by David Edison
“Hey, buddy, give me my shirt.” Nixon pawed at Cooper’s side. “What’s your shirt say, anyway? What’s a Danzig?”
Then, “Shit. You gotta navel, kid. What gives?” Nixon fixed Cooper with a doubtful eye, and Cooper pushed him away.
“Huh?” Cooper’s eyes were wide. “Of course I have a navel. Everybody has a navel.”
Nixon pointed at his own bare belly. There was no navel there, just smooth skin. “Jesus. Nobody has a navel, moron.” Cooper’s eyes grew even wider, saucers of shock in his round face. “Excuse me? Nobody has a fucking what?”
Asher held up his hands. “Okay, okay. Listen, Cooper, as it turns out, you didn’t exactly die.”
Before he could vomit, Sesstri stepped in. “It’s my fault. I saw it when I strip-searched you. I just . . . didn’t . . .” She wilted.
Cooper blinked rapidly. “You saw what, exactly?”
“Your navel. It’s just another scar, Cooper. And scars disappear when you die.”
“I don’t understand.” Cooper didn’t. “Why are you telling me this now?”
Sesstri skirted that question. “When your body fails, you move on. Your spirit clothes itself in its own reflection—the flesh and blood and good denim that you remember. You awake in a body that is your own, but new. The only way to tell, really, is this.” She prodded his belly and then shrugged artfully. “You only get one belly button. So you cannot have passed over. You are still on your first waking life. You are simply too young to be anything more than you seem.”
“I still don’t understand.”
Asher took a turn. “Plenty of people have navels. Anyone born here, in the city, and they’re on their first life— in their first body. Because you only get a navel by being born—you weren’t born here, you merely reincarnated here. You had no placenta, no umbilicus to feed you. You awoke, whole and new and dead.” He pointed to Nixon. “This boy has no navel because he’s died at least once already, that’s how he got here. Neither does Sesstri, and, I thought, neither did you.”
“So . . . so. I’m not dead? I’m not dead!” Cooper cheered, then realized that not-dying changed his circumstances very little. “Why am I here? How am I here?”
“I would very much like to know.” Sesstri glared at Cooper as if he knew the answer and refused to share. He glared right back, taking the opportunity to examine Sesstri more closely: tall, thin and coldly beautiful, her light brown eyes flashed with a surgical intelligence. Sesstri wore a high- necked dress of wrapped yellow silk, its stiff collar only emphasizing the length of her amber neck. Like so much here, she was breathtaking and frightening at the same time. Nixon and Sesstri had taken one look at each other and, by wordless accord, ignored each other entirely. The unboy retreated to the doorstep, listening from outside while appearing to doze.
Asher took the opportunity to needle the angry woman. “Witness, Cooper, this irradiant creature who assaults us: Sesstri Manfrix—scholar, tyrant, beauty queen.” He finished his drink.
“Cooper,” Sesstri pronounced, and it sounded like an accusation. She poked him again. “Cooper. Not a magical adept, not a Coffinstepper or other professional corpse, no advanced technology, nothing. So what are you? Why are you here?” He shrugged. “Tell me!” she commanded, her words trailing the faintest red thread of panic. WhatBringsYouHere? Her thoughts scratched a rhythm in his head. WhatRises?
“I don’t know,” Cooper said, his voice beginning to crack. This was too much. He wanted to cry. He wanted to shoot them both in the face with a fat .45.
Asher stood and put his hand on his hip. His red-rimmed eyes were kind.
“Cooper,” he said, pressing one big gray hand against Cooper’s shoulder. “You will be fine. I promise it. You will be more than fine.” And then, “I’m sorry I abandoned you and left you for dead.”
And for the first time Cooper really saw Asher: maggot skin, bloodless lips, beauty in a body bag. He was sex and dissolution and strength in a ropey slouch.
“Something is wrong with the world,” Asher rasped, and his voice was thick with a sorrow deeper and wider than Cooper would ever have guessed from his casual front. That face was a mask hiding a whole underground ocean of sorrows.
“We need worthier drinks for this part of the conversation.” Asher stalked into the kitchen. “And by worthier, I, of course, mean stronger.” He returned with a squat bottle of dusty glass in one hand, balancing three ice-filled tumblers in the other. Into each he poured a measure of acid-green liquid. “This is obsinto,” he announced. “It makes everything better.” With a little two-step flourish, he passed Cooper a drink that smelled of anise and mothballs.
“Something is wrong with all worlds,” Sesstri corrected, still musing over Asher’s pronouncement. “And nobody seems to care. We don’t know what to do, or what will happen.” With an expression of supreme relief, Sesstri closed her eyes and drained her glass in one quick motion. Then she looked at Cooper and smiled. A peregrine falcon smile, fierce but just as much a mask as Asher’s. She was sad, too, Cooper realized, and desperate as well. They were each desperate and sad, and for some reason Cooper himself was a disappointment that increased the measure of both. He asked why.
They exchanged a long glance. A loaded glance, and there was more than business and world-worry in it.
“We thought you were . . .” Asher hesitated. “You won’t understand.”
“Tell me!” Cooper commanded.
“He’ll think we’re crazy,” Asher cautioned Sesstri, who kept silent, occupied by her thoughts. WeAreWeAreWeAre.
“I already do.”
She sighed and threw up her hands in defeat. “Hardly a surprise,” she said flatly, then leaned in to Cooper with intensity. “Do you know what a shaman does?”
“We thought you were a shaman,” Asher said, rolling his eyes out of sheer helplessness. “Or an adept. A mage, a mystic. Something to help us.”
“We were looking for someone,” Sesstri corrected. “Instead we found you.”
“What do you mean, shaman?” he asked, ignoring her newest insult.
“Shaman: a core-world, practically proto-cultural totemic, whose power is usually marked by, among other things, a journey of ascent—or descent—into the lives beyond life. A guide, a protector, a seer. Primitive from a certain vantage, perhaps remedial but, under certain circumstances, quite effective. One who walks between worlds and communes with spirits.” She clicked her tongue, looking him up and down. “But you don’t look proto-cultural.”
Cooper bared his teeth.
“He looks feral enough to me,” Asher said blandly.
Sesstri shook her head and her hair rippled. Dawn silk dancing. “Look at his clothes. He’s wearing denim, Asher, not home-tanned leathers.” She leaned over Cooper, peering closely and scratching at the seam of his jeans with a lacquered nail. “I woke up in a bath towel—this is merely part of the process. As I observed earlier, the stitching is clearly mechanical and the construction and branding imply a large commercial presence. Maybe massive. Industry.” She leaned in close, her burl-wood eyes flashing. Sesstri’s intellect shone from those eyes, self-evident and intimidating. “Do the words Starsung Underwine mean anything to you?”
Cooper shook his head no.
“What about Drambassel Fivemalt?”
No again. Sesstri pouted.
It dawned on Cooper that she was listing brand names, though he didn’t know why.
“Mercedes-Benz?” she asked hopefully.
Of course. She was trying to place him. She could do that?
Cooper nodded with enthusiasm, more pleased to have been correct in his assumption than to give the woman what she wanted. His battered mind was adjusting after all.
Sesstri snapped her fingers and rounded on Asher. “This one is no shaman!” she pronounced. “I told you so. I know of his world.”
“You do?” Asher asked with a screwy face.
“So do you, you just aren’t aware you know it—it’s one of the big
players. Real shamans don’t exist in postindustrial, magic-dead societies. Coreworld shamans are shadows, and their magical adepts are simply practitioners of self-delusion. It’s all drugs and drumming.”
“So what am I?” Cooper interrupted. They both looked at him like they’d forgotten he could speak.
“An erratum, I guess,” Asher muttered, averting his gaze down into his tumbler.
“I haven’t the slightest idea what you are, stranger, or why you’re here,” Sesstri said with finality. “That alone should terrify you.”
Cooper looked down into his own glass—they were all avoiding eye contact now—and swirled the grass-colored pastis to enjoy the familiar sound of ice cubes clinking. He drained it and observed that he wasn’t terrified at all. Embroiled in a plot beyond his understanding, something that stole him from his bed as he slept and dropped him here, among these improbable strangers in this impossible city—Cooper should have been horrified; he should have been a quivering mass of tears and snot. But he wasn’t horrified, not anymore. By some trick of fate or magic or inner strength, Cooper found himself merely annoyed. And careful.
“I guess I find that kind of rewarding,” he said, looking at Sesstri. She didn’t shrink from their locked gaze, and neither did he. “It may be self- defeating, it may even be suicidal, but right now? Right now I think, Sesstri, that stumping you is a beautiful thing.”
After that, she did not speak to him for quite a while.
Sleep called to Cooper like a siren. Sesstri and Asher circled each other for the better part of an hour, sniping and ignoring Cooper, who was happy to be ignored. He poured mothballs down his throat and got drunk for the second time that day, while stars circled overhead. Still, a tension had been broken. Somehow it felt as if the three of them were bound together now, in their loneliness and confusion. Cooper wondered if they were . . . it felt like they might almost be friends. And that was the least sane thing he’d observed all day.
Companions, then, if friends was too strong a word. Coconspirators. Mutually fucked. Outside, Nixon napped on the threshold stone, his head against the door. Fucked seemed to be a hot commodity in the City Unspoken.
Sesstri’s falcon gaze found him again. She’d been drinking heavily too, though it didn’t show, and she seemed to have made up her mind about something. With careful little steps she sat down next to him. Quick, like a raptor.
“This city is nameless,” she confided, leaning toward Cooper. “You know by now that it is one of a very few places in the whole of everywhere that True Death is possible—maybe even the first such place. Maybe the last. Beings come here from every corner of the metaverse to Die. It was once beautiful, so long ago that no one living remembers, but is now ruined.”
“How did I get here?” Cooper felt his belly beneath his shirt. She and Asher shared a guilty look.
“We don’t know.” Asher lifted up his arms. “There are powers that can intervene. Things that call themselves gods, but we’ve no evidence of that.”
Asher lounged like a dancer in the window, gray ropes of muscle in repose while fire filled the horizon. Again Cooper saw the towers there, north and west of the Dome’s moonlight; skyscrapers of steel and glass stood among more fantastic spires, fluted marble, pitted limestone. Some were ablaze, their tops lit like candles although they never fell. Something about towers that burned but stood both reminded Cooper of home and made him mourn his city.
And again, when he looked at the towers, he heard crying. Screaming and crying.
“What you said about false gods,” he asked softly. “What does that mean, really?”
Sesstri braced her hands on her knees. “It is crucial that you listen to me and understand what I’m telling you: worship gods at your own peril. There are beings beyond the scope of your understanding, yes. There are the First People, who came before us; they are powers that may be kind, or foul, or capricious, and many would have you believe that they are gods. But just because a mind is older and wiser and even greater than yours does not make it divine. This is a secret that the vast majority of sentient beings seem incapable of apprehending. There are mighty spirits, entities, forces that clothe themselves in the trappings of the infinite, but if there exists an all-pervading omniscience—a truly divine light—I have seen no sign of it.” She hesitated, tapping a finger slowly against her plum lips. “And I have looked.” AndLookedAndLooked.
Asher slumped against the window frame, kissing the frost off his glass. “If anyone could find evidence of the divine,” he slurred, “it would be Miss Manfrix.” He stared blankly out the window, following Cooper’s gaze. “She’s very . . . thorough.”
“You’re still bitter I lied to you.” Sesstri said a bit more gently than Cooper had come to expect.
Asher made a rude noise. “Not at all, my lovely. I’m bitter because you won’t go to bed with me.”
“How common a reaction,” she said absently, though Cooper could have tightrope-walked across the tension. “I thought your breeding was better than that.”
“Breeding!” Asher brayed, still facing the windowpane. “Breeding? Bells, woman, breeding is just a fancy way of saying a man is well-trained enough to wipe down and pull up his pants before his wife walks in and sees the tailor’s daughter down on her knees, with her lips open and her hair all mussed and sexed-like, in that tight little stomacher and that scandalous cleavage erupting all over the place, looking so plump and willing and, well, kind of juicy. . . .” He sighed, collecting himself. “That’s breeding.”
“You’re drunk,” she answered. “Go to bed.” YourBed MyBed.
He ignored her and turned to Cooper with a conspiratorial wink. “There are two things every man who sees Sesstri Manfrix knows straight away. The first is that she is the most beautiful woman he will ever see. The second is that he has no chance whatsoever to make babies with her.” He giggled drunkenly into his glass, then shrugged to himself and burped.
Sesstri seemed unfazed. In fact, she nodded. A miniscule nod, like she knew he was right but was uninterested in her own beauty, even bored by it.
“So why were you looking for this shaman guy?” Cooper asked the room, eager to change the subject.
Asher drew himself upright, suddenly very sober. “Before all this began,” he said, his varicolored eyes locked with Cooper’s, “I had trained myself never to remember my dreams. Now I am plagued by them, and they are full of the restless Dying.” Cooper nodded. “The release they seek here . . . it has become more difficult for them to attain. The passage of pilgrims through the city has been stymied, and our streets fill with those who have lived past their due. This . . . this is more than a problem of overpopulation. Without True Death, the metaverse itself grinds to a halt, like gears without oil. There is a . . . sickness, I suppose, and as it spreads it will affect everyone. So I tried to find someone, anyone, to help us, and I failed, and here we are.”
Cooper nodded. “The svarning. That guy who came after us in the Guiselaine, that’s what he said. And the old minnow at the applestory, she said it too.”
“Winnowed. Apostery.” Sesstri spoke slowly but deliberately, “Yes. Well . . . Well. I see everyone knows about the svarning, and not a clue what to do about it or even when it will erupt, as plagues do.” She looked away. “In any case, the prince has been rather absent these last few years. Someone has to look after the city.”
The confusion must have been clear upon Cooper’s face, because Sesstri clarified immediately. “In theory, the city is governed by the prince, though individual precincts are administered by the families of the Circle Unsung, the ruling council of nobility. But some time ago the prince shut them all away inside the Dome, his capitol. Again, no one knows why. He has chosen to abandon his responsibilities, perhaps . . .” Her voice trailed off. She sat staring into her glass.
Asher was quiet for a moment, then shook his head as if clearing his thoughts. He smiled.
“This has been quite an eve ning,” he said jovially. “We�
�ll sleep now, and seek answers in the morning. We may not be able to heal the universe, but maybe we can find some help for our new friend, Cooper the erratum.”
Cooper’s head was spinning by this point, looped on insanity and bitter liquor. He knocked his tumbler down on the table—hard—and it echoed like the pounding of a gavel.
A yelp from outside broke the silence.
Glass shattered and Sesstri screamed. The shadows of men appeared at the windows, then climbed into the room, and Asher leapt to action; he became a whirl of smoke that streamed to a bay window and brought down two men in brown leather smocks, their heads smashing together with a satisfying crunch.
Cooper sat up in alarm but found himself paralyzed. There wasn’t time to be frightened, but for all his determination to wrap his head around the events of the day, his death and its subsequent repeal, the tale of the city and the worlds and lives upon lives, Cooper had no instinct for dealing with violence.
Sesstri and Asher had no such limitations. Asher continued to fell men in a blur of gray skin and twirling rags, while Sesstri had knives in each hand and stood like a pink and yellow- silk valkyrie with her back against the stairs, etching a sphere of safety into the air around herself with the flurry of her blades. One of her assailants fell back, clutching his guts as they slipped out of a sudden gash. Were those kitchen knives or daggers? Was she prepared to eviscerate men at a moment’s notice?
Cooper found the good sense to jump behind the sofa in which he’d been sitting and tried to hide, but in doing so realized that he’d exhausted his combat training. Asher’s right, he thought, I really am helpless. But I can flag down a mean cab.
More men streamed in, and Asher became a rush of doves beating wings against a storm, his hands and elbows and feet his only weapons, pale blades of bone and skin that danced violent and dangerous at the head of the sudden incursion. Blood flew from the faces of the men who swarmed him. They were pulling themselves through other windows now, and someone kicked down the door with a smash.