CHAPTER FIVE Down
CHAPTER FIVE
Down
It came on a Wednesday, by the front door, at a perfectly reasonable hour, and I have never in my life been so unsettled by good manners.
There was no knock. There was the sound of somebody wiping their boots on my scraper, three thorough passes, and then the door opened on a woman in a plain grey travelling cloak with the hood down, standing in the lane and waiting to be asked in.
Sixty, perhaps. She had a schoolmistress’s face and iron-coloured hair pinned very flat, and she was so completely, aggressively ordinary that it was three full seconds before I noticed that her cloak was dry in a drizzle. After that I noticed she was standing in a puddle in soft shoes.
“Miss Angel.” A slight lisp on the s. “My name is Threnn. May I come in? I’d rather not do this on a doorstep. It looks like debt collection.”
? ? ?
She sat at my table with her hands folded in her lap and refused tea twice before accepting it, which is a Duskmere manoeuvre if ever there was one, and I couldn’t account for it in a woman from the bottom of the sea.
“I’m not an envoy. Kael is an envoy. Kael’s function is to be noticed; mine is to be accurate. I’ve been sent because somebody read over what he told you and concluded, correctly, that you’re now in possession of a great deal of impression and hardly any information.”
“You’re a clerk.”
“I’m an archivist.” Her mouth moved very slightly. “Which is a clerk with opinions.”
Elias stood by the dresser with his arms folded. She’d looked at him once on the way in, nodded, said “Vale,” and gone back to her gloves, and that was all the acknowledgement he got. It was deliberate. It was also, in her fashion, kind.
From inside her cloak she took a folded paper and laid it on my table and turned it round to face me with two fingers, the way a card sharp shows you the queen.
“That’s the invitation. It’s in our script, which you can’t read, and I’ll read it to you presently. First I’d like you to look at the seal. The seal’s the part that matters. The words are largely decorative.”
? ? ?
The seal wasn’t wax. It looked more like mother-of-pearl, thin as a fingernail, set into the paper instead of stuck on top, and when the light from the window slid across it nothing happened at all. No shimmer, no play of colour. It was a flat white, dead as chalk.
“It’s inert.”
“It’s spent.” Threnn refolded her hands.
“A seal of that kind is made by somebody putting a measure of their own life into it. That’s not a figure of speech, Miss Angel, and I’d like it understood that it isn’t.
A measure of the years they have left. It goes in, and the seal shines for as long as the promise behind it holds, and goes dull when the promise is broken or the maker dies. Whichever comes first.”
“This one’s dull.”
“This one was made three hundred and eleven years ago. The maker is long dead, so the seal is evidence of nothing, except that whoever made the promise made it with something real. It’s a precedent.
We keep four of them. They come out when the Court wishes to say, this has been done before, in this manner, and it was honoured. ”
She turned the paper the right way round and read it to me.
Eleven lines. The daughter of the line was invited to the Deep as a guest of the Court of Tides.
She would come and go of her own will. No claim, service or oath would be required of her while she was a guest. Safe passage down, and up again, was guaranteed by three named houses whose names meant nothing to me, and I noticed Threnn said one of them differently from the other two.
“That’s a lot of law.”
“It is. And I’d encourage you to think about what law is for.”
? ? ?
“Say it,” Elias said.
“Vale, I’m about to be discourteous to you. I’d ask you to take it as professional rather than personal.”
“Take it however you like. I’ll do the same.”
“Law is what people write down once they’ve concluded they can’t simply take a thing.
” Threnn kept her eyes on me the whole time.
“Nobody drafts guarantees of safe passage for a person they could fetch. This document is the single most encouraging fact you’ve got, Miss Angel, and I say so as the woman who was made to draft it. ”
A gust threw the drizzle across the window like a handful of gravel.
“You’re telling me they can’t take me.”
“I’m telling you that a fortnight ago, in a room I was standing in, a number of people who very much wanted to take you found they couldn’t agree on who’d be doing the taking.
” She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to.
“It won’t last. There’s no wall. It’s a crowd of people blocking a doorway by arguing in it. ”
? ? ?
I got up and went to the window. I’ve started doing that. I know I have.
The lane, and the wet slate roofs going down the hill in steps. A dog nosing along the gutter after something dead. Past the roofs, the harbour, and past the harbour, grey and lying flat under the rain, all the rest of it.
“What happens if I say no?”
“Nothing, for a while. Then a great deal, slowly. Then something quicker.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one I have, and I’d sooner give you that than a satisfying lie.
I can’t tell you the shape of what comes after, because I don’t know it, and the people who do aren’t in the habit of explaining themselves to archivists.
” She paused. “I can tell you where I’d expect it to fall. Not on you. On the town.”
I turned round.
“Say that again.”
“You are difficult to reach and expensive to compel. Duskmere is neither.” She said it the way she might have read me a tide table. “That isn’t a threat, and it isn’t meant as pressure. I’m aware it works as both. I’d have thought less of you if you hadn’t heard it that way.”
Behind me, very quietly, Elias unfolded his arms.
? ? ?
“And if I go?”
“Then you go down, and you’re treated as a guest, and I carry the paperwork myself.
Which means anyone who wants to lay a hand on you has first to get past a three-hundred-year precedent and a woman with an excellent memory for procedure.
” Threnn straightened one cuff, pinching it square at the wrist. “And you’ll meet a number of people who knew your mother.
Several with opinions about her. One or two who’ll be glad to see you and mean it. ”
The room went quiet. I felt it in my back teeth.
“The last part. Again.”
“Which?”
“People who knew my mother.”
Threnn considered me. Something crossed the schoolmistress face and was gone before I could get hold of it.
“Miss Angel, I knew your mother. I was junior in her household for nine years.” She stood and shook out her cloak, which was still perfectly dry.
“I don’t tell you so to move you. I tell you because you’ll find it out within an hour of arriving, and you’d be right to wonder then why I kept it back here, at your own table, with your own tea in front of me. ”
? ? ?
She left the paper. She left it on purpose, squared to the edge of the table, and at the door she told me no reply was expected for nine days, that she’d come back for it on the ninth, and that if the answer was no she’d take the paper away and I wouldn’t see her again.
Then she went off up the lane into the drizzle in her soft shoes, and the puddle she’d been standing in was dry.
Elias and I stood in the kitchen with the seal lying grey-white on the table between us.
“Nine days,” he said.
“Nine days.”
“She wanted the town said out loud. She wanted your mother said last. She put them in that order on purpose.”
“I noticed. She’s very good.”
I picked up the paper. It weighed nothing. Three hundred and eleven years old, with somebody’s remaining life spent on it, gone dull when they died, and here it was on my kitchen table next to the milk jug.
“I’m going to say yes.”
“I know.”
“You could argue with me.”
“I’ve been arguing with you since Monday. I’m going to lose. I’d rather lose on a Wednesday with nine days in hand than on the ninth day with none.” He came and stood at my shoulder and looked down at the seal. “So I’ll spend the nine days finding out what my family cut out of those books.”
“And if it isn’t there?”
He took his time. The muscle along his jaw worked once; that’s how Elias thinks.
“Then I’ll be on the shore,” he said. “Like my father was. And his father. And I’ll hate every one of them a good deal more than I do now.”
“That’s a lot of hating for one shore.”
“It’s a long shore.”
? ? ?
He didn’t find it.
Nine days of the six books, and a fortnight’s worth of Rellhaven parish records he’d had sent over, and on the last night he came into the kitchen at two in the morning with his thumbs pressed into his eyes.
“There’s a name,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got.
A name that turns up twice, either side of a cut, and I don’t even know if it’s a man or a boat. ”
Then he sat down and put his head on his folded arms on the table.
I came round behind him and put my hands on his head, both of them, fingers spread into his hair, and held on. He didn’t move. After a while his breathing slowed and got longer, and I stood there with my mouth shut, which isn’t a thing I’m known for, and my arms ached, and I stayed.
Ilmarren. That was the name. I’m putting it down here because I didn’t give it another thought for eight days, and since then I’ve wished, badly, that I had.
? ? ?
The going down was at slack water, an hour past dawn, off the reef in my own cove.
Threnn was there in her grey cloak with a satchel.
Kael was there too, barefoot, with the air of a man waiting on a late coach.
And a third had come up in the night, a young one whose name I never learned and never will, who stood apart on the wet rock and said nothing and watched me the whole time with a look I couldn’t read and didn’t like.
Elias came down the cliff steps with me and stopped where the shingle ended.