Big Sister held the bag. She already knew what was in it, just by the feel—her old sharkskin scourge. With her old name coiled in copper round the handle.
“There’ve been three sisters to take the hardest way these past two years,” said Biggest Sister. She folded her hands around a cup of kava, but did not lift it to her lips. “Four have gone to rest beneath the stones, and one has taken the blue in deference to her age.” The cup twirled slowly in her hand. “I am sure you have studied arithmetic.”
“Yes,” said Big Sister. “I can count.”
“We are not dying away, far from it.” Another twirl. “We are at some danger of losing the edge of our blade, becoming in time nothing more than an order of monials ministering to the poor and the victims of the state.”
“And if we did not run bawd houses and guard the dark pleasure rooms and take money from the cash boxes of the petty merchants?”
Biggest Sister sipped this time before answering. “We protect, and we aid. That is not the same thing as bettering. If we did not do these things, someone else would. Someone else always will. Someone male, who does not care for women, who will not trim the balls off men who prey on children and break the pelvises of whores. Someone who will simply count the money and throw a few more bodies to the sharks. And they would not give hospice or teach beggar children to read or make sure the potshops have meat in the soup kettles.”
They would not beat bloody the girls growing between hinge and post, either, Big Sister thought, but she kept her words within. As she had always known, there was a sad wisdom to everything the Tribade did.
“There is … more,” Biggest Sister said. “You have not reached this lore yet, but believe me, there is more. Much sleeps beneath stones and behind walls in this City Imperishable that is not seen in daylight. And for good reason. Along with others, we guard those secrets. Only the Big Sisters, though. And you must pass this final test before your title is more than honor.”
Big Sister drew the sharkskin scourge from its bag. Though it loomed huge in her memories, the thing seemed small in her hand. A toy, almost. She’d used worse straining at pleasure with some of the other sisters who had a taste for the rough trade.
But never used such a thing on a child.
“This,” Big Sister began, then stopped. She took a deep breath. Her hand shook as it held the scourge. “This is what is wrong with us.”
“No.” There was an infinite, awful gentleness in Biggest Sister’s voice. “That is what is wrong with the world, that we must raise some of our Girls so in order to be strong enough to stand against it.”
They were quiet a moment as a waiter passed with a basket of hot rolls, spiced with cardamom and sea salt. He didn’t see the scourge lying in Big Sister’s hand, and he never would. It was why some among the Tribade met here to talk from time to time.
“Hear me now: there is a greater wrong to come,” said Biggest Sister. “This last test. A distillation of our way. You must give life before you can take it. This you have done. You must take life before you can have power over the life and death of others. You must kill for the City Imperishable, for the Tribade, for yourself.”
“With this?” Big Sister asked. “It would be a sad and messy business.”
“With that. So you come full circle, releasing the last of your name.” Biggest Sister put down her mug. “If you do not come to do this thing, you will still be a Big Sister. In other times you would have remained a Gray Sister, but our need is too great. But you will never rise to Bigger or Biggest Sister, and you will never see the inner secrets that we guard. And you will never wield the blade against someone’s neck, either in your hand or by your word.” She stood. “Come to me when the thing is done. Tonight, or half a lifetime from now, come to me.”
“What thing? Who am I to kill?” Big Sister hated the fear that trembled in her tones.
“The child who you would have been,” said Biggest Sister. Her voice was distant as the unknown sea. “Bring me the head of a girl-child, that you have killed yourself, and you are done with tests forever. Beggar or daughter of a Syndic’s house, it makes no matter to me.”
She was gone then, her cup shivering slightly on the tabletop.
Big Sister walked to the edge of the rooftop, where a wrought-iron railing worked in a pattern of roses and snakes marked the drop. She stood there, watching a pair of heavy horses draw a scrap cart quietly through the late streets. The moon was slim this night, but still it washed the streets in a purpled silver.
There were a hundred thousand people in the City Imperishable, she thought. A third of them must be children. Half of those would be girls. Would a hive miss a single bee? Would a tree miss a single apple?
Her breasts ached, and she thought she felt milk flowing across the spiral tattooed scars as she wept in the moonlight. There was no way to stop this save to become what she hated most, no way to keep promises made to herself in the earliest days save to break them with blood.
It was not what was wrong with the Tribade, it was what was wrong with the world.
Slowly she picked at the copper windings on the haft of the scourge. The name of that young girl smaller than the hinge dropped away as flashings into the street below, where beggars swept daily for the scrap. She picked until she’d forgotten forever the name, and with it the promises, and there were no more tears in her eyes to follow the copper down.
Big Sister dropped over the railing to a three-point landing on the cobbles. If she was going to hunt a girl, the child would be taken from the highest, greatest houses in the City Imperishable. No mere beggar was going to die for her.
And then, never again, she promised herself. Big Sister ignored the hollow echo she could hear ringing from the future.
Testaments
* * *
Sometimes you just have to let the language rip. This is me, wide open.
* * *
The Testament of the Six Sleeping Kings is bound in ebon plates so dark that they drink all light that flows before them. Brilliance born in the fires of the sun, taking a thousand years to rise to the surface and eight minutes to leap across the stygian depths of space from the daystar to the humble Earth, only to be swallowed with the same finality as any rattling blade dropped upon a shuddering, aristocratic neck.
These are the hard truths: Some words were never meant to be read. Some thoughts cannot be undone. Some darknesses shall never be dispelled.
Some people will never believe these truths.
The First Sleeping King
In a time before countries had borders, when birds filled the skies like raindrops in a storm, and the great migrations of the beasts had not yet been halted by walls and fences and fields, there lived a man named Linnel, youngest son to Ezar. In a hard land of withered olive trees, struggling cedars, salty ponds, and miles of sere rocky hills, he was born to no great consequence, son of an ageing goatherd and the second of his father’s three wives.
His first-mother, Aranu, had already forgotten herself and lay within her tent of hides moaning, except when she wandered smeared with shit and ashes to search for a baby who had died half a lifetime before Linnel’s birth. His third-mother, Raha’el, had been a servant girl taken on more out of pity than need, then bound in marriage to stop the gossip about his father’s undeniable concupiscence. His second-mother, who had carried Linnel into the world, was Aranu’s much-younger cousin, Tobeth, who stood midway in years between her co-wives.
Thus Linnel had grown up beneath Ezar’s hard hand—for goats are unforgiving, and their masters learn this from the animals themselves—burying Aranu when he was nine years of age and finding his way into Raha’el’s bed when he was twelve.
All in all, an unremarkable childhood in that time and place before the morning of the world had been set by those who first chose to keep time.
Until the dream came.
It was the dawn of his fourteenth birthday. Raha’el had celebrated with Linnel the night before, suckling him to
her breast and calling him her best child until Linnel’s staff had hardened enough for him to be her biggest man instead. As always he took her in the manner of a boy so there would be no chance of get. After she’d wrung her pleasures from her son, Raha’el had sent him away, lest Ezar be forced to take notice of these nocturnal excursions. No one was fooled, but the niceties were kept.
Except that morning Linnel lay on a goathide amid a meadow of tiny night-blooming flowers. Already they shut their pale colors and delicate scents away against the first hot breeze of day trickling down from the stony hills to the east. A light descended from the sky in a stink of brimstone and old ash.
Linnel sat up, startled, all too conscious of Raha’el’s passion still glistening on his thighs and amid the downy fuzz of his beard. A torch, thrown by an invader? He was unprepared for anything except a wash in the goats’ pond. Cursing, he realized even his sling was in his tent, too far to reach now.
But a torch would have fallen with the speed of any stone, and this light drifted like a wind-born seed.
Linnel, said a voice out of the very air itself.
“Aranu?” It was all he could think, that his first-mother had found her way out from beneath the stones of her grave in search of her lost infant.
—Malakh.
Linnel realized he heard a name. It meant “messenger” in the tongue of a people who sometimes traded with Ezar for goats, but this being of light was clearly not one of the She’m. Uncertain if this was an ancestor or a spirit of the air or some creature whose nature had never been communicated to him, the boy dropped on one knee.
“I serve.”
—Fire.
With that word, Malakh told Linnel a story, a tale which raged inside his head, of the birth of the world from boiling rocks hotter than even the heart of a smith’s fire, of rains which quenched the land until storms of steam and vapor finally ceased, of the intention which made plants and trees, then birds and beasts, and finally rising like a pomegranate tree from spilled seeds, people themselves, fire’s great-great-grandchildren.
“I know,” Linnel said, and wondered if he dared address this being more directly.
—Honor.
With that word, he knew what must come next. Such a power in the world deserved respect, fear even, and substance; not the soiled thrustings and small betrayals of a family forever encamped on the hillsides of this land.
“I obey.”
Opening his eyes, Linnel strode back into their camp and took up his father’s thornwood staff where it lay propped outside Ezar’s tent. He used the aging tool as a weapon to restore honor to himself and the Messenger of the fire. He almost turned away from his course when he saw Raha’el’s blood fresh upon her heaving breasts as she screamed her last, but her dying curse propelled Linnel to his father’s tent with his resolve renewed.
“The path must be made ready that people will know who stands above us,” he told the three fresh graves, hasty cairns assembled before a puzzled audience of wary goats. “We must know our sins before we can repent of them.”
Eating of a withered apple, Linnel strode away from his bleating charges toward the more fertile lands lower down and coastwise, already framing the words of his tale that people might properly understand their import.
His steps slowed for a moment when he began to wonder if the being of light had been a dream or a true sending, but the sacrifice was made. He was committed. Dream or no dream, this was his path.
* * *
The angel’s pen nib was wrought of the stuff of stars, a metal so dense and fierce that it could almost fold space around itself. The ink it used was distilled from the blood of a dozen dozen saints—what use sinners, when they are as common as sand at the seashore, and thus of no import at all? The parchment was stripped from the hide of a broken god, stretched and scraped on frames of living bone.
The Second Sleeping King
Massah often walked in dreams. He had learned to do this long before he realized it was any trick at all. Even as the smallest child there had been the steps taken on chubby, uncertain feet amid the veiled ladies of the royal court; and there had been the steps that unfolded before his inner eye, sleepwalking on clouds and the backs of crocodiles and the memories of the day.
The mystery and miracle had arrived for Massah when he finally understood that almost no one around him did this thing. Pten, the withered old priest who always smelled of grave dust and bird droppings, certainly had the secret. They’d even met, in the other lands. There, Pten was a broad-chested young man with skin the color of old tea. Much more handsome than the pasty, hollow youth the priest had doubtless once been.
Pten always frowned at Massah, knowing him for a dreamwalker, but had not then sorted out who he was in the waking world. Massah, on the other hand, knew who it was he met in dreams. Always, and without fail.
So when he met the Angel of Death come for the woman who had raised Massah as though he were her own son, he knew enough not to try to bar the other’s path. At the same time, Massah could not help but bid the stranger tarry a while, his secret hope to spare his mother a few more moments of life’s breath.
“I know your errand,” he told the angel.
The other looked at him with empty eyes. Like all the messengers of God, it was as perfect as a marble statue, slick-pale and unblemished, but its gaze was just as blank. The angel wore no armor except that of his studied magnificence, clad only in stone-hard skin and the regard of a distant deity. Even the sword of legend was absent.
—All men know my errand, at least at the end of their days. The angel’s voice was as devoid of passion as its expression was.
“All men are born to die,” Massah replied. He was ever polite. Impolite people did not long remain behind the shaded walls and rambling bowers of the royal court. “Only a fool pretends otherwise.”
—Why does this fool pretend to converse with me, then?
“I bargain for nothing but a few moments of your time. In payment I offer my own wit. Among some circles I am accounted a more than passing conversationalist.”
—She will not live a heartbeat longer. A tinge of pity might have stained its voice.
Massah was ashamed then, and even afraid. “It was never my intention to waste your time, lord angel.”
—All of time is the lord God’s. None will ever be wasted.
The angel touched the side of Massah’s head with a cold finger heavier than any stone.
—Go back to your court and look beyond its walls, if you would see the price of life and the value of death.
When Massah awoke he was forced to swallow his screams. He stumbled to the basin to banish the taste of embalming herbs from his mouth. In his reflection upon the water, Massah saw that his dark, curly hair had become white and brittle and straight where the angel had touched him. All thoughts of his mother fled him in the face of the strangeness of that gift from the angel of death.
He rose in time from his ablutions and subsequent meditations to don a heavier pair of sandals and a roughspun robe, and pass outside the royal court through the gate called Envy, and into the bustling streets and marketplaces beyond.
There in the city of kings he found a world he’d always known of, but never considered with sufficient care. The people of his birth labored under great loads of clay and straw, sweating more than the donkeys of the merchants. Even the poorest of the kingdom were free to spit upon the slaves. Many did so, simply to find a moment when they could call their own lot better than another’s.
Massah had been raised among the scent of lemons and the coolth of fountains. Now, his sandals slapping the dusty clay and worn cobbles of the streets, he realized that he had always been only a pet to the princesses and concubines who had dressed him in versions of princely raiment and taught him to twist his tongue in honeyed speech much as the smoothest courtiers did.
A joke.
A monkey, trained to ape his betters for the amusement of the women of the royal court.
> Why had he never seen this in all his dreamwalking?
Because he’d been ashamed of the poor, starveling dreams of slaves.
He began to run, the smack of his sandals slapping against the stones of the city that had always sheltered him. Massah sprinted past obelisks and the blank faces of temples and fly-clouded ossuaries and clay pits where his countrymen worked naked in the rending heat. He raced as if he could outrun the very touch of the angel gone past.
On his return to the royal court, a death was being cried.
Of course.
His mother.
The priests demanded to know where Massah had been. Old Pten nodded with a dark leer. Long conversations were held in small, hot rooms. A senior prince stormed in, and Massah thought he might die then on a bronze blade, but the prince departed again as temple gongs began to echo across the palaces of the royal court.
In time, he was left alone with his thoughts. Massah understood what the angel of death had shown him. Every people had their time under the brassy gaze of heaven. He could forestall the doom of none. But he could change the price of life.
He dreamed again, of rivers of blood and rains of frogs and the stilled heartbeats of every firstborn son in the city. Walking in dreams, Massah made it so in the hot lands of the waking world, until the streets themselves cried as never he had for his mother’s death.
* * *
The angel wrote in a language possessing only one word, though that word was of infinite length. All the syllables of creation echoed in the letters it scratched across the weeping pages. They did not remain static as ink on vellum might, but writhed in their own private torments, recalling the souls rendered to make them so.
The Third Sleeping King
The Bridgebuilder was a man out of his place. He’d been raised by Attic tutors among marbled halls on a hilltop overlooking a glass-green sea. He’d learned the classics, he’d studied rhetorics and logic and law and the histories of empire. He’d answered questions and stood for examinations and dutifully learned the arts of sword, shield, spear, and horse. In short, the Bridgebuilder had been forged to be the sort of man needed in every corner of the empire.