Episode 261 · The Rivet

Varren came into the mill after dark, alone, with a bag over one shoulder. Bram had already tied their rope around his own waist. Soles stood beside the open hatch, watching the doorway.

Bram inspected him without offering a hand.

— You know the way?

— From below.

— Then you can tell them what to expect before they find it.

Maxim lowered the first coil, and they went down, leaving Bram at the hatch. At the bottom, Soles waited for Tesa. She caught the back of his coat and kept hold until Krista’s flashlight found the narrow ledge beside the channel.

Before they went on, Varren told them he had found the blade months ago, then brought Zora, Halloran and Noct back to see the chamber. He had pushed against a weak place beside a pillar. The opening had remained when he stopped.

— You opened it? Soles asked.

— Yes.

Soles wanted to see exactly where Varren had put his hand.

They followed the channel beneath the embankment.

Halfway along, the channel dropped. The water went over a stone step as high as a man and fell into a pool they could hear and not see, and the ledge went down beside it in three wet treads, slick with spray. The noise filled Soles’s left ear and left nothing for the right.

Varren went first, the rope at his waist.

— The second one moves, he said over his shoulder.

Soles put his boot on the second tread, carefully, at the wall end. It tilted anyway.

He went sideways toward the fall. His hand slapped the wall and found only wet stone. The flashlight beam swung across the spray, and below it was black water, loud and close.

His stomach dropped before his body did.

A hand closed on his right wrist, over the cuff.

He hung by it, one boot scraping the tread, the other in the spray. Above him Varren lay half on the bottom tread with his free arm braced against the wall and the rope taut behind him.

This afternoon I wouldn’t take this hand. If he opens it, nobody will ever know it wasn’t the step.

Soles got his boot onto the loose tread and pushed. The stone slid out from under him and went into the pool, and for a heartbeat all his weight was on that one hand.

It did not open.

He brought his left hand up and closed it on Varren’s wrist in turn, the way you take a hand you have decided to shake, and Varren leaned back into the rope and drew him up the step as if he weighed nothing, until Soles’s knees found the tread and Tesa’s fist closed on the back of his coat from above.

They let go at the same moment.

Neither of them said anything. Varren stood, wiped his palm on his coat and went on along the ledge. Soles followed with water running out of his sleeve.

The mill brickwork ended at a stone opening, where Varren stopped to let Krista light the chamber beyond.

The ceiling rose above their beams. Roots had been cut across it, thick near the pillars, branching into finer grooves toward the walls. A low stone table occupied the middle of the floor. Beyond it, beside a pillar, a slit hung just above the ground. Its uneven light washed the stone below. Steps rose beside the table toward a shut slab in the far wall.

Soles stopped in the doorway.

— How far from where we went down? he asked.

— Further under the river, Varren said.

Soles could hear the water overhead.

Varren pointed toward the steps.

— That way comes out on the landing.

Maxim looped their line around the foot of a pillar near the entrance. Krista put her flashlight on the table. Its beam reached the slit; she turned it slightly to keep it out of their eyes.

— This is where I found it, Varren said.

He set his bag on the table and unwrapped a length of cloth.

Soles knew the shape before the curved edge appeared.

The pale blade had the same narrow body as his own. Light caught along one side. Near the base was a round hole, worn smooth at its rim.

His fingers went to the dark blade beneath his coat.

Varren noticed.

— Yours has the other part.

Soles drew it, keeping the edge toward the floor. The chain rested across his wrist. The rivet stood out from one side, as useless-looking as when he first tried to understand it.

He had searched for a missing handle. Here was a hole where that rivet could sit.

— Turn it sideways, he said.

Varren lifted the pale blade. Soles held his own beside it, each keeping his hand on the metal that belonged to him.

The rivet lined up with the hole.

A low note ran through Soles’s fingers.

He stopped. Across the table, Varren’s grip tightened. The blades remained apart, their edges turned away from each other.

Tesa came closer.

— What was that?

— You heard it too? Soles asked.

She nodded. Maxim had taken his hand off the rope.

Krista crouched beside the table, shining her phone along its base. Signs ran beneath the carved roots on the wall behind it. She found a group she recognized and opened her notebook at the copies from the temple near Vineward.

— The same writing, she said. This group repeats here.

She compared the strokes, then passed her light to Tesa so she could copy the next line. Soles wanted to ask what it meant. Her pencil was already correcting the shape of one mark.

Varren lowered the pale blade toward the cloth.

The note faded. Behind him, something moved inside the slit.

Soles took the flashlight from the table.

— Wait.

A line showed within the opening. It was thicker than the one he had tried to catch on Thursday, dark at its center, with light pulled tightly along its sides. It ran down past the stone, out of sight.

Varren turned to look. The pale blade moved farther from Soles’s hand.

The line disappeared.

Soles kept his own blade still.

— Bring yours back.

Varren held it beside the dark one. The low note returned.

So did the line.

Krista stood, leaving the notebook open.

Fine strands spread from the thicker one, crossing the slit and continuing beyond its edges. Some rose straight into the ceiling. Others slanted through the wall toward the mill. As Soles watched, another became visible behind them, and then more, until he could no longer separate the ones nearest the center.

He remembered the pull through his wrist. The many small weights that had held on when he pulled harder.

They were here.

— Can you all see them? he asked.

Maxim pointed toward the wall.

— Those go back the way we came.

Tesa stepped aside to follow a strand with her eyes. Varren stared past the pale blade in his hand, his lips parted. Soles had seen that expression before, when a repair had turned out to be something worse than the fault he had come to fix.

— You didn’t know, Soles said.

— No.

It came without the pause Varren gave a difficult answer.

Krista brought her phone close to one of the fine strands. The beam passed across it without changing its shape. The strand continued into solid stone.

— The ones under the street, she said. We followed the drains. They keep going.

Soles looked from the carved roots above her to the living shape exposed inside the slit. On Thursday he had tried to draw the opening shut. The smaller lines had tightened against him. Varren said his people had got worse that afternoon.

Soles couldn’t see where the strands ended. But the pull he had felt toward the town now had a shape. He still could not tell what closing it would take from them.

The pale blade shook slightly in Varren’s hand.

— Hold it there, Soles said.

Varren steadied his wrist against the table. He watched the strands that passed above the stairs, toward the houses.

Soles turned his own blade until he could see its edge against the thick line. There was the thing they had come to close. Around it, the finer strands crossed and twisted, too close to separate with his hand.

Tesa moved beside him.

— We’re only looking, she said.

He lowered the edge.

The bright strands lay across every path he could see to the root.