House War - The Hidden City Part 2

"If you're thirsty, wine is exactly the wrong thing to drink."

She shrugged. Her shoulders inched up and down; they were tight and drawn in toward her body, as if, at any moment, she might have to ward off blows. Or other physical violence. It angered him. The anger surprised him. He would have bet money-his own-that he had long lost the capacity for that kind of anger.

He split the beef evenly, and the loaf less evenly; it left a trail of crumbs for the mice. The water he sloshed into ceramic mugs. "Here," he said, handing one to her. "Eat. Drink."

She eyed the food, hunger warring with wariness.

It said much about her that wariness won. "Why are you doing this?" she asked him softly.

"I'm hungry."

"I mean, why are you-"

"I know what you meant; I'm not an idiot. But I'm hungry, and I dislike philosophical discussions on an empty stomach. If you're determined not to eat, starve. You've probably become adept at it."

That brought a flush to her cheeks, and the color added something. Not beauty, not exactly, but warmth and life. She shoved her hair out of her eyes, pushed something off a chair, and pulled the chair up to the table, sitting down as heavily as her sixty pounds of weight allowed. Reaching over the ungainly lump that was the unopened pack, she grabbed the strips of dried meat and began to eat.

"To answer your question, Jay, I don't know. I have no idea what I'm doing." He swallowed warm water, brushed bread crumbs from the corner of his mouth, and looked at her face in the glow of magelight. At her disheveled hair. At her eyes. "It isn't every day that someone steals my satchel in the streets of the thirty-second. I should have cut you; you were faster than I thought."

She shrugged, chewing slowly.

"I thought leaving you with the money would be enough. I had no intention of seeing you again; I went out for a walk tonight, found these, and started back. But . . . I walked past your bridge on the river." It would always be that to him, even years later: Jay's bridge. "And I saw you there."

"You could have kept walking. Everyone else does."

He nodded companionably. "I could have. But you could have taken what the farmer offered. You didn't. And you offered to pay him for what he did manage to slip you the last time you visited. I don't need to tell you how unusual that is."

As she frowned, he realized that he might be wrong on that last point. "You don't work," he said softly.

"I do. When there's work. When someone needs me. When it's festival season, I can be a runner-"

He lifted a hand, and she let the words trail off. She still had hope. He couldn't decide whether that was a gift or a curse; when one had hope, one always stood on the brink of despair.

"The magisterians would consider your line of work suspect," he told her, smiling to take the edge off the words.

It didn't work. Her face crumpled around the edges, her eyes narrowing in shame. He almost reached out to touch her then, but that would have been a mistake, and Rath had survived to be called Old Rath for good reason.

"When I'm older," she told him, averting her gaze, "I'll work."

"Doing what?"

"What everyone else does," she said. There was no hope in that phrase at all, and Rath decided that hope, in Jewel's case, was a gift. To him, at least.

"What," he said carefully, "does everyone else do?"

She hated the answer, and didn't give it, but she shot an accusing glance at him, and held his gaze.

"No lies," he said softly.

"I wasn't going to lie," she told him. "I just wasn't going to answer. You said you weren't an idiot. You figure it out."

His shadow flickered as he moved; the magelight, unlike inferior candle flame, was steady and constant. "Sell your body?"

She nodded.

"It's not a good life," he told her. "And it's usually a short one."

"Shorter than this?"

"Less respected."

She snorted. Not quite what he'd expected, but he was willing to let it play out. "It shouldn't be," she said, after the pause had grown long. "I own my body. It's mine to sell. It's honest. Stealing isn't."

"Jay-"

"It's true," she continued, her earnestness at odds with the subject. "At least that way, I'd be giving something back. I try," her voice dropped, "to steal from people who look like they won't starve if they lose a few coins. I try not to take more than I need. But I-"

Silence.

"There are men who won't pay you," he told her quietly. "And men who will beat you if they think someone else has."

She said nothing.

"Jewel."

Looked up.

"How long have you been living by the bridge?"

She shrugged. He knew, by the quality of that forced nonchalance, that she could tell him to the day how long it had been. But he didn't press her. Instead, he rose and untied the leather thongs that bound the backpack shut. Her eyes s.h.i.+fted, watching his fingers work the knot. She didn't offer to help him.

But her hands jumped up against the tabletop as he pulled the two tablet fragments from their resting place and laid them out beneath the light, runes taking shadow and making shape of it.

"Were you born here?" he asked, as he carefully arranged them so that they were oriented for her view. They were cold to the touch. Almost as cold as her hand had been, come new from the river.

She nodded, still staring, her fingers now fluttering as if they were trapped by some unseen force of air. "At least I think I was. This is the only place I remember."

"And your parents?"

"Not my Oma. My grandmother," she added, as if Rath couldn't be expected to know the old Torra word. He did; he didn't enlighten her. Enough that she talked at all.

She hadn't looked away from the engravings, but her expression was slowly s.h.i.+fting into something that looked like disappointment. If disappointment could be said to be shattering and crippling. "I can't read them," she whispered. "It's not-it wasn't the light."

He said, "If you cry, I'll throw you out. I cannot abide tears in a child."

"I'm not a child."

But you are, he thought, as he carefully moved the stones so that the runes faced him. And, G.o.ds help me, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with a child.

"This," he told her, lifting the stiletto he had chosen as the most convenient pointing device available, "is an R."

Her forehead wrinkled; the lines would fall away the instant her expression s.h.i.+fted, and it did so a dozen times in a minute. As she shoved her hair out of her eyes again, he asked, "Does your hair always do that?"

"All the time."

"And you haven't cut it?"

She stared at him, and the shadow of poverty crossed her face.

"Never mind. That was a stupid question. And in compensation for the stupidity, I will allow you to ask any three questions that come to mind." He turned back to the tablet. "It is not in the form of the R you would normally write; this is not Weston. It is Old Weston, and it has not been spoken in the Empire since well before its founding. It is, however, the root of the Weston you do speak. Can you write it?"

She nodded. It was hesitant, but he caught no lie there. "Who taught you?"

"My father, mostly."

"Good man."

"He was," she whispered. For a moment, the tablets lost her interest, and her gaze fell inward. Rath couldn't divine, from her answer, any specific truth; he had seen monstrous men who were, in the end, loved by their children, and that twisted love was a bitter, bitter legacy in the open street.

"In Old Weston, the letter forms used for engraving were very precise. The men and women employed in the carving of this particular tablet were probably Priests."

"Whose?"

"I can't answer that question."

"Can't?" she said, her eyes suddenly sharp and bright, "or won't?"

His smile was reward enough. "Smart girl."

"Does that count as one of my questions?"

"No. It wasn't stupid enough. But back to my point: the engravers were artists, of a kind. They worked with chisels, and judging from the absolute uniformity of these curves, I would say those chisels were magical in nature. The R looks much like any other letter form; the letters carved here were intended to be almost of a kind to the uneducated eye."

"Did people read a lot then?"

"That," he said, "counts as one question. It's not quite stupid, but I'm not that generous a man, as you will quickly discover. No, it is our belief that when these were engraved, writing and reading were done by very few."

"You can read these, though."

"Not a question. You're a clever girl, so I'll let that one by. Yes, I can read these."

"How?"

"I studied Old Weston. I hated it, at the time. My friends-such as they were-were out in the sword yards, or out on horseback, or out in the country hunting all manner of vice. My grandfather was a strict old b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and had no patience for such time wasting; I learned from him." He winced, remembering how often blows had been part of that experience.

"Does anyone write Old Weston now?"

"Not that I know of," he replied. "And I'll count that as half a question. There is a possibility that the Priests still write it, when it suits them; it is certainly spoken in some of their more odious, long-winded ceremonies."

Her mouth rounded in an O of shock, and he was almost ashamed at how pleased he was by the reaction. He really had spent too much time in self-imposed exile.

"That's an M?"

His brow rose and fell. "Yes, in fact, that is an M. And in the middle of a word. You have a good eye."

"These aren't from the same place, are they?"

"An extraordinarily good eye. No, they aren't. The larger piece will fetch a higher price."

"Where did you find these?"

He smiled. In truth, he had expected that to be her first question. "It's a trade secret. And I," he added, "am a trade of one."

"Tell me what they say."

"The first," he said, "is a snippet of praise. I believe it's from the base of an old statue; the statue itself exists only from the knees down, and there is no name here to indicate who was being honored by its erection. The second, longer and flatter, is from the base of a cenotaph."

She frowned, turning the word over and over. After a moment, she gave up. "A what?"

"A large, stone coffin that rests above ground. Usually in a crypt."

"You-you robbed the dead?"

"That was your second and a half question. And it was suitably stupid." He shrugged. "The dead don't care, Jay. No matter what your Oma told you, no matter what your parents might have said-the dead simply do not care. But the living do. And every fragment we find, every piece of ancient Weston, gives us information about the society that once laid claim to the city and the Isle."

"You're going to take these and sell them?"

He nodded quietly. "I have friends in the Order of Knowledge upon the Isle."

She drew back from the table, staring at him, her expression s.h.i.+fting between awe, fear, and a very stark envy. "I've never been to the Isle," she said at last.

And Rath knew that he was a complete idiot, an utter fool, because of what he said next.

"Would you like to?"

She stared at him. Turned away. Surprised him. "They'd never let me across the bridge."

"Not dressed like that, no."

"I don't have any other way to dress." There was no bitterness in her voice; none of the anger he might have expected. There was simple acceptance. Of life. Of fact. She stood, pus.h.i.+ng the chair back so gently it made no noise. "Thank you," she told him gravely, "for dinner."

She made her way to the door and reached for the locks. He wasn't afraid of losing her; she couldn't reach the topmost one. But he rose, leaving the most valuable objects in the room by the light.

"Jewel Markess."

She turned at the sound of her name, listless, but no longer afraid. He had earned at least that much this eve-her lack of fear.

"If you could have any one thing-anything at all, accepting the fact that the dead cannot return-what would it be?"