Page 29 of City of Stone and Silence

“Tori,” he says quietly. “I’ve been in the back with Grandma since this started. Has anyone told you anything about what happened?”

“Just a little,” I tell him. “There was a group stuck at the draft checkpoint near the High Market, and they started shouting at the guards, chanting, that kind of thing. The Ward Guard ordered them to disperse, and…” I shake my head. “Nobody seems to know how it started, but pretty soon people were throwing rocks, and the Ward Guard were laying out everyone in sight. When their cavalry showed up, they charged the crowd.”

That’s the story I’ve pieced together, anyway, from the two dozen people I’ve talked to. Wounded are still coming in, though the flood has slowed a little. The majority were hurt in the stampede that had followed the guard cavalry’s charge, thrown against buildings or trampled underfoot.

It’s becoming a depressingly familiar sight here at the hospital. Nearly every day sees someone injured by the guards at the checkpoints. The haul of recruits must not be meeting the quotas, because the enforcers have daily become more insistent.

“Again,” Hasaka says with a sigh. “Rotting idiots in the guard. Don’t they see where this is going to end? How long do they think they can keep pushing people?”

I give an uncomfortable shrug. “I’d better go see if they need help at the front.”

Hasaka nods and trudges back behind the curtain, and I hurry to Kosura, who is setting yet another broken arm. Thankfully, the girl with the broken ribs is the last serious case of the evening, and we spend the rest of our time dealing with injuries that fall within my competence. At Grandma’s direction I’ve learned to bandage, splint, and stitch, and a little bit about herbs and poultices. Kosura knows more than I do, as usual, and her inner reserve of kindness and patience seems limitless. By the time we close the doors, long after midnight, she still has a kind word for patients begging for extra blankets we don’t have and liquor we won’t give them, whereas my own attitude has turned distinctly snappish.

Hasaka arrives to lock up the main doors, speckled with blood as though he’d just come from an abattoir.

“Tori, Grandma wanted to see you before you leave,” he says, as he passes. “Go talk to her so she can get some sleep, would you?” Hasaka considers himself the guardian of Grandma’s health, though no one else—least of all Grandma—agrees with this.

I nod and head back to the curtained-off section. On the way, I pass Giniva, dressed in a fresh robe but her skin and hair are still smeared with gore. She’s clutching her soiled clothes to her chest, looking at the ground. I give her a bow as she passes.

“Thank you for your help.”

“What?” She looks up, and there’s a moment before she recognizes me. “Oh. Yes. I thought … it was the least I could do.”

“Go back and get some rest.” It feels strange to be giving advice to this girl several years my senior, but she looks so lost.

“I will.” She gives another halfhearted nod and wanders away.

Grandma is cleaned up and behind her desk, leaning back and staring at the cracked, cobwebbed ceiling. At first I think she’s fallen asleep like that, but without looking down she says, “Did you see the new girl?”

“I did,” I say. “She seems a little shaken.”

“She’ll be all right in the end.” Grandma rolls her head, wringing a series of cracks from her neck that make me jump. “It would be a kindness if you would check up on her from time to time. When things are calm, anyway.”

“I will,” I say. Though when that will be I don’t know. “Hasaka said you wanted to see me before I left?”

“I did.” She sits up and looks at me. Her face is drawn, very pale, exhaustion kept in check only by her iron will. “Got something for you today. A letter.”

“A letter? From who?”

“Don’t know. Some street kid dropped it off.” She produces an envelope, sealed with unmarked white wax, and pushes it across the desk. “Tori” is written on the outside in a neat hand. “I don’t want to pry into your affairs. But if there’s some kind of problem, just tell me, you understand? I have friends, we’ll take care of it.”

I nod, dumbly, as I pick up the letter. The paper is startlingly white. Expensive. It’s the kind of thing I’d expect to see back home in the Second Ward, not here.

“That’s all,” Grandma says. “Go and get some sleep.”

A few minutes later, I’m in the back of a cab, rattling up the military road toward the Second Ward. The passes and identification I carry are enough to make the Ward Guard at the gates snap to attention, and a coin or two encourages them not to ask questions. Normally I try to get home earlier than this, and the thought of my sleeping mat is already pulling at my eyelids.

I resist the urge to doze in the carriage, though, and turn my attention to the letter. When I break the wax seal, I find several folded pages inside, written in the same well-tutored hand.

Tori,

I hope this letter doesn’t cause you any alarm. Your secrets are in no danger, I promise. After our meeting, I asked around the neighborhood for anyone who matched your name and description, and from what I was told the best place to reach you is at Grandma Tadeka’s hospital. I pray that the Blessed allows this to find you.

We met in an alley behind the High Market, where you saved my honor—and very possibly my life—with an exceedingly brave deception. I admit that it has taken me some time to work up the courage to pen this. But, ultimately, I felt that if I let this chance meeting slip by, I would regret it for the rest of my life.

I must be honest with you. I am not a native of the Eleventh Ward, as I pretended to be. My name is Marka Garo, and my family resides in the First Ward. My father is an Imperial Minister of the Fourth Degree, and I am his oldest son and heir.

I break off reading for a moment, surprised. I’d guessed the boy that I’d rescued wasn’t a commoner—he wasn’t fooling anyone, really—but I hadn’t thought he was a Marka. They’re a noble family, and not an insignificant one, either. A Minister of the Fourth Degree is high up the Imperial bureaucracy, only one or two steps removed from the Emperor’s inner circle.