City of Stone and Silence

by Django Wexler

  “Something’s bothering you,” Grandma says.

  I look up at her. Sometimes I think Grandma has a touch of Kindre herself.

  “Out with it,” she orders. “I can’t abide sulking.”

  “What I do.” I glance around to make sure no one is close enough to overhear. “Touching their minds. It’s not right. A person’s thoughts should be their own.”

  Grandma is silent for a moment. “No, it’s not right.”

  I bite my lip. “Then—”

  “Would it be better if we’d taken that girl in, and she’d brought the Immortals down on us?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “Of course not.”

  “Or if I turned everyone away because I didn’t know who to trust?”

  “No.”

  “You want me to tell you you’re a monster, because of what you can do?” She pauses for a moment, looking upward. “You know what they say about people like me.”

  That’s the other secret, the one I didn’t learn until long after I’d started working at the hospital. Grandma isn’t just good with bandages, needle and thread. She’s a ghulwitch.

  Not a powerful one, of course. It’s an open secret that the Immortals allow Ghul touched to operate in the city, providing minor healing and preventatives. But everyone knows that ghulwitches are unclean, unholy, which is reason enough for them to keep their abilities secret.

  “I know,” I tell her, feeling suddenly embarrassed. She’s lived with this her whole life, however many decades that’s been. “Sorry. I just—”

  “Don’t be sorry,” she snaps, and starts walking again. I scurry to catch up. “Have I told you about the first time I saved someone’s life?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It was my cousin. I wasn’t much older than you, and he was about the same. My father and his brothers all lived together, so the boy was as close as a brother, and when he fell sick I stayed by his bed all the time. His guts swelled up, and he cried like a pig getting slaughtered. Worthless doctor my uncle brought in told us he was being tested by the Blessed One, said a few prayers.” She pauses to spit in the road.

  “Did you know … what you were?”

  “By then I did. Can’t explain what it’s like, any more than I guess you can explain what you see when you’re looking inside someone’s head. But I could feel … anything alive, and what was happening. Just a little. I was a curious little thing. Used to practice on rats.” She shakes her head. “Killed a lot of rats. But I touched my cousin and I could see what was wrong. Something had gotten tangled up in his guts, and he couldn’t shit. That was all, just shit building up, but it was going to kill him.”

  “So you healed him?”

  “I figured, what did he have to lose?” She shrugs. “Maybe I shouldn’t have. I know a bit more now about what can go wrong. But I did it. Unknotted his guts and smoothed things along and saved his life.” She glances at me. “Of course, when I did that, everything that had been festering came rushing out. Learned a lesson that day.”

  I wrinkle my nose. “What lesson?”

  “You do what you can with what you have.” Her grin is sharp as daggers. “Sometimes, you want to help someone, that means you get covered in shit.” She rolls one shoulder with a pop. “Come on. Still plenty of work to do.”

  * * *

  When I tell Kosura that story, she breaks down laughing, hiding her face behind a dirty bedsheet until she can get control of herself.

  We’re doing laundry, on the hospital’s third floor. Keeping the sheets clean and mended is a never-ending battle, and we all pitch in whenever we have a few moments free. I’m worthless with a needle, so I pile the baskets of parti-colored bedding—stitched from rags, flecked with blood and who knows what else—into the great wooden tubs, then carry buckets of boiling water from the hearth in the corner. Grandma is a big believer in boiling water, which she says keeps disease from spreading. I suppose she would know.

  Kosura, of course, stitches as tiny and neat as any professional seamstress, so she works on fixing rips and tears, saving what she can and putting aside what she can’t to be cut into patches or torn up for bandages.

  The thing about Kosura—

  If I’m being honest, the thing about Kosura is that there is no thing about Kosura. She’s from the Eleventh Ward, but she seems to have a natural grace that elevates her above the coarse manners of most people here. She’s tiny, shorter than me with long, thick hair and lively eyes, and seems to contain enough energy for a person twice her size.

  When I look at her, I feel like an imposter. She’s not mage-born, has no Wells to draw on, no special reason to help. But she’s here anyway, nearly every night. Her father is a merchant, successful as Eleventh Ward merchants go, but she spends her evenings sewing bedsheets and wiping up vomit and doing all the other awful things that go with running a hospital.

  For all that, she’s the closest thing I have to a real friend. She’s a year older than me, though she’s so innocent sometimes it makes her seem younger. Grandma trusts her, and she knows about the mage-blood sanctuary, though of course I haven’t told her about my own power. As far as she knows, I’m here out of the kindness of my heart, just like she is.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, when she can keep a straight face again. “I can just see her saying that, you know?”

  “It’s a very Grandma story,” I agree, stirring the cloth in the steaming tub. “I just have a hard time picturing her at our age.”

  Kosura grins. “Back in the time of the Blessed One, you mean? Before the Empire?”

  “Right. Everyone had stupid haircuts and spent their time fighting duels and dying of unrequited love.” History is not my favorite subject, and much of my understanding comes from popular dramas.

  “I think the stupid haircuts were a little later, but otherwise that sounds basically accurate.” Kosura leans forward over her stitching. “Speaking of unrequited love. I hear you had an adventure today.”

  I roll my eyes. I would trust Grandma to take any important secrets to her grave, but anything gossipy she passed on immediately. “It’s not like that.”

  “You saved a boy from the Ward Guard! No doubt he’s ever so grateful.”

  “He ought to be.” I shrug, trying for nonchalance. “But I doubt I’ll ever see him again.”

  “That’s what makes it so perfectly tragic! Think of him, lying awake at night, pining for your half-remembered face glimpsed by moonlight.”

  “Maybe not my face.” I flush, but only a little, and tell her the particulars of how I’d gotten rid of the Ward Guard. By the end, she’s shaking with laughter, the half-mended sheet thrown over her head.

  “You didn’t,” she forces out between gasps. “Come on.”

  “I couldn’t think of anything else to do,” I mutter, looking down into the tub.

  “So you thought, hey, I’ll take my shirt off, maybe that’ll help?”

  “I didn’t take it off. And it worked, didn’t it?”

  “You should try that on Grandma the next time she doesn’t like how you’ve folded the bedsheets.”

  She comes up for air, and I hurl a wet rag in her direction. She dodges, still giggling.

  “Well,” she says. “He’ll definitely remember you, at least.”

  “Maybe.” I poke at the sopping sheets with my stick. “I think—”

  “Tori!” Hasaka, the doorman, appears in the laundry entrance, panting for breath. His face is white.

  I drop the stick. “What’s wrong?”

  He hurries closer, lowering his voice. There’s no one else in the laundry, but voices carry in the old building.

  “It’s old Sewagauri,” he says. “He’s gone off again. Ichi was trying to bring him his medicine, and he just snapped.”

  “Is Ichi all right?” I ask.

  “A little singed, but he’ll be fine. But we need your help before Sewa hurts someone.”

  I glance at Kosura, who makes a shooing gesture. “Go. I’ll
finish up here.”

  Hasaka shifts from foot to foot in anxiety. I drop the stick and follow him, out to the exterior stairs, hurrying down groaning, rickety steps to the first floor. From there we take another, internal staircase to the basement, an earth-walled cavern stuffed with sacks of rice and other essentials. Working by the faint light spilling from the stairs, Hasaka leads the way to the far corner, where a dirty, half-height door is mostly hidden behind several stacked barrels of lamp oil. It looks like nothing much, maybe a closet, sealed with a rusty iron padlock.

  Hasaka unlocks this, and it slides open without the squeal you’d expect. Beyond the door, there’s a stone-lined passage, broad and well-lit, ending in an iron staircase spiraling upward. We hurry over, crossing under the street outside the hospital, and I imagine the drunks wandering a few feet above our heads.

  The staircase leads up into the central yard of another derelict tenement. From the outside, it looks abandoned, door boarded over and plaster crumbling. Inside, though, the courtyard is clean, with well-weeded beds of flowers and raked gravel paths. Windows looking into the lightwell reveal that the rooms are in good repair, too, with fresh floor mats and clean, whitewashed walls.

  For the most part, the mage-bloods Grandma shelters hide in plain sight, as patients or assistants at the hospital—Hasaka is one of these, I know. People the government is actively searching for, though, need somewhere to lie low. For them, we’ve converted the first few stories of this building into a safe house, with several unobtrusive entrances.

  A young woman with an old, ugly burn scar across the right half of her face is waiting by the door, wringing her hands, and she hurries over at the sight of us.

  “He won’t let anyone near him!” she wails. “Geraya tried talking to him and he set the curtains on fire.”

  “It’s all right,” Hasaka says. “Tori can always get him to calm down.”

  I swallow an acid taste and nod, trying to look reassuring. The woman looks me over uncertainly. Her right eye is incongruously bright in the melted ruin of its socket.

  “Where is he?” I ask.

  “Second floor,” she says. “Come on, before he burns the place down.”

  The second floor is mostly apartments converted into single-room residences. Old Sewagauri’s room is at the end of a hall, where a former parlor has been made into a common area with several apartments letting on to it. A small crowd of people are gathered at the junction, trying to peer around the corner. Many of them are my age or younger—one of the biggest groups that stay in the safe house are boys and girls who haven’t learned to control their powers. Older teens and adults are mixed in, those lying low until the guards give up the hunt for them, and a few who, for whatever reason, can’t take work at the hospital.

  Old Sewagauri is one of the latter, obviously. I wave my hands to shoo some of the younger children out of the way, and Hasaka busies himself trying to drive the crowd back, without much success. Glancing around the corner, I see a lot of smoke and not much else, though deep in the heart of it there’s a sullen red glow. Reaching out with my mind, I can sense Sewa, lost in a torrent of bitter, stinging fear and rage.

  “Sewa?” I raise my voice. “It’s Tori. Can you hear me?”

  His fear flares, and his cracked voice calls back. “Go away! Leave me alone!”

  “I just want to talk to you.” I motion to Hasaka to keep the others away, and slip around the corner, creeping down the corridor. “Can we talk?”

  “I don’t know you! Where have you taken me?”

  “You’re safe. This is Grandma Tadeka’s sanctuary. You remember Grandma?” I edge farther, putting my arm across my mouth and trying to breathe through the fabric.

  “I … don’t…” Grandma can be hard to forget, and I feel his mind waver. Then the fear returns. “What have you done with my friends? I want to see them!”

  “Your friends aren’t here right now.” My throat is thick, for reasons that have nothing to do with the cloying smoke. “Sewa, please. I’m going to come over so we can talk, all right?”

  “Don’t.” I hear a crackle of flames. “I’m warning you!”

  The brass jangle of his mind gives me plenty of notice to throw myself flat. A wave of fire passes overhead, hot enough to frizzle my eyebrows. I hope Hasaka is keeping the kids back.

  “I’m sorry,” Sewa says. “I just … I want to see my friends.”

  I scramble forward, through the smoke, and reach the common room. Sewa is standing in a circle of scorched floor mats, small fires still smoldering around him. He’s an old, wispy-haired man, still straight-backed and solid from years in the Legions. His eyes go wide when he sees me, and I can feel his mind fighting through confusion, trying to remember.

  It’s not his fault. The only ways out of the Invincible Legions are death or the end of a forty-year term of service, and those who reach the latter milestone are kept on at Legionary forts and away from civilians. Desertion is punishable by execution, of course, but even so Sewagauri is far from the only former soldier Grandma has taken in. For the most part they keep to themselves, happy never to venture outside the confines of the sanctuary. Sewa is like that, most of the time.

  “You’re safe,” I tell him. “Just calm down, please. Everything will be fine. Grandma won’t hurt you.”

  His hands, swathed in Myrkai fire, drop a few inches. “What about my friends?”

  I try to keep my voice soothing, and fight back a cough. “They’re fine. Everything’s fine.”

  “I remember…” He blinks. “Mika. She—she’s dead.” His hands come back up, fire roaring. “What did you do?!”

  This time, there’s no room to dodge. Instead I reach for him, Kindre power snapping out and wrapping itself around his mind. If sensing his feelings is like a distant prickle on the skin or a whiff of a smell, this is plunging my arm into ice water and taking a long draught of something vile. I throw myself on his rage, smothering it, pressing his fear back into the dark crevices. He’s tired, unaccustomed to drawing on his Well like this, and I bring that to the fore, filling him with the feeling of exhaustion.

  Sewa blinks, and the fire fades away.

  “I…” He looks at me, and there’s still no recognition in his eyes. “I’m…”

  “It’s all right,” I manage. “Go to sleep.”

  His eyes close, and he topples over.

  * * *

  That night, I have the dream again.

  I wake up in my bed, arms and legs still aching. When I go out into the hall, the maids are waiting. Normally they would bow and go in to change the bedding, but now they just stand and stare at me, blank-eyed.

  I stare back. Wave to them. Step closer. And then I see the strings. Impossibly thin wire, gleaming like fishing line, running from every joint on the bodies of these two women up into the air. When I step backward, they move toward me in lockstep. I raise my arms to ward them off, and find the other ends of the lines looped around my fingers.

  My hands move of their own accord, and the maids step back and bow, going into the bedroom with eerie synchronicity. I run away, leaving them behind.

  My tutor Ridatha is waiting for me at the breakfast table, a book open in front of her. She looks up, trapped in a web of glistening strings, and I trace the movement back to my crooked little finger.

  “Is something wrong?” she says, and I speak the words with her, for her. I let my hands fall to my sides, and she slumps across the table, as inanimate as a doll.

  I run to Ofalo’s office, on the other side of the building. On the way, I pass other servants. Puppet guards, marionette footmen, gardeners going about their business, and I feel my fingers twitching to direct their every move. They call out to me, and I’m talking to myself.

  Looking over my shoulder, I run into Ofalo in the hall. He bounces off me with a wooden clatter, his limbs swinging wildly as he bobs on his gossamer strands. I clench my fist, and he twists as though in pain, though his expression doesn’t change.

&
nbsp; “Lady Tori?” he says, and I can feel my lips moving. “What’s wrong?”

  There’s a clatter by the front door, a carriage arriving. I race out onto the drive. The mannequins are getting cruder, less lifelike, unpainted toys with fixed expressions. Two of them bob around the carriage, opening the door.

  Isoka gets out. Her Melos blades are ignited, brilliant green energy crackling and spitting as she moves. Very deliberately, she raises one of them above her head and brings it sideways in a decisive stroke. There’s a twang like a piano string breaking, and threads cascade down all around her, their severed ends drifting in the breeze. I look down at my hands, and they’re covered in blood.

  “I’m here, Tori.” I mean for Isoka to say it, but the words come out of my own mouth, and she only cocks her head.

  “I should have known,” she says, raising her blades. “I should have known you were a monster.”

  When I wake up, this time in reality, I can still feel the searing heat of her blade sliding into my chest. My heart hammers, and my shift is drenched in sweat. I don’t scream, but only because I have a lot of practice.

  The feeling of touching old Sewa’s mind is still all over me, an oily taint I can’t clean. The sun is low in the sky, which means I’ve only slept for a few hours, but I can tell closing my eyes again would be pointless.

  I had to, I try to tell myself. He could have hurt me badly. I didn’t think he wanted to, even in the depths of his fear, but he hadn’t been in control of himself. He could have burned half the building down, killed someone. I had to.

  Sometimes, you want to help someone, that means you get covered in shit. Grandma’s voice makes me feel a little better, but only a little.

  I get up and take a bath before breakfast. The water in the tub is chilly, but I don’t want to wake the maids to heat it, and it still sluices away the sweat. I soak my hair, press it dry carefully, and go over it with a brush. Then I dress in a sky-blue kizen embroidered with purple plums, and pick a silver comb set with amethysts to match it.