Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (9 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
To run the false steeple days before a baby was due was the hardest way to make the course. No one could scale and jump with her usual speed and precision while her belly was distended and full of sloshing life.
Little Gray Sister had, and fetched out the Third Counselor’s privy seal to prove it. Not for the sake of the theft — the Tribade had their own copy of the seal, accurate right down to the wear marks along the left edge and the three nicks in the bottom petal of the rose — but for the sake of doing the thing.
Pregnant and due.
In this moment she was already minor legend. If she did what Sister Architect suggested, and she succeeded, her legend would grow.
“Vanity,” said Little Gray Sister, leaning backward to ease her spine. “I have already proven all that I need to.”
“Hmm.” Sister Architect sounded disappointed, but did not press her case. “Perhaps you are not quite so much flash as some of the younger sisters claim you are.”
Another test, she realized. But true. There were many kinds of sisters in the Tribade — red, white, blue, black, and more. Sister Architect was a blue sister, one of the professions, though her skills were mostly put to plotting and revising the rooftop runs, rather than any new construction.
Only the grays were trained to die and to kill. Only the grays were given the bluntest and sharpest weapons and trusted to use them. Only the grays were trained between hinge and post in secrecy and ignorance, that their true mettle might be known.
Only the gray sisters became Big, Bigger, or Biggest Sisters, to lead the Tribade into the uncertain future.
She smiled with pride at the thought.
Her abdomen rippled, a muscle spasm that caught Little Gray Sister by surprise. She sucked in her breath.
Sister Architect tugged at her arm. “Sister Midwife awaits within the Quiet House.”
“I — ” Little Gray Sister stopped cold, fighting a wave of pain so intense it roiled into nausea. She took a deep, long breath. “Yes.”
•
Big Sister — like all Big Sisters, a gray sister — sat on the edge of Little Gray Sister’s cot. Big Sister was almost a heavy woman, unusual in the Tribade, with roan hair fading to sandy gray and glinting gray eyes. “You’re a mother now,” she said. “Would you like to see the baby?”
Little Gray Sister had thought long and hard on that question. Her breasts ached for the child, weeping a pale bluish fluid. Her loins felt shattered. Even her blood seemed to cry out for her offspring.
Like everything, this was a test, though of late she had been her own examiner more and more. “I would, but I shan’t,” she told Big Sister.
Big Sister took Little Gray Sister’s hand in her own, clenched it tightly. “You can, you know,” she whispered.
Little Gray Sister fancied she heard a burr in Big Sister’s voice, some edge of old emotion. It was possible — the Tribade were neither monsters nor ghosts, just women of a certain purpose living within the walls of the City Imperishable. “I could hold her… ” She stopped again, realizing she didn’t even know if she’d birthed a boychild or a girl.
A girl
, she decided. The baby had been a girl. Just as she had been, once.
“I could hold her, but I do not think I could let her go.”
“And would that be so bad?” The emotion in Big Sister’s voice was almost naked now, a shift from control to a raw wound that might be decades old.
She held on to that hurt, knowing she must own it too, if she were ever to set things right. “Not bad, Big Sister, not if it were my ambition to take the red and care for her myself, or even train among the Sisters Nurse.”
“Well.” Big Sister’s voice was controlled once more. “Will you take the hardest way, then?”
That
was the other choice. The Tribade had many sisters of the brown, the street toughs and money bosses. They shook down good merchants and shook down bad merchants far more, kept rival gangs in line, maintained some semblance of order in streets and districts where bailiffs were rarely seen. Those women were the most public of the hidden faces of the Tribade, and they did most of the public work.
Little Gray Sister could run rooftops, tackle criminals and watch over her city for the rest of her life as a brown sister. But the only path to becoming a Big Sister, a Bigger Sister or even — and especially — the Biggest Sister, was to take the hardest way.
She cupped her leaking breasts in her hand, regretting the feeling of both tenderness and joy. There had been a man at them once, too, for a few hours, the night she’d gotten with child amid tearing pain and weeping and a strange, shivering joy. She still wondered who he was sometimes, but at least he’d been kind.
“I am ready.”
“I’ll send for the fire and the knife.”
“The ink, too, please,” Little Gray Sister said. “I’d prefer to have it all at once.”
An expression flickered across Big Sister’s face — unreadable, save for context. Most women waited for the healing before they took the ink. Tattooing the Soul’s Walk across the flat, puckered scars on a Big Sister’s chest was one of the greatest rites of the Tribade. It was also one of the most painful, for the poppy given for the fire and the knife was not given for the ink.
Little Gray Sister would do it most painfully, cutting away her womanhood in the first blush of mothering to join the ranks of the sisters who protected their world.
Still, she was surprised they had the brazier ready, and the long knife, and there was even no wait at all for Sister Inker.
Someone had known. Perhaps all of them had known. Just like they’d known to be standing on the rooftop just below, the night she’d jumped into the violet moonlight.
Even though it was the Quiet House, her shrieks set dogs barking three streets away. It was the only time in her life Little Gray Sister screamed.
She looked at the long, narrow velvet bag Biggest Sister handed her. The two of them were in a rooftop cafe in the Metal Districts, a place where women in gray leather with close-cropped hair received no special scrutiny. There was an electrick lamp on the table which buzzed and crackled, shedding pallid light against the evening’s gloom. The wind was cool, bearing mists and distant groaning booms off the River Saltus.
“You know there is one more test,” Biggest Sister said. The woman was compact, a walking muscle more reminiscent of a bull terrier than the fine ladies of Heliograph Hill.
“There is always one more test.” Big Sister shrugged. Even now, a year and a moon after, her chest ached whenever it was chill, or if she moved certain ways. Sometimes she awoke with the pain of her breasts still full of milk, and for that brief muzzy instant between sleep and alertness treasured the feeling, false though it was.
Never again
kept slipping into the future. “Life is one more test,” she added.
“Yes, yes, that’s what we tell the girls. It makes nice philosophy for them to whisper over after lights-out. But really, life is for living. After this, only you will set yourself to more.”
“Have you ever stopped setting tests for yourself?” she asked Biggest Sister.
“No.” Biggest Sister smiled. “But my Sister Nurse always did say I was a fool and a dreamer.”
Big Sister held the bag. She already knew what was in it, just by the feel — her old sharkskin scourge. With her old name coiled in copper round the handle.
“There’ve been three sisters take the hardest way these past two years,” said Biggest Sister. She folded her hands around a cup of kava, but did not lift it to her lips. “In that same time, four Big Sisters have gone to rest beneath the stones, and one has taken the blue in deference to her age.” The cup twirled slowly in her hand. “I am sure you have studied arithmetic.”
“Yes,” said Big Sister. “I can count.”
“We are not dying away, far from it.” Another twirl. “We are at some danger of losing the edge of our blade, becoming in time nothing more than an order of monials ministering to the poor and the victims of the state.”
“And if we did not run bawd houses and guard the dark pleasure rooms and take money from the cash boxes of the petty merchants?”
Biggest Sister sipped this time before answering. “We
protect
, and we aid. That is not the same thing as bettering. If we did not do these things, someone else would. Someone else always will. Someone male, who does not care for women, who will not trim the balls off those men who prey on children and break the pelvises of whores. Someone who will simply count the money and throw a few more bodies to the sharks. And they would not give hospice or teach beggar children to read or make sure the potshops have meat in the soup kettles.”
They would not beat bloody the girls growing between hinge and post, either
, Big Sister thought, but she kept her words within. As she had always known, there was a sad wisdom to everything the Tribade did.
“There is…more,” Biggest Sister said. “You have not reached this lore yet, but believe me, there is more. Much sleeps beneath stones and behind walls in this City Imperishable that is not seen in daylight. And for good reason. Along with others, we guard those secrets. Only the Big Sisters, though. And you must past this final test before your title is more than honor.”
Big Sister drew the sharkskin scourge from its bag. Though it loomed huge in her memories, the thing seemed small in her hand. A toy, almost. She’d wielded worse straining at pleasure with some of the other sisters who had a taste for the rough trade.
But never used such a thing on a child.
“This,” Big Sister began, then stopped. She took a deep breath. Her hand shook as it held the scourge. “This is what is wrong with us.”
“No.” There was an infinite, awful gentleness in Biggest Sister’s voice. “That is what is wrong with the world, that we must raise some of our Girls so in order to be strong enough to stand against it.”
They were quiet a moment as a waiter passed with a basket of hot rolls, spiced with cardamom and sea salt. He didn’t see the scourge lying in Big Sister’s hand, and he never would. It was why some among the Tribade met here to talk from time to time.
“Hear me now: there is a greater wrong to come,” said Biggest Sister. “This last test. A distillation of our way. You must give life before you can take it. This you have done. Now you must take life before you can have power over the life and death of others. You must kill for the City Imperishable, for the Tribade, for yourself.”
“With this?” Big Sister asked. “It would be a sad and messy business.”
“With that. So you come full circle, releasing the last of your name.” Biggest Sister put down her mug. “If you do not do this thing, you will still be a Big Sister. In other times you would have remained a Gray Sister, but our need is too great. But you will never rise to Bigger or Biggest Sister, and you will never see the inner secrets that we guard. And you will never wield the blade against someone’s neck, either in your hand or by your word.” She stood. “Come to me when the thing is done. Tonight, or half a lifetime from now, come to me.”
“What thing? Who am I to kill?” Big Sister hated the fear that trembled in her tones.
“The child who you would have been,” said Biggest Sister. Her voice was distant as the unknown sea. “Bring me the head of a girl-child, that you have killed yourself, and you are done with tests forever. Beggar or daughter of a Syndic’s house, it makes no matter to me.”
She was gone then, her cup shivering slightly on the tabletop.
Big Sister walked to the edge of the rooftop, where a wrought iron railing worked in.a pattern of roses and snakes marked the drop. She stood there, watching a pair of heavy horses draw a scrap cart quietly through the late streets. The moon was slim this night, but still it washed the streets in a purpled silver.
There were a hundred thousand people in the City Imperishable, she thought. A third of them must be children. Half of those would be girls. Would a hive miss a single bee? Would a tree miss a single apple?
Her breasts ached, and she thought she felt milk flowing across the spiral tattooed scars as she wept in the moonlight. There was no way to stop this save to become what she hated most, no way to keep promises made to herself in the earliest days save to break them with blood.
It was not what was wrong the Tribade, it was what was wrong with the world.
Slowly she picked at the copper windings on the haft of the scourge. The name of that young girl smaller than the post dropped away as flashings into the street below, where beggars swept daily for the scrap. She picked until she’d forgotten forever the name, and with it the promises, and there were no more tears in her eyes to follow the copper down.
Big Sister dropped over the railing to a three-point landing on the cobbles. If she was going to hunt a girl, the child would be taken from the highest, greatest houses in the City Imperishable. No mere beggar was going to die for her.
And then, never again, she promised herself. Big Sister ignored the hollow echo she could hear ringing from the future.
•
Greg van Eekhout
He’s five years old, and the blades of his skates rasp the ice. He thought there’d be more falling down involved, but skating turns out to be easier than he thought.
Now he’s nine. The ball rips through the net. He catches the rebound and shoots again. Rip, rebound, shoot again.
Fourteen. He makes little piles of blue eraser debris while the clock ticks away. Still twenty questions to go.
Seventeen. The seatbelt buckle presses into the small of his back as the boy leans over him, even more nervous than he is.
He’s nineteen. Rip. Rebound. Shoot again.
And twenty-two. The last age he’ll ever be. The park got dark early, but no problem. He knows this trail, and it’s good to be alone with his thoughts.
There’s a sound behind him. Are those footsteps?
•
Every third Tuesday of the month, they hold the ghost market beneath the Washington Street Bridge. You have to get there early if you want the best bargains, before the sun has a chance to warm the day.
“Hey, you wanna be a red-hot lover boy?”
I shrug. “Who doesn’t?”
Behind a folding table, in a stall built of PVC pipe and crinkled blue tarp, she’s shaped like a Willendorf Venus in a Che Guevara T-shirt. “Some people are scared to be red-hot lover boys,” she says, showing me an apparently empty beer bottle sealed with wax. “I knew this one personally. He was my neighbor. He fathered seventeen kids. Energetic, you know?” She winks. “He was in the act when his heart exploded.”
“How romantic,” I say, taking the bottle and holding it up to the gray-lilac sky. There’s nothing to see inside. “But that doesn’t sound like red-hot lover boy to me. It’s more like horny-old-man-who-wouldn’t-give-his-wives-a-break boy.”
She snatches the bottle back from me. “You’re free to shop elsewhere.”
I think of continuing this stimulating bit of dickering but then, “Dead end,” says a voice in my ear.
I tug down my wool cap and move on.
There’s a part of the market that’s not really an official part of the market. You have to go further under the bridge where, if you look up, you’ll see a green-black mess of struts and supports, like a giant spider’s web. The sound of traffic rumbling over the deck mixes with the rush of the river, and it’s like the roar of blood when you cover your ears. Go this far and you’ll find a space sectioned off with a chain-link fence. There’s a gate with a lock, but the lock doesn’t work, and if you know that you can go right in.
Good bargaining can be done here.
Some of the dealers are cooking their breakfasts over lit trashcans, and the air smells of garlic and cabbage and fish. There’s the
high-pitched tinkling of a string instrument, the tapping of a drum.
I walk up to a man sitting on a Coleman ice chest. He’s old, child-sized, his face worn and shiny like an over-polished shoe. He smiles his clean dentures at me. “I got a gun,” he says, and his hands fidget inside the pockets of his jacket.
“Um.” I take a step backwards. “Okay.”
“We can deal,” he says, “but get funny and I blow a hole in your chest.” With one curt, matter-of-fact nod, he takes a swig from a can of Dr. Pepper.
“Maybe I’ll try someone else,” I say.
He takes his hand out of his pocket, and I flinch. But the hand is empty. He waves it at me dismissively. “Go ahead,” he says. “They got nothing. Just nursing-home stuff. All old shit. Rip-offs.”
It’s a common fallacy that young and fresh is better than aged. People are paying ridiculous prices for expired infants and children, and there’s even a ring on the east side that gets tips from the doctors of terminally ill kids. It’s crazy. It’s like Dutch tulips.
“I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck,” I tell the little man. “I can recognize value when I see it.”
He looks me over thoroughly, like a tailor assessing the drape of a suit. “Huh,” he says. “Well. What’re you looking for, then?”
Some people will inhale only ghosts who died in terror. Others are interested only in little girls, or in executed convicts, or in fragile women with jittery, prescription-drugged spirits. So many kinks.
“You read the newspaper?” I say. “You hear what happened to that boy in Dump Hill?”
The expression on the old man’s face doesn’t change. He shrugs a little.
I go on: “They say they tortured him. Marks on his wrists, cigarette burns, the whole treatment. The bottles must have been singing here.” Ghosts grow excited when they know they’re about to be joined
by another of their kind. Ghosts call to their own. “You get in on any of that?”
Murder victims. Indulging in this particular kink is illegal. They’ll put you away for ten, fifteen years.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man says.
I stare at him. It’s amazing how long he can go without blinking.
“Really? You don’t have a piece of him? Well, okay. I’m sure somebody here does.” I show him the corner of a rubber-banded wad of hundreds. It’s an inch thick.
And, ah, there it is. The tiny little flicker of his eyes. He glances over my shoulder.
“I don’t like the look of you,” he says.
The hundreds go back into my pocket. “Whatever. Enjoy your Dr. Pepper.” I get a full twelve yards away before he calls out to me.
“Wait.”
I pause. Turn. “Snooze, you lose. I’ll deal with somebody else.” But I walk back over to him.
A hint of a smile touches his beet-colored lips. “There is nobody else. I got him closest to the moment.”
Closest to the moment.
He means he got the boy closest to the moment of death.
I spend a few moments nervously reassessing my surroundings, checking to see if anyone’s watching. Huddled figures move in the dim morning light of the market. The string instrument plink-plinks away, and the drums do an impatient toe-tap.
I give him a nod and he produces an apple juice bottle capped with a strip of duct tape.
This part is necessary. The bottle’s contents are invisible, and no buyer would part with his hard-earned cash without a sniff. And I have to make sure it’s genuine stuff for reasons of my own.
The man tears off a strip of tape from a roll and sets the bottle down on his ice chest. I crouch down and lean forward. Everything happens quickly, now. He pokes the bottle’s seal with a sewing needle, and I get a whiff, and then the strip of new tape goes over the bottle.
•
He’s two, and the grass tickles his feet.
He’s fourteen. Cigarette smoke burns the back of his throat, but he proudly suppresses the cough.
He slides his hand under her shirt, thinking of someone else. The opening chords of the song say everything about him worth knowing. Rip, rebound, shoot again. Three. A Birthday card. Fifteen. The bitter first taste of beer. Running, laughing across the finish line. Footsteps and pain.
•
“Eight-hundred,” the old man says.
I give him the money and take possession of the bottle.
Very clearly, so there’s no possibility of being misheard, I say the prearranged words: “That’s good stuff.”
And the voice in my ear says, “Take him.”
The tinkling string instrument falls silent. The drum beats stop. Hats are thrown off, shawls discarded, and a surge of blue windbreakers descends on the old man.
The honor of handcuffing him is mine.
•
And long after, when I’m in the office banging out my report on my coffee-stained keyboard, the boy is still with me. He rises in my head, not just his death-moment — the bright, acidic terror, the sorrow of knowing that the only end to his torment is the end of everything — all that is just the sharp edge.
But what cuts deep is his life. The thousands of small moments. The diary moments, the formless events, the pinings and hungers and little victories — all of it. I live every second of it. I am him. All the sweet and bitter richness of his life.
I have been on the task force for six years.
I have tasted many ghosts.
They never go away. I am their vessel, and I will carry them for the rest of my life.
Everyday, my street value increases.
When I come to die — take a bullet in the face, jump off a bridge, do a morphine fade-out in a hospital bed — someone’s going to have a good business day.
•