I follow her up the steps, my coils taking the stone behind her, and I do not think about her weight in my arms at the river.
BRYN
Isleep badly and wake early.
The chamber he gave me is small. Stone walls hold a window slit on the east side and a flat ledge wide enough for the bedroll he pulled from a storage room last night. The bedroll smells like old cloth and dust. Nobody has used it in a while.
The air is musty and smells like a place nobody has mapped. Jungle sounds come through the slit, birds I cannot identify, water moving somewhere below the floor. There is warmth in the stone under my bare feet, rising from a level I have not seen yet. I let myself feel it for exactly one second. Thirteen years of carrying a drawing toward a place I was not sure was real, and here I am, lying on a ledge inside it. Every part of me that has ever needed to know what is around the next bend is already awake and pulling toward that warm lower level.
I lie on the bedroll for a few minutes and listen to the building. A pressure through the floor, low and constant. The building is sitting on something.
I get up and get dressed. At the bottom of my pack, wrapped in cloth, the piece of paper I brought with me. I leave it where it is and go looking for water and food.
It is the one thing I packed that has nothing to do with staying alive, and I am not ready to look at it. I have carried it a long way to a place I was not sure existed. It can stay wrapped one more night.
I follow the moving air through the corridors until I find the main hall.
The corridor is wide. Three times the width of any passage I have moved through in human-built stone. The ceiling is arched and high, the blocks fitted without visible mortar, each join close and deliberate. Through a gap in the upper wall I can see the canopy, close and green and pressing against the building like it is trying to climb inside. The air smells like wet stone and growing things and something older underneath. Something mineral.
The hall is large and long, with pillars running down both sides and a row down the center, the ceiling high above, the floor flagstone cracked in places and patched in others. Morning light comes through gaps in the upper walls and lands in long bars across the stone. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever broken into, and I have broken into a few.
Vadh is in the hall.
The gold armor is on. The same chest plate and shoulder guards from the auction hall, buckled tight. He wears it inside his own home.
He is coiled at the far end, near what looks like a supply room. He has food out on two separate stones spaced several feet apart: dried fruit, a hard flatbread, water in a clay jug.
He looks up when I come in.
“There is food,” he says.
“Thank you.”
I sit on the stone he has set my portion on. The bread is a little stale, the fruit dry but sweet, the water from the jug is coldwith a mineral taste. I eat everything. I have not eaten since yesterday’s dried meat on the trail before the auction.
He eats his own portion across the hall from me, giving me space. A large animal with a smaller one sharing its territory.
When I finish, I set the empty bowl on the stone.
“What do you need me to do today?”
“There are channels in the walls,” he says. “Carved grooves. They run through the corridors and down through the floors. Some of them are blocked with debris. Roots, dirt, stone chips. I need them cleared.”
“Show me.”
He takes me to the nearest corridor. The channel is in the wall at about his waist height. A carved groove, two fingers wide, running along the stone. It is clogged with dried root material and packed dirt.
I reach up into it, working my fingers into the debris, and pull. The roots come out in dry clumps. Underneath, the stone is carved clean and smooth.
“Like this?”
“Yes.”
I nod and keep pulling roots.
I pull the charcoal and a blank sheet from my pack and set them within reach. My mother sketched every place she entered. I picked up the habit without deciding to. The corridors want mapping.
He watches me for a moment, then turns and goes back down the corridor. I hear the drag of his coils on the stone, heading to his own work somewhere else in the building.
