The City of Woven Streets

CHAPTER TEN

Weaver places the key on the table in front of me. Darkness presses heavy against the corner window. She ordered me to go to sleep for a few hours that I spent awake. It is such early morning that light has not yet broken through the edge of night.

‘Where did Valeria get this?’ Weaver asks. ‘She did not have it when she arrived at the House of Webs. Who gave it to her?’

Glow-glass light paints the metal with a pale-blue sheen. Looking at the key turns a cold blade inside me.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘She just began to carry it around her neck. I thought maybe it was an amulet, like pieces of coral.’

Weaver stares at me intently, reading every movement on my face.

‘Do you know what it is?’ she asks.

‘No, but I think I can guess,’ I say. That at least is true.

‘Dreamers use these to recruit more people,’ Weaver says. ‘Carrying one of these is a serious offence.’

I understand now why the woman on the square dropped the key at my feet. I feel my eyes well up.

‘Perhaps Valeria didn’t know,’ I say. My voice is faint and dissolves into the shadows. A lump of stone grows in my throat.

‘In any case, it was found in her possession,’ Weaver says. ‘Together with the tapestry it gives the City Guard more than enough reason to detain her.’

I have tried to turn what I heard into images so I could understand: Valeria’s wordless voice, the bangs and creaks. And I have driven the images away, so I would not need to see them. I look at Weaver.

‘Is that what you believe happened?’

‘You are intelligent enough to draw your own conclusions,’ Weaver says. Her gaze is even more serious than usual.

I close my eyes for a moment and draw a breath. If this were a dream, I could turn everything around. I could make Valeria step through the door unharmed, will the key out of existence. Take back what happened. But the moment around me is not a dream-moment, and I have no power over reality.

Weaver must see the struggle on my face. Her expression changes barely at all, but I hear compassion in her voice when she speaks again.

‘Eliana,’ she says. ‘How well do you know Valeria?’

I wipe my eyes.

‘We have shared a cell for three months,’ I say and realize it does not sound like much.

Weaver’s face is dark and unreadable. She looks at her hands on the table, then at me again. Thoughts move across her expression.

‘There is another possibility,’ Weaver says. She considers her next words for a long time. ‘Could she have run away?’

I have thought about it myself. Of how little Valeria has been able to tell me about herself. Of how much time she has spent by herself, avoiding even me. And yet also of the way she raises her eyes to look at me in the middle of weaving, as she arranges the threads in order to find the right form for her secret image. Of her endless focus when I have taught her letters and words, the arc of her body against mine.

‘She wouldn’t have left without telling me,’ I say.

Weaver sits still, like a statue behind the table.

‘Maybe she had her own reasons to leave,’ she says.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There are Dreamers on the island outside the House of the Tainted,’ Weaver says. ‘It is known that they have sent spies around the city. To the Hospital Quarters, Ink Quarters, Museum of Pure Sleep. And the Houses of Crafts.’

‘Do you believe Valeria is a spy?’

Weaver’s face is stone-smooth.

‘Do you believe it is impossible?’

I think about it. After all, what do I know about the Dreamers’ movement, beyond what I have heard from Irena? I have not met them. I do not know how they work. But if Valeria is with them, she is not in danger. I almost want to believe it.

‘No,’ I say. ‘But I find it hard to believe.’

Weaver’s head stirs, only slightly.

‘Why?’

I look her in the eye.

‘I feel like I know her,’ I say.

Weaver nods slowly.

Yet the thought stays, bothering me. The City Guard did not take Valeria away together with the other weavers. I cannot think of an explanation for it.

‘I can see that Valeria means a lot to you,’ Weaver says. ‘I promise to do what I can.’

‘There is something I have been wondering about,’ I say. ‘I don’t understand which way she took out of the House of Webs. No one saw her walking in the web-maze. And no air gondolas have left the port since yesterday morning.’

Weaver raises her eyebrows. Her thumb taps the edge of the table. The sound is faint, like a beetle hidden in the walls.

‘You have been asking around,’ she says.

‘If I knew where she was,’ I say, ‘I’d go after her.’

Weaver looks at me intently, as if pondering the truth of my words. Eventually her mouth turns into a slight smile.

‘I understand,’ she says. ‘You may have heard stories about the past of the island. Maybe even this one. Not necessarily from me, but from someone else.’ Her voice proceeds deep and knowing its direction, like waters in the canals. ‘A rumour tells there are secret routes on the island, long-abandoned passages. Only a few know of them. Yet it is said that the Dreamers have rediscovered their locations and put them into use again.’ She goes quiet for a moment. ‘And I have heard that one of those routes begins at the House of Webs.’

Hope begins to shine within me like algae in a glow-glass.

‘Whereabouts?’ I ask. My voice sounds breathless.

‘If I had to look,’ Weaver says, ‘I would look somewhere people rarely go. An unnoticed and dusk-covered corner.’

In the House of Webs, everything is on display. In the dormitories you sleep under the eyes of others; the cells are shared, and the washing rooms and dining halls are communal. There is no shelter from looks in the Halls of Weaving. Only Weaver’s room is often empty.

I remember the webs, the rustling voice in the dark. The limb that studied me. The chill rising from the core of the sea, an abyss where no warmth could reach.

‘If there was such a route,’ Weaver continues, ‘it might not be the safest, and it is difficult to tell where it would take you. Anyone who does not know the way would do wisely to consider carefully whether to follow it.’

Weaver’s face has paused to wait. Her hand rests still on the edge of the table, the other one in her lap, hidden.

‘I think I understand,’ I say.

‘My study will be empty tonight,’ Weaver replies. ‘You may go now.’

I get up to leave.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ I ask.

I think I see something on Weaver’s face that resembles sorrow, or perhaps regret, but in the dusky room it is hard to be certain.

‘Because I must,’ she says.

As I walk through the door, I feel the stares of twelve of Our Ladies of Weaving on my back. Weaver may have turned hers away, or not.

I have all day to consider it. I think of the unfamiliar hands that have taken speech away from Valeria, of the sharp weapons of the City Guard. I imagine the House of the Tainted, its high walls covered by thorny vines and its gates which prisoners never exit. I feel the weight of the key I gave to Valeria, which she carried above her heart, against her skin. I think of her hands on the smooth surface of the shuttle and on my skin, of her face in the dusk and the story hidden in her tapestry.

By nightfall my decision is made.

If Valeria is with Dreamers, she cannot be in great danger.

If she is somewhere else, she is there because I gave her the key.

Either way, I must find her.

I dress in several layers of sea-wool. The shoes are easy to pick: I only have one pair. I place some dried fruits, a piece of bread and a wineskin filled with water in the middle of a shawl, then tie it into a knot. I pick up a glow-glass from my bedside table. I go and refill it from the shimmering algae pool in the square.

The final thing I do is find the only piece of paper I have. I am now glad I have carried it in my coin pouch at all times and not left it in the cell for anyone to find. I already know by heart the ink recipe Alva wrote on it. I scribble a few sentences with a charcoal pen on the blank side.

I cross out the ink recipe on the other side, fold the paper and write ‘Alva’ on it.

On my way to Weaver’s study I stop by the sick bay and slide the note through the gap under the door.

Our Lady of Weaving watches me from the wall. The threads at the ends of her many fingers tighten, shift, loosen and tauten again as the fabric undulates. Without looking I know that the low door in the corner is cracked open.

I step through it with the glow-glass in my hand, into the place where everything looks different.

The strange stench that reminds me of dead things surges stronger over me than last time. In the growing light of the glow-glass I see now that darkness had given the room a different scale. On my first visit, the height resembled that of a great hall, the distance between the walls felt like the width of many Halls of Weaving, and the end where the ancient creature lives was as far as the sea or sky. I see clearly now that the room is barely larger than Weaver’s study. The far end is still draped in shadows, the webs persistent and far-reaching, and the figure waiting amidst them is big – several times my size – but not enormous, not too much for the mind to comprehend. In light, many things lose their impossibility and turn into a conceivable part of the world.

I see other things I did not see the first time around. On the edges of the room, there are hanging lumps wrapped in silk yarn. None of them is large enough to be a human. Most are the size of small birds. A few could be goats, or maybe dogs. Someone must have brought them here. Weaver, perhaps. A mild nausea runs through me.

Spinner stands there, in the broken darkness that is her home and my gate. Her limbs have stopped, but the movement still sways on the web she is spinning.

I wait for her to speak. When the silence continues, I address her.

‘I came back,’ I say. ‘Do you know why I am here?’

Spinner is quiet. A draught moves in the threads.

‘Do you know who I am?’ I continue.

A voice materializes from the shadows, put together from sounds that are not produced by a human.

‘Of course I do,’ the creature says. I am not certain if she is answering both of my questions, or just one. ‘Do you?’

My words are small and feeble before her; they vanish into dark corners.

‘Because I believe you can help me,’ I say, although that only answers one of the two questions she may have posed.

‘Yes,’ Spinner says, and her voice rustles like dried seaweed. ‘The girl who weaves a different pattern. Who turns the threads into her own map. You wish to step into it and follow.’

She goes quiet. Silence intrudes me, encircles my thoughts and draws them clear.

‘Have you seen her pass here?’ I ask.

‘Interesting,’ Spinner says. ‘I can see your outline more clearly. Before, your spirit hid and wandered without direction. Now it has chosen its path.’

She moves one of her long limbs. It brushes softly against the stone floor.

‘There is a secret way out of the House of Webs,’ I say. ‘Is there not?’

A limb rises towards me and falls on my chest, before I have time to yield. Terror thrusts through me and settles as a fluttering in my muscles. The limb does not press or push, but I sense its strength precisely. One swift movement, one merciless wrench that would require less of her than plucking a loose thread from a fabric would of me, and I would never talk again, or move.

‘Even if you were right,’ Spinner says, ‘why would you wish to walk that way?’

I imagine Valeria vanishing among the shadows of the earth, her red hair disappearing around the corner, her coat-hem waving, my own hand reaching for it and meeting nothing but empty air. My voice curls somewhere under my chest, will not rise to the lips. My heart beats red and slippery in my breast. The only thing between its movements and the strange, stark limb of the creature is fragile human bone and a strip of thin skin. I feel Spinner’s mind probe my thoughts.

‘Is she the only reason?’ Spinner asks.

I do not understand the question.

‘What other reason could I have?’ I respond with words more fragile than webs.

Spinner stares at me with all her eyes, and yet stares only into her own darkness. A memory turns in me, another. A dream I have half-forgotten. They slide away, drift apart in the dusk. Spinner is quiet. Her mind draws further. Cold gathers around me, and silence.

‘It does not matter,’ she eventually says. ‘My mind has travelled in the world for a long while. Sometimes it wanders and seeks what no longer exists.’ Her voice ripples into the dark and goes quiet.

‘I only wish to find Valeria,’ I say. ‘Will you show me the way?’

Spinner is silent and still. Then a great sigh moves across the room, rouses winds to blow above the sea. The weight withdraws from my chest. The limb falls to the floor without a sound. I breathe evenly again.

I see the creature move towards the wall. I hear a click. A breeze blows into the room from the shadows behind Spinner, colder than winter sea and cutting like the edge of broken glass.

‘Go,’ Spinner says. ‘The hours of your kind are brief and your days are brittle, and there will not be many chances at happiness.’

I pull my shawl tighter around me and shiver. I walk past Spinner between the webs. I do not look at her directly, but I sense her heavy presence next to me. I step through the doorway that has opened in the wall, and hear the door close behind me. I do not stay to see if I can open it again. I do not need to.

The glow-glass is delicate as an insect’s wing against the unmoving storm of the darkness. In its light I discern my own arm, the tattoos on my wrist poking from the sleeve end, and a few steps before me. I am standing on top of a stairway. The steps deepen into the earth. There is no other way ahead. I begin the descent.

The stairs are steep, smooth-worn, and the stones do not shift under my weight. I listen to the space. Sounds from the House of Webs or the city do not carry to the passage at all. I hear a distant sighing and roaring, which I imagine to be the sea, a wind that moves atop water and gathers waves into tall, sharp folds. I soon give up on trying to maintain a sense of direction; the stairs circle around their own axis like wool on a spindle.

There is nothing to indicate whether the route was last used yesterday or a hundred years ago. My senses seek a footprint, a hair stuck to a wall, a scent still floating in the stagnant air or a human voice far ahead. The stones keep within what they know, do not stir to reveal and tell.

When I do not expect it, my foot meets a level floor, hits it too hard because it is closer than I anticipate.

The floor spreads ahead of me like the frozen surface of a pond. It is only slightly wider than the staircase. I raise my hand. It hits the ceiling. The walls only allow one direction, so I continue along the passageway. Dark ribbons of algae run along the borders like dark upside-down flames flaring towards the innards of the earth. I discern oozing humidity, as if the stones are sweating. Yet the air is cuttingly cold.

Eventually the passage opens into a wider space.

The first thing I see is a faint sheen on the walls circling the darkness. The ceiling above rises to form a high vault that vanishes into the shadows. The rock floor before me is sleek, as if washed pure from all human traces. Across, I discern a black doorway leading deeper into the dark. I step towards the wall and raise the glow-glass close to it. Carefully I run my fingers along the wall. It is smooth under my hand, its surface glass-clear and orange-yellow. I recognize it as amber. I take a few steps and let my hand continue following the wall. The smoothness morphs into sharp edges. The light of the glow-glass hits the shining-white objects.

Seashells.

Most of them are barely larger than my fingertips, and their glinting mother-of-pearl insides are turned outward. They have been arranged next to each other in patterns, but there is not enough light for me to see the whole.

I follow the curve of the cave. Approximately halfway I see a niche in the wall. Inside, there is a small pedestal, like the base of a statue. Above the pedestal a round, convex disc is attached to a chain, its surface apparently formed by several circles within each other. I bring the glow-glass closer. The disc hangs yellow-orange and translucent in the stagnant air.

Amber.

When the light from the glow-glass hits the disc, it refracts onto the walls of the niche and seems to brighten.

I place the glow-glass on the pedestal and pull the amber disc cautiously downwards. Somewhere higher up there is a metallic creak. The chain moves. The amber disc descends to cover the glow-glass.

I turn to look at the hall and my breath catches, as if a night-maere had sat down on my chest.

The amber lens grows the light of the glow-glass brighter than the sheen of full moon. It falls on the mother-of-pearl of thousands and thousands of seashells, draws their patterns clear. It pierces the smooth, honey-coloured surface of the walls, showing what is hidden in them.

The creatures stand still in their translucent amber shell, taller than me, slim limbs arched. I immediately think of Spinner. The bodies of the creatures have the same build, but these ones are larger, and their jaws look wider. The fangs are sharp and the look in the black eyes bright.

My heart flutters inside me. I try to get my breathing to calm down. These creatures have not moved towards or away from anyone for thousands of years, not raised a limb or wrapped anyone in their webs. Amber has caught them during a time so distant that I have no words for it. But they do not look forgotten or hidden away, not like obscure figures on the edges of the senses. As I walk closer and study the creature that is separated from me by nothing more than a thin layer of translucent wall, I see each bristle on its limbs and body, each round and glistening eye. The posture in which it is frozen. As if to attack.

Others like it float in the halted time of the amber. One has curled its limbs into a tight knot. One limb of another creature is broken at a joint. Some are tensed, wriggling their way out, at strange, anxious angles. One holds prey in its jaws: an animal no bigger than myself, and not very different.

The cave is roughly circular. Carved by the sea and reshaped by human hands, I think. Someone must have polished the amber to reveal the creatures within. And many hands over many, many years have collected the seashells, sorted them by colour and attached them to the walls. At first their patterns look in my eyes like a word I have known but forgotten, or a dream dying at dawn. But as I stare at them for longer, I begin to see more than parts of something bigger. I begin to see threads that have each their place.

The parts tie together and I understand.

The seashells form the Web of Worlds, surrounding and enclosing the room. Stars glow blue at its knots where the strands meet, and small moons that grow from slim sickles to full globes and shrink into tiny claw-slivers again. All strands run towards the centre, a shape that I first take for the sun, made from silvery-white and pale-yellow seashells. Its eight points reach in all directions. As I stare at it for longer, the points morph into arms, the rays shooting from them into threads holding earth and sky and sea together.

It is the sun and Our Lady of Weaving at the same time, and she is not just holding the threads, she is spinning them and arranging them and weaving the tapestry of life itself. I now see that some of the patterns are not images, but there are words too: none that I know, their language long forgotten, but the letters I recognize and know they spell something with a meaning.

There are small human characters shaped around Our Lady of Weaving. Threads run to them from her fingertips, and from their fingertips start other threads. They grow into trees, buildings, clouds and sea animals.

I do not understand what I see, but as I gaze at the patterns, it feels as if a long-unmoving knot begins to unravel inside me.

I walk a full circle around the hall to make certain there is no other exit that might have gone unnoticed. The only ways out are the passageway from which I came, and the other across the room, which I must follow.

I pick up the glow-glass. The light goes out in the hall again and the images sink under the dark surface. The eye closes.

When I come to the doorway, something shifts behind me. I turn to look. All I see is my own shadow, which follows me, climbs onto my back and wraps itself around me.

I take it with me. The chill of the sea emanates as a veil through the doorway onto my skin as I step into the passage.

Behind the doorway the walls turn into dark and coarse stone again. The passage descends deeper under the island. I have walked a few hundred steps, when my eyes brush the bare slice of my wrist at the sleeve end. I hold the glow-glass a few palm-widths away from my skin. The tattoos do not show as clearly as earlier. I wonder how long I have been walking in the passage. It cannot be longer than an hour or two since I left. I filled the glow-glass with fresh algae water just before I stepped into Spinner’s chamber. It should last at least a day, maybe two.

I continue and count my steps. After three hundred I raise the glow-glass again and look at my wrist. The light has grown dimmer than before.

I quicken my footsteps.

I am grateful for the simple route, for the passage which does not branch in many directions. I force myself to proceed without looking back. I begin to wonder what will happen if the glow-glass loses its light entirely. Perhaps I could find my way back in the dark, feeling the way with my hands. But who would hear me, if I ended up behind the door to Spinner’s chamber? Would Weaver let me back into the House of Webs? Would Spinner know, or care?

The glow is dying fast. Only a few pale-blue speckles float in the water. I can barely discern my hand carrying the glow-glass, and a narrow stretch of the wall beside me. I realize that when the last of the light goes out, I will be completely alone. The algae is a living being, but it is dying next to me, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.

I fumble onwards until darkness comes.

Time disappears into the cracks of the stone floor and freezes as puffs of breath in the air. Maybe the world above does not exist. Maybe there is no island or city, no House of Webs. No Valeria. Maybe this is the only existence and everything else is a dream. I wonder how far below the city I am, and another, far more terrifying image takes shape in my mind: what if I am under the sea?

I imagine the stone ceiling above me ripping apart, the weight of water crashing in and filling the passageway, swirling to the stone steps and enclosing me in its lightless embrace. No one would know where I am, or ever find me – not Weaver, not Janos, not Alva. Not Valeria. Perhaps she would float in the darkness of water somewhere ahead of me, and the currents would carry us closer to each other, intertwine our limbs, and we would move in a strange, soundless embrace, unseen by anyone. Water would tug off the garments floating about us, and we would sleep forever on each other’s skin without knowing it ourselves. Perhaps we would be washed to the storming sea, where waves would tear us apart again. And we would not know that, either.

The darkness pulls me deeper. The passageway is still descending. My fingertips meet moisture on the walls. In the distance I discern roaring, a sound of welling water. Maybe I am on my way to the bottom of the sea, where the drowned wail and long for the daylight they will never see again. Maybe I should stay here and wait for them to come for me.

Weariness weighs in my limbs. I am caught in your net, I think to the drowned. Come and claim me.

And then, light.

Not bright or all-changing, but nevertheless: the thin outline of a rectangle-shaped door far ahead. I walk towards it with cold-stiffness and ice weighing down my bones. The distance is long, but finally I am in front of the doorway. I have hung the glow-glass from my belt long ago. I place both hands on the surface of the door and feel it. The warmth surprises me. The surface is wooden. I run my fingers across it. There is no handle of any kind.

I draw a breath, press my palms against the door and push.

Light floods in my face and stabs behind my eyes. Warmth descends onto my skin.

‘We have been waiting for you,’ a voice says.