There'd be time for that later. For now he pressed on, headed for the Carroway night markets.
Soon the neat Slumswelter flagstones underfoot turned to cobbles. The streets grew narrower and the houses became more densely packed, changing from grand stone to simple wood. The smell of varnish and grease cut through the frosty air. This was Alam's district, of artisans and craftsmen, and it felt very different than the haunted sense of the Slumswelters. It had a clinical kind of life to it, like a steady turning of gears, as finely tuned minds worked on complex problems of engineering and design.
From the map in his mind he knew where to go, weaving down alleys and lanes well-stocked with gear manufactories and cooperages, braising yards and tailors, most of them still shuttered at the early hour. He shared the streets with a few lone Allswellmen, snuffing revelatory lampposts with copper horns on long poles, here the odd Spindle or Gawk walking a lonesome path home from a long night shift on the Gutrock.
Once he caught the sense of an Adjunc, cold and sharp and drawing near, and fled down an alley and over a brickyard's low wall. In the shadow of a freshly tarred rain-barrel he hid until the sensation passed.
The Grammaton chimed for five, and he emerged from hiding to continue on. Soon he drew near to the first of the night markets, feeling them as a tingle in his skin, a hint of what he'd felt in the chaos of the Haversham. He steeled himself against it and continued on.
Soon there were people; not as many as the Haversham, but enough to make moving through them painful: Pinheads, Molemen, Spindles, Ratfers, Appomatox, Scabritics, the odd Balast, some Ogrics. There were voices of hawkers calling out their wares at a low night's pitch, and Sen gritted his teeth and hurried on, passing down one street rife with metal wheels bitted with teeth, down another lined with mechanical contraptions, and another with carpentry tools and saws.
Only one street away from the Haversham, where the noise of thoughts was so loud he could barely stand it, he found himself in a narrow street of scriveners' supplies. He stopped at the first stall and chose rapidly, gathering a stack of cheap reed-papers, a can of glutinous paste and brush, a black inkstone, an ink well, and a ducted bronze nib. He did not barter when the hawker, a bleary-eyed Dogsbody who named a high price, and simply paid five silvers and two coppers then hurried off, folding the goods into his backpack.
Through the streets of Carroway he gradually calmed, until in the Slumswelters he was back in control again, but drained. The millinery stood silent and still before him, and he gratefully stumbled up the stairs as the day dawned outside. In the back larder room he nailed the door shut behind him, then rolled into his bedding and shuffled into the protective cocoon of the larder.
It was cold, but he didn't light a fire. Their brazenness of the night before seemed outlandish now, sitting in the open hall with the flames blazing, where anyone could see. Now he lay and remembered that heat, while he shivered and chewed on an oat cake, before exhaustion dragged him down into the dark.
POSTING
He woke in darkness, and couldn't tell if it was day or night and for a while didn't care. He just lay there with the city's ocean of minds lapping against him. The Abbey was already in the past. In the Abbey he and Alam might have raced down for breakfast, giving Gellick a shove as he rolled up off his pallet. Afterward they'd have spent some time in the grounds doing chores, followed by lessons. It had been the routine of his life, and now he needed a new routine.
He ate a breakfast of the last of his water, an oat cake and an apple then pried open the door and went out into the chilly hall. Through the hole in the wall he saw the last light of a gray day draining out of the sky. Heavy, rain-fat clouds allowed only a few stars to wink through, obscuring even the mouth of the Rot.
Live by night, Mare had said. He was already falling into that pattern.
He lit a candle and drew his misericorde spikes. In the hall, he adopted one of the striking positions she'd shown him, and began to practice. He ran the blades flush along his forearms, spun them, struck down, blocked up, and moved at the same time. Up and down the hall he went, practicing the moves they'd tried on each other, inventing new variations as he went and stringing them together into chains.
After a time he expanded his range, moving the candle and fighting his way up and down the stairs, across the mud and through gaps in the wall on the ground floor. It wasn't much, and he'd need real training with an expert if he ever hoped to be truly effective, but it felt good.
After two hours passed by the Grammaton's chime he was steaming from the exercise, and set to leave the millinery. First he peered from the roof, then out along all sightlines from the various holes in the walls, but there was nobody near his blasted hill. As he stepped out under the black sky, he gave brief, strange thanks to the Heart for the lasting effect of the Drazi plague, leaving this area so cursed, then picked a careful path through the thick brunifer bushes and stinging reticole weeds into the overgrown park, hard on the millinery's shoulder.
In its center he appraised the stone fountain he'd seen the night before, carved with statuary he didn't recognize. Noses, ears and hands had been chopped off, leaving chests and legs and nothing to identify them by. Perhaps it was a retelling of Saint Ignifer's war with the Rot, but he couldn't be sure.
With his knife he set to work on the fountain's spigots, scraping away decades of clogging rust, working a twig down the lead tubes and flushing out ancient wads of spider web and dirt. He worked the worn pump handle and a few brackish spurts of water coughed out, yellow and foul. He worked it harder and more followed, until fresh water poured out in clean, freezing jets.
He drank until his back teeth ached with the cold, filled his bottles, then stripped and scrubbed down his body, thankful the snow underfoot had melted through the day. Heat steamed off his exposed skin, scars sharply white for all to see, until he quickly dressed again in his winter layers.
Back in the millinery larder room, he set a small fire in the hearth and sparked it with his striker. The flames bloomed quickly, spilling warmth and flickering light into the windowless dark, making the filth of the place impossible to ignore. Mouse droppings lay everywhere, while daubs of paint on the walls spelled out crude obscenities he'd never heard of before. Cobwebs proliferated in the corners, while in a broken-hinged cupboard he found the desiccated corpse of a crow.
Using a swatch of ferns from the park he swept the room as best he could, then sat down on his bedroll with his purchases from the night before spread before him: the inkstone and quill, the reed paper, the nibs, the inkwell.
He picked up the brass nib and attached it to the quill. He'd worked with tools like it before, though the pieces in the Abbey had been much finer. He couldn't afford vellum now. He poured a little water from one of his flasks in to the inkwell, then shaved the inkstone with the knife, stirring the scrapings with the nib until they dissolved. The nib drank ink easily, and when he placed it on the first of the reed papers, it wrote smoothly enough.
Avia.
I'm in the Slumswelters, where you brought me. Where are you?
Sen.
It was a simple message, written in large letters, and hardly the equivalent of The Soul. To make things worse, after a few moments the ink blotched through the porous paper, and the letters ran and smudged.
He tried again, this time using less water and making the letters bigger. It went better, though it used a lot of ink to make the large letters, and he had to keep shaving the inkstone to replenish it.
In an hour he produced ten good copies, laid out neatly before him. The message was large and clear. It had taken too long, but he was already getting faster. Perhaps a larger nib or a brush would speed the process along. When they were done he was famished, and ate another rock cake and some cheese, then slotted the papers carefully into his pack, pressed between two clean boards, along with the paste-can and brush. He tucked his coin purse into the inner folds of his cassock, strapped in his spikes, and carefully kicked out the fire.
He began posting in Lord Quill Square, at the Carroway edge.
It was a small square with a large statue of a blocky-shouldered man standing atop a chariot filled with eight women, pointing upward. This was Lord Quill, the Man of Quartz who had saved the city from the Drazi, commemorated in stone. It was probably put up shortly after he led the plague away, then forgotten, hundreds of years ago.
Sen watched the square carefully before entering, but the only sign of life was the dull glow of a furnace emanating from a ceramicist's shop. A half-Balast woman exited and laid out hot clays in the shape of Lord Quill and the Grammaton tower on a wooden table. Goods for sale.
He advanced carefully, and at the old hero's forgotten statue he pried open the paste can. After dribbling a little water in from his flask, and stirring with the brush, the paste released a thick and acrid-smelling mist. His heart raced, and it felt like he was under observation, though no one was watching him. In his hurry to make a posting, he slathered paste over his fingers, where it clotted quickly like a second skin. He took a calming breath, then daubed a thin rime over Lord Quill's boot, pressed the first of his finished papers on top, and smoothed it out.
He stepped back to survey his work. In the weak revelatory light the paper hung oddly yellow against the gray stone. People would certainly see it. The large inked words stood out starkly.
He walked deeper into Carroway. Along the quiet artisanal lanes he headed back to the night markets, thinking about the places Avia would be most likely see his message. Again he gritted his teeth as the empty streets grew busier, and he pushed past various castes in the orange revelatory glow, seeking out shuttered dinning bars to post upon. It was a little easier than the night before, but still at times he felt like he was drowning.
He posted his second on the blue wooden shutters of a dinning bar called the Yaling Chain. A small group of Ogric teamsters watched him from a crossing two blocks over, beneath the Carothaby bi-rail, but they didn't make a move toward him. The third he placed at the corner of the scrivener's street, across two empty revelatory gas canisters nudged up against the wall.
"What's that, boy?" a man's voice called out, and Sen scurried away.
After that he kept to the quieter parts of Carroway, closer to the Slumswelters. He posted on a rain barrel by the Quintillion Carothaby station. He posted on the railings of a glazier's, next to another post advertising an Induran circus act. Each location came with a lot of thought, a lot of preparation, and with each spread of paste and laying of the paper, the process grew a little smoother.
Still his heart throbbed the whole time, exhausting him. Still he looked around ceaselessly, watching for Adjunc. At times he glimpsed street children darting around in the hollows and alleys between brick-firing yards and tumbrel-merchants, the lowest of caste like Ratfers and Cowfaces, their eyes roaming over him like Gomorrah flies. He eyed them back, resting his hands on the spikes at his waist. He tried to walk as if unafraid, posting papers on an apothecarist's sidewall and a tailor's board. He could feel their indecision, holding back from this odd hooded figure, trying to decide if he was a threat or a victim.
His last two copies he posted on the tall Calk wall, near the millinery. As he touched the stone, vibrations rang through from the other side, where Balasts beat rocks through the day and night. He thought briefly of Gellick and the life he would almost certainly be returning to, along with calcification.
He returned to the millinery with the moon setting and dawn on the horizon, mentally and physically drained, wondering how long it would take to canvas the whole city. Perhaps he could post along every street on the dark side of the Levi River in half a year. There were some areas across the river he might gain access to as well, certainly the industrial areas around Afric, if not heading up toward the King's Roy. He fingered the coins in his purse. There was enough, perhaps, for paper and food. It gave him a sense of purpose.
He lay back in his creaky larder box in a warm and sleepy haze, imagining the arms of his search stretching out like white roots through the city's ocean, swimming up its streets and avenues, racing over all castes alike, seeking out his mother.
* * *
The next night began the same, with food, the misericordes, a wash in the park, then more work on his papers. He made fifteen this time, in only an hour, and took them foraying into the Moleman district of Belial.
The streets there were wide, clean and largely silent, lined with the windowless yards of usury butchers. Occasionally Sen caught the weak cry of a debt-victim held in bondage through the night, even felt their pain in his mind, but there was nothing he could do.
He posted carefully on signboards and lampposts, on low canal walls and on the turnstile for the Ambertham bi-rail station, Gylary Lark. Once he saw a tight scrum of Molemen exiting their usury yard in silence, carrying something that looked very much like a wrapped body on their low shoulders. Sen watched them as they walked by, and they watched him, but none of them spoke a word. Molemen didn't care about caste or scars, and that was a relief. Still, the memories of recently inflicted pain hung off them like wilting leaves, dropping in the winter's chill.
He posted his last four papers in a hurry and hastened back to the millinery hours before the sun came up. In the hall he took up his misericordes again, and practiced until the fear diminished.
The next night, after purchasing fresh fish, salted meat, figs and bread from the night markets, he edged into the Boomfire, that haunt of damask whores near the HellWest harbor. It was a tangle of winding alleyways lit red by shaded revelatories, with damasks of every caste from Sectiles to Malakites standing at corners and leaning from windows, waving to the navvies and dark-side men that went by. They largely overlooked Sen, just another low-caste child on a night pasting run. He went down alleys flanking the main artery of Shale's Hark with his heart in his mouth, pasting to brickboard walls and discarded ale casks. The chances of anyone seeing his postings in those places was low, but he was starting to appreciate the work he'd set himself was more complex than just letting his message be seen.
It was also about learning the places he could safely go. He knew every street and square from the maps he'd memorized as a child, but that was no substitution for standing there and smelling the night air redolent with burning scarab smoke and yeasty ale, feeling the unique mix of fears, desires and anger on the air. He needed to see the people as they saw him, and taste their minds turning on suspicions and old grudges, coming to know each batch of castes as just another flavor of each district in the city.
It was enlightening and terrifying. Every step and every street taught him more, and each night that passed he pushed further toward the center of the Boomfire, where it bordered on HellWest Docks and became a noisy, groany ruckus, made of grimy buildings built atop buildings, cantilevered out over the street. The air there was filled with the moans of damask at their work, the calls of drunkards, the occasional short sharp snap of a fight. The intensity of the past nights had already numbed Sen's sensitivity, but within central Boomfire's jumbled waters he felt new things; the musk of sex and pleasure, frustrated desire, humiliation and pain. Sensations blurred on the air all around him, rousing confusing thoughts of Feyon in his mind.
He pushed those thoughts away as best he could and hurried away.
"Cheap for you, darlin'," a Sectile damask called as he went by.
Another night he went along the Calk wall, taking refuge in the steady thrum of thought from the Balasts within its noisome white mist. Their minds were so simple and pure, focused only on the task at hand, moving slowly through their long shifts toward completion, each like a dripping sand timer counting out the hours. Briefly he stepped through one of the dolmen and lintel gateways into the Calk itself, where the air was a white fog of powdered stone and great rocky bodies moved down the streets like half-remembered dreams.
On other nights he went up to the edges of Indura, where the stone-flagged streets gave way to slopping expanses of chur
ned brown mud, and the buildings became twisted trees, mogrifer-hollowed and grafted onto each other, so everything there was sinuous and alive. There were dying Pinheads lying against a whiskey stall, their faces caved in by some plaguey rot that made them bark at the air like dogs, and beg for ale. There were Ratfer children covered head to tail in muck, dipping in and out of carrion piles slumped at the edge of open canal latrines. There were wailing Ninnies trying to sow pebbles into the weeds, and a cart of dead pigs rotting in a culvert, steamed round by Gomorrah flies. At Spitstock Square there was a Cavicurn in the stocks on the stage, its three boneless arms locked to the frame while a scant few night revelers rubbed moldy cabbage leaves in its tear-reddened face.
Sen fled, taking refuge from their penetrating sickness in a back alley between two lurching oft tree homes, only to find himself standing in a purplish, freezing puddle, in which two pale fingers floated.
He returned to the millinery numbed and disgusted. It was hard to believe Mare had been born and survived there, with only half a brain. It wasn't right that any castes should live in such squalid conditions.
"They like it," he heard two night roamers comment, pointing at him as he'd walked past on the way out of Indura, leaving mud footprints on the stone. "The filth and squalor suits their disposition."
It was a Cowface talking to a Bellyhead. They were already two of the lowest castes in the city, and even they looked down upon the Indurans. It made Sen sick.
Winter grew colder. Snow fell, and one night he spent much of his time clearing it from the molding straw roof, lest it break the fragile beams and crush him below as he slept. His small fire in those times did little to keep him warm, and he bought fresh blankets from the markets, and worked harder to seal up cracks in his fortified larder room. One night the water in the park's pipes froze, and he collected snow to melt while shuddering against the cold. The streets grew quieter as the cold bit deeper, and it became easier to go abroad for longer, more adventurous trips.
The Saint's Rise (Ignifer Cycle Book 1) Page 14