The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

Chapter 7: The Night the Sluice Opened

Mother Hesk stood on her step with her skirts bunched in both fists, shrieking with laughter while rats ran over her clogs.

Half the Row was laughing. It was Reading night, the beer had been out since noon, and a river of rats going the wrong way up a street is funny until somebody asks what they are running from.

Old Brann was not laughing.

He had come down off his step and stood in the middle of the street with his thumbs in his belt, watching the brown tide break round his boots. His eyes went along it to the foot of the Row, and the black arch at the waterline.

"Seen that once," he said, when Ravel came up beside him. "Mouth of the Marrow Warren, thirty years back. Rats came out like a tap left running. An hour after, the Warren broke." He turned his head. His eyes were small and shrewd in their pouches. "You've a face on you, lad. What do you know?"

Ravel had spent the afternoon working out what he could say to this man that was true.

"I know what my father used to say. When the rats leave a drain, something worse is coming up it. I know that grating's been rotten since the flood. And I know that if it comes tonight, it comes into a street full of drunk people and children, in the dark."

Brann chewed on that. "Go on."

So Ravel went on. It came out of him the way a party lead gives it: the ground, the danger, a task for each pair of hands. He heard himself doing it and could not stop.

"Nobody stands in water. That's the whole of it. What comes up a drain hunts in water; on dry stone it's meat. So everybody goes upstairs and stays there, and nobody goes down a cellar for anything. There's an iron flap that shuts the drain mouth. The wheel's in the gate-pit."

"Two men's work," said Brann.

"Or one man's, if he's carried frames for forty years."

A grunt that was nearly a laugh.

"And a quarter past second bell, the foundry race opens. Every night of the year. It's in the lock schedule, seventh column. It pulls this pound down a full yard. If the drain's shut by then, the street empties itself, and whatever came up with the water is lying on the cobbles."

"And till then?"

"Till then I keep them off the steps. Lamp oil. They don't like fire on the water."

The old porter looked him over: seventeen, narrow as a lath, in his good shirt.

"You talk like a party lead, boy."

"I listened at the Chartery door."

"Hm." Brann spat. "There's a watch-hound at the lock that knows me. I'll have him along. Send a Dunne to the watch-house for Rusk." Two warm bits were pressed into Ravel's palm. "And you'll not get oil for nothing. Lamplighter's on the Row at dusk. Don't let him cheat you."

It was as easy as that, and afterwards the ease of it was what he could not forgive.

They had an hour, and they used it. An old porter's word carried on Tanner's Row where a boy's would not. Hesk laughed in Brann's face and took her peas indoors anyway. The cooper nailed down his cellar hatch. The three lodgers above the chandler's leaned out and jeered, and stayed where they were, which was all anyone wanted of them. The lamplighter, a long cheerful man called Wend, parted with half a can of oil and a stub of slow-match, and said he would look in when his round was done.

His mother was waiting at their door with her arms folded.

"Brann says upstairs. Brann says you say upstairs."

"Take Pim up to the Harbins' landing. Please, Mam. Don't come down, whatever you hear."

She gave him a hard look, him and whatever it was about his eyes. Then she took Pim's hand and went.

One door did not open. Widow Marsh lodged in the cellar room of the end house, three steps below the street, and she was as deaf as the wood he was hammering on.

"She's at her sister's," Hesk called across. "Every Reading night."

He hammered once more, and went away.

Second bell rang from the Ninth Lock.

He was on the mounting-block outside the chandler's, halfway down the Row, with the can between his feet, the knife in his belt, and the rat inside his shirt, cold against his ribs.

Under the street, something knocked. Once. A deep flat thump, like a laden barge taking a pile. The cobbles jumped. Every lamp on the Row shivered.

Then the grating blew out of its arch in pieces, and the canal came up into Tanner's Row.

It was black, and it smoked with cold. It came over the quay in one smooth fold and ran between the houses faster than a man walks. Before he had counted ten it was shin-deep in the street, and it smelled of deep stone.

There were things in it.

He saw the first by what it did to the lamplight: a crease drawn across the water, arrow-straight, toward the cooper's step, where a forgotten bucket stood rocking. The bucket went over. Something as long as a man and as thick as his thigh rolled where it had been, and showed him its mouth. A hoop of hooked teeth with no jaw behind it, opening and closing on nothing. Two blind white eyes.

Locklurkers. He counted creases. Twelve.

Somebody upstairs began to scream.

"Stay up!" His voice cracked on it. "Stay off the steps!"

He took the rat out of his shirt. One point of soul left, and this thing eating it. "Swim," he told it. "To the lamp. Round it. Don't stop."

It could not swim well. That was the beauty of it. It thrashed. It beat the water with all four legs, tireless and mindless, making for the lamp post twenty paces down, and every crease in the street swung toward it like a needle to a lodestone. They hunted by the tremble in the water. He had just given them the loudest thing on the Row.

He went along the house-fronts from doorstep to doorstep, keeping pace, keeping inside his twenty-four. When the rat began to circle the post, and the eels came boiling in around it, he pulled the bung and flung the oil out over them in a long shining arc. He lit the slow-match at a door-lamp, and threw.

The street caught fire.

It went across the water in a sheet, with a sound like a sail filling. The knot at the lamp post came apart in a frenzy and went thrashing back down the Row toward the dark, trailing flame. From twenty windows came a noise he had not heard in either life. People were cheering him.

He did not hear it for long.

In the ring of fire, between one stroke and the next, the rat stopped swimming and sank. He had nothing left to hold it up with.

And at the foot of the Row, three steps below the street, a cellar door opened. An old woman stepped out into the water with a candle, to see why her floor was wet.

She had not been at her sister's.

"Marsh!" Twenty voices. She could not hear one of them.

Ravel ran.

He broke his own rule. He went down off the step into the black water and ran forty paces through it, with the fire dying behind him and the creases turning.

One of them hit him at the cooper's. It was like taking a mallet in the calf. Then cold, then nothing at all: a leg made of wood. He ran on it.

She was under when he got there. He found her by the candle, still floating. He got his left hand into her shawl and hauled, and she came up white and far too light, and he began to drag her backward toward the steps. As he dragged, his right hand took the knife from his belt, and his body dropped, without asking him, into the only guard it had ever known.

Blade low. Weight back. The other hand full.

It came in along the wall. He had not the strength to stop it or the speed to slip it. What he had was fourteen years of knowing where a Locklurker's skull ends: a hand's breadth behind the eyes, where the hide is thin. When it rose to strike he put the kitchen knife there with his whole weight, and it went in like a key.

He got her onto the top step. She was dead. She had been under too long, or its mates had found her first.

He should have left her then. There were living people on that street.

He straightened her legs. It took one breath. He could not have done otherwise.

And when he took his hand from her shawl, he saw it.

It stood out of her breast, fine as spider-silk and bright as a new blade, and it went straight up through the smoke into the dark. Taut.

He had seen nothing when the rat died. All day he had told himself that the vault had been the casket's doing, or the blood, or a dying man's eyes. That it belonged to the other life.

At the edge of his mind, outside the silver rule, something wrote one slanting word and was gone.

seen

"Here, lad! Give her here, I've got her..."

Wend. The lamplighter was splashing across from the far side with his pole in his hand, because he had said he would look in.

"Get out of the water!"

Wend looked down. He had time for that. Then he went over backward as if a rope had been jerked, and the street closed over him, and a second silver line came up out of the black water and climbed.

From the lock came a clang like a dropped anvil.

The roar under the street stopped. The flap. Brann.

And a breath later, far down the pound, the foundry race opened exactly when the schedule said it would, as it had on every night of his childhood. The black water in Tanner's Row hesitated, and turned, and began to run back down the gutters toward the canal.

It went out fast. In two hundred heartbeats the cobbles showed. What it left behind lay humped and gasping in the lamplight, long bodies beating themselves against the stones.

The Row came down its steps with coal shovels.

It was butchery, and it was soon over. Ravel killed two himself, limping from one to the next, a hand's breadth behind the eyes each time.

[Level 2.]

He hardly saw it. He was listening.

Brann should have been shouting by now. Forty years a porter; he would have been bellowing the count from the lock wall.

There was no shouting from the lock.

He went on his wooden leg. The gate-pit lay open under the great black beam, eleven stone steps down, with a lantern burning on the top one.

The wheel was hard over. He saw that first. An iron bar stood in its spokes, where somebody had levered it through the last quarter-turn.

The watch-hound lay at the foot of the steps with its teeth locked in the throat of a thing half again the size of any in the street. It had come up through the lock, after the noise of the wheel. A second iron bar stood out of its eye.

And Brann sat against the wheel-housing with his legs out in front of him, like a man resting on a long carry, and his coat was black and wet from collar to belt.

His eyes were open. They found Ravel.

Out of the ruin of his chest, a silver thread was rising.

Ravel went down the steps, and reached for it.