Debris vw-1

by Jo Anderton

  I nodded. "I will go, and hope I take all my trouble with me."

  She lifted her eyebrows. "What did you want to ask? I might not be the old man, but I have stood beside him for a long time." Dina softened as she spoke of him. "I learned a few things here and there."

  "It doesn't matter now. And I won't give them any reason to come for you."

  I crouched again, took one of Jernea's hands and then held him. He felt thin and fragile, like so much of my life now. And as I thanked him silently, I realised those questions I had thought so important really didn't matter. Why broken people like me could see debris, whether we could be fixed. What mattered, what really mattered, was why the puppet men had taken such an interest in me. And what, if anything, I could do about it.

  A final pat on skin that didn't seem to feel me, and I stood. "Thank you," I said to Dina.

  She nodded, seemed to hesitate. "Listen, I don't know if I should tell you this, but I think I will." She looked down to Jernea. "For him. When they came, the strange veche men, I heard a rumour. Kopacks are being withdrawn from us, here and at other universities, and thrown into something very secret. I overheard members of the military discipline talking about war with the Hon Ji, and those veche men seem to be involved. So be careful, Tanyana. Those are very powerful men."

  When I left the university the bell was late, the sky streaked with long, drawn-out clouds shining crimson in the sunset. As I travelled the ferry I wondered if I was being watched.

  Trudging back to my room above Valya's home, I realised I had no appetite. Of course, that wouldn't make a difference to her.

  "You're late!" she called as I entered the house. "Busy, busy day."

  I shrugged out of my jacket and draped it over a chair before sitting at her table. It was constantly hot in Valya's kitchen. There was always a fire burning and something cooking. "Not really." I rested my elbows on the table and sank my face into my hands. "I was looking for something and I didn't find it."

  "Eh?" She placed an earthenware bowl in front of me and spooned it full of thick soup. She and Eugeny would have agreed on the apparent universality and infinitely appropriate virtues of soup. "Debris?"

  "No, we found that." I stirred chunks of potato, parsnip, carrot and onion. Valya ate little meat. "Found that easily."

  "It is everywhere now."

  I blinked, slowed my stirring. "You've noticed that too?"

  "Impossible not to." She shook her head. "Dangerous times. Explosion in the night. Debris left lying on the street. Too much to pick up. Not a good sign."

  A sign of what?

  "So then, what were you looking for?" Valya asked.

  "Answers, explanations. Hope." I caught myself. "Don't let it bother you."

  "Answers, eh? Eat." Valya sat at the other end of the table with her own bowl. She watched my spoon like a hawk watches a mouse. I forced myself to eat, if only to appease her keen gaze. "You need someone who knows many things. You know who knows many things?" She sipped delicately. Always gave me most of the chunks. Apparently Valya still believed I needed fattening.

  "Who?"

  "Yicor. He sees much, he hears much, and he has many books."

  I swallowed a large slice of onion without bothering to chew. I had seen books, hadn't I? Hidden in those shelves.

  "Lots of books. Books other people don't have. Books other people aren't interested in having. Books only certain people care about."

  Slowly, I looked up from the table. It was like surfacing from a fog. Valya's eyes were bright and sharp, stars in a clear sky.

  "Only certain people?" I released the spoon and it slid into the soup, leaving only the very end of its wooden handle dry.

  "Only some." Valya gestured to the soup. "You eat and you go. He'll be happy to see you, he will want to help. Likes girls."

  I pried the spoon up and wiped sticky fingers on a napkin. "I owe you thanks, Valya."

  "Eat. Those are my thanks."

  I finished the bowl so quickly I burned the top of my mouth. Valya, taking the time to taste her food, waved me away as soon as the bowl was empty. I took it to the tub of cleaning water, grabbed my coat and headed out into twilight.

  I hadn't returned to Yicor's shop since he gave me Valya's address, but I could remember the way. He wasn't far. Street lamps sprang into light as I arrived. His windows were dark, the door closed, but as I stood on the step and listened, I could hear noises inside. Footsteps and a solitary voice.

  I knocked, rapping cold knuckles so hard on the wood they stung, and the noises ceased. Then a lock turned, the door opened a crack, and an eye looked out at me, lit by the lamps at my back, the only bright thing against the darkness of the shop.

  "My dear!" The door opened wide and all of Yicor's face was washed in lamplight. "Now this is the kind of surprise I wish I had more of."

  "Thank you, Yicor. I hope I'm not intruding."

  "You, my dear, could never." He stepped from the door. "Please, come in from the dark."

  I didn't mention that it was, in fact, darker inside his shop.

  He shut the door and I waited a moment for him to light an old portable gas lamp.

  "Come through, come through." He led me down the shelves, his lamp bobbing like a firefly. "Is everything all right, my dear?"

  I hesitated a moment, and blurted out, "Did you find a home for it? The book I sold you."

  He placed the lamp on his desk. The face he turned to me was piteous and full of compassion. "I did, if it helps you to know. Somewhere it will be treasured."

  I nodded, more than a little surprised by how relieved that made me feel.

  He added, "But I'm certain that is not the reason you are here."

  No, it wasn't. "Valya suggested I speak to you."

  "Good woman, that one."

  "Yes, she is."

  "Obsessed with food, though."

  That made me grin. "So it's not only me then."

  With a chuckle, Yicor patted his generous stomach. "Not in the least."

  "She thought you could help me. You see, I'm looking for answers."

  "Answers?" Yicor's eyes left my face, travelled too casually over the shelves we had passed to rest on the ceiling.

  "And Valya told me to ask for your help."

  "Did she?" he asked.

  "She said you'd be happy to give it."

  Yicor stood rigid a moment longer. Then he released a great sigh; his shoulders sagged. "Valya is a good woman. She knows who to trust. If she sent you here, then she had her reasons. I won't argue with her."

  Who to trust? Why did I feel like there was a conversation going on that I couldn't hear? Hidden meanings behind innocuous words?

  "Come with me." Yicor collected his lamp from the desk again, and headed into the forest of shelves, junk and dust.

  He did not take me to the door. The shelves turned around on themselves, became a maze that spread deep into the shop. More deeply than I had realised it had space to go. When we got to a point where I was thoroughly lost, and quite convinced that I could wander here until I starved to death, Yicor stopped. He put the lantern on the floor beside a rug. He flipped the mat up by its corners to reveal a trapdoor in the floor.

  He gripped a large iron ring and hauled the door open. The room below was small, walls cut from earth, ceiling low and supported by wooden beams.

  "Down you get."

  I stared at him in sudden panic. What was he about to do? Lock me in this hidden cell?

  But he shook his head. "I'm not about to hurt you, my dear. If I wanted to, which I don't, it wouldn't be worth crossing Valya. She's a good woman, like I said, but Other's little curlies, she can be frightening. I'll hand you the light."

  I gripped the edge of the trapdoor and climbed down. It wasn't much of a descent. Standing in the room, my head peeked out of the trapdoor and was about level with Yicor's shins.

  Yicor said, "Here."

  I accepted the lamp.

  "You call when you've found what you were after
, and I'll come get you. Coffee drinker?"

  I nodded, still not sure what to say.

  "I'll boil us a pot." Then Yicor left me, wandering into the darkness. It seemed he did not need the light to find his way.

  Crouching, one hand braced on the floor and the other holding up the lamp, I turned into the room. It was longer than it had looked, although narrow and low. And it was full of books. They were stored on metal shelves, behind glass that reflected the lamp if I brought it too close. There was nowhere to sit, no room for a desk or a chair. Only books.

  I shuffled further into the room, placed the lamp in an indent on the floor of packed earth so it would stay upright, and approached one of the cabinets. With a little effort the doors slid open. The books inside were clean, free of dust, earth, or damp. They felt new, leather soft, paper crinkly. How old were they, how precious, considering Yicor's rather extreme methods of keeping them?

  And what could they tell me?

  None of the spines were labelled. I drew one out, and the cover too was blank. I sat, conscious that the dirt would mark my jacket. I shivered. The earth was cold.

  When I opened the cover I did not find words. Symbols rose at me from the page. Not imprinted in ink and applied with pressure on the vellum, they floated from the paper, hooked somehow into the weave but struggling always to escape. Like bubbles in black.

  I shut the book with a snap that echoed through the room.

  A breath and I opened it again. The symbols were still there, flattened by the board and leather, but rising gradually as though filling with air.

  One symbol caught my attention. Smaller than the others, down at the very bottom of the right-hand corner. But I had seen it before. I had, I realised with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold, followed it. An eye stuck in a gate.

  Lad's symbol.

  What was Lad's symbol doing written in a strange bubbly I lost all feeling in my fingers and watched the book as it fell. It dropped gradually, like a feather, spreading over the packed earth in a smooth motion.

  "Worked it out, have you?" Yicor was peering from the trapdoor, one hand holding onto the floor, the other gripping a steaming mug. I hadn't heard him approach, hadn't noticed footfalls on the wood above me.

  "How?" I swallowed a multitude of questions that struggled in my throat; they fought each other to be voiced and choked me. "It's written in debris, isn't it?"

  "Yes. Here-" he wiggled the mug "-you'll need it."

  I crawled to the door and took the drink. "But how?"

  "I don't know." His face was a mask. Impossible to tell if he was lying, if he was sincere. If he cared, or had any opinion at all. "That art is lost. Long gone. And so much else with it."

  A viciously strong coffee smell smacked into my nose. It cleared my head. "What about the symbols?" I lifted my wrist. I had followed them, read them like a map. But if books were written using the things, then perhaps they meant more.

  "No." Yicor, however, did not look at my suit. "I cannot read them. Another art lost with the revolution. Taken with our history, our dignity."

  Then why was I inscribed with them? If none of us could read them, if even the technicians didn't know what they were for, then who had decided to use these symbols? And why?

  "Our history?"

  Yicor gave me a sad smile. "We did not always collect debris. And we had a language in those symbols, a language just for us. Traditions and ceremonies and more, gone from memory, lost from history. Before the revolution came. Before it brought the technicians, the national veche, and their twisted men."

  "What good are the books, then?"

  "Not all of them are written in cipher, my dear. Persevere." Yicor left. This time, his feet were heavy above me. They sent trickles of dust through the wooden ceiling.

  Coffee in one hand, I crawled back awkwardly to the book. I dusted dirt from the cover. I flicked through more pages and found nothing but more bulging symbols. So I replaced the book and began my hunt.

  The first book I found that I could read sent quivers into my stomach so fierce I had to swallow deep mouth fuls of coffee. The liquid was thick, so strong my head buzzed with each sip. The book was a long description of a ritual that, while I could understand the words themselves, made no sense to me. It ranted about invisible body parts – hands that were not, mouths that were not – and a way to connect with them that seemed to involve a barbaric level of violence. It sickened me to see something so brutal written about debris. I felt culpable, somehow. Because only collectors could have read those words, so only collectors had wanted to do the things they described. Collectors just like me, although I could never imagine myself driving a metal skewer into the head of a friend.

  I was halfway through the shelves by the time I found it. The coffee was long gone, although its scent remained, keeping with it that tingling buzz. Yicor had not returned and I couldn't begin to guess how late the bell was. I had no thoughts of giving up, however. The symbols alone, that impenetrability alone, was enough to keep me looking. Even if I ran out of books.

  I knew the text was different the moment I drew it from the shelf. Where the others had been plain, covers unadorned, this had a single symbol in embossed silver pressed into the bottom right corner.

  The gate and the eye.

  Lad's symbol.

  My hands shook as I opened the book. I had wished for few things with the fervour I now wished that the book contained words – legible, readable words.

  The first thing that must be made clear is the childishness. The Bright world will see this as a defect. This is a lie brought on by misunderstanding and fear.

  What may look like childishness at first is but an eye divided. In experiencing both worlds one cannot truly live in either. Distraction is not distraction: it is looking at things we cannot see. Talking to oneself is not talking to oneself: it is conversing with those who we cannot hear. Idiocy is not idiocy: it is understanding a world beyond ours.

  I sat so hard it was almost falling. This was it, it had to be it. Distraction, hearing voices, a degree of idiocy. There was Lad, spelled out in rising black. And there was his symbol, cool against my fingers as I held the book open.

  Shuffling, I sat up straight to ease a crook in my upper back. The desire to read quickly, to turn chunks of pages and hope I landed on the right one was so tempting I ached to deny it. But I kept reading, moving through the text slowly.

  Halves are born into this world already cut in two.

  Halves? Uzdal and Mizra immediately came to mind.

  Half in this place, half in the world beyond. No ritual can create them, no blade or blow. The Keeper calls them for his purposes. Who are we to second-guess him?

  I glanced up, though I could not see the Keeper Mountain though floor, shelves, wall and buildings. I scanned the words again to make sure I had read them properly. The Keeper. Our Keeper, weeping over Movoc? Or the mountain's namesake. A guardian against the Other and his darkness. In myths he was a kind guide, an unseen presence who heard pleas for help and protected us from nothingness and death.

  But he was a myth, an ancient deity no longer needed in this pion-bright world. Now, he was just a mountain.

  So look for them within the first years of life. Halves will not learn speech easily. They will not take to play as other children do. They are slow to understand, slower to obey. Walking may be difficult, games even harder.

  I did not know about Lad's childhood. This wasn't helping.

  I gave in and flicked through further. How would this help Lad? How could it help Kichlan? What did he want, what had he always wanted for Lad? An end to it all. A normal life that did not involve hiding and random acts of violence he could not control.

  …because without them, we are surely lost.

  I stopped, frowned at the end of a sentence and scanned to find its beginning.

  A Half within the family is a blessing. Do not send them away. Do not lock them behind walls. Do not wish they had been born other than
they are. Each Half is more precious than gold, because without them we are surely lost.

  Halves will hear the words of the Keeper.

  When the Keeper comes to close the Gate, who will hear him if the Halves are gone? And fear for the worlds, both Dark and Bright, if the Gate is opened and he is not there to close it.

  Fear for everything.

  Fear for everything?

  I continued to skim, and the book gave up more of the same. Tales of a Half who had heard the words of the Keeper and not understood him. He had thought the Gate would open in the heart of a girl he loved, and had opened her body instead. But mostly it was full of warnings against the very thing Kichlan was trying to do. To rid Lad of his affliction. To make him – to use a term too close to the book to make me comfortable – whole.

  But how could I tell Kichlan any of that? To let Lad hear his voices, to pay attention to them, to try to make sense of what they were I closed the book with a loud, echoing snap. I had heard his voices. What was more, I had spoken to them, communicated with them. With an unseen presence. Was that the Keeper, talking to me from the debris? The Keeper warning me about the puppet men, about debris he could not control?

  Fear for everything? What did that mean? And why could I talk to the Keeper? I was not a Half like Lad.

  Fear for everything. I thought of the puppet men, and shuddered.

  I replaced the book, closed the cases, collected the lamp and the mug. At the trapdoor I stood, placed both on the floor and called Yicor before climbing out. He meandered out of his maze as though he had been waiting only a few shelves away. I wondered how late it was as I rubbed redness from my eyes and suppressed a yawn. The old man didn't look tired.

  "Did you find your answers?" Yicor asked. He retrieved the lamp. I carried the empty mug and followed close.

  "Only more questions," I replied.

  "The books are like that." The light bobbed as he watched me over his shoulder, feet finding their way with surprising surety and steadiness. "No matter how many times you bring them out, they fill only the gaps they want to fill, and leave too many spaces."