A Footprint in the Ceiling

The footprint came out of the ceiling while Eri was drawing the crack beside it.

She had set her brass pin beneath the crack to keep the scale honest. When she looked up again, the pin’s shadow no longer reached the line she had drawn. A heel, the width of her palm, had pushed down through the red fired clay. Five toes followed, slowly enough for her to watch the white salt dust split around each one.

Eri held her charcoal off the paper. The little chamber was open on its quarry side, where the cutters had removed a wall of rock. Morning light reached the ceiling at an angle and made old tool marks easy to mistake for new ones. She shifted her stool, then her lamp. The heel kept its shape. An old burial relief would have been carved into the clay, or applied to it before firing. This one stood out from a surface she had measured flat an hour earlier.

She reached up. The clay was dry and warmer than her fingers. Above it lay a slab of unbroken rock, visible in section along the cut face. She had drawn that too: one handspan of fired plate, three handspans of stone, then the undisturbed shelf. No floor for a walker. No space for a leg.

The smallest toe sank back. Salt powder slipped into the shallow edge it left.

Eri put down the charcoal and climbed from the stool. The excavation register lay beside her drawing board, open to the page she was meant to finish today: Burial House, north chamber, ceiling ornaments. The name had been written before anyone now alive had seen the room. Her task was to record the last exposed surface before Dema Ar cut away the dangerous shoulder of the quarry. If she signed the drawing, the cutters could take the clay down with the stone. A measured copy would be all that remained.

From outside came the scrape of a dragged saw and a man’s short whistle. She glanced at the doorway. Pavi would ordinarily have answered that whistle. He had brought her a cup of water every morning since the chamber opened, invariably setting it on the dry end of the bench where she could not knock it into her paper. His cup was there now, full. Dema had been asking after him since first light.

The heel flattened. By the time Eri raised the lamp again, there was only a faint powder rim and a dark clean patch inside it. She had not drawn the whole print. She had drawn enough.

She went to the cut face and checked the stone with her own eyes. The pale band above the clay ran without a break to the quarry wall. She found the joint where the roof plate met the band, pressed the point of her pin into it, and got no farther than the shallow manufacturing groove. A person might have found some other way into the rock. They could not have stood immediately over that heel.

Outside, the saw dragged again. Eri took her drawing off the board and folded it once, against everything she normally told her apprentices about folding field sheets. It would fit in her pocket. She went to the entrance and called for Dema.

No one answered at first. The crew was moving the saw uphill, away from the exposed chamber. Beyond them the salt flats burned white under the climbing sun, and the ridge above the quarry had the color of broken pottery. Three men had a coil of rope between them. One end ran under the lip of the working face, where Pavi had last been seen before dawn. Eri knew the position from her plan; she did not know the condition of the ledge beneath it.

“Dema,” she called again. “I need you to see something before you make the cut.”

Dema appeared at the upper path, one hand on a rope that had been left for her, the other bare. She had taken off her glove to feel the line. Her eyes went first to the chamber opening, then to Eri’s pocket.

“If it’s the painted border, you’ll have it by noon,” she said. “The men are not going under that overhang tomorrow.”

“It isn’t paint.”

Dema looked past her to the cut face. A thumb-sized chip of stone fell from the ridge and clicked against the saw frame. Dema followed it with her eyes until it stopped. Eri had seen her do this before, listening for the little delayed rattle that meant another piece was loose.

“Pavi still hasn’t come back?” Eri asked.

“No.” Dema’s hand tightened once on the rope. “We checked the carts and the upper camp. I’ll send two people around the west path after the cut. I can’t send them under the face while it’s settling.”

Eri had meant to show her the drawing first. Instead she said, “Something moved in the ceiling.”

Dema waited. Eri unfolded the sheet against the wall. The heel was a dark shape, with measurements along its edge and five quick charcoal circles where the toes had risen. Even on paper it looked like a print from a foot planted above the room.

“That plate was flat this morning,” Eri said. “I measured it at first light.”

Dema took the sheet but did not look at it for long. “And the rock over it?”

“Solid where the mark is. I checked the joint.”

“Then a bit of clay eased. The face has moved twice since dawn.”

Eri pointed to the circles. “One toe went down before the others. The heel went last.”

Dema handed back the paper. She did not say Eri had seen it wrongly. She did not send the crew down. For a moment both women listened to the quarry. Eri heard picks being set on stone, a cart wheel squealing as someone turned it on the shelf. Dema seemed to hear something in the interval between those sounds.

“Show me,” Dema said.

They entered by the open cut. Dema ducked beneath the first roof rib, tested the floor with her boot and looked up. The heel was gone; Eri had expected that. She pointed out the clean patch in the salt powder and the thin rim around it. Dema leaned so that light from the opening fell across the plate. The patch did not resemble a burial carving now. It barely resembled anything.

“How long?” Dema asked.

“Long enough to draw it. Less than a minute, maybe.”

“Did it make a sound?”

Eri shook her head.

Dema put her fingertips on the roof rib, not on the mark. “The face is taking weight. If that clay is squeezing, I need to know before I put men against this wall.”

She had found a reason to care about the same sign, but it was not Eri’s reason. Eri moved her lamp until the rock band above the plate was clear. “This part could squeeze as one piece. The toes didn’t.”

Dema tipped her head. “You’re sure of five?”

“I counted them while the last two were still rising.”

“Pavi wears boots.”

“I know.” Eri had stopped herself, outside, from saying it might be him. A barefoot mark was no better proof of Pavi than a carved name. “He could have taken them off.”

“Or it could be someone who was never on my crew.” Dema’s voice remained level. “People come up the abandoned terraces to take glazed pieces. I want Pavi found. I also have six workers waiting for me to tell them which side of the face will stand until afternoon.”

The salt on the ceiling stirred.

Eri raised the lamp. A small mound appeared beside the clean patch, nearer the wall, then lengthened into a narrow foot. Dema stepped back so fast her shoulder struck the opposite rib. The relief did not stop. Its toes formed one by one, angled away from the first print. When the heel settled, there was a stretch of bare clay between them.

Dema lifted her hand, palm open, as if she meant to feel for a second person just out of reach. “That isn’t the first one.”

Eri laid the pin across the two shapes without touching either. The new foot was shorter by almost the length of her thumb. The impressions were differently spaced. She drew what she could while the relief held, the charcoal scratching too loudly in the chamber. Dema went to the doorway and looked along the cut face, up toward the continuous pale stone.

“Nobody can stand above that spot,” Eri said.

“There’s nowhere to stand that I know of.” Dema turned back. “I’m not putting a man into an unknown pocket to find out.”

The smaller heel began to sink. Eri pressed the edge of her sheet against the wall and made a last mark for the toes. She had a plan of the chamber in her case, three complete sections and a name copied from an older register. None of them showed where a person could be making this happen.

“The cut line crosses the rock over this room,” she said. “Does it cross anything below it?”

“A maintenance notch. Packed shut years ago.”

“Is it on your plan?”

“I don’t use your plan to keep the face up.”

It was almost an answer, and Eri might once have bristled at it. Dema had seen the slip from the ridge. Eri had not. The difference mattered more than the sting.

Dema left the doorway long enough to call to her crew. She ordered the saw hauled back to the level shelf and the ropes cleared from the overhang. One man protested that the western brace would be harder to reach after the sun crossed the ridge. Dema said she knew. She named the two people who would move the brace while the ledge could still be approached from above, and told everyone else to keep off the lower track.

Then she came back inside. “Until the sun touches the old kiln chimney,” she said. “I can give you that much. Afterward I need to cut or abandon this face for the day, and the loose crown may come down on the track without asking me.”

Eri looked at the two fading marks. She could ask for longer; she could not say it would be safer. “I’ll measure the wall below the plate. If the notch connects to this room, I can show you where before your people go near it.”

“Show me what you find,” Dema said. “Not what you need it to mean.”

The last toe of the smaller print went flat. A little salt remained around its edge. Eri stood beneath the empty ceiling, listening to the crew drag the saw away from the cut they had expected to make. Then the first heel rose again, a hand’s width from where it had been before.