The Weaver

CHAPTER TWELVE

The waters of sleep part around me. I let them wash over the weight of my body and try to sink back in, but my lips feel dry, my nose is blocked and an ache throbs on my brow. I open my eyes. The bedsheets cling to me, and I can feel the wetness under my armpits. The room is unfamiliar. A woman dressed in a healer’s white coat sits in the corner, darning a sock. I croak. The woman glances at me.

‘Thirsty,’ I say. The sound that comes out is not a word.

The woman seems to understand, however, because she gets up, picks up a jug from a small table and pours some water into a cup. She brings the cup to me. I wriggle into a sitting position from under the clammy sheets and drink. Water drips down my chin. Without asking questions the white-coat fills the cup again. Three cups later I begin to feel tolerable. The sheets are soaked with my sweat, and I am glad I cannot smell my own stench, but my throat no longer hurts. I remember short moments of wakefulness: hot herbal brew, salty broth I had barely been able to swallow. Humiliating squatting over the chamber-pot, supported by someone in a white coat – perhaps this woman, perhaps not – because my own legs would not carry me. A damp cloth on my forehead, and small red dots floating before my eyes.

I fall asleep again.

A pressing urge to go to the privy wakes me up. The white-coated woman walks me there, wearing a doubtful expression. She seems relieved when I do not slump along the way. As we return, I stop at the doorway. Someone in a guard’s uniform is waiting for us in the room. At first I think it is someone from the City Guard, but then I realize the uniform is slightly different and bears the emblem of the Tainted. The guard turns. I recognize her as the same short-haired guard who gave me my diving outfit on the first day.

I remain standing, uncertain what is expected of me.

‘Go back to rest,’ the guard says. ‘This won’t take long.’

I sit down on the bed and try to look as formal as I can in my white gown. Cold air brushes across my chest. I shudder. The guard gives the healer a glance. She stares back for a moment that freezes and shatters, then collects her needlework and leaves the room. We are left alone.

The guard pulls forward the healer’s chair from the corner and places it before me. She removes her cap, sits down and regards me.

Her skin is slightly darker than mine. Every feature of her face is strange to me, and yet there is something familiar about the shape of it. Her short hair curls against the arc of her skull. She watches me in silence. A broken cobweb floats on the wall. I discern the square of light of a narrow window near the ceiling. The passing shadow of a bird grazes it. Eventually the guard reaches out a hand and takes hold of my wrist. She turns the back of my hand upwards, pointing at the tattoo on my arm.

‘You are from the House of Webs,’ she says.

‘Yes,’ I say. I want to pull my hand away.

‘I have always wondered what it is like there,’ the guard says.

I wait for her to continue, but she does not.

‘Have you visited any other Houses of Crafts?’ I ask to fill the silence.

‘Have you ever seen people who wear the mark of the Tainted walking around in the city?’ she asks, an edge in her voice.

I think of the Ink-marking, the Dreamers standing on the dais before all eyes who only have two routes ahead of them: a return to the House of the Tainted, or banishment from the island.

‘No,’ I say.

The guard lets go of my hand.

‘Tell me about the House of Webs,’ she says.

So this is a questioning, then. I wrap Valeria in silence, tuck her at the back of my thoughts, turn her into hollow letters of a name I can barely spell.

‘What would you like to know?’ I ask.

‘Anything,’ the guard says.

It is a strange request. Frowning sends a crack of pain across my brow. I do not remember hitting my head, but I must have.

‘Anything?’

‘Anything,’ she confirms.

A trick to get me talking against my better caution, perhaps. I scour my mind for something irrelevant, something safe.

‘There’s the smell of bread in the mornings,’ I say. ‘Not every day. Twice, maybe three times a week. It doesn’t carry all the way to our… my cell, but when I open the door to go for my wash, it wafts along the corridor, and I know there will be fresh, warm bread at breakfast. The kind with a crust that grates the roof of your mouth if you’re not careful, and white insides that are like sun-baked clouds on your tongue.’

‘We get freshly-baked bread here once a week,’ the guard says. ‘But it is always brown, hard before it is out of the oven. And by the end of the week there are white stains growing on it that taste like dirt water.’ She crosses her arms. ‘Tell me something else.’

‘When the work has not yet begun in the Halls of Weaving,’ I say, ‘the unfinished wall-webs are like mist in the light sifting through the windows.’ I can see them before my eyes: soft and pliant and yet made stronger than many a house built from stone. ‘And as we come in, we bow to Our Lady of Weaving, who watches us from the wall.’

I speak of crammed mornings in the washrooms, of air gondolas docking at the port and of rooms where inside and out are not opposites, but one and the same. I talk about weaving, hanging and unravelling the webs. I pick and choose things that cannot possibly interest the guard: cleaning the chicken coops, the scent of rosemary and lavender in late-summer heat, the soft lights of the city flicking and fading like deep-sea creatures. I speak of the pool at the centre of the square, the brighter-than-world colours of the old silkweed wall hangings in the Tapestry Room.

The guard listens to me in silence, as if memorizing everything I say.

As I speak, a realization grows within me.

I walked the long corridors of the house for years. I hid behind the closed door of my cell, and day after day I picked up the threads that sometimes weighed like chains. But the washrooms smelled of home, and the slow-blue fires of glow algae showed me the way after darkness had fallen. Now I would run my fingers along every surface, breathe in every smell and memorize the shape and size of every room like I once learned the paths in the web-maze, if I ever could return. There may have been days and nights when I wished to tear down the walls, but those walls were also my shelter and my skin, giving me the shape into which I grew. Without them I stand alone and terrified on a slowly drowning shore under a crumbling sky.

A stinging-hot bubble bursts in my chest and a clenched sob falls out of me. I cease to speak.

The guard looks around, seeking. She grasps a wrinkled but clean-looking rag lying on the table next to the water jug.

‘Wipe your eyes,’ she says and offers the rag to me. ‘And your nose.’

I take the rag and blow my nose on it. My eyes leave damp stains on the fabric. When I look up again, I see the guard staring at the floor and something that could be a trace of kindness fading away on her face.

‘You have said nothing about your house-elder,’ the guard says and raises her eyes. ‘What is she like?’

I see Weaver’s tall figure walking along the corridors, standing still at a doorway. Is that what this is about? Her loyalty, or betrayal? I choose my words with caution.

‘I have always thought she was fair and kind.’

The guard watches me, studies my face.

‘Did something change?’ she asks.

I see Weaver sitting at her table in the half-dark. Pointing the way with steady hands, speaking the words in a snare-smooth voice. I do not know what will spare or condemn me, or if anything will. I may as well speak the truth.

‘It’s her fault I am here,’ I say. ‘She sent me.’

A strange expression flashes on the guard’s face, like a lightning so swift you cannot be certain if you saw it. I expect more questions. I think I can see them taking shape on her tongue and crowding her mouth until there are too many to hold.

But she gets up and says, ‘Rest. You will return to work tomorrow.’

She moves the chair back into the corner of the room. The legs scratch the floor. She turns and stares at me. The light falls on the tattoo on her forehead.

‘You are not here because of your house-elder,’ she says.

I wait. She seems to weigh her words, rehearse them in her mind the way people do when they wish to share a secret. I hear someone pacing outside the door. Probably the healer.

‘You are here because you carry the dream-plague,’ she continues.

She puts her cap on and opens the door. I am almost certain that she intended to say something else. I wonder if she knows that what she said is not true. I cannot see behind her words and gestures.

After the guard is gone, the white-coated woman steps back in.

My forehead itches. I scratch it. Some skin comes off under my nails.

‘I will put ointment on it,’ the white-coat says. ‘The wound will take a while to heal.’

‘What wound?’ I ask.

She begins to open the lid of the ointment jar.

‘Sometimes the needles cause infections,’ she says. Then she sees my face. ‘Is everything fine?’

‘Can I see?’ I ask. My voice cracks.

There are no mirrors in the room, but there is a small metal plate on the side table. The white-coat hands it to me. Something passes across her face. I recognize it as compassion. In the surface of the plate I see my reflection, unclear and dim, but the features are just about discernible. And on my forehead, where it cannot be missed, a tattoo darker than my skin. I understand the red dots swimming before my eyes, the stinging above my eyebrows. Drops of blood on a damp cloth.

I hand the plate back.

‘I do not want ointment,’ I say.

The white-coat tilts her head, curves her lips downward and screws the lid of the jar back on. I wrap myself in the blanket and turn to the wall. I taste the salt of my tears as they trickle into my mouth.

I stand on the dream-cliff looking over the island and the sea. The mark on my forehead burns. I rouse a grey-gleaming torrent of rain from the dream-clouds that is like a wall-web cast over the world. The canals swell and wash the streets and doorsteps and bedrooms, where people sleep, unknowing. I call the dream-waves to come closer and shove them away again, I carve their crests with my hands and thrust them towards the sky, until no ship can survive in their steep, perilous desert. I dig ever deeper: I seek the roots and veins hidden under the seabed, buried in rock and coral and layers of mud. I tug at the bones and sinews of the earth far below and feel the sea rolling faster and faster, rolling towards the city and covering it with a wide stroke that sweeps everything off the skin of the island: the towers reaching for the sky, tall and low rooftops, gondola-carrying cables, people’s thin lives.

Only the dream-cliff remains. It stands still amidst the waves, as they slowly settle to cover the horizon-wide silence.

Then I am awake and exhausted, and every last drop of strength has been drained from me.

The next morning I am taken back to my cell before dawn, packed on a ship again with other prisoners and shoved into the sea. I still feel like a trampled-on wineskin that someone filled with muddy water, but pain has turned into dull discomfort, and my head weighs a little less than the day before. The water wraps me with freezing fingers again. Again I fumble around with blind hands and aching lungs. I climb on board with the sediment of the seabed on my skin and drink the tasteless brew. The bell clangs, the hourglass turns, and it all begins anew.

At first I expect the short-haired guard to come and ask me more questions. But time drags on and she does not approach me. The guards who wear the tattoo of the Tainted eat in the dining hall with the rest of us, whereas the untattooed guards never do that. There are many of them, but I give names in my mind to those I see most often: Octopus is tall, robust and dark, and never hesitates to grab or shove us. Turtle is slow to move, but sees everything. Oyster is grey all over and says little. And there is a pale-eyed, red-haired guard whose orders are sharp and whip-hand swift. I call her Stingray.

The tattooed guards I name after insects. Mantis is bark-coloured and so narrow she seems ready to snap in two anywhere. Ant is short and walks as if she has more than two legs. Bug has shiny, black eyes and hair and is often kinder to us than the others. The short-haired guard I decide to call Moth.

The tattooed guards are responsible for herding us in tasks like cleaning our cells, washing the pots and plates, and emptying our chamber-pots, whereas the untattooed ones give them orders. Once I see Stingray argue with Bug on the ship. She pulls out her whip and hits Bug’s bare hands with it, twice. It leaves a red mark. Bug lowers her head and accepts the punishment.

After following the rhythm of the house for a while I am convinced that the tattooed guards are prisoners, like the rest of us, but with some privileges. The more I think about it, the less I understand why Moth would have been sent to question me. Sometimes I catch her watching me with an unreadable expression, and I turn my eyes away.

I have begun building two maps of the House of the Tainted in my mind: of its space, but also of its time, the way the days are shaped within. I look for hidden openings, cracks I could slip through. I need to send a message to Janos, but I do not know how. I have nothing, except my clothes, my blanket, a chamber-pot and a bar of soap. I have not seen anyone in the house use pen or paper. There must be a watergraph somewhere, but I have seen no indication of it being used, either, so I am growing increasingly certain it must be on the men’s side of the building. Occasionally we see the prisoners of the second women’s shift from a distance: boarding a ship in the harbour, arranging themselves in a line behind a barred door as we are leaving the dining hall. Too far away for me to recognize Valeria, even if she were among them. The male prisoners are separated from us completely. The building is divided in two with only a passageway in between. The only time I caught a glimpse of them was when we boarded the ships one day and a silent line of them carried full coral cages further away.

I learn about currents under the surface, the push and pull of tides arranging the pieces in the house. One day I notice I am floating alone in my strip of sea. Everyone else has gathered into a dense cluster. I swim the same way and see a short, wide-shouldered girl who is around my age, maybe a year or two younger, emerge with a basket full of deep-red branches. She throws them into the boat. As I dive, I see it: a patch of blood coral, dense enough to see but too deep to gather with ease. The girl is fast and dares to dive deep. The rest of us try and follow, but her catch is the largest of the day by far.

That evening at supper we queue for vegetable soup with little more than cabbage and seaweed in it. The wide-shouldered girl stands in front of me on the line. The cook looks at her and slips something into her soup while the guards watch. The aroma of roasted meat drifts into my nostrils and my mouth waters. It smells of goat, or maybe lamb. The last time I felt no hunger was at the House of Webs, before Valeria disappeared. The girl takes the bowl and sits down at the long table. A guard moves close to her. No one takes another glance at her portion, although many must have seen what happened.

As the chain of days grows longer, I get further confirmation that there are rewards for the best coral-hunters. I see a guard offer a spare blanket to a woman whose hands are strong enough to pick branches that no one else can break, and another give new shoes to a young girl whose arms are long and thin enough to reach into hollows that are too narrow for the rest of us.

I learn to hold my breath for longer, and wounds open in my hands from tearing off coral. Rash grows in blotches onto my arms and neck and legs. But I am never faster or stronger or nimbler than the others. Hunger never goes away, and cold never goes away, and the sores on my fingers and feet never heal.

It is the evening of an overcast day, drab and dreary. Heavy drops of water lash at the walls around us and, somewhere, at the streets where people walk free. Hunger tears my insides, an emptiness around which my body wraps itself and which gives form to my every thought and movement. We are eating thin soup once again. With it we are given a slice of bread each, dark in taste and colour, and hard before it was out of the oven. Just like the guard I have named Moth said.

Mirea is seated next to me. I have tried to speak to her once or twice since our first conversation on the ship, but she has given curt answers, or no answers at all. I gnaw at the edge of my bread slice. I can sense its hardness at the very roots of my teeth. I place the bread on the table and tilt the soup bowl to my lips.

A crash from the other end of the table catches my attention. I see an older woman bend to pick up the pieces of a soup bowl from the floor. I hope the bowl was empty before her arm swept it off the table by accident. She will not be given another one.

When I turn back, my bread is gone. I have barely had time to notice, when Octopus, the dark and robust untattooed guard, strides towards the table.

‘You!’ she says, a raised whip in hand. ‘Give it back. Now!’

I stare at Octopus. Then I realize she is not talking to me. She stops beside the table, looking at Mirea next to me.

‘I saw you,’ Octopus says. ‘We are waiting. Or would you rather go into solitary confinement?’

Mirea looks defeated. She pushes her hand into her sleeve and pulls out the piece of bread on which I have already nibbled.

‘There’s been a misunderstanding,’ I say, addressing Octopus. ‘Everything’s fine. I told Mirea she could have my bread. It’s too hard for my teeth.’

Mirea looks at me, her eyes wide. Octopus appears suspicious.

‘Are you telling me she didn’t steal it?’ she says.

‘It’s hers,’ I say. ‘I gave it to her.’

Stealing is harshly punished, but sharing food is not forbidden. I have seen prisoners do it before.

Octopus still does not look convinced.

‘Try to look a little less like you’re doing something forbidden next time, lass,’ she says.

Mirea gives a nod.

‘Eat your bread then,’ Octopus says.

Mirea begins to chew on the corner of the slice of bread. The guard watches for a few moments, then turns her back on us. Mirea glances at me, but says nothing. I say nothing either.

A week later I am ordered to laundry duty. I have been in the House of the Tainted for well over a month, and this is the first time I see laundry being washed. My clothes have taken on the same smell as everything else here: of tears and sea and sweat, salty things that give the threads a feel of rotting against my skin.

The sticky stench of lye rises from the copper at the end of the room and cuts into my nostrils. The steam concentrates at my hairline, making the tattoo sting as sweat runs down my forehead in small streams. I am scrubbing yet another swimming-shirt against the slanted stone in the sink before me. On each side of me, I see dozens of others doing the same. Next to me Mirea is focused on removing a stain from a pair of trousers. Moth paces around the room. Her gaze stops on me for slightly longer than it needs to.

When she has turned away, Mirea’s quiet voice swims into my ears.

‘Why did you do it?’ Mirea says without raising her eyes from the stain.

I take a quick glance around. Her words have dissolved into the splashing of water, unheard by others.

‘Do what?’ I ask, staring at my own washing. I keep my hands moving.

‘Why did you help me? When I stole your bread.’

Guilt spreads in my guts, a dark pool that settles into something heavy and strangled.

‘Because you needed it more than I did,’ I say. ‘You’ve been here for longer.’ And it’s my fault, I almost add.

Mirea is silent for several moments. She pulls the dripping garment out of the sink, wrings it and drops it into a tub behind us. She picks another pair of trousers and begins to rub it against the stone.

‘Thank you,’ she says.

I wring the shirt and throw it into the tub, taking the chance to look around. The guard is at the other end of the room. I reach out and give Mirea’s hand a quick squeeze: a gesture I should have made long ago, in the dormitory when her night-maere had just visited. She looks surprised, but not displeased.

‘I spoke to someone who was moved to our shift,’ she says, still staring ahead of her. ‘About that girl you asked about on the ship.’

Hope sweeps through me, light as a dream-wind that lifts me off the ground.

‘She is about my age,’ I say. ‘Red hair. Pale skin. She cannot speak. She was… hurt.’

‘It’s probably not the same girl,’ Mirea says. ‘Or else she is kept hidden somewhere.’

I am heavy again, full of weight of water and worry.

‘Thank you anyway,’ I say. And then, just because I want to feel her name on my tongue, I add, ‘Her name is Valeria. Valeria Petros.’

Mirea’s face freezes. Her head makes a tiny movement. I realize Moth has stopped behind us. She stands close enough to raise her whip and lash at me, or Mirea. But she does not. She remains still and says nothing.

I do not know if she has heard us. After a while she continues to walk around the room, but Mirea and I do not speak again.

The sinks are drained and the laundry hangs on lines outside, on a roof landing surrounded by high walls but baked by the sun on bright days. The tubs are lined to dry against the wall of the laundry room. Smoke from the burnt-out fire clings to the air. We stand in a row, ready to leave. Moth inspects the room with Oyster.

‘I will need two prisoners to clean the floor,’ she says. ‘505 and 317, stay behind.’

I watch as the others walk past me. Oyster gives her nod of approval and leaves the room with them. Mirea and I are left alone with Moth.

‘The buckets are in the corner,’ she says and gestures towards the back wall. ‘Use water from the copper.’

The floor is covered in puddles of lye and dirty footprints. We begin to mop it with rags. Wipe, wash, wring and wipe again. My already sore knuckles are chafed from all the scrubbing, and the lye-water stings. Moth watches us closely.

‘Is laundry very different in the House of Webs?’ she asks.

I run possible answers through my mind. Did she hear me talk about Valeria, and is this a way of turning the conversation to her? But again, why would Moth be sent to question me instead of one of the higher-in-rank guards? And why would she arrange to do it in secret, rather than as a disciplinary action, a display of power in front of other prisoners?

‘We wash it more often,’ I say, with caution. I watch Moth’s reaction. She looks calm, even kind. Sincerely curious. Why would she want to know about something as mundane as the laundry?

‘Once a week with cold water, and twice a month in a large copper heated on fire,’ I continue. ‘The bed linen, too.’

‘How do you dry it?’ the guard asks.

‘The same as here,’ I say. ‘We hang it outside in the sun, or if it rains, we leave it outside but under a roof.’

‘What do weavers wear in the House of Webs?’ the guard asks.

Mirea stares at the floor, at her hand wiping it.

‘Sea-green coats and long grey skirts under them,’ I say. ‘You may have seen them on weavers who have been brought here.’

‘Yes,’ the guard says. ‘In fact, I took a closer look at yours. Very fine fabric.’

‘Sea-wool,’ I say, although the image of her taking my coat and feeling the texture makes me uneasy. ‘Our house-elder is very specific when it comes to our clothing.’

‘Interesting,’ the guard says.

She steps close. Her boot is right next to my hand. She could break my fingers by stepping on them.

‘I think that is enough,’ she says.

As she walks us into our cells, I wonder what she wants. I still do not know.

Days unravel around me, and nights string the days together, for they bring the dreams. I walk in passageways where no light falls, holding a hand I know to be Valeria’s. Every morning my fingers close around emptiness. When the ship rides the waves, I imagine myself on stable ground to push the sickness away, and the roll of the sea still lives in my limbs when I lie down in my cell at night. Yet a part of me is grateful for the sailing, because that means the sky is not sealed out of reach. I scan it for the moon to keep track of time. Our Lady of Weaving has unfolded her fingers to reveal the silver coin in her palm, closed them and begun unfolding them again. I have been in the house for just over two months.

I save a piece of bread and slip it to Mirea whenever I can. She seeks a place next to me in the dining hall and on the ship more and more often. Sometimes we speak. Usually we sit in a shared silence. Moth has not spoken to me since the laundry day, except to give the orders she gives everyone. A warmer wind brushes the winter breezes now and then, although spring is still far off. It is yet another evening when the ship is carrying its cargo to the island: blood-coral branches, weary bodies and torn fingertips. Mirea is slumped next to me: her dark hair, her twig-thin limbs.

‘Have you heard what they’re saying?’ she asks after a while.

My first thought is that she has heard something about Valeria.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

‘It’s not about that girl,’ she says.

A heaviness settles into my chest again.

‘What is it, then?’

‘It’s so strange,’ Mirea says. She lowers her voice. I lean a little closer, keeping an eye on the hatch so I can pull away swiftly if the guard looks into the hold. ‘I’ve heard some of the girls talking. Saying things about dreaming.’

‘What kind of things?’

Mirea hesitates.

‘That it’s not a disease. That you can’t catch it from others, and that you can’t die from it.’

‘Who was saying it?’ My heart moves faster. The glow-glasses on the ceiling look brighter. ‘Where did they hear that?’

‘243 and 111. 479. Many of them.’ She brushes off a piece of seaweed clinging to her leg. ‘They said they heard from the newcomers that people outside are saying it. But it can’t be true, can it? Everyone knows we’re sick. That’s why we are here.’

People outside. New prisoners arrive at the house every day, bringing scraps of news from the outside world. If the people of the city are talking about dreaming, it means the Dreamers are still working on the plan we devised.

‘What if it were true?’ I say in a quiet voice.

Mirea does not turn to look, but I see the shift on her face.

‘How could it be?’ she says.

‘Think about it,’ I say. ‘We were all sent here because of dream-plague, but have you seen night-maeres visiting here any more often than elsewhere in the city? Do you see anyone getting ill from anything other than cold, or lack of food or washing?’

I can see she is thinking about it. We would know: all sounds carry from one cell to the next, and most cells have three or four people in them. We can hear each other snore and cough and urinate and moan quietly into our blankets. A night-maere would not go unnoticed.

I glance around. No one is paying us attention. I lean closer to Mirea and lower my voice into a whisper.

‘Mirea,’ I say. ‘You are not sick. None of us is.’

Mirea’s head twitches slightly, but nothing else reveals her thoughts. She stares at her feet.

‘Do you remember when I said it’s good that they brought you here?’ she says.

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘It’s not good, really,’ she says. ‘I wouldn’t want anyone to end up here.’

‘Neither would I,’ I say.

Mirea’s eyes move in the dark. The only person at a hearing distance is prisoner 503, but her eyes are closed and she is speaking her soundless words again: to those lost to her, to Our Lady of Weaving. No one knows. Maybe she does not, either.

‘I’d set everyone free if I could,’ Mirea whispers.

‘So would I,’ I say.

Mirea is silent for a long while. The hatch opens with a creak. A guard’s dark silhouette appears against the bright daylight, then disappears. Eventually Mirea speaks again.

‘If everyone knew that we’re not sick,’ she says, ‘if even the guards knew, do you think they’d let us go?’

I glance at her from under my brows. I feel my own smile, uninvited, but it makes me lighter. I let it stay.

‘I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘Maybe.’

Mirea smiles back at me, and for a moment I imagine her roaming free, picking seashells on the shore, turning her laughing face to the sun and growing like a tree.

The rumours are spreading. The Dreamers are still working to proceed with the plan. For the first time in weeks hope runs through me like quicksilver, liquid and many-shaped and shimmering

the Council is seated at a round stone table in the Tower, their mute faces turned towards each other and away from their crumbling surroundings; they sit without making a sound. A lizard runs across the table, turns swifter than water, is startled by the approaching footsteps at the door and disappears into a crack in the wall. Its tail wriggles on the table, twitching, prey caught in a web, until it comes to rest still, dark as a rock or the shadow of a rock.

The Council around the table does not pay attention to it, does not turn its gaze, does not say a word. Other creatures live in the cracks of the humid Tower too, they cross the room now and then. No one will raise a hand for just one.

The door opens and a servant carrying a torch steps in, bows in the direction of the table. He walks from one window to the next and kindles the torches on their racks outside the windows, the eyes of the Tower that watch the island when darkness falls. Before leaving the room he glances at the sea, sees what the Council does not.

A grey-gleaming torrent of rain falls from the clouds, lashes at the landscape, moves the waters and whips into movement the sediment clouds that rest as a heavy, rust-coloured ring where life is supposed to stir. The roots of the seabed and the bones of the earth stir, ready to sweep everything off the skin of the city: the towers reaching for the sky, tall and low rooftops, gondola-carrying cables, people’s thin lives. The dream-cliff stands silent amidst the waves and the movement of dream-threads still continues; it is ever stronger, it unravels into the world