 
Woolgathering

Christina Hambleton

Copyright © 2012 Christina Hambleton

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 9781301701247

DEDICATION

To Sue, for whom "The Virtue of Deception" was written and whom is always the first and foremost of my readers.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Whether one considers the fact that I grew out of a new tradition of writers in online forums a good or a bad thing, it has had an impact. So to each of you who examined pieces of this collection online and gave your two cents, know that I wouldn't be the writer I am without you.

Also worth mention is Dr. Paul Sukys. Most of the ideas that became Radical were sparked by his lectures, and it's thanks to his counsel I have truly grown as both a writer and a student.

Aesop's Last Fable

The girl was pale— so pale that her wan face reflected the jaundiced hue of the light over the dining room table, whose coverlet might once have been white like her skin, but had long since yellowed with age and filth. The girl was also very thin, almost bony. Beneath an untidy frizz of hair she had eyes swollen with fatigue, eyes that burned feverishly as they darted about in astute, fearful scrutiny, sinking ever deeper into their sockets like candles burning at the wick. Her hands were articulate, but curiously bruised over the knuckles. She had a nose and a mouth, as well. But these were small since the frail girl was often to sickly to smell, and her lips were small and clasped, only to be opened under the direst of circumstances. Overall, she was a spindly, awkward creature in black— but one needn't recall any of that. The girl could have been just the opposite. She could have been a boy. It wouldn't have mattered to her, or the fates, and especially not to the pair of black steel toed boots and bleached sneakers under the table.

The girl felt her stomach churn, set down the ancient, greasy Victorian silverware in her skeletal hands and laid them in her lap to keep them from trembling. The boots were speaking to her. She knew they couldn't talk themselves; it wasn't as though the soles flapped open and closed, and she was aware that perched atop the enormous trunks that sprouted from the leather there was a face. It was simply that she was too frightened of it to dare look. The same for the shoes— except she wasn't afraid of them. Their head just spewed venom, and catching it in her eyes was painful. It was best just to keep her gaze low, to let all the lashes and vehemence break over her back rather than her face.

"You don't think you're done, do you?" the boots were demanding, in a voice that was ever inches from booming. The girl took her hands from her lap quickly, squeaking:

"No, Dad."

"What did you say? Haven't we told you not to mumble?"

She put a bite in her mouth to illustrate, to end the interrogations, though her stomach ached already.

"Why would she be done?" the sneakers wondered sardonically. "It isn't as though she's eats anything unless we force her, anyway."

The girl chewed resolutely. She wanted to throw up. She knew she couldn't.

"I don't know," the boots said, pointedly. "But she'll find a way to start eating more, if she knows what's good for her. Girl can't listen worth a damn."

The girl didn't bother to say that she was trying, or that she could hear all too well, and suddenly felt that the effort of shoveling in her food wasn't worth the virtue of obedience just then. She could make up for the transgression later. So instead she fiddled with a scrap of blank paper in her pocket that she'd been using as a bookmark, crumpling and smoothing its contours over and over as she mulled over said book's contents. Her roving eyes surveyed the dusty refrigerator behind her, the counter inches away where kitchen and dining room crammed themselves, resignedly, together. Slowly, agonizingly, she mustered the expediency to ask:

"May I be excused?"

"What?" the boots asked, irritably.

"She wants to know if she can get up," the sneakers clarified. "Though the fact that even I managed to hear her is a miracle."

The head at the top of the boots and their tree trunk legs swept its gaze over the girl, and she tried not to wince, her heart racing as it lingered on her mostly finished plate. Her breath caught in her throat, and she could feel a cold sensation tingling down her spine, as of dread that she would be refused. But no. She was safe.

"Fine," the boots decreed, with a sniff.

The girl stood, and though she wanted to scurry away like a roach before she was trod under those heels she walked steadily to the staircase, dissimulated. Sudden movements jostled the boots and sneakers. Sudden movements made you a target, bared your weakness.

The girl peered up the smooth wooden staircase. It was steep and fraught with the peril of splinters, ascending in a curve behind the low floor of the second story, its lofty destination hidden from those who braved it. She clung to the railing and began to pull herself up.

Every time she forced herself to climb these towering steps she wondered if it was worth it. Wondered why her feet shouldn't take her elsewhere, if the journey was going to make her ache so. But these were strange thoughts, she reminded herself as she made it to the top, panting. Nonsensical thoughts.

Running a hand through her hair, she moved into the greater darkness of her room. She'd drawn a heavy curtain over the window, muting the searing, angry sun and plunging her chamber into a blackened swelter.

She didn't care. She hated summer, hated all those oppressing waves of heat and light that claimed happiness while corralling her into this house. They had stolen her— stolen her from her the long, golden chariot that used to carry her off to that place, the one where she could stop thinking and just be. There, bent over her beloved books and papers, she could apply herself to the noble task of labor. She could lose herself in the one virtue she truly believed she possessed, the only, paltry offering she could lay before the heavens.

Also, there was something about this season, about its lurid, suffocating miasma of warmth, that made the boot's blood boil. The boots were darker against the bleak, fiery backdrop of summer, and they would reproach her, lock her in this chamber just as she had been for three weeks now. What a lie that light and pleasant warmth was, the songs of the birds. What demonic whispers in her mind, of rebellion and fetters shrugged, of...

Ah, but even to think of those was an indulgence. More than she deserved.

The girl sidled into bed, staring blankly at the ceiling, relishing the freedom of her mind for one, two minutes. It was too long. Too selfishly long. Rolling over, she reached under her mattress and pulled out a weighty tome filled with bulging pages lathered in cramped, militant scrawl black as night. That darkness... it was all there was save for a few, blood red patches of ink toward the back. That was where she turned now; she was close to having finished the book. Close to having read it through a second time.

It was a lengthy process, reading it. But it was worth the trouble. This was, after all, the crux upon which those terrifying steel-toed boots rode. If the words that punished her down the stairs were a whip, then the print before her was a crop, keeping the wounds fresh and open until they numbed in sweet relief. These words confirmed everything she knew with their largeness, their imminence, reflecting her wretchedness endlessly back upon her so that she couldn't grow complacent, couldn't lose her way. If she searched long enough in these pages, they would tell her everything, grant her all the wisdom and virtue she could ever desire. But for now they could only help her to admit her deficiencies, could only expose her sins. There could be no exoneration before the purge, and that's what her reading was. It hurt because it was dissecting her, carving out the flaws, purifying her with misery.

So yes, she was in the last part of the book now, the part that had once been her favorite because it spoke of love, of equality, of children and forgiveness. Each of those drops of blood that had fallen onto the pages from the tree of life formed crimson splashes of text, and in their words she'd once dared to believe herself free, her thoughts clean.

But no. No, the boots had told her she was wrong, had shown her what a disease of the mind it was to think that her dreams could ever be holy or true. The boots had pointed out condemnation after condemnation buried in her once-beloved consolations like daggers beneath their wine-red cloaks— daggers now sinking into her heart. And while she was still bandaging those wounds with her decimated fingers, still damp and stinging with salt from wiping her eyes, the girl had stumbled upon the last chapter of the book, just as she was now.

A spasm almost of terror came over her, and she slammed the tome shut, not daring to throw it across the room lest she invoke the sky's wrath, but letting it clatter to the floor.

That last chapter, it was black. It was cold— so cold it seemed to burn with the searing, bone-shattering heat of perdition. Lip quavering, on the verge of tears, the girl knew she didn't have the strength to face it again— no, not now.

She sniffled, wiping at her running nose. She wasn't strong enough yet. Not enough to let herself cry, that queerest of actions that always left her drained, her thoughts eventually wearing themselves down to a sense of peace, to such a weak state that she would begin to hear demonic suggestions to rest, that she'd done enough.

It was never enough. She stood, glaring defiantly down at her tiny, bruised fists.

She needed to be stronger.

Crossing to her closet, she stared at its thick mahogany door-frame, the black paint flaking, curling away from the wood. There was one patch, just below her eyes, where it looked particularly chipped.

The girl slammed her fist into that patch, her knuckles throbbing in response. She did it again, and felt a sharper pain. Again she did it, and again it hurt. She'd been at it for weeks. Eventually, as her knuckles healed, they would callous, harden. That was why she forced them into the door-frame, though they ached more now; her arms had gained muscle and power.

Yet... her knuckles hadn't strengthened, only tendered. Her jaw clenched. She thought of the chapter unread in her book, and it still gave rise to a shiver in her spine. For the dozenth time she punched the wall. Monks did this. Holy monks. That was how they broke through boards— because they'd followed that strict, pure truth handed down to them from the heavens. The girl's fists beat the wood before them harder now, more frantically as her agony increased.

Stronger. She would be stronger, she repeated to herself, a chant with which to distract from the pain, to keep herself going. Stronger stronger stronger stronger stronger.

A splinter drove itself into her hand, and she bit down on a cry, but she wouldn't— couldn't— stop to pull it free. Only endurance, only anguish could relieve her. She resumed her litany, yet every collision of her fist with that wall brought greater agony, not the numbness she craved.

Stronger, cried her mind and body in synergy as her fingers smashed into the wood. Stronger, they yelped as the splinter was driven further into her bleeding fist.

Stronger. Stronger stronger stronger. Stronger shi— stronger stronger stronger— shit! S-stronger bull— strong— bullshit! It was all such—!

"Agh!" the girl exclaimed, throwing herself back on the bed, clutching her aching skull. Now, now she couldn't help it as she first choked on a sob, then collapsed hysterically into a fit of tears.

Bullshit. It was all such bullshit— no, that was heresy! And yet, hadn't she been aching for weeks, wasn't the black and blue shame branded into her fists enough?! Why hadn't she made any progress?! Why couldn't she move?! Why was she trapped, day after day, in the echo of her own folly, as though caged by bars wrought of tuning forks, their scathing reverberations shaking her very core? Hadn't she been good? Hadn't she suffered? Or was it that she was weaker still than she thought? Was it that her sins required more atonement, still greater reprise? Was— was she truly so vile?

"I'm sorry!" she cried, curling in on herself as though a scrap of discarded prose shriveling in the hearth, a creation tossed away. "I'll try harder, I'll take more— I'm so sorry! Please let me keep trying! I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry!"

Her corpse was wracked with sobs, and she muffled them in her pillow, fearful that the boots would find her wallowing in the shame. Into the cotton she screamed and wept and dug her fingers until her knuckles cried her grasp was so tight. It might have been hours she lay twisted there with anguish; it might have been days. But at last her frail little body gave in, and she collapsed into the merciful folds of a dreamless sleep.

***

When she woke she was numb, numb all over with that kind of drowzy, dreamlike haze in which one's limbs were flaccid, their conscience light and lenitive. There was still a tiny pain in her heart, but it was just loneliness. She wished the sneakers would visit her. She knew they wouldn't. So her hand moved slowly to her crown, and she petted her hair, thinking of him, instead. When she closed her eyes and stroked her head like this she could almost see him, could see the features blurred by time, but whose expression remained fond as he patted her, as he spoke those words she couldn't forget.

"You're a good girl, aren't you? Why—."

The girl halted the thought. It was too precious, the second half of what he'd said— it was all the whispering of a demon, of a heretic, but she was vile so it was precious. Her heart was weak and depraved. It needed those evil words.

You're a good girl, aren't you?

A smile tugged at her face. There was a crack of light arcing through her dark curtains, and for once she basked in it, let it warm her bones with its effusive glow. She lay there, indulging while she could. To atone, she knew she would have to read that last chapter, face the horrifying truths of God and the heavens, so for a time she allowed a smile— stretched her limbs, petted her own head, and dreamed of that kind, ingratiating demon who'd stolen her childish heart.

It was too fleeting, her rendezvous with sin. Soon that peremptory, wriggling black spot in her conscience began to reprimand her; her spirits sunk back into their appropriate low, her features drooping into the sorrowful and fortitudious visage of the holy whom she knew she would never be. Taking deep breaths to steady herself, she reached under her mattress and retrieved the book.

The girl could hardly lift it, it weighed so heavily in her grasp. It was with the pallor of fear, with her eyes round and wide and her lips drawn that she pried the pages open a crack with her fingers. Already she could feel an icy wind breathing out, roiling in smoky convolutions to fill her lungs, bringing her agonizingly to life.

She swallowed. Gooseflesh crawled over her skin. Her hair was standing on end. Her heart threatened to beat out of its cage.

Arduously, she began to read.

She read of hell spilling over the earth, of heaven raining fire, of beasts and devils and seraphs with blood over their snowy robes and cool murder in their eyes as they dispatched the infidels and weak. She read the sum of those who would be deemed worthy to enter the kingdom, and how the rest would be plunged evermore into a great lake of fire, burning to the end of their days.

And the girl knew. She knew she could never make it, knew she could never pray or bleed enough to earn the wings to fly. She pictured herself writhing in that bed of fire, raped by its blackening tendrils, tormented by the nightmares and mirages flickering in its ruby depths. She imagined watching as magma continued to pour down from the clouds, wondering why God had bothered to make hell when there was so much fire and brimstone in heaven, so much suffering on the path to it. Then God would hear her wretched thoughts, and, livid, he would plunge her deeper in the lake, and she would feel everything burning, burning, burning! She would feel her soul tearing into smoldering pieces, melding with those of demon and heretic alike. The pages beneath her hands were spotted now with tears— she was heaving over the black, dogmatic ink.

Then that last word fell like the blade of the guillotine.

Amen.

Her fate was sealed.

Shaking her head frantically, stomach twisting for dread as her heart stopped, the girl flipped the page. Surely there was more! Surely that was not the end, surely there was more for man than this! Surely—!

Her eyes fell on the last sheaf of paper, one previously blank, but onto which she had scrawled, in an untidy hand and forever ago, the final words of her demon.

You're a good girl, aren't you? So why are you walking to hell?

Gambit

I.

The Colonel's regiment was marching. It was marching against an enemy no one would remember, in a time no one would remember, in a place that would be beyond recall or desire once its mines were depleted. Yet still the regiment was marching. Not together, because this was guerilla warfare— a term that had long since ceased to bring images of banal natives and exotic jungles to mind and come, instead, to mean there were two kinds of men: careful and dead. They were lucky about as often as struck by lightning.

Thus was the regiment split into tip-toeing battalions creeping toward their destination. This was for the best. Grumbling was what soldiers did best, and splitting them up meant the Colonel didn't have to hear all of them at it at once.

Since when, they wondered, did the Colonel roll over for his superiors? Since when did the laconic, ponderous man agree to missions like this: slaughtering and razing a village of rebels?

They bitched and they moaned and they cussed at the devil that had gotten into their leader. They were miserable. The only comfort they'd had in this gods-be-damned territory was that their regiment had this unique code of honor, like. They'd hung it over their companions for months.

And now it would be wafting to the heavens with the smoke from the funeral pyres. Every step the men took toward the doomed village ahead left them increasingly certain that they, too, would die on its wickered streets.

Which was why their jaws dropped when at last they arrived.

The Colonel was already there, standing in the midst of a ghost town. He rarely curled those dark features of his in a smile, but now he graced them with one positively boyish, brooding gorilla that he was.

"It appears, men," he spoke wryly, enigmatically as he gestured to the abandoned huts, "That God has cleared the village of natives himself. All that is left to us is to burn the place. Be quick about it. I want to get back to camp before dusk. We'll feast to our blessing when we arrive."

A cheer went up.

But the Lt. Colonel and his Captain didn't smile.

Blessings never came free.

II.

The Lt. Colonel sat with his feet atop the Colonel's meticulously arranged desk, and while normally this would have rendered him smug he was not happy. Against the lurid lamplight that flickered over the cabin walls and maps his gaunt face waxed eerie. He looked like a criminal, and not a charismatic one. He was ten years his Captain's senior, and discomfitingly aware of the fact.

The Captain was reporting, that bitterly short and icily composed woman. He wished she wouldn't stand at attention while they were together— he was her mentor, and she'd rarely done so in the past. But she was scared, much as she wouldn't let herself acknowledge it.

"The men are about to riot over the Colonel's punishment," she said. "You need to give them busy work." It was what the Colonel would have done. Run their asses into the ground, make discipline productive.

"You knew," the Lt. Colonel mumbled through the sweets he was never without, ignoring her demands. "You knew the Colonel was evacuating that village. You could have been implicated. You could have been punished, too. And yet I was told nothing."

The Captain frowned. She didn't like the emphasis on 'you.' She was too clever not to perceive its roots.

"It was none of your concern, Lt. Colonel," she replied. "And the Colonel trusted you with a more important duty. I don't see why you would be upset."

"You know damn well," the Lt. Colonel growled as he rose to his feet. When she didn't respond some of that bravado seeped out of him, bowed his shoulders as he gritted his teeth against the woman he feared most. He circled the desk to take her hand, too tightly for her to withdraw it.

"The Colonel has an excuse for his stupidity— he loves these men and he knows them all by heart. You don't; you wouldn't let yourself. So what we both know I'm wondering is why you would risk the only joy I have in this shit-hole of a post?"

It was at times like these his Captain regretted ever kissing him at that battle ages past. It had been a spur of the moment thing, a lapse in her defenses, and he'd gotten too direct, too honest since then. He'd started thinking fool thoughts like he was safe with her. She didn't like it, and she ignored it whenever possible— sometimes even when it shouldn't be. Now, for example. The Captain bit her lip for a moment, hesitated, but that was the only reaction his candor gleaned before she reigned her emotions and broke his grasp.

"You aren't making sense, Lt. Colonel. Perhaps you should sleep."

His face soured with a knife of a smile, a dangerous smile whose sharpest edge was the one facing him. "Duty, hmm? Does it please you, not having to decide anything for yourself, having it all written out in a little book of codes?"

The Captain paused, face stony. It hurt to see him lower himself to those barbs.

"On the contrary," she said, "I'm in perfect control of myself, Sir." Because that was it, wasn't it? This was a point at which she couldn't afford to let go. She couldn't afford to let herself be swayed by ideals like the Colonel, or by feelings like her mentor— someone had to stay unattached. Her superiors were the heroes and fools. Someone had to be the unshakeable pillar of reason. If she wasn't controlling herself, someone else would be.

And that might mean, someday, that she would fail to protect...

"Sleep, and don't forget to take your pills, Lt. Colonel," she murmured, cursing the tenderness that leaked into her voice as she stepped out into the camp. She could hear her mentor swearing as he realized her motives; he always had been too perceptive. He and the Colonel, they thought too much.

It made her wonder how the Colonel was taking this.

III.

The Colonel was doing what he did best— worrying. 'Mummy', his men called him, and cluck and fuss over them he did— much more obviously than he liked to think. Currently on his mind was the fact that while he served his punishments his superiors would be trying to usurp the tight hold he had on his regiment. They'd put his Lt. Colonel through hell.

But that was why the Colonel hadn't involved him in the heroics to begin with. The Lt. Colonel was ruthless, used any means necessary to protect those he cared for, selfish bastard that he was.

They were too much alike.

"Colonel, you might want to take that off," advised a nervous Lieutenant, nodding at his dusty undershirt.

"I wore an old one on purpose," said the dissimulated giant. "Sitting on my ass leading's making my gut soft. Don't want my men to endure the shame of a flabby commanding officer."

"But Sir—."

"I've been through this before," the Colonel spoke quietly, with a hint of a scowl. The thought of how lax the Lt. Colonel would be about drills had just occurred to him.

"Right this way then, Sir."

It was starting to go by fast, these sessions. He used to have a higher rank, once. But he couldn't seem to go long without dereliction of duty or covering one of his men's asses. He didn't mind. After a while the whip— Ah, hello old friend, he winced— didn't sting as bad, though this time they were going to send him and his lacerated back to penal labor, just to see if that would break him. His superiors were losing patience.

The Colonel didn't feel bitter. This was justice; this was how it should be.

Control was needed for order. Order was paramount. But another, very important part of the law was that it had punishments for crimes— it made allowances for a breach, recognized the freedom of choice and prepared accordingly. This, the fire raging over his back, it was just the price of liberty— one was not entitled to it, never could be. Liberty was synonymous with struggle. The day that no one suffered would be the day that man had fallen, the day that no one could make choices to pay for.

The twelfth lash cracked like lightning over the tattered, bloody fabric of skin and cotton. Old scars opened. Blood pooled beneath the Colonel bowed before the law.

A shiver coursed through the spines of his superiors as he grinned.

IV.

The Lt. Colonel slumped in his seat, fiddling idly with the peppermint on his tongue. He was in a kind of daze; his dark eyes bored into the ceiling. No... not into the ceiling. Into the miasma of thought looming overhead.

Damn them. Damn them both, he swore without conviction; he was too weary to muster anything but resentment. He'd already wasted all his energy raging at the Colonel and brooding on his Captain.

That blasted Captain... she didn't deal with anything but business. Discipline his ass— she was hiding. And that was to say nothing of their dear, sweet leader.

The Lt. Colonel unwrapped a bar of chocolate, munched thoughtfully on the treat. He was never without his sweets; it had started as an indulgence to get by on, the cheapest he could find. Anymore, though, he could barely make it through the day without a dose of his candies. Kind of like how he couldn't make it at night without the Captain there to keep the nightmares away, how he hadn't slept since she started closing her door. Kind of like how after a lifetime of surviving he was powerless to do much else. Chained by habit, addicted to worthlessness, fated to live loathsomely... There was no control. Not as deep in the rut as he'd fallen.

Yet there was the Colonel he hated most of all. That fool... he'd acted as though it didn't matter. As though—!

"You should have let me do it, Colonel. Or at least agreed to apologize so you didn't have to work the mines. The men won't listen to me— not while they know you're out killing yourself."

The Colonel paused getting into the armored truck that was to ferry him to his whipping post, stared at the Lt. Colonel with that gods-be-damned emotionless act.

"You're the best man to stay," he answered. "The superiors will be kicking up shit over this. No one's better at evasion than you."

"But I can't hold us together; you know that."

"That's what Captain's for. They'll listen to her, begrudgingly."

The Lt. Colonel tried a different angle. "Colonel, they'll only hate me worse for this. I'm not their martyr like you, and I sure as hell can't be an idol like the Captain."

"Exactly. You're a reminder of the kind of shitty officers they'll get if they don't stay loyal."

"It's not funny! I know I deserve it, but damn! Not even the Captain respects me."

The Colonel laid a hand on his shoulder. "It's why you're the most important man I have."

"Bullshit."

"You're the only human officer. If you were halfway honest, the men mightn't hate you as much as you think. A selfish prick like you— if you can do it then they start to think they can too. The fact that you're here proves you've changed. Enough that I can count on you to be the one who lives to fight another day, if anything should happen. Enough that out of everyone else, I don't have to worry about you: I know you can take care of yourself."

The Lt. Colonel floundered.

The Colonel stepped into the truck without a word of farewell.

The bastard.

When he put it like that, the Lt. Colonel didn't have a choice.

Magnum Opus

"I wonder if there will come a time when man is surrounded solely by his own creations. Every year, every month, every day that passes man, in his insatiable curiosity, delves into the secrets of the universe. Learning is his opiate; it is his raison d'être, to grow and change. But it was never enough to be schooled by the disciplines of science or philosophy. No, he must test his knowledge, he must be certain that the flower of the universe has opened its petals to him, has divulged every last, intimate drop of nectar from its tender blossoms. And what greater test, than to fashion the object of your studies by your own hand, what greater challenge of your understanding and wisdom than to improve upon the design? Yes, man has a lust for creation. He was indeed carved in the image of his God.

Still, God was wise enough to bless his creations with free will, that they might surprise and delight him, that he might grow to love them. Man, too, tried this— albeit to a lesser extent. As men wrote tales characters took a life of their own. Their inventions revolutionized society in ways they couldn't begin to imagine.

And therein lie the problem. A man could exceed himself, but he could never craft anything that exceeded man, and man was not possessed of the limitless possibilities afforded a God. When he is left with nothing more than the work of his own, fumbling hands will he succumb to despair? Will nothing remain sacred or mysterious? Will man lose his will? What will happen, on that day of reckoning?

I think I know.

Yes... I know all too well."

—Icarus Toombes

I. The Fruit and the Ferryman

The night that Charon appeared before Adamae Fukamori she was in the close darkness of her London flat surrounded by tattered scraps of music and newspaper, their stark black print gleaming in the light through the window. Their ink had the metallic luster of dried blood. It pooled about the keyboard smashed into the nearest wall, pooled about its mangled grave as though those keys rather than their musician had possessed a soul. And indeed, there was in Adamae's eyes the sunken, feverish depth of one who had reached their limits, had sunk so low that they could fall no farther. Articles applauding her genius were among the newsprint she'd torn, and she was, even now, setting fire to them with the most grim and terrible of miens. She was lucid enough to know she'd regret it in the morning. She was frantic enough not to care. Everything was crumbling around her, and she'd been the one to set the hammer to the foundation, to wrench and scream and pound until the walls that held her in were no more.

Only now the cornerstones were tumbling down on her head.

Surveying her trembling limbs, the raven hair scattered wildly over her brow, Charon had to smile. These were the people he loved. Formerly he'd dwelt in the long, eerie pool of her shadow. Now he rose from it as though a wisp of heady smoke, and he leaned over her, his latest curiosity. So devastated, so broken was the girl that she was too absorbed in her own self-destruction to notice him, clear up until he whispered:

"My my. This isn't like you at all, Miss Fukamori. Or is it Fukamori-san?"

The woman drew a quick, terrified breath, swinging her trained legs automatically to cripple the intruder. But her foot passed through him, pallid spectre that he was, and she was left panting, sprawled in the ashes of her creations as she gaped for terror. What was he? A hallucination? A dream? Had her sanity fled along with her career, along with her passions?

She was white with fear. Nevertheless, it wasn't long before she hardened under the bitter summons of her iron will, the very virtue for which she suffered, and she tilted her chin up at him in proud distrust. Only the pounding of her heart betrayed her dread.

"Who are you?"

The apparition seemed impressed. His face had a grin of such calm and wisdom as to make her blood run cold.

"I am the man who can make all your dreams come true."

"If you're real you're no man."

Charon chuckled, a silky rumble from his very core, and his grey eyes gleamed from under greyer hair, though his skin was smooth as a child's. "You do not disappoint, even for a woman hailed as genius. But I am a man, of a sort. And I can give you anything you can... imagine." The choice of words seemed to amuse him.

Fukamori didn't reply, not at first. Instead the stony, narrow eyes flickered, their pupils smoldering. There was an edge to the woman, a deadly one none too keen to be tested that evening. "Leave. Now."

"Come," Charon sighed, inviting himself to drift over to a leather, modish armchair. "You've had a very rough time of it. Wouldn't you like to take it out on something other than your beloved masterpieces, there?" He gestured to the floor.

"No."

"Or... is it something else?" the apparition murmured, appearing not to hear her. "Fire is a curious tool for a purge. Symbolic, really. Could it be with all that's transpired Fukamori-san thinks her pieces too masterful, too deep for this world's ears?"

"Go!" the woman barked, but there was a quaver buried in the discord of the command. The latest review of her performance shook between her fingers. Fukamori: Genius or Diva?

"I told you I'm more man than anything," Charon reminded her. "Albeit a curious one— one that has been dead for a very, very long time. I'm not a demon. You cannot banish me."

"Then tell me what you want!"

"From you? Nothing."

Nothing. Just like her audience. Was he here merely to watch, for some idle manner to waste away his existence— never knowing or caring what they— what he heard, so long as it excited feeling?

"That's not—" she bit her lip, then chose to let her anger flood, anyway. "That's not fair!"

"You're right; it's not fair, is it?" Charon muttered, bending toward her to rest his elbows on his knees, his perpetual grin sympathetic, though nothing in his expression had moved. "That now, when your work is at its finest, when you've transcended form or style, they would disparage it. That they would punish you for their ignorance, fire you for your skill. Mm-hmm. Not fair at all."

Something in her glare softened, as with the tenderness of a wound, but she hid it back under dissimulation— her parents had imparted that virtue to her, even if they'd failed with all the others. And that blank stare of hers still demanded that Charon be gone.

He turned thoughtfully toward the window. "It occurs to me we don't have quite the ambiance for this gravest of occasions." Dark clouds hung complacently over the nighttime sky, the rain pelting down on the rooftops like drumsticks beating one, singular chant at the mortals within.

Fools, fools, fools...

Charon nodded at this dreary scene, at the black, rugged skyline, and there was a flash of lightning that sent Fukamori scrabbling away from the glass, her music crackling and rustling beneath her. Before she could collide with the kitchen island, however, she felt icy hands gripping her shoulders. It was Charon, but she couldn't wrench away as he held her fast, transfixed her to the dying refulgence of his ire.

"This has been a day of tragedy for you, has it not? And I have come to offer you a choice. You had best listen."

Fukamori shivered, and it was clear his words had finally cut to her guarded heart, to her very bones. He released her, standing, reaching into his long coat.

"You have lost your job. It is clear that they will take from you, also, the means to produce on the grand style you desire— no, need," he spoke, softly. "They don't want art no one will appreciate. And so, you can spend your existence trying to destroy every last memory of your fading dream, or..." He withdrew a small, ripe plum.

"Or you could start again, without limit or distraction."

She eyed the fruit with suspicion— she was terrified of him.

"I can offer you a world all your own," he told her, and at once that grimace of his wasn't just haunting, but alluring for its life, the fervency of his offer. His thin white fingers bore the plum aloft as though it were his vitreous heart waiting to be shattered. "A world devoid of all save for what you choose to fill it with, where the only terminal for your creations is your own imagination."

"You're insane," she accused, though judging by her breath her pulse had fluttered erratically at the notion, with a thrill.

"Would you care to find out for certain?" He wondered, holding the fruit out to her, his profile black against the stark explosion of yet another bolt of lightning. "If none of it is real, then you have nothing to lose, nothing to fear. Consider this plum our covenant." This time his grin did move, widening into a pantomime of Cheshire.

She realized suddenly that his eyes had no pupils. No windows to his soul because his enigmatic essence was the soul, with no good or evil lurking beneath. She swallowed.

"No."

"Don't you trust me?" he questioned, tilting his head to the side in a manner that might have been touching if he were a dog, or even a human being. Instead, it chilled her.

"No. I don't."

"Only apples hide poison, Fukamori-san."

She didn't appear convinced.

Charon groaned long-sufferingly. "But m'dear, you can't see the world otherwise. Faith is my price, and one may not be ferried to another world without paying the toll. Still, the choice is yours." He shrugged, an indescribably facetious gesture for one as daunting as he. "But if you do decide to join me, it must be before the fruit rots."

Before she could say anything there was another crack! of lightning, Charon bit nonchalantly into the plum, and he was gone.

It landed on the smooth wooden floor with a fleshy thud, rolling just so that his teeth marks were bared to her.

The storm outside hand vanished, her heart was slowing, and the perilous auguries tightening the fabric of the air about her slackened. All was turbid once more, stagnant like the life she'd worked so hard to bring to that point, to her long fall from fame, from inspiration, from purpose.

From sanity, apparently.

Nevertheless, she stared at the soft, glowing plum. He had broken its skin, and she was filled with its aromatic scent, its pungency an invitation and warning at once. She watched the juice run down its skin like a tear, well from the flesh like blood.

And suddenly that gift was the difference between life and death.

***

There was a blackness enveloping the land, a yawning void reaching out with darkest tendrils to efface what had felt like years of effort. Various and sundry, spectacular creatures were swallowed; rivers of magic were sucked dry. Tiny cottages of fay and faerie, villages of screaming women and children, powerless heroes and wearied villains— the void was indiscriminate.

There was one who could have saved them. Yet their father, in the midst of the ruin, shed not a tear. Not even when the stars and their angels were snuffed out, their flame expired, and they were the dearest of his children. Indeed, he did not weep for any of it— felt nothing at all. The man was numb with the same, all-consuming gloom that devoured his world. He was empty, and the existence of anything save his very being was an eyesore.

At least he knew there was a rhyme, a reason to his creation. A master hand wiser, larger than his own that had plucked and spun him from the grand tapestry of life— or so he hoped. Lying in the eternal, formless deep, he stared at the pen and journal in his feeble grasp, then he willed those, too, to disappear. It seemed that he was the only being, the only truth in all the universe, but that had held true from the very beginning, from the moment he'd let himself dream that he could start a world all his own.

What a fool he was. There was nothing. He had nothing.

He wanted to go home.

Did he have a home, though? Or was it a memory he'd fabricated, here in this timeless existence he led? Hundreds of years had passed, according to the generations of heroes he'd sired, and yet he felt it had been a much shorter time, an eternity. What would inventing thirty years of life before his lonely cultivation of this void be for his subconscious? He'd raised giants. He'd felled tyrant and king alike. And yet, what senselessness there was to it all. Year after year he felt less sympathy for his children, left them to themselves and their pernicious ways for longer and longer. There was no progress.

In the history of the world he remembered man had built bridges and ships to the heavens, they'd divined meaning from the thread of space and time. But not his failed creations. Without a push from him, a hint, they might never move, might as well seal themselves in a cryonic time chamber.

How futile. How meaningless.

He would go mad like this, he knew. Already he'd begun to doubt the only certainties that had sustained him for this long— that there had to be a way out, that surely someone would join him here, in his world. As in someone indigenous this dimension, or his dimension, or any dimension outside his imagination. So long he'd waited, trying to entertain himself by breathing life into his musings. And all for naught. He ached from the cold, the loneliness of his unassailable power. He wanted to end it. He was too scared to.

What if he failed, after all? What if enough of that fibre of reason in him remained to keep him from his own destruction? Suicide had been possible, even before his new-found authority, but he had become a demigod, and could such a monstrosity die? Hell, if even that was lost to him, then what did he have? And if death came, would he be denied an afterlife? Now that he'd watched himself sweep his world into nothingness the thought of enduring a similar fate made him sick.

No. He couldn't die; not like this. There were still the memories, invented or no, of that world. The one where people hurt you and helped you, where life had meaning. Such precious meaning... and to think he'd left it all behind.

"You are fortunate," said a voice as it surveyed the void, the yet nubile devastation, "That gods are not as eager to destroy as humans."

Eyes widening, the man jolted to his feet. "C— Charon?" he breathed, praying to God this was real, that it wasn't a manifestation of the deep yearning inside of him.

The pale spectre grinned. "I hadn't expected that you would be so glad to see me, Icarus."

Icarus threw himself at the apparition, seizing its collar with wild eyes. "Please— I'm done!" he cried frantically, terrified that this chance would elude him. "I'm begging you: take me home! I can't take this, I—"

Charon's grin softened a tad at its corners. "It has only been seven days. You would abandon this place so quickly?"

"It's only been—?! Never mind—yes!" the man choked, sobbing now for relief. His wide, tearing eyes had all the ambiguous joy and resentment of a child once abandoned, yet the former sentiment was prevailing. It was hard not to succumb to it, when moments before he'd had naught but despair for company. Now, even if it was just a ghost, a ferryman— even that was proof of something!

"Yes, please!" he cried with renewed fervor. "Take me home! I'll do anything! I— everything is wrong. I'm not a God. I want to go home! I—!"

Charon frowned. "I'm afraid that's not quite possible."

He might have twisted a dagger through Icarus's heart. The man's spirit sunk from his breast back to the low, hellish pit of his stomach, his shoulders sagging with its weight. He might have staggered from the blow, but he had been too expectant, too fearful that it would fall, and he was left only with agony.

"Don't say that again," he begged in a small voice. "Don't... say it... Damn it!" He seized Charon by the shoulders now, a fierce and wounded beast. "Why did you do this to me?!! You knew what would happen, didn't you?! How could you even have—?!" A sob robbed him of his anger all at once and he slumped onto the spectre's shoulders, heaving tears and pounding the immaterial breast. "Why?!!"

Charon patted his back. "I only said," he spoke, refusing to answer the man's questions, "That it wasn't quite possible." That inscrutable grin, the cruel tear of a knife through his features, returned. "I have a feeling someone will be joining you very soon."

Icarus looked up at him, and he really was angry. "You mean you wish to drag another into this hell?! Is that supposed to comfort me?! The exchange of my life for another?!"

"She," Charon murmured, slipping away to turn and shrug his shoulders, "Chose to come here, just as you did."

"A... woman," Icarus seemed only to take the news harder. "Back then you didn't warn me— not about this place. Did you warn her?"

"I warned both of you," the spirit spoke patiently, as though to a child. "That you didn't listen was no concern of mine. And it will take more than her coming here to free you, I'm afraid."

The man's fists clenched, his jaw tight. "What will it take, then?"

Charon turned, and materialized so quickly in Icarus's face that he stumbled and fell in the darkness, only to find the spirit looming over him.

"Your will is too feeble to leave of your own accord. You must convince her, too, to accompany you."

"That will be no problem," the man assured him acrimoniously. "A few days here is enough to make anyone long to go."

"Ah, but she is terribly stubborn, my dear Icarus," Charon murmured, almost pityingly beneath his unerring grin. "It would not surprise me if you had to win her trust twice over before she so much as began to listen to your philosophical musings, your reason. And there is a limit to how long before the two of you become a part of this dimension. You cannot taste idly of worlds and expect to emerge in all in one piece."

The fear had returned to Icarus's blue eyes as the words, Charon's silky voice, trickled under his skin, into his blood, through his veins. Sweat dampened his clammy skin, and when next he spoke his voice was hoarse.

"How long do I have?" he whispered, and Charon's pupiless eyes narrowed with satisfaction.

"A week," he declared, his face inches from that of the trembling man. "You have one week, Icarus."

II. By the Artist's Hand

"My my my." Charon's voice was a lilting chuckle in his throat, amused or deprecating— with him it was hard to tell which. "You've certainly been quick to get your bearings."

Fukamori stood in a conductor's stiff uniform, pulling the starched white gloves off with precision. They were, to all appearances, standing in her apartment. Rather than the devastation that had greeted Charon the night he met her, however, one was faced with an immaculate display. Sheets of music were stacked on her shelves, unmolested, their corners perfectly aligned. All the furniture lie at right angles, modish geometric hangings adorned the walls, and there was black and white décor every place one turned... all that differed from home was that the turbulent blackness licking at the windows.

Charon and Fukamori were in her new world. The all-consuming void looming outside remained, the apartment drifting above and within it forlornly. The rest of the dimension had yet to be stirred by its new master's ruminations.

"Of course I've been," she replied stiffly to Charon once she'd lain the gloves carefully aside. "All it takes to fashion this world is a thought. Unhindered— no, unguided by mediums it's easy, almost sacrilegious."

Charon's lips pursed thoughtfully at her, his pale irises flickering. "I've no doubt you will find a way to mold it however you wish, Miss Fukamori."

She didn't reply, reached instead for the violin she'd leaned against the side of the leather couch. The woman was lost to her calculations, the layered and refractory tracings of inspiration tessellating in her mind, and the message was clear. This was her world now; she did not desire a guide, and her ferryman's time had expired.

He bowed as a formality, though he was all but invisible to her, and whisked himself away in a temporal flash.

Alone, Fukamori let her dark eyes wander to the sole portrait that graced the chambers. Her lip curled in a bitter smirk— it was always such irony to see that white, flyaway hair and spontaneous grin compacted into the orderly symmetry of a frame. She wondered what her old mentor was dreaming up, which of his sloppy musings critics were labeling ingenious this time. Oh, she was grateful for the tutelage he'd extended her, there could be no doubt of that, but at the thought of his wasted potential, the lack of discipline he applied to his craft, his insistence that impact was superior to perfection or form...

Ah, but it mattered not, she reminded herself, checking her thoughts. She had a world of her own now, and when all its well-oiled cogs had slotted into place, when her delicate machinations slid together in a harmony complex yet measured, that ruinous and immemorial anarchy she'd fled would be but a discarded thorn from her side.

Rolling her neck, listening to the delicate rhythm of cracking bones as though it were a warm-up, she crossed to the window. There was a balcony outside with a single, silver music-stand upon which she willed the pages of the piece she was composing in the lowest layer of her consciousness. They materialized instantly. She sneered one last time at the writhing darkness. Then, emotionless once more, she set the violin to her chin and cast her gaze to the tidy lines and blotches below, her altar.

At last, drawing the bow over her violin in a fluid motion, she began to play.

The first note she struck had a palpable effect on the deep that yawned before her. It was as though all those fibres of nothingness were drawn taunt, stretched in rows like the line of the staff below her, albeit hesitantly, lured by the gentle caress of that first noise in the symphony to come. The eternity paused with bated breath as the bow finished its slow introduction to the strings.

Then Fukamori's snapped to attention, struck a series of twelve chords in such rapid and peremptory succession that all her universe was stunned and bound before it could protest, and from thence there was no reprieve. The brittle staccato stitching of the rumbling, ominous base interludes was executed with such precision, such cohesion that it was as steel. It was as steel, and so were the regiments it birthed.

One by one amid the blackness's now linear coils rose musicians in perfect form, filling row after row at an even pace. They didn't join in their conductor's melody, remained poised over their instruments and yet blank sheaves of music as though wax statues, or stalled machines. There were pianists and brass and woodwinds— timpanists and cellists alike. Each was of perfect height and build for their instrument, each was pale with darkest raven hair, and each was in a suit identical to that of the puppeteer above. Dozens of them slotted themselves atom by atom into existence. But even once all her marionettes were in place Fukamori had yet, in her building fury, the increasing fervor of her notes, to reach a conclusion, and as the manic tempo, that wild and all-imposing order of composition, rose the very air grew heady with expectation. The mechanical tendons of the orchestra primed in a ripple.

Roused by the violent chains the burgeoning pantheon had forged, all existence grew dense and choking for suspense, for awe. Tighter and tighter coiled the binds that tethered it to that scepter grinding over Fukamori's whetstone of a fiddle. Faster and faster surged the heart of the black, fearing something like Genesis.

Then the entire orchestra surged— whipped or tore or strangled their instruments with their master as she struck the last chord. It reverberated through the black: a threat, a promise.

For a moment all hung suspended. There was no applause— rather, her kingdom shook, as with terror.

Fukamori condescended to let the most infinitesimal of smiles grace her features. She bowed, but not low, and, her marionettes returned at ease to their seats. Then she did an about face and returned to her quarters to rest and plan. Verily, she was pleased.

Tomorrow would be the first day.

It isn't even the first day, Icarus Toombes marveled in the midst of the void below, staring fixedly at the balcony. As Fukamori had glided out he'd called to her, practically screamed, but she'd been oblivious to his presence, cloaked thickly in her vision. Now he couldn't even muster the strength to stand, but curled in on the tiny golden hourglass clutched to his breast, holding it close as though it were the only raft that could buoy him, keep him afloat in the sea of dread and wonder that this world's new master had inflated in him.

Before, he could have moved and sent himself into an endless, sombre drift through the void, but now Fukamori had imposed structure upon it, stratified it, and he could no more establish perpetual motion than he could push off the cool, hard ground and soar to her floating pedestal. What if he never reached her? Crippling fears skewered his heart as he stared at the timekeeper Charon had provided him, the grains of sand gliding in beautiful, piercing mockery to the bottom of the glass. He had but a week. Despair nearly swallowed him. But terror was man's first and only defense against the insurmountable, so instead he pinched himself hard and lay in the sympathetic, callously reigned eternity.

He could try and reach her through her orchestra, he realized, but an involuntary shudder wracked his spine. Those hollow entities chilled him the way a camera, or a security system did— they were cool and impersonal, weighing him in terms that disregarded intent and seized only dissemination, stripping him to the bone, menacing any resistance he might show.

And from the looks of things, he was most certainly against whatever standard Fukamori bore.

His thoughts wandered as so oft they did. Trying to avoid the injuries and horrors of the waking world, to make them but lambent quivers in the greater solace of his mind, he contemplated what Fukamori's reasons were for coming. What had driven her to abandon the real world and take the plum— the plunge into madness?

Rolling on his back, he imagined the stiff yet curdled yellow cushion of his mattress back home, where it all began. He remembered the screaming voices surrounding him yet worlds away, how even the bruises and the stabbing ache of his heart had waxed ephemeral as a dream when he slipped into his cloud-like musings. He remembered how he would take and divide his soul equally among his heroes, his imaginary friends, how together they would conquer every challenge that rose like chaff in his garden of enchantment and prayers, that secret realm of his mind.

The acrid, toxic smoke that filled the lungs of his parent's house, its raging, drunken minotaur... they couldn't reach him in his Never-land. They couldn't tear it from him, his jewel, his Elysium... And when Charon had come, offering to make his dreams real—!

What irony that at the last they, too, had grown into nightmares.

He grimaced as the image of a woman's face, wan yet matronly, fluttered behind his eyelids, and he squeezed them tighter, willing it away, banishing the memories to oblivion. His lips formed a prayer— or, rather, a plea for the release of slumber.

And so the sands of time wore on, swirling in a drizzle to the bottom of Charon's hourglass like a galaxy spinning itself into oblivion, its stars and planets and moons tumbling indiscriminately from the ledge— far, far, from the toils of being. Fukamori ascended to the balcony with her conductor's baton at the same time every afternoon, crisp and embattled. She still seemed beyond hearing him, no matter how loud he might call to her.

Icarus saw no more of her violin. But in the primordial display that was to come, he missed its haunting melody unbearably. The days were fleeting, their excruciating duration but a brief pain, yet this was only because his heart was racing him through, beating against its cage for sheerest panic.

The first day Fukamori's movements were gentle, yet ritualistic. Her orchestra responded with a keening tenor that reverberated deep within Icarus's essence, polarized him, caused him to experience joy and suffering at once with a great and terrible fissure between. The very fibers of his being strained and pulled, torn, and a scream rose soundlessly to his lips as he clutched his head and writhed, sure he would die. But in the next moment it was over. He thought he felt a hand on his shoulder, thought he heard a silky whisper, and he didn't care if he was hallucinating because Fukamori's spell released him.

Panting, heaving, and retching, it was a long time before curiosity could prevail to draw him out of himself. When he did look, he was nearly blinded. The light above him was searing, intense— stark against the darkness below. His eyes burned upon contact. But then, slowly adjusting and learning by degrees not to glance at it directly, he realized what Fukamori had done. She had divided her world into light and dark, with no grey, no twilight between.

Something in him rebelled against it, decried that it could be as he cringed and trembled at the alien surroundings. The wrongness of it enlivened his soul. He couldn't articulate what it was that disturbed him so, thought he must be going mad, and more than ever he felt homesick.

It was only as the days progressed that he realized the true sickness of Fukamori's all too solemn farce.

Oh, he endured a fleeting sensation of hope the next day, when that short figure and her tall shadow began with a jumble of windmilling arms and frenetic tosses of the wrist. The chaotic squall that rose, clamoring, from her marionettes seemed almost a beacon of life against the unforgiving canvas their conductor had laid the day before. But then, as the light gathered itself into orderly pinpricks of refulgence and the solar winds lancing between darted straight and true, connecting the dots, he realized there was a pattern to the thrashing of that powerful firmament Fukamori had wrought. By the time the orchestra had died to a rumbling base and the first, perfectly formed wave of her new oceans crashed over him he was so exhausted he couldn't even curse his luck as he floated there, the notion of drowning himself lighting tantalizingly upon him in his dreams.

He slept through the third day, through the large and majestic symphony, and he woke, shivering, to dry land beneath him. The world was freezing and bare, with naught but rows of never-ending evergreens under the ministrations of the dimension's first winter. Icarus hated the cold. He felt depression sweep over him, then, and just as he had as a child when it blossomed, an icy rose in his heart, he laid down and slept again. In a way, he had surrendered to whatever fate befell him so long as it was over.

The fourth day he was ripped violently from his sojourn in the land of dreams by laughter. Delighted, childish, triumphant laughter— lilting and mad, disturbingly girlish.

Groggy and frightened, like a startled deer, he leapt to his feet, casting about for an explanation, too scared to risk so much as a glance at the dark goddess above. His eyes widened.

Before him lie herds of beasts. All identical. All marching in lines. All... dead.

Icarus snapped, then. His breath stuttered and pushed out of him in a frosty mist, but it felt more like steam from the bellows as his chest heaved, as his heart pumped and stoked the fire that kindled suddenly, vibrantly within. Like a Herculean statue, he planted his feet and pointed his gaze toward the heavens, in utter loathing at the woman cackling above.

"STOP!" he cried. "Stop it, damn it!! You witch, you devil, you God-damned bitch! Stop it!"

She didn't. She was shaking, holding her sides as her laughter escalated into rocking, fervent, yet mechanical yaks careening over the land, booming through his ears.

He seized a rock, threw it hard as he could at her, but it fell yards short, and he screamed in frustration.

"Listen to me, damn it!" he demanded, kicking the nearest tree and cursing as his foot exploded with pain, dancing around in a savage, apoplectic fit. "Why can't you hear me?! Are you deaf?! Don't you dare go back inside! Don't you dare— Damn it!"

He didn't know how long he spent kicking and swearing and shrieking. His world was a dizzying red haze of pain and rage. It was a long time before the former won, before he collapsed in a ball on the ground, holding himself, digging his nails into his flesh and sobbing. He swam in tears; he could barely make out the hourglass through his murky vision, his time easing heedlessly away, indifferent to his strife.

"Help me, Charon!" he begged, closing his eyes, trying to imagine the pallid spectre there, chuckling in his desultory fashion and telling him it had all been a huge, cosmic joke to pass the time. But when he opened them the ferryman hadn't materialized, and so he tried again and again and again, bawling like a child until he gagged on his misery and fell quiet, whimpering instead.

"Charon..." he mewled. "Charon...!"

It was a long night. Not even sleep would come and deliver him from his own wretchedness.

Yet, there was something about shedding tears, about the human capacity for grief. There was something purifying about the ardent, harrowing intensity with which man experienced pain, his thoughts shoveling ever more fuel, ever more miseries onto the fire until, at length, it blazed so hot as to burn them away in its white and impassive coils. A numbness, an ire so smoldering as to freeze the soul stole over Icarus, and the edge of his reason waxed so keen and cold as to pierce even the thickest of barriers.

Icarus Toombes was afraid of Fukamori. Cripplingly so. But that mattered not as, with her haughty glide onto the safe and rational confines of her balcony, he pulled himself calmly to his feet. He knew what today was. It was the day she would connect the heavens and the earth. It was the day of man, but her blasphemies would not be allowed to touch that most blessed of creations. He wouldn't allow it.

Fukamori began. Her baton flitted like a sparrow's wing, light and subtle as a breeze, and yet he was deaf to the masterfully rendered dissonance of her orchestra as he walked steadily, resolutely toward her stronghold. As the stair to heaven formed step by step with the notes of the cacophony he was there, planting his feet firmly one after another, ascending inch by inch toward Fukamori's most lofty of fantasies. The hourglass danged at his side. Tomorrow was the end. But he couldn't let her madness last that long.

Fukamori didn't notice him— not even when he joined her, hopping lightly onto the balcony before the last step could form. Each strand of her dark hair adhered perfectly to the tidy bun crowning her. Her features were placid, smooth and consummate in their dispassionate mien. But her blackest pupils— oh, what twisted, sordid life there was to those!

"Fukamori," he said, firmly. She did not hear, continued conducting as though she, too, were but a puppet on the strings.

"Fukamori," he repeated, little louder. Still, she did not move.

"Adamae!" he shouted, seizing her roughly by the shoulders, and at his touch she was jolted, as though by a shock. The silence crashed into them like a physical blow, rocked the apartment alarmingly as she stared in disbelieving fright at him, the whites of her eyes surging to rim her dilated pupils.

"I— I haven't created man yet," she stammered, confused.

"No. You haven't," he agreed. "I'm from the real world, Fukamori. Just like you."

She went pale, shaking her head in denial. "No. No— that's not possible. He said—!"

"Yes, this is your world," Icarus explained impatiently, some frustration seething through. "But it used to be mine. Charon made a deal with me, and I broke it. Then he made one with you. Now we—."

"Get out," Fukamori whispered, staring at him as though he were the devil himself.

"What—?"

"Get out!" she shrieked half hysterically, panting, still shaking her head. "This is my world! Get out!"

"I will!" he urged, fearing he was losing her. "But you have to come with me, or—!"

"You won't take it away from me! It's mine! I won't let you!"

"You don't understand!" he pleaded, his hope slipping away. "You don't want to stay here. It may be fine now, but soon you'll realize that what you're doing is—!"

"Get the hell away from here!" she shouted. She was indignant, dangerous as a cornered beast, and he recoiled from her.

"I— I can't!" he gasped. "I can't unless you agree to leave with me!"

Everything seemed to click, and Fukamori's features contorted with rage, a fell and unholy temper streaking through her eyes. He collided with the banister just as she surged forth, pushing him frantically with an ultimatum, the first commandment of that dimension's goddess:

"Then die!"

Icarus pitched over the edge of the balcony, felt the air rushing futilely to try and buoy him as he hurtled toward the ground. Yet he stared fixedly at Adamae's face as he fell away, and saw only his own, plain features contorted with rage, felt only the pain of his stepmother ages past as he'd torn the pages of his work from her, condemned her with the selfsame words that bound him now. He wrote so few of his dreams on paper. She'd just wanted to share his pain and delight, just wanted to appreciate the delicate tracings of his soul etched into those thin white sheaves of revelation. And with what terror he'd spurned her, with what heartless abandon.

At the last, he recalled those warm brown eyes splintering with hurt and forgiveness. They faded as the wind howled past and the ground rushed to swallow him.

"I'm sorry," he croaked.

Then his world went black.

III. The Gondola's Tale

Prostrate. It had always been such a feeble sounding word, limp and benign. It was the kind of word one assigned an enemy as he drew his last, the kind of word reserved for the pitiful by the proud.

And yet... what peace.

Icarus stared, simply stared. It was all that he could do. He had been released from the choice of rising, or of speaking, or of searching his environs. All that was left to him was his lot, a swaddle of helplessness and the timeless sensation of all the world washing over him, effacing him, wearing away all the rough and craggy edges as it coaxed him gently from existence. He half wondered if he was lying on a beach—but no. He was not above the waves. He was a part of them, just like the smooth ash-wood gondola under him, whose bottom was all he could see. Well, all he could see beyond the scintillating robe that fell in front of his eyes, undulating with the motion of its oarsman.

He meant scintillating in a... strange sense. It was not an array of colors that glittered and shifted over the robe's surface, but an array of forms, of incarnations, of... avatars. One had an ashen, fraying hem that covered the spectre's ankles, another donned a white robe and sandals, and a third wore a sable raiment that bared a skeletal foot. There was even one silk curtain whose folds swathed the dark, bare toes of a Bodhisattva.

These weren't shifting states, though—no, they existed side by side in something like duality for all that there were hundreds more than two of them. It was just that it was impossible to focus on more than one at a time, tangled as they were in the richly embroidered cloth of the sentience above. Icarus might have been awed, but he had a feeling this was a place through which all men passed and all were rendered equal and base.

There was no rhyme or reason to why he was there now. He didn't desire one. Just then, just blissfully, he knew only that he existed, and he didn't want to know anything else.

Tired. The word came to him. He was too tired.

"If you aren't careful," spoke a silky voice, its power drawing Icarus's gaze, tilting his chin upward as the mottled play of realities dancing over the ferryman conglomerated into a familiar set of pupil-less grey eyes, ashen skin, and silver hair. "Then I may ferry you farther than I had intended."

Icarus felt too weak even to groan in protest, but he did manage to furrow his brow, instead.

Charon shrugged as his charge slumped back into the gondola's bottom—that omnipresent, wry grimace of his fixed. It was a queer un-smile bent by sadness into something unshakeable, all knowing and darkly amused.

The fact that Charon wouldn't—or perhaps couldn't—offer Icarus a hand jarred the man. He realized he'd been thinking of the spectre as a friend, and what a mistake that was. The cold thrill of remorse jolted him from his indolence, into a seated position.

He blanched at his surroundings, grey-green swimming with wispy figures he could only imagine were spirits all around them, slowly twisting into anthropomorphic creatures under his gaze and projection.

Charon chuckled.

Trying not to think about it, Icarus turned back to the ferryman, rubbing at his head. After a moment of thought, a greater perplexity overcame him.

"...I didn't get Adamae to come," he said. "So you must have interceded on my behalf, to free me from that world..." It was obvious, what he was getting at, but he said it anyway:

"Why?"

The ferryman raised a brow, lips stretching wider to bare teeth. "Me? Sully my mitts on such a troublesome little poppet as yourself?" he wondered, splaying one hand over his breast when the motion of the oar brought it there. A breeze blew past them, rancid at first whiff with decay, then leaving a cool, sweet wake, and Charon leaned into it, closing his eyes. "Mmm. No. It wasn't me."

"God?" Icarus hazarded incredulously.

Charon blinked at him, then threw back his head and laughed, the noise reverberating, causing alarming waves in the river that surrounded them as Icarus clung desperately to the rocking boat. It seemed forever that he was in that lurching, tenuous state, but at last the ferryman's mirth subsided.

"How would I know?" he asked, remorseless. "I don't understand the notion of God any more than you can grasp my true nature."

"Then how am I alive?" Icarus blurted, sounding more than a little ill.

"You aren't. Yet. In the sense you mean. Or haven't you been paying attention?"

A pause, in which the world finally stopped rocking and resumed its gentle undulations, the frenzied dead of what Icarus was coming to regard as both the Styx and the Path easing back into placidity.

He forced himself to think, to weigh his next words carefully.

"Where are you taking me?" he asked in a hushed tone.

"Wherever you tell me to stop. But the further I go, the greater the price." Charon winked, yet somehow the frivolity of the gesture did not quite reach his eyes.

The man shuttered. "Can you leave me in my body? The physical one I had before I ate the plum you offered, that is."

"How very specific," Charon mused. "I'm so charmed I might juuuust tell you when to jump off the ride."

Icarus sighed, feeling very depressed very suddenly, wondering if it was from the air between the spectre and him. "Will Adamae ever escape?" he asked.

Charon shrugged. "You'd do better asking her, personally. Who knows? Perhaps she's content. I can't be bothered to keep track of every mortal's fate."

Yet you do. "I thought I was content there at first, and I was wrong."

"Well, you understood things a bit better." Charon moved to shrug again, but the tendons in those shoulders strained as he rolled them, as though a great weight was draped over them like a mantle.

"...I want to remember you," Icarus confessed at last, sensing that his time was drawing near. The sea of spirits about them seemed too quiet, had fallen to susurrations too low for mortal ears.

Yet the ferryman shook his head and gave one of those rarer chuckles, the ones that pealed deep and smooth inside his chest.

"Few do," he told Icarus. "It's likely you'll think me a dream."

"I won't."

Charon loaned the man an indulgent half-smile. "Everyone says that while they're in the dream."

Icarus couldn't hold that fathomless, pupil-less gaze, and he bit his lip to stare, blushing, at the grains of wood in the ruggedly hewn gondola. The vessel was battered, weathered by time. Warped yet true and serving its purpose still, ever faithfully, ever without complaint.

Icarus took a deep breath, and he stood, gripping the ferryman's shoulder. The ferryman recoiled at the steadiness of those normally shifting eyes as his charge's back straightened and he vowed solemnly:

"I will remember you as a story, Charon."

There was a sudden hush like a thunderclap, and a wave crashed over the gondola, nearly taking Icarus with it into the now foaming river. Regaining his footing on the damp bottom of the gondola he realized that Charon had stopped rowing. The spectre was bent double over his oar as it morphed into a scythe and he into a form with a low black cowl.

Another wave, and Icarus was nearly thrown, staid only by clutching Charon's arm, but the next thing he knew the spectre had tossed him away and he slammed into the side of the boat, catching it in his gut so that he was nearly thrown over head first.

His eyes widened at the chasm forming beneath the ephemeral river, barely visible under the frenetic, twisting visages of the dead. Horrified, he turned to face Charon, to plead for his soul.

But "Jump!" Charon hissed, and the command was too strong for Icarus to resist. He lurched back over the hull of the gondola.

Just before he shattered its icy surface, just before the current dragged him under, he could have sworn he caught a glimpse of a true, beatific grin under the shadow of that cowl. One that would have given any heart a pulse.

And he realized the story was longer than he'd imagined.

***

In a lackluster hospital no place in particular, a coma patient two weeks running moaned, tossing his dark hair. There was a woman beside him. She'd been there for two weeks, and she had warm brown eyes that widened as he stirred. Immediately she took his hands, calling his name, but she stopped, gasping when she realized he wasn't groaning at all.

"Death can't smile," the man slurred instead. "Not really. That would be mockery, indescribably cruel, and the ferryman knows it. But what a weight he bears—what a weight!" His dry lips cracked as he pursed them against a hiccoughing sob. "It's too much to ask that he never grin. That's why—that's why when he stretches his lips we call him something different, something proper..."

"We call him..." the man trailed off, sinking back into repose. Frantic, the woman above him made to call for the nurse, fearing suddenly that he might never wake again as she reached to shake him. But the moment she touched him something like a shock tore through the man's spine, and he cried out again.

"We call him—!"

"Please—!" the woman began, and her voice rent the air, opened it wide.

"—We call him Life!" Icarus gasped, and he opened his tear-filled eyes.

Living

The moon was high, a mere week from fruition, and its milky bath of light drizzled over the mountains. Lucent, its glow streamed into the river where the water dashed and frothed through the heights, throwing lunar eddies into coils of light that wound through the scintillating waves like ribbon. As these twin currents leapt over the dazzling heights of the falls they spiraled, as though their cascade to shatter on the gleaming rocks below were all an intimate waltz, each tide holding the other close until impact bound them in one, glorious effervescence.

The tall, dark boy appreciated this from his lofty perch. He was grounded firmly at the peak of the falls, his silhouette looming from a jutting granite boulder the river had yet to efface. He stood in nothing more than a pair of old pants rolled up to the knees, his whole physiognomy flushed with excitement. His heart pounded, roared in his chest. A wide grin was stretched over his lips.

Every fibre of his being was shaking for terror.

His grey eyes stared down a 35 meter drop, and reason screamed he couldn't make the jump out from the rocks below. Reason was probably right. But it didn't matter. Every moment or so a convulsive shiver, a warning, would course through the boy's spine, and he delayed only to feel it, the weighty blow of anticipation, imbibing it. By the time he made the jump he wanted to be desperate with fright. Fear was his opiate, or perhaps it was the adrenaline that fueled him. He didn't know. Nor did he care. No, right now his frigid skin, the leering dive, the menacing river and the roar of the falls like a caution were seeping into his being. His breath steadied even as his chest squeezed faster, tighter— even as the air in his lungs thinned. For the barest of instants his eyes closed.

Then he started to run.

His bare feet slapped against the worn granite slab, his legs straining, a sudden streak of euphoria blazing through his pupils until—!

He threw himself over the falls.

For a moment all was senseless, all was chaos as air whistled shrilly, damningly past his ears, as he heard the water breaking over the rocks advancing rapidly in his sight and he tumbled all out of form, flailing through the air and dreading the knowledge of whether he'd jumped far enough.

Then there was the force of his impact with the river, and he was sucked under, pain assailing him at every angle, water filling his mouth and nose, chilling him to the bone. But he had rushed into jeopardy, through shock and panic and horror, dozens of times before, and he focused all his energy, all that freezing, dying blood coursing through his veins into the controlled strokes of his arms, a desperate grapple with the river. He wrestled every current— he, who hadn't the muscle of a warrior nor the grace of a diver. There was no skill and no strength in him, only the great, turbulent will for survival powering his limbs. They lashed out at the enemy, all that surging water. For a glorious moment he knew no thoughts, nothing but instinct, and this powered him with such a wave of euphoria that somehow, miraculously, his arms made it to the bank, and he had pulled himself over it before he could so much as thank the heavens.

Then he lie there in the grass. His head spun, light and giddy. His chest ached as he spluttered. He could feel blood running down his leg where one of the fall's teeth had ripped at the flesh.

And in that one, horrified moment, he knew the joy of life, just as he had time and time again through similar stunts. Just as he had a year ago, when he last risked this indulgence. He lie there in the grass, staring now at the stars and the heavens, and as his high, that rush of adrenaline, faded back into the dull remorse of his existence he offered a small prayer. Later, he wouldn't recall if it was one of thanks or forgiveness, or even what god he made it to.

But then, there were few moments as spiritual, as intimate, as the realization of your own mortality.

It was a shame that he was interrupted by something so cliché as a rustle in the underbrush.

The noise was peripheral, but it was night, when all was in reverse, and only the softest of sounds could shine bright in the greater tangle of human consciousness. He was on his feet before he could think, some of that instinct in possession of him still, and suddenly the world was quiet once more. But the boy was not appeased. His heart, previously stilling, raced back to its former state. His pupils dilated, his eyes searching the gloom frantically as he scrabbled toward the edge of the bank where he'd left his clothes.

Intuition was something he denied himself. It ran strong in him, those primordial answers, the reign of subconscious over his being, but though it was rarely wrong he rarely gratified it. This, though, this was a matter of life and death, not of science and reason, and he knew there was someone in the forest with him. Someone, not something.

Tripping and stumbling over to his clothes, he scooped them up and ran as fast as he could, paying no heed to his feet as they were stabbed by pine needles and bruised over rocks, just throwing himself in the gaps between trees, trying desperately to steer. Behind him, he swore he heard the snapping of a branch, and he broke into a sprint, not daring to glance back, to risk slowing even for a glimpse of the threat. Indeed, he didn't pause at all until he made it to the road ten minutes later, his chest heaving, and that was only to cram his feet into his tennis shoes and continue on his way.

The shuttle stop, he thought in a blind panic. If he could just make it to the shuttle stop, then there would be witnesses— he'd be fine— or at least no one could get him from behind with his back pressed against the solid interior. Longer he ran, but his energy was swiftly fleeing him, and his muscles burned, his bones ached.

He didn't realize his pursuer was gone at all until he'd holed himself in the stop, just as planned. It was beyond him when his dizzying escape had proved successful— all he could do was breathe an immense sigh of relief, coughing and panting and leaning heavily against the glass side of the booth.

He'd run almost two miles, he realized.

He needed to change, he realized.

And, because his mind would conjure up innumerable terrors of the night regardless, he pulled off his sopping clothes, praying no one came until the shuttle was due in a half an hour as he slipped into the relative warmth of a dry suit, mitigating the freezing dread that had crept upon his soul.

In a way, he hoped that God was punishing him. In another, he knew that something much worse had transpired.

And suddenly, against all odds, he really wished he was home.

The Virtue of Deception

Tonight Elzio of the Quatronne family was stationed on Hickory Street. His short but muscled frame was terse beneath his trench coat as he melded with the city's grime. This was easier said than done in the southern half of Ghileswick where only the wealthiest Ashlanders dwelt, isolated from the extorted hell they'd furbished in the northern Shidaran half. Oh, the weightier crimes and high stakes criminals eventually trickled down to this, the seat of legislation, and they'd left their mark in the gritty residue that dampened the prosperous neighborhood's streets, fulgid and ghoulish in the lamplight. However, it couldn't compare to the hair-raising adventure that was a stroll through the northern docks.

Elzio had begun his career as a petty thief, though. He preferred the simpler, more prevalent filth of the Shidarans, with whom his family's drug and arms trade resided. Easier to blend with the shadows when the people themselves had arranged their tenements in a manner befitting a guard's worst nightmare, when there was a cloak and dagger in every crag and crevice, a crime for every issue of the daily news. The south end of the city featured a different breed of man, a finer, more artistic touch at the craft of murder and finance. Men here broke in not with crowbars, but with faux smiles and pretty words. They enveloped their victims in a diaphanous web of lies before they sunk their fangs in, made it so no one heard their screams... Ah, but such was life. While Elzio's task this night was easy enough, he supposed it, too, was the catalyst to something even the most sadistic and tasteful of villains could appreciate. He would do as he was instructed, he would receive his pay, and his position in the Quatronne family would be secure. It was as painless as that.

The Quatronne family. What posturing, what a misnomer that was! But he digressed— his target had finally emerged from his rounds in the high end pubs that most Ashlander's frequented, and like a good little copper he hadn't dawdled for food, drink, or bribe. Such was to be expected of the straight-laced man with his regulation black uniform, the great cloak drawn close beneath the silver badged deerstalker. The hats were a nice touch, Elzio allowed. They cast an ominous shade over the visages of the officials who donned them, even if they were a tad dehumanizing.

This particular official paused outside the gilded door to the Silken Parlor, sniffing not at the dirt-encrusted street without, at the darkness or the faint stench of humanity lingering about the place since the drainage systems had been remodeled. No, he sniffed at the frivolity within. Elzio could relate. Still, he was tense as his target's gaze swept over the grungy, lamp-lit cobblestones, the brick-and-mortar shops... the compact figure hidden in plain sight against one of those silly iron streetlamps. As the official's eyes reached him Elzio's breath hitched, but his target's scrutiny seemed to glide over him indifferently— a streak of luck.

Or perhaps no, he corrected as the official turned unexpectedly into the close darkness of a yet narrower ally. It was a place in which his vulnerable back would seem wider, in which confrontation was an inevitability, and a painless one for the villain in question.

'You're a justiciar from another age,' Elzio praised his target. 'But little good will it do you tonight.'

Ambling across the street, he pulled his bowler hat low over his grim, steady features and slipped into the snare his prey had wandered down. Said prey had lighted a lantern and waited with his back to a dead end. He seemed to invite, which was quite a feat in light of the black pockets and garish sallow hues that danced predatorily over his features. The lantern swung back and forth like a pendulum in his cool grasp. It was so affecting that even with the firm bite of metal in Elzio's hand, a guarantee of safety, he could not but hesitate at the sight of that dark extension of the law suspended in a halo of refulgence that had somehow conquered even the ancient obsidian fold of a Ghileswickian night.

Fortunately, Elzio was as brave as he was ruthless. He took quiet, steady strides toward the officer, and it was the officer who spoke first in a voice crisp and weighed, certain.

"Followed me all night, have you? You have fair stealth. Is it a bribe you seek, fool? I arrest men merely for making the attempt."

"I've more important business, this night," replied Elzio, drawing ever closer.

The officer was not phased, nor convinced. "Do you now?"

His pursuer gave an enigmatic smile; it cut through his broad, shaven features like the tear of a knife through granite. He turned his silver weapon over and over in his hand, in his pocket.

"Yes indeed," he affirmed. "To pass something along."

"And what is that?" the officer wondered aloud, gruffly. He hadn't moved, hadn't shifted, but suddenly he was primed for action, suddenly he was dangerous as a trap.

Elzio advanced a step farther, and the officer sprung, but a glint of silver flashed through the lantern-light, and he crashed into it as though it was a wall of steel, his eyes wide and fixed with a kind of spasmodic dread on the medallion that dangled from Elzio's outstretched hand.

The emissary of the Quatronne family smirked at his target as he shuttered, then collapsed, the fire in his eyes and the lantern expelled once more by the insidious, sprawling nighttime fog.

"I think you know," Elzio whispered belatedly and, satisfied, he turned to leave.

One thing was for certain: Tonight he had murdered Thomas Worthingson, just as he'd been ordered to.

***

Morrigan Coombes sincerely doubted that God's sense of humor was anything less than suspect.

A woman of great prominence, not of reputation but stature, she had in this, her twenty-second year of life, been bereaved of her father. Being a poor and disowned Shidaran among Ashlanders, he had left in his will that his daughter might be placed into the care of a benefactor of his. Coombes had been skeptical to say the least that her doe-eyed father's wishes would appeal to the senses her education had cultured her to possess, but she had come to 636 Wotcher Street, nevertheless. It was remarkable what one would do out of respect for the dead and well-intentioned.

Thus far her venture had not yielded promising results. The house number she was looking for had been curiously rotated so that it read 939 and fasted as such, and it had only been after a great deal of hesitant knocking that she had been accosted by a young sibilant voice from within crying loftily: "If it is R. Farley you seek then enter, yon damned, determined knocker!"

So now here she stood in the narrow, sparsely furnished halls of R. Farley's home, boring into him with a steady, expectant gaze as he sat, much less oblivious than he seemed, in the parlor.

Mr. Farley was exceedingly young— his smooth face and full lips, androgynous though not in such a way as to make him handsome (disappointingly enough), were sufficient to deem him no older than nineteen. Twenty at the most. His spare form was draped with clothing, draped over the desk upon which he was scribbling attentively, his dull brown curls turned pointedly toward her, his sharp little nose turned away.

Morrigan knew he'd heard her enter, and the youngster be damned if he thought she would be the first to speak, that she would herald her own entry. She was an academic, not a lady, and she hadn't the patience.

Once Miss Coombe's brown eyes (to call them hazel would be generous in light of their dark, blazing indignation) had drilled at last through young Farley's head he glanced up with a sigh. He had gray padlock eyes with pupils like rusty key holes.

Naturally, Morrigan expected him to greet or dismiss her. Instead, he took one look at her stout figure and its practical petticoats, the typical Shidaran spirit of her haughtily tilted chin, and he flung himself maniacally back onto the paper, crying aloud:

"And who would claim, without fear've reprise

That pride t'weren't trouble in woman's guise?"

"Excuse me?!" the woman balked, beginning very much to doubt the sanity of her father and his young benefactor alike.

Dotting the line he'd just completed with a flourish of his quill, R. Farley twirled back on his toes to grant her an elaborate bow filled with such mockery and suspended mirth that Miss Coombes could just imagine lightning arching through the curtained window to strike the jolly bastard down.

"My apologies," he was saying. "You must be Miss Coombes. I beg your pardon if I startled or disserviced you. Among investigation, foolery, and other pursuits I write prose for the wealthy to giggle over. Throw in a few high society refrains, a lexicon of some substance, and they're all waving the nonsense under the working classes' nose like it's the secret to life. Still, lines my pockets, and seeing as its the contents of these pockets off which you'll be living I shouldn't think it would render you that wroth."

Her brow arching menacingly at his gall, Morrigan began: "First of all, Mr. Farley, that was not prose, and second—."

The bell rang, and she jumped almost out of her skin, not having noticed that such an object existed while she was without the house. She colored.

"Ah that'll be my fellow Investigator, Ulisse!" chirped Farley enthusiastically. "Only he knows where the bell is— do come in Investigator!"

"Investigator Ulisse?!" blurted Miss Coombes, and she turned upon hearing the approach of very soft leather boots indeed to find herself face to face with the paragon of justice himself. He was the pride of north and south Ghileswick alike, he and Farley both dwelling on the narrow streets of the bridge connecting the halves, and he had a reputation for being both incorruptible and brave. Women adored him. The man was of Illumni descent, so he was handsome in a dark, swarthy way in spite of his too long, too protruding face and heavy brow. And his stoop was apparent from the moment he crossed into the foyer— he walked as though bent toward some far-off destination, as though he wouldn't halt even for the hellish pit.

Still, he didn't seem too frightening as he removed his black deerstalker and bowed his head in deference to her.

"I hope I haven't intruded?" he asked, looking to her and ignoring Farely's reply as the youth answered with a dismissive wave:

"It's only my cousin, come to live on my good graces."

"I should think I'm not!" she protested vehemently, with an ugly glare at the miscreant, wishing that the Investigator wasn't blocking the door.

Ulisse smiled as he dusted some of the mud off his knees onto Farley's spotless floor and the youth's lips curled up in reprise. "I suppose Risk has neglected to tell you that he's not just a poet, he's a gentlem— I mean liar."

Farley chuckled darkly at the joke in a way that implied it was more irritating than amusing, reciting suddenly:

"Ah what is truth but the lark of God?

He changes his mind and it's gone— aplomb!"

Then, with an expressive twinkle in his eye: "Oh— that was good!" The unbalancing youth drew back his sleeve to unveil a bundle of parchment affixed to his wrist, taking the quill off the table and scrawling his inspiration feverishly.

"His name is Risk?" Morrigan remarked sardonically, sensing an ally in the Investigator, though she wouldn't be staying long enough to need his services. Certainly not. "Why am I not surprised?"

"Risk, Rich, Richard, Ricky," drawled Farley. "Any of those will do, but if you deviate, Miss Coombes, I'll be quite cross."

Ulisse shook his head; he was a good fifteen years his friend's senior, and well within his rights to scold. "He's not as terrible as his dishonest nature compels him to brag, Miss Coombes. But for now, and though it's his day off, I fear I'll have to borrow your poet. Investigator business and all that— Hangman's noose." Something grave and reverent entered his tone as he spoke of it, in direct contrast to the droll organization of his words.

"A poet who writes prose..." Morrigan muttered to herself, feeling a tad overwhelmed.

"I don't write prose," Farley informed her as he pulled the regulation great cloak and deerstalker from his couch. "Chronic liar, recall? Help yourself to my cellar and cupboards if you should wax faint in my absence. The neighbors are nosy but sympathetic— they'll tend to your emotional needs better than I."

"They're just nosy," Ulisse clarified for her. "I wouldn't speak to them, if I were you."

"You don't honestly believe I've decided to stay!" the dignified Miss Coombes admonished Farley, who tossed her the most genuine, cynical grin of their brief acquaintance.

"With any luck, if we do our jobs right," he told her, "this city may become a place in which fiery young women with loose tongues can live alone and at peace. For the present, Miss Coombes, I would bet my savings you'll stay right where you are and put up with me until you find a nice husband to hand my will and testament as a dowry."

He wrenched the door open, Ulisse scowled and made a remark about only using truth as a thumbscrew, and then the portal slammed back shut, leaving Morrigan Coombes both mortified and intrigued.

This was not a wise course of action.

Which was why, as the Investigators approached the scene of the crime they were to be applying their profession to (a sizeable house in Ghileswick's southern docks) Ulisse was saying, observationally:

"If you keep taking out your moods on others you'll scare her away from the first." He turned one dark eye on his companion, and his other scanned the ivy-enshrined stones of the house before them, the carriages rattling past, the innocuous town criers milling quietly about in hopes that the junior officers following the Investigator wouldn't thump them for prying.

"With any luck I'll scare her," Farley snorted, creasing those boyish features of his before smirking capriciously at a secret joke. "Can't stand women, m'dear Investigator."

"Ever the paradox," Ulisse the Illumni scoffed at him, unimpressed.

Farley beamed gaily. He smiled as though that were the only response to any and all stimulus, even sorrow, even rage.

"I'd love," he confessed in musical tones, "For you to limit your advice to poetry and profession, Ulisse. You're remonstrance rather irritates me."

"You lie," the Illumni said unnecessarily as Farely and he ascended the marble slab that was the cramped mansion's doorstep. He turned to the ivory and gold wrought handle. It was an ostentatious little curiosity that opened up, not down, though the elder Investigator seemed to have taken note of this peculiarity before he laid his hand on the knob, because he opened it first try. "But alas, we are here," he continued as Farley stroked his chin. "You analyze the scene and I'll praise or deride your conclusions accordingly."

"The docks..." Farley mused as he moved to enter. "Happened right under your nose, didn't it?"

"You could," Ulisse suggested, "Have the common decency to wait to cut to the heart of the matter until after we've entered the building." But he knew his incorrigible pupil wasn't listening, and he didn't expect him to. The youth had drawn up his sleeve once more to expose the paper over his wrist, and he was penning his observations raptly in charcoal even as he spoke them aloud.

The foyer consisted of polished wood floors and rugs from the west, from the desert lands. They were colorful, an array of tessellations and sinuous colors of thread that could not be forged by one who hadn't known the loom intimately from their earliest days, and by comparison the gilded mirror and stylishly carved coat rack seemed most dull.

"He was well-to-do, obviously," Farley said, "But not the usual Ashlander's taste for the luxuries of home— judging by the furniture and quality he's either a trader or an eccentric."

"Trader," Ulisse clarified with a wry thought on the irony of the word 'eccentric' passing through Risk Farley's, of all lips. Perhaps he would comment next time the youth needed to be knocked down a peg. In the meantime they moved further in, Risk's eyes sweeping the hall in search of anything unusual, which there wasn't until one stepped into the central ballroom and living space.

At the time of the murder it had been used as a living space, with more foreign rugs, vases, and low tables. There were also pearl white couches and bookshelves filled with the kind of practical knowledge only a seaman and a merchant could appreciate. Farley took all this in before he allowed his eyes to gravitate toward the magnetic, grisly scene that occupied the center of the immense chambers, because he knew once he afforded it his attention the power of it would color his judgments.

"...the manner of death was very clean— professional," he said at last as he indulged in a look at the cadaver, gruesome not for the contortion of the face, nor for the brutality— there was none. Indeed, it was the fact that a single bullet wound had been aimed perfectly straight, perfectly steady, and struck the tradesman's heart at precisely the mark where, on a target, the bulls-eye would have been placed. The lack of signature, of any personality, of any bearings or closeness to the deed at all was exceedingly casual, almost artistic. "May I proceed to examine the point of entry?"

"There are a few more observations I expect of you, first," Ulisse told him with an enigmatic smile, which Farley matched with such a dimpled, innocent grin as barred his teeth manifestly. Nevertheless, the youth turned back to the scene, biting his full lip, tapping the charcoal pencil against his notepad.

"He... was taken by surprise. The killer did not speak to him at all, only shot and killed," he said at last. "There is a scuff mark on the floor there, by his calf where his boots chafed the wood and presumably he spun, noticing his killer's presence. But... then how did the killer strike him so perfectly when he was moving? He must be exceptional."

Ulisse nodded, seemingly satisfied. "The killer may also have had a lucky shot," he said, but his voice bore no conviction.

Farley took this as invitation to move at last to the corpse. He was a man of somewhat advanced age for his profession, fifty or so, with browned skin starting to weather and streaks of ugly iron gray through his fair hair. The man was muscled, but it appeared as though he'd been lax of late— the sinews were softening in places. In death his wide-set eyes and low brow only served to give him a more stricken appearance. The youth was not concerned with the humanitarian aspect, however. He smoothed the silken clothes over the man's chest, gray eyes boring through the hole thereon almost as intensely as the bullet had.

"Interesting," he murmured, jotting down notes on his wrist. He didn't seem to notice the blood his fingers had contracted, and even smeared it over his forehead absentmindedly as he rose and wiped his brow. "I would swear he was killed by one of the old issue pistols we used. Beside ourselves, I can think of but three others who still have them."

"As ever your infatuation with weapons does not fail you," Ulisse ceded. "Conclusions?"

"Obviously an assassination. A skilled one. Likely not mercenary. Likely trained under an organization."

"Not obviously and not certainly," Ulisse reminded him.

Farely rolled his eyes. "Explanations are innocent of falsehood until proven guilty."

"But you've still missed something, though it isn't contrary to your hypothesis at all."

The youth bristled. "Oh? And what is that?" he demanded with faux cheerfulness.

"Point of exit, my friend? How are you to make anything of eyewitness accounts if you have not pieced together the method of entry and withdrawal, the two most commonly glimpsed phenomena?"

"A minor detail," Farley insisted, though to his round face rose a blush.

"He came in through the front door, exited by the window," Ulisse told him, and though he was ever serious about his work he afforded his pupil a wink as he moved toward the aforementioned window and gestured out it.

"Take a look," he instructed Farley. "What do you see?"

Farley looked out, then up, and then down. "A puddle," he said, though not flatly, but with interest, licking his lips as he glanced back at his instructor. "I'll take note of that, as well. It doesn't look wholly undisturbed, what with the mud dried over the cobblestones adjacent."

"Excellent," Ulisse nodded at him. "What think you next?"

"I think," Farley said, adjusting his deerstalker, "that I need to see if I can't find some history of offense or intrigue in yon tradesman's past. He was looted after death; the pocket is tucked in by an outside hand— look at the bulge of it. Name, please?"

"Thomas Worthingson," Ulisse obliged. "I won't keep you any longer."

"Ah, but allow me to keep you for one more question." Farley spoke wistfully, almost to himself as he drew closer to the Investigator. Behind those disused keyholes of pupils many cogs were turning, racing, tumbling. For once he was utterly dissimulated, and that was as close to a true expression as Ulisse had gotten out of him in a long time. "Do you know what it is like to toil under abuse or... threat, Ulisse?"

The Investigator's brow furrowed. At first it seemed he was about to admonish the younger for imprudent questions, but then he answered, truthfully: "No. No I can't say that I do."

Farley's lips curled back up in that smile, that all-important crown of equivocality. "That's a shame," he said, airily. "In that case, I don't think you could understand my current musings— at least, not until I am certain of a few more details."

Ulisse ruffled his hair; above all things Risk Farley hated contact, hated closeness. "Bastard," the Investigator muttered, just so it was clear this was a punishment. "Do you have any ideas as to a suspect?"

Farley's eyes closed, his entire visage cherubic with his widest, most pervasive and roguish of grins. "Of course not."

"Lying bastard," the Investigator corrected.

"Why, Ulisse!" Farley chuckled as he all but skipped out the door, "You wound me."

***

The scraping of a key in the door, a heavy slam, and a scream of frustration announced Farley's return that evening. Young Risk was flushed with indignation, his clenched jaw quivering dangerously, the fury of his expression as he rounded the corner to the parlor such that he seemed ten years older beneath all the ruddy anger and glinting eyes. Not that Miss Coombes, perched coyly at his desk with her skirt arranged neatly about her, noticed. She was concentrating most studiously on a sheet of parchment, her stately wrist affecting the most solemn decrees over it in black. At sight of her Farley's vehement scowl quickly reverted to a leer, and he stamped over to fling himself down on the couch.

"I neglected to recall that you were here," he remarked scathingly. "Then, it's just as I predicted earlier."

Miss Coombes didn't so much as look up from her task. There was the continued scratching of a quill, and her voice was poised as could be as she ventured to ask, desultorily:

"What has your trousers in a twist?"

"My trousers," Farley smirked dangerously. "My trousers?! They've been all over bloody Ghileswick, through the slums, over the bridge, and back again in an attempt to find out which god-damn crime ring was involved in my case. And then what does Hangman's Yard do? How does my mentor repay me? He takes the guard job for the next target right from under my nose. Why, it was my catch! I'm more experienced!"

"That's the first discernible lie since you walked through the door," came the smooth reply like a reprimand, inches from patronizing. "Did it ever occur to you that perhaps Ulisse is more trustworthy than you? Even if you didn't glide over the details of what happened during your watch you'd doubtless write some trouncing poem on the matter."

Farley's face twisted into an excruciatingly wide grin. "And what, pray tell," he snarled, "Are you doing in my chair, all comfortable and familiar?"

"I've written up a contract."

"I can't read print," the stubborn youth returned as Morrigan finished her work and presented it to him with all the graciousness of a school mistress, or governess.

"That's lie two," she commented lightly as she waited for Risk to take the parchment from her. When he snatched it up at last he scanned it with an alacrity that took Miss Coombes wholly by surprise. She was less astonished when he threw it at once to the floor.

"Teacher or nursemaid," he laughed irritably, "You are not bringing those aristocrat's snot-nosed brats into my house, and especially not the urchins. I don't do children."

"Naturally that's why I would be handling their lessons," Morrigan informed him. "So wherein lies the problem?"

"It's my house. I hate children. Enough said."

"You are a child!" she blurted, exasperated. "And if I am to stay here, I need to be able to conduct business as surely as you do!"

Farley drew out the papers on his wrist and a charcoal pencil, a sardonic hue lighting upon his grinning mask as he said aloud through his penciled ministrations:

"A lonely woman buries it in charitay.

Give it to her fast or she'll waste right away."

"Oh that wasn't even very good," Morrigan scowled with a roll of her eyes. "And does every line of your poems rhyme, or are they all couplets?"

There was an abrupt change of subject. "Have you eaten yet?"

Miss Coombes shook her head primly. "Not without you. Some of us have decency. Besides, there was nothing but treats and such in your cupboards."

Farley's brow twitched with the last, restless fits of his unraveling patience. He sunk deeper into the couch and turned his face from her as though to take a nap. "Then run out and buy what you need, damn it. My change purse is on the mantle." He began writing once more on the pad on his wrist and reading its prior contents.

Seeing that no improvement could be wrought over his mood Miss Coombes resigned herself to the task at hand, crossing to a dusty brick hearth some distance from the desk and pocketing the silken black pouch lying there. She then regarded the youth sprawled over the furniture with exaggerated dignity.

"Do try to behave yourself while I'm gone."

Farley's face was buried in a haze of papers and pencil marks, but he muttered:

"When dearest mother is here to stay

Then, my friends, it's a rainy day."

Morrigan tied the change purse to her side and, crossing the room to don her jacket, said not another word as she slipped into the frigid nighttime din.

Farley's street, Wotcher, wasn't much frequented, but not far from thence was a tiny, closing bazaar whose occupants were more than happy to oblige her request to take the last of their fresh product at a fresh price. It wasn't a dreadfully interesting marketplace; the stalls were modest, professional wooden stands and there were none of the exotic tents or baubles that crowded dockside entourages.

Nevertheless, the hunched women and calloused men were easy to deal with— she didn't have to play the ridiculous bartering game. It wasn't long before she had a sack filled with cheeses, vegetables, and breads, and she was just debating whether she would prefer to cook a wild or tame meat for that evening's dinner when the sight of a familiar face gave her pause.

It was early evening, so the blackened cobblestones were glinting in the lantern-light, but the skies were clinging to an indigo hue that twinkled ominously with a few of the brighter stars. There was a curious half-shadow to everything in the marketplace, rendering faces dim and expressions monotone beneath the veil of pubescent darkness.

Nevertheless, Investigator Ulisse was unmistakeable with that towering, hunched profile of his, with the obtuse nose and deerstalker. He was advancing from the ally opposite Farley's home, and wore an implacable, weighty frown. As he passed he seemed not to notice Miss Coombes, who beckoned to him; he was, after all, one of only two faces she really knew in the city. But he didn't stop, although she was certain he must have heard her.

Perhaps she looked the part of a beggar or miscreant in the fading light?

Much as she doubted it, Morrigan found herself watching as Ulisse wound into the diffused, nearly abandoned bazaar. His soft boots didn't seem to make a sound over the crooked rises of the makeshift plaza, and there was even more of an object, even more of a resolve behind his steady advance than usual. He was stealthy and bristling with power, as though galvanized by the chase. Was he after a criminal, she wondered? The one Farley had mentioned, earlier?

No, she realized as a slim woman dressed in yeoman's garb met him. They drew close in the dark gray shadow of a baker's shop, the baker's stall and business having long since withdrawn to the welcoming fold of storage or bed. The sinuous young lady greeting Ulisse was certainly ready to hit a mattress, her wide dark eyes sparkling, her form accentuated by unnecessary gesticulations as she conversed with the Investigator.

He didn't seem interested, predictably. Indeed, Morrigan would wager that, hidden though he was in the aforementioned swathe of darkness, Ulisse's pragmatic features hadn't moved. He must have said something, because the woman pouted (even Coombes could see that full lip jutting out) and presumably simpered before a reprimand enticed her to take something from her pockets. It glinted briefly in what little refulgence pierced the site of their rendezvous, and Ulisse hid it swiftly in the folds of his great-cloak.

He didn't even seem to stay to hear the woman's farewell. Instead, he was off, plunging into the greater obscurity of the bridge's narrow alleyways. The woman's posture and too-swift stride from that place indicated frustration, but Coombes did not care for her. With the investigator gone she turned away. Meat was all but forgotten as she bustled toward Farley's once more, her groceries nearly flattened beneath her excited grip.

What a queer scene she'd happened upon! What a mystery the Investigator's actions were! And who had the woman been? In her haste Morrigan scuffed her right shoe, and much as she prided herself on taking care of her possessions she didn't notice as she flew right up to 939 Wocker street and admitted herself, short of breath and cheeks flushed by the kind of fantasies that only an educated imagination can entertain.

"Risk," she called out as she entered, "I saw Investigator Ulisse in the market!"

As she swept in Farley looked up from his armchair by the hearth. The desk showed evidence of his restless sojourn there, so she could only assume that he had been alternately pacing and switching seats. There was still something dour to his grin as he looked up at her, raising a brow.

"From the looks of it he stole you away on a cloud only to return you without your purity or, judging by the looks of your grocery bag, meats, unless you sinned and placed them in the bottom."

"Oh hush!" she reprimanded him as she set the bag down on the floor. "He was speaking to this woman—."

"You're a gossip. Why am I not surprised?" Farley said scathingly, though there was a glimmer of interest peeking lambently from behind his fading smile, the careful arrangement of disinterest. Morrigan was, at the present, too eager to divulge to make him beg for her information, and thus she made a breach in her usual discipline and continued:

"He was speaking to this woman, and she was trying to win him over coquetting, but he didn't seem interested. Then she slipped him something silver and he left."

"Unusual," Farley said ruminatively. "Normally he's the one slipping the women something silver. He's a real scamp about the female race. I doubt that you should get so worked up, however, Miss Coombes. In all likelihood he's scouting out the politics of our present case."

"But it wasn't a courtesan—or, not a fancy one," Morrigan insisted with some acumen as she ignored the lie about Ulisse's habits. "It was a dark woman dressed like a yeoman."

"Dark, did you say?" Farley asked. "Dark in the same manner as our Investigative friend?"

"Yes! And when I tried to speak to him he didn't seem to recognize me at all."

"Hmmm..." Smiling again, reflexively, young Risk stroked at his chin. "This thins the plot considerably."

"Thins it?"

"Yes," Farley told her. "Thins. You've been somewhat useful today. There is rabbit in the cellar; I wasn't going to tell you there was meat, but I suppose you've earned that trifling of honesty." He turned back to the papers he'd lain over himself, staring at all the parchment at once as though if he could fit them all together they'd be a map, or a diagram.

"Clearly," Miss Coombes admonished him as he didn't offer to help with the heavy bag, nor the meal, "Investigator Ulisse works much more studiously than you do."

"Clearly," Farley repeated noncommittally, breezily.

"Do you ever look into politics?," she wondered aloud, conversationally. "You'd be good at it."

"No," Risk told her, and for a moment she could have sworn that he wasn't grinning like an idiot, but then, perhaps it was her imagination. "In politics you have to believe what you say so much you start thinking it's real. You have to lose yourself in the lie. And the day I get that tangled will be..." he hesitated. "Unfortunate."

Morrigan paused in the doorway, studying him as he fixed his eyes pointedly back at the charcoal smudges over his arrangement. He was very young, but there was an air of experience about the boy, she would give him that. Harrowing experience. She wondered where he'd come from, that his morals and decorum had been so warped. She wondered if he had ever known pain.

"...how much of what you just said was false?" she asked at length, much more casually than she meant it.

Farley smiled. "All of it, of course."

But then that, too, was a lie.

***

It was raining the next night. Outside the window Ghileswick was a shimmering obsidian mass of shambling profiles and towering buildings. To the north there were tenements and apartments stacked all on top of one another. To the south the rich built their mansions in stories since there wasn't sufficient space even for them to buy their way into a larger foundation. So the city crawled higher and higher, stretching up to the heavens for all its sordid people and transactions, for all its impurities.

Ulisse remembered Illum better than he would confess to any who asked, but he loved this city most of all. In Illum the ruling, criminal families had such a strangle-hold on business and law that to do his job well would have been impossible, to do it wrong would have been inevitable, and to do it profitably would have been his only consolation. Here, there was yet a sense of pride burning at the heart of the courts, of the legislation, that demanded a certain level of integrity be upheld before their astute people— there was still a place for an assiduous man of the law. And that was what Ulisse was. He loved the justice here, loved the thrill of the chase, grimaced but felt satisfied in the punishments. His whole life was the study of law and its surrounding sciences. His heart and soul were poured out before the altar of right and wrong and their necessary maintenance, their necessary order.

Which was why he apologized to Farley, his dear apprentice and knave, but tonight he would be on his own as he upheld the most sacred of his passions, as he leaned against the Illumni banker Desi Consentio's hickory doors and let his senses peak, his eyes dart from shadow to shadow and back again at constant attention, in spite of the fact that after a day of preparation those eyes burned with fatigue. This was his element. This was something too intimate to be shared.

Besides, you never could trust a clever thing like Risk.

This thought made him frown, rumpled his brow with a turbulence of emotion the likes of which Ulisse knew he couldn't indulge in, and so he ran a hand through his thick dark hair, over the heavy brow and under his regulation deerstalker.

If he kept this up it would be a very long night, indee—.

The Investigator nearly leapt out of his skin as there was a prickling in his hindmost pocket, startling him out of his melancholy reverie and pressurizing all his anxiety into a sudden, painful snap to attention. His hands tore to the pocket and, upon brushing something metallic therein with his fingertips, he remarked ponderously:

"I don't remember putting anything in that—."

He cut off as a flash of silver greeted his eye, as the medallion with the insignia of the Quattrone family caught the moonlight that fell in shafts through the curtains beside him and his pupils dilated at sight of the winged serpent wound around the barrel of a pistol. He collapsed suddenly on the floor, clutching his head with terse, spasmodic fingers. A convulsion wracked his spine; he choked on something like a cry, and then fell limp.

It was a full turn of a shadow he lie there, his long, dark figure crumpled in a heap like a discarded cloak, but once that time had passed he seemed to reanimate. The eyes opened, albeit lazily, drooping with a kind of bored, disappointed lustre at the world as though to scold it for complacence. The sinews, loose and powerful, pulled him to his feet gracefully, and there was no stoop to his shoulders, no inhibitions or consideration in the fixed pupils. He was the same creature, but of a more concentrated shade, a finer hue.

Stretching, he placed the medallion back in his great cloak and turned to the door behind him, laying his hand on its polished brass handle and twisting it delicately so the latch made not a sound as it slid out of its frame. His face didn't move— it was knit in the calculating visage of a professional, of one who knows how to do his job, and does it well. It was silently, coolly that he swung the hickory gates, then closed them behind him, listening to the steady snore of his victim.

There was a nuance in the air, however, and the finely-tuned assassin was far from missing it as he paused, watching the rustle of the blankets as his target's diaphragm rose and fell. He listened to the snore, the too perfect snore happening in exact time, with precisely three moments between each refrain.

"You are not Desi Consentio," he spoke, atonically. "Where is he?"

The blankets stirred, and at length the small figure in the bed rose to face the assassin, lips curling, dimples flashing in challenge as the blanket slid from his great cloak and he adjusted his deerstalker.

"The real question," Risk Farely replied, "Is where is Investigator Ulisse?"

He and the assassin drew their weapons simultaneously, their old-issue pistols gleaming in menace at one another as they cocked them in that most grim of rituals.

"A boy," remarked the assassin, his dark eyes devoid of recognition, his placid features resolved. "You must be Richard Farley. I'd warn you not to lie when you tell me where Consentio is hiding. How you came to be here in the first place and the questions you have that prompted it is of little consequence to me."

"Ulisse's alter ego is more foolish than I thought if after leaving such an obvious trail of killings he thinks I'll let him escape to make another," Farely smiled thinly, his lip turning up slightly over his canines to ghastly effect.

"You shall, or you will die," the assassin told him, and might have shrugged, but the next thing Farley knew that finger was pulling the trigger, though there was an almost imperceptible jerk of the professional's wrist that sent the bullet awry. Perhaps this was because at that moment Morrigan Coombes had appeared behind him, and he was twisting too late to avoid the club that cracked him expertly, moderately, over the back of the head. Farley didn't trust his judgment on the matter. All he knew was that the assassin dropped like a log.

"Excellent work Miss Coombes," he praised his accomplice as he stepped nearer to the Investigator to bind him with cuffs. "I would so have hated to get the rest of the Hangman's Yard involved in this."

"I never want to hear you complain about having a woman around the house again," she informed him, handing him his club with a sniff. "So Ulisse is two people?"

"Two personalities," Farley corrected. "So in essence yes."

"How did that happen?" she demanded. "And how did the other one come to be a murderer?"

The youth didn't answer as he tried to lift his heavy companion and stumbled, refusing to ask the sturdier elder woman for help, though she could see the strain in the tendons of his bony wrists. She decided to lend it anyway, since her pride had already been reduced to such levels as had allowed Farley to drag her hence.

"Well?!" she prompted as she lifted Ulisse's carcass off of him. "Do you know?"

"Not a clue," Farely said matter-of-factly.

Morrigan scowled. She'd been skeptical when young Risk dragged her off to the Illumni banker's mansion to act as decoys (Consentio had directed them to a secret escape route in his room; clearly the paranoid bastard had been making deals with the Quatronne family long before he refused his latest offer) but now she saw that there was genuine reason to believe that Ulisse might be... diseased. So how was it that Farely was so calm, so droll about all of this?

"I don't see why you're still grinning," she muttered, sympathetically to the poor Investigator. "He's the only one I know who could put up with you, and God knows what will happen to him now."

"He will be arrested, and then hanged," Farely informed her.

"You're heartless, then," she informed him. "Ulisse was so kind to you, too—."

"Don't speak as though you know him!" Farely blurted, with such ferocity that Miss Coombes recoiled, nearly dropping the Investigator in the doorway to which she and Risk had dragged him. The youth's eyes had flashed, the rusty locks rattling on their chains before settling almost instantaneously to their prior station. He tilted his chin proudly as he dragged Ulisse's left shoulder toward the door and Morrigan was obliged to follow. It took her a moment to realize, in her stunned silence, that the young poet was murmuring:

"Many are the shades of the mind

So I truly do pity the colorblind.

The most hideous of tinctures are black and white."

"Ulisse took me," Farely retaliated at last, glaring daggers at Morrigan, "Not out of your virtue of pathos, but because in every profession a partner must be, above all, confidential. Liars are the best secret keepers, Miss Coombes. They couldn't unveil the truth if they wanted to. Now, let us be off to my residence so we can get some answers out of Ulisse before Hangman's Yard catches up with him, shall we?"

Morrigan couldn't bring herself to do anything else, so she nodded dumbly.

It took them a while to drag the Investigator outside— longer still for the carriage to arrive so that they could rattle on to 636 Wotcher Street. As a matter of fact, it was in the carriage that Ulisse first began to stir, and Miss Coombes sucked in her breath, but Farley scathingly informed her that when he woke he would be his usual self.

"How can you know?" she asked as the Investigator's eyelids fluttered and his head tossed in Farely's lap. The youth reached down, ostensibly to feel for a temperature, but his fingers lingered as they smoothed back the dark hair.

"I know," he replied simply, emotionlessly.

So with the carriage driver's help they dragged Ulisse into Farley's home and laid him over the couch. It was too short for him— his shins dangled over the end of it even as they folded him a little to elevate his head. Risk ordered Morrigan to fetch a glass of water for when Ulisse woke, and by the time she had returned the Investigator was awake, staring perplexedly at Farley.

"I don't understand."

"Miss Coombes clubbed you over the head and we brought you here."

"Liar."

"For once I am most pleased to say no, no I'm not."

Ulisse closed his eyes, that heavy brow furrowing as he massaged his temples; his head certainly attested to having been clubbed, throbbing and tender as it was. "I was guarding Consentio..." he began at last, then suddenly bolted erect on the couch. "What happened to Consentio?! Where is he?!"

"Seeing as you were his intended assassin, I don't believe it's safe for you to be privvy to that information, my dear Investigator," Farley beamed at him, pushing Ulisse's shoulder steadily to keep him from rising.

"I what?"

"You have two identities," the youth informed him.

"Risk, that's not funny."

"Don't pretend you think I'm joking— I don't jest, only fib. If you would be so kind as to hand me the contents of your back pocket without looking at them I would appreciate it."

"I don't keep anything in my—," the Investigator began, and then cut off as his reaching hand and memories caught up with him. He did not pale, however, only closed his eyes and did as Farley had requested. The youth inspected the medallion and seemed satisfied as he tucked it into his own great cloak. "You will recall— oh, and you can open your eyes now— you will recall that I asked you whether you'd been abused or mistreated."

"You think I have two personalities, and that somehow one of them is a murderer for the Quatronne family. And that this is because my father beat me?" The Investigator raised a brow.

"I dabble in burgeoning mental theories," Farley told him.

"Philosophy also toys with theories on multiple human natures," added the recently graduated Coombes from the door. She was finally inviting herself in, it seemed, and she handed the Investigator some water. He downed it gratefully in but a few swallows.

"There you have it," Farely spoke wryly before flashing her a look that said not to interrupt again. "In any case, I believe that you must have belonged to a couple under the Quatronne family's control. It is then possible you were abused in a controlled fashion to create a personality with that particular medallion as the stimulus for calling out their best assassin, which I find unlikely but intriguing. Another possibility is that you were supposed to be their assassin and crafted a more docile, truer entity out of defense for your immortal soul, and they found out. Both are rather fantastic events, though not for you."

The Investigator opened his mouth to speak, but the youth was talking over him. "For Miss Nosy's benefit, because I've no doubt she'll write all this down or tell it to a gaggle of filthy orphans, I knew it was you committing the murders because the bullet was yours, of that I had no doubt, I know your signature better than you do, and there was mud on your knees when you came in here, the same mud outside the window. Also, there's no way in hell someone could leave that clean a trail in your patrol area unless they were you yourself."

"But how would you know I was abused if I said no?" Ulisse mused.

"Kindred souls can recognize these things," Farley explained, still smiling. "Particularly after spending a night together."

The Investigator coughed.

Morrigan colored. That was more than she'd needed to know.

"So now the question," the youth continued; he was being unusually straightforward, as though rushed, as though he had a pending sense of time running through a sand-glass, "Is what you think we should do."

"Take me to Hangman's Yard," Ulisse answered.

Farely wasn't surprised, as Miss Coombes was, but he grinned dangerously.

"Predictable," he spat.

"Honor's price is honor's gain

And from death, indeed, she ne'er refrains."

"Don't rhyme at me, Risk," the Investigator growled, rising to his feet. "It isn't as though you don't have everything figured out by now. You know why I'm going."

"No," Farley said, and it was the first time that Morrigan, watching helplessly at his side, had ever seen him use that ugly sneer of his on the Investigator. "I know more than you think, and that is precisely the problem. You couldn't stop being so bloody honest even in the heart of a lie, damn you."

Ulisse had been walking out, and now he paused, eyes closing as though he'd been dealt a blow. Only Farley heard him swallow, and the youth dared think for a moment that perhaps he would stay, but it seemed his dreams, too, were lies, because soon after the Investigator was walking into the hall.

Farley stood there a moment, numb. Then he laughed. Laughed and laughed, holding his sides as though hysterical as he sunk into the couch with a chuckled:

"Oh why do we with wisdom bother?

Fools will always walk to slaughter!"

Morrigan stared at him, watched as he drowned himself in his petty faux mirth and flattery, and her fists clenched tighter and tighter until she couldn't stand it any longer. In one, two steps she was at the couch, and her hand struck Farley's cheek so hard his head spun even as his jaw fell in stunned silence.

"Listen, you damnable brat," she rumbled like thunder, nostrils flaring. "Those who build their walls too high are often crushed by them. When yours do I won't stay to clean up the mess, so you'd best start rethinking those towers of insufferable delusions you keep building."

She stormed into the kitchen, so she didn't see.

But Richarda Farley went white as a sheet.

And but two miles from the youth's house, Inspector Ulisse was ambushed in an ally, pinned from behind and stabbed by the poignant sight of the Quatronne family insignia dangling on a chain before his broken features.

"No, God," he managed to breathe as the world went black.

But by then it was too late for prayers.

***

The assassin within Investigator Ulisse was poised in the center of an underground chamber secreted beneath the Ghileswick Mariner's bank. His dissimulated features hadn't changed despite their surroundings, and his arms were crossed over his broad chest in an expression that admitted no fault for the relocation of his target, Desi Consentio. He had removed the deerstalker and great cloak, but his faithful pistol dangled from the holster at his side.

The seven top officials of the Quatronne family didn't seem to approve of his choice of weapons, but neither could they deny that he was their most reliable emissary. They were dressed, typically, in an array of morning suits and fanciful hats, many with signature rings on their fingers that cost more than an Investigator made in his prime. Said rings tapped idly at the round mahogany table circling the speaker— Ulisse, in this case— and their faces were in the shadows. Yet another gimmick belonging to the various mind-games they used to keep their delegates in submission.

Since the proud 'families' of Illum had grown into crime rings dissolution and cutthroat politics were a growing threat; honor was a joke, group unity was upheld by fear, not principles. But of course, none of this mattered to the assassin they'd crafted. He was a perfect tool, fashioned of their own hands, by their own blood, sweat, and tears. From the time he was born they had indoctrinated him to his purpose. They made sure he knew that it was what he was bred for, what God or perhaps his prophet Rue himself had intended that the dark, frightening little boy with his too-sharp wit should become.

And so he had.

His lip twitched, but the light bearing down on him from above was too blinding for any of them to see. Apparently they had located the newest haven for the unfortunate Desi Consentio, and they were briefing Ulisse on how he was to go about executing the derelict.

They had already gone through the pleasantries: the stern 'don't fail us again' and his polite remark that it was an honor to finally be brought before the heads of the family after all his years of service. Now... now they were getting nitty-gritty, instructing him on how he should enter the Roanokan Center for Trade and Commerce, how he should leave a pointed letter there to warn other partners in the business of extortion not to make the same mistake. He listened attentively— when he did a job he took pride not just in doing it right, but in doing it perfectly.

"Any questions?" the head of the table, the Quatronne family boss, asked unnecessarily. Everyone seated knew that Ulisse Quatronne never needed to be told anything twice; his curt nod was just a seal on the paperwork, so to speak. Though, of course, his audience with them was not over, he thought to himself, and he barely suppressed his exultant grin. It seemed like a divine blessing indeed when the boss, pleased with his weapon's acquiescence, asked:

"Tell me, Ulisse. Have you found out a way to rid yourself of that cumbersome alter ego of yours? I know you insisted it could prove useful, but you could playact the role of Investigator just as well."

The urge to grin had been unbearable before, but the assassin was a man of discipline. His smile crept over his features gradually, exposing his gleaming white teeth one by one, sending an inexplicable shiver down more than one of the hardened villains' spines at that table.

"I'm sorry, boss," he said, with careful, solemn deliberation. "I don't think I can be rid of him. We're the same person, you see."

Seven guns were drawn, seven skilled hands aimed to shoot. But they had made Ulisse into a monster, and there wasn't a single man who fired before one, perfectly aimed bullet drilled through their chest and they topped to the ground. There were seven shots, all from the assassin's, the Investigator's pistol, and seven souls fled to hell from the demon they had created.

The demon...

"Your problem," Ulisse found himself saying to no one in particular as the flavor of that word demon in his mind made his stomach twist, made him sick, "Is that you were too willing to believe that humans could be good or evil. There's no such thing in man. And if there was, I was too clever for it. I was so clever that none of you paranoid bastards guessed, not even when I first started playing the game for my father. And now you're dead. And it's not good. But it's lawful."

Strange that this, his obsession, his ultimate offering to the holy precepts of morality and order wasn't as fulfilling as he'd imagined. But then, he hadn't finished yet. There was yet one more sinner facing execution, and fortunately Ulisse had the authority to condemn him.

The Investigator didn't go back out through the door he'd come in; that way he'd be shot down by the Quatronne family's mongrels. He moved toward the 'secret entrance' behind the boss's chair. The sliding, camouflage door was a centimeter or two from lining up perfectly with the crevice behind— one of many mistakes his victims had made that day. Idly, he wondered if it would be the Gianni family that inherited the Quatronnes' territory and the criminal organization known as the Derci. The womanizers were little better, but they did have some standards, and one of them was to benefit the people at large whenever it didn't interfere with their objectives. They were the lesser of two evils. The lighter of two, very dark shades of gray.

Ulisse emerged in Ghileswick to find it sighing with a light drizzle, its stony cheek and the streets he had worn smooth with his soft leather boots wet as though with tears farewell.

On a whim, the assassin removed his boots and his stockings, throwing them over his shoulder as he felt the slick cobblestones beneath his pale toes. He'd likely cut himself on someone's discarded rubbish. He didn't care. He ambled leisurely toward Hangman's Yard and smiled as his feet squelched through cool puddles of mud, as he felt all those sensations he'd always been too reserved to appreciate. Ghileswick rained on him in bittersweet acknowledgment, and he loved the city all the more for it. It seemed too soon that he drew near to his destination. It seemed too soon that he had to face the wan, androgynous figure hanging at the gates, waiting for him.

"I knew you were the same all along," Risk said as he approached.

The Inspector's smile widened, and he nodded. "You always knew me best."

For once, Farley was frowning; his smooth features wrinkled into an accusatory mien. "You're not a judge, Ulisse," he said with some strain. "Only an investigator."

"I know," Ulisse confessed. "But I think I'm qualified for this."

"You're not," Farely told him, flatly.

"Always so presumptuous," the Investigator sighed. "But why argue? This isn't what I wanted to leave you doing, my friend." He reached forward, pulling the wriggling youth into his embrace.

"You can't do this," Risk yowled as he struggled to free himself. "Hell, you don't even have to go to prison. We're smart. We could pin the murder on the Quatronnes— it isn't as though you left them alive to protest."

Ulisse shook his head, gently. "Besides being illegal and wrong, what would that make me but a hypocrite— more of one, anyway? Please don't fight with me anymore, Risk." He squeezed the youth. "Do try to listen to Miss Coombes. She could teach you a lot, and you won't keep your boyish figure forever," he said, his hand sliding up to cover Farley's heart, his breast. The youth moved to protest, but cut off as Ulisse kissed first one cheek, and then the other.

"Take care, my little liar," he whispered as he turned to leave, but Risk was still touching his fingers gingerly to the cheeks the Investigator had graced with the Illumni greeting of friendship. Or perhaps he'd meant it the Roanokan way; Farley was too buried in his own denial to know at that point. Instead his mind fixed on the one truth he did possess, and he flushed with rage.

Ulisse was going to die...

"I hate you!" Risk cried at the Investigator's back. "I hate you and Miss Coombes and all your stupid, foolish honesty! People like you— you should be happy! You should love yourselves for being so genuine— and you go and kill yourselves to prove your virtue? What the hell is that, then?! Will your integrity never be satisfied? Can't you idiots see that your truth is that you're fine! If anyone should go and hang themselves it's— I could never be like you, damn it! And I— I don't need your truth anyway! Why did I ever—?!"

Risk punched the iron gates to the prison yard while Ulisse stopped, twisting to stare in amazement at the hot tears streaming down the youth's face.

"I hate you!" Farley sobbed again, covering his face because he didn't want the Investigator to see. "I hate you so much!"

"Risk," Ulisse said, pleadingly. "Stop."

But Farley continued to weep; the rusty locks had crumbled, the soul peering out through his eyes had shattered and spilled forth. He was in pain. He, the fool, had listened to Morrigan and come, and now he would die of grief beneath the Investigator's noose. He couldn't do this anymore, he thought as he bawled, sinking to the ground.

"Risk," Ulisse wheezed. He didn't want to watch this anymore, yet he was transfixed.

"I hate you!" Farely cried a third time, holding his stomach, crying so hard he wretched.

"Richarda!" the Investigator shouted at last.

The youth blinked, swallowing.

"Calm down," Ulisse begged as the poet hiccuped compulsively. His nose was running, his face a ruddy, heart-wrenching mess. The Investigator felt his hands shaking, his heart racing as he came to a very important realization.

I hate you, his precious little liar was screaming. I hate you...

"No," the youth choked at last. "I— I won't calm down."

"Why?!"

"I don't know!" Risk buried his head in his knees, sobbing harder.

"Hey..." Ulisse murmured as he somehow, miraculously returned to the youth's side, as he knelt down beside him. "Richarda."

"Stop calling me that!"

"This is important," he scowled, taking her shoulders. "Listen to me. Just—!" the youth squirmed. "I—!" The investigator was kicked for his troubles. "Richarda!"

"I said to stop it!" Farley shouted, glaring at him.

"Then listen!" he ordered the youth. "I— remember the night I told you I love you?"

"I don't remember," Risk insisted venomously. "Was it you or the assassin?!"

"Damn it grow up just a minute!" the Investigator demanded, desperately. "Risk I won't go to the noose. I'd— I'd live through anything if you'll just promise me something."

Farley's eyes widened; he seemed mute, shaking his head feverishly as though imploring the Investigator not to say it. 'No,' he was mouthing, but he'd lost his voice.

"Promise me you'll stop doing this to yourself," the Investigator continued. "Promise me you'll stop living this way."

Farley looked as though he'd just been shot. "I—," he squeaked. "I promise."

"Promise me honestly!" Ulisse beseeched him. "You know I can tell when you're lying!"

Beneath the Investigator's hands the youth was trembling, even jerking spasmodically when he hiccupped. "I can't. You— you know I can't."

Ulisse grimaced, rising. "And I can't let someone like me live with my sins."

He said this, and yet his heart was breaking over the apprentice he'd thought so strong, the apprentice he'd thought would be okay. Was the greater punishment to watch this, or hang, he wondered?

Still, Farely wasn't the only one who was good at lying. The Investigator turned back toward the gallows, and at sight of his determined back stooped once more with the weight of both their flaws, Farley seized his wrist.

"Please," he whispered. "Please no."

"I can't," Ulisse echoed in Farely's ears, calmly. It was only the truth. If he was of no use to him— to her, if his very life wasn't enough to help her, then he didn't think he could see the point, anymore.

"Don't do that!" Farely shouted.

Ulisse walked, tearing himself from the youth's grasp.

"Stop, damn it!" Risk cried.

The Investigator plowed through, inexorable.

"I told you why I'm like this!" Farely said, wrenching himself forward as he tried to catch up with his friend, whom was inserting his key to the prison's yard. "I told you— I trusted you with that! How haven't I been honest to you?! What do you want of me?! Do you want me to wear dresses? Do you want me to tell everyone I'm a defiled heiress whose father cast her out?! Do you want me to state the obvious?! Is that it?!"

"No," the Investigator said. "Something much more important than that." He had pulled the gate open, and he cast one last, solemn glance back at his beloved, at her suffering. Risk's heart stopped. Once Ulisse had passed through that gate, he could not be recalled, he would be beyond salvation.

"What do you want?" Risk whispered, though he knew and had already confessed he couldn't give it.

"Look at yourself," Ulisse murmured, haplessly. "For just one minute, look at yourself, honestly."

"I—." Farley held himself, backing away. "I have. I just didn't see what you wanted." He was stalling. Ulisse knew it. Because Risk never saw anything unless it was through that cracked and filthy lens his father had given him. Because Risk only stared into mirrors, never into pools, never down at himself. And for all the time the Investigator had known him, for all the joy the youth had given him, for all the love he truly thought they shared, his bloodstained hands had been of no avail in what his precious little liar needed most.

He began to walk through the gates.

He ran into a short, decidedly cross little woman, with a scowl so deep he thought at first she must be scarred as she jabbed him in the stomach with her pistol.

"What. Do you think. You're doing?" Morrigan demanded.

Ulisse gawked. Behind him, Farley was doing the same.

"I leave the two of you alone for ten marks," she said, brandishing the weapon, forcing Ulisse to retreat until finally he ran into the tear-stained Risk. "And suddenly one of you is hanging themselves and the other's having a fit of hysteria!"

"W—where in the hell did you get that gun?!" Farley finally managed to ask. He quickly regretted it as the barrel was directed at him.

"What woman in hell doesn't own a gun when they live by themselves?!" demanded Morrigan as though it were the most natural thing in the world. "More importantly, why haven't you carted Ulisse's ass home, young lady?!"

Risk colored at the honest title. "I— what did it look like I was doing?!"

"A whole lot of whining, that's what. And you," Morrigan rounded back on Ulisse, proceeding to poke him anew with the pistol. "Suicide is against the precious law you keep going on about, if I'm not mistaken. And what kind of man reduces a girl to such tears, hmm?!"

"That's—." Ulisse began.

"Oooooohhhhh no!" the school teacher chastised. "None of that! No more platitudes from either of you. Risk, your lover's a man with depreciated self-worth who has a hero complex. Ulisse, Risk is a liar, she will be a liar for as long as she wants to be, and the man never changes the woman. Have I made myself clear?"

"No!" Farley said, regaining his fire. "First of all, this is not the time for you to start referring to me as a woman; second, who invited you you old crow, and third—!"

Staring at the barrel of the pistol, Ulisse laid his hand on Risk's shoulder.

"Perhaps..." he suggested, "This is an argument for another time."

"Damn straight it is," Morrigan scowled. "Now both of you are coming back to the house, and we are all going to sleep."

And with that, she began stomping ahead, leaving the scolded lovers baffled in her wake, but not before she'd added, with a significant look at the two of them:

"In separate beds."

Ulisse and Farley stared at each other, wondering what it was precisely that had just happened, sobering once more.

"You do have a hero complex..." Risk said, slowly.

"And I suppose if I stick around I'll have a much better chance of saving you than if I try to rush it all at once," he said in jest, blushing.

"Were you really going to... to hang yourself?"

"Yes. Were you really trying to say that you loved me, while you were screaming all that?"

"...yes."

"That's not a lie?"

"You tell me."

"I think I'll let Miss Coombes do the translating, from now on."

"Indeed..." They drew a little closer to one another.

"Perhaps she's right. Some sleep would help us... think more clearly," Ulisse coughed.

Risk nodded.

And with that the man that was two men and the woman who was too many things to name both took each other's hand, and they followed a teacher who was very much herself indeed, reflecting that it would be a long time indeed before any of them understood what they should have felt that night.

Sufficient Unto the Day

A figure from the lost generation, but decades too late,

winds up the street in tendered, forceful apathy.

It is hard to tell, whether this hollowed ghost walking

on hallowed ground is laughing or crying—

either way, it's been drowned by the screeching of the bellows

and the muting veils of cinders and ash.

Yet watch how our figure's eyes narrow lovingly at the flakes

of backbreaking sable snow, of embers shoveled,

of a father's sweating back, thin and scarred,

rippling in grotesque time to the spitting of those chimneys— blackest chimneys!

Only the industrialist knows of prayer, of feeding the swine on the hill

in barest hopes they'll nuzzle a truffle or two down, that your

children can sit and imbibe the sweet Elysium, suckle on the milk

of Wisdom the squirming piglets know instead of breaking their stems

forcing their blossoms through the tarmac.

Our figure tears at this, its careening riance echoing through the city.

Oh dearest cynic, knowing not the irony of temperance and

drunken thoughts— a bacchanal of hopeless ennui!

You learned battle from a soldier who didn't want to teach,

but knew that war comes to us all, and that anyway

you love guns and daggers and sin without ever putting any to use

because they're this absolute where all bleed equal.

Except maybe— maybe it's true that people in the tenements—

they bleed just a little— just a smidgen!—

darker.

A Story

I'd read plenty of books in my quest to figure out what was wrong with me, so I was pretty sure I wasn't imagining it when I realized something might be wrong with Miss H— the librarian. She wasn't very talkative; she spent most of her time curled in the chair behind her desk, literally curled, with her knees drawn up to her chest and a book balanced on top of them. Her limp hair was grey but she had that kinda moony look adults never have, so I couldn't tell what age she might be. It didn't matter anyway. I was young. For all I knew she could have lived there, in that library, forever.

I heard some ladies— the same pitying ones that tell me no child should have a library for a babysitter— I heard them call Miss H— a state monument. They said the trustees on the board couldn't bear to see the old thing torn down; her whole life was this place, she didn't go anywhere else, and she was efficacious to the task so it was fine. Well, they didn't say efficacious. Nobody but Miss H— and I used words like efficacious, and like I said, Miss H— didn't use many words at all.

I watched her a lot when I wasn't reading. I know I'm much more intelligent than most the people I see on the street, but I have the attention span of an inebriated squirrel, so I'd glance up a lot. And she'd turn those pages hungrily, then stare with rapt intent at the ceiling, then read some more. Every day the same. Except that wasn't all. No... she was real furtive about it, but one day I caught her. She looked at me. She'd noticed me.

This might not seem significant to you. All I can say is that she was a mystery. I hungered to explore, for all that I was also a coward. I thought up lots of things to say to people, measured out how much of my lexicon I should us so as to impress and not scare them. I studied them. But I never actually got around to talking to anybody. Not since I'd given up on talking to Mom. I was deathly afraid Miss H— would disappoint me, or more that I'd disappoint her. The very thought of it made me squirm because she just had that air about her. People hustled past her like they did me.

In spite of all that she'd looked at me, though, and that was just enough to get me to leave my seat wedged between the bookshelves and pad over the abused carpet toward her.

She was buried in her novel again. She didn't notice me. Somehow I was sure she was doing it on purpose.

I was afraid I'd wasted my courage, because suddenly I couldn't pry my tongue loose and my chest constricted with that augury of tears I never could stand in myself. That's how young I was. I was going to cry because it felt so unfair, I could have sworn her eyes beckoned me, and yet there she sat in studied nonobserv—.

Buried as I was in self-pity I jumped when she spoke.

"I was wondering what you were thinking," I heard that sapient, centuries worn voice she's got say like dust breathing over rustling, forgotten pages of lore.

"Before you looked at me, Ma'am?" Ma'am was what they said in stories. I didn't know no-one said it anymore.

She nodded, though her pupils didn't lift from the text.

"I was pondering why they always tell us we have to start out with good grades and lots of sacrifices but the heroes in stories don't start out doing much at all— just sitting staring at grass and such and thinking— and people don't like it much when I do it. And anyway, history says all the bad things just happen over and over again and one hero's another's villain and all the heroes do bad things anyway, so what do we need them for to begin with? I— um..." I willed my lips to stop flapping. I'm always so chattery, so superfluous when I'm nervous. All I was doing was being a fool again— especially since it was just this kind of talk my Mom didn't like. If thinkers were heroes and heroes did bad things, I supposed it made sense. But then, that was awfully depressing, and I didn't think I was hero material anyway, which was more depressing still.

"Those are some long-winded thoughts," Miss H— replied tonelessly. "Anyone ever tell you to stop them?"

"I can't, Ma'am."

"...That's a problem, isn't it?" Her eyes had stopped darting over the pages on her knees.

I didn't know what to say. I was afraid I'd answer wrong and lose everything. But she didn't talk again and even when I muttered a goodbye she didn't respond, appeared to be in a daze, so I left that day and I really did cry on my way home.

I cried because I was a child and I shouldn't have to deal with bittersweet encounters like that yet.

***

There was this thing about being me I just couldn't seem to get over. The thing where I couldn't stop myself. I had to question everything a googleplex of times and I never really believed in it and even when I did I saw it all skewed, like. It happened to me all the time. My Mum called it creative at first. Then she called it scary.

On the days I gave myself headaches I was inclined to agree.

The next day, for example. I was on my way to the library, perusing the books I'd carried home the night before. One was real famous and typical like stories of that sort— prettily painted with loves and forevers and impossibles. The other was kinda dusty and decrepit, a rambling bit of cleverness and despair and new ideas. Nobody liked to hear those much, because nobody had checked it out since before I was born, or so said the card in back of it.

I hugged it to my chest, aching with a kindred spirit as I lusted for the other, hopeful friend waiting across the dilapidated street. I passed the corner gas station where I would go to eat my shopping bag of sandwiches and tiptoed to the park out back of the library where parents always promised to take their kids if they'll just, please, pick a book instead of a movie. I didn't like the place. It had high play sets and loud noises. So I bowed my head and scuttled across it like a mouse just trying to survive long enough to make it to its cozy little hole across the linoleum.

Miss H— was there at the desk. Where else would she be? I handed her my books solemnly and, still reading, she scanned them mechanically into the computer with that strange gun I wince to see pointed at my beloved companions.

I lingered there awkwardly, I guess, praying that she'd look at me again and swearing to myself I'd not screw it up this time. She didn't. My little heart that my doctor says has a murmur, and which I was sorry to hear didn't mean Mom would have to pay me any extra attention, sank. I shuffled to my usual seat.

There, I itched my greasy hair, wondering if I smelled. I'd been to scared to shower for a day or two since Mom's last boyfriend came. I couldn't reach the lock on the bathroom door and I was always afraid someone would walk in on me. I only bathed when the fear that my filth would offend one of the nosier ladies at the library and they'd adopt me and trap me forever in a shower supplanted the fear of being walked in on. You could get a lot of fears, if you thought about it enough. And I did.

Idly, I flipped at a picture book and conjured imaginary meetings with Miss H—. She was a little crazy like the wise men in books, the ones nobody visits up on their hills unless they need something. I fancied her showing me a secret door that led to the library's dark underbelly— a darker monster would lie in wait there, guarding all the books about immortality. Or maybe she'd just whisper one little spell in my ear, a spell to make somebody, anybody, love me. Or maybe she'd steal me away and try to sacrifice me for the good of the world on a stone altar. The knife she used wouldn't hurt much because it was made of justifications— of justice.

I could spend whole days doing that— making up stories, things to look forward to, reasons to live. Reasons to live were the hardest things to imagine, chiefly because I don't think they exist. If you're special you make one up. Everybody else just kind of muddles along. It used to be why I thought I was important, because I'd make up hundreds of reasons to exist, all just crazy enough to work. But I couldn't stick with any of them, so I suppose it was just useless. All it did was make me feel a little better about things.

I risked a glance up at Miss H—. I had problems sticking with things, and the feeling would probably pass eventually, but I'd never wanted anything half so bad as I did a friend. It was a naïve thought. I may have been prematurely disillusioned, but I was still a child. And I was convinced suddenly that if I didn't do something right then I'd be alone forever, drifting at the end through a lonely corner of non-existence.

A dire impetus rose in me, and I rushed— not up to the desk, but behind it.

"Ma'am!" I blurted with a fearful blush. "Ma'am I'm sorry for my audacity but I wanted to tell you the story I made up for you!"

It was then that I saw the first expression I thought Miss H— must've made in years. She blinked.

"I think you must be some kind of wise old mentor," I said in a hurry. "I think you must've been born just like that— with lots of ancient, wise thoughts to bestow on people— but you can't talk much or they'll all go to the wrong people on accident."

She gazed at me. I realized her eyes weren't anything magical under the overgrown bangs, just really tired and really brown, and I thought that made her an awfully unique wise-woman. I was afraid she'd never reply though, that maybe there weren't any secrets made just for me after all. I wasn't yet old enough to realize another's discomfort when I saw it.

Then, slowly, she responded. Her lips parted, easing ever so slightly from their droop to form about the softest question: "Is that my story?"

"It's the one I made for you."

She hugged her knees, rested her chin on them and peered owlishly down at me. "I... like yours best, I think."

Then, gesturing at the empty little corner behind the desk, the one next to the door to her quarters and speaking with maundering kindness: "Do you want to read back here? People don't look back here much."

I felt my whole not-freckled, not-scarred, not-very-story-worthy-at-all face stretch into a grin. I might have kissed her cheek if I'd been at all convinced she was of this world or mine.

Either way, stowed in our hidden corner with nothing in the world but a novel and my thoughts to bother me, I felt the safest I ever had.

I almost felt that all was well.

***

I remember wishing it could last forever. I loved it there, in that sheltered space, sharing Miss H—'s company in silent appreciation. But people like us, the thinkers, their lives are always changing. And most of the time it's our own fault. Most of the time it's curiosity that does it. I'd like to taste of this disease, complacency, that everybody talks about. I hear it feels good.

Miss H— and I naturally didn't interact much. I don't know who was more afraid of whom, but I do know it was usually me that spoke when it did happen. And that meant that when she opened her mouth it was something almost holy in significance to me.

"I think you should be in school," she said one day.

"It's summer," I reminded her, wondering that the heat billowing in angry droves around us didn't touch her, but then, she was wearing a turtle neck and a world away at that. "'Sides. School's nothing special." Just a bunch of boring, trivial tasks and teachers wondering why a good kid like me with perfect grades wouldn't show a little more initiative. To this day I don't know what definition of 'initiative' they operated under. I was plenty self-motivated; everybody else got help with their homework, but not me. I'd learned not to need it.

"Oh," Miss H— said, and she turned a page of the novel she was reading.

It was then that I noted the splotches of color that stained her veined hands and fingers. I regarded them surreptitiously all day, half hoping she would notice and explain. She didn't, though, and I had a pernicious combination of shyness and inquisitiveness that made me just sit there, dying to know. I would rather have sent myself to the grave with the bleeding of an unanswered question than offend the only person in the whole world I had just then.

Nevertheless, I had to investigate. The next few days tormented me without any leads— I suppose part of it was the old cynicism in me. The last words I ever heard my Dad say before Mom took me were that the whole world has an agenda and that I'd better get one too. I tried to tell myself it was just because he was bitter with the courts for believing Mom loved me just 'cause she said so and she was a woman. But when he'd said it it had sounded like an awfully old truth in his heart. It didn't help that I had a mind that wouldn't take anything at face value. I wasn't even sure that I'd have trusted him if he finally won and the courts let him have me.

I wasn't even sure he was trying anymore. Maybe he'd started just paying the checks Mom wanted so bad every month. Maybe he'd forgotten how special he told me I was, once, after listening to me for a while.

But I was sure going to try and trust Miss H—, which was why I ended up making the effort to get to know her better. When you think too much you get to caring too much about people, too. That's why you avoid them, and that's why you stop blaming them for misunderstanding.

I thought all that while I hid under the library's table at closing time, while I watched people shuffle out. There was a boy with a pug nose and flab who checked out a real old book I liked, and I smiled because one of my friends was being read. His mother looked patient, too; I might've envied him bitterly if my head wasn't full of excitement for my secret mission, if I wasn't terrified. My brain had already conjured all kinds of punishments for my transgressions ranging from seraphs raining fire to the utter dissolution of my character.

These concerns slid from my mind when Miss H— stirred, however. I had to restrain a gasp when, jerkily and with a grimace, she lifted herself from her chair. It was an act the equivalent of Yggdrasil uprooting itself and walking away from the seat of existence. That chair was her throne. I'd never known her outside it, and the merest act of her crossing to the gate to her quarters transformed my tiny act of delinquency into an adventure.

She opened the door and went in. Simply. I found myself feeling cheated that there hadn't been an incantation required, no secret compartment to speak of.

But then I was faced with a different dilemma I should have come to grips with ages before I ever followed through with my schemes. I wanted a peek at Miss H—'s secrets, yet they were all behind that door. If I opened it she would know what I'd done.

Then I remembered how far I'd come already. To a degree, I suppose I was swelled with pride at my own bravery, for staying in a grown-up land. I almost didn't realize I was crawling out from under the table, my heart beating against my ribs in time to my feet padding timorously over the carpet.

Behind the desk I went. Past the corner Miss H— had given me, and if I weren't but a child maybe it would have given me a guilty pang. Parents should be gentle with their children— everything we do is a mix of curiosity, confusion, entitlement, and the defiance they seem to fancy everything to be.

So yes. I laid my hand on the portal to Miss H—'s secret gardens and a thrill galvanized me. I twisted the knob to that door, bursting headlong through it.

Miss H— might have screamed, if only she wasn't so astonished. I'll never forget how wide those bruised eyes of hers got— so wide I could see them as perfect white circles, the pupils all small and quivering inside as though begging to escape.

Callously curious creature that I was, I let the sight of what adorned her room steal my attention. There were paintings. Dozens of paintings, scary but beautiful, and they told stories, and I knew those stories were hers because you always spill your soul into stuff like that— if you don't you're not doing it right. Most all of it was black, but it was as though that shade were a beam of darkness filtered through a prism. A scintillating play of colors fluttered just below its sable surface, and it was into those colors that images— of stares that burned and sound that deafened— were carved. My mouth must have dropped open at those horrific and captivating scenes. Only the things that should chill you to the bone as a child do, and those paintings were disturbing but sacred, those purest reflections of Miss H—'s heart.

"Out!" I almost didn't hear the first shriek I was so engrossed, but then Miss H— was scrabbling to her feet, spreading her baggy skeleton out to try and hide as much of the canvas as she could. "Out!" she cried again, frantic and pained, and I cringed from her.

"W—why?!" I gasped. "They're beautiful!"

"You have no right!" she insisted. "No right to be in here!"

That hurt, and tears welled in my eyes. "But they're so lovely; why would you keep them in here?! You could sell them, or display them, or—!"

"No!" She seemed horrified by the idea. "No they're my only joy— mine!"

"But they'd make other people happy too!" I pressed, angry now because it hurt that I wasn't a joy, too, and all children are selfish that way. "What's the point if no-one sees them?!" What was my point, if even she couldn't hear me?

"I— They make me happy," she repeated, pleading inconsolably, and I saw her gaze dart across the room before she could think to retract it. I followed her eyes, felt my stomach twist at sight of what I faced.

It was a slashed canvas, but somehow I knew that she hadn't done it. It radiated the bitter air of a cruel and frightened monster. Suddenly I realized why she was so terrified.

"This is all I have that's worth anything. This is all I have. Don't judge it. Don't hate it. Its the only part of me I can stand. Don't..."

I started really crying then, when with those silent pleas ringing in my conscience I turned to Miss H—'s crumpled form on the floor. Her knees were all drawn up to her chest and she lay her face in them, weeping. I cried for the same reasons we always cry, because it wasn't fair. 'They' judged us, they tore us apart, they cowed us. And instead of fixing it, instead of giving them the one thing that might be able to help them understand, we ducked and clutched it frantically, selfishly, to our breasts. It was such a dreadful cycle, so hard and agonizing and vicious.

"Miss H—" I croaked, hoping to drown out my thoughts.

"Shut up!" she cried, clamping her hands over her ears, "Shut up and leave me alone!"

My lip quivered, and my feet moved to carry me away. I almost left her there in that ruinous heap; already I stood without the door, primed to flee. But something stopped me. I couldn't move my legs. I couldn't because she was my friend, my only friend, and that was the most precious thing in the world to me.

So I turned back and I knew what I had to do even though I hated it, even though I was trembling with fear. It was to be the hardest thing I'd ever tried. It was to be the most important decision of my young life.

Slowly, I crossed the floor to sit down next to Miss H— and I said, very quietly, almost in a whisper:

"No, Ma'am. You see, I have a story to tell you, and I— I'd like it awfully well if you'd just listen. You don't have to like it. You can hate it if you want. But please listen, because it's all I have..."

She stared.

I forced myself to smile.

And with that I began.

An Aged Love

Why do others compare their love to fire

When mine like dwindling embers glows—

Only rarely tasting of their God, desire—

And in tenderest mercy only shows.

For them a fluttering lash would suffice

And sweet longing for kisses and tributes of flesh,

Yet for us a wry smile, forgiving our vice,

And a burden twice shouldered our passions addressed.

So forgive me darling if I sing not of praise

For your childish whims and ignorance,

Because the rose tinted glasses I set all ablaze;

Your confessions, alas, were sweeter incense.

Let us hope that the ring we've held onto so long

Will, as youth's fervent dreams, prove just as strong.

The Following is a preview of 'Coronach', a Sci-fi serial series. Read the rest at:

http://tatterdemalioncandle.deviantart.com/

Radical

Hindsight is undeservedly notorious. The historian is derided for it, and the simple minds that commit that slander would also have us believe that it brings only regret.

The truth, of course, is that hindsight is the most beatific of humor. It brings with it the kind of gut-wrenching laughter that makes tears of joy and pain glide in harmony down rose-pink cheeks.

This is true particularly with ideas. The speculation of one generation is the amusement of the next. Doomsday predictions aside, this isn't because the projections that men make are a far from the truth, from their destinies. In reality, such predictions are usually chillingly accurate. It's the little ironies that get people.

It was the little ironies that got Cinder that day, trailing as she so often did behind the rustling fabric of her friend's canary coat and black hakama. Hakama, as in the ancient pleated trousers they wore in Japan. It was the year 3005, and men and women alike were back to the antiquated, if now shimmering, styles of medieval times. Kolkander, the northernmost of Europa's nations, was a tad frigid in the winter, and somehow the most efficient way of crafting insulated clothing was to style it after traditional kimonos. All those new materials sewn into a worn design, new wine in old bottles... Ironies like that were the ones on Cinder's mind.

She and her friend Yura were strolling through what Yura called the ugly, patchwork streets of Cosm. There urban advancement and brittle, hardy weeds did battle, stitches of cheap and hastily erected old tech attempting to sew them together.

It was only natural that in the fifth largest city on planet Europa (it may have been an oceanic moon, but for as long as her professors weren't listening it was where she lived) the inner streets would be too poor to contrive better. But the fact that steel and concrete, once the proud monuments of industrialization, had faded to the disparagement with which adobe huts and dirt were once regarded amused Cinder. That was, after all, another irony. Another hindsight.

Man told himself his every discovery was the gateway to a 'golden age', but all were mere levies raised and dissembled to direct the flow of progress. Steel? Try plastics. Plastics? Try nanofibres. Perspective was ever changing.

Then, Cinder reflected, pushing a pair of goggles up her nose against the harsh wind as she and Yura passed a relic from the city's earliest days— sometimes progress branched off in trickling streams, too. Sometimes those streams dwindled, then vanished altogether.

Across the faintly glowing, fiber-optic walkway she strolled was a platform like an egg-shaped cradle next to two, giant loops. Their form was reminiscent the rings circus tigers would have leapt through in times gone by, but the truth was a tad less aged, if just as romantic.

The assemblage was the remains of a time machine—the last vestige of Cosm's original, tiny scientific community before it had radiated out and left its center to a pulsing mass of commerce, emigrants, and vagrants.

The loops were the two ends of a worm hole that a ship was to propel endlessly through at near the speed of light, launching it into the future where it would bring the entrance to another wormhole whose end used to be the egg-shaped cradle.

They'd done it. They'd travelled to the future and then the past only to discover that Novikov's self-consistency principle was right all along—you couldn't change the outcome. Or, you mostly couldn't. Little things changed, on rare occasion. There was individual willpower. But if you did or didn't do something someone else was going to restore the balance, guaranteed.

It was complicated. And that was beside the point. The real point was the futility of all the physicists' effort; convoluted or not it was another entry in Cinder's book of ironies.

Though... it was significant, the complexity of it all. The truth of the matter was that the whole world was complicated, and somewhere along the line people had just stopped worrying about it.

She and Yura certainly weren't worrying about it—or, at least, Yura wasn't as they pressed on. And should she have? Their health monitors were pulsing green over their hearts, the tiny oval gleaming through their clothes as it streamed anonymous "all's-wells" back to the city's security networks. They were in no hurry. And everyone else was just the same. Certainly men and women—not of a brisk pace, mind you, but with a determined bent— were leaning a bit eagerly toward work. But it was always such when one had mouths to feed.

In Cinder's age, people weren't rushed anymore. Watches hardly existed. Haste had died when Earth stopped choking on greenhouse gases and diseases had been cured, stretching the hypothetical hourglass. Man still advanced, but at his leisure. Or, rather, with caution.

The clock had finally slowed. That was a third irony, a lighter one, and it raised Cinder's spirits before the last and darkest could descend upon her. It was, after all, through their generation's indolent mien that Cinder and Yura had enough time to visit their friend in the slums. That their guardians didn't scold them for doing so.

Overhead the sunshine from the Solar Reformatory was fading and the glow of celestial bodies were faint on the bluish horizon. How strange, that light and life were provided by convicts forced to labor on a space station thousands of miles away. Yet, queer or no, their refulgence glittered off streamlined bullet trolley cables overhead. Overhead... and underground, where the fiber-optic walkways and translucent cobblestones lent passersby a murky picture of what was underfoot.

The city was like every other on Europa, except that most were floating gardens, and Cosm was more a floating gyroscope. All of Kolkander looked to it for precedents in technology and infrastructure, but there was little green. Instead, its body was a series of metamorphasizing rings into which the city was tidily arranged. The innermost of those rings was the only solid one—another irony, seeing as business and poverty battled for it, immovable, beyond redemption. That core was surrounded, pointedly, by a ring of police, security, and public service offices. From there expanded more circles of buildings devoted to civilians, scientists, markets, and the outermost docks. Cinder spent a great deal of time watching the docks. It was there that Cosm's habit of removing and rearranging entire blocks of the city like an overgrown Rubik's cube became apparent. One minute a pier might be on the east side, and the next it might have been paddled over to the west face of the city for convenience's sake.

Cinder liked looking at pictures of the city from afar, too. It defied the human aesthetic, a garish protrusion from the glittering sea climbing up and up—teetering and functional. But was it stable? Presumably that was the reasoning behind the subways under her feet; they provided a base for the city. That, and they kept commuters off the streets. Cosm didn't believe in congestion. It would only complicate things.

And what with Cinder's last irony in place, things were twisted enough.

People didn't like complications—at least, people like Yura didn't. She was energetic, and she strode resolutely with her shoulders back beneath her warm haori. But she wanted to keep order, fit things to the laws and universe. For her, like most of Kolkander, the ebb and flow of theories was a fluid, acceptable deviation from that truth. Complexity was fine.

Contradictions and paradigm shifts, however...

That was where Rad and Cinder's final irony came in.

"I worry about you, you know," Yura spoke up matter-of-factly. She turned just so that Cinder caught a glimpse of her auburn ponytail and dazzling smile—a sheepish smile that apologized for all the inferiority it was bound to make you feel. What was worse, it wasn't arrogant, but assured. She didn't have to wear goggles. "I mean, most would feel like a third wheel, and you come just so my father won't worry."

Her concerns were unfounded. Based on Cinder's own lies. But naturally the shorter and more frazzled of the two didn't admit as much.

"Rad's my friend too, in a different and infinitely less appreciable way," she shrugged. "Come to think I really just tag along to make love to his lab."

The satisfaction Cinder derived from Yura's pout wasn't so much the jealousy most had of her gorgeous friend as the amusement of a tiny, frazzle-haired girl with a secret to make up for the fact that her parent's hadn't been able to afford having thicker eyelids biologically engineered onto their now be-goggled child.

"It's uncanny how good you are with his gadgets," Yura said.

Again, she wasn't aware Cinder had helped build them. But Cinder refrained from one of her eccentric, disorienting grins, in part out of restraint. The other part was that just then a twisted iron rod fell from a banister above, clattering through the quiet and drawing attention to the thinning streets. Rad's neighborhood was eerie enough—dilapidated, with hoardes of consumer incentive boards pulsing rather than glowing expectantly at passersby, as though aware the rag-tag civilians couldn't pay. Gone were the translucent walkways. In places the only light was that of the heart monitor over Cinder and Yura's breasts, its greenish blink seeming deathly pale under their kimonos.

This didn't bother Cinder. She knew of worse places in the solar system. What bothered her was the knowledge that she was drawing ever closer to Rad.

It wasn't that the boy was sinister. He wasn't the kind of scary that would hurt you... more the kind of scary where it happened by accident. The kind of scary that would forbid you to swat a fly then catch it sleepwalking and smother it in his palm.

Yura hadn't noticed yet, though, Cinder thought wryly. Yura frowned as they picked their way through the various engines, computers, and processors that littered Rad's "garden"— or "graveyard" as Cinder preferred to think of it. Yura turned the fringes of her yellow haori away from the grimy tiles and slick steel walls of the abandoned factory Rad called his "fort."

But Yura didn't fear him.

