Cícero did not sleep.
He spent the night sitting at the kitchen table, with the black stone in front of him and the canteen beside it. The oil lamp hissed softly, throwing long shadows across the mudbrick walls. Donana snored in the next room—a steady snore, from a woman who slept the way she worked, without asking permission.
He poured water over the stone for the tenth time. The lines lit up. The same map. The same blue-tinged paths, the same forks, the same pulsing central point. This time, Cícero copied everything into his notebook, line by line, with the obsessive precision of someone who had been drawing maps since he was twelve. When the water dried and the lines vanished, he compared the drawing with his own maps of the region.
Some of the trails matched. The dry bed of Dead Creek. The curve of the Dry Moon Range. The outline of the Silent Well—the ruins everyone avoided. But the map on the stone went farther. It showed paths that did not exist on the surface. Paths that descended.
And every time he wet the stone, he saw things.
They were not clear visions like the first one—the woman running in the dark. They were fragments. A face he did not recognize, aged and serious, looking at him as if assessing a tool. Hands digging into black rock. The sound of water running through an enclosed place, echoing like a church hymn. A word repeated in a language he did not know, but that sounded like the name of a place.
Ibiraci.
When the first rooster crowed, Cícero put away the stone, washed his face with the last of the water in his canteen, and went to Donana's room. The old woman was already awake, sitting on the bed and braiding her white hair with fingers that had known the gesture for seventy years.
“Grandma.”
“I know what you're going to ask.” Donana did not look at him. “The answer is no.”
“You don't even know what I found.”
“I do know.” She finished the braid, tied it with a piece of thread, and finally looked him in the eye. Her eyes were as dark as his, but they had an extra layer—something Cícero had always taken for exhaustion that now, in the weak morning light, seemed like something else. It looked like fear. “I thought the reservoir would dry up before you found it. I almost managed it.”
Cícero sat on the edge of the bed. He took the stone from his pocket and placed it between them. Donana looked at it the way someone looks at a snake.
“Where did this come from, Grandma?”
“Below. From where everything bad comes.”
“You've seen one of these before.”
It was not a question. Donana closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were wet.
“Your mother had one just like it.”
The silence that followed was the kind that had weight. Cícero felt it on his shoulders, in his chest, in his throat. He waited. Donana was a woman who spoke in her own time, and hurrying her was like hurrying rain—it did no good and only made her angry.
But Donana did not speak. She stood, straightened her dress, and went out into the yard without looking back.
“Grandma—”
“Go to Tamboril Fair.” Her voice came from the yard, already mingling with the clucking of chickens. “Find Tomé, that drunken peddler. He knows stories. Ask him about the Old Woman of the Well.”
“What old woman?”
“Go, Cícero. Before I change my mind and burn that devil's stone.”
He went.
Tamboril Fair was half a day's walk away, following the dirt road that linked the villages of the Backlands like a frayed thread connecting beads on a broken rosary. Cícero made the journey with the leather bag over his shoulder, the canteen on his belt, and the stone in his pocket, knocking against his thigh with every step like a second heart.
The fair was the opposite of Craúnas. Noise, color, people. Canvas stalls covered the central square, selling everything—flour, rapadura, cachaça, knives, cordel booklets, plaster saints, root medicines. Ox carts competed for space with donkeys and barefoot children who ran between the adults' legs like lizards between stones.
Cícero found Tomé where he always found him: sitting on a crate behind the cachaça stall, a cup in his hand and a story on his lips.
“Cícero Alencar! The cartographer at the end of the world!” Tomé threw his arms open as if welcoming home a prodigal son. He was a forty-year-old man who looked sixty, with skin weathered by sun and roads, a thin mustache, and eyes that gleamed with the particular intelligence of someone who survived on conversation. “Sit down, boy. Have a drink. Water's running out anyway, so you'd better get used to the substitute.”
“Tomé, I need to ask you something.”
“Ask while you drink. A dry conversation is a short conversation.”
Cícero sat, refused the cachaça, and got straight to the point.
“What do you know about the Old Woman of the Well?”
Tomé's smile shrank. It did not disappear—Tomé was incapable of being completely serious—but it contracted enough for Cícero to realize he had touched on something.
“Who told you about her?”
“My grandmother.”
“Donana?” Tomé took a long swallow. “Donana knows things she shouldn't. Always has.” He lowered his voice, which was rare for a man who treated volume as a virtue. “The Old Woman of the Well is a crazy woman who lives near the ruins of the Silent Well. No one knows how long she's been there. My father already talked about her when I was a boy, and his father did too. Always the same old woman. Always in the same place. Blind, barefoot, talking to herself in a language nobody understands.”
“And what does she know?”
“Everything and nothing, depending on the day. Some say she's a witch. Others say she's a saint. I say she's both, which in the Backlands is almost the same thing.” Tomé leaned forward. “Why the interest, Cícero? You're the kind who believes in maps, not ghost stories.”
Cícero hesitated. Then he took the stone from his pocket and placed it on the crate between them. Tomé looked at it. He did not touch it.
“Where did you find that?”
“At the bottom of the reservoir.”
“Black stone. Just like the ruins.” Tomé ran his tongue over his dry lips. “Just like the Devil's Bones.”
“When it gets wet, a map appears.”
Tomé stayed quiet for a stretch of time that, for him, was an eternity. Then he finished the cachaça in one gulp, set the cup on the ground, and looked at Cícero with a seriousness that seemed borrowed from someone else.
“If you're going after the Old Woman of the Well, you'll need someone who knows the way to the ruins. I know the Backlands from the top of an ox cart. To get to the Silent Well, you need someone who knows the Backlands from beneath their boots.”
“You know anyone?”
Tomé pointed to the other side of the fair. Between the stalls, a tall, dark-skinned woman with braided hair was arguing with a goat seller. She gestured with one hand; in the other, she held a rope tied to the leanest, most furious goat Cícero had ever seen.
“Luzia Sombra. Best tracker in the Backlands. Finds water where there isn't any, paths where none exist, and trouble where it's not needed.”
“Will she want to help me?”
“No.” Tomé grinned. “But you'll want to try.”
Cícero crossed the fair toward Luzia. He was three steps away from her when the goat decided it had tolerated enough, yanked the rope from Luzia's hand, and charged straight at Cícero. The animal slammed its head into his stomach, knocking him onto a rapadura stall that collapsed with a crash of wood and sugar.
Luzia appeared above him, blocking out the sun. The scar on her chin shone with sweat. Her eyes were the kind that measured a person in two seconds and decided whether they were worth spending a third on.
“You're in my goat's way.”
“I noticed.”
“Get up. You're crushing someone else's rapadura.”
Cícero stood, pulled a piece of rapadura from his hair, and held out his hand.
“Cícero Alencar. Cartographer.”
Luzia looked at his hand the way someone looks at a suspicious offer. She did not shake it.
“I know who you are. The map lunatic.” She went after the goat, which was now chewing on the canvas of a neighboring stall. “What do you want?”
“I need someone to take me to the Silent Well.”
Luzia stopped. She turned slowly.
“What for?”
“To find someone.”
“There isn't anyone at the Silent Well. Just stone, snakes, and heat. In that order.”
“There's an old woman who lives there.”
“The Old Woman of the Well is a legend.”
“My grandmother says she isn't.”
Luzia tied the goat to a post, crossed her arms, and studied him with that two-second look. Cícero held firm. He had plenty of practice being evaluated and found wanting.
“How much?”
He named the amount. She laughed—a short, dry laugh without any joy in it.
“Double.”
“I don't have double.”
“Then find another guide.”
“There isn't another guide. Tomé said you're the only one.”
“Tomé is a drunk who talks too much.” But something changed in her face. It was not interest. It was something more like recognition—as if Cícero had accidentally spoken a password she had not expected to hear. “When do you want to go?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Paid up front. Half now, half when we arrive.”
Cícero paid. Luzia put away the money, untied the goat, and started walking away. Halfway there, she stopped without turning around.
“If you die on the way, I don't refund the half.”
“Fair enough.”
She disappeared among the stalls. Cícero returned to where Tomé had been, but the peddler was already gone, leaving only the empty cup and a note scribbled on a scrap of wrapping paper: “Be careful what you look for. Sometimes the thing you're looking for is looking for you too.”
Cícero put the note away, adjusted the bag on his shoulder, and started the journey back to Craúnas. The sun was high, white, and cruel, and the air smelled of dust and crushed rapadura.
That night, in Craúnas, while Cícero slept with the stone beneath his pillow, Donana waited for his snoring to settle into a steady rhythm. Then she got up, lit a candle, and went to the back of the house. Behind the china cabinet—the one nobody ever touched, the one she claimed was stuck—there was a dark wooden chest.
Donana opened the chest with trembling hands. Inside, wrapped in a piece of unbleached cotton, was another fragment of black stone. Identical to Cícero's. And beneath it, a letter. The paper was yellowed, the ink faded, but the handwriting was firm—the handwriting of someone writing as if it might be the last time.
Donana unfolded the letter. She had read it so many times she knew it by heart, but she needed to see the words. She needed them to be real.
The letter began like this:
“Mother, if he finds the first piece, don't let him go after the second.”
Donana pressed the paper to her chest. The candle trembled. From the bedroom, Cícero's snoring continued, steady and innocent, like that of a child who still did not know the world had basements.
She folded the letter, put it in the chest, and closed the lid.
She did not sleep for the rest of the night.