Besides, the heir wanted the dragons close enough to protect the king and queen, and their soldiers, all of whom were in the narrow strip of page between the rifts. The soldiers shouted and pointed, but were powerless to stop the dragons in the sky. With their attention directed upwards, the soldiers did not see the true danger. On both sides of the queen’s army, leeches squirmed through the great tears, wriggling up like giant worms before bending their round mouths back down to the page to consume the art on either side of the rifts.
The heir ordered the dragons to attack, and they swooped low over the rifts and let loose their flame, lighting the leeches on fire. Leeches kept pouring out of the rifts, far more leeches than the heir had drawn. They had found a way to multiply, just as the residents had done. The dragons split into teams and flew at the leeches in waves. Each team dove down to breathe flame onto the leeches, then flew in a wide slow circle to get back into position, giving the dragons a moment of relative rest while the other teams attacked.
On the fourth page, there had been one leech, and several dragons had burned it fast and hot until it was nothing but ash. Here there were more leeches than dragons, and though the leeches caught on fire, they did not burn instantly to ash. Flames were everywhere, and if the page itself caught fire, all would be lost.
The heir landed near the pencil queen. “You must have the soldiers control the fires. Tell them to stay clear of the leeches, and douse the flames that spread beyond the torn rifts.”
“What do you care about the fires you started?” the queen demanded. “Afraid of burning the realm you seek to conquer?”
“You do not know me, for I have traveled a longer path than you did to get here, so I am older than you expect. But I am your heir, and I am here to save this realm.”
All around them, the battle continued to rage. A dragon dove too close to the rift, and a leech bit into its wing with sharply pointed teeth and started to suck the art away. The leech grew, and the wing shattered, leaving the dragon with only one wing, desperately flapping as it crashed to the ground. The next wave of dragons torched the leech.
The queen stood and stared at the heir. “I do not take orders from you, or from anyone. I am the queen of this realm. I sketched this world, it is my creation, and you have destroyed my vision with your dragons and your fire.”
“The page itself will burn,” the heir said. “Are you really willing to let the entire page burn to maintain the illusion of control?”
“Control? I have no control! All I wanted was to make this realm and keep it safe, but you have all betrayed me, siding with the dragons!” The queen began to laugh hysterically. “Perhaps fire is what the page needs, a cleansing flame to burn the sketchbook clean, that we may begin again and be born in pure white ash!”
The queen turned her back on the heir and sketched flames onto her easel, ignoring the chaos that surrounded her.
“I will save our realm for you,” the king said softly, but the queen made no sign that she heard. He turned to the army, and raised his voice. “Soldiers, listen, for I have painted you into reality and I am your king. Use your helmets as buckets, and put out any fire that is not burning a monster.”
And so the dragons fought the leeches, and the soldiers fought the fires, and—despite the queen—the realm was saved.
Up in the tallest tower of the castle, the heir looked out over the realm. Here and there, black plumes of smoke rose from the burning corpses of leeches. The smoke was worst along the edges of the rifts, but even there the soldiers had the fire under control. Dragons flew high above the castle, looping and diving, playful now that the battle was done.
In the castle courtyard, the queen stood before an easel, filling sheet after sheet of paper with sketches of fire. The king, of course, did not paint her sketches, but she was losing substance, and soon she would have no graphite left to make her mark upon the page. It began to rain, but the queen didn’t stop sketching, and the king didn’t leave her side. He blamed himself for her decline, and he second-guessed his decision to paint the heir in so many colors. The rain ran down the king’s body and slowly washed his paint into puddles in the courtyard. Their time as leaders of the realm was ending.
Behind the heir, the door to the second page stood closed on the tower wall, a solid oak door surrounded by a thin strip of blank white page. Up close, the heir could see the cuts in the paper, sealed only with a thin layer of paint. Long ago, on the second page, the black birds had erased the other side of the door. What would happen now, if someone tried to open it and step through?
The heir cut away the seal, and pulled the door open, not all the way, but a tiny crack. Enough to see what was on the other side. The residents had cleared away the debris of the fallen mirror city, and created a new world for themselves. Instead of the detailed designs of the first couple, the residents had filled the page with simple things—trees and farms and cottages. Scattered around the page were residents, tending fields and building homes. The heir pushed the door closed. The residents didn’t need any help, they were rebuilding nicely on their own.
The heir wasn’t needed anywhere, not really. The king and queen were no longer fit to rule, but if residents could mend the second page, the soldiers and the dragons could tend this one, given the proper tools. The tower room had not changed since the heir had left it. The easels still held the plain black circles that the heir had sketched at the queen’s demand. The heir drew the circles into palettes, broad plates piled high with paint in every color. On a blank page, the heir drew pencils, not pressed together into the shape of an artist, but single pencils that a soldier could hold in its hand. It came more easily now, to draw what was needed before the joy of painting. Making sketches come alive with color was the heir’s true passion, but there was a satisfaction to doing both sides of art and creating things alone.
When the palettes and pencils were finished, the heir called a soldier up to the tower to collect them. The inhabitants of the page would be free to make their own future. Making art was not unlike making children—once the work was finished, it was important to let it go, to not try to control every detail.
The soldier dropped one of the pencils without noticing, and left it behind in its hurry to take the supplies to the others. On the ground beside the pencil was the Möbius strip that the king had made, now flat because the heir had cut it apart. There were spheres and cubes scattered across the paper, but no sign of the tiny used-up artist or the younger copy. The heir flipped the paper over and checked the other side, but there was no sign of them there either.
Their absence was vexing. Their paper was not a sketchbook, but a single sheet of paper with two sides. If they were not on the front, and they were not on the back, where had they gone? The birds of the second page could erase unwanted art, but there was no sign of anything like the birds here. The tiny artists weren’t sophisticated enough to create anything more complex than spheres and cubes.
The heir might never have found them except that a breeze came in through the tower window and rustled the paper of the easels. The heir looked up, and on the back of one of the pages was a spiral staircase made entirely of tiny stacked-up cubes. The heir pulled the paper down from the easel, and on the back side was a city built entirely from geometric blocks, a city full of tiny artists. Art was everywhere, and it found ways to spread. The tiny artists had escaped their strip of paper and climbed up the easel.
It gave the heir an idea. Dragons circled the castle, and the heir called one over and rode upon its back to the unbound edge of the page. What if the sketchbook itself was drawn on an even grander page? There would be a vast and wondrous world out there to explore. The creations of an artist talented enough to make a sketchbook universe would be well worth seeing.
The dragon reached the edge of the paper, and the heir urged it onward, out into the void beyond the page.
SEASONS SET IN SKIN
Cherry Blossoms
Spring followed Horimachi as she hiked u
p the steep trail. The branches of the cherry trees had been heavy with flowers when she left the capital at the end of March, but here the cold mountain air hindered even the turning of the seasons. She was condemned to make her entire trek under pink petals that drifted down from the trees like snow.
It reminded her of the cherry blossoms that she’d tattooed into her daughter’s skin. Months of pain, and the faeries killed her anyway. After ten years’ service as an artist for the Imperial Army, Horimachi had left the capital in shame. Her tattoos were failing, and soldiers were dying for it.
Aya had died for it.
The ancient road that Horimachi walked was lined with abandoned shrines and thousand-year trees. There were no other travelers. Forests were the domain of the gaijin fae, invaders from the West, and there were dark rumors even in the most isolated villages. Horimachi had done hundreds of tattoos for the Imperial Army, but her own skin was unprotected. Her tattoos were from before the war, when black ink was made of soot instead of faery blood. The only color on Horimachi’s skin was a cadmium red, not the deeper crimson of ground faery wings. She carried the protective inks with her, but she had vowed never to use them. She was done with soldiers, and cities, and war.
Horimachi hesitated at the edge of the village, at the bottom of the hundred stone steps that led up to the outermost temple. She’d lost her eldest daughter to the war, but not her youngest. Suki had been too small to go to the capital, only twelve when Horimachi left with Aya. She had always been respectful in the messages they exchanged—tiny scrolls of paper tied to the legs of gray waxwings—but a relationship only on paper was not the same as living under the same roof. Horimachi’s last scroll, the one she could not force herself to send, was in the breast pocket of her shirt, close to her heart. It bore the news of Aya’s death.
Swords clashed in the temple courtyard. Two women fought with wakizashi, short swords like the one Aya had practiced with before she joined the Imperial Army and graduated to a longer katana. When the women noticed her, they stopped their practice, and one of them rushed over to greet her.
“Mother?”
The woman who approached bore an eerie resemblance to Aya. Suki was a nurse now, tending the fae-addled veterans who had retired from the war, but Horimachi still remembered her as a skinny twelve-year-old girl who had bravely fought back tears the day she and Aya had left. The sword tied to Suki’s waist sash was Aya’s practice sword.
Horimachi bowed her head. “Suki. I’m so sorry. I didn’t protect her well enough.”
“Aya.” Suki mouthed the word but had no voice to speak.
They held each other and cried.
The cold mountain air had not kept away the destruction of war. Men and women, covered head to toe in tattoos, wandered aimlessly through the village and babbled about sources of life energy and swirling eddies of time. These were the soldiers that had been ridden but not killed. Men and women who had watched, helpless, as the fae used their bodies as puppets, forcing them to slaughter their compatriots. It was probably for the best that their minds were broken, because it spared them the knowledge of what they had done. Horimachi spent two days nursing the veterans before Suki pulled her away from her work.
“I need a tattoo.” Suki had shaved her head to prepare herself for the protective ink. Without her hair, she looked like a new soldier, like all the soldiers that had been assigned to Horimachi in the capital.
Like Aya.
“The northern provinces are falling to the fae. I am going to fight and banish these intruders back to the West. Will you offer me protection?” Suki stood, her bald head bowed in respect, waiting for Horimachi to reply.
“Tattoos are painful. They take a long time. They are not for foolish girls who rush off to the city to be soldiers.”
Suki lifted her head and stared in disbelief. “The waxwings from the north no longer bring news, only scrolls of names, soldiers killed by the fae. Thousands of people died in the early attacks, before we knew to protect ourselves, before the tattoos. Nearly all our men are either fae-addled or dead. Foolish is not a young woman wanting to fight. Foolish is pretending that war will not come to the village when it is done with the cities.”
“If so many soldiers are dying, it means the tattoos are not working. My tattoos are not working.” If she had done better work, Aya would be alive.
“I’ve seen your work, and it isn’t flawed. The fae are getting stronger somehow. The tattoos aren’t giving as much protection as they once did, but they are better than nothing.” Suki paused. “But I will go to battle with bare skin if you refuse to help me.”
Suki was so much like her sister, with the same soft fierceness. They were rivers that wore away at rock. Flexible but persistent, fluid but strong. Horimachi would do the tattoo, despite her old back and her aching hands. She would cover every inch of her daughter’s skin, so that she could fight.
Horimachi started with cherry blossoms, their outlines winding up Suki’s neck and covering the pale skin of her skull. The branches and flowers were carefully arranged to ensure that there were no gaps large enough for a faery to slip into her body and drain her life away. Never more than fingertip’s width between two lines of faery blood. Suki was a good canvas, quiet and still. She bore the pain well. Over her breathing was the clicking sound of needles sliding in and out of her skin. Shakki. Sha sha sha sha. Horimachi dabbed away the ink and blood that pooled on the surface of Suki’s skin, then continued making the blood-black outline of petals. Around the lines, the skin turned pink and slightly swollen, a temporary effect that made the flowers look three-dimensional and almost real.
Horimachi stopped after five hours of work. The fine-lined blossoms and branches on the back of Suki’s neck and skull looked almost like the hair she’d shaved away. “We will continue in two days’ time.”
It was the schedule she had used with the soldiers in the city, five hours of work every other day. It was painful, but fae-based inks healed faster than ordinary tattoos, and by the time a soldier’s entire body was covered in an outline of black, the first sections of tattoo had healed enough to begin shading.
“Tomorrow,” Suki countered. “At this rate, the tattoo won’t be finished until the end of summer. If I don’t leave for the capital soon, there will be no capital to defend.”
“Two days. Be glad we aren’t using cadmium and soot because then you’d have to wait two weeks. Even with the fae inks, your body needs time to heal.” Horimachi didn’t say it, but her own body also needed time to heal. Her aching joints were getting too old for so much work.
Water Lilies
Golden magic was strongest at sunrise. An hour before dawn, Yōsei went to a field outside the capital where humans buried their dead soldiers. The ancestors told Yōsei to practice magic on the dead. Safer that way.
The corpses were arranged in neat rows. Yōsei could feel the blood of the ancestors embedded in their human skin, even buried beneath several feet of earth. The humans preferred to burn their dead, but the blood on the soldiers’ skin made them impervious to flame.
Yōsei uncovered a girl, three months dead. Even in the dim predawn light, her skin was striking. She was a canvas covered in black and red, decorated with an intricate design of dragons and flowers and koi. There were swirls of water below her waist and swirls of clouds above. Water lilies floated on her hip, the line where water met sky. A symbol of summer, and even in the early hours of the morning, the August heat was enough to make her body reek of death. The tattoo that protected her skin slowed internal decay but did not stop it.
Stolen blood from Yōsei’s ancestors, injected into human skin. An ink made from ground red wings tinted the petals of flowers and the scales of dragons and fish, granting protection against red magic. Generations of red-winged warriors had died trying to reclaim the sacred land where the humans had built their capital, but Yōsei was different. A thousand generations ago, a group of ancestors left the war and escaped into a faster swirl of time. Centuries
flew by in less than a decade, and they used that precious time to breed themselves for color. Instead of red wings, and red magic, Yōsei had wings the color of gold.
In a thousand generations, the magic was not the only thing that had changed. The ancestors were filled with a rage as red as the magic of their wings, but Yōsei was calmer, more rational. Most of Yōsei’s generation favored war, but some believed that peace was possible. What they needed was a way to communicate with the humans, a puppet to speak on behalf of the ancestors. Any human would do, but as the ancestors said, corpses were safer.
The blood-black outlines of the dead girl’s tattoo were enough that Yōsei could not have killed her, had she been alive, but there were more subtle magics to be done. The first thin crescent of the sun appeared on the horizon, filling the sky with golden light, and Yōsei knelt beside the girl.
Slipping into her body was like meditating inside a stone, cold and still. Yōsei filled the girl with tendrils of gold and divided life energy between two bodies—one cold and dead, the other hot and familiar. The girl was too plump, too dense, and filled with tiny creatures that decomposed her flesh. These Yōsei banished, drowning them in golden light.
She merged into the human.
Yōsei began to mend her otherself. She used golden tendrils to draw blood upward from where it had pooled in the lower portions of her body. She collected the blood back into her vessels and repaired the veins and arteries where they were broken. She inspected all her flesh and healed it, and when the work was complete, she restarted her heart and opened her eyes.
Yosei’s true body recoiled in distaste. Her human body sat up, disoriented. There were traces of the dead human lingering in the connections of her brain. The ancestors said that humans were like puppets to be worn and discarded, but the dead girl had memories and emotions, and even a sense that Yōsei did not know.
Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories Page 18
