He woke because the ceiling was coming down, and Ilsa Quire was shouting at him about it.
”—up, Saltings boy, I am not carrying you and a tree—”
Stone hit the floor somewhere near his head. Dust. Lantern-light, yellow and ordinary, swinging; somebody had relit the lanterns, or some of them. He was on his back on the black stone of the dig with his arms laid out beside him like things that belonged to somebody else, and when he tried to move them they moved, slowly, and did not hurt, and were white to the shoulder.
“I’m up.”
“You’re not—”
He got up. The roof, the great dark vault over the dig, had cracks in it that he had not seen before, running from the gate outward, and as he watched a piece of it the size of the Lantern’s bar let go and came down through the scaffold with a crash that put him on his knees again.
“The gate,” said Ilsa, hauling him. “Brakka says the hill was leaning on it. Four hundred years of hill, and it moved, and now it’s remembering it’s a hill.” A stone the size of a head hit the floor by her boot and she did not flinch. “We’ve got the time it takes to climb out, and no bridge. Move.”
“Aldo—”
“Marta’s got him. Move, I said.”
He moved.
They went out the way the Skitter went, because the Skitter way was the only way the stone had not yet thought of.
Whisk led. Up the ledge-crack from the water-channel, Skitter-width, with Wick pushed through it from behind by Ilsa and pulled from in front by Skritch, and Aldo after him with Marta’s hands under his arms and his feet dragging, and the seven Hounds, and Dace with his brother on his back because the board would not fit. Oswin went up it with his coat empty and Pip’s dark body in one fist. Veyra went up it with her dress in rags and her bare hands scorched to the wrist, and did not say a word.
Penn went up it carrying the seed-pod.
Wick saw it in his arms at the crack-mouth and stopped so dead that Ilsa walked into him. It was the size of a child. Smooth, brown, hard as a nut, with a shape in it that was almost a folded figure if you knew what to look for, and the Watch recruit was holding it against his chest with both arms the way you hold something you have been told is more important than you are.
“The captain said carry it,” Penn said. His ears were pink. “She said she’d break me if I dropped it.”
“Give it me.”
“Your arms—”
“Give it me, Penn.”
He gave it. It was warm, like a thing with a hearth in it, and lighter than it looked, and when Wick got it against his chest inside his coat, where the journal was, he felt it beat. Faint, slow, once in the time it takes to say a long word. He stood in the crack-mouth with it against him and felt it beat again, and his eyes stung, and he let them.
“Oh,” said Ilsa, behind him, very quietly, and then, in her ordinary voice: “Fine. Carry it, then. But if you fall I’m catching it.”
Brakka came last, and she did not come empty-handed.
The crack was too small for a Varr. Everybody had known that, and nobody had said it, and when the last Grey Hound was through, Wick turned in the water-channel with the seed-pod against his chest and looked back down through the stone at the dig, and saw her.
She was standing at the foot of the broken scaffold with Auntie across her shoulder and the roof coming down round her in pieces, and at her feet, where the Thunderclap had thrown him and the scaffold had come down on top, pinned under a timber the size of a mast with his leather mask split to the jaw, was Vosk. He was not fighting. He was swearing, a long wet stream of it through a bellows with a hole in it, and Brakka was listening to it the way she listened to Oswin.
“Captain—”
“Go on, Sprat!”
“The crack, you won’t—”
“I’m not coming through the crack.” She looked up at the roof, and at the windlass rope, which was still hanging into the dig from a shaft that had not fallen in yet, and at the man under the timber. “Keel left me a basket. And this one’s for the Compact, and the Compact can have him in one piece or several, I’ve not decided.” She put Auntie’s head under the timber and heaved, once, and it lifted the width of a hand, and she got the other hand in the back of Vosk’s collar and stood up with him hanging from it like a sack of meal, and he stopped swearing because there was no breath left to do it with. “Up, dog. You’ve a rope to climb.”
Wick watched her go up it. One-handed, with Auntie through her belt and Vosk’s collar in her fist and the roof falling, and the last thing he saw before Ilsa hauled him into the dark was Brakka Ironsong, seven feet of Varr on a rope over a hole in the world, singing.
“Forty tusks upon the shore, and forty more to come—”
The dig fell in behind her.
The long gallery was empty.
Whisk went through it at a run and nobody breathed, and the dry tik that should have been there was not; either the Thunderclap had sent the long no-no deeper or the hill had, and nobody asked which. Wick counted anyway, out of habit, and lost count at two hundred, and then there was the scree and the black water and the cistern, and the warren was waiting.
Two hundred Skitter on their rafts under the six-ringed pillars, every one of them standing, every one of them silent, and on the biggest raft under the canopy of leaves, on her chair with one arm broken off, the Tally. She had stopped counting. Her claw lay still in her lap. She looked at the big-folk coming down the scree with their burned hands and their white arms and their wounded carried between them, and at the three scouts who came with them, and her small black eyes went over all of them and stopped at the one with a tin button at his throat.
“Put-out,” she said.
Skritch went flat on the scree.
“Stand up.”
He stood up. Badly. His legs shook. The button on its string was trembling against his chest, and his whiskers were down, and he looked, suddenly, very young and very far from a drain under a pier.
The Tally looked at him for a long time.
Then her claw lifted from her lap, and moved, raft by raft, across the whole floating village the way it had moved the first time Wick had seen her, telling beads, counting her people, every one, and when it reached the end of the rafts it did not stop. It went on. Across the water. Across the scree. And it came to rest, pointing, at a small wet Skitter with a torn left ear, and ticked, once.
“In,” said the Tally.
The warren made a sound. Wick had never heard Skitter make it and never did again: two hundred of them at once, a thin high whistle that went up into the vault and came back off the six-ringed pillars like the fog bells on the Wharves. Skritch stood on the scree in it with his whiskers going up and up until they were a fan round his face, and his tail lashing, and his eyes squeezed shut.
“Counted in,” said the Tally, when it had died. “Loud-mouth. You said, and you were right, and the singing is shut. Get on a raft.”
Skritch opened his eyes.
He looked at the rafts, and the pups under their rags, and the old fat Skitter on her broken chair who had put him out and counted him in. He looked at Whisk and Dabble, who had gone to the water’s edge and were waiting, and Whisk’s whiskers went up a quarter of the way, which was all the goodbye a Skitter gave. And then he looked back up the scree at the company: at Oswin with his empty coat, and at Ilsa, and at a boy with a seed-pod against his chest and his arms white to the shoulder.
“Skritch is in,” he said. His voice shook. “Skritch is in the tally. Squeak true. Skritch will always be in.” He put his paw on his chest, over the button. “But Skritch owes. Skritch said, on the stair. And it’s not paid. Not near.”
“It’s paid,” said Wick. “Skritch. It’s paid ten times over, you don’t—”
“Big-folk don’t know Skitter counting.” He turned his back on the rafts, which Wick understood, from the sound the warren made, was a thing a Skitter did not do. “Skritch goes with the Lanterns. Skritch comes back to the warren. Both. Is that allowed, Tally?”
The Tally’s claw ticked, once, as if it were adding something to a column that did not have a name yet.
“Nobody’s ever asked,” she said. “So. Yes.”
Dawn in the Thornwood was a thing Wick had not known could happen.
They came up out of the Kell door into it an hour later, the whole bedraggled lot of them, and found Brakka already there with Vosk tied to a tower and five Watch recruits sitting in a row on a fallen block with their cutlasses in a heap and their hands in their laps. They had spent the battle at the top of the windlass, Marta said, because when the basket came down with coats in it she had put a crossbow in the first face and sent it back up empty, and Penn had bellowed up the shaft what the old man was, and they had believed him, which was the first sensible thing anyone in a blue coat had done all week. Vosk’s masked men and the borrowed coats had fought each other for the rope while the roof came in, and the ones who had won had gone down the mule-track in the dark, and the ones who had lost were under the hill.
The company came out into a grey light that went gold while they stood there, and the mist was lifting, and there were birds. He had not heard a bird in the wood in days. Now there were a dozen, in the black oaks round the broken towers, going at it as if somebody had paid them. He went to the nearest and put his hand on it, and the grey that had veined it was going out of the bark as he watched, from the middle out.
He put his cheek to it, and tapped, and listened underneath.
The hill hummed. Loam, a grit in his teeth, happy as a bee. And under it, where the wrong note had been for two years, there was nothing at all. Just stone, being stone.
Aldo was sitting against the Kell door with his hands in his lap, looking at them.
Wick sat down beside him with the seed-pod between his knees, and for a while neither of them said anything. The sun came up over the Ironbacks and hit the towers, and the birds went on, and somewhere behind them Oswin was explaining to Marta Keel, at length, exactly what had been in each pocket and in what order it had gone into the brazier, and Marta was letting him.
“Fingertips,” Aldo said at last. “That’s all. Just the tips.” He turned his hands over. “A year, and I’m back to the tips. And you—”
“Shoulders.”
“Shoulders.”
“It doesn’t hurt.” Wick looked at his arms, white to the sleeve. “Nothing bit.”
Aldo was quiet.
“Mam would have skinned you,” he said at last. “Shouting for the whole hill to come and put things in you.”
“She’d have skinned you first. You started it.”
“I did, didn’t I.” He looked at his fingertips. “What are you going to do with it? After.”
“Feed this.” Wick looked at the seed-pod. “Seven said given goes where it’s sent. A little Gleam every night. From a lamp. Asked for.” He did not say so there’s a spring. “And I’m going to join the Lanterns, if she’ll have me, and you’re going to join them too, because I’m not leaving you on a tide-post with a note.”
Aldo laughed. It was the old laugh, the harbour-wall one, the one that made a six have a belly.
“Bossy little sprat.”
“I learned it off you.”
Brakka sent four of the Hounds back along the ravine to the pit-mouth before she would let anyone sit down for long, and they came back with two of Quill’s crates slung on hatchet-hafts between them, Compact thumb and all.
“Coin’s honest,” she said, when Wick looked at her. “So’s a brand. The Compact can read it off the lid with its own eyes, and I’ll not have a fat man in a fur tell me a Varr made it up.”
Then she sang him into the Ledger.
She did it on the hillside above the ruin, at noon, with the whole company sitting round her and the Grey Hounds and the Ashborn and a Skitter and a Watch recruit with pink ears, and Vosk tied to a tower with his mask off and his burned face turned away, and she did it in the Varr fashion, which was to say at a pitch meant to carry through hull-wood across a mile of ice, with her head back and her eyes shut and Auntie across her knees.
“Edwick MARSH, of the Saltings, a sprat and a bucket and a LAMP —”
“Oh, no,” said Oswin.
”— who went down a hole with the Lantern Company —”
“She’s making it up as she goes,” Ilsa said. “She does this. Verse eleven was about a cook because she’d just had a bad dinner.”
”— and asked for what he needed, which was ALL of us, and got it, and shut a DOOR —”
It went on. It got worse. It had a chorus, which turned out to be “Forty tusks upon the shore,” because everything did, and by the third time round Marta Keel was singing it, flat and hoarse, and by the fourth Oswin was, and by the fifth Skritch had joined in with a high thin whistle in a key of its own, and Aldo had his head in his hands and was shaking, and Veyra Sel was sitting very straight with her lips pressed together and her veins glowing faintly at the throat.
“— and the LEDGER says, by my grandmother’s TUSKS —”
“PAID IN FULL,” roared the hillside.
Wick sat in the middle of it with the seed-pod warm against his chest and his white arms in his lap and his face hot, and could not stop grinning, and did not try. Somewhere under the hill a cold thing lay with its face to the stone and its door shut. Somewhere above it a Varr was singing so badly that birds were leaving.
“Forty tusks upon the shore,” sang Brakka Ironsong, “and forty more to come—”
“How many verses,” said Penn faintly, “are there?”
“Nobody knows,” said Oswin. “Her grandmother knew. Hum along. It helps.”