“Not with me. Can I borrow yours?”
An shook ans head, and that sleek, straight hair brushed along the embroidered silk of ans sleeveless robe. “I don’t need one.”
Elir licked her bottom lip to feel the threads of force dancing around Irsu, and when ans gaze flicked down to watch, she realized a non-designer might think it was a different sort of habit. But when Irsu kept ans gaze on her mouth, she also realized she didn’t care why an thought she’d done it, because it was clear an liked it.
She took a deep breath. “I need that tea, please.” She plucked a small square of cheese off the tray. The sweetness was complicated by essence of roses. A good restorative.
“What is the alert for?” Irsu asked.
“An old spider mine was tripped last night, arming a whole web of them between Chimera and Ribbonwork. Everything around is on the god’s interdiction.”
Disgust crawled over Irsu’s beautiful features. “It is these wars that make the small kings small.”
“When you are the small king of Rivermouth, will you stop them?”
“If I survive to ascend.”
An would, Elir thought, because ans mother was not long for life.
* * *
They walked in the labyrinthine pearl garden in the residential section of the fortress. Near the center, four towers were connected with flaring balconies like petals spiraling up the stem of a vibrant suncup. The pearl garden wove around the bottom levels, looping over itself in puzzled layers, tucking under to make surprise rooms or corners that flared with shade bushes. The paths were laid with crushed marble, gleaming white and iridescent blue-purple, which is what gave the garden its name. Irsu led Elir to a tear-shaped grotto with a thin lattice roof laced with blossoming drop vines—the flowers hung in near-perfect spheres of white and deep pink. They bobbed happily in the artificial breeze of force-fans.
“I can relax here,” Irsu said, sinking onto the gleaming granite edge of a crescent-shaped pool. Fish with fins like a peacock’s tail swam lazily in the clear water, blowing bubbles that lifted above the surface before popping to release a sweet smell. Decorative chimerical design could be the most fun, but it wasn’t intense enough to hold Elir’s interests.
She perched beside Irsu, watching the way sunlight filtered through the vines to mottle ans black hair. She could see the slight waver in the light-prints indicating that a force-roof covered this entire garden.
“Do you think you’re making my mother better?” Irsu asked, tilting ans head back to look at the nearest bobbing drop flower.
“Is something wrong with her?” Elir asked, sliding her gaze along the lines of Irsu’s throat. Her pulse popped with little bursts of ecstatic force.
Irsu laughed and jerked ans chin down to grin at her. “So many things. But nothing a redesign of her body will improve.”
“Oh.” Elir missed the visual access to ans neck, and traced the lines of ans bare shoulder with her gaze instead. “But what will a redesign hurt? And if it improves her state of mind, surely it helps.”
“Her state of mind is boredom, so I suppose….But your skills are wasted giving her a new aesthetic she doesn’t need.”
“It’s never a waste!” Elir was startled out of her obsession with Irsu’s features. “At the very least I am practicing, and together, your mother and I create art.”
“But you could be practicing your art by making the world better.”
Elir narrowed her eyes. She knew this philosophy. “You’re a cultist.”
Irsu glanced away and rubbed ans thigh nervously. Then an curled ans hand into a fist and looked back at her, hard. “So? Cultists have good ideas. There is even a cult approved by the fallen god.”
“My parents were both architects in my college,” Elir said.
“The College of Dedicated Renovation.”
“It sounds cold, and we have many necessary regulations that help us direct our designs so we don’t end up hurting anyone. My ama taught me to work architecture without doing harm.” She put her hand over Irsu’s and wondered if her ama would approve of this sabotage assignment. It was a small harm to prevent a greater one. Like cutting into a body to revive the heart, the commander-philosopher of her college had said.
An loosened ans fist and nodded. “Good.”
“Good?”
Turning ans hand beneath hers, Irsu laced their fingers together. “I wouldn’t like to want to kiss someone who believed in weaponizing architecture or death-design.”
Elir’s breath caught in her throat, and instead of replying, she leaned up and put her mouth against Irsu’s. Ans lips were dry, and softer than she’d expected, and an pressed gently. Her eyelids fluttered, and she thought of the contours of ans thin lips even as she touched them with her own, even as rising force teased up her spine, tingling with ecstatic, and flow pounded through her veins with every beat of her heart. Falling force dripped through her stomach like the hundred tiny feet of a tunnel snake.
Irsu tasted her, and Elir gasped into ans mouth at the touch of ans tongue, leaning away.
It was lovely and strange to feel the eddies of design dancing in the air because someone else had licked her bottom lip.
* * *
Irsu kissed her almost every day.
In one of the pockets of the pearl garden, or in her workshop, or quickly in a turn of the corridor, just a breath or lick of her lips. It added such a tension to her days that Elir relished nearly as well as the kisses themselves. Frequently, Irsu came to observe during Lady Insarra’s posing sessions, leaning over Elir’s shoulder to watch the sweep of her pencil. She’d moved on from the contours to the details, and marked extremely precise maps of Insarra’s body. The lady wanted as little change as possible, except what was required to forward a male aesthetic. Irsu rarely spoke to Elir during the sessions; an wasn’t cold exactly, but seemed indifferent. When Elir asked why, Irsu said ans mother would lose respect for her if Insarra realized she was carrying on with an. “I’m lazy and unambitious,” an said, drawing the words out like ans mother.
Insarra did wish to retain her perfectly shaded Osahan skin, but said she’d take a darkening of her hair with undertones of auburn, as such was the perfectly realized beauty of her ancestors. Elir nodded her agreement, but she was disappointed.
Irsu noticed, and inquired why when they were alone.
“Beauty should be surprising,” Elir said. “She could have blood-red hair, or iridescent scales spilling down her scalp, for the price she’s paying. I could fit her irises with ecstatic shifting flecks! And she merely wants the physical appearance of a man’s aesthetic. How is that better? For her or anyone? It is merely different.”
The heir to Rivermouth smiled in such a haughty manner Elir snapped her mouth shut. But an said, “You’re frustrated with the art.”
Elir reminded herself that the ultimate point of this redesign was assassination. She could not meet Irsu’s gaze that afternoon, and put off ans kisses. An teased her for being a grumpy artist.
* * *
Elir carefully controlled the release of her breath to keep her claws from trembling as she linked six separate threads of force over the mouthpiece of her design mesh. They latched as they should, shaping a perfectly specific lip-corner. Insarra had approved the final design two days prior and so Elir had begun the real construction. This part was even more delicate than the initial phases, especially because it would be examined closely by security designers and the small king’s mercenaries, for weaponry or false-design. Elir had to get it right, and still leave a ripple in which to pinch the sabotage at the very last moment.
Every stroke and pull of her claws could unravel it.
When the alarm ripped through the walls of the workshop, Elir gasped and instantly splayed her hands away from the mesh. Then her mind caught up, and she realized what the alarm meant: the fortress was under atta
ck.
She carefully opened the long box and settled the mesh inside it, sealing the box with null spikes to keep every possible combination of forces out. The workshop was a good place to hole up, as it was suited to defense here in the depths of the fortress.
But Elir didn’t stay there: she clawed the door open and dashed out, heading up the spiral stairs. Irsu spent ans afternoons in the tiny fortress library, practicing rhetoric with a tutor or listing Sarenpet declensions, and occasionally writing poetry an refused to share.
It was stupid to leave the workshop sanctuary, but Elir wasn’t thinking. She pushed past a quad of Insarra’s personal soldiers and avoided people rushing to one of the underground shelters by darting through the gardens. The air was tinged dark, despite the daytime hour, and rang with the alarm. Just as Elir reached the side arch leading into the minaret with the library and a honeycomb of guest rooms, she slammed into Irsu.
An caught her shoulders, but was given no moment to speak, for the soldiers swept them both along to the private shelter, disregarding that Elir was not allowed, because Irsu refused to release her.
Once they were buried under not only the red rock of the crater floor but layers of defense-design, a combat-designer in Insarra’s employ lit force-lights in a web against the cave ceiling. The shelter was small but luxurious, and Insarra herself was standing with a flask of some fuming liquor in hand.
When she saw Elir, the small king tapped her foot angrily. “What is she doing here?” she asked, not exactly hostile, but annoyed.
“She was with me,” Irsu said. “And so I brought her. She’s too expensive to risk losing to your enemies.”
“Our enemies,” Insarra said sourly. She drank from her flask and stalked to her combat-designer, dismissing Elir.
Elir hugged herself. Irsu touched her shoulder. Ans hand was a weight grounding her, and she wanted to lean into an, but she settled for closing her eyes and licking her bottom lip. The forces in this shelter were perfectly aligned and in order.
She felt a hum in the soles of her feet. Then the vibration traveled up her crystal bones in uncomfortable dissonance to her ears, becoming a sound she doubted anybody else could hear. “Null the gates,” she said. Then louder, glaring at the combat-designer. “Null the gates! Can you do it from here?”
“Kid, I don’t know what you—”
Elir unsheathed her claws, gripped the lines of force tightly woven across the arch, and bent them, slipping out enough to see the air of the tunnel turning hard yellow in billowing clouds. A gaseous design, and it was strong enough to turn on elements too tiny for her to see—that was the only way through the defenses they’d passed. The elements of the air screamed as they were violently redesigned, and she could feel it in her bones.
She reached out and dug her crystal claws into the stone wall, hunting for the right threads: they were so thickly woven here she had to strip some apart to find what she wanted. Knots that could be undone and redone into null knots. She gripped a thread of rising in her teeth—bless the crystal in her bones—and worked fast. Behind her the combat-designer grunted and grabbed another thread with the tip of his stylus. He twisted it and held it at the angle she needed, then Elir flipped the final thread and hissed to speed the ecstatic force, and the null knots imploded.
As Elir fell back, Irsu caught her, dragging her inside while the combat-designer sealed the arch again.
Irsu lowered Elir to the cold floor of the shelter and stroked her braids.
“What was she doing with you?” she heard Irsu’s mother demand, though Elir was slowly drifting into force-loss sleep.
“Drawing my picture,” Irsu said tenderly.
Elir’s last thought was that her quick actions had saved Lady Insarra’s life.
* * *
Four silver-moon months ago her teacher Sahdia had interrupted Elir’s practicum for her final project and dragged her into the commander-philosopher’s office. The view from the spire opened in three directions: east, south, and west, leaving the ecstatic north closed off with black-fired tiles. The commander’s crescent desk curved against the wall, and she stood behind it, flanked by trees of pale-yellow force-fire.
The commander beckoned Elir close with her milk-pale hands. Her vertical inner eyelids blinked one at a time so she never took her gaze away. Though not truly a parent to Elir, hers had been the father-seed Elir’s ama used to grow her in az womb. When az died of a miscalculated force-feedback, Elir had been thirteen, and the commander had told her they both had been proud of her and that she could serve that familial pride by climbing the ranks at the college fast and well.
Elir had: she was only sixteen and already prepping her final project.
“I have a new final for you,” the commander said, Sahdia thrumming with restrained ecstatic charges at Elir’s side. “I’ve received a commission for a redesign of the small king of Rivermouth. She requests a body with a male forward aesthetic.”
“That’s all?” Elir wrinkled her nose.
The commander grinned to show her crocodile teeth. “That’s not all, girl. The small king of Rivermouth, we’ve learned, supports the heresies of the hope cult with quite a bit of money, and you will use your access to design a poison to kill her when she undergoes the aesthetic surgery.”
Murder! Elir could not hold back a gasp of ecstatic surprise.
Sahdia touched the nape of Elir’s neck. “Use your imagination, sky-heart. Impress us.”
Elir thought of her ama excoriating the Cult of Hopeful Design for its philosophies, for the scandal five years before that revealed how many children were buried in their catacombs with ruined bones and crushed skulls.
Lazy architecture, her ama had exclaimed. The worst crime. A careful moderation is necessary for the long-term benefit of humanity’s design! Fetal mesh is not meant to change human children into chimeras—merely for slight changes like your perfect bones. I drew out the crystal already written into your design, nudged you better. Aren’t you better, baby?
Yes, ama.
That’s right. No lazy designs to glorify the possibilities of human design!
Then most colleges had banded together for once to demand that the hope cult be stopped—the cultists were too wild, too bizarre! Of course, the fallen god of the red moon had dismissed the complaints of the city colleges, saying there should be no limit to the possible achievements of human architecture. The fallen god rarely took sides, preferring, some said, chaos.
Elir understood, though, that her family and college believed the design of the world would be better if the hope cult fell. It made sense. The cult took too many wild risks. They were not regulated.
And so she had walked to the inner curve of the commander’s crescent desk and, with her crystal claws, touched the skin over her heart. “I accept,” she’d said, meeting the dangerous gaze of the commander-philosopher.
* * *
Elir woke to the touch of light silk sheets and a warm breeze fluttering her lashes.
She opened her eyes and saw first a vaulted ceiling set with tiny shards of blue and green chipped tiles, in a mosaic like the waves of the sea.
“Elir,” said Irsu, coming to kneel at her bedside. “You’ve slept more than a day, and I brought you to this room, a guest room. It’s yours until you’ve recovered, but I’m afraid you’ll have to remain while the fortress is interdicted.” An spoke more quickly than usual.
Elir blinked slowly, thinking of the commander’s vertical inner lids. A shiver dragged down through her bones, and Irsu kissed her forehead.
“Are you ill?” an said. “Curro thought it was force-loss faint, and that you’d recover quickly.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Water?”
Irsu left, but Elir heard an moving and the trickling sound of water being poured. An set a shallow cup down on the rug and scooped an arm around her to he
lp her sit up. Then an brought the cup to her lips, and she drank.
“You’ll have to draw me now,” an said. “I told my mother that you’d offered a portrait.”
“No extra charge?” Elir whispered, managing a little smile.
Irsu laughed and kissed her cheek, then pressed ans forehead to hers.
* * *
Elir remained at the fortress for six days while the small king’s combat-designers cleansed the air. They were wonderful days, because Irsu spent them with her and allowed her to draw an.
Elir went carefully, first focused on ans eyes, then jaw, then mouth, before letting her gaze travel down ans throat to the bend of ans collarbone.
“Shall I remove my robe?” an offered quietly.
Elir’s heart popped with ecstatic hope, and falling knots twisted in her belly. She parted her lips to answer but could not.
Irsu took the paper and the pencil from her numb fingers, set them aside, and tugged at the small hooks holding her robe closed below her breasts. She allowed it, barely breathing, and took ans face in her hands, fingers flicking over the copper studs in ans ears, and kissed an without a thought to eddies of force. She wore a sleeveless linen shift under her robe, and Irsu kissed down her sternum, teasing her with warm breath that easily drifted through the linen. When an kissed one of her breasts, Elir flexed her claws. They sliced through the silk of ans robe, snagging a line of embroidered succulents. Elir gasped, and Irsu laughed. “See,” an said, “I should just take it off.”
Nudging Elir away, Irsu stood and easily untied ans robe, letting it slip off one shoulder. An lifted the shoulder and turned to gaze flirtatiously over it at her. Where the robe slunk low on ans chest, the hem of pretty purple binder showed.
“What do you want me to draw?” Elir asked, staring at Irsu’s languid beauty.
A Universe of Wishes Page 24