Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2016

Copyright © Emmi Itäranta 2016

Cover design by Alexandra Allden © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016.

Cover illustration © Istvan/ Chaotic Atmospheres.

Emmi Itäranta asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780007536061

Ebook Edition © 2016 ISBN: 9780007536085

Version: 2016-05-11

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Emmi Itäranta

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

I still dream of the island.

I sometimes approach it across water, but more often through air, like a bird, with a great wind under my wings. The shores rise rain-coloured on the horizon of sleep, and in their quiet circle the buildings: the houses grown along the canals, the workshops of inkmasters, the low-ceilinged taverns. The House of Words looks inward behind its high walls. Threads knotted into mazes run in all directions from the House of Webs, and air gondolas are suspended on their cables, dead weights above the streets.

At the centre of the island stands the Tower, smooth and blind. A sun of stone glows grey light at the pinnacle, spreading its sharp ray-fingers. Fires like fish-scales flicker in the windows. Sea is all around, and the air will carry me no longer. I head towards the Tower.

As I draw closer, the lights in the windows fade, and I understand they were never more than a reflection. The Tower is empty and uninhabited, the whole island a mere hull, ready to be crushed like a seashell driven to sand and carved hollow by time.

I also understand something else.

The air I am floating in is no air at all, but water, the landscape before me the seabed, deep as memory and long-buried things.

Yet I breathe, effortlessly. And I live.

Amber would sometimes wash ashore on the island; it was collected and shipped across the sea. As a child I once watched a jewel-smith polish it on the edge of the market square. It was like magic, one of the stories where ancient mages span yarn from mere mist or gave animals a human tongue. A sweet smell arose from the amber, the smith dipped the whetstone in water every once in a while, and in his hands the murky surface turned smooth and glass-clear. He handed the orange-yellow lump to me, and inside I saw an insect frozen in place, a mayfly smaller than the nail of my little finger. Its each limb, wing and antenna was so easy to imagine in movement that I believed it was still alive, ready to whirr and fly, when the hard shell would be broken.

Later I learned that creatures captured in amber cannot be freed. They are images of the past, fallen outside of time, and it is their only existence. When I turn the past before my eyes, I think of the mayfly. I think of the translucent brightness guarding it and distorting it. Its wings will not vibrate, it will never turn its antennae. Yet, when light pierces the stone from a new angle, the mayfly seems to morph into another. And in the posture stalled long ago is already written what will come later.

Likewise, this present already grows in my past that first night, when I see her.

She is lying on the smooth stones, face down, and it takes me a moment to understand she is not dead.

There is blood. Not everywhere, but a lot of it. She is still, like those who have stopped breathing are still. A red, glistening pool is spreading under her head; the ends of her hair are swimming in it. I see a rust-coloured streak on the hem of her dress and imagine the rest: a sticky trail running down the front of the garment, as warm as her mouth at first, before the air cools it down. The thought of the pain behind the blood twists my gut. I push it away, to where I am used to enclosing everything I cannot show.

There are not many of us yet. When the others move to make space for me, their glow-glass spheres tilt and hover in the dusk, and the pale light catches on the creases of their palms, on the coral amulets around their necks. Above the hands their faces are frightened or curious, I cannot tell which. Perhaps both. They are all younger than me, mostly first- and second-year weavers. I think of soft-bodied sea creatures, of how they slip away when something bigger comes too close.

‘Has anyone gone to find Alva?’ I ask.

No one says anything. I search among the faces, trying to find just one I can name, and fail. I kneel next to the girl on the ground and take her hand. It is soaked in blood, and so is mine, now. I do not mind; there will be time to wash it later. I see blood every month. Not only mine, but that of others, too. When hundreds of women live in the same house, someone is always bleeding. We do not get childbirths here, not often anyway, but we see enough of other varieties of bloodshed.

The girl’s skin feels cold, her arm limp and heavy. I know I should not touch her until the healer comes.

‘Go and find Alva,’ I say.

They shift, a restless cluster of silence. No one takes a step to go.

Unexpectedly the girl moves under my hand. She turns over, raises her face and spits blood and strange-shaped sounds from her mouth. Bright red drops fall across my jacket. They make a pattern, like blood coral ornaments on a rich man’s cloak.

‘Go,’ I order. ‘Now!’

A second-year weaver turns and runs towards the other side of the square confined by stone buildings. The moments are slow, the whispers a surging sea around us. The wrist within my fingers is sinewy and narrow. More pale-blue spheres of light float through the dark towards us from the direction of dormitories and cells, more hands and faces behind them. A few weavers stop to fill their glow-glasses from the algae pool in the middle of the square; its shimmering surface vibrates and grows smooth again. Everyone must be awake by now. Eventually I see a woman in white approach across the square. She is carrying a stretcher under her arm. A tall figure I recognize as Weaver is walking at her heels. Light spills on the stones, catches in the folds of nightdresses and hair and limbs. Alva and Weaver order everyone to give way. When there is enough space, they place the stretcher down.

‘I think you can let go of her hand,’ Alva says.

I do. I get to my feet, withdraw into the crowd standing around us and watch as Alva and Weaver lift the girl onto the stretcher and begin to carry her towards the sick bay.

Somewhere, the bells of the city begin to toll sea-rise.

Some flooded nights I watch the city below from the hill. I follow the waters that rise high and wild, swell across courtyards, push aside chairs and tables stacked up in a futile attempt to make frail, treacherous bridges. But the sea never reaches the House of Webs. Weavers turn over when the bells toll and do not grant it much thought.

This night is different. Sleep is thin in the house, because strange blood is drying on the stones of the square. Sand flows slow in hourglasses. Coughs, footsteps and words exchanged in secret fade away little by little. I see the girl before me every time I close my eyes. Although I know the attacker must be far away, every shadow on the walls is darker than usual.

I pull the last dormitory door of the night-watch round closed behind me. My brother tells me I should get more sleep, but being awake has its advantages. The corridors of the house are long, and someone must walk them all night, look into every dormitory, listen behind the door of each cell. Those are the Council’s orders, and therefore also Weaver’s. It is not a precaution against those coming from outside the House of Webs. We have all heard the drinking songs about wet weaver wenches circulating in the taverns and on the streets, but those are just words. In order to get into the house, you would have to climb the steepest hill on the island and find your way through the maze of wall-webs undetected, and you would risk serious sanctions in doing so. No: the night-watch is to keep an eye on those who already live within the walls.

The luminous ribbons of the glow-glass pipes throw cold sparks along the corridors, revealing the unevenness of the worn stone. The current in the canals is strong; it drives the swift movement in the pipes, and in fast water the algae wakes to shine bright. A draught blows past me, as if a door is opened somewhere, but I do not see anyone. I could return to my cell. I could sleep. Or stay awake in the fading shine of the glow-glass, wait for the morning.

I turn in the other direction and step outside.

I like the air gondola port because you cannot see the Tower from there: its tall, dark figure is concealed behind the wall and the buildings of the House of Webs. Here I can imagine for a moment that I am beyond the reach of the Council’s gaze. I like the port best at this hour, when the cables have not yet started creaking. The vessels are still, their weight hanging mid-air, or resting at the dock, or floating in the water of the canals. The gate cracks open without a sound. The wrought iron is cold against my skin, and the humidity gathered on its surface clings to my palms. The cable of the air route dives into the precipice, which begins at the rock landing of the port, and the city opens below. I walk along the landing close to the brink. It is steep as a broken bridge. Far below, the sharp edges of Halfway Canal cut through the guts of the island, outlining waters that always run dark, even in brightest summer light.

The sky has begun to fade into the colours of smoke and roses. The first light already clings to the rooftops and windows, to the glint of the Glass Grove a distance away. The flood has finally ceased to rise, and down in the city the water rests on streets and squares. Its surface is smooth and unbroken in the calm closeness of dawn: a strange mirror, like a dark sheet of glass enclosing a shadow double of the city.

My eyes are heavy and stung. I could catch an hour of sleep before the morning gong if I returned to my cell now. It is a short enough time. It would be safe enough.

I stay where I am.

The gate creaks behind me. I turn to look.

‘The gate should be locked,’ Weaver says.

‘It was open when I came.’

‘I was not reprimanding you,’ she says. ‘What happened there?’

She points towards the strip of sea on the horizon, north of the Glass Grove. I had not realized, because it is something you do not notice.

‘The air highway,’ I say.

The north side of the island is dominated by air gondola routes: light vessels travelling an intricate network in all directions and on many levels, cables crisscrossing between the trading harbours in the west and the inkmasters’ workshops in the northwest. But the skyline of the city above the rooftops has changed.

‘The largest cables are down,’ Weaver says. ‘There must have been an accident.’

‘The flood?’

‘Maybe.’

The floods do not usually damage the air routes. But if one of the supporting poles has fallen, it could affect the whole network.

‘I expect we will get word when the watergraph starts working again,’ Weaver says. She turns her face towards me. It is the colour of dark wood. ‘But that is not why I was looking for you.’ She pauses. ‘Alva would like to see us both.’

‘Alva?’ The request surprises me. ‘Did she say why?’

‘She believes we should go and meet the patient together. She has something to show us.’

The thought of seeing the girl again is a cold stone within me.

‘I had hoped to get some sleep before breakfast,’ I say.

Weaver’s gaze is deep in the growing daylight, full of thoughts.

‘Come,’ she says.

When the house-elder says so in the House of Webs, you obey.

The first thing I sense is the surge of heat through the door. Then, a cluster of scents. In the House of Webs, the sick bay is the only place apart from the kitchen where live fire is allowed. Even laundry is washed in cold water most of the time. Alva stands by the stove, feeding wood into the spark-spitting metal maw. A steaming pot of water sits on the stove, and next to it another one with an inch of dark-brown liquid in it. I inhale, recognize liquorice and lavender, hops and passionflower. The rest blurs into a blend of unfamiliar scents. On the table, next to scales, mortars and bags of herbs, I notice a neatly laid-out row of needles cooling down on a polished metal tray.

Alva closes the hatch of the stove and wipes her hands carefully with a steaming towel.

‘We’ll need a gondola,’ she says. ‘We cannot keep her here.’

‘I will send for a gondola to take her to the Hospital Quarters as soon as I can,’ Weaver says. ‘The watergraph pipes are too badly flooded.’

‘Again?’ Alva picks up a glass jar from the tall shelf that fills the space behind the table. I see dozens of teardrop-shaped wings stirring, hair-thin legs moving, and something round and black and bright. Eyes stare directly at me.

‘There is nothing we can do but wait,’ Weaver responds.

Alva turns towards us with the jar in her hand.

‘She’s awake,’ she says. ‘But she can’t talk.’

‘Why not?’ I ask.

‘It’s best if you see her now,’ Alva says. ‘She’ll need a new singing medusa in any case.’

Alva walks across the room to the medusa tank. It sits on robust legs of stone, as wide as the wall: a smooth, oblong pool of glass rounded on the edges, covered by a lid with a slim opening at one end. The singing medusas float through the water without hurry, their translucent swimming bells pale green and blue, weightless in their water-space. Alva unscrews the lid of the jar and holds the jar upside down over the opening. Wings and limbs and eyes move, first behind the glass and then briefly in the air, as she shakes the jar.

The medusas reach their thin tentacles towards the insects raining into the water, close their round, murky bells around the black-green gleam of the beetles and flies. Alva lets the last sticky-limbed insect fall into the tank. Then she dips the glass jar in, collecting some water into it. She picks up a small hoop net from a hook on the wall and pushes it into the tank. The bloom of medusas opens and pulls away, their tentacles wavering like broken threads in a breeze, but Alva has already caught one. It is small and slippery and blue-green, and it seems to shrivel, to lose its colour and grace as soon as it is out of water.

Alva slips the medusa into the glass jar, where it opens again like a flower, but now constrained, without joy. As we watch, it begins to open and close, open and close, and in an echo of its movements, the bloom in the tank begins to do the same. A low, faint humming vibrates in the water, refracts from the glass walls, grows towards the ceiling until it seems to ring through our bones.

Alva hangs the hoop net back on the wall hook. The water dripping from it draws a dark trail on the wall towards the floor. She parts the curtains covering a wide doorway into the back room and steps through. Weaver and I follow. Slowly the singing recedes behind us and fades into a silence as dense as mourning, or farewells left unspoken.

There are only six beds in the room, and despite the faint lighting I can see that five of them are empty. In the furthermost bed by the back wall lays a narrow, motionless figure. She is covered by a rough blanket, but I can discern her form under it: long limbs, softness sheltering angular bones. The warmth from the iron stove spreads across the skin of my neck.

Our shadows fall deep and shapeless, interlacing where the fragile halos of the glow-glasses overlap, hemming in the bed we are approaching. There is no light on the back wall. Thick curtains cover the window.

Dimmed glow-glass globes hang on the walls. Weaver picks one, shakes it and places it on the girl’s bedside table. A blue-tinted light wakes up within the sphere. Slowly it expands and falls on the girl’s face. I notice there is also an empty cup on the table.

The girl is approximately my age, between twenty and twenty-five. There are still dry, rust-brown tangles in her red hair, but the garment she is wearing is clean. Or so I think at first, until I notice the burst of tiny speckles on the front. As if someone had tried to paint an impression of faraway stars on it, the sparkling Web of Worlds that holds the skies together.

She struggles to sit up on the mattress. Her eyes are grey and full of shadows in the glow-glass light, and her skin is very pale. Her lips are squeezed together so tightly it makes her face look older, shrivelled upon itself. I realize Alva has made her drink a calming herbal brew. Yet behind its artificial languor the girl is tense and all edge, like a dagger drowned in murky water, ready to cut the first skin that will brush it.

‘In order to help you,’ Weaver says, ‘we need to know who you are.’

The girl nods slowly.

‘She is not island-born,’ Alva says.

The lines on Weaver’s face seem to sharpen. She looks at Alva.

‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’

‘I wanted to show you,’ Alva says. ‘May I?’

The girl’s eyes close and open again. The question seems to sink in letter by letter. Eventually, she moves her head slowly up and down. I do not know if this is because nodding hurts, or because she is too dazed to make faster movements.

Alva directs the girl to rotate her upper body slightly, face turned away from us. She gathers the girl’s hair gently in her hand and lifts it. The skin of the neck is bare: there is no trace of ink where the sun-shaped tattoo marking everyone born on the island should be. I glance at Weaver, catch a glimpse of the shadows on her brow. There are not many people on the island who were born elsewhere. Seamen and merchants come and go, but most islanders avoid mingling with them.

‘May I see your arms?’ Weaver asks.

Alva lets go of the girl’s hair and the girl turns her face back towards us, her movements still underwater-slow. She nods again.

‘I already checked,’ Alva said. ‘She must have moved to the island when she was very young.’

Weaver pulls up the sleeves of the girl’s garment. One of the arms is bare. Not from the Houses of Crafts, then. The other has a row of short, black lines on it, like wounds on the pale skin. Weaver counts them.

‘Twenty-one,’ she says. That is two less than I have.

Weaver lets go of the girl’s arms. The girl leans back into her pillows in a half-sitting posture.

‘Were you born on the continent?’ Weaver asks her.

The girl nods.

‘Are your parents from the island?’

Now she hesitates. Weaver sighs. A mixed marriage, perhaps. They are rare, but not impossible. Or perhaps she does not know her parents. But foundlings have their own mark in place of the birth tattoo, and she does not have one.

‘Never mind,’ Weaver says. ‘We can talk about that later. I brought pen and paper.’ She pulls a slim notebook from her pocket. The covers are well-worn, stained leather, and the pages are yellowed on the edges. She places the book on the girl’s lap and a pen on top of it. ‘If you know how to read,’ Weaver says, ‘please, write down your name.’

The girl stares at the blank page. We wait. After a long moment, she shakes her head, slowly and painfully.

None of us is surprised. Word-skill is only taught in the House of Words, and women are not allowed there. Most women on the island are illiterate.

‘Whereabouts in the city are you from?’ Weaver tries. ‘Can you draw that for us?’

The girl’s face changes slowly like shadows on a wall. Eventually she draws an elongated lump that bears a vague resemblance to a fish.

‘The island?’ Weaver asks.

The girl nods. Her hand shakes a little, as if the pen is too heavy between her fingers. She marks a cross in the northwest corner of the lump.

‘The Ink Quarters?’ Weaver says. I have only been there a couple of times. I remember narrow streets thick with pungent smells, canals where water ran strange-coloured, and tall, vast buildings with darkened windows you could not see through. Gondolas carrying blood coral in large cages to be ground in the ink factories, and red-dye transported from the factories to the harbours in big glass bottles.

The girl nods again.

‘Are you able to tell us anything about the person who attacked you?’ Weaver asks.

The girl lifts two fingers.

‘Do you mean there were two of them?’

The girl begins to nod, but pain cuts across her face and stops the movement short.

Weaver looks like she is about to say something else, but a few red drops fall onto the page from between the girl’s lips. A narrow trickle of blood follows. Alva’s face is taut. She pushes Weaver and me to the side. The glass jar in her hand is still holding the medusa, which lies motionless, like a plucked petal.

‘Open,’ Alva orders.

I only realize now why the girl cannot talk. I only catch a brief glance at her mouth, but that is enough. Where the tongue should be, there is only a dark, marred mass of muscle, still a bleeding, open wound. I have to turn away for a moment. Alva holds a towel under the girl’s chin, fishes the medusa out from the glass jar and slides it into the girl’s mouth. Relief spreads on the girl’s face.

‘She is in a lot of pain,’ Alva says. ‘She must rest. But there is one more thing.’

She places the jar on the night table and picks up the glow-glass. She turns to look at me.

‘Are you certain you don’t know her?’

The question makes no sense. I look at the girl again, just to be certain, although I do not need to. She has closed her eyes and her breathing is turning even. Her muscles twitch slightly. She does not open her eyes.

‘Of course I’m certain,’ I say.

Weaver stares at Alva, then at me, then at Alva again.

‘Why do you ask such a thing?’ she says.

Alva steps right next to the girl. She does not react when Alva takes her hand and gently coaxes open the fingers closed in a loose fist.

‘Because of this,’ Alva says and turns the palm upwards. The light from the glow-glass falls on it. Bright marks begin to glow on the skin, the letters forming a word I recognize immediately.

Eliana.

My name.

CHAPTER TWO

The girl’s hand is narrow in the grip of Alva’s fingers, the angles of her bones sharp around the dent of her palm. I am aware of Alva’s and Weaver’s attention, a tense net around me. But I have done this countless times before. I turn the perception inside out, as if I am focusing my eyes on something close by and letting the background soften into a haze where all boundaries are unclear. I look at the letters as if they are mere contours and colours in a landscape, akin to cracks in the walls of houses, or the black and green algae growing in the canals.

I turn to look at Weaver, taking care not to let my face reveal a thing.

‘What does it say?’ I ask.

Weaver does not answer immediately. Her gaze perseveres in the dusk, but I do not shiver under it.

‘Has your brother not taught you anything?’ she asks.

‘He never thought it necessary,’ I respond.

Weaver is still looking at me when Alva says, ‘Eliana, someone tattooed your name on this girl’s palm in invisible ink.’

I let my face and body react as they should. They adjust to the situation. I know what Weaver reads on them: surprise, confusion, just the right amount of alarm.

‘I don’t know her,’ I say. ‘I’ve never seen her before.’

‘Eliana is not a common name,’ Weaver says.

It is true. I am the only one in the House of Webs, although there must be others on the island.

‘Maybe it’s her name,’ I suggest. ‘Have you asked?’

Alva sighs.

‘Of course I did. And no, it’s not her name. Or so she claims, at least.’

‘Quite a coincidence,’ Weaver says. She turns to Alva. ‘This is no ordinary tattoo.’

‘No,’ Alva says.

She covers the glow-glass with a towel, reaches for the window and parts the curtain slightly. The early-morning light floats into the room, settles on the girl’s skin. The letters turn invisible. Her palm looks no different than mine; only a few lines and callouses are discernible on it.

‘Interesting,’ Weaver says. ‘I have not seen one of those before.’

‘Neither have I,’ Alva says.

She lets the curtain fall back to cover the window and removes the towel from the top of the glow-glass. My gaze turns towards the letters as their outlines slowly grow visible. They run across the narrow lines on the girl’s palm, towards the fingers closed around my name, as if to keep it safe. Alva places the girl’s hand back on the blanket.

‘We must let her sleep.’ Alva’s voice is firm.

Weaver turns to face me.

‘You may return to your room,’ she says. ‘I will let the City Guard know about this as soon as the watergraph is working again.’

I bow my head slightly in acknowledgement of the order.

‘And keep me up to date about her condition,’ Weaver says to Alva.

The girl’s eyes crack open and close again. Her breathing flows calm and even. The pain seems to be gone for now, and the bleeding has stopped. Very gently Alva coaxes the girl’s mouth open, holds the towel and the glass jar against her skin and pulls the medusa out. Its lifeless weight drops into the jar, where the bright-red blood tendrils begin to spread through the water cradling its dead body.

Alva picks up the cup from the night table. We turn to go.

After the warmth of the sick bay, the morning is cold around us. Weaver stops a few footsteps ahead of me.

‘I don’t expect you in the Halls of Weaving until this afternoon,’ she says.

I am grateful that she remembers. It is nearly time for the morning gong. I bow. Weaver nods at me and continues towards the building where the Halls of Weaving are located. I suspect she sleeps even less than I do. The incoming day is unfolding on the horizon, and for a moment I am alone under the sky of the house.

The cell is cool and silent. The thick curtain lets in a thread-slender rectangle of light around the edges of the window. I turn the key in the lock and shake the glow-glass on the table. As the water inside the globe moves and wakes up the algae, the shine begins to grow. In the dim light I examine my skin from head to toe more carefully than usual. The back is always the most difficult; there is no mirror. I find nothing apart from the perpetual callouses on my fingertips and soles. I look for clean clothes to wear and fold the dirty ones into a pile I will carry into the laundry room later. I can sense the faint scent of Alva’s brew on them: herbs that bring sleep and rest. Perhaps I should have asked Alva to mix me a similar potion. She would have said no at first, but then done it anyway.

I sit on the bed until the morning gong begins to echo in the stone walls and vibrate on the webs.

I walk together with the weavers who are on unravelling duty and on their way to work in the web-maze today. It is said on the island that the district of the House of Webs is mapless, a shapeshifter: careless travellers never find their way out if they wander too deep. Yet the weavers know the way. The three solid buildings of the house are surrounded by a zone where the streets and buildings are formed only by woven webs hung between stone pillars, seemingly arbitrary narrow alleys and dead ends. It is here that strangers will lose their way, and sometimes weavers too, when they have not yet learned how the routes are shaped and transformed. Here, walls are unravelled as soon as they are completed and woven anew somewhere else when they have ceased to be. Everything follows a predetermined order, yet you must hold the exact keys to it in order to perceive it.

As I draw further from the heart of the House of Webs, stone fences grow onto the landscape almost unnoticeably. The city no longer flits and filters light everywhere, but takes a more solid shape. Amidst the soft view of yarn frayed on the edges rise stairways covered in dark algae, walls eaten by humidity and whole houses with no woven parts. Eventually all of the maze is left behind: a city of stone where the work of weavers does not belong swallows the walker. The canals flow brown in the chasms among the buildings, and gondolas rise and fall between water and air. None of the other weavers come to the city with me.

The banks of Halfway Canal are still burst and rippling. The pavements have been claimed by water, and I have to climb up steps cut on the outer wall of a tall building to one of the rope bridges that are lowered from rooftops during floods. The bridge wobbles under my footsteps. There is a small crowd standing at the far end, waiting for their turn to cross. Below, people are wading in water, some of them in high-leg oiled leather boots, others barefoot. They are all scooping up something limp and leaf-like, placing armfuls of it in half-drowned wheelbarrows and small boats and large baskets. At first I think it is just seaweed, not the web-thin algae used in glow-glasses, but a leafy variety that grows deeper. Floods often throw large amounts of it across the island.

The bridge comes to an end and I begin to climb towards the next one. I have to cross a high rooftop, and there I stop. Usually this would cause pushing and shoving and protests, a rush that tries everyone’s patience. But today there are others beside me who have stopped on the roof to stare at the sea and the rising tide that is slowly swallowing the shores.

At first it looks as if the waves are bubbling, or growing soft scales, translucent and circular. Their surfaces turn coarser, their density different. When the first wave carrying the dead weight crashes onto the rocks, I am not certain. When the second one does, I could not be wrong if I wanted to, and I understand the people with their baskets and boats, the scooping movements of their hands.

The sea is carrying dead singing medusas to the island, throwing them to the shores and driving them into the canals. Their bodies lie quiet and lifeless, only cradled by the movement of the water. There are thousands, tens of thousands of them, each one as alone as the others, each one as unable to sing ever again.

I think of the medusas in Alva’s tank, of their soft rippling. I wonder if they know, if they sing their farewells to the lost ones.

I climb down the other side of the rooftop and fit my steps to the unsteady planks of the next rope bridge.

The rooftops are crowded and the flooding streets too, as always on the Ink-marking days. The sound of a seashell horn soars above the rooftops from the Tower, inviting city-dwellers to gather. A steady stream of people moves towards the museum. I choose a circuitous route I know to be more quiet. On the way I must cross a square bordered by porticos on each side. The ground is a little higher here, the stones humid only from fog and drizzle. A small group of black-clad people is gathered in the square. There are maybe five or six of them. They stand there as a dark and silent front, like rain on the horizon. I recognize the mourning garb immediately. Many families of Dreamers hide their shame, but some wish to remember those they have lost.

As I am crossing the square, one of them detaches herself from the group and walks towards me. I turn my gaze downwards, trying to ignore her. She walks past me, so close it is more a push than a brush. She drops something to the ground. I hear a faint clink and before I know it, I have stepped on the item without even looking.

A guard is there in an instant. I had not noticed him. Neither had the woman, probably taking a bigger risk than she had intended. But he has seen the sea-green coat of the House of Webs on me, he has seen the woman’s black garb. He will have drawn his own conclusions. The guard grabs the woman by the arm, his fingers hard and tight.

‘You’re not going anywhere,’ he tells her. Then he turns to me. ‘Did she bother you in any way? Try to give you anything, say anything inappropriate?’

I stare at the woman. Her face is expressionless, mask-like. If I say yes, she will be in trouble. Perhaps all of them will be, the group standing behind me, wordless and unmoving. Their eyes are on us. If I say no and the guard notices the item she dropped, I may be in trouble, whether I am from the House of Webs or not. I can feel a flat surface through the thin sole of my shoe. The item is small enough to be hidden from sight until I move. I do not even know what it is.

‘No,’ I say. ‘She did nothing. I wasn’t looking where I was going and walked into her.’ I direct my next words at the woman. ‘It was entirely my fault. I apologize.’

The woman nods. If she is surprised, she hides it well.

The guard relaxes his grip on the woman’s arm.

‘Be more careful next time,’ he tells her. ‘Your kind have no business bothering folk from the Houses of Crafts.’ The woman does not move. ‘On your way then,’ the guard orders.

The woman begins to walk towards the group, slowly at first, then accelerating her steps. The guard looks after her.

‘If you ask me, her sort should be thrown into the House of the Tainted along with their family members,’ he says. ‘Who knows if they are clean, either.’ He glances at me. ‘Good day to you, Miss Weaver.’

I nod at the guard. He nods back, then turns away. I wait until he is close to the other side of the square, taking his post in the shadows between the pillars.

I tug at the string that ties a small leather pouch to my belt. The pouch falls. The coins inside clink against each other. I deliberately avoid glancing in the direction of the guard. If he is looking at me, he will simply see me pick up my coin pouch which I had tied in place carelessly. He will not see me move my foot and take the item from under my shoe. I have time to feel cold metal in my fingers before I slip it into the pouch with the coins. The guard will find me clumsy. He will find me unsuspicious.

The group in mourning on the edge of the square will see something else, but they will not tell. Not if I do not.

The Museum of Pure Sleep has always reminded me of a sea monster, the kind described in children’s tales. The statues standing on its roof rise tentacle-like against the sky, ready to reach and grab and pull down into the abyss anything that comes their way. The round windows gleam orange and blue, and sometimes shadows close to cover them like eyelids, to let the sleep in. But never the dreams.

I plunge into the stream of people. The steps are slippery and wide under my feet, their edges rounded and worn hollow by the weight of all who have climbed them. The throng is already suffocating me. I sense the warmth and movements of human bodies forced too close together, their smells and impatience. Before me, I see other museum visitors disappear into a portico. The columns in front of the entrance shine pale as teeth against the dark stone-skin of the building.

I walk into the monster’s mouth.

It is always dim at first. I join one of the four long queues. They all trickle towards checkpoints where men in uniforms guard the gates. The light only begins beyond the iron bars dropping down vertically from the tall ceiling. There, I can see a group of visitors that has stopped on the landing halfway up the coral-red staircase. The skylight casts brightness upon them, separating them from us.

My eyes focus on the bars again. They look like the weft of an enormous wall-web. I imagine a giant hand passing a warp through them.

When my turn finally comes, I show the guard my birth tattoo. A cold draught brushes the hair of my neck. Although I checked my skin this morning, my breath runs tight as I pull up my sleeves and wait. Every year I fear that the guard will find more on my skin than the lines tattooed on my arm. Yet he counts the tattoos with the customary bored expression on his face and nods. He checks the house-tattoo on my other arm, finds my name on a list and draws a mark next to it. He opens the gate to let me through and closes it again before beginning to examine the next citizen. Two new groups are already gathering around the guides at the bottom of the staircase. I join the group appointed for me.

Blood coral, amber and tapestries woven from dyed yarn glow around us, making the light pouring from the skylight grow and burst into flames. We wait until the previous group has disappeared into a room at the top of the stairs. The guide asks us to follow. We all know where to go.

We walk across the entrance hall and climb halfway up the staircase, where we stop. The guide begins to talk and gestures towards the large mural on the wall above the top landing. Our gazes are turned to it, but I might as well be looking through a window, not noticing the unevenness of its surface or the stains left on it by weather. I have seen the mural too many times. Even as a child I did not like it. The tall Tower in the middle frightened me, as did the eight masked figures standing in front of it. I told my mother they were ghosts. She placed a hand over my mouth and ordered me to be quiet. I still remember the looks the guide and the other visitors gave me.

It was only later that I understood how afraid my mother was then. My words could easily have been interpreted as an indication that it was common in my family to speak of the Council in blasphemous tones. But the image had come of its own volition and had not originated from my parents’ conversations. With their black cloaks and featureless, blood-coloured masks, the mural-Council looked like an image of death in my child’s eyes.

The guide’s story about how the Council ended the Reverie Revolution, purged the island of Dreamers and restored peace and prosperity to our city is the same every year. I know parts of it by heart. And thus dream-plague was banished from our midst, with those spreading it sent to colonies or enclosed within walls where their disease could be contained. Night-maeres ceased to roam free and fled to the dark places they had come from, never to emerge again except for the cursed few who carried them within their blood.

The group keeps their eyes fixed on the mural while the guide speaks. I take quick glances at the people around me. There is a young mother with two children. I wonder which one of them is here for the Ink-marking. I hope it is not one of the children; although if not today, they will have to endure the pain when their time comes. There is an old man in a grey waistcoat and brown jacket, with a powdery white stain on his dark trousers. A baker, perhaps. Another man is clearly from the Ink Quarters: his hands are tarnished with black and red dye. Several young women are among the group, wearing bonnets and dresses made from slightly finer fabric, and skilfully polished bone coral pendants. Daughters of merchants, I think.

I notice a man glancing down to the entrance hall over his shoulder, as if searching for something. He is not young any more, and there is nothing about his looks that gives away his craft. Grey trousers, a brown hooded jacket, worn boots. No stains on fingers. Hair tied neatly to the nape of the neck with a leather ribbon, his hands clasped behind his back. He returns his gaze to the mural. The sky above shifts, the light falling from the glass ceiling burns deeper and hits the man’s hand mere steps away from me.

The hollow of his palm bears a strange, gondola-shaped scar. It is wider in the middle, narrowing towards the ends.

I raise my gaze before anyone sees me staring.

As we walk up the staircase and proceed to the next room, I notice the man looking around again with the same searching face. I also notice something else: he is careful about the way he does it. Before looking away, he pays close attention to the guide and only turns his gaze for the briefest moment when he believes he will not be seen.

A guard with a short spear stands beside one of the walls. His uniform carries the sun-emblem of the Council and the City Guard. The man’s eyes stop on him, then return to the pictures on the walls the guide is talking about. These too are words I have heard before. Once the island was a tangle of forest with wild beasts inhabiting it: a cruel and dangerous place where a man could easily be lost and never found again. But our ancestors brought their torches and swords to drive the beasts away, and with heroic courage and suffering great losses they laid the first foundations of the city we know today. From the cradle of the sea they harvested silkweed and blood coral, and they took their ships across wide waters and established the first trading routes, which you can see on these maps.

We continue to walk through rooms filled with images of the past: weavers and scribes at work, the building of the Tower, codices spread on the square for the annual Word-incineration. I keep an eye on the man with the scarred palm. In each room he glances around as soon as he has entered, before turning his focus on the guide.

We reach the room I have always liked the least. Glow-glasses hanging from the ceiling light the windowless space. The guide points to a picture on the wall, showing the bodies of those dead from dream-plague being burned. But there are more than paintings here. Glass cases hold medical instruments made from coral, both bone white and blood red. Their points and blades are sharp, their jaws wide and hard. Thick, spread-open books lie next to them under the glass. The illustrations show skin lesions and bulbous growths where the limbs meet the torso, like darkness boiling under the skin.

The man with the scarred palm has stopped in front of a painting portraying a young woman. She is lying on a bed with her eyes closed, a hand fallen towards the floor over the edge of the bed. Her lips are cracked open in an anxious arc. A dark shadow sits upon her chest with hands reaching for the woman’s neck: a night-maere visiting a Dreamer. The man pulls his hand out of his pocket and scratches his head.

That is when I see it. It is a mere glimpse, but I am certain that it is there.

A tattoo glows white on his palm, where the scar was. I do not have time to discern any details, but the shape is similar to the scar’s: elongated, pointy at each end.

He pushes the hand back into his pocket.

The image rises within me like water: the injured girl’s hand holding the letters of my name.

As in all the other rooms, there is a guard in here, too. When the guide urges us to move on, the guard steps closer to the group and speaks.

‘You,’ he says to the man. ‘Halt.’

The man freezes. An alarmed expression appears on his face. He opens his mouth, but no sound comes out.

‘You may continue,’ the guard tells the guide. ‘This man will join you after I have had a word with him.’

The guide gives a bow. We walk after him to the next room. I glance behind. The guard is speaking to the man in a low voice and quick words I cannot hear, his face less stern than I would have expected. They both notice me looking. The guard’s lips stop moving. The room begins to fill with new visitors. I turn my head and follow the group.

No one speaks after we exit the final room and walk down the staircase. This is the way the tour is designed. First the monster swallows you, then it digests you and eventually you come out of the other end feeling filthy.

The exit hall resembles the entrance. We have to queue for the gates in the iron-bar wall again. Only here the queue is slower and stretches all the way outside. I look at the others who have come to receive their annual tattoos. Many of them have brought families and friends, and some of them will be throwing parties today. But even they must first come to the Ink-marking. No one on the island avoids that.

As I scan the space, I spot the man with a scar on his hand again. He has taken his place in another queue a little ahead of me. Dozens of glow-glass globes hanging from the ceiling paint the space blue. The man clasps his hands behind his back. His palm turns up. I expect to see his tattoo again.

It is not there.

The distance is long enough that I may not discern the scarring, but I am certain that I would see the glowing tattoo. He was not standing further away from me in the room where I first noticed it. But now his palm is bare, his skin without any markings.

I almost move to join the same queue with him, try to find a reason to talk to him. But the queue proceeds and people flow between us, a whole open sea, impossible to cross. I lose sight of him.

The exit opens to a square on the other side of which the Tower rises larger than I remember, a storm-grey column against a blue sky. The sun glistens dimly on its stone surface and the mist has dissipated on the streets. The queues trickle towards the checkpoints and the inkmasters’ tables behind which they meld into the billowing crowd.

I look where I cannot help looking, none of us can.

The Dreamers stand in the middle of the square on a dais, four women and four men. None of them is young. One of the women wears an eyepatch and one of the men is missing a hand. They are barefoot and grey-clad, and the mark of the Tainted is clearly visible on each of their foreheads. A City Guard with a hand on spear-haft has taken a place at each corner of the dais, and at the foot of the dais an entire front of them stands in formation.

The queues reach and move. The autumn-dampened sun pours lukewarm light on faces. The prisoners stand silent, still, have been standing for hours. No one offers them water or food.

Eventually it is my turn to sit in front of an inkmaster. He wipes his tattoo needle and dips it in an ink jar. I pull my sleeve up to bare my arm above the dark lines.

The song of the seashell horn pauses. A wave passes through the crowd, another. It is finally time for what everyone has gathered to wait for. On the upper balcony of the Tower the wide doors open, and the Council steps out through them. Their coral masks glint in the sun like freshly shed blood against stone-coloured cloaks. The noise growing from the crowd resembles the whistling of the wind.

The inkmaster brings the needle onto my skin and begins to tap its handle with a stone in order to pierce the skin, drawing another mark right next to the crook of my arm. I look away and clench my hand into a fist. My eyes water from the pain. Weaving will hurt for a week at least, and the itch left by the needle where the ink has entered under the skin never quite goes away.

The ringing of the bell is crisp and sharp as the edges of the afternoon shadows.

I turn to look at the dais again. A man wearing a loose coat bearing the sun emblem leaves the foot of the Tower, approaches the dais with unrushed footsteps and climbs onto it. He holds an opaque glass bowl in which eight wooden sticks have been arranged. The man stops before the first Dreamer.

I have wondered many times which stick I would wish to draw from the bowl if I were to stand on the dais one day. I change my mind every year.

The Dreamer woman draws from the bowl a wooden stick approximately the length of her palm. I do not discern her expression clearly from this far away, but I notice she turns her head in order to see how the Dreamer next to her will choose. When the man carrying the bowl moves to stand before the third Dreamer, I see the first two holding wooden sticks of similar length in their hands. I cannot tell if their faces are disappointed or relieved.

I shiver. The inkmaster wipes the droplets of blood from my skin with a cloth that does not look very clean. I pull my sleeve back down to cover the twenty-four lines on my arm. I am officially one year older. My skin smarts when the fabric touches it. I get up and move into the crowd through the checkpoint gate.

The bowl-bearing man has proceeded to the second-to-last Dreamer. The other six are holding sticks of similar length in their hands. The breathing of the audience has quieted, and no one speaks. Somewhere, a child bursts into tears.

The Dreamer pushes his only hand into the bowl and slowly draws out one of the two wooden sticks. It is twice as long as the others. A howl-like scream rises from the audience and people begin to clap and stomp, when the man lifts the stick high in the air for everyone to see. Something resembling a smile visits his face, wide and stiff as if it were painted on. For form’s sake the last Dreamer draws the remaining short stick.

The bowl-bearing man turns to the audience.

‘In their great fairness the Council have pardoned this Dreamer,’ he says. ‘He is free to walk the world and leave the island at dawn. In the name of the Council!’

‘In the name of the Council!’ the crowd yells in return. The words leave my lips too before I even know I have formed them.

‘And now we shall together swear an oath of loyalty to the Council, who in their wisdom pilot the island through all storms,’ the bowl-bearer says.

The words of the oath begin to flow from me with the choir of voices. They who raised the Tower with their own hands and watch the city from atop of it, to them I am faithful.

The Dreamer who drew the long stick is walked down from the dais and led away from sight behind the museum. The guards guide the seven other Dreamers into a cage on wheels, which they begin to transport towards the large black gondola of the House of the Tainted. The oath pours past me like water.

They who feed us and clothe us and make us strong, to them I am faithful.

The wheels of the cage clatter on the stones of the square.

They who drove sickness away from the island and purged our sleep forever, to them I am faithful.

One of the Dreamers in the cage throws herself against the bars, the old woman with an eyepatch.

‘Lies!’ she shouts. ‘It’s all lies!’

If the stones of the streets crumbled from under me and the canals escaped their confines, I would place my life in their hands and be faithful to them.

Two guards wrench the door of the cage open and tear the woman out.

‘Lies!’ she yells again. ‘Ask yourselves why—’

One of the guards hits the woman so hard she goes quiet and begins to weep with pain. The guard ties a scarf to cover the woman’s mouth. I see a red stain spreading on the scarf.

If the sea climbed over my doorstep, I would let their ships carry me to safety and I would be faithful to them.

The City Guards drag the woman into the crowd and I do not see her again. Somewhere another gondola is waiting, a narrower and more enclosed one, and aboard it is a cage covered with black fabric. I think of the woman inside it. I think of the longer stick that she might have drawn from the bowl, and of the man who did draw it: of the ship he will be taken to in the faint light of dawn that will carry him somewhere with a strange language and jobs different from those he is used to. I think of the man looking back towards the island from aboard the ship for the last time, knowing he can never return.

Above everything the Council stands quiet, does not raise a hand, does not move.

The oath comes to an end and my lips are still moving, but my voice has faded away.

CHAPTER THREE

I am seated on a hard, wooden chair in Weaver’s study. It is the one she offers when she wants to scold someone in private. She has another one for visitors, a high-backed, cushioned chair she has upholstered again every few years; but that one is pushed into the far corner, and she is sitting on it herself.

Two City Guards are facing me across the long table. This room is usually brighter than any other in the house, the Halls of Weaving included. But today the lattice of the large window in the corner only filters dark grey and dim white. The fog rests thick and still in the furrows of the city below, and the glow-glass pipes emit but little light despite the fast flow of the water. The lack of light makes the guards’ faces look hollow, as if they could be removed to reveal something else underneath. Or perhaps nothing at all.

‘And you do not know this girl?’ one of the guards asks for the third time.

The chill of the room wraps itself around me and strangles. The Council watches us from a large painting on the wall. I anchor my gaze on the tapestries hanging behind the guards, use them to build a wall between myself and the questions. In them, Our Lady of Weaving holds every thread in her multitude of hands, and waves and clouds and stars behind the clouds obey her will.

‘No, I don’t,’ I answer. Again.

The guards look at each other. One of them introduced himself as Captain Biros, the other as Captain Lazaro. I am not entirely sure which one is which. They are about the same height, and they both have deep-set eyes and thick eyebrows, although one of them is more robust than the other.

Captain Biros, or perhaps Lazaro, nods. Captain Lazaro, or perhaps Biros, writes something in his notebook.

‘And you were on night-watch the night she came to the house?’

‘Yes, I was,’ I say. Again.

‘Are you certain you did not steal away to the city between your rounds without anyone noticing?’

This question is new.

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Besides, it would have been impossible. The air gondola would have been too noisy. By foot, it would have taken too long. And someone in the house would have raised alarm when they noticed movement in the web-maze in the middle of the night.’

‘Yes, we have heard about the extraordinary system,’ says Biros. Or maybe it is Lazaro. ‘Of course, it would help our investigation if we knew how it works …’

‘That is secret information.’ The voice from the shadows belongs to Weaver. The words are quiet, yet they cut the air clear.

‘Of course.’ Biros closes his mouth. Lazaro scribbles in his notebook. Or perhaps it is the other way round.

Lazaro, if it is not Biros, lifts his eyes from the page he is filling. The sound of the pen is cut short.

‘Did anyone raise alarm when the girl moved through the maze towards the house?’ he asks.

‘Eventually, yes,’ Weaver says. ‘But she made it all the way to the house before she was found. It was as if she knew the way. Yet she is not one of our weavers, Captain Lazaro.’

The guards glance at each other again. They probably arrived by air gondola. Visitors usually do. If they had walked through the maze, they would have needed a guide, and they know it.

‘Biros,’ Biros says. ‘Interesting.’

‘Fascinating,’ Lazaro says. He turns to look at me. ‘And you say you don’t know this girl, and you have never seen her before, and you don’t know why your name is tattooed on her?’

A draught passes through the room, waves knotted from threads move under the eyes of Our Lady of Weaving.

‘I don’t, and I haven’t.’

‘In invisible ink,’ Biros says.

I think of the letters glowing on the girl’s skin and of the scar-handed man in the Museum of Pure Sleep, of the tattoo that appeared and vanished.

‘It means nothing to me,’ I say. ‘I didn’t even know invisible tattoos existed.’

Biros and Lazaro wait. When I do not continue, Biros whispers something to Lazaro. Lazaro whispers something back. They speak in a low voice which blends their words into a soft hiss. I only discern one among them: Dreamer.

A cold current passes through me. Above them, Our Lady of Weaving reaches in all directions and not one strand comes loose from her grip.

Biros and Lazaro nod at each other and turn to me.

‘Fascinating,’ Biros says.

‘Interesting,’ Lazaro says. He closes his notebook and slips it into his pocket together with the pen.

‘We will look into it,’ Biros says.

‘And we will let you know,’ Lazaro says.

They get up. I get up too. They both take a quick bow at me. I bow my head slightly in return. Then they bow at Weaver, and in a few fast strides they are gone, the echoes of their footsteps vanished into the fabrics covering the walls. Twelve of Our Ladies of Weaving look from the tapestries far beyond this room and hour, and speechlessly their limbs spin new meshes for the Web of Worlds.

I turn to go, but Weaver’s voice stops me.

‘I wish to have a word with you as well,’ she says. She closes the door. We stand in the shadows and watch each other across the distance of the room.

‘If there is something you are not telling me, now would be a good moment to mend the situation,’ she says. ‘That way I might be able to help you.’

‘There isn’t.’

She regards me.

‘You know I’m not unfair,’ she remarks. ‘I have trusted you with more than I have many others. It would make me sad to know that trust is not returned.’

It is true. She often lets me send water messages, showing me the symbol to insert in the watergraph without telling me what it means. She does not know that I have learned most symbols over the years. The skill is not much use, however, because she only ever asks me to send unimportant routine messages, such as vegetable or seafood orders to the market, or notes to let the merchants know how many antique silkweed tapestries the House of Webs will be auctioning off this year.

Weaver has also let me keep my cell to myself for a long time without questioning it. Most younger weavers have to share their cells with someone else, and the only reason I am on my own is because my cellmate left the house without warning a year ago. I suspect she was pregnant.

‘I would tell you if there was anything,’ I say.

Weaver smiles almost unnoticeably.

‘Of course you would,’ she says. ‘Before you go back to work, could you take a message to Alva for me? Tell her I will send for a gondola to take our patient to the Hospital Quarters tomorrow. I know the sick bay is running out of space.’

I bow my head slightly. As I walk to the door, I half-expect Weaver to stop me again, but she does not. When I glance back, she is standing by the watergraph, waiting for me to go, so I do.

I find Alva placing a sample under the microscope. It is an expensive device. She has told me there are only three of them on the island. She glances up when I walk in. Two bright lanterns are burning on the table. The curtains between the sick room and the front room are closed. I hear coughing from the other side. I imagine the girl in her bed, her long limbs, the dampened pain on her face. The tattoo that is like an invitation written on her, one I cannot understand.

‘The ointment is between the scale and the opened bag of camomile,’ Alva says and turns a small, round mirror in her hand. ‘It’s been waiting for you for days.’

I pick up the glass jar from the table and push it into the pocket of my jacket.

‘How did you know I needed it?’

‘You come to ask for it every year after the Ink-marking,’ Alva replies. ‘Do these seem the same to you?’ She points at two grey strips on top of the mirror. A scent of mud and seaweed rises from them. I look at them more closely and notice that they appear to be slices of medusa flesh.

‘Exactly the same,’ I say. ‘Why?’

Alva places the mirror under the microscope lens and pulls one of the lanterns closer. She looks into the microscope and adjusts it by the wheel on the side.

‘What about now?’ she asks.

I walk around the table next to her and peer into the microscope. The view makes me think of trunks of strange trees, a pile of maggots or budding branches of unfamiliar sea plants.

‘You’re looking at the part of medusa skin that helps them feel and sense light. It also contains their medicinal properties, the cells that produce a pain-relieving chemical,’ Alva says. ‘There are samples from two medusas under the lens, not just one.’

The difference is clear. The tree-trunk and budding-branch patterns on the left look translucent, but on the right dark streaks show on them, as if they have been dipped in ink that is slowly dripping off.

‘What is that?’ I ask.

‘I asked someone to bring me a dead medusa from the shore, the freshest they could find,’ Alva says. ‘That’s the one on the right. The other one is from my tank.’

‘I thought they all died of polyp fever.’

It has been a week since the flood. A few days after the first wave of dead medusas washed to the shores, the Council sent a water message around the city. The word spread quickly: polyp fever, a rare disease that was not harmful to humans but could become an epidemic. Unfortunate, because it would take years for the medusa population to recover. Ships had already been sent to collect healthy singing medusas from the open sea to be planted in the waters close to the island.

‘That’s what I thought,’ Alva says. ‘But then I began to wonder. Polyp fever doesn’t usually strike during the cool season. According to lore, there have only been three epidemics on the island before, and they all took place in late summer.’

I remember the mute and still blooms of jellyfish that people are still collecting from the streets and shores, their stench that floats around the midden ships. I think of the humming of the medusas in denser-growing evenings, the silence spread across the shores, and the air feels heavier to breathe.

‘What is it, then?’

‘I don’t know, but it is not polyp fever. Could be a different kind of disease.’ She reaches for the side table and picks up two glass jars with water and a dead medusa in each. The animals are missing a slice of their bells. ‘There’s something else, too,’ she says.

Alva walks across the room to the tank and pushes one of the jars against the glass wall. Inside the tank, a bloom of medusas begins to gather near the dead one, and a faint humming grows in the water. The medusas settle into the shape of a circle and the slow gauzes of their swimming-bells ripple behind the glass. Alva waits, pulls the first jar away and presses the other one against the tank. The singing medusas keep their formation for a moment, some of them even swimming closer in curiosity. Then the humming is cut short, and all goes quiet. A few seconds later the whole bloom bursts like a large soap bubble. The medusas scurry in all directions, far away to the other side of the tank.

‘Have you ever seen them do that?’ Alva asks.

‘No.’

‘Neither have I.’ Alva turns and walks back to the table. Only after some time do the medusas return to their languid paths in the water-space.

‘What are you going to do?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know yet,’ Alva says. ‘I need to look into this further.’

I will soon be missed in the Halls of Weaving. You can stretch a temporary absence from work for a while, but you have to do it carefully.

‘Weaver asked me to tell you that she wants to move the patient to the Hospital Quarters tomorrow,’ I say. ‘The … visitor.’ My hand has moved to gesture at my mouth before I realize, and Alva needs no further specification. She nods.

‘Good. I’ve already had to put spare mattresses to use. A severe cough is spreading in the house, and it seems to come with a dreadful rash.’

‘Is it contagious?’

‘Presumably,’ she says. ‘Do you want to come and say goodbye?’

I glance in the direction of the Halls of Weaving.

‘I will take full responsibility if Weaver comes after you,’ Alva says. ‘Medical emergency.’

‘Offer accepted,’ I say, more out of temptation to stay away from weaving a little longer than anything else. Or so I tell myself.

Alva leaves the glass jars with dead medusas on the table and we head into the other room.

There is more light today, and sound, the kind created when you put many people in a small space and tell them to rest but they are in too much discomfort to do so. Two spare mattresses have been wedged in the narrow gaps between the beds. There are three younger weavers and four older than myself in the sick bay. Two seem asleep, but the rest are tossing and turning restlessly. Their breathing is distorted and ragged, heavy with cough. Their skin is covered in a rash that looks like they have been dipped in red or purple ink. I smell the heavy scent of burning herbs, and under it sweat and sickness.

The girl is awake. She is sitting at the back of the room, propped up with pillows, and is putting together a puzzle. Alva must have given it to her. She turns to look at us. Alva puts a jar under the girl’s chin and she opens her mouth. A dead singing medusa drops into the jar.

‘I’m afraid I cannot give you another one,’ Alva says. ‘I don’t know when I will be able to get more, and I need to keep a few in reserve.’

The girl nods.

‘But I have good news,’ Alva continues. ‘We can finally arrange your transfer. It wasn’t possible earlier, because there was an accident in the north.’ I remember the flood night: the empty sky, the missing cable. ‘An important air route crashed the night you came. Cleaning up has caused so much work that the route has only just started operating again.’

The girl looks like something is troubling her, but nods again slowly. Her face begins to darken in a way I do not understand.

‘A gondola is coming to take you to the Hospital Quarters tomorrow,’ Alva continues. ‘They have more singing medusas. And if not, they’ll have something else to ease the pain.’

The girl’s face continues to darken. She takes a deep breath and stares at Alva.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

She grasps my wrist. I start, but do not pull my hand away. Her fingers are warm and narrow, and their grip seems to reach deeper than the skin. I glance at Alva.

‘Everything is fine,’ I say to the girl. ‘There will be more space in the Hospital Quarters. They will be able to take better care of you there and find your family.’

The girl holds my gaze with hers: grey as rain, or floodwaters in the light of dawn. A slow shiver travels through me, as if she is pulling an invisible string somewhere inside. The corners of her mouth tremble once, she draws breath again, and then lets go of me, turning her face towards the floor. She is very still, as if holding a deep tremor within.

‘I just came to say goodbye,’ I say.

The girl raises her gaze. She nods slowly.

‘I hope you feel better soon.’

They are worn and hollow words, but I cannot find any others.

Before I turn to go, something moves in her eyes. A knot tightens inside me, but I choose to treat it as just another shadow. One more will make little difference.

I step into the hall where the others have already settled to work. I kneel in front of the statue of Our Lady of Weaving and the image of the Council. I touch my forehead to the floor. I get up, walk to my seat and pick up the shuttle. My fingers know the paths and cannot err, for they never change. Wall-webs must be strong enough to survive even heavy rainfalls and storm winds carrying across the sea. Yet they must also be easy enough to unravel, so the yarn can be used again. The hours slip through my fingers uneven, in slow knots.

This evening, after I have placed down my shuttle, taken my supper and returned to my chamber, sleep is deceptively easy to come. It puts me behind a door in a place that is the web-maze, and yet is not: the walls are gauze and yarn, but the door is a robust wooden door. It is ajar, and behind it opens a deep and dense darkness. On the other side there is a rustling sound, like someone breathing. I turn around. The web walls close to form a dead end before me. As I approach them I think I hear words swishing, and behind the walls I sense many solitudes interlaced with one another. But I know it is a dream, and my dream is mine to command. I will my body to be lighter than air. Wind blows through the crack in the door and over my skin, picks me up from the maze with lithe fingers and floats me towards the skies. The starry night sky pulls me up until I am wind and light, rips apart to reveal a universe where nothing withholds me.

Then I am back in my bed, the mattress hard under my back, breath struggling in my throat. My body is tired, as if I have spent all my strength on hard work. The walls of my cell are close.

I am not certain what has woken me.

There is no light yet around the edges of the curtains. The glow-glass draws a faint blue ring around itself. The house is frozen around the mutest heart of the night. If there are weavers walking and guarding the corridors, they are far away from my cell.

I realize I have forgotten my night-watch.

The glow-glass almost shatters to the floor when I reach out to shake it brighter. I catch it just before it slides over the edge of the table. I throw my blanket aside and pull a cloak from the foot of the bed to cover my nightgown. The sand sits still in the hourglass next to the door. I forgot to turn it before I went to bed. I push my feet into leather-soled shoes.

The door closes behind me more loudly than I intend.

Half-running, I pass a long row of quiet cell doors. When I turn the corner at the end of the corridor, I hear the sound.

It is a hardly discernible rift in the wall of silence, thinner than a line drawn with a needlepoint. A narrow moan is rising and falling along the ceiling vaults, in the chambers of stone that throw it back from their walls. I recognize it. My steps turn faster.

Past the washrooms I reach the first dormitory doorway. The sound fades. I peek in. All is quiet. A drowsy third-year weaver lifts her head and lets it fall back on the pillow. I do not see anything unusual in the next dormitory, either. But when I close the door, the sound begins again. This time I know where it is coming from.

In the first-year apprentices’ dormitory everyone is awake by now. A flood of whispers and half-spoken words washes over me. At the far end of the room, where the youngest apprentices sleep, a group of girls is gathered around a bed, but not too close. Their ring leaves an empty space full of fear around the source of the sound, and they are all fiddling coral amulets between their fingers. A faint, anxious moan carries from the bed, circling the room like a starved ghost seeking a way out.

I hope to be wrong. I walk across the dormitory towards the bed.

When I see the girl from whose mouth the moan is rising, I know there is nothing I can do for her.

She is lying on her back, her body completely still and her lips slightly parted. I remember her name: Mirea. She cannot be older than ten. Her breathing is strained, as if her throat is trying to close around it. But it is her eyes that really give her away. They are open, black holes. Her pupils have widened like dark water, washed away all colour, and there is nothing between their edges and the frightened whites. Because frightened she is, her whole face brimming with terror as she stares into the space above her that seems empty to everyone else. Yet I know what she sees. And I know the strange song of her low, bare moan: the kind people always sing when a night-maere is riding them. The sound marks the sleeper as soon as someone else hears it.

I seize my own coral amulet and speak her name softly.

‘Mirea.’

A violent shudder runs through her, and then she grasps my arm. The grip is tight enough to bruise.

‘Help me,’ she says.

‘Everything’s fine, Mirea,’ I tell her, although it is not.

‘There was a shadow,’ she says. ‘It tried to strangle me.’

Her first time, then. She does not know yet what happened. Does not know how to keep the secret. Not that it would help now. The others stare at us. I see some girls whisper to each other. There is no easy way to do this.

‘Have you heard of night-maere possession?’ I ask.

Alarm stains Mirea’s face. Of course she has. Everyone on the island has.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she says, but without certainty.

‘I’m so sorry, Mirea,’ I say. The rims of her eyes are turning red and her cheeks quiver once, twice. ‘Everyone saw you. Your eyes were night-maere black. You carry the dream-plague.’

‘My mother says night-maeres are invisible,’ Mirea tries. Her voice cracks and fails. ‘It was here. Someone else must have seen it.’ A single tear rolls down her face.

The girls around us shift uncomfortably. Someone sniggers. Anger burns in my throat like white-hot glass.

‘Only those who carry a night-maere can see them.’ Weaver’s tall figure has appeared in the doorway. Her words cross the room before she does.

I look at Mirea, who has begun to shake with sobs.

‘I don’t want to sleep in the same room with a Dreamer.’ It is a blonde girl. Her face is smooth as polished white stone, and equally hard.

Weaver looks at her with an expression that betrays the slightest crack of impatience, and behind it, something buried far deeper. For a moment I think her words are going to be something else entirely, but then she just says, ‘We will want to avoid contamination, of course.’ She pulls a small notebook from her pocket, tears out a page and draws three symbols on it. ‘Eliana, go and send this message immediately.’ She hands the piece of paper to me.

Mirea is still crying. Her nose is dripping large, wet drops to the sheets, and the softness of her child-face is distorted with fear. The coral amulet hangs around her neck purposeless, incapable of keeping the night-maere away, a piece of dead seafloor. I see the blonde girl look at her in disgust. I nod and turn slowly to go. I have to stop myself from giving Mirea’s hand a quick, encouraging squeeze. It would be a lie. She has nothing to feel encouraged about.

The door to Weaver’s study opens without a sound. It is never locked. The glow-glasses shine faintly. Through the window in the corner I can see the ever-burning fires of the Tower at a distance, like sharp eyes blinking in the face of darkness.

I missed my night-watch.

Perhaps there is nothing I could have done for Mirea. But if I had been walking the corridors and listening to the sounds of night-rest in the rooms, I might have heard her before anyone else. Quietly, without anyone knowing, I could have woken her up, and she could have hidden her illness – if not forever, at least until the next time. She might have lived through the dormitory years and even through sharing a cell without another visit from a night-maere, and no one would ever have known.

The watergraph stands tall and robust in the corner. The glass tank embedded in its stone body reflects my face dark and distorted when I step close. I select the lever that bears the emblem of the House of the Tainted. The metal creaks. The message-pipe leading there opens. In the faint light I can just barely see the index and the scale plate with its engraved symbols inside the tank. I do not need the paper Weaver gave me, because I recognized the symbols when she wrote them down. Fetch a Dreamer from the House of Webs. I turn the wheel on the side of the machine until the index points at the first symbol. The surface of the water rises in the tank as the index moves along the scale. In the tank of the watergraph in the House of the Tainted, the water level will change accordingly, showing the same engraved symbol.

When I have inserted all three symbols, I wait until a small bell chimes to signal that the message has been received at the other end of the pipe. Then I turn to go. I am nearly out of the door, when I stop. I listen. The corridors are night-silent and all I hear are the movements of my own body. There is no one else in the building.

I move behind Weaver’s table. Slowly I coax the drawer open and stop to listen again. No light flickers to life and no footsteps brush the floors. The message-book is pushed to the back of the drawer, but like the door, the drawer is never locked. I pull the thick book out and place it in my lap. The pages are yellowed and brittle on the edges, and full of water message code, which no one in the house knows apart from Weaver – as far as she is aware.

She is not in the habit of writing down the dates, but she records moon phases with precision: how Our Lady of Weaving hides a silver coin in her palm behind the sky, reveals it little by little and hides it again. The last full moon was two days ago. I only need to find the circle marking it and count from there backwards towards the day the girl arrived at the house.

There are no entries for that day. Then I remember: the flood. The watergraph could not be used. I find three entries from two days later. The first one is a request to the trading harbours to buy more yarn. The second seems equally casual. Herbs, it reads. The third and final one is in the column for incoming messages. To be certain, I check the symbol against the translation sheet Weaver keeps placed between the final pages of the book.

Intrusion at the museum, the message says. The sender is the City Guard.

I remember the scar-handed man I saw at the Museum of Pure Sleep.

A stone-cold draught blows across my skin, too sudden and sharp to ignore. It is possible that I hear a soft creak of weary metal. I turn to look, and take a moment to see what I am looking at. In the corner of the room, a tapestry billows like a sail in wind. Behind it a dense and deep darkness cuts the wall.

There is a modest wooden door in the wall. I have always imagined it to be some kind of storage room, if I have ever even taken notice of it. Now I do.

The door was closed when I came to the room. I am certain of it.

I push Weaver’s watergraph logbook back into the drawer.

This time I hear the creak of the hinges clearly. The door is swinging slowly in the draught. I walk closer. I listen closely, and for a moment I think I hear a rustling sound, as if someone is breathing in the darkness. But when I try to catch the sound again, it is gone.

Another breeze blows through the chink and across my skin, making every hair stand on end. The door slams shut, as if pushed by an invisible hand from the other side. I take a step back, then another, and as I walk towards the tall door of Weaver’s study, I hear the quick beating of my heart against the bones of my chest, like an animal struggling to break free.

I do not slow down until the long, shadow-soaked corridor is halfway behind me

and another landscape opens ahead, a world that is ready to crumble or change.

She dreams dark dreams of a place where longing settles in limbs and thickens into fog on window panes, where a hunger to run free and feel the salt of the sea on one’s face makes the air bitter to breathe and fear crawls dense along the floors. The walls fall quiet into deep water, every door is held by a lock and branch-stiff lattices cover the windows. If you go close enough, you may hear words swishing, and behind the walls you may sense many solitudes interlaced with one another. Even closer you may sometimes catch screams, but perhaps they are of seagulls.

Those who carry marks on their faces and are confined within walls scratch the doors until their claws break, and under the weight of their dreams the city subsides and cracks, poles and foundation stones under houses shift out of joint and crumble, the edges of shores and canals corrode into the sea. But ink chains others also, flows under skins and in the veins of the island. It grows slow wounds at the core of all life, hiding from sight what is meant to be seen.

Hands reach for the threads of sleep and fall towards them, and they do not thwart the touch. Their stirring started long ago, elusive, adaptive, impossible to stop. The door into darkness is closed, the door into darkness is open, air flows and through it

CHAPTER FOUR

A gondola arrives for Mirea at dawn. We all hear the squeaking of the metal cables as the vessel approaches, hovers above the drop and climbs slowly to the port on top of the hill. I am not outside to see it, but the walls of the Halls of Weaving make every sound swell in my ears: the heavy footsteps, rarely heard in the house; the indistinct words of Weaver’s voice; and, eventually, Mirea’s weeping. I imagine two silent and dark figures taking her into the black gondola bearing the emblems of the City Guard, which will return down to the city across the void. Once its bottom touches water, the large hooks holding it to the airway will be detached. The vessel will float down the canal, turn to a waterway running towards the House of the Tainted and finally stop before the locked iron gate. I imagine Mirea: struggling and fighting, her body wriggling like a slippery fish at the bottom of the boat. Or quiet, submissive, her face closed.

None of us flinches, or slows down the work, or stops it.

Later, when the weather turns warmer, the folding doors of the Halls of Weaving are opened towards the square. Many weavers carry their looms outside, under the canopy woven of web-yarn. If interior and exterior spaces can be separated from each other in the House of Webs, that is: here, rooms move often. The dormitories and cells remain. They are built in stone, because sleep must be confined within solid walls, it cannot be released to wander free. But around the stone buildings the rooms, walls and streets wax and vanish, nor are they supposed to stay. That is the will of Our Lady of Weaving.

Days are seldom warm this late in autumn. The sun draws soft shadows on the walls and casts them across the floors, falls through the half-woven wall-webs. Clouds break the edge of the light. The long rows of weavers reach from the room all the way to the square. Their hands pass the weft through the warps, building within the frames fabrics that are all alike. No exceptions are allowed. The only sounds in the hall are the rustling of clothes, the swishing of yarn and the breathing of dozens of women. The coarse sea-wool stings my fingers until their skin cracks, and my weave is not as smooth as I would like.

I pat the weft with a wooden weaving fork to make it a tighter fit with the rest of the web. The warp rises tall and bare ahead of me. On my left side Silvi, who came to the house three years after me, has already woven twice as much as I this morning. My weft twists into a tangle and leaves a large, protruding loop in the wall-web. I am so focused on tugging the knot free that it takes me a while to notice the low chatter that has grown in the hall, and the stopped movements. Silvi stares away from the square and folding doors, towards the arched stone doorway between the hall and the corridor.

The girl tattooed with invisible ink stands at the door of the hall. She has changed her white patient gown for a long, grey wool dress and tied her hair low in the nape of her neck. The skin around her mouth still looks slightly swollen and bruised, but she stands straight and without hesitation. Her gaze circles the hall and stops on me.

I place the shuttle down. The girl begins to walk towards me. I catch uncertain looks and tense postures from the corner of my eye. Outsiders are not allowed in the Halls of Weaving. Yet no one rises to stop her; neither do I. Outside clouds part, and the sky casts sudden light across the hall. A shining forest of halfway webs reaches in all directions. She walks to me, tilts her head and the corners of her mouth lift, just a little. I do not know what moves on my face, but something must do. She sits down on the narrow seat next to me, so close I smell the soap on her skin. For a few moments, neither of us moves. I breathe her in.

She places a hand on top of the shuttle resting in my lap. Her fingers brush it briefly before settling on the polished wooden surface. Its shape is a familiar fit against her touch. She looks at me, face close to mine, and tilts her head again. Her expression poses a question.

It is quiet enough to hear a hundred simultaneous breaths drawn in the hall. Only those chosen as apprentices are allowed to weave in the house. Anything else is forbidden. Everyone stares at us.

I nod.

The girl nods back. I feel her breath brush my neck. She picks up the shuttle and begins to pass it through the warp. Her movements are swift and sure. The yarn slides without clumping, and I see immediately that the resulting weave will be smooth and dense. When the wall-web is ready in its frame, it will show the place where the shuttle passed from my hands to hers: the lumpy, sometimes too tight and occasionally too loose texture turns even and made with skill.

I remain seated, although the seat is too narrow for both of us, and she is tightly pressed against me. There are footsteps at the door. Alva steps into the hall, her face red and her breathing heavy.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘She disappeared while I was outside drawing water from the well. I will take her back immediately.’

I look at the girl’s hands again, the endlessly intertwining strands sliding through her fingers.

‘I don’t think she wants to go back,’ I say.

The gondola from the Hospital Quarters arrives that evening and takes away six rash-covered, violently coughing weavers. The girl is not among them. On the second day after I have handed my shuttle to the girl, she steps into the halls with Weaver. Together they set up a new loom in the corner and stretch the warp between the upper and lower beams. The girl carries a seat in front of the frame and sits down, places the shuttle, a skein of yarn and a weaving fork next to her, and begins to work. Weaver keeps an eye on the girl for a while, and when she leaves, no one says anything. We all take secret glances at the girl. Once she glances back at me. I can only see her face diagonally from the back, but the cheek turned towards me lifts as if she is smiling.

After supper I sit in my cell, detach the coin pouch from my waist and pour the coins in front of me on the bed. The House of Webs pays a small monthly salary and clothes its residents, because the servants of Our Lady of Weaving are expected to look tidy. But my socks have worn thin, and there will not be new ones on offer until spring. I begin to count the coins to see if I can afford to buy a pair of warm socks at the market for winter. My fingers brush something oblong. For a moment I am confused, but then I remember the metal object the dark-clad woman dropped at my feet on the day of the Ink-marking. I pick it up. It is a small key. I turn it in my fingers. Its teeth are simple, but one end is unusually shaped: it is tapering, like an eye, and in place of a pupil an eight-pointed sun shines at the centre, the emblem of the island and the Council.

There is a knock on the door. I drop the key back into the coin pouch, collect the coins from the bed in a hurry and tighten the mouth of the pouch. I get up to open the door. Weaver stands behind it with the girl who is carrying a pile of clean bed linen in her arms.

‘Eliana,’ Weaver says and places her hand on the girl’s shoulder. ‘She will stay in the house for the time being. At least until we find out where her home is.’

I glance at the bed linen and understand.

‘Can we come in?’ Weaver says. ‘I have no doubt she would like to prepare her bed.’

‘Can’t she live in the sick bay?’ I ask, and my voice sounds harsher than I had intended. The girl shifts her weight from one foot to the other. ‘Or in one of the dormitories?’

‘The sick bay has five new cases of rash, and we do not want more infections. After what she has been through, I trust you understand that she would prefer more privacy than a dormitory can offer.’

‘I cannot sleep when there is someone else in the room,’ I try.

Weaver looks at me from her heights, eyes black in the dark face.

‘I thought you did not sleep anyway,’ she says. ‘She is your roommate for the time being. I will leave you to make closer acquaintance.’

I know the conversation is over. I move to the side and let the girl in. She places the bed linen on the night table next to the empty bed. The table is too small, and the sheets fall to the floor. She picks them up with hasty hands and begins to make the bed without looking at me. Weaver simply nods and leaves.

I do not know where to look. There is little to do in the cell in the evenings after work. My former roommate usually wanted to chat about seamen and jewellery sold in the market, or how many children each of us would have when we found husbands and left the house. I mostly responded with a few syllables, if at all. That never seemed to bother her.

The girl gets the linen in place and begins to take off her dress, which seems slightly too big for her. I look away and hear her slip under the blanket in her thin undergarment.

‘It would be good for you to know that I sleep less than most others,’ I say. ‘I’m often on night-watch.’ It seems like a sufficient explanation.

Her eyes are wide in the dusk, their colour metal-sharp.

‘I didn’t mean to be rude,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I just haven’t shared a room with anyone for a long time.’

I close the curtains. The glow-glass globe on the night table dims slowly. I take off my jacket, change into my nightgown and lower myself to bed. I turn towards the wall.

I hear the sheets rustling and the bunk creaking under the girl. Apparently she too has turned her back on me. It feels as if I can sense the warmth of her body across the room. I close my eyes and fear falling asleep. From her breathing I can tell she is not sleeping, either.

As weeks pass, the girl and I try to get used to each other’s presence in the small space that is now new to both of us: to her because she does not yet know it, and to me because the strange, shifting element of her limbs and hair and shape has been added to my former privacy. I begin to understand I am also responsible for introducing her to the ways of the house. She follows me into the washrooms in the morning and to the supper table, although she cannot eat normally yet. She bends her head down to the floor of the Halls of Weaving after me and goes to sleep when I do. I stay awake and watch her, but some nights exhaustion eventually drops me to sleep. When images begin to form behind my closed lids, she seems to chase them, too. The walls of sleep fall quiet into deep water, and she climbs on them before me. I follow her through low and tall doors to dream-rooms where branch-stiff lattices cover the windows. I seek her in dream-halls where black water rushes in the rifts of cracked floors and walls are fraying webs, because the threads run from their meshes and everything unravels. I want the floors to be unbroken and they close their cracks in front of my footsteps. I want the walls to be whole again and the yarn interweaves back into meshes, but it escapes my grasp and I cannot reach it, and each new wanting is without strength.

When I wake with a start in the light of night or dawn, I hear the girl’s breathing on the other side of the cell.

I should perhaps know how to read these signs:

That morning, when I arrive at the Halls of Weaving with the girl at my heels, I see two City Guards enter Weaver’s study.

My shadow has moved two palm-widths on the wall, when a weaver who is on messenger duty steps into the hall, bows her forehead to the floor, walks to the girl and says something to her in a low voice. They leave the hall together.

The air gondola cables screech under the weight of a vessel.

At lunch I keep a vacant seat next to mine, but she does not come.

No one touches her wall-web for the rest of the day.

I am on my way to the cell after supper, when Weaver stops me in the corridor.

‘Come to my study,’ she says. ‘I must tell you something.’

The tapestries on the walls are dark and their patterns seem to move while you look away. I sit on the chair Weaver has offered me. This is not the Scolding Chair, but one of the better ones, with a high back and a smoother shape.

‘Two City Guards came to the house today,’ Weaver says. ‘They were trying to track down someone who missed her Ink-marking recently.’

For some reason I think of the key, of the woman on the square. Of the guard who saw me. On the wall Our Lady of Weaving raises all her hands, inviting the sea to storm.

‘I did not miss my visit,’ I say.

‘I know,’ Weaver replies. ‘But someone named Valeria Petros did.’

She pauses and watches me. I search my memory for the name and do not find it.

‘Who’s that?’ I ask.

‘Your roommate,’ Weaver says. ‘She confirmed it today when the City Guard spoke to her.’

I reach for the girl’s thoughts, try to imagine what I would have done. She must have been too badly injured and heavily medicated to even know what day it was. She could have gone later, but how would she have explained what had happened without words? And whoever attacked her probably still walks the streets of the city, eyes perhaps ready to see, hands ready to capture and kill this time.

‘Will Valeria Petros leave the house now?’ I ask. The thought hits me deeper than I expect.

‘She will stay,’ Weaver says.

‘Doesn’t she want to return to her family?’

‘I am certain she would like to,’ Weaver says. ‘Unfortunately it is not possible.’ She pauses. ‘You will remember that air gondola accident the night she arrived.’

I nod.

‘Her parents were in the gondola that crashed. There were no survivors.’

A cold weight settles into my chest. I think of the cables in the sky, of their distance from the ground below, or water. When you fall from that high, it matters little what is underneath. An image from the week before arises in my mind: Valeria’s darkening face when Alva mentioned the air route crash. She must have known her parents were travelling by gondola the night she was attacked. She must have wondered.

‘Doesn’t she have anyone else?’ My voice is evened by years of practice, as if it belongs to another.

‘She has an aunt, an inkmaster. I have sent her a message. But Valeria has indicated she prefers to stay here. And I do believe her skill is put to better use within these walls.’

I recall the night Valeria arrived at the house. I see the pain curled on her face, the bloodstains on the stones of the square.

‘Do you know who attacked her?’

Weaver shakes her head.

‘I’m afraid the City Guard do not seem to have made progress on that front.’

She is quiet. The tapestries move, are still and move again. A cold draught travels across the room. I glance at the corner. The door is closed behind the glass frame of the watergraph. Weaver has pushed the hood back from her face. She does not do that often. Her face is dark and nearly smooth, although it cannot be young. Her short hair curls close to the curve of her head.

Weaver breaks the silence.

‘There is one more thing.’

I wait.

‘Valeria’s parents have already been cremated. She didn’t want a place for them in the burial ground. But as their daughter she must collect the ashes from the House of Fire. She will need someone to accompany her.’

‘I will do it,’ I say.

‘Yes, you will,’ Weaver says. ‘You may go now.’ She turns to the pile of papers on the table and picks up a pen. It begins to rustle on paper.

I walk to the door where I stop, because an unexpected thought takes shape in my mind. No one should have to travel beyond the Web of Worlds without thoughts and deeds to smooth the way. I cannot do much for the girl, but this I can.

‘What were their names?’

The rustling stops. Weaver looks up from the papers. The pen hangs mid-air in her fingers, ready to be raised, ready to fall.

‘Valeria’s parents,’ I specify. ‘What were they called?’

‘Mihaela and Jovanni Petros,’ she says.

‘Thank you,’ I say and leave.

I knock on the door of the cell. No response. Quietly I open it. The curtains are closed, and the girl – Valeria, I fit her name in my mouth – has thrown a shawl over the glow-glass on her night table. She is curled under the blanket, a lump of darkness, like grief sealed in a throat. I listen to her breathing and am almost certain she is awake. But I do not say anything, in case I am wrong.

My bed makes a soft creak when I sit down on the edge, even though I try to do it slowly, without sound. Valeria does not move.

My hand wants to reach out to her, stroke the curve of the shoulder and her side, very softly, because words are too heavy right now. Instead I get undressed in the dark as quietly as I can and go to bed. I think of the broken cable, its end swaying in the wind, or perhaps cradled by water, and everything she will never tell her parents. Of how her hours have suddenly turned briefer and her days more brittle, because there is no longer anything between them and emptiness, and she is the next in line.

Valeria stays in the cell for days. I do not see her cry, but when I return from work in the evenings, her eyes are red and swollen. Sometimes she merely lies facing the wall. I bring her soup and bread, the hard crust of which I have scratched off. Sometimes she eats. Mostly she does not.

A week later I climb up a tangled path to a hill where cables do not squeak or webs divert walkers from the way. Low wind-whipped bushes grow here and there among the stones, and stunted trees sticking from the thin soil like gnawed bones. Their yellowing leaves are dappled by bruise-like spots I do not remember seeing the year before. The day is bright, the wings of the white gulls sharp against the sky, but their cries are drowned by the distance. The hill is veiled in silence.

Far at sea I discern earth-coloured ships that do not bear the flags of trading vessels on their masts. Everyone on the island has seen them, but no one knows what they are for. They sail to a secluded harbour near the House of the Tainted, and people do not go there. Some say they have seen pale figures in the port who vanish from sight when they are spoken to. I turn my gaze away from the ships. This day does not need more ghosts.

Janos stands before the arching stone gate at the end of the path, waiting for me. We meet here on the last day of the week after every new moon. He clasps me into a wide hug. The gesture seems out of place, too loud and large, but I do not push him away.

Janos lets me go and looks at me.

‘You have been missing sleep again, sister,’ he says.

‘So have you, brother,’ I respond.

‘Must run in the family,’ he says. His smile is our mother’s.

We both glance around. There are no others on the hill. Or if there are, they will be inside the Glass Grove. From there, they cannot hear us speak.

‘I hear someone was taken from the House of Webs the other week.’

So he has heard. I should have expected it. News always finds its way to the House of Words. I wonder if they have already received word of a strange girl who collapsed on the stones and nowadays sleeps only a cell-width away from me.

‘She was one of the youngest,’ I say. ‘She didn’t have the privacy of the cell to protect her.’

Janos pushes his hands into the pockets of his blue scribe’s cloak. His eyes look to the sky, then at me again. I see serious concern in them.

‘Someone was also taken from the House of Words recently,’ he says.

I do not remember Janos telling me about any Dreamers being discovered in the House of Words in years. Memories come without looking: our mother’s night-maere-black eyes and her moan in a candle-lit room, our father’s hand dropping to her forehead and stroking the evil spirit away. Torn breath in my throat and my mother’s cool fingers on my face, her soothing voice, as I sought the shadow I had seen in the room mere moments earlier. Janos’s face, a dark patch in the light of faint flames. My mother’s words in the dusk: never tell anyone.

‘No one knows,’ I say.

‘I do,’ Janos replies.

‘You would never tell.’

Janos’s smile is our mother’s, but his way of frowning is our father’s.

‘A speculation: one day I’m careless, spill ink over an important codex and spoil it,’ he says. ‘Or make a disrespectful mistake during the next Word-incineration, before the eyes of the whole island. Scribe gets angry with me and throws me out of the House of Words. The City Guard nabs me and tortures me for information.’

‘You are never careless,’ I say. ‘And they don’t do that.’ Except to Dreamers, perhaps, I nearly add. But the truth is I do not know what the guards do in dusky rooms, behind closed walls. Nor what kind of orders the Council do or do not give them from the Tower, from the shelter of their masks.

‘I could compose an essay on the probability of the event, if you want,’ Janos says, raising an eyebrow.

‘No doubt.’ I shove him lightly. He rarely talks of his work, but I imagine the House of Words to be like the House of Webs: rows of scribes in the large Halls of Scribing bent over their desks, dozens of pens rustling on paper and filling the library of the house with copies of old codices, trading contracts, nautical charts, essays on learned subjects.

Our footsteps settle into a shared rhythm, and no one else carries the same childhood memories as the two of us. It makes the world a little less alien to us, and we both know it.

We walk through the gate side by side. The exterior of the arch is worn smooth by winds and rainfalls, but on the inside you can still discern faint traces of figures once carved on the gate. Their shape is not human, but older, stranger. I see more than two limbs, and something that might be a network of threads, or only toothmarks of weather and time in lichen-covered stone. Beyond the gate a path paved with flat, grey slabs crosses an open field of grass, and then, through a narrow opening, leads into the Glass Grove.

Here, light has an underwater quality, like sun sifting through the sea. It glimmers and dapples gold-green along the smooth arches of the glass walls, catches on the metal plates we pass and creates pillars of rays where dust speckles float without weight. This is how I imagine it would be to lie at the bottom of the sea, looking up at the surface and seeing the world above, but different, its shapes unfamiliar, softer, melting into each other, free from the forms assigned for them. Perhaps that is what those who built this place had in mind. Perhaps the rusty hooks in the ceiling above had fish hanging from them once upon a time, smooth and slippery and colourful, or singing medusas. The glassmasters still know how to make their tails swish without movement, how to capture the shape of swimming-bells mid-billow. But if they ever were here, they would have been stolen away long ago. Why leave something beautiful in a place where almost no one comes any more?

We stop before a plate with a waxing moon above waves engraved on it. For generations, only seafarers and fishermen came from our family. Janos and I are the first to be accepted into Houses of Crafts. I sweep aside a vine covering a small shelf under the metal plate. A leaf covered in bruised stains comes loose and floats onto the ground. Nothing is left of the heel of bread we brought last time. All the surrounding shelves are empty, but further away I see a cluster of wasps crawling over a rotting piece of fruit. Someone else still visits, then.

Janos pulls a simple earthenware cup from his pocket and detaches a wineskin from his belt, then pours a little bit of wine into the cup. He places the cup on the shelf, and we bow our heads to speak a quiet greeting to our parents. I think of my mother’s arms, slender and fragile as winter branches, and eventually as grey. I can no longer remember her voice. Every time I visit, yet another piece of her has fallen away, and what remains is so deeply entwined with my own being that I can no longer tell them apart. I think of my father’s eyes, losing their colour under the folds of his lids, fading away like the rest of him. The slow-growing disease they called it, first the neighbours and then the healers, when our parents finally sought them, each in turn. My mother was already gone when Janos was accepted to the House of Words; he was only ten. I was twelve, and had been rejected three times by the House of Weaving. I did not see my father again after they took me in two years later.

Goodbyes were said many times but always buried under other words, and in the end, they were never said at all. Thus we come here again and again, farewells weighing our steps. They are forever late and out of place: a moment gone by we did not recognize when it was within reach, and the ghost of which we will therefore never cease to carry.

But this is what the Glass Grove is for. No remains are kept here. Once the ashes leave the House of Fire, they are scattered into the sea. There is also another burial ground on the island, the place where most people go now. I have heard that there the dead are kept in dark glass coffins, and their features are clearly visible through the lids. The bodies are prepared in such a way that they look like a still image of life even decades later. Their families go to see them and talk to them, and in response they get a mute stare that looks unchanged yet entirely different.

I do not intend to go there. My ashes can be claimed by the sea, and if anyone remembers me once I have left the world, they can come here and whisper their farewells to the sky and trees and vines treading the glass walls.

‘I would like to go to the forest for a moment,’ I tell Janos.

He shrugs.

‘I’ll wait,’ he says. ‘If you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all.’ I had been counting on it.

He makes a space for himself on the stone floor, leaning his back against the wall. I see him close his eyes from the watered-down sunlight coming through the ceiling.

The curve of the inner wall is steeper than the outer, its glass opaque and thick and murky. My mother once told me it was the oldest part of the Glass Grove, perhaps of the city. The treetops rise above it from the encircled forest inside, the only one on the island. The rusty iron gate croaks when I slip through the gap.

The stalks of the bright broadleaves and dark-drizzling conifers push towards the sky smooth and straight, and all is covered by a roof of intertwining branches. Ancient webs of stone are petrified between the trees. There is a tale in the city, one that all weavers know: it tells of the first people of the island, those who were already old before humans came. They taught our kind how to weave, and these webs are all that is left of them. I have walked here many times, touching them and memorizing their shapes. But of course I can never try to replicate them. There is only one way to weave wall-webs, and the patterns, knots and twists of these tapestries of stone are as strange as the creatures that weather has worn away from the gate of the Glass Grove: placed there to be remembered, yet now all but forgotten.

I dig out a piece of bread from my pocket, something I slipped in there at breakfast this morning. The newly dead need nourishment to make their trip to Our Lady of Weaving beyond the Web of Worlds. Valeria can weave, so a web of stone is as good a family crest as any other I can offer. I place the bread under it and kneel. With closed eyes I speak the names of Valeria’s parents and wish them a safe journey, say the words that Valeria can never speak again.

A wind does not rise. A rain does not come. The dead stay dead, and do not respond.

When I get to my feet, sunlight scutters along the stone surface of the webs, and for a moment the air seems to burst in flames, ready to scorch the world and make it anew.

I breathe in. Clouds close the sun away again, and the ancient webs rest shadow-coloured like things that must remain unspoken. I follow my own steps back across snapping twigs and leaves turning into earth.

On the way to the city I tell Janos about Valeria. He listens, then speaks.

‘An invisible tattoo?’

‘Do you know something about them?’

He takes his time to think before saying, ‘Maybe.’

‘You have access to the census records, don’t you?’ I know they are kept in the House of Words.

Janos looks doubtful.

‘The City Guard imagines I have something to do with Valeria because of the tattoo,’ I continue. ‘If you could find anything at all about her family …’

‘It shouldn’t be too difficult,’ he says. ‘But no promises.’

‘No promises.’

We part near the edge of the web-maze, and he continues along Halfway Canal towards a closely-guarded gate that can only be accessed from water. The House of Words does not wish to offer a too-steady foothold to visitors. The low-burning evening sun catches on the webs as I climb up the hill through the paths that only the weavers know.

The door of my cell opens into an empty room. Both beds are neatly made, and the only thing revealing that there are two of us living here now is a half-made ribbon on a weaving tablet, neatly folded on the other bed. I run my finger along the ribbon. Its texture is like in Valeria’s larger work: smooth, dense, skilfully shaped. Without openings you could see through. Behind the window, beyond the forest of webs, the soft lights of the city are slowly flickering to life. I shake the glow-glass awake and take the opportunity to examine my skin all over. It has turned more difficult since Valeria moved into the cell, because I am rarely alone. All I can find are the familiar birthmarks and callouses. I shiver as I get dressed; the room feels crammed and cold. I take to walking along the corridors of the house.

I like the Halls of Weaving best when there are no others there. The rooms that can get crowded, stuffy and sometimes noisy in the working hours feel spacious, fresh and silent. The unfinished works in their wooden frames sleep undisturbed. The Tapestry Room at the far end of the building is my favourite. No tapestries are woven in the house any more; Weaver chooses a few every year to be auctioned off, and their value sustains the house for another year. The old tapestries are made of silk yarn, now impossible to spin, because silkweed died from the seas centuries ago. Their colours are still unfaded, and when I wish to be alone, I often walk among their green trees and flame-coloured flowers and ice-blue waters. The red-dye of blood coral glows brightest of all in them.

On my way I pass the hall where my seat is, and something makes me stop.

There is movement in the darkness of the hall.

Most glow-glasses have gone to sleep and the foldable doors are closed. I wait for my eyes to adjust to the half-dark. Yet I am sure already before I see her clearly, because I recognize the spot in the space of the room. I am always aware of it, the zone she occupies while working. Her hands move ceaselessly, anticipating the exact density of the yarn and unravelling the knots even before they are formed. She sees with her fingers. I can only see her backside, but it would not surprise me if her eyes were closed.

I take soundless steps towards her. She is so focused on her work that she does not notice my presence. I stop behind her, a short distance away.

‘Valeria,’ I say.

She gives a start and turns around. Her face is wrapped in shadows, but I see tears drying on her cheeks. I feel like an intruder and turn my eyes away, look at her work instead. I only realize now that it looks different from the usual wall-webs. There is a pattern forming, the start of something complex and new, although it is too early to tell what shape it is going to take.

‘What are you weaving?’ I ask.

Valeria frowns. Her face tenses. She whimpers, and her eyes well up again. From pain or grief or both, I do not know.

‘You don’t need to tell me,’ I say.

I see her thinking about how to explain this without words. The empty space of silence grows around her like a shadow. When I imagine the agony every sound must create, I feel it as a disease-like prickling at the root of my own tongue. I wish to wind my voice into a skein and hand it to her, even if only for a brief moment, so she could shape from it the words she needs and tell me what there is to be told.

Valeria places the shuttle in her lap and rolls up her left sleeve, revealing the lines of the annual tattoos on her arm. She presses her palms together, lifts them to her cheek and tilts her head against the back of her hand like onto a pillow. She closes her eyes. She breathes deeply with her eyes closed.

‘Something … to do with night-rest and sleep?’ I ask.

Valeria opens her eyes and nods. She runs her finger along the annual tattoos and taps one of them in imitation of the movement of the tattoo needle. She forms a pillow with her hands again and pretends to sleep.

‘And tattoos?’ I say.

The sound of footsteps carries from the outside, but they do not approach. The water of the algae-pool splashes and its surface shatters. Someone is filling a glow-glass. Valeria nods and repeats the series of movements. Tattoos, night-rest.

‘The tattoos … help you sleep better?’ I try. It does not sound sensible, but it is all I have to offer.

Valeria frowns, moves the shuttle next to her on the seat and gets up. She traces the surface of the web with her fingers. I understand she is drawing the invisible pattern that is not there yet. Her hands trace several long lines that run from the centre of the rectangular web radially towards the corners and edges. She draws a circle at the centre of the web, tapping at it emphatically several times. Finally she shapes an outline around everything that resembles a fish, or perhaps an eye.

I stare at the pattern in the air, in my own imagination. In her mind, where I cannot see.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

Valeria stares at me through the half-dark.

‘I do want to understand,’ I say.

Valeria’s shoulders fall a little. I see her eyes tear up again. I see her fight it, and lose. She begins to cry, quietly, without loud sobs. I place my hand on her arm. The warmth of her skin hidden by the fabric flows into my fingers and deeper, settles into a glow inside me. I almost pull her into an embrace, but I know nothing about her, and I have no words that will help. We stand there, keeping a distance that does not seem quite short enough or quite long enough.

‘I will try again,’ I say eventually. ‘And again, and again. Until I understand.’

Valeria offers me her hand. I shake it. It feels strangely formal, and yet binding at the same time, something I cannot turn back from. She holds my hand for longer than I expect. When she lets go, I do not have many words left.

‘Are you staying here?’ I manage to ask. ‘You should get some sleep.’

Valeria sits down and picks up the shuttle.

‘I won’t tell anyone,’ I promise. The words leave my mouth the same moment I understand there is no need for them. Weaving outside the working hours is not forbidden. It is just that no one ever does it. It would be considered unusual, but not punishable.

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