“We can’t be sure that Iriyat wrote this,” Alizhan said.
“No,” Thiyo said. “But she’s our best lead. Unless you have a better idea.”
“No.”
“So tell me about her.”
“I don’t know how to explain it,” Alizhan said. She exhaled roughly. “I don’t have a family. I’m an orphan. Or I was, until Iriyat took me in. I lived in her house—”
“Varenx House,” Ev offered. “One of the Great Houses of Laalvur. Not just any house.”
“Tell me about that.”
“There’s a Council of Nine that rules the city,” Ev said. “Four Great Houses and five Lesser. They’re the richest and most powerful merchants and bankers in Laalvur.”
“They all hate each other,” Alizhan said. “At least a little. Or they fear each other. They spend a lot of time at parties pretending to be nice to each other.”
“And you know that because Iriyat took you in,” Thiyo said.
Alizhan nodded. “I spied for her.”
“So she knew about your gifts.”
“I never thought of them that way, and neither did she, I think,” Alizhan said. “Being the way I am has always been more of a burden than anything else. But Iriyat took me in when no one else would, and I tried to make myself useful to her.”
“But no one else knew,” Thiyo said.
“Not until recently.”
“That’s our first secret,” he said. “Good. What other secrets can you tell me?”
“I don’t follow,” Ev admitted.
“This text was written in invisible ink and in a script no one else can read. It’s a safe bet that it contains secrets. If I have an idea about the nature of those secrets, it’ll help me crack the code. Tell me what happened that made you two flee Laalvur with this stolen book.”
“I found out that Iriyat can alter memories,” Alizhan said. “Just like Ket and Merat Orzh. She touches people and they forget things.”
“She’s uheko like you,” Thiyo said.
Ev had never heard that word. “What?”
“Uheko is what we call people whose gifts can pass through their hands,” Thiyo said, holding up one of his in an unnecessary demonstration. “I’m not one, but Alizhan, Henny, and Mala are all uheko. So are Ket, Merat, and Iriyat. They’re one of the more dangerous kinds.”
Henny waved her right hand and lifted Ev’s with her left.
Thiyo paused. “It’s a power that’s most effective when kept secret.”
“Very few people know about Iriyat,” Alizhan said. “I couldn’t ever read her. I only discovered it recently. Although looking back, it’s possible that I found out in the past and then she forced me to forget. Who knows how many times that might have happened?”
She made all those words come out of her mouth in the usual order, at the usual volume, even though it felt like a bottomless pit had opened up inside her and everything she knew was pouring into it. Iriyat was doing bad things. Vile, cruel, brutal, unforgivable things. She understood that. But she still wanted to keep a few of those golden, sun-soaked childhood memories—Iriyat stroking her hair, Iriyat kissing her cheek—untouched by all this ugliness.
But nothing in her life was untouched by Iriyat.
“Well,” Thiyo said. “That gives me something to think about. I think we can stop there for now.”
And then, instead of asking what was wrong, he pulled her to his side and gave her a squeeze. Alizhan lay her head on his shoulder and neither of them moved for a long time.
As much as Alizhan hated traveling Nightward, now that they’d finally made it to Estva, even she could admit that the sight before them was impressive. The city’s walls of ice towered above them, rising out of the snowy ground and glimmering white in the darkness.
“How can it possibly be warm in there?” she muttered.
“The city’s not made of ice,” Ket said. He was still seated on the driver’s bench of the wagon. He and Henny, well suited to the cold, had spent the last few hours there together. “Just some of the walls. But I heard there are outposts farther Nightward, little huts dug into the snow and built out of ice, with a firepit in the middle. Supposed to be quite warm. The tribes use them when they go on long hunts.”
There were very few animals on the frozen plains, but on their journey, they’d passed a few oases—thermal pools with strange plants growing in their hot, sulfurous water. Grey caribou gathered to graze there.
“Will they really let us in?” Ev said, peering at the walls from her position inside the wagon.
“Only one way to find out,” Thiyo said.
He and Alizhan walked along the wall until they reached the gate, and Ket drove the wagon slowly behind them. Ket got down from his bench, and Henny helped Ev get out of the wagon, so the five of them could stand together in front of the gate.
There were two guards. It was hard to see their faces through the slot in the gate, even though it was lit with torches on either side. Alizhan couldn’t distinguish their thoughts. Perhaps it was the distance, or the gate, that prevented her from learning more. The guards had a moment of conversation with Thiyo, and from their voices, Alizhan determined they were women. They were as pale as Nalitzvans, but both short, which Alizhan had heard was a characteristic of the Nightward tribes who roamed outside Estva.
“Anyone who agrees to work and follow the rules is welcome for as long as they choose to stay,” Thiyo translated.
“So what do they need walls for?” Ev said.
One of the women said something to Thiyo in Estvan, and her companion laughed and added something else.
“Bears, wolves, Nalitzvans,” Thiyo translated. Ket and Henny both shifted nervously. Alizhan had no idea why the King of Nalitzva would bother to march his army through the snow to capture this remote outpost, but apparently the inhabitants had been motivated to build strong walls.
“And the second woman, what did she say?” Ev said.
“People who don’t follow the rules.”
“How hard can it be to follow the rules?” Alizhan said. “Let’s be good so they’ll let us inside where it’s warm.”
Thiyo conveyed their consent to this agreement, and the huge wooden door swung open to let them in.
20
Lyrebird shift, 4th Triad of Barsha, 761
AFTER YEARS OF OBSERVING—WAITING—it came to me that I would die before I found real answers. Our world’s eruptions, quakes, and waves are separated by years. True understanding would never be possible within my lifetime.
Unless I could create my own.
A wave was out of the question, as was an eruption. But a quake seemed possible. I would simply need a way to move a huge quantity of earth all at once.
I knew I could not share this revelation with Tsardeya. He would not have the stomach for it. But the pursuit of knowledge has always required sacrifices. Our greatest scholars of medicine have been grave-diggers and torturers, flaying and dissecting and stringing bodies back together so we might save others in the future. The success of my own experiments would save even more lives.
As a matter of coincidence, at the moment I was considering this question, my contact in Adappyr had provided me with a primer on local politics. The murder of a charismatic leader in 740 splintered the city into factions for years. There was fighting in the streets. Neighborhoods belonged to one faction or another.
By the time my correspondent described this to me, in 750, peace had been achieved. Adappyr was then a prosperous place, and if people have enough to be comfortable, it is harder to goad them into a fight. But for some, the old tensions were still there, he wrote, simmering beneath the surface.
Beneath the surface of an underground city. Here was my quake. Political instability could be transformed into physical instability. Enough violence could endanger the structural integrity of the city—moving a huge quantity of earth all at once. Would it cause a quake? Perhaps even an eruption of Adap? I went in search of business opportunities
in Adappyr as cover for a trip there. I began to plan.
21
Far from Home
INSIDE ITS INTIMIDATING EXTERIOR WALLS, Estva wasn’t impressive. Squat stone buildings, their roofs white with snow, clustered together inside the walls. Estva’s original building was a meeting hall that had once housed all the residents together. Several dormitories and a few other buildings had been haphazardly added over the years. Some above-ground corridors connected the buildings, and Thiyo assumed there must be tunnels below. Going outside, even for only a moment, required preparation.
“There are a lot more women here than I thought,” Thiyo said to their guide as they walked through the main hall. Thiyo could reach up and touch the exposed beams of the ceiling, but at least the massive hearth fire was keeping the room warm. The room was furnished with long wooden tables and benches, and would be full at mealtimes.
Their guide, Pirkko, one of the guards who had let them in, nodded. Her heavy blond braid didn’t budge. “Women who come here tend to stay here, as opposed to the young men who pass through hoping to strike gold. And women are better at following the rules.”
“What exactly are these rules?” Thiyo asked, not pausing to translate Pirkko’s answer for his companions. He could feel the four of them gathered behind him. They were all listening with interest despite the language barrier. He could summarize this conversation for them later, in private. Henny and Ket might be able to pick out a few words here and there, since Estvan, through structurally very different, did share some words with Nalitzvan. Thiyo remembered that from his childhood training.
Although his mother had been crushed that he’d inherited her gift rather than his father’s, once she’d identified his potential, she’d forced him to spend shifts and shifts listening to an ohokutho recite texts in every world language from memory. Even for a child who loved languages, it had been a perishingly lonely way to pass the years. His early dreams of learning all the mainland languages had soured as he’d grown, and Thiyo remembered arguing with his teacher at length. It makes sense to learn Shade-side Hoi, and all the varieties of Li and Kae. But why bother with Nalitzvan, or Laalvuri, or Estvan, of all the depths-drowned useless things to learn. They don’t come here and only a handful of wai traders ever go there!
And who do you think we send out into the world to trade? Halelitha, his implacable ohokutho teacher had said. And then, without waiting for Thiyo’s undoubtedly indignant and impertinent answer—why would he ever go to some desolate Nightward encampment full of unwashed mainlanders?—she’d gone right back to reciting the Estvan epic he’d interrupted. Something about a warrior with a sword forged in the belly of the earth. The phrase stars as white as snow, which had never meant anything to him as a child, had been repeated endlessly. The warrior had probably had a monster to slay, or an invading army to defeat. Thiyo wasn’t ohokutho, so his imperfect memory never retained the stories. But the words—their sounds, their systems—stayed.
Thiyo had never appreciated the old memory-keeper and her endless mental library. Perhaps her own gift had seemed more like a curse, since it had saddled her with the thankless job of educating him. Halelitha hadn’t always understood the words she was teaching him, and Thiyo had been an unruly and ungrateful student. He’d been a perennial disappointment to both Halelitha and his parents, first being born with the wrong gift, and then being born without the dedication and ambition to put the gift he did have to honorable use.
If Halelitha was still alive, and if he ever got home, he would thank her. He’d ended up needing depths-drowned Estvan after all.
He’d asked Pirkko what the rules were, and she was answering.
“If you came here to work in the mines and you strike gold, the city takes one third in return for housing and feeding you while you work,” she said. “The other two thirds of what you mined are yours to keep. If you came here to work in the ice trade, the city will take a cut of your profits once you sell the ice. The cut will be determined by how long you enjoyed our hospitality. Two other Estvans will accompany you to Nalitzva—or anywhere else you choose to sell—to ensure that your payment makes it back to the city.”
Pirkko recited all this as if she’d said it many times before. Women who come here tend to stay here, she’d said, and Thiyo suspected she’d been here a long time, perhaps her whole life. Attuning his ear to the nuances of Estvan accents would require a few more conversations, but Pirkko sounded at ease in the language, as if she’d grown up speaking it.
Of course, so did he.
“Is that why people come here? To mine gold and sell ice?” Thiyo asked.
She was leading the five of them across the main hall. She stopped by a table near the opposite wall, next to a set of wooden doors that led into the rest of the building. The table had a gigantic book lying open on top of it. The left page was about half full of handwritten text. Estvan used the same script as Nalitzvan. Thiyo’s gift for listening and speaking other languages did extend to reading and writing, but if he encountered a new script, he still needed time to understand it. Comprehension wasn’t instant. He’d once made the mistake of complaining about this to Ilyr, who was completely devoid of sympathy. Some of us have to learn everything ‘the hard way’, he’d said.
“Some people seek their fortune,” Pirkko answered. Her gaze roamed the room as if she was looking for examples, but the long tables were empty save for two or three people speaking in low voices near the hearth. “You will also find many priests and scholars of different nations who have come to study the stars. People who do not mine gold or ice are hosted in exchange for the work they do to maintain the city, whether it is keeping our accounts or peeling potatoes. In addition to the scholarly community, Estva also houses a certain population of people who… left their former homes.”
“Voluntarily?” Thiyo pressed. Estva was legendary for providing sanctuary to criminals on the run from Nalitzvan authorities. Now that he was one of those criminals, he needed to make absolutely sure the legends were true.
“Everyone is welcome in Estva as long as they do their part,” Pirkko said. “No one is to be made to feel unwelcome because of their nation, their religion, or their personal history—whatever it may entail. We ask no questions. The only rules we care about are our own. Making someone else feel unwelcome is a violation of the rules, and there is only one punishment.”
“Being thrown out,” Thiyo said.
Pirkko nodded again. Shorter and thicker than Thiyo, decked out in furs and leathers, with no trace of a smile on her round face, she didn’t look like a woman who would hesitate to throw rule-breakers into the icy Night.
“Is that it, then? Pay your dues and make everyone feel welcome?”
“No killing, no raping, no fighting, no stealing,” she said, counting the fingers of one leather-gloved hand with the other. “No shirking work. No unnatural behavior.”
“What exactly constitutes… unnatural behavior?”
Pirkko pinned him with an unimpressed gaze of pale blue, then continued to list the rules as if Thiyo’s question had been a joke. “Babies born in Estva stay in Estva until they reach the age of twenty, as do their parents.”
Were you one of those babies? Thiyo wondered. Or had Pirkko come here to escape something? He wasn’t supposed to ask. He didn’t have a good idea of how old she was, either. Her serious expression and air of authority made her seem older, but her skin was smooth and her hair had no grey in it. She might be twenty-five or thirty-five. All Thiyo said was, “Unless they break the rules.”
“Unless they break the rules,” she agreed. “I see you think this rule is unjust. It isn’t. Babies require resources, and resources are scarce. Many young women run away from home and come here. Sometimes they’re already pregnant. Sometimes they get pregnant here. It doesn’t matter. We help them, in exchange for the promise of their help in the future. We need people here. We need people who will stay.”
“So there aren’t any rules against sex, then?
” Thiyo said, taking a different angle on the question of unnatural behavior. “Or drinking,” he added, as the thought occurred to him.
To his surprise, Pirkko broke out in laughter. “It’s dark and cold here all the time. What do you think we do for fun?”
Thiyo smiled tightly. Unnatural behavior meant magic, then. He was already breaking the rules, and Alizhan was, too. Henny and Ket weren’t planning to stay long, but he would have to warn them. He hoped no one asked him any questions about how or where an islander had learned the language of the world’s most remote Nightward settlement. Nalitzvans had been eager to believe that their genius prince could take credit for Lady Lan’s language skills, but they weren’t in Nalitzva anymore. And Lady Lan was dead.
Here he was contemplating serious matters when Pirkko had just made a joke, so Thiyo came back to himself and forced a smile. “Good point.”
Pirkko’s mood seemed to have lightened considerably. She gestured to the book and said, “Please write your name and the names of your companions in the ledger.”
Thiyo’s right hand was stiff and still discolored with bruises, but he’d been doing Henny’s exercises, and he was able to tug his left glove off before he picked up the quill. He dipped it in ink and glanced back at his companions. He knew none of their surnames. He also wasn’t sure he wanted a written record of their presence in Estva.
“We use this ledger to keep track of who is staying in Estva so we can distribute food and work,” Pirkko reassured him. “Whatever name you choose for yourself will be your name while you’re here. If anyone outside Estva is looking for anyone inside Estva, they can only enter if they also agree to follow the rules. We extend the same protection to everyone who enters the city. We don’t ask questions, and we don’t answer the questions of outsiders.”
Nightvine Page 17