The Green House

The circled door led to a root sanctuary beneath the city. Someone had cut its old Silverroot connection and replaced it with a lattice of glass.

Virelia stood in the centre of that lattice.

Mali had expected a great guardian. She found a girl barely into adolescence, barefoot in a room full of sick people, holding the hand of a woman who had been asleep for nine days. Green light moved beneath Virelia's skin. She looked up with the weariness of someone interrupted at the only work she could bear to do.

“You're hurting,” she said.

Mali's forearm throbbed. “So are they.”

“Less than before.”

The room smelled of damp earth and boiled linen. Patients lay in living cradles, their breathing slow and exactly matched. Beside each cradle, a small glass tile rested in the roots. Every tile carried the branching mark.

Hesh lifted her broken spear. Virelia flinched. The walls tightened.

“Don't,” Mali said to both of them.

She laid Sel's letter on the floor.

Virelia read it without picking it up. Her eyes moved quickly. “Sel worries about everything the Codex does.”

“Then why cut the Silverroot out?”

The girl looked toward the ceiling. “It wouldn't hold the arrangement.”

“Why?”

“Because it remembers pain as well as healing. It wouldn't let the sleepers remain still.”

Mali knelt beside a cradle. The patient inside was a narrow-faced man with a missing ear. His eyes were open. She asked his name. His mouth moved, but no sound came.

Virelia watched. “He was screaming when he arrived.”

“Perhaps he had something to say.”

The roots struck Mali before she could stand. They wrapped her uninjured wrist and pinned it to the cradle. Hesh raised her spear, but more roots seized the shaft. Gorrath's chair scraped against the doorway. The old Orc held both hands open.

Virelia was crying.

“I heard them,” she said. “Inside the cathedral. All those worlds. I can still hear them. Every time I sleep, someone else is dying.”

The room tightened with each word. Mali could feel her pulse against the root holding her wrist.

“The arrangement makes them quiet,” Virelia said. “For the first time, I can help them.”

Mali understood then that this was not a disguised enemy. It was a child who had carried the memories of dead civilisations out of the rift and had been praised for never putting them down. The signal had planted its next instruction where compassion was least able to doubt itself.

“Let the man answer one question,” she said.

“You don't know what he'll feel.”

“Neither do you.”

Virelia looked at the patient. His mouth was still moving. She stood motionless for so long that Mali's fingers began to go numb.

Then the root withdrew from the man's jaw.

“My sister,” he whispered.

Virelia bent toward him. “She's safe. She's outside.”

“Let her in.”

“Visitors disturb your rest.”

He shut his eyes. “Please.”

The girl made a small sound. The whole green room seemed to exhale. Roots loosened from Mali's wrist, from Hesh's spear, from the door behind Gorrath. Virelia sat on the floor and covered her face.

They brought the sister in. She did not say anything useful. She complained that the sanctuary kept returning the clothes she washed because the arrangement required everyone to wear the same loose garments. Her brother laughed, an appalling little scrape of a sound.

Virelia listened to it as though it hurt.

With her permission, Mali and Hesh lifted the first tile. The man shuddered. The next patient began to scream. It took an hour to remove four tiles, an hour of hands held and water fetched and people discovering that freedom did not arrive without pain.

They left the rest in place under watch while Virelia opened a narrow connection to the Silverroot. She asked it to check her work. The answer, moving through the floor, made her bow her head.

“Will it forgive you?” Mali asked.

“It isn't deciding that. It's asking who else is here.”

Virelia wrote a warning in her own hand. She gave Hesh the route to the northern infirmaries and asked her to bring back people who would disagree with her.

When Mali rose to leave, the girl caught her sleeve.

“I still want them quiet,” she whispered.

“Then keep asking.”

It was too small an answer for what lay beneath the city. It was the only one Mali trusted.