by Jeff Young
“It is good to see someone enjoy something so simple,” she said, hiding her smile behind the teacup.
“I am quite in your debt for, well, for everything. Thank you for rescuing me.” Avalem bowed his head briefly to his host.
She made a vague gesture with one hand, and the curtains on the nearby window parted.
“All sorts of things wash up here, and occasionally I take an interest.” Her eyebrow flicked upward briefly as her smile grew more mischievous.
Suddenly very aware of his lack of dress, Avalem covered the awkward moment by reaching for his tea. The woman turned to gaze out the window, and once again, he caught a glimpse of something on her shoulder, close to the nape of her neck. Looking now, he discovered that her hair did not precisely fall in waves but was lifted by something that rose from her back.
“I am sorry to be rude. My name is Avalem. I should have told you that before.”
“Interesting, but unnecessary. Out there, I am sure that you have a use for names so that you can bind things to your definitions. In here, we don’t care much about what one calls anything. We care about what it really is and its potential.”
Taken aback by that statement, Avalem paused with his tea halfway to his lips. “What do I call you?”
Her laugh rose sweet and brief as her gaze returned to the lake. “You can call me the Lady of the Lake, the Sorceress of the Night, the Greal Witch. I am the weaver, and I know every one of my threads and can feel all of them. You decide what to name me, I will know, no matter what, when you choose to call me.”
Her head shot around, and she met his gaze as every thread in the entire house leapt through the air to connect with her. For an instant, she appeared a glorious spider lying at the heart of a web encompassing every portion of her house. Just as quickly, a ripple in the curtains by the window caught Avalem’s attention, and the all-pervasive threads vanished.
He sat there for a moment, overwhelmed. Then cautiously, he said, “I think I shall just call you Lady.”
One red eyebrow shot up, as well as the corners of her mouth, “Oh, foundling, you and I shall get along well.”
When they were done with the meal, she found him trousers and a shirt made of the ever-present material that filled her home. When she led him out into the light, Avalem started to ask her why he could suddenly see, but she silenced him with a finger across his lips and pulled him down to the lake. They spent the afternoon walking along the sands of its shore. Reaching down, she cupped a handful of the lake’s waters. Like a liquid ruby, the surface rippled with each of her breaths. “Do you know the story of the Long-Chain-Makers?” she asked.
“I know they remade the world and left.”
“There is a great deal more. Years and years ago, men tried to make intelligences other than their own. They used tiny machines to weave great nets of logic, but it never occurred to them that the small ones would learn as they worked. Each one of the Chains is forged of links of makers, communers, and unmakers. They were made to be more than the sum of their parts, and they came together, becoming more than the whole.”
Avalem looked up at the immensity of the interior of the Pillar of Night. “And they built this.”
“Yes, and they also changed us. They left humanity with an extended lifespan, as well as the power to heal most injuries and to consume nearly anything. But the Long-Chain-Makers also built us a cage, taking away our ability to undo their alterations. They changed us so we can’t survive anywhere but Earth. Then they took away all our toys, leaving us with just enough to get by. They founded a world where the works of one’s hands and mind and the flavors we could enjoy became a new currency. The world became temperate and plentiful everywhere under their touch. Lastly, they also made the Greal. But even that is fading.”
With that, she flicked her hair aside, and Avalem could clearly see the series of growths that ran up the back of her shapely neck like shelf fungus.
“In the beginning, merely a touch from the lake would have transformed you. Now those ruffians practically had to drown you before you took enough in.”
“Do you mean... “
The Lady let her hair fall back once more with a laugh. “Don’t be foolish. How could you see as well as you do if you hadn’t changed?”
Avalem stepped away from her side and ran his fingers over the back of his neck. Then he stared intently at his hands.
“There’s nothing yet. It’s too early.”
“What?” He took a deep breath, shaking with relief and astonishment that he was at last different from everyone else. “What can I do now?”
She threw her hands up in the air, a shower of scarlet water raining down. “Who knows? Each ability is unique.”
Then she led him back toward the house, between the rows of sculptured shrubs that extended on either side and then back into the woods. They walked the corridors of the maze until she brought them to the center and the rose garden concealed there. A copper orrery whirled about from nothing but the air of their passing. Scattered about were works of art clearly fashioned by the Greal-touched. A tree shaped into a mermaid leaping from the spray, and yet overhead, its foliage gave them shade. A granite rock braided like hair. Each nook and alcove hid another treasure. Avalem remained bemused at the variety of the wonders as the Lady led him to a marble bench.
“They are presents from those who have found their aspect of the gift the Greal bestowed on them.”
“Finally,” Avalem sighed, convinced that at last his life had changed for the better.
The Lady reached out and laid her hand against his cheek. “What you will do will be amazing no matter where your talent lies. But there are some who cannot learn to master their abilities and others who fall under the influence of the unscrupulous. I do my best to teach them, but you’ve seen how others react to what the Greal-touched make.”
Indeed, thought Avalem, briefly unable to meet her gaze.
The Lady continued, “What you have is like a hammer. It can be used to build an edifice of towering beauty, or it can be swung with murderous intent. We’ll find out together.”
“Then I’ll give you a gift that will make all of these other gifts pale in comparison.”
Her smile took him by surprise, so too the warm, twining fingers among his own. Together they walked hand and hand back to the house. There she stroked the closest lamp into light.
“Why does that work?” Avalem asked.
“It’s a talent, a Greal-given talent.”
“You mean the man in the tunnel... ” It did explain the other’s ability to see in the dark. “But the ‘I love you’?”
The Lady ran her fingers across the top of the glass and the light within chased after their tips. “It’s a maker, a maker of light. It works because we want it to, and it can actually sense intent. Therefore, we need to prove we need its light.”
“But—”
Her smile stopped him. “Love is a word we don’t say often.” A brief awkward silence reigned until the Lady finally broke it. “Hungry?”
Lady kept casting him glances through the curtain of her hair, which fell forward in a fetching way throughout dinner. As the light faded in the window across the table, Avalem found no surprise after the incidental touches throughout their meal that once again she reached for his hand and drew him further into the house. She pulled him onward, the webbing of her home growing deeper, the fabric of his clothes rustling on their own. Her clothing unwove itself before his eyes, revealing more and more of her milk-white skin. When she drew her hands to him, he felt his own shirt and pants slough away and rejoin the mass of threads about them. Threads swept under their feet, and buoyed them up, and wove them into a vast cocoon that sealed out the world. Then, like the giant web that it was, all the strands in the house began to sway with the gentle motion their joining imparted.
When Avalem awoke in the darkness due to nature’s need, he wondered briefly how he might find his way down to the floor. The nest reacted to his turni
ng and unknitted itself in such a way allowing him to exit their bower without disturbing the Lady. He looked back and found himself bemused by her splayed form, the fall of her breasts, and the way that her tresses merged with the strands of the net.
She turned, and her shoulder came into view, the design that broke its alabaster skin drawing his attention back. A rose raised itself above the surface of her skin. A filigree of woven skin lay across its stem and petals, holding it in place. The stem grew from the Lady’s skin at the base, and several of the petals on the underside of the flower were also joined to her. Shock filled him, and, for a moment only, she breathed. Staring at his hands, the inevitable revelation came: I have done this.
Avalem fled.
Whipping strands from his path, he found his way back to the room where he first awoke and threw open the closets there until he discovered most of his clothes. Beneath them also lay his satchel and the lamp. For an instant, he fell further into shock. Why would the Lady have these things? Could she have recovered them from the pack of ruffians? Or had she actually ordered them to cast him into the lake?
No matter how hard he looked, he could not find his shirt, but in another closet lay one made of the Lady’s material. His hands shook as he drew on her shirt. He gathered up his belongings, sliding once more through the webbing, fearing to signal the spider at its heart of his departure. Caught between the elation of discovery and the fear of how she might react to what he had done to her, he felt confused. In this state of mind, he could only think to run. When he finally cleared the doorway, Avalem breathed a sigh of relief.
Walking through the forest, returning to the entry tunnel, he once again considered the surface of his hands. Was there more detail to the lines that traced his palms? How could these ordinary parts of him that he had known and used all these years have accomplished what he’d discovered? All artists used their hands; where else could he have imagined the Greal coming from to work such a transformation? But what could he do with a talent like this? Could he be worse off than before he came? Avalem’s head sank forward as he continued to trudge along. Changed forever, but who could say if such a change was for the best. He passed into the tunnel and left the Land of Night.
~*~
A week later, he came upon a girl drawing in the dirt, her left arm hanging limply by her side. Her infirmity drew him despite himself.
Once the Pillar of Night had become a smudge in the distance, he’d deliberately avoided villages. Going out of his way to stay clear of others had become the norm. The back of his neck filled with strange bumps that grew day by day, and his hands itched incessantly. At night, he forced them into his satchel, drawing the string tight with his teeth. Several times, he’d blanked out and discovered himself with his arm plunged into the ice-cold streams of the area. Something is wrong with me. He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t explain why he’d come here.
Now Avalem stumbled up to the girl, reaching for her dragging limb. Some part of his awareness felt bemused by the damage to her arm. The gifts of the Long-Chain-Makers altered human physiology so that such a break should easily heal, but something must have gone wrong. His fingers touched her arm, and in that instant, all the confusion and the irritation in his fingers passed away.
She had a moment to look up at him confused before the Greal acted, and then its insidious strength poured into her, reworking the very nature and stuff of her limb. The Greal flicked through possibilities until settling on an answer. Then a wave of heat cascaded from his reworked digits, both making and unmaking at the same time. The end result gave him a brief sense of satisfaction that he later attributed to the Greal and then a growing sense of horror at what he’d done. This stranger, whom he’d never met nor spoken to, now had a new arm. This limb was a helical weaving filled with spiraling filigrees whose bones and joints were refashioned into not only an efficient but also elegant form. The skin wove over the entire construct but not so densely as to hide the new architecture within. Avalem had never seen anything like it. He’d taken her broken arm and made it into a work of art. Maybe, just maybe, his talent did have value.
He had only that moment to admire his work before a man grasped his shoulder and threw him to the ground.
While Avalem lay there staring at the hulking figure that reached for the long curved threshing blade that hung at his waist, he felt the need rising from the Greal once more. It wanted. It wanted him to lay hands on this other, to remake him, to string the sinew differently, reorganize the skin and weave bone into something amazing. The sensation overwhelmed him, and he did not move quickly enough to stop the stranger from lopping the arm from the girl.
Shock overwhelmed Avalem. Instinctively, he knew that the arm would grow back, that it should be straight and whole once more. It reminded him of the beating he’d received at the side of the lake in the Pillar of Night. Mankind’s bodies were designed to take so much more punishment now that it was very difficult to truly hurt one another. However, the Greal-influenced part of him also wondered in what state the limb would return. The natural repair systems of her body must have failed before leaving her with a useless limb. Avalem had just enough time to observe that her bleeding stopped immediately, and the skin of her back stretched to cover the missing area before her assailant turned on him.
“Whatever you did to my daughter, I won’t stand for it. She’ll have a perfectly good arm now, not that abomination you created. We were only waiting until she could accept what had to be done until you stepped in.”
The blade turned toward him, and Avalem caught the other man’s wrist with both hands, once again feeling the slippery hot sensation of the Greal at work. The makers inside of him evaluated the wrist and remade it even as he turned the blow away. The metal of the scythe, also raw material, reappeared as part of the resulting architecture. A well-intentioned mistake played out against him. For now, the farmer turned his wrist in an impossible fashion and captured both of Avalem’s. The rewoven mesh of metal and flesh making the grip inexorable. The girl’s father gave a long wail of frustration and cried out, “Help me!”
Then Avalem felt the first blow strike his head, and others fell about his shoulders as the villagers came to their comrade’s rescue using the handles of their farming implements as weapons. Avalem’s body desperately tried to keep him conscious, and he could feel the Greal at work here and there when another came within his grasp. Finally, as he curled in upon himself on the ground, he felt his awareness slipping away.
~*~
When he awoke, Avalem found himself inside a small conical granary. The door blocked, the only light coming in through chinks in the gaps between the masonry. When he stood up, his shoulders brushed the sides of the enclosure. The heat and the grain dust were stifling. Worse still, the itching in his hands had begun again. The Greal anxious once again to alter flesh after he’d finally used his talent. Sitting down, he wrapped his hands in his shirt. He wasn’t sure when he started, but Avalem began to rock back and forth. The heat surrounding him grew as the sun rose farther into the sky. Emanations from the Greal grew more and more intense. The walls wavered in his vision. The granary a forge as he felt himself being cast anew.
~*~
The Lady followed Avalem. Once again, she touched the rose, now forever a part of her. Something drew her forth from the safety of Night—the material of his shirt calling to her. But its song grew weaker when she arose in the morning and rapidly faded away. Still, she suspected she would not have to look any farther than the village that lay in the valley below her. When she walked down its central road, a small crowd of children flowed about her on either side, noisily playing with strange toys. Mechanical birds sang sweetly, flying creations spun of their own accord, lifting into the air, musical instruments, and more. From each, the Lady felt the vague echo of her work. When she looked carefully, the parts seemed to be carved from ivory or bone and bound with tanned thongs. Beyond the children, the men and women of the village picked through a bounty o
f knives, tools, and baskets, all strewn about the remains of the last of three granary towers.
Possibilities flashed through her mind. The Lady knew that Avalem was here, all about her now. The Greal remade him entirely, frustrated at its inability to act when the villagers locked him away. Unconsciously, she rubbed at the back of her neck. But why, she wondered. Then it came to her, a truth she had not expected. Avalem’s Greal was a tool too valuable to be wasted. For the first time in untold years, something free in the world could undo the very chains that bound humanity to Earth. Because it could alter human physiology, Avalem’s Greal could reverse the changes made by the Long-Chain-Makers. She felt a certainty that each and every piece that resulted from his transubstantiation bore the Greal to its new owner. More than likely, a new version of the Greal, better tempered and less likely to consume its host. The ability would spread from person to person, a plague of possibilities where before there were none.
The Lady’s hand came to rest on the rose again as she remembered waking the previous night and staring up at the stars. In the Pillar of Night, she’d long since forgotten the simple joy of considering their multitudes. What wonders now awaited them out there? At last, they could walk the path that the Long-Chain-Makers had laid ages ago. However, a long way remained to go before humanity could leave Earth, but each journey begins with a single step. She knelt and reached out for the nearest toy. The puzzle box slowly unfolded under her inquisitive fingers; the rose hidden at its heart no surprise at all.
Blankets
Collateral damage, Kiersey thought, staring at the small, sandaled foot as he pulled more branches off of the body. That’s what Lieutenant Roberts would call it, but all Kiersey saw was a young boy who should be running and playing. Their medic, Leigh, looked over the casualty quickly and logged the cause of death as exposure. She took a blood sample for confirmation because Leigh was nothing if not diligent. If the exploratory force from the Ross weren’t planetside, the kid at his feet might still be alive.