Chapter 16
Night of Chimeras
The crater city at night is unreal.
Lyric has already wandered hours by the time the sun sets, dazed by the variety of wonder and horror available everywhere he turns.
There’s a garden of trees with candle flame leaves, an alley covered in vines bursting with bubbles that pop to scatter glittering lights, a market square of quartz and topaz flagstones surrounded by buildings of seamless glass.
A row of houses grown from living trees.
He sees lizards with hot-pink tail stripes, quite mundane compared to the iridescent stag beetle the size of a ribbon skiff whose hard outer wings have been designed into a carriage chair.
It trundles along, lights dangling from its horns and sniffing at the air with feathery antennae.
The couple riding it snuggle close, and one of them Lyric is fairly sure has a third eye.
There are apartment platforms high in the air, balanced, it seems, on single foundation pillars as thin as needles.
Small castles floating on low clouds, clustered in the north of the city.
Perhaps their inventors will escape and become the Cloud Kings.
There are two kinds of dragon he’s only seen illustrations of: a feathered dragon slinking over the rooftops and an iron-scaled fire dragon on a leash being walked like a pet.
And the people. Though outside the Moon-Eater’s fortress fewer folk have obvious displays of human architecture to make them appear more beautiful or strange or exotic, Lyric sees plenty of evidence of cheaper design: accentuated eye color, hair that might be design or might be art, and occasional oddities like the fully articulated gleaming wooden hand on a street vendor he buys fried sweet potatoes from, or the contraption that is either a corrective lens or a magnifying glass growing over the eye of an artist piecing together tiny dolls out of thin flower petals in the same market.
As the darkness grows deeper, more people appear in wild masks, holding hands with friends or family, trailed by children in elaborate costumes of beasts or chimeras.
At least Lyric thinks they’re costumes. And real chimeras, too—there’s one that is some sort of dog limping on crab-like legs and a yellow bird in a cage with three flapping wings and a choking song.
Lyric turns away from such things. Perhaps he lacks imagination, but he cannot think of any reason such creatures should be made.
Especially if their destiny is to die tonight.
(That is why many of them are created. Just for the party.)
The energy throughout the city is bright and lively.
Buildings are covered in billowing streamers, and pennants snap freely, untethered by poles or strings.
Flowers float in the air, and streams of colorful smoke drift about.
Strangely, there is no design graffiti that Lyric can see.
He wonders how people learn news and gossip here.
Several catlike creatures dart past him, making calls like laughing barks, then they use overlong arms and prehensile tails to scurry up the side of a spiraling tower. Two stop to stare back down at him. They have faces like human children.
Lyric swallows against the rock in his throat.
Perhaps he should have remained in the fortress, meditating at the crater shrine.
Except, the Moon-Eater was correct that in order to introduce Aharté successfully in the city, he needs to understand the city.
The Moon-Eater claimed it as his own, but someday it will be Lyric’s, if he can initiate the transformation.
Perhaps that begins with Aharté, or perhaps it begins with drawing out Maimeri Sarenpet. Lyric doesn’t have to decide tonight.
He continues to wander, vaguely searching for the less affluent streets, the pockets of difference, diffidence, rebellion he knows must exist. That is where he will find Aharté if she is here.
That is where he is certain to find the longing for her, if she is not.
But in the glow of all the sparkling lights it’s difficult to read the patterns of forces or the energy of the people.
Better, he supposes, to stay in the more crowded areas for now, while alone.
Before he left the Moon-Eater’s little mask-making party, Amado the Reconciler arrived and invited Lyric to their family celebrations in the Chimera fortress.
Lyric declined gently. He said he was charged by the Moon-Eater to explore, and so Amado gave him a small purse of money—chips and coins of silicate that were valued on weight and clarity—and a defense necklace.
Lyric frowned as he accepted it. The necklace is twisted wires in steel and copper, and the pendant a nest of the same, cradling an object like a thumbprint in pale blue clay.
Amado explained it protects against concussive attacks if Lyric taps it once, and a temporary air shield if tapped twice, in case of gaseous death-design.
“The Night of Chimeras is rarely violent in the past decade, but if Lyric goes out alone, it’s better safe than sorry.
Unless,” Amado said, brows raised hopefully, “Lyric would consent to take a soldier from Chimera with Lyric, or one of Amado’s combat-designers? ”
“Is this priest in that much danger?” Lyric asked.
Amado made a thoughtful moue. “Amado requires this Chimera’s family and personnel to have a defense necklace at minimum when traversing throughout the various fortresses.”
Lyric accepted, and though nothing in the intervening hours has made him feel in danger of violence, he can see and in some cases feel the tension between precincts that doesn’t exist in his time: Some have checkpoints and energy walls like the one surrounding the Moon-Eater’s fortress.
Others are patrolled by patchwork-looking soldiers he realizes belong to various mercenary schools, and their patchwork armor is actually patterned in archaic force motifs.
It makes Lyric glad to be wearing the horrible skull siren mask—it’s no stranger than several other costumes he’s passed and allows him an anonymity that his god-red skin would not.
Once the bonfires are lit and the sky grows starry, strings of tiny blue candle flames flare across streets, and the banners and streamers spark to light.
The quality of the light is eerie and a mess of competing colors and strobe effect.
Disorienting at least, especially when the near-quarter moon vanishes below the crowded city horizon and Lyric doesn’t even have such a misplaced beacon for comfort.
Now that the sky is devoid of Aharté’s smiling eye, it is nearly four hours to midnight, when the sacrifices will be made.
Thrown into bonfires in every yard and market square in the city.
Lyric prays Irsu River kept his word and spirited Setka away.
Unbalanced, Lyric continues moving slowly.
He takes moments to connect all four forces within him, and lets his pace grow into a meditation: The entire crater city is his labyrinth tonight.
The meditation makes his fingers feel better.
He’s offered a tiny cup of liquor from someone in a grinning lion mask. “Terrifying mask, chimera,” the person says before joining a group of others in predatory animal masks—two of whom have design masks like Lyric’s that appear to grow out of their faces.
Lyric downs the liquor. It’s a lot like honeybite: bland and sharp. His pulse races.
The worst thing he sees is a competition between children in chimera costumes, clamoring to be the most ugly, the least useful, the strangest with wooden arms and plaster and painted horns, with colored paste hardened on their faces into extra mouths, and there’s one kid with a whole second head.
The children are laughing and shoving one another.
I want to be in the fire! I’m the messiest, I’m the best, let me burn!
The competition is judged by the crowd, but a trio of adults leads them, one a masculine-forward person with no human legs past his upper thighs, but moving fast and gracefully with eight glinting, polished carapace legs like a spider, and Lyric doesn’t understand because if legs like that can be designed, why not real human legs, why this?
(Ah, but perhaps there are redesigned human legs, or reattached limbs, or flesh prosthetics that are so natural looking, so human, that Lyric hasn’t even noticed, and couldn’t possibly if his life depended on it!
Some people want to be remade into what they were before accident or impairment.
Some people want to be spiders. Some people don’t want to be redesigned at all. That is the glory of the monster city.)
A boom startles Lyric and everyone around him, and he reaches for the defense necklace as brilliant light flares just above: fireworks exploding much too close.
Laughter and yells of shock and surprise surround him, and another firework explodes.
It’s merely a quad of paces in the air. He can feel the heat of it, see sparks raining down like hot waterfalls.
He backs away, pushing through the crowd to one of the corners of the market where the celebration trickles off toward new places.
Lyric reaches the road, half attached to a party of youths with pink and yellow and violet hair that ripples and shines like streamers.
He breaks away, heading for a quieter crossroads, and realizes his heart isn’t racing, urging him on. It’s the marriage seed.
Lyric stops again, a hand over his sternum. It feels urgent, but not afraid or excited, no hint of what she’s experiencing except I’m looking for you.
There’s no point in hiding.
He doesn’t even want to.
Turning, he closes his eyes, ignoring the people around him, the crowd and noise and lights. He steps in one direction, then another, gauging the sense of the seed, the hook of its pull. Then he chooses a way and starts walking.