s.h.i.t. s.h.i.t. s.h.i.t. Cooper felt nearly corporeal in his panic, banging the idea of his fists against the idea of his prison. Worlds away from his own body, trapped inside the carapace of a an evil faerie monster queen, where he existed only as a ghost of information in an almost-closed computer network whose nodes were batteries made out of dying faerie, Cooper finally found his mojo.
His mojo: it didn"t matter that the worlds had been built to the specifications of insanity. He hadn"t been built that way. In fact, hadn"t immutable sanity had been the only remarkable quality he possessed, according to the Lady? Shamanic tendencies seemed not that impressive in the Lady"s eyes, but Cooper"s enduring sanity, that had impressed her.
The Cicatrix lurched, raising her torso a dozen yards by rearing her most proximal coils: a chitin and graphene cobra, ready to strike. Rather than speak she hissed, a thunder of amplified feedback and simple, feral hate.
Cooper acknowledged that terrifying sound, but retained his selfpossession. I wonder what I might do and where I might go, if I were an electric shaman whose superpower was keeping his s.h.i.t together?
"What wight winds its way twixt our wires?" The Cicatrix beat her claws against her breast, speaking out loud to her vivisistors in case there truly was an intruder. "If you inconstant goblins vex us again with your prankish alarum, we shall riddle you with megavolts till your eyes pop like cherry tomatoes in the fat of a rendered babe."
She c.o.c.ked her horned and plated head, sniffing at the air again. A sly smile crept across her face, a woman"s features st.i.tched onto a dragon"s skull. She patted her mismatched hands together and promised: "Hifi fofun: I"m going to f.u.c.k your eye sockets with my railgun."
Cooper held himself as still as a signal could stay, and considered his predicament. Considered it quickly. Inside the queen"s body, he could only play hide- and-seek, and he didn"t know what-if anything-she was capable of doing to his spirit should she be able to catch it, so an expedient retreat seemed his most desirable option. But to where? And how? Beating his electric fists against this cage was useless, and the vivisistors formed a closed system that led nowhere.
Except they do lead somewhere, and that"s what worries her. This isn"t a closed system, not the way she wants it to be.
The queen worried about other vivisistors, hadn"t she? And how she could sense them, worlds away, even though she thought that was not supposed to be possible. If the queen could sense them, could Cooper? More importantly, could he follow them away from this place? If there was a vivisistor beneath the City Unspoken, could he follow it back?
He reached out to the mangy pixie with the fiery eyes, and felt it flicker with motor signals that coordinated the Cicatrix"s movements: coils rising, claws flexing, an alien tongue licking metal teeth. He followed that bundle of awareness, sensing the vivisistors nearest. One handled input for the same nervous systems, relaying sensory information to the queen"s mind: light to eyes to brain, touch to skin to brain, sound to ears to . . . sound.
And suddenly, Cooper could hear them all. Every vivisistor in the queen"s body, dozens of them, a raucous chorus of air and darkness; the louder ones were newer installations, while older devices, the ones with less life inside them, sang more feebly. It was pandemonium. How did she function, with this many dying voices calling out inside her own body?
Cooper pushed the clamor of the queen"s vivisistors to one side and listened for the others, nonlocal but somehow networked. There were others out there, so distant he could barely hear them. . . . A smattering spread across the worlds-those he didn"t bother to trace-but one signal stood out from the background noise, and while its call was muted by distance, Cooper could sense its enormous size. There was no mistaking the giant vivisistor . . . that sang so sweetly . . . and felt like peace.
And so Cooper leapt. It felt like leaping, anyway; he threw himself toward the song of peace and prayed to whatever real or false G.o.ds might be watching, popcorn.gifs at the ready, to watch him fail.
8.
I spent my life pursuing an understanding of death, only to languish for years in the furrow of illness. When at last the little b.u.t.terfly pinned inside my chest flew free, I felt grat.i.tude beyond measure-now the mystery, now the answers!
Who could be disappointed with the worlds we are given? I have found my countrymen (for we are all countrymen on these sh.o.r.es, who hail from Gaia), and they are prodigious even in this vastly larger theater, but oddly cheerless in matters concerning our original misbeliefs. It is as if the truth diminishes them, and they grieve over the smaller heavens and h.e.l.ls for which they had hoped or feared. They grieve for the families with which they have not been reunited, and I think it all a lingering selfishness.
All those I have loved who went before me, they live! They breathe air and live lives beneath other suns. What small mind would find fault with that? As for me, nothing stirs my spirit so much as the a.s.surance that whatever else may happen, my family lives. And lives. And lives. I pray they work and dance in equal measure.
I thought that death meant freedom for the departing. How I right was I, and how wrong.
-Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Life and Living "All this death!" exclaimed Purity when she and Kaien reached the little freestanding aviary that sat halfway between the safety of her own quarters and the Pet.i.te Malaison. Guardsmen lay scattered like leaves, their bodies mutilated, their precious armor cut to pieces. Servants too, liveryman and attaches piled atop seamstresses and elderly house keepers, all killed in the same fashion-sliced with a long blade, judging by the length of the wounds and the severed limbs. Purity pulled Kaien into the celadontiled atrium to survey the carnage. Maybe two dozen bodies, give or take an arm. The birds feasted on the corpses but rose in a varicolored cloud of winged music as Purity and Kaien descended into their midst; the high alarum rang on.
Kaien grimaced as Purity tutted and picked her way through the corpses, lifting her skirts and playing a game of keeping her satin slippers away from the pooling blood. She"s already covered in rock dust, why bother? Kaien had never understood women well, but it was clear that Purity plunged his ignorance to new depths-in the short while he"d known her, she"d proven herself at once proper and apocryphal, dainty and brutish, naive and yet full of devilment.
Kaien watched Purity- so gemlike in aquamarine and yellow- gold hair-traipse amidst the scattered bodies with a dumbfounded look on his face. Once, as a child, he"d witnessed a five-ton chunk of limestone crush a man, a mason, and had been fascinated at the shapes the blood made as it squirted out of the body. Afterward, Kaien had cried with shame at the fact that he"d been calm enough to make such observations; his father had told him those tears were mortar, and the sight of the dead man the first brick in a strong wall.
But he"d never seen . . . never even considered this kind of violence. Kaien wasn"t sure his wall was strong enough, and yet Purity seemed wholly unaffected-in fact, she only put her hand to her forehead in distress when blood ran between the tiles and stained her shoe. Was this how they lived? Were murder and Murder and sights like these just another part of their world, along with b.a.l.l.s and business and tournaments, arranged marriages and arranged accidents?
"How many of these souls are body-bound?" Kaien asked, curious about the level of collateral damage the n.o.bility were permitted-or noticed.
Purity heard the question with half an ear and shrugged. "At least half, I would imagine. The praetors are supposed to be bound-although it"s been so long since anyone killed one that I can"t say for sure. Let"s hope for their sakes they didn"t get lackadaisical with their enchanting. The servants, I fear, will not be bound-the upper echelons of those in n.o.ble employ, your heads of staff, your chief house keepers, stewards, and the like-they will have been bound as a practical matter. But these all wear the prince"s colors. Unlike the guards, it"s likely that most of them will have moved on." She bent to lift the bloodless wrist of a young scullery maid off the green tiles, then let it flop back.
"This one is gone," she said of the poor woman. Purity made a funny gesture with her hands that Kaien didn"t recognize.
"How can you tell?" He scratched at his close- shaved black hair.
"Can"t you feel it?" Purity realized too late that not every child of the City Unspoken benefited from the education she"d enjoyed. Bells, for that matter neither did half her peers. Again, Purity silently thanked her father. "The body feels different when the soul hasn"t fled, it vibrates almost. You get the feel for it if you touch enough bodies or if you kill yourself all the time." She looked away, embarra.s.sed.
"I"ll skip that lesson, I think." Kaien paled.
Purity flashed her winningest smile. "Of course, Kaien, so would I have," she lied, "if I"d had a choice." Men don"t like to feel inferior, she had to remind herself, and not all men had the Baron"s unimpeachable selfregard. Then again, not all men had Kaien"s square jaw and kind eyes. Oh Purity, stop it. She pinched the skin of her forearm, hard. This is scarcely the time to nurture a crush.
"So is this madness why the alarm was sounded, or did the alarm bring these guards and servants rushing to their deaths?" Kaien asked, trying to address the situation the way his father would, with unflappable calm and constructive reasoning, the cla.s.sic Masonic temperament. Kaien felt less cla.s.sic, but he tried.
"That"s an excellent question," Purity said, hopping over a body and putting her hand on Kaien"s chest for balance. Oh my, that"s firm.
Kaien steadied Purity with a dark hand upon her waist and thought much the same thing.
"Won"t this cause an uproar?"
Purity shrugged, unable to skirt the ambivalence toward life that pervaded every level of her society. "Unlikely. There will be a mighty flap of gossip, certainly. But an uproar? Wrong crowd."
Kaien cursed. "Bells, Purity, what does it take to get a reaction from you bloodless people?"
She had the decency to blush but couldn"t stop herself from answering honestly. "Well, so long as no one"s committed an atrocity in the apiary as well, we should manage. Disturb the birdsong and the florists, however, and the courtly ladies shall rebel spectacularly."
Kaien looked at her crosswise. "I want you to tell me you"re kidding, Purity, but I have the sinking feeling you won"t."
"Because I"m not." She pulled an apologetic face. "Admittedly, I have a terrible memory for names and t.i.tles. Absolutely wretched. It"s a running joke among the luncheon set, but rather less worthy of taunts is my knowledge of courtly history. Most of my friends would rather kill each other over the cut of their sleeves than pick up a book."
Maybe that explains the business with the shoes and the blood. Bells, why was he trying so hard to find fault with this girl? Maybe she simply didn"t want blood on her feet! They are lovely feet, after all. And was it her fault if Purity was inured to atrocity?
"But if they bothered to turn a page once in a while," Purity continued, "they"d remember the Ladies" Most Insistent Uprising or the Lysistratic Filibuster, both of which ended with bloodshed among the opposition and victory for the women. Now help me up."
Kaien offered no argument. She set one foot upon the lip of an urn, heedless of the impatiens that suffered beneath her slipper, and held out her arm for Kaien to steady.
"What are you doing?" he asked as he supported her arm and-for the second time, now-her waist. Purity made no protest as his hand squeezed her middle, and Kaien again questioned his judgment. That"s twice too many opportunities to manhandle a highborn lady.
"I"m trying something my brother"s tutor mentioned." She pulled herself up and away from Kaien"s grip. Half-hanging from a branch, Purity took a survey of the room and remembered what it was that Pomeroy"s martial instructor had said about the advantages of high ground.
"Your tutor mentioned climbing garden trees in satin slippers?"
Purity scrunched up her face and pointed toward the entrance that she and Kaien had used. "See? The culprit or culprits went that way, and they came in from . . . over there." She pointed toward the other exit. "The guards were following from behind and engaged the suspect here, but he cut them down before they could a.s.sume a defensive stance. Or an offensive stance, for that matter-this was quick, Kaien. See the way the bodies are scattered in a circle? Praetors fight in tight formation, but these guards are all akimbo, cut down in a line as they ran."
Kaien nodded with respect. "That"s an impressive reading."
"I"m not finished. The servants are all either on top of the guards or got tangled up in their mess." Purity pointed to some smears of blood by an old man in royal livery, who looked like he had slipped on the bloodslick tiles before having his throat cut. "So I"m guessing that the guards were disposed of before the servants. The killer must have fought off the guards before being interrupted by . . . bells, a dozen servants?"
"Why would a dozen servants chase after a maniac?"
"They wouldn"t." Purity didn"t have a better answer than that, except that from what she could see through the gore, most of the dead servants were seamstresses, milliners, and tailors. Curious, that a cadre of servants whose duties were limited to dressmaking and suit- sizing would gang- rush a killer who"d just felled half a regiment of praetorian guardsmen. Why in the worlds would they do that? She twitched her skirts and hopped down.
One erstwhile seamstress clutched a spindle of bright yellow thread. Purity blinked rapidly and picked up the spool, pocketing it with her body turned so Kaien didn"t see. Surely not.
Then something moved atop a pile of corpses, interrupting her train of thought. Kaien knelt and wiped blood from the mouth of a young apprentice tailor. Despite the razor cut that nearly b.u.t.terflied his breastbone, the young man clung to life. Resting her hand on Kaien"s shoulder, Purity glanced down at the wounded boy and saw he would not cling much longer.
"I"m very thirsty, sir," The tailor"s apprentice said, his voice quiet and respectful and so, so small.
"I"ve got you," Kaien fretted over the dying child. "You"re going to be just fine. Just fine, I promise."
"Kaien." Purity squeezed his shoulder; she didn"t want to upset him further, but they hadn"t the time to comfort the lost. "No, Kaien, he isn"t going to be fine. I"m sorry."
"f.u.c.k off!" Kaien shouted, shrugging off her hand and glaring at her through tears. "f.u.c.k this! You look like men and women but you have hearts of ice. You have empty veins. You deserve prison, all of you-you belong in a cage much worse than this."
"Kaien . . ." But what could she say? She agreed.
"So fast . . ." coughed the boy as his lungs filled up with blood. He fixed Purity with a stare. "Darn her."
Kaien shook his head as the boy left behind his body, milk spilled from a pitcher. "He shouldn"t be like this, Purity. Boys too young to even curse shouldn"t be cut in two. Your kind is a cancer."
Cooper shot into the City Unspoken like a bullet, smearing himself across its inconstant sky. He hit his body, full stop, sixty-to-zero, and opened his eyes. Marvin"s eyes were inches from his own, and Cooper knew with a sickening change of perspective that only seconds had pa.s.sed, though it seemed like he"d been out of his body for hours.
He said nothing, brushing himself off and holding his head, which pounded. He could no longer sense the vivisistors now that he was back in his body. He looked toward the Dome with a sense of unease.
"Cooper? Answer me!"
"Sorry. What?" Cooper forced himself to look at Marvin, made his face look casual.
"Are you a hypoglycemic or something?" Marvin asked. "Do you need a cookie?"
Cooper couldn"t tell if Marvin was being sincere or mocking him. He said so.
Marvin rolled his eyes and smiled. "Follow me, and be more careful."
Cooper did follow the Death Boy, head ringing, up flights and flights of stairs cut open to the sky, thinking all the while of machine faeries and transistors powered by living things. Up and up they climbed, the city dropping away through the crumbled walls, till Cooper"s breath ached in his chest. He muttered something about the physical endurance of s.e.xy zombies.
"You think we"re undead?" Marvin cawed, as if that were the stupidest thing he"d ever heard. "You must have hit your head harder than it looked-we"re the only beings in this city who truly live!"
"I just meant . . ." Cooper blushed and looked down at his feet. The Cicatrix lingered in his mind like the aftereffect of a bad dream, but he pushed her away. "Sesstri said you worshiped liches. If I remember my pen-and-paper lore correctly, that means you worship undead, um, wizards . . . I guess." Cooper heard what he was saying and cringed. "I mean, that"s from books and games and stuff. What do I know about life? Unlife. Whatever."
Marvin stroked Cooper"s scalp, and Cooper"s eyes rolled back in their sockets like an ear-scratched dog. "The skylords are that, yes, and yeah . . . it"s hard to believe at first. But they are also so much more, Cooper-they are lords of flight and freedom, and they are willing to share with us. The rest of us, the Undertow, we"re very much alive, Cooper. In a little while, I will show you exactly how alive I am."
He paused, then flashed a shrewd look in Cooper"s direction.
"A piece of advice for a newcomer: words that sound like wisdom usually aren"t. Especially in the City Unspoken. The spirits that infect this city will try to confuse you by blurring the lines between life and death. It"s only by deluding themselves that they can stave off oblivion. Don"t let them make you a coconspirator in their fantasy. This is a place of death. Death"s capital. This is the bottom of the pit, Cooper, and the only way out is up." He pointed through the open wall to the black clouds spiraling overhead. "Freedom."
Marvin sat Cooper down for a rest break on the fifty-third floor of the rusting tower, according to a stenciled numeral, and they dangled their legs over the long fall. Marvin pa.s.sed Cooper a joint of something sticky and green, and Cooper was happy to get slowly stoned and feel the simple heat of Marvin"s body beside him, watching a brown dwarf sun ease its way into the horizon. The city spread itself out before him, a great bowl of urbanity painted ochre by the failed star. Cooper mused over the nature of the sky, and decided that the city borrowed skies from other worlds because it had none of its own. He felt it unlikely that he"d get a more satisfactory answer.
He did know there were more ways out of the city than through the lich-lords, but he didn"t want to tell Marvin about that. He didn"t want to tell Marvin anything about the accidental spirit walk he"d taken, or the denuded faerie garden whose machine queen he"d . . . visited. So far as the Death Boy knew, Cooper had hit his head on a girder and fainted, and that was that; Cooper saw the glint of suspicion in Marvin"s eyes, though, as if he knew that there was more going on in Cooper"s head, but wasn"t confident enough to say so.
Marvin made a groan that was halfway between awkward and s.e.xy. "I knew you for a New Yorker a.s.shole the minute I saw you in that Danzig shirt."
Cooper nodded, just stoned enough not to be surprised, much. "You too?"
Marvin snaked his arm through Cooper"s and tilted his head onto Cooper"s shoulder. "Denver. I was a big Misfits fan, Black Flag, Samhain."
"OK, cool." Cooper smiled, though Marvin couldn"t see him.
"I was waiting for their first alb.u.m, in "88, but I . . . didn"t make it."
"Oh. Sorry." What was the protocol for talking about someone"s deaths? Sympathy? Congratulations? "That must have been a shock. It shocked me, waking here."
"There are a lot of us in the Undertow, you know. Young men from Earth, from the "80s, the "90s. . . ."
"Uh huh." Cooper looked at Marvin sideways, not understanding.
"It started . . . maybe thirty years ago? We found our way to the city, each of us-it called to me, sort of. After what happened to us, nowhere else seemed to fit. Our other lives didn"t . . . they didn"t work, not after . . . how we . . ." Marvin trailed off.
"What are you trying to say?" This side of Marvin was new. His eyes looked haunted.
"Young men die all the time, I don"t know why we"d be special. Maybe we"re not." Marvin tried to smile, but the corners of his mouth pulled down; he was holding back tears. "It was just s.e.x, but to us it was the first taste of freedom and life and . . . and it killed us." Marvin lifted his hands in a helpless gesture.
Cooper didn"t understand. And then, with a rush of insight, he understood far, far too well. He"d been living under this shadow his entire life. "HIV?" he asked, weirdly insulted that such an Earthly problem could crop up here, amidst magic and evil cyborg faerie queens.
"We had just started to be allowed to live, and it was the living that killed us." Marvin looked lost. "Imagine that the sun shone black. It . . . did something, to me at least . . . we invented a new kind of scar, and it brought us to the skylords, in search of our stolen freedom." Marvin seemed to deflate. "And we"re worlds away, still in closets, still f.u.c.king in a circle around death, still struggling to fly away. Young and broken forever: be careful what you wish for, Cooper."
Marvin shrugged and tossed the last of the joint into the air and watched it spin. "It will be time to dance soon, we should head up to the roof."
"Dance?" Cooper asked, suddenly queasy. "I don"t really . . . dance."
Marvin pulled him up the last few storeys. "Don"t be scared. Hestor is happy I brought you-he"s hoping that stealing the marchioness" prized childborn will set him above Killilly. The Charnel Girls are already jealous." Hestor was the Death Boy chieftain, Cooper knew: Marvin had mentioned him before with a frightened kind of awe.
Cooper stepped out onto a rooftop party that could have been in Manhattan, except for the fires that blazed from neighboring towers and the cold storm overhead. Trashcans burnt like torches, and wine and smoke were everywhere. Marvin pointed to a terror of a man who could only be Hestor- surrounded by a circle of admirers, he sported a tawny crest of hair shaved close at the sides, a vest spiked with pieces of bone, and plastic louvered sungla.s.ses. He glared out from between the Beach-Boy-yellow slits with a menacing alchemy of att.i.tude, and even from across the rooftop Cooper could feel Hestor"s eyes latch onto him, the prize.
"Our power is shamanic, like yours." Marvin looked at him, waiting. "We both cross the lines between life and death-we just don"t quite come all the way back. Hestor values your shamanic potential."
"Ah." Cooper could not quite pretend to be pleased. "Another fan."
Someone began pounding a drum, then another, and another, and the mood of the Undertow shifted. The small groups engaging in muted conversation broke apart, the Death Boys and Charnel Girls separating into two groups. Some began hooting-all looked excited, and their antic.i.p.ation trebled the air.
"Whoelse is your fan?" Marvin asked with a bit of an edge. "The pink- haired lady?"
"Ha!" Cooper shook his head. "She knows better-Sesstri"s the one who decided I was just a t.u.r.d. I"m starting to think I"d be better off if she"d been right."
"Cooper, don"t say that." No edge now, just an arm slinking through his, elbows locking.