CHAPTER TWELVE What They All Knew #2
On the second morning after Sevrid I asked Ivrid to take me north. She said no. Then she said, “When,” and I said now, and she put down what she was holding.
“Not in that.”
“What’s wrong with this?”
“Nothing. It’s grey and it’s good and it cost somebody four days.
” She was already reaching for a bag. “There’s no light up there.
You’ll be putting your hands on things you can’t see, and one of them’ll be a wall gone soft, and that dress’ll come back with a mark you’ll never shift.
Then you’re the woman who went to gawp at the dark quarter and ruined a dress.
They’ll be saying it in the Court inside a week. Change.”
I changed.
It’s not a walk. Nobody had told me that. You don’t just stroll into the northern quarter from the good end of the city. The city thins out for about a mile before you get there, the way a town thins into its outskirts, and the thinning’s the worst of it, because you have to watch it happen.
The blue-white of the great avenue goes first. You lose it behind you in stages, like the surface light on the way down, and what takes its place is the low gold of the residential terraces.
Then the gold goes patchy. Then there are stretches where the wall on one side is lit and the wall on the other isn’t, and you walk along with your left hand in a sort of evening and your right hand in nothing whatever.
And people still live along there. I hadn’t allowed for that.
There were washing lines. There’s no wind down there and nothing ever dries, so God knows what they were for, and I didn’t ask.
Partly Ivrid was walking fast. Partly I knew, without being able to say how, that asking would have been rude.
Then the last lit terrace, and a woman on a step outside it mending a net by feel.
Then the dark.
? ? ?
I’ve tried to describe it properly, and the trouble is there’s nothing to describe. Which is the point.
It isn’t black. It’s the same absence I fell through on the way down, the one that isn’t a colour at all. Your eyes keep working and nothing gets into them, and after a while your mind starts making shapes up out of plain politeness.
The buildings are still there, though. You can feel them.
The city’s chord, which I’d stopped hearing after the first weeks the way you stop hearing the sea in a harbour house, changes up there.
It goes wrong. Every structure in the Deep sings its own note off the water moving through it, and in the northern quarter the notes are all still being made, by towers nobody’s lived in for eleven years.
Together they’ve gone flat and sour and a hair out of time, and it goes on and on in the dark over your head.
That was where Threnn’s thirteen per cent stopped being a number for me. It’s a mile of city singing to nobody in the dark.
“Stop,” said Ivrid.
I stopped.
“Hold your hand out.”
I did, and she put something in it. Small, hard, cold, about the size of a plum, and completely dead. It had a seam round the middle like a walnut, and my thumb found that straight away and kept going back to it.
“What’s this?”
“A light.”
“It isn’t lit.”
“No.” She took my wrist and closed my fingers round it, roughly, the way you’d fold a child’s hand round a coin. “Want it to be.”
? ? ?
For about four seconds I didn’t get it. Then I did, and it went through me like cold water down the back of a collar.
“You want me to.”
“I want you to want. At a stone. In your own hand. For about as long as a breath. And I want you doing it here, with nine people inside four hundred yards, and not finding out how it works in front of nine hundred.” Flat and fast. “It’s the smallest version of the thing you’re for.
Only one you’ll ever get to practise on.
Go on, then. I haven’t got all year, and neither have you. ”
I opened my hand, and the lid came off a fraction, and the thing in my palm lit.
Pale gold, and not bright. About what a candle does in a big room, which in a place with no light at all is an event. It threw the shadows of my own fingers onto the wall beside me, and the wall was pale and ridged and huge, and there was a doorway in it eight feet high with nothing behind.
I made a noise. Ivrid let it pass.
“How long will it hold?”
“As long as you go on meaning it. That’s the whole of the science.” She set off again. “Bring it. Don’t drop it, don’t get proud of it, and for God’s sake don’t offer it to anybody.”
? ? ?
Seventy or eighty people lived in that quarter.
Eleven thousand used to. Ivrid gave me both numbers on the way without my asking, in the flat voice she keeps for figures, and then didn’t say another word about it for an hour.
They came out for the light.
Not all at once. It was maybe ten minutes before I noticed we were being followed, and another five before I saw that followed was wrong. They were coming out of doorways and off terraces and just standing, a way off, in ones and twos, watching a small gold thing go by in a stranger’s hand.
Nobody came close. Nobody said anything. A boy of about nine came out further than the rest, and a woman put her hand flat on his chest and moved him back without looking down, and they both kept watching.
I stopped and turned round.
“Don’t,” said Ivrid.
“They’re standing in the dark.”
“They’ve stood in the dark eleven years and they’ll stand in it tomorrow. Give that stone to one of them and you’ve given one person a light that dies the minute you’re round the corner, and the rest of them get to watch it die.” She hadn’t raised her voice. “You’d be putting on a show. Walk on.”
I walked on. It’s the worst thing anyone’s ever told me to do, and she was completely right, and I still hate her a bit for it.
? ? ?
The woman found us about half a mile in, at what used to be a market.
I knew it was a market from the floor. Stone wears a certain way where a great many people have stood for a long time, and my light showed me that wear in a low pool eight feet across. When I held the stone up, the light climbed the front of a building with four storeys of empty windows.
“You’ll be her.”
She was maybe sixty-five. She came up out of the dark with no warning at all and stopped at the edge of the light and didn’t step into it. I’ve thought since that she meant that.
“I’m Rose Angel.”
“I know what you are.” She wasn’t hostile. She was tired, and it had nothing to do with the hour. “You’re the one they’ve been waiting on. Since before you were born, some of us.”
Ivrid shifted. I put my free hand out and stopped her.
“Yes,” I said.
“You came to look.”
“Yes.”
“Good.” The woman nodded, slowly. “They said you would and I said you wouldn’t. There’s two down here been saying for a month you’d come north before you went to the ridge, and I told them they were soft. Glad to be wrong. Doesn’t happen often enough to get dull.”
? ? ?
I’d come north braced for hatred. It’s not a flattering thing to admit. Somewhere on the walk I’d staged the whole scene in my head: they’d know whose daughter I was, somebody would say so, I’d stand there and take it, and taking it would count as a kind of payment. Very tidy. Comfortable, nearly.
None of that happened. What happened was worse.
“Did you know her?” I said. “My mother.”
“Saw her twice. I was thirty and she was a great deal more than I was, and she’d no reason to notice me, and she didn’t.
” The woman laced her fingers together in front of her.
“She’d not have known my name. I’ll have that clear, because you’ll meet people down here this month who’ll tell you they were dear friends of hers, and every last one of them’s lying. ”
“Do you blame her?”
And she thought about it. That’s what undid me. She stood at the edge of a light I was making out of my own body and really considered it, for what must have been fifteen seconds.
“No,” she said. “I did. For about eleven years. Plenty of us went through that and some are still in it, and you’ll meet them.
” She shifted her weight. “But I’d have gone.
That’s the end of it for me. If I’d been made for a thing and told at six and put to it at twenty, I’d have been out the first gap I saw.
So would you. Anybody down here says different is telling you what they’d like to be true. ”
“That doesn’t help you.”
“No, it doesn’t help me at all,” she agreed. “Not meant to. You asked what I thought and I told you. Now I’ve one for you, and I’d like it straight, because I’ve stood in the dark eleven years and I reckon I’ve earned one straight answer off somebody.”
The light in my hand had started to waver. I steadied it.
“Ask.”
“Are you coming?”
? ? ?
Nobody had put it to me like that.
Threnn had given me figures and Sevrid had given me a maintenance question. Kael had given me the cost, honestly, in my own kitchen. Elias had given me four questions, and Wren had told me to say the mad part out loud.
Every one of them had been talking about me.