Stitch, p.20
STITCH, page 20
“Quickly, Molly,” Vora's ghost said. She guided Molly to an open chest filled with hundreds of thin, glass vials. “Each of these is a different pheromone, a different chemical message for the Barbary Guard.” She pointed to one filled with pale green. “That one will calm the apes until they're all but asleep. Smash it. Let its scent fill the air.”
Molly threw the vial at the floor, and only moments after it shattered, the apes' blood-hungry howls fell silent, and their heavy-fisted pounding on the doors ceased.
With Hilde Conac as their prisoner, they stepped carefully out of the tower-top lab. The corridor outside was nearly full of narcotized apes that sat against the wall with their heads lolled forward on their barrel chests or lounged on their backs with their limbs splayed limp around them. Their great fists had fallen open, and their pale blue, leathery palms were as big as a man's head. Molly gripped one of their hands by its finger, lifted it from the floor, and let it fall. The ape's only reaction was to roll on its side and turn away from her. “Hurry,” Vora said, “the effect won't last forever.”
Through Molly, Vora's ghost guided them down the spiral stairs, and at the base of the tower they followed the high-arched, helio-lit corridors past placid Barbaries and fearful, hissing witches until they found the pearl-skinned dungeon doors. There were no locks, no keyholes, and the seam of the door was so fine that it was all but invisible.
Juan Chang gripped Hilde Conac's wrist, pried her fingers open, and pressed her reluctant hand to the door's bumpy pearl coating. When it recognized the Queen of the castle, it cracked open with a gusting rush of stale air. Stairs led down into the dim where there was only the cold, thin half-light of the same moon-glow paint Molly had seen inside the Rekki Maru.
The Stitchlifes they found in the dungeon's cells didn't respond when their doors opened. Vora guided Molly to Hala Zamis. The dethroned matriarch sat cross-legged on the barren floor, and her eyes were closed. “Is she dead?” Molly asked as she poked the old witch's cheek with her finger.
“She's suspended her thoughts,” Vora explained. “Brush your fingers over her wreath.” Molly did, and the lids of Hala Zamis's eyes sprung open. They were dull at first, but as Molly watched, fire lit and grew inside her. In seconds, the burning eyes set in the Stitchlife's skull turned their light on Molly.
“Has it been a hundred years already?” she asked.
“Come with us,” Molly said, “Corina awaits.”
Hala Zamis's wrinkles all grinned at once. “Don't forget Kitty Hawk,” she said.
Juan Chang's lieutenants carried Kitty Hawk and her crystal coffin on their shoulders like pall-bearers while the freed Stitchlifes followed in a procession behind her. Witches loyal to the castle cried out and cursed at the sight of the invaders, but once they saw Teddy Da, the legend now returned, they fell silent and withdrew.
As Molly led them from the inner walls to the gardens, the whip-vines that grew there heard their steps and lashed out. The poison-barbed plants snapped in the air, but they struck too slowly to catch the witch-sped, and Juan Chang hacked a path through them as they shrieked from unseen mouths with every slice of his blade.
Mei Corina guided Baba Yaga's bridge to the top of the outer wall. Before they crossed it, Teddy Da released the snarling Hilde Conac. “You're lucky he didn't gut you,” Hala Zamis said with a laugh. Hilde Conac stormed down the stairs and across the gardens cursing Hala Zamis and all her rebel witches. Hala Zamis looked up to the faces of the witches and novices that watched from tower widows everywhere and shouted, “Where Kitty Hawk goes, so goes the true Coral Castle!”
Chapter Three
The Return To the Haunted City
The pale-blue glow from the helio blooms caught in the crystal, and it looked like Kitty Hawk was illuminating it herself. When they brought her aboard Baba Yaga, the rose-blush light of dawn made her look almost alive, but her skin was so transparent that Molly imagined she saw the old woman's teeth through the skin of her cheek. For every wrinkle and vein Molly had seen on Pietra Fona's ancient face, the living death-mask of Kitty Hawk had three.
Her crystal was held fast with strong vines in the heart of Corina's lab, and the bear sat in front of her. Molly knew he heard her approach, but as she walked up behind him, his eyes remained fixed on his mother.
“You've been sitting here for weeks,” Molly said.
“The Stitchlifes don't mind,” he said without taking his eyes off the crystal. The rebel Stitchlifes they'd rescued from the Coral Castle's dungeons were all around them working their craft. They had been for weeks – since Baba Yaga had turned East to head home. “They like having me here,” he said, and as Teddy Da spoke, Hala Zamis approached and bent low to stroke his furry head.
“The bear is finally home,” Hala Zamis said. “He is with his mother and all who follow her oath for true.” She scratched Kitty Hawk's creature behind the ears before she smiled at Molly and returned to her work.
Since the three hundred, newly-sped Musketeers had awoken, the Stitchlifes spent all their time testing grains of Baba Yaga's sands. Molly heard them use the words 'assimilate' and 'rewrite' in the same breath as 'the city', and when Juan Chang told her what the words meant, the Stitchlifes began to make her uneasy.
“What will she think of me when she wakes?” the bear asked as he gazed up at his mother's ancient face. “I killed her.”
“Corina says the Stitchlifes won't wake Kitty Hawk until the new Coral Castle is 'secure'. Whatever that means.”
“It means danger lies ahead and they think she's safer in the crystal.”
“But couldn't Kitty Hawk help us?” Molly asked, “Why did we take her if we're not going to wake her?”
“I think I saw her heart beat in her chest. Hala Zamis said it only happens once a month.”
“I picked out a nice fish for you,” Molly said to Teddy Da. “It's one of the dawn-colored ones you like.”
“Where is it?” he asked without taking his eyes off his mother. When Molly looked, she was sure she saw The Witch's eyes move. “I can smell its scent on your hands,” he said.
“It's on top of the main tower in the shade. Come to the tower with me and eat it and we'll watch Juan Chang's army drill. They're getting much better. Please?”
Teddy Da followed Molly to the top of the tower and found the fish she'd picked out for him sitting in the shade of a parapet. While they wordlessly watched the Populists drill on Baba Yaga's bow deck, the bear sank his teeth into the fish's jewel-scaled side.
The Populists marched in formations to the commanding notes of a bugle and then practiced working together to attack in small groups with their sabers. “Juan Chang said he couldn't make three hundred men into expert fencers in the week since they woke up, but if they use their numbers like that, then I think they'll be good enough to fight the nobles.”
“Three hundred witch-sped blades,” she said. “That's more than any noble family has.”
Corina ascended the stairs to the tower's top with a spyglass in hand. When Molly had first met the Stitchlife, her skin had been so pale it was as if she only lived in moonlight. Now, after weeks atop Baba Yaga's tower, her young face was tanned with a hint of the weather-worn character that Juan Chang's face had. She brought the spyglass up and pointed it at the far-off, hazy Edge Of The World over Baba Yaga's bow.
The young witch beamed from ear to ear as she lowered the spyglass, handed it to Molly, and pointed to where she'd been looking. It was too far to see clearly with the naked eye, but through the spyglass, Molly saw how the horizon grew irregular where something split the sea and the sky. “Land,” she said. When Molly used the very tip of Baba Yaga to line her view up perfectly with their course, she saw a white dot shining like a beacon, like a single star set against rising coastal hills behind it. Molly knew what it was. “The Haunted City,” she said with a grin.
*****
Vargas Hale hated the automata city; its sands wouldn't bend to his will. What he needed was a Stitchlife, and there had been no response to the winged messenger he'd sent weeks ago demanding another one – a loyal one. Until the Coral Castle sent him a Stitchlife, the city and all of its witchy sands would mock him.
Being surrounded by its recalcitrant automata drove him deeper and deeper into a black fugue. He couldn't even live in the city's central spire where a leader should. Its doorless base refused to admit him. There were many houses in the city where he could stay, but Vargas Hale found them spartan and below his station. So did the nobles who'd come with him. Three days after the battle, after they'd been reenforced with another hundred-and-fifty of the Hale Guard, Vargas Hale sent almost all his noble blades back to the enclave with the bodies of their dead and kept only fair cousin Scilla for company. He should have gone with them, but the fact that he'd gained nothing from all his efforts and the deaths of his children drove him to stay until he had something to return home with in victory.
When Scilla found him brooding in the late afternoon sun at the side of the skull-top, her noble, bronze-skinned cheeks were flush with excitement. “It's returning,” she said.
“What is?” he asked.
“Mei Corina's polymorph castle. It's come back. As a ship. The Guardsmen on the pebbled beach spotted it a few minutes ago and sent a runner. I've seen it. It's off-shore, just outside the bay.”
Vargas Hale smiled for the first time since they'd taken the damn city.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“I need a Stitchlife to work her witchery and give me control over this forsaken city's automata. If I can't have that, then revenge on the rogue Stitchlife Corina will be at least minimally satisfying. Now, I'll have one or the other. Or both, perhaps. That's why I'm smiling, fair cousin.”
“Don't you think Corina plans to attack?” Scilla asked.
“Who knows what a damn Stitchlife is thinking,” he said. “Whatever it is, all you can be sure of is that they move for their own interests.”
“Should I form up the Guard to fight?”
“Defensive positions inside the walls. But tell Hassam to do it. He's their commander,” Vargas Hale said as he turned and walked away.
“Where are you going?” Scilla asked.
“To pay the Stitchlife Corina a visit.”
Minutes later, Vargas Hale had retrieved his helm, and while he sat in his tent, he soared above the city, the rolling hills, and the bay. He was glad he'd sent for his Thunderbird. Not just because riding its wings through the helm had been his only pleasure in weeks, but because he hoped that now it might give him what he wanted.
*****
The golden-lit city grew large before them in the late afternoon sun as Molly, Teddy Da, Corina, and Hala Zamis watched from Baba Yaga's central tower. “It's amazing,” Hala Zamis said. “So much automata. So much power. Can it all be converted to our use?”
“It's possible,” Corina replied. “I only had time to grow enough of the infectious black automata to take control of a tiny fraction of the city's walls. Given six months and a factory farm, I could grow enough to take control of the entire city.”
What she heard made Molly want to scream out that the city didn't belong to them, but Fin Singh's ghost brought his finger to his lips in a gesture that silenced her. “Knowing your feelings will not change their minds,” he said. “Allow them to believe your allegiance is only to them; you'll have a better chance of saving your city if your true feelings are hidden.” Molly realized devious Fin Singh was right so she wore a placid smile and expressed no opinion on the subject. Instead, her fingers played over the sheathed blade in her pocket. “Good girl,” Fin Singh's ghost said. “You're learning.”
Corina brought Baba Yaga to the mouth of the bay and stopped. “The bay's waters are shallow,” she said. “It's time to give Baba Yaga her long legs again. Just as soon as my red-cloaked lover has brought his army inside the shelter of the castle-keep's walls.”
Molly could see Juan Chang's red cloak among his men on the deck. They marched in tight groups into the arched doors of the castle, and their movements were so coordinated now that the sound of their unified footsteps was a rousing drumbeat. Molly wondered if Vargas Hale was still within her city's walls and if he could hear it.
In minutes, the decks were clear, and shortly after that, Juan Chang ascended the spiral stairs and stood on the tower next to Molly. “My men are secure,” he said to Corina, “and the witches say the laboratory is ready.”
“Then I'll begin,” Corina said. The Stitchlife closed her eyes and concentrated. Her eyeballs moved underneath her lids like she was dreaming, and moments later, the transformation began. The bow and the stern pulled themselves closer to the castle-keep. All around the castle itself, the eight-sided wall grew again from the black grains blown on the unseen wind. When the walls were only half-formed, Baba Yaga shifted beneath her as the lengthening legs of Corina's creation touched the sandy bottom and lifted her a few yards higher in the water. In another few moments, the bow, the stern, and the entire hull were gone, and the walls and courtyards were around the castle again. Baba Yaga rocked slightly as she walked on sea-bottom sands. Corina turned to Juan Chang with a smile and asked, “Shall we land your witch-sped army, General Chang?”
“In the fields to the West of the Haunted City,” Juan Chang said.
“As you wi-”
Molly didn't have to wonder what caused Corina to leave her sentence unfinished. Inside the bone wreath on Molly's head, cells stolen from a hammerhead's snout sensed the sparks of another mind approaching. Fin Singh screamed, “Up! Look up!” but before she had even craned her neck halfway back to see what was falling on them, she felt the powerful, gusting air. Dark-feathered wings spread wide and blocked the sun.
The Thunderbird twisted itself in the air, and as the claws wrapped themselves around Corina's body with precision, its wings knocked the rest of them down. Juan Chang sprung to his feet and tried to reach her, but even with all his witch-sped quickness, he was too slow. He almost threw himself from the tower trying to grab her as the giant bird slid off to the left and tumbled, spinning and falling with its wings tucked at its side. When it passed below the tower, it was gone from Molly's view and all she saw was the anguish on Juan Chang's face.
Molly looked down over the tower's parapets and saw the bird right itself as it spread its wings wide again and caught the air only yards above the bay's waters. Its tail feathers were so long and broad that she couldn't see Corina underneath it. After a few seconds of low gliding, the Thunderbird flapped its wings and climbed. As it flew away towards the Haunted City, Molly saw Corina in its claws, sideways with her arms pinned to her sides.
*****
The Thunderbird flew her over the walls of the Haunted City, swooped down, and dropped Corina at the base of the spiral tower. She fell from two yards up to land on the stone at Vargas Hale's feet. It was a jarring fall, and while she fought for her breath, she watched the copper-blood giant fly away to light on the top of the city's skull-top dome. Corina was bruised, both from the flight and the landing, but she was thankful that Vargas Hale's control of the Thunderbird had been so precise – its talons had nearly crushed the life from her in flight, but they hadn't pierced her flesh when they'd grabbed her.
The patriarch of the Hale family stepped forward, took off his witch-bone helm, looked down at Corina where she lay, and said, “Oh, Corina, how disappointing it was to see you abandon me, but now that you're back, I'm willing to forgive your moment of disloyalty. Use your witchy ways to give me control of the prize I've already sacrificed so much to win. Unless, of course, you can't. Then, I might as well kill you.”
“That would be unwise,” she said.
A sound like war-drums floated over the top of the city's walls, and when Corina heard it, she knew that Baba Yaga had walked onto land. She'd had to concentrate hard during the flight to release control of it to Hala Zamis after she'd felt the old witch eagerly trying to take command of her walking castle.
Vargas Hale heard Baba Yaga's footfalls, too. When they stopped, he glanced down the avenue that led to the West gate, then his eyes looked behind Corina, where she heard someone approaching. “The walking castle has moved into the field to the West,” a woman's voice said. Corina recognized it as Scilla Hale's. “Mei Corina,” Scilla said. “It seems you're back with our dear family again.”
Bugle calls bounded over the walls to them.
“The Stitchlife was just about to explain to me why I shouldn't kill her,” Vargas Hale said. Corina saw his eyes shift from Scilla to a runner from the Hale Guard who sprinted towards them through the tents and the kneeling wagons. There was fear in his eyes.
“Lord Hale,” he said, “The walking castle lowered a ramp, and now there's an army in the field outside the West gate. Hundreds of men. Witch-sped men. As fast as nobles!”
“That's impossible,” he said.
“It's true, Lord Hale,” the Guardsman insisted. “Hundreds.”
“Three hundred,” Corina said with a smile. She finally raised herself from the ground and dusted herself off. “The new Populist Army. All of them witch-sped and led by Juan Chang.” Being there to witness the bronze color drain from Vargas Hale's face as he realized his position was almost worth all the bruising his Thunderbird's claws had given her.
*****
Hassam saw a little girl stand still outside the walls for a few seconds. Then, she was gone in a witch-sped blur, and the parade began.
He counted two hundred and fifty men, all armed with saber. They didn't do anything at first except march in tight, disciplined formations in the fields between the walking castle-keep and the western wall. Hassam wasn't too worried at that point; his own Hale Guard were only outnumbered two-to-one. They held the city, and he'd arranged them in strong defensive positions.
Hassam's concern grew when he saw Juan Chang's red cloak among them. Hassam had one just like it in his tent. It was the same one Fin Singh had worn to impersonate the leader of the Populist rebels, and he'd used it for the same purpose. The nagging sense that a day of reckoning had arrived wasn't fully upon him until a bugler's notes filled the air, and the Populist formations began to disappear in streaks across the fields and reappear in new formations in almost the same instant. Every few seconds, in the blink of an eye, the Populists were in new positions and new formations. The truth of what they showed him dawned on Hassam in a hot flash of alarm that radiated outwards from his core. The Populists weren't just well-armed and organized, they were witch-sped, too. This was an army that even the Hales should fear. Even if they mustered every noble blade they had, there was no way the Hales could stand against this army. For the Hale Guard to face them was insanity.
