THE GLASSHOUSE

Frostgaol did not look like a prison, and that was the first thing that frightened her.

She had seen the Dominion's jails in engravings, great sooty bastions of brick and iron with barred windows and spiked gates, and she had thought she knew what to expect. She had braced herself for filth and noise, for the stench of old straw and the shouts of drunks. She had not imagined that the prison where the Empire sent its most dangerous enemies would be the most beautiful building she had ever seen.

The prison wagon had carried her through the empty streets of Highmark in the gray hour before dawn, up the long hill to the northern edge of the city, with the iron shackles chafing her ankles and a guardsman on either side who refused to meet her eyes. Beyond the last gas lamp the driver reined in the horses, and the guard on her left muttered something under his breath that might have been a prayer. Through the barred window she saw it rising from the frozen heath at the foot of the Northern Spire: a vast, black, glittering tower, jagged as a broken bottle, standing alone against a mountain of snow. The pale winter sun struck its walls and fired them with a cold green light. Every surface shone. Every edge gleamed. It looked like a cathedral carved from a single enormous block of obsidian ice, and as the wagon drew nearer she saw that the walls were not stone at all, but glass, black glass a foot thick, so clear that she could see the shadows of figures moving deep inside.

The Glasshouse, she thought. They call it the Glasshouse.

Every prisoner in it, she realized, could be seen at every hour by every other. There was nowhere to hide.

…

They processed her in a long white hall that smelled of carbolic and cold iron.

A matron with forearms like hams stripped her of the gray shawl and the nightgown and put her into a rough linen shift of an indeterminate color. She took the tin comb from Tamsin's hair and the ribbon from her wrist. She took away the boots. When a guardsman, with an air of embarrassment, unlocked the manacles from her wrists, he clamped a heavier pair around her ankles, joined by a short chain that allowed her to walk but not to run, and she shuffled forward in them down a corridor lit by pale blue lamps that burned without flame.

The cold struck her as soon as she passed the second gate. It was a different cold from the Hollows, a dry still glittering cold that seemed to come up out of the floor itself. The walls were smooth and black and faintly luminous, and her breath hung before her face in a white cloud. The glass sang faintly as she passed, a high sweet note, as if every pane were a bell struck by her footsteps. She walked past rows of cells, each a small transparent box with a cot and a bucket, and in each box a dim figure sat or lay or paced with listless regularity, and not one of them looked up.

They stopped at a door at the end of a passage. The guardsman unlocked it with a key the length of his hand, and the matron gave her a shove between the shoulder blades.

"The Magistrate wishes to see you," she said. "Behave yourself, and mind you stand straight."

…

Magistrate Corwin Blythe received her in a small white room furnished with a table, two chairs, and a lamp, and he did not rise.

He was a thin, dry, careful man of fifty-five, with a long yellow face and a high forehead, and he wore the black gown and white bands of the Imperial bench. A pair of gold-rimmed spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose. He had a stack of papers before him, squared with great precision, and a fountain pen laid parallel to the edge of the table, and he regarded her through the lenses with the mild impersonal interest of a naturalist examining a beetle.

"Miss Reed," he said. "Please sit down. I regret the formality of your attire, which is a matter of regulation."

She took the chair across from him. The chain on her ankles clinked against the leg of the chair. She laid her hands in her lap and met his eyes, and waited.

"I shall be brief, since I am sure you are weary." He drew the top sheet from the pile and laid it before her. "You stand accused of a serious offense. I have read the evidence against you, and I confess that I find it very strong. The bottle, the formulae, the testimony of Dr. Pell and Lady Delphine. A conviction is, I think, a foregone conclusion. The penalty, as you know, is Committal."

"I am aware of the penalty."

"Then you will also be aware that there is a means of mitigating it." He turned the sheet toward her. It was a closely written page, with a space for a signature at the bottom, and it began with the words I, Tamsin Reed, do freely and voluntarily confess. "If you will sign this, I am empowered to recommend a lesser sentence. Perpetual confinement, perhaps, in a comfortable ward. There would be no public trial and no spectacle. And I am authorized to add one further inducement."

He paused, with the air of a man about to produce a rabbit from a hat.

"I understand that you have a younger brother, a boy of thirteen, afflicted with the Gray Cough. It is a tragic case. The Imperial Hospital at Highmark has a modern ward for such patients, with every comfort, and the Chancellor is prepared to see that he is admitted there at the Crown's expense." Blythe took off his spectacles and polished them on his sleeve. "A signature, Miss Reed. And your brother lives."

…

The room was very still. The lamp hissed. Tamsin sat quite motionless, with her eyes on the paper, and she felt the first hot surge of rage rise through her chest, so powerful that it took her breath. She thought of Jonah on his pillow with blood on his lips. She thought of his hand curled in hers. She thought of the sixty dollars a week and the cold water in the gray cup, and the chain on the old man's leg in Ash Row, and Lila's thin small voice saying someone who doesn't mind.

Then she raised her head, and she smiled.

It was a small, tired smile, and not at all pleasant. It surprised her to discover that it was real.

"You'd love me to say it, wouldn't you?" said Tamsin.

The Magistrate lowered the spectacles. "I beg your pardon?"

"I have been in this building for forty minutes, Magistrate, and in that time I have been stripped, shackled, and given a linen shift that smells of someone else's fever. I have been told that my conviction is a foregone conclusion, that I may escape the worst of it by signing a page I haven't read, and that my brother's life depends on my compliance. It's a very well-built trap." She tilted her head. "It's the sort of thing that is designed to be accepted by a frightened woman at the end of a long night."

"I assure you, Miss Reed..."

"If I sign that paper, I admit to poisoning a child. I admit it in writing, in my own hand, and from that moment, whatever promises you've made will last exactly as long as it suits the person who made them. Jonah will not go to the Imperial Hospital. He will go to a Ward, where the boys die in rows. And I will be an example." She looked at the paper. "It's very neatly drafted. There are no footnotes, though. I do like a footnote."

Blythe stared at her. A slow flush crept up from his collar.

"I will not sign," said Tamsin. "You may tell the Chancellor that I am quite comfortable here and look forward to the trial."

"There will be no trial," Blythe said. His voice was cold now, with all the dry courtesy gone out of it. "The Chancellor will see to that. You are a fool, girl. You have just thrown away the only hope you had."

"I have thrown away a forged one," said Tamsin, "which I think is a good bargain."

He rang a bell on the table. The door opened, and two guards came in and lifted her to her feet, and as they marched her out she heard the Magistrate slowly tearing the paper in half.

…

The cell was at the end of the lowest corridor, eleven steps down a spiral stair of black glass.

It was larger than the others, and darker, and colder. It was perhaps ten feet long and six wide, with walls of the same translucent obsidian, and a pale green light seeped through them from somewhere far away. There was a narrow cot, a bucket, and a small barred grating high in the wall through which a thread of freezing air entered. The floor was rough stone, sunk below the level of the walls, and the shackles on her ankles rang against it like a bell.

The guards unlocked the door and pushed her through, and it clanged shut behind her.

"Well, now," said a voice from the shadows. "A new one. And a young one. What a shame."

She spun round. Someone sat on the cot against the far wall, in the dimness at the edge of the green light, a small bent figure wrapped in a threadbare blanket. As her eyes adjusted, she made out a face, brown and wrinkled as a walnut, framed in a cloud of white hair that stood out round it like dandelion down. The woman was perhaps seventy. Her hands lay folded in her lap, large and gnarled, and her eyes, which were bright and black and extraordinarily alive, were fixed on Tamsin with a look of frank, delighted curiosity.

"Don't stand there with your mouth open, cher," said the old woman. Her voice was low and rich and slow, with a soft southern drawl that rolled the vowels like warm syrup. "You'll catch a draft. Come and sit by me, and let ol' Agnes have a look at you."

…

Her name was Mother Agnes Thibodeaux, she said, and she had been in the Glasshouse for six years.

She had come from the Bayou Reach, where the Rootkin lived free in the shadow of the cypress trees, and she had been taken in a raid on a hidden settlement, along with eleven others. The rest had been taken to the Wards. She had been brought here because she was a traiteuse, a healer, a speaker to the roots, and the Magistrate had wanted to know her secrets. She had told him a great many things, none of them true. She laughed when she said it, a rich cracked chuckle that made the whole cell seem warmer.

"I've been telling him the same story for six years," she said. "I make it a little different each time. It keeps him interested." She patted the cot beside her. "Now sit down, chère, and tell me what you did."

Tamsin sat down on the cot. She told her, in a flat low voice, the whole of it: the letter, the Hall, the Princess, the gray cup. She told her about the tonic, and the bottle, and the warrant. When she came to the Duke, she hesitated, and the old woman's black eyes sharpened, and Tamsin finished the story with her face turned away.

"I see," said Mother Agnes softly. "I see, I see. It's an old trick, that one, and it is also the oldest one of all."

"You're not surprised."

"Child, I'm seventy years old. I don't have the energy for surprise." The old woman reached out a hand, brown and knotted, and touched Tamsin's chin, and turned her face gently to the light. Her fingers were warm. "Let me look at that mark."

Tamsin held still. The old woman's thumb traced the line of the scar, from beneath the ear down toward the collarbone, following each branch and fork as lightly as a feather. Her expression was intent and grave. She was murmuring under her breath, in a language that Tamsin did not know, something that sounded like a blessing.

"The Gilded call this the sign of the Blight," she said at last. "I heard it in the courtroom, when they took me. The mark of contagion. The mark of the unclean." She dropped her hand, and her wrinkled face split in a smile of the most extraordinary sweetness. "Child, you don't carry blight. You carry the cure."

…

She taught her the song that night.

Neither of them could sleep. The cold crept through the glass and into their bones, and the green light flickered faintly in the walls, and from the cells above and below came the small hopeless sounds of people trying not to weep. They sat side by side on the cot with the one blanket drawn over their knees, and Mother Agnes began to hum.

It was not the lullaby of the Hollows. It was lower, older, stranger, a melody that moved in long slow spirals and seemed to have no beginning and no end. It rose and fell like the swell of a river. It had no words, or if it did, they were so ancient that they had worn smooth, like pebbles in a stream, and what remained was only the shape of them, a sequence of open vowels that seemed to hollow out the chest and fill it with warmth.

"This is the Rooting Song," said Agnes. "My grandmother's grandmother taught it to her, and she to me, and I've taught it to nobody, because I've had nobody to teach. It's the first song, cher. It's the one that was sung when the Rootkin and the Gilded were one people. It speaks to every living thing, and every living thing answers."

"I know a lullaby," Tamsin said. "My grandmother sang it to me. It has the same shape, at the end."

"I'm sure it does. That is where the lullabies come from." Agnes took her hand. "Put your palm flat on the wall, chère, and close your eyes, and sing what I sing, and don't be afraid."

She laid her palm against the black glass. It was colder than ice. She shut her eyes and opened her mouth and let her voice find the long spiral notes, thin and unsteady at first, then stronger. She felt the scar on her neck begin to warm. It spread through her like honey, a slow golden heat that ran down her arm and out through her hand, and she felt the glass beneath her palm change.

It was not glass. Under the smooth black surface she felt a pulse, a slow, deep, patient throb. Something lived in the wall. Something ran through it like a vein, thick as her wrist and old as the mountain, and the song went down into it and rang there like a bell in a cavern. There were roots, thousands of them, tangled in the stone, pale and dormant and deep, threaded through the foundations of the prison as the veins thread a leaf. They ran north and south and east, in dark intricate patterns, and all of them, every one, turned slowly in the dark toward a single distant point beneath the earth.

All of them were pointing south, toward the heart of Highmark.

…

She opened her eyes, trembling. The song had ended. The cell was silent, and the cold was the same, but something in the air had changed, as if a window had been opened in a room that she had not known was closed.

"You hear it?" whispered Agnes.

"I hear something." Tamsin kept her palm pressed to the wall. Beneath the pulse of the roots, so low that she felt it in her teeth rather than her ears, there was a sound. It was a deep slow hum, rising and falling, like the murmur of a crowd heard through a wall. It was not one voice but hundreds, and each of them was whispering, in the dark, in a language of pain.

"What is it?"

The old woman's face, in the green gloom, had lost its smile. It had grown very old and very still. Her black eyes were fixed on the wall as though she could see through it, to the Cathedral that lay a mile to the south, and the white towers on the cliff, and what slept beneath them.

"That hum," said Mother Agnes Thibodeaux, softly, "is the Sunwell, cher. And it's hungry."