第14章 The Keep

The room where they kept the people was a chapel, which Corvin had not expected and Selka had not explained, and the explanation came at the door and was four words long. "Mercy, for a price." The Nine had taken the river-kin's dead and put them in the niches. That was the whole of it. There were four hundred and some of them in the wall of that room, arranged by year, and each niche held two or three, and each had a slate above it with a name and a length of time, and the slates were the work of a careful man with a chisel. Corvin read six of them on the way past and every one of them was somebody's river-kin and every one of them had died in the tunnels, and beside each of them, cut smaller and later and in different tooling, somebody had added a second name. "Relatives," Selka said. "They are not ours to stop. Once a body goes into a wall, the family cannot let it alone. Half those second names were cut by our own people, standing in this room, in the dark, in the two hours after, on their knees." The room had a lamp in it. Not a compass-glow, not a rushlight — an actual wick-lamp on a hook, burning, with a man sitting beside it who had been told to sit there and was doing it well. "You are expected," he said. "Quart sent word down on the flood that if the ferryman comes, he comes to the middle room and puts the light on the table. He said you would do that." "And if he doesn't come." "Then I have spent a night," the man said, "and I do not care." His name was Ost, and he had a key on a chain, and he was forty years old and had been a courier on the Thorn for eleven of them, and he had the first two keys. He did not offer them. He said, "Not yet." They waited in the chapel for the tide to turn at the half hour, and the tide made the room move, because the room was under forty feet of river and the whole building was founded on rock and the floor of it dipped about two inches and came back. Vael used the two hours to look at the slates, all four hundred of them, without touching. She read them the way she read a tide table, in order, all the way along. "Corvin. This is not a necropolis. Look at the distribution." She put her finger along the wall without touching it. "This cluster here, and this cluster, and this one. They are not random and they are not by year. They are by *reach*. Everything in these three groups died inside two hundred yards of the Ninth Gate culvert. Not in the tunnels. Not in a fight. In the culvert." "Somebody is pumping the culvert dry and putting it back wet," Corvin said. "Somebody is pumping the culvert and *breathing* into it." She straightened up. "A dredge does not kill people. A dredge moves the silt that has been settling over a hundred and fifty years and holds it in suspension and takes it somewhere, and that silt is the only cover the culvert has ever had. Take the cover off and you have a culvert with a great deal of water in it in a confined space with four hundred people living upriver of it." Selka had gone very still. "The boys who swim the culverts," she said. "They come up dead." "How?" "They come up blue." She said it the way she had said *mercy, for a price*, which was to say it once and never refer to it again. "They come up blue, and they come up dead, and there has never been a mark on them. Eleven of them, since the turn of the year, and I have buried eleven." Ost made a small sound and then stopped making it. "They are not drowning," Vael said. "They are drowning in water that has not been in the culvert before. Water that is carrying a hundred and fifty years of silt into a space with a man in it. And it is not the tide doing it and it is not the dredge doing it deliberately, because the dredge works on the low water and the boys go in on the high." Then the light in the middle room changed, and they all heard it: a voice, a man giving an order in a corridor, and the specific sound of a door being opened that had not been opened in days. "Quart," Ost said, quietly. "He does not run. He is not a man who runs. He is a man who is always going to be in the middle of his own building when you arrive." Corvin took the compass out of his coat and put it on the table in the middle room, where it lit the underside of a face that he had seen once, four days ago, across about eleven feet of moving water on the Second River, on a boat going the other way. Quart looked at it for a long time. He was sixty, and heavy, and wore the dull coat of an accountant and had the hands of a man who has never in his life pushed an oar. "Sit down," he said. "Not you. The one with the light. Sit, because you have walked since the flood and I can see it in the way you are standing, and I would rather not have this conversation with a man who falls over in the middle of it." Corvin sat. "You want to know about the pressure," Quart said. "I want the Ninth Gate's pressure back where it was." "The Ninth Gate's pressure is where it has to be." Quart put one hand flat on the table, not on the compass, an inch away from it. "Do you know what a gate is, ferryman? A gate is a promise made by a river to something it would rather eat. Nine of them, and every one of them says: not this year. And the promise holds because everybody who would break it has to be willing to be the last man alive when the water comes." He turned the hand over and looked at the palm, as though he had been asked a question about it. "Sixteen of my people died in the spring of the eleventh year," he said. "I have not told that to the river-kin and I am not going to. Sixteen, in one morning, in the ninth reach, because I opened a bar to take a barge through at a level I had believed was safe for a year and a half. I was wrong by eleven inches. Eleven inches, and sixteen men." He put the hand down. "So you can tell the old woman at the back of that chapel that the pressure is not being raised to drown anybody. It is being raised because I am not sure I can hold all nine of them with the people I have, and I would rather raise the pressure on the culverts than be wrong by eleven inches again." The compass light moved on the wall behind him, and through it the four hundred slates went faintly green. "The dredge," Corvin said. Quart's face did not move. "The dredge is not mine." "Whose is it?" "That," said Quart, "is the first question anybody has asked me in four months, and you asked it in the first ten minutes, and I have been waiting eleven years for somebody to ask me that question and I want you to understand that I am not going to answer it, because if I say a name, then in a week it will not be a name, it will be a reason for you to come back through that room with a light in your hand." He stood up, and he was slow about it, and the two men at the door were not the ones who had come to fetch him. "Tide turns in forty minutes," Quart said. "The tide will carry your water down to the Eighth and the Ninth will open a foot and a half and the culverts will clear themselves, because that is what the Ninth does at the top of the flood. Your river-kin will live. Three weeks a year they will be safer than they have ever been, and I will lose two barges, and I have told the two men who own them, and they have been told, and the boatmen are still with me." "And the price." "The price is a foot and a half of water and a walk of four miles and the ferryman's pride, and all three are things he has before Tuesday." Quart looked at the compass. "I have not touched it. I want that said in front of the light. Sixteen years I have wanted it and I have not laid a hand on it, and there is a reason, and the reason is that I am sixty-one and I would like to be buried in a town where the river goes the right way." He left the room. The two men at the door stayed, and then they followed, and then the door was shut, and the compass sat on the table in a light that was now the only light for forty feet in every direction. Selka came out of the chapel. She had not come through the door and neither had anybody else, and there was mud on her hands to the elbow. "I have heard the whole of it," she said. "He took it." "He is a liar." "He told the truth once and the rest of it was a bargain," Corvin said, "and I have met a great many men who are only one of those things and not the other." He put his hand round the compass and closed it, and the light went out. "Nine gates," he said. "The flood opens the Ninth a foot and a half, and the culverts clear, and the dredge is not his. Then we get one flood. One. And we have to be in the right place with the right weight to be in the right place, because the last tide in this river turns the gates forever and the dredge is being worked by somebody who is not the man we just insulted, and the dredge is not stopping." "What are you proposing?" "That we go up to the Eighth tonight, while the water is up and the Nine think a man who has been insulted has gone back down his own tunnel. And I am going to need somebody who can read a silt bank." He looked at the wall of slates, all four hundred of them, and at the one small second name under a third of them, cut by somebody on their knees in the dark two hours after. "And I am going to need to know whose it is, and I am not going to ask you, and you are going to tell me anyway."