Chapter 16 The Last Gate

The way under the Ninth sill was a thing you did once and then remembered wrongly for the rest of your life. Vael went first with the lantern hooked to her belt and a line round her waist, and Corvin went second with the other end of the line round his forearm, and the punt came bodily out of the channel and went up over the lip of the apron on three inches of water, and after that there was no water to speak of and there was only the bottom of the river. The ballast on the apron had been tipped from a boat, and tipped badly. It lay in the shape of a bar, a long crescent of it, banked against the west side of the sill, and above it on the right-hand side the stone went up into a ceiling of two feet and then nothing at all. Corvin went along it on his hands with one shoulder in the water, and where the water got shallower he put his ear against the stone, because the trick he had learned at nineteen on the upper reaches was that a river tells you what it is carrying in its voice before it will show you in its shape. The river said mud. Then it said iron. Then it said, for about two feet, nothing at all, which meant a stone overhang, which meant the ceiling had come down and been shored and the shoring was old. He put his hand up and found a beam. Above the beam there was air, moving, in a place where he had thought there was water. "Lamp," he said. "Vael. Bring it here." The air pocket was about eleven feet along the drainage and five feet high at the crown, and it had a floor of laid stone, which meant it had been a room, and the room had a door, and the door had been walled up and taken out again by somebody who did it in a hurry within the last year. "So it is not new," Vael said. "This is not new. The whole west drainage of this gate is a building." "It is a building the city-builders put in when the river was still being argued with." Corvin got his shoulders up onto the stone and came out of the water. "Selka's people have been living in these rooms for a hundred and fifty years and they have been calling them tunnels, and that is why nobody has ever found a floor plan." The camp was on the far side of the walled-up doorway, in three rooms, and it was warm, and there was a stove in it made out of a cut-off oil drum, and eleven men were asleep in it, and on the wall above the stove there was a slate with the tide times on it in a hand that was not Selka's and not Corvin's and not the Nine's. "Two sets of hands," Vael said quietly. "That is not a river hand. It is a quay hand, or a counting-house hand, and somebody has been standing in this room writing down when the water is going to be high for six weeks." The one who was awake was sitting up against the far wall with his boots off and a chart on his knees, and he had not been asleep, and he had a knife across his knees and had not drawn it. "You have come a long way with a light," he said, "and I am going to tell you that the tide is two hours off the top, and that when it comes it comes into this room, and that is not a threat, it is just what the room is for." "It is a room you have drained by hand," Corvin said. "Eleven men, six weeks, and a barrow on the apron." "Four men," the man said. "I have four. The other seven are the ones who go out." "Go out where." "Where it is thin." He did not move the knife. "Six weeks on the west apron. Your ferryman knows the weight of what is coming down and he can guess better than I can how little it takes to shift it, and I am telling you it is three cartloads and a man holding a lamp at the wrong corner, and we have been moving three cartloads a week and we have moved perhaps forty of them, and the bar under there is nine feet of it now, and it will not matter that the sluice opens a foot and a half, because the water comes up against a wall of ballast and the wall does not go anywhere." "You have been killing people." The man looked at his own boots for a while. "Yes," he said. "Not on purpose, and I have not slept a whole night since the second of them, and I have had four men in this room who could not swim, so you may put your lamp down anywhere you like and I will not stop you. But if you want to be angry at somebody, be angry at the man on the middle gallery who signed a paper in the eleventh year. There were six of us licensed to work the drainage then. There is one. And the five of us who went down to the city for work have been doing this for a year and a half without a licence, and a licence in this river is not a piece of paper, it is a man who does not come after you." "Who is he." "Rann," the man said, "is asleep on the left with the bad chest, and you are going to want to talk to him, and he is going to tell you the same thing I am telling you, which is that the apron is going to fail at the top of this tide and take this room with it, and that if a hundred and fifty river-kin are in the Ninth's cellars at the top of this flood, then the apron failing is the least of it." The two hours were spent. Corvin took Vael through the rest of the drainage and found the sill — the actual sill, a line of dressed stone across the whole mouth of the Ninth, with the bar sitting in a seat behind it, and behind the bar a foot and a half of open space, and under the whole of it a culvert mouth four feet square that Selka's people had been swimming for a hundred and fifty years and had called, in the only language they had for it, *the throat*. "That is where they die," he said. "That is where they go in and do not come out," Vael said. "Corvin, that culvert is the pressure. Everything upstream of this gate drains through that, and the silt is what makes it a throat instead of a pipe, and there is forty cartloads of ballast on the apron and there is a bar that a man can lift. The gate opens a foot and a half and the gate opens *nowhere*, because the water has got to get through that four-foot hole, and it cannot, because the hole is silted, and so it goes up. Into the Ninth reach. Into the cellars. Into the galleries." "So we clear the culvert." "We clear the culvert and we take the ballast off the apron, and we do it in the two hours before the top, and the moment we clear it the gate is a gate again and the flood goes through the throat and not into the Ninth." She was already looking at the cart track. "How many cartloads." "Nine feet of it, banked. And it has been tipped wet." Corvin looked at it, and at the forty feet of drop to the water, and at the light. "There is no cart on this river that can stand up on that slope with a load." "No," Vael said. "But there is a river-man standing at the bottom of it, and there is a lamp, and there is a bar, and the only question in this river tonight is which of those three gets where first." They went back to the room and told Rann, who listened with his eyes shut and his hand on his own chest, and who said one thing, and then Corvin carried the light out onto the apron alone and set it on the stone and stood on the edge of the ballast bar with a barrow in his hands, three feet from nine feet of ballast that had been tipped there by a man who had not understood what he was holding.