City of Night (21 page)

The cenotaphs themselves were arranged like rectangular clover petals. There were three, each bearing the likeness of a body. The feet of those elegant, perfect bodies pointed in, their heads toward the walls. But they weren’t exactly men; they were taller than any man she had ever met. Even though the figures were lying on their backs, she could see height and majesty.
Makers,
she thought.

“You think the maker-born made these?”

Sometimes, the division between thinking and speaking wasn’t sharp enough. “I think they must have,” she told her den- kin. “Look at their hair. Look at their armor. I’ve never seen anything like the armor.” It was true. The armor was faintly blue, and gilded. They bore shields which obscured their breastplates, and they carried helms in their folded hands. Hair trailed the length of their bodies, like capes, and curled around their narrow, fine-boned faces.

“Are they male or female?” Duster asked.

Good question. Jewel couldn’t tell.

She took a step forward and stopped. Around each of the standing stone coffins, circles had been engraved in the ground. Three concentric circles, and between each ring, writing caught light. But the circles were dark, and seemed to grow darker as she approached. She stopped walking and lifted a hand.

But Duster, relaxed, had seen what she had seen, and Duster interpreted it differently. “That
is
gold,” she said. She passed Jewel, headed to the nearest circle, and knelt before it. The dagger hovered above gold runes, gold symbols, as Duster looked for a good place to start.

“Duster,
no!
”

The dagger touched, seemed to touch, floor, and Duster cried out, briefly, as the light flared to a searing, painful white. She was thrown across the room. Her dagger went flying and clattered, skipping like a stone, across the surface of marble floor.

As it did, Jewel heard words. They were not words she understood, not clearly, but they hit her the way a gong strikes a bell: she resonated with them. She would have raised her hands to her ears, for all the good it would have done, but Duster was half a room away, and might be injured. So she ran instead, while the syllables underscored her frantic steps.

But she remembered the words. They were not the only words she would take from this place, but she would not repeat them to anyone save Rath, and even to Rath, only a few at a time, until she could make sense of them without alarming him.

Jewel ran over to where Duster had fallen; Duster was already slowly gaining her feet. She was too surprised to swear. Much. And stunned enough to wordlessly take Jewel’s offered hand.

“Okay,” she said. “No gold.”

“I think,” Jewel replied, “no room. I don’t like the feel of this place.”

“You couldn’t have said that before?”

Jewel grimaced. “Let’s just stay by the walls and see if we can get out.”

Duster nodded, and then looked down at her empty hand. She cursed. Jewel, looking down at it as well, saw a white mark across her palm and the skin between thumb and forefinger.

“Duster, wait—”

Duster didn’t answer. Instead, she headed back into the room’s center.

“Duster, what are you
doing
?”

“I’m getting my knife,” Duster snapped, without a backward glance.

“No, forget the damn knife; you can have mine. Duster!”

Duster froze for a second; her feet were at the edge of the circle that enclosed one coffin. Jewel managed to catch up, and she could see, resting against the farthest corner of the bier, the flat surface of naked blade.

She wanted to leave this place.

But Duster said, quietly, “I am not leaving without that knife.” It was a stubborn quiet. An implacable quiet.

Gods damn it all,
Jewel thought, furious with herself. She knew
exactly
why Duster wasn’t willing to leave the knife, and she knew that Duster would never admit it. She tried to say,
Leave it, we’ll buy you another one,
but she couldn’t force the words from between her clenched jaws.

Because she knew that it would make no difference to Duster. Duster couldn’t be talked out of something she was unwilling to admit existed.

This is what you wanted,
her Oma said curtly, rearing up in memory as she always did when things were bad.
You wanted to give her a present. You wanted to give her something tangible that she’d use. You wanted her to value this kind of thing.

Living with it, Jewel thought grimly, might not be the problem. “We can try pulling it with the rope. We can toss the rope over, see if we can get it that way.”

Duster said, without meeting Jewel’s gaze, “I won’t step on the circles. It should be safe.”

What was the worst thing that could happen? Duster could go flying and hit a wall? Jewel said, “Do it quickly.” And held her breath. It wasn’t hard to hold her breath; she often forgot to breathe when she was afraid. And she
was,
now. She couldn’t say why. She understood that it was, as they called it in the den, the
feeling
. And also understood and accepted that in spite of it, she was going to take the risk.

But things often worked out so badly when she ignored her feelings.

Duster jumped over the three circles. Her landing was awkward, because she was also afraid. She sprinted, head down, for the dagger, and reached for it without quite stopping. She missed. She slowed herself down by grabbing the edge of the damn coffin.

Jewel bit her lip, to stop from crying out. Because the statue on the bier, the one that Duster was touching, had
moved
. Not a lot. But his fingers had moved around the curve of his helm. “Duster, damn it,
hurry
.”

Duster grabbed for the knife a second time, and this time, she got it. She pivoted and made a running leap out of the circles.

Jewel watched the statue for any other sign of movement, but it was still again. “Come to the wall,” she told Duster.

Duster sheathed her knife, and followed.

 

“What are they?” Duster asked, her voice low.

“I don’t know.”

“Magic?”

“I think so. I know we’re not coming back here.” She waited for the
I’m not afraid,
but it didn’t come. Whatever these were—fancy golems, living statues, enchanted creatures—she didn’t want to meet them, speak with them, be seen by them. That was all she was certain of, and that was all she needed.

“Jay?”

“What?”

“Are they sleeping?”

Silence. Just like Duster, Jewel thought bitterly, to give voice to something that she herself had been trying damn hard not to think. She didn’t answer. Normally, that would have been enough.

“Jay, are they—do you think they’re the—the Sleepers?”

The Sleepers.
Yes, damn it.
She forced herself to shrug. “What are the Sleepers, anyway?”

Duster didn’t know. “End of the world,” she finally said, with a shrug.

“End of the world?”

“Yeah. When the Sleepers wake.”

“It’s just a saying.” And it was.
When the Sleepers wake
meant, pretty much, never.

“Yeah. Just.” Duster cast a glance at the cenotaphs, and then shivered and turned away.

 

“Tunnel or door?” Duster asked, her voice subdued.

Jewel hesitated. Out of habit, she had begun to walk to the familiar dark patch that suggested broken stone and possible tunnel, but she stopped against the curve of a wall. “Let’s try the door,” she said at last.

 

“Problem?” Duster asked, after a minute.

“It doesn’t have a handle.” She shoved the cut glass magelight into the inside of her shirt and looked at the door. “Duster, is this glowing at all to you?”

Duster shook her head. She nodded toward the third exit, and the darkness, and Jewel almost said yes. Opened her mouth to say it.

What emerged instead was
“No.”

They both looked a little surprised. Duster said, “All right, then.”

But Jewel felt that particular shock that comes with strong intuition; the cold of it, and the certainty, made her ball her hands in fists. “We have to get out of here,” she said, dropping her voice. Looking, as she did, at the cenotaphs, and the vaulted ceiling above them. At shields that were, in her vision, strangely blurred; at faces that made a hollow mockery of beauty, because they
were
beautiful, but somehow terrifying as well.

She turned her attention, and her body, toward the closed door. Unlike the figures, and the room itself, it wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t grand. It was just a door. But as she touched it, both of her hands spread, palm out, against its sturdy, unremarkable surface, she felt warmth, saw light.

She could never have said what color the light was, not then, and not after. But she felt it almost as gold; the gold of harvest and plenty, not the gold of the banker.

She gave the door an experimental push. “Duster?”

“What?”

“You said you lived in the Mother’s temple for a little while.”

“When did I say that?”

Jewel rolled her eyes; it was safe, as Duster couldn’t see them. “I don’t remember when—next time I’ll take notes. Look, it isn’t an accusation. I don’t care where you lived.”

Duster hesitated; it was almost physical. But after a moment she gave a very noncommittal grunt.

“I went there with my mother and father a few times. Not often,” Jewel added softly, “but a few times.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because—don’t laugh—it reminds me of that.”

“What reminds you of what?”

“The
door
. It reminds me of the Mother’s temple.”

Duster’s hands joined hers, and Duster came to stand beside her, her narrowed eyes examining the wood grain as if it were writing and she had actually bothered to learn it. “You’re crazy,” she finally said.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Jewel replied.

“It looks like a door, to me.”

Jewel bit her tongue, hard. A thousand sarcastic words jammed themselves into the backs of her teeth, and stayed behind closed lips by the sheer dint of will. “It
is
a door. It’s a wooden door. How many of those do we see in the undercity on a normal run?”

None, of course. Duster knew the answer, and didn’t offer it.

“But this one is standing. This one is still here. It feels solid, but old.” The pauses could kill a person. “It’s either been replaced, been oiled and repaired, or it’s magical. Which of the three do you think is most likely in a room like this?”

Duster grunted. After a few minutes, she realized that Jewel expected her to carry at least a small portion of the conversation. Looking harassed, she said, “Not the first two.”

“Right. So. Do you remember anything you were taught in the temple?”

“Why the Mother’s temple? It’s a
door
.”

“I
don’t know,
” Jewel said, and then, forcing her voice back down from its brief climb, added, “it’s what it
feels
like, to me.”

Silence. It was always like this when you asked a question Duster didn’t expect; she had to examine it to see if she could figure out what your game was. Only if she couldn’t—because in Duster’s world, that meant there wasn’t one—would she risk answering. “Yeah, some.”

“Do you remember any of the prayers?”

“Prayers? Are you serious?”

“Yes. I only know street prayers, and those are all short and to the wrong gods.”

Duster shrugged. She was uncomfortable. If Jewel had missed Carver, she was glad she’d sent him home now.

Jewel waited. She waited while the hair on the back of her neck rose. The only warmth in the room emanated in some measure from the door, and she didn’t lift her hands. But neither, she noticed, did Duster.

“Some,” Duster finally said. “There was a lot of stuff about food.” She hesitated, but the hesitation was different, and when Jewel looked at the side of Duster’s face, framed by black hair, she saw that it was the effort to remember, and not the fear of mockery, that held her tongue.

“There was some other stuff. About health. I think there were things about babies.”

“Were they all Weston?”

“The ones I could understand, yeah.”

“Were there other ones?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever have to—to recite them?”

“Only one.” Duster’s lips had thinned in annoyance.

“Often?”

“Every day.” Very thin.

“Could you repeat it?”

“Jay—”

“I’m not asking because I’m bored and it’ll kill time,” Jewel said softly, each word distinct and low.

“It’ll kill me,” Duster snarled. Her eyes were that particular shade of dark they got when they narrowed, but she didn’t snap. Instead, she took a long, slow breath. In the first year, she’d have tried to stab the door. “Why do you need me to do this?” She spoke each syllable carefully and precisely.