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When she can no longer hear their moans, she reaches the cavern.
She knows by the changed echoes of her footsteps that she has found the place. When she kneels and stretches forth her hand, she feels ten centimeters of remaining ledge, then the abyss. Strong cold wind gusts past her: the Earth’s own breath, or some great monster’s far below. It howls. The noise clatters off the bone mobiles the nuns make down here, to remind themselves of the impermanence of flesh. The bones sing and turn, hanging from marrow twine in the darkness.
Red feels her way along the ledge until she finds one of the great anchored tree trunks from which the mobiles hang. She shimmies out upon the trunk until she reaches the bones of some ancient nun, hung by some other.
The countdown clock in her eye warns her how little time is left.
She cuts the old bones free with her diamond-sharp nails and takes her replacements from her pack. Strings them one by one with marrow twine, connecting skull and fibula, jaw and sternum, coccyx and xiphoid process.
The timer ticks down. Seven. Six.
She ties the knots rapidly, by touch. Her limbs inform her that they ache where they clutch this ancient trunk above an unfathomable drop.
Three. Two.
She lets the bones fall into the pit.
Zero.
A rush of wind splits the earth, a roar in darkness. Red clutches the petrified trunk closer than a lover. The wind peaks, screams, tosses bones about. A new note rises above the ossuary clatter, woken by the cavern’s wind whistling over precise fluted pits in the bones Red has hung. The note grows, shifts, and swells into a voice.
Red listens, teeth bared in an expression that, if she saw it mirrored, she could not name. There’s awe there, yes, and fury. What else?
She scans the lightless cavern. She detects no heat signature, no movement, no radar ping, no EM emissions or cloud trail—of course not. She feels gloriously exposed. Ready for the gunshot or the moment of truth.
Too soon, the wind dies, and the voice with it.
Red curses into the silence. Remembering the era, she invokes local fertility deities, frames inventive methods for their copulation. She exhausts her invective arsenal and growls, wordless, and spits into the abyss.
After all that, as prophesied, she laughs. Thwarted, bitter, but still, there’s humor in it.
Before she leaves, Red saws free the bones she hung. The pilgrim Red meant to shape is gone, and the hermitage will be unbuilt. Now Red will have to fix the mess to the best of her ability.
The abandoned bones tumble and tumble and fall and fall.
But don’t worry. The seeker catches them before they land.
* * *
Dear Red, in Tooth, in Claw,
You were right that I laughed. Your letter was very welcome. It told me a great deal. You imagined the fire glinting off my teeth; knowing your fine attention to detail, I thought I’d put a little devil in it.
Perhaps I ought to begin with an apology. This is not, I’m afraid, the omen you were anticipating; while you listen to my words, you might give a little thought to whose bones are cored and pocked with this letter. That poor pilgrim who might have been! Why leave a self-destructing paper trail when one can enjoy an asset-destroying scrimshaw session and let the wind take a turn tickling some ivory?
Don’t worry—he lived a fine life first. Not the life you would have wanted for him, perhaps—unhappy but useful to posterity, harbouring the vulnerable, dimpling the future’s punch cards one new life at a time. Instead of building a hermitage, he fell in love! Made glorious music with his fellow, travelled widely, drew tears from an emperor, melted her hard heart, bumped history out of one groove and into another. Strand 22 crosses Strand 56, if I’m not mistaken, and somewhere downthread a bud’s bloomed bright enough to taste.
It flatters me to find you so attentive. Be assured that I’ll have looked long and hard at you while you assembled my little art project. Will you go still or turn sharply when you know that I’m watching you? Will you see me? Imagine me waving, in case you don’t; I’ll be too far off for you to see my mouth.
Just kidding. I’ll be long gone by the time the wind turns right. Made you look, though, didn’t I?
I imagine you laughing too.
I look forward to your reply,
Blue
* * *
