"Our sister?" Lallowe stopped cold, the hangers of slacks in her hands forgotten.
"Don"t you remember? When we were small there was a holiday, and our sister came to play. She thought she was dreaming, of course, but still she visited us in the way that human children so often do: accidentally, and in dreams or at twilight, dawn, some liminal hour. And Mother gave us dresses she"d had the spiderkin weave, and we played rabbit-rabbit- worg. You were the worg the whole time, chasing us all through the brush and howling like a mad thing. Then Mother gave us iced cakes and sweet wine and danced for us, I remember. She called us Almsy and Lolly and Sissy."
Sissy. Lallowe narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms.
"I remember no such thing." She was not pleased to hear talk of another sister-this morning she had been an only child, now she was bookended by b.i.t.c.hes from the same litter. Shoved aside by her mother- again-and kept out of the loop entirely, it would seem. "I do not remember any Sissy."
"Well, I do." Almondine fingered some spare clockworks that Lallowe had left on a dresser. "She was a sharp little thing, angry like you but without your cruelty. Hair like sunrise, thanks to fey blood, but her hands were human, so she couldn"t stay-her blood ran to baseline human. You shouldn"t concern yourself with her, Lolly, she"s not a contender. Just a memory. We both need to keep our eyes on Mother; I don"t know what she intends but there is a chance it will . . . conflict . . . with . . ."
"With life as we know it?"
Almondine flashed a blade-thin smile that could have been Lallowe"s. "As you know it, maybe. I haven"t known life for some time."
"Yet here you are, returned to take my place." Lallowe took off her bolero, then put it back on, uncertain how she should react.
"Your place? Lolly, no." Almondine leaned against a dresser and inspected her nails-they"d always been strong, sharp wood. Living wood.
"You honestly, truly expect me to believe that Mother didn"t revive you to supplant me?" Lallowe settled on a ruched wrap jacket with deep inner pockets, and with the discarded bolero in one hand she surrept.i.tiously grabbed the red metal jewel box. The Ruby Naught had once belonged to her husband"s grandfather, but now it was hers, all hers. And it could do far more than sever fingers.
Almondine frowned. "I don"t know what Mother intends, honestly. She speaks in riddles these days, even when she means to be straightforward. She has compromised the integrity of her essential self, and I could no sooner follow her logic than I could follow her orders."
"You expect me to believe that you"re here to disobey?" Lallowe scoffed. "Perfect little Almondine?"
"I am my mother"s daughter. I will never betray her, Lallowe, do not think that." The elder sister put her palms together and cracked her knuckles. She spoke deliberately so that Lallowe could not willfully misunderstand. "I have always accepted as fact my succession. I will rule, I thought. Let you rant-there was no amount of success you could achieve that would displace me: by primacy and by blood, I am Mother"s heir. Only . . . I do not want to rule a broken empire. Do you?"
Lallowe lowered her eyes. "The Court of Scars could be restored, if Mother were to be removed."
Almondine nodded. "Just so."
"And it might be even worse, Almondine, than just ruling broken universes. You say you"ve seen what Mother did to our people-machine faeries coughing up engine oil." Lallowe arched her back and felt her body, whole and young and flawless. "Have you ever considered what atrocities she would force upon her heir?"
"What else were you about with your vivisistor, if not atrocity?" Almondine asked. "Mother could have done as much to me as I slept, or she could have let you finish your treachery and make me into an abomination. But she did not, and for that she will forever have my grat.i.tude. I cried in relief when I awoke down below, in your ossuary, Lolly. Not to be awake-what is life, and what is waking?-but to be whole."
The Cicatrix unleashed the madness when she felt the chains wake, juddering to life after millennia of slumber. That was an interesting development-one her a.s.says had a.s.signed a likelihood of less than 5 percent-but would not significantly disrupt her own. She held no truck with the First People; the signs of Chesmarul"s interference weren"t hard to miss, certainly, but the queen hadn"t known to what extent the being"s interests would collide with her own-or if Chesmarul would make a play to help the mortals avoid the plague of deathless madness that would momentarily consume them.
Why Chesmarul would put the chains into play escaped the Cicatrix"s reasoning, but it changed little: operational or deactivate, that machine- that ancient, impossible engine-would yield up its secrets once she stormed the Dome and handed the city to her allies.
The First People were immortal, not omnipotent. Soon enough, they would share even their immortality. Freedom; scars like lacework crisscrossed her tongue, but the Cicatrix could still taste it.
So much effort spent looking for evidence of the svarning, only to discover that it had been growing within her all the while. It was the song she could not stop the vivisistors from singing to one another-the network she could not disable-and she"d fed it with her own life force. It was not at all unlike a child.
Perhaps the fourth would make her proud.
"Unspool, you childe of faerie." She crooned to the svarning, opening up her systems to vent the madness into the s.p.a.ce between worlds. "The ancients named you, but I give you life."
It rushed out of her like bad blood, clotted and knotty, swarming the air. It gobbled up spare thoughts, demanding attention, a magical neurosis that never slept. Soon it would drown the metaverse for its mother- a gift she would humbly accept.
Asher stood at the crown of the caldera and surveyed the city he"d striven for so long to protect. The mountain that contained the Apostery offered the best view of the city: Caparisonside and the Lindenstra.s.se still slept quietly in the predawn light, except where plumes of smoke and dust rose from streets and intersections collapsed by the movement of the ma.s.sive catenary chains as they returned to their ancient positions and began their intended function. Due west, the Guiselaine bustled as always, torches and gas lamps illuminating its maze of streets. Displacement Avenue shot northeast out from the Guiselaine like a needle of light, more alive at night than during the day.
To the northwest the false elements of Bonseki-sai boiled in eternal struggle and balance, or at least they seemed to. North of that, G.o.dsmiths slumbered as well as it ever did, which was fitfully at best. To the far north, towers burnt beneath a swarm of black clouds. Even in the predawn light, Asher could see that the clouds that hovered over the abandoned towers now stretched a finger of black turbulence south, toward the Dome. The liches and their black dogs marched to war.
The Apostery"s caldera offered more than a view: if the chains were moving, then all eyes would be on the Dome- aboveground. That was a spectacle that would captivate and terrify, and even the praetors would be too panicked to think of posting a rear guard. While the Undertow fought their madman"s battle, Asher would sneak inside unseen.
That wasn"t all. He"d stood here twice before, so long ago that the precincts of that city had been erased and rebuilt, and erased and rebuilt again. History was a palimpsest that would not remember your name, nor recall why it mattered. Or so Asher hoped: he could not remember his father"s name, but he remembered coming to the lip of this pit, a hundred thousand years ago or more, as a child. His father had been blinding, and when the world-beast blessed his reign, Asher had not known he could feel such pride. When the time came for Asher to stand in his father"s place, well, by then things had grown darker. The world-beast"s blessing had not felt so generous, then.
Despite the incense smoke that rolled out of the Apostery, Asher could smell the life in his city-the polyps that punctuated his rib cage pulsed in time to the heartbeat of the city, maddening lately but more alive than ever, since he"d sang the Lady to her peace. He"d had to flex organs he hadn"t used in years to keep the spears of light from stabbing through his leathers and refixing his face. Sesstri would beat him senseless when she saw the truth.
He smiled, feeling the ache that always arose when he thought of Sesstri but could not reach out a hand to feel her body, slender and firm, smelling always of parchment and leather.
The Dome pulsed with urgency: the Dome, always the Dome. He avoided looking at it whenever he could, but now he had no choice. A spherical mountaintop larger by orders of magnitude than any other structural or topographical curiosity within the sprawling necropolis, the Dome glowed gold and green from within- a combination of the false sunlight illuminating the wooded glades within, the riotous vegetation itself, cloaking the buildings within from sight, and the thick tempered gla.s.s held in place by whorls and webs of metal.
If the telltale seismic activity originated where Asher supposed it did, the unchanging monument would soon look differently: by the time the sun crested the horizon, the Dome would open like a five-petaled flower. He could feel the chains moving underneath the city, winding tight around ancient drums-from the Guiselaine, from the Lindenstra.s.se, Caparisonside, and G.o.dsmiths, from the wasteland in the north where the Undertow hid amidst the bristling towers that no one living recalled was once called the Argent Theft.
He could delay the moment no longer. Time to jump. Time to irradiate. Swallowing the pain of five years of self-exile, Asher spread his arms and leapt from the crown of the caldera; the smoke- stained scent of a thousand false faiths whipped past his head as he dropped like a stone through the cylindrical shaft. He aimed for a spot far below: the metal plate at the center of the Apostery courtyard. These days it was worn smooth, but once it had borne his father"s crest.
His forebears had uncrowned themselves here, dashing their bodies on the floor far below. He"d last seen his father like this, rushing to greet his fate, painting the seal with white blood-singing the final song of his Death, and clearing the way for his heir. If the chains did not work as they ought, Asher would share a similar fate, pulped beyond recognition, leaving the city leaderless.
He thought pulp might indeed be his immediate future, until the entire courtyard shuddered and rock dust blasted out from beneath the plate as he raced toward it; a fraction of a second before Asher would have crashed into the metal slab, it began to drop. As the plate accelerated downward like a dumbwaiter cut loose from its counterweight, Asher caught up to it and met its surface-touching down with his feet and one gray hand, a feather-soft landing. He smiled without warmth; a real prince would not try to survive. A real prince would abdicate and disappear.
The second half of the ride happened just as quickly as the first: mirroring the vertical shaft that rose above the now-gaping hole in the center of the Apostery courtyard, so did a similar, deeper pit drop away beneath it; the metal crest descended steadily, guided by the catenary chain that must still be attached to its underside, and through this aboriginal bore Asher rode the ancient elevator to the bottom of the city he"d ruled and strangled and ruined, resigned at last to go home.
Cooper was thrilled to hear Lolly"s screams, though judging by the ashen look on Tam"s face, the domo did not share Cooper"s enthusiasm; the foxfaced young man kept tugging at his vest as if a tidy outfit might protect him from the worst of the fallout. It likely won"t, poor guy.
Tam had hurried Cooper into a high, long hallway, a groin-vaulted ceiling looking down upon a carpet runner the color of red velvet cake, its deep pile resting atop a blocky parquet that vanished in both directions, the whitewashed walls covered with a small infinity of tapestry. A nearby credenza overflowed with the same white flowers that had enshrined Lallowe during his amputation in the greenhouse, but these were severed at the stems and their petals no longer breathed.
"Oh come on." Cooper nudged Tam. "Did you forget how to smile?" Tam gave Cooper a strange look. "I remember smiling, Cooper, I just don"t remember why we did it. These days . . ." He trailed off, and for just a moment, Tam looked like his head felt too crowded with anxieties, as if he wanted to bash his brains out against the doorjamb.
Cooper eyed the domo warily. Tam"s namesign spoiled like bad fruit before Cooper"s eyes-the bowl-shaped stringed instrument went from gold to brown, and the note above it disappeared entirely. Then, as if a cloud blocking the sun pa.s.sed and let light flood back down onto the world, Tam"s namesign restored itself, and Tam was shaking his head as if to clear it. "I"m sorry. What just happened?"
Cooper looked cagey. "Eh, Tam, I"m not so sure I should tell you. You"re kind of the enemy, you know."
Tam tossed his head and scrubbed his fingers through his hair, which fell to one side like a roan mane. "A single night beneath the faerie mound . . ." Tam said to the ceiling, noticing the cobwebs among the molding. He"d have to get out a stepladder. "I know what I am." He squared his shoulders and seemed to have made a decision. "Let"s get you out of here, while we can."
Cooper thought to apologize for calling Tam the enemy, but just then the whole mansion shook, its floors and walls vibrating angrily-and he felt something pa.s.s underground with the force of a subway train.
"What, now we have earthquakes?" he asked, but in his head he saw a spiderweb beneath the city, only the web was made of metal chains as thick as house. He saw a dragon made of black plastics with the face of a faerie. He saw the Dome at the center of the spiderweb, waiting.
"t.i.tania"s t.i.ts, how should I know?" Tam grumbled, and hurried Cooper to a heavy door at the end of a service corridor. Tam opened the door onto a short landing beside one of the Guiselaine"s many ca.n.a.ls, and there they found a surprise: little Nixon stood in the doorway with his hands on his hips and an impatient expression.
"We don"t give alms," Tam said brusquely. "There"s a baker off Velocipede Way who sometimes takes in street children, if you"re willing to knead dough for your supper." He made to slam the door.
Cooper caught the door midswing. Nixon nodded gravely and held out his little hand. "Time to run, t.u.r.d. Me and the pink broad are cooling our heels on a riverboat, but I think you better hurry." Another tremor shook the house.
Cooper looked toward Tam imploringly. "The ground is heaving. Your lady"s sister is back from the wooden. I"ve been severed and body-bound. The Dying can"t Die and there"s a . . . there"s a place I need to be." Cooper paused, wincing at what he said next. "I"m such a dork. I"m such a waste . . . I know you from the stories, Young Tam Lin-do you even know you"re in stories? If I don"t go now, there won"t be any more stories, ever." Tam pursed his lips and pointed to a rickety ladder leaning against the manse wall that could be tipped over the ca.n.a.l and used as a footbridge. The quay beyond forked off into an alleyway that disappeared into the Guiselaine, and would be the quickest route to flee.
"Thank you." Cooper stepped out into the morning light and looked back at the domo, with his fox-red hair and his green suit with the silk vest and neatly knotted tie-Tam"s hands were shaking on the doorframe, and he looked behind him into the house. He pulled a wistful face and shook his head. "Just leave while you can, Cooper." Then he closed the door, its lock snapping into place and obviating further discussion. "Let"s go," Cooper said to Nixon, lowering the poorly made ladder so that it bridged the ca.n.a.l. Nixon skipped across and waited for Cooper with a crooked smirk.
The alleys of the Guiselaine weren"t busy, but the few people they pa.s.sed wore expressions that were tight around the eyes and full of agita. A busker stood against a blond stone wall, drenched in morning light and looking at his guitar like it was filled with snakes. A flower girl carried her basket under one arm and smiled at them, but her flowers were dry and brown-she seemed too busy coughing up dark, wriggling things to notice. Two men who looked like brothers stood on opposite sides of a three- foot wok simmering with fragrant, popping oil; they fried flatbread and rolled it around fresh cut coldc.u.mbre and onion, but never took their eyes from the boiling oil. Nixon swiped a pair of rolls as he walked by, but the brothers only stared at the oil, mesmerized.
"Is Sesstri really waiting for us on a boat?" Cooper asked, taking the roll that Nixon proffered and scarfing it down. Nixon nodded, his mouth full of fried bread and vegetables.
Nixon swallowed and wiped his hands on the ap.r.o.n of a grandmother who stood in her doorway, looking frantically in every direction but seemingly afraid to take a step. Her hands dripped liquid s.h.i.t, pouring from her fingertips. Cooper and Nixon turned down a narrow lane crisscrossed with laundry lines.
"I always wanted to live on a riverboat, you know," Nixon said, tucking his thumbs through the belt loops of his short pants.
"Really?" Cooper asked, incredulous.
Nixon scrunched up his face. "Of course not, idiot. There"s only one thing I ever wanted to be." The unboy cackled and leapt over a puddle. "A cla.s.smate once said he"d voted for me no fewer than twenty times, for one student office or another, before I graduated from school. I, friend, am very good at becoming what I want to be." Nixon bit his lip. ". . . And a little less good at staying that way. Here we are."
A barge waited at the quay. A woman the shape of a box stood quiet at the helm, and an old man with long yellow- gray hair and a soup- stained beard waved a hand toward Cooper. Nixon hopped back and forth on each foot, impatient to be away. "This is Captain Bawl," he said to Cooper, dipping his head at the square helmswoman, "she"s taking us to the middle of the action."
"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo, bluebird!" The old man waved almost girlishly, smiling a great big h.e.l.lo in Cooper"s direction. "You"re awake now."
"I am!" Cooper agreed. "Was I otherwise?" He stepped onto the barge, which pushed off immediately.
"Don"t ask, Cooper." Sesstri"s voice came from behind the captain. She sat cross-legged on a crate, reclining against the wooden shed that served as the barge"s cabin. She had a book in her lap and a brown cigarillo dangling from the corner of her mouth. "Don"t. f.u.c.king. Ask."
The old man pulled at his yellow beard. "Weren"t we all, my son? Otherwise and unawake, all of us."
Nixon rolled his eyes and hopped up onto a cargo crate.
The cube of woman at the helm grunted apologetically, steering them out of the Guiselaine"s narrow pa.s.sages. "You"ve been aboard the Barge Brightly before, in a sack with a lump on your head."
"I have?" Cooper looked at her-she looked, well, tough was a word. "When?"
Sesstri leaned forward to drop-kick one of her books off the side of the barge. "I warned you," she said before returning to her reading; her poise looked effortless, even on what smelled like a trash scow.
The old deckhand held his arms wide open and proclaimed, "The mystic deliria, the madness amorous!"
Captain Bawl nodded in the old man"s direction. "Old Walter there has the gist of it: we bore you to La Jocondette not three nights ago."
"Oh, thanks for that. It turned out to be really . . . helpful?"
Sesstri made a face.
"You aren"t angered?" Bawl asked. "Offended? Inspired to vengeance?"
"Walter, it"s nice to meet you." Cooper gripped the old lunatic"s hand and exchanged a refreshingly cordial h.e.l.lo, then answered the captain. "No, Captain Bawl, the worlds are ending. Or something. Kidnapping is water under the bridge at the moment." Bawl dipped her head ambiguously.
The old man flashed Cooper a conspiratorial smile, his eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with yellow fire from the torchlight. "I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers."
"That sounds fun. Who are you quoting?" Cooper asked. It sounded like a quotation, anyway.
Walter puffed out his chest. "The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything."
Cooper patted the old man on the back, still filled with an odd, prophylactic glee-Walter felt more solid than his bony wrists and shoulders indicated. "You should be published, Walt."
Walter giggled, and dug his pole into the water with particular gusto. "Seeking something yet unfound though I have diligently sought it many a long year, singing the true song of the soul fitful at random."
A derisive snort came from Nixon"s side of the barge. "You"re both East Coast f.a.ggots." Nixon sighed matter-of-factly, nodding at the old man. "But at least he"s famous."
Cooper looked at the old man and refocused his vision as he"d learned to do. He saw a namesign shimmer beneath the red chicken-skin of Walter"s neck: a worn folio bearing a union star and, stuffed between the pages, tufts of gra.s.s. The sign struck an unexpected chord, and as Nixon threw stones into the water, Cooper thought he might know the weathered deckhand.
"Walt . . ." Cooper marveled under his breath, a ghost from lit cla.s.s rising up from his muddled memory. "You"re already published, aren"t you?"
Walter bobbed his head with enthusiasm. ". . . And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death."
Cooper looked up, distracted by black figures jackknifing across the faces of the buildings overhead, and Captain Bawl cursed a string of blue pearls that would have made a Shanghai sailor blush. "Them again. Walter, can you outrace the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds?"
To that, Walter laughed-pealing his joy into the day. Cooper just then realized that the morning sun was a trio of violet orbs, and had been since it peeked out over the tops of the buildings. He hadn"t even noticed what flavor the sky chose to be, today. I"m getting used to this, he marveled, uncertain how he felt about that.
"Ha!" Walter pointed his finger at Cooper in some kind of recognition. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain mult.i.tudes."
"OK." Cooper nodded. "Then I won"t worry about it."
"Attaboy." Walter poled them beneath a low bridge supported by double- sided, gape-mouthed stone faces, and suddenly the Dome was all Cooper could see-green and copper and gold and light in the distance, a cobbled desert separating them. The ca.n.a.l ran straight toward it, down the middle of the yawning plaza.
Nixon padded across the deck and joined his countrymen at the prow, impressed by the view. He put his small hand on Cooper"s shoulder but kept his peace.
Cooper gave Nixon a sidelong glance. "Walt, you"re not the first dead American I"ve met, but you"re by far the nicest. Also, I did my thesis on "Song of Myself." It"s a shame you have to go so crazy to keep up around here, but I reckon that bird is already half-cooked as far as yours truly is concerned." Cooper leaned against the prow of the swift but unlovely barge and couldn"t help wondering how many folks back home would pay more than a finger or some back meat to have the conversations he"d had over the last week, and how miserably he"d squandered each opportunity. Still, he couldn"t think of anything to ask the transcendentalist poet beside him.
"Anyway, thanks for not being a d.i.c.k or trying to steal my shirt."
Walt gave him an ogle from one wild eye, the other squinted against the sun. "Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed pa.s.sage with you?"
Nixon elbowed Cooper hard, and Cooper relented. "Okay, fine, but that"s kind of beside the point, isn"t it? I learned lessons I"d rather forget from the people who, um, braced themselves against me."
Walter rolled his eyes. "Sack up, kid."
"Amen, Whitman," Nixon agreed.
Unable to argue with that, Cooper sat down on the deck of the barge and swung his legs over the foul ca.n.a.l water foaming beneath the keel, and as they sped toward the gold- green eye gazing down at the city from the horizon, even the black flies of the Undertow ignored them. He wondered what he was supposed to do now, down there, in the machine below the Dome.
Behind him, Sesstri grunted and cursed the ca.n.a.l.
Walter leaned down, one gnarled hand atop his pole and quoted himself again, whispering into Cooper"s ear a sentence"s worth of advice that Cooper had been flayed, f.u.c.ked, and forced to learn already-but which bore repeating: "Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes."
14.
To my students I promised that all natural laws could be bounded within the burning of wax and taper: "Now I must take you to a very interesting part of our subject-to the relation between the combustion of a candle and that living kind of combustion which goes on within us. In every one of us there is a living process of combustion going on very similar to that of a candle, and I must try to make that plain to you. For it is not merely true in a poetical sense-the relation of the life of man to a taper; and if you will follow, I think I can make this clear."