Chapter 17 The Cost

The barrow chained to nothing, the line round his forearm, the lamp on the stone: that was how the work was done, and Corvin had a full hour of it before he understood that it was going to work. It was going to work because the ballast was tipped wet and wet ballast is not stone. It is silt and shell and the broken ends of things, and a barrow of it will go down a slope at a walk and it will not stop for a light. He went down the apron four times and four times the barrow went ahead of him, and on the fifth he left it at the top and went down on his own feet and put his hands into it and got a full apron-load over the edge and then had to get out of the way of it, which he did by putting his back against the wall and letting forty cartloads of somebody else's ignorance go past him into the drainage room below. Rann's men heard it. That was the part he had not planned for. Eleven of them came up out of the door into a yard that had not existed four seconds earlier, and one of them was the man who had sat against the wall with a knife, and he got a hand on the sill and looked down into a room full of rising water and rising mud, and said one word. "Quart." "Aye." "He is sixty-one and he is standing on the middle gallery of his own gate right now watching a bar he cannot see go down." The man did not take his hand off the sill. "You have just buried a channel." "I have just opened a channel," Corvin said. "There is a difference and it is in the word." The top of the flood came up at four minutes past midnight and it came up the reach behind them at a walk, the way it always did, and Vael was in the throat with a bar and a lamp and Corvin was on the sill above her with the compass in his hand and the whole of the Thorn in his ears. He had told her what he intended to do and she had said no for eleven minutes. "You have not used it," she said. "In four days you have not taken it out and put it anywhere. It is a compass. It shows a way. That is all it has ever done." "It is a compass of a river that did not exist," he said. "Selka said the carvings call it the first light. The carvings also call it what it is for, and there is one carving in that gallery above the boat store and I looked at it for an hour and I did not understand it, and I understand it now." "Tell me what it is." "It is a thing that is put into a throat." He turned it over in his hand. It had been warm against his chest for four days and it was warm still. "The city-builders did not cut the culvert and walk away. They cut the culvert and they put a thing in it, and the thing drew the silt, and the drawing is why a river has a throat instead of a pipe, and it has been doing that job for a hundred and fifty years with a piece of star-metal in a hole under the water, and somebody took it out of the hole in the eleventh year for a compass that a ferryman could carry, and everything since has been a river trying to close." The bar came up out of its seat with a sound Corvin had not heard since he was a boy on the upper reaches, and the Thorn came through four feet of square hole into a throat that had been asking for it for six weeks. He put the compass into the mouth of the culvert, on its side, and let the water take it. It went about four feet and stopped. Then the silt went with it. Not all at once. It came off the bed of the throat in a long grey tongue and went up into the reach, and the reach was already full of rising water, and the water found the open bar of the Eighth and went through that, and went through the Ninth, and the sound of it went up through the floor of the world and came back as a noise in the ribs that Vael felt before Corvin did because she was lying on it. "It is going," she shouted. "Corvin, it is going, the throat is opening, the whole six weeks of it—" He had his arms in to the elbow and the water on his chest and he was trying to feel for the stone at the side of the culvert to get a hold, because a man in a closing throat does not come back out by the way he went in. The compass did not come back either. That had been on the cards from the moment it stopped moving. It lay on the bed of the throat with the silt coming over it and the Nine's last clean water going past, and it was doing the only job it had ever been built to do, and after about four minutes there was no point at which anybody could have put a hand on it, and Corvin understood in his chest before he understood it in his head that the thing he had spent a career and a name and four days and a great deal more than four days on was now under nine feet of water in a hole in a river in the dark, doing its work, and would do its work for a hundred and fifty years. He got out. It took him a long time and Vael got the line round the sill and hauled until her hands tore and neither of them ever discussed the four minutes in between, and there is no part of this account that gives them any other number. Rann's eleven men were out on the apron by half past three, on a flat punt with three inches of freeboard, in a flood that had nine feet of fall in it, and they took the gate staff with them because the staff is what you take when you are going through a working gate and the gate is not yours. The bar came down at five and the Ninth went slack for the first time since the spring, and the culvert ran clear, and by the time the light came up off the water the intermediate reach was a mile of ordinary river doing what it had done every day for a hundred and fifty years. Corvin sat on the sill with his boots off and his hands shaking and looked at the mouth of the throat, and there was nothing to see, and there was never going to be anything to see again. Vael came and sat down on the wet stone beside him with a piece of cloth round each hand and did not say anything for about a quarter of an hour. "It is a compass," she said at last. "It was." "It showed a way. That is all it ever claimed to do and you have spent two years being ashamed of a thing that showed a way." She turned her head to look at him. "Corvin. It is under a river with a job to do and it is not lost, it is *spent*, and those are not the same, and if you sit on this stone crying about a piece of metal you are going to do it for the rest of your life and it will be the only thing you know how to talk about." "I know." He put his hands flat on the stone. "I am not crying. I am sitting on a wet sill at five in the morning working out that I have no way back up this river now, and no reason to come up it, and nothing in my coat." "You have me," Vael said, "and you have a boat with a badge nailed in it, and a woman on the fourth gallery who is going to be standing at a tunnel mouth in about four hours, and about four hundred slates with a second name cut under them that somebody is going to have to tell. That is a way up a river. It is slower and it is heavier and it is not made of anything you can hold." The ebb came off the reach. The gate went over. Somewhere above them, in a light room at the top of a barn-sized world, a man of sixty-one put a hand on a bar he could not see and found it moving easily for the first time since the spring, and stood there for a while, and did not trust it.