Fifteen

Three days passed in heaven. Sisphe and Harlow learned from Brandegor that you are Gwyar, and treated our time with hallowed reverence, if wariness. They gave us distance. Neither of their religious cultures feared revenants like mine did, but they both had superstition enough to think that you might perhaps be evil. Still they pulled aside Vikare and they told her about the war. Our war, the grand Hereafter. They told her about the imminent destruction of the Fingerbluffs and the holy fight, the final fight, to defend this place and its spirit. I saw them swimming together down in the Amandine Sea, saw them vanish between narrow buildings and reappear in dance halls. An invitation was being made, I thought, to be embraced by the wild majesty of Choirhood. To be a part of this rather than opposed to this.

I care for Vikare. I admire her and feel fantastic pride in her inclusion. I would have rejoiced to participate in her initiation into the Choir, which happened the morning of the third day, as I was told an hour later by Uthste. She recounted how Vikare laid across Harlow’s lap with her dress in her fists and let Sisphe thu Ecapa tattoo something small across her belly. She did not tell me what it was. Perhaps including Vikare was reckless and dangerous, perhaps it was a kindness to me rather than to her, either way was not my call.

I spent my three days showing you my favorite places. I’d given you a tour so many times. Showing you now felt important. You looked. You let me lead you around and when you grew weary you let me carry you on my back like you did when we were small. You questioned the lurchers but did not press when I gave you watery nonsense about how we just had them down here. You let me wait on you. You let me rub your shoulders and massage your tight hands, you let me brush your hair, you let me fetch your cool glasses of water. I did not let you touch me. You did not yet remember me. It would be unfair to you. When we ran away together, I’d let you touch me like I let nobody touch me. I’d give you the parts of me that I’d assumed had choked and shrunk. I’d grow my heart anew and give it fresh and unblemished to you. Have your way with me however you’d please. I’d do what was necessary for your happiness. There was only one obstacle in our way, and I’d surmount it.

I parted with you before we left, just briefly. I went to embrace Harlow and Sisphe, I embraced Uthste and Valor and Brandegor, I embraced old Amon, who kissed my head.

“Vikare is staying,” I said to him.

“I have audience with her tonight,” he said. “It is naïve to think that she would participate in the war effort. Rich children make poor converts. But then, the first Hereafterists who called themselves such were scholars, wealthy students, who learned about the extremity of wrongness in this world and its persistent recreation and audaciously imagined the world otherwise, then put arms to those ideas. Maybe she’ll sway. Marney. Darling. Do you remember what you’ve sworn to do?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to kill Yann Industry. Tonight, I’d wager. I’m seeing him tonight.”

“You love his ward. That makes this difficult.”

Love was too small and blunt a word. I touched his long white hair. He was so old now. I did not want him fighting. “My devotion to her is the selfsame fire that leads me to kill Yann Industry. I will do it for her, not in spite of her. I know she might not understand. She’s lived a life of captivity in his hands and her memories of what has been done to us are corrupted, her loyalty is not her fault. I will make quick work of this, as is my destiny. Then I’ll bring her back.”

“You’ll bring her back?”

“Yes. I’ll bring her back here. We’ll run away.”

Amon looked pained. He held my jaw in his hands. “Say the bleed with me before you leave. You are the only man for whom I’ve ever been reverend. I want to tell you the words that made me a reverend so that you might say them and ascend to your own reverendship. I considered myself a Torn reverend when I killed the Loveday heir, the girl you’ve named Velma Truth Loveday. Tonight you’ll get yours. You’ll become yourself. I’m more proud than any mother has ever been.”

He led me to the table and we knelt beside it. We put our hands on the table, and he told me about the clarity that took him when the Lovedays died and the Fingerbluffs became briefly free. He told me about his faith’s true power. He cut his thumbs and daubed my eyes, and I cut mine for his. Boletes and daisies and my ichorite knife. These things for the Torn. All for you.

On the train you showed me your ledgers. Economics was a science, you assured me, that anyone could learn. I’d be learning it, you insisted. My duty was not the overseeing of finances, but if I was to be a competent partner in the Chauncey ichorite empire, I needed to know what these figures revealed about the world. I confessed that I could not read your handwriting and you laughed, you thought my earnestness was so charming, I completely dodged having to reveal that I simply couldn’t read well at all.

You showed me your sketches instead, designs made out of nested lines so faint I could hardly see them. Trade routes. You’d signed a contract with Mir that he would be the principal global shipping partner for Chaunceyco so long as he lived. Not forever, she stressed, just his lifespan. Then whomever Mago picked next, assuming whichever usurper killed Mir let Mago live. You told me that Mir’s brother Hiram had been an acquaintance because Mago, enterprising and blessed with ambition and considerable polyglot powers, had written to all the most promising new business magnates in the world and introduced himself in his capacity as advisor. Mir murdered Hiram, surprising nobody, and Mago cleanly transitioned from one brother to the next. All they wanted in return, riches aside, was use of the Flip without toll. Accessing the Flip River would mean avoiding the circumnavigation of the continent otherwise required for its crossing. Susannah would relent where her parents had not. She’d do this because she loved you. I could not fault you this assumption. The things I intended to do for you to demonstrate my love far exceeded the insanity of ceding free use of the Flip.

The vibrations of a train ride are sacred to me. I can’t remember half my exploits as Whip Spider, tearing trains apart with my hands nearly killed me, the fits made my prime a mirage of pink anguish and movement, but the movement, the constituent parts of this device grinding together and throwing us forward through space, that feeling had become definitional to my life and sense of self. I put my arm around you, and I felt the wheelsets lurch underneath my boots and I knew that my brief life had amounted to something. I was proud of what I had done. I looked at your sketches and imagined how lightly you must hold your graphite, barely pressing the paper, and I imagined what grip you’d use, how your fingers might fold around the instrument. I looked down at your hand in my lap. You kept making passes at me. I wanted to swallow you whole. I wanted you inside me. Soon. We wouldn’t wait long. We’d waited for ages. Just a night. A few more hours.

“Everybody’s gone,” you assured me. “No more guests. We’ll invite them back for the wedding though. You can do a Goss’s Girl victory lap. They’ll be so envious and impressed.” When I didn’t laugh you brought your cheek close to mine. “Do you want to go slow? I assumed, you know. Because of Vikare, I had assumed you went fast with physical touch.”

“I’ll be yours soon in all the ways I can be,” I promised. I kissed your brow. “What time will Yann Industry arrive?”

“He’s already home, I’d imagine. Him and his new bodyguard. Why, are you nervous?”

“Excited,” I said. “Nervous too. That’s part of it.”

“He’s a little intense, but he means well. He’s a great man.” You yanked one of my curls. “I’m sure you’ll get on swimmingly. He likes novelty and passion. You have both. Besides which, you saved his life. That’s got to count for something.”

You held my arm as we walked up to the gates. Birdie answered the door along with the guard whom I’d kill in an hour. I beamed at Birdie. She beamed at me. She called out into the open room, “Baron Velma Truth Loveday, Lord of the Fingerbluffs, and Mister Gossamer Dignity Chauncey!”

You bonked your forehead against my shoulder. “Look alive,” she said. “Be polite.”

We swept through the Bellonan funerary husk of your estate and strode into the palm-frond courtyard. A thin gray man sat alone in the awful ichorite furniture. He stood when he saw us. He clasped his hands together. “Such a quick trip. I’d expected you both to remain on the coast for longer.”

“Hello, father,” you said, like you couldn’t be prouder that the word in your mouth was father. Like you loved its taste.

Yann Industry Chauncey looked at me. I observed the veins in his face. He had blue eyes and was nondescriptly beige. In different clothes he’d be anyone. In a reedy little voice he said, “Sit. There are mediocre finger sandwiches if you’re starving. The crumb is wrong. Choke them down if you’re desperate and rest assured that I’ll sack the cook.”

You laughed. You sat right beside him, so close as to be too close, not in a proper seat slot. I sat across from him.

“Truth,” Yann said. “You very nearly killed me.”

You stopped smiling.

“Yessir,” I said. “I could have.”

“Your father has recently died, I understand. He was not a reasonable man. He did not send you to Wilton. Are you otherwise educated?” He pushed the tray of crustless white sandwiches at me. “Eat up.”

“I am educated in my way,” I said.

“So no. Education is expensive. The hiring costs for middle management are evidence enough of that, and your barony isn’t known for anything, save for your late father’s madness. I assume you grew up among the aristocratic poor. That’s fine. You aren’t entitled and you don’t need to be middle management. You’ve vaulted over that by impressing my ward.” Not daughter. He pressed his thumb into the edge of a sandwich and watched the bread compress and slowly rise. He pinched it harder. It stayed flat. “Nevertheless, when she asked you where ichorite ore might be found, you gave the theological answer. You’re smart. You think about the world abstractly. Are you faithful?”

“To my Virtue.”

“Again, no. We’re Stellarine. Marriage is a unity between man and woman according to our religious codes. Your Lunarist,” he said, pronounced the word indistinguishably from crawly, “partnership is the achievement of property law forcing cooperation between disparate faith groups, not the religion that raised you. So you know religion, and you know how to use it to open up the geode of the world and reap the riches inside, but you do not practice religion like a religion, it does not restrict your movements, which means when you open up the world with religion you don’t have religion to prevent you from taking what you find inside. What do you think of Gossamer?”

“I love her,” I said, astonished.

“You don’t. You’ve known her not quite a month. Spare me the romantic answer. Be specific. What do you think about Gossamer?”

“She’s slippery. She likes pageantry. She’s ambitious and insightful and makes useful friends.”

“Fascinating. That’s better. Slippery, yes. Everybody knows it. It’s her great flaw, the fact that she’s so obviously scheming something. She looks guilty. You don’t. You look simple. There’s utility in that. She can use you as her brusque but soft-spoken provincial shield. People like a farmer in the city. Pastoral chic is in. You have a slow tongue, you sound almost Tullian. You’ll be fantastic now that you have your seat in the Senate. Unassuming, perpetually earnest, innocent. You and Gossamer will make a fine team.”

You gasped, collapsed back in your rigid ichorite chair, lolled your head back and looked up at the sky. The lines in your shoulders slackened. You looked so relieved. Nearly happy. I cherished that look on your face.

“Mister Chauncey,” I said. “May we have a conversation, just you and I?”

He waved a hand, and you leaped to your feet, eager and beaming. Yann continued to look at me and did not watch you touch your heart, did not watch you blow a kiss to me, did not watch you swirl out of sight. If I guessed correctly, you went to the library, or out behind the house to the gardens. I didn’t know for sure.

Then I sat across from Yann Industry Chauncey.

“Let’s walk,” he said. “The Bellonans built these tiered galleries so they might walk around the edge and look down into the courtyard, where their women and children would play with the pigs. Gossamer fills this courtyard with women, but when you’re married you can be firm with her. I hate her whoring. We’re more clever than Bellonans. We’ll overlook the silence and hear ourselves think.”

I stood up. I left my coat at the table. The lustertouched fit bubbled under my skin, the fit and boiled lightning. He stood with me, walked beside me up the stairs to the second-story gallery. We were among the fronds, not above them. He put his hands behind his back. All around us, the house was smithereens. Perdita’s tirade tore up this floor. Glancing down the hallways, I saw that glass still glittered, and flecks of broken amphorae. I half expected the bloated rotten corpses of Gossamer’s bodyguards to be still strewn amongst the chairs.

“Whatever you want to ask me about with Gossamer doesn’t matter. I approve the marriage. I don’t care that you’re lying about something. The Fingerbluffs situation doesn’t make sense. You export nothing. You should’ve starved, but you’re fit, vital. Perhaps you’ve bought the pirates. It ultimately means nothing. I don’t care. Now. There’s something I’ve got to tell you about ichorite ore, now that you’ll be among its inheritors. The deposits occur in clutches.

“They’re usually about a thousand feet under. That’s deeper than most miners prefer to go, but it’s crucial to dig that deep. The initial depositing was, as far as I estimate, about three thousand years ago. Great trenches remain deep underground that reflect this. Miners will come across the tunnels and raise questions. Suppressing these questions is not a conspiracy nor is it to obscure or hide the reality of what ichorite is. The purpose is to prevent excavation rights from becoming a question of cultural preservation, or maybe scientific inquiry. Ichorite is a resource. It needs to be a resource. Our wealth and universal progress depend on its exclusive use as something to be used. It shouldn’t be cordoned off by antiquarians and kept inert behind glass. It should be refined. It should be the pride and the means of our lives. It is the answer to all manufacturing questions. There are enough eggs underground that we could remake every major city on the continent entirely out of luster.

“Sometime in your generation, you could expect to see yourself and Gossamer helming the general progress of the entire world. Just keep a handle on the mining. The rest can tangle. Factories can tangle. Factory workers are fungible, and people will look at the starving and desperate on the streets and decide that a hard life in a foundry is preferable to desolation. Shipping, packaging, these things will yield if you press on them. Mining must be exquisite. Obscure the nature of the eggs and put your money into your mining sites. Build towns around them and own everything inside them. Make it so that the entire world within those towns is in service to ichorite ore and its extraction. Pay them more. Make leaving impossible. Harvest one egg at a time.”

He did not look at me. I heard the sound of his voice, but the words held little meaning. While he spoke I unbuttoned my shirt. I pulled it wide, let my tattoos breathe, uncovered my name across my breast. I rolled up my sleeves. I pulled my knife out of its special sheath and I cradled it in my hand, the coalesced slugs of the bullets that’d killed my family and friends. That prickling pink feeling took me. Yann Industry’s back rippled. His hair became self-luminous.

“When you’re old, they’ll hate you. They hate me. You care about the world and you will lament that they hate you. You will want to make them love you. You’ll be a philanthropist. You’ll throw money at small problems, you’ll stop up cracks in dams with ichorite, you’ll ease the immediate effects of the human condition, and you’ll do these things to feel better, like you are still a person. You are no longer a person. It is hateful to live, Truth. It hurts to be a human animal inching across the spinning globe, it debases and agonizes you, and nothing helps, and then you die. Life is lonely. Most people are ultimately pointless and ineffectual. They have little problems and you will solve them trivially, and they will still hate you, and you should not care. Very few people have the willpower and creativity to be significant. You’re significant now. You’re separate. Pain cannot touch you anymore. It doesn’t matter if you’re hated by ants. It doesn’t matter if you tread on ants in your walk to where you are awaited. There is a cosmic scale on which you are now a player. You sculpt the spawn of heaven.”

“Look at me.”

He continued walking.

“Fucking look at me.”

He glanced over his shoulder. Something flashed across his face.

“You killed my family,” I said. “You killed everybody I’ve ever known, you killed us on the street while we were singing and pleading with you to treat us decently, to treat me decently, to know what’s fucking wrong with me. You slaughtered us. Fungible? You tell me that my family was fungible?”

Yann turned to face me. He worried his hands together, twisted the thin ring he wore on his thumb. “The lustertouched bandit. Right. I’ve heard about you.” Chilly dismissive nonchalance. “So Veracity’s servants did kill him. That rumor’s been floating around for years. Don’t interrupt me.”

“I’m going to kill you,” I told him. “These words are your last. Be deliberate.”

“We’ve already discussed why none of that matters. Be deliberate. Calm down and I’ll make you very rich.” He chuckled to himself. Chuckled! Smiled at me, crinkled his eyes like I was a child throwing a tantrum, like he was unkillable. He was the first emperor of Bellona. He’d never ever die. I saw his face in the stained glass colors, candy beetle red, piss yellow, rat poison blue, the building blocks with which all other colors were made. I saw him glowing high above me.

I came toward him.

He parted his lips.

I advanced and he took a step back. Two steps back, he was a limber man but not a fast one. I caught up in a stride. I channeled sweet Vikare’s wisdom and slashed out the knife’s tip, a smooth extension of my arm, and I clipped up the length of his wrist, slit the sleeve, a quick shallow cut to demonstrate that I could make him suffer.

His face twisted. His lips thinned until they vanished. Panting he shouted, “Help!”

Gunshot, the banister near me exploded into pearl dust and splinters. His guard stepped out into the courtyard. He reloaded. I screamed, I screamed so loud my throat split, I felt something tear, and with a heave that made my muscles wrench and the world burst in globs of seething false colors, I killed the guard. I threw an ichorite chair over his body. It became liquid and splashed over his shoulders, over his gun, and he collapsed without a sound, a mass of metal.

I spat on the floor. There was blood in the serum. It leaked from my ears, curved down my cheekbones at the edges of my eyes. I felt it slick on my inner thighs. I felt it pulse and turn slippery in my nail beds. I squeezed the knife tighter, citric acid on the wound in my brain, and I looked around for Yann.

He took off running. I saw him round the gallery, make for the cornermost suite. Your room.

I walked after him. I had been in your room, there were no doors out besides this one. I did not wipe away the serum as it fell from me. I sniffed then gave up. My vision blurred. Edges softened, everything stirred as though with breath. Gentle movements, an easy tide. The whole building recalled the Amandine Sea. I waded through the air. I rounded the corner.

Your bedroom door was shut. I tried it. He had put something against the handle. Handle wasn’t ichorite, very good! I pressed my cheek against the wall and focused. I could hear the table on the other side of the door but I listened past the table. I listened for the sparkly chime sound, the way that ichorite tasted in the inner ear. I listened for how trains felt. The hinges! There was ichorite in the door hinges, not the leaves and knuckles, but the pin. The pin was cut ichorite.

My diaphragm kicked and something pinched behind my brain.

The ichorite pins melted.

I pulled the double doors toward myself and skittered sideways. I barely cleared them as they fell. They smashed the opposing gallery railing. Little individual rail posts fell down toward the courtyard like knocked-loose teeth.

I stepped inside your bedroom.

Yann stood inside. He was scribbling something furiously in a notebook on the table.

My body twisted away from the table. My blood roiled inside my capillaries. My skin looked mottled, the bruises that suddenly flowered along all my joints showed sky blue and fit pink and noxious, poisonous green. I looked like my knife. I clung to my knife. I stepped toward my reverendship with my promised knife outstretched.

Yann slammed the notebook shut. He knocked it aside, threw his hands in the air. He reached for a lamp, a candlestick, a poker. He found a letter opener. He held it shaking. “You’re ruining this,” he heaved. “I would’ve shared this with you and you’re ruining it.”

For Edna, for you, for our collective Hereafter. Torn Child sleeps no longer.

I struck Yann Chauncey down.

My knife pierced him. My chest knocked his chest and he cut back at me, he opened my shoulder up with his dirty blunt-edged knife, but I pushed him down and put my weight on the knife, I willed the knife back into metal, I pushed it into the wound I made, I pushed all the melted bullets down, I watched the ichorite seep through the veins of his body and turn him silver inside. He did not scream. He twisted once, then went very still. His eyes opened wide, his jaw relaxed. He looked intently at something above him. He stopped breathing with that reverent look. The wound in his chest did not bleed. The ichorite stayed inside it. It held the wound closed. He’d look hale if he was not dead.

I panted over his body. Slowly, I stood up. I looked at my hands. They looked like his chest, fully metallic and veined with light.

You screamed behind me. Your scream filled the whole room. It brought me out of my stupor. I turned to behold you, saw you trembling in the doorway. Your teeth chattered with how you shook. I saw on your face that you did not understand, and I could not blame you for that. I came toward you and knelt. I put my hands on the floor. My shirt hung open and dripped metal, who I was had become plain to see. I saw you read beneath my collarbone. I am your Marney, as I’ve always been. Your Reverend Marney Honeycutt.

“Gwyar,” I said. “My Gwyar, it’s done. I’ll take care of you. We can go away together and I’ll provide for you. Nothing in this world can stop us now. Forgive me that it’s taken so long. I wish it could’ve been sooner.”

Your expression wrenched. You threw your hands over your mouth. You stepped nearer to me. Fear flashed in your eyes, and big red veins. “No,” you said. “Nonononono.”

I bowed, I slumped. I pressed my forehead to the floor at your feet. “I love you,” I said. “I never stopped loving you.”

You stepped over me. You stood over Yann Industry Chauncey’s metal-webbed body. You trembled harder, I thought you’d shiver out of your skin. The hair on your head fluffed up like a scared cat’s, looked redder.

I rose again, rocked back on my heels. “You can rest now,” I said. “I avenged you.”

Your eyes rolled in their sockets. You looked at me out of the most extreme corner of your pale lash lines. “You killed my father.”

“You died in the massacre. You died, everybody died, but I have gotten good enough to strike back at the man who killed you. I murdered your murderer. It’s going to be okay now,” I said. I did my best to be level, to be patient. You didn’t understand. That was alright. That made sense. You’re the clever one, I’m the steady one. I’ll be steady. “We’re going to go away. I’m going to take us somewhere safe, Gwyar. My lurcher is in the woods. You’re small, we’ll both fit if you hold onto me. We can be gone and halfway across the continent before morning.”

“You killed my father!” You whirled on me, stepped around me. You stood in front of me, red-faced and seething. I’d only ever seen myself so mad.

“I love you,” I pleaded, I prayed. “I’m your Marney, Gwyar. You know me. I love you.”

You slammed your boot into my breastbone and shoved me back. I slammed against the table. The glass shattered around my hips and in an ice splinter explosion I screamed and sank down into the table through shell through skin inside the table sank down through layers of the skin within the shell inside the table the marbled shifting not yet flesh under the skin inside my skin under the table where my insides flip splice unseam around the shell splinter the horn bone marrow oil awake whereabouts I watched you fall over his body unaware that dying I was in his body in your ear