The chapel had been under water for a long time, and nobody had told the water.
It came over my boots and stopped at the ankle — warm, and moving like something asleep and not quite.
Stone pews. A font the size of a cart. At the far end, the drowned altar, and above it a woman made of brass with her hands full of nothing.
“Don’t drink it,” Pell said.
“Wasn’t going to.”
“People do.” She was already reading the walls, spectacles up, one finger tracking a line of script. “It’s the only water on six floors. That’s the trick of the room. Somebody always drinks it.”
Dagny had the stone on her shoulder now. She’d rigged the strap through her pauldron so it pointed where she pointed, which meant it pointed at me, which meant the city had been looking at the back of my neck for two floors.
“Does that have to be aimed at me?”
“It’s the only light we’ve got,” she said, without turning round.
We had two lanterns.
I let it go. That is a thing I have started doing, and I have not decided yet whether it is patience.
Then my knees did the other thing. Not the collapse — the low ache that had been sitting under my ribs since the Counting Room, and which had spent the last hour turning from a worry into a debt with interest on it.
I counted, because counting is what I do instead of feeling. Six hours since the brass. Two floors. The ache had gone from a hum to a knock.
“Pell. How long does this last?”
“It doesn’t last,” she said, in her components voice. “It accumulates. It’s why the deep parties send one person down and bring four back.”
“Is that a real saying, or a thing you just made up?”
“Both. It’s in the sealed reports.”
Silwen had stopped walking. She was standing in the water with her bow across her back and her ears gone completely still, which is what her ears do when she has decided something and would rather not say so.
“We should rest,” she said.
“We’re not resting. We’re two floors from the arch.”
“You are two floors from the arch,” she said. “I’m two floors from a long sit down, and the water’s warm.”
She sat.
Not on the pew. On the step of the font, boots in the water, and she took out a piece of dried apple and began to eat it, and Dagny — the woman who once walked eleven miles on a broken ankle rather than admit she was tired — sat down on the pew beside her.
I stood in the middle of the flooded chapel with three people sitting and looking at me and understood that the descent had stopped being something I was running.
“Get up.”
“Ask me nicely,” Silwen said.
“I’m not asking. I’m the one with the map.”
“You’re the one with the map,” she agreed. “And you’re shaking.”
I looked at my hand.
I had, in fact, been holding my satchel strap so hard my fingers had gone white, and somewhere between the arch and the font I had put my other hand flat against my thigh and left it there, and neither of those was about the walking.
Six years of proper adventuring and I have never once had to say the words out loud.
“Silwen.” My voice came out at the wrong pitch. “Take them ahead.”
“No.”
“I’m asking.”
“You’re ordering. Ask.”
The water moved against my boots like something turning over in its sleep. Behind me, the stone glowed warmer, and the brass woman above the altar went from dull to gold, and I knew, with the certainty of a man hearing a door lock, that the audience was not only watching. It was waiting.
“Please,” I said. “Take them ahead.”
Silwen’s ears came up.
“Ten minutes,” she said, and stood, and took Dagny by the elbow without a word. “We’ll be no further than the arch.”
They went. The stone stayed.
That was the trick of it, and I understood it as they faded into the dark. The privacy was real. It had been given to me. I had paid for it with the only thing I had left — saying the word out loud to three women who would never let me forget it.
I put my back against the font and got my belt open, and the water was warm, and above me the brass woman had both hands full of nothing at all.