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CHAPTER 38

SALT AND RAG


Darkness.

I could remember darkness blacker still, could hear it wailing, gnashing all about me.

It was quiet then. All was quiet.

My name, I thought—I thought it was me that thought. My name is Hadrian.

I tried to speak, to work my mouth and jaw. Did I even have a mouth? The mere thought made me want to rage, to scream, to test the limits of my humanity. But I could not move. I could remember green eyes. Valka had green eyes. Or was that someone else?

And who was Valka?

Was I crying? I wanted to cry. To cease.

Drip.

Water. That sound was water falling from some high place.

Drip. Drip.

Striking metal or stone.

I had not been aware of it until that moment, though its fall was so constant I felt I should have heard it long before. I was on my back, though I knew no other sensation. No heat or cold, no soreness, no pressure of the surface beneath me. I might have been immersed in warm milk.

“Don’t try to move,” came a croaking voice from over my head. “You’re not all here yet, he says. And he don’t want to lose your image.”

I could not so much as blink.

Hadrian, I thought, sure that I was right. My name is Hadrian.

Was I fugue-blind? It happened, had happened to me often enough. Crystallization of the fluid in the eyes, deformation of the lens. But that had been a kind of grayness of the vision. This was something else.

I could hear the blood in my ears.

Blood.

I remembered blood, blood on the mirror, on my hands, soaking through the soles of my boots. I remembered pain as my left arm tore away, the skin of my face running like wax.

I was dead, I thought. I am dead.

Drip. Drip.

A light shone high above me, faint and far away and cold. Walls of rough stone black as night receded toward that light above, vanished into gray. The reflected light of water rippling danced upon the lower walls, as though I lay in the bottom of some well.

“You’re right, you know,” said the croaking voice. “You met a nasty end. But you’re safe now.”

There was something familiar about that voice.

“You should be able to see now,” it said. “Be able to move soon. But you shouldn’t.”

Water. I had awoken in water the last time, too, in a shallow pool in the gardens of the Undying aboard the black ship, Demiurge. Gibson had been there, standing over me. Only it hadn’t been Gibson.

“Am I the Quiet?” the rough voice inquired, seeming to guess my thoughts. “No, cousin! Oh, no!”

“Cousin?” I echoed, uncomprehending. The Emperor called me cousin, but it was not his voice, and this was not Forum. I was underground—of that much I was certain. Deep underground.

“You mean you don’t remember me?” A cackle sounded from somewhere above my head. I turned to look, in the process disturbing water warm as human flesh. It washed over my face, entered my mouth. Panic conquered me, and I floundered, limbs thrashing as I struggled to right myself. Where had the air gone? Which way was up and light?

For an instant, I was certain I would die again. Death by water, this time—not fire. The darkness of that pool was the Howling Dark of death itself, and I was falling into it. Then my feet found smooth stone, and I pushed, and an instant later—too soon—my body struck a wall. Numb hands scrabbled against it, fingers desperate for purchase.

My feet found a lip of smooth stone, and I tried to stand, felt my body strike a wall. I thrashed, and a moment later broke the surface coughing, sputtering, gasping for air.

A hand seized me then, and a new voice shouted, “That’s it! He’s here!”

Only half-aware of what was happening to me, I felt myself hauled from the pool and cast upon the flat stone beside it. I lay there a long while, face in my hands, my whole body shuddering.

My hands . . . 

I could remember my hands dissolving, my skin molting, peeling away like varnish on old wood, revealing the raw and weeping flesh beneath.

They were whole again, exactly as I remembered them: pockmarked and scarred. There was the old wheal of cryoburn scar where my family’s ring had burned the skin of my left thumb, and there the mark of Irshan’s sword. The star-fine points on my right hand recalled the surgical repairs I had endured on Delos as a boy, and the smoothness of those last two fingers hinted at good Doctor Elkan’s repairs.

I touched my face, moved long black hair streaked white from my eyes.

“What happened to me?” I asked, voice barely more than a whisper.

“You were dead,” said that second voice, higher and smoother than the first. “We recalled you.”

“We?”

A figure stood over me then, bare feet on the stone shelf beside the pool. Looking up, I found myself staring into the face of a boy perhaps ten- or twelve-years standard. Black he was of hair, curling and unruly, with pale blue eyes. He wore only rags of soiled white, a shapeless gown that fell almost to his ankles, without belt or sash. It could not have been he who hauled me from the water, so small was he and slight.

“Call me Rag,” he said, crouching, and nodding away to my left, added, “I think you know Salt.”

The other figure at the water’s edge shuffled forward, its long arms nearly dragging on the ground. It was short, barely taller than the boy called Rag, and clad in grubby coveralls of oil-stained green. Its skin was gray as ash, its face so wizened its age might have been a hundred or a thousand, for all its childlike size.

“I know you,” I said to the shrunken creature, guessing that it had been the one to pull me from the water.

The homunculus pointed at its own face. “I should hope so, it’s thanks to you I’m in this miserable place.” As it spoke, it pawed at the queue of black hair that sprouted from the base of its otherwise bald head.

“You were . . . on the ship,” I said, remembering. “The ship that took me out from Delos. You were Demetri’s—”

“Slave,” said the homunculus, Saltus, “I was Demetri’s slave, but I proved the master in the end. My blood may be curdled, cousin, but curdling’s a kind of preservation. I outlasted them all. The twins. The doctor. Old Bassem. Even the highborns.” It thrust a hand out for me to take. “I’m the only one left.”

Drip.

I stared at the offered hand, not taking it. “That’s not possible,” I said, looking down at my reflection. “The Eurynasir was found adrift. I was the only one left, I . . . ” I touched my face again. “I was old.” A horrible thought flashed like lightning across the surface of my mind. “Cassandra! Was she real? Was any of it . . . ”

Still crouching beside the misshapen dwarf, Rag said, “It’s a lot to take in, I know.” He stood, “The Judicator will explain. He sent us to fish you out.”

“Am I dead?” I asked.

“Take my hand, cousin.” Saltus waggled his fingers. “Let’s get you dry.”

“Either I am dead,” I said more strongly, and shut my eyes, “or everything since I left Delos is a dream.”

“I said take my fucking hand!” the homunculus croaked, shaking its arm.

I tried. My fingers passed clean through Saltus’s paw as though it were a holograph. I looked up into the homunculi’s shriveled face, horror yawning in my breast. I tried once more, but again my hand passed clean through the creature’s fingers. Saltus laughed, capered back a pace, hands on its knees as it bent over, cackling with mirth. Horrified, I scrambled away from the creature, forgetting where I was. One hand missed the lip of the shelf above the edge of that deep well, and I plunged backward into water black and cold as space with a strangled yell.

A hand seized upon my wrist, warm and strong, and once again I was hauled bodily from the pool and cast upon the cold, black stone. Memory of Dharan-Tun washed over me with the water. I remembered awakening in slime and cold upon the mat at Dorayaica’s feet. Strong hands rolled me over, and I lay there, an old man spluttering and cold. The boy caught one of my hands as I flailed, held it fast with both his own.

“Looker?” I asked, mistaking that place for Padmurak.

“He’s not all here yet,” Rag said to the still-laughing Saltus. “The condensers need more time.”

“The look on his face!” Saltus chortled, dabbed at his eyes with his braided queue.

“You’re not helping, Salt,” the boy said. “Go . . . fetch him a robe, won’t you?”

“For all the good it’ll do him!” Saltus said, and scuttled away, still laughing. Quiet came in its wake, until there was no sound but the distant drip-drip-drip of water. I was certain for a time that Rag had left—so still was he. But when I turned to look I found him unmoved, crouching on the stone beside me.

Drip.

“It’s cold,” I said.

Rag smiled. “Cold is good. It is cold. It’s always cold below.”

The old, familiar pains had started once again as well. My back, my knees, the dull ache in my reconstructed shoulder. Old wounds, old scars.

“Where am I?” I asked. “What is this place?”

“Llesu,” Rag said. “We are several miles below the old city. This is the Well of Nahaman, where the dead are wakened from sleep.”

For a moment, I only looked at the boy. He had spoken as one out of fable, out of fantasy. “The dead?” I echoed him, shook my head. “What planet? This isn’t Forum.”

No answer. The boy called Rag just looked at me, head cocked to one side, mouth half-open. I was not prepared for the question he asked next, could not have prepared for it, not in a million count of years. “What’s a . . . planet?”

My own mouth hung half-open.

There were perhaps peasant populations in the Empire with no knowledge of the stars. The men and women of Borosevo had, for instance, largely been ignorant of the standard calendar, preferring their local one. But to be ignorant of the very idea of what a planet was . . . it beggared belief.

“You were dead,” Rag replied, looking up at the walls of that place, that Well of Nahaman, and at the antique machines that hung like stalactites from them. “You’ve been dead a long time. Everything you know is gone—that’s what the Judicator says. He sent me to fetch you back. The dead don’t . . . go away, you know? The Judicator says each life is like a wave. The water’s still there after the wave breaks. He says this place helps the water—the matter—remember the wave it used to be.”

“How?” I asked, still lying on my back.

Rag only shook his head.

Seeing that no answer was forthcoming, I asked another question, the most pressing question: “How long?”

“How long have you been dead?” Rag asked, clarifying. “I don’t know. I’m only supposed to bring you to the Judicator. He’s far away. Up in the city. In the old church.”

I felt as one roused from sleep, uncertain if the world he’s woken to is a dream. Abruptly, I recalled Prytanis, Preceptor of the Order of the Seekers After the First Truth. That strange Extrasolarian cult believed the universe only a simulation housed on the machinery of some unknown designer in some other, more real universe. Looking round the Well of Nahaman, I felt . . . I felt as I thought one must feel awakening from such a simulation to the cold reality of that other world.

And yet I bore my scars, the marks of war and torment. If the Seekers were right—if there was some higher universe to awaken into, and if I had awoken to it—surely the marks of blade and talon would have vanished. Do not mistake me, Reader. I do not cleave to the doctrine of the Seekers, a doctrine which is—at any rate—little different from the Cielcin belief in the falsity of our world, I only aim to communicate my profound sense of dislocation.

You’ve been dead a long time.

If what the boy had said was true, then everything I had ever known had passed away.

“The future?” I hardly breathed the words. “This is the future . . . ”

Were those tears on my scarred cheeks? Or only the waters of the Well of Nahaman?

Drip.

Drip.

“Who is he?” I asked at last, “Your Judicator? What does he want with me?”

A look passed over Rag’s face then. Confusion? Bemusement? I could not be sure. He seemed far older than his years.

“You are called to account,” the boy said. “You are to be tested.”

“Tested?” I asked, and almost laughed. “I am dead. You said it yourself.”

“But you need not remain so,” Rag said. “You are yet the shortest way.”

“What?” I blinked up at him. The shortest way. Those had been the Quiet’s words, spoken to me upon the mountaintop of Annica. The shortest way. The straightest route through the mires of unfolding time . . . from my time to his, to a universe rid of the Watchers at last and ripe for rebirth.

“That is what he says,” Rag said.

“The Judicator?” I asked. “He says I’m the shortest way?”

Rag bobbed his head.

“The Quiet . . . ” I mouthed the words. I sat up. “You serve the Quiet?”

The boy inched back, startled by my sudden movement. “I don’t . . . ”

Of course. The Quiet had been our term, confected by those ancient archeologists who had discovered their ruins across the first Imperial stars. He would be called something else.

“Can you take me to him?” I asked, mind reeling. Rag had said that I had been dead a long time. Might it not then be that I had been dead—been asleep, as Rag called it—until the Quiet’s day?

Rag lay a hand on my shoulder, the gesture of a much older man, I thought, as though I were the child and he the concerned guardian. His hand was warm, not thin and cold as it appeared. “You need more time,” Rag said. “You will not be able to leave the Well until you’re stable.”

“Stable?”

“Your hand passed right through Salt’s,” the boy said. “It takes time.”

“You can touch me, though,” I said.

“You’re getting better,” Rag said.

“I don’t understand what’s happening to me,” I said. “Am I a ghost?”

“The Judicator can explain,” Rag said. “He says the Well is so deep that only black energy gets in from outside. That makes it easier to collect the . . . the waves that . . . used to be you.” The boy grew silent then, and rocked back to seat himself cross-legged on the stone beside me. “What do you remember?”

I was silent then a long time. “I remember dying,” I said at last. “I was poisoned. My body . . . disintegrated, fell apart. Selene was there. And Neema. I tried to tell them to save Cassandra. To find Albé . . . and Lorian. They were all in danger for helping me. They’ll kill Cassandra . . . just because she’s mine. But I guess she’s already dead.”

“Everyone you know is dead,” the boy said, words flat and very small. “I don’t know how long you’ve been asleep, but it was long ago.”

“Then how is it you speak my words?”

“Saltus taught me,” Rag said. “And old Juno. She was still about when I was little.”

Juno had been Demetri’s wife. I recalled a Jaddian woman, handsome, bronze faced, with hair bright as the stars.

“How did they get here?” I asked. “The same as me?”

“Not the same as you.” Saltus had chosen that moment to reappear, clutching a wad of undyed cloth in his hairy fists. “We didn’t have to die to get here. The Judicator’s people brought us when they took our ship.”

“You . . . traveled through time?” I asked, and stood, groaning with the effort.

“Only the same way we all do,” Saltus said, grinning like a demon. “Only faster.”

My hand trembled as I reached for the homunculus, said, “Give me the robe.”

“I should make you beg.” The dwarf leered at my nakedness.

A brittle smile touched my lips, though my whole body shook with cold. “Give me the robe.”

“It’s your fault I’m here,” the homunculus said. “You know that?”

Standing straight as I could despite my nakedness, I asked, “How long have you been here?”

Still clutching the robe in its grimy hands, the homunculus answered, “Long enough for the rest to die,” he said. “Hundreds of years—though whether a year to these people is a year for true I’ve no idea. But it’s better than living out my days on that thrice-damned ship. So I owe you for that.” Smile widening, he threw the wadded garment at me. I caught it by reflex.

Seeing this, Rag sat straighter. “Good!” he exclaimed. “You’re here!”

I held the rough linen in my hands, felt its coarseness with my fingers.

It had not passed through me. I shook it out, revealing a garment not unlike the one that Rag himself wore, a shapeless thing with wide, square sleeves and a ragged neck and hem.

“Put it on,” Rag said. “We’ve lingered long enough. It’s a long way up to the city, and the Judicator is waiting.”


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