by Rabia Gale
“Help you do what?”
Her eyes narrow, her features pinch. “Something monstrous comes. Something dark. I try to hold it, but it eludes me.” She shakes her head. “It’s beyond reach.”
“From the hospital? Is that where this darkness is?” I press.
She flinches. Her eyes shade from human to cloak and back to human. “Lair of horrors,” she hisses. “Den of darkness.” She hunches tight, almost into a ball, and says no more.
“Did—” The words are dry crusts in my throat. I swallow, continue. “Did Sera send you?”
She shudders, a ripple of dissolving and materializing. “Sera… Yes, Sera.”
“What about her?” I ask, eager. “Is she—did you know her? Was she there with you in the hospital?”
She shakes her head. “Pain. There’s nothing there but pain.”
“Is Sera there now? Flutter.” I take her by her thin shoulders, willing her not to mist away again. “Can you take me? Show me?”
“I-I… no. It is not in the Instructions. Not in the threads. Not in the…” Blue sigils pulsate in her wings again, but I focus on her face, on holding her, as if my gaze and my hands can keep her solid.
“Flutter! Those are not the guiding principles of your life. Remember, you are eilendi and Sera of the tribe of judges. She is a sister of the faith, and you are beholden to aid her, save her. She sent me to you. Why else would you come to me? Take me to her, Flutter.”
She twists free from my grasp and lunges for a corner, all in one impossibly swift, snake-like movement. She doubles over and retches, though I doubt there is anything left for her to throw up. What do cloaks eat and drink? What can I offer her for sustenance?
Flutter wipes her mouth. Her lips twist in a grimace, and a sickly-sweet smell emanates from her.
“If those people in the hospital are targeting eilendi and others of Taurin’s priestly family,” I say, “then it is your duty to help, Flutter.”
Flutter bobs her head, draws her knees up to her chest. “I’m afraid.”
I hold my breath. Say nothing. Her duty to Taurin is the most persuasive argument I have. I am not too principled to refrain from using it for my own ends.
Sera. Hold on. I am coming for you.
“All right,” she whispers. “I’ll help you.”
Against Instructions. Not valid. Not valid. Return to original destination.
Knife-twist in gut with each step. Atoms spin in frenzy, strain against bonds, on the edge of breaking free. Wish I can fall apart, hide myself in cool undemanding rock, drift in dank underground air. But he pulls at me—the man with his eagerness and ardor, hot as the noonday sun—and the Law, dragging me like a chain.
Lalita vey. Itauri dia itauri. Eilendi dia eilendi.
Taurin’s child to Taurin’s child. His chosen to his chosen.
Render aid. Give comfort. My all to you.
My feet know the way through this underground warren, this tangle of tunnels, where every drip of water and every foot fall is magnified. The walls are of crumbling brick, the ground is covered in rubble, everything has fallen into disrepair. A rat squeaks by my foot and scuttles away into a hiding place. Slime smears the wall on my left.
And then we come to the gates, sharp with oil, shiny with newness.
The gates to the hospital above. Locked, of course.
I lean into the steel bars, fill the locks and shift the bolts. The gate falls open for him, the man who can help me.
I know him now. I remember. Kato. Taurin-forsaken, they say.
But then, now, so am I.
Into the cellars of the hospital. A place of concrete and steam and mold, full of hulking machinery. Instinct and memory commingle. I cringe from a table with great iron rivets at the sides, jump away from two mechanical arms with nozzles facing each other. Reddish lines streak tables and pool on the floor.
This is the place of blood and fire, screams and sharpness.
This is where they broke me for the first time.
Are you the one? Are you the one? Are you the one? The question batters my mind once again. I want to melt away but he won’t let me. His solid presence anchors me in the now, to this place.
The lock at the stairs is huge, rust-stained. I pause and stare at it, while something alien and cold twists my insides, demanding obedience. A memory rears its ugly head.
The worst is not here. The worst is on the other side.
After the arcane devices and torturous implements in the cellar, the hospital itself is a shock. It is white, a white so clean it hurts the eyes. White tiles span the corridors and slash halfway up the walls. The plaster above them is the same clinical color. Every angle is square, every corner sharp. There are no shadows, no slack, no give.
An inflexible mind designed this place. An inflexible, sterile mind.
I never came inside when Sera worked here, meeting her instead on the steps outside the front doors. More often than not she was late, fatigue heavy in her eyes. She invited me in, wanted to share her work with me, but I had no interest. The science of it all made me nervous.
Even back then I couldn’t pull away completely from Taurin’s teachings.
And then one night she’d started home too late—or so they said—and in the morning, there was nothing left of her but half-disintegrated clothes and goo, the distinguishing marks of a cloak attack.
Or so they’d said, in their hushed, horrified voices. Their sympathy had oozed over me like syrup, smothering my anger.
It was only outside, away from the solicitude of Sera’s co-workers, that my rage had quickened into action.
I’d hunted cloaks, then, in my vengeance. I should’ve been hunting doctors.
I should’ve come to the parties here. I should’ve toured the labs, like Sera wanted me to. If I’d paid more attention, Sera might not be suffering right now, the way Flutter is, caught between instinct and memory, trapped in a shifting body.
The place smells of disinfectant, a pungent stench of alcohol and ammonia. The fumes would make you dizzy, if you stood inhaling them too long.
Corridors slash off each other, like knife cuts. Stairs march up to upper floors. The lack of concealing places bothers me—no draperies, no furniture, no unlit nooks. White lights glare from boxy fixtures in the ceiling.
My shoes squeak on the polished floor, leaving faint smudges. I take them off. There are no potted plants to stash the incriminating evidence, so I carry them in my left hand while I pad after Flutter in my socks.
Oh, I look so threatening I’m sure, creeping about, holding my shoes so as not to smear the nice clean floors.
Flutter pauses, flattens herself against the wall. She spreads, but doesn’t turn to mist. Instead she goes blurry, grainy, as if the walls have no pores for her to slide through, as if they resist the movement of her atoms into them.
What other anti-mourning cloak measures do they have?
I copy her. A door in one of the branching corridors opens with a clang. Shoes squeak. Weary women’s voices float down the hall.
“Keeping us up so late. What’s the rush?”
“You know her. Everything’s always urgent.”
“Some of us actually have lives outside this place, you know.”
“I think she’s forgotten how…” The voices move away from us.
Flutter gestures and we step-rush for the stairway, which bends back above itself in yet another of those sharp angles.
At the end of that steep ascent is a door. A reinforced steel monstrosity that gleams with an oily film. Flutter shrivels into herself at the sight.
“What’s behind this?” I ask.
“The womb.” Her eyes go large and mesh-like again. In this light, I see oily rainbow colors in them. “Destruction. Reassembly. Rebirth. Where we are made.”
She remembers. This is promising. I put my shoes back on.
“Can you get through the door?”
She shakes her head. “It resists me.”
But not me.
Eagerness thrums in my veins. If Sera is behind that door…
A partial transformation will not hurt me. The spiders have had a day to rest and the marrow-deep weariness of my abused bones and stretched-string tension of my tissues is almost gone.
I feel alive, like I haven’t in years. I can do this.
The spiders have gone deep. I am too impatient to coax them out. Not that I was ever very good at persuading.
That had been Sera’s job.
“Attack me.”
“What?” Flutter stares.
“Attack me.” I prod her stick-thin arm, tweak a fold of her wings. I crouch, expecting her swoop.
She doesn’t move.
“Come on.” I balance on the balls of my feet. “Attack me. I’m a heretic, you know. Taurin’s a dumb-ass.”
Flutter looks confused.
“If he exists—which I doubt—he’s not good for much, is he? When was the last time he came around to see how we were getting on? Why does he let the golems attack us every hundred years from Tau Marai? Every time we spread, every time we settle new land or open a new mine, they come and trample us into the ground.
“And what’s this whole business about prophecy that no one can decipher?” It feels so good to be saying all this, these things I’d kept bottled up far too long. “How many lives lost, eh, because so many idiots followed a stinking goat-herder from Sau Veria? And how many dead because other morons followed another claimant? And all that could’ve been avoided if he’d maybe put a—I don’t know—a great big sign on the backside of the poor sod he’d really picked out.”
Flutter looks sad. “You’re angry. I don’t blame you. Taurin’s ways look messy to us, like tangled yarn, but to him they are clear, spread out like a tapestry.”
Why does she look at me with such understanding and sorrow? How dare she think she can understand? “Aren’t you eilendi? Aren’t you going to defend Taurin’s good name?”
“Taurin doesn’t need my defence.” She lays her fingers on my arm. I push her hand away. “We are all blasphemers one way or another. Even me. Even the holiest of the eilendi. You are just more honest.”
She won’t attack me? Fine. I don’t need it. Anger suffuses my veins and the spiders come scurrying out of bone and muscle, begin weaving their more dependable magic. I put my hand on the door, and my pores eagerly suck in its substance. Metal spreads up my arm and over my shoulder. I stop it just shy of my neck. Nerves turn to wires, pulled up my arm, plugged into my brain. I feel the paths of heat, the buzz of flow inside the walls as vibrations against my fingertips.
“Come,” I say, and my voice is as strong as my armored arm. The door, half eaten away, crumples in my hands. I leap into the chamber beyond. My right arm is too heavy, I almost pitch over. The spiders strengthen my other arm, my legs, my spine.
But I guard my organs. My brain, my heart. My lungs and my stomach. They are too fragile for this.
A large patch of heat—the only warmth in this cold upstairs warren—calls to me. I hurry into a hallway to my left. It dead-ends into a door with thick glass set in the top of it. The cavernous room beyond is filled with hexagonal cells from top to bottom and half-full of warm bodies.
“The Honeycomb,” says Flutter. “Where we sleep.” Her eyes flicker as they shift from cloak to human and back to cloak. I turn my body so I can watch her, and grip the door handle.
Flutter puts her hand on my armored arm. Her claws scrape and bite into the metal, but she does not seem to notice or care. “No. She’s not there.”
“Then where?”
“I think… I remember…” She glides away, down into another corridor. I pause by another glass window, this one huge and wide, looking into a long narrow room. Three giant cocoons hanging from the ceiling. Two are mottled black and brown, a third is translucent and pearly. Within it is a knotted-up body, a tangle of arms and legs and hair.
Stomach churning, I push away. I do not want to see, after all, this bizarre hatchery.
Flutter’s way is full of starts and stops. She zigzags down the corridors, edges across the walls of empty rooms, darts around corners and swoops through doorways. The edges of her pulsate in agitation, curling and clenching like puffs of smoke.
Where is everyone? It’s still and quiet and painfully neat. Nothing on the desk surfaces, not even dust. The few books I see are bound in dark green, lined up in precise rows on a shelf. Strange instruments hunch in darkened rooms. I flip open the lid of a trash can—discarded gloves, broken glass and needles are scattered at the bottom.
We go past banks of locked cabinetry—I know, I try the doors at regular intervals. I bump into a gurney pushed against the wall. The leather restraints attached to it take on a sinister meaning.
Finally, we step into a small round nook and up a spiral staircase. It winds up a turret, an architectural detail that is as out of place in the hospital as the warm-toned tiles underfoot and the ornate metal banister on one side.
But the door across the small landing is huge and metal, even bigger and stronger than the one below.
“In here.” Arms and wings wrapped around herself, Flutter looks even more insectile, her face elongated, her eyes faceted, her torso long, segmented. “This is where it all began.” She squeezes herself into the curve of the railing, not quite dissolving into shadow and stone.
I grin. My spiders hunger for metal; the more I take in, the more powerful I become. If there ever was a time to transform, it is now, and the consequences be damned to the nine hells.
I’m going to save Sera.
I place my hand on the slick surface, and pull.
I expect resistance, but the door gives in, easily, eagerly. A warning panic surges through me. Oh no.
Alien particles race through my body, tearing bindings as if they are made of paper. They shoot off bursts of energy, disrupt delicate systems. The metal around my fingers corrodes.
The door is laced with chromatic salts. Someone set a trap for me.
How had they known? Had they tortured my weaknesses out of Sera?
I wrench at my hand, but the door bubbles and reforms around it, magnetic and molecular bonds holding it fast.
I am dissolving into it even as it dissolves into me.
Then Flutter is there, her hands thin and cool on my wrist. She tugs at my frayed sleeve, asking permission. My armor slides away from her fingers, just above my elbow, showing elastic-looking skin underneath. Flutter slices a fingernail through, revealing whitish flesh. Blood so dark that it is almost black oozes out.
Like this, I am just as inhuman as she is. Worse, because I chose to do this to myself.
Flutter bends her head and touches her lips to the wound. The edges of her blur; her particles, flickering purple, blue and green, congregate to the area—and slip inside me. I gasp, not because it hurt, but because she can really do it—this thing that I can not fathom, this mingling of essences, this sharing of physical space. I feel her chase down the shark-hungry chromatic salts, quench them of their desires. When she would’ve withdrawn, I shake my head. “The door.”
She understands. I clench my teeth, and pull that door—the door she can’t get through—into me, and she cleanses my body of the poisons that pollute it. Armor plating spreads over my limbs and creeps up my neck. My vision changes, and now Flutter is an ever-changing cloud of lights, her substance turning to mist and smoke. My bones harden into something both stronger and springier. The cold pierce of metal pricks all through me.
And then the door yields and my attention is caught as it collapses into a heap of crumbly flakes.
A hot blast of wind scorches my cheeks, a gust as dry as if it had been kiln-baked and as gritty as if it had blown across a desert. I pull Flutter along with me and step across the threshold.
And look into another world.
Half the room is the same as what lies below, tiled in white, furnished in steel. I scarcely pay attention to the machinery that crowds against the curved walls because a veil—f
lickering at the edges and shimmering like a soap bubble—divides the room from floor to ceiling.
I recognize the chamber beyond the veil. The mosaic on the tiled floors. The cracked marble walls. The huge sunken bath that takes up one side of the room.
I had once lain in the bronze mold within it. Glass orbs glisten from the ceiling above. Bronze devices I have no names for crowd around the bath. These are the things that gave me my power—and my curse.
The reddish light of a setting sun floods in from the empty arched windows. They look out on to a narrow valley and on the other side of that valley, barely seen, are the huge bronze gates of the city of the golems.
Tau Marai.
I turn to Flutter. My words come out savage, with teeth. “Did you show them this, Flutter? Did you?”
She looks at me, shakes her head. She may be eilendi but even eilendi know little about the chamber on the other side of the veil, which opened only to Taurin’s Chosen. I’d been the first to enter it here in over a century, and the only one who’d been with me was Sera.
Oh, Sera. What did they do to you?
She’d not have given up the secret willingly.
Were they holding her on the other side, torturing more secrets out of her? She’d been the one to make the arcana work, who’d pored over obscure diagrams and instructions in ancient languages, who’d made it all happen.
They’d had her for three long years. They wouldn’t have her for a moment longer than I could help.
“Come on,” I growl to Flutter.
“Wait!” she calls, panicky, “Wait, I…” But I’m already stepping through the veil. It folds around me, clammy and slippery on my skin, lye and ashes on my lips. My vision wavers, as if I’d plunged into water. All sound is muted, I no longer hear Flutter.
“Meet me on the other side,” I call over my shoulder, not caring whether or not she comes.
I have my spiders and my armor and soon I will have Sera.
I remember.
I stare, stunned, as Kato Vorsok plunges through the portal. It clings around him like a second skin, embracing him in spider webbing and poison.