The Retired Abyss Innkeeper-Chapter 34: The Second Floor Knows We’re Up Here

The sister boards weren’t going to install themselves. Timber, nails, and gravity have never shown the slightest initiative about that sort of thing. So we ended up with the same arrangement we usually did when neither of us could be blamed for the obvious.

Bram went upstairs to start the joists. I stayed downstairs with the stew.

By the time the afternoon had settled into the sort of respectable rhythm afternoons preferred, the noises from the second floor had turned steady and methodical.

The sort of rhythm you got from someone who’d done the same job often enough to know exactly which parts required effort and which parts required waiting for the world to finish behaving like itself.

I took the list and the lamp and headed upstairs.

The stairs were fine. The third step was also fine. I noted that on the list anyway. The second floor had opinions, and the third step lived close enough to them to deserve documentation.

The landing opened up at the top like it always did. Which is to say somewhat more than architecture normally allowed.

The lamp reached a few feet further than a lamp that size had any right to reach, rationally speaking. I’d stopped writing down the measurement some time ago and started recording the lamp’s behavior instead. It proved more consistent and considerably more useful.

Conveniently, it also fit into exactly the same column.

Bram was already at the first joist position. Pencil line marked. Second nail going in.

The ceiling plaster was running a pattern I didn’t have a name for. It moved like water did when someone disturbed it from below instead of above.

It stopped for three seconds exactly. Then it started again, a little faster than before, continuing in the same direction it had apparently decided was correct.

I wrote down the time, the duration, and the new rate and placed them beneath the existing lamp schedule entry. There was already a column for second floor behavior. Occasionally administrative foresight paid off.

Bram handed me a measurement without me asking.

"Th’joist’s takin’ it well," he said. "Second one wants checkin’ before th’sister board goes on."

He knocked on the wall beside the joist. The first knock sounded perfectly ordinary. The second knock came half a second late.

Same hand. Same force. Same spot. The wall clearly had an opinion about the matter.

Bram already had the pencil out. He shifted the sister board position two inches east, marked it, and tucked the pencil behind his ear in one smooth motion.

The sort of motion a man made when the argument had already been settled and the material had been the one to end it.

"Does that every time," I said, meaning the knock.

"Aye." He studied the mark. "Wall doesn’t fully agree with th’current load. Remembers a different one. Y’fit th’work to what th’material thinks it is, not what th’survey says. Otherwise y’re arguin’ with th’wall. And th’wall’s been there longer than th’argument."

"Reminds me," I said. I looked at where the new mark sat on the joist, "I had a guest once. Stayed three weeks waiting for a letter that never arrived. Perfectly reasonable fellow. No trouble at all. But the room got into the habit of waiting for him. He left. The room didn’t notice."

I had to move every piece of furniture twice before it stopped arranging itself like it was expecting someone to come through the door.

I glanced at the lamp schedule entry and considered where the sister board adjustment belonged in a list that had started life intending to be simple.

"Turned out it was easier to give the room something new to remember than to argue it out of remembering. I put a good chair by the window. Within a fortnight the room forgot about the letter and started having opinions about the afternoon light instead."

Considerably better opinions, as it turned out. Morning light never suited that room anyway. It had just been too distracted to notice.

Bram was already moving to the second joist. He made a small sound that probably counted as acknowledgment and kept working.

I went to check the east rooms.

The second east room door was open about an inch. Through the gap the room’s light was doing what it usually did.

It arrived from the Abyss-facing angle that had absolutely nothing to do with the window’s physical position. The window had been measured, verified, and placed on the lamp schedule, which meant its official arrangement had already been established.

What was new was a second source near the center of the room. No fixture. No physical origin.

It cast its own shadow at a different angle than the first light. Two sources. Occasionally the shadows met on the far wall and produced a third shape between them.

The sort of angle you got when something had briefly stood in exactly that spot and hadn’t entirely finished whatever business had brought it there.

The wall itself looked further away than it was. The plaster was correct. The distance behind the plaster had apparently reached a different conclusion.

I pushed the door open a little further, added the second source and its position to the lamp schedule, and moved on.

The west hall was colder than the landing. Colder than roof work could explain.

The floor had been swept. Surfaces were dust free. Curtains drawn across windows that hadn’t been opened in some time.

The sort of maintenance a space received when it had been waiting long enough to expect it.

I wrote it down the same way I’d written down the east rooms before they were finished. A space with arrangements it intended to keep.

I reached the middle of the hall.

Three beats from the far end. Not underfoot. Nobody there to make them. Too widely spaced to be footsteps.

The spacing reminded me of the Walker’s morning fog. Three forward with a pause between each one. Then nothing after the third. No return.

I wrote three forward, no return, west hall end and added the time.

"It heard us," Bram said from the landing. He didn’t look up from the joist.

He picked up the hammer again and kept working.

I wrote that down too. The sequence. The spacing. Bram’s interpretation.

I placed the rhythm note beneath the west hall entry. Rhythm that matched an existing pattern was either information or coincidence. The list, being a sensible list, didn’t insist you decide which at the moment you recorded it.

From where I stood I could see the corner room door at the end of the hall.

The air around the frame was colder than the hall itself. Which was already cold. I could feel the difference just standing there.

Sound didn’t carry properly past that point. What came back from the direction of the door wasn’t quite the same quality as what went toward it.

It reminded me of old wells that turned out to be deeper than the opening suggested.

The corner room had progressed further than my last inspection. I wrote that down beside the assessment note.

"Still next month," Bram said from the landing. He still hadn’t looked up.

At the top of the stairs I checked the hammer light. The light the re-hafted hammer produced down in the common room had become visible from the second floor landing sometime during the early afternoon.

It hadn’t been visible this morning.

It arrived horizontally at the top riser and stayed there. Level with the landing floor. It didn’t travel any further in any direction.

Which was definitely something the lamp schedule required a new entry for. I crossed off verify this afternoon and went back downstairs.

Lenne was sitting at table three. The spoon stood upright in the bowl.

She was watching the east window. The cup beside her sat at exactly the same level it had been when I’d left.

I stepped behind the counter and looked.

The street outside was running two directions at once.

The cobblestones on the east half followed the alignment of a road that had taken a different route decades ago. Foot traffic moving along that older route was present in the current afternoon.

The way reflections existed in glass that was also a window. Clear. Entirely involved in its own business.

A woman carrying a basket along the old street walked straight through a man in the present one heading the opposite way. Neither of them noticed.

A cart traveling the older route crossed the junction and its wheels passed directly through three present-day pedestrians who didn’t adjust their steps in the slightest.

The building across the street had two signs. The tanner’s sign. Current address. Correct lettering.

Behind it and somehow also through it was another set of letters. Older paint showing through like an earlier coat surfacing beneath a new one that had started to peel.

A different name. A business that had occupied that address before the street had become this street. Both signs were readable at the same time.

Which suggested the building was experiencing a mild disagreement with chronology.

Above the eastern third of the city the sky was the wrong time of day.

The light there ran flat and grey-pink. The uncertain look of a morning that hadn’t picked its colors yet.

The line where it met the correct afternoon above the rest of the city ran straight across the rooftops like it had been drawn with a ruler. No gradient. Just a border.

Fog moved along the street at ground level. In and out of doorways. Three beats forward. Pause. Two beats back.

The Walker was inside. Its fog sat in its usual place drifting above the counter stool.

Whatever was moving the street fog had found the same sequence from somewhere else. I added it beneath the street entry as a separate note.

I wrote the street down. Double routing. Old traffic. The tanner’s sign and the older one behind it. Sky boundary. East sector.

Fog movement. Separate entry. Each received one line. If you started giving phenomena more lines than they asked for they tended to take advantage of it.

Then I went to find a lid for Lenne’s stew.

"The east light’s running," she said.

She was already moving as she said it. She grabbed the umbrella from the stand and went outside.

The door closed.

I put the lid on the bowl. I wrote it down on the list. Lenne, east situation, umbrella, mid-stew.

And underneath that, lid on Lenne’s stew.

I looked back at the window. The ghost traffic along the old street continued calmly through the afternoon.

Kern and Renner had been expected today. Lenne had mentioned it earlier.

I added their names to the bottom of the page beneath the lid note. Expected, not arrived.

Then I went to check on the stew.