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All this completed, I went to the city fathers of Shadukiam and asked for my payment, my opals and silver. I considered briefly that I should have asked for better, but agreements are agreements, and living stones rarely break theirs. Imagine my surprise when the Shaduki governor glowered darkly and mumbled that he could not possibly render my payment when the flowers that crowned his city were clearly no roses, but some monstrous abomination of a flower that only a specter like myself would know where to find.
“Did I not do just as you asked? Did I not find for you an imperishable rose?”
“Well—” The little man shuffled, twisting his bracelets in anxiety as I flared my wings, towering over him. “Even on this point we must disagree. They are not strictly imperishable, are they? One petal in a century, it’s quite a lot of work for city sanitation on those occasions…” He sweat red and redolent under my nose.
“I have worked wonders for you,” I whispered.
“Even so,” said he.
“I will bring down the Dome on your heads; the shattering of the frame will be heard all the way to the sea.”
“Again,” said the wretched governor, his hems weighted in gold, “we must disagree.”
It is difficult to subdue a Hsien. One might as well try to keep the moon still. But they gagged me and bound me and there were so many of them, so many, like ants, and the blood they drew from my scalp was white and thick, like molten bone. They bound me and dragged me up to the highest of the diamond turrets, which were clearer and sharper in those days than they have ever been since, and with so many hands they impaled me on its tapered tip. I saw the glittering edge of the turret slide through me, dripping white, shredding through my skin. I shrieked owl-shrill, but there was no help, only their laughter, which perhaps you know well enough, my boy. My siblings tried to release me, but they were kept away by volleys of arrows so thick they seemed to be flocks of ravens flinging themselves at the Hsien. For nine days I lay there bleeding on my roses, and they kept vigil, watching me die. I screamed, I cursed, and all of Shadukiam listened as though I was a great bell tolling out their hours.
I bellowed out any number of dooms, any number of hideous wishes to the alabaster ears of my mother. Maybe she could not see me, up there on the roof of a city. Does she see the grackles, the sparrows, the doves? She did not see me. But I seem to remember now, in that history before history, so long ago, that as the ninth sun set I sobbed weakly and begged her to let that place die, too, to let it become as dead and gray as her own dry kneecaps, to let it starve, since it would feed no one but itself.
I seem to remember this, and I am sorry.
THE TALE
OF THE CROSSING,
CONTINUED
“WITH THAT NINTH SUN I PERISHED THERE, AND I cannot say what became of my body, no more than any man can. I came here; it is the first thing I remember, the lonely shore and the ferry. And the bones and the lizards—we are all translated on these shores, and I am sure I don’t understand it, but there is a kind of poetry in metamorphosis, and if I could but see my lizards, I should be very interested to know what is written on their backs. But I was angry at first, and the little things scratched so terribly, and my journey on the lake was much farther than yours. When the storm came, I seized the pole from the ferryman in a frenzy of itching and impatience, a nice old woman with no teeth at all and two parrots’ heads squawking out of her palms. I tried to steer myself, and fell into the water. I’d advise you not to try it. When I spluttered and gasped my way back onto the raft, the old woman was gone, and I have been the ferryman for all the years upon years that have piled up since in this place.”
Seven blinked and chuckled a little. “That’s quite a story.”
Idyll shrugged. “Almost as good as yours.”
A few drops of rain spattered onto his broad face. And, as is the way of storms, once the first drops had squeezed from the sky, the rest came tumbling after, and soon the pair was drenched.
“This is your storm?” Seven asked shakily, trying not to think of the creatures scurrying beneath that pitiful scrap of cloth. But the ferryman shook his head.
“Best let me shelter you, boy. We aren’t going to make it across before they come through.”
Idyll held out his arms, and shuddering, Seven fell into the embrace, his teeth chattering as bone arms and flesh hands wrapped him, as the cloak stuck to his skin like wet grass, as two ponderous wing-frames, their hollow bones whistling in the whirling wind, tore through the cloth and closed over his body. He could feel the lizards moving, and tried not to look them in the eye. But the backs—he saw their backs, and on one was a terrible song of wind through broken windows, and on the other was a complicated algorithm concerning cloud patterns, and together he thought they might say something about the staying of rain.
Suddenly, the wind began to shriek—truly shriek; dozens upon dozens of throttling screams rolled past Seven’s ears, men’s cries and women’s keening, children’s hitching sobs. Clouds whipped by him, sharp and hard, slashing his cheeks. He felt warm blood dripping from his chin. The rain was nothing, he could not even feel it, but the terrible shrieking and the hard clouds, they clutched at him, trying to reach him through the cage of Idyll’s arms. The ferry pitched and bobbed on the raging water, spray flinging itself against the two passengers. Wisps of gray cloud snapped from the wide wings like laundry on the line. Seven gripped the ferryman’s frame and shut his eyes, buffeted and battered by the voices in the wind.
And as quickly as it had come, it was over. Seven stood on the ferry, his face bleeding onto the boards, Idyll slowly folding his wings up again under his cloak and picking up the long pole once more.
“What sort of storm did you expect in this place, Seven? They come through every few hours, like chariots rounding the last corner. Everything is plainly itself here, nothing more or less. You bear up under the Storm of Souls, and cross the Lake of the Dead.” The old man’s mouth twisted into a mocking smile. “Are we not courteous, to name ourselves succinctly? Are we not kind? Be glad I have not yet tired of my work. Be glad the Moon is patient, or I would have pushed you overboard and had my peace.”
Seven sat heavily against the mast. He wiped at his bloody face.
“But you are not dead, my friend,” Idyll went on. “You are as you are, and untranslated. How did you ever find your way here?”
The boy shrugged. “There is a lake here, there is a lake there. A lake, and a cave, and a grove, and if you pay the maid who lives there,” he cleared his throat, “if you pay her enough, she will open the cave and the grove and the lake, and let you pass.”
Idyll snorted. “Strumpet. I shall have to have a word with her.” Seven smiled weakly. “I find it curious,” the ferryman continued, “that you have never once asked whether I carried her across, your tree-girl, and how she cam
e, like you, or like me.”
There was a long pause. “I know she came. I know it.”
“I suppose you will see soon enough.”
