She shrugged. “I thought it might come in handy. It never would leave me alone. Kept buzzing outside my window, until I finally let it in.”
“I guess he belongs to you.”
“He?”
“Well, I’m no expert at sexing bees, but aren’t men usually the ones who buzz outside your window? That sounds like a masculine strategy. All he needs is a tiny lute. He could sing to you about queens and honeycombs.”
“Shut up.”
“It’s a perfectly serviceable metaphor.”
“No—” She pushed him against the wall. “Shut up. Someone’s coming.”
He lowered his voice. “And where are we supposed to hide? Should I close my eyes and pretend that I can make myself invisible?”
“Shut your mouth, or I swear by the wheel—”
Something moved a few inches from his hand. At first, Babieca thought it was the living moss that clung to the alleys. The founders only knew where that came from or what its purpose was. But as his eyes adjusted to the flickering lamplight, he realized that it was a boy in a dun-colored tunica. He wore a cloak that looked as if it had been stitched from a dozen grimy shawls and scarves. Now it matched precisely the shade of the walls. Even his sandals were gray. It took him a moment to realize that the boy had always been there. He’d simply looked like one of the cloaca’s shadows, still as the oozing stones. Two other figures resolved themselves in the dim glow, seeming to step from the walls, like ghosts. How long had they been there? Had they followed in silence the whole time, or had there been others, grim trees pressed close to the crumbling brick, listening to them as they fumbled through the dark? Babieca rather feared that it was the latter. The eyes of the cloaca had been following them from the very first moment.
“Well,” he said, “I suppose it was foolish to think that we might sneak up on you.” He inclined his head slightly. “Not that we mean any harm, mind you. I’m a poor singer, and this baggage next to me is an artifex. Mostly, she just tightens bolts. Her words.”
The furs seemed to regard them as one presence. They were motionless. Babieca didn’t feel the fear that he’d been expecting. After all, they weren’t exactly menacing. The boy nearest him couldn’t have been more than ten years old. No more than a grimy cherub, with calm gray eyes. Too calm, perhaps. A few feet away from him stood a woman with silver hair. It was difficult to tell how old she might be. Her face was smudged, and the lines on her forehead could have been the result of hard living, rather than age. Her eyes were uncommonly still, like the boy’s. They weighed him piece by piece, until he felt naked. The third shadow was a girl, maybe thirteen, with close-cropped hair. She wore a boy’s tunica praetexta, its red stripe now faded to rust. It looked as if her nose had been broken more than once. This was their welcoming party.
Julia drew herself up. Her voice was steady, though Babieca could detect a faint trill of fear humming around the edges. “We are emissaries of Basilissa Pulcheria. Her Grace has sent us to parlay with the Fur Queen.”
The furs exchanged a look. Then the boy held out his hand wordlessly. Julia offered him Pulcheria’s scroll. Neither had any idea what the basilissa had actually written in her neat, gliding hand. Perhaps it was their death warrant. He examined the seal critically. Then he slipped the scroll beneath his patchwork cloak and motioned for them to follow. The ledge was too narrow for them to walk abreast, so the boy led them in single file. The girl crossed to the other side of the tunnel, while the old woman followed behind. Babieca couldn’t help noticing how effectively they’d been surrounded. Not even a spectacular diversion would buy them the chance of escape. All they could do was keep walking.
“I don’t like this,” he whispered.
“No?” Julia kept her voice down, but her eyes were bright with anger. “You don’t think that walking into the furs’ den with an escort is a brilliant plan? I rather thought that we’d outfoxed them, until this moment.”
He eyed the girl, who seemed to regard them as slow-moving prey. “We’re not exactly dealing with palace guards. They don’t even have weapons.”
She leaned in closer to whisper. “Did you see their eyes? They might be planning to eat us.”
“You’re a very soothing person. Has anyone ever told you that?”
The furs led them through a series of junctions and blind turns, until they were thoroughly disoriented. Their guides remained silent. He could hear the slow-moving river of refuse beneath them, as well as the dripping from above. Was there really a tower buried in all of this filth? People said that it grew like a blind root in the earth, a reversal whose defiance mocked the other gens. But why? There were shadowed corners on the surface that already belonged to the furs. They could have made their den in any number of hidden alleys, but they chose to gather here, in this place of forgetting, where dyes and piss and ruins mingled with water from the aqueduct. What worried him was how quickly he’d adjusted to the smell. Maybe he belonged here.
The passageway narrowed. The boy gestured to their lamp, as if he wanted to see it. Julia handed it over, and he snuffed out the light.
“Wait! How are we supposed to see?” The panic was hot in her voice. Babieca felt it coursing through his own body as well. A child’s fear of the dark. He realized that they were being led by a child, and the thought made him laugh, before he could stop himself. The sound fractured as it struck the walls, which he could no longer see. For a long moment, nobody moved or said a word. This must be what death feels like. No time or movement. No shape of things. No separation between you and the dark. Just one perfect pause that never ends.
But gradually, as his eyes adjusted further, a gauzy outline began to appear. He couldn’t quite see Julia, but he could make out the contours of her, as if an impatient artist had drawn an outline and then abandoned the project. He could smell the licorice on her breath. His heart was pounding in his ears. If he stared hard at the space next to Julia’s shadow, he could see a slight separation, a contrast between her and the wall that he knew was there.
He felt fingers groping for his own. It was Julia’s hand. She was sweating, even in the chill of the tunnel. He wrapped his fingers around her own, and there was a spark of contact, like two latches combining. Then cool, dry fingers slipped into his left hand. It was the woman with silver hair, standing behind him. She was barely an inch away, but he saw her as indistinct markings, rippling shadow. Her grip was surprisingly firm, and that calmed him, somewhat. Then the line began to move forward, slowly, but steadily. Their young guide must have known the place intimately, every stone, every turn, like a body grown familiar in the dark. Either that, or he had cat’s eyes. For a brief moment, he wondered where the girl was. He imagined her watching them shuffling along from a distance, waiting for some silent order. Perhaps a whole army of cats was following them.
Babieca decided that this had not been their best plan.
They inched forward for what might have been hours. In the deep dark, there was no real sense of direction. Only the steady pull of Julia’s hand told him that they were moving in a straight line. Sometimes he’d forget about the old woman, until he felt her body against his back, her cold grip on his other hand. Sometimes they were a shadow with three hearts, sharing the same shallow breath. His body was connected to theirs, had always been, faceless and silent beneath the earth. Inch by inch, they moved. The sound of the water began to recede. The quality of the air changed. Now it was cool and dry, like the woman’s hand. Babieca could smell something metallic. Every once in a while, a spark flared that might have been a vein of quartz, or perhaps another set of eyes. He wanted to reach out and touch the walls, to see if they’d changed, but his arms were pinioned. They could only move as one, a machine with no choice but to go forward, gears turning. The smell reminded him of the undercroft beneath the black basia, where they’d first met Drauca. He remembered the beautiful stolae and winking gems, tools of the lover’s trade. The tower of wigs and p
ots of precious tincture.
I once . . . knew a horse named Babieca.
He almost laughed again but thought better of it. The silence was somehow holy. They were in the heart of a tumulus, where old things slept. He could feel the memory of violence, the blood that had soaked into this earth, centuries ago. The ghosts were heavy like cobwebs, stirring against his mouth, and it took all of his concentration not to break contact and brush them away. Perhaps they meant no harm, though he couldn’t be sure.
Suddenly, the path ended. He started to lurch forward, but the woman’s grip pulled him back. They held steady for a moment. Then he felt Julia’s hand moving, and he had no choice but to follow. There was nothing beneath his foot. Like a child learning to walk, he stepped into the void. Then there was stone. He felt it against his sandal. For a moment, he was torn in two directions. Then the woman gave him a gentle push, and his left foot joined his right. It was a step, he realized. Now that the vertigo had passed, he could feel that he was standing on a narrow step. He shuffled slightly and felt the step taper off as he moved to the left. Now his toes were dangling in empty space again, while his heel remained on solid ground. It was a spiral staircase, narrowing as it turned in a hidden gyre that could go on for miles beneath the surface. He had no way of knowing, and no chance to ponder it. For now the woman was gently pushing him again, while Julia’s hand pulled him down.
It felt like a strange dance. At first, the movements were alien, but over time they grew familiar. Then there was only the dance, taking him farther beneath the surface. He’d spent his life descending these stairs, one inch at a time, inhaling the black scents of this stone bower. He’d been born in the dark. Nobody had told him about the sun, or the sound of voices. The stairs, he thought, must continue until they eventually reversed direction. His whole life was a dream of staircases that formed a perfect circle. He would dance with them, lifting and dipping, a line stretched blindly across some fathomless caesura.
Julia stopped, and he nearly ran into her. But again, the woman pulled him back slightly, anticipating the change in momentum. They were still for a breath. Then they stepped forward, on solid ground. Babieca could see something in the distance. At first, he thought that he was imagining some flicker of light. But then he saw the flash again. It was truly a lamp. Now he could see it dancing across Julia’s face. Shadows resolved themselves. He could see the boy ahead of them, and the girl who paced them at a distance. They reached the lantern, which was affixed to the wall. It was carved in the shape of Fortuna, though time and the touch of damp had weathered her face. She was frozen in the act of cutting someone’s purse strings.
“I think we’ve arrived,” Julia whispered.
She pulled away from his grasp. The feeling of emptiness was indescribable. His fingers flexed, unsure of how to work on their own. The woman’s dry grip was gone as well, and he realized that she was standing next to him. The path was now wide enough for them to walk abreast. Not a path, but a road. Its stones were uneven and had crumbled away in places, like the margins of a scroll. But it was solid.
The founders must have built this, when Anfractus was still young. In the summer of the imperium, before everything broke away.
Babieca couldn’t imagine what a road was doing beneath the earth. Something must have buried it. Unless the stone had simply grown up around it over time, like some kind of ancient, questing weed. An undercity. If the skyways connected the buildings above, why couldn’t there be secret roads below?
Their guide led them forward. It was no longer uncomfortable that neither of the furs had spoken a single word. Babieca had come to think of them as naturally silent. There was, in fact, something oddly comforting about their lack of speech. They didn’t even require a gestural language. A glance was enough. He’d expected them to use a cipher, like the hand signs that were common among vendors in the Exchange, but that would have been too frenetic. This was closer to a serpent’s tongue, rhythmic and silent, occasionally testing the air without making a mark. Footsteps in snow.
The thought struck out of nowhere, confusing him for a moment.
Snow.
What was that?
He recognized the word, could taste it even, but the precise meaning escaped him. In Anfractus, it was always summer. But some part of him—something that seemed much closer in the dark—remembered snow. The word was a creeping whiteness, covering him just as surely as night would, only in drifts of silver.
Smaller tunnels branched off from the path, each one flickering with its own light. Babieca caught glimpses of other rooms. In one, he saw a table full of daggers, gleaming in a circle of light. In another, he saw shadows moving. At first, they seemed to be sweeping across the floor. But they moved in unison, extending small hands, grasping at emptiness. Again, a voice said. They ghosted across the floor, hands outstretched. Again. The image was gone before he could decipher it. They kept walking. He peered down another tunnel and saw a room whose walls were covered in locks of every type. Some were shaped like human faces, while others were glaring lions, or plates with curling inscriptions. Heaps of keys covered the floor. A small girl—no more than nine—was squinting in concentration while she worked at one of the locks with a flexible bit of wire. The lock clicked open. She looked up at that moment, eyes flaring in triumph, and they met each other’s gaze. Her joy leapt across the dark, and he felt it tear through him with burning paws. He grinned, and she did the same.
Finally, they came to a larger room. It might have been a hall, save for the lack of a hearth at its center. Instead, the space was lit by a sea-green glow that seemed to come from the walls itself. Babieca realized that it was patches of night-moss, which covered the stone like an iridescent tapestry. The feeling was akin to being underwater. The light moved because the moss was moving, just as it did in the alleys, but more insistently. Blind threads of it trembled in his direction. He wasn’t sure if he should greet it politely or twist away from its peculiar, undulating grasp.
Benches lined the edges of what, he decided, he would have to call the great hall. There were rushes on the ground, which held bits of mystery, as well as meat. Furs talked quietly in groups, or ate in silence. Babieca nearly jumped out of his skin as something moved next to him. But it was only a thin dog, coughing on his foot. Its dark eyes resembled glass beneath the breathing glow of the night-moss. Everyone stopped talking and looked at them. Julia stood stock-still, hands at her sides. The boy was gone. Had he simply vanished? Babieca scanned the crowd but couldn’t see him anywhere. The girl still lingered to their right but had moved a respectable distance away.
All eyes were on them. Babieca was about to say something when the woman with silver hair walked past him. For some reason, his mouth closed. A ripple passed through the gathered furs as she made her way to the center of the hall. She handed her cloak to a shadow nearby, and Babieca saw that underneath it, she’d been wearing a black stola. Gold bracelets flashed on her bare arms, and two brooches were pinned to the fabric of her dress, linked by a delicate silver chain. Now that she was beneath the light, he realized that her hair was a wave of silver, marked by a tortoiseshell comb. She washed her face in a basin, wiping away the smudged dirt. Then she sat in a leather chair—the only chair in the room.
“Welcome to my home,” said the Fur Queen. “Not as impressive as the arx, but I like to think of it as a subterranean palace.”
“Thank you—em—Your Majesty.” Julia tried to execute a curtsey but only succeeded in tripping. Babieca steadied her. Did furs curtsey? He was unfamiliar with the rules of this buried court. Should he bow? The moment passed before he could move. He stood next to Julia, one hand on her shoulder, as if they were both a painted tableau. Frozen intruders.
“Let’s have a look at your papers.” The Fur Queen gestured with one hand. “Thorn, darling, give me the scroll.”
The boy reappeared. He’d been standing behind her chair the whole time. N
ow his ragged cloak appeared to flicker beneath the light of the hall. First it was the color of the stained oak benches, and then the dark of the queen’s gown. His hand, almost disembodied, was pale as milk against the shifting garment. She took the proffered scroll. For a moment, her eyes narrowed as she examined the wax seal. Then she broke it and scanned the contents. Nodding once in satisfaction, she handed the scroll back to Thorn, who receded into the shadows behind her.
The Fur Queen shook her head. “Basilissae. They’re good at issuing proclamations, but not so expert at seeing the big picture. It’s all a game to them. We’re just stones on a board, and they’ll sacrifice all of us, if it serves them.” She looked up. “Are you stones?”
Julia frowned. “I’m not sure I understand the question, Your Majesty.”
“It’s simple. Pulcheria is using you. When your value fades, she’ll discard you. Latona is doing the same thing with your friend—the oculus.”
Babieca took a step forward. “You know about Roldan?”
He couldn’t quite give up the name. They’d been close. Lashed together with a single belt, at one point. Now he was a different riddle entirely. He’d made a pact with Latona. He’d given her exactly what she wanted.
The Fur Queen’s expression didn’t waver. “I don’t believe he goes by that name any longer. But yes. I see both sides of the board. We’re all just stones in the end. But we can still surprise the hands that move us.”
Babieca frowned. “But you’re a queen. Doesn’t that make you closer to the basilissae?”
Her mouth quirked slightly. “They only think that they’re in control. I know that I’m not—which gives me a certain advantage.”
“What does the scroll say?”
“Babieca—” Julia warned.
“What? I’m being hospitable.” He inclined his head. “I just want to know what it says. If we’re pawns, we might as well have a glimpse of the rules. In fact, I want out of this metaphor completely. No more talk of stones and strategy. What does she want from us?”
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