A FEW WEEKS AGO we had been high with excitement over Beklemek and Winter Ship. Now our bellies were concave. Breathing was our one chore. I woke in the night, licking the iron roof under my pillow.
Grid came around each morning. “Are you making water?” In faith, I had no spit, no tears, no piss. What could she do, but give me a larger ration of water from ice she had melted under her body in her bedroll in the night?
Marek put Dragomir in my charge, and Faisal, too. He was too busy to notice if they fainted or lost faith. What could I say to them? The three of us were barely alive, lying side by side each night in my tent, exhaling foul stenches from empty innards.
On every roof and in every guild the scene was the same. The city was being driven to its knees.
On the fifth morning of the month of Rhagfyr, I rolled out of my sack, thick with coats and hides and joined a line of Thebes’s runners at the west edge. Marek was not there.
Grid carried Emem to the edge because he was too weak to walk. Emem had a lens and was watching something on the earth. A black form, some shadow fathoms and fathoms below us, chased a smaller form through the streets and to the river, a narrow ribbon of silver we could see between the towers. We had never seen a beast before, save once, in a far-gone time. The smaller one was panicked, angling back and forth.
“Isan. Nnwoon,” said Emem, unaware he had reverted to his mother’s tongue.
Everyone looked at me. “He says they can walk on the water.”
“Emem, no,” Grid said quietly. “They are running on ice. We are iced in.”
The first shadow was faster and it overcame the small one.
Emem said, “Wait, where did it go?” But no one answered.
I lay in my bedroll late into that night, running my fingers between the ribs under my shirt, wondering where Marek was and where Errol was. Wondering where I would be when I took my final breath and who would be left to tell my going-stories. I had thought it would be Errol Thebes and he would rest me in my mother’s bed. The thought of this undid me, and I laid my elbow over my face and ached with homesickness for my own self.
I lay half sleeping, restless, in my tent like that.
“Odd Thebes,” said a voice at the flap. “Are you awake?”
“I’m up. Yes. Just finishing some astronomy calculations. What is it?”
“Are the kelps still with us?”
“What kelps?”
“Dragomir and Faisal.”
“Marek—is that you? There’s ice on the river. Where were you this morning?”
He did not answer but rather whispered, “Emem has—” He could not say it. “Emem is gone.”
“Gone gone?” I said.
“Aye. We’ve lost him.”
Emem was gone? Nobody was gone! Nobody died at eighteen! Emem knocked the crow every morning! How could he be gone?
I pressed on Faisal’s shoulder. He yawned and asked if it was time for breakfast. Aye, I said. Let him dream. But Dragomir would not wake. I shook him. I pinched his cheek hard enough to bruise it. I leapt out of my sack and jumped on his chest. Nothing. I put my face next to his and blew a great hot gush of foul breath up his nose. His eyes opened, the stone-cold look of a corpse.
“Odd Thebes, you are beyond all help,” he said.
I fell back into my sack with my heart beating wildly. I cried out, “Both pelts are with us still.”
“Would you come out?” Marek’s voice cracked. “I have Emem’s tellensac.”
“Of course. Yes.” I laid my head back on my pillow. “What time is it?”
“Crust,” he said. “By the stars.” Three in the morning. Festivum, somnium, crustum.
“So early?” I said. I thought of the baker’s bell for a long while—of bakers, and bread, and how when we were kelps we used to steal precious white flour from the kitchen and spew it at each other and pretend to be fire-breathing wyrms. I thought about all this until I could not remember what I was thinking about and I forgot Marek outside my tent and sank into sleep.