by Unknown
“Why must Theodore die?” I cried, staggering through them. “How will I kill him? Why does she mean more than him?” They receded before me, and I reached the pile of stones and started to climb after the Clockwork King. “Who would I not kill for her?” I shouted. But there was no answer.
Then there was fresh air upon my face, and the warmthless light before dawn. And the sounds and smoke of war.
I had chased the Clockwork King to a rooftop garden, a thick mechanical forest where evenly-spaced metal trees shadowed iron sod. The King staggered away from me, and I jumped upon him. He fell, spread out beneath me. We rolled over together, and brass arms fell upon my back, crushing me up against him.
“Why does no-one see the truth of Olympia but me?” I demanded. Roughly I tore the hood from the mirror that was his head. “How can I touch her, break her, to make her feel me?” His arms, embracing me, ground my ribs against each other and I could not breathe. Bleeding, feverish, drooling, my fingers scrabbled over smooth glass. “Why does love mean pain?” I gasped, and shattered the mirrored head of the Clockwork King, which was after all only a close-fitting helmet, and underneath was a human skull.
The skull said: “Can a shadow weigh desire in a scale, or a serpent measure art by a cord?” And then the Clockwork King fell back, and did not move, done in by the fatal question he could no longer keep from asking. His dead arms bound me, and for a time I lay atop him, drifting in and out of wakefulness, gunfire and organ music surging in my ears. I thought it odd that the question he could not answer was not, after all, unanswerable; then it seemed to me that he could not answer the question not because he did not know the answer, but because he did not dare to provide it. To ask it was to answer it. To answer it was to admit his ruin. Thus I had killed him with a question.
Then I was being pulled free of the corpse of the Clockwork King. I screamed as my flesh was torn again. But I opened my eyes, and I saw the glory that preceded the dawning sun, and saw who it was that had freed me, and then knew I was mad, mad beyond hope of return. “You,” I said. “Here.”
“Yes,” said Olympia. Did I love her? Or did I love only the image of her in my head? At that moment those two things collapsed into one. “I followed the automata when they retreated from the city,” she said. “For I am being chased.”
Behind her, climbing up the stone stairway from the Palace of Wheels-Within-Wheels, came Theodore. He had a new sword in hand, twin to his old one, which I still, somehow, held. “Ernst,” he said. “Stand aside.”
“No,” I said. He stepped forward, left hand out.
“Let us be reasonable,” he began.
I stabbed him through the heart.
He blinked, and stared at his own blade projecting from his chest. He whirled away, wrenching the sword from my hand. “Ah,” he said. “The Clockwork King ... he said that I would perish here.” He fell to his knees, and then upon his side, and died looking no man in the eyes.
For a moment in the mechanical forest Olympia and I stood, silent. The powerful throb of the organ music made a strange harmony with the shelling and gunfire at the edge of the fair-ground. I took Olympia by the shoulders. “He is dead,” I said. “He was a thief and a killer and a seducer and maybe a rapist and a traitor, for all I know; but he was close enough to my soul as to be a part of me; and now he is dead.”
She said nothing. I stared at the light of dawn playing upon her face. Then I kissed her.
We fell to the ground, which was no longer metal but true forest land, and there were trees above us with birds singing to the accompaniment of the great organ, and fireworks exploding all around us, and the sun shining; and we were there together, and loved one another.
When I returned to myself it was past noon. Some noise had woken me from a sleep or daze. I sat up. I was still upon the roof of the palace, its metal soil, its artificial forest. What had happened? What had really happened, and what had been dementia? The Clockwork King was dead nearby. So was Theodore. But the metal of the place was unchanged. And Olympia was nowhere to be seen.
I looked over the edge of the palace. Living soldiers, wearing the colors of the Empress, were demolishing the city; having shelled it from a distance for some hours, they were now evidently brave enough to approach to complete its demolition. The automata, such as were intact, were everywhere immobile. I watched the soldiers awhile, feeling the pains of the past night; then I descended into the palace.
The Prodigy was asleep, curled up upon the seat of the organ. I woke him. He claimed he had played the organ all night, until he fell asleep; he thought that Kreisler had climbed into the pipes of the organ and never come out again. “He said something strange before he did, though,” the Prodigy told me. “He said, ‘Now I see the answer; I see the way by which the answer will come; sanity is, after all, madness, and our words are too small for the truth.’” I shook my head, and we left the palace.
Outside, the soldiers glanced at us, and went about their chores. We clearly were not the enemy. It was a grey day; high clouds had rolled in, and a thin rain fell.
I left the Prodigy with a colonel, to whom I gave instructions to see him carefully back to V—. I trudged through the city of the automata. Its every proud tower had been thrown down. Its jewels were scattered about in the mud underfoot; most of them quartz and pyrite.
I came to the gatehouse with the hall of mirrors. The hall was dim, lit by the dull light from outside, bereft of mystery. Only glittering shards upon the floor, throwing slivers of me back to myself, recalled what it had been.
Then I saw, in one corner, a single mirror untouched. Whole. And madness rushed full upon me again, and I put my hand upon the glass.
I said, “Can a shadow weigh desire in a scale, or a serpent measure art by a cord?”
And at what I saw then, I gasped aloud.
Copyright © 2009 by Matthew David Surridge
PODCAST STORY
Dragon's-Eyes
Margaret Ronald
“It’s an easy question.” Skald leaned across to adjust the boot. “All Michel wants to know is if you speak the language. Just a yes or no will do.”
The man strapped to the table spoke through clenched teeth. “Not that simple.”
“Really? That’s a shame. Well, I’m sure we can make it that simple.” He turned and pulled out a drawer, standing aside so the contents were visible.
There was a knock at the door. “Bronze Michel wants to see you,” someone said through it.
“Me or him?” Skald asked without looking up.
“You.”
“Be there in a minute.” He left the drawer open and gave the man a pat on the shoulder. “I’ll try not to take too long.”
The man on the table didn’t whimper—he’d got a while to go before that—but the thin keening sound came close to it. Skald closed the door and pulled off his hood, then began the long process of strapping his blades back on and jamming his feet into his boots. The last took longer than he liked; Skald couldn’t bend as easily as he had at thirty, and he couldn’t straighten up as quickly as he had at forty.
Bronze Michel was waiting down the hall, weighting down the edges of a map on a long table. “Six-Blade,” he said as Skald entered. “You took your time. Any luck?”
“Not yet. Why the interruption?”
“Close the door.” Skald did so, and Michel upended a bag onto the map, spilling red and gold stones across it. He picked up a few and let them fall through his fingers. “You know what these are?”
“If they’re still what they were when we were both razormen, they’re dragon’s-eyes.” He caught the flicker of annoyance across Michel’s face; the man didn’t care to be reminded of the days when he was little more than a young street tough with ambition and a gift for bringing others into his net. “They’re pretty, but useless. Can’t put them in jewelry, not unless you want the nobles crying upstart on you; can’t wear them for the same reason; can’t even sell them to a far-trader for more than a couple
of coppers.” Not that he hadn’t tried, but the traders hadn’t considered them valuable. Only city nobles did, and Skald had long since stopped caring about them. “Why? Planning on courting the old nobility?”
“Hm? No.” Michel stirred the heap of stones with a forefinger. They rattled together, light washing over their clear, smooth surfaces. “Do you know why they’re called that?”
Skald shrugged. “Never bothered. Probably same reason whores get called night blossoms.” He eyed Michel, marking the man’s quiet concentration. “This doesn’t have to do with your dragons, does it?”
“My dragons?” Bronze Michel shook his head and tapped the stones, making a sound like bird bones clacking. “No one’s seen a dragon within city limits for centuries. Don’t you listen to any of the stories?”
“Not when you listen for me.”
Michel let the joke pass. These days, when it came to dragons or anything else having to do with the old royals, he lacked a sense of humor. “Dragon’s-eyes must be more than just pretty stones with a pretty name, Skald. I’ve found out who brings them into the city. I want you to learn everything you can about where they come from.” He cleared away the dragon’s-eyes, tracing a path along the map. “You’ll have to leave for a bit, but I’ll put you in touch with a man in Wullfort.”
Skald bent over the map, examining the route Michel had indicated. “North. There’s not much up north—just knifegrass and yokels who think screwing a cow is the high point of the day. Nothing good comes out of the north.”
Michel smiled, but only briefly. “The old royals did.” Skald snorted. “And their dragons.”
“Yeah.” Skald scratched the back of his head with rusty fingernails. “That’s why you’re sending me. Because of this dragon obsession of yours.”
The smile returned. “I’m sending you because I trust you.”
Their eyes met across the jewel-strewn map, and Skald chuckled. “All right, then. Speaking of dragons, if I’m leaving tomorrow, I’ve got some work to finish tonight.”
It took him more time to unstrap the blades and pry off the boots, and by the time he was done, he found himself thinking less of dragons and more of a hot drink. Work couldn’t wait, though, and he pulled on the hood nonetheless.
The man on the table hadn’t moved, though he’d tried to. Tear-tracks, some still fresh, cut across the lines of his face. “Please,” he said. “I’ll tell you about the dragons. Just let me go.”
Skald glanced at the steel “beggar’s boot” clamped onto the man’s left foot, at the bulge of flesh above it and the vise that could only tighten further, then at the open drawer and all its tools in plain sight. He nodded. “All right. Tell me, then.”
He leaned down, and the man whispered in his ear. Skald straightened up with a sigh. “You know,” he said, “I believe you. I really do. But the trouble is, Bronze Michel won’t.” He took one of the little gleaming tools from the drawer and held it up to the light. “So I suggest you come up with a lie, and come up with it fast.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The master of the wagon train was a woman ten years his junior, though the years of traveling under the sun had burned her to look his age. Nona also had enough scars to shame a razorman, judging by the healing pink streak over one eye and the fine network of short white lines across her entire left cheek. She listened to his fake story, listened harder to the money he was willing to pay for passage, and finally nodded. “We lost our one of our drovers a few nights back, so you’re welcome to join us. But I’m surprised that you’d want to leave the city. Most razormen don’t leave even to be buried.”
Skald shrugged. “Live this long and you get tired of the city,” he lied.
“Or it gets tired of you. Well, then.” She turned toward the assembled wagons. “Keia!”
A girl scrambled over the backs of the wagons, bounding down from the last with the grace of an athlete. She gave the carved dragons over the city gates a hard look, as if she found their squat viciousness lacking. “Yes, mother?”
“This is Skald Six-Blade. He’ll be coming with us on the run to Wullfort.” She put her arm around the girl’s shoulders. The girl was a younger version of her mother; her hair was a shade darker, and her skin though tanned wasn’t yet scorched. “Six-Blade, this is Keia. Maybe you could give her a lesson or two on how fighting’s done in the city.”
“Nona,” Keia muttered with the intonation common to all exasperated children. “I know all that stuff already.”
Nona shook her head. “The Sisters won’t have taught you this. Take a good look, girl: most razormen don’t make it to thirty, and this man’s lasted twenty years more.”
Keia’s eyes widened at that. Skald nodded to Nona, flicked Reap and Sow from their sheaths, and cut a pattern in the air so fast it was visible only as afterimages of silver. He snapped the blades back, bowed to Keia, and presented her with the tuft of hair he’d cut from her head in the process.
It wasn’t really razorman work, he acknowledged even as Keia laughed and Nona grinned. It was the sort of trick that razormen did in the taverns before heading out to put their knives to real use, the kind of trick that Skald still practiced on his own. And practice or no, it had been a little slower than it ought.
But it had gotten him a place and, judging by the look in Keia’s eyes, a follower.
♦ ♦ ♦
They saw their first dragon three weeks out: a speck in the sky like a scrap of rust-colored silk caught by a purposeful wind. Spring had followed them as they plodded north, but the dragons didn’t seem to bother migrating just yet. “Or maybe they’re coming south,” Keia told Skald as they rode in the last wagon, Skald at the reins, Keia keeping him company.
“Dragons don’t come south,” Skald grunted. Not even the sideshows and grotesqueries that made it to the city every summer had a dragon; something about how quick they died in captivity. He’d seen pictures, and every arch in the city had its own heraldic dragon, but never one in the flesh.
Keia shrugged. “They did it once. Back when the royals moved down to the plains.” She pointed. “There’s another.”
“If you say so.” It wasn’t more than a red dot at this distance, crouched just at the edge of the plain, where the land began to dip into the hummocks and hills that would mark the rest of their trip till they reached Wullfort and the Basin above it. (How a basin could be above a city was something Skald hadn’t yet figured, but he decided he’d work it out in time.) Keia had described the route in detail as they trundled along it, in between asking for more stories of the city and showing off her own not inconsiderable knowledge.
“They won’t eat unskinned meat, you know,” Keia said. “That’s how people knew they weren’t just animals.” She stretched, then hopped off the wagon to walk alongside. One of the riders ahead whistled through his teeth and tossed back a waterskin; Keia caught it easily.
“I knew a man,” Skald said without thinking where the story would lead, “back in the city, who sold dragon-skinned leather, the scraps from their kills. If you looked gullible or just couldn’t hear so well and thought he was selling dragon-skin, he’d charge twice the price.”
“That’s stupid. The first time anyone told someone about their dragon-skin, they’d learn they’d been cheated.”
“Yeah, but he’d still have their money.” Skald’s smile faded: that man had made a few other claims, ones that had drawn attention. He’d be back at his stall by now, but walking with a stick and scared to death of Bronze Michel. The beggar’s boot was effective like that.
Keia was silent a moment, holding on to the side of the wagon as if it was her guide. “Nona sells dragon’s-eyes.”
Skald raised his eyebrows. “Really, now? I’d always wondered where those came from.”
“From Nona.” Keia spoke with easy confidence.
And that’s how they made it into the city. That was probably Michel’s first step; the rest was up to him. Skald flexed his fingers.
“Did yo
u know that none of the old royals could wear a crown unless it had dragon’s-eyes on it?” She apparently took his silence for skepticism. “It’s true. I looked it up at my old school.”
“School?” Dragon’s-eyes could wait, he decided. It wasn’t as if either of them would be leaving the wagon train soon.
“Nona left me with the Coldwell Sisters when I was born.” She said it proudly, as if she were claiming kinship to kings. “They have a school there, for all the lords’ bastards and priests’ sons. Their library’s three stories tall.”
“So I guess you learned everything there.”
Keia smiled a secret smile. “Not everything.”
From a different girl, he’d have taken that for a tease; from Keia, though, it seemed to hold another meaning. Skald gazed at her, thinking of the children he hadn’t had, the sisters he’d left. Would they have been as strange and alive as this girl?
Keia noticed his interest and cocked her head to the side, considering him as she’d considered the stone dragons on the city gates. “Why does my mother call you Six-Blade? You’ve only got four.”
Skald smiled. “Not quite.” He shifted the reins so that he could gesture freely. “This is Reap,” he said, touching the blade on his left forearm. “This is Sow. This—” left hip, “is Wail. And this—” right hip, “is Moan.” He reached behind his back and unshipped the small, cruelly curved blade that rested there. “And this last is Mercy.”