The Starwatch Gate

Chapter 10: The Third Rule

The Third Rule

She had one night, and no easy way to spend it.

Two ways to be finished by morning. Out of the town before daybreak — the sentence the watch had given her twice, word for word, and which was written down, as far as she had been able to find, nowhere on earth. Or in through the house's own door: the one her needle had been dragging toward since sundown, the one no rule mentioned and no watchman would name.

And one way to be in the wrong place when the light came up, which was to be standing in the middle of Starfall.

She had no evidence for any of it. What she had was a man in armor standing in a square all night with his hands folded because somebody had told him to, a town that answered her one question with a fish, and a sentence about daybreak that nobody here had thought worth putting on a wall. Something in Starfall was being held still until morning. Whatever was holding it had somewhere to be when morning came.

She wanted to be through a door before that happened. The door was in a wall, and she had already gone over most of that wall with her hands in the dark like a woman checking a horse for lameness.

She went back to the gate.

The square was empty except for the watch, and the watch did not care that she was there. She took the needle out of the pouch, past the paper packet with the dead fish in it, and laid it flat across her palm. It swung once, slow and heavy, and hung, pointing at the north jamb of the arch — exactly where it had pointed when she walked away from it an hour ago.

Wall, then.

She worked it in strips, one palm's length at a time, top course to bottom, holding the needle flat against the brick to feel any change in the pull. Near jamb: nothing. Across the arch: nothing. She crossed and ran the far jamb end to end, because one pass told her nothing, and two passes told her the same nothing twice.

Nothing. Same direction, same strength.

So she took a brick out.

It came looser than it should have, and she got her fingers into the mortar line and worked at it until the joint gave. Then she crouched with the brick in her hands and looked into the hole. Grit. A run of dark sand. Behind that, another brick, mortared in the ordinary way, tight as a new tooth. No seam. No hinge. No thread of cold air coming out of anywhere it shouldn't.

She put the brick back in its socket and pressed the crumbs of mortar flat with her thumb, so that from ten feet away the wall looked like it had never been touched.

The door was real, then. And it was not a door for hands.

Nobody put that much wall on a public street with nothing behind it. But a door that answered to a needle in a stranger's palm would have been found and used and written about long before she got here. This one answered to something else. The house sorted people — the Assay did that part in public, in daylight — and whatever it sorted them into was something you could feel inside a wall, and a needle could not feel it.

So the door opened for the people on the list, and she had spent a good part of her life learning the exact shape of every list she was not on. It had stopped stinging years ago. It had never once stopped making her want to read the whole list.

She looked at the watch. Fifteen of them, spaced along the inside of the arch, armored, still, doing the slow patient nothing they had been doing all night. The nearest one had a rope of drool on his chin long enough to catch the fog.

She beckoned him over.

He came. Ten unhurried steps, and stopped one arm's length away, and looked down at her with the flat patience of a man waiting his turn in a line.

“You have something on your—” she said, and pointed at her own chin, and mimed wiping it.

He looked at her.

She did it again, slower, in case the first attempt had been unclear. Then she stopped, because the slow, careful version of that had always been for new people, and there was nobody home.

“All right,” she said. “Fine. Stay.”

She used him.

Both hands on the shoulder plates, one boot on his belt, one boot on his shoulder, up and over. The armor was cold on the outside and warm under the leather straps, where a man would be, and his head turned to keep her in view the whole way up, and something wet went across the back of her hand.

Then she was standing on his shoulders with both palms flat to the stone, and she went along the top of the arch on her knees, a foot at a time, the needle wedged in her fist, feeling for anything that felt like an answer.

Nothing.

She came down. She put a hand on his shoulder and pushed, and he stepped, and she pushed again, and he stepped, and that was the most cooperative thing that had happened to her all night. North twenty paces along the wall, palm to brick, palm to the next brick, another push on the shoulder. He moved when she pushed him and did nothing else, and he never once asked her what she was doing, and when she stopped pushing he stood where she left him and looked at her.

Nothing. Everywhere, nothing.

She stood back in the middle of the square and looked at the wall for a while and let it be true. She was not going to open this door tonight.

That should have been the end of the night's work. Instead she wanted it more than she had wanted anything at the top of the evening, and there was a whole wall, and she had until dawn.

She went north along the seawall road, back into the dark between the houses, and she had gone maybe a hundred paces before she noticed that the street had gotten slower.

The woman with the basket was still there. Her arms had come apart from each other by half a beat — one hand tipped the basket, and then, half a second late, the other arm corrected, and the fish inside never fell out. Two men were hauling a net in on the water side, and their hands still worked fine, and their elbows came back a little slower every time she looked. A man with a bucket crossed fifteen feet of street while she counted his steps, and the water in the bucket did not spill, and she would have preferred it if it had.

Then she stopped counting steps and started counting heads.

Eleven people were looking at her.

She went back and counted again, because eleven was worth checking. Eleven. Nobody had called out. Nobody was walking toward her. But every head on that street was turned in her direction, and the bodies underneath the heads were not turned with them, and the eyes in the faces were not moving at all.

The man with the bucket was taller than the doorway he had come out of.

He had not been, ten minutes ago. He was longer through the shoulders than a man was, and his neck came up longer than a neck, and the whole of him was very slightly wrong in a way she could not put on any one limb, as if the body had kept growing and the shape it was wearing had not.

She walked backward four steps to check something, and the eleven heads did not follow her. They stayed pointed at the place she had been. She walked forward again, and the heads were already waiting for her when she got there.

They were not tracking her. They were pointed at her, which was worse.

The proper thing to do was close on one and see what he did. She was not going to do it. She kept the width of the street between herself and them and kept walking, and the wall came up on her right and gave her something else to look at.

She blamed the light first. There was more of it than there had been — a grey coming up behind the fog, thin as milk, changing shapes and telling her nothing. She stood still and looked at the wall anyway, and then admitted that the light had nothing to do with it.

The wall had carvings on it. She had walked past them twice tonight: a long run of sea beasts, heavy-shouldered things with whiskers and coils and teeth, cut into the brick in the old shallow way, the sort nobody in a town like this had looked at in a hundred years except to lean a pole against.

They were standing out now.

Not because of the light. Because they were coming out. The beasts had been cut flat and were not flat anymore, and the relief of them had come up off the brick far enough to hold a shadow, and their heavy heads were bending down, all of them, toward what was underneath them.

Underneath them were people.

Thin ones. Grass-thin, wrong scale, half the size of the beasts, with no more modeling on them than a town bothers with for the ordinary men it has lost — a few lines for a head, a few lines for a coat. And they were getting clearer. Every minute they got clearer, and the fear came up in them first, in the faces, and the shapes of the bodies came after.

They were not carved. The wall had them inside it and was letting them out a hair at a time, and the faces it was letting out looked like people pressed into a dark place with no air in it and nobody on the other side of the wall to hear them.

She made herself get closer. Close enough to read them. Then closer than she wanted to be.

She found two she knew.

The first was the man who had taken her horse's head at the fog line and looked her over and decided she was worth half a sentence. The second was the one who had knelt in the road with a lantern and put a hand on the wagon's axle and said something back over his shoulder that she had not caught. Both of them Crowe people. Both of them had come in with the wagon.

She did not touch the wall. She stood a long step back from it with her hands in her coat and did the arithmetic twice, and the arithmetic would not come out. The gate was the only way into this town. She had walked through it on her own feet, and behind her there had been the cart and the road and the fog and no sound at all, nothing calling, nobody taken.

Then she turned and went along the faces and counted them and looked for him.

Small eyes. Clean jaw. The face of a man who had been kept waiting and intended to remember it.

She found five men she had seen that day, and none of them was him.

So where was he, then? If the wall kept the faces it had taken, and his face was not in it, then the wall had not taken him, and he was somewhere in the streets behind her, in a town where every door was shut and every head was turned. Or the wall had taken him and was holding him deeper than this, in a part of itself she could not see from the street.

She had two answers and no third one, and she kept walking.

She took the needle out again, because it was the only thing in this town that had ever given her a straight answer, and turned with it, slowly, through a half circle, and watched what it did.

It did nothing. It hung flat in her palm, pointing out through the wall. She walked forty paces north along the curve of it and tried again, and it pointed out through the wall. She walked back and tried it at the arch, and it pointed out through the wall from there too: same bearing, same angle, level and patient, as if the wall in front of her were the thickness of a door and not six feet of brick and mortar and sand.

A needle points where the thing it wants is. If the thing it wanted were a spot on this wall, it would have swung as she passed and settled on the spot and stayed there, and she would have found it with her palms an hour ago. It had not swung. It was pointed at something on the far side of everything she could touch, and it did not care which part of the wall she stood in front of.

Which left her two readings and she did not like either one.

Either the door was out past the fog, in the water, under all of that. Or the door was inside the wall, in the part of a wall that has no surface, and a needle could not point at that from out here, so it was doing the next best thing a needle can do, which was point through.

The wall had been spitting men and beasts out of itself all night and taking its own people in, and it was not finished. If the door was inside it, the door would not be a door until the wall was done, and the wall was not done. Which put a clock on the night that was not daybreak, and she had been spending the night as though she had all of it.

She looked back at the arch and counted her own paces toward it. Three. Four. Five. She stopped counting, because she had walked it twice tonight and knew the length of it exactly, and walking it was not the hard part. The gate was a hundred and forty paces behind her and she could be outside it before she finished the thought.

The second rule had never asked her to do anything difficult. It only asked her to leave.

She turned her back on the arch, which was the second time tonight, and went north along the wall with the needle pinched flat in her hand, looking for the third rule.

She found the nets two streets on.

They came out of a side street in a line — eight, ten, twelve of them, the same slow people she had counted a few minutes ago, only bigger now, and each one dragging a black net that was much too heavy for the pace he was going.

She stopped where she was and let them cross in front of her.

They did not look at her. The nets dragged past her boots, wet and long, smelling of deep water and old rope, and the line kept going, slow as a burial, and turned in at the wall.

The first one in the line walked into the wall without slowing down.

The brick gave around the outline of the body, soft as mud under a boot, and took him to the shoulders, then to the waist, and then it closed over the net behind him and swallowed that too, and there was no sound in the street except rope dragging on stone.

She backed off twenty paces. Slowly, without turning, watching, because running in a street full of those things had to be a decision and not a reflex, and she wanted to see what they did about it.

They did not care. They walked into the wall, one and then the next, in the order they had been walking in, and the wall took every one of them, and the twelve black nets went in with them.

She could almost see the reason for the second rule now.

It was written up and down the wall in front of her, an arm's height of brick at a time, and it was close to being a sentence she could read, and she did not finish reading it. There was nothing useful at the end of that thought and a great deal that was not, and dawn was coming whether she understood it or not.

She went north faster, past the low houses, keeping to the middle of the street.

The houses had gone bad. They had been mud-colored and shut when she came in, and now the color had gone out of the clay and the door frames had gone grey, and every door was still shut, and she did not want to be inside any of them.

Then she saw the stairs.

They were cut into the outside of the wall, thirty or forty of them, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, climbing to a platform that sat against the brickwork with a small stone building on it and nothing else. No light in it. No smoke. No shoes at the bottom of the steps.

The needle came alive.

It had been pulling all night. Now it turned in her palm like a fish trying to get off a hook and went straight up the stairs, and she had to pinch the flat end of it between finger and thumb to hold it, and the flat end was not made to be pinched, and she did not let go.

She looked at the shrine.

Stone, one shuttered door, an ordinary roof, a single step at the top. A place people kept, in a town that had no word for the house she had come to find, and no notice on any wall, and no writing anywhere at all. A place the third rule was about.

You will not set foot in the shrine.

She went down the list out loud, at the bottom of the stairs, in a town full of slow things that did not care.

One. You will draw no blade in this town. She had not drawn anything. She had a needle and a sharp tongue and no knife worth the name, and nobody had come to argue the point with her.

Two. You will enter after sundown and be out before daybreak. She had entered after sundown. If she got through the house's door before the light came, she would be standing in a doorway instead of standing in a town, and she was willing to argue that with any watchman alive. The rule said she had to be out. It did not say out of what.

Three. You will not set foot in the shrine.

The needle was pulling up the stairs hard enough to hurt her hand.

Nobody had said what happened if she did it.

She stood there and went looking for the consequence, and there was not one. Not in the rule, not in the watch's mouth, not anywhere in the whole night she had spent being told things by people with teeth. Every other rule in this town had something standing behind it. This one had nothing, and nothing was the part she could not price.

Above the shrine, the sky went grey.

Not slowly. There was a grey line over the fog, and then the sky was torn open along it and a whole sun came through, flat and white and hard, and it was in her eyes and on the wall and on the stairs, and everything in that town was suddenly visible and none of it was any better to look at.

The sound came after, from the far side of town. She heard it before she understood it: surf, and under the surf, the wind noise of a very large thing coming through a small opening.

She turned around.

At the far end of the street, the seawall had a mouth in it, and the water was coming out of the wall.

Not leaking. Not seeping. Coming out of the brick at the height of a man's chest in one solid green-white sheet, with the sea in it — huge coils turning in the water as it fell, shoulders and tails and long whiskered heads, all of it coming down onto the low brick houses at the bottom of the street and taking their roofs off the way you take a lid off a pot.

The street began to fill.

She stood at the bottom of the shrine stairs with the needle in her fist and had, by her own count, half a second in which two doors were open to her.

The shrine door, shut, at the top of the steps, with the needle pulling at her hand toward it.

And to the left of it, past the foot of the steps, where the wall turned off the street and left a wedge of open ground: a tower. Round, the same stone as the wall, standing on its own four corners, a bronze bell hanging under its roof and a black arched door at the bottom of it. Thirty paces from where she stood, along the platform edge, and the water had not reached the turn yet. She counted them without meaning to.

She thought about the shut houses the water would reach first, and the air locked in them, and about that one door at the bottom of the tower.

Her fist closed on the needle. She turned and ran for the tower, and behind her the water came up the street past the low houses, and one by one they went under.