Izza slipped through the shop’s front door without ringing the bell. The man’s mouth slacked open as the door shut. His snort covered the hinge’s creak. Izza waited, awash in smoke and scent. Her fingers itched. She could steal half his stock and leave before he noticed. Could swipe the dreams right out of his head.
She could. She didn’t.
That was the point.
She walked to the counter and rang the bell. The old man snarled awake and staggered to his feet, machete suddenly in one hand. Izza strangled her urge to flee. Her reflection stared back from the machete blade, and from the glass incense cases. Ripped and dirty clothes, lean and hungry face.
Neither of them spoke. The old man’s chest heaved. Heavy gray brows cast shadows across his bloodshot eyes. Incense smoke weighed on the sweltering air of a Kavekana afternoon.
“I’m here to buy,” she said.
“Get out, kid. Your kind don’t buy.”
She wondered whether he meant street kids, or Gleblanders, or refugees, or poor people in general. All of the above, most likely.
She reached for her pocket.
“I’ll cut your hand off and call the watch.” The machete trembled. “You want to test me?”
“I’m here to buy incense.” She pronounced the words with care, suppressing her accent as much as she could. “I want to show you my coin.”
He neither moved nor spoke.
She took from her pocket a thin beaten disk of silver, with an Iskari squid god stamped on one face and a two-spired tower on the other. She sank a piece of her soul into the coin, twenty thaums and some change, and tried to stop herself from swaying as the shop grayed out. Running low. Running dangerous.
The old man’s eyes glittered. He set the machete down. “What do you want?”
“Something nice,” she said. Forming words took effort. She didn’t like spending soul, not straight like this. She didn’t have much to go around.
“Twenty thaums gets you nice.” His head bobbed. His neck was freakishly long, and spotted like a giraffe’s. “What kind of nice? We have Dhisthran sandalwood here all the way from the other side of the Tablelands, send men into rutting elephants’ heat.” Her face must have twisted, because he laughed, creaking like a rusty dock chain. “Smells for all occasions. Murder, sacrifice, passion, betrayal.”
“I need incense,” she said, “to mourn a god.”
He lowered his chin and watched her through the bushes of his eyebrows. This was why Izza’d come herself, rather than sending one of the other kids: enough refugees had flowed through from the Gleb at one point or another that the request might not seem strange.
“Old festival coming up?” he asked. “Some god dead in your wars?”
“Give me the stuff.” She didn’t want her voice to shake. It shook all the same.
“Which one are you mourning? Or would I know its name?”
“A god that doesn’t talk much.”
He shrugged, and stepped into the back room, taking the machete with him. Thin trails of smoke rose from smoldering joss sticks, twisting in and out of light. Izza’s head hurt from the soul loss. She hoped that was the reason. Maybe the old man had drugged her with smoke. He might be out the back door now, running to call for the watch, for the Penitents. She had done nothing wrong, but that didn’t matter much.
She stayed. She needed this.
The man returned, machete in one hand and a slender black wood box in the other. He set the box on the counter and slid it across to her.
She reached for the box, but he placed the machete edge against the lid. His eyes were a lighter brown than Izza’s own.
She laid her coin on the glass beside. He snatched the coin, walked it down spidery fingers, up again, kissed the milled edge, then dropped it into one of his four shirt pockets.
She grabbed the box, but he pressed down with the machete and the blade bit into the wooden lid.
“How old are you?” he said.
“Fifteen.”
“Old for a street kid.”
“Old enough to take what I pay for.”
“You should be careful,” he said. “The Penitents start grabbing kids about your age.”
“I know.” If she could have burned him with her gaze, he would have been dust already.
He lifted the machete. She tucked the box into her belt, and ran into the street, trailing doorbell’s jingle and wafting incense and the old man’s laughter.
Soul-loss visions haunted her down the block. Recessed windows stared from plaster walls, the eye sockets of sun-blanched skulls. Bright sun glinted off broken glass in gutters. The alley stank of rotting mangoes, stale water, and sour wine. Her headache wouldn’t leave. She’d almost died of thirst once, in the desert, after her home burned, before she jumped ship for the Archipelago. Soul loss felt the same, only you couldn’t cure it by drinking.
She was so far gone that her shaking hands woke the man whose purse she slit minutes later, an Alt Coulumbite sailor drowsing on a couch outside a Godsdistrikt gambling den, long pipe propped on his stomach. He caught for her wrist, but she ducked, faster strung out than most sober, grabbed a handful of coins, and ran down the alley. Stumbling to his feet he called for the watch, for the Penitents, for his god’s curse upon her. Fortunately, neither watch nor Penitents were near, and foreign gods weren’t allowed on Kavekana Island.
She ran until she collapsed, beside a fountain in a palm-shaded courtyard, and drank the dregs of soul from the sailor’s coins. White returned to the walls of surrounding buildings, red to their tile roofs, joy to the fountain’s babble, heat to the air, and life to her body.
A single dull gray pearl hung from a worn leather string around her neck. She clutched it tight and waited for the pain to pass.
She wasn’t whole. She did not remember what whole felt like anymore. But she felt better, at least.
* * *
Izza met Nick at the corner of Epiphyte and Southern an hour and a half before sunset. He crouched by a lamppost, thin, bent, eyes downcast, scribbling in dust. He looked up when he heard her coming, and did not wave, or smile, or even speak. She often forgot he was younger than her. Keeping quiet made him seem smart.
Together they turned north, and walked up Southern toward the mountain.
They soon climbed out of the city. The bay emerged behind them, peeking over red roofs, and before long they could see the two Claws, East and West, curved peninsulas stretching south to shelter the harbor. They walked fast in the shade of overhanging palms, past large green lawns and sprawling houses. The mountain slopes weren’t priests’ sole property anymore, but real estate was expensive here, and the watch quick to sweep up loiterers.
When houses gave way to jungle, Izza and Nick left the road. Izza stepped lightly through the undergrowth, and only where she could see soil. Trapvines and poison ferns, ghosts and death’s head centipedes lived in these woods. Nick moved slowly through the foliage, and made more sound than Izza liked. Any sound was more sound than Izza liked. She walked softly until the trees gave way to solid rock, and the mountain’s roots rose from the earth.
She scampered up the stone, and held out a hand to help Nick after.
“I wish,” he said, breathing hard, as they climbed, “we could do this back at the docks.”
“The mountain’s holy,” she said. “There were gods here once, even if the priests build idols now. Where else should we hold the Lady’s funeral?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t know what they were doing. Neither did she. No one had ever taught them how to pray: they made most of it up as they went along.
They cleared the trees and spidered up the scree, exposed to sky and sun. Izza fought her urge to hide. The mountain, Kavekana’ai, was a holy place, but it wasn’t hers. For all she knew the Order’s priests could feel them crawling flealike on the cliff face. Or a Penitent might see them exposed against the stone: their jeweled eyes were sharp as eagles’, and hungrier.
They climbed. Izza helped
Nick, and he helped her. A dragonfly watched them both from its stone perch, then buzzed off, wings scattering light to rainbows.
By the time they reached the funeral ledge, the sun had just kissed the western horizon, and the mountain’s shadow lay long upon the ocean to the east. The other kids were here already, ten of them, representatives of the rest. They’d built the pyre, and crouched back against the rock. Izza felt their eyes, eyes of every hue in faces of every color, all hungry, all watching her. She’d heard them whispering before she reached the ledge. They fell silent now.
A row of ash smears lined the cliff, one for each funeral past, and in their center stood the pyre, a small pile of twigs and palm thatch. On the pyre lay a jade-breasted bird with folded blue wings.
Ivy had found the bird outside a hotel, neck broken. At least, she claimed she found it dead. The girl had a crooked sense of humor, and an even stranger sense of worship. She hugged herself and smiled grimly at Izza. Breath whistled through the gap between her front teeth.
Izza crouched beside the dead bird. Nick took his place with the others, and waited with them.
Izza felt her age. At fifteen, she was the oldest, had been since Sophie was taken for a Penitent after the Green Man died. So the story was hers to tell.
The others waited. Little Ellen curled her legs up under her chin. Jet ground his teeth, and picked at the side of his sandal where a strip of rubber had come loose.
Izza licked her lips. She’d seen Sophie do this before, for other gods. Her turn, now. That was all.
“The Blue Lady,” she said, “is gone.”
The others nodded. “Yes,” a few whispered. There was no ritual beyond what felt right, and nothing did.
She told the story as she’d thought it through. “She died helping us. The way she lived. Tired of waiting for his dead boys to do his work for him, Smiling Jack himself came down the mountain to hunt her children through the streets. When he caught them, he threw them into his sack, and shut the sack, and when it opened again there was nothing inside.” This had never happened. She’d made the story up days before, a patchwork of invention and theft and half-remembered dreams. None of these kids had been caught, and none had seen Smiling Jack. Still, they listened. “He caught me in a dead end, with stolen gold in my pocket. I offered him the gold, and he said he didn’t want gold. I offered him my next night’s take, and he said he didn’t want that, either. I asked him to spare me, and he refused. He came at me, with the sack open—it looks like burlap outside but inside is all needles.” Heads bobbed. They knew, though they’d never seen. The sack, the needles, both felt true. “The Lady fell on him from above, tearing and pecking at his eyes. I ran, but as I ran I felt her die.”
More nods, emphatic. They’d all felt the death, and heard her scream.
“She saved me. I didn’t deserve that. I didn’t deserve her.” The backs of Izza’s eyes burned. She tried to breathe, and realized she was gulping air. She looked down at the bird, and saw everything it wasn’t, everything it should have been. This small feathery stand-in never sheltered her in sickness, never whispered promises to her at sunset, never caught her when she fell. Her heart beat double-time in her ears, loud and distant at once. The whistle of breath through Ivy’s teeth sounded like a scream.
“We didn’t.” Nick, again. She hated the confidence in his voice. As if he believed this made-up ceremony would help. “None of us.” Izza’s heart kept up its strange double-beat—physical, an echo as if she stood too close to a loud drum. A familiar feeling. Her blood chilled. “When I first met the Blue Lady, I—”
Izza lunged for Nick. He hit the cliff face hard, and swore, but she clapped a hand over his mouth, and raised one finger to hers. He understood then, and froze.
The others did, too. Jet stopped picking at his sandal.
Izza’s heart beat in her chest, but the echo she felt was not a heartbeat. And that high keening was not the whistle of breath through Ivy’s teeth.
She released Nick, and uncurled herself on the ledge. Spread flat, she edged out her head so she could see.
A hundred meters to their left, a Penitent climbed the slope.
The Penitent was built on the model of men, but larger: a statue three meters tall and almost as broad, features carved of planes and angles, two massive three-fingered hands, two feet like slabs of rock. It did not climb like Izza and Nick had climbed, feeling for handholds, testing and trusting. It marched up the mountain as if stairs had been carved into the eighty-degree slope. Joints ground rock against rock. Dust drifted down behind it. Jewel eyes in its stern stone face scanned the mountainside.
With every step, the Penitent screamed.
Izza wondered who was trapped inside. Some dockside tough too smart or drunk or angry for his own good. Dope peddler, or murderer, or a kid old enough to be tried like an adult. Maybe that was Sophie. You couldn’t tell from looking which Penitents held men and which women. You could only guess from the sound of their cries.
Penitents made you better. That was the line. You went in broken, and came out whole.
They just had to break you more first.
Izza did not shake. She’d given up shaking when her mother died, when her village burned. She did not make a sign to ward off bad luck or evil spirits. She’d tried all those signs, one after another, and none had worked for her before. Staying still, though, had.
So she stayed still, and watched the Penitent climb.
It drew level with their ledge.
She stopped breathing. Its steps slowed—or else her terror slowed time.
The Penitent climbed on.
Ivy shifted, dislodging gravel. A whisper of a sound, but Izza glared at her nonetheless, and the girl’s pale skin paled more.
Footsteps receded. Faded. Vanished up the mountain.
Wind blew soft and cool over shaded slopes. The sun set, and the first stars pierced the sky.
The dead bird lay on the pyre. The kids watched her. Scared, and waiting for direction. For their leader to tell them what happened next.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.
No one spoke.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We don’t need gods who die and leave us afraid. We don’t have to be the ones who survive.”
Their eyes glistened in the light of new-risen stars.
“Okay,” she said. “Fine. But this is the last. Care for the gods yourselves from now on. I’m done.”
She fished a coin from her pocket and handed it around. Each of them sank a piece of their soul into the metal, and by the time Nick passed it back to Izza, the coin pulsed with heat and life.
She took all their soul scraps, and held them, and touched them to the thatch. The dry grass caught at once, and burned, and the bird burned, too. A thread of sickly smoke rose to the sky. Izza removed two incense sticks from the black box, and lit them in the pyre. They smelled of the desert after rain, of blood shed on cold stone, of empty temples pierced by shafts of light through ruined roofs. Beneath all that, she smelled burning feathers.
Nice, the old man had said. She wasn’t sure.
One by one the others left. Ivy stayed longer than the rest, curled into a ball against the ledge, chin propped on her knees as reflected fire and burning bird made a hell in her pinprick pupils. At last even she climbed down, and only Nick remained.
Izza could barely breathe. She told herself it was the smoke.
They climbed down together, and through the woods, and strolled along Southern past rich folk’s houses until plaster walls closed in again and streetlamps put the stars to flight and they could walk easy, camouflaged by drunks and madding crowds.
“What did you mean,” he said, “that you can’t do this anymore?”
“What I said. I won’t wait around to be locked in one of those things, just for one of you to take up as storyteller after me and get locked up in turn. I won’t be Sophie for you. For them. I have to go.”
“You can’t.”
“Wa
tch me.”
“They need this. They need you.”
“They shouldn’t,” she said, and walked away down Southern toward the beach. He didn’t follow. She told herself she didn’t care.
3
Kai met the Craftswoman a week later in a nightmare of glass. She sat in a glass chair in front of a glass table and her fingers trailed over the slick armrests without leaving a trace of oil or sweat. In one corner a glass fern stood in a glass pot, glass roots winding through glass soil. Other identical rooms stretched above, below, and to all sides, beyond transparent walls, ceiling, and floor, and in those rooms sat identical Kais and Craftswomen. As Kai crossed her legs beneath the table her infinite other selves crossed their legs, too, a susurrus of stockings breaking the silence of the dream.
In the distant waking world, she lay bandaged on a bed. Here, no injuries bound her except the ones she earned herself.
She’d set her hand on the table’s edge as she sliced her palm to the pink, a long deep wound that healed at once. The blood on the table stayed, though. Millions of red streaks surrounded her on millions of tables, catching the nightmare’s sourceless light.
“Before we discuss the idol’s death,” said Ms. Kevarian, “please explain the services your firm provides.”
“Our Order, you mean.”
“Yes.”
Myriad reflections offered Kai a choice of perspectives on her interviewer: a severe Craftswoman in a gray pinstriped suit, with black eyes, short white hair, and a thin wide mouth. Ms. Kevarian sat statue still. Her eyes held neither pity nor humor, only a curiosity like Kai had seen in birds’ eyes, alien, evaluative, and predatory.
Behind Ms. Kevarian sat her client, a shadow in a white suit, a smudge of gray with a broad and gleaming grin. Fingers like wisps of smoke never seemed to rest. They laced together and unlaced, and trailed down his lapels and along the chair’s arm without seeming to care whether the glass edge cut. He hadn’t spoken since they shook hands; nor had the Craftsman Jace sent into the dream to protect and advise Kai, a round-chested skeleton who bore down so heavily on his note-taking pad that Kai wondered if he might be writing with rips instead of ink.
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