by Jo Anderton
He drew me into the drying room, where I had slept the last time I came here. I suddenly realised how exhausted I was. But Kichlan didn't let me lie down. He found a collapsed couch somewhere behind the forest of hanging clothes and bed sheets. He propped me up in its cushions, drew a blanket from a line close to the dim fireplace and draped it around my shoulders.
I struggled against its weight. "Hot," I murmured.
"No, Tanyana. It isn't. Not really." He wrapped long fingers around the book under my arm. "Give me that. You can sit, then, and have a nice drink."
Was I thirsty? "No." Maybe, it was hard to tell. My mouth felt dry, but the thought of anything in my stomach made me nauseous. "You can't take it."
Kichlan leaned very close. His breath smelled of cinnamon. "It's me, Kichlan. I'm not going to take it away, I'm going to look after it."
Kichlan. That's right, it was Kichlan. Not Barbarian lying on my floor, not Comedian clutching his wrist and howling. Kichlan. Kichlan I could trust. I eased my arm open and he slid the book out. He gave it half a moment's glance and placed it on the floor.
"Be careful," I whispered. "That's all I have left."
Eugeny entered, a tray in his hand and Lad at his heels. Lad carried a mug, steaming faint trails of haze over his face, with a reverential delicacy.
"Drink." Lad bent at the waist to hand me the mug. His eyes were focused on the surface of its dark liquid so intently they nearly crossed.
I tried to take it from him but Kichlan was much faster. He took the cup with a click of his tongue. "Fingers like that, you'll spill it all over your own lap."
"Don't want to do that," Lad told me, solemn. "Need to drink it all."
Kichlan held the mug up to my lips. I scowled at him. "I'm not a child, I can hold my own drink."
"Don't be stubborn." A firm light came into Kichlan's eyes, the kind I had seen when he spoke to Lad in one of his moods. "You came here for help, didn't you? So take it."
Help involved a roof and a space away from the snow. It didn't involve being fed like an invalid or a child. But as I opened my mouth to protest, Kichlan pressed the mug against my lips, and I ended sipping something hot and bitter instead.
I coughed, and Lad gave me a knowing smile. "I know it tastes bad," he lectured me in a fair imitation of Kichlan's voice. "But you need to drink it all."
"What is it?" I made a face at Eugeny, certain he was the cause of this particular problem. "Not another gold plant."
He lifted his eyebrows at me. "Golden roots of the waxseal plant? No, not this time. Hyssop, liquorice root, thyme."
Words in a language I didn't understand. So I glared, puzzled, at him over the rim of my mug as Kichlan – with gentle, but inexorable hands – forced me to drink.
Eugeny shook his head. "You always come here in a state, girl."
I swallowed and leaned my head back long enough to gasp some much-needed air. Kichlan's idea of drinking, it seemed, did not involve enough time to catch one's breath. "Here is a good place to be in a state," I said, before I finished the drink's grass-murky dregs.
"Bro?" Lad, having satisfied himself that I would in fact finish the disgusting but no doubt beneficial brew, collected my book from the floor. "What is this, bro?"
Before I could move, Kichlan smoothly turned, stood, and took the book from his younger brother. "It's Tan's. She brought it with her."
Lad seemed content to peer at the cracking leather cover from over his brother's shoulder. "A book!" Excited, he clamped his fingers over Kichlan's upper arm. Kichlan winced. "What does it say, bro? Do you know what it says?"
Kichlan ran his finger below the embossed lettering on the jacket. It had once been gold, I had been told when given the gift, but years and use had eroded the title to the point where it was almost illegible. "Its title says Principles of Architecture, by Eldar Velchev."
I waited for the gasps, the wide eyes, the "How ever did you come by such a remarkable piece?"
Lad leaned back again, and wrinkled the skin at the top of his nose. "Oh." His eyes slid sideways to his brother. "That's not very interesting, is it?"
With a chuckle, Kichlan shook his head. "Not really." He turned the book over in his hands. "But it is very old. Isn't it?" His gaze flicked to mine in a question.
"Yes," I said.
"Old things can be valuable. Can't they?" Again, that quick, but searching and suspicious glance.
"Yes," I said again.
Lad bobbed his head as he searched for something valuable in the old book. "Doesn't look it, bro. Doesn't look it."
"People with too many kopacks have strange ways of seeing things," Kichlan said, grinning.
"Oh." Lad squinted at the book and leaned even closer to it.
I scowled between the both of them. "If this becomes a morality lesson, I'm going outside again."
"No, you won't." Eugeny, who had remained silent and in the background, pushed his way forward. He rested the tray on my knees, and a far more appetising bowl of soup stared up at me. "You're going to sit and eat, and Kichlan will put that somewhere safe. Where hands, unwelcome or simply curious, won't find it."
My gaze followed the book as Kichlan took it from the drying room. My life was in those pages, all that was left of my memories, my ambition and achievements. Something wrenched in my gut as I watched it go, but it was in Kichlan's hands and strangely that was enough. I knew it would be safe, because he carried it.
Eugeny watched me; I caught his pursed lips in the corner of my eye. Then he placed a spoon in my hand, and I was occupied by rich vegetable-and-grain stew.
Without anything new to excite him, Lad drooped. When Kichlan returned he managed to convince Lad to go back to bed. I received a wet kiss on the cheek before Lad was led upstairs, stumbling on the way.
By the time my bowl was empty I was feeling warm – no longer hot while tickled at the extremities by cold – tired and comfortable. I sat among the cushions and closed my eyes to the quiet conversation between Kichlan and Eugeny. Whatever decision they came to, I didn't hear it. For the couch was soft, the room was warm, and for the first time since I had unlocked my front door, I felt secure enough to fall into an easy sleep. I felt like I was home.
12.
We kept the details from Lad. All he needed to know, Kichlan said, was that I had left my old home and needed a new one. He didn't need to know about large and violent men who burst into the one place you're supposed to feel safe, and take your life away. I rather thought I didn't need to know about such things either, but the choice had, unfortunately, been long taken away.
Wetday and Thunderday I spent under Eugeny's herbobsessed supervision, not allowed to move, not allowed to do much other than drink strong doses of various herbal tea and eat stew until I was tired of the very sight of it. For Frostday and Olday, Eugeny pronounced me well enough to join Kichlan and Lad in the collecting field. The team showed me small sympathy.
"About time you toughened up to the cold," Sofia told me with a superior sneer.
"I've spent half of my life with a fever because of this Otherdamned collecting," Natasha muttered. "Get used to it."
I gathered Kichlan hadn't told them the whole story, and rather marvelled that Lad hadn't let my homelessness slip. I felt a deep thankfulness to both of them.
By Rest, I was chafing to be free of Eugeny's scrutiny and stew, and wished to be a burden on Kichlan no longer.
Lad woke me early, tangling and stomping through the drying clothes. "Tan! Early morning, Tan! Time to get going."
My bed had once again been made before the fireplace. I levered myself up on my elbow and squinted at him. "Today is called Rest, Lad. Rest. Don't you get the hint?"
He blinked at me, bird-like, studying me separately with each eye. "But it's time to go. Kich said we won't have time if we don't go."
"Go where?" I sat up and stretched. No amount of use could make this temporary bed comfortable.
"To find you a home, of course," Kichlan said, from behin
d veils of drying sheets. "What did you think we were going to do?"
In all honesty, I hadn't considered it. I scooped my clothes from the floor and struggled into them. After my late-night flight, two days of rest and two days of collecting, these clothes needed a wash the way a drowning woman needs air. Unfortunately, they were the only ones I had.
"Continue to enjoy my company for a little while longer?" I swept past the clothes, Lad in tow, and smiled at Kichlan where he leaned against the door frame.
He flashed a grin that reminded me, for a moment, of Devich. My stomach lurched and I wondered if he was missing me. If he had called at my apartment and found the place ransacked, blood-splattered and empty. If he feared for me.
"A man can only do that for so long." Kichlan chuckled. "Before he starts to lose his mind."
Lad let out an explosive laugh, although I wasn't entirely convinced he understood us.
"No houses on an empty stomach!" Eugeny called from the kitchen. As Lad ran in, the old man peered at us across the hallway. "And if you two keep that up I'm going to lose my appetite."
I felt hot and flushed as I spooned runny, honey-drizzled porridge into my mouth. Judging from Kichlan's red face he felt much the same, but I could guarantee he wasn't as confused about it. That he didn't have Devich, out there, somewhere.
Once we were fed to Eugeny's satisfaction, he tipped us out of the house in a way that made me feel like a child sent to play. "You remember what I told you?" he asked Kichlan. "Here." Eugeny placed a heavy bundle, wrapped in felt, in my hands. "I'm afraid you'll need that." Then he closed the door on my forming question, and left us milling on the step.
"Shall we?" Kichlan gestured to the street, as I pried the edge of the material apart, and recognised my book nestled within.
I covered it, and ran a hand slowly down the spine. It was worth enough kopacks to build a life with, surely. And in a way, it was a fair bargain. An old life for a new one.
"You know you don't have any choice." Pragmatism was somehow better than sympathy, at least coming from Kichlan.
I held the book tightly against my chest, and said, "I know."
We walked in silence below a bright blue sky. Cold fingers of wind played with the flaps of the overlarge jacket Kichlan had lent me. The ice had melted, and the faint colours of small flowers could be seen peeking through cracks in the poorly tended paving stones.
"What is it?" Kichlan asked. He seemed to know where we were going, and I had been following him out of unconscious habit, seeing the city only as a grey haze, unclear and unreal. "The book. Why does it mean so much?"
"A gift," I answered him. "A symbol."
"It's a book," Lad added helpfully. "It's a book, isn't it, bro?"
"Sometimes books are more than books," Kichlan said. He hesitated. "It's rare, Tanyana. Isn't it?"
"You know that already." I sighed, and gave in. "Eldar Velchev was a leader in the critical circle revolution. He composed a set of principles for nine point pion circles that architects still use today. The usual concerns: weight and pressure, distribution of mass. And the broader ones like propriety and symmetry. But more so, he applied the same concerns to the pion circle working the building. He came to realise that a circle must also be balanced, that too much pressure on one point could destabilise-" I broke off. Two blank faces were staring at me, as though I'd started gibbering in another tongue.
"Um… What?" Lad asked.
"My thoughts exactly," Kichlan added.
"Right." I shifted the book into my armpit to free up my hands. "When I was a pion-binder, I was an architect. I designed and made buildings."
"Like these?" Lad pointed to an unnaturally ugly mound of cement that, I supposed, could have passed for apartments if one squinted or covered an eye.
"No." I stuck out my tongue and made him laugh. "No, I made beautiful things. Big things. Important things." Important things? I shook my head at myself. "This book is written by the man who started the pion revolution in architecture. At the same time as they were working out how to put together factories to generate and distribute light and heat, he worked out how to build cities like the one we live in."
Both brothers nodded.
"Well, this book is all his theories. Written in his own hand, with his own notes. It's very old, like Kichlan said, and very rare. And to an architect, it's probably the most important thing ever written."
Kichlan was silent. Lad, after a moment, said, "Ooh." A long and low exclamation, like he'd eaten something particularly delicious. "Why do you have it then, Tan?"
His acute question surprised Kichlan and myself, and we exchanged a quick, shocked glance. "Well, Lad." I reached up to pat him on the shoulder. "I built something very special. Very beautiful." My throat choked before I could catch it.
"Very important?" Lad continued.
"I suppose you could say that." Rueful, I smiled at my own words in his mouth. "When it was finished the people who had asked me to build it gave me this." I patted the book awkwardly. "To say thank you."
"That was very nice," Lad said, tone approving.
"It was indeed."
After a moment, Kichlan said, very softly, "We would like to see this building, one day."
After a longer moment, I answered, just as softly, "One day, perhaps."
"Where are we going now, bro?" Lad asked. He glanced between the road and the book under my arm, as though gradually putting the two factors together.
"Where are we taking Tan's special book?"
Kichlan's shoulders sagged as he answered. "To a nice man that Eugeny knows who will buy it from Tanyana. So she can have somewhere new to live."
"Oh." The glances grew worried. "But, bro, it's a special book. It's a thank-you book. Tan shouldn't sell it. Should you, Tan?"
I patted Lad again. "A home is better than a book."
"You could stay with us then, and keep the book."
My stomach gave a different lurch, a fluttering as Lad tugged at my heart. "That's a lovely thing to say. But there shouldn't be too many people in Eugeny's house. It wouldn't be fair."
"And Tanyana deserves her own home, don't you think?" Kichlan added.
Glum, Lad nodded. "Guess."
The man Eugeny trusted owned an odd little shop, built of wooden offcuts and sandstone fragments held together by a clay-based mortar. Its windows were made of many small shards of different types of glass, woven together with lead, and they caught the morning sunlight in a mesh of light and colour. Stone steps led up to a wooden door with an old iron handle, and a sign scrawled into the wood that I could not understand. Strange signage for a shop. It sat in small, squat contrast to the rest of the street: from the hulking apartments to a landau crawling its way past us on invisible insect legs.
"Lad, will you wait here?" Kichlan asked.
I expected his younger brother to pout, but Lad, still glum, huddled himself out of the wind beside the stone steps.
I followed Kichlan through the door and into a quiet, dim world.
"We don't need Lad trying to convince you not to sell it the entire time," Kichlan murmured as he threaded his way between dark shelves. "Or knocking over only the Other knows what."
I grunted in agreement.
The shop was a hushed place, where any voices raised above a whisper didn't belong. It smelled of dust, cracking leather and silver polish. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall – at least as far as the short distance I could see – was full of shelves. These were built of wood that looked like it had, at one time, been dark and smooth, but was now so heavily laden with dust it was hard to tell colour or texture beneath the grey. All the shelves were full of pots, leather straps, old porcelain, dolls or spoons and more, and all were covered in their own layers of dust or marked with rust spots and stains. The further we crept into this rubbish graveyard, however, the thinner the dust became, until the shelves opened up to flickering light and an ancient man standing behind a desk. The desk itself was equally laden, but instead of the ha
phazard growth of accumulated time, the desk was clean, neat and organised. A long curved sword, with a golden tassel on the hilt, glinted beneath a glass case along the front of the desk. A full set of plates painted with dancing bears was arranged for a meal at one end. The other was heavy with leather-bound, gold-embossed books. These caught my eye more than the old man. They were ancient, but the gold more legible than that under my arm, and the leather softer. I caught some words on the spines: Principles of the Six Pointed Circle, Rural Classes and the Pion Revolution, Old Varsnia: A History.
The old man had been tinkering with something like a watch. Its face was dark, the glass old and misted, and the inside opened up to reveal dozens of tiny gears and screws. He set it aside as he stood, hands at his back, a smile creasing his weathered and wrinkled face.
"Welcome," he said. "May the bear be ever at your back." He rocked on his feet and chuckled. I gathered Kichlan's expression was as confused as mine. "Old saying, that one. A greeting, or a farewell perhaps, when meeting travellers on the road. Translation isn't the best, so we cannot be sure."
"Um, hello," Kichlan stammered. Perhaps Lad, with his easily infectious enthusiasm, might have done us some good. "Eugeny sent us."
"Ah!" He unclasped his hands and reached over the desk to shake ours with a remarkable display of dexterity for someone so wizened. "Eugeny, you say? How is the old man?"
"He's well," Kichlan answered, and cast me a by-theOther-say-something expression.
I responded, "He sent us, sir…?"
"Yicor." The old man took my hand a second time and held it for longer than strictly necessary. "To you, my dear, I am Yicor."
I tried to look as flattered and feminine as possible, although I had little in the way of experience. "Eugeny sent us, sir, with something you might be interested in."
"Well, he was right." And Yicor took my hand again.