“She didn't die,” Serit said. “I’ll explain what just happened, but first let's get out of here.”
They turned around and started the slow process of cutting through the crowd of people gathered around the hole. The chattering had mostly faded, replaced by melancholic looks and some whispered prayer. It looked just like the end of a funeral.
“I saw her explode,” Saia said as soon as they were out of the partition and crossing into the central room.
“What you saw was her body turning into water. She rained.”
“And that didn’t kill her?”
“She will come back, eventually.”
They stopped talking when a priest passing by glared at them and only resumed the explanation once they were outside of the temple.
“This is the fundamental problem of us shilvé: we can't descend below a certain altitude without turning into water. Or better, éshan, blood.”
“That's why you never come down to earth?”
Serit nodded.
“We’ve tried in the past, but we physically can’t.”
Saia took it all in, observing the morning activities going on around them. A couple was carrying bags of food on a wooden cart. A well-dressed man left a shop with a smile, a servant trailing behind him with a rolled-up carpet on her arms. An old man sitting on a bench was holding a bottle, gaze lost somewhere in front of him.
That last vision momentarily distracted her from her thoughts: it would have been a very sad image to see, back at the mountain, but now she knew that the man was only reading.
“Why did she jump, though? She did that to herself, some people even wanted her to stay.”
“She didn't have any choice. It has to do with how viss works in our bodies.”
Saia was walking toward the staircase to the first level, but Serit took a turn left.
“We're taking the elevators. Anyways, as you probably know, human bodies produce their own viss like most other creatures. We descended from humans, so our bodies do that too, but in much lower quantities, even if we still need it to function properly. A lot of it, actually, since our bodies have a higher percentage of water than humans do and they rely on the data in our viss to keep themselves together.”
Saia wanted to ask about the 'descending from humans' part, but Serit was already moving on with the explanation.
“So our bodies developed a solution to avoid meeting a premature death: once the quantity of viss becomes too low, we start feeling an itch that becomes stronger the more we ignore it. We call it the ‘urge to rain’.”
They were reaching the end of the path. Saia saw a huge entrance in the wall of rock in front of them. Not many people were headed there, but she guessed the bottom’s inhabitants were rich enough that they didn't have to leave for other levels to get what they needed.
“The only way to stop this urge is to let ourselves turn into water, and that only happens when we die or get to a low enough altitude. The most efficient way is to just jump, like Hilon did. We have thirty holes in the temple, three for each god, destined solely to this purpose.”
“So she'll come back, right?”
“Yes.”
“When? How?” she asked before they could resume the explanation.
Serit laughed.
“ ‘When?’ is a question for the gods. We've been trying to find a reliable way to calculate it for centuries, but our science isn't at that point, yet.” They returned serious. “The 'how' is easier. Do you know how water travels around the world?”
“I know about the cycle of water, if that's what you're asking.”
“Our drops follow it too. We're unconscious during this time, but the viss in each drop makes sure that they all flow together and are more or less able to reunite if separated. The water in the sea is filled with viss from all kinds of creatures, so our drops gather it during their voyage. Once it's enough to sustain our full body for a significant amount of time, we evaporate and reform in our city.”
“Wait… If you're unconscious and the cities move around, how do you know where to reform?”
“The food we eat, the water we drink, the people we interact with leave data in our viss, and we leave our viss on the things we touch. It’s a distinct imprint that we can follow unconsciously. Then again, this process isn't perfect at all. Sometimes we wake up in a completely different city, sometimes the voyage takes longer than it usually does. And sometimes, we never return.”
They were at the entrance, a dark opening in the wall half a towerlength high. The passage was divided in two by a low wall of rock, two guards standing at both sides of it. They stared at Saia as she and Serit passed between their vertical tridents, but didn’t move or say anything.
The short hallway opened into a larger room that resembled a bigger corridor rather than a proper hall. The wall in front of them was barely visible behind five large cabins of metal and the huge chains that kept them suspended. The chains disappeared beyond the ceiling, continuing inside a vertical square tunnel. Saia guessed the number on top of each cabin, one to five, identified the level they led to.
A deep rumbling started in the walls as the chain labeled ‘one’ tensed and moved up, carrying the corresponding cabin with it. It disappeared into the square tunnel, out of her perception.
They joined the line in front of its empty hole, made of only three other people who hadn’t managed to enter the elevator in time. There was an operator behind a small desk at the top of the line: she had a small bottle tucked in her palm, but her eyes looked aware of her surroundings. Saia realized she was just listening to something and not having a vision.
“So that was why people were crying,” she said quietly. “She might not return?”
“Exactly. But that's a risk that comes with age, and she's still fairly young.”
The cabin arrived with a soft clattering of metal net against iron supports. There was a woman with a child inside. They hurried out, the kid almost running to keep up with their mother.
“Kids have to jump too?” Saia asked, horrified at the idea.
“Yes,” Serit answered while they stepped into the cabin. “The first jump happens between five and seven years of age. The following ones are more frequent.”
Saia carefully stepped onto the iron floor.
“Don't worry,” Serit reassured her. “I’ve seen thirty people pressed in here and it didn't even squeak.”
The other passengers gave the two of them confused looks. They seemed to relax once the elevator started moving upwards.
“It must be scary,” Saia said. “I’d be terrified of jumping even now that I can’t get hurt, I can’t imagine what a kid would feel.”
Serit shrugged, glancing at the three other people in the cabin.
“Usually the parent that’s closest to their next urge to rain goes with them.”
“Will you need to jump too?” Saia asked.
They laughed.
“You wish. I returned five months ago.”
“So when will you leave again?”
Their eyes twinkled with amusement.
“I fear you'll have to do your own research on this.”
The cabin stopped quite suddenly, to the point Saia feared some kind of issue. But the other passengers didn’t even change expression as they stepped out, into a room that was only different from the previous one because there was a bit more light shining through the huge entrance. A lot more people were waiting to get in, only kept in check by the gaze of the operator.
They left the room through the entrance’s partition dedicated to the passengers who were leaving and found themselves outside, at the top of the first level. Saia could see the stairs several towerlengths away, one at their left and one at their right. Serit headed to the left, and she became too busy examining that unknown part of the city to ask more questions.
The alleys were as narrow as anywhere else on the first level, but there were many more shops. She slowed down in front of a bottle store, each one in a different color and shape. She saw necks that arched like a heron's, bellies squeezed like hourglasses and even round little barrels.
“Do you need one?” Serit asked, already reaching for one of their pouches.
Saia almost recoiled at that. She accelerated.
“I thought I made it clear that I don't want anything. Either you free me or you stop pretending you give a shit about me. If you feel guilty, you only have yourself to blame.”
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Serit hurried to follow her.
“That's cheap glass, I certainly don’t expect to buy anyone's forgiveness with that. And I don't need yours, by the way. There are more important things than what either of us wants.”
“Like what? Using me to... I don't even know what it is that you're trying to do. Making me prevent you from raining?”
Serit nodded.
“And allow us to go to earth.”
“Why? To attack us better?”
Serit frowned.
“We don’t attack humans anymore. We’ve stipulated treaties with all the major cities.”
“With the mountain too?”
They hesitated.
“A lot of cities pass from that area, it could have been any one of them.”
Saia didn’t need to move her eyes to look at them, but she turned her head anyways to meet their gaze.
“Do you know for sure that this city didn’t attack us?”
“I’m not part of the guards, so no, I can’t be sure of that.”
“Would they have a reason to do that?”
Serit’s eyes focused ahead.
“I can think of some, but they’re not compelling enough to waste artillery on.”
Saia didn’t stop staring, even if Serit was clearly avoiding her gaze now.
“Our gods have to constantly protect us from you.”
“I still don’t think it was Iriméze.”
“No, you’re right,” Saia looked ahead. “You’re the ones who kidnap people instead.”
Serit sighed, but didn't reply.
Saia wondered once again where her shard was. Her instinct told her to look up, but she realized it was because she expected to find the mountain and its secrets. The shard could be everywhere in the city, or even outside of it. There were so many things she didn't understand, and they could deactivate her from anywhere in the world.
But, she realized, if they were too far away they needed someone to tell them to deactivate her. Even if they could observe her at all times, it was unlikely that Serit didn’t have a way to alert the guards, in case she attacked. So she had to convince Serit that they were in danger in order to make them reveal their method for communicating with whoever had the shard, but to the point that they would actually use it.
She was so immersed in thought she didn't realize they had arrived at the warehouse. She followed Serit to the first floor.
“What now?” she asked once they were inside the kitchen.
“Now I'll eat and think about this afternoon’s experiment. I will need your participation. Do you think you can help me today?”
“What if I refuse?”
“Then your day is free from obligations. Just keep in mind that the sooner we give some results to the representatives, the less likely it is they'll deactivate you.”
That was one thing she wanted to avoid: being deactivated without warning, from afar, without a chance to fight back. And again, she didn't want to lose all of that viss just because the mountain was too far.
“I want an empty bottle, though. And some éshan.”
Serit smiled a bit.
“Third door on the right, don't mind the chaos.”
They took out a bundle of keys as they said that, detached one and gave it to her.
“I want it back when you're finished,” they said.
Saia ignored them, heading down the corridor. She tried the key on a different door, but it didn't turn. She gave up and opened the right one, identical to all of the others. The inside was like a second, smaller warehouse, with the same contents of the bigger one, packed one on top of the other in boxes of cheap wood that scraped against the ceiling. A library, or maybe she should call it a 'bottlery', was pressed from the sides by two such piles. The éshan in the bottles trembled a bit, stirred by the door's closing. She touched them one by one as if to comfort them, reading the contents: they were all empty, not a single speck of viss on the inside and only faint traces on the outside, from the people who had handled them.
She took one, then turned her attention to the boxes that surrounded her. They were so tightly pressed together she couldn't open them, but by expanding her domain a bit she found tools of steel on the other side, vials encapsulated in sturdier wood, molds with spiral patterns on the inside and even nuggets of ores.
She left and headed to her own room. Once there, she sat on the bed with crossed legs and held the bottle in both hands.
On a whim, she took out Aili's shard from its cavity. She could feel a piece of her viss inside, but she didn't know how to reach for its connection to Aili's sphere without tainting it with her own energies. She put it back: better to wait until it was Aili to contact her. She briefly wondered why she wasn't doing that, but rejected the surge of anxiety that came with that thought. It had been only a day, after all.
She focused on the bottle: she wanted to record everything she was experiencing of that world outside the mountain. Explaining what she'd seen with words was impossible, and Aili would have loved to receive all the details she could gather about the city and cloud people.
She started by transferring a bit of empty viss into the glass of the bottle, and from there into the liquid. It floated around, maintaining its shape instead of dispersing. That would have been the beginning: she'd learned how to find it from the course of Shilizé, a portion of viss devoid of information and brighter than the rest to signal that the reader should focus there first. The rest of the viss had to be thin like a string, extending from the beginning in gentle curves. The author hadn't seemed to follow a particular pattern, the only evident criteria was the huge amount of information that had to be packed inside that bottle, which forced the string to make tighter curves.
She hesitantly produced a string, thinking about the image of the mountain seen from above. She perceived the viss finding its place inside the bottle almost without effort. She put the container down, raised her hands, then hesitantly touched it again with a finger, this time to read the content.
The image was unclear, with more colors than shapes. She tried to take the viss back to redo the whole process, but found out she couldn't. She found it weird that a bottle could prevent her to take its contents, then she realised the bottle wasn’t the problem: it was her. The monks had made it so that the gods couldn't take viss from anything except each other, thus guaranteeing that a fugitive god would have eventually faded.
She was about to give up in frustration, then decided to try and modify the viss instead. If it turned out she couldn't do even that, she'd have used that bottle as practice, then only transferred the images into another one once she was sure she could do it properly.
She examined the information inside the viss: the image appeared in front of her, and at the same time she could sense the thread it came from. She focused on the small brown shape in the blue of the sea, Rabam's boat: she remembered being able to see it pretty clearly from where she was standing. She focused on the memory, the picture inside her mind, and sent more viss forward to merge with the existing thread and make it stronger.
She stopped reading and started again: the boat was clearer. The borders weren't as clean-cut as she would have liked, but she could distinguish Rabam's head and the rows he was holding. She looked at the rest of the picture: she needed to fill it in piece by piece with all the other details she remembered. Thankfully, her memory was inscribed in her viss, easy to recall and difficult to forget, even if it wasn’t easy to untangle it from all the others and copy it into the bottle as it was. The expenditure of viss wasn't excessive, certainly it was better than losing so much of it due to the precautions of the monks.
She set out to work and kept going until the light outside became a penumbra. Only the other side of the city was receiving light, now that the sun had started its slow descent.
Serit knocked at the door.
“Everything is ready for the experiment.”
Saia stood and hid the bottle under the cloudy shape of her bed.
“Yes, I'm coming.”
She looked at her clothes: the good part about having the body of a statue was that she didn't need to change them that often. She still waited a bit before opening the door, to make it clear that she wasn't at Serit's orders.
When she stepped out, Serit was already walking away. They turned their head, showing eyes wide with excitement, even if the rest of their face remained serious, focused like the point of the chain of that goddess's statue. They led her without explanation to a room, the first to the right coming from the kitchen. There was a round table that occupied half of the room, made of more solid wood than the floor beneath it.
The left side of the room was occupied by a line of four smaller tables. They were cluttered with objects grouped by type and size: tools in the first one, like hammers, pliers, scissors, but also nails, screws and bolts; bottles and other glass containers on the second, empty or full, but not labelled; more bottles, this time filled and labelled; and on the last table, an object she could only describe as an open nutshell of iron, bigger than two human heads put side to side. The grooves that were chiselled on the inside reminded her of the monks’ well, except they were mostly incomplete, a huge part of the surface left untouched.
She approached that last table, ignoring the central one. The two halves of the object were kept together by a hinge and could be closed shut through a complicated mechanism enclosed in a bump on the husk with a lock at the top. Inside, in the middle of the unfinished pattern of grooves, there was a perfectly spherical cavity.
She snapped her head around to look at Serit, standing opposite of her behind the big table.
“What is this?”
“Nothing special, for now. But in order to obtain what we want, we'll have to change the movement of the viss inside your sphere. In any case, I need more data to complete that thing, it's not even a prototype now.”
“Why the lock?”
“It's not properly a lock, but it will seal the husk tight, so the viss won't disperse.”
Saia examined the object with her domain. It seemed easy to break, at least.
She tore away her attention from the husk and focused it on the big table. It was mostly empty, except for two stacks of rough paper and a basin of water at the center. She approached the liquid and found out it wasn't water, but éshan full of viss. She touched the basin to read it, but it was mostly empty, with enough traces in it to connect it to Serit.
“Is it your blood?” she asked, without hiding the disgust.
Serit laughed.
“No, I've just put some viss inside it. You'll need it to manipulate the shape it will take.”
Saia put both hands on the table, the basin between them.
“Is this what I'm going to do? Create shapes?”
“For now, yes. Based on the results, we'll know how to proceed.”
Saia nodded. At least it didn’t sound as dangerous as much as boring.
“Which shape should I do?”
“Let's see…” Serit looked around the room. “A hammer.”
Saia expanded her domain to include the whole content of the basin. She visualized what she wanted to obtain and sent small winds to move the liquid around. She managed to make parts of it retreat and pile up, until they formed the general shape of a hammer.
Serit was scribbling down onto the sheets with a piece of graphite. They distractedly touched the éshan she was manipulating and jotted down something else.
“Excellent, but I need it to be solid. I should be able to pick it up. Even better, I should be able to pick it up and nail something to the wall without it becoming water again.”
Saia glared at them.
“I’ve never done anything like that.”
“Please try.”
Saia focused on the hammer of water and willed it to become solid. Nothing changed. She moved the viss around inside it, but it didn't have any effect. She stopped trying, maintaining the shape but not wasting more energy otherwise. Figuring out how to do that wasn’t her problem.
“I can’t,” she said.
Serit tapped the side of their cheek with the point of graphite.
“There's something I didn't tell you that might help to motivate you.”
They stepped around the table and approached the husk of iron.
“The connection you have to mount Ohat is quite strong. It's the kind of strength that's difficult to break but very useful to repurpose.” They ran an index along the grooves. “I intend to tie that connection to an object. A jewel of some kind, most likely, so that it can be worn without catching too much attention. The viss will leave your body to target it and keep the person who’s wearing it whole and solid even if they fall past the rain threshold. It’s essentially what your viss is already doing: keeping something together, just not a mountain but a person.”
Saia crossed her arms.
“So what? I'm not feeling particularly motivated.”
Serit looked at her.
“You should. I told you, the connection to mount Ohat is responsible for your constant loss of energy. If we change the connection, aiming it at something closer and smaller, we'll reduce the waste of viss significantly. Which is becoming increasingly important, since Iriméze is getting farther every day.”
Saia looked back at the basin, the hammer of transparent blood still jiggling at the bottom.
“So the solution you promised me…”
Serit nodded.
“It's the same thing that will allow us shilvé to walk the earth for the first time. I can only help you as much as you help me.”
Saia nodded, lowering her head. She focused on the hammer again as Serit stepped back behind the table.
“Let's try again,” they said, raising the graphite over the paper.