by David Edison
“If you’re worried about the rest of your money . . . don’t be.” The woman handed Nixon a little wooden box, and he peeked beneath the lid. It brimmed with nickeldimes, easily twice as much as he’d been promised.
“He came!” The words were out of Nixon’s mouth before he could stop himself. He held the box behind his back and retreated a step toward the exit; his curiosity evaporated in the face of cash.
A Cheshire grin lit the barefoot woman’s face, brightening even the abandoned building that decayed around them. She did a little dance and held her hand out in an invitation, one eye shining in the torchlight, the other dark. Nixon hesitated, then tentatively put his small brown hand in hers. Her skin felt feverish-hot and cold as the vacuum of space, and for half a moment her bright eye blinded him as the darkness in the other yawned vertiginously.
She pulled the length of red ribbon from her ankle and tied it around Nixon’s thumb. “When you see him again, I want you to do me one little itty-bitty favor. I want you to give him this. He’ll be new and untrusting, but I want you to do it anyway. Use that disarming smile of yours.” Dropping his hand, the being shaped like a redhead stood back and admired the boy as she might admire a puppy in a shop. “Will you do that for me?”
Nixon wasn’t listening, which was nothing new. Then he snapped himself out of it and nodded with an earnest grin even though he didn’t follow her logic—any newcomer should be untrusting, and what would he want with ribbons?
“You’re a spicy one, aren’t you?” she asked with a trill of a laugh. Nixon didn’t know what she meant by that, either, so he looked at his feet. When he raised his eyes, he was alone in the hallway with a lantern and a ribbon and a boxful of dinner.
The Apostery was as vast inside as it was outside. For a long minute the only thing Cooper could process was the hugeness of the space: a vaulted cathedral ceiling soaring higher than any he could recall seeing before; massive support columns the girth of small houses rising into the darkness above, etched with names and signs, inlaid with silver and steel; smoke-stained wheels of candelabra dangling from chains as thick as his torso; and the light—the light that came streaming from all angles ahead, slanted on an angle that caught in the air, veiling the enormity of the space in serene curtains of dust and smoke that wafted through the air, unlike the barometric fumes that billowed up the well of the courtyard. Any bishop would give his favorite catamite for a place of worship like this. But this, Cooper began to understand, was no cathedral—rather a mausoleum. A grave for buried gods and the stories they told.
He and Marvin walked toward the light, their footsteps the only discernable sound in the enormous space. As they grew nearer, he saw past the columns to the source of the light, and that was the real glory. As the Apostery’s courtyard was a vault of doorways, here was a court of windows—stained glass portraits ringed about the walls and rising in layers to the ceiling. It appeared that the mountain was hollow. Each picture captured the likeness of some being—gods, it could only be—of every sort imaginable and more. A blue woman with severed breasts and eyes like sapphires glared down from a throne of ice; a man with stag’s horns crouched half-hidden behind a mask of leaves; a gray sword, point down, with garnet eyes staring impassively from the quillon. Panes of gold glass as tall as sequoias stretched upward beyond sight. On and on the windows shone, each more artfully worked than the next, and each was lit from behind as if by perfect afternoon sunlight, although it was eve ning already, they were far underground and, in any case, the sun could not possibly be in so many places at once. The light filled the air now, shading its smoke- strata a hundred colors.
“Apostery.” Cooper repeated the name like an invocation. “Apostatic? You said? Like an apostle?”
Marvin shook his head. “Like an apostate. I told you, these people have nothing left to believe.” Marvin indicated the visitors who sat with their own thoughts or strolled from window to window. “Atheism is the traditional faith of the City Unspoken. When your own persistence disproves the truth of every religion you’ve ever encountered, churches lose their punch. Hence the Apostery—the Apostatic Cemetery, where we mourn our lost gods, whether they were real or not.”
Marvin steered them to an alcove off to the side, beneath a clerestory where a small group of people milled about. They joined the others and Cooper smelled the familiar scent of a campfire. He craned his neck and saw the reason for the gathering.
An old woman sat on a broken column, warming her toes over a fire tended by those gathered around her. The crowd bore many faces, and Marvin whispered to Cooper that he might even recognize some; they hovered near the fire pit—there were eyes faceted like gemstones, antennae and feelers and protuberances aplenty; jawless tongue-flapping faces; viridian and scarlet and mauve faces; fey-touched and bedeviled faces.
“The usual stuff, if you get around,” Marvin explained, nodding at the more unusual-looking people. “Which, of course, you will. Eventually.”
One feature every face shared was a certain flavor of anticipation, a kind of lonely hunger. And patience. Patience, because many of them had heard the old woman tell her stories before and knew it would bring them a measure of peace; those who had not heard the story had traveled far and long to hear it, which was why the faces of this gathering were stranger than those Cooper remembered seeing in the city above, and although they might not know that it was this particular story for which they had come, they had all learned patience along the way and gained the knack of sensing important when it was near.
Are these the Dying, then? They seemed nothing like the crazed man who’d assailed him earlier on the streets of the Guiselaine.
Only a hooded woman at the other end of the gathering seemed impatient. She tapped a pencil against a pad of paper, insistently, and pursed her lips. Pursed lips were all of her face that Cooper could see, obscured as she was by others, but he wished she’d stop tapping that pencil.
The old woman looked something of a scoundrel. Something about her seemed different than the others, as diverse as they were— a smile that lived in her eyes, a kind mischief crouched in her wrinkled mouth. Her sparse white hair braided with beads and bolts and bottle-caps, she smiled at the pencil-tapper. Cooper imagined that she would draw this one out, just because she could.
Eventually, after much tapping of the pencil, the old woman gave a conciliatory nod and began speaking. Her voice was strong and clear, not at all what he’d expected.
“Sataswarhi, hear me; be my midwife in the birthing of these words.”
Marvin leaned in close to Cooper and whispered, “She is Dorcas, an elder of the Winnowed, a tribe that live beneath the city. They’re rarely seen aboveground, but they send elders to the Apostery to tell a version of this story from time to time. It’s never even remotely the same.” Cooper heard the words and drunkenly processed something about an underground tribe and stories of debunked deities, but all he could focus on was Marvin’s clove- scented breath hot against his neck. He wished it would move closer.
The elder Winnowed continued:
“Sataswarhi, heed me; I call you up from the depths beneath the crust of the worlds.”
The hooded woman had stopped tapping her pencil and was hunched over her pad, scribbling. Cooper’s head spun.
“Sataswarhi, help me; there is more weight in this story than my voice can carry without your touch upon my work.” For a moment the old woman hesitated, looking up at the towering windows as if they were old friends; she smiled at her stained glass family. Then she explained herself:
“Storytelling is my contribution to the Great Work in which we are all instruments. This is a story our people tell about the origin of our city, not a tale of gods and goddesses. It is not a real story, but it carries some truth. Perhaps.
“Sataswarhi. Clear Star of the First People, the origin and namesake of the celestial river that flows from above down through every land, from the most distant dim heaven through every isolated cosmos until it spills, he
re, beneath our feet. Far below the source of the river lies its mouth, where the waters empty into the void beyond creation. Here.” The old woman, Dorcas, pounded her perch with a shriveled fist.
“Here did a tribe of the First People build a city. They named it, as it has been named and renamed ever since, again and again—until, like the snake that swallows its own tail, there was nothing left to hold a name. Today it is simply a city, and we call it as we like; we curse it or praise it according to our mood, but we know better than to ask its name. It is sometimes easier to live with a thing when you do not know its name, especially if you do know its nature.
“However, this is not a story of the nature of the City Unspoken as it sprawls and oozes today. This is not a story of our time, the time of the Third People, we who comprise what the shortsighted call history.” A careful flick of the eyes to the woman with the note pad. Would the note- taker know that the tale was only one version among many, crumbs scattered for the faithless flock? “Nor is it a story of the Second People, whose crime was so great that nothing remains of them, as everyone knows, neither bones nor stones nor names. This is a story of the First People, the bright and dark ones who were born in the crucible of creation, who are the direct children of the Mother and the Father, born of Their destruction. They who are the children of the dawn.
“We only ever had two Gods, and They murdered Themselves to give us life, and it was terrible. A thing to shatter galaxies, if there had been matter or gravity then. When the storm of shadow and light had passed into mere turbulence, when the worlds first coalesced from the divine fallout of the Apostatic Union, then did the First People open their eyes. They rose from the dust and glitter of the worlds, or they gasped their first breaths in the ether between universes, that starless stuff which is empty yet always full. Wherever they stirred, the First People shaped the worlds around them. Some were great, and pulled the fabric of existence behind them like a heavy cape as they moved; it is true that some few of these still persist today in one form or another, disguised at the edges of our lives as gods or demons or half-whispered nothings that caress our hearts in the darkness. Many of the First People were not great, however, but lived much as we do, which is to say they depended upon one another. Community. They came together for shelter and solace, for survival, and so they laid down the foundations for everything.
“They built the first cities.”
Marvin elbowed Cooper. This is the good part, so listen up. Cooper might have wondered why Marvin’s voice in his head was clearer than before, or how he knew to think at Cooper rather than whisper, but Cooper’s attention was so finely divided between following the story and trying to resist the further-intoxicating scent of his new guide that these arguably more important considerations were, for the moment, beyond him. He thought he might need another drink soon.
“Now of the great ones, there were many who found no interest in their minor siblings, and those who took interest often did so for less than generous reasons. The smaller children of the dawn could be fed upon, or manipulated and amassed into armies of soldiers or servants, or simply toyed with for the amusement of their more powerful kin. Still, there were a handful who were both great and kind, and it is to these— where they have endured—that the most lasting monuments, mythologies, and blood-memories are dedicated. There is Chesmarul, the red thread, who is called first-among-the-lost, who others claim was the first daughter of the Mother and Father and witnessed Their destruction with her own new-wrought, tear- stung eyes. There is the Watcher at NightTide, who does not condescend to speak his own name but bequeaths knowledge to those with the mind to seek it and the fortitude to withstand it. Another is his father, Avvverith, inscriber of the first triangle and all that sprang from it— all things which come in threes, including architecture, which is idea written in three dimensions.
“This is not a story about Chesmarul, although we suspect she is always with us, after her fashion. Neither is it a story of the Watcher, even though it is his nature to observe all things. Avvverith Sum-of- Square gifted the lesser First People with the tools they used to build their cities, but has ever since been absent, so this cannot be his story.
“Instead we turn to Sataswarhi, the Clear Star, who made her home atop the ceiling of the heavens where she could look down upon all the worlds, all the baby universes exploding and expanding in their own pockets of space. She is said to be the source of all art, the inspiration behind inspiration. Not a muse as some consider the notion, not a passive beauty that turns men into dreamers—Sataswarhi is the active catalyst that turns dreamers into doers, poets into bards, wonderers into wanderers. From her home at the apex of creation a river flows, it is said, that touches upon every world in every little universe at least once. How it winds and where it turns are unknown quantities, and the legend tells us that in these days of the Third People, the river Sataswarhi flows still but is buried beneath aeons of rock and ruin.
“Of one thing we are certain, both then and now, that the river Sataswarhi begins at the highest point and ends at the lowest, the nadir, that land which sits like a drain at the bottom of creation, where all things must eventually find themselves before they pass out of existence and into oblivion. It was at this sacred but troubled place that the First People built the original incarnation of our city, fashioning a series of great gates encircling each other, a maze of concentricity crafted of diamond and gold, something bright to raise the spirits of the Dying as they made their pilgrimage. Here the First People built a fortress around a threshold, beyond which lay True Death.
“Now, listen closely; this is important. Although if you are here, you must know it already. It bears repeating.”
Now. Marvin thought fiercely. Magic voices sound louder when you’re a little fucked up, Cooper noted.
“There are many deaths, some larger than others. We are born only once but die many times. Each death is followed by an awakening on a distant world, where one lives again until another death comes to ferry the spirit across the void toward the next step of one’s own journey. This is life; this is what it means to live. We are born, and we live. We find ourselves and lose one another only to be reunited somewhere most unlikely, for although the worlds are finite they are of nearly infinite variety— some are cold and lifeless; some are bright but blind to the teeming others which surround them; many are rich in magic or invention, or both.
“There is only one common destination shared by everything that is born, and that is the City of the Gates, which we inhabit today like squatters in an abandoned mansion—eventually, all things that are must come to this place so that they can attain iriit and cease to be. It is the cloaca of the metaverse, the Pit, the great drain, the Exit.”
“Iriit?” Cooper whispered, but Marvin shushed him. Cooper tried something new—he flexed a muscle in his head and thought, somehow, loudly: What is that?
An older word for True Death. Marvin thought back. What makes this city famous. For the first time, Cooper became conscious of the fact that he did not hear any fear in any Marvin’s thoughts. What made Marvin different?
“You may believe the river Sataswarhi is the blood of the Father- god, or the spirit of the Mother- goddess; you may believe it is only a metaphor for the processes of life and death; you may even doubt its existence entirely, and choose to believe that it is a myth cultivated to aggrandize the City Unspoken and its cash crop, True Death. My people, who live beneath the city where the old waters still flow, share these opinions and more besides, even though it is the river—well, a river—that sustains our troglodyte lives.
“And while the Winnowed venerate diversity of belief and nonbelief, living far beneath the streets of the city has given us an unusual education regarding its long-forgotten beginning. We make our beds beside the cornerstones of the founders, architecture long ago buried but still recognizable as the handiwork of the group of First People who built here—not the scattered poseurs of this era who masquerade as deities, or ply thei
r petty schemes, or find refuge in distant worlds— but a people who lived as we do.
“We recognize the authority of no gods, but we approach worship in the reverence with which we see the footprints of the founders of the city. What stone survives tells us only enough about them to appreciate the depth of our own ignorance. They named their tribe ‘aesr,’ and appeared as brilliant-skinned people whose flesh was made of white light; they had only one eye, or perhaps four; proud crests topped their scintillating heads that might have been ornamentation or part of their anatomy; their limbs were arms and wings, and they tended to a grove at the heart of their city-maze that, I believe, was itself the remains of a primeval forest that covered the land during an even earlier age.”
Cooper tried to picture the creature the Winnowed woman had described. What would he say to such a thing?
“The First People of the city—the aesr—had no king, but were governed by a prince; this much alone seems to have survived although the rest of their lives have been overwritten a thousand thousand times by the palimpsest feet that have walked the streets of this city throughout its history.
“What became of our founders remains one of the city’s greatest mysteries. If the scale of time were less vast, we might know their fate—did they vanish or perish, did they file through the Last Gate? Did they Die at once or did they slowly become extinct? Did they travel elsewhere? What we can say for sure is this: they are gone, save one. He who ruled this place, the monster of light who locked up the nobility inside the Dome, and then fled.
“All that is left aboveground, tangibly, of the greatest of the cities of the First People now sits within a Dome half as big as the sky itself, the seat of our prince, last of his kind, who until recently maintained his lonely vigil over oblivion, as his kind have done since before we acquired memory. This is why we must have faith in the face of recent events: it is the prince’s charge to protect True Death, for it is essential to the cycle of life on all worlds. What is born must die. What is here today must be gone tomorrow, or the next morrow, or the next. Like the river Sataswarhi, our lives must eventually empty into nothingness to create room for the waters that rush behind us. Otherwise comes the svarning.”