“Yesterday?” he asked.
She nodded.
He grimaced. While it was true he was better at this than Jewel, he hated to make mistakes in front of Rath; they all did. But he touched four spots on the maps, all of them at the edges. “One of these, I think.”
Carver hadn’t been inside the great hall. Jewel had, and of the four possibles she narrowed it down to one. She touched the map, and pressed down. A blue line grew slowly from beneath her finger.
Rath frowned. “You were there?” he asked softly.
Jewel nodded, and almost as an afterthought, she pulled the cut-glass magelight out of her clothing. It wasn’t the most comfortable thing to carry because the edges were sharp and they cut into her stomach. She handed it to Rath.
He whistled.
“Where did you get this?” he asked her.
“Here, I think. If this is the right place.” She hesitated. “The street here wasn’t clear; there was a lot of heavy rubble, but we managed to crawl through it. When we made our way through the fallen stone, we were in a huge hall; it was lit. That stone came from the hall,” she added. “We kind of had to pry it out of a wall, and when we did, everything went dark.”
He whispered his own magelight, perched as it always was in a holder on the desk, to brightness, and he examined the glass in its glow. His fingers traced the rune at the back of the gem.
“I thought it would be useful,” Jewel admitted, “but we don’t know the activation words for it.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said softly. “I don’t recognize this rune.”
“It’s not Old Weston.”
Rath shook his head.
She hesitated for a moment, and then said, “Rath, I think we found something . . . else there.”
His expression didn’t shift at all, but he was paying more attention.
“I think—there was a crypt, at the end of this hall. And . . .” She hesitated.
“And?”
“Three cenotaphs. Three figures on stone biers. They looked like painted stone, maybe painted marble. The room they were in was lit so brightly I thought it might come up above ground.”
“Go on.”
“But they . . . they moved. When we came near them, they moved.”
He fell silent for a moment, and then he looked at Jewel. The glance was brief, but there was worry in it; Rath had a way of being almost motionless when something was serious. “Do not go back there,” he told her softly.
She nodded. “I’m not even sure we can,” she added.
“Why not? Did the hall outside collapse?”
“Yes.” She frowned, and then added, “But I don’t think it collapsed on its own.”
He became utterly still. “What do you mean, Jewel?”
“I mean—I don’t know why, but I think something was pulling the walls down.”
He rose. “If they knew you were there, of all places,” he mused, “they might.” He reached for the map that her fingers still touched, and after a moment, she lifted her hand. He brought the map into the light, running his hands across his eyes before he examined it. “Jay,” he said. Just that.
“It’s bad news?”
He didn’t appear to have heard her; the map had his whole attention.
“Eat,” she told him. “Rath, eat. You need food.”
“I need information,” he said bitterly.
Jewel glanced at Carver, and Carver signed, Leave?
She nodded. When the door closed, she turned to Rath, who had not eaten, and had not looked away from the map.
“Rath. Eat.”
He glanced at her, then. “Don’t go into the maze,” he told her softly. She had known he would.
“Rath—what’s happening? What’s happening with the maze? Who are the ‘they’ you’re talking about?”
“I am not entirely certain,” he replied. This much, at least, was true. But it was also not the whole truth. Since so much of her life depended on the maze, she said, “What do you think is happening?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you.” This was also true. “I have a feeling the knowledge would not be conducive to survival.” He paused, and then he set the map aside, as if aware that its presence would only invoke more questions, none of which he wanted—or intended to—answer. Then he sat, and he began to eat. Jewel watched him in silence.
“What information do you need, and can we help gather it?”
“No.”
“Rath—”
“No, Jewel.” He lifted a hand, finished chewing, swallowed, and then said, “I regret that I showed you the maze, as you call it. I regret, on certain days, that I discovered it. But, yes,” he added, “the magestone that you brought is worth money, and I will make it a priority to sell it.”
She exhaled, and he offered her a small, grim smile. “The need to eat and sleep under a roof often causes us to do things that we later regret.” He hesitated, and then said, “I trust you to know when things are too dangerous, Jewel. If you cannot trust yourself in this regard, stay out of the maze.”
“Because of those walls?”
“Because of the hall, yes. Think about what it takes to tear down walls of that size. Age may make them somehow more brittle—although with stone, I fail to see how—but not so brittle that they are easily leveled.” He looked at her and added, “how certain are you?”
She shrugged. “Not certain,” she offered, at last, testing the words. They were true. “I thought—I thought I heard roaring, but I couldn’t tell. Because the stone makes a lot of noise when its falling and hitting other stones.”
Rath nodded. “Where were you when you heard this?”
“In the crypt. Rath, we had to pray to get out of that room.”
“Pray?”
“A prayer taught in the Mother’s temple. Duster remembered it. You can imagine how happy she was to have to repeat it.”
That invoked a smile with a bit of an edge; he could, indeed, imagine it. “This rune,” he said at last, lifting the magelight Jewel had pried from the undercity as he spoke. “I have a suspicion of what it might mean, and your prayer confirms that. I will take the magestone to the Isle, and see what can be learned from it.”
“Will you tell me what you learn?”
“If it’s relevant.”
Which pretty much meant no. But as Jewel had no connections on the Isle, it didn’t matter. She took a breath and then said, “When we left that part of the undercity? We came out at the Sanctum of Moorelas.”
“Came out? What do you mean?”
“I mean we stepped into something that looked like it was liquid rock. Not molten,” she added quickly. “Just liquid. We sank into it, and we kind of fell out the other side. At the foot of the statue near the seawall.”
Rath frowned.
“You never went there?”
“No. There are whole sections of the undercity that I haven’t explored, and that one would require someone of smaller stature than I.”
“What do you think brought the hall down?”
He didn’t answer.
It frightened her, and he knew it. He put a hand over hers, just one, and he offered no words. After a moment, he ate. “If I had never met you,” he told her, “I would still be here. I would still be in the undercity, and its mystery—and its danger—would still be mine.”
“If I had never met you,” Jewel told him, after a few minutes of silence, “I would never have found Finch. I would never have had a place to bring Lefty and Arann. I would never have built my den. Yes, I would never have discovered the maze on my own.
“But I wouldn’t have the life I have now. I don’t regret it,” she added, in case that wasn’t obvious. With Rath, it was hard to tell, sometimes.
“I hope you never have cause.” His smile was slight, and wan; he was tired. “I promise I will finish eating,” he added, “And I am almost at the point at which your visits here are purely social.”
“Meaning?”
“Y
ou don’t need to come to nurse me back to health.”
“Could I do it anyway?”
He laughed and shook his head. “Not if you want to sell this,” he told her, setting the odd glass to one side. “I’ll come to you, when I have word of a buyer. Or, if you prefer, I can buy the stone now.”
“No. Find a buyer. We already owe you too much.”
“Jay—”
“You won’t be here forever. We have to be able to stand on our own sometime.”
He nodded.
She let herself out when it became clear that he had no intention of leaving his desk or the work he had set for himself. Carver was lounging quietly against the wall. “How bad is it?”
“I think it’s bad,” she replied. “But I don’t understand how.”
Carver nodded. Rath’s moods and his temper were unpredictable at the best of times, but he was particularly fussy about the maze. “Should we walk home?”
Jewel hesitated. She hated to walk into the twenty-fifth when there were only two of her den. “I think,” she said, stalling for time, “that someone else has finally discovered the maze.”
Carver whistled, but after a moment said, “It had to happen sooner or later.”
She nodded, thinking. “I don’t know where Rath was injured. I don’t know how; he won’t say.”
“You asked him?”
“About a dozen times over the last two weeks.”
“He must have been really bad.”
“He was. Of course, the last time I asked, he told me he’d eject me physically if I bothered him about it again.”
“He had to get better sometime.”
Jewel laughed. “We’ll walk, for now,” she told Carver. She headed toward the familiar door, with its three bolts. She no longer needed a stool to reach the highest one, although it helped. Carver, who was standing behind her, tactfully did not reach above her head to pull the highest one free.
She wondered if she would ever grow taller. She was already taller than Finch, but that was it; even Teller was her height, now. She remembered her father as a large man, but the last time she’d seen him she’d been so much younger. His actual height? She didn’t know. Sometimes it bothered her. Today, it didn’t.
Rath, she thought, who are they? Who are they, that you thought they could pull down the damn walls just because we were poking around in a crypt?
But she didn’t say it out loud; there was no point. She didn’t want to worry Carver, and Rath would never, ever answer that question.
She slid out the door that led to the hall, waited until Carver had followed her, and then closed the door behind them both. She didn’t bother to lock it; Rath didn’t trust single locks, and he’d come out of his room sometime to push the bolts home.
But she paused a moment outside the door, looking at its worn surface. As doors went, it wasn’t great, but it was better than the door she opened daily. It wasn’t a window, though. She could look at it for hours and see nothing.
“Jay?”
She shook her head.
“The worst thing about the feelings,” she said softly, as Carver bent to catch the words, “is that you can’t make people listen. They hear as much as they want to hear, and they do what they’re going to do anyway.”
Carver, quiet in a way that Duster was not, said, “Rath?”
She hadn’t meant to say so much. She didn’t intend to say more.
But she looked up at her den- kin, and she felt her throat tighten, her lips compress. She nodded.
Carver wasn’t much for comfort; he didn’t ask for it often, and he didn’t offer it. But that was good, in its way, because he knew there was no comfort he could give, and he didn’t try to tell her that she might be wrong. He didn’t try to argue her out of instinct or her belief in it; he couldn’t. The den relied on it, and trusted it.
He said, instead, “Do you want us to try to talk to him?”
It should have made her laugh. Give Carver his due, it almost did. But she couldn’t work a laugh out of her throat just now, and walking away from this basement apartment in the thirty-fifth holding didn’t put any distance between her and the memory that it now evoked: Her father, and her father’s death in the shipyards.
It had been so damn long since she’d felt this helpless, because building her den had been both an act of faith and an attempt to use what she could see, in nightmare and sometimes in rare waking vision, to save lives.
And she had saved their lives. “Let’s go home,” she told Carver.
He nodded, and he led, although they both knew this part of the City so well they could walk it blindfolded. Not that that would have been either practical or safe, but it was possible.
25th of Morel, 410 AA The Common, Averalaan
Farmer Hanson smiled when he saw Jewel, but he always did. What was different about this smile was the way it dropped from his face after only a few words had been exchanged. He asked her how she was, of course, and he asked after Lefty; he didn’t ask after Arann because Arann was with her. Finch was chatting with his scary daughter. The farmer often worried about his daughter, and Jewel privately thought he was crazy; his daughter could freeze a would-be thief in his or her tracks simply by looking at them.
But the daughter liked Finch, and they often chatted while Jewel was talking with Farmer Hanson. Today, however, the chatter was sparse. He was worried about something.
She finally asked, “Is something wrong?”
The smile that came up in response to the question looked like something dredged out of one of the Common’s less savory puddles. Like, say, the ones near the butchers’ stalls. “Wrong? Why do you ask that, Jay?”
She looked at him, and raised a brow.
He lifted both of his hands in mock defense, but he dropped them slowly. “You aren’t the only kids I keep an eye on,” he said, as if it needed saying.
Jewel nodded, because clearly it did.
“There’s a young girl and her brother,” he said.
“How young?”
“About your age. Maybe a year younger.”
“The brother?”
“Two years younger. They’re not doing as well as you are,” he added quietly. “But they manage.”
She didn’t ask how. He probably didn’t ask them either. Just fed them when he could, or more likely ignored their thefts when he could.
“Her name’s Marion, and his is Mouse.”
“Mouse?”
“Mouse.”
“Seriously?”
Farmer Hanson shrugged. “You’ve got Lefty, Teller, Carver, and Duster,” he pointed out.
Fair enough. “What about these two?”
“I haven’t seen them in the Common for the last three weeks.”
“Do you know which holding they live in?”
The farmer shrugged. Which meant no. “They don’t talk much,” he added, “and I get the impression they’re like Lefty and Arann were—they find a place they can hunker down for a while, and they move when they have to move.”
Arann was listening with half an ear. Which really meant the farmer had the whole of his attention. The mention of Lefty’s name often had that effect.
“You think they’ve been co-opted by a den?”
“I don’t know. It’s just not like them to be gone quite so long.”
“They can’t freeze to death at this time of year.”
“No,” the farmer replied, scanning the crowd as he often did when he talked. “Marion’s about your height, but thinner. Her hair’s a brown-black, and it’s straight, but straggly. Mouse is shorter than you are, hair’s the same color. It’s too long,” he added, which was just like Farmer Hanson, “but he mostly keeps it off his face.”
“I’ll keep an ear out,” Jewel told him. “If they’re running in the twenty-fifth at all, we might be able to find them.”
The farmer nodded. It was clear that he didn’t think Jay would find them, and if she were being honest, he was right.
“Just keep an eye on your den,” he told her quietly.
“None of my den is likely to get lost any time soon.”
8th of Lattan, 410 AA Twenty-fifth holding, Averlaan
Later, Jewel would remember the longest day in the year of 410. The longest day, the eighth day of the fourth month, when sunset took its time, and the sky was a clear azure that only slowly tinged purple, and even pink, before the stars could be seen. She would remember, as well, the longest night, because the former marked the beginning of the end, and the latter marked the end. The end was easier to mark and easier to remember, because endings were.
But not so, the former. The beginning of the end, the point at which things started to unravel—after so much effort, so much hope and planning—was harder to pinpoint.
The eighth day of Lattan was always a busy day in the Common, because it started at the regular painful predawn hour, and continued well into the night. There were candles, and charity was such on the longest day that even the beggars had them; there were the special pastries that, adorned with melted butter and dusted with sugar, also found their way through the milling summer crowd. There was sweet water, sweet wine, and apple beer, although it was true that even the charitable had their limits, and apple beer, while it could be scented upon any moving breeze, remained in the hands of the few with enough coin to spare.
The bards, taught and housed in the famous Senniel College upon Averalaan Aramarelas, crossed the bridge, carrying small harps, lutes, and pipes, and they traveled toward the Common, where they came to rest, for minutes at a time, in the crowd. They offered their songs, when asked; they played for copper and silver, although they were accustomed to commanding purses of gold. They started at dawn, and they continued until the moons were high, as if their voices alone could cajole another hour or two of daylight.
Here, in the Common and at its edges, the Priests and Priestesses of the Mother also came, often at the head of small groups of the orphans they fed, housed, and clothed.
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