by Jay Lake
It would give them a very strange view of life.
Late that afternoon the land opened up into a steep-walled valley that sank into the rise of the hill, leading to a break in the cliff. A cold wind blew out of the gap as they made camp. Frost settled with the darkness to make for the chilliest night yet.
Huddled beneath his cloak, Bijaz awoke with the dawn. His hair prickled again. This day will bring regret, he thought.
That was clear enough even without a nudge from the noumenal world. The dangers of the ice were obvious. Ashkoliiz couldn't plan to walk back west across that broken, frozen hell.
Two hours down the valley, as they made their way out onto the ice, that was exactly what Ashkoliiz proposed. "We will break into teams of six," she announced. "Each carrying ropes."
It was cold as Dorgau's hells. The wind blew wet and hard. Bijaz's skin hardened like pebbles.
"Lady," said Azar, reining his horse in tightly. "The mounts will not walk this. Even if we force them, they will break legs or founder with fright."
Ashkoliiz gave him a look which should have singed his moustaches. "I've always heard that Tokhari could ride through the hells and come back with a fire for the night's supper. Perhaps I mistook you for a man."
"I am a man." His voice was tight with shivering anger. "But I am not a fool. Only a fool takes horses over ice. Especially dirty, broken ice like this, shot through with old god magick." He nodded at Bijaz. "Your pardons."
Bijaz smiled politely.
Ashkoliiz was clearly in a killing mood. This close to their goal, her former aplomb had eroded almost entirely. "Then you will dismount and slay the miserable animals here," she declared.
One of the mounts whickered. Thirty-three men, Tokhari and Yellow Mountain tribesmen alike, rested hands on weapons.
It would be rank mutiny, pure and simple.
Bijaz cleared his throat, wondering what in all of Dorgau's brass hells he was going to say.
They all stared at him. "Friends," Bijaz began. Now there is a classic opener. "Men of the City Imperishable." Wrong. None of the horsemen were City men. "Adventurers." That ought to cover it. "We are very close to our goal. In quarreling now, you bicker at the gates of history. Blood shed here will later be remembered in shame. We have traveled and fought and died to come to this dreadful place. Do not discard everything for the sake of pride."
He turned to Ashkoliiz. "Lady, I pray you listen to the horse masters. They know their animals as you know men." Then he bowed to Azar. "Free horsemen. I pray you listen to the lady. She knows history the way you know horse." Bijaz spread his arms wide, addressing all. "I counsel you to detail five men to keep the mounts. The rest may march onward in company. Otherwise, the horsemen will not witness the opening of the gates. Otherwise the Northern Expedition will be too small to break them down."
Bijaz folded his arms and shivered, waiting to see if blood would be shed. He could see the fire in Ashkoliiz's blue-white eyes, the twitch of her face as she struggled to recall her own words.
Azar broke the stalemate first. "I will stay with the horses, along with any others of the riders who wish to." He dipped his head to Ashkoliiz and Bijaz. "You go open the doors of history. I shall be the first to hear your report."
The already reduced Northern Expedition left three more men with Azar. They walked on much of the day, keeping a ragged formation. The pace was poor. Bijaz was distracted by the wind reaching through his clothing straight to his skin, the nagging scent in the air—a mix of the electrick and the noumenal.
Around the middle of the afternoon the bear gave out a bellowing roar, then raced across an ice ridge.
"We are almost here!" Ashkoliiz shouted. "Hasten!"
Bijaz resolutely kept his pace as everyone lengthened their strides. As a result he was the last to see what lay before them: Pillars were carved in the rock face, topped by an entablature. The porch below was lost in the ice. His attention was caught by what was between the pillars, above the ice and below the roof.
Paper.
The wasps had flown here from the mine, then sealed themselves into Terminus' final resting place.
Ashkoliiz was already haranguing the men to attack the paper wall. Ulliaa, Amalii, and Ashtiili were deep in consultation with the ice bear. Bijaz vividly recalled how awful the wasps had been in the mine. Here, now, even though they were on open ground, the fight would be much harder.
He picked his way off the ridge toward the formation. Fire was the answer to the paper. Fire, which cost a godling nothing if an honest man set it with a match.
By the time Bijaz caught up, Ashkoliiz and DeNardo had agreed to storm the tomb before dark. "Tear it open with fire," Bijaz said.
"Yes." DeNardo was focused on the moment. "We are already to be thinking that."
"You knew about the wasps?"
"We knew there might be defense," Ashkoliiz said acerbically.
Of course there is a defense, Bijaz thought. The gates of history did not just sit waiting for any fool with a wheelbarrow to happen past. But giant wasps?
DeNardo set fire to the paper plug on the tomb. With oil splashed freely, it burned merrily awhile until it slumped in a mass of ash like a lava-edged rose. No insects came boiling out. A ragged cheer was swiftly shushed by DeNardo.
Great bronze doors had been concealed beneath the paper plug. They stood open, broken by the long years of ice.
"To be casting in a torch," shouted DeNardo.
A lithe man sprinted toward the open doors, hurled a pitch brand into the shadows beyond. He then turned to run back. The resulting explosion sent a spinning chunk of ice that sheared his head off. Dark red blood sprayed the frozen ground directly before DeNardo's line of soldiers.
The first wasp emerged, flying erratically. The compound eyes were cloudy, wings draggled. Its thorax was visibly swollen. A distended mass the color of rotted flesh swung below the smooth curve of chitin.
Pierce, their lost light troop commander, peered out of the mass. The man's eyes rolled and his lips moved silently. Agony flared in Pierce's eyes as he pled for death.
Half a dozen troops broke and ran screaming. DeNardo shot one in the back with his pistol, shouting, "To be stopping now!" The wounded man flopped on the ice like a landed trout, while the other five dropped to their knees, facing away from the wasp and its hideous cargo.
Bijaz could hear someone crying.
DeNardo turned to the wasp and raised his weapon. The prisoner's face twisted.
Enero's man pulled his trigger a second time. Pierce's forehead shattered. The wasp collapsed in a spray of ice. This time DeNardo let the men cheer.
The giant insect's body shuddered, then began to move in lumpy waves. The swelling peeled off. Chitin flaked away with a startling suddenness.
Small bats flew out of the wasp. They had monkey faces bearing an uncanny resemblance to Pierce. Each screamed, "Ruin, ruin, ruin," in high-pitched echoes of the dead man's voice.
More of the troops broke. DeNardo stood his ground, sword at the ready, as the bats swirled into the sky.
"Eater of Forests," said one of the Northmen in a voice compounded of fear and awe. Three of them set off in a run toward the entrance.
Bijaz followed the Northmen. He was forced to duck as the next wasp erupted with another silently screaming face embedded in its thorax.
Onesiphorous
Dawn found Onesiphorous and Kalliope sitting in a dory at Greathouse's dock. They'd chivvied a map from Honeywood's bargemaster, and descriptions of the channels. None of them had experience navigating the swamp country, but overland was no option at all.
They'd also set a date a month hence for the barges to be in the water.
The night had been long and warm. They'd seen nothing of Jason or Greathouse.
"He must be burning himself up," Onesiphorous said as the east stained red.
"My brother?" Kalliope toyed with a paddle. "As he told us, his is the madness of flowers. They give everything to grow in spring,
then spend their short lives going to seed. I think Bijaz had a purpose in remaking Jason, even if the old dwarf didn't know it himself."
"He is the luck of the City. Perhaps the City Imperishable had need of whatever Jason is."
"The Green Man of spring," she said. "Who may wither come summer, but blooms now like a colored fire."
When Jason came down the path, he was followed by half a hundred Angoumois field hands bearing long fronds of hemp. Greathouse was nowhere in evidence. The scent of the broken-off plants was overwhelming.
Jason walked out onto the dock and stared down into the boat. "I could stay forever among these fields."
"We have work to do." Onesiphorous kept kindness in his voice.
"Yes." Jason climbed into the boat.
Onesiphorous noticed green stains on the man's hands, and darker ones as well. Soil? Blood? What had he used to fertilize his night's work?
They cast off. The Angoumois lit the green hemp cuttings, though the plants would only smolder. They tossed the smoking bundles into the river to follow the current awhile.
"Are you well, brother?" Kalliope asked, but Jason only leaned to the back of the boat and closed his eyes.
Onesiphorous paddled and wondered what had been set upon the land here. Something that made great ripples followed them closely, but it did not move against them. He figured it for one of her horses and made his peace with the rising dawn.
The weeks which followed were a foetid blur of muddy channels, slow currents, and overgrown riverbanks, punctuated by meals of fish, fish, and more fish, with occasional stops at plantations.
With every visit, the process of negotiation became easier. Arguments were refined, objections answered repeatedly. The most difficult problem solved itself—the price of inertia was growing higher as summer loomed. Still there were no boats from Port Defiance. Any barges sent down did not return. While certain crops could hang in drying barns—turkweed and hemp, for example—others coming in as early harvest from winter plantings wanted shipment to market. Muskmelons rotting by the hundredweight on the docks improved no one's fortunes.
He fell into a rhythm with Kalliope and Jason. The Green Man slept most of the daylight hours, and spent his nights standing knee deep in water staring upward. It did not seem to matter whether the canopy was stars or leaves. He never attracted leeches or insect bites.
Onesiphorous and Kalliope sailed the boat, kept their maps updated, made notes and collated inventories of promised barges and other resources, set up and struck camp, and did what they could to advance their cause.
Jason awoke whenever they approached a plantation or an Angoumois village. Just the sight of his calm, smiling face seemed to be enough to stimulate a flurry of worshipful attention and gifting from the swamp people. Onesiphorous quickly learned to refuse almost all of what was offered.
Among plantationers, the Green Man was a figure of mixed awe and dread.
Imago
Imago wasn't certain that a mocking carnival would have the intended effect. Everyone in the City Imperishable preferred that the noumenal remain within its own realm, while their daylight world carried on by sensible and solid paths. The Card King proposed to raise the ghosts of past power against Wedgeburr.
That struck Imago as being the opposite of a solution.
Nonetheless he watched the krewe prepare, sitting idly atop his overturned crown until a harried tailor thrust a pile of black cloaks into his hands. "Here, baste the hems," the man said, then scuttled off with his needle-filled vest flapping behind him.
Imago didn't know what a baste was, but he set to work. The needlework was inexpert, to say the least, but he had something to do.
Someone eventually brought him a small bucket of beef broth and a dark loaf with a wedge of blue-veined cheese. He couldn't yet bring himself to eat from a bucket, but the rest was a treat upon his aching gut. Finally, he had an appetite again.
As the light darkened overhead, a very short woman found him. No, he realized, Marelle, wigged and cloaked.
"Hello," Imago said. The stirrings which Kalliope had raised in him a month or two ago seemed to be returning.
"Lord Mayor." She hugged him.
"I'm glad you survived that day," he told her.
"I turned aside for a moment, entering the Great Hall." She looked ashamed. "It saved my life. I was three days leaving the Limerock Palace, but the servants hid me."
"Later, tell me of what happened while I was away."
Marelle sat next to him on the crown. She pulled one of the waxy poppies from beneath her cloak. "Here," she said, handing it to him. "Do you know what they call this now? Lord Mayor's memory."
Imago took the flower and smiled. "Another name Wedgeburr hates, I would imagine."
"Wedgeburr hates much. Even his own party within the Burgesses has sickened of him. Word is that he has not called them into session for several weeks, for fear of being voted out."
He found that news interesting. "Will the Assemblage bring him down?"
"Who knows? We need to retake the city. Soon, I am afraid." She touched his too-thin arm. "Strange flights of creatures are rumored to come out of the North. I fear that Ashkoliiz woman has disturbed something. The tales are fantastic, but their telling continues with every new arrival from upriver."
"I assume the situation in Port Defiance is starving us."
She snorted. "You were imprisoned when the Trade Control Act passed the Burgesses. All foreign assets in our banks and trading accounts have been frozen, pending seizure by the Intendant-General."
"If that process is completed, we are finished," Imago said. "Syndics in this city hold paper on ships and cargos ten thousand miles away. That is the true basis of our wealth. A few months' blockade of the manufacturing trades is not enough to unseat a thousand years of trust and well-secured vaults. But such a foolish law would be."
"And so we need Wedgeburr out," Marelle said gently. "And we need you back as Lord Mayor. Believe me, I understand why the power must be spread about. I've seen far, far more of this city than most people ever will."
"But you're not old," Imago teased.
She smiled sweetly. "And you're no liar, either."
He slipped his arm behind her back. She didn't move away.
They talked on awhile, but soon sitting close seemed more important than the words. Later that evening, when the bustle had died down, Imago and Marelle climbed the stairs to the costume racks. They found a little nest of velvets behind an array of woolen plaids. Lying down together, he teased off her wig to run his fingers through her beautiful pale hair.
"You shouldn't do this," Marelle said. He started to pull away, ashamed. "Your health, I mean!"
"I've been too long without." Imago wasn't willing to meet her eye.
"You think you have been too long." She reached over and pulled him close. "You cannot imagine how it has been for me."
Lying with his face against her neck, he undid one button of her blouse. She said nothing, so he continued to undress her. Marelle's breasts were as pale and small as she was, nipples barely colored, but they fit well into his mouth. She found his cock soon enough, which fit her hands quite nicely. He ached to take her like a boy, but they had no grease with them, so when they finally coupled, it was as man and woman.
Imago had expected to come on the moment, after so long without—almost a year, he thought—but as he slid his cock into her, staring into her pale eyes in the costumed shadows, he found himself firmer and firmer. He plunged into her until she bucked, clawing at his shoulders and giggling her way into tears. He pulled out and spent himself in the pale fuzz about her cunny.
After, she held him close to her breast.
"I recall," she said, "so much." Tears shook in her voice and her chest shuddered, but she would not let him up to comfort her. "When I brought the archives to the City Imperishable, I was a heroine for a day. Memories of the empire were fresh then, and so reminding them of what was falling quickly soured their af
fection. The students had no use for me. I embarrassed their tales of their own courage. I made lies of the nobility of their august professors who'd fled like rabbits before the fox.
"No man likes a woman who stood where he would not." She took one hand away to rub her neck. "When they worked up the pot-bravery to beat me to the ground, then showed me the rope, I thought I was ready for it. But the City would not let me die."
"What do you know?" Imago asked quietly.
"What everyone knows," she told him. "The City is. The difference is that I know what the City is."