The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (33 page)

When the chatelaine grew tired of peering out the window, seeing nothing of the unrest her servants told her about—though she
could
smell fire—she prepared to take her dinner, as if it were a regular night. Yet again there came a knocking at the door of her bedchambers. Thinking it might be Octavia, the chatelaine eagerly pulled open the double doors, one handle loop in each hand, but it was the chamberlain, old man Erricus, standing there, looking grave and sour and eternally unfathomable.

“Already, chamberlain? I thought you might be busy sneaking around, conspiring, setting up your camp. You haven’t rapped on these doors for many years! What do you want?”

For the longest time, the chamberlain said nothing. His left eye twitched. Finally he cleared his throat, coughed into his fist.

“The fecund,” he said, “has escaped.”

Blood drained from the chatelaine’s face. She felt this happen, the blood falling. Both doors, and the Great Hall beyond them, even Erricus himself, all seemed to recede until the chatelaine was standing at the far end of an impossibly long warren. There was a ringing in her ears.

“With a rider atop,” continued the chamberlain. “A young girl, it would seem. They have gone to the river.”

Octavia
. The chatelaine knew with certainty that the girl on the monster’s back had been the kholic. Even before this news, awareness of the doomed relationship had been circling her, but the chatelaine had done her best to suppress it, to fight it off: now the truth struck her, mocking the vain hopes she had recently tried to nurture. By letting the kholic into her life, and into Jesthe, she had brought about humiliation, catastrophe.

On shaky legs, she made her way to the alcove. She saw the empty cage and greeted her anxious pets with her own choked cry of dismay: sure enough, the keyhooks now clawed nothing but air. She remembered telling the kholic that the missing key had been the key to her heart! She remembered her giddy state of mind, the wonderful love she had felt. But the affair, the chats, the sex, these had been a ruse. Octavia had stared at her, with no discernable expression, most likely planning her deceit the entire time.

When the chatelaine turned back, Erricus had entered the room, his robe sweeping the floor, his fingers pressed tight together. He drifted over the straw carpeting.

“I didn’t say you could come in.” Blood pounded in the chatelaine’s head, threatening to make her black out.

“We are searching the River Crane, where the creature was last seen, but there is no sign of them. This event, chatelaine, falling on the day that you granted us lost powers is, well, prophetic. Gods have made themselves known again. Your fecund is no longer in her pen. Do you have any idea who might have done such a thing? Released the fecund?”

“I do not appreciate your questions, nor the tone in which you ask them.”

“There is more trouble. Factions, chatelaine, are marching. There are great disturbances. Trouble at the ostracon, I believe, and elsewhere, at spots throughout the city.
Beatings
. Change has been accompanied by upheaval and civic unrest. Even my own men . . .” He shook his head. “You are aware of the sightings?”

“Of course,” she snapped. “I know all about that. But gods and goddesses are your problem, chamberlain. Not for the likes of me, who disbelieve.”

“There is violence in our streets.”

“Can’t you control the city? That’s your job.”

Erricus said, “Anu, god of the skies, has been seen in the vicinity of South Gate. The benevolent sisters, Kingu and Aspu, have flown over. They are the underworld, and the goddess of anger. There can be no more disbelief. Disbelief has brought us to this point.”

She stood very straight. “You must be happy. You and your palatinate. I extend my congratulations. Now leave, please. Leave me alone.”

Yet he did not go.

“Chatelaine,” he said, “to be honest, the palatinate and I had been prepared for a much less—”

From the window came the low rumbling
whoomp
of an explosion; concussive waves shook the walls of Jesthe.

Path awoke. He stared up at a dim ceiling. Several small flames burned nearby, but he could not see them. He felt a depth of connectivity that extended beyond flesh and bone and thought. He understood who he was, and what he had become since the light had touched his forehead. All that remained of the unfortunate desert boy was a name, a shell. In fact, there had been nothing left of path since the day the long spacer had completed the circuit and reached out to him. Maybe, thought the boy, there had never been such a child, just a vessel, waiting to be filled.

With ease, he sat up.

Two old humans were here with him—the tiny, naked man, who called himself the castellan, and another—taller, skinny—completely swaddled in rags, face hidden by a mask. They both watched him.

Path examined his forearm—a metal rod, delicate chains, fingers of wire and cloth and linked knuckles. His legs were spindles, set into a leathern hip.

“Stand,” said the castellan, eyes moist. “You can stand.”

Miraculously, path did manage to get to these feet. He tottered. Moving the fingers of each hand, slowly, testing the commands, he felt the digits flex. He rotated each wooden foot. Putting the wire fingers against his chest, he felt the strong beat of his heart.

“A lifetime ago,” said the castellan. “I wanted a daughter, but she . . .”

Path glanced at the man. The spirit of the mother ship had downloaded as much as it would. He felt the spacer acknowledge him, far above, as he moved. “I have no parents,” he said, as gently as possible. “That was part of the deal. I am an orphan and will remain an orphan.”

Bodies were scattered about down here. Children had died since leaving the fold. They had fought each other. Many had died. This understanding brought sadness. Only four of her brood remained alive
—

He took a step, his first ever, toward the edge of the table.

Black wings draped the ground. With his back arched, Pan Renik’s wobbly legs just managed to keep his weight. He lifted both hands, with huge effort, fists clenched into claws, skin rough and split, burned by the wind.

Though it was hot here, and he could hardly breathe, his mind was clear, like the sky on a blue day.

There were others in this underworld. He heard them. “I escaped the power,” he said. “I escaped the padres. I have sucked in clouds.” Echoes of his words rasped back at him. Stepping forward, sap leaking down over his face, he realized he was blind. Vision exchanged for clarity. He tried to touch the sides of his head but did not have the dexterity.

He stumbled over a body at his feet, took another step forward. A peaceful wind, of sorts, blew through his mind. Soon, Pan Renik would soar again.

“Listen,” panted the fecund, “think you could get off? My back’s killing me.” Her drool writhed in the glow of a lantern, alive with parasites.

There were not many people around. Octavia climbed down. Neither mentioned the miscarriage, if that was what had happened in the river. Filth dripped onto the muddy street from both her and the monster and it seemed that a myriad of tiny snakes and worms continued to drip from the fecund’s skin. She was bony, sunken. They had stopped at the entrance to Hangman’s Alley, smoke thick in the air. Shouts from somewhere very close.

“I should never have left my cell. I feel like I’ve lost my mind.”

“Can you walk?”

“I think so. Octavia, I don’t know what you expected from me. You tore me from my house.”

“You were a prisoner.”

“Not really.”

Sticking close to the market stalls, the fecund walked toward the vendor’s area; beyond, Octavia saw the ostracon.
Burning
.

She stopped, breath catching in her throat. Kholics clustered, some sitting, dazed on the road, others lying on the mud, perhaps even dead. Smoke rolled from windows and down into the street. Clouds were red as embers.

A wall crashed down with a roar and a shower of sparks, sucking flames from the interior of the ostracon that rose, triumphant.

Men catcalled from the perimeter of the glow. Within, trapped kholics screamed.

Mummu had survived the war. He did not know this achievement was remarkable; his awareness was dim at the best of times. He had no knowledge there had even been a war, let alone that eight of his siblings had died during the skirmishes. In fact, Mummu was unaware of mortality, even his own.

When the siblings had made planetfall, Mummu was an infant, wanting only to rumble away from the others, who squabbled and preened and occupied themselves with vain pursuits. Single-minded, Mummu was unlike them. He had trundled across the barren landscape, toward the distant range of low mountains.

By the time the walls of Nowy Solum were completed, and the fecund was a young, lush monster, Mummu was seven times his birth size, working nearly a kilometre under the surface, eating rocks and churning out drones, which he put together in his own shop, manufactured with metals from the rocks he bored through.

When the fighting ended, with Anu half-destroyed, and his sisters hiding, he was perhaps thirty times his birth size. Big enough to generate an impressive mantle.

Today, Mummu was a further seventy times as large. He had continued to spread out, incrementally. His drones were diligent, and dutiful.

The sisters found him by first locating a pack of workers tunnelling under the crust along a stretch of coastline. Kingu and Aspu had known the general area where their brother was set up but they were astonished to see the extent of the work he had done. They approached his seeding towers, extending high above the beach in rows, penetrating the very clouds they had generated for so long.

Several attempts on many frequencies were required to get their stalwart brother to respond, to make him understand that Anu had returned, and that their mother was active. Mummu listened but was not especially interested. Only his agenda remained clear. He had little interaction with the indigenous creatures down here and even less concern for their future. With no decisions to make that required anything other than empirical logic, he had no need for exemplars. He did not care for approval, nor covet worship.