The Towers, the Moon

by Andrea K Höst

  "She does not look it, certainly! You would think her the same age as Milo instead of Martine! I have been waiting and waiting for you all to arrive and tell me everything that happened to make her so."

  This girl probably knew Aunt Arianne better than they did, since Griff had first met his aunt only a few months ago. But a lot had happened between then and now, beginning with a hunt for their parents' murderers, and ending with the return of the eternal Pharaoh Hatshepsu to Egypt. Aunt Arianne looked younger because she had been tangled up with a vampire, between all the conspiracies.

  This took a while to tell, and before he was done the occupants of the nearby tables had openly turned to listen, and even the waiters were lingering and making unnecessary visits. Griff made sure to talk as clearly as he could manage, while pretending not to notice. Prytennia sat at one of the edges of the world: not very interesting to most people, but everyone knew of Hatshepsu's return.

  "Your accent is really quite good for someone who has never visited before," was all Aunt Arianne said, after he'd finished describing Hatshepsu's departure for Egypt in the form of an automaton his own parents had built.

  Ned was frowning at him, but Griff didn't care. A friend of Aunt Arianne's had died before Hatshepsu had been revealed, and he knew their aunt didn't really like talking about it, just as Ned didn't like talking about how she'd lost one of her arms.

  Tante Sabet started to ask something, but then the sky exploded with birds – mostly pigeons and starlings – and Griff ducked his head, even though they were well above him, and didn't sweep lower before flying away.

  "The Shift is coming," Josette explained. "They always leave. It is the first sign."

  Griff approved. Anything that made pigeons go away was a right and proper thing. He hadn't begun to guess so many were up there, perched on top of the filigree. Were the Towers of the Moon covered in pigeon droppings? And how did plumbing and water and waste, all the practical concerns he was learning to take into consideration when planning buildings, how did that work?

  Josette, when pressed, said, "The Towers take care of that, like a tree."

  "It is starting," she added. "You notice my voice, it sounds deeper? The air is thickening. Now the colour will change."

  All along the curving stretch of restaurants, people were falling silent, turning in their chairs, heads tilting back. The sky above looked darker than it should so early in the evening: a bruised blue that seemed to swallow the filigree, and then to contrast against it as the Towers of the Moon began to flush white.

  Griff's stomach shifted. He swallowed, and his ears popped, but it wasn't too bad. He had worried that it would be like cars and trains and all the things that made his insides want to come out. Good. He had wanted, above all things, to see the Towers of the Moon, but it was better still that he could properly enjoy why this place was more than just an incredible building, why half the world wanted to travel to France, because there was nothing so fun as night beneath the Towers of the Moon.

  "I'm floating!" a boy cried out, and fell over in a strange exaggerated wallow.

  It wasn't true, not quite. Griff carefully lifted and let go of a salt cellar, and it dropped directly back down to the table, but it did so with a lazy lack of haste. It was very like being underwater, without the need to hold your breath. Griff felt immensely strong, like he'd become a giant.

  "May we get up, Aunt Arianne?" Ned asked and, when their aunt nodded, Ned moved like an old lady, holding on to Eleri for support.

  Griff was not such a namby, surging to his feet and laughing when his chair sluggishly leaped away and bounced like a ball, while the table shifted ominously before cousin Martine stopped it. She was smiling, though, so he just grinned and picked the chair up carefully and then turned and put all his effort into one giant leap, all the way over the little row of potted greenery, and the path beyond.

  He didn't land very neatly, and tumbled and wallowed, and then lay on the grass and laughed until Ned and Eleri came and got him up. He and Ned and Eleri had a lot of trouble learning to stay on their feet, and the best of times throwing each other into the air, those launching falling over each time they did so, but the one flung into the air dropping down like a flailing snowflake. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of other people were doing the same, all across the enormous park, beneath the Towers of the Moon.

  Above, people were flying.

  Some were people-people, just like Griff, but wearing strange clothing with silk panels from wrist to ankle. They came spiralling down after leaping off the top of the smallest filigree dome. That looked tremendous fun.

  Others were maybe-people. If you died in France, you would be reborn in the Court's Otherworld as some sort of winged thing. Most were 'la clochettes', tiny people who spoke in bell voices. Others were larger, like a cross between a snake, a dog and a bat, and were called gargouille. And there were rarer, different shapes, and Griff did not know whether to consider them animals or people, since any of them might theoretically have been people-people once.

  He was glad those stayed mostly overhead, anyway.

  Only a single time did he see any of the Cour de Lune, the rulers of France. A little cluster of them passed at great speed, and went on to circle the whole of the dome. People with wings, not feathery or furry, but instead leathery like a bat's, with a membrane made up of little circles and ovals, layered and almost see-through, and coloured depending on what Tower they belonged to. The ones who flew overhead were part of the current ruling Tower, the Gilded, and their wings were all golden circles, like a shower of coins, or sunlight reflecting off rippling water.

  "Tired yourself out yet?"

  Aunt Arianne, walking in short, effortless bounces, came bounding up to where they had paused for a rest.

  "You make that look so easy," Ned told her. "I somehow keep forgetting where the ground is."

  "Some people, they can never adjust to it," Aunt Arianne said. "They lose their sense of what is up and what is down, and fall over at all times. But a couple of days' practice and you'll find it no longer so hard."

  They were a long way from the restaurant, and Griff thought it odd that no-one had joined in, and only Aunt Arianne had come after them. He could understand that maybe Tante Sabet would find throwing each other into the air boring, but–

  "Is Josette one of the people who can't adjust?"

  "Josette is far too grown up a young lady to be bouncing about," Aunt Arianne said, sitting down cross-legged. "She is very nearly fifteen, and knows better than to act like a tourist, particularly in front of Tante Sabet."

  "You mean that the people who live here don't – they have this wonderful thing and they don't play with it?" Griff did not know whether to be angry or sorry for the French.

  "The Gilded Reign is all about play. But Tante Sabet grew up during the reign of the Snow Tower, when everyone was expected to act very restrained. She didn't have to adjust too much during the Sky Reign, but she is out of step with the Gilded Reign."

  The four Towers of the Cour de Lune that took turns ruling France were very different. Father had said it was a mistake to simplify them into martial, spiritual, intellectual, and sensual, but that's how Griff's teachers had always talked about them. The things people were expected to value shifted along with the Towers, but Griff knew he would not want to change what he thought important just because someone else was in charge.

  "Poor Josette," he said. "Living in the Reign that's all about having fun, and stuck not enjoying it."

  "There's nothing poor about Josette," Aunt Arianne said. "And I suspect you would have preferred the Sky Reign. It's a pity that they won only a short portion of rule this cycle."

  The competition between the Towers was judged once a century by the Tower of Balance, which played umpire but never joined in. Griff was going to ask why he'd enjoy Sky Reign particularly, but Ned had a different question.

  "You said that drinking vampire blood hadn't made you as strong as a vampire, Aunt Arianne, b
ut it had made you stronger, right?"

  "A little. Nothing spectacular, I'm afraid."

  "Does it matter to you if you behave like a tourist?"

  Ned was like that: not nearly so interested in politics as things that made her heart race – and drawing her precious plants. But Griff didn't mind, since adding Aunt Arianne to the launching team made an enormous difference. She even let them throw her up a couple of times, before they started back to the restaurant, and was definitely overall in a much lighter mood than she had been since…since they'd met her at the beginning of the year. Not just acting like nothing bothered her.

  Perhaps she was simply glad to be back in France. She had, after all, dropped everything to come to Prytennia after Mother and Father had died…

  Griff didn't want to think about that right now, not on such a good night. There were other questions to answer.

  "Aunt, why do people-people's ears and noses and eyebrows get bigger when they get old, but vampires' don't?"

  "The vampiric symbionts try to maintain their hosts at an ideal state." Aunt Arianne lifted her hands to her ears, as if checking their size, and then laughed. "I am now picturing my most-irritating vampire master with enormous ears and a nose twice the size of his face. That would go well with his eternal bad mood."

  “And what about the Cour de Lune? They can live longer than most vampires – do their ears and noses keep getting bigger?"

  "Yes, but the rest of them grows as well, to match. That's the main reason they don't usually go outside the Towers in our world – the older ones are too tall to even stand at a normal weight, let alone fly."

  "Have you met many? What are they like?"

  Aunt Arianne looked up as a swirl of la clochettes passed overhead, like a shower of tiny bells falling sideways. "I've never been inside the Towers – far too expensive an indulgence. I've seen a few of the Court at the theatres, but I don't have entrée to their circles."

  Aunt Arianne always acted like having money was a bigger adjustment than all the other things that had happened to her. Griff started to ask whether she would like to be reborn in a different body in the Cour de Lune's Otherworld, a thing Griff found mildly horrifying, but Aunt Arianne was covering her mouth, yawning.

  "Time to go back to the hotel, I think – it's been a long day. We can come back here again another night, if you wish."

  Griff did. The Towers were even better than he'd hoped, and it had been a grand day, worth the risk of coming into a territory where you turned into something else when you died. And luckily Tante Sabet didn't really seem all that sniffy about what they'd been doing, instead teasing Aunt Arianne in a grand way about acting even younger than she looked. He still felt sorry for Josette, though, for having to sit with her family instead of seeing how high she could leap.

  They had to take a special chain-drawn tram out from beneath the triple domes, and the transition left him heavy and tired, like he weighed twice as much as normal. He was glad they were only one flight up, and trailed everyone else up, clumping his lead-lined feet.

  "Tell your sisters, be ready an hour before dawn," Josette whispered, passing him.

  Before he could even turn toward her, she had trotted up the stair and was gone, and of course Ned asked: "Ready for what?" when he told her and Eleri.

  "How would I know? I'm just saying what Josette said."

  "Better set an alarm for an hour and a half before, Ned, if we expect to get Himself here up in time."

  "I'll be up before either of you," Griff told them firmly, but ended up being dragged out of bed by Ned, as usual. He never could understand how it worked out that way.

  They were eating some of the fruit that had been in a basket in their room when there was a scratch at the door, and Ned opened it to reveal Josette, dressed in trousers.

  "They're old ones of Milo's," Josette explained, when Griff pointed them out. "He's waiting downstairs."

  "What we doing?" Ned asked, labouring over her pronunciation.

  "You've seen the Towers at sunset – you need to watch the dawn come in as well, or you haven't properly seen them."

  "You just want to bounce around when your grandmother's not nearby," Griff said.

  Josette ignored this, saying: "We had best hurry."

  He repeated what she had said so Ned and Eleri could understand, talking in whispers as they followed Josette down a narrow back stair and out a rear entrance. It had rained, even though the sky had been clear before and was clear again, and the rain had brought a chill that made it properly feel like autumn.

  A shadow shifted, but it was only Milo. "Remember to wedge the door," he said, with a resigned note to his voice, and Josette hastily turned back to collect a folded newspaper and used it to stop the door from closing all the way.

  "Now we must hurry," she said, shooing Ned and Eleri toward the main street, and keeping them moving at a brisk pace – not heading direct to the Towers, but at an angle that took them to the bank of the Seine, which was wide and paved and handily passed directly beneath a low point of the outermost dome, giving Griff a good opportunity to observe it as they marched steadily into wobbly footing and enormous bounces. They reached a small park not too far from the outer edge, with a good straight view of the south-west Tower and the two inner domes.

  "Just don't try to jump the river," Milo said, and then repeated himself in Latin for Ned and Eleri.

  "Do people really try?" Griff asked, eyeing the wide gap to the far bank.

  "Tourists," Milo said, shrugging, then gave in to Josette's insistence that he help toss her into the air.

  After a while, they switched to a race across the park, and then a game a bit like crack the whip, where they all joined hands and, using Milo as the anchor, ran around him, trying to keep their momentum up until the person at the end of the string spun dizzily away – and usually the rest of them tumbled over as well.

  When it was his turn to be flung, only the embankment railing saved Griff from a dip in the river, and he clung to it laughing, and then caught an unexpected noise nearby, and held his breath to hear it better. Sniffling.

  He looked down, and saw the embankment split into a lower walkway, narrower and closer to the water. There were fewer lamp posts down there, and it wasn't easy to spot the source of the sound, but eventually he made out a hunched figure by one of the chain-linked posts meant to keep people from falling in.

  Grinning for what it would look like to Ned and Eleri, he immediately jumped over the railing to the walkway below. The sniffler looked up, and he saw it was a girl, maybe a little younger than him.

  "Are you hurt?" he asked. "Do you need help?"

  He could see that something was definitely wrong, for the dim light reflected off a slickness at the back of her dress. But she shook her head sharply and muttered something Griff couldn't work out.

  The tone said 'go away', though. There were times when Griff wanted people to just leave him alone, particularly if he was on a train and his stomach had turned into a knot. But he could say that knowing Ned and Eleri would stay within earshot, while no-one seemed to be around for this girl.

  "What are you doing?" Ned asked crossly from above.

  "There's someone hurt down here."

  "Ah?" Ned looked about, spotted the girl, and gestured to the others behind her before lifting herself effortlessly over the railing and wafting down. She walked right up to the girl and knelt beside her, keeping it simple by saying: "Je m'appelle Eluned. Et vous?"

  "Comment vous appelez-vous?" Griff added helpfully. Ned's accent was terrible.

  The girl shook her head, and in a thick whisper told them to go away. By then, the others had arrived, so Griff explained again, and was surprised when Josette, after a sharp look, simply said: "Chrysalide."

  Griff knew the word – even Ned would know the word – though he'd never understood why the French used it, because it was not as if the girl was wrapped in a cocoon. But, just as a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, she was growing win
gs.

  Milo had joined them down on the lower walkway, and took the girl's hands, saying: "Come up. There is no clear thinking in the dark."

  The girl obviously didn't want to budge, but Milo slowly backed away, and she came with him rather than fight. They followed a ramp up, and stopped at a bench under a lamppost.

  The girl's face was like a marrow, but that was because she'd been crying for so long her eyes had swollen up and her skin had gone blotchy. Griff would cry too, if his back was like hers, with two thumb-sized lumps jutting beneath the skin, like boils grown beyond any reasonable size. There were scratch marks all around the top of her shoulders, and she'd torn her dress a little at the back. One of the things had wept a lot of blood and clear liquid, and some of the cloth was stuck to her skin.

  Josette leaned forward, peering not at the girl's back, but at her face. "Aimée Bouchard's little sister," she said. "I am right, am I not? Nathalie?"

  The girl's flinch was answer enough, and she turned her face away as if that would undo recognition. Milo and Josette exchanged a glance, and then they both looked at the sky. Josette murmured something low, before turning and bouncing away.

  The expression on Milo's face suggested that Josette going off on her own was an unwanted complication. Eleri must have seen that too, because she bounded off in pursuit, not so elegantly, but just as fast. Ned had produced a handkerchief and offered it to the girl.

  "Vous…fai…" she began, then grimaced and said in Prytennian: "Ask her if she thinks it would help if we pulled away more of her dress."

  The reaction to Griff's translation was not positive, but Milo promised they would be careful, and eventually Nathalie nodded and bent forward. This allowed Griff to see a sharp, bony tip emerging from the leaking right lump. The left was still swollen to drum-tightness, and he could just imagine how sore and itchy it would be, all at the same time.

  Ned and Milo worked carefully together, peeling and tearing, and the girl bit her hand and shuddered, but didn't make any noise until they were done, and then she curled down even further, so her face was in her knees, and her voice was all muffled when she spoke.