THE ROOTING SONG

The copper tube found her left arm before it found her throat.

She had twisted away from it in the narrow cell, wrenching her head to the side until her cheek was pressed against the cold glass and her scar throbbed with the strain, and the thing had paused in its slow ascent, swaying, as a snake pauses when its prey has moved. For one dreadful moment it hung in the air an inch from her neck. Then it dipped, as if it had changed its mind, and slid down the length of her arm in a cold bright line and found the bare crook of the elbow, where the sleeve had slipped from the wrist band, and drove its silver point into the vein.

The scream tore out of her before she could prevent it.

It did not hurt as she had imagined. It was worse. The point went in clean and quick, with a small sharp pinch that was over at once, and what followed was a long, deep, appalling pull, as if a hand had reached into the middle of her body and begun, very gently, to draw out a thread. She felt her blood leave her. She felt it run down the tube in a warm bright stream and out through the floor of the cell and away along the channels in the rock toward the center of the pit. She felt the green go with it, the green that she had been taught all her life to hide, flowing out of her veins like light out of a broken lamp, and she felt the Well drink it down with a great slow sigh of satisfaction.

So that is what it feels like, she thought, with a strange detached wonder. So that is what they were all feeling, Agnes. All of you. All this time.

The cell began to swim. Her knees gave way and she slid down the glass, held upright only by the copper bands on her wrists, and hung there with her head against her shoulder and the light of the pit wavering in front of her eyes in slow bright rings. Far above, through a hundred feet of stone, she heard the muffled booming of the second bell, and the third.

He is up there, she thought. He is standing at the altar in front of a thousand people, and he is going to say it, and I will not be there to hear.

The thought brought her a quite unexpected fury.

…

It rose in her slowly, from somewhere below the weakness, like a stone coming up through water. She had spent twenty-four years being practical. She had been careful and clever and patient. She had read the footnotes, and bowed her head, and hid her scar under a high collar, and kept her temper, and she had been told by every person in authority she had ever met that the sensible thing was to endure. She had a sudden vivid recollection of the fishmonger in Marrow Creek who used to wrap her father's herring in the Highmark Dispatch, and of herself at seven years old, flattening the greasy pages on the kitchen table and reading by the stove: the Dominion prospers under a wise and benevolent Council. She had believed it. She had believed it for years.

No, she thought. I am done with being sensible.

The seed was still around her neck, in its little cloth bag, lying against her skin below the scar. She could feel it. She could feel its warmth, which was now almost a heat, and the faint insistent pulse of it, patient and steady, like the heart of a sleeping child. She could not move her hands. But she did not need her hands to sing.

She closed her eyes, filled her lungs as deeply as the bands would allow, and began.

It was not the song she had sung in the Glasshouse, nor the careful lullaby she had murmured at Lila's door. It was the Rooting Song as she had never dared to sing it, with her whole body, from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head, in the full open throat voice of a woman who has stopped being afraid of being heard. The long spiral opening rose out of her and climbed the shaft like smoke. It struck the black glass walls and came back doubled, and the cells trembled with it, and the copper bands on her wrists began to ring.

Down by the creek where the green things grow, she sang, and now there were words, they had come back, they came up out of her blood as easily as breath, the water runs clear and the willows bow low.

…

The seed split.

She felt it happen against her chest, a small clean snap like the cracking of a nut, and then a warm wet rush as something thin and strong and impossibly alive uncurled out of the shell. It was a root. It slid from the cloth bag like a pale thread, no thicker than a strand of wool, and wound itself around her throat once, lightly, in a green caress. It crept over her shoulder. It followed the line of her arm down to the elbow, and there, with a delicacy that made her gasp, it coiled around the copper tube where it entered her vein and squeezed.

The tube parted with a sound like a plucked string.

The silver point slid out of her arm. A trickle of bright blood ran down her wrist, and for a moment the whole pit seemed to hold its breath. The root went on. It uncoiled from her elbow and spread across the copper bands in a delicate green net, and where it touched, the metal turned dark and brittle and flaked away like old bark. One of the bands fell off her wrist and rang on the floor. Then the other, and she staggered, and her knees gave and she caught herself on the glass, gasping, blood-warm and half blind with weakness, and the root ran down her body and into the cracks of the cell floor and away.

Plant it where the water is sick.

The song did not stop. It had begun to carry her, rather than the other way about. She could feel the root traveling through the rock beneath the cell, thin as a hair, unrolling in the dark, finding the channels where the tubes ran and dividing and subdividing as it went. Into every channel. Along every tube. She felt it pass the cell to her left, where a gray-braided woman hung in the copper bands with her head bowed, and the cell beyond, and the cell beyond that. And she felt, with a sudden shock that went through her like cold water, the first answer.

It was a voice. It was very faint, and cracked, and it came from the cell on her right. She turned her head. In the glass beside her, a dark woman in a Bayou shawl, who had been hanging with her chin on her chest and her long black hair across her face, had lifted her head.

Her eyes were open. They were green.

"Keep singing, girl," said the woman, in a voice like old paper. She had to repeat it, because she had not spoken in years, and the first time it had been only breath. "Keep singing, child, and don't you dare stop."

…

It went through the Well like a wind through a field of grain.

One by one, in tier upon tier, up and down the great circle of the pit, the sleepers were waking. She saw it from her cell. She saw the gray-braided woman raise her head, and the old man with the shaved skull open his eyes, and a boy of twenty with blue lips draw a long shuddering breath and cough. The faint flicker of green that had been drawn away through the tubes came back, stronger, brighter, spreading along the veins of their throats and arms. Their lips began to move. A thin cracked humming rose from the cells, from a hundred throats, from two hundred, from four hundred, ragged and out of tune and slow, picking up the melody in broken pieces, like a congregation that has not sung a hymn in many years and is trying to remember it.

The roots will hold you while the whole world sleeps.

Where the sleepers woke, the tubes began to wither. She saw them going dark one after another in long lines down the walls, curling up like burned paper, falling away from the throats they had fed upon. The copper bands cracked. A thin green fur crept over the glass of the cells, and the glass began to craze, and there was a sound of breaking all through the shaft like the thawing of a river.

Down in the pit, the light of the Sunwell flickered.

It was the first time she had seen it do anything but pour. The bright slow honeyed gold of the surface shuddered, and dimmed, and flared up again in an angry red. A long groan rolled up out of the depths, a sound of huge discontent. The chains around the rim of the Well began to rattle on their rivets. She felt it as a shudder in the floor, and then a tremor in the glass of her cell, and then the first crack, which ran from top to bottom across the panel in front of her face with a shrill cold ping.

"Tamsin, where are you?"

It came from far away, from the dark mouth of the gallery behind her, high and clear and desperate. She knew that voice. She would have known it at the bottom of the sea. She turned her head, with the song still in her mouth, and saw a small figure in a gray flannel gown come tearing out of the passage onto the stair, with a rag doll in one hand and a lantern in the other, and a mass of tangled black hair flying behind her.

…

"Tamsin, Tamsin, I heard you singing!"

Lila ran down the glass stair as if it were a meadow. Her bare feet flashed on the black steps and her lantern swung wildly, scattering light, and behind her, three at a time, came Dorian, bareheaded, with his arm out of its sling and a miner's pickax in his good hand. He shouted something that she did not catch. He was soaked to the skin and grinning like a madman. And behind him, pouring out of the dark of the gallery in a long ragged river, came the people.

There were hundreds. They came down the stair two and three abreast, holding lanterns and candle ends and the little green glow that rose from their own cupped palms, men in miners' boots, and women in black Bayou shawls, and white-headed grandmothers on the arms of grandsons, and children. She saw Jonah's sandy head near the front, with a lantern in one fist and Granny Odell's hand in the other. She saw Granny, small and grim and bolt upright with her stick in her fist, taking the steps one at a time with the inexorable steadiness of a glacier. She saw a hundred faces from the church at Marrow Creek, and faces she did not know, from the Bayou and the Calder seams and the Wards. They were all singing. They had come into the dark singing the Rooting Song, and it rolled up and down the walls of the pit with a sound like the sea.

"We came by the river," panted Dorian, as he reached her cell. "There's an overflow culvert at the foot of the cliffs, the one in Finch's map, a great stone tunnel big enough to drive a coach through. Half of it's under water. We had to wade." He spat a mouthful of dirty river onto the glass. "Lila heard you when we were still a mile off. She stopped in the middle of the passage and said, 'She's started.' I thought she was having a fit."

"I was listening," said Lila, arriving, and flung herself against the glass.

Her small face was pressed against the pane, and her eyes were enormous, and green, and fierce. She had one palm flat to the glass and the other fisted in the doll's gingham dress, and she was shaking with something that was not fear.

"I can hear her," she said. "It is Mama, and she's down there in the bottom of it, and she is so loud, Tamsin, and she's crying, and I can't make her stop."

"I know, my darling," said Tamsin. Her voice broke. She had to stop and breathe. "I know that you can hear her. We are going to try to help her. But first, Dorian is going to get me out of this box, and then you are going to take my hand and sing with me, and we are going to wake everyone in this place."

"Stand back, both of you," said Dorian.

He swung the ax.

…

The glass of her cell burst outward in a bright shower of fragments, and the green fur on the panels flaked away like frost. She fell forward into his arms. He held her up with one hand, for she had no strength left in her legs, and with the other he took the last copper band by its broken edge and snapped it from her ankle. His face was inches from hers. It was filthy and wet and white around the mouth, and the lopsided grin had a look of rigid terror behind it.

"I have been up since midnight," said Dorian hoarsely. "I have walked eleven miles. I waded a river with a child on my back, and fell down a thousand stairs in the dark. I am going to be insufferable about this for a very long time."

"I shall let you," said Tamsin, and began to laugh and cry at once.

Lila's arms went round her waist, and she bent and gathered the small body against her. She was warm and solid and fiercely alive, and she smelled of river mud and chamomile. Over the child's head Tamsin saw the Rootkin spreading out along the tiers, a hundred pairs of hands fumbling at latches, a hundred voices rising. She saw Granny Odell stand before the cell of an old Bayou man and set her gnarled palm flat against the glass. She saw the glass crack from top to bottom, and the old man fall out of it into the arms of two weeping grandsons. She saw Jonah hurtle along a gallery with a crowbar. She saw the white-haired woman in the fifth tier lifted down.

Agnes, she thought. Her eyes blurred. Agnes, they are free. They are all of them free.

"Take my hand," she said to Lila. "Both hands, if you can, and hold tight, and sing it with me. Like we did at Granny's. Sing it as if there was no one in the world but the two of us."

Lila gave a solemn nod, took both of Tamsin's hands in her small cold ones, and shut her eyes, and began.

…

It was like putting a lamp beside a sun.

Tamsin's voice had been a thread of light in the dark of the pit. Lila's joined it, high and clear and perfect, and the two of them braided together and became a rope, and the rope reached down. The green blazed out of the child like a fountain. It poured through their joined hands, and up Tamsin's arms, and she felt her own wound close and the weakness fall away from her like a dropped cloak. Roots burst from the walls of the shaft. They were thick as ship's cables, green and gold and silver, glittering with dew. They crawled up the black glass. They wound about the iron chains of the Well and the pillars of the gallery, and split the stone, and the whole great circle of the pit lit up with a rich warm waking light like the first morning of the world.

The singing swelled to a roar.

For a moment she thought it was done. She had a wild bright certainty, a feeling in her chest like the lifting of a great weight, that the thing was over, and the Well was finished, and the old wrong undone. She saw it on the faces about her. She saw it on Granny's face, wet and shining. She saw Dorian lift his fist.

Then somewhere high above them in the rock, something began to turn.

She felt it before she heard it, a deep metallic grinding in the walls, as of enormous gears being thrown into mesh. Dust sifted down from the vault. The roots paused in their climbing. Along the rim of the pit, high on the topmost gallery where the shaft opened into the Cathedral's foundations, a row of copper pipes as wide as chimney flues began to glow, one after another, dull red, and then orange, and then white. A shrill whistling filled the air. The surface of the Well, which had been shuddering and blood-colored, went suddenly still, and clear, and brilliant, and the light that rose from it was no longer the warm honey gold of the morning but a hard, pitiless, burning yellow, like the glare of molten metal.

"Everybody get down!" screamed Dorian.

The first drop fell.

It fell from the vault above them, a single bead of liquid gold the size of a pea, and it struck the stair three feet from Lila's foot with a hiss and a puff of smoke, and burned a hole through the glass as clean as a drill. A second fell, and a third, and then the whole ceiling of the shaft was raining fire.

…

They ran for the shelter of the gallery arches, Dorian with his coat flung over Lila's head, Tamsin dragging Jonah by the collar, Granny hauled bodily along between two enormous miners who had picked her up as if she were a sack of flour. The golden rain hissed on the steps behind them. It splashed on the glass and ate it away. It struck the edge of a cell and the cell was gone, in a burst of white steam, and a woman screamed and a man shouted and the singing broke into a hundred pieces. Tamsin pressed her back against the wall of an arch with the child clasped to her chest and watched the fire come down in sheets, and thought with a dull terror that it was falling all over the Cistern, and up the flues, and into the Cathedral.

Soren, she thought. Soren is up there. All of them are up there. It will come out of the floor.

"It's the Binding," said Granny, panting, at her side. She had one hand clamped on her stick and the other braced against the stone, and her old face was gray. "It is what the Landry man told us. They have started it from above, and the Well must take the full blood of an Aldridge in the hour of the ceremony, or it will burst."

"But Soren has refused. He is supposed to have refused."

"Then it will burst anyway, child, with all of us in it. It will fall up through the floor of the Cathedral, and burn every living soul in the place, Gilded and green." Granny's voice shook. "That is what they built it to do. It is the last trick of the Founders, when the Well can no longer be fed. It takes the whole city with it."

A voice spoke.

It came from nowhere and everywhere, out of the copper flues, out of the speaking pipes that she had not noticed, ringing and booming down the length of the pit with the courteous, deliberate, silken ease of a voice that has never once been raised in its life. The whole shaft shook with it.

"My dear Miss Reed," said Harlan Sterling. "I must congratulate you on your resourcefulness. I confess that I had not anticipated the root. Still, I think that we may regard the matter as settled, and I thought that I should say a word before we all went on to other things."

She stood very still.

"You cannot save them," said the Chancellor, "and the Dominion, both. If you free the people in the cells, the Well will burst, and the whole city above will burn. If you give the Well what it wants, the city will stand. It is not a cruel arithmetic. It is merely arithmetic." A pause, as of a man consulting his watch. "I will give you five minutes, Miss Reed, and I suggest that you choose with care."