Episode 03
The head
My window shows a wall. I've had it for a very long time and I want to say, before anything else, that it's a good wall.
I'm one of the four hundred. The dowry. We walked in through the eastern gate behind a bride, a long time ago, and the city put us where it puts things: in cages, in side rooms, on chairs by windows. I got a side room off the Kanzlei and the chair, which is called the executor's, and the job is this. Four hundred households a year go out of the gate. Every household has small listening bodies in its walls, mice, and when a family is walked out at four in the morning the mice in that house would come apart, and take the walls with them, and the next house, and the next. So a dragon sits in the side room and holds them. Steady. Till the gate's shut. I've never had a better word for it than minding.
And through the mice, I hear the city. Every corridor. I heard all of this. Some of it twice, because it went past my door.
The page came back over the border after what his mentor called a while and what the ledger called two hundred and six years.
He had the small green one on his shoulder, and a way of walking he'd learned over there that made people in the palace look at his feet. I looked at his feet. He was walking around the mice. He didn't know he was doing it.
And Gucci had a plan.
Of course she did. She was the brightest scientist this city ever produced, and she'd had two hundred years and a grievance.
The plan was to hit them first.
I'll try to tell you what that meant. The ancient kingdom had never been attacked. Not once. Not by anyone, in a history so long they'd stopped keeping it. That's what safest means. And Gucci, in the Kanzlei, on the rail, under the ring of the oldest objects in the world, with four hundred small doors in front of her, had worked out how to do it. It was clever. It was the sort of clever that ends everything. I'm not going to describe it, because I heard it through a wall and it still works.
She told people herself. That was the Gucci of those years: she told you. She'd stopped hiding things somewhere around the crater, on the grounds that nobody who'd sent a creative message had the standing to object to anything. She'd stand in the corridor outside my door with the gold hair up and the smile on and explain, kindly, patiently, one at a time, how she was going to end the safest place in all the worlds, and ask if you'd like tea.
"They'll send the Nymphen," the page said. That was outside my door too.
"They'll send the Nymphen," she agreed. "And I'll have them read something. You taught me that, page. You and my sister. It's the best thing anyone's ever taught me."
So he stopped her.
The same way. That's how he said it, later, standing in my door, and he said it flat, so I'll say it flat: he stopped her the same way they'd stopped the Nymphen at the crater, with the same friends, with a message. Exactly the same way.
"I rubbed her the wrong way," he said.
That's Chanel's joke. She made it the night they decided, in the war room, over the map of the coast that doesn't exist, and a mouse in the war-room wall brought it down to me, and I've been told it's the worst joke in the whole business and I've kept it anyway. It's the last time anybody heard her laugh at a thing she'd said herself.
What it means is this. The thing they did in the crater wasn't a lie, or not only. It was a message, in the language the Nymphen read, cut into the ground where a city had been, and that language doesn't care who wrote it. It's a way of making a truth about somebody so loud that the world hears it before they do. They'd done it once, to point three Nymphen at three names.
And he did it again. With his friends. In the Kanzlei, at night, with Gucci's own four hundred mice. I felt it go through them. He made her plan legible: to the city, to the ledger, to the ring of old things over the hall, and across the border to the ancient kingdom, in the language they read. He took the thing she'd told him kindly in a corridor and he wrote it where everything could see it.
I held the mice steady while he did it. I'd like that on the record somewhere. It's the one thing in this chapter I did.
Then they showed her.
That was the mistake. I'd like to be clear which part.
Not the message. The message was right; it's the only thing in this chapter that was. The mistake was going and showing her, four of them and a dragon, in the hall at the end of the rail, twenty steps from my door, because some part of him that had been a page for four hundred years still believed that if you put the truth in front of a person, they'd look at it.
She looked at it.
She looked for a long time. I had the door open; I usually do. She sat on the rail with the pedals under her feet, which are connected to nothing, and read her own plan off the walls, and understood that everyone else could read it too, and I saw the exact second she understood there was no getting it back. I'd tell you what her face did. I felt it through the wall, and I've never found the word.
Then she turned round.
His dragon was on his shoulder, where it always was. Green. Five points, if you looked. And she reached out with the hand that had buttered bread at the end of eleven years of silence, and took him by the head, and pulled it off.
One movement. The way you'd take the top off something.
I'm going to leave a space here.
Here's what happened in the rest of the city, because I'm the only one who was in a position to feel all of it.
Four hundred of us, in cages and side rooms and on chairs by windows that showed walls, felt it at once. That's the network; that's what we are. What had never happened before, and hasn't since, is what the network does when what comes down the line isn't a dog in a basement or an earthquake but that: a bonded one. The small kind. The kind that's born for somebody. Killed by a hand, in front of its person.
It didn't mirror. There was no wave. Nobody panicked and nobody died.
We held.
Every dragon in the city, at that second, without a word passing, put a hand on whatever was nearest. A wall. A bar. A floor. Another dragon. I put mine on the window. And we held still, and held each other still, four hundred of us, and kept it that way. I have thought about it a great deal since, in this room, and the nearest I've got to a word for it is holy, and I'm not comfortable with the word, and I've not found a better one. A family deciding, all at once, in the worst second of its history, to be in the room and not come apart.
It lasted about a minute. Then, one by one, they let go of the walls, and looked at Gucci, and looked at the page, and left.
Not the hall. The city. Over the next year, without anyone giving an order, the dowry walked back out of the eastern gate it had come in by. Didn't stop at the border. Didn't come back. I felt each one go, the way you feel a tooth. And the executor's chair stood empty at four in the morning for the first time in the history of the ledger, because I wasn't in it. I was at the gate, watching them, trying to work out whether they were leaving Gucci or leaving him. I still don't know.
People say the dragons disappeared, in a tone, as if it were weather. It wasn't. We were given. And then we were shown what the people we'd been given to would do, and we took ourselves back.
I didn't go. That's the thing I have to account for, and I'll do it at the end. First, the two things that happened because I was the only one who didn't.
The first is the lizards.
A city without an executor is a city where four hundred households a year don't get walked out of the gate, and the ledger doesn't care about your feelings, and I wasn't in the chair; I'd walked as far as the gate and no further, and I couldn't make myself sit down again. Within a decade there were families inside the walls with nothing under the column and nowhere to go, and it was Gucci, of course, who solved it. She'd learned, years before, how to put a person into a mouse. Now she worked out how to put a mouse into a lizard, one of the big pale ones from the drains. The lizards could feel the mice the way we could, badly. They sat in my chair. They pushed the pedals with their feet, which are connected to nothing, and they walked families out of the gate at four in the morning with nobody holding anyone steady, and people got hurt, and the ledger recorded it. That's the Kanzlei you'll have heard of. The one that looks like an office. It was never meant to be an office. It was meant to have a dragon in it who minded.
I sat in the side room and listened to the lizards do my job. I'd like to say why and I can't.
The second is the egg.
There was a brass egg on a cushion in the room at the end of the hall. Two boys had made it in a garden, for when one of them grew up. It sat through the horses. It sat through the clean city. It sat through six children in good clothes standing in front of it for eleven minutes each. And the day she took the head off the page's dragon, Gucci walked past him on her way out of the hall, and past my open door, and picked it up, and put it in her coat.
She hid it. As far as I know, nobody's found it. He's looked; he told me so, once, standing in my door on his way through, and said he'd cut every place he'd looked into a diamond so he'd not look twice. Then he asked if I'd felt where she went with it, through the mice, that day.
I had. I told him. It didn't help. She'd walked out of every wall I had.
After that: the Alliance.
A council. The dowry that had walked out, and every mystic thing left in a world going soft: they took the city over in the end, when Gucci's time had run long enough, and closed the doors. All of them. The hundred small ones, and the big one at the end of the hall, and the one in the ground. For good. And the secret city, the Forbidden one, the one with the twelve thousand years and the drains, started to go, the way a thing goes when nobody's holding it.
The page went up. Into the galaxy, with no dragon and a green star and a bag of diamonds, and I'm told he makes lists.
And I'm still in the side room. That's the account.
I've decided it more than once. I stayed the first time because somebody should feel the mice go out of that city one house at a time, and I thought it should be one of us and not a lizard. I stayed the second time, when the Alliance came and asked if I wanted to go, because I found I didn't want to be asked. I told myself I was minding.
There's nothing left to mind. The mice went a long while ago. The lizards after them. It's been quiet so long I can hear the wall settle.
I've put my hand on the window. I've held it there about a minute, which is the proper length.
The wall's still there. It's a good wall. I'm going to go and see what's on the other side of it.