Black Bread

The summer rotted.

That was the only word for it. It rained in the month of the Long Days, when it should have been dry, and kept raining through the month of the Harvest, when it should have been dry, and was still raining in the month of the Falling Leaves, when everyone had given up hoping that it might stop. The clouds came down from the mountains and sat on top of the Still Sea like a lid on a pot, and the Spillway wept from a thousand cracks, and the fields of the valley below Calder Reach turned into a vast, sodden sponge of black earth and drowned stalks that stretched from the foot of the wall to the edge of the Ashlands.

The wheat came in thin and sickly. The barley came in worse.

Only the rye did well. Rye always did well. It was a hardy, stubborn, ugly grain — the bread of poor people — and it did not seem to care how much it rained. The farmers of the valley brought in cart after cart of it, dark and damp and heavy, and sold it to the grain merchants of the Shelf for whatever they could get.

Teo watched those carts climb the switchback road every morning, and counted them, and thought nothing of it.

It had been almost three months since the night in the Archdeacon's study.

His life had changed very little, and also completely. He still pushed the cart for the Mercy House. He still collected the dead of the Sump, although there were fewer of them now that the flux had gone... the usual autumn trickle of old age and fever and knife-fights on the Rope Walk. He still lived in the room at the top of the sinking chandlery. He still went down to the cellar every night.

But there was an Ashwarden standing at the corner of Brine Lane now, most hours of the day. Not always the same one. Never doing anything in particular. Just standing there, in his long grey coat, watching people come and go.

And sometimes, when Teo pushed his cart through Saint Orlen's Square... where the iron post still stood, handleless and blessed, beside an Ashwarden guard who had long since stopped looking interested... he would see a tall figure with a silver collar leaning against a wall at the far end of the street, his mask pushed up onto his forehead, watching him.

Captain Sorrel Dane never spoke to him. He never stopped him. He simply watched.

'It's like being haunted by a very patient wall,' Teo thought sourly, more than once.

Hesk, when Teo had told him about the Archdeacon's last words, had been silent for a long time. Then he had laughed... a short, strange, unhappy laugh... and said only:

"Valdris always did have a fine sense of theatre."

He had not wanted to talk about it after that. Teo had not pressed him.

Nell had come back from the orphanage with all her hair, a bruise on her chin, and a tooth-shaped scar on the hand of a sister who had tried to wash her face. She had stalked into Teo's room, sat down on the mattress, folded her arms, and announced that she was never leaving again, and that if anyone else tried to take her anywhere, she would bite their nose off. Teo had not argued.

She was learning to read now. Properly. Hesk taught her every evening, by touch and by voice, tracing the letters of the old script on her palm with his fingertip while she sounded them out. She was far quicker than Teo had been. She was far louder, too.

And Sister Mira...

Mira came to the cellar every Fifthday.

She came after the evening prayers, wrapped in her brown cloak, with a basket of bread and honey and whatever else she could take from the Mercy House stores without it being noticed. She sat on a crate with her knees drawn up and her braid over her shoulder, and she listened to Teo read the Leaves aloud. Sometimes she asked questions. Sometimes she argued with Hesk, quietly and stubbornly, about things that Teo did not entirely understand... about whether the small lives in the water had been made by the Flame, or whether the Flame was only another thing that could be measured. Hesk enjoyed those arguments very much. Teo suspected that Mira did, too.

She never said what she believed now. Teo never asked.

But she still wore the white robes. And she still prayed. And every week, she brought them the gossip of the Mercy House, which was how Teo heard about the bread.

"Wheat's doubled," she said one Fifthday, unwrapping a dark, heavy loaf on the table. "The bakers on the Shelf are charging four coppers a loaf. My mother wrote that she's switched the whole household to rye. Can you imagine? My mother. Eating peasant bread." She tore off a chunk and handed it to Nell. "Rye's all anyone can afford, even up there. Merchant Fell has three granaries full of it. He's been buying from every farmer in the valley."

Teo took a piece too, and bit into it, and grimaced.

It was terrible bread. It always was, this year. Dense and sour and almost black, with a strange, faintly bitter aftertaste that lingered at the back of the throat. The grain had come in damp, and damp grain made bad flour, and bad flour made bad bread. Everyone in the Sump complained about it. Everyone in the Sump ate it anyway. There was nothing else.

"Fell," Hesk said thoughtfully, from his chair. "Osric Fell? Of the Grain Guild?"

"His son, now. Osric the Younger." Mira made a face. "My father says he's buying every sack in the valley because he thinks the winter will be hard. He says when the snow comes, Fell will be the richest man on the Shelf."

"And what does your father think of that?"

"That he wishes he'd thought of it first."

Hesk chuckled.

Teo chewed his bread slowly and did not say anything. Something about the conversation itched at him, the same way the bodies on his cart had itched at him in the summer. He could not say what. He put it aside.

Later, he would wish he had not.

Winter came early that year, on the back of the rain. The first snow fell in the last week of the Falling Leaves, wet and heavy, and the Sump huddled in on itself and burned whatever it could find and ate its black bread and waited for spring.

It was three days after the first snow that Teo, pushing his cart through Coopers' Yard in the grey dawn, heard the screaming.

It was coming from a tenement on the corner. Not the screaming of a woman in childbirth, or a man in a knife-fight, or a child who had been beaten. Teo knew all of those. This was something else. It was high and raw and endless, and there were words in it, and the words made no sense.

Teo left the cart and ran.

He found a man on the second-floor landing, surrounded by his neighbours. He was a big man, a cooper by the look of his hands, and he was writhing on the boards, clawing at his own legs. His feet were bare. His toes had gone a strange, dusky purple, as if they had been bruised all over.

"They're burning!" the cooper was shrieking. "Put it out! Put it out! My feet are on fire! Can't you see the flames? Can't you see them?"

There were no flames.

The man's wife was kneeling beside him, sobbing, holding a wet cloth against his feet. Two of the neighbours were trying to hold his arms. And in the corner of the landing, pressed against the wall, a little boy of perhaps six was staring at his father with huge, terrified eyes, and twitching.

His hands were jerking, Teo saw. Small, sharp spasms, as if someone were pulling on strings tied to his fingers.

The boy did not seem to notice it at all.