She appeared at the door, wiping her hands. “Raffen? What is it? Are you ill?”
He realized his voice had betrayed him, edged with half excitement, half fear; like a knife, it had cut into her contentment. “The word has come.”
She shivered. She had had to know, as all the Rivermen knew, and yet she had kept it closed away in the back of her mind somewhere, along with other unwanted and dangerous lumber. “When?”
“Tonight.”
“So soon!”
“Once the word came, it had to be soon. Immediate. We could not expect to keep it quiet long after the word was given. Too many birds. Too many messages.”
“So.” She wiped her hands again, as though by wiping them she might wipe away the need for acting, for responding. “What am I to do?”
“You are to stay here, in the house. I’ll need the children as messengers for a time, then they must come in and stay close. I will spread the word now. We will spy out the pits during the day to see how many men will be needed.”
“The River?”
“Yes. The barge is ready. The stone sacks are ready. We have men to man the lines.”
“I worry,” she said, tears in the corners of her eyes. “I worry the barge may break loose. You may end up west of here. You could not return to me. How would I find you?”
He laughed, a quick, unamused bark of laughter. “Silly woman. Such a silly Murga. After tonight, dear one, it will not matter east or west. When we have done with the Servants of Abricor, do you not think we will have done with their gods? And then do you not think we may walk where we choose? East or west?”
That night he came with others to the pits, well after dark, to pile the bony remnants and twitching corpses into barrows, careful not to touch them with naked skin lest there be some infection from the Tears of Viranel. The barrows creaked down through the town and were emptied into the barge, and there the heavy sacks of stone were tied to the bodies while the barge made its laborious way out into the River, sweeps creaking and men cursing at the unaccustomed labor. The line that connected them to shore reeled out, span after span, and at last Raffen gave the word they had waited for. The bodies went overboard, into the massive currents of the ever-moving River, and the Rivermen turned to the winch to take up the line and bring the barge back to the place it had left.
When morning came, there was nothing different, nothing remarkable, nothing to show that the world had changed. Except that the worker pits were empty.
In Xoxxy-Do, where there were no piers and great rocks encumbered the Riverside, a great pit had been prepared, dug by Rivermen over the decades, deeper and deeper with each succeeding year, the stones taken from it piled above it on teetering platforms of poised logs, the earth piled behind the stones. “A quarry,” they had called it, taking from it small quantities of carefully crafted blocks, chosen, so it was said, for their veining and color. There the Rivermen came to the quarry late, bringing with them the harvest of the worker pits of towns both east and west, their wagon wheels creaking in the dark and lanterns gleaming. It was early morning when the last of the bodies was laid in the great stone hollow, almost day, with the green line of false dawn sketched flatly oh the eastern plains. Then the engineers moved certain logs that braced certain others in place, and the mountain of piled rubble fell, the accumulation of years fallen into the place from which it had been taken.
If the Rivermen were to try to dig it up, it would take a generation. The Servants of Abricor could not unearth the bodies in a thousand years.
In the towns of Azil and Thrun and Cheeping Wells, the Rivermen carried the corpses to the ends of the long piers, weighted them well, and tossed them out into the River’s deep currents.