THE CISTERN

The Cathedral of the Founders was cold in the hour before dawn, and its cold was not the clean honest cold of snow but an older thing, damp and mineral and faintly sweet, like the breath of a cellar where something has been kept for a very long time.

Tamsin came in through the Chapel of the Queens.

It was the one place in Highmark that nobody had thought to guard, because nobody had ever imagined that a person might wish to break into a graveyard. The little chapel stood against the north wall of the great church, behind a screen of dead ivy, and a side door of the vestry gave onto it that had not been locked in a hundred years. Finch had found it for her. He had drawn the whole route on the back of a hymn sheet, in the tiny exact hand of a man who has spent his life copying out the lines of other people's catalogues, and she had learned it by heart on the train, with her lips moving, until Soren had put a hand over hers and told her she would wear a hole in the paper.

Now she walked it alone, in the dark, with a dark lantern shuttered to a thread, in a plain gray dress and soft boots, with the copper key in her pocket and the seed in a little cloth bag round her neck. The nave was a vast black cavern above her, hung with banners and garlands for the wedding, with a smell of hothouse lilies and beeswax and the slow dying heat of a thousand candles. She did not go into it. She went down. A flight of worn steps behind the altar led to the crypt, and at the bottom of it she found herself in a low vaulted gallery lined with the tombs of the Founders, whose carved stone effigies lay on their backs with their hands folded on their breasts, in the attitudes of men who have never been troubled by a doubt.

Edmund Aldridge, she read on the nearest, by the thread of lantern light. First Defender of the Realm.

She did not stop. She did not look at the face. She walked on between the tombs with her heart knocking against her ribs, and came at last to a narrow door at the end of the gallery, set low in the rock, black iron studded with copper bolts.

There was no lock that she could see. There was only a flat disc in the center of the door, the size of her palm, stamped with a sunburst, and as she drew the key from her pocket it began to hum.

…

The door opened without a sound.

It swung inward on its own weight, smooth and silent, and behind it a spiral stair went down into the dark. She stood at the top for a long moment with the lantern lifted. The steps were of black glass, polished by feet that had not trodden them for three hundred years, and each of them shone faintly in the light like the surface of a pond. The air that came up was warmer than the air of the crypt. It carried a smell of wet stone and old iron, and underneath it another smell, thin and sharp and unmistakable, that she had last known on the floor of the infirmary at Vandermere.

It was the smell of blood.

I have a choice, she thought. I can go back now, and Soren can stand in the Cathedral alone, with all the evidence in the world, and say what he likes. And the Well will go on as it has gone on for three hundred years.

The seed was warm against her breastbone. She laid her hand over it, and began to hum.

The Rooting Song rose from her throat without effort, soft and low, and she felt it travel out of her into the stone. The stair answered. A tremor ran through the glass beneath her feet, and the faint glimmering of the steps brightened, step by step, down and down into the dark, as though the whole stair had been waiting for a signal. It was not a light she could have read by. But it showed her the way, a thin green path winding away into the depths, and she put her foot upon the first step and began to descend.

…

She went down for a very long time.

There were four hundred steps, by her count, and then a landing, and then another stair. She lost the number after that. The walls were close and dripping, and the light of her song moved ahead of her, following the turns of the passage, leading her through low arched corridors and across narrow bridges over black wells that breathed up cold. Once she passed a cell cut into the rock, with an iron grille, and a chain on the floor, and a heap of gray rags in the corner that she did not examine. Once the passage opened on a landing where a dozen steps led down to a flooded vault, and she saw on the black surface of the water the reflection of her own face, thin and white, with the scar gleaming on her neck like a line of writing.

The hum grew louder. It had been a murmur, in the Glasshouse, a trembling at the edge of hearing. Now it filled her chest and her skull and the bones of her fingers, a vast, slow, sleepy sound, like the breathing of an animal larger than the world. She began to be afraid. She had not been afraid on the stair, nor in the crypt, but she was afraid now, with a small cold animal fear that sat in her throat and would not be swallowed.

It knows I am here.

She came round the last turn of the passage, and stopped, and put the back of her hand against her mouth.

…

The Sunwell lay at the bottom of the world.

It was a pit. It was a great round shaft sunk into the rock, so wide that she could not see the other side of it through the shimmer, and so deep that the sound of the water at the bottom came up to her only as a long, soft, regular murmur, like a tide. The walls of the shaft were lined with black glass. Around the rim ran a ring of carved stone, forty feet across, inscribed in letters she did not know, and wound about the ring in endless coils were iron chains as thick as her arm, bolted to the floor with rivets of copper, each link engraved with a tiny crabbed glyph.

And in the pit, filling it from the bottom to a hand's breadth below the rim, there was light.

It was not gold, as she had thought it would be. It was red-gold, a thick glowing liquid color like honey held up to a fire, and it moved. It swirled and gleamed in slow eddies, throwing up bright veils of vapor that hung in the air above it and drifted. She could feel its heat on her face. She could feel it pulling at her blood, as a magnet pulls at a needle, an enormous, patient, hungry attraction that made her scar burn and her knees weaken, and she gripped the iron rail at the edge of the gallery and held on.

It is alive, she thought. It is a thing that wants.

Then she looked at what stood around it, and forgot everything else.

They were set in the walls of the shaft in rings, in tiers that rose upward into the dark like the boxes of a theater, hundreds upon hundreds of narrow cells of thick glass, each as tall as a man, each lit from within by the glow of the pit. In every cell there was a body. They stood upright, bound by the wrists and ankles with copper bands, their heads lolling, their eyes shut, and from the base of each throat, just under the jaw, a thin copper tube ran down through the floor of the cell and out along a channel in the rock toward the center of the Well. She saw an old man with a shaved head and a face like a carved saint. She saw a woman with her gray braid hanging over one shoulder. She saw a young man, hardly more than a boy, who could not have been twenty, whose lips were blue, and beside him a girl of perhaps twelve with a ribbon still tied in her hair.

The Rootkin, she thought. These are the ones who went into the Glasshouse and never came out. These are the ones who were taken at night from the Wards, and from the Hollows, and from the Bayou, on the roads in the dark. They are all here. They are all still here.

And they were alive. She understood that after a moment, with a slow terrible shock. Their chests moved. Their eyelids flickered, as the lids of sleepers do, and a faint pulse of green passed over the veins of their throats, a flicker like a firefly, and was drawn away through the tube and into the pit. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of sleeping people, held up in their glass boxes like specimens, and the blood going out of them with every beat of their hearts.

The Rooting Song died in her throat.

…

It was a long time before she moved.

She went down the stair that wound around the inner wall of the shaft, past the first tier, and the second, and the third, with her hand sliding along the rail and her eyes going from face to face. She could not help it. She searched every one. She knew what she was looking for, and knew that she would find it, and could not stop. Past the old man, and the woman with the braid, and a thin dark-skinned man in a Bayou shawl, and at the turn of the fifth tier, in a cell a little apart from the rest, she saw a mass of white hair.

Mother Agnes stood in the glass with her head bowed on her chest.

She was still wearing the gray shift from the Glasshouse, and her feet were bare, and the copper bands at her wrists had left red marks on the thin brown skin. Her face was calm. The tube in her throat was dark and dry. There was no flicker in the veins of her neck, and no movement in her chest, and the green that had once made her black eyes shine was gone out of her like a lamp that has run out of oil. She looked smaller than she had in the cell. She looked as though she had folded herself up, quietly and neatly, in order to give no trouble.

She told me, thought Tamsin. She told me, and I did not understand.

It's a harvest, cher.

She went down on her knees on the cold glass, with her forehead against the cell, and her hands spread on the panel on either side of Agnes's face. She did not make a sound. Her breath came in dry shuddering gasps, and she felt the tears run down her cheeks and drip from her chin, and she felt the seed burning against her chest as though it had been struck.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I am so sorry, Agnes. I should have stayed with you. I should have held your hand."

The glass was cold under her palms. Nothing answered.

…

"I must say that I admire your persistence."

The voice came from behind her, from the stair, pleasant and cultivated and entirely unhurried, and every hair on her body rose at once.

She turned her head slowly.

Harlan Sterling was standing on the landing, three steps above her, in a black morning coat and a white waistcoat and a white rose. He carried a gold-headed cane. He looked, she thought, wildly, exactly as he had looked in the Council chamber on the day of her trial, a handsome silver-haired man of fifty-eight, well-groomed and mild, a man who might have been the senior partner of a respectable bank. There was no triumph on his face and no malice. He regarded her with the courteous, slightly rueful interest of a host who has found a guest in the pantry.

"I did hope that you would come, you know," he said. "I had a man at each of the three doors since Tuesday, in case you were fool enough to come by another way. But I rather thought that you would use the key. It was the only path that the Well itself would open to you, and you have always been so thorough."

She got to her feet. Her legs shook, and she held onto the rail. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Only for a few minutes. I did not wish to interrupt your devotions." His eyes moved to the cell beside her, to the white-haired figure in the glass, and he made a small gesture with his hand that might have been compassion. "I see that you have found our dear Mrs. Thibodeaux. Six years she lasted, which is much longer than one would expect. I regretted it, of course. But the Well makes demands, and she was a woman of great generosity."

"You murdered her."

"I used what was available." He sighed. "Miss Reed, I should like to say a few things before we proceed, if you will allow me. I think that you are owed it. You are a person of intelligence, and it seems a pity to leave you in ignorance of how very well you have done."

"I do not want to hear..."

"You were selected, my dear, because you were convenient."

He said it quite gently.

"I read the file in October. I had been looking, you understand, for a certain kind of candidate. Someone of unusual gifts, with a strong line of the green, but poor, and unconnected, and without protectors. A scholar, of course, because the Princess required a tutor, and I needed someone who would ask the correct questions and be seen asking them. A woman from the Hollows. A woman with a motive, in the eyes of the world, to hate the Crown." He smiled faintly. "A brilliant Hollow girl with a motive, a method, and no friends. If you had succeeded in rousing the Princess, so much the better. If you were caught, as I fully intended, there was a trial prepared. And in either case, you would end by walking down this very stair, of your own free will, with a key in your pocket and a song in your throat."

She stared at him.

"The Emperor gave you the key, did he not?" he said. "I rather suspected that he would. A sentimental man, in his lucid hours. I let him. It saved a great deal of trouble. You played your part beautifully, Miss Reed. I should like you to know that I mean that sincerely."

…

"You were with her," said Tamsin.

She heard her own voice as from a great way off, steady and cold and strange. "You were with Adeline. In her bedroom. You held Soren's shoulder, and you told him you were sorry. And you stood there, and all the time you were..."

"Taking her blood?" Sterling raised an eyebrow. "Why yes, of course. Dr. Pell collected it in the last week, in a small silver bowl. It is a pity to waste such a thing. The Empress was the strongest root I have ever encountered, and the Well has fed on her ever since. You would be surprised how much light one woman can give." He tapped his cane thoughtfully on the stone. "It is why the child hears it, I think. She has her mother's blood, and the Well has her mother's blood, and the two of them speak. It is quite touching, in a way."

Mama is under the floor.

Something broke in Tamsin then, very quietly, like a thread that has been drawn too tight. She had not known that she was capable of hatred. She had thought herself too tired, and too sorry, and too much in the habit of explaining other people to herself. But she stood on the glass stair at the bottom of the world with the dead in their boxes at her back and the sleeping light before her, and looked at the gentle gray-eyed man in the white rose, and felt the hatred rise in her, bright and clean and absolute as the edge of a blade.

"You are going to lose," she said.

"Am I really going to lose?" He looked mildly interested. "I should be very curious to know how."

"Because you have forgotten who is on the other side of the door."

"I assume that you mean the Duke." He sighed. "He will come to the Cathedral, as I know he will. He will make a speech. And at that moment, by an arrangement which I have taken some pains to perfect, a quantity of Frost Guard will quietly close the doors, and my daughter will take her place at the altar, and the ceremony will proceed whether he wishes it or not. The Binding does not require that he be willing, my dear. It requires only that he be present, and that his blood be shed. He will be most comfortable. I shall see to it personally."

He moved down a step. He did it unhurriedly, with the cane in his gloved hand, and she saw for the first time that there were men behind him in the dimness, four of them, in the gray-blue of the Frost Guard, with rifles.

…

She did not remember deciding to run.

She was on the stair, and then she was past the cell and tearing down the long curve of the gallery, with the glass ringing under her boots and the bright eddying light going past in a blur, and she heard a shout and the heavy pounding of feet. She did not get far. She had gone perhaps forty steps when a hand like a vise closed on her hair and jerked her backward, and she screamed and kicked and clawed at the leather glove, and was hauled round and pinned against the wall with a rifle butt in the small of her back.

"Be gentle with her," said Sterling, strolling up. "There is no need for violence. Miss Reed is a guest."

"Let go of me!"

"There is a vacancy, I believe, on the sixth tier." He nodded to the sergeant. "The one next to the Bayou woman. It has been prepared since the end of November."

It was empty.

She saw it as they dragged her up the stair, an open glass cell, a little apart from the rest, with the door swung wide and the copper bands ready at the wrists and ankles. A brass plate was set in the glass at about the height of her heart. It had been engraved in a clear flowing hand, with her name, and the date, and a number. They had even spelled it correctly.

They threw her in. The door slammed behind her with a ringing finality like the closing of a vault, and she heard the key turn, and the click of a bolt. She flung herself against the glass. She beat on it with both fists, and saw the Chancellor's face on the other side, mild and attentive, with the faint blur of her own breath fogging the pane between them.

Far above, through a hundred and fifty feet of rock, there came a sound.

It was a bell. It was the great bell of the Cathedral of the Founders, tolling across the roofs of Highmark in the first light of Midwinter morning, deep and slow and golden, and the whole shaft thrummed with it, and the glass of her cell trembled against her palms.

"Listen to that," said Sterling, tilting his head. "That is the first bell. The wedding has begun."

He turned and went up the stair, with his cane tapping, and the four soldiers filed after him, and she heard the sound of their boots die away into the dark.

…

The light flickered, and a pale stream of vapor rose from the copper bands at her wrists, with a thin faint hissing, and she felt the metal shift and tighten against her skin, closing, as a hand closes round a small bird.

She stood with her back against the glass and her heart racing, and looked down.

At her feet, coming through a small round hole in the floor of the cell, something was moving. It was a copper tube, no thicker than a pencil, supple as a snake, with a polished silver point at the end. It lifted its head slowly out of the hole. It swayed from side to side, as if tasting the air. Then it began to crawl up the glass toward her throat.

She heard the second bell strike.