POV: lift
Summary
In an alley across from one of Yeddaw's communal ovens, Lift squats on her heels and pays a grimy, gap-toothed urchin girl a handkerchief in exchange for an opinion about the woman who runs the local orphanage. The girl gives it to her in clipped slot-cant — *gotta lunks for smalls, but gotta snaps too, biga stone, eyes is swords* — Lift answers her in the same cant without thinking about it, Wyndle from the wall calls the entire exchange the strangest thing he has ever heard, and Lift cannot see what the problem is. The girl confirms what the other urchins have already said: the Tashi's Light Orphanage gives away food, but nobody likes the woman who hands it out. They say she is mean, and that the only reason she feeds anyone is to look good for the officials watching her. Before she goes, the girl turns back, asks Lift whether she was the *outsida* who dropped the grain from the sky, and tells her one more thing in trade: *people, they don't listen*. Then she scuttles off into the slot.
Lift sits a while longer and turns that small philosophy over in her head — does *she* listen? — then stands and weaves her way through the trench street toward the orphanage. The chapter dwells on the Tashikki habit of stringing their spheres on cords through holes drilled in the bottom of the glass, so even in a pouch a fistful of money is laid out in a row like beads. She judges it ridiculous, but allows that it beats the chips of bare gemstone people use farther west. Most spheres in this city, in any case, are dun: it is supposed to be the Weeping, and only those who happened to leave spheres out during an unexpected highstorm a few days ago have any infused light at all. Spherelight is a luxury here.
The orphanage is built into a corner where two streets meet. Its street face is bright orange and meant for officials; the alley side opens onto a half-circle of stone benches cut into the rock, like a little amphitheatre with the alley as its mouth. Urchins are told to come around to the benches and knock. A flat-faced young man opens the door, looks Lift over, points at the benches, and tells her food comes later. She sits and waits with old Tashikki men in shiquas gossiping behind her, and the slot deepens into evening shadow.
A woman wrapped in dark cloth — a foreigner, Lift thinks, faking a shiqua — leads a large, sightless boy to the doorstep, hugs him, and walks away. Lift thinks of the rich viziers in Azimir who imagine orphanages full of plucky scrub-faced children, and resents the cleanness of that picture. Real orphanages, in her experience, are mostly children too hard to keep at home. She sits down next to the boy and takes his hand and tells him it will be all right.
The door opens, and the Stump comes out: a shrivelled old woman with twig-like fingers and skin that looks like it might slough off if she moved too fast. She glances down at the two on her steps and pronounces *an idiot and an opportunist* — and when Lift protests that the boy is hurt rather than stupid, the Stump cheerfully clarifies that she was describing Lift. The boy is led inside. Lift is told her allotment is three meals, total: she may pick when to take them but after three the door is shut for good. When she asks where to sleep, the Stump suggests the stone benches and shuts the door. A moment later the helper reopens it just long enough to toss out a clemabread roll filled with spicy paste.
Lift settles on the bench to eat and is joined by an older man in a black shiqua with the face wrapped folded down — grey moustache, wide easy smile — who tells her not to judge the Stump too harshly: people call her the Stump because no storm has yet managed to blow her over. He offers a trade in true Tashikki fashion: he has information she might want about the Stump in exchange for the answer to one of his questions. The information turns out to be that the Stump runs a quiet sphere-exchange business on the side and does not want it known. His question is what part of the body Lift feels herself most to be — hand, mind, leg — because, he says, each person is a piece of one great organism that makes up the city, and he is building a philosophy of it. Lift tells him she is a nose, on the grounds that she is full of crud and you never know what is going to fall out, and hops off the bench. As Wyndle uncurls from where he had been coiled on the stone, she announces, around the last of the clemabread, that she has an appointment to keep.