Page 22 of City of Stone and Silence

“I should have known,” she says, raising her blades. “I should have known you were a monster.”

When I wake up, this time in reality, I can still feel the searing heat of her blade sliding into my chest. My heart hammers, and my shift is drenched in sweat. I don’t scream, but only because I have a lot of practice.

The feeling of touching old Sewa’s mind is still all over me, an oily taint I can’t clean. The sun is low in the sky, which means I’ve only slept for a few hours, but I can tell closing my eyes again would be pointless.

I had to, I try to tell myself. He could have hurt me badly. I didn’t think he wanted to, even in the depths of his fear, but he hadn’t been in control of himself. He could have burned half the building down, killed someone. I had to.

Sometimes, you want to help someone, that means you get covered in shit. Grandma’s voice makes me feel a little better, but only a little.

I get up and take a bath before breakfast. The water in the tub is chilly, but I don’t want to wake the maids to heat it, and it still sluices away the sweat. I soak my hair, press it dry carefully, and go over it with a brush. Then I dress in a sky-blue kizen embroidered with purple plums, and pick a silver comb set with amethysts to match it.

None of the servants seem to notice anything’s amiss, but Ofalo is more observant. After breakfast is cleared away, he leans toward me.

“Are you feeling unwell again, Lady Tori?”

I shake my head, a dull, throbbing pain behind my eyes.

“It’s nothing,” I tell him. “I didn’t get enough sleep.”

6

ISOKA

As it turns out, I don’t get my chance to interrogate Veldi, our mysterious stranger, until the following morning.

There’s too much that needs doing in the meantime. At Meroe’s direction, teams fan out through the stone corridors of the ancient building. They find other entrances, one on each of the four sides, and we set guards on them. There are large central chambers on several levels, big enough to accommodate the crew several times over. We search one thoroughly and herd everyone inside. Another team finds a spring trickling into a rocky pool on the bottom level, and Meroe hurriedly orders every available skin and bottle filled.

The crew is a mass of confusion, friends and families separated in the chase, the crowd milling desperately as they seek familiar faces. Shiara takes charge there, sorting people out and restoring order. Most of those who were separated get reunited, but not all. We lost people in the mad dash, overrun and torn to pieces by the walking corpses.

A year ago, I wouldn’t have cared. Even a month ago, I was ready to leave the crew behind, take Meroe and flee to the Garden on my own. She’d convinced me to try to help, instead. And now, somehow, they expected it from me, relied on me to keep them safe. And I hadn’t done it.

It hurts. Why does it hurt?

I pause for a rest at some point. Just briefly, sitting down on a blanket some kind soul has spread across the stones, closing my eyes. When I open them, sunlight is slanting down into the chamber through high slit windows, and Meroe is sitting beside me, her head leaning on my shoulder. As I move, she yawns and stirs.

“Hey,” I manage.

“Hey.” She sits up and wipes gunk from her eyes. “I guess we’re still alive.”

“I guess so.”

I kiss her, with only a brief hesitation due to the eyes all around us. It’s not like we’re keeping our relationship secret, but some habits die hard.

“If the sun’s up,” she says, “I want to go up to the roof. Maybe we can finally get a decent look at this place.”

After confirming with the teams watching the doors that there had been no further attacks overnight, I follow Meroe up a four-sided spiral stair that runs around a shaft at the center of the building. With the fading of adrenaline, the pains of the night before are making themselves felt, and my legs are twinging by the time we get to the top. My arms have the bone-deep ache of powerburn, something I’m intimately familiar with. The crew’s healer, Sister Cadua, is still caring for the injured, but I’ll have to see if she salvaged any of her ointments.

The stairs end in a flat platform with a ladderlike arrangement of stones leading up through a square hole in the roof. I groan at the sight, and Meroe gives me a sympathetic look. She goes up first, and I follow, gritting my teeth. I’m breathing hard when we emerge into the glare of the sun, and I shade my eyes and look around.

At least all that climbing brought us a good view, far above the tops of the jungle trees. The building we’ve occupied stretches out below us, an immense stone ziggurat, pyramid-shaped but stair-stepped, built of huge stone blocks. Ramps run up the center of each side, leading to the four main entrances we’d discovered the night before, and bands of narrow slit windows ring the structure. Everything is carved from stone.

Ours isn’t the only such building. Looking out over the jungle, I can see more step-pyramids rising through the trees. Some are smaller than ours, others roughly on the same scale, while three in particular are truly enormous, towering half again the height of our viewing platform. In between, tall obelisks jut upward, tapered pillars of cut stone like enormous swords thrusting toward the sky. A few are intact, but most have lost at least part of their upper reaches, and some have toppled over entirely, barely visible through the jungle.

Turning, I look toward the sea. Soliton is still berthed in the gargantuan dock, along with the decaying hulks of the other ships. I can’t see any activity among the angels on her deck, but there’s a steady flow of Eddica energy still pouring out of the ship, invisible but strong enough that I can sense it easily from here.

“Look,” Meroe says, tugging at my sleeve. “Over there. That looks like fields.”

I follow her pointing finger. A large strip of land does seem to have been cleared of jungle, covered with a checkerboard of different colors. It’s hard to tell from here, but I think I can see something moving, dark figures reduced to ants by the distance.