1.

 
 
 
 

The great silver bones of Grandeur's hand reflected the morning light and it looked, for an instant, like the giant statue was holding the sun itself. I couldn't have arranged a more perfect moment to lead three veche inspectors into my construction site. We paused, blinking away the after-image of the statue's skeletal palm.

  "As you can see," I said, "her construction is right on schedule. If I may, my lords, I still do not understand the need for this impromptu inspection."

  "You and your statue represent a significant investment to the veche, Lady Tanyana," the oldest of the three said. "Considering the amount of kopacks we are paying, surely you do not begrudge us the opportunity to oversee that investment."

  I met his bland expression with a false smile. There was something jarring about this man. So ancient he walked with the support of a cane – in an era where such inefficient aids were unnecessary – but still managed to do so with an undeniable aura of authority. The large silver bear's head, inlaid with opals and flecks of gold, hanging by a thick chain around his neck marked him as a member of an old family.

  "Of course not, my lord," I answered. "What I do not understand is the need to do this today, without notice, and outside of the prearranged inspection dates." And why him? Why would the veche send one of their most senior members to inspect the construction of a statue, no matter how grand she was?

  The other two inspectors, younger men, were already peering at the bindings in Grandeur's feet. The insignia on their garish, bright yellow woollen jackets marked them as sitting members on the Construction for the Furtherment of Varsnia. More the calibre of people I'd expect on an inspection. If I'd expected one at all.

  "You're worried there has been a complaint?" The old man wandered, slowly, peering about, tapping at the ground. "Hmm. Good, strong pion-bonds. Clean systems. I don't see why anyone would complain about this construction site."

  I gritted my teeth. "Neither do I, my lord. But what other reason would there be?"

  "Indeed."

  That was not an answer, not an Other-cursed answer at all.

  "My lady?"

  I glanced over my shoulder. Volski was the first of my circle to arrive. He usually was. His gaze flickered to the inspectors, and his mouth pinched into a small, concerned frown. "What are they doing here?"

  I lifted a hand, gestured to quiet him. "We are being inspected," I whispered.

  His eyes widened. "But why, my lady? Has there been a complaint about our binding?"

  I shook my head, and wished I had an answer. "I don't know. Other's hell, Vol, I've got no idea what's going on." I drew a deep breath, calmed myself. "Just warn the others as they arrive, won't you?"

  Volski nodded and stepped back to wait outside the gate to the construction site. I hurried to the inspector's side. He was smiling as I approached. A cheeky, impish kind of smile that made me shudder.

  "Your circle is loyal to you, aren't they?" He continued to tap the ground with his cane.

  "Yes, my lord."

  My critical circle made me – nine skilled binders who worked below me, in harmony with me, to manipulate pions and alter the very structure of the world. Everything was made up of pions, from the steel in Grandeur's finger bones to the sun-spotted skin that stretched across the back of my hand. I saw them as lights, a myriad of tiny fireflies. Some were brighter than others: those on the surface layer of reality were easy to see, eager to please, but weak. I could manipulate them with little more than a coaxing whisper, but any structure I built with them would not last the first brush of wind.

  It was the stronger pions, the dim lights that kept themselves hidden, that my critical circle and I could manipulate. It took all ten of us to pry the pions free, to entice their cooperation and set them to work. But once we did, oh, the wonders we could create.

  I glanced up at Grandeur with a smile, breath deepening, my palms itching just to start. There was so much work left to do on her, and how the pions were calling me. From all across the construction site they flickered a coordinated phosphorescent dance – in time to the twitch of my fingers, the beat of my heart – to work with me, to bond with me, to build Grandeur's wonder high into the sky. I was used to the enthusiasm of my pions, but this seemed stronger than usual: their caress like a tug, their call a demand.

  Perhaps they were feeding on my frustration. There were pions in all of us, in everything, and we were all connected by their light. I could ride that, I could control that, if only the veche inspectors would let me get on with my job.

  It took a moment to collect myself, to draw my focus back on my body and the elderly inspector in front of me. The pions dimmed. They never truly left, of course, but only the shallow ones still shone if I wasn't concentrating on them. If I wasn't letting myself get carried away by them.

  The inspector's smile deepened. "Impatient, are you?" he said, with a chuckle. "Don't fear, my lady, we will not keep you long."

  The rest of my circle arrived as I answered a pointless set of rudimentary questions. Yes, I had two healers on site as the edict required. Yes, my raw materials were sourced from veche-accredited mining operations and handled by an experienced circle of lifters. I'd worked with them before. Six point circle, a high number for something as straightforward as carrying heavy rocks, but all in the name of safety.

  Hardly seemed worth dragging an old family veche member all this way just to ask questions like this. Why were they really here?

  From the corner of my eye I watched Volski organise the site. He spoke to each member of my circle, sent the healers to their usual corner to set up, and admitted a ragtag band of debris collectors. It was unusual for collectors to arrive so early. Debris was the waste created by all our pion manipulation. Our work on Grandeur would certainly produce a lot of it, but we hadn't even started binding so there was nothing for them to collect yet.

  Finally, when the first slabs of raw stone started to arrive, I could make my excuses. I had a statue to build, after all.

  "Yes, of course." The elderly inspector and his fellows withdrew to the fenced-in edges of the site, near the healers' small white tent. "We won't hold you up." But they didn't actually leave.

  "You're staying?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

  "Of course." Another of those Other-cursed smiles. "To watch you work. Wouldn't be much of an inspection if we didn't, now – would it?"

  "I suppose not, my lord." I gave him a small bow, as his status in the veche deserved. "If you will excuse me."

  Just what I needed.

  I hurried over to my circle, where they stood in a tight knot in the centre of the site, and held up a hand to silence any questions before they could be asked.

  "Veche inspection," I said. "Don't let it worry you." I clapped my hands together, forced a hopefully bright smile. "Let's get started."

  The members of my circle spread out to surrounded the statue, evenly spaced, and began gathering pions. Across the site the tiny particles of light flared up again, fast and eager, in response.

  I turned to Grandeur, and found myself grinning. Such enthusiasm was infectious. All around me it was building: bright lights and raw energy, swirling, coalescing in vast daisy chains around my circle, around me. Flashing, brilliant particles brushed against my skin, stirring the bonds inside my very body, linking us all together: the statue, the circle, the world. Me. I pushed down a sudden and unseemly need to laugh as the thrill of it tickled through me. Better than any food, better than passion, better – dare I say it? – than the syrupy black coffee with a dot of caramel cream Thada at Keeper's Kaffine poured for me every morning.

  This was me, the truest me. Tanyana Vladha. Pionbinder, architect, centre of a circle of nine and good – Other-damned good – at all of it.

  "Help me up there," I whispered to the pions. They hardly needed convincing.

  We fashioned stairs out of the very air. Tied thousands of tiny drops of water with miniscule fragments of sand, and ash, and whatever trace metals the pions could find, and froze them, then burned them, crushing them together until something like glass appeared. And we did this with every step I took, binding and rebinding, until I stood on the bones of Grandeur's incomplete palm, eight hundred feet high.

  The tension of a site full of riled-up pions travelled through her steel beams and hardened glass tiles in a constant tremor. Nothing she couldn't handle, I was sure. I had designed and built her to be strong.

  "Are you ready to begin, my lady?" Volski's pions carried his words to me, up a current of wispy blue lights that smelled of dust. Each member of my circle was different. Llada bullied hers along on a solid track of authoritarian purple. Tsana's touch was green, sharp as the eyes of a child.

  "I am." The tiny bright particles couldn't speak, of course. Rather, they replicated the vibrations of my words, carrying and depositing them where instructed. I could ask them to shout across the whole of the site, if I wanted, but these words I kept for Volski alone, "Are the inspectors watching us, Vol?"

  A pause. Either Volski was collecting his thoughts or – and, I thought, more likely – his pion stream was struggling to push its way through to me. The construction site was so full of light, countless different streams and loose particles attracted to us but not yet incorporated; a single thread could get tangled on its journey.

  "Of course they are," he answered, finally. "You really don't know why they're here, my lady?"

  "Vol." It took several attempts to get down to him. "Don't let it upset you." I opened up my pion thread and sent my words to everyone in my nine point circle. "Let's use this opportunity to show these so-called inspectors, and the veche, just how good we are."

  The pions, at least, surged with agreement, even if I couldn't quite make out all of my circle's reply.

  "If you say so, my lady," Volski said. Then, after another pause, "The first block is on its way to you now."

  I stepped to the very edge of Grandeur's palm, lifted my arms, spread my hands wide and urged the circle on. They gave everything I could have asked for. Colours surged as the pions they had gathered travelled up their threads toward me, like blood through veins. From nine points spread out across the site below me, my pionbinders coaxed power from the world around them and sent it all up to me.

  "The block is nearly there!" Tsana's words came across clipped, and I hoped she wasn't tiring already. Grandeur was, well, a grand lady. She would take many more sixnights to complete, and for the two hundred thousand kopacks the veche was paying, I'd make sure we built her well. For moons we had crafted her, from sturdy, sand-filled legs to the crystalline squares of her glass-sewn gown. Hands, face and neck were all that remained to be done. But a face takes longer to sew than a dress, expression needs time and care. A light touch, the delicate detail.

  The rock the lifters hauled past the hem of Grandeur's sparkling, crystalline sleeve was enormous. To my architect's eyes it was a tangle of bindings, of tightly knotted energy giving it structure and form. Dense with material, shining with ore and sand and potential. I would build a hand from that rock.

  "Have you got it yet?"

  I took a small step from the edge, feet steady, steel the only thing between me and the ground. The obliging pions in the girder shone a bright path to follow. The boulder wobbled as it rose, jerking in the sky. The lifters were having trouble.

  "Hurry, my lady," Volski murmured by my ear.

  I shook out my fingers. "Ready now?" I whispered to the lights buzzing around my head like fireflies. I must have looked like flame from the ground, a tiny lit wick in an enormous candle. The toes of my boots hung out over space and a humid updraft.

  It seemed we had, in fact, already loosened a lot of debris. Debris was always followed by heat.

  I cupped my hands, repeating the gesture, and imagined holding the boulder there in my palms. The pions caught on quickly. They had trailed over my fingers like streamers woven from flowers. Now, they wrapped around the rock, cupping it in a tight, bright mesh. "Good little girls and boys," I whispered again. Then I sent down to my circle, "Patience, Tsana, Vol. Art and beauty, these things should not be rushed."

  Laughter does not carry up the circle. But I imagined a smile brightening Volski's ever-serious eyes. "Lifters are getting weary. The site is thick, so don't work them too hard."

  It was a lot of stone to lift so high and hold for so long, even without a throng of pions clogging the sky.

  I brought my cupped hands together, with more care than I had placed my feet. Falling didn't worry me; if I couldn't create myself something safe to land on, then I had nine people below me who could. But the pions guided by my hands, with their jostling, in their zest, they needed a focused mind and a firm grip.

  A gust of wind, warmth-tipped, billowed my jacket. The high collar of densely woven wool tugged at my throat. I locked fingertips and sent the pion horde drilling. They rushed to their duty, pushing inside the rock, sticking to its bindings, prying at its knots. Undoing its old form, and preparing it for a new existence in Grandeur.

  Once I could feel every grain as though they were pressed against my fingers – from smooth iron-ore to fine sand – I instructed Volski to give the lifters some rest.

  The rock was a sudden weight, and I braced my feet on the steel beam, leaning into the wind to compensate and regain my balance. I was not alone. The circle throbbed below me, around me, and even as I fed pions into the rock, even as they set about their dismantling and reconstruction, the circle found me more.

  Sweat on my neck, clammy wool. All part of the thrill, wasn't it?

  First, cement separated in a flurry of mud. I padded the hand bones with it, filled out the palm, was careful to lift my toes as it solidified at my feet. Next, more steel.

  Another gust of wind, and I staggered a half step onto thankfully dry cement. My interlocked fingers jerked in reflex. Particles tugged in an attempt to escape, but I had knotted them so tightly they could not slip out of place. Somewhere below me, the structure rattled. Just wind, surely, trying to knock Grandeur around like it was doing me.

  "Are you all right?" Tsana asked. "The wind's come up."

  "I noticed," I snapped off the words. "Be quiet and keep working. We're being watched, remember."

  Tsana was silent. The pions didn't carry sulking, either.

  Fingers are hard to fashion. I guided pions to the squareend edges of the metacarpals and set them to building knuckles out of steel. Grandeur was a statue, so she was hardly going to flex her hands or pick anything up, but I needed sufficient mass there and a strong enough supporting structure to keep the fingers stable. Grandeur had her arm outstretched, hand cupping. When I'd vied for the contract to build her I'd described this as a poignant way to show that Varsnia, even as wealthy and advanced as we are, was not beyond lending a helping hand to lesser nations, not beyond carrying an extra weight. Didn't mean I believed it, of course, but it had certainly convinced the veche.

  Another shudder ran through Grandeur's frame. Fine dust from her shoulder trickled in a soft waterfall behind me.

  "Did you feel that?" Tsana put aside her hurt ego.

  "Of course." I was standing on it.

  With a frown, I peered over the edge. The distant ground was hard to see with heat waves adding their haze, and a sky thick with lights. My circle was still complete and distinct, linked by varied colour and dotted with light like dew on a spider's web.

  Movoc-under-Keeper stretched out beyond the construction site, a sprawling city of dark stone and bright lights. Threads of thin, sharp pions surged between buildings, carrying light, carrying heat. Down along the Tear River, further south of the Keeper Mountain, factories burned. Thick patterns of orange rose above a rubbish disposal. Twisting, complex green over carpenters working. And on top of it all, the mess of the everyday. Lives made up of pions shifted, prodded, caressed and coaxed into action. It would be easy to say Movoc wasn't built of bricks, of cement and steel. It was erected on a frame of pions, it lived through them, and was lit by them. A true city of the revolution.

  All this was normal. Nothing amiss. Just a few more pions than usual, overexcited for reasons I did not understand. And the wind, battering Grandeur's glass dress. Swallowing vertigo, I returned to the steadily solidifying knuckles.

  "Tanyana?" Tsana's pions sped by so fast they took most of her voice with them. "I think something's wrong."

  I completed the knuckles, each a hub of steel with half a dozen smaller pins extended, ready to brace fingers. Only an eighth or so of the boulder's total mass had been used. I drilled for more ore, removed it, and started construction of five thick beams.

  "I need details, Tsana. Anything you say is useless to me without details."

  The wind hit again, harder still. And below, my circle flickered. No, not just my circle – all the pions in the construction site. Gone was their light, their colour. All I saw, for a slow and breathless moment, was Movoc as it would look without the pions that gave it life. The city was grey, wet, and darkness haunted its corners.

  They returned in a flurry, somehow faster, somehow thicker, and wilder than before.

  "There's too much interference, I can't keep the pions focused." Tsana's words spilled around me. "I don't understand why–"

  Llada burst in. "Systems are failing all over the site! The lifters are down: two of their stones have dissolved, they're trying to contain the third but, my lady, they can't even maintain a circle. The bonds in Grandeur's feet are loosening. Her hem. Her ankles. Other, we're losing pions and I can't stop–" Her thread of purple lights whipped free of the circle, thrashing unrestrained against the sky, and her voice disappeared. It only took her a moment to rejoin us but it was far too long for someone with her pion-binding skill.

  Other, what was happening?

  I took a deep breath, and put all thoughts of the inspectors out of my mind. I didn't need this now, not now while they were watching and reporting on me, but worrying about them would only weaken my focus. The safety of my circle, indeed my entire construction site, was my main priority. I would deal with the effect on my career later. "Everyone, come in close," I said. "Tighten the circle and you should be able to bring–"

  "They won't listen to me!" Tsana's jarring, sporadic voice peppered me as her pion thread tore violently through my fingers. "Too many–"

  "Can you hear me, my lady?" Volski, at least, remained calm. "You need to get this place back under your control."

  "I know. Shorten your threads–"

  "My lady? Can you hear me?"

  Other damn us, we couldn't even get through to each other. The site was just too bloated, overrun by wild, fierce lights. Any pions I sent down to my circle were surrounded, torn from their threads, and riled into abandon until they joined the powerful and unruly throng. And I didn't understand why. The pions were my friends, and had always been. When I called them from their home, deep in the layers of reality, they responded with enthusiasm, with joy. Not this.

  This felt like madness, and the very idea sent a chill over my skin.

  When we controlled them, pions could change the very structure of the world. But mad, like this, and out of our control, what would they do now?

  "No," I whispered to myself. "No, I won't let–"

  A great screeching sliced through my words. The finger bones, being carefully constructed only a moment before, writhed in the sky like pockets of termite-infested timber. I focused all my attention on them. I let go the circle below me, I ignored the chaos infesting the rest of the site and the inspectors, observing it all, scribbling away only the Other knew what in their reports. All I saw, all I knew, was those finger bones, and the tiny particles of energy bright within them.

  "Enough of this," I told the pions. My pions. Stern, but kind, I was a mother, a teacher, a firm hand. "We have a job to do. Enough."

  But they couldn't hear me, or wouldn't. So I approached them, balancing on hot steel beams wet with condensation. I reached up to the closest finger bone, placed my hand against its stretching, writhing notquite-metal-anymore form so the pions in me and the pions in it could touch, could mingle.

  "Listen–"

  But then, only then, so connected to the finger bone, so focused, did I see them.

  Pions, yes, but not like any pions I had never known. Red, painfully red, and buried so deep inside reality that even the collective skill in the building site below hadn't seen them. When I tried to communicate with them they burned like tiny suns and heat washed over me, and anger, such a terrible tearing anger I could feel from my head to my chest and deep, deep inside me. In my own pion systems.

  Gasping, I stumbled back. They bled out from the finger bone, infecting the particles around it, undoing all the bonds I had made. I spun, and they were everywhere. It wasn't the wind battering Grandeur around like she was little bigger than me. The crimson pions whirred around us like a nest of furious wasps. Bereft of any guiding structure they crashed indiscriminately against my statue, against my circle, the earth, the street. They infected every pion they touched and tore apart every system in their way.

  Desperately, I stumbled back to the edge of Grandeur's palm. My circle was holding on by only a few stubborn threads. Volski. Tsana. Llada.

  I drew all the clean pions I could gather into a single, solid thread and thrust it back down toward my circle. "Can you hear me?" I had to penetrate that mess, I had to warn them. "It's not the wind, do you understand? Let everything else go, look to the sky, the edges of Grandeur and you might see them. There are pions!"

  I was answered only by screaming below. Not passing my ears, not touching my senses with a brush of colour and scent. Below.

  The finger bones fell. Two crashed onto Grandeur's palm, only feet away, and there they lay, writhing. One dripped, hot like melted cheese, over the side. The other curled over itself in a snake-sex frenzy.

  Where had the others gone?

  More screaming and great thuds. I swallowed, clammy in my jacket, too hot.

  I had to take control. I was the only one who could. Not even my circle, skilled though they were, could see pions this sharp, this deep into the world.

  I ran hands through my hair. My short fringe stuck up hard, styling cream rearranged by sweat.

  Take control, but from whom? Who had coaxed these crimson pions from the deep places they must have slept in? Who had disturbed their dormancy? Pions could not be created, just as they could not be destroyed. So this anger, this burning rage, must have always existed, somewhere deep inside all things.

  Why had it been set free?

  Legs folded beneath me as I shook tension from my wrists, and reached out with open, cupping hands.

  The fiery particles slipped through my fingers. Not around them, like water, but through them. Like reflections on a wall, like shadows. Like my fingers weren't even there.

  "No!" Focus. Touch them, command them. Pions had listened to me since I was a child, been keen to please me, never hating me, never too wild to be caught, too angry to be soothed. "Don't let this happen!" My voice broke, I took shuddering breaths to try and control myself. How could I hope to control pions if I couldn't even do that? "I don't know who's doing this, but you don't have to listen to them. I'm here. You know me. Trust me, and come back. Come back to us."

  I could have been talking to empty air. Nothing changed, the chaos, if anything, grew fiercer. And while my fingers passed through them like I wasn't solid, those particles hooked themselves into the pion-bonds in my coat, my hair, the outer layers of my skin and dragged me forward. Grandeur shook. I could feel her swaying, as her systems were ruthlessly undone. Creaking eased around me, below me. Somewhere glass shattered. The threads of Grandeur's dress, pulling away?

  No. I wouldn't let this happen. Not to me, and not to all the people below who trusted me, who relied on my strength and my skill not only to work such wonders, but to keep them safe while we did so. I would not let them down.

  So I stood, braced, haloed by blazing fire. I called out to the pions again and opened my arms wide. They rushed over to me from all across the site, and further out too, from the rest of the city, as far as my call could reach. I gathered every clean pion I could summon, anything that wasn't crimson and furious and blind, and wound them into tight, complex threads. Unstable without my circle's strength to support me, surrounded by the chaos of the construction site, still I tied my threads into all the weakening pion-bonds below me. I stitched up Grandeur's feet and legs where she had been rapidly dissolving; I injected solidity into the decaying finger bones; I recombined the lifters' stones and helped them reform their tattered circle; I caught the edges of my own, frayed circle, and bundled them together.

  "It's Tanyana! She's taking control–"

  "–restoring integrity! That's amazing, my lady, amazing–"

  "–can you come down? The bindings in her arm are still loose and we need–"

  Voices flashed at me, snippets of sound. The circle flashed with them, lightning strikes of panic.

  I strained to hold them all, to control so many pions and keep their threads safe, solid. And it looked, for a moment, like I was winning. I, and my binding, was stronger than the furious crimson pions trying to undo us. Grandeur strengthened, the circles below hardened into solid colour and began channelling fresh pions of their own. More binders were joining us, emergency and relief crews, and I even allowed myself to smile, and whisper to my pions, "There, do you see? We can do it. Together we are strong."

  Until all the bright and furious lights slowed in their whirling chaos, then stopped, hanging like too-close stars in the air around me. They flashed, coordinated, and my stomach clenched as they gathered into a wide and terrible thread of red light. And attacked.

  They did not attack Grandeur again. Not the circles below, not anything else in the construction site. This time crimson pions attacked me, and only me. They crashed into me, through me. And all my threads were torn from my control, and all the systems inside my body cried out and jumbled up, and I stumbled forward, toes on the edge of Grandeur's palm. I burned, and the sky burned with me, for an instant of tortured brilliance before they all disappeared. The bloat of crimson, the normal few, every last pion that lit Movoc-under-Keeper was gone.

  And in their place, darkness. A sea of the wigglingworm stuff.

  Tanyana, is it? Welcome. And a single voice, a whisper more imagined than real.

  Metal screeched and shuddered at my feet. Strangely numb, I turned to see Grandeur crack below her elbow. For a moment we hovered, her arm and I, in a strange handshake eight hundred feet in the air. She took her time deciding which way to fall. Then the sky tipped, pions pushed, my soft-soled feet slipped forward, and I was free.

  Silver knuckles shone, bright in the sunlight of a clear day, and even as I fell I squinted back to watch them arch toward me, filling the blue sky. She was Grandeur to the end. Not content to throw me to the earth and away from the safety of my nine point circle, she had to slap me on the way down.