“It doesn’t have to. Just long enough.”
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s try it. But when you start talking, don’t stop.”
“So long as you don’t stop listening.”
She grinned, or bared teeth. That would have to do for a yes, for now.
Zeddig set herself to harness, and took a breath, and marched away from the tracks, into the Wastes of her story.
“South of Alikand”—the name easier on her tongue the second time—“lie the flats travelers call the Fragrant Plain. Rain rarely falls here, but each year, at the death of the sun, the wind shifts to blow south from the Shield Sea, and carries an ocean’s weight of water. Rain falls. Children run through the streets, gathering rain in bowls and dousing whoever they find, fearless: professors and Grand Senators carry their books wrapped in sealskin or waxed cotton during the Festival of Rains. But the children are not the season’s greatest gift. When storms cross the Fragrant Plain, the ground floods, buried seeds sprout, and Alikander poppies bloom. You’ll find many poppy fields in this world, but none to match these: red and yellow crowning hills and spilling down like skirts. Every poppy grows here; travelers gather seeds, bring them home, and cast them forth, and the bees the honey-makers keep wed strain to strain to make new colors. Not every poppy emerges each year. Some sleep centuries until they bloom. Each year the hills change cape, and each year their fragrance gains a new character, intoxicating, cinnamons and citrus and deep deep green. When the rains pass, we emerge from our homes to parade south, family by family, bearing baskets of food and wine, and spread on the hill, a million Alikanders, to sit in silence and hear the flowers bloom.”
The air softened and warmed. She focused on the weight of her harness, on her feet and her step, and let the world blur. She smelled cinnamon and citrus, glimpsed reds and yellows to beggar dye. She knew too well what lay beneath her feet. There were no flowers anymore, and most who lived in Agdel Lex no longer remembered the winter rains, the poppy fields, the festival of silence. Little rain fell in Agdel Lex these days: it was a dry city, because it was a desert, because the Iskari believed it so. She had never known the rain herself.
But she could say the words, and Ley could hear them, and if they both believed, out here in the Wastes where belief could change the world, she could wrap them in the tale, in unwalled, ancient Alikand.
So long as she spoke.
There had been contests after the silence, of art and poetry and dance, attempts to catch the poppies’ hillside splay and pass it down through centuries. They carved stone, and painted the patterns of the hills upon their walls, and visitors from the Archipelago wove those patterns into rugs, which became an industry and art all their own, though never approaching the firsthand sight.
Aman did not remember the hills either, but her grandmother had been young before the God Wars, and remembered the silent festival as a burden children bore after water-throwing antics—but her memory endured though the fields were gone, and she returned to it as she could not return to the hills themselves, and found the scents and silences waiting.
Zeddig’s voice dried. Her legs ached, and her arms. She could not see, could not let herself see. Memory burned. If the tale stopped, if the world turned real, they’d be out in the Wastes again, or worse, within the wall, locked in stone, or dead.
She walked, and spoke, and pushed forward, blind, in hope, as the light changed, as the moon set. She told Ley about the Palatine Perfumer’s Guild, who sent people each year to gather the poppies’ scent, to bottle or fake it, and produced many symphonies in bottles but none that smelled so rich as the hillside in spring; she told of lovers’ trysts in the red; she told every story she could remember save the story everyone knew, the story that ended in fire and in ice.
But she could not speak forever. She’d place her foot wrong, turn from the path, remember that this world was broken after all.
And at last, Zeddig stumbled, and the story slipped, and she cried out—
And they did not die.
Her knees struck cobblestones, hard, and her shoulders sagged. She knelt in an alley. Clotheslines wove a cat’s cradle overhead. She breathed hot wet air. Her coat stifled her, and the harness cut her shoulders. She looked up, and over: a street vendor stood behind a cart, eyes wide beneath her scarf, ignoring the dough burning in her vat of hot oil.
And the woman, angels and saints love her, did not scream. Did not say, “Who are you?” Or “Where did you come from?” She knew.
She drew the dough from the oil, covered the vat, and knelt by Zeddig before her cart, and touched her arm, which steamed from the cold and the Wastes. “How can I help?”
Zeddig did not weep.
It felt good to be home.
Chapter Fifty-eight
IN VANE’S WAKE THE world seemed mad. She started and stopped suddenly, walked at a pace that would have been more comfortable as a jog, slammed doors, strangled knobs, stabbed buttons—but somehow she made her tempo seem ideal. Everyone, everywhere, and everything, should accept Alethea Vane’s pace. Obviously hers was correct. If not, why would she have chosen it? A door’s failure to open fast enough, a crowd’s to ebb and flow in answer to her predictions, these were obstinacy at best, rebellion at worst, and what right-thinking person would tolerate rebellion?
Kai squeezed into an elevator as it closed, brushed past Authority cops who tried to interrupt their progress, shoved out into the chill purple night of Agdel Lex, and the whole time remembered Vane’s fingers on her throat. And the whole time Vane kept talking.
“An interesting experience, to be trapped in one’s own work. We didn’t frame the project for such pedestrian use, though it’s always pleasant to find general applications. You can find soulblades aplenty at your local murder hobo supply store; the present problem is far more general. The blade does not steal. It listens, aggressively, to the soul: it pulls people in. With an integrating sentience at the core, this effect creates a common frame of reference; lacking one, it draws its subjects until they’re utterly incorporated.”
Vane stepped into the street without looking. Oncoming carriages pulled up short. Horses reared and snorted; their hooves cycled in the air and plunged to the cobblestones where Vane would have been had she not turned at the last minute to check that Kai and Tara were keeping pace. A golem cart tipped on its side; piled lemons spilled across the intersection, yellow against the stone and muck. The golem driver cursed her with a ground glass screech.
“Still with me? Good.”
Without pausing in case they answered no, Vane turned off the crosswalk and stepped into the street, picking her way through the traffic snarled around the upturned cart.
Kai glanced to Tara—she was fixed on the retreating lab coat. The Craftswoman looked like she was walking into a wind. Kai recognized that expression, had seen it on priests fresh from meeting with the kind of pilgrims who had come to Kavekana’s shores with careful, deniable questions about extradition treaties and the extent to which the priesthood might cooperate with foreign clergy in the event of criminal prosecution. Kai had felt that way herself.
Tara Abernathy didn’t like compromise. And working with Vane and the Iskari was all compromise.
Whatever. Kai didn’t like Vane, but she didn’t have to work with the woman. She just wanted to know what was going on.
So she ran out into traffic, after her.
* * *
Ley started babbling a block from the safe house. She tossed on the tarp, jerking Zeddig and the fried dough seller side to side; the dough seller fell, but Zeddig caught her, set her on her feet. “I can drag her the rest of the way.”
“You’re certain?”
“She’s my responsibility.” Zeddig put all the confidence she could fake into those words, and it must have worked. The dough seller nodded, hugged her, and left behind a cinnamon waft. After she was gone, Zeddig wondered if saying those words—she’s my responsibility—had been a confession, or a decision, or the final ac
ceptance of a decision she’d made long ago.
Ley twisted on the tarp, teeth gritted, sodden with pain. She grunted in Kavekanese, most of which Zeddig couldn’t understand. Back when they first dated, she’d tried to learn the language, checked books out of the library, practiced flashcards, but she could never tell the tones apart. No, she understood, at least.
“Come on. A few more blocks.”
She tried to slide her arms under Ley, but the woman did not keep still. She lashed out—struck Zeddig’s face, her nails leaving stinging tracks on skin.
“Work with me. We’re close.”
A hiss. A name Zeddig did not recognize. Kai’s, maybe, said in some odd case or irregular declension? Some other word, similar? “Sister”?
“Ley.” She tried again to get one arm beneath Ley’s back, but Ley, not quite awake, dug her nails into Zeddig’s shoulder. Zeddig controlled her urge to pull away, to curse or push her off. There would be time for all that when they weren’t wedged into an alley, hurting, hunted, and alone. “Ley, this won’t take long. Work with me.”
She wrapped the tarp around her to stop her thrashing, and lifted with her legs, and with her back and arms and heart. Ley fought. Zeddig would not have made it three blocks.
Good thing she only had to make it two.
* * *
“All nightmare telegraphic applications rely on a similar protocol: they exploit the tangency of human minds. The Craft uses the same principle, though your professors at the Hidden Schools, Ms. Abernathy, would warn that this analysis begs the question. A deal is a point of negotiated agreement, while the nightmare telegraph functions due to preexisting, non-negotiated unities. Unfortunately, non-negotiated unities are few in number. We’re forced to rely on deep evolutionary terrors, which burns out the communicating parties. Anyone can deploy the system safely from time to time, but the average tenure of a dedicated full-time nightmare operator hovers around eighteen months. The human filament can’t bear any more. Even with postoccupational counseling, therapy, and hypnosis, that’s a steep cost.”
Vane had not slowed. Kai’s feet complained that she’d been using them for a full day without a break. Scars pulled in her back and shoulders. Vane crossed roads and climbed stairs, still unshod. The pads of her feet flashed white beneath the lab coat’s hem. She’d bound her hair back with a tie she’d stolen from a roadside stand. Abernathy followed, wreathed with lightning, keeping them safe. When Vane stepped into the street, Tara bound the cars around her, to stop another crash. When Vane made a sharp turn and shoved a thickset man off the curb into traffic, Tara righted him.
If Vane noticed this intervention, she said nothing. She tossed a lemon in one hand, and caught it.
“Art provides an alternative: a work becomes a touchpoint for its audience. The mind is never so vulnerable save when exposed to a story.”
Tara’s step hitched. Kai caught her arm; the lightning shocked her hand. Beneath the power that wreathed her, the Craftswoman looked—spooked.
“But art is a lossy medium. We need a work that is more than a static sensory touchpoint, a work that negotiates connectivity between its onlookers. The ideal work, for our purposes, would draw people in, and mirror them. It would serve as a vacuum, calling to individual audience members, and integrating them through an independent consciousness, creating negotiated agreement. The work itself would be a responsive second-order entity, mediating the audience’s collective self through a single unifying viewpoint.”
Kai recognized this street, and the building at which Vane stopped, and the Muerte Coffee across the way. She’d been here before.
Vane stood in front of the wall, which was blank one second, and the next second contained a revolving door. Vane searched the lab coat’s pockets, frowning.
“And the Iskari sponsored this?” Kai didn’t try to hide her skepticism. “Because this is constructive theology, just from an artistic angle. You’re talking about building a god.”
“Not at all.” Vane slapped her forehead—actually slapped it, which Kai did not think was a thing people did in real life. “Sorry. The head’s still jumbled.” She stuck her hand in the revolving door, and before Kai or even Tara could respond, slammed it shut on her fingers.
The door sparked. Somewhere, a curtain tore. Space twisted.
Kai blinked. The door was turning clockwise now.
“There we go,” Vane said. “Security system’s built not to harm me or my employees. If you’d have tried that, you’d be missing a few fingers. Now, anyway, you said, right, building a god.” She grinned. “Not exactly. But we built something like a god.”
* * *
Zeddig set Ley down on the bare mattress. Streetlights filtered through thick dusty glass and glinted off the wet lines on her cheeks. Zeddig unwound her. She tensed when Ley’s arms came free, in case she’d thrash, but she stayed limp. Black pupils darted between slit lids, surveying the room, no fixings, no furniture save the bed.
“Tell me,” Zeddig said. “What’s this all about?”
“I recognize this place.”
“What did you steal from the tower?”
“That stupid door. I made that mark on the wall when I helped you move in.”
“What were you running from when you found me? What had you done?”
“Did you bring me here on purpose? Did you, gods, did you move out when I left? Because it hurt too much to remember?” Her voice twisted, sardonic, a hook in Zeddig’s guts twisting upward to the heart. That was Ley trying to change the subject.
Zeddig let the rage come, and made it go. “Answer the question.”
“The flat we shared back when we knew nothing about one another, back when you didn’t ask and I didn’t say, and we used each other to our hearts’ content. Before I got too close, and you kicked me out.”
“I trusted you,” Zeddig said. “You used that trust to make a business. But nothing you say now will change what I said in the Wastes. No matter how much that scares you. I love you, and you owe me an explanation.”
Ley closed her eyes. With her forearms as a prop, she pushed herself upright against the headboard, and hissed as her broken leg changed position. The mattress creaked beneath her weight, and the headboard, too. A dark stain climbed one bedroom wall. “The place looks grim without our stuff.”
“Yes.”
“It’s not just the missing books and tapestries and furniture.”
“Couldn’t fit the bed out the door,” Zeddig said. “I didn’t want to leave the rest.”
“It’s us. We’re not here anymore.”
Zeddig did not answer with words. She could tell from how Ley’s face changed that she had, in fact, spoken, on a level she could not control, by twitching or shifting weight or glancing down at floorboards or over at the stain on the wall.
Ley adjusted her leg and the angle of her back, untangled the knots of her neck and shoulders. Zeddig imagined her as a convalescent in some Iskari melodrama, seated on a porch, tea in hand, the axle of the stage. Her broken leg, her torn clothes, the dirt and sweat on her face, the matted hair, vanished beneath the shell of her composure.
Zeddig gave her the time she needed.
“They want—” Ley said. “That is, Vane, my old partner, wants—to destroy Alikand. And I was trying to stop them.”
* * *
The Dreamspinner workshop, Vane explained, needed nothing from the outside world. Bioluminescent algae made its light, and while the building drew water off the mains it could, in a pinch, create that as well, through basic alchemy and recycling. A hydroponics lab grew food; in the event of demonic outbreak, the entire structure could submerge beneath the city and remain static until local authorities put the situation to rights. It was a white labyrinth of winding stairs, and as they passed various laboratories, Kai saw, behind glass, rats running mazes of their own.
“I’m no fan of gods,” Vane said. “But they fascinate me—beings arising from interactions of human will. With that as our model, w
e built a vector to connect consciousness. An icon to draw the mind in, and a seed soul around which the network forms: a listening mind to serve as a bridge, a director and decider. Without that, the icon could inhale viewers’ minds, separating them from physical substrate. That’s what your sister did to me. Agdel Lex was an ideal first deployment. We could resolve its pesky indeterminacy once and for all. But of course the next step would be building a global dreamlayer. Instant communication, and a single source of truth, which would become, naturally, a single source of control.”
Vane led them up three floors and down six, until, deep below what Kai thought was ground level, they arrived at an enormous wheel-locked door. Vane turned the wheel with a groan and the full weight of her resurrected body.
“What’s my sister’s part in all this?”
“I would have thought that was obvious.” Vane pulled the door open. “She built the thing.”
* * *
“You and I split up,” Ley said, with a hitch even her self-possession could not hide, “after my show. I was so excited to share that work with you. You showed me Alikand, suspended between the Iskari and the wreckage. I wanted to show it back, the way I saw it.”
“You stole my city. You used it. You had no right.”
“Maybe I didn’t,” she said. “I wanted to capture this place. Praise it. Agdel Lex is a bridge over an abyss. The dead city is the abyss itself. And Alikand hangs between them. Everyone here lives in all three at once. If I could give people that vision, if I could tie the city together, then—”
“Then we would all be at the mercy of the Iskari.”
Ley sighed. “That’s what you said back then, too.”
“Because it’s true.”
“But after we broke up, I found a partner who liked my ideas. Who saw my exhibit, and thought, yes, exactly: cities are acts of will. Cities are decisions people make, every day. They are artist and audience and art. If we could make a thing like that—if we could use my work on Alikand as a model to build new cities, with new bonds—we could do anything. Make new, better gods. We didn’t know how to deal with the distribution issue at first—how do you get everyone in a city to stare at the same piece of art at once—but Altus solved that problem: we launch the knife into the sky, and unfold it over the city, drawing starlight for power. That was it. One weird trick, and we’d give Agdel Lex back its history.”
The Ruin of Angels--A Novel of the Craft Sequence Page 33
