by D. K. Fields
‘But not here,’ Ruth said. ‘Not now.’
Cora gestured to the small canals that snaked through the Water Gardens. ‘Take a look around you. We’re in a place of many rivers.’
‘No, Cora, we’re not. These are fancy puddles. If I was at the bottom of one of these, I’d still be standing.’
That Cora couldn’t argue with. But if Tannir hadn’t been talking about striking at Ruth in the Water Gardens then that meant they had another problem.
Cora jogged to catch Ruth then spoke with bindle-shortened breath. ‘Sounds like Tannir knows about the trip to get the Wayward Hook – Morton’s man telling Tannir he’d be joining you at the bottom of a river.’
‘A river, Cora. There are plenty in the Union.’
‘You’re saying it’s coincidence? You’re about to sail up the River Tun, and the man who’s already made one attempt on your life just happens to mention waterways to an agent of the other person who wants you dead? Those are poor odds, Ruth.’
The quiet was lifting. Voices drifted towards them. Ahead was the garbing pavilion, its white canvas glaring in the sun.
‘Not everything in life can be boiled down to bets, Cora. Winning this election, what it will mean, that’s beyond the world of chequers.’
Cora was about to tell Ruth that she was wrong about that – elections were the biggest bet in the Union. On the tip of her tongue was the phrase people were endlessly saying to her: Don’t you read the pennysheets? But there was no time.
They’d reached the back of the public gallery – rows and rows of seats all facing the covered bandstand that stood at the exact centre point of the Water Gardens. The bandstand was made from the same curling wrought iron that was found across the Water Gardens – the benches, the bird cages. But unlike those things, the bandstand was painted red and blue: the colours of the twin duchies of Perlanse. In the summer there were concerts here. If you happened to be passing in the streets above, you could hear the faint tunes and be reminded of the lack of pennies in your pocket to go through the gates and hear the music properly.
No sign of the masked voters yet, but the way the crowd was quietening, they were likely getting ready to leave the garbing pavilion and take their seats: fifty of them, set apart from those of the public gallery, and those of the Commission box too. She caught sight of the banners fluttering high above the box: one bearing the spoked wheel, symbol of the Commission, and six others, each with the symbol of a different realm. A sign of unity to have them all lined up like that, when the Union was anything but unified. The division between north and south felt as wide as the Tear itself. And just as dangerous.
The canopied Commission box was full – she could see the press of finely-clad people, if not the faces of the great and the good of the Union who’d be sitting there on padded chairs, flanked by side tables of drinks and tiny bits of food on sticks. All the Chambers would be in the Commission box, apart from Rustan Chambers Latinum who would be with her storyteller, out of sight, sharing some last words of encouragement. Senior Commission staff would be in the box too, Chief Inspector Sillian among them. At the thought of her former commanding officer, Cora was glad of the rows of people seated between her and the Commission box. Glad, too, of the Seeder clothes Nullan had found for her, though she wasn’t about to start admitting that.
‘Looks like we’re too late for a seat in the public gallery,’ she said to Ruth.
‘We’ll have to make do with this.’
Ruth sat on the wide stone lip of a fountain, the centrepiece of which was a bronze statue of two intertwined kenna birds – the ridiculously long-necked creatures that, twisted together like this, were the symbol of Perlanse. One for each of the Perlish duchies, east and west, because the Perlish could never do anything singly. Not even build a fountain. From the mouths of the kenna birds, water arced into the air. The spray cooled the air at Cora’s back, which wasn’t unpleasant, given the heat. The Commission box might be protected from the sun, but everyone else had to put up with it. How many election stories were remembered for the sunburn they came with?
The fountain’s spray reaching her back meant a blow could do the same. They were unprotected here, the whole of the Water Gardens open behind them. Ruth was so confident nothing would happen here, but maybe…
A bell rang, sending such thoughts out of Cora’s head. It was time.
Everyone got to their feet, and once the noise of the chairs catching on gravel had eased, there was silence. Someone had even thought to turn off the fountains: the cool spray at Cora’s back vanished. The side of the garbing pavilion was raised by an unseen hand. From the darkness within, the Audience came.
They were themselves like the darkness they’d come from: fifty Fenestirans, drawn from a pool of three hundred to hear the Rustan story and cast their vote, all dressed in black robes. All black, except for the masks of the Audience which gave each voter their own flash of colour. As the voters made their way to their seats, Cora could make out the pale green of the Vicious Beginner, his mouth pursed, then the Dandy in brazen red, then came the Trumpeter in gold, her mouth an O to bellow. The whole Swaying mob came out of the garbing pavilion, each with a stone in either pocket: black for yes, white for no, to be cast into the huge voting chests at the end of the story. The Rustan tale was the fifth to be told. The Wayward would be the last.
A figure appeared in the bandstand – the Master of Ceremonies.
‘Not a bad view,’ Ruth said, ‘all things considered.’ The edge of the fountain she and Cora were sitting on was higher than the public gallery in front of them. Ruth patted it, as if it were a horse.
But the stone was hard beneath Cora, and with nothing to support her back, it was going to be a long afternoon. She’d taken off her coat and folded it on the stone ledge beside her. She kept her hand resting on the top of it, feeling the shape of her ’dusters tucked inside the cloth.
She stretched her back, and already there was the start of an ache. ‘I might not be able to get up again,’ she said to Ruth.
‘Me neither. You’ll have to fetch back that pennysheet girl to help us.’
‘And have our ears assaulted for the second time today?’
The Master of Ceremonies opened his arms wide. ‘Audience, welcome. In this, the two hundred and ninth election of our realms, we give you a ’teller who gives you a tale.’
‘The Audience is listening,’ came the response from the masked voters. Had Constable Jenkins been beside Cora, she would have mouthed the words along with them. The Master of Ceremonies bowed to the Audience, then turned to bow to the second figure who was making their way into the bandstand.
The Rustan storyteller had arrived.
From this distance, Cora couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. They were slim, their reddish hair clipped short as Ruth’s now was. The storyteller looked to be her sister’s age too. If the ’teller had any metal additions to their body – beyond the lockport in her spine that Serus said all adult Rustans had – Cora couldn’t see it from here. She’d have to wait to read the pennysheets for a full description, though the hack writers would likely invent a few extra metal limbs.
‘You saw the Hook,’ Ruth whispered to Cora. ‘What do you think the story will be about?’
‘You mean you don’t know? I thought that, given the southern alliance—’
‘Storytellers would share tales in advance?’ Ruth shook her head. ‘That would be a break with tradition too far. All I know is that the message of the Rustan story will support that of the Wayward, and the Caskers too. Broadly speaking.’
‘The Hook suggested the story might involve flying.’
‘No surprises there,’ Ruth said.
‘And maybe jokes.’ Cora was thinking of the dropped holens and the giggling Rustan children.
‘A funny might not play well, given the exit polls after the Perlish story.’
‘But Rustan humour wouldn’t be the same as the Perlish,’ Cora said. ‘It would have more met
al in it for a start.’
‘Speaking of which…’
The Master of Ceremonies had stepped away, and the Rustan storyteller now stood at the centre of the bandstand, their head bowed, hands clasped before them. It was then Cora caught sight of a wink of silver: metal fingers. The storyteller slowly lifted their head, turned to look out at all those waiting in the Water Gardens – the Audience, those in the Commission box, in the public gallery, and at two Seeder women seated on the edge of a fountain. Cora felt the storyteller’s gaze on her, and her pulse quickened. This was what made a great ’teller: the power to connect with a stranger before you’d even said a word. Would Ruth be up to this challenge? Her sister was looking down into the now still pool of the fountain, not watching the Rustan storyteller at all.
Cora looked back to the bandstand. The storyteller rocked on their heels, once, twice. Then they began.
‘All things are new once.’
The Rustan Story
All things are new once. All things have a first sighting, a first use, a first telling.
But you people forget.
We tell the stories again and again until nobody can imagine a time without the riding of a horse. A time without fires in the night. A time without Rustans in the sky.
*
Old Man Berklum is a bonesmith, and a bonesmith is what Old Man Berklum is. From the top of his crown down to the nubs at the end of his toes: bonesmith.
Look to him now, hunching over his forge. Hunching from concentration, sure, but hunching because that’s his way of holding himself in these, his latter years. But wait, I hear you thinking: How’s a bonesmith not seen to his own problems? How’s a bonesmith not righted his own crooked back, and a man of such purported talent at that? Ask him. Go on, ask him.
‘Too invasive,’ Berklum mutters. ‘Spine work’s dangerous.’
‘What’s that, Palla?’
Berklum looks up from the fire and metal in his lap. He has to squint across his own workshop to where his daughter, Unun, stands. She is fuzzy at the edges like only the young can be – still too much to be decided, they are incapable of being still. Or so Berklum thinks.
‘I don’t trust no one to work on me myself,’ Berklum says.
‘Is that what you’re working on?’
It isn’t, not by some long way, but Berklum can only shrug. ‘Spine work’s dangerous,’ he says, and so he settles back to his hunching, the fire snapping and barking like a pricked dog.
A bonesmith’s workshop bears some describing. But not as much as it bears some tidying. It is a dizzying place, even to those who’ve grown up there, like Berklum and Unun both. Tools hang from all four walls, only making grudging way for the low workshop door. The many tarnished and blackened iron tabletops are buried under sketches, half-formed hinges, sticks of charcoal and a graveyard’s worth of bones cast in metal. Everything from knuckles and jaws to thighs and ribs. A charnel house. That’s what you’re picturing, isn’t it? But that means death, the destruction of the body, bones pulled apart and out of their rightful living place. And there can be no denying the workshop is a dark, iron-tasting place, with more shadows than—
‘Tallow costs too much,’ Berklum says.
‘I know, I know.’ Unun comes to stand behind her beloved palla.
‘Wayward trying to sell me candles like they brought the sun itself.’ Berklum gestures with his pliers to the ceiling and to nowhere. ‘Tell them forge-light is all a workshop needs. Tell them that.’
‘Palla, the Wayward have gone.’
‘Shh, girl, I’m working.’
‘Tell them that,’ he says. Forge-light is all a bonesmith and his workshop needs, but you can better picture Old Man Berklum, hunching, working, amid his many made bones if you can picture shadows.
Unun, a middling beauty, too generous with her time, melts back into those shadows.
The room snuffs to black. More so than even Berklum and Unun are accustomed to. He grunts. She makes a lighter noise. And then, from Berklum’s fiddling at the forge comes a dazzling flare. It singes the strays of his bushy eyebrows and tightens the skin of his wrinkled face. When the forge settles, he holds the fingers in his pliers. Behold his work, as he does: the smooth thin lengths; the machinations of the knuckles; the tapering as natural as any unbroken bone. They look like a terrible claw, which is about the right of it.
‘Finished?’ Unun says, unable to keep the hope from her voice.
Berklum stares hard at the fingers. ‘What do you think?’
How could we know? We did not take this order. Who are these fingers for? What were the measurements, what was asked for, how will they be affixed?
He waves away such questions. ‘Listen to the girl.’
Unun leans close to the fingers, taking the pliers herself to better examine the work. ‘Palla, they’re finished!’
‘Easy. No need to wake the whole spire.’
But there is a need. Unun glances about the workshop and its scattering of unfinished business. Orders unfulfilled, forgotten, discarded. How many days, months, years has it been?
‘Not so long as all that,’ Berklum says.
Unun’s expression is schooled flat, which tells its own story.
Old Man Berklum stands and stretches that crooked spine, too dangerous to work on. He picks up a shinbone from among the detritus. ‘Nothing to this,’ he says. ‘Where’s the pride in such work?’
‘Right next to the coin,’ Unun says, but she can’t meet his eye as she does so.
‘Any bonesmith can make coin. You’ll see that when the workshop’s yours.’
‘Palla, don’t talk like that.’
His laughter grates along his three metal ribs. ‘It’s how Nibalt talks. I’ve heard him telling his stories to the Audience.’
‘No…’
Yes. Nibalt, her husband, wheedles and whines, wishing today away for a tomorrow of his making.
‘You see, they hear him,’ Berklum says. His toothy grin does nothing to settle his daughter. Instead, she grasps the fingers as if they were opportunity made manifest. All this talk of her husband, Nibalt, has made her keen to be away from the workshop. To be away before his return from his work as a wincher. She can stand no more arguing between the two men of her home.
‘We could take the fingers to the buyer,’ she says.
‘We’ll take these to the buyer,’ Berklum says, as if it were his own idea.
‘But…’ Unun hesitates. Doubts herself. ‘They’re all the way on the ridge.’
‘That’s not so far. Only one ropebox.’
‘And who will pay for only one?’ she says.
He wraps the fingers in the cleanest cloth he can find. ‘I’m sure our buyer would find gratitude for us in saving them the trouble.’
‘Gratitude.’
But he will not be dissuaded. When he claims the walk would be to an old man’s benefit, Unun accepts defeat. He covers the forge, which kills the flames to embers, and gathers his stick. He uses this to walk and menace in equal measure. His thumb and little finger click into place at the head of the stick, the rest sitting neatly in his still fleshy palm. With a precise wiggle of his thumb he can extend the stick upwards of ten feet, the finger retracting the cane to a length of mere inches. Very useful for the busy walkways and ropeways of the spire.
‘Don’t forget the ridge,’ Berklum says. ‘No respect for no one, on the ridge.’
Said like a true spire-man.
‘Palla, please, you know I don’t go much for that kind of talk.’
‘No one goes much for the truth.’
The workshop locks like a vault. Its door is thicker than Berklum or his daughter, far heavier, and worth more than any of their other possessions. Iron only on the surface, a far more complicated blend of metals hides beneath. Deeper still are the twelve locking mechanisms that Berklum laboriously sets to engaging – some with simple keys, some with ornate keys that look more like latticework or filigree, and some by pressed patterns that n
o one would recognise as a key.
Unun waits with practised patience, more interested in the narrow street that winds its way up and down from their home. Not cobbled, but the effect is not dissimilar. The street is a corridor – floor, building frontages, and vaulted ceiling all hewn directly from the rock of the spire. The floor’s rock has worn smooth from generations of angled feet; rare are the times in the Rusting Mountains that you are neither going up nor down. It is hard to stand still. Unun wanders, not far, to the windows of the other shops and businesses that crowd the street.
Berklum joins her. He has to turn slightly to avoid colliding with two youngsters coming down at pace – the street not wide enough for three.
‘You’re welcome!’ he calls once they are safely round the bend and away.
He stands beside his daughter, and together, they browse the window of a tailor.
The cuts are unusual. Daring, one might say. The materials he recognises, or at least he tells himself he does. Slipdog hide, tatterwing bat skin, feathers and furs from the Mountains. But looking deeper into the window reveals the Union in panels, linings, collars and cuffs. Colours made from the grinding of Torn beetles. Patterns that could be as easily inked on a Casker’s arm as stitched onto a jacket. Hats that only the Perlish would find occasion for. He stares as if it is a travelling exhibit.
They are quiet for a while, thinking.
‘Not just thinking, looking. Properly looking. Why else do we have eyes, as well as ears?’
Unun takes his arm in hers. ‘I don’t know, Palla, why?’
‘Because we’re too foolish to just listen. So we stare, and we talk, and somehow we learn. You can learn from seeing such things.’ He presses a finger against the imperfect glass. ‘See there? Who cuts a cloak so slim? What would that do to someone standing alone on the mesa?’
‘Do?’
‘Exactly. Without the wearing of it, we cannot know.’
She smiles the smile of the indulgent. Because that is easier, and Unun’s time is hard enough. Arm-in-arm they make their way up the street, stopping to note new arrivals from the more adventurous traders. That trade is a benefit of being on the spire, the closest of the Rusting Mountains to the northern edge of the Tear. That the spire is the end of the mountain chain is the price they pay – getting to the cone is arduous, the mesa near impossible. That the fingers now nestling in Berklum’s pocket were ordered by an individual on the ridge was no coincidence. Commerce can only travel so far, only so fast, along the mountains.
