Hope smiled sadly and shook her head. “Not even witches, farmer boy.” The tattoos on her skin seemed to stretch to make her smile more solid. And even though her comment sounded dismissive, Rafe heard more respect in her voice than he’d heard for a long, long time. Respect, and perhaps fear.

They continued through the streets, the warrenlike maze of alleys and roads and courtyards, all of them that much wilder than the greater part of Pavisse, that much more downtrodden. Yet the life here seemed faster and more intense, as if this part of the city was reveling in the fact that it was hidden within the greater whole. There was drinking and fighting and fucking in the streets. Bodies too, victims of drunken brawls or robbery or dark, seedy revenge. A couple of the dead were covered with ragged blankets as if to hide their wounds from sight, but each corpse was being slowly eaten. Rats, lizards, wild dogs, carrion snakes as wide as Rafe’s arm and four times as long, all of them emerging from beneath the buildings or out of the ground, snatching their fill and then disappearing again. Rafe wondered what must exist beneath the streets to give birth to such a variety of wildlife, all of it fattened on carrion. He paused, kicked away sand and stones from around his feet until he found solid ground beneath.

Words stared back up at him, a language far away in time or place. Symbols and letters combined, all of them mysterious, and none of them for him. He imagined these words spoken as the strange whispers he had heard in his head, and the idea seemed to fit.

“Hope,” he said. She paused and turned. “What’s this?”

She glanced down at his feet and kicked sand back across the carved stone. “History,” she said, turning away again.

More to ask later, Rafe thought. There were more things to life than he could have imagined, more than his parents had ever told him, and he felt small and alone in this place. All eyes seemed to be staring at him, and back here in the streets behind streets they mostly belonged to people he had no desire to mix with. Fledgers stared with yellow eyes, coal miners shoved him aside without even noticing, other people mingled and argued and occasionally fought. And the buildings themselves were equally as threatening. One tall stone block, drilled with toothed windows, was spiked with long obsidian prongs, thrusting out into the street and up at the sliver of sky. Parts of an unknown machine maybe, or more likely adornments, a few of the spikes held sticky remnants. Black birds darted down and alighted on the spikes, picking at the mess, screeching as they took off again and flew straight back up. Even they seemed afraid to land for too long.