layers and you can cut a section of it and read the year. This is not in layers. It has come out of a hold. Three different holds, and two different boats, and the older of the two loads has been here long enough to have a crust on it and grass growing out of it in a place where there has never been grass in this room in a hundred and fifty years." "How recent is the new one." "Six weeks." She looked at the light in his hand. "Someone has been bringing mud out of the Deep and dumping it on the apron of the Ninth Gate at low water, by the cartload, for six weeks. And they are doing it at low water, which means they are doing it out of a boat that can sit under the sill, which means they are doing it from inside the gates, which means the last thing Quart told you in that chapel was true and the next thing is that he does not know who is doing it in his own ninth gate." "Would a boat go under the Ninth sill?" "No boat." "A flat punt with a punt's crew would go under it, if the crew were river-kin and had been up here since the water was high." Vael was already working the punt round. "Which means the crew of that boat has been up here since the water was high, and is up here now, and and has been for six weeks, and the Eleven who are dead in that culvert are dead because somebody has been putting ballast on the apron of the Ninth at low water for six weeks, and the sluice has not been able to clear it, and the pressure has gone up by a third, and Quart has not dredged his own culvert and the dredge is not his, and he knows it is not his, and he let it go on for six weeks because a man who will not touch a silted sluice is a man who does not know there is a sluice." Bain said, from the bow, "Then who dredges the Ninth?" Vael and Corvin looked at each other across the lantern. "Nobody dredges the Ninth," Corvin said. "You do not dredge your own ninth gate with a boat you have to bring up through the drainage. You dredge it with a crew you pay, from above, and you pay them in cargo they are not asking about, and you have been doing it for eleven years, Quart has, because a bar that will not open is a bar that stops the barges he is supposed to be bringing in." He put the pole down inside the punt and did not pick it up. "Or there is a second crew on the Thorn," he said. "One that does not carry the Nine's badge and does not ask the Nine for anything, and has been living in the drainage below the ninth gate for a season, and is a great deal better at this than a man who was a ferryman two years ago." Serr said, "How many men to work a cartload of mud up from under a sill at low water?" "Two to load. Four at the apron. Somebody holding a lamp." Corvin looked at the silt bank in the lamplight, the one with grass growing out of it in a room that had never had grass. "And whoever does it has to be able to get back down under the sill before the flood, which is six hours, which means they have a camp." "A camp," Vael said. "Under the ninth gate. In the drainage. Where we are going." "Yes." The punt lay in the silt at the foot of the Eighth with a foot and a half of room above it, and Corvin sat in it and understood that the next four hours were the ones in which a great many decisions would have to be made by people who were not going to get to make them, and that he had brought five people up a river to a room with nine feet of ballast in it, and that three of them had not voted. "Serr," he said. "Bain. Go back down. Take Teviot." The girl said, "I did not come up here to sit in a boat." "You came up here to carry a lantern. You have carried it. Go back down and count the niches in that wall again, every one, both names, and when the next flood comes and the water is in the third gallery, I want to know which gallery holds the ones it reaches first." Corvin looked at her. "That is not smaller work. That is the only work here that matters after tonight." Teviot's jaw set, and she did not argue, which was worse. Serr said, "Then we are two." "You are two, and you are the only two people on this river who can get back down through a rising flood without air." Corvin handed him the pole. "Go." They went. The punt swung out into the channel, and Bain looked back once, and Serr did not. That left three in a flat-bottomed punt under a barn-sized room with nine feet of somebody else's ballast in it, and one tide, and a gate that would open a foot and a half in about five hours, and the last tide in this river coming up behind all of it like a hand closing.