Beasts of the Walking City (44 page)

“That doesn’t sound hard.”

“And I want my people around me, Ercan. All of the Hulgliev. From wherever they’re hiding now. In forests or caves, or out in the grasslands. In the bowels of some wild walking cities. I want to find every single kiva out there and every single Hulgliev in it, and I want to bring them together and bring them home.”

Ercan nods. “So let’s get you started, then.” He holds out his hand, and I take it and let him think he’s helping me up, as the snow falls thick around us and the trees lean into the wind that comes down into that small valley. He passes me the flask, and we drink together there as the moons swing unseen across the sky overhead, tracing out our futures.

• • •

If Semper were still alive, he would talk to you about how the course of history can change in a matter of moments, and he’d be right. But it’s only later, much later in my life that I’ll look back on that moment, that simple handshake with Ercan as a time in which everything changed for me. A time when I went from being something of an aimless guy to really stepping up into adulthood, really becoming a man at least two of my fathers would have respected. 

It will stand with the time I’d kneel in the middle of Times Square before the singing Dragon of Barakuu and speak the Seven Words of Symmetry. The time I’d ride a jet-black grohver across the Golden Gate Bridge at the head of an army of Hulgliev, all of them shouting my name. 

It’ll rival the seating of that new Lunar Council I joked about, the setting of the Winged Crown across a new leader’s brow in a place called Switzerland, the hunting of those wild walking cities that get loose in the arctic. And it’s certainly ahead of all of those fierce and terrible battles by which two worlds will come to know my true name.

It’ll even stand up there with the moment when I will catch my own newborn daughter in my arms.

But all of those things? Like I’ve told you before.

Those are other stories.

Epilogue: Lespethl Ghat

Chancellor Ghat doesn’t want to be here, in the Council chambers. She doesn’t want to be hosting this delegation of Talovians.
You were responsible for a lot of this wreckage,
she wanted to say.
You blew up the fucking sea wall!
And now you have the utter gall to come here in front of me and complain that the city isn’t doing enough for you?

She’d rather be riding her grohver. She still keeps one in a private stable, at a farm up river, and if the Talovians ever stop talking, she thinks she might be able to get out there. She’d saddle it carefully—neither of them was young any more, and a saddle that was too tight could hurt the old creature’s digestion. One that was too loose would, of course, be pretty painful for her own constitution. She’ll saddle up and they’d fly low up the River Gaspek, through the narrow canyons and steep cliffs, over rapids and the lower waterfalls. She’ll take a tent and some basic food and a pole to fish with. And it will be quiet at long last. Quiet.

But the Talovians are Talovians, and they talk and croak and talk some more and lick their eyes and wave their tongues in the air—so much drama. She runs her fingers back through her long, white hair, keeps a patient expression plastered on her face and listens. Finally they wind down, and she tells them in careful, politically-correct terms that they are damn fucking lucky to still be squatting in the city at all after their little godsdamn spree, and that they will do well to stay quiet, tend to their own, and not ask too much of anyone lest it become widely known exactly
why
the city flooded. And exactly
who
was at the heart of it. After all, there’s an awful lot of damage and a lot of people looking to recuperate that damage financially. And Tamaranth does have a very straight-forward court system that tends to frown on things like, say, massive sabotage and willful destruction of critical infrastructure.

Not exactly in those words, of course. She
is
a politician now. But they get the point. They lick their eyes submissively and leave with a few extra bottles of the expensive Highland Red hidden under their cloaks, like they always do.

After the Talovians were a group of merchants from the upper Warrens, who wanted concessions on their tax rate to compensate for the flooding.
Talk to the Talovians, why don’t you
she wanted to tell them.
They just left. You can still catch them.
She didn’t. They’re also a little suspicious about this man named Capohne, the Earth man the Keruls had brought over, who says his little private army can protect them from looters in the future. Shouldn’t the city guard be doing that? Do the taxes they do pay cover nothing?

She listens patiently again, and listens some more, and tells them that while little funds are available, she is committed to keeping the Warrens commercially viable, and that the city would of course do its best to help such a critical part of the city’s economy. They nod and thank her. And they also leave with a few extra bottles of wine snuck into their bags.

After the merchants comes the Dockside union, and after that the representative from the sanitation union, and then the architect of the new Tower has many questions that simply must be addressed this very hour, provided of course she tells him the answers that he wants her to.

She doesn’t.

She has dinner with the poor man who is to take her old job as Councilor for the Seventh District, a round, sweating human named Khosk who is very bright and very competent, and largely well liked by many of the Seventh’s movers and shakers, but who has an annoying way of staring at her niece’s posterior as the young woman clears the table for them.

Damn Aart anyway, the lousy skeck.
He was a great Chancellor and dealt with all of this shit. He had to go and die and leave her with this mess.

After they are gone, every last one of them, and she and her niece Cryah have shared a quiet glass of the really good wine from the secret, hidden stash that she and Aart used to share, she finds herself walking again. Walking through the quiet, long, empty hallways of the Bane tonight. She nods to the few guardsmen who had drawn what she knew to be an awfully boring shift, and makes her way out to the windowed rooms at the far end, the ones that overlook what’s left of the tower.

She’d had them bring the girl’s body here, not knowing what to do with her. She was Ciordoi by the looks of her, so family in some distant way, and it had seemed somehow appropriate to keep her in sight of the Sisters; she was now as enigmatic as they were.

Ghat finds herself drawn here, night after night, to sit by the girl’s side. She brings another bottle of the good wine and sips as she watched the progress of the rubble being cleared by the light moons, watches the poor plants still milling about in the Garden, trying to find some place in is left of the soil there to be comfortable in. She watches moons pass slowly overhead, aligning and shifting and realigning in patterns as complicated as the alliances between all of the families. She long ago decided that those sages who thought they could tell the future of the world by reading the patterns of those same moons were either drunk or stupid or both.

Sometimes, she will see the sun rise.

Tonight, she needlessly smoothes the blanket across the girl’s body again, fussing as though she is tucking her in for sleep the same way she had once tucked in Cryah herself, thinking not for the first time that they should have put her in an actual bed instead of the hard stone pedestal of a window seat here.

She studies the smooth, dark face, the stern set of the jaw and the tattoos that overlap each other like the fibers of a tightly woven tapestry all down the girl’s neck and arms. She straightens the girl’s hair, and realizes she’s watching the girl’s chest again to see if it will rise. She knows it’s all an old woman’s foolishness. But she’s lived long enough to allow herself to be foolish now and then.

When she’s finally satisfied, she pulls her chair to the window and fills her glass again. Tomorrow will be another parade of petitioners, and she really wonders how Aart had stood it all. She had known his translator, a smart young man from the highlands who’d had a gift for imitating that deep thrumming sound the Kruk made with those undertongues. He’d told her how much of Aart’s cursing and threatening he’d had to filter out. At the time it had made them both laugh. But now she was beginning to understand. She snorts to herself: soon she might need a translator of her own.

She may have drifted to sleep off for a bit, then, because she realizes she’s imagining vividly how it would feel to be back on her grohver. The wind will be flying though her hair and the creature’s warm muscles will bunch and flow beneath her. Its warm animal smell will envelope her and below, at her feet, the world will spin away beneath them as if they are the ones suspended and all of the politics and all of the scheming and all of the things that other people think are valuable but that really are just distractions will spiral away and it would be her and her magnificent grohver, the two of them, together reaching effortlessly for the horizon that will forever lay just outside of their reach, as it should.

It’s the deep, choking gasp from behind her that startles her awake. The glass that is in her hand falls and breaks on the stone floor and her heart pounds in her chest. She stands and turns and sees the girl rise from the pedestal, then, and stagger toward her. She starts to run to her side, but when the girl crosses into the light of the moons Ghat draws back, and her breath catches in her throat.

The girl’s face is shifting, flowing—as though the very bones underneath her skin are rearranging themselves. There is a large and terrible bird there, with a long beak and a thick cranial ridge, these glittering eyes that study Ghat coldly. Then there’s the girl’s face again, that she had come to know so well, and the eyes are open and startlingly violet and alive and the girl’s expression is terrified and her lips are pleading soundlessly to Ghat for help.

But then there is another face there, too. A face that Ghat felt she should recognize but doesn’t, quite, a man’s face that is somewhat bird-like at the same time. He has long, stern features, a hawk-like nose, a cleft in his chin and a dark and menacing grin that makes her stumble backwards.

Her boot crushes the broken parts of the glass on the floor, and Ghat looks down for a moment. When she looks up again the girl is next to her, only it was the man’s face that was present and studying her.

“Greetings, Chancellor.” Lasser Arbellin says, for she’s sure it’s him now. His face is on statues that are all throughout the Residence. But how could it be him? Dekheret’s nephew here, after so many centuries? And why?

“By my Great and Glorious Prick, it is good to be home again after so long.” His voice is deep and harsh and it rattles out of the girl’s throat like a dead thing.

Ghat struggles for something to say, and finds nothing. And as the figure reaches out to her then, reaches behind her and snaps her neck with a gesture that seems far too easy and far too quick, it occurs to her that she doesn’t actually need the grohver to fly. Why, she can do it right now, all on her own! And as the demon thing called Lasser begins to consume her body, to fashion a new one for himself from it, she rises up above the city, and looks down at all of the wreckage and all of the work still needing to be done, and then sees all of the chaos and terror that are waiting now, lying just over the horizon, a very guilty and selfish part of her is glad, so infinitely glad, to discover her very own wings.

About the Author

Del Law’s writing has appeared in a number of publications, including Glimmer Train Stories, the Sycamore Review, Passages North, repeatedly in the Mississippi Review, and has received an Honorable Mention from the O. Henry Awards anthology. A reluctant world traveller for his day job in Silicon Valley, he lives now with his artist wife, two kids, two dogs, and eleven chickens in the California’s rural Santa Cruz Mountains, about a mile from the San Andreas faultline.

Interested in a sequel? Let him know: Del can be contacted directly through his blog at
http://houseonbearmountain.com
. Like the book?  Please review it online, and pass the word along to other Fantasy fans!

A portion of the proceeds from this book are being donated to Habitat for Humanity, a US Charity that helps build homes for people who need them.  (Blackwell would be proud.)

Published by Choroleos Books,
Santa Cruz, CA USA
[email protected]

Digital Edition
Copyright © 2012 by Del Law
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