“No, no. My assistant, a human, he prepared them for you. I don’t soil myself with …”
“I would expect one of your kind to associate with humans.”
This was going all wrong. “But there have always been indentured humans,” Aldram said. “For as long as I’ve been here. Hundreds and hundreds of years. We need them to do work fairies can’t do.”
“You are a fairy only in name, changeling.”
Aldram had been born in the mortal realm. But he came out wizened and old, withdrawn and given to violent fits. His bewildered parents had tried to drown the fae out of him. Instead the fae came for him. To rescue him, he’d thought.
Reva turned back to the corpses. “The coloring of these vessels is peculiar.”
“I got you only the youngest, the freshest, the best. No one can select a host better than me,” Aldram babbled. In his frantic gesturing, Aldram’s fingertips grazed against Lord Reva’s sash.
He had enough time to hope that no one had noticed before gasps erupted from the court. Reva reared back, his mouth hanging open. He gestured at a guard, who struck Aldram in the stomach.
Aldram collapsed to the floor. He gasped, trying to pull breath from his constricted chest, and scrambled to prostrate himself before the other guards could join in.
The next blow never came. Lord Reva said, “How much human trash has passed through those fingers? If you ever lay hand upon me again, you will not survive the gesture.” One of the courtiers was gingerly removing Reva’s sash. The courtier let it drop and muttered a syllable. It ignited before hitting the floor.
Reva continued, “I would give you to the flames as well. But we need you to handle the filth.”
Reva paced back and forth along the row of corpses. Aldram kept his head pressed to the floor. Reva said, “This one. Destroy the others.”
Aldram heard nine thunderclaps in succession, and then blinked as a scattering of dust blew into his eyes. Reva said, “I cannot go into my next life carrying your touch. I will return after taking purification.” The room was filled with rushing air as the court disappeared from the Recycling Tower.
Aldram levered himself to his feet. He could feel every one of the wounds he had accumulated over years of beatings. Traditionally, changelings weren’t allowed to change vessels. In his youth, his mentors had told him that gaining a new body would eliminate his resistance to iron.
Benny found Aldram slowly sweeping the transference room, wincing with each step. He took up a broom as well, and said, “Why do you put up with it?”
“Reva is the only one who can admit me to the city,” Aldram said. It might be decades, centuries, before another noble of Reva’s standing visited the Dump. His foolishness had lost him his best chance.
“They’ll never let you out of here; they need you to do their dirty work.”
“I know that I can’t stay. But I want to see what all this is for.”
Benny leaned in close. “Just get up and go. Screw all of them.”
“I don’t want to sneak in. I want to be welcome.”
“You’re never going to get a red carpet. But they know they need you. Sit yourself down on the steps of the palace and let them try to throw you out.”
Aldram pushed Benny aside. “This is my place in life. Don’t forget yours.”
“Just keep choking it all down, then,” Benny said. He stalked to one of the open doors, where his spider was waiting. He stopped abruptly. “It’s never snowed before.”
White flakes were frosting the ground of the Dump. Aldram hobbled past Benny out onto the platform. This wasn’t right. It was still searingly hot.
They stood there, watching the horizon. The thunder had gotten more frequent. Cars were falling by the dozens, smashing the mailboxes, furniture, and other trinkets already on the ground. A smear of green dropped past the platform. He looked over the edge at a metal board calling attention to “Exit 23A to Woodside.” There was a tremendous thunder-clap as a submarine appeared near the edge of the ravine with water pouring from a tear in its side. As one end hit the ground, the other one smashed into the side of the cliff and the submarine came to rest at an angle.
The flakes covered Aldram’s face and hair. When he brushed them off, they crumbled into grey specks. The sky was raining ash.
For awhile, Aldram tried to keep the dust from clogging the gears and wheels that kept the pallets running. Then the ashfall accelerated, and all of his work was undone within an hour. They spent the next week huddled under a make-shift tent of fairy cloth as the ash blanketed the ground outside. Occasionally, they would hear a clang or scrape as some human object knocked into the tower.
On one of his periodic trips outside, Aldram saw a grey-shrouded figure wading towards the tower, picking his way through the debris. Was it was a reaver, caught unawares, struggling towards a place that had once been his home? When Aldram checked a few hours later, the man was gone and the ash was a few feet higher.
The flies buzzed overhead, circling the tower at high speeds, unable to fill their trained function. More and more of them fell from the sky, exhausted. The unlucky ones landed on the ground, and disappeared. The pallets sent back from the cliffside stacked up underneath cauldrons that produced nothing.
Eight days passed before they saw the sun again, hanging static on the horizon as it traced an eons-long path across the sky. Twitching spiders and flies were strewn across the tower. Unable to die, they waited for Aldram to revive them.
Aldram heard a loud crack. A mass of blackened wood appeared, splintering when it hit a stone footbridge peeking through the ash. Of course the buildings would come next, as they slowly faded from human history. They fell throughout the day: from shacks with roofs of corrugated tin to glass palaces that shattered when they hit.
“Are you coming with me?” Benny said. He was wearing a pack and harnessing one of the spiders.
“We won’t need more bodies for some time,” Aldram said. Dozens were lying atop the ash, within easy reach.
“I’m joining the reavers. There’s no point going home now,” Benny said. His comment was punctuated by the fall of a bronze statue.
“We can use the spider to drag that out. The alchemists always need more bronze.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’ll all stop in a few days. Then the Dump will get mined out and disappear.”
“It will take years for those huge metal towers you told me about to fall into the ocean and make their way here. Centuries maybe,” Aldram said.
Benny dropped his packs and walked over to Aldram. He grabbed the fairy by the shoulders and said, “They are going to keep treating you like shit. Hell, they’ll probably blame you for all this. But we are gonna need you.”
“I need to get the pallets moving. The Other Realms must be falling apart,” Aldram said. Would they think he had abandoned his duties?
“You can go,” Aldram continued. “All the rest gave me speeches before they left. I thought you had more responsibility. But I went on without them, and I can go on without you.”
“Listen to me! Whether it’s now, or centuries from now, everything will fall apart. Come with me and start something new.”
If the humans were truly gone, how much longer would it be before Aldram picked the Dump clean? He had always known that if he waited long enough, the Other Realms would open up to him somehow. What if he no longer had eternity? Would they fade away while he waited for his chance?
“You’re as much like me as you are like them. And there’s nothing else you can do for them.”
“Alright,” Aldram said. “I’ll join you. But there’s something I need to do first.”
Aldram approached the towers obliquely, letting his spider avoid the homesteads dotting the dusty, boulder-strewn landscape that made up most of the Other Realms. He left the spider to wander beyond the hills, and set off on foot, drawing the hood of his robes over his head. Benny had argued against this detour, conjuring up all kinds of vicious punishments for his tresp
ass. But Aldram needed to see what he was leaving behind.
The city was far more complex than the austere spires Aldram had pined for. All of the towers flowed from the same thick trunk, splitting and branching, with no apparent direction or common style. One tower split off from the main trunk and plunged deep into the earth, emerging several hundred feet farther as a glass hut topped by a triangular roof. Three other strands intertwined, half a mile high, holding up a garden platform that spilled vines and roots.
Tiny figures were suspended in dew-drops of glass that clung to the sides of many of the towers, while others walked through long corridors that hung over the air. Pallets of goods zipped through the air, paying no heed to the fairies floating between the towers or crawling up their sides. As he got closer, he noticed that the towers were pockmarked with small sores, and some of the dew-drops seemed to be melting away.
At the base, the gaps between towers were obscured with green vegetation fed by springs of free-flowing water, a rarity in the lifeless Other Realms. There was a line of carts trundling out of a large gate; they were stacked high with goods and accompanied by shuffling clots of people. The vehicles overhead were more diverse, ranging from men sitting astride flying horses to castles in the air. But, amongst all the traffic, only Aldram seemed to be moving towards the towers.
A man jumped off of an observation platform, flying towards Aldram, arm outstretched. He was wearing a guard’s sash. Aldram froze. He wanted to live. But the triumph of finally seeing this place washed out his fears.
There was a gasp from somewhere behind him. Two figures and various crates, all strapped to stacked panes of fairy-glass, had flown overhead moments before. Now shouts and curses were drifting down as the platform inched backwards.
When the platform touched down next to the guard, he engaged in a short, spirited conversation with the two men standing on it. The straps sprung off the crates and the men were thrown from the platform by an invisible force. Then the guard, and the plates of glass, drifted back towards the tower, leaving the men sprawled amongst their belongings.
As Aldram trudged past, one of them called out, “There’s nothing in there for us.”
He pulled his hood tighter and tried to keep walking, even when he heard footsteps. The man said, “You’d be better off following us to the next city.”
Aldram turned around and muttered, “I had to come.”
The man recoiled when he saw Aldram’s wrinkled face. “You’re in deep trouble, my friend. Can the swap-out wait? Our changeling’s gone and gotten angry. Started a ferocious storm out in the Dump. You can’t even see the Recycling Tower for all the dust, much less get there.”
They just thought he was an old man, coming in for a transference. Aldram said, “This is my only hope.”
“Then you’d be better off trying to make your way to the Tower yourself. The lords here won’t help you. With supplies shut off, they’ve started to steal the youngest glass for themselves. We put together our place only a few weeks ago. Earlier today, someone came by and ripped half of it away. We were trying to escape with the other half, but you saw how that went. They’re not letting anyone in, and they’re not letting anything valuable out.”
“Is he coming with us?” the second man said as he paced towards them.
“No, looks like he spent too long in the Borderlands. Or maybe out in the mortal world. Has to make a swap-out fast.”
The second man looked at him as if he was already dead. “That’s all over now. The changeling went crazy when Reva was trying to get a new body. He threw human blood all over the Lord and broke out of the bonds that were keeping him trapped there. Then he brought the entire human world crashing down on us. People’ve been whispering about his human army for ages. I bet they’re all out there, waiting for us to disappear.”
Aldram felt a tingling build up behind his heart, and he struggled to cut off his laughter. “What does it look like from up there? At the very top?”
“You’ve been in the beyond for too long. We’d get blasted out of the sky if we even started to float up to the palaces,” the first man said.
“Come, we’d better keep moving. Before they come back and decide that they like the looks of our clothes too,” the second man said. He turned back towards the upended crates.
The first man stared at Aldram for a few moments. His hand drifted up to his face, and then he turned away as well.
The two men headed off, their crates skating along beside them, leaving Aldram with a city that was cannibalizing itself.
Aldram imagined the city stripping away the accretions of countless generations, until, within only a few years, it was a solitary tower staring out over a ravine still filled to the brim with toxic iron that could have been used to rebuild—if only someone was able to collect it. And then even that tower would shrink, until all that remained to mark this place was a patch of flattened ground.
“Finally satisfied your curiosity?” Benny said when Aldram entered the cave. He gathered his packs. “When I was out scouting, I saw footprints and spider tracks in the ash. Looks like some reavers were holed up in a cave nearby. We can head towards them as soon as you’re rested.”
“I’m going back to the tower. And I want you to come with me.”
“I ought to have known that you’d lose your nerve,” Benny said. “But you’re a fool if you think I’m going to spend another ten years slaving for you just so I can go back to a burned out, blasted Earth.”
“Then don’t go back. The city needs us. It’s falling apart.”
“If they needed us so bad, then they should have treated us better. Now their time is over, and even if you work hard as you can, you’re only going to put a few more years in front of the crash.”
“Even if that city is fated to disappear, it can’t be because of me.”
“You’ve lived in the Dump longer than anyone alive. We need you. And we won’t shit on you for it.”
Benny was pleading. Did he need Aldram so badly? Or was he afraid to lose his only friend? “Leave me, if that’s what you need to do. But what can the reavers give you?” Aldram said. “After we’re gone, the spiders and flies will die. The human food in the Dump will run out. This world is not habitable without magic, and you have none. Come back with me. We’ll tough out these final days together.”
Benny harnessed his packs to the spider. “You and your kind,” he said. “You eat garbage. Do you know that? You’re just a bunch of rats who scurried around in our trash. Human beings aren’t like that. When you’re all gone, we’ll crawl out of this heap and figure out how to put it all back together.”
The Recycling Tower was already starting to show gaps where the fairy-glass had faded away. Aldram could see the builders camped out at cliff’s edge, unable to repair the tower. Within a year, the Recycling machinery would have faded to uselessness.
Aldram began by reviving the flies lying in the ash. Gradually, the legions of insect gatherers rose into the air and began to root through the ash with their slender forearms. They had to burrow deep, but a trickle of supplies began to run through the cauldrons again.
He spent days crawling through the depths of the Tower, scraping ash from the gears, shuddering as he moved past pits of iron and steel. Before long, his repair trips became mindless journeys, where only the fear of collapsing in those tunnels and being sapped dry kept him moving.
He had only managed to get an intermittent stream of pallets moving when Reva and his entourage appeared. Aldram hadn’t had time to clean the transference area yet. He lumbered towards a corner, and rooted through the dust for the broom.
“I see that you haven’t stopped neglecting your duties,” Reva said. “Why were our supplies interrupted?”
Aldram’s efforts with the broom were just moving the dust around, and when he tried to sweep faster his joints cracked with each movement. There were tendrils of fear in his spine, but he was too exhausted to let them dominate him. Aldram stared at Reva, looking in
to his eyes for the first time.
“Your only function is to maintain this tower, and you failed.” Reva looked at the body he had selected earlier, which still stood in the center of the room. “My vessel is filthy. Another failure.”
Aldram withdrew a cloth and began to dab at the corpse’s face. He wiped away the make-up along with the caked layers of ash, revealing the scars underneath.
“What is wrong with its face? I will not limp through this life in a cracked vessel.”
“There was a war in the human world,” Aldram said. He had gone through too much to let Reva heap new indignities upon him. He continued to clean the corpse, rubbing away the scabs and baring the raw skin underneath. “This is all there is. Better than you deserve.”
“That is not acceptable,” Reva said. “You will have to find an unscarred vessel.”
Aldram turned to face Reva, looking him in the eyes for the first time. “The humans blasted their world to pieces,” he said. “There are no unscarred vessels.”
“Do not contradict me,” Reva said. He sucked in his breath and exhaled sharply. “What about that human that was skulking around here? He seemed in fine shape.”
“He’s gone,” Aldram said.
“You will direct my men to him.”
Aldram began to inscribe the runes in the body’s scarred and blackened face. He did the work with his fingers, enjoying Reva’s horror at each pass. The skin came off under his nails, coating his fingers. “The body is nearly ready for you, my Lord.”
“Tell me where the human went!”
Aldram waited until he had drawn the last rune on the body’s forehead before he said. “Now all you have to do is take my hand.” His blackened fingertips stretched towards Lord Reva.
The guard closed in, but Reva waved him away. “Fine,” he said. “If this is all that you have been able to find, it will do for the short term. Get on with the procedure.”
“Take my hand,” Aldram said, moving closer.
Reva continued to back away. “That is not required. I have already prepared myself.” He spoke a few words, and glowing runes appeared on his face. “Finish the transference and we will leave you.”
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 26 Page 8
