The first thing he knew was cold.
Not discomfort. Not the manageable chill of an open window or a thin blanket. This was something older — stone cold, the kind that had been sitting in the dark long enough to forget what warmth felt like. It pressed into his back, his shoulders, the side of his face where his cheek had found the ground. He became aware of it gradually, the way a man surfaces from deep water, and then all at once, like a man hitting the surface.
He opened his eyes.
Grey sky. A narrow strip of it, visible between two walls that leaned toward each other overhead like old men sharing a secret. The walls were stone — dark, wet, mortared badly and rebuilt worse, held together more by habit than craft. From somewhere above came a sound like metal scraping metal, rhythmic, unhurried, somebody's morning routine. From somewhere below, or perhaps beside — it was difficult to orient himself — came the smell.
Ash. Rot. Something animal underneath both of those.
He sat up.
The ditch was about four feet deep, narrow enough that his shoulders nearly touched both walls when he straightened. Around him: three broken crates, a tangle of rope that had gone black with moisture, and what appeared to be the remnants of a fire that had burned out days ago. A rat sat at the far end of the ditch watching him with no particular alarm. He looked at the rat. The rat looked at him. Eventually the rat went back to whatever it had been doing.
He checked himself methodically. Both hands — present, uninjured. Fingers worked. He turned his left hand over and looked at the back of it, which he was not sure why he thought to do, but the impulse was immediate, almost reflexive, like checking a pocket for keys. The back of his left hand was bare. No mark. No sigil. Nothing.
He didn't know yet what that meant. He filed it.
He stood, and the world tilted once and then settled. His body was fine, or close enough to fine — no wounds he could feel, no obvious damage. He was lean, dressed in clothes that were plain and dark and not quite right for the season, whatever the season was. He patted his pockets. Empty. He checked them again. Still empty.
No coin. No identification. No memory of how he had come to be in a ditch.
He thought about this for a moment, standing in the grey morning with the rat watching him again from the far end.
Then he climbed out.
✦
The street above the ditch was not a street in any organized sense. It was a gap between structures — buildings of varying height crowded so close together that the space between them was an afterthought, something that had happened rather than been planned. The ground was packed earth and old stone and the accumulated residue of years of foot traffic, dark and uneven. There were people moving through it already, even at this hour: heads down, purposeful, nobody looking at anybody else. A habit, he noted, not a coincidence. A practiced thing.
He stood at the edge of the ditch and watched them for a while.
The city — it was a city, or the bottom of one — existed in layers he could see simply by looking up. Above the roofline of these cramped ground-level buildings rose others, cleaner and taller, and above those rose more still, and above those the shapes blurred into mist and something that might have been light if light worked differently here. The higher you went, the less the buildings seemed to be apologizing for themselves. Down here, everything apologized. Down here, the buildings hunched.
A child ran past him, nearly colliding with his legs, and did not look up or say sorry. Three seconds behind the child came a woman who glanced at him once — a fast, practiced assessment, the kind that happened in low places where knowing a stranger's threat level was a survival skill — and then moved on without changing her pace.
He fell into the foot traffic and walked.
He walked for two hours. He walked the way you walk when the walking itself is the objective, when you are mapping rather than moving, cataloguing rather than going anywhere. He noted: the way the streets narrowed toward the outer edges and widened toward something that might have been a centre. The way the smell of food concentrated at certain corners, where small stalls sold things he could not identify from skins and pots, attended by vendors whose eyes tracked the crowd with the same automatic wariness as everyone else. The way the people moved differently depending on where they were — more compressed near the eastern wall, more spread out near what appeared to be a market square, shoulders looser there, marginally.
He noted the marks on people's hands.
Not everyone's hands were visible. But enough. On the back of the left hand, most people carried a small sigil — a shape like a stylized letter, or perhaps a number, rendered in a faint luminescence that was only visible at certain angles. Most of them glowed a dim blue. A few were brighter. He saw one man whose sigil was nearly white, and the people around that man moved differently, unconsciously, giving him a wider orbit, finding reasons to look elsewhere.
He looked at his own hand again.
Nothing.
✦
By midmorning he had established several facts.
One: this city operated on a hierarchy organized around those marks. He had worked this out from observation alone — the way marked individuals were served first at food stalls, the way the brighter marks got wider berths, the way an argument between two men on a corner resolved itself the moment one of them extended his hand and the other one saw what was on it and went quiet and stepped back. The marks were rank. The rank was everything.
Two: there were people without marks, or with marks too dim to see clearly, and they occupied the lower edges of every interaction. The ditch he had woken in was in a district populated primarily by these people. The ash smell was theirs. The hunched buildings were theirs.
Three: there was a gate.
He had found it at the northern edge of the district — a checkpoint in a wall that separated this level of the city from the next one up. The wall was old stone reinforced with iron, well-maintained in contrast to everything around it, and the gate was attended by two men in dark uniforms carrying weapons that were not swords but not quite anything else either, long-handled things that hummed faintly at the tips. There was a line to pass through. Most people in the line had marks that glowed at least a dim blue. The checkpoint guard held a small crystal at each person's hand as they passed, read something in its glow, nodded or noted something on a board, and waved them through.
He stood at the edge of the square and watched this process for forty minutes.
Then he joined the line.
He had no plan beyond the gate. He had no particular reason to go through it. But he had observed, in two hours of walking this district, that everything useful — better food, better information, better vantage — was above him, and the gate was the only organized way to access above. He preferred organized. Organized was legible.
The line moved slowly. He moved with it. The man ahead of him was short and broad, carrying a cloth sack over one shoulder that clinked softly with each step — metal tools, possibly. The man had a dim blue mark and the posture of someone who had done this commute many times and found it tedious rather than tense. They did not speak.
When he reached the front of the line, the guard — young, bored, the particular blankness of someone doing a job they had done a thousand times — extended one hand.
'Mark,' the guard said.
He extended his left hand.
The guard pressed the crystal to the back of it. The crystal lit — a pale, searching light. It swept across his skin. Then something happened that had not happened to anyone else in the line: the crystal flared white, so bright that the guard squinted, and then it cracked. Not shattered — cracked, a single clean fracture running from one edge to the other. The light went out.
The guard stared at the crystal. He stared at it for a long time.
'That's —' he started, and stopped. He looked up. He looked at the hand. He looked at the crystal. He looked at his partner, who had seen it happen and was now standing slightly straighter, hand moved closer to the long-handled weapon at his hip.
'Wait here,' the guard said.
He produced a second crystal from his coat pocket. This one he held more carefully, like a man handling something that had recently surprised him. He pressed it to the back of the hand.
The crystal glowed. Searched. Flared.
Cracked.
The sound it made was very small in the square. But the line behind him had gone quiet. He became aware, without looking, of the particular quality of stillness that descends when a crowd of strangers all stop moving at once and start watching the same thing.
The guard's hand was not shaking. To his credit, it was not shaking. But he had taken a small step backward, and the partner had moved forward, and the hand was now fully on the weapon.
He reached down and picked up his sack — he had set it at his feet during the process — and slung it over his shoulder.
'Is there a problem,' he said. It wasn't a question.
The guard opened his mouth. Closed it.
He walked through the gate.
Nobody stopped him.
The square behind him was completely silent until he was twenty feet past the wall, and then it started up again, all at once, a dozen conversations beginning simultaneously, none of them quiet.
✦