City of Night (22 page)

Jewel exhaled. “I know this is going to sound stupid—”

“Good.”

“—But I don’t think the door will open if you don’t.”

Duster turned to look at her den leader. Jewel waited.

“Mother’s blood, Jay!” She lifted a hand and pounded the door once. As if she were knocking. “What if I remember, and I say it, and it’s the wrong damn thing?”

“Then we go out the way we came in.”

“Why don’t we just go out the way we came in
anyway
?” But she knew the answer. Jewel didn’t want to go back. For some reason. And asking her why wouldn’t get answers; that wasn’t the way the strong
feeling
worked.

“Duster,
please
.”

Duster exhaled. Jewel, watching her, realized for the hundredth time that she could ask Duster to risk her life a thousand different ways much more easily than she could ask her to dent her pride. This, for whatever reason, was pride-denting in a big way.

“I don’t know why I’m still here,” Duster told the door.

Because the door’s closed.
Jewel, however, kept that to herself.

Duster began to speak. Well, to mumble. She had both hands on the door, and Jewel put her hands there as well. But Jewel also bowed her forehead, leaning it against the wooden surface. She waited, in silence.

Nothing happened, and she winced.

“There,” Duster said bitterly. “Satisfied?”

“No.”

Duster swore. “I’m
not
—”

“Say it slowly again.”

“Because you need to teach it to me. I need to say it, too.”

“What the Hells?”

“We’re both in here. Whatever it is needs saying, it needs saying by both of us.”

“Godsdamnit, Jay. You’d better be sure about this.”

“Sure as I ever am.”

Duster spat, which Jewel found shocking in the perfect white of the room. The shock cheered Duster immensely.

She started to speak the unfamiliar syllables slowly. Jewel repeated them back. “How many lines are there?”

“It’s three sentences,” Duster said. “If you could see ’em, you’d know that.”

“You couldn’t read them.”

“No, but they were carved on the damn wall.”

“Look, I’m sorry. Give them to me slowly again. First line first.”

Duster stared at her for a minute, and then she seemed to relax. It was a slow unwinding, but teaching Jewel the prayer, syllable by syllable, was leading her into unexpected terrain. Not back to whatever she had suffered—and if there was suffering to be had in the Mother’s temple, Jewel wasn’t sure she even wanted to know—but somewhere else, somewhere she had never expected to be.

“Here,” Duster said, “sit down. Just close your eyes and listen.” As if she’d been told that, and had listened, once.

Jewel nodded. She was afraid, now, and couldn’t say why. Didn’t want to know.

But want or not, she felt the beginning of an answer beneath her: a tremor in the ground. She opened her eyes and looked at Duster, who had fallen momentarily silent. They waited. Silence.

“Jay—”

And sound. The distant fall of rock.

Jewel swallowed. “Duster.”

Duster nodded. Any peace the act of teaching had offered, and with Duster all peace was tenuous, was gone. She began again, her voice low, her lips very near Jewel’s ear. Jewel repeated the syllables, trying to feel them as rhythm and sound, trying to pick a pattern in cadence that would make it easier.

The ground trembled again, and this time, it was stronger.

Duster cursed, and Jewel caught her hand—the unburned one—and pressed her fingers into it. Touch sometimes upset her and sometimes steadied her. This time, it steadied; it was a familiar and unthreatening hand. She kept speaking, slowly, and Jewel, frustrated at herself, repeated what she heard.

This time, when rock broke, it was undeniably closer, as if whatever was breaking it was moving, slowly, toward them. Jewel stood, and put her hands firmly against the door; it stilled their shaking. Duster did the same.

“Try it,” Jewel told her. “I’ll try to follow.”

Duster did. And Jewel tried.

The door, however, remained shut. Frustrated, tense with fear, Jewel said, “Duster, what does it mean?”

Duster looked at her. “Is that important?”

“I think so. What does it mean?”

“It’s just a prayer. We called it the orphan’s prayer.”

“Which we both are. Tell me, if you remember.”

The hesitation was very small; it was there, but necessity made it easier to step around.
“Mother, guide and guard your children as they walk the longest road. In darkness, hunger, isolation, in the lee of war and death. Mother hear us, lost and wandering, lead us, lead your children home.”

Jewel took a breath and closed her eyes. Those words, she could remember. They were way too long for street prayers, but she promised the Mother that she would say them every bloody night if the Mother would only
hear them
now.

She sucked in air, and then said, “Okay, Duster, again.”

And rock fell, closer now. The ground shook with it, accompanying the sound.

“Kalliaris,”
Duster whispered. “I think the hall is coming down.”

Jewel nodded. “Duster,” she said.

Duster began again, and this time, while Jewel followed her, pronouncing each syllable, she mapped them: the meaning and sounds. The door against her palm grew warmer, and the sense of harvest and hearth, nearer. She held them as she could, because the ground was now shaking beneath her feet and in the distance, she thought she could hear more than just the roar of falling stone.

A different roar; an ancient voice.

She didn’t raise her voice, but Duster did. And it helped. She needed Duster’s lead here, needed to concentrate, needed to give the lead to someone who knew what she didn’t know.

And it was hard. It was always hard. Didn’t matter.

Duster spoke clearly. Jewel, less so, but Jewel’s words were distinct. She felt heat now, as if the door’s warmth had spread throughout her entire body. For a moment, the warmth was stronger than the fear; for a moment, she felt cocooned and safe, and the tremors at her feet and back, the sound of crashing rock, receded; they were outside.

She saw her hands beside Duster’s hands, and knew she would remember them for a long time.

And then the door dissolved, and both she and Duster fell through the arch where it had stood.

 

They got to their feet in silence. The breaking of stone had either stopped, or they had stepped somehow beyond it into a familiar, silent darkness. Duster reached into a pocket and pulled out Jewel’s magestone, holding it in one palm. Jewel whispered the word to brighten it, and then remembered the heavy glass she carried against her stomach, in the folds of her shirt. She pulled this out as well, although she could not change the brightness of the light it shed.

“We’re not coming back here,” Duster said, echoing Jewel’s earlier words.

Jewel nodded. “Not that I could find it again, without you or Carver,” she felt compelled to add. Duster snorted. She reached for the sheath at her hip, touched the familiar hilt of a new dagger, and then relaxed a little. But when she turned to look back, she stopped.

Jewel, caught by the quality of her silence, turned as well.

In the frame through which they’d both just fallen, stood a door. No, not a door; two doors. Nothing about these doors was familiar. They were tall, and they stretched from ground to a ceiling that magelight did not quite illuminate. Across the seam where the two doors met was a symbol, a complicated symbol encircled by a spiral that started at its center. It was glowing with gold light, and as they watched, the light slowly faded.

They watched it until it could no longer be seen, even as an afterimage. Then they turned and began to make their way down the hall.

 

It was a long damn hall, and there were no doors to break it; there were also no junctions. They walked slowly in the magelight, and Jewel only tripped once on the bulky rope that wouldn’t quite stay in a convenient wreath. They didn’t speak, partly because they were listening, and partly because they were examining the ground.

“Rope?” Duster asked her, when they’d been walking for a few minutes.

“I think we’re good. There are no cracks at all in the stone.”

“There might be soon.”

“I don’t think so. I’m not even sure we’re anywhere near the room we left.”

Duster shrugged. The door was so clearly not the same door to her eye that she couldn’t argue. Besides which, neither of them particularly liked the confinement of knots. They walked for several minutes and came, at last, to stairs.

The stairs were not wide, but they weren’t that narrow. They were stone, and they headed up into darkness in a slow, curving spiral. Up was a good sign. Duster took the lead.

She put her weight slowly on the second step up, testing it.

And jumped back down almost instantly.

A clear note had sounded in the darkness. It was not something you normally heard when walking up the stairs. Bending, Duster brought the magelight closer. The step, to her eyes, and to Jewel’s, was solid rock.

She tried again, and again, a single note sounded. It wasn’t harsh, and it wasn’t horribly loud; the shock came from the fact it happened at all. “Magic?” Duster asked.

Jewel muttered, “Oh, probably. But I don’t see any magical auras very clearly.”

Duster muttered something about music and fear, and then began to walk; Jewel didn’t need to hear it to know what it was. Every step she took sounded a note, and each note was deep and long. Jewel began to follow, and found that her steps produced the same notes.

“Think this is some sort of early warning?” Duster asked.

“Yeah. Hopefully they’ve got nothing against would- be grave robbers.”

Duster snorted. It was slightly more nervous than the usual snort, but not by much; the closed doors and the lack of obviously disintegrating walls had put her in a better frame of mind. That, and the notes themselves; there was something soothing about them. The music created by the act of walking was neither too loud nor too harsh, and as they climbed their way through even—and changing—notes, they discovered that the notes created song, one that was soft and melodic. Sad, Jewel thought, but in a melancholy way.

They reached the top of the stairs, and the last of the notes faded into stillness.

T
HEY HAD CLIMBED FOR A
LONG
TIME. Jewel couldn’t be certain how high the stairs were, but she was almost certain that they must be close to an exit—if an exit from the undercity existed here. She had always wondered how far the undercity went. Did it stretch past the demiwalls that in theory girded the farthest reaches of the City, burrowed and hidden by dirt and stone roads? It certainly couldn’t extend into the sea.

The landing that led from the stairs was composed of a different stone than the stairs themselves had been; it was dark, and its surface, veined with hints of colors that might only be found in stone, reflected the magelight in Duster’s hand. Jewel bore the heavier, cumbersome cut-glass light in her hand, and held it aloft as she knelt to run her fingers across the floor.

“Marble,” she said quietly.

Duster had never been hugely concerned with what things were made of if they couldn’t be carried, but she waited while Jewel looked.

When Jewel rose, they approached the frame—or what was left of the frame—of an arch. It was not a doorway; no doors, except possibly those in
Avantari
, the Palace of Kings, were this damn wide.

And no rooms, Jewel thought, as magelight moved in both of their hands, were this damn big. Not even, she felt certain, in
Avantari
. She couldn’t see ceiling. “More light?” Duster whispered.

But Jewel shook her head. “Not here.”

Duster nodded. And whistled. “Look,” she said, “that’s gold.”

Jewel, glancing at Duster’s hand, shook her head. Had it been anyone else, she would have laughed and dared them to try to remove it; with Duster, that was only a guarantee that she
would
.

Duster nonetheless felt the need to say, “I’m not afraid.”

Jewel said, “No,
I
am. On the other hand,” she added, pushing a little, “I’ll try, if you want.”

Duster shook her head. Lifted one hand off dagger hilt.
Not you
.

Jewel signed back,
Not anyone
. Duster nodded. Gold was good, but hands were better.

The walls couldn’t even be seen, although they must have existed. Great runes were carved into the surface of marble, their edges undamaged by time and debris. Like the symbols in the first hall, they were unfamiliar to Jewel, and the scope of their size was so vast, she could not immediately identify them as single runes. But there were also circles, similar to those that had enclosed the cenotaphs; these circles, however, were broken in places, and the central figures they encircled seem to be parts of statues. She couldn’t read the writing at their bases, but they seemed to be Old Weston.