The Cicatrix tried to cover her disfigured mouth and throat with her good hand without falling over again, but there was too much exposed flesh-her tongue dangled, impotent amidst a clutch of sparking wires, and the skin of her lower face and neck had been peeled back from her palate to her collarbone, curtains of b.l.o.o.d.y meat hanging loose from beneath her upper lip.
"Mother?" Lallowe"s hands shook-her face brimmed with conflicting emotions. "What do I do? Mama?" She looked up at Cooper, pleading.
Sesstri lurched to her feet with a groan, stepped forward, and reached into the exposed throat of the mortally wounded queen. She grabbed her mother"s windpipe and yanked, crushing it and withdrawing a fistful of dripping tubes. The queen"s eyes rolled back and she flopped to the ground, dead.
Lallowe looked at Sesstri with a helplessness that seemed full of questions.
"That"-Sesstri turned to shake her bloodied fist at her sister,-"is called mercy, b.i.t.c.h." Then she stumbled into Asher"s arms and buried her face in his chest, hiding her tears in the blinding light of his body.
Lolly knelt by her mother"s head, huge in its deformity. She stroked the smooth black horns-recurved and ma.s.sive-the sealed weapon ports and ventilation gills, the synthetic venom glands bulging beneath molded cheekbones. She ran her fingers through the cables behind the crown of horns, dark metal dreadlocks and plastic curls that had spilled down the dead queen"s back but now spread their tendrils across the golden floor, seeking with the last of their energies the warmth of life that had fled their mistress.
Sesstri and Asher made their way down the stairs, leaning on each other for support. Purity and Prama drifted away, talking civic politics. Cooper and Lallowe shared the empty, blood-spattered engine room with the corpse of the unnamed First Person that Prama had called the mother of all aesr.
But the divine battery was not the only dead thing in the room. Something stirred upon the corpse of the Cixatrix. The cha.s.sis shifted and began to reject her nonliving tissue, uncurling from the queen"s body and exposing the barbed teeth that had pressed the inorganic components to the flesh of the queen. Lallowe, startled, hovered her hands palms-down over her mother"s body, not knowing what to do. She felt a fleeting and horrifying urge to hold her mother"s body together.
Her husband watched from the side, silent.
The marchioness nodded to herself, humming. She stroked the helm; it did look like an enormous beetle"s carapace, horns curved and flared like a dung beetle- but from another angle it was the skull of a dragon, and from another a praetor"s helm, black and p.r.o.nged instead of platinum and single-crested. There were vivisistors inside that she could repair, if she cared to. What kind of code had her mother written? She shuddered- it would be all that was left of her mother. That poetry . . . verses of faerie logic that would chase electrons through the circuits like moonlight on ash-wood, pale and perfect. The colors of leaf and twilight, emerald and lilac . . . like her beautiful jewelry.
She tugged at the helm and it slid off her mother"s head easily, eager to be free of the dead flesh. Beneath lay the sweat-streaked, pale face of a woman, pretty but not beautiful, with a nub of a nose and soft brown eyes. Short-cropped ginger hair covered her scalp in patches-she looked as if she had been ill for a long time. Lallowe closed her mother"s eyes and felt a moment of peace.
Lallowe"s eyes were huge, the past touching the present. Was this what victory felt like? She supposed that despite her healthy self-confidence, she hadn"t ever really won before. Just moved pieces across the board. Taking a bishop, marrying a knight, obliterating p.a.w.ns. And now, a queen.
A deformed, mostly inorganic, nightmare queen with the head of a polyvinyl dung beetle for a helm. Well, it was more of a mask, she supposed, or maybe a headdress. Her mother had worn it as a crown. Yes, that was the appropriate point of view-the crown Lallowe had earned, whether it disgusted her or not. She cradled the smooth thing in her lap, stroking it with turquoise-tipped fingers.
In the corner of Lallowe"s vision an indicator began to pulse with the colors of pale sapphires and deep forest cover; leaf and twilight. She did not find them unpleasant colors, nor was she surprised by their appearance, though she thought perhaps . . . perhaps she ought to have been alarmed. Maybe she would use those colors in the redesign of the bower, her bower, when she returned to rule the Seven Silvers. When she razed the ruined land and restored the proper Court of Scars that she knew from childhood.
It is time to retreat into the Ruby Naught, she decided, and felt at her waist for the jewel box tucked away there.
She had business to attend to now and did not care to tarry. Lallowe felt herself seized by the desire for efficiency, for using her resources as surgically as possible. The Seven Silvers were hers. The Court of Scars was hers. She held up the crown-it was hers, this trophy, this magnificent and possibly functional war-helm. Hers. It should have been enough to make her cry.
Looking at the marchioness, Cooper saw her namesign shimmer. On the face of the green serpent a lilac eye winked in time to his own heartbeat. One-two, one-two, one-two.
He saw the way she clutched the Cicatrix"s headgear and felt the blood in his pinky finger begin to hum a playfully odd little tune, and Cooper knew. This was how it would begin, for Lallowe-how she would come to share her mother"s addiction. The shaman senses uncoiled in his chest, not to exert themselves but to get out of the way, to clear his thoughts of any influence so that Cooper could realize it was only his natural instinct, his lifetime of stories and fantasies and observations he had thought useless, that knew.
"Lallowe, don"t. Please."
She met his gaze and shook her head. A corner of her small mouth twitched, half- smile, half- sneer. "Too late." Lallowe lifted the crown upon which she had wasted so much effort; it no longer felt heavy in her hand. In her other hand she revealed a beveled box of red metal.
The marquis let out a long sigh. "I had hoped you didn"t have it, song of my song." His voice was full of heartache. "But of course you are who you are. I do love you for that, you know."
If the marchioness heard her husband it did not show. She held the box level with her face and locked eyes with Cooper. You are a part of this now, she thought to him. You are a part of me, and I of you. Who laughs loudest at that, furry man? Who predicted this? Not you, not me. The worlds surprise, Cooper. They surprise and surprise and surprise. Lallowe Thyu triggered something inside the box and with a sucking twist of s.p.a.ce, she and the looted war-helm evaporated. Green stars glittered for a moment in the empty air, a snake"s head and searching tongue, a winking lilac eye.
EPILOGUE.
The next day dawned red and smoggy, streaking the sky with heavy cloud cover and scenting the air strongly with ammonia. Through the tyranny of the methane sunrise, a small procession followed a redheaded woman in an old purple robe-unbelievably old, if she cared to brag about it-down the nearly deserted Boulevard of Metal Mornings and around the Garrison of First Wakings. Garlands of marigolds appeared as she pa.s.sed, draping themselves over gaslights and rain gutters, and cherry blossom petals fell at her feet. Where she walked, the madness cleared.
The gathering was small but solemn: masons walked with Winnowed, intermingling, their eyes hollow with fatigue and shame; a smattering of plumbics and ca.n.a.lworkers followed behind, regarding their masonic brothers with uncertainty; a cortege of the Dying followed too, bleached of color and tremulous-the Dying, who were once the lifeblood of the City Unspoken, but who had retreated of late to abandoned districts, huddling over trash-can fires and waiting for the absolution that would dissolve their selves into the nothingness from which they had, so long ago, been born. Behind and amidst the Dying walked a handful of ordinary citizens, curious and aware that the past twenty-four hours had forever changed their city-the Dome opened like a shy flower, the Undertow scattered, and True Death, the cash crop of the City Unspoken, broken like a clock. As if to confirm that truth, a group of n.o.bles brought up the rear, steely-eyed and determined to make the proper impression as they returned to the city from which they had been sequestered for five long years.
All twenty-three n.o.ble families were represented, surrounded by a platinum ring of praetors, and every single member of House Kloo had turned out to support their daughter, sister, and cousin, Purity. Even NiNi came, alone, to represent her house, though she clung to the periphery and looked lost in a sea of black tulle. For once, her face remained uncovered, her hawkish nose and high forehead facing the day, whatever it brought. Also to the side walked Oxnard, unaccompanied, still wearing the red jacket and high boots of the admiralty.
At the head of the procession, Cooper followed just behind Alouette, and beside him Kaien and Purity held hands and kept their heads bowed. Cooper wished Asher or Sesstri were with him, and his eyes watered a little at the thought of Nixon, who was beyond them now.
The route they followed was old and unused, the highway merely one of dozens of abandoned thoroughfares in the City Unspoken. Beneath the curling crust of Amelia Heights, the highway that a crowd of citizens now followed was too old to sport a half-forgotten name or purpose; it was just a straight line of pylon-suspended concrete that followed itself down farther than anyone had a good reason to walk, and pa.s.sed into Winnowed territory as well. Too bare to be of use even to thieves and their ilk, the way had been truly and thoroughly ignored until this morning.
Now, Alouette led a procession of citizens, guildsfolk, n.o.ble families, Winnowed, interlopers, and visiting powers down the thoroughfare that ran beneath the crust of the city to emerge on the far side of the rind of the world. They didn"t know it, but she led them to the neck of the beast who bore the city upon his back, where she would bury her mother at sea, in the Sea of Remembered Skies.
She looked wee and frail as a human, though Cooper knew better. It amused and confused him to see her in her mortal body, now. He didn"t like Alouette as much as he liked Chesmarul-whether or not she called herself the caretaker of the lost and abused. At least the route she took was marvelous-Alouette intended to impress, in her way: after the red morning light faded, scarlet witchlights appeared at her shoulders, sentinels of b.l.o.o.d.y light that soon sp.a.w.ned satellite lights that drifted behind her, floating overhead to light the way for those who followed.
For a long time they walked in the ruddy darkness, silent save for the sound of their feet against concrete, the dancing red sparks of Alouette"s witchlights the only light to see. When the pavement ended, they carried on across smooth, quarried granite. When the quarry- sc.r.a.ped granite gave way to natural rock, the procession did not falter.
A sound like breathing wound through the tunnel, which seemed odd until all of a sudden the tunnel opened into a cavern lit by a faraway source of light, and the cavern gave way to a great hall filled with birdsong and mist and a deep pounding reverberation that shook the bedrock on all sides. Still-distant light glimmered from across the enormous s.p.a.ce, obscured by pillars nearly as thick as city blocks supporting an unseen ceiling that disappeared overhead, hidden by clouds of the mist that poured in from the far end of the hall. n.o.body in the gathered a.s.sembly had ever seen a cavern so vast and so alive, not even the Winnowed- this was an ancient way, isolated by geography and subtle enchantments placed aeons ago. The vanishing distance consumed the walls, most of the ceiling, and the source of both the light and the ba.s.s-thumping noise, which lay at the far end of the habitat like a curtain of rainstorm on the horizon.
Birds spiraled and bats bobbed, betraying the size of the cavern-hall, and ferns sprouted in cl.u.s.ters poised to gather the light. Where visible, walls of natural rock joined with the crumbled, candlewax billionstone of the aesr from the post-Anvitine era; the First People had stopped here before they conquered the surface, carving their perches into rock walls that still scrolled with their ancient, oddly organic stone. This was their first bulwark, and Cooper saw their ghosts arriving on the world that would one day sprout the City Unspoken; they flew/swam through the Sea of Remembered Skies and founded a rookery here, to collect themselves and explore the forested world beyond.
As they progressed through the mile-long chamber, Cooper saw shafts of sunlight stream sideways through a haze of waterfall spray-the falls still lay half a mile or more distant but they must be ma.s.sive to generate such seismic noise and volume of fog. What would it feel like to march out from beneath Niagara? He"d seen those falls and felt their pounding- this was more intense by far. Or was there a second sound, a t.i.tanic breath, that underlay the merely breathlike pounding of the water? The world was a beast, after all, Prama had revealed that much, and beasts must breathe.
And there she waited, before the wall of water, a column of winged light that outshone even the brilliant sunlight refracted in all directions by a billion-billion droplets of mist. She stood beside her father, who draped his restored incandescence in layers of cloth, and who clung to Sesstri, red-faced and pink-haired, tightly bandaged about her middle but standing with the support of her lover, the disgraced prince.
Alouette greeted Prama with a bow, which surprised everyone except for Prama; Asher"s heir had stepped into her role seamlessly, rising above her mortal subjects with the inhuman grace and remoteness that her father had long ago abandoned, unwilling or unable to remain detached from the worlds. Prince Prama Ramay showed no such weakness.
Together, Alouette and Prama turned and led the funeral procession through the thundering mist and out into the world.
After such a trek beneath the ground, stepping through the curtain of parted water into the light was a shock. The suns branded his eyes, and Cooper experienced the last leg of the trip as a blear of overexposed still frames: the masons and the Winnowed and the switchback trail down to the horn of the beast, where the water falls into the sea; a longboat with the head of a beluga, tied all "round with red ribbons and floating in midair above a sheer drop off the edge of everything; Alouette in her purple gown and petals filling the air overhead and bra.s.s bowls pouring milk and salt.w.a.ter into the spray; an isthmus neck leading out to a spur of rock-or was it bone, or chitin, or sh.e.l.l?-jutting out into the day, while the crowd clung to the steep gradient of the makeshift amphitheater afforded by the densely packed switchback route; no horizon, just cloud and sky, a hundred skies, above and below, a sea of them, drifting by.
Out past the improvised cairn altar where Alouette stood, the neck continued, swallowed by fog and miles of clouds, bearing the continental head and mouth of the beast who was the world. Cooper could only imagine what the world-beast looked like, and was too full of vertigo and awe to dare try and send his vision out there into the skyborne depths. Alouette came to a stop before the longboat, made of dark wood and floating in the air but tethered to the makeshift cairn of piled stones and shale. Within the vessel lay the red-draped corpse of the nameless First Person who had powered the engine of Death since before the advent of humankind. She looked enormous here beneath the tidal infinities of the Sea of Remembered Skies, larger than she had seemed in the engine.
Prama stood on a rocky prominence surrounded by praetors in their platinum kit, a semicircle of metal that could almost be light. The prince herself was dimmed by the day, and the brightness of the suns would have revealed her hide had her praetors not covered her with layers of white linen, draping over her wing-fins and blowing in the gusty wind. Her hands and head were bare, and the people could not help from staring at her head, so similar in shape to the helms of her guardsmen. She made for a living reliquary, and to walk with her was to travel back in time by millions of years.
The man who approached Cooper seemed diminished by the environment, so essential was domesticity to Tam"s vitality. In the sun his face looked lovely rather than dodgy, his tawny hair and prominent nose seemed more fox-like than ever. He wore a trim gray suit and light brown tie, and he looked at Cooper expectantly.
"What next, Young Tam Lin?" Cooper asked, shading his face to look Tam in the eyes.
"I"m free, f.u.c.k you." Tam"s tone was snappy but he smiled.
"Aren"t you worried Lallowe will come back for you?" Cooper couldn"t help but project his own fears-although Tam should share them, he thought.
"No. I"m not important enough." He tossed his hair out of his eyes. "You are, though."
"Yeah. I can still feel my finger inside her body, wherever that is. It"s beyond disgusting."
Tam held up his own pinky and looked at it as if it were a talisman of doom. "Cooper, one way or another, she"s going to . . ."
"Yeah, I know. I"m dead meat."
Tam made a face. "I"d suggest killing yourself to break the connection and kill the finger, but the Sixth Silver will keep your finger safe for her no matter what. I"m sorry."
Cooper agreed, and nodded at Asher and Sesstri, at Alouette, and Prama beside her, waved to Purity and Kaien with a so- so gesture, and shrugged toward Oxnard, who looked lost. "But I"ve got backup. And bigger problems."
Tam looked doubtful. "What can you possibly do about the end of Death, Cooper?"
What could he do? Watch the worlds turn into a madhouse? Cooper pulled a wry face. "I meant my back. Have you seen it? I"m hideous."
Something dry and warm squeezed his hand. He looked down and saw that it was Tam"s hand inside his own.
"I"m used to hideous."
Cooper grunted. Tam laid his tawny head on Cooper"s shoulder. "You should probably stay away from me, Tam."
"I know. f.u.c.k you."
"I"d rather have coffee." Cooper squeezed the warm dry hand, thankful for it.
"How about both?"
Cooper smiled, then frowned-feeling his phantom finger twitch, somewhere amidst the worlds. He thought of the vivisistors that linked him to the new queen of the Seven Silvers. It doesn"t stop, does it?
As if to prove his point, Alouette stepped forward and expanded into something bigger than herself. In one stride she opened up the kernel of herself and regrew whole branches of awareness, thought, and ability that had been denied her embodied consciousness. Looking at her directly, Cooper felt the change wash out from her body like a wave of ice water, as a woman exploded with the energy of herself, only to be replaced with a woman-shaped being. For a moment, as she grew in what Cooper could only identify as presence, her clouds of red hair began to burn the s.p.a.ce they occupied with the fullness of her being, and he knew she wore her real name, Chesmarul. So many selves, for one meddling creature-were all the First People that complicated? Asher did not seem so, but how could Cooper tell?
But it was not Chesmarul the Red Ribbon who spoke. The invocation came from Prama, a.s.suming her place as prince.
"These are inauspicious days. The Dying do not Die. The bile of the worlds rises in all our throats, but for this day, even here at the edge of all things, we share a moment of peace. In the years to come we may all need the memory of today, so open your minds to the taste of tears and milk, to the smell of petals on the wind, the sound of the water that spills into the sea of skies."
She paused. The spray from the falls cooled Cooper"s face. Marigolds and cherry blossoms filled the air.
"Some of you feared, these past few days, that you faced the end of the worlds. You face something far worse than that. Still, if one thing can be said of our trials it is that life goes on, and so do we-in fact, we have no other choice. Now that she is dead."
Prama waited, and Chesmarul nodded her head at the funeral bier. Red curls licked through the air around the pyre like stylized winds, tendrils of the attention of Chesmarul. The caudal polyps still smoldered within the unrecognizable remains-so vast in age and size that her death took days-but the light was feeble. What had flickered like tea lights before now winked red and weak.
She must once have been spectacular.
"Rare in the worlds is a final funeral, but today we send to sea the remains of one of the savants-of-being, the very earliest First People, older than almost any before her, whose brood gave birth to the aesr race who founded the City Unspoken. Also the mother of Death, and perhaps even of sacrifice, who gave her flesh to become a battery for peace.
"Before the Third People, perhaps before even the lost Second, this nameless hero became bound beneath the earth within a sarcophagus of gold and light, and with her life the ancients pierced the gourd of is and opened up the Last Gate, the threshold to is not. With her Death that threshold is barred to us all, and consciousness returns to the mercy of the curse of is."
Prama kept speaking to a rapt a.s.sembly, but Cooper broke away from the crowd and found the edge of the nearest cliff-Tam was so focused on the immortal"s words that he let Cooper walk away- and looked out over the emptiness, so full of sky. Far off, hundreds of miles away in every direction, he saw other skies, green firmaments and orange and black, lit by a vagary of stars. It really was a sea of skies wasn"t it?-wrapping sky within sky within sky.
Why had Chesmarul stolen him away from his life? What had he done? He hadn"t conquered the Undertow, or opened the Dome, or killed the Cicatrix. Not really. Was he just a witness, or was there more?
Behind him, Prama deferred to Chesmarul, who turned to face the crowd. More accurately, part of her spun toward the a.s.sembly-her eyes were portals to a plane of red electricity, a vital energy that was her true self. They brimmed with her.
"She was my mother too, you know. Before my little cousins became the aesr, she was my mother. I do not know who or what gave birth to the worlds, you gathered People of Remembered Skies, only who gave birth to me. We swam down the waters of the river Sataswarhi in the redshifted dawn of things, my mother and me. Long before the worlds knew the counting of time, I swam out with my mother through a sea of light and music, and we were whole."
The crowd was frozen, the birds hung still in midair, and the waterfalls had become sculptures of broken gla.s.s. Cooper stood alone in a spot of shadow with Chesmarul, and he felt the tendrils that were her true self drawing a circle of stillness around them; he reached out with his own self and felt the boundaries of her spell-a simple thing, now that he noticed it, that didn"t so much stop time for the rest of the worlds as speed up its pa.s.sing within the circle she inscribed.
It struck him. "Oh, it must be Tuesday. For a whole week I didn"t need to know what days were. Isn"t that strange? Do you know about Tuesdays, or is that like me knowing what ants call the increment of time it takes for crumbs of my cake to fall from the table to the floor?"
"I know Tuesdays, and this a Tuesday." Her dress faded in and out of existence, showing the ruby lights crawling up the sides of her body. Lining her flat stomach. Coiling around her small but perfect b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Portals, just like her eyes. "Another f.u.c.king Tuesday."
"We"re stuck in a loop, aren"t we?" He looked at his hand. "It used to be that I was caught in a world of weekdays, and Tuesdays were my worst enemy-the second day, not as universally dismal as Mondays, but a depressing reminder of the rest of the week and month and year ahead. Now I"ve whole lives to contend with. Endless f.u.c.king lives, not to mention a seemingly endless number of overpowered beings who like to give me new powers that don"t quite stop other overpowered beings from cutting bits of me off." Cooper nodded to himself and looked out into the vastness. "We are well and truly stuck."
Chesmarul shook her head; her pure red eye-holes left streaks trailing to either side like afterimages. "We"re the opposite of stuck, now, Cooper. In fact, you might consider the thought that travel is the closest thing left to oblivion. You cannot cease to be, but you can cease to be here. Now that we cannot Die, we can only learn. Only voyage."
He made a noise that was half laugh and half sigh, and looked at her with a flat expression. "What the f.u.c.k are you doing with me, Chesmarul? I have a little experience now, a few tricks up my sleeve. But I"m still nothing compared to you, or even compared to Asher. Christ, Sesstri can outfight me and outsmart me, and now she"s a half-elf. I know I"m not here just to stand up to monsters in a rising gold bubble, or give Lallowe Thyu a little finger. What are you up to with me?"
She reached out with one hand to stroke his cheek, running her knuckles down the week-long growth of beard. Her skin felt like paper fire. She looked at him sorrowfully with her arm still outstretched; he smiled.
Chesmarul seemed to hesitate, then she commanded, "Cooper: voyage." And in one deft motion she snapped his neck.
The waking current swept him away. Somebody who feels just like him smells menthol cigarettes and opens his eyes to a brand new sky.
end.