by Mike Allen
“Where is the fleet?” the people whispered. Their whispers turned to wails when they saw the scant dozen ships that limped into port, and heard the mournful dirge they sang.
The rest would not return, the statues might have heard the sailors say. They were burned or sunk, along with the armadas of Melkurr and the Gil-Gadin. Melkurr was defeated, its capital sacked, and the sheikdoms were falling one by one.
From their plinths before the gate, the statues could have watched the angel battle to reach his tower roost. Were their eyes acute, they might have seen the trail of blood that mingled with the rain, and seen that, as it fell, it turned to glimmering dust.
Had the statues walked the city streets, they might have witnessed the wonders where the dust alighted. Cobblestones turned to clumps of poppies. Some grew legs and scuttled away. Downpipes turned to twisting vines, or pythons that insinuated themselves through the windows of the houses. A colony of pigeons grew arms, and minds that thought, and plotted war against the rats and starlings who raided their nests. People who were touched by the dust burst apart into clouds of copper bees, or turned inside out, for golden-boughed trees to spring from their quivering guts.
The angel slumped gratefully over the high balustrade of his refuge. Had the statues chanced to look up, they would have seen a last drop of blood turn to dust as it fell.
* * *
Her eyelids fluttered. She heaved a raw breath, then another. For a long time, that was all she did, her new mind aflood with the sensations of her body, and all the memories of things she would’ve seen and known, had she always had eyes that saw, ears that heard. Centuries of days and nights overlaid the deserted plaza. Harvest dances and winter stillness, the red crackle of solstice bonfires and the smoke and clamour of war. Changeless through it all was the petrified stare locked on hers, stone fingers always reaching, never touching.
She swayed, wincing as the briars that wreathed her hooked their barbs into newly soft skin. She shifted her arms, to extricate herself, and cried aloud when she saw the flat stump that ended her left arm above the wrist.
A memory swam to the surface, of Yng’finail Reavers fighting the beast-headed slave warriors of Avalae, a massacre dance of iron blades on bronze, swirling about the plinths. A wild-swung halberd struck her wrist, splinters showering the wielder. She remembered the fractures spreading through her arm as the temperature fell and rose in the nights and days and weeks that followed until, with a crack one frosted morning, the hand tumbled from her wrist.
Her breaths became sobs. The briars stabbed her anew. Moving slowly, whimpering at every tear of her skin, she freed herself from their embrace and shoved the mess of vines from her plinth. She sank down into a crouch, and shivered in the cold rain. The sounds of the restless city assailed her, disorienting. She crept her toes forward until they found the edge of the plinth, and clung there, vertiginous and confused.
A flicker of lightning caught a glint of wet stone in the edge of the briar patch. With a yell, she leapt from the plinth, powered by muscles that did not know, yet, how to properly obey command. Hip, hand and stump met the cobbles. She lay, winded and gasping, staring up through the rain at the black silhouette of the tower that filled half the sky.
When the breath had found its way back into her lungs, she rolled over and crawled to the spot where she’d seen her severed hand. She cradled it, cold and unfeeling against her breast.
Her gaze strayed up again, to the statue of her mate, like her hand still etched in stone. He was all but featureless in the gloom. Higher still, to the balcony that marked the angel’s roost, where the mages of Avalae had summoned their fabulous winged beasts to take them hunting, once upon a time. She saw in her mind the angel’s latest, agonized return. The tower gate was closed, and there were no windows in its face to show if light and life existed within, except the balcony, and it was dark.
A hand gripped her arm, hard fingers bruising new skin. A rough voice said, “’Allo, lovely.” Sniggered.
She twisted, lashing out blindly with her stone hand. Her ears rang with memories of screams cut short, terrible sounds of fright and injury in the shadows at the plaza’s edge.
The man retreated, cursing loudly, cradling a forearm bruised, at least, or fractured.
She registered an answering shout from across the plaza. Another man, or several, she didn’t wait to see. Clutching her stone hand to her chest, she fled.
She ran down well-lit streets, where the private guards of the well-to-do eyed the first nervous citizens ascending from the city below to come demand the angel’s counsel. All stopped to stare, amazed, at the naked woman who sprinted past.
At the foot of the hill, the streets grew darker. She heard the grumble of larger crowds ahead. She slowed, clutching at the stitch in her side, and turned from the main avenue. The cold air burned her lungs, her legs shook and her uncallused heels ached from pounding on the cobbles.
The doorways along this street were alcoved, the frontages colonnaded with the long bones of giants, the doors themselves shrouded in shadow. Blankets spilled into the rain from one, nearby. Shivering violently now, she crept over and reached with tentative fingers. She began to tug at the wet hem of the topmost blanket, then abruptly withdrew her hand. There was a body underneath the covers. She waited, but there came no cry of protest.
She tugged on the blanket again, gathering it into her lap, ready to flee at the first sign of movement. Her hand touched an outflung limb. The flesh was cold.
She drew the first blanket around her shoulders and dragged the remaining covers from the corpse. Bundling them to her chest, she crept to the next alcove along the street. She wrapped herself as tightly as she could, tucking her legs against her chest and pulling the blankets over her head, holding them closed with her single hand. After a time, her shivering stilled and she felt something approaching warmth.
She slept, and her dreams were filled with the black stone features of her mate.
* * *
Consciousness returned slowly. The clatter of hooves punctured her dreams, then the creak and crack of a cart following, the drum of passing feet, random snatches of conversation. With a start, she came fully awake.
She raised her head to peer beneath the blanket’s fringe, blinking against the morning light. The rain had ceased, but the clouds remained heavy. The street was filled with people.
Most were Yng’finail, the city’s current masters, red of skin and silver-pale of eye and hair. Slight figures wove among them, coal black skins stark against white robes and shining gold-in-gold eyes—Gil-Gadin, she had seen their like beneath the angel’s tower. A trio of brown-skinned warrior women stalked past, their spiny manes held erect, open vests displaying the scars left by severed breasts.
Others in the crowd were stranger and less human. She remembered them, the cruelly fashioned playthings of the Avalae. Folk with the furred heads and naked tails of rats, scuttling on four limbs or two as the need took them, their eyes the glowing gold of Gil-Gadin. A hairless Yng’finail, pushing himself awkwardly along on a serpent’s coils. A gargoyle leaning on a cane, too old to fly anymore, her once powerful wings twisted with arthritis, copper feathers tarnished green.
All of them, human and less so, had an agitation about them. They moved with a step more hurried and a nervous indecision, both, that on a different day might have been absent. Tempers were quick as people got in each other’s way. But only threats and curses were exchanged. It seemed no one had the stomach for trading blows.
A rumbling beat penetrated the hubbub. It resolved into the sound of dozens of feet—booted, hoofed or clawed—treading in not-quite-unison. A company of soldiers marched by, their armour an irregular assortment of lamellae and baked leather, only a handful with helms of any kind, the rest in felt caps or bareheaded. The weapons on their shoulders made an ugly forest of mismatched steel.
“And what’s this, cluttering my step?” said a deep voice, startlingly close.
The door had o
pened behind her. A cassocked figure filled the frame. Blue human eyes glared down at her from a horned bovine face. Sparse hair covered a hide as thick and dimpled as citrus peel. She had seen his kind stand like colossi on the last day of Avalae while Yng’finail Reavers slaughtered their lesser brethren around them, until weight of numbers and iron blades brought them down, too.
“Be gone,” the minotaur said, lifting an arm to strike backhanded.
She scrambled back, shaking her good arm free of her blankets. She raised the stone hand in warning while she got her feet under her. The minotaur’s eyes widened as she retreated into the sunlight.
He followed, raising his hand again, but palm outward this time. “Wait.”
But she was already running. A carthorse flapped its neck frills in warning as she skipped in front of it. She ducked the half-hearted swipe of the carter’s crop and pushed on through the crowds.
The cobbles were cold and slippery wet, her feet bruised and aching from her running the night before. She soon slowed to a hobbling walk. She had no direction in mind, no knowledge of the city beyond the plaza where she had stood. She passed terraces of shops and houses walled with brick and stone and black iron plate, others roofed in bright canvas to resemble the sails of ships. Others still were grown of living trees woven tight together.
Lost, she let the pedestrian tides carry her where they would, until her attention was arrested by the aromas of a pie seller’s stall. His wares were heated over a bed of coals in the iron belly of his spider-legged cart. Her stomach knotted painfully as she watched a man walk away with a steaming pastry. She sidled closer, wondering if she might snatch a pie and run.
She noticed a boy staring at her, narrow-eyed and blunt nosed, a younger, leaner version of the pie seller. He tapped a leather cosh meaningfully against his thigh.
Downcast, she retreated, and walked on.
She passed a golden tree, growing in the centre of the thoroughfare. Beneath it, a trio of hook-beaked gargoyle men confronted a party of soldiers with axes. A gargoyle woman knelt between them, wailing and tearing at copper breastfeathers.
The black tower loomed above the rooftops. She turned towards it. Her pulse quickened as she ascended the hill, a twinge of fear as she remembered the man she had injured the night before.
Reaching the plaza, she saw that her anxiety was needless. A mob had gathered before the angel’s keep, demanding entry. Soldiers watched them, but made no move to intervene. No one had any attention to spare for her.
She stopped beneath the petrified figure of her mate. His features were opaque with the sun behind him. She stretched up, but his outstretched hand was too high for her to reach. She pulled aside the briars that covered his foot and ran her fingertips over the shape of his toes. The stone was as ungiving as the severed hand she clutched against her belly.
A loaded cart arrived, and people started piling wood for a bonfire. She cleared a nest among the briars, on the side of her mate’s plinth that faced the tower, then sank down and curled her limbs around the hollow misery of her belly.
* * *
She started from a torpid daydream, of her mate smiling, his stone visage turned to flesh, his fingers grasping hers.
The minotaur looked down at her.
She levered herself up, fumbling for her stone hand.
Panic made her clumsy, and she dropped it in the briars at her feet. With a yelp, she bent to grab it.
“Be still,” the minotaur said. “I’ll not hurt you.”
She paused, warily, the stone hand half raised. He gazed at her in silence for a time, then his blue eyes shifted to look at the male statue.
“How did this come to be?” he asked.
She opened her mouth, struggling to shape a response. Although she understood him, like a small child, she lacked the skill to form words of her own. She pointed to the grand balcony.
The minotaur gave a bovine snort and took her by the wrist. Dragging her along in his wake, he marched towards the tower.
A few, braver or more angry than their fellows, still beat at the gate with mallets and staves. The blackened iron seemed to drink the sounds of their blows into itself. The hammerers fell back at the minotaur’s arrival. He raised his fist, muttering beneath his breath, then struck the door, three times. With each blow a boom like the striking of a gong echoed inside the tower.
For a time, there was stillness. Then a postern cracked ajar within the surface of the gate and an Yng’finail head peered out. The man’s hair was yellowed with age and his skin a jaundiced orange. His pale eyes blinked and watered in the daylight.
“We seek audience,” said the minotaur.
The old man licked his lips. His eyes flickered to the minotaur’s companion, still caught by the wrist, and back again.
“Forgive me, m’lord,” he said. “There’ll be no audience today.”
He began to withdraw, but the minotaur raised a hand to stay him. “When?” he asked.
The man started an answer, thought the better of it and stuttered to a halt. “I cannot say.”
He shrank back as the minotaur leaned towards him. “If he is hurt, I might aid him.”
The old man’s eyes went wide. He stepped back abruptly through the door and shut it behind him.
An angry mutter passed through the crowd. The minotaur snorted. A human might have sighed.
“Go to your homes,” he said, and turned on his heel. He let go his captive’s wrist. “Go.”
She stared at his broad back as he strode from the tower. The hammerers closed again around the gate. She struggled free, buffeted and bumped, and hurried after the minotaur. She tugged at his sleeve to stop him, and pointed to the male statue.
The slump of his shoulders was answer enough. He said, “Only he who gave life to you can give it to your mate. I cannot help.”
She fought with her tongue. “When?”
The minotaur glanced back at the tower. He shook his head. “Come back tomorrow, and see.” The pocked skin around his eyes was tight, as though something pained him. “Come. I will see you fed. You can bed in front of my hearth. Cassiann, is my name.”
She looked back over her shoulder, at her mate in his cloak of briars. Her gaze travelled up the black face of the tower, to the balcony, silent to the entreaties raised below.
They returned to Cassiann’s house. He had to duck his head to fit through the door, and remain stooped, inside, so as not to scrape his horns on the ribs of the ceiling. Inside, a wooden bench stood along one side of the hall. The door of the front room was open, the room lined with shelves of jars and vials and tins, every one labelled in meticulous script. A high table with an ornate set of scales stood in the centre and, to the rear, a padded couch and scale curtain to pull around it.
He was an apothecary, Cassiann said, and when it was plain she did not know the word, explained that he healed people with magic and medicine. He led her down the hall to the kitchen and parlour in back. He pointed to the stairs, leading up to rooms where he slept and studied, and showed her the larder, the lavatory chute and the water pump. He tossed a fresh log onto the hearth, set out fruit and cheese, and a bowl, and cloths, for her to wash herself, should she wish. Then he said he had customers to prepare for, had missed appointments already. He closed the hallway door, and she was alone.
She stuffed the food into her mouth, hardly chewing before she swallowed. Finished, she wriggled back in the seat of his solitary chair, so that her feet dangled clear of the ground. Her stone hand was cold beneath her living palm. She stared into the flames that licked inside the hearth. Her stomach still grumbled, but her hunger lacked the urgency it had before.
Presently, she heard voices, the minotaur’s and another, higher in pitch. She listened for a while, idly trying to discern their words. Her gaze wandered around the room, settled on the staircase, then up the curve of the wall to the joists of timber and giant ivory that crossed the ceiling.
She slipped down from the chair.
; The lowest stair creaked beneath her foot. She crept quietly up, across the small landing at the top and into the bedroom. She padded past the long bed, to the window that opened over the street. The panes of polished leviathan scales let in light, but revealed only the murkiest outlines of the world beyond. She examined the latch, gave it an experimental tug. The window swung outward. She pushed it open.
Cool air brushed over her face and arms. She leaned her elbows on the damp sill and gazed up at the dark tower, high on its hill. She saw a black stone face, and fingers reaching for her own.
* * *
She awoke early the next day, in the dull red light of the coals in the hearth. Her mate’s face faded slowly from her mind’s eye.
Cassiann was already in his surgery, mixing powders. He paused when she appeared in the doorway. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.”
She shook her head.
The minotaur returned to his work, tipping a measure of pale green powder into a jar already half filled with white. He stoppered the jar and shook it vigorously to mix the powders together, then placed the jar on a shelf. His hand lingered. He seemed to be gazing at something other than the shelves in front of him.
“It is a lonely thing, to be unique,” he said, suddenly. “My people’s shaping occurred elsewhere in the realms of Avalae. Our nation holds the islands to the west of here. It has been a long time, since I was forced to leave them.”
He fell silent again, ordering the ranks of jars. He stopped, faced her. With an abrupt stride, he closed the gap between them. He reached out, jerkily, to touch her cheek. “My people were made to adore those whose shape you wear,” he said.
His fingertips were dry and smooth. He traced the shape of her ear, the rapid pulse that arose in the side of her neck. His hand paused at her collarbone, then slowly eased the blanket from her shoulder.
Carefully, she stepped backwards through the doorway. The minotaur hung his head. His outstretched fingers curled back into his palm.
