by Robert Reed
“You heard it,” said his tiny brother.
King said nothing.
“What did it tell you?”
King didn’t want to say.
“What day is this?” Diamond asked.
Then he answered his own question, saying, “This is the Great Day.”
King stared into the blackness.
“But you did hear it, right?”
“I heard something,” King allowed.
Diamond smiled brightly.
“But if this looks like a great day,” King said, “then your mystery voice damn well can’t tell the time.”
TWO
Human faces were difficult to mimic and human manners were impossible to duplicate. But early on and a million times since, Quest had witnessed how these myriad faces carried their own habits, unlikely quirks and singular tricks of the tongue. Being peculiar was normal. Being unique was ordinary. Humans had endless troubles trying to be human. Besides, the District of Districts had a reputation for its odd people, and war only made it more so: refugees fleeing the outlying Districts, particularly the wealthy and their grateful staffs; government officials sprouting from the shadows; officers too crafty to be sent into danger and young males learning to be soldiers in the high camps; plus the endless merchants taking “a little dust from every coin,” making themselves even wealthier. Most of the world’s tree-walkers were clinging to these the giant trees. There were even rumors about closing the borders to the outlying Districts, before the sheer mass of meat and money ripped the bloodwoods out by their roots.
In the midst of chaos, where almost every face belonged to a stranger, one fearful little soul could vanish easily, again and again.
Today and for almost six hundred days, Quest had wandered the forest by night, changing bodies and guises until dawn began to stir under the demon door. Forty-eight mornings ago, she found a chuckerhole and its owner, a ratty and selfish chucker monkey. The owner was waiting beside his escape hole, but he was also eager to defend his fortune of carefully hoarded trash. Chucker monkeys adored the color blue. That proud fellow assumed that Quest was here to steal his treasure, which was why he was easy to kill, and she ate him through the night, using the light of a fake glowdob to search the lost pieces of paper for anything useful.
Spotter uniforms were a deep wonderful blue, and the monkey had abducted several of those treasures.
The cleanest uniform carried the picture identification of a plain-faced woman. Quest donned the shirt and trousers, stolen boots and then a suitable body. With the plain face shining in the bright sunshine, she walked about in the human world. For ten days, nobody questioned her presence or her purpose. On the eleventh day, as she wandered the airy bottom of the forest, a genuine spotter called to her by her apparent rank.
Quest considered leaping into the open air, feigning suicide.
Suicides happened every day.
But the man kept talking, revealing his boundless ignorance as well as another possible stroke of luck.
“My shift’s done,” he claimed. “Please say you’re here to replace me.”
She carried a name and a woman’s voice. Using both, she asked why he would grab that conclusion.
“You look lost,” he said with considerable hope. “And I don’t think anyone could find our station on the first try.”
Hundreds of spotter stations occupied the low tips of the bloodwoods. These were not popular jobs. Crawling inside a big, overloaded room filled with telescopes and binoculars required a rare individual, someone who could stand the boredom and solitude, and this man was definitely not one of the best.
“I’ll show you where you work,” he said. “And I’ll replace you come night.”
She managed a believable smile, and later, when the grateful man in blue returned, Quest had a plausible life story to follow the smile. But the man never asked about where his partner came from or where she lived now, and he certainly didn’t care about her sisters’ names or why she voted for the Archon in the recent election.
Their relationship was instantly set, and perfect.
Quest roamed by night, changing form and directions while studying the sleeping world. She eavesdropped on small generals and linchpin clerks, massaging every word for meanings. She measured jet sounds and propeller sounds and the deep throb of the farthest battles. Every airship had a name that she knew, and every airship ran without lights in the darkness, trying not to be seen. But she noticed, and she often knew where the next battles would be fought, and because of her brother’s questions, she watched the reef with neurotic care, hunting signs that the papio were about to launch some great final assault on the District of Districts.
There were respectable reasons for concern. Prisoners and two-faced spies talked about hidden fleets of wings, some bearing designs that had never been deployed. And the papio had captured fletches and blimps during the war, any ten of which might come here by night, pretending to be friendly. Every home was scared, but the mood was worse inside the Archon’s palace. The treacherous and insatiable enemies were always coming tonight. Tomorrow. Soon. What was hiding inside those reef bunkers and surviving cities was beyond measure, which was why the citizenry and the high generals had no choice but think about little else.
That final night was the same as the previous thirty. Quest wandered and watched. Five airships and a squadron of wings destroyed one another among the dead blackwoods. Later she heard an important sound, but only once and she was far from the palace. By the time she arrived, the signal bell had been pulled back into its hiding hole, and she flew away, still wearing the leatherwing form.
Later, she plastered her body across a low limb, pretending to be an epiphyte, night-blooming flowers hiding an army of eyes.
Everything was memorable, but only because everything was always memorable.
Then the night felt done, and she was a different species of leatherwing gliding back to the chuckerhole, and after putting on the day’s body and the blue uniform, she rode a descending rope, travelling down to where the rope bent and started up again. And that was the moment when the demon floor parted, raining burst upwards with a fabulous roar and the first ruddy wave of sunlight.
A woman in such circumstances was free to run.
She ran.
The rain was still rising when she arrived. But oddly, the male spotter wasn’t waiting at the door. He was usually impatient to leave, preferring to escape before he was soaked, and his absence had to be a warning. Quest felt the strong urge to turn and flee, shucking off this over-trusted disguise afterwards. But the rain was just beginning, and it felt stronger than any storm from the last hundred mornings, and even her terrors had limits: nobody would be laying in ambush for her, not in this weather and with no place to hide.
The male spotter was indoors, but he wasn’t waiting.
Unlike every other morning, he was doing real work. The station’s largest telescope was fitted with special machinery, allowing spotters to see through the darkness half as well as any night-flying creature. The man’s right eye was fixed to the final lens. His left hand was holding the call-line receiver. A voice at the other end of the line was talking, and then the spotter said, “Shut up. Shut up.”
The distant voice shut up.
“You don’t understand,” the man said. “I see what I see. And it’s there.”
The telescope was supposed to be pointed at the reef and the papio. But instead the great brass gears had directed it straight down, aiming through a hole in the floor that had never made sense to Quest.
“When the rain stops, look,” the spotter screamed.
Quest stood in the doorway, letting the water spray everything.
The voice on the line said, “But I won’t sound the alarm.”
“Then don’t,” said the spotter.
Quest made a sound inside her throat.
Then a man who couldn’t even identify an alien standing in his midst looked up, noticing her and smiling at her as he
reported with great joy, “It’s another one of the big ones, the famous ones.”
“Which ones?” she asked.
“The coronas,” he said. “It’s another big black ancient. You know. The sort that brought us the Children.”
Coming into any room, Diamond always looked at Elata first.
Elata sat beside the long table. Her back was straight, a book opened where the plate belonged. Eggs and fresh crescents were cooking in the kitchen, making the air warmer, brighter. Chocolate eyes didn’t look up. A finger and thumb were eager to turn the page. Diamond’s eyes wanted to look at nothing else. He always embarrassed himself at moments like this. The girl was a younger, prettier version of her dead mother. The long black hair needed brushing, and she was wearing bedclothes and an old wine-colored robe, and nothing about her body was revealed . . . yet the boy spent a full breath doing nothing but absorbing her.
“It seems nobody can sleep,” Mother called from the kitchen.
Thick windowless walls barely blunted the sound of water exploding upwards across the bloodwoods. The strongest wood in the world was twisting, and the entire palace groaned in response.
“Motion is a blessing,” Father used to say. “Bending is stronger than being rigid and stubborn. And that’s triply true with people too.”
Other people were sharing the breakfast table.
Master Nissim sat beside Elata. Reading glasses rested lightly on the tip of his spectacular nose, bone frames holding bright new lenses. A tightly folded copy of the morning news was perched before him. Seldom was occupying the opposite chair, reading the opposite page. “Hi, Diamond,” he said without looking up.
“Hi.”
“Finished?” Nissim asked.
“No, sir,” said Seldom, squinting at the tightly packed words.
The Master sat taller in a chair than anyone else. He had recently started to grow a beard, the whiskers emerging white and coarse. Removing his glasses, he told the newcomer, “You look well rested.”
Diamond was walking towards the farthest chair.
Turning the page, Elata finally glanced at Diamond. “That’s sarcasm,” she said.
“Only if it’s humorous,” Nissim said.
Seldom rubbed his eyes. “Some battle woke me.”
“Not me,” Elata said.
Diamond began to sit, but then his mother called out. The words, “Come in here,” were wrapped in a tone that could only mean him.
His bottom lifted off the chair.
Nissim was pouring bangle tea into his milk. Once more, he asked, “Are you finished?”
The tall boy leaned forwards, grinning. “Done.”
“Do the folding, please.”
Shaped like a giant funnel blossom, the news stood with its broad end down, flat outside faces defined by complicated folds hiding many more pages. Spidery fingers opened the blossom, hunting for fresh words.
“What did you read?” asked the Master.
“We shot down five of theirs in the Mists,” said Seldom, “and only one of ours got damaged.”
“What does that mean?”
“We lost two, and they lost three.”
That battle was fought the day before yesterday.
“Anything else?” Nissim asked.
“I bet the fight wasn’t far inside the District of the Mists,” the skeptic said. “Probably near the border with our District.”
“Our District.” Seldom was the only one among them who claimed the District of District as his own.
Diamond stopped in the kitchen doorway. The room was bright and tall, with enough counter space for three servants to help prepare every possible meal. But the one lady who helped feed them was gone. Once Mother felt well enough, she made certain that their cook had a pleasant new job waiting, and then she fired her.
“You’ll never eat as well as you did,” she told her extended family. “But who deserves feasts, these days?”
Mother was finishing a wide skillet of eggs. Without looking up, she said, “Take the crescents out, put them in their bowl.”
The oven door creaked as it fell open. The curled loafs of bread were resting on a sheet of black iron, their tips just beginning to burn. The mittens were hiding. Diamond used his hands, setting the iron on the polished coral counter.
Mother disapproved. He knew she would stare, and he imagined their conversation as he emptied the sheet two crescents at a time, the tips of each finger burnt worse than the oily bread. But Mother was ignoring him. Instead of the conversation that he expected, she said to her companion, “I told you two sweet nuts. How many was that?”
“One and one and one,” said Good.
“Which is three,” she warned.
The monkey looked at his best old friend, trying to share a grin. Then dipping his head, he moaned, “Sorry.”
And he laughed.
“Take the crescents out,” Mother repeated.
Blisters were already turning back into ordinary flesh. As Diamond matured, the healing came faster.
Mother shoveled the golden eggs into a matching bowl. “These too.”
Diamond took the crescents, then the eggs. Mother had the nuts. Sweet nuts were the one indulgence—from one of the last happy blackwoods surviving inside their old District.
“Anything else?” she asked the table.
Reading wasn’t allowed with food. Master Nissim set the news aside, and Elata closed her book and sat on it. Every chair was filled. There was room at the long table for others, but Mother didn’t like how it looked. Empty chairs were just another item on that very long list of sights that made her sad.
Good sat on a box balanced on his chair. If he put one foot on the table, he would be sent to his room.
His room was Mother’s room.
The carafe of oil was passed first, a little poured into the center of their plates, and after the food was claimed, the oil was passed a second time. Every bowl ended with Diamond. His plate was a serving platter, and his appetite was as big as any two others. Twenty days ago, he had visited the Grand University for the single purpose of sitting alone inside a special room—a sealed room built specifically for him—and he ate what he wanted and breathed naturally. Unseen people measured the oxygen used and the carbon dioxide coming out of him. The amounts were in balance, and what energy wasn’t making new tissue went into heating his blood and stockpiling energy inside each of his busy cells. Numbers proved what everyone knew: his metabolism was like an hairyheart elf’s, only on a giant scale. Scientists and doctors couldn’t find anything that was genuinely, unabashedly magical, at least in that one narrow test. But all the same, the word “magic” was used quite a lot.
“Somebody needs to talk,” Mother told the table.
She was sitting where she always sat, beside her son.
Master Nissim was the best hope. He smiled in a thoughtful way while looking at her, carefully measuring her state of mind. She didn’t seem especially depressed or sensitive this morning, which was why he risked saying, “I’m taking my class on a little journey today.”
That was the first word any of them had heard about this.
“The four of us are going to visit the Grand University. Again, yes. But we’re exploring a different specialty. The world’s leading expert on spheres and their mathematics has kindly agreed to make my students feel stupid.”
Seldom laughed nervously.
Elata looked at Diamond. This was the first moment of the morning when she kept her eyes on him, and he felt her gaze, glad for it and not glad for it.
“Well,” Mother said with a flat tone. “That sounds very entertaining.”
Sarcasm, thought Diamond.
“Join us,” Nissim said.
Diamond thought that was funny, at least a little bit.
She looked at him, letting a smile slip free. “You think I’ll be bored.”
“I will be,” he said.
“Not me,” Seldom had to say.
Elata’s broad shoulder gave
a shrug. “There’s a lot more than math at the University.”
“No,” Mother said. “I want to hear about spheres.”
She sounded earnest.
Diamond didn’t know what to believe. He tried to laugh but ended up sounding dismissive when he asked, “Why?”
“Spheres are the perfect shape,” she said. “Every child knows it, even before he learns so in school.”
Nissim had opinions on the subject that he didn’t dare mention.
Mother grabbed her boy by the hand, squeezing and staring at his face. “He told me,” she began, and then she had to gather herself.
“Who told you?” Seldom asked.
Father, she meant.
“Merit,” she said. But she didn’t cry or look especially sad. The name was a pleasure to share and she might be able say it ten times without bending too much, shattering in the end.
Reading strength in her face, everybody relaxed.
“When he was flying,” she said. “When he was beneath the District of Districts, and the sunlight was strong and the air clear, he would climb on top of his ship and look at all of the world at once. The hemisphere above covered with its the forest, and the reef wrapped the faintest gold mist, and he could almost see past the coral and wood, seeing the edge of Creation falling smoothly down into the demon floor, and that was one of the loveliest sights anywhere.”
Then with a bittersweet edge, she said again, “One of the loveliest.”
Nobody spoke.
Only time spoke.
Then out from the silence, she said, “Yes, I’d love to go with you.”
Good understood. He was going to be abandoned at home, and that was the moment when he reached out with his bare feet, nabbing several of the sweet nuts off their plate.
Then he galloped off, the usual reprimands chasing after him.
There was pleasant talk after that. For several recitations, every subject was small and vital.
Outside, the rain was finally slackening.
Silence was trying to grasp the world.
Then from some distant place came the diluted roar of a siren. There was just one siren, the warning beginning in the direction of the Bluewind District, but quickly more and closer sirens joined in. And in another few moments there was nothing to hear but the wailing of hundreds of sirens and the first ominous firings of cannons—every gun aiming at nothing, doing nothing but mapping the winds.
