Page 8 of City of Stone and Silence

The Eleventh Ward, where I’m going, is only one tier above the Sixteenth, but it’s a very different sort of place. Where the Sixteenth is messy, the Eleventh is tidy. Families might be packed two or three to a tiny tenement room, but they maintain a scrupulously polite air as they squeeze into their tiny nooks and take turns at the communal water pump.

It’s a different sort of people who live here, too. Instead of sailors and dockworkers, the Eleventh Ward and its sisters in the second tier are home to servants and small craftsmen. Every morning, great tides of people flow upward, weavers and potters and ivory-cutters and smith’s boys and every other sort of artisan, all those too poor to own their own shops and businesses.

They have a strange pride, these people. They may be poor, but they can look down on the Sixteenth Ward and say, at least we’re not thieves or streetwalkers like them. Isoka would find that infuriating, their need to stand on their tiny shred of higher ground. It’s not that there isn’t crime here, it just goes on behind closed doors, protection rackets and smuggling. You can walk down an alley at night without being robbed, or raped, or murdered.

Usually. I carry a long knife thrust crosswise through the back of my belt, although in truth my best defense is the fact that I’d feel the mind of anyone with bad intentions in time to run away.

The cab drops me off at the ward gate. Inside the Eleventh, there are no carriages—the streets are too narrow, and filled with a tide of humanity, regardless of the hour. I take a deep breath, adjust my cap, and plunge into the chaos. Just past the gate is the High Market, packed solid with people returning from their labors in the higher wards and doing their shopping before going home. I can only make progress with liberal use of my elbows, jabbing my way forward.

The sounds and smells of the market are enough to overcome even the babble and stink of the crowd. Vendors shout at the top of their lungs from small wooden stalls, simple repetitive chants overlapping like raucous birdsong. The calls are singsong nonsense, unless you know the patterns—car car car for carrots, a high two-tone whistle for pork, low barks for the fat dumplings they call dogheads.

I home in on a woman making a trilling riii riii, and burst out of the crowd in front of a stall hung with ropes of dough. I manage to work a copper bit out of my pocket, and the woman tucks it into the bandanna tying back her hair. She tears off a length of dough, dunks it in a simmering pot of oil with a pair of wooden tongs, then swishes it through a bowl of honey before handing it over. It’s almost too hot to touch, dripping and sticky. I’ve already had dinner, but I can’t resist.

The next stall over is wider, serving noodles to customers crammed shoulder to shoulder on a narrow bench. As I devour the fried dough, I get snatches of conversation.

“—the Bonira boy, and Vana Kujan’s son.”

“Terrible, rotting terrible.”

“—say it’s a death sentence if you get sent to the oars—”

“—better to volunteer. Might get into the Legions—”

“—can find a set of papers. I know a guy—”

I finish the dough, licking honey off my fingers, and push back into the crowd. Heading south, I soon reach the bottom of the market, where it narrows into Orchard Street, high tenements rising on either side. Ordinarily, I would expect the press to ease beyond this point, but the street is just as crowded as the square, a mass of people pressed cheek by jowl. I can hear angry muttering.

“—rotscum, it shouldn’t be allowed—”

“—His Imperial Majesty, Blessed preserve him, wouldn’t stand for it if he knew—”

“—Mommy, I have to pee—”

I’m close to the edge of the street, where the wood-and-plaster façade of the nearest tenement rises beside me, patched and stained from years of abuse. I fit my fingers into the cracks and climb up a foot or two, just enough to get a view over the mass of heads. A couple of people around me laugh, and a young boy shouts encouragement.

Up ahead, where Orchard Street meets Fishmonger Row, wooden partitions block the road. Two dozen men in Ward Guard uniforms man the barricades. They split the incoming traffic in two: women, children, and the elderly one way, men the other, and each man has a conversation with a stern-faced sergeant and shows a paper.

I can’t make out the documents from here, but I can guess. The talk of the city (though not of my house, as Ofalo’s made clear) has been Jyashtani aggression down in the islands. His Imperial Majesty, through his servant Kuon Naga, has proclaimed that the Empire must be ready to resist the infidels. That means finding soldiers for the Legions and, more importantly, oarsmen to bring the Imperial Navy up to strength. Since most people would rather stew in jail than row in the fleet—as the joke goes, the only difference is that you’re less likely to drown in prison—that means a draft.

Any likely-looking young man has to produce papers to prove that his family has already contributed a son to the cause. I can see a dozen sullen boys whose documentation was apparently insufficiently convincing standing between two burly guardsmen. Some of them will probably be rescued by friends and family with better paperwork or more bribe money, but the rest will be shipped out to power the Emperor’s war machine.

There are no draft checkpoints in the Second Ward, of course. If the families there send a son or daughter to the war, it would be as a mage-blood in the Legions, or at least as an officer. Watching the crowd here shuffle forward, like pigs in a butcher’s pen, tears at something in my chest.

More immediately, the checkpoint presents a problem. In a pocket sewn into the inside of my shirt, I carry my identity papers, but showing them here is likely to cause trouble. They might not even believe me; young ladies of the Second Ward simply don’t turn up at Eleventh Ward draft checkpoints. I definitely don’t want someone sending for Ofalo to spring me from a prison cell.

On the whole, it seems easier to take the long way around. I hop down from the wall and start pushing through the crowd again, heading for the entrance to an alley between this building and its neighbor. It looks like a dead end, but there’s a broken slat in the fence on the far side if you know where to look, and a quick climb will take me into the back lot of a building on Fishmonger Row. From there it’s easy enough to cut the corner and get to Grandma’s.

The crowd spits me out into the alley like a broken tooth. There’s not much here, just a long stretch of dirt between two buildings, smelling heavily of piss and rotting trash. Halfway along there’s a stack of wooden boxes, the ones that hold cheap jugs of rice wine, and beyond them an alcove with a back door into one of the buildings.

I let my power sweep the alley, carefully. Opening my senses with so many people crowded so close can be distinctly uncomfortable. But there’s no one hiding in the darkened corners, so I jog past the stack of crates to the crooked fence at the rear. Just as I remember, one of the boards pops off, revealing some easy-to-climb slats. I’m about to scramble up—they’re splintery with protruding nails, making me thankful for my big stompy boots—when I feel several people in the alley behind me, their minds glowing with ugly suspicion.

If you’re going to move, move fast. Isoka drilled that into me, before she left me to be educated as a lady, and I never quite forgot. I don’t have long enough to get myself over the fence, so I duck to the side of the alley, flattening myself in the doorway behind the crates. I’m pretty sure that gets me out of sight, and it’s dark enough they probably didn’t notice me.

Probably. My heart is suddenly beating fast, and I feel the hard shape of my knife in its hiding spot. Probably they’re not looking for me, either. I hear rapid footsteps, and focus my attention. There are three people, one close and scared, two suspicious and bored, farther back toward the mouth of the alley. Peeking out, I can see a shadow darting toward me, and the light of a lamp further along. Before I have the chance to make out much else, the shadowy figure rounds the crates and slams into me shoulder first.

I stagger back into the doorway with an oof. For a moment, I think of the knife, but I don’t feel any menace in the stranger’s mind, just high, tinkling worry. He—it’s a young man, probably not much older than me—presses himself against the boxes and puts a finger to his lips, his eyes frantically begging for silence.

At the end of the alley, two older men are reduced to black silhouettes by the lantern one of them carries. As they approach, I can hear them over the babble of the crowd.