The sword smith and the seer had been great friends for years. Sometimes he would ask the seer to read swords.
He went to the tavern and brought the new sword. He bought the seer a drink.
“To Seeking,” the seer said, lifting his cup.
“To Finding,” the sword smith replied, lifting his drink in return.
They talked of current events and politics and the weather before the smith showed him the sword.
The seer looked at the sword for a long time. He asked the smith for another drink and the smith obliged.
The seer finished his second drink and then handed the sword back.
“This sword will kill the king,” the seer told the smith.
“What does that mean?” the smith asked.
The seer shrugged.
“It will kill the king,” he repeated. He said no more about it.
The smith put the sword away and they discussed other matters for the rest of the night.
The next day the sword smith tried to decide what to do with the sword, knowing that the seer was rarely wrong.
Being responsible for the weapon that killed the king did not sit well with the sword smith, though he had previously made many swords that had killed many people.
He thought he should destroy it but he could not bring himself to destroy so fine a sword.
After much thought and consideration he crafted two additional swords, identical and indistinguishable from the first. Even the sword smith himself could not tell them apart.
As he worked he received many offers from customers who wished to purchase them but he refused.
Instead the sword smith gave one sword to each of his three children, not knowing who would receive the one that would kill the king, and he gave it no more thought because none of his children would do such a thing, and if any of the swords fell into other hands the matter was left to fate and time and Fate and Time can kill as many kings as they please, and will eventually kill them all.
The sword smith told no one what the seer had said, lived all his days and kept his secret until his days were gone.
The youngest son took his sword and went adventuring. He was not a terribly good adventurer and he found himself distracted visiting unfamiliar villages and meeting new people and eating interesting food. His sword rarely left its scabbard. In one village he met a man he fancied greatly and this man had a fondness for rings. So the youngest son took his disused sword to a smith and had it melted down, and then hired a jeweler to craft rings from the metal. He gave the man one ring each year for every year they spent together. There were a great many rings.
The eldest son stayed at home for years and used his sword for dueling. He was good at dueling and made quite a lot of money. With his savings he decided to take a sea voyage and he took his sword with him, hoping he might learn as he traveled and improve his skills. He studied with the crew of the ship and would practice on the deck when the winds were calm but one day he was disarmed too close to the rail. His sword fell into the sea and sank to the bottom, impaling itself into coral and sand. It is there still.
The middle child, the only daughter, kept her sword in a glass case in her library. She claimed it was decorative, a memory of her father who had been a great sword smith, and that she never used it. This was not true. She often took it from its resting place when she was alone, late at night, and practiced with it. Her brother had taught her some dueling but she had never used this particular sword for duels. She kept it polished, she knew every inch, every scratch. Her fingers itched for it when it was not nearby. The feel of it in her hand was so familiar that she carried the sword with her into her dreams.
One night she fell asleep in her chair by the fire in the library. Though the sword rested in its case on the shelf nearby she held it in her hand when she began to dream.
In her dream she walked through a forest. The branches of the trees were heavy with cherry blossoms, hung with lanterns, and stacked with books.
As she walked she felt many eyes watching her but she could not see anyone. Blossoms floated around her like snow.
She reached a spot where a large tree had been cut down to a stump. The stump was surrounded by candles and piled with books and atop the books there was a beehive, honey dripping from it and falling over the books and the stump of the tree though there were no bees to be seen.
There was only a large owl, perched atop the beehive. A white-and-brown owl wearing a golden crown. Its feathers ruffled as the sword smith’s daughter approached.
“You have come to kill me,” the Owl King said.
“I have?” the sword smith’s daughter asked.
“They find a way to kill me, always. They have found me here, even in dreams.”
“Who?” the sword smith’s daughter asked, but the Owl King did not answer her question.
“A new king will come to take my place. Go ahead. It is your purpose.”
The sword smith’s daughter had no wish to kill the owl but it seemed she was meant to. She did not understand but this was a dream and such things make sense in dreams.
The daughter of the sword smith cut off the Owl King’s head. One swift, well-practiced swing sliced through feather and bone.
The owl’s crown fell from its severed head, clattering to the ground near her feet.
The sword smith’s daughter reached down to retrieve the crown but it disintegrated beneath her fingers leaving naught but golden dust.
Then she woke, still in the chair by the fire in her library.
On the shelf where the sword had been there was a white-and-brown owl perched on the empty case.
The owl remained with her for the rest of her days.
ZACHARY EZRA RAWLINS sits frozen in the darkness. He can hear the Vivaldi though he cannot remember if it had been playing the entire time under the conversation and the tea. There is a scraping sound that is likely Allegra pushing her chair back. Zachary keeps waiting for his eyes to adjust but they don’t, the darkness is thick and solid like something pulled over his eyes.
That sound was definitely the click of a door opening and he guesses Allegra has abandoned him, leaving him stuck tied to his chair but another sound follows, something hitting the other end of the table hard enough that it reverberates all the way down to the other side, and the sound of something falling to the floor and a teacup breaking.
Then footsteps, coming closer.
Zachary tries to hold his breath and fails.
The footsteps stop next to his chair and someone whispers in his ear.
“You didn’t think I’d let her talk you to death, did you, Ezra?”
“What is going—” Zachary starts to ask but Mirabel shushes him, whispering.
“They might be recording. I got the lights but the audio and the cameras are a different system. Rescue mission proceeding more or less as planned, thank you for being distracting.” A movement against his arms breaks the cords on his wrist and Mirabel pulls the chair back so she can free his feet.
She must have good night vision, in the darkness she takes his hand and he knows his palm is sweaty but he doesn’t care. He squeezes her hand and she squeezes back and if there are sides to whatever all of this is he feels pretty good about siding with the king of the wild things.
In the hall streetlight sneaks in through the windows, just enough to see by.
Mirabel leads him down the stairs and around to the basement stairs and Zachary is mildly relieved to know where he is going even though he can’t see all that well. Shadows upon shadows with an occasional glimpse of purple-pink from Mirabel’s hair. But when they reach the basement they don’t exit to the ice-covered garden, Mirabel leads him in the opposite direction, deeper into the house.
“Where—” he starts but Mirabel shushes him again. They turn down a hallway, losing the lig
ht from the garden and falling back into darkness and then somewhere in the darkness Mirabel opens a door.
At first Zachary thinks maybe it is one of her doors, but as his eyes adjust he can tell they are still in the Collector’s Club. The room is smaller than the ones upstairs and windowless, lit by an old-fashioned lantern set on a pile of cardboard boxes and the light flickers over walls covered in framed paintings, like a disused miniature gallery.
Dorian is slumped on the floor near the boxes, unconscious but obviously breathing and Zachary feels something in his heart unclench that he didn’t realize had been clenched in the first place and he is mildly annoyed by the implication of that but then he is distracted by the other door.
In the center of the room stands a door in its frame with no wall surrounding it. It is fastened to the floor somehow but there is open space above and to each side, more cardboard boxes visible behind it against the far wall.
“I knew they had one,” Mirabel says. “I could feel it in the back of my head but I couldn’t find it since I didn’t know where it was. I don’t know where they took it from, it’s not one of the old New York doors.”
The door looks ancient, with nails set in studded patterns along the edges, a heavy round knocker clenched in the jaws of a tiger and a curving handle rather than a doorknob. A door more suited for a castle. The frame doesn’t match, the finish shinier. An old door set in a new frame.
“Will it work?” Zachary asks.
“One way to find out.”
Mirabel pulls the door open and instead of the far wall and the cardboard boxes there is a cavern lined with lanterns. This in between has no stairs; the elevator door waits opposite, farther away than should be possible.
Zachary steps around to the back of the door. From behind it is a standing frame. He can see Mirabel through it, but when he comes back to the front there is the cavern and the elevator again, clear as day.
“Magic,” he mutters under his breath.
“Ezra, I’m going to ask you to believe in a lot of impossible things but I’d appreciate it if you would refrain from using the m-word.”
“Sure,” Zachary says, thinking that the m-word doesn’t explain everything that’s happening right now anyway.
“Help me with him, would you?” Mirabel asks, moving toward Dorian. “He’s heavy.”
Together they lift Dorian, each taking an arm. Zachary has played this game with many an overly intoxicated companion but this is different, the sheer dead weight of a completely unconscious rather tall man. He still smells good. Mirabel has the superior upper-body strength but together they manage to keep Dorian upright, his scuffed wingtip shoes dragging along the floor.
Zachary glances at one of the paintings on the wall and recognizes the space depicted within it. Shelves of books lining a tunnel-like hall, a woman in a long gown walking away from the viewer, holding a lantern much like the one currently sitting nearby on a cardboard box.
The painting next to it is also a depiction of a familiar underground not-library: a slice of curving hallway, figures disrupting the light from around the bend and casting shadows over the books but remaining out of sight. The one below is similar, a nook with an empty armchair and a single lamp, darkness flecked with gold.
Then they pass through the door and Zachary’s view of the paintings is replaced by a wall of stone.
They carry Dorian across the cavern to the elevator.
Behind them there is a noise and Zachary belatedly thinks he should have closed the door. There are footsteps. Something falling. A faraway door slam. Then comes the chime of the elevator’s arrival and safety feels like worn velvet and brass.
It’s easier to settle Dorian on the floor than the benches. The elevator doors remain open, waiting.
Mirabel looks back the way they came, through the still-open door into the Collector’s Club.
“Do you trust me, Ezra?” she asks.
“Yes,” Zachary answers without taking the time to consider the question.
“Someday I’m going to remind you that you said that,” Mirabel says. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a small metal object and it takes Zachary a moment to realize it’s a handgun. The small fancy sort that a femme fatale might tuck into a garter belt in a different sort of story.
Mirabel lifts the gun and points it back through the open door and shoots the lantern where it sits on its stack of cardboard boxes.
Zachary watches as the lantern explodes in a shower of glass and oil and the flames catch and grow, feasting on cardboard and wallpaper and paintings and then his view is obscured by the elevator doors as they close and then they are descending.
Once there was a woman who sculpted stories.
She sculpted them from all manner of things. At first she worked with snow or smoke or clouds, because their tales were temporary, fleeting. Gone in moments, visible and readable only to those who happened to be present in the time between carving and disintegrating, but the sculptor preferred this. It left no time to fuss over details or imperfections. The stories did not remain to be questioned and criticized and second-guessed, by herself or by others. They were, and then they were not. Many were never read before they ceased to exist, but the story sculptor remembered them.
Passionate love stories that were manipulated into the vacancies between raindrops and vanished with the end of the storm.
Tragedies intricately poured from bottles of wine and sipped thoughtfully with melancholy and fine cheeses.
Fairy tales shaped from sand and seashells on shorelines slowly swept away by softly lapping waves.
The sculptor gained recognition and drew crowds for her stories, attended like theatrical performances as they were carved and then melted or crumbled or drifted away on the breeze. She worked with light and shadow and ice and fire and once sculpted a story out of single strands of hair, one plucked from each member of her audience and then woven together.
People begged her to sculpt with more permanence. Museums requested exhibitions that might last more than minutes or hours.
The sculptor conceded, gradually.
She sculpted stories out of wax and set them over warm coals so they would melt and drip and fade.
She organized willing participants into arrangements of tangled limbs and twined bodies that would last as long as their living pieces could manage, the story changing from each angle viewed and then changing more as the models fatigued, hands slipping over thighs in unsubtle plot twists.
She knit myths from wool small enough to keep in pockets though when read with too much frequency they would unravel and tangle.
She trained bees to build honeycombs on intricate frames forming entire cities with sweet inhabitants and bitter dramas.
She sculpted stories with carefully cultivated trees, stories that continued to grow and unfold long after they were abandoned to control their own narratives.
Still people begged for stories they could keep.
The sculptor experimented. She constructed metal lanterns with tiny hand cranks that could be turned to project tales on walls when a candle was placed within them. She studied with a clockmaker for a time and built serials that could be carried like pocket watches and wound, though eventually their springs would wear out.
She found she no longer minded that the stories would linger. That some enjoyed them and others did not but that is the nature of a story. Not all stories speak to all listeners, but all listeners can find a story that does, somewhere, sometime. In one form or another.
Only when she was much older did the sculptor consent to work with stone.
At first it proved difficult but eventually she learned to speak with the stone, to manipulate it and discern the tales it wished to tell and to sculpt it as easily as she once sculpted rain and grass and clouds.
She carved visions in marble, with moving piece
s and lifelike features. Puzzle boxes and unsolvable riddles, multiple possible endings left unfound and unseen. Pieces that would stand steadfastly and pieces in constant motion that would wear themselves to ruin.
She carved her dreams and her desires and her fears and her nightmares and let them mingle.
Museums clamored for her exhibits but she preferred to show her work in libraries or in bookstores, on mountains and on beaches.
She would rarely attend these showings and when she did she did so anonymously, lost amongst the crowd, but some would know her and quietly acknowledge her presence with a nod or a lifted glass. A few would speak with her about subjects other than the stories on display, or tell her their own stories or remark on the weather.
At one such exhibit a man remained to speak with the sculptor after the crowds departed, a man who seemed more like a mouse, quiet and nervous, a world unto himself pulled tight and secretive, his words soft and delicate.
“Would you hide something in a story for me?” the mouselike man asked the sculptor. “There are…there are those who seek what I must conceal and would turn the universe inside out to find it.”
This was a dangerous request, and the sculptor asked for three nights to consider her answer.
The first night she did not think on the matter, concerning herself with her work and her rest and the small things that brought her happiness: the honey in her tea, the stars in the night sky, the linen sheets on her bed.
The second night she asked the sea, since the sea has hidden many things in its depths, but the sea was silent.
The third night she did not sleep, constructing a story in her head that could hide anything, no matter what it might be, deeper than anything had been hidden before, even in the depths of the sea.
After three nights the mouselike man returned.
“I will do what you request,” the sculptor told him, “but I do not wish to know what it is you desire to hide. I will provide a box for it. Will it fit in a box?”
The man nodded and thanked the sculptor.
“Do not thank me yet,” she said. “It will take a year to finish. Come back then with your treasure.”
The Starless Sea Page 19
