Stone-Smell the Glass Wouldn’t Give Up

I went to the counter for enzyme on the second count. Onia was at the tray. I’d been buying enzyme from her twice a week for two years.

“Morning,” I said.

“Morning,” she said. She looked at me. Waited. I could see her working at the recognition and not finding it. “I’m sorry, cousin. Your name?”

“Jerne.”

“Jerne. Of course.” She wasn’t being kind. She genuinely couldn’t place me. “What can I get you?”

“Enzyme. The usual measure.”

“Right.” She measured it out from the stone jug. Her hands were steady, practised at the pour. “I’ll put it on your tab. The name again?”

“Jerne.”

“Jerne. Got it.”

She wrote it on the counter-strip. By tomorrow she wouldn’t know she’d served me.

I took the enzyme and walked back through the trade-stop. Two cousins nodded at me as I passed. Generic nods, the kind you give a body you don’t know. I’d nodded back at both of them a hundred times. They didn’t know my face.

My name was on my door-frame. I rewrote it every morning in the stone, the pheromone-ink holding just long enough for a cousin passing to read it. Jerne. Back room, west building. The name went too, if I didn’t write it.

* * *

My room had one window and a shelf. Narrow cot. The walls were living stone, like all the walls in the trade-stop. The cilia in the stone carried pheromone, or that was the word for it. Other cousins left traces. A cousin walked through a corridor and the stone held her marker for hours, for days. Other cousins walking the same corridor could read who’d been there.

My marker didn’t hold. I’d tested it. I’d stood in a corridor putting out everything I had, and then walked out. Came back with Muro, who lived two doors down. Muro read the walls and found nothing. “Somebody was here,” he said. “The stone’s warm. But I can’t get a read on who.”

He didn’t know the warm stone was me. He was standing next to me and he didn’t know.

I’d been at the trade-stop two years. I’d arrived with a condition the cousins at my old Hall called “clear-channel.” My pheromone output was so thin that the Seeping overwrote it almost instantly. Other cousins’ markers held in the walls for days. Mine lasted thirty seconds, maybe forty if I was rested and the air was still.

Thirty seconds. I’d been timing it.

On the shelf next to the enzyme were six True Glass jars, small ones, the kind used for Scribe-work. I’d traded for them over the past year. True Glass was hard to come by. The monks hoarded the good pieces and what reached the trade-stops went for high counts.

I picked up one of the jars. Unscrewed the lid. Held it open for a count of breaths, letting my pheromone-output fill the interior. Then sealed it. Set it back on the shelf.

I’d been at this a year. Every day, opening the jar, filling it, sealing it. Checking later. Every time, the same result. Nothing inside. My pheromone dissipated from True Glass the same as everything else. I kept trying anyway. The monks hoarded the good pieces for a reason, the Seeping didn’t get a hold on the stuff, which meant if anything could keep a marker, True Glass could.

Still wrong. A year now.

* * *

The seasonal gathering was in three days. The main chamber, cleared and aired, the walls wiped clean of old markers so the room started fresh. Cousins came from the outer settlements for it. Food and enzyme-trade and pheromone-work, the kind of thing that filled a room and told a story.

I was going to perform.

“You’re going to perform,” Muro said. He was sitting on my floor again. He did that, came by in the evenings, sat on the floor. He didn’t remember me from one evening to the next, but he remembered “the cousin in the back room” and he kept coming back.

“I am,” I said.

“Your name’s Jerne, isn’t it.”

“It is.”

“Jerne. Right.” He picked at a thread on his coat. “I keep forgetting. I’m sorry about that.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“No, but it’s rude. A body ought to remember the cousin he visits every evening.” He looked at the shelf. “What’s in the jars?”

“Nothing.”

“Looks like enzyme jars.”

“They are enzyme jars. There’s nothing in them.”

He shrugged. “What are you performing?”

“A new composition. Pheromone-sequence. Long-form.”

“Long-form.” He nodded. “I like long-form. If I’m thinking of the right thing. The kind that tells a story?”

“The kind that tells a story.”

“Good.” He picked at the thread some more, pulled it loose, wound it round his finger. “There’s a cousin coming to the gathering. From the coast-settlement. Tiana. Do you know her?”

My chest did something. I didn’t have a word for what.

“I know the name,” I said.

“She does good work. Pheromone-analysis, from what I heard. Reads compositions better than most.” He looked at me. “You all right? You’ve gone pale.”

“I’m fine.”

“You look like you’ve seen a thing.”

“I’m fine, Muro. When does she arrive?”

“Day before the gathering, I think. Coming with the coast-caravan.” He stood up. Picked up another thread from his coat, dropped it. “Well. Good luck with the performance. I’ll be there. I’ll try to remember it was you did the work.”

He left. I sat on the cot and didn’t move for a long time.

Tiana. She was coming to the gathering.

* * *

I’d had a partner once. Not bonded, not contracted, not in the way the Hall meant it. But pheromone-bonded, which was rarer and harder to explain. We’d Linked once, fully, the kind of Linking where the filaments intertwine and you hold the other cousin’s self in your head for a count of minutes. She’d read me better than anyone ever had. She’d understood my compositions on the first pass.

Then my marker started thinning. It happened fast, over a season. I’d been able to hold a room for an hour. Then thirty minutes. Then five. The thinner my output got, the less I showed up in the walls, in the air, in the memory of anyone I spoke to. Tiana was the last cousin who could read me. When I got to thirty seconds, she couldn’t hold me either.

She left for the coast-settlement. Not because she wanted to. Because she couldn’t remember why she stayed. The bond we had, she could feel the shape of it, she knew she’d been close to someone, but she couldn’t attach it to me. I’d stand in front of her and she’d look at me and there’d be nothing.

I let her go. What else could I do.

* * *

The gathering filled the main chamber. Forty cousins, maybe fifty, the walls already layered with their markers. The room was thick with pheromone. Cousin-talk and enzyme-trade and the thick smell of fifty bodies.

I stood at the edge. A few cousins glanced at me. Generic glances. Nobody asked my name.

Muro was near the door. He looked at me and I could see him working at it. He knew he should know me. The face wasn’t landing.

Tiana came in with the coast-caravan. I saw her before she saw me. She looked the same. Same dark hair, same wide-set eyes, same way of walking into a room and reading the walls before she read the cousins. She always went to the walls first. Pheromone-analysis. She could read a room’s history in ten seconds.

She read the walls of the main chamber. Her face did something, a slight tightening around the eyes. She’d read something she couldn’t place. The room had been wiped clean before the gathering, but I’d walked through it three times during the preparation. A residue in the stone that wasn’t quite pheromone and wasn’t quite nothing.

Her eyes went past me without stopping.

* * *

The performance space was the centre of the chamber. I stood there and opened the composition.

Pheromone-work is physical. Onia had tried explaining it once. Output from the temple and the throat, into the air, I hadn’t followed the rest of it. Mine came out stone-smell and root-damp. The Hall I’d grown up in. Skin-after-work on top, warmer. Personal marker last. I couldn’t hold that part. I’d watched cousins keep one going for hours. Mine lasted seconds. But I’d been working on this one for two months. I’d concentrated everything I had into a single dense burst.

The sequence opened. Stone-smell, warm-skin, and then the personal, a smell that was me, or the closest I could get to me, and on top of that, the story. The story of two cousins who Linked once and held each other’s selves in the air between them. The story of one cousin’s marker thinning until the other couldn’t find him anymore. The story of a bond still there in the shape of what was missing.

Thirty seconds. I counted them.

At twenty seconds, Tiana’s head turned. She was looking at the centre of the room, at the air above my head where the composition was thickest. Her mouth opened. Her hand went to her throat.

At twenty-five seconds, she looked at me. Right at me. Her eyes were wide.

At thirty, the composition dissipated. The air went back to ordinary. The room was full of cousins talking and eating and the pheromone-soup of fifty bodies, and my work was gone.

Tiana blinked. She was still looking at me. Then her face went uncertain. She looked away. Looked back. The recognition was going, or gone. She turned to the cousin next to her and said something.

I walked out of the chamber.

* * *

I was in my room when Muro knocked. It was late. The gathering was over. I could hear the trade-stop settling, cousins going to their quarters, the walls holding the thick markers of a good evening.

Muro came in. He was carrying a small True Glass jar, one of mine, I could tell by the size, though this one wasn’t from my shelf. He’d brought his own.

“Jerne,” he said.

“You got my name.”

“You wrote it on your door.” He pointed. “I saw it on my way in.”

I had. I wrote my name on the stone of my door-frame every morning.

“What’s in the jar?” I said.

He held it up. “I don’t know how to explain this.”

“Try.”

“I was at the gathering. I had this jar in my coat, I use it for enzyme, keep a measure on me during long days.” He set the jar on the floor between us. “I opened it during the performance. Yours. The pheromone-work in the middle of the room. I opened it to check my enzyme level and forgot to close it again.”

I looked at the jar. It was sealed. The lid was on tight.

“When I got home I opened it to put fresh enzyme in. Only I didn’t need to, because there was something already in it.” He looked at me. “Your work. Your composition. It’s in the jar.”

“Open it,” I said.

He unscrewed the lid.

The smell came out. Stone-smell, warm-skin, the dense personal marker, and the story of two cousins. All of it. Intact. Not dissipated. Not thinned. Full.

I stared at the jar.

“That shouldn’t hold,” I said.

“I know it shouldn’t. Pheromone-work fades from everything.” Muro picked at his coat sleeve. “But True Glass doesn’t get written on by the Seeping. You told me that once, or somebody did. Maybe it was you.”

“It was me.”

“Well. There it is.” He pointed at the jar. “Whatever the Seeping does to your marker, it can’t do it through True Glass. The glass kept it.”

I picked up the jar. The smell was coming out of the open top, filling my room with the composition I’d spent two months building. It wasn’t fading. The True Glass was holding it.

“Muro,” I said.

“What?”

“Do you have another jar?”

He looked at me. “What for?”

“There’s a cousin at this gathering. Tiana. She reads pheromone-work. She was at the performance.”

“I saw her. She was the one who—”

“Who what?”

“Who looked at you. When the composition was going. She looked right at you.” He paused. “You know her.”

“She knew me. Before.”

“Before what?”

“Before my marker went thin.” I held the jar. The smell was still coming out. “I need to find her before she leaves.”

“Jerne.”

“I need to find her, Muro.”

He looked at the jar, then at me, then at the jar again.

“There’s something else,” he said.

“What?”

He reached into his coat and brought out a glyph-moth. The wings were folded, the pheromone-script on the scales still readable. He held it out.

“Came for you this evening. I took it because I was passing the moth-box and I saw a name on it, or what I thought was a name, only your name doesn’t hold on moth-scales either, so I’m not sure how the moth found you.”

I took the moth. Unfolded the wings. The pheromone-script was faded, Tiana’s marker was strong but she’d written this in haste, from a place of uncertainty. I read what I could.

She’d written something about the gathering. About a composition she’d experienced, briefly, that had felt like something she’d lost. She couldn’t name what. She wanted to find it again. She’d written a meeting-place: the stone bench at the east gate, before first light, before the coast-caravan left.

I read it twice. Three times.

“She wants to meet,” I said.

“Who?”

“The cousin who wrote this. Tiana.”

“The coast cousin?” Muro leaned forward. “You’re going to go.”

“Before first light.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No.”

“Jerne—”

“No, Muro. Mine. This one.”

He sat back. Picked at his sleeve.

“All right,” he said. “But if you need a body who forgets your name every evening, I’m two doors down.”

I didn’t laugh. There wasn’t enough in me for laughing.

* * *

I went to the east gate in the dark before first light. The stone bench was at the angle of the wall where the road turned east. The air was cold. The walls held the markers of the night’s gathering, already fading.

Tiana was already there. Sitting on the bench. Facing the gate. The coast-caravan was loading in the yard behind her, would be leaving in an hour.

She looked at me as I came through the gate. The same look. Searching. Not finding.

“You’re the cousin from the gathering,” she said.

“I am.”

“You did the pheromone-work. In the middle of the room.”

“I did.”

“It was your composition.”

“It was.”

She looked at her hands. “I can’t remember your face. I stood in the gathering and your work was in the air and I knew it. I knew the body it came from. And then it was gone and I couldn’t find you again.”

“I know.”

“It’s like something’s been cut out of me. Like a piece was removed and the edges are still raw.” She looked up. “Do you know what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean.”

I held out the True Glass jar. She looked at it.

“What’s that?”

“Open it.”

She took the jar. Unscrewed the lid.

The composition came out. Stone-smell, warm-skin, the dense personal marker. The story of two cousins who Linked once. The story of a bond still there in the shape of what was missing.

Tiana inhaled. Her hand went to her throat. Her eyes went wide. Not uncertain this time. Not searching.

“Jerne,” she said.

My name in her voice. The way she used to say it, with the pheromone-marker behind it that said she knew who I was.

“Jerne.” She said it again. She was standing now, the jar in her hand, the composition still coming out of it, filling the cold air at the east gate. “It’s you.”

“It’s me.”

She looked at me. Really looked. The bond was coming back, I could see it in her face, the way a cousin’s face changes when the pheromone-network catches up with what the eyes are seeing. She’d held my marker once, deep in her filament-memory, and the True Glass jar was putting it back.

She stepped forward. Her hand came up and touched my face. Her fingers were cold from the air. She held them there, against my jaw, and I could feel something of her marker going into my skin, the pheromone-signature I’d been carrying for two years in the place where my own marker had gone thin.

“I couldn’t find you,” she said.

“I was here.”

“I couldn’t find you and I didn’t know what I was looking for.”

“I know.”

She took her hand away. Looked at the jar. Back at me.

“The glass kept it,” she said.

“The glass kept it.”

She closed her eyes. When she opened them she was crying. A rough cry, not gentle, the back of her hand coming up to wipe at it.

“I’m not leaving with the caravan,” she said.

“No?”

“No.” She wiped her face again. “We’re going to need more jars.”

I looked at her. The first light was coming over the east wall. Her face in it. The composition still in the air around us, held by the True Glass, not fading, not thinning.

“We are,” I said.

She put the jar in her coat and took my hand. Her marker went into my skin. I put mine into hers. Thirty seconds. Maybe forty.

But the jar was still open. And what the glass held, the Seeping couldn’t take.