“Ask him what he wants.”
Zarun nods and answers. After a short dialogue, he turns to me again.
“He says he’s here to welcome us to the Harbor, the holy place of the Divine Being.”
“I got that much. Something about ‘garash’ and an order?”
Zarun frowns. “You have monks in the Empire, yes? People who retreat from the world and devote themselves to religion?”
“We do. Less than we used to, I think.” I remember something about a war between the monks and the Emperor, but I’m not sure if that’s history or just a story. “Is that what he is?”
“More or less.”
“My image of a monk is an old man with limbs like sticks and a long white beard.” I nod at the avatar of masculine perfection in front of us. “Not that.”
“There are many monastic orders in Jyashtan, and their traditions vary widely. His is called the gara-tseni, which is something like ‘those who carefully watch,’ or—”
“The Minders.”
“Right,” Zarun says. “Garash is the head of the order. He says anyone who wants to join them is welcome.” He scratches the side of his head. “I think. He gets a little flowery there.”
“Well.” I pause for a moment, considering. “Tell him…”
I’m saved from having to continue that statement—since I have no rotting idea what to tell him—by the arrival of yet another out-of-breath messenger, this one a boy with a peach-fuzz beard.
“Deepwalker!” he says. “There’s—”
“Let me guess,” I say. “More visitors.”
He gulps and nods. “Veldi’s here, but there’s a whole group with him. And they brought a bunch of stuff. They say there’s food!”
That would at least be something to get excited about. I’ve been steadfastly ignoring the rumbles from my stomach since morning.
“Okay.” I beckon to the leader of the door guards and nod at Harak. “Take him somewhere out of the way, politely, and tell him I’ll be back as soon as I can. Zarun, stick with me, let’s see what Veldi’s friends have to say.”
We follow the boy back through the central chambers. People are talking in small, excited groups, and I can almost see rumors winging their way through the air. If Veldi hasn’t brought food after all, there’s going to be a rotting riot.
“It looks good on you,” Zarun says in my ear.
I frown at him. “What does?”
“Command.”
“Please. You know I’m making this rot up as I go along.”
“Of course. But you don’t let it show.” He gives me that brilliant smile, and I shake my head.
This time, our guards have already escorted the visitors to a small chamber inside the ziggurat. There are, as the messenger warned, quite a few of them. I count a dozen armed Imperials, including Veldi, all young men wearing old-fashioned swords, dark robes, and with their hair done up in the same strange, elaborate style. Four of them stand in a square around a young woman in a long, voluminous kizen, with a silk veil drawn in front of her face.
To one side of these dignitaries, there are another dozen people in less elaborate costumes. They’re evenly split between dark-skinned southerners and pale, blond icelings dressed for labor in rough vests and trousers. Beside them is a pile of heavy canvas sacks, and barrels that seem to be mostly full of silver-skinned fish. Just the sight of it makes my mouth water.
Meroe and Shiara arrive only moments after we do. I’d badly like some time to consult with Meroe, actually, but that doesn’t seem to be an option. As soon as they notice us, the Imperials stand and bow, and I respond automatically. The young woman steps forward, her four retainers following. Her bow is shallower, carefully precise.
“Isoka Deepwalker,” one of the men says. “You represent the new arrivals?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I say.
“My lady of Cresos, ruler of the Harbor, bids you welcome,” he says. “She brings you these gifts as a token of her generosity.”
“She has our thanks,” I say.
The veiled figure beckons, and the man speaking leans closer so she can whisper. He straightens again and says, “My lady wishes to meet with you in private, if that is acceptable.”
I glance at the others. “If what she has to say concerns our crew, then the whole Council should be there.”
Another whisper.
“The southerner may attend,” the man says. “But not the Jyashtani. My lady has suffered enough at the hands of his kind.”
I go tense. Zarun’s face is smooth, unreadable. I glare at the veiled woman.
“Give us a moment?” I ask, and step back with the others. “Any idea what’s going on?”
“Imperials hate Jyashtani,” Zarun says, with a shrug. “It’s not exactly news.”
“It was never a problem on Soliton,” I say.
“Soliton is a ship full of dregs and outlaws,” he says.
“They were on Soliton, too,” Meroe says. “Something else is going on here.”
“Their language is … odd,” Shiara says. “But I’d guess they’re noble-born.”
“Why would Kuon Naga feed nobles to a rotting ghost ship?” I say.
“Because he had some he wanted to be quietly rid of?” Meroe says. “That’s what my father did to me.”
Rot. I hadn’t thought of that. She doesn’t seem upset, but I make a note to apologize later.
“I’m missing something,” Shiara says quietly. “Cresos. It sounds familiar.”
“I could tell them to go to the Rot,” I say to Zarun. “I don’t want to start off with them thinking they get to push us around.”
“We need the food,” he says. “Besides, I can hardly follow this formal talk anyway. I’ll go see if I can get anything more out of Harak, and you find out what you can from Lady Cresos. Maybe if we compare notes we’ll get somewhere.”
I nod, feeling sour. Shiara, Meroe, and I return to the visitors, while Zarun heads back the way we came.
“Lady Cresos is more than welcome to meet with us,” I say, “though we can’t offer much in the way of hospitality. In the meantime, we would like to distribute your gifts among our crew as soon as possible.”
“Of course,” the man says. “Our servants will assist. Some of the Harbor’s fruits will be unfamiliar.”
The servants—all the non-Imperials—start picking up the sacks and barrels. I let them pass, then extend a hand, and the veiled woman follows us out. I note some sour looks among her attendants, but none of them speaks up.
* * *
We settle in another empty stone chamber—the ziggurat certainly doesn’t lack for those—with a blanket spread on the floor. Lady Cresos sits, folding her legs beneath her in the nerve-deadening formal style. Shiara matches her neatly, and to my surprise, so does Meroe, with grace enough that you might have thought she was raised in the royal court. I suppose she was raised in a formal court, and probably had special training on dealing with Imperials.
I sit beside her, legs defiantly crossed, and wonder if I should fart and pick my nose to make the point. Lady Cresos inclines her head and reaches up to fold back her veil. When she straightens—
There’s a blurred moment of confusion, and my heart skips a beat.
She doesn’t look that much like Tori, really. She might be about the same age, thirteen or fourteen—has Tori’s birthday passed? I’ve lost track of the date—with the same long, smooth black hair, curling down past her waist. She holds herself in much the same way, the careful manners inculcated by etiquette tutors, and a touch of powder enhances the pallor of her cheeks. Her eyes are different, wider and light brown.
Meroe is looking at me, concerned, and I grit my teeth. Focus, Isoka. Tori is in Kahnzoka, Blessed knows how many miles away, and if I don’t get out of here …
“Thank you,” Meroe says. “For the gifts. The angels didn’t give us much time to gather supplies.”
“They can be rude things, can’t they?” the girl say
s, with the ghost of a smile. “It is nothing. They bring us more than we need, and I am pleased to share. You are the first newcomers in a long time.”
“Lady Cresos—” I begin.
“You may call me Catoria, if you wish.”
I pause, not sure of the etiquette, but eventually decide to take her at her word. “Catoria, then. My name is Isoka, and these are my fellow Council members Meroe and Shiara.”
“An honor,” Catoria says, with another slight bow.
“You said it’s been a long time,” Meroe says eagerly. “How long? And what happens when no one arrives?”
“Veldi said five years,” I cut in. “What about Soliton? How long does it stay in the dock?”
Catoria holds up her hands, long sleeves brushing on the blanket. “I had a feeling you would be confused. Perhaps I should begin at the beginning?”
Meroe and I look at each other. I glance at Shiara, who has raised one painted eyebrow, as though to ask why I insist on making a fool of myself.
“Perhaps,” I say, “that would be best.”
7
TORI
“Help!” The boy sounds desperate. “Somebody help, please.”
His cry is nearly lost in the chaos. Grandma Tadeka’s hospital, never empty, is now packed to the rafters. The longer-term patients have been moved upstairs, crowding two or three to a sleeping mat to make room for the flood of new arrivals. They started turning up just after dark, a blood-drenched, mud-spattered horde, stumbling in on their own or carried by friends, family, helpful strangers. There are five of us helping Grandma tonight, Kosura and I along with three older women, and while Grandma has sent out a call, extra assistance has been slow to arrive. So far, all we’ve been managing is to sort out the deluge.
The boy’s voice nearly vanishes as I fight my way over to him, pushing through groups of men and women clustered around the injured. Kosura is trying to talk to a young man nursing a broken arm, while an older woman screams at her about her son needing immediate attention. One of the other assistants is pulling a man’s twisted leg back into place—he lets out a piercing shriek and flails at her, which she ignores as she wraps the splint.
When I reach the boy, I find him standing over the prone body of a girl in her late teens, holding her limp hand in his. I don’t see any injuries on her, but her robe is mud-stained, and she’s unconscious. Her lips are flecked with blood.
“What happened?” I try to sound comforting, but I have to shout to make myself heard.
“One of the horses kicked her!” The boy, close to my age, is fighting back tears. “She was trying to get me out of the square, and the Ward Guard rode in. The horses—”
The girl coughs, weakly, spraying blood across the mud-tracked floor. I bend over to listen to her breathing, and it bubbles wetly. Something’s badly broken inside her, and she’s going to drown in her own fluids. There’s certainly nothing I can do about it.
“Come on,” I tell the boy. “Let’s get her up.”
Moving her can’t be helpful, but there’s no choice. I pull her off the floor, trying not to picture the jagged ends of broken ribs shifting and grinding. The boy gets under her other arm, sniffling, his tears cutting tracks through the grime on his face. Together, we walk toward the back of the room, where the curtains around Grandma’s office have been extended to separate a whole section of the hospital floor.
“I’ll take her from here,” I say, when we reach the curtain. The boy seems too numb to question me. I take the girl’s weight and stagger forward—she’s bigger than I am, and her feet drag on the floor—pushing through the curtain.
Beyond, there are more sleeping mats, with more patients. All of these are considerably worse off than the people out on the main floor, and the air smells of blood and shit. Grandma Tadeka, her arms bloody to the elbows, works beside one heavily pregnant woman, while burly Hasaka carries a man’s limp, bloodstained body to a mat in the corner with surprising gentleness. Giniva, the mage-blood girl whose sister I’d turned away from the sanctuary, is changing bandages, with the look of someone who’s about to be sick but is determined to press on anyway.
I find the nearest empty mat and let the girl down as gently as I can. I check, and she’s still breathing, though she seems weaker. As I straighten, I hear an infant’s high, piercing wail, and turn to see Grandma calling Giniva over. She hands her a cloth-wrapped bundle that must be the baby.
“Take her upstairs,” Grandma says, over the crying. “Find Menako, she’ll know what to do.”
Giniva nods, nervously, and hurries off. Grandma heads in my direction, wiping her gory hands on a rag.
“Is she going to be all right?” I can’t help but ask.
“The baby will be fine. The mother won’t. Too much blood.” Grandma’s tone is clipped, clinical, but I can hear the strain in her voice. If I dared to open my mind—which, right now, would be like inviting a hundred people to scream in my ears—I know I would feel her turmoil, in spite of her brave face.
As a ghulwitch, she can do more than any ordinary doctor. But her powers aren’t unlimited, and the more she has to intervene the better the chance of something going wrong. On a day like this, she has to ration her strength, and I know she must already be nearing her limits. I can’t imagine what I would do in her place, faced with so much pain, knowing that I could help some, but not all—
“Who’s this?” she says, looking down at the girl.
I shake myself. It’s been a long night. “I don’t know. A boy brought her in, said a horse kicked her.”
Grandma rips the girl’s robe open, and I have to fight an automatic urge to look away, out of modesty. There’s a mess of torn, bloody skin in the center of an enormous purple bruise. Grandma frowns, and lays her hand on the girl’s forehead. I feel a faint prickling across my skin as she invokes her Ghul Well. This is forbidden magic, the stuff that created the Vile Rot and nearly ended the world, but it never seems like much when Grandma uses it. Often it has no visible effect at all.
“She’s dying,” Grandma says. “Broken ribs punctured the lung. She won’t last an hour.”
I sit back on my haunches, feeling the weight of exhaustion. Grandma looks down at the girl for a moment, then sighs and closes her eyes. A faint purple aura flickers around her hands. The girl stiffens, and draws in a sharp breath.
A few seconds, and it’s done. The girl breathes out, without the awful wet sound. Grandma sits back, her shoulders slumping.
“Did what I could,” she says. “The ribs will have to heal the rest of the way on their own. Tell her people to keep her in bed.”
“I will.” I bow my head. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. We’re not done.” She gets back on her feet, a little wobbly, and gestures to Hasaka, who hurries over. “Take her out and give her a blanket and some water.”
I tug the girl’s torn robe so she’s mostly covered. Hasaka comes back with a sheet, and we put it around her shoulders. Together, he and I lift her, and carry her back through the curtain. For obvious reasons, only those who know Grandma’s secret—people from the mage-blood sanctuary, for the most part—can be allowed in the back.
The boy explodes into tears when I tell him the girl—his sister? I have no idea—will live, and we set her on a mat and give him Grandma’s instructions. He nods, frantic and sniffling. I turn to go back to the front, to see who else needs help, but Hasaka takes me by the shoulder.
“Tori,” he says quietly. “I’ve been in the back with Grandma since this started. Has anyone told you anything about what happened?”
“Just a little,” I tell him. “There was a group stuck at the draft checkpoint near the High Market, and they started shouting at the guards, chanting, that kind of thing. The Ward Guard ordered them to disperse, and…” I shake my head. “Nobody seems to know how it started, but pretty soon people were throwing rocks, and the Ward Guard were laying out everyone in sight. When their cavalry showed up, they charged the crowd.”
>
That’s the story I’ve pieced together, anyway, from the two dozen people I’ve talked to. Wounded are still coming in, though the flood has slowed a little. The majority were hurt in the stampede that had followed the guard cavalry’s charge, thrown against buildings or trampled underfoot.
It’s becoming a depressingly familiar sight here at the hospital. Nearly every day sees someone injured by the guards at the checkpoints. The haul of recruits must not be meeting the quotas, because the enforcers have daily become more insistent.
“Again,” Hasaka says with a sigh. “Rotting idiots in the guard. Don’t they see where this is going to end? How long do they think they can keep pushing people?”
I give an uncomfortable shrug. “I’d better go see if they need help at the front.”
Hasaka nods and trudges back behind the curtain, and I hurry to Kosura, who is setting yet another broken arm. Thankfully, the girl with the broken ribs is the last serious case of the evening, and we spend the rest of our time dealing with injuries that fall within my competence. At Grandma’s direction I’ve learned to bandage, splint, and stitch, and a little bit about herbs and poultices. Kosura knows more than I do, as usual, and her inner reserve of kindness and patience seems limitless. By the time we close the doors, long after midnight, she still has a kind word for patients begging for extra blankets we don’t have and liquor we won’t give them, whereas my own attitude has turned distinctly snappish.
Hasaka arrives to lock up the main doors, speckled with blood as though he’d just come from an abattoir.
“Tori, Grandma wanted to see you before you leave,” he says, as he passes. “Go talk to her so she can get some sleep, would you?” Hasaka considers himself the guardian of Grandma’s health, though no one else—least of all Grandma—agrees with this.
I nod and head back to the curtained-off section. On the way, I pass Giniva, dressed in a fresh robe but her skin and hair are still smeared with gore. She’s clutching her soiled clothes to her chest, looking at the ground. I give her a bow as she passes.
“Thank you for your help.”
City of Stone and Silence Page 9