Rubble

The first thing Isolde knew was that the floor was cold, and the second was that it was real.

It was a different cold from the Threshold. That had been the cold of an idea, thin and clean and faintly smug. This was damp. It had a smell. It soaked up through her skirt into the bones of her hip and smelled of old stone, and lamp-oil, and candle-smoke, and, underneath, very faintly, of lilies. It was an utterly ordinary cold. It was the cold of a cellar in October. She lay on her back with her eyes shut and thought that she had never in her life been so glad of anything.

Then somebody sneezed.

She opened her eyes.

She was lying on flagstones, among broken glass. The glass was everywhere, in long curved shards and bright fine powder, spread in a wide shining fan across the floor. Above her was a vault of dark brick, arched and heavy, and beyond it, high up, a faint gray light came through a grating. A fine dust was still falling. It drifted through the slanting beams like snow.

"Well," said Dora Mallow, from somewhere on her left, in a hoarse and furious voice. "That's one way to arrive."

…

It was the crypt.

She knew it for what it was within a minute. It was long and low, a hall of thirteen pillars on either side, carved with a pattern of hands and keys, and it ran away into the dark in both directions farther than the light would carry. Candles in iron sconces burned along the walls. They were small and orderly and white. Someone had been tending them. The air was very still. Under her palm the stone seemed to hum.

At the near end of the vault stood a plinth of white marble, and on it a glass coffin.

What remained of the coffin.

It had burst from within. The lid lay in three pieces, one against a pillar, one across the floor, and one still hinged by a twist of silver wire to the base. The sides had split like an eggshell. A satin pillow, perfectly white, lay on the floor with a dent in it where a head had been. The plinth was bare. On the marble, in the dust, was the clear impression of a long body, lying on its back with its hands folded.

It was empty.

She sat up so fast that the room swam.

"Valerian—"

"I am here," said a voice.

It came from behind the plinth. It was hoarse, and cracked, and very faint, but it was a voice, a warm voice, and it was followed immediately by the sound of someone trying to stand up and failing. She was across the glass in a moment, heedless of the shards. She came round the end of the marble on her hands and knees.

He was sitting on the floor against the plinth, with his legs stretched out in front of him and his head thrown back.

He was breathing.

She would remember that all her life. He sat in the pale gray light, in a coat that was beginning, at the edges, to crumble into black dust, and she saw his chest rise and fall. A hundred times she had watched him walk beside her and speak and lie and weep, and not once had she seen what she saw now, the small unconscious labor of a living man. His lips were cracked. His skin was the color of candle-wax. There was a faint blue shadow under his eyes, and a vein pulsing in his throat, and, in the long white hands that lay open on his knees, a tremor he could not control.

He turned his head. He smiled at her, weakly, with the tired astonished smile of a man who has woken from a long fever.

"It hurts," said Valerian, in a tone of wonder.

"What does?"

"Everything." He laughed, and coughed, and laughed again. "My knees. My hair. There is a thing happening in my stomach. I believe it is hunger." He lifted a trembling hand and touched his own face as if it were a mask he had been handed. "I have a pulse. I can feel it. It is quite rapid. Is that usual?"

"It's usual."

"Is it always so loud?"

"Yes."

"How do people bear it?"

"They don't, much," said Isolde, and then she was crying, and had both arms round his neck, and was being held by a shaking, laughing, perfectly solid man who smelled of dust and cold glass and, impossibly, of soap. His heart was going like a rabbit's. It went through her ribs. It was the loveliest sound she had ever heard.

…

"There's a lot of us," said Brannoc, behind them.

They looked up.

The old man stood in the middle of the vault, with Wick on his hip and a streak of plaster across his forehead, and looked about him with the dazed bewilderment of a man at the end of a battle. He seemed to have shrunk. His coat was in rags. But the line of his jaw had loosened, and the one-eyed face under the dust was lit with a strange wide unwary look, like a man who has been told, after twenty years, that he may go home.

"Count them," he said.

She counted.

They were lying all across the floor of the crypt, among the pillars. They lay in their white robes, in heaps, in pairs, in knots, like the survivors of a wreck cast up on a beach. Some stirred. Some sat up and stared. Some were weeping into their hands. A tall gray-haired woman had got to her knees and was feeling her own face as if she had never seen it. A young man in a Lantern pin was being sick, with great determination, into an urn.

"A hundred and sixty," said Isolde, after a time. "Two hundred."

"Some will have been in there longer than that."

"Yes."

"Some of them were in there before I was born."

"Yes," said Dora Mallow, rising out of a crowd of whimpering Strays with her arms full of folds of white wool and a thunderous scowl. "I'd like to know who they think is going to feed us." She turned on Brannoc. "You. Rook. What's the day?"

"I've no notion."

"It's the thirteenth," said Isolde.

Everyone looked at her.

"It's the thirteenth day. It must be. We came out of the last door." She had gone cold. She was on her feet; she did not remember rising. "It's morning. That's the light from the grating, that's dawn. It's the day my sister—"

"Isolde."

Valerian had caught her hand.

He did not hold her. He did not seem able to. His grip was like a baby's, loose and damp and very weak. But he looked up at her from the floor, with his gray eyes clear, and said, in a voice that had suddenly steadied: "Linnet is alive."

"How do you—"

"Because the Bloom is gone."

She stared.

"Look," said Valerian.

She looked at the floor.

…

They were lying all across it.

At first she took them for glass. They were scattered through the shards, among the shining powder: small, curved, delicate things, pale as ash and dark as ink. A hundred of them. A thousand. Each no bigger than her thumbnail. Each wrinkled, and dry, and curled at the edge, and beautiful.

Petals.

They had come down through the grating with the dust. They lay in the candlelight, black on the gray stone, and every one of them was dead. She stooped. She picked one up. It crumbled in her fingers into a puff of fine black powder that smelled of lilies and decay and, faintly, of the sea.

"The Blood-Bloom," she whispered.

"It was a petal for every one the Hunger touched," said Valerian. "They are falling everywhere. In the Hospices. In the streets. In every wrist that carried one." His eyes were wet. "You called it home. It has stopped reaching."

"Then she's—"

"I think she is waking."

Isolde sat down on the floor.

She had meant to run. She had a clear and detailed picture of herself running, up the crypt stair, down a hundred corridors, through the Sanctum, into the ward, and flinging herself on a narrow bed. But her legs would not. They folded under her. She sat in the dust with a handful of black powder and a heart that seemed to have forgotten how to beat, and gazed at it, and it was a long moment before she understood that she was laughing.

"Take your time," said Valerian gently.

"I can't. I can't, I've got to—"

"You will not get there before you are able to stand."

"I've been running for thirteen days."

"I know." His weak hand tightened. "But I think you may stop now. I think she is not going anywhere."

…

He told her the name while they waited for her legs.

It was half an hour, perhaps. Dora had organized the Strays into groups, as a sergeant does, and sent three of the stronger ones up the stair to find water. Brannoc sat with his back to a pillar, holding the sleeping boy, and watched the grating. And Valerian, who could not yet stand, lay with his head on Isolde's knee on the floor of his own tomb, and looked at the vault of brick as a man looks at a sky he never expected to see again.

"Her name was Aldith," he said.

She waited.

"Aldith Orme. She was my oldest friend." His voice was low. It was still faintly cracked, as if from disuse. "We were at the Sanctum school together. I was twenty-six. She was thirty. She was the cleverest woman I had ever known, and the kindest, and she had a long plain face which she thought ugly, and which I thought the best face in Aethelgard. She was the head of the Chapter. She was the one who held the key."

"The key. The great curved one."

"The Seal-Key. She wore it at her belt." He closed his eyes. "I went to her first, you understand. Before anyone. I had found the Hunger, and I knew what it was, and I told her I wished to sit with it. That I thought I could talk to it. That it was not a thing to be killed or caged but to be heard. And she listened. She was the only one who did."

"And then?"

"And then the others came. The elders of the Chapter. The Council. They were afraid." His mouth twisted. "They said a hearing was not enough. They said it must be bound. Sealed. Held in one man, locked away from the world, for as long as it took to find a way to unmake it. And Aldith said: Let it be Valerian. He volunteered. It will be a year. Perhaps two. I will keep the key myself. And I thought: She will keep the key. I trust her."

"Valerian."

"She wept when she turned it." His voice shook. "She said, We have no other way. I thought she meant the Council. I thought she meant that she too was bound. I did not understand until the Hunger told me, on the stair, what that sentence was." He opened his eyes. "She had known what would be done. She had known the seal would take more than a year. She knew they would not let it go. And she turned the key all the same."

Isolde said nothing. She stroked the hair back from his temple.

"I do not think she meant to betray me," said Valerian. "I think she meant to save the kingdom, and she did not see another door. I think that she regretted it every day of her life. And I think that the Order of the Quiet Hour, which began as a vigil for me, has been busy ever since turning her regret into a trade." He drew a long unsteady breath. "Her descendants kept the key."

"Orme," said Isolde.

The name fell between them like a stone.

"Prioress Sabine Orme," she said, slowly. "Gideon's Prioress. The one who asked for Linnet."

"Yes."

"It's a family business."

"It is the oldest in the kingdom," said Valerian.

…

They heard the boots at the top of the stair.

There were a great many of them, and they were not hurrying. They came down in a measured, solemn, practiced tread, the footsteps of men who had been trained to go into holy places without making a noise, and who had, in the last quarter of an hour, forgotten how. Torchlight swam along the walls. A thin cold voice somewhere above called out a sentence in the Old Tongue, the same sentence, over and over, in the dull chanting rhythm of a liturgy.

Isolde got up.

She found, to her surprise, that she could. She went to the foot of the crypt stair and stood there, with the pot lid against her chest, and her notebook in her belt, and her hair wild about her face. Behind her, in the candlelight, Brannoc rose with the boy asleep on his shoulder. Dora Mallow came up on her left, with a long iron candlestick in her fist. A rank of white-robed Strays, ragged and bewildered and some still weeping, shuffled into line.

She could not understand the chant. It meant nothing to her now. It was the first time in her life she had heard the Old Tongue as a stranger hears it, a stream of beautiful, empty, rolling noise, with no handle to hold. But she heard the tone. She heard the tune. It was cold, and measured, and perfectly pleased.

"They're calling it a rite," said Valerian, from the floor.

"What are they saying?"

"That the work is done," said Valerian. "That the Reset is complete. That the vessel is renewed." He had propped himself on an elbow. His face was gray with effort and fierce as a drawn knife. "They think the ninth reader has picked up the knife."

She stood very still.

"They are coming down," he said, "to collect the payment."

Then the doors at the top of the stair swung wide, and the light of a hundred torches came pouring into the crypt.