by Jay Lake
Light erupted from his hand. The men cried out. Around them a thunder made of wings began to echo.
Mercifully the glare kept him from seeing.
The comb burst into flame where his hot beam struck. A grub began to blacken as the wax holding it dripped in a burning rain.
"Push them over the edge as they fall!" Bijaz shrieked.
And fall they did, like flaming, boneless, albino cattle. When the first of the grubs slammed into the lift, its progress stalled a moment. A blessing, really, as they were a dozen yards from the comb, but then there was a thousand pounds of sagging insect to shove over the side.
The second grub crushed two men. Wee Pollister and the Northman levered it over, then tossed the bodies after. Let Ashkoliiz make what she would of the falling corpses.
The grubs' caretakers spread their wings. Bijaz could hear the buzz as they dropped away, but none had yet climbed onto their platform.
Two more grubs dropped, killing another man and setting the wood smoldering. He realized something was wrong at his feet.
A quick glance down showed the wood evaporating where he stood. His footing was fast becoming a dusty lattice. Was this reaper-magick taking its fuel from the deck?
"Wait," he shouted as four of the heavies groaned to shove the next grub over. Bijaz leapt for the huge, smoldering corpse and plunged his free hand into its side. He tried to envision the circuit, like an electrick light—the generator inside the grub, the bulb his open right hand.
The grub sizzled as it contracted.
Bijaz looked up again.
They were too close. He'd burned partway into the comb. Half a dozen grubs still clustered above them.
"To me," Bijaz called, stepping away from the grub's collapsing shell. Wee Pollister and his men formed around Bijaz, swords and spears braced upward. The Northman stepped close, too, hands open as if ready to catch a great burden. Some prayed. The troops were a metal thistle with a shaft of light in their midst.
Bijaz was losing the wood beneath his feet, but that wouldn't matter in a moment or two. They'd bump up against the plug. At that point he could use the plug itself to feed the fire. If it wasn't two dozen yards thick, or capped by stone.
Too late to worry.
Swords and spears around him sliced into the burning paper and hot wax. Men cursed as their cloaks caught fire. Bijaz could feel his hair smoldering. Goo and grub bits encased them. The platform slowed to nearly a halt, shaking as it strained upward.
"Get down," he said, and stretched to touch the paper.
A thought came unbidden to his head. Enough fire. Transformation was easier than heat and light. His fingers brushed tons of paper. From this madness of insects he would make instead a madness of flowers.
With that, it was done. The paper exploded in roses the color of light and flame, twisting in a whirlwind as the reaper touched Bijaz's shoulder to claim back his fragment of the sun.
Onesiphorous
Morning brought a lean breakfast of thin soup and a tasteless flatcake made from chopped grasses and old crusts. They had only water to drink, with a few drops of wine to cleanse each cup.
"We need to move as far and fast as we can," Onesiphorous said. "I will go among the plantation men and appeal to their old ties to the City. You miners split up two or three together and make for the other thumbs. Tell them what we are doing and raise their support."
"What are we doing?" asked Ikaré. "I can talk of turtles and drowned boys, but that won't mean much in honest daylight. Not to sweating men with jade where their brains should be." He glanced around at his fellow miners.
"A question well asked," replied Onesiphorous. "We are gathering weapons and people to wield them. We will need to meet somewhere not far from Port Defiance. The boats and barges of the plantationers will be our navy."
Ikaré persisted. "Where do we meet?"
"You tell me." Onesiphorous stared him down. "Your first assignment is to figure our assembly point."
Someone snickered, but Ikaré subsided with a thoughtful glower.
Onesiphorous looked to Beaulise. "The rest of you should prepare to travel. Gather your weapons and food. I am taking Jason and Kalliope to the top of the thumb, to show them what you showed me."
"Mind your step," the dwarfess told them with a sly glance at Onesiphorous.
Everyone grew busy then. He grabbed a lantern and led the newcomers to the upward ladder he'd used before.
Both Kalliope and Jason were sufficiently compact to make their crouching way through the tight, winding tunnels without resorting to hands and knees. Somewhat to his own surprise, Onesiphorous found the way without having to double back.
Condensation covered the walls. Tiny runnels slid down the floors, pooling to glistening puddles that seemed to have no depth at all. Or possibly too much.
Onesiphorous didn't bother with half-remembered commentary on jade mining. He wanted them to see the world from atop the thumb.
When they reached the trap door, Jason had to help him push it open. Out onto the thumb the air was gusty and wet. He stood and looked around—a dark gray storm line was moving in off the Jade Bight.
The thumb was still bathed in sunlight. The green billowing roofs of Angoulême spread around them like an arrested sea. Birds spiraled in shrieking flights, seeking shelter. Distant rock towers were outlined in an eerie chiaroscuro. The light had a curious, vitrified quality.
"Strange taste in parlors you've developed." Kalliope hugged herself against the wind.
Jason turned, smiled. "It's beautiful. I can see the mother of swamps at her sleep, her dreaming thoughts leaping from tree to tree."
"I wanted you to spy out the lay of the land." Onesiphorous shouted over the rising wind. "The Jade Coast is a very long, very narrow place. These people think long, narrow thoughts. Angoulême dreams and resents us all. The miners have their own concerns. I can't say what the plantation men believe."
Lightning struck not far to their south. The thunder which followed was close enough that Onesiphorous could feel the pressure of the air upon his skin.
"Let us go below," he shouted. "Before we are stricken."
"No," said Jason. He raised his arms and faced the oncoming rain. Kalliope watched her brother intently, ignoring Onesiphorous.
Rain slapped the top of the thumb. Jason shifted his weight so as not to tumble backward. Water sluiced through the open trap as Onesiphorous dropped into the tunnels. "Come on, you fools!" he screamed.
Lightning struck so close that all the hair on Onesiphorous' body was raised. The rock around him was strangely slick, and his teeth buzzed. It took a few moments for him to refocus his eyes. When he did Kalliope was standing over him, oddly pale in the lantern light. Her leathers smoldered as her lips moved silently.
Somewhere in the middle of her tirade his hearing returned. " . . . which case I will kill you, you little Slashed bastard."
"I'm a Boxer now."
That stopped her. "What?" She sat, heedless of the water coursing down the tunnel. "You never did make any sense. Daft buggerer. Right now my stupid twice-born brother is outside calling down lightning and laughing."
"What did Bijaz do to him?"
"It's my fault." Kalliope tucked her head down. "When they found him, he was almost finished dying again. Bijaz was in a sweat to bring him back, make something more of Jason than he had the first time. The old bastard used my brother, you know, when he was a boy. Used him like a greased rag to spill his own lusts. Jason cried himself to sleep licking dwarf come off his fingers."
That explained much about both of them.
"If you don't believe me," she went, "ask that angry little dwarfess down there. She grew up listening to my brother whimper. I believe he took her virginity, and her sister's as well." Kalliope shuddered.
"They didn't seem to recognize each other last night."
"It's been close to fifteen years. This morning, she might have been pretending not to care. As for Jason, well . . . I've been traveling with hi
m these past ten days. His memory has holes. They're getting bigger."
"Is he still your brother?"
"Not for much longer. Bijaz reached into him as he was dying the second time and made him into something green."
"Green?"
"He was the sula ma-jieni na-dja. The dead man of winter. Now he is the Green Man of spring."
"Bijaz did that?" Onesiphorous didn't know whether to be astonished or horrified.
"I showed him how." She cupped her hands and spilled golden sand. The water flowing around her steamed. The sand glowed a moment with the light of the distant desert before it became a thread of pale sludge in the runoff. "You forget, my friend, that I am a sandwalker. I have been taken down into the dark and made my way back into the light again. Thinking to help, I showed him a path to make his power more than parlor tricks and the death of longshoremen. He needed to control what he was given, not be subject to the whims of amusement and panic."
"You showed him a path to raising Jason?" Onesiphorous' head was spinning.
"No, I showed him a path to his power. He raised Jason all on his own. But in doing so, my brother was changed."
"Changed again," Onesiphorous said gently. "You had already changed him once, sandwalker."
"I should have left him alone." Her voice rang with a familiar misery.
"As may be," he said roughly, trying to draw her out. "But here we are now. What will he become? Is he our friend or our enemy?"
"I have no idea."
They stared at one another as lightning continued to flash outside the open trap. The thunder was growing more distant, though the water had not slackened.
"So we watch him as if he were a drawn weapon," Onesiphorous said quietly. "I have no noumenal powers. I am just a dwarf with a purpose. Can you match him?"
"On hot sand under a snake-eye sun, certainly. Here in the swamps of Angoulême where the power of green trumps bright, hard sand and stone, I doubt it."
Onesiphorous tried a different approach. "Was Bijaz seeking more than emotional reparation? Did he have some purpose to which he raised your brother?"
"I don't know that, either. He said he wanted things to be right. Then that woman came to town, and the old buggerer was gone." She stood, brushing wet sand from her leathers. "Enough. I will say no more. Just watch Jason awhile. You'll understand. As for me, I think the hairs in my ears are singed. I'm wetter than a fish. My brother can take care of himself up there. Are you coming down to dry off?"
"Yes." The wet chilled him. "Let us go down."
The tunnels wound strangely, the water changing the lay of the shadows from his lantern. He turned and turned again, trying to find the way down, but was quickly lost.
They came to a shaft which dropped in front of them. A dead end, unless he wanted to fall free. Another tunnel stubbed off the shaft on the far side, though he couldn't see any way to cross.
Not that it mattered. They'd never crossed a shaft coming up.
He peered over the edge. Light flickered forty or fifty feet below, and voices echoed indistinctly. Water dripped rapidly from above.
"What's over there?" Kalliope asked next to his shoulder.
Despite himself, Onesiphorous startled at her presence. "More tunnel," he said, "but we didn't come this way."
"Something glistened."
"Half this mine is wet."
She took his lantern and tried to angle the light. "I tell you, something is over there."
He tried to keep exasperation out of his voice. "This is a jade mine. Beaulise told me they'd stopped extraction until the assay boats were running again."
Kalliope groped to the right and then to the left of the mouth of their tunnel. "Ha," she whispered, and pulled a well-slimed rope into view.
She handed him the lantern. With effort she knotted a large loop in the rope near their floor level. "Sucker's heavy," she grunted. "Long."
She knotted another loop about her shoulder height. "Pull me in if I mess up too badly."
"Right." Onesiphorous figured on finding her body in the main gallery later. "Try not to kill anyone when you fall."
"Your faith is inspirational." Kalliope stepped into the stirrup formed by the lower loop, grabbed the upper loop with her right hand, and kicked off. She spun into the middle of the shaft with a slithering noise, then swung back to their opening.
"Done yet?" he asked. "It's not hung right from above. You can't swing across like an acrobat. And that rope is rotten."
Kalliope tugged slack in from further down and made a second loop around her foot. Then she crouched on the edge of the shaft.
"Why are you doing this?" Onesiphorous asked.
"Because I'm angry." She kicked into open air.
The woman had muscles, he would give her that. It was a strong jump, but the weight of the rope pulled at her. Kalliope milled her free arm, grabbing for the edge of the opposite tunnel. She was tugged upward by the rope, robbing her of forward momentum and lifting her over the lip of the shaft.
Onesiphorous watched Kalliope reach one hand into the darkness, then slip back. He grabbed at her shoulder as she slammed into his tunnel. A loud snap echoed. The rope began to tumble.
"Kick it free," he screamed, fearing the dead weight.
The coils slithered into the shaft. Onesiphorous crabbed backward, trying to drag her with him. He nearly lost Kalliope when a loop of the rope tugged her toward the edge.
She slashed at the coils with a thin knife. He braced heels but simply slid after her.
"Stop, by Dorgau's rotten nipple!" he shrieked.
They were both leaning over the edge before she finished sawing the rope away. Onesiphorous could feel his balance shifting into the shaft.
Kalliope threw her arms out. They wriggled away from the drop. Once out of danger, they lay gasping in the stink of fear-sweat.
Somehow the lantern had survived.
"You are as crazed as Jason," Onesiphorous finally said.
"Look." She opened her fist.
He plucked a three-inch lump of dark rock and held it up into the light.
It was dusty and fractured, but it was unmistakably blue, with gold flecks.
Onesiphorous chewed his lip. "Beaulise told me that stuff was mythical."
"Mythical to you and me, perhaps." She smiled. "Trust my intuitions, friend. I paid a very high price for them."
When they finally picked their way back down to the main gallery, Jason was already there examining the weapons and equipment. Onesiphorous saw no sign of the rotting rope they'd dropped.
Ikaré swaggered up to them. "Found something to keep yourselves busy, I see," he said with a leer. "Though there must be better places than a mine gallery."
Onesiphorous opened his mouth, but Kalliope beat him to it. "Do not mock what you only can dream of."
The dwarf gave her a sour look. "Indeed."
"Where did the rope land?" asked Onesiphorous, trying to change the subject.
"What rope?"
"Don't play the innocent. We dislodged a long section of rotten rope."
"Nothing here," Ikaré said. "Maybe you threw it down some other mine."
"Possibly." Onesiphorous felt a sudden need to drop the discussion. He exchanged a long look with Kalliope. There had been lights at the bottom of that shaft. And voices.
Another mystery in a life full of mysteries, he thought.
Imago
He wound up at the Potter's Field, along the northeast corner of the City. The air was colder here. The roads curved on themselves and ended in odd places, graves placed in haphazard arrays. The district was dotted with little groves, accidental orchards, colonies of flowers and shrubs. Pale poppies unlike any he'd seen before grew in abundance—petals almost waxy white, with a blood-red dot at the center of the flower.
The wealthy interred their dead in the catacombs of the Temple District, or private ossuaries on Heliograph Hill. The poorest simply laid theirs into the River Saltus, to the occasional dismay of boatmen. He
re lay the ordinary citizens, paupers buried by the City Imperishable, foreigners, and executed criminals—hence Jason's search for his father.
Imago wandered among the markers. Many were wood, rotting away in a decade or two. Bones were piled where old graves had been dug up to be reused. Some were overgrown with berry vines already showing pink and purple fruits.
These were the City's people. The gods had their magnificent tombs deep beneath the New Hill. The rich slept armored in splendid gold until their grandchildren crept down to steal their rings for pawn. These bones here kept watch beneath the old walls forever.