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And he made for her a wicker face, and fixed it to her willow-skull.
And he made for her wicker eyes, and set them into her branch-brow.
But her teeth he did not close into the reliquary. He climbed the mountain of teeth and laid them down at its peak, which was by now very near the ceiling.
The lord was sated, and I awoke.
The white bundle of Malgorzata’s teeth descended to my heart, and out of the tooth cairn I stumbled, raw and uncertain as a newborn. Maciej stared as I took my first steps, hooves of tooth clicking on the tiled floor. I wobbled, my vision blurred—I saw him clearly, and the wicker body behind him.
I saw him, and I hungered.
THE
FOREMAN’S TALE,
CONTINUED
“I SWALLOWED HIM UP, BONE AND TOOTH. I WAS still hungry, and I turned to the wicker-wight which was once Malgorzata, and we looked at each other, twig-eye to tooth-eye. But I would not devour her. She was my sister, we two things hollowed out by hunger. Instead I leapt from the house on the hill which was now dark, dark as rock over stone, and I took the hunger with me. It is all I am. I am all it is.
“The hunger and I looked for things big enough to feed us. We began with cattle and peasants, but these were not enough. We tried forests but they were bitter, marshes but they were brackish. Finally, we came here.”
I quavered, my flesh wet with gem and sweat. “Are you punishing us?” I whispered. “Because we are hungry, too? Because we eat strange things and are never sated?”
The tooth-wight snorted, a peculiar, rattling sound. His movements were like a housecat’s, scratching at the soil, opening and closing his tusk-claws, tossing his molar-tail into the air. “Of course not. Does a farmer punish a cow? No, he eats it right up and licks his chops. You are pretty, and pleasing, and we suspect this place is big enough to feed us. We will pass you through us, and revel in your taste. I am no different from any other thing: I want to eat; I want to live.”
Golod turned and fixed his oversized jaw on one of the long cedar roots. He ground at it and suckled at it and worried it like a bone—and slowly, the root turned ashen and peeled away from itself in shingles, wisping away to broken shards and pale strips of bark. It kept its shape—and I might have imagined it, I do not say that I do not imagine things, and who would not imagine things in a place so dark and terrible?—but it seemed to me a winding wind fluttered through the ruined root.
“That is not eating,” I said softly. “That is wasting, that is ruining, but it is not eating.”
Golod leered at me, his wolf teeth gleaming in their sockets. “Do you not also leave waste behind when you consume a thing? It is not my fault that mine is more interesting than yours.”
We looked at each other. I knew then that he would swallow me up, and running was impossible—surely he knew these tunnels better than I, he who had chewed them into the lightless guts of the city. I was frozen—who would not have been frozen, about to be eaten like a ripe jewel? Cold emerald slipped down the nape of my neck. I thought of my cart, all my apples, and my little agate god statues, and my new golden spit which turned so quietly and smoothly in the hand. I thought of the topaz of so many years past, and how its juice had trickled down my throat.
“I wonder what you will look like,” he said, “when you have passed through me?”
THE TALE
OF THE
TWELVE COINS,
CONTINUED
“I PASSED THROUGH. IT WAS NOT LIKE BEING eaten, more like being worried—wasted.” Vhummim looked at us miserably, her eyes huge and milky in her round, floating face. She stroked her sinuous neck with bony fingers. “Golod put his teeth to me and my skin turned to pages and ash, held together by old, dust-clung air. Down there among the roots of bank and basilica, I became other than myself. My neck grew so long I could not eat, my limbs so long I could not run. Death translates us into what it will—we are the Pra-Ita, those who have passed through.”
I stared at her, her withered, stretched throat, so thin I could almost see through to the wasted edifice behind her. Curling, grasping wind threaded the streets. She pulled her robes aside, gauzy and wispy as dandelion silk, and showed her belly, swollen as a woman long gone with child. But instead of flesh there was a jewel, a great colorless, faceted thing set into her flesh as though she were no more than a ring.
“I speak the tongues of death,” she whispered, her voice mingling with the wind. “I am translated, and I do not know myself, save that I have become what I have eaten, and it has become me. Thus went the rest of the city, slowly, the way of the Rhukmini, the way of Vhummim. The Varil’s green and blooming docks sank into a river of detritus; the war memorials sighed into crumbling. Finally the Asaad, too, lost all its scarlet and gold, and became nothing but its own shell, money and paper and stiff, dead silk blown together by that endless wind. It happened so gradually that we did not really notice, until we had all passed through, and still we spent our money, still we traded our wasted goods. It is a habit, a compulsion, and it does not need translation. The wind, that relentless, thrashing wind that Golod brought, blows us from place to place, now. The wind keeps us together as long as it can, and then we are gone, gone until there is another valley or cliffside to sigh against, and then it breathes us into our old shape again. This is where we have come, now. It is like any other place to us.”
“And the place you wish us to go, with all the strange words on the lintel?” the shorn girl asked.
Vhummim blinked slowly, as though it should be obvious. “It is the Mint. You will work, like the other children. The living work; the dead do not. Be happy that you were chosen for work. It is better for you this way.” She closed her dress and fidgeted with the ragged cloth, looking up at us from behind her lanky hair. “If you do not go now, they will miss you at the counting, and it will be bad for you.”
“We could just run, you know,” I quavered, trying not to think of that flat, heavy door and what it would sound like when it swung shut.
“Please believe I would catch you,” said Vhummim solemnly. Her leg cocked up like a stork’s, a promise of speed our little legs could not hope for.
We followed her. Who would not have followed?
