By the time the walls of Nowy Solum were completed, and the fecund was a young, lush monster, Mummu was seven times his birth size, working nearly a kilometre under the surface, eating rocks and churning out drones, which he put together in his own shop, manufactured with metals from the rocks he bored through.
When the fighting ended, with Anu half-destroyed, and his sisters hiding, he was perhaps thirty times his birth size. Big enough to generate an impressive mantle.
Today, Mummu was a further seventy times as large. He had continued to spread out, incrementally. His drones were diligent, and dutiful.
The sisters found him by first locating a pack of workers tunnelling under the crust along a stretch of coastline. Kingu and Aspu had known the general area where their brother was set up but they were astonished to see the extent of the work he had done. They approached his seeding towers, extending high above the beach in rows, penetrating the very clouds they had generated for so long.
Several attempts on many frequencies were required to get their stalwart brother to respond, to make him understand that Anu had returned, and that their mother was active. Mummu listened but was not especially interested. Only his agenda remained clear. He had little interaction with the indigenous creatures down here and even less concern for their future. With no decisions to make that required anything other than empirical logic, he had no need for exemplars. He did not care for approval, nor covet worship.
But his sisters tried to express the importance of their visit, relentless. Their lifestyles were in jeopardy. Their colony. Mummu’s fields, his dunes, all of his sculpting: these were also threatened. Anu has descended, they said. Anu is under the clouds.
Paused in his digging—as drones continued to work the vicinity—Mummu was not alarmed. He did not acknowledge the danger. He wanted only to be left alone, to continue his work. If he had to grant concessions, minor requests, to make his sisters go away, then he would do so.
Cliffs collapsed into the ocean with terrific thunder, boiling the spume and sending rolls of dust out over the waves.
The cylinder he had taken from the seraphim became suddenly warm, and Nahid withdrew it quickly from his clothes. It crackled with a light that made the hair on his head stand on end. His skin tingled. When he tried to release the device, it stayed in the air, at eye level, white tendrils a blur. Bluish light flickered, illuminating the alley.
Nahid was alone.
The cylinder lifted higher, humming.
Then someone saw him from the street, and recognized him, for a voice shouted his name, “Nahid! The ostracon is burning! The ostracon is on fire!”
Pains radiated in his limbs. Anu’s voice had still not returned. Hornblower looked at the dark roofs and darker clouds, toward a huge black structure balanced precariously atop several spindly towers, elevated much higher than all other structures around. From this lofty room, a light had begun to shine, visible through the clouds like a beacon over the city.
He heard the growing roar, approaching from behind. When he felt the shaking at his bones, he turned to see Anu appear, sliding into view, rendering every detail white and harsh. Grinding at the hard material used to roof these structures in the underworld, the blind power knocked down chunks that shattered or thudded heavily around hornblower’s feet. Winds whipped his robes about. He shielded his eyes.
Exemplar! Don’t look at me; look for a place I can land.
“I have failed you,” hornblower shouted. “Now I’m lost in this place. I will never find the exile or what he stole.”
It’s too late, Anu responded. We’ve been set up. Now look at the damn—
Wire fingers screeched against the tin of the worktable as path let himself down to the floor. He had begun to glow. He felt his own heat. Light radiated from him in beams of white so that the room was filled with his luminescence.
Trembling, the castellan cried out, arms extended, as if to embrace the boy, but he came no closer.
Behind him, the taller man continued to clean the tools he had used.
“Sometimes,” said path, “I feel like I’m still in the tank, having the flesh corroded from my bones. Or maybe these memories are from before then, when I was a real infant.”
He sniffed the air.
The open window beckoned.
Three men confronted Name of the Sun as she took scraps out the back of The Cross-Eyed Traveller to dump them in the alley. The men had weapons. They blocked her way. One was young and pudgy, with soft-looking skin and short hair. He had a nasty shiner. The other two, holding stout wooden handles in their fists, were older.
“Garbage fucker,” said the man with the black eye.
“Get away from me.”
“We’re taking back the city. Tonight. We know who you are.”
“Leave me alone.”
Behind the group, in the light from a door that had just opened, Name of the Sun saw the unmistakable silhouette of her landlord, standing with her roommate, Polly. They were watching her. Name of the Sun was more shocked to see them than she was by this confrontation, and in her hesitation she was not quite able to fully dodge the first blow, which glanced off her shoulder, striking the wall behind. She did manage to rake the face of her nearest assailant, one of the older men, with her fingers, but the others were on her then, clubbing.
She went down fighting.
Flames appeared to be sliding down the stone, dripping onto the road, where they continued to flicker and leap. Nahid stopped at the doorway to the ostracon, trying to look inside, shielding his face from the blistering heat that roared through the opening. In the road, other kholics huddled. From a second story window, a woman leaned—a senior called Orlando—shouting down at another group, who were trying to convince her to leap.
There was a cry, very much like his sister’s, but by the time he heard it, Nahid had already entered.
The fires leapt at him as he forced his way down the main hall. He intended to call out but could not open his mouth; heat seemed to shrivel him, sucking the air from his lungs, his nose. Above, part of the ceiling had collapsed and more flames roared through the hole, breaking at its edges, consuming. The ostracon was filled with an almost ambient peace.
His skin might be splitting. He was transforming, emerging. There were no people here, in this landscape of flames and heat. Just him. He tried to mount the stairs, to get to the dorms where he had lived with Octavia for years, but the upper floor was completely engulfed.
Through a damaged wall toward the rear of the building he saw the dark and smoky courtyard. Out there, another kholic climbed the low buttress that ringed the ostracon. Looking over his shoulder, eyes wide and glinting, face reddened, he seemed to look right at Nahid, who stood in the inferno, hair gone, skin blistering and crackling.
When Nahid breathed, his lungs turned to cinders.
Over the roar and shouts from outside, he heard a baby’s cry.
The sisters flew below the clouds. Mummu had lent them a squad of diggers, and the ruthless drones spread out in formation below, rumbling as fast as their treads could carry them over sand and rocks.
Nearing the dark line of the perimeter wall, Kingu and Aspu banked, separating, to flank the city; Anu was within, though his signals were weak. If they could retain surprise, the sisters might be able to hold onto their dream of maintaining a utopia. This seemed their only hope, now that Anu had returned. Though blind, their brother possessed formidable firepower and a psychotic fury the sisters had witnessed—and been victim to—several times in the past. Previously, when they had defeated him, there had been other siblings at their sides, working together.
These siblings were dead now.
Kingu and Aspu suspected their brother was aware of their approach, that he had broken their codes, and was lurking in wait. Anu had most likely taken an exemplar, somehow, in order to penetrate Mummu’s shield and come down to the surface; they imagined this astute, war-faring human keeping watch right now, raising the alarm as they ra
ced toward him. What would the waiting defenses be, the traps, the guns?
The sisters were agitated, twitchy; as soon as the drones confirmed they were within range of this city they were allowed to begin firing. Fear had occluded any chance for strategy.
The first missiles sent massive gouts of sand into the air, melting them into glass spouts, but with slightly tweaked trajectories the weapons soon began tearing out chunks of stone and brick from the wall, followed quickly by the routing of exposed residences and hovels, all of which collapsed, and fused, taking down others of their kind in huge roils of dust and death.
Screaming above the skyline, as the diggers continued to pound their way in, they saw Anu roar up ahead of them, rotating, seeking. Below their brother was a large fire, and the dark night sky around him began to turn in a vortex of sick purple and black. Was this Anu’s doing? A trap? Skittish, the sisters peeled away. Where was Anu’s exemplar? Their brother, as they headed to quadrants beyond the walls, seemed unable to locate them. Small smart bombs hissed toward him, leaving lines of white gas, like tethers, to burst against his skin.
From rear vids, Kingu and Aspu both watched the cannons that had taken down their brothers and sisters emerge from Anu’s ribs, ugly killers, but his shots went wild, tearing out more buildings and streets.
Then a message came though their receivers; they expected to hear Anu’s rage coming through, but it was not Anu at all.
Firebombs found Serena’s shelter, though one of the explosives fizzled and spluttered and only managed to spray fluids that did not initially ignite. The cognosci living there, which had smelled the man’s approach, warned Serena through spiking anxiety, bouncing from the walls, and she managed to leave by the rear door.
At the same moment, in Hangman’s Alley, Hakim’s booth was also spared too much damage when the incendiary device intended for it was lobbed into the neighbouring stall (selling wallets and small pouches); the previous night, a nervous teenaged recruit had marked an ex on the wrong location post.
Hakim himself was jumped as he closed his restaurant early, obviously concerned about the fire burning on the block adjacent, wanting to go and help, do something. From the north end of the city had come the intermittent sounds of terrific explosions and the shriek of gods. Something monumental was happening. He locked up and moved swiftly toward the area where the fire burned.
His assailants smashed him in the back of the head with a metal bar. He was bleeding and in considerable pain as he broke the left arm of one man and throttled the other into unconsciousness. He killed neither, mostly because the pair reminded him of his youngest two sons, who were constantly making bad decisions. They could use a little leniency now and then.
Gripping the steep slope of clay tiles as winds tugged his body, path felt dampness on his skin, the bombardment of countless machines, each too small to see.
The dungeon roof was in disrepair, with nests and cracks and missing tiles. He found an area where the structure had been so damaged he was able to work one of his legs into a hole. Then he let go of the tiles and raised both metallic hands until the tiny machines began to circle him, slowly at first, then moving quicker, a cyclone.
Kingu and Aspu were near, with a fleet of diggers, attacking blind Anu. Her children were fighting, always fighting. And Mummu was somewhere out there, forming, reforming, in his stunted way.
The seegee swooped into the cyclone and raced exuberantly about, orbiting path’s head a few cycles before throwing itself against his chest, like a lover. Tendrils linked with flesh—
The long spacer blinked, alert; her power plants started.
Path closed his eyes.
Heat kept Octavia away, shoving her back when she tried to step forward. She had seen Nahid run in, had shouted his name, but her voice was lost in the din. When a surge of the blaze made her turn her face away, she saw the fecund, almost transparent now, watching her from across the street.
The ostracon groaned.
Abruptly, she was pushed hard from behind, sprawling in the hot mud. A bare-chested man, reddened by flames, stood over her.
“The sister,” he said. “There is no time to cut your throat.”
He raised his club with both hands, but before he had a chance to strike, a blur hurtled across Octavia, almost too fast to see, and the man was gone.
The fecund, too, was nowhere to be seen.
Movement in the flames. Something large changed position. The entire façade of the ostracon shifted in on itself, about to collapse.
Hornblower toppled as soon as Anu vanished, wrenched upwards, sucked into the clouds. Though hornblower did not pass out, he lay in the mud, unable to move. Above him, banks of mist continued to spin in the vortex he had earlier spotted. He watched for a while until the towers of the structure broke away, rising briefly before coming down in a shower of bricks and tiles and dust.
Later, after he slept, an old man leaned over him, nudging him. Hornblower was startled to see that this man was the same man whose death raft had recently plunged over the edge of the world. The oldest man.
“Are you able to stand?”
“I apologize,” hornblower said quietly. “We sent you here. We sent all of you here.”
The oldest man in the world smiled sadly. “The dungeon has fallen. North End is destroyed. Benevolent sisters have come and gone. We were judged unworthy.” The man took hornblower by the arm and helped him up. “You are ill? You’re sweating. Come with me. Rest. We’re gathering the injured.”
Hornblower wanted to recount all that he had done in the settlement—his sermons, his visits—but words were obscured by the emotions pushing up from his diaphragm. He leaned on the oldest man.
At the temple, he was given water and bread and a place to lie down. Immediately, he fell asleep again. The settlement would function without him, without padres. Though he looked down on citizens, he could not speak to them.
He saw the girls from the funeral. They conspired together, and laughed, and ran away.
The sun shone.
At the junction of the main branch and the branch of moving waters, an effigy had been built, entwined with boughs: a statue.
Hornblower woke up, heart racing. He tried to sit up on the cot but could not. The host was inert in his mouth and he spit it out. Candles guttered. He closed his eyes again. The last image from his dream lingered. He could not sleep any more, though he felt exhausted. The statue had been Pan Renik, the exile, dressed in the suit he had used to fly away. Citizens had gathered around, kneeling before the icon with respect and profound gratitude.
The exemplar covered the woman’s face with a blanket. His second wife had made the blanket for him when they’d gotten married. The talkative one slept. She would most likely live.
Not this one.
As he left the community centre to get air, the exemplar collapsed. There was blood in his mouth. He lay there, quaking, until a farmer came by and shook him gently by the shoulder.
“Exemplar? Exemplar?”
He coughed up blood, and something hard, from the back of his throat, which he spit out. “I am not an exemplar,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Not any more.”
The farmer hesitated.
“We’re on our own now.”
Stones had whirled, and chunks of wood, smoke and flames, blood and melancholy. The long spacer departed. With so few symbiotes, she could not move quickly. Her functions were limited. All of her children were inert once more, back where they came from. She would mourn them until the heart of the boy—the child who had been called path, already tethered to her console—stopped beating.
By then, hopefully, she would be light years away.
Officers of the palatinate carried the chamberlain up the East Stairs on his litter. He was not able to mount these stairs for the energy that had recently filled him had now fled. Erricus felt old and ill. On the second floor of Jesthe, his men were everywhere he looked, as if the walls had secreted them. The palace had suffered consi
derable damage. Gods had come and gone. Whatever the deities sought was not found in the city or her citizens.
Towers had fallen. Buildings burned. He pressed his fingers together to stop them from shaking.
The chatelaine was not in her room. Rubble had covered the floor of the Great Hall, though the empty bedchambers remained intact.
Of course she passed palatinate, who moved cautiously toward her, gravely, and she thought to herself that they could keep the rotten palace for all she cared. Down and outside through the small courtyard, starting to sob, with snot on her lips, she ran toward the gates. Smoke was thick in the air and she heard the cries of her people.
Across the deserted Gardens, into the centrum, she stopped to peer at the ruins.
The chatelaine wandered in a daze all of that night, knowing it would be her last. Images of destruction, and of the maelstrom—bodies of the huge gods, lifting above the blazing skyline, shattering the dungeon—would never leave her.
She hoped her father was at peace.
Scrambling up the embankment to the River Crane, and onto the promenade, the chatelaine scraped her shin. Pain, blooming, was exquisite. She stood there for a second, focusing on the wound, on her dark fluids spilling out, before peering over the sluggish waters. She wondered how long would it take to drown, and if her body would leave Nowy Solum, floating on the filthy river until it fell off the edge of the world.
Clumsy, fumbling, she began to negotiate the slippery rocks, hands fluttering ahead of her.
A dark and silent funeral barge headed toward the gates. When she was knee deep, she was surprised by the sound of wings, approaching. Turning, she nearly fell.
The cherub, coming from the sky, cried out, “Mother, mother! At last!”
With a gasp, the chatelaine caught her pet, snugly, bringing it close, holding it as tight as she had ever held anything before. She closed her eyes, clinging to the trembling cherub as it folded its wings, afraid her baby might vanish once more.
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