Farewell to the Liar

by D. K. Fields

  Berklum takes up his intricate lattice of twine and rope. Beside him is a coil, just shy of eighty feet. He nods to the girl. She lifts the test body as if the weight of a grown man is nothing to her little arms. She flaps wings that are a quarter of the size of those she is carrying.

  Berklum holds his breath. Readies himself with the rope, hoping he is strong enough to keep control.

  And then she is off. Her tiny wings beating at such speed the colours ripple and run together like water. She is clear of the ledge, carrying the test with her. She flies away from the spire and towards the black clouds of the Tear.

  Mark this tableau, Berklum; who knows when you will see its like again?

  ‘It’s just a test,’ Berklum mumbles.

  Yes, but can we not appreciate the wonder of things when we see them? There must be more to such a story than the functioning of cogs and gears, of ropes and pulleys. And it is a wonder to see Newsands’s brilliant colours in proper flight, not just hopping about your workshop.

  He marks it, of course, not for the beauty but because he is concentrating. He already feels in his hands the tug and release of the wind. Even this bloodless test has a kind of life to it. The kind of life that is unsure of itself, that is difficult to control, and as unpredictable as the Audience.

  And then Newsands, mid-air, lets go of the test.

  Berklum cries out – not a word, just a feeling, and one that comes rushing up from his lungs to surprise him. It is a sound he recognises from the early days of fatherhood, when his daughter started to crawl up the walls. He braces himself. A not inconsiderable part of him is expecting to be dragged right off the ledge and out into the Tear. But the pull is not so great as to move this man of metal, flesh and bone.

  The pull is not so great when the test wings start to drop. Or do they?

  It is hard to be sure from where he stands on the spire. Newsands could be rising, he thinks, trying to use the girl as a reference among the swirling clouds. He checks his twines to make sure the wing holes are all closed. When he looks up again it is clear Newsands is rising. And he needs to make the test follow her – this was how they agreed it would work. He pulls the threads, and the wings jerk in response. Easy, bonesmith, easy – this isn’t the forge. You’re not bludgeoning elements of the earth into submission, but asking for the assistance of air. That’s right, gently. See how the girl circles. Follow her round and up, up and round. Have faith when either your test or your guide slips behind the cloud.

  ‘This is good,’ you hear her say, as if she were right beside you. ‘Now down.’

  Is this the real test, Berklum? You can be satisfied the heat of the Tear is enough to keep a Rustan and their wings afloat, just as it does the tatterwings, but what about when that Rustan wants to come back to the mountains?

  He plays cat’s cradle with the twines and ropes in his hands, and far away, the wings twitch and convulse. The far membranes on either side reveal their holes to the Tear and the air. The stitched hide ripples with the rush of it. This time the test definitely descends. He can feel it as much as see it – there’s a heaviness in his hands that wasn’t there a moment ago. He counts to three slowly, so he is sure, and so he can judge just what a difference the holes make. More complicated work with the ropes makes the holes close. The test stops falling. He will have to find another swirl of hot air to rise but, although he can see Newsands in a position to guide him, he decides he has seen enough. He angles the test back towards the ledge, back towards its maker.

  Could you have asked for more, Berklum? The air not only holds the weight but can also lift it, and the holes allow for a controlled and gradual descent. Are you pleased?

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he says, still concentrating.

  Good. Remember that feeling.

  Newsands isn’t following the test back to the ledge. She is still circling among the clouds. Perhaps she is simply enjoying the freedom of real flight; it must be better than those short hops she makes onto tabletops or high shelves.

  So she isn’t there to help.

  He guides the test in as straight a line as possible back to him. This may not have been the best idea. When the wings are only ten or so feet from the ledge, one is caught in a strong gust. It sends the whole thing spinning. Ropes and twine coil around each other. The test spirals downwards sharply.

  Before he can even guess what might help, it’s gone.

  He has long enough to glance down at his hands before the ropes there are ripped from him. He hears a slap, and flinches as if struck. Despite our earlier suggestion, it is this sensation that he remembers most – the feeling he and his test had been slapped by someone. Someone with the authority to chastise him for what he attempted here.

  The sound is, of course, the test colliding flatly, drily with the spire. It’s a long, long fall to the Tear below. At least it cannot scream.

  He waits though, and listens. He waits longer than he needs to. But he doesn’t hear another sound, not until the tatterwings come out from their roosts. He doesn’t want to watch them today. Turning from the edge, he readies the handcart for the journey home.

  He is not so dejected as you might think. He has lost his test, yes, but it served its purpose. It proved that something so heavy could use the hot air to fly. The landing will be someone else’s problem.

  Newsands is standing in the entrance to the passage. He has long since given up trying to understand how she gets from one place to another.

  ‘It works, Berklum,’ she says.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You don’t sound pleased.’

  He sees what’s coming, that’s why.

  ‘Rustans will own the sky here,’ he says. ‘I hope they’re worthy.’

  They walk home, both of them tired in their own ancient ways. Home, except there’s no joy in the prospect, is there? Why don’t you tell everyone listening – and we mean everyone – why you don’t want to go home, Berklum?

  ‘Unun,’ he whispers.

  *

  He sneaks back into his own workshop. At least he is aware enough of this irony – of him having accused Unun of stealing back into the house earlier, only for him now to do the same. He closes the metal door behind him as quietly as possible. He all but tiptoes about the workshop until he can settle into his chair. Newsands disappears, reappears a moment later with a bowl of stew. He recognises the work of Nibalt when he smells it, but he’s not hungry. He picks at the food out of habit. A habit of pleasing his daughter. A habit that will be impossible to maintain soon.

  He waits. How long is hard to say in a room with no windows, when you sleep whenever you feel tired, and you only eat a mouthful here, a mouthful there. He is waiting for a certain sound. He hears its kind twice a day – the way to record time passing would be to count this, but what would that mean to an old man so singular in purpose? He hears its kind, but not the sound he is waiting for.

  It is a test of wills, he realises. Which of them has the greater patience, which of them is the more stubborn of the two. Which of them has the most to lose. She may try, but he has no doubt he will win. She undoubtedly has more days to give, but she has more of a life to live in them.

  Latecomer’s luck, he’s not sleeping when he hears the sound. The house door, softly, softly opens and closes. He can almost hear her holding her breath. He can almost feel the tension in her shoulders. He can almost see her waiting in the street, waiting for him to open the workshop and go to her. But soon she realises how cruel such hope is. She leaves for the market.

  Hurry, Berklum, hurry out of your chair and into your home. Use this urgency to distract you from what you do here.

  You know where she keeps it.

  She may have lost the hairs on her hands and feet, but this part of her never changed: the room she grew up in is now the room she sleeps in with her husband. The room where, one day, her own child will climb up to the shelves and form habits that last a lifetime. You, however, can’t climb.

  Berklum drags his da
ughter’s chest of drawers from one side of the room to the other. He at least has the wherewithal to take the drawers out first. As he is dragging the piece of furniture, he notices Newsands in the doorway. She won’t come in, for some reason. It would be easier, wouldn’t it, to have her fly up to the shelf? But that feels too sharp a betrayal. If someone has to do this, it has to be you. That’s what you’ve decided.

  With the chest beneath him, he manages to reach up, into the corner of the room. He can’t see so well but he can feel the raised edge of the loose stone. He pulls it free and strains to reach behind it, to his daughter’s hiding place. To where she keeps her most precious things. To where she keeps her money.

  His metal fingers clunk against soft leather filled with coin. His fleshy fingers know the feel of a coin purse well enough. To his surprise, he finds two more beside it. And they’re all full.

  He takes one down, careful, careful, and eases open the string. Where he expects pennies, he finds marks. He shakes his head. He knew his daughter had more of a mind for money than he did, but this is too much. She must have saved so hard, he thinks, gone without so much, and so often. What little is left of this old man’s heart breaks there, as he stands atop his daughter’s chest of drawers, her coin purse in his hands. He cries soundlessly, because he knows he cannot stop, and he knows he cannot blame anyone else.

  Newsands is saying something. Words that are soft and consoling, but he hears only snatches as he stares down at the golden marks. Unun will forgive, she says, changed forever, she says, Rustan future, she says.

  And Berklum, though he might hate himself for it, only thinks: one purse is not enough. The weight, the feel, what he can count. He needs more.

  If he was not already broken, if that part of him had not already shattered into thousands of irretrievable pieces, he couldn’t have reached up a second time. But he is, it is, and he does. He takes another purse, and then flees.

  He leaves everything just as it is: the chest of drawers up against the wall; the drawers themselves on the other side of the room; the stone pulled away and sitting on the shelf. There’s no use in hiding what he has done here.

  He hurries out of the house, out of the workshop, and away from the spire.

  *

  Berklum makes it as far as the main street of the ridge before he stops. Here, he’s not worrying about Unun finding him. That worry was a helpful distraction as he made his way up the spire and across on the ropebox. A distraction from what he’d done. Now, staring at the barroom doors, he seeks another escape from the heavy ache. And perhaps someone will listen as he tells the story of it.

  The long, dark barroom is mostly empty at this time of morning. He sits at one end of the metal bar and clunks his fingers on the top to show he wants to do more than sit. The woman behind the bar has the kind of limp Berklum recognises as a modification.

  ‘What’re you after?’ she asks.

  A good question, isn’t it? Without a better answer, he asks for Greynal. She raises a very weathered brow.

  ‘Occasion, is it?’ She turns and ratchets her leg up so she can reach the top shelves. It happens on only the one leg, and it could look ungainly if she wasn’t so used to balancing like this.

  ‘It’s what she used to drink,’ he says.

  ‘Ah.’ The woman doesn’t need any more than that – she might not know the particulars, but she knows the story. She pours the Greynal, and he pays from his own small coin purse. No need to let the whole Union know he has a family’s fortune about his person. The woman instinctively moves away and busies herself with something or other. This one, she thinks, doesn’t need me to listen. He’s here because he should be talking to someone else.

  He sips at his drink and barely tastes it, this pride of the Seeders. Instead, he prefers to stare at the swirling depths of deep grey in the glass. Her hair went a similar colour, a year or two before the end.

  ‘I haven’t done that badly,’ he mutters – not to us, but to her, if she’s listening from among the Audience. ‘We didn’t do so badly. Unun’s strong, and she has the talent.’ He sends the Greynal swirling again. ‘That has to count for something,’ he says.

  Oh, Berklum, we wish it was her voice you could hear and not ours. We wish she was here now, to say how right you are. It won’t mean a thing coming from us.

  ‘I just wanted to do good work. Good work.’

  We know. She knows. The whole Audience knows. Such a simple dream, but those can be the most dangerous.

  There’s still time, Berklum. You could hurry home, put the coin purses back in the wall above the high shelf, tidy your daughter’s room and be the only one to live with the shame of what you almost did.

  ‘No,’ he says, and we wonder if the word has ever had such finality to it? Such certainty of the ending that is to follow.

  He stops staring at the drink and finishes it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. And maybe there’s some value in the saying of it, even if those who need to hear are far, far away.

  *

  ‘Seems you’ve already made a start,’ Lanthan says. She can smell it on you. That’s no surprise to you though – you remember just what that’s like.

  Berklum is sitting on her table, his chest bare and his shoulders hunching as if he’s trying to make himself as small as possible. But this will make you huge, Berklum, bigger than any man has ever been. Behind him, Lanthan is marking up his back – where to cut, where to graft, where to break, and where to mould with metal.

  There’s a tall glass of something waiting beside you. It won’t taste as good as Greynal and won’t listen as good as Greynal either, but it will take some of the pain. The part that’s not self-inflicted.

  The workshop is hot – hotter than usual – from Lanthan working the forge. He’s had to wait as she finished with another recipient, though that was just an enquiry. And now there is more waiting as she sent Acti out for the materials she didn’t have to hand. So she marks you up, in the manner you’ve done for so many modifications. But it’s been years since you felt the charcoal press against your own skin. Despite everything, you feel the flutter of a thrill there, don’t you? What is that, Berklum?

  ‘Only a Rustan can know,’ he says. ‘To be modified, to change in such a way that your body is new to you again. Knowing that feeling is to be Rustan.’

  Lanthan leans forwards to see you better. She isn’t so much surprised by the outburst – she has heard all kinds on her table – but by the eloquence of it. ‘It’s why we’re bonesmiths,’ she says. ‘We get to be close to that feeling every day.’

  ‘But it starts then,’ he says, nodding to the doorway. They both look, which makes the boy, Acti, stop. Slung over his shoulder is a heavy-looking sack.

  ‘What?’ he says.

  The only answer Acti gets from either adult is an expression he knows all too well: pity blended with a kind of longing.

  With the last of the materials brought by Acti, Lanthan returns to the forge and begins to turn orange heat to white. There, she can shape the lumps of metal into the intricate, interlocking parts that took two bonesmiths to draw. Berklum wishes he could help at this stage too, but he respects the craft too much for that.

  Instead, like a good recipient, he drinks the hideous concoction given to him and lies face down on the table. He starts to dribble – something he’s aware of but has no power to stop. His whole body slackens. There’s no way to stop now, if there ever had been. This is your story, Berklum, but is it yours? Do any of us have that kind of power, of ownership?

  No, you’re right, it’s cruel to ask such questions when you can’t answer.

  Sleep now, Berklum the bonesmith, and when you wake, you’ll find your body new to you again.

  *

  We watch what he cannot. Do you want to hear of it? Of course you do. Even those of the Audience who claim to be above such gratuities, or claim not to have the stomach for them, are just trying to deny their fascination. We suppose they have their rea
sons, and so might you. But we shall tell it, and you can decide how closely you listen.

  Lanthan starts by making a wide circular incision – her word, not ours – on one shoulder blade. She is precise and she is careful, taking her time to ensure that, even in beginning, there is symmetry to her work. There is blood, but not as much as we imagined. It seems to be in no hurry to leave this old man, who is not much more than skin and bones and metal. In fact, there appears to be very little flesh removed before her scalpel strikes bone.

  ‘See here, Acti,’ she says, ‘we’re not following the shoulder entirely. Instead, part of the circular incision runs close to the spine on either side.’

  The boy is next to her, watching even more closely than we are.

  She drops the cut away flesh in a nearby bucket and wipes the wound as clean as such a thing can be.

  ‘First, the base part needs to sleeve the shoulder bone.’ From the forge she retrieves a thick metal disc that has raised walls but, importantly, a slot cut through one side. This, we are given to understand, will slide over the shoulder bone to ‘sleeve’ it, as she says. She uses tongs to carry the disc because it’s still hot. She tests just how hot this is with her hand – too much heat and it will just burn a way through the man. But there needs to be some burning, if the metal is going to fuse with the bone, if the modification is going to take. Lathan knows this right kind of burning. She knows the touch of it better than she knows what it’s like to run her hand through her son’s hair; this heat is more familiar than the feel of sun on her skin.

  Waiting until it’s just right, she then slides the disc into place around the shoulder bone. There is some resistance, but her measurements were fairly accurate. She has to make one or two small adjustments by filing at the metal. Acti is ready with the suction bellows and assists with the clearing of any loose filings – such things can cause all sorts of problems later. Eventually, the shoulder bone nestles neatly against the inside wall of the disc.