Prologue · The Last Account

Hara del Dique put a hand on the map. Her nails were broken. Beneath her fingers, the lines of rivers passed through settlements that no longer existed.

“Close it. But write down who is left outside.”

Madruga dipped her pen. The agreement had room for the granaries they would divide, the roads the Armada would patrol, the amnesties offered to the Horde. There was no column for those waiting for someone to return.

The child woke when a tremor bent the lamp flames.

“Is it him?” she asked.

Madruga did not answer. Her husband had been dead for eleven days. The girl still counted the nights as though they were steps and she might reach the last one.

Wet footsteps sounded in the corridor. The guard opened the door and a woman came in without anyone's permission. A burn cut across her travelling dress; on her throat, the wound that had killed her looked like a scar many years old. Madruga had seen her under a blanket that very afternoon.

“Do not sign away ownership,” the newcomer said.

The representative from Dawnrock rose.

“Who sends you?”

“I was dead. That is no place from which to take orders.”

The woman had to brace herself against the table. Hara brought her a chair, but she clung to the map.

“There are voices on the other side. They do not sing together. One asks for form; another, that we remember. One wants to burn what is finished. Another keeps the seeds. The fifth…”

She put a hand to her mouth. She was bleeding, though her wound had already closed.

“The fifth keeps the threshold open. They all have limits. Do not let one man take their place.”

She touched her chest, just below the collarbone, like someone feeling for a coin she does not remember putting away.

“And when I came back, I brought something. Here. It's warm, like a splinter of light. Don't ask me for it, because it can't be given.”

Water came under the door. First it smelled of

mud; then of leaves and iron. The frogs sang all at once and fell silent again.

Madruga saw the line the blue-clad envoy had added to the agreement: “All who return shall be subject to the custodian of the seal.” It was written in darker ink. It had not been in the draft she copied at dawn.

The man drew a desk knife.

Hara overturned the table onto him.

The lamps went out. Madruga lifted her daughter. As she ran towards the servants' stairs, she heard the dwarf split the tin sheet with a hammer blow. Something small struck her back and fell into a fold of her skirt.

“Take the true account!” Hara shouted.

Madruga did not see who closed the door or how long it held. In the courtyard, the night was full of bells ringing out of time. Water from four canals ran towards the same square. An entire bridge turned slowly, people still clinging to its rails, and sank without raising much of a wave.

At

the corner by the dyers' workshops, they found a guard tied to a grille.

The current reached his waist and was still rising. Refugees passed without freeing him. He had defended the closing of the canal that very morning. Madruga recognised him by a scar across his nose and the way he had pushed a woman away from the distribution point.

The guard asked for a knife.

The copyist carried the one she used to trim parchment. It could not cut a thick rope in a single stroke. She would have to get close. The child clung tighter to her neck when she felt her descending the stairs.

“The water will take us,” she said.

Madruga looked towards the bridge that had just sunk. It was true. They might lose their way out to help someone who could arrest them if he managed to give orders again.

She put her daughter in a high niche and stepped into the water.

The guard tried to grab her. She pulled away before

his desperation could drag her under.

“Stay still.”

He obeyed for two breaths, then began struggling again. Madruga pressed a hand against his shoulder and showed him the tiny blade.

“If you make me lose it, I have no other.”

She cut one strand, then another. The water had a strength that seemed to come from no particular direction. It carried spoons, flowers, a cupboard door. The guard began to weep with his face against the iron.

When the rope gave way, she could not help him climb. She only pointed to a chain on the wall. He seized it and worked his way towards the courtyard.

Madruga picked up her daughter.

The guard followed them for a block. He tried to give her his cloak. She refused because she needed her arms free and the wet garment was too heavy. He persisted until he understood that he could not decide what shape his rescuer's gratitude should take.

They parted on the slope.

The child asked whether the man was

good.

Madruga thought of the woman driven from the distribution point, the ropes, the hands grasping the grille.

“Today he was tied up,” she replied.

It was not explanation enough for a child. Perhaps it never would be for anyone. She kept climbing until the water began to fall behind them.

She felt the fragment of tin in her skirt pocket. It struck her leg with every step. For a moment she wanted to throw it away and carry only her daughter, let other people decide what the night had meant.

She kept it.

Not because she knew the world would need it. Because she had seen words change owners on a table and could not bear to surrender them in her memory as well.

Many years later, they would say that the Rupture had happened through the miners' cowardice and the gods' pride.

Madruga hid the tin fragment in a sack of flour. She spent the rest of her life correcting the story in a voice so low that

only those sleeping beside her could hear it.

Her daughter learned the first version before she could read.