Emmi Itäranta - The City of Woven Streets

I hand the skin back and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. Janos studies my face.

‘So that’s where they kept you,’ Janos says, and I feel his gaze on the tattoo of the Tainted. ‘I suspected as much.’ His fingers brush my forehead. I start. The touch is light, but it burns the raw skin like a firebrand.

‘How did you find me?’ I ask.

‘A message was delivered an hour ago,’ he says. ‘The House of Words is mostly intact, but we’ve been moving scriptures all day long, building a makeshift library on the roof. The messenger looked like he had journeyed to the continent and back in search of me.’

‘What did the message say?’

‘Only that you were alive and had escaped the House of the Tainted. I couldn’t think of anywhere else to look for you.’

‘Where did the message come from?’

‘I don’t know,’ Janos says. ‘There was nothing else in it. But I doubt it was sent from the House of Webs. Its foundations were damaged in the flood, and the City Guard are moving the weavers away. There is probably no one left there.’

I remember the strangely tilted silhouette of the house on the hill, a crack in the landscape.

Moth had said she knew who I was. Could she have been working with the Dreamers without me knowing it? But if that were true, why did she not help me sooner?

‘How long was I gone?’ I ask.

‘Two and a half months.’

That corresponds with the rough track of days I have been keeping. All that sky-gazing, every memorized moon phase was not wasted, after all.

One question has been scorching my throat since Janos removed his hood. I have to ask.

‘Have you found Valeria?’

A shadow deepens on Janos’s face, then dissolves into light again. I cannot tell if it is the lantern-flame growing fainter and brighter, or something else.

‘We still don’t know what happened to her,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’

The words are slow, deliberate. He must have known I would ask. I breathe in the meaning.

Valeria has been missing for two and a half months.

‘I spoke to your house-elder after you disappeared. After I received your note.’ Janos’s voice is calm, calmer than I would like it to be. ‘She claimed to know nothing. That you had simply left.’

‘Weaver?’ Anger rises in me, bitter as bile. ‘She’s lying. She showed me a way out of the House of Webs, knowing it would take me to the House of the Tainted. I’m certain she had something to do with Valeria’s disappearance.’

Two vertical lines appear between Janos’s eyebrows.

‘Don’t you believe me?’ I ask.

‘I do,’ he says. ‘But why would she have done it?’

‘The Council must have pressured her into it somehow,’ I say. ‘I just don’t know why.’

We stare at each other without answers.

‘Are you certain Valeria was not in the House of the Tainted too?’ Janos asks.

Moth’s words surface from my memory. She’s not here. But she could have been lying.

‘I didn’t see her there the whole time,’ I say.

My mind wants to create a way out for Valeria, a hundred ways out. I see her flee the House of Webs and hide in an abandoned building, stealing her food from the market. I see Valeria assume a different identity, take on another name and find work as a weaver, or perhaps a net maker. I see her buy a place on a trading ship somehow and leave the island. I believe in all these scenarios, and any others that will help her survive. Yet under them lies another possibility I cannot deny.

‘Do you think she’s alive?’ I ask. I have thought the sentence many times, but speaking it aloud wrenches my heart.

Someone shouts in the distance. Janos turns his head and looks towards the window.

‘We should go,’ he says. ‘It’s getting late. The city may be restless tonight, with looters coming for the broken buildings.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Somewhere safe,’ Janos says and picks up the lantern from the floor.

I note that he did not answer my question.

After long, quiet canals and distant lights moving in the thickening dark, we stand in a sheltered and shadow-filled space, and Janos opens a door into a shaft. It is wide, made for something larger than humans, and iron rungs descend into its deep maw.

‘You’ll need to climb down,’ he says. ‘Do you feel strong enough?’

I do not.

‘Yes,’ I say.

But the drop is long, and we are going underground. I imagine water, flood. Entrapment. Some of it must show on my face, because Janos says, ‘This place is entirely flood-proof, if that’s what you’re thinking about. Place your hand on the wall.’

I do. Its murky surface is not cold enough to be metal and not warm enough to be wood. It is not coarse enough to be stone, and it resembles something I recognize, something like…

‘Glass,’ I say. ‘Why are the walls made of glass?’

‘To keep the water out,’ Janos says. ‘This is one of the two entrances, which are both higher than floods have ever reached. The space we are about to enter is enclosed in a thick shell of glass. There is no crack for the water to seep in.’

I turn to look at him.

‘Who built this?’ I ask.

‘We don’t know,’ Janos replies. ‘We think it may have been the Web-folk.’ He nods towards the rungs. ‘Do you want to go first?’

I say nothing, but he sees my face.

‘I’ll go first,’ he says.

The lantern light hovers on the walls, shifting and swinging with Janos’s movements. He climbs down much faster than I do. His boots hit the rungs below me. I squeeze the ladder with tight fingers, and my breath dangles dense and thorny in my throat. Eventually my feet meet the floor. I kneel to brush it with my hand: it really is made of glass. It is scratched and dusty and has lost whatever polish it may once have had, but it is beautiful nevertheless, the colour of dark seawater and stones slickened by it. I think of the Glass Grove, of the few traces left behind by the Web-folk. What did they wish to hide from when they built this?

Janos leads me to a thick metal door with a heavy knocker on it. At first I mistake the shape for the sun of the Council. But as I look closer, I see it is slightly different, and the rays are surrounded by an oblong outline. Janos knocks five times. A similar knock responds from the other side. Janos repeats the knocking once more.

‘Don’t be scared of what happens next,’ he tells me. ‘You’re safe here.’

A peephole opens in the door.

‘Identify yourselves,’ a voice says from within.

Janos places his palm into the peephole.

‘Approved,’ the voice says after a short moment. ‘What about the other one?’

‘I will guarantee her,’ Janos says. ‘She’s my sister.’

Slowly the door opens. Janos looks at me and steps in, carrying his lantern. I follow.

It is almost entirely dark in the room. I see a pale woman holding a glow-glass, a sphere of dim speckled-blue light. At the edges of the room I sense human shapes, unmoving, watching. The gatekeeper swings the glass back and forth. The pendulum movement wakes the algae, and slowly the light spills wider around her. In the dark the marks begin to glow white-bright, forging a chain around the space. Janos turns his palm upwards, and I see the mark shining on it, too.

An eye with the sun in the centre. The invisible tattoo of Dreamers.

The tattoos glow like eyes turned towards me. A flame bursts to life in the room, catches the core of a torch and grows. Hands move to light more fires. A tall, dark-skinned man carrying a torch steps forth towards us. Behind him, I notice a short woman with a birthmark on her face watching us intently.

‘This is your sister, then?’ the man asks.