Rath disappeared into the tunnel. Did she have a kitchen back there? Maybe a bedroom. Maybe more books. A whole troupe of clowns. The thought made him smile.

Stray pages saved from long-drowned books caught his attention as he waited for her. Red eye peering from monstrous face. Lines of scrawl in an unknown language. Diagrams of buildings or plants or motored vehicles. A black-and-white photograph of a gaunt five-year-old girl in a ragged dress standing in the muddy track of a tank.

Truff knew who had lived here before, collected the books originally. Or how long it had taken Rath to organize it all. Or how much she had added to it, scavenging across the city. The collection was an ever-changing scene of preservation and dissolution. So many things saved only to be destroyed by time. Always with the water gurgling its way along the floor. Sometimes fish would get trapped, their fins brushing against pipes or grillwork and making a sound like quills over skulls.

She came out with a teapot and two cups on a tray. Set it down on the table between them. Poured him a cup.

“You sure you want this?” she asked. Skeptical.

“Yes.” Took the tea gladly. His head still hurt. The tea tasted different. Better. Drove out the lingering taste of the memory bulb.

“I haven’t looked at the lists,” she said, sitting opposite him in a low wooden chair with a green blanket atop it.

“Didn’t expect you to yet,” Finch replied. “What about the symbol?”

“Now, that I did get around to,” she said. “If only because it was easy.”

“I’ve seen it, I’ve just never known what it meant.”

“You’re not alone. We know more about what the symbol is associated with than what it means.”

A broken version was scrawled by the gray caps as a warning, Rathven told him. At the beginning of the city’s history, when the gray caps sent back the eyes of Ambergris’s founder, the whaling captain John Manzikert, on the old altar now drowned by the bay. Manzikert, who had slaughtered so many gray caps and driven them underground.

“It looked like this,” she said, drawing it for him:

It had figured prominently in the recovered journals of the monk Samuel Tonsure, Manzikert’s fellow traveler underground. Had appeared in unbroken forms at various times since, at crucial moments in history.

“Give me an example,” Finch said.

“The Silence,” Rathven said. “That symbol, according to the accounts I have, appeared everywhere, all across the city.”

Finch gave her a sharp look. “I never heard that.” But an intense feeling overtook him, telling him that he had known. Just forgotten.

Rathven shrugged. “I’m just telling you what’s in the histories. Half the books down here mention the Silence, so it’s not hard to track down.”