POV: lift
Summary
Lift drops off the cliff above Yeddaw's upper checkpoint with Wyndle as her improvised rope. He is — by his own theory — not supposed to be physically there to hold; he keeps explaining it as her being partially in the Cognitive Realm; she does not particularly care. He shoots down the wall faster than she falls, she lets the vine slide through her fingers to slow herself, and the awesomeness pads the rest of the landing. She kills her glow and ducks into the mouth of an alley while above her the dropped grain disappears in minutes into the hands of an entire quarter — gone, she notes, faster than a pretty whore in Bavland. A few husks blow in the wind. That is what is left.
Standing in the alley she takes the trench-city in properly for the first time. It is like noon dropping straight into dusk: long shadows everywhere, wet smells, walls of stone cut sheer and bored through with doorways and windows. The "buildings" are columns of bright paint on the rock face, set apart for neighbours' sake. The traffic is thick and varied — Tashikki shiquas, Azish patterns, mercenaries probably out of Emul or Tukar, rural folk from Alm and Desh that she remembers fondly because no one in either country has ever really tried to kill her — and the place feels alive, the way she likes a city to feel. Wyndle notes, dry, that she did dump that grain rather generously after hearing the man who owned it was a thief. She tells him she just wanted something soft to land on if he was snoozing.
The street layout is more peculiar the longer she looks. Shanties cluster in spokes off the main slot, every doorway up three or four cut steps off the trench floor, every shanty wall up on its own stilts. She likens it to the Purelake, where everything is similarly raised: protection, Wyndle supplies, from storms. It is also, surprisingly, isolating. Even crammed wall-to-wall with bodies, a Yeddaw slot doesn't feel like a city in the usual sense — there are no other rooflines to glimpse, no shouts from three streets over; you are at the bottom of a long tunnel that happens to be open to the sky. She picks her way past lifespren bobbing among the hanging blankets of one packed alley and resists the urge to wander in: cosy as the shanties look, an urchin foreigner is rarely welcomed.
Predictably, her stomach reasserts itself. Wyndle points out, with limited patience, that she just ate — and that she has now spent all of *that* food on the powers she used to escape the guards, leaving her hungrier than when she started. She refuses to feel bad about it; she got the pancakes, and the pancakes were good. Pressed for a next move, she fishes out a small book she pinched from the post on her way out. Wyndle grows up her leg, across her arm and over the cover, splays tiny vines between the pages, and gives her the news: it is the captain's duty log. She replaces her shift at ten on the dot every day; she visits the Grand Indicium once a week for a detailed report. Fastidious, but nothing in here a fence is going to want. Lift complains that books are books; surely *someone* wants it. Wyndle tries to explain that books are worth what is *in* them, which Lift gamely glosses as "pages," then "ink." She gives up and tosses it over her shoulder.
The book hits a Tashikki woman with a basket of yarn. The woman yelps. A guard down the slot spots Lift and shouts that she has just assaulted a citizen. Lift, indignant — *barely* — answers him with her own opinion of how hard the impact really was. He starts toward her. Wyndle asks, almost hopeful, whether the next item on the itinerary is run. The next item is run. She ducks into an alley with the guard barrelling in after her, while Wyndle, miserable about the whole prospect of being a weapon and not a chair-gardener, complains the rest of the way out of sight.