Sesstri"s falcon gaze found him again. She"d been drinking heavily too, though it didn"t show, and she seemed to have made up her mind about something. With careful little steps she sat down next to him. Quick, like a raptor.
"This city is nameless," she confided, leaning toward Cooper. "You know by now that it is one of a very few places in the whole of everywhere that True Death is possible-maybe even the first such place. Maybe the last. Beings come here from every corner of the metaverse to Die. It was once beautiful, so long ago that no one living remembers, but is now ruined."
"How did I get here?" Cooper felt his belly beneath his shirt. She and Asher shared a guilty look.
"We don"t know." Asher lifted up his arms. "There are powers that can intervene. Things that call themselves G.o.ds, but we"ve no evidence of that."
Asher lounged like a dancer in the window, gray ropes of muscle in repose while fire filled the horizon. Again Cooper saw the towers there, north and west of the Dome"s moonlight; skysc.r.a.pers of steel and gla.s.s stood among more fantastic spires, fluted marble, pitted limestone. Some were ablaze, their tops lit like candles although they never fell. Something about towers that burned but stood both reminded Cooper of home and made him mourn his city.
And again, when he looked at the towers, he heard crying. Screaming and crying.
"What you said about false G.o.ds," he asked softly. "What does that mean, really?"
Sesstri braced her hands on her knees. "It is crucial that you listen to me and understand what I"m telling you: worship G.o.ds at your own peril. There are beings beyond the scope of your understanding, yes. There are the First People, who came before us; they are powers that may be kind, or foul, or capricious, and many would have you believe that they are G.o.ds. But just because a mind is older and wiser and even greater than yours does not make it divine. This is a secret that the vast majority of sentient beings seem incapable of apprehending. There are mighty spirits, ent.i.ties, forces that clothe themselves in the trappings of the infinite, but if there exists an all-pervading omniscience-a truly divine light-I have seen no sign of it." She hesitated, tapping a finger slowly against her plum lips. "And I have looked." AndLookedAndLooked.
Asher slumped against the window frame, kissing the frost off his gla.s.s. "If anyone could find evidence of the divine," he slurred, "it would be Miss Manfrix." He stared blankly out the window, following Cooper"s gaze. "She"s very . . . thorough."
"You"re still bitter I lied to you." Sesstri said a bit more gently than Cooper had come to expect.
Asher made a rude noise. "Not at all, my lovely. I"m bitter because you won"t go to bed with me."
"How common a reaction," she said absently, though Cooper could have tightrope-walked across the tension. "I thought your breeding was better than that."
"Breeding!" Asher brayed, still facing the windowpane. "Breeding? Bells, woman, breeding is just a fancy way of saying a man is well-trained enough to wipe down and pull up his pants before his wife walks in and sees the tailor"s daughter down on her knees, with her lips open and her hair all mussed and s.e.xed-like, in that tight little stomacher and that scandalous cleavage erupting all over the place, looking so plump and willing and, well, kind of juicy. . . ." He sighed, collecting himself. "That"s breeding."
"You"re drunk," she answered. "Go to bed." YourBed MyBed.
He ignored her and turned to Cooper with a conspiratorial wink. "There are two things every man who sees Sesstri Manfrix knows straight away. The first is that she is the most beautiful woman he will ever see. The second is that he has no chance whatsoever to make babies with her." He giggled drunkenly into his gla.s.s, then shrugged to himself and burped.
Sesstri seemed unfazed. In fact, she nodded. A miniscule nod, like she knew he was right but was uninterested in her own beauty, even bored by it.
"So why were you looking for this shaman guy?" Cooper asked the room, eager to change the subject.
Asher drew himself upright, suddenly very sober. "Before all this began," he said, his varicolored eyes locked with Cooper"s, "I had trained myself never to remember my dreams. Now I am plagued by them, and they are full of the restless Dying." Cooper nodded. "The release they seek here . . . it has become more difficult for them to attain. The pa.s.sage of pilgrims through the city has been stymied, and our streets fill with those who have lived past their due. This . . . this is more than a problem of overpopulation. Without True Death, the metaverse itself grinds to a halt, like gears without oil. There is a . . . sickness, I suppose, and as it spreads it will affect everyone. So I tried to find someone, anyone, to help us, and I failed, and here we are."
Cooper nodded. "The svarning. That guy who came after us in the Guiselaine, that"s what he said. And the old minnow at the applestory, she said it too."
"Winnowed. Apostery." Sesstri spoke slowly but deliberately, "Yes. Well . . . Well. I see everyone knows about the svarning, and not a clue what to do about it or even when it will erupt, as plagues do." She looked away. "In any case, the prince has been rather absent these last few years. Someone has to look after the city."
The confusion must have been clear upon Cooper"s face, because Sesstri clarified immediately. "In theory, the city is governed by the prince, though individual precincts are administered by the families of the Circle Unsung, the ruling council of n.o.bility. But some time ago the prince shut them all away inside the Dome, his capitol. Again, no one knows why. He has chosen to abandon his responsibilities, perhaps . . ." Her voice trailed off. She sat staring into her gla.s.s.
Asher was quiet for a moment, then shook his head as if clearing his thoughts. He smiled.
"This has been quite an eve ning," he said jovially. "We"ll sleep now, and seek answers in the morning. We may not be able to heal the universe, but maybe we can find some help for our new friend, Cooper the erratum."
Cooper"s head was spinning by this point, looped on insanity and bitter liquor. He knocked his tumbler down on the table-hard-and it echoed like the pounding of a gavel.
A yelp from outside broke the silence.
Gla.s.s shattered and Sesstri screamed. The shadows of men appeared at the windows, then climbed into the room, and Asher leapt to action; he became a whirl of smoke that streamed to a bay window and brought down two men in brown leather smocks, their heads smashing together with a satisfying crunch.
Cooper sat up in alarm but found himself paralyzed. There wasn"t time to be frightened, but for all his determination to wrap his head around the events of the day, his death and its subsequent repeal, the tale of the city and the worlds and lives upon lives, Cooper had no instinct for dealing with violence.
Sesstri and Asher had no such limitations. Asher continued to fell men in a blur of gray skin and twirling rags, while Sesstri had knives in each hand and stood like a pink and yellow- silk valkyrie with her back against the stairs, etching a sphere of safety into the air around herself with the flurry of her blades. One of her a.s.sailants fell back, clutching his guts as they slipped out of a sudden gash. Were those kitchen knives or daggers? Was she prepared to eviscerate men at a moment"s notice?
Cooper found the good sense to jump behind the sofa in which he"d been sitting and tried to hide, but in doing so realized that he"d exhausted his combat training. Asher"s right, he thought, I really am helpless. But I can flag down a mean cab.
More men streamed in, and Asher became a rush of doves beating wings against a storm, his hands and elbows and feet his only weapons, pale blades of bone and skin that danced violent and dangerous at the head of the sudden incursion. Blood flew from the faces of the men who swarmed him. They were pulling themselves through other windows now, and someone kicked down the door with a smash.
"Cooper!" Sesstri called. "To me! Upstairs, now!"
More men stormed in from the kitchen, distracting Asher and Sesstri both. Cooper moved toward the stairs, but not quickly enough. A hand clamped down on his mouth from behind and Cooper fell against the wall, hitting his head hard. He felt more hands lift his body and saw the starry sky for a moment as they pa.s.sed him through a broken window, then the pain in his head swamped his thoughts and sleep came to Cooper at last.
In times now past, which the historians of the n.o.bility called ancient times but were, in fact, closer to recent events than anything resembling ancient, the people of the Guiselaine paid a bone t.i.the to the lords who kept them safe, employed, and fed. The governances of other districts had employed similar policies, but the Guiselaine had always been a populous and prosperous territory, and its maze-tight streets and deep, narrow ca.n.a.ls relatively dangerous to maintain; the resulting coin-to-calcium ratio was fairly steep, or shallow, depending upon one"s point of view.
If that view happened to be from the nave of the ossuary beneath the manse Terenz-de-Guises, one might think all the currency and corpses were worth the t.i.thing, especially if one happened to be Lallowe Thyu. The marchioness breezed down the stairs onto a tweed parquet resembling the floor above, only made of finger bones: carpals and phalanges met her bare feet at perfect angles, and Lallowe gripped the floor with her toes, letting herself pretend for a moment that she walked across the floor of woven, living wood that rimmed the Court of Scars.
Through the nave, Lallowe padded her way past pillars of femur and humerus, designed to lean into the midline like rows of trees, branching somewhere past two-thirds of their height to honor the Golden Mean and support narrow hyperboloid archways that formed at the junction of almost conical ceiling vaults built steeply with pubis and skull. At the apex of each dome dangled a ring of baby rib cages, the bone fine as lace, within which enchanted lights hung like glowing fruit, painting the ceiling and floors in the colors of nature: sunny, leafy, wildfire-ruddy. Between the blooming lights and the dappled floor, a forest of yellow bone welcomed its most recent mistress.
Even this world could be a beautiful place, she thought, if one kept the proper perspective. And disposed of the ugliness- as she was more than happy to do.
Lallowe came to a stop at an apse lit in green, resting her hands on the flat waist of her wide-bottomed trousers; she rubbed her bare arms and wished she"d brought a smock to protect her blouse- blood spattered the bones, looking black in the green light, and Tam raised a blood-drenched face from the remains of a torso, nodding his head at the marchioness.
"Ma"am," he said, hiding his exhaustion as best he could. There was marrow in his hair, dripping onto his cheek like spittle or s.e.m.e.n.
The remains of a man were scattered about the apse, but his trunk stood upright, impaled upon a steel spike. In a far corner, hidden from the green light, a statue of a young girl leaned against the wall of bones. The statue bore more than a pa.s.sing resemblance to Lallowe, and appeared to be carved from cherrywood.
"Ah? I have butchered the butcher, ma"am," Tam announced, returning Lallowe"s attention to the corpse. "And immersed the device in his organ, as you requested."
She nodded. "Pull it out." Let us see what heartsblood reveals.
Tam made a face and obeyed. He held the golden oval in his goredrenched hand.
Lallowe peered over him but made no move to touch the thing herself. True enough, fresh heartsblood revealed an unseen pattern of fine lines that crisscrossed the surface of the thing: circuitry. And one thing else besides. "There"s a hint of a groove along the side-I believe it"s a catch. Do you see?"
"I . . . I think so, ma"am." Tam had mortal eyes, and had to squint.
"Open it," she hissed, her mood slipping from appreciative to impatient-always mercurial, a restless serpent.
Gold light shined off the thing in his palm. "It looks like a jeweled paperweight," he said, brushing fox-red hair from his perfect, defiled face. "Milady is certain that the bibelot in question . . . opens?"
Thyu nodded, showing as always just a whisper more patience for foxfaced Tam than for any other servant-he was a great beauty and could please her with his tongue, when she chose to be pleased. "I"m certain of it now . . . something is inside. Can"t you hear it?"
Inside? Tam nearly dropped the precious machine.
"Oh, give it here." The marchioness plucked the device from her valet"s palm and traced its outline with a filed turquoise nail.
"I heard something when I touched it, yes ma"am, though I"m not certain it was . . ." Tam looked relieved to be rid of the device. He sighed. "Beware unfamiliar magics," Tam cautioned before he could stop himself. It was faerie logic, and good advice besides. Unless your advisee was the Marchioness Terenz-de-Guises, in which case the best advice was to keep your pretty mouth shut if you wanted to remain inside your skin. Tam half-expected to see her forked tongue lash out and punish him for using his own, and steeled himself.
But his mistress didn"t reprimand his impertinence, being mesmerized by the marvel in her hand. Lallowe peered more closely at its faces, at the ultrafine etching of parallel lines that branched and reconnected, capillary channels filled with blood.
"This is not magic," she breathed, admiring the alien filigree. "At least, not chiefly. There are principles at work here that neither you nor I have seen before till recently-this device produces an electrical current. It also emanates a most unusual vibration that has perplexed me."
"Magic vibration?" Tam asked a little foolishly. Old habits.
"Oh no. Can"t you hear it, Tam?" whispered the marchioness, tracing a deeper groove along the back of the device. "The screaming?"
Like the catch of a jewelry box, the top half of the bauble popped open. It shocked her finger at the same instant, discharging energy that numbed her hand.
Beneath, on a circle of plainer metal, lay a bright-winged dragonfly, pinned through the abdomen and fluttering weakly. Death throes, for popping open the cabochon had separated the mechanism impaling the dragonfly to the disc, disemboweling it in the process.
The device, bisected, no longer hummed in Lallowe"s hand. It was powerless.
Tam took the top piece when Lallowe thrust it at him, and looking at the cup of golden eggsh.e.l.l in his palm, he saw a brown smear of innards clinging to a sharp little needle that protruded from inside the cover of the device.
The marchioness stared at the sight for some moments, teasing the dead wings of the dragonfly with her stone nail.
"Well," she said at last, her voice dry and weary. "This is new."
4.
The Kol Kol Tuin people of the Dimmest Heavens have evolved to a breathtaking yet absurd level of abstraction. The souls who join the Kol Kol Tuin have attained a state of extreme enlightenment, though that might seem a contradictory condition. They emerge from the ether in bodies of flesh and gla.s.s, and cultivate within the clear flows of their gla.s.s anatomy the oddest dwarfed plants.
I met my grandmother there, of all places, and her skull was an open sphere of gla.s.s where a succulent curled its roots. She would not speak to me, not because she failed to recognize me or felt no joy at reuniting with her progeny upon such improbably distant heights, but because I moved too fast. I lived too fast for a gla.s.sy life, and she could no more catch me in a hug than I could pluck a photon from the glare of the noonday sun.
The neighboring Kol Auin people were nearly identical, but chose to live portions of their lives in what you or I would experience as real- time. Their civilization consumed itself when a rare celestial event caused a panic among the populace. The Kol Auin aroused into real- time and tore themselves apart before the event could be properly identified as harmless. On agate balconies the nearby Kol Kol Tuin did not speed a glacial thought for either the potential celestial threat or the extinction of their cousins. They felt both concern and sorrow but maintained their centuries-long meditations.
With her silence, my grandmother taught me that the chief measures of a culture are how it copes with fear, and how it copes with idleness.
-Durango Wreckmist, The Life of Jungles Purity Kloo, Elisabetta Bratislaus, and NiNi and NoNo Leibowitz sat in a solar parlor, embroidering hoods of pale blue silk. The Leibowitz twins were arguing over the finer points of millinery, with NiNi insisting that the confections of human hair crafted by one of their co-captives within the Dome didn"t count, and NoNo demanding the group acknowledge that the selfsame creations were hats, not wigs, and should be respected as such.
Purity might have mentioned that hats and wigs would both be found within a milliner"s shop, but she hadn"t the stomach for argument today.
A curved hull of translucent green Dome gla.s.s ran the length of the parlor and filtered the sunlight through its pastel sieve, but Miss Bratislaus-Bitzy, to distinguish her from the other Elisabetta of her line- had ordered warm-toned lamps set in strategic locations about the salon. Unlike Purity, Bitzy didn"t especially mind life within the Dome, except perhaps for the coolness of the light through the gla.s.s, which did little to flatter her complexion.
Purity Kloo, on the other hand, positively glowed in the curved hallways of their palace-prison, aquamarine and pear-colored light falling across her wispy blond hair and pet.i.te features as if she was born to this royal captivity. Which of course she was-they all were.
And if that captivity had grown more literal in recent years, it didn"t change the fundamentals of life in their society, only tightened the rules. It tightened the rules like a noose.
Outside the gla.s.s, the city burned and consumed itself. Purity could watch, but never help.
Bitzy Bratislaus rarely looked through the gla.s.s. She cleared her throat into a sateen kerchief and stared at the palm- sized miniature paintings that decorated the interior wall of her favorite salon. They"d been arrayed into cl.u.s.ters that faced the Dome wall like little phalanxes of gloved ladies, begonias, and overstuffed lapdogs, all glaring at the curved gla.s.s that imprisoned their mistress. Every n.o.ble family held token residences within the ma.s.sive royal complex, a city unto itself, but until Prince Fflaen had proclaimed the Writ of Community, few had ever bothered to use them.
Now the Dome apartments were country home, city house, and pieda-terre in one, and the families" proximity to one another had heightened tensions that in bygone days would have been ignored or left to the lesser cousins to squabble over in ca.n.a.lside duels. Duels rendered utterly pointless by the body-bindings placed on every member of the peerage at birth or elevation. NoNo once told Bitzy that when the Writ had first been proclaimed, Purity Kloo had attempted escape by killing herself every hour for a solid week in an attempt to weaken the enchantment that bound her spirit to her body. All she"d gotten for her efforts was a traumatized chambermaid and a scarcity of unspoiled nightgowns.
If only Purity"s suicide binge had been the least disturbing event since the Writ and the subsequent confinement of the peerage. If only their mothers and fathers who sat on the Circle Unsung had not discovered the Weapon; it was a fact that Death could come only to the Dying-the very old or very weary who matched the criteria of some existential equation. Or, it had been a fact, before the Circle found the Weapon: some tool or knowledge that let them inflict True Death upon anyone they chose. And they had chosen with abandon-twice now, the Circle had battled, and twice its ranks had been devastated. Wherever Fflaen had hid himself, the prince must be apoplectic that the aristocrats he was trying to protect had defiled the sacred trust that was his duty to safeguard. Iriit. Whoever would have guessed that True Death would become a tool of the Lords and Ladies Unsung? It was a measure of their desperation that they indulged in such tourist attractions. To the n.o.bility, the City Unspoken was a playground, not a destination.
Bitzy cleared her throat again, attempting to wrestle her thoughts from the maudlin and into the warm light of her carefully arranged lamps.
"I saw quite the spectacle today," she teased. Her three companions looked up with earnest expressions. She continued, "We broke our fast with Duke Eightsguard and his family this morning, as has become something of a fortnightly tradition, despite the fact that Daddy has to walk twice as far to reach his offices in the Pet.i.te Malaison." Bitzy paused, posing; she never pa.s.sed up an opportunity to mention her father, the Lord Senator. She smiled, baring perfect white teeth. "Well . . . Rawella Eightsguard wore a lilac pericoat to the table."
"Lilac, you say?" NiNi picked up a pink sugar cube and licked it, catlike.
"Lilac. A charming confection of pucebone lace. You might have recognized it."
"Oh?" NoNo sounded bored.
"Yes." Bitzy nodded. "From the Princeday Eve Day Bruncheon, just four days ago."
Purity Kloo raised an eyebrow, sensing where Bitzy was steering the conversation. "Not . . . not Princeday Eve Day Bruncheon, surely?" Purity laughed, a nervous t.i.tter that did little to dispel her anxiety. NiNi and NoNo leaned forward with their twinned nostrils flared, scenting blood in water. NiNi wore a mean little smile.
"The very same." Bitzy bit her lips in mock sympathy.
"Oh my," gasped NiNi without a hint of surprise.
"What a pity." NoNo echoed her sister"s disingenuousness.
"Are you absolutely certain, Bitz?" Purity dared. "Mightn"t you have seen that lilac pericoat three weeks ago instead, at the tea for Circlestung Supper Day, Bitz?" Silence. "We oughtn"t be hasty, not after the mixup with poor Lyndee Bocks."
Bitzy sniffed. "That mistake was entirely understandable, Purity, and you know so as well as I do. If we were a week or so early in our administration of justice, what"s the difference? The Bockses are always in flagrant defiance of one tenet or another, and Lyndee would have met an ill fate eventually in any event."
"Yes, Bitzy. I suppose she would have."
"Rawella Eightsguard!" NiNi Leibowitz exclaimed again, half- striving for a truer note of sympathy. Her instrument of false concern was poorly played, Purity couldn"t help but observe. She put it down to lack of practice.
"I"m afraid so. But here: Purity, you"re the cleverest of us four, you should appreciate the concerns of propriety and its enforcement. Oh, I know you"ve always been especially close with poor Rawie and her sister, but I daresay you"ll be a great comfort to Brindle Eightsguard over the next few days."
Purity Kloo nodded in agreement, not showing for a moment that she hadn"t the slightest idea who Bitzy and the twins were talking about. Rawie? Brindle? The only Eightsguard Purity remembered was an old bag named Druessa, and she"d been Killed early on after the Writ of Community, during the first wave. There was no point in asking for clarification- Purity might as well wear a hoop skirt and skin her mastiff for a stole-her coterie wouldn"t tolerate any c.h.i.n.k in their collective armor. Perceived weakness was a worthless commodity of late, which didn"t exactly play toward Purity"s hand, but she hadn"t grown to womanhood among the Last Court thus far without learning a dozen ways to disguise her spotty memory for names, faces, and events of social importance. Purity sighed. A great and weighty sigh, contrived to mean any number of weighty and great things to whomever might be scanning her armor for c.h.i.n.ks. What a bore of a vigil, she thought.
"Rawella was terrible at cards." Purity strove for apathy. "I"ll miss watching her lose. For a while, anyway. Are we still hiding body parts to delay the binding?"
"Was?" NoNo asked with a spark of interest, "Is our Purity developing a taste for blood?"
"Justice," corrected Bitzy and Purity simultaneously, just as Purity had intended.
"Well, you know of course what this means, NoNo," continued Bitzy. "We were all the best of friends with Rawella, naturally, but she"s gone and broken the rules, hasn"t she?"
"Well, of course she has, and she should be punished." Purity wondered if she"d taken her abetment a step too far. "But-"
"-And she will be, darling. You know what the Circle would say: "When we break our own rules, we break our own necks." Better we girls administer justice with delicacy than allow our parents to bully the poor girl to Death."