City of Stone and Silence

by Django Wexler

  Cabs gather at the gate. I find a two-seater heading for the Eleventh Ward, already occupied by an older woman with a long woolen shawl and a cheerful expression. She shoves over and I climb up beside her, passing a couple of copper bits to the cabbie with a nod of thanks. The horse snorts and starts moving, and we pass through the gate, gleaming spikes of the portcullis hanging threateningly overhead.

  Then we’re out, onto the broad thoroughfare of the military highway, joining a stream of carriages and pedestrians. I take a deep breath. My gardens smell of willow and fresh-cut grass, sharp and clean, but this is the real scent of Kahnzoka—dung, smoke, and the press of humanity. I give the old woman a grin, and she grins back.

  2

  ISOKA

  Meroe rolls over, sending the sheet slithering to the floor, and mutters something unintelligible in her sleep.

  I sit and watch her for a moment, her brow creased as though in deep thought, eyes shifting under closed lids. She’s naked without the sheet, and I have to fight the urge to run my hands along her beautiful brown skin. I never get tired of looking at her body, so different from mine; soft and curved where I’m lean and hard, smooth and unblemished where I’m scarred and marked. Her face relaxes, brow uncreasing, and her breathing grows smooth and deep.

  I wish I could rotting sleep.

  Meroe spends her days doing useful things—managing our food supply, organizing guard shifts, going up to the deck to plot our course with her navigator’s instruments. In the meantime, everyone calls me leader, even though all I do is nod and smile and drink. And fail to sleep.

  My restlessness must be getting to Meroe, because she mumbles again and puts a hand over her eyes. I roll out of bed—an old mattress tossed on the floor of this chamber, high above the Garden—and pad around to her side. When I pull the sheet back over her, she relaxes again, and I slip out into the corridor.

  The Garden complex is in better shape than the rest of Soliton, fewer rusted-out patches or mushrooms growing on the walls. It’s like a ship-within-a-ship, a cylindrical section walled off from the rest of the vessel. A pair of big doors open onto the first level, the grassy plain where so many died to keep the rest of us safe from maddened crabs. Above that, a few more levels produce various kinds of food. Then there’s the control room, where I killed the Scholar, where I’ve spent many frustrating hours since.

  Higher up are more levels divided into smaller chambers, which is where we’re living. I don’t know exactly how many people survived the trek through the ship and the battle that followed—counting things had been the Scholar’s job—but it’s a lot fewer than were living at the Stern. A few hundred, none much older than I am, many as young as twelve or thirteen. What’s left of Soliton’s crew.

  I stop for a long piss, then make my way to the stairwell, winding up through switchback after switchback. Soliton is huge, bigger than a ship has any right to be, and it seems like it takes hours to reach the deck. Eventually, though, I find myself facing a door, improvised from rope and broken metal plate. At the moment it stands open, though a guard waits just inside, ready to slam it shut if the crabs return. I give her a nod, and she bows.

  “Deepwalker,” she murmurs, and it sounds like a prayer. I can feel my teeth grinding.

  “Is anyone on the tower?” I ask her.

  “Zarun,” the guard says. “For about an hour now.”

  Too much to hope that I could be alone in the middle of the night. I suppose I’ve had worse company. I pause in the doorway for a moment, my breath steaming in the air. The Garden keeps itself heated, but out here it’s getting cold.

  Soliton’s deck is cluttered with protrusions—small rectangular humps, mysterious snaking metal conduits, spires like tree trunks trailing cables. In a few places, such as the Captain’s Tower near the Stern, these are the size of buildings. The tower rising above the Garden isn’t nearly that big, just a couple of stories high, but it provides a good vantage point. There’s a ladder set into the outside, and I make plenty of noise as I work my way up. Zarun isn’t someone you want to catch by surprise. At least not accidentally.

  Meroe keeps her equipment up here, a telescope and a few other mechanisms whose use I don’t even faintly understand. To my surprise, Zarun has his eye to the telescope’s lens when I reach the top.

  “Anything worth looking at?” He’s got it pointed almost straight up.

  “The moon,” he says, raising his head. His dark hair is cut short, framing a handsome face with the copper skin of a Jyashtani and startling blue eyes. “Want a turn?”

  I glance up. The moon is near full, a slightly imperfect circle glowing in a diamond carpet of stars that is nothing like the smoky, sepia-toned city skies I’d grown up with. Staring gives me a faint sense of vertigo, as though I were going to fall up into that darkness and never stop.

  “What’s the use of looking at the moon?” I ask him.

  Zarun shrugs. “No use. It satisfies my curiosity.” He steps away from the telescope and leans against the waist-high railing that surrounds the top of the tower. “There’s little enough else to do lately.”

  “Not enough scavenging expeditions to keep you busy?”

  The crew had left almost everything behind at the Stern. Soliton was littered with goods, sacrifices loaded on board for generations, the greatest treasure hoard in the world. Our scavengers combed through it, ignoring the gold and jewels, bringing back cloth, wood, leather, books, anything useful.

  “I’ve gone out plenty,” he says. “But they don’t need me. The last dozen teams haven’t seen so much as a bent crawler.”

  “That doesn’t mean the next one won’t find a hammerhead.”

  “Let’s hope.” He grins.

  “You’re that bored?” My own battle with a hammerhead had left my leg nearly torn off, and that was before Meroe and I fell into the Deeps. It isn’t an experience I look forward to repeating.

  “Maybe not quite,” Zarun says. “But we could use the meat.”

  “Fair.”

  The Garden provides grain, fruits, and vegetables in abundance, but it doesn’t offer any farm animals. The crew are used to a lot of crab in their diets, and there’s been grumbling since it ran out.

  The crabs—a baroque variety of multi-legged, hard-shelled creatures—had always been a fact of life on Soliton, dangerous but valuable. Now they’re gone, and nobody knows why. Some people say they’re hiding, scared of us after the battle for the Garden, but I don’t believe that. Meroe thinks they’re going into hibernation as it gets colder.

  A noise echoes across the ship, a gong-like sound followed by a long, metallic scraping. I look around, suspicious, and Zarun laughs.

  “Iceberg,” he says. “Soliton just plows them out of the way.”

  I give him a sour glare, which he ignores.

  “If we keep heading this way much longer, it’s going to be too cold to come up on deck,” Zarun says. He looks up at the moon again, then over at me.

  “If you’re asking whether I’ve figured out where we’re going, the answer’s still no,” I tell him. “We’re well off any map I’ve ever heard of.”

  “You’re the one who claimed to be able to talk to the ship.”

  “Apparently we’re no longer on speaking terms,” I mutter.

  And that, unfortunately, is the crux of it. Since my confrontation with the Scholar, I’ve spent hours in the control room, trying everything I can think of. I can feel the Eddica energy flowing through the conduits, but when I try to reach it, the ship pushes me out again. UNAUTHORIZED/REJECTED, over and over.

  Hagan hasn’t said a word to me since that day. I’m worried about him, if you can worry about a ghost.

  But what worries me more is that the hourglass is running out. Kuon Naga gave me a year to return with Soliton if I wanted to save Tori. There’s still plenty of time to make it back to Kahnzoka if we turned around now—though the thought of another brush with the Vile Rot makes me shudder—but every day we’re going full spee
d in the wrong direction, and the ship remains stubbornly beyond my control.

  The crew is starting to worry. Before, when Soliton was going around and around its slow circuit, it didn’t seem to matter where we went. Now, though, it seems to be heading somewhere, and no one is sure what will happen when it gets there.

  “Well,” Zarun says, after I’m silent for a few moments, “I’ll leave you to your brooding.”

  I give a grunt of thanks, and take a moment to admire him as he swings nimbly over the rail. He may be a ruthless killer, but he’s certainly easy on the eyes, and a good rut besides.

  When I catch myself thinking that, I flush and look away. It’s just a thought. I’m allowed to have thoughts. The trouble is …

  The trouble is that this, what I have with Meroe, isn’t like anything I’ve had before, and not just because she’s a girl. Back in Kahnzoka, I’d take Hagan to bed, or a good-looking boy I met at Breda’s, or one of Keyfa’s prostitutes. It was always just a rut, with no pretensions, no promises. Simple.

  With Meroe … I don’t know. It’s not like it’s something we’ve talked about. But I’d rather bite my fingers off, one by one, than hurt her. So I’m working on it.

  It would scare me, being so vulnerable to someone else’s feelings, except that I don’t seem to have any rotting choice in the matter.

  Rot. Rot, rot, rot. I flop against the railing, metal cold against my skin, and stare down the Bow. Moonlight dapples the sea, and I can even see a few icebergs, drifting slowly past and bobbing in the wake of the great ship’s passage. Farther ahead, there’s only darkness, broken by—

  —a glimmer of light.

  * * *

  The Council convenes on the tower the next morning.

  These days, that means me, Meroe, Zarun, and Shiara. The journey up the length of the ship dissolved the packs and clades of the Stern, especially since so many of the pack leaders had died fighting to get us here. But old habits break hard, and Zarun and Shiara have a lot of accumulated respect.

  Of the two, it’s Shiara who makes me wary. Zarun, I understand. I can even see through his brash bluster, a little, to the more thoughtful man underneath. Shiara is a mystery to me, elegant and perfectly attired in a silk kizen like a noble lady of Khanzoka, wearing a slight smile with no humor in it at all. Alone of the old Council members, she isn’t a fighter—her Well is Sahzim, Perception—but she has the loyalty of some of the crew’s most experienced and dangerous hunters.

  Not that she’s caused trouble. On the contrary, she’s been perfectly cooperative since our flight to the Garden. But I don’t know what she wants from me, and that makes me worry.

  Right now she’s peering through the telescope pointing at the horizon. After a moment, she straightens, moving back with delicate, careful steps. Her cheeks are red under the powder she uses on her face. The sun is well up by now, but it does nothing to cut the chill, and we’re shivering in the wind of Soliton’s passage.

  “What is it?” she says.

  She’s looking at me. They’re all looking at me. Even Meroe, who ought to know better. All I can do is scratch the back of my head and be a disappointment.

  “I have no idea,” I tell them. “Other than the obvious.”

  The obvious was that, far out ahead of Soliton, there’s a faintly glowing hemisphere of soft gray light. Last night, I hadn’t been able to gauge its size, and I’d thought it might be another ship. When morning came, though, it became obvious that the thing is much farther away—and much bigger—than I’d originally guessed.

  “Is that Eddica energy?” Shiara says.

  I give a slow nod. “I think so.” I can feel it, a tickle on my mind, even at this distance.

  “And we seem to be headed right for it.” She raises one perfect eyebrow. “So it’s reasonable to guess that it has something to do with Soliton.”

  “Reasonable,” I parrot. “But I’m not sure what we can do about it.”

  “Make sure everyone’s under cover, at least,” Zarun says. “And that the doors are closed, in case the crabs go mad the way they did at the Rot.”

  “Take a look at this,” Meroe says. She’s wandered over to the telescope. “At the edge of the light. Either there’s a really big iceberg, or that’s land.”

  We take turns looking through the instrument. Sure enough, off to one side of the gray glow, pure white snow mounds up out of the surface of the sea in what looks very much like snow-covered hills. We look at each other for a moment, and Zarun says what everyone’s thinking.

  “Maybe this rotting ship has finally gotten where it’s going.”

  That’s the news that spreads through the crew, like fire over dry thatch. Wherever we’ve been heading, we’re almost there—my best guess is we’ll arrive by evening. Meroe and I do a tour of inspection, check the big doors on the first floor, the guards and food supplies. Hunters arm themselves and assemble in small groups, and the younger non-combatants are herded into rooms on the upper floor that’ll be easy to defend. To my surprise, there’s no panic, just an air of expectation.

  “They’re excited,” I tell Meroe, as we leave another band of eager hunters behind.

  “Shouldn’t they be?” She’s back in one of her long green dresses, with an asymmetrical silver band on her right arm. I’m wearing my Deepwalker armor, crafted to show off the blue marks on my skin. Meroe says it improves morale.

  “My morale’s not improved,” I say. “Who rotting knows what that thing is?”

  “Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.”

  “You have no way of knowing that.”

  She gives me a sly grin. “You worry too much.”

  “You don’t worry enough.” I can’t help but smile back, put my arm around her shoulders, and give her a squeeze. She leans into me, and for a moment my morale is improved.

  “Besides,” she says, lowering her voice, “you’re not making any progress on getting the ship back to Kahnzoka, are you? So any change has to be for the better.”

  I suppress the urge to say, Unless we all die, or something similarly cheerful. I can tell when I’m not being helpful.

  We make our way back up to the tower that evening, once Meroe has assured herself everything is in readiness, while the gray wall draws ever closer. The door there is the only remaining opening to the Garden, and the guards are ready to slam and bar it at the first sign of a crab onslaught. I’ve given that duty to Thora and Jack, and they greet us cheerfully as we approach.

  “Deepwalker!” Jack gives a low bow. “Clever Jack reports a strange phenomenon indeed. Behold!”

  I barely have time to duck as she hurls a snowball at me. It shatters against the wall behind my head, melting rapidly in the heat of the Garden, and Jack cackles. Meroe looks delighted.

  “It’s really snowing?” she says.

  Thora nods. “Just a little bit so far, but getting heavier. Here.” She offers a pair of heavy blankets. “If you’re still set on going out there.”

  “You can trust Jack and lovely Thora with the watch,” Jack says. “You may be needed below.”

  “I should be on the tower.” I’m not sure why I think this—some vague notion, maybe, that if strange Eddica powers are afoot I may be able to influence them. And, of course, I want to see, even if there’s nothing I can do. I take the blankets from Thora and hand one to Meroe. “Thanks. If anything goes badly wrong—”

  Thora nods. “I’ll shut the door.”

  “After I rescue the two of you,” Jack says gallantly.

  Meroe and I go out onto the deck. Snow filters down, nearly invisible against a sky that’s white with cloud from horizon to horizon. Meroe stands, arms spread, staring upward with wide eyes. A fat flake lands on her forehead, and she flinches, then giggles.

  “I didn’t think it would be so soft,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”

  “You’ve never seen snow before.” I hadn’t put that together until now.

  “In Nimar it only snows up in the highest mountains,
” she says. “When I was a girl, my father told me about getting caught in a blizzard on a hunting trip, and I didn’t believe him.” She turns to me and cocks her head. “Does it snow in Kahnzoka?”

  “Not much. A few times a year.” I shrug, uncomfortably. Bone-deep memories rise from my years before, on the streets of the Sixteenth Ward. Snow didn’t mean beauty and wonder, it meant a real chance you’d freeze to death before morning. “In the city it just piles up and turns to brown slush.”

  Somehow, she gets what I’m thinking. There are times when I wonder if Meroe is a Kindre adept. She takes my hand, and our cold fingers lace together.

  Climbing the tower is considerably harder in the chill, the cold metal sucking the warmth from our hands. We wrap ourselves in the cloaks when we get to the top, and I stick my hands in my armpits, trying to coax some life back into them. Meroe’s precious instruments have already been moved safely inside the Garden, so the top of the tower is empty except for us. Meroe walks in a circle, trying to get her blood flowing, then delights at the crisp footprints she leaves in the fresh snow.

  My attention is focused on what’s ahead of us. Soliton is still headed directly for the gray light, and I’ve had to revise my estimate of the thing’s size yet again. It has to be huge, a circular dome several miles in diameter and half a mile high. Not a ship at all, even a ship as big as Soliton, but more on the scale of a mountain. It dominates the view directly ahead of us, but to either side it’s still possible to see a snowy landscape stretching way into the gray distance. The water is crowded with icebergs, and they scrape and crash against the great ship’s hull, though they don’t impede its progress.