Debris (36 page)

  "You don't want them to lock him in a castle for the rest of his days. Yes, I understand that."

  "It's more than that." Kichlan shifted the bag. His fingers sought purchase in the folds of calico. They squeezed deep indents into the soft clothes. "I think, you see, that some of us fall differently. Like your Ulric fellow."

  "Uric," I corrected.

  He flashed me a frown. "Yes, whatever his name was. A long time ago I met others who heard things after they fell, who thought they could see faces instead of debris."

  I half stumbled on the road's uneven stones. "What? Really? Why didn't you say anything?"

  "This isn't something Lad needs to know about. Listen to me, Tanyana, please."

  I shut my mouth against more questions.

  "I thought I could find out what was wrong with Lad, I thought I could help him. But he didn't give me enough time. He has always been like this. Listening to voices no one else can hear. But they can't find out about it, do you understand? They can't."

  "They?" I whispered.

  "The veche men. Technicians. Because every one of those people I met, those people who fell hard, were found by the veche, and they were taken away." He drew a deep breath. "I know, because I was there. Because I helped."

  I stared at him blankly.

  "I wasn't always a collector, I wasn't born like this. Not the way Lad was. And before I fell I thought I could help him, I wanted to use–" he struggled, his hands quivered against the bags he carried "–my skill to help him. My binding skill."

  Cold that had nothing to do with the Movoc-underKeeper weather made me shiver. "I thought you didn't know anything about pion-binding?"

  Kichlan couldn't meet my eyes. "I tried to help him. I learned things, but not enough. And when Lad hurt the girl, I knew I had to make a choice. Fall, and protect him. Or watch him being taken away. You know what I chose."

  "I don't understand, Kichlan. What was your skill? What did you do–" But I did. The silver hand, that dull metal with its thick cords that had reminded me so much of my suit, on Kichlan's dresser. "You were a technician?" My tongue felt frozen, the words impossible to say.

  "In a way. I didn't make suits, not like the ones we wear. The veche had me experimenting, making changes. I was quite skilled."

  "You must have been." He wasn't bad at lying, either. "Any reason for the pretence? Or just amusing yourself by lying to the new collector?" The bitterness in my words was too sharp to contain.

  "The team don't know this. Lad, I think, doesn't really understand. I gave it all up for him, Tanyana. When he hurt that girl, he took away any chance I had to find out what was wrong with him. To fix him. I fell, so I could protect him. He doesn't need to know. He shouldn't have to carry that." His voice hitched. "It isn't his fault."

  I wondered, numbly, why he had told me. Did he think I had the strength to carry his grief around with him? The love in those words, and the resentment, and the failure.

  "Where did the veche take them? The collectors you said fell hard?"

  Kichlan shook his head. "I didn't find out. I wasn't there long enough. But they never came back." He looked at me, and in his eyes I saw the kind of fear, the kind of desperation and terror I would have associated with his brother's confused mind instead. "I will not let that happen to Lad. They cannot take him away. He's all I have left, Tanyana. He is my everything."

  "I know, Kichlan. I know."

  I wanted to touch him, to hold him or pat him in a way Lad would have let me easily. But, even if we weren't laden with my new clothes and their calico bags, I wasn't certain Kichlan would let me get that close.

  "I'm still going to find a way," Kichlan whispered so softly I almost missed him beneath my own breathing. "I'm going to find out what the voices are, and I'm going to stop them. Then the veche can't take him, they'll have no reason. Then he will be safe."

  I watched Lad's back. His head was tipped, with his song reaching a roaring chorus without discernable words.

  Did any of this make sense? Did I fall from Grandeur and land beside Kichlan and his brother for a reason? Was it anything more than terrible, devastating luck?

  Uric's twelve pointed circle burned too brightly in my mind, and I stood beside him, fighting pions of my own. I had known from the beginning, hadn't I, that this was more than Yicor's
luck
. Kichlan had thrown himself from his Grandeur, I had been pushed.

  What, exactly, was I going to do about that? I felt backed into a corner. Devich and the powerful people he knew weren't accessible to me any more. Pavel and the thugs who had thrown me from my apartment felt like warnings, as though someone was telling me in brutal terms to cast aside all thoughts of Grandeur, of pions, of justice and a veche tribunal. To let that life fall forgotten into the past, and get used to being a debris collector.

  And most of all, to stop asking questions.

  But what frightened me most was how comfortable this corner could be. Lad's friendship, Kichlan's loyalty, Eugeny's care, I wanted these things. I liked them. It would be too easy to embrace this new life, to stop fighting for the truth, to leave the past alone. It even sounded like the most sensible thing to do.

  After all, nothing was holding me to my old life anymore. My circle was gone, my apartment was taken, and I had just sold the last piece, the last memory.

  Maybe it was time to let go?

 
 
 
 

Lad leaned into the river spray, one hand wrapped around the railing, the other tangled in mine. I was keenly aware that I had nowhere near enough weight to keep him on the ferry if he fell, and would be sucked into the Tear's icy current behind him.

  "Feet on the floor, Lad, not the railing." I tugged at the large man, a lot like trying to shift a steady wall of brick and mortar with my little finger.

  "The water is nice, Tan." He leaned over further.

  "Not if you fall in it, it won't be."

  With a sheepish glance, Lad slipped his feet from the first rung and back to the deck, landing loudly. The few ferries that ran on Rest were filled, but not in a crowded way. There were tired young men making their way down from the city. Middle-aged chaperones supervised younger women who fluttered their eyelashes and were rewarded with leering, sleep-deprived smiles. An elderly couple huddled on seats by the doorway, watching the Keeper Mountain grow slowly smaller, blinking against sunlight on the river. A gaggle of children were doing a fair imitation of Lad's unsafe climbing. I felt sorry for the two governesses trying to pry them all down.

  Kichlan stood beside me, also watching the Keeper Mountain. "They weren't like him, you know," he said, soft against the rush of the wind, not loud enough for Lad to hear. "Neither. Both were good binders, respectable people working hard for Varsnia and their children. It's not in the blood. My parents weren't collectors."

  "Pion skill has got nothing to do with blood, although the old families won't want to hear that." My mother was proof of that.

  "Don't you wonder, then, what it is?" Kichlan's hands gripped the railing, knuckles white, skin blue in the chill. "What made us?"

  "I know what made me." I touched the side of my face. "And you made yourself." Kichlan had not been forthcoming with any more details of his fall, but I refused to be dissuaded and continued to pry. "Fling yourself eight hundred feet into the air, did you?"

  He said, "Doesn't take eight hundred feet to break a person, and not all of us have to be quite so dramatic." Kichlan looked over my head. "Him then." In the corner of my eye I noticed one of Lad's feet had crept back to the bottom railing. I poked him in the side, and he lowered it with a chuckle. "What made him?"

  Over the last sixnight and one, Kichlan, Lad and I had explored the backstreets and alleys between the seventh Effluent and the eighth Keepersrill. Narrow, dark capillaries between wide veins, shaped without reason, blocking often in dead ends or gates. It was this constant companionship, I told myself, that had stopped me searching for Devich. How could I head into the city, or try and find the building where he had suited me, with Kichlan and Lad like dogs, constantly at my heels. And Olday evening, as the brothers had said their farewells at the bottom of Valya's rickety stairs, Kichlan had asked me to come with them the next morning, to visit his parents' graves. If I hadn't been so surprised, I might have thought up a way to decline.

  Devich had to be worried. He must have visited my apartment by now. I owed him the truth; he deserved to have his fears rested. Instead, I was heading for the cemetery.

  Graves were not my speciality. Between Movoc's prerevolutionary walls and the newer townlets that were springing up around the Weeping Lake, the cemetery was a sprawling necropolis, an architect's nightmare dedicated to the dead. I never visited.

  We disembarked at an aging limestone quay, just on the other side of the old Tear gates. Once large defences, securing the break in Movoc's wall necessitated by the Tear River, the gates were rendered useless by the revolution and were now entirely ornamental. The iron had been restored to a better condition than it had probably ever been. The bars were shaped like little rivers, starting with a viciously sharp-summited Keeper, and ending with a skull. Lad stared at the skulls as we passed beneath the shadow of the wall, and even I couldn't help but shiver. Their eyes had been replaced with original kopacks, ancient coins of brass, and they glinted cruelly in the glare from the water.

  From the quay we filed along a narrow road, just as ancient, cut into a rocky landscape of desolate knolls. Little more than thistles grew. Shadows seemed to lie there without anything to cast them, hugging the cold earth. We weren't the only ones travelling to the necropolis to visit the loved dead that rest. The old couple followed, at an increasing distance, slow over the treacherous, uneven ground.

  "Is this something you do often?" I asked Kichlan, feeling breathless but desperate for something to fill the shadowed quiet.

  Lad followed a few yards behind us. He hummed a slow, sad tune.

  "I want Lad to remember them," Kichlan answered. "So I suppose, yes, we do this more often than most people."

  Certainly more often than me. I wasn't even sure I could remember the plaque behind which my mother's ashes slept. I had not known my father when he was alive, and certainly didn't know where he rested now.

  Kichlan led the way along thin paths of cracking stone. I felt surrounded. Gravestones with small roofs made hushed, disordered suburbs. Memorial statues and tombs hulked beside older, unmarked barrows. Rosemary grew in thick-scented clumps between stones. And images of the Other loomed from every corner. Featureless faces etched into gravestones; flat, humanoid shadows built of dark rock stretching from the side of a tomb wall. And older, more frightening things. A skull, half buried, its face crushed. The chaos of a skeleton statue, bones put together the wrong way. The Other was death, and disorder, and fear. Surely he belonged here, then, far from the protective shadow of the mountain named after his opposite: the Keeper.

  The stonework was coarse, the paving poor. I tried to tell myself that was why I preferred to stare at the skyline, or a square of green cloth that had been used to repair Kichlan's jacket, near the shoulder.

  He halted in a newer patch of graves. Each had a headstone, engraved with names, no worn-away faces or shadows. The roofs were well tended, no tiles cracked. Shin-high fences marked them all apart. Lad tugged rosemary from where it grew in a gap in the path. He settled onto his heels before two graves with no fence to divide them, and placed the rosemary gently on the earth. He picked at weeds that had began poking around the iron fence. He brushed dirt and dried leaves from the roof.

  "They loved him, despite what he did. Despite what I chose to do." Kichlan remained by my side, hands deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched.

  "I'm sure they did." Was this why I was here? To be told how much Lad's mother loved him? "Why have you brought me here, Kichlan?"

  Lad, satisfied with the cleanliness of the graves, had started pulling small leaves from the stalks of rosemary. The scent surged up around him like a rising tide, and he muttered to himself, a constant flow of words I couldn't hear.

  "After I– when Lad forced my hand, I didn't give up. I tried healers first." Kichlan was as quiet as Lad, nearly as difficult to hear. "They kept telling me the same thing. That no one knows what is wrong with him, no one knows why pions choose to abandon some people. They said it like that. As though he'd been tested, and rejected." The venom in his soft words was a chilling and terrible thing.

  I touched the top of my head. "I wish I could tell you I can't imagine how horrible that feels."

  Kichlan shuffled closer, so our arms touched through layers of woollen and leather coats. "Too much of that and someone in the veche must have heard. They sent technicians to check on Lad every second day. Even some of those Other-cursed veche men. I stopped asking after that."

  I shuddered, and Kichlan leaned against me.

  "Eugeny had some ideas of his own. You know what he's like."

  Golden root wax plant, whatever it was. "I do."

  "Nearly impossible to get Lad to drink his concoctions, I have to say. For all the good it did." He let out a sigh so long it sounded like it had started somewhere close to his feet. "And now, all I can do is watch him, protect him. Make sure he remembers the parents that loved him, and try to make him happy."

  "Did you read the veche records?"