Chapter 156: Inside Knowledge

Roderic was very bad at being a servant.

"Behind me," said Iselle. "One step. On my left."

Roderic took one step behind her, on her left, holding the little tin lamp Linus Carr had made him out of a tea canister and a stub of candle.

"Further," said Iselle.

He took half a step back.

"Further."

"If I go any further," said Roderic, "I won't be able to see you."

"That," said Iselle, "is the point."

It was Tuesday, a little after ten in the morning, on the end of the north pier at Westmere. The sun was out, thin and white. The tide was going out under us with a sound like somebody tidying a drawer. Green had brought me home from the Knock the night before, along with Roderic and Linus Carr, and the Knock was still sitting a mile off Harl with Caitlin on her bucket and Carol beside her and my father at the stern rail, and the lid was still on the island like a lid on a pot.

And on Friday morning, Iselle was going to walk up forty steps in the dark into a fortress full of people who had sworn their faces away, with my little brother carrying her lamp.

So she was teaching him how.

* * *

I sat on a bollard and watched. Linus Carr sat on the next one down with a blanket around his shoulders, though it wasn't cold, and Roderic's coat still on under the blanket, though it was much too big for him. Helena had fed him three times since dawn. He had eaten every time as if somebody might take the bowl away.

"He's doing it wrong," said Linus Carr, in Kethran.

I'd been learning Kethran from Iselle for three weeks. I was not good at it. But I knew wrong.

"How?" I said. In Kethran, badly.

Linus Carr looked at me sideways. Then he answered slowly, in small words, the way you'd talk to a horse.

"He walks like somebody's going to see him," he said. "Lamp boys don't walk like that. Lamp boys walk like nobody ever has."

* * *

I passed it on.

Roderic stopped in the middle of the pier with the lamp in his hand and looked at Linus Carr for a long moment.

"Show me?" he said.

Linus Carr didn't understand the words. But he understood the lamp, held out to him handle-first. He got up off his bollard and let the blanket fall and took it.

And then he disappeared.

I don't know how else to say it. He was standing right there on the pier, a skinny boy of fifteen in a coat four sizes too big, with a tin lamp. And then he stepped in behind Iselle, one step back and on her left, with the lamp held at the height of her shoulder and his eyes on the planks, and he was gone. He was still there. I could see him with my good eye. But my eye kept sliding off him to Iselle, the way your eye slides off a coat rack to the coat.

Iselle walked to the end of the pier and back. Linus Carr walked with her. His feet made no sound at all.

"Oh," said Roderic quietly.

* * *

"How long were you a lamp boy?" I asked him later. Iselle translated.

"Since I was nine," said Linus Carr. "In the Ash valley the priests take one boy from every village for the lamps. They took me because I was small. Then I got big, so they put me on a ship." He shrugged. "But on the island there weren't enough boys. So they took me off the ship at night for the stair."

I sat very still.

"The wrist stair," I said.

He nodded.

"You've been up it."

"Lots," said Linus Carr. "Brother Ostrand doesn't like the stair. He's old. His knees hurt. He has to stop on every landing and say the words, or the stair won't let him go on. So it takes a long time, and he needs the lamp the whole way."

Iselle had gone very still too.

"How many steps?" she said.

"Forty," said Linus Carr. "But the thirteenth one's broken. You step over it. If you put your foot on it, it rocks. And it's loud."

* * *

We sent for Caitlin's book.

Not Caitlin. Caitlin was a day's sail away on a bucket, counting a lid. But she'd left her other book, the blue one with Iselle's map in it, the one with 212 and 40 (?) written in the margin in her small, ruled hand. Mary brought it down to the pier wrapped in a dish towel, because it was Caitlin's and Caitlin didn't like her books to get salty.

I opened it to the map of the fist.

Linus Carr looked at it for a long time. Then he put his finger on the palm, just behind the little circle Iselle had drawn for the brazier.

"Here," he said. "The stair comes up here. There's a door in the floor. Bronze. Flat. With a hand on it. The priest puts his wrist on the hand and it opens. And the smoke from the brazier goes right over it. All the time. Day and night. They never let the brazier go out."

"So nobody sees you come up," I said.

"Nobody ever sees the lamp boy come up," said Linus Carr. "That's the whole job."

* * *

He told us everything.

He didn't seem to think any of it was important. That was the strange part. He told us the way you'd tell somebody where the spoons are kept.

The soldiers changed the watch at midnight and at six. The ones on the night watch were always tired by five, because there was nothing to do on the island and nobody ever slept well under the lid. It made your ears feel full.

The soldiers didn't go into the finger towers. Nobody went into the finger towers except the priests. The Hushed stood in there in the dark in rows, and they didn't move, and they didn't sit, and they didn't do anything at all until Brother Ostrand said the hand closes. Then they did whatever he said next.

"Only him?" I said.

"Only him," said Linus Carr. "Or the gray one. But the gray one never says anything."

Brother Ostrand said the oath with the fishermen every dawn, at the brazier, with his book. Every single dawn. He'd done it every day for two weeks. He was never late.

"Then at dawn on Friday," I said slowly, "the priest will be standing in the middle of the palm, at the brazier, with his back to the door in the floor."

Linus Carr thought about it.

"Yes," he said. "With his back to it. Because you face the fishermen, to say the words. And the fishermen face the sea gate."

* * *

I looked at Iselle. Iselle looked at the map.

"If the priest is the only voice the Hushed listen to," she said, "and the priest is standing with his back to me—"

"Then you'll come up behind him in his own smoke," I said, "with my brother carrying your lamp. And before he can say the hand closes, three hundred people in the finger towers will just go on standing there. Waiting for somebody to tell them something."

"And then," said Iselle, "somebody else will."

She didn't say who. She didn't need to. On the far end of the pier, Corran Hale was sitting on a coil of rope beside Brede Oller, teaching her the hand-signs of the Kethran mills again, the ones she'd known for forty years and had forgotten for nine. Marra was sitting with them. So was Ada.

"Somebody who knows their names," I said.

* * *

That afternoon Iselle taught Roderic the servant's words.

There weren't many. A lamp boy doesn't say much. There was one word for yes, holy one, and one for the light is here, and one for I am nobody, which you said if anyone ever spoke to you, and which you said with your eyes on the floor.

Roderic couldn't say the last one.

He tried. He stood on the pier with the tin lamp and Iselle in front of him and his eyes on the planks and he opened his mouth and nothing came out.

"Again," said Iselle.

He tried again. Nothing.

"Roderic."

"I can't," said Roderic. "I'm sorry. I can say the others. I can't say that one."

"It's just a word," said Iselle. "It doesn't mean anything. You say it so they'll look away."

"I know," said Roderic. "But you'd hear me say it."

Iselle didn't say anything for a while.

* * *

I got up off my bollard and walked down to the end of the pier and stood where the planks stopped and the sea started, so they could have the middle of it to themselves. My left ear was coming back. Not all the way. But enough that I heard what she said next, though I don't think she meant me to.

"I said it," she said. "When I was twelve."

* * *

She told him about the oath-house in the golden city.

She told it very quietly and very evenly, in Avarran, looking at the water. I didn't turn around.

She'd been twelve. She'd been taken out of her room in the night and walked down a stair in the dark to the small oath, the one that only goes on the wrist, the one they give to the children of the house so they'll always belong to it. There'd been a lamp. An old woman had carried it. A servant. One step behind, on her left.

"I was so frightened," said Iselle, "that I couldn't feel my feet. I thought I'd fall. And halfway down, the old woman leaned forward, so close I could feel her breath on my ear, and she whispered, Count, little one. Count the steps. If you're counting, you're still in there."

Roderic didn't say anything.

"Sixty-one steps," said Iselle. "Down to the brazier. I counted every one. And when they put the iron on my wrist and told me to say I am nobody, I said it. Because I was twelve, and they told me to. But I was still counting. Under it. Sixty-one. Sixty-one. Sixty-one." She stopped. "I've counted every stair I've ever been on since. Every single one. I never knew why, until Caitlin. Caitlin counts so the world stays the right size. I count so I stay the right size."

"What was her name?" said Roderic. "The old woman."

"I never knew," said Iselle. "I think that was the point. Nobody ever knew the lamp-servant's name. You weren't supposed to." She took a breath. "I've thought about her every day for eight years. She's the only person in that whole house who ever told me the truth."

* * *

Roderic was quiet for a long time.

Then he said, "I'll say it."

"You don't have to."

"I'll say it," said Roderic. "If you count. If I say I am nobody, and you're counting under it, and I know you're counting, then it's just a word. Isn't it? Like you said."

"Like I said," said Iselle.

He lifted the little tin lamp. He looked at the planks. He said the word.

It was very quiet. It didn't sound like him at all.

"Again," said Iselle. Very gently.

He said it again.

"And now," said Iselle, "say your name. So I know you're still in there."

"Roderic," said Roderic. "Roderic Grey."

* * *

My father came in on Calder at sunset.

He didn't come to the pier. He came down at the far end of the harbor wall, where nobody goes. I went up to meet him. He was standing on the wall with his hands in his pockets, looking northwest toward Harl, which you couldn't see from there, because it was a day's sail away and the world is round.

"Caitlin's at two thousand six hundred," he said, without turning around. "She says the lines go around and come back to where they started. Like a ball of yarn. She says that's good."

"Is it?"

"I have no idea," said my father. "But she sounded pleased. She almost looked up." He turned his head. "How's your brother?"

I told him about the lamp. About Linus Carr disappearing. About the thirteenth step. About Brother Ostrand at the brazier every dawn with his back to the door in the floor. About the word Roderic couldn't say, and then could.

My father listened to all of it without interrupting. When I got to the part about Iselle's old woman, he took his hands out of his pockets and put them on the cold stones of the wall, and kept them there.

"Sixty-one," he said, when I'd finished.

"Sixty-one."

"I want to see that door," said my father.

* * *

"You can't go through the lid," I said.

"I know I can't go through the lid," said my father. "I'm not going to go through anything. I want to look at it. I want to look at the door before I send my son and that girl up the stairs behind it." He looked at me. "You'd want to look at it too."

I did want to look at it.

"Wednesday night," said my father. "Caitlin's last counting night. Kell Dunnet knows the north side. We'll take the jolly boat. No lamps. Just to look." He paused. "Bring Iselle, if she'll come. She's the only one who'd know what she's looking at. Your brother will come whether we ask him or not, so we may as well ask him."

"And if Kessavel sees us?"

My father was quiet for a moment.

"He saw us on Friday," he said. "From the top of his own tower. And he turned around and walked down the stairs."

* * *

Green took the four of us back out on Wednesday afternoon. Iselle rode in front of me, with her shawl tied over her hair and Roderic's arms around her from behind, and none of us said anything for the whole flight, because Green flies very fast when she's in a hurry and talking just blows back down your throat.

Caitlin didn't look up when we landed on the Knock's deck.

"Don't touch anything," she said to the lid. "You'll move my lines."

"We won't touch anything," I said.

"You'll want to," said Caitlin. "Don't."

* * *

We went at midnight, when the watch changed.

Kell Dunnet rowed. He rowed the way he stood on the rail, as if the sea were a floor and the boat were a pair of shoes, without hurry, without splash, the oars going in and out of the black water like a needle through cloth. He'd muffled the oarlocks with strips of Helena's dish towels. Iselle sat in the stern with her right wrist held in her left hand. Roderic sat beside her. My father sat on my left without being asked.

He didn't say anything about it. He just sat down there, on my blind side, close enough that our shoulders touched when the boat rolled, and turned his face toward the island.

Alistair had told me to keep somebody I trusted on that side. He hadn't told me that sometimes they'd just come and sit there by themselves.

* * *

There was no moon. There'd be no moon at all on Saturday. Tonight there was only a sliver, low in the east, very thin, like a paring from a fingernail.

It was enough to see the lid by.

I'd seen it from above, from Green's back, a gray dome over the island like a bowl turned upside down over a crumb. From the water it was something else. It came down out of the dark above us like a wall of smoke that didn't move, and met the sea, and went on into the sea, and you couldn't see where it stopped. The water at its edge was perfectly flat. No waves broke against it. They just went under it and didn't come out.

My father's hands were in his lap. I watched the frost come up on the backs of them, very faintly. He didn't reach for the lid. He didn't do anything.

"One hair harder," he said, very softly. "I can feel it from here."

* * *

Kell Dunnet took us around the north side, a hundred yards off the lid, following the edge of it.

And then the lid bent.

That's the only way I can say it. It ran along the dark water in front of us for half a mile, smooth and gray and perfect. And then it came to a place where the black rock of the island came right down into the sea, and there was a mouth in the rock, low and wide, like a mouth that's yawning. And the lid didn't go over the mouth. It went into it. It curved in through the opening and went back into the dark, the way a sheet tucks under a mattress.

Iselle made a small sound.

"There," she said. "That's the wrist."

* * *

Kell Dunnet shipped his oars and let the tide take us in.

The cave was bigger inside than the mouth. The walls went up into the dark. The water was black and very still and smelled of weed and old iron. Somewhere ahead, water dripped. On either side of us, close enough to touch, the lid ran back along the walls of the cave like gray glass.

And at the back of the cave, there was a stone landing, slick with weed, with an iron ring set into it, rusted to the color of dried blood. And above the landing, set flat into the back wall of the rock, there was a door.

* * *

I don't know what I expected. Something bigger, maybe.

It was just a door. A little narrower than an ordinary one. Black iron. No handle, no hinges that I could see, no keyhole. In the middle of it, at the height of a grown man's chest, there was a hand. A closed fist, in raised iron, the size of a real fist. And just under the fist, there was a shallow hollow in the iron, long and narrow, shaped like the inside of a wrist.

The lid came in from the cave walls on both sides and met the door at its edges, and stopped there.

"Don't," said my father quietly.

I wasn't going to. But I looked.

* * *

Opening things is the only thing I've ever really been good at. I've opened gates and padlocks and hoods and chains and dragons and, once, a ship that wasn't there. When I look at a lock, I can see how it's made. Not with my eyes. With the part of me that knows where the knot is.

So I looked at the door. With my good eye and with the other thing.

And Iselle was right.

Every line in it faced out. Every single one. The whole door was built like a hand closed against a blow, every knuckle turned toward the cave, toward the sea, toward us. It was built to stop anybody who came from outside. It was built very well. It was one hair harder than anything I could open.

But from the other side, from the inside, there was nothing. No lines. No knots. Just the back of a closed hand, with all its fingers folded the wrong way to stop anything at all.

"His locks face out," I whispered.

"I told you," said Iselle. Very quietly. "He builds them all the same."

* * *

That was when her wrist started to hurt.

I saw her flinch. She'd been holding it in her other hand the whole way, and now her fingers tightened around it until the knuckles went white.

"Iselle?" said Roderic.

"It's ringing," she said. "The mark. It's—" She stopped. "It knows I'm here."

My father was already moving. He reached across me with one hand to Kell Dunnet's shoulder, to tell him to back the oars out.

And then, behind the door, very faintly, there was a sound.

Footsteps. On stone. Coming down.

* * *

I counted them. I couldn't help it. I've been around Caitlin too long, and around Iselle too long, and I'd been thinking about sixty-one all day.

They were slow footsteps. Light ones. No lamp; no glow came under the door. Whoever it was didn't need a lamp. One step. Another. A long gap after the twelfth, and then a longer step, as if whoever it was had stepped over something.

The thirteenth.

Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine. Forty.

They stopped.

There was a small sound in the door. A sliding sound, metal on metal. And at the height of a man's eyes, just above the iron fist, a little slot opened in the door, no wider than two fingers. A priests' squint. The kind you look through to see who's knocking.

There was an eye in it. Gray. Pale. Very still.

* * *

It was on my left.

My blind side. Of course it was. The door was in front of me and a little to the left, and the slot was at the left edge of it, and I couldn't see it. I could only see it because I saw Roderic's face go white, and Iselle's hand tighten on her wrist, and my father's head turn slowly to look past me.

So I did what Alistair taught me. I turned my head.

* * *

"Iselle," said Kessavel.

He said it in Kethran. His voice came through the slot very small and very tired, like a voice from the bottom of a well.

Iselle didn't move. Roderic moved, just slightly, to put his shoulder between her and the door. Iselle put her hand on his arm and he stopped.

"Yes," said Iselle.

"The mark on your wrist," said Kessavel. "It rings in my collar. Like a bell in another room. It started ringing the moment your boat came under the edge of my lid. I came down to see who was sworn and still outside." A pause. "I didn't know it was you."

"Now you do," said Iselle.

* * *

There was a long silence. The water dripped somewhere in the dark. The tide moved under the boat.

"Did it hurt?" said Kessavel. "When they did your wrist."

Iselle's hand tightened on Roderic's arm.

"Yes," she said.

The gray eye in the slot didn't move.

"Mine didn't," said Kessavel, after a while. "I didn't know it was happening. I was asleep, I think. Or something like asleep. When I woke up, it was already there." He stopped. "That was the worst of it. Afterward. That it didn't hurt. That I didn't even notice."

* * *

I opened my mouth.

I don't know what I was going to say. My father's hand on my knee, very lightly, said not yet, and I closed it again. But Kessavel's eye moved in the slot, and found me. He'd seen me open it.

"Garrick Grey," he said. "You asked me once if I wanted to stop."

"Yes," I said.

"Don't ask me that here," said Kessavel. "He can hear here. This close to the stair, he can hear everything." He paused. "You've seen my door."

"Yes."

"Then go away," said Kessavel. "And come back when you're coming."

* * *

The slot closed. A little sliding sound, metal on metal.

And then the footsteps went back up. Slowly. I counted again. One. Two. A long step, over the thirteenth. Thirty-nine. Forty.

And then one more. A forty-first. As if he'd stopped at the top, on the landing, and stood there.

And didn't go any further.

* * *

Kell Dunnet took us out of the cave without a word, backing water so slowly that the oars didn't drip. Nobody said anything until we were out past the edge of the lid again, in the open sea, under the paring of moon, with the Knock's little stern lamp a mile off like a star that had come down to sit on the water.

Then Roderic said, "Was that—"

"Yes," said Iselle.

"He let us go," said Roderic. "Again."

"He told us to come back," said my father. He was looking at the island. "Come back when you're coming."

"That's not the same as letting us in," I said.

"No," said my father. "It isn't." He was quiet for a moment. "He might be telling us he won't stop us. Or he might be telling us when to be waiting. I don't know which. I don't think he knows which."

"He knows I'll be at the door," said Iselle. "He'll feel me. The second I put my wrist on it, he'll know."

"Do you still want to go?" said Roderic.

Iselle looked at him. Then she held out her right hand, open, with the faint gray mark on the inside of the wrist turned up to the thin moon.

"Forty steps," she said. "Step over the thirteenth. I'll be counting. And you'll be behind me, one step back, on my left, saying you're nobody." She closed her fingers, gently, around his. "And I'll know you're not."

* * *

When we came up over the Knock's rail, Caitlin still hadn't moved from her bucket. Carol was sitting beside her with a blanket over both of them. Neither of them looked up.

"Two thousand eight hundred and ninety," said Caitlin, to the lid.

"Is that all of them?" I said.

"Nearly," said Caitlin. "I'll have the last of them by dawn." She turned a page in her blue book without looking at it. "He came down his stair."

"How do you know?"

"One of the lines moved," said Caitlin. "Near the bottom. On the north side. It went loose for a little while. Like a stitch when you pull the thread next to it." She paused. "Then it went tight again. But not quite as tight as before." She wrote something very small in the margin. "I've marked it."

Carol looked at me, then. Over the top of Caitlin's head. On my left side, so I had to turn to see her. She raised her eyebrows.

"Forty-one," I said.

"Forty-one," said Caitlin. And wrote that down too.

* * *

Mary's book. Thursday. Written at Westmere at dawn, from what Iselle and Roderic told her when Green brought them in for the day to rest, and what Linus Carr told her on Tuesday, and what Caitlin's book said, which Mary copied very carefully, without letting it get salty.

Tuesday. Linus Carr was a lamp boy since he was nine. The priests took him off his ship at night to carry the lamp on the wrist stair. He showed Roderic how to walk like nobody ever saw him. He disappeared. Roderic says he'll practice.

The stair is 40 steps. The 13th is broken. Step over it. At the top there's a bronze door in the floor behind the brazier, with a hand on it. The smoke goes over it all the time. Nobody sees the lamp boy come up.

Only Brother Ostrand can tell the Hushed what to do. He says the oath at the brazier every dawn with his back to the door.

Iselle was 12 when they did her wrist. An old woman carried the lamp. She whispered count, little one. Iselle has counted every stair since. 61. Nobody knew the old woman's name.

Roderic couldn't say I am nobody. Then he could, if Iselle was counting.

Caitlin. Tuesday night 2,610. Wednesday night 2,890. Nearly all. The last by dawn.

Wednesday midnight. Kell Dunnet rowed Garrick, Uriah, Iselle and Roderic into the sea-cave on the north side. The lid goes into the cave like a sheet tucked under a mattress. The door is black iron with a fist on it. Garrick says every line in it faces out.

Kessavel came down the stair with no lamp. 40 steps. He looked through a slot. He asked Iselle if it hurt. She said yes. He said his didn't, and that was worse. He said don't ask me here, he can hear here. He said come back when you're coming. He went back up. He stopped on the 41st.

Caitlin says one of his lines went loose when he came down. Then not quite as tight.

Uriah sat on Garrick's left in the boat. Nobody asked him to.

And under that, in a careful, upright Kethran hand, the letters very small and very evenly spaced, as though each one had been counted before it was written, with an Avarran translation underneath in the same hand, a little less certain:

Iselle. I'd like it noted that it did hurt, and that I told him so, and that I'm not sorry I told him. And that I'd like very much to know the old woman's name. I'm going to ask, when this is over. Somebody will know. Somebody always does.