Gathering was hard, back-bending work that made bones and muscles ache. The Tears had to be scooped into baskets without touching them. The sun was hot, the dust sticky, provoking an unending damp itch that distracted and annoyed. Attention could not be allowed to waver. There were many cautionary stories about those who had touched the Tears accidentally, only to feel the tiny fungi passing through the skin in an instant of fatal error for which, there was no cure. Those who touched the Tears were possessed at once by Viranel. Those possessed by Viranel Were living workers. Unlike the dead, they were able to speak, for a time. Like the newly dead, they knew what they were and felt the agony of possession.
It was only as she returned to the Tower, her basket full, that she remembered what she had promised Delia. The sun bulged upon the horizon like a single oozing drop before she came to the garden and the little house to find both empty.
The note was there on the table, half-written, scratched and erased, tried again and again. The words fumbled, crawled like crippled fliers on the page. “Miri, forgive … “ “I did not know … “ “Only now, in my age, Miri … “
Pamra heard her own words in the silent room as though someone had spoken. “Much better than to go sneaking off through the worker pits in the dead of night,” she had said. “Sneaking off through the worker pits … “ Cursing herself that she had not kept her word, that she had not even guarded her tongue.
So. Delia had gone. There was not even a chance to say good-bye. The house did not feel of parting. It welcomed, even now, even empty. In the kitchen the pots shone in the level rays of the sun. Pamra ran her hand over them, smooth and cool, as she had used to do when drying them for the old woman. Spice cakes filled a covered jar. Dried fruit rested upon the sill. High in the rafters bunches of herbs hung like autumn brought home, smelling of the fields. In a cupboard her own child’s apron was folded away where she had left it the day they took her to the Tower. She felt it now, shaking out the sweet-smelling buds that lay in its folds. “Delia, ah, Delia. Why didn’t you wait?” knowing as she whined into the silence that it was her own fault, her own. And at the end, as the sun darkened in startled ambers and bruised purple and the kitchen room settled into a quiet she remembered from childhood, all she could say was what Delia had said to her then, time after time: “Rejoice. May the Sorters protect you and bring you to Potipur’s arms.”
She skulked out late that night, a shadow in her robe, striding to the hill overlooking the pit where the little light burned to guide the Sorters, where all were forbidden to be after nightfall. She sat there, invisible. It was no good. Delia, if she had gone this way, had gone long since. It was too late to do anything about it. Against the stars she could see the wings of the great fliers, moving in and out of the bone pits, seeming to peer down into the worker pits. What was the sound she heard? A croaking murmur? As though someone had spoken? A chill went through her. If she sat here until the Holy Sorters came to bring those who had not been Sorted Out, they would turn her to stone for her presumption, and it would still be too late to do anything for Delia. Suddenly fearful for herself, she turned back, sneaking into the Tower as silently as she had left it.
Each evening thereafter she took herself to the Tower by way of Delia’s house, hoping the old woman had returned. On the third day she found her half sister, Prender, sitting in the silent room, dusty now and beginning to smell of disuse and damp, weeping over the scribbled note. Pamra had not seen her for years. The face raised to her was familiar and strange at once, familiar in its outline, in the well known quirk of the lips, the expression she had so often interpreted as a sneer, but strange in its softness, in the lines above the eyes, around the mouth, lines of pain. “Gone,” her sister said. “Pammy. She’s gone.”