The Starwatch Gate

Chapter 11: Thrown Back

"Little Moon… I've found you at last."

She got the door shut with her shoulder and the flat of her hand. The noise of it seating itself in the frame was nothing next to the sound outside, which was the sea arriving.

The stone filled the doorway. It did not stick, and it did not have to be forced, and when it stopped moving it stopped all the way, and the last of the grey went out of the seam.

She stayed against it and listened.

The water came up the steps and hit the tower all at once — not a wave, a weight — and the whole building took it and did not move. The sound came up through the stone and stood in her teeth and stayed there. She waited for the seam to start weeping. She waited for the black line at the foot of the door to go bright and run, for any part of the lake to come through and touch her boot.

Nothing came through.

She counted, because the first answer in a place like this was usually the lie. At a hundred, nothing had come through. She counted the next hundred anyway, standing with her back to the stone and her cut hand held up off her coat.

At two hundred the water was still outside and the tower was still there.

She was wet through. She had been wet through since the street, and the coat hung off her with the weight of it, and there was salt drying on her face and salt in the cut, which had opened again somewhere and gone red across the heel of her hand. Overhead, at the top of a dark shaft, a bronze bell hung in its frame and said nothing at all.

She went up.

The stairs were narrow and stone and they turned with the curve of the tower. There was no light in them except the grey coming down from above, a thin column standing on the steps and widening with every turn. No candle. No voice. No foot but her own. The water outside kept working at the stone, and the stone kept not caring, and the bell hung over her head without a sound.

She stopped one step below the top and put her head out slowly, an inch at a time.

She drew the veil down over her eyes, and the water went clear.

Starfall was gone.

Where the town had been there was water to the rooflines of the low houses, and then no rooflines, only water, still now and no longer green, blue the whole way down. Whatever the veil did, it did it the whole way down. The light came through the lake in long slow columns, and there was no floor at the bottom of them, and the water darkened in steps and then held that color and stayed in it. Shapes crossed between the columns, unhurried, and the shapes were not fish. She did not try to make them into anything.

It was not a lake. It looked like the sea at night: no far side to it, no bottom, no reason to believe it stopped anywhere.

She had walked that street a few hours ago. There were stones under the water that she had put her boots on.

The wall was the part she could not stop looking at.

It was the same wall. The same brick, the same height, and this was the side of it that nobody was meant to see. It was thick — not the thickness of a wall, the thickness of a street, a block, a town. She could see into it the way she could see into the water, and inside it there were houses.

Roofs. Lamps. A square with a well in the middle of it. Shutters, awnings, doors, a chimney with smoke going up out of it into a sky that was made of brick. A place with room in it to walk around and get old in and argue with the neighbors in. All of it dry.

And the town she had spent the night in — the gate, the shrine, the slow watch, the three rules — that was on this side now. That was the lake. It had been the lake the whole time, with the light off.

She held the edge of the opening with both hands and made herself keep looking.

The beasts were off the wall.

The carvings — the long row that had been coming up out of the stone in the last hour of dark, tails and shoulders and heads — were not on it anymore, and neither were the thin human shapes. The wall on this side was bare and smooth and wet, and she looked for the faces she had found in it, the five she had been able to name, and there were none.

Which meant nothing yet. It only meant they had finished coming out.

And the ones coming out now were not coming out. They were already in.

She found them again. The woman with the basket. The two men with the rope. The man with the bucket. All the slow ones who had been in the street with her last night and had turned their heads at her, one by one, in order, as she went past. They were inside the wall now. The wall had let them finish the thing that had been happening to them in the street.

They were huge. Not tall — wrong, in every direction at once, the way a reflection goes wrong in the back of a spoon. Too many joints. Too much shoulder. A face where a chest should be. One of them had no front and no back to it that she could name. There was nothing of a person left in the shapes. There was something left in the way they moved: slow, easy, used to itself.

They brought out the nets.

Each one had one. They hauled them up out of openings on the inside of the wall — black nets, wider than the doorways, heavier than anything that size had any right to be — and carried them across to the lake side and stood at the edge and threw.

The nets went down through the blue and opened, and for a moment the light came through them in a pattern, and then the pattern closed.

Then they pulled, and the nets came up full.

She counted the first one out of habit and stopped at twelve, because past twelve it was not a count anymore, it was a haul. The beasts that had been carved into the wall were in that net, and in the net they were the size of dogs. A long whip of a tail went around the mesh and found nothing to hold. A thing with a mouth like a door hinge turned over and shut on water.

Then the people of the town took their catch apart.

They did it slowly. That was the part she kept — not the blood, which went into the water and was water, and not the size of them. The slowness. They did it the way you do a thing you have done every day of your life and have all day to do again. One cut, opening the belly. The sac came out into both hands. They put it into their mouths and held it there. From the cut to the swallow took a long time, and not one of them hurried, and not one of them looked at another, and the sound of it did not reach her at all. What reached her, down the stone, was the motion. Patient. Unbothered. Like the back room of a fish market, seen through glass.

Then the emptied beast went up onto the wall — belly open, spread wide, pressed flat — and stayed.

There were rows of them. They went along the wall in both directions above the waterline, and she could not see an end to the row either way. The ones high up were grey and dry at the edges. Some of them were old.

There were people in the nets, too.

She found one — a small shape in the middle of the mass, arms and legs in it, coming over the edge with the rest. When the net came up, that shape did not go onto the wall with the catch and did not go into any mouth. One of the huge ones picked it out without looking.

It was thrown back.

Not killed. Chosen and dropped. It hit the water, and the water took it, and then the water gave it back wrong.

She watched it the whole way, because there was no way not to. It went in the size of a person and it did not lie in the water like a person. It floated in a patch of light and it got longer. The back thickened. The neck went. The head changed under her eyes the way dough changes under a hand, and it took a minute, maybe two. Slow enough to watch. Slow enough that she had time to look away, and did not.

So that was what the water did. Not drowning. It kept you.

The one she was watching got big enough to be wrong, and then it turned in the water and went down. It went down along the wall to where the low houses stood on the bottom of the lake, and it found a doorway, and it went in.

It did not come out.

She watched that doorway through a slow count, and then the ones beside it, and there were people going into those too, one at a time, no hurry, no looking around, no discussion.

She had thought it in the house of the woman with the basket, with the shut door and the air behind it. Now she was sure of it. The drowned houses stood on purpose. The ones who had lived here long enough knew which door was theirs.

The shrine was still there.

She leaned out and found it. The stone platform. The steps going down under the water and the top step dry. The shut door. The ordinary roof. Above all of it, unchanged, the way it had been when she stood at the bottom of the stairs with the needle pulling at her fist.

The needle.

She took the Iceheart needle out of the pouch and laid it across her palm. It had stopped fighting her. It lay there and pointed, dead straight, patient, and the pointing was not at any wall now. It was at the shrine. It had pointed at the shrine from the bottom of those steps, and it pointed at the shrine now, with the whole town under water, which meant the thing it was for had not gone down with the town.

From the tower to the shrine roof.

She measured it the way she measured things, in the only units she trusted, which were her own body and her own luck. The tower stood behind the shrine and a little to one side. The roof was below her and to the right — twelve feet of air, then tile over timber, then the shutters, then the step, then the lake.

If she missed, or if the roof went through under her, she was in the water, and the water did not drown people.

Twelve feet.

She stayed on the ledge and worked it, and the trouble with it was that it had one unknown in it.

You will not set foot in the shrine.

No consequence. No sentence. Not a word out of any watchman's mouth, and this town put marks on its stone for everything else. The second rule she had watched come up the street in a green-white sheet and take the roofs off the low houses; that one had teeth. This one was a sentence with nothing on the end of it, and there was nowhere she could look it up.

She looked at the roof. Twelve feet. Dry.

She did not jump.

Not yet was not a decision. It was the absence of one, and it was a thing she could live inside a while longer. The water was not rising. She checked that along the wall, twice, against the doorway of a drowned house and against a lamp bracket, and both times the line was where it had been. Twelve feet, no clock on it, nothing down there in any hurry, nothing in the wall paying her any attention.

The sound came from behind her.

It was not water on stone. She had been listening to water on stone for an hour and she knew it: a tick, a hiss, and nothing, over and over. This was thicker than that, and slower, and it was the sound of a great deal of water coming off something, all at once, close by.

She turned her head.

He was already up.

He had come over the outside of the tower, the water side, and he stood at the top of it with one shoulder against the bell frame, and he was wet. Not rained on, not splashed. Wet through — the wet of a thing that had gone down and come back up. The robe hung off him and dripped onto the stone. The veil hung over his face and dripped, and under the weight of the cloth the face did not read the way a face should: too little of it, and the rest of him too thin, and too long, and bent where a person does not bend, like something folded out of wet paper and stood upright.

He looked at her across the top of the tower.

His mouth moved behind the wet cloth, and he said it.

"Little Moon…"

Then, quieter, not to her, the way a man says a thing he has been saying to himself for a long time:

"I've found you at last."