Chapter One Dace
The dropstone was a slab of slate the size of a breadboard, with a hole bored through one corner and a long coil of tarred line knotted through the hole. I had borrowed it without asking from Old Tenacity, who like everyone in Wrackhold is named for the wreck he was born on. In Wrackhold, taking without asking is called borrowing until the owner notices. After that it is called a debt.
I sat on the rail of the Sorry Annie, a dead hulk at the edge of town, with my feet in the Lantern Sea and the other end of the line tied to her bitts, and breathed up. Slow in, slower out. Boys on the wrecks breathe fast before a dive because it makes them feel brave, and it does, right up until it makes them dead. Fast breathing hides the warning. You feel fine all the way down and fine all the way up. Then somebody fishes you out with a boathook.
It was the fourth bell of lowlight. We call the nights lowlight and the days burns, because the Glass Sun never goes out. It only banks down. It hung over us in the middle of everything, a ball of glass and fire held up by nothing anyone can explain, banked now to the colour of a forge coal, and at lowlight you can see what it hangs in. Rock. The Caul is a cave, a cave the size of a sky, with the whole weight of the world on its roof. The Lantern Sea fills the bottom of it, lit from inside, gold at the top and greener the deeper you look. Wrackhold floats on that sea: four hundred years of wrecks lashed together into a town.
Nobody in Wrackhold notices the light in the water any more than they notice air. You only notice it when it thins. It had been thinning. Three lowlights this month the sea had gone the colour of weak tea by the sixth bell, and the old men on the wrecks had started sleeping in their coats. People were saying the Sun was tired.
I rolled a brass coin over my knuckles and back. My hands need a job or they find one, and the job they find is usually somebody else’s lock.
Mrs Sorrel had found me in a chandlery on the market hull eight burns ago, between the caulking and the rope. She wore grey wool and good boots, and she called herself Mrs Sorrel. Sorrel is a herb, not a wreck. A woman who gives you a plant for a name is telling you she wasn’t born here and would prefer you didn’t ask where.
“There’s a vault under the Sounding,” she said, “at the ninth mark. There is a key in it made of glass. Bring it up.”
“That’s the Warden’s vault,” I said.
“It is.”
“The Warden lives on top of it.”
“The Warden sleeps on top of it, between the second bell of lowlight and the sixth.”
“And if he wakes up?”
“Then you will be somewhere else.”
The rest is in the book.
