Nothing’s sliding.
I’m at the foot of twelve with my weight forward and the stick standing beside me, its end on the stone, and the hum comes up through my soles and sits on its note. Twelve is right. Eleven was right. I let the listening go on past twelve, out along the row and into the dark past the lamp, and every pillar out there is sitting where it sits, the whole north half holding still like a room full of people who’ve been told not to move and are managing it.
Something is always sliding. A seam somewhere taking up weight after rain. Grit going down a crack. One of the far pillars a fraction under where it was last week, so small you’d only catch it if you knew that pillar by heart. Every morning since I was five there’s been something, and every morning I’ve found it and marked it and gone up to breakfast.
This morning there’s nothing. Yesterday there was nothing. It’s been like this for seven weeks.
“You’ve stopped,” Gran says.
She’s back at the foot of the stair on Grandad’s stool, with her hood up and her rod across her knees and the lamp-stone at her feet lighting about a stool’s worth of floor. She’s brought the stool down every morning since my birthday. She sits on it, and I walk. She says she’s practising.
“Twelve’s fine,” I say.
“Then why are you stood at it?”
“Listening.”
“For what?”
“Nothing.”
“Well,” says Gran. “You’ve found it.”
I go on. Thirteen. Fourteen. My wraps don’t make a sound on the stone. I carry the stick slung across me on the blue sash and only set it down where I want to listen hard, so it doesn’t make a sound either. It’s grey-brown and plain and about as tall as I am, and for most of last year the whole town called it firewood. It came when I asked it to, once, in the dark, in a shaft. I haven’t asked it again.
Overhead the town hasn’t started. It’s too early even for the milk cart with the bad wheel.
My left ear has the whine in it, first thing, high and thin. It used to sit under everything all day. Now it’s mostly gone by fifteen, and by twenty I forget which ear it was.
Under the pillars, a long way down, past the rock and past level three, there’s the saw.
You can’t hear it from the street. You can from here if you stand still: back, and forth, and back, slow, somebody with a wire who isn’t in a hurry. Seven weeks ago there was a giant down there with gold in its seams, walking. Now there’s a crew cutting it up a block at a time with a ruler and a wire, and they’ll be at it till summer.
Everybody says that’s why it’s quiet. The giant’s stopped, so the ground’s stopped. Dad says it. The egg woman on the square says it. The whole guild says it over its tea.
I don’t know that. It’s only what everybody says.
Seventeen has JUNO cut into it low on the north face, older than any of the chalk, and nobody has ever found out who Juno was. Seventeen’s fine. Twenty-nine is river stone and lime, town work, and never says anything at all, and I go past it the way you go past a fence post. Thirty-one I stand at longer than I need to. Grandad called thirty-one, once, and it was twenty-nine that came down. We don’t tell that one.
Forty-one’s flat.
It’s been a hair flat since the spring before last, and it’s the same hair now. I plant the stick at its foot and put my ear to the top of the grip and wait. The note doesn’t go up. It doesn’t go down. Under it, very small, there’s the stick’s own note, the one that came back the night of my birthday. It’s no bigger now than it was then. I keep listening for it to get bigger. It doesn’t.
“Forty-one?” Gran calls, from the stool.
“Flat.”
“How flat?”
“Same.”
“Same’s not a measurement.”
“A hair.”
“Then mark it.”
I’ve got the chalk out already. The tins live on the catwalk rail, one for every ten pillars, and the ticks on forty-one run in a column from higher than I can reach kneeling right down to the stone, sixty-odd years of them. Mine goes at the bottom. It’s straighter than last spring’s.
Forty-two. Forty-three. Forty-four hums under my wraps, fat and slow, with a binder’s note laid in it over the old one where it was mended. There’s one tick on forty-four, low down, and it’s mine. It’s the best-sounding pillar in the north half now, and I don’t trust that either.
The tin for the fifties has a mouse in it. It moved in at the first snow. When I come past it turns round twice in there, small dry scratches on the tin, and settles again, and I leave it be. It can have the chalk.
Out to sixty and back. The lamp gets smaller behind me and then bigger.
When I get to the stair Gran’s up off the stool with her hood pushed back. Her hair’s white, wound up with one long wooden pin through it, the thing she forged at her own graduation. It’s never done anything but hold her hair up. She says that’s more than most swords.
“You did forty-one twice,” she says.
“I came back past it.”
“You stopped at it coming back.”
“It’s on the way.”
“Everything’s on the way.” She folds the stool and gives it to me to carry. “You stopped.”
“It’s too quiet.”
Gran thinks about that. She has a way of thinking that’s mostly chewing, with nothing to chew.
“Then enjoy it,” she says.
“I’m trying.”
“Try at breakfast.”
She goes up the stair ahead of me. She takes the rope now. At the top the trapdoor knocks the bell and she lets it ring, one clear note, down into the dark and out along the rows, and back from about forty pillars away.
It comes back on its note. Exactly on it. I stand on the third step from the top with the stool under my arm and wait for the fraction under, the one that’s always there somewhere if you wait long enough.
It doesn’t come.
“Breakfast,” says Gran, from up top.
I put the stool down on the step and go back down.
At eight there are four red cords at the board, and they’re ours.
Tova’s is on her left shoulder, where it’s been since summer. A goat had it off her once and Ivo’s needle put it back. Holt’s is pinned so straight you’d think Penhallow used her steel ruler, which she might have. Ivo’s is on his tabard today, which it isn’t always. Mine’s on Dad’s old coat, sideways, where Penhallow pinned it in the first snow, and I’ve never moved it.
A year ago we sat on the bench by the door with no cords at all, and crew after crew walked past us to the board and nobody looked. Now there’s a crew boss on that bench, the one with the red cord round his neck, and he nods at Holt when we come in.
The guild hall is all timber inside an old stone shell, so the whole floor talks: the counter, the done-spike taking a slip, Penhallow’s pen going on the ledger, scratch, fifty boots, and up in the roof the pigeons that nobody’s ever got out. And Tova’s left heel. She came in last, at a run, with a stone in her boot she hasn’t stopped to get out, and now she’s stood on one foot reading the slips with her sleeve pushed up and her forearm turned so she can see it. LITTLE. LONG. DON’T STOP. is the oldest bit, by the wrist, gone grey with washing. Mine’s going the same way. A week ago, on the arch, she wrote SAY IT TWICE on my arm in her ink pen, and I’ve been washing round it.
“That’s us,” Tova says. She taps a slip. In the corner it says what every slip on the board says. LICENSED CREW ONLY. “That’s us. That’s us now.”
“You said,” says Holt.
He’s eating. It’s a pie from the Dunne kitchen, and he’s got his shield on his back and his dad’s old yard rope slung over the top of it, the black one with a knot every arm’s length. There are four hairs on his chin. He calls them face. His lips aren’t moving. A year ago he’d have been counting the slips, and he isn’t, and he hasn’t since the winter.
Ivo comes out of the passage from the infirmary with his satchel. He lives back there, on the second cot. He’s brought a paper twist for Holt, with HOLT AGAIN written on it, and Holt takes it without looking and puts it in his shirt for after the pie.
“Ear?” Ivo says to me.
“Gone by twenty.”
“Twenty what?”
“Pillars,” says Holt.
Ivo looks at my left ear as if it might be lying to him, and then lets it go.
Penhallow comes round the end of the counter with a fistful of new slips and her pen behind her ear. She hangs them on the nails one at a time, without looking at us, and talks while she does it.
“Licensed crew,” she says. “Four Adepts. A licensed crew takes its own slips off this board, brings them to me, and I enter them. Nobody signs for you.” Another slip. “Nobody fetches you. Nobody has to wake anybody up.” Another. “Anything off the Spans comes through the back office. Anything on them, you may take on your own say.”
“Our own say,” says Tova.
“That’s what I said, Sard.”
Crell’s crew comes in behind us, off something wet. Her big one first, because he leans left on a bad knee and his weight goes down the boards uneven, and then the talker, who is talking. Crell’s boots come down like she’s paid for the floor. Her bracer’s on her left forearm, bronze, gold at the edge where the light’s poor.
“Morning, bab…” says the talker.
“Adepts,” says Crell, not looking round.
The talker shuts his mouth. I’ve never heard it shut before. It makes a small wet click.
Crell reaches past Tova’s nose and takes the slip Tova was reading off its nail and puts it in her belt.
“I was reading that,” says Tova.
“Read faster,” says Crell, and goes to the counter.
On the stair, something taps on oak.
The stair’s oak. Oak swallows feet. It doesn’t swallow this. A tap, then a step, then a step, then nothing for a while, then a tap. For a moment I think it’s Corin’s spike. Corin’s spike doesn’t stop for anything.
It’s Bram.
He’s come through from the back, where his bed is now, two walls along from the infirmary, and he’s on the bottom treads. Corin’s on his left, under his arm, with his bad hand at Bram’s back, the one with two fingers gone. Bram’s got a walking stick, plain ash, with a brass end on it that goes tock on every tread.
“Set it,” Corin says. Low. “Now the foot.”
Bram sets it. He brings the foot up. The breath he takes goes in and stops halfway, where his ribs are, and then goes on.
“Now the other.”
Tova starts forward. Holt steps across into her way, and she shuts her mouth and stays where she is, on one foot, with the stone still in her boot.
Nobody in the hall looks at them. Fifty boots go on doing what they were doing. The crew boss on the bench reads a slip he’s already read. Crell’s big one moves his bad leg off the bottom step so there’s room, without seeming to know he’s done it. Penhallow, back behind the counter, looks up once at the big clock over the board, and down at her ledger, and writes something.
Bram Cotter runs the back office and gives out the jobs nobody wants. For a year he gave them to us. Seven weeks ago the Deep Hall came down on him, and he got up. Slowly, he said. He’s still getting up.
At the top of the stair he stops and leans on the rail and breathes. Then he says, without turning round, in the voice he uses for everything:
“Sard. Socks. Big one. Dray.”
The back office is the same as it ever was. Paper on the desk and paper on the floor and paper in a box marked PAPER. A third of the ceiling put back with planks, and a stain round the planks the shape of a rain cloud. The bucket’s in the corner under the window, with BRAM painted on the side.
Ivo’s past us at the door and up on the windowsill above it before the rest of us are in, with his satchel on his knees and his heels hooked on the pipe that runs along the wall under the sill.
Bram lowers himself into his chair. It takes a while, and then all at once, the way a slab goes down when you’ve stopped being able to hold it. He leans the walking stick on the chair arm. Then he looks at mine, slung across my back on its sash, and lifts his own an inch off the floor.
“Snap,” says Bram.
The floor’s full. Holt’s in the doorway, because he fills doorways, his weight right down through his heels. Tova’s left heel is going. Corin’s by the desk with his spike leaned on it, still. The chair creaks when Bram breathes.
Penhallow comes in. I didn’t hear her on the stair. Oak. She puts a letter on the desk, and next to it Bram’s tankard, which she’s carried up herself.
It’s the same tankard, pewter, battered, with the dent in the side and the hollow in the handle where his thumb goes. Till the Deep Hall it didn’t have a bottom. Nobody ever explained that to me and I never asked. It’s got one now. Penhallow’s put tea in it.
“Tea,” says Bram, as if somebody’s done it to him.
He picks it up in both hands. It shakes. The tea goes up one side and over the rim and down onto his knuckles, and onto his apron, and he drinks anyway, and puts it down again, and the tea slops against the bottom of it. It never used to make that sound.
Holt finds something to look at in the ceiling planks. Tova reads her forearm. Corin looks out of the window past Ivo’s head at the yard.
Ivo watches Bram breathe.
“In,” says Ivo, from the sill. “All the way.”
“That is all the way.”
“It isn’t.”
“It’s all the way today,” Bram says, and picks up the letter.
It’s Dagny’s. I know before he opens it, because the writing on the outside’s so big it only fits COTTER, and the pen’s gone through the paper in two places. Dagny Furlow came through last autumn to teach Tova patience, and hasn’t got any herself. She once kicked a kiln over because it was taking too long.
“Came on the Kilnlands carter,” Penhallow says. “Last night.”
Bram holds the letter out at arm’s length and reads it to himself first. It takes him a while. Then he says, “Huh,” and reads it out, slowly.
“’Fellglass heat works is losing its binding. Old heat, spike work, held in. It loses its note as it cools, and it cools every night.’” He stops for breath. It stops halfway. “’The Kiln College won’t send its students in. I don’t blame them. I’ve told them I blame them.’”
He lowers it.
“She wants a crew,” he says.
“Whose?” says Tova.
“Mine.”
He looks at us. He does it with both eyes open, which he doesn’t, mostly. Holt in the doorway, and Tova on one foot, and me in my wraps, and Ivo on the sill. One at a time.
“You,” Bram says.
Tova’s heel stops. Then it goes twice as fast.
“The Kilnlands,” she says. “The actual Kilnlands. Fellglass. That’s the glass city, that’s the one with the furnaces from the spike that never, that hardly ever, Mum’s had Kilnlands sand through the works since before I was born, it comes in sacks with the carters’ chalk on, I used to sit on the sacks…” She stops for air. “Fellglass.”
A week ago on the arch over forty-four, with the whole town under us, she said she’d go to the Kilnlands one day and stand in front of one of the big furnaces and not blink.
“I’ll do socks,” says Ivo, from the sill.
“How long?” says Holt.
“Till it holds,” says Bram. “Or it doesn’t. She doesn’t say which.”
“How far?” I say.
“Four days.”
“On the ground?”
“Mostly.”
Holt looks at me from the doorway. He’s been under me on every ladder for a year, with his hood up. He doesn’t say so.
“What’s the ground like?” I say.
Bram looks at me.
“Warm,” he says.
“You’ve been?”
“Been everywhere.”
Under the guild, under the boards and the stone shell and the square, the town’s sitting on its note, the same as at five. All of it. I listen for anything that isn’t, and there isn’t anything.
Dad will have something to say about five o’clock. He’ll say it gently. He says everything gently.
“Five o’clock,” I say.
“Your gran walked the north half sixty years before you had feet,” says Bram. “She’ll manage a few weeks.”
“She’s practising,” I say.
He doesn’t ask what at. He gets the tankard up and drinks, and it knocks the desk going down.
“You’re coming,” Tova says to him.
“No.”
“You can sit on the cart. You sit everywhere. You can sit on the cart and we’ll…”
Bram looks at the walking stick on the chair arm.
“The stair,” he says.
“Nine minutes and a half,” says Penhallow.
“Thank you, Agna.”
“It’s written down now.”
Nobody says anything. Out in the yard somebody drops a pail on the cobbles, and it goes on rolling a long time.
“Drill’s at six tomorrow,” Corin says to Holt. “Before you go.” He picks his spike up off the desk. “I’m stopping here.”
Penhallow takes a sheet out of her apron pocket and unfolds it on the desk, over the top of everything else.
“Out of the Spans,” she says. “Crew of four. Tallis, Dunne, Sard, Dray, Adept. Contracted to D. Furlow, Journeyman, Kilnlands, at Fellglass, for the term of the job.” She dips the pen and holds it out to him across the desk. “Back office signs.”
“Why am I third?” says Tova.
“Order of the letter.”
“Sards aren’t third.”
“You are on this,” says Penhallow.
None of us has ever been signed out of the Spans.
Bram takes the pen.
He signs B. C., two letters and two full stops. He’s put them at the bottom of everything we’ve done for a year. He puts the nib on the paper, and the shake goes down his arm and into the pen, and down the pen into the desk, and down the desk legs into the boards, and I can hear it, every bit of it, in my soles. It isn’t a line. It’s a lot of very short lines, close together, going across.
He doesn’t stop. He gets to the end of it.
Penhallow slides the ink pad over. She doesn’t look up. He presses his thumb in it and puts his mark next to the letters, smudged on one side. It used to go on in whatever was in the tankard.
“Entered,” says Penhallow, and takes the sheet, and blows on it.
Bram sits back in the chair. He folds his hands on his apron, on the wet patch.
“There,” he says. “Somebody else’s problem.”
Tova’s already got the letter. She takes it off the desk from under his elbow, and he lets her, and she holds it up to the light from the window by Ivo and reads it to herself, fast, her lips going, the way she reads her arm.
“There’s more,” she says. “On the back. ‘Send the listener. Send the big one. Send Sard, and tell her SLOWER.’” She turns the paper round to show us. “Underlined. She’s underlined it.”
“Twice,” says Holt, from the doorway, reading over everybody.
Tova reads on. Her heel stops.
It stays stopped. In the boards under me there’s Holt, and Corin, and the chair, and Penhallow by the desk, and the yard, and the town, and the saw, a long way down, going back and forth. Tova’s only weight now, with nothing moving in it. On the windowsill Ivo’s heels are on the pipe, and they haven’t moved either.
Tova reads the last line out loud, quiet and flat, the way you’d read a slip off the board.
“’Bring the healer,’” she says. “’Ours keep dying.’”
