CHAPTER EIGHTEEN What the Sea Keeps #2
Ever since October I’d pictured holding a gate as pushing. Wanting at it. Standing there pouring myself into a hole in the floor of the world until there was nothing left of me to pour.
It’s the opposite.
You open. That’s all it is. You stand at the seam and take the lid off the thing you’ve kept the lid on since you were fifteen, and let the whole of it out with nothing aimed, no direction, no object, no man across a room, and the seam takes it and makes light of it and sends it north.
It isn’t a sacrifice, whatever you’ve heard. It’s the most selfish relief a woman of my line can have, and it’s also the only way a city stays lit. I tried for a while to pull those two apart. They won’t come apart. I’ve stopped trying.
I took the lid off.
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And it didn’t work.
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I opened the way Ivrid had shown me in the training yard, the way I’d felt at the rail above the vents, everything I had. I stood forty feet from an open seam with thirty-four years of held breath pouring out of me, and the seam didn’t take it.
Nothing refused me. There was no resistance, no wall, nothing shoving back. What left me simply went past the seam, over it and round it, the way water goes round a stone, and carried on north into the dark, unchanged, unused, and the light along the ridge didn’t shift by a shade.
I tried again. Four times. By the fourth I was shaking so badly I had to put a hand down on the ridge to stay upright.
The ridge was warm. It gave a little under my palm, exactly the way the walls in the city give, and I knew then that it wasn’t a machine and it wasn’t a hole.
It was alive, in whatever way those walls are alive.
And it didn’t want what I was giving it.
“Why,” I said out loud, in the water, on my knees, forty feet from the most beautiful thing I’ll ever see. “Why not? Why not? I came down here on my own feet.”
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The answer came the way answers come in that water, from nowhere in particular.
Because it is not vacant.
I got up and turned round. There was nothing behind me but half a mile of rise and three figures at the top, much too far away to have spoken, and in front of me the seam, putting out its slow blue-gold fall.
It has not been vacant for thirty-four years, child. Nobody down here has been able to bring themselves to consider it. The consideration is intolerable. The figures were easier.
I knew the pressure behind those words. I had walked out onto the silt in October and stood in front of it.
“Thalassar.”
Look at the western third.
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I looked at the western third, where the seam is shut.
And I saw it. I’d been staring at it for two days and hadn’t seen it, the way you never do see a thing until somebody says it might be there.
It isn’t closed like a wound. It’s closed like a hand. Held.
“Somebody’s holding it shut.”
Somebody has held it shut for thirty-four years. The strain of that is what has forced the eastern end too wide. And your gift goes over the seam and does not catch, because there is no room for a second pair of hands on a thing already being held.
My legs went.
I sat down in the silt on the northern side of the ridge of Ilmarren, with the light going over me, and my voice came out in bits.
“Who?”
Ceria Vale, of the coast at Duskmere, in eighteen forty-four, bound her blood to a promise and gave no reason for it.
And thirty-four years ago a woman went into the water off that coast and did not come out, and everyone above and below agreed that she had died, and the seal she made went dull, which is what a seal does when its maker dies.
“Yes.”
And the other seal did not.
The light went over. Six seconds. Six more.
“That’s Ceria’s. That one’s Ceria’s, Kael said so, she put the family into it, it burns because the Vales are still...”
It burns because it is being spent. It has been spent at a steady rate for thirty-four years. A seal is spent by its maker. And its maker is dead.
I couldn’t get any air. In water. Which isn’t possible, and I couldn’t.
Child. What is in the western third is not your mother. I will not do that to you, and it would not be true. She is dead. She died in that water, and I was awake for that, at least.
“Then what?”
The promise she made was carried. The instrument said so, and everyone read it as bookkeeping. The obligation was carried for the term of the substitution. Nobody asked what was doing the carrying.
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Something in the western third moved.
The seam itself stayed as it was. But the dark stretch where it’s held shut, half a mile of it, went from a closed thing to an occupied thing, the way the dark had filled on the silt in October, and the whole ridge under my hands changed temperature.
And it knew me.
I’ve got no better way to say it. There was no voice.
It didn’t speak, and it never has. But something that had been holding a gate shut with everything it had for thirty-four years turned part of its attention on a woman sitting in the silt on the northern side, and the attention wasn’t curious, and it wasn’t hostile.
It was relieved.
And under the relief, so huge and so patient and so worn out that I put both arms over my head, one thing kept arriving, over and over, the way the tide keeps arriving:
finally
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I don’t remember the climb back up the rise.
Ivrid says I did it on my own and didn’t say a word. Kael says I stopped twice to look back at the ridge, and the second time he was certain I meant to go back down, and had made up his mind to stop me bodily if it came to that.
Threnn says that at the top I said one sentence, and that she wrote it down four hours later when her hands had stopped shaking, because she is an archivist, and because she’d understood straight away it was the only record there would ever be.
The sentence was: The gate isn’t empty and it never was.
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They took me up before light on the fourth of April.