Say Number 13
Pip Rippon. The Rawson Spring. You're buying, which is the arrangement whenever you want one of these out of me, and I've noticed you never want the short ones.
Right. You know the Rivelin culverts. Everyone says they know the Rivelin culverts and then you get them down there and they go quiet. The tiled outflow under the bottom dam, where the water comes out flat and black and a dropped ¢hit rings for a whole second before it dies. If you've stood in that you'll know the sound I mean. If you've only walked the path along the top of it you don't, and you want to keep it that way.
A woman I'm not going to name lost her man down there in the newshoot. He went in after a dropped tool, or a dropped nerve, nobody could say which, and he came back out. That's the bit people leave off when they tell it, so I'll put it in. He came out. Walked home on his own feet, sat down at his own table. There was nothing you could measure that was wrong with him. There was nothing left in him either.
You've read my entry on the ullagnaw or you haven't. The short of it is that it doesn't take your body. It takes the part of you the nascenti read and the hivemind files, the soul-weight that makes you a person the murk bothers to recognise, and it takes it at its own pace, and what goes doesn't come back. Her man sat at that table about a fortnight being the shape of himself, and then he stopped doing even that.
So. Nobody recovers a body off an ullagnaw, because there isn't one. What you get, if you get anything, is one batch of murk-salt cooling on the brick where it's been working. She'd paid a man to go down and drive the thing back off its den long enough to cool a batch, and he'd done it, and now there was a cup of the stuff sat on a ledge in the Rivelin outflow, still warm, and it was ringing.
That's the thing about fresh murk-salt. Cup it while it's warm and it rings, faint, on and off, and old hands will tell you that's the last of whatever the thing drained still in there, hunting the way out. Let it go cold and it's just salt. She wanted it at her door before murkrise, while there was still a ring left in it, so she could hold it to her ear the once. She had a number. She lived at number thirteen, on a road I'll come to.
And she wanted somebody to carry it across the city for her overnight, and pay for the privilege. That's the trade, murker. I carry what other people won't, and I don't ask what's in it more than once.
The man met me at the outflow and did not come one step further than the tiling. Handed me the cup wrapped in oilcloth, and a fistful of cut nails, cold iron, and told me to keep the nails in the same pocket as the cup. Iron fouls whatever an ullagnaw resonates through. Dampens it. He said the salt would go on ringing whatever I did, but with the iron in there the ring wouldn't carry so far, and carrying was the whole problem.
Then he told me the thing I've thought about most since. He said: don't say the number. Not to a soul between here and her door. Not to check you've got it right. Not under your breath. The ring off that salt goes down a grating like water, and there's more than one ullagnaw keeps the resonant stretches under this city, and every one of them sleeps until something makes a sound worth waking for. You walk over a grate on a tiled street saying thirteen out loud with a ringing cup in your coat, he said, you might as well knock on the culvert and leave your name.
Count the doors, he said. Don't say the number.
I said that seemed like a lot of care over one word. He said I could take the care or I could take his place next fortnight, sat at a table being a shape, and he went back down the tiling and I didn't see him again.
I came up out of the Rivelin valley with the cup against my ribs and the nails against the cup and the murk down to about ten paces, which is a good murkneet by the standards of this year. It was doing its funfair noise somewhere off past Wadsley, that packing-up tune the DPDC keeps putting notices out about, and for a while it was only a walk. A cold one. The salt would ring, this little tin sound out of my own coat, twice, three times, then nothing for a hundred yards, then again. You'd think you'd get used to a sound coming off your own body. You don't. Every time it went I looked down like it might have been somebody else's.
Then I got onto Holme Lane and remembered what murkneet it was.
There'd been netherlanders in the city. Or the hivemind said there had, which comes to the same thing in the number of exacids it puts on the street. Somebody over the Causeway that shouldn't have been, a sighting down Neepsend, a broadcast telling everyone to bolt their doors and report anything with the wrong markings. And then a checkpoint across the road by the old tram stop, a queue backed up under the bridge, and every coat coming open. Where the DPDC thinks there are crosslanders it sends exacids, and it does not send one or two. Big armoured beggars up on their back legs, one to a corner.
I stood in a doorway and watched it a while, because you learn more watching an exacid than doing anything else near one. This one had a way it did every search. Same three moves. Step in, claw up, look you over, and if the three moves turned nothing up it stopped. Just stopped, for a breath, like the instructions had run out and it was waiting for more. Then it went again on the next coat. They're not clever. Everyone says that like it's a cruelty and it isn't, it's just the one true thing about them, and it's the only thing near an exacid that's any use to you.
Down the queue the jellyheads stood patient as fenceposts, psycmasks ticking over, biofeed lines catching what light there was, that whole stretch of road lit the colour the organic network likes a thing lit. Nobody in that line was going anywhere in a hurry and none of them minded.
I did not fancy the queue with a ringing cup in my coat. Murk-salt off a den that's been driven that fresh is a regulated thing, you're meant to have a docket, and I had a cup wrapped in oilcloth and a fist of nails and a story no exacid has the wiring to follow. So I waited for the stop, and on the stop I walked, not fast, across the front of the queue and down the side street by the chapel like I lived there, and the salt rang once while I was doing it and I have never in my life wanted a sound to not happen so much.
Nothing came up out of the road. I want that on the record, because of what happened later. The exacid didn't turn. I got down the side street clean.
Which put me in Owlerton, off the main road, in the terraces. And I should have thought harder about that than I did.
There'd been a gambrel working Owlerton about three weeks. I knew that. Everyone in that end of the city knew it, they were all sat up after murkfall with the curtains open comparing notes on the eyes. A gambrel does a district a season and moves on, and three weeks in is the bad middle of it, when it's hungry and the whole valley's jumpy and a stranger walking the back streets after murkfall is taking a risk from the living as much as anything.
You know the rule with a gambrel. I wrote the rule. Walk the middle of the road, not under the eaves. Keep your chin up. It wants the drop, it comes from above and behind, and if you deny it the angle it'll usually wait for something easier. Middle of the road, chin up. Simple.
Try doing it with a cup of ringing salt against your ribs. I was hunched over the thing. Hurrying. Head down, listening to my own coat, going quick and quiet along the wall where the shadow was, which is the exact shape of the exact animal a gambrel comes down for. I made myself into the easy thing without once noticing I was doing it.
It came off the gasholder. I heard it on the way down, this noise like somebody laying out cutlery, and then it was on my shoulders and we were going sideways across the road at the railing over the Don, fast, and the only clear thought I had was don't drop the cup, which tells you something about the murkneet I was having.
I got a hand on the railing before it rode me over it. Just. Took the top bar across the ribs hard enough that I've still got the print of it, and below it the Don going the colour water goes when it's carrying more than water. Then the weight came off me and there was the cutlery noise going up the brick on the other side and it was gone, back up top, off to wait for something that wasn't going to grab a rail in time.
People die of that. Not of the gambrel. Of the rail, or the road, or the drop. I've written that down and it never lands until it's your own ribs.
I stood in the middle of the road a while after that. Chin up. Bit late.
The last of it was the worst and the quietest.
Her road runs along the top of a culverted beck, and half of it is old tiled paving with the gratings every few yards, breathing up a cold that isn't weather, and I could hear the salt ringing and I could hear, underneath it, something down there ringing back. Not loud. A note you feel in your back teeth and behind your eyes more than you hear it. And walking that road I could feel the other thing an ullagnaw does, the drain, this sensation of being turned down a notch at a time. Nothing hurt. I just had less of myself every few doors. I got vague. I got slow. I stopped being sure which door I'd counted last.
And I would not say the number.
I'm not being dramatic about this. I stood on that road with my head going soft, iron in my pocket, a dying ring in a cup, genuinely unable to remember whether I was at the eleventh door or the fourteenth, and the one thing that would have sorted it in a heartbeat was saying the number out loud and counting to it, and I did not do it, because a man with his instructions run out had looked at me and told me not to.
I went back to the corner and started again. Counted on my fingers against the doors, mouth shut. One. Two. Down the row in the murk with the gratings singing at me.
There was a child sat on a step about two thirds down. Her child. Waiting up, the way they do when the grown-ups have gone quiet about something. And as I got near she stood up and asked me, clear as anything, what number I was looking for.
I had it right there. It was in my mouth. I was tired and drained and I'd been hit off a gasholder and the honest easy human thing was just to tell the girl the number.
I pointed instead. Held the cup up so she could see it, and pointed at her own door, and she looked at it and looked at me and went and got her mother.
The woman came out and I put the cup in her hands and she got the oilcloth off and held it up to her ear on the step, right there, not a word.
I don't know what's in a batch of murk-salt. Nobody's opened one up and found anything you could put a name to. But she held it to her ear like there was somebody in it, and she stood like that a long time. Long enough that I looked away, and looked back, and she hadn't moved. And the whole while the ring was going out of it, this little tin sound getting further off inside the cup, the way a voice gets further off when the person's walking away down a corridor, until it wasn't there at all.
Then she took it down and looked at me. And I have thought about that look a great deal more than I've thought about the gambrel, and the gambrel had me on a railing over the Don.
She didn't say whether it was worth it. I didn't ask. She paid me what we'd agreed and I walked back to the tram in the murklight lighter than I'd gone out, and not just in the pocket.
And now I count doors. Everywhere. I've done it coming in here tonight. I do not say the number out loud, any number near it, and people who know the story do the voice about it, and I let them.
Say it in here if you want. High ceiling, no gratings, you'll be fine.
I still won't.
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