Stitch, p.24
STITCH, page 24
Brothers always fight, he thought. Until cousins come along.
The patriarch of the Walton family was stimulated to two different responses to the upstart Hala Zamis's message. He drank several cups of mead to calm himself before delivering the first response to the bound messenger bird and whatever Stitchlife Witch would hear his words. He spoke with soft tones, a measured tongue, and a pointy-toothed smile when he told them of his joy that the land had finally been brought under the rule of a single, wise and witchy hand.
Once the bird was well out of earshot, he expressed his boiling mad rage in a primal cry that shook the witch-bone walls of his pagoda castle. Then, he drank several more cups of mead and a corn-mash liquor that steadied his hand so that he could write his second response. Within the hour, his secretary had made a copy to send to each of the other noble families and dispatched them on the wings of his own messengers.
Two days later, at roughly the time he'd expected his own messages to arrive in the houses of his noble peers, their birds began to appear on his balcony. His servants warily withdrew the letters from the carriers tied to the birds' clawed legs. They were sure that any Holtz bird would strike at them as quickly and easily as a Holtz might, or that a Southern raptor Schwartz must necessarily be as vicious and hateful towards them as its master.
As the responses from the heads of the noble houses came to him, Roge Walton smiled wider and wider as he read them. All of the nobles had been wise enough to voice their acceptance of Stitchlife rule to the witches themselves and then draft letters of a different tone to their peers. Their letters were almost entirely like the one he'd written – nearly identical in sentiment, almost alike in wording, and just as vulgar in spirit. They only thing the leaders of the noble families disagreed on was the geographical point where their combined armies should meet and join forces to march against the witches. That's a tiny detail, Roge Walton thought. We'll work that one out soon enough.
*****
Hala Zamis and Corina sat in the grandeur of Vargas Hale's tea room. The finely grown witch-bone ivy that decorated the walls was a testament to Vora Mbuntu's skill and her mastery of the craft she'd worked for the Hales before she betrayed them. Sitting in the middle of it gave Hala Zamis as much pleasure as it had given Vargas Hale.
“I'm sorry,” Hala Zamis said.
It was such an unexpected thing for Corina to hear that she was taken aback. “Excuse me?” she replied.
“About Juan Chang.” As Hala Zamis spoke, one of the Hales' servants rolled a tea cart into the room and approached the witches with caution in her eyes. Hala Zamis imagined that the servants had planned to flee, fearing pillage and slaughter at the hands of the Populists, but once it was clear that the witches were in charge, most of them had decided to stay and serve the witches as they had the nobles.
Hala Zamis waited for her tea to be poured, and when the girl had curtseyed and withdrawn, she sipped and continued. “I know you developed some feelings for your red-cloaked General over the course of the last months. Your display of affection for him was not entirely deception, I think. Know that it gave me no pleasure to reveal your treachery to him and turn him so solidly against you. The indisputable end of your love affair was, however, necessary to ensure your release from his considerable charms. Now that you understand he hates you and can never look at you fondly ever again, now that you know there is no future for you with him, there can be no questions about your affections for him compromising your judgment. I trust you, of course, but the love between you and the Populist made the rest of our sisters question your allegiance. Just between the two of us, I think they burned with envy to hear the cries from your chamber, to hear you enjoying such pleasures such as are unlikely to ever be theirs. Perhaps that made them over-estimate Juan Chang's effect on you. Now, of course, that's not an issue.”
“I understand,” Corina said, but at the mention of her lover's name, the witch's eyes had flared with anger and pain, and Hala Zamis knew Corina was lying.
“Who will lead our army now?” Corina asked. “One of Juan Chang's lieutenants? That Guardsman Hassam or perhaps Garrick Jayce?”
“It's possible that Juan Chang will reconsider his decision to oppose us if he understands that not only his life hangs in the balance, but the lives of all his men.” Hala Zamis watched Corina wince again. “He'd be a better choice than any of the others. Failing that, I'm told that before Vora corrupted the Hale Archive and drove it mad, it contained a construct of General Jin-Soo Hale. I've come to understand that Vora Mbuntu stole it and placed it in her wreath – the one that now sits atop the girl's head – Molly's head.”
“Do you believe we can trust her?” Corina asked.
“She didn't make even a mouse's squeak when we locked up your red-cloaked lover. She's a Stitchlife now. Our youngest and most untrained novice, to be sure, but in this new age, new skills will be required of witches – skills like hers.”
“She's a demon with that little knife of hers.”
“The blade that Vora grew served her well, and now, it will serve us well, too.” Hala Zamis sighed. “But we will, I'm afraid, need more than her to save us from what's coming.” From Corina's expression, Hala Zamis could see that she didn't understand. “The nobles are coming,” Hala Zamis said.
“But you said the heads of the noble houses all agreed. You said they all accepted our rule and pledged their loyalty.”
“Yes, they did,” she said. “They all agreed, and that's alarming. They've never agreed on anything without battles and blood-feuds and negotiations. And it's not just their agreement that makes me suspicious, it's the ease of their acquiescence. Not one of them pushed back a whit. Not one of those pompous, power-hungry fools even attempted to jockey for a standing greater than their peers. I expected to have to make an example of at least one more of the noble houses. The fact that none of them resist us, not even for the purposes of negotiating some advantage over the others, tells me that they resist us, one and all.”
“Do you believe they need another example, perhaps?” Corina asked. “Do you think that we should move forward to crush the Waltons or the Lees after all?”
“We won't need to go to them,” Hala Zamis said with a laugh. “They'll be coming to us.”
“The Waltons or the Lees?”
“Waltons, Lees, Holtzs, and Southern Gentlemen Schwartzs. Macks, Austins, and Ortegas. All the noble families on the continent. All of them.”
“Together?” Corina asked.
“A combined army. They know none of them can withstand our numbers, but together, they can field a combined army greater than ours. I didn't expect it would happen. I expected that half of them would side with us for the chance to rule over the lands of the other half, but the improbable similarity of the responses from the noble houses suggests that will not be the case. The tone of their agreement suggests quite clearly that they all plan to march against us together.”
“We'll need to prepare.”
“Baba Yaga will help even the odds, and the golems that the noble families send to battle will feed her and make her taller, stronger, more impenetrable.”
“I'll get started right away on making more of my black automata in the factory farms. Perhaps I can find a way to make it quicker in action.”
“If we had a version that rewrote automata in minutes instead of hours, that would be helpful.”
“I'll come up with something faster, but even if we took the golems away from the nobles, that wouldn't eliminate the disparity in size between our army and the combined armies of the noble houses.”
“Yes,” Hala Zamis said, “What we need is one of Kitty Hawk's Gargantuans, a mile tall with feet so broad that not even the witch-sped could avoid its stomping wrath.”
“None of us ca-”
“Yes, I know. None of us possess the secrets of how to create such wonders. Even if we did, it's well-known that they took nearly a year to grow. But we have something nearly as fantastic. We have the seeds of the Haunted City. Each of them can grow enough cellular automata to make a golem nearly as large as Kitty Hawk's legends. I want you to develop a fast-acting cellular automata that can convert every grain of those cities so they are ours to control.”
“It's not just the speed of conversion that's an issue. There are problems of scale, too. Each grain of automata I infected the walls of the Haunted City with could only trigger the rewrite of a few million grains before entropy asserted itself in the replication of the code. Decoherance set in after that, and the conversion of the Haunted City's automata ceased. That's why I only converted a small section of the walls and not the entire city. To convert the whole city at once I'd need a volume of my black automata far greater than we could possibly grow in the enclave's factory farms before the battle comes to our gates.”
“Then you'd better come up with something new,” Hala Zamis said. “Either you've got to find a way to overcome the decoherance in replication so you can convert a newly grown city, or you've got to find a way to rewrite one of the seeds before it's planted so that it grows mindless automata twinned to a wreath and awaiting our command. I've had three of our sisters working on that problem since the seeds came into our hands, but they report no success. They don't yet understand what Pietra Fona did to make the first seed. If they did, then they'd know how to do what I ask. Take one of the seeds from them. Work to unravel its secrets. At the same time, press forward in the development of a faster and further acting infectious, black automata so that we can plant a seed and use your invention to convert a city to our use.”
“Yes, of course,” Corina said, “ but having Kitty Hawk to help m-”
“It's too dangerous to wake her now,” Hala Zamis said. “You'll work alone. If you're successful in either way I've described, then we'll have a creature nearly as powerful as the ancient Gargantuans Kitty Hawk made, and the nobles will have no choice but to fall into line or be pulverized.”
“And if I fail?” Corina asked. Hala Zamis didn't give any response to the young witch's question; her silence answered it more completely than anything she could say.
*****
Molly sat in Baba Yaga's empty courtyard across from the window of a doorless room where she knew Juan Chang was held prisoner. She tried not to stare at it. “Chances are,” Fin Singh's construct said as he appeared beside her, “you're being watched by the witches. Don't let your eyes betray your intent.”
“I've got to get him out of there,” Molly whispered, “but it's too high to reach and even if I could, the window is only a slit. It's too narrow for Juan Chang, and the ten yards from there to the courtyard below is a big jump.”
“He can't very well escape with a broken leg, now can he?” Fin Singh asked.
“No, and I'd try to open the door to his cell, but there is no door. Baba Yaga won't shift her sands to make one without a command from Hala Zamis.”
“Indeed.”
“And if Teddy Da's claws cut Baba Yaga, then the sands just reform themselves around the wound. It's hopeless. I hate it.”
“So, then it should be clear to you that no matter how you might feel about it, if there is no opportunity, then now is not the time to rescue General Chang from his prison.” Molly nodded at Fin Singh's words. “Good girl,” he said, “now that that's settled, let's go a bit further away. Your very presence here is suspicious.”
Molly rose from where she sat, allowed herself one last glance at the cell's slit window, and began to walk away. When she'd gone halfway across the courtyard, she looked up again to see Corina watching her from a window not far from Juan Chang's cell. Molly refused to look away from her. Instead, she tried to burn the witch's eyes out with her gaze. Corina's eyes didn't reflect the feeling back to Molly. If anything, they opened wider and embraced the violence of it. For the briefest moment, Molly saw the hint of a smile on the witch's full lips. Then, with a deft and discrete flick of the wrist, Corina tossed something out the window. “You'll be wanting to catch that,” Fin Singh said as time tricked and the small object fell slowly, end over end. “Discretely,” he added. In the eternity as it tumbled and fell, she scrutinized it and tried to guess what it was. It was shiny and thin and split itself into two lengths halfway up, like a wishbone. It glittered with shiny promise as it fell. “Move only as quickly as you require to place yourself in its path,” Fin Singh's ghost said. “Only use your full speed to snatch it from the air without being seen.”
When it was within reach, Molly plucked the object from the air with all her speed, but she secreted it in her pocket with a casual motion as if her hand had idly wandered there. “Good girl,” Fin Singh said.
“What is it?” Molly asked as her fingers interrogated its shape in her pocket.
“It's a tuning fork,” Vora's ghost said, suddenly on the other side of her, “But more importantly,” she said with a smile, “It's a key.”
“Will it open Juan Chang's cell?” Molly whispered.
“No,” Vora said, “but it'll open Kitty Hawk's.”
*****
Baba Yaga's lab was always full of witches. It wouldn't take long to use the key, Vora had told her, but she'd need a few minutes without the Stitchlifes watching. Molly went there after dark. There were still five witches working away as she crossed the lab to where Teddy Da sat.
Molly sat next to him and waited for them to leave, and since her mind was so full of her task that she couldn't think of anything to say, she lay down, put her head on his fur-covered leg, and pretended to sleep. Thirty minutes later, she wasn't pretending anymore.
She didn't know how long she'd slept, but she imagined that it must have been hours later when Vora's voice woke her from her slumber. “The Stitchlifes are gone,” Vora said. “I don't know for how long, but this may be your best chance.” Molly opened her eyes to the soft light of the helio blooms and saw that Teddy Da slept, too. She shook his leg and roused him, and when he woke, she met his gaze with her finger already to her lips.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“It's time,” Molly whispered back.
“For what?” he asked.
“To free Kitty Hawk,” she said as she smiled with the pleasure of telling her secret. The bear's eyes flashed in the dim light. Molly stood and withdrew Corina's gift from her pocket. She held it up for him to admire.
“With that?” he asked. “What is it?”
“The key. Corina gave it to me.” She heard the rumble-growl grow in the fur-belly's throat.
“How can you trust her?”
“Vora says this is the key. You want to see your mother freed, don't you?” Teddy Da nodded.
“How do you use this witchy key?” the bear asked.
“Like this,” Molly said. She held the single prong of it between her fingers and thumb and struck the key against the heel of her other hand like Vora showed her. The moment she did, it vibrated with a life of its own. Teddy Da drew a sharp breath and brought his paws up to cover his ears. Molly couldn't hear anything at all, but as she held the vibrating key high and near to the face of The Witch, its vibrations didn't fade. They grew stronger.
Then the bear cried out in pain, and Kitty Hawk's crystal coffin began to crack.
*****
The last sensations of freedom had been the taste of brine-savory oysters, the smell of a Barbary's musk, and the warmth of firelight on her back. Then, in an instant, her body was no longer hers, and she slept. She awoke breathless and beating her heart once a month, as still as a living thing can be. Her mind still moved, and her wreath sensed the determined and purposeful sparks of the minds around her. Kitty Hawk wasn't sure, but she imagined her daughters had betrayed her.
The Witch slowed her thoughts to make the passing of time more bearable, and through the wreath she sensed her disciples as they came and went like fast-darting insects. Sometimes, they all gathered around her at once, and there were so many of them that she wondered if she had been placed in the Great Hall. Twenty years later, she was sure of it. She imagined herself encased in lattice-craft crystal for all to see and gather under. Through the treachery of her own witches, she'd been reduced to a symbol, a flag. Her will was no longer the will of the Coral Castle, and her preserved body was on display to endorse the will of the witches who'd imprisoned her.
There had been plenty of time to think about why, and after decades of sensing how Thera, one of her first apprentices, was always closest when the witches gathered before her, she knew. It had been a coup. It was probably Thera's poison that had felled her, she thought. Thera had openly resented how Kitty Hawk held back her greatest, most dangerous secrets after the bear came to murder her and she swore her oath. Thera was one of the first apprentices, from the days before the oath, and Kitty Hawk knew Thera had wanted to use her witchery for a different purpose.
Thera was undoubtedly the new Queen of the Castle, and Kitty Hawk wondered what the will of the Coral Castle would be under her.
After another century, the sparks of Thera's mind no longer tickled Kitty Hawk's wreath, and she knew her treacherous usurper was dead and that the Coral Castle had a new Queen – one that might not even know that inside the lattice-craft crystal in the Great Hall, Kitty Hawk still lived. For the century-and-a-half after that, there was nothing to do but think. She meditated on The End Of The World and What Went Wrong and how even this was All Her Fault. As decades and then another century passed, she lost hope that she'd ever be freed and slipped into slow-minded slumber. She barely passed a thought.
That changed when her wreath sensed the sparks of her prodigal bear and she knew that Teddy Da had returned to the Coral Castle once more. The last time he'd come had been four centuries ago, and he'd come to kill her, but this time, she knew he'd come to free her. Over the last weeks, she sped her mind to wakefulness again and called out to him, and he'd heard his mother's call. She could feel him close, even now.
