Chapter 54 #3
Commonplace enough in the south, they’d been.
Common enough that he could remember his grandmother complaining as the explosions would rock out over their village shaking the tea in its cups, rattling the teeth in their heads.
The noontime shivers, she’d called them.
He’d always thought of the bombs as shivers since then.
Sixteen shivers left now.
Enough to crack the mountain, he hoped. Enough to send him to oblivion in chewable pieces if he got it wrong.
Distantly listening to the crunch of cricket legs, he runs his fingers gingerly over the rough surface of the topmost shiver.
This was a lot of death to bring down on a city. But he understood why Crowkisser wanted it. Thell had to die so everyone else could live. It was cruel, but life was cruel. You had to be hard to make it better.
Still, still, it wasn’t what he’d dreamt of as a child.
But then, who knew what he’d dreamt of as a child.
He vaguely remembered a smaller world, moving stitch-legged among the waists of taller people who dispensed cuffs and care in roughly equal amounts.
There had been the flash of jewels, rings and trinkets and deft fingers moving between them.
The boom of the rock split open, and the gleam of silver in their hands and hearts afterwards.
There had been boats and sails, yes, but trees as well, their trunks straight and slender. Their branches whip-thin, tempting and treacherous. There had been a fountain he thought, bright with cold water, flecked with gold.
And then, something had happened. The old world had frayed and split and the shadow had come through, and beyond the shadow, the eye.
He remembered the fear. Not just fear. He remembered the terror as it fell on him.
He’d shit himself, and scrabbled limp-legged against the cobbles.
Fought. Choked. Gagged. Panic had covered him, swallowed him, filled him.
It had slid behind his eyes, into his throat, his heart.
The world had frayed, and he had been a thread left on the seam, curled on the cobbles as men and women screamed around him and golden things with the faces of angels and the voices of lizards split and burst in streets which opened themselves to great depths.
Until blackness had yawned under him. Until the whole world shivered.
He’d felt the gaze of the eye eat him. Inch by inch, the whispers of his mind swallowed. He’d stopped there, and given himself up to it, because what else was there to do on the frayed edge of the world?
Given himself up to it. Until she’d emerged from the slanted buildings, smoke-stained and bloody. Given himself up to it, until he’d realised that there was life beyond the shadow.
Years had passed since then. He shifts, setting the gun down.
It throbs slowly as he runs fingers over the knots in his neck, feeling the frayed stitching of his collar.
He slips the jacket off and finds needle and thread.
Wet between the lips and then passed through the eye. Quick, economical loops.
There are a lot of little tears, now he looks, dark spots and blemishes.
He moves to the workbench beyond the pile of shivers, reaches up, takes a tin from a box, wax from the tin.
Works in small circles, from the inside out.
His fingers straighten sleeves and seams, smoothing the lining where it has snagged from sudden, fast movement.
It had been a gift, originally. She’d brought it to him in those early days.
A dull grey morning like this, the sky a hammered pan.
A bit before they’d taken Astic, in a herder’s hut south of here, jam on her lips and her fingers worn raw.
The time it must have taken. And there it was, given without ceremony.
‘This is yours,’ she’d said, and pressed it against his chest. Then pressed herself against him.
They’d fallen into rough wool and rushes, the air outside heavy with the scent of hill-flowers, split with the lone piping of a startled bird.
She’d taken him by inches. Teeth running over shoulders, hips.
Her body a slim, insistent thing, her legs woven like wire along a branch.
Her spine always out of reach, pale in the soft light, until his hands could bring her into him, could lace her with fingers and tongue.
Her wrists light against his palms, toes pointed.
Her heart a hammer in a bone box. And then her mouth open and a soft, lilting cry, that built like a banked fire. Softness, softness and release.
Leaving the next day, the jacket had felt light and strange on his shoulders, like the touch of a friend just met.
The linen tight on his throat, his breath catching when he looked at her.
The last scraps of forest falling to the gullies and scree paths of what would become the Rim villages, the people following them picking their way gingerly over stones that turned easily, gave up flints, fossils.
The land alive with tall grey grass which shivered white in the breeze, holding tan foxes, and slim, wary deer that emerged at twilight, their coats shimmering with the mock and sway of the grass.
They’d only lost one man on the way to Astic, fallen on the trail, convulsing, spine arched and mobile, his lips bubbling with gold.
Crowkisser held him as he talked, her mouth close against his, her cheeks flecked with spittle, thumbed by his desperate hands, her own hands working his body, stopping the worst of the change, until he quieted and she motioned Slickwalker to bring the gun and put a bullet into him.
The gun was hungry even then. Spitting forth death that slunk through the air like a scolded cat, falling on flesh and bone and bubbling gold and burning it all to merge with the rock beneath. Chips of flint, chips of bone.
Over time they moved north and west, seeking the sea, the coast, and the purification of salt before eventually finding Astic.
As they travelled, the gun grew sleeker, lighter and the jacket picked up darknesses, blood, tears and blemishes.
Still whenever he wore it, he thought of her, with sweetness on her lips and the shudder of silver grass beneath an empty sky.