Stitch, p.27
STITCH, page 27
“They usually eat live food,” Kitty Hawk said. “But this one is so hungry, I don't think it'll mind. Toss it the little animals first.” Molly threw the fur-covered carcass of a weasel into the air and the bird's head lunged forward to snatch it. It threw its head back to swallow and waited for more. “Yes,” Kitty Hawk said, “he's not too picky.”
While Molly threw the rest of the small bites up to the raptor's snap-snatching beak, Kitty Hawk walked towards a room set off the main stable. “Where are you going?” Teddy Da asked her.
“Jars,” she said. “They'll have jars full of samples around here.”
“Samples of what?”
“Bird-flesh,” she said as she opened the door, stepped inside, and disappeared from view. “For twinned entanglement and binding to wreath and helm,” she shouted a second later. Then her voice called out again and asked, “Does that creature have a name on its stall anywhere?”
“Car'ro,” Molly called back to her after she read it on the stall door.
The bone leaves of Kitty Hawk's wreath were smeared with fresh copper-blood when she returned.
“What did you...”
“My wreath had to taste Car'ro's flesh,” she said.
“The bird is bound to you now?”
Kitty Hawk closed her eyes, and Molly and Teddy Da both looked up at the Thunderbird as its open mouth hissed, “Yeeeeessssssssss.”
After the bird crunched through the side of meat that Teddy Da threw at its talon-clawed feet, Kitty Hawk approached without any hint of caution. “Found the key in there, near the jars,” she said as she bent slowly and unlocked the shackle from the bird's leg. She tossed the key over her shoulder and said, “Won't be needing that anymore.” Then she turned around, smiled at Molly and the fur-belly, and walked out of the stall, past them, and out the rear of the building. The Thunderbird followed her, and Molly and Teddy Da got out of its way. It walked slowly and deliberately with its broad wings tucked at its sides until it was out in the open air. Then it spread its wings outward and stretched them, blocking their sight of Kitty Hawk until the bird took to the air. They saw her again through the dust cloud the Thunderbird's flapping wings raised as it lifted itself from the ground.
Kitty Hawk lay down and watched it fly above her. “Ohhhh, it feels good to stretch my wings,” she said.
Molly stood over her and asked, “What are you going to do with it?”
“Are you going to attack the nobles?” Teddy Da asked. That made his mother cackle and turn her head to look up at him fondly, “Goodness, no. Car'ro is going to take me for a ride. To the sea.”
“You're leaving?” the bear said with shock.
“But you can't leave,” Molly protested.
“Of course I can. The world will get on fine without me.” She laughed. “Better, perhaps.”
“But we need your help,” Molly cried. “You can't go to the sea; you've got to help us.”
“How? What do you want me to do?”
“I don't know. You're Kitty Hawk. Do something.”
“Oh, you mean smite the nobles somehow?”
“Yes. Please,” Teddy Da pleaded. “We don't have a chance of defeating them. Help us.”
“I'm not interfering anymore,” Kitty Hawk said. They looked at her in disbelief, and she asked, “If I won this battle for you then what might happen?”
“The nobles would fall,” Molly said.
“And others would rise,” Kitty Hawk countered. “That will all happen anyway if for once I do nothing. Round and round, rise and fall. That's how it's supposed to go. If I don't meddle.” She counted it off on her fingers for them. “The first time, I interfered because I thought the world was a wicked place and needed change that only I could bring. I set the world back a thousand years. The second time I interfered was after you returned, my dear bear. I pledged an oath to serve man and tried to fix what I'd broken. My craft and my witches made the nobles too powerful. I almost ended all cycles of rising and falling, making this world a medieval version of the one I first destroyed.”
“But nothing bad will happen if you help us,” Molly said.
“I didn't think bad things would happen before, but they did. Can you really say you know what might happen if I saved the Populists from the nobles?”
“You would fix your second mistake,” the bear said. “And the world would be better.”
“Every time I try to fix anything with my power, it makes the world worse. Better to let the nobles kill the Populists, then take their revenge on the Stitchlifes, and then fade away themselves. Without the Stitchlifes to speed them and keep them young and give them power, they won't last long. In a few hundred years, common men will overthrow them. Men like Juan Chang, but unsped by any witch's hand. Yes, give it a few hundred years and everything will sort itself out.” She smiled at them with a happy resignation that made Molly's blood rise.
“A few hundred years? But we're here Now,” Molly said. “We need your help Now.”
“You don't understand, dear child. I'm not going to help. I'm not going to do anything ever again. My touch is so powerful that it's poison to the world. I am the Terrible Twins, my Horned Hero. Once I was a raven, and then I became a rabbit. After that I was a twin-horned hero like you.” Molly remembered the story the General had told her in Wrecks' Landing as she listened to the sound of the Bow Enders' blood in the lapping waves.
“You know that story?” Molly asked.
“Oh, yes,” The Witch said. “It's a very old story. The oldest.”
“What happens to the twin-horned hero in the end?” Molly asked. “The General told me most of the story, but not the end. He said I wasn't ready to hear it yet.”
“In the end, the hero dies and is transformed yet again.”
“Into what?”
“The Hero becomes the Terrible Twins, and their power is so great that it dominates everything around them, and their touch threatens to destroy the world. The only way to save it is to destroy themselves. You understand, don't you?” Kitty Hawk said, “I'm not going to help anyone ever again. I'm going to the sea. To die.”
“You can't,” Teddy Da shouted. “We need you!”
“You think you do, but you don't. Not really.”
“But we'll all be killed,” Molly said softly.
“You can come with me if you want. You don't have to die today if you'd rather live. Car'ro is strong enough to carry me and the two of you as well.” Molly thought she saw Teddy Da's eyes water as he took a single step away from her and shook his head. “Spoken like a Hero,” she said. “Teddy Da, my Prodigal Bear, if you were all that remained of me on this earth, then my legacy would be a good one.” She didn't rise, but extended her arms upwards to him from where she already lay in her grave. The bear embraced her. When he rose, his fur was wet with tears. “And you, Molly,” she said, “Take care of my Teddy Da for me. He's the only thing I ever made that I don't regret.”
“You swore an oath, but you don't care about mankind at all,” Molly spat. “All you care about is not feeling bad for doing the wrong thing. That's selfish. You tried to do the right thing and it turned out to be wrong, but you can't just stop trying because you made a mistake and it made you feel bad.” Molly began to cry, too. “Sometimes you have to do horrible things, and you know they're wrong, but you do them because you have to. And doing those things makes you hate yourself, but you do them because that's what needs to be done. If you're not selfish, then you do. No matter how it makes you feel. That's sacrifice. If you cared about the world more than you cared about yourself, if you understood sacrifice, then you'd help us. But you don't care because you're just a selfish old witch.”
Kitty Hawk looked at the sky.
The wind from the Thunderbird's wings blew over them in great gusts as the massive copper-blood hovered just long enough over Kitty Hawk for her to guide its closing talons around her body. The Thunderbird flapped, lifted her into the air under the ember-colored clouds, and flew Kitty Hawk away over the enclave and out of sight.
Chapter Ten
Last Words
Juan Chang sat in Vargas Hale's manor, at the head of a long table set with finery and feast by Vargas Hale's servants. He wore his red cloak over slumped shoulders and held his face in his hands. When he heard the girl and the bear enter, he lifted his head and saw their faces pale at the sight of his despair. “Where's Kitty Hawk?” he asked in a flat voice.
“She's gone,” Teddy Da said.
“She fled?” Juan Chang was astonished. “She left us? Now?”
“She said she won't meddle any further,” the bear said. “She said it was all a mistake from the start.”
“Kitty Hawk won't help us,” Molly said bitterly.
“She went to the sea instead,” Teddy Da said. “To die.”
“Then I'll see her soon enough.” It wasn't a joke, and neither the girl nor the bear laughed. “Soon my lieutenants... Excuse me, your lieutenants will come to hear the brilliant battle plan I've crafted. They will come to hear how I'm going to lead them to victory. Except I don't have a plan. There is no plan that can save us from the army we face.”
“We should run,” the bear said.
“Don't you think I've thought of that? Seven hundred witch-sped nobles are outside the Eastern gate. There's no way past them. Outside the West gate on the enclave's far side there are a thousand of their Guard with thorn-spitters. The West gate is narrow. They'd fill it so thick with their fire that even my witch-sped men couldn't dodge them. Crossing the ground from the gate to their firing line would entail such losses that there would only be a handful of us left if any at all.”
“A few of you might make it out,” Molly said. “You could continue your fight.”
“More likely, the nobles' scouts would see our movements. Then the nobles would break through the East gate, pursue us across the enclave, and trap us between them and their Guard. No,” he said. “That's not an option.” He covered his face with his hands and shook his head from side to side.
“The General says he has a plan,” Molly said.
After she relayed it to Juan Chang, he asked, “You do know what happened to the General at Harpers Ferry don't you?”
“He won?” Molly asked.
“Yes, but he's called 'The Hero' because Harpers Ferry was where he died for his victory.”
*****
Kitty Hawk looked down from the claws of the Thunderbird that flew her to the sea. By the moon's light, she watched the patterns of the ruins and the blackstone scars that ran through the wilds below while the winds whipped the thin hair beneath her wreath and swelled her crevice-wrinkled cheeks.
The Thunderbird flew her across the edges of the fringe-sprawl, the crumbling concrete and blackstone deserts that went from one horizon to the next. There were fires below in the ruins, and they followed the path of a river through the man-made desert. How can they live there, she wondered. It's a hopeless landscape. It was ruined even before I touched it. Nothing grows there. Nothing lives there. Except them and their little fires, pinpricks of foolish hope.
The fringe-sprawl led to a dead city like all of them did. She didn't see any lights there, and when she didn't want to look on the ruins that her mile-high children had made anymore, she turned the Thunderbird South. There were fires there, too, but they were lurid green, and they speckled the rolling, treeless hills and hummocks beneath her. That's the color of methane, she thought. She'd flown almost all the way to the sea when she saw the same color glowed broad and bright on the Southern horizon, so she flew the bird just a little further to take in the sights before The End.
It was a city. Not a dead, flattened one, but a rising, growing city, built around four beached ships. The burning methane of its lamp posts made the dust-filled air above it shine with a proud and lurid light. That much methane? You couldn't get that from compost or a landfill, she thought. Not that much. You could only have that much if you custom-coded a bacteria to make it for you. That was no small feat. That took some witchery. She wondered whose meddling that was.
Kitty Hawk flew past the city's glow and many miles further down the shore, down endless lines of breaking, moonlit waves and foam. The bird gently set Kitty Hawk on the hard sand of a low-tide beach and landed a few yards away. She sat up, saw the stars reflected in the wet sands and the ocean, and walked into them. After she was a few paces away, she remembered to release the Thunderbird and heard it fly off to freedom.
Something crunched and snapped under her foot, and Kitty Hawk bent low to pick a broken mussel shell from the sands. She paused to stare at its sharp edge in the moonlight before she carried it with her into the waves.
After the sandy shelf under her feet fell away, she swam as far as she could, then let the air out of her lungs and sank into the sea. The currents blew her limbs like kelp, and curious fishes gawked at her with wide, lidless, shining eyes before darting away into the murk. There was a beauty to this world where nothing rose or fell. At least my meddling never ruined this place, she thought. And it never will. She brought the sharp edge of the seashell to the veins on her wrist and cut.
The saltwater stung, but as she watched the cloud of her color in the moonlit water, she enjoyed the sight of her and the eternal sea becoming one. There was just enough strength in the hand of her cut wrist to make the other one match it, and then twin clouds of color floated free. The fishes swam through it and tasted her. Thick schools of them were everywhere around her, and the sparks of so many little minds in the conductive saltwater made her wreath tingle and buzz.
Kitty Hawk grew dizzy, and the undersea world began to warp and spin. Up and Down fought to change places, and she lost track of which was which and then forgot there was a difference. Soon, Inside and Outside would be gone, too. Me, the sea, the fishes, what's the difference? She tried to find her last words, her last thoughts, but another voice was in her head. The girl was too young to understand, Kitty Hawk thought. What does she know about Sacrifice and Selfishness. Has she ever destroyed the world? No. But I have.
They were miserable last words, and even if she was the only one to hear them, Kitty Hawk was far from satisfied. But time was running out with her breath and the clouds of her color in the water. She tried again. At least after so many centuries, she thought, I've finally learned to be still and leave the world well-enough alone. Those last words weren't any better, and she wanted to try and get them right one more time, but Molly's words drowned out her voice, and she knew good last words wouldn't come. Not today.
Kitty Hawk cackled underwater and laughed at the Old Fool as she watched her dying hands move of their own mind to find the tiny, witch-bone vial around her neck and unscrew the top. You haven't learned a thing, she thought. You'll never learn to stop meddling. Nothing good can come of this. In the end, it'll be my fault. Again. I'll make mistakes, and I'll be damned for them.
I'll be damned for their sake.
Good words finally, she thought, but not my last.
She poured grains of her automata out of the vial and swirled them into a cloud. As they touched her blood, the plankton, the microbes, and all the creatures too small to see, the water around them began to boil, and each of the grains shot outwards, curving and spiraling in random directions, leaving thin, faintly glowing bubble trails in the water behind them.
In seconds, Kitty Hawk was at the center of a tangled alchemical arabesque, and as her infectious automata grains spread outwards, they met more Life and merged with it. The contributions of the creatures it touched – Life, expressed in a thousand different ways – gave Kitty Hawk's automata what it needed to multiply without bounds and grow and grow and grow. The grains touched her too, and she felt herself being rewritten, cell by cell by cell, until she was no longer Kitty Hawk.
Her new body, mind, and wreath shared so much with the infinitely replicating amalgam-life roiling the waters around her that they were entangled, twinned. She reached out with her mind to all of it, or it reached out to her. She couldn't tell the difference. Only with the greatest effort of Mind did she call all of herself together, stop her endless growth, form, and walk out of the sea.
What rose from the frothing waters and shook the moonlit shore with its first, earth-quaking steps was neither Kitty Hawk, nor her automata, nor the life of the sea. It was all of them, and it was nearly two-miles-tall.
Chapter Eleven
The End
When dawn came, Hassam stood on the dead automata dune in front of Vargas Hale's mansion and wore Juan Chang's red cloak. His Guard wore the skins of the Populists. A half-mile away, far enough so that the noble army would have to split their forces to fight them both, the Populists wore the witch-bone helmets and the uniforms of the Hale Guard and stood with Garrick Jayce's men.
“Will they really split their forces as the General says?” Molly asked.
“They'll send their witch-sped blades after Hassam's red cloak and send their Guard to fight us,” Juan Chang said. “They have such an advantage in numbers that there's no reason for them to do differently.”
“Hassam doesn't look as good in your cloak,” Molly said. That made Juan Chang laugh.
“He's played the part before, I think. He wears that cloak well-enough to fool most,” Juan Chang said, raising his eyebrows at Molly who smiled at his joke.
“But they won't be able to last very long against the nobles,” Molly mused. “They're not witch-sped.”
“The nobles will think they're charging into a sword fight. They'll be bunched in their charge. Hassam and his men might kill a few. Maybe more than a few. Hassam's men will last long enough, I hope.”
“And if he runs?” the fur-belly asked.
“Then he won't get very far chased by witch-sped nobles. He knows that.” The terrible, war-drum sounds of stone fists breaking down the enclave's wall rang in the distance.
