CW: religion, criminal justice, corporal punishment, capital punishment, skin horror, bones
Quiet force - where do you whine
At turn’s edge - at noose’s ribbon
Phoenix, dust maker - now I see you
Painted orange on the warm berry glass
Savannah - desiccate, world of land -
Phantom, spell, flooding vessel -
My knife blunts and bends back
Ka! My full hand, my pale dress
Beyond me is the rounding wall
Outside my under eye and hand
And in that cushioned voice - petal
The water stilled - winter dream
Craft - Bara III
“At that time, Red Bird was the one red thing in the world: no other thing sang red. Red Bird was the one hand, and the one eye, and may as well have been a rock tumbling down that hill. Round and round e may have rolled, circling the valley, cracking on the other rocks and getting redder. The day had passed. “Where can I go?” Red Bird thought to emself, “How can I follow this raindrop in my head?”. For e had now seen the length and breadth of the worldover, had sang and gyred and threw eir barks down into the land. But nothing had come for em.
“This can’t be right,” e said. “I’ll figure out a way. This one-eye jewel I carry has to fit in somewhere – I’ll jam it in!”
Red Bird flew to the flattest water e could find, and dropped eir one eye down like a star to where the cleft river slept. Now it disappeared, surface-first - the waves bent outward, recoiling from the ripple that passed through the water but was not a part of it. Through the growing concentric circles phasing through the water, Red Bird's falling eye spun without its talon socket.
Suddenly the world was reversed. The water was a mirror - and now that eye was immersed entirely in a mirror, and the water recognized the water in the eye as water, and the eye became a mirror. E looked up-down at the sky from above the water’s surface, still within the water!”
Skyland, Nestsong, Redname: Selected Folklore Transliterations of Pre-Contact Savannah
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Record IX
of the last days spent in the city Quay before a further flight
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In the calculus of good and evil there is but one variable for us, and it is sensation. Flesh takes precedent over spirit: this is so unintuitive that not until the establishment of neighborly studies was it able to be articulated. Only that distant lens would gain the context necessary to parse our own history of life, and the pattern of what God had etched into us. Only weighed against those million-year tapestries could we see our own place in the weave.
We, as tellurian creatures, are inherently bound to a body. A single human perspective is necessarily as vast as the entire world it observes, it can hold it all. This contradiction turns an animal into a person.
It is a truth so short and sweet that the Ecumene and its predecessor organizations struggled to admit it in explicit creed text, even as the principle organized them. The dichotomy of “pain and love” is a sign of an older era, and a less mature understanding based on pure emotion and spiritual state. “Good and evil” is likewise flat moral judgment, words that can only be gestured to but never defined. “Injury and health” is the correct view, that which takes away and that which grants the proper functioning of the body. That which allows freedom of movement - a body that can live in the way its soul loves - that can run and work by the urges of its heart and comrades. This grounds our perspective in the state of others until it encompasses the world.
An honorable pain builds future health, and love is worthless if its object is injury. When something you love is burning - when they are gripped in a pain that cripples - "good and evil" will run like water through your fingers, for here is the world of mass and mortar. Now is our time of blood and birth. Here is our sanctioned lesson, between dream and death. What is injuring the world? What is healing it?
Kali and I sat at the center of the grave tree. This – this central cradle of roots – was where eir master held eir loose daily court. Kali emself still did occasionally, and so a small audience flitted in and out of earshot, still eager to hear the king.
“It can happen,” e answered one of them, “A singer hears speech and comes to understand word in the lens of song - icebolt. Word is that which moves the real, eternal lens forming and misforming. Word flashes, molten and living and cruel, cutting to heaven and down. Song cannot. Becomes in exchange itself metal and stone - song supports, past utter than these tongues, encodes by impulses. Sad, I think, and, to switch a loss. Specialists cannot understand the alternate mode in full, their perspective does not fit it. Bilinguals are functional in each but ineloquent, cannot reach art heights of either. What is to be done?”
A young voice chirped up from the crowd, "Ten quarrybirds, they talk. Why is that answer? The life of the wall, boiled down, would they if stronger sing?"
"That project Quarry has a one-colored freedom. A lathe cut wry. Word can hone itself forward - objective over archetype - press signifiers into math of motion. Sing to declare and sweep, a self-foundation that strengthens against world parts away. Too: word the social sound, flattened, leveled in spanning service.”
The little roan questioner alighted near me, just distant enough from my resting litter to remain polite, pretending e did not see me. I caught the hint e passed me, and I asked what was on eir mind. “Teacher – why do we work with the Quarriers? Is it pure hope or pure convenience, or is there a better tie? What way chosen we along that long and weightless bridge?”
“Say that city mine chases a shadow, wake-veil cast in the water. I eat echo – hence this place we require, with the wood that will sharpen my talons left. Quarry: of the ship and blade that parts. The story and doing never in same material meet. In odd reflection we see their search, even sing it better for a samed and reaching branch. More they slink through phase, more we hear that clang - so my chase comes to me in pattern. Ynewy – e can tell me who I am.”
My own question: "All of that. but are they of the law? Are they compatible with it?"
Kali rolled eir head, beak pointing to the upper branches and then aimed at my shoulder. "They would tell, 'no'. But I say yes. Theirs is the law necessities - back-seen strictness. Retrospective obsession: unimpeachable a thousand years. Enforced poverty. Their way inexorable is finding. Their stricture does not bark at specifics, exiles the matter itself! No error possible. Root of it is severed. Fuel-fuel for the engine. Kaka, if I were to ask - Ynewy throws scoff, would say 'no!' to the demand, ‘be people of God’. The End neither what-wants not to be people outside from God. The End yells to become angels, and slash early road to the last day."
It was an odd answer, and an odd course to follow. Quay followed in the slow steps of city-builders, the walkers and founders who were the seeds of the social impulse. Quarry's approach was more like flashing forward to the corporate states just after reformation, where entirely new social modes became necessary once freed from the well of Heath - broken from the laws of land and season, what were people to do with themselves? What lives would grow in new air and new weight, hit by new angles of the sun, which transform the underlying pace of life so that body and culture must transform in turn.
Kali gestured for my attention, a patient pulse of eir wings: "But I parry now: you will tell me. Is the law ours? Does Quay make compatible? What penalty? A criminal comes!"
E gave me so little to work with there that I had to recite. “Monitoring, reeducation, severance petty and high, death.”
“The orthodox course, no - you. Which lever, haruspex, do you admire?”
“Kuryo accused me of jumping directly to severance high. Do I appear the type to you?”
"Go personal then. A book burner comes. A breaker, laughing and walking. You have them - no desperation - tied and clean. They spit at you, anticipate your arguments, tread on your tenderest ideals to fain hollow. What is it then? A killer and a rouser, mad rider! And who points at place where they hit before. Do you make the cut? Mark them, or discard them?”
I hesitated - the crowd was listening, and listening hard. Still I struggled with this balance, between comrade and representative, between friend and symbol. I could only trust the raising of Kali’s city, and that the ears of eir citizens most eager would be tuned well. “I say reeducation. But not out of mercy - you understand this. Neither mercy nor anger can fit into these decisions. And we do not speak veiledly of Kuryo, not even with her step out of the world: that is a woman with no fire in her, with no spirit for crime beyond carrying papers and private hopes. We talk of something else, someone else. From where could an enemy be born? Jilted but unwatched? You submit this, Kali, as a matter of insult, as a chance to make a point. But the muscle needs practice. Harsher sentences have their time, but a burner must be unraveled. Let's strip them down to the impulse and trace that path backwards..”
“You, with the edifice,” e said, “behind. You have the courage and surety resource, given it to you. This is ideal and pure. But a king is a slave, my Emelry, a slave to the fate and world's corner that trapped them, people land and life. Behind a great ship there are no walls, nothing to hold history in. We take the rail. Every choice must be mandated, every lesson must be spoken in action. Beyond action to symbol, and only then follow record. Quarry knows this but derives no poetry or lee to it. Kings must engrave the world. Their claws split the soil, and their eyes burn when met, and tongue a swaying blade. Chose I reeducation, I must delegate it to court or officer, when if I spoke it myself, tender. But if it was an enemy. If it was a current that I feared - and kings have no emotion but fear - I speak blood.”
E had warned me of this. The little crowd of observers around us, in our alcove, had stopped their chatter with a ripple of nervousness. Kali had not met my eyes yet that day, and in our previous sessions that shyness of contact had betrayed a waiting plan, a little trap I was led into.
E flexed one talon. “A tengmunnin body is a one hand. We do not have limbs, but rather five fingers. We cannot take a hand. And a talon! No, a one-legged crow is a holy sign and halfway to king. A wing is too cruel - me most but for all - taking a wing would betray ourselves - taking a leg and a face at once. I have never slid into a heart, there has not been the occasion. Perhaps, in Savannah, that occasion cannot happen, barred by the bone. I hope your friend will tell you that his master made a place that war cannot scrabble into enough for a furrow; too much, too little for it…”
“Please, come to this point. What do you sever?”
“I am explaining the position. Now we go down - come with me. Sit with me at first grave and hear a story. We take the thumb at the root.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The plaza was readied. Nothing left to do. I peered out from the checkered curtains, red and white, that spinelight played upon like tiger stripes.
“My errant - my errant, again arrive to me.”
Bara's eyes were sunken past eir longtime empty white. The muscles of eir face, the very integument, was slack and pulling itself apart though e hardly noticed this now. E was at the point of living in many times, now. I would sit by em, on the worse days, straining to hear each of those whispers. Dreaming whispers - the walls of the city of eir youth - the flowers and the work - the sacred ropes and dusty straining roads - the intoxicating rainbow light that danced through the grave tree at midday.
I had realized recently, in my studies, that our lives could not reach a certain pace of nostalgia. My master and I were separated by a full generation, yet all the things e spoke of loving in eir youth I had seen in mine, little-changed. The city yet grew and flourished, reaching out, and as we managed those greedy tendrils I learned that my romance was still living. Here it was - my dream and ours. There was the layer of tarnish, but it was the distance from a human childhood to adolescence. Less! I was full-grown and had overseen a few quick iterations, process on process, but no full change. No change to the city - the homes had expanded and grown patina, the streets had lengthened, but all my loved places remained and made rich.
But there was a shadow of change on the city. Bara bore its mark. Gone were eir comrades, a line of bests and brights dead. E emself felt here too long. Gone now was eir doctrine, the barrel-chested certitude. Gone was eir powerful grace, eir sharp remige vane that would cut air with authority as e spoke. E had grown past that, surpassed it, and now lived in the slow summer of the threshold, in a stuttering and noble retrospect.
Today e was stronger than most days, unsteady but strong. E could stand and knew where e was. Even e smelled strong, eir bluefeathers in a shine e had commonly lacked, dulled by the indoor light no matter how revered.
“Here I stop,” I cooed to em. I touched my neck to eirs, and felt em relax - and accept a degree more weakness back into that body.
“Tell again, me now. We've pronounced little. Tell me, I… huff. Why bark you for that crowd? Why feel it, further filth on these my flagstones. It is still a lot of mine, route my softness soften them. Who is it? Just the one?”
“Hitand. E alone, yes. Recall, my king -”
“Yes! Yes, the other. So much toil, little Kali, into this. Now I lament when the hoof is falling. We must do it? Perhaps hastier, surely, tell me, this is a child, enveloped in the opening fervor. A letter and letter, here, crossed in lace! Can it be?”
My chest tightened, my breath stopped a moment. Pain - pain, pain to hear em like this, to ever see that falter in the one who was and always is my tower. “It needs to be seen. My way is that - in my mind, it is - in fast times and fast loves as this - this -” I stuttered, interrupted by Bara’s shaking cough. I tried to find my words again. “...Is your city not so new? Are these its tentative makings? My king, we are well and truly weighed now. We must answer proper.”
“Kali. Kali. Do you know? At the height of bower a lover’s betrayal. The smell of death to a human child. Crime is that makes fire fearful: now, my doubt, my wrong path runs!” e cried, animated in the old theatricality e would use, since years ago, when illustrating a point. “Where is my word and that world I loved first? Has each thing I touched and knew, then, bitten me back? Now I am cast out: now I am proven sad and simple, I, who did not know it then. That is crime - the pain of crime - and the anti-ecumene. Do you chase yourself in that doubt? Do you hurt, that way, at eir face?”
“I do. Is this my sacred city so thin that this permeates? This, terror even to the weal? Worry I taken, pride and shame both mocked - of every that wants the fruit noble. That healing you say - it has to be cut. Will you licence?”
“Go,” Bara said, “and prove a cadence you want for.”
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“Quay and Quay,” I lilted, to my comrades that had gathered like vultures. I - I! - the greatest of vultures now. “Morning is now, the spine wakes, and down turns the lighter land. Here the fogs rise, the smokes pass, here at the tide of breath. A battered wall - mossing over. We will make the end of this, now, let rise this wound to cloud.”
"Heavy and pouring," someone barked. "Black sky, what hand could push it away!" The crowd murmured around them, stilling and hushing them - Harka, behind me, hopped forward but did not find the need to go further. The pot simmered - too intent to burst.
If I strut on this stage enough, I could trace a perfect circle around it. A bee dance. My skin shivered, my muscles hummed, like a creaking ship deep, deep out on a buffeting sea. Sway and sway. If I walked in the right pattern and cadence I could make these bad wings a rudder and turn like a plow in the earth. Part of me wasn't here - it was watching me over my shoulder - any flight in me had atrophied to peripheral flash-memory, and repurposed itself to only see me from outside.
I did not think of it then - but later, I realized that this was the first decision my master had yielded to me. E was not jealous with eir judgement, e did not make to guard a power - eir will was simply so straight and flowing, such a gust of wind, that carried em from place to place. The blindest part of em was this, the cantering sidestep, eir ability to merge the essence of action and learning. Everything e did was a dialogue with emself - and this was the first point where it had faltered, and now the wind fell to me who could see it better than feel it, and who had no sailcloth to catch it.
I think the crowd caught these thoughts in my eyes, and mistook that high mind for high-mindedness. They thought I was looking to the horizon, and not the back of my own head. I could make no better speech than that.
“By Bara’s call, who is the seat of the city - by will of where it happened. Harka, my friend! If there is paper ash here, it earns us so mingling. Spill see what was made!”
E blustered up, pushing forward the cart e and the other attendants had prepared - and with a buffet of eir wings, upturned the vessel across the plaza floor. A cloud of black dust - the crowd recoiled - the smell, which had laid like a captured viper in that vessel now rose again to where it had first escaped.
“What scent of autumn! What higher fire on the wind! Harka, naming, call!”
E took my place at the front of our formation, and barked out in eir deep voice: “Lahaten, doctor, found now in over medicine! Luki, kilnsbird, whose shape continues in the industry riverine! Olycc Millneur, well-ended on the high road of ties! Kariro, wing-member, who watched blood wet the grass! Sunan, who plucked fish gilled on dam’s cracked air! Halani -”
As e spoke over those ruined bones - charred dust, over which no one could mourn - I watched the one who had made them black, and shattered their gems. I paced close to where e was bound, letting not a moment pass without my beak pointed at eir eyes.
Clipped and shackled Hitand sat, and eir beak was already chipped. While in custody, e had tried to rob us of the price e knew would be taken. While we held em e had barely moved but for eir eyes - but now only eir head followed me as I flanked em, leering in wild and unbroken conviction. E was the wispy white-grey of a roan who does not wear henna, for e ate what we provided rather than wear it.
Harka had finished eir account of the near-seventy dead that had been destroyed, but not yet the six living who had been made dead: e looked at me expectantly.
“Now, enemy, I ask: was this your object? To crush something beloved? To erase a shared edifice? Here sit with me and say - is this the lesser part of what you desired?”
E broke directly into song:
“Red/call/red/call/long/call/blue
High/high/red/line/high/stone/core
Eye/half/eye/soft/make/lack/lack
Stop/red/blue/stop/blood/poor/song
Poor/eye/stone/line/eye/you/red
Mud/song/clear/song/sand/song/blue
Stop/line/high/you/poor/down/fly
Stop/stop/stone/blood/song/high/red”
“See!” I screeched, before e could begin a new verse, “Ka, what a discovery you have made! What interest shape cast a shadow wall, what odd rock you have riveted your life to! End now. You say nothing. What furrow can be cast by this coward? City-enemy, love-enemy who will spend blood and fire and beak to sing, to spread this little song pattern to carry eir stone, stone line forward, trapped in eir eye, long spear inert in soil. What was learnt? What was won?”
E croaked it out, throat begrudgingly yielding to a speech e hated. “You will say, ‘no love’, to that seeks liberate you from this shallow bower yes you yes who flee the life given you who eat what humans have been but spite the shape from their words. Cattle! Hi, pale cattle, full flaw in you!”
Fervor gripped me. Bara had prepared me ill. E had given me the perspective of two people - asked me to weigh two souls by their own sizes. What good is that? What good is such patience in the face of the mountain cut? It was a law for children, and none of us had ever been children. I woke into my soul to find it already complete: the battle there is over. We are loosed arrows, and I would catch this one.
“Sentimentalist. Who will follow when you are gone? None will find it. Sad killer, branch breaker, who once could have carved tall and true. See who fears the page. See who fears the speaking of words - who fears eir own thoughts, such fear to burst.”
“Fear is not in me not in this body - this body seeing past yours, invisible. Fire, fire, where are you? Untouched by fire - transparent. I bite that sick ladder the one takes you from full force. I claw away that evil brick that turns your heart to nothing. I break the glass by which you waste your life - you pour it into a ditch - bone-cracked, you hit the ground. Bit by bit, that crawling ladder erodes.”
And then the fervor slipped from me. I turned cold and clear and gentle, then. “Forever, forever. Forever. My ladder is forever.” I leaned in close to where e sat trussed, and swung my beak down low to the ground, the very ground I was plastered to, and looked up at em from where I was eating dust. “Words cannot be erased. This encryption is not built but discovered - lying, long phantom, behind they mortal curtains. This you’d know if you felt it - if yours was the eternal flame, and not the impermanent wisp of song. You will disappear, and that song - the one that encapsulates you - the one surged in hope by your burnt claw - will follow you.” I rose again, stepped back from em, and let my voice rise to the level of the crowd again. “Do you hear me? No bone was burnt, each name aledgered. No branch was broken, nor disturbed a climb of graft and greenth. And no word lost - not one - already each is printed and bound again. Bring me my skinning knife!”
Only once the attendant passed its hard handle to me did I notice that the noise of the crowd, which had been growing from a murmur to a roar, was now a shriek.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Awake. “Why! How dare you!”
Kali smiled at me. “Too cruel? You would have done otherwise?”
“Too cruel by far, that you have withheld it from me!” I was in an outburst and did not care, but sniffled and settled my voice. “Put me in again. Let me see.”
“No.”
“Master! Deny me nothing. No pity, none of this separation! I must see.”
“You know what happened. You would feel it? The surgery of it? Beak peeling from flesh? You cannot even think it - a femur pulled from a finger. The shifting stone of it, the fruit squelch. Demand this, the sensation? Ah, the grit. I will give it to you, if asked. But answer very honestly! Do you want to know?”
“Master - this is not a matter of squeamishness - this is about your life -”
“Do you want to know what it is to hurt one of my kind? Answer no, yes, though see. Give answered real - sleep and dream of what should we feel. Should you know? Is it fit? Should I know the other arrow, now?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Kaka! Now you ply! See, precious thing, that has retreated to precious from pressure. We end today, Emelry, able to eat.” And e began the slow hop up the rooted stairs until I caught up.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Why is there fear when a lawship comes? Exposure? Reprisal? Scandal? It is that the tide of war has been boiled out of us, barred from the system.
Before the Ecumene, Mandate and Empire and Alliance all three shared an edifice of law built upon the priest; that only the studied and sworn had the right to administer those road-paving stones. Only a priest can write law, and only a priest could enforce it - perhaps it was for this reason alone that each lasted through their hemispheric storms of war to become precursors of the one state.
Even in wartime, only a priest could command a force. But a millennium into the paz-pandorada, what this means is that where there is a haruspex there is the fear of death. There is that shadow, however distant, that threatens to cover the sun and break a criminal from the peace it guarantees. There is that heat, however slight, that can build a boil again - that can break the skin.
In modern Akkadu, the verb to war has been redefined into the verb to scar.
Who lacks love for this peaceful era? Who hates plenty and plenitude? Who lives outside it: I.
Had I ever known myself, before Kali? Had I known what to look at in myself - how to read my own internal poetry? I had not been exposed to something new while in Quay, since Savannah - I was immersed in a dark mirror, unable to take a breath.
The sad little pride inside me that soared in its distance. That said, “I am so beyond, so cut from others that I am fit to judge them from a vantage point.” This was not confidence or cowardice but a kind of worry. I do not make plans - I orchestrate worries. In me there is a whirling knot, and I see it every time my heart adapts to the frame necessary to see Kali’s. E who has no worry, and only movement. E who would have said the same of eir master, and the same of emself, that I know say of e and I.
If I followed em close enough, could I catch that same fire? The certainty, the descent, that two-step path? It was in sight, now, I thought.
Since I was a child, I had never looked at anyone. I looked through them, scryed them invisible, focused on tracing their lives backwards and forwards. I did not want to see the living hearts in front of me - I shocked, wounded, at the proximity - I wanted to see their complete line. Where they were from, where they were going. Fellow humans as snapshots of souls that were not here in the room with me. My pride was in that, too: I can see you for who you really are, for the things carved into you, for the route you chase so predictably. I can speak your next action without having to know you, without having to touch you or love you. If I ran away enough, I could own everything
And then the blackwing chorus killed this capacity in me. Unreadable hearts that pierced my own like so many catchpoles angled at the same point - as an honored guest, I felt like a long-pursued fugitive. One who for years had lived underground and paralyzed in fear, and now none. Ah, they got me. God caught up with me, and pressed my face into the blood-scented Savannah until I understood my place. Now I would become that conduit - now I would lose the self I protected. Now my scab is off, and I touch the air again - glory Adonai.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The updrafts were ready - unfolded like papercraft from sheets of metal, bent and hammered and buzzed alive - and hung in the air like wasps, or jellyfish. The banks of the river where the glider had landed had been hastily converted into an assembly zone. Supplies and commodities wound their way on cart and rope to this new forum center, as the turbines of the updrafts descended and laboriously rose again with their new cargo before hitting the practical unweight border and zipping up smoothly. Beautifully choreographed, but even from this distance we could hear the roar of the machinery.
“Why are we all going again? It seems that everyone was very quickly convinced. This wasn’t planned until, like, just now. Days ago. Why are you going along with it?”
“Ah Rain, I can’t let you too far from my sight. If you were cajoled into it, I am following you. I’m the one surprised you’re coming, but with how it worked out there was no other way. Our brave escort!”
He stretched, “Yes, I’m a brave brave pack mule. It’ll be nice putting the spider back to what it was made for, though, makes me feel like less of a thief. It’s a worse tradeoff for you. Is it worth leaving the city so soon? I still say you haven’t seen half of it - I mean I get the rush, and I’ll tell you stories the whole way there. But still.”
“We’ll return,” I said - so assured, them. “This process is just as important. My sympathy is the city’s but I have a recorder’s duty to the habitat entire. And this was not such a last-second determination - I’ve gotten the sense that Kali and Ynewy have long flirted with the idea of a proper visit, but at last they have an unmissable excuse in us.”
“Hm.” He peered at me sidelong. “Was it a bad day after all? You were freaked out when you got back. I could see that, and I just wanna make sure you did too.”
“Please don’t insult me.”
“Maaan… don’t be like that. I’m not even trying to press it either, I’m just saying.”
I wanted to laugh, he was so clearly pouting at his little misread. How could he know that nothing could hurt me any more? “I apologize. You’re right. See, it has strung me tight, you noticed it full. But don’t see squeamishness in me - I have been bred for coldness, I can work with it. It is my usual concatenation of dread.”
Those words were too harsh. Now it was him who looked on me pityingly. “Saw a new side of Kali?”
“No, not em. Nothing different with em. It is the weight of guessing how the See will react, how they will interpret things here. It began with the city’s laws, but I understand them now. Quay will do well, it will preserve, I know this. But the scope stretches from end to end, no?”
We watched the assembly continue, cargo rising into and falling from the sky. A few tengmunnin, strong fliers, followed the updrafts up in small flocks - staying far enough for the current to not disturb them, but daredevils nonetheless. A strong flier was not an endurance specialist as one would think; long flights at ground level were slow but effective. The high fliers were sprinters, marathon-swimmers, who could push past that first barrier of weight into the lighter sky. Once that wall was broken one could rise at leisure, swim in the air, coast and glide for thousands of miles with a minimum of wingbeats.
A little group of five, ants against the skyland, flew straight up. They spiraled, beaks pointed to the spine, barking and playing. An upward rocket drive of hard wingbeats, a circling rest to restore muscles, and then another climb. Tight spiral, loose spiral, tight - miles of flying against a punishing, invisible uphill - and then entry into the dream of dreams. True and delirious freedom. An easy, richocheting teleport to the other side of the world should one choose it. Flight, flight.
I’d met Rain on a little plaza on a hill that had a decent view of the proceeding. Few places were built for views, here - much less incentive for them, when one could fly. Coming closer up the slope arrive Kali and Ynewy and their little retinue, riding the royal cart. I’d seen so little of it, since Kali began preferring the litter.
We exchanged greetings - the cart stopped itself just next to my little which tilted itself towards it, and Kali gingerly stepped across the threshold, back to eir accustomed perch on my railing. Likin dove at and veered away from Rain’s head, who laughed in return, and soon those two with Harka had veered off for one more night of play in the city. I was left with the leaders.
Ynewy flitted far above for a moment. This was a custom of eirs, an almost compulsive occasional circle to orient themselves, an abundance of caution - but in a few moments, e landed on my further railing. “Walk us down the banks,” e said. “We should go look well at our shared product, and I will point out every part.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Like a liner catchup, two angles burning closer in a long spin. Like a shuttle jettisoning and staging on its path. The rising process was curiosity, and of the three of us Ynewy was somehow the most captivated.
“Kaka! Dancers!” Ynewy said, the busy skies spinning around em. “This trip’s capacity is doubled, out of blank fortuity these. But the normal run would have been grand too. Last visit, what, fifteen of these? Now so many.”
“Generous little High-sevens. E loves, true to name, to make an odd-minded blush,” Kali nodded. “You never walk with me, Ynewy, shy. What do we see, leech at me?”
Ynewy puffed eir feathers - e was happy, swelled with contentment. “Such an escort now - who says no to rest? I cannot make pace with you before now. And this city - this one - I need to see now. Never again will it live like this. Now a name of it is ending - so I can see the streets.”
It still surprised me how comfortable the two were with each other. Close, they always were, to remain in an earshot of confidence. Their barbs - like old members of the same club - were constant but softened, jocular and forgiving even in the moments of criticism. Partners, not comrades, but still a friendship there - did either know how deep it ran?
Quay was in festival. Cloth kites and paper balloons - kept far from the rising-airs that they mimicked in shape to not crowd the operations - nonetheless crowded the streets and treetops. Lanterns shaped like updrafts rose by an internal candle rather than rotor, tethered by leftovers of the binding-rope that was crucial for the transport of goods. There was even an effigy of Rain’s janitor - and a much clumsier effigy of Rain himself, a lunic rose and lily held in his hands like swords - I bet half odds he had encouraged this himself.
In the dim underglow of the late hours - when the spine still shone diluted but clear, and the lights of the city had flared on, creating a band of dark in the middle distance into which the cargo steadily flowed - the two little heads of state perched together on adjacent corners of my litter. We moved slowly through the special town and gazed together up at the filled skies.
A cloud of night dragonflies blurred the outline of a distant lantern as it passed before it. “You are ready? For my band to steal you away?” Ynewy asked me, dipping eir beak demurely. “From you masque I’d never make the guess you would make from this quay.”
"Steal me if you can, I will give you every opportunity. But you know to whom I owe my debt now.”
"But still you come, come to see my city, my one grander. No shallow word I’m saying - call Quay a droplet distilled of light, gallons of honey on a pinprick. I am the coral mesh of vein, empty, and leading in circles. But still grand? We will up there soon, climb up the footstools. I ask again of your readiness. It’ll be a long wrack, for you.”
"I’ve been strengthening,” I lied. Living at this weight I was becoming accustomed to - but it was not becoming easier. Perhaps even harder, as I spent more and more time outside of the water. My muscles knotted, but did not keep up.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I said no goodbyes. Kali would come, Harka would come, Minak had argued eir way into the position of porter. And Rain had of course been cajoled into the role - reticent at first, but quickly warming to the praise. Not until everything was in the air did he drop down in the janitor to pick me up; thus we were in the position again of our little shared journey, always in the process of catching up.
I lay splayed in the copilot chair, trying to make a bed of it, trying not to move my body until we were past the weight border. We rose slowly, and with a long eye watched the final steps come together. Slowly the shield that had fallen on Quay rebuilt itself into a spear.
“Will you stay in the quarters? You could drop me there.”
He rolled his eyes, busy surveying the displays. ”What? No, I’m sleeping here for the flight. You’ll want to do the same.”
“Hm? I’m the more eager now. Now I will do it.”
"This isn’t a liner. It’ll be a long trip but it’s designed for storage, not inhabitation - everything is luggage compartments, quarters or no. It will be tiring and boring - what do you even want to see the battens for? I’m not dropping you anywhere.”
“Frugality is beautiful in its own right.”
“Wrong. I helped load in - we might get a glimpse if I get called in again for reconfigs. But trust me, you don’t wanna be outside long enough to get there, and I’m not gonna run curiosity-errands for you in a janitor.”
“Fine. We will make a job here then. When will you speak to Pearl Wall?”
He grimaced, shyly. He had been promising me a talk with Sever and his staff for days, now that the letter was sent. In full haruspicial seal, aimed at the highest rungs of the audience I had access to, and no response. Speaking with Ynewy convinced me the time for pure blackout was over. We needed - no, we did not need, but we would very much like - Sever to remain on our side of contention for once the hearing began.
More and more comfortable with desperation, I. Knowing how to move through it.
Night fell and disturbed nothing. The choreography of the trip continued, the glider broke apart again once we were past the unweight border to rearrange itself, mid-flight, into something that had less lift rather than more. The winds were strong at our back, for at this highest spine level they blew ever endwards.
By day, the warm air rose into the stream from the midpoint of the habitat, pushing it from the median. By night, the cool air plummeted down, especially at the caps, birthing strong squalls snaking towards the center again. Thus the habitat breathed this fountain: that below one was kept inward, and above one was allowed outward.
We were so close to the thing itself - the thread, the heart, in its dull moon-mock glow. Perhaps I was less fearful of its theological implications this far in - Kali, if e was anything, was a true spirit of the sun, and you felt this stature across eir entire city. The spine’s dread was now material, terrifying in its infixity. No windows meant Savannah was secret - and that its daylight was built to be extinguishable.
How far had we come?
Why had it been done? What was the wound meant to be? What variable did this white light intersect? The level of engineering - it made one speechless. A full and strong sunbeam had already been acquired, this was never in doubt, and still the full-length, full-spectrum transmutation, as through a water filter, of sunlight itself. Into pure energy, and then into blank light - what had it tied down? Its object, I was sure, had not succeeded - if indeed it was meant to change. Stifled, foreign air, here, but not wrong.
More likely than an affected change was an open possibility. How had this been approved - what had the argument looked like, those decades ago? This spine was not a direct tool of oppression; it was an escape hatch. An open door for another energy, another source but the sun.
“Hey,” Rain said, “it went through. Call in twenty minutes - I can talk to him?”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It would be better if I wasn’t on video. Rain pushed for me to support him when he had this conversation - but I could tell part of him wanted it to be alone, and unmediated. This would grant more control over the narrative for us, and I did not want to be seen in the human world.
I fashioned a nest for myself out of view as Rain Flower, hurried and suddenly breathless, oiled his hair and rearranged his jewelry. After he had preened to satisfaction, he stopped. He dimmed the cockpit window and let us continue to rise on the machine’s own recognizance, stared a moment at his reflection in the new silvery sheen, and stilled his breathing. He clasped his hands and closed his eyes - and after two heartbeats of that had had enough, and made the connection.
It was not Sever but Beckon who arrived, seated in the very office I had interviewed him in - their shared workplace. Rain flinched.
“Let’s talk, then,” Beckon said without introduction. His own door was closed, and windows likewise dulled to the receptor’s suffusing light. “No one’s watching me, and I’ll hear you out.”
“Where is the master?” Rain all but stammered. “I was promised an audience. What will I say to you? You won’t be able to decide anything.”
“Please. You asked for business, let’s do it. You’ll take me as a translator or we won’t do any of this.”
He sat up stiffer in his pilot’s seat. “Why should I speak with you? This wastes time for both of us. You’re dreading this conversation, no concern, no panic, no resistance, no anger. I want to talk to the one who can understand me, understand the stakes of what I’m asking!”
Beckon closed his eyes, exhaustion and strain lying gently over his features, and responded slowly: “Flower. Nothing is happening here. We are, all, in the suspended animation you wanted. There isn’t going to be a fight until the hearing. Everyone has buckled down and shut up. We knew - he and I - that this would come. We’ve readied ourselves a long time ago.”
“The call is made. The hearing approaches.”
“No response? If I’m guessing right, that’s not a good sign for your odds. Nothing has happened at the receptor - no overture. If you mean to gamble here, you will be disappointed. The fervor of those girls will carry you through the tough decisions, I know, but…” another sigh - a terse one, he looked to the walls - “
“You’re being inert, Leaves. You are being kinder to me than usual - it scares me! You know why I’ve called, we want your support and backing - yours and his. If you knew anything about what’s down here - what it’s like - the organization, the establishment - you’d be losing your mind. This will be a revelation, and an easy one, but we need a unified front when it happens - the lawship and the quarter together is such a good picture to paint! Is that what you’ve so resolved on, to just take the licks? Or will you let die any gains from the mess?”
“You’re worried about him and that makes all your strategy transparent. You have to start thinking - now - the balance between his reputation and the company’s. What will the changelings think? How many, even after all this collapses, will still be happy to claim the same ideals that built it? Sever has had his times with old Cote. Ha, he thinks they’re friends, comrades in their rejection from the world. You can try to pierce that togetherness, and convince him it is delusion, if you like. But what happens next?”
“Restoration. He stands with us, I said, and so will not have his own story told for him by someone else. He can remain a visionary - and his design can remain visionary, and not be turned into a cage. You can sell this for him! That Savannah is a bone, and the crows the jewel inside it. It’s an easy picture, we can tell it.”
“And then?”
He let the volume of his voice escape him, and started forward in his chair. “La! ‘The company’, you say - since when have you ever had pretense of being a loyalist?”
“I was always a loyalist - I still am - to the regime before this. All personal. You’re too young, for that and for what happens next. Not here, not with anyone we know, but in the balance of potentials. What will this turn say for the big arc of business? The levels of trust? Lune strains and strains itself more - the reins are slipping, the Chair is desperate - sand through fingers. Will this be an updraft, or a final sign of disloyalty and disengagement? Do you love your homeland at all?”
Rain folded himself back into composure and let his nose turn up. “This isn’t the time - it’s not for me. I see what’s in front of me, what has to be done now. Both of you need to make it out of this or it will be so bitter when it plays out.”
‘You,” Beckon said, tension leaving his body, “are free to throw your lot in with the master. Of everyone, he worries most - perhaps he is anxious enough to listen. But I don’t think you and I have ever had much to say to each other. I don’t think that will change.”
“But you won’t give me access? Give me an audience!”
“You will have one the second that you ask for it - in person. Not during this phase of gallivanting. Not when you are in the sway of adventure - you don’t know what you’re talking about. Why would I expose him to that?”
Rain fumed and had no answer. Holding back a pout, he cut the connection. We sat in silence.
I asked in a quiet voice, “How many people are there in the world?”
He shook his head, annoyed, towards the screen he had been watching before swinging to face me. “What? What are you talking about?”
“How many types, classes, spirits of people. How many roles you have the pick of, that you could fall into. You could count them, I think, they are finite. A blend of body and birth and eras and ideals, take a list of all those combinations, meld together those that overlap, and you can count up the spectrum of human existence. Perhaps a hundred? A thousand? And among that list, infinite colors for each - every soul is unique - but there is a common book of souls we are drawn from.”
He just stared at me, distracted from his upset at his conversation failing so badly. He debated internally whether to argue with me, outburst at this new stream of nonsense, or humor me. “Okay. Spell out what you’re trying to say, what does this matter.”
“You can count them, if you try. If you have the love of others strong enough, you could count them accurately. It’s an undertaking I won’t pretend at. But look! The Craftsman - bound proud to the work his - and who ages along the many paths prepared for that role. Rivers, intersecting at life events. We will he find success? When will he lose it? When will he discover his opus? What esteem will he die in? There are finite answers to this. Take a point in those rivers, and draw a line from it to another soul. How would you call your role?”
“Come on. I’m trying to listen here, you’re talking about the master - how to predict how he’ll move? I don’t think it’s as simple as a chart, you aren’t going to be able to just slot him into what you expect.
“Not what I expect - the portrait that hangs behind this. Are you a footman? A concubine? A prodigy? A spy? I think I am learning which groove my heart has arrowed to.”
The rivers of the zealot: relationship towards orthodoxy. Basic impulse of faith. Level of warlikeness. Guiding light: person or structure?
The fifth messiah walked to Wanakauri and chose the path of advent king. Feet cut on the knife’s-edge mountains, under the smoking sky. He wailed, in those valleys of ash, “where is the father of light, whose golden breath is the law?” And the answer was not in sun but stone. The history of humanity is one of cities, and thus one of city-founders - scattered seeds, and little roses in the snow.
Rain still stared at me, disappointed. “Were you listening to the call? Loop around to your point, are you giving me a mission? You want me to act a certain way when we get to the quarry? I haven’t been just playing around, you know, I’m taking this seriously!”
“I’m saying - I am the dull-eyed zealot, after all,” I said in a wry laugh that he nervously joined, thinking I was making a joke. “The overcommitted disciple, the most credulous of the lot. You should know that the only action I will make - from here until it is done - is to chase the little footsteps of my king.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rain indulged me. It was night when we arrived, and our approach was now so close that it could slow. He had flown us out to perch on one of the great wings, now falling through the air at such a pace that we could sit on the crest of the foils. Kali and Ynewy, with their retinues, joined us, tethered on the ropeway network that even now held the mass together. We clung beside them, hanging out of the janitor’s chassis.
We approached the End, and the lights of its impossible city sprouted like a reversed tree. Quarry, it proved, was built around its own river, and on the cap walls spread out from the central artery cutting down its middle.
One of the rail lines - like the one we had used on our pretextual visit to Fisher Valley - had been reappropriated, carved out into a wide transportation yard. Each layer of Quarry was another set of docks, another connection point to the flow of work and matter that screeched up and down those rails. Far below us was a great field, like the industrial assembly ones of Quay, where work that required weight took place - even this late at night, beneath the clouds’ sparse veil, we could see the humming cranes and din of work back and forth below.
A permanent slow storm of fog occupied both extreme ends of the habitat. Wispy, and transparent, but roiling.
“Night shift will be turning, now,” Ynewy said, feathers fluttering in the wind that was still strong enough I could barely hear. “We’ll right in be for stowing. Aim, aim!”
Beside the rail was a column of luminous water. Where the falls at Savelyevna’s end were unbound and cascading, forming cold rainbows all down the wall to beat back the fog, here the flow had been hemmed in. A sheath of smooth cloudy glass had been built as a channel for the water, and at banded intervals in its route downward thrummed great generators like those of Quay’s dam. The water neither cascaded neatly into a sourcewater lake, but rather was now so compressed that it jetted out where it met the land like a ruptured pipe. Where it hit the ground, pointed away from the settlement’s lower fields, it had scoured away so much of the habitat’s original topsoil and underlayers that it was now bare bedrock, fenced in by reinforced mounds of wet earth.
From there the water spread out wide into a terraced series of paddies before finally coalescing back into a river proper. There below us were yet more lights, harvesters and farmers’ homes.
Savannah was a fat land. The crows of Quay hunted - they did not farm. In typical Triactian fashion all that grew here grew aggressively; it made for fast cycles when nothing starved and there was plenty of rot. Unlike Ilian settlements, where the balance of recycling was a constant planner’s worry, or in Hightower habitats, where the palette of life metered out very carefully the strokes of what grew and how, the Triactian ethos was always pure and perfect plenty. When one plucked a peach while walking to work, one would grow back again in a day. Wherever a seed fell, a sapling would rise in a week. Each plant would pour its energy into building its own soil - all green, all brown. It was a warlike spirit - letting the ecosystem war with itself, letting the cycle of thickets and stands and fields eat itself over and over again so that the pace of evolution was overclocked at baseline.
These ideals had carried over into the Savannan landscape, where bioregions were strictly measured in terms of border but within those limits had a strong cyclical turnover. Thus for the tengmu of Quay it was always harvest and never sowing, double the work of payoff and none of the work of setup. They had never had need of agriculture, only foraging as one passed, and the hunt.
Henwon saw me staring down as we passed the paddies and I was found myself looking backwards for the first time. “Ynewy wishes you’d dazzle at the city,” e whispered to me, amusement in his voice, “but I am proud of here - you know? Call it a culture rationing. This land I do not love, I am happy to see the end of it! I am happy to go. Humans so specialize into taste - no offense - with your fat-organed mouths. It must be like sight. For I, it is a battery, to be proud of. Taste or refinement! How to make things eternal; grind them to dust and keep them forever.”
“Distillation of surplus.” I kept watching the harvesters pick through the alleys between each patch of water, their floodlights swinging like tiny traveler’s lanterns. A teeming soup of rice and plankton, regrowing and regrowing. In black waters. In a newborn torrent already slowed.
A great clang and hiss - the glider had begun jettisoning components, untransforming itself. It rattled every bit of the patchwork chassis remaining, yet still we levitated, tiptoeing towards the wall.
The path was marked for us – it had been hard to distinguish line from line of lights, but we were pointed at a wide and thin aperture now. It branched horizontally off from the rail’s growing trunk of light – we floated on the air to a dock that had been hastily cleared for our arrival, and quickly our group scattered to more secure stowage again, the small window of comfortable viewing vanished.
The length a runway would require to slow something so massive as our vessel – even stripped of the majority of its mass – would be considerable. Yet that length and more had been gouged into the far cap of Savannah in one absurd bore. We pushed downwards on that cold way, hit the ground keening and shaking like a proper airplane, and the entire stretch we passed more and more bright windows - cargo doors, entry and exitways, air valves, container blocks. Drones, skittering at our approach or clamped onto the walls as we passed, seemed to watch from so many cameras, and even when we came to a stop the tunnel continued stretching inwards, beyond the length my vision could match. When we stopped, it felt too early.
What was left was comically small. Scarcely bigger than the janitor the central component now held - the rest had all been deposited, broken off even while inside to whichever stations and passages now lay behind us. We were at the End - and past it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Back to weight - the journey had spoiled me for the physics of home. I was heavy and battered again, it all came back at once, I could only lay down as my litter kept pace running with the flock. I was half asleep, Rain perched at the prow all anxious about leaving his machine behind - but my stamina was quickly gone. Mercifully, they let us rest. I slept freely in the downtime left between making the first rounds again.
I awoke feeling like I had been through a hammermill. I tried to gain my bearings. We were now in a small and official room - one that recalled the closeness and industriality of the receptor facility, now so, so far away. It was an observation room, overlooking a great dock - yet another rail system, the width of that long runway, that ended in a blunt patchwork of welding sparks and folding catwalks and cold, cold air. I knew that feeling.
It was that electric tingle that you felt when the void was close and the walls were thin. Where no rock, and little walls protected you. That shivering feeling you would find when lingering in the entry points at home, or too close to windows, or preparing for a journey. The feeling that had filled Umihotaru like so much cold water.
The room was velvet and clean and organized. Adorned with sculputures - made of scrap metal, twisted and folded together smooth and neat? Sparse bookshelves, and reams and reams of schematics and scrolls. Ynewy’s voice was the first I heard.
“I have already called the others in - they are there. See? Walk closer?”
With a turn of my wrist, my litter traipsed to the windows that overlooked the floor.
“That mounted pillar in the center, whose home is this long rail. They investigate it now - the seed which this my Quarry feeds. Entertain me, I will tell you. Quay is a painting,” e whispered, gently, “a colorful flower bushel of lives and experiment, joy and memory. The project is the everyday - that loved library - yes, a machine Kali rides to produce feeling, to produce story. But you already know this: that Quarry, it is a system of roots and filters. Stowing, and stowing. No rote and no role. This is a purification machine. A well-carved now workflow to leach nutrients and raw matter into their highest forms, to steal from the wealth of Savannah, the work of its building, to eat its bones.”
I saw what e meant. Quarry was scrap metal, riveted in slipshod pulleys and parcels - but these compounded into each other, folding and folding. Flowing to a single point - and it was here. “A foundation. A vault to grow from - away from here.”
“Aye. And now I prove to you I could be a poet too – but no sentimentalist. Kali’s fault is dithering and scattering, smallness and multiplicity. The grave tree is a rainbow – ephemeral, but always returns when the sky is correct. Leave that away from me. Here is my treasure, my ark. Hypercondensed resource - but that is not my poetry. I distill wealth, so too I distill life. Look - that chamber, on the upper rail, the one lit within. There is my single immaterial hope. My mountain and my sea – the Diamond.”
In a special enclosure of the great ark bay, there was a spot only a few technicians attended. It was a great cube, a pyramidal brick, of dense and off-white solid color. From above, we could see the mechanism that fed it.
Still dripping from an acid bath, three tengmunnins’ worth of loose bones tumbled into a collection pan. With a chainsaw’s roar they were ground to dust, the dust shuttled into the below enclosure. Machined piston arms unfolded from the container’s lid - they pounded their violent hammermill claws down onto that immaculately flat surface until no sign of what had been added was left. Three bodies pulverized into a layer of dust, a paper’s thickness stacked onto all the rest of it.
Rain - poor Rain. If only he had been at my side when I woke, he, who could not even stomach the grave tree. A dread spectacle to first see, but so soft, so romantic - he who could not look at that, how would he parse that smell in the air, knowing what it was? I wanted to laugh. It was so perfect. I did laugh, I laughed at laughed, in shock and in great esteem. It was a beautiful system, it was a perfect statement. Come, prisonwright, and see! The diamond anvil whose weight you have earned!