“You slept in my door to wait for a chat, then?” he asked.
“Yes … no … well,” I absently pushed up my sleeves as I stuttered. I yanked them back down as soon as his eyes fell on my marked wrist. I didn’t need this stranger assuming I was an incompetent, too.
“I see,” he said, still watching my covered wrist. “Can’t give you much help, I’m afraid. Girl wasn’t from here.”
“How do you know I’m here about her?”
“Everybody who’s been here these last weeks but not for renting wants to know about her. You, I figure, might have a good reason to be asking, though.”
I’d so hoped she was from Bernin. “Do you know where she was from?”
“Nope,” the old man said as he settled into the open chair. His cane leaned against the desk, knocking a few papers off the top of a pile.
“How did she seem? Was she nervous or agitated?”
“Cheerful, I’d say. Seemed a little flustered, but I thought it was because of the accident. Guess it may have been nerves. I wouldn’t know.” He shrugged with the pseudohumility people put on when describing other people’s emotions to a Sentimancer.
“What accident?”
“She said that the hollow people had attacked her just outside of town. She stopped just before dawn to piss in some bushes and they pulled apart her vehicle. She bolted and didn’t stop until she reached town. Found her sitting on my door when I came in to open the shop. She wasn’t sleeping, though.”
My disappointment compounded. Either the old man was lying, or he was credulous enough to have believed a truly incredible tale from my patient. “They attacked her vehicle, but not her?”
“That’s what she said. I told her it weren’t the hollow people if that’s what they did. Might’ve been gesserack or flytings. There’s some of them out there.”
“Did you find the vehicle?”
“That was the strange bit,” the old man said. “I was sure she’d run into flytings until we got to it. Now …” There was a grimness to his shrug this time.
“What?” I prompted.
“I seen plenty of those that come back from the hollow people. The bodies, you know. There’s this feel to them, like it’s been arranged somehow. You follow?”
All too well. I nodded.
“The vehicle, what was left of it, it had the same feel. I never heard of the hollow people sparing somebody, or of attacking machinery either, but there you have it. I haven’t got the car, the investigators took it, else I’d let you see it for yourself.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Not as I can recall.” He sent me off with another shrug.
I made it out of the shop before the shock hit me. You worry too much, Georg, rang in my head, glowing eyes in a night-gray face staring at me. The hollow people don’t spare anybody they catch. But they’d spared me. And her.
Sundered Moras.
There were two days before the close of the trial and my presentencing visit with her. I should have gone back to the apprentice hall, spent the time consulting with Master Nubeshai about the best way to serve my patient. Besides, I still had a pocket full of change yearning to be lost in the barrows. I should have run back to do my duty to my profession.
I pushed on, following the road to Vedhalig Moreeum.
It’s not a pit. Everybody knows it’s been filled, but that doesn’t do it justice. It’s been filled with prejudice, filled to overflowing, and then a small mountain built on top of it. Anybody who expects to drive up to the edge of a pit and peer in at the sleeping half of the Sleeping Bubble’s creator has read too many kids’ stories. I’m told that the pit used to be nothing more than a flat stretch of sand and gravel surrounded by untouched forest. That hasn’t been true, if it ever was, since the repairs after the Vasik rupture. Now there’s a two-ton block of iron over the pit, and that covered in a heap of gravel and sand that rises above the tree line. You can’t see the block when you look at the mountain.
You can see the green fog, though. It rolled off the mountain, iridescent even as the day glow faded from the sky. There was a subtlety to the pervading sense of doom it carried, like a bitter aftertaste in something delicately sweet. I wanted to walk the perimeter of the mountain and examine every inch of it just as much as I wanted to run away and pretend I had more sense. What I didn’t want to do was scale the mountain with a brass gong and wake up the buried god. I spent ten minutes staring at the mountain, opening myself to every insane urge that might present itself, and I didn’t get so much as an inkling of that desire.
That settled one question for me. She’d definitely already planned to wake him when she came. I’d hoped that had been an influence from the place. It would explain her bizarre actions and her perfect calm in a way I could understand. None of my answers were going to be easy to find, it seemed.
I’d had to leave my car at the road and hike through the woods on foot. I meant to go back and sleep in the safety of my locked vehicle, or even to drive back to Bernin in the dark. Now that it was night, I realized there’d been a serious flaw with my plan; I’d never find my way back to the car. I wanted to blame that on stress and sleep deprivation but it was so much less stupid than coming here at all that even I didn’t believe it. I settled down with my back to the mountain, crossed my arms over my chest, and waited.
The hollow people didn’t disappoint. Only a female actually came out of the woods, but I could see the eyes from a dozen others watching me from the trees. She loped up to me on long, slender limbs, then crouched down just a few feet away. It wasn’t possible for her to be the same female I’d seen the night before—even if the hollow people didn’t stay near their nests, they’d never be able to travel as far on foot as I had with my vehicle. Still, she looked the same.
“We’re sorry we frighten you, Georg,” she said. It was still Kjolla’s voice, but at least they weren’t his words, this time.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“Protect the membrane. Stop the osmoid.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. The breeze carried a whiff of her scent to me. Ozone and turned earth. I’d been resigned before, but that odor did me in and suddenly my heart was hammering against my ribs. Or it had been doing that the whole time and I just hadn’t noticed. Hard to say which.
“The makers put us here to record their experiment. We take samples and save them. We must protect the membrane.”
“You slaughter people,” I said. “You’re going to kill me.”
“We must not, Georg,” she said. Kjolla had never spoken with such gravity. She sounded like he might have if he’d had time to grow up, if he’d left the damn raspberries alone. I’d thought I’d never get to hear Kjolla’s adult voice. “You must shackle the osmoid.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I said.
She crawled forward, her long fingers reaching for me. I was scrambling up the mountain as fast as I could scream, but she was faster. She had me by the shoulders, pressed to the ground before the rocks I knocked loose finished falling. I stared up, her eyes glowing over me with the night sky shimmering faintly behind her. Her black tongue darted out, almost brushing my face.
“We can scent her on you. You know the osmoid. She has an obligation to you. She is like them.”
“Who?”
“Your people have erased her name.”
I was afraid she’d say that. “She’s just a psychopath.”
“She can fold the membrane. She could break it. We will lose our samples. None of you should be like the makers.”
Anything that threatened the hollow people seemed like a good thing to me, but I couldn’t talk. I’d forgotten to breathe. Again.
“You must understand,” Kjolla’s voice said.
Suddenly, I could hear it, the Bubble, humming—a minor chord echoi
ng under my ribs. I could sense the entire curve of the universe in the sound. I knew I was still lying on my back next to the mountain over Dhalig Mora’s pit, but I was aware of so much more. Our universe was a plaintive sound, vibrating against the edges of the multiverse, and at its core, the two imprisoned gods.
The sound of them, the tones of the Moras, reflected off the surface of the Bubble, reinforcing it, giving it structure, turning the single chord into a melody over time. In that moment I could hear the whole shape of our universe, from its inception at the height of our creators’ passion to its eventual collapse when they join once more. I could feel myself drowning in it, the raw untempered emotion of it, my senses scattered with each beat, each progression. I went far enough to realize I was about to lose myself to insanity.
Then I found them, crawling over the surface of the membrane, a series of rests inside the chord: the hollow people. They were a stillness, a silence in the universe, a grip I could seize upon to take a breath. And I did just that, throwing myself into those gaps.
But I was wrong. They weren’t silence at all. They were filled with voices, thousands of them, echoing across the surface of the membrane, playing counterpoint to the music of the universe that held them. Those voices sang, a choir of the dead and slaughtered, echoing from one end of time to the other.
“Do you hear it now, Georg?” Kjolla’s voice said, and it was a crescendo, expanding across my awareness even as the world around me went quiet once more.
As the sound faded, I could hear notes from the ground, the trees, the mountain behind me, my own bones. My bones. I could hear my own notes across time, my resonance disappearing into the sound of the mountain, the membrane, falling out of tune when Master Nubeshai stuck his needles in me, but always veering back, disappearing into the chord as the hollow people spoke, lost until I heard their choir.
What’s the recipe for despair? Suddenly, I could sing it.
My awareness collapsed completely, leaving me just me, alone in the woods with a nightmare creature hovering over me.
“We keep him safe with the rest,” Kjolla’s voice said. Kjolla’s grown-up voice, a small window into what might have been. For a moment, it didn’t seem so much like I’d lost him. I couldn’t hear the choir anymore, but I still knew it was there, and his voice in it. “She will destroy him.”
“You already did that,” I said. But now I knew better.
“He was given to us. We will protect him until the end. You must protect the membrane.”
Then she was gone, and the rest of the hollow people with her. I stood up, brushed myself off, and walked to the tree line. No sign of them. I knelt, bent over and heaved up everything I’d ever eaten, and half of what my mother had while she carried me. Then I went back to the edge of the mountain, stretched out and fell fast asleep.
Two tributes a year, and anybody who disturbs their nests. That’s all the hollow people demand to keep them from raiding towns and cities. Two samples. Two voices to steal for their chorus. Two bodies returned, pulped and bloodied. Arranged.
Nobody had known that the hollow people were nesting near that raspberry patch. It was unfair to punish Kjolla for something when he couldn’t have known better. The hollow people compromised by letting him stand as one of the mandatory tributes, though we usually gave volunteers who were old or dying. Everybody called it mercy. They looked me in the eye, before letting me see the body, and told me how grateful I should be for that mercy. I shouldn’t take it so badly when Kjolla was so brave. After all, he was still smiling.
I had nine hours before my consultation when I arrived back at the apprentice hall. I spent them in a lab with my case. It was more than enough time.
Master Nubeshai took one look at me as I came in, then didn’t say anything. No “How was your trip?” or “Did you find what you needed?” Master Nubeshai never wasted words by asking questions with obvious answers.
I arrived at the prison, my case slung over my shoulders, exactly on time. I was a bit disheveled, hadn’t stopped even to shave since returning, but none of the prison guards who checked my pass noticed or cared. Why would they? I was only there to consult with the madwoman who’d tried to end the world.
She was still ugly, her bones just as jagged under her flesh, her hair just as limp and stringy, but I could see something else now, something telling in her calm poise as she perched on her narrow bench. It was faint, but something in her posture reminded me of the hollow people who’d spoken to me. I suspect they’d meant for me to see the resemblance. I suspect I knew what she would sound like to them.
Neither of us spoke as I pressed the button on the side of my case and let it unfold. I caught a whiff of raspberries as I pulled the new vial from among the rows. It was small, alone in the palm of my hand, unlabeled. Master Nubeshai wouldn’t approve of the plan for this vial, no matter how carefully I labeled it.
“You found it,” she said as I stepped through the force field of her cell.
I closed my eyes and saw Kjolla’s smile.
“You met them, and found the recipe.”
“They’re frightened of you,” I said.
“They should be.”
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
I opened my eyes again and watched her. Her shoulders rolled as she shifted on the bench, and her voice, the one so beautiful it pulled at the strings of the universe, came at me like a slow trickle, easy and inevitable all at once. “They were lovers. Lovers and scientists and makers so passionate they formed our Bubble. And we took advantage of their exhaustion to sunder them. But we have no right to keep them apart.”
“Dhalig Mora chose his pit. Vasik Mora her keep. They sundered themselves.”
“We’ve put locks on the keep. And you’ve seen the pit. You know despair, Sentimancer. You’ve tasted it. You hold it in your hand. Can you truly accept existence at the expense of your creators’ despair?”
Understanding came, the answer I’d gone to Bernin to find. “You lost your lover.”
“And everything else in the bargain. But time heals, and I’d learned something once it did.”
“What’s an osmoid?” I asked.
Her lips turned in a small, sad smile that barely showed the gaps between her teeth. “Someone who understands the nature of the Sleeping Bubble. Someone who can control it, a bit.”
“You have a way out of this cell,” I said. “That’s why you aren’t afraid of the execution.”
“True,” she said.
“Could you destroy the hollow people?” I asked.
“I could.”
I took a step toward her as I loaded the vial into an injector. Protocol dictated any treatment should begin by taking a blood sample and establishing a baseline, but I wasn’t there to follow protocol. I already knew this patient wouldn’t be commissioning a mark for me. Moras, she wasn’t even going to consent to this treatment. “How can you leave the hollow people be, yet condemn us for locking the cages the Moras built for themselves?”
“If I reunite the Moras and end the world, that destroys the hollow people too,” she said.
If I’d taken better care of Kjolla, if I’d watched him more closely, been able to feed him better, enforced more discipline … I don’t know. If I’d done any of a thousand other things, he’d have never bothered that nest and he’d have grown up and finished school and become something great. He might have come to say some of the words the hollow people gave him when they spoke to me. But I didn’t do any of those things and all that was left of Kjolla were my memories. And his voice. “They must preserve their samples.”
Finally, a break in her calm. I could see the edges of alarm in her eyes, even as they started to glow. Her skin shimmered, like the night sky, and suddenly she was as beautiful as her voice, the sight of her stretching and melting into the world around her, unctuously enchanting. She was fading, escaping, bendin
g the membrane that sheltered our tiny little constructed universe to put herself elsewhere. Melting into the chord of the universe.
I lunged and stabbed her with the needle.
She collapsed back into herself, the shimmer gone. Her eyes were wide and watering with fresh tears. Her bony chest heaved as she gasped, and she flailed against me. I took a step back, letting her come back to herself, letting her realize what I’d done.
She’d lost her lover and become like them.
“That’s not … what did you do?” she asked.
There are no bad emotions. But there are dangerous ones.
“I gave you what the hollow people gave me,” I said, stepping out of the cell. I closed my case and pressed the button on its side, letting it compact once more. “It’s a bit of an overdose, but soon you’ll agree you needed it.”
As it turns out, there’s a really good reason a Sentimancer should never induce despair.
“I can’t … everything’s gone flat again … won’t let me pass …”
“You’re cured.” Not permanently, but they were going to execute her soon. I hefted my case over my shoulder and started down the hallway.
“What is it?”
I shouted her answer over my shoulder without breaking stride. “Hope.” After this, I was definitely never going to take prison duty again.
What are you feeling, Georg?
Peace.
One ought to have some sort of transcendent reaction to the realization that the world exists because the gods are trapped in the same abyss you’ve occupied for three years. It should be inspiring or comforting or, I don’t know, cathartic. Whatever the right reaction is, I wasn’t experiencing it. I’d shackled the osmoid, and saved a piece of Kjolla. That was much more important than the metaphysical misery of the universe.
The urchins were just setting up the first rounds of rat-catcher when I arrived. I took up a post at the edge of the ring where I could see them as they prepped their dogs, riling them up by playing tug-of-war with bits of twisted rags. My change rattled in my pocket as I looked them over.