It was, Tadala thought, both the curse and the blessing of the desert city that she was alone all the time.
Not that she didn't spend a certain amount of time entertaining the twins—she did—and not that she wasn't extremely good at carefully rearranging her possessions into pleasing compositions and then brooding over them for hours at a time—she was. But the longer she stayed in the empty city, the stronger her memories of her mother's village became, and the more she felt a steady ache grow under her breastbone, a gnawing hunger for friends—or at the very least, adult company.
Her mother had been the oldest of eight siblings, four of whom had had daughters her own age. Two of her brothers had gone off to live in the villages of their wives, but her mother's sisters had stayed and raised their children alongside Tadala. Gani and Kondwani and Mutende. Mutende. Her heart sank when she could not remember the face of her mother's second sister's daughter. How was that even possible, to forget someone she'd spent ten years playing with, harvesting the garden with, learning to spin and weave and cook with? The face of her cousin wavered in her mind, like she was looking at the girl through smoke or mist.
She wouldn't be a girl anymore, Tadala realized with a pang. She'd probably be married. She might have her own house and a baby.
It was hard to imagine being easy friends with Elabel as she had been with her cousins. Elabel was—there were hardly words for Elabel. Aside from her reveries and confusion, her moods washed from one tide to the next. Some days she crept onto the patio with the tiny fruit trees, her head down and shoulders hunched, like a dog that had been kicked; some days she bounded into the house, shouting for the twins or reciting tonelessly from some book or other.
Nyoma and Ntembwa had started asking Elabel questions about what they would do when they were grown up in the city. Tadala felt an emotion that was something like relief and something like sorrow and somehow neither one at all. It wasn't exactly that she thought Elabel would lie to them or mislead them. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that the other woman was not capable of deliberate deception, but it was hard to miss how her face lit up when they emerged from their house; how pleased she was to be useful to them; how happy it made her when she could tell them something about this carving or that fountain. It would be easy for someone in her position, who had doubtless been alone for so very long, to resent having her only company taken away.
Tadala thought that it was more likely that she had simply accepted that they were never going to leave, and the knowledge came through as a kind of grief, a bone-deep exhaustion. It was so very strange here, even on the very normal days. She had let herself refuse to admit that the city was truly real, let herself refuse to admit that the strangeness was anything she needed to understand or become accustomed to. But she was never going to live a proper life among her own people. This was what there was for her and the twins.
It was in this frame of mind that Elabel found her during a winter afternoon, stewing, rubbing her arms, and staring out over the terraced houses.
Elabel had put a little ladder against the terrace of their house, so she could climb up and speak to Tadala without crossing through their house or her room. Tadala heard the rustling of the lavender bushes (which spilled partway down the wall, their roots finding purchase in pockets of soil that had infiltrated between the stones) before she saw the crown of red hair slowly rising between the leaves.
“Hullo, Elabel,” Tadala said.
Elabel stopped, her nose level with the top of the lavender bush. From her chair on the terrace Tadala could see only her golden eyes darting around the terrace. “Good afternoon.”
“Come the rest of the way up,” Tadala said, exasperated. “I can't stand not being able to see your mouth when you talk.”
“Sorry,” Elabel said meekly, and hoisted herself over the edge, her large feet thudding onto the planks of the roof.
Elabel usually looked shabby, and today more so than usual. Her tunic was coated in pale dust, and her leggings were more darning than fabric. She noticed the direction of Tadala's eyes and patted at herself, raising a stony-smelling cloud.
“Are you extremely busy?” Elabel asked, after bobbing her head for a moment.
“Not extremely,” Tadala said, now feeling equal parts exasperated and amused.
“Perhaps another time,” the other woman said anxiously, twisting her hands in her tunic and getting them covered in dust too.
“I'm not busy at all, which you could see if you looked at me,” Tadala said, tugging at her ear and fighting the urge to roll her eyes. She wondered suddenly if this was how Ababa had felt all the time.
“Oh. I—I was wondering if you might have—if you might have a minute to help me with something.”
“Is there something wrong in the garden?” she asked, standing up hastily. While the wall protected her plants from the worst of the desert wind, sometimes it still managed to pull up her stakes for peas or beans or, on one distressing occasion, smash an urn full of spreading peppermint into her yam bed.
“The garden is fine,” Elabel said. “I was hoping you could help me with something—indoors. Extremely indoors,” she said. “Sort of—in a cellar.”
Tadala stared. “Don't you want the twins?” Elabel took the twins on weekly expeditions into the depths of the city. Ntembwa and Nyoma came back with any number of wild stories of mysterious passages and carvings and their host doing uncanny things, but Tadala stayed resolutely on the terraces. Very occasionally Elabel had asked for her help with tasks that she suspected were some sort of magic, but these were always innocuous enough that she could pretend otherwise.
Some of these jobs were simple but strange. Elabel asked her to count olive and lemon trees and to mark down when they gave fruit. There were three hundred twenty-five and seventy-nine, respectively; half of them gave fruit continuously, while the other half all gave in different months. She was to look for a certain plant with yellow flowers and deep red stamens and, if she found it, to dig down and check how deep its roots went. There were three specimens on the whole roof, one growing from a crack in a staircase down into the city and two next to the outer wall. Tadala dug, and dug, and dug, excavating a waist-deep hole next to one tap root before she told Elabel that she didn't know how deep the plant grew but she was quite done digging, thank you.
Then Elabel had started on a project concerning the massive stone pillars at the four corners of the city, which up close had the grain and texture of wood. Tadala had helped Elabel map the irregularities each pillar, marking a diagram with symbols as Elabel crawled across the surface of each and called down marks and distances. She did not think that a perfectly unmagical person could climb quite that well.
Once Elabel had fallen. Instead of grabbing at the pillar, she had reached into the air and seized. Her hands closed on something that flashed gold in the air. Her descent slowed but did not stop. She had landed heavily on the stone steps circling the pillar. The thought of that sound, and the bruises purpling Elabel's pasty skin that she had dressed after helping the dazed woman back to her house, still made Tadala feel quite ill.
Initially she did the tasks because she was bored, then because she was humoring Elabel, and then because—why? Because, perhaps, she had an ever-growing sense of the city as something living, breathing, something that did not just have to be tended and kept up, but a—personality, of sorts, with huge, slow, stony thoughts of its own. It had made an alliance with Elabel, and now that bond extended to her and the twins, she thought. She was still not sure she wanted to know why, and she was certain she couldn't understand how, but if this was how the mistress of the city tended to the strangely benevolent creature in her care, then Tadala would do her best to help.
Now Elabel flapped her hands, overwhelmed, before catching herself and pressing her palms together very hard. “The twins are playing a game.”
Tadala put her hands on her hips and waited.
Elabel pinched her upper lip and pulled, a sure sign of worry. “I don't think they should be in the place that needs fixing today.”
“Why? Is it dangerous? Because I don't want to help either, if it's dangerous.”
“It's not dangerous—exactly,” Elabel said haltingly. “It's more—upsetting. Unsettling?”
“Upsetting how?”
“It's very deep down, several rooms underground—I know you don't care to be underground—”
“Being underground's all right,” Tadala said cautiously. “It's what things are underground with me that I want to know about.”
Elabel blew the hair off the tip of her nose. “It's not a thing, exactly. It's just—there's—there's bad history there. The stones—the threads—they have a sort of a way—a way of knowing—”
“I know about places that don't forget bad things that have happened there,” Tadala said shortly. Isn't that what a witch is—someone who makes the ground remember something terrible they have done? She started and shook her head—she had not thought of Elabel as a witch for months. “What are you going to do?” she asked, realizing as she said it that she had already resigned herself to help.
“There's a library—only I don't know if it's a library on this side—there are some very important carvings there, and—” Elabel broke off, her eyebrows low and her jaw working. She looked as angry as Tadala had ever seen her. “I need to see if they're still there on this side or if—” she stopped and shook her head.
Tadala followed Elabel to a stair that led down into the passages of the citadel. Uneasily, she watched for hallways and doors she recognized—were they going down to the front hall, where Elabel had buried the men from the caravan? But that, unpleasant and fearful as it had been, did not feel like a place that nursed a deep injury.
The headwoman of her mother's village had once ordered that a house be pulled down, the center pole burned, and rituals of purification be done over its foundations, and the owner rebuild five hundred steps to the east. In that house, the cows never gave good milk, babies were always sickly and often died, and the seedlings in the garden shriveled before they could flower. All of the elders had consulted, and it was found that someone—a child? A younger sister?—was known to have died unfairly there, either by malice or neglect. But there was something there—sadness, resentment, sickness, that emanated out from the walls—
“Be careful here.” Elabel's voice came unexpectedly. “The drop is very sharp.”
Tadala looked down and found that they were on a high, narrow ledge around a huge, circular room with sheer walls. A single light pipe of massive proportions spotlighted a place on the floor far below. “What is this? Where are we?”
“It was a well once—the first well of the city—but it's been dry for many years. Over here.”
Tadala pressed her back against the wall and inched forward. Ahead of her, Elabel was standing next to an entrance so low that she had to bend deeply at the waist to enter. It had no door, and was perfectly black within.
“Elabel!” Tadala said sharply, when the other woman plunged into the darkness. “I can't see anything!”
“Er—if you don't mind—”
“I don't,” Tadala said. “I just want to be able to see.”
A huge intake of breath echoed up the stairwell, followed by a soft golden light. Tadala eased down the first of the narrow steps thus illuminated—she almost swore as she had to twist her hips back and forth to push through the tight stone passage—and around a curve, to where Elabel stood above an even steeper flight of stairs. Every line of her face and her hair and her skin under her clothes gleamed with golden light. Even the irises of her eyes shone piercingly against the stone.
Tadala closed her eyes, steadied herself against the walls, and opened them again. Her mind flashed to Elabel dragging the body of the caravan man through the sand without touching it. Witch. But Elabel had had three years to do something wicked to them, if that had been her intention, and had so far foregone the opportunity.
Tadala inhaled. “Have you always been able to do that? You look like a lamp.” Her voice hardly shook, she thought. She ought to get some sort of prize.
“I don't know,” said the golden apparition in Elabel's meek tones. “I don't usually think of it because I—um—see in the dark.”
They continued downward. No matter how strange Elabel's abilities, Tadala thought, she would rather be with her than without. She felt almost safe in the brilliance of the tiny staircase.
The passage they went through together did not have the feeling of something that had been built but hacked from the depths of the rock. Though a smooth depression running down the center of the tunnel showed where hundreds or thousands of people had walked before them, wide, flat marks still scarred parts of the walls, as though its makers had just finished chiseling it out. Otherwise there were no cracks or seams in the walls, no sense that there was anything but stone on the far side. The stairs became a ramp, the floor slippery with pebbles and dust, which took several sharp switchbacks through more tiny doorways as it descended. Tadala felt ill with claustrophobia.
“We're almost there,” Elabel said. “The roof is about level with the floor of the well.”
How she knew where the bottom of the well was in relation to where they stood, Tadala did not ask, but the next switchback opened into a long, low room, the ceiling barely high enough for Elabel to stand straight. It was perfectly empty. Oddly, though her lamp-like presence ought to have thrown deep shadows at the far end of the room, instead the golden light seemed to call to a luminescence in the stone, filling the entire chamber with a diffuse gleam.
“I don't see any carvings,” Tadala said.
“I was hoping they might stay in the same place on this side,” Elabel said glumly. “But I suppose there was always a good chance we'd be searching for traces.” She turned to the side and started to inspect the wall intently with the very tips of her fingers.
“I won't even pretend to understand what you mean by that,” Tadala said. “What kind of traces? Scrapes in the stone?” She mimicked Elabel's actions on the other side of the door.
“I don't know about scrapes,” Elabel said. “I think you'll know them if you find them.”
But for the first two hours it seemed there was nothing at all left in the ancient room. Elabel proceeded incredibly slowly along the wall, brushing her hands first down, then up, then back and forth over the same spot, before moving them a hairs'-breadth further down the wall to repeat the task. The walls in here were smoother than those of the passage, and it was hard to keep track of what had already been examined.
“What were the carvings of?” Tadala asked. After a few minutes of standing on her tip-toes to reach the edge around the ceiling of the room, she decided that Elabel could deal with that, and sat down on the floor. She had felt her way across a section of wall as high as her waist and half a step long when the other woman answered.
“They show part of the history of the city,” she said, her words coming slowly and with great force, as though she had to shove each one through her throat to get it out. “A very important part, that we—that I—do not know enough about.”
Tadala waited, and found she could not leave it at that. Her fingertips were starting to feel raw from the grit of the stone, and the square of rock she had been staring at for the last five minutes looked no different than any other part of the wall. “What is the history?” She looked up at Elabel. Though she was still glowing, Tadala's eyes had adjusted, and she looked nearly the same as she ever did.
“Are you sure?” Elabel was so startled she let her hands fall to her sides.
“Maybe,” Tadala said. “If it's too—” filled with witches, she thought “—unnerving I may have to stop you.”
Elabel bobbed her head and rocked from foot to foot, touching and tapping the stones in front of her before opening her mouth again. “The city—the city was founded by the First Emperor, but we don't have any records of him. He must have picked the place, anyway, back when the land was—was—was far more unsteady, than it is now.”
“Unsteady,” repeated Tadala.
“The land was dangerous,” said Elabel fiercely.
“More than it is now?” Tadala asked. She realized she'd gone over the same bit of stone three times, sighed irritably, scooped up the fabric of her dress, and heaved herself to the right.
“Oh,” Elabel said. “Well, maybe not on this side. But on the other side—you couldn't trust the stones to stay stones, or the light and the water to run downward.” She said this with the air of an incantation, or a memorized poem.
It made Tadala's skin creep, but she nodded. “Go on.”
“The first and the second Emperors we know nothing of, but the third Emperor started to cut out the walls.”
“He built the walls?”
“No,” Elabel said hesitantly. “Not exactly. Here—where the city is now—here was a sort of … um … stable bit. A bit that didn't flow. Like a big rock. And he carved himself in, made bedrooms and kitchens and things like that. Though that's all gone now.”
“It fell in?”
“More like eroded off the top,” Elabel said. She crouched down to the feel the seam between the floor and the wall. “It was stable, but not that stable. The only piece that's left from his carvings is the room we're in now and the passage that leads down to it. He and his people lived in the city for forty seasons of darkness and forty seasons under the high current,” she said, again with the air of someone reciting something learned as a child, “never passing from inside of the stone.”
“What did they eat?” Tadala burst out. “Where could you grow food in an underground city?”
“The stories say he didn't eat,” Elabel said thoughtfully. “But I've never known what to make of that. I get lightheaded if I miss two meals in a row.”
Tadala laughed, and Elabel blinked at her. “Is that funny?”
“Maybe,” Tadala said, resting her forehead against the wall. “Who taught you the city's history?”
“My mother, mostly,” said Elabel, her fingers pausing over the wall. Tadala had a sudden, painful vision of a woman and a small child alone in the city in the desert, the woman spinning clouds with her voice to fill the emptiness all around them.
“How long has she been gone?” she asked.
Elabel stared very hard at her hands. “Five years. She died the year before you came.”
“I'm sorry.” There seemed to be no good way to ask what she wanted to ask, so she settled for: “What was she like?”
Elabel started to rock again, and Tadala worried for a minute that the question had upset her, before she burst out in a long flood of speech.
“She was very tall, and she knew everything about everything. She had hundreds of books and she had read them all and she knew exactly where to find something again if she needed it. If I asked her a question, she answered the question and then four more questions that I hadn't even thought of yet. And she cared about everything and everyone, even the very small things and the small ones. She—she took care of the whole city, all of its threads and everything.” She turned to Tadala, and though she didn't meet her eyes the light from her skin seemed to intensify in her general direction. “What about your mother? Do you remember her? I don't remember my father,” she said, the words tumbling out. “I wish I did but he's gone all muddled in my head.”
“I remember her,” Tadala said. “Her farm was the second-biggest in the village, after the headwoman's, and the vegetables from her garden tasted the best, and she wove the most beautiful fabric of any of the houses. The village down the river once traded us a cow, a whole cow, a good milker, for just one length of her weaving. And she laughed more and was a better dancer than anyone else's mother. Yeva said her mother was more graceful, but she didn't know how to use her feet at all.” To her surprise and horror, she found her eyes heavy and wet and her throat tight. “And my father—” She tried to laugh, but it came out more like a sob. “He was a good sailor,” she whispered.
They tried to look at each other, but neither could quite manage it.
“I wish I'd listened better,” Elabel said. “There was so much she was trying to teach me, and I couldn't keep up.”
Tadala cleared her throat, finding herself unable to speak. Finally she said, “Do you miss her?”
“Not every day,” Elabel said. “But most days.” She left her hands drop to her sides and looked at her toes. “Do you miss your mother?”
“No.” Tadala pushed the heels of her hands into her eyes and took a deep breath. “Yes. I miss what I left. But I don't know if my mother or the village or anyone is even there anymore, or if it's all gone now.”
“It isn't all gone,” Elabel said, her voice so quiet that Tadala could barely hear it. “You're still here.”
They rested in silence together for what seemed like a long time.
Her heart would probably burst now, Tadala thought. It was so full of different things that hurt in all directions. Maybe she didn't really want to have a friend. She turned to the wall and blindly ran her fingers down it.
And there, in a bizarre burst of color and sound, she found the trace. It was so sudden and peculiar that she immediately jerked away from the stone, only to lean forward and tap it again to see if she had imagined it.
A man and a woman are sitting together in a room. The man is shaped like a normal sort of human, but his face is strange: a mask, made of bronze plates. His black eyes glitter behind the round holes cut for them. He is very tall. The woman is very tall too, and has red hair like Elabel's. She is spinning on a strange horizontal wheel. The man is holding a distaff in bronze gauntlets, playing out fiber to her, watching her hands very closely. This fiber too is very strange: before it passes through his hands, it shivers formlessly, without discernible color or texture; as it leaves them, it glimmers with light. Finished skeins of threads hang in huge loops from hooks in the ceiling, so long that they brush the floor.
Tadala yanked away from the wall and gasped. “Elabel, it's here. I mean—one of them. There's something here.”
“Don't lose it,” Elabel said urgently, crossing the room in a few long strides. “Where?” She put her hands over Tadala's fingers and her face became distant for a minute. “Oh,” she said finally, both surprise and sadness in her voice. “That's—well, I'm glad you found that one first. It's not as—not as terrible as some of them.”
“What—what is that?” Tadala asked slowly. “Who are those people?”
Elabel didn't meet her eyes, but did her best, staring at Tadala's hairline. “The man with the mask on is the third Emperor. I don't know why he's wearing a mask, but he was in all the carvings, too. I think the woman is his City Commander, but it could be the first Swordkeeper. Or even the first Recorder, to be honest—the history isn't very clear.”
“Why are they spinning?” Men don't spin, Tadala thought. So why a spinning emperor?
“That's hard to explain,” Elabel said nervously. “It's very, very much city business.”
“Right.” Tadala looked down the length of the room, her heart sinking. It had seemed like a small chamber when they had spent nearly an hour descending from the brightness of the terraces above, but it looked enormous now that she knew how small a trace was. “How many of these are we looking for?”
“I'm not sure. There were at least a hundred carvings, but I didn't count them before my—before the—before they were moved. Some of them are bigger than others.”
“We're not doing all that today,” Tadala said flatly.
Elabel looked like she might cry. “It is a lot—I probably shouldn't have—it is a bit much—if you don't want to help—”
“I didn't say I don't want to help,” Tadala interrupted her.
“Oh,” said Elabel.
“Oh,” Tadala mimicked back at her. “You beanhead. I'm hungry. Let's go back up and have dinner.”
“And tomorrow we'll come back down?”
Tadala thought of the tight stairs, the steep ramps, and the low doorways, and her stomach churned. “Maybe the next day. There's time, isn't there?”
“I suppose there is.”
It took them six weeks of searching, descending every third day, for Elabel to map out what she believed were all the remaining traces. (The second time she tried to respect Tadala's sensibilities by bringing a candle down. After an hour of smoky, dim light, Tadala gritted her teeth and asked if she could blow it out and make herself glow again.) There were eighty-six fragments of memory clinging to the rock. Most of them featured the man with the bronze mask and a small cast of men and women, several with ghostly-white features, but a few, to Tadala's surprise, had dark skin and features like her own. In the more mundane of memories, they all wore similar clothes and intermixed freely with one another.
But most of the memories were not mundane, and Tadala soon understood why Elabel did not want the twins to help her with this project. She became a horrified witness to things both bizarre and sick-making: A creature that had far many too mouths and far too many teeth and no body holding everything together in between fell upon a woman and consumed her flesh, leaving jagged, unbleeding holes, while she screamed and screamed. More nightmarish creatures swarmed a store-room, destroying all of the foodstuffs inside and leaving giant gaps in the walls and doors that led into a swirling gray cloud. A wind made of eyes and tiny blades dissolved a tower with two men standing at its summit, whipping them away into the distance with a despairing howl.
“How long ago did the third Emperor live?” Tadala asked Elabel, who hummed uncertainly.
“There have been one hundred and two Imperial figures,” she said finally. “So I don't know how long that is.”
“So all of those—things, in these traces,” Tadala said carefully, “they are long gone. They have not been in the city for many years.” For the first time in a long time, she thought about how big a pack she would need to make it across the desert.
“You and I are probably the only people in the city who know they were ever here,” Elabel said, though this was probably less comforting than she intended it to be.
Later Tadala regretted all of the questions she didn't ask: if there had been one hundred and two Emperors in the city, where was the Emperor who ruled it now? Did he know Elabel was running around, poking around in all of the rooms, and giving food to strangers she had found in the desert? Did the Emperor know that Elabel and her mother were maintaining the threads? Why were they maintaining the threads? Had the Emperor asked them to do it?
In summer they celebrated the twins’ twelfth birthdays with more flavored ices. Elabel had brought something else: two gold chains of flat links. They buzzed slightly when Tadala brushed them with a finger. Ntembwa and Nyoma excitedly dropped them over their heads, seemingly unaware of their strangeness.
After they had eaten their ices and emptied out a bowl filled with the red fruit from the tree beside the door—still their favorite after all this time—Elabel cleared her throat.
“I have some news,” she said.
“More presents?” Ntembwa asked hopefully.
Elabel smiled weakly. “No. Not yet. There will be—there is soon to be a big change. I mean, I have a big change to tell you about—I told Tadala, that is, I told Tadala that this might—I told her a long time ago—”
Tadala dropped the pit she was holding and it clattered across the floor. “You told me about what?”
“I said—I told you—I told you about what my mother did for the city. And I—I am— I am taking on my mother’s role in the city.”
“Who was your mother?” Nyoma asked with bright eyes.
“What did she do?” Ntembwa wanted to know.
Elabel shifted uncomfortably. “She—maintained the walls, and the threads, and the ways into and out of the city,” she said carefully. This was clearly not the whole truth. “But this means I will have to return to the other side, and I will have less time. Almost—almost no time, in fact, to come to this side and bring you things.”
Tadala’s mind seized up, and she found herself swallowing again and again to get the lump to leave her throat. “So—you’re leaving us,” she said. “We have the garden. We have flour and salt and dried vegetables—probably enough for two weeks. We’ll make a plan—”
But Elabel was shaking her head. “No. You have to come with me to the other side of the city.”
“The other side?” Nyoma repeated.
“What other side?” Ntembwa asked.
“The other side,” whispered Tadala. She closed her eyes very tightly. A vision of the monsters of the traces came to her: They are still here, somewhere. They are hidden, but they are still here. She opened her eyes and looked at her friend. The rest of her is hidden somewhere, too. She was not sure how she knew this so certainly, but somehow it was comforting.
“The side where I was born,” Elabel said. “I promised you that I would take you home, and I will not break my promise. But I’ve done all can by myself, found all the books I can, brought through everything I could to show you. And now—now I couldn’t take the time even if I knew what needed to be done next. Now we need to ask for help from others, who know more than I know, who might know other ways through to your home.”