It was Tarn, the Duke whose Duchy had been dissolved into the mists of the Backworld, thanks to ambition and compassion and a doorway he couldn’t manage. The handmaiden knew him of old and no longer liked him. As the murmuring court cleared a space between him and the Queen, she saw what he had brought with him and liked him even less.
He held the hand of a mortal child, a boy, who looked at the floor rather than at the wonders who surrounded him. The court murmured and the handmaiden sprang forward. “How could you? How could you do this to her again?” She moved between them as if she could obscure her Queen’s view of the child, vainly.
“Bring your gift forward, Tarn,” commanded the Queen. “Let me inspect it.”
Tarn tugged on the child’s hand and the child raised dark brown eyes to the Duke. “What?”
“Remember, I had somebody for you to meet? Come, little one. You’ll like her.”
“I like the ground,” remarked the boy. “It shines. What kind of crystal is it?” He took an obedient step forward.
The handmaiden looked away, holding her arms across her chest to contain her fury. As they passed by her, Tarn murmured, “We do what we have to, my lady, as distasteful as it might be.”
“You stink of mortal’s death,” said the handmaiden coldly. “Stand away from me, if you please.”
One of the courtiers who had left returned smiling, and she realized he hadn’t fled at all. He had sought this out, gone to Tarn to push this mad plan. She wished he’d been a coward instead.
The Queen said, “What is this, Tarn?” and the handmaiden wanted to press her hands to the ears to shut out the farce. She couldn’t turn away, though, couldn’t take her eyes from the child’s sweet face. The fire had come upon them again and they would all suffer until it was ashes once more.
“A mortal child, Your Majesty,” said Tarn, sweeping a bow. “He is homeless and alone. I heard other children describing him as ‘stone-like’ and thought you might enjoy meeting him.”
The Queen’s blank eyes stared down at the child. The child stared back. “Why are you a statue? What are you made of?”
“I had a child once,” murmured the Queen. “Once and oh, so many times since. But once of my own.” Her eyes raised again to the heavens and the handmaiden felt her blood chill. What if even this step, as repellant as it was, did not serve? What if this time there was no stopping the Queen of Stone from rising from her throne and ascending into the sky to tear the world apart?
The little boy touched the Queen’s gown. “You are stone,” he said happily. “Me too.” He started clambering up the Queen’s skirts, oblivious to the direction of her attention.
The court’s murmuring became a mix of horror and amusement, as it suited the courtiers. Tarn was amused, the hateful creature that he was.
The handmaiden alone was yet afraid: afraid of the Queen rejecting the child and afraid of the Queen accepting him. She watched her mistress’s face intently.
The boy made it up to her lap and leaned back against her chest. “Crystals,” he said in pleasure.
“Look beyond the crystals, child,” said the Queen.
“What for?”
Her arms came around the child. “Beyond the crystals is your eldest sister. They took her and pinned her to the sky. And one day, when you are grown, you will rescue her.”
Tears in her eyes, the handmaiden went to prepare the necessary chamber for the Queen’s new son, just as she had so many times before.
Book 3
The Endless Silence of Forgotten Things
The sky is black. The ground is fertile with the ashes of the dead, but nothing grows in the clearing where they died, where they burned, where they were devoured. Nothing grows there. Not anymore.
The trees around the clearing, though. The trees thrive. They have been watered with blood and grief. Their trunks are twisted and gnarled, but their greenery is lush with the strength they draw from their roots.
The sky is black. The ground is ash. The air is a conspirator, pressing down on the ground. Nothing grows in the clearing and nothing moves: not vibrant leaf or swirl of cinders. Movement is akin to life and the barrier here between life and death is too easily crossed.
Silent night.
Roots stretch deep. They do more than probe for water. They do more than anchor. On the other side of the soil is another world, a winter world where the roots are leafless branches hanging down over the caverns of the dead.
This is an endless place, and tiny: bounded by roots and broken mirrors. What enters does not leave. How can anything leave, when the only movement is the slow growth of roots in the hollows of the dead as they transmute the ash?
But now—now the air moves. A breeze, drugged by the silence, traces a path through the ash. Slowly, slowly: the best effort of that which has forgotten how to dance.
Silver traces cracks in the sky like lightning. The breeze freshens; the membrane between the clearing and the sunlit world trembles. Something terrible presses against the blackness.
The wind strengthens, raking fingers through the glossy leaves and kicking the ash into a whirlwind. Bell-like thunder follows the silver lighting and something terrible comes through.
A figure stands on the edge of the blackened clearing, a yew and a sycamore at his back. The ash surges over his shoes as the wind settles like a mantle over his back. He surveys the clearing for a long moment, looking at the ground as closely as the trees, at the nothing as well as the something.
“Speak with me,” he commands, in a voice of bronze.
But nothing stirs in the clearing. It is a place of the dead, and the dead do not answer back.
The figure listens to the silence. “Very well.” He puts his hands in his pockets and leans on the yew behind him. He is gaining—something. The trees bend toward him and the ash shifts as if on a slope, as the earth itself distorts under him. He is a black hole and he is gradually pulling the clearing into himself.
When the roots twitch from their elaborate patterns in the spaces below, that which waits in the clearing ignores the visitor no longer. Shadows grow from the trees, orienting like needles on a compass until they layer upon each other in the center of the clearing, where the ash is deepest. A shape forms among the shadows and the ash, and the pull the visitor has exerted upon the clearing reverses as once again the spiritual forces come into balance.
As the visitor appears as a young man of business, dark-haired with his shirt sleeves rolled up, so the ghost appears as a schoolgirl, with shadowy hair to her waist and eyes of static. She balances on one foot for a moment then braces herself on the charred earth.
After equilibrium returns, it is some time before the visitor once again breaks the silence. “It would be better if I didn’t stop.”
“No,” says the girl, the word bobbing up from the depths of silence, “It wouldn’t.”
“I first heard a whisper of what grows here when I was on the far side of the stars. The earth itself groans under the strain.”
The girl whispers, “Before I was born, my mother clutched her back and vomited through her nose. And yet she lives still, in all her grief.” She spread her hands and ash spins around her, through her.
The man with the wind as a mantle kneels down and plunges his hands deep into the ash and the earth, until the surface seethes around his forearms. His sleeves remain clean. His awareness goes deeper yet: into the hollows cradled by the roots and the strangeness that grows between them. “It is an atrocity,” he says, but he doesn’t pull away.
The girl watches him, her hand upraised to cup a fragment of ash that flares to a cinder. “We know you.”
“Oh? And what do you know of me?” Tendons move in his arms as his fingers move under the earth.
“You are the executioner of angels. You have committed endless atrocities.”
He pulls his hands out of the earth and sits on his heels, tilting his head to gaze at the ghost. “Not endless,” he says, and his voice is mild. “I’ve k
ept count. I remember them all.”
“And yet they do not end. Those you have cut off from their names continue on, broken and breaking.” More sparks flare in the ash and scarlet glints in her eyes. “What we’ve suffered could be laid at your feet. Just as our vengeance is.”
The leaves tremble as if a hand has been pulled back to strike.
His mantle of wind rises around him, which fans the embers into tiny flames. But she does not move. He listens to that which he just touched, listens for premature movement, for the howling of an atrocity lunging for its doom.
He hears nothing.
The girl with static eyes and coals on her fingertips smiles. “We are patient. Our vengeance will not be destroyed so easily. If we are patient, he will come to us in the end, he who murdered us, who commits horrors day after day.”
Trouble touches the brow of the executioner of angels. “He was corrupted before I took his name. It was all I could do to limit him. I assure you, he would be worse if I hadn’t.”
The coals on her fingertips make a fiery pattern through the drifting ash as she shrugs and spreads her hands as if to encompass the clearing. “And yet you seek to stop what we do here.”
“You’re immortal souls,” he points out as he rises to his feet. “Chaining yourself like this, to this purpose, goes against all that was built into your nature. And what you do cannot succeed. He is as immortal as you are.”
“The executioner of angels,” she repeats, savoring the phrase.
“Yes. Trust me to know. There are better places for you. Even my mansion is better.” A wry expression twists his mouth. “Mostly unoccupied, too.”
“You make a joke,” she says, as if identifying a distant landmark.
“An offer. Abandon what you do here and know peace.”
Her mouth twists in disdain. “And how would we know peace beyond this place? Would you strip of us our hatred? Destroy our memories? Make us into preserved blossoms to adorn your home?”
“The mansions of heaven have a way of providing… perspective.” He holds out his hand.
All the ash flares bright as her rage ignites. Her hair lifts from her back, her feet lift from the ground. “Perspective? Perspective on how our lives were shortened? Perspective on how we suffered? Or perspective on how we are not important? Perspective on how your kind, guardians of the world, does not care, does nothing to stop him and those like him? On how you create monsters, then leave them to play in the wreckage of our bodies and hearts and minds? We do not want your perspective.”
He steps back, back from her rage, until once again he is leaning on his tree. “You want retribution.”
Surrounded by her scarlet rage, the ghost stares through him, as if that which she is connected to grants her vision beyond what is possible. “We wanted justice. We must, it seems, make our own.” The embers die again, all but those at her fingertips and burning at the ends of her hair. “You can destroy what we build here, if it pleases you, but you cannot stop us from building anew.”
He looks up at the fractured sky, beyond the cracks. “There is that which could stop you. That which was made to stop you.”
Her voice is once again a whisper. “Not to stop us. Not to stop this. You never expected that we might be a danger to your kind. Are you afraid now?”
The man thinks about the question and then smiles. “No more than I should be.” There’s something wrong with his reaction. Something is off.
The ghost’s mouth is a slash as she stares at the man. Then her expression changes, and for a moment the static of her eyes fades to reveal a very human surprise. “You don’t actually want to destroy our work.”
“No,” he says, smiling still. “I want to learn. Teach me what you do, and in exchange I will protect you from the others.”
She hesitates, this representative of the clearing. Then the ghost and the angel exchange secrets: the method of the machine for the means of calling the executioner. When it is done, the angel departs.
The sky is black. The ground is ash. All is silent. And under the earth, vengeance grows.
Far City Cheer Squad
The feral city was a far cry from Neverland but the lost ended up there all the same. Criminals, runaways, or lovers, sometimes all three, and most of them were little more than kids. It had been that way for uncounted years: the homeless hiding in the streets and alleys of a city that barely tolerated them, while dodging the hunters prowling for a moment’s entertainment.
All this might have been true in any city in the world. But the feral city was different, because nobody lived there except for the runaways and the hunters and their monstrous prey. It was a strange place, full of both wonders and terrors. But the wonders—buildings made of crystal, twenty foot tall sculptures of roses, weird and elaborate water fountains—never lasted, while the terrors seemed to be eternal.
And then one day, the hunters left.
Once the rumbling of their collapsing tower had faded and the crimson dust had been swallowed by the city, once their monstrous prey returned to the snow-and-blood forest, the runaways considered it a reason to celebrate. But too soon their joy turned to something else. They’d started as runaways, criminals, lovers, but in the feral city they all became scavengers. It was the natural path if you weren’t a hunter and you avoided being prey.
It wasn’t like the hunters had ever valued their kills. They hunted so many things: monsters and big game and small game and children—and most of those were good eating once the hunters had taken what trophies they wanted and ridden away.
So. Once the dust of the hunters’ doom had faded, once the joyful dancing had become weary sprawling, the scavengers realized they were once again getting hungry.
They went out to look for food. At first it wasn’t too bad. There were many kills, and few other scavengers, and sometimes the city itself, in its pure randomness, brought forth bounty.
“I’d give anything to find that spaghetti tree again,” said Izzy wistfully. He was a scrawny, dark-skinned boy wearing a tattered Seahawks jersey and carrying a canvas bag that was sadly empty.
“Oh come on, man.” said Ramone. “You never found any such thing.” He—and he fought like a demon for that ‘he’ when others expressed their doubts—was quite a bit shorter but a lot less scrawny than Izzy. He tapped the pavement with the twisted remains of a metal signpost, clanging out a simple pattern as they strolled down one of the broad avenues of the feral city. There were never any cars to worry about, police or otherwise, and now that the hunters were gone, only hunger to fear. Hunger didn’t care if you made a lot of noise.
(The city sometimes did. But as long as they didn’t go inside the city’s buildings, they were usually safe. Everybody learned that pretty quickly when they came to the city. The whole idea that indoors was safe and outdoors was dangerous was the first of many ideas turned on their head in the city. The idea that Ramone should have introduced himself as Ramona was another.)
“How did I get the bag of spaghetti then?” demanded Izzy. “I don’t lie, jerk.”
“What we really need,” said Ramone, ignoring Izzy blithely, “is for Miss Zellie there to get herself over to the shitty real world and bring us back some chow.”
‘Miss Zellie’ was half a block ahead with her boyfriend Cam, checking down alleys for edible remains, for signs of small animal life, for weeds and randomly generated trash. She’d eaten all of it in her time in the feral city. But when she heard her name she stopped and turned around, putting her hands on her hips. “Would you guys stop following us? And you too, Eden!” She raised her voice so she could be heard by the two girls a block behind Ramone and Izzy, too. “I’m not going to lead you to some promised land of roast chicken so you might as well piss off and go look down another street.”
Ramone groaned. “Roast chicken. Like, that rotisserie stuff. Oh man, and pizza. Come on, Zellie! We’re starving here and you got the gift! All you need to do is pop over, grab some stuff and pop back. Nobody’ll no
tice quick enough to catch you.”
“Did somebody find food?” demanded Eden, sprinting up with Deena beside her. “That weed stew Zellie made did not go very far, let me tell you.”
“You’re so welcome,” Zellie said nastily. “I didn’t want to share it with you anyhow.”
Izzy said, “Don’t listen to her, Zel. We need you. We’re going to end up bones ourselves without you.” Most of the inhabitants of the city just wandered in one day and never could figure how to get back out again. The city was a maze from which there was no exit.
It was different for some of them, though. Like Zellie. She could walk between the real world and the feral city just by changing her pace. She went other places, too, like the snow-and-blood forest that bounded the city. Almost everybody could get there if they tried, but it took longer, and Zellie could go much farther, because she didn’t seem to be afraid of anything.
Zellie looked away. “What we need is to scour this city until we find a park or a backyard or something where we can plant some seeds and take care of ourselves. This climate is good for that. It would work.”
“Hah!” said Ramone. “And that would last just as long as Izzy’s stupid spaghetti tree, which didn’t last longer than spit in a frying pan.”
“We need to make friends with the city,” said Cam quietly. Cam said things like that. He was slim with silky brown hair, and intensely nearsighted. His glasses had shattered the first time he’d had to run from the hunters. Zellie said that even when he’d had them, he hadn’t quite seen things the same way as everybody else.
Ramone ignored Cam. “And even if it did last, we’d still starve long before anything was ready to eat, Zellie. Even radishes take a few weeks and believe-you-me, you don’t want any of us living off radishes, anyhow.”
“It’s not like we’re shacking up together, why should I care?”
“Sunny says we all have to take care of each other,” Deena piped up.
Etiquette of Exiles (Senyaza Series Book 4) Page 15