Wood keeps a record. That is not a saying. A board that has stood in a house forty years has a face and a back, and the face is lighter where it took the lamp, and the back is dark where it took the damp off the plaster, and there are nail holes in it at the spacing of whatever it was nailed to. You can read the joists off a floorboard without ever seeing the floor. You can read where a family got money and put a partition up, and where they lost it again and took the partition down for firewood. I have been a joiner in Kormor Kirak thirty-one years. I can tell you the ward a beam came out of by the soot in the grain, because the Marrow burns cheap coal and the Terrassian Quarter burns better, and the difference stays in the wood forever.
My name is Antal Somos. I was set on at the Theater of Everlasting Peace in the second week of the rebuild, at nine krone the fortnight, which was more than any yard in the city was paying, and I took it and did not ask why it was more.
You have seen the site. Everyone has. It stands on the shoulder above the Kereskedo where the ground flattens, and for three months after the fire it was a black ring of uprights with the sky coming through. Three stories, in the round, timber the whole way, and no roof over it by design, which people talked about a great deal, because the roof was a safe thing to talk about. A man from the Albion consulate put the fire to it with bottles of oil. Everybody in the trade knew his name inside a week and nobody said it aloud, and he was dead before the ash was cold, and the gold that was to have built the thing went wherever such gold goes.
So when they started it again in the spring they started it without money.
Foreman Nero told us that himself on the first morning, standing on a stack in his good coat with the rain coming sideways. There would be no new timber. The mountain yards were spoken for by the tower works and the causeway, and what we would have instead was salvage, and any man who could not frame in salvage should go down the hill now, no hard feelings. Nobody went down the hill. The Convergence had been proclaimed in the squares a fortnight before, and a proclamation in this city means work for somebody and grief for somebody else.
Salvage is honest enough as a trade. Half the houses on my own street are built out of some older house. You pull nails, you scarf out the rot, you turn the sound face out and accept that your frame will have a hundred holes in it that mean nothing. What you learn in a yard is to read fast. Hand on the board, eye down the length for the wind in it, ends checked for split, and onto the pile it belongs to.
The loads came at night. That is the first thing. Up the hill on muffled wheels between the second bell and the fourth, stacked behind the hoarding, so that by the time we came on in the morning there would be forty tons of somebody's house standing under a tarpaulin.
The second thing is that it was too good.
Salvage is broken. That is its nature. You get a load off a demolition and it is half kindling. What came up that hill was whole. Full joists, unsprung. Stair treads with the risers still pegged to them. Door frames out in one piece, which any man in the trade will tell you does not happen, because the way you get a door frame out is you wreck it. These had been taken out by somebody with time and care and no interest at all in the wall they came from.
By the third week I had begun to know things I did not want to know.
There was a counter top, elm, three inches, worn into a dish at the near edge the way a counter goes when somebody has leaned on the same eight inches of it for twenty years. It had chalk in the grain. Tailor's chalk goes into elm and does not come out, and there were pin scars along the far edge and a shallow groove where a rule had been fixed. I knew whose it was before I found the sign board face down under it, planed thin but not planed enough. You could still read M. SOLLER, MENDING & MADE NEW in the shadow of the paint.
Everybody in the Marrow knew Magrit Soller was gone. She went in the winter, after the Red Guard had her doing their coats for nothing, and her landlady stood in the street asking men to write it down. Brother Aldric wrote it down. He wrote down a great many names, and then in the summer they came up from the monastery for him, and there was nobody left who was writing anything.
I said not a word about the counter. I cut it into sill plates for the second gallery, which is what Nero had put me on the pile to do.
After that I could not stop seeing it. A newel post off Fever Row with a child's height cut into it in notches, nine notches, the last about four foot six. Floorboards with the pale square of a bed in them. A run of wainscot with the red ochre still on the door frame it came with, the ward mark, the one your grandmother renewed at midwinter and told you never to paint over. Nero looked at that ochre a long while and told Peti to plane it off before it went up.
Peti was seventeen and asked why. Nero said because it is dirt and the drawing does not allow for it, and Peti planed it off. By midsummer we had two men doing nothing else, and some mornings the whole yard smelled of it, that dry red smell like a floor swept for the first time in years.
They moved me under the stage in the eighth week.
The theater is in the round, the floor of it is a drum, and beneath the drum there are chambers. That was always in the plan. The delegates were to meet down there, out of sight, and settle the Century War in comfort while the city watched a pageant over their heads. The public part was to be a theater and the private part was to be the room where the thing was actually done. Any man who has worked on a great house understands that arrangement and thinks nothing of it.
What I do not understand is the ring.
There is a course of framing that runs round the underside of the drum at about the height of a man's chest, joined in scarfs. A scarf is how you make one long timber out of two short ones. You cut a shallow tongue on each, you lap them, you peg through. It is a joint for carrying a load along a line. I have cut ten thousand of them and there is nothing occult about one.
These carry nothing. The ring stands clear of the drum above it by a finger's width the whole way round, and clear of the wall behind it. The drawing they gave us was on good Albion paper and it was not a builder's drawing. No loads marked. No sizes given except the one, and the angles laid out from a centre point in the middle of the floor, which is what you do setting out a wheel or a rose window, and this was neither.
The drawing said eighty-eight.
I counted them off as I cut them, because that is how a man works. Fourteen by the end of the first week, thirty-one by the second. Nero came down twice a day, put his hand on the last one cut, asked the number and wrote it in a book. He never once asked whether it was true or square. Only the number.
And the wood fought me.
I want to be exact, because I have heard men in taverns talk about haunted timber and it is not that. Haunted would be easier. This was the wood behaving as though it had already been fitted somewhere else and did not care to be fitted again. Scarfs that came off the bench dead true would not close on the site. They sat open a sixteenth and stayed open, and if you drew them with a wedge the tongue split with the grain in a way oak of that age has no business doing. Blades went blunt in a single pass. Peti pulled a saw out of a joist and the teeth were bright and turned over like a comb dragged through gravel. There was sap in beams a hundred years dry, coming up in the pin holes, and it did not smell of sap. It smelled the way the tunnels under the Kereskedo smell in August.
The chambers are dug, so a cellar chill is only sense. But the yard above was in high summer, and a man came down the ladder sweating and was cold to the bone in a quarter of an hour, and the cold came off the ring itself. You could find it in the dark with your hand out, the way you find a doorway you cannot see.
The slips came with the loads.
I nearly did not look at them. Every salvage load carries its condemnation, a printed slip with the ward, the street, the number of the house, the seal of the Magistracy, and a date. It is what makes the load lawful. They came nailed to the end grain of the top board, and the yard men tore them off into a barrel, and I began taking them out of the barrel because there was a name on one I knew.
I kept them in a satchel under the bench. By the Feast of Bells I had two hundred and some.
What I found, I found slowly, and I did not go looking. A house on Vezer Row, number eleven, condemned and cleared, the slip dated the twenty-second. That load came up the hill on the sixteenth. I know it came up on the sixteenth because I framed a partition out of it on the seventeenth, and I sign my work with the date on the back of the sole plate, as every joiner in this city does.
I told myself it was clerks. Clerks in this city would post-date their own mothers.
Then I walked down to Vezer Row on the evening of the twenty-first, and there was a house at number eleven with a family in it, a lamp in the front room, a woman shaking out a cloth from the upper window.
I stood in that street until the lamplighter came round and then I went home.
I have not been back to Vezer Row. I did not go on the twenty-second and I have not gone since, and if you want to think less of me for it I will not argue. A man with a satchel of stolen paper, telling a family their walls are already up the hill and framed into a gallery, is a man the Red Guard take away that same night, and his wife with him, and then there are two more houses on the carts.
The comet was very bright that week. It does not set any more, it only goes round, and you can read the slips by it with the lamp out.
The last load of the season came up on a Thursday.
I was on the ring by then, cutting the eighty-eighth. Nero had asked the number every day for eleven weeks and now it had come down to the one, and there was a mood on the site like the day before a holiday.
I went through that load in the yard at first light, because I had got into the habit, and a third of the way down the second stack I came to a shelf.
Ash, one inch, twenty-two inches long, the front edge rounded off with a plane because I rounded it off with a plane, in my own kitchen, eleven years ago, out of a scrap I carried home from the Bastion job under my coat. My wife's letters are burned into the underside at the left end, K. S., done with a poker heated in our own grate because I had no iron and would not buy one. There is a knot at the far end that I worked round instead of cutting out, and the shake in it has opened since, and I know exactly how it has opened because I look at it every morning of my life.
I put it under the bench with the satchel and went home at the dinner bell without asking leave.
The house was standing. Kata was at the table with the mending. The shelf was on the wall over the water crock where it has been eleven years, with the jar of salt on it and the tin of thread, and the letters underneath that I burned there, and the knot with the shake in it.
I put my hand on it and it was warm from the room. She asked was I ill and I said the heat, and she gave me water and I drank it, and I sat down across from her and said nothing. That is the whole of what I did. There is no second part where I was braver later.
The condemnation slip for our street is in the satchel. It is for the fourth of September, which is a Wednesday, and the day after that is the day the astronomers have been arguing about all year.
On the Friday I went up and cut the eighty-eighth joint.
I used the shelf for the tongue, because there was ash on the bench and Nero was at the foot of the ladder with his book open, and because a man who has taken nine krone the fortnight all summer does not put down his chisel at the last joint of the work. I cut it and lapped it and drove the peg.
It closed the first time. Dead tight, no wedge, no sixteenth. The only one on that ring that ever did.
Nero wrote the number in his book and shut it, and the ring went cold the way a stove goes hot, all at once and all along. Every man down there felt it and no man said anything, and we went up the ladder into the light. The comet was in the afternoon sky over the drum, small and white, and the theater stood open to it with no roof, the way it was always meant to.
I have eleven days. Kata is making a shift for the festival because attendance is compulsory and she does not want to shame me in the ranks. I hold the lamp for her in the evenings. She sews well, better than I frame, and she is quick, and she says she will have it done in good time.