City of Night (41 page)

But it wasn’t, and they both knew it.

“A week,” Jay said. She’d picked up a couple of slates, dropped one of them in Teller’s lap and set the other in her own. Her hair, slightly red with the sun the way it always was at the end of the summer, she’d shoved off her forehead by tying a cloth band just beneath it. It wasn’t holding. In the humidity of the warmer seasons, nothing kept that hair in place.

And even if it had, she’d have pulled it half out by shoving her hair out of her eyes. She always did, even if it wasn’t in her eyes to start with.

“I can go down to the docks,” Angel said.

Teller cringed slightly, but said nothing.

Jay even started to say no, but stopped herself. “For what?”

“Loading. Unloading. There’s always work there, while the port’s open.”

“More work than at the Common?”

Angel nodded.

“What kind of work?”

“Moving boxes, mostly. Moving cargo.”

“They don’t have their own people for that?”

“On ship, they have some; they sometimes pick up hires to speed things up. It’s busy, this time of year.”

“Only lifting?”

“More or less.”

Arann watched. Arann knew how her father had died. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll go with Angel.”

Angel said nothing, waiting. After a minute, Jay nodded. “Carver?”

He looked up. Shook his head.

“Not yet,” she told him softly. “We’re not that desperate yet.”

“We will be,” was his quiet counter. “A week, Jay. If we’re smart, we won’t touch what’s there.”

“We don’t have a choice.”

“It’s not cold yet,” he added, as if she hadn’t spoken.

Even Lander and Lefty fell silent, hands dropping into their laps.

“But it will be. Having no money when it’s warm isn’t nearly as bad. Let me go back to some of my old haunts.”

“No. You’re not working this holding alone.”

“I won’t be alone. And it probably won’t be in the twenty- fifth. This isn’t where I camped, before.”

She wanted to say no. Everything about her already did. But she held Carver’s gaze, and he didn’t look away. In the end, she did.

She nodded.

Among the other things that came home with Carver and Duster on one of their foraging sprees was a deck of worn cards and four dice. “We left him his shoes,” Carver added, when he emptied his satchel. “And his clothing.”

If he meant this to be comforting, it wasn’t. “Cards?” she asked.

He shrugged. Duster looked at him and snorted. “Wasn’t my idea.”

They did bring back money, though. It wasn’t a large amount, but it would cover a day’s worth of food.

The first night out, they’d come back with more, but Carver had also come back with bruises.

Angel and Arann came back with less, because even if the port was busy, it was still difficult to find people who would pay them. People who would agree to pay them once they’d done the work could be found—as they discovered to their great annoyance—with some ease. Getting the coin, however, was much harder. The Port Authority guards were not, after the fact, their friends.

Arann, however, was fascinated by the ships and their flags; he was fascinated by the Port Authority itself. He didn’t care for the miles’ worth of very tired and irritated people who often walked the docks on their way from those ships to the Authority building but, like Angel, he learned to stay out of their way. He was off in the corner now, talking to Lefty. Lefty, boxed in, was listening as Arann told him about the ships and asked him about ship words.

Which, of course, no one in the room actually knew. Not even Jay. “We’ll ask Rath,” she told him, the third time he asked. “He’ll probably know.”

They were, by Teller’s count, only a day and a half behind. Jay checked his numbers.

 

A week later, they were four days behind.

Two weeks later, and they were just barely even.

It was growing dark earlier, but the nights weren’t cold; Jewel worked by magelight at the table, reading the same passages over and over again because she couldn’t keep her mind on the words. Tomorrow, she thought, staring at Weston but seeing, instead, the blackened inside of an almost empty iron box.

She couldn’t
do this
. She’d spent three years building a safe place, and it was going to crumble—was crumbling now.

For years, she’d been angry and upset at her father, but she understood his death now. He
had
to work. Because if he didn’t, this is what they would have faced.

This is what he would have faced, alone in the dark; he had no magestone, and every other form of light cost money. He hadn’t believed her, when she’d warned him that he would never come back. But he hadn’t wanted to believe either. Because if he failed to show up at work, they’d replace him, easily. And then he’d be
here
. With no money for rent. Or for food. And with a child who needed him to have both.

 

On the seventh day of Maran, the ninth month of the year, Jewel woke, went to the Common with what remained of their money, and then headed home in silence.

An hour later, she gathered her den, and in the same silence, the magestone in her pocket, they headed back to the undercity for the first time in months.

Angel and Arann went to the Port Authority. Carver and Duster went “out.” Finch, Teller, Jester, Lefty, and Lander went with Jewel.

Duster made clear how much she hated this arrangement, and she and Jewel exchanged terse words, but in the end, Jewel wouldn’t budge.

“We need what you bring in,” she said, her voice flat. “Even if we find something, we won’t have money from it for a week. Or two.”

Carver had put his hand on Duster’s shoulder. Duster shrugged it off. But she stopped speaking. “Take Angel,” she finally said. “Or Arann. You’ll find the cracks in the ground harder without ’em.”

Jewel’s brows had lifted in surprise. “I would,” she finally said, “but we can’t spare them. We need anything they can bring in, as well.”

Duster stood, mute now. She was poised in the doorway, one foot over the threshold, frozen there; it was hard to tell, looking at her, whether she was coming or going. Had she been anyone else, Jewel would have hugged her. She was Duster. Jewel raised her hands, not to touch, and not to push, but instead, to sign.

Duster hesitated, and then said, “Don’t lose them.”

The den watched her leave in silence.

There was no sky in the undercity. No sea breeze, tasting, always, of salt. No moving maze of people. No light that wasn’t theirs. Jewel held the magelight as they emerged into the streets. Familiar streets, opening up into the darkness of perpetual night.

They walked in a huddle, and this slowed their progress, but that was fine. The undercity had become strange with absence, and unknown with Fisher’s loss. Everything—every step, every hushed word—was hesitant. Even Jewel’s.

But the hesitance couldn’t last.

With each step and each word, a little bit of confidence returned. Teller pointed at familiar facades, Lander and Lefty signed, poking each other when their gaze wandered from the moving flight of den-sign that was their hands.

“Where do you want to start?” Teller asked.

Jewel frowned. She didn’t want to start exploring the uncharted areas of the undercity, but all the ones they knew had nothing to offer; they’d been over them, time and again. “Let’s head to the center. We can decide from there.”

 

The center of the undercity—which was, as far as Jewel could tell from her study of Rath’s maps, an accurate description—was where the larger roads met. Some of those roads were wide, and buildings, stepped back from flat, smooth rock, girded their progress. She thought grass or flowers or even trees must have grown near the building fronts at some point, because there was dirt in evidence; none of the foliage remained. Some of those roads were impassable; bridges had fallen across them.

At least Rath had called them bridges; they were
also
stone, and Jewel couldn’t understand why you’d build a stone bridge above the streets. But apparently, the people who lived here had thought it was a good idea to never touch the ground.

Teller knew more, because he asked more questions, and because Rath actually liked talking to him; he told Jewel and Finch that Rath thought the original buildings on some of these roads had been taller than
Avantari
, the palace of Kings. Taller, he added, than the Cathedrals. But wider. The bridges that had fallen had crossed from the heights of one structure to another.

Thinking about the number of steps you’d have to climb several times a day just to reach those heights made Jewel sneeze. She wondered if that’s where the poorest of the people lived, way back. She’d asked Rath once and he’d laughed, which had set her teeth on edge. She’d been younger.

“No, Jay,” he’d replied, using her preferred name the way he generally did when other members of the den were present. “I think we can safely assume that only the very, very wealthy, and the very, very powerful, lived at the heights of this city.”

“But
why
? They want to run up and down a mile’s worth of stairs every single time they need water or food?”

“I imagine,” he replied dryly, “that they would pay other people money to do it for them.”

“They’d have to come down sometime.”

“Oh, indeed. But I think that’s where the bridges would have been useful, or even necessary.”

“How do you even
know
they’re bridges?”

“I don’t. But the maps that you found suggest levels to the city; they would either have to descend into basements, or climb. And some of the fallen stone is not architecturally consistent with the style of the facades of actual buildings. In my explorations,” he added, which Jewel knew far outstripped her own, even three years later, “I’ve found nothing to suggest that basements were used as a tunnel system.

“There was wealth, in this city,” he added softly, “and power. Never doubt that there was power.”

Power enough, apparently, to build huge stone bridges that collapsed across buildings and roads, making them completely impassable. Jewel swore that if she ever possessed that elusive thing called power, she was
not
going to waste it on something so stupid.

“And what, then, would you waste it on?” Rath had asked, that annoying half smile on his face. It wasn’t a smirk, or she wouldn’t have answered.

“A bigger place for us,” she replied. “Food. Clothing.”

“Haval’s expensive clothing?”

“No,
real
clothing. And good boots. And better daggers. Oh! And magestones. For everyone. And solarii for Farmer Hanson. And—”

He lifted a hand. “Enough, Jay. Enough. One day, you’ll have those things, and you might—just might—be required to waste money on the things you don’t want and think you don’t need.”

“Why?”

“Because to others, it will signify power. Your power,” he added. “And they will therefore treat you with more care.”

“Or try to kill you,” Teller added.

They both turned to look at him. “Well,” he added, “that’s what always happens in your books.”

Rath’s smile had faded, although his expression hadn’t changed. “Yes,” he’d said softly.

 

Jewel avoided fallen bridges. She’d traveled to the center of this city often enough that she knew how to jog around the wide, main streets where the roads vanished beneath the weight of too many kinds of rock.

“There’s more stone than there used to be here,” Teller said quietly, when they’d made their second detour.

Jewel looked at the road. She couldn’t see any difference. But she didn’t
want
to see one either, and his words settled into her stomach like bad meat. “You’re sure?”

He nodded. “And the cracks are wider in places as well.”

Lefty snorted. “Tell me about it.” And then fell silent. Lander touched his shoulder and Lefty looked automatically at his hands. The hands were still. After another quiet pause, Lefty nodded at Lander.

It reminded Jewel—as if she needed a reminder—why she loved these people. She smacked Lefty on the back of the head. “Let’s go,” she told him.

 

They reached the center of the city. It was obvious in part because the roads seemed to converge to meet here, and in part because of the statue. Well, what remained of a statue. Its base was large enough that the whole den could line up against one of its square sides, end to end, with plenty of room to the right and left. The statue’s lower torso and legs were still attached to the base; Jewel had no idea how tall they were because they couldn’t really climb the statue’s base without a lot of effort; it was just too damn tall.

The remains of the upper half of the statue lay strewn along the ground for some distance. They examined every single piece, hoping for some gold leaf or gems they could pick out, but had no luck.

Mixed in with the slabs and chunks of broken stone was always a smattering of glass; it caught light, and the reflections glittered across the surface of otherwise dim and solid ground, hinting at riches and delivering small wounds, instead.

Teller looked at Jewel, and Jewel caught herself before she could shrug. People were tentative, now, and that was fair—she had to resist the urge to count them every time they stopped moving.

“Let’s head this way.” She started walking. Teller fell in to her right, and Finch to her left; Lander, Lefty, and Jester walked behind. Footsteps were like heartbeats, constant, steady, and slow. Where rock lay in their path, those steps stopped and shifted as the light shifted. Here and there, Jewel stopped when something glinted on the ground ahead. Glass or no, they couldn’t afford not to look.