Beasts of the Walking City

by Del Law

  Their eyes are all on me.

  I can tell there’s no negotiating here—regardless of what Nadrune wants with me, these people want me stone cold dead.

  They reach out with so many tracers I can’t count them.

  But then the huge tidal wave of the Garden plants crests and breaks down onto them. The walking flowers grab the podship like it’s a child’s toy and rip it into pieces. They throw chunks of metal and wood, slivers of glass and the dark wet blood of the pilot and her crew into the air.

  The marines start yelling and gesturing and they scramble to turn, and I hear them calling out over the knife for reinforcements. Their matrix cracks back into place, they throw out tracers, and start lighting up the plants with Akarii fire, one by one.

  That’s a mistake, though, and a big one.

  Beyond them, the whole of the Gardens uproots itself and comes running down the long stretch of land at the marines.

  The great flowers and bushes roll in, waving their limbs and stomping at the earth with their roots so that the ground thunders and rolls.

  In all my nights of guard duty, I’ve never heard them roar quite this way before. It shakes the ground and vibrates my teeth and I think I see cracks in the marines’ armor already.

  35.

  I sprint toward the Residence walls and run roughly parallel to a wide path that meanders through the garden here. The path enters the Residence through a large arch, carved like a Sister’s wide open mouth, and I duck through it.

  The power is still on here, and the glowing orbs that hang from the arch illuminate a grand passageway that stretches deep into the Residence, a main artery of traffic that’s now deserted. The floors here are cut from an opalescent stone, rows of majestic columns stretch into the distance, and the walls are hung with tapestries and lined with visual projections depicting great events in the city’s past.

  I don’t stop to look. I keep running until I come to the transport system.

  I was told once that the Chancellor right after Hadran had installed it, just to help her find her way around the Residence. She had been a Solingi, and wasn’t used to living in something so large. It’s old Flowermech tech, a thick and heavy structure of flowering vines that wrap around the standing columns in a lattice, and from the lattice drop these giant, fragrant blooms on thick tendrils. The blooms are inverted, facing upward, and you can ride in them. The petals are as hard as any wood or metal, and they’re so brilliant in color you know a Kruk had to have been involved in the design somehow; bright reds and greens and blues, some vivid shades of lavender circle a tall central pistil that’s a glossy black and flickering with glyphs showing the different locations you can get to.

  It’s still running--power reserves, I guess. I climb into one, grab one of the one of four stamen and select the glyph for the Chancellor’s primary meeting hall for the Akarii family.

  The bloom shifts, and above my head I see the tendrils supporting the blossom sprout shoots that wrap around the overhead lattice father down the line. The other tendrils unwind themselves from where they’d been attached, and the blossom swings forward. The tendrils rewrap themselves father down the lattice and the blossom heads down the hall faster than you’d think, kind of like a kid swinging hand over hand on overhead bars.

  I jump off and send three more flowers on their way to different ends of the Residence: to the Chancellor’s Suite, to the Great Rooms of the Wind where the Chancellor traditionally meets with his captains, to the Rotunda where the Tel Kharan have probably ousted the City Garrison and settled in.

  The noise from the battle in the garden is growing louder as I climb onto a last flower, this one for an observation platform near Rilhey’s Bridge, which runs close to where the Chancellor’s Suite is. I'm guessing Nadrune can't resist setting up shop in the Suite, and I know from guard duty that Rilhey's Bridge has been a favorite spot for assassins. Not that I'm out to kill her. Or am I?

  The blossom sways gently through the long halls, moving higher and higher in the Residence at each turn. I pass vaulted rooms that are entirely empty and small rooms that have been hastily abandoned. Some are offices. Some are filled up with books or furniture stretching floor to ceiling. Corridors meet and branch off at awkward angles, but the blossom sails through smoothly without any hesitation. Other blossoms pass me, mostly empty. One of them holds a dazed Tel Kharan marine bleeding from her scalp, who stares at me without recognition.

  It swings to a stop on a high landing. I jump out onto the old, arched bridge there that reaches across to a tall tower, one that’s started to lean at an awkward angle.

  The stones of the bridge are crumbling in places, and I have to watch my footing carefully.

  Just above the peak of the bridge’s arch is a narrow ledge. I leap and catch the edge of it, and haul myself up.

  I press myself against the stones there, taking on the color and pattern of them just in case, and I work my way around a corner. While I can’t see into them, there are windows above me that open directly into the Chancellor’s Suite. They’re open as usual in Tamaranth’s heat, even now before dawn. I grab the bottom of one and haul myself up and into the room.

  I land, draw Semper’s knife, and take in the room quickly—bright, florescent artwork covers the walls so that there’s no blank space on them. Several long, low Kruk couches are scattered around. It’s a sitting room. There are signs of a fast departure—papers on the floor, a cup half full of tea on a low table by one of the couches, and articles of bright clothing draped over pieces of the furniture.

  I realize that I’ve mimicked the color and crazy patterns of the artwork on the wall without thinking about it.

  I look down, and shake my head—I didn’t know I could do vermillion.

  On the far side of the room there’s an Akarii with his back to me. He’s robed and he’s got a tall orange topknot. He’s bent over, folding a long Kruk tunic. When he finishes it, he places it on a tall pile.

  “I thought I’d neaten up some while I was waiting,” Semper says, turning to face me. “You should have seen it when I got here.” His two-color eyes widen as he sees my patterns. There’s a new knife in the sheath across his chest, I notice, and more lines at the corner of his eyes.

  “Are you alone?”

  “Well, you’re here.” Semper smiles sadly. “Nadrune thought you might just walk up to the front of the Residence and knock, but I had a suspicion you might come in the back way. She had me wait here, in the event you did.”

  “How is she?”

  “Nadrune? She’s in a rage that the Sisters won’t speak with her. She won’t leave the tower now.”

  “I meant Mircada.”

  Semper studied my face. “The Kerul woman is fine, my friend. Finer than she led you to believe, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

  “Perhaps I’d better let her…”

  “Perhaps you better.”

  We can both hear the anger in my voice, and if that wasn’t enough, my fur has gone black now. I’ve got that sinking feeling again, and I'm getting a little too used to it. Semper frowns, and picks up another garment to fold. “It was the Kerul woman who offered herself to Nadrune,” he says quietly. “She’s your bait, Blackwell, she knows it, and she’s being well paid for her trouble. You need to know it too.”

  I turn and walk to the window. I can see the tall pillar of smoke rising up from the Garden. The Akarii warding traps the smoke inside its dome, and it’s starting to gather above the Residence in dark clouds that are churning and roiling. If you saw my insides now, I’m guessing that’s what they’d look like. My chest is tight, my breathing is rapid and shallow, my fur goes grey.

  I’ve been played, and played really well. I feel like that smoke, held down and unable to rise. I feel like I need to burn something.

  I can see the long stretch of the Bane and the Lie and the Alabaster Tower, the Fan and all of the warehouses out beyond the warding, and off in the distance I
can see the mansions on the cliffs there, dotted like eggs left by some insect. The red Lover’s Moon is sinking. The retrograde moon has passed it. The tide will be peaking again. Soon it’ll be dawn. I’m alone with all of the world laid out at my feet, and there is not a single part of it that I can call my own.

  Up above, beyond the wards and the smoke, near the arch of the mech caravan, is that great black bird. I’m guessing it’s some giant vulture or a carrion crow, larger than I’ve ever seen. I’m guessing there will be more of them before the day is over.

  Semper waits, saying nothing and folding a dead Kruk’s clothes. I turn back from the window. “So all of it was nothing. All of it was a lie.”

  Semper shrugs, not without sympathy. “Who can say, Blackwell. These are hard times. We all have to make difficult choices, and she made one for herself. You have difficult choices too. The Kerul have no hope of ending this war. Nadrune can, and will before long.”

  “She can’t hold Tamaranth.”

  He shakes his head. “Of course she can. There’s another of her Father’s fleets on the way by now. That walking District might block the harbor for a time, but it can’t hold out long with no support, no resources.”

  It’s like I’m wearing dark glasses. Everything looks grey to me, like the color has drained out of the world, and even the Kruk paintings fade. “What do you want me to do, Semper.”

  Semper steps up and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Come with me, my friend. Talk to Nadrune. See the Sisters in their home, and maybe they will speak to you this time. Stand beside Nadrune and tell the world she is Dekheret reborn, and encourage them to fall in line.

  "Think of how many lives you can save, Blackwell. Think of how you can make a difference for not just your people, but everyone. Isn’t a world without war a worthy enough goal?”

  I sigh. “Take me to her,” I say.

  Semper nods and touches two fingers to his knife.

  36.

  The podship lands us at the top of the Alabaster Tower. As I step off the ship with Semper in my arms, the five Tel Kharan marines who stand there draw their knives and make as if to advance on us. All of them, I notice, are Stona.

  Semper gestures sharply at them, speaks to them in what must be their own language, and when I set him down he pushes past them briskly on legs that only I can see are still shaky from the short flight.

  We walk down a curving flight of white stone stairs that opens into an antechamber with high, arched ceilings and long hanging tapestries, carved and painted walls in red and gold and shimmering hues of cerulean blue, the color of a grohver’s bright tongue. Semper strides across the room to a set of imposing double doors and beckons me forward.

  He throws the great doors open.

  The first things I see are the three great Sisters, all resting atop three stone pedestals under the great domed ceiling.

  The high foreheads and identical third eyes, the intricate carvings and the flat, broad lips; they’re lit from all angles with magelight and while they don’t move I get the immediate sense that they are about to, that they’re full of unseen energy, crazy potential motion, vibrating like a toddler made to stand still. In a moment they will break loose, go careening past me out the door, down into the Gardens and the Old City or out across the ocean, skipping across the surface of the waves. If I close my eyes I can see them lit up like some major city at night, and I feel dull, insignificant, like anything I would say now would be so far short of what would interest these artifacts that I might as well not try.

  Semper leads me up to where Nadrune sits in a chair before them, her great head in her vast hands. She’s still attended by two mages who bathe her in aether. I can’t take my eyes from the Sisters for long, though. When I reach Nadrune I fall to my knees beside her, before them.

  “Blackwell,” someone says. It’s a voice I recognize, and when I turn my head Mircada is there, too, over near a window and dressed in something long and flowing.

  I should say something.

  I should acknowledge her.

  I remember that I feel something, but I can’t quite reach that feeling to know what it is.

  The Sisters are overwhelming. I can’t answer, can’t think—I turn back to stare at them.

  I imagine whispering, passing like static between them, and I can almost make out the words.

  I think all of my fur is standing on end.

  “Hulgliev,” Nadrune says. “It’s about time.”

  A thought occurs to me and it passes out of my mouth before I can stop it. “You don’t even know my name, do you Nadrune.”

  She looks at me sharply, and then looks around her taking in the Sisters, the view of the city, her fleet out in the open ocean, and the fighting still going on in the garden, the streets and out at the mouth of the harbor where Ghat’s Seventh District has settled. She raises her arms in the air? “What does that have to do with anything right now.”

  “Because they do,” I say, nodding to the Sisters. "It's Blackwell."

  And I know I’m right, because just then, the three Sisters all turn to me.

  Their third eyes open, their fat lips part and they began to sing.

  It’s as if I’m in a dream. Their crazy song is nothing like you or I would think of as music. The closest thing would be the sounds of coyotes in the wild—strange yipping and howling that’s all over the scale, high pitched chitters and low rumbling growls, barks and yowls that have no rhyme or rhythm. It’s the sound of ghosts in the desert. It’s the sound of all of your past and future catching up with you at once. It strips me down to my essence, tosses me into a torrent of gale-force winds, holds me up high right next to the sun where everything I know about myself is burned away until I am just a tiny blue stone, a small brown bird, a passing thought in someone’s head and nothing more than that.

  I don’t understand the language or the music at all, and yet I know what they’re saying. They are evaluating me, judging the long and tangled string of my life. Their chrome eyes spin and twirl, growing to the size of moons and I understand that there is great concern here, great worry and doubt about me.

  I am wanting, I will always be wanting.

  But I also understand that there is some cause for hope, too, and as I begin to hear their separate voices I get that the hope is led by the third Sister, the one we pulled from the sea. She’s arguing for me with the others. Defending me for something, though I don’t know why, and I don’t know for what.

  Semper’s eyes are bright and shining, and he’s fallen to his knees beside me.

  Mircada is beside him, too, her eyes wide and afraid, her mouth open.

  Nadrune has gone pale. Her eyes flash with anger and rage.

  Then, the newest Sister begins a new chant. This one is deep and resonant like the sound I’ve heard monks make in one of the mountain temples Sartosh had taken me to as a child. But this chant was far deeper, so low it made the stones of the Tower shake. This chant speaks of history and time, of greatness and great wrongs, of Dekheret and the Hulgliev Farsoth and the great leaders that had come before them, of challenges faced and overcome and both disasters and triumphs that have changed the face of the world as we’ve known it.

  The Sisters have been here for an eternity, the chant says. They were watching before, they are watching now, and they will be watching when the suns die and the worlds turn to blackness.

  The two other Sisters join the chant then, and I realize they are singing to me now. Directly to me, about my mother and fathers, of my parents' mothers and fathers and the ones that had preceded them all back down into history.

  And of me. There is a need for me to take my place in this long line of succession, whether I want to or not. There are things I need to do, burdens I must accept, and I can no longer avoid a place in the world even though I might want to.

  Even though it was easier not to.

  I know they see me. They see all of my deep self doubts, all of my fears, and all of the inner turmoil that I h
old myself back with.

  Yet the third Sister speaks clearly now, in words that transcend language.

  She tells me to rise. She tells me to come forward. She opens her mouth wide, wider.

  I step inside, onto her great metal tongue.

  And then she swallows me.

  37: Semper

  The singing is overwhelming, insane. He wants to hold his hands over his ears, shut his eyes and curl into a ball, and yet Semper realizes that as a sage and a student of Akarii history, he will never again stand at the making of real, momentous history like he is right now.

  As the Sisters started to sing, and to actually rise up from their thick pedestals and hover there in the air before them all, he falls to his knees. He tries to resist the urge to prostrate himself entirely and place his forehead on the floor and leave it there in awe, the way Nadrune’s mages and the Kerul woman and now even Nadrune herself is doing.

  Instead, he tries to remember even the smallest details, so he can write about this later. For that’s his role here, he understands that—he will document this for the world so they can know what took place. The way the light from the wards outside seems to flicker over the Sisters, as if they are underwater. The way the air in the room swirls around them, around the circular room, extinguishing all of the mage-globes as if they had been candles or torches, blowing tapestries from the walls and stripping them to the bare stone. The way Blackwell steps forward, an expression of wonder on his face that Semper has never seen on him despite all of the Akarii wonders he’d shown the man.

  The Sister they had pulled from the sea opens her mouth, and there’s a loud burst of air pressure, a popping sound that’s almost deafening. Outside the wards flicker.

  There’s the strange, frustrated cry of some sort of great bird just outside of the warding, somewhere beyond the dome.

  The floor beneath them shakes and within the Sister’s great mouth he sees a great steel tongue extending. Her throat is deep and dark, and there’s a rushing of wind into it, the smells of coriander and the ocean. Semper feels dizzy and wonders if the tower is swaying. Sparks of aether spin in the air all around them.