Under Cael Meddan

They slept on a ledge above the water, in a place where four tunnels met, and when Wren woke she had no idea if it was morning.

It was black, as it was always black down here except for the torch, which Madoc had let burn to a stub in the night and then pinched out to save it. The dark had come in so thick that when Wren held her hand before her face she saw nothing at all. She had lain on the cold stone with her back against Pip's, listening to the water run past below the ledge, slow and heavy, talking to itself in the dark. Sometimes something splashed far off down one of the tunnels, and every time it did she heard Bracken's breathing stop.

Now Madoc struck a light, the new torch caught, and there they all were. Pip lay curled up with his hood over his face, and Alder sat propped against the stone with his staff on his shoulder and his eyes open. Bracken was at the edge of the ledge with his spear, where he had been all night.

"Morning," Madoc said.

"How do you know?" said Wren.

"I don't. But I'm hungry, and I'm always hungry in the morning." He grinned at her in the torchlight. He had slept with the fiddle case on his back. "Close enough."

They ate cold oatcake and a strip each of dried mutton, and nobody talked much. Then Pip got up and studied the four tunnel mouths, and the water and which way it ran, and pointed.

"Up that one," he said. "Then it's straight. Big and straight, all the way to the Hall. There's a grate. Then it's the water-door."

"Is there a grate on your map," Bracken said, "or is there a grate?"

"On the map there's a grate."

"Right," said Bracken, and got up.

The tunnel was bigger than the others, high enough for Bracken to walk upright and wide enough for two carts, with a vaulted roof of dressed stone gone green and black with age. The water ran knee-deep and black down the middle, and along the right-hand side ran a stone walkway just under the surface, where the Survey men must once have walked dry-shod. They waded along it single file with the torch at the front. The cold of the water went into Wren's legs and stayed there, until she couldn't feel her feet at all and walked on them anyway, because there was nothing else to do.

There were old things in the water, a bucket and a lantern rusted to lace. Once a whole boot stood upright on the walkway, as if someone had stepped out of it and gone on barefoot. No one touched it.

Then Madoc stopped and held up his hand, and they all stopped behind him.

Ahead, at the edge of the torchlight, the tunnel widened into a chamber where a smaller drain came in from the left, and in the chamber, in the black water, stood the dead.

There were six of them, maybe seven, standing thigh-deep with their backs to the company. They wore leather hoods, long leather aprons and heavy boots, and some held tools: a shovel, a long iron hook, a rake. Survey drain-men, Wren thought, who had been working down here when the cold came and had never finished the job. None of them moved.

"Back," Madoc breathed. "Slow."

Behind Wren, Pip took a step back, his foot came off the walkway, and he went down into the deeper water to the waist with a gasp and a splash.

The sound went up into the vault and came back doubled, and every hooded head in the chamber turned.

"Oh, hells," said Pip.

They came toward the torch without wading as the living wade, sliding through the black water fast and hardly rippling it, and their white eyes shone in the torchlight.

Madoc had an arrow on the string before Wren had her breath. He touched the pitch to the torch in her hand, and as it flared he drew and loosed in one movement. At that range he couldn't miss. The arrow took the first drain-man in the chest, and he went up in a gout of yellow flame with a scream that had no breath in it. He staggered and fell forward into the water, and the fire went out with a hiss and a great puff of stinking steam.

He got up again, blackened and smoking, and came on.

"The water," Madoc shouted. "It puts them out. Get them up out of the water!"

"How?" Wren shouted back.

Bracken pushed past her to the front and set himself on the sunken walkway with his spear low. The roof was too low to swing it, and he didn't try. The first of them came at him and he thrust, short and hard from the shoulder, and the broad iron head went into its chest until the crossbar stopped it. Then he heaved, the muscles standing out on his neck, and lifted the dead man bodily out of the water on the end of the spear. He slammed it against the wall above the waterline and held it there.

"Now, Stayer."

Madoc put a fire-arrow into it from three feet away. It burned on the spear-point against the wall, the fire licking across the vault, and the smoke came rolling back down the tunnel into their faces.

Wren choked, her eyes streaming. Through the smoke she saw another one coming, and another behind it, and she swung the torch because it was all she had. The drain-man with the iron hook reached for her and she shoved the torch into his face. His hood caught. He fell back clawing at it, went under, and came up again with his head smoking.

Beside her Pip shrieked. Something had him under the water; his leg jerked, he went down to his chest, and his hands flailed for the wall.

"Pip!"

Wren grabbed his collar and Alder his arm, and the thing under the water pulled. Pip's face went under and came up again, spitting.

Bracken dropped the burning body off his spear, turned, and drove the spear down into the black water beside Pip's leg, once, twice, grunting. The third time it struck something and stuck, and Bracken leaned on the shaft while something thrashed below.

"Get him up," Bracken said through his teeth.

They hauled, and Pip slithered back onto the walkway, gasping. A gray hand was still locked round his ankle, the arm ending at the elbow in a black stump where Bracken's spear had taken it off. Wren got her knife out and cut the fingers off his boot one by one, and her hands shook so that she nearly cut him.

"Is it through?" she said. "Pip. Is it through to the skin?"

"Don't know." His teeth were chattering. "Can't feel it. Can't feel nothing."

"That's the water. That's just the water."

"There's more," said Madoc.

There were three more in the chamber ahead, and others behind them coming down the smaller drain from the left, and Wren could hear the water moving round their legs.

Madoc loosed again. The arrow went into the first of them and it burned and fell and went out, and then it got up. He loosed again, with his quiver more than half empty.

"We can't hold this," he said. "Not in the water. They'll just keep getting up."

"Then we don't hold it," Wren said. "We go through."

"Through what?"

She pointed with the torch. Beyond the chamber, beyond the dead, the big tunnel went on toward the Hall. "That way. We go that way. Past them. Pip said it's straight."

Bracken looked at her through the smoke, and nodded.

"Stay behind me," he said. "All of you. Close."

He went forward like a boar through a hedge. He didn't try to fight them; he put his head down and his spear across his chest, crossbar out, and drove into them. The dead reached for him and he shouldered them off. One took hold of his sleeve, and the cloth went white and tore away in its hand, and he went on. Madoc went at his left shoulder, shooting, and Wren at his right, shoving the torch into faces, while Pip hauled Alder by the arm. They went through the chamber in a knot, splashing and choking in the stink of burning hair, with the dead grabbing at them from both sides.

Then they were through into the big tunnel beyond, and there, ten yards on, filling it from wall to wall and floor to roof, was the grate.

It was a grid of iron bars as thick as Wren's wrist, set in the stone at top and bottom and bolted at the sides, rusted a deep brown-black. The water ran through it and nothing else could. On the far side the tunnel went on, straight and dark.

Bracken threw himself at it. He got his spear-butt between two bars and heaved until the ash shaft bent and creaked, and the grate didn't move. He dropped the spear and hauled on the bars with his whole weight. Rust flaked off in his hands; nothing else gave.

"There's a gate," Pip was saying. "There's got to be a gate. For the drain-men. There's a gate in it somewhere, there always is. I drew one."

There was one at the right-hand side above the walkway, a narrow door in the grate with a hinge, a hasp and a padlock the size of a man's fist. All three had rusted into one lump with the door and the frame, so that you couldn't see where one ended and the next began.

Behind them the water was moving, as the dead came down the tunnel.

Madoc turned with his back to the grate and his bow up. "Twenty arrows," he said. "Maybe fewer."

Pip had his picks out, but his fingers were so cold that he dropped one in the water, swore, and scrabbled after it and couldn't find it.

"Leave it," Wren said. "Pip. Leave it."

Alder put his hand on her shoulder.

"Stand back," he said. "All of you. Stand away from the grate."

He stepped up onto the walkway in front of the rusted door. He was gray already from the cold and the water and the long night, his beard was wet, and his brown cloak hung on him in dripping folds. He put his hand flat on the iron. For a moment he looked very old and tired and a little surprised, like a man who has put his hand in his purse and found only the last coins there.

Then he drew breath and spoke. The Word went out of him cold and bright, and was gone.

The rust burst off the door in a cloud of brown flakes. The hasp sprang back and the padlock fell open and dropped into the water. The hinge shrieked, a long iron scream that went up into the vault and on down the tunnel, and the narrow door swung open and banged against the grate.

Alder sat down on the walkway, in the water, all at once.

Bracken caught him before he could fall further, got an arm under his shoulders, and carried him through the door. Pip went after them dragging the spear, and then Wren. Madoc came last, walking backwards, and loosed one arrow into the dark behind them; it lit the tunnel for a moment and showed the dead twenty yards off, splashing toward them.

Madoc slammed the door behind him, though there was no lock left to close it with.

"Hold it," Wren said.

"With what?"

Madoc pulled his iron hand-axe from his belt, drove the haft through the hasp and the staple, and hammered it home with the heel of his hand until it jammed.

"With that," he said.

The first of the dead hit the grate, and the bars rang. It reached through for them with its gray hands and could get no further. More came up behind it and stood against the grate in the black water, pressing, their white eyes on the torch, reaching.

Wren knelt by Alder. His lips had gone blue, and he was shaking so hard that she could hear his teeth grinding.

"Opening," he said between them. "That was Opening. I was keeping it for the water-door."

"I know."

"I am sorry."

"I know," Wren said. "Hush."

A light was coming toward them down the tunnel.

Madoc saw it first and turned with his bow raised, and Bracken with his spear. It was a small yellow light, a lamp, a long way off in the dark, and it bobbed as it came, as if whoever carried it was walking fast and splashing.

"Faded don't carry lamps," Pip said.

"Taken might," said Madoc.

The light came on, and Wren stood up. Now she could hear the splashing, and a low voice muttering to itself without a pause for breath.

"—rot this water, rot the old snake, rot the Captain, rot every drain-digging, stone-carving, name-writing, long-dead son of a—"

The lamp came round into the torchlight, and it was Dorrit.

She had water to her thighs and her skirts hitched up in one fist, with a knife in the same fist and the lamp in the other hand. Under that arm, clamped against her side in a fold of her shawl, she carried a book in dark leather with a brass clasp.

She stopped and stared at them.

Bracken made a sound with no word in it and went through the water toward her in four strides. He took the lamp from her hand, set it on the walkway without looking, put his arms around her, and picked her up off the ground.

Dorrit hit him on the shoulder, hard, with the fist that held the knife, and then again.

"You great bald lump," she said. "You took your time. You took your rotten time, didn't you? I've been sat down here since the middle of the night with the rats, and there's no rats, which is worse—"

Then she took his face between her hands and kissed him.

Everyone looked away. Madoc looked at the roof of the tunnel. Wren looked at the water. Alder, against the wall, shut his eyes. Pip did not look away. He watched the whole thing with his mouth open and his eyes shining in the torchlight. When it had gone on long enough he said, very softly, "Now that's a kiss," and Madoc cuffed him on the back of the head.

When Bracken put her down, Dorrit looked past him and saw Wren, and her face crumpled.

"Oh, you," she said. "Oh, you, you idiot."

Wren never knew which of them moved first. Then Dorrit had her, crushing and rocking her with her chin on the top of Wren's head, crying and swearing at once, with Wren's face in her wet shawl and the book squashed between them.

"You're alive," Wren said into the shawl.

"Course I'm alive. I'm too annoying to die. Ask him." Dorrit held her out at arm's length and looked at her. "You're thin. Look at you. What've they been feeding you? What've you been—" She stopped. She pushed the book into Wren's hands. "Here. Here. Take it. It's yours."

Wren took it, cold and damp at the corners, and held the Waybook against her chest.

"How?" she said.

"The Captain." Dorrit wiped her face with her wrist. "Iyene. She came down to my cell in the middle of the night and burned the two dead ones on my door, and opened it, and gave me the book, and her knife." She held up the knife, a soldier's knife, plain and heavy. "And she told me the way down. I pinched a lamp off a wall on the stair. Down a chute on my backside into the dark, which I'll thank her for when I see her, if I ever see her. She said wait at the bottom. She said you'd come by the water. She said Pip'd have read the plans." Dorrit looked at Pip. "She said, 'I taught him.'"

Pip made a small noise in his throat and turned his face to the wall.

"Is she coming?" Wren said.

"No. She went back up. She said somebody had to be where Vance expects her to be." Dorrit shook her head. "She's either the bravest woman I ever met, or the biggest liar. I can't tell which. I don't think she can either."

"I told you," Pip said. His voice cracked. "I told you. I said she's not bad. I said it."

"You did, lad."

Bracken had fetched something from his pack. He held it out to Dorrit: a roll of oiled cloth tied with tapes, stained and bulging, with the handle of a small saw sticking out of one end.

Dorrit stared at it. "That's my medicine roll."

"You left it at Scarrow."

"You carried that the whole way? Across the White?"

"It wasn't heavy."

"It weighs a ton. I know what's in it." She took it from him and held it against her. Her chin wobbled. "You daft great ox."

"Dor," Bracken said. "Who's Vance?"

She told them there in the tunnel, fast, with the dead pressing on the grate behind them and the torch burning down.

She told them about the old man in the frost-gray robe with the lovely hands, who called her his dear girl and fed her bread from before the Frost. She told them about the iron ring hammered into the floor under the arch, for somebody's ankle. She told them what she had heard him say to his dead from the gallery: that she would carry it a long time, and nobody would ever make songs about a herbwife. When she told that part, Bracken's hands closed slowly into fists at his sides and stayed closed.

"And the Chainman," Dorrit said. "He comes in my room. He sits by the wall, every night. He hums." She looked at Wren. "Wren, he's a boy. He's just a lad. He's young and he's lost and he doesn't know his name. I taught him bread. I taught him bee. He's got fiddler's fingers, Wren, hard on the ends like yours. And the old snake stood him under that arch and swore on his life he'd get his name back, and he believed him. He still believes him."

"His name's Will Rudge," Wren said.

Dorrit looked at her, and then shut her eyes.

"Of course it is," she said. "The tune."

The water-door was a hundred yards on.

It closed the end of the tunnel from wall to wall. It was a single leaf of iron, black and brown and scabbed with rust, taller than two men, set in a frame of the great squared stones that were the Hall's foundations. Bolts as big as Wren's forearm ran down its edge, rusted into their sockets. It had no handle and no lock, only the iron and the rust, and a thin trickle of black water that crept out under it and ran away down the tunnel toward the river.

To the left of it, high in the wall, a stone chute came down out of a square black hole, green with slime and steep as a roof.

"That's how I came," Dorrit said. "You'll not get up it. I tried, a bit. Like climbing a frozen gutter."

Bracken put his shoulder to the water-door and heaved, and might as well have heaved at the hill.

Alder stood leaning on Madoc and looking at it, gray and shaking, and kept quiet, because they had all heard him at the grate.

Wren opened the Waybook. Her fingers were numb and clumsy as she turned the pages past the maps, past the Stair and the gorge and the Empty Kingdom, past Scarrow and Coldharbour, to the Hall near the back. There was a drawing of the great building from above, and on the next page its foundations, and there, in the Survey's small careful hand, a gate was marked across the end of a drain. She knew that mark now. It meant a door.

She got out the pen, and the ink she kept inside her shirt against the cold, and uncorked it with her teeth.

"Wren," Dorrit said.

"It's a door. It's a work of the road. I can do it."

"I know you can. That's not what I—" Dorrit stopped. "What will it cost?"

"I don't know. It never tells you."

"Wren."

"I don't know, Dor."

She held the book open against the wall in the torchlight, with Madoc holding the torch close and Pip holding the page flat, and dipped the pen. Under the little mark of the gate she wrote, in a hand nothing like Wystan's.

The water-door of the Hall stands open.

The cold went into her hand as she wrote, up her fingers and into her wrist, until the whole hand ached to the bone. The ink ran silver from the nib, bright as a fish in the torchlight, and then went black.

The iron groaned. The sound rose from the stones under their feet and out of the walls, and the water in the tunnel shivered. Then the rust began to crack along the edges of the door in long lines, raining flakes into the water, and the great bolts shifted in their sockets and drew back one by one, screaming. The door swung inward on hinges that had not turned since the Frost, slow and grinding, until it stood wide against the inner wall and the tunnel beyond it lay open.

Wren felt the cold gap open in her as the ink went black, and she went looking for what was gone. There was nothing there but the gap, and she didn't know what shape it was.

"Wren?" Dorrit said.

"I'm all right."

"What's gone?"

"I don't know." Wren shut the book. "I don't know. It's gone. I can't find what it was."

Beyond the water-door the tunnel ended in a round stone chamber, filled from wall to wall with deep black water. On the far side, a long way off at the edge of the torchlight, a stair went up out of the water into the dark.

Madoc held the torch out over the water and looked down, and couldn't see the bottom.

"It's deep," he said. "Over my head, in the middle. Not over his, maybe." He nodded at Bracken.

"It's not far," Pip said. "I can swim that. I swam the Merrow docks for pennies." He was already pulling off his boots.

Wren stood at the edge with the book held against her chest and looked at the black water. She didn't want to go in, and didn't know why. Her body shrank from that water, and her mind couldn't tell her whether it would know what to do once it got there.

Dorrit came and stood beside her, took the book gently out of Wren's arms, wrapped it in her shawl, and handed it up to Bracken.

"Go on, then," she said. "You can swim, you daft article. It's a few strokes. Chin up and kick." She grinned at her in the torchlight, wet and red-faced and her old self. "Like the millpond, remember? When I taught you? You were six and you screamed the place down, and Hobb came running all the way from the inn with a rope because he thought you were being murdered. And then you wouldn't come out. We had to fetch Granna to drag you out by your hair."

Wren looked at her and tried. She knew the millpond below the mill at Dallbridge, with the willows on the far side and the green weed at the edge, and she had swum in it a hundred summers. But when she went looking for a day when she was six, and Dorrit, and screaming, and Hobb with a rope, there was nothing. There was only the cold gap, smooth as a river stone, and it was exactly the shape of that.

"I don't remember," she said.

Dorrit's face changed all at once, from the grin to something else and back again, very fast. She reached out and took Wren's cold hand in her big warm one and gripped it so hard it hurt, and then let go.

"Well," Dorrit said. Her voice was steady. "You'll have to take my word for it. Go on. Chin up."

Wren went into the water. It closed over her shoulders, black and bitter, and her body knew what to do: her arms reached and her legs kicked, and she swam. Behind her she heard Pip go in towing Bracken's spear, and Madoc swearing with the fiddle case held over his head. Then came Bracken, walking the bottom on his toes with his beard in the water, holding the torch and the book and Dorrit's lamp over his head in his two fists. Alder rode on his back, and Dorrit swam alongside telling him not to be proud about it.

Wren reached the stair and climbed out onto it, streaming and shaking, and turned to hold out her hand for Dorrit, and for the book.

The stair went up a long way to a low doorway, and beyond it lay a vault.

It was the undercroft of the Hall. Bracken lifted the torch, and the light went out across a wide, low room of gray stone, where thick pillars held up the floor of the Hall above. It was colder here than in the drains. Frost furred the pillars, and their breath hung in the air in clouds.

Nobody spoke. They climbed from the stair one by one, dripping, and stood close together in the doorway and looked.

On the far wall, opposite them, an iron staple as thick as a man's arm was sunk into the stone, and from it hung a chain.

It was only a short length, five or six links, each as long as a hand and black with frost. The last link hung open at the bottom, its iron stretched and twisted where some huge strength had wrenched it apart. Wren had seen the rest of that chain on the Stair, wound round and round the one who had broken it and walked out wearing it.

She couldn't take her eyes off it. Then she saw the floor in front of it. The flagstones there were worn into a hollow path that went back and forth as far as that chain had once let a man go, and no further. Someone had walked there, up and down, since long before anyone now living was born.

Somewhere above them, far off through all the stone of the Hall, something heavy began to move.