CHAPTER ELEVEN The Debt #3
What came up out of me had no thought in it, and I never decided anything. I’ve gone over it a hundred times hunting for the moment I chose. There isn’t one.
? ? ?
The fire came.
It didn’t go to my hands. I’d spent four days with Ivrid learning that it goes to the loudest wanting in the water, and this time there was no question at all what the loudest wanting in that water was.
It came out of me from somewhere behind the breastbone, and it didn’t turn slowly at shoulder height like a fist-sized ember.
It came out in a sheet.
I felt it go. I felt the water take it and spread it the way Ivrid had said it would, forty yards, eighty, and it didn’t thin.
It went out low and wide over the vent field and lay across the top of the light, and wherever it passed the rose glow darkened.
It didn’t go out. It was pressed down, like a palm held flat on a fire before you let it breathe again.
Three hundred feet of the lower quarter went dim.
Somebody screamed on a terrace above me. A whole row of people came off the rail and back into the arcade. Something enormous that had been crossing the dark overhead turned all at once, the way a shoal turns, and was gone.
It was the best thing I’ve ever felt.
? ? ?
That’s the part I have to put down and would give a great deal not to.
It didn’t feel like rage, though that’s what it was.
It felt like relief, like finally letting go of a sack you’ve dragged up a hill.
It went on feeling like that for about four seconds, and in those four seconds I knew, more clearly than I’ve known anything before or since, that I’d been holding it in since I was fifteen.
Everything I’d ever called self-control had been a lid.
There was a lot more under the lid, and all of it would come if I asked.
And then, in the dimmed water, with people shouting somewhere above and the rose light starting to seep back up off the vents in slow patches, a bruise going the wrong way, the offer came.
? ? ?
I’ll describe it as exactly as I can. It doesn’t sound like anything.
Nothing spoke. No voice, no presence, none of the vast turning-over in the dark I’d felt out on the silt with Thalassar. Nobody visited me.
The water was just full of something that hadn’t been in it a second before. Full of it in the direction of the wanting. It wasn’t offering power, or revenge. Nothing so vulgar. That made it worse.
It offered to make the feeling permanent.
That was all of it, and it came in the only language that’s ever worked on me: you never have to pick it up again.
Four seconds of not carrying it. And the suggestion that there was a way to go on not carrying it for good.
I stood at the rail in the half-dark with my hands shaking on the stone, and I wanted it so much my back teeth ached.
? ? ?
Ivrid got to me first. I’ve always been grateful for that, because Ivrid doesn’t do sympathy.
She came down the arcade steps at a run, pulled up four feet off, looked at the vent field, looked at me, and said one word.
“Out.”
“What?”
“Out. Now. Whatever’s in you, get it out. I don’t care how. You’ve got thirty seconds before somebody with authority turns up and finds a guest standing over a dark vent field with her hands on the rail. You’ll look guilty. You’ll look guilty because you are.”
“I don’t know how to get it out.”
“Then hold your breath.”
I stared at her.
“You can’t hold your breath,” she said, “in water. Try it, idiot.”
So I did, out of pure bewilderment. I shut my mouth and held it, the way you would up top, and my body had no idea what I was asking it for.
Nothing came in. Nothing went out. Inside six seconds my whole attention had shrunk down to one simple animal question, which was how long this was going to go on.
The thing in the water thinned out. Then it was gone.
I let go, took a mouthful, and folded forward onto the rail.
“Trick for children,” said Ivrid. “Works because you can’t want anything grand while you’re doing something stupid. Remember it. You’ll need it again.”
Then she stood next to me at the rail with her arms folded and didn’t leave, and didn’t say another word, and watched the light come back for as long as it took.
? ? ?
The rose light came back over the next hour. Nothing was damaged. Nobody was hurt.
Threnn came and found me, asked not a single question, walked me up to the western terrace, and stood in the doorway while I sat on the floor with my back to the bed.
“They’ll say I did it on purpose.”
“Some of them.”
“Did I?”
Threnn gave that the silence she gives a slate she doesn’t trust. I was more grateful for it than for anything comforting she might have said.
“You didn’t decide to,” she said at last. “I wouldn’t care to be the one explaining to a Court that those are different things.”
She left. I stayed on the floor.
Some time in the night I got up and went to the window that has no weather outside it, and looked down the long avenue with the great shapes going over, and said out loud, to nobody, in an empty room two hundred fathoms under the sea:
“Whoever you are. Your seal’s still lit.”