Out of the Ruins

by Preston Grassmann

  “And what if a bloc expires?” Manjari asks. “Or runs out of coins completely?”

  “Then when the last members of a bloc expire, the coins left in their sack are redistributed,” says Lydon, ignoring Manjari’s second question.

  “But… why did you bring three sacks?” you ask. You look at Lydon, then look at Yi San, who looks impassively back at you, his nanos muted, and then you look at Jeremy, who also mutes his nanos, but meaningfully. Theologically, even.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” says Lydon. “To secure your vote. The other blocs have agreed—”

  “They agreed to the war,” Yi San says quietly, but he turns his nanos back on for emphasis. “But we got them to agree to proxy their votes, and count them toward any non-violent equivalent action that’ll get us what we need without going to war, without bloodshed or danger. We can use our excess coins to get even more coins, then buy the bridge, dismantle it, sell the scrap for more coins, and then…” Yi San drones on for a bit. He and Lydon have big big plans, and this bloc is an important one as it includes both Mankill and Boroughton citizens and it’s clear that Lydon won’t be retiring anytime soon. You look over at Jeremy again, who glances down at the cutting board.

  You snatch up all the mushroom slices—they’re cut into coin shapes, you notice for the first time—and jam them into your mouth. Your senses explode instantly, your nanos spin widdershins. Your consciousness floods into the bodies of your bloc, then shoots out the top of your head and fills the skies over both Mankill River City and Boroughston. You ate way too much, way too fast, and the only way out is up. You can see it all now, understand every cognition and decision, grasp the entire economy like the algorithms were a cat’s cradle stretched between your fingers. You run a zillion calculations, see a bazillion fates flare into existence and fade out. The sky is slate gray, a board on which you can write anything. It makes sense, it makes sense.

  But where the fates have darkened lies that great shadow, a doom in the shape of man. Lydon Walker. The coins don’t need a pusher; they’ll push themselves. In every one of them, you see now, Lydon Walker has embedded one of his own nanos. He won’t push the economy, he’ll be the economy. That’s the dark trick, the thing that turns utopia into dystopia every single time.

  But it still makes sense. It’s the only way. Coins and Lydon Walker in every pocket, always and forever, or the algorithms failing here and there, people occasionally starving or suffering, blocs falling into bickering, wars of dozens on dozens like in the beforetimes.

  The mushrooms have another idea—you can fly even higher, beyond the bird’s-eye view of the river cities, beyond the green planet. You can wear the very sun upon your forehead and be a great big cosmic everything and then it won’t matter what happens to Emmal and Aftixi and the rest because…

  No. That’s no solution, that’s just more fleeing. The solution, the real one, is right before you. Your eyes are open, the secret yours! Emmal’s knife, forged in the ancient days before the nanowars. It’s light in your hand, and you’re light on your feet, and now you are upon the table and now you are upon Lydon Walker and the knife goes in easy and he is mostly bereft of his nanos so he almost dies right in front of you, on the Feast of Saint Nicholas like some kind of dark trick, but he’s big and stronger and he rallies, and so you jump up in the air again and kick out both feet and with a two-legged kick push him right out of his hovercloak and he stumbles backward out the window and you land flat on your back.

  You are stunned. Your bloc is stunned. When you get your wind back, when the cosmos stops spinning on the axis of your spine, you look out the shattered window and see Lydon Walker dead and broken four stories below. That’s your solution. Be a tolkach, a pusher, but instead of pushing the economy where you think it needs to go, you’ll be there to push back, every single time.

  Chris Kelso and Preston Grassmann

  1.

  MAHIRO turned his head up to the sky, staring at the permanent veil of cloud that divided their world from that of the gods. There were four mountains, each with its own caste, rising above the empires of Edo. Rivers coiled between them like poisonous snakes, twisting through a wasteland of fallen shrines, where the names of the dead had long-since vanished from the stones. Somewhere high above the graveyard city, cosmic deities watched on from behind that smoky curtain. The memory of their wrath clung to Mahiro’s body like wet dirt.

  Now, strong winds came and dark sentinels appeared at the edge of the cloud, the cords of their masters dangling behind them.

  “The God-puppets of the Olde Ones,” he said, more to himself than anyone in particular. Mahiro wished he could pluck them out of the sky and watch the bastards fall.

  “A pale red rose falls

  Cut down from the sky above

  Sharp thorns take revenge.”

  “Ahhh, that’s a much better one,” Ki said turning to his brother. The air was keen with the hot stench of the mines.

  “How about this one:

  We never stop crying

  The gods never end their weeping

  Suffering never ends.”

  “That’s not exactly a haiku, but it’s not bad,” Mahiro said and ruffled his little brother’s hair. Ki grimaced, shrugging off Mahiro’s habit of treating him like a child. At the rate he was growing, it wouldn’t be long before he was towering over his brother.

  “Do you remember what it was like to see the jewels falling for the first time?” Ki asked, pointing at the gem-like forms glittering among the shrines. Each one represented a single soul, tossed down from the clouds. Some Bomesha believed the jewels were nothing more than the remnants of a soul’s pain, or the ash and dust of bodies remade by the poisons of the veil. Mahiro, however, was convinced that they were the refracted memories of a soul’s yearning; the prism chambers of an individual’s desires and dreams. There were days the clouds hung low and the brothers would catch wisps of rogue memories, the final moments of a death replaying in their heads. One thing was certain, though: the gods gained power with each life they consumed, and what remained fell through the clouds to be mined by the exiles and sold to the banished sorcerers of the outer world.

  “I remember the mourners watching the jewels fall.”

  “There was a man, a father. He kept running, tripping over shrines and broken stones, so sure that he would recognise his wife.”

  “They tried to find out which one was hers…”

  “…and they couldn’t find her. Just like we couldn’t find our mother,” Ki said.

  “We have to conquer our grief, brother. The gods will use it against us.”

  2.

  Times were at their sternest in Hachimantai and the city certainly struggled to hide its scars. Each day, the gods dropped more and more refuse from the sky, and it piled high among the ruins, filling the streets with reminders of how little these people meant to the Olde Ones.

  Mahiro woke, facing the stone grave that he used to mark out the days remaining until Obon. A strange loneliness filled his heart. He turned to tell his brother that there was only a week remaining, but Ki was nowhere to be found. Mahiro walked outside to see the wind pulling streams of poison out of the cloud. Some of the exiles wandered through the plumes. Others stood motionless, lost in their memories of the dead replayed in the private theatre of their minds.

  “Ki,” he screamed, but there was no answer. He walked through a labyrinth of graves, dodging the cloud streams that swirled around him. Mahiro eventually found his brother staring up at the sky from the edge of a mine, carving into his own arm with the jagged end of a jewel. Panic filled Mahiro—he feared Ki’s awakening sadness more than the behemoths on the other side of the veil.

  “Wait!” he shouted. He knocked the jewel out of his brother’s hand, but Ki only turned away and began wandering off through the shadowy skeletons of the shrines, blood streaming down his arm in crooked branches. Mahiro followed, tried to wake him from his poison-dreams.

  “Wait for revenge, brother
. Whatever it takes, we’ll find our way back, we’ll put an end to the gods for what they’ve done. I promise you, Ki… we will get our revenge.”

  He shook Ki by the shoulders and tried to look earnest, but even Mahiro didn’t believe himself.

  3.

  With only four days until Obon, the village had settled into silence. Obon was the time of year when everyone would pay their respects to those they had lost, when the souls of the dead would return. That morning, a familiar figure stood up in the crowd, as if shaking off shackles binding him to the graves. His name was Tsukai. A true bastion of the miners’ union, Tsukai was an imposing and powerfully built exile. At times, Tsukai was a heretic and dissident on matters of religion, but he was an invaluable source of knowledge when it came to the gods and their aberrations. His thick forearms hung loose by his waist and both sets of knuckles were clenched into jagged knots of bone. Every muscle in his body surged with the inducement of excessive labour.

  “The fallen souls can become active again during Obon,” he said, lifting himself up to stand on the remains of shrine. He was already the tallest of the exiles, but standing on the ruins of that stone monument, he appeared like a giant.

  “One week a year, the dead return, and if you build them a body they will come and they will stay!”

  Tsukai rarely spoke, but when he did the exiles surged around him, as if his words were coins tossed among the ruins. It was hope that flickered through the crowd, eyes burning as if they all shared something with the jewels—hope and desire.

  “A body?” someone asked.

  “The jewels can be assembled, made into a form that the souls can recognise,” he said. “That form will help them remember who they once were and how they had died, and they will fight for their living kin.”

  “How can they fight the gods?” Mahiro asked.

  “Even the Olde Ones can’t defeat the dead.”

  4.

  They began by making miniature versions of the dead. During this process, Mahiro’s thoughts quickly turned to his mother and father. He was glad Ki had not seen the things he had seen—his sadness was already intense and rooted without further images of murder and chaos. And witnessing the murder of his father was something that never left Mahiro… could never leave him.

  The memories of that day were clear as the unclouded sky of their god-stolen city. Mahiro remembered watching an entity appear in their parents’ shop one afternoon. The candles surged, flaring a sleek image into prominence—long black hair like rivers breaking against rocks, forming into two streams. There was something inherently wrong with his physiognomy, as if blurred by hideous, dangling appendages, and when he began to lift his head the muscles in his great neck strained, like pulleys raising a statue onto a temple wall.

  Their father stood at the entrance, bowing before the ambivalent god, offering a prayer.

  “Such craftsmanship,” the beast said. “In all the worlds of gods and men, there has never been a sword-maker like you. And you would throw it all away to save a few peasants?”

  Their father said nothing. Mahiro just watched from the storeroom.

  “You can’t sheath your thoughts as well as you sheath a sword,” the dark one said. “We are gods for a reason.”

  Mahiro would never forget that cosmically weary stare. He could see how many souls had drowned inside it.

  5.

  In the distance, they could see the gold towers and statue-lined temples of the merchants. Further away, the mountain farmlands rose up in long jagged tiers, covered in trellises and training lines for crops. Mahiro and Ki had never known those mountains. They had grown up in a world before the Olde Ones came. Their indifference to humanity soon turned to hatred as their hollow hierarchies continued to grow. They quickly turned the samurai into puppets for a new system, a caste of gods instead of men, who stole souls to feed their famished egos. The boys’ mother and father had planned to leave the city, but they never made it.

  “We have to prepare,” Mahiro said. He could catch glimpses of dark memories as the cloud-tunnels formed. It filled his mind with images of Kamaitachi and Joro-Gumo, monsters that had filled the streets before they fled. He saw a giant skeleton assembling itself out of bones—Gashadakuro. Others around him stumbled, trying to push past their own visions of death as they worked. Whatever had been left of their homes seemed to reside in the crooked ruins of their own bones, the resignation of those who believed they had nowhere else to go.

  “Do you see the lights?” Mahiro asked, holding a jewel up. “Look.” The light inside was visibly brighter.

  The crowd of slaves marvelled at the dancing specks inside the jewels and fell to their knees and began to pray to gods much older than the ones above their city.

  They sought to pull their collected jewels together, testing them as quickly as they could. Some of them worked on the arms, while others forged the legs. The brothers pieced the head together.

  “Do you think mother and father are here?”

  “I don’t know, Ki,” Mahiro said honestly, observing his brother’s bandaged forearms with a frown. “But the hierarchy of Hachimantai will end if this works and the dead will finally have their say.”

  Some of the exiles began to weep, others kneeled. This body was their shrine now, their place of worship, not the tombstones and the graves of the gods who exiled them. They watched light flood through its form, glimmers of spirit flowing from its head to its legs, a latticework of colours opening around them.

  6.

  The clouds opened and closed like the mouths of hungry koi. They all knew the Oni were coming down from Hachimantai first, preparing the way for the Olde Ones. The long roots spread out behind their red bodies, oozing with a substance that blackened the earth behind them.

  The joints of the communal body creaked. Its limbs began to shudder, as if the souls were competing for control of its functions. Before long, it settled, and its head rocked back and forth. Screams came from around the shrines, and the exiles began to kneel around the form. It burned with internal fires, flowing through its body like an aurora. Ki walked up to the form and ran the rough of his palm across a collection of jewels. The lights burned more brightly where his fingers touched. He put his ear to its heart and saw it glow beneath his head.

  “Is that you, mother?” Ki asked, as if he already knew the answer.

  “Stay with me, Ki. The gods are coming!”

  “She’s the heart, Mahiro.”

  “They’re coming, brother.”

  He hadn’t anticipated the arrival of the Oni so soon. But there were other gods and monsters. He saw the Gashadokuro again, the skeleton made from the bones of the dead, but it was much larger than it had been when he saw it in the old city. He saw a group of Katakirauwa running down the slope, the ghosts of baby pigs that steal souls when they go between the legs. There was even a Tsuchigumo, with the body of a tiger, the segmented limbs of a spider, and the head of a demon. The same primal ooze poured down from all their bodies. The poison cloud opened and they came too fast, running down from the veil.

  The exiles screamed and ran to hide behind the tombs and gravestones, but they soon became their own burial. The procession of gods and monsters descended too fast for them to escape and they vanished in clouds of blood-red mist or were consumed alive. Mahiro turned to his brother, but it was already too late. He had been so badly burned that his face was gone. Ki had fallen to his knees, the charred mask of sinew and bone weeping in a grotesque deluge and mixing with the soil below. Mahiro screamed, watching the smoke pour off Ki’s kneeling body, but a moment later he saw a light pull away. It began to flow into the jewelled body and the form began to sway. It motioned forward, as if it suddenly knew its purpose. It lifted itself and walked toward the mountain, crushing the monsters and god-puppets with its limbs. The jewels that littered the ground started to roll, gathering into sections of its body. For a moment, it faced Gashadokuro, two giants, one made of bones, the other of jewels. A fist made of a t
housand angry dead souls struck out and splintered the chest of the giant skeleton into shards of femur and skull and spine. As it continued, Mahiro heard the clash of Oni against it, but their forms were too frail. They lay crushed on the ground like the petals of flowers. Soon, the cloud tunnels began to break apart, until all that remained was the smell of sulphur. Some of the god-puppets had fled through holes in space, but most had been destroyed.

  Mahiro saw a thousand reflections of himself in the jewelled form, running through prisms of a desire that had been accomplished. A moment later, the jewels began to fall, starting with the head. It looked like a waterfall, as they glistened and scattered into pools across the mountainside.

  * * *

  Ki heard through the chaos, the sound of water. He and his brother used to play near water often, kicking stones into the stream bank, watching the water sweep from the hollows and ambling beside its current, and he remembered the day he walked up the bank and saw his mother. She was looking up at a sky with no clouds.

  We will stop crying

  The gods will end their weeping

  And suffering ends.

  His mother had spoken the words.

  For the first time in many years, Ki could see the sun through the cloud above the mountain.

  Jeffrey Thomas

  WHEN he regained consciousness, he found himself facing a curved window. There was no way he couldn’t be facing it; the window was situated a short distance in front of him, and he was fastened tightly in his seat.

  Outside the concave window, autumn filled his view, so entirely that the space capsule could have been resting on the floor of an ocean of autumn, drowned in autumn. He was also viewing this sight through the concave face shield of the helmet he wore over his head. A succession of windows, like the multiple lenses of a microscope, or telescope.

  He didn’t remember his name, or how he had come to be here, yet somehow he had vague, dreamlike recollections of being a child who had loved the beauty of autumn and the month-long season of Halloween, but at the same time had dreaded the coming of fall for heralding in a new school year—forced once again to rejoin the laughing, shouting, taunting, bullying ranks of other children.