Pazel turned his face to the sky. “At least the sun is out,” he said.
He was seated on the steps near the glass wall, eyes closed, basking. Thasha was leaning against his shoulder. They had clung together quietly since his mind-fit, and her own brief spell of strangeness. It was Thasha who had held him through his last raving hour, Thasha who had washed his bloodstained face, cradled his shivering body while he slept. Thasha who had explained, when he woke in the dawn chill, that they were in a place called the Imperial Human Conservatory, and that the hoots and squeals and grunts that woke him were the tol-chenni, in some other part of the compound, screaming for their morning food.
Now she rose and looked at their prison again.
You could call it a garden, or the remains of one. It was about fifty feet long and half as wide. Ragged shrubs and flowers, un-pruned trees, a fountain that had not flowed in years. Benches and tables of stone, a little wood-burning grill and stocky chimney, a fenced-in patch that might once have been used for vegetables (this was where Uskins sat). Five tiny bedchambers, with no doors in the frames.
The main courtyard was roofless, but the walls were nearly forty feet high. Set into the wall across from the bedchambers was an immense pane of glass, thirty feet long, six inches thick, and without a scratch on its gigantic surface. Hercol thought it might be the same crystal used in the Chathrand’s own glass planks, a substance lost to the knowledge of the Northern world. There were small bore-holes in the glass, possibly for speaking through. To one side, tucked into the corner, was a solid steel door.
It was through this glass wall that the birdwatchers came to stare at them, to take notes and whisper together. From the corridor, the birdwatchers could see the whole space within, and even much of the bedchambers. You could sleep out of sight, but the moment you got to your feet you were on display. So of course were the birdwatchers themselves. Close up, they had revealed themselves as rather careworn, older dlomu, grubbing for handkerchiefs in the pockets of their gray uniforms, squinting at their notebooks. But they were earnest in their study of the prisoners. On the second day they had brought a painter, who set up his easel in the corridor and worked for many hours, filling a number of canvases.
The birdwatchers paid unusual attention to Marila and Neeps. Once, when Neeps stood close to the glass, a dlomic woman had lowered her nose to the bore-hole and sniffed. Then she had backed away, eyes widening, and fled the corridor, calling to her fellows.
The intense scrutiny had abated, however. On this third day their keepers had so far appeared only at mealtimes. But they had not abandoned the watch altogether: a dog had been left on duty. The musty brown creature sat upon a wooden crate carried in for the purpose, watching them through mournful eyes. Thasha had tried speaking to the dog, as she would to Jorl or Suzyt. The animal had turned its eyes her way, but it never made a sound.
The birdwatchers never spoke to them either, but they were as generous with food as everyone else in Masalym. Twice a day, under heavy guard, the steel door was unlocked and a cart rolled inside, heaped with fruit, vegetables cooked and raw, snake-beans, cheese and of course the small, chewy pyramids of mul. They never ran out of mul. Druffle was morbidly chewing one left over from breakfast.
“You know what we have to do, shipmates,” he said to no one in particular. “We have to show ’em we’re sane.”
“Ingenious,” said Chadfallow.
“You leave him alone,” said Neeps. “If the two of you start fighting they’ll throw away the key. Anyway, he could be right. It might be the only way out of here. We are sane, after all.”
“Did you hear that bird?” said Uskins, brightening. “It sounded like a falcon. Or a goose.”
The south wall was lined with cabinets and shelves. There were some books, mold-blackened, nibbled by mice, and cabinets with cups and plates and old bent spoons, a tin bread box. The north wall was a grille of iron bars, at the center of which hung a rusted sign: Treat Your Brothers with Compassion
Remember that They Bite
Beyond the iron bars stood further enclosures, which were larger and wilder, with ponds and sheds and stands of trees, all neglected, all walled off from the city. Now and then, between the trees and outbuildings, Thasha saw the tol-chenni, squatting naked, raking hay into piles and scattering it again, picking things from the dirt and eating them, or trying to. They seemed quite afraid of the newcomers. Neeps had tossed a hard dlomic roll over the gate: it had lain there in the sun all day, untouched. But by this morning it had disappeared.
This, surely, was the place Ibjen’s father had spoken of, where Bali Adro had tried and failed to cure the degenerating humans. But what was its purpose today? Were they locked in a prison, a hospital? A zoo?
“The dlomu are moving in the next wing,” said Hercol, from his listening post near the glass wall. “Be ready-our chance may come at any time.”
Thasha sighed. He had been talking that way since their imprisonment began. She drifted into the chamber she shared with Marila and looked down from the barred window at the world outside their prison. She had spent hours here, entranced.
The Conservatory was built on a bluff over the river, near the cliff that divided one part of Masalym from the next. They were in the Middle City, but a stone’s throw from the window the land fell away into Lower Masalym, vast and largely abandoned. Oh, there were people-two thousand, she guessed, or maybe three. But the homes! There must have been fifty thousand or more. The Lower City by itself was the size of Etherhorde, and yet it was very nearly a ghost-town. Countless streets lay empty. Yesterday smoke had risen in the distance: a blaze had consumed three houses, unmolested by any fire brigade. The ruins were smoldering yet.
And there were stranger things: hulking buildings of iron and glass, and monstrous stone temples that looked as old as the surrounding peaks. But like the tower of Narybir these giant structures lay closed and dark.
By daylight she saw the dlomu scurrying about their lives, carting vegetables, mending windows and fences, gathering scrap wood into bundles. They met at street corners, talked briefly, anxiously, scanning the empty streets. A mother marched her child down a sunlit avenue, clearly afraid. A face appeared at an upper window, through moldering curtains, vanished again. Four times a day, a dlomu in a white robe climbed the steps of a half-ruined tower to strike a brass gong, and the lonely noise lingered in the air. His coal-black face, framed by the white hood, turned sometimes in her direction, thoughtfully. At dusk, animals crept from the abandoned homes: foxes, feral dogs, a shambling creature the size of a small bear but quilled like a porcupine.
There were also soldiers, of course, servants of the Issar. She could pick them out here and there. At the port, they surrounded the Chathrand: the Great Ship was plainly visible from her window. Along the road they had followed two nights before, a few troops came and went. And on the outer wall there were soldiers, milling, marching, tending the great cannon that pointed down into the Jaws of Masalym.
But for all the busy movement along the wall, the number of men there was not very large. There were far more guns than men to use them. By night, they lit lamps at sentry posts where no actual sentries stood guard. By day they appeared at pains to keep every man on duty out of the turrets and walking the battlements in plain sight. It’s a facade, she thought. They’re hiding behind those cannon, these cliffs. They’re mounting a guard around an empty shell.
All this was strange enough. But even stranger, beside the windswept emptiness below was the bustle and noise of this higher part of Masalym, this Middle City. Thasha could see only a few blocks of it, but the curve of the cliff told her that the Middle City was a fraction of the size of the Lower. And yet the Middle City was alive. Its streets were crowded, its shops abuzz by early morning and aglow half the night. There were musicians playing somewhere; there were dlomic men with water pipes seated on rugs outside doorways; there was a fruit market that appeared as if by magic at dawn and disappeared by noon; there were dlomic children walking to school in daisy chains.