Its sharp beak plunged into my skin.
There was pain, but worse, I realized, was that it had ripped a piece of skin off my stomach.
He sat up!
I did not move. No one did. The brass man’s brown eyes were wide open. In the moment that they glanced over me I knew, knew, that he was alive. Alive as you or I. But it was only for a moment that I could think that. The next, shouting, screams, and chaos. The brass man had leapt off the table.
In the confusion round him, he had no trouble reaching Commander Takahashi. Men in soldier’s grey stepped back from him. Men that were meant to fight him. To stop him. Men who had been assured that the brass man was dead. They stepped back. They yelled for him to stop. But they were frightened and confused and did not think to stop the brass man’s thick, mechanical hands from grabbing the Commander by the throat.
We attacked him, then. Men threw themselves at him. Others smashed chairs. Anything. But it was not enough. Not nearly. Commander Takahashi’s neck splintered. We heard nothing, but when the brass man tossed him away, the Commander landed in a bent angle that no living man could make.
I do not think the brass man expected to live. Whoever had sent him, whoever gave the order for him to die and come back to life, must have told him that there was no way to survive. And so he made no attempt to do so. Instead, he attacked the officers. He attacked only those with rank. He ignored anyone else. Even as we attacked him, he ignored those of us in simple grey.
I broke one of his arms off. I had a hammer. A big, long hammer that they use in mining pits to break rock open. The tools were outside the tent. They are giving new recruits hammers, Kyo and I had joked when we saw them. We made jokes about how we would apply for them, for they were weaponry we were both more capable of using. And when the brass man was attacking, we had no choice but to run for them. Yet with that hammer I took an arm off. With another Kyo smashed open the brass man’s leg. Together we broke open his head. Together we killed it. We could not have done this with a musket. Yet still, even having done this, the brass man had killed five of our officers with his own hands.
We are back in the watchtower now. They sent us afterwards. Send us back to watch the lines of ash draw closer. To shoot blackbirds. To await this enemy.
Yoshio
“It is not Yoshio.”
Mariko’s voice. It was faint, however, as if it was being smothered or pushed away, and could be heard only from a distance. I struggled to hear as she continued to speak, straining as much as I could, but her words were simply incoherent to me. I wanted to open my eyes and look at her, to assure myself that she was there, that she was a person I could recognize, but another voice told me not too.
Don’t open your eyes
, it said. Why, it did not explain, but the voice sounded like mine in all but the subtlest of tones, and it had such an unquestionable authority that I did not dare disobey it. Not yet. Not until I knew more.
“But the letters are from him.” My mother’s voice spoke this time; it was loud and clear, as her voice always was. “How do you explain them, then?”
“A lie, maybe.”
“There are over ten thousand blackbirds in Aajnn. What kind of enemy could send so many?”
Mariko’s voice was still faint: “An enemy winning.”
“The Queen says otherwise.”
“I do not wish to disagree with the Queen.”
“You just did,” my mother said. “Your soulbird is not helping my son. You tell me that these letters are wrong. That this Yoshio is not in him. You are even suggesting to me that the blackbirds in our neighbourhood—in our entire city, even—are not real. The only way that this could be true is if the Queen has lied to us for the last two years about this war. That is what you are telling me, is it not?”
“The Queen—”
“The Queen protects us!” Mother interrupted.
Don’t open your eyes
. I wanted to, needed to. I could feel the silence around me, thick and angry now, and opening my eyes, I knew, would diffuse it. I would prove to them that it was Yoshio inside me. That the birds were right.
“Mu.”
It was my father’s voice, distant as Mariko’s was.
“She is a guest, Mu,” he continued. “More than that, she is trying to help our son. It’s been three days. It’s as she says—this Yoshio is not in him.”
Don’t open your eyes
.
My mother’s breath was heavy and ragged. “I know. It’s just—No, I am—I am sorry.” Her tone was rigid, angry, but the anger was directed at herself, not Mariko. I could not hear the soulcatcher’s voice reply, but my mother said, “No, please, I shouldn’t have said that. I have believed in the Queen since I was born. She sent you, you must understand. She sent you for our son. She has never—to think that she might be lying . . .”
“She’s just tired.” My father’s voice grew stronger, clearer. “Mu, you need your rest. You can’t be with him all the time.”
Don’t—
“What if he wakes up?”
—open—
“That’s why Mariko is here. You’ve barely slept in three days.”
—your—
“I want to be here for him.”
—eyes—
“You need rest.”
I opened my eyes. There was no one in the room. There was no room. Rather, there was only whiteness and a faint, faint pecking, coming from all directions about me. I tried to sit up, but I could not move. The pecking grew. It sounded as if it were coming from a sharp beak that was being scraped across hard stones. My arms and legs were immobile. I could feel straps holding me down. The pecking continued, steady, coming from all around me. I struggled to raise my head. I felt a stab of pain. Then another. I looked down and saw, standing on my stomach, its claws a wet red, the shaggy, wild soulbird. Its long, sharp beak had just pierced my stomach and plunged into the bloody mess that already existed. As I watched, it drew back, ripping the wet, raw contents of my intestines with it. As it raised its head, the soulbird’s white eyes met mine and I realized, with horror, that they were no longer a clean, crisp white, but rather they were stained red.
Its beak opened, and in a voice that was mine, it said, “I told you not to open your eyes.”
Satomi
The tower to the North exploded today.
One moment, it was there. The next, its thin legs were all that remained, and its broken wreckage smoldering beneath the morning’s red sky. I had been on watch when it happened. Kyo was sleeping. I had gotten us dry powder for the musket and so I had it sitting on the rail of the tower. Sitting ready. Kyo had helped me, even, after what happened with the Commander, though as we stood and looked at the wreckage, I knew that our new musket was useless.
The explosion began in raining fire. It’s the only way to explain it. A soft sprinkle of fire began to fall and then, suddenly, the tower exploded! It burst apart. Ripped apart. It was shredded. I don’t—I can’t explain it to you. The fire rained down and then, suddenly, the slowly bleeding mid morning had opened up like a wound, and there was a broken tower on the horizon and no sign of the enemy. No brass men. No brass animals. Just the plumes of ash, drawing closer. Ever closer.
I know more fear, every day.
Yoshio
When I awoke, Mariko was sitting in my room. Her blue jacket was hanging off the back of my chair and she was sitting at my table, reading the dirty, burnt letters that I had collected. I was no longer strapped down, though my limbs felt sluggish, as if they had not been used for some time, and I was tired. There was a thin white blanket covering me and, before I said a word to Mariko, I lifted it. I was completely naked, but to my relief, there was no other mark upon me.
“How do you feel?” Mariko picked up a stone pitcher from the floor and poured a cup of water, then came over to me. “If your throat hurts, drink.”
I did and, after watching me take my first hesitant sips, she said, “It took five days. You’ve been in a sleep, of sorts, for five days, but you won’t feel rested.”
“Where—where is your bird?” I asked, my voice soft, scratchy.
“At home. He finished yesterday, so there was no need to make him sit in the cage as I travelled here. Are you sure you’re fine? Five days is a long time to be under, so if you’re feeling nauseous, or your hurt, you should tell me.”
I shook my head. “Just tired.”
“Good.”
“Where is . . .” I hesitated, the memory of what I heard while under still fresh in my mind. “Was it Yoshio?”
“No.”
“Who was it?”
Mariko sat on the edge of my bed. “That took a little while to figure. You’re only my third patient, Mi, and I still have much to learn. Forgive me. My soulbird had found something, but it was difficult to remove. It wasn’t Yoshio, as I said, but that does not account for five days. Even an unknown soul should be able to be removed within two. But still he worked by a third and fourth. Only a suicide is so difficult.”
“Kyo,” I whispered.
“Yes, Kyo. It took him five days to pull Kyo out—if I had read the letters, it would have taken less, perhaps. But I thought they were fake. I’ve only just read them now. In fact, I was just reading Yoshio’s final letter now, where he finds Kyo.” She stood, and picked the dirty piece of paper off the table. Aloud, she read, “I found him this morning. He had done it in his watch. In the time when he was meant to have his gaze on the dark red sky. When he was meant to be watching the plumes of ash. To report if they came closer. When he was meant to be watching for the first touches of flame falling through the sky at our outpost. But he hadn’t been doing any of those things. He hadn’t been watching. His eyes were open, but he would not see anything. Kyo had done it early in his shift. He was stiff when I touched him. Cold. So cold. Colder than the wind that cut through my clothes.”
She stopped, but I knew how the rest of it went.
He lay against the wooden wall with the musket next to him. The musket that was now stained with his blood. The musket that we had been given to defend with. To share, one between two. The musket we had just only gotten dry powder for. That musket that he had used, finally. The musket that he had used to crush his soulcatcher so that his soul could return home to Aajnn, so that it could find a sanctuary that he could not here.
And I wondered, as I helped the doctor take Kyo away, how it is that I will return home?
Yoshio
I never saw my soulcatcher again, but we only remained in Yokto for another month, so it was to be expected. As Yoshio wrote in his first letter, he should have gone deeper into the world rather than taken part in the Queen’s War; he should have gone into the cities that were lit in blues and greens and, I learned later, purples and yellows and much, much more, and where the red sun and the Queen were not known. It was into these cities that my parents took me.
I remember well the morning that they told me of their decision. For weeks, we had heard rumours that cities neighbouring Aajnn had fallen. That they had fallen as much as six to eight months ago. But it was not until a Queen’s messenger, wearing the pale green that signalled his service, came around and spoke in Yokto that it was finally confirmed. The letters the birds brought, he said, were from real soldiers. The Queen was now attempting to establish a peace with the forces for the Shibtri Isles and we need not panic. Or words to those affect. On the morning after that, I awoke in my bed, chilled, the lights on the roof the world dimmer than usual. Outside, blackbirds sat quietly, as they always did. Yokto was a neighbourhood of blackbirds now, and Aajnn a city of them. Climbing out of bed, I walked down the cold hallway to the living room, where my mother sat at the small, stone, dining table, crying.
I had never heard my mother cry before and so I approached her quietly. As I drew closer, I could see the outspread wings of a blackbird on the table. They were still. As still as the wings of the blackbird on my eleventh birthday. My hand drifted up to my soulcatcher, to feel the warm bone and cold silver. I hoped that I would stay in it after I died. That I wouldn’t become lost like some many others. Gently, I placed my hand on my mother’s shoulder.
“Mother?” I asked. “Is everything fine? Why are you crying?”
In response, her hand reached up and clutched mine. She did not speak, but her answer was in blood on her hands. The blood from the blackbird she had killed that very morning.
It was the weight that woke Linette. Her weight. The weight of herself.
The flat red sky above Issuer was waiting when she opened her eyes. Five hours before, when she had closed her eyes, it had been a dark, ugly brown-red: the middle of the night. Now it was the clear early morning red, and a thick, muggy warmth was seeping through her open window with the new light. There would be no rain today. Just the heat. Just the sweat. Just that uncomfortable, hot awareness of herself that both brought. The worst was Linette’s short dark hair, dirty with sweat and ash. The ash that had come through the open window during the night. It had streaked her face and settled in her mouth and she could taste it, dry and burnt in her gums. Her left arm, with its thick, straight scars across the forearm, felt heavy and ached; but it always ached. It was a dull lazy ache in the heat, and a sharp, pointed pain in the cold, as if, with the latter, the brittle weather was digging into her fractured bone to snap it. Her feet, tangled at the bottom of her coarse, ash-stained brown sheets, sweated uncomfortably, and her long, straight back could feel the sweaty outline of the bronze frame beneath the thin mattress that she lay on. There was no end to herself, Linette thought, and she would never be able to sleep again, so aware of it was she.
Her dreams, however, had not been a sanctuary. In them, Linette had lived under a different part of the red sun, wrapped in heavy brown clothes, wearing pieces of light bronze armour, and holding a short, wide-nosed gun. Around her, clouds of black ash spewed from the back of bronze, grey and silver coloured machines. Cages of crows peppered the ground and, inside, the black birds sat silently, waiting. They were not real, she knew. They never had been. The ground the fake birds lay on was mud and ash and the waste of brown and red trees that had been torn down to make the circular camp she lived in. The wastage clung to her boots, leaving a trail to its centre behind her. There was a man beside her, but she couldn’t make him out. He had been asking her when she planned to read the letter, but she had responded by telling him to be quiet. Two men had escaped, she said. They could be anywhere. They could be watching—
They were, but she had awoken before that.
It didn’t matter: she knew the outcome, had lived it, and didn’t need to experience it again.
The letter, however, was not part of the memory. The letter was part of her muggy, hot life in Issuer. It was sitting in her tiny kitchen, leaning against an old bronze kettle: thin, straight, pristine and white. A perfect set of teeth to speak with. Her name was printed in messy letters on the front, and though a young, clean-skinned man she didn’t know had delivered it, she knew the author.
Slowly, Linette pushed herself up with her good arm. Her left was a dead weight in her lap. It would take a shower and exercise for it to gain full movement. Two months out of the hospital, out of the army, and a month living in Issuer and her arm had only just begun to improve to the point that she could use it properly. But it took time, still. She slid across the bed that was big enough for two—but held only one—and placed her feet down on the cool stone floor of a room so bare that a visitor would have thought no one lived in it.
The room’s possessions lay in the hallway in a jumble. Linette had thrown them there last night. The large, bronze framed mirror that had once sat on the far wall to give the room size now leaned against the wall with cracks around the top. Near it lay a brass clock, and next to that a stocky bronze fan with bent blades, followed by a dozen tiny mechanical devices that she had been unable to stomach the thought of having near her as she slept. The way that each simulated a natural event, or imposed an artificial meaning . . . they disgusted her, just as the easy familiarity with which she had treated them at one stage in her life did. In anger, she had thrown them from the room and opened the window so that the muggy, ash-stained breeze could enter.
She had not yet opened the letter.
My Dear Linette—
I do not know how to begin, but I do know that there is little time left for me to write. In half an hour, the operation will begin. I am apprehensive. My hand trembles. I have always prided myself on clean, simple letters, but look at them now. They cross lines. They mix against each other. They slope one way, then another. They fall outside the neat order that I have cherished so much. I suppose, given what is about to happen, it’s the way things should be. Nothing in life is neat and contained.
She tried to eat, but the taste of ash lingered in her mouth, even after she had rinsed.
From her chair at the kitchen table, Linette swallowed her half-chewed piece of apple, and then tossed the remaining half into the bin next to her sink. The apple was small, brown, and made an unpleasant, soggy slap as it hit the brass bottom of the bin. Silence followed. A tall woman, now wearing black pants and a long sleeved, black, buttoned shirt, Linette had not allowed a sound to escape her mouth since waking up. She had left the bedroom rubbing the scars on her arm, disgusted by the way sweat gathered around the thick, puckered flesh. She had stepped around the mess in the hall, entered the toilet, pissed, showered, scrubbed herself with hard movements, worked her arm until it moved like the other, then dressed and picked up the apple. The only noise had been her feet on the slowly warming concrete floor.
Not so long ago, the mornings had been filled with sound: men and women she knew in smoky, hazy camps, talking about bad food, operations, people back home, and those they knew now. Before she had left, and when she had lived in Ledornn, there had been conversations about what kind of toast she would prefer, and who would come up with dinner. Insignificant, shallow, domestic conversations . . . .
Linette gazed through the dirty window of the kitchen. The tall, dark shadows of windmills lined Issuer’s morning skyline, a few turning slowly, but most were still. The empty red sky hung above them regardless, still and oppressive.
She did not think consciously for the half hour that she sat at the table, her fingernails clicking on the bronze top every now and then. Her mind had drifted and, in a mix of conversation fragments, bits of song, parts from books, and even scenes from plays that she had seen, her mind turned itself over until, finally, she began to focus on a man. He was blond, slim, and his teeth were crooked, and he had been an unlikely lover for her as much as she had been for him. She did not want to think of him, and when her arm began to throb again, either with real or symbolic pain, she knew that she had to stop before her thoughts turned into a morbidity that would crumble her resolve for the day.
Quietly, Linette entered the small, pale grey painted living room. There was a long brown couch in the middle, and a slim bronze table in the corner with a brass and silver lined radio on top of it. A box of outside opinions pushed aside. On the floor, however, were a pair of old, scuffed black boots, which Linette picked up. Holding them, she sat down upon the couch, and there, paused again.
In the kitchen, the letter sat, still, against the kettle.
“I have been to too many funerals,” she said, as if it could reply to her.
It could not, of course, but the fact that she had spoken to it both frustrated and upset her. With hard yanks, she tightly wound the frayed black laces of her boots up. On the right boot she missed a hole, and on the left, two. She ground her teeth together harshly both times, but retied carefully, wiping her hands free from sweat.
Finished, she rose and crossed the tiny kitchen, to the back door. Her strides were quick and purposeful: the walk of a woman who had an unpleasant task ahead of her, but who would meet it without flinching.
Are you angry?
That day when I first met you, you were angry. Nearly two years and that is what I remember about you most. It is not your beauty, not your smile, not your habits . . . .No, for over the years, I have realized that these do not define you. They are secondary to your anger—that brilliant, burning anger that exists because the world is not right. The anger that exists because you must fix it, somehow. The first time I saw you was from afar, standing beneath a bronze parasol, while you stood at the front of the Anti-War rally in Ledornn, and it was there that I saw that anger. You demanded to know why Aajnn mattered so much to the Shibtri Isles? Why the Queen and her Children were such a threat?
You told us that they lived in cramped cities beneath the earth, away from our red sun, and with the bones of crows around their necks to catch their souls when they died. They were full of superstition that made the men and women who had Morticians tattoo their life into their skin for God seem at the forefront of science and logic.
What impressed me most (and everyone else, I imagine) was that you were not a person off the street, but a career soldier. You stood in front of us in the straight light brown pants and suit of the army, your medals and rank displayed for all. You were proud of who you were. You were proud of what you had done for the Isles. You were proud to be in service.
But now, you were angry, and that anger would not allow you to be silent, no matter the consequences. It was an anger to fear and, I am afraid to say, I did—and do—fear it.
The pear shaped Ovens of Issuer dominated the city’s horizon, though they were easily an hour away by carriage.
Lately, the twin Ovens had a tendency to blur around the edges for Linette, but even with the beginning of her deteriorating eyesight in her thirty-eighth year, the immense girth and height of the creations meant that they were unable to be passed over when she looked at Issuer’s skyline. In contrast, the hundreds of long, bronze windmills that rose out of the city could—and did—fade from her awareness. The Ovens, however, lurked on the horizon like a pair of dark, hunched watchers outside the city, covered in a layer of soot as a disguise. If you managed to forget them (and Linette doubted she ever could) then you would be reminded each Friday when they belched tart-smelling ash, and plumes rose out of each to signal the burning of the weekly dead.
Outside of her house, Linette spent a moment in morbid contemplation of the Ovens. It was where she would finish her mortal journey, she knew: a friend, a family member, perhaps even a Mortician, would take her body wrapped in white sheets up to the silent monks who lived beneath the Ovens. There, she would be bathed, cleaned, and finally placed in the giant pits that never fully cooled, and which would ignite at the end of the week, consuming her. There was nowhere else that she would prefer to end. She would not be buried in the ground, not given—or sold or stolen—to a Surgeon’s workshop . . . what was left of her would be burnt away. She would be given freedom.
Her small house sat at the end of Issuer, surrounded by other small, cheap, red brick houses. Packed dirt worked as a road around them, but within minutes, she had stepped onto the paved streets of Issuer proper. There, the tall windmills turned at a variety of paces, powered by electricity that was strung from house to house. Issuer had never been big: it was a transient’s city, organized in an ordered grid, with street names that indicated purpose. Everything in it was designed to make it easy for the visitor, of which Issuer saw many. It was a city—more a town, really—where men and women arrived for a few days, a week, and after they had seen the Ovens burn and their duty was done to family and loved ones, they left.
The windows to the private houses Linette passed were shut, the boards pulled closed. Inside, bronze fans circulated the air, but the impression of personal lives being closed off was not an illusion. The people who lived in Issuer mostly kept to themselves, and it was only when you entered the middle of the city that openness existed. There, the public stores, hotels, and other places of business kept their windows unbolted. There, fans sat on the streets, blowing, while larger windmills—the largest in the city—turned above them. There, men and women, mostly young, presented the smiling, happy face of Issuer to visitors. Everywhere—and everyone—else, Linette believed, looked like a coffin: closed in, quiet, and still.
Death was the commodity of Issuer. Alan Pierre, a black man who had come to the Isles as a child and made a fortune as a body snatcher, had founded it. When age had finally driven him into looking for a way to settle, he had looked at the makeshift tent city that had existed outside the Ovens and sunk his considerable, ill-gained fortune into turning it into something more lasting. It wasn’t long until hotels were built, and then Surgeons and Morticians arrived, as did the other trades that had attached themselves to the industry of death. The people, like Linette, who drifted into the town, drawn by their own morbid frame of mind and their internal struggles, had always been part of it.
Linette herself did not know, exactly, what it was that drew her to Issuer. Her pension provided enough for rent, food, but very little else. In another city, she might find work and earn more, but while her life was mean, she did not dislike it. The heat bothered her, but it was not as bad as the cold. She was lonely, but—
No.
No, that was wrong: she was not lonely.
She had not been lonely since she moved here and had been able to gaze upon the Ovens daily.
I am not a soldier, and I do not pretend to know what you went through, or why, indeed, Issuer allows you to sleep more calmly than you did in Ledornn; but I like to think I have been supportive of all your needs. That I have tried, as much as I possibly can, to be supportive of you.
It has not been easy, Linette. It is true, yes, that I have not been in the best health, but your hatred towards the advancements in our society have made our lives—our illnesses and injuries—more difficult than they should be. Neither of us can heal with your attitude.
For you, it is your arm that bothers you. Why would it not? The machete of an escaped prisoner splintered the bone and it is now held together by steel rods. It will take years to heal, if ever it does, and it bothers you greatly. The obvious solution to your injury was a replacement, which was offered by the army Surgeons, but you rejected this—and you have since rejected anything that the Surgeons have been able to offer that takes away what you are born with. You tell them (and you tell me) that it is unnatural, that it is not right.