BLOOD MEMORY

The coal train carried them north for three hours through a country that Soren had never in his life seen from below.

He had traveled the length of the Dominion a hundred times in private cars, with velvet seats and a steward to bring his tea, and he had looked out of the windows and thought it a pleasant and orderly landscape. Now he lay on his back in a wagon full of anthracite with a stranger's elbow in his ribs, and watched the dawn come up gray and filthy over the Hollows, and understood that the pleasant orderly landscape had been arranged for his benefit by people who knew that he would never look at it from the ground. The hills were black with tailings. The villages were rows of identical cottages with smoke lying on their roofs like gray wool, and at every crossing stood small silent groups of men and women with their hands in their pockets, who watched the coal go by with the dull patience of people who have never been told what it was for.

Where the line forked at a ruined signal box, the train slowed to a crawl for a sharp bend, and Dorian, who had been dozing against the boards with his hat over his eyes, sat up and said cheerfully that it was time to leave. They dropped over the side one after another into a drift of dirty snow. The train clattered away without them, and they stood in a hollow between two slag heaps with their breath smoking in the cold, and Soren found that his legs were not entirely willing to carry him.

"You are swaying," said Tamsin.

"I am merely adjusting to the absence of motion," he said, with as much dignity as a man can muster when he is covered from head to foot in coal dust. "I shall be perfectly well in a moment."

She did not argue. She slid her arm through his, which was the nearest thing to an admission of weakness that she had ever made, and they went down the cinder track together toward a smudge of chimneys on the horizon, while Dorian walked ahead with one hand on his sword and the air of a man out for a Sunday stroll.

…

The tannery district of the Hollows was the kind of place that nobody visited unless they were obliged to.

The streets were narrow and crooked and ankle-deep in a slush that smelled of lime and wet hides and old blood, and the buildings leaned over them like drunks leaning against one another for support. There were no gas lamps. The few people they passed kept their heads down and their eyes on the cobbles, and not one of them looked twice at three filthy travelers in borrowed coats, which Soren supposed was the whole purpose of choosing it. At the end of a blind alley, behind a heap of rotting barrels, stood a low brick building with a sign reading Ketteridge and Daughters, Fellmongers, and Dorian knocked on its green door in a pattern of three knocks, a pause, and two.

The door was opened by a very small old woman in a leather apron, with ink-black fingers and spectacles pushed up into a nest of iron-gray curls. She looked at them in turn, her sharp eyes lingering on the gloved hand and the bare one, and then she stood aside without a word and jerked her head toward a stair.

It led down, and down, and down again. At the bottom was a cellar so large and so long that Soren thought at first he must be mistaken about its size, a vaulted brick chamber like the crypt of a church, lit by lanterns hung on hooks and smelling of oil and paper and hot metal. Along one wall stood the cases of type, ranked like the pipes of an organ. In the middle, crouched on a platform of oak like a sleeping beast, stood a great black iron press with a flywheel taller than a man, and beside it a stack of printed sheets, still damp, rose to the height of his shoulder.

"Welcome to the Quiet Press, Your Grace," said Finch, rising from a bench by the stove. "I hope you will forgive the lack of ceremony."

He had slipped out of Vandermere an hour after they had made the plan, by the servants' door, with a carpetbag in one hand and a leather case under his arm, and he looked as though he had not slept since. His waistcoat was buttoned correctly for once. He took Soren's hand in both of his own and pressed it, then did the same for Tamsin, and Soren was startled to see that the old man's eyes were swimming with tears.

"I heard the bells from the Glasshouse tower," he said. "I was on the Calder road at the time, and I could see the glow from fifteen miles away. I did not know until the first mail train that you were alive."

"We are very much alive, thanks largely to Captain Pike's sense of theater," said Tamsin, "and also to a quantity of coal. Mr. Finch, I should be more grateful than I can say if I might lie down on something flat for a little while."

…

She slept for fourteen hours.

They gave her a cot in the back of the cellar, behind a curtain of sacking, where the warmth of the press furnace came through the wall, and she went down into sleep like a stone into a pond, without a movement or a word. Soren sat beside her for a long time. The compositor, whose name was Mrs. Ketteridge and who seemed to regard the arrival of a fugitive Grand Duke as a minor interruption to her work, brought him a bowl of mutton broth and a hunk of bread, and he ate them without tasting either. Dorian prowled the passages. Finch worked at his bench, and the soft click of type being set rang from the far end of the cellar like the ticking of a clock.

When she woke, it was evening again, and the lanterns had been lit, and there was a smell of onions and tea. She sat up on the cot, pushing the hair back from her face, and looked about her with the vague unfocused gaze of someone who has traveled a long way in dreams.

"I can still hear it," she said.

"What is it that you can hear?" He was beside her at once.

"I can hear the humming, the same one that sang in the walls of Frostgaol, and I thought that it would stop when we were out." She pressed both hands against her ears and then let them fall. "It has not stopped. It is quieter, but it is there under everything, like the sound of the sea in a shell, and I think it is coming from the south."

"From the Cathedral."

"From the Cistern, I think." She turned her face toward him, and he saw the shadows beneath her eyes, as dark as bruises. "Soren, I did something in that cell that I should not have done, and I would like to try something else now, if Mr. Finch will let me."

"Whatever it is, you are in no condition to..."

"I am in better condition than I have been in a month, and I would like to try, because I think I have been looking at this the wrong way round." She stood, swaying a little, and he caught her elbow. "Mr. Finch, have you a microscope?"

…

Finch had a microscope.

He had carried it all the way from Highmark in the leather case, wrapped in his spare shirt, and he set it up on the long table by the stove with the tender care of a mother dressing a baby. It was a handsome instrument of brass and black enamel, with a mirror beneath the stage and a row of tiny lenses on a turret, and Soren recognized the engraving on its base: Royal Botanical Society, 1771. Finch said apologetically that it had belonged to the author of the Field Guide, and that he had kept it for forty years in a cupboard, in case a day ever came when someone would wish to use it.

"There is a thing my grandmother used to say," said Tamsin. She was sitting on a stool in front of the instrument with her sleeve pushed up and a sterile needle in her hand. "She said that everything a Rootkin needs to know is written in the blood, if only one learns to read it. I always took it for a figure of speech. But Agnes said it too, and the Pharmacopoeia says it, and in the Glasshouse I touched the stone of the wall and it told me where the roots went." She looked up at them. "I think that it may be quite literal."

"What do you propose to do?" said Soren.

"I propose to look at my own blood under a lens, and ask it politely to talk to me."

She pricked the ball of her finger. A bead of red welled up, bright as a garnet, and she touched it to a glass slide and slid the slide under the clip. She bent to the eyepiece. Soren watched her adjust the mirror, and the focus, and the little brass wheel of the turret, and saw her go quite still.

"Oh," she said, in a very small voice.

"What do you see?"

"The blood is moving, but not in the way that it ought to move, because there are..." She drew a breath. "There are little threads in it, like roots, and they are all reaching toward something. They're reaching toward the light." Her hand groped across the table and found his. "Soren, I think I am going to need to hold on to someone."

He did not stop to think. He took her hand in his bare right one, and he felt the cold, small, trembling fingers close around it, and there came a sudden rushing in his ears as if the whole cellar were falling away beneath his feet.

…

The first thing he knew was the smell of water.

It was clean, cold water, flowing over stones, with a green mossy sweetness in it that he had last smelled as a child in the garden at Vandermere, when his mother had taken him down to the river and let him trail his hand in the current. He opened his eyes and found that he was standing on a bank of short grass under a high clear sky, and that Tamsin stood beside him, her hand still locked in his, looking about her with the wide dazed face of someone who has walked through a door into another country.

They were in a valley. It was a broad green valley, hemmed in by wooded hills, with a river flowing through the middle of it as bright as a sheet of polished silver. Along the water were houses built of gray stone with roofs of thick green moss, and every one had a garden, and every garden was a riot of herbs and flowers and climbing beans. The air hummed with bees. Children ran along the bank shrieking with laughter. A woman was hanging washing on a line between two apple trees, and she turned and looked straight at him, and he saw that her eyes were the color of new leaves.

"They cannot see us," whispered Tamsin. "It's a memory, I think. It's not happening now. It is all of it a long time past."

"How long ago was this?"

"Three hundred years." She said it with the certainty of someone reading a date from a page. "This is Rootvale. It is where the Silverwater begins."

He turned slowly on the grass, and the valley turned with him, as though he were looking at a painting that had been brought to life. At the water's edge, a dozen people had gathered to sing. They were of all ages, old men and young mothers and children no taller than his knee, and their voices rose together over the stones in a wordless spiraling melody that he recognized with a pang that went through his whole body. It was the song that his mother had hummed in the garden. It was the song that Tamsin had sung at the nursery door. As the voices climbed, the river seemed to answer, and the water ran clearer and brighter, until he could see each pebble on the bed as though it were set in glass.

And among the singers, he saw, there were people with gold eyes.

They were not many, but they were there: a tall man with a grizzled beard, a girl with yellow braids, an old woman with a hand on the shoulder of a green-eyed child. They sang with the others. They stood in the same circle, and laughed at the same jokes, and drank from the same stone cups. When the song ended, the girl with the yellow braids kissed the cheek of a green-eyed boy and ran off laughing along the bank, and the tall man took off his hat and wiped his brow and said something that made the whole circle roar.

"They're the same," he said. His voice sounded far away in his own ears. "They are not two peoples, Tamsin. They are one family. The gold and the green grew out of the same root."

"We are cousins," said Tamsin softly. "We were always cousins. Somebody has been lying to us for three hundred years."

…

The light changed.

It happened all at once, as when a cloud crosses the sun. The valley dimmed, and the bees fell silent, and the singers by the river turned their faces to the hills. Soren felt the hair lift along his arms. He knew, before he saw it, that something was coming that he did not wish to see.

A man rode out of the wood on the north slope, alone, on a tall black horse.

He was young, perhaps twenty-five, and richly dressed, in a coat of gold-embroidered velvet and a high-crowned hat, and he sat very straight in the saddle with his chin lifted and his eyes fixed on the water. His horse picked its way down toward the headwaters, where the river began at a spring in a ring of ancient willows. There was a heavy sack tied behind his saddle. He drew rein at the edge of the spring and dismounted, and looked about him quickly, and Soren saw his face in the light.

It was his own face.

It was not a resemblance. It was the face that he saw in the glass every morning, with the same high cheekbones and the same straight dark brows and the same faint hollow beneath each eye, the left eyebrow lifting a little higher than the right. The man's eyes were gold. They were bright and hungry and not at all unkind, and in them was a dreadful, shining eagerness, like the eyes of a boy who has been told that he may take whatever he wishes from a shop.

"That's Edmund Aldridge," whispered Tamsin. "I have seen his portrait in the Founders' Book, with his hand on a globe. He's the first of your line."

Edmund untied the sack. He lifted it with both hands, and Soren saw by the way it swung that it was heavy. He slit the cord with a knife. Then, very carefully, as one pours out a libation, he emptied the contents into the spring: a long glittering stream of pale yellow crystals, like coarse sugar, that caught the light and sank into the water without a sound.

The spring bubbled. The river ran on, and for a moment nothing happened at all.

"Gilt salt," said Soren. He found that he was whispering. "It's gilt salt. He is poisoning the river at the source."

"He doesn't know what it will do. Look at his face." Tamsin's voice shook. "He thinks it will make the Gilded stronger. He thinks that it will feed the light. He doesn't understand that it will make people sick."

"He understands well enough, afterward."

They watched it happen, in the flickering way of dreams, in a rapid succession of images that passed before his eyes like the pages of a book. The river turned from silver to gray. The fish floated belly up in the shallows. The children coughed, and the coughing grew worse, and the gray frost crept into their lungs until they lay in their beds with their faces turned to the wall. The gold-eyed folk sickened too, but fewer of them, and more slowly. And at the edge of the village, a crowd of men on horses had gathered, torches in their hands, and at their head rode Edmund Aldridge with his hat pulled low over his eyes.

"It's the Rootkin," he said, in a clear carrying voice. "I have studied the matter. The sickness is in their blood, and it spreads by the water, and it will kill us all if it is not stopped. I call upon the families of the Founding to rid the valley of this plague."

He is lying, thought Soren, with a dull sense of horror. He poured it himself, and now he stands in front of them and says it came from the green.

The crowd roared.

…

He would not afterward be able to recall the whole of it in order. It came back to him in pieces, in nightmares, for the rest of his life.

He saw the moss-roofed houses burn, one after another, and the ash fall like gray snow over the orchard. He saw a green-eyed woman running through the smoke with a baby in her arms, and a rider cut her down in the street. He saw the gold-eyed man with the grizzled beard standing in front of a door with his arms spread wide, and saw them ride him down as well. He saw men bound with ropes and driven in lines along the river road. He saw the singers on the bank with their hands tied behind them, and the song going on, thin and shaking, until a rider's whip came down across the first singer's face.

Ashfall, he thought. This is what the Founders named the Ashfall Purge, and the history books say that it was a mercy.

Beside him, Tamsin was making a small broken sound in her throat, over and over, like a child who has stopped being able to cry. He pulled her against his chest. He could feel her trembling from head to foot, and could not stop his own shaking, and it seemed to him then that the vision knew they were there, and wished them to see, and would not let them look away.

It took them down into a cavern.

It was a great round hall of rough rock, cut deep into the cliffs where the river came out of the hills, and in the middle of it lay a wide stone basin filled to the brim with black water. A ring of channels had been carved around its rim. Round the basin, bound hand and foot to rings in the floor, lay thirty or forty Rootkin, men and women both, with their heads turned toward the water and their green eyes open. They were quite silent. Edmund Aldridge stood above them with a knife in his hand, and behind him the other Founders watched, grave and pale and silent in their velvet, and not one of them looked away.

"Let it be a covenant," said Edmund. His voice shook, and his hand shook too. "Let the blood of the green feed the light of the gold, and let the light never fail, and let the Dominion stand for a thousand years."

He knelt, and cut.

Soren could not look. He could not look away. He saw the red blood run down the channels into the basin, and he saw the black water change, drop by drop, from black to dark green, from green to a warm, wild, golden brightness, as if a sun were being born beneath the surface. The light rose. It poured upward to the roof of the cavern and flooded the hall, and the Founders raised their hands to it with expressions of terrible joy, and the Rootkin lay in the shining pool and went still, one after another, like candles blown out.

The Sunwell, he thought. This is what it is. It is a well of blood.

…

He woke on the stone floor of the cellar with his cheek against the cold brick and the taste of bile in his mouth.

For a time he did not know where he was. Then the world came back around him in fragments: the glow of the stove, the smell of ink, the clatter of Dorian's boots as he ran across the floor, and Tamsin's hand, which had slipped out of his and lay palm-up on the flagstones beside his face. He rolled onto his side. His stomach heaved and he vomited, dryly, helplessly, until there was nothing left in him to bring up, and lay shuddering with his forehead pressed against the stone.

"Soren, can you hear me?" Dorian was kneeling beside him with a hand on his shoulder. "What in God's name happened? You both fell down at the same moment, like a pair of felled trees, and Finch and I have been trying to wake you for ten minutes."

He pushed himself up on his elbows. His whole body felt as if it had been wrung out and hung up to dry. Across from him Tamsin sat with her back against the table leg and her knees drawn up, staring at nothing, with the tears running steadily down her face, and Finch crouched beside her with a cup of water that she had not touched.

"My name is on this," said Soren hoarsely.

"Your Grace, what do you mean by that?"

"My name is on this." He heard his own voice crack, and went on. "We saw it, Finch. We saw every bit of it, from the beginning. It was Edmund Aldridge who put the salt in the river, and it was my own blood who stood on the bank and lit the fires and told the world that the Rootkin had done it. We built the whole Dominion on it. My family built a throne out of your people's bones, and we have been sitting on it ever since."

The cellar was quiet. The press furnace ticked and settled. Somewhere overhead the green door slammed and Mrs. Ketteridge's boots went away across the yard.

"Your Grace," said Finch gently, "I would not wish to lessen the horror of what you have seen. I have read the Founders' Book, in fragments, for forty years, and I think I have always known its shape." He set the cup down on the stone. "But I would remind you, as an Archivist, that history is a river that runs in many channels, and not all the stories of the Aldridges end the same."

Soren said nothing. He had no words left.

At last Tamsin moved.

She put her hands flat on the floor and rose to her feet, slowly, as an old woman rises, and wiped her face on the back of her sleeve. She stood for a moment looking down at him. In the lantern light her gray-blue eyes were red-rimmed and enormous, and there was in them a hard bright steady look that he had never seen before, not in the courtroom, not in the Glasshouse, not on the night when he had told her he would rather lose everything. She looked at him as if he were a stranger who had walked into the room.

"Then tell me what you are going to do about it," said Tamsin.