The Stair of Ilm

The Stair of Ilm is a great stone stairway on the Drowned Coast, some forty paces wide, which descends the red cliffs below the village of Stairfoot and goes down into the sea. It is older than the kingdom whose name it carries, and older, on the evidence of its stone, than any building now standing in the Reach. Where it ends, the archive cannot say. No diver has found the bottom of it, and the accounts of those who have tried do not agree about anything except the cold.

The Descent

The cliff at Stairfoot stands perhaps two hundred feet above the water, and the Stair takes the height of it in long, shallow treads, each worn to a dish by feet that were climbing it before the Empire was founded. The stone is a dense green-black rock, close-grained and faintly greasy to the touch, which matches nothing in the cliffs around it; the nearest stone of its kind known to the archive lies in the hills above Saverra, four hundred miles away. At low water a determined counter may descend three hundred steps and more before the weed and the swell stop him. The recorded counts differ — four hundred, seven hundred, one account from the year 201 AS claims nine hundred and eleven — and the archive notes drily that no two surveyors have ever agreed, and that some have refused to go down a second time.

Below the waterline the treads carry on, smooth and even, into water that is rarely clear enough to show more than twenty steps at once. Barnacles crust the lower stair thick as a ship's hull. On calm days the fishers of Stairfoot say you can lean from a boat and see the steps going down as far as the light goes, straight as a plumb-line, into the dark.

History

What survives of Ilmish writing — fragments kept in the counting-houses of Saverra and copied into the archive — nowhere claims the Stair. The kings of Ilm named themselves in their charters keepers of the Stair and the tide, which is the language of men holding a thing they did not make. Who did make it, and why a people would build a road into the sea, is one of the oldest unanswered questions the archivists keep.

In 104 AS the kingdom of Ilm sank in a single night. The towers of its royal seat, Tregaron, still stand in the shallows a mile south of the stairhead, their upper windows above the water at low tide, and gulls nest where the king's bedchamber was. The Stair survived the Drowning as it has survived everything else: unchanged, uncracked, the sea's habitual prisoner and never its spoil. Whether the Drowning reached it at all is a question the wreckers argue over their fires. The old men say the water never rises above the fortieth tread, whatever the tide or storm. The tide-tables kept at Stairfoot do not quite bear this out, but they do not quite refute it either.

Life There Today

Stairfoot lives by three trades: salt, salvage and pilgrims. The salt-pans lie in shallow clay ponds behind the sea-wall, raked by women in grey sacking, and the salt goes south in League casks. The wrecker-custom here is honest by the coast's rough standard: false lights are forbidden on pain of drowning, but what the sea gives up on the rocks belongs to the village by old charter, and a storm week will feed Stairfoot through a lean month. The inns sell eel stew, grey mullet, dark bread and a thin beer that travellers describe politely as strengthening. Ordinary pilgrims come through in ones and twos all summer, walking the coast road to look at the towers of Tregaron and dip their hands in the water that took a kingdom.

The Grey Pilgrims are another matter. They come off the coast road alone or in threes, walk straight through the village without word or purchase, and go to the stairhead. The villagers leave bread and salt on the last dry step, which is sometimes taken and sometimes not. Since the Long Winter the grey figures come oftener than ever before — the innkeeper at the Tread and Anchor counted forty-one in the year 311 AS, against nine the year his father died. Several, the villagers swear, have gone down past the waterline and not come back up. The archive records this as it was told, and notes that no body has ever been found on that shore.

Count the steps if you like, stranger. The Stair counts you back.

Rumours

At the spring tides, fishers say, you can hear the Bell of Ilm tolling under the water — one slow stroke, then nothing for an hour. Sceptics blame the swell in a cave of the cliff, though no such cave has been found. A Pale Choir mission out of Ostrovane came in 297 AS to take soundings below the stair and left within the month; their cantor's letter to the Seventh Circle, if it survives, has never been opened to the archive. During the risings of the Long Winter, Stairfoot kept watch-fires on the cliff, for the wet Unquiet of the coast villages were seen more than once on the lower steps at night, standing in the wash as if listening, and the Lantern-Wardens who came by contract burned three of them on the shingle. What they had been listening to, no one asked twice.