Episode 05
Do you hear the trumpets
I climb for a living. That's the job. The ledger goes up the wall of the Kanzlei, twelve thousand years of it, and someone has to fetch the year, and the someone is small and doesn't mind heights and has a steady hand, and that's me. I have one fear. It's writing a four where there should be a nine, in a column that has been right since before there were columns, and going home, and nobody noticing for a hundred years, and then everybody noticing at once.
I mention it because I've spent a lot of these years on a ladder with my hand not shaking, and I'd like it understood how much that cost.
This was the year the drains flooded twice. I'm writing it down because nobody else who was on the ladders is going to, and because I'd ask you not to read it near her.
She'd got worse. Everybody said it, quietly, in the corridor, and each time you thought you'd seen the floor of it there was another stair.
I know when she went down, because I fetched the ledger. The oldest one, from before the count, the one nobody asks for. She read one page of it standing at the foot of my ladder and gave it back up to me and went to the service stair, alone. That's how you make a deal with the Rat King. You go alone.
I want to be exact about who he is, because it sounds like a story and it isn't one. Under every old city there's a thing that runs the mice that aren't ours, the ordinary ones, the ones with nothing in them, and under ours he's been down there since before the ledger, and he has never once been on anybody's side. She came back up with an arrangement. His rats, through the walls that no dragon has held since the year the four hundred walked out, across the border that isn't a border, into the safest kingdom in all the worlds, to steal.
Not gold. They've got gold. What she wanted was what the ancient kingdom keeps in its cellars and doesn't name: the old things. The living furniture. The pieces that make their revival plan work and ours not. And the rats went and got them, one small piece at a time, for eleven years, and nobody over there noticed, because nobody over there has ever needed to count.
I know it was eleven years because I shelved every receipt.
And she began the experiments.
I'm not going to describe them. I climbed past them. That's as much as I'll say, and I'll add that the word the city used was cruel, in a city that walks families out of the gate at four in the morning and calls it friendly, and if that word could shock those people then you have the scale.
She wrote it all down. Every result. How things behave, she called it: how a stolen old thing behaves in a new body, how a mouse behaves with a person in it, how a person behaves when you show them what you've done to the mouse. Ledger after ledger, and I shelved those too, high up, where she wanted them. The most complete account of how living things break that has ever been made, in the neatest hand I have ever seen, and I have seen mine.
And she invented. That's the part that's hard to say about someone doing what she was doing: that she was brilliant at it. Every failure became a machine. Every machine went into the next attempt. The Kanzlei stopped looking like an office and started looking like a workshop with an office attached, and the lizards ran the rail, and the rats ran the border, and she ran everything, kindly, individually, in a corridor, with tea.
"Tea?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"You're the one who climbs."
"Yes."
"Your hand doesn't shake. I've watched. That's rare." The gold smile. "Is there anything you need?"
There was a ledger open on the table behind her with a drawing in it I didn't understand. I said no. She said good, and meant it, and that was the whole of it, and I went back up the ladder and my hand didn't shake, and that cost what it cost.
She was building an army.
I add things up for a living and I added that one up late, because she never called it that. She called it the arrangement. But an arrangement with ten thousand bodies in it that all behave, that all do what the ledger says, that will hold still when they're told and go where they're pushed, is an army. It was for the ancient kingdom. It was for the day the revival plan over there produced something she could take.
Here's how she paid for it. It's the part I most want on the page, because it went through my columns.
She sold things. To the folk. Her own people, inside the walls, who had twelve thousand years and a family account and nothing to spend either on, and to whom she offered, at a price that came straight off the column, unimaginable things. I mean that exactly. Things nobody had imagined. A year of your dead mother's voice. A day inside a mouse. A single true fact about your neighbour, from the rail. A child that looked like you, for a while. The pieces of the ancient kingdom's cellars, cut small and sold on. Everything she'd learned from breaking things, offered back to the people she'd learned it on, at a rate.
They bought it. All of it. A city with too much time and a ditch down the middle of the street will buy anything that isn't the ditch.
And the world went under. Not with a bang. With a market. I watched the account empty faster than it had in eleven thousand years, from a ladder, with the numbers going past me on their way down, and the lizards walked families out of the gate every night instead of twice a year, and nobody held the mice steady, because nobody was left who could, and people were hurt, and the streets were bad in the summer.
And the trumpets played.
Every morning. From the wall above the eastern gate, at the hour the families went out, so the city would wake to music and not to the sound of what was happening under it. Bright, she said. Encouraging. And the whole city learned, inside a season, to hear those trumpets and feel sick, and never once say so.
I went to her about it. I'm not proud of the going; I'm proud that I went. Corridor. Tea.
"Do you hear the trumpets?" she said.
"Yes."
"Then it's all right, isn't it."
I said yes. Everybody said yes. I worked out on the ladder afterwards what they were, and it's the same as the market and the arrangement and the neat hand: they're what a person builds around the thing they can't look at, so that they never have to. A whole city of music at the eastern gate so that nobody hears the gate.
It drove her empty. You could see it from height. Everything she did was to change the past, to make the horses not have run, and you cannot spend eleven thousand years pushing on a thing that has already happened without the pushing becoming what you are and the thing you're pushing on becoming nothing at all. By the end she wasn't doing it for the boy. She'd forgotten him. She was doing it because she was the person who did it.
And then the dragons went. The last of them. The ones who'd held on in the side rooms out of some feeling for the family walked out through the eastern gate under the trumpets and did not come back, and the day the last one went, she stopped.
Not the way you'd think. She went quiet. Not the old quiet, the eleven-years kind; a different one. Quieter, and energisch, the way a person goes when they've finally understood the size of the problem and have decided to solve it properly, from the start, alone, with the lights on. She shut the market. She shut the border, though a parcel of drawings went out through the rats the week before, for a machine I couldn't read, to a place with no line in the ledger; I shelved the receipt and I don't know what it was for. She burned the arrangement, ten thousand bodies, in one night, and I'm told she did it herself and said something to each one. And she went into the workshop with the ledgers, all of them, everything she'd ever written about how things behave, and I carried them down to her, and she tried, one last time, to make it add up to a boy in a hat.
She didn't succeed. I'll write that plainly because the page should have it plainly: she failed. She was the brightest mind that city ever produced and she took everything she'd ever learned and it wasn't enough, and she knew it wasn't, and one morning the trumpets didn't play, and that's how the city knew the operation was shut.
I was on the ladder at the hour. My hand did not shake. I heard the gate.
And then the grandmothers.
That's what the city called them by then. The sisters. Two women who'd been governing since they were nineteen and had gone, in the ledger's count, very old. They took the ledgers, hers and the city's, everything that had ever been written down about the horses and the crater and the arrangement, and they hid it. Under the hill, in the room at the end, behind a hundred small doors.
I carried them. Who else climbs? A hundred small doors, and every one of them I closed with a hand that had done nothing wrong in all those years but write what it was given, and I'd like that noted, and I'm noting it.
Then each of them started a mission. Separately. Without telling the other. Which is the most Aktzen thing that has ever happened, and I only know it happened because each of them told me on a different day at the foot of the ladder, and each of them finished the same way.
"I'm going to be a stone," said the one, and looked at me, and said: "Don't tell my sister."
"I'm going to keep the lamps," said the other, a week later, and looked at me, and said: "Don't tell my sister."
I said yes both times. I'm good at it.
The wall's bare now where the ledger was. Twelve thousand years of holes, and a ladder leaning on nothing, and me at the top of it at the hour the trumpets used to play, listening.