Episodul 64 · The Stone Above

The faceless man stopped beside Soles and opened his jacket.

Not roughly. With almost polite care, the way a tailor opens a client’s coat to take a measurement. His hand slid under the jacket, over the ribs, over the place that hurt anyway, and stopped on the oiled leather. On the curved shape beneath it.

Soles caught him by the wrist.

He had not decided to. His bandaged left hand had gone out on its own, fast, the way a hand goes after a falling mug. The cuts under the bandage tore open. His fingers closed over the black cord. Over the knots. He felt them one beside the other, hard, tight, like a root wrapped around a stone.

No one moved.

The faceless man looked at the hand on his wrist. Then at Soles’s face. For the first time something crossed that face no one could ever remember. Not fear. Not anger. A brief astonishment, like a man who has believed all his life that no one sees him, and hears his name called on an empty street.

He pulled free. The cord slid through Soles’s fingers. The leather stayed under the jacket.

— It’s here, he said to the lawyer, without turning. Under his arm.

— Then take it.

The man raised his hand again.

Maxim’s headlamp, tilted up from the floor, lit the vault for a moment.

Soles looked up.

Long smooth blocks, set without mortar, holding back the earth and the river above their heads. He had spent half his life looking at things that held other things up: beams on the port cranes, brackets, the frame of a press. His father used to say you never look at the part that seems to carry everything. You look at the one behind it.

At the crown of the vault, one block was wedged between the others, narrower at the bottom than at the top.

Under his palm the slab was warm and alive, and it was not alone. It leaned against the walls, the walls against the vault. Soles felt the load through the stone the way he felt a bad bearing through the housing of a pump: not with his eyes. Every block pressed on its neighbor. Along the edges of the narrow one, the pressure gathered.

Move that one, and the rest follow.

It was not Leonatus. It did not smell of hot iron. It was not Elias’s patience either. It was his own, the thought of a man who repaired machines.

The faceless man opened the jacket again.

Soles pushed.

Not with his hand. His hand stayed on the slab. He pushed with the weight that had sat in his right arm since Thursday, the blind pressure that had wanted somewhere to go. He meant to give it a little. Enough to shift one stone and make them all look up.

It did not come out a little.

The place in his chest that had widened twice opened a third time, all the way, like a door flung back against a wall. The warmth went up through his arm and out of him, into the slab, the walls, the narrow stone, the way water bursts from a split pipe. He could not have closed it if he had tried.

Every lantern went out.

In the dark, dust rose from the floor to the ceiling. Soles felt it on his face, on his lips. From above came a sound he had never heard: a long, deep crack from inside the stone, like a great bone giving way slowly.

Someone shouted. The lawyer, maybe.

Maxim’s lamp came back on, its beam shaking toward the ceiling.

The crown stone had dropped. A finger’s width. Maybe two. Around it, through joints no blade had ever entered, water was coming in.

It did not drip. It ran. Thin, then thick, in black strands that twisted and fell with the sound of summer rain. Cold water that smelled of silt and reeds.

The river.

— Out! the lawyer said, and his voice was no longer pleasant or low. Everyone out. Now!

The men from the wall let go of Maxim. They let go of Tesa. They did not run for the tunnel. They turned to the walls and went into them, shoulder first, hurried now, careless, the way people jump into freezing water. The stone blurred behind them and set.

The faceless man was last. He stopped with one foot in the wall and one still out, half of him swallowed by stone, and looked at Soles. Not at the jacket. At his face.

Then he was gone.

The lawyer snatched the thin folder from the floor and ran for the tunnel, the dead lantern in his other hand, through water already over his ankles. He did not look back. Soles watched the folder go with him.

A second block gave way beside the crown, grinding. Through the gap burst a whole vein of water, thick with earth and reed roots.

— Soles!

Maxim was on his feet, blood on his forehead, the crowbar back in his hand. He had found it by groping in the water. Tesa stood against him, her broken hand held to her chest, the other gripping his shoulder so as not to fall.

— Take your hand off the stone! It’s all coming down!

Soles did not take his hand away.

Through the gap, in the round room, the afternoon light still poured from the wooden door, warm and steady, as if the water and the cracking and the dark belonged to another world. On the threshold stood Krista.

She had not turned. She stood with her hand on the frame, looking at the person at the table.

The person at the table had stood up.

He faced her now. Soles could see part of him against the light: a man neither tall nor short, sleeves rolled to the elbow, fingers stained with ink. He held a sheet of paper out to her across the table. Like something prepared long ago and kept for her.

Krista reached for it.

The water had reached Soles’s knees.

If he let go, the slab might close, and Krista would be left on the far side with the door and the man and the paper.

If he held on, the vault would come down on all of them.

— Krista! he shouted, with all the air his ribs allowed.

On the threshold of the wooden door, Krista took the paper.

Only then did she turn around.