Tallowmere was a city of stone and water. Brannoc had known that since the Hall, the way he knew the weight of a bar before he lifted it, but he had not understood it until he walked down the main street and felt the water rise to his shins. The lake had come up over the town for two hundred years. It had left the upper floors of the houses dry and pale, with their window-frames full of grey silt and their doors standing open on nothing, and it had left the lower floors to the fish and the weed. The street went down into the water like a path into a river. The paving under the surface was the same flat grey stone as the Caul road, laid in the same pattern, with the same heave and settle, and Brannoc’s boots knew it before his mind did.
“Left at the lamp-post,” he said, under his breath.
There was no lamp on the post. There had been one once, perhaps. Now there was only an iron stem with a ring of rust at the top and a crust of the lake’s green weed round its foot, and the water lapped at the weed in small slow pulses, like a dog drinking. Brannoc turned left at it without looking back. He knew this turn. He had walked it every night for as long as he had slept in the Hold, in the stair of his dream, where the street was dry…
