The girl decides she has said enough. But before she can make a point of silence, there is another ripple across her perception, followed by something that is unmistakably a jolt within the earth. Specks of mortar trickle from beneath a loose panel on the cell wall. Another shake? No, the deep earth is still cold. That jolt was more shallow, delicate, just a goosebump on the world’s skin.
“You can ask what that was,” Ykka says, noticing her confusion. “I might even answer.”
The girl sets her jaw and Ykka laughs, getting to her feet. She is even bigger than she seemed while sitting, a solid six feet or more. Pureblooded Sanzed; half the races of the world have that bottlebrush hair, but the size is the giveaway. Sanzed breed for strength, so they can protect themselves when the world turns hard.
“You left the southern ridge unstable,” Ykka says. “We needed to make repairs.” Then she waits, one hand on her hip, while the girl makes the necessary connections. It doesn’t take long. The woman is like her. (Taste of savory pepper stinging her mouth still. Disgusting.) But someone entirely different caused that shift a moment ago, and although their presence is like melon—pale, delicate, flavorlessly cloying—it holds a faint aftertaste of blood.
Two in one city? Their kind know better. Hard enough for one wolf to hide among the sheep. But wait—there were two more, right when she split the southern ridge. One of them was a different taste altogether, bitter, something she has never eaten so she cannot name it. The other was the vinegar man.
Four in one city. And this woman is so very interested in her usefulness. She stares at Ykka. No one would do that.
Ykka shakes her head, amusement fading. “I think you’re a waste of time and food,” she says, “but it’s not my decision alone. If you try to harm the city again we’ll feel it, and we’ll stop you, and then we’ll kill you. But if you don’t cause trouble, we’ll know you’re at least trainable. Oh—and stay off the leg if you ever want to walk again.”
Then Ykka goes to the grate-door and barks something in another language. A man comes down the hall and lets her out. The two of them look in at the girl for a long moment before heading down the hall and through another door.
In the new silence, the girl sits up. This must be done slowly; she is very weak. Her bedding reeks of fever sweat, though it is dry now. When she throws off the patch-blanket, she sees that she has no pants on. There is a bandage around her right thigh at the midpoint: the wound underneath radiates infection-lines, though they seem to be fading. Her knee has also been wrapped tightly with wide leather bandages. She tries to flex it and a sickening ripple of pain radiates up and down the leg, like aftershocks from her own personal rivening. What did she do to it? She remembers running from people on horseback. Falling, amid rocks as jagged as knives.
The vinegar man will not linger long in this city. She knows this from having tracked his spoor for years. Sometimes there are survivors in the towns he’s murdered, who—if they can be persuaded to speak—tell of the wanderer who camped outside the gates, asking to be let in but not moving on when refused. Waiting, perhaps for a few days; hiding if the townsfolk drove him away. Then strolling in, smug and unmolested, when the walls fell. She has to find him quickly because if he’s here, this city is doomed, and she doesn’t want to be anywhere near its death throes.
Continuing to push against the bandages’ tension, the girl manages to bend the knee perhaps twenty degrees before something that should not move that way slides to one side. There is a wet click from somewhere within the joint. Her stomach is empty. She is glad for this as she almost retches from the pain. The heaves pass. She will not be escaping the room, or hunting down the vinegar man, anytime soon.
But when she looks up, someone is in the room with her again. The statue she hallucinated.
It is a statue, her mind insists—though, plainly, it is not a hallucination. Study of a man in contemplation: tall, gracefully poised, the head tilted to one side with a frank and thoughtful expression moulded into its face. That face is marbled gray and white, though inset with eyes of—she guesses—alabaster and onyx. The artist who sculpted this creation has applied incredible detail, even carving lashes and little lines in the lips. Once, the girl knew beauty when she saw it.
She also thinks that the statue was not present a moment ago. In fact, she’s certain of this.
“Would you like to leave?” the statue asks, and the girl scrambles back as much as her damaged leg—and the wall—allows.
There is a pause.
“S-stone-eater,” she whispers.
“Girl.” Its lips do not move when it speaks. The voice comes from somewhere within its torso. The stories say that the stuff of a stone-eater’s body is not quite rock, but still far different from—and less flexible than—flesh.
The stories also say that stone-eaters do not exist, except in stories about stone-eaters. The girl licks her lips.
“What . . . ” Her voice breaks. She pulls herself up straighter and flinches when she forgets her knee. It very much does not want to be forgotten. She focuses on other things. “Leave?”
The stone-eater’s head does not move, but its eyes shift ever-so-slightly. Tracking her. She has the sudden urge to hide under the blanket to escape its gaze, but then what if she peeks out and finds the creature right in front of her, peering back in?
“They’ll move you to a more secure cell, soon.” It is shaped like a man, but her mind refuses to apply the pronoun to something so obviously not human. “You’ll have a harder time reaching stone there. I can take you to bare ground.”
“Why?”
“So that you can destroy the city, if you still want to.” Casual, calm, its voice. It is indestructible, the stories say. One cannot stop a stone-eater, only get out of its way.
“You’ll have to fight Ykka and the others, however,” it continues. “This is their city, after all.”
This is almost enough to distract the girl from the stone-eater’s looming strangeness. “No one would do that,” she says, stubborn. The world hates what she is; she learned that early on. Those of her kind eat the power of the earth and spit it back as force and destruction. When the earth is quiet they eat anything else they can find—the warmth of the air, the movement of living things—to achieve the same effect. They cannot live among ordinary people. They would be discovered with the first shake, or the first murder.
The stone-eater moves, and seeing this causes chilly sweat to rise on the girl’s skin. It is slow, stiff. She hears a faint sound like the grind of a tomb’s cover-stone. Now the creature faces her, and its thoughtful expression has become wry.
“There are twenty-three of you in this city,” it says. “And many more of the other kind, of course.” Ordinary people, she guesses by its dismissive tone. Hard to tell, because her mind has set its teeth in that first sentence. Twenty-three. Twenty-three.
Belatedly, she realizes the stone-eater is still waiting for an answer to its question. “H-how would you take me out of the cell?” she asks.
“I’d carry you.”
Let the stone-eater touch her. She tries not to let it see her shudder, but its lips adjust in a subtle way. Now the statue has a carved, slight smile. The monster is amused to be found monstrous.
“I’ll return later,” it says. “When you’re stronger.”
Then its form, which does not vibrate on her awareness the way people do but is instead as still and solid as a mountain—shimmers. She can see through it. It drops into the floor as though a hole has opened under its feet, although the grimy wooden slats are perfectly solid.
The girl takes several deep breaths and sits back against the wall. The metal is cold through her clothing.