Robin Hobb - Blood of Dragons

He shook his head. Her eyes had adjusted to the pale light the jewellery made, but there was no colour to his features, only planes and shadows. ‘I wanted you to be her. That’s true. I still want that. We always dreamed that we would live again in another Elderling couple. That we would walk and dance and dine together. Make love in our garden again. That was why we made the columns as we did.’ He drew a deep breath and sighed it out. ‘But that’s not why I brought you here. I brought you here for the dragons. And for Malta and Reyn and their child. For Tintaglia. For all of us. We need the Silver, Thymara. A bit of dragon blood or a scale can start the changes. But to sustain them, to move them in directions that let us live, that will let our children live? That will take Silver.’

She knew that. It didn’t change the facts. ‘There’s no Silver down here, Rapskal. Only bones.’

She found she had slipped the ring on her finger. It hung loose against her knuckle. Not her ring. The jidzin against her skin whispered secrets she didn’t want to hear.

‘You used to tend this well. You and some of the other artisans. You spoke of managing it. I thought …’

‘I don’t remember any of this, Rapskal.’ She slapped the gauntlets against her thigh, and tried to push them through the loop in her gear belt. She wasn’t wearing one.

‘Don’t you?’ he asked her quietly.

She looked at him without speaking. She stared around at the faintly gleaming walls of the small space. ‘I remember it was dangerous to come down here. We always carried lights. We were always supposed to have a partner.’

‘Ramose,’ he said quietly.

She smiled bitterly. ‘Never trust a jealous man,’ she said, and wondered what she meant by it. A silence built and she did not fight it. She studied the smooth black walls, waiting for a memory to push into her mind. Nothing came. She looked down at the bones and tried to feel something about a woman who had died here a long time ago.

A stray thought came to her. ‘I’ve always been afraid of this well, since I saw it. But I couldn’t have known that Amarinda died here. She couldn’t go back and put this memory in the stone.’

‘No. You couldn’t have known. But I did. Even back then, when I left a message for her and then left the city, I think I knew. And my memories tinged yours.’

‘But you still brought me here.’

‘It was a last chance. For all of us.’

She thought about that for a time. A last chance. She had warned him that if he forced her down the well, it would never be the same between them. Well, she had come of her own free will. But she still suspected that everything she felt for him had changed.

‘My hands are cold,’ she said, to say something. Then she added, ‘It’s useless to stay down here, Rapskal. There’s nothing for us here. I don’t remember anything. We’d best get back up there while we can still climb.’

He nodded, defeated, and she gestured for him to go first. She had always been a better climber than Rapskal. She boosted him high and then held the line tight for him and waited until she heard him say, ‘I’m on the chain now!’ before she started to follow him.

She realized she had put on the gauntlets only when her claws pressed against the ends of the fingers. ‘Huh,’ she said, only to herself. The gloves had closed off the light from her ring. It didn’t matter , she told herself. I’ll soon be up and out of here . She took a wrap of the line around her hand and set her bare foot to the wall. Cold. She reached over her head with her free hand, gripped the rope, and began her ascent in the dark. Going up was much harder than the burning slide down had been. She had no one to hold the rope tight for her; it swung and whipped below her as she climbed, and the claws of her feet skittered on the smooth wall.

Below the chain she paused. The gauntlets had saved her rope-burned hands, but they’d be a hazard on the slick chain. She moved her weight onto the chain, then looped the rope around herself, braced her feet on the wall, dragged off one gauntlet … and found herself staring at a small tracery of Silver on the black stone before her. Had it been there when she climbed down? She was certain she would have seen it. Unless the gleam of the moon locket had hidden it from her.

She stuffed the gauntlet down the front of her tunic. She gripped the chain afresh and leaned closer. Writing. She put a fingertip to the letters, traced their almost familiar curves. It said … something. Something important. Almost of its own accord, her hand reached the end of the line of letters and then tapped a glyph there. Twice.

Below her, the grind of stone on stone startled her. She wanted to flee up the chain, but sharpest curiosity made her back slowly down the rope instead. There it was. A large block of stone in the wall was retreating, sliding smoothly away, leaving an opening behind it. ‘The seam valve,’ she heard herself say out loud.

And then the memory came, of her first trip down the shaft with the older Silver worker. He’d shown it to her, halting the platform on its slow descent. ‘Can you believe,’ he’d asked her, ‘that sometimes the Silver pressure was so high, it came into the reservoir at this level? Sometimes, we’d have to come down here and open the drains to let it out. There were pipes that would carry it out into the river and away from the city. And when the Silver seams were really producing, we’d have to shut down some of them, to keep it from welling out the top and running through the streets.’ The oldster had coughed and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. ‘This seam has been dry for decades,’ he continued sourly. ‘And if the Silver pressure keeps dropping, we probably never will open it again. Well, start cranking, girl. It’s a long way down to where the Silver comes in now. We need to measure the level of standing Silver and log it. That’s your job now, once every seventeen days. Can’t ration it if we don’t know how much the seams are producing.’

Thymara blinked, abruptly surprised to find herself alone and hanging on a rope in a well shaft. ‘Reservoir shaft,’ she corrected herself quietly. Reflexively, she reached over and tapped the glyph again. She heard the grinding halt, and then resume with a different note. She moved down the line and set her hand to the wall until she felt the brick move back into alignment. Relief slowed her thundering heart. Best to leave things as they had been until someone like Carson could help her understand what little she remembered.

As she lifted her hand from the block, it seemed to tremble under her fingers. Then it suddenly shot out, past her hand, to land with a clatter at the bottom of the shaft. A square of liquid Silver followed it, pushing out thickly, at first keeping its shape and then turning into a fat worm wriggling down the wall. She stared at it, trying to make sense of what she saw. The seam had replenished itself. And the old valve had given way. Stone grated as two adjacent blocks swung out unevenly from the wall as the heavy Silver forced its way out and into the shaft. A slow bulge began around the leak. She heard a pop and saw another brick fly out of the wall. It hit the opposite side of the shaft with force, and a gout of Silver leapt after it. She stared aghast, then shrieked, ‘Rapskal! Something broke down here!’

‘What?’

‘Climb!’ she shouted up the shaft. ‘Climb fast!’ She went up the rope like a frightened monkey, gained the chain and did not pause. The one gauntlet was a hindrance on the slick chain; there was no time to strip it off. She raced a zig-zagging crack in the wall that paralleled her progress. It shone silver as the long-suffering stones gave way to the pressure behind them. They opened with sharp pops that hurt her ears.