Chapter 122: People Who Do This for a Living

By the time the coach was an hour out of the academy, Elyra had said perhaps twenty words, and eighteen of them had been to Silas.

She sat beside him with her knees angled toward the window and the carrier wedged at their feet, answering when he spoke to her and watching the other two with polite, careful attention whenever he didn’t. Silas didn’t know how to fix it and suspected that trying would make it worse.

Dagna fixed it without appearing to try.

“The wind ones,” she said, somewhere past the first river crossing. “Do they come inside old glasshouses? Or do they keep out?”

Elyra blinked at her. Then she turned from the window. “It depends on the glass. If enough panes are gone that air moves through, they treat it like outside.” She hesitated. “Why?”

“Because last time something knocked a tray over in the north galleries and nobody was near it,” Dagna said. “Alden blamed me.”

“I did not blame you,” Alden said. “I said you were nearest.”

“That’s blaming,” Dagna said.

Elyra laughed, surprised into it, and by the time the scrub turned to broken ridge country, she was arguing gently with Dagna about whether a draft counted as weather.

***

Harrowglass looked different with working people in it.

Last time, there had been instructors and teams and folding tables. Today there were carts. Three of them stood in the outer yard by the service gate, which had been propped wide so they could drive straight in from the ridge road, and men in canvas aprons were loading broken facing stone into them from wheelbarrows. Collectors’ crews were already spreading out along the outer beds with crates and trays, moving with the brisk, unbothered speed of people being paid by the hour.

The site supervisor was a heavy, gray-bearded man named Brede, who gave the briefing standing on a cart step with a slate in one hand.

“Collection’s open in the outer service beds and the east court, marked in white. Inside the white, take what’s growing. Outside it, don’t. The inner conservatory is shut, and if I find you in it, you’ll go home in my cart with your hands tied.” He pointed at the propped gate. “That’s the service gate. Carts come and go through it all day. Don’t stand in the way of a loaded cart, because it won’t stop for you. Cutoff is the four o’clock bell. After that, my crew starts draining the conduit and the facing comes down.”

He glanced at the ridge behind them.

“The work’s been upsetting the ridge-hounds. Gray, about the size of a calf, bristles down the spine. They mostly keep off, but they’ve been seen near the road. There are guards on the outer approaches. If you hear a horn, get behind something solid and let them work.”

Then he climbed down, and that was the briefing.

***

Farther along the east wall from the dry channel, an outer bed lay beneath a surviving strip of pale glass. Damp stone showed between long mats of silver-thread in its shade. Silas hadn’t inspected this stretch on the first visit. Now the growth would have made his heart jump if he’d been alone.

He wasn’t alone. A crew of four was already working it.

Their speed annoyed him before he’d even put his carrier down. Their leader was a lean woman in her forties with cropped hair and a sun-browned neck, moving down the bed with a broad flat blade, lifting mats free in long clean strips and passing them back to two men who rolled them onto damp cloth and stacked them in deep crates. A girl at the end was already sorting by color. They weren’t keeping the stone. They didn’t need to. Everything they took was going straight to be dried and processed.

By the time he reached them, they’d cleared a stretch as long as his room.

I knew this place first. He sounded like a child even in his own head. He had no idea how often this crew had worked here.

He made himself look properly. The open mats were thin and lay on bare stone. Lifted with their backing, they would crack into gravel. To compete for them, he’d need more hands and bigger crates and a faster blade, and he’d lose anyway, because she had all three. What the crew wasn’t touching was the facing along the base of the wall: the same thin, loose slabs he’d worked under the hood, half shaded by the ledge above, with denser growth bedded right into them. It was slow, awkward work. It was also the only kind of moss his carrier was built for.

“We’ll take the facing,” he said. “Under the ledge.”

Alden followed his glance and nodded. Dagna was already pulling on her gauntlets.

The only way to reach the facing was a narrow loading lane between the bed and the cart sheds, maybe three paces wide. It opened off the outer yard at one end and ran down to a hinged iron gate at the other. Beyond the gate was a cleared holding bay where the carts backed in to load. The gate stood partly open toward the lane on heavy hinges. A low drop latch at knee height secured it when closed. A worker had parked a crate of broken facing in the lane right beside it, half in the way of its swing.

The crew’s leader met him in that lane.

“Vessa Noll,” she said. “I’ve got trays coming down here every few minutes. Where are you putting yours?”

“Against the shed wall,” Silas said. “Out of your line. We’ll work from the facing outward.”

“Keep the lane clear to the gate,” Vessa said. “If my boys have to step round your box with a full crate, I’ll move it for you, and you won’t like where.”

“Then don’t stack your empties on my side of the lane,” Silas said. “We’ll need the shed wall all afternoon.”

Vessa looked at him for a moment, then at the carrier, with professional and entirely unsentimental interest.

“Fair,” she said, and went back to her bed.

***

The original shelter was in the east court, under the stone hood, and the little presence was still there.

Silas felt it the moment he lay down on the paving and let his attention out, small and cool, settled in the thickest part of the silver. Elyra lay beside him. For a long time she said nothing at all.

“It’s watching the air,” she said at last, very quietly. “Feel how it leans when the draft changes? It follows the movement. Not the light.” A cart rumbled past outside the court, voices rose, and the presence drew back hard into the stone. “And it doesn’t like people. Not crowds of them.”

“Will it die if the vent dries?” Silas asked.

“I don’t know.” Elyra kept watching the hood. “I know it likes damp and moving air and being left alone. That’s what I can see. I won’t tell you more than that.”

They found the alternative together, a little before noon. Behind the old caretaker’s station on the north side of the court lay a shaded propagation bed that wasn’t due for maintenance at all, fed by a separate drain, with a low stone ledge along one side where the air came through a broken pane and moved. The caretaker, a stooped old man named Hollis who had apparently lived on the site for decades, listened to Silas’s explanation with his arms folded.

“A little cover on the ledge,” Silas said. “Some of the old stone from the hood, damp. Nothing you’d have to tend.”

Hollis looked at Elyra, then back at him. “That bed gets left alone anyway,” he said. “Put your cover where you like. Don’t make me a mess.”

They agreed to move a little of the old substrate there and provide cover, leaving the presence to approach it if it chose. Elyra would handle contact; Silas and the others would do the lifting.

He went back to the facing to start the harvest while she stayed by the hood.

The first slab came away cleanly. Silas bedded it in the grit and watched it lean against its stop as Dagna carried the tray to the shed wall. The second went beside it. He was pleased enough to check both again, until Dagna pointed him toward the next slab. Vessa’s crew had filled another crate while he’d been admiring two pieces.

He was easing a third slab loose when a horn blew on the ridge road, one long falling note, and somebody on the outer approach shouted, “Hounds! Hounds on the cart road!”