Clockwork Phoenix 4

by Mike Allen

  Catchkeep [illegible], running free,

  Herding the souls out over the trees:

  Cold ghosts you are. Till ghost I be,

  You have no power over me.

  Similar formations in other charts: the Lurcher (Hothouse Chart, NQ4), the Hunt (Pennon Chart, NQ4).

  * * *

  She turned the first four away with her blessing, for they were faceless, the height of her knees, and moved vaguely, as if underwater—but the fifth ghost Wasp saw up on the lightning-blasted ledge of Execution Hill was a tall one, easily a head higher than herself, and there was something about it that caught her eye. Not exactly awareness, never that; but a sort of daunted yearning that it broadcast, which she understood too well.

  Before she put out the saltlick, she sat on her heels a moment to watch it. It fascinated her, the way the ghosts moved, pacing their confines like tethered dogs, sounding their boundaries, back and forth. She saw much of herself in them, so she never watched for long.

  This particular ghost was walking down a corridor she could not see, turning invisible doorknobs. Its mouth moved, shaping the same word again and again, but no sound came out. A name, Wasp thought. It could have been anyone’s. A lover’s, a child’s, a friend’s. Wasp’s mouth twisted: scorn or envy.

  She wondered what had done it in, this restive ghost. If she waited long enough she would probably get her answer, but she’d lost her stomach for that long ago.

  Hurriedly she laid the saltlick out and the ghost nosed forward, browsing at the air.

  She never knew quite why the saltlick worked. Never quite cared. Another fragment of the ritual, she figured, another step in the dance of call-and-response that kept her here—not exactly like the ghosts, for no Archivist trapped her in jars for questioning, and not exactly unlike them, for her path was prescribed in lines as clearly drawn as any one of theirs. The saltlick worked, the Songkeepers said, because it put the ghosts in mind of the flesh they used to wear. The salt of sweat, of tears, of blood. It drew them. It made them remember. But there was no Archivist to lay a trail of salt for Wasp. Her rescue, or else her entrapment, was her own.

  The ghost reached the saltlick and began to feed.

  She gave it a moment.

  “I am the Archivist,” Wasp said, when the ghost had slowed. She gagged against the cloy of rote, but spat it anyway. “Catchkeep’s emissary, ambassador, and avatar on earth. Her bones and stars my flesh; my flesh and bones her stars. I greet you.”

  The ghost looked up at her. This part used to frighten her a little: the sea change in the ghosts’ eyes as the salt waylaid them, clogged their feet with the memory of clay. The look they’d wear, as though waking from a dream and seeing something wholly frightening which Wasp could not. It had not taken her long to learn that they were only seeing her.

  She set the rolled map on the ground and toed it toward the ghost, who for its part was not cowering as most did but instead had drawn itself up to its full height and was peering down its nose at her as at a turd in the path it would have to step around.

  Wasp hid her smile. She’d been lucky. She’d gone out to Execution Hill expecting to keep coming back a week, a month, before she’d found one quite like this. This was the sort of ghost that had retained or salvaged enough of itself to be searching for something, or someone, or somewhere, and the draw of it was stronger even than the salt. This one sought a someone, she was sure, and from the look of it, the days it’d lived out were long past. Then it was looking for a ghost. And it wouldn’t find it on its own.

  She hoped it was smart enough, or dumb enough, to bargain with.

  “You’re seeking,” she said. The other ghosts walked or flew or fell through their last moments to all sides of her, oblivious, but this one, this one heard. It eyed that map the way a half-starved dog eyes carrion, and she held it up at armslength, keeping the salt between them; the ghost lunged and came up short, collared by the empty air. “Well. So am I.”

  The Cinder Girl

  Area: 1119.303 sq. deg. (appx. 2.71%)

  from the Sinkhole Chart: razor scarring, human skin

  Autumn

  Twenty-three stars: eight major, fifteen minor, including neither the visual binary blue supergiant representing her heart nor the nebula colloquially known as the Spool; while this latter’s representation remains the subject of some debate, it is generally agreed to be either the Girl’s navel or her womb. (If one can use agreed in fairness, conjuring as it does more a smiling accord over a glass of fine vintage than the panting stalemate reached by brawlers, each having succumbed less to his rival’s blows than to his own growing lassitude.)

  On some charts this constellation shares two major and one minor star with the Carrion Boy, whereas on others the Girl and Boy only border upon points (e.g. the Blood Quilt Chart, which depicts them handfast, or the Floodplain Chart, which shows them going at each other’s throats with shivs).

  The Lintel Chart (fig. 3) marks one striking departure: the two constellations are drawn together into one, torso to torso, while the stars designated elsewhere as the base of the Cinder Girl’s childbed-pyre, her right knee, and the Carrion Boy’s attendant crow are here shown to represent offerings—water, bullets, seed-fruit—heaped by persons unknown at their feet. The overall effect is that of a two-headed, four-armed monster god: arguably an attempt, in the spirit of the origin stories of the Well-Before, to explain away cases of severe mutation.

  Apparently a light- or fire-bringer, the Cinder Girl was—and in some few rough backwaters of the Waste-that-was, still is—called upon, with that wayworn trinity of incantation, song, and sacrifice, to conjure out the sun from where it floundered in its yearlong skirts of ash. In fact, whatever demarcating line is sketched in between sun and Girl is vague; most indications hint there’s no line there at all: she either is the sun, or else is swollen with it, as any mother is with any child.

  Consider then this chart: carved into the flesh, from soles to brow, of a girl of childbearing age—more: one who has recently borne a child—but with interruptions in the chart over the girl’s heart and abdomen, wherein are illustrated the binary blue supergiant called the Beartrap (see above) and the Spool Nebula, respectively. These breaks in the chart demonstrate a level of artistry ratcheted up several notches from that shown in the execution of its remainder, and the entirety of the scarring was performed very shortly before the death of its recipient via living interment in the ash.

  The suggestion of apotheosis is not a subtle one. Pared down to its particulars, what we have in the Sinkhole Chart is a pair of extraordinarily well-preserved corpses—those of the abovementioned girl and her infant—the former being illustrated with both the hallmarks of the constellation whose avatar she likely is and the chart in which that constellation may be found, the latter (we are given to conjecture) as a stand-in for the sun the Cinder Girl gives birth to, and which is her death by immolation. (It remains also a matter of supposition that the ash burial edged out the conflagration in the affections of this girl’s acolyte-executioners simply because they wished the chart to be preserved.)

  The observant eye will glean hints toward this circuit of ritual human sacrifice—for crops, for rain, for the fertility of barren wombs—from the story cycles “Bones and Coins,” “A Greener Grave,” and “Cinder Girl Tricks the Honey Thief.”

  Similar formations in other charts: the Bonewitch (Palimpsest Chart, NQ2), the Chooser (Fallows Chart, NQ2), the Queen (White Chart, NQ2).

  * * *

  By that evening, Wasp had learned her letters. The next day she could spell her name.

  “Wasp,” the ghost sneered, chafing at its leash of salt. “What sort of name is that supposed to be?”

  “The one I was given,” she answered placidly. Wasp could understand the ghost’s frustration: it wasn’t like it had come all this way up from the world Below just to teach a teenage girl to read. Still, a bargain was a bargain. And she was turning out to be a fast learner. “Because I was a foo
l and I let them make me fight for the privilege of being Archivist.” She told it about the night that she was chosen out of all the novices and made to challenge the current Archivist for her place. All that training, all that bloodshed, just to be deemed strong enough, cutthroat and holy enough, to wring ghosts free of stories and with them piece the story of the world before.

  As she spoke she rubbed the ridged scar on her neck, shades paler, pinker than her skin, where the then-Archivist had drawn first blood. Wasp hadn’t been expected to get up from it. She smiled, remembering.

  “After that they called me Wasp. Because I’d poisoned my blade and I stabbed her full of holes with it.”

  “How fierce,” the ghost said, mocking. “How proud. All the thwarted dignity of a whipped dog. Have you ever seen a wasp? A live one?”

  She had not.

  “Nuisances,” the ghost said. “You’d like them. They can do nothing else but sting.”

  (You daft bitch, the Catchkeep-priest said in Wasp’s memory. You malapert. Why do we keep you? You’re no solace to anyone. You couldn’t unpuzzle a snarl in your hair.)

  (You keep me, Wasp had replied, because none of you can kill me.)

  Wasp gritted her teeth. Bent her head back to the map. Read spool. Read blue. Read trap. And dreamed of the constellation the Catchkeep-priest’s blood would make upon his clammy robes.

  The Carrion Boy

  Area: 487.012 sq. deg. (appx. 1.19%)

  from the Brainpan Chart: scrimshaw, whalebone

  Summer

  Ten stars: four major, six minor, and a further two to designate the eye and tail of the attendant crow toward which he is discovered making full-body placatory gestures. A random selection of charts lists the crow as either the Boy’s sidekick (the Holly Chart), his anima (the Chalk Hills Chart), his nemesis (the Gatekeeper Chart), or virtually anything between (both the Riot Shield and Blast Charts—fig. 4—provide striking deviations). Even the Boy’s posture of deference, which renders this constellation unmistakable in any sky—balanced on one foot, head down, arms up and out, hands open, palms heavy with offerings or bribes—is variously interpreted, beyond its face value, as either a game, a gambit, or a trap.

  More curiously still, six of this constellation’s stars belong to binary systems (two visual, one eclipsing), and as the stars shift back and forth by virtue of their mutual orbits, they completely change the shape this constellation describes upon the earthbound viewer’s sky: slowly the crow’s wings shift to become the boy’s, and the crow vanishes altogether.

  Setting aside the sheer technical achievement that this chart represents—albeit carved, one suspects, with a blade not much at ease in service to the arts, still it covers, in nearly microscopic detail, the entire frontal bone plate of the skull of a juvenile male Orcinus orca, incidentally providing an embarrassingly large component of the bone record of a splendid creature long-extinct—it appears to have served as, or been associated with, an object of some ritual significance. The skull itself was found interred in ash, alongside the corpse of a young man staked down, apparently alive, to a stretch of barren, heavily irradiated slag.

  However, unlike what the host-canvas of the Sinkhole Chart (see above) experienced, this was no ash burial: what covered this chart and its—what? Ancillary? Chaperone?—was that which the winds had drifted in. One particularly intriguing aspect of this find was the presence of nine pairs of crows’ wings, affixed between the stakes and their victim’s flesh at wrists, elbows, knees, ankles, and neck, presumably to buoy up his manumitted soul to whatever fairer skies awaited it. Another was the assorted heap of limbs that lay atop the corpse: some crudely hacked, some removed with surgical precision, but all well-muscled and apparently quite healthy up until the very moment of subtraction.

  No more colorful, perhaps, than the traditions upheld in the veneration of any of these tricksters, although quite probably more grotesque, and considerably more infamous, is the custom in the cult of the Carrion Boy toward ritual self-mutilation.

  As always it is difficult to ascertain whether it was the custom that shaped the way of life of its practitioners, or the way of life that shaped the custom; puzzlingly, some few seem to spring up like daisies on a slag-spit, self-engendered and unreasoning. This is one of those.

  Owing most probably to the striking lack of sheltering features in the landscape where these people chose to settle, a large fraction of their cultural experience was warfare: preparation, avoidance, aftermath, glorification. Upon reaching physical maturity, all young men and women (with the exception of those pregnant, nursing, or convalescent) entered into a combat training regimen that only the most charitable would term rigorous. At the culmination of the training, those whose lives it had not claimed were made to choose a part of their own bodies for dedication to the Carrion Boy in a ritual taking place under that constellation’s ascendancy. The most common form this dedication took was amputation, but simple mangling of the flesh was also widely used. All these gentle ministrations were performed with the aid of song (“Carrion Boy Feeds the Crows” was a particular favorite) and vast quantities of scorchweed wine.

  One would soon have little doubt whether one’s offering was deemed acceptable to the Boy: accounts still survive of bodies found turned literally inside out, bodies found tied literally into knots, bodies hanged from points quite inaccessible to human agency (see fig. 5 for artist’s interpretation).

  Similar formations in other charts: the Scapegoat (Stairwell Chart, NQ2), the Juggler (Flotsam Chart, NQ2).

  * * *

  The slow burn of autumn congealed into winter, the edges of the map grew sticky with apple juice and the dirt from underneath Wasp’s bitten nails, and the ghost was getting restless. “This is not a map to walk by, idiot,” it told her, standing by in silence as she lay out the saltlick and the apples and the little dish of blood. As she crammed ghosts into jars and took them back to the hut where she paced the tiny room of it nightlong, four paces by four, and questioned them. Each with its story of a long drop on a short rope, or a fall down the stairs, or a half-dozen bullets sinking themselves, wet as kisses, in its erstwhile flesh. Or of a strange deep sick-smelling sleep, stalked by the dreams of dreams. Or nothing. “Or can you fly now? It will lead you nowhere.”

  Wasp said nothing. Not when the ghost berated her, not when the snow caved her roof in, not when she neglected her duties at the shrine and the dogs caught her at it and went to fetch the Catchkeep-priest, and the Catchkeep-priest came to lash her raw and lick the blood away. Blasphemy, for she was Catchkeep’s puppet, her blood the blood of stars. Even as the priest hissed his wet breath down her neck the dogs were tonguing up that holy blood from the floor where it had spattered. Half-dazed with pain and rage, she thought she saw one lift its head and smirk.

  She could feel Catchkeep rising up in her, all teeth. Wasp steeled her mind and shoved her down. She’d free herself.

  “I had to lie,” she told the ghost. “I thought I needed you to teach me how to read the map. So I could. So I.” Something tightened in her throat and she ground down on it hard. “But it’s just junk. A relic for the idiot Songkeepers. A few seconds of heat.” And she tossed it on the fire. “There’s nothing past here,” she said, eyes averted. “Only more.”

  One evening she caught the ghost scratching at her door like a cat. She recalled how she had first seen it, walking down a hall she could not see, turning doorknobs. Even as she watched, it began to pace that hall again, two steps from her own door to the wall of the hut, then straight out through the wall. Sticking her head outside, she could count out twelve more paces in the snow before the ghost slammed into empty air at the end of its tether like a bird into a window. When its circuit snapped it back, the snow where it had walked was left unmarked by any prints. Until she fell asleep she watched it pace out through the wall into the snow and be returned, one arm outstretched, one hand rattling at locks that were not there.

  Where the last light hit the ghost, it shone s
traight through.

  The Bonesetter

  Area: 442.122 sq. deg. (appx. 1.07%)

  From the Railway Station Chart: spray paint, red brick

  Spring

  Thirteen stars: four major, nine minor, and barely visible through its pall of ash (best seen, in fact, in a wind too foul to allow for comfortable viewing: it scuds the cover sideways off the stars, like prying up a scab).

  This constellation is a strange one. Crouched low on the horizon, hulking and spidery at once, it tiptoes hunchbacked through the fallen cities, downbent as though searching, by which it earns itself the alternate appellation Ragpicker (the best extant example being found in the Lighthouse Chart, fig. 6); sinister yet oddly delicate, its stars are among the last to prick the darkling sky, among the first to be annihilated by the coming of the sun.

  As is also the case with the One Who Got Away (see above), few clues survive regarding the figure behind this constellation. Unique to it, however, is that whatever evidence might have remained seems to have undergone systematic eradication, for reasons only guessed at, by people of whom nothing is known save their creation of the chart via which this constellation reaches our notice.

  As always, uncertainty is hypothesis’s breeding-ground: here the theorists swarm like flies to carrion, all too eager to spawn fresh execrations upon the heretofore unsullied lap of scholarly intent. They hold that this evidence was destroyed out of pure fear of the Bonesetter’s return to earth out of the sky, where up until that point he had been chained, like many a chastised fellow-trickster from the stories of the Well-Before, by the very stars that outline him to mortal eyes.

  They also hold that it is from this trickster that we get the songs “Marryings and Buryings” and “Scavengers’ Circus,” as well as the expression “a bonesetter’s gambit,” still in use today to describe apparently anything from anodyne to idiocy. But as the vast majority of these theories share an irritating tendency to go out on a limb and then saw it off behind them, all we can rely upon with any certainty is the chart itself, and, tricksterish in its own way, its lips are sealed.