The city went silent before it cried out.
The hearth's hiss stopped. Steam died over the branch pipes. Above the chamber, the barrier broke in a long bright seam, and cold daylight reached places that had lived beneath its glow for twenty years.
Selka dragged herself toward the landing. Water came down the stairs and through the gate below, meeting in the chamber. She saw Voss catch a crossbar; then the lever assembly struck it, and both went under. When the surface cleared, he was gone.
Ruun rose through the broken roof.
For a moment it had its old vastness. Selka could see it in the moving water above the lock: the width of a river mouth, darkness full of salt, waves entering streets that had never expected them. The god's human face appeared and vanished within it, no longer the center of anything.
The anchor was gone. It was taking itself back.
On the upper bank a woman staggered away from a bronze wall connection. The band at her throat went dark. A man dropped his bundle and caught her. Farther along, two people fell beside a cart, one getting up, the other not. Selka could see them through the roof where the stone had broken away.
At the landing Iven lost his footing. The bellows stopped for an instant. Selka caught his elbow, braced him against the remaining rail, and pushed his hands back toward the handles.
Sorell looked at her. “Take the blanket. Under her shoulders. We have to move.”
Selka obeyed. Anet was frighteningly light, her body dragged between other people's work. The lost branch did not brighten. Beneath Selka's hand, Anet's chest waited for each movement of the handles.
“Ruun!” Selka shouted.
The vast water turned toward her.
She had meant to ask for Anet, to shout it until the god could hear nothing else. But Anet's hand was in hers, and Sorell was holding the mouthpiece, and around them people whose names she did not know were beginning to die.
No word she had could make one of them worth more than another. She had done that once already.
The water slowed.
Selka felt the change first through her wet coat. The pull against her body slackened. Above the lock the dark tide trembled as if two currents had met. Ruun's face appeared close to her, a high moving hollow in the water.
Its gaze went to Anet. Then to the bellows, to Iven's cramped hands, to the freed men trying to reach a woman on the bank.
The god had not promised this. It could still take everything that remained.
Instead, brightness moved outward through the dark. Not toward the hearth pipes. Toward the bodies whose movement was still held inside them. The woman on the bank lifted her head. The man holding her began to weep. In the cart one person moved again; the other remained still.
A narrow brightness entered Anet beneath the breastbone. She jerked against Selka's arm. Her dark pendant stayed dark, but the skin below it warmed. Ruun's face held near her for a moment before the current took it apart. Iven kept working; when the mouthpiece lifted to be settled again, Anet made one shallow attempt at a breath.
“Keep going,” Sorell told him. “She still needs us.”
Ruun gave a sound so deep that Selka felt it in the broken floor.
Its vastness split. The reach above the lock fell away in sheets. Water rushed back into the ordinary channel, leaving a narrower tidal shape beside them. Gray stone appeared through it where recovering depth should have been, then dissolved into a pale absence.
The power it left in living bodies would never return to it. Selka had seen a finger pay for a child. Now the tide drew inward where the river mouth had spread above her.
The freely flowing warmth was still gone. No barrier reformed above the city. Water remained in the streets, and the people who had stopped moving did not get up.
“The whole mouth,” Ruun said in tide tongue. Its voice came from near her, though the water still moved around all of them. “I could have had it.”
Selka had nothing to put beside that loss. She would not offer thanks as payment.
The tide turned under the landing, lifting the broken stair just enough to make a passage. Kerr and the men carried Anet through it with Selka and Sorell beside them. Iven kept working, stumbling sideways over stone. The bell lay where he had dropped it. Selka left it.
On the upper bank they put Anet on a dry door torn from its hinges. Sorell refitted the mouthpiece. For a while her chest moved only when the handles moved. Then Selka felt a small effort of breath under her palm, uncertain but Anet's own.
Below them Ruun gathered into a smaller reach of water. There was room for it in the lock now. It no longer filled the sky.
“Will you stay?” Selka asked.
“No.”
The answer did not ask her permission. It went downstream through the broken gate while people ran on the banks, calling for warmth that would not come. Selka watched until she had to turn back to her daughter's breath.