The Year 1160

Corwen Ashe died on the thirty-fourth floor of the Wellmouth in the year 1174, with a Hollow Wyrm's jaws around his ribs and the last lantern of the Abyssal floors guttering out above him. He remembered the cold very clearly. He remembered thinking that fourteen years of climbing had bought him nothing but a deeper grave.

Then he woke in a bunk that smelled of lamp oil and wet wool, and the ceiling above him was the low pine ceiling of the Lantern Company bunkhouse in Sallow, and his hands, when he lifted them, were the unscarred hands of a boy of nineteen.

He lay still for a long time. Outside, the morning bell of the Wellmouth rang the first shift down. Somebody in the next bunk was snoring. It was, by every sign he could gather, the spring of the year 1160. He had died in 1174 and woken fourteen years earlier, in his own body, in his own bed.

He said the word that every delver learned on the first day, and the window opened in the air before his eyes.

Level 14. He had been Level 52 when the wyrm took him, and a Master Blade for six years. Now the window called him a Journeyman again, the third tier of the Blade track, which was where a nineteen-year-old with a grade-B talent and no money belonged. Two tiers above him stood the Grand, and there was only one of those in the whole kingdom.

Every delver in the kingdom of Vael learned the two measures as a child. The first was the Ladder. It ran from Level 1 to Level 100, and nobody in living memory had passed sixty. Each level was bought with blood on the dungeon floors, and each one made you a little stronger, a little faster, a little harder to kill. The second measure was the class track. For a Blade, the track had five tiers, and they were always recited in the same order: Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Master, Grandmaster. A Novice held a sword. An Apprentice could use it. A Journeyman could be trusted on the Deep floors. A Master could hold a floor alone. And a Grandmaster was something else again. There was exactly one in the whole kingdom, and he lived in the Queen's palace at Vaelmere.

The talent grade was the measure people got wrong. It ran from F at the bottom through E, D, C, B and A, then S, SS and the almost mythical SSS. A talent grade said how fast you could climb the Ladder, not how high you stood on it. A grade-F cart driver at Level 40 would break a grade-SSS child at Level 3 across his knee. Corwen's grade was B, which meant he climbed a little faster than most and a great deal slower than a few.

He swung his legs out of the bunk and found his boots by memory.

"You're up early, Ashe." Tamsin Rook was sitting on the bench by the door, lacing her greaves. She was twenty, brown-haired, with the broad shoulders of a shield-bearer and a scar across her chin that she would not get for another three years. Her brother Pell sat beside her, eating cold porridge out of the pot with his fingers. Pell Rook was two years younger than his sister and already half a head taller, and he grinned at Corwen with his mouth full.

"Maud wants us on the fourth floor by second bell," Pell said. "Shallow work. Rats and rockhounds. You look like you've seen your own ghost."

Corwen looked at Tamsin and his chest went tight.

In the first life, Tamsin Rook had died in the autumn of 1168, in the week the delvers afterward called the Calamity, when the Abyssal floors had opened and poured their beasts up through the Deep and the Shallow and out of the Wellmouth into the streets of Sallow. He had seen her body. He had carried it.

He opened his mouth to tell her. The words were right there: the Calamity, 1168, the thirty-first floor, do not be in Sallow that autumn.

His throat closed as if a hand had taken it. Not pain, not quite. A silence that sat in his mouth like a stone. He tried again and the stone did not move.

"Ashe?" Tamsin said. "You're going grey."

"Slept badly," he managed, and that came out fine.

He understood it then, or thought he did, and the understanding settled on him like cold water. In the first life there had been a priest on the eleventh floor, an old woman who claimed she had come back once herself, and she had told him a rule he had taken for drunk talk. One who returns, she had said, cannot speak of what is to come to anyone who died in the life he returned from. The dead keep their own silence, and the Returned keep it for them. He had laughed at her. He was not laughing now.

Tamsin had died in the first life. He could not warn her. Pell had lived, as far as Corwen knew, had gone south after the Calamity and never come back, and so Corwen could say anything he liked to Pell. The thought was so unfair he almost laughed after all.

"Up," said a voice from the doorway. Maud Ferris filled it, a square grey woman of fifty with a lantern-pole over her shoulder and the Company's brass badge pinned to her coat. Maud Ferris led the Lantern Company, had led it for eleven years, and every one of the twenty-two delvers who wore the badge answered to her, Corwen among them. "Fourth floor. The Warden wants the rockhound nests cleared before the Marquis comes to inspect the Wellmouth next week. I don't want the Marquis of Sallow seeing rats on my floors."

"Yes, Maud," said Pell.

"Yes, Maud," said Corwen, and the name of the Lantern Company's leader came out of his mouth as easily as it had fourteen years ago, which was only yesterday.

They walked down through Sallow in the grey light. The town sat in a bowl of hills, and in the bottom of the bowl was the Wellmouth, a shaft of black stone wide enough to swallow a cathedral, with the Warden's gatehouse crouched at its lip. Captain Bram Tallow, the Warden of the Wellmouth, stood on the gatehouse steps in his crown-blue coat, counting delvers through with a tally-stick. The Warden was a crown post. Tallow answered to the Queen's chancery and not to any company, and the badge he wore was the Queen's sunburst, not the Lantern's brass.

"Ashe," he said as Corwen passed. "You still owe Marsk for your father's sword, I hear."

"Three gold crowns," Corwen said. "I know."

"Ilya Marsk is not a patient man."

"I know that too."

He did. In the first life he had never got the sword back. His father's blade, Greyhallow, had hung behind Ilya Marsk's counter until the Calamity, and then it had hung nowhere. Three gold crowns. Twenty silver marks to the crown and a hundred copper pennies to the mark, and a Journeyman on Shallow work cleared perhaps thirty pennies a day after the Company's cut. In the first life the sum had been a mountain. He looked at it now and it was a hill.

"Did you hear," Pell said, as they stood in the lift-cage waiting for the winch, "that Old Harrow came through Sallow last month? The Grand himself. Stood at the Wellmouth for an hour and went away again."

"Grandmaster Harrow," Tamsin said. "Show some respect. He's the Queen's Blade."

"He's an old man with a sword."

"He's the only Grandmaster in Vael, and the Queen's Blade is the Queen's own sworn champion, and if he heard you call him Old Harrow he would cut your tongue out and you would thank him for the lesson."

Corwen said nothing. In the first life, Grandmaster Harrow had died on the second day of the Calamity, holding the Wellmouth stair alone while Sallow emptied behind him. The old man had been a Grandmaster, the fifth tier, the top of the track, and the Abyssal floors had still eaten him.

The lift-cage dropped. Lantern light slid up the black walls. Corwen Ashe, Journeyman Blade, Level 14, nineteen years old, stood with his hand on a borrowed sword and did the only arithmetic that mattered now. Eight years to the Calamity. Eight years to get from the third tier to the fourth and, if a grade-B talent could bear it, to the fifth. Eight years to get Tamsin Rook out of Sallow without being able to tell her why.

The cage touched the first floor, and the Shallow dark opened in front of him like a mouth he already knew.