by David Edison
The Cicatrix’s laughter sounded like a broken engine. She was running on reserves, dying and in pain. “You’ve won so many battles,” she quavered. “Shattered so many thoughtful contingencies: banished my allies; defeated their host; murdered my daughter and, it seems, myself. You’ve rendered warheads useless and agitated vivisistors into sedition. So many weapons you’ve countered and disabled, but you have not yet met my weapon of choice.” She twisted her face in pain and pushed herself up on her arms, pivoting from her shattered pelvis. “And then, of course, I cannot stop myself from wondering: what will you do when the other engines begin to wake?”
The lost queen began to laugh but choked on engine oil and, unable to breathe, clawed at her throat with one hand. The pressure valves beneath her diaphragm had failed, and as her atrophied lungs struggled to compensate, the queen pointed a broken finger and tried to curse her progeny. Denied voice, her lips fell off in a cloud of steam as the silver mouthplate fell off of her face and hit the floor with a clatter, trailing blood where it had dislodged from her upper jaw, its vocalization mechanism squawking wet static. The quicksilver lips stopped moving at last and lay still as a broken mask.
The Cicatrix tried to cover her disfigured mouth and throat with her good hand without falling over again, but there was too much exposed flesh—her tongue dangled, impotent amidst a clutch of sparking wires, and the skin of her lower face and neck had been peeled back from her palate to her collarbone, curtains of bloody meat hanging loose from beneath her upper lip.
“Mother?” Lallowë’s hands shook—her face brimmed with conflicting emotions. “What do I do? Mama?” She looked up at Cooper, pleading.
Sesstri lurched to her feet with a groan, stepped forward, and reached into the exposed throat of the mortally wounded queen. She grabbed her mother’s windpipe and yanked, crushing it and withdrawing a fistful of dripping tubes. The queen’s eyes rolled back and she flopped to the ground, dead.
Lallowë looked at Sesstri with a helplessness that seemed full of questions.
“That”—Sesstri turned to shake her bloodied fist at her sister,—“is called mercy, bitch.” Then she stumbled into Asher’s arms and buried her face in his chest, hiding her tears in the blinding light of his body.
Lolly knelt by her mother’s head, huge in its deformity. She stroked the smooth black horns—recurved and massive—the sealed weapon ports and ventilation gills, the synthetic venom glands bulging beneath molded cheekbones. She ran her fingers through the cables behind the crown of horns, dark metal dreadlocks and plastic curls that had spilled down the dead queen’s back but now spread their tendrils across the golden floor, seeking with the last of their energies the warmth of life that had fled their mistress.
Sesstri and Asher made their way down the stairs, leaning on each other for support. Purity and Prama drifted away, talking civic politics. Cooper and Lallowë shared the empty, blood-spattered engine room with the corpse of the unnamed First Person that Prama had called the mother of all aesr.
But the divine battery was not the only dead thing in the room. Something stirred upon the corpse of the Cixatrix. The chassis shifted and began to reject her nonliving tissue, uncurling from the queen’s body and exposing the barbed teeth that had pressed the inorganic components to the flesh of the queen. Lallowë, startled, hovered her hands palms-down over her mother’s body, not knowing what to do. She felt a fleeting and horrifying urge to hold her mother’s body together.
Her husband watched from the side, silent.
The marchioness nodded to herself, humming. She stroked the helm; it did look like an enormous beetle’s carapace, horns curved and flared like a dung beetle— but from another angle it was the skull of a dragon, and from another a praetor’s helm, black and pronged instead of platinum and single-crested. There were vivisistors inside that she could repair, if she cared to. What kind of code had her mother written? She shuddered— it would be all that was left of her mother. That poetry . . . verses of faerie logic that would chase electrons through the circuits like moonlight on ash-wood, pale and perfect. The colors of leaf and twilight, emerald and lilac . . . like her beautiful jewelry.
She tugged at the helm and it slid off her mother’s head easily, eager to be free of the dead flesh. Beneath lay the sweat-streaked, pale face of a woman, pretty but not beautiful, with a nub of a nose and soft brown eyes. Short-cropped ginger hair covered her scalp in patches—she looked as if she had been ill for a long time. Lallowë closed her mother’s eyes and felt a moment of peace.
Lallowë’s eyes were huge, the past touching the present. Was this what victory felt like? She supposed that despite her healthy self-confidence, she hadn’t ever really won before. Just moved pieces across the board. Taking a bishop, marrying a knight, obliterating pawns. And now, a queen.
A deformed, mostly inorganic, nightmare queen with the head of a polyvinyl dung beetle for a helm. Well, it was more of a mask, she supposed, or maybe a headdress. Her mother had worn it as a crown. Yes, that was the appropriate point of view—the crown Lallowë had earned, whether it disgusted her or not. She cradled the smooth thing in her lap, stroking it with turquoise-tipped fingers.
In the corner of Lallowë’s vision an indicator began to pulse with the colors of pale sapphires and deep forest cover; leaf and twilight. She did not find them unpleasant colors, nor was she surprised by their appearance, though she thought perhaps . . . perhaps she ought to have been alarmed. Maybe she would use those colors in the redesign of the bower, her bower, when she returned to rule the Seven Silvers. When she razed the ruined land and restored the proper Court of Scars that she knew from childhood.
It is time to retreat into the Ruby Naught, she decided, and felt at her waist for the jewel box tucked away there.
She had business to attend to now and did not care to tarry. Lallowë felt herself seized by the desire for efficiency, for using her resources as surgically as possible. The Seven Silvers were hers. The Court of Scars was hers. She held up the crown—it was hers, this trophy, this magnificent and possibly functional war-helm. Hers. It should have been enough to make her cry.
Looking at the marchioness, Cooper saw her namesign shimmer. On the face of the green serpent a lilac eye winked in time to his own heartbeat. One-two, one-two, one-two.
He saw the way she clutched the Cicatrix’s headgear and felt the blood in his pinky finger begin to hum a playfully odd little tune, and Cooper knew. This was how it would begin, for Lallowë—how she would come to share her mother’s addiction. The shaman senses uncoiled in his chest, not to exert themselves but to get out of the way, to clear his thoughts of any influence so that Cooper could realize it was only his natural instinct, his lifetime of stories and fantasies and observations he had thought useless, that knew.
“Lallowë, don’t. Please.”
She met his gaze and shook her head. A corner of her small mouth twitched, half- smile, half- sneer. “Too late.” Lallowë lifted the crown upon which she had wasted so much effort; it no longer felt heavy in her hand. In her other hand she revealed a beveled box of red metal.
The marquis let out a long sigh. “I had hoped you didn’t have it, song of my song.” His voice was full of heartache. “But of course you are who you are. I do love you for that, you know.”
If the marchioness heard her husband it did not show. She held the box level with her face and locked eyes with Cooper. You are a part of this now, she thought to him. You are a part of me, and I of you. Who laughs loudest at that, furry man? Who predicted this? Not you, not me. The worlds surprise, Cooper. They surprise and surprise and surprise. Lallowë Thyu triggered something inside the box and with a sucking twist of space, she and the looted war-helm evaporated. Green stars glittered for a moment in the empty air, a snake’s head and searching tongue, a winking lilac eye.
EPILOGUE
The next day dawned red and smoggy, streaking the sky with heavy cloud cover and scenting the air strongly with ammonia. Through the tyranny
of the methane sunrise, a small procession followed a redheaded woman in an old purple robe—unbelievably old, if she cared to brag about it—down the nearly deserted Boulevard of Metal Mornings and around the Garrison of First Wakings. Garlands of marigolds appeared as she passed, draping themselves over gaslights and rain gutters, and cherry blossom petals fell at her feet. Where she walked, the madness cleared.
The gathering was small but solemn: masons walked with Winnowed, intermingling, their eyes hollow with fatigue and shame; a smattering of plumbics and canalworkers followed behind, regarding their masonic brothers with uncertainty; a cortège of the Dying followed too, bleached of color and tremulous—the Dying, who were once the lifeblood of the City Unspoken, but who had retreated of late to abandoned districts, huddling over trash-can fires and waiting for the absolution that would dissolve their selves into the nothingness from which they had, so long ago, been born. Behind and amidst the Dying walked a handful of ordinary citizens, curious and aware that the past twenty-four hours had forever changed their city—the Dome opened like a shy flower, the Undertow scattered, and True Death, the cash crop of the City Unspoken, broken like a clock. As if to confirm that truth, a group of nobles brought up the rear, steely-eyed and determined to make the proper impression as they returned to the city from which they had been sequestered for five long years.
All twenty-three noble families were represented, surrounded by a platinum ring of praetors, and every single member of House Kloo had turned out to support their daughter, sister, and cousin, Purity. Even NiNi came, alone, to represent her house, though she clung to the periphery and looked lost in a sea of black tulle. For once, her face remained uncovered, her hawkish nose and high forehead facing the day, whatever it brought. Also to the side walked Oxnard, unaccompanied, still wearing the red jacket and high boots of the admiralty.
At the head of the procession, Cooper followed just behind Alouette, and beside him Kaien and Purity held hands and kept their heads bowed. Cooper wished Asher or Sesstri were with him, and his eyes watered a little at the thought of Nixon, who was beyond them now.
The route they followed was old and unused, the highway merely one of dozens of abandoned thoroughfares in the City Unspoken. Beneath the curling crust of Amelia Heights, the highway that a crowd of citizens now followed was too old to sport a half-forgotten name or purpose; it was just a straight line of pylon-suspended concrete that followed itself down farther than anyone had a good reason to walk, and passed into Winnowed territory as well. Too bare to be of use even to thieves and their ilk, the way had been truly and thoroughly ignored until this morning.
Now, Alouette led a procession of citizens, guildsfolk, noble families, Winnowed, interlopers, and visiting powers down the thoroughfare that ran beneath the crust of the city to emerge on the far side of the rind of the world. They didn’t know it, but she led them to the neck of the beast who bore the city upon his back, where she would bury her mother at sea, in the Sea of Remembered Skies.
She looked wee and frail as a human, though Cooper knew better. It amused and confused him to see her in her mortal body, now. He didn’t like Alouette as much as he liked Chesmarul—whether or not she called herself the caretaker of the lost and abused. At least the route she took was marvelous—Alouette intended to impress, in her way: after the red morning light faded, scarlet witchlights appeared at her shoulders, sentinels of bloody light that soon spawned satellite lights that drifted behind her, floating overhead to light the way for those who followed.
For a long time they walked in the ruddy darkness, silent save for the sound of their feet against concrete, the dancing red sparks of Alouette’s witchlights the only light to see. When the pavement ended, they carried on across smooth, quarried granite. When the quarry- scraped granite gave way to natural rock, the procession did not falter.
A sound like breathing wound through the tunnel, which seemed odd until all of a sudden the tunnel opened into a cavern lit by a faraway source of light, and the cavern gave way to a great hall filled with birdsong and mist and a deep pounding reverberation that shook the bedrock on all sides. Still-distant light glimmered from across the enormous space, obscured by pillars nearly as thick as city blocks supporting an unseen ceiling that disappeared overhead, hidden by clouds of the mist that poured in from the far end of the hall. Nobody in the gathered assembly had ever seen a cavern so vast and so alive, not even the Winnowed— this was an ancient way, isolated by geography and subtle enchantments placed aeons ago. The vanishing distance consumed the walls, most of the ceiling, and the source of both the light and the bass-thumping noise, which lay at the far end of the habitat like a curtain of rainstorm on the horizon.
Birds spiraled and bats bobbed, betraying the size of the cavern-hall, and ferns sprouted in clusters poised to gather the light. Where visible, walls of natural rock joined with the crumbled, candlewax billionstone of the aesr from the post-Anvitine era; the First People had stopped here before they conquered the surface, carving their perches into rock walls that still scrolled with their ancient, oddly organic stone. This was their first bulwark, and Cooper saw their ghosts arriving on the world that would one day sprout the City Unspoken; they flew/swam through the Sea of Remembered Skies and founded a rookery here, to collect themselves and explore the forested world beyond.
As they progressed through the mile-long chamber, Cooper saw shafts of sunlight stream sideways through a haze of waterfall spray—the falls still lay half a mile or more distant but they must be massive to generate such seismic noise and volume of fog. What would it feel like to march out from beneath Niagara? He’d seen those falls and felt their pounding— this was more intense by far. Or was there a second sound, a titanic breath, that underlay the merely breathlike pounding of the water? The world was a beast, after all, Prama had revealed that much, and beasts must breathe.
And there she waited, before the wall of water, a column of winged light that outshone even the brilliant sunlight refracted in all directions by a billion-billion droplets of mist. She stood beside her father, who draped his restored incandescence in layers of cloth, and who clung to Sesstri, red-faced and pink-haired, tightly bandaged about her middle but standing with the support of her lover, the disgraced prince.
Alouette greeted Prama with a bow, which surprised everyone except for Prama; Asher’s heir had stepped into her role seamlessly, rising above her mortal subjects with the inhuman grace and remoteness that her father had long ago abandoned, unwilling or unable to remain detached from the worlds. Prince Prama Ramay showed no such weakness.
Together, Alouette and Prama turned and led the funeral procession through the thundering mist and out into the world.
After such a trek beneath the ground, stepping through the curtain of parted water into the light was a shock. The suns branded his eyes, and Cooper experienced the last leg of the trip as a blear of overexposed still frames: the masons and the Winnowed and the switchback trail down to the horn of the beast, where the water falls into the sea; a longboat with the head of a beluga, tied all ’round with red ribbons and floating in midair above a sheer drop off the edge of everything; Alouette in her purple gown and petals filling the air overhead and brass bowls pouring milk and saltwater into the spray; an isthmus neck leading out to a spur of rock—or was it bone, or chitin, or shell?—jutting out into the day, while the crowd clung to the steep gradient of the makeshift amphitheater afforded by the densely packed switchback route; no horizon, just cloud and sky, a hundred skies, above and below, a sea of them, drifting by.
Out past the improvised cairn altar where Alouette stood, the neck continued, swallowed by fog and miles of clouds, bearing the continental head and mouth of the beast who was the world. Cooper could only imagine what the world-beast looked like, and was too full of vertigo and awe to dare try and send his vision out there into the skyborne depths. Alouette came to a stop before the longboat, made of dark wood and floating in the air but tethered to the makeshift cairn of piled sto
nes and shale. Within the vessel lay the red-draped corpse of the nameless First Person who had powered the engine of Death since before the advent of humankind. She looked enormous here beneath the tidal infinities of the Sea of Remembered Skies, larger than she had seemed in the engine.
Prama stood on a rocky prominence surrounded by praetors in their platinum kit, a semicircle of metal that could almost be light. The prince herself was dimmed by the day, and the brightness of the suns would have revealed her hide had her praetors not covered her with layers of white linen, draping over her wing-fins and blowing in the gusty wind. Her hands and head were bare, and the people could not help from staring at her head, so similar in shape to the helms of her guardsmen. She made for a living reliquary, and to walk with her was to travel back in time by millions of years.
The man who approached Cooper seemed diminished by the environment, so essential was domesticity to Tam’s vitality. In the sun his face looked lovely rather than dodgy, his tawny hair and prominent nose seemed more fox-like than ever. He wore a trim gray suit and light brown tie, and he looked at Cooper expectantly.
“What next, Young Tam Lin?” Cooper asked, shading his face to look Tam in the eyes.
“I’m free, fuck you.” Tam’s tone was snappy but he smiled.
“Aren’t you worried Lallowë will come back for you?” Cooper couldn’t help but project his own fears—although Tam should share them, he thought.
“No. I’m not important enough.” He tossed his hair out of his eyes. “You are, though.”
“Yeah. I can still feel my finger inside her body, wherever that is. It’s beyond disgusting.”
Tam held up his own pinky and looked at it as if it were a talisman of doom. “Cooper, one way or another, she’s going to . . .”
“Yeah, I know. I’m dead meat.”
Tam made a face. “I’d suggest killing yourself to break the connection and kill the finger, but the Sixth Silver will keep your finger safe for her no matter what. I’m sorry.”