by David Edison
Sesstri ran her fingers through her hair, letting it fall over her face in a veil of pink. When she was a child, she had hid behind her hair like that, hoping to make herself invisible from her father and the cadre of armed men who always surrounded him. Like a peek- a-boo who never peeked, Sesstri would throw her pink hair over her face and pretend she was somewhere he could not see her. Somewhere safe, where a mother who still lived cared for Sesstri as a parent ought. She’d been told her mother died in childbirth, though she knew that to be a lie. Her father always blinked when he lied.
She didn’t see the shadow fall across her doorstep, nor see Asher wilt against the doorframe. She didn’t hear his ragged breath catch when he saw her hips and breasts silhouetted by the late morning sun. Asher stared at her out of the corner of his eye, half-afraid to be caught admiring the view and wholly afraid that the view might take herself away.
“Miss me?” he dared ask her.
Sesstri gave a start, shook her hair from her face, and glared in the direction of the voice she recognized so instantly and with such a rush of blood that it shamed her.
“A careful man would know better than to surprise me,” Sesstri answered as her eyes focused on the man who so bedeviled her, “unless he loves a knife fight.” She summoned all her frustration and assembled it into armor that protected her like a plated knight, but what she thought was: Yes, yes, oh yes.
“Your morning as dismal as mine?” Asher loped into the room and coiled himself into an armchair near Sesstri, swiping broken china off the leather onto the floor. He tried not to wince as his torn body relaxed at last, then reached up and took her hand; she let him.
Sesstri pushed away thoughts of pillows and big gray hands and lips that did more than repress smiles; that he made her want to smile was a sacrilege she allowed, but inadmissibly.
“Oh, it was plenty dismal.” Her gaze remained fixed on the view of the city through the window. Terraced hills and bell towers, wheeling flocks of birds, the twins of yellow fire that posed as today’s suns. She would not think about the heat of his hand holding her own, and she would not let him warm her.
“Tell me about it, please?” He stroked his long nose with a finger, a statue admiring its own profile.
Sesstri let out the breath she’d been holding. “One of the First People has been with me all along.”
A queer look passed over Asher’s face. “Oh?”
“Chesmarul, the red ribbon—you know of her?” He nodded and smiled. Smiled, of all things. “She exploded behind the great tree in Bonseki-sai and turned into my fucking landlady.” Sesstri sulked.
Asher absorbed the news with a kind of élan, and flashed a smile that disarmed her. “You mustn’t blame yourself, my thorny briar rose. Even the most brilliant of the Third People, which you are, can be hoodwinked by the least of the First People. And Chesmarul, she is not the least—she is one of the eldest.” He pulled her hand toward him, so gently, and moved his lips to touch the back of it. Not a kiss, just lips and skin; she could not hate that.
She did not hate it, but she withdrew her hand anyway. “She claims to have summoned Cooper, Asher.”
“Good—question answered. Sesstri.” Asher looked up at her through snowy lashes. “Listen to me. I am ancient and wise, bound to be right upon occasion, and I say not to punish yourself.”
“Horse guts.” She yielded to her desires and poured herself a finger of obsinto.
“Could this be a manifestation of guilt left over from your deception regarding Cooper’s navel?” Sesstri ignored him, and he chuckled under his breath.
Green liquor cooled and burned her throat. Better. But not another drop. When Sesstri set down her glass it was a gavel, and she heard the judgment. Her mouth formed a perfect O, and Asher found himself longing to match it with his own. “Braided tits of the Horse mother, I’ve ruined everything, haven’t I? I kept Cooper’s navel from you, I—I—How did I miss this, and how did I behave so perfectly wrongly?”
Asher steepled his fingers and hid behind them. “Because you are perfect, even in disgrace?”
“I lied to you about Cooper and then I accosted him at the Apostery and probably drove him into the arms of some Death Boy gigolo! No wonder the Death Boy kept attacking me, I interfered in a perfect little hunt. The fucking Undertow saw Cooper more clearly than I did!” She picked at the rattan arm of her chair. “Oh Asher, I am everything I promised myself that I was not.”
“Death Boy?” Asher sat up with a start, wincing at the wounds he’d ignored since La Jocondette. “What do you mean, Death Boy? You got attacked by a Death Boy too?”
But Sesstri no longer heard him. She’d retreated to memories of her stepmother, a simpering creature who reminded her strongly of Alouette. Always growing things, always nurturing something back to health, or into a better blossom. As a child, Sesstri had fantasized about what her real mother looked like, how she acted—surely she would be a vase of ice water to her stepmother’s carafe of warm milk; steel to her wool.
Sesstri’s real mother would be an inhuman queen of lace and blades, that was how Sesstri imagined her. The only idea she had of her mother was an impossible vision of a woman who’d equaled her father, and the only clue had been her father’s rare remembrance of the vanished wife who’d surprised him by embodying all he’d been taught a woman could not be: strong, cruel, tactically brilliant. It was this last quality that had inspired Sesstri, driven her to outdo her father’s battlefield successes in the scholastic arena. And how she had! The first woman to earn an Optimae degree in over three hundred years, and the youngest of any gender to do so by half a de cade. She’d left opponents as bereft of life on the debating floor as her father ever did in the theater of war. She’d been an unstoppable force, a scalpel performing surgery on her world until it fit like a glove.
And then she’d been raped to death in the high passes.
“Sesstri, are you listening to me? It’s important.” Asher poured a measure of green liquor into her glass and drained it himself. He began to pull at his shirt, tenderly. “Tell me about this Undertow business.”
In the passes, Sesstri had felt so close to the sky that the mountaintops seemed to scrape at the firmament like teeth. And there atop the world she had bled out like a stuck pig, unable to remove the polearm that impaled her gut or push away the corpse of the man who’d been foolish enough not to kill her quickly, and from behind. He’d earned his own death that day, atop the untrammeled mountains, raped to death himself by Sesstri’s dagger in his belly. In his manhood. She’d been able to do nothing else but stab at him, pinned and impaled as she’d been—just the one arm free, and only enough strength left in it to hack her murderer again and again and again until, at last, her first face stared unblinking into the heart of the sun.
When death had been simple, when it spelled the end of her everything, Sesstri’s goals had been simple as well: accomplish as much as possible before the lights went out.
Now she had two deaths under her belt and she felt more afraid of dying than she’d ever felt at home. Now she knew death was not the end, but it was an end—and here it would spell an end to her involvement with this city, this problem, this insufferable gray bastard. Now death meant moving on with nothing but her memory of unfinished business— leaving behind all of her work, her notes and journals, the prized primary sources she’d worked so hard to reach. It meant leaving behind all of that, and Asher.
She was scared to death to leave.
How her stepmother must be laughing, wherever she was, at the irony. Scared to die, scared to leave a man. Her lessons on being human had taken root at last. How could Sesstri bend and retain herself? And wasn’t that a convenient orthodoxy, to secure her identity in an alpine solitude that didn’t challenge or frighten her. Either way, I’m weak.
Asher groaned, and Sesstri pulled herself out of her ruminations to see him shrugging off his shirt. His body was covered in bruises, deep gunmetal clouds of clotted blood beneath his skin;
he winced and tried not to make any noise as he tugged away his clothing, but she could read the pain in his face. It hurt to watch.
Asher looked up at her with a half smile and held up a handful of rolled linen strips. Had he been saying something? “If you aren’t going to tell me what you’ve done, could you at least help me with these bandages?”
Then she noticed the older wounds on his torso and gasped despite herself.
“What happened to you?” She pushed the bandages away and inspected Asher’s scarred body.
“I . . . I fought, and then I did something, and it . . .” He hid a grimace behind his hands. The pattern of the wounds was so deliberate that Sesstri almost dismissed the scars as some kind of ugly tattoo; between each of his ribs on either side of his chest puckered a scar, like the javelin wounds she’d seen on tourney stallions—a round piercing hole, not torn or sliced, but punctured. And they were bleeding afresh. They lined his sides at regular intervals, one beneath each rib, and blood as white as fresh cream oozed from their mouths. White blood . . .
“Asher, who did this to you?” Sesstri surprised herself with the concern in her voice.
“I can’t tell you.” He looked down.
“Of course you can!” The words snapped out of her mouth like a whip, all reflex and no reflection. Then, a wonder—Sesstri Manfrix backed down from an unanswered question. “That is . . . if you . . .” She nodded. “I understand.”
I most certainly do not understand.
He gawped at her, so disarming in his sudden sincerity, bandage in his hand. “Huh. We must be in trouble.”
She bent to inspect the wounds. His skin even healed in grayscale; the scars were charcoal holes, with darker new skin covering them—but each and every one had been reopened, and today. The white blood surprised Sesstri, but men had undergone weirder modifications in the near-endless dance of lives. Of course they had.
“Do those hurt?” She pointed at the older, reopened wounds. They reminded her of the sockets of eyeless beggars, wimpled and hollow.
“Only when . . .” he began, but stopped himself. “Sometimes.”
She sat next to him on the sofa, not touching. Just close.
“I know what you feel . . .” Sesstri began, but Asher leveled her with a flat look and she trailed off, shaking her head. “That is, I know what those kind of injuries feel like. Piercing wounds, I mean.” She stalled, and swept her lap clean with her uninjured hand. “. . . I don’t know what I mean.”
He brushed his hair back from his forehead; dovecote wings hid a marble face. What he saw when he looked at her face was a mystery to Sesstri, and she felt a different kind of thrill at the prospect of learning what that might be. A thrill and a needle of fear—what could Asher read in her face that was not all cold angles and icicle stares? She’d never wanted to be that sort of person before.
“Then I’m sorry, if you do. You shouldn’t have to know some things.” He looked away, at his feet, at the horny old Victrola.
Sesstri found herself agreeing. “I suppose under normal circumstances I’d lecture you about the value of knowledge in the face of even the most painful reality, but on this point, Asher, I’m inclined to agree with you. Some lessons are best delayed as long as possible.” She put a hand on her belly, then took it away.
He nodded, afraid to smile. “I suppose that’s the closest you can come to saying the lesson shouldn’t be learned at all, isn’t it?”
She smiled. “I would never say that, Asher, not even if by some major miracle I happened to believe it.” She blinked at the lie, just like her father.
“. . . On principle,” he said.
“On principle.”
Outside the windows, locked in perpetual moonrise, the Dome glowered an angry green-gold, and flames that burned but did not consume licked the horizon. “I understand your militancy more than you might think.” He made it a suggestion, not an imposition. He danced around her amazing mind and shrunken heart, and it felt like flying.
The scream of shattering glass reverberated through the room, causing all three girls to look up as one and set aside their embroidery hoops. The manservant who’d tripped and dashed the lunch-laden tray against the wall blushed and disappeared, while a brigade of additional servants rushed in to rescue the parquet and wainscoting from the ravages of broken cups and spilled cherry liquor.
NoNo and NiNi Leibowitz opened and closed their eyes lazily, slow- blinking lizards in canary tulle and burgundy batik, respectively. NoNo palmed a lacey sunshade and NiNi wore a cockeyed hat that obscured half of her face from view, but despite the fact that the twins had come late to her breakfast tea, Bitzy had decided there wasn’t much to miss on that score. In fact, Bitzy had decided a number of things: firstly, that Purity Kloo had been allowed to exercise far too much free will than was appropriate for a young lady of her station, and secondly that an increase in the frequency of the murders in their little crusade against chaos would do them all a world of good and teach Purity to mind herself besides.
“Doesn’t anybody know where Purity ran off to?” Bitzy asked by way of ignoring the embarrassing clumsiness of the servants in the corner.
NoNo and NiNi shrugged. NiNi nibbled a coldcumbre sandwich triangle and observed: “I don’t think she runs.”
Bitzy inhaled. “That isn’t at all what I meant, NiNi dear.”
To her credit, NoNo managed to sound slightly less vapid. “Maybe she’s just . . . like . . . taking a nap.”
“We did not see Purity.” NiNi shook her head in accord. Bitzy thought her eyes might be closed, but she couldn’t quite see. Stupid sideways hats would be the next to go. “Especially we did not see Purity watching the sunrise in the Petite—”
NoNo jabbed her sister in the foot with the point of her sunshade. NiNi stopped speaking, trailing off in midsentence. The twins blinked as one.
“I’d like a nap.” NoNo rested her head on the grip of her folded sunshade. “Dance classes are so tiring.”
“Maybe she’s killing herself again?” NiNi tried to be helpful.
Bitzy dismissed the twins from her attention. She’d been ruminating over Purity since yesterday, when they’d dismembered the Eightsguard girl. It wasn’t that Bitzy felt guilty, exactly, but she couldn’t help feel— silly as it was even to suggest—somehow judged by Purity. It was nothing of any importance, of course; Bitzy felt confident that the dead girl’s name wouldn’t even come up at the next meal her family took with the Eightsguards. It wasn’t like they’d scattered Rawella’s remains or anything pernicious, the stupid thing was probably already alive again and hiding in her rooms, as she ought to. The lords of the Circle Unsung were fussily tightlipped about everything since the advent of their fun new secret toy, and had no time for the squabblings of girls, not even her own darling father.
But it wasn’t the lords or their secrets that occupied the thoughts of Bitzy Bratislaus as a meager morning filtered in through the thick glass section of Dome wall that hugged the parlor. It was the look she’d seen on Purity’s face as they chopped up the Eightsguard girl that Bitzy couldn’t get out of her head. It hadn’t been the bland half-interest of the Leibowitz twins, nor the lick of thrilled heat between the thighs that Bitzy herself felt when enforcing order. It wasn’t even something as louche as demented murderous glee, which could at least be excused given the restrictions of their confinement. No, Bitzy had seen something else in Purity’s eyes just for a moment, and she hadn’t liked it, not one little bit. She’d seen distaste.
Bitzy steeled herself against resentment. Purity had every right to be unamused by the enactment of justice—and reluctance would have been forgivable, perhaps even appropriate in the hopelessly outmoded way of thinking that Bitzy sometimes worried Purity embodied. But the fleeting expression of distaste she’d seen on Purity’s face discomfited her enormously. It seemed to suggest—however ridiculously—that Bitzy had engaged the girls in an activity that was less than the apex of fashion. That she might somehow have bee
n wrong about taste.
The idea was absurd. Style meant everything, and Bitzy epitomized style. This was established fact. Who else could popularize culottes beneath short skirts, or beanies colored according to each woman’s birthstone? Nobody at all, that’s who. And hell-bent for butchery was anyone who suggested—who even implied—otherwise. Bitzy Bratislaus was a pioneer, a savior of her people in these dark times of limited recreation.
Perhaps Purity had been thinking of her own servants and how difficult it was to remove bloodstains from chiffon. That would be just like Purity, wouldn’t it, to so wrongheadedly bother herself with the concerns of those who ought to remain beneath her notice? Yes, Bitzy felt sure it was only that. Mostly sure.
“What do you think of the mystery Killer?” NoNo asked the room.
“The what?” Bitzy pounced. A killer? She hadn’t heard anything about a mystery. “You mean us?”
“No, no,” said NoNo, “the mystery Killer. I overheard Mother and Lord Mothwood talking. Somebody’s been Killing people. Just recently someone Killed two of the lesser Tsengs and enough stableboys to leave a noticeable trace.”
“Oh please.” Bitzy waved the thought away. “Nobody’s committing real Murder anymore. ‘mystery Killer?’ Listen to yourselves. You sound like silly idiots.”
NoNo shrugged. NiNi shrugged. They looked at opposite ends of the salon.
Bitzy scrubbed her eyes. “The Circle isn’t Killing each other again, are they?” She would know about that if it were so. She hoped she would. “Well, they aren’t. Silly.”
NiNi shook her head. “This is different—there’s just one person, going around Killing people. Isn’t it awful? I love it.” NiNi would have been gloating if she’d seemed more than half awake.
“How in the worlds is that possible?” Bitzy asked. The Circle had discovered how to Kill, that news was old by now. But they’d always done so as a group; whatever their secret was, nobody dared wield the Weapon as a lone agent for fear of reprisal. At least, not until now. “The Circle Unsung would never allow that to happen, girls. Our fathers—”