by Andrew Smith
At street level hung a shingle announcing the building as the place of business of one Tina Virtue, Proprietor of Truth and Beauty. Within, many people come and go, many with faces hidden, not wanting the world to know what they seek.
Behind a makeshift desk, really a black lacquered table that shone in the light of the illuminating candles, sat Tina Virtue. She tugged at the low-cut front of her dress before her next customer came in. A woman, dressed like Tina in black, only somewhat more conservatively, entered the room. Her face was covered in a black widow’s veil. A few bits of wavy brown hair escaped from around the edges. The visitor glanced about in the usual pattern of people avoiding Tina’s eye: the wrought-iron chandelier, only half lit, the baroque portrait of a sea captain on wall to her right, the cold fireplace behind Tina, and finally, at Tina herself
“Good morning,” said Tina steadily. She sipped at her hot chocolate to give her visitor the chance to speak in her own time. Cold. She quickly reheated it and took another sip.
The woman sat in the chair opposite Tina. She glimpsed painfully dark eyes behind the veil. “You know who I am?”
Tina simply nodded tranquilly. “What would you like to know?”
“Well, I... I’ve just...”
Tina waved a hand mistily before her. “You’re worried that the life you chose was not the right one.”
“Yes,” said the visitor.
“Relax,” Tina ordered placidly. “You are strong enough to resist the fate that befalls most of your kind. And your skills will serve you well.”
“I thought, well, that’s why I started my study.”
Tina nodded. “However... I cannot tell the future,” she said, “but I can tell you this: all beings in this place are meant for something; some small part of their future is predestined. This truth I can tell: a struggle will choose you. And you will not back down.”
“Ah, I ah... Thank you.”
Tina nodded serenely as the woman took a small gold medallion, a Spanish doubloon, and placed it on the desk in front of her. The visitor rushed out of the room as quickly as she could and still preserve some small measure of dignity.
A woman, short and round, wearing khakis, a pink cardigan, and white go-go boots along with a disconcertingly similar black widow’s veil, entered the room. Tina raised a serene eyebrow at the woman, and thought seriously of opening up a veil shop next door. After all, the place had been abandoned for some years now, and no-one charged rent in the Woven City. Though evictions were common enough.
This woman was different. She hustled urgently across the room and flew into the chair, making it rock up on two legs. “I need to be disguised,” she said without preamble
Tina Virtue shook her head sadly. “That is not my business,” she explained
“But you can make me beautiful! I can start a new life with...” The woman trailed off as she saw Tina shaking her head
“No,” said Tina. “But I will give you some good advice at discount prices.” She paused as the woman took a small vial filled with smoke and placed it on the desk. Tina nodded her approval and continued: “I have seen many like you, many who run. Against my better judgment, I even granted a few of the favors you seek. They are all dead now. You may run as you feel you must, but if you run you will run forever, until they catch you. If they are determined as you believe that they are, they will not stop. They will find you. Don’t seek help to hide. Seek help to fight.” Tina could tell that there were conflicted emotions playing over the face beneath the veil. In the end the woman nodded, in a defeated sort of way, and exited slowly.
Darkness
Everyone wants something. In the normal world, things could get dangerous because of that simple fact. In a place like the Woven City, things could downright apocalyptic. Though to be fair, it’s usually an accident. After all, a person would have to be crazy to want to end the world.
As Tina Virtue was heard to say, nobody knows everything. When sorcery, desire, and that particular axiom collided, events often got out of hand.
Damon McLenen walked as inconspicuously as he could down the road. He preferred to wear dark clothes, like most of his kind, but it made them easy to spot on the street. He had pulled on a plaid shirt and, to his extreme distaste, a pair of blue shorts.
The city was organized into rings of time, but the population was more clustered than evenly spread. There were a few main neighborhoods and certain places that people rarely went, especially places from the distant past. In the normal world, the giant Buddha statues of Indonesia were famous. Here they were infamous. The surrounding area was made up of buildings nowhere near Indonesia, for the most part. Here they formed the neighborhood known as Buddha’s Wrath. It was a haven of dark sorcery, necromancy, and plague science. And the people were none too friendly. No serious necromancer or dark sorcerer would live here, and it pained Damon even to come. Buddha’s Wrath was a neighborhood of junkies and tinkerers. They did, however, come into a lot of interesting items. Half the time they didn’t know what they had, and someone, like Damon McLenen, who knew what they were doing could get away with murder.
Figuratively. In that case, anyway
There was a small shack. The windows were black, even though there were undoubtedly lights burning within. Damon walked up to it and kicked it. Knocking was too polite for this neighborhood and would probably get a person mugged. The weather-beaten door creaked open. A man, apparently in his mid-thirties appeared. His eyes were vague and unfocused and he was having some trouble not giggling. Damon rolled his eyes.
“Damon, dude. What’s up?”
“You know very well what’s ‘up’. You said you had it, you told me to come and get it, and here I am. Now give it here.”
“Do you have my stuff?” asked the man.
“Yes, and it’s been giving me a damn headache all the way here. I’ll never understand how you live like this.”
The man smiled. “The headaches stop after a while. All the headaches stop after a while.”
“Whatever,” said Damon shortly, thrusting forth a cloth sack tied with a length of string. Just take it, and give me mine.”
“Alright, dude, chill,” said the man. He walked a few unsteady paces to a decaying table within and grabbed a small globe, about the size of a billiard ball, out of a cluster of miscellaneous objects. It was a marbled mix of violet and black which seemed to shift in the light. Or maybe the light had nothing to do with it.
“Thanks,” said Damon, meaninglessly
“Yeah, no problem. This guy gave it to me for two of these,” said the man, holding up the cloth sack. Its contents clinked. “Didn’t even know what he had.”
“And you do?” Damon asked, doubtfully.
“Oh yeah, dude. That’s a Sorcery Core. It’s been a long time since anyone’s seen one of those. Course, they all look different depending on which order of sorcery it is, and I don’t really know anything but the ones for the dark sorcery. Still, that’s what it is alright. Y’know it’s the one Ruin used.”
Damon narrowed his eyes at the man. “How do you know that?”
“I know things, dude. It’s the only way to stay alive here. Gotta know stuff.”
“Funny you should say that,” Damon remarked, examining the Sorcery Core.
“Funny?”
“I meant ironic, but I didn’t think you’d know what that meant,” Damon explained
He wrapped his fist around the globe and punched the man in the gut. The man barely managed to sputter the word ‘what’ before a fountain of blue energy sprayed like fire from his mouth. It jetted over Damon’s shoulder, landing on the ground behind him and burning there for a few moments before dissipating. Damon could barely hear the man choking over the strange crackling sound it made. He pulled back his hand and the junkie fell to the ground.
Damon lifted the cloth sack, his payment, and examined it for a moment before throwing it at the unmoving body and walking away.
With his back turned, Damon never saw th
e shadows from inside the junkie’s shack creeping out and pulling the body back in. Damon didn’t look back. He had a church service to get to.
* * * *
The man called Ruin was someone to avoid making irritable. And waiting did that to him. It seemed like all of life was waiting, waiting to grow up and become independent, waiting for important dates, waiting for answers. Especially that last part. Right now, he was waiting for a messenger. Ruin ceased pacing the stone floor of his basement, and returned to the slab. Both the slab and its keeping in the basement were terribly cliché, he knew. Still, proud as he was of his work, and even with his basic lack of sympathy for the living, he could never bring himself to move his lab upstairs. A little sorcery would keep the bodies fresh enough, but where would he keep them? The living room? The study? Certainly nowhere near the kitchen. Germs
Ruin leaned in to study the dead man. He looked basically like they all did. He had a different death wound, and eyes were interestingly pointed in opposite directions. Ruin always kept the eyes open. It was easier to tell that way
He thrust his fingers into the man’s heart, the ribs cracking as he pushed. He began to chant, the old words. So many of the artifices of his work were in ancient Egyptian, obsessed as they were with death, they had been the pioneering culture in both the dark sorcery and necromancy. They and the Romans were big on the dark sorcery. Ruin assumed that in the case of the Romans, it had something to do with their paranoia.
The dead man closed his eyes, and they snapped open once again. They were clearer, much less vague, and though focused, they were focused somewhere infinitely far away. He spoke. That was encouraging. Not all of them spoke.
The problem was the same as always. When they spoke an actual language, they spoke in gibberish, stringing random words together. One time, Ruin had a man who spoke entirely in prepositions and proper nouns. Ruin quieted that one after the sixth time the man pointed at him and shouted, “Over Rome! Over Rome!” And then there were the others, like this one. He reached towards the ceiling and spouted what sounded like distinct sentences. The problem was, they were in a language that didn’t exist. Ruin had spent a lot of time at first, writing it all down phonetically, and researching it at the Mulhoy Institute, but he had found nothing. Then building security got all huffy and refused him entry because he lost his temper the one time and mummified a passing linguist. The living could be so unreasonable
Nightlife
Most of the city had night at roughly the same time. No-one knew quite why. After a thousand sunsets, the night settled over the Woven City. The bars and clubs sprang to life, crowded with people from all parts of the world, from all times of human civilization.
Everyone was multilingual. There was no agency to regulate a common parlance, and people were understandably disinclined to give up their native tongues. With the lengthy lifespans here, there was plenty of time to learn several languages fluently, and common phrases in many more.
Mary, formerly the Queen of Scots who had arrived already knowing several languages, was sitting at a table in the Roxy with a man who claimed to be a former incarnation of the Dalai Lama, though the bleached pony-tail and skull tattoos on his arm tended to dispute the assertion. She finished her Irish whiskey and excused herself, suddenly feeling very much like she should wear her hair loose more often. There was a rock concert going on the stage as Mary filtered out through the crowd. She exited into the cool autumn air. Mary had mixed feelings about rock music in general, and definite doubts about crowded places. A small man in a leather vest attempted to push a leaflet on her. She glared at him until he recognized her and decided to pretend that he was handing the leaflet to the other leaflet man just behind her.
The leaflet was for a concert at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go. In reality of course, they were right down the street from each other. They had appeared in the Woven City at the same time, right next to each other, but over the decades been pushed apart by the appearance of new buildings. They still had a lot of crossover business, since the walk was reasonable enough: right down the curving street.
Mary had been feeling kind of restless since talking to Fernando. Usually, she took nights off and just enjoyed her free life here in the city. Tonight she just couldn’t relax. Maybe if she hit something... Mary resolved to walk down to the Nightlight, just a decade or two from the Roxy. She walked through a few blocks of the city, which had the disturbing habit of turning from streets to alleys and back again, and stepped suddenly into a pool of bright daylight.
The Nightlight stood before her, twenty stories of converted university dormitory from upstate New York, bedecked with signs informing the passer by of its identity as the city’s premier club. There was a bit of ambiguity involved in calling it a nightclub, since most of its business occurred during the Nightlight’s day hours. Most of the city was dark now, and the Nightlight was the most notable exception. It had more than enough room to cater to all manner of clientele. Which made it prime real estate for the clashing of cultures, and personalities. Which in turn made it even more popular.
It was a trouble spot Mary usually avoided. As attached as she was to her home, she couldn’t be everywhere at once, and had to make choices as to where she should concentrate her peacekeeping efforts, as she referred to them. The fighting here qualified mainly as entertainment.
There were always stories of people accidentally walking into the Nightlight’s Portico, the doorway to the normal world that each building in the Woven City contained. Mary figured that universities were used to seeing strange, intoxicated people appearing and disappearing at all hours
Smoke filled the lobby as Mary entered. A dozen globes of light in a dozen colors zoomed by her and disappeared. She saw a bored-looking young man sitting in the corner with a wand, replenishing the smoke and light effects. He glanced up at the ceiling as though wishing he could see what was happening in some of the club’s more exotic levels. Mary bypassed the cluster of elevators and headed for the stairwell.
Nineteen flights later, thinking, and people wonder how I keep in shape, Mary exited into the main bar on the top floor of the place. It was crowded with an assortment of tables and chairs and people and some of the more interesting inhabitants of the city. She sat on a bar stool and ordered another Irish whiskey from the bartender. She kept her fingers on her drink, glancing surreptitiously around the room. Near the flutter of absinth-drinking Eagle Maidens and the Portico repair man knocking back his x-number bottle of beer from the city’s finest (read: only) brewery, sat a Vestal virgin and a priest of Asiago, a local god who had the misfortune of sharing a name with cheese, and was more than a little touchy about it. Mary sipped her drink. Though the Temple of Vesta in the normal world was long since ruined, and home only to tourists and archaeologists, here in the city it was a major player. They were also a lot less pacifistic since the rape of one of their number by the Emperor Caligula, who had fled to the city after his supposed death in the normal world. His flight didn’t last for long once the Vestal virgins had caught up with him. The rumor was that Vesta herself held him in some eternal torture for his crimes, and no-one was too terribly upset about the idea.
The rather intoxicated priest was making passes at the virgin, and she was reaching for her Focus, which Mary had spotted concealed in her laurel-wreath crown. The priest made the mistake of laying a hand on her shoulder. The virgin knocked the hand away and leapt to her feet. Her Focus, like a wand, only a more organic branch shape, was suddenly in her hand, but the priest was ready with his own wand. Mary got to her feet and edged closer as the rest of the bar was making room, the usual theater-in-the-round that formed for sudden fights. The priest disarmed the girl, her Focus skittering across the floor. She in turn locked his wrist and started kicking him in the shins. With his free hand, the priest punched her hard in the face, and Mary was there. So was her spear, pressed against his belly
The priest felt the pressure and froze. He looked down at the spear and looked alarmed. He looked
up at its carrier and dropped his wand.
“Evening,” said Mary. The virgin tried hard not to look smug. “I thought,” Mary said, “that I would save us all a whole lot of trouble by reminding you of a few things: This is a Vestal virgin. One would be wise not to try and pick them up. You don’t touch Vestal virgins without permission. That is something they aren’t likely to grant to someone who’s drunk and grabby.
“And you don’t,” she said with emphasis, “punch them in the face unless you are suicidal.” She glanced meaningfully at her spear.
“Perhaps I’d best be going,” said the priest.
“Perhaps you’d best be,” said Mary.
She pulled back her spear. The man grabbed his wand and ran out of the room like his pants were on fire. Which Mary barely resisted doing. The virgin introduced herself as Claudia and thanked Mary for her help. “Maybe next time you could step in a bit earlier,” she said with a smile, and shook Mary’s hand.
Mary returned to her drink, and finished it quickly when she felt the weight of many eyes pressing upon her. She couldn’t imagine why they were all staring so, as this was the sort of thing she did all the time. If she didn’t break up at least three fights during the week, she wouldn’t give herself dessert on Sundays. She got up, threw the bartender a silver cube and strode casually out of the bar.
Crusader
It was another morning like any other at Mme. Rumella’s. The proprietress herself was manning the espresso machine as Mr. Markab exited with his medium earl gray, no milk, no sugar. Jason Oblivion stumbled into the shop. His clothing was rumpled and dirty. “I met the loveliest person on the way,” he said, and collapsed into one of the armchairs around the small fireplace towards the rear of the store.
“Oh Jason, lamb, are you alright?” Mme. Rumella called over the noise of man and machine.