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?"
He snorted. "Those little glass pion-written things? I did, when I could. They were not terribly helpful."
I could imagine that. "What about researchers? You must have attended a university to become a technician. The texts there, the lecturers, they could have helped you."
Yes, what about them? I knew some strong binders who'd dedicated their lives to the study and the teaching of those little spots of bright light. If I asked them, they might know what made a person lose their pion sight, and they might know how to fix it. What's more, they might know how to summon a horde of furious, crimson pions from deep inside reality. They might even know who could do it.
Why hadn't I thought of this earlier? Jernea, if he was still alive, would not turn me away. I was sure of it.
"Ah." Kichlan looked down at me, mouth set, but unable to quench a sudden hope I saw in his eyes. "Technicians train each other, I'm afraid. If you display the correct skills and make the right inquiries the veche comes calling, and offers you a position. So I did not attend any university that could help us."
I remembered the letter from Proud Sunlight that I had cradled so close to me. It is with regret we hear of your misfortune. But if Jernea was still there, he would listen to me. He would help.
"I did," I whispered. "And I will try."
"Done now, bro." Lad was standing, watching us, and neither of us had noticed. "Is that enough?"
For a collector like him. And a collector like me.
"Yes, Lad," Kichlan answered with a smile. "We can go home now."
Together, we rode the ferry on its journey upriver. Together, we took Lad home and gave him over to Eugeny's food and care. Together, we returned to my new home. I felt close to Kichlan, close to Lad. A part of the team, even something like family.
Then Mornday, when I descended to the sublevel and stepped beneath the filtered morning light and the cracked ceiling, Devich was there.
He glanced at me, and his expression didn't change. He had been rotating half a dozen or so small glass slides in the air in front of his face. He stilled them with a whisper, then plucked one and held it close to his eye. I wondered what was written in it.
"Vladha?" he asked.
I realised I was gaping at him. I shut my jaw with a click, and forced my feet across the floor. Kichlan, Lad, Mizra and Uzdal were already sitting in the couches, none of them pleased. A second technician was counting jars.
Guilt knocked the air from me, guilt at Devich's expressionless face. "Yes," I answered with a gasping breath. "Tanyana Vladha."
"And are you still housed at the second Keepersrill? Paleice, I believe it is."
Kichlan glanced up at this, surprised. I gathered this was not an ordinary question.