You don't listen to water. Nobody can. You listen to what it's standing on.
Dorran Sedge, lock-keeper at Mereby
The story
“Not sure.”
That’s all Wren Tallis has for the warden, standing on the lock at Mereby with his ear on his staff while the flood comes down the canal. The town stays up its ladders. When the water has gone by, Mereby is legs in the mud.
Wren, Tova, Holt and Ivo are a licensed crew now, hired by Weirwatch to help hold the Weirs, a marsh country of old dams that are giving way one after another. The oldest, the Mother, is still standing. Nobody can say for how long.
Ivo, the kindest of the four, has been carrying a page in an old menders’ hand. It names a tool that can unmake whatever is bound and let out everything it held. Pour that into a failing dam, he says, and a town stays standing. His friends think he’s right about the problem and wrong about the answer. They make him promise one thing: nobody goes through the door alone.
Then the winter floods come, relic thieves break the Crown’s seal on the Mother’s door, and the four go down into the dark beneath her, together, the way they promised.
Unmaker is Book Two of The Long Dim: a coming-of-age progression fantasy where magic keeps its own rules and every power is paid for.
Two thousand years ago, the Abundance stood a hall of pillars in a valley and bound them, and the town of Harrowmouth was built on top. Their haulers still carry crates up and down the haul-road, day and night. The binding is still in the stone. Here and there, it is starting to slide.
The Long Dim follows four friends from Harrowmouth, Wren Tallis, Tova Sard, Holt Dunne and Ivo Dray, through one long story, told in turn by each of them. It begins the day they leave school, unlicensed, with a mentor who has never taken anyone. Magic here has limits: everyone can hold only so much and push only so hard, and when it’s spent, it’s spent.
The books are read in order. Unmaker is Book Two.
Content note
This novel contains danger and serious injury, drowning and the recovery of the dead, the death of a town, grief and loss, and a parent’s death remembered. There is no romance, no sexual content and no strong language.
