"You should send the moths first. I'll tell you how they all work."
"And what will you be doing?"
"I have a vat to prepare," Rose said. "It's all up to time."
"Time and assumptions."
"Those too." Rose stared into the room for a while, lost and daydreamy again.
She's not even a day old and she's trying to save a world, Gorham thought. He reached out and took her hand, and she gave him a brief squeeze before heading back to her rooms. Her rooms. She's the Baker now. He followed, shivering when he thought of Nadielle, where she was at that moment, and what she might be facing.
Rose went to one of the many cabinets, opening and closing several doors, frowning as she looked for something. She paused, concentrating, then spun around and crossed to another cabinet. Behind the first door she opened was the bottle she sought. She brought it across to Gorham and unscrewed its lid. There was a new sense of urgency about her now. Even the act of sitting and eating together, so recently completed, seemed a world away.
"I'm going to give you-"
"You're chopping me?" he asked, stepping back. The bottle looked ancient in her young girl's hands, the glass uneven and distorted, coated in the dust of ages.
"No," she said sharply. "Aiding. Gorham, this won't hurt, it won't damage, and… even if it did, you can't think of yourself now. If I could chop you quickly enough, send you up with the message to spread yourself, I would. There are ways and means. But it would take far too long."
"But this?" he asked, nodding at the bottle.
"A gentle nudge in the right direction. Take this, sit in the moth room, repeat a short message again and again, and your voice will implant that message in the moths. They'll leave and spread it through the city. Same again for the other creatures. It'll be a dream in the ears of sleepers or an epiphany in those awake."
Gorham blinked, taking in what she had said. "Those rooms, they're always ready?"
"And they've been used in the past. That's how I know they work."
"But with methods like that, you could change the city. Steer events, influence…"
Rose stared at him, her silence speaking volumes. Then she tipped the bottle, spilling a splash of its contents into its upturned lid.
"The moths first," she said, "because they'll be most effective. Every message sent is one life saved, or a hundred if the listener spreads the word, or a thousand. And the only people who'll live past what's happening here will be those who take heed."
Gorham tried to comprehend what she was telling him. I can't carry that responsibility. But he realized instantly how self-absorbed that was. Rose was right-this was so much more than him. It was so much more than all of them. That was why Nadielle had left him.
Rose swayed a little, and he saw the weakness in her. She isn't going to last, he thought, and a momentary panic was subsumed beneath a determination to do whatever needed doing. They might not have very long.
"Will you know when…?" he asked, thinking of Nadielle.
"Perhaps. I'm not sure." She held the lid out to him and he took it from her, swallowing the potion and tasting mepple petals, stale cheese, and vinegar. It was not altogether unpleasant.
"The moths," he said.
"Yes."
"I've always hated moths."
"That's because they want it that way." She smiled softly, then turned to leave. "I'll be working on the vat if you need me."
"Thank you," he said, unsure of what for. He watched her exit the room, then followed without pause. He suddenly felt part of-instead of apart from-this incredible place for the first time. And as he approached the moth room he felt a burgeoning sense of hope that had been absent for so long. The terror is rising, go south to Skulk… the terror is rising, go south to Skulk…
He kept his eyes closed because his own fear was still there. He could sense them moving around him, approaching but not quite touching. He felt the soft draft from their wings and the soundless yet loaded movement of their bodies through the air around his head and face. Perhaps they were dusting him, but he could not quite feel that. What he did sense was that they were listening.
He spoke the same line again and again, and the potion Rose had given him did something to his words. They became abstract and meaningless, as though he were hearing them in an unknown language, yet the feeling as they were formed in his throat and left his mouth transmitted complete understanding. He saw the words in pictures that placed him anywhere in the city, yet always with the knowledge of where Skulk lay in relation to where he was. It was a mental map, and his words provided the route.
When he realized how thirsty he was and opened his eyes, the moths had gone. He looked up into the endless space above him, and he knew that somewhere up there they flew. They carried his words with them. He hoped people would listen.
When he left the moth room, he could see Rose's feet where she stood beyond the nearest vat. She was motionless, silent, and he watched for a while, waiting to see if she moved. She did not. He thought of walking around the vat to see if she was well but decided against it. What can she be making? he wondered. What can save all those people? Nadielle had mentioned rackflies, their spreading of germs, but she had kept her ideas close to her chest.
Rose had set him on his task, and her own was something he could have no part of. He'd watched enough monstrous things birthed from these vats, and he had no real wish to see what she was making next.
So he went to the next room, the one with deep holes in the walls where the sleekrats lived, and started whispering his message again.
After the sleekrats, the bats; and after the bats, the red-eared lizards. These creatures he had never used before, and he approached them with caution. They had a reputation for being vicious and cruel, their surprising intelligence balanced with a hatred and fear of humanity that kept them deep, or in places where few people lived. But he trusted Rose and trusted what Nadielle had initiated here. The lizards watched him with their stark yellow eyes as he whispered. Then they left, flitting through cracks in the walls to the Echoes outside and from there up into the world.
He worked until there were no more creatures left. His throat was sore and dry, and the message repeated itself in his head: an endless, doom-laden echo.
Just before the last of the lizards had left, a distant impact shook the small room, dust drifting from the ceiling and stone shards pattering down in one corner. He'd paused and held his breath, but no more noises came. Rose, he'd thought, because she was working outside on her vat.
Leaving the room, stretching and craving a drink, he saw her sitting on the vat's top lip.
"Did you hear it?" she asked. "Feel it?"
"Was that you?"
She shook her head, then looked down into the vat. An array of bottles and pouches sat on a board beside her, and she picked up one bottle and dripped several splashes of its contents inside. Gorham went to ask her more, but it already felt as if she'd never spoken to him. The Baker has a talent for being dismissive, he thought.
As he stood at the toilet at the back of her rooms, rebuttoning his fly, another thud transmitted up through his feet. In the pale-yellow water below him, ripples.
He went back out to see how else he could help.
It had been a long time since Dane Marcellan had fought. As a young man he'd spent some time as an anonymous soldier in the Scarlet Blades-a rite of passage required of every Marcellan who did not make the shift into the Hanharan priesthood-and he'd been involved in the short but brutal Seethe War in the south of Marcellan Canton. Drug dealers and pimps had come in from Mino Mont, united to try to assert their authority over a small neighborhood. It had taken seven days of house-to-house combat before the last of them was captured or killed, and Dane had been at the forefront of the fighting, killing two men and a woman and being present at the impromptu execution of nine more. He had not enjoyed it, but it had been necessary. It had been required.