A thin, light-colored line upon the roundness widened, stretching as they watched. He set it upon his bed, and they leaned over it, not daring to breathe too loudly. The line strained, shifted, strained, opening wider over a lighter lining, which began to tear with a thin ripping sound like rotted canvas.
From inside came the sound of shallow breathing, slow as the tide.
Pamra reached out to tear the shell open gently with her hands.
A child lay within. Tiny. Perfect. Brown as Suspirra had been, yet moving. Breathing. Opening its night-black eyes to look up at them as though it saw them entirely and comprehended them utterly, moving its lips as though to speak.
They said nothing. It was a wonder too great for speech. They could have made exclamations of disbelief, but in the quiet of the room it would have seemed blasphemy to speak at all. When those eyes closed at last and the baby half turned as though into sleep, they took the shell away. It was connected to the child by an umbilicus, a dried, brittle cord that shivered to fragments when they moved her. A girl child. Pamra reached a tentative, fearful finger to touch that flesh, warm and soft as her own. Silently, she wrapped the child in one of Thrasne’s towels and laid her in the basket he used for his mending while Thrasne stared and stared, lost in the wonder of it.
“Now you must come with me,” he said. “To care for her.”
“Who … what is she? How can I care for something like that? Surely this is no human child.”
Thrasne took her by the shoulders, shook her gently. Though the child was a wonder and a miracle, had not Suspirra been both a wonder and a miracle? “A strange child, yes, but I believe she is your sister. Born of the same parents.” He did not say what other strange parents might have been involved in that birth. The strangeys of the depths? The blight?
“Where will we go?”
“For a time, we will simply go on,” he said firmly. “They will not look for you on the River.” He would make this so if it were not so already. Perhaps it would not be safe enough forever; perhaps some other provision would have to be made. For the time being, it was enough that Suspirra-who had been in turn a dream, a small carving, a drowned woman, an almost carving once more-was with him now, alive.
9
The Accusatory of the Chancery at Highstone Lees was a cold stone building, built high along one side of the ceremonial courtyard, where dark-needled trees made a solemn shade around a jetting fountain. The room in which Ilze found himself confined was no less chill. He could walk around and around in it to warm himself. He could stare out the high, shuttered windows at the mountains along the horizon, which seemed to nibble at the sun as it moved along them. After a very long time of alternate walking and staring, Ilze realized that the sun would get no higher than the low northern sky where it swung in a long arc from east to west barely above the peaks. When darkness came, he huddled on the narrow bed, beneath the two blankets.
There was nothing else to do: walk, stare, or huddle on the bed, staying as warm as possible. There was food in the room and two buckets, one of water, one for his waste. The sun went once around the mountains before anyone came near him. Then there was only a silent guard with more food and a lackey to deliver two clean buckets, one full and one empty, and take away two dirty buckets, one full and one empty. Ilze had a vision of himself spending years in this cold room, moving water from one bucket to the other by way of his guts, moving solids from the plate to the bucket, consuming, being consumed. Somewhere nearby was another such room, he imagined, with the lady Kesseret in it. He had been separated from her almost immediately, but he thought he would be released as soon as she had had time to tell their story.