His underlings vanished, and Madding began to pull me along toward wherever that white-hot power had come from.
South Root—Where Sows Root, went the local joke—was the worst neighborhood in Shadow. One of the Tree’s main roots had forked off a side branch nearby, which meant the area was bracketed on three sides rather than the usual two. On rare days, South Root could be beautiful. It had been a respectable crafters’ neighborhood before the Tree, so the white-painted walls were inlaid here and there with mica and smooth agate, and the streets were cobbled in patterns of large and small bricks, with gates of iron wrought in magnificent shapes. If not for the three roots, it would have gotten more sunlight than parts of Shadow closer to the Tree’s trunk. I’d been told that it still did, on windy days in late autumn, for an hour or two a day. Any other time, South Root was perpetually dark.
No one lived there anymore but desperate, angry poor people. This made it one of the few places in the city where Order-Keepers might feel comfortable beating a man to death in the street.
Their consciences must’ve bothered them more than usual, however, because the space into which Madding finally dragged me did not feel open. I smelled garbage and mildew, and there was the bitter acridity of stale urine on my tongue. Another alley? One that had no magic to keep it clean.
And there were other smells here, stronger and even less pleasant. Smoke. Charcoal. Burned meat and hair. I could hear something still sizzling faintly.
Near this sound stood a tall, languid female figure, the only thing I could see aside from Madding. Her back was to me, so at first I noticed only her long, ragged hair, straight like a High Norther’s but an odd mottled gold in color. This was not the gold of Amn hair; it was somehow not pretty at all. She was also thin—disturbingly, unhealthily so. She wore an incongruously elegant gown with a low back, and the shoulder blades that I could see on either side of her hair were sharp-angled, like knife edges.
Then the woman turned, and I clapped both hands over my mouth to keep from crying out. Above the nose, her face was normal. Below, her mouth became a distorted, impossible monstrosity, her lower jaw hanging all the way to her knees, the too-long expanse of her gums lined with several rows of tiny, needlelike teeth. Moving teeth, each row marching along her jaw like a restless trail of ants. I could hear them whirring faintly. She drooled.
And when she saw my reaction, she smiled. That was the most hideous sight I had ever seen.
Then she shimmered and became an ordinary-looking woman, nondescriptly Amn, with a nondescriptly human mouth. She was still smiling, though, and there was still something disturbingly hungry in her expression.
“My gods,” Madding murmured. (Godlings said this sort of thing all the time.) “It is you.”
His words confused me because of their direction; he was not speaking to the blonde woman. Then I jumped at the response, because it came from another unexpected direction—above.
“Oh, yes,” said this new, soft voice. “It’s him.”
Madding suddenly went still in a way that I knew meant trouble. His two lieutenants suddenly flickered into view, equally tense. “I see,” Madding said, speaking low and carefully. “It’s been a while, Sieh. Have you come to gloat?”
“A little.” The voice was that of a young, prepubescent boy. I looked up, trying to gauge where he was—a rooftop, maybe, or a window on the second or third floor. I could not see him. A mortal? Or another godling who was feeling shy?
There was a sudden feel of movement before me, and abruptly the boy spoke from the ground only a few feet away. Godling, then.
“You look worn out, old man,” the boy said, and belatedly I realized he, too, was addressing someone other than me, Madding, or the blonde woman. Finally I noticed that off to the side of the alley, near the wall, there was someone low to the ground. Sitting or kneeling, maybe. Panting for some reason. Something about those weary breaths was familiar.
“Mortal flesh is bound by physical laws,” the boy continued, speaking to the panting person. “If you don’t use sigils to channel the power, you get more, it’s true—but then the magic drains your strength. Use enough and it can even kill you—for a while, anyhow. Just one of a thousand new things you’ll have to learn, I’m afraid. Sorry, old man.”
The blonde woman uttered a laugh like pebbles grinding underfoot. “You’re not sorry.”
She was right. The voice of the boy—Sieh, Madding had called him—was utterly devoid of compassion. He sounded pleased, in fact, in the way that most people would be pleased to see an enemy brought low. I cocked my head, listening close and trying to understand.