Ves didn’t fight them.
She thought about it. She stood in the stern of the Lantern-Moth with her right arm strapped to her chest and the lance on her back and thirty grey coats on the quay above her, and she thought about it very clearly for the space of three breaths, the way she’d think about the weight of a wall before she struck. She had one hand. Abel had one hand and eleven stitches. Nella had a canvas bundle and a knife. The lance had four charges in the reservoir and Nella had pumped none of them.
And if she fired it at a Tidewarden — at a person, a living one, on the quay of her own city — he wouldn’t come apart into a woman saying a name. He’d come apart into nothing. Nobody would remember him. Not his wife. Not his mother.
Know what it costs.
She climbed up onto the quay.
“Provost,” she said.
“Weaver.” Ashlar’s smile didn’t move. He looked at her arm. “Oh, my dear. Your hand. Is that — the whole hand?”
“To the wrist.”
“I’m so sorry.” He sounded it. That was the worst of it, she’d think afterward. He sounded exactly as sorry as a kind old man would sound. “We’ll get you to the Hospice at once. The fire-salts. Tonight, if you like. There may still be time.” His eyes went past her, down into the skiff, to Nella and the bundle. “And Mistress Sorn. You’ve brought something back.”
“Something,” said Nella. Not moving.
“I wonder if I might see it.”
“No,” said Nella.
The Provost nodded, slowly, as if she’d said something reasonable. Then he lifted one finger, very slightly, without looking round, and four Tidewardens went down the quay steps into the Lantern-Moth.
Abel came up off the thwart. He didn’t have a weapon. He came up anyway, white and huge and one-armed, between them and Nella, and the first Tidewarden put a hand flat on his chest — on the stitches — and pushed, not hard, and Abel went down onto the floorboards with a sound Ves felt in her own shoulder.
Nella didn’t let go of the bundle. They took it out of her arms. Two of them. It took two.
“Don’t touch it,” said Ves. “Whatever you do. Don’t open it. Don’t put your hands on what’s inside.”
“No,” said the Provost. “I don’t imagine they will.” He turned to the Warden at his elbow. “Warden Marr. You’ll see to it, please. The lead box. You know the one. To my rooms.”
Marr looked at him for a moment. Then at Ves.
“Provost,” she said, and took the bundle from the Tidewarden in both arms, the way Nella had held it, and turned and walked up the quay toward the stair without a word.
It went quickly after that. Ashlar was good at things going quickly. Nineteen years.
Abel to the Hospice, to have his shoulder seen to. “Properly. With a Wardens’ surgeon. And a guard on the door, I think, for his own sake — he’s lost a great deal of blood and men who’ve lost a great deal of blood do foolish things.”
Nella to the Inkworks. “Every vat, Mistress Sorn. Every keg you have, and every keg you can boil between now and dawn. The reef-cannon are being run out on the eastern wall tonight. All twelve. I’ll want them loaded by first light.”
Nella stared at him. “The cannon.”
“The ink-throwers,” said the Provost, patiently. “The great ones. For the dead season, when the drowned-forms come in too close to the gates. You know them better than I do, you fill them.” He looked east, out over the reef, to where the dark was coming down over the Brine. Where the black cliff stood on the horizon. Closer. Taller. “It’s a very large drowned-form. Very large. But it’s only a drowned-form. And we have a great deal of ink.”
“You’ll erase it,” said Ves.
“I’ll protect the city,” said Ashlar. “That’s what the Provost is for. Some days it’s all he’s for.” He turned back to her. “And you, Weaver, are going home. To rest. You’re exhausted. You’ve lost a hand. You’ve been out on the Brine in the Wind season for eight days and you’ve been inside a thing that makes people forget their names, and I’m told you’ve been talking about the Founding.” His eyes didn’t leave her face. “I think you need to sleep, and think, and be very sure of what you remember. Before you say any of it again.”
“I’m sure.”
“I’m certain you feel sure,” said the Provost. “The Hull is very good at that.” He folded his hands over the ledger. “Two Wardens will see you home. They’ll stay on your door. For your own safety. We’ve lost two hundred and sixty people to the sea since you left, Weaver, and some of them were very sure of things too, right up until they stepped off the wall.”
They didn’t search her. That was the first thing she noticed.
Two young Wardens, a man and a woman, polite and nervous, walked her up the long stair to the fourth terrace and across the western face to her door. The song-salt door. They waited while she sang it open — a short note, hummed, the way every weaver’s door was keyed — and then one of them said, “Weaver, the lance, please,” very apologetically, and held out his hands.
She gave it to him. She didn’t see what else to do.
They didn’t ask for her journal. Or her bandolier, with its eleven forks. They didn’t think of it. They’d been told to put the hero of the Hull to bed, and they didn’t search heroes.
And they didn’t take Hush.
The door shut. She heard them settle on either side of it in the passage, the scrape of boots, a murmur.
She stood in her own room in the dark.
It was exactly as she’d left it. Eight days. The narrow bed against the wall. The washstand with the cracked mirror over it. The table under the window with her calipers and her inkpot and the pile of measurement-books — twenty years of knuckles, one page a day. The weaver’s workshop below, cold and quiet; she could feel it through the floor, the faint hum of the salt-bench, labor, labor. The window open on the western face and the lagoon below it, glowing, all its bands of color, and the voices in it.
Hush hopped down off her shoulder onto the table and stood beside the calipers with its blind face turned toward the window.
Toward the east, Ves realized. Through the wall. Toward the Hull.
She lit the lamp. One-handed, it took her a long time.
Then she got down on her knees beside the bed, and reached under it with her left hand, and pulled out the box.
It was a plain box. Salt-board, the cheap kind, a weaver’s tool-box with the label scraped off. She’d put it under the bed the night she came back from the eastern spit, twelve years ago, and she had never once opened it since. She’d dusted it. She’d moved it, twice, when she moved rooms. She’d never opened it.
She opened it.
The journal was on top. Her mother’s journal. Salt-bound, the same as hers, the same as everyone’s — the cover worn pale along the spine where Corra’s thumb had rubbed it every morning for thirty years. A brass clasp. She undid the clasp with her thumb.
The first page.
You are Corra Thole, it said. In her mother’s handwriting. Small and straight and neat, the hand of a woman of twenty writing the first page of her first journal, carefully, so that she could read it in the Wind. You are a Salt-Weaver of Saltreve. You live on the second terrace, eastern face, over the chandler’s. Your mother is Bryony Thole. Your father, Tam Thole, was lost at sea. You have a bird coming to you from Weaver Henn when she kneels; its name is Hush. If you don’t know where you are, look at the sea. If the sea is on your left, go up.
Ves read it twice. Then she closed the journal and held it against her chest with her left hand, very hard, and knelt there by the bed for a while.
Under the journal, wrapped in a strip of oilcloth, there was something flat.
She unwrapped it.
Kelp-paper. A single sheet, as long as her forearm. Grey-green, brittle, curling at the edges, gone dark with age along one side as if it had lain a long time in a damp place. Covered on one face in close lines of marks. Not letters. Not any letters Ves knew. Small looping shapes that went up and down and turned back on themselves, in brown ink — cuttle-ink, she thought, and her throat closed — in rows, with long gaps between, and at the top of the sheet, larger than the rest, two marks. One long and level. One that fell.
Held. And falling.
She’d been sleeping on it for twelve years.
Hush came down off the table. It walked across the floor to her, the short-stepping walk it did on flat ground, and stopped beside her knee, and lowered its long hooked bill toward the sheet in her hand. Not touching. Waiting. The way it waited for a page.
She held it out.
Hush touched its bill to the first mark.
Come here, it sang. In Oshe’s voice. Soft. I am here.
Ves put the sheet down very carefully on the floor beside her, and put her face down on the bed, and stayed like that until the lamp began to gutter.
She didn’t read the end of the journal.
She couldn’t. She tried. She opened it at the back, where the last pages were, and the handwriting there wasn’t her mother’s handwriting at all. It was a scrawl. Huge and wild and sloping, letters as big as a thumb, running off the lines and over each other, the pen pressed so hard in places that it had torn the page. The hand of a woman whose fingers were salt to the second knuckle, and then to the third, and then to the palm. A woman holding the pen in her fist like a fork.
Ves knew that hand. She’d written that hand. Right hand: wrist.
She couldn’t make out a word of it.
Hush could. Hush could read any written ink, in the voice of whoever wrote it. Hush had read her mother’s journal for nineteen years.
She held the journal open on her knee and looked at Hush, and Hush looked back at her with its blind white eyes, waiting, and she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t ask it. Not tonight. Not her mother’s voice, in this room, now, saying whatever her mother had said at the end. Not on top of all the rest.
She turned back toward the front instead. Further back than the scrawl. To the year before. Where the handwriting was still her mother’s — shakier, larger, but readable.
She read for an hour.
Weaving. Measurements. Left: 2nd knuckle and a hair. The price of fish. An argument with Nella about vat-temperatures, written down so she’d remember who was right. (Nella.) A note to herself to buy Ves a new fork-grip for her twenty-sixth birthday. Ves had never got it. Her mother had walked into the sea a month before.
And then, in the autumn of that year, this:
Wardens’ survey of founding salt. Assigned to the undercroft below the Hall. Six weeks. The oldest salt in Saltreve and it is SINGING. Not a weight. I have no fork for it. Something in a language I don’t know.
And a week later:
The Kneeling Row. The first shapes. I sat with Gran tonight and put my hand on the old ones at the eastern end and they sing the same as the undercroft. Not weavers. I don’t know what. Nobody knows. Nobody’s ever asked.
And:
There is a door in the undercroft I’m not keyed to. Provost’s lock. Asked Ashlar. He said it’s the founders’ archive, very dull, ledgers. He said it kindly. I don’t believe him.
And, a month later, written fast, the letters bunching:
I got in. Salt forgive me, Nell made me a vial. I got in.
Ledgers. The founders’. Corvane Ashlar’s own hand. Counts.
Nell, I think we’ve been building on somebody.
I took one sheet. Kelp-paper. Not ours. In a box with hundreds of them, all the same, all in the same hand. I don’t know what it says. I put it under Hush’s bill to see if it would read and it SANG. An old woman. A voice nobody has.
Ashlar knows. He came down after me. He didn’t stop me. He stood in the door and watched me come out with it and said: Corra, you’ll make yourself ill. He said it KINDLY.
There was more. Pages more. The skiff east. The deep. The black thing forming. I think it’s ours. I think it’s everything we ever pumped. Then the handwriting began to go — larger, wilder — and then it was the scrawl.
Ves closed the journal.
There is a door in the undercroft.
The knock came at the second hour after midnight.
Not on the door. On the window. Ves was sitting on the floor with her back against the bed and her mother’s journal in her lap and Hush asleep against her knee, and she had been thinking about the window for an hour — four terraces up, the western face, a sheer drop of white salt into the lagoon — and when the knock came on it she thought for one breath that she’d fallen asleep.
Then she saw the face. Square. Plain. Grey-brown crop. Pressed close to the glass, looking in.
Warden Ilsabet Marr was hanging off the outside of the fourth terrace on a rope.
Ves got the window open. Marr came in over the sill the way she’d seen Wardens come over sea-walls in a gale, rolling, all elbows, and landed on Ves’s floor on her hands and knees and stayed there a moment, breathing hard. She had the rope still knotted round her waist and a bag on her back and a Warden’s lantern hooded on her belt.
“Your door’s guarded,” she said. “I’d have come through it. But I picked those two myself, and they’re good, and I don’t want them to have to lie about it.”
“Marr.”
“I touched it,” said Marr.
She sat back on her heels on Ves’s floor. In the lamp her face was grey, and older than forty-seven, and her eyes were wrong. The way Nella’s had been wrong on the floor of the black hall.
“The shard,” she said. “Ashlar told me to put it in the lead box. I’m a Warden. I’ve been a Warden twenty-six years. I’ve pulled three hundred bodies out of the Brine and I’ve never been told don’t touch it about anything in my life that didn’t turn out to be evidence.” She looked at her own hands. “So I unwrapped it to see what I was boxing. And I picked it up.”
“What did you see.”
“I was on a raft,” said Marr. “I was kneeling. My hands were out.” She stopped. “It came up my legs. The white. I sang. I didn’t know the song, but I sang it, I could feel it in my mouth. And it came up my body and into my throat. And I could hear all the others all round me, going out. Like lamps.” She looked at Ves. “I dropped it. I sat on the floor of the Provost’s anteroom for I don’t know how long. Then I put it in the lead box like I was told. And I put the box in his rooms like I was told. And I went home, and I sat in my kitchen, and I thought about it. And then I went down to the low quay and borrowed a rope.”
“Why,” said Ves.
“Because he knew,” said Marr. “He told me not to touch it. He knew what it would do. He’s known all along.” Her jaw set. “And because two hundred and sixty people have walked into the sea since you left, and he’s had me pulling them out of it, and he’s known all along.”
She reached into the bag on her back and took out a small stoppered glass vial. Black inside. And a Warden’s ring of keys. And a coil of rope.
“I went to Nella first,” she said. “The Inkworks. Ashlar’s got four Wardens on her, but they’re all inside watching the vats, and nobody watches the back wall.” She held up the vial. “She said your mother had one of these once. For the same door.”
The undercroft of the Tidewardens’ Hall was older than anything else in Saltreve.
Ves had never been in it. Almost nobody had. You went down to it by a narrow stair behind the Provost’s bench, cut through the founding salt itself — grey, worn, the edges of every step rounded by two hundred years of feet — and Marr had a key to the gate at the top of the stair, because Wardens did the founding-salt survey every twelve years and kept the gate keys.
Marr went down first with the hooded lantern. Ves came after, her left hand on the wall.
The wall sang.
She’d known it would. She’d read her mother’s journal. SINGING. Not a weight. But she hadn’t known it would sing like this. The whole stair. Every step. The walls on either side. Grey, old, worn smooth, cold under her palm — and under the cold, the crowd. Thousands of voices. The language with no hard sounds. Low and long. Not screaming, here. Not the braided anger of the Hull. Something quieter. Sadder.
The asking song.
Ves stopped on the stair with her palm flat on the founding salt and listened, and she could hear it — she could hear it now, the turn of the phrase, the loop, the way it came round on itself. The same phrase Oshe had sung to her by the bridge. The same phrase she’d sung to the Lantern-Moth at dawn. Thousands of voices singing it in the founding salt, faint, endless, frozen at the moment the white reached their throats.
Lie down. Be soft. Carry us.
Two hundred years. Under the Provost’s bench. Under every Tidewardens’ meeting. Under the carving of the First Weaver with no face.
“Ves,” said Marr, from below. “Ves, what is it?”
“It’s them,” said Ves. “It’s the reef. The first reef. We’re inside it. We’re walking down the inside of them.”
Marr’s lantern didn’t move for a long moment.
Then it went on down.
The door at the bottom was iron.
Not salt. Iron. The only iron door Ves had ever seen. Black with age, set into the founding salt in a frame of more iron, with a single lock-plate in its middle the size of her palm, and a keyhole. Plain. A Provost’s lock. No song in it at all. Of course there wasn’t. Iron didn’t sing.
Marr knelt in front of it and unstoppered the vial.
“Nella says the door’s iron but the frame’s set into salt,” she said. “Says you don’t eat the lock. You eat round it.” She looked up. “She says your mother spent two nights working out which bit to eat. And she wrote it down. And Nella kept it.” She took a twist of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it on her knee. A sketch. In ink. A door, a frame, three small crosses at the edges of the lock-plate. In Corra Thole’s handwriting. Here. Here. Here. One drop each. Wait the count of fifty.
Ves looked at her mother’s handwriting on the paper for a long time. Then she said, “Do it.”
One drop. On the grey salt at the edge of the iron frame, beside the lock-plate. The salt hissed, very softly, and a pale steam rose off it. And where the drop had been there was a hole. Clean. A finger deep. Going down into the founding salt like a drill.
And the voices in it went silent.
Not all of them. Only the ones in that finger’s depth of salt. Ves felt it through her palm on the wall. A tiny silence, a pinprick, in the great faint endless crowd. Five voices. Six. Gone. Not into the Brine. Not lying back down. Gone.
Marr put the second drop. The third.
Know what it costs.
Ves counted fifty. Every number. She made herself.
Then Marr put her shoulder to the iron door and it swung inward on the eaten frame with a groan, and they went in.
It was a small room.
That was what she’d remember first. All her life she’d imagined the founders’ archive — everyone in Saltreve had, a little, the way you imagine the bottom of the sea — as something enormous. Vaulted. Lined with books. It was a room the size of her own bedroom, cut square into the founding salt, with a low ceiling, and shelves on three walls, and a table in the middle with a stool. And dust. And the voices in the walls, singing, very faint, all round.
On the shelves, ledgers. Big ones, bound in grey sharkskin, with the years stamped on their spines in faded gilt. Rows of them. Two hundred years of them. And on the lowest shelf, a long salt-board box, with its lid off.
Kelp-paper. Hundreds of sheets. Grey-green. Brittle. Covered in looping brown marks.
Oshe’s house. Everything in it. Ysmay had carried it back along the reef in her arms and not dropped one.
Ves knelt by the box and didn’t touch it. Hush got down off her shoulder and stood at the edge of it and lowered its bill toward the sheets and stopped. Then it turned its blind face up to her. Asking.
“Not now,” she said. “Later. I promise. All of them. Later.”
Marr had gone to the shelves. She was running her lantern along the spines. Reading the years. She went all the way to the end, to the left, to the oldest. And took down a ledger that was smaller than the others. Thinner. Bound in something that wasn’t sharkskin. Grey, and woven.
Kelp.
She put it on the table and opened it.
Corvane Ashlar had kept the counts.
Ves read them over Marr’s shoulder by the hooded lantern. His hand was square and plain and very neat. A clerk’s hand. A careful man. He’d written everything down.
Boats arrived at the people of the rafts: sixty-one. Souls aboard: two thousand and four. Lost on crossing (by my previous count): one thousand and twelve.
Received by the rafts: all.
The people of the rafts. They call themselves something like Dellin. By my estimate, in the near rafts: three thousand five hundred. In the far rafts, which come and go: unknown. Perhaps as many again.
And a few pages on, after lists of food, of water, of the sick and the recovered:
Weaver Thole has made a fork from the anchor-chain. She has made the sea stand.
Council with the raft-people. They will share the sea. They will not give us the ring. They say the sea will scream.
The dead do not need a vote.
And then a page with only a date on it, at the top. And under the date, a column. Two columns. In the same neat clerk’s hand.
Held, on the first reef: three thousand four hundred and twelve.
At the gaffs: sixty-one.
Fled west: not counted.
And under that, ruled off with a line, as if it were the total at the bottom of a sum:
The sea is empty.
Marr put her hand flat on the page. Not to stop it. Just to put it there. Her square plain Warden’s hand, over the column.
“Sixty-one,” she said. Very quietly. “At the gaffs. The same as the boats. One for every boat they gave us.” She didn’t take her hand away. “He made it come out even. Look at that. He made it come out even.”
Ves didn’t say anything. She was reading the next page.
Not Corvane’s hand. Another. A hand she knew, now. Bigger. Heavier. A hand that held its pen in a salt-stiff grip, the letters made of strokes, not curves. A woman’s hand, writing in the founders’ ledger the morning after.
I cannot hear them anymore.
The reef is silent. The ring is silent. I knelt by the first one for an hour and there was nothing. Nothing.
Thank the iron.
We will carve the Hall. We will carve it as it should have been. An empty sea. We came to an empty sea.
Leave my face off. I cannot have them look at me.
Y. T.
There was more. There were two hundred years more.
The ledgers on the shelves weren’t the Salting. They were the city. Every year. The weaving: how many paces of wall struck, of which weight, by which weaver. And beside every weave, in a column of its own, the dregs. How many barrels pumped. How many barge-loads. To the east deep at the turn of the tide. Every day. Signed, at the bottom of every page, by the Provost.
Every Provost. Two hundred years of them. Ashlars, most of them. Not all. But most.
Ves found the pump-records for the year she was nineteen. Her first wall. Eleven barrels of labor-dregs, pumped, barged, poured. Signed A. Ashlar.
And in the margins, here and there, in different hands across two centuries, notes. Short. Dry. The kind of notes a clerk writes to the next clerk.
Soundings over east deep: 410 fathoms. A hundred years ago.
Soundings over east deep: 320 fathoms. Deep is filling? Sixty years ago.
Soundings over east deep: 140 fathoms. Something forming at the bottom. Dark. Ships report singing. Thirty years ago.
Soundings: 40 fathoms. Petition of Weaver C. Thole to cease all dumping and to open the founders’ archive to the Weavers’ Hall. Denied. A.A. Twelve years ago.
And beneath it, smaller, the same hand:
C. Thole entered archive without leave. One kelp sheet removed. Not recovered. Matter closed.
C. Thole into the sea off the east spit. Matter closed.
And then nothing more in the margins at all. For twelve years. Only the dregs, every day, in their column. Barrels. Barges. To the east deep. Signed A. Ashlar. Right up to the page that was still open on the end of the shelf, its ink not long dry.
The day before yesterday. Forty barrels. To the east deep.
He was still pumping it out there. With the Hull a league off. With the thing that had come up out of the deep riding toward the city. He had been pumping it into the deep the whole time.
“Matter closed,” said Ves.
She heard her own voice. It was very calm. It was the voice she used for measuring.
“Matter closed,” she said again. “Twice. He wrote it twice.”
“I did,” said Ansel Ashlar, from the door.
He was alone. That was the first thing Ves saw. No Wardens. No grey coats. Just the Provost, tall and stooped, in a long dark dressing-gown with his silver hair loose on his shoulders, holding a small brass lamp. He looked as if he’d got out of bed. He looked very old.
Marr’s hand went to her belt. There was a Warden’s short club there.
“Please don’t, Ilsabet,” said the Provost, mildly. “I’m sixty-three and I’ve come down a great many stairs. I don’t think I’m going to fight anyone.” He looked at the door. At the frame, eaten round the lock-plate. “I knew someone would come tonight. I didn’t know it would be you, Warden. I’m sorry it’s you.”
“How did you know,” said Ves.
“Because the last Thole came,” said Ashlar. “And because I’d have come. If I were you.” He looked at her. “If I were anyone, and I’d seen what you’ve seen, I’d have come down here to find out if it was true.”
“It’s true.”
“Yes,” said the Provost. “It’s true.”
He came into the room. Slowly. He set his little lamp down on the end of the table beside the kelp-bound ledger and looked down at Corvane’s column. At Marr’s hand still lying flat across it.
“Every Provost reads it,” he said. “On the night they take the chain. Alone. In this room. The outgoing Provost brings you down and shows you the door and gives you the key and goes back up and leaves you here with it until dawn.” He touched the edge of the page with one long finger. “I was forty-four. I’d been on the Tidewardens’ bench for twenty years. I thought I knew what was in here. Dull. Ledgers.” He was quiet a moment. “I sat on that stool until dawn and I read it eleven times. And then I went upstairs and put on the chain.”
“And then you pumped forty barrels into the east deep the day before yesterday,” said Ves.
“Yes.”
“With the Hull a league off.”
“Where else would I put it?” said Ashlar. And for the first time something came into his voice that wasn’t kindness. Something tired, and sharp, and very old. “Tell me, Weaver. Where else? You struck eleven barrels’ worth into the sea-wall the week before you left. The eastern breach. I signed for it. Where would you like it to go? Into the lagoon? Under your window?” He shook his head. “Every wall in this city makes it. Every wall that keeps the Brine out of forty thousand people’s beds. It has to go somewhere. It has always gone there. And I am very sorry it’s come back. I am. But it doesn’t stop the walls needing to be struck.”
“They didn’t need to be struck,” said Ves. “There’s another way. They sang them. You’ve seen the sheets. There’s a box of them on the floor by your feet. Oshe’s whole house.”
“And none of us can read them.”
“The bird can.”
The Provost looked at Hush. Standing at the edge of the box of kelp-paper, with its blind face turned up toward him. He looked at it for a long time.
“Your mother’s bird,” he said.
“It sings them. I’ve learned one. I’ve sung to the sea. I’ve made a finger’s width of deck and there was no cold in my hand. None. You want to save the city? You want to stop the Rot? It’s in that box. It’s been in that box for two hundred years, under your bench, and you’ve been sitting on it.”
“And when the city learns to sing,” said Ashlar quietly, “what does it learn first?”
Ves stopped.
“Think,” said the Provost. “Think, Weaver. You’re a clever woman. You don’t learn the song without learning whose it was. You can’t. It’s in it. You’ve heard it, I think. In the walls. On the stair.” He looked at the grey founding salt of the room round them. “I’ve heard it. Every day for nineteen years. I sit on that bench and it sings up through the seat. I go to the Kneeling Row every founding-day and put flowers on the first one, the big one at the eastern stair, and I put my hand on her, and she sings.”
He looked at Ves. His face was very tired.
“If they remember, there is no Saltreve,” he said. “There are forty thousand people who know they live on graves. Who know their walls are made of murder. Who sleep every night on the people their great-great-grandparents salted alive and put flowers on. Do you know what happens to a city like that, Weaver? I do. I’ve read it.” He touched the ledger. “Not in here. In me. I know what happens to one man who knows. It took me nineteen years. Imagine forty thousand of them.”
“They’re walking into the sea,” said Ves. “Two hundred and sixty of them. Right now. Because of what you buried.”
“And by dusk the Hull will be in the ring, and I’ll erase it,” said Ashlar. “With twelve cannon and every drop of ink Nella Sorn can boil. And the note will stop. And the walking will stop. And the sea will be empty again.” He picked up his lamp. “And then we’ll strike the walls back up, and pump the dregs, and in two hundred years some other Provost will stand in this room and have this conversation with some other Thole. I hope he’s kinder to her than I’ve been to you.”
“It’ll be gone,” said Ves. “All of it. If you ink it. Not lying down. Not going back into the sea. Gone. Nobody will ever remember them again. Not even the sea. That’s what the ink does. It unremembers. Oshe told me —”
“Yes,” said the Provost. “I know what ink does. I’ve read the margins.”
He turned to the door.
“I’ll leave the door open,” he said. “I won’t call the Wardens. I don’t need to. There’s nothing you can do with any of this by dawn that will matter, and I’d rather you spent the night reading than climbing out of windows. You’re both very tired.” He looked back at Marr. “Ilsabet. Report to the eastern wall at first light. I’ll need you on the cannon. If you’re not there, I’ll understand.”
And he went out, and up the stair, and they heard his slow old steps going up and up through the singing salt for a long time.
They didn’t stay.
Marr pulled the kelp-bound ledger off the table and stuffed it into her bag. Ves knelt by the box of song-sheets and wrapped as many as she could carry in her mother’s strip of oilcloth — thirty, forty, she didn’t count — and gave them to Marr too, because she had one hand.
“The shard,” she said. “His rooms. The lead box.”
“I put it there,” said Marr. “I can take it out.”
At the top of the stair, in the Tidewardens’ Hall, the great nave was dark and empty, and on the walls the Clean Founding stood carved in grey stone — the Crossing, the First Weaver at the bow with no face, the empty sea. The long empty sea.
Ves stopped in front of it.
She put her left palm flat on it. On the long carved waves.
Under the stone, under her hand, the crowd was singing.
Through the high windows on the eastern side of the Hall, the sky was going grey. And on the grey, filling it, from the north of the reef to the south, black.
The Hull. Just beyond the reef. So close she could see the shapes rising and sinking in its sides. A window. A raft. A face.
And the note came through the founding salt under her palm and into her bones so loudly that she nearly fell.
Get out. Get out. Get out.
Down in the city, below the crown terrace, the bells began to ring.
WRIST · V. THOLE (LEFT HAND)
DAY 8–9
ASHLAR TOOK THE SHARD. LANCE TAKEN. ABEL TO THE HOSPICE. NELL BOILING INK FOR THE TWELVE REEF-CANNON.
I OPENED THE BOX. CORRA’S JOURNAL. OSHE’S SHEET: “COME HERE. I AM HERE.”
I HAVEN’T READ THE END.
MARR TOUCHED THE SHARD. SHE CAME IN THE WINDOW. NELL’S VIAL; MAMA’S SKETCH.
THE UNDERCROFT SINGS THE ASKING SONG.
CORVANE: HELD 3,412. GAFFS 61. “THE SEA IS EMPTY.”
YSMAY: “LEAVE MY FACE OFF.”
DREGS SIGNED A.A. EVERY DAY. “MATTER CLOSED.” TWICE.
“IF THEY REMEMBER, THERE IS NO SALTREVE.”
THE HULL IS AT THE REEF.