Chapter 24 The River Watch
The boom bell came first, out of the grey ahead, and it answered the closing bell of Vael toll for toll, slower and lower. Elowen counted the beats as she had counted the city's last bell. Eight. The boom struck eight, and the loose hand's oars never missed a stroke.
"Tide's half done," he said, not looking up. "The chain closes at sun-up. We're inside the hour, and the channel will have the boom on it before the light." He stopped rowing and let the boat drift, and for the first time since the water door he looked at her full in the face. "Know the reeds?"
"No."
"Good. Then you won't argue with them." He turned the boat off the main channel.
The current pushed at the bow and then let go, and the water changed from open grey to black and cold: drowned willows stood taller than a man, dead and pale, and the flood had taken their roots so the boat slid between them in silence, the hull kissing stalks that bowed and straightened behind them.
"The boom won't know us," the loose hand said, "and what it doesn't know it can't count. "
His oar had been mended twice, the shaft wrapped in dark cloth where a crack ran, and he rowed in sevens, counting under his breath as other men breathed.
Elowen counted with him for a while, one to seven and seven to fourteen, and then she stopped, because the river had begun to carry something that did not belong to it.
Ash rode the water.
The river was full of it, a grey scum in the eddies, flakes turning slow as snow in the dark, clinging to the reed-stalks at the waterline, riding the flood accounted and numbered and logged, as the church sent everything downriver.
The high window's work. Elowen had watched nine litters carried up and nine carried out empty at the rite in Vael, and the window had taken the twenty-three under the seat at dawn, and here was the rest of it, all of it, come down with the tide to be counted again below the city.
"The window burns," Aldric said from the stern, where he sat with his broken hand cradled in his lap, "and the river keeps the receipts.
" He was watching the ash too, with the flat attention of a man who had seen this weather before.
"Ask the ash who they were, girl. It will tell you the count and not one name. "
"Twenty-three," Seren said. She had the greyroot laid across her knee, three roots, one for morning, one for middle, one for night. "They took them up and they did not come down."
"No," Aldric said.
She counted the roots again, lips moving over the numbers. "When they write me in, you'll cross me out."
"I promised," Elowen said.
"Then it's a promise." Seren tucked the roots into her sleeve, one, two, three, and looked at the water as if it were a floor she expected to give way. "Can the boom close on us?"
The loose hand answered without turning. "It can close on the channel. It can't close on the reeds. The river never runs the same line twice."
Elowen touched Seren's wrist under her sleeve. The grey held at Idra's charcoal line, a finger's width and no more, and the three roots were still in Seren's sleeve, unspent. Not yet.
Through the last of the willows the boom showed itself: a line of lanterns strung across the water, and under them the chain, a great dark link lying slack along the surface, hung with seals that caught the lantern-light like open eyes.
Patient as a ledger page. Beyond it a sweep boat moved against the current, its oars dipping in time, and a voice carried across the water, calling the count of the dead as they floated past.
The boom had stood longer than the walls of Vael, they said; the river ate at it every winter and the Sanctum rebuilt it every spring, because a chain is cheaper than a war.
The loose hand shipped his oars. "Down," he said, and they went down into the bottom of the boat, Elowen's hand over the page at her collar, the ward-key cold against her hip where it lay in the inner pocket, Seren pressed against her side, Aldric braced on his good arm.
The boat drifted into a stand of reeds that closed over them like a roof, and the world went to water sounds: the creak of the hull, the drip from the blades, the boom bell tolling once, twice, into the grey.
They slid past the roof of a drowned farm, a dark spine above the black water, its windows gone to the tide, and no one commented on it, because the river had taken so much of the low country that a roof was no more remarkable than a stone.
The sweep boat's lantern came down the reed-line.
It moved slow, counting the water, and through the dead stalks it threw a long beam across the black, across the ash-drifts, across their hull.
Elowen watched it walk over Seren's cheek, over the collar of her coat, over the white knuckles of Aldric's good hand where it gripped the gunnel.
The light stopped. It held on the water at the boat's stern for a long breath, and Elowen felt the thread pull tauter under her sternum, and she held it, and kept her hand at her ribs, and did not reach.
Then the light moved on.
The hail came across the water, thin and bored: "Count!"
The loose hand raised his head only far enough to answer, and his voice changed.
It flattened into the voice of a man who had answered the same hail a thousand times, all numbers and no edges.
"Four barge-lengths of ash, north channel, two short of the full count.
" He named a station number Elowen did not know.
"Sweep's near done. You'll have your tally by sun-up. "
A pause. The lantern on the sweep boat swung.
"Ash," the voice said. "All night, ash. The window's had its work." Another pause, longer. "Pass on."
The loose hand did not answer. He waited until the sweep boat's oars had carried the voice downstream, then he took up his oars and rowed, and the boat slid out of the reeds at the far edge of the boom, past the last lantern, into open water where the current took them again.
Elowen let out a breath she had not known she was holding. The thread under her sternum was taut, held. Her hand lay at her ribs, where the void lived, and it came away empty; she had not spent, had not reached for it, and she left the thread taut as the only coin she had left to pay with.
She looked back to measure how much water lay between them and the boom, and saw the reader.
A girl stood at the shore post where the boom's chain was made fast, a lamp on a pole in one hand, a grey coat hanging wrong on her shoulders, a tally-cord wound around her wrist, and while the sweep boat called its counts downstream she kept her eyes on the water and her thumb on the cord.
Readers taste the wind for torn threads, lifting their faces like hounds on a scent; this one never lifted her face.
She watched the water, and her thumb worked the tally-cord as the ash went by, notch by notch, and her mouth moved with the count.
Her name was Nessa. The cord on her wrist had not taken every name the river had offered her tonight.
The lamp stopped.
It had been swinging in a slow arc as she worked, and it stopped on the boat.
The girl looked down at Elowen for one breath, and in that breath Elowen saw her plain: young, younger than the readers who had tasted the threads at Northwater, old enough to wear the coat and not the rank.
Her eyes went to Elowen's collar, where the page lay warm against her throat, and stayed.
Elowen did not move. The void sat under her hand, and she did not reach for it. The thread stayed taut, and the tautness was his holding, and she held her half of it and waited.
The girl's thumb moved to the tally-cord, to the next empty space where a notch would go. It rested there.
Then she looked back at the water, and the lamp swung on, and she did not call it out.
The boom slid behind them. No one spoke until the reeds were a line of black and the lamps had shrunk to pinpricks in the grey.
"She's counting the ash," the loose hand said. "All night, the window's tally. She won't add a living name to a dead man's count. Not tonight."
Aldric watched the shrinking lamps over his good shoulder. "Somebody'll ask her about that lantern before the week is out," he said. "Counts don't balance themselves."
The page was warm against Elowen's collar. She took it out, and it was warm in her hand, a shade warmer than it had been on the open water, and she could not say whether it counted for her or for the reader it had just passed.