“Huh. So you can talk,” Lift said. “Didn’t think you could, after all that staring around dumbly last night.”
“I…” The boy blinked, then looked at her. No drooling. Must be a good day for him. A grand accomplishment. “Mother … come back?”
“Probably not,” Lift said. “Sorry, kid. They don’t come back. What’s your name?”
“Mik,” the boy said. He looked at her, confused, as if searching—and failing—to figure out who she was. “We … friends?”
“Nope,” Lift said. “You don’t wanna be my friend. My friends end up as emperors.” She shivered, then leaned in. “People pick his nose for him.”
Mik looked at her blankly.
“Yeah. I’m serious. They pick his nose. Like, he’s got this woman who does his hair, and I peeked in, and I saw her sticking something up his nose. Like little tweezers she used to grab his boogies or something.” Lift shivered. “Being an emperor is real strange.”
The Stump dragged over one of the kids who’d been fighting and plopped him on the stone. Then, oddly, she gave him some earmuffs—like it was cold or something. He put them on and closed his eyes.
The Stump paused, looking toward Lift and Mik. “Making plans on how to rob me?”
“What?” Lift said. “No!”
“One more meal,” the woman said, holding up a finger. Then she stabbed it toward Mik. “And when you go, take that one. I know he’s faking.”
“Faking?” Lift turned toward Mik, who blinked, dazed, as if trying to follow the conversation. “You’re not serious.”
“I can see through it when urchins are feigning illness in order to get food,” the Stump snapped. “That one’s no idiot. He’s pretending.” She stomped away.
Mik wilted, looking down at his feet. “I miss Mother.”
“Yeah,” Lift said. “Nice, eh?”
Mik looked at her, frowning.
“We get to remember ours,” Lift said, standing. “That’s more than most like us get.” She patted him on the shoulder.
A short time later, the Stump called that playtime was over. She herded the kids into the orphanage for naps, though many were too old for that. The Stump gave Mik a displeased eye as he entered, but let him in.
Lift remained in her seat on the stone, then smacked her hand at a cremling that had been inching across the step nearby. Starvin’ thing dodged, then clicked its chitin legs as if laughing. They sure did have strange cremlings here. Not like the ones she was used to at all. Weird how you could forget you were in a different country until you saw the cremlings.
“Mistress,” Wyndle said, “have you decided what we’re going to do?”
Decide. Why did she have to decide? She usually just did things. She’d taken challenges as they’d arisen, gone places for no reason other than that she hadn’t seen them before.
The old people who had been watching the children slowly rose, like ancient trees releasing their branches after a storm. One by one they trailed off until only one remained, wearing a black shiqua with the wrap pulled down to expose a face with a grey mustache.
“Ey,” Lift called to him. “You still creepy, old man?”
“I am the man I was made to be,” he said back.
Lift grunted, climbing from her spot and strolling over to him. Some of the kids from before had left their pebbles, with painted colors that were rubbing off. A poor kid’s imitation of glass marbles. Lift kicked at them.
“How do you know what to do?” she asked the man, her hands shoved in her pockets.
“About what, little one?”
“About everything,” Lift said. “Who tells you how to decide what to do with your time? Was it your parents who showed you? What’s the secret?”
“The secret to what?”
“To being human,” Lift said softly.
“That,” the man said, chuckling, “I don’t think I know. At least not better than you do.”
Lift looked at the sky, up along slotlike walls, scraped clean of vegetation but painted a dark green, as if in imitation of it.
“It is strange,” the man said. “People get such a small amount of time. So many I’ve known say it—as soon as you feel you’re getting a handle on things, the day is done, the night falls, and the light goes out.”
Lift looked at him. Yup. Still creepy. “I guess when you’re old and stuff, you get to thinkin’ about being dead. Kind of like when a fellow’s got to piss, he starts thinkin’ about finding a convenient alleyway.”
The man chuckled. “Your life may pass, but the organism that is the city will continue on. Little nose.”
“I’m not a nose,” Lift said. “I was being cheeky.”
“Nose, cheek. Both are on the face.”
Lift rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I meant either.”
“What are you then? An ear, perhaps?”
“Dunno. Maybe.”
“No. Not yet. But close.”
“Riiight,” Lift said. “And what are you?”
“I change, moment by moment. One moment I am the eyes that inspect so many people in this city. Another moment I am the mouth, to speak the words of philosophy. They spread like a disease—and so at times I am the disease. Most diseases live. Did you know that?”
“You’re … not really talking about what you’re talking about, are you?” Lift said.
“I believe that I am.”
“Great.” Of all the people she’d chosen to ask about how to be a responsible adult, she’d picked the one with vegetable soup in place of brains. She turned to go.
“What will you make for this city, child?” the man asked. “That is part of my question. Do you choose, or are you simply molded by the greater good? And are you, as a city, a district of grand palaces? Or are you a slum, unto yourself?”
“If you could see inside me,” Lift said, turning and walking backward so she faced the old man on the steps, “you wouldn’t say things like that.”
“Because?”
“Because. At least slums know what they was built for.” She turned and joined the flow of people on the street.
11
“I don’t think you understand how this is supposed to work,” Wyndle said, curling along the wall beside her. “Mistress, you … don’t seem interested in evolving our relationship.”
She shrugged.
“There are Words,” Wyndle said. “That’s what we call them, at least. They’re more … ideas. Living ideas, with power. You have to let them into your soul. Let me into your soul. You heard those Skybreakers, right? They’re looking to take the next step in their training. That’s when … you know … they get a Shardblade.…”
He smiled at her, the expression appearing in successive patterns of his growing vines along the wall as they chased her. Each image of the smile was slightly different, grown one after another beside her, like a hundred paintings. They made a smile, and yet none of them was the smile. It was, somehow, all of them together. Or perhaps the smile existed in the spaces between the images in the succession.
“There’s only one thing I know how to do,” Lift said. “And that’s steal Darkness’s lunch. Like I came to do in the first place.”
“And, um, didn’t we do that already?”
“Not his food. His lunch.” She narrowed her eyes.
“Ah…” Wyndle said. “The person he’s planning to execute. We’re going to snatch them away from him.”
Lift strolled along a side street, and ended up passing into a garden: a bowl-like depression in the stone with four exits down different roads. Vines coated the leeward side of the wall, but they slowly gave way to brittels on the other side, shaped like flat plates for protection, but with planty stems that crept out and around the sides and up toward the sunlight.
Wyndle sniffed, crossing to the ground beside her. “Barely any cultivation. Why, this is no garden. Whoever maintains this should be reprimanded.”
“I like it,” Lift said, lifting her hand toward some lif
espren, which bobbed over her fingertips. The garden was crowded with people. Some were coming and going, while others lounged about, and still others begged for chips. She hadn’t seen many beggars in the city; likely there were all kinds of rules and regulations about when you could do it and how.
She stopped, hands on hips. “People here, in Azir and Tashikk, they love to write stuff down.”
“Oh, most certainly,” Wyndle said, curling around some vines. “Mmm. Yes, mistress, these at least are fruit vines. I suppose that is better; it’s not completely haphazard.”
“And they love information,” Lift said. “They love tradin’ it with one another, right?”
“Most certainly. That is a distinguishing factor of their cultural identity, as your tutors said in the palace. You weren’t there. I went to listen in your place.”
“What people write can be important, at least to them,” Lift said. “But what would they do with it all when they’re done with it? Throw it out? Burn it?”
“Throw it out? Mother’s vines! No, no, no. You can’t just go throwing things out! They might be useful later on. If it were me, I’d find someplace safe for them, and keep them pristine in case I needed them!”
Lift nodded, folding her arms. They’d have his same attitude. This city, with everyone writing notes and rules, then offering to sell everyone else ideas all the time … Well, in some ways this place was like a whole city of Wyndles.
Darkness had told his hunters to find someone who was doing strange stuff. Awesome stuff. And in this city they wrote down what kids had for breakfast. If somebody had seen something strange, they’d have written it down.
Lift scampered through the garden, brushing vines with her toes and causing them to writhe away. She hopped up onto a bench beside a likely target, an older woman in a brown shiqua, with the head portions pulled up and down to show a middle-aged face wearing makeup and displaying hints of styled hair.
The woman wrinkled her nose immediately, which was unfair. Lift had taken a bath back a week or so in Azir, and it had had soap and everything.
“Shoo,” the woman said, waving fingers at her. “I’ve no money for you. Shoo. Go away.”
“Don’t want money,” Lift said. “I’ve got a deal to make. For information.”
“I want nothing from you.”
“I can give you nothing,” Lift said, relaxing. “I’m good at that. I’ll go away, and give you nothing. You just gotta answer a question for me.”
Lift hunched there on the bench, not moving. Then she scratched herself on the behind. The woman fussed, looking like she was going to leave, and Lift leaned in.
“You are disobeying beggar regulations,” the woman snapped.
“Ain’t beggin’. I’m tradin’.”
“Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Is there a place,” Lift said, “in this city where people stuff all the things they wrote down, to keep them safe?”
The woman frowned, then raised her hand and pointed along a street, which led straight for a distance, toward a moundlike bunker that rose from the center of the city. It was big enough to tower over the rest of the stuff around it, peeking up above the tops of the trenches.
“You mean like the Grand Indicium?” the woman asked.
Lift blinked, then cocked her head.
The woman took the opportunity to flee to a different part of the garden.
“Has that always been there?” Lift asked.
“Um, yes,” Wyndle said. “Of course it has.”
“Really?” Lift scratched her head. “Huh.”
12
Wyndle’s vines wove up the side of an alleyway, and Lift climbed, not caring if she drew attention. She hauled herself over the top edge into a field where farmers watched the sky and grumbled. The seasons had gone insane. It was supposed to be raining constantly—a bad time to plant, as the water would wash away the seed paste.
Yet it hadn’t rained for days. No storms, no water. Lift walked along, passing farmers who spread paste that would grow to tiny polyps, which would eventually grow to the size of large rocks and fill to bursting with grain. Mash that grain—either by hand or by storm—and it made new paste. Lift had always wondered why she didn’t grow polyps inside her stomach after eating, and nobody had ever given her a straight answer.
The confused farmers worked with their shiquas pulled up to their waists. Lift passed, and she tried to listen. To hear.
This was supposed to be their one time of year where they didn’t have to work. Sure, they planted some treb to grow in cracks, as it could survive flooding. But they weren’t supposed to have to plant lavis, tallew, or clema: much more labor-intensive—but also more profitable—crops to cultivate.
Yet here they were. What if it rained tomorrow, and washed away all this effort? What if it never rained again? The city cisterns, which were glutted with water from the weeks of Weeping, would not last forever. They were so worried, she caught sight of some fearspren—shaped like globs of purple goo—gathering around the mounds upon which the men planted.
As a counterpoint, lifespren broke off from the growing polyps and bobbed over to Lift, trailing in her wake. A swirling, green-glowing dust. Ahead of her, the Grand Indicium rose like the head of a bald man seen peeking above the back of the chair he was sitting in. It was a huge rounded mass of stone.
Everything in the city revolved around this central point. Streets turned in this direction, curling up to it, and as Lift drew close, she could see that an enormous swath of stone had been cut away around the Indicium. The round bunker wasn’t much to look at, but it sure did seem secure from the storms.
“Yes, the land does slope away from this central point,” Wyndle noted. “This focus had to be the highest point of the city anyway—and I guess they figured they’d just accept that, and make the central knob into a fortress.”
A fortress for books. People could be so strange. Below, crowds of people—most of them Tashikki—flowed in and out of the building, which had numerous screwlike sloped walkways leading up to it.
Lift settled down on the edge of the wall, feet hanging over. “Kinda looks like the tip of some guy’s dangly bits. Like some fellow had such a short sword, everyone felt so sorry for him they said, ‘Hey, we’ll make a huge statue to it, and even though it’s tiny, it’ll look real big!’”
Wyndle sighed.
“That wasn’t crude,” Lift noted. “That was being poetic. Ol’ Whitehair said you can’t be crass, so long as you’re talkin’ ’bout art. Then you’re being elegant. That’s why it’s okay to hang pictures of naked ladies in a palace.”
“Mistress, wasn’t this the man who got himself intentionally swallowed by a Marabethian greatshell?”
“Yup. Crazy as a box full of drunk minks, that one. I miss him.” She liked to pretend he hadn’t actually gotten eaten. He’d winked at her as he’d jumped into the greatshell’s gaping maw, shocking the crowd.
Wyndle piled around on himself, forming a face—eyes made of crystals, lips formed of a tiny network of vines. “Mistress, what is our plan?”
“Plan?”
He sighed. “We need to get into that building. Are you just going to do whatever strikes you?”
“Obviously.”
“Might I offer some suggestions?”
“Long as it doesn’t involve sucking someone’s soul, Voidbringer.”
“I’m not— Look, mistress, that building is an archive. Knowing what I do of this region, the rooms in there will be filled with laws, records, and reports. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them.”
“Yeah,” she said, making a fist. “Among all that, they’ll have written down strange stuff for sure!”
“And how, precisely, are we going to find the specific information we want?”
“Easy. You’re gonna read it.”
“… Read it.”
“Yup. We’ll get in there, you’ll read their books and stuff, and then we’ll decide where strange events w
ere. That will lead us to Darkness’s lunch.”
“… Read it all.”
“Yup.”
“Do you have any idea how much information is likely held in that place?” Wyndle said. “There will be hundreds of thousands of reports and ledgers. And to state it explicitly, yes, that’s a number more than ten, so you can’t count to it.”
“I’m not an idiot,” she snapped. “I got toes too.”
“It’s still far more than I can read. I can’t sift through all of that information for you. It’s impossible. Not going to happen.”
She eyed him. “All right. Maybe I can get you one soul. Perhaps a tax collector…’cept they ain’t human. Would they work? Or would you need, like, three of them to make up one normal person’s soul?”
“Mistress! I’m not bargaining!”
“Come on. Everyone knows Voidbringers like a good deal. Does it have to be someone important? Or can it be some dumb guy nobody likes?”
“I don’t eat souls,” Wyndle exclaimed. “I’m not trying to haggle with you! I’m stating facts. I can’t read all the information in that archive! Why can’t you just see that—”
“Oh, calm your tentacles,” Lift said, swinging her feet, bouncing her heels against the rock cliff. “I hear you. Can’t help but hear you, considering how much you whine.”
Behind, the farmers were asking whose daughter she was, and why she wasn’t running them water like kids were supposed to. Lift scrunched up her face, thinking. “Can’t wait until night and sneak in,” she muttered. “Darkness wants the poor person killed by then. ’Sides, I bet those scribes work nights. They feed off ink. Why sleep when you could be writin’ up some new law about how many fingers people can use to hold a spoon?
“They know their stuff though. They sell it all over the place. The viziers were always writing to them to get some answer to something. Mostly news around the world.” She grinned, then stood up. “You’re right. We gotta do this differently.”
“Yes indeed.”
“We gotta be smart about it. Devious. Think like a Voidbringer.”
“I didn’t say—”
“Stop complaining,” Lift said. “I’m gonna go steal some important-looking clothes.”
Edgedancer Page 11