Chapter 42
Not for everyone, but for enough
It’s raining when Lyric arrives at Rivermouth fortress, and he stands in it, listening to the heavy tapping on his umbrella while waiting for admission.
The earthquake of the hour shudders through the crater city, lasting several full minutes.
The shield gates of Rivermouth cannot be opened (or closed) during a quake.
Lyric tilts his head as the tone of the rain changes, glancing at the pale light on the underside of the umbrella.
It’s made of several long slats of godgrass, with simple strands of treated string between them.
When extended, a thin ecstatic net fizzes open from glass design buttons at the end of each slat and at the cap of the pole.
Rain hits the net but slides down to drip off the ends without falling through.
The first time Lyric used it, he’d realized it’s the exact same technology four hundred years in the future.
Some things don’t need to be improved, he thought, amused.
Now, though, rain itself shivers in the air like every drop is caught in ecstatic hold.
The power from the untethered array is causing earthquakes, yes, but as they’ve progressed, the energy shocks have begun vibrating up into the air and atmosphere itself.
It’s beautiful, almost like diamonds hung from invisible strings.
Once the quake passes, Lyric is allowed entry, and the moment he displays the token sent to him by their small king, he’s taken directly to Irsu River.
As he walks through the manor, no one looks at Lyric, and dread makes a muddy nest in his stomach. The message he received from River merely said, Come collect Iriset.
“What happened?” he asks the attendant with him as he’s led up the shallow steps onto the porch surrounding the whole library building.
“Design accident,” the attendant says.
Lyric frowns. “Was anyone hurt?”
The attendant stops and looks down. “This attendant is not informed, Lyric Aharté.”
But the way it’s said sends fear spiking through him. He drops his umbrella and charges toward the library door. Through the continuous sheets of rain he hears, “Over here, Lyric.”
Lyric turns so fast he nearly trips. On the porch floor, leaned up against the inner wall next to the door to Eliri’s half of the offices, is River.
An holds a dark cigarette but only lets it burn.
The bright embers slowly eat their way nearer to ans long fingers as Lyric approaches, heart pounding enough to feel in his palms.
The small king wears a plain gray tunic over pants the same color.
They’re the most ordinary things Lyric has ever seen an wear.
River’s hair is loose, frizzy around ans temples, feathers askew.
Until now, Lyric realizes he’s always seen River with makeup lining ans eyes.
The green-to-blue-and-back-again ripple of ans irises is the only color on an now.
Stopping beside River, Lyric looks down at the other, trying to find the words to ask. It feels like a moment that will change everything, a moment that can never be taken back. But whatever changed has already happened. Not knowing won’t fix it. “River,” he says.
“Iriset is inside,” the small king says with uncharacteristic plainness. “Don’t let any of Eliri’s notes be destroyed.”
Relief and confusion tangle on his tongue, and Lyric makes a stunted noise.
River sighs and holds up a hand. Lyric grasps it unthinkingly, only hesitating once he’s holding ans hand.
River is so cold. Lyric pulls an to ans feet and River blinks very slowly.
Ans breath smells sickly sweet, a drug Lyric doesn’t know.
All the relief he felt flows away with the rain as River says, “Iriset stayed with this useless king during the diagnosis, and when Iriset heard what happened, Iriset left. Found Iriset inside Eliri’s office. ”
Lyric, still holding River’s hand, shakes his head. “Iriset is fine, so what happened to Eliri?”
The small king looks away, then startles and drops the tiny stub of the cigarette.
It burns its final dregs there on the glistening dark wood of the porch.
“Anyone from here would have known,” River says, a hardness creeping into the edges of ans voice.
“It’s why fetal meshes are so controversial and difficult.
If Iriset was a designer of this crater city, Iriset would have known. ”
Lyric moves around River, impatient now to find Iriset.
River says nothing else, but Lyric hears an slide back down the wall.
There’s such an ache of anxiety in his body now, Lyric can’t even call out.
He pushes open the first heavy sliding door and walks into the entryway, looking around past blue curtains and dark wood, at shelves of books and scrolls.
He hears a thud like a book dropping to the floor, and hurries.
Rounding a standing bookcase, he finds Iriset seated on a bench, staring at a spread of design manuals on the desk.
Untied outer robe and messy topknot make her seem wild despite how quietly she’s reading, both eyes darting back and forth too fast. Her arms fold over each other, one hand tapping staccato misery against the opposite elbow.
Instead of speaking, Lyric walks around the desk and leans down to take her in his arms from behind. She sucks in a breath and her head drops. She grasps his forearms and squeezes for a moment, then shakes her head and pushes at him. “I can’t,” she says.
Lyric lets go, but moves to straddle the bench next to her. “Iriset.”
“She didn’t tell me. She knew, she… she knew,” Iriset murmurs. “I can’t believe how many people I’ve killed.”
“Talk to me,” he says, thinking of her lover Bittor, the rebel he killed last year at the end of summer.
The only time he’s killed with his own hands.
But there is also Setka now, whose death is his responsibility, and countless apostates and rebels and very likely innocents who were only guilty by association, perhaps the justification farthest from justice.
Lyric brushes stray hairs from her face as she stares at him. He’ll wait her out with touch, burying his own anxieties, his need for answers. He runs his fingers along the shell of her ear again and again.
Iriset tilts her head like a cat. Her eyes drift closed.
“Eliri knew. Her heart and lungs and muscles were meant for quartz bones. She was designed that way, in the womb. She couldn’t live with regular human bones, Lyric, not without her organs changing, too.
I could have changed it all, but she told me not to.
She said just the bones. Just the bones.
” Iriset blinks several times, her eyelashes picking up the flecks of tears and clumping together so no actual tears fall.
“It isn’t your fault, then, Iriset,” Lyric says.
He’s thinking about human architecture, and how this doesn’t happen when it’s forbidden, and how he’s supporting a huge redesign initiative and probably, certainly, the whole mirané people were made with apostasy, not by She Who Loves Silence, the goddess who is silent, if she exists.
And Iriset isn’t a god, even when she acts like one.
And that’s why he can still love her. “She used you,” he adds.
Iriset stands up, disrupting his caresses.
“Look at this,” she says, pulling out an open book.
“I saw this book in your forbidden library,” she mutters, flipping the pages until she comes to a fold-out double set of pages with long diagrams of wings and Old Sarenpet notations.
Iriset points to some of the notes. “This is Eliri. She wrote, not compatible with quartz, and I didn’t know what that meant back then, but she’s talking about herself, her bones.
And this”—Iriset flips two pages—“this says, too heavy, calculations impossible, try air pockets, hollow bones? Too heavy were basically her last words!”
Lyric catches Iriset’s hands. “She knew what she was doing.”
Iriset grimaces with all her teeth. “But why? Why not tell me? Why—why leave River? An is going to follow her, as soon as an can justify it. You’ve heard their story, haven’t you?”
“Yes. And I don’t know.” He squeezes her hands, feeling like his lungs squeeze, too.
“So much for consent,” Iriset says darkly.
“If she thought…” Lyric pauses, throat closing around words he hates to think much less say.
“If she thought there was no place for her in Holy Design, maybe it was the only way she could imagine remaining, here, alive, at all. Maybe it wasn’t a death sentence but a risk. A risk worth taking to her.”
“You mean maybe it was brave?” Iriset’s mouth twists.
“Maybe she wanted to believe it was possible? Then she should have told me everything. Let me want to believe it, too.” Iriset breaks free and reaches for a long pen, dipping it in ink before writing directly into the margin of the book, Eliri Who Touched the Sun.
“It was me,” she whispers. “I’m the one who names her that.”
They return to the Moon-Eater’s fortress and find the old fairy himself by following the sounds of celebration.
Iriset shoves her way past people cavorting in various fountains and water features, which seems redundant given the light rain.
Lyric tries to follow closely behind, but he’s not so good at ignoring the fact that many if not all the people are naked.
It certainly makes the variations of human architecture more obvious than usual.
Lyric sees skin striped like a cat, feathers on not only the head but the pubis, gemstones embedded along a sternum, and an actual prehensile tail.
Not to mention at least three ridiculously enlarged penises and one that’s in some kind of armored sheath that matches the scaled armor down the man’s back—Lyric stops in utter shock, unable to look away.