by Robin Hobb
“There. I heard the rope hit the bottom when I dropped it. It’s hand over hand from here on down.”
“If you step down into live Silver . . .” She left the thought dangling.
“I saw debris down there when they fished for the bucket. I’ll stand on it.”
She felt him moving again. He was working harder now, and his weight jerked the chain back and forth. Her hands were cramping from their grip on the cold metal, and the links bit into her feet. She freed one hand to lift the necklace over her head. Rapskal was too far below her to hand it to him. She gritted her teeth and then dropped it, letting light fall away from her. “Look where you step,” she warned him, and she realized that she was back to it being her and Rapskal doing something foolhardy together. She was still angry at being compelled to be here, but she was not sure Rapskal was the one to blame for it.
The jerking continued for some time. Bereft of the jewelry’s shimmer, the blackness closed in on her. She closed her eyes and willed herself to remember that the shaft was not, truly, that narrow. Deep, yes, very deep. So far from light and moving air. She began to tremble and not with the cold. She hated this. Hated it and feared it. Darkness was a thing to her, not just the absence of light, but a choking thing that could cover her over like a smothering hand.
“Come down,” he whispered. “I’ll catch you. But be careful.”
She did not want to go down to him, but her hands were losing their strength. She moved down to the end of the chain, and then onto the rope. Her numbed hands slipped, refused her weight, and she slid, shrieking, the rope burning through her hands. He caught her hard and swung her to his side. “Open your eyes!” he demanded of her, and only then did she realize they were clenched shut.
She held tight to him and opened her eyes slowly. He wore the moon necklace now. The light it cast was faint and yet bright in contrast to such utter darkness. She looked away from it, trying to let her eyes adjust.
They stood together in the bottom of the shaft. Looking up, she was startled to see distant pinpricks of light. Stars. The walls of the shaft were almost smooth, the seams of the stonework fine and straight. They stood on rubble of metal and pieces of ancient wood preserved by the cold. “Stoop down,” she requested in a whisper. When he did, he brought the light with him as she bent beside him. Squatting, she touched the long-broken platform beneath their feet. Here was a piece of a gear. “This is the part that went up and down in the shaft. It must have broken and fallen a long time ago.”
The necklace moved slightly with his nod. “It did,” he said. “In the quake. The last big one.” There was a clutter of smaller sticks that crunched as she stepped on them. Something gleamed among them. Silver?
He caught his breath as she pushed the sticks aside with her bare hands and then peered more closely. “It’s a ring,” she said. She picked it up, and her touch woke it. Elderling-made. A flame jewel lit with a pale yellow gleam in a jidzin setting. Jidzin. She knew it for what it was now, Silver trapped in iron. She held it between two fingers, using it as a tiny lamp. “All kinds of stuff on the ground down here. But no Silver. Just earth.” She peered closer.
“Rapskal, look here, where we can see past the broken platform. The bottom of the shaft is paved with stones! That makes no sense for a well! Think how we lined our drinking-water holes on the way here. We wanted the water to seep up from the bottom and in from the sides. We filtered it, but we didn’t block it. Why would they make a shaft this deep and close it off on all sides from the Silver? It makes no sense.”
“I don’t know.” His voice was shaking. “This is the first time I’ve ever been down here. I wanted to come down here, but I couldn’t.” He swallowed.
“Well, we’re both here now.” She recalled Carson’s frequent words. “Everything the Elderlings did, they did for a reason.” She turned in a half circle. Her boot snagged on something: a piece of dirty fabric. “Someone’s old tunic is down here. Did they throw garbage down here when the well went dry?”
“No,” he whispered. “No.”
She tugged at the dirt-caked folds. “Look. Here’s a glove. No. It’s a gauntlet.” She picked it up by a fingertip, shook it free of dirt and sticks and studied it.
“There’s the other one,” he said, but he made no move to touch it. He crouched with his back braced against the wall, watching her. She found the mate and tugged it from under a stone that had trapped it. The stone rolled slightly and tapped against the wall with a hollow sound. She turned to look at it.
“Amarinda,” he said, and his voice choked on the word. She leaned closer. It was not a stone she had dislodged. It was a skull, brown and cracked. She stared, feeling the pressure of a scream build inside her. Then it died away to nothing. She took a long careful breath.
“These were her gloves. For working the Silver.”
He nodded. She heard him gulp back tears before he gasped, “After the quake. I couldn’t find her. I was desperate. I even went to Ramose. I threatened him, and he finally told me that she might have gone down the well when it hit. To make it safe somehow. Everyone was running, trying to get on the boats, pushing toward the pillars, trying to be anywhere except in Kelsingra. In the distance, the mountain was smoking. They feared mudslides and floods. It had never happened here, but other Elderling towns had been buried that way. So many people were fleeing, but I couldn’t go without you. I came here, but the mechanism was broken, half of it fallen down the shaft and no one answered my shouts. My shoulder was broken. I tried to move the debris but I couldn’t. I shouted myself hoarse, but no one answered. Then the second quake hit.” He cradled his arm, his face creased with a memory of old pain. “I wanted to get down here somehow, to be sure. But I couldn’t. I went back to our home, hoping to find you. Someone told me they had seen you, leaving through one of the pillars. I knew it was a lie, knew you wouldn’t leave without me, but I hoped it wasn’t. I left you a message in my column by our door. And I went with the others.” He shook his head slowly. “We all meant to come back. We knew the streets would mend themselves and that the walls would heal if we gave them time. The Silver in them told them what they must be.”
His voice died away. He looked around the well shaft blindly.
“I must have died before I ever returned. Where or how, I’ll never know. After the message I left for you, no other memories are stored in the pillars. Nothing from me. Nothing from you.”
Thymara straightened slowly. She shook the gauntlets, and the last stick that fell from them was a finger bone. The broken sticks under her feet, thin ribs preserved by the cold. “Is this why you made me come down here? To see this, to prove she died here?”
He shook his head. Her eyes had adjusted to the pale light the jewelry made, but there was no color to his features, only planes and shadows. “I wanted you to be her. That’s true. I still want that. We always dreamed that we would live again in another Elderling couple. That we would walk and dance and dine together. Make love in our garden again. That was why we made the columns as we did.” He drew a deep breath and sighed it out. “But that’s not why I brought you here. I brought you here for the dragons. And for Malta and Reyn and their child. For Tintaglia. For all of us. We need the Silver, Thymara. A bit of dragon blood or a scale can start the changes. But to sustain them, to move them in directions that let us live, that will let our children live? That will take Silver.”
She knew that. It didn’t change the facts. “There’s no Silver down here, Rapskal. Only bones.”
She found she had slipped the ring on her finger. It hung loose against her knuckle. Not her ring. The jidzin against her skin whispered secrets she didn’t want to hear.
“You used to tend this well. You and some of the other artisans. You spoke of managing it. I thought . . .”
“I don’t remember any of this, Rapskal.” She slapped the gauntlets against her thigh, and tried to push them through the loop in her gear belt. She wasn’t wearing one.
“Don’t you?”
he asked her quietly.
She looked at him without speaking. She stared around at the faintly gleaming walls of the small space. “I remember it was dangerous to come down here. We always carried lights. We were always supposed to have a partner.”
“Ramose,” he said quietly.
She smiled bitterly. “Never trust a jealous man,” she said, and she wondered what she meant by it. A silence built and she did not fight it. She studied the smooth black walls, waiting for a memory to push into her mind. Nothing came. She looked down at the bones and tried to feel something about a woman who had died here a long time ago.
A stray thought came to her. “I’ve always been afraid of this well, since I saw it. But I couldn’t have known that Amarinda died here. She couldn’t go back and put this memory in the stone.”
“No. You couldn’t have known. But I did. Even back then, when I left a message for her and then left the city, I think I knew. And my memories tinged yours.”
“But you still brought me here.”
“It was a last chance. For all of us.”
She thought about that for a time. A last chance. She had warned him that if he forced her down the well, it would never be the same between them. Well, she had come of her own free will. But she still suspected that everything she felt for him had changed.
“My hands are cold,” she said, to say something. Then she added, “It’s useless to stay down here, Rapskal. There’s nothing for us here. I don’t remember anything. We’d best get back up there while we can still climb.”
He nodded, defeated, and she gestured for him to go first. She had always been a better climber than Rapskal. She boosted him high and then held the line tight for him and waited until she heard him say, “I’m on the chain now!” before she started to follow him.
She realized she had put on the gauntlets only when her claws pressed against the ends of the fingers. “Huh,” she said, only to herself. The gloves had closed off the light from her ring. It doesn’t matter, she told herself. I’ll soon be up and out of here. She took a wrap of the line around her hand and set her bare foot to the wall. Cold. She reached over her head with her free hand, gripped the rope, and began her ascent in the dark. Going up was much harder than the burning slide down had been. She had no one to hold the rope tight for her; it swung and whipped below her as she climbed, and the claws of the feet skittered on the smooth wall.
Below the chain she paused. The gauntlets had saved her rope-burned hands, but they’d be a hazard on the slick chain. She moved her weight onto the chain, then looped the rope around herself, braced her feet on the wall, dragged off one gauntlet . . . and found herself staring at a small tracery of Silver on the black stone before her. Had it been here when she climbed down? She was certain she would have seen it. Unless the gleam of the moon locket had hidden it from her.
She stuffed the gauntlet down the front of her tunic. She gripped the chain afresh and leaned closer. Writing. She put a fingertip to the letters, traced their almost familiar curves. It said . . . something. Something important. Almost of its own accord, her hand reached the end of the line of letters and then tapped a glyph there. Twice.
Below her, the grind of stone on stone startled her. She wanted to flee up the chain, but sharpest curiosity made her back slowly down the rope instead. There it was. A large block of stone in the wall was retreating, sliding smoothly away, leaving an opening behind it. “The seam valve,” she heard herself say out loud.
And then the memory came, of her first trip down the shaft with the older Silver worker. He’d shown it to her, halting the platform on its slow descent. “Can you believe,” he’d asked her, “that sometimes the Silver pressure was so high, it came into the reservoir at this level? Sometimes, we’d have to come down here and open the drains to let it out. There were pipes that would carry it out into the river and away from the city. And when the Silver seams were really producing, we’d have to shut down some of them, to keep it from welling out the top and running through the streets.” The oldster had coughed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “This seam has been dry for decades,” he continued sourly. “And if the Silver pressure keeps dropping, we probably never will open it again. Well, start cranking, girl. It’s a long way down to where the Silver comes in now. We need to measure the level of standing Silver and log it. That’s your job now, once every seventeen days. Can’t ration it if we don’t know how much the seams are producing.”
Thymara blinked, abruptly surprised to find herself alone and hanging on a rope in a well shaft. “Reservoir shaft,” she corrected herself quietly. Reflexively, she reached over and tapped the glyph again. She heard the grinding halt, and then resume with a different note. She moved down the line and set her hand to the wall until she felt the brick moved back into alignment. Relief slowed her thundering heart. Best to leave things as they had been until someone like Carson could help her understand what little she remembered.
As she lifted her hand from the block, it seemed to tremble under her fingers. Then it suddenly shot out, past her hand, to land with a clatter at the bottom of the shaft. A square of liquid Silver followed it, pushing out thickly, at first keeping its shape and then turning into a fat worm wriggling down the wall. She stared at it, trying to make sense of what she saw. The seam had replenished itself. And the old valve had given way. Stone grated as two adjacent blocks swung out unevenly from the wall as the heavy Silver forced its way out and into the shaft. A slow bulge began around the leak. She heard a pop and heard another brick fly out of the wall. It hit the opposite side of the shaft with force, and a gout of Silver surged after it. She stared aghast, then shrieked, “Rapskal! Something broke down here!”
“What?”
“Climb!” she shouted up the shaft. “Climb fast!” She went up the rope like a frightened monkey, gained the chain and did not pause. The one gauntlet was a hindrance on the slick chain; there was no time to strip it off. She raced a zigzagging crack in the wall that paralleled her progress. It shone silver as the long-suffering stones gave way to the pressure behind them. They opened with sharp pops that hurt her ears.
Rapskal had paid attention to her cry. He was waiting for her at the top of the well, grabbing her by the shoulders of her tunic and jerking her to safety. “Do we run?” he asked her, and his eyes were his own again, wide in a scared face.
“Uphill!” she confirmed, and they retreated to the edge of the plaza. Dimly she recalled a tale of a time when the silver had overflowed the well and run down the streets to the river. People, fish, and birds had died from its touch.
Overpowering curiosity made them pause at the edge of the square to look back. The dragons had not fled. They stood by the well mouth, visibly shivering with excitement. They both had their heads lowered inside the shaft. As they watched, Sintara dropped to her front knees and stretched her neck down farther. She looked ridiculous, hunkered down. Her ribs worked as she crouched there, and abruptly Heeby followed her example. Were they drinking?
Thymara gasped for breath, her gauntleted hand on Rapskal’s shoulder. Dawn was starting to gray the sky at the eastern edge of the horizon. The dragons still drank. No Silver reached the top and brimmed over. Then Heeby uttered a squeal of protest and lifted her gleaming dripping muzzle. She stared at Rapskal indignantly. His voice was his own as he said, “She’s furious. Sintara’s neck is longer and she can still reach the Silver, but Heeby can’t.” He lifted his voice. “Don’t you worry, pretty girl. I’ll fill buckets and buckets for you. I promise.”
Thymara’s mind began to work again. “The buckets Tats and the other keepers used to haul rubble away from the well. We need to fill them with Silver and get them to Tintaglia. I’ll lower them down and haul them up. You don’t touch them unless I say it’s safe.”
He nodded and turned to look at the gloved hand that gripped his shoulder. He scowled. “What is that made from?” he demanded.
Thymara didn’t look at him or it as she put the second gaunt
let on. Heeby lay as much on her belly as a dragon could, her head down the well, struggling to reach the stuff. She watched her own dragon gulping down the Silver as if her life depended on it. It did. She understood a little of what Sintara had told her about hating dependence of any kind. Dependence forced one to make compromises, ones they would rather not recall. She looked at the glove on her hand, heavy leather with the scale beds still visible.
“Dragon hide,” she said. “The only thing impervious to Silver.” She felt a shadow wash over her and looked up. Dragons were circling, and a moment later, their wild trumpeting filled the air. “We’d better get those buckets filled now if we’re going to get any,” she told him, and he nodded.
The baby was squalling, a lusty angry cry. Malta was laughing and crying as she fumbled at the front of her tunic. When she freed her breast, Ephron seized it indignantly; his cries stopped so suddenly that Reyn laughed aloud. Their son was thin, his eyes sunken and his little hand a claw on her breast, but he was alive and fighting to remain so. He suckled so hard that Malta winced, and then laughed again.
“She heard me,” she told Reyn. “At the last, she heard us. She changed him.” Tears ran down her face and followed the curves of her smile. She leaned forward to touch her dragon. The breath from her nostrils barely stirred the fine hair on Ephron’s head. “He’s going to live, Tintaglia. He’s going to live, and I will see he remembers all I know about you.”
In another part of the city, a wild trumpeting of dragons suddenly arose. Malta turned to Reyn. “I think they know. And soon Kalo will be here to take what is left of her.”
Reyn asked the dreadful question they had both wondered. “Will that make him of her lineage, if he takes her memories? Will he know how to help Ephron again if he needs it? Or if we have other children?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. Other children. A foolish dream, perhaps. They had one, one to cherish, one whose eyes were closed now, his little round belly tight and full. Had they a right to hope for anything more than that?