Chapter 132 Nothing to Cut

Theo went back out along the ruts at a run, which in four feet of water is not a run.

By the time he got there the chest had come on all the way and the shoulder was going, and the lights had found their rhythm again and gone back to being out of time with each other.

[Restoration in progress]

[Progress: 4%]

[Estimated: 26 days]

’Twenty-six days... a reset takes an hour. That’s a building site putting itself back up.’

He waded round the side of it to the nearest cable.

Raindrop went into the iron and stopped.

Theo put his weight behind it and then put the sword behind that, and the cable took a notch about a third of the way through, and then it began to sing, low and unpleasant, all the way along its length.

And the thing moved.

Not much. It came forward on the anchored side by about four inches, and the seven cables that were still whole went hard, and a wave went out across the vault and slapped the third causeway.

Theo stopped cutting.

He stood in the water with the sword still in the notch and the whole of it arrived at once.

’...They’re not building it in here to hide it. They’re building it in here because this is where the floor holds.’

He looked down the length of the cable to the ring, and at the lead poured properly round the shank, and at the seven others going away into the black in seven directions.

’Eight anchor points, load-bearing. It said load-bearing and I read it as a restraint.’

Seven whole cables, hard as bar, and one with a notch in it that had moved something twenty-five feet high by four inches.

’If I cut all eight I don’t kill it. I let it stand up.’

He took the blade out of the notch.

Then he stood there for a full minute with his hand on the cable, and in the end he went into the Coffer for the tally board and the Uncommon Quill.

He got down in the water with his shoulder against the ring, turned the collar over, laid the board flat on the stone, and copied the foundry stamp.

Three letters and a shape. He did it twice, once at speed and once properly with his thumb holding the board out of the water, and when he had it he looked at the two of them side by side and got them to agree.

’Right. I can’t take the iron, but I can take whoever made it.’

Going out took him an hour and eleven minutes and it was not quiet.

The reset had done the easy work first.

There were Drowners on the third causeway that had not existed when he walked down it, and they came up out of the water in twos the way the old ones had, and Theo went through them without slowing down and without any of the pleasure he had taken in it that afternoon.

He stopped counting at nineteen.

’Twenty-six days for the big one and about four hours for these, so it’ll be full by the time I’ve had breakfast and the thing in the middle will still be six per cent of a wall.’

He came up the last flight with water coming off him in sheets and his boots full of it, got onto the causeway with the ruts in it, and kept his back to the vault.

The ring put him out into a night with stars in it.

The yard was exactly as he had left it.

Flat ground where the shed had been, eleven hundred and eighty crates in a heap with the roof props across them, the pens broken down into a fence-line of stumps, and the ramp still standing at the ring where he had walked up it.

The air was warm. That was the thing that got him. He had been cold to the hip for six hours, and he came out of a ring of grey stone into an Alderkeep summer night at about two in the morning, and it went into him like a mouthful of soup.

Theo stood on the ramp and breathed it and did not move for a while.

’Twenty-six days.’

He counted the problem the way he counted a bill.

’There’s an unregistered gate four miles from Alderkeep with something in it that’s sixty-one per cent finished, I can’t cut it loose and I can’t leave it, and I’ve got twenty-six days.’

The Hall would have it on a board by noon, if the right man walked in and said so.

’And the right man is somebody four hundred people watched take a collector’s hands off this afternoon.’

He came down the ramp.

’And if Theolyne Chadwick tells them, Theolyne Chadwick has to explain what he was doing four miles up the east road on the night the stockyard came down.’

He walked another twenty yards across ground that had been a business that morning.

’...I’ve got the only copy of this and no mouth to say it out of.’

He was still turning that over, walking down the flattened middle of the yard, when he saw that it was not empty after all.

She was sitting on a fence stump on the east side with her knees together and her hands in her lap, and she had been there long enough to have picked a stump she liked.

Theo stopped about twenty feet away.

Yura did not get up.

Her throat had come up worse in the hours since, four marks gone a bad colour, and the eye that had gone red all the way across was still red, and she had walked four miles on the east road at night on her own to sit on a stump in a yard that somebody had flattened.

She looked at the crow mask for a long time.

Then she looked at the ring of grey stone behind it, and at the ramp, and back at the mask. Her voice came out damaged, and it was going to stay damaged for a fortnight:

"Sivvy came back and told us a man in a bird mask cut her rope and said one word."

’...’

Yura’s hands stayed in her lap.

"She said he pointed at the road and wouldn’t speak to her. So I came out here to see the man who won’t speak to us."

Theo stayed where he was.

She tipped her chin at the ring.

"It’s been six hours. I’ve been sitting here for four of them, and I have watched that thing the whole time, and nobody has come out of it except you."

Then she stood up off the stump, and she was not steady on her feet, and she did not come any closer.

"Take it off, Theo."