City of Night

by Michelle West

  Rath bowed, briefly, to both of the members of the Order of Knowledge. He then left them.

  “I am uneasy,” Meralonne said quietly, as he picked up the stone he had set upon the table and slid it into his robes.

  Sigurne said nothing for a long moment. “What will Ararath do?”

  “I cannot say. I wonder instead, if he will do what he intends in time.”

  “In time?”

  “Can you not feel it? There is a shadow growing across the City, Sigurne. Something in it reminds me, much, of my distant youth. I cannot say, for certain what, or why, and it frustrates me.”

  She glanced at him, and then away. “If it will ease you, follow him. But I suspect you will meet with the same success the kin and their masters have had, where he is concerned.”

  Meralonne nodded. “I will visit House Terafin,” he added.

  8th of Emperal, 410 AA Undercity, Averalaan

  Angel cursed as rope slipped across his palm. He tightened both hands, and the rope slowed, but not enough that it didn’t abrade his skin. Beneath him, over the edge of cracked and broken stone, Lefty almost shrieked.

  “I’ve got you,” Angel said, raising his voice. Duster and Fisher were across the gap; Carver was beside him. Carver caught the rope in both hands as well; he was better braced than Angel. Angel had slid two feet, and he could feel the edge of the gap against the thinning undersoles of his boots. He hadn’t been prepared for Lefty’s fall, and rocks dislodged by Angel’s momentary stumble dropped toward Lefty’s upturned face. They were neither heavy nor large, but they were sharp-edged, and Lefty raised one hand to cover his eyes as they fell.

  “Sorry,” Angel said, the word more grunt than speech. “I’ve got you.”

  Lefty said nothing. He dangled for a moment, eight feet below Angel. Then he put both hands on the rope, and began to search the side of the crevice for footholds.

  The weight lessened as he found them, and increased as one—Angel couldn’t clearly see which—failed.

  “I swear these gaps are getting wider,” Carver murmured. “I’ve got him, Angel,” he added. “Pull back. Duster!”

  She nodded. She was utterly silent. She held the magestone in one shaking hand, and its light was not kind; it exposed everything. What Angel saw in her expression, he couldn’t say. Not fear; Duster didn’t show fear even in nightmare. But close enough, for Duster.

  “See if the gap narrows anywhere. I don’t think he can make this jump.”

  Duster nodded, and then hesitated.

  “We’ve got Lefty,” Carver told her, grunting as Lefty began to try to climb. “We don’t need to see much, because we’re not going to move. Go.”

  She nodded. She didn’t argue, and she didn’t tell him not to give her orders. Fisher followed in her wake.

  As the light ebbed, Lefty continued to climb, to lessen the weight on the rope that was probably making it difficult to breathe. Carver and Angel put their backs and shoulders into the narrow line that connected them all, and pulled.

  Lefty came up slowly; rocks went down as he scrabbled along the edge. It was now dark enough that they could barely see his hands, but it didn’t matter; they held him. They didn’t try to reach for him, but in the dark, he made it back up.

  He paused for breath, and then crawled away from the edge, his chest and limbs flat against the ground. “Let’s not do that again,” he said, as the rope went slack in the hands of his den-kin.

  Angel nodded in the dark night of the undercity. His stomach growled.

  Carver snorted and smacked the back of Angel’s head; lack of light didn’t seem to affect his aim.

  “What? We’ve been here for hours.”

  “You eat more than the rest of us combined,” Carver answered. “You’d be making that noise if we’d been here for less than ten minutes.”

  Angel sat, folding his legs. “Lefty?”

  “I’m good,” Lefty replied. “Well, I’m not dead, at any rate. Sorry.”

  “Why? You’ve made that jump a hundred times. We’ll find a narrower gap, and we’ll try it from there.”

  8th of Emperal, 410 AA Twenty-fifth holding, Averalaan

  Candlelight.

  It wasn’t magelight; it wasn’t steady. It flickered, and it illuminated only the small space around its wick. It didn’t, and couldn’t, banish the darkness of night sky at a single word. But Jewel liked candlelight; it reminded her of her family, long dead. Magelights, of course, had existed then, but only in lampposts that towered above the streets, or in buildings that existed for the convenience of the wealthy.

  Her family had had candles. Lamps, and lamp oil, were too expensive; candles were cheaper—but even they weren’t free. They were seldom lit, for that reason. Her mother and her Oma made as much of daylight as they could, and when the sun sank, and the moons took to the skies, they retreated to bed, and sleep.

  When Jewel was ill, they would light candles, briefly, and stand over her, expressing worry by silence, or the softness of their voices. She could remember their faces, lit from beneath by orange light, noses throwing shadows across the familiar.

  Lamps were better light than candles for reasons that weren’t entirely clear to Jewel, but she put off buying one, even when the den was flush. She worked, instead, by candle, if any one of her den, except Duster, was out. The work was long and tiring, and in truth she would have put it off, but it was important to Rath. She could do nothing else for him, so she read, and wrote, and worked through numbers that seemed more arcane, and more unapproachable, than Old Weston ever had.

  The numbers she did on paper that Rath had provided. She could leave them on the table, and when they returned from the Common or the well, he would have them annotated. Sometimes the words in the margins of her messy columns were more real than Rath; they reminded her of the early months. Terse, yes, but sometimes encouraging. She both dreaded and looked forward to them.

  The candle was almost a stub when she at last stoppered the inkwell and took the pen to the bucket; she very carefully cleaned the quill and returned it to the table. She closed the books, and made a neat pile of them, pushing it to one side. Then she rose, and went to the windows, stepping over Lander and Jester, who were snoring. Arann was, as usual, a bit closer to the door, and Finch and Teller slept a room away.

  The rest of her den?

  Pushing her hair out of her eyes, she levered herself up onto the windowsill and looked out at the still face of the moon in the night sky. The bright moon’s light silvered the City, even in shadow. She could see, by its position, that it was late. Very late and edging into early.

  She lowered herself gently, creaked along the floorboards, and made her way back to the candle that was burning itself into a small puddle. Then she sat, carefully, in the chair that she had vacated, yawned, and rubbed her eyes.

  Kalliaris, she thought, giving in, at last, to the hour. Lady, smile.

  The candle guttered.

  Duster came back after a full ten minutes, and her light trailed past them on the opposite side of the crevice as she followed its edge in the other direction. Not one for words, not Duster. If she’d found something, she would have let them know. She didn’t turn, and didn’t speak; she might have been an apparition.

  But as they watched her go, Lefty suddenly sat up, his supine back stiffening. He didn’t shout, not to Duster. But he spoke loudly enough for either Angel or Carver, who bracketed him, Carver cross-legged, and Angel standing.

  “Where’s Fisher?”

  They looked, as the last of her light grayed and faded. “Carver?”

  Carver shook his head, black hair obscuring his eye just before darkness did. In the undercity, darkness had meaning, and it was absolute.

  “I didn’t see him.”

  “No,” Angel said. “I didn’t either. But he followed Duster when she left.”

  “Maybe he saw something, and she kept walking.” Carver’s voice held no conviction. It held hope. “If he did, he’ll stand and wait
.”

  Duster came back, the faint light of slowly moving magestone gray again. They felt the distance keenly, and her approach was so slow it was almost agonizing. You couldn’t begrudge it; the crevices weren’t simple, straight lines, and the stone along their edges wasn’t solid. But even so, they held breath until she could be seen, magelight trailing the underside of her chin.

  “Duster!” Carver shouted. His voice, the two syllables distinct, echoed in the silence.

  She looked up. “I think I’ve found—”

  “Duster!” Carver shouted again, but this time not quite as loudly. “Where’s Fisher?”

  She frowned then, and her eyes left the crevice along which she’d been searching. She turned to look back the way she’d come and Carver shouted her name again.

  “He didn’t come back the first time. He followed you when you went to the right, but he didn’t come back.”

  She cursed. More loudly than Carver had called her name. “Why didn’t you say something?” She started to head to their right, lingering only to hear the reply.

  “Lefty noticed as you passed us.” He turned to Angel. “You want to stay here, or should I?”

  “Either way.”

  “Stay.” He walked back, away from the crevice, and approached it at a run. He cleared it by at least two feet on the opposite side, landing in Duster’s shadow.

  Duster passed him the stone without comment, and he hesitated before holding out his palm to catch it. They left, and Angel watched them until there wasn’t anything to watch.

  Jewel didn’t light another candle. No point. She wasn’t working, so she didn’t need that type of light. The light from the street and the light from the moon were good enough.

  She sat in her chair, and she waited.

  She had always hated waiting.

  It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Carver knew it, and knew as well that Duster needed reminding. Because he held the light, it was his face that was exposed, but even in the shadows it cast, he could see enough of her to know. She was tense as a bowstring. Her hand had found its perch on her dagger’s hilt, and nothing would separate them. Carver didn’t try. He followed her, held the light, saw the buildings and the crevice and the fallen shards of stone that lay across the street, taller than a man.

  Neither of them raised their voices; they called Fisher’s name every few feet, and they checked the rubble and fallen rock, although it was pointless. If more rock had fallen, this close, they would have heard it. And felt it.

  They walked to the end of the crevice, or rather, to the last passable point; here, slabs of rock had fallen across it. Had they been flat, or even, they would have formed a bridge; as it was, they formed a small mountain.

  Duster started to climb, and Carver called her back.

  She said nothing, but her lips were compressed in a line so thin they were almost white.

  “He’s the laziest member of our den,” Carver told her. “No way he’d try to climb anything.”

  Duster snorted. But she nodded, and she turned back, following the light and the edge of the crack in the world.

  Three times they went back and forth. Angel traded places with Carver, and he followed Duster as she searched. The search grew longer, and wider, but they found no sign of Fisher. No sign that he had fallen—and even the taciturn Fisher would have made some noise if he had. No sign that he had stopped to wait. They broke, walked with Lefty to the far left, where the chasm, as Duster noted, was narrower. It was a long trek, and they would have left Duster standing there to mark the spot, but Lefty wouldn’t agree to that.

  “No one stays alone,” he said, almost inaudibly.

  Duster opened her mouth to snarl something, and shut it again hard. The snap of her teeth was audible.

  “Mark it with stones,” Angel told her. He picked up a few loose rocks and began to make a standing pile on an open patch of ground. Duster watched him for half a minute, and then she joined him. They didn’t take their time, but the pile was big enough and irregular enough that they could easily find it on the way back.

  They got Lefty across, put the rope into the pack that hung, slack, across Carver’s back, and then began to search in earnest.

  The sky changed color, and the moons paled, and Jewel sat in her chair. It was an anchor, it was what she knew and what she did when her den was not gathered under the safety of this roof, when they weren’t all sleeping in bedrolls and blankets across the length of the floor, like a human carpet.

  Had they ever been gone this long? In silence, she could expose the heart of her worry. She could poke at it, prod it, test it against other worries, other fears. She could lob facts at it, as if trying to pierce it somehow. As if, in so doing, she could suddenly shake loose the knowledge and the certainty that was both curse and gift.

  But nothing came, in the slow graying of darkness.

  Not the feeling, and not her den.

  They did not separate again.

  Carver held the magestone, and Lefty stayed at his side, as if he were Arann. Angel and Duster moved ahead, fanning out as far as the light would reach, and circling back in silence. And it was silent. They spoke, when they spoke at all, with den- sign and movement: the curt shake of a head. Whether it was followed by the trail of moving dark hair or the sharp spires of white didn’t matter; it meant the same thing. No luck.

  And, goddess, they wanted luck. If they didn’t speak, they thought the words: Her name, and a plea that the face she showed was her smile.

  The only word that broke their self- imposed silence was a name, and it echoed against fallen and standing buildings, whose occupants had long since vanished. They widened their search, narrowed it, crossed the same ground again and again; they listened for any sign of movement, huddled together around the light.

  They didn’t so much lose track of time as ignore it, as if by ignoring it they could buy more, or could—even better—turn it back to the moment when Fisher casually turned to follow in Duster’s wake.

  But after hours, they regrouped. This time, they whispered, argued, held on to both their tempers and their fear. No one wanted to leave, not because they felt their presence would suddenly change things, but because they would go home, without Fisher, and find Jay waiting.

  No one knew what they could say to her, or even what they would say, but in the end, home is where they retreated, gathering and guarding each other as they took their light and its foreign illumination from the undercity that had, in the space of one night, become as unknown, as mysterious, and as uncontrollable as the City that rested above it.

  Teller woke when the sun’s light lay across his brow and eyes. He rolled over so it was on his neck, but that didn’t help, and eventually he sat up, blankets falling away from his chest. He pushed his hair out of his eyes—a gesture they’d all picked up in their years of watching Jay. No nightmare last night, he thought with relief, and he turned to look at Jay’s bedroll.

  It was empty.

  Finch was still asleep a couple of feet to his right, but Duster was already up; her space was conspicuously empty. Which was unusual; Duster didn’t like morning much, and she had to be dragged into it, which was only a little less risky than waking Arann. Arann, on the other hand, was awake; Teller could hear the boards creak in the other room, and they only creaked that loudly for Arann.

  Teller rose, found his clothing, and slid into it. He opened the door carefully, and stepped into the main room. Jester and Lander were still sleeping against the wall. Arann was . . . pacing. He paused when he saw Teller, and something about his expression caused Teller to look at Jay’s table.

  Jay was still on her chair, her arms wrapped around her upper body. He couldn’t see her face, but he looked at the rest of the room, then. Carver, Angel, Fisher, and Lefty were missing.

  He opened his mouth, closed it, and tapped Arann’s arm; when Arann turned, he signed.

  Arann shook his head.

  How long?

&nb
sp; Arann’s gaze flickered to the window and back.

  No nightmare, Teller thought, but this time with no relief, and with a curious hollow sensation that had nothing to do with hunger. No nightmare, no second dream, because Jay hadn’t slept yet.

  Duster was often out at night, and she was good enough to wait until Jay was in bed before she left. But only Duster. Not half the den. And even Duster didn’t stay out all night unless she’d managed to get into a fight that involved injury, running, and hiding.

  This was the time they usually began to assemble a crew for the Common. Teller didn’t bother; he knew they wouldn’t be going anywhere until everyone returned.

  He turned back to the bedroom to wake Finch.

  Finch was never a heavy sleeper. She might have been at one time, but years spent sleeping in the same room as Jay had destroyed that. Like Teller, she hadn’t been expecting a full night’s sleep; like Teller, she’d expected Jay to wake them all in that state of panic that followed those dreams that weren’t quite dreams. She hadn’t expected sleep; she’d expected the odd dread that came from spending too much time in the darkened kitchen, while Jay spoke and Teller captured her words.

  But unlike Teller, she felt no relief at the sight of morning sun, because the first thing she saw was his face. “What?” She whispered. “What happened?”

  He lifted a finger to his lips, and she lowered her voice, although she hadn’t spoken loudly to begin with. “They didn’t come back last night.”

  He slid out of the room while she changed, and she joined him and Arann in the main room. Then she woke Jester and Lander, finger to lips, and waited until they were dressed. They looked at each other, and fingers flew as they glanced at Jay’s bent back.

  Lander nodded, and he and Arann went to the well, taking Jester with them. Even with the streets busy, Jay hated anyone to travel alone unless there was pressing need. Only Jay and Duster did.