The Shattered City (33 page)

‘There's something wrong with her.' Delphine was trying not to panic, but this was Rhian, and they'd all gone through so much. (She couldn't lose Rhian too, she just couldn't; she would fall to a million pieces.)

Macready went to Rhian's side, neatly disarming her and placing the knife further along the table, out of reach. ‘Now then, my lovely, how are you doing? What a mess you've made here.'

Rhian turned to look at him, but her eyes were sightless. ‘I can hear them singing,' she said in a frantic voice. ‘They just keep singing at me.'

‘Is she …' said Delphine, and choked on the rest of the question. First Ashiol, now this. ‘Is she broken too?' She couldn't do this, couldn't look after a crazy Rhian by herself. She needed Velody, and that thought was enough to make her chest twist into knots.

Velody was gone, and they were on their own.

‘Not like Ashiol,' Macready said in what he probably thought was a comforting tone of voice. ‘But she's the Seer now, lass. It could take her hard.'

‘She has to give it back,' Delphine blurted. ‘She can't do this; she was already so fragile.'

‘Is that what you think?' said Macready, his hand hovering as if he was going to touch Rhian's hair, before he pulled back without making contact. ‘I always thought she was the strong one, so I did.'

Rhian grabbed out at his hand, squeezing his fingers tightly between hers. ‘He's making them sing, Macready! Cover the mirrors, quickly, before they come through.'

‘Aye, lass, we'll see to it, but you must draw out, now. No getting lost in the futures. Trust me, there are no kind ways to bring you back.'

Delphine watched as he soothed Rhian with his voice, responding to her as if what she said was normal. He kept it up for far longer than she would have had patience for. What kind of a thimblehead was she, trying to push this man away?

Finally Rhian was calm and herself again. ‘Thank you,' she said to Mac in a soft voice.

Delphine tidied away the ruined flowers and then made mint tisane for them all with shaking hands,
forgetting as she always did how many scoops of the fine dried leaves she should use. She almost cried with relief when Rhian chided her for making it too strong. Normal. Somewhere near normal.

‘Well now,' said Macready a while later. ‘We've had a narrow escape here, so we have. So busy working on Delphine's training, we never gave a thought to yours.'

‘I —' said Rhian and then stopped, darting an anxious look at Delphine, as if whatever she was about to say could be worse than anything else Delphine had put up with lately. ‘I hear them. The other Seers, the ones from before. I hear their voices. I think they are the ones who are supposed to teach me how to do this.'

‘Aye,' Macready said grimly. ‘I thought it might be something like that. They won't always be able to help you, my lovely. There are some things about being a Seer that — will be a problem for you.'

‘Like what?' Delphine interrupted.

Rhian broke her cup. They both turned to stare at her, but she was lost again, staring at the tisane as it dripped over the edge of the table, her eyes locked on the broken pieces. ‘He's coming back,' Rhian wailed. ‘He's coming back, he's coming back, and you're all going to
burn
!'

 

Macready watched Rhian as she babbled, eyes glazed over by the futures only she could see.
My poor sweet lass
.

He's coming back
, she had said. He. Not Velody, then. Whoever it was, it couldn't be good. No time to dwell on that. Rhian was lost again, deeper than before, and feck it, he might not be able to talk her down this time.

Macready remembered how hard Heliora had railed against all this when it first crashed in on her. She had
loathed being a Seer, and it swallowed her up whole and hard. She had been a tough wee fighter, though, right from the start. For all he said that Rhian was strong, there were clearly some things she couldn't deal with, and this damned role was going to hurl them all at her.

‘Make it stop,' Delphine said in a high, panicky voice, dragging Macready back to the here and now. ‘Do something. How do we make it stop?'

Well, one of us could frig her against the wall. How would that be?

Saints and devils. Rhian was tumbling over herself now, barely able to speak the prophecies as they fell from her mouth. She was losing herself. ‘He'll break us in pieces, all over again, he can't come back, we can't return to what we were, we won't survive it …' She was trembling, and the words burst out of her as if she was trying to hold them in.

‘Rhian,' Macready said urgently. ‘Don't let them take you. We can't bring you back. You have to do it. Stay strong, lass.'

‘Help me,' she mouthed, pushing herself back from the table so violently she almost fell back on her chair.

Macready made his decision. He got up and dragged the table against the wall, making space.

‘What are you doing?' Delphine demanded.

‘Give her one of your swords,' Macready ordered her, drawing his own, the steel blade that still didn't feel like his. (The loss of his lasses was an ache he hadn't come to terms with yet.)

‘Are you kidding me? She can't fight you.'

‘Physical reality — it's the only way to snap the Seer back when the futures take them,' he said, wishing he didn't have to spell it out. ‘Sex, lass. That's what Heliora
always used. Given a choice between fecking and fighting … which do you think we should force on your lass here?'

Delphine hesitated and nodded, tugging Rhian to her feet and closing her fingers around the hilt of her own sword. ‘Don't hurt her.'

As if he would. Macready leaned in, flicking the sword against the one Rhian held in a stage trick rather than a genuine fighting move. ‘Play,' he said firmly.

Rhian had been silent for some time, though her eyes were still glazed with the unmistakeable look of someone lost in the futures. She looked at him blankly.

‘Play,' he said again, and rapped his blade harder against hers. Maybe she didn't have much experience with a sword — but she had a multitude of Seers in her noggin, and Hel surely wasn't the only one of them who had started out sentinel.

Rhian's eyes narrowed, just a little. ‘The children will sing and he will return and the sky will fall,' she burst out. ‘It happens that way a thousand different times, different events, different deaths, but they always sing and he always returns and it's going to be a bloodbath.'

‘Good to know,' Macready said steadily.

The third time he rapped her blade with his, she started fighting back. Her moves were slow at first, as if she was relearning something she had known instinctively as a child, but as he pressed his advantage she began to fence him like someone who knew how to use a sword.

Some of Rhian's moves were classic Heliora, picked up from the Silver Captain, and it twisted Macready's gut every single time she used them. He hadn't thought about how he missed having Heliora around, until now. How much of her was inside Rhian's head?

All of them. He missed all of them. The rowdy family of sentinels he had once been part of. The Creature Court was not the same place without them.

Finally Rhian stepped back, out of breath, and lowered the sword. ‘What — what are we doing? I was making dinner.'

Delphine squeaked and threw her arms around Rhian from behind. Macready shook his head. There had to be an easier way, surely.

S
he was cold. Cold was a good thing, surely. It meant that she was somewhere. Not blown into random threads across the sky.

Velody opened her eyes, and found herself lying on stone. She was naked, and as a matter of habit she reached inside herself for that familiar glow of Lord shape. It was not there. She breathed deeply, calling upon her animor, and found her skin empty of it.

Maybe that was why she was cold.

Silence spread across the air in front of her, reaching in all directions. Velody had spent most of her life within city walls, and had never heard a silence so deep or all-encompassing as this.

Heliora?

But no, even the last remnant of the Seer that had clung to Velody in those moments before the sky swallowed her was gone now. Velody made the sign for
swift passing, hoping that wherever Heliora was now, it was peaceful.

This did not address the question of where Velody was. The stone was part of a street. The cobbles were a dusty yellow colour, not the usual brown or black or grey she knew from Aufleur. And yet it was familiar.

She walked out into the main street, and there was no sky. It was not nox, nor daylight. There was no ceiling or pavilion roof covering it, and there was no cloud. The sky was merely absent, as her animor was absent.

This was a city, Velody realised, as she followed the empty street down to a crossroads. A wooden saint was skewered neatly in the centre, as was normal back in Aufleur. This was not her city, though. The stone was golden yellow, and the buildings of a different age and style.

She turned another corner, and was swamped by a wave of memory, so intimate that it almost turned her stomach. This
was
her city. She was two streets from the Greater Dockyards of Tierce. She was home.

Velody began to run. How could she not? Twelve years ago, she had stepped onto the train that would take her away from here, to an apprentice fair that would change her life forever. It had only been a few months since her memories had returned, and they came in fractured pieces — her papa's arms, kneading the dough he would make into crisp bread rolls. Her mam's apron. Her sisters, squabbling over who would wear the best dress. Her brothers, shouting and tumbling through the busy house until they were put to work in the yard, or at the ovens. Her grandmother's swift fingers as she spun yarn in starlight colours, to sell to the local weavery.
Her grandfather's stiff back as he lectured them all (even the babies) on the proper handling of flour.

Velody stopped, finally, because she knew this lane. There was the bakery, whole and exactly the same. Smaller, perhaps. Humbler than the palazzo of yeast and rye that had formed in her head after so long away. There was no scent of baking bread. The shop was as empty as the rest of the city. It smelled like death, or the cold stone of an abandoned home. Where were they all?

She hesitated on the threshold, wanting and afraid at the same time to see nothing but the empty spaces left behind by her family. Where had they all gone? The bakery was never empty. There was always new bread. The scent of it infused everything. Velody breathed in, and could smell nothing but stone and dust and the absence of everything she craved.

There was nothing here for her, and yet she could not resist going inside to see the emptiness for herself. The bowls and ovens in the bakery were empty. The house upstairs was full of things, but no people. No food. Nothing that felt as if it belonged to the now. Velody couldn't bring herself to step into the room she had shared with her sisters, not yet, but she went into her parents' room and found a soft grey dress, well mended, folded in a chest. Mam's funeral dress. What could be more appropriate for Velody to clothe herself with upon her homecoming?

She didn't stay. Being here was too painful. She emerged from the bakery and sat on the top step, staring out at the desolate street. Utterly alone.

Five minutes later, someone started singing. Velody wasn't sure of the sound at first and then she was on her
feet, running, trying to find the source of that odd, lilting sound. She wasn't alone here after all.

The docks made everything sound wrong (water, there was no water lapping against the pier, just more of that nothingness that hurt the eyes), and it took a long time before Velody could make sense of the echoes.

She found herself at the entrance to the bathhouse at the corner between the docks and her home, and yes — the singing was coming from in here. Velody walked nervously through the frigidarium, and the demoiselles' pool, finally ending up at the caldarium. Here, among the stone arches, there was water. It steamed, and how was it possible to have this source of heat when there was nothing else in the city?

The song had stopped, leaving her with no trail, but as she stumbled forward into the hot and clammy room, she saw him.

A man half-floated lazily in the water, naked and muscled. As Velody watched, he turned his head. The wet hair made it look darker, but his skin stood out, pale and bright beneath the red.

Now would be a really good time to start breathing again.

He smiled a slow smile of recognition. Maybe a flash of hunger. It made her shiver. ‘Velody,' he said. ‘I've been waiting for you.'

Garnet. Holy saints and angels. It was Garnet.

 

Time passed.

Velody was regretting now that she had done nothing to mark her days here, but what exactly was she supposed to record? There was no daylight, no nox. No waterclocks, nothing but her heartbeat.

She wasn't even sure that her heartbeat could be trusted. Some days, she couldn't hear it at all.

It felt like she had been here a long time, but perhaps it was one of those dreams which gave you an entire epic story in the time it took to blink asleep and awake again.

Velody had considered marking the wall of her old room above the bakery every time she slept. But time went on and she realised that she didn't sleep. Sometimes when the weariness overtook her she would lie on the cool, musty covers and remember the room as it had been, full of the giggles and whispers of her sisters, but somehow she never managed to slip into any kind of darkness. She was relentlessly
here
.

She could possibly record the number of times she avoided Garnet; that might be worth remembering.

This was her life now. She avoided Garnet when she could. Spent her time walking the canal paths of the city. She had no hunger, no thirst. No animor.

One of Velody's favourite places to wander was the city Museion, an edifice of stone and pillars that she had never even known existed in her old life as a baker's daughter in Tierce. She could spend hours (minutes? days? no way of knowing) walking through the many grand halls, looking at the paintings and statues and costumes.

The hall of costumes almost broke her heart. So many lovely dresses, fine suits, representing decades and centuries of history. Velody touched the fabrics, the edgings and bindings, telling herself that as long as she could feel the difference between silk from Isharo and silk from Camoise, she was still a real person who actually existed.

On her third visit, she stripped off the grey funeral
dress she had taken from the bakery and slid an antique emerald-green gown over her body, fastening the clasps with shaking hands. Why not? The city was empty of everyone but ghosts.

She still felt like a thief as she walked out of the Museion.

Garnet waited for her, legs dangling casually as he lounged on the plinth of a great granite statue. ‘That colour suits you,' he said lightly. ‘You look like a King. If Kings wore frocks.'

‘They do these days,' said Velody.

‘So they do.' Garnet surveyed her thoughtfully. Her skin prickled under his gaze. He wasn't the long-limbed boy she had dreamed about for so many years. There was nothing romantic about him. He was lean and hard; all angles. His skin was pale, and his hair a coppery shock. She had expected it to be longer — in her later visions of him he had worn it back with a ribbon.

She remembered it falling loose around his shoulders as he kissed Ashiol, mouth dragging down his neck and teeth fastening onto his collarbone. But that wasn't Velody's memory and she forced it away, before Garnet could see it in her face.

‘Why do you keep running away from me?' he said. ‘I can't hurt you now.'

That ‘now' was significant — a reminder that when they were alive, he would have hurt her without a second thought.

Velody lifted her chin. ‘I don't need anything from you.'

‘Not even company?' he said mournfully. ‘Aren't you a little worried that you might go insane with no one to talk to in this broken, dead city?'

‘Is that what happened to you?'

Garnet flashed his bright white teeth at her in a grin. ‘Not yet.'

‘Then I'll take my chances. It's a fair bet that my mental state was better than yours to begin with.'

‘You make a good point.' He swung his legs back and forth. ‘What do you miss the most, ladyking?'

Home, my friends, my hearth, my work
…

‘What do you miss?' Velody flung at him. ‘Ruling the Creature Court? Torturing your friends? Fighting for your life every nox? I don't want to talk to you, Garnet. You should have stayed dead.'

He shrugged as if giving up, and slid down off the plinth to land neatly on his feet. ‘Sadly, that's harder than it sounds. Trust me, little mouse. A few more endless days of this and you'll be wishing for your own death, not mine.'

‘Something to look forward to,' Velody said unsteadily.

She walked away, and made it to the edge of the courtyard before Garnet yelled after her: ‘You're just like me!'

Not that, never that, no, no, no.

 

Velody started smashing glass. There was something satisfying about it. The city was so damned silent, and the noise cut through everything, harsh and clear and perfect.

She broke every window in her family's bakery, watching the arc of smashed glass fly out into the street, or the canal behind the house. When there were no windows left, she went to the next house, and the next. So many windows, so little time. For the first time in
forever, she felt something pulsing through her — not quite a heartbeat, not quite animor, but something.

She felt alive.

When she was done with that street, she worked on another, and then another. The destruction was compulsive, and what else did she have to do? She made her way out of Cheapside and into more affluent districts, leaving a streak of damage in her wake.

Broken pieces of everything.

Some time later, she found a street she had never set foot in before. It was an avenue lined with trees (no leaves, just bare branches — nothing was allowed to live here): the kind of place where Delphine and her fancy family might have lived.

Every window was broken. The street was awash with glass. She stared at it, knowing she had never been here before, wondering how … but of course. She wasn't the only prisoner in Tierce.

You're just like me
, Garnet had told her. Apparently, it was true.

Glass crunched under her shoes. Velody crouched down, picking up a long sliver. It had an edge to it, like a knife.

She thought of Rhian, of that horrible Lupercalia, blood dripping from her slashed wrist. Velody had always thought that there was no despair, nothing that could make her do something like that to herself. Even when the Creature Court had driven her to the edge, she had never thought of this.

But she had to do something. Had to remind herself that she was real.

Velody held the glass against her wrist, pressing it brutally against the skin.

‘I wouldn't,' said that voice, coming out of nowhere. She looked up and found Garnet lounging against a wall as if he had been watching her for some time.

(Well, what else did he have to do?)

‘Wouldn't you?' said Velody.

‘Believe me, little mouse, you don't want to know the answer to that particular question.' He sounded calm and reassuring, which was disturbing beyond belief.

‘I don't trust you,' she said clearly and stabbed down at the skin.

She didn't bleed. There really was nothing in her veins. Velody stared at the ragged gash in her wrist, wanting some sign that she was alive. Even the pain was dull, and the moment she stopped concentrating on it, it was nothing at all.

Garnet came to her, one hand wrapping around the empty wound on her wrist, another taking the glass from her hand. She let him. ‘Fancy a reason to live?' he asked in a low voice.

That made Velody laugh. ‘Think a lot of yourself, don't you?'

Garnet laughed too, and for once she didn't think it was an awful sound. ‘You should be so lucky. I'm offering something better. Almost as good as breathing.' He leaned in, mouth on her ear. ‘Break all the windows you like, but keep the mirrors in one piece. We're going to need them.'