A man will give you his sword if you promise him the water. I have proved this more times than I can hold in my head, and it is the first thing I would tell you about the Erdo Pools, before the steam or the heat or the way the stone sweats. Bring a soldier up the road on a litter with his belly opened or his leg gone to rot, and the law of the place will be told to him at the gate, that no weapon goes down to the water, that this is old ground and older than the Queen and older than the war, and he will not argue. He will work the buckle himself if his hands still work. He will put the thing that has kept him alive his whole soldiering life into the hands of a girl he has never met, and he will weep with the relief of it, because it means he is going to be allowed to heal.
I am the one who takes it. I am the keeper of the blades.
There is no glory in the office and I want none. I sit in the cold room by the gate where the racks are, and I take what they surrender, and I tie a tag of waxed thread to each piece with a number burned into the wood, and I give the man the twin of that number on a chit of bone to wear on a cord round his neck into the water. When he is healed and is leaving he gives me back the bone and I give him back his blade, and he goes down the Cliff Road on his own two feet that a week before were carried, and that is the whole of it. That was the whole of it for the four years I have done it. I oil the steel so it does not pit in the damp. I keep the racks. I match the bone to the wood. A simple trade, and an honest one, in a city that has very few left.
You should understand what the pools are, if you have never been broken enough to need them.
They are six, cut into the living rock of the hillside below the Eastern Tower, fed from below by water that comes up already hot and smelling of iron and something sweeter under the iron that I have never found a word for. The Terrassians say their grandmothers' grandmothers bathed there. The Albion men, who believe in nothing they cannot put in a ledger, come up sneering and go down into the water and shut their mouths, because it works. A wound that would take a chirurgeon a month and a saw closes in the Erdo water in five days, six. The flesh knits. The fever breaks. I have seen a Terrassian gunner brought up with his face half burned away leave with a new pink face like a child's, soft and strange, but a face. The water does not care which side of the Century War opened the man. That is the tradition, and the tradition is the weapons. Down there an Albion grenadier soaks an arm's length from the Terrassian who shelled him, and neither has so much as a knife, and so neither does the thing a hundred years of war has trained him to do. They lie in the heat and they heal and they do not speak and then they leave by separate doors. It is the only peace I have ever seen hold.
It held because of me, I used to think. Because of the racks. I was proud of that, a little. A small proud thing to carry.
The water changed when the tower went up.
I do not mean all at once. I mean the way milk changes, that you do not see the hour it turns, only that one morning it is turned. The steam came thicker off the pools and it came with a smell in it that the iron could not cover anymore, a smell I knew and could not place and did not let myself place. The water ran hotter. The men healed faster. That should have gladdened me and it did, for a while. A soldier who took six days now took three. Three days now took one. By the time the tower was high enough to see from the gate, a man brought up at dusk with his guts held in by a belt could be walking by the next dusk, whole, pink, soft-faced.
And here is the thing I noticed, the small wrong thing, the way you notice a draft before you find the cracked pane. The faster they healed, the fewer of them came back for their blades.
At first I told myself the honest tale. That a man healed so fast and so strange was glad to be gone and forgot the chit, the way you forget an umbrella when the rain has stopped. That the bone cords came loose in the water and were lost and the men were too dazed in their new soft skins to remember the rack at the gate. I had a drawer of unmatched bone going green with damp, numbers I could not give back because no man came to claim them, and a rack going full of good steel with no owner, and I told myself a man does not come up the Cliff Road on a litter to fetch a sword once his legs are his again. I told myself it for a season.
Then I started watching the doors.
There are two ways down to the water and two ways up. The left stair, from my cold room, is the one they come in by, carried or limping, and it is the one I see all day. The right stair I had never had cause to watch, because the healed go out the right and down the back of the hill to the road, and a keeper of blades has no business with men leaving who have already had their steel returned. But these men had not had their steel returned. So one evening I left the racks and I went out into the cold and round the shoulder of the rock where I could see the foot of the right stair, where the road begins, and I sat in the dark with my back to the warm stone and I watched the men come up out of the Erdo water and go home.
They came up in the violet light. You will know the light I mean if you have stood near the castle after dark in these weeks, the light off the tower, that is not lamplight and not moonlight and falls on a face like cold water. They came up in it one and two at a time, the healed, the pink-faced, and they did not go down to the road.
They went up.
Up the path that runs to the Cliff Road's high switchback, the one that goes to the castle and to nothing else. They walked it well. That was the thing that put the cold in me deeper than the night did, that they walked it so well, men I had taken up that same week with their bones showing, walking the steep dark path to Castle Torony Piros at a soldier's pace, not tired, not stumbling, in good order, like men who had been given an order. They did not speak. They did not look at the road home. I sat in the dark and I counted them up the path and I did not let myself understand it yet, but my hands had understood it already, because they had gone to the cord at my own throat where I keep nothing, and were holding it as if there were a bone there to hold.
I know what the Spawn are. Everyone in the lower city knows by now, the way you come to know a plague by its smell before the criers say its name. The Queen's new soldiers. Faster than the Red Guard. They do not tire. They do not bleed the way a man bleeds. They man the new stations on the Northern Causeway and they stand the night watches that would break a living man, and where she gets them no decree has ever said. The decrees only say there are more of them every week, as the tower rises, as the comet comes.
She gets them from me.
Not from me alone. I am one gate of it and a small one. But I see now what the Erdo water has been made into, under the tower, fed up hot from whatever she has cut into the rock below. It does not heal anymore. It did once and the old smell under the iron was the proof of its healing. The new smell is the proof of what it does now, and I know the smell, I have always known it, it is the smell of the Feeding Chamber that the corpse-carriers bring down on their clothes when they stop at the gate. The water knits a broken man whole and it empties him while it knits him, the way you might mend a coat and take the man out of it in the one motion. What comes up the right stair has the soldier's body, healed, better than healed, and it has nothing of the soldier in it but the training in the legs. It walks up to the castle because that is where it is wanted. It does not come back for its blade because it has no more use for a blade it would have to choose to lift. It is the blade now. She points it.
And the wounded keep coming up the road on their litters, from both sides of a war that does not know it has been turned into a harvest, and they reach the gate with their bellies open and their faces gone, and the law is told to them, and they give me their swords.
I have thought about the other thing a keeper might do. I am not a fool and I am not, whatever I have let myself become, without a conscience. I could tell them. I could meet the litters on the path before the gate and say, low, the way the cup-boys in the castle are said to whisper a kindness, do not go down to the water, the water is the Queen's mouth now, turn your litter round and die of your wound on the honest hillside with your sword in your hand and yourself still inside your own body when it stops.
I tried it once. A Terrassian boy, a drummer, no older than me, with a ball in his hip and his leg already black to the knee. I knelt by his litter and I started to say it. And he looked up at me out of his fever with such hope, such plain dog hope at the sight of the gate and the steam coming off the rock, that the words turned in my mouth. He did not want the truth. No man carried up that road wants the truth. He wanted the water, and the water would take his black leg and his fever and his pain and give him three more days of walking before it spent the rest of him on the castle wall, and to refuse him that was to give him nothing back but the black leg and a clean conscience that was mine and not his. I let him pass. I took his little knife, all the steel he had, and I tagged it and I racked it, and I have it still.
So that is my office now, that I once thought honest. I take the last thing a dying man owns. I promise him the water with my silence, which is the cruelest promise in Kormor Kirak, because I keep it. He goes down a man and comes up the Queen's, and his sword stays with me, oiled, tagged, racked, against a claiming that will never come.
I do not count them anymore. I did, when I thought the count was mercy, the way the corpse-washers count their wounds and the cup-boys count their full cups, as though a number held in the dark were a kind of keeping faith. It is not. The rack is full and the drawer of green bone is full and there is no faith in it, only steel that outlasts the men it was forged for. I oil them still. I do not know why I oil them. Someone should keep the edge on the last true thing a man owned, I suppose, even after the man has been poured out and stood up again with a sword in his hand that is not on my rack, that he did not surrender, that he will never lay down.
They are forging her an army out of the broken halves of a war, in the only water in the world that two enemies will lie down together in unarmed. And I take the weapons at the door. I am very good at it. A man will give you his sword if you promise him the water, and up here, under the tower, in the violet light, I have never once had to ask twice.