I passed through.
It was not like being eaten or like being worried.
Wasted."
Vhummim looked at us miserably, her eyes huge and milky in her round floating face.
She stroked her sinewous neck with bony fingers.
Golod put his teeth to me and my skin turned to pages and ash, held together by old, dust-clung air.
Death translates us into what it will.
We are the Pra-Ita, those who have passed through."
I do not speak the tongues of death," Vhummim whispered, her voice mingling with the wind. "
I am translated, and I do not know myself, save that I have become what I have eaten, and it has become me.
Thus went the rest of the city, slowly.
The green and blooming docks sank into a river of detritus.
The war memorials sighed into crumbling.
Finally The Market, too, lost all its scarlet and gold, and became nothing but its own shell.
Money and paper and stiff, dead silk blown together by that endless wind.
It happened so gradually that we did not really notice until we had all passed through.
And still we spent our money, still we traded our wasted goods.
It is a habit, a compulsion, and it does not need translation.
The wind, that relentless, thrashing wind that Golod brought, blows us from place to place, now.
The wind keeps us together as long as it can, and then we are gone, gone until there is another valley or cliffside to sigh against, and then it breathes us into our old shape again."
And the place you wish us to go?
With all the strange words on the lintel?"
Vhummim blinked slowly, as though it should be obvious.
It is the mint.
You will work like the other children.
The living work.
The dead do not.
Be happy that you were chosen for work.
It is better for you this way.
If you do not go now, they will miss you at the counting and it will be bad for you."
We could just run, you know."
Please believe I would catch you," said Vhummim solemnly.
Her leg cocked up like a stork's, a promise of speed our little legs could not hope for.
We followed her.
Who would not have followed?
We were lead, child by child, to the center of a room, our little hands placed on smooth bars and handles we could not quite see in the dim, windowed light.
Things which seemed like soft-toothed gears, things that seemed like trays, things that seemed like long tables.
Beneath our fingers we began to understand lay a machine.
And as our eyes softened to the shadows we saw it whole for the first time.
In the middle of a peeling, gray floor stood a peeling, gray frame.
It hunched like a broken turtle, a high arcing shell through which nameless things passed, lumpish gray heaps disappearing, passed solemnly as relics between children no older than we, and tipped into the rusting, ash-ridden structure.
Smoke stacks tottered high into the vaulted ceiling and spat pale fumes into the air in weak, spiraling puffs.
Pistons drove into the depths of the machine and emerged again, dark and wet.
A terrible crunching, stamping sound filled the room, and at the far end of the shell the contraption contorted into a twisting, enameled mouth built in the image of a thing which had once walked, a thing made entirely of teeth.
Out of this mouth ran a long board, and onto it slowly spat coin after coin, dull, and yellowish-white, clunking dully onto the black wood.
Perhaps once in the long past of Marrow when they knew all possible things, the machine, the Mint, had moved of its own accord.
But now small hands pressed and pulled and shoved at its every corner, turned its every gear, drew up its ever dowel and thrust it down again.
Furtive dark eyes gleamed around the shell and in it, dozens of children adding their arms to the apparatus so that it could move, so that it could press out coins at a stuttering, halting pace.
Thin hands sat on our shoulders like owl's feet and thin fingers curled around our chins, holding our faces fast toward that creaking thing.
The living work."
It was a little like school, save that we were all so afraid.
So afraid.
The Pra-Ita did not speak to us but placed our hands where they wanted them, pushed our fingers as they meant us to move.
I was stationed at the edge of the great, arching thing.
Already it hummed with moving bodies, lurched and swayed as though itself were alive.
It was Vhummim herself, to my surprise who cradled my arms in hers.
Her blue-white hair brushed my face as together we reached for shroud covered baskets.
Her diamond belly pressed against my back as we drew back the shrouds.
And her wheat-stalk arms caught me as I fell away from the thing which she meant me to haul up out of the straw.
For under the colorless gauze were the tangled limbs of children.
Glass-peopled and sightless, gaping at nothing, "
It was better for you," she wheezed, wretched and worrying. "
I told you it was.
To work, and not to be minted."