“Clouds,” said Peter, “simply hide the unsettling reality.”
Nietzsche stared at him.
Peter shrugged. “This close to the source, thoughts are words.”
“Mind your soul.” Origen spoke quietly. He sounded very sober.
There was a glimmering of light ahead, a false dawn that grew into a constellation of fireflies as they approached.
“This is the problem.” Peter’s voice was stony and grim. “This has always been the problem.”
The fireflies became bonfires, and the bonfires became a sky full of light, and the sky full of light became a host of angels, in their naked majesty all swords and pinions and flames and power, burrowing amongst ribs larger than rivers.
Angels feasting on the corpse of God.
Like maggots eating Leviathan.
“His bones are the world’s,” Origen said quietly. “His flesh is the world’s. I was right. The Adversary did create Earth to torment us.”
“Heaven stands outside time,” Peter declared. “The world is made, for the first time and anew, over and over. For ever and ever.”
“So what do we do?” Nietzsche asked. “Is this the beginning, or the end?”
Peter turned to Nietzsche, laid one trembling hand on his shoulder. “Make it different this time. You have free will. He made you so. Break the cycle and create us a better world.”
“I have no power here.”
“You are Heaven’s coroner.”
“God is dead,” Nietzsche whispered.
“Long live God,” Peter echoed.
“The Earth was without form and void,” said Origen.
Though it took time beyond measure for them to see the difference, mountains rose from His bones, while the terrible angels birthed snakes who would someday be teachers of men in their innocence.
Phantasies of Style and Place
Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable
* * *
A story about a place I love, and wish I could have revisited. I managed two novels, Trial of Flowers and Madness of Flowers, and a few shorts. This world always wanted more.
* * *
Girl
She’d had a name, when she was little. 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 message 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 cut and 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 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 winds 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 the 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 top 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 in
to the handle of her scourge. Girl said nothing, did not even blink or turn to face the half-familiar 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 the question 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.
Little Mother
“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 nighttime, 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 Cambist’s 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 wall 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.
To run the false steeple days before a baby was due was the hardest way to make the run. No one could scale and jump with her usual speed and precision while her belly was distended and full of sloshing life.
Little Gray Sister had, and fetched out the Third Counselor’s privy seal to prove it. Not for the sake of the theft—the Tribade had their own copy of the seal, accurate right down to the wear marks along the left edge and the three nicks in the bottom petal of the rose—but for the sake of doing the thing.
Pregnant and due.
In this moment she was already minor legend. If she did what Sister Architect suggested, and she succeeded, her legend would grow.
“Vanity,” said Little Gray Sister, leaning backward to ease her spine. “I have already proven all that I need to.”
“Hmm.” Sister Architect sounded disappointed, but did not press her case. “Perhaps you are not quite so much flash as some of the younger sisters claim you are.”
Another test, she realized. But true. There were many kinds of sisters in the Tribade—red, white, blue, black, and more. Sister Architect was a blue sister, one of the professions, though her skills were mostly put to plotting and revising the rooftop runs, rather than any new construction.
Only the grays were trained to die and to kill. Only the grays were given the bluntest and sharpest weapons and trusted to use them. Only the grays were trained between hinge and post in secrecy and ignorance, that their true mettle might be known.
Only the gray sisters became Big, Bigger, or Biggest Sisters, to lead the Tribade into the uncertain future.
She smiled with pride at the thought.
Her abdomen rippled, a muscle spasm that caught Little Gray Sister by surprise so that she sucked in her breath.
Sister Architect tugged at her arm. “Sister Midwife awaits within the Quiet House.”
“I—” Little Gray Sister stopped cold, fighting a wave of pain so intense it roiled into nausea. She took a deep, long breath. “Yes.”
* * *
Big Sister—like all Big Sisters, a gray sister—sat on the edge of Little Gray Sister’s cot. Big Sister was almost a heavy woman, unusual in the Tribade, with roan hair fading to sandy gray and glinting gray eyes. “You’re a mother now,” she said. “Would you like to see the baby?”
Little Gray Sister had thought long and hard on that question. Her breasts ached for the child, weeping a pale bluish fluid. Her loins felt shattered. Even her blood seemed to cry out for her offspring.
Like everything, this was a test, though of late she had been her own examiner more and more. “I would, but I shan’t,” she told Big Sister.
Big Sister took Little Gray Sister’s hand in her own, clenched it tightly. “You can, you know,” she whispered.
Little Gray Sister fancied she heard a burr in Big Sister’s voice, some edge of old emotion. It was possible—the Tribade were neither monsters nor ghosts, just women of a certain purpose living within the walls of the City Imperishable. “I could hold her—” She stopped again, realizing she didn’t even know if she’d birthed a boychild or a girl.
A girl, she decided. The baby had been a girl. Just as she had been, once.
“I could hold her, but I do not think I could let her go.”
“And would that be so bad?” The emotion in Big Sister’s voice was almost naked now, a shift from control to a raw wound that might be decades old.
She held on to that hurt, knowing she must own it too, if she were ever to set things right. “Not bad, Big Sister, not if it were my ambition to take the red and care for her myself, or even train among the Sisters Nurse.”
“Well.” Big Sister’s voice was controlled once more. “Will you take the hardest way, then?”
That was the other choice. The Tribade had many sisters of the brown, the street toughs and money bosses. They shook down good merchants and shook down bad merchants far more, kept rival gangs in line, maintained some semblance of order in streets and districts where bailiffs were rarely seen. Those women were the most public of the hidden faces of the Tribade, and they did most of the public work.
Little Gray Sister could run rooftops, tackle criminals, and watch over her city for the rest of her life as a brown sister. But the only way to become a Big Sister, a Bigger Sister, or even—and especially—the Biggest Sister, was to take the hardest way.
She cupped her leaking breasts in her hand, regretting the feeling of both tenderness and joy. There had been a man at them once, too, for a few hours, the night she’d gotten with child amid tearing pain and weeping and a strange, shivering joy. She still wondered who he was sometimes, but at least he’d been kind.
“I am ready.”
“I’ll send for the fire and the knife.”
“The ink, too, please,” Little Gray Sister said. “I’d prefer to have it all at once.”
An expression flickered across Big Sister’s face—unreadable, save for context. Most women waited for the healing before they took the ink. Tattooing the Soul’s Walk across the flat, puckered scars on a Big Sister’s chest was one of the greatest rites of the Tribade.
It was also one of the most painful, for the poppy given for the fire and the knife was not given for the ink.
Little Gray Sister would do it the hard way, cutting away her womanhood in the first blush of mothering to join the ranks of the sisters who protected their world.
Still, she was surprised they had the brazier ready, and the long knife, and there was even no wait at all for Sister Inker.
Someone had known. Perhaps all of them had known. Just like they’d known to be standing on the rooftop just below, the night she’d jumped into the violet moonlight.
Even though it was the Quiet House, her screams set dogs barking three streets away. It was the only time in her life Little Gray Sister screamed.
Big Sister
She looked at the long, narrow velvet bag Biggest Sister handed her. The two of them were in a rooftop cafe in the Metal Districts, a place where women in gray leather with close-cropped hair received no special scrutiny. There was an electrick lamp on the table which buzzed and crackled, shedding pallid light against the evening’s gloom. The wind was cool, bearing mists and distant groaning booms off the River Saltus.
“You know there is one more test,” Biggest Sister said. The woman was compact, a walking muscle more reminiscent of a bull terrier than the fine ladies of Heliograph Hill.
“There is always one more test.” Big Sister shrugged. Even now, a year and a moon after, her chest ached whenever it was chill, or when she moved certain ways. Sometimes she awoke with the pain of her breasts still full of milk, and for that brief muzzy instant between sleep and alertness treasured the feeling, false though it was. Never again kept slipping into the future. “Life is one more test,” she added.
“Yes, yes, that’s what we tell the girls. It makes nice philosophy for them to whisper over after lights-out. But really, life is for living. After this, only you will set yourself to more.”
“Have you ever stopped setting tests for yourself?” she asked Biggest Sister.
“No.” Biggest Sister smiled. “But my Sister Nurse always did say I was a fool and a dreamer.”