Split gulped as his eyes slipped sideways and fell again on the Droughtweed pit.
‘Tell Meshua to go burn forever,’ Split exhaled, his thumb shaking so badly it was now tapping the release. ‘Didn’t save anyone.’
Shilah slowly removed Split’s hand from the trigger. ‘You can save us. Help bring the machine to Langria. Be a part of this.’
The Pedlar’s face cycled through a dozen emotions, and finally he let out a long sigh and dropped to his knees, the crossbow skittering across the floor. Shilah was quick to pick the weapon up and take the arrow off the shaft, giving me a calm nod, almost as if she did this sort of thing every day. The knife never even left her thigh.
Saving my admiration for later, I reached over the Ice and put a hand on the Pedlar’s shoulder, my whole arm tingling.
‘She’s right,’ I said. ‘We need you, Split.’
‘Show mercy, and tell me it’s a trick,’ Split said, his eyes closed tightly, refusing to look at the Ice. ‘Is it expected that I forgive everything? Just like that?’
‘It’s real,’ I said. ‘And I’ll tell you everything you want to know.’
‘You have the miracle,’ Split said, face still scrunched tightly. ‘The golden tears of the World Crier’s child. And you don’t know Meshua.’
‘I don’t know. But we need to keep the Coldmaker safe. Now can you get us to Langria before the hounds track us down?’
Split opened his eyes and pressed his palms on the ground as flat as he could, the mist that had settled against the floor slipping through his fingers. Then he looked up at me, boring into my eyes. Anger had slipped away, and of all the things plaguing his face, regret now ringed his eyes the most.
‘Don’t you understand?’ he asked, pointing a finger at the block of Ice. ‘This is the miracle; this is Langria. And it’s not just hounds that they’re going to send.’
Chapter Seven
Split’s hands moved like heat lightning as he scooped out mounds of ash, burned leaves, and slag from the small pit in the floor. Tossing the residue aside, he wiped his hands on his already ruined shirt, leaving long black smudges. The air in the shack quickly became dusty and thick from the flurry of upended Droughtweed remains, making me hold my breath so I didn’t cough or inhale too much. Once the plant touched fire, the smell turned from earthy to sickly sweet. The tang caught in the back of my throat and reminded me of things of which I didn’t want to be reminded.
I looked at the Ice, over which Split had reverently draped his thin sleeping blanket, making sure that it wasn’t sullied by his senseless digging.
Cam leaned in and whispered in my ear. ‘I don’t think this is the time for him to huff Droughtweed and go on some vision quest, Spout.’
‘I’m not sure that’s what’s happening,’ I said. ‘You add leaves to make the slag more potent, you don’t wipe it clean.’
‘You do know your stuff. Can you say something to him?’ Cam asked. ‘I don’t think he likes me very much.’
I nodded, making my tone as gentle as possible. Split’s reactions were interesting to behold, making me wonder if I should have kept the Coldmaker secret.
‘Split,’ I said gently. ‘Perhaps it’s not the best time for that. We should be moving, and it’s best we take our wits along.’
Split had already removed most of the old deposit, and he grabbed a new strip of boilweed, wiping the pit clean. The cleaning didn’t make much sense, knowing from my weeks beholden to the Roof Warden that compounding the grey residue only made the visions and high stronger. He was ruining his supply.
‘Meshua and Ice,’ Split said to himself, his coughs coming out grey. ‘Wits don’t exist any more. So I have to get Baba Levante. I have to get Baba Levante. I made a promise that I would.’
‘Split,’ I said again, hoping the sound of his name might snap him back to reality. ‘We have to get moving.’
‘Absolutely,’ Split said, practically shining the pit now. ‘But first we have to go under.’
Shilah had returned to her place near the Khatclock, scrutinizing the edges for signs of a secret passageway the device might be hiding.
‘Okay,’ Split said, stopping and sitting back on his thin ankles, looking over the pile of ash and slag next to the pit. ‘It’s ready.’
I swallowed, taking a step back. ‘I don’t do that any more.’
I thought back to Old Man Gum from my childhood, curious about what event had sent him over the edge of sanity. We had to respect him, since he was the oldest and most weathered in the barracks, but no one ever took his babbling seriously. Now I had to know, who put what in the ground? Had the crazy loon from my past, with his toothless mouth and wild eyes, known about this Meshua as well?
‘Girl,’ Split said gently, still staring into the pit. ‘Shaylah. You can do it now. Open the clock and give it a turn.’
‘Shilah,’ she corrected firmly.
‘Fine,’ Split said, waving a hand. ‘Just don’t look at me.’
Shilah lifted the glass off the face of the machine. She didn’t seem nearly as lost as Cam and I in all of this. She spun the hands one full rotation in the same way Mama Jana had, and the large Eye clicked open, revealing gears behind. But instead of causing the whole creation to swing forwards, the Khatclock stayed where it was.
The floor opened up.
With an angry creak, the bottom of the Droughtweed pit fell to the side, revealing a tight passageway wide enough only for one person. Thin stairs dropped down into the darkness at an alarming angle, steep and slick.
Split coughed at the wave of dust stirred up by the floor’s disappearance, and gave a satisfied nod, his body visibly loosening. ‘Okay, let’s be quick. They’re going to be coming for us.’
Cam covered his mouth and spoke between fingers. ‘Shivers and Frosts, Spout. What is he—’
Split turned to Cam, his eyes still red and raw. ‘You don’t get to touch anything down here.’
Cam turned up his palms, taken aback. ‘Why are you singling me out?’
Split scoffed, turning back around and threading himself through the hole. ‘Tavors.’
Once the Pedlar had disappeared into the secret chamber, a tiny light blossomed within, casting flickering shadows back up the stairs. Shilah came over and gave the back of my neck a squeeze, her fingers lingering on my tattooed numbers. ‘He’s right. About what we made.’
‘Hmm?’ I asked.
She pointed to the Ice, and then, without another word, followed the Pedlar into the hidden space. Her upright posture was perfect for slipping down the steep stairs, and the grey dust swirled and eddied in the wake of her swift descent.
A sudden gasp returned back up, but it sounded more of awe than danger.
I clapped Cam on the shoulder, finally wanting to smile at the adventure in it all. I should have been dead a dozen times over – we all should have – but my father would have been proud to watch me attempt this Coldmarch. There was no time for me to grieve, so I knew the second best thing was to do his memory proud. Abb had had a great sense of humour, but an even greater sense of story.
‘Better keep those hands to yourself, Tavor,’ I whispered with a smirk, hovering over the open pit listening to the sounds of muffled conversation.
Cam’s face fell. ‘I wasn’t going to touch anything.’
‘I was joking,’ I said as quickly as I could.
‘Oh.’ Cam gave me a sullen look. ‘You seemed serious.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said. ‘I was just kidding.’
Cam waved it away. ‘No, I know that. It was funny.’
I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re family. I don’t lump you with the rest of— I just—’
Cam’s smile grew wider, but I could see his true expression behind his eyes, as if I’d punched him in the gut, or taken a taskmaster’s whip and added to the scars on his back.
‘It’s okay,’ Cam said.
‘No, we—’ I tried, my stomach sinking. ‘You’re not�
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‘It’s okay, Mic— Spout,’ Cam said with a nod, finding his eyes on the hole instead of my face. ‘Let’s go see what this crazy Pedlar is hiding.’
I pressed my teeth together, promising myself I’d make it up to Cam later. Before going into the chamber I slung the Coldmaker bag over my shoulder, wincing as a metal edge of the machine caught my injured wrist.
‘You can leave it up here,’ Cam said in a gentle manner. ‘I don’t think anyone is going to take it.’
‘I know,’ I said, but couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the machine behind. ‘But just in case.’
Then I proceeded down the stairs, holding the bag close and trying not to slip. Since I only had one good grabbing hand to begin with, I had to keep most of my body pressed sideways for balance, the lips of the stairs scraping into my ribs, worsened by the weight of the machine.
But once I settled at the bottom, I was unable to withhold my own gasp.
The place was a museum.
Or a tomb.
Or a vision.
Or the finest shop, selling equal parts treasure and equal parts dust.
I couldn’t tell.
‘What is this place?’ I asked, clutching my machine close.
This was completely unlike the other secret chamber we’d discovered since starting the March. Even though we’d found spaces with little shrines and gifts from past flocks, mostly those rooms had consisted of crude drawings on clay walls.
This third chamber made the first seem practically empty.
Split’s chamber was the size of a small Cry Temple, the ceiling high enough that even Slab Hagan – the tallest Jadan from my barracks – wouldn’t have been able to touch the top without a stool. Two dark corridors snaked away near the back of the room, dimly lit by a fresh candle flickering on a centre table. Overstocked shelves rose up from every available part of the stone floor, bursting at the seams with artefacts and maps and tapestries and treasures that screamed at us from every corner of the room, dizzying in their array and sense of age. Statues. Beaded clothing. Pottery. Jewellery. Scrolls. Everything down here had a tinge of neglect, but even under the shawls of dust, the items glowed with personality and life.
The paintings shouted the loudest.
Hundreds of decorated canvases fitted together like flush gears all along the walls, so that very little blank space existed between them. The paintings were splashed with every colour imaginable, but looked faded, possibly older than the Khatdom itself. After one sweeping glance I knew that these images were important, more important than any of the famous pieces in the basement of the Paphos library. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but something resonated.
There were long landscapes and vibrant hills, decorated with beasts the likes of which I’d never seen; muscled, horned, and dragging contraptions through impossibly green grass bursting with life. There were animals that walked on all fours, velvet black, with thick fur all over their bodies. They rested in trees that had too many limbs, alongside tiny insects with colourful wings. Birds streaked the sky, many of them with dull beige plumage the colour of Wisps.
I couldn’t stare at the birds for too long.
And next to the cluster of animal paintings were images of ships, built with more wood than I’d seen in a lifetime. They practically sailed off their canvases, floating on gigantic rivers that weren’t boiling from heat. They caught wind with giant silk sheets embossed with symbols I didn’t understand, and I had to wonder if such massive bodies of water ever existed.
Detailed paintings of the night sky sat clumped together, swirled and streaked with infinite Cold falling to the ground. The Crying wasn’t happening just in a few Patches, however, but everywhere across the land.
Other sparse canvases gave life to wizened men with dark skin, but not so dark as to be quite Jadan. They smiled and wore long beards and woollen hats that looked torturous, as the thick fabric would have drained even the most resilient of us today. The ceiling was covered with paintings as well, showing mountainous dunes that looked taller than the Khat’s Pyramid, the same kind of white mist rising off their peaks that came from the block of Ice.
There were costumed bodies dancing in festive halls, laughing and spinning within circles of Frosts. The piles of forbidden Cold were so large that they must have been exaggerations, as that many Frosts couldn’t possibly have fallen since the beginning of the Drought.
My dry mouth began to water over the pictures of exotic fruit, most of which I didn’t recognize, gluttonous amounts of green berries just waiting to be devoured. Next to the food, some of the other frames simply held numbers painted on tablets, set with indiscernible markings. There were even a few that looked to be the work of children, streaky and with no particular purpose.
I moved from paintings to statues.
Clay bodies stood sentry around the place dressed in the strangest clothing I’d ever seen. Their shirts were made of heavy cloth, as thick as my thumb – so thick and stifling in fact it would be enough to kill the wearer after five minutes under the Sun. At first I thought the shirts might be primitive torture uniforms used by the Vicaress, but the cloth was colourful and decorative. There were also beadwork vests with a lot of empty spaces interwoven between the fabric, as if there were once round objects there that had since been plucked. None of it made any sense.
There were shelves of diamond-encrusted swords with blunted edges, dusty vials of petrified medicine, silver tokens bearing unfamiliar crests, candelabras with eight arms, and stone carvings of rulers who looked nothing like the Khat.
A slight turn of my face revealed a whole cabinet of musical instruments, stringed and buttoned and keyed, their bodies carved from giant gourds that couldn’t possibly have grown in this dying world. A twist of my neck revealed black parasols and black tents – which would be useless, as they’d just gather all the heat – and rusty tools with odd shapes. There were even a few once-shiny inventions with enough tattered knobs and copper spooling to make my empty hands itch.
And then I spotted the group of paintings suspended on the far wall that stole my breath away. These were clustered by theme as well, and the subject of each one revolved around the same powerful figure. His long hair was braided to one side, his chin prominent, and his cheekbones high. He held a Frost in one hand and a razor-sharp fan in the other. I knew from all the myths that this fan was a gift from Sister Gale, imparted with the hope of stacking the odds against their older brother Sun.
The World Crier.
Instinctively, I tossed a hand over my eyes and buckled, half falling to my knees.
‘It’s okay,’ Shilah said softly from my side.
Remembering who and where I was, I took my hand away from my face and stood up, feeling rather foolish.
‘Habit,’ I said, still not looking directly at the paintings.
Shilah gave a wry smirk. ‘I almost kneeled too. But don’t you dare tell anyone.’
‘Me too,’ Cam said quickly from my other side. ‘I almost kneeled, too.’
I swallowed hard, squinting my eyes and walking across the room, threading around the stacks of objects glazed with dust and age. Split was in the corner pushing a pile of thick sheets off a marble trunk. I ignored the Pedlar and rounded in front of the group of spectacular paintings. My eyelids trembled with effort, wanting so badly to close against the images.
It was him.
Our divine Creator.
But as I got closer, I realized I was wrong.
‘This isn’t the World Crier,’ I said, my throat going dry.
‘I think it is,’ Cam said in certain tones, tapping the place on his chest that normally held a pocketed book. His fingers slipped across the smooth silk. ‘Or rather, it was.’
‘Finally a shred of intelligence from the Tavor,’ Split said from his knees, the lid of the trunk now open. His voice was still full of pain, but at least I could no longer see the matching expression on his face. ‘Meshua. Of course Meshua just happens to be real.
Ice right in the place that she used— where is this blasted thing?’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said to Shilah, reaching out without actually touching the paintings. They all had the same telltale signs that they were representations of the Crier, but these paintings were different from those in Paphos. Here, his face was softer, and his braided hair was not yellow, as the Crier was always portrayed. These weren’t right, since everyone knew that the Nobles were created in the image of the Crier.
I brought my fingers to my eyes and then traced my nose and chin and hair. I gave Shilah’s face a scrutinizing look as well, going over her angles and colour and smile.
‘His hair,’ she said, her face just about glowing with pride. ‘It’s dark as coal. And just as rough.’
‘He sort of looks like …’ I almost couldn’t get the word out, my throat gritty from shock. ‘Us.’
Split got up from his knees. ‘That’s why those images are the most illegal things in the Khatdom.’ He moved on to another trunk, this one beautifully striated with red lines, and I could see a mad smile forming at the corner of his lips. ‘Were the most illegal. Ten years later. Baba Levante, where are you hiding, you old crone?’
The last part was said in singsong, making me wonder what parts of the Pedlar’s mind had broken under the stress of seeing Ice. Or maybe it was inhaling that residual Droughtweed slag that had sent him over the edge.
Split dragged something carefully out of the bottom of the next trunk, cradling it like a small child. He made clucking sounds as he pulled it free, rocking it back and forth. The object almost looked like an infant, but the shape was wrong, the head too big and the limbs too thin. The figure also had string and wooden dowels rolled up against its back. It was a puppet, an ancient Jadan woman puppet to be exact, carved from wood and meticulously painted with deep wrinkles. The puppet was wearing shiny tin shoes and a miniature silk sundress, the kind Nobles wore, but from the skin tone and hair, the doll looked distinctly Jadan.
‘Baba Levante, you old rascal,’ Split said. ‘It’s been too long.’
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