The Machine Under the Deck

The Lamb sat on Orra's old slip with her keel on the stones and her belly in the sun, and Nera Pell thought her the ugliest thing ever built by people who knew their trade.

They had warped her up on the top of the night tide, and now the water had gone down and left her canted to starboard with weed drying on her planks. She was about sixty feet long and nearly half as broad, bluff at both ends and strapped round with iron. She had no masts worth the name. Her deck was low and crowded with hatches, and a squat house without a single window stood amidships.

The cove was a bite out of Orra's south cliff, steep on three sides and open on the fourth to the deep channel. The slip ran up out of the water to a smithy shed at the foot of the cliff stair. Beside the shed was a long stone tank where the island's boatbuilders had once steeped planks to bend them. It was full of seawater now, and a tarpaulin was weighted over it with stones.

Something under the tarpaulin moved. The canvas lifted and settled, slow as a sleeper's breath.

"He's at it again," Enoch Garvey called from the tank's edge, where he sat on an upturned bucket with a boathook across his knees. "Every quarter hour, regular as a church bell. He gets one hand up against the cloth and has a feel about. I told him, you're not going anywhere, friend. You're roped like a Sunday ham."

"Don't talk to him, Enoch," Nera said.

"Somebody's got to," Enoch said. "He's had a hard week."

Nera ducked under the Lamb's turn of bilge into the shadow beneath her hull.

The vanes hung there. Tomas Ebb had told her they would, but knowing a thing and standing under it were different trades. On either side of the keel, from the forefoot to the sternpost, ran a long cage of iron bars as thick as her wrist. Inside each cage, on bronze pins, hung a line of plates the size of tavern doors and curved like the blades of a mill wheel. Every plate was cut over its face with lines so fine that her eye slid on them, and small crabs walked in the weed grown into the cuts.

She put her palm on the nearest plate. It was colder than the morning.

"Please don't," said a voice behind her. "There's no harm in it now, but please don't."

Ebb stood at the edge of the shadow with a marine on either side of him, a narrow man in his forties with ink ground into the side of his right hand that no scrubbing would shift. He had not slept since they took him.

"Why not, if there's no harm?" Nera said.

"Habit. In the yard at Lisk they'd fine you a day's pay for a handprint on a vane." He came in under the hull, hunched, and drew a finger along one of the fine lines without touching it. "When she lies to a current, or when she's towed, the water goes past these. The plates take something out of it. Not the force of it. Something under the force."

"Take it where?" Nera asked.

"Up. To the frame. The vanes feed the frame." He glanced at the hull above them. "When the feeding stops, the frame holds what it has for a time, and then the dark goes. For this one, hardly any time. She was a trial. They built her small to see whether it could be done at all."

"And when the frame breaks?" Nera asked.

"Then the dark goes at once," Ebb said. "You saw it."

She had seen it. Yesterday morning she had stood in the Lamb's frame room with an iron bar in her hands and a lattice of bronze and black wood in front of her, humming in her teeth. She had beaten it with the maul, then driven the bar into it and leaned. The lattice had cracked like ice on a pond, and then there had been sunlight on the ladder and screaming from the terraces.

"Show me the frame," she said.

The frame room lay below the deckhouse in the Lamb's middle, under her waterline, walled with oak a foot thick and plated over with iron. The only way in was a ladder and a door with two bars. Nera went down with a lantern and her drawing board, and Ebb came after her, and Cobley the marine sat on the bottom rung with his short sword across his knees.

The broken frame filled the room from the floor timbers to the deck beams. It was a lattice of bronze rods and black wooden struts, lashed and pinned and wedged into a shape that hurt the eye to follow. Where her bar had gone in, three rods had snapped and a strut had split along its length, and the whole lattice had sagged inward around the break. In the corner lay the rubble that had pinned the drowned man until Dunning's people dug him out with a pike at his throat.

Ebb laid his hands on the lattice, feeling along the joints, and as his fingers moved his voice steadied.

"Every rod is cut to a length, and every strut is set at an angle to every other, and they're warded where they meet. The vanes keep it ringing. While it rings, it throws the dark up and out all round, as far as its strength runs." He touched a cracked rod. "You'd never get a bar into one of the big ones. Their frames lie deep in, behind armor, a great deal more iron than this. And they hold their charge longer."

"How much longer?" Nera asked.

"A quarter hour, I think. Maybe more. I was told it once in passing." He shook his head. "I wasn't meant to need it."

"Who would know for certain?"

"Darn," Ebb said. "The drawing office at Darn. They adapted the frames from the old harbor wards there, and every sheet went through that office."

Nera's pencil was going while he talked. She drew the lattice joint by joint, as she would draw a frame of timbers she meant to copy. She took the angles off with the little bevel gauge from her apron pocket. Ebb watched her work.

"You're very quick," he said.

"I was eight years in the drafting room at Darn myself, under Gideon Dray," Nera said.

Ebb's hands stopped on the lattice. "Master Dray. He was alive in the summer when I left. They had him at the drawing office under guard." He licked his lips. "He was good to me once. I spoiled a sheet, and he never told anybody."

"That sounds like him," Nera said, and kept drawing. "Now show me the door."

The fitting sat in a well beneath the floor timbers. Ebb called it a sea-chest: a box of iron as big as a cask, built into the bottom of the hull and open beneath to the sea. A wooden trunk ran up from it through the floor, capped with a bolted lid. With the Lamb high on the slip the chest had drained. They unbolted the lid and lowered a lantern on a line, and Nera saw it lying at the bottom on an iron cradle, wet and black and no bigger than her fist.

They drew it up with a hook. Ebb would not touch it, and Nera did. It was a knot of dark metal twisted round a core of black stone, and the metal was cut with the same fine lines as the vanes. The stone was smooth and very cold. It weighed almost nothing, yet it sat in her palm heavier than it was.

"The frame makes the dark," Ebb said, low. "The vanes feed the frame. That is the door."

"Door to what?" Nera asked.

He took so long to answer that Cobley shifted on the ladder.

"There is something in the deep," Ebb said finally. "West, past the islands, where the bottom falls away. The Admiral opened a way for it, and we made the doors. Every engine has one in its chest, under the frame. It comes through the door and takes hold of whatever is near. Drowned men. Only the drowned."

"How near?" Nera asked.

"As far as the engine's dark reaches, and a little past the rim. It thins out there the way the dark does; it doesn't stop at a line. For this one, a mile, near enough. That's the hold." He pressed his inky hand to his mouth and took it away. "But a man must drown within a mile of a door to rise, whatever the engine, and it takes him some minutes. Pull him out quick enough, and if he breathes, he's only a half-drowned man with a cough."

Nera turned the fitting in the lantern-light. "When I broke the frame, the dark went, and the dead on the terraces fell. But the man in this room kept moving."

"Because the sun never reached him, and the door was open," Ebb said. "The frame doesn't matter to the hold. Only the door matters, and how far it reaches."

She thought of the Wolfhound's well at Southwick a week ago: the hatches lifted, the marines standing ready with their pikes, and the dead lying in the bilge like sacks of wet meal. Whatever drove them let go once we were out of the dark, Hanne had said, and Marr had agreed. Nera had not liked it then, and now she knew why.

"It wasn't the daylight that dropped them in the Wolfhound," she said. "They were below hatches the whole way. They'd simply gone out of reach of any door."

"I would think so," Ebb said.

"You'd think so," Nera said.

"I wasn't there, Mistress Pell," Ebb said.

She closed her hand on the fitting until the cold ached in her bones.

"Cobley," she said, "go and fetch the Captain, and the Commander, and the Keeper. I want them to see this."

They came down the cliff stair in the late morning, Rusk in his shirtsleeves and Marr in her blue coat, with Marietta Voss behind them and her keys at her belt. Orris was already in the cove, sitting on a bollard and offering opinions about the Lamb's planking to anyone in range.

The smithy anvil stood outside the shed door, a black horn of iron on a stump of oak. Nera set the fitting on its face and took the long sledge from the shed wall. By the tank, Joss Ambry knelt with one corner of the tarpaulin lifted a hand's breadth, so he could see in without letting the sun through. Ebb had insisted on that.

"Is he moving?" Nera asked.

"His fingers are." Joss swallowed. "He's got hold of the rope. He's picking at the knot."

"Keep watching, and call out the instant it changes," Nera said.

Rusk was studying the fitting. "You've drawn it?"

"Every face of it." She tapped the board under her arm. "If I break this and nothing happens, we've learned something. If I break it and he stops, we've learned more."

"And if you break it and something else happens?" said Marr.

They all turned to Ebb, who stood between his marines with his hands knotted together.

"Nothing else will happen," he said. "I don't think anything else will happen."

"You don't think," said Orris from his bollard.

"Nobody has ever broken one," Ebb said.

"Salt and blazes. New ground, then." Orris lifted his feet onto the bollard. "Mind your toes, all of you."

Nera set her feet, swung the sledge up over her shoulder and brought it down. It struck the black stone and glanced off, and the shock went up the haft into her elbows and her teeth. The fitting skidded across the anvil and fetched up against the horn without a mark on it.

"Rot it," she said, shaking her hands.

"Again," said Rusk.

This time she brought the sledge down square with her whole weight behind it. The stone cracked with a sound like a dropped plate, and the metal round it buckled. She swung a third time and the core split in two, and a breath of cold came up off the anvil that smelled of deep water and the bottom of a well. Then it was only a smell, and the sea air carried it off.

"He's stopped," Joss said. "His hand's gone slack. He's let go of the rope."

Marietta walked to the tank and pulled the tarpaulin off. The sun went down into the water. The dead man lay on the bottom in his sea boots with the ropes loose round him. His face was turned up to the light, and now it was only a young man's face, gray and swollen, with the mouth open. Nothing moved in it.

Marietta looked at him with her hands at her sides.

"Take him up to the old ground behind the cisterns," she said. "Bury him deep, well away from the water. Somebody knew his name once."

Ebb had sat down on the slip with his head in his hands. Enoch regarded the tank with regret.

"I'll miss him," he said. "He never once complained about my singing."

They talked it through over the anvil, with the pieces of the fitting lying on the iron between them.

"Two things, then," Rusk said. "The dark and the hold. The frame makes the dark, and this made the hold. Break the frame, and the dark goes, and whatever's standing in the sun falls. Break the door, and whatever it held falls, sun or no sun."

"Within its reach," said Ebb. "Yes. And the big ones would hold their dark a quarter hour or more after the vanes stopped. I can't tell you more than I know, Captain."

"Darn knows," said Nera.

Rusk looked out at the channel with the face he wore for judging a tide.

"One thing more," Marietta said. She had not sat down. "When the Lamb's dark went, there were dead men working on the hulks in the Throat. They fell into the water, and we never got them up. They're lying on the bottom a quarter mile from where I stand." She turned to Ebb. "Do they stay down?"

Ebb opened his mouth and shut it again.

"Answer the Keeper," said Marr.

"If another door comes in reach of them while they lie in the water," Ebb said, "they can rise again. The sun doesn't cure them. It only lets them go."

Marietta looked west, and so did they all. Beyond the cove's mouth and the black rocks of the Brack, the sea was blue to the horizon. On the morning of the counterattack the main canopy had stood two miles out on the water, and it had drawn off since.

"Then we'd best be quick," Marietta said. "All of us."

She was quick. By the afternoon flood, the first boats were going out through the Kittle.

Nera watched from the north terraces, where she was mending a sprung plank. Seven boats went in the first flight, deep with people: the families from the lower terraces, the sick, the old, and the mothers with the smallest children. Abner Daw had the leading boat. He stood in her stern with an empty pipe in his teeth and took her into the twisting channel between the shoals as if he were walking down his own lane.

Marietta stood at the top of the landing steps and saw every boat away, holding a list she never once looked at.

"Holm Ennis first," she told Nera. "They'll take a hundred there, and they've walls and a well and a dozen good men with crossbows. Then the islands east, a few families to each. The rest stay with me." She watched the last sail go into the Kittle. "Two hundred mouths are fewer than four hundred, Mistress Pell, and the men who stay can hold a wall. I'm not emptying my tower. I'm making it easier to hold."

A girl of about six sat on the steps at Marietta's feet with a doll made of rope.

"This is Posy," Marietta said. "Her mother's in the infirmary with a broken arm. They go with the next boats."

"Did you break the bad boat?" Posy asked.

Nera crouched to her height. "I did. With a big hammer."

Posy thought this over before she held out the doll for inspection. Nera admired the knots gravely and handed it back.

"It's well made," she said. "Who tied it?"

"Me," said Posy, and went back to it.

The second flight went out on the morning tide of the fourth. Nera spent that day in the cove with Ebb and a dozen island men, drawing the broken frame out of the Lamb rod by rod and laying the pieces on canvas along the slip. By the middle of the afternoon her board was full, and she had started drawing on the planks of the smithy door.

At four o'clock by the smithy clock, Joss called her from the top of the slip.

It came out of the west across the sea, as it had come across Greyhaven harbor ten days before.

From the cliff stair Nera could see down the whole length of the deep channel to its mouth, and beyond it to the open water of the western approach. Far out on that water, six miles or more, a cluster of small sails was working in. Tugs, she thought, and in their midst something broad and dark and low. Above them the sky was going out.

The black stood up off the sea round the broad thing, as if it grew out of her, and swallowed the tugs. It spread as it rose, a wall with no top, and where its foot touched the water the afternoon light went off the waves. Then the tugs stopped, and she saw the white splash of an anchor going down. Still the dark spread. It ran on east across the approach, into the mouth of the deep channel and up between the cliffs, and came over the water of the cove and up the slip. Then the cliff went out, and the world was a black room without walls, and somewhere above her a gull was crying, lost.

A lantern bloomed in the smithy door, and another on the slip. Ebb was beside her on the stair. She could hear his breathing.

"That's Vigil," he said. "She was lying at Lisk Roads when I left. They've brought her up to cover the strait. She'll lie in the stream off the mouth as long as they please."

"How far off?" Nera asked.

"Four miles and a half from here." He paused. "Mistress Pell, her reach is as far as her dark. You saw how far her dark goes."

Nera looked down into the blackness where the Throat lay, a quarter mile off, with the sunk hulks in it and the dead men on the bottom round them.

"Cobley," she said. "Run up and tell the Keeper and the Captain. Tell them the dead in the Throat are inside Vigil's reach."

At dusk by the clock Rusk brought the Kestrel into the cove mouth and anchored her two hundred yards off the slip, broadside on, with her heavy crossbows run out. He came ashore in the boat and stood with Nera at the foot of the slip.

"I want those pieces," she said, pointing at the canvas where the broken frame lay in its rods and struts. "That's the only engine anyone on our side has ever had their hands on. Drawings are one thing. The thing itself is another. If they come for it, I want it kept."

"Will they come for it?" Rusk asked.

"Ebb thinks they will," Nera said. "He says the Admiral will want it sunk where nobody can study it."

Rusk studied the black water. "If they come up the slip I'll have six heavy crossbows on them, but I'll be shooting past you in the dark."

"Then shoot carefully."

"I always do," Rusk said. "Orris is staying ashore with you, and Garvey, and the boy. And Nera, if they come in strength, leave the bronze. Pieces of a frame aren't worth your neck."

"Yes, Captain," said Nera, who had no intention of leaving anything.

They worked through the evening by lantern-light, crating the vanes and lashing the frame pieces into bundles. Enoch sat on the edge of the empty tank and told Joss an untrue story about a captain who kept a pig in his cabin and dressed it for dinner on feast days. At eleven the tide was up and lapping at the Lamb's keel, and the island men had gone up the stair to sleep.

A little after midnight, Joss said, "Mistress Pell," in a voice she did not like.

The slip ran down from the smithy into the black water at a long slant, fifty yards of weedy stone with the Lamb lying across its upper end. The flood covered its lower half. Two lanterns burned on poles at the waterline. Beyond them was nothing, except the Kestrel's riding lights hanging off in the dark, and the Throat somewhere off to the left with its hulks and its dead.

Something was coming up out of the water into the lantern-light on its hands and knees.

Behind it a second head broke the surface, and a third. Out beyond the lanterns, low on the water, Nera saw the glow of a shuttered lamp in a small boat. Somebody alive was out there.

"Up!" she shouted. "Orris! Enoch! Get the island men down!"

Orris came out of the smithy with his short axe in his fist and the forge-light behind him, saw the slip, and swore richly and at length.

There were eight of them on the stone now, and more coming. They stood up one after another as they reached the dry slip, swaying and streaming. Two wore the gray smocks of the clearance craft. One had the rags of a Compact blue coat. They paid the people no attention at all and went straight for the canvas where the frame pieces lay. The first of them stooped, got his arms round a bundle of bronze rods, and began to drag it toward the water.

Nera snatched the long-handled maul from beside the anvil and ran down the slip at him.

He never looked up. She took his knee from the side, as Dunning had taught them all, and he fell across the bundle and went on hauling at it with his arms, inch by inch toward the water, until she broke his neck and his fingers opened.

"Legs!" Orris was roaring. "Legs, you island lubbers! Legs first, necks after!"

The island men came pouring down the stair with lanterns and timbers and boathooks. Joss had a baulk of oak from the timber stack, longer than he was, and he swung it like a sweep and took two of the dead off their feet together. They went down on the stone and began to crawl.

Orris met a big one in a sodden leather jerkin at the foot of the smithy wall, took it down in two short chops, and turned to the next with his whiskers bristling.

"Too old for this," he panted. "Drown me, I'm too old for this."

There were more than she had thought, twelve or fifteen, and now some went for the bundles and some went for the people. A young island man named Simmy Gale was at the water's edge with a boathook, fending one off, when another came up out of the black behind him and took him round the waist. He screamed once. They went into the water together, and the splash closed over the scream.

Nera ran for the edge. Her boots went out from under her on the weed. She fell hard on her hip and slid, and the water was round her knees, black and shocking cold.

A hand came up out of it and closed on her ankle.

She kicked. The grip held, and pulled, steady and heavy, and she went over on her back on the slimed stone and slid toward the deep. She clawed at the weed and it came away in her fingers. The water came up past her waist, and a second hand found her belt, and a white face rose out of the sea beside her with its eyes open and full of water. She still had the maul. She swung it one-handed and hit the face, and it turned aside and kept pulling. The water was at her chest. Vigil was too far off to raise her. She would only drown.

Then Enoch Garvey was in the water beside her to his knees, where he had no business being, with the boathook reversed in both fists. He drove the iron down past her shoulder into the white face under the water and leaned on it.

"Hold still, my girl," he said, quite calm. "Joss! Her wrists!"

Joss had her by both wrists from above and was leaning back up the slope with his heels dug into the weed. Enoch worked the hook under the dead man's jaw and heaved, and the white head came up and back, and Nera heard the neck go like a green branch.

The hands opened. Joss hauled, and she came up the slip on her knees, coughing, into the lantern light, and Enoch came out of the water after her with his hat gone and the sea pouring out of his boots.

"Enoch," Nera gasped, and he cut her off.

"Don't thank me, there's another. Joss! Behind you, boy!"

A drowned woman in a fishwife's skirt was coming at Joss from the side. Nera got up, soaked and shaking, with her hip a blaze of pain, and met the woman with the maul across both knees. Joss finished her with the oak baulk and stood gasping.

Out on the water the Kestrel spoke. Nera heard her heavy crossbows go one after another down her side, a deep thrumming crack, and a swivel thrower barked from her rail. The shuttered lamp beyond the lanterns jerked and swung, and a man cried out across the water. Then the lamp went out, and she heard oars going away fast and ragged toward the channel mouth.

On the slip, the dead stopped where they stood. Their heads turned toward the water all together, slowly, and then they walked down into the sea, and the ones with broken legs dragged themselves after on their elbows. The black water took them one by one.

"Let them go," Orris said, when an island man started after them. "Let them go, lad. You'll never catch them in there."

Bronze rods lay scattered over the stones. One bundle was gone, dragged down into the water, and the rest were there.

They found Simmy Gale an hour later, when the tide had dropped a foot. Cal Voss went down on a rope with a lantern and brought him up. He was dead, and he lay quiet on the stone as a dead man should.

Enoch sat on the tank's edge again with his boathook across his knees, watching his hat float on the black water a few yards out, turning slowly.

"That was my good hat," he said.

Nera sat down beside him because her legs would not hold her any longer. "I'll buy you another at Darn. The best in the yard."

"Darn hasn't got hats. Darn's got sawdust." He considered the hat a while longer. "Still, it's the thought."

The dispatch came in on the morning of the fifth, up from Southwick by relay and through the Mare's Gut in a Tull boat, wrapped in oilskin inside a fisherman's shirt.

Marr went through it on the Kestrel's quarterdeck by the binnacle lamp. Nera lay on the after hatch nearby while Hanne Webb painted her bruised hip with something that smelled of turpentine.

"Commodore Petch sends his compliments on the relief of Orra," Marr said, "and asks for a full report. He also orders me to meet four supply boats at Holm Sound tomorrow and escort them to Carrick's Holm. Carrick is starving. A Pale Fleet garrison has taken its grain."

"Carrick's north-east," said Rusk from the rail, where Orris stood beside him. "Darn is east, and every sheet of those drawings went through Darn. If we knew for the big engines what we know for this one, we'd know how to kill them. Every day we wait, Vaust is building."

"And every day we wait, Carrick starves." Marr folded the dispatch. "Those are pilots' families, Captain. Petch wants the pilots back on our side, and he's right. And I have an order."

"Petch is fifty miles off and doesn't know what we know," Rusk said.

"Then I'll tell him, in my report," Marr said. "Meanwhile I'll do as I'm told."

They were not shouting. They had no need to, because every hand on deck was listening while pretending to coil something, and Enoch had stopped polishing a swivel and was simply holding the rag.

"You've done as you were told before," Rusk said. "We both know where that ended."

Marr's jaw went white along the bone, and her scarred hand closed on the dispatch.

"And you've done what you weren't told," she said. "We both know where that ended too."

Orris cleared his throat.

"Will you listen to the pair of you," Orris said. "Captain, how far is Carrick from Darn?"

Rusk reckoned it. "Twelve miles. Thirteen."

"And who knows the back ways into Darn better than a Carrick pilot? Every one of them has run a cargo past that harbor guard in his time. I ought to know, I paid half of them." Orris turned to Marr. "Commander, how long does Petch give you at Carrick?"

"He doesn't say," Marr said.

"Then he doesn't say you can't go on from there," Orris said.

Nera watched them over Hanne's shoulder.

"Carrick first," Marr said. "We get the grain in and the families out, and we ask the pilots for a way into Darn."

"Then Darn," said Rusk. "Straight on from Carrick, no new orders."

"If new orders come, I'll open them after Darn," Marr said.

Rusk almost smiled. "Agreed."

"Done," said Marr, and turned away to the binnacle and began writing her report.

Ebb came up from below at noon between Cobley and another marine and stood at the lee rail, looking at the black. Nera limped over and stood beside him.

"You're aboard for the voyage," she said. "Commander's orders. She wants you near."

"Near the guard, she means," Ebb said.

"Both," Nera said.

He was watching the north-east. "Darn," he said. "Master Dray. Will he forgive me, do you think?"

"For what?" Nera asked.

Ebb held up his ink-stained hand in the binnacle light and studied it as if it belonged to somebody else.

"For being good at what he taught me," he said.