Con had been the first to come back from the healers. I awoke the next day to the wails of loss that met the rest; only a handful. The wardens of our shelter said these were the last. Many more were dead now, and I heard the wardens speak of some black poison which was known by Vorth’s army to taint the spears of the Rath. There would be no burials. The bodies, the wardens told us, would burn in city furnaces.

They gave us food, a stodgy porridge in wooden bowls, a little goat’s cheese to go with it, and water. The water here was strange ‒ tangy and bitter, not like home’s water. I gulped my five measured mouthfuls and missed the River Elm.

Outside the warehouse, the street picked up its business and traffic. And then the fight-breaker guard turned up, as promised, swinging a bucket in his off-hand. There was too much fresh grief and weeping around for anyone to notice me leaving with him. Anyone, that was, except Jerome who dared to follow at a distance.

Not far before the steps of that high fortress wall was a well. The chain being too high for me to reach, the guard attached the bucket and sent it down to the bottom. He made me pull it back up, though, then carry it as best I could, sloshing and slopping, up the steps.

‘It’s only water, borderlander,’ he taunted from three steps behind me, but really enjoying every bit of my struggle to keep my balance. It was so full that, with each slop, the brush inside nearly floated over the rim. My arm was straining, but to swap hands I’d have to stop and I didn’t think the guard would let me. I took the top steps at a skip, which was all I could do to keep hold or else tip backwards and fall.

The morning sun scorched my neck as I set it down and rubbed my arm. The guard snorted. ‘Got half a mind to send you back,’ he rebuked. ‘Half the water’s on the steps!’ It was three quarters full, to be fair. But when I looked up at his face, that brown unshaven Vedish face under the dome of his helm, I realised it was talk. He’d pulled a short straw, I guessed, and didn’t want to be here any more than I did.

I looked around. At the scene of my crime now sat a bulky wood and metal structure with an arm that jutted out between the sandstone battlement squares. A man was bent over behind it, peering through a hole in the arm. ‘These ropes won’t be wanting more molasses,’ he said grittily. ‘Any more an’ the boy’ll take best part of a week to drop a yard.’

A rheumy eye lifted from the hole. Ratty grey beard and green turban: it was the old man I’d watched buying metal clinkers yesterday.

‘This ‘im?’

‘It’s him,’ said the guard.

The old man – keeper of the structure – gave me a grin, wide and yellow. ‘Like your heights?’ he quizzed me, but I was lost in his ugly cataracts. ‘Better start liking ‘em, little borderling. Long way down.’ He sniffed and drove a thick black stopper into the hole in his machine. ‘All in working order.’

With that, he rearranged his turban, lifted a small, sticky-looking drum under his arm, and left us, passing Jerome a few steps down, who was trying as hard as possible to look absorbed in the sandstone masonry.

The guard tapped the bucket with the shaft of his spear. ‘Oi, eyes front! Thought old Loquar was here to do the job for you? There’s the crane, now get to work.’

‘I don’t know how,’ I said small.

‘How—’ Stopping short, the guard regarded the machine. Then turned and looked back down the steps the way the old man had gone. Ignoring Jerome. But the old man was gone. So the guard stepped up to the machine’s arm and clapped a hand beside the stopper. He drummed his fingers. It was obvious: my guard had no idea either.

I looked more closely at the thing. The main body of the structure was assembled here on our side of the battlements. I saw a wheel, and a lever there. I went over to the gap through which the wooden arm leaned out, sensing a quick shade of yesterday’s dizziness at the height. Well, it was easy enough to see where I was meant to go. A second, shorter pole was chained below the main arm, wound up in rope from one of the holes underneath it. The rope split into two and suspended a plank with a bucket-hole some feet above the banner. Dry now, I could barely even see my streaks of vomit.

At the wheel of the machine, I gave the lever a nudge. The wheel didn’t move.

I looked back at the ropes. They looked greasy. Hadn’t the old man said something about . . . ‘Molasses.’

‘What?’ the guard nipped back.

‘Isn’t, um . . . isn’t molasses sticky?’

‘What of it?’

I knocked my knuckles on the wood of the arm: it was hollow. And there were two more metal holds, and two more stoppers, down its length. ‘The ropes run through . . .’ I thought aloud.

But my guard wasn’t listening. He sighed, ‘I’ll call another engineer.’

‘No don’t. Wait,’ I said, not really hearing myself, and pulled out one of the stoppers. There were two sticky ropes inside, running side-by-side, with little knots at intervals, all basted in the goo that would make them feed more slowly. Through the arm. The guard went over to the wheel and supplied an irritable shove, but it didn’t move even one bit. Almost ahead of myself now, I said: ‘The wheel’s for pulling them back.’

Something else caught my eye. At the mid-point, conjoined bars ran through the inside of the arm, capped with handles at both the top and underside. When I pressed up on the lower handle, it started moving. Slowly.

Of course. Knots.

‘Now what are you doing?’

‘These bars are wider in the middle, I think. So that the knots can get through,’ I told him.

He circled the crane and looked into the hollow of the arm. And scowled, ‘They’re not moving.’

So I pushed the double-bar all the way up, until it stopped ‒ until molasses held it fast ‒ then checked inside. But he was right. Even with the knots free to move, the ropes weren’t feeding an inch.

‘Too much,’ I heard myself murmur. That’s what the old man, that Loquar, had said. ‘Too much molasses. It’s sticking because there’s nothing to pull the ropes out. I’ve got to be in the chair.’

‘So get in.’ He wasn’t bright.

‘We have to pull it up first.’

Expecting no help from him, I went over to the wheel, leaned my weight into the lever and heaved. It slowly started turning but I knew I’d never manage the full five feet of knotted rope.

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‘Hell’s harems!’ the guard cursed, batting me aside with his spear-hand. ‘Just leave off, will you, before you snap yourself in half.’

He did the wheeling after that, and I went back to the gap to watch the ropes coming in. Up came the plank. The second pole, the lower one, was meant to spread the weight of the load. Surely that couldn’t work very well . . .

‘There—stop,’ I said before the gap closed too much. When I looked back, Jerome was gaping at me. In his eyes, I guessed, I’d just given an order to a man with a helmet and a spear. I pushed the bars home. ‘That locks it,’ I said. ‘But someone’s got to unlock it again to drop me down, that’s how it works. It needs two people.’

‘Good thing you brought an assistant then!’ declared the guard. He turned and seized Jerome’s shoulder, pulling him onto the walkway so hard that he ploughed straight into me. Not a man who liked being shown how things worked, I supposed. ‘Maybe I’m a little thick for the Guilds, but I know when someone’s standing behind me. Not on the Fortress Guard for nothing. There’s puke to clean, boys. I want it off in an hour.’

Soon enough I was in position with my bucket. The seat would never hold a grown man: even under my weight it creaked in ways I didn’t like. And even though the face of the fortress wall was just an arm’s length away, my knuckles were white around the ropes. I refused to look down, it was too high.

Our guard watched us for some minutes, then lost interest and strolled away along the walkway.

I called up: ‘Ready.’

There followed the sound of the bars sliding in. I started to descend, swaying gently. Up came the banner. Down its long face I followed streaks of dry sick.

‘There, lock.’

The slide of bars came again, the chair slowing to a stop at the speed of molasses. Overhead, the crane’s arm squeaked.

‘It s’posed to do that?’ Jerome asked from above. I couldn’t see him from here; he was still too nervous of the height to come all the way to the edge.

‘Hope so,’ I said.

‘Didn’t sound good.’

‘Well,’ I huffed, ‘it’s this or—’

‘Or what, they chop your hands off?’ Now his head popped through the gap next to the arm. But I pretended I hadn’t heard him, unnerved by how right he really was. I hadn’t even told him about my interrogation in the Captain’s office. ‘How’d you even know how to work this thing?’

‘Just did,’ I said, but couldn’t help but wonder too. I’d never seen a crane before and yet, somehow, piece by piece, I’d simply felt it making sense. A sort of sense, at least; there must be some better way to build a thing like this.

Jerome snorted contempt. ‘These people are just weird if you ask me.’

‘I didn’t,’ I muttered back, carefully letting go of one rope to lift the brush out of the bucket. Then fished for the soap and rubbed the bristles.

Up in the gap, Jerome rested his chin on his forearms. ‘Why’d you get sick on it anyways?’

‘Didn’t do it on purpose, Jerms.’

‘Yeh I know. But if you’re gonna be sick, kind of a weird place.’

‘If you say so.’ Aside from his patter, it was quiet. Out here, blocked by the wall of the fortress, the bustle of the districts was a murmur. Our own voices seemed muffled too, muted by the baking-hot sandstone.

‘Where’d they take you yesterday?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Where’d they take you?’

I pushed a sigh. ‘Can’t you just leave it?’

‘Come on, Flor, we’re best friends. You’re s’posed to tell me stuff.’

I scrubbed harder. ‘To the barracks.’

‘The what?’

‘Look, it doesn’t matter. Lower me down.’

He disappeared.

Chug, slide ‒ I was eased another foot. ‘Lock.’

At first I was too careful of pushing myself off balance for my strokes with the brush to be much use. But the banner’s weave was heavy. It displayed, on a pale mauve background, a yellow crescent-moon symbol over a circle of blue. Five white rays darted out from the right side of the circle. The dyes were bleached thin and the weave worn rough by the winds that must have blasted these walls to have left the sandstone around it so scarred. It was filthy as well and so were the others further along. Rain came so rarely to the borderlands; I wondered if it ever came to the desert. So I decided I would do a less-than-perfect job of it in case they noted the improvement and had me doing the rest.

The work took less than an hour, even though I’d been very, very sick and some of the vomit had run all the way down the banner’s side-angled tail. There, the fortress wall retreated inwards, leaving me exposed on all sides. I was more careful again. At least it was harder to hear Jerome’s annoying questions from here.

Though I’d told myself I wouldn’t, I turned and looked behind my shoulder. Back across the plains of Vorth. They were so vast, brown-grey between their far fringes of gold, and scored with lines of rock striation. Yesterday the air had been too full of dust to see the dunes on the horizon, but now I could, if only just.

The “north” wall was what they called this, wasn’t it? That meant the borderlands were that way, and home and family were out there; still out there, had to be out there. But no, they weren’t anymore. And never would be again. I knew I shouldn’t have looked. Just like the sick from my stomach yesterday I felt the ache rise in my throat, a wet-hot burning from my chest.

All that was out there were the Rath.

‘Hurry up.’

Jerome’s voice called me back to my body—dangling in mid-air I remembered—and I grabbed the ropes tighter. Splashing more water on blue weave, I went on scrubbing the tail. Only once I’d swallowed down that sting and thought my voice could be trusted, did I ask: ‘Con know we’re here?’

‘Nah, sleeping.’

Scrubbing harder, now wanting to be back behind the wall again, I weighed my next question. ‘Gonna tell him?’

No reply.

I kept on scrubbing but peered up, squinting in sunlight. His face had disappeared from the gap now. And it was quiet.

‘You still there?’ I dropped my brush into the bucket. ‘Jerms?’ Slow footsteps approached; they weren’t the guard’s.

With that same cool elegance, the white headdress and robe appeared where Jerome’s head had been. The red jewel flashed. My heartbeat skipped. Without looking down, the white Commander scanned the plains. Did he even know I was here? He had to know; I was only here at his bidding. After another minute of silence, I reached for my brush again.

‘That’s clean enough.’ I dropped it. ‘You’re to come with me now, to the Deep. The Viceroy craves a word with you.’

I wiped my forehead on the inside of my arm, staring up with difficulty, but still he didn’t look down. The rapid grunt of jogging boots came from the left side of the crane.

‘Begging pardon, High Commander,’ puffed my guard. ‘Was just a little way along the wall there, never far.’

‘Yes I saw you.’

‘Had my eye on him all the time.’

‘I’m sure you did. In any case nothing treasonable appears to have happened in your absence.’

I heard the guard swallow through his panting, before the white Commander at last deigned to look down. Nothing more than a fleeting glance at me before his gaze swept on again.

‘The boy is finished. Bring him up.’