Breakable Things, page 12
“Littlest Sister,” It repeats, fond, extruding cartilage and wet wisps of hair; a figment of womanhood, sinuous, numinous. Teeth manifest in a sickle-grin, too wide, too sharp. No other features follow. There is only maw and skin, joints limned with proboscises, like crane-feathers, the lengths curling to ink: trade-aspect of She Who Waits, she who sits opposite of She Who Hungers, murder-mother and parasite-king, end and evolution. “What have you done?”
“I—” Mei Huang shivers, an infant again, language leached by awe. She Who Waits is more splendid, more terrible than anything imagination could have stitched.
“Such sloppy work.” The deity grazes fingers along the soldier’s mouth, palpating the bloodied fat. Its hand drifts to where skin opens to ribs. The man does not react, not even when She Who Waits laces fingers through his bones. “Littlest Sister, did you call me to save you from yourself?”
“Lady. Please.”
“What will you give me? What can you give me? Your heart is already forfeit and your soul is no good. As for your bones, well, we both know that there is no fortune worth bartering there. What could you possibly offer that I do not already have?”
Mei Huang shudders, all cognizance pared down to instinct and custom, the ritual words like a second heartbeat. To the simple understanding that there is, was, could only ever have been, one option; one future. At last at last at last, her heart repeats its glad hymn.
“My hunger, Lady.”
“And how vast is your hunger? How rich is the wellspring of your desires? What do you want, Littlest Sister?”
“Everything.” Mei Huang wets her mouth, trembling. “Everything, every scrap of knowledge ever spoken, every wet rind of wisdom. I’d suckle the libraries dry, crack the sternum of every scholar that I can glut their experience.”
A lie.
“And how much do you crave it, Littlest Sister? How much do you desire its birth?”
“With all of me.” A truth. “With every thread of vein and skein of sinew.”
“Yesssss,” the divinity hisses, its tongue to the hollow of Mei Huang’s throat. “Littlest Sister, you smell so sweet. A perfect gift. Will you waste it on something like this boy? You don’t love him. You don’t even know him.”
“It isn’t about him.”
The goddess laughs into Mei Huang’s skin, a razored noise, teeth applied to her collarbone just so. The tiniest nip. Mei Huang shudders. “If you insist. If you insist, Littlest Sister. I will not turn down a gift.”
She Who Waits is not uncompassionate. The trimmings of liver that It takes from Mei Huang and the soldier are insignificant, almost vestigial, cuts so small they may as well be nothing.
“Aren’t I the better one?” It coos into Mei Huang’s ear as It seals her belly, leaving behind a puckered line of black tissue.
Mei Huang, gasping curses into the cloth between her teeth, finds no answer to give. But she does think to herself, even as the goddess makes room in the wrap of Mei Huang’s intestines, head rested against diaphragm: this is not so bad, she would tolerate depravities that are a hundred times worse if she had to, all for the sake of her.
“You weren’t pregnant when we began—”
Mei Huang studies the palm aligned below her own, meaty, textured with scars, one finger foreshortened. “No. No, I wasn’t.”
“Is it mine? Was this something that she demanded?”
They are all the same, Mei Huang reflects. Every last one of them. These foreigners and fears, birthed of willful monotheism, always so leery of the goddesses, unable to fit their mouths around the sacred names without shuddering disapproval. Yet still they come to the gilded city of Hong, still they track the world-turtles, always searching for a better death than the one they’d be given.
“No. And even if it was, this is not your business to know.”
“But if it is my child—”
“It is not. I promise you. Even if was your cum that warmed my womb, stirred it to sudden life, it would not be your child. It would be mine and my sisters and my temple’s own.”
He blinks slowly, stupidly. “But if it was my semen that—”
“No.” Mei Huang sighs. “This child is not yours.”
The soldier—so exasperatingly young, his skin pink where it isn’t laced with scars—changes direction, fumbles through a worse question. “Did we—”
“No. No, we did not. Please. No more questions. You are embarrassing yourself with your ignorance.” Mei Huang interrupts, sighing again, hoping to circumvent any coital fantasies, hand retracted so that she can steeple fingers above a knee. Her guts ache, the skin pulled tight over an embryonic tumescence. “You have what you need.”
“I suppose.” His eyes, shaded by gelatin-colored lashes, are uncertain. “I—I don’t know what I’d expected. I thought your order granted immortality.”
“No. And even if we could, we would not. Immortality is a poor gift, a gorgeous lie. Everyone thinks they want to live forever, but they don’t know what it means. And before you ask, it means boredom. Endless boredom. There is nothing beautiful about infinity. It is tiresome and you’d soon wish you were dead. What you have is so much better.” Mei Huang leans forward, pats his thigh in sympathy. “There are people who would kill to be able to choose their own deaths.”
“Is that even possible?’
She nods, prim, and folds her secrets under latticed fingers. Idiot foreigner. Of course it’s possible. He’d died already, had walked his road to the end she’d foreseen—a vision of disembowelment, entrails steaming over snow. Or white linen, Mei Huang appends dutifully, silent as the soldier counts her payment out in the smallest possible denominations; his thumb stroking orbits across each coin, as though the heat from his skin might linger, might incite a change of heart. “Yes. Many do it every day.”
“What do I do now?” he asks, at last, with a tremor in his voice. “What do I do with this gift?”
Mei Huang, heaving with predatory divinity, shrugs. “Live and hope you choose enough of the right decisions that you don’t die any time too soon.”
The streets of Hong are narrow by necessity, its stacks of shops and houses cut deep into the world-turtle’s shell. Gutters and gargoyles jut from the balconies while housewives flap laundry over the balustrades, exchanging gossip as they go. From somewhere, a woman calls for customers, promising lobes of curried offal, the ingredients so fresh they still shudder with the world-turtle’s life force.
Below, Mei Huang wanders the tableau without a seeming purpose, a hand over her belly. The goddess had grown tremendous in the last hour, so much so that it has become impossible to walk without waddling splay-footed over the cobblestones. She halts at a lamppost and sucks in a ragged breath, wincing at the strain on her spine. Mei Ying, she thinks. Mei Ying, I hope you’re watching.
A hand fits itself around the small of her back. “Ma’am, could I be—Mei Huang?”
She looks up. The face above hers totters on familiar: soft-boned and round, its lips full. Black hair wisps from a maiden-braid, worn ironically in this case. Lei Yang, necromancer, scrutinizes Mei Huang, expression cloying.
“Already? I thought it’d be another five years, at least,” Lei Yang says.
“It was that or a dead soldier in the inn’s bed.”
“Would that have been so terrible? There are so many of them. Thousands. Like ants crawling all over the world-turtle’s back. No one would have noticed his loss.” Bone-beetles shift in Lei Yang’s hair, chips of luminescent white against the dark.
“You’re not wrong.” Gingerly, careful to make no contact, Mei Huang circles to Lei Yang’s right. An instinctive gesture, worthless in truth. Lei Yang might have an sold an eye for greater power, but she sees as well with one as others do with six. Her children—bone-beetles, marrow-roaches, like so much glass in her black hair—chitter at Mei Huang.
“I have never been wrong. You know that. And you didn’t answer my question.”
Mei Huang narrows her eyes. “No, it wouldn’t have been that terrible.”
“So, why do it for him? Of all the people you could have given up yourself for. You chose a foreign soldier. It seems such a waste.” Lei Yang raps her chin, theatrical. “Did he spurn you? Was that why? Is this a question of love, Mei Huang?”
“You should know the answer to that. We’ve spoken about it.” Mei Huang traces a spell with the edge of a nail, repeating the sigils, over and over, until her skin bleeds into the patterns. Beneath her dermis, She Who Waits stirs like a worm in her blood.
“Yes.” Lei Yang’s pupils divide, once and then again, so that four black circles spin in each of her irises. “Yes, we have. Is it time then, Mei Huang? Is it time to send you to her palace? Is it time to take you to her? Now, Mei Huang? Is it time now?”
She’d hoped for someone less garrulous, more refined, but you don’t choose these things. You grasp them with both fists and cling tight even when the world conspires to unbend your fingers. “Yes. Why not?” Mei Huang whispers. “Yes, sister. Yes.”
A flash of a bone knife.
The cut barely hurts at all. It spreads the skin of her chest into two halves; the blade leaves no scratch on her breastbone. Mei Huang’s blood washes onto the streets of Hong, vermilion on dusty red, a spill as bright as the sun. It feeds into the slits sliced into the world-turtle’s shell, anointing the massive reptile, a sacrifice, a gift.
Somewhere, Mei Huang’s goddess must be stirring, irate that another of her own is now consecrated to She Who Waits. But all things come to those who wait, as they do to She Who Waits. Like death, like life, one lies at the end of the other. Mei Ying, Mei Ying, sings her failing consciousness. Wait for me. I’ll be there soon.
She wakes in scarlet; like a child, newborn. Her robes have been replaced by more aureate finery, carnelian and lustrous ruby, the drag of her cape a shade of burgundy so deep that it is almost black. The air is hot.
“Littlest Sister.” She Who Waits traces Mei Huang’s cheek with a blood-rinded nail, her disapproval clear. “That was a mean trick.”
“It wasn’t a trick.”
“You crossed faster than I thought you would.”
“It wasn’t a trick,” Mei Huang repeats, smoothing a hand down her belly. It is smooth again, no scarring beneath the fabric.
“I am still hungry, Littlest Sister. It is cold here and none of my children have desire to spare.”
Mei Huang blinks the salt from her eyes, vision adjusting to the penumbra. There are other people here in the bones of Hong. A throng of shapes, each and every one draped in carmine. Head bowed, they are anonymous, inscrutable, unidentifiable. Only She Who Waits draws the eye, stark in her myriad extremities, her grinning scrutiny.
“It wasn’t a trick,” Mei Huang says for the third time, inspecting now the rungs of her ribs. There. Relief throbs through her, even as she digs nails beneath a panel and tugs. Mei Ying, she repeats in silence. I’m here. Finally, I’m here.
“Then what is it?”
A violent motion: fabric tears and her flesh unhinges, pivoting on gears of enamel. With a gasp, Mei Huang unsheaths the dagger—it is bone, only bone, but a sister’s grief can sharpen anything, even a sliver of a femur, lovingly preserved against one’s heart—and flings it at the crowd, trusting that it will find its way home. Blood calls to blood, bone sings to bone. Like death, like life, you always find your way to yourself.
She Who Waits does not scream, only tilts her head as the dagger buries itself not in her divine chest but the belly of one of her red-dressed acolytes. The figure slumps forward, palms curling around the hilt of the blade. They slip onto their knees, crumble, and fall with a sigh that is not unlike relief. There is no worse burden than immortality, Mei Ying had told her sister, those rare days she was allowed to speak, to be less than a deity’s avatar, to be more than a mouthpiece.
A ming-ren cannot provide fortune, but they can sometimes author a better death.
“There.” Mei Huang sighs and shuts her gaze against what must come next, a future as red as the glow outside her eyelids.
monologue by an unnamed mage, recorded at the brink of the end
I wanted to tell you, in case opportunity absents itself forever, that it doesn’t matter. That your magic is algorithmic, that mine is an abstraction of reality. That yours demands cartographic soliloquies, every verse a phrase and a phase of mathematics and momentum, every word you speak a part of the map, and you build the rules as you recite them. That mine is raw sensation, synesthesic, sinewy as sex, worthless with context, worth everything on the ledge at the end of time.
Hold.
We have to hold the line.
That I can speak through my spells and you can’t. That you have the world tessellated in amber, while nothing of my magic will mark this earth, only a faint lambency, as though of candlelight staining the black-gold kintsugi bowls your mother gave us. That our friends are dying, that the gods are coming, many-bodied and million-eyed, that the fucking door won’t open, although we’ve made it keys of our bodies, keys of bone and breath and broken promises. All of this doesn’t matter.
What matters is the night when I first met you and how cold the air was, and how the ice needled my breath, and how you stood there with your hangdog smile, your hair rough-tangled, and the light in your eyes, sacrosanct in its shyness, was better than anything the heavens could stitch from the suns. What matters is that I asked you to run away with me and you said yes, and that we kept running even after our Orders came hunting for us, seven to a coven, like we meant something, like we were bigger than two people making vows of the salt-silver rain.
That they dragged us back, bound in brambles and bronze, that they made us choose between being separated or being part of the vanguard against the apocalypse, all that is of no importance. That we laughed at their ultimatum, that we said yes, that we held hands as they told us we probably wouldn’t come back, that is what matters.
What matters is that I love you and that I will always love you, and I won’t let them have you, even if I have to husk myself of all that I am and splinter the universe again. You’re mine and I am yours, and what are gods to people who have seen the continents fold up like paper planes?
I made you a promise the first night of our expedition. Do you remember that? Lying on our backs, blankets spread over the brittle grass, a charred skein of stars strung up above us. We laid there, counting the constellations as they vanished into the black, our hands intertwined, your hair still dark. I told you I’d always protect you.
You laughed. Like it was that or crying.
You said you’d keep me safe too.
I remember the Blacksmith and the curls of her long hair, like wedding rings, forever threaded with lilac, and I remember the Bard, the Cook, the Huntress, the Knights who came last, their armor gilded with rust, their Lord’s body held safe between them. There were others too, I remember that. Like the Crossbowmen, their skin mantled with scars. Like the Priest, who wore burgundy at his collar instead of white. But their faces were taken along with the names of our friends, eaten, nothing but grit in the teeth of those numinous bastards.
Don’t falter.
Please.
This is a kind of magic too, you know? The Bard told me this. Resurrection by way of oration, every retelling a species of necromancy, and if some of it fails to be beautiful, if some of it crooks from the truth, that doesn’t matter. Stories are meant to adapt. I used to wonder what was the Bard’s purpose, if she had a purpose, if there was any meaning to putting music to our massacre, if it’d be better to just forget. Easier, safer to bury our dead in the decay and pretend it was always like this.
She asked me one night what then would be the point. If we were just going to forsake what we loved, forget why we fought, forswear that chance we might make it, although the sky is unmade into fractals, why not just let the gods win? Without stories, there is no memory, no trajectory to illuminate what came before and what might come after. Without stories, there can be no hope.
The fact that the gods don’t understand this is what will ensure we’ll find our way home. Because nothing is just fact and though the world is cinders, if enough people believe we’ll make it, there’s still soil to grow miracles.
Yes, I heard that scream too. How could I not? But don’t look back. There’s not our part of the story. Ours is the chapter engrossed with the task of holding our ground. Be careful, beloved. See how they’ve creped the borders of our barriers, their villi seeking cracks, seeking the gaps made by our grief?
Let me help.
There.
I’m going to marry you when we survive this.
I decided this on the road between here and the ruins of the last elvish capital. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. It never seemed like the right time. But you might as well know now, as opposed to later or never, that I intend to marry you by salt and silver, with the sea as our witness and the mountains as our minister, by the shore at the edge of the world, by the house in which all this began. That I plan to wear white and in my dreams, you wear silk, and though there might be nothing but handfuls of hope to hold in the cup of my palm, I intend to make you a home and a hearth.
That smile of yours, that light in your gaze, the way you look at me even now, while the universe buckles under the weight of its deaths, that is what matters. You are my story, its beginning, its happy conclusion. More than anything else, more than this world, more than this life, you are what matters.
The door is open.
I think someone sold their soul to shatter that lock.
Are you ready? We can do this.
Take my hand—
you do nothing but freefall
(With A. Maus)
Once upon a time, a fox came across a cat in the forest. Or something very similar to a cat, at least. The thing was neither flesh nor fur, but pale enamel, the tip of its nose and the insides of its ears daubed with blood. It sat on its polished haunches atop a mossy log beside a babbling brook, paw metronoming in salute.
