He squinted up the street where she was pointing. His skin visibly paled. He looked away and said, “No. Nothing there. Move along.”
In the lower city the weight of the Gray Thing’s presence lifted again, leaving her to stumble back to her storefront and bolt the door behind her.
She didn’t need to know exactly who or what was following her to feel in her bones that it was deadly. It had to be some function of the Upper City intrigues Araias had alluded to. But she had known this job would put her at the mercy of the whims of the Swathed—and oddly enough, it wasn’t the Gray Thing that haunted her that night as she lay waiting for sleep to take her but rather the question she had until then forgotten to ask:
As all High Fabrics had their supernatural effects, what would a jacket made of sky do?
The Gray Thing didn’t appear again in the weeks it took her to rebuild and finish her research, to the extent that her goal could be researched at all. She could only string together inferences based on what the books left conspicuously unsaid. One volume mentioned sky only to say that it ‘could not be accumulated in a soul-mesh trap,’ implying that it could be gathered by some other means; another included it in a table of comparative vapor species, with a citation pointing to a nonexistent footnote; a third listed sky in the index but the relevant pages were missing.
She had only one idea. She dreaded to think where she’d be left if it didn’t work.
She spent everything she’d been paid so far on the finest spun-shadow blanket she could get her hands on, using Tyan as an intermediary. Wrapped in its soft fuzz, she crept through pre-dawn alleys and followed the back roads out of town, until the last buildings faded into the jungle and she was left alone, staring ahead to the wind-scoured peaks of Silver Mountain.
The journey to the summit took her longer than she’d hoped. She spent the night between the trees, afraid the snakes might seek revenge for the legions she’d made into clothes over the years. In the morning she crossed the timber line, hidden from the blazing sun under her shadow blanket. When she finally planted her blistered feet on the shore of the placid crater lake at the summit, it was deep into a moonless night and the arc of galactic light was too dim for precision work.
At dawn she cursed herself for sleeping: the summit was shrouded in muggy fog, and there was nothing to do but wait for it to clear. She spent hours pacing the rocky ground. She hadn’t fully relaxed for one moment since Araias had paid his visit. To hire her. To endanger her life. To remind her of everything she’d lost.
She felt an itch under her eyepatch, and when she lifted it, her swatch of lacuna silk fell away in shreds, worn completely through. A long-cultivated inner numbness gave way to tingling as its memory-blunting effects abruptly ebbed.
She saw Tyan, forever young. She saw herself, back when they’d been the same age, studying under the same guild master. How they competed to weave the finest cloth or stitch the perfect seam—how, despite their rivalry and all the stresses of their apprenticeships, they turned on their stools when the master wasn’t looking, risking a secret kiss or a whispered promise to make a life together once they were Tailors.
She wished she’d never seen Tyan again.
Every hour that the warm fog refused to lift, the fever of resurgent memory worsened. She tried singing to herself, arranging rocks, even focusing on her present anxieties to escape past ones, but she couldn’t dispel the vision haunting her.
“They let just anyone practice the craft now, do they?” said the Swathed lady in her mind’s eye, storming into the fabric mogul’s ball to confront Jorren in front of everyone. Brandishing a newly bought scarf like a weapon.
Shut up, Jorren commanded. Shut up, shut up!
“A single day I’ve been wearing this moonlight-knit, and it’s already coming apart!” the lady snapped.
Don’t respond, Jorren thought. Don’t reply. Offer a refund. Run away. Anything. But the apparition of her younger self responded: “It’s a very fine material. You have to avoid worrying the edges.”
Forget, Jorren thought. She pounded her head. Forget.
“A tailor presumes to command me?” the Swathed lady said, and in one effortless motion she snatched the scissors from Jorren’s belt and whipped them open to slash with a blade sharp enough to swim through flesh as if through air; precise enough to destroy a person’s entire life without killing her.
Jorren startled awake to find the naked dome of the sky spread out above her, endless and blue.
She walked the circumference of the lake with her last spool of dream-thread, laying it down carefully so as not to disturb the water’s surface or let any part of it sink. Her every nerve felt taut with the sudden fear that after all of this she wouldn’t remember her own craft, but she forced her mind clear. She held both ends of the loop she’d laid, let its otherworldly humming fill the whole of her awareness, and began to give it a series of light tugs.
For the longest time, nothing happened.
Then she began to feel it. The just-perceptible crinkling resistance. The dream-thread gently combed a luminous fabric off the water’s surface: the impossibly thin sky, caught in the mirror of the lake, progressively achieving substance as Jorren pulled the loop in toward herself. She slowed and held her breath when it thickened and bunched at the edges, afraid to tear or wrinkle it. After several minutes it arrived in a soft, fat pile at the water’s edge.
She didn’t dare to handle it directly, but with some care and a pair of tongs she was able to roll it up. It was cumbersome but blessedly lightweight on her back, and its brilliant light streamed out the top of its sack and painted the barren rocks in lapping waves of azure and pink as she started her way down.
The door to her storefront was open a crack when she reached it. She wavered outside in the night, clasping her spun-shadow blanket with shaking hands and praying no one could hear the soft, insistent humming of the dream-thread in her pocket. The sliver of darkness past the bashed-open lock taunted her with promises of dry coolness, a bath, food and fresh socks—and pain or death and the hands of whoever might be waiting just inside: a robber; an assassin sent by Araias’s enemies; Araias himself. But it was too late to turn back. Her only way out of this now would be to finish the job.
She took a few last breaths, switched her monocle to medium focus, and pushed the door fully open.
There was a scraping sound from the coins Araias’s courier had pushed under the door in her absence. Nothing else moved. A faint rancid smell hung on the air, but it blew away before she could identify it, and the shop was empty.
She rushed to seal herself inside. She braced all the windows and barricaded every possible entrance with stacked boxes and tipped-over shelves.
Her body was wracked with fatigue, but there was no time for a bath or a change of clothes or a foot-soak. There was nothing to do but pour a cup of tea, scrub the mountain dirt from under her fingernails, and go to work.
In the darkness of the shop, the unfurled fabric of the sky glowed too brightly to look at directly. She had to put her monocle’s sun lens down whenever she got close to it. When her gloved fingers slid over it she had no doubt that it was the smoothest surface she’d ever touched.
Her Tailor’s scissors lay in their velvet and ironwood box like a corpse in a coffin; gold and abalone grips, trigger-wires for each finger to precisely control the action of the blades. She reached out, but phantom pain pushed her hand back. Her scars ached as if they were new.
“You can’t hide from what that Swathed lady did to you,” said a voice in her head, rasping like a dusty wind. “Admit the object’s history. Know it for what it is.”
This time she didn’t force the memory of the slash back down into the recesses of her mind. She let it surge through her as she lifted the scissors for the first time since her exile. Only when she was sure her fingers remembered how to operate them did she slide the sky’s edge into their jaws.
The blades twitched in the fabric. They started to jam on the
impossibly thin material.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Jorren muttered. It had been fifty years, for lint’s sake. “Why was I such a damned fool as to think I could still do this.”
“Because you can,” hissed the voice.
“The last time I Tailored anything,” she answered it aloud, “I had two sharp eyes and a clear head. My hands were agile. Fresh from years of practice.”
The voice in her mind rasped: “Once you were a pawn in the petty games of the Swathed and knew nothing of the world beyond the gallows gate. But you have now what you did not then.”
Truthfully, even at the height of her skill she had never attempted anything where success was less assured. But as her cuts grew straighter, she realized the otherworldly voice in her head was right. She’d gained something for all her lost years, and she could feel it uncurling in her now like a sinewy knot: a bone-deep longing that intensified with her every squeeze of the blades. She had missed her true craft. She’d had no idea just how much she’d missed it.
“Yes,” whispered the voice. “Feel. Let it flow through your touch. On that ancient pain, all else depends.”
She was surprised at her own tears. She wiped them away before they could stain the glowing surface below her. So suddenly and so strangely, the work had become reflexive. The fabric complied as if it craved her design. Before long the pieces were all laid out. The edges were the smoothest and straightest she’d ever cut.
She carried them to the sewing machine. She spent some time simply feeling the texture of the fabric between her gloved fingers, sensing out its subtle elasticity. Then she strung her softly humming dream-thread through the eye of the bone needle.
She sewed for hours, turning the wheel slowly, sensing out the tension at every loop—and again the fabric moved as if seeking its own perfect geometry. It drank up the thread, and its seams faded away with a shimmer as they passed. Every turn and twist of the fabric cast brilliant patterns of light around the room and burned like pink fire on the machine’s brightly worn cog teeth.
“Exquisite,” said the voice in the back of her head.
It was done. It seemed to shine directly on her when she lifted it by the shoulders, and its light had a bittersweet taste reminiscent of plum blossoms. She had no doubt that it was her finest work. Traces of distant cirrus clouds moved kaleidoscopically over the breast, and evening stars twinkled along the collar. It made her ache to be near it.
Finally she realized that the voice she was hearing was not really in her head—and she realized, even before she switched the lens to bring the Gray Thing into focus, why it had been so overwhelmingly difficult to perceive.
“Misery,” Jorren said. “You’re wearing a coat of felted misery.”
“The miseries of the lower city,” the Gray Thing confirmed in its rasping voice. “Poverty. Hunger. Despair. Slow death. A blend of them all.”
It hurt to look at. The coat seemed to exude noxious malaise from every matted fiber. “Could you please take it off?”
“I cannot. Its fibers long ago grew into me. It was necessary. To disappear from those who would have possessed me, and appear to those with the heart to notice.”
Jorren was surprised at the calm that came over her to ask: “You’re here to kill me. Aren’t you?”
“I was,” the Gray Thing said. “But then you noticed me.”
By the light of her creation she perceived more of her visitor’s details—how those mottled, fibrous tufts of misery had grown like mold over the anonymous body they had once contained, supplanting skin and hair. The only visibly human parts of it were the long yellow teeth in the hollow of its mouth.
“Then what do you want?” Jorren said. “Why have you been following me?”
“A hundred years have I waited for someone to make the sky again. I could no longer do it myself.” It raised what had once been its hands, fused by the organic growth of that brutal fabric into a sort of blunt claw, and made a dry chuffing sound not immediately recognizable as laughter. “At last my day has come. You will give it to me.”
Jorren clutched the jacket a little tighter. “Why do you want it?”
Its gray lips peeled back over its clenched teeth. “That I may burn the city.”
“What?!”
The Gray Thing stepped closer. “The Upper will be incinerated first, yet the flames must stop for no wall. Know that the fire in me hungers for all cruelty, Tailor. From the Swathed down to the petty ruffians and husbands’ fists. All that made me must go into that fire.”
Behind Jorren a coatrack slammed to the floor. She managed not to trip as she crept backward. “I don’t understand. Why do you want to destroy the city? How could this jacket, any jacket, do such a thing?”
The Gray Thing hissed impatiently. “What is the sky to us? When we reach for it, what is it we reach for? What in it would the Swathed reach for? What would you?”
Its innards emitted a crinkling sound like dry leaves as it closed in—then froze, stilled by a knock at the barricaded door of the shop.
“No more time,” the Gray Thing growled. “Give me the sky.”
“I don’t understand. Who are you?”
“I was you. I am what you will become if you repeat my mistake. The rest, I have already told you. Give me the sky.”
The knock came again, louder.
The Gray Thing rushed forward. Jorren tripped and fell back onto the loose floorboards with the jacket clutched to her chest. Its rasping voice rattled the windowpanes. “I can snap your neck with a nudge. Give me the sky!”
It bent over her, and its breath was so wet and rank that Jorren blessed the emptiness of her stomach. She felt her body go rigid as the claws of rotten felt curled around her wrist to pry her grip open. The fibers stabbed into her skin like spines.
An earsplitting crack rocked the room. Jorren held her breath against a blast of searing acrid fumes, and when she looked up a flaming hole had been blown through the storefront. Someone was stepping through, silhouetted against the glittering embers. Araias. Wearing extravagant dragon-tongue gloves that stretched fully up to his elbows; brandishing white-hot fingertips.
“Get out of the way, old woman.” His whole body was radiant with destructive urge as his eyes fixed hard on the Gray Thing. “You’re in danger.”
Before she could move, he unleashed another gout of flame that melted the sewing machine to glowing slag in the time it took the Gray Thing to tuck and roll out of the way. Then it lunged for Araias, and the two collided in a frenzy of swinging claws and jets of flame amid the thickening smoke.
Jorren crawled coughing from the wreckage and out into the muggy night, clutching the sky in her gloved hands. The rough, rain-damp cobblestones scraped at her knees. She looked back in time to see a final blast of dragon’s breath overflow what was left of her shop. Glowing embers spewed into the street, followed by a single wretched blood-curdling howl of inhuman anguish.
Jorren felt something swelling the skin of her wrist: a matted tuft of mold-gray fiber, sticking where the Gray Thing had touched her. She tried to wipe it off, and just then Araias stepped out of the wreckage, looking exhilarated, lifting the hem of his light coat to avoid soiling it with the soot of his own destruction.
“Misery, as it happens, is quite flammable,” he said matter-of-factly. He blew the last wisps of smoke from his fingertips. “You’re lucky I happened by. I have no idea what that creature was, but it would have killed you, I’m sure.”
He reached down to her: not to help her up, she realized, but to take the jacket. Something was itching in the back of her mind as she crawled back and stumbled to her feet. She held her creation tight.
Araias waved his hand impatiently. “I see you’re unhurt and you’ve completed your task. Delightful. Give me my order and you’ll get what you’re owed.”
She started to comply automatically, but the dragon-leather burn of his authority tangled with an alien feeling in her chest: light, cool, and pure. She froze and lo
oked down. In her scramble out the door she’d ripped her gloves on some broken glass, and when she’d grabbed at the sky she’d unknowingly touched it directly.
“Now,” Araias commanded, but all the supernatural heat radiating from his scaly belt couldn’t compel her anymore. There was a stronger power reaching from within herself, compelling her to hold the jacket even tighter.
A sort of awful sense began to weave itself in her mind.
“The Gray Thing wasn’t invisible to you at all,” she realized. “You felt no urge to look away.”
His eyes widened, astonished at her resistance. “Give me my jacket, you old coot!”
“The way you looked at it—” She swallowed hard. “It was as if misery delights you.”
Araias cracked his knuckles in their tongue-leather gloves. “I won’t ask again. The jacket. Now.”
She knew without having to think it that her chances of living to see another day were rapidly wearing thin—but she felt the cold-burning seep of the sky’s magic through the skin of her palm, and she began to understand what it was she really held in her quivering hands.
She whipped it around and stuffed her arms into its sleeves. Her body shuddered and her breath left her lungs as the fullness of the sky’s power rippled through her.
“Have you lost your mind?” Araias was shouting. “How dare you? That is my jacket!”
He clapped his hands sharply, and fifty-odd black-clad figures emerged from hiding places along the street, creeping over the crests of rooftops, darting out of alleyways, casting off sheets of shadow to reveal they’d been standing in plain sight. They carried crossbows, kukris, throwing knives, bolases, and whips hewn of every variety of supernatural leather.
Jorren raised a quivering hand to brandish her Tailor’s scissors.
Araias was incandescent with rage, but his lips peeled back into a taut grin. He tugged his gloves off finger by finger and declared to his mercenaries “I shall have no burn marks, no wrinkles, not one split seam on that jacket! You, with the crossbow. Come here.”
Elly Bangs - [BCS280 S01] - A Handful of Sky (htlm) Page 2
