The Third Bear (21 page)

At first, the corridor seemed to end in a blank wall - as disconcerting as following an arm with one's gaze only to have it end in a nub. But no: it curved once again, and beyond the curve was the office of the great man. A sparse desk. A windowless existence. Parts of things all over the floor, red and various. No chair. It was not needed.

In the light from the lamp on the desk, we could see that a giant raven stood there. It had a beak huge and ominous, which had the sheen of steel but the riddled-through consistency of driftwood, riven with wormholes and fissures. A clacking black tongue within the beak. A head like a battering ram. A body the size of a mastiff. Instead of legs and claws it had thick human forearms and hands. The fingernails were long, curved, and yellowing.

The raven inclined its head and turned one giant, bottomless eye toward us - an almond of pure black with just a hint of light reflecting from it.

"It didn't take them long," the raven said, in a deep, refined voice. "It didn't take them long at all."

At the sound of that voice, my partner began to cry: a soft weeping that I echoed from somewhere deep inside.

But I had a mission. We had a mission. Now, when it didn't matter, I took her limp, cold hand in mine and held it tight.

"We have a message to deliver," I said.

"Oh?" the raven said, considering me coldly. I saw now that dried blood had flaked all across his razor beak. "And what message is that? I'm busy here."

"You are to stop. You are to stop," I said.

"Stop what?" Bemusement beneath the dark feathers.

"Out there, they want you dead."

A soft, chuffing laugh that a bird should not be able to make. "There is no out there. Anymore."

"No," I admitted. "We didn't find much. But every time you change something, it changes there."

"Some day it may be enough," he said.

My partner made a sound, as if to speak.

"Don't you recognize her?" I asked.

"Her?" he said. "Her?" Peering.

"Don't you recognize me?" she said. "I recognize you."

The raven with the human hands turned back to his desk. Beyond that desk was a formless darkness. "That was a long time ago. That wasn't here. That wasn't this."

"It could be," she said, and took a hesitant step forward. And then another. I saw the courage that took, although I don't believe in courage.

The raven's head whipped around, and it said, almost with a snarl, "Stay back."

She stopped.

I heard a lurching sound now, coming from down the corridor. Every light behind us was dark. We existed only in the round glow of the lights in the office. I was trying to remember a life before this that might have been nothing but smoke: a cottage by a stream and a cool night with friendly stars and the weight of a woman's head against my chest as we looked up from the wet grass.

"We are here to make you stop," I said.

"I know," he said.

"Don't you remember?" she said, as the dead talk to the dead. But she was staring into the darkness beyond.

I was close enough now. I lunged across at him, in the motion I had practiced a thousand times under his watchful eye.

My arm around the surprisingly delicate neck. A quick, wrenching twist. The raven's eyes rolled up. It dropped to the floor. Dead.

I stood there, staring. Was it to be that easy?

It was not.

The darkness moved, came out into the light. It was him. Again. Much larger, but the same. The eye regarding me from above was not without love.

"I couldn't let you after all," he said. "The work is too important."

"Don't you remember?" she said, again. My partner now seemed caught in a loop. I could not help her.

The lurching came nearer.

"Your predecessor is almost here," the raven said. "I cannot stop, and you cannot stop me."

"Some day you will be convinced," I said. "And you will let me."

"Some day I will finally sleep," came the rumbling voice.

There was a wetness behind me, and a soft guttural sound as of a throat that has been cut and yet the flesh lives.

"Don't you remember?"

A sadness entered the eyes of the great man. "I remember enough to let you decide."

It was useless, but I tried. I lunged up at him, but my predecessor had caught up to me. A hand that was not a hand on my arm. A kind of intensity of motion that sucked its way into my skin, all of my skin. Tore it off. Tore it all off. All of it.

Brought me struggling to the box of starlings. Shoved me in. Left me there. Waiting for the moments when the great man and his new-old queen walk by. Waiting to sense them from the way the wings ripple differently across my face, the way the beaks and heads and claws suppurate and wriggle and try to escape, and keep trying to escape. Breathing in the spaces between.

One day, he will let me go, with or without her. He will release the starlings up through the ruined second story, through the chimney, to explode out into the sky, over the old woods. They will no longer know they are birds, as I no longer remember what I was before. But we will be flying and falling, falling and flying, and against that beating of atrophied wings, against that sharp blue, I will see the gravel path and the bridge beneath us. Returning. Remembering.

While my predecessor feeds upon me.

FIXING HANOVER

When Shyver can't lift it from the sand, he brings me down from the village. It lies there on the beach, entangled in the seaweed, dull metal scoured by the sea, limpets and barnacles stuck to its torso. It's been lost a long time, just like me. It smells like rust and oil still, but only a tantalizing hint.

"It's good salvage, at least," Shyver says. "Maybe more."

"Or maybe less," I reply. Salvage is the life's blood of the village in the off-season, when the sea's too rough for fishing. But I know from past experience, there's no telling what the salvagers will want and what they will discard. They come from deep in the hill country abutting the sea cliffs, their needs only a glimmer in their savage eyes.

To Shyver, maybe the thing he'd found looks like a long box with a smaller box on top. To me, in the burnishing rasp of the afternoon sun, the last of the winter winds lashing against my face, it resembles a man whose limbs have been torn off. A man made of metal. It has lamps for eyes, although I have to squint hard to imagine there ever being an ember, a spark, of understanding. No expression defiles the broad pitted expanse of metal.

As soon as I see it, I call it "Hanover," after a character in an old movie back when the projector still worked.

"Hanover?" Shyver says with a trace of contempt.

"Hanover never gave away what he thought," I reply, as we drag it up the gravel track toward the village. Sandhaven, they call it, simply, and it's carved into the side of cliffs that are sliding into the sea. I've lived there for almost six years, taking on odd jobs, assisting with salvage. They still know next to nothing about me, not really. They like me not for what I say or who I am, but for what I do: anything mechanical I can fix, or build something new from poor parts. Someone reliable in an isolated place where a faulty water pump can be devastating. That means something real. That means you don't have to explain much.

"Hanover, whoever or whatever it is, has given up on more than thoughts," Shyver says, showing surprising intuition. It means he's already put a face on Hanover, too. "I think it's from the Old Empire. I think it washed up from the Sunken City at the bottom of the sea."

Everyone knows what Shyver thinks, about everything. Brown-haired, green-eyed, gawky, he's lived in Sandhaven his whole life. He's good with a boat, could navigate a cockleshell through a typhoon. He'll never leave the village, but why should he? As far as he knows, everything he needs is here.

Beyond doubt, the remains of Hanover are heavy. I have difficulty keeping my grip on him, despite the rust. By the time we've made it to the courtyard at the center of Sandhaven, Shyver and I are breathing as hard as old men. We drop our burden with a combination of relief and selfconscious theatrics. By now, a crowd has gathered, and not just stray dogs and bored children.

First law of salvage: what is found must be brought before the community. Is it scrap? Should it be discarded? Can it be restored?

John Blake, council leader, all unkempt black beard, wide shoulders, and watery turquoise eyes, stands there. So does Sarah, who leads the weavers, and the blacksmith Growder, and the ethereal captain of the fishing fleet: Lady Salt as she is called - she of the impossibly pale, soft skin, the blonde hair in a land that only sees the sun five months out of the year. Her eyes, ever-shifting, never settling - one is light blue and one is fierce green, as if to balance the sea between calm and roiling. She has tiny wrinkles in the corners of those eyes, and a wry smile beneath. If I remember little else, fault the eyes. We've been lovers the past three years, and if I ever fully understand her, I wonder if my love for her will vanish like the mist over the water at dawn.

With the fishing boats not launching for another week, a host of broadfaced fisher folk, joined by lesser lights and gossips, has gathered behind us. Even as the light fades: shadows of albatross and gull cutting across the horizon and the roofs of the low houses, huddled and glowing a deep goldand-orange around the edges, framed by the graying sky.

Blake says, "Where?" He's a man who measures words as if he had only a few given to him by Fate; too generous a syllable from his lips, and he might fall over dead.

"The beach, the cove," Shyver says. Blake always reduces me to a similar terseness.

"What is it?"

This time, Blake looks at me, with a glare. I'm the fixer who solved their well problems the season before, who gets the most value for the village from what's sold to the hill scavengers. But I'm also Lady Salt's lover, who used to be his, and depending on the vagaries of his mood, I suffer more or less for it.

I see no harm in telling the truth as I know it, when I can. So much remains unsaid that extra lies exhaust me.

"It is part of a metal man," I say.

A gasp from the more ignorant among the crowd. My Lady Salt just stares right through me. I know what she's thinking: in scant days she'll be on the open sea. Her vessel is as sleek and quick and buoyant as the water, and she likes to call it Seeker, or sometimes Mist, or even just Cleave. Salvage holds little interest for her.

But I can see the gears turning in Blake's head. He thinks awhile before he says more. Even the blacksmith and the weaver, more for ceremony and obligation than their insight, seem to contemplate the rusted bucket before them.

A refurbished water pump keeps delivering from the aquifers; parts bartered to the hill people mean only milk and smoked meat for half a season. Still, Blake knows that the fishing has been less dependable the past few years, and that if we do not give the hill people something, they won't keep coming back.

"Fix it," he says.

It's not a question, although I try to treat it like one.

Later that night, I am with the Lady Salt, whose whispered name in these moments is Rebecca. "Not a name men would follow," she said to me once. "A land-ish name."

In bed, she's as shifting as the tides, beside me, on top, and beneath. Her mouth is soft but firm, her tongue curling like a question mark across my body. She makes little cries that are so different from the orders she barks out ship-board that she might as well be a different person. We're all different people, depending.

Rebecca can read. She has a few books from the hill people, taught herself with the help of an old man who remembered how. A couple of the books are even from the Empire - the New Empire, not the old. Sometimes I want to think she is not the Lady Salt, but the Lady Flight. That she wants to leave the village. That she seeks so much more. But I look into those eyes in the dimness of half-dawn, so close, so far, and realize she would never tell me, no matter how long I live here. Even in bed, there is a bit of Lady Salt in Rebecca.

When we are finished, lying in each other's arms under the thick covers, her hair against my cheek, Rebecca asks me, "Is that thing from your world? Do you know what it is?"