Page 7

We leave before the village wakes, because I want twenty kilometers behind us before anyone in Mountmend can be paid to remember which way we went.

The route south-southwest is not a route. It's a series of arguments with the marsh. Open water for an hour, then a channel that narrows until the skiff has to be poled, then a stretch where there is no channel at all and we drag the hull across a mud shelf on rollers cut from deadfall. Clara takes one end of the boat without being asked. She is roughly half my mass and she does not put it down.

By the second hour I've stopped watching her for signs of quitting and started watching her for something else.

She talks. Constantly. To me, to the boat, to a bird that follows us for a kilometer and a half. I have worked with people who fill silence because it frightens them, and this is not that. She narrates the way some people hum. It should be intolerable.

It is not intolerable, and I have decided not to look at why.

The three-legged platform stands where her uncle drew it, half-collapsed, its fourth leg lying under two meters of water like something that fell asleep. Beyond it the marsh changes. Older growth. Trees instead of reeds. The water goes still and dark and stops carrying sound properly.

“Here,” she says.

“You're certain.”

“No. But he wrote a bearing and a count of eleven, and there are eleven trees.” She points. “If that's what eleven means. It might mean depth. It might mean a date.”

“It means trees.”

“You can't know that.”

“I can count them.”

She laughs, which is a sound she makes at things that are not funny, and goes to work.

What Marlow built here takes her three hours, and I spend most of it doing perimeter and the remainder of it being quietly rearranged.

The cache is under a stone slab at the base of the eleventh tree, and the slab does not move. There's no seal on it and no mechanism, and I could break it in eight minutes with a cutting charge and lose whatever is underneath. Clara sits on the roots and reads the same half-page of her uncle's notation nine times.

“It's a joke,” she says eventually.

“It's a slab.”

“It's a joke. Listen. This part I'm sure of, this is his word for water, and this one appears whenever he's being smug about something. He's telling me the marsh already knows how to open it.” She stands. “What happens here at high water?”

I look at the trees. Two meters up every trunk, the bark changes color.

“This is a flood shelf,” I say. “In the wet months, all of this is under.”

“So the slab floats?”

“Stone doesn't float.”

“No, but—” She's already crouching at the edge of it, digging with her hands. “But if there's a void underneath, and the void fills, and there's a hollow under one end⁠—”

There is. Her uncle cut a chamber under the northern edge, sealed it, and left the southern edge bearing all the weight, so that a slab no two men could shift becomes a lever the moment you flood the low side. She wants to break the seal. I break the seal, because the mud is holding a stone the mass of a landing skid and I am not letting her put her arms under it.

The water goes in. The slab sits stupidly still for eleven seconds, and then the northern edge lifts three centimeters and the whole thing swings on an axis that has been waiting ten thousand years to be used again.

Clara makes a noise I have never heard a human make.

“He built this for you,” I say, before I've decided whether to.

“He built it for anyone who'd bother.”

“For someone who talks to birds and doesn't mind putting her hands in a hole. That isn't anyone.”

She looks at me for a moment too long, and then goes down into the chamber, and I let the silence stay where it is.