"Why are we Third People, Mama?" Lallowe asked, "if we"re as old as time?" Little Lallowe lay in the crook of her mother"s arm, surrounded by pillows.
The queen scratched her younger daughter with an amber nail. "Our kind has always been, Lolly, but we have not always lived. In the beginning we were eternal, glacial; not immortal and vast like the First People, but akin to the trees and the river stones. Beautiful and unmoving. Unmovable. It was not until the dawn of the Third People that we first glanced down and noticed ourselves."
"I want to be perfect," complained Almondine from the lee of her mother. "I wish we lived at the beginning, before humans."
"It is good to want to be perfect, my tiny nightmare. But you are wrong." The queen shook her head and watched as another puff of steam drifted away. "We do not predate the humans any more than the air predates the wind: that is when we moved, when we began. With man. The tension between man and fey is his history and our own."
Lolly sucked on a sugared lizard"s tail, sc.r.a.ping off the sweet scales with her sharp little teeth. "That"s when we came to life? For men?"
"Quickened," corrected the queen. "Man"s birth quickened us, and we began to live. We lost a kind of ever-living purity and gained mankind"s predilection for strife and sin. If only we could return to stillness, I think, we might recover our lost grace. But then again perhaps not, perhaps forward into motion is the way-that is certainly the dancer"s way." The queen stretched one scarred but shapely leg into the air; her love of dance was famous. "It was the way of your foremothers. Who knows where the chaos of progress will take us?"
"I don"t understand," Lallowe muttered into her sweet tail. "Are we going somewhere?"
The dancing queen pulled both of her daughters into a tight embrace, touching noses. "Time and thorn will tell, my b.l.o.o.d.y darlings."
A polite cough brought Lallowe back to the present. Maintaining perfect repose, adult Lallowe opened her eyes, then narrowed them.
"Every apology, ma"am." Tam bent at the waist. She"d sent for him, but that didn"t mean she was pleased to have her thoughts interrupted. "How might I please?"
"You may run an errand." She procured a folded note. "Fetch me a coin, boy, and a body-binding enchantment while you"re about it."
As before, the Cicatrix had sent only the briefest of messages, a list of numbers and letters that Lallowe only half understood.
"A . . . binding, ma"am?" Tam distrusted the self-imprisonment of the n.o.bility of the City Unspoken as much as Lallowe herself-it was unnatural, and belied a fear of losing that no fey worth her saltpeter would dare feel, let alone express.
"Did I mumble? The coin is to be a diode, of course." she explained to n.o.body, a role Tam had mastered. "A diode for a new vivisistor. Has Mother been fusing magics and technologies from half a dozen worlds all along? Ordinarily I"d not be inclined to believe such nonsense, but we endure nonsensical times and so it is lunatic logic that we must follow."
Lallowe held out her hand to give Tam the note, and he stepped forward. But she withdrew it just as quickly, and so Tam stepped back again. His fox-nosed face remained still.
"She wants me to make one? With what?" The Marchioness mused over the coin, and on the Cicatrix"s previous message about the human. "Time and thorn, Tam! Tell me, how do I fit a fatty on a face?"
"Ah? Pardon me, ma"am?"
"Or a tails. Does the side of the coin matter, I wonder? Sympathetic magic could make a difference in this. Or be irrelevant. Or cause disaster." She tapped her nails on the parchment, thoughts flickering across her lovely face. "I speculate that the origin of the materials used has as much to do with the vivisistor"s functionality as the ingenuity of its design, though that might be overthinking it. Or under. I hate this, there are too many threads to follow, and all of them false as a Seelie promise."
Quick as a cobra, the marchioness turned her head toward Tam, unhinged her jaw, and shot out a long, thin black tongue to sting his cheek. She moved so quickly that her lips were pressed together and pouting by the time Tam realized she"d lashed out again. He felt blood trickle down his cheek and wondered if it were Tuesday, somewhere.
"Take the note, and I will show you a wonder"-Lallowe lifted the hand with the ring of fourth silver-"of coin and cold metal, and the longest way to die."
The day had corrupted the blue sky, and the promising morning had already miscarried into a sickly yellow noonday-the twin suns fused into a kind of angry mating, their orbs gone orange, streams of red-black plasma arcing between them as they grew steadily closer together. Another costume change for the sky above the City Unspoken.
With her shoulders cradled in one of Asher"s long arms, Sesstri stared out the window of her living room and wondered what she"d done. Somewhere out in that improbable, brachiated mess of a city Cooper needed help, urgent help, yet she couldn"t extract herself from the arms of a wounded drunk. Listing Asher"s deficiencies helped her from being swallowed by the pleasures, his touch, his breath, the warmth of his body against hers. . . .
He snored softly with his marble head turned away. Sesstri tried to pull herself together. She recalled the words of the old Winnowed storyteller holding court on her broken pillar inside the Apostery: If the Last Gate closes, we will all drown.
Sesstri turned her body into his, filling the backs of his legs with her knees, her nipples brushing the stone wall of his back, trying to decide if she should just give up and enjoy the time she had left, before the svarning took her mind away. When the plumbing of the metaverse became fully clogged-the Dying denied their Deaths backing up the pipes, so to speak, and the flow of energy between worlds, between people, all became congested. Cloudy. Deranging.
Maybe that"s why I"m feeling all of these . . . feelings.
Had that been how she"d ended up naked with Asher? It had happened so easily, Sesstri didn"t want to blame it on madness, but she didn"t know how to accept this intimacy as a part of herself.
"You?" Asher had come round to the subject of Alouette again. "You learned little, I take it?"
"Too much and too little, all in a trice," Sesstri had despaired. "I should have gone to your wh.o.r.e."
He"d cleared his throat self-consciously. "Not my wh.o.r.e, exactly, but yes-Cooper has some sight, I learned that much."
"Asher, what is he? He seems so . . . mundane."
"I think he"s becoming a kind of shaman. He wasn"t what I wanted, but he might end up that way. How can he help us restore the ability of the Dying to achieve True Death? I haven"t the slightest."
Sesstri had bitten her lip. "What can he do?"
"I worry that the proper question is, what will he learn to do? He hears the fears of others, firstly-"
"-That"s oddly specific, if not exactly indicative of a nascent superbeing."
"It gives him access to secrets, both consciously and unconsciously. For instance, somehow he knew . . . something he ought not know." Asher had taken a deep breath before continuing. "I don"t want there to be any unnecessary secrets between us, Sesstri."
Sesstri had kept very still. She still thought of Cooper as a t.u.r.d, but perhaps a t.u.r.d with a touch of shamanic vision. Doors were opening, and she suspected he was-somehow-the catalyst.
Asher had looked at her with liquid eyes that were far too close to her own to be safe. "Okay," she"d said. "That"s . . . okay. Tell me."
His body shook a little, as if he held back tears; she knew better than that, though. "I had a kid once. A daughter. It . . . the circ.u.mstances were not ideal."
"I see." She most certainly did not. How was this relevant?
"It was not the child"s fault, but her mother and I . . . we did not want to come together. It was forced upon us." He"d curled his shoulders and tried to make himself as small as possible-not easy for such a long man.
"I wanted to love my daughter so badly." Asher"s voice had threatened to break. "And we tried to forget how she came to be, but I could not stand to look at the mother . . . Chara, she found a way . . . they are Dead, now."
That"s when it had happened; Sesstri reached out to touch Asher and noted with some amazement that she didn"t try to stop herself. He was turned slightly away from her and her hand found his knee. She decided they had both earned the truth.
"I know what it"s like to be forced, Asher. It can"t have been easy for you." She"d flushed as she said it, and felt him stiffen. She"d nodded once, between the wings of his shoulder blades; he had scars there, too. "There"s more." I should have had that drink. "I had a daughter, too. Had. Not from, from that encounter-that was what killed me the first time." Sesstri spoke rapidly without wincing, half-hiding behind Asher"s back. "I had Sally during my second life, back on Desmond"s Pike. I was not a good mother."
"Where is she now?" Asher had asked, turning toward her with an expression both sad and hopeful.
Sesstri had shrugged. "Wouldn"t a good mother know?"
The living room filled up with silence, and Sesstri and Asher sat there, her hand on his knee, Asher still hugging himself. They were lost and sad, but they were not alone.
At last she"d said what they knew to be true. "If we don"t help Cooper, Asher, n.o.body will."
He had leaned in. "There isn"t anything or anyone I wouldn"t sacrifice for a moment together with you, Sesstri. I hope you know that."
She"d nodded.
"No one will ever hurt you again, I will make sure of it."
She"d wiped her eyes. "You either."
He"d leaned in closer still and kissed her. His lips felt so soft above his stubbled chin. "Cooper. Yes. That"s who . . . we have to save . . ."
Asher nodded without breaking the kiss. "A moment for ourselves, even when hurried by the end of all things and imperiled friends . . ."
"Ourselves." She"d breathed the word. "Just a moment. But, oh . . . yes."
Asher had cracked his knuckles and cupped her face in his enormous, warm hands. "Optimae Manfrix solves another riddle." She"d scowled to hide a blush; he"d never used her academic t.i.tle before. Then he"d kissed her again, and didn"t stop until she slipped into his arms, strong despite his wounds, and allowed him to hold her.
Cooper understood the power of the lich-lords the moment he crossed the threshold into their territory: the seething clouds swallowed the sky and, suddenly, undeath saturated the air and earth around him. He"d crossed into another world; the light from the day still lit the blocks on all sides, but within the perimeter of those clouds roiling overhead, a curtain was drawn and day became night. Cooper had no firsthand experience with the undead but could feel the energy of the unliving pouring from the sky in a deluge. For a moment, the sick song of the lich-lords drowned out the golden voice of the woman whose ghostly sobbing called him forward, to the top of that mad darkness. The sky swarmed with lich-lords, black contrails against a dark sky. If death was the answer to the question of life, then undeath was the question reframed to turn the answer into a corollary: an existence fueled by the energies that brought an end to the living. Death rewritten as life.
Is that freedom?
The scrambling figures of Death Boys and Charnel Girls dashed toward the cl.u.s.ter of towers directly beneath the spiraling black clouds, and when Cooper pushed forward, the woman"s voice returned like a shaft of sunlight. It pierced him. Vaulting atop an exposed girder, Cooper clawed at his ears.
He stumbled and fell from the girder. It wasn"t a long fall and trash absorbed most of the impact, but it dazed him, and he could do nothing but listen to the dueling musics that clashed over his head, one sunlit aria drowned out by a symphony of grave dirt and shadows. The faces of Death Boys and Charnel Girls flickered across his vision, concerned or curious or scornful, but he couldn"t make his eyes focus properly. He followed the lines of life and death until they reached a crescendo, and Cooper"s body spasmed.
Then he left his body altogether.
Like a gunshot, Cooper"s senses erupted from his body with bullet speed: sight and sound soared out of his skull and wheeled away, past the variable sky, piercing the rind of the world to flow into a kind of dimensionless non-s.p.a.ce, an empty fullness that blanketed the universes and hid them from one another. Flattened and ghostly, Cooper flowed through the connective tissue of the metaverse. His disembodied consciousness rattled through impossible places, and time was his darling-he could soar through the nothingness as he pleased and only picoseconds pa.s.sed in the real world.
The real world? Cooper"s ghost scoffed. The real world is a fairy tale.
Seven spheres of light appeared, orbiting a common center. In the same way he knew anything here, Cooper knew that the spheres were only spheres in the most abstract sense, and that their orbits were less actual than ill.u.s.trative, and that their common center was one of ident.i.ty rather than ma.s.s.
Still, the spheres beguiled him with the tactile immediacy of physical objects, and he watched, fascinated, as they coruscated with the colors of life: yellow sun and green leaf and the steely refractions of rippling water. These were worlds, universes, realities-seven discrete realms of existence that were home to a single culture and thus linked by bonds more abiding than the laws of physics.
How do I know that? Cooper wondered, though he already knew the answer. This is the work a shaman does, isn"t it? Walking between worlds, visiting the worlds beyond death for the good of the living. He could blame the liches and their captive, if he returned to his body.
Cooper drifted closer to the Seven Silvers, hearing the name as the worlds drew his focus, until something tugged at him, clawing at his . . . body? No, not body-he had no body here, just information coded into the ether-signal was the right word. He was a signal. And the signal that was Cooper had just found a receiver, something voltaic that sucked him into the closest sphere with a magnetic attraction. Helpless to resist or control his movement, Cooper saw only flashes of the world he entered: streaking past brown skies crossed with teal lightning; a dark hollow looming like an impact crater; a coiled serpent with a woman"s torso; a nest of restless synthetic spindles; black claws so thin he could see the sky through the blades, like obsidian. Then Cooper was gone, an echo inhabiting a machine.
Her Majesty the Cicatrix, Regina Afflicta, Matron of the Seven Silvers, Childe of Air and Darkness, and Queen of the Court of Scars had been partially inorganic for centuries, continuing a trend that had begun as minor enhancements, barely more than accessories that flattered her vanity with bra.s.s and c.o.ke. The fashion had started as an ironic condescension toward that least enchanting of mortal endeavors, science, but had sublimed into a practice that eclipsed the mystical arts before absorbing them entirely.
Now the queen lifted her ma.s.sive helmed head and sniffed at the air. It was her native element, but the winds had discharged unusual energies of late. She smelled nothing except the dried loam and weeds that bedraggled her barren enclosure. Ozone, when the lightning hit, arcing down her coiled spine.
The Court of Scars had been excavated to accommodate the queen"s ever-increasing bulk: gone were the moonflower vines and mountainous rhododendrons that once adorned the bower of her court, and the wild cress that had carpeted the earth had long ago been trammeled by the sinuations of the royal carapace. Only the bounding ring of sentinel oaks that surrounded the court remained, skeletal. The sky flickered with lightning that followed straight lines and perpendicular branches, as if the clouds themselves had been seeded with circuitry.
The Cicatrix yawned a silent scream, silver grills cracking apart to let her tongue taste the air.
From this nest the she had ruled an alliance of seven universes for ten thousand years, faerie worlds united beneath her banner ages ago by charisma and threats and a willpower that had extinguished suns. Today, none of her va.s.sals would recognize the beauty who conquered them clad in naught but glee and blood: her remainder lay coiled like a dragon atop its h.o.a.rd, dark graphene and vinyl st.i.tched together with rivets and industrial adhesive, her tiny dancer"s body hacked apart and stuffed inside armor crafted into the shape of a great serpent. Grasping appendages studded her length and facilitated some movement, but for the most part the queen had sacrificed her mobility to her technological addiction: there was always more machine to add to the monster.
Her arm jerked of its own accord, a vivisistors shorting out briefly while its occupant tried to communicate. Her little engines spoke to her, an annoying and persistent defect that manifested throughout her systems, and she"d learned to ignore the occasional errant impulse.
"M1sstresss mine!" called out the pixie powering the servo where the Cicatrix"s shoulder joint had been, streaming verse through wiring that terminated inside her skull. "It sings to us again from the garden of El Ciudad Tacito, and it brings us a visitor::login:guestnotfound! Gray bird sings a harmony, m1lady, and the navel of a11 worlds inhabits us as 1t s0 sadly singsss! Your Light Music Machine, my qu33n::login:xxMyQueenSoScarre dxx . . . Your Golden Appppple! In tone s0 sad, in voice s0 ancient, in volume 5o greatttttt-"
Despite the slithering length of her abdomen, the queen"s torso remained relatively humanoid, corseted in metal and plastic but still a recognizably womanly shape; she"d replaced her auburn curls with a towering headpiece of shining black, twin horns like a giant dung beetle twisting toward the sky while braided cables cascaded down the back of her neck, connecting her helm to the bulk of her machine components.
The Cicatrix kept one hand unadorned to proclaim her fey heritage to any being unlucky enough to be brought before her, and she raised that hand now, demanding silence. Proprioceptive relays made verbal communication with her systems unnecessary-the pixie in her shoulder fell silent with a whisper of static terror. Unaware that Cooper surged through her systems, the Cicatrix bared her metal teeth in a silver smile.
The vivisistors suspended within her polyvinyl cha.s.sis transfixed only the rarest of fey creatures-a perversion of loyalty kept the Cicatrix from employing any other kind of servant, within or without her body. She knew that Lolly had uncovered the truth about the magitechnical composition of the vivisistor design, but the child remained ignorant of the number and composition of her mother"s upgrades: Lolly might well revolt if she knew that her own little fey cousins had been used to power the queen"s vivisistors, or how aggressively the Cicatrix had been upgrading herself since her daughter"s deployment to the City Unspoken.
Something Cooper-derived bootstrapped itself into a state of minimal awareness, flickering between vivisistors that wound along the coiled length of the faerie queen, which looked something like an ink-black subway train wound up in a curl, with a woman at one end. A mile-long mermaid machine, black as coal and flickering with Tesla arcs. He struggled to gain consciousness and found himself by focusing on his host"s fears, piggybacking across her thoughts. Alien thoughts. As he incorporated himself into her cognition, the active part of Cooper calmly observed that the mind he inhabited seemed to consider itself the mother of the Marchioness Terenz-de-Guises, and that the mind belonged to a monster. Elsewhere, Cooper"s dormant majority screamed.
But the part of him taking this electronic spirit walk acknowledged the maternal horror and moved on, following the narrative of the queen"s fear that Lallowe Thyu had not improved upon some kind of programming language that the Cicatrix herself had improvised. The queen- and therefore Cooper also-considered that language, which she used to program her vivisistors.
Her code was by necessity feral and half-formed; there were no guides to this work, and all of her usual resources were useless: no epic poetry recited in the Court of Scars detailed the recursive spells of If-Then and Let-X-Equal that would breathe true life into the vivisistor design. Yet she hoped that Lolly, possessed of the combined gifts from her human father and the compulsive genius that so resembled the queen"s own, would discover the language to unlock the potential of the technology- and emerge with a vivisistor that would be a far more significant device than the half- aware batteries that currently powered her armaments.
Armaments that were needed to keep the eons at bay, as well as to provide the Cicatrix with new and more appealing diversions in these latter days. The true Wild Hunt was long gone, fractured and refractured across time as well as s.p.a.ce, and although its denizens had seeded a hundred cultures of barbarism and wild magic, the rule of the Unseelie Court was a thing of near prehistory. The Unseelie champion-the Queen of Air and Darkness-died ages before with no successor, and no one remembered her true name to summon so much as a ghost, not even ancient fairies such as the once- spindly dancer, now corseted with metal and braided with optical cables, who had become a queen in her own right.
Farther down the length of her body, another vivisistor bucked as its prisoner whispered through the wires: "All we caged birds hear the same song, my queen. And you hear it t00, while the Omphale gnaws through your sacred fruit. . . ."
She lashed out with a pulse of electricity that whipped through the inside of her body and silenced the offending device, but the trapped thing was correct, she could feel them out there, across the worlds-the other vivisistors, the old ones. She"d begun to sense them years ago, but as her systems improved so too did the signal-old machines, vivisistors that predated the rise of the Third People.
That shouldn"t be; yet somehow every vivisistor in existence-so far as the queen could determine-was linked together with its peers via some oblique tunneling protocol into a background network she could not disable, and while this latent network didn"t interfere with her benchmarks and diagnostics, a persistent hiss of feedback lingered no matter how she configured her modules. She could still hear the others, even the miniscule surveillance drone she"d hidden with Lallowe years before. And the one she"d sent, only recently, with the dragonfly inside- she"d heard that dragonfly die, and it had disquieted her.
The Cicatrix could hear them all, and Cooper heard them with her. One vivisistor in particular loomed larger than the rest, its song a constant presence in the back of the queen"s head, and its energy signal shone brighter than a hundred stars. A golden apple that dazzled her from somewhere within the City Unspoken. It glittered with a greater concentration of power than she"d ever witnessed, and even though it hung like a golden fruit just out of her reach, it fed her with its light.
Vivisistor? The ghost of Cooper scanned the queen"s thoughts and marveled. How am I here, and how am I hidden inside this creature? He could feel the pain of sentient beings close by, calling out for peace. Little winged men and cat-paw ladies; smooth- groined nullos and b.u.t.terflycrotched oni: all in pain, each begging for death.
Green and lilac LEDs danced up the Cicatrix"s side, forming a tattoo of peonies and mandrake. The sprites whose slow deaths powered her HUD flashed poetry across her field of vision, obscuring her inactive targeting reticle: He kn0ws a secret sector, We share a partial place. Where is it always w1nter, And iv0ry, old lace!
Nonsense. More and more of it lately, clogging her systems with digitized doggerel and fancies that were not her own-always with a call for stillness. And yet she heard the same nonsense bubbling from the mouths of her attendants, her governors, everywhere. From all corners of the Seven Silvers came whispers of secrets and madness, always distant, always growing nearer; a panic built itself all around her, within her and without, muddling her own systems as well as her satraps and coteries. Every level seemed affected-even her Wild Hunters returned most days with more fear than flesh, wide-eyed and unwilling to voice their troubles. They, too, seemed gripped by a need for stillness-a relic virtue she could ill afford-and sat empty-eyed beside their fires, mouths moving as if in prayer.
Some days, the Cicatrix felt the pain of all the worlds.
The hunters of the Seven Silvers were creatures who had always existed as the embodiment of nature"s frenzy. Few of them had ever felt unsettled before, let alone afraid-even when she"d forced them to follow her example and upgrade their natural bodies with synthetic components. No, anything that could disturb her nest of blade-boned serpents and polymer wasps merited more than a little vigilance-it was hardly alarmist for the queen to be worried by anything that could worry dark fairies in their own wood.
Nothing mattered other than devouring that enormous vivisistor signal, whatever it was, that eluded her somewhere beneath the chaotic skies of the City Unspoken. She would make it a part of herself, or consume its essence, or its secrets. If trouble was coming, the kind of worlds- shaking trouble that her instincts, her vivisistor- sprites, and her subjects seemed to suggest-even the ones insane enough to accuseher of causing the trouble- then the Cicatrix wanted the protection she imagined would be afforded by incorporating that enormous energy signature into her own array. And if Lolly failed her, then her pet liches would split the city like an apple so she could suck out its golden pulp.
Where am I, and how? Cooper flickered from node to node inside the Cicatrix, trying to escape something he didn"t understand. Was he inside this thing? Was he hallucinating again? Cooper knew he was not, and yet he"d heard her think of herself as Lallowe Thyu"s mother, and at least a little bit robot. The queen didn"t seem to notice him, but the little people trapped inside these awful little battery-machines might-they whimpered in helpless supplication.
Why, Cooper thought, does this keep happening to me?
A pinging blip at the edge of the queen"s vision interrupted her thoughts- and Cooper"s. An automated signal from Lallowe surveillance unit- the fool girl thought herself un.o.bserved, though she should know better. Contingencies within contingencies, that was the only way to play the game. The Cicatrix summoned the signal into her field of vision, although she already knew its contents.
So the girl had begun building her own vivisistor, exactly as she was expected to do. She"d resorted to asking her father for help, which ought to have humiliated her. Perhaps it did. Or perhaps the Cicatrix had chosen the wrong daughter to remove from the board. Almondine, perhaps, should be awakened. If only the third daughter had been true fey, instead of inheriting her brutal father"s humanity. That was a contingency plan the Cicatrix would like to have had.
Oh, thought Cooper, with a detached nausea that brought more of himself online by reflex. Machines that feed on life. A family of evil faeries, starring Lallowe Thyu. A cyborg queen with the body of a Chinese dragon, who wants to devour the chewy center of the City Unspoken. Of f.u.c.king course.
Flexing the spirit-muscle he"d only just begun to learn he possessed, Cooper extended a tendril of his self and contacted one of the nodes- the vivisistors, she"d called them- and peeked inside. A miniature man with moth wings and the mangy remains of a blue pelt lay inside, skewered through his middle by a metal pin. A pixie, Cooper recognized/realized/learned, abetted by the hijacked thoughts of the queen, and a diseased-looking pixie at that. His tiny hands clutched the pin that impaled him; the little thorns at the tips of his fingers had splintered against it.
I am so sorry, little insect man. Cooper spoke to the creature as easily as if he"d still had a throat. I know nothing, but I promise to help you if I can.
The pixie jerked his head toward the source of Cooper"s signal. His eyes were the color of fire and the expression on his face combined outrage with agony in equal measure. These were not prisoners, Cooper realized, but volunteers.
My queen! An invader with1n the royal cha.s.sis skulks! The pixie screamed an alarm into its adjacent hardware and writhed on his pin. 13reak his 13ones of lightning 13efore he logoff::flees!
Cooper recoiled, if that was a thing that electric souls could do. He startled himself as his previously offline horror awoke within him and immediately sought an escape from the closed system of menace that was the Cicatrix"s inorganic self. As he did so, other vivisistors shook off the shroud of soul-sickness that had maddened their thoughts with the poetry of oblivion and took up the wicked pixie"s call to arms.