steamlands
Drunk, you've always found it easier to let your feet guide you home. To let your mind wander as your feet stay true to course. A restful night's slumber beckons, and around its edges, thoughts without consequence mill and mingle in disarray. In that state it's easy to get misplaced, to switch back and forth from one street to its parallel, edging closer and closer to the centre of an urge to sleep. There is a midnight panic, a wondering fear that keeps its eye on dark alleys and the breeze, but the shadow of that littlest death pulls on.
As you walk up the path, filaments catch on your fingertips, whisper against your face, but they're almost absent amongst the alchohol haze. Unless you've heard of the House of Spiders you could almost imagine them hair from your own head, the wind ruffling the fuzz on your forearms. Open the door, though, and you are left without doubt. This close you can feel web split before you, spun across the threshold. The door will sigh at your touch, swing open unlocked, and the house is there for you to see. Just a normal house, but not yours, unlit. Just another in a row of nameless Petrichor houses, all just the same. Perhaps the carpet here glistens more than usual. It's possible it crunches underfoot. A hundred thousand discarded shells and wings of prey. The sound of it makes your head itch. But maybe that's the young landing on the breeze. Each step flutters the hair on the back of your neck, fans a fear crisscrossed with silk. Take another step, take two. Your skin crawls with the dry stink. Crawling from the ankles up, the littlest death flowers into chitin and fangs, and pulls on.
Dalgriatha pauses from his meal to look up at the palid sky, claws still wrapped around the mendicant’s liver. Hand, wrist deep in the man’s carcass. There is an ache at the base of his rack that warns of coming snow. Crouched still, the collection of horns and antlers atop his skull almost conceals the giant as a hunkering rock and wind-blasted sapling. His light blue complexion blends in amongst the ice and stone as that of his brothers matches the hue of evergreen or earth. The Ogre removes his grasp from the human friar, five fingers on one hand, seven on the other, and unfolds to scent the breeze. Dalgriatha towers, tattoos and piercings gleaming. Behind him, Fathulain, a grimacing Fawn, is having his hide carved with copper and splintering glass in similar spirals to mark his first kill. There is a yellow taint to the air that heralds a storm. Balmalor’s odd numbered eyes weep in the wind. The trees shudder and whisper their confirmation. Their retinue of crows has disappeared.
Grasping his bronzed spear from the corpse’s thigh, Dalgriatha issues a quiet oath to his kin without turning. A last whorl is cut, wounds are sucked dry, and Fathulain, Nemoran, Balmalor, and Gwyngolad reach for their swords, clubs, and victims. The distant front will conceal their kill, but it will also make travelling hard. The hunting party gathers and disappears into the pine. As they run across cliff edge and frigid stream each Walks The Skin, just a little, to outpace the blizzard howling behind them.
Our pale horses are breakers upon the waves of grass that sweep across this open land. Pennants snap above us like handclaps to our hunting song and the clouds skid through the sky. These days are ours. After years of war, these lands are Xiao lands. All trace of resistance has melted away before the rumble of hooves.
We stop at a small Shan province camp for the night, exhausted but triumphant. The locals and their daughters are pliant. They bring us food, and pleasure, and we refrain from slaughter. Even when the wise woman comes late in the evening to tell us we will all die by the whim of water, we refrain. Our Captain cuts out her tongue and removes her hands at the forearm. As we leave with the setting moon the seer’s twin spits at us and fades away like a vengeful ghost made whole.
The further we ride into Shan the more the local aquiescence feels like pity. There is no rebellion, but the night is quietly hostile and the same faces appear again and again… all the locals look the same, it is an easy mistake. Regardless, unease blossoms within us. In Karolei we are greeted by a muttering old man who sits on his porch, blowing smoke rings from a pipe. There is a trick to it such that the rings twist into animal shapes.
When we reach Ragolan the farmers are singing horribly out of time in their fields. When pressed the stoney faced barkeep tells us it is a weather-charm such that they may prosper. We laugh at him, laugh at the farmers and their ugly plea. We laugh at the whole of hopeless little Shan and ride on.
The flowers sing at Werryn as she reels, all high pitched and fluttering disharmony. It makes her ill, disturbs her balance, and it is all her fault. Left alone to talk to the world her charm has reached too far. Quera is nowhere to be seen as Werryn stumbles, through the brook and up the bank. Birds screech on her passing, trees sighing their disapproval with bowel trembling bass. Werryn will one day make a sorceress of epics, if she can only get to Quera and beg her to make the grass stop screaming.
It is the alien dissonance that nearly kills her, and even years hence she will panic in an apparently quiet moment. Straining to hear if the aching chorus is there, clapping her hands to her head and shaking in fear. She falls at the feet of her mistress with that same motion, wailing against the wind's abrasive gossip and the thousands upon thousands of cries that rise from beneath her. Quera tries to calm her, but every word is lost to the choir. Out of sheer desperation Quera spits upon her right hand in ritual, drags the bloody lids of her empty left eye apart, and lays a deafening hex upon Werryn.
It is enough to buy relief, enough for the girl to rein back her own lay. She grips hard to her mistress, and brings on an element of calm, though through it all is a single mammoth note that fills her chest fit to burst. Just when she is ready to drown on it the charm is done, and she knows the sound for what it is. It is the turn of the earth beneath her feet. It is the reach of her grasp.
It’s dark inside Cloud Mountain, and in the absence of light there have grown creatures strange and unreal. Things with mouths big enough to wait for prey, or antlers thin and fanning. Anything not blind has eyes so large that even the tiniest mote of light is enough, born of fungus or reflected over and over by rich seems of ore. Life that cannot see a Goldleaf goblin even when looking at one. They slide in clots through the mountain, backs spread upward and arching from low and pointed skulls edged with teeth. Wide nostrils flaring, they are as much of four legs clawed as two, moving fluidly upon wall and ceiling. Their sense of smell keeps them fed but their tongues keep them safe. They are drawn to the taste of gold, searching for it, drawing it from the rock, they cast it across rib and spine in flexing veins. When a creature of the mountain sees the metalled and waiting goblinkin, it is blinded by the gleam, their details are erased. When the Goldleaf move, it is as if the walls themselves burst forth with hunger.
Gilded blades thin and motionless, backs flared upward, perspective distorts around them. The filigree of precious metal may be closer than it appears.
No man mines cloud mountain.
We found her one day among the pistons, fingers as black as her eyes. She'd not come through the gate, not come over the wall. She'd come through the cracks. You could see it in the way she moved. Each tiny motion at right angles to the one before. We lost Rebecca the same day; vanished; or traded away. So we made her ours in the place of our own, roughly the same age. Her voice was all honey and bees. She said her name, and by the third syllable our ears began to ache. By the twentieth, we were faint. We taught the child our steamwork tongue and called her Rebecca, because it was safer that way.
The Elders said not to trust her. To keep clear of the changeling flesh... but she could fix. If only we'd had the parts, she could have fixed the moon to the ground. 'Cogfane', the Elders muttered, 'cogfane', like some methuselan curse. Like the machines might hear and flock to her. Like her tapering ears might flicker at the sound, her mind bloom into the perfect clock, hands tick to keep time. We caught her one evening singing to the stars, as if they were just another machine to be coaxed. The notes brushed against each other, locked, turned in sequence...
But Becky never sang to us. She muttered nothing but nonsense in our repurposed steamwork tongue. Redefined beyond our ken to shape a greater tool and echoing weirdly off iron and brass. She never quite clicked into place, always at right angles to the clan, always judderingly out of time with the flesh-cloaked world, never quite one of the Mex.