Chapter 10

At slack low, the flats ran out flat and brown and shiny, and the ruins of the drowned district stood up out of the mud like the ribs of something that had been eaten.

Maren Voss was still tied to the buoy stake. Peg cut her loose. Hale was gone - I found that out later, and it surprised nobody who'd been paying attention - and the garrison line stood in ranks with their muskets grounded and their eyes on Rusk, and their officer, a young man named Cray who had chased me off a fish table three days earlier, looked at the regent, and then at the crowd, and then at his boots.

That was the moment the charter broke. Not a shot. A silence, and a hundred men deciding not to raise their weapons.

Pell shouted something about the law and Sloane said nothing at all, which was worse. Rusk walked up onto the boardwalk, took the log from Peg, and opened it to the week of the flood, and read the numbers out loud, and there were old men in that crowd who had worked that water for fifty years and were already shaking their heads before he finished the first line, because they knew what the tide does and what it doesn't.

Then Rusk held up the ring, and asked the assembly, in the old words, whether the harbor rejected the regent's charter.

The harbor said yes. It took about four seconds.

Somebody put hands on Osric Pell. He looked around for his garrison and found a circle of dockworkers, and he went down on his knees in the mud of a street he had drowned, and he wept, and nobody in the crowd had the smallest piece of pity to spare him.

Emmerich Sloane had already slipped away.

I never saw the pistol. It came out of the crowd behind me, a shot flat and sharp across the water, and Rusk turned and took it in the shoulder and went back off the boardwalk into the mud, and by the time I got to him he was cursing steadily and bleeding hard and gripping my sleeve with a hand that wouldn't let go.

"Go," he said. "Go and put the fork in the frame."

The meeting-house bell frames were twenty yards out, exposed at the ebb, black iron ribs standing out of the mud with the bells hanging in them under a skin of weed and silt, three of them, big as coffins. I got down in the mud beside them and found the socket at the middle of the frame, a brass plate with two prongs curving up off it, grooved in a slow spiral, matching the ones in the Wick exactly, down to the wear.

I stopped being afraid. I don't know how else to say it. I knelt in five hundred years of silt on top of my father's drowned street, and I thought about a freezing room and a red door, and I took the cord off over my head, and I laid my mother's fork into the cradle of the bell frame.

It fit the way it had fit the lamp room.

The metal hummed. I felt it go up through my knees and into my teeth, a note below hearing, and the mud around the frame shivered, and then the bells spoke.

They rang underwater and above it at once, the way a bell rings in your chest and in the air together. They rang out across the flats and up the quay and over the roofs of Kellbridge, and on the spit of black rock at the harbor mouth, the Wick flared gold - one long pulse, then another, in time with them, its dead lamp answering its twin after fifteen years.

Every bell in the city answered. The fish quay bells, the chapel bell, the shipyard bell, the little cracked bell over the union hall. People came out of their doors onto the streets, and the sound went up the bluff into the garrison, and the men there stood in the yard and listened to a city ringing at itself while the tide began to turn.

We held the trial for another two hours on the flats, standing in the water by the end of it. The assembly stripped the Vantree Consortium's charter, seized the warehouses and the anchorage, and named the harbor-master's heir as keeper of the tide record until a full assembly could sit. Maren stood at my shoulder the whole time, spitting mud, saying nothing, looking at the bells.

By evening we knew about Sloane. His sloop had made it out past the breakwater while we were counting votes in the shallow water, and he had gone with a copy of the grain-fleet contracts under his arm and a list of every Kellbridge official who had taken consortium money in the last fifteen years.

I sat in the harbor-master's old office above the union hall with my boots off and my feet wrapped in somebody's spare shirt and Peg's stew going cold on the desk, and I read the list twice.

The third name down was hers. Peg Marrow. Carried the log through the middle of a garrison line with her hands in the air.

I sat with it for a while. Out on the water the bells were still ringing, because I'd given the order and nobody had stopped me, and the sound was going out over the harbor mouth where a Vantree sloop was already hull-down and moving fast toward open sea.

Fenn came in and said they'd found the grain ships in the anchorage, sixteen of them, ours to move or burn. He asked me what we did now.

I folded the list and put it in my coat, and I told him to take the fleet out to the harbor mouth and hold it there, and to keep the bells ringing until every street in Kellbridge knew the tide had turned.

Then I went down to the quay and stood on the black stone and watched the last of the light go out of the sky, and the sloop's sail shrink to a gray fleck past the breakwater, and the fleet I'd sent beginning to move along the harbor like a line of dark hands closing.