THREE
“What do you mean, by boat?” Leodora asked Soter.
“I mean,” he said, leaning upon the undaya case, “we have ourselves taken to another spiral of the span. We abandon this trip north along this arm of the spiral and begin again—”
“—where we’re not known! It means everything I just did on four spans is for nothing. I go back to being Jax, a boy, because they won’t know anything about what happened here tonight. The story of this will carry up the line, maybe even as far as your elf friend’s span.”
“Grumelpyn.”
“I know his wretched name,” she snarled, and for a moment he actually feared she would strike him, pick up a cup or a knife and attack him; but her anger, boiling up beyond her control, brought tears to her eyes, and despite her every effort she began to cry. “Daimons damn you, Soter, I won’t do it!”
Diverus, standing uncomfortably behind her through it all, raised his hands as if to place them on her shoulders to comfort her, but seemed at the last to lose his nerve; he drew them back against himself like a mantis about to fall upon a victim. Soter saw it, registered the significance—that a bond had grown already between them that he would be foolish to try to sever—and bowed his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. His head hurt. He should have objected to such language from her, but he couldn’t work up the false ire. He deserved every invective. Worse, he had no good argument to justify this change of plans. In that tense moment he could think of only one story, lame as it was, and only one promise that might convince her.
“You won’t have to,” he said. “You don’t have to pretend to be Jax anymore—or, rather, Jax becomes a woman. We’ll sail to a span where they won’t mind. Colemaigne. We’ll go to Colemaigne.” It had been the span of choice anyway. “It’s one of the oldest spans, and they have no restrictions about—”
“About women?” She might have been crying but her voice remained all threat.
“About much of anything. They’re the epitome of the debauched.”
“Like Vijnagar.”
“Oh, my dear, Vijnagar is positively puritanical. It hides its predilections beneath its surface.” He gestured at Diverus as living proof of what he said. “In Colemaigne there’s no hypocrisy of that sort. And they’ll welcome you. Perform a Meersh story for them first thing. They always loved him. Positively their favorite. I’ll be surprised if they haven’t erected a statue to him by now.”
“I don’t have to pretend?” She was wounded, but the anger had drained from her voice.
“No,” he assured her. “No pretending. And we’ll work our way around, you see, while the story of you spreads from two sources instead of one. By the time we play half a dozen spans on that spiral, the tales of you will have closed up, they’ll meet with us in the middle. Then we’ll have a circuit to travel. Maybe we’ll even sail to a third one before then and spread your reputation farther. Why, by the time we return to Ningle, we’ll be riding in on the shoulders of crowds, too esteemed for your uncle even to—”
“Ningle?” she said warily. “We’re going back there?”
“Not soon, but, you know, it was part of the circuit in Bardsham’s day, and there are many good venues on that spiral, but above and below it. We’re just broadening our compass, is all, as well as our repertoire. You wanted to see the world and collect its stories, didn’t you tell me that?” He waited for her reply, hanging everything on that reminder—the argument fabricated even as he was saying it.
She sniffled and made a weak smile. “All right. That is—” She turned about. “—Diverus?”
“Yes?” He seemed surprised that anyone cared to ask his opinion.
“Would you want to go? To sail to another span?” Behind her, Soter observed him coldly with a look that might have implied a threat.
He replied, “I’ve nothing to compare it to. I’ve never been on a boat.” Then as an afterthought he added, “But if it takes me farther from Vijnagar, that’s probably good, isn’t it?”
“Well, there you are,” Soter said.
She nodded. “All right, Soter. It’s settled.” He smiled but she didn’t meet his gaze, wouldn’t look at him as she parted the fabric and stepped out of the booth. He tried to listen to her retreat, but she tread silently like a cat.
Then it was just the two of them, with Diverus looking puzzled and uncertain. “You care about her,” Soter said. “Well, so do I. I’m protecting her, though she’s unaware of it.”
“Protecting her from what?” asked Diverus.
For an instant he contemplated confiding, but as quickly rejected the idea as insane. “From everything,” he replied. He stared at the open case and shivered. The Coral Man lay hidden in the bottom compartment. When that figure had invaded Leodora’s dreams, he’d dismissed it, or at least pretended to. Now he appreciated what it meant to have something without a mouth, without a face really, speaking to you.
He’d have liked to open the case, haul out the boxed puppets, and confront the figure. In his mind’s theater he carried the Coral Man to the edge of the span and tossed it into the ocean where it sank without a trace, for someone else to find. What he said was, “Be sure you secure that case well and then grab yourself some sleep, boy. We’ll be up early tomorrow for us. Or, rather, today.” Then he, like Leodora, stepped out of the booth and left Diverus alone to secure the lid and blow out the lantern.
From the stern of the ship, she watched Hyakiyako shrink slowly, steadily, rounding upon the horizon until the whole length of it and of the span north of it—which they would not know hereafter—lay upon the sea like the body of a great dark snake, with the towers that divided the two spans projecting like horns, but even this image dwindled and soon only the tops of the towers remained, illusively rising and falling, buoyed upon the choppy sea until, finally, they vanished and with them the sense of the continuity of her life. Disconnected, she could not mask the pit of terror this opened in her, that everything had now been abandoned and she was lost in a way she’d never been, even when turned from Bouyan and the haven of home.
When finally she pushed away from the lost view, the tillerman, seated beside her with one arm up and pressed to the rudder bar, looked her up and down as if not sure what he made of her.
She walked unsteadily toward the ship’s prow—for all that she’d ridden a sea dragon and lived upon an island that fished for its livelihood, she had never set foot in a boat before, and this one seemed determined to throw her to her knees. It was a shallow-bottomed craft and felt much too small and flimsy to undertake journeys across vast stretches of open water—especially with no one but the tillerman seeming to pay the slightest attention to how it sailed.
In the middle of the deck and butted up to the mainmast stood the only shelter the boat afforded, a small shack—at least, that was her opinion of it. The crew called it a “house.” Soter had ducked into its dark recesses before they’d even left the span, along with the remaining three crewmen, and he hadn’t come out since. He’d been unusually reticent this morning, mostly nodding or shaking his head in response to questions, and more than once as they’d waited to cast off she had caught his gaze at the other boats moored along the two quays that projected from the side of the span, as though he expected something to come from them. When she looked, the boats were empty. No one was paying them any mind at all.
Like Soter, Diverus sat in the shadows of the shack. He had his arms wrapped about his knees and was trying very hard not to be ill. She would have liked to have confided in him, asked him what he thought of Soter’s behavior, but clearly he was in no condition to discuss anything at the moment.
The two undaya cases were secured to the side of the little shack, surrounded by more crates and baskets of amphorae packed in straw. She steadied herself against them as the ship abruptly lurched. Then she took hold of one of the sail-control lines and swooped beneath the woven main sail and toward the second mast. A control line ran from that smaller sail to the side of the boat, and she caught it and swung beneath it with her feet up and was a child again for a moment, free and untethered. She let go and landed beside the mast, almost kicking what she took to be an enormous yellow cable, as big around as her waist, that encircled the base of the mast. The cable flinched, and Leodora caught herself against the mast, leaning forward precariously over the cable. In the middle of it an eye opened and a thin reed of a tongue flicked into the air. The cable’s color changed then, yellow becoming brown, darkening to viridian. It was not hemp rope at all, but an enormous snake. She backed away from it, then scurried to the prow of the boat, and once there glanced over her shoulder. The snake hadn’t moved. Its color was blending with the deck again, until she was looking once more at a coil of rope that had no apparent eyes or tongue. The snake had gone back to sleep. It didn’t care about her.
In the vee of the prow, ahead of the lugsail, a small step boosted her high enough that, gripping the side tightly, she could lean over the stem head of the boat to look down into the water as it parted beneath her. She saw a fragmented reflection in the ripple, a face split into shadowed halves topped by a burnished cowl of hair that flared with the late-afternoon light. The water was a deep blue, almost violet. She felt that if she’d leaned down far enough to dip her hand in, it would have come out dyed.
Ahead lay only more ocean, and no hint of any other spiral. Gulls wheeled around them, probably hoping for some food, and that suggested to her that nothing else lay anywhere near, for surely gulls would find better feeding off a span or even an isle than from a single small boat where no one was eating.
If the world was infinite as Soter claimed, then how far might Colemaigne be? The way he’d described the world when she was small, she’d imagined that one span led to the next, and wherever you were you could look out over the rail and see the nearest spiral just across the way. That was certainly not the truth, however. The world might contain infinite spirals, but they could also be infinitely separated. And so, no longer able to assume that what she assumed was true, she wondered about the truth of Colemaigne. It was a much-celebrated place, the subject of endless fables and tales and, most likely, lies. A locus for hedonistic delights, they said, where wine flowed from a huge central fountain and through a thousand capillaries, so that no matter where you were, you had only to dip your cup to sample it. Streets were paved with a crust of hard rock candy, and glazed pastry shell houses leaned over them. No one ever went hungry and every pleasure was indulged—no worries, no desires left unfulfilled. She might have been amazed by such tales once, but now—and especially after rescuing Diverus from the paidika—she understood that for one person’s pleasure to be indulged, another must submit to indulging it. Pleasure had its price, even when paid by another.
In any case the stories were ancient, as old as those of the storyfish and Meersh, according to Soter. What Colemaigne might have been in its past said nothing of what it was now. Look at Ningle, a decrepit, crumbling span that had once been new and glorious and blessed by Edgeworld, and which was surely much younger than their proposed destination.
Colemaigne by implication had to be on an ancient spiral. How else could a span so old exist? Every span linked to it must likewise be old, mustn’t it? Or did bridge spans spring up suddenly after long intervals, the way that spans had appeared night upon night in Chilingana’s story? Another span, called Valdemir in one of the Meersh tales, had fallen into the sea because it was so old. Would another span have replaced it, then or later, or was there a permanent gap where it had been? She hadn’t seen enough of the world to surmise much less know the answers to such questions. Besides, every span on every spiral had its creation story; many were alike, but just as many contradicted the rest. While Chilingana’s was nearly universal—at least it seemed to be so far—it didn’t account at all for the unseen gods of Edgeworld, for Dragon Bowls or the myriad creatures and cultures she knew existed. How could one fisherman have dreamed it all? Finally she doubted she knew anything about the truth of the origins of Shadowbridge and suspected nobody else did, either. It didn’t bear contemplating. She was part of this world. The truth of its creation and its being, whatever that was, wouldn’t make her less or more so. Nevertheless, she wondered if she could ever unravel the mystery. Maybe, someday, if she ever found the mythical Library and it contained all the works it was supposed to—maybe then she would discover the truth; but not here, not in the company of a drunken old liar and a boy her age whose memory barely stretched back beyond a few subterranean months. So she focused her thoughts on their destination and let herself be excited by the notion of setting foot on one of the most ancient spans no matter what shape it was in now, for such a span must know the oldest stories, the earliest versions of all the tales she already knew. With luck Soter would let them stay awhile on each of these spans, giving her time to soak up everything while Jax’s reputation spread.
She stood at the prow until sea spray showered her, then jumped back, but too late, already drenched. The lugsail slapped against the back of her head.
“The price of curiosity,” hissed a low voice.
She crouched and looked beneath the sail. Nobody else stood on the deck; but the snake, against the mast, had raised his head. Although his body was yellow, the head had darkened again to green.
She pushed her dripping hair out of her face and walked halfway to the second mast. “And what’s your price?” she asked, just to be certain who was speaking to her.
The snake’s head rolled from side to side. He said, “That would depend upon what you’re purchasing.”
“What sort of snake are you, then?”
“Do you mean, am I the sort who would sup on you?”
“It would be useful to know.”
“Your drenching hasn’t done a thing to curb your curiosity, has it?” He sounded amused.
She walked closer. Her bare feet left wet prints across the deck. “I’d rather know than not know, if that’s what you mean.”
His head bobbed back and forth as if he was weighing her answer, then suddenly he stretched toward her. She leaned back but otherwise didn’t move. She’d judged that he would have to unwind one coil to reach her; but close, she could see the remarkable blue and yellow facets of his eyes. He opened his mouth wide in a yawn. There were no fangs.
“If you must know, I’m an Ondiont.”
“Ondionts are water snakes.”
“So you know something then, after all. Yes, we are water serpents, my people.”
“Then what are you doing on a boat?”
“Being lazy. Actually, I’m supposed to be a sentry to protect the cargo these creatures shuttle back and forth from one span to another. I’ve been sentry now for months, and so far I haven’t had to do more than stick out my tongue to send off the occasional scavenger. Eventually, I’ve been assured, they will ferry me home.”
“Do Ondionts have a span of their own?”
He snorted. “A span? What would we do with a span? How would we get up the stairs from the sea?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Nor does anyone else. No, we have an isle, mostly rock, full of caverns—very nice, cool caverns out of the sun to sleep in.”
“So, what do you eat?”
“Everything. Same as you.” He rubbed the side of his head against the mast, his eyes closing ecstatically. “We squeeze it to death first. If necessary.” His narrow pupils settled on her again. “Now, what is it you’re buying, storyteller?”
“How do you—?”
“I listened to all you were saying to one another when you boarded. People will tell you everything if they don’t realize you’re listening. Stillness is a great skill. I’m sure you know this. I’m sure there are moments when you hold your puppets absolutely rigid to draw in your audience, and then strike.” She thought if he’d had teeth he would have been grinning at her.
“If you know what I am, then you must know what I’m seeking.”
“You would like a tale of the Ondionts, as different from your own people as I am from you.” When she nodded, he said, “My price for this is that you must sit beside me.”
“So that you can squeeze me to death before you eat me?”
His tongue flicked in irritation. “So that you and I have a pact of trust. You must trust that I won’t crush you.”
She rubbed the bottom of one foot against the other ankle. “That would seem to put all the trust on my side of the bargain. What are you trusting me to do?”
“I am trusting you to honor the story every time you tell it on the spans of men and other creatures, by telling it true. Mine is the greater trust, because if you break it, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“There’s nothing I can do about it, either, should you choose to crush me.”
“That’s quite probably true. But you might attract the sailors and your comrades, who are inside, and they could certainly kill me before I could finish my meal. And anyway, they would see. It’s not as if you would be easy to hide once I did eat you.”
They faced each other in silence then, and if the snake was thinking anything at all, she couldn’t tell. Yet she sensed that, like the kitsune who’d led the procession of monsters, the snake meant her no harm.
She walked boldly up beside him and sat down cross-legged on the deck. “What story then pays for my trust?”
The snake opened his mouth wide and hissed. She tensed to flee until she realized that he was laughing. “You’ve steel in you, storyteller.”
“Maybe not as much as you imagine.”
“Oh, the contrary. I’m a judge of such things. But now to your reward. Here is a story you do not know.” He lowered his head and, very delicately, laid it upon her lap. His crystalline eyes swiveled to look up at her as he spoke. “There was once a serpent woman who collected souls.”
THE STORY OF MISSANSHA
Her name was Missansha, which means “the lonely one” in the Ondiont speech. She was born blind, and this is very rare among my people. Perhaps because of this, she schooled her other senses. We have a strong sense of smell, but hers was superior. She could flick her tongue and tell you what lay beyond the horizon, picking up its scent long before anyone else could.
However, as she came of age, she developed one particular talent that no other of us has—she could sip life itself. When she came near anyone else, she drank from them. She surely didn’t know this was unusual. It was how she was. Nor could she control it, any more than the living can control the urge to breathe. Inadvertently, like a basilisk, she drained the life from two playmates.
We have elders among us in whom we place our governance, and she was taken before them for this crime; but even as she was escorted into the room, she was draining those guards who accompanied her. One collapsed at her side; the other slithered away for his life. No one, nor especially her family, could come near her. The more she cared, the more absolutely she absorbed.
Now, we do not slay our own, least of all for things they cannot control, and Missansha bore no responsibility for this. She wept for those she destroyed. We could not harm her for it.
The elders chose the only solution they could imagine. They would commission a tower for her, high enough that she would never again come near them. As you can imagine, for snakes such an undertaking was near impossible, and so we sent out messengers to the bridges, to ships, to other islands, asking for assistance. There were few who accepted our very generous offer to come and erect our tower. Serpents have an unsavory reputation among other species, most of which we’ve done nothing to earn. We’re simply distrusted for our appearance and stories concocted about us, our decency dismissed. But I digress.
There were humans who deigned to set foot on our island. They were paid handsomely for their masonry skills, their talent, and their labor—we have much gold in our caverns. And there were no unfortunate incidents of the sort that can spoil a relationship…that is, until the tower was complete and it was time to place Missansha in it.
Some of us there were who speculated that Missansha’s powers might only hold sway over her own kind. The long, ascending rampway that spiraled around the outside of the tower, though it was built for snakes, still posed a burden to us. We asked that these foreigners would escort her to her chambers. None of us wished to be close enough, and we could not have her slither off the edge of the narrow ramp.
We made another generous offer, and two of them volunteered. The rest waited alongside us.
Only one of the volunteers returned. The other died as he reached the top. His body became as glass, transparent and stiff. The survivor managed to lock her in before he stumbled back down the spiral to safety. We offered to nurse him back to health—we had much experience by now with the effect of her—but, no, the foreigners did not trust us after that, these alien creatures. They departed our shore and never returned. The tower they’d built was solid, well constructed for the ages, and we left her there, banished with us but never among us.
Once a week someone carried food to her, leaving it where she could reach it. At least for a long time this was so. Over time, the act of delivering food became a ritual. To be chosen was an honor. Because it was codified as ritual, no one asked if the food was taken, if there was a sign she still survived. She surely had long since died. The ritual continued nonetheless.
And so it was for centuries, the lonely one isolated safely above us. We congratulated ourselves that we had found a benign solution to her existence.
What happened then was that Death paid us a personal visit.
Death as you know looks like anyone. When he is among you humans, he looks like one of you. Among the Ondionts he was a serpent, and yet dissimilar. Obsidian of eyes and sheathed in bone. Unlike us, he had arms, thin as reeds and supple, down the sides of his body. We knew him the instant he arrived, and he did not dissemble, but came right to the point.
“I want to know,” he said, “how it is that you have all stopped coming to me.”
The elders, who had been unborn when Missansha was sent away, shuffled meekly up to him. They replied as one, “We don’t know what you mean.”
“There are rules,” he explained. “I for my part must adhere to them, as must you. Else what sort of a world would we have? You, for your part, seem to have ceased to die, and I wish to know how you have done this—what magic or art now protects you. I’ve traveled a long way for the answer and I will not leave without it.”
Now, none of them understood Death’s accusation. Ondionts had been born and had died as always. Our insignificant island would have become surfeited otherwise, and our caverns jammed with wriggling tenants. Death saw this for himself even as they protested their innocence. He noted the tower rising in their midst—something no snakes had built—and his sinister arms pointed at it.
“Why is that erected?” he asked.
Before they had even finished reciting the now mythic story of Missansha, Death gestured them to silence.
“You think then that by placing a problem out of sight, you resolve it? That is your notion?”
“But how could we punish her?”
“Forgive me, did I suggest you should have punished her?” answered Death. “And yet you are of the opinion that she relishes her imprisonment. That placing her in a tiny room in the sky is not a punishment to her?”
“But…but she wasn’t put to death!” exclaimed one of the elders, who immediately regretted his outburst and shrank away. For a moment he had forgotten to whom he spoke.
“No,” agreed Death, showing his teeth. “She was not. Not to death, but surely to madness have you condemned her. You are not people who fare well when isolated, and she began life more isolated than the rest of you.” With that Death passed through the crowd. One by one they lay down before him. At the tower’s base he stared up into the sky, to the very tip of it. He imagined himself there and a moment later he stood at the top, for that was how Death traveled.
His hands pressed that barred door, and it opened to him. Inside, it was dark and cobwebbed. Spiders had busily taken over the space. They dropped from their webs as he passed beneath them.
Deeper into the chamber, Death saw tiny lights burning—an entire wall of them. This struck him as unlikely. The lights sparkled. They were round like the eggs laid by Ondionts. They were eggs, in fact, and the fire in each was a spark of life. He reached the wall and pried one loose from the mucilage that held it. He held it in his hands, and with his needle-like fingers, he cracked it open and let the light escape. Like a flame it leapt up at him, and then through him. He heard it, saw it, experienced its life in a burst, because that is what the soul is—every moment of the life that was known, compressed into a flame of existence. It sang to him as it passed from this plane of being. And from the darkness behind him, a voice unused to speaking croaked, “What was that? How did my little song escape?”
Death turned and there she was. Impossibly alive, thin and ancient, and yet to him unutterably beautiful.
“I let it go,” he said.
Missansha gasped. She uncurled and rose to his height, the height of his voice. She’d learned to do that as a child, as a way of protecting herself. “How did I not hear you enter?”
“No one hears me enter, just as no one can surprise me. And yet you have just done that impossible thing.”
She didn’t need eyes to identify him. The sense of him burned her like heat.
“These,” he said, and turned back to the wall.
“My songs,” she replied. “Long ago they began to come to me here in this chamber, I don’t know from where. They entered me, pierced me, and then I birthed each one. So long ago that began, I can hardly remember the time before it.”
“Another impossible thing, I think.” He could still taste the essence of that soul he’d freed; he understood now how she had lived for so long. The lives entering her had passed to her a little of their being, each one rolling back her age. “Once upon a time, you lost your wits. You had already a power, a great and fearful power that frightened your people, and in the madness of isolation this gift transformed. It grew. You became as I am.”
He drew beside her. His hands embraced her, and for the only time in her life Missansha felt what it was like for others to stand near her. There was no pain, but she was sundering from the world. “Am I dying?” she asked.
Death answered, “No. Something else.”
She could not think what to say.
When it was done, her metempsychosis, they opened the eggs together and let Missansha’s songs fly. It was orgasmic. The songs swirled and swept through her. She leaned back her head, and her tongue flicked at the sky. She moaned and would have swooned but Death caught her. “You’re not used to it,” he told her. “So many at once is dizzying.”
She would have agreed had she been able to speak, but her voice failed her. She looked into his empty eyes and realized that she could see. He, as if apprehending her confusion, said, “Your corporeal eyes could not see; but you no longer have need of them.”
Soon the last of the souls had been released from where Missansha had collected them. She had been preserving them—though she hadn’t recognized it—as a dowry for her groom.
When, after some days of speculating, the surviving people climbed the tower, they found the room at the top abandoned. No trace remained of Missansha save for her cast-off skin. Her body was missing and the floor covered with shattered eggshells, dry and empty; covered also with the bodies of a hundred spiders, curled and desiccated.
Of Death himself there was no sign, either.
“And that,” said the snake, raising his head from her lap, “is how my people met Death. In return for providing him with a bride, we were given very long lives. And we’ve never been sure if that was his blessing or his punishment for how we’d treated her. What do you think?” He leaned over Leodora; the sun had all but set now, and the penultimate orange glow glittered in his eyes like hunger.
“Both,” she answered without hesitation, and the snake tilted his head thoughtfully and then gave a small nod.
“Ssseeyash,” he said and placed his head on her shoulder.
“What does that mean?”
His tongue darted. “It’s not translatable; you don’t have the concept in your language. It references the shedding of the skin, the death of the old shell and the life manumitted beneath, the balance of the two coexisting being true existence, and so it is a word that expresses ultimate truth.”
“That’s a very complicated way to say you think something is true.”
“Yes, which is why we have a simple word to hold all of it.”
She reached up and stroked his nose. He sighed and closed his eyes. After a moment he muttered, “You’re dangerously brave, Leodora.”
“Foolishly so?”
“That has yet to be determined, and won’t be by me. You imagine that stories protect you, and that makes you brave. But it doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“Is that a warning?”
“Advice. Nothing more. Death comes looking for everyone eventually.”
“I’ll try not to invite him.”
“I suppose you must take it lightly,” he replied. “To do otherwise is to admit your fear.”
“If I let it stand in my way, I’ll never get off this boat. I wouldn’t have gotten on in the first place. I wouldn’t have ridden a sea dragon. I’d have married the choice of my uncle.”
“All concrete objects of fear, real and tangible,” said the snake, and she knew by the way he said it that there was another kind of fear he didn’t speak of.
She would have asked him, but at that point one of the crew members raced past to the boat’s prow, and she turned to look where he did.
Riding the horizon, a black sail protruded against the sun’s ember. It was tiny, but clearly a ship.
Soter walked up beside her. She looked at him, and saw abject horror on his face. His gaze flicked over the water to where the crewman was looking, then down at her as he said, “You have to come inside. Now.”
“Inside?”
“In the shack, the house, here.”
“Why?”
“For safety. Please, don’t fight with me, just come inside till that boat out there has gone.”
“What about my friend the snake?” She turned, to find that the snake had retreated, his head down, eyes closed, back around the mast so that he looked like a rope again. His was the perfect disguise.
“What are you talking about, a snake?”
“Nothing,” she replied, and got to her feet. He grabbed her arm and drew her along beside him. As they hurried clumsily into the shack, one of the crew came out from it, carrying a large lit lantern. He carried it to the starboard side and hung it off a hook there. It dangled out over the water.
“Why not in the bow?” she asked.
“In case someone hostile comes, they’ll see the lamp, but from a distance they can’t tell if it’s fore or aft, or port or starboard, and so can’t gauge where to board till they’re close upon it. Every ship, every boat, puts the lamp somewhere different, and the only reasonable thing you can do is steer a wide berth around ’em.”
How, she wondered, did he know the way things worked on board ships? “Hostile?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.
By the time the new ship neared, the sun was gone, the sky black; the breeze had died away. For a while Leodora had watched the ship’s inexorable approach. One light split into two—two red glows like mismatched eyes of a behemoth slithering silently toward them. Soon the ship came close enough that she could make it out—at least the places where it glistened. It was black as the night around it. The red running lights were strung upon ropes, one off its nose and one off the stern. As it overtook the tail of their boat, Soter pulled her back into the blackness of the house. Where he sat behind them, Diverus looked up at the commotion. The nose of the black ship pushed into view.
The ship had a high foredeck that dropped off before the mainmast. It was a deep-bottomed craft, and its ropes and tackle creaked as it drew alongside. The red lantern on the prow rocked back and forth. The ship slowed.
Soter’s grip on her shoulders squeezed tight, and she almost cried out before he released her. She could hear him slide deeper into the darkness, his fear like an oil sprayed upon the air. The forward light glided past, and the side of the ship hove into view. It seemed to be lined with odd pillars. Then all at once she realized that the pillars were people, figures standing motionless along the side—she counted five of them, their bodies dark like the ship, edged only in the rolling red lantern light; their pale heads smooth, gleaming, hairless, their eyes seeming to welter in deep sanguine sockets. Their fixed stare like a braided force sliced through the protective shadows. Red light splashed along the deck ahead of her, doubling and bending the shadows, penetrating the depths of the three-sided house, steadily, rhythmically, like a pendulum as the forward lamp swung. She watched, hypnotized, as color flowed toward her feet and away, cast back again, closer, away and closer, away and closer. Then Soter snatched her into the depths of the shack, and the light splashed across Diverus where he sat staring at it, either unafraid or too ill to move. It lit the room, hooks and gaffs, ropes and tackle, all along the wall where Diverus sat. Soter pressed Leodora against the starboard wall and out of the light completely.
Yet for all that his dread was palpable, nothing happened. The black ship glided on into the night until the light from its rear lanterns had merged into a single spot, a cinder cooling, shrinking, until it went out altogether over the horizon.
“What was that?” she asked without turning to look at him.
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” was his answer. Then he pushed past her and strode to the stern, where he appeared to strike up a conversation with the tillerman, but too quiet to be heard.
“Could they have been pirates?” asked Diverus.
“I don’t know,” she answered, but in fact she was certain that the explanation lay elsewhere.
“Would the snake know?” He glanced up from where he sat; in the lantern light, his face devoid of anything she might call wry.
“How do you know about the snake?”
“I walked around the house before, to try to feel better. He was speaking to you about a tower. You had the same look you had with the fox, and so I knew you didn’t want to be interrupted and I came back here to wait.”
She thought a moment, then said, “You know about pirates.”
“Only from things said in the paidika. There were two boys, and they’d been stolen off a boat by pirates, far from Vijnagar, and brought to market there. I know no more than what they said, and so the black boat could have been pirates, couldn’t it?”
“I think it’s something else.”
“What?”
She shook her head. “Something that scared Soter.”
“Pirates would be enough to scare me.”
She replied, “Me, too.”
Stars smeared the sky overhead. The boat sailed on and Soter stayed beside the tillerman, while Diverus and Leodora hunkered down inside the house. Tension and the motion of the boat worked upon them, and they fell asleep against each other.
In the morning the light of dawn woke them, and they walked stiffly onto the deck, to discover that they were docked below an astonishingly high wall. It must have been twice the height of Hyakiyako. Pennants flew from its top. The wall was rough, the stone uneven, and scattered across its surface were small star-shaped objects, like medallions, that glinted in the early light. Farther along, away from the jetty, the wall opened into a dark and uninviting arch that wouldn’t even have accommodated their mast. Any ships wanting to pass to the far side of this spiral would have had to sail on to the next span up or down the line. The rest of the span repeated the pattern of massiveness broken up by low arches. The steps and the jetty appeared to be dead center along its length.
One of the crewmen, red-bearded, came up behind them, carrying a basket on his back. He passed them and, climbing up and over the prow via the step Leodora had used to look into the sea, he walked down the jetty to the wall. A platform attached to ropes lay there, with another of his shipmates standing by, and he set his cargo carefully in the center of it. Then the two of them gave two of the ropes a tug. The ropes snapped tight; the platform lurched slightly, then began to ascend. They steadied it until it slid from their reach. High above them but beneath the top of the wall, beams jutted out, and between the beams was an opening, another arch. The sound of a squeaking pulley echoed distantly down like a bird’s solitary cry.
As the crewman returned, Leodora asked him where Soter had gone.
“Up,” he said, and gestured his head at the wall. “First one of us out, he was.”
She turned, anger infusing her until she saw that the puppet cases were gone, too, already uplifted. Soter had accompanied them. She was chagrined then by her own overhasty judgment. Behind her, Diverus set down his bundle.
“Time to go,” she muttered, then looked around for the snake. He was nowhere to be seen. The mast he’d girdled was empty, the sail drawn down and wrapped in loops of rope.
The bearded crewman and another came lumbering around the house now, carrying one of the larger crates. The platform was still ascending, so they set the crate down and watched it from on deck.
“The snake,” said Leodora. “Where did he go?”
The two men looked at her, then at each other, then at her again. “Snake?” asked the bearded crewman.
“The snake who guards your cargo. He was wrapped around that mast there last night.”
The other one said, “She seen it, too.” They remained facing her, their faces tight with worry as if weighing what to do with her, and she thought that perhaps she shouldn’t have said anything, that the snake was their secret.
Abruptly, the bearded one said, “He weren’t crazy then. He were tellin’ the truth.”
“And we trussed him up for nothing,” said the other. The morning sun glistened off the stubble on his face. “This snake, he speak at you?”
She nodded uncertainly. Behind her, Diverus said, “I saw it, too. Talking to her.” They all looked his way then. “Last night. It was telling her a story.”
Said one to the other, “But why can’t we see it? Why these two an’ not us?”
“Does it matter? It’s real. That’s all, that’s what matters. We have us an avatar on board. We been blessed.”
An avatar. She’d spoken to an avatar before that no one else had seen…and Soter hadn’t seen the snake, either. But Diverus had.
The bearded sailor grabbed her by the shoulders. Close up, he smelled of sweat and brine. “You brought on us luck, girl, you and your friend. You ever want to venture between spirals some more, we’re your men. We’ll take you.”
“Thank…thank you.”
He let her go and lifted his end of the crate again. To his partner as they carried it the rest of the way off the boat, he said, “We go back to Merjayzin and get him released first thing. We’ve committed a crime here, we have to make it right. Make it right with the avatar. Bring that poor sod back on board and let him talk all he likes…” They climbed onto the jetty, their words fading.
Diverus asked, “We saw an avatar?”
“Apparently.”
He stood still a moment before asking, “What is an avatar?”
“A spirit of the gods. Or a god made flesh.”
“Or snakeskin.” He smiled a little sheepishly and hefted his bundle of instruments.
“Yes, snakeskin.” With a final glance back at the mast, she followed him up and off the boat.
From right below, the stairs looked even more imposing than they had from the boat, impossibly steep. At least, she thought, they were wide.
Responding to the same view, Diverus drew a breath and started up. The sack of instruments rattled on his back.
As she ascended, the two sailors waved to her; they grinned as if the oyster girl, Reneleka, had arisen from the water and handed them her pearl. And, thought Leodora, perhaps she had. Perhaps the snake did indeed herald great good fortune.
Twice on the climb up the steps they had to stop. The second time they stood parallel to the pulleys that lifted the platform, still a dozen steps below the top. Turned around on the steps, they could see that the ropes securing the platform ran from the pulley in beneath the opening in the wall, and as they watched, hands reached out to grab the goods and drag them off the platform, out of sight into the darkness there. The workers remained ill defined in the shadows. Clearly a large space existed beneath the surface of the span—possibly nothing more than a place to store goods; but with the memory of their climb up Vijnagar still fresh, they both could well imagine a much more extensive underworld. The semicircle out of which the pulley beams projected was itself an ancient opening, the lip of pinkish stone grooved as from years of ropes cutting into the face of it as cargo was raised, perhaps from a time before beams and pulleys had been applied.
Down below, the sailors had become no bigger than gnats and the boat a toy in a crystalline harbor. Off to one side of the boat, something serpentine floated upon the surface. It might have been nothing more than the ridge of a reef. Farther out and to the south, a cluster of small islands rode the horizon. Leodora wondered if fishermen lived there.
Above them threadbare pennants snapped in a strong breeze, which buffeted them as they came up the final few steps.
If, as all the tales claimed, most ancient Colemaigne had once been made of spun sugar and other confections, then centuries of rain and wind had eroded the hard façade of the buildings, exposing and aging more traditional materials underneath—crumbling mortar and stone. The skinny buildings had lost their flat surfaces, their precise edges. Rooftops dipped, and tiles coexisted with thatchwork while the frameworks leaned askew. The roofs and the top floors had collapsed in most of them. It was as if monstrous claws had swung down from the sky and scoured them of their skins, leaving them to rot. The buildings were chalky ruins, their cracked beams like broken bones. The wounds looked old, and yet no one had repaired or rebuilt the houses. That seemed odder still.
The steps opened onto a wide square of broken flagstones, off which half a dozen streets branched. To the supplies being hauled in below, there was no apparent direct access.
Small ramps ringed the steps, wedges with their apexes facing in toward the square. At some time in the past carts would have met travelers here and whisked them away across the span in either direction. She could see them in her mind, the carts backed up to the little ramps, accepting trunks, crates, whatever people brought. She could hear them, too. The excitement of that time crackled up into her through the broken street. The sense of displacement lasted a few minutes, then evaporated as if blown apart by the wind; after that she was fluent in the language of Colemaigne.
In the center of the square stood the remains of a fountain, with figures in the middle of some sort of animals, four of them facing four directions. The waters of the fountain trickled darkly from their mouths and down their bodies, leaving a dark stain, like blood. Soter was seated upon the edge of it with the cases beside him. His head was down, arms resting upon his thighs and his hands holding a cup between them. The stones of the street between the ramps and the fountain were pitted and cracked. Some were shattered or missing altogether, and difficult to walk on.
At their approach Soter glanced up, then lowered his head again, as if they weren’t what he’d been waiting for.
The fountain did contain wine, although if she’d stood in it, it wouldn’t have reached her ankles. It looked black, but Leodora remembered the stories he had told her and knew that it wasn’t. It seemed that at least one part of the myth was true. Small earthenware cups like the one he held dotted the lip of it.
She and Diverus flanked him and sat. Without looking up he said, “It didn’t used to be like this. When Bardsham came, they had banners flying. A welcoming crowd. They knew us, they cheered us. This place was alive.”
His words slurred appreciably. This was not his first cup of wine. She asked, “What’s happened then?”
“Blight,” he said. He gestured with the cup toward an open stall selling vegetables and fruits. She noticed that his hand was trembling as if the cup was heavy. “I asked there, and they told me,” he said. “Terrible. Cut a path the length of the span, years ago, but the place has never recovered. Chaos. The richness is gone, washed away. Your father and me, we entered this very square once in triumph, and it was everything I said it was, a confection of a span. Good days, those. Good days.”
She didn’t understand what he meant—his description of the maelstrom made it sound as if something like a water spout had descended and smashed across the span. Chaos—he used that word too freely to account for too much. He blamed everything on chaos, as if it dogged him wherever he went. He seemed inordinately affected by the state of Colemaigne.
“So, what do we do? We’re here and we’re surely not climbing aboard that boat again and going back.”
“Back? Gods, no. Not an option, going back. Anyway, it’s not blighted everywhere, according to them, or not so badly anyway. There’s another square on the opposite side, a mirror to this one. We can look. Things are better over there, they said. The whole span might not be so bad. Depends on how far…how deep.” He lost himself in some thought then, but came out of it quickly. “And it’s early, you know, barely past dawn, so there’s not much of a crowd out yet.” In fact there was nobody anywhere save for the two vendors behind their stall. He twisted about and dipped his cup. “The fountains still run, I’m pleased to say.”
For once she was inclined to let him have his fill, although his rambling about the blight upon Colemaigne told her very little. It was a span that had been great but had fallen upon hard times since he’d last seen it. Between that and the small stand selling produce, she thought again of Ningle. Someone brought the produce, someone caught the fish. She understood better than anyone the complicated processes that no one saw—and no one cared, so long as what they wanted was available.
“The other side, then,” she suggested. “It’s not that far, is it?”
“Not far,” he agreed. He stood, an unsteady moment. Prominent veins mapped his left calf and, although she’d noticed them before, it was only now she appreciated that he was an old man, strong and proud and unwilling to bend, but old nevertheless. Perhaps it was the remaining magic of this span, or the result of meeting with another divine adviser, but she seemed to be experiencing an array of epiphanies today. She found herself feeling affectionate toward him despite everything that pitted them against each other time and again. She got up and kissed his cheek. Diverus could not have looked more shocked, while Soter’s bewilderment had to swim through the muddle of his brain.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s see the rest of Colemaigne. We have to find somewhere to perform.”
She hefted one of the cases and ducked under the strap, then started walking. After a dozen steps she turned and looked back.
The other two were eyeing each other distrustfully. Then Diverus, as though taking a cue from her, offered his lighter bag of instruments to Soter and shouldered the second undaya case. “You can’t imagine what this place was like,” Soter said to him as though he hadn’t described it. “It was so magical.”
Diverus traded a look with Leodora that said he was pretty certain magic was still afoot.
The far side did prove to be in better shape. Whatever tumult Soter had been describing, its effects hadn’t blanketed the whole span. Some of the slender houses near the opposite square still maintained their surface coats, which were hard like stone, shiny and carved, like sculptures, with all manner of swirls and motifs. In one lane Leodora wetted a finger and wiped it across a bright green wall before sticking it in her mouth. “Sweet,” she said around her finger. “It really is sugar.”
“No one in the world knows how they do it, either,” Soter told her. “They’ve a guild, sworn to secrecy. Can’t even catch them working if you try.”
More people were gathered in this square, too, the span now awake for the day. They milled about shops and stalls. It was exactly like a market day on Ningle, if not as busy.
Soter inquired at the shops about some places and names, and was given directions and information. “Yes,” said one purveyor, “that old theater is still standing. No performances there anymore. The owner died, oh, years, long time back. Probably can find you a place to lodge, though. They got lots of room.”
Soter strode into the lead, along a seaward lane so narrow that they had to go single-file with their luggage and press up against the buildings if someone needed to pass by, which happened every few minutes. He regaled them all the while, in love, it seemed, with his own voice. “Oh, yes, we played there for months. People were coming from half a dozen spans away to see, not thinkin’ or maybe they just didn’t care, that we would be moving on to theirs eventually. ’Course in the end we didn’t, we got on a ship and sailed off to Remorva.” He stopped talking. A look of puzzlement pinched his face as if he couldn’t decide quite how he had drifted into that part of the story. In a more subdued manner he added, “I guess they were right to journey all that way for Bardsham, after all, ’cause they wouldn’t see his like again in a generation—not before now, in fact.” He turned about and shook a finger at Leodora and Diverus. “They’d better let us play here or they won’t know what they’re missing.” He bumped into someone coming the other way. Apologies were made, and thereafter he focused on the direction he was walking. “Better let us play,” he muttered to no one.
Carrying a load that was lighter than usual, Soter didn’t notice that he was inadvertently putting more and more distance between himself and the other two. Approaching the dragon beam of Colemaigne, he thrust a finger at it and called back, “Look at it. That thing hasn’t seen a visitation in your lifetime…What am I saying? In my lifetime, which is much more considerable. Of course, used to be nobody much minded, since the span had everything.” More quietly, he added, “My gods, it’s lost its edge, hasn’t it? Gone quiet. You see this, you bloody coral ghost, you see what happened here? This is our doing, sure as I’m walking here again. We sucked the life out of Colemaigne, and the gods of Edgeworld forgive us. I ought to know what happened here.”
He pressed against the buildings to let a woman in a dark purple wrap scuttle past, saying “Begging your pardon” as she did. She kept her head down and gave barely a sign that she’d heard him. “Not very sociable, are you,” he muttered to her back, but if she heard that she didn’t respond.
Passing the opening, he gazed out along the curve of the dragon beam.
It did look as ragged as if it had been gouged out of the sky. The sides were crumbling, and it was so thin across the middle, it was a wonder the weight of the Dragon Bowl at the end hadn’t caused the whole thing to snap off and plunge into the sea. Soter hastened to pass it by.
Diverus and Leodora progressed more slowly. The cases made passage along the lane difficult. The corners kept bumping against the uprights in the railing. When the woman in purple reached them, they had to set down the cases and step back into a doorway to let her pass. A cluster of three more people came along behind her, and so they waited in the doorway for the rest to pass, too.
Leodora asked Diverus, “Was the bowl on Vijnagar as decrepit as this before your transformation?”
Diverus peered at it ahead. “It might have been. The beam was crumbling and the walls of it had fallen away like that one. On Vijnagar, the bowl had broken tiles in the bottom, you couldn’t even tell what the mosaic had been. I can’t see from here if this one’s like that, too.”
“Would you dare me to go out on one?” she teased.
He turned to face her. “You’ve never stood in a Dragon Bowl?”
She shook her head. “I’ve meant to. The first spans, Soter argued it was too dangerous. Too public. Someone might notice, and if my uncle came along looking for us, they would tell him. Now that I think on it, that makes almost no sense. Soter’s so protective, even when there’s no reason. I don’t know why. Jax is out in the public and I’m to stay hidden from sight. Even now, you’ll notice, and there’s no chance Gousier’s hunting us here.”
“I thought you said your uncle was dead.”
“I said he might be. I don’t know for certain.” She leaned around him. “As for the beams, Soter wouldn’t allow me near one. I suppose I started climbing the towers to defy him without stepping out on a beam. Your story is the closest I’ve gotten to one.”
The impeding pedestrians had walked on, and the sea-lane was now empty. Soter had moved far ahead. Diverus slid the strap over his shoulder and hefted the undaya case. “Well,” he said, “I think I wouldn’t dare you. Unless it was the only way to get you on one.” He gave her a puckish smile and walked off clumsily with his burden.
They shortly reached the opening onto the beam, and their regard traced the curve of its route that, tentacle-like, nearly surrounded the hexagonal bowl at the end. Not a single person sat or stood anywhere on it. The Dragon Bowl was likewise empty. This was a span where the inhabitants had long since stopped believing in the capricious gods. Diverus and Leodora paused and stepped back as two more people emerged from an intersecting lane and came toward him. They looked at them sidelong as they passed, but neither so much as glanced toward the Dragon Bowl.
Up the lane Soter came to a point where everything looked like the square where the trio had first arrived. The building beside his shoulder, the nearest one, was a ruin. Half the quarrels in its windows were missing. There were one or two places where bits of glossy façade remained, but most of the front of the house revealed an underlying structure of irregular stones and gray, gritty powder. He touched one stone and it crumbled in his fingers. Above, the last story and the roof looked to have collapsed into the building. It was like a house that had been consumed by an attic fire, except that no traces of fire remained, and the rest of the houses as far down the lane as he could see shared its state of decay. Seabirds appeared to have nested in the upper reaches of some of them. The surface of the lane stretching ahead comprised nothing but flinders. The sea rail had disappeared, too, reduced to stubs where the posts had been, making the route more precarious.
Under his breath, Soter said one word: “Tophet.”
He edged forward cautiously, and had only gone a few steps before Diverus caught up with him. Diverus set down his case and scanned the damage much as Soter had. Then he stepped out and peered over the side at the ocean below. “It’s a ruin down there, too,” he said. “Looks like pieces of the houses fell off. There must have been a quay once, but it’s just rocks now. What happened here?”
Soter set down the instruments again. He shook his head at first, but then said, “I wager that, if you followed this line of damage street by street all the way back, it makes a straight line to that square where we climbed up.”
Diverus squinched his face. “Like a path, you mean? Like a giant smashed them all?”
“Not a giant,” Soter replied. “Like a curse.”
“You sound as if you know what it was.”
Soter blinked. “What? Why, no, of course I don’t. I just…now, where’s Leodor—” His eyes swelled with horror. “Oh, gods help me, no!”
Diverus turned, following his gaze, not up the lane but to the Dragon Bowl.
Leodora left her puppet case beside the opening and walked out onto the crumbling beam and onto the Dragon Bowl.
She considered that the beam’s condition made it slightly perilous, but not more so than climbing up a tower. She didn’t fear the height at all; she embraced the thrill of it.
What had Diverus felt? she wondered. What was it like to stand within the hexagonal bowl, hoping for some sign that you were exalted, chosen? A thriving span, covered with people, and only one or two would ever be blessed by the gods in such a way, and no one able to predict who it would be or when it would happen; no one sure it would ever happen at all. Spans like Ningle eventually forgot the bowl was there at all. There must be stories in that—of course there were, and she knew one: the tale of the two brothers. Soter had taught it to her years ago.
This bowl was in worse shape even than what Diverus had described of Vijnagar. There were almost no tiles remaining. If he hadn’t said, she wouldn’t have thought it had ever been covered with them.
She turned around and looked back along the ragged beam. From the narrow lane Soter was waving, and she waved back. The buildings behind him were osseous husks, like the ones on the far side they’d seen. It looked like the rest of Colemaigne all the way to the far support tower was a ruin. Before she could wonder at that, her attention was drawn to the underside of the span, visible from where she stood at the entry into the bowl. Unlike the opposite side, this one wasn’t hidden behind a solid wall.
What she saw beneath Colemaigne was utterly impossible.
There were houses in a kind of mirror image of the city above. They hung upside down off the bottom of the span. She crossed the bowl and leaned over the lip, astonished.
The wind gusted at her back, then swirled around her. It blew back her hood. Soter shouted something, but she couldn’t hear him over the wind. He was hurrying back. He’d left Diverus’s instruments in the lane.
Diverus was calling to her, too, from between his hands. His words were drowned out by a rumbling in the sky overhead, and she tilted her head back.
Above the Dragon Bowl the sky was roiling as if throbbing with heat; the blue had darkened to greenish black as though the substance of the sky itself were scorching. Lightning flicked from this mass like the tongue of the Ondiont snake, transfixing her in fascination. She wasn’t even aware that she had stepped away from the edge, back into the center of the bowl. The air crackled. It pulsed with energy that tingled right through her. She held up her hand, and a blue fire surrounded it. She had the presence of mind to think I should be frightened. Instead she spread out her arms as white lightning shot down from the middle of the overhead darkness, straight into the bowl. The world evaporated in light. The light stung her like a thousand bees and she screamed. The bowl, the beam, the span, and her friends upon it all disappeared in an instant. The pain released her and she fell into oblivion.