Page 8

“Treila, would you go? Over the wall?” Simmonet asks, scooting closer.

“No, she wouldn’t,” Edouart says, and Treila keeps her expression steady, not scowling like she wants to. What does he know of her? Nothing. Nobody here knows anything of her. “They all die,” he adds.

She cants her head, surprised.

Simmonet stares. “What do you mean, die?” he asks.

“If they don’t die,” Edouart replies, shrugging and casting his dice again, “then why don’t they come back? With help?”

Treila nods, slowly, thoughtful. He’s right, of course; she figured out long ago the messengers were likely dying, but she hasn’t heard anybody else voice as much until now. Morale is truly cracking, then. The riot was just the beginning.

Things are going to get ugly. She can feel it.

“It’s a hard climb,” she says. “But I would risk it,” she lies.

Edouart looks at her dubiously, like she’s mad. Simmonet stares in awe. “Yeah,” he says. “Me too.”

They play for maybe twenty minutes more, silent now except for the clatter of dice, and then she leaves them, so that they may finally admit their exhaustion, yawn, crawl off to bed.

She lies on her little pallet and tries to sleep, but sleep refuses to come. It’s a learned frustration; she should know how to sleep like the dead when she has the chance, and instead she knows how to survive on so little sleep she might as well be dead. She lies there, motionless, for as long as she can stand it, but her mind is on fire, thinking of the riot, of the dwindling number of rats, of the dead messengers. The buzzing of summer insects fills the room and adds to the chorus in her mind.

And then she’s up and headed down the stairs again, toward her workroom, because maybe, maybe, the coolness down there and the thick stone will shield her enough, the touch of her fingers to her heap of food will still her soul.

It doesn’t, of course. She’s still restless. She hides the cache once more and paces around the tight confines of the not-really-a-room, wondering how long before somebody finds her, raises questions she doesn’t want to answer.

Nobody appears. Treila eventually sits, legs tired from a long day, scrubbing at her face. It’s not a space amenable to sleep; there’s not much floorspace and the windows are nearly level with the ground outside, there only for air and a bit of light. But its depth makes it quiet and cool. Perhaps she should move down here, stack up a barrel or two to make a nook, except that would draw attention to her cache. Not safe in the long run.

But a little rest...

She lies down on the floor, curled up tightly to fit between a loom and a heap of sacking.

Her brain settles, just a little, just enough, and soon she’s drifting on the edge of sleep. Flickers of forest greenery and split wood spark across her mind, eager for her to dream again, dream of home and shame and rage.

She smells water.

And that is new, and unexpected, and it rouses her just a little. She opens her eyes. She rises onto her hands and knees. She inhales, deeply.

She smells growing things, algae and muck, and damp stone, and shit: the same smells that rise from the well. But the well is several hundred yards away, through so much stone. This is something else. Something different.

Treila presses her palm to one of the flagstones. It does not budge. But the one up and to the left of it does, just a little, rocking in its seat, and the one beyond that a little more. Treila crawls to where the floor meets the wall, shoving detritus out of the way, and wedges her fingertips into the mortar, wiggling just a little.

It crumbles. The smell thickens.

By dawn, when she’s forced to retreat and dress for work, she’s made a little hole, barely large enough for even a small rat to squeeze through.

But it is something.

It is salvation.

4

Phosyne prods the rotted lump of flesh with one slender piece of bone, fashioned into a polished pick. It is a small bit of flesh, received in her rations three weeks ago. She thinks it was ox, at one point. Now it is furred and pitted, oozing a riot of colors that combine into an unpleasant, sticky black. It took a lot to get it there, as it came to her well-dried, not fresh at all, in a controlled rot instead of an active one like this. But now it is exactly where she wants it, the pinnacle of putrescence. Perhaps putrescence can be reversed into fecundity; the two concepts are clearly related, after all.

She prods the flesh again. The lump shudders, the puddle of ichor around it spreading another hairsbreadth. Its stench lessens, just a little, and so Phosyne leans in, spears another little grass seed with the tip of the bone, gently nudges it into place. Encouragement. A pattern for it to follow. New life, please; the rapid growth of seedlings, woven now into flesh.

The sun is on the verge of setting, just the slightest shift in light through her tiny window. She sees the furred layer of tissue move a little, ripple slightly, and then the pits of it are winking, opening, closing, respiring, and she holds her breath. She squints. Rubs her eyes.

Mutters a string of syllables that might be curses, and then rocks back on her heels.