Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (7 page)

“Why?” asked Lata.

“Because the Aversa knew that harmony is pleasing to Somna,” Tobas replied. “She sought to serve. Our ancestors were content to let her.”

“Why?” asked an old man across the circle.

“Because men knew that the powers of the Aversa would make their work go more quickly,” Tobas said. “And they sought their advantage.”

Jassa could see the stony expressions of the others in the circle and knew that whatever had touched that one storyteller had grasped them all. He spoke carefully. “Why did our people hate and fear the Aversa?”

“Because one of them had more power than all of our distant fathers. Because there was nothing of them that was part of our fathers, save for Somna who created both. While Somna dreams she creates our world. The Aversa share a bit of that sleep, as well as the dream. Any one of them could remake the world, up to a point, and no one of our fathers knew what that point might be. Uncertainty breeds fear like cattle.”

“What happened?”

“The walls were finished. The Temple of Somna was finished. Our distant fathers tried to slay the Aversa as soon as this was done. They failed. With a word she broke the temple and then walked out of the city, along the path still called the Aversan Way, through the Weslan gate. When she stood beneath it, the walls fell. All except the Weslan gate, where we gather to this very day.”

“Where did the Aversa go?”

“To Loga’s Well, at the foot the Gralat Mountains, which some call Gahan’s Spine — ” Tobas shook himself, and his features relaxed. The others in the circle followed him as if on cue. Perhaps it was planned that way. Jassa did not think so.

“Did I go too far?” Tobas asked the others. He seemed to have forgotten about Jassa.

“The lad’s question was unforeseen and ill-timed,” said the old man who had spoken before. “but, if you were not meant to speak the answer, it would not have been spoken.”

“You’re a fatalist, Gos,” said another. “I think it was a mistake.”

“It doesn’t matter, it’s done,” Lata said.

“What’s done?” Jassa demanded.

Tobas shrugged. “If you don’t know, then perhaps that’s for the best. Thank you for listening.”

The circle broke apart. Somna’s Storytellers went off alone, in ones and twos and all in silence. After a while Jassa left, too, with the rather strange feeling that, as he passed beneath the Weslan Gate, he was leaving a temple.

Jassa did not go very far in his walk outside the city walls. He soon passed through the Weslan Gate, now deserted, and made his way home. There was no one there to greet him, had not been since his father’s death the month before. The smithy attached to the building was locked tight and shuttered, the forge cold. Jassa gathered what he thought he would need, and in the morning he left the city. As he passed the Weslan Gate, Jassa paused for a moment and smiled.

I need a miracle to win Lady Scythe. If there’s any truth at all in what the Storytellers said, now I know where to find one.

It’s not as if he had anything to lose.

•

The Aversa laughed until Jassa was afraid the roof of the cave would come crashing down on both of them. She finally wiped tears from her eyes and grinned at Jassa. She had a lot of teeth. Sharp, too, he thought.

“They
still
tell that story in Thornall? Such a paradox, that men’s lives should be so short and their memories so long. For all that they never seem to learn much from either.”

“Then it’s true?” he asked.

The Aversa shrugged. “Truth is a matter of interpretation; if the Storytellers failed to mention that, I will be amazed. Did it actually happen? More or less.”

Jassa had followed the storyteller’s directions and walked for two days, until he came to the foothills of Gahan’s Spine. He followed the only road — more of a goat-path — and came to a freshwater spring near the end of a narrow box canyon. The cave was just a little farther in.

He found the Aversa sitting on a chair of stone about ten yards from the entrance, at a place where the entrance shaft widened into a high, echoing chamber. For a creature of myth and legend she was surprisingly easy to find and to recognize. She was slim and elegant, but her hair was white, and the beautiful proportions of her face were nonetheless covered with skin almost translucent with age, marked with a fine network of lines almost as if she had been woven of spider-silk. Her eyes were larger than any human woman’s, and the color of amber. She almost appeared to be waiting for him.

“It’s true, then? You can reshape Somna’s Dream?”

“We can make small changes in the world, if that’s what you mean. Trifles. And at very high cost.”

“I’m not a wealthy man, but I have some property to sell — ”

The Aversa almost burst out laughing again, but she confined it to a brief chuckle, though it took obvious effort. She shook her head. “Let me show you something, Jassa of Thornall.”

The world changed.

They weren’t in the cave now. They stood in a perfumed garden at the base of a mountain that looked a little like the one where the Aversa made her home now. A waterfall cast rainbows into the air as it fell into a marble basin. Statues of exquisite artistry were set into niches carved in the living stone, in places Jassa remembered seeing as eroded, crumbling rock just a few minutes before. The Aversa sat done on a white stone bench and patted the seat beside her. Jassa sat down, numbly.

“How do you like my home?” the Aversa asked.

“It’s lovely.”

“Yes.” She sighed deeply. “It’s also gone.”

They were back in the cave. The Aversa wasn’t smiling now. “Once all my people lived like that. But there never were many of us, nor did living in peace with your kind work out very well. They’d think us greater demons than Gahan himself when the mood struck them. Use us when they could, kill us or drive us away when they could not. Until what few of us are left hang on in the empty places that no one else has found a use for.”

“With your power, why did you allow this to happen?”

The Aversa smiled again ruefully. “Our power is in the Reshaping of Somna’s Dream, the dream that is the world. But it is still Somna’s dream, not ours. Do you know what happens when someone reshapes the dream in a way she does not like?”

Jassa shook his head, trying not to lose himself in her amber eyes. The Aversa continued. “It disturbs the Goddess’s sleep. Do it often enough and brutally enough and she wakes. The world ends. Do you think the Aversa wanted to do what the Demon Gahan, with all his tricks, has so far failed to accomplish? Your folk have their place in Somna’s dream or they wouldn’t be here; I think ours will soon go away entirely.”

“But…you are Beloved of Somna! First of all the races of the Dream!”

The Aversa looked around at the bare stone walls. “As I said — the cost is high. Only we pay it, Jassa. You do not. You choose your way, and that has its own consequences which have nothing to do with me. Now, then — do you still want me to help you?”

Jassa took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“You’re a fool, but I already knew that. This concerns Lady Aserafel of Thornall, yes?”

Jassa blinked. “How do you know that?”

“I can always tell when the Storytellers have been at work, and whom they’ve touched. Your dreams told me the rest. Call it a whim, but I will help you. What do you want?”

“If you’ve seen my dreams, you should already know.”

The Aversa smiled again. “Clever boy. Dreams at once reveal and obscure. It’s true I know what you want. Do you?”

Jassa shrugged. “I want Lady Scythe to love me. I want to have her lips on my brow. I want her to look into my eyes with such devotion that, in that instant, she is mine and only mine.”

The Aversa nodded. “So I expected. Hand me that stone at your feet.”

Jassa bent down and picked up a piece of dull limestone, little more than a pebble. He handed it to the Aversa, and in a moment she handed it back to him, only now it wasn’t a stone. What she gave him was a small bronze medallion on a leather thong.

“Wear this,” she said. “When you return to Thornall, show it to the Watcher at the gate. You will get your wish. Or…”

Jassa was already tying the cord around his neck. “Or?”

“Or you can toss it in the nearest river, or simply drop it here and now, go home, take up your father’s profession or some other, and build a life for yourself without Lady Scythe. That would be my advice, if you’d asked for it.”

“I can’t do that. I love her.”

The Aversa nodded, and she looked even older than she had before. Older, and infinitely more weary. “I know,” she said.

•

On the long walk back to Thornall, Jassa took a little time to think. He wondered if it were really possible to do as the Aversa had advised; he would always be a poor substitute for his father at the forge. Oh, he was well-trained, and Jassa was sure he could earn a decent living at the forge, but not like his father. The man worked art with his steel; where Jassa would make a serviceable sword, Noban would create a master blade, perfect in balance and form. The same for anything Jassa had attempted; what his father had went beyond experience and practice, and Jassa knew that neither one would turn him into the smith his father was.

I could settle for less.

Only it was a lie. That was one thing Jassa could never do. Just as with Lady Scythe; there was no one to compare to her, and no point in trying. All or nothing; if there was a middle way he could never quite see it.

Jassa looked at the medallion. It was a simple disk of bronze with a carved sigil that looked like a closed eye. He dimly recognized it as one of the ancient symbols for Somna the Dreamer; beyond that it meant nothing to him. He wondered what it would mean to the Watcher.

He didn’t have to wait long to find out. Jassa approached the gate and the Watcher on duty there. Jassa didn’t show him the medallion; Jassa didn’t have to. The Watcher glanced at it as Jassa approached, and in an instant the man’s sword was at Jassa’s throat.

“In the Name of the Emperor, I apprehend thee.”

In a dirty, damp cell that night Jassa reached fitful sleep. The Aversa was waiting for him in his dreams.

“You betrayed me!” he shouted, though no one not on the stage of dreams heard him.

The Aversa shook her head. “I have done something, yes, but
not that.”

“They wouldn’t even tell me what the medallion means.”

“To the Watchers it means you are a man who helped lead the revolt against the Emperor in the city of Darsa. A revolt that is spreading. Now they will stop looking for that man for a while. We all serve Somna with what we have, and the Emperor’s reign has been bad for all of the Dream. You aren’t the man they were looking for, of course, but the Watchers believe otherwise.”

“Then I’ll tell them!”

She nodded. “I suppose so.”

They both knew it wouldn’t make any difference. “Why?” he asked, finally. “What did I do to you?”

“You asked my help,” she said. “And did not understand what that meant. That understanding is coming.” Then Jassa was left alone in a dream that was no more than a dream. In the morning he did not remember.

•

Jassa walked with three younger men along the Aversan Way; his arms bound behind his back. In time he came into the presence of Lady Scythe.

Jassa almost smiled.
At least no one can deny me this much
.

One by one the others died. Soon it was his turn. He looked right at Lady Scythe and said, “I love you.”

The Watchers just stared. Lady Scythe’s sweet face had a quizzical look, but she didn’t say anything. Jassa drew himself to his full height and waited for the Watchers to try and force him, as they had the old man. It didn’t happen. Lady Scythe stepped forward immediately and took his hand. She led him to the device.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “I love you.”

She smiled at him. “I do understand,” she said, and then Jassa was in the harness. Her smiled flirted with madness. “Of all those I have loved, you were the only one to speak first of love to me. Thank you.”

Lady Scythe took her place by the lever and then Jassa saw her lips move, as they always did. Only now he was close enough to hear. Now he was close enough to see the look of joy and devotion in his Lady’s eyes; the recognition that was always there when she pulled the lever and looked into the eyes of Death itself. And, at that instant, it was all for Jassa.

“I love you,” she said.

•

Jassa wanted to laugh, but he had no time.

When the Storytellers gather at the Weslan gate, every now and then someone tells the story of how Lady Scythe took an unclaimed head lying by the statue of Somna the Dreamer and made the skull into a gilt drinking cup. They would tell of how she would smile to herself as her lips brushed its cold brow and she gazed into its empty eyes. No one really knew if this actually occurred, but like any good story it grew enough in the telling that, in time, more than one good meaning found haven in the shade of it.

Such as the version in which, a few years later with both the Empire and the need for her services in decline, Lady Scythe married the governor of the frontier province of Lyrsa and moved far away from Thornall. Her clothes, her gold, and the skull cup were all she took from the city. The execution machine fell to rot and rust beneath the statue of Somna the Dreamer who, with closed eyes, saw all.

•

Cat Rambo

The bookstall was Doolia’s shelter, her refuge. The afternoons she spent reading on the Saltmarket Building’s topmost floor were more precious than anything else in her crowded existence. Which made the noisy intrusion of her three older brothers this afternoon all the more horrifying. She envisioned a life of never being able to read in Deitl Krank’s shop again without fearing a sharp poke to her ribs, a frog slipped in her pocket, the sharp teasing whistle that meant “Look at Doolia,” laughter following.

She glared around at them. Tow-headed Cirius and Claytus, twins, and their younger brother by a year at fourteen, Marcus. He rolled his eyes theatrically.

“You know what they say about Krank, don’t you?” He leaned forward, stage whispering. “He consorts with Dark Forces — the Dead People beneath Tabat!”

Deitl Krank, a small, gnomic man with pursed lips and spectacles like moons of chilly light, cleared his throat from the two-crates-and-a-shelf counter where he sat.

“If you’re not purchasing anything, I suggest moving along,” he told the boys with a flap of his hand. Much to Doolia’s dismay, he included her in the gesture. She would have protested, but she didn’t want the boys knowing how important it was to her. That way they wouldn’t look there for her again.

Resigned, she followed them down the twisty, windy stairs, past a series of little windows, each a different shape: trapezoid, triangle, arch — framing the crowds of the marketplace outside.

At the stairs’ foot, in the Bumblety’s stall, case after case displayed bird eggs arranged by size and adorned with paint, wax, feathers, silk flowers, or even jewels. Less ordinary eggs as well: warty green cases from swamp trolls, the flat black purses that hold skate eggs, spangled gold balls cradling embryonic faerie dragons and the clear bubbles from which sylphs hatch. On a topmost shelf, three cameleopard eggs stared down, the dark spots on them looking like cartooned eyes.

The Bumblety itself served as showcase. Its bulgy, greasy, coal black skin glittered with marbles pushed into the sticky flesh. Its eyes were two enormous glass orbs, the right a yellowy-green and the left as blue as noonday sea.

As Doolia turned the corner, Cirius and Claytus jostled, pretending to push each other into her. On the topmost shelf a white oval wavered.

Without thinking Doolia held out her hands to catch the falling egg. It filled her palms with cool smoothness, sized like an ostrich egg but speckled with rose and blue undertones like sunrise. At Marcus’s exclamation, the Bumblety turned. All three boys vanished into the crowd, leaving Doolia behind.

She stood in shocked silence as the Bumblety moved to her in a waft of cedar and licorice. It took the egg with stubby fingers studded with lines of freshwater pearls, turquoise balls, and malachite rounds. She had never heard it speak.

Replacing the egg on a shelf, it held out an arm. Lines of marbles were fixed along the length. It gestured at her to pick one.

The marble emerged beneath her shaky touch as though the skin were expelling it: an inch-wide amber glass sphere, a crack in its depths like a line of light. She thrust it in her pocket, mouthing nervous thanks, unsure how to express gratitude and worried she might offend it.

She chose to turn and leave.

Exiting the building in a sunlit dazzle, she collided with another body and went sprawling with an
oof
.

Still trying to catch her breath, she scrambled to her feet to extend a hand to her obstacle. He refused it, scowling as he rose.

He was exquisite, a china doll next to her untidy length of limb, neatly pressed pants and jacket unlike her crumpled clothing. She stared at his immaculate midnight hair, conscious of her own disarray.

“Watch where you’re going!” he snapped, and pushed past into the building.

Doolia glanced at the sun’s position, ignoring the jostle and sway of the market goers around her. Youngest of seven children, she knew from experience that while there would be plenty of dinner left from the inn’s table, it would be simple stew and bread. She liked the market fare’s variety: sour-sweet thornfruit candy, steamed fish eggs in purses woven from dark seaweed fronds, roasted nuts, and smoky dried fish. Her mouth watered at the thought, and she fingered the marble. The Bumblety operated under its own laws of commerce, but perhaps the marble could be traded for a bite to eat.

She made her way to the market’s northeast corner where food stalls emitted smells ranging from cinnamon to cassia root to coroco, the gritty salt that dwarves favor on venison. Sheltered between an oyster shucker and an elderly woman dispensing bundles of fragrant twigs, Annaliese was gathering up her leftover fried fish. Doolia knew that since the other teen tended her sick father, she left earlier than most vendors.

“Annaliese, Annaliese.” Doolia came up beside her, eying the spratlings, thumb-long oily fish threaded on pine sticks. Three skewers left. “Will you trade me? You must be tired of fish.”

“Do you have food to trade?” Annaliese said. “I don’t dine on promises.”

“I have this.” Doolia rolled the amber ball on her palm, slanting sunlight roiling its depths. “It’s so late there won’t be any dinner for me…” She let a sad quaver edge her voice.

Annaliese sighed and pushed a skewer to her. “Take that, then. I can trade the other two for pasties.”

Pleased with the exchange, Doolia went to sit by the harbor to eat her fish, one by one, each small chewy curl a blend of salt and piney smoke.

Returned home, she was slipping in through the Salty Turnip’s back door when an alleyway shadow caught her attention. “You! What do you want?”

The boy who had bumped into her earlier stepped from the darkness. His dull-gray but well-tailored cloak blended with the shadows, making him difficult to distinguish. “I want to buy something from you.”

“What?” Doolia blinked. She could imagine nothing of hers this upper-crust youth might want.

“The Bumblety gave it to you.”

“Oh! The marble, you mean? I gave it away already…” She broke off as his brows knit in anger. “But we can go in the morning, it has to be very early in the morning, before sunrise, and get it back. How much did you want to pay for it?”

He unpinned a clasp, knotting the cloak’s corners at his throat in its place. He held out the circle of gold and pearls, yellow flowers with shimmering white centers, set in a larger round of ironwood but closed his fingers over it when she reached forward.

“All right,” Doolia said, mind awash with avarice. A pin like that would buy books from Deitl Krank’s stall, sweetly musty books she would be able to read unchallenged under the quiet drone of the sunlit flies, at least a year’s worth, maybe more. “Meet me here tomorrow, here in the alleyway. We’ll go get it. Why do you want it, anyhow?”

“It has sentimental value,” he said, his tone flat. “All right, in the morning. Don’t stand me up.”

She nodded and went inside.

She took one of the little bread loaves cooling by the kitchen hearth and ate it in the common room near the fire, listening to the tavern’s easy chatter. She fell asleep as a bard began the many stanzas of
Caram-Sul’s Doom
, and when her father shook her awake, she staggered upstairs into her bed to dream of dwarves and vast stone cities by shadowed cave light.

•

She rose before anyone else to fumble with the brick that held her cache, extracting it: three thin, half-moon silvers. When she arrived in the alleyway, the boy was waiting cloak-wrapped, standing well away from the stinking bin of fish guts and leavings that a crowd of gulls picked through. Two alley cats, shrouded in mange and hunger, watched the birds, tails lashing.

“What’s your name?” she asked. “I’m Doolia.”

“Dion,” he said, voice as sullen as the gray clouds glowering overhead, heavy and low with rain promise. The cobblestones’ greasy swells underfoot testified that when the sky did give way to moisture, it would be a revisitation.

Annaliese lived near the Piskie Wood, the little square of woodland surrounded by pointed iron fencing that held the enclave of piskies that sanctioned hunters brought out for the Duke’s Bounty, an ancient and hallowed avocation given to war heroes and those who served Tabat well. Annaliese’s father had been the former; allegedly he had vanquished countless pirates and was given the position of Piskie Hunter by the Duke himself.

Within the last few years, though, the old man had succumbed to senility. Annaliese kept him locked in the house throughout the day while at the market, but in the evenings went with him into the Piskie Wood and watched him check his snares for the winged humanoids.

Their house slumped near the entrance. Boxes furred with red blossoms cradled the curtained windows and a bustle of smoke rose from the chimney. Doolia smiled when she glimpsed it.

“She’s still here cooking.”

Annaliese opened the door, sleeves rolled up and aproned, surprised to see them.

“I need to buy back that marble,” Doolia said.

“That marble? Why, what for? Here, come inside.”

Annaliese’s kitchen ceiling was low, and the room smelled overwhelmingly of fish and smoke. Doolia’s eyes watered and squinted, but Dion seemed unaffected. Annaliese’s father sat near the stove, wrapped in a gray blanket despite the room’s sweltering heat. He watched the arched wire cage before him. In it something flapped and buzzed.

“Is that a piskie? I thought no one ever caught a living one,” Doolia said.

“It was snared and hadn’t killed itself trying to get loose like most of them do. It must have just gotten caught,” Annaliese said. “It’s a small one, just a baby.”

Doolia stared into the cage. The piskie seemed fashioned from black candy-floss and leather, its translucent wings a constant blur. It stared back.

“Don’t they talk?” Doolia said.

“They don’t usua — ”

Dion cut Annaliese off with irritated words as quick as knife slashes. “Where is the marble?”

“I gave it to my father. Papa, do you have that marble?”

The old man stared at the baby piskie, eyes glazed.

“Papa,” Annaliese tried again, then went over to go through his pockets. He paid no attention.

“He must have lost it, it’s not here.”

“Where would he have lost it?” Doolia said.

“Perhaps when we were catching the piskie. It put up quite a struggle.”

“Well then,” said Doolia. “We’ll try the Piskie Wood.”

“Piskies are dangerous,” Dion said. The other two blinked. “I mean historically they’ve been savage.”

“Not for centuries,” Annaliese said. “The city piskies are trophy piskies. The last survivors of the Piskie War, with sorceries laid upon them and their children so they will be harmless.”

“So now you hunt them to re-enact that war?” Dion said. “Rather bloodthirsty, isn’t it?”

Doolia shrugged. “You talk as though you’re not as Tabatian as anyone else. Do we want to debate piskies or go find your marble?”

They entered the wood through a wrought iron gate. Its intricate scrollwork depicted a long-dead Duke beset by tiny flying forms.

Slender, dark-barked trees filled the wood, and layers of ferns and maidenberry covered the ground. As they walked, raindrops fell with heavy plops from the leaves along the path, and cold moisture crept up their legs, dampening their leggings. Unseen things scurried out of the way, and an oppressive feeling of eyes in the upper branches had Doolia constantly swiveling her head.

They made their way towards the center, where Annaliese had indicated the trap line started its spiral. There in the middle of the wood, trees surrounded a brief clearing.

“Odd,” Dion said.

“What is?”

“Every tree in the circle is a different kind of tree. See, that one is an oak, and that’s an apple.”

“Annaliese said to look for the white birch tree.”

“Yeah, but she didn’t say anything about the trees being different.”

“Why would she?”

“It just seems odd.”

They bickered their way towards the birch’s pale shimmer. As they reached it and she stooped to examine the snare, Dion’s hand reached for her.

“Watch out! That’s fresh dirt!”

But she was already falling into the pit, dragging him with her in a confusion of limbs and bruises.

•

When she awoke, darkness and the smell of earth pressed on her. Fiery pain constricted her wrists and ankles.

“Welcome back,” Dion’s voice sounded in her ear.

She was pressed up against something lumpy and cold which turned out to be Dion himself.

“How did we get here?”

“The piskies dragged us. You were unconscious and there were too many for me.”

“Too many? There must have been every piskie in the wood!”

“Quite probably,” he admitted.

Her nose was jammed under his chin. She paused in the darkness. “Why aren’t you breathing?”

“It seemed pointless to keep up the pretense.”

“What?”

“I’m one of the underdwellers.”

“You’re a ghoul? An undead.”

“Those are two of the vulgar, mistaken terms people sometimes use, yes,” he snapped.

“What are you doing here?”

“The same thing you are. Looking for my marble.”

“No, I mean what’s the deal with the marble?”

Silence prevailed for a time. She could hear distant water dripping, and her nose could pick out individual odors: the woody smell of tree roots and Dion’s faint effluvia of myrrh and rot.

“It’s my mother’s heart. I thought if I put my mother’s heart in something and kept it with me, she would pay more attention to me.”

“That’s blackmail!”

“No, no, I wasn’t going to tell her I had it. Just let the magic work its unconscious effect.”

“Couldn’t you just tell her you want more attention? How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“None.”

She shrugged. “Try being one of seven, then you’ll see no attention. But I don’t understand — the marble is her heart?”

“I’d been coming up here to get books on magic,” he said. “It’s a transference spell. But I didn’t realize the spell had worked. I left the marble in my room and she took it and brought it up to buy herself her own scrolls. Deitl does a good trade with us — he gave the marble to the Bumblety in turn.”