CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (9 page)

Because she could not be both Hathirekhmet and herself.

Understanding swirled through the reeling dizziness of her head. The goddess chose children because they were unformed, empty—vessels she could fill. Life was the imperfection, the cracks through which the world entered, changing little girls into young women. And day by day, year by year, the avatars pushed the goddess out to make room for themselves.

Which meant she could reverse it. The sun’s hammer beat upon her, seeking entrance. All she had to do was step aside, and let the goddess in.

Let go of Nefret, and become Hathirekhmet again.

Then the goddess could experience something new: a grown body, twisted hard by the desert; a life austere instead of luxurious. Her skin pulsed, a fragile barrier between humanity and divinity. It was easy. Simple. The kind of pure answer Sekhaf sought.

Sekhaf.

She held in the palm of her hand all the things that barred Hathirekhmet from her. All the other thoughts, all the desires and annoyances and knowledge, all the things he called her wisdom. All the things that brought the philosophers to her desert refuge, that fueled their debates in the long heat of day.

Everything that made her who she was.

She could regain what she had lost—by losing what she had gained.

Once, she would have found it no choice at all. Nefret had nothing; Hathirekhmet, everything. But in her seeking, she had found another life. One of lizards and scorpions, a muddy spring and a hard bed, and questions always to be answered. It was not the life she had known in the temple, but it was hers.

Hers. Not Hathirekhmet’s.

I was once a goddess. Now I am myself. And myself I
shall remain.

Nefret curled her hands around herself, filled her mind with thoughts of life—and bid Hathirekhmet farewell.

* * *

She awoke to stone, rough under her cheek and hand.

Nefret opened eyes that felt dry as dust. She knew without thinking that it was sunset, heat slipping quickly from the air, familiar shadows consuming the world around her.

One shadow was out of place.

She spoke, and the word went little further than her lips. “Sekhaf.”

He heard her anyway, or perhaps just saw her move. The philosopher rose from hiding and came to her side, shame-faced. “I should not have disturbed you,” he said. “But I watched from below, and saw you collapse. And I thought—”

For once he did not share his thought. He did not have to. Nefret reached out, and he gave her the skin bag at his side. She drank greedily, tasting the leather, letting water spill over her cheeks and chin.

When at last she stopped, he asked quietly, “Did you find your answer?”

The one she had sought, and more besides. Hathirekhmet bore her no grudge for her choice; a grudge implied desire, and Hathirekhmet desired nothing. Not as a human might.

Not as Nefret desired the life she had chosen to keep.

“I found myself,” she said. “That is answer enough.”

She could feel Sekhaf’s dissatisfaction with it. But that was all right. It was one of Sekhaf’s favorite sayings, that questions bred answers, and answers, more questions; he would ask her more before long.

Together they would create wisdom, a new understanding of the goddess. And the time had come, Nefret thought, for that wisdom to go beyond this desert refuge, into the world without. To the priests, and the temple, and the little girl who was Hathirekhmet, who someday would become someone else.

When she did, Nefret would be there to greet her.

Ian McHugh

It was a day when autumn’s bitter rain swept in off the strait. It rinsed the filth from the streets and beat against the black tower that rose from the heart of the city’s sprawl.

In the plaza before the tower’s gate, a pair of statues stood on man-high plinths, rendered from the same black stone as the tower and overgrown with climbing briars. A female figure and a male, they wore the long-bodied forms of the race of Avalae, the city’s first masters, and had the high-domed skulls and small round ears, set low behind the jaw, distinctive of that vanquished folk. The statues reached, left-handed, towards each other, as though they longed to cross the space between, their unseeing gazes locked together. The woman’s outstretched arm ended in a stump above the wrist.

Being statues, they were inert and unknowing, but had they ears to hear, they would have known the cry of dismay that arose from the ghettos below.

The angel was returned.

Always in the past, the angel’s homecoming had been greeted with joy, and the ears of the city dwellers had pricked up to listen for the strident chorus of the returning songships. But on this day, as copper sunshine found the gap between horizon and clouds, there arose no triumphant song from the harbour. Had the statues eyes that saw and legs of muscle and sinew to walk among the people, they would have seen the faces that turned up and watched the angel’s passage, tight with worry, and they would have marked his course, erratic as a butterfly’s, the beat of his grey swan wings laboured and inconstant.

“Where is the fleet?” the people whispered. Their whispers turned to wails when they saw the scant dozen ships that limped into port, and heard the mournful dirge they sang.

The rest would not return, the statues might have heard the sailors say. They were burned or sunk, along with the armadas of Melkurr and the Gil-Gadin. Melkurr was defeated, its capital sacked, and the sheikdoms were falling one by one.

From their plinths before the gate, the statues could have watched the angel battle to reach his tower roost. Were their eyes acute, they might have seen the trail of blood that mingled with the rain, and seen that, as it fell, it turned to glimmering dust.

Had the statues walked the city streets, they might have witnessed the wonders where the dust alighted. Cobblestones turned to clumps of poppies. Some grew legs and scuttled away. Downpipes turned to twisting vines, or pythons that insinuated themselves through the windows of the houses. A colony of pigeons grew arms, and minds that thought, and plotted war against the rats and starlings who raided their nests. People who were touched by the dust burst apart into clouds of copper bees, or turned inside out, for golden-boughed trees to spring from their quivering guts.

The angel slumped gratefully over the high balustrade of his refuge. Had the statues chanced to look up, they would have seen a last drop of blood turn to dust as it fell.

* * *

Her eyelids fluttered. She heaved a raw breath, then another. For a long time, that was all she did, her new mind aflood with the sensations of her body, and all the memories of things she would’ve seen and known, had she always had eyes that saw, ears that heard. Centuries of days and nights overlaid the deserted plaza. Harvest dances and winter stillness, the red crackle of solstice bonfires and the smoke and clamour of war. Changeless through it all was the petrified stare locked on hers, stone fingers always reaching, never touching.

She swayed, wincing as the briars that wreathed her hooked their barbs into newly soft skin. She shifted her arms, to extricate herself, and cried aloud when she saw the flat stump that ended her left arm above the wrist.

A memory swam to the surface, of Yng’finail Reavers fighting the beast-headed slave warriors of Avalae, a massacre dance of iron blades on bronze, swirling about the plinths. A wild-swung halberd struck her wrist, splinters showering the wielder. She remembered the fractures spreading through her arm as the temperature fell and rose in the nights and days and weeks that followed until, with a crack one frosted morning, the hand tumbled from her wrist.

Her breaths became sobs. The briars stabbed her anew. Moving slowly, whimpering at every tear of her skin, she freed herself from their embrace and shoved the mess of vines from her plinth. She sank down into a crouch, and shivered in the cold rain. The sounds of the restless city assailed her, disorienting. She crept her toes forward until they found the edge of the plinth, and clung there, vertiginous and confused.

A flicker of lightning caught a glint of wet stone in the edge of the briar patch. With a yell, she leapt from the plinth, powered by muscles that did not know, yet, how to properly obey command. Hip, hand and stump met the cobbles. She lay, winded and gasping, staring up through the rain at the black silhouette of the tower that filled half the sky.

When the breath had found its way back into her lungs, she rolled over and crawled to the spot where she’d seen her severed hand. She cradled it, cold and unfeeling against her breast.

Her gaze strayed up again, to the statue of her mate, like her hand still etched in stone. He was all but featureless in the gloom. Higher still, to the balcony that marked the angel’s roost, where the mages of Avalae had summoned their fabulous winged beasts to take them hunting, once upon a time. She saw in her mind the angel’s latest, agonized return. The tower gate was closed, and there were no windows in its face to show if light and life existed within, except the balcony, and it was dark.

A hand gripped her arm, hard fingers bruising new skin. A rough voice said, “’Allo, lovely.” Sniggered.

She twisted, lashing out blindly with her stone hand. Her ears rang with memories of screams cut short, terrible sounds of fright and injury in the shadows at the plaza’s edge.

The man retreated, cursing loudly, cradling a forearm bruised, at least, or fractured.

She registered an answering shout from across the plaza. Another man, or several, she didn’t wait to see. Clutching her stone hand to her chest, she fled.

She ran down well-lit streets, where the private guards of the well-to-do eyed the first nervous citizens ascending from the city below to come demand the angel’s counsel. All stopped to stare, amazed, at the naked woman who sprinted past.

At the foot of the hill, the streets grew darker. She heard the grumble of larger crowds ahead. She slowed, clutching at the stitch in her side, and turned from the main avenue. The cold air burned her lungs, her legs shook and her uncallused heels ached from pounding on the cobbles.

The doorways along this street were alcoved, the frontages colonnaded with the long bones of giants, the doors themselves shrouded in shadow. Blankets spilled into the rain from one, nearby. Shivering violently now, she crept over and reached with tentative fingers. She began to tug at the wet hem of the topmost blanket, then abruptly withdrew her hand. There was a body underneath the covers. She waited, but there came no cry of protest.

She tugged on the blanket again, gathering it into her lap, ready to flee at the first sign of movement. Her hand touched an outflung limb. The flesh was cold.

She drew the first blanket around her shoulders and dragged the remaining covers from the corpse. Bundling them to her chest, she crept to the next alcove along the street. She wrapped herself as tightly as she could, tucking her legs against her chest and pulling the blankets over her head, holding them closed with her single hand. After a time, her shivering stilled and she felt something approaching warmth.

She slept, and her dreams were filled with the black stone features of her mate.

* * *

Consciousness returned slowly. The clatter of hooves punctured her dreams, then the creak and crack of a cart following, the drum of passing feet, random snatches of conversation. With a start, she came fully awake.

She raised her head to peer beneath the blanket’s fringe, blinking against the morning light. The rain had ceased, but the clouds remained heavy. The street was filled with people.

Most were Yng’finail, the city’s current masters, red of skin and silver-pale of eye and hair. Slight figures wove among them, coal black skins stark against white robes and shining gold-in-gold eyes—Gil-Gadin, she had seen their like beneath the angel’s tower. A trio of brown-skinned warrior women stalked past, their spiny manes held erect, open vests displaying the scars left by severed breasts.

Others in the crowd were stranger and less human. She remembered them, the cruelly fashioned playthings of the Avalae. Folk with the furred heads and naked tails of rats, scuttling on four limbs or two as the need took them, their eyes the glowing gold of Gil-Gadin. A hairless Yng’finail, pushing himself awkwardly along on a serpent’s coils. A gargoyle leaning on a cane, too old to fly anymore, her once powerful wings twisted with arthritis, copper feathers tarnished green.