The Ninth Stair Above the Sea

The ninth stair failed to appear, and Pella Norr spilled soup down the front of her only respectable coat.

All along Tarn Quay, people stopped eating. Bowls remained halfway to mouths. A child asked whether the floating city was late, and somebody answered yes before anyone had decided what the answer ought to be.

Above the harbour, Vael hung where it always hung on the Night of Landing: its narrow houses, its gardens in iron baskets, its lamps moving gently against the sky. Eight black stairs rose from the quay toward its gate. Where the ninth should have been, there was an empty piece of evening.

Pella put her bowl on a bollard and counted again.

"Still eight," said her master.

"I thought an expert count might help."

Daro, who had been cutting stone for longer than Pella's twenty-seven years, took the bowl before it fell into the harbour. "Try looking instead."

The stairs were made each year from paired moonstone: nine small pieces in Tarn Quay's landing wall, nine in Vael's. When the cities met, the paired stones called a path between them. The path lasted until dawn, when Vael continued its year-long circuit above the sea.

Pella had crossed twice as an apprentice and once simply to buy a cake she could not afford. She knew the feel of those steps underfoot. A person could stand on them safely, but living flesh could not cross a break in the path. A rope, a tool or a loose stone could pass through the empty space. A hand could not. The old magic was annoyingly particular about the difference.

Now, at the far gate, a man held a lamp over the missing stair.

He looked down at the quay. Even from there, Pella could see he was counting too.

They fetched the speaking horns from the landing shed. Pella had polished one last winter and knew it made every voice sound like an irritated goose.

The man above put his mouth to Vael's horn.

"Is anybody there who isn't counting?"

"A stone worker," Pella called. "How many of your wall stones are missing?"

A pause. "One."

The crowd below began talking at once.

"I asked him," Pella said, more sharply than she intended.

Daro raised his own hand for quiet. At sixty-three he could make people listen by appearing to save his breath for a much worse opinion.

The man at the gate was Iro, a gardener, twenty-nine, and he had spent the last hour searching beneath a bench. During repairs to the landing wall, its ninth stone had been lifted into a padded box. A new handcart had struck the box. The stone had gone over the edge of Vael and vanished into the deep sea.

"We thought it was an ordinary facing piece," he said. "There was no mark on the back."

"There never is," Daro murmured.

Pella asked whether the socket was damaged.

"No. The stone is gone."

People could remain safely in Vael without landing. It had stores, water and its own homes. But those who had arranged to move to Tarn Quay would miss their passage. Those below waiting to return to Vael would spend another year away. A woman beside Pella held a parcel wrapped so carefully that its string had cut into the paper.

"My father made that chair for my daughter," she said to nobody. "She'll be too big next year."

Pella looked at the empty stair. The problem was not a city about to die. It was a hundred ordinary plans about to become impossible. That seemed reason enough to work quickly.

Daro examined Tarn Quay's nine pieces. None had moved. He cleaned their edges with a cloth while Pella held the lamp.

"Can we give them ours?" she asked.

"Then both shores would be missing a ninth. The bridge is a pair, not a collection."

"A new piece?"

"From the same original block. Anything else would be an ordinary stone in a very important hole."

Moonstone was not the moon. Pella's first teacher had made her repeat this until she stopped drawing craters in the workshop margins. It was an old name for a black stone, with pale branching threads inside. Each block had its own pattern. The paired landing pieces had been cut from one block a century earlier.

The quarry had long since collapsed. That much everyone in Tarn Quay knew, which made it one of the facts people offered before thinking.

Pella knelt closer. A white thread crossed the ninth piece like a bent finger. Another branch ended at the edge.

She had seen that turn in a larger stone only three days before.

"The memorial," she said.

Daro stopped cleaning.

At the centre of the square stood a carved anchor commemorating the founding of the harbour. Pella had recently repaired its ordinary stone base. The anchor itself was black, veined with pale branches. Its lower curve carried the same small hooked line.

"Was it cut from the remainder?"

Daro looked toward the square, then back at her.

"My master said it was. I hadn't thought of it for years."

"You've just thought of it now."

"Yes."

The admission came without defence. Pella was grateful. She had no time to be angry about the size of the things a person could forget.

Councillor Maren met them at the memorial wearing her festival sash over a work apron. She had been frying onions when the eighth stair appeared and had not yet turned off the little pan; her neighbour went to do it.

Pella explained the missing piece, the quarry and the anchor.

"Where would you cut?" Maren asked.

They walked round the base. Beneath the anchor's lowest curve was a projecting foot, part of the stone block rather than part of its carved rope. A small piece could come from its edge without unseating the monument. It would leave a visible notch.

"You can't put it back after the crossing?"

"Vael needs it next year too," Pella said.

Maren looked at the names carved around the base. Her grandmother's was among them. Daro's father's name was there too. Neither of them touched it.

"People gave this stone to remember the harbour," Maren said. "It isn't mine to give away."

Pella wanted to say that memory was no use if it stopped a chair reaching a child. She was glad she did not. Maren was asking who had authority, not refusing to care.

The quay council had five members. Four were in the town that night, the fifth aboard Vael. They could speak to her through the horn. Maren sent a runner for the others and asked Daro to explain the cut in plain terms.

Pella waited beside the anchor, trembling with the effort of not beginning.

A boy offered her a paper of fried onions that Maren's neighbour had rescued from the pan.

"You look hungry."

She took one. It was cold. She had forgotten the soup.

The councillor in Vael was furious, though not about the anchor. Through the horn she demanded to know why a landing piece had no identifying mark and why the padded box had stood beside a cartway.

"We can ask that after," Maren called.

"We should ask it before it happens again."

"Yes. After we have a stair."

Pella bit the inside of her cheek. Daro looked firmly at a rope.

The decision took less time than waiting for it seemed to take. All five agreed to the cut, provided the carved names remained untouched and the workshop made a sound replacement for the anchor's appearance afterward. The notch would be recorded as a gift shared between the two towns, not disguised as damage that nobody could explain.

Maren took off her sash and tied back her hair.

"What do you need?"

Pella had expected permission and perhaps a speech. She found herself handing the councillor a lamp.

They brought the workshop's frame and tools. This was no task for excited spectators, and Daro kept them back. Pella worked inside the arrangement they knew, with her master checking each stage. The story of the old stone was magic; the patience required to cut it was familiar.

Before midnight a new block lay in its padded tray. It was larger than the missing piece had been. Daro would not cut it to final size from a shouted guess.

"Someone will have to measure the socket," he said.

"Iro can."

"Someone who can tell us which face belongs outward."

Pella looked up at the stairway, eight separate places over the dark water.

"I'll go far enough to show him."