She’d tugged on Sabriye’s sleeve-that was the older girl-and told her all about it, and it was a precious pig to little Suzu, and come the winter when they cut it open they found oracles in silvered letters on its bones. She’d led it home, she’d loved to keep it, she’d ridden on it and confided in it and drawn great swirling patterns of black ink upon its flesh. When Suzu, the younger of the two, was four, she went out into the sluice-streets to play only, instead of dying to the hungry dead, or falling into the hands of some fleshtaker, scavenger, or priest, she found a white pig (that her father said was likely sacred), with an earring that was a bell. “Some number of little people reside below,” they’d say, or write, “-and bugs,” and nod their heads. They who lived there were scarcely recorded by the men and women who kept the books in Heaven. The sluice-streets down in the bottom-most layers did not run wet and then dry three times a day, like in the better districts, but simply sat there pooling, seeping, gathering bugs and gunk and plague. There in that place the sea was still its waters were stopped up, its currents were broken. Nce upon a time, two girls lived in a dark place: a place of stagnant water at the bottom of the world.Ībove them were stacks of ancient buildings new buildings, piled up upon the old and endless criss crossing walkways, so many you could hardly see the sky.
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