Gaunt jabbed again. Bone kicked the table toward her and tumbled, and thus avoided her main blow; yet a petal sliced his shoulder even as he stumbled into the porcelain cat and crushed it beneath his weight.
He barely noticed the physical pain. For he screamed with the awareness of his pointless life. He realized he was severed from the essence of existence—the business of loving, of harvesting, of raising many children, of having the tidiest house on the row. He wept, for these things now seemed glorious, not the hollow grotesqueries the Comprehenders saw.
Then the dark perceptions returned to him, whispering that the cycle of life was but a rotting millwheel, its only product a creaking noise.
Yet in the midst of the screaming and the whispering there opened a clear space deep in his mind.
And Imago Bone, who had some experience maneuvering between warring parties, found in that space a chance to know his own thoughts.
The first thought was this: that neither Comprehenders nor Sword of Loving Kindness respected the life he’d chosen.
“My life,” he murmured.
“Do you yield, Bone,” Gaunt demanded.
“To nothing. . . except you.” He tried to the squeeze the words out of his mouth, crystallize his new thoughts in language before they collapsed under the force of one impulse or the other.
He rose painfully, turning to Skath. “Girl.”
The young gardener stepped forward, cradling the little tree like a baby.
“The Comprehenders hate you. The sword hates you.”
Skath nodded.
“Do you not see? You must play them against each other! Make your own way.”
“But the sword is good,” Gaunt said, with a hint of uncertainty. “The sword is right.”
“Then why should it hate Skath?” Bone found his strength now, and his voice. “No. This weapon cannot tolerate whimsical little girls. Or morbid poets. Or wandering rogues. None of us three is fit for grand purposes. And so all great powers despise us.”
Gaunt stared at Bone a long while. With trembling hand she stabbed at the earthen floor and released her grip. The sword quivered there, perhaps angered by the indignity. Gaunt released a long breath.
“Skath,” she said. “Bone is right. But I know something else. Your brother is right about something. You must take up the sword.”
Skath looked mystified. “It hates me.”
“Yes,” Bone said, turning to Gaunt, then back to Skath. “And I think it’s that’s because you know your own heart. You needed no philosophy, no etiquette, to become a kind person. Your intuitions surpass its powers. The sword may fear that quality.”
“There is more,” Gaunt said. “Something I realized while wielding the weapon. I could not strike down someone I loved, even with the sword commanding it. I wonder if at its core it still carries, not just the fury of Nettileer Kinbinder, but the passion of Allos the Smith. If so, a gentle heart may be able to command it.”
“I don’t know those names,” Skath said.
“It may not matter,” said Gaunt, and she fished into her pack, and pulled out her pouch containing the powdered blood of Allos. She poured it upon the Sword of Loving Kindness.
The powder hissed, liquified, and flowed into the sword. The pink glow flickered madly and reddened. It seemed tempered now with the hard, steady quality of forge-light. It stood within the earthen floor, looking less dainty, more solid, like some miniature redwood.
“Take up the sword, Skath,” Gaunt said. “It may be your only chance to stand against the Comprehenders, and the Pluribus too.”
“Is that,” Skath asked in wonder, “what I should do?”
“If it is what you want,” Bone said.
There came the sounds of shouting and pursuit. Bone peeked outside. Beyond the crowd he caught a glimpse of drab-robed figures. “Decide soon,” he added.
Eyes shut as if testing whether she dreamt, Skath set down her miniature tree and grasped the sword. She winced in horror, teetered, but mastered herself.
“No. I will not change. You will do what I want. I will command you.”
The sword’s light grew yet more natural, less lurid, like a waning desert sunset. Rainbows and sparkles subsided. Although a child, Skath now seemed somehow taller than either Gaunt or Bone.
“You do not care about people,” Skath told the sword. “But I do.”
The silence that followed was swiftly broken. Mistress Needles rushed in, four maimed citizens close behind.
“Success, Mistress,” Bone began cheerfully, as he tripped her.
Gaunt smashed the porcelain cat’s head over a citizen’s. He went down, but the remaining minions advanced upon their foes, one to a person. Given his and Gaunt’s exhaustion, Bone calculated the odds at a hair less than fifty-fifty, if Skath did not act.
Skath acted.
Glowing crystal slashed her opponent’s arm. The Maratracian regarded Skath with shock and collapsed dead at her feet.
“What have you done?” Mistress Needles hissed, rising from the floor.
Skath pricked Gaunt’s foe in the back. He sobbed and fell still. Bone’s own opponent fled, and the final citizen ran close behind, brushing porcelain fragments from his hair.
Mistress Needles sized up the situation, spreading her hands. “We called you Brother, Imago Bone.”
“You used me.”
“Out of expediency. Are you not using this girl, now?”
“Ask her.”
The Comprehender was silent.
Skath stared at the bodies. “Lepton, are they . . . dead?”
“Yes,” Gaunt answered after kneeling beside them.
“I was so angry. . . the sword doesn’t think their dying matters. The sword really thinks they killed themselves. By living the way they did.”
“What do you think?” Gaunt asked gently.
“I think. . . . I think I am tired. Lepton, Osteon—come with me?”
Bone and Gaunt trailed Skath, keeping watch on Mistress Needles. The Comprehender shuffled after them, pinching herself.
Meanwhile the crowd had become a throng, Maratracians now mixing with the foreigners. They jostled each other to behold the strange girl with the sword, but they parted for the boy Skower, who charged at his sister, ending with a jump and a shout.
“You command it!”
“Yes,” Skath murmured.
“Now you will be strong. Now you will not embarrass us, or make Mother and Father fight about you. You could become as mighty as a Comprehender. Or a pirate lord. Or a god.”
“It is not that way, Skower. I could not use the sword as you wish, even if I wanted to. I must always be careful of it.”
Skower’s smile collapsed. It was replaced—not by a frown, but by a bulging of the eyes, a set to the brow, that Imago Bone had beheld far too many times, on far too many faces. He tensed for a fight.
“Always you are weak!” Skower screamed. “You don’t deserve this sword. Give it to me. I will show you how to use it! I will show everyone!”
“Skower—”
“Give it to me!”
He lunged at her, and she gave it to him.
But, Bone realized in horror, Skower did not understand it was a gift. The boy grabbed, brother and sister fumbled, and in a dozen places the crystal petals impaled Skower’s hands.
Bone and Gaunt rushed forward, pulling the boy away. Gaunt cradled Skower as Bone wrapped the wounded hands with his Comprehender’s cloak. Skower had been cut more deeply by yesterday’s street game. But Bone understood what it meant to suffer a single scratch from the sword. It was too late.
“I struck at kin,” Skower wailed. “There is nothing worse. . . .”
“Skower, no,” Skath said. “It was an accident—”
“Destroy us, sister,” Skower said. “Destroy us all. We deserve. . . .” The boy’s last breath framed no word, only the sound of surrender. His body went still.
Gaunt touched Skower’s neck, shook her head at Bone. They lay the chil
d down.
Looking up into Skath’s face, Bone thought that Nettileer Kinbinder in her last fury could not have been more terrible. She raised the Sword of Loving Kindness and it blazed like a pyre as she confronted the crowd of people, Maratracian, Comprehender, and foreigner. They recoiled and whispered and clutched at once other, sensing at last a promise of violence that was no game.
Skath lowered the blade to underscore a command, and it dimmed like a shooting star as it fell.
“Bury him.”
~ ~ ~
The interment made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in coordination, and although Gaunt and Bone shared a look that said flight was indicated, they both helped, laboring wordlessly beside Mistress Needles and the other Comprehenders.
Soon a low mound of earth rose upon a dusty street of the foreign district.
Skath had not stirred from the site, but when her brother was fully buried she knelt and scooped a hole upon the mound. Biting her lip as though about to plunge into waters deep and cold, she drove the sword into the spot.
Light flared from the weapon, and its petals spread, and its hilt bloomed. A wind rose, creaking the boats on the piers, and the new crystal flower twitched like a supple, live thing, twisting upward toward the sun. Beneath the red blossom, the blade became green. Rose-scent filled the desert air. And all those watching felt their hearts quicken, as the sword’s influence waxed. Yet although never stronger, it was not the uncompromising force it had once been.
Out of the sky descended a swarm of bees. They settled upon the changing sword for just an instant before there came a flicker like bloody lightning. The bees dispersed like dust in a running girl’s wake.
They reformed as a humanoid shape, floating in the air beside Gaunt, Bone, and Skath. It made a sound like the purring of a hundred cats spotting a fat crippled bird, or of a thunderstorm shrunk to the size of a bear.
“This is not the desired outcome,” the Teller buzzed. “The sword called to Slaughterdark’s strongest descendant. In her hands, it should have destroyed Maratrace. Or else the Comprehenders should have destroyed it.”
“As it happens,” Gaunt said, looking at the blood and dirt covering her hands, “the sword is changed. And people still died.”
“Too few.”
Skath had heard enough. “No more killing!” she shouted. “No more hurting! I don’t know who you are, but this is Skower’s Rose now, not some weapon!”
“You had best listen to her,” Bone said.
“The sword bears as much of Allos now,” Gaunt said, “as of Nettileer. And something of Skower and Skath as well. There is more than one kind of love in the world.”
“And as I recall,” Bone said to the Teller, “its creation was a response to your acts of Deicide. It did not like your touch.”
“Indeed not,” the Teller mused. “Intriguing: a crystal rose grows in the soil of pain.”
As the Teller spoke, it turned its constantly writhing face left and right, where the people stood silently, too overwhelmed, perhaps, to fear mere eaters of gods. “It is an unexpected alchemy. Perhaps you have changed the nature of the sword. But if you believe you will thereby redeem this city, think again. This place is a disease. The future we are shaping belongs to commerce and self-indulgence, not to misery and self-abasement. That way lies the return of gods. Beware!”
“This is Skath’s city,” Gaunt said. “And Skower’s Rose. I would not underestimate either.”
“Very well; enough. Bone and Gaunt, you have fulfilled your bargain. You saved us the trouble of finding couriers for the sword, whatever our disappointment that sword or city yet endure. You may continue using your security comb.”
“Thank you,” Bone muttered.
“This will,” the Teller said, “bear interesting nectar, at any rate.”
Gaunt watched it fly like a small lonely stormcloud to the west.
~ ~ ~
They made their own departure upon the boat of Flea, who had wonder in his eyes. Under the influence of Skower’s Rose he’d released his conscripts, without quite remembering why, and retained a few as well-paid associates. He was now drinking away his loss.
Already, scores of Maratracians had camped within sight of Skower’s Rose, beginning a new, chaotic city growing within the ordered husk of the old. They planted weed gardens and spoke gently to one another. And yet, as Gaunt noted upon departure, they still displayed their mutilations.
As the scene passed out of sight, they glimpsed a man and a woman embracing a young girl, beside the mound of the Rose. Gaunt looked at her hands, clutching tight the rail.
“I wonder,” she said, watching the river slosh by, breathing in the smells of water and mud as though they were nectar and ambrosia, “if in a hundred years this change will seem an improvement. Will the world come to fear these people? For it’s a dangerous folk who honor both hearth and horror.”
“I was torn between the two,” Bone answered, watching the clouds. “And I want none of either. I only want to settle the matter of the accursed book.”
“Do you still want to rob a drunk?”
Bone glanced toward the captain’s cabin. “Soon.” He took Gaunt’s hand. “For now I only want you, free and alive.”
She touched his face. “You have not spoken quite like this before.”
He smiled. “I have finally given up following in the wake of Slaughterdark. If the Teller spoke true, Skath is his descendant, and I glimpsed within her the kind of spirit he or I might have become, in richer soil. There is more to life than larceny. There is another whose footsteps I would follow.” He touched his clever fingers to her chin. “But I warn you, I am still a thief and a scoundrel and a disappointment to my family, with little to give.”
“Give me this moment and this road and this sky,” she said, and kissed him.
“Never give me roses,” she added.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Chris Willrich lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works as a children’s librarian. He’s absurdly proud that his young daughter could identify space shuttles before she could identify cars. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Flashing Swords, and The Mythic Circle, with another forthcoming from Black Gate.
ARCHITECTURAL CONSTANTS
Yoon Ha Lee
The city
THE CITIZENS OF THE SILKLANDS have no name for the city. There are other cities upon the world’s wheel. There are others more celebrated, whether for the rooted topiary birds that line their boulevards, or their sparkling, inverted fountains of wine. Others have taller spires with which to focus the unlight of the phantom moon, or deeper dungeons with which to contain the abysses of desire.
In any of these cities, you may mention the city or the architect, its restless Spider, and no listener will fail to understand which city you mean. The city lies at the intersection of leys that move through seas and continents, and stretch into the vastness beyond the visible stars. The city extends upwards and downwards in preposterous arches and chasm-spanning bridges.
If you listen during the silence following the city’s curfew bells, you can hear the click-click-clicking of the Spider’s slide rule as she checks her calculations.
~ ~ ~
The librarian
Eskevan Three of Thorns had dropped his lensgear in the gutter. Twice he had been splashed by murky water while determining the best way to retrieve the lens. He had another hour before the water started circulating. Having sullied the yellow-trimmed coat that declared him a licensed librarian, Eskevan felt doubly reluctant either to remove his gauntlets or to plunge them into the water.
There the lensgear gleamed, polished and precise. Enough dithering. He would have to hope that no one questioned his credentials tonight. The master archivist always said a shabby librarian was no librarian at all, but it could not be helped.
Other parts of the city boasted libraries of indexed splendor. Other librarians handled nothing more threaten
ing than curling vellum and tame, untarnished treatises. Eskevan did not aspire to any such thing. In the dimmest hours, he admitted that he exulted in the wayward winds and the grime underfoot, the heady knowledge of the paths words traveled.
He had heard the whispers up and down the city’s tiers, and the whispers distilled into a single warning: The Spider ascends. Eskevan, who lived merely three tiers underground, a child of the chasm’s kindly shallows, could not fathom the depths to which the city descended or the vast distances that the Spider must traverse.
The Spider governed the city’s processes, designing new foundations to withstand the weight of condensed dreams, or selecting the materials that would best gird the city’s gates. If the Spider had roused, it implied that the city was in dire need of restructuring. Eskevan had no desire to involve himself in such troubles.
A trolley approached, sleek and metal-slick. Eskevan plunged into the water and grabbed the lensgear, lifting it clear of the muck.
He imagined that he could feel the effluent seeping purposefully through his boots and socks and the neatly tucked hems of his pants. Feel it canvassing the surface composition of his skin, mapping every pore and uncomfortable callus. Feel it molding his feet into shapes meant to tread alien, unstable shores.
Eskevan stood rooted and terrified and cold as the trolley whisked past. He breathed its exhalations of sterile vapor with relief, then scrambled out of the sewer. He wiped the soles of his boots against the street’s gritty surface and shook his gauntlets free of water. From a coat pocket he withdrew gossamer cloth and wiped the precious lensgear. The cloth absorbed the effluent. He blew it away; it dispersed into seedsilk strands, each of these unraveling in the unquiet air.
Closer inspection suggested that the lensgear had not suffered damage. All its facets and toothy edges remained intact. It was easier to break a man than a lensgear. Their values were appraised accordingly.
A cat watched him from a doorway, its gaze slitted and bright. He wished it would go away.
Eskevan closed his left eye and turned to the patchwork of cracks along the walls of the tenement. He stopped. He scrutinized the insolent cat.
The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year One Page 6
