I kinda want to get a turtle, but when I leave for a few weeks, no one would feed it.
Karesh Ni, Chapter 6
Previous Chapters
Chapter 6
As I descended, I thought about Whitefire. After leaving the Baroness’s office I’d asked about them because I’m super curious and definitely not just nosy.
Whitefire followed Starlight, one of several Celestial elements (Alyssa knew another, Lightning). They were lead by a Hierophant and four Eparchs, Kyria having been Hierophant before and Amon Tim being the Hierophant now. Hierophant Mal Set had built this fortress up among the stars, their source of power, after they fled in exile. It was called Karesh Ni, the Silver City.
When asked why the Ashirai empire ordered broad sanction against Whitefire, the Kagerani had generally agreed that nearly a century ago, Ashirai Emperor Thullus had married a young woman, Aryce, who’d already been engaged to Maurius, a Whitefire initiate. Royal Ashirai weddings are three-day affairs where the couple don’t sleep together until the third day, the first day of celibacy representing a sacrifice to their gods and the second a sacrifice for the people. By tradition the groom stays awake partying while the bride gets some sleep so the whole world can attest to their celibacy before heaven. Thullus had caught Aryce and Maurius breaking celibacy during God’s Night.
Before dawn he’d dragged them to the Gold River that runs through Ashirak, and before being cast in, Maurius had cursed him and all his people. Thullus had heaved him into the rapids himself, and within those waters, Maurius had been drowned or beaten to death on rocks. Aryce had begged for mercy, but when Thullus lifted her as he had her lover, she cursed him as well. She followed Maurius.
The romantic ending of the story is the lovers found each other down there. I don’t know.
But that didn’t cause the Maurite Prohibition. That came later. During the somewhat subdued feast of the People’s Night, Thullus had a bit too much to drink and went to the Gold River’s canyon wall to taunt their ghosts. The canyon wall gave way, and Thullus fell to his death.
The Empire left without an emperor, the Baron of Dylath-Leen, the Saffron Prince of Tyr, and Duke Larange, a cousin of Thullus’s, all went to war for the throne. The legions stayed out of it, and the Prince of Tyr won. However the oaths the Red Guard swore were to the ‘Emperors of Ashirak, born sons of Jermaine, Kings of Kings,’ and a matter of bloodlines precluded the Saffron Prince from taking the seat. When he tried, the legions threatened mutiny.
Prince Eigen of Tyr, the Saffron Prince, apparently told the Reds to kick rocks. Two legions marched on Tyr, and on the morning of the battle when the Prince realized that he was going to have to fight the Red Guard, the Swordsmen of Ashirai, he suddenly discovered a willingness to negotiate.
In the play Birthright of Gods the Red legions send their lowliest foot solder, Ve Therrin, to challenge the entire Tyrian military to a series of single combats. After seeing his forces ruined by one man, the Prince sued for peace. Pretty much everyone agrees that didn’t actually happen.
Anyway, without the bloodline to take the throne, the Prince Eigen ordained himself king, demoted everyone else to less-than-kings, a custom which continued to Alyssa’s ‘royal baronacy,’ and the legions declared obedience to the king of Tyr. End of that, right?
Of course not. Perhaps you see the loophole? If not, let me give you a hint. Duke Larange had a daughter, Hnoss, who at this point was eight. The Prince Eigen of Tyr was fifty three and married.
The Emperors of Ashirak were ‘sons of Jermaine’ and drew their birthright from direct descent from one of the gods of old. He couldn’t take the throne of Ashirak, but he could give it to a son, provided the mother of his son was Larange’s daughter.
His wife Tamora did not agree. She murdered him and Hnoss (the eight-year old!), the legions murdered her, and the Baron of Dylath-Leen took the throne, swearing the same oaths to respect the line. The throne was ‘given back to Jermaine’ since no one lived of his lineage to take it.
The Baron blamed the whole thing on Maurius and Aryce, because clearly their curses led to this affair. Rumor escaped that followers of Whitefire were to be rounded up and beheaded, their mouths stuffed up or tongues pulled out, and none of them stayed around to find out if the rumors were true. On pain of death, the followers of Whitefire were exiled from the lands of Asharai for the evil power of their curses.
The killing of Hnoss is the part that really got me. It was a hundred years ago, so I suppose it’s just history, but there was no reason for that! She was eight!
Kageran had joined the Ashirai Empire about twenty years back. Queen Alyssa had become Baroness Alyssa. Citi Kageran had accepted the Maurite Prohibition. Many Whitefire refugees who had lived in Kageran at the time disappeared. The people I’d asked hadn’t known where they’d gone, nor about this place. Alyssa and Satre had but seemed to have kept their mouths closed. The feeling of having secret knowledge, that I was one of the elect, pleased me. In spite of the cold, I hurried down the stairs.
Several hours later, that feeling of being special was really struggling to keep up with the desire to feel my toes.
I decided to give up. At the time, I was several hours into the murderously cold descent and had stopped to huddle on the stairs and eat another flat. I’d been walking in a trance, concentrating on keeping my footing on the wide, flat, and smooth stairs. Since I couldn’t feel my feet, every step had an element of hazard to it. I wouldn’t know I was slipping until too late. A low balustrade ringed the stairway, intricately working in white marble, and I sat by one of the balusters. For a while I looked out at the world, the skies undimmed by clouds, and wondered why I wasn’t overwhelmed.
I was too cold to be overwhelmed.
That was it. If you’re too cold to appreciate the vastness of space, the world laid out like a painting, and mythical architecture, you are too cold for anything. I ate my flat. I gave up. I slouched over to tie my shoes and happened to look down, past the stairway.
The island that hung below was a brown island about a deep cone. From an outer triangle, it rose to a vaguely circular ridge, and inside the ridge a deep pit sank into more white stone. Houses, buildings, roads, and clustered on the ridge like white crows sitting on rooftops, and two greater palaces stood on either side. One of the white stairways descended to each of them. The gold rope sank into the very center of the central pit.
The mountainsides were grim and dull, covered in the naked trunks of brown trees. Yet between them grew a few evergreens, dark enough to look brown or black themselves. At the center of the pit bubbled a white froth, and mist flowed through cracks in the right to fall down the slope. Cloud rivers fell off the sides of the island like smoke rises from a candle yet in reverse, descending smoothly in straight lines until they began to fold and curl up before catching the winds and spreading. They blew east, the direction Pallas passed far below. A wide band of milky white light flowed underneath the island.
I ate another flat.
Okay, fine, I thought, and I un-gave up. It was right there. I had to be almost done. This was one of those darkest-before-the-dawn moments.
It wasn’t. I wasn’t even close. I had to go twice as far as I’d come before. It turned so cold my eyes hurt. My eyelids froze shut, and I couldn’t see. I had to thaw them with my fingers, which made my fingers freeze, and then I had to thaw my fingers with my breath.
I got stubborn, kept going, did an awful lot of whining, said some very, very unfriendly things about Alyssa, Satre, people in general, and used a bunch of language that would not make Prince Aehr swoon with desire.
Did elves swoon?
They’d better. Someone was swooning after all this, and it wasn’t going to be me.
Honestly, I was getting pretty tired and felt like I could go for a swoon.
I couldn’t swoon now. I’d fall over the railing.
I kept walking.
#
The bottom of the stairs flattened out on a wide landing. On either side, the landing looked like it ended in cliffs, but that was because the landing was perched on one of the high points of that central ring-like ridge. There were paths and lower buildings below on both sides. Forward and behind more buildings rose from the crest, some of them geometric with windows and doors, some botanical like alabaster flowers, and some oddly shaped like spirals or points, all made of that same white marble.
Two stood out. One, a huge white orchid, stood by itself, and the body of the building resembled a closed flower, just in the act of unfurling. Between the petals, a red and gold light escaped. The other resembled a dragon’s skull and was the only animal-looking thing around. It perched on the crest of the ridge some distance behind me. It was a little bigger than a house.
I squinted at the dragon skull when the stairs passed overhead. It could be real. Dragons did get that big, and the skull was grayer than marble. The eyes, nostrils, and mouth had been blocked up with stone, making the difference obvious. But a skull that big would need a body even bigger, and I didn’t see any half-mile dragon carcasses lying on the island.
I didn’t see many people, and those I did see moved quickly. They usually had white cloaks with pointed hoods, ornamented with stars or silver bands. Many of their clothes looked quilted, with plenty of white designs sewn into white jackets, coats, and pants.
I don’t think they had much dye. That catches me by surprise sometimes, even as long as I’ve been here. People generally work with whatever color thread comes off the sheep or plant. Kageran is so unusual in its colors. Here, I spotted embroidery, but it was all the same white thread as the basic garment.
They didn’t look prepared for the cold. Most had little white shoes with turned-down cuffs no higher than the ankles and no gloves. They hustled, outdoors and walking quickly down a street, to return indoors again with a slammed door behind them.
I also spotted stair guards, and they looked miserable.
Sitting in a little hut facing the stairway were three people. Each one wore two or three of those white cloaks, but the same tiny shoes. Two had their arms folded with hands inside their armpits, but one’s sleeves hung floppily empty. I saw little pink fingers poking up through her collar as she breathed on her hands. The man on her left was frowning so hard his wrinkles looked like creases, and another man had his head down against his chest.
I was about two circuits up when one bumped another and pointed at me. They spoke among themselves, and someone ran off. I couldn’t very well turn around now, so I kept going. Before long several more guards arrived with one among them who seemed in charge, a dark-skinned Malician woman with her hair done up like two cacti. They stood informally at the bottom of the stairs, waiting.
Half a circuit up, I paused, tried to shake off the cold, and decided what I wanted to say. I adjusted my clothing and gear into the most comfortable manner. Then I walked down with fingertips on the railing.
The waiting party said nothing as they stood at attention, watching.
On a hunch, I stuck my both hands into my pockets as I stepped down onto the wide marble landing, and the lady in charge said, “On bound law, do not move.”
“Okay.” I did not move my hands out of my pockets.
“I am Eparch Tel Viv. Who are you?”
“Astrologamage Elegy.”
Official people tend to like following their own rhythm, so I let her go.
“Astrologamage Elegy, you have entered Karesh Ni. Do you have a mark of passage?”
“No.”
“Then you are detained and shall come with me for questioning. Do you have any remarks?”
“I’m here to see Hierophant Amon Tim,” I said.
She gave me side-eye while the guards stared straight ahead or turned their necks to stare at me.
“We’ll see about that. Hospitaller Ain Var, bind her hands and feed.”
The original lady guard, there were three there now not including Tel Viv, said, “Ma’am,” and took some white ribbons from her pocket. She looked like she’d been holding them while she waited.
Detaining seemed much like being arrested. They searched me and found the knives in my sleeves, belts, and boots. They missed two. We didn’t talk. The guards in the hut rotated, and Tel Viv lead the rest away.
We passed rows of sterile white houses with dead lawns out and empty gardens. Frozen watercourses, dry fountains, pristine white pathways swept of old leaves branched off the roads we followed, looking like they’d been carved of ice. The whole city, glorious, elegant, and polished, looked like some abominable dream in crystal. I was so tired.
People had told me about this. I didn’t listen. Mountaineers, Malicians, the incomprehensible people who voluntarily live even further north than Malice: they talk about how the cold wakes you up at first but then puts you to sleep, confuses your brain, and makes you stupid. I’m not stupid, so I’d just ignored them when they said the cold does it. But I was suffering the cold now, and it wasn’t some brutal, anguish of suffering. I wasn’t being cut by blades or burned with irons. I was just cold, miserable, dumb, and I hated it. The only way I could fight back against the cold was not complaining, so I walked along as silent as everyone else, as silent as the ghost-shaped people who watched from the rowhouses, as silent as the houses themselves. We entered the white lotus palace, veined with glittering quartz, and shaped like a blossom opening to the moon. It was, I would learn, the Sunset Basilica, and it had been made by humans imitating elves.
Movies
I’m still looking for movies I like as much as the LotR trilogy.
The Creed movies were surprisingly good. Same for John Wick. The Marvel movies are basically over, flanderized into nonsensical lights and sound.
I haven’t been able to get into any of the books I’ve read recently. Well, not the fiction ones. I read Feynman’s QED, and it was good, but I’m not writing electron/photon slash.
idk. Keep searching, I guess.
KN6
That should not have been published yet.
Natural wonders
Morphological rivers and trees
Notes
I haven’t figured out a way to schedule updates to the Archives yet. I’m working on it.
The recent fiction tab on the right side-bar is as close to an event calendar possible without really monkeying with some stuff under the hood. We’ll see if that works. Everything over there is uploaded already, so those are pretty stable.
Loading ...Twilight in Heaven: Chapter 10
Chapter 10
“Hold on, hold on, hold on I appreciate your help down there. I’m Aesthus of Hemlin, of the Line of Tollos. Thank you.” One of the cousins held his hands up, palm out.
He caught me by surprise. And after a moment, I replied, “You’re welcome. Thank you.”
The others looked like they didn’t know what to say, so they said nothing. I couldn’t fault them, but that left all the talking to Aesthus.
He continued. “You said you’re here to acquire the saber?”
I nodded.
“We can–” He paused. “—talk about that.” He paused again to make up his mind over something. “As I said, I’m Aesthus. These are my cousins, Zenjin, Osret, Apseto, and Nurim.”
The cousins looked varyingly wary, curious, or distrustful.
“Let’s temper blades,” said Aesthus. He glanced around.
The cousins had just not-fought each other, so they showed varying levels of willingness to not-fight me. Most looked guarded but listening.
“You too,” Aesthus told me. “You saved me, and I appreciate it. Let’s not waste your effort.”
I felt like arguing, but Aesthus was leaving everyone a way out. Besides, I’d saved their lives, and I’d be throwing that away if I fought them, something that moments ago, I’d been trying to figure out how not to do. This whole situation was making me short tempered.
But now that I was aware of it, I could fix it.
“Thank you. I’m pleased to meet you,” I said and waved specifically to Osret. He didn’t reply with much grace, but he nodded back. “I’m pleased to meet you all.”
“Come,” said Aesthus. “We live nearby. We’d be honored if you joined us.”
And again, I let myself agree.
We left the beach, avoiding the water if we could. In some stretches, there was no alternative, but the nereids did not pursue us while we looked for them.
#
The cousins Hemlin had a small palace that was basically a wide townhouse. Five stories tall with a courtyard out back, its second story overhung a tunnel through the first floor. The tunnel opened into the courtyard where a circle of smaller cobble stones between large slabs of sandstone formed the center of the back yard. Behind rose a small garden that seemed mostly full of strange rocks and small huts. The cousins lead me through an elegant glass door to a tiny foyer, a wide staircase, and on the second floor a large receiving room. They lit a fire from an ember dish, and offered me a stiff drink or a warm towel.
I took both, but the towel first.
Zenjim put the blade on the main table and patted it dry. I sat where I could see it.
“You said you’re prepared to pay for it?” asked Aesthus.
I considered before nodding.
“This is the only one left. It’s rare now, perhaps rarer. That’s got to be worth something.”
Maybe, I thought. There had been two assassin’s parties.
“How do you know?” I said, equally cautiously.
“Mallens didn’t just break the seashore. He broke the earth. There’s a power in him, an energy. When he strikes something, it comes apart, and not merely in breaking. The stuff of it disintegrates. I think he did not truly stamp this sword. Perhaps it was close to his foot but not hit. Maybe it had already been dropped and fell into the pit. But we found nothing else of its like, and we are from the high mountains. Apseto is particularly clever with finding things in stone, even stone under water.”
Apseto didn’t look cocky, but he did look confident.
“What if it’s in sand?” I asked.
“Sand is just a lot of very small stones,” said Apesto.
If that was how it worked for him, so be it.
“I’ll show a few cups,” I said and pointed at the copied sword. “I’m here to get that, and I’m willing to pay for it. My customer is willing to pay in cash, so there is no reason to be concerned about favors or credit. I was at the beach looking for the sword when we met and saved your lived. You owe me. Business is business, but enjoy all that breathing you’re doing. Drowning is a hard way to go.”
“Who’s your customer?” asked Zenjin.
“No,” I said. “That doesn’t need to be discussed.”
The group of them glanced at each other, and a silent conversation of shrugs and facial expressions told me they didn’t feel like arguing the point.
“I’m going to go change my clothes,” said Aesthus. He was dripping. We all were. “I don’t think we have anything that will fit you, but can I lend you some sweats?”
“Thank you. I’d appreciate that.”
Again Aesthus deflated the tension, but his idea was a good one. I didn’t want to let the saber out of my sight. They wouldn’t leave me alone with it. With some towels and a little consideration, everyone changed and met back up in their living room, arrayed on couches around the chair.
Aesthus wasn’t quite as big as the others and had a slightly softer look. He’d changed into khaki pants and a fitted sweater, leather shoes, and leather belt. My stubble was longer than the hair on his head.
Osret wasn’t quite as tall but wider built, and he wore tight clothing to show off his muscles. None of his shirts had sleeves.
Zenjin was a bigger guy but didn’t have the gym build of Osret. He had a huge back, shoulders, and gut. He wore designer t-shirts and jeans, the sort of sports shoes that get dropped in limited quantities. A silver-handled Puritan nestled under his left arm, set for a cross-body draw. No one else seemed to be carrying a gun, so it certainly was a statement, but fashion or security?
Puritans, from the 22nd Testament of Thorophus the Weapon Maker, were good guns. They were such good guns people collected them, which made them rare, then valuable, and now they were fashion statements themselves. Still, they shot straight and rarely jammed.
Apseto showed up in a suit, and I don’t know a whole lot about suits. His seemed to fit well. He had thunderbolts on his tie pin, thunderbolt cufflinks, and a brown shirt with a white tie that drew attention to his face. They said he could find things in stone, even stone under water. That could be a valuable skill, depending on how good he was, and he wore the suit comfortably. He didn’t pick at it.
Nurim sized up the bunch of us and started making something in the kitchen. He threw chips in a bowl, got everyone a glass of water or beer, and brought out some bread and a few spreads. He was always moving, cleaning plates or putting glasses on coasters. He and Aesthus were slim compared to the others, but they were still big guys. He wore jeans of some unremarkable make, a hooded sweater, a watch he kept checking, and slip-on shoes. He changed the latter twice during our meeting.
I started. “Let’s talk peacefully. I’m not looking for a fight.”
“I don’t see why that’s relevant,” said Zenjin. “You’re mortal. There are five of us. A fight won’t go well for you.”
“He’s hiding his power,” said Aesthus. He looked at me. “I don’t think the fight will go the way you think it will, but since you attacked nereids in water, you’ve got something in reserve. But let’s put that aside. Temper blades. You’re not looking for a fight, we’re not looking for a fight. How much?”
“And when and where and all that,” said Nurim, coming in with snacks. “You’re not carrying any suitcases full of cash.”
“Yeah, also we’re not letting the sword out of our sight,” said Zenjin.
“The hand-over can be arranged.” I tried to wave pleasantly. “One or all of you can follow me to where I have the money.”
“Let’s talk about that,” said Apseto. “How much?”
The sidebars stopped. Nurim in the kitchen stopped puttering. Zenjin leaned forward, elbows on knees. All eyes watched me.
I’d made two payment drops for each of the two groups. The killers had been paid half up front and half for after the job was done.
I’d never known exactly how Koru made his riches. Earlier, I hadn’t cared. Now I cared, but I didn’t know. He had money. Bills, bribes, and charitable donations had all been paid, and I’d paid most of them. I had also hidden small packages of silver coins and ambrosia for the successful assassins.
I’d been such an honest fool. I hadn’t taken a coin or a bite. The money waited for me now.
I said, “Forty two thousand.”
That was a bad lowball. Forty two thousand sesteres was new horse money, maybe even nice new horse, but not a race winner nor a good sire. It would make a downpayment on a home. Someone like me could live easily on forty two thousand a year and scrimp it out three years. All four drops combined had about five hundred thousand.
“That seems a little light,” said Aesthus.
“It’s a magnficient blade,” I said. “It’s also stolen. It was used in the commission of a crime, and people will come looking. Problems will come. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. And the saber will disappear and you can say, with utmost honesty, you have no idea where it is.”
“We know your name,” said Osret. He stuck his chin out at me.
I had to bite back a quick remark. Osret was hot-tempered to begin with. I had things too say but for once, didn’t say them.
“You are correct,” I agreed neutrally. “You know my name, Remus.”
Apseto sighed. He and Osret sat on a couch together, and Apseto leaned over and whispered something to the other.
Osret kept a stoneface for several seconds. “Of course. You are Remus, and when someone comes looking for the saber, I will tell them Remus has it.”
“Please do,” I said.
Mental clockwork shifted everyone else in the room. Nurim glanced at Aesthus, and if I had to guess, I’d say Nurim was recalling Aesthus saying I was hiding my power.
“Ten million,” said Zenjin.
“Nope.” I shook my head and ignored him.
“It’s a rare and stolen sword. The rest are destroyed. Ten million,” he insisted.
“That’s not an offer.”
“I said ten million, and we’ve got it right now.” Zenjin moved forward a little on his chair.
I reached out, took a slice of bread, and examined the sauces. Nurim had laid out butter, olive oil, and something yellow and ganular. I don’t think it was hummus, but I bet it was close enough to rhyme. I scraped invisible butter on the bread and layered over top with the hummus stuff.
I took a bite. My mistake: it was hummus, but they’d mixed ambrosia in here.
Wow.
I wasn’t faking. It tasted like euphoria. My wounds began to close. My scrapes healed. My aching muscles felt salved. Those little wrinkles of tension around my eyes relaxed, and I suddenly noticed a coldness in my side by the way it faded.
I had really lowballed them with that offer.
“This is really good.” I held it up to Nurim. “Sourdough?”
He nodded. “We get it from the artsy place down the street. Girls like it.”
Zenjin said, “What about the–”
And Aesthus interrupted him, “Do you mind if we take a moment?” he asked me.
I waved the bread. “Please do. I’ll be here.”
They looked at me, the saber, and gears clicked behind every pair of eyes. I waited.
The cousins got up and moved into the kitchen, forming a small huddle between the stove and an island of counter.
I tried to look relaxed and dangerous. I tried to look thoughtful. I thought, but I was thinking about ambrosia in hummus.
We had tried to kill the Lord of Creation for a million sesteres. One thousand miles, a ton, two weeks pay for a legion. We’d tried to kill the King of the Gods for a million sesteres. And these fools who had the saber had enough money to put ambrosia in the hummus!
Their house was worth more than a million.
I was in the wrong line of work.
A volcano went off between my ears. I heard nothing but eruptions and thunder. I thought of stale wayhouse sandwiches and of not being able to afford stale wayhouse sandwiches so I stayed hungry until I made it home. I thought of sleeping hungry so I could eat manna in the morning.
They’d laid out a whole spread of artsy bread with ambrosia in the hummus.
These guys could get blisters. I wasn’t going to stop for appearances. I ate all their hummus.
Morning
Swimming is tiring.
News Blog Hackers
Who hacks computers in a ski mask and a hoodie?
The hoodie I get. But the hood should be down. The ski mask makes no sense.
And don’t get me wrong, I understand. The websites are defying reality, good journalism, and basic standards of reporting to spin a narrative of ‘spooky computer guy’ when we all know spooky computer guys usually aren’t that spooky. When the narrative defies the facts, the narrative wins and society loses.
Any website that does this shall be held in low regard. It is written.
Karesh Ni: Chapter 5
Chapter 5
For all that she had me over a barrel, I got something else out of it. I got land. Baronness Alyssa offered me a small manor house within Kageran proper. Manse Plachar filled about a quarter of one of Kageran’s round city blocks, with a shared private well in the center. It needed some work. The roof leaked, and there were mice in the walls. But a complete refurbishment was only a mark or so, even for an eighteen room mansion with a summer kitchen. Manse Plachar came with a title as well, and I would be Lady Elegy of Kageran.
It’s not a high title, but it’s the first step above.
So I sat on a boat in the middle of the lake, waiting for moonrise. The Sun would rise swiftly behind the waning Moon, but for now the sky held nothing but stars. It was bitterly cold. The Baroness’s office had been chilly; this was a compound hell. Wind blowing down the Aph valley carried all the Doon’s chill. There was no snow, but a fine sleet of dust and sand from the uplands stung my face. Waves beat away from the wind, pulling my boat elsewhere.
I was wrapped up in every blanket I could carry. Every few minutes I would unwrap myself enough to pull the oars and row back to the point Alyssa had prescribed west of the dead center of the lake. Then I swam back under my blankets and sulked. No one could see me sulking. The sky was clear. Alyssa should be stilling that wind, not watching me.
But just in case she was watching, I said some mean things about her. This was her fault.
Why don’t powerful sorcerers ever build their temples of evil on beaches? Warm beaches? Beaches where I can drink something in a coconut mug? You’re powerful sorcerers! Do warm things!
The wind gusted, I rowed back to position, and the air was so cold my face hurt. My hands ached where they weren’t numb. People do freeze to death on the water in winter. This could kill me, I realized, and not in the whiny, I-don’t-want-to-be-here way. There’s risking death for a job, but this wasn’t really the job yet. This was sitting in a boat on a nigh-frozen lake in winter, waiting for a sorceress to kill the damn wind.
You know, this just wasn’t worth it. I could cut the contract and be done. Her job was to stop the wind, and I wasn’t going to die because my employer couldn’t stop a wind from breaking up reflections–
The wind died, like a switch was flipped, and the lake-surface flattened into glass.
My boat stopped rocking. I lost all sense of time.
In the east, the trees of the Arsae rose black against a star-speckled sky. Here and there a star would peek through, twinkling as leaves blocked it, but the forest-ocean looked like a low shadow crouching on the horizon. That great thicket by the Three Sisters where ghosthearts rose high above the rest stood unusually dark, unusually tall.
The moon peaked through the thicket. The water lay flat as a mirror and the air dead still. I waited. A thin sliver of moon broke above the treetops, a bit of crescent only, and that meant soon it would be dawn.
In the lake’s surface, the reflection of the moon looked startlingly bright. Prepared as I was for sorcery, it looked mystical. But the night was dark, the trees below the moon blocked the stars, and the water was thick with silt from the mountains. I couldn’t be sure.
The moon kept rising. Its reflection brightened, I tried to discount what I saw as optics and perspective, but the reflection brightened further until the moon in the lake and the moon in the sky hurt my eyes. I blinked and glanced away.
I looked back, and the reflection was rising out of the water. A rash of bubbles set the surface foaming, and a low, white rock with a mooring pin stuck up.
I rowed once, and the boat slid through water. I winced at every wooden creak and the hint of splashing in my wake. Nothing else made a noise.
The prow bumped the rock with a solid, mundane ‘thump.’
I reached out, caught the mooring pin, and stepped from boat to rock. Up close it was white marble, veined with something translucent like quartz. The moonlight hitting the side cast rainbows thought it. I tied off the rowboat.
The moon rose further, and with it rose the platform. My rock rose on a crescent of other stones, all white and crystalline. They reached around a pool of water, the boat at the center. Every new block in the crescent appeared below the one before, and soon the boat was in the center of a small lagoon of white blocks, apparently standing unsupported in the center of the lake. The stones were as still as the water.
But the moon kept rising, and more rocks appeared underwater within the circle. They faded into view down there among the reflections of the stars, a long, spiral stairway that sank into the reflected sky. I looked east. The sickle moon was now fully above the trees, and in the water, the stairway descended up into the sky.
I walked down to the lowest part of the crescent to rise above the Hyades. Underwater the landing at the head of the stairs bridged the gap in the arc. Here the stairway that seemed to descend through the reflection of the sky rose to its highest/lowest point. The first step was right before my feet, underwater.
Do you have any idea how cold that water was going to be?
I’m really not very brave. I thought about dying, freezing to death feet first, if I stepped off the dock and onto the stairway. That’s how Alyssa said I could climb to the Karash Ni, the Silver City. But I didn’t have much time, for the Sun was closely chasing the Moon and would soon wipe the reflections and the stairway from the lake as it wiped the stars from the sky. To get to the Silver City, I had to step onto the stairway, go down into the water, while the Moon reflected. I had to start before dawn.
Back in the office, Satre had come back from his snit and reluctantly agreed with her.
“It’s not that hard,” he’d said. “It’s all downstairs, anyway.”
He’d sounded like my father. On the landing I paused, took out a small honeyed pastry called a ‘flat’, and had a snack.
#
I was born outside Indianapolis, Indiana and have exactly zero memories of it. Apparently I lived in Columbus, Ohio until I was one. But I grew up in Alexandria, Virginia in a big family, six kids, and remember it well.
I don’t know what small families are like, but big families are wondrously intense and you sort of want to murder someone. Everyone is in your business. For us this was partially because our house was so small that brothers or sisters had to be in your business. They had nowhere else to go! The parents had no money and worked odd hours, so the only thing they spent on us was time. Sometimes I wondered if they should have had such a big family when they struggled financially and realized they just really liked kids.
The parents liked messing with us. My father told outrageous lies, and my mother enjoyed having someone with her. I asked her about it growing up.
She said, “I wanted to matter. I don’t remember who won the Academy Award when I turned eight, and I don’t recall who took the Nobel Prize. I remember the president because I had to memorize him and the VP for class, but they’re just names and pictures on a wall. But I know my mother liked to cook chicken and beans, and she seasoned them with garlic. I remember my father coming home and making me take off his boots in the evening. His fingers had been run over long ago, and the way he wore his laces they ratcheted tight over the day until he couldn’t remove them at night. When I was in school I thought about trying to become a celebrity or a politician, but they only touch people superficially. I wanted to matter to someone so they would never forget me. So we had you.” And she touched my head. I was nine, she was thirty four, and she was always the most beautiful woman on Earth with black hair and a quiet smile.
“Do I have to?” I asked her. “Be a Mom and not a famous person?”
“No, sweetie. You don’t. You can if you want to, but you can be a politician, or scientist, or businesswoman, or anything you want. You can be both. Just be the best person you can be.”
Then I asked my dad why he had kids.
“Tax breaks,” he replied.
Even at nine, the peak of believing everything my father said, I had a feeling that wasn’t true.
“I don’t think you had kids for taxes, Dad!” I told him.
“We haven’t made a profit yet, but next year you’ll be old enough for the salt mines!” He wiggled his bushy eyebrows. “And we may sell your spare kidney on the black market. You have two!”
My father had the worst of all social diseases: he thought he was really funny.
My mother liked to cook with one of us kids at a time. The kitchen was tiny, and she didn’t want fighting around hot stoves and ovens. She liked our questions, she liked answering, and she liked to pat my head or touch my back while I was doing something tricky.
Dad could cook, and Mom once told me that he’d cooked for her when they’d dated, but he enjoyed stirring the pot of a great fighting mass of kids, all of us arguing and yelling, so to him fell the setting of the table with one kid, the clearing of the table with another, washing the dishes with a few more, and innumerable cleaning tasks, limited only by the number of children he could foist them off on.
Dad– I never really got a handle on Dad. Dad was far more entertained by us than Mom was. He had a bit of distance which let him observe us as pawns on a chessboard or maybe more like dogs at a park. He was immensely invested in all of us, and he enjoyed everything that went on regarding us. He liked driving us on errands because he would put someone in the front seat and talk, sometimes about economics, often the back-stabbing politics of tenure, the history of technology, or equally intensely our little struggles. He loved us, loved putting time into us, and equally loved bothering us: deep down, bone deep irritating his children. He once snuck into my room at night and unlaced all of my shoes.
Why would anyone ever do that? I just assumed it was one of the brothers, but maybe my sister because we were fighting at the time, and only years later he’d admitted it was him.
“Why?” I’d asked, astounded beyond words. I truly felt flabbergasted.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I just wanted to see what you’d do.”
Coming from Earth to Pallas is a story for another time. I can’t go back. I don’t think about the trip much, but I think about Mom and Dad, the world I lived in, and the differences between them. They don’t have flats on Earth but Pallas doesn’t have sugar like Earth. Nothing here is as sweet. Food-wise, I mean. There’s no food here as sweet.
#
But eating finishes a pastry quickly, and then I had sticky fingers and was still scared. If I stepped into the water, and that reflection of stairs was just a reflection, I’d splash right through. That would kill me. Even if I climbed out immediately, out here, on the lake, in the cold, I would die. I had blankets in the boat nearby, but I didn’t think they would matter.
But some horrible part of my brain said, You could make it. Those blankets are right over there. Even if you fall into the water, you can jump right out, wrap yourself in blankets, and you’ll be fine.
You could even quit, said my brain. Right then. If those stairs aren’t real and you fall into water, Alyssa hired you under false pretenses, and you could quit the job immediately. Take your money and go. First you just need to take that one step.
And every other part of me said, don’t do it! but that one terrible part of my brain said, just try.
I whined a little and stepped into the lake.
My foot landed on a dry marble stair. I knew where the water level should be, but inside the stone crescent the water was so clear I couldn’t see the lake at all. My foot stayed dry. I stepped off the landing and took the next step. Then I took another. Soon I was grumbling and muttering to myself, walking down a helix of stairs that descended towards stars and clouds. Behind and above, the crescent of white stone hung just like a moon in the star-speckled sky. A few revolutions down, the stone crescent was the sickle moon, hanging in a star-speckled sky, and the night-wrapped expanse of Pallas lay below.
To the east lay the dark Arsae, the great tree ocean between the elven homelands and goblin nations. To the west rose jagged mountains. The Doon, the great mountains on the north of Tenemerrair, looked like rumpled laundry thrown over big dogs. The glaciers looked white and cold, the valleys between them dark and deep, and tiny, ribbons of silver water appeared and disappeared between peaks. North and south, the mountains met the trees in a folding line. I knew that the mountains pushed east to the north and far up there the great goblinmounts rose, but I was making stuff up if I told myself I could see them. To the south, the sharp border cut hard west, and I could see peaks abutting the blackness. Further south, and I might be making up details because I knew they were there, I thought I saw the floodplains of Nar, maybe the dun grasslands of the Horned Lords to the west and the gentler trees of the Solange to the east.
Directly below me hung the Silver City. My helix of stairs danced with its match, another white marble stairway that rose from Karash Ni. That stairway rose to the black part of the moon, the shadow within the crescent. Between them ran a long gold cable, thick as a building, made of braided gold cords, themselves made of twisted gold strands. Throught the middle of it ran something white and red. If I leaned over the inside railing, I saw the stairs spiral together until vanishing at a distant point, the gold cable running through the center. If I looked outside, Pallas spread out like a misty map with dawn rising in the distance.
I stopped to appreciate the view, cold be damned, and stayed still long enough to see the world slide by. The Silver City remained a fixed point, but the ground beneath it slid east. Soon we passed the blotch of the Hyades to hang over ice-capped ripples. The mountains looked so tiny and mild. A long, thin cloud slithered by. The city stayed perfectly still as the world walked past underneath.
I wasn’t on Earth any more and hadn’t been for a long time.