第13章 The Drowned City

The tunnel came out into a nave, and the nave had a roof, and the roof was forty feet up and made of water. Corvin stopped at the mouth of it with the compass held out in front of him and its light going up into the green-black until it found nothing to fall on. The floor of the chamber was silt, ankle-deep, and the silt had a texture like scoured wool where the current worked at it twice a day. Above them the whole surface of the river lay like a lid, and columns of light came down through it in nine slow bars, and the light moved when the water moved. "That is Mirefall," Selka said. "Or the bottom of it. There is no more of Mirefall than this." "Which part?" "The part your Nine dug out." She made a gesture with two fingers at the far end, where the silt gave way to a channel of moving water and the channel had a wall along it. Dry stone. Cut stone. "They have had a dock in the drowned quarter for eleven years. They come up the Thorn on the flood, they take the barges through, and they store the cargo in eleven rooms under forty feet of river, and no city above this has ever known." Corvin walked out onto the silt and it took his weight and held. Vael came out behind him and put her hand flat on the wall at the mouth of the tunnel, feeling for something, and found it: a groove, waist-high, worn into the stone, and the groove went on down the chamber as far as the light reached. "Mooring holes," she said. "There are thirty of them along this wall and nine of them are cut square. Square is not a river thing. Square is a warehouse thing." "Three hundred barges in a season," Selka said. "Eleven rooms. Two of the rooms are for people, and the people are not workers." The three of them went along the silt with the compass for a lamp, and where the current came through in a seam it came through hard enough to strip a man's leg off at the knee, and Selka went ahead without looking down, which told Corvin she had been doing this since she could walk and had stopped seeing the holes. They passed a stair. It went up out of the silt and stopped eleven steps short of the top, and the tops of the steps were worn into bowls. "Somebody built this to come and go," Vael said. "Somebody built this so that when the tide is out, the barges can be walked out," Selka said. "Your Nine are not clever people. They are patient people. There is a difference and it has cost me eleven years of my people to learn it." At the far end the silt gave way to open water and the compass light jumped off the surface and went all over the ceiling, and Corvin saw the towers. They came up out of the mud the way the stumps of a burnt wood come up out of a bog: eleven of them, the tallest forty feet, and each one leaning a little, and the whole row leaning together, east, in the direction the flood tide works. Between them the water was black and the current ran in long slow bands and every band had weed on it, and where the weed was thick the water looked like something solid that you could stand on and would not. "That is the rest of the city," Selka said. "There were forty towers. Nine are out. The rest are in the mud, and they will be in the mud for another two hundred years, and the mud is the only stone in this river that anybody has ever needed." Corvin looked at the towers for a long time. He had crossed the Thorn eleven times and had never known it had a city in it, and the discovery did not feel like the discovery of something lost. It felt like finding a tooth in a jaw you had already been biting on. "Where is the keep?" "There." She pointed with her chin, west, where the current came from. It was a square thing with a wall round it and it stood in water that was not moving, which told him it was founded on rock, and it was the only thing in the whole of that room that was not a ruin. "How many of the Nine?" "Ninety, when the water is high. Forty when it isn't." She was looking at the wall rather than the keep. "They run the gates, Corvin. Every one of the nine, the sluices and the bars and the wheels. They are not smuggling past the gates. They are the gates." He had not thought of that, and he had been thinking about nothing else for four days. "Selka." "I know what you are going to ask and I have asked it for twenty years." She turned round, and in the compass light her face was older than he had been taking it for. "How does a boat of my size get past nine gates run by ninety men. There is no way. There has never been a way. That is what a gate is for." "Then you have kept the Second River for a hundred and fifty years by not needing one." "We have kept it by not needing one because there has been nothing to trade and nothing to lose." She looked back at the towers. "Now there is a guild on the Thorn that takes cargo off the water above and puts it in the water below and has taken three of our rooms. And now there is a ferryman with the first light in his coat walking up the tunnels toward the keep. And the pressure on the Ninth has gone up by a third in a month and the boys who swim the culverts have started to come up dead. Nobody is doing that on purpose. That is what is frightening about it. They are not digging. They are *dredging*, and they do not know what they are pulling apart." Vael said, "Then we do not go in the front door." "No," Selka said. "We go in through the room where they keep the people."