RUNAJO CAME UP WITH THE plan late that night.
But then she couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
She squinted at the paper where she had been trying to do calculations. The numbers seemed to be wiggling. It was nearly dawn; her eyes felt swollen and gritty, while her head ached and felt too light at the same time.
She could hardly think when she was this tired, but she didn’t have time to sleep. The Great Offering was in three days. Two days, now, because it was nearly dawn. And Runajo still couldn’t get the numbers right. She’d always been good at the sacred mathematics, but this calculation was more complex than anything she’d ever tried before.
The plan itself was simple: shrink the city walls. Viyara was huge. The Upper City—the original city, which had stood guarding the Mouth of Death for thousands of years—was built upon a vast spike of rock, with the Cloister at its top. Carved into that spire were the underground chambers where the Sisters grew the food of Viyara. At the base lay the Lower City, built a hundred years ago when refugees from the Ruining arrived. Only the Catresou and Mahyanai had negotiated a place for themselves in the Upper City; the rest built a sprawling, overgrown labyrinth of buildings that went right out to the edges of the island.
The city walls—the invisible sphere of magic that surrounded Viyara, keeping the deadly white fog of the Ruining out—didn’t even touch the land. They rose out of the surrounding water. They were so vast, no wonder they were failing.
Runajo was sure that if the city walls were shrunk to the base of the city spire, it would take much less power—much less blood—to maintain them. It wouldn’t be an easy way to live. They’d have to evacuate the people of the Lower City, and whether they went into the Upper City or the inside the city spire, it would be hard to fit them all. It would be hard to keep the peace.
But it had to be better than a perpetual bloodbath. Surely she could convince Lord Ineo to see it that way.
If she had the numbers worked out, to prove it could be done.
And that was the problem. She had to design a new set of walls for the city, and she had to design a plan for shifting from one set of walls to another, without the walls having a deadly reaction. And she had to do it without really knowing how the walls worked. That knowledge had been lost in the first days of the Ruining, when over half the Sisterhood died protecting Viyara, and the Sunken Library was overrun by revenants. Now they only knew how to keep producing the walls; Runajo had to extrapolate from that how to create new ones.
She groaned and rested her head on the table. Time to face the truth. She wasn’t going to finish in time. She might not be able to do this alone at all.
And Juliet would have to guard the sacrifices.
Cold nausea dragged at her stomach. Juliet wouldn’t do it without orders. So Runajo would have to look her in the eyes and tell her to stand guard as her people were slaughtered one by one.
She didn’t want to hurt Juliet anymore. She didn’t want to get people killed anymore.
She wasn’t going to have a choice.
Runajo let out a slow breath, and admitted another truth to herself: she was not going to make this plan work on her own. She needed help.
And the only way to get it was to wait, and pretend she was obedient, and go to the palace of the Exalted.
Runajo had never been inside the palace before. Like all the Upper City, it was carved of white stone, alive and glimmering with the power of the Sisterhood. But it felt like a different world.
She was used to smooth white walls, to lamps carved of glowing stone in the shape of flowers, to the occasional stray spark of light running down the floor. Here, every surface was carved with swirling lines, with birds and flowers and tiny dancing figures. There were no lamps; light glimmered and pooled in the crannies of every carving. Veins of light glowed in the floor, ever-shifting. In every room were pools and fountains, their inner surfaces tiled in gold or bright blue.
When Runajo had come to the gates and told the guards that she needed to speak with Mahyanai Sunjai, she hadn’t expected to be allowed in. She had thought that she would be left in one of the outer courtyards and made to wait until Sunjai came to her. She had written a note, in case she wasn’t allowed to see Sunjai at all. She had thought she might have to beg and plead, and she’d brought her best gold earrings in case she had to bribe.
But as soon as she told the guard her name, he nodded, and said, “Come with me.”
He led her through the glimmering rooms and corridors to a little walled garden with three pools where huge carp glittered dimly from under the lily pads. Between the pools was a stone bench, and on the bench sat the younger sister of the Exalted: Inyaan, who had once been a novice beside Runajo and helped weave the walls with her.
Once, Runajo had hated her.
Inyaan had the dark skin and white-gold hair of all the Old Viyaran nobility, but she didn’t look like the child of a dynasty descended from the gods. She was a short, scrawny girl, neither pretty nor impressive. Now that she was no longer a novice, she wore gauzy white silks and glittering gold chains, but they hung on her like weights, not adornments.
Her face was like a mask, fixed in a blank expression that looked both bored and disdainful. That was just the same as in the Cloister. It had taken until the very end of their time together for Runajo realize that the blankness had actually always been fear.
The guard bowed low. Runajo did too.
Inyaan didn’t blink.
Well, Runajo hadn’t expected getting permission to see Sunjai would be easy. She stepped forward, opening her mouth—
She gasped in pain as the guard caught her by the hair. “May she approach, Sister of the Exalted?”
Runajo felt unbearably stupid. As a novice, Inyaan had been treated almost the same as all the other novices; but here in the palace, she was due the same courtesies as the Exalted.
For a moment Inyaan was silent. From a nearby pond came a plop as one of the carp gave a sudden wriggle.
“Allow her,” said Inyaan, her voice soft and dull.
The guard released Runajo’s hair. She stumbled slightly, and then—feeling the guard’s eyes still on her—dropped to her knees.
“Leave us,” said Inyaan. As the guard retreated to the doorway of the garden, she finally looked Runajo in the eyes. “Why are you here?”
Runajo was painfully aware of the fact that they’d never been friends in the Cloister, and that she’d loathed Inyaan until nearly the end.
“I need to speak with Sunjai,” she said. “I need her help.”
“She serves the family descended from the gods,” said Inyaan. “What has she to do with you?”
“She served the gods themselves in the Cloister,” Runajo snapped, “and wasn’t too grand for me then.”
But that was a stupid thing to say, when Inyaan could have her thrown out with a word—and wrong, because Inyaan had never been as proud as Runajo thought.
“Please,” she said quietly. “I know she’s your friend, but—”
“She is nothing to me,” said Inyaan, instantly.
The words were a lie: they had been friends. Runajo had worked at weaving the walls with the two of them every day, so she knew this for sure.
The words were clearly a lie, but also a reflex. Runajo felt sick as she remembered discovering that Inyaan’s proud stares had always masked fear, as she wondered now what Inyaan was hiding.
“I’m not trying to make trouble for either one of you,” she said. “But I need her help. I need your help. No one else outside the Cloister knows enough about weaving the walls.”
Inyaan drew a breath. Her fingers flexed as if preparing to unclasp, but didn’t.
“Why should I help you?” she asked, and the little bit of resentment that had crept into her voice was comforting. At least she sounded alive now.