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Asky beneath the earth.

That's the phrase. It's the last thing my uncle wrote in the last journal, in plain script, on the back of the page where he told me not to believe the drowning, and for six days I've read it as poetry.

It isn't poetry. Garrick didn't have any.

I find that out at four in the morning, sitting on his workshop floor with the jars.

There are two hundred and eleven of them. Marsh water, shelved wall to wall, each one labelled in his hand with a date and nothing else, each one a fractionally different brown, and for five weeks I have moved them, dusted around them, and pressed four into service as paperweights while treating them as the eccentricity of a lonely man.

Two hundred eleven jars. Nine artifacts. Eleven sites.

The dates are not when he collected the water. I check the first six against his journals and each falls on a day he recorded being somewhere else entirely, and my uncle was many things but he was never careless with a date.

So the dates are the message and the water is the filing cabinet.

I put them in order. It takes until dawn, and Pip helps for the last hour because he wakes up and finds me on the floor surrounded by two hundred jars and correctly identifies this as more interesting than breakfast.

In date order, the shades run light to dark. Not smoothly. In steps.

Nine steps.

“It's a scale,” I tell him. “He built a physical scale so it couldn't be copied, stolen, or read by anybody who didn't know it was a scale. Each band is a value. And the dates — look, they're not real dates, they're bearings written as dates. Degrees and minutes.”

“That's mental,” Pip says, with total admiration.

“He was mental. Get me the lens.”

Here's what the ninth artifact does, and what Garrick did about losing it.

The ninth holds the way in: the final four hundred meters, the door, the threshold. He knew it was the single point of failure in his whole design, because if any one piece went missing the assembly was dead, and he was not a man who left a system with one weak joint.

So he made a spare. Not a duplicate of the artifact — he couldn't. He duplicated the information instead, encoded as a physical sequence, across every jar on a shelf in a house so cluttered that nobody who broke in would take a second look, and he checked it against the projection often enough that the reference dates are corrected in three places in his own hand.

By ten I've got the final approach written out on a single sheet of paper.

By eleven I've read it four times and I'm crying again, because the final line of it isn't a bearing.

It's a depth. Two hundred and sixty meters, straight down, beneath water he swam in every week of his adult life. He went down there. Alone. Repeatedly. For decades. And then he came back up and went to Edda's for supper and let her tell him he should sell a relic and mend his roof.

They hit Mountmend just after four.

Let me be honest about this part, because I've read a lot of accounts of things like this since and they all make it sound faster and cleverer than it is. It isn't a battle. It's twenty minutes of the worst noise I have ever heard, and most of what I do is count.

Two boats come in from the north weir and one from the channel, which means somebody told them the channel exists. Eleven men. They don't come for people. They go straight up the eastern walk to Garrick's house, which means they've been told exactly where it is, and only one place in this village has ever held any of it.

Draeven is nine kilometers south with Joren, checking the descent route.

So it's me, and Edda, and Pip, and Tilda, and Elder Harlan Moss, and forty people who fish for a living.

I get four minutes of warning because Pip has been on the meeting-house roof being sixteen, and I spend the first one shouting at Elder Moss and the remaining three watching a man of seventy-three move faster than anyone I have ever met.

He rings the flood bell. Mountmend has drilled for flood every spring for six generations, and the whole village, told all their lives what to do when that bell sounds do not stand around asking questions. They go to the boats. They go west. The bell doesn't say why and nobody asks.

Edda takes the children. Tilda takes the far bridge with a cutting torch and drops sixteen meters of boardwalk into the marsh behind the last boat, which strands three mercenaries on the eastern side and buys us everything.

And I stand in my uncle's front room with a satchel and eight artifacts and a wall of jars I cannot possibly carry, and I make the only decision I'm proud of that entire day.

I take the sheet of paper.