Chapter 12The Heart

“My desk will ring in a minute,” Saskia said. “I’ll go up and tell them I’m standing next to the post.” She looked past Wes into the dark at the back of the chamber, where the basins went on down without the lamp. “How long do you need?”

Wes looked at Pruitt, who was looking at his knee. “Half an hour,” Wes said.

“Then take half an hour.”

She went up through the dark toward the throat without a light, the Greaves hanging from one hand. Before she’d gone ten meters the dark had her. Wes listened for her on the slabs and heard nothing at all.

“She’s going to stand next to that post while it reads the cloud I left,” he said, “and tell her own House it’s fine.”

“She’s going to stand at her post.” Pruitt held up a hand to be pulled. “Get me up.”

The knee took Pruitt’s weight for one step and complained about it. They went on with Pruitt’s arm over Wes’s shoulders, the lamp in his free hand, two men leaving a bar at closing. Pruitt still read the stone, only slower, from higher up.

They went round the fourth basin on its high side. It still had its pool, smaller than the others and dimmer; Wes left it where it lay. Somewhere back across the basins his line came tight at its full length; he gave it two pulls for more. From far up the throat Hamid’s voice came down small: “Tying on.” A minute later the rope went slack again.

Past the fourth basin the chamber started to close. The walls came in from both sides. For the first time since the throat the lamp found a roof, low and grey and ribbed with old cracks, sloping down toward a cleft at the back. The air got warmer the further in they went. Under the petal on Wes’s forearm the Draft had stopped being a slow drain. Something ahead of them was pulling hard through the stone.

“Something’s drinking,” he said.

“I know,” Pruitt said. “I can hear it.”

Wes could hear it too now: a long, slow sound, wet and patient, coming up out of the cleft in pulses about a breath apart. On every pulse the pull on his forearm jerked like a line with a fish on it.

At the mouth of the cleft the floor dropped away into the last basin. Pruitt let himself down onto the rim with his bad leg out in front of him, set the lamp on the stone and aimed it down into the dark.

The heart sat at the bottom.

It was the size of the Bucket. Wes’s first thought was a church bell somebody had set down mouth-first over a drain. Grey shell plated its sides, ribbed from crown to rim, while a lip of pale flesh sealed the rim to the floor all the way round the sump. It didn’t move except to swallow. On every pulse the whole bell drew in a little; the sound came up the cleft; the Draft jerked on his arm.

Arms ran out from under the rim across the floor of the basin, a dozen or more, pale grey, each as thick as a diver. Every arm lay in a groove worn into the stone, a drain it had made for itself out to the basin’s edge where the pools came in.

“Nobody’s got one of these on Shelfnotes,” Wes said quietly.

“Nobody’s ever looked at one from here.” Pruitt kept his eyes on it. “Last time, Vahl would have gone at it from the front. Four hunters, swords, thirty-one hours.” He moved the lamp down to the basin floor. “Floor first.”

He read it sitting down, with Wes crouched at his shoulder following the light. “The grooves are its,” Pruitt said. “Every one’s got an arm in it. Step in a groove and it’ll know you’re there before you do. Between them it’s dry. See? Grey, no grease. It’s sucked that floor clean.” The lamp moved along the near wall of the cleft. “Wall’s cracked all the way up. You could climb that.”

“To what?”

“Look up,” Pruitt said, and tipped the lamp.

Eight meters over the heart the cleft narrowed to a slot. Four slabs of fallen skin lay jammed across it one on another, each as thick as a mattress, their broken edges still glinting gold. Some chute of their own in the roof had brought them all the way back here before the slot caught them.

“Those came in when your door opened,” Pruitt said.

Of the four, the bottom slab was the worst. Its near end rested on a single knob of rock where the wall bulged, a lump no bigger than a car battery, which took the slab’s whole weight at an angle. Between slab and knob a wedge of broken skin had jammed itself in tight.

“See the bottom one? Near end.” Pruitt kept the light on it. “That one’s sitting on nothing.”

Sitting on nothing, Pruitt had said in the throat. The slab he’d meant had gone down a gap the moment the rope touched it.

Under them the heart swallowed again. Wes looked from the slab to the bell.

“I can’t hit that,” he said. “It’s a Second Circle. On reserve I’m about a Second. That’s two Seconds slapping each other for twelve seconds. After that I’m sitting down next to it for sixty.”

“No.”

“But that”—he nodded at the slab—“isn’t a Second. That’s a few tons of Hollow door, eight meters up.”

Pruitt was quiet for a moment. “You’d want to knock the wedge out,” he said slowly. “Not climb onto the slab. If you’re on it, you go with it.”

“So I’m on the knob.”

“You’re on the knob, under the three that don’t fall.” Pruitt looked up at the stack again. “I think they don’t fall.”

“You think.”

“I’m reading a floor from a chair. I’m telling you what I think.” Pruitt turned to him at last. “The arms will come up the wall after you. Slick covers your hands and one arm. It doesn’t cover the rest of you.”

Wes looked from the cracks that ran up the wall to the knob under the slab. Twelve seconds gets me up, he thought. Then sixty sitting on a lump of rock, under three slabs, with the wedge still in. He worked it again and got the same answer. The twelve gets me up. The wedge needs something more, and all I’ve got is the twelve.

“I’m telling you before I do it,” he said. “Jules’s rule.”

“I heard you.” Pruitt set his watch on his knee where the lamp could see it. “Go on, then.”

He went down into the basin on the dry stone between two grooves. Three steps from the wall, the first arm moved. It didn’t come up out of its groove. It slid along the groove toward him, slow as a cat deciding, until its tip lay a meter from his boot. When the heart swallowed, the arm came on another hand’s width.

At the foot of the wall a second arm rose out of its groove and slapped down across the stone where he’d been about to step, so he stepped somewhere else. Off the floor it came after him, pale and blind, to wrap his left forearm in one smooth turn.

When the arm squeezed, Slick did what the card said: the grip slid down off the petal, over his wrist and off his hand, his arm held out like somebody else’s. The arm dropped back into its groove. A long shiver ran down it into the bell. All round the basin, every arm had lifted its tip.

He went on reserve.

The wall came at him. He went up it on fingers and boot-edges, crack to crack, fast enough that the rock blurred. On the third reach his right forearm opened again under Jules’s tape; he felt it go and kept climbing. Below him the arms came off the floor all at once with a sound like wet rope pulled out of a bucket. One slapped the wall under his boots. Another got as high as his knee and slid off the rock. He didn’t look down; he kept his eyes on the knob until his right hand caught its lip, then hauled himself onto it on his chest.

The reserve ran out as his knees came over the edge.

He was crouched on a lump of rock eight meters up. A few tons of Hollow door rested on the other half of it, a hand from his head. The wedge was right by his shoulder, jammed where slab met knob. He got a heel on it and kicked. The wedge didn’t notice.

Under him the arms had found the wall. One came up the rock in long, blind slaps, a meter higher each time. Down in the basin the heart had stopped swallowing. What came out of the bell now was a low hum that Wes felt through his knees in the stone. Over his head the slab creaked.

Sixty, he thought. It isn’t going to give me sixty.

He reached for the reserve again, seconds after it had gone, before the ring could settle. Something answered. It came thin and short, but it came. With his back against the wall he put both boots on the wedge and pushed.

The wedge went. It shot out of the gap and fell, turning, past the arms. For half a second nothing else happened. Then the slab’s near corner came off the knob with a crack like a rifle, a hand from his shins.

The slab went down flat.

It fell eight meters and hit the crown of the bell with a sound Wes felt in his teeth. The bell split from crown to rim. Under the slab’s weight the whole heart went down into its own sump as far as it would go, its rim tearing off the floor, its shell folding round the slab’s edges. It stuck there, wedged in its own drain with a mattress of skin on its back. Over Wes’s head the three slabs left in the slot ground down a finger’s width together and stopped. He crouched on the knob with his back to the wall and nothing left to say yes to, while the basin under him went mad.

“Twelve,” Pruitt was saying from the rim. “Then five. That’s five, Wes, you had five. Sit.”

“I’m sitting.”

“Then I’m counting.”

The arms didn’t know where he was anymore. They came up off the floor in every direction, slapping at the walls, at the slab, at each other. One came up the wall right under the knob and fell across his boots, heavy as a fallen tree. It didn’t squeeze; it just lay there twitching. As a nine he couldn’t shift it. He put his hands flat on the knob and didn’t move.

Twelve, then five, then sixty of nothing, he thought. Ask for the reserve again before the ring’s settled and you get a little more, not much.

“Twenty,” Pruitt said. The slabs overhead creaked in the slot. Under the fallen one the bell hissed, a long leaking sound, while the hum went on lower. Half the arms had gone back to their grooves and lay there jerking. The one across his boots twitched in time with the hiss.

“Thirty.”

He kept his eyes down while grit pattered onto his head out of the slot. I think they don’t fall, Pruitt had said.

“Forty.”

The arm across his boots slid a hand’s width down the wall and stopped. The hum faltered and came back once, very low, then cut out like a fridge in a power cut.

Every arm in the basin went slack at once.

The words came up behind his eyes in the same plain square letters as everything else the Sink had ever told him. On the rim Pruitt had stopped counting out loud, his ringed hand turned to the lamp.

Every Marked hand in this city lights up at once, Mags had said at the Grate. Half my line will know the night you did it. It wasn’t night; it was a little after seven on a Saturday morning. Every Marked person in Caddock had just been told that somebody had cleared House Vahl’s Hollow: Kessler on his way to Ten, Benny Sato over his breakfast, Moss wherever Moss slept, somebody at a Vahl desk with an alarm already ringing.

“Sixty,” Pruitt said, in a different voice.

The reserve was there when he reached for it. Wes lifted the dead arm off his boots, dropped it into the basin and came down the wall in three long reaches to land between two grooves.

Three things in the basin were glowing.

The biggest lay half out of the split bell, where the slab’s corner had cracked the shell open like an egg. It was the heart core, a disc of light the size of a truck tire, warm amber at the edges and white in the middle. Rolled partway out when the bell went down, it leaned against the broken shell and lit the whole basin from below.

The other two glowing things were smaller. Round the sump, where the bell’s rim had been, the floor was littered with old grey husks: the dry shed skins of divers, dozens of them, curled and flat like snakeskin behind a garden shed. Two of them had darkened when the heart died; now their edges shone. One was the hollow shell of a head, jaw and all. The other was a length of body skin as long as Wes’s arm, rolled loosely on itself.

“A heart always pays,” Pruitt said from the rim. “That’s the one thing everybody knows about them.”

The heart’s own cloud hadn’t come yet. When it came, it came all at once.

Out of the split bell and out of every limp arm in the basin, the spill lifted together in one slow, heavy column of gold. It filled the cleft, rose against the slabs in the slot and spread out under the roof: more than both pools together, more than the gillback, a Second Circle heart at the bottom of its own Hollow. Its light threw Pruitt’s shadow three meters tall on the wall behind him.

He’d let the diver’s cloud go to pay Saskia. This one was theirs. Wes opened his hand and wanted it.

It came down out of the roof in a single bent rope, hot and heavy, into the back of his left hand. Past the ring it went, past the splinter, down past the whale, past the pools, to wherever the cellar kept its floor. It went on going in for a long time. When the last of it was gone the basin shrank back to the size of the lamp. He was sitting on the stone.

Held, heavy, full, he thought. Full sounds like the last one. Under the ring something sat harder than it had before, pressing, like a full bag on the floor of a cupboard. Nothing came up out of it.

“Pruitt.”

“I saw. Full?”

“Full.”

Pruitt didn’t say anything to that. He got his good leg under him and stood up the slow way, one hand on the wall and the lamp in the other. “I’ll find us a dry way back,” he said. “I’m not going round that fourth pool on its low side. Not today.” He went off along the rim reading the floor aloud to himself, taking the light with him.

That left Wes in the glow of the core. He went over to the husks first. Close by the sump, half under the slab’s edge, lay something that wasn’t a husk. It was a plate the size of a car door, grey-green, curved like a shell off a beach. Along one edge it thickened into a knotted hinge of something like gristle gone to stone. It wasn’t diver; diver scale was small and overlapped. It wasn’t the heart’s either, since the bell’s shell was ribbed and this was smooth.

He touched it with his boot. It didn’t glow or give him a card. The husks did, so he picked up the head first.

That one was Saskia’s. He set it down on the core.

The other one was as light as a sock. It unrolled in his hands into a long sleeve of fine grey scale, cut to go from wrist to shoulder, with a gold sheen under the grey.

He read the last line twice.

Twenty minutes ago he’d hauled Pruitt out of a pool blue-lipped. It’s not air, Pruitt had said. Face in it and you drown.

In pooled spill, you breathe.

Down the rim, the lamp had stopped at the fourth basin. Pruitt was reading its edge with his back to the cleft.

Requirement not met, Wes thought. On a First it’s a sock, and it stays a sock till I go down to Twelve and come back a Second. He looked at the Hood sitting on the core. Vahl brought two pieces out of here last time. Greaves and Hood makes two again.

Two, last time. She gets two. He rolled the Sleeve up as small as it would go, a grey fist of scale, pushed it down into the chest pocket where a lapper petal had ridden once and zipped the pocket shut.

The core was heavier than it looked. By the time Pruitt came back with the lamp, Wes had it lying flat on the stone beside the bell with the Hood on top.

“Dry all the way to the throat on the high side,” Pruitt said. He looked at the core for a long moment. “That’s a truck tire.”

“That’s Dolly’s.”

“That’s Dolly’s,” Pruitt agreed.

A nine could lift it off the floor. A nine couldn’t carry it up three basins and a thirty-meter throat with an old man hanging off his shoulder. So he did it in bites, the way Petra had rigged the gillback on Ten. On reserve he got the core onto his back and went up out of the basin and along the rim as far as the reserve lasted, then set it down. Pruitt limped after him with the light.

“Sit,” Pruitt said, with the watch up. After the first bite he made him sit the whole sixty. After the second, he let the hand go round only halfway.

“Try it.”

“That’s thirty.”

“Try it.”

When Wes put his hands under the core and said yes, the reserve was there. “Thirty,” Pruitt said. “Thirty, son.”

Two minutes, ninety, sixty, thirty, Wes thought, lifting. Every meal takes a bite out of the sit and leaves the twelve alone. Twelve on, thirty off. Out of every forty-two seconds, I’m only what the sheet says for thirty.

It took eleven bites to reach the foot of the throat. At the last one Wes set the core down on the bottom slab and sat beside it with his back to the rock. Pruitt sat down on the other side of it, his leg out, the Hood in his lap.

Above them the throat went up thirty meters over the fallen skin to the hole. Dolly’s work light still stood at the lip, a square of white at the top of the dark. Somebody was standing in it.

Saskia stood on the lip with the light behind her, her face turned down. She wasn’t looking down the throat at them. She had her left hand up in front of her face. She was reading the back of it.