Down Into It

My boots were still wet from a supper and I took that flight in a run.

Sixty steps, and the cold comes up at you from about the fortieth. My hands still had Saturday's flour in the creases.

Down?

Homesick!

On the fortieth step of a stair in another world, and it has picked now.

Cold on the face first.

Then the hands. Then it's in your teeth.

"My brother had a word for this," I said, out loud, on about the fortieth step, to a duke's daughter and a Thimble. "The last stair. He said you always go down it on your own feet, and I never asked him what he meant by it."

"HE SOUNDS USEFUL," said Io.

"He's got eleven years of this in him," I said. "About half of it's wrong. I've never known which half."

Io came down after us in a coat worth a bathhouse, dragging nobody's chair, and Yulen came last with the lamp.

The doors stood where they came in off their own weight on Friday. The cup let into the bronze is still there, white, with the gold line around the rim.

That cup again!

Third time. A hall, a desk and a door, and it's still the small one.

Who decided a room like this wanted a cup on the front of it?

Then we were in it, and Io stopped talking, which she doesn't do.

You cannot see the far wall. The pillars go up into the dark in rows and the rows go on past the lamp.

It's full to two feet under the roof and the top of it doesn't move. Our breath went up in it like steam off a proof drawer.

"IT'S NOT MOVING," said Io. "WHY ISN'T IT MOVING?! WATER MOVES. I HAVE WATCHED WATER MY WHOLE LIFE AND IT MOVES, IT MOVES IN A GLASS, IT MOVES IN A BATH, ithasneverONCEsatthereandnobodyinthisroomiseven—"

"Nothing in here has shifted since before there was a bathhouse in my lane," I said.

"THAT IS NOT AN ANSWER THAT HELPS."

It isn't.

I've had four days of answers that don't help and I've started handing them out myself.

Shu came out of the apron hot pink and wouldn't put its feet down.

Still pink.

Pink since the steps!

Gedda says a full one bursts, and there's a city over this room.

So. The shape of it, and I had all of it standing on a step in the cold.

Shu is past full and has been since a corridor. The one thing in the world built to take what it holds is this room. The room is already full to the roof.

And the door on the room is a cup.

A full drinker bursts.

It bursts in a room, and it gives back everything it ever drank at once, and this is the room.

"Yulen. If I empty it, does it fill up again?"

He didn't answer for a while, and he is never slow.

"No," he said. "It fills at a drop a child at a time. It has taken eight hundred years to do it once."

"So if I empty it, nobody in this kingdom ever gets it back."

"Nobody in this kingdom ever gets it back," said Yulen. "You pour what you have and your rank is what you keep back. From tomorrow everybody does that over bare ground, with nothing under them to catch the rest."

He's worked it out already.

He worked it out on the steps and he came down anyway.

"And you? Eleven years of you is in this room."

"Twelve," said Yulen. "I was twelve. And I have been the finest control of my year since I was fifteen, and from tomorrow that is a thing a man can do at a party."

Ha.

He said it flat and he meant it as a joke and it's the worst joke in either world.

"Say the rest."

"There is no rest of it," said Yulen. "I opened the door on Friday. I have had two nights to think about what I did and I would do it again, and I would like the subject changed."

Ken says the one who opens the last door is the one it costs.

He said it with his mouth full!

And I told him to stop talking about games at dinner.

Now, the pour, and I want the frame down before I let go of anything, because the frame is the whole of why this isn't simple.

Down is nothing. Down is the floor of the deepest room in the kingdom and there's nobody under it.

Up is four hundred rooms, a palace, a hill, a bridge, and a lower city, and every pipe Ovel opened at ten o'clock this morning.

The Fill. Into a vessel, not at a target.

And there are ten thousand vessels over my head and every one of them is empty.

Before I put my hands near it I went four pillars in and three rows up and put my hand flat on a brass plate, where nobody could see me.

Tidy.

Wrong word. It's the one I'm putting down.

The head is a mouth the size of a cup, with a bar across it. It is where the water goes in.

Whose water is it once it's in somebody's jug?

Yulen took the bar off it and didn't ask anybody whether he could.

"The Narrow," I said. "All I've got, through one hole."

"All you have got, through one hole," said Yulen, "and it goes where the hole points, and this one points at a city."

"Sorry about this," I told the room. "You've held it eight hundred years and you've been very good about it."

I wanted every empty thing in Vasa full before the bells.

Then I let go.

The sound came up through the stone into my knees before it got to my ears.

Not a bang. One long note out of a hole the size of a cup, and under it the whole room turning over.

Then the water went up.

Eight hundred years of it, off the top, in one rope, into a mouth you could cover with a hand.

It went up the shaft and it kept going. The floor of that room came down two feet, then four, and the pillars came out of it wet and black in the lamp.

And over our heads a city started.

I got the outside of it later, four ways, because everybody wanted to be the one to tell me.

Every standpipe on the bridge approach went at once. The terrace fountains came on in order going up the hill, one row after another, like somebody walking up a stair lighting lamps.

The palace tank came over. The kitchen tanks came over. Four hundred rooms with a jug in them and every jug full.

A trough on the fourth terrace that hasn't run in a woman's lifetime ran.

And on every terrace, in front of a city, the measured mages of Vasa put their hands out to steady the nearest thing and dropped what they were holding.

Rods on stone. All the way up the hill, in a line, going up.

Is anybody up there counting?

Tk. Tk-tk. Tk.

Nobody cheered.

It went the way it went on the arch stair, and this time I knew what it was.

Two thousand people watched a girl put a kingdom's water back into a kingdom, and the noise they made was a hundred instruments hitting stone.

They've gone quiet again.

Why, though?

They go quiet when it's big and they cheer when it's a bath, and I've never worked out what that is.

Down in the room I was on my knees on wet stone with both palms flat and the lamp behind me.

Arms gone!

Both of them, to the elbow.

Frightened of what I've done, and pleased about it, and those two do not come at the same time.

What does a kingdom do on the first morning it has nothing underneath it?

And starving!

Then Shu got off the step.

It went past me, out onto the floor of an empty Cistern, and stopped in the middle and put its feet flat down.

"Shu—"

"Leave it," said Yulen.

"It keeps everything it drinks," he said, "and it gives back exactly what it chooses. I said the first half of that to you on a road and the second half is not mine to say."

It opened that mouth all the way, which is the whole front of it, and gave two months of this kingdom back.

It came out gray. It came out fast. It came out for a very long time.

A drain grating came out. A gauge glass came out. The ink off a finished form came out, and a cobble off a road, and a foot of somebody's wall, and a schoolroom's worth of cold.

It's giving it back.

Nobody asked it. I didn't ask it. It went out there on its own four feet and it chose it.

And the voices came with it.

They came out of that mouth into a room the size of a street, all at once, over each other, at the volume the ward keeps for a lane.

"Whatever you don't use, somebody mops."

"It's too hot. Far too hot for a first night."

"That's not a stairs question."

"It's a job, and if I don't take it the bridge sends its own."

"Thank you. That gets said as well."

"OUT. UP THE STEPS. LEAVE THE CLOGS."

"He said, where do you think it goes."

Every one of them off a step or a doorway or a wet floor in Kanal, in the mouths they came out of, in a room under a palace, with nobody in it but four people and an animal.

That's my ward.

That's my whole ward, in here, and not one of them knows it.

"THEY'RE ALL IN IT," said Io, on the floor in her good coat with both hands over her mouth. "THEY WERE ALL IN IT THE WHOLE TIME—"

"Whose is the loud one?"

"My landlady. She's on a bridge with her arm out."

"I am going to meet her," said Io.

She means it!

I sat down in two inches of water in an empty Cistern and cried like a child at a gate.

Io held the lamp. Yulen stood where he was and didn't do one kind thing with his face.

Then he sat down on the wet beside me, which he has never done, and left the thin book in his coat.

"You have emptied it."

"I've emptied it."

"Then I will say the thing I have and you may have it however you like," said Yulen. "I would rather be sitting on this floor than be the finest control of any year that has ever been counted."

Warm. I've got no word better than that one and I'm not looking for one.

We came up at four. The steps were running with it and the rail was still off.

A man came down past us with his sleeves rolled and his boots in his hand.

"My tank's come over," he said. "It's come over and it's got in under my floor, and there's a board at the top of these steps saying I'll be charged for what's in it."

"I'm sorry—"

"You'll be the one that did it," he said, with no heat in it at all, and kept going down. "I'd get out of this city if I were you. Not tonight. When you've had your dinner."

Somewhere above us a bakehouse tank was full for the first time since the spring, and a man was standing under it with his sleeves rolled, and I looked at that tank the way other people look at a horse.

The Cistern is empty and it will not fill again in anybody's lifetime.

Every drop of it's in the city now, in tanks and troughs and jugs and one bakehouse.

And it is standing in every one of them, and it is Sunday.

On the fourth terrace a woman put her hand under a spout that had never run and held it there.