The Names Below the Water

Create up to 20 seconds from 0:00. Available for free opening episodes. Preparing a clip downloads this episode on your device.

Lina returned to her stall through the back lane.

Pip went in first. Rook checked the alley before following.

Nobody waited inside.

That frightened Lina more than broken drawers would have.

The guild hadn't bothered to search her home.

It didn't believe anything important could be there.

Pip lit the workshop lamp. He hung his new coat on a nail, then put on his old apron.

Lina placed the copied plans on her bench.

The bench was scarred, cramped, and too low. She had promised herself a better one for years.

Today it seemed like the centre of the world.

Rook set the collector's case beside it.

“Still sealed,” he said. “Still witnessed.”

Lina took the small prize bell from its cloth.

Pip stepped back automatically.

She stopped.

Then she pushed it away from him.

He had already been used to prove something once.

She wouldn't ask him to endure it again because it was convenient.

Instead, she tied an old spoon to a piece of string.

She hung it beside a household bell and struck the rim.

The spoon trembled.

Pip watched.

She moved the spoon farther away and struck again.

Less movement.

Closer.

More.

Lina pointed at the copied coupling diagram.

Rook bent over it.

“The ninth bell stops the draw?”

She nodded.

“Only inside the iron circle.”

Another nod.

Pip looked between them.

“Then we go there.”

Rook touched the drawing's top edge.

“Beneath the palace. Past a royal gate. Through a guardroom.”

Pip's shoulders sank.

Lina took the pencil.

Not through the palace, she wrote.

She drew a second route.

The lower drainage tunnel.

Rook knew the entrance. He had ordered it sealed last winter.

Lina pointed to the small hammer mark on the plans.

Someone had left a maintenance route. Workers needed a way in when the people above them were asleep.

She had used that kind of route all her life.

Rook moved to the shutters.

Outside, the alley was empty.

Lina picked up the paper with a pair of clean tongs.

Pip gave her a questioning look.

“Good habit,” Rook said. “We don't know who touched it.”

The paper carried no threat.

That made it worse.

It was an invitation.

Mistress Vale offered private settlement before the exhibition. Lina's remaining debt would be forgiven. Her voice would be returned. Pip would receive a permanent guild position.

The terms looked generous.

Only one line spoiled them.

No further challenge to registered collections.

Pip read it twice.

Then he looked at the case.

“How many are in there?”

Rook checked his custody inventory.

“Fourteen name-strips.”

“And in all the towers?”

The captain had no inventory for that.

Lina watched Pip do the calculation anyway.

Fourteen in one small case. Eight great bells. Years of festivals. Years of coats.

His hand went to his throat.

“What happens if we say no?” he asked.

Lina wrote the truth.

I don't know how to keep everyone safe yet.

Pip read it slowly.

“Do you know how to keep me safe?”

She put down the pencil.

She wanted to nod.

She wanted the right to be the adult who could nod.

Instead, she opened the workshop's cash tin. Three bent copper coins sat inside it.

She pushed the tin towards him.

Then she took the back-door key from her ring.

Pip understood what she was offering.

Enough for a bus cart inland. A place to leave from. Permission.

“You'd let me go?”

Lina nodded.

His eyes filled.

“So I don't have to earn staying?”

She shook her head hard enough to hurt her neck.

Rook turned away and examined the shutters.

He gave them that much privacy.

Pip found the guild's exhibition rules in an old training book.

He had kept every book Lina gave him. Even the ones missing covers.

A registered bench could challenge a casting in public. A second bench had to support the challenge.

Lina pointed at herself.

Pip shook his head.

“Your bench is suspended. Mine isn't.”

He turned the book around.

His apprenticeship registered a separate half-bench under her roof. The guild had charged him for it.

Lina closed her eyes.

They charged for everything.

For once, a charge might buy something useful.

Rook read the rule.

“A second bench,” he said.

Lina wrote the name of the mender who had recognised the voice in the gallery.

The captain nodded.

“I'll ask. I won't tell her she has to.”

Before leaving, he looked at Pip.

“Supporting this doesn't mean standing unprotected in front of Vale.”

The boy lifted his chin.

“I can read a question.”

“Yes,” Rook said. “And I can stand beside you while you read it.”

Alone with Pip, Lina turned back to the gate drawings.

Three counterweights. Two wheels. One tide-facing chain.

The chain had been marked for replacement nineteen years earlier.

She knew where to buy a chain that size.

She also knew how far beyond three copper coins it would cost.

Pip followed her pencil.

“Could people pull it?”

She drew the load. Then the number of people needed.

His face fell.

“That's a street full.”

Lina looked through the shutter crack.

Beyond the alley, market workers were closing their stalls. Lifting crates. Hauling shutters. Helping one another with jobs too heavy for two hands.

A street full wasn't a number.

It was people she knew.

She began another list.

Rope. Spare gear teeth. Oil. Wedges. Menders who understood wet stone.

Pip added lanterns.

Then blankets.

Lina looked at him.

“If we're asking people to go into water,” he said, “we should remember they'll come out cold.”

She put a small tick beside the word.

Then she added food. People hauled badly when they hadn't eaten. She had learned that on market mornings when pride kept her working past noon.

Pip went upstairs and brought down the last loaf. He cut it into three uneven pieces.

Lina moved the largest piece towards him.

He pushed it halfway back.

They left it between them and ate from either side while she drew the gate wheels.

Outside, the bells continued their rehearsal. Inside, the pencil scratched, the bread grew smaller, and the list became something a person could actually carry.

Rook returned as the exhibition lamps were being lit.

A second bench had agreed.

So had six more.

He placed their written questions on the table.

Then he put down something else.

A new royal notice.

Every registered guild voice would be placed at the Crown's disposal when the collection began.

Not only disputed apprentices.

Not only those who missed payments.

Everyone wearing a seal.

Lina touched her bare throat.

Pip looked at the clock.

For the first time, Rook didn't tell them there was still time.

He simply opened the door.

Lina caught his sleeve before he stepped outside.

She pointed at the receipt in his pocket. Then at the royal notice.

Rook understood the question she couldn't ask aloud.

“The winter flood was twenty years ago,” he said. “They told us the collection would be temporary.”

Pip looked towards the captain's empty seal mark.

“Where is your brother now?”

“Inland. He makes bread. He writes me once a year.”

“Do you write back?”

“Every time.”

Lina waited.

Rook looked at the floor.

“I tell him about the weather. Repairs to the house. Things that don't need an answer.”

Pip said nothing.

The captain drew out the receipt. He laid it beside the new royal notice.

“They told me bringing him in was public service. I believed them because believing them let me keep my job.”

Lina picked up her notebook.

This time, she didn't write a question.

Tell them that tonight, she wrote.

Rook read it. His shoulders lowered a little.

“Yes.”

Pip took the invitation to private settlement and folded it carefully. He put it in the evidence cloth, beside the cut handle.

Lina saw what he had understood. A polite offer could belong beside a broken instrument. Both could show what somebody expected to get away with.

Then they went out together.