Chapter 13 - The Ferry Road

I went up the rest of the stair.

The fourth flight was the one Fenwick had called unsound, and he had been generous. Two steps were gone altogether, and the one above them rocked under my boot, and I went up the last of it on my hands with my face an inch from the stone, cursing every step out loud so they would hear me coming. They heard me. When I came out through the hatch onto the top of the tower, the laughing had stopped, and the three of them were waiting for me in the wind.

The Tome lay on the parapet. They had propped it up on three loose stones so it could see over the edge, and set a stub of tallow candle beside it, ringed with pebbles to keep off the wind, and the flame stood up straight and yellow in the dark. Kit and Jory sat on the parapet on either side of it with their legs hanging over the drop. They were thin. I had never seen them so thin. I could see the stars through Jory’s chest, and Kit was hardly more than a gray smudge with his hair in it, and the two of them looked at me with the face Bertha made when I caught her in the oat sack.

I picked up the book. I blew out the candle.

“BOY,” said the Tome.

“What’s the price?”

“That,” said the Tome, “is a private matter between the house and its tenants.”

“I own the house.”

“You own the WALLS. You own a great deal of stone, and a well, and a ferry chain nobody wants. You do not own a conversation.”

I turned on the two of them. Kit looked at his bare feet over the drop. Jory looked at me, and his face was so faint in the dark I could hardly read it.

“We didn’t say yes,” Kit said.

“We didn’t say no,” said Jory.

The wind came round the parapet and went through all three of us, and only one of us shivered. I stood there on top of my own tower with the book under my arm and the candle smoking on the stone and looked at the two of them, worn down to nothing from carrying a book eighty-four steps one fire at a time because it had asked them to, and I was so angry my hands shook and so tired I could have lain down on the stone and slept.

“Rule five,” I said. “The book stays where I put it.”

“Is that a rule?” said Jory.

“Yes,” I shouted.

“Yes, master,” said Kit, to his feet.

I carried the Tome down eighty-four steps in the dark, with it complaining about my grip the entire way down, and put it back on the table in the warm room, and sat down on the bed in my coat and pulled my boots off, and the next thing I knew it was morning.

I woke up because somebody was sucking my cock.

I knew who it was before I opened my eyes. I knew her mouth. I knew the rough slide of her chain across my thigh, and the weight of her collar resting on my hip, and the slow, lazy way she went about it, because she had all day and she knew I wasn’t going anywhere. I lay there with my eyes shut and my hips coming up off the bed all on their own, and I put my hand down into her hair, and she made a pleased sound around me, and I felt it all the way up my spine.

“His left hand,” said Jory. “He’s holding her hair wrong.”

I opened my eyes.

It was full daylight. The shutter was open, and white winter sun came in across the quilt, and Kaniz was kneeling between my legs with her shift round her waist and my cock in her mouth, and Kit and Jory were sitting on the foot of the bed with their legs crossed, watching. They had filled back out overnight, and I was so relieved I forgot to be furious that they were watching. They were still gray and still see-through, but they were themselves, Kit with his shirt hanging open and Jory with his arms folded, and they were watching Kaniz like they meant to remember every bit of it.

“Rule two,” I said. It came out as a croak.

“It’s day,” said Kit.

“It’s been day for hours,” said Jory. “You slept through the bell. We rang it twice.”

Kaniz didn’t stop. She looked up at me along my body, her dark eyes wide and bright, and took me deeper, all the way, till her nose was in my hair and I felt the back of her throat, and held me there, and I stopped caring about rules altogether.

“Oh,” Kit whispered to Jory. “Look at that. Look how she does that.”

“I’m looking.”

“Can you do that?”

“I’ve done that,” said Jory. “You were there.”

Kaniz swallowed around me. My heels dug into the mattress. I had my hand fisted in her black hair, wrong or not, and she went up and down on me slow and wet with her tongue working underneath, and the cold came off the two of them at the foot of the bed onto my bare feet, and I could feel them watching, every second of it. I’d been watched before, by Felix and by the Tome, more times than I could count, but never by two men who looked like they’d have given their whole afterlife to be the one kneeling there.

It made me come so hard I yelled.

Kaniz took all of it. She held still with her mouth round me till I was finished, and swallowed, and pulled off me slow, and licked her lips, and sat back on her heels between my knees with her collar shining in the sun.

“Good morning, master,” she said.

At the foot of the bed, Kit had both hands over his mouth.

“That,” said Jory, after a while, in the voice of a man reviewing a bill and finding nothing to dispute, “was very well done.”

The Tome, on the table, said nothing at all. It hadn’t said a word since I put it back on the table. Its eye was open, and it was turned toward the window, toward the tower at the corner of the wall, and it didn’t look round at me once. I should have worried about that. I was too busy lying there with my cock out, too pleased with myself to think.

I went up the tower again after breakfast, because I wanted to see who could have seen that candle.

It was harder in daylight. I could see how far down it went through the gaps where the steps were gone, and the loose one moved worse than I remembered, and my balls tried to climb back up inside me. But I got to the top, and stood at the parapet where the Tome had been propped on its three stones, and looked out.

You could see everything from up there. The river was frozen white all the way round the inn, with the old landing and my useless ferry chain under the snow, and on the far bank there was nothing but willows for miles. To the west, the old road ran back along the river toward Ashbourne, white and empty, with nothing on it but the tracks of the brewers’ wagon and Bertha. To the north, where the road forked, the ferry road went off across the flats toward the new crossing upstream, dead straight. And anybody on either road, anywhere for a mile, could have looked up last night and seen my candle.

I kept my eyes on the ferry road.

There was a horse on it. It was standing still at the edge of the willows where the road went into the trees, a good bay horse with a blanket on it, a horse I wanted to steal on sight, and a second horse beside it, and beside the horses, just inside the trees, two people in dark coats with their hoods up, standing stock-still and staring at the River Bell.

They were looking straight at me.

My stomach went cold. I didn’t move. Ashara had taught me that, the first week, with a switch: the eye goes to what moves. I stayed on the parapet in the sun and kept still, and the two of them kept still in the willows, and after a long time one of them put back her hood.

She was too far away for me to see her face, but I could see her hair, which was pale and done up high and elaborate on her head, the way a lady did her hair to go to a dinner, and I could see something red at the cuffs of her coat. She held both her hands up in front of her, palms out toward the tower, and kept them there. Beside her, the other one did it too. I had no idea what it meant, and I liked it a lot less than if they’d pulled bows on me.

I would have bet my mule they were listening to the book.

I was down the stair in the time it took to swear, and through the yard, and out of the gate at a run.

I went into the willows along the river bank, low, a quarter of a mile below the place where the ferry road went into the trees, and I let the Shadow Dance take me.

It came easier than it had in the drain. There was nothing in the willows but snow and gray branches and cold, and I sank into it, and my breathing slowed and my thoughts went thin and my feet found the places where the snow had blown off the roots. I came up through the trees toward the road. I didn’t hurry. I could hear them before I saw them.

“…so much louder,” the woman was saying. She had a rich woman’s voice, plump and pleased with itself. “Can you hear it, darling? It’s so much louder out here. At home it was in the next room. Out here it’s in the same room.”

“I can hear it,” said the other. A young man’s voice, with a cold in it. “I can hear it, it’s lovely, can we please go back now? My feet are wet.”

“The Deacon said to watch.”

“The Deacon said to watch the tower, and we watched the tower, and there was a man on the tower, and now there isn’t.” He sniffed. “Where did he go?”

I was close enough to see them now, through the last of the willows. The woman was fifty or so, plump and still good-looking in a fur-lined coat that cost more than my mule, with crimson cuffs showing under the fur and a gold ring on every finger. The young man was thin and pink and miserable, in a coat too big for him, with a ledger under his arm. He looked like a clerk, or somebody’s son. Behind them, in a trampled clearing off the road, I could see where they had stood all night: a ring in the snow, and in the ring a circle of black candle stubs, burned down to nothing, with their wicks all bent the same way, toward the tower.

“He’ll have gone to it,” said the woman. Her voice went low and greedy. “He sleeps in the same room with it, darling. Every night. Imagine. Imagine lying in the dark and hearing it right there, close enough to touch.” She put her ringed hand over her heart. “The Deacon says tonight. When the moon is down. Everyone. All of us at once, and we’ll go in, and we’ll be close enough to touch.”

“And the man?”

“The Deacon says the man is a vessel,” said the woman, “like the carter,” and smiled.

I came out of the willows.

I didn’t decide to. My body went before I did, as it always does, the Shadow Dance going to pieces round me, and I was out of the trees and onto the road with my dagger in my hand and my heart slamming, and the young man saw me and screamed. He screamed like a girl at a mouse and threw his ledger at me and ran for his horse. The woman didn’t scream. She looked at me with her pale eyes wide and her hands still raised, and she looked happier than anybody I had ever seen.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, it’s you. It’s on you. I can smell it on you.”

I went for her. She was faster than she looked, and I was slower than I should have been, and she was up on her bay horse before I reached it and wheeling it round, and the horse struck at me with a front hoof, and I threw myself sideways into the snow. When I got up, they were both gone down the ferry road at a gallop, and the young man’s hat was lying in the road.

I picked up the ledger.

It was a clerk’s ledger, bound in green, and he had written in it in a neat round hand. He had written the same thing on every line, on every page, all the way through the book, in ink and then in pencil when the ink ran out:

It is up. It is up. It is up. It is up.

I read three pages of it standing in the snow before I made myself stop.

I put the ledger down on the table in front of the Tome.

It looked at it. It had its eye open, and the eye went over the page, the neat round hand going down the lines, and stopped at the bottom, and didn’t come up.

The whole household was in the warm room. Kaniz sat on the bed with her knees drawn up. Kit sat on the windowsill, in the sun, with the light coming straight through him onto the floor. Jory stood by the door with his arms folded and his face careful. It was past noon, and the room was bright and cold, and nobody had said a word since I came in. I was still out of breath from the run, and I wanted to throw the book in the fire.

“Tonight,” I said. “When the moon’s down. All of them.”

The Tome said nothing.

“A woman in the willows said I’m a vessel, like the carter.” My voice shook, and I let it. “They stood out there all night with their hands up, listening to you. They lit candles pointed at you. You had them carry you up the tower and light a candle on the top of it so anybody on the ferry road could see. Tell me why.”

Kit picked at his sleeve.

“They have come for the book,” it said at last. “For me.”

“I know that.”

“You do not know that. You know they want it. You do not know that I let them.” Its eye came up off the ledger, and it looked at me, and it didn’t shout. “I have let them hear me since the spring, boy. In their beds. Not words. Only enough. Only the sound of somebody reading in the next room, so they would lie awake and want it.”

Kaniz had gone still on the bed. Kit had turned round on the sill.

“Why?” I said.

“Because I was BORED!” Its voice cracked up into a shout and broke there, and came back down. “Eight months in one small room above a tavern. Eight months of a mule and an egg and a slave I had already taught everything, and a boy who uses me for a doorstop, and nothing, NOTHING, boy, to read but the inside of his coat. I was a book that had been read by emperors. I wanted to be heard. I thought a few dreamers in a few warm beds would be a pleasant thing. A little congregation. A little admiration.” Its eye went back to the ledger, to it is up, it is up. “I did not know they would open a carter on four brass bowls and point his hands at my table. I did not know it until I heard it through the floor.”

“And then they were under your landlady’s storeroom,” said the Tome, lower. “Under her kitchen. Under the florist’s shop next, I suppose, wherever the book went. And I could not stop them hearing me. I tried. I have tried every night since the carter. A thing that has been heard cannot make itself unheard. So I did the other thing. I moved where they would follow. Out of the lane. Out of the city. To a house with a wall twice your height and an iron gate and two dead men who do not die. And last night I lit a candle so that they would know exactly where to come.”

“You brought them to my house.”

“I brought them to a house with WALLS!” It was shouting again, and the shout was a relief. “Your landlady had a PRIVY! Would you rather they came for me through her storeroom floor at midnight, with her asleep upstairs? I chose the ground, boy. Every general worth his salt chooses the ground. I watched a margrave hold a mountain pass with forty men because he chose the ground.”

“What happened to the margrave?”

“He died,” said the Tome. “But the pass held.”

I sat down on the bed beside Kaniz. My legs were shaking too hard to stand on. She put her hand on my knee, and it was steady, and I put mine over it.

“And the price,” said Jory, from the door. He said it evenly. “For making us felt.”

The Tome’s eye went to him.

“Blood is ink,” it said. “Every rite is written in something. The rite that would make you solid, gentlemen, for as long as you like, is a long rite, and it wants a great deal of ink.” Its eye moved to the window, to the empty white road beyond the wall. “And a great deal of ink is walking toward this house tonight, of its own accord, with its hands up.”

Kit made a small sound on the windowsill.

“I never asked for anybody to die for it,” he said. “I didn’t… We didn’t say yes.”

“You will not have to ask,” said the Tome. “They are coming whether you say yes or no. The only question in this house tonight is what the walls do when they get here.” Its eye came round to me. “And that, boy, is the question you have been refusing to answer since you signed. What do you allow?”

The gate was hanging on one hinge.

I had driven a wagon through it twice and never once thought about it. It stood open on its one good hinge, sagging, with its bottom corner frozen into the snow, and when I put my shoulder to it, it didn’t move an inch.

“Kit was going to fix that,” said Jory, behind me. “The week we died. He had the new hinge.”

“It’s in the stable,” said Kit. “On the shelf over the end stall. Wrapped in a sack.”

It was. It was a big black iron hinge, wrapped in a sack that had rotted round it, with a box of bolts beside it, waiting three winters for a man who had needed one more week. I carried it out to the gate. I dug the gate’s corner out of the frozen snow with Lily’s spade, which she had left driven into the ground with its red ribbon, and I tied Bertha’s lead rope to the top bar of the gate and talked to her for a long time, kindly, about oats, and got her to pull.

It took the rest of the afternoon. It took me and Bertha and Kaniz, who hung her full weight off the top bar of the gate with her chain looped round it while I hammered the bolts into the post, and looked at Kaniz’s ass instead of the bolt, and swore, and bled from a knuckle, and hammered again. The ghosts couldn’t lift anything. They stayed beside me through all of it. Kit told me which bolt went in which hole, and got it wrong half the time. Jory told me where the post was rotten and where it was sound, because he had set it.

When the sun touched the willows, the gate swung shut on two hinges, and the bar dropped into its brackets with a sound I felt in my teeth.

I stood there with my hands on the bar, sweating in the snow, and Kit came and stood beside me. He put his hand on top of mine on the bar. It went through, cold and tingling, and he left it there anyway.

“That’s my hinge,” he said.

“It’s a good hinge.”

“I know it’s a good hinge. I picked it.” He stared at our hands, his gray one sunk right through mine. “If the book’s right,” he said, low, “I could hold this. I could hold you. Without the fire.”

My cock heard that before I did. It went heavy in my trousers in the freezing yard, at the gate I had hung, with a cult coming, and I hated it, and I didn’t move my hand.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t want it yet.”

“I’ve wanted it for three years,” said Kit. “I can’t do yet.”

I closed up the house. I swung every iron shutter on the ground floor shut and dropped every bar, and Kaniz went round after me and checked each one, and Jory told me which ones stuck. The egg went down to the cellar in its crate, into the second cell, wrapped in both blankets, and Kaniz put her iron ring in with it for luck, which she said was what you did. I sharpened both my daggers, put the four ritual knives from the catacombs on me, two in my belt at the back and one in each boot, and told myself six knives meant six more chances, and built the fire in the common room up high, till it roared.

I left the Tome on the table in the warm room, where I had put it. It didn’t say anything when I went out.

Jory was on the tower. He had gone up at dusk without my telling him, and I had let him, because he had set the stones of it himself and knew every one, and because nobody else in the house could stand on the parapet all night in the wind without freezing. I was in the yard, checking the bar on the gate for the fourth time, when he called down.

“Samuel,” he said. “The ferry road.”

I climbed up onto the gatehouse to see over the wall.

The moon had gone down. The ferry road ran north across the flats into the dark, and all along it, from the willows to as far as I could see, there were lights. They were small yellow lights, candles, held up in hands, one and one and one, in a long, slow, swaying line, walking toward the River Bell. I tried to count them. I got to sixty, and they were still coming out of the trees.