The Immortal City

by May Peterson

  He bared the side of the medallion that’d been facing him. A name gleamed in bold letters in its surface. I peered. “Emio?”

  Hei nodded. “That was the orphanage name they gave me.” The shake of his had seemed wistful “I had this fear, ever since my first year in the orphanage. That maybe one day I’d wake up and just not have a name. No one would have taken Emio, and Hei would have been forgotten. Eroded away. And I would just be nobody. My favorite sister always reassured me I’d never forget my origins, because memories are always precious, but I couldn’t seem to shake the fear.”

  I couldn’t look into his eyes. That fear disturbingly mirrored my own sense of loss. I had simply opened my eyes under Serenity’s half-rock sky—and had been nobody. Even now, Ari had next to no content. It was just the label on my husk, designating the unkept story of what I had been.

  Hei was stroking the other side of the medallion gently. “So. Beniro did this for me. He said it was so I would never forget.” The wood turned in his hands, and this time the light revealed something else scratched into the opposite side. A script. “That the same thing that had taken my name would give it back. And I would always remember.”

  It struck me like a punch in the gut. There, in jagged letters, was written “Hei.” With the Zangenjai characters carved large, fluid, underneath them like a signature.

  Beniro had preserved the endangered spark of his identity. And it was Hei, the Hei that had remembered, that was lying here in my embrace. “That’s...breathtaking.” My fingers moved as if on their own to touch the wood. Hei brought it closer, and I felt the grooves Beniro had inscribed.

  The image of my scraps of letters seared through my mind like lightning. With my name—Ari—preserved in smudged hand on the ravaged pages. Someone had to have remembered my name, enough to try to seek me out. Just like Beniro had not let go of Hei. And as Hei was now devoting himself to find those he had lost. When Hei held the medallion to his chest, reverently as if it were something hallowed and precious, I understood.

  He kissed the wood and lowered it. “Ari. I told you a little of why I’m here. But I want to tell you what I’m hoping to achieve. I found her.” His gulp was visible.

  “Her?” The person of whom he’d spoken? I was afraid to ask more. For more of his tale to fill me, bind me to him. But I also feared he might stop there.

  Hei’s tongue dashed out, licked his lips. “I already knew where she was, for a little while now. But I had to find out how to reach her.” He studied me, perhaps deciding how to detail his plans. “She is called Kaiwan. A witch who lives in the city. I searched...for a long time.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you know of her?”

  My thoughts didn’t seem to want to gel together. “As long as I’ve been here, there have been rumors of witches who’ve fled to Serenity from punishment. But the name doesn’t ring a bell. Why?”

  Hei chewed his bottom lip. “I want to know if you’ll come with me to meet her.”

  I squinted. Meet. So she wasn’t some loved one from his past. Then...? “If you wish it.” I leaned up on my elbows, scanning him. “What exactly is it she can do?”

  Hei only looked at me for what felt like a long time. “She can open the door to the past.” The medallion had caught the light of the fire, so that like the tundra, it appeared to burn. “And there’s someone I need to find there.”

  Chapter Six

  Hei asked to meet again the following night. I was secretly relieved that he didn’t require me to accompany him right away—part of me craved time to absorb what I had learned. To marinate in Hei’s story, my expanding feelings for him.

  I also wanted to make sure I had some hint of what I was walking into.

  Tamueji wasn’t hard to find in the night-street fair. Hard to miss the chatter about her besting eight fellows in a drinking contest. With booze, against mortals, it would be an utterly uneven match. But this had been silver colloid in liquor, and she remained above the table. And apparently was the only one—poised above a crystal bottle of fiery spirits, she eyed me approaching her across the bar. A clamor of lights and sounds was uncoiling in the air between us, and through it I hoped my message was clear—I need to talk to you.

  A glint sparked through the drunken fog of her gaze, and she nodded me behind the table. We didn’t normally meet in public, and it was hard to say how many eyes were on us at any given time.

  I followed her into a back compartment between the outer rooms and the kitchen. She sealed both entrances and gestured me to a chair. “You know, hate to be discouraging, but it is eventually going to be suspicious—us being seen together this much.”

  I nervously pulled fingers through my hair. “I know.”

  “Unless everyone thinks I’m fucking you, which would actually draw a lot of attention. No offense, Ari, but I fairly notoriously prefer women.”

  “Tamueji.” I tried to maintain a whisper. Lots of fuckers here could still make out low speech through walls. “It’ll be quick. Have you heard of someone in town called Kaiwan?”

  She stopped, squinted. Sobriety returned to her with the speed of a flashfire. “Ari. Honestly. I don’t like hearing that name in your mouth.”

  I sat next to her, put hands together in supplication. “Please. Just tell me what you know about her. If it’s not too dangerous to—”

  “It is!” Tamueji emitted an angry belch, then patted her belly. “Ugh. All right. I have been here a long fucking time.” She stabbed a finger into my chest. “From the first full moon I passed in Serenity, I have heard talk of the witch Kaiwan. Accounts dating from seventy years ago, eighty. A hundred, two hundred. Think about that, Ari. If they’re based on reality, then she has lived in Serenity for longer than most of the moon-souls have.”

  My head hurt. So many things I didn’t understand. “So? Everyone’s been here a while.”

  Tamueji sighed. “She’s a mage. Mages can’t become living-again. Noble spirits never choose to resurrect them. Don’t ask me why, but it’s true. How does a mortal human last in a place like this, on their own, for a lifetime? Let alone longer than that?”

  I drew a few breaths. None of this seemed to be leading me anywhere but deeper into confusion. “Surely there’s magic that can prolong life.”

  “Sure. But if it’s for as long as the legends would have me believe, that has to be some fucking magic. The kind I’d rather not find myself entangled in. Godhoods are bad enough.”

  All right. I was starting to get it. “Is she a sorcerer? Can she control minds?”

  Tamueji flashed her eyes wide as if in warning. “Who knows? I’ve heard everything about her from her being able to raise the dead at will, to being able to change any living thing into another, to being able to move back in time, to having power over the stars. Hell, there was even a story that she created Serenity. That she’s just been sitting here for centuries, holed up in whatever version of immortality her magic gives her. It’s one thing to lay low somewhere a long time, avoid notice. It’s quite a-fucking-nother for there to be a million bastard tales about you for that long and still to have no one know the truth. Stay the fuck away, I say.”

  I stood, my hands shaking slightly. And Hei was about to take me to her for a sit-down and cup of wine. Fuck. “Right. I’ll...do my best.”

  Tamueji puffed a dry laugh through her lips. “In other words, you’re probably looking for her. Well. I did the same. Come on, a witch who grants wishes? Of course I looked into it. But apparently there’s only one way to find her, and I never figured it out. So there is that.”

  The picture in my head—of all of this, of Hei and Umber and weeks of spying, of Tamueji and dire warnings and thousands of disparate threads—was slowly attaining coherence. Just enough to be threatening in its ambiguity. “Thanks, either way.” I turned to go.

  She stopped me, rising and putting a hand on my wing. “Ari. I would say to be careful, whatever yo
u are going to do. But I have a feeling that caution isn’t going to do you any more good than anything else now. Just. Don’t die a second time. Got it?”

  The quality of her gaze was sincere, sober. Frightening. I nodded.

  Outside, the night air felt heavy and thick with promises. I went to find Hei.

  * * *

  He was waiting for me with his now familiar grin, a gleam of tenderness in his eyes. We linked hands, as if we’d known each other for much longer. As if I could rely on him.

  Maybe I could, in the end. But as he guided me to our destination, the sensation of approaching a quagmire in the mist only strengthened.

  I feared what this Kaiwan would expose to me, when she did as Hei had said—and opened the door to the past.

  The drugged glitter of the night-streets thinned relatively quickly, as Hei led me through its turns. We were close to the borders, where the light would sometimes cut a line, clear as a sword stroke, between the places divided by the sun. Here was where the city seemed to stretch in a yawn, those who frequented the night-streets bending away from the upper layers. And the higher tiers of the city stretched, like plants quietly seeking light, up the course of the mountain. It was a stony wasteland, with the shadows of towers and tiger stripes of grass the only denizens of this between-scape.

  I followed Hei into a darkened, dust-mottled street empty of lights. For all the stillness surrounding us, the only breaths drawn here had to be ours. From the look of the structures in the dimness, this was the last region along Hei’s path that could be properly called a street. Lumpy, erratic shapes loomed like cave formations in the distance. I curled one wing over his shoulders and walked closer. “It doesn’t seem as if anyone lives here. Even a moon-soul would leave some sign of inhabitance.”

  Hei returned with a mild, amused sound. “Oh, she doesn’t live here. That’d be much too easy to find. There’s a place further to the edge of the city, by a mountain wall. I’ve come close to her home before, but haven’t actually secured an audience yet. Tonight I will.”

  I took Hei in—his easy smile, the shimmer of resolve in his gaze. The dearness I had grown to associate with his face, his movements. He wore all black tonight again, and his bag seemed laden with some secret weights. I pictured an endless supply of the twine I’d found last time, tangled with mysterious riches. He sounded certain. Ready. Eager.

  We marched into the shadow of the rock, the ageless earth that cradled Serenity. Where Kaiwan apparently made her home.

  The irregular shapes I’d spied were a combination of unformed rocks—probably gathered from the mountainside over the years—and rubble. Pieces of structures, fragmented by time. They created a loose path, the debris thickening and parting in odd patterns, as if the settling of the ages naturally pointed the way to the witch’s lair. And that way seemed easy enough—I helped Hei over a few groaning piles of rock, but altogether it was no more treacherous than the streets.

  What daunted me most was the absolute lack of light, save the beckon of gem-glow at our backs and the half-presence of moonlight. Even to my eyes, this was off-putting. Soon I realized what lent this passage its gravid air—I was accustomed to a Serenity that perpetually crawled with motion, life, ghosts. Phantasmal arrays of shape and color, the wingspans and claws and tails of my peripheral brethren. The heat and energy of the mortal populace, the jeweled constancy of the streets’ lights. Here, nothing prevailed. Only sleep. Only the effortless, age-deepened logic of rocks and ruin, of years worn down to the clusters of matter they’d left behind. All pointing inward, to the heart of the earth, the median of the city’s lines. As if to say, Here it opens. Here she waits.

  Hei said little as we advanced, but an atmosphere of hunger—of the thrill that I had first sensed in him, perhaps—plumed from him like vapor. I had been wrong. It wasn’t nothing that I was feeling here. It was Hei’s ardor, the small but unshaken force that moved him across the wreckage.

  In time, a wall appeared. It was nearly more like a cliffside, a smooth stone face curving far above us to join the inward-turning calyx of the mountain. No door, opening, or crack was visible anywhere along its surface, but here Hei stopped. A moment passed before I saw why—a circle of rocks stood in perfect solemnity. Had they had more familiar, specific shapes, they could have been as imposing as the statues on Ancestor Rock. And their angles cast light and shadow in medley against a singular point. A spiral, like the coil of a serpent, ending with an empty circle at its center. The shape was a lightless smear of ash on the gray stone.

  “Is this it?” I tuned my hearing to signs of activity. “Maybe the directions you were given were wrong.”

  “No.” Hei’s voice trembled. “This is it.” He opened his pouch and dug inside. “I’ve had to make careful preparations, but it will be worth it. Look.” Upon the palm of one withdrawn hand sat a chip of crystal. No. A second of inspection confirmed—a diamond. And it was bigger than a chip, filling the center of his palm as he turned it. A faint, effervescent illumination sprang from its depth, as if it were a chunk of ice that had caught the tundra under the dying sun, and kept some of that fire for itself.

  Tamueji’s words unwound in my mind—This Hei character has money. Fucking diamonds. There’s only one way to find her. And Hei’s—I had to find out how to reach her.

  It hit me, strangely, dreamily, that the diamond looked like one of these devastated rocks. Only smaller and brighter, a symbol of the pressures that had made it.

  Hei wasted no time explaining how he’d found this stone, or why. In the next three breaths, he began to sing.

  The lyrics rose above us, clear, melodic Zangenjai. “Warrior who has transgressed time, I call to you by name. Witch who unweaves the hours, reveal to me your path. A kingdom, silent, bitter snow, I plead your power now. Show me the way!”

  As he chanted, the bead of light in the gem burgeoned, flared stronger, until he seemed to be holding a flame. An answering radiance shone off the wall, the ashen circle catching with pure white fire. It flickered without smoke or heat, quietly devouring black toward the heart of the circle. When Hei’s song was done, the light flashed, as if it had struck powder. And the stone in the core of that circle cracked.

  It did not seem to be a material change, a breaking or mechanism at play. Instead, the change was as though some truth of the wall were finally becoming visible. Like an optical illusion revealing its trick, the circle somehow spiraled inward, exposing layers of dimension. Perspective and shadows changed the circle into the pattern of a drill, and the empty ring at the heart became a distant point. The circle was now an opening, leading into a rounded passage—or perhaps, it had already been.

  The brilliance of the circle faded, reduced itself to the soft murmur of starlight. But the glow of Hei’s stone remained, numinous and startling in its persistence.

  A complex emotion ravaged Hei’s face, some admixture of hope, shock, and bitterness. He stared at the passage, breathing slowly, as if it meant something inscrutable to him. Carefully, he covered the diamond with his fingers, and held it to his heart. Its light stole through his skin, as if he, too, were becoming fire. His breath looked like steam. “This way.”

  I held my silence and followed, but my heart was rapidly trying to claw its way out of my chest. Of all the imagery that could have heralded my meeting with Kaiwan, this was not proving itself reassuring. It lent weight and prophecy to Tamueji’s warnings, adding to the sense that every step forward was increasingly treacherous. The legacy of Kaiwan’s magic seemed bigger than the mountain, than Serenity.

  Hei reached back as we entered, took my hand again. “I have to admit.” His voice echoed faintly in the passage. “I wasn’t entirely convinced that would work.” The implied relief was unmistakable.

  If only I could share it. But I squeezed his hand in solidarity.

  The passage was a long hall of stone, whorls of gem deposits glistening in its bulk
occasionally like winking grins. Hei’s stone illuminated the path, but as the darkness swallowed the way we had come, it seemed to annihilate the hall itself. Even I could not pierce the shadows behind us. The hall uncoiled, a serpent’s back rising, bringing us toward its mouth. The air should have been choked with dust, yet it was fresh and cold as the sky around the mountain.

  Suddenly, the fear overcame me that I could lose Hei easily in this place, if the path diverged or became too broad. The deeper we went, the more it felt like I was drowning in mist.

  Until that mist parted. Without warning, the passage opened like a mouth. Hei gasped and came to a stop. We had stepped abruptly into what looked like a cavernous room—and on every side, panes and chunks of crystal shed a colorless glimmer over the floor and walls. Directly facing the path we had walked was a tremendous door. It dominated the opposite wall, seemed to drink in the light with an eldritch hunger. Its own panels were semitransparent, like frosted glass, and yet appeared as heavy and thick as gutrock.

  My eyes practically crossed as I took in the sight. “This is. A little terrifying.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that, as important as this seemed to be to Hei. But mental pictures were papering over my mind, visual translations of Tamueji’s legends and fears about the witch. I imagined an impossibly elderly woman spinning miracles out of worm silk, massaging new dimensions into the world the way a sculptor would in clay.

  Hei shrugged fractionally, and it occurred to me that without thinking, I had drawn him to me. The flex of his motion was palpable under my hands. He turned his face to me, and it was lit with the same phosphorescence that had brought us here, reflecting in his eyes. “It should be completely safe. Especially for you. I’ve never heard of her hurting anyone who has come to make a request. There’s a chance she won’t wish to help me, or won’t be able to. But...well. No time to concern myself with that now.”