“There’s only one thing I know how to do,” Lift said. “And that’s steal Darkness’s lunch. Like I came to do in the first place.”
“And, um, didn’t we do that already?”
“Not his food. His lunch.” She narrowed her eyes.
“Ah…” Wyndle said. “The person he’s planning to execute. We’re going to snatch them away from him.”
Lift strolled along a side street, and ended up passing into a garden: a bowl-like depression in the stone with four exits down different roads. Vines coated the leeward side of the wall, but they slowly gave way to brittels on the other side, shaped like flat plates for protection, but with planty stems that crept out and around the sides and up toward the sunlight.
Wyndle sniffed, crossing to the ground beside her. “Barely any cultivation. Why, this is no garden. Whoever maintains this should be reprimanded.”
“I like it,” Lift said, lifting her hand toward some lifespren, which bobbed over her fingertips. The garden was crowded with people. Some were coming and going, while others lounged about, and still others begged for chips. She hadn’t seen many beggars in the city; likely there were all kinds of rules and regulations about when you could do it and how.
She stopped, hands on hips. “People here, in Azir and Tashikk, they love to write stuff down.”
“Oh, most certainly,” Wyndle said, curling around some vines. “Mmm. Yes, mistress, these at least are fruit vines. I suppose that is better; it’s not completely haphazard.”
“And they love information,” Lift said. “They love tradin’ it with one another, right?”
“Most certainly. That is a distinguishing factor of their cultural identity, as your tutors said in the palace. You weren’t there. I went to listen in your place.”
“What people write can be important, at least to them,” Lift said. “But what would they do with it all when they’re done with it? Throw it out? Burn it?”
“Throw it out? Mother’s vines! No, no, no. You can’t just go throwing things out! They might be useful later on. If it were me, I’d find someplace safe for them, and keep them pristine in case I needed them!”
Lift nodded, folding her arms. They’d have his same attitude. This city, with everyone writing notes and rules, then offering to sell everyone else ideas all the time … Well, in some ways this place was like a whole city of Wyndles.
Darkness had told his hunters to find someone who was doing strange stuff. Awesome stuff. And in this city they wrote down what kids had for breakfast. If somebody had seen something strange, they’d have written it down.
Lift scampered through the garden, brushing vines with her toes and causing them to writhe away. She hopped up onto a bench beside a likely target, an older woman in a brown shiqua, with the head portions pulled up and down to show a middle-aged face wearing makeup and displaying hints of styled hair.
The woman wrinkled her nose immediately, which was unfair. Lift had taken a bath back a week or so in Azir, and it had had soap and everything.
“Shoo,” the woman said, waving fingers at her. “I’ve no money for you. Shoo. Go away.”
“Don’t want money,” Lift said. “I’ve got a deal to make. For information.”
“I want nothing from you.”
“I can give you nothing,” Lift said, relaxing. “I’m good at that. I’ll go away, and give you nothing. You just gotta answer a question for me.”
Lift hunched there on the bench, not moving. Then she scratched herself on the behind. The woman fussed, looking like she was going to leave, and Lift leaned in.
“You are disobeying beggar regulations,” the woman snapped.
“Ain’t beggin’. I’m tradin’.”
“Fine. What do you want to know?”
“Is there a place,” Lift said, “in this city where people stuff all the things they wrote down, to keep them safe?”
The woman frowned, then raised her hand and pointed along a street, which led straight for a distance, toward a moundlike bunker that rose from the center of the city. It was big enough to tower over the rest of the stuff around it, peeking up above the tops of the trenches.
“You mean like the Grand Indicium?” the woman asked.
Lift blinked, then cocked her head.
The woman took the opportunity to flee to a different part of the garden.
“Has that always been there?” Lift asked.
“Um, yes,” Wyndle said. “Of course it has.”
“Really?” Lift scratched her head. “Huh.”
12
WYNDLE’S vines wove up the side of an alleyway, and Lift climbed, not caring if she drew attention. She hauled herself over the top edge into a field where farmers watched the sky and grumbled. The seasons had gone insane. It was supposed to be raining constantly—a bad time to plant, as the water would wash away the seed paste.
Yet it hadn’t rained for days. No storms, no water. Lift walked along, passing farmers who spread paste that would grow to tiny polyps, which would eventually grow to the size of large rocks and fill to bursting with grain. Mash that grain—either by hand or by storm—and it made new paste. Lift had always wondered why she didn’t grow polyps inside her stomach after eating, and nobody had ever given her a straight answer.
The confused farmers worked with their shiquas pulled up to their waists. Lift passed, and she tried to listen. To hear.
This was supposed to be their one time of year where they didn’t have to work. Sure, they planted some treb to grow in cracks, as it could survive flooding. But they weren’t supposed to have to plant lavis, tallew, or clema: much more labor-intensive—but also more profitable—crops to cultivate.
Yet here they were. What if it rained tomorrow, and washed away all this effort? What if it never rained again? The city cisterns, which were glutted with water from the weeks of Weeping, would not last forever. They were so worried, she caught sight of some fearspren—shaped like globs of purple goo—gathering around the mounds upon which the men planted.
As a counterpoint, lifespren broke off from the growing polyps and bobbed over to Lift, trailing in her wake. A swirling, green-glowing dust. Ahead of her, the Grand Indicium rose like the head of a bald man seen peeking above the back of the chair he was sitting in. It was a huge rounded mass of stone.
Everything in the city revolved around this central point. Streets turned in this direction, curling up to it, and as Lift drew close, she could see that an enormous swath of stone had been cut away around the Indicium. The round bunker wasn’t much to look at, but it sure did seem secure from the storms.
“Yes, the land does slope away from this central point,” Wyndle noted. “This focus had to be the highest point of the city anyway—and I guess they figured they’d just accept that, and make the central knob into a fortress.”
A fortress for books. People could be so strange. Below, crowds of people—most of them Tashikki—flowed in and out of the building, which had numerous screwlike sloped walkways leading up to it.
Lift settled down on the edge of the wall, feet hanging over. “Kinda looks like the tip of some guy’s dangly bits. Like some fellow had such a short sword, everyone felt so sorry for him they said, ‘Hey, we’ll make a huge statue to it, and even though it’s tiny, it’ll look real big!’”
Wyndle sighed.
“That wasn’t crude,” Lift noted. “That was being poetic. Ol’ Whitehair said you can’t be crass, so long as you’re talkin’ ’bout art. Then you’re being elegant. That’s why it’s okay to hang pictures of naked ladies in a palace.”
“Mistress, wasn’t this the man who got himself intentionally swallowed by a Marabethian greatshell?”
“Yup. Crazy as a box full of drunk minks, that one. I miss him.” She liked to pretend he hadn’t actually gotten eaten. He’d winked at her as he’d jumped into the greatshell’s gaping maw, shocking the crowd.
Wyndle piled around on himself, forming a face—eyes made of crystals, lips formed of a tiny network of vines. “Mist
ress, what is our plan?”
“Plan?”
He sighed. “We need to get into that building. Are you just going to do whatever strikes you?”
“Obviously.”
“Might I offer some suggestions?”
“Long as it doesn’t involve sucking someone’s soul, Voidbringer.”
“I’m not— Look, mistress, that building is an archive. Knowing what I do of this region, the rooms in there will be filled with laws, records, and reports. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of them.”
“Yeah,” she said, making a fist. “Among all that, they’ll have written down strange stuff for sure!”
“And how, precisely, are we going to find the specific information we want?”
“Easy. You’re gonna read it.”
“… Read it.”
“Yup. We’ll get in there, you’ll read their books and stuff, and then we’ll decide where strange events were. That will lead us to Darkness’s lunch.”
“… Read it all.”
“Yup.”
“Do you have any idea how much information is likely held in that place?” Wyndle said. “There will be hundreds of thousands of reports and ledgers. And to state it explicitly, yes, that’s a number more than ten, so you can’t count to it.”
“I’m not an idiot,” she snapped. “I got toes too.”
“It’s still far more than I can read. I can’t sift through all of that information for you. It’s impossible. Not going to happen.”
She eyed him. “All right. Maybe I can get you one soul. Perhaps a tax collector…’cept they ain’t human. Would they work? Or would you need, like, three of them to make up one normal person’s soul?”
“Mistress! I’m not bargaining!”
“Come on. Everyone knows Voidbringers like a good deal. Does it have to be someone important? Or can it be some dumb guy nobody likes?”
“I don’t eat souls,” Wyndle exclaimed. “I’m not trying to haggle with you! I’m stating facts. I can’t read all the information in that archive! Why can’t you just see that—”
“Oh, calm your tentacles,” Lift said, swinging her feet, bouncing her heels against the rock cliff. “I hear you. Can’t help but hear you, considering how much you whine.”
Behind, the farmers were asking whose daughter she was, and why she wasn’t running them water like kids were supposed to. Lift scrunched up her face, thinking. “Can’t wait until night and sneak in,” she muttered. “Darkness wants the poor person killed by then. ’Sides, I bet those scribes work nights. They feed off ink. Why sleep when you could be writin’ up some new law about how many fingers people can use to hold a spoon?
“They know their stuff though. They sell it all over the place. The viziers were always writing to them to get some answer to something. Mostly news around the world.” She grinned, then stood up. “You’re right. We gotta do this differently.”
“Yes indeed.”
“We gotta be smart about it. Devious. Think like a Voidbringer.”
“I didn’t say—”
“Stop complaining,” Lift said. “I’m gonna go steal some important-looking clothes.”
13
LIFT liked soft clothing. These supple Azish coat and robes were the wardrobe equivalent of silky pudding. It was good to remember that life wasn’t only about scratchy things. Sometimes it was about soft pillows, fluffy cake. Nice words. Mothers.
The world couldn’t be completely bad when it had soft clothes. This outfit was big for her, but that was okay. She liked it loose. She snuggled into the robes, sitting in the chair, crossing her hands in her lap, wearing a cap on her head. The entire costume was marked by bright colors woven in patterns that meant very important things. She was pretty sure of that, because everyone in Azir wouldn’t shut up about their patterns.
The scribe was fat. She needed, like, three shiquas to cover her. Either that or a shiqua made for a horse. Lift wouldn’t have thought that they’d give scribes so much food. What did they need so much energy for? Pens were really light.
The woman wore spectacles and kept her face covered, despite being in lands that knew Tashi. She tapped her pen against the table. “You’re from the palace in Azir.”
“Yup,” Lift said. “Friend of the emperor. I call him Gawx, but they changed his name to something else. Which is okay, because Gawx is kind of a dumb name, and you don’t want your emperor to sound dumb.” She cocked her head. “Can’t stop that if he starts talking though.”
On the ground beside her, Wyndle groaned softly.
“Did you know,” Lift said, leaning in to the scribe, “that they’ve got someone who picks his nose for him?”
“Young lady, I believe you are wasting my time.”
“That’s pretty insulting,” Lift said, sitting up straight in her seat, “considering how little you people seem to do around here.”
It was true. This whole building was full of scribes rushing this way and that, carrying piles of paper to one windowless alcove or another. They even had this spren that hung out here, one Lift had only seen a couple of times. It looked like little ripples in the air, like a raindrop in a pond—only without the rain, and without the pond. Wyndle called them concentrationspren.
Anyway, they had so much starvin’ paper in the place that they needed parshmen to cart it about for them! One passed in the hallway outside, a woman carrying a large box of papers. Those would be hauled to one of a billion scribes who sat at tables, surrounded by blinking spanreeds. Wyndle said they were answering inquiries from around the world, passing information.
The scribe with Lift was a slightly more important one. Lift had gotten into the room by doing as Wyndle suggested: not talking. The viziers did that kind of thing too. Nodding, not saying anything. She’d presented the card, where she’d sketched the words that Wyndle had formed for her with vines.
The people at the front had been intimidated enough to lead her through the hallways to this room, which was larger than others—but it still didn’t have any windows. The wall had a brownish yellow stain on the white paint though, and you could pretend it was sunlight.
On the other wall was a shelf that held a really long rack of spanreeds. A few Azish tapestries hung at the back. This scribe was some kind of liaison with the government over in Azir.
Once in the room though, Lift had been forced to talk. She couldn’t avoid that anymore. She just needed to be persuasive.
“What unfortunate person,” the large scribe asked, “did you mug to get that clothing?”
“Like I’d take it off someone while they were wearing it,” Lift said, rolling her eyes. “Look. Just pull out one of those glowing pens and write to the palace. Then we can get on to the important stuff. My Voidbringer says you got tons of papers in here we’re gonna have to look through.”
The woman stood up. Lift could practically hear her chair breathe a sigh of relief. The woman pointed toward the door dismissively, but at that moment a lesser scribe—spindly, and wearing a yellow shiqua and a strange brown and yellow cap—entered and whispered in the woman’s ear.
She looked displeased. The newcomer shrugged awkwardly, then hurried back out. The fat woman turned to eye Lift. “Give me the names of the viziers you know in the palace.”
“Well, there’s Dalky—she’s got a funny nose, like a spigot. And Big A, I can’t say his real name. It’s got those choking sounds in it. And Daddy Sag-butt, he’s not really a vizier. They call him a scion, which is a different kind of important. Oh! And Fat Lips! She’s in charge of them. She doesn’t really have fat lips, but she hates it when I call her that.”
The woman stared at Lift. Then she turned and walked to the door. “Wait here.” She stepped outside.
Lift leaned over toward the ground. “How’m I doin’?”
“Terribly,” Wyndle said.
“Yeah. I noticed.”
“It’s almost as if,” Wyndle said, “it would have been useful to learn how to talk politely, like the
viziers kept telling you.”
“Blah blah,” Lift said, going to the door and listening. Outside, she could faintly hear the scribes talking.
“… matches the description given by the captain of the immigration watch to search for in the city…” one of them said. “She showed up right here! We’ve sent to the captain, who luckily is here for her debriefing…”
“Damnation,” Lift whispered, pulling back. “They’re on to us, Voidbringer.”
“I should never have helped you with this insane idea!”
Lift crossed the room to the racks of spanreeds. They were all labeled. “Get over here and tell me which one we need.”
Wyndle grew up the wall and sent vines across the nameplates. “My, my. These are important reeds. Let’s see … third one over, it will go to the royal palace scribes.”
“Great,” Lift said, grabbing it and scrambling onto the table. She set it into the right spot on the board—she’d seen this done tons of times—and twisted the ruby on the top of the reed. It was answered immediately; palace scribes weren’t often away from their reeds. They’d sooner give up their fingers.
Lift grabbed the spanreed and placed it against the paper. “Uh…”
“Oh, for Cultivation’s sake,” Wyndle said. “You didn’t pay attention at all, did you?”
“Nope.”
“Tell me what you want to say.”
She said it out, and he again made vines grow across the table in the right shapes. Pen gripped in her fist, she copied the words, one stupid letter at a time. It took forever. Writing was ridiculous. Couldn’t people just talk? Why invent a way where you didn’t have to actually see people to tell them what to do?
This is Lift, she wrote. Tell Fat Lips I need her. I’m in trouble. And somebody get Gawx. If he’s not having his nose picked right—
The door opened and Lift yelped, twisting the ruby and scrambling off the table.
Beyond the door was a large gathering of people. Five scribes, including the fat one, and three guards. One was the woman who ran the guard post into the city.