On what he now called the two hundred and third day — not from his arrival in Valdrek, but from Tuesday, the last day of the world he had come from — Kael did something that surprised him.
He bought groceries.
Not those groceries. Not eggs, not chickpeas, not the cheap orange juice that was mostly water. Valdrek had no orange juice and no concept of on sale and no Tuesday to buy things on. But there was, in the city that had grown around the citadel's lower levels over the centuries — a city he had not known existed until the forty-eighth day after his arrival, which had been the first time he had left the citadel grounds — a market. A place where the not-quite-dead who inhabited Valdrek's occupied strata traded in the materials of a world that had no sun.
He had been there three times in the six months. Once to understand what it was. Once because Seren had told him there was something there he should see. Once — today — because he had run out of chalk for the slate and had nothing else to write on.
He walked to the market in the gray hours that passed for morning, alone, with the three dead following him at the usual interval. They had been following him since the second week and showed no sign of stopping and he had stopped finding it unusual and started finding it — appropriate was the word, he thought. The right arrangement for the thing they were to each other.
The market stalls held materials for a dead world — not depressing, which he had initially expected, but functional. Things people needed. Things that, in a world without sun and without the ordinary commerce of the living, had become valuable and were traded with the specific care of people who understood that scarcity was real and availability was not guaranteed.
He bought chalk at a stall operated by an entity whose Fractures were numerous and old, who handed him the chalk without speaking and received the exchange material — a quantity of Resonance, small, calibrated, the ordinary currency of Valdrek's non-divine commerce — and nodded with the efficiency of someone completing a transaction they had performed many times.
He stood at the stall for a moment longer than necessary.
He said, in Valdrek, using two hundred and fifty-eight words plus the vocabulary of tone and intention that was not technically language: "Thank you."
The entity looked at him. The transaction had been completed. Thank you was not a required element. The stall operator looked at him with the expression of someone who has received something they were not expecting in a context where unexpected things do not usually arrive.
Then they said: "Welcome."
He walked back toward the citadel.
The three dead followed.
The gray light of Valdrek's closest approximation of morning moved through the ash streets of the city. Somewhere above the seventh stratum, the upper gods were doing what upper gods did — accumulating, competing, managing the political consequences of a return that had changed the calculation of every territory in the Ashenveil. Somewhere in the first stratum, Soa was being whatever they had been for longer than any reliable record covered. Somewhere south, the borderlands that had received the return's redistribution were recovering in increments too slow to observe directly but real in the aggregate.
He had two hundred and fifty-eight words and a piece of chalk.
He thought: I need to add the word for welcome to the list. That is two hundred and fifty-nine.
He thought: the list is organized by function. Welcome is — it is its own function, which is the function of naming what the other person is to the space they occupy. A welcome is an acknowledgment that the arrival was expected, or at least permitted, or at least — received.
He thought: I was not welcomed here. I arrived in a field of ash and eleven things were dead around me and I walked toward information because that was the only thing I knew how to do.
He thought: but I am here now, and the stall operator said welcome, and the three dead follow me at the usual interval, and I have chalk for the slate and the seat is functioning and the return has been performed and Seren uses the word that does not file under any of the usual categories, and the window in my room is slightly wider than the cell window was and does not close all the way.
He stopped walking.
He stood in the ash street of the city around the citadel in the world without a sun and held the piece of chalk and thought about Tuesday.
The water had not been dramatic about it. No roaring current, no cinematic surge. Just a flooded underpass and secondhand boots and the cheap kind of orange juice that was mostly water anyway and the eggs he thought about as he went under.
He thought: I have thought about the eggs approximately once a week since I arrived in Valdrek. They come back at the edges of things — when I am almost asleep, or when I have just finished the listening and the territory is very quiet, or when something happens that is ordinary in the particular way that ordinary things are in a world without sun. The eggs were on sale. That was the last thing he remembered thinking before the cold came in at the edges.
He thought: that is not a wrong thing to think about. That is the last ordinary thing I had, and it is true that ordinary things are worth thinking about.
He looked at the piece of chalk in his hand.
He started walking again.
Behind him, the three dead followed.
The tall one's arm swung, very slightly, with each step. The way a living person's arm swings when they walk. He had started doing it sometime in the weeks after the return and had not stopped, and Kael had been observing it with the attention he gave to everything and had decided it was not something to analyze. It was something to note and leave in the category of: things I do not yet understand but that seem right.
He walked home.