by Pollock, Tom
It’s not really his mind. It’s a map, a model, nothing more.
Beth thought of all the tiny synaptic sparks inside Fil’s brain, the electrical impulses that had made him who he was. She looked at the dancing lights and wondered if they could really represent them.
There was, it struck her, something familiar about the apparatus – something she’d seen that did look like this, but writ larger, more complex. She frowned, trying to place it.
The grey-skinned baby was enraptured. He waved his stubby arms delightedly, his dark gaze swallowing up the show.
‘Holy Hell and Riverwater,’ Petris muttered. ‘You went to Candleman?’
Beth nodded.
‘That bright spark,’ Petris growled. ‘He’s the bane of my existence. I’d be a fountain of song and sunny disposition if it wasn’t for him. Don’t look at me like that,’ he said when Beth arched an eyebrow at him. ‘He might not be a heretic, but he’s still a parasite. His clients go to him grief-blind and grasping, missing those they’ve lost so badly, wanting them back, wanting them to remember. They’re so obsessed with the idea that it might be possible, they never stop to think whether or not it’s kind.’
He snorted. ‘Growing up inside a punishment skin’s hard enough without knowing you’ve done it sixteen times before. You—’
A commotion from outside cut him off. Shouts and curses from desiccated throats. Stone crashed against stone with a screech that made Beth’s bones vibrate. Then a familiar voice called, ‘Bring her out, Petris!’
Before the old High Priest could react, Beth ducked under his arm and shoved the door open.
The scene outside looked a bit like a game of oversized chess: statues faced each other on the frosted grass, drawn up in battle lines, stone teeth bared, stone fingers hooked like claws. Some overeager pair had already clashed, for a marble scholar stood hunched, his arms still locked around the elbow of the sprawling Victorian bronze he’d just thrown over his shoulder. Both were motionless, but she could hear the rasping breath being dragged into their lungs.
In the midst of it, Ezekiel stood, hands and wings outstretched, his stone face beatific, as though he were calling for calm.
The words that came from his mouth however, were hardly conciliatory. ‘Give her to me, Petris, or I’ll pull the arms off your punishment skin and use them to beat you into bloody shale and take her anyway.’
‘Why?’ The stone monk kept his voice mild as he emerged behind Beth. ‘Whatever are you going to do with her?’
‘Well, first I’m going to make her a nice cup of tea,’ Ezekiel said acidly. ‘Then I’m going to rip that blasphemous lie of a face off the front of her skull and make her eat it, and then I’m going to kill her. Depending on time constraints, I might have to skip the tea.’
Well, Beth thought, her stomach pitching, good to know you’ve made up your mind, then.
‘Careful ’Zeke,’ Petris said. ‘By the Scriptures you claim to hold to, it’s that that sounds like blasphemy. You’re sworn to protect her, after all.’ His tone was insultingly offhand, a deliberate provocation, and it stripped the last vestiges of warmth from Beth’s skin.
‘She. Is. Not. Mater. Viae,’ Ezekiel hissed. The priests that flanked him tensed: they didn’t move, but there were suddenly lines carved in their stone muscles, as if they were ready to spring.
‘I’m not giving her up, Stonewing,’ Petris said. ‘She’s our friend. She set us free from a lie.’
‘She’s bound you in one!’ Ezekiel shouted back, saliva spraying from his mask. ‘But then, you were so quick to believe her propaganda, I wonder if it wasn’t what you were secretly hoping for anyway. Reach himself could’ve shrieked it to you and you would have bought it.’
‘Reach!’ Petris laughed incredulously. ‘The Crane King fell because of her.’
‘Just like you will,’ Ezekiel said, ‘if you don’t get out of our way.’
Beth swallowed hard. If this was a movie, she thought, this is the bit where I give myself up to avoid bloodshed.
Somehow, though, taking the noble route was harder when you couldn’t see any way you’d go on breathing for more than twenty second afterwards.
She gripped her spear, wondering if she could fight her way out. She eyed the statues in front of her, trying to memorise them. When the stone ranks broke, there’d be precious few ways to tell friend from foe in the blur of the mêlée.
The ranks flickered closer together until the carved jut of Petris’ cowl was almost touching Ezekiel’s angelic face.
Beth’s mouth was dry with the anticipation of violence.
Petris snorted derisively, dust puffed from under his hood. ‘You’re hopelessly overmatched,’ he said.
‘The Masonry Men will fight for us, and the Blankleits too,’ Ezekiel boasted.
‘Will they? And if they do, who do you think their Amber cousins will fall in behind?’
‘My faith gives me my courage.’
‘That’s wonderful. My three-to-one superiority in numbers gives me mine.’
‘Mater Viae will decide.’
‘Mater Viae is dead!’ Petris shouted.
Both clerics fell silent then, possibly in surprise at the razor-sharp railing spear that had been thrust between them. The gap from stone belly to stone belly was so small that the spear’s blade was caked in dust, granite on one edge, marble on the other, where it had sliced fine channels in their armour.
Beth gripped the weapon in shaky fingers. Absurdly, her mind flashed to a classroom years ago: Mr Billings was choking on marker-pen fumes. The date 28 June 1914 was inked in the corner of a whiteboard. In the centre, ARCHDUKE FERDINAND was printed in capitals and ringed in red, and around that name, a web of wonkily drawn lines linked the names of countries, standing for the web of distrust, paranoia and blind loyalty that had dragged the world into war. She pictured that spider diagram superimposed on a map of her own city.
All she knew was that she could not let these men lay a gauntlet on each other.
Ezekiel’s head ground slowly around to face her.
‘What’s that face then, a trophy?’ His voice was bitumen-black. ‘Can you actually hear yourself, Petris? How can you tolerate her parading Our Lady’s likeness around like that? I mean, what is she even supposed to be?’
Inside his carved open mouth, Beth saw Petris’ real flesh-and-blood lips move to answer and then hesitate as he wondered exactly the same thing.
Beth swallowed against her parched throat. The world shrank. What is she supposed to be?
That was the question that was driving Ezekiel, she realised, the question that was very nearly driving him mad. Whatever he might protest, he wasn’t certain; he didn’t know what to make of her, so reminiscent was she of the Goddess she’d pronounced dead. Part of him wanted to despise her for it; another wanted to grasp at her like a drowning man. He couldn’t bear being torn like that, so he had to destroy her.
Beth did have a choice: she could fight Ezekiel, or she could try to help him understand.
With numb fingers, she let the spear fall and as it clanged off the stones she pulled a black marker pen from her pocket and dropped to one knee. The Pavement Priests watched her uncertainly.
On the pavement beneath them she wrote:
I don’t know. But I know who to ask.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Pen’s attempts to put on her makeup would probably have been going a lot better if she could have stopped her hand shaking.
‘I must say, My Lady,’ the courier who’d turned up at six a.m. that morning had said, ‘I’m really looking forward to seeing today’s shots. I hear they’re going for immediate syndication, so they should be out in time to make the evening papers.’
‘Papers?’ Pen had said hollowly. ‘Lots of people will see them, will they?’
‘Oh, a fair few. About three million, I should think, Countess, plus the folks who’ll look online, of course—’
‘Three … million?’ Terror threaded itself
through Pen’s throat and pulled it closed.
‘At least.’ The courier had beamed as he’d handed her a large black box tied with a silver ribbon in an elaborate bow, then he ducked his head and backed away down the corridor, delaying looking away until the last possible moment.
The box had been lined in velvet. Pen had emptied it out and found foundation, blusher, lipliners and lipsticks, eyeliners, mascara, Touche Éclat and eyeshadows in every conceivable shade, along with an exquisite set of bonehandled brushes. The last thing to fall from the box had drifted like a leaf onto the dresser: a glossy photograph of Parva, smiling and made-up to emphasise every single scar. Pen had set her teeth and hissed when she saw it. To her, it was more exposed and traumatic than a skull.
On the corner of the picture, a couple of sentences had been scribbled. Pen had held them up to the mirror to read them.
‘Come like this to start, we’ll amend as we go. BD.’
Three million people, Pen thought, eyeing the picture, seeing me like this – no wonder I’m shaking like an earthquake. Parv, how on earth did you ever do this?
*
She’d just about managed the foundation, but when her quaking hand nearly shoved a peacock-blue pencil through her eye, she put it down and exhaled hard. It felt like her lungs were packed with barbed wire.
‘Um … Countess?’
Pen started and turned, wondering how long Espel had been watching her. The steeplejill was sitting up on the couch. Sleep had messed up her blonde hair and its random, dandelion strands made the symmetry of her face even more unnerving.
She eyed Pen with a shy curiosity. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine, I’m just …’ Pen tailed off, because she didn’t really have an end to that sentence.
Espel’s frown said she didn’t believe her. She rose and came to stand beside Pen’s shoulder, clutching the duvet Pen had thrown over her like a child’s security blanket. She hesitated, then picked up a brush and tentatively turned it over in her fingers. ‘I don’t want to step out of line here or anything,’ she said. ‘I mean, you’re a mirrorstocrat, you do your own makeup – that’s your privilege, of course, but it’s Beau Driyard waiting downstairs. Do you … do you want some help?’
Pen nodded and handed her a brush – it was all she trusted herself to do.
She couldn’t help tensing when Espel brought the brush to her cheek, and she noticed Espel tense in turn. Then, very gently, the steeplejill eased pigment onto the skin below one of Pen’s scars, and started to speak.
‘My brother and me, we used to do each other’s makeup when we were kids. Well, he used to do mine, and then he’d let me smear stuff all over his face and get one of his friends to fix it later. I was only seven. One autumn I won a steeplechase – I was the fastest girl at school, and I was going to have to go up on stage in front of the entire year to get my prize. My brother said he’d help me get ready, but I was so scared I kept jerking around under his brush. When he asked me what was wrong I told him I was afraid of all those people looking at me. Most of my classmates had managed to buy at least a mole or a dimple or something original for their false sides, but I was still as symmetrical as symmetrical gets. I was so scared what they’d think, how they’d see me, what their eyes might make me into, that I’d thrown my breakfast up.
Her fingers hovered over Pen’s skin with a closeness that stalled her breath, but in the mirror, the half-faced girl was invisible and the brush seemed to float in the air like magic.
‘So my bro said to me, “Think of it like this: right now, what I’m painting on you is another face, the one that goes between your face and their eyes. The makeup’s a mask, that’s all. So you don’t need to be scared of how they’ll see you, because they won’t see you at all.”’ Espel smiled to herself at the memory. ‘“The only one who’ll see you is me,” he said. ‘“And you can trust me to see you right.”’
She’d expertly layered dark blue and red around one of Pen’s scars, creating a vivid optical illusion that raised the twisted tissue from her cheek.
A mask. Pen latched on to the idea: It’s Parva they’ll see: the most beautiful woman in the world, not me.
Her breath moved a little easier in her lungs. ‘Thank you,’ she said, very quietly.
Espel blushed and shrugged Pen’s gratitude awkwardly away.
Pen looked into the mirror, at the ghostly floating brush. You’re a mirrorstocrat, she thought. You can see yourself. You do your own makeup.
‘Espel?’ she said casually.
‘Ma’am?’
‘How come you don’t show up in mirrors?’
Espel actually laughed.
‘Give me a break, Countess! I’m only a half-face. I can’t afford to just go spilling my image into every passing mirror the way you can. Image is essence, after all. Gotta hold on to it.’ Espel picked up an eyebrow pencil. ‘I was brought up thrifty; runs in the family.’
‘The family?’
‘For four generations. Ever since my great-grandprofiles were reflected through from the Old City.’
‘Like I was,’ Pen said.
Espel’s lip quirked. ‘No, Countess, not like you were – not even close. They were half-faces; you were born in an instant, out of infinite reflections, infinite wealth. My great-grandprofiles gestated over years– their originators in the Old City took the exact same pose in the exact same mirrors with the exact same light, time after time, and every time those mirrors retained and remembered a tiny little bit of what they saw.’
Reflections and memories, Pen thought.
Espel sighed. ‘Fifty per cent’s about the lower limit for consciousness in a Simbryo. When there were enough stored reflections of my great-grandprofiles to make up half a face, that’s when they woke up and found themselves here, confused and scared, stumbling away from the mirrors that made them before they could grow any more, remembering only half of who they once were. That’s why there aren’t any third-faces or three-quarter-faces, only halves and mirrorstocrats. Infinite and sparse. Rich and … not so rich.’
Espel looked into the mirror, at the emptiness there. ‘I could,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘if I tried, I could cast a reflection. I could give up a little piece of myself to see myself. I won’t lie, it’s tempting – but it’s also addictive. There are hospitals in the Kennels full of faded men and women who couldn’t stop admiring themselves, and I don’t want to start down that road.’
Her hand rose to brush the skin on her prosthetic cheek.
‘Besides, staying respectable takes pretty much everything I can spare. Ids are reflections too, remember, and reflections ain’t free.’
She turned her gaze towards Pen’s reflection. She shook her head as she picked up a dark pencil. ‘It’s strange, I never would have thought—’
She caught Pen’s eye, broke off and blushed deeper.
‘Never would have thought what?’ Pen asked.
‘Nothing, Countess,’
‘You never would have thought what?’ Pen insisted.
‘That you’d be scared to be seen,’ Espel said quietly. ‘I mean, you’re a mirrorstocrat. You can see yourself any time you want. You can make yourself with your own eyes – be however you see yourself.’ Espel pursed her seam-stitched lips wistfully at such luxury. ‘What have you got to be afraid of?’
‘That maybe how I see myself is how I really am—’ Pen said before she thought.
There was a long silence, broken by a long low beeping coming from the desk-monitor.
‘That’ll be them calling from downstairs.’ Espel set the brush down. ‘Are you ready?’
Pen stretched her fingers experimentally. They answered her. She looked in the mirror at her stark scars, her inverted image: Parva’s face.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
*
The digital numbers blinked to 50 and the lift doors slid open. Pen went to step out, but Edward rumbled, ‘Ma’am?’ in such a pained way that she paused.
He j
erked his head at Espel. ‘Go and make sure the chamber is prepared for the countess.’
Espel stiffened very slightly, then dropped a curtsey. After much embarrassed protestation, she was wearing a black shirt and trousers Pen had found in one of Parva’s seven cavernous walk-in wardrobes, a fact Edward seemed to note with disapprobation as she walked away.
Pen waited. The bodyguard’s massive forehead creased until it looked like sedimentary rock, but he didn’t speak.
‘Edward,’ Pen said at last. ‘They’re waiting for me.’
‘Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am.’ He rubbed his temples with his fingertips. ‘This is most awkward, ma’am.’
Pen felt something tighten in her belly.
‘What is?’
‘Milady’s private affairs are her own concern …’
‘But?’
‘The steeplejill girl … given her … background … are you sure she’s suitable?’
Pen glanced over her shoulder, but Espel had already vanished around a corner. ‘Her background? What, have you gotta be posh to be a lady-in-waiting now?’
‘I didn’t mean for her position, ma’am. I meant for – for …’
When some people were uncomfortable they squirmed. Edward went the other way. He froze. Beads of sweat appeared symmetrically on his brow. He was an ice-sculpture slowly melting in the heat of his own embarrassment.
‘You must understand, Countess. I don’t judge, I like Espel—’
Pen arched an eyebrow. ‘I think I just felt the earth shift under the weight of that lie.’
‘Fine,’ Edward admitted, ‘I don’t like her at all. But what do you expect? I’m your bodyguard; I need to be ready to put two bullets in the brain of anyone who gets within twenty feet of you. Liking people,’ he said with the sort of curled-lip distaste others might keep for describing animal vivisection, ‘is not in the job description. Still, I loathe the girl on a purely professional basis. When it gets out you’ve taken a half-face for a lover, your fans won’t be so moderate.’
