CHAPTER EIGHT What Sirens Were Made To Do
CHAPTER EIGHT
What Sirens Were Made To Do
They didn’t take me to it. It sent for me, and I was given to understand that there was a difference.
Kael came at what passed for the middle of the night, and he wasn’t lounging. That by itself had me out of bed before he’d finished knocking.
“Now?”
“Now.” He was already turning away. “Don’t dress for it, madam, it doesn’t care what you’ve got on. And don’t ask me questions on the way down. I’ll not answer them, and it’s a long way to waste your breath, such as it is.”
? ? ?
We went down past the Court and past the vents and past the lowest quarter, where the rose light comes up. And then out.
I’ve never found a better word for it. The city just stops.
There’s an edge, a last terrace with a rail, and past that the floor of the world runs off into a dark the city’s light can’t get into.
You walk out onto that floor. After two hundred yards or so the glow behind you isn’t something you see by any more.
It’s something you look at, small and far away, like a town at night seen from a hill.
Then it’s dark, and you keep walking.
The floor out there isn’t rock. It’s a fine grey silt that takes the print of a foot and holds on to it.
Once, a good way out, I looked back and saw my own prints going off behind me in a line, with Kael’s next to them, and nothing else anywhere.
Nothing walks out there. There’s no track, and there never has been.
The pulse gets stronger the further you go. At first it’s a knock in the breastbone. Further on it shifts your whole body a fraction each time, like a deck riding at anchor.
Somewhere in the dark Kael stopped.
“That’s me.”
“You’re not coming.”
“I’m not permitted, and I’m not willing, and I’d not have come half this far for anyone else.” He was looking past me, and in the last of the far glow his face wasn’t the bored, pretty one he’d worn in the Gull and Anchor. “Straight on. You’ll know when.”
? ? ?
I walked on alone for what felt like an hour. Could have been longer.
Then the dark ahead stopped being dark, and it came to me that it had stopped a while back and I’d missed it, because whatever was out there wasn’t lit and wasn’t unlit either. It was occupied.
There was no shape. I’ve tried to give it one ever since and I fail every time, and I’ve come round to believing that the failing is the honest account.
Something very large was there the way a cliff is there when you walk into it in fog.
You don’t see it. The whole world in that direction goes solid, the sound goes wrong, the water turns colder, and your body has worked it out before you have.
The pulse was coming from it. I’d spent an hour walking about inside something’s breathing.
You came.
It wasn’t a voice, not really. It landed in the chest like all speech does down there, but under the words ran a pressure that made my teeth ache and my eyes stream.
I stood in the silt two hundred yards from a thing I couldn’t see and said, “You sent for me,” and it came out small and completely steady, which amazed me.
I asked. They will have told you it was a summons. They enjoy that.
? ? ?
This part I remember word for word.
Say what you have learned.
“That my mother held a gate. That she wasn’t supposed to leave it. That there’s a draft on the floor of her workroom, in somebody’s hand, about a child to be raised on land, untaught and unmarked. And then it just stops.”
Yes.
“Was it true? Did she.”
I do not know what she agreed to. The pressure shifted, and it took me a moment to understand that the enormous thing had moved, or turned, or done whatever it does instead.
That is not evasion. I was asleep. I have been asleep a very long time, and I woke when you came into the water, and what was done while I was under was done without me.
I am angrier about that than you are able to imagine.
I stood in the silt with my hands hanging, because I couldn’t think what else to do with them.
“Then what do you want from me?”
Nothing.
“Nothing?”
I want nothing from you. That is why they are frightened.
Something huge and patient turned over in the dark.
Every voice in that city wants a thing. The Court wants you claimed or contained.
The houses want you married or buried. The one who sent Kael wants you useful.
Even the archivist wants you to be the ending of a story she has carried for thirty-three years.
“And you?”
I want to see what you do.
? ? ?
“That’s not enough. It isn’t. You called me daughter. You said the old watchers had seen what they’d been waiting to see, and Elias went white, and I’ve had two months of my life turned inside out on the strength of one sentence you said at a bad moment. One sentence.”
Yes.
“So tell me what I’m for.”
The pulse went. Six seconds. Six more.
Child, said Thalassar, and the pressure behind the words eased off, so that what reached me was very close to gentle, which frightened me worse than anything that had come before, that is the question they asked in the Court and did not answer.
“I know.”
They did not answer it because the answer is written down.
They have all read it. Not one of them will say it to your face, because they know precisely how it would sound.
It paused, long enough that I thought it was done with me.
I will not say it either. Not from kindness.
Because you would believe me, and you would believe me tonight, and you would never once go and find out for yourself whether it is still true.
“That’s not fair.”
No.
“Then tell me one thing.” My voice cracked and I let it. “Was she happy? Up there. With him. Was any of it.”
I do not know that either. Ask the woman who was a junior in her household for nine years. She has waited since your kitchen table for you to ask, and she will tell you the truth, and it will not be the shape you want.
? ? ?
Threnn told me on the terrace with the amber going down, and she told it like a clerk reading off a bill of lading. She’d obviously decided that was the only way she’d get to the end of it.
“You’ll want to hear this as history. It is history. It’s also what you are, and somewhere in the middle those two facts are going to arrive at the same time. I’d ask you to let me finish before you speak. I’d like that on the record.”
“All right.”
“Nine gates.” She held up one hand and folded the fingers down as she counted, ran out, and started again on the other.
“The Deep isn’t one body of water, whatever it looks like from a beach.
There are nine places where the old current comes up from below, wherever below is, and those nine places are why any of this exists.
The city’s light comes from the vents. The vents come from the current.
And the current comes through the gates. ”
“And somebody holds each one.”
“Somebody holds each one. Holding isn’t a ceremony.
” She put her hands back in her lap and squared them there like a stack of papers.
“A gate doesn’t stay open of its own accord, and it doesn’t stay shut.
It does what it’s persuaded to do. It has to be wanted at, without a pause, by somebody with a particular gift, and the gift isn’t strength, and it isn’t intellect. It’s a thing very like.”
She stopped.
“Say it.”
“Desire. Applied at scale, for a lifetime, at a hole in the bottom of the world.”
? ? ?
I sat with that while the amber dropped another notch.
“The Influence.”
“Yes.”
“The thing I’ve been using on drunk men in a tavern since I was fifteen.”
“The thing you’ve been using on drunk men in a tavern since you were fifteen is a domestic application of the instrument that keeps the Deep lit. I’m aware of how that sounds. I’ve watched three people be told it, and all three of them laughed first.”
I didn’t laugh. I put my hands over my face and left them there.
“That’s what Sirens are.”
“That’s what Sirens were made to be. It’s a different sentence, and a worse one.
” Her voice didn’t move off level at all.
“They aren’t a people. They’re a line, bred to a function over a stretch of time nobody can account for now, by people who wanted the gates held and cared very little what the holders felt about it. ”
“Bred.”
“Bred. Chosen, matched, recorded.” She set each word down like something heavy she’d carried much too far. “There’s a book. I’ve read it. I’d ask you never to ask to see it, and I’ll show it to you the moment you do.”
? ? ?
“And when a gate isn’t held?”
Threnn looked out past the rail, down the nine hundred feet of light to the blue-white at the bottom.
“Ilmarren has been unheld for thirty-four years.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the whole answer, and you’re looking at it.
” She tipped her chin at the drop. “The eastern shoulder is out of fashion, Miss Angel. That’s what we say.
It’s been out of fashion for four hundred years and nobody lives up here now.
The amber is very charming and rather dim, and it gets dimmer, and the terraces below have gone the same way for a generation.
There’s an entire district at the north of the city that was emptied eleven years ago because the light failed.
Nobody says failed. Everybody says the fashion changed. ”
“It’s going out.”
“The northern quarter of a nine-hundred-year-old city is dark. There are four hundred thousand people down here. The current that came through Ilmarren was thirteen per cent of the whole.” She folded her hands. “I’m an archivist. I don’t hold opinions. I hold figures.”
? ? ?
What I’ve had to live with ever since is that I understood the whole of it at once, and understood it correctly, and it didn’t help one bit.
My mother hadn’t run from a duty. She ran from a job she’d been bred for, and the job was to spend her entire life wanting at a hole in the floor of the world so a city could keep its lamps on.
She was the fourth generation of women made for exactly that.
And one day she looked at it and got out, and went up to land and married a sad young sailor, and read a book about apples.
And eleven thousand people in the northern quarter live in the dark because she did.
Both of those are true. I’ve turned it over more nights than I could count, and I can’t make either one go away, and I’ve given up trying. If anybody tells you there’s a clean answer in there, check what they’re selling.
“Threnn.”
“Miss Angel.”
“You said they’d already told me what I’m for. That none of them would say it to my face, because they know how it sounds.”
“Yes.”
“Say it to my face.”
Threnn turned on the bench and looked straight at me, which she hadn’t done once the whole time.
“They want you to go and stand at Ilmarren,” she said, “and want. For the rest of your life.”
The amber went down a notch, and then another one. I watched it go because it was something to look at that wasn’t her.
“Miss Angel.”
“I’m all right.”
“You’re not. I’m going to sit here regardless, and you’re under no obligation to be interesting.”
So we sat there, the archivist of a great house and a sailor’s daughter from Duskmere, on a terrace nobody had lived on for four hundred years, while the amber sank by degrees and the great shapes went over, and neither of us said anything else until it was completely dark.