by David Edison
The forces that had built this vivisistor predated them all, but any organism old and big enough to power a device the size of the Dome could be nothing but one of the First People.
As Cooper arrived with a noble girl and a blindingly bright female aesr, Lallowë marveled at the spray of light across the ornately textured walls of the chamber—circuitry etched into the inner surface of a golden ball as large in diameter as an opera hall, a wide rim of gold floor spanning its circumference, where they stood. After blinking, Lallowë saw that most of the engine chamber was empty space, defined by a golden dome above, top open to the daylight, and a circular pit below, slick with dark fluid that dripped down the far wall.
The aesr’s illuminated skin cast light across the curved walls, making the gold inscriptions beside her shine bright as a sun. A dark stain nearly three stories tall painted the full height of the far end of the engine chamber, a spray of the same slick filth that filled the central bowl. Rotting gore spilled down the wall and gathered in a pile, where some pieces of the body remained, each as big as a horse and glowing from within as cysts the size of human heads slowly released the last of their light.
Whatever had powered this engine had been destroyed by the opening, but had certainly been close to death anyway. If True Death was the byproduct of a machine, the engine’s loss of power would correlate to the inability of the Dying to Die, and thus to the svarning. She wondered if any of them even suspected the truth.
Lallowë saw Cooper notice her. She lifted the hand that had rested on Almondine’s forearm and licked the thumb.
“You owe me a finger,” he said.
Lallowë smiled, the collar of her sleeveless powder- green blouse stiff and high like a general’s. Almondine had eyes only for Sesstri, and did not see the scrap of drafting paper that Lallowë pressed against her wet thumb. Almondine clapped, and pulled on Lallowë’s elbow. “It’s her, Lolly! The one I told you about! It’s Sissy. Oh, Lolly, you get your new sibling after all.” She paused to see if Sesstri was listening, then cocked her head. “Pleasure to see you again, little sister.”
“You will die screaming on my knives.” Sesstri remained perfectly still.
“Tut-tut. Your older sister, Almondine, is right,” Lallowë said, raising Almondine’s hand in her own, while holding her thumb to Almondine’s wrist. “She tells me that Manfred Manfrix was Mother’s first human mate, and a failure—”
Cooper watched Prama become a streak of golden light—moving just like Asher, the same scissoring perfection of limb and flattened palm. Inside a heartbeat, she had cut off Lallowë and held each sister by the throat. Behind them pulsed a portal that must belong to the Cicatrix, a vulvic thing dripping acrylic paint in midnight hues—black and purples.
Prama shone like a furious golden axe, forged from sunlight. “You desecrate the engine of the ancients and the deathplace of a being so majestic that the likes of you do not deserve to know her identity. Once I have banished you and bound your undead scum for eternal torture, I will return her remains to the waters of our sea.”
“ Really?” Lallowë asked by way of an introduction, looking down at the being who held her. “I think you’ll find yourselves too busy begging for death to be returning any bodies to any waters. Don’t you agree, sister?”
Almondine nodded once, the crack of a pistol. “Just so.”
The sisters turned their eyes toward the sky, gazing up through the hole in the ceiling of the engine, where the storm of lich-lords descended. Streaks of black smoke spiraled down into the gold machine room, lich- lords that did not bother to resolve into their individual forms. They dove for Prama, swarming her in black clouds until she shrieked and clawed at her face. Her radiance was swallowed by darkness, which still poured down from above.
The sisters fell free. Lallowë and Almondine resumed their poses, armin-arm, walking no faster than two courtly ladies on an evening’s promenade.
As liches filled the room, Cooper curled his lip in a snarl and narrowed his eyes at Thyu.
The marchioness waved her fingertips in response, sending ghost fingers trilling up his spine. They were connected now, blood to blood and back again. Cooper knew with a sudden insight that if she were injured, he would feel it.
Oh yes, and feel it doubly. He heard Lallowë’s whisper inside his head as she held out her arm to show him the scar. The stump of Cooper’s little finger twitched—he felt its tip twitch below Lallowë’s bicep.
I know what you are and it is vile, Lolly. Cooper thought his accusation at her like a slap on the cheek, and was glad when she shook her head, glaring at him. At least the enhanced call quality worked both ways.
Purity gasped horribly—a lich wrapped its arms around her, and she sagged, turning pale. The lich wore huge sunglasses that did not quite contain the smolder of the yellow- green coals burning in place of its eyes, and a gold tennis bracelet. It chuckled wordlessly and pulled her away. Another landed beside Cooper with a grinding chuckle. A rusted claw found his shoulder and he, too, felt a numbing chill.
Only Sesstri remained standing, squared off against her sisters. She pulled Chesmarul’s book out of her satchel and began flipping through its pages with manic haste.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” she recited under her breath like a mantra. She hadn’t seen any use whatsoever in poor Ms. Messerschmidt’s Urban Weather Patterns; that is, until undead monsters clad in black weather descended into her midst.
She began to recite a passage on the legal rights to air space and breathing rights. “According to . . . according to princely decree, the building, breathing, and flying rights or . . . or any subset thereof . . . may be remanded by . . .” She stopped momentarily as Nixon flew into the engine chamber, red-faced and huffing from a thousand stairs. Sesstri almost smiled. When Asher followed a moment later, wounded and bleeding, Sesstri’s smile gleamed.
Almondine stepped out from behind her sister without pretext and stalked toward Sesstri with murder on her otherwise expressionless face. It wasn’t murder Cooper needed special senses to see, and Nixon saw it too, his eyes wide in alarm.
Almondine whipped out her hand and grabbed Sesstri by the throat, jerking the taller woman’s feet off the floor. She drew back her other arm and prepared to smash Sesstri’s skull with her fist. “I think it’s time to end you now, Sissy. I will wear your lover’s gray skin at my coronation, and rekindle the hearts of my Wild Hunters with the tale of the fall of the last aesr—his daughter’s skull will make a splendid crown. Faerie fire shall burn your corpses without consuming your bones, limning my victory trophies for a thousand-thousand years on the pyres of triumph.” She fixed Sesstri with a slow-burning smile. “And you, Sissy, will be forgotten entirely. Like your father forgot you, and our mother.”
Sesstri made a sound of choking despair, and scrabbled for her knives to no avail. Messerschmidt dropped to the floor.
“Hey Doll!” Nixon shouted, pelting toward the women and pulling out his own weapon—the knife he’d looted from the dying Charnel Girl— as he ran. “You leave my pink bird alone!”
Almondine kicked him away without even looking. Nixon shot off like a cannonball and didn’t slow until his body hit the wall, his stolen knife shattering against the etched gold circuits. He picked himself up slowly, his mouth gaping a gory hole from Almondine’s kick to his face. His pointed nose was broken and most of his front teeth were gone, blood dripping onto his belly. Nixon looked at the bloody bone chips scattered across the floor of the great machine, felt at his toothless mouth with a pudgy little hand, and his eyes went black. Leveling his gaze at the tidy monster in the hound’s-tooth coat, he charged.
“Nixon, stay back!” Cooper shouted. “You little idiot!”
But Nixon leapt at the deranged faerie with a roar. “Stick it, sister!” he screamed, tackling Almondine at her knees—she folded in half and fell backward as Nixon’s momentum carried them both over the edge, tumbling into the pit. As their bodies spun through the air he exulte
d, “Nobody kicks the new Nixon!”
They landed with a splat on the slope of the depression, Nixon rolling away from the lethal faerie on impact. Her eyes wide as a cow’s, Almondine scrabbled desperately at the side of the golden bowl, slick with oily blood, but was unable to gain any purchase. Her cherrywood fingernails splintered as she slid toward the drain, and she lost her cool at last, howling once in fury before being swallowed by the darkness.
“Ha!” the unboy cackled in triumph, flattening himself against the slippery side of the pit even as gravity pulled him toward the same black hole. The deadly fall would not end for hundreds of feet, maybe thousands, in the caverns below the city.
Because of his small size, Nixon slid more slowly but just as decidedly toward the drain at the bottom of the machine chamber. Cooper threw himself toward the edge of the pit, but Nixon was out of reach. He didn’t struggle, but instead grinned up at Cooper and Sesstri as his body tipped into the drain. “I did it! I’m a good guy!” He raised his hands to flash twin victory signs and was flown away.
15
In the field hospital we shared a lark: that birth seemed most likely to occur during an eclipse, death at dawn.
Sometimes both at once, and then a day—light or dark—but filled with the most sonorous music.
These days rape the worlds of a virgin contradiction and plant the seed of tomorrow’s blessed sorrows. On such mornings I peal the hymn that bled through the legs of the Western daughters and the pig-stuck organs of their war-dogged sons.
The poem of flesh repeats my lesson that each moment of dark and light is a miracle.
—Walt Whitman, Barge Through the River Brightly
Quiet claimed the air for a long minute after Nixon’s sacrifice. Then Lallowë stepped forward, peered down at the hole at the center of the pit, and bared her teeth.
“May you find a pleasant waking, little unboy, Thank you for clearing my competition from the board.” She lifted an arm and waved her fingers at Sesstri. “And a fine hello to you, baby sister. Welcome to the fucking family.”
Sesstri shuddered but offered no reply. Cooper shuddered too; he could feel Lallowë’s sick satisfaction through the blood bond. Spirits of salt and stone and water danced within them, and between them, and beyond.
Asher threw himself toward his besieged daughter but was intercepted by four shadows—in less than an instant, they had snared Asher in a frame of darkness, night and day boiling where they touched. A fifth lich with a shiny brown wig over its shoulder spread its polished fingerbones across Asher’s face. He howled, dying a little to feed the vain abomination. His eyes went dark and dry as a corpse, and he sagged in his captors’ grip. But his bone-dull skin began to bleach itself brighter, appearing almost to shine.
Across the room, Prama stood her own again a circle of five hissing lich-lords.
“As I was saying.” Sesstri sounded dangerous. She recited Messerschmidt from memory now, with a swift efficient voice that gave even Lallowë pause. “According to municipal statutes, the building, breathing, and flying rights or any subset thereof may be remanded by royal decree, resulting in immediate expulsion from the City Unspoken and its environs.”
Asher could decree nothing but his own death rattle at the hand of his lich captors.
Light rekindled beneath his gray skin as it healed—the grayness flickered like celluloid film, then bleached itself to silver and white before their eyes. If Cooper had stood beneath a hundred flashbulbs, he might shine so bright. Spears of light from bright polyps lined Asher’s ribs, and his ragged clothes disintegrated.
Naked, Asher’s humanity was dispelled: ropes of muscle, lanky joints, a thatch of darker gray hair surrounding his generative organs—these faded as the scars between his ribs glowed brighter and brighter, pushing cysts of new cells into the puckered wounds, and as the lights under his skin intensified, the reality of Asher’s heritage asserted itself. His patrician nose elongated into a regal crest that stretched down below his chin and all the way up past the crown of his skull, and his eyes—flickering still between red and blue and green—blurred together until he gazed out from a single conjoined orb, ensconced within the bony crest that flew up and backward over his skull.
He reached out with one massive white-boned hand and grabbed Ambassador Rousseau by the face, as she held him. He squeezed, and silver light shattered her skull. The rest of her fell away like ash and costumery.
His four captors released their grip and backed away, but it was too late. Asher flared his rekindled light, and spears of silver-white brilliance pierced the four, nullifying them.
His resis tance gave the undead swarming Prama pause, and she took the opportunity to flare her own golden light, repulsing the lot of them a short distance, cast out in a circle around her. Father and daughter faced each other and, after nodding, bowed their heads and spread their wing- fins. Light arced above each of them.
From across the room, Prama’s gold light and Asher’s white light merged into a bridge of light that illuminated everything. All shadows were consumed by light cast by the aesr or reflected from the mirrored sphere around them. All shadows—even those constructed and maintained by necromantic perversion.
For a moment, it seemed to Cooper that every lich within the engine was caught in the flash of a paparazzo’s camera. The next instant, their bones collapsed in a hail, ringing off the metal floor, the anti-light that glued them together—their actual medium of existence—was simply banished. Vaporized by pure light generated by two wounded, pissed off First People.
Then the bridge of light faltered, and winked out as Asher and Prama gasped, sagging, each merely radiant, rather than blindingly brilliant.
Cooper wanted to exult in triumph, but the Cicatrix’s portal was convulsing—first contracting, then pulsing wider than before. Slowly, something began to push through. Something with an elongated, black head— a horned ovoid shape he imagined to be slick with acid blood, tail a mile long, vile. Cooper’s ghost finger pulsed in triple-time: his own blood pounding through it; Lallowë’s heart beating strong as a boxer in her chest; and the song-to- song countermelody of the vivisistor to its siblings, clustered within the Cicatrix like intentional tumors: brainstem, wrist, heart, womb.
He sensed her considerable bulk and again marveled at how large she’d been able to grow, from the seed of a such a small woman. A subway train of black claws and ozone breath, with no light in her but that of her life- fueled LED tattoos. Cooper could hear the maddened pixies already— they screamed for death inside her vivisistors.
WinterWinterWinter! GiveUsWinteryDeath, GiveUsAirAndDark, WinteryDarkyDeath, PullThePinsFromOurHearts, Cooper-Omphale, AndBleedUsDeadDeadDead!
“What is she?” Cooper asked Lallowë out loud; she didn’t need to speak to answer. They were connected by blood and machine now, and he could have overheard her fright-dappled thoughts anyway, had it occurred to him.
She is my mother and my queen and my bane. She calls herself the Cicatrix, the mistress of scars, and she will crack this city like an egg when she arrives.
Then Lallowë Thyu turned on her heel and ran.
Sesstri knelt at the lip of the circular pit where once a god had been pinioned by the Lash and bled its life into the engine that allowed the mortals of the worlds to achieve everlasting oblivion. An engine to end wakings.
She covered her face in her hands, not at all sure whether she wept for Nixon or because of the lies Almondine had told before she died. They were lies, she knew that much. They had to be. It was true that Sesstri had never known her mother, but she knew the woman had been a fierce soldier, a foreigner, and the only woman her father had ever acknowledged as his equal.
She can’t be, just can’t. Gods, her belly hurt.
Asher took Sesstri by the wrists and lifted her to her feet. On the far side, Prama hugged her knees and rocked herself back and forth, barely glowing at all.
“She’s coming,” Cooper pleaded to anyone who cared to listen. Only P
urity seemed to hear.
“Can’t you stop it?” she asked Cooper, scrubbing her face to warm it.
A sucking sound drew Cooper’s eyes to the portal, which tore itself open inch by inch, acrylic blood chasing the etched channels as it dripped onto the floor. Cooper considered the branching, convergent tattoo of circuitry painted in purples and blues and blacks.
Within the portal, a shape began to resolve itself. Like a sketch, the lines that described her face appeared before the face itself resolved in the portal: the eyes of a woman gazing out from beneath a pronged helm, a pair of silver lips adorning the plate where her jaw should be.
Sesstri gasped in pain and nearly fell to the floor, sagging in Asher’s arms. She clutched her belly.
“What it is?” Asher asked with a voice full of concern.
“Womb magic,” Cooper answered. “I’ve been inside the Cicatrix, and she’s not quite woman anymore. I think that she’s drawing upon her daughters’ bellies to birth herself.” He grimaced. “I’m sorry, Sesstri, but it’s true.”
Blood to blood and back again. He could feel the blood they shared, the women and his coin machine.
The Cicatrix emerged from the pulsing ellipse headfirst, wailing with the effort as her arms slithered out of the canal, ceramic insulator discs mounted atop her shoulders popping audibly; she yawned, gasping for air as she struggled to push her shoulders into the world. Her perfect silver lips stretched wide and wider—and then they dropped down as her mouth plate slid past her throat, and she inhaled through a curtain of jawless meat.
Her horned helm scraped the edges of the portal, which sprayed dark fluids and electrical discharge into the air. One hand remained bare, white skin tweeded with overlapping scars—on the other she wore a wicked gauntlet with slits at the fingertips for her obsidian nails.
The polymerized faerie queen screamed when she saw that Almondine was gone.
Cooper clapped his hands over his ears, Sesstri and Purity following suit as the Cicatrix decanted herself into the world. Her amplified lamentation blared on for too long, her rage and loss venting from artificial lungs that snaked down through her thorax.