Weird Tales, Volume 352

by Ann VanderMeer

  Instead we attempt to ignore them, and so the beautiful Old Game falls apart. Its intricate web of hierarchy and territory and ritual and meaning withers and shreds. It becomes only a game—its rules arbitrary and its purposes obscure—it becomes a mere affectation. Which is to say, we no longer duel. We issue no challenges, we launch no stratagems. We are embarrassed even to insult each other. I, as it happens, affixed a string of sharp black beads in my hair before entering Dwarf John's territory. Suppose I had not? Suppose I had brazenly flouted his rules? In the old days he would have dropped on me, stinking of wildcat and booze and vomit, dirty knife probing . . . But perhaps today he might not bother. What's one more insult, when the refugees are an omnipresent affront?

  And what if tomorrow the dwarf came clambering up the crumbling rocks of the Scarp, among the watchtowers where I make my home, and flouted my rules—if he wore no brass or fur, approached at an irregular hour, even whistled? Or Feather, or Girodias, or any of my other friends and enemies? Would I or would I not? I am no longer sure.

  I have frequently feared Dwarf John. Sometimes I have thought I loved him. Occasionally we have worked together—we are both, in our ways, assassins, and though our methods are rarely compatible, I have always respected him. I have never before been embarrassed for him. But his grin was sheepish and he shifted awkwardly on his pillar, and scratched at his thick hairy throat. The refugee fellow smiled vaguely and waved. We pretended we could not see him. We conducted a brief unhappy conversation about the weather. I considered tearing the black beads from my hair and shouting some fine elegant challenge—I practice them in my rooms at night; who doesn't?—so that the dwarf and I might have it out. But how could we fight, under the mild nervous eyes of those refugee shopkeepers? (The shopkeep and his ginger-haired wife would hold each other and sigh. They would tell the children to stay indoors. They would shake their heads sadly.) So instead it's good day to you, Dwarf John, and good day, Horn, and I frankly don't see how either of us can be expected to do anything worthwhile with the rest of our day . . .

  They are fleeing some sort of crisis. Some unpleasantness. Something dismal. A catastrophe in distant parts. What could it be? There are rumors, but of course all our rumors are lies. My very good friend Moth, who I do not entirely understand, affects to listen to the refugees themselves, eavesdropping on their increasingly crowded public-houses with his brass listening-tube. Moth says: they say something about shadows, something about winter, and wolves, or guns, or trains, or gigantic and hideous machines.

  I am not heartless. I pity them in their plight. But why do they come here? None of their rituals make sense here, none of our rituals make sense with them watching. They make themselves and us ridiculous.

  Day by day their squat and colorless homes encroach on the ruins. At the foot of my Tower of Ivory Horn, every morning, one of them walks his dog. An insult? Not intentionally.

  I cannot bring myself to kill him.

  I try to ignore him. I try to ignore them all. But sometimes in the evenings on the trams as I hang from the side, the cold night roaring past, the rattle of iron wheels, the brush of insects and wet leaves and wind—sometimes they try to start up conversations. Honking voices! We are largely incomprehensible to each other.

  Though lately—much as I would prefer not to—I begin to discern scraps of sense in their drab babble. I believe they are asking about jobs, about the prices of houses, about what I do for a living. They sit with their arms neatly folded in their laps and smile weakly. We are hunters and stalkers and pacers; the new men are great sitters-down; this is an unbridgeable divide between worlds. They go back and forth from offices—they are constructing offices in our ruins. What do they do with all that paper? Do they understand their actions?

  If one demands silence, if one threatens them—draws a knife, say, or dangles a little fat man from the side of the rushing tram—a wretched confusion and misery falls across each pale anonymous face, and they babble of catastrophe. They attempt to explain and excuse themselves. They mime atrocities, gunshots, grave-digging, buildings falling, things burning and ash blowing away. Cravenly, they appeal to pity. They act out expressions of pleading and cruelty, the carrying of crying children at night from certain danger into unknown danger. Then they smile again, as if to say, see? Now we understand each other! But we do not.

  I am not unsympathetic—I never kill them. Sometimes I throw them from the tram, but only when it moves slowly, and only to watch them roll and spin and clatter downhill. They pull themselves up and dust off their torn clothes, their broken spectacles, their dented hats and battered briefcases, and sigh, as if they have not understood the joke at all.

  I am hardly unsympathetic. Anyone who knows me knows that I cry at the drop of a knife, that I am unusually gentle to birds, that I enjoy music, that I have fathered children here and elsewhere. But I do not understand why they come here. I do not follow the news very closely. I am not a political person. My job is . . .

  My vocation is: I am an assassin. My name is Horn.

  Last night, laughing, I remembered how clever cruel Morgan once invited us all to a party in her warrens, and how she plied somber Girodias with drink while her numerous bastard children crept into his tower and poisoned his ravens, leaving his territory eyeless and vulnerable to . . . I forget the point of Morgan's stratagem, precisely. But it was wonderful! A classic gambit in the Old Game! I ran out into the windy street calling do you remember the time . . . The blank face of my new neighbor shrank from me, nervous, embarrassed. I could not explain what I meant. He was building a fence, I think, he held a hammer. They do not understand me, and I refuse to understand them.

  gWhy don't they simply keep going? If wolves pursue them, or mobs, would it not be more beautiful to go ragged into the night? Starving and lost and fewer of them every sundown. Oh, Moth—they could change their names constantly and forget, so that only their enemies would remember who they were. Gunned down under the moon, Moth, one by one! Austere and perfect. Elegant and mathematical—precise persistent subtraction. Wouldn't that make more sense?”

  “You're overexcited, Horn. You know how you get.”

  “Explain it to me, Moth. Is there a flaw in my reasoning?”

  “I swear you think about them more than I do, Horn.”

  “You're complacent, Moth. You sleep late in the mornings. You are spineless, overly-flexible. You have always had a defective sense of fear.”

  In the past when we have fought it has always been inconclusive. Moth is perhaps faster than me, but he lacks a certain energy, a certain drive. It is unsatisfying to fight him—perhaps that is why he has cultivated the art of conversation, so that he has some alternative way of being entertaining. My hand strayed only briefly to my knife, and he only laughed. In the heat of that afternoon it was too much bother even to stand up. Besides, the pale men were making some discouraging and dismal noise in the street below.

  My very good friend Moth! He claims those rooftops. I was his guest that afternoon. We lay on the hot roof-tiles and drank wine; we threw the green bottles down and made the new men jump and sigh.

  Moth! He is extraordinarily tall, and thin, and his long face and furrowed brow quiver with curiosity, as if probing the air with delicate invisible antennae. He likes the moon, and the night, and dust. He weaves his robes out of scales of something unknown, something he found in the ruins, that shimmers violet, or green, or grey, or black. He rustles. He constructs machines out of brass. He lays claim to the rooftops around Venison Crescent. His rules concern light, and shadow, and electricity, and the number three, and of course moths—but he has always been a lazy, lazy player of the Old Game. Even before the new men came he was inclined to turn a blind eye to infractions and challenges, and I do not think he ever made a challenge himself. He left his territory unguarded, and was lax about his rules. He may be the most intelligent of us—I am no judge of intelligence. Generally he styles himself a thief, or a reclamation man—an explorer of ruins, a
digger-up of ancient and forgotten machines, a diviner of buried secrets. Occasionally he likes to think of himself as an astronomer. Astrologer? He cannot predict the future—“I would not want to. Everything always comes as a surprise. Why would I change that?” For a while he laid claim to Mondays, and to rain, but he never enforced either claim; I think he may have proposed those rules in a spirit of irony, of the purely aesthetic. He dreams of flight to a greater-than-ordinary degree. Like all of us he is very old indeed, and very beautiful.

  Recently, he has been studying the new men.

  He does this with a telescope—a golden and glittering device which he retrieved, he says, from the ruins of the Tower on Mira Street. It has dials and levers and lenses. He leans at daring angles from the rooftops and studies the men working below. “Hmm,” he says. “Aha!” The new men shift awkwardly under his glittering mechanical gaze. Sometimes they smile and wave; sometimes they try to wish him good morning or offer to sell him shoes or newspapers. . . “Aha!” If you ask what he's looking at he will confess that he is baffled.

  “Is there a solution to our problem, Moth?”

  “Who cares?” He shrugged. “What a boring thing to look for.”

  Well, then of course I lunged for him with my knife—the blade of which is made from the curving horn of a black stag beetle of extraordinary size and splendor, that thrives in our rain and heat and rotting timbers—and he parried smartly with the telescope, off which my blade carved possibly significant dials and levers.

  We both laughed.

  Then I did it again. But as my blade curved in inexorably towards his throat and we teetered together on the edge of the roof, I met the nervous eye of the refugee gentleman in the street below, the leader of the little work-crew, as he sighed in embarrassment and signaled his workers to put down their tools, quietly to leave the scene, our conduct having made it inhospitable to them . . .

  I saw what they were working on.

  In the street below the new men were constructing a new tram stop—painting a sign, driving a pole, erecting a kind of shelter out of glass and wood. They had wheelbarrows stacked with sleepers and rods and. . . In a sudden access of fear I asked, “Moth—how long has the tram run here? Is it ours or theirs?”

  Disentangling himself from my grip, Moth looked at me pityingly. “Oh, Horn. Do you really not remember?”

  The weeks go by. My very good friend Moth's investigations continue. With weightless footsteps, all-but-intangible fingers, he approaches the refugees and thieves their effects. “It helps,” he explains, “that their clothes are ill-fitting, their pockets capacious. They are not attempting to keep secrets from us. Their openness may be their most remarkable quality.” He retrieves wallets, spectacles, unfamiliar coins and tokens, pictures of frowning and uncomfortable children. He has quite a collection. He observes their reaction to their losses. Puzzled; mild; resigned. “They report the thefts to each other, Horn! They have erected some of their kind in authority over others; it has to do with badges and hats. A report is made and a series of shrugging motions ensue. There, as far as I can discern, the matter ends.”

  Lately he has begun talking to them.

  We do not approve. There is a general feeling among us—if one can talk of general feelings among such dedicated cultivators of individuality—that he may perhaps be going too far. This feeling is tentative and uncertain. We are never so vulgar as to speak it. But Morgan has let it be known through her manner of dress that Moth would be ill-advised to attend her functions, or enter her warrens. Dwarf John vomits drunkenly at the base of lampposts to signal his displeasure. Girodias lets his black birds circle angrily overhead. Feather sharpens her knives.

  I have watched him do it! He approaches them openly in the street. At first he frightened them. The women would recoil, clutch their children, shift from foot to foot. The men would go pale and nervous and gesture at their shop-fronts, or retreat into their offices.

  After a number of experiments Moth has found a manner that does not terrify them. They converse. “I begin to understand them, Horn.” I have seen him perform a certain limp and pointless ritual of hand-shaking, which puts them somewhat at ease, if those nervous little men can ever be said to be at ease. Moth practices laughing in the strained and ingratiating way that they laugh. He returns from his investigations laden with pies, and bananas, and hats, and soap, and white electrical kettles, and ugly little pieces of pewter statuary. “They are not unfriendly, Horn. Have a piece of pie!”

  Recently he captured one, etherized it, locked it in one of his towers. He performs observations and experiments. The noise it makes! He tells me: “She is asking for her children, Horn. A very large part of their conversation revolves around their children.”

  What catastrophe drove them here? Moth remains unsure. Yesterday he believed they were the survivors of plague—he said that they bear the marks of fear of sickness in their shapeless bodies, their discomfort in and disregard of their own flesh, their sexlessness, their obsessions with cleanliness, newness, their fear of dust and decay . . . Before that he spoke of floods, earthquake, unexpected and disastrous phases of the moon—indeed briefly he imagined they had descended from the moon, as evidence for which theory he offered, though I did not ask, first, their pallor, second, their relative scentlessness, third, the cold discoid glitter of their spectacles, and fourth, the silence with which they appear. Today he babbles excitedly of his theory that they are displaced not in space but in time—lost and accidental harbingers of futurity. “Can we doubt it, Horn? Look how much of our city already belongs to them.”

  All these theories may be true, or none of them. I am an assassin, not a scientist.

  “They are fragments of a past from which we thought we had escaped, Horn, descending on us like dust. Stagnant, we moved too slow, the past catches up, overruns us. Consider the solemn gravity they exert. We are the catastrophe they have been dreading.”

  Nor is Moth any kind of scientist, either, of course.

  He assures me that the female is safe to approach. It's not fear, I tell him, that causes me to hang nervously back in the shadows of his attic, far from the stinking cage, avoiding her tearful gaze—not fear, nor distaste, exactly, but some other emotion I cannot easily name.

  A job!

  Money in my pocket, blood on my knife!

  The Caliph of Taiga has contracted me to remove a troublesome rival, one Mr. Itzinoff, whose towers—three, like black ships' sails, bound by bridges and arcs— overlook Dunkirk Square, and contain a collection of scientific artifacts and anomalies that put even the Caliph's to shame, and therefore . . . the knife!

  How long has it been? Months, at least, since my last contract. It was becoming embarrassing. My neighbors—who are mostly new men, now, building their homes around me, moving when I'm not looking into the lower floors of my Tower, fixing up the stairs, cleaning away the wreckage, misplacing my trophies, filling the empty spaces with the bland smells of their cooking and the inane chatter of their radios! My neighbors wonder about me. They gossip. What do I do all day? I have begun to wonder myself. In the old days idleness became me, I slept like a predator, but lately I find it hard to fill the hours . . .

  Never mind. A job! The letter arrived by raven, in the most perfectly traditional manner. It is scented with rose, lemons, cyanide. The ink is the violet of fires at sunset. The Caliph's calligraphy has always been exquisite. And best of all the contract specifies that Moth is to assist me—that while I, in darkness, remove Mr. Itzinoff, Moth is to recover and restore to the light a number of the artifacts in his collection. An elegant balance!

  I have not spoken to Moth in weeks. At the urging of Morgan and Feather—on the one hand menacing, on the other seductive—I ceased communication. But this is a job. They can't begrudge me this brief contact. It would hardly be fair. How I have missed him!

  At the bus stop I waited among my neighbors—them in shabby grey suits, briefcases, umbrellas, on their way to their offices, and me
resplendent in snakeskin, leather, horn and silk, a number of knives and darts about my person. I think they were pleased to see me looking so well. The bus was late and in an access of high spirits I took to the rooftops instead—it has been too long!

  Oh, you should have been there!

  We entered by moonlight. Mr. Itzikoff's towers were a clawed hand reaching to steal the stars—mad stars! Dark streets below, bright stars above, everything in its place—none of the streetlights that the new men erect everywhere in my own streets, blotting out the stars, turning the night into a long dull afternoon. Dunkirk Square is, so far, free of their infestation. How wonderfully liberating!

  By moonlight, from the stars! We glided down from the peak of Valium Bridge, hanging side-by-side on an ancient contraption Moth had recently retrieved from one of his tombs somewhere, and we laughed together as the rust and silk of it shuddered in the cold and turbulent air and bolts clanged loose . . . Gliding down through night mists, and then in through arched windows and the crimson curtains, clattering in dust, upending wineglasses, candles, golden bowls of pomegranates and dates, terrifying the servant-boys! Slash, slash with the horn knife to the paintings—my calling card. Moth sighed, as he always does. Then him down the clockwise stair and me counter-clockwise, him in search of treasures, me in search of the throat's blood of Mr. Itzikoff himself. Golden sentries, their clockwork a-rattle, ruby eyes a-glitter, slow mechanical axes falling to mark my passage! Traps. Gas, blades, the rope. Mr. Itzikoff's guards in a fetching black-and-silver. Dogs so black and fierce they might be panthers—they might be bloody scraps slashed from the night herself. A clash of blades in the library—blood spattering the spines of blasphemous volumes! (I favor the horn knife; Mr. Itzikoff was a man for axes.) Tumbling laughing from a high window, the water below shimmering like steel. . .