The Spring Between Us

Chapter 73: The Quarry at Midnight

We went to the quarry at midnight, before the dawn hearing, because Hank said a thing that I could not get out of my head.

"The clerk has been at every hearing," he said. "But he has only ever been in the hall. He has never been in the pump house and he has never been in the chamber and he has never seen the assay shed. If we put the whole of it in front of him at dawn, he will be a clerk reading papers. If we put him in the chamber with the lantern and the pipes and the room where the water was cut, he will be a wolf standing in a hole in the ground."

So we went at midnight with a lantern and a pry bar and the key to the pump house.

The quarry was dark. The crusher was silent and the sheds were dark and the company office at the bottom of the road had one light in it and that was all. We went round the back of the pump house and Berik broke the lock and we went in.

The hatch was in the corner of the floor and it was locked again. Berik broke that lock too and we went down the ladder with the lantern and the chamber was empty as it had been, with the four pipes in the wall and three of them capped and the fourth running.

"The chamber is empty," Sten said. "There is nothing here."

"There is the floor," I said. "We broke it open once and found the box with the second key. There is more under it."

We went to work on the concrete with the pry bar and the pick, and it took an hour and it took the skin off my hands again, and this time it was Cal who found it. There was a second stone under the floor and it was loose and it had a hollow behind it, and in the hollow there was a tin box with a hasp on it and a lock.

I broke the lock with the pry bar.

Inside the tin box there were papers. They were not old. They were dry and clean and they had been folded once and put in the box, and the top one was a company form with the company mark on it and a line of writing across the top.

Water sabotage order. South section. Kızıltaş spring.

And under that, in a hand I knew, there was a signature.

Ruth.

I sat down on the floor of the chamber with the paper in my hand.

"Read it," Hank said.

I read it out loud. It was a company form and it said that the south section water line was to be cut at the cistern and the spring house pipe was to be capped and the plate was to be set on the welling hole, and that the work was to be done in the spring before the thaw and that the cost was to be charged to the Council's water account. It was dated three years before, in the spring. And at the bottom, under the words approved and paid, there were two signatures.

The first was Silas.

The second was Ruth.

Hank took the paper out of my hand and read it. Then he read the second one and the third and the fourth, and they were all the same. They were company forms and they were all about the water and they went back three years, and every one of them had the two signatures on it.

"She did it," he said. "Three years ago. She cut the line and capped the pipe and put the plate on the welling hole, and she did it with the Council man's money and the Council man's paper, and she signed her name to it."

"And then she spent three years watching the pack die of thirst." I got up. "And then my mother found the plate and wrote to the Council and Ruth put a rope on her wrists." I took the papers. "She did not do it because she was frightened of Silas. She did it because she was paid. And the paper she kept to hold over him was not the order to kill my mother. It was this. The water order. Her own signature on her own crime." I looked at Hank. "She kept it so that if he ever turned on her she could say, look, we did it together. And then she rode down that mesa road and confessed the murder and not the water, because the murder was the smaller thing."

Sten was at the wall with the lantern. "Luna. There is a second door."

I went to him. There was a door in the wall behind the pipes, an iron door low and wide, and it had a lock on it that had been oiled. Berik broke it and it came open.

The room behind it was small and dry and it had a table in it and a chair and a shelf of ledgers. There were more papers on the table and there was a map on the wall and there was a row of small boxes on the shelf, and every box had a label and every label had a name.

I read the labels.

Council water account. Company ore shipments. Assay shed receipts. Town water sales. Kızıltaş lease. South section water order.

And at the end of the shelf, on its own, there was a box with a label that said Kızıltaş succession.

I opened it. Inside there was a bundle of letters and a small book and a photograph, and the letters were in Silas's hand and they were addressed to a wolf in the capital and they were about the Kızıltaş succession. They said that the Luna was young and unsteady and that the pack was divided and that a trustee would be needed by the autumn, and that the trustee should be a wolf the Council could work with. And in the last letter there was a line that made my hands go cold.

The Beta is willing. She will sign the lease and hold the seat and she has already done what was needed on the south track. She asks for the seat in return and I have told her it will be considered.

I sat down in the chair.

"Ruth asked for the seat," I said. "She killed my mother and she asked for the seat in return."

Hank was reading over my shoulder. "And the Council man wrote to the capital and told them the Beta was willing. And the capital wrote back and said the trustee should be a wolf the Council could work with." He put the letter down. "Derya. This is the whole of it. The water and the ore and the lease and the murder and the succession. It is all in one room under a quarry with the Council man's hand on it and Ruth's signature beside it."

I stood up. I put the papers in my jacket and the boxes in a sack and the photograph in my pocket, and I looked around the little rock room with the table and the chair and the shelf.

"Then we take it all up that ladder," I said, "and we put it in front of the clerk at dawn."

We went up the ladder with the sack and the lantern, and the pump house was dark and the quarry was dark and the sky over the eastern rim was going grey. We came up the powder path to the yard and the Council hall was there with its doors shut and its lanterns burning on the steps, and the clerk was standing on the steps with his papers in his hands.

"Luna," he said. "The hearing is at dawn."

"The hearing is at dawn," I said. "And before it begins there is a thing you should see."

I put the sack down on the steps and opened it and the papers came out and the boxes came out and the little book came out, and the clerk looked at them and then at me and then he knelt down on the steps in his Council coat and began to read.

He read for a long time. The sky went from grey to pink and the soldiers came out of the hall and the packs came into the yard and the town came up the canyon road, and the clerk knelt on the steps of the Council hall and read the whole of it.

Then he stood up and took off his hat.

"Luna," he said. "I have been a Council clerk for twenty two years. I have written down every hearing I have ever attended and I have never once written down a lie. And I am going to write this down." He put his hat on the step. "The hearing at dawn will be held. But it will not be held by the envoy and it will not be held in his hall. It will be held in this yard, in the open, with the whole canyon present, and I will preside, and I will write down what I see." He looked at me. "And the first thing I will write down is that the envoy Silas is charged with the theft of water and ore from this canyon and with the corruption of a pack and with the murder of a Luna, and that the charge of murder rests on the confession of the rogue and the evidence of the papers and the box under the Beta's floor."

I looked at him.

"The murder charge rests on Ruth," I said. "Silas did not do it."

The clerk looked at me for a long moment.

"Luna," he said. "I know. And I am going to write that down too."