Alizhan grabbed him, careful not to touch his skin, and pulled him to his feet. “We’re getting out of here,” she said. She could have touched him barehanded and made him understand, but they were both run ragged and she was afraid to hurt him. Instead she steered him through the crowd as fast as she could, no direction in mind other than out. The world began to shake.
27
A New Beginning
The ground trembled and jerked. Thiyo had lost Alizhan in the crowd. Shoes and rocks had been raining down from the upper levels since he’d come out of the river, and for the first time he wondered if some of the rain of debris wasn’t caused by rioters. Was this the quake of Iriyat’s dreams? Had Ev and Sanno inadvertently hastened her experiment? Or perhaps Iriyat had planned to instigate this riot all along—no, she wouldn’t have left herself so vulnerable, if this were her plan. She wanted to live to control the future.
A stranger knocked into Thiyo. He stumbled and was swept up into a crowd stampeding forward out of the hall. They were forcing their way beyond the stage toward the neighborhood on the Right Bank. Thiyo’s feet didn’t touch the ground as the press of bodies carried him along.
A shriek went up as the shaking of the world shattered the glass dome in the hall. The whole crowd jerked with motion as people turned their heads behind them. A sunlit fall of shards hit the place where Thiyo had stood only moments ago. He saw nothing more than a few glints tumbling through the air. The sound of screams and bodies falling was subsumed into the unceasing din of the riot. The air was as full of sound as it was of the odors of blood, sweat, and river mud. Thiyo was so close to the people around him that he couldn’t tell their pulses from his own. He had never considered the unwelcome intimacy of potentially being crushed to death by a herd of frightened people, and a hysterical laugh made its way out of his throat.
The mob surged forward into a large street, thinning so Thiyo could breathe and direct his own movements again. He was on the lowermost level of the city, and if the upper floors came crashing down, they would all die. Was this tremor the quake itself or a warning? Did he have time to get to the stairwell at the end of the street and go higher?
He rushed for the stairs, only to find that thousands of others had been struck with the same idea. Panic choked him, making him feel as though the city had already collapsed on top of him, crushing his lungs. He fought for a breath. He wasn’t dead yet, and he had to believe that Ev and Alizhan weren’t, either. The shaking intensified. Following the example of those around him, he dropped to the ground in the middle of the street, kneeling and protecting his head and neck with his hands. The world roared. They were showered with dust from the ceiling. It felt like hours. Distant crashes echoed around them. Each house in the street jostled the other, and the one closest to the central hall cracked, its exterior walls falling outward into the street. People scurried away, squeezing tighter into the middle of the street, as far from the houses on either side as possible. Thiyo put his head back down. With every tiny speck that touched him, he wondered if this was the one that heralded the crumbling of everything.
And then there was silence, a moment that stretched long and empty as everyone in the street measured whether it was wise to speak or move.
Thiyo waited until many other people were up and moving about. His best plan was to find his way back to the tavern three levels above and wait. But the stairs at the end of the street were a crush of people and he deemed the central hall unsafe. There was nowhere to go. To calm his own jitters more than anything else, he went to the people who’d gathered around the fallen house and offered to help.
Or he intended to offer his help. It wasn’t until he arrived that he realized that without Ev or Alizhan or Djal, he would have difficulty speaking with these people.
The worry passed when a man handed him a shovel with only a nod. Nobody had time to stare at his foreign features now that they were all surviving this disaster together. Thiyo could dig, and so he dug.
Some of the people in the street lived there, and they opened their homes to those who were stuck for the shift. Thiyo was offered water, some kind of vegetable stew, and round flatbread, and after a few excruciating tries, he landed on the word for “thank you.” The woman who’d given him the dish smiled and patted him on the head like a child, even though he was taller than her. He didn’t manage to hide his eyeroll, but at least when she caught it, she burst out laughing.
“Sorry,” she said.
Thiyo grinned. It was only one word, but he knew it. He gave her a shrug of acceptance, and she gestured for him to come inside her house. He sat with her in the tiny kitchen, each of them on opposite sides of a square table. Space was at a premium in Adappyr—now it would be even more so—and all the houses he’d seen so far were small but efficient.
“Nari,” she said, pointing at her chest.
“Thiyo.”
Nari was older than him, of medium height and slight build, and she leaned against the stone wall of the kitchen, flattening her ear-length black curls. There was a dish stacked with more flatbread on the table, and she pushed it toward him. Thiyo smiled but declined. Other people might need that food, and he was too jittery to eat more.
Nari talked at him for a while, her tone pleasant and her pace slow, but he didn’t understand. No one had yet tried to teach him Adpri—not that his lessons in Laalvuri or Hoi had been fruitful. The sound of it was familiar from the chatter of the Vines crew on their journey, but that was all. Once, Thiyo could have plucked new words from nothing. He tried not to sigh.
It was so dull, being trapped like this. He was trapped in his head and trapped in this house and trapped in this street and trapped in this city. There was nowhere free, or there wouldn’t be until Alizhan fixed him. He wished he’d asked for Adpri instead of Laalvuri.
Nari poked his arm. She asked him a question. From her tone, it wasn’t the first time she’d done so. Thiyo offered her the apologetic smile he’d been practicing for weeks, the one he’d honed to perfection, paired with the slightest lift in his shoulders. It weighed on him. He never wanted to use it again.
Nari repeated her question.
The urge to roll his eyes or look away or walk out of the room rose up, but then he thought of the time he’d made Ev cry with his obstinate sulking. How backwards, that he would show the worst parts of himself to the people he loved most in the world. This stranger didn’t deserve more courtesy than Ev, but Ev wouldn’t have wanted him to treat her poorly, either.
Besides, he couldn’t leave. Who knew what chaos swamped the city? There was nowhere to go and he had nothing better to do. He listened.
Nari was patient, and she became more so when he showed signs of attention, watching her and repeating what she said. He came to understand that go meant “you.” His first guess was that she was asking where are you from, but when he said “Hoi,” she shook her head. She tried explaining another word to him, gesturing at both of them and their places in the room.
Adpri differentiates between “exist” and “be in a location or a condition” and “be this many years old.” These are three different verbs. The clarity of his own thought startled him. Like a bottle washed up on the shore, it had been adrift for some unknown age, but its message had been preserved. “But what are they?” he muttered to himself.
Nari looked surprised by his interjection, but she repeated herself, helpfully providing a form of the verb for “be in a location.” She met his eyes and said “Go somagel u Adappyr,” and once it was clear that he’d understood, she gave an exaggerated shrug with her palms spread, looking at the ceiling, and added, “Dudji?”
Thiyo took that to mean “why.” He beamed, having understood the question.
Nari waited for the answer.
Thiyo’s happiness evaporated when he contemplated how difficult it would be to explain what he was doing here, and how inadvisable it might be to reveal that he was an intimate acquaintance of the woman whose presence here had just started an
apocalyptic riot. He chewed his lip. An inelegant gesture, but he’d ceased to be elegant around the time Merat Orzh had thrown him in prison. It had just taken some time to accept it.
Finally, an insight came to him, as sudden and clear as his earlier memory about the verbs. “Meful,” he said. Friend.
“Go zup somagel yulur,” she said. You are not lucky.
He understood every word effortlessly. Was it Alizhan’s touch earlier? Was that why things were coming back? Thiyo felt luckier than he could ever explain, but all he did was smile and shake his head.
Nari asked him a few more questions—what language do you speak, when did you arrive in Adappyr, do you like it here, that sort of thing—and understanding grew easier with each one. Thiyo mimed being hit on the head to answer the question about language, because as more words came back to him in Adpri, he needed an explanation for why a flawless sentence sometimes rolled off his tongue. It was close enough to the truth.
He was grateful that Nari avoided more difficult topics, like what he did in life. “I abandoned my family and my duties at home to sail across the ocean with a man who broke my heart, and now I’m wandering around the world in a vain quest to stop a woman from bending the will of the earth to her mad vision and killing us all in the process” was beyond his current abilities and not the sort of thing one shared with a stranger, besides. Nari hadn’t been at Iriyat’s speech, or if she had, she’d run home quickly. The taste of her flatbread and the tidiness of her kitchen told Thiyo nothing of her politics, and it wasn’t safe to ask.
Eventually, Nari asked where his “friend” was.
“Alive, I hope,” Thiyo said, before he could consider the pall this would cast over their conversation.
“How will you find this friend? Where do they live?” Nari wasn’t being polite by omitting any mention of gender. Adpri had no distinct words for “he” and “she.” There were different words for a person who was present, or close by, and a person who was distant or absent. She’d chosen the pronoun for an absent person—also the one used to speak of the dead—but by asking “Where do they live?” in the present, she’d made her hopes clear.
Thiyo had missed language so much.
“They’re staying at an inn,” he said. He had no idea what the name was. He didn’t know what any street or neighborhood was called. “It’s three levels above us, I think, and on this side of the city.”
Nari clucked in disapproval. “A bad part of town. There are safer inns for the same price in other neighborhoods.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Well, I suppose most parts of town are the bad parts now,” Nari said. “If the stairs at the end of the street are intact, you shouldn’t have too much trouble getting to Stoneforest. It’s good you’re already on the Right Bank.”
“Stoneforest? That’s the name of the level?”
“Yes,” Nari said, studying him. She was probably wondering what had happened to him over the course of their conversation to change him from someone who could understand nothing to someone who could speak with an almost native ease.
He couldn’t blame her. He was wondering, too. “I should go,” he said. They’d passed more than an hour in conversation and there hadn’t been more tremors. He could only hope the city was calmer. “It might take a long time to get there.”
“It’s been nice talking with you, Thiyo,” Nari said.
“Thank you for inviting me in. It’s been nice talking with you,” he assured her. “You have no idea.”
She raised an eyebrow. She had some idea. She’d have to be staggeringly unobservant not to.
“You want to pat me on the head again before I go?” Thiyo asked her. He stood up and Nari came with him to the street.
“I shouldn’t have done that. But you looked so pleased with yourself when you got it right, you reminded me of my kid.”
Thiyo turned in surprise. She had a child she’d been ignoring this whole time?
She laughed at his expression. “Oh, no, they’re grown now. Can take care of themself. They went out with their shovel just before you came in, and they’ll be back soon enough. But they had some trouble learning to talk when they were little, so I always have sympathy for those like them.”
“Ah,” Thiyo said, unsure how this comparison made him feel.
“They learned,” Nari said. “Not as fast as you did, but they learned.”
“I’m exceptional.”
She laughed again. “I can tell. Go find your friend.”
Alizhan and Sanno emerged from their shelter in some stranger’s living room after the world went quiet again, and then he led her up to the level called Stoneforest, where he said Ev would find them if she still could. Alizhan had come to like Sanno in their hours together, because he’d refused to tell her anything about Ev until he’d thoroughly interrogated her about her motives. The interrogation had been difficult until Alizhan had slipped off a glove and offered him her bare hand.
Instead of recoiling in horror, he’d simply accepted her hand. This was the most wonderful place in the world, and Alizhan hated Iriyat for bringing harm to these people.
Like all Adpri, Sanno had some training about how to handle magic. It was still difficult. He was as emotional as Thiyo had been when Alizhan had first touched him, although for different reasons. Sanno had known two people like Mala and one like Djal, but no one like Iriyat or Alizhan—at least not that he remembered. Her intrusion into his head initially alarmed him, but once he accustomed himself to it, he treated her with caution. There was no disgust in him. Alizhan could live with that.
“Did you see what happened to Iriyat?” Sanno asked her. He still spoke aloud, even though he didn’t have to. It was a hard habit to break.
“I didn’t,” Alizhan said. “Last I saw of her, she was on the stage with you and Ev. It’s not good that both she and Ev are missing.”
Sanno was silent for a long time. Alizhan knew what his question was before he asked it.
“You didn’t cause the riot,” she said. “Iriyat planned for all those people to be gathered there. We know she has mercenaries in the city. Even if you’d only read her speech aloud and done nothing else, it might have happened.”
“I put Ev in danger,” Sanno said. “I should have known someone might suspect who she was.”
“Ev makes her own choices,” Alizhan said. “And she lived through this, I know she did.”
That last part was a lie, but Sanno didn’t know that. Or maybe he just wanted it to be true as much as Alizhan did. Neither of them pointed out all the ways she could be wrong.
“The rest of them will be there, too,” Sanno said. “Not just Ev.” They were waiting at the entrance to the stairs. Every open stairway was packed, since a few had been blocked by collapses, and there were still thousands of people filing out of the Sun Hall.
“It will be good to see them again,” Alizhan said, although it didn’t come out with much conviction. She liked Djal and Mala and Ifeleh, but they weren’t Ev. “I hope Thiyo is there, too.”
“The islander who doesn’t talk?”
Alizhan let out a bark of laughter. “Not for long.”
“How does he fit into all this, anyway?”
“We needed his help to crack this code,” Alizhan said. “We thought Prince Ilyr of Nalitzva could do it, but it turned out it was Thiyo the whole time. Thiyo used to be in love with the Prince, but they broke up. We met him in prison, which was after things had soured between them. Anyway, he helped us identify Iriyat as the mastermind behind a conspiracy to torture Laalvuri citizens who have magic, which brought him to the attention of one of Iriyat’s spies in Estva—oh, we went to Estva because we were wanted for murder in Nalitzva—and also Iriyat’s mother was involved—well, I’m not doing a very good job explaining it, but basically he’s here because he’s in love with Ev.”
“I… see,” Sanno said. “He cracked a code?”
“Oh, he used to speak every language in the world, even
ones he’d never seen before. Then he got thrown overboard and a medusa almost killed him.”
“He does have those scars,” Sanno said. “I thought maybe he was a tracker, someone who hunted them.”
“Not by choice,” Alizhan said.
“So he’s in love with Ev?” Sanno asked. “And is she in love with him?”
“Definitely. Although she used to deny it and maybe still does. I won’t know until I see her. It’s okay that you’re disappointed about Ev,” she assured him. “I’m in love with her, too.”
Sanno didn’t seem to know what to do with that information, so he reacted to her earlier statement. “I’m not—she stayed behind to rescue me and she didn’t have to, so I feel responsible and I want her to make it. That’s all. I’m sure she and… Thiyo will be happy together.”
“And me,” Alizhan said.
“Oh,” Sanno said. “Is that common in Laalvur? We always hear that the rules are much stricter in darker parts of the world.”
“Laalvur isn’t dark! I’ve seen the dark. Although actually in the Nightmost parts of the world, people don’t seem to care much about those sorts of rules. It’s too cold and lonely. But yes, you’re right about Laalvur in the other respect. There are a lot of useless rules.”
“No place is perfect,” Sanno said, gesturing at the crowd in the stairwell.
“But people here are trying! And it’s much easier to be me. I appreciate that.”
Their trip up to Stoneforest took hours. It was slow and frustrating, being trapped among all those people, but everyone was in good humor, kindness having overtaken fear in the wake of the disaster. Alizhan had worried that people would be angry with Sanno for his role in instigating the riot, but most people reacted to his bruised face with pity. A few thanked him for exposing the truth and agreed that the city should come together to repair itself.
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