CHAPTER NINE Neither Wholly #2
“I’ll be here,” said Wren. “Which is all that’s on offer, love, and I’d be obliged if you’d take it.”
Then she got up and took my plate, and on her way past she put her wet red hand flat on the top of my head, just briefly, the way she might have steadied a gatepost, and kept on walking so I wouldn’t have to do anything with my face.
? ? ?
I made the decision on the way home, on the hill.
There’s a place where the lane climbs past the last of the roofs and the whole bay opens up on your right. I stopped there, like I always do, and the water was doing what it does on a bright westerly day, all broken silver and too bright to look at straight.
Out there somewhere. Two hundred fathoms down.
Standing in the wind with my hands shoved in my coat pockets, I saw that I’d come up out of that city angry and spent two days telling myself it was about Elias’s family and the cut pages.
It was about a question somebody had asked from the rim of a bowl, somebody I never even identified, and nine hundred people declining to answer it, and me going back up the next morning like a guest who leaves early after something’s been said at dinner.
I’d been in the room. Somebody had asked what I was for. And I’d gone home.
“No,” I said out loud, on a public lane, to nobody at all.
Two doors down, a woman looked up from scrubbing her step.
I went in and told Elias I was going back.
? ? ?
He didn’t fight me. I’d braced myself for a fight, and not getting one was so much worse that I nearly started it myself.
“When?”
“As soon as they’ll have me.”
“Right.” He was at the table with the books. He shut the one in front of him on a finger to keep the place, which he never does, and I understood he was giving his hands a job so they wouldn’t go looking for a different one. “Then you’ll take a list.”
“A list.”
“Four questions and two names. I’ve had eleven days, and I’ve got four questions only somebody down there can answer, and if you’re going into that archive you’re not going in without knowing what you’re after.” He pulled a sheet towards him. “And Rose.”
“Say it.”
“I’m not going to be all right about this one.” He was writing and didn’t look up. “The first time I was frightened. This time I’ve had eleven days on that beach to learn exactly what it’s like. I’d rather you knew that now than have me be splendid about it and take it out on you in March.”
“You’d never take anything out on anybody.”
“I’d sulk. Magnificently. You’ve not seen it yet.”
I came round the table and stood behind his chair and folded my arms down over his shoulders, with my chin resting on the crown of his head.
He stopped writing. His hand came up and closed round my forearm and held on, hard enough that I found marks there the next morning, and neither of us moved for a long time.
“Four questions,” I said, into his hair.
“Four questions.”
? ? ?
The second descent was a different animal altogether.
Threnn came up for it, which she hadn’t done the first time. She was waiting in the cove at slack water in the grey cloak, dry as a bone, satchel on her shoulder, and I understood this was a courtesy, and that down there a courtesy is never only a courtesy.
“You came back very quickly, Miss Angel.”
“Eleven days.”
“You came back very quickly, and the Court has noticed. I’d have you know, before you go under, that a number of people have spent this fortnight explaining to each other what your quick return signifies. Not one of their explanations is that you were angry.”
“So what are they?”
“That you’re considering it.”
I stood on the wet reef with my boots in my hand.
“Then they’re going to be disappointed.”
“Miss Angel.” She looked at me with the schoolmistress face entirely in place. “They’re going to be wrong. That’s a different thing, and a good deal more use to you. Please don’t correct them.”
? ? ?
And then the going down.
It wasn’t easy. Forty seconds is forty seconds whether you’ve done it once or a hundred times, and somewhere in the dark stretch my body put its case to me again, and made it well.
There was one difference, though.
The first time, Kael put his hand between my shoulder blades and pushed.
This time I stepped off the black rock into six feet of glassy water at slack tide, took the first mouthful in, and looked down past my own bare feet at two hundred fathoms of nothing.
And went.
Nobody’s hand on me, no grip at the back of my neck.
I let my arms hang by my sides and let my own weight take me, and I dropped through the green and the long blue and on into the violet with my eyes open all the way.
When the colour ran out and my mind started throwing up my kitchen at me, and the pike in the Crown’s passage, I said out loud, in the middle of the dark, in water, in a voice that turned up in my own chest:
“I know. Go on.”
And it did.
? ? ?
They gave me the same room on the western terrace. Threnn had seen to that too.
I did four days of work before anyone let me near the archive. The four days were the training, and they were the first days down there I was properly happy.
The woman’s name was Ivrid. She was about my age and a head shorter, built like a swimmer and as blunt as a mallet, and she’d been sent to teach me in the spirit you’d send a shepherd to look over a promising pup. Low expectations, and she said so.
“You’ve no technique,” she told me, inside the first hour.
“I’ve had none to learn.”
“I’m not blaming you. I’m describing.” She swam a slow circle round me with her arms folded, which is a thing you can do down there, and which is extremely annoying.
“Thirty-four years with a gift and nobody teaching you. So you’ve made habits, and they’re all wrong.
Habits are harder to get off a person than ignorance is. At least ignorance knows it’s stupid.”
? ? ?
The fire first, because the fire was the surprise.
I’ve called fire since I was twenty. Up there it comes to my hands like a dog that knows the voice, warm at the fingertips and then the wrists, and it wants to go outward, and the whole trick is keeping it in.
Down there I called it in the training yard and nothing happened.
I called it again. Nothing. I called it a third time with my eyes screwed shut and my teeth set and everything I had in me, and Ivrid said, “Stop,” and I said, “It’s gone, it’s,” and she said:
“It’s not gone. It’s behind you. Turn round.”
I turned round.
About four feet behind me, hanging in the water at shoulder height, was a thing the size of a fist, dull red in the middle and gold round the edge, turning slowly. There was nothing burning in it. It threw no light and gave off no heat, and when I put my hand near it my palm went cold.
“What’s it doing?”
“What you told it.” Ivrid was watching me, not the ember.
“Up there, when you call it, it comes to your hands, because up there you’re the only thing in the room that wants anything.
Down here you’re not. Water carries wanting the way air carries sound, and it went off after the loudest thing in earshot.
” She jerked her head at the far side of the yard, where a man was bent over some work.
“Him. It was heading for him. It only stopped because he’s had the training and shut it out, and it’s been sat there since, waiting to be told. ”
I looked at the little turning ember hanging behind me like a lost pet.
“That’s horrifying.”
“That’s Tuesday,” said Ivrid. “Again. And mean it at yourself this time, you great fool.”
? ? ?
The Influence went the other way round, and it was the harder lesson.
She had me do it at her, over and over, for most of a day, and nothing happened. Then nothing happened. Then, for a bit of variety, nothing happened.
“You’re pushing.”
“I’m doing what I’ve always.”
“You’re pushing. Up there that works, because up there you push at a man with nothing between you and him but eight feet of air and his own bad manners.
” Ivrid came in close. “There’s no air. Everything you push at down here goes into the water first, and the water eats most of it and smears the rest over forty yards.
Stand in the middle of the Court and push with everything you’ve got, and nine hundred people will feel a faint, unaccountable wish to leave the room. ”
“So it doesn’t work at all.”
“It doesn’t work outward.” She held up one finger. “Now do the other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“Don’t push. Pull. Everything in this water wants something. It’s going past you all day long. Stop shouting into it. Listen to it. Tell me what’s in this yard.”
I shut my eyes and did the opposite of the only thing I’d ever known how to do.
And the water was full.
Not of voices. Not thoughts either. Pulls.
Dozens of them, like somebody drawing threads slowly across my skin while I stood there.
The man at the far side wanted his work finished.
Somebody above me and to the left, on a terrace I couldn’t see, wanted something with a low, steady, desperate weight to it that shut my throat.
Two people on the other side of the wall wanted each other, quite recently and quite badly, and my eyes flew open and I said “Oh God” out loud, and Ivrid laughed for the first time since I’d met her.
“That’s it. That’s the lot. The rest is practice.”
? ? ?
On the second day she made me do nothing for six hours.
I hated it with everything in me. I’d come down with four questions in my head and a book in my bag and a man on a beach, and Ivrid walked me into the yard at first light and pointed at a spot on the floor and said, “Stand there. Listen. Don’t do anything. I’ll come back.”
“For how long?”
“Till I come back.”
She came back at midday, looked me up and down, said, “You’ve been doing something,” and went off again.