Read Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy Online
Authors: Ekaterina Sedia
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Short Stories & Anthologies, #Anthologies, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Epic, #Paranormal & Urban, #Anthologies & Literature Collections, #Contemporary Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Anthologies & Short Stories
A whisper of noise and sickly luminescence came through the darkness. It seemed blinding at first, but once her eyes had adjusted,
she saw a contingent of piskies. One held a glowing, spongy mass that lit the cramped tunnel.
Two piskies cut their feet free and they staggered along, bent halfway in order to avoid scraping their heads on the ceiling, until they reached a larger chamber. Dion could stand fully here, but Doolia still stooped.
A bloated piskie sat atop a pile of fist-sized white cases. More piskies filled the cavern edges, their wings’ hum a whining underscore.
“You will speak now!” the central piskie demanded. It stared at them, its eyes imperious. “You will offer to do our bidding!”
“Er, all right,” Doolia said. “Perhaps we might offer to do your bidding, sir, ma’am?”
“You will retrieve our taken one, you will bring it back here!”
“Of course. And there was this marble we were looking for…”
“You will not speak!” The piskie gestured, and another at her side wobbled the marble forward on the cavern’s uneven ground. “This holds a soul! It will be smashed if you do not return!”
Inwardly Doolia groaned, seeing the determined glower on Dion’s face, but she nodded.
With a last glare from the piskie ruler, they were pushed along burrows, and forced to crawl out the last one on their hands and knees, emerging in a tangle of sea nettles near the gate.
Annaliese was long gone from the house. “I don’t have the key!” her father shouted from inside.
“We could wait till she comes back,” Doolia offered, but Dion shook his head. He placed his hands on the door’s surface and whispered to it, looking strained.
“What are you doing?”
“Shut up, I need to concentrate. It’s a door opening spell.”
Sparks flew from his fingertips, outlining the lock. With a soft click, the door swung open, and they stepped inside.
“We need the piskie, sir,” Doolia said.
The old man’s eyes shifted between them and the doorway. “What will you give me for it?” he said.
“It seems as though you might like to be let out, sir,” Dion said.
“We can’t do that!” Doolia whispered. “Annaliese will be furious! What if he hurts himself?”
Dion said nothing, but continued looking to the old man clutching
the cage.
Dion and Doolia returned to the center of the Piskie Wood, skirting the gaping pit. They knelt and set the wire cage on the ground, opened its door and backed away.
The piskie hovered by the door, as though suspicious. Then with a movement almost too quick for their eyes to follow, it was gone into the underbrush.
They looked back at the trap. The marble sat atop it.
•
Despite a fierce argument, Doolia insisted on escorting Dion down through the tunnels underneath the marketplace. She marked them mentally for future explorations, but finally was lost in the maze of dark twists and turns.
The further they traveled, the warmer and moister it became. Fungus covered the walls, mottled purplish growth like giant’s ears and tendrils strung with pearly drops. Stars shone on the arched ceilings overhead in the form of glowworm clusters, fat-bellied and unmoving.
“Is it all like this?” she asked Dion.
“Like what?”
“Like being in a museum at midnight. Or a church.”
“Oh. Yes, it’s always like that.” He considered. “I hadn’t really noticed. It’s certainly much quieter than where you live.”
“Sounds wonderful,” Doolia sighed.
“It’s not.”
“How can it not be? All the peace and quiet you could want, and money to buy books with when you like.”
He shook his head again, picking his way through a forest of blue stalagmites, knobbed and coldly swollen. The splash and drip of his footsteps echoed from all sides.
As they rounded a corner, the walls of the cavern swelled outward. They stood at one end of an immense, elongated chamber, ribbed
with massive drips of limestone, cradling an underground lake. A slippery path edged the cavern wall, stepping up and down and back up again as it led to a shelf-like landing on the other side, where a single light gleamed.
As they came closer, Doolia saw that the light came from a silver lantern that sat beside a high-backed stone bench. A woman wrapped in white sat there, watching the slow play of ripples on the lake’s surface. Beside her on the bench, scrolls lay cluttered like attenuated leaves in the windless air.
“Who is that?” Doolia asked in a hushed whisper.
“It’s my mother,” Dion said. His hand stole to his pocket. He stepped along the water’s edge to the woman.
She looked up as they approached. Her profile was as beautiful as a new moon riding the sky’s breast, and her hair fell like a shining obsidian waterfall. Her disinterested gaze passed over them and returned to the water.
“Mother,” Dion said. “This is my friend Doolia.” His hand half-emerged from his pocket, fingers wrapped around the marble, but his mother’s polite aloofness did not change.
The only sounds were the plink and sigh of water and Doolia’s breathing. They stood in silence: Dion and Doolia watched his mother, who seemed to have forgotten them.
After an eternity, Doolia stirred, trying to ease her legs.
“Take the lefthand path each time on the way up,” Dion said. “That will take you to the sewer tunnel and that ladder.”
She would have said something more, would have said some word of goodbye, but the terrible fixity with which he looked at the woman, who sat motionless and unchanging, stopped Doolia’s words in her throat.
Turning, she made her way home, to the crowded rooms above the Salty Turnip. Shouts of welcome greeted her there while far below, the silence lingered on and on.
•
Jay Lake
She’d had a name, when she was small. All children did, even if it was just Grub or Little Jo or Sexta. But for some living on the brawling streets of the City Imperishable, names were like cloaks, to be put on and taken off. And for some, a name might be cut away like a finger crushed beneath a cartwheel, lest rot set in.
The lash cracked past Girl’s ear, so close she felt the sting, though without the burn of a rising welt.
This time.
Girl held her pose splayed against the wall, dipping her chin as best she could with her face pressed against the rough stone. She waited while Sister Nurse studied her. Right now, there were five of them under Sister Nurse’s care. Each of them was named Girl. Each of them was taller than the broken hinge set in the wall stub along Pyrrhea Alley. Each of them was shorter than the rusted iron post in front of the Fountain of Hope where the alley let out on Hammer Lane. That was how long they had under Sister Nurse’s care, from hinge to post. It was the way of things in the Tribade.
“What’s your name?” Sister Nurse asked, looking up from just below Girl’s feet.
“Girl,” she whispered, though a woman’s voice in her head spoke another name.
“Where are you bound?”
It was the catechism, then. “From hinge to post.”
“You’ve my count of thirty to gain the roof,” Sister Nurse said.
Not the catechism after all. Girl scrambled, knowing the task to be impossible — there were at least five body lengths of wall above her, and the other Girls had been climbing quickly while she was stopped for questioning.
She came to a window at Sister Nurse’s slow
eleven
. Scrambling up the side of the frame, it occurred to Girl that Sister Nurse had changed the rules. She was no longer climbing the wall, she was gaining the roof.
With no more thought than that, Girl tumbled into a dusty room. The lash cracked against the window frame but missed the soles of her bare feet. She scrambled, taking up the count in her own head, looking for stair or ladder before time ran out and she was beaten bloody for both failure and insubordination.
Never again, she told herself. Not while she drew breath.
Each of the Girls had made a scourge. The six of them, for there had been six at the time, had gone into the River Saltus to land a freshwater shark. One Girl had been bitten so badly she was taken away bloody-stumped and weeping, never to return. The rest skinned their kill, cured the strange, rough hide, and cut it into long strips for braiding. They used human shinbones, found or harvested at their own discretion — Girl had cut hers from a three-day-old corpse — for the handles. The sharkskin braids were anchored to the handles by copper windings. Those, mercifully, had been provided, though Girl supposed only because the City Imperishable lacked mines for them to descend into.
She’d wound her old name into her handle, setting gaps in the copper in the places where the letters might have fallen. It was a code known only to Girl, a secret whispered from her former self to her future self in memory of silent promises of revenge and betterment. “You are you,” she’d said, a message being drawn out of her with red hot tongs by the Sisterhood.
Whenever Sister Nurse landed a blow or cut across her back, her neck, her ass, her thighs, Girl knew it was with the power of her lost name behind it.
She’d never asked the other Girls if they’d somehow done the same. Perhaps they bled in vain. She did not.
•
The Tribade did indeed beat her bloody before a fire that roared in an iron grate. The metal glowed like eyes in the darkness of a summer night. Skin came away in narrow red flecks while sisters shouted at her. Is this your name? Who are you? Why are you here?
“Girl,” she told them, until she could no longer move her jaw. That was all she said, no matter what they asked her. She would give them no satisfaction. Instead she remembered every blow, for the future.
In time Sister Nurse cut Girl down and slung her across her neck like a haunch of meat. They trudged through moonlit streets, surrounded by beggars and whores and night soil men, none of whom lifted a face dark or pale to acknowledge Girl as she watched the world upside down through blood-dimmed eyes.
Stairs after that, stairs on stairs on stairs. They were climbing the Sudgate, the great, monstrous, empty castle which anchored the southwestern wall of the City Imperishable, brooding over the river and the poorest districts and the vine-wrapped forests that slunk away further to the south. She could tell from the scent of the dust, too — this was cold stone crumbled with age and disuse, not scattered dirt and flakes of skin and pollen borne on bright breezes from beyond the walls.
Even if Sister Nurse had remained still and silent, Girl would have known where she was. Then, and always.
On the roof — a roof, rather, for the Sudgate was ramified and ramparted like some palace of dream — the moonlight was almost violet. The heavy grease-and-shit scent of the Sudgate Districts moiled below them somewhere, miscegenating with night humors off the Saltus and whatever flowed down from Heliograph Hill and the Limerock Palace. Sister Nurse set Girl down so that they stood on a narrow ledge, looking back across the City Imperishable to the north and east as a curious, abrasive wind plucked at them both.
The great ranging complex of the Limerock Palace in the middle distance was the most obvious structure. Gilded and tiled domes of the Temple District gleamed in the moonlight. The Rugmaker’s Cupola on Nannyback Hill punctuated the northern horizon, its candy-striped walls shadow-on-shadow now. Smokestacks and factories and mansions and commercial buildings stood all across the City Imperishable. This close to the summit of the Sudgate, they were as high up as all but the tallest of the buildings and hilltops.
Sister Nurse said a name. It was a familiar name, one borne by hundreds of female children in the City Imperishable. It was the name worked into the handle of her scourge. Girl said nothing, did not even blink or turn to face the half-remembered sound.
“Are you taller than the post?” Sister Nurse asked.
At that, Girl turned and looked. Her own length of leg had not grown in the last day or two.
“Are you taller than the post?”
As always, there was no hint what that might actually mean. Sister Nurse set exercises, asked questions, made demands, meted out punishments. Waking up each day was always reward enough. It meant she had a future.
It was more than some had, in the alleys and flophouses and mucky attics of her part of the city.
“Are you taller than the post?”
No question was ever asked more than thrice.
“I am taller than the City Imperishable,” Girl said.
Sister Nurse smiled. “Then you are free, if you can fly away.”
This was something new, something outside the boundaries of pain and promise. Girl looked down at the tiled roof sloping sharply away from the ledge beneath her feet, the angle so steep that the missing pieces were scarcely visible. It was a hundred body lengths and more to the pavement of the wallside alley.
“But I have not been given wings,” she whispered.
“Then we have failed you.”
It took Girl a moment to understand what had just been said. Not that she had failed, but that Sister Nurse, and the Tribade, had failed her.
I will not back down
, she told herself. Girl spread her arms, stared at the pale moon a moment, whispered a name, and toppled forward into empty air and the broken-toothed mouth of the cobbles far below.
“Run it again, Little Gray Sister,” urged Sister Architect.
She considered that. The baby shifted in her belly, making her heavy as a cotton bale, and just as ungainly. There had been pains in her groin, too, pushing the edge of what was permissible. She could not lose the child, but she could not lose herself either.
Little Gray Sister looked over at her partner in this effort. It was another rooftop, another evening, another Tribadist, but she was very much in mind of the night she’d been reborn. “It’s not a matter of trust,” she said. “Nor casting away.”
“No…” Sister Architect smiled, her eyes glimmering in the pale moonlight. “Pride, I suppose. You’ve already made your goal.” Her goal, in this case, was a scale across the rooftops from the bakery on Forth Street to the Cambists’ Hall on Maldoror Street a block over, and there up the false steeple on the old Water Bureau office to make the jump across Maldoror and down to the edge of the Limerock Palace’s south wall. From there, it was trivial to slip over the rampart and enter the building — the real work was in the run up and the leap, the parkour-pace practiced to deadly precision by the Gray Sisters among the Tribade. The false steeple was one of the two or three hardest runs practiced by the sisterhood.