In the end, he staggered to his feet and rested his head against the far wall, beating it gently but firmly against the stonework. He couldn’t do it. It was defeating him, and would continue to do so. There was no one he could ask for help. No teachers, no professors, no colleagues, no draughtsmen. This was his task alone, and he was failing.
He turned around and hunched down, back against the wall, staring half at the map, half into the middle distance. He rubbed at his face with his fists, and took a deep breath.
So he couldn’t find a solution. There could be three reasons for that.
Firstly, that he was too stupid to find it. That was always his first thought. He didn’t claim to be a genius, and he’d always had to work hard to understand the things he’d been taught. But if he had all the information, then he was just a dot-to-dot away from revealing the picture. And it wasn’t happening.
Secondly, that he didn’t have all the information. He had a map made up of nearly two hundred other maps that he and Mary had cobbled together on a piece of cloth with some rough charcoal. He knew he didn’t have all the information. There were map fragments he couldn’t place, and there was also the physical limit of the cloth itself. The land it represented stretched far beyond its now-ragged seams, and there might be other continents, all with their own portals and castles.
What he did have was enough, he was certain of that. If there was a repeating pattern, then it would be repeated in the area he had.
Which left him with the third option: that the problem had no solution.
He’d often been given maths problems that had no solutions. Most of the time because proving the problem had no solutions was in and of itself the answer, and a test of his skill. And occasionally, there was no solution because there the question was wrong.
He went back to the map and looked at it with a different eye.
He started to look for things that were wrong, not things that were right, and the obvious◦– he struggled with how obvious it was◦– anomaly was the area around the White City itself. No lines crossed it. There were no villages, and no castles. The region that was void, dead to magic. He had always thought so, even calling it Down’s blind spot. But what if it wasn’t anything natural to Down? What if it wasn’t so much a blind spot as an open wound? The body would continue to function the best it could, even though it was injured, and possibly sick, infected.
What did he know? That the White City had been over by the coast, that it had been vast and grand, and then it had fallen. If it had been a castle, he wouldn’t have been surprised, because that’s what happened to castles when not enough people lived in them. It couldn’t, however, have been a castle, because there were no lines of power crossing at that point.
If the lines were taken away, the city would fall. The line would only fail if the portals… died.
Like the Down Street one had.
If other portals had failed before it, then the pattern had been broken before he’d arrived in Down, it would continue to break until each and every portal closed its doors. And in fact, the map was already wrong. Down Street was gone. Bell’s castle would have fallen anyway. Had she known it was failing? Was that why she’d been willing to throw her slaves’ lives away on one last mad scheme before the stonework started to crumble to nothing?
That explained why there was no pattern.
What it didn’t explain was why there were no lines going through the White City area, as if there was some force explicitly stopping them from doing so. It wasn’t just chance: the White City was legendary for its non-magicalness. It had been stable for decades, even hundreds of years.
So that was the answer. Down was not only broken, one portal at a time, it was also altered artificially.
Or.
Down was breaking one portal at a time because it was being altered artificially.
This world was linked to London through the portals. His London was in ruins. The portal had closed. What if the portal hadn’t closed because of the disaster, but had caused it? That would mean every time a portal closed, a London died. And if the whole network was unstable, it was going to keep unravelling until there was nothing left. Every London, throughout time, gone.
He couldn’t begin to understand how that worked. It was a preposterous conclusion, almost as preposterous as the existence of Down itself.
It would, however, explain why they survived. As the connection was severed, they were reeled in. Everything else was destroyed, except the tiny bit of London that was attached to Down that they, by sheer chance, happened to be standing in.
The odds that he was right with any of his speculation were extraordinarily slight. Yet it was the only over-arching explanation that covered all of the facts. He was either close enough to correct to make no difference, or he was fantastically wrong, and probably suffering from the same madness that afflicted the geomancers.
What it did mean was, there was something here, very close, that had both caused the initial problem, and was still causing it.
He had cramp. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had something to eat or drink. He sat with his legs out in front of him, groping for his toes with his fingers, and tried to stretch the pain away.
It was dark outside again. He’d worked the whole day. How could he have concentrated for so long without anyone coming to find him, or seeing how far he’d got? Or even to tell him to pack up and go because the scouting party had found a way down the cliff?
It was quiet, too. Before, there had always been some sort of noise drifting in from the courtyard◦– voices or the clatter of cooking pots◦– but now, with that absent, he found it strangely, ominously quiet.
He reached out and picked up his machete, making sure it didn’t scrape across the floor. His boots had tough, flexible soles◦– he could walk quietly in them. What he couldn’t do was account for every last creak the floorboards would make. Hands and knees would be better.
He set off towards the nearest ladder at what felt like a glacial rate, testing each move, holding his breath uselessly. Out of the map room, across the next. He could see the hole in the distance, but the ladder had been pulled up through and now lay next to it. He looked behind him, in front of him, and crawled nervously closer.
There was someone else there, propped up against the far wall. Dalip peered into the shadows, and saw it was the steersman, who raised his finger to his lips in a mime. He pointed downwards.
Dalip crept around the hole and up to the man. There was only so much they were going to be able to communicate through gestures. He put his mouth close to the man’s ear and whispered.
‘What happened?’
He turned his head, and the man whispered back. It made for a laborious, halting conversation, but it was all they had.
‘They came. All of them. Simeon went out to parley.’
‘Was Mary with them?’
‘The girl? No. They talked for a long time. He left with them.’
‘Why?’
The steersman shrugged, and Dalip remained baffled.
‘Where’s everyone else?’
‘They’re dead.’
Dalip jerked his head away. He stared at the steersman, then crawled over to the hole in the floor. He peered through.
There was a body in full view. It was just lying there, as if asleep, but there was no rise and fall of the chest, no languorous shift in position. A pair of feet showed through a doorway. Dalip crawled back.
‘Then why are we whispering?’
‘I heard something moving down there.’
‘How did it happen?’
‘They just fell over. No panic. No time to panic.’
‘Why are you up here?’
‘Simeon told me to keep an eye on you. Make sure you didn’t go anywhere.’