by D. K. Fields
‘Nicholas!’ Odette was there, her head close to his, doing her best to cover herself against the pelting of stones and cinders. Somehow, she’d crawled to him to check he was all right. She always was the strong one.
There was nothing to say, nothing to do other than hope. There was no shelter nearby – and what shelter could be trusted when the very ground turns against you?
And then, just as suddenly as it came, it went. The ground stilled. The only shaking was his arms and his legs and every other part of him that had been tensed the whole time. Without realising, he’d been gripping one of Odette’s hands – so tight it hurt, but he didn’t let go, not at first. The air hadn’t cleared and was a close, thick cloud. Even through the masks, it was hard to breathe. Lilja wasn’t faring much better – he could hear her coughing, even though he couldn’t see her.
‘Nicholas, my hand,’ Odette whispered, as if worried a loud noise might set off the shake again.
‘Sorry.’ He let go, and they both rose to kneeling. He wasn’t ready to try standing just yet.
Her face was covered in dust and grime, except for tear tracks. He hadn’t heard her crying. He wondered if he’d wept too, if his face looked the same. She was shivering with shock.
‘Nicholas.’ She swallowed hard. ‘We shouldn’t be here. What are we—’
He leaned forwards, pulled both their masks down, and kissed her. Amid all the dirt and mess, he found her lips, and for once, he was the one doing the kissing. He touched her cheek and felt her trembling. And then she was kissing him back. The whole thing was very different with two properly involved. He didn’t care that she tasted like ash. Months may have passed since they met, but this felt right. Now. Here. After what they’d been through together.
He took a breath, their foreheads close to touching, her eyes eclipsing everything else.
‘We’re here to find stories,’ he said. ‘Remember?’
‘I remember.’
Lilja coughed, waving an ineffectual hand in front of her face as she stumbled towards them. ‘Keeper’s kiss,’ she said. It was supposed to be a joke, but nobody laughed.
The three of them managed to help one another up and along the path towards the har. The going was slow and treacherous, and more than once, one of them would have tripped if it weren’t for the support of the others. It was hard to see much beyond their own feet, as if they’d gone from sunset to deepest night in a matter of moments. Lilja was doing the best she could to cover her mouth, and Nicholas was more grateful than ever for his mask.
When he wasn’t struggling to stay on his feet, he was very much aware of Odette beside him. The press of her. The heat of her, even fiercer than the heat of the Tear. And the kiss. The kiss…
‘Nicholas, look,’ Odette said. She was pointing ahead, where the air was starting to clear. There were lights in the distance. He had to squint against the ash and the dust to be sure, but then he saw the har. Solid rock gates, ledges and balconies, spires – so much black rock in a landscape that had nothing else. And yet it could not be a more different, or more welcome, sight.
Without a word, and without risking too much with each step, they picked up their shuffling pace. Home – of a sorts – was not far now. Just to be inside, safe under a roof and breathing air as clear as the Tear could offer. It sparked a kind of hope.
That was, until they heard the first cry.
It was so clear and so close that Nicholas thought Odette or Lilja had stepped on something, or twisted their ankle. But a quick glance told him that wasn’t the case. That, and the weight of agony in the wail. There is a cadence to pain, if you ever really stop to listen to it. And growing up on the Steppes, around so many animals, Nicholas had learnt the difference between a bruising, a breaking, and a pain that was worth mentioning to the Widow. The cry they’d heard was the last kind, and it was followed by more.
Somehow, they’d taken a winding path back from the fields that put Er-jun mine between them and the har. The thought occurred to Nicholas to skirt the mine, give it a wide berth and do his best to close his ears to the screams. A hard-hearted path, yes, but would anyone have blamed them? Would anyone, except for they themselves, have known? But instead, together, they stumbled on towards the mine.
They came to the dead first.
Rows of bodies, laid out neat and still as only the dead can be. But as they drew closer, those bodies told stories that were anything but neat. Limbs ended in messy stumps, or missing entirely. Clothes little more than shreds and patches among the blood and bone. More than a few skulls had been crushed or made almost unrecognisable. Men and women alike, lifeless and broken.
‘Ransu,’ Nicholas said, stopping at one of the bodies.
‘You knew—?’
‘Basti. Bengt. Peska.’ He pointed to each in turn. There were more, many more, who he knew – at least by their name, at least to look at, even as they were now. They’d all wanted to talk to him once, the Wayward boy working their mine with them. Not unheard of, but not so common either. And now they were dead. As the air was beginning to clear, the ash and dirt thrown up by the ground-shake was settling once more. It was starting to coat the mine’s dead in a layer of ash, as if gently burying them one flake at a time.
Lilja had left them. She was wandering between the rows, slow, careful, looking at each person in turn. Then, without warning, she dropped to her knees. Her shoulders shuddered as she wept. They gave her a moment alone.
Nicholas looked about the outskirts of the mine. The cries they had heard before were coming from those pulled alive from the rubble that now covered the mine’s entrance. Crews of people were doing their best to clear the rocks but such a thing could only be dangerous. Those they found among the rocks were either put on makeshift stretchers and carried to the har or brought here, to the rows of the dead.
‘We have to help,’ he said.
Odette took his hand. ‘Lilja first.’
Their friend was cradling the misshapen head of a man in her lap. She was smoothing the skin of his cheek down, down, so as to cover his back teeth. They waited, but she didn’t notice them. Eventually, Odette touched her shoulder, and she gave a start.
She looked up at them, her eyes red, and said, ‘My uncle.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Odette said.
‘He and my mother argued. Bitter, bitter arguing because of borrowed coins. Long time I have not spoken to him. I took her side. I took her side.’ She shook her head and started to weep again. It was clear she wanted to be alone with her grief.
Nicholas and Odette left the dead to help the living. They crossed the rocky open ground, a distance of respect as much as a practicality, and approached an older woman Nicholas didn’t recognise. She was organising those who carried the stretchers, all of whom looked exhausted.
‘We want to help,’ Nicholas said.
She took one look at them, then waved to where a man lay groaning.
They stood beside the stretcher, and for a moment, all they could do was stare. The man’s eyes were closed, but his face was wracked with pain, from what they could see through the blood and the grime. But what they really couldn’t ignore, couldn’t look away from, couldn’t properly understand, was that the man had no feet.
‘Odette,’ Nicholas said softly. ‘Odette, look at me.’
He had to say it twice more before she did.
‘We’re going to carry him back to the har.’
‘But, he has no—’
‘We’re going to carry him. You and me. We both know the way, don’t we?’
She gave a small nod.
‘You’re going to go first, at the front, nice and slow,’ he said. He moved to the other end, where the man’s feet should have been. He’d spare her from being close to those stumps, and from the temptation of looking round. And he’d spare her from the fact he knew this man’s name too.
When they picked up the stretcher, it felt unsettlingly light. He told himself it was because of all the days he’d whee
led lava rock from the mine. The grim irony that the miners now carried one another along the very same path was not lost on him.
As they walked the stretcher towards the har, the last of the ash thrown up by the shake was falling like the snows of late winter. He would see those snows on the Steppes again, and when he did, he’d appreciate them all the more for where he’d been and the stories they brought back. A story that began with a gift from the Keeper, was thrown into turmoil by the Trumpeter, and ended – as so many do – with words for the Widow.
*
‘I don’t care how safe they say it is, I’m not getting metal hands.’
Odette pushed him back onto the chair. ‘Well, sit still then. You need the ointment.’
‘But it stings!’
‘I’ll get the bonesmith, shall I?’
He shuddered. He had tried to keep his prejudices to himself since they left the Steppes. He’d known enough of the Union to know the Torn spoke funny and none of them had any hair, and he didn’t have a problem with that. But the Rustans with their modifications were something else entirely. He couldn’t walk down one of their winding streets without staring at someone who had metal where there should have been skin. And that was just the adults. He’d heard stories about Rustan children, but never believed they could be true…
He held out his hands and winced as she rubbed the foul-smelling mixture onto his palms. Even with the heavy leather gloves he’d been given, working the ropeboxes was tearing up his skin. He was starting to think no matter where you worked in the Union you wore a pair of gloves. At least, if you were Wayward. Growing up, his hands were tough enough – calloused by years of herding from the saddle. And that had helped some, but there was no accounting for the salt of Break Deep or the constant burn of winches. Odette was right in some ways: the best thing for it was to have a bonesmith replace his palms with metal plates. And maybe a finger or two while they were there, for better gripping. That was how most of the men and women working the cone’s ropeboxes managed. But he was only there for one season. Surely, there wasn’t any need for something so extreme?
‘Ow!’ he said, trying to pull back. But Odette had him now.
‘Stop squirming.’
‘You’re enjoying this,’ he said. ‘Seeing me suffer.’
‘Rubbing ointment onto blistered hands… Best part of my day.’
Through gritted teeth, he said, ‘So tell me about your day. Tell me a story.’
‘Hold still,’ she said.
‘Not until you tell me a story. Come on, you want to be a storyteller. Here’s your audience.’
‘Here’s my audience,’ she said. Somehow, she made those words sound mournful. ‘Fine. Work today was the same as the day before, and the day before, and every other day. I move numbers from one column of parchment to another. Sometimes the numbers go up, sometimes they go down. A really exciting day is when I get to rule a line through a name. That means someone has either died or paid off their debt. I guess which based purely on their name and the size of the debt.
‘But I have to guess quickly, because if Vana notices I’ve stopped writing for longer than it takes to scratch my nose, she bangs her desk with a cosh she’s kept from her collecting days. She usually barks a word or two as well, but I can’t understand anything through her metal teeth. Vana only gives those working the ledgers one candle each, so I’m working in near-darkness most of the day. Why do so many people in the Union hide away from daylight? I will never take the open skies of the Steppes for granted again.
‘All of that is to say, when my working day is done, I hurry along to one of the high ledges of the cone. I try to catch the last of the sun on my skin and do my best not to look down at the swirling clouds below. I breathe deep what passes for the cleanest air in the Tear. And then I wait until the stars spread across the sky.’
‘No wonder you’re back so late,’ Nicholas muttered.
Odette ignored him, fully in the telling now. ‘On each of the ledges I go to there’s a shrine to one of the Audience. The Inker is popular with the east-facing ledges, for obvious reasons. But there are shrines to the Hawker, Devotee, Student and many others besides. Since we came to the Rusting Mountains, since the shake… well, since I’ve spent my evenings on those ledges, I haven’t told a single story to a shrine.
‘Don’t look at me like that. I know that’s the kind of thing I berate you about. It’s bad, I know. But worse, it scares me. I’ve always told stories at shrines. Always. Always, except for one time.
‘Do you know the Mernberry Rings, in the far north of the Steppes? Do they herd goats that far? No? Well, my family spend the late weeks of summer there grazing the bison. In truth, they will have only just left the hills, with the weather having turned colder. Do you remember what it’s like to feel the cold? Anyway, one of the many shrines at the rings is for the Critic. My family makes sure we tell a story at every shrine before we leave, but some years we have to hurry because of weather or problems with the herd.
‘On one such year, we’d had no luck with saddles. My mother took me to one side and told me to visit every shrine around the rings and quickly tell a story while the rest of the family broke camp. Nothing fancy, she said, just enough to appease the Audience. No election sagas. I did my best to keep each story short, but some stories take on a life of their own. And it’s hard when facing a shrine – it’s not like a Seat, which is so big as to make you feel like you might slip away unnoticed, just one among many under the Audience. No, a shrine is just you and the member, as close as you are to me now.
‘The last shrine I came to was that of the Critic. My father was bellowing over the hill, impatient to be away. The bison echoed his calls, and I could see my mother waving to me. Everyone was waiting. But so was the Critic. His stone carving was severe. A long, sharp nose and a flat mouth that would never turn up into a smile, not for me. People had left the Critic various offerings, but the carving was unmoved. Somehow, even though I was just a young girl, I had the sense that few stopped to tell him their stories for fear of critique. I started to feel the same fear. A leaden, weighty thing in my legs that started behind my knees and rose until my whole body slumped under it.
‘But I wanted to tell the Critic a story. And not just because my mother would take a switch to those heavy legs of mine if I didn’t. I wanted to tell him a great story, the greatest story. I wanted to make his long, dour face laugh, cry, sing and for all the Audience to sit up and take notice. I would be a storyteller for the ages. Election-winning.
‘He just stared at me, and for the first time in my young life, I could not think of a story. Nothing, not even something short about one of my annoying sisters or a time my father broke wind which would rival the waft of a bison. There was a gap, a blankness, like a cloudy, moonless night’s sky, where there had always been stories. And that really frightened me.
‘I haven’t felt anything like that since. Or, more truthfully, I hadn’t until we left the Torn har. Now, I can’t even look at the shrines on those ledges. There’s nothing there anymore, Nicholas. There’s… I just stare at the sky and then come back here, to this room, to you.’
‘But you just told me a story,’ he said.
She let go of his hands. ‘I knew you wouldn’t understand.’
*
Their room was small, barely bigger than their tents, but at least they didn’t have to share with anyone else. There was a small window out onto the street, two pallets up against the walls and the corridor had a communal privy. The Rusting Mountains was not a place of wide open spaces, inside or out. The streets were narrow and spiralled tightly about themselves. There were no open markets or caverns like the Torn fashioned in their hars. Everything was so very close, and Nicholas constantly felt as if he was about to bump into something, or someone. The Rustans favoured small, private places compared to the dorms and camps that he was used to. And of course, you couldn’t pitch a tent anywhere.
Apparently, he and Odette had enjo
yed the Latecomer’s luck in finding work and a room at all. In travelling west from Erdan-har, they had come to the cone first. They had briefly considered pressing on, deeper into the Rusting Mountains, but were too tired. Nicholas had wondered if the mountains were really so different from one another. But the story they found at the cone soon drove this ignorance from him.
The streets of the cone teemed with Rustans at all hours, and more were winched up from the Tear every day. They all looked as surprised as anyone to find themselves there. Those Nicholas worked with said it was the ground-shakes. Had he felt them? They had badly hit the spire and the ridge, so bad, people were abandoning their homes. It made life on the cone hard, but what could they do? What if the shakes had ruined the cone? The fact that could still happen went unsaid, but it haunted the eyes of the men and women who winched the ropeboxes. Once he knew what it looked like, he saw the very same in the faces of every Rustan he met. Or worse.
The next morning, when he and Odette walked to work, they had to wait in a queue for a vertical ropebox. Some days were better than others, but normally when they had to wait, Odette made a joke about lazy Wayward winchers. Every time they shuffled forwards he expected her to say something, but she was silent. She was staring at a shrine.
At first, Nicholas hadn’t recognised what it was – Rustans had so many confusing customs. He thought it was a tailor or the like showing off their wares. The shrine was a trellis attached to the wall of a building, but only as high as the first floor. Tied to this trellis were hundreds of brightly coloured scraps of cloth. No, looking closer, he realised it was silk. Scraps of silk for the Whisperer. Expensive offerings, but what could be more expensive than the truth?
‘There’s more silk on that wall than in the whole of the Steppes,’ he said, but Odette wasn’t listening. She was staring at a woman sitting at the foot of the shrine. The woman’s head drooped forwards, lolling as if drunk, and she was speaking but too quiet to hear.
