The Fall

"You have made a supply," said Consort Ovel.

He said it on the terrace steps at nine, cuffs done, in front of a capital that had come out to look at its own fountains.

"I've made a mess."

"You have made both. The mess is mine to clear and I will clear it. The supply is the difficulty."

Here it comes!

He's had all night with this.

Cold to the elbows. That's fear, and it turned up before the second word.

Who is going to write this one down?

He held it where I could read it, the way he does, because he would rather you read it than were told about it.

Sign it with what?

"Water in a vessel, given by a person who is not a licensed supply, is the offense of the household that took it," said Ovel. "That is eight hundred years old. You have had it off me in a wet room and off a clerk at a window."

Is he going to read all of them?

"Whose household?"

"Every household in Vasa," he said. "And every household in Kanal, which is the one you will care about, and I would rather you heard the list from me than had it read out."

Then he read the list out.

Anzo, for a tank. Tulk, for the loft. Weller, for a subscription with the word flue written twice at the top of it.

Sarel. The man with the soap. The woman who took her own bowl home under her coat on the day the rope went up.

And Baba Dova, of a bathhouse in Kanal, for a pool she hasn't been able to fill since July.

He read it the way he reads anything, which is all the way to the end of every word, in the sun, with the fountains going behind him.

"Twenty-one," said Yulen, at my shoulder. "He has not looked up from it once."

He's got Onnik's father on there.

Twenty-one?

A bucket!

A man who keeps a roster for a puddle, in writing, over a bucket.

Ashamed. Not for me — for them, and it's a much worse one.

My ward.

Every name on there drank out of a jug I filled.

And not one of them asked me to.

"You can't do that to Dova."

"I am not doing anything to her," said Ovel. "I am reading you what is already true. There is one signature that makes all of it go away and it is not yours, because you cannot sign."

"Then whose?"

"Mine," said Consort Ovel. "I will sign it this morning, in front of these people, and I will ask for nothing you have not already refused me twice."

"Twice."

"Twice," said Ovel. "I asked in a wet room in July and you said no. I asked on a road in front of four hundred people and I did not ask at all. I have gone over that second one since, and I would do it the same way, and I would rather you had that from me too."

The animal.

Where are the guards?

It's gray!

Asleep in my apron, and it has been since it emptied itself in a room under his feet.

He wasn't gloating. He never has, and I've looked for it.

He stood in the sun on a terrace with four hundred people on it and told me the whole arrangement himself, hands behind him, because there is nothing he is hiding.

Down on the bridge my ward stood in a line and couldn't hear a word of it.

Anzo had his hat off. Sarel had her arms folded. Weller had got as far as the second post and stopped there, with his paper, and put it away.

They came up yesterday and they stayed the night on a bridge, all of them, at their own cost, and I found that out afterward from a boy.

They slept on it. Seven of them, on a stone bridge, in a city that charges you to stand still, because the coach went back at six and none of them got on it.

Anzo sold nothing all day. Tulk has a mother at the top of a stair four hours from here and he stayed anyway.

Sarel said at four o'clock that she was going home, and she did not go.

And when Ovel started on the list, they came up the terrace steps.

Not fast. They came up the way that ward does everything, which is all together, arguing, with somebody at the back saying it isn't worth it.

They're coming up.

They can't hear a word of it!

And they're coming up anyway, because they can see my face from a bridge.

Ken says there's a bit where you do the thing you swore you'd never do.

He had a word for it. Renegade. Paragon. One of those, and I don't want either of them.

Shu came up out of the apron for the first time since the Cistern.

Gray end to end. It got as far as my collarbone, put its face out at the man in front of us, and turned it away.

Then it put its head in my apron and wouldn't come out, and it has never done that to anybody but a puddle it wouldn't drink.

It won't look at him.

It looked at a man who put it in a crate.

I've never poured at a person.

Not once, in either world. Not in a hall, not on a road, not in a schoolroom with one clean line down the middle of it and a girl standing in it.

I don't have an argument for it. I've never worked one out and nobody has ever asked me for one, except a twelve-year-old on a step, and I had nothing to say to her either.

You want that terrace the way I had it, because I had all of it before I moved.

He was on the top step with the water off the fountains running past his shoes. Below him, sixty steps down, the flight went to the doors and the doors went to a room that's empty.

Nobody downhill of him at all. They had all come up.

Nobody in the way.

First time in two months and there's nobody in the way of it.

It was short. I'll say how short.

It wasn't a decision. I've had two months of standing in rooms working out where everything goes, and that was the first time the answer came back empty, and my hands went before the rest of me.

"I'm sorry about this," I told him.

Then I let go.

Whoom.

It took him off the top step and it didn't put him anywhere clever.

He went down that flight in front of the capital, in the water, with his arms out, the whole sixty, and everything he had went with him.

The seal went. The crest came off the front of what he was holding and lay face down on the seventh step.

The bill, the notice, the order with the bridge seal that I've carried since a corridor — all of it went down that stair as pulp, in an inch of his own supply.

Why is nobody moving?

The men behind him stepped back before he was halfway down.

That is the part I keep. Not the water. Two men in good coats got out of the way of a piece of paper.

He came to rest at the bottom, in the wet, against the bronze, under the mark he has the use of.

Stay up there!

Nobody went down.

Four hundred people on a terrace and not one went down the steps, and they were all still there, and I could hear the fountains the whole time.

I liked it.

I'm not saying that out loud to anybody in this kingdom.

And I'd do it again tomorrow.

And I can't tell Ken. That's the first one I can't tell Ken.

My hands smelled of the rail I took off yesterday, and they smelled of it while I did that.

Glad. Flat, plain glad, and I'd like that on the record with the rest of it.

I stood at the top of sixty steps with my mouth open and my heart going like a boiler, and what I wanted was for somebody to say my name.

Nobody did. Four hundred people watched me put a man down a stair and not one of them said a word to me.

I stood in front of all of them wanting it. That is the undignified part and it's going in.

A stair with an inch on it, and a crest face down on the seventh step. It's the crown's stair and it's nobody's to rope.

I sat down on the top step with both hands shaking and put them under my arms, which is a thing I've done since a hall.

Mira came and stood next to me facing the same way I was facing, which is how she does it.

"You put it on him."

"I put it on him."

"Right," said Mira.

"Say the other thing."

"There isn't one," said Mira, and wrote nothing on the slate at all, and that is the only time she has ever done that.

I'm not upset. I was going to write upset and it isn't that. It's tired, at nine in the morning.

Gedda came along the terrace eating out of a cloth and looked down the steps the way she looks at anything.

"He's wet," she said. "That's all that's wrong with him. He'll be up by noon and he'll be dry by two."

She's right!

He's going to walk out of this!

Everybody down there knows it and so do I.

"Then what's finished?"

"The paper," said Gedda, chewing. "There's a hundred men in this city who lend on a name and not one of them lends on a man who's been down a stair. Is there any more of that bread?"

"THERE ARE CAKES IN THE COACH," Lady Io told the terrace. "SINCE TEN, AND NOBODY HAS HAD ONE—"

"Io."

"I HAVE BEEN WAITING SINCE THE BAND."

A man has gone down sixty steps and she has been holding a hamper since ten o'clock.

Anzo got up the steps first, out of breath, hat in his hand, and stood in front of me with his boots in the wet.

"That's the season's fill gone through this city in one morning," he said. "My mother had a bath last night in her own house and she has not had one in her own house since my father was alive, and I will say that in any ward you send me to."

Warm, and it turned up at the wrong moment, and I took it anyway.

Guilty, and it's not about him at all.

Tulk came up behind him and said nothing at all and put his mother's stick down on the step beside me, which took him a while.

"IS THAT LIST STILL GOING UP?!" Weller shouted at a crown clerk, from four steps down, with the paper already out. "BECAUSE IF IT IS GOING UP I WOULD LIKE TO BE ON IT IN WRITING—"

Ha!

Then Weller got up there and produced the paper, because he is Weller, and started on terms.

"I'm not going to say it was right," said Sarel, from two steps down, with her arms folded. "I'm going to say I watched it and I'm not sorry, and those are two different things, and I'd like both of them said out loud."

"Sarel—"

"And my pillowcases are still gray," said Sarel.

Down at the bottom of sixty steps, in the water, against a bronze door.

With the capital standing above him and not one of them coming down, Consort Ovel got his back against the mark and put his hand up.

"Would somebody bring me a cup."