The black doorway behind the crates went down forty steps and stopped at a wall of fallen stone.
Not old stone. The boot-prints went up to it and the picks had been at it from the other side, and then the roof had come in, a great wedge of grey rubble from floor to ceiling, and the prints came back. Whoever had carried the crates in had sealed their own door behind them, on purpose or by accident, and gone round by the pit.
Brakka put her hand on the rubble and listened with her Loam for a long moment and said, “Thirty feet of it. We’d be a week.”
“Then the pit,” said Ilsa.
“Two crossbows on the pit and a hut full of who knows what and Sel’s twelve watching us walk into it. No.” Brakka took her hand off the stone. “Think.”
It was Skritch who thought.
He had been very quiet since the warden; he had seen the thing fall on its face and had gone up a pillar and not come down until Oswin was carried past. Now he sat on the bottom step with his nose working, and his whiskers trembled, and he said in a small voice:
“Water.”
“What?”
“Down. Under. Skritch smells it.” He went to the wall of rubble, not to the middle but to the corner, where the stair met the floor, and put his face to a crack at the bottom no wider than a hand. “There’s a hole here. Little. Little. Goes down to water. Old water, big-folk water, the kind the warren’s in.” His whiskers twitched. “Skritch could go. Skritch could see.”
“And then what? We can’t get through a hand’s-width.”
“Then Skritch finds the big way. There’s always a big way. Water-places have doors.” He looked at Wick, not at Brakka. “Skritch said he’d pay. Squeak true. This is paying.”
He went into the crack like a cork going into a bottle, backwards, and was gone, and they sat in the dark with Pip’s green light for the length of time it takes to boil a pot, and then the rubble at the far corner shifted, and a grey-brown face came out of a hole that had not been there before, with a stone in its paws the size of its head.
“Loose,” said Skritch, dropping the stone. “All loose at this end. Big-folk never look at corners.”
It took an hour, Brakka hauling and the rest passing stones back up the stair hand to hand, and at the end of it there was a hole a Varr could get through on her belly, and a slope of scree going down, and at the bottom, in the dark, the sound of a great deal of still water.
The cistern was a cathedral.
That was the only word Wick had for it. Pip’s light went out across the water and did not reach the far side. Pillars went up out of the black water in rows, six-ringed at the capitals, and the ceiling they held was so far up that the moth’s glow only hinted at it. The Carrovans had stored their water here, under their city, and the water was still here, four hundred years on, flat and black and cold as a knife.
And on the water, on rafts, was the warren.
Wick had thought warren meant twenty. It meant two hundred. The rafts were lashed together out of crate-wood and old doors and the long thin leaves of some water-plant, in a floating village that filled the near end of the cistern from pillar to pillar, and on every raft were Skitter: grey-brown, sleek, whiskered, child-sized, and thin. Their ribs showed in Pip’s light. Pups the size of cats lay in heaps under rags. The adults stood up as the light reached them and did not run and did not come forward. They watched the big-folk come down the scree, and the only sound in the whole vast hall was the lap of the water and Oswin’s breathing.
“Oh,” he whispered. “There are so many.”
Something hissed.
It came from the biggest raft, in the middle, under a canopy of leaves, and it was a Skitter the size of Oswin: fat, which none of the others were, with whiskers gone white and a mouth with half her teeth missing, and small black eyes that had not stopped moving since the light came. She sat on a throne of a chair with one arm broken off, and she was counting. Wick saw her paw move. One claw ticking across the rafts, raft by raft, as if she were telling beads.
“Tally,” said Skritch, under his breath, and went flat to the scree.
“Big-folk,” said the Tally. Her voice was a dry old croak. “Big-folk in the water-hall. With light.” The claw stopped. “Who brought big-folk to my people?”
Skritch did not move.
“Who,” said the Tally again, and now her eyes had found him, flat on the stones with the tin button glinting at his throat, “brought big-folk to my people? You. Put-out. Loud-mouth. I counted you out, you are not in the tally, and you bring a Varr and a tree and a fire-Pell and a knife into the last place we have, and you squat there like a pup that’s wet the raft—”
“Hang on,” said Brakka.
“Be quiet, Varr. I have counted more of my people dead this season than you have fingers and I will not be quieted in my own water by—”
“Tally.”
Skritch had stood up.
He did it badly. His legs shook. His whiskers were flat against his face, and the button on its string was trembling against his chest, and his voice when it came was a thread. But he stood, on the scree, in front of Brakka and Seven and all of them, and he looked at the fat old Skitter on her broken chair, and he said:
“Skritch brought them.”
“I know you—”
“Skritch brought them because Skritch said. In the drains. Skritch said, the cold is coming up, the little ones are going Quiet, big-folk should know. You said big-folk don’t listen. Skritch went up-top. Skritch found big-folk. These big-folk listened.” His voice was steadying. “This one—” the paw at Wick ”—let Skritch go with the Watch fifty tail-lengths off. This one—” at Brakka ”—said Skritch’s choices weigh. They went into the no-no under the wood with six, and the warden fell on its face. Skritch saw.” The paw was shaking. “And the no-no under the wood, Tally. It’s why the little ones go Quiet. It’s the same cold. It’s the same cold. Under Saltmire, under here, the same, and the warren’s sat in the water in the middle of it, and you’re — you’re counting.”
Two hundred Skitter held their breath, and so did Wick.
“Skritch is loud-mouthed,” said Skritch. “Yes. Count Skritch out again, after. But they’re going down to shut it. And they need the water-way, because the big-folk way fell in. And the warren knows the water-way. So.”
He sat down, quite suddenly, as if his legs had been cut.
The Tally looked at him for a long time. Her claw had stopped moving. Across the rafts, two hundred Skitter looked at her, and at the exile on the scree, and back.
“Shut it,” she said at last. “Shut it. You, Varr. You’ve heard it. The wrong water. The singing.”
“I’ve heard it,” said Brakka. “I’ve a stone in the Sprat’s pocket that’s heard it, and an old woman in Greystep who’s heard it fifty years, and I’ve a Lumen with its arm going grey from it, and I’ve a contract to find out what happened to fifteen people who went down to it and didn’t come up. So yes. We’re going down to shut it. Or die trying, which is likelier, and then you’ll not be bothered with us.”
A long pause.
“Whisk,” said the Tally.
A Skitter came forward from the nearest raft: older, lean, grey at the muzzle, with a claw missing from one forepaw. “Tally.”
“And Dabble.”
A second, young, barely bigger than a pup, who came so eagerly he nearly fell in.
“They know the long gallery. They’ll take you to the ledge over the big-folk hole where the singing comes from, and no farther, and then they come back to me, both, and I count them in.” The old eyes went to Skritch. “The put-out goes with you. He is not in the tally. If he does not come back, he was never here.” A pause. “If he does come back—”
She did not finish. Her claw began moving again, raft by raft, and Wick thought that it had skipped, just once, over the scree where Skritch sat, as if it were counting something that was not quite there.
“No light,” said Whisk.
They were at the mouth of the long gallery, on the far side of the cistern, where the Skitter had ferried them raft by raft across the black water, and the gallery was a tunnel of fitted stone going away into a dark that was a different thing from ordinary dark. Wick could feel it on his face. The song-stone in his pocket had gone from warm to cool to cold, and was getting colder.
“No light,” said Whisk again. Her voice was a dry whisper, like Skritch’s but older. “The Quiet drink it. Down there, they’re thick as pups. One torch and they come. Two and you’re gone.” The missing claw pointed into the dark. “And light’s not the worst thing in the gallery.”
“What’s the worst thing?”
“The long no-no.”
Dabble, beside her, made a small noise and put both paws over his mouth.
“It lives in the gallery. Long. Long. Legs like a cellar full of brooms. No eyes. It hears. Breath, boots, a dropped stone, your heart if you’re close.” Whisk’s whiskers were flat. “It eats what it hears. Three of ours this moon, going for water. We go past it now in twos, slow, and we don’t breathe till the far end, and some of us still don’t come back.”
“Right,” said Oswin faintly. “Right. So we — no light. And no sound. And we walk past a thing that eats sound. In the dark.” His frill, which Wick could just see by Pip’s dying glow, had gone past flat into something that looked like it was trying to crawl inside his collar. “Pip. Pip, I’m going to have to wind you down.”
“Not down,” said Whisk. “Low. One tick. The green. The long no-no don’t see, and the Quiet don’t come for a glow that small. Just don’t let it fly.”
Oswin turned the brass key back, a quarter-turn, until the glow-cell was the faintest green ember, barely enough to show his own fingers.
“One tick,” he said. “Right.”
Brakka put Auntie over her shoulder and stooped under the gallery lintel first.
Wick had never been anywhere so quiet, and he had been in a cellar with the Quiet.
The gallery went on. A tunnel wide enough for three, high enough for Brakka, with the stone underfoot smooth as a Saltings flat at low tide, and nothing to see but the faint green of Pip’s cell going ahead like a will-o’-the-wisp and the rest of them following it in a line, hands on the shoulders of the one in front. Whisk, Dabble, Brakka, Seven with its grey arm in its coat, Oswin, Wick, Ilsa, Skritch at the back. Nobody spoke. Wick put his boots down toe first the way Ilsa had shown him in the hollow, and counted the steps, and his hands were empty and cold and useless.
He had not been ready for that. He had nothing. The slack had left him hollow, Seven’s gift had warmed the hollow but not filled it, and there was nothing in the air here to catch even if he could have caught it: no wake, no Current, only the dark drinking everything. If the long no-no came, he could not push it, or burn it, or freeze it. He could only walk, and not breathe, and trust that the Skitter ahead knew the way and the girl behind knew her knives.
It was horrible. It was also, he thought, somewhere around the four-hundredth step, what everyone else felt all the time.
The air changed.
He felt it before he heard anything. A pressure, as if the gallery had got lower. Then a smell, faint and dry, like the inside of an old chest. And then, ahead, Whisk’s hand came back and found Brakka’s wrist and squeezed, and the line stopped dead.
Wick heard it.
Not a sound: a stillness where sound should have been, a stretch of the gallery ahead where the faint drip and sigh of the stone simply stopped, as if something very large were lying across the floor absorbing it. And then, in the stillness, one small tik. Like a fingernail on slate. And another, to the left. And another, higher, on the wall.
Legs. Settling.
The line stood. Wick’s lungs began to burn and he let the air out through his nose, slow, slow, and the tik came again, nearer, and Pip’s one green ember showed, for a single instant at the edge of its glow, something that was not stone. A jointed thing, pale, as thick as a man’s arm, bending at an angle no arm bent. It touched the floor without a sound. It lifted.
Oswin’s breath caught.
It was the smallest sound in the world. A hitch, a half-gasp, swallowed at once. And every tik in the gallery stopped, and the stillness turned, Wick felt it turn, toward the place where the sound had been, and the pale leg came down a yard from Oswin’s boot.
Wick’s hand was on Oswin’s shoulder and he could feel the Pell shaking through his coat. Ilsa’s hand on his own shoulder was like iron. And in the ember-light he saw Oswin’s face turn, very slowly, and look at the thing that was looking for him, and then look down at the moth in his hand.
The Pell’s frill was gone. Flat. Vanished. His eyes were enormous. And in them Wick saw him understand what Whisk had meant, it eats what it hears, and decide.
Oswin stepped sideways out of the line.
He did it so softly that Wick’s hand simply slid off his shoulder and found air. Two steps. Three. Toward the left-hand wall, away from the rest of them, and then, with his webbed thumb on the brass key, he wound Pip.
One turn. Two. Three. Tick, tick, tick. The glow-cell went from ember to green to a hard bright white that lit the whole gallery like a struck match, and Wick saw everything.
The thing filled the tunnel. It lay along the floor and up both walls and across the ceiling in a tangle of pale jointed legs, dozens, more, going back into the dark farther than the light reached, and in the middle of them, where a head might be, there was a smooth grey nothing with a seam in it, and the seam was opening. It had no eyes. It did not need any. Every leg in the tunnel had swung toward the light and the little ticking thing that was making it.
Oswin threw Pip.
The moth went down the gallery, away from the line, back the way they had come, burning white, wobbling, tick, tick, tick, loud as a drum in all that silence, and the thing went after it. All of it. The legs swarmed off the walls and the ceiling in a wave of pale joints and the whole long body poured past them down the tunnel like a bundle of rope being dragged, so close that a leg brushed Wick’s hair, and it made no sound at all except the dry rustle of its joints, and it was gone into the dark after the light.
And Oswin went after it.
“Oswin—”
Brakka’s whisper, savage. Too late. The Pell was already ten yards down the gallery, walking, not running, with his coat charred and his eyebrows gone and his two burn-scarred hands held out in front of him in the dark, going after his moth, and his voice came back very small and very steady.
“Twenty breaths. Then it’ll stop ticking and it’ll want something else to listen to. So I’ll give it something. Go on. Go. I’ll find you.”
“Tallowby, you absolute—”
“Captain,” said Oswin’s voice from the dark, “I don’t like this either.”
And then, far down the gallery, deliberately, he began to hum. Off-key. Verse eleven. The one about the ship’s cook.
Whisk’s hand closed on Brakka’s wrist and pulled, and the line moved, fast now, no longer caring about toes, and the humming went away behind them into the black, getting smaller, and did not stop.
They came out onto the ledge an hour later, or a week, Wick could not have said, and Oswin was not with them.
Nobody spoke about it. Brakka’s face in the dark had been a thing Wick did not look at twice. They went on because there was nothing else to do, and the gallery ended in a crack in the rock, and the crack opened onto air, and the air was full of light.
Lanterns. Hundreds.
They lay on their stomachs on a shelf of stone and looked down into a hole in the world. A cavern so wide the far side was lost in haze, with a floor a hundred feet below, and the floor was a dig. Scaffolding of raw timber. Shafts and sumps. Spoil-heaps. Ropes going up into the dark to windlass-drums. Lanterns on poles in rows, yellow, every one burning too low, and between them men moving, small as beetles. Some in leather half-masks. Some in long coats that Wick knew the colour of even from here. Blue-grey. Tidewatch.
And on the near side, under the ledge, pens. Timber stockades, three of them, with figures in them that did not move much, and chains, Wick could see the chains, long lines of them running from post to post with the lantern-light sliding along the links.
Ilsa’s hand found his sleeve and gripped it.
“There,” she breathed. “There. Grey Hound colours. Second pen.”
He could not see colours. He could not see anything but the far wall.
Because the dig had a shape, and the shape pointed. Every shaft, every scaffold, every rope ran toward the one place on the far side of the cavern where the lanterns were thickest, and there, set into the living rock, was a door.
A round door. Not twice Brakka’s height. Twenty times. A disc of black stone so vast that the scaffolding against it looked like scratches on a plate, and carved into it from rim to centre, ring inside ring inside ring, six rings, with the lanterns flickering along their grooves and the frost, even from here, white in the carvings.
The song-stone in his pocket was so cold it had stopped humming. It was just a stone now. A stone that had gone Quiet.
“That’s it,” Wick said, and his voice came out of him as if it belonged to someone else. “That’s what they’ve been digging for.”
Beside him, Seven said nothing at all. It lay with its grey arm under it and its face to the door, and the smell that came off it was wet earth, so heavy that Wick could taste it over the lamp-smoke rising from the dig.