366.
"Yes," Niki murmurs, tasting blood and bile, and This is what I do now, she thinks clearly. This is what happens next, and then it will end.
And the absolute gravity of the portal pulls her from herself, tears her from the dying sh.e.l.l of her body, and she doesn"t try to fight.
This is how the story ends, and she only regrets that Spyder will never grasp why this is how the story ends, and that Daria is dead, and those women sacrificed in the temple of the red witches, and Marvin will have to find another girl to save from the wolves. The portal draws her in like a lover, the last and most perfect lover that she"ll ever know.
Niki can hear Spyder screaming down on the bridge, Spyder shaking her limp body, and she can also hear the trumpets of the angels, and the armies of the Dragon pushing their way towards the Dog"s Bridge.
And then the portal closes, sealing itself shut around her.
You are brave, Niki thinks, remembering Pikabo"s Kenzia"s chant, and you will shame us all with your forfeiture.
By your sacrifice might worlds be saved.
But the red witch never would have understood this either; Niki knows that. She can feel the cloud walls of the portal beginning to close in about her as she ends the storm that Spyder began, and knows that the portal is sealed at both ends. And without her, or the philtre, or the house on Cullom Street, Spyder will never build another. Niki opens her arms wide as galaxies swirl about her, through her, col-liding and reforming, one star system cannibalizing another, and in the silent death and birth of universes, in the most infinitesimal sliver of a second, the collapsing star named Niki Ky winks out, and winks in, the pulsar rhythm of her being, and eternity rolls on.
And the mother Weaver at the blind soul of all creations still dreams in her black-hole coc.o.o.n of trapped light and antimatter, her legs drawn up tight about the infinitely vast, infinitely small shield of her pulsing cephalothorax.
367.
Satisfied, she draws tight a single silken thread, one worldline held taut between her jaws, and snips it free to drift in the void. And then she collects a second, and sets it free, as well.
These things happen.
These things happen.
Her black matter spinnerets work endlessly in her sleep, dividing time from s.p.a.ce and st.i.tching the two together again.
And her daughters, grown to fat, long-legged spiderlings in electrostatic egg sacs laid in the s.p.a.ces between worlds, emerge at last from the squeezing, oscillating tidal forces of their mother"s singularity to scramble across the swirl of the hole"s vast accretion disk.
And to drift free across the sky.
E P I L O G U E.
Land"s End.
Marvin flips open the rusted snaps on the battered black guitar case, flipping them up one after the next, and then he opens it. The morning sun glints unevenly off the twelve-string cradled in worn crimson velvet, shining off wood and varnish scuffed and scratched by all the years that this was the only guitar Daria Parker owned. The one she found cheap in a p.a.w.nshop and played for spare change on Pearl Street in Boulder. But she put it away in the attic when they bought the house on Alamo Square, putting away that part of her life, though sometimes Niki would sit up there alone and pick at the strings, pretending she knew how to play, or only pretending Daria was there to play for her.
He looks up at the wide sky stretched out above Horse-shoe Cove, only a few shades lighter than the surging blue of the sea. The waves slam themselves against the granite edge of the continent, spraying foam and stranding fleshy stalks of kelp, and above him, the white gulls wheel and dip and cry out to one another.
The sun was barely up when Marvin left the city, locking the front door of the house on Alamo Square for the last time before he drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and then north along Highway 1, the decrepit Volkswagen sputtering and complaining all the way to Bodega Bay.
369.
And then he turned west, towards the sea, driving until the roads finally ended, and he hiked the rest of the way, carrying the guitar case in his right hand and the bra.s.s urn with Niki"s ashes tucked securely into the crook of his left arm, a small backpack strapped across his shoulders. The November sun was warmer than he"d expected, even with the northerly wind, and by the time he found the trail leading down to the water, he was tired and hot and sweaty.
He came here once before, with Niki, almost a year ago now, and they watched birds together and hunted sea urchins and anemones among the tidal pools. He likes to think that Daria would have been happy here, too, if she"d ever had the time to see it.
Marvin opens the urn and carefully transfers Niki"s fine gray ashes into the hollow body of the twelve string.
Then he sets the empty container down among the slippery rocks and opens his pack. There are flowers in there, only a little worse for wear; four yellow roses for Niki, yellow roses with petals fringed in red, because those were her favorites, and for Daria, a single white rose. He threads the th.o.r.n.y stalks of the flowers in between the guitar strings.
For days, he tried to think of something appropriate to read or say. There was a memorial service in the city, no bodies but a lot of people there who said a lot of things, mostly things about Daria and her music, and how they wished they could have gotten to know Niki better. So maybe everything"s been said that needs saying.
He lifts the guitar, holding it up and out to the sun and sky and the screeching gulls, and wishes there were more of Daria here. But they found nothing in the hole burned by the fire in Birmingham, nothing at all. A fire that made CNN and MSNBC because no one had ever seen anything like it before, or anything like the hole it left in the melted limestone bedrock of the mountain. So the old Fender will have to do, and he knows that"s the heart of her, anyway.
Marvin stands up and casts it out into the Pacific; it lands 370 in the water a few feet from sh.o.r.e, only a soft splash, and the twelve-string has become a funeral ship, its long neck for the bowsprit. He can hear the strings singing softly above the noise of the surf.
"No more wolves," he says, "for either of you."
About the Author.
Caitlin R. Kiernan is the author of Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, and Daughter of Hounds.
Her award-winning short fiction has been collected in four volumes- Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Sh.o.r.es; To Charles Fort, With Love; and Alabaster. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her partner, doll maker Kathryn Pollnac.
www.caitlinrkiernan.com.
NOVELS BY CAITLIN R. KIERNAN.
Silk.
Threshold.
Low Red Moon.
Murder of Angels.
Daughter of Hounds.