The stitcher and the mut.., p.34
The Stitcher and the Mute, page 34
On occasion Aris would go to the lower market under one pretence or another. She was looking for the cloth seller, but he was not there. What he had said that night as Palmi danced with the shadows, about keeping something for the Torn, she wanted to speak to him about that. She remembered little of the words but much of the feeling. It was driving her now. Her beetles – still nameless – were not for the north.
The north. Quick in its anger, and as relentless as Wit’s Blood in its vengeance. It did not overlook Aris.
*
When half the imagos emerged from the pupa, Aris called for Natalia Geirsdattir. Then for Torfa Barasdattir. The two women who had helped her get so far, and would help her further. But she did not call for her father. She came close, turning towards home when the tunnels twisted that way. She found other ways. Father had said to come to him when ‘yet was ready’. It was not. She was not.
Natalia came willingly, as if indulging her own daughter. Torfa was more excited than Aris and left her business in the hands of a hired man. He was new to Aris, but not so new otherwise.
‘I should have retired years ago,’ Torfa said as they walked. ‘And I like it when he bends over.’
Natalia laughed at her old friend. They exchanged promises of drinks and social events neither expected to keep.
‘How many of these new imagos?’ Natalia asked.
‘Six, with six more to come,’ Aris said.
‘All twelve from egg to adult?’
‘What is to stop them? No tatterwings, firecats, or Wit’s Blood.’
‘You are breeding the wrong beetle, Natalia,’ Torfa said. ‘Perhaps I am also? But then I have never liked to see them fight.’
‘You have a weak stomach.’
‘My third husband thought so. Why so much spice, I asked him? Expensive. And then he choked to death. Next husband, not so expensive.’
They laughed, but Aris was too nervous to join them.
She had helped her new imagos into the last enclosure she had managed to build. It was too small for them all, but what could she do? And what would she do when the others emerged? Despite what she told Natalia, she did not expect all twelve to survive. It was a horrible hope that they would not. A hope she did not have to live with long.
*
Aris noticed the smoke first – the smell. The others were too distracted with their discussion of husbands. It was wood smoke; a heady smell, rich with a life lived above ground. That was how it was so different to smoke from Hadun. Aris picked up her pace.
‘Aris, where—’
And then Aris was running and the women did their best to keep up.
It was too late.
Standing in the tunnel, surrounded by smoke, were three men in northern masks. Two big, one small.
‘Ah, here she is,’ Vernon said. He stepped back between the other men. ‘I have the misfortune of informing you, Aris Rafnarsdattir, that the Commission has ordered the termination of your business activities in accordance with Regulation sixty—’
Aris grabbed his throat. Natalia punched the man in front of her and he dropped without a sound. The last looked to his sharpened staff, then to the three women, then decided to be somewhere else.
The smoke billowed out of the cavern. It was starting to sting her eyes, but Aris ignored it. ‘Why?’
Vernon wheezed, and she loosened her grip just a little. ‘Not a… registered species.’
‘No box,’ Aris said.
He tried to nod, but found it difficult.
She remembered the look on his face as she put her blouse back on. ‘You live a petty, lonely life, little man. You will die that way.’
His eyes grew wide and white. Piss ran down his leg. He was terrified that this would be his final story for the Audience.
But Aris threw him to the ground. Even in the heat and the dark she knew that to kill such a person would end not just his life, but the life of her and her family.
She turned to the smoke and the flames that were feeding on her dream. They licked the shrine to the Bailiff, testing, tasting, then devouring. She started forward. She wanted to be with them at the last, as the Widow welcomed them together. Natalia stopped her, engulfing her in thick arms. Aris could not fight the woman.
The three of them watched until the smoke was too much. There was nothing they could do; there was not enough water in all of Hadun-Har to put out a fire. It would consume everything in the cavern and then die surrounded by black, pitiless stone.
The three of them watched until the smoke was too much. They said nothing. Aris’s tears silently carved their way down her face. She did not have many to give.
The three of them watched until the smoke was too much. Vernon slithered away.
Eventually the fire was finished. Aris would not leave until it was, and the others would not leave her. The ground was hot beneath her boots. Everywhere was ash. Her fences gone, her rags gone, her shrines gone.
Where the ash was thickest she found her horrors.
Beetle husks, some of which bore the marks of a death before the fire: a hole on the top of the skull. Aris shook away images of unsuspecting beetles and a northern man with a sharpened stick. Aris sobbed. She sought the touch of another, and Torfa was there. Her friend tried to pull her away but she had to see it all.
Where the ash was thickest she found her hopes.
Two pupa. Huge, blackened, but unbroken. Vernon’s stakes must have missed them. Aris brushed away the ash and the soot and, at her touch, the casing cracked. She cleared the space as best she could, risking her hands on the hot stone. Two imagos slowly emerged. Two males.
‘I am sorry,’ Natalia said. ‘They were always too big to fight northern birds.’
‘I wanted something else. Something for us. I wanted them.’ She gazed at her red beetles, her survivors, tall as her waist, with the horns and pincers of their forebears.
The two males flexed their wing-casings, steadied themselves on their feet, and tried life as an adult for the first time. Curious, they seemed to taste the air, taste the ash, even the three women. When they found each other, a different instinct took them.
‘Feisty,’ Torfa said, as the beetles set themselves.
‘We should…’ Natalia said. They gave the beetles the floor. ‘At least you know they would have fought for you.’
Circling each other with their wing-casings out they were a thing to behold. Then one male tried its horn; casing down, it shuddered and shook and Aris readied herself for a noise that did not come.
‘Not everything is passed down,’ Torfa said. ‘I would count that as a blessing.’
‘Perhaps, but—’
A spout of green flame tore through the air. Aris ducked, far away as they were. Then another spout. And another, as both males tried their horns. Fiery green light danced with shadows on the cavern wall as the three of them looked on in awe. Green, in that place of only black and orange. The beetles turned their horns on each other and the flames flowed over their shells like blood over rock. But still the rock remained.
‘How?’ Torfa aired the question they were all thinking.
‘The fire,’ Aris said with a sudden certainty. ‘It woke something in my new beetles. The northerners wanted to destroy. Instead they were a part of creation. Born in ash, fire came.’
‘This,’ Natalia said, ‘this changes everything.’
‘This is for us. No one will watch a bird again.’
‘You will need help,’ Torfa said.
Aris looked at her friends. ‘I have help.’
‘And a name.’
‘My fire beetles have a name.’
‘The northerners will not like it,’ Natalia said. ‘They do not like change.’
One of the beetles bashed into the other, then fired its horn. The other slunk away to the cavern wall. Aris went to him.
‘They do not have to like it,’ she said. ‘They just have to see it.’
Twenty
With the final words, the Torn storyteller closed his eyes. He swayed on the sandstone rock he’d stood on for hours, a slow weave. Someone in the public gallery shouted, No – help him! And then with a jerk the Torn toppled backwards from the rock.
People were running over at once. Purple tunics swarmed the rock, and in the haze of leaving the world of the Torn story, Cora found herself thinking the rock looked like it was in the middle of a surging purple sea, rather than in the middle of First Wall, itself in the middle of Fenest. She shook herself awake: was the storyteller ill, or under attack? Not another body. This election had claimed too many already. Was this somehow Tennworth’s doing?
Cora hurried to the rock, Jenkins ahead of her. There was barely any light behind it, where the storyteller had fallen, but she made out the Master of Ceremonies in the crush of Commission bodies. People were shouting and the noise bouncing around First Wall became deafening. The storyteller had greyed and was coated with a sheen of sweat that glistened in the weak light. The Master fumbled at the Torn’s face. The mouthpiece – he was trying to put it back on the Torn’s face. But the tornstone inside it was dark. No embers were left.
‘Stand back! Give him some room!’ the Master shouted.
The purple tunics leapt away at once and the noise around the rock dropped to near quiet. Beyond, in the seating areas, anxious murmurs continued. Cora pushed people aside to get closer.
‘I said, get back!’ the Master shouted.
Without taking her gaze from the Torn, she flashed the Master her badge. ‘Bernswick division. I need to see what’s happening.’
‘Death,’ the Master said, his voice cracking into a sob. ‘After so long without his tornstone. Widow Wel—’
The storyteller gasped. Everyone in sight made a noise of relief as if they’d all been holding their own breath, waiting for the Torn to find his.
He sucked at the mouthpiece and at once the tornstone flared and Cora could smell sulphur. She’d never been so glad of the smell in her life. The Master of Ceremonies gathered the storyteller into his arms and demanded someone get the man some water, a blanket, a stitcher. Looking at the Torn, Cora doubted any of those would help him. He looked in a bad state, his eyes rolling in his head, his back floppy. He was breathing again, but for how long? Even now, his lungs might be turning to water. She turned away from the sight and rounded the rock.
The Audience had gone.
The Commission box, too, had emptied. Only those in the public gallery remained, the noisy listeners hemmed in by purple tunics at the end of each row of chairs.
‘The voters didn’t hang around,’ Cora said to Jenkins.
‘I expect the Commission rushed them into the garbing pavilion as soon as the poor man fell. Getting on with the job of the election. The spoked wheel turns…’
‘And some are crushed beneath it,’ Cora added.
Jenkins shook her head. ‘He did what he had to, and now he’ll be cast aside.’
A shout went up from the garbing pavilion and a huge wooden chest was carried out by purple tunics, constables forming a guard on all sides. A chest now full of voting stones.
‘And all for that,’ Cora said. ‘The Torn ’teller almost died for those votes. And we don’t even know where they go!’ She could hear her own exasperation, but she couldn’t fight it. She couldn’t shake the image of the Torn man falling from the rock, dropping into the darkness of First Wall.
‘My mother knows where the voting chests go,’ Jenkins said, ‘though she’s never told me. Says she won’t, not even on her dying day.’
‘Is she saving it for the Audience?’ Cora said.
‘I doubt even those rogues will get it out of her. But wherever the chests go, it’ll be the safest place in the whole Union, given that they won’t be opened until all the stories have been told.’
‘Four down, two to go,’ Cora said. ‘Let’s hope the number of bodies doesn’t rise any higher.’
‘I think you spoke too soon, Detective.’ Jenkins gestured in the direction of the rock.
Cora turned.
The Torn was carried by four purple tunics. His eyes were open but unblinking. His white coat was spattered with blood. Following the sad procession was the Master of Ceremonies, the mouthpiece of the Torn storyteller cradled in his hands.
*
‘Will his story be worth dying for?’ Jenkins said, as they waited for a gig to take them back to the station.
‘Strange as it sounds, I hope so.’ Cora lit a smoke and tried not to remember the light of the Torn storyteller’s mouthpiece weaving from the dark as he came to tell his tale.
Why had the Torn taken off his mouthpiece and knowingly condemned himself to death? Far as Cora knew, it had never happened before at an election story. It was too great a sacrifice; of all the peoples in the Union, the Torn were the fewest. Life in the Tear made just existing difficult – the election story had been clear enough on that point – and when the Torn left their home, they never travelled in large groups in case they were harmed. The massacre at Burlington Palace must always be on their minds. And even when they did leave the Tear, they couldn’t breathe.
But the Torn ’teller had removed his mouthpiece. Making sure the Audience heard his realm’s story properly, with nothing between him and them, had been more important to the Torn this election than ever before. It had been a story of change. Just like the Wayward story was meant to be. There was more to this election than just the usual reshuffle of power. More was at stake – much more. Two storytellers dead. Ruth returned as if from the dead. People following Cora in the streets. Plague. The Hook barge destroyed. When would it end?
All at once, Cora couldn’t breathe. The streets around First Wall were still jammed with people. She caught sight of a gig at the crossroads ahead, but it looked to be making little progress in their direction. She needed to get away. Get far away from everyone.
‘Four stories told and two ’tellers dead,’ Jenkins said, and shook her head.
Cora was glad of Jenkins, of the distraction, anything to help ease her rising panic. ‘The Audience has never known an election like it.’
‘Never known such good stories either,’ Jenkins said.
Cora was keeping one eye on the gig, hoping it would reach them. ‘You like the Torn’s chances?’
‘It’s my favourite of the election so far.’
Cora felt the same. Seemed to her to be about survival when things around you were changing, about being able to change.
‘A tale of triumph over adversity that surely got the voters on side,’ Jenkins said. ‘As for the Perlish—’
‘But both stories were about the same thing really, weren’t they? The Perlish want to keep the southern foreigns out,’ Cora said. Where was that gig?
‘Yes…’
‘And the Torn are southerners but they don’t want to be anyone’s foreigns. They want to stay in the Tear and make it work for them.’
Jenkins looked to be deep in thought. So deep, the constable didn’t notice when she was nearly knocked over by a group of Seeders leaving First Wall.
‘I suppose so,’ Jenkins said slowly. ‘But the Torn story was about knowing your own worth, not settling.’
‘True.’
‘And the Perlish story was about knowing your worth and thinking you’re better than others. That doesn’t sit right with me. Such hostility.’ Jenkins sounded like she was still recovering from hearing the Perlish story, though it had been days ago.
‘And yet the Perlish tale was the funny one!’ Cora said.
‘There’s often cruelty in the comedies, Detective,’ Jenkins said firmly. ‘That story was cruel for judging people just because of where they’re from.’
‘Easy, Jenkins. Tell it to the Keeper if it bothers you so much,’ Cora said. ‘At least the Torn managed to get in a dig at the Commission. If the Torn win this year, there’s bound to be grumbling at the Wheelhouse.’ That was the first cheering thought she’d had in a while. ‘We’re getting nowhere fast here. Might as well walk back.’
‘Is your leg—’
‘It’s fine.’
It wasn’t, but the constable didn’t need to know that.
On the way, Jenkins bought the most recent ’sheets from a seller shouting the freshness of her stories: ‘The Torn tale – fire and fights! Fire and fights!’
‘But we’ve only just heard the story!’ Jenkins said as they left the pennysheet seller behind.
‘They must have presses set up nearby,’ Cora said. ‘Gone to print as soon as the story ended. All that ink now on your hands – can’t get much fresher.’
Jenkins looked at her inky fingers with distaste.
‘Let’s hear it then,’ Cora said.
‘Well, there’s no mention of the ’teller’s death in The Daily Tales so I think you must be right, Detective.’
‘Any exit polls there?’
‘Looks like The Fenestiran Times have included one.’ Jenkins riffled through the sheets. ‘Odds on the Torn story winning have shortened, even with those of the Rustans and the Wayward still to be told.’
‘I can believe it,’ Cora said. The young Torn woman, Aris, she had faith – faith in her realm. Cora had never seen the Tear with her own eyes but after listening to the storyteller’s words, she felt as if she had seen it, smelled it, felt its heat on her face.
Heat.
The heat of the south. What was it Sorrensdattir had said before she died? South for the hottest season. And the hottest season was always… Cora pulled out the scrap of paper Jenkins and Marcus had found in the archive.
‘Detective, what is it?’
‘The season…’ As Cora read the list of names again, the five names who likely paid money to Tennworth, one word seemed to gleam on the page. ‘She meant Summerleaze. The Torn who died on the barge. She was trying to tell me where I should go.’
‘You’re going to the Tear?’ Jenkins said in alarm.
But Cora barely heard the constable. Thoughts were crowding in. Sorrensdattir wanted her to go south to find Summerleaze. Whatever that was, it had to be connected to Tennworth. And it wasn’t only the Torn aide who’d told Cora to go south. So had Ruth. Finnuc, too, had tried to help her: the south is falling apart. And there was somewhere particular in the south that kept coming up.
