Beasts of the Walking City

by Del Law

  She turns on me again, her bloodshot eyes glittering malevolently. “Shashoi died because of you, you know.” She grins to herself, seeing my face react. Shashoi was my secondfather, the name I couldn’t pronounce as a kid. “Yes, he went looking for you, down through the grasslands toward the city. He was sure he would find you, and yet the Hunters found him there. I expect they ran him down. How does that feel, nephew? Some son you were to him, eh?”

  My mouth works, but I have no words that will come out of it. I’m sure all the color has drained out of me, though it’s the last thing I’m thinking about. My mind is spinning in on itself, and I’m thinking of that big red spear, sticking out of my secondfather’s chest.

  I might as well have put it there myself.

  My aunt turns away, knowing she’s hit her mark, and huffs up into her chair again. She picks up her khar pipe. “Now get out of this home, this little thing that I have left to me, and go back to your indulgences. You are no obligation of mine any longer, and I have much to do that is far more important.”

  My face is burning, and I can feel my heart pounding.

  I pick up Te’loria. I climb out of the kiva.

  I walk straight out into the woods, then, and I keep walking until the pines rise up tall around me, hundreds of them reaching toward the sky and the air is thick with their sap. Deer scatter before me, and I flush a herd of wild boar, several of which turned to charge me with their thick tusks but then reconsider after taking a looking my face. Instead they turn tail and run.

  I walk all night, all the next day and the one following, heading north into the great Akarii reserves. I walk high up onto the mountain peaks and across their summit, above the tree line, and then down into the trees again on the other side. The khytelwinds haven’t really begun yet, but frost cakes my fur anyway, and there is thick snow here on the other side of the peaks, thick and heavy and nearly to my waist.

  I push on relentlessly, unsure of any destination, only knowing that I will keep moving until something, anything is able to stop me.

  I come at last to a clear mountain lake, set down into a bowl of a small valley rimmed with steep cliffs, where the waters shine a bright, unfrozen emerald blue. It’s familiar to me in a way I can’t place.

  And then, I get it. I lived here once with my tribe.

  There, on the far shore, I think, though there is no sign that he could see from here.

  I make my way around the lake and stand on the beach at the water’s edge. It’s a beautiful place—the sun reflects clearly off the still waters here, and the trees are tall and majestic. The wind wends through their boughs with a clear voice, and somewhere in the distance a hawk calls. I turn back toward the trees, and there at the edge of the woods is a series of humps beneath the snow, old kivas now ruined and buried.

  Which one of them had been ours? I can’t remember. My memories are nothing but fragments. My mother swimming. My firstfather carving me a small totem from a branch I’d brought out of the woods. Eating a grilled, rainbow-striped fish my secondfather had caught with his own hands.

  This, too, was where it had all come to an end.

  The red-cloaked riders had come out of the woods on horseback—Human and Stona, some Talovian, carrying long and wicked knives and jagged spears. They had ridden down on us at dawn and had caught us utterly unprepared. He remembered his mother struggling to don her armor, his firstfather rushing from the family kiva naked, a drawn knife in his hand. His mother talking swiftly to my aunt, something about me, and my aunt bundlingme off into the woods, away from the noise and the shouting and the chaos, away from my mother and firstfather and the screaming until there is nothing but the sound of her panting as she runs through the woods, not letting me look back.

  I pace restlessly from the kivas to the lake and back again, and then strike out along what might be a faint path through the trees beneath the blown snow. It winds back into the deeper woods again and slants slightly uphill until it emerges in a clearing tucked against a steep side of the surrounding ridge.

  In the center of the clearing is a statue. Somehow, I’d known it would be here. It’s nearly as tall as I am, and after I clear off the snow from the head and the neck ridges and the shoulders, I know it’s a statue of my mother.

  I dust off the rest of the blown snow. She’d been carved from a single tree by my firstfather—I can remember now when I would visit him here, at work. The carving has faded, but I can still see that she was fierce and beautiful and intelligent, and that when he’d carved this she was no older than I am now.

  She stands as if ready for battle, the thick armor around her shoulders and chest, her weight balanced on the balls of her feet, the two mage-knives held upright before her, one in either hand.

  I want to remember what happened when my firstfather had shown the statue to us, but I can’t.

  It might have been painted out in full Hulgliev war paint. I imagine my mother would have been surprised and embarrassed, and that my firstfather would have been pleased and proud, but I really don’t know.

  A small brown bird lands on one of the upright knives and studies me, then launches itself back into the air again.

  I unwind Te’loria and go down on me knees here. I study her face from below.

  More snow begins to fall, thick white flakes of it.

  I bow my head then, listening. As if the statue of my mother, like a Sister, will speak or maybe the spirits of all the dead that I’ve called friends and lovers will speak through it and tell me what they want me to know.

  All I hear is the sound of the wind through the old pine trees. The snow covers my shoulders and neck ridges.

  Soon they will speak. It might be any minute now.

  46.

  It’s like this that Ercan finds me days later—stiff and nearly frozen, but still kneeling at the statue’s feet with Te’loria before me. Ercan unstraps his backpack, unfastens his new snowshoes and approaches me slowly. He kneels by my side and places a hand on my frozen shoulder.

  “You, um, pulling a Nadrune?” he says. “Staring at that thing, I mean.”

  “Leave me the fuck alone.”

  “Here,” he says. He hands me a flask. I sigh and take a drink, and it burns going down. A good kind of burn.

  “Thanks.”

  He waits. There’s more wind through the trees. Somewhere in the distance, a treecat howls.

  I sit back in the snow. “Sorry I left you in the truck.”

  “It’s ok. Your guy Sartosh makes some good grilled tofu.”

  “You ate that stuff?”

  “I was being polite.”

  I take another drink from the flask. “Solingi?”

  Ercan shakes his head. “American? Someplace called Khentuki.”

  “It’s not bad.”

  “That’s what I thought. Look, you should probably come back with me, Blackwell. Your guy Capone is getting a little out of control, and there are these Akarii people? In boats?”

  I stand up and shake the snow off. I open my mouth, but Ercan cuts me off. “You don’t need to say it,” he says.

  Blackwell shook his head. “Say what?”

  “Whatever you’re about to say. Something about honor. Something about commitment.”

  “But I do need to say it.”

  “All right.” Ercan watches me. “Go ahead.”

  I open my mouth and, after a minute, close it again. “Fucking skeck. You spoiled my whole speech.” I sit down again.

  Ercan grins. “Good. Look, I’m not Nadrune. You don’t need to sign over your soul. What do you want to do?”

  “My aunt would have me unite the Hulgliev tribes and wage war on you.”

  “I heard she was kind of tough.”

  “Then I was thinking I’d bring all of the races, all the families together. I’d forge a new Winged Crown and find a head to wear it, and I’d seat the Lunar Council in Tamaranth again to govern over a glorious new age.”

  “Ambitious.”

  “I k
now it.”

  “You might need a little help there. A couple of armies. Some really big knives and things.”

  “Details,” I say. I hand him the flask, and he takes a drink. “And then I realized that all of those things are things that other people want. They might even be things that you want, Ercan. The crown, that is. Not the war thing.”

  “It’s interesting to think about,” Ercan says, his eyes twinkling. “But I’ll ask you again. What do you want, Blackwell?”

  “I want a small house by the Old City,” I say. “In a place where there aren’t any dogs.”

  “That doesn’t sound hard.”

  “And I want my people around me, Ercan. All of the Hulgliev. From wherever they’re hiding now. In forests or caves, or out in the grasslands. In the bowels of some wild walking cities. I want to find every single kiva out there and every single Hulgliev in it, and I want to bring them together and bring them home.”

  Ercan nods. “So let’s get you started, then.” He holds out his hand, and I take it and let him think he’s helping me up, as the snow falls thick around us and the trees lean into the wind that comes down into that small valley. He passes me the flask, and we drink together there as the moons swing unseen across the sky overhead, tracing out our futures.

  • • •

  If Semper were still alive, he would talk to you about how the course of history can change in a matter of moments, and he’d be right. But it’s only later, much later in my life that I’ll look back on that moment, that simple handshake with Ercan as a time in which everything changed for me. A time when I went from being something of an aimless guy to really stepping up into adulthood, really becoming a man at least two of my fathers would have respected.

  It will stand with the time I’d kneel in the middle of Times Square before the singing Dragon of Barakuu and speak the Seven Words of Symmetry. The time I’d ride a jet-black grohver across the Golden Gate Bridge at the head of an army of Hulgliev, all of them shouting my name.

  It’ll rival the seating of that new Lunar Council I joked about, the setting of the Winged Crown across a new leader’s brow in a place called Switzerland, the hunting of those wild walking cities that get loose in the arctic. And it’s certainly ahead of all of those fierce and terrible battles by which two worlds will come to know my true name.

  It’ll even stand up there with the moment when I will catch my own newborn daughter in my arms.

  But all of those things? Like I’ve told you before.

  Those are other stories.

  Epilogue: Lespethl Ghat

  Chancellor Ghat doesn’t want to be here, in the Council chambers. She doesn’t want to be hosting this delegation of Talovians. You were responsible for a lot of this wreckage, she wanted to say. You blew up the fucking sea wall! And now you have the utter gall to come here in front of me and complain that the city isn’t doing enough for you?

  She’d rather be riding her grohver. She still keeps one in a private stable, at a farm up river, and if the Talovians ever stop talking, she thinks she might be able to get out there. She’d saddle it carefully—neither of them was young any more, and a saddle that was too tight could hurt the old creature’s digestion. One that was too loose would, of course, be pretty painful for her own constitution. She’ll saddle up and they’d fly low up the River Gaspek, through the narrow canyons and steep cliffs, over rapids and the lower waterfalls. She’ll take a tent and some basic food and a pole to fish with. And it will be quiet at long last. Quiet.

  But the Talovians are Talovians, and they talk and croak and talk some more and lick their eyes and wave their tongues in the air—so much drama. She runs her fingers back through her long, white hair, keeps a patient expression plastered on her face and listens. Finally they wind down, and she tells them in careful, politically-correct terms that they are damn fucking lucky to still be squatting in the city at all after their little godsdamn spree, and that they will do well to stay quiet, tend to their own, and not ask too much of anyone lest it become widely known exactly why the city flooded. And exactly who was at the heart of it. After all, there’s an awful lot of damage and a lot of people looking to recuperate that damage financially. And Tamaranth does have a very straight-forward court system that tends to frown on things like, say, massive sabotage and willful destruction of critical infrastructure.

  Not exactly in those words, of course. She is a politician now. But they get the point. They lick their eyes submissively and leave with a few extra bottles of the expensive Highland Red hidden under their cloaks, like they always do.

  After the Talovians were a group of merchants from the upper Warrens, who wanted concessions on their tax rate to compensate for the flooding. Talk to the Talovians, why don’t you she wanted to tell them. They just left. You can still catch them. She didn’t. They’re also a little suspicious about this man named Capohne, the Earth man the Keruls had brought over, who says his little private army can protect them from looters in the future. Shouldn’t the city guard be doing that? Do the taxes they do pay cover nothing?

  She listens patiently again, and listens some more, and tells them that while little funds are available, she is committed to keeping the Warrens commercially viable, and that the city would of course do its best to help such a critical part of the city’s economy. They nod and thank her. And they also leave with a few extra bottles of wine snuck into their bags.

  After the merchants comes the Dockside union, and after that the representative from the sanitation union, and then the architect of the new Tower has many questions that simply must be addressed this very hour, provided of course she tells him the answers that he wants her to.

  She doesn’t.

  She has dinner with the poor man who is to take her old job as Councilor for the Seventh District, a round, sweating human named Khosk who is very bright and very competent, and largely well liked by many of the Seventh’s movers and shakers, but who has an annoying way of staring at her niece’s posterior as the young woman clears the table for them.

  Damn Aart anyway, the lousy skeck. He was a great Chancellor and dealt with all of this shit. He had to go and die and leave her with this mess.

  After they are gone, every last one of them, and she and her niece Cryah have shared a quiet glass of the really good wine from the secret, hidden stash that she and Aart used to share, she finds herself walking again. Walking through the quiet, long, empty hallways of the Bane tonight. She nods to the few guardsmen who had drawn what she knew to be an awfully boring shift, and makes her way out to the windowed rooms at the far end, the ones that overlook what’s left of the tower.

  She’d had them bring the girl’s body here, not knowing what to do with her. She was Ciordoi by the looks of her, so family in some distant way, and it had seemed somehow appropriate to keep her in sight of the Sisters; she was now as enigmatic as they were.

  Ghat finds herself drawn here, night after night, to sit by the girl’s side. She brings another bottle of the good wine and sips as she watched the progress of the rubble being cleared by the light moons, watches the poor plants still milling about in the Garden, trying to find some place in is left of the soil there to be comfortable in. She watches moons pass slowly overhead, aligning and shifting and realigning in patterns as complicated as the alliances between all of the families. She long ago decided that those sages who thought they could tell the future of the world by reading the patterns of those same moons were either drunk or stupid or both.

  Sometimes, she will see the sun rise.

  Tonight, she needlessly smoothes the blanket across the girl’s body again, fussing as though she is tucking her in for sleep the same way she had once tucked in Cryah herself, thinking not for the first time that they should have put her in an actual bed instead of the hard stone pedestal of a window seat here.

  She studies the smooth, dark face, the stern set of the jaw and the tattoos that overlap each other like the fibers of a tightly woven tapestry all down the girl
’s neck and arms. She straightens the girl’s hair, and realizes she’s watching the girl’s chest again to see if it will rise. She knows it’s all an old woman’s foolishness. But she’s lived long enough to allow herself to be foolish now and then.

  When she’s finally satisfied, she pulls her chair to the window and fills her glass again. Tomorrow will be another parade of petitioners, and she really wonders how Aart had stood it all. She had known his translator, a smart young man from the highlands who’d had a gift for imitating that deep thrumming sound the Kruk made with those undertongues. He’d told her how much of Aart’s cursing and threatening he’d had to filter out. At the time it had made them both laugh. But now she was beginning to understand. She snorts to herself: soon she might need a translator of her own.

  She may have drifted to sleep off for a bit, then, because she realizes she’s imagining vividly how it would feel to be back on her grohver. The wind will be flying though her hair and the creature’s warm muscles will bunch and flow beneath her. Its warm animal smell will envelope her and below, at her feet, the world will spin away beneath them as if they are the ones suspended and all of the politics and all of the scheming and all of the things that other people think are valuable but that really are just distractions will spiral away and it would be her and her magnificent grohver, the two of them, together reaching effortlessly for the horizon that will forever lay just outside of their reach, as it should.

  It’s the deep, choking gasp from behind her that startles her awake. The glass that is in her hand falls and breaks on the stone floor and her heart pounds in her chest. She stands and turns and sees the girl rise from the pedestal, then, and stagger toward her. She starts to run to her side, but when the girl crosses into the light of the moons Ghat draws back, and her breath catches in her throat.