“Yes. Lord Martin—”
“Wait,” Judah said. “Mad Martin? The Lockmaker? Gavin’s however-many-times-great-grandfather?”
“Five. Five times great. Yes. Although he was more like Theron than Gavin, which probably won’t surprise you to hear. He was very interested in history, and he became obsessed with the northern war. Specifically with Pala.” She heard him take a deep breath. “There was a power in the world then. Nobody quite knows what it was, but it was everywhere. Like water, or air. Some used it, some didn’t. They used it to make their lives better; to free time and energy. To give themselves choices. Most rulers don’t like choices. And, of course, the easiest way to control a populace is to keep them tired. Tired, hungry, drunk.
“And the more obsessed with Pala Lord Martin became, the more afraid he became that this power—this simple power that simple people had, to keep a fire burning or a well flowing—would be used against him somehow. His people were beginning to question his own power, after all. They always do, after a while. So he gathered together his most loyal scholars and told them to study the problem, the power and the questioning and how they were connected. They sequestered themselves for months, and when they finally emerged, they told him that they’d devised a way to bind the power, and restrict its use to only those who would use it according to the Lord of Highfall’s wishes. We don’t know how they planned to do it, if it was a ritual or a machine. Whatever it was, it took all of them working together.”
Judah broke off another piece of chocolate and let it melt on her tongue. “Did they succeed?”
“They did.” Now his voice was soft. “But they erased themselves from existence in the process. Like a wet rag on chalk-covered slate. The scholars, the tools they used—even part of the tower where they worked.”
Judah looked at the neatly sheared edges of the gap, the smooth gray slices of exposed wood where the shelves ended. “This tower?” she said. “Is this story true? Is that what happened here?”
“I believe it is,” he said, and smiled at her. It was a sad smile. “That’s why I’m here. And I believe that’s why you’re here.”
A funny feeling spread inside her, a shivery something she couldn’t quite identify. The remnants of chocolate were sickly in her mouth. “Magic power and secret rituals. You’re as crazy as Theron is.”
“Why is it so crazy?” he said. “If I go downstairs and stab Elban’s son in the throat, you’ll bleed to death as sure as he will. Is it any stranger than that?”
Something about the way he said Elban’s son struck her oddly. “That’s different.”
“Why? Because you’ve experienced it firsthand? I was with him while you were caned, you know. I watched the marks appear on his back. If I tell somebody else about it, should they assume I’m a liar, because they didn’t experience it firsthand?”
“I don’t think you’re a liar. I think you’re insane.”
“Like Theron is insane.”
“Yes.”
“Theron’s not insane.” The magus’s eyes glittered, his voice cold and sure. “I know the poison Arkady gave him. People use it because they think it’s painless, but they only think that because they don’t know what it really does. There is something inside us that makes us us, Judah. Individual and unique in all the world, a song sung only once and never again. Call it conscience, call it essence, call it soul. That poison drives it out of the body. Sends it away—” Judah shivered “—to wherever we go when we die, the river of black water or the waiting place or the roots of the great tree. Whatever you believe. By the time you gave him the antidote, most of Theron was already there. Not all of him came back.”
“Stop it.” Tears pricked at Judah’s eyes. That long moment of indecision. Her fault.
“Why?” the magus said rudely. “I’m only telling you about it. You have no proof that it’s true, no firsthand experience. Arkady wanted Theron dead, that’s all. That he wasn’t a good enough magus to know what he was really doing, that nobody in this wreck of a city could know—that’s probably just a story. Probably part of Theron’s brain got too much or too little blood, and that’s why he is the way he is.”
“I was scared.” The tears were falling now, leaking from her eyes and running down her cheeks. “For all I knew, the poison was in what you gave me. For all I knew, you wanted me to kill him myself.”
The hardness melted out of the magus. “I’m sorry.” His voice was tired. “I had no way of proving myself to you. You did the best you could under the circumstances.”
And it hadn’t been good enough. “Theron wouldn’t agree. He would hate the way he is now.”
She expected the magus to argue, but he only nodded. “Theron is half in this world and half out of it. In a way, he’s far more unnatural than you and Gavin. He shouldn’t exist. He can sense things that most people can’t, though, like the cats.” He looked thoughtful. “What’s wrong with him—I can see it, but I can’t fix it.”
Judah sat straight up, tears drying. “What do you mean, you can see it?”
The tower was quiet. The only sound was the gentle rush of the room’s broken edges carving away the breeze. The magus was pale, his lips slightly parted; there was something wild in his eyes. But when he spoke, his voice was calm. “It’s easier if I show you,” he said.
* * *
From his satchel, he took a bundle of soft leather. Inside was a folding knife, a small mirror and a square of cloth. As he spread the cloth on the floor and laid the knife and mirror on top of it, his movements were deliberate, almost reverent. He glanced at the sky, which was the same cheerful blue it had been all day. Out of nowhere, Judah wondered what she would do if there were a storm. Be cold and wet, she supposed.
“It would be easier at night. Something about the moon; I never really understood it.” He hesitated, then said, “Honestly, I’m a little nervous about this. I think the reason that Theron doesn’t like this tower—the reason this part of the House was abandoned—was because the ritual that happened here made it an uncomfortable place to be. But you say you don’t feel anything.”
“Why does that make you nervous?”
“Because you should feel it. I do, and by rights, you should be...well, a lot more sensitive than I am. You must have developed some fairly strong defenses is what I’m trying to say, and since nobody ever taught you how, they won’t be the kind I understand. I’m not sure what’s going to happen if we breach them.” He gave her a wry smile. “I’m actually not the world’s most talented Worker. I’m only here because I’m pale enough to not look completely bizarre with blond hair, and healing is a useful enough skill to get me in anywhere I needed to be.”
“Worker,” Judah said.
He took up the knife and, without flinching, made a small cut on the inside of his arm. Not for the first time, Judah noticed: his skin was ridged with old scars, most neat and cleanly healed. The blood dripped down his arm and pooled on the surface of the mirror. He drew a symbol in it with one finger: like a letter, but not any letter she knew. “This is Work,” he said. “And that’s a sigil. It’s like...what you see when you close your eyes, only most people can’t make sense of it. Everyone has one, all unique.”
Disgusted and transfixed, Judah said, “A song sung only once and never again.”
He smiled. “I guess you could say sigils are the sheet music. This is my teacher, Derie’s. And this—” he drew a second symbol next to the first “—is my mother’s. She’s very strong too, but farther away. When I do this, it’s like calling their names. Asking for help. They’re not actually here, but you can communicate with them.”
“Like Gavin and me,” she said.
“Exactly. It’s Work that binds you. A very powerful Work, done by a very powerful Worker who died long ago.” The blood on the tray was beginning to clot. The magus hesitated, then drew a third sigil.
This one fel
t different from the others. There was life there, in the swirls and hashes, and...personality. The sigil pricked at her, caught her and held her. “That one feels different,” she said carefully. “Why does it feel different?”
“Because it’s your mother’s,” he said. “You have her blood.”
Judah felt dazed. “My mother?”
“She was one of us. Not from my caravan, but I did see her once, when I was a child. I knew your father better.” Carefully, the magus wiped the third sigil out. Judah felt as if a piece of her was being torn away. He must have seen, because he gave her a kind smile. “Some people can Work with the sigils of the dead. But I’m sorry, I’m not that strong.”
“My father,” she said.
“His name was Tobin,” the magus said. “Your mother was Maia. They were both incredibly powerful, but...especially Maia. That story you told me. To survive that, for you—”
Something in his tone reminded her of the creepy Wilmerian, all those months ago: when he’d talked about eating clay, when he’d gawked at her hair. But it didn’t matter. Maia and Tobin. Her parents were people. Her parents had names. A thought occurred to her, so huge and marvelous and fearsome that it drove the Wilmerian from her mind. “Your people.” The words had to be forced out, they didn’t want to come. “Your people are my people.”
“The Slonimi,” he said, and a brilliant, beatific smile spread across his face. “Yes. You’re Slonimi, like me. Oh, how I’ve wanted to tell you, Judah. But I couldn’t. Not until we were here. Not until I could show you.”
“I have people,” she said. Then, “We look nothing alike.”
He laughed. “None of the Slonimi look anything alike. We come from all over.” He took her wrist carefully, as if it were blown glass, and poised the knife over her skin. “It’s polite to ask permission before I do this. Do I have your permission?”
She stared down at the arm he held, which was scratched and raw from Gavin’s incessant attempts to lure her downstairs. The curlicue scar was just visible at the edge of her sleeve, raised and pink and smooth. Probably she was insane. Probably this was all as imaginary as Theron’s cats.
Maia. Tobin.
Why not? she thought, almost belligerently. At least he’d asked first, which was more than Gavin or his father had ever done. “Go ahead,” she said.
He was quick, the knife was sharp, and there was hardly any pain. Then her blood joined his on the mirror, thinner and brighter. It ran into the marks he’d made—the sigils—filling them in. Below them, like lines of words on a page, he drew two more. “Mine and yours,” he said. The mark he called hers was graceful and strong. It didn’t feel like something that would come from her.
“How do you know my...sigil?” Now there was pain, a slow warm burn.
His own cut was still oozing blood and all it took was a flex of his wrist to reopen it fully. “Because it shines out of you like a bonfire. This will be strange,” he said, and pressed her cut to his.
The world opened. Split like an overripe fruit, the rind falling away. It hurt, but it was a relieved kind of hurt: lancing an abscess, pulling a splinter. The room—which she could still see faintly—was full of purple membrane, impossibly knotted and nearly the same color as her hair. She could feel it as much as she could see it, growing through the House like ivy, tree-trunk-sized ropes of it winding up staircases and tendrils working their way into the tiniest of cracks. But the tower was the root of the Work, the source.
The sigils on the mirror glowed now, and she could feel the people who belonged to them: nothing as unimportant as their faces, but their very essences. The person the magus had called his teacher was ferociously smart, determined, cruel. The long years she’d lived piled inside her like bricks. His mother was just as smart and determined, with fewer years stacked up behind her—but oh, the love between her and the magus made Judah’s heart ache, and the ache was so sharp that she reflexively pushed away.
Downstairs, in the catacombs—the walls of the House were irrelevant, her body was irrelevant, distance was irrelevant; wherever the Work was, she could be, and the Work was everywhere—she could feel Theron, but wispy, only half-there. Scattered, somehow, like a page torn free of its book. Other, smaller wisps floated through the House, pieces of the purple membranous stuff that split off and fused again, or drifted across the floor like leaves. Theron’s cats. He had figured it exactly right: his brain was turning the wisps into something it could understand. Her brain, she suspected, was doing the same thing; Theron saw cats that nobody else could see, and she saw purple rope. What would an observer standing in the tower see now, she wondered? Just her body and the magus’s, lying among the leaves on the dirty floor, blood trickling down their arms?
She looked down and was unsurprised, in this strange lifted world, to see a thick purple rope sprouting from the middle of her chest and disappearing through the floor. Judah could feel it reaching through layers of rock and plaster and wood like she could feel her arm inside her sleeve, down through the House to Gavin. Who stood in Elban’s parlor, at the open door of the room where they’d met with the chieftain. The pulsing tether that sprouted from her chest ended in his. But while the rest of the membrane felt organic, like cobwebs or moss, the rope between her chest and Gavin’s appeared almost woven, like the ropes Darid had made. There was pattern to it, and rhythm. She could feel Gavin through it. Not like a nagging doubt in the back of her head, but really feel him. If she wanted to, she could slip inside him like a suit of clothes. She didn’t want to. The empty room was a terrible place. The membrane there was sickly and blackened.
That extra bedroom of his—you want to hear about that?
Elban had killed people here, she suddenly knew. Tortured them, made them suffer, watched them die. What she saw was the remnants of their pain and fear and death. She didn’t think Gavin could feel it the way she could—or at least, she didn’t think he knew he was feeling it—but he knew the place was awful and he feared that he was awful and some part of him was making himself stand there and feel the horror as a punishment or a penance. For her? For Darid? He was a mess inside, Gavin. Knotted and snarled, packed with feelings that clashed like soldiers on a field.
She could fix him. Untangle him like a necklace. He would feel better. She reached out.
And felt herself restrained. Don’t.
It was the magus. Nate. In the ordinary world she had resisted calling him that, but thinking of him any other way in the Work would be like thinking of a chair as a dog. Without thinking, she slipped inside him, and he opened like a warm bed to let her in. In the tower she heard his body make a noise, but it was only his body, it was unimportant. She was radiant, hyper-alive. She was the center of his being. He was a hallway full of doors and she threw them open with reckless abandon; behind each one was a memory. She remembered flipping through the pages of Gavin’s mind, back in the study, to find the lie he’d told her about Darid; that had been nothing to this, that was peering into a shadowy room through half-closed eyes. In Nate’s memory, she heard the creaking wheels of a wagon in the sun, smelled green grass and horses and childhood and joy. His eyes showed her a woman with copper hair, braiding long fronds of some plant; a handsome young man with a bloody nose laughing and splashing his face with creek water; a girl with closed eyes and skin the color of sand after a rainstorm lying in the grass. When her eyes opened they were full of passion, and it was night. The air was clear and sweet and Nate had been young and full of mad soaring energy. He could remember. She remembered with him.
The memory made him sad. She could feel that, too. She tried another door. Behind this one was a towering woman with steel-gray hair, impossibly tall—no, it was Nate who was small, and Judah inside him. The woman was beating him. As blows rained down from her cane, he wept with pain and humiliation. The woman’s sigil shone from her like light from a lantern: Nate’s teacher. Judah didn’t understand her cruelty, but
she understood beatings. She fled.
Another door. A village, dusty and worn, but somewhere in it gleamed someone who carried with them a power as bright as a star. Older now, more thoughtful, Nate was searching for that someone. It wasn’t a competition, but he wanted to be the one, he’d never been the one, and when he rounded a corner and saw that he’d found source of the power—a plain girl with a missing front tooth—triumph exploded out of him in a broad smile. Surprised, the plain girl smiled back.
Another. A narrow path carved into the edge of a cliff, hoary with ice, the howling wind tearing at his body.
A campfire, surrounded by singing and dancing and clapping. A drum, a flute. Comfort. Home.
A dingy kitchen, walls black with soot. A sad pile of blankets that didn’t keep the floor from being cold and hard. He didn’t want her to see that, for some reason.
Door after door, each one holding a moment of Nate’s life: she had lived her whole life inside the Wall and she was greedy for experience, starving for it. Perhaps there were more noises in her body’s ears and perhaps they were coming from his body, but she ignored them, throwing open one memory after another. Crowded taverns, singing musicians and bantering jugglers, groups of children chasing each other. Somebody’s baby. A drunken fight. A less drunken one.
Then she came to a door that was locked. She pushed it, rattled it, and finally threw herself against it, filled with disproportionate annoyance that something was being kept from her, there was a place he wouldn’t let her—
She found herself back in the tower, lying flat on her back. She was dazed. Her arm hurt. The membranous stuff was gone. The magus lay in a tight, protective ball next to her, both hands clutching his head. She heard a funny noise—how strange to hear only with her ears again, what limited things her five senses were—and realized that he was retching.
The locked door. Her insistent, frustrated pounding on it. She’d hurt him. She pulled herself up to her hands and knees and crawled to his side. His hair was drenched with sweat and he’d bitten his lip hard enough to draw blood. His eyes, red like he’d been crying, rolled and pitched in his head, but then found her.
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