Chapter 15: Bone Tithes – Part 4

They travelled mostly in silence, only stopping on rare occasion for the woman to consult her map. Beyond their initial meeting, she did not seem particularly talkative and the boy was even less so, preferring to keep all his thoughts to himself.

He had stowed the bones she gave him in his drawstring bag and spent most his time walking a few paces behind her, wrestling with the part of him that still insisted she couldn’t be trusted. He knew it made no sense to think that way. Why would she have given him bones if she meant to betray him? It wasn’t like she was short for food or water either, and nobody killed for a knife; it wasn’t the worth the risk. Yet some part of him held tightly to a suspicion that would not relent.

After a couple of hours they came upon idol, and the woman stopped beneath it and peered up into its dark eyes with ones of her own. The boy had never paid much attention to the eyes of other people before, perhaps because so many wore masks or goggles that obscured them, but as he watched the woman’s face he realised he had been missing much indeed. There was something very old and very wise about the way she gazed at that stone face she no doubt thought her own. It almost seemed to the boy as though all the years of her life were wrapped up together and squeezed into those eyes, cramming them with hurt and wit, fear and fury, distance and hope. And yet it also seemed that they were very, very tired.

Then she looked away from the idol and in an instant all that was gone. Her eyes were just eyes, dark brown, set in an aged face beneath a brow that often frowned. The boy quickly looked away towards the idol as she turned to him. Its eyes were quite different. They were empty, cold, twin yawning hollows of darkness that drew in the gaze of those who passed them by, commanded their attention and held it as long as they could.

‘Gaze,’ they seemed to say. ‘Gaze upon us, upon yourself in stone.’

As he realised that, the boy took a step back and decided without the slightest shred of doubt that the idols were either omens of ill, or the makers of it. When they set off again, he led the way, and did so until the woman had to tug on his sleeve to guide him down the right street.

‘You fear them?’ She looked down at him, her stick, which he had long since realised she did not need, swinging carelessly ahead of her as she walked.

He shook his head. ‘No. I mean, I didn’t. I think they’re evil.’

‘You and me both,’ she agreed, and for a while the boy thought she might say more, but she seemed to decide against it.

Before long, the topic was gone from both their minds. They turned around into another street and saw by its side a stone ramp that cut down into the ground, where a tall, wide entrance led down into the cold and darkness of the tunnels beneath the city. There was no light down there, at least none that could be seen from the entrance, and the boy did not intend to investigate any further than that.

The woman glowered at the tunnel as they walked past. ‘Been a long time since I saw one of them. Mines, I understand, though I’ve never met anyone who could say where the miners might be. I do wish they could be closed. All that shadow down there, who knows what could be lurking?’

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The boy looked over his shoulder with renewed unease as the mine receded behind them. ‘Do you know what they were mining?’

‘Can’t say I do,’ she admitted. ‘Maybe whatever it was is what did for this place.’ She nodded around at the buildings. ‘Something must have. No one builds a ruined city.’

That gave the boy much to think about. He had never considered before that the city must have been built. It had always seemed to him that this was just the world: an endless broken city cloaked in fog and harried by screechers and unseen beasts, as the Tithe Proctor stalked the nights collecting bones from its inhabitants. But he supposed everything had to come from somewhere, and he did know that buildings were made by people, although he wasn’t at all sure how he knew that.

And the people had to come from somewhere too. He knew where people came from, of course, but there must have been first people. Where had they come from? Looking around at his derelict surroundings, he tried to imagine what it might have looked like before it fell to ruin. Had the skies been clear? Had the buildings shone in sunlight, had trees grown at the sides of the roads or around the fountains, had birds of feather and flesh flown the skies in place of the bone-made screechers?

He looked up at an old skyscraper that was passing on their right and tried to imagine all of its windows unbroken, the clean glass gleaming bright under a fair sky, people bustling on the streets below as they went about their days unafraid, not wanting for food or bones, the world fresh and alive around them, with no Proctor to darken their nights and weave dread and desperation into their waking hours. Had that world ever existed? It seemed so far away, like a distant memory that had never truly been anything more than a dream.

As they walked, his thoughts slowly faded into vaguity and time ticked on, marked by the consistent rhythm of their footsteps. That was the way most days passed in the city. After a while, all the streets and all the buildings in them, and even the people, few though they were, started to blend into one another until they all looked much the same. When tithes, food and water were all secure, there was little to keep the mind occupied, so even with the prospect of the gardens themselves ahead, the boy drifted into relative thoughtlessness, keeping alert enough only to follow the woman and listen for screechers.

And it was well that he did listen, for as afterenoon grew late and the first shadows of evening began to stretch long and leering from their corners, one of those high and baleful cries echoed down from above. He did not intend to react as slowly as he had before, so he leapt to the side without thinking and dashed for a doorway. As he skidded into it, he spun around with his knife raised and stared as the woman ducked and swung at something with her walking stick.

The doorway was low and the street quite narrow, so he did not get a proper look at the screecher, but he heard its cry as the woman turned to run towards him. Her swing seemed to have fended it away for a moment, perhaps even enough of a moment that she would make it, but after only two steps she stumbled and fell. Her stick left her hand, and as she scrambled to her feet, wide and wild eyes fixed on the boy, a terrible stridor rang from wall to wall and two clawed feet wrought in bone reached down and plucked her from the ground.

For a few moments, the boy did not really react. He stood and stared mutely at the empty space before him, the patch of scattered dirt and sand where the woman had been only moments ago. She had not made a sound as she was snatched into the sky. There had not been time. Her stick lay where it had fallen, discarded. As he watched, a piece of paper, rolled up and tied with string, drifted down on the air and came to rest among the dust.

Minutes passed, then more, and more, and he did not hear the cry of the screecher again. Eventually, he stepped forwards and knelt to pick up the map. He turned his eyes skywards, searching for any sign of anything, though all was far too gone for there to be any hope of that, and his gaze met only silent fog.

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