by Unknown
Skath wore a look, Gaunt thought, of the oldest soul within the world’s five corners. Then this ancient-eyed being took Gaunt’s hand, and was merely a girl again. Gaunt said nothing but clasped Skath’s hand in turn.
She felt a surprising maternal need to spirit Skath away—to Palmary, to Swanisle, someplace where a girl who loved flowering weeds would have a fighting chance. Yet this girl had a mother, a family, a life of her own, and Gaunt had a lover to save. As she considered all this, Gaunt felt less like an adult comforting a youth than like an older child defending a younger.
If I am ever a mother, she thought, will I lose this ability to be a child’s true friend? Must I always, then, feel superior?But there could be no answer.
Then Gaunt released Skath’s hand and spun, seeing movement out the corner of her eye.
The boy Skower had entered the hiding place. He looked from Gaunt to Skath with wide eyes, and blurted, “The other outlander.... I heard it from the crowd at the Comprehenders’ tower. They’ve got him in the mindthresh. When they’re done teaching him, he’ll come outside—with the sword. He’ll come looking for you, Skath. He’s going to kill you.”
I’ve been entranced in some way, Imago Bone thought, wanting to feel angry about it. Something in the wine? Perhaps. Magic? He saw nothing obvious, but he no longer trusted his perceptions.
Yet even without magic or drugs, there remained the alcohol. The heat. The long hardship of the road to Maratrace. The confinement of the mindthresh. The constant discussion. And the people who came and jabbed him whenever he dozed. Bone had known thieves who’d confessed to far worse than burglary, signed anything, simply for the right to sleep. And also the self-assured voices of his captors, and the strange rhythm of their self-tortures.
Each time the world blurred and the Maratracians poked him back awake, the chamber seemed hotter, more constricted. Eventually he dreamed with his eyes open, his thoughts guided by the Comprehenders’ remarks.
Bone had waking dreams of his father (the fisherman) and Bone’s two elder brothers (the fishermen) and his mother (the fisherman’s wife) and his sister (the fisherman’s daughter.)
The Bones of Headstone Beach, on the Contrariwise Coast, were all fishermen. It had not been objectionable that Imago be different—it had been incomprehensible.
Yet Imago had no desire to fish. It was not that he hated the sea; indeed, he could study its wavering surface and shadowy depths for hours, much as others would watch a fire. Imago’s dream was to wander that sea as an explorer, not hug the coasts. Imago’s father once or twice grumbled acquiescence to the idea. But that was before Imago’s brothers drowned.
To the boy it seemed a life sentence had fallen upon him, this assumption he must fish to sustain his family. So he asked himself, how would Slaughterdark the Pirate Lord have comported himself, and he answered Slaughterdark would do anything necessary to reach free sea.
With this notion fluttering high, Imago fashioned a mask of old sailcloth and robbed a carriage of the Skullfellows, those merchants who taxed all the trade of Headstone Beach. To his delight he discovered a knack for such work. Triumphantly he presented his father enough money to secure the family for a year.
But Effigy Bone cursed his son for a thief, and kept the money. Imago was not released; he was banished. Though he wandered the Spiral Sea’s three great islands and its gnarled mainland, Imago Bone found no delight in escape. For it is one thing to sally forth, quite another to be exiled.
Other travelers whom Bone met upon the road, alone as they were, seemed possessed of a self-assurance he could never feel. Could it be that these travelers knew the trust and love of unseen, even dead, families? While Bone knew only the contempt of his? He felt like a vessel with a gutted hull, apparently sound and yet inevitably sliding to a fate even Captain Slaughterdark could not evade.
So he turned by slow degrees from the sea. He did not understand it then, but he came to believe he did not deserve his dream. Instead he focused on enhancing the skills that bought him survival on the road. He became, not just opportunistically but occupationally, a thief.
And thanks to Joyblood and Severstrand, two equal but opposed angels of death inflicted by a pair of eager but uncoordinated enemies, his life was strangely prolonged, so that those skills became legend. Yet at heart he was a man who’d abandoned a dream, to punish himself for failing a family long dead.
Bone shuddered as he reached this conclusion, trembled with the need to relate it to his friends, the only people who could comprehend. Only dimly was he aware that he told it hunched up, within a narrow wooden box.
Gaunt led the children through shadows and dust to her hiding place beneath the pier. There she hissed angry questions to Skower. “Explain yourself, boy. You turn us over to the Comprehenders, and now you want to help?”
“I love my little sister,” the boy said, with a quaver of pride. “I want Skath to be strong, proper, normal.”
“Nothing about Maratrace is normal.”
“It is our way, outlander. But Skath has never fit in. She is too gentle. With herself, with others. When she told me about her dreams of the sword, I thought she was at last growing up. Then I saw the sword in reality. I knew, somehow, Skath had to claim it.”
Skath said, “You forced me to touch it, Skower. That was wrong.”
He contemplated the muddy sand. “Yes.”
“Then you summoned the Comprehenders, and now everything is worse.”
“I got scared,” Skower said, “after Lepton hit me.” He shot Gaunt a glare. “Of the outlanders. Of the sword. Of you with the sword. But I still believe that you’re supposed to use it, that it’s your destiny. The Comprehenders want to destroy it. They think having Osteon slay you with it will do that. Maybe you embarrass me, Skath, but I can’t let him kill you. I can’t oppose the Comprehenders, but Lepton can.”
Brotherly love, Gaunt thought, but what she spoke aloud was, “I can’t let him kill you either,” and she said this as much for Bone’s sake as Skath’s. “And he will not. Skath, tell me again about your friends near the harbor.”
There were nightmares in the dark, and some happened while Bone was asleep, and some while he was awake.
After a long interval he found himself atop a dark tower rippling with faux spines and sculpted ooze, spearing the air with its spikes and swellings. From this vantage he saw the sun rise obscenely over the city, exposing it like a lamp above a pustulous wound.
He could barely stomach the sight. He felt ill. He studied his own hands, his sandaled feet, noting each blemish and wart, each peculiarity of form. One toe was crooked in a way that offended him. His body seemed a lump of gristle and fat. He loathed the sound of his own rasping breath.
“You perceive,” someone said. “You understand.”
His friends the Comprehenders circled him, wearing robes that hid the nauseating truth of their bodies. They bore an identical robe for him.
He took it eagerly. Its cover compensated slightly for the sun’s oppressive eye.
When he had become as the Comprehenders, Mistress Needles said, “You have come far, supplicant. Since the days when Captain Slaughterdark established this realm, each generation has passed our founder’s abyssmitude to the next. You are not so unlike him, and you have progressed quickly. But there is yet a task required of you, our new Brother Box.”
And now his namesake approached, Master Box. As if passing a torch, Master Box unveiled the rose-red crystal rapier with its hilt sculpted like a blossom, his hands poised carefully beneath the cloth. The sword greeted Brother Box with a cheery pastel crimson glow.
Master Box said, “Behold the abomination. It teaches us to live in a shallow world of insipid pleasantries and callow smiles.”
As one, the other Comprehenders spat. And they spoke, as though intoning a liturgy.
Mistress Rack said, “Our founder plundered this sword, to his everlasting regret. It was to escape its pall that he fled to the desert. There he fed upon locust
s and scoured his skin with rocks, until he cleansed his mind of the sword’s ways.”
Master Drip said, “But he accomplished far more. He broke the illusions that veil the horror of the world. Of all men, it was he who first truly Comprehended the loathsome nature of the universe. He abandoned his old life, and taught others to share his abyssmitude. And he foretold that one day our creed would encompass the Earthe, freeing all from illusion. The crusade would begin when Maratrace destroyed the Sword of Loving Kindness.”
Mistress Needles said, “You will do the deed, Brother.”
“But....” He could hardly speak, yet felt he should object.
“You fear losing your new-found perspective,” Master Box said. “We understand, Brother, and there is a risk. But if you cling to knowledge against the siren lure of ignorance, you may banish your illusions for good. We would be proud.”
Mistress Needles said, “We would be even more proud, if you could destroy the sword. Slay the girl Skath, she who tends weeds and smiles so shamelessly.”
“To sacrifice such a one with the sword,” said Mistress Rack, “would negate its claim tokindness. For whatever else the idiot Skath is, she is kind.”
“Do this,” said Master Drip, “and you’ll be free to do as you choose.”
“Even,” Mistress Rack said, “to teach abyssmitude to your beloved Persimmon Gaunt.”
“Give me the sword,” he said.
The touch of the hilt was like a hot gale, and the world seemed to spin around the Comprehenders’ tower.
A similar unbalancing shook his mind.
The sword hungered. He could almost hear it hissing its outrage. It longed to stain the Comprehenders’s drab costumes with crimson, bludgeon their followers into donning bright, cheery garb to please family and friend. It wanted the citizens to tell all their troubles at bladepoint, with the help of tea and trifles. It wanted to topple this grotesque tower and supplant it with something beautiful and airy, flanked by topiary. It wanted to replace torture chambers with padded cells, each with its complementary book of spiritual devotion.
Come! the sword seemed to sing. Let us make the world lovely, by smiting the unsightly!
But Brother Box resisted, for his newfound abyssmitude was strong.
He knew that between the cracks of the sword’s shining new world, loathsome vermin would scuttle. Moths would eat the pretty clothing, mold would claim the sweetcakes, and the beautiful happy people would, at last, rot.
“I am ready,” he said.
As the girl was known to be missing, he stalked the harbor, where a fugitive might readily hide. Mistress Needles accompanied him, with an eye to maintaining his abyssmitude.
She needn’t have bothered. These stinking, muttering bands of greedy, lecherous, sloppy traders were enough to inspire horror in any neophyte. Yes, surely Skath would hide here. Soon he would discover her and be rid of this damnable, mocking blade....
So absorbed was he, he almost missed the fleck of white flaring in an alley to his left. “Come,” he hissed, shifting that way, unconsciously seeking shadows.
Mistress Needles had seen nothing. “Eh? Where do you go, Brother?” Her voice was suspicious. But she followed him into a noxious alley cluttered with refuse, so unlike the bleak dusty paths of inner Maratrace.
He knelt beside a trash-heap and lifted a severed dandelion puff. He crushed it and peered at the rooftops. “Gaunt is near,” he said. “Skath is with her.”
He leapt upon the mound, jumped to catch a window ledge, and scrambled onto an adobe roof.
“Brother, come back!”
“You could never take Persimmon Gaunt on the heights, Sister. I trained her.”
He struck out across the rooftops, ignoring the Comprehender’s protests.
The buildings of the trading district formed a fractured maze. The Maratracians might impose starkness upon their own dwellings, but outsiders were not so rigid. As in so many lands, Maratrace could not afford to expel the foreigners it disdained, so it made do with isolating them.
All this he noted with a barely conscious sweep of observation, along with the awareness that Gaunt had set a trap.
She was not visible of course, nor was the girl. But upon a distant roof he spied the corner of a flower-bed. Despite himself he felt a distant flicker of pride. First, lure me into isolation. Then, force me to cross a long span full of ambush sites. And I must cross, for how can I be certain Skath isn’t beside that flowerbed after all?
His own abyssmitude mocked him for admiring such childish games.
The sword sang its outrage at the indignity of crossing rooftops.
His guts as unbalanced as his mind, he slunk along a roundabout path, from time to time dropping and rolling to see if the ambush was upon him. None came. Perhaps he’d bypassed it.
“Gaunt,” he murmured sadly, “you are brave and gifted. But sorry to say, I’m the master.”
A glint met his eye up ahead, and he stopped, thinking at first to see a dagger, or a crossbow, aimed his way. But no... it was just a common leather money-pouch nestled in a nook between chimneys, just as if some ambitious trader had stashed it while conducting dangerous business. A gem or two glinted through the loosened top. Only someone of keen senses, passing in just this direction, could have noticed. He licked his lips.
“Gaunt,” he called out. “I see what you are doing. But I am beyond such things. They are but stones, and I play for higher stakes.”
He leapt onward toward the flower bed.
A roof collapsed beneath him.
Sloppy, he thought as he fell. He should have noted that stairway gap, concealed though it was by a mandala-carpet covered with sand.
Tumbling down the stairs, Brother Box caught flashes of beauty foreign to Maratrace: brass statues of six-limbed gods, low oil lamps with wicks sticking out like fiery tongues, incense sticks trailing delicate smoky arms. Pain and distraction tore the sword from his grip; it lay upon another carpet of intricate swirling forms, flashing ruby light as if offended by the contemplative surroundings.
Whatever foreign merchants inhabited this home, they’d gone elsewhere. Shaking his head and wiping his eyes, Brother Box saw only Persimmon Gaunt.
Or rather, he saw the elephant-headed statue she slammed into his forehead.
Through the exploding starfield that filled his eyes he heard her say, “Sorry, O unknown deity. Sorry, Imago.” As he reeled, she padded away. He heard a clatter of beads, and when his vision cleared, the sword was gone.
He snarled and crawled through the beaded curtain into the sunlight. He saw Gaunt duck into another mud-brick home, two houses down. Dogs and chickens voiced excitement; humans gasped. The ugliness of existence slapped Bone in the face, but something deeper than his abyssmitude drove him on. He hated to lose. He got to his feet, spat at the onlookers, and ran.
As he passed the next door, the girl Skath emerged and tripped him.
Before he could recover, she darted inside.
He needed both girl and sword. Best he make her unconscious now. He rose and tumbled through the doorway in one motion.
Again an exotic interior confronted him. Red wall hangings coiling with flowing gold calligraphy trembled in a hot breeze. Monochrome scroll paintings of mountainous landscapes hung beside lacquer cases reflecting the dying light from a fireplace; these sheltered jade and ivory carvings of dragons, unicorns, and flying folk.
Something old stirred in Brother Box, a desire to investigate and inventory these unusual trinkets. Something older longed to wander those imaginary mountains beside the dragons. His abyssmitude whipped him on, however, whispering that all human works were so much junk... the calligraphy, the carvings, the paintings....
The intricate ironwork of the hot fireplace poker in Skath’s hands....
She slashed and stabbed, leaping out of nowhere. The scent of hot metal and burnt wood shot past his nose. He scuttled back. He was far, far off his game. Yet though his reflexes were muddled, Skath was no warrior. O
n her next jab, he swatted the poker away.
Skath kicked him, howling. He shoved her off, following with a gut punch. She toppled with an oomph.
A flash of light warned him of Gaunt’s approach. He spun.
Shaking, Gaunt advanced with the Sword of Loving Kindness. It shone with a lurid pink glow, bringing out the pigments in her rose tattoo. Rainbows sliced the air. Gaunt winced as one of the hilt’s rose-petals pierced her hand. But it seemed to cut her spirit more deeply.
“Bone...,” she murmured. “My poetry.... So foolish and morbid. I should speak of sunshine, of virtue, of weddings and dynasties....”
“The sword,” he answered, “is awake. It is too much for anyone who lacks abyssmitude.” Indeed, his perspective was clearer with the sword lost. He perceived the entropy reflected in the fire’s ashes, the decay that would inevitably claim woman and girl. There was no escape. One could only Comprehend.
“Bone, I am sorry.” Gaunt raised the weapon, and its lurid light intensified. It emitted a sound resembling a shrill birdsong, or frantic harping.
“I am Bone no longer. I am Brother Box.”
He slid beneath her swing. He sensed the sword’s eagerness to sunder his spirit.
“You are not yourself, Gaunt.” He tumbled toward the exit.
“You should talk.”
He sped into the street and ducked into the final house on the row. He must improvise some weapon.
But he found this home not just unoccupied but nearly barren. A life-sized porcelain cat with upraised paw welcomed him to a chamber bearing a little unadorned table with a miniature tree growing from a pot in its center. The very simplicity of the room drew the eye to the complexity of wood and leaf. Brother Box felt he could lose himself in that miniature world.
A trifle, a vanity, a waste of time. Lacking cover, he picked up the little tree, crouched, awaited Gaunt.
She stepped unsteadily into the room, a wary Skath beside her.
“Give up,” he told Gaunt. “You grow progressively less certain. The weapon overwhelms you.”
“Then we’re even. These madfolk have overwhelmed you.”