Page 76 of The Only Way Out Is Up

“Can you do it again?”

“I think so.”

The shape of the sigil is very clear in my mind, as though it had burned itself in. I pick up my knife—a proper carving knife this time—and start etching it into the blank. There’s a familiar pull at my spirit, that sensation of part of me entering the clay. I must have winced, because Ky looks at me sidelong.

“Does it hurt?” she says.

“Not… exactly.” The sensation itself isn’t unpleasant, just the implications. “I just can’t help but think how I’m burning lifespan.”

“What do you mean?”

I look back at her, surprised. “Burning lifespan. Like a workhouse sigworker.”

“I know what a sigworker does,” Ky says. “But what does that have to do with lifespan?”

Can she really not know this? “Sigworkers die young,” I say slowly, as though explaining something to a small child. “You’d be hard-pressed to find one who makes it past forty.”

“That’s not—that can’t be right.” She waves a hand. “Obviously people on Malkuth don’t live as long as they do on Hod, but it’s just… diseases, bad food, that sort of thing.”

“It’s not,” I say flatly.

“You can’t know that.”

“Of course I can.” I feel irritation rising. “The workhouse inmates have it better than we do in the Heap, don’t they? Food and medicine and so on. But they die quicker than us all the same, as long as we don’t get eaten by Twisted in the meantime. Everybody knows the workhouses will kill you.”

“If that were true, why would anyone ever take a job there? It’s not like they kidnap anyone, people volunteer—”

“Because dying at forty is still better than starving at fifteen. Or thirteen. Or ten.”

“But…” She trails off, chewing her lip.

“Fara did some workhouse work, when she couldn’t avoid it,” I say. “And some piecework, clothes mostly, and some whoring. Out of all of those it was the sigwork she tried hardest to stay away from. She made me promise that none of us would go near it.”

Ky is silent for a few moments. I worry that I’ve gone too far; does it really matter if this rich girl from Hod is wrong about the way the world works? I still need her.

“Even if all that is… true,” she says slowly, “a workhouse sigworker makes eight or ten sigils a day, for years. I don’t think that carving a handful at a time is going to… hurt you.”

“Not where it would matter,” I agree, glad to change the subject. “I never figured on making it to forty anyway, with the work I do. I just don’t like the feeling, that’s all.”

Ky nods. But she’s still chewing her lip, lost in thought. I pick up the knife again and finish the sigil, the character similar to EXPLODE but subtly different. “There.”

“You’re right,” she says when I show it to her. “That doesn’t say explode. Although the character you’re talking about actually has more of a sense of erupt, like—never mind. Point is that this is what you’d say if you tried to”—she waves a hand, looking for words—“tried to pump too much air into a balloon, and it popped.”

“What’s a balloon?”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s more like burst or blast.”

“BLAST, then.” I tap it with one finger. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to go off unexpectedly, at least. “With Gestian I connected it to LIGHT and some adjectives, and—”

“It made light. A lot of light. But you said that wouldn’t help against Rotwurm?”

“I doubt it. Twisted have PERCEIVES all over their body. We need something more direct.” I rummage in the bag of sigils we got from Ekkeban and come up with two. HEAT and FORCE.

Ky raises her eyebrows. “That sounds… dangerous.”

I let myself grin. “That’s what I’m hoping.”

TWENTY-FIVE