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The door swung shut. It sounded like bones breaking.
THE TALE
OF THE
CROSSING,
CONTINUED
IDYLL COUGHED IN THE DAMP AIR, HIS BREATH ricocheting in his lungs like a loose arrow. His fingernails, long as a wealthy woman’s, dug into the ash-wood pole as he dragged it forward. A tiny whirlpool formed around its pale shaft as he drew it up—unseen mud clasping, dragging down.
“I would like to disbelieve you, but this is not a place where many men hazard lies. You were in the Mourned City—I envy you. I was there when there were neither ashes nor pages nor fish skeletons piled up into minarets. Are there roses there, still? Have they all gone white and brown, drifting along the dead dockside?”
Seven frowned and shoved his dark hair back from a wan face. Around his bruised eyes were already lines and cracks that would one day be wrinkles, chasms, trenches in flesh. He spoke softly.
“Some days, in the Mint, they blew through the door like snow.”
Idyll nodded. In the farthest distance, behind the mist, Seven thought he could make out the spiky, scattered tips of bare trees, cat scratches in a gray sky, and a lonely beachhead. It was still so far off he could scarcely call the water a lake. It seemed to him a vast inland sea, and he trembled without wishing to. The ferryman rubbed at his k
nee with a hooked and gloved hand that seemed to have far too many knuckles.
“I can feel the storm in my joints now, a soreness like longing. I’ll try to get you across before it comes through, but I can’t promise.”
“What sort of storm? How can there be storms here?”
“The sort that little coat won’t begin to hold back. And if you knew much of the local geography, you would have brought better and thicker, and a tongue less eager for questions.”
Seven sank back against the ruined mast and drew his knees up to his chest. He rubbed his chin against them and the leaf-stiffened wind reddened his nose.
“She’s there,” he mumbled.
“She?”
“My friend. She’s there, in the empty forest, where all those trees are cracking in the wind. She’s there, all wrapped in rags. She must be so cold. I can’t leave her.”
Idyll shook his great head and tugged his cloak tighter around his massive frame.
“Oh, son. I’m sorry. What a lot you have paid me for nothing.”
The young man dug his fingernails into his palms and coughed into his sleeve, the nettle-sharp wind tearing his breath into scraps.
“You don’t understand. You couldn’t possibly understand us—we always save each other…”
THE TALE
OF THE
TWELVE COINS,
CONTINUED
WE WERE COUNTED JUST INSIDE THE GREAT hall, before our ears could adjust to silence and our eyes could adjust to darkness. The Pra-Ita were all around, their huge heads bobbing silently as crows pecking at grass. My head throbbed with the sudden cease of the wind. The bald girl stood just behind me in the long, gray line and clutched my hand.
“My name is Oubliette,” she whispered, and she whispered it like a blessing, as though her name could hold me close and comfort me. I squeezed her cold fingers.
The numbers spilled out of the Pra-Itas’ mouths like water unwanted, and we were led, child by child, to the center of the room, our little hands placed on smooth bars and handles we could not quite see in the dim light, things which seemed like soft-toothed gears, things which seemed like trays, things which seemed like long tables. Beneath our fingers, we began to understand, lay a machine, and as our eyes softened to the shadows, we saw it whole for the first time.
In the middle of a peeling gray floor stood a peeling gray frame. It hunched like a broken turtle, a high, arcing shell through which nameless things passed, lumpish gray heaps disappearing, passed solemnly as relics between children no older than we, and tipped into the rusting, ash-ridden structure. Smokestacks tottered high into the vaulted ceiling and spat pale fumes into the air in weak, spiraling puffs. Pistons drove into the depths of the machine and emerged again, dark and wet. A terrible crunching, stamping sound filled the room, and at the far end of the shell, the contraption contorted into a twisted, enameled mouth, built in the image of a thing which had once walked, a thing made entirely of teeth.
