Chapter 4
The song and the breath of a song
Impossible.
The word rings in Lyric’s mind. This is all impossible.
Pieces of information stick to him: the Moon-Eater and Old Sarenpet and human architecture, the monster—the chimera—the empty, empty, empty sky, no mirané people, the red rock of his crater but there is no palace or temple or architecture he knows.
The forces tingle and swirl and he can’t quite feel his fingers, but it’s wrong the way everything settles against his skin—no balance. No Silence.
No moon.
Impossible.
Lyric takes one step, a foot on the stairs, and another, carrying Iriset with him.
But how many things were impossible before he knew Iriset mé Isidor?
Before he married an apostate who changed her face and upended the Silence of the Vertex Seal’s palace, infiltrated the hallowed balance of—of everything?
Killed his mother, started a rebellion, freed the numen, tried to destroy Holy Design.
The marriage knot churns in his chest, biting, eager, reminding him.
Nothing is impossible when she is involved.
Eliri leads him across a foyer of polished black glass.
It shimmers like liquid, and Lyric nearly trips.
The tiles are solid, but they seem to shift like water.
Flickers of color dart here and there like tiny fish, disorienting.
The foyer is lined with pillars encircled by deep green tendrils, long leaves waving gently. It’s like being underwater.
Beyond, a great archway opens up into a massive bright courtyard.
They descend shallow black glass stairs that give way to paler glass, or clarified quartz, or something that ripples like sunlight on water.
Five of those metallic towers rise all around, as if the courtyard is a disk held in the palm of a giant’s silver hand.
The towers are woven of filaments of silver and crystal and seemingly grown together with exquisite design.
Lyric has seen nothing like them. Elegant glass-like bridges connect the towers at various levels with balconies and glass bubble windows here and there.
At the pointed tips, hundreds of paces up, sea-green pennants drift long and languid in the wind.
The sky remains an empty, impossible blue.
Lyric looks abruptly down at the clear glass floor again, shaking off disorientation.
“Shade,” the invisible voice hisses, and something darts past him—it’s the numen, its silver hair streaming pink and black as it moves in leaps and starts toward the daybed at the very center of the glass courtyard.
Someone reclines upon it. A mirané man, Lyric thinks, as the figure gets to his feet.
He’s an extremely masculine-forward person, broad and muscled, more defined than a chiseled statue and wearing only a long unbound vest and pleated black skirt.
What is more outstanding, though, is that he is mirané brown, but more: Not only is his skin crater-rock red, the man’s hair and eyes—even the sclera, the palms of his hands, and nail beds that on a miran tend to be paler—are as crater red as everything else.
This is a man carved not of marble but of polished red moon rock, and Lyric knows what he is looking at although he cannot name it yet. It’s impossible.
“Shade,” the numen says again, a mirané word for a slash of darkness across daylight grass, the shadow of a tree cast by the sun.
And the impossible man’s body changes, slipping itself into a mirané-skinned youth, fifteen or sixteen only, lanky and almost cute except for his hair going silvery and his eyes pink-black.
And a vicious baring of fangs that cannot be called a smile.
The Moon-Eater says, “Never?”
It’s a mirané word, too. A negative absolute.
“Yes,” the numen answers with a laugh, and it is a youth just like the Moon-Eater, lithe and eager, and as pink-silver as Aharté’s moon.
The two creatures embrace, arms wrapped tightly around each other. They kiss again and again, rubbing their cheeks like cats. Only, where their cheeks touch they smear, faces merging together and pulling back like raw dough. Lyric barely registers how disgusting it is.
He sinks to his knees, sitting back to cradle Iriset in his lap. He stares. Awed, shocked, his pulse seeming to spark in little stars outside his body. He can’t. The Moon-Eater, the moonless sky, Old Sarenpet, human architecture, chimeras.
The Apostate Age. This is at least four hundred years before Lyric was born.
“You came back to me, Never,” the Moon-Eater says. He smiles again; even his teeth are red.
The numen cups the Moon-Eater’s face. “Leaving does not mean no returning.”
For a moment the Moon-Eater’s expression slips into an undefinable passion, but it’s gone too quick, and Lyric too exhausted.
“Why now?” the Moon-Eater asks, removing the numen’s hands from his face but holding on to them.
“I found a sunderer,” the numen answers.
The Moon-Eater scoffs. “That old story you like.”
“It isn’t a story, you child,” the numen snarls.
They’re speaking mirané, Lyric realizes, dazed. “What is a sunderer?” he says mostly to himself. But the Moon-Eater’s attention snaps to him.
“Eliri the Adept Hand,” calls another voice, in Old Sarenpet, and everyone looks.
Eliri touches Lyric’s elbow gently. “Alis Healer is here to help Lyric Aharté’s wife.”
“Iriset,” he says, aware of the Moon-Eater slowly stalking closer.
The healer is a dark-skinned woman with red freckles painted on, and matching eyeliner.
Her gaze is steady, waiting for Lyric’s response.
She must be only a little older than him, but right now he feels like a lost child.
So instead of answering, he lets her help him lay Iriset out.
But Lyric keeps her head in his lap. “Dart shot Iriset, ah, here.” He doesn’t know the Old Sarenpet word for lung or ribs, but he can show the physician where the robe is torn, where the blood soaked the deepest. “Eliri stopped the bleeding, a force—a force-burn?”
The healer nods, slicing the material away with a tiny tool between thumb and forefinger like little pinching scissors. With a few drops of something that smells like liquor, she cleans the blood from around the wound. It remains raw and angry but closed up.
Alis Healer has a box beside her, to which she returns the bottle of liquor and retrieves instead a knot of material and quickly opens it. A net of some kind, which she pricks to Iriset’s skin over the injury, using her pinching scissors that must be also like tiny styli for design work.
Lyric is about to watch apostatical surgery. He should make them stop. He should—
Except before he can protest, the Moon-Eater plops into a crouch next to Lyric.
Lyric startles, but the Moon-Eater only cocks his head, staring at Lyric as his hair slithers into black waves like Lyric’s, his eyes turn mirané brown with flecks of red like Lyric’s, and his teeth finally turn white as bone.
He is handsome but his expression tilts slightly toward madness, perhaps his eyes are too large for his face, his pupils not quite round, or there are too many white teeth in that mouth, or he has no pores but only smooth, impermeable skin.
One such thing or all, Lyric’s mind flags the Moon-Eater as wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Your tongue curls so smartly around these words of ours, friend,” the Moon-Eater murmurs in mirané. “What are you?”
Then the Moon-Eater reaches out with a forefinger extended and Lyric steels himself. The Moon-Eater’s finger makes contact with his brow.
Lyric barely manages to keep his eyes open, looking into the gaze of the Moon-Eater.
It must be some kind of sacrilege. The Moon-Eater is a numen, he thinks.
He feels the four forces in his body one after another: ecstatic popping with his heartbeat, the flow of breath as he struggles to keep it even, rising heat in his blood and falling exhaustion, cool trepidation, pulling him into himself.
“You should kill him,” the numen says coldly. And who can blame it? Lyric and his family imprisoned and tortured it for a hundred years.
“Ah,” the Moon-Eater gasps softly. “But he is perfectly designed. Not a thread out of place… Ah, so beautiful.” His finger slides down Lyric’s nose and taps his bottom lip, then the Moon-Eater cups Lyric’s face. “I’ve never seen the like. And tied to this one at his core.”
“That is the sunderer,” the numen says. “She was fool enough to marry him.”
“So she might be upset if he dies,” the Moon-Eater says, looking only at Lyric like he’s fascinating. “And I don’t want to kill him.” He switches to Old Sarenpet. “These two caused the star?”
Eliri kneels as the healer continues to prick design against Iriset’s ribs, ignoring everything else.
Eliri says, “Yes, Moon-Eater. The star fell, knocking a crater in the Sunrise Rock Garden. Two were within, this Lyric Aharté and wife. Eliri did not realize the Moon-Eater’s friend was a third until now. ”
The Moon-Eater glances at the numen. “Do you know what happened?”
“Maybe,” says the surly numen, flicking a glare at Lyric. “He imprisoned me for one hundred years. He should die.”
“He doesn’t look old enough for that,” the Moon-Eater says, and Lyric wonders if he can bargain for Iriset to live, at least. But then the Moon-Eater’s attention returns to him. “Who made you?”
Lyric tries to speak, his tongue dry. He swallows, tries again. “I am made by Aharté.”
“Lyric,” the Moon-Eater says slowly. “Aharté. The song and the breath of a song. A word and the pause between words.”
“My wife is Iriset,” Lyric manages, his voice hushing as he lowers his gaze to the healer’s work. “I don’t know what happened, or how we got here.”
“The sunderer,” the numen says.
“Hmm.” The Moon-Eater grins. “If your stories are true, Never, she could kill me.”
“She won’t. Don’t hurt her,” Lyric says, shifting with the urge to hide her, to put himself between them. The healer grumbles at his movements. From the way she ignores the rest and Eliri remains still and quiet but on guard, Lyric guesses they don’t understand mirané.
The numen strides forward and grabs the Moon-Eater by the hair, pulling his head back. The Moon-Eater’s long red neck bends easily, too long, inhuman. And he smiles, flicks out a tongue that’s just as too-long. Nausea ripples up Lyric’s throat.
In his lap, Iriset stirs. He jerks his attention to her as a tiny groan parts her lips. Lyric tenderly brushes hair off her sticky forehead. Everything around him is monstrous and confusing, but she’s here. One thing he knows, even if he never knew her at all.
The healer—Alis—clicks her tongue and Lyric looks to the physician’s work.
Golden threads of force are visible in a dome with four curving corner wings, like a strange roof.
From each wing, lines of force plunge into Iriset’s body.
At the points, there is redness and tiny droplets of blood. “What…?” he asks.
“The pagoda array is building down into the wound to the deepest point, and will leave force-mesh in place to assist the body in healing well,” the physician says. “The work already done to stop bleeding and close the wound was crude but effective. This patient will survive with rest.”
Then Alis uses her scissor stylus to pinch the four wings of the array up into something Lyric can only imagine as a dumpling.
She twists it closed with a quick flourish and the force array sinks into Iriset until the dumpling cap rests against her skin.
“Array will remain, fading when its work is done. Two, three days.”
Lyric nods, too overwhelmed to speak. He bends close over Iriset, tucking his nose to her tangled hair.
“Lyric Aharté,” says the Moon-Eater in mirané, having ended his disorienting flirtation with the numen, who crouches with too many knobby knees and arms a distance away.
“Moon-Eater,” Lyric says more mildly than he thought possible. Despite the Moon-Eater’s assurances he wants Lyric alive, that could change at any moment. This creature reeks of capriciousness.
Right now the Moon-Eater’s smile is almost affectionate. “You need rest, and your little sunderer wife is still knitting back together. In a few days I will meet you again.”
“Shade!” the numen protests.
“I want to know what she can do, and what he is made of,” the Moon-Eater says teasingly. Then his voice hardens. “And you have not been here. This is my city, Never. Mine. If you would like to challenge that, do so. If you would like to leave, again, do so.”
There is a tension in the air, a force unlike any Lyric is familiar with, and he wishes he was not here, was not feeling it.
“Shade,” the numen hisses softly.
“Yes. You and I have much to discuss. Let them rest. Eliri.”
Eliri kneels. “Go with Eliri, Lyric Aharté. Will find a place for Lyric and Lyric’s wife.”
“Iriset,” he says.
“Iriset,” Eliri says quietly.
“Thank you,” he says in mirané, because he doesn’t know those words in Old Sarenpet.
“It is ‘thanks given between friends,’” the Moon-Eater says in Old Sarenpet.
He’s smiling again in his youthful form, and the numen has wrapped itself around him from behind, arms tight about his waist and chin tucked over the Moon-Eater’s shoulder.
The Moon-Eater reaches up to pet its face and neck tenderly.
Lyric repeats the phrase of thanks to Eliri. She only nods. In all this time she has barely expressed anything but quiet surprise and a little curiosity. But she helps him stand with Iriset in his arms, her hand on his elbow.
“Take care of her,” the numen croons.
Lyric studies it for a moment, and then nods slowly, having come to no conclusions.
He goes with Eliri, weariness darkening his vision. He only wants to fall onto his face, to sleep, too. Let Garnet strip him down, put a cup of water in his hand. He wants to hold Singix—no, his wife is not Singix. Iriset.
He hasn’t slept since his mother died, since he chased Singix and discovered she’d been dead for quads, since he killed the rebel—the first time he’s ever killed by his own hand. Lyric hasn’t slept and it’s all too much.
Eliri leads him to a room and points to a bed on a swaying platform. He sets Iriset carefully onto the pillows and falls down beside her.