The Lake to the East

Day 221 began the way every day had begun since the sky fell, except that when Jace Marrow woke in the dark he could see his sister breathing on the other cot without opening his eyes, a small steady warmth two metres away, and the shaking in his hands did not come.

He pulled up the window anyway. Habit.

Stage Two Early. Two days old. He kept expecting to wake up and find it had been a dream and the window had gone back to One Peak out of spite.

"Stop looking at it," Nia said, without opening her eyes. "You've looked at it forty times since Day 219. It isn't going anywhere."

"You looked at yours every morning for two hundred days."

"I'm your sister. I'm allowed to be a hypocrite." She sat up. "Briefing. She wants everyone, Hands and the new seven and Osaka too, which she never does, so it's something."

It was something.

The briefing board under the main gate had been chalked fresh, and the first line of it was new. Day 1 was the Ashfall. Day 40 was the founding of the Greywall Compact. Day 219, a Stage Two inside the wall. Day 221, today. Below that, the ladder, the nine stages and their three sublevels, unchanged. Below that, in red, the five tiers of the dead, unchanged. And below that, in a hand Jace did not recognise, somebody had chalked Davor Kessel's name and the day he died and the words pipe wrench, and the Warden had not had it rubbed out.

Mireille Dast stood under the gate with her two Captains at her shoulders, Tomas Brandt on the left and Sera Quill, who ran the wall, on the right, and she was the Warden of Greywall this morning exactly as she had been on Day 40, and Jace found that the sight of her standing there steadied him more than the window did.

"Thirty-seven Hands," she said. "One Stage Three, which is me. One Stage Two Early, which is Marrow, as of Day 219. Thirty-six at Stage One or not awakened at all. I want you to hear those numbers, because they are the numbers I have been looking at for two days and they are the reason for what I am about to say."

She let the silence sit.

"The Choir is louder. Marrow can feel it, which none of the rest of us can, and he tells me it is one thing, not many, and that it is thinking. Captain Brandt tells me, and he is right, that nobody on this wall climbs on whites and greens, and that the only thing that has ever pushed one of ours over a line was a Tier 3 nucleus, and that the only place Tier 3s have ever been reported in numbers is Carrow City. The Choir is in Carrow City. The Hound came from the east, from Carrow City. So I am going to do the thing I have refused to do for two hundred days. I am going to send a run east."

The murmur this time was not about greens.

"Not tomorrow. Not this week. We have thirty-six people who cannot survive a Tier 3 and I will not march them into a city that sings. We will go when we are ready, and we will spend the time between now and then getting ready, and part of getting ready is this: I want to know where my greens are going."

She looked, as she said it, directly at Ren Osaka, and the trader looked back and did not blink.

"Thirty greens on Day 214. Twenty-eight this morning. Still locked. Still my key. Osaka tells me there is a drain in the floor of the vault that connects to the old filtration channels, and that the channels run under half the plant, and that a person small enough could come up through it. So that is where we look. Okada."

Ren Okada stepped forward. The scout had come to the briefing straight off the wall and had ash on her face.

"You and Marrow walk the channels today, with his new trick. If anything warm is down there that should not be, I want to know by dusk. If it's a person, I want a name. If it's not a person, I want you both back up the ladder before you find out what it is."

"Warden."

"Pell." Dana Pell looked up, startled; Wren was behind her as always, peering round. "Your brother says he can read a radio schematic. Harrow Bridge's radio is slag, but ours isn't, and I want to know whether the thing in Carrow City is making a noise on any frequency a radio can hear. He starts in the radio room this morning. Your daughter stays out of the grain store."

Wren made a face. Petr Pell, in the back, nodded with the grim concentration of a man who had spent a week in a cellar and would take any job that kept him above ground.

The channels under the plant were cold and wet and smelled of two hundred days of nothing. Ren Okada went first with a shuttered torch she did not switch on, because even underground the rule was the rule, and Jace came behind her with his eyes closed, which the scout found funny until she understood that he was not walking blind. He was walking by heat. The channels were a map of cold; the pipes were colder lines in it; and the two of them were the only warm things for fifty metres in any direction, except once, at a junction under the old settling tanks, where he felt a small warmth low down and to the right and said so, and Okada put her hand on it and it was a rat.

"Nothing," he said, an hour in. "Nothing that's alive that shouldn't be."

"Then it's not coming through the channels now," Okada said. "Or it's coming at a time we're not here. Or it's not warm."

"Everything that's alive is warm."

"Everything that's alive," she agreed, and neither of them said the next thing, and they climbed back up the ladder into the grey light.

He told the Warden. She wrote it on the board under the greens count: channels clear, Day 221, Marrow and Okada. And then, because she was the Warden and because she did not waste a Hand's afternoon, she sent him to the wall, where he put down four shamblers with Davor's knife and felt every one of them arrive as a patch of cold against the warmth of the ground long before Nia, beside him, saw them.

"He'd have liked this," Nia said, on the wall, about Davor. It was the first time she had said his name since the grave. "You feeling them coming. He'd have said it was a cheat and then he'd have stood behind you and let you cheat for him."

"He stood in front," Jace said. "That was the whole trouble with him."

The sun touched the top of the wall. Greywall went dark, the way it did every night, every lamp shuttered and every fire pit cold, because the rule was the rule and the Warden did not bend it and Millbrook had died for the lack of it. Jace stood on the wall in the dark and felt the stronghold at his back as a field of small warm lights, thirty-seven Hands and a Warden and a trader and a ten-year-old who was, he could tell, not in bed. He felt the dead at the base of the wall as a scatter of cold.

And to the east he felt the lake.

It was closer. He was almost sure of it. Two days ago it had been at a distance he could not put a number to, and tonight it was at a distance he could not put a number to but which was smaller, and it was not a held note anymore. It had changed pitch. Where the Choir had risen and fallen like breathing, it now rose and did not fall, and under it, so faint that he thought at first it was his own pulse, there was a second note, deeper, answering.

"Nia," he said.

"I hear it."

"You can't hear it. Nobody can hear it. I can feel it, and it's two now, and it knows there's a Stage Two inside this wall."

"You don't know that."

"No," Jace said. "I don't."

Below them, under the gate, where the board could not be read in the dark, the day's last line waited for morning: what is singing from Carrow City, and why is it getting closer.