Ink

The Inkworks smelled like the bottom of the world.

Ves smelled it from the top of the quay stair, before she could see it. Rot and salt and smoke and something sharp and bitter underneath, like burnt hair. It came up the stair on the night air and filled her nose and her mouth and settled on her tongue, and by the time she reached the bottom of the stair her eyes were watering.

The low quay ran along the inner face of the reef on the lagoon side, at the waterline, below the lowest terrace. It was the oldest working part of the city: a long ledge of grey founding salt where the boats tied up and the nets were mended and the trades that nobody wanted near their houses were done. Gutting sheds. Rope-walks. The tar-pits.

The Inkworks were at the far end. Past everything. A long low shed of black-stained salt — the only black building in Saltreve, Ves realized now, looking at it in the lamplight; she’d never noticed — with a row of chimneys along its roof putting up thin grey smoke, and big wooden vats outside it on the quay, steaming.

And a woman sitting on an upturned vat in the doorway, smoking a pipe.

“Thole,” said Nella Sorn.

She was fifty-six. Short, thick, strong, in a leather apron gone stiff and black with years of ink. Her arms were black to the elbows. Not dirty — black, the ink worked into the skin so deep it had become the skin, and her fingernails were black, and there was a black smudge on her cheek where she’d wiped her face. Her hair was grey and cropped short as a man’s, and her eyes, in the black-smudged face, were very pale blue and very sharp.

“Marr said you’d come,” she said. “I said you’d come at dawn. You were always early. Your mother was always late.” She took the pipe out of her mouth. “You look like her. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“No,” said Nella. “No, they wouldn’t. Nobody talks about Corra Thole.” She stood up off the vat. “Come in. Mind the floor. It’s slick. Don’t touch anything you don’t know.”

Inside, it was worse. And better.

It was hot. A long shed full of steam and smoke and lamplight, with a row of iron cauldrons along one side over low fires, bubbling black. Racks of drying things on the walls — black things, long and limp, like wet rope. Tubs. Sieves. Stone mortars as big as barrels. Kegs, stacked to the roof at the far end, iron-banded, stoppered with wax. And on a long table down the middle, under a hanging lamp, laid out in a row like a surgeon’s instruments: brass.

“Nightsquid,” said Nella, nodding at the racks. “From the vent-trenches off the Ninefold. They live in the deep Brine where it’s blackest, and they’ve never seen light, and they’ve never had a memory in their lives. Blank. That’s why it works.” She went to the nearest cauldron and stirred it with a long iron paddle. “You squeeze the ink-sacs. You boil it with charcoal — driftwood charcoal, burnt black, ground fine. You boil it down. Three days. Till it’s thick as tar and black as the inside of your eyelid.” She lifted the paddle. The stuff ran off it slow and heavy, glossy, so black it seemed to drink the lamplight. “And then it’s ink.”

“I know how ink’s made.”

“You know how writing ink’s made,” said Nella. “Thin. Gentle. Steeped and strained and mixed with gum so it sits on a page and stays there. That ink’s tame. You put it on paper in words and it settles down and becomes a thing that means. That’s what written ink is. Ink that’s been told what to be.” She knocked the paddle on the cauldron’s rim. “This isn’t that. This is ink that’s never been told anything. It’s hungry. It’s blank. And when you put blank on top of memory —“

She took a little clay cup off a shelf. In it was a lump of white salt the size of a thumb. Fresh. Ves could see the grain in it. A labor-salt, by the shine. Somebody’s day’s work, hardened.

Nella dipped a glass rod in the cauldron and let one drop fall on the salt.

It hissed.

Not like water on a hot stone. A soft wet sound, like something exhaling. And the salt under the drop went grey. Then soft. Then it slumped. Ves watched the white lump in the cup sag in on itself like a candle in a fire, losing its shape, its grain, its shine, going from white to grey to a dull iridescent liquid that pooled in the bottom of the cup and slid with colors.

Brine. Raw. Meaningless. In a cup.

“Unwritten, it eats,” said Nella Sorn. “That’s the saying. It eats the shape out of things. Back to what they were before anybody salted them. Back to sea.” She put the cup down. “Salt’s a memory that’s been made into a thing. Ink unmakes it.”

Ves looked at the grey-colored liquid in the cup for a long time.

“How much,” she said, “would it take for a wall?”

Nella looked at her.

“A sea-wall? One of yours?” She thought. “A keg. A good one. Fired hard, at the base.” She knocked the paddle again. “Why? Thinking of taking one down?”

“Thinking of what the thing on the horizon’s made of,” said Ves.

The brass on the long table was the lance.

Nella had it in pieces. She put it together in front of Ves, slowly, by lamplight, the way you’d show somebody how to load a gun they’d never held.

A tube. Long. Taller than Ves. Brass, but sheathed down its middle third in white salt — a hard dense labor-salt, Ves could see from the grain — for grip and weight. At one end, a narrow nozzle like a spear-point, with a valve in it. At the other, a round brass reservoir the size of a man’s head, with a screw-cap on top and a pump-handle on its side. And along the haft, a trigger-lever, under where your hand would go.

“Pneumatic,” said Nella. “You fill the reservoir with charge. Six charges — one keg, split six ways, more or less. You pump it. Twenty strokes. Thirty, if you’ve got the arms. That puts the air on it. And when you pull this —“ she touched the lever “— the valve opens and it throws. Black. Hard. Fifteen paces, maybe twenty if you’re lucky. A spear of ink. And whatever it hits —“

“— goes back to sea.”

“Goes back to sea,” Nella agreed. She looked at Ves’s hands. At the salt fingers. “And be careful where you point it. You’ve got a good deal of the sea in you already.”

“Ink on skin’s harmless.”

“Ink on skin’s harmless,” said Nella. “Ink on salt is ruin. And you’ve got two hands of salt to the second knuckle.” She held out the lance. “Point it the other way.”

Ves took it. It was heavy. Heavier than the fork-bandolier. She shouldered it. The salt-sheathed grip settled into her hands, into the stiff salt fingers that wouldn’t close properly, and she found — to her surprise — that it fit. The grip was thick. Thick enough that her fingers didn’t need to close all the way round. Somebody had made it that way.

She looked at Nella.

“I made it for your mother,” said Nella Sorn. “Twelve years ago. Her hands were going too.”

Nobody talked about Corra Thole.

Ves had known that her whole life and never thought about why. Her mother had been a weaver. A good one — better than good; Ves had heard old weavers say so, quietly, when they didn’t know she was listening. And when the Rot reached her elbows, Corra Thole hadn’t gone down to the Kneeling Row like the others. She’d walked into the sea. Off the end of the eastern spit. At night. Twelve years ago.

Ves had been twenty-six. She’d come down to the spit in the morning and found her mother’s journal on the salt, the way she’d found Hadrin Coll’s.

She’d never read it.

She’d carried it home and put it in a box and put the box under her bed and never opened either. And Hush, who’d been her mother’s bird, had come to her. Mnemons did that. When the person whose voice they carried was gone, they went to the next nearest voice. Hush had sat on her windowsill for three days without eating. And on the fourth day it had flown down onto her shoulder and touched its bill to her journal and spoken, for the first time, in her voice.

It had never spoken in her mother’s since.

“She used to come here,” said Nella. “At night. The last year. After she’d finished weaving. She’d come down to the quay and sit where you’re sitting and drink my bad wine and ask me about ink.” She was looking at the lance in Ves’s hands. “She wanted to know what it did. Not to salt. To old salt. Founding salt. She wanted to know if it would take that back to sea too, and what would come out of it if it did.”

Ves didn’t say anything.

“She said the old walls sang,” said Nella. “Down at the Kneeling Row. Under the voices. She said there was a song in the founding salt that wasn’t like the rest. Not grief, not labor, not anything she had a fork for. Something else. She used to sit there all night with her hand on the stone.” She paused. “Like Hadrin Coll.”

Ves’s salt hands had gone tight on the lance.

“She asked me to make her this,” said Nella, nodding at it. “So she could take a sample. A little bit of founding salt. Dissolve it in a cup and listen to what came out.” She was quiet. “I made it. I never asked if she did it. Two weeks later she went off the spit.”

On Ves’s shoulder, Hush had gone very still.

“Did she,” said Ves. Her voice came out strange. “Did she ever say what the song was?”

Nella Sorn looked at her for a long time with her pale sharp eyes in her ink-black face.

“No,” she said. “But she said something. The last night. Sitting there with her wine. She said: Nell, I think we’ve been building on somebody.” She took the pipe out of her pocket and turned it over in her black fingers. “I thought she meant the Kneeling Row. The old weavers. I thought she was afraid of going into the wall.” She looked at Ves. “I don’t think that’s what she meant anymore. Not since I heard that sound at sundown.”

They tested the lance at first light.

There was a drowned-form in the lagoon. There usually was, at the start of the Wind season. They came up out of the Brine when strong memories clotted together in the deep and rose, and the Wind seemed to stir them, and in the first weeks of every season the reef-watch went round the lagoon with ink-nets and gaff-hooks breaking them up before they got near the quays.

This one was off the low quay, forty paces out, drifting slowly along the inner face of the reef. Ves saw it from the end of the quay in the grey dawn. A shape on the surface of the Brine, the size of a fishing-skiff. Iridescent like the sea but thicker, duller, lumped. And moving. Not drifting — moving. Slowly turning over and over on itself in the water like something trying to get comfortable.

Hands.

That was what it was made of. She saw it as it turned. Hands. Dozens. Hundreds. Reaching up out of the Brine, palms open, fingers spread, all clustered together into one great slow-turning mass. Reaching. And closing. And reaching again.

“Somebody’s drowning,” said Nella, beside her, very quietly. “Lots of somebodies. All at once. That’s what that one is. Everybody’s last minute in the water, clotted up.” She held out the stoppered keg. “Load.”

Ves loaded.

Screw-cap off. The reservoir took the black charge with a thick wet gulp, and Nella poured until it was full, and Ves screwed the cap down and set her foot on the quay and worked the pump. Twenty strokes. The handle got stiffer. Twenty-five. Her salt hands ached. Thirty.

She shouldered it.

The drowned-form was thirty paces off now. Drifting closer. Turning. The hands reaching up out of the Brine toward the quay, toward the people on it, toward her. She could hear it. Under the voices of the sea. A sound like breathing, gone wrong. Like a hundred people trying to take a breath at once and getting water.

On her shoulder, Hush made a small hard sound.

She pulled the lever.

The lance kicked against her shoulder like a mule. And threw. A spear of black, straight and heavy and glossy, out across the lagoon in the grey light, twenty paces, and into the middle of the turning mass of hands.

It hissed.

The sound she’d heard in the cup, but enormous. A long wet exhalation, like the whole drowned-form breathing out at once. And the hands where the ink struck went grey. Went soft. Slumped. Lost their fingers. Lost their shape. And the grey spread out from the black through the whole turning mass, fast, like fire through dry grass, and the hands stopped reaching, and folded down into themselves, and went slack, and lay on the surface of the lagoon as a broad dull grey stain.

And then the stain went iridescent. Slid with color. And sank. And was Brine.

The lagoon was quiet.

Ves stood on the end of the quay with the lance on her shoulder, breathing hard. Her shoulder hurt where the kick had taken it. Her salt hands were shaking on the grip.

“Good,” said Nella Sorn. “You’ll want to brace better. And you’ll want to aim lower. It drops.” She took the lance off her, gently, and checked the reservoir. “Five left.”

Ves didn’t answer. She was looking at the place in the lagoon where the hands had been.

Everybody’s last minute in the water. She’d just put them back. Into the sea. Into nothing. All those last minutes. She’d unmade them.

She’d thought it would feel like weaving backward. It didn’t. Weaving was building. Calling something up out of the sea and giving it a shape so it would last.

This was the opposite of that.

Abel Rook’s skiff was the last boat on the quay.

It was salt-hulled, like every boat in Saltreve — a long narrow hull woven from labor-salt, white, smooth, light as a gull — but somebody had painted it. Black. Inside and out. Ink-varnish, Ves realized, coming down the quay toward it: thin written ink, the tame kind, laid on in coats and coats until the white hull was dark and glossy and the Brine wouldn’t eat at it. A short mast. A lug-sail, furled. Two sets of oars. A little covered cuddy in the bow. And on the stern, in white letters someone had scratched through the black: LANTERN-MOTH.

Abel Rook was sitting in the stern with his feet up on the thwart, eating an apple.

He was forty-four. Big — not Bastian-big, nobody was, but broad and heavy in the shoulder, with big slow hands and a brown face weathered to leather and a short black beard going grey at the chin. He wore a pilot’s oilskin with the hood back and three things on cords round his neck: a shark’s tooth, a little bag of something, and a brass ring.

He looked at Ves. At the lance on Nella’s shoulder. At the bird.

“The Brine-Bleach in the Wind season,” he said. “East. To a black thing nobody’s ever seen that makes people forget their names and walk into the sea.” He bit the apple. “Marr said.”

“Yes.”

“Ten days. Nine to get there and back, if it’s a league a day and coming toward us, and you want to be back before it is.” He chewed. “In the Wind. With wax in your ears. And a bird reading your name to you.”

“Yes.”

He finished the apple. He threw the core into the lagoon. It lay on the Brine and slowly sank, and a faint ripple of color went out from it — somebody’s memory of an apple, maybe, waking up for a moment in the sea — and was gone.

“I lost my partner,” said Abel Rook. “Six years ago. Jessamy. Brine-struck. She was mending a net at night on the outer reef and she slipped and put her hand in it. Just her hand. Up to the wrist. For about a breath.” He looked at the lagoon. “She came out of it talking in other people’s voices. All of them. For two days. And then she stopped talking.” He touched the brass ring on its cord. “She’s at the Hospice. On the top floor. She doesn’t know me.”

Nobody said anything.

“I don’t believe in luck,” said Abel. “Or curses. Or the old walls singing, or any of that. I believe in salt that floats and ink that keeps it floating and keeping your hands out of the sea.” He touched the shark’s tooth. “But I carry these anyway. Because you never know.” He looked up at Ves. “And because Marr said the Provost’s offering you the fire-salts. For your hands.” He paused. “If you get to the bottom of this. If you stop it. Ask him for one more thing.”

“What?”

“Ask him if the Hospice has anything for the top floor,” said Abel Rook. “For the brine-struck. Anything at all.” He stood up in the stern of the skiff, and it rocked under him, and he put out his big hand for the keg. “I’ll take you.”

Nella came. Ves hadn’t asked her. She was simply there at the quay-edge at sunrise with four kegs of charge on a handcart and a bag over her shoulder, and when Ves looked at her she said, “Somebody’s got to feed that thing,” and started loading the kegs into the skiff’s cuddy.

Marr was there too, at the top of the quay stair, in her grey coat. She didn’t come down. She raised one hand. That was all.

And at the last, before they cast off, Nella took a small clay pot out of her bag and opened it. Wax. Yellow. Soft. Smelling of honey and smoke.

“Beeswax and tallow,” she said. “From the Ninefold. Best there is.” She pinched off three pieces and rolled them between her black fingers into plugs. “Ears. All of us. As soon as you hear anything you don’t like. And don’t take it out. Not for anything. Not if you hear your mother calling you.” She looked at Abel. “Not if you hear anybody calling you.”

Abel took his. He didn’t say anything.

Ves took hers. She held the soft yellow plugs in her salt palm and looked at them.

On her shoulder, Hush leaned down and touched its bill to her wrist-journal. To the first page. The page every person in Saltreve wrote first, and read last.

And said, in her voice: “You are Ves Thole. You are a weaver. You are going east to find the black ship. Do not take the wax out.”

She hadn’t written that yet.

She looked at the bird.

It turned its milk-white eyes toward her, the way it did when it was listening to something she couldn’t hear.

She took out her pen. She wrote it. Under her name. In her square careful hand. You are going east to find the black ship. Do not take the wax out.

Hush touched the line with its bill. And was quiet.

Abel Rook pushed off from the quay with an oar. The Lantern-Moth slid out onto the lagoon, black on the slow colored Brine, toward the gap in the reef where the sea-gate stood open on the east.

Behind them, in the city, the morning sounds. Somebody laughing on a terrace. Check your wrist.

Ahead of them, past the gate, the open Brine. Glowing faint in the dawn. And on the horizon, very far, very dark, low — the shape.

And under everything, just at the edge of hearing, the note.

WRIST · V. THOLE
SALTREVE, THE LOW QUAY, DAWN
INKWORKS. NELLA SORN. NIGHTSQUID INK + CHARCOAL, BOILED 3 DAYS. “UNWRITTEN, IT EATS.”
A DROP ON LABOR-SALT: BRINE IN A CUP. A KEG FOR A SEA-WALL.
THE LANCE: SALT-GRIPPED BRASS, 6 CHARGES, 30 STROKES. NELLA MADE IT FOR MY MOTHER.
MY MOTHER SAID: “NELL, I THINK WE’VE BEEN BUILDING ON SOMEBODY.”
TEST: A DROWNED-FORM OF HANDS. ONE CHARGE. GONE. IT DIDN’T FEEL LIKE WEAVING BACKWARD.
ABEL ROOK. THE LANTERN-MOTH. HIS JESSAMY IS ON THE HOSPICE TOP FLOOR.
WAX.
HUSH SAID A LINE I HADN’T WRITTEN YET.