I screwed my eyes shut again, against the rush of nausea.
“We’re going back to Sitka?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll freeze to death in this!”
“You’ll manage.”
The machine stopped. I felt a breath of cool forest air and heard crickets.
We were in the woods where we’d started. But there was no snow. The light of a full moon filtered through the forest canopy. An owl called and flapped away. I stepped out onto soft humus and the yellow room disappeared behind me.
“Months have passed,” I said. “It must be June or July.” I slapped a mosquito.
Raven beat the air with his wings and rose to an eye-level branch. “Something has passed.”
I had a chill that had nothing to do with temperature. “You said you were a guardian, but not my guardian. Are you going off to save someone else now?”
“I think I’m done here. I don’t save lives. I save life. By making the smallest change I can.”
“Life?”
“Think about what I’ve said.” He hopped around in a full circle, the moonlight glinting soft rainbows off his feathers. Then he cawed, like an actual raven, and flew off into the night.
“Wait!” I said, but he was above the trees and soaring.
For a moment I was totally lost, and started to panic, but got ahold of myself. Sitka was an island, after all; if I walked in any direction I’d eventually come to the water, and there take my bearings.
Bears. I whistled, the way Gordon had taught me. Raven. They won’t attack you if you don’t surprise them. Unlike some other mammals.
I could have gone in any direction, but made the assumption that Raven’s room, or ship, had come down in the same place from which it had left, in the same orientation. I picked my way through the undergrowth in a straight line for a few minutes, and was rewarded with a game trail. I turned left and walked down the hill.
I thought I knew where I was, but the place where my cabin should have been was just a small clearing. In a few more steps, though, I was on the path that turned into Lincoln Street.
The moon was high, but somewhat west. It was probably about two in the morning. The town was quiet except for faint noise drifting up from the harbor. I came to a slight rise and looked down in that direction. There were work lights arranged around one of the boats, which looked vaguely familiar.
A chill gripped me. It was the White Nights, and the noise was from a work crew below decks, banging rivets into the boiler. I broke into a run, as fast as my skirts would allow! I ran downhill to Baranoff Street, paused to get my breath, and walked swiftly to the Baranoff Hotel.
There was a light on in the lobby. I rushed up the steps, but the door was locked. When I tapped on the glass, the little old lady came ’round, thumb holding her place in a dime novel. She unlocked the door and a hundred wrinkles pinched into a frown. “What on earth are you doing about at this hour?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I improvised, “and went down to check on the ship.”
She looked at the key in her hand, evidently trying to remember having let me out. “Down to the docks after midnight,” she clucked. “You’re daft. But ye must have a guardian angel.”
“Yes!”
I rushed by her and up the stairs to the room that Daniel and I had shared. The door was locked. I tapped, and then knocked loudly.
He opened the door and stood there bleary eyed, completely alive. I grabbed him and hugged him so hard his joints popped.
“My son … do I have a story to tell you.”
Familiar
China Miéville
A WITCH NEEDED TO impress his client. His middleman, who had arranged the appointment, told him that the woman was very old—“hundred at least”—and intimidating in a way he could not specify. The witch intuited something unusual, money or power. He made careful and arduous preparations. He insisted that he meet her a month later than the agent had planned.
His workshop was a hut, a garden shed in the shared allotments of north London. The woman edged past plots of runner beans, tomatoes, failing root vegetables and trellises, past the witch’s neighbors, men decades younger than she but still old, who tended bonfires and courteously did not watch her.
The witch was ready. Behind blacked-out windows his little wooden room was washed. Boxes stowed in a tidy pile. The herbs and organic accoutrements of his work were out of the way but left visible—claws, skins like macabre facecloths, bottles stopped up and careful piles of dust and objects. The old woman looked them over. She stared at a clubfooted pigeon chained by its good leg to a perch.
“My familiar.”
The woman said nothing. The pigeon sounded and shat.
“Don’t meet his eye, he’ll steal your soul out of you.” The witch hung a black rag in front of the bird. He would not look his client clear on. “He’s basilisk, but you’re safe now. He’s hidden.”
From the ceiling was a chandelier of unshaped coat hangers and pieces of china, on which three candles scabbed with dripping were lit. Little pyramids of wax lay on the wooden table beneath them. In their guttering the witch began his consultation, manipulating scobs of gris-gris—on the photographs his client provided he sprinkled leaf flakes, dirt, and grated remnants of plastic, with an herb shaker from a pizzeria.
The effects came quickly so that even the cold old woman showed interest. Air dried up and expanded until the shed was stuffy as an airplane. There were noises from the shelves: mummied detritus moved anxious. It was much more than happened at most consultations, but the witch was still waiting.
In the heat the candles were moist. Strings of molten wax descended. They coated each other and drip-dripped in instantly frozen splashes. The stalactites extended, bearding the bottom of the candelabrum. The candles burned too fast, pouring off wax, until the wire was trimmed with finger-thick extrusions.
They built up matter unevenly, curling out away from the table, and then they sputtered and seemed not to be dripping grease but drooling it from mouths that stretched open stringy within the wax. Fluttering tongues emerged and colorless eyes from behind nictitating membranes. For moments the things were random sculptures and then they were suddenly and definitively organic. At its ends, the melted candles’ runoff was a fringe of little milk-white snakes. They were a few inches of flesh. Their bodies merged, anchored, with wax. They swayed with dim predatory intent and whispered.
The old woman screamed and so did the witch. He turned his cry, though, into a declamation and wavered slightly in his chair, so that the nest of dangling wax snakes turned their attention to him. The pigeon behind its dark screen called in distress. The snakes stretched vainly from the candles and tried to strike the witch. Their toxin dribbled onto the powder of his hex, mixed it into wet grime under which the woman’s photographs began to change.
It was an intercession, a series of manipulations even the witch found tawdry and immoral: but the pay was very good, and he knew that for his standing he must impress. The ceremony lasted less than an hour, the grease snakes leaking noise and fluid, the pigeon ceaselessly frightened. At the end the witch rose weakly, his profuse sweat making him gleam like the wet wax. Moving with strange speed, too fast to be struck, he cut the snakes off where their bodies became candle, and they dropped onto the table and squirmed in death, bleeding thick pale blood.
His client stood and smiled, taking the corpses of the half-snakes and her photographs, carefully leaving them soiled. She was clear-eyed and happy and she did not wince at light as the witch did when he opened the door to her and gave her instructions for when to return. He watched her go through the kitchen gardens and only closed his shed door again when she was out of sight.
The witch drew back the screen from before the terrified pigeon and was about to kill it, but he stared at the stubs of wax where the snakes had been and instead he opened a window and let the bird out. He sat at the table and breathed heavily, watching the boxes at the back of the hut. Th
e air settled. The witch could hear scratching. It came from inside a plastic toolbox, where he had stashed his real familiar.
He had called a familiar. He had been considering it for a long time. He had had a rough understanding that it would give him a conduit to a fecundity, and that had bolstered him through the pain and distaste of what the conjuration had needed. Listening to the curious scritch-scritch he fingered the scabs on his thighs and chest. They would scar.
The information he had found on the technique was vague—passed-on vagrants’ hedge-magic, notepad palimpsests, marginalia in phone books. The mechanics of the operation had never been clear. The witch consoled himself that the misunderstanding was not his fault. He had hoped that the familiar, when it came, would fit his urban practice. He had hoped for a rat, big and dirty-furred, or a fox, or pigeon such as the one he had displayed. He had thought that the flesh he provided was a sacrifice. He had not known it was substance.
With the lid off, the toolbox was a playpen, and the familiar investigated it. The witch looked at it, queasy. It had coated its body in the dust, so it no longer left wetness. Like a sea slug, ungainly, flanged with outgrowths of its own matter. Heavy as an apple, it was an amalgam of the witch’s scraps of fat and flesh, coagulated with his sputum, cum, and hoodoo. It coiled, rolled itself busy into corners of its prison. It clutched toward the light, convulsing its pulp.
Even in its container, out of sight, the witch had felt it. He had felt it groping in the darkness behind him and as he did with a welling up like blood he had made the snakes come, which he could not have done before. The familiar disgusted him. It made his stomach spasm, it left him ill and confounded, and he was not sure why. He had flensed animals for his calling, alive sometimes, and was inured to that, he had eaten shit and roadkill when liturgy demanded, but that little rag of his own flesh gave him a kind of passionate nausea.
When the thing had first moved he had screamed, realizing what his familiar would be, and spewed till he was empty. And still it was almost beyond him to watch it, but he made himself, to try to know what it was that revolted him.
The witch could feel the familiar’s enthusiasm. A feral fascination for things held it together, and every time it tensed and moved by peristalsis around its plastic cell the contractions of its dumb and hungry interest passed through the witch and bent him double. It was stupid: wordless and searingly curious. The witch could feel it make sense of the dust, now that it had rolled in it, randomly then deliberately, using it for something.
He wanted the strength to do again what he had done for the woman, though making the snakes had exhausted him. His familiar manipulated things, was a channel for manipulation, it lived to change, use, and know. The witch very much wanted that power it had given him, and he closed his eyes and made himself sure he could, he could steel himself. But looking at the nosing dusted red thing he was suddenly weak and uncertain. He could feel its mindless mind. To have his own effluvia maggot through him with every experience, he could not bear it, even with what it gave him. It made him a sewer. Every few seconds in his familiar’s presence he was swallowing his own bile. He felt its constant eager interest like foulness, God knew why. It was not worth it. The witch decided.
It could not be killed, or if it could he did not know how. The witch took a knife to it but it investigated the blade avidly, only parting and reforming under his efforts. It tried to grip the metal.
When he bludgeoned it with a flat iron it recoiled and regrouped its matter, moved over and around the weapon, soiling it with itself and making the iron into a skate on which it tried to move. Fire only discomfited it, and it sat tranquil in acid. It studied every danger as it had dust, trying to use it, and the echo of that study turned the witch’s gut.
He tipped the noisome thing into a sack. He could feel it shove itself at the fabric’s pores and he moved quickly. The witch drove, hessian fumbling in the toolbox beside him (he could not put it behind him, where he could not see it, so that it might get out and conduct its investigations near his skin).
It was almost night when he stopped by the Grand Union Canal. In the municipal gardens of west London, between beat-up graffitied bridges, in earshot of the last punk children in the skate park, the witch tried to drown his familiar. He was not so stupid as to think it would work, but to drop the thing, weighted with rocks and tied up, into the cool and dirty water was a relief so great he moaned. To see it drunk up by the canal. It was gone from him. He ran.
Cosseted by mud, the familiar tried to learn. It sent out temporary limbs to make sense of things. It strained without fear against the sack.
It compared everything it found to everything it knew. Its power was change. It was tool-using, it had no way of knowing except to put to use. The world was infinite tools. By now the familiar understood dust well, and had a little knowledge of knives and irons. It felt the water and the fibrous weave of the bag, and did things with them to learn that they were not what it had used before.
Out of the sack, in muddy dark, it swam ugly and inefficient, learning scraps of rubbish and little life. There were hardy fish even in so grubby a channel, and it was not long before it found them. It took a few carefully apart, and learned to use them.
The familiar plucked their eyes. It rubbed them together, dangled them from their fibers. It sent out microscopic filaments that tickled into the blood-gelled nerve stalks. The familiar’s life was contagious. It sucked the eyes into itself and suddenly, as visual signals reached it for the first time, though there was no light (it was burrowing in the mud), it knew that it was in darkness. It rolled into shallows, and with its new vitreous machines it saw streetlamp light cut the black water.
It found the corpses of the fish again (using sight, now, to help it). It unthreaded them. It greased itself with the slime on their skins. One by one it broke off the ribs like components of a model kit. It embedded them in its skin (its minute and random blood vessels and muscle fibers insinuating into the bone). It used them to walk, with the sedate pick-picking motion of an urchin.
The familiar was tireless. Over hours it learned the canal bed. Each thing it found it used, some in several ways. Some it used in conjunction with other pieces. Some it discarded after a while. With each use, each manipulation (and only with that manipulation, that change) it read meanings. The familiar accumulated brute erudition, forgetting nothing, and with each insight the next came easier, as its context grew. Dust had been the first and hardest thing to know.
When the familiar emerged from the water with the dawn, it was poured into a milk-bottle carapace. Its clutch of eyes poked from the bottleneck. It nibbled with a nail clipper. With precise little bullets of stone it had punctured holes in its glass sides, from which legs of waterlogged twig-wood and broken pens emerged. To stop it sinking into wet earth its feet were coins and flat stones. They looked insecurely attached. The familiar dragged the brown sack that had contained it. Though it had not found a use for it, and though it had no words for the emotion, it felt something like sentiment for the hessian.
All its limbs were permanently reconfigured. Even those it tired of and kicked off were wormed with organic ruts for its juices. Minuscule muscles and tendons the thickness of spider silk but vastly stronger rooted through the components of its bric-a-brac body, anchoring them together. The flesh at its center had grown.
The familiar investigated grass, and watched the birds with its inadequate eyes. It trooped industrious as a beetle on variegated legs.
Through that day and night the familiar learned. It crossed paths with small mammals. It found a nest of mice and examined their parts. Their tails it took for prehensile tentacles, their whiskers bristled it, it upgraded its eyes and learned to use ears. It compared what it found to dust, blades, water, twigs, fish ribs, and sodden rubbish: it learned mouse.
It learned its new ears, with focused fascination. Young Londoners played in the gardens and the familiar stayed hidden and listened to their slang. It heard patterns in
their sequenced barks.
There were predators in the gardens. The familiar was the size of a cat, and foxes and dogs sometimes went for it. It was now too big for the bottle armor, had burst it, but had learned instead to fight. It raked with shards of china, nails, and screws—not with anger, but with its unchanging beatific interest. It was impossibly sure-footed on its numerous rubbish legs. If an attacker did not run fast enough, the familiar would learn it. It would be used. The familiar had brittle fingertips, made of dogs’ teeth.
The familiar moved away from the gardens. It followed the canal bank to a graveyard, to an industrial siding, to a dump. It gave itself a shape with wheels, plunging its veins and tissue into the remnants of a trolley. When later it discarded them, pulling them out, the wheels bled.
Sometimes it used its tools like their original owners, as when it took its legs from birds (scampering over burned-out cars like a rock rabbit on four or six avian feet). It could change them. In sun, the familiar shaded its eyes with flanges of skin that had been cats’ ears.
It had learned to eat. Its hunger, its feeding was a tool like dust had been: the familiar did not need to take in nourishment but doing so gave it satisfaction, and that was enough. It made itself a tongue from strips of wet towel, and a mouth full of interlocking cogs. These teeth rotated in its jaw, chewing, driving food scraps back toward the throat.
In the small hours of morning, in a waste lot stained by chemical spill, the familiar finally made a tool of the sack that had delivered it. It found two broken umbrellas, one skeletal, the other ragged, and it busied itself with them, holding them tight with hair-grip hands, manipulating them with rat tails. It secured the sack cloth to them with its organic roots. After hours of calculated tinkering, during which it spoke English words in the mind it had built itself, the shaped umbrellas spasmed open and shut on analogues of shoulders, and with a great gust the familiar flew.
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