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 threatening 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 th
at 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.
Through the lensgear, he saw no cat. The gear click-click-clicked through its several apertures. His teeth vibrated; he clenched his jaw. Each time, Eskevan saw the loose, flat outline of a cat. A paper cutout, if paper could reproduce such glittering eyes.
Eskevan opened his left eye and let ordinary vision reassert itself. He returned his attention to the wall. Graffiti was broken into illegibility by the cracks. Inside the gauntlets, his hands tingled. He used the lensgear again. Amid the tangle of slurs and obscene jokes, he found a single shining line of poetry. With the assurance of long practice, Eskevan reached for the words.
To his astonishment, the words flared white and gold, and whistled from his grasp, leaving him holding an inky afterimage. Eskevan swore. Fumbling one-handed, he opened his capture tome and pinned the afterimage onto the page. It seethed before settling into dark, angry spikes.
The line read: The Spider ascends, except “Spider” was misspelled. That simple fact made Eskevan’s stomach clench.
It seemed he was going to be involved whether he liked it or not.
~ ~ ~
The sentinel
Attavudhra Nought of Glass stood at the entrance to the city’s nexus, holding a pistol-bow in one hand. It was a thing of tension and angles, of parabolic urges. At her back was a curved sword. Behind her, light shifted. She whirled and shot.
The captain of the guard, Yaz Five of Masks, let the arrow embed itself in his shield. “It would have hit my heart,” he said.
“It did not,” Attavudhra said. She had dueled and defeated her comrades in the guards’ trials. She had trained cadets to combative excellence. She was agonizingly close to being able to best Yaz.
His tone was amused: “And that’s why you don’t hold my position.” He drew his own sword, which split Attavudhra’s second arrow, then blocked the sweep of her blade. She did not counterattack. Here, now, she was a mirror to his intention, thwarting his motions and nothing more.
Yaz stepped back and relaxed his guard. So did she. “It suffices,” he said. Then, to her bewilderment, he asked, “Have you been dreaming?”
Attavudhra never remembered her dreams or thought of her past. She said nothing. Guard training was the single lens through which she saw the world. Everything else was irrelevant.
Yaz’s smile twisted. “Of course not. Come.”
Another guard came to take Attavudhra’s post. For a second, his image blurred, and it was as though she saw two men standing where one should be, one short and one tall, one fair and one dark. Attavudhra glanced at Yaz, but if he noticed, he gave no sign. I must be imagining it, she thought.
Yaz and Attavudhra walked into the nexus, past a kaleidoscope of floating windows that showed varied views of the city: trolleys running behind schedule, orreries out of true with the movements of celestial bodies, shipments of salt and iron arriving at incorrect destinations; the sky’s bright dome above, the endless well of darkness below. For a second, white shapes moved across all the windows, like the shrapnel of a jigsaw puzzle. Then they cleared, except for a child’s bloody fingerprints on the other side of each glass.
They reached the city’s singular gate, beyond which stairs spiraled up and spiraled down. Attavudhra blinked, but she couldn’t make the gate come into focus. Sometimes it looked like bright brass with abstract scrollwork, sometimes like a hole, sometimes like an aged portcullis.
Yaz said, “The Spider will emerge through that gate.”
“Then the rumors are true,” she said. The guards spoke about graffiti that wrote itself in dank alleys, cursing the city; frost that drew flawed architectural plans on windows; masonry whose cracks outlined the shape of a spider.
Yaz inclined his head. “The city is unraveling, and all her adjustments avail her nothing. She must come set things right in person. Your task will be to keep anyone but myself or the Spider from the gate. And yourself, of course. Tell me, when was the last time you slept?”
She didn’t sleep, either, not since—she couldn’t remember. Hence no dreams.
“I have preparations to make,” Yaz said. “I would have a partner here for you”—his voice was low with some unshared irony—”but you are the only one suited to the task, the only one with the necessary perfection of discipline.”
For one mad moment, Attavudhra was tempted to argue with him. The other guards were not as skilled as she was, but that hardly made them incompetent. But Yaz Five of Masks was her captain. It was not for her to second-guess his orders. She said only, “You may trust me, sir.”
“Then I will go,” Yaz said. He touched one of the mirrors. It gaped wide, wider, widest; he stepped into it, and away.
Attavudhra blinked as slowly as she could, unable to escape the reflection of her own face, its proportions oddly distorted, staring back from the knife-fine surface of the mirror. Did the other guards dream? Or was she singular in her monstrosity?
She stared at the mirror that Yaz had stepped into. Had he always looked the way he did now? Just as he stepped through the mirror, she had seen a strange shadow bisecting his face.
Yaz had not said when he expected the Spider to arrive. The supreme architect did not travel to the dictates of others’ clocks and schedules. The city reconfigured itself in accordance with her needs, and Attavudhra served the city.
~ ~ ~
The silhouette
The city housed many stairs, and Riyen Nine of Knots had no guarantee that he had found the right ones. He was not entirely real, especially from the left, as though he had been hollowed out on that side. This restricted his ability to descend clockwise, for he had no corporeality to protect him from the outward rush of wind into sky.
Riyen thought he might be breaking, despite his precautions. He had had his left leg replaced with an illegal prosthetic, carved and fitted from the fossil of a deep-diving leviathan. He regretted disturbing the dreams of something so long dead, and fracturing it from its proper position in the sloughed-over earth. Yet it might be the only part of him that endured long enough to deliver this warning.
Fossils had voices distilled over eons of sleep. Riyen hoped that, if the rest of him disintegrated into the spaces undergirding all matter, the fossil-song would rouse every dream in the city younger than itself.
He had sung, once, with his own lungs and words. Not as one of the great harmonists who tuned the city’s uppermost tiers against the wind’s harpist touch, countering the vibrations at resonant frequencies that threatened to unmoor the city from its foundations. Riyen’s aspirations had been other. Now that his voice was a harsh, shadowy thing, given to
distorting nuances, he found his thoughts drifting into snatches of counterpoint.
The Spider ascends, said the city’s thousand thousand voices. But the Spider’s ascension would make her vulnerable. Riyen had reason to believe that someone planned a coup regardless of the threat to the city. He was not the only broken thing moving in the tiers.
No guards had yet apprehended him in his headlong descent. Riyen despaired. Of course: he was fading, and they had no attention to spare for anything but the Spider, even a murderer who had escaped one of their dreaded prisons.
Riyen had tried speaking with a citizen of the 239th tier, with no success. The woman in her high-collared silk coat and baroque pearls had looked through him, imperious in her conviction that a man with half a face would soon cease to exist.
He had not dared look into mirror or window or water since then, fearing that his own gaze would precipitate his disintegration.
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