I turn in the other direction and step outside.
I like the air gondola port because you cannot see the Tower from there: its tall, dark figure is concealed behind the wall and the buildings of the House of Webs. Here I can imagine for a moment that I am beyond the reach of the Council’s gaze. I like the port best at this hour, when the cables have not yet started creaking. The vessels are still, their weight hanging mid-air, or resting at the dock, or floating in the water of the canals. The gate cracks open without a sound. The wrought iron is cold against my skin, and the humidity gathered on its surface clings to my palms. The cable of the air route dives into the precipice, which begins at the rock landing of the port, and the city opens below. I walk along the landing close to the brink. It is steep as a broken bridge. Far below, the sharp edges of Halfway Canal cut through the guts of the island, outlining waters that always run dark, even in brightest summer light.
The sky has begun to fade into the colours of smoke and roses. The first light already clings to the rooftops and windows, to the glint of the Glass Grove a distance away. The flood has finally ceased to rise, and down in the city the water rests on streets and squares. Its surface is smooth and unbroken in the calm closeness of dawn: a strange mirror, like a dark sheet of glass enclosing a shadow double of the city.
My eyes are heavy and stung. I could catch an hour of sleep before the morning gong if I returned to my cell now. It is a short enough time. It would be safe enough.
I stay where I am.
The gate creaks behind me. I turn to look.
‘The gate should be locked,’ Weaver says.
‘It was open when I came.’
‘I was not reprimanding you,’ she says. ‘What happened there?’
She points towards the strip of sea on the horizon, north of the Glass Grove. I had not realized, because it is something you do not notice.
‘The air highway,’ I say.
The north side of the island is dominated by air gondola routes: light vessels travelling an intricate network in all directions and on many levels, cables crisscrossing between the trading harbours in the west and the inkmasters’ workshops in the northwest. But the skyline of the city above the rooftops has changed.
‘The largest cables are down,’ Weaver says. ‘There must have been an accident.’
‘The flood?’
‘Maybe.’
The floods do not usually damage the air routes. But if one of the supporting poles has fallen, it could affect the whole network.
‘I expect we will get word when the watergraph starts working again,’ Weaver says. She turns her face towards me. It is the colour of dark wood. ‘But that is not why I was looking for you.’ She pauses. ‘Alva would like to see us both.’
‘Alva?’ The request surprises me. ‘Did she say why?’
‘She believes we should go and meet the patient together. She has something to show us.’
The thought of seeing the girl again is a cold stone within me.
‘I had hoped to get some sleep before breakfast,’ I say.
Weaver’s gaze is deep in the growing daylight, full of thoughts.
‘Come,’ she says.
When the house-elder says so in the House of Webs, you obey.
The first thing I sense is the surge of heat through the door. Then, a cluster of scents. In the House of Webs, the sick bay is the only place apart from the kitchen where live fire is allowed. Even laundry is washed in cold water most of the time. Alva stands by the stove, feeding wood into the spark-spitting metal maw. A steaming pot of water sits on the stove, and next to it another one with an inch of dark-brown liquid in it. I inhale, recognize liquorice and lavender, hops and passionflower. The rest blurs into a blend of unfamiliar scents. On the table, next to scales, mortars and bags of herbs, I notice a neatly laid-out row of needles cooling down on a polished metal tray.
Alva closes the hatch of the stove and wipes her hands carefully with a steaming towel.
‘We’ll need a gondola,’ she says. ‘We cannot keep her here.’
‘I will send for a gondola to take her to the Hospital Quarters as soon as I can,’ Weaver says. ‘The watergraph pipes are too badly flooded.’
‘Again?’ Alva picks up a glass jar from the tall shelf that fills the space behind the table. I see dozens of teardrop-shaped wings stirring, hair-thin legs moving, and something round and black and bright. Eyes stare directly at me.
‘There is nothing we can do but wait,’ Weaver responds.
Alva turns towards us with the jar in her hand.
‘She’s awake,’ she says. ‘But she can’t talk.’
‘Why not?’ I ask.
‘It’s best if you see her now,’ Alva says. ‘She’ll need a new singing medusa in any case.’
Alva walks across the room to the medusa tank. It sits on robust legs of stone, as wide as the walclass="underline" a smooth, oblong pool of glass rounded on the edges, covered by a lid with a slim opening at one end. The singing medusas float through the water without hurry, their translucent swimming bells pale green and blue, weightless in their water-space. Alva unscrews the lid of the jar and holds the jar upside down over the opening. Wings and limbs and eyes move, first behind the glass and then briefly in the air, as she shakes the jar.
The medusas reach their thin tentacles towards the insects raining into the water, close their round, murky bells around the black-green gleam of the beetles and flies. Alva lets the last sticky-limbed insect fall into the tank. Then she dips the glass jar in, collecting some water into it. She picks up a small hoop net from a hook on the wall and pushes it into the tank. The bloom of medusas opens and pulls away, their tentacles wavering like broken threads in a breeze, but Alva has already caught one. It is small and slippery and blue-green, and it seems to shrivel, to lose its colour and grace as soon as it is out of water.
Alva slips the medusa into the glass jar, where it opens again like a flower, but now constrained, without joy. As we watch, it begins to open and close, open and close, and in an echo of its movements, the bloom in the tank begins to do the same. A low, faint humming vibrates in the water, refracts from the glass walls, grows towards the ceiling until it seems to ring through our bones.
Alva hangs the hoop net back on the wall hook. The water dripping from it draws a dark trail on the wall towards the floor. She parts the curtains covering a wide doorway into the back room and steps through. Weaver and I follow. Slowly the singing recedes behind us and fades into a silence as dense as mourning, or farewells left unspoken.
There are only six beds in the room, and despite the faint lighting I can see that five of them are empty. In the furthermost bed by the back wall lays a narrow, motionless figure. She is covered by a rough blanket, but I can discern her form under it: long limbs, softness sheltering angular bones. The warmth from the iron stove spreads across the skin of my neck.
Our shadows fall deep and shapeless, interlacing where the fragile halos of the glow-glasses overlap, hemming in the bed we are approaching. There is no light on the back wall. Thick curtains cover the window.
Dimmed glow-glass globes hang on the walls. Weaver picks one, shakes it and places it on the girl’s bedside table. A blue-tinted light wakes up within the sphere. Slowly it expands and falls on the girl’s face. I notice there is also an empty cup on the table.
The girl is approximately my age, between twenty and twenty-five. There are still dry, rust-brown tangles in her red hair, but the garment she is wearing is clean. Or so I think at first, until I notice the burst of tiny speckles on the front. As if someone had tried to paint an impression of faraway stars on it, the sparkling Web of Worlds that holds the skies together.