Kajja was quiet for just a moment, smiling at him. Then she said, “I know that, too.”
“What about you? Are you okay?” Dagan had to wonder.
She nodded. “I think so. It still feels like home. I still want everything good for this place. For these people. I’d give anything to make it happen. But I know Hendrik is done, and I don’t blame him.”
“You’re a very good sibling,” Dagan told her.
“You’d know, I guess, so thank you.” Her smile went lopsided. “We hardly saw each other growing up. I guess it’s just lucky that I love him anyway.”
“He’d choose you for his family if you hadn’t been born into it,” Dagan said. “There’s no truer bond between siblings than that.”
“I mean, he’d never tell me that…” She snorted.
“Maybe,” Dagan allowed. “But don’t count it out, yet. Unexpected eloquence is his specialty.”
*
After supper that night, all three scouts sat lotus-style on the stone floor of the common room. It would’ve been better if they could see the sky and feel the earth, but no point drawing attention to their existence within City walls so soon. Dagan took his breathing exercises slowly, envisioning his own energy, his breath as it rose and fell through him, then into the cut granite of the building, then into the mountain below.
A stark echo met him, like throwing a pebble into a deep chasm and hearing nothing for a long, long time. Then a little bounce, a sign of life, far off, toward the walls. A neat patch of land where sweet grain ripened, a terraced mountain orchard teeming with life, a paddock full of sheep or donkeys. It felt regimented in a way the Heart Wood’s productive groves could never be, and inefficient because of that strictness. It was also isolated in the most unnatural of ways: a pocket of life, green and breathing, in the middle of an absolute warren of drained darkness.
“How in all the hells…?” Dagan wondered aloud once he opened his eyes. Alonza had basically warned him about this, but it felt so strange. “There’s no life, except the people rattling around on the cobblestones. None at all, except in this one little district. The whole fucking mountain has been drained, hasn’t it?”
Bartolo’s eyes fluttered open, still creased deeply at the corners. He just nodded. “I suspected as much, from outside. But it’s…”
“Lonely,” Gareth supplied, shuddering. “By all the forest gods, how could anything do this?”
They were all thinking that very thing, of course. Alonza’s confession about the effects of perverted lifecasting had carved channels in their minds, and now all thoughts flowed through them. Dagan shook his head, at a loss. “It’s so meticulous. It’s carved up the mountain, and the little chunk of the Ag District, and the walls… but now it’s going over the walls. It ran out of life.”
The lingering sensation on his mind and even his body reminded him forcibly of the slimy feeling he’d had after the Blue Bird estuary. But it was even darker, here in the City. Overwhelmingly empty.
“What happens if it can’t be stopped?” Gareth wondered.
“That’s crossed my mind, too,” Bartolo admitted with a long sigh. He took another deep breath, betraying just how shaken he was, too. “It’s already been slowed, though. It’s been looking for ways to avoid creating more of the wastes, if you ask me.”
“Like in the books?” Dagan wondered.
Bartolo nodded. “If the Masters, whatever they are, really did create the wastes with their sick, twisted version of lifecasting—which, I believe, is our working theory now?”
Dagan and Gareth exchanged a wary look before nodding.
Bartolo went on, “Then it stands to reason that this thing, whatever it is, is trying to avoid the same fate, at least a little. It’s been here almost a thousand years, after all, and its devastation is only beginning to slip past the City walls.”
Dagan mumbled, “The land is too fucked up. Lifecasting can’t help us, here. We need to know what the stone has to say.”
“Innan has to be protected,” Bartolo replied under his breath. “At all costs.”
“Yes,” Gareth agreed.
Dagan nodded. And hoped the cost wouldn’t be too high.
*
Dagan slept in fits and starts, tortured by the certain knowledge that he was in a dead zone, as far as lifecasting was concerned. He woke in the pitch dark with his head on Hen’s burn-scarred left arm and his leg thrown over Hen’s thighs. It took him a few seconds only to realize that the lock on the front door was rattling.
Everyone but Kajja was on their feet, long knives in hand, before the door even swung open. A cloaked figure entered, carrying a candle that lit up a pale face. When they threw back their hood, bright, fire-colored hair danced in the flame.
“Innan,” Dagan sighed. He started toward them but paused when Kajja took off running from her bedroll. Innan threw their free arm around her neck and kissed her cheek, and they whispered something between them, low and sweet.
Jak appeared in the doorframe then. “We’re heading to the See in groups,” he said without preamble. “We need to get Innan into the catacombs, and there’s no time like the present. The High City is asleep, for the most part.”
“Right now?” Hen asked.
“Pretty please,” Jak replied with a cheeky little smile, though there was a dark undercurrent to his voice. He locked the door behind him.
Hen grunted in reply, already pulling on his shirt. Dagan shifted his on quickly and moved to greet Innan, now they’d let go of Kajja. He asked, “How were the tunnels?”
“They’d be beautiful, if not for the people suffering in them,” Innan said, reaching out for his hand and pulling him into a hug at the same time.
“I wondered if you’d like them,” he said, inhaling the scent of the woods from Innan’s hair. It gave rise to a violent sense-memory, transported him almost. “You smell good.”
“You smell like ash and rock-dust.” Innan pulled back and examined him. “Remember the forest gods.” Which, in the Heart Wood, meant be ready.
He nodded. “Always.”
“I brought paper and charcoal,” Jak piped up from behind Innan. “And copies of the maps Sister Eva already made. Half of you, come with me and Innan. The other half, follow with Piret in the lead; she knows how to get into the See and find Eva.”
“The usual?” Piret asked, tucking in her shirt.
