From the air, Alt Coulumb made no sense. Taking the city part by part, you could mislead yourself into believing it obeyed a higher logic: the Business District to the north had gridded streets and avenues, but fanning around the clockface that order broke to jags, as if the Sacred Precinct was a rock thrown through a window and the rest of the city the window’s shards. “Cow paths,” she said as they flew south toward the university.
“I don’t understand.”
“We didn’t have many trees back home, but I climbed the ones we did have. This looks like cow paths from overhead.”
“You did not grow up in a city?”
Tara caught her breath as Shale’s wings spread to mount an updraft. “No.”
“Where?”
“You wouldn’t know it.”
He said nothing.
“Edgemont,” she relented at last. “Little place at the eastern edge of the Badlands. Farm country. Lots of corn. Very flat.”
“Near Lark’s Ridge?”
“Twenty miles northeast,” she said automatically, then: “Wait, how do you know Lark’s Ridge?”
“We passed through on the way to the wars. There was not much ridge to speak of.”
“Yeah, well, we didn’t have much mont to edge on either—just enough for the quarry.” The city wheeled below, the Business District clocking around to three and six and nine and back to midnight or noon. “Lark’s Ridge in the God Wars. Weird. What was it like back then?” That would have been forty years ago, around the time Tara’s mom’s folks fled the siege of Alt Selene west to Edgemont.
“Small.” His deep voice cut through the buffeting wind. Stars hung overhead—more stars the farther they rose, but still too few for Tara’s comfort. Cities of the Craft were more careful about light pollution. “Wooden. We were not comfortable there. They had a high temple to their earth goddess, with a clock tower. Aev tried to perch on the tower, but its wood was weak, and she broke through.” He chuffed a laugh.
“I know that church! They rebuilt the roof. They said it was God Wars damage but not—that was you?”
Shale leveled out to glide over the university. Postage-stamp quadrangles lined by fake battlements interrupted the crumpled streets. “If you ever tell Aev I told that story, I will deny it.”
“Your secret’s safe with me. Do we really have to be this high to see your poems?”
“The oldest ones,” he said. “Can you read our glyphs?”
“Almost. I’ve only had a year to work on Stone, and human vocal cords aren’t shaped right for the phonemes. I might need your help.”
“It is difficult to translate poetry.”
“I just need the meaning.”
“Just the meaning?” He turned to look at her over his shoulder, which made them tangle into a roll. She screamed a little—understandable given the circumstances, dammit—and clutched his sides with her knees like he was a horse in full gallop. Her grip on his neck tightened enough to crush a human trachea. Good thing Shale didn’t have one.
“Don’t do that!”
“Meaning,” he said, righting their course, “comes from rhyme and rhythm and form. You can’t just fill a page with words that have the same definition as the original. True translation requires understanding the associations and contexts of the source language, then shifting all that into the target tongue. The greater the poet, the harder the translation. And Stone’s not even—how would you render a second-voice bass tonal shift rhyme in Kathic?”
“Come again?”
He demonstrated: two syllables with the same tenor voicing, but the first she felt as a steady rumble in Shale’s skin, while in the second the rumble started faster but slowed. “The first word renders in Kathic as turtle. The second is a second-person-plural pronoun addressing a subgroup of a collective.”
“This is awfully technical.”
“Poetry is glory to the Goddess.”
“That doesn’t explain the jargon.”
“We had,” Shale said after a long, silent swoop, “a lot of time in exile. I thought perhaps if we could, ah, publish our songs, maybe we could draw others toward the Lady. I subscribed to journals by mail. Submitted poems. Received rejection letters. There are advantages to being able to pass for human. Did you just giggle?”
“No.” She pushed from her mind the image of Shale, dressed in stitched-together rabbit furs or whatever he wore for clothing in human form out in the countryside—hells, had he even worn clothing?—arriving at some log-cabin town’s post office with a subscription card for Poetry Fancier’s Quarterly. “So, these poems you’ve recorded in Stone—they describe the Goddess. They’re an authoritative representation of her.”
“Strange phrasing.”
“I’m translating,” she said. “From my language to yours.”
Miles west, at the airport, a great glittering beast ascended into the night, tail sweeping a swath through clouds. Its blackness blended with the space between the stars.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Which returns us to my question: Do we have to be this high to see the poems? I’ve seen them before, in alleys, from street level.”
“Codas,” he said. “Fragmentary midcentury additions of the minimalist school. Many of what you thought complete works were cantos of longer poems designed to be read overhead in moonlight at a particular angle.”
“If we’re meant to be viewing works in alleys from overhead,” Tara said, “we’re still too high. I can’t see any building walls from here.”
“You see nothing for which you are not prepared to look.”
Below her, the city turned silver all at once.
An instant before, they’d flown above an Alt Coulumb dark and jeweled as ever. Then, as if they crossed an invisible threshold, the streets transformed to rivers of silver-blue light. From ground level the effect would be too subtle to notice, since light would never strike the right angle for more than a thumb-size piece of pavement. A drunk might see a patch of glory in an alley shadow and mistake it for a streetlight reflection. This was more. The city was built around luminous words.
“Cow paths,” she said.
“Some,” Shale acknowledged. “But how do the cows know which paths to walk? They followed tracks we carved.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Yes.”
“What does it mean?”
“That,” he replied, “is harder.”
* * *
Cat won three games and Raz two. “Superior strength. Hah.” She sank another ball, missed her third follow-up shot, passed to him; he dropped three, then scratched. “What’s with the whiskey, anyway?”
“I’m in the man’s bar. Passengers on my boat pay for the privilege. Shouldn’t I pay him for his floor space?”
She knocked back her own, and tasted fire and smoke. Then she bent to the table and lined up angles in her head. “We’re paying for the table. And you’re in demand here. Plenty of people would be happy to give you a drink. Not on the dance floor—that’s the only rule. Don’t want the place to get slippery.”
“That’s how you think I work? Canvassing a room of people I don’t know for a taste—”
“I don’t judge. You do what you need to live.”
“I don’t need that.”
“You have to drink sometime.”
“It’s personal.”
“You can tell me.”
“I don’t like to talk about it.”
The angles settled in the green felt’s reflection behind her eyes. Her heart did beat, so she slowed it, and she did breathe, so she waited for the pause after exhalation. The crack of the balls reminded her pleasantly of breaking someone else’s bone.
They finished the game in silence, relating through force and spheres that disappeared into velvet pockets. The band rocked. Four of the booth curtains had been drawn when she came in, and seven were now. She’d seen the seventh curtain close as Raz lined up a shot on the eight ball: two women, one older than Cat, the other younger and rounder, both hungry, and she couldn’t tell which had the teeth. She hadn’t expected to be so aware of the curtains. She liked this place. She liked Walsh. She liked the music. She liked the damn booths and the damn red leather upholstery in them and the stupid paintings of naked women who didn’t look how naked women looked and were all twined round with rose vines and thorns. He missed the eight. She didn’t.
“We saved lives tonight,” she said. “We fought and won. Dance with me.”
“Fine,” he said, though it hadn’t been a question.
He offered her his whiskey, and she took it, swallowed it, set down the glass. Grabbed his hand, smoother than any sailors’ she’d felt. No hemp rope could burn his skin. He followed her with a look on his face like she was a chess problem or a tricky knot he wanted to untie. The whiskey felt good. Girls to the left of them, boys to the right of them, and she pulled him into the valley of the dance.
Music was a way to lose yourself, music good and loud with a pulse you could follow, a double beat that vined through your ears and mouth into veins and spread shoots, leaves, flowers. Drink-sweat and too much perfume and leather and slick vinyl and hair pressed close to her. She smoothed her skirt against her hips and danced. Somewhere a singer sang. There were flowers in her arms and her stomach and deeper. She raised her arms like wings.
And he danced with her. It happened unsteady and slow as new spring, but he did dance. His eyes, which he’d held half-closed since entering the bar, opened, and she saw the whites around his ruby-stained brown irises. By the second song he forgot himself and smiled.
She forgot herself and moved toward him.
There was bass and there was guitar and there were drums and a piano only it wasn’t a piano exactly but some strange machine that worked with spinning cylinders of glass crackling Craft, and bodies pressed them close, and she danced with the crowd and they with her and he with them and then they were together, and the crowd held fangs and blood that called for them and the fangs were white and dark blood flushed faces red and there was so much wanting in this room, wanting to vanish, to be drawn under another’s power into a mouth—
She danced with him, and he with her, wound tight as clocks were wound in Iskar, so tight his skin might sing. She touched him. She pulled him toward her. He followed. She kissed him. He kissed her back. Her lip slid between his teeth, and the teeth touched her, and she pressed her lip against them and her skin parted and there was a sharp sharp stab of joy—
that all went wrong at once.
He pulled back.
She stumbled into him. Beauty raged in her vein. There was nothing she could not be, there was no mold into which she could not be poured, the draw had been so strong and rich, and at its withdrawal she clutched for him, seeing too late his sudden horror at herhimself, at what they were—at what they were about to—at what they, at what she, had—
He staggered into the moshing crowd, knocked into a blond-dreadlocked man, who shoulder-checked Raz back, and Raz, eyes wide and wet like marble library lions’ eyes in rain, moshed the blond-dreadlocked man harder than he’d ever been moshed before, sent him tumbling airborne into a pair of shirtless bodybuilders who fell like pool balls run from a single shot, two left side four right far corner six right side thunk thunk thunk, until only blond dreads was left standing, spinning, laughing a wild woo with hands raised in horn-sign as the fallen rose and piled on him in turn.
Raz looked uncomprehending at them, at her, and left.
She ran after him.
He snaked through the crowd. She never could have caught him but for Candy at the door, who blocked him in while she admitted two new customers—so Cat, ignoring Walsh’s waved good-bye, reached the alley before Raz left it.
“Raz!”
He didn’t turn.
“Don’t run from me.”
He stopped. “Then what? Do you want me to stay?”
“Did it look like I was pushing you away?”
“It looked.” He moved toward her so fast he didn’t seem to cross the intervening space. So damn quick with blood in him—how long did he go, anyway, without feeding? How long could he? And how would the hunger of a single taste after deprivation feel? She knew. She was all need, a single exposed nerve. Her clothes rasped her skin. Her skirt’s hem was tight as a knife. He was close, though not close like he’d been when they danced, not close enough she could touch him without his letting her. “It looked,” he said, softer now, “like you were out of control.”
“You responded. We kissed, dammit—”
“Don’t pretend that’s all. I tasted you. I could break that building in half if I wanted. I could fly.” She’d never heard such disgust in his voice before.
“I wanted it. So did you.”
“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. I thought you wanted to fix—”
“To fix myself? To fix what’s fucked-up about me?”
“I didn’t mean that,” he said, too fast.
“I see the way you look at me, like I messed up somewhere. You’re always in control, you never put a foot wrong. You never jump a ship before the signal comes. You never take a risk that’s not worth it. Unlike me. To all the hells with that. I know how the change works. I know you had to want to be what you are.”
“I wanted not to die,” he said. “Okay? I wanted to survive. And since then I’ve maintained. I’ve managed. All this”—he waved in a big circle—“these booths and blood and just taking from one another all the damn time. So when some kid loses control and gets a stake through the heart, it’s a piece of gossip to you people. It’s my life.”
“Is that what this is about? Brad?”
“You have a problem. You admitted you have a problem.”
“I’ve been working on it for a year.”
“Great. A year.”
“Fuck you, a year’s a long time for someone who can die. And I’m tangled, but I know enough to tell the difference between something I need and someone I want. I was wrong, fine. I’m not fucking perfect. But you’re the one who keeps pulling back.”
He dropped his hands. “You want me to be the monster here, fine. I can do that. I’ve had plenty of practice.”
And he walked away.
The someone in fishnets by the trash heap had curled against the former bouncee. He passed her a cigarette. The someone took a drag and passed it back.
Cat swore in a growling grinding language not meant for human throats. Then she turned and ran.