6 · Madruga's Frogs

to roots. It took more than an hour to cross what looked on the map like a narrow white strip.

On a small island they found a shirt hanging from a reed. It bore the embroidery of a family from the dyers' quarter. A bag was tied to its sleeve: soft bread, a piece of soap and a note asking whoever found it to take it to a prisoner in the canals. There was no name. It said “the one who sings when afraid.”

Neris put the bag away.

“There could be a hundred,” Serik observed.

“Then one of them will be grateful for the bread.”

Teren helped wrap it in dry cloth. He knew too many prayers that did less than that gesture.

They went on in single file. Small clicking sounds came from the reeds. Insects fell silent when the travellers' shadows passed over them. In the distance, a heron took flight without landing in the tree they all expected.

Elyen looked towards the reeds again.

“Now it's

following us.”

Serik loosened his sword strap.

“People?”

“We'll know by what they kill.”

On the last island stood a fishermen's hut. Its roof was covered in empty nests. Elyen found scales on a board and knew someone had come through before the flood. He found no tracks leading away.

Teren ducked inside. A man sat waiting on a bench, one leg splinted. A knife lay across his knees. He looked at Serik, then turned his face to the wall.

He was fleeing no crime. He had sold fish outside the permitted hours to keep his catch from spoiling in the heat. The collector took his boat as a fine. Then the flood came, leaving him trapped in the hut.

The story could have been false. Teren began examining his leg while the paladin looked at the fine tablet. It had a date and a seal. The sum exceeded the boat's value.

“I can't get him out alone,” the cleric said.

Elyen calculated the detour. They would lose what little

light remained. The sluice might close as the canal level changed. Ivara looked at the sky, then the water. There was no sure way to know which risk was greater.

Neris offered to take the fisherman to the bank on one of the mounts they had left tethered. He could not cross the mud sitting upright. None of them carried a stretcher; they would have to make one before moving him.

They removed two planks from the hut. Serik and Elyen lashed them together with rope. Teren wrapped the leg and gave the man water before they moved him. Together they carried him to a sheltered rise where the night-patrol boatmen usually collected nets.

Ivara lit a brief signal. Not a beam into the clouds: a light fixed to a post, shaped like the sign the dyke inspectors used. The fisherman knew it. He said they would see it before midnight.

Teren wanted to stay.

The man handed back the knife from the floor, which Teren had put away without

noticing.

“If you stay, what will you do when it rises farther?”

The cleric covered him with the last dry blanket and left with the others. On the way, he looked back every few paces until the signal was out of sight. No one had ever taught him how to leave someone in the hands of help that might or might not come.

They reached the willows at dusk. Roots surrounded a grille; water ran inward with a throaty murmur. While Ivara searched for the mechanism, a long head emerged among the reeds.

The animal had the smooth skin of silt-dwellers and a white scar where one eye was missing. It did not come from another sphere. It was a river predator, driven downstream by the hot water discharged from the works. Elyen recognised it and backed away slowly.

Neris stepped on a branch.

The leap scattered them. Serik took its weight on his shield and slipped over the roots. Teren saw teeth close around the metal's edge. Ivara raised

the lamp and drew an arc of light over the snout; blinded, the animal turned. Elyen drove an arrow beneath its jaw. It was not enough.

Teren could have run for the open grille. Instead he caught Serik's strap with the mill hook and pulled. He felt the stitches in his thigh open. The paladin came out from beneath the animal just as another arrow pierced its throat.

The animal dragged itself towards the water, dying, making an almost human sound. Elyen finished it and stayed a moment beside its head.

“It never hunted here before,” he said.

In the Forgotten Channels they found walls marked with names. None bore a title: “Sela, two blankets”; “Jorin, large pot”; “Madruga, flour.” Families had lived there during the Rupture.

The frogs lived down there. They were pale as wax and no bigger than a fingernail. When they sang, their throats lit with an ember glow, and the whole channel filled with points of light pulsing to the same beat, as though someone

had sown stars in the water so they would not get lost. Ivara put out the lamp without anyone asking her to. For a while they walked in the dark by that borrowed light, and no one said anything, because any word would have been smaller.

Farther down, in the Council Cisterns, there were recent beds and grain crates bearing Ordan's seal. The frogs fell silent when they entered. Teren felt the silence touch the back of his neck.

Ivara opened a box of documents.

“They're collecting lists of the dead by family.”

Teren had assumed a list was a harmless object until someone chose to misuse it. There he began to suspect something else. The headings chose which relationships counted, which deaths deserved a search and which were considered abandonment. A woman appeared as a widow on one sheet and absent on another; the first allowed her to claim food, the second kept her from claiming her children.

Ivara found a consultation book. The scribes had asked about household

habits: what song was sung to a child, what a woman called her husband on waking, where a craftsperson kept a favourite tool. Believing parents had competed for the right to leave better memories, more worthy of drawing an answer. Someone had crossed out “sews shirts badly” and written “devoted to the care of her family” above it.

“They're taking even the dead's voices away,” Neris said.

Serik did not answer. He found a note from his father. The handwriting was unmistakable: letters too small, a huge space before the full stop. He remembered his wife ordering them to let the soup cool. Of all memories, that was the one he had chosen.

The paladin sat on a bed. He had not known his father asked the chancellor for help. When they spoke of his mother, the old man preferred to tell how she kept the house during absences on campaign. On that sheet appeared instead the simple hunger for another afternoon at the same table.

Teren stopped beside him

without looking at the paper.

“I didn't know,” Serik said.

“You couldn't know everything he missed.”

“I once told him to stop living among graves.”

The cleric remembered the answers he had learned and chose to use none.

Neris put water to boil on a workers' stove. With the bread from the bag and a handful of herbs, she made something like soup. They drank it from three cups passed between them. Serik held his until it stopped burning, then ate without speaking of his father again.

Later he went back to the box of lists. He found his surname on the third line.

The entry concerned his mother. She had died giving birth to his sister. On the right, another hand had written: “Possible guarantee of obedience.” The paladin stared at the paper until it began trembling.

Neris laid the bandurria on a bed and sat nearby without speaking.