Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (4 page)

But there are always echoes.

He slopes out from beneath the sheets and goes cold barefoot, slapping skin on wooden floor, and over warmer, rich-patterned, Prosian rug, to the window where the city waits for him to wake it, make it rise.

Elsewhere in darkness, at the foot of sheer and ragged cliffs, in rock and concrete, cracked and broken by the crashing of milkwater, scoured by swash of black basalt sand and bound, wound round by chains and wires threading through his dead flesh and woven into stone, his shattered ribcage torn by twisted steel, impaled in his eternal agony, a thief of fire rages at his binding. If he would only rest, his chains would rust away, but he must rage against his fate. Some day, he swears, some day the gods will pay. Some day.

•

Within the caverns of a mountain, a crippled smith hammers out the artifices of eternity in gold and steel, copper and bronze, his broken body wracked with pain with every blow. He builds himself anew, his legs of bronze, his hand of silver, eyes of mirrored chrome, steel teeth and iron heart. In the dark and fiery cave of shadows and reflections, some day soon, some day, the shell of an adamantine-armoured and articulated god will be complete. And coldly, dispassionately, he will begin to forge himself a soul. Some day.

•

Calloused bloody claws, the hands of a fallen king, slap stone and push. His arms strain, and his muscles, veins and sinews, stressed, stand out in sharp relief as stone. Step by step, he drags the great rock higher up the mountain, rough rubble skree under his sliding feet all scattering as he slips and struggles, throat torn by his parched and soundless scream. He will not break, he knows, even as the rock tears from his grasp and rumbles crashing to the bottom of the slope. He will not break, he knows, as he begins the task again, not knowing that it’s only when he breaks that then his rage will lift the stone above his shoulders and carry it up to the gates of the eternal city itself. Some day.

•

Myth is a burning man of wooden soul, clay skin carved in with crimes and reckonings. Titanic, godlike and all too human, we have manufactured, in and from your myths, symbolic shabtis, men of stone and answerers for your sins. Call it Hell or Hades, Tartarus, Sheol or Kur, this modern
altjerinca
is the landscape of the damned. We have no choice in this, we bitmites of the afterworld, gifting you only what you want: order, meaning.

Outside the twilight and beyond the pale, on the other side of our distinctions, in the dark, there are no definitions, no edges, only the internal horizons of your senseless souls. There is, it seems, no forbidden realm so dark you cannot envision it as torment for the forces that you fear. We have no choice but to make that vision flesh. And yet, for all their exile from reality, these myths refuse to recognise defeat. Some day, they say. Some day.

The songliner lays his hand on slits of shutters on the windows, and unslants them with one smooth motion, letting light slice in, a grey glimpse of gloaming still too dull to be considered dawn. He stretches up on tiptoe, limbers arms behind his head and out far to the side. He roars another yawn. Sensing its master’s motion, somewhere a system swishes on to gild the walls, the rug, the bed, the folds of sheets, the curves of sleeping lover, and the desk (where dog-eared scraps of paper with phrases of Heraclitus written on them jut out from between the pages of an old Plato’s
Morphology
), to gild all this with flickerings of subtle-hued subdued light, reflected and refracted, shimmering simulations of a fire’s life.

•

That night, he’d dreamt of fire. He had dreamt of all the spirits of the crossroads, down the ages, hoarding their legacy in the stone underfoot, in the lost songs of the river and the roads of dust that were their books. Beneath the temple of the tree, they sat in council, ancestors, judges, dynasties of deified dead. Yes. He’d dreamt of a magic lantern play of shadows on the wall of a cave — Eleusian and Elysian, illusions of elusion — and of premythean valkans of stone and metal, giants of the Raucasus and high Shimalayas, builders of mountain kurgans, asleep in vast cavernous dreamtombs, under Eastralasia and Cyberia. Even as he was waking from — and yet still walking in — his own sleep, he was dreaming that these Brahman also sleep but will a wake, that, in their sleep, they dream this world — this old, old world — a new.

•

Outside, in the first grey light, a forest of stone creatures rises around itself in shapes of shadow in the morning mist of cloud and fog that rolls in from the ocean out there in the inchoate. Ghosts
of creatures form out of the roiling cloud: wormlike, softbodied, proto-vertebrate Pikaia of the Mid-Cambrian; Mixopterus Kjaeri, sea-scorpion of the late Silurian with the spiny cage of its front limbs; late Devonian extinctions; charcoal wraiths out of the Carboniferous. Out there, it is the dawn of time. Out there, the unawoken city sits in limbo, in the emptiness of a Mid-Permian super-continental desert, world of the trilobites with eyestacking all-round vision, and great Acadoparadoxides sacheri. Out there, it is the time of dawn, the dawn of time, as it is every morning in the city at the world’s end.

•

Fire. He had dreamt of fire: a fierce firmament in the deep structure of the afterworld, a flux of flash in an ocean system of eddies and currents, waves and tides, splashes and ripples, the simple quarternity of colour complexified into chiaroscuro. He’d dreamt the word
anounciation
, adjected into the void, watched it refracture into a whole language of light, of elemental primes, a whole kaleidoscope, the turmoilance of seasons turning, wheeling destiny and fortune, as painted in the sworls of blue and white over a cornfield.

The songliner shakes the last slumberings of sleep’s nonsense from his head, clears his throat. It is his work to summon a more solid world with song, to sing reality into existence. The last thing that he needs is more weird words to make the world still wilder.

Over the sleek slate colouring of cobbles, curved smooth but still lumpen, limps the cart, rattling its bone wheels through the ruins of the city, bringing in the dead. Built not of wood but out of stone, of ossified bone, built from the great petrific trees that grow out in the wilderness of limbo in the desert outside the city, the cart is solid and moves slow, methodical, a cold-blooded lizard of a vehicle, a bone-built automaton drawn by a tame chimaera. The carter flicks the reins —
hie
— halts at a junction, looking first left then right, then rolls on —
hie
-
hup
— through the dark streets.

•

He glances over his shoulder at the cargo of stone, of bones and dust, the rubble of abandoned paradises and infernos brought out of the derelict eternities of the illusion fields, the crumbling wastes where all those other cities of the dead have long since risen and fallen, these worlds that had seemed — to those who left their lives behind to walk the long road of the crows and cornfields — to offer Havens in the Hinter where a wanderer might find an everlasting home with other warriors of valour, other pious pilgrims, places of revelry or rapture. It seems, from the wilds the carter travels, that there has been, once far ago, for every wanderer on the road, a city made for them alone, a hall within that city and a table in that hall where sits an empty chair, at the right hand of their divinity, waiting for them alone.

•

Even eternities die in time, collapse under their own weight. Glass flows from multicoloured windows, pouring down to mingle with the sands that scour the edges of these afterworlds. Souls sit in never-ending feasts slipped into drunken slumbers, and the echoes of the echoes of the laughter and the song reverberate on the stone walls, and the stone tables and the stone souls and the stone gods; but eventually even those echoes die.

And so they have come, they have all come, in the end, to this one city on the edge of everything, whether as refugees or relics: as souls still…active even though in their eternities they’ve long forgotten their original identity; or as souls long since surrendered to a dormant state, ossified and crumbling statues of themselves, splinters of bone, handfuls of dry red dust. So the carter travels out each night into the wilderness, to scavenge the soul cities for the stone, the sand, the lime, the constituents of the cement which holds this last great city of the dead together.

•

The chimaera creature switches its scorpion-sting from side to side, a lick of flame, a sword of fire. Scaleshimmers golden on its copper carapace where the fiery streetlights glint, its body speaks a language of its own, the articulation of its animal nature, lithe and powerful, muscles ribbed and rippling like the flanks of a horse, the shoulders of a cat. A beast of burden, unable to decipher all the civilisation around it, and in communion only with the sound and sweat, its great horned head belowers in threat or bondage, leonine mane framing a face androgynous, ambiguous like a virgin or a viper boy. It sniffs a snort of air, trying to scent something akin to its own sylph. A snort of steam comes from its nostrils, grey vapour blown into the mist of morning, dissipating into wisps. The very air that fills the streets, the carter thinks, might be the breath of such a beast.

And as the singer, muezzin of myths, breathes in, breathes deep the air into his lungs and holds it, holds it to begin, the city stops, held in the moment. The wisping mists, caught in a sudden current, all align like smoke drawn back towards a smoker’s mouth, sucked back towards the source. If the carter and his beast were to follow the pale trail of time through the streets they’d find the mouth of it all, a shuttered window in an old sandstone tenement in the Litan Quarter where the singer stands, in contraposto crucifixion pose, his hands rested on window frames, head slightly tilted, ribcage stretched, caught in the tension between muscles intercostal and extracostal, and lowered diaphragm. Breath fills the lungs that wing the singer’s heart. The city stops.

•

Elsewhere, elsewhen, a boy walks up onto a stage, surrounded by his family and friends, watched over by a priest, to read — to
sing
— from scripture, sing that today he is a man. He fills his lungs with air and fear, and touches a trembling finger on the script of arcane letters brought through empires and millennia, knowing that this moment in his life is shared with countless other young men.

On another stage, an actor pauses in his soliloquy, holding the moment for effect, letting his audience feel the tension, the anticipation of release.

•

Elsewhere, elsewhen, a priest enters the holiest of holies on the day allotted to an annual act of ritual recitation. He leaves behind him all the pomp and ceremony of the others, of his father and his brothers, as he walks alone behind the final veil to stand before the gilded chest, its solid secrets shielded by the great winged cherubim that face each other from either end. He is there to speak the secret name of God, an act forbidden but for this one moment, this one day in every year when God is to be called, the covenant remade, the world begun again. He feels the weight of his responsibility and the pride of it, in his dry mouth, in his cracked throat, and in his chest.

And as the singer sings a crystal note, beginning in wordless purity, elsewhere, elsewhen: the boy sings out the death of childhood and the birth of manhood; the priest invokes his hidden formless deity, naming it, and thereby binding it into reality, into the world, into
his
world; and another priest, elsewhere, elsewhen, opens the mouth of his dead desiccated lord and, through a curving pipe, blows breath into the dry lungs of the mummy, as the ceremony calls for, thinking of the old legend, of how the creator was himself created, how Ptah, the potter god, emerged out of the primal chaos, conceiving the great god Atum within his heart, and bringing him forth upon his tongue in the speaking of his Name.

In the back of his cart, the carter watches dust, raised in the rattling motion of wheels stumbling over cobbles, caught by the faint, distant vibration in the air, dancing.

The tower rises out of and over the old city’s sandstone streets, an obelisk in steel and silver sheen, mirroring the sky it scrapes, yet somehow, also, in the way the first light of the morning slices off its surfaces, seeming also to imprison darkness somewhere deep inside. Behind the modernism of its glass façade, something in its structure suggests the same vision, the same voice, the same vast and ancient purpose as stands, still and solid, in all monoliths of all millennia, its inner mysteries the silent architecture of a monotheist creation. And here, in the city on the edge of time, it is a singularity within a singularity, a monad in Monopolis.

But now, here, in the moment of time’s dawn, for all its still solidity a slight sound breaks the silence, a hum, a buzz. A resonance.

•

It is said, in the rumours that run rife among the babble of rabble in this city’s streets, that the architect who designed its geometric abstractions to seem this transcendent, so very absolute, is himself still studying it. Long ago, and of his own volition, so they say, he entered into his construction and, as he wandered, following the Fibonacci constants in the volutions of the inner corridors, he ceased in a way to see himself as separate from it; now, so the story says, he’s long since disappeared into its intricacies, spotted now and again across the abyss of its vast atrium, here or there, crouched on a ledge like some lost gargoyle born of it. Some say they’ve seen his face in stone reliefs, heard an echo of his voice in the acoustics of a hall.