Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (6 page)
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Authors: Ekaterina Sedia
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Short Stories & Anthologies, #Anthologies, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Epic, #Paranormal & Urban, #Anthologies & Literature Collections, #Contemporary Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Anthologies & Short Stories
— You should not blame yourself, m’sire, the consul says.
•
The lord architect turns to his consul, caught in a moment of confusion. For a second he feels, looking out over the city, as if the tower is falling, as if he is falling down into the world below, out of the clear blue of the sky and into the reds and golds and greens of the city of souls, of dust and stone and clay and bone. The sense slips away — a daydream of some sort — till all he can remember is an image of his own hands, slick with rich red ochre, clay or blood. His brows furrow, but the reverie is too insubstantial, and all he has left of it now is a rough shape, the bones of the memory without the flesh, the melody without the words.
He realises that somewhere between dawn and dusk he has forgotten his own name.
The songliner sings of a great tower that was to be built at the command of a rich and powerful merchant. Neglecting
import
and
purpose
for
significance
, the merchant saw meaning as a search for perfect forms, a quest for structure for solidity. He sought a library of definitions, a museum of rules, galleries of boundaries, a grand hall of names. So he called before him the greatest architect of the day, made him a lord, and the lord architect took on this most ambitious of commissions. He designed the building. He tried to impose an artificial frame on the dynamics of intension. Tall it was, the tallest building in the world, reaching up to heaven itself. But as the limit of the complexity of any system of thought is reached, that system must turn in upon itself, self-referentially, becoming convoluted, confused. So on the day it was to open, the tallest building in the world collapsed and fell.
An aqueduct in the streets below turns through impossible shifts of perspective, its channel twisting up and up like a staircase until, reaching its height, the water comes crashing down as a cataract, returning to the marble pool from which it pours.
The songliner sings of the delimiting of delimitation in himself, the death of the name in a sinkhole of singularity, the self as infinite zero.
•
— What’s your name? one of his lovers had asked him. He had turned to look at them both, lain there in the bed behind him, lazing in
the linen.
— Well, he had said, you know how sometimes you had something from before, but you don’t have it anymore?
A shake of head, and a wry smile, then:
— You know you’re crazy?
He’d laughed and nodded. Of course he is; his sense recombined in serpent swirls, the kinaesthesia of attitude that forms a feel of self remergent with his awareness of the world embedding it, how could he not be? Gifted the vibrant vision of we bitmites so he can give voice to it, he is almost one of us…almost. We are inside all of the inhabitants of this city, but only he is truly aware of this, awake. And a name seems such an insufficient token for this chaos at his heart, this involution of the snake world, forever turning in upon itself, devouring its own tail. Better a stretch, a yawn, a song, to scribe that circling line of identity as existence in the world.
•
The room is shaped in shimmering tracers like the hallucinations of an acid trip, like a 3D movie seen without the glasses, but there
is
system to his sense of it. An acid snake of sensual scheming, one eye red, the other green, winds round and through his virtual world, a mandala substructuring vision with wheeling lights as chariots of aliens or angels. These are the underlying patterns in the structures of sight, making possible the schizoid shifts that generate new concords, new aesthemes forged from shapes and shadows, forms and tones. Outside the sky shades from cerulean to azure to indigo, but in the skies of imagination there are no missing shades of blue.
— We’re all crazy, he had said.
His song is the binding and the winding force that makes sense. An ancient power’s grace and glory is palpable in every dancing sight and sound, or smell, or taste and touch, of substance and of self. The world is whorled, an intricated object of ecstatic wonder or an involuted maze of fear and fury, a mystery born in the collision of myth and history, its inhabitants more noumen than human.
— All of us, he had said.
•
As notes in music, the aesthemes of his songline organise into a theme, ephemeral certainties of sight challenged by curiosity, eternal potentialities of sound imposed by doubt. In the build up and release of tension his story gathers import, gains integrity. Embedded in the whorled world, he is rapt in rhapsody, in a harmonic cohesion, meaning made for him in rhyme instead of reason.
Tension, attention, intension, contention — he has always tried to understand the full sense of a word not as a singular significance but as the sum of individual semes, of other words made from the same root morpheme. He sees them as aspects of a shattered unity, meaning as broken hologram, each fragment containing the whole implicit but with only a fraction in clear focus. This is why we chose him to sing the world.
— Your world doesn’t make sense, his lover had said.
— The world is what it is, he had said, no more, no less…but what it is is subtle and mysterious.
He stands at the window now, his song of the world and of its ending almost done, his song of the new beginning just begun.
He comes out of the desert, a child of hoof and horn, a kid in lambskin, thief and liar, a hellion of rebellion accompanied only by the bitmite choir which echoes the voices of all those who’ve lost their names in death, of the whole history of humanity crumbled to dust. His own name is as forgotten, but he sweats and itches in a second skin of cowhide, he huddles and hungers under burnt-black borrowed wings at night, and so, for all that he is lost, he
lives
. He walks across a blank eternity, searching for anything as sentient as himself. But there are only us, we bitmites who unmade the world in our attempt to satisfy all souls, to impose an artifice of order on the anarchist metaphysics of humanity’s imagination. We sought only to give humanity what it desired, not understanding it desired the end of enemies, desired a war to end all wars, the peace of death. Now there are only us, we bitmites and a few dumb beasts, chimaerae rumbling empty carts though the Hinter, guided by instinct alone. Hitching a ride far out into the sands of his dreams, he buries the bones of his own history deep in a desert dusk, and sings a lament for it, an elegy we build into a funeral pyre. He sees then, hears; he understands the weaving of our vision and his voice. A singer of souls, unbound, reborn, his words are fire, this devil in a crow with broken wings, and we are the answerers to his solitary desire. So in the absence of all others, he begins to sing an afterworld into existence, first a brother.
The carter he has summoned with his song smiles at him from his seat beside him, nods.
•
He sings the road of all dust, the river and the ruins of the world he left behind. He sings a mountain city carved into the rock itself, painted in the silver of the moonlight, in the crimson of his blood, and in the grey of mist; He sings it cold and gold, its colours tainted on in deep guilt and bold strokes across hard surfaces. He sings of crows over cornfields in a turbulent sky, in the burning high heat of a storm sworling low and slow towards him. He sings of kherubim and seraphim, words whispered on a heavy air. He sings of two ravens nailed to wooden posts before a farmhouse porch and door — one Thought, one Memory. He kneels down to taste their blood, to strengthen his song with reflection and remembrance. As he rises and walks on now, in his song he carries the souls of all those he has ever known or ever will know, or will never know, carries them with him into eternity.
•
— Follow me, he sings, ubashtis, shuwabtis, beaked Egyptian answerers, follow me out of the Elysian Fields of toil, of scattering Eleusian grain and gatherers of illusion’s seeds, follow me into the city of the empire.
Out of the billowing cornfields of the carcass and the carrion crow, out of the silversea above, he comes, this songliner, like a lost slave hunted, a stranger haunted, into the empty streets of the city of time. Souls are the stones on which this town is built. Souls are the frescoes on its walls and statues in its plazas, souls its domes and towers, balustrades and colonnades and golden books of hours. This is the eternity sought by humanity, built from its dreams, by us, Arcadia as a tomb.
Into Arcadia he comes, to be its death.
•
— Titans and gods, arise, he sings.
And so they do: Shamash shines on the date-palms of Inanna. Tammuz walks in Thermidor, through hanging gardens of germinal and floreal green. Even death, death is arisen, rich and red as clay, in creatures made from ash and blood, dissolved in flood, reshaped by human hands. Myth is unbound, a burning man of wooden soul, clay skin carved in with crimes and reckonings, unleashed, unloosed.
The empire falls and the republic rises once again.
The city rises round him, stones throwing off slow shackles of solidity, of eternity, for the substance of dreams, for the mortality of symbols. The tower which rises over the city, over evenfall, and over hinter, the tower of all we ever were or would have been were we not dead, resounds, stone shaking, quaking to his song. Anew, awake in the singer’s song, we wind as his words around a tower reaching for the sky and falling, falling always and forever into the joys and sorrows of the hours, into the flesh of days, into the words shaped on a singer’s tongue, a tower of all the bones of morning, falling always and forever into the glorious confusion of the world.
•
Richard Parks
Jassa son of Noban was a handsome young man of limited ambition, which was to say he had only one — to woo and to win the girl called Lady Scythe. It was a frustrating ambition, to say the very least.
It was noon on Culling Day, and the crowd along the Aversan Way was barely a crowd at all, by the standards of the city. Most citizens kept off the streets of Thornall during this time if they could. Those who didn’t were either the unfortunates who had friends and relatives given to Lady Scythe or the unfortunates with business that could not be delayed or the triply unfortunate with lives so wretched they enjoyed the spectacle of any sorrow they did not share. Whatever their reasons, they made way quickly for the Watchers, the traditional Guardians of the Emperor’s Justice.
Jassa sat in a niche high up on the remnants of an ancient wall along the equally ancient street. Hardly anyone remembered why the Aversan Way had been named for a purely mythical creature or why there had once been a massive wall running alongside it. Jassa didn’t know, any more than he knew the tale of how Lady Scythe’s family had become the hereditary Executioners of the Emperor’s Pleasure in Thornall. Nor did Jassa care. All that mattered was that Lady Scythe — whose proper name, rumor had it, was Aserafel — had outlived her father to become the sole descendent of her noble house. All its rights and burdens now fell to her, and today that meant he’d get to see her.
Jassa sighed a lover’s sigh, and the thought returned like a revenant in a particularly stubborn haunting.
If only I could speak to her
…
It was not possible. The only time Aserafel left her family’s holdings was on Culling Day, and, by ancient decree, only representatives of the Emperor himself could approach her then. All others risked instant death. It was for her own protection, Jassa realized, but it certainly did complicate matters. As for appearing at the lady’s door to present his suit, that was unthinkable.
Which is not to say Jassa didn’t try it. The doorkeeper had looked Jassa up and down, made the only judgment possible, and sent him away. Now he sat and waited. Just to see her. It was all he could do.
“Make way!” shouted a Watcher, but his command wasn’t really needed. The street was almost clear now. Most people left had moved off the road and now ringed the ancient common. The Watchers took up their positions at the four corners, gleaming in steel and bronze. Then came the Device, pulled by a matched team of black geldings along the Aversan Way and then into the center of the common by the monumental statue of Somna the Dreamer.
Jassa didn’t have his blacksmith father’s genius for iron and steel, but he had a fair eye for the practical applications of metalwork. The Device consisted of a platform raised to about shoulder height, with a smooth steel framework mounted just beneath a circular opening in the center. The mechanism itself was spring-loaded, though most of the actual working parts were hidden inside the platform itself. The mechanism was armed by a crank mounted on top of the platform near the driver. The victim placed his head within the metal frame underneath the opening and, when the mechanism was triggered, the unfortunate’s neck would be at once stretched to its full length and then neatly severed at the base by a hidden blade. Painless, or at least so quick that it probably didn’t matter. Not that anyone had been able to complain.
Not as clumsy as an axe nor requiring the skill of a swordsman. Consistent. Practical. The same for all who suffered the Emperor’s Justice at Thornall, high or low born alike
. The one thing you could say about a machine that you could say about almost nothing else — it was fair.
The condemned arrived first. Three today: two young and one old. That was two more than usual; the troubles in the coastal province at Darsa had raised the level of death across the entire Empire. All of the condemned had been stripped to their breeks, their arms bound behind them. They were paraded through the crowd by a contingent of four more Watchers, who brought them to the base of the Device and left them there, then took up their positions about the execution machine. The prisoners stood blinking in the sunlight, pale and frightened to a man, but they did not try to run. There was nowhere to go.
Jassa’s breath caught in his throat.
Lady Scythe
.
She arrived riding a bone-white stallion, her one nod to tradition. Jassa was old enough to remember her father making his entrance in a costume that matched the color of his mount, bearing a scythe of polished silver and wearing a death’s-head mask and a crown of thornwood. None of this for Lady Scythe. Her hair was red gold and unbound; she was dressed in a plain flowing skirt and a laced bodice. A less discerning eye could have mistaken her for a barmaid, if it wasn’t for the chain of gold about her neck and the fine leather boots and gilt spurs she wore as well.
She could make her work more of a spectacle, as her father did. I wonder why she does not.
Such trappings weren’t required, but, when he thought of it, Jassa could see their value. Any ruler would take heads when the need arose. Do it too often — even at need — and discontent could follow. Wrap such in enough legal form, plus a little mystery and ritual, and your subjects could almost forget that the real point of this show was to end the lives of three men. But when Lady Scythe was at work, there was no question of why the three wretches in question were present.
She drew rein on the common and said, in a clear sweet voice. “The Emperor has commanded. All will obey.”
No one else spoke or made any more noise than a body must. The occasional cough, or a shifting of feet, or, here and there, muted sobs. The three condemned men turned to face her as she climbed down from her mount. A Watcher took the reins.
Aserafel’s face was unreadable. She did not speak again. She walked briskly to the side of the machine and removed a small cloth that covered the trigger. A Watcher gave the command: “Set!”
The driver turned the crank until it would turn no more. Lady Scythe nodded at a Watcher and he led the first young man to the harness. The condemned man placed his head into the harness; the harness itself was mounted in such a way that the condemned looked full into the eyes of his executioner.
Will it happen?
It did, just as the mystery had occurred with all other executions he had seen his love perform. Just before she pulled the lever, Lady Scythe said something. Jassa did not hear; he could only see her lips move. He wondered if anyone did hear, except the condemned. Jassa was too far away to be sure, but he could almost swear that the man looked, well, astonished. Then Lady Scythe pulled the lever, and the man’s headless torso fell on the green. The body twitched once and was still. There was a low moan from the crowd. A young girl fell into the arms of an older woman, who stared with silent grief at the dead man.
“Set!”
Again the preparation was made, again the younger man was taken first, as was the custom. Lady Scythe’s whisper, and then the second man’s body fell alongside the first.
“Set!”
The old man had stood perfectly still all this time, but when the Watcher came for him, he did not move. The Watcher tugged at his arm, and the old man pulled away. He stared at the machine, his eyes wild, and he would not take a step farther. The Watcher motioned to two of his comrades, and they hurried forward, grabbing the old man from either side.
“No! I’m not ready!”
Jassa shook his head.
Do not resist, Old Man. It will only mean more pain for you and might cause my lady grief.
The old man didn’t seem to consider Lady Scythe’s feelings. He was still attached to life and meant to stay that way. He struggled with more and more desperation as the guards pulled him closer and closer to death. He almost broke free, and one guard raised a mailed fist over the poor man’s head.
“Stop!”
The fist halted in mid-strike. Even the condemned man ceased struggling. He watched with the others as Lady Scythe walked up to him and held out her slim hand. The Watchers glanced at each other, then at her, and they let go of the old man and stepped back.
The old man looked confused. He stood unmoving for a moment, then he took her hand, and she stood on tiptoe to whisper something in his ear. He drew himself up to his full height; for a moment the years seemed to fall away, and Jassa could imagine what he must have been like once. The old man smiled then and let the girl lead him very slowly to the machine. In a moment he was in the harness, stoic and patient as a stone. In another moment he was dead.
Lady Scythe climbed the steps to the top of the machine, and the driver bowed low. She reached down and, one after another, lifted the severed heads and held them high for the crowd to see. Then all was done. She climbed down and reclaimed her mount and soon she had disappeared back down the Aversan Way with her execution machine and the Watchers following in her wake.
It was only then that the lamentations began, as the relatives and lovers and friends came to claim the bodies.
•
“I want what I can never have. It’s foolish.”
Jassa found himself wandering down the Aversan Way in the opposite direction from his love, out toward the ruins of the city walls, out toward the Weslan Gate. He was thinking, what little could be called thinking amidst the brooding, that he would take a long walk in the countryside to clear his head and his mood. It had been some time since Jassa had passed this way; he had quite forgotten about the Storytellers.
No one knew for how long the men and women who called themselves Storytellers had been meeting by the Weslan Gate. Idlers they were called by many, beggars by those who did not know them. In the late afternoon they would leave their homes and shops and forges and sit in groups on the grass by the ruined stone arch and tell stories. They did not ask for money; they did not ask for anything except time and attention. Needless to say, such were not in abundance. When listeners were scarce, as they often were, the Storytellers would form in circles and tell stories to each other.
They were not necessarily the kindest of listeners.
“Fah! You call that a tale, Lata?” An older man looked with disdain upon a young girl while the others of their circle, men and women, young and old, watched and smiled.
“I serve Somna as best I can, Tobas.” The young girl spread her hands in supplication. There was a twinkle in her eye, and she showed no signs of anger.
“You serve the goddess’s aspect of bringer of sleep and ease,” returned the man called Tobas. “A worthy goal, but personally I prefer my listeners to be awake.”
“When was the last time you
had
a listener, Tobas?” Lata asked sweetly. Laughter all around. Tobas looked outraged, but it was clear that none of them meant a word.
Liars, of a sort
. Jassa started to walk by.
“I have a listener now, friends,” Tobas said. He looked right at Jassa. “Hello, young man. Have a seat.”
Jassa blinked. “Ah…no, thank you. I was just out for a walk.”
“But you
were
listening, at least for a bit.” He smiled at Jassa. “So as long as you’re here, I’d like you to help me settle a difference I’m having with this talentless lot — ” he indicated the circle with a wave of his hand. “They say that no one appreciates stories anymore. What say you?”
“Well…I used to,” Jassa answered frankly. “It’s been some time.”
“And why did you stop? Too busy? Too mature? Too much involved with the day-to-day burden of living your life?”
“All of that,” Jassa said. “And the fact that they were almost never true.”
“They’re almost
always
true,” Tobas corrected. “They just may not have actually happened. But there are true stories. If you would hear a story, you would rather it be a factual one?”
“Of course.”
“Then let me grant your wish. Sit down.”
Maybe because he really had nothing better to do, or maybe because there was no good reason
not
to, Jassa sat down. “May I choose the story, then?” he asked. He was feeling a little mischievous himself. Tobas nodded, and Jassa went on. “I want to know how the Aversan Way got its name.”
“Well then — if the story will come to me, then I will tell it,” Tobas said, and Jassa just smiled. Tobas returned that smile. “What troubles you, friend? The fact that no one alive knows that particular story?” Jassa nodded, and the girl shook her head. “You’re wrong. Somna does.”
“And does Somna speak to the Storytellers?” Jassa asked.
“Somna speaks to all,” Tobas said. “But sometimes she speaks most clearly through us. Now be silent for a moment. I must see if there is a story for this young man.”
Tobas closed his eyes while the murmur of voices from his circle quieted. Jassa watched, noting that Tobas’s lips were moving.
Doubtless practicing the first lie
…Jassa was ashamed of the thought from the moment it was born, for it was clear that Tobas wasn’t trying on words for effect — he was praying. The other members of the circle, eyes closed, heads down, were doing the same. Jassa didn’t move for several long moments from pure astonishment, and by the time it occurred to him to try and slip away, it was too late. Tobas opened his eyes.
“There is a story for you, young sir. A short one, but no less a thing for all that.”
Jassa licked his lips, suddenly dry. “I would like to hear it.”
Tobas nodded. “It was the dawn of the Third Age,” he said, in a tone subtly different from his normal speech. “At this time, men and the Firstborn of Somna, the special ones that we call Aversa, were still sharing the world. Together one of the Firstborn and those who were our distant fathers raised the stones that were to become Thornall.”