Walker in the Gyre

Chapter 1

Their prison was too brightly lit for comfort. In other respects, though, it was well appointed, with a coffee maker, a large bed and a leather couch, a full-length mirror, bad wallpaper, and a television that only turned to dead channels.

When they realized they couldn't escape, the two of them settled down to wait. Walker made some coffee, and Adrienne lay back on the couch.

"So tell me a story, old man," she said, when the silence had stretched on for too long.

Walker poured her a cup of coffee and put the pot back on the burner. "I'm thirty-five. That's not old."

"It's old enough," she said, and stretched sinuously where she lay. She took a sip of the coffee and crinkled up her face. "What's in this, mummy dust?"

"Good for the complexion," he said. "You look like a corpse."

"It's makeup." She set her coffee back on the table and held her wrist up to shade her face. Light glinted off the spikes on her black leather bracelet. "So tell me a story already."

"What kind of story?"

"A true story. Tell me a true story about what's going on outside."

"I don't think it works that way. I'm a writer, not a prophet. And I don't even write very good books."

She looked over at him; her blue eyes were lined in black. Stray strands of white hair fell across her face. "I don't see any prophets here. If all I've got is an old man who writes adventure novels and makes bad coffee, then that's all I've got."

He harrumphed into his beard. "All right then, little girl. I'll tell you a bedtime story."

"Just because I'm patronizing doesn't mean you can be."

He sat down in a chair next to the couch and tried not to look at her. "This story isn't any less true than any other. It happened not too long ago, and it happened everywhere at once. Gods are as large as our dreams, and as small as our jealousies. It's important to remember that."

"Just tell the story."

"Stop being a brat, and listen."

#

It wasn't Heaven, Olympos or Elysium, or the root of the World-Ash Tree.

Of course, it wasn't a pleasantly breezy and blue summer mid-afternoon on a hilltop in middle Tennessee, either, but it was something like that, at least as far as the two individuals drinking tea were concerned.

The man - or so we'll call him, for he looked and operated very much like a man - was a little over six feet tall, most of his frame shrouded in a beige trench coat. He had short, bristly black hair and a little trace of stubble. Beneath the trench coat he was dressed formally, as if for a business meeting, which this was, in a sense.

The man's name was Matthew, as far as any human ear could hear it or human tongue could pronounce it.

He sipped his tea.

"Good afternoon, Grandmother Spider," Matthew said.

"Good afternoon, young Matthew," said the old woman in the other chair. She was wrinkled but still healthy-round, with wizened little eyes, and she cradled her teacup with long, strong-fingered hands. She wore a blue dress, and looked completely unassuming, as did he - not in the least unnatural or transcendent. "I suppose," she said, "you're wondering why you're here?"

"Not really. I know you'll tell me sooner or later. Until then, I'll just sit here, and enjoy the tea and the view."

"Yes, I'm particularly proud of this one." Grandmother Spider dipped herself a spoon of sugar, and poured the sugar slowly into her tea. It sparkled like thousands of tiny stars as it fell. "It's a nice web, and I've got your Grandpa locked up so tightly here in the ground, you can hardly hear him bleeding."

Matthew uncrossed his legs, and crossed them again. "So, what's new?"

"Dusk's going to have a baby."

Matthew coughed in mid-sip and pitched forward, spraying tea all over the grass. Somewhere in the middle of that he managed to shout, "What?"

"Well, you know how this works."

"No, I don't. I didn't even know we could have children!"

"Oh, yes. It's one of the pleasures of having a-." She paused. "You know, I'm not really sure what to call the two of you. You're not kin, and you're sure not lovers - are you?"

"Hell no!" He wiped tea off his face, and set the teacup back on the table. "Have you been smoking whatever it is they grow on this planet?"

She smiled. Her teeth were very thin, very white, and very strong. "Let's call her your opposite. But opposites are always full of surprises." She poured him some more tea, and put a sugar cube in it. "Grandpa Blood here was pretty surprised when I spun him into the ground, for example."

"That's very reassuring, thanks." He drank half the tea in one gulp, then stared for a second at the sludge of tea and sugar in the bottom of the cup, confused.

"Things change, young Matthew, even when I'm not expecting them to."

"What are you-"

"Just listen. You don't know everything, not yet. Order knits, but it can bind; Chaos regenerates, but it can rot." She spoke fast, too fast for her, and in her urgency, her form slipped. For a moment, there was something else where the old woman sat, penetrating through all the levels of the world at once, something great and tired and old and dark and hungry, and then it was the old woman again, only changed, bent forward, twisted. Matthew leapt up from his chair, knocking his teacup off the table in his haste. His extended his hand, and now it held a metal staff, but he had already slipped, fallen. He struck the ground with a dull sound.

"There's a young prince coming," Grandma Spider said, apparently unconcerned, "the quintessence of dust, the half-mad. And you can't stop him. Not as you are."

Matthew's eyes were even with his fallen teacup. Grandma Spider had served herself loose sugar. "Poison." He reviewed the chemical composition of his blood, and confirmed it - noted the drug eating through the bonds that connected his body to his soul. And then came the pain. He cried out. His hands dug at the earth, and he forced himself up onto one knee.

Grandma Spider smiled wide, so wide her lips split and mandibles worked their way out from within her mouth, and her eyes sharpened into so many facets they became orbs again. She laughed, and ice covered the world.

Matthew fell through the ground, and out into the emptiness and void between the stars. Behind him, around the tray with its teapot and two cups and its bowl of sugar and its tainted sugar cubes, the peaceful hilltop began to change.

#

"Poison?" Adrienne shook her head. "Poison wouldn't work on Matthew. I've seen him reattach his arm. And take a direct hit from a tank. Someone's going to come along and knock him down with something they bought at a pharmacy?"

"It wasn't ordinary poison - Grandma Spider made it, and who knows what she throws into the mix? And poison isn't quite the right word for it, either - but it worked more or less like that, sliding under his defenses."

"If it wasn't really poison, why tell the story as if it were?"

He set down his coffee. "Because," he said, "this is the way I tell it. Why don't you take over?"

"Because I'm bored, and lazy, and the TV doesn't work. If I can't escape, I might as well milk the closest thing I have here to entertainment."

"So sit back and listen, without snarking, unless you want me to smack you with a rolled-up newspaper."

"I'm not that desperate for entertainment." Curved shadows ran over her body as she shifted on the sofa. "Though I'll let you know."

"Fine." He laced his fingers, unlaced them, placed his hands in his lap. "Now, time passes in strange ways in stories, but then, it passes in strange ways everywhere. Matthew was gone, and without him, time passed."

#

But, time pass as it may, the City always remains. It rises above the empty starfield, or above a barren plane, or out of a mountain peak in a distant range; it crouches on an island between two rivers. It is a democracy, an oligarchy, a plutocracy, a theocracy; it is Camelot and Babylon and Sodom. It is beautiful and ugly, and rich and poor. What side of the City you see depends on how you enter it, and what you take out of the City depends on how you leave it. In this way, it is a lot like life.

The City contains every street and every corner, and every suburb is its suburb. It is the vision that haunts the young men and women who set out to find their fortunes.

Also, it has excellent coffee shops.

In one particular shop, on Asher Street, a not-so-young man named Walker stood before the register, hunched in his green army coat, trying to ignore the angry cries of the hunting mob outside. They had started pulling down telephone poles, presumably hoping their quarry had been hiding on top of one. He heard the cracking crash of the falling poles, and winced.

"That'll be four dollars and seventy-nine cents," the barista said.

"Death to the cosmocide!" screamed one of the members of the mob. Walker crouched further inside his coat, hands fumbling for his wallet.

"Did you ever have one of those days," Walker said, as he counted out four dollars and fished around in his pockets for change, "when it feels like the universe is out to get you?"

"All the time," said the barista.

"Burn him! No, flay him first! Then dismember him! Then burn him!"

"No," said Walker, "I mean in a more personal way." He lay three quarters on the counter. "Hold on, I know I've got some pennies around here somewhere."

The girl turned around and started to fill a cup with coffee. "The universe is out to get all of us, all the time. Life is trash. Isn't that personal enough?"

"Like, maybe you did something wrong, and you're being punished for it."

"You mean, like, karma? Have you pissed anyone off recently?" She set the cup down. He put down three cents and smiled sheepishly. She didn't let go of the cup.

"I- kind of." He fished deeper in his pockets. "I mean, I wasn't intending to - I didn't know I was doing anything wrong, but you know how sometimes things don't work out like you intend?" His hands closed around a small copper disc, and he smiled and set it on the counter. It was a Canadian penny, but she took it anyway.

"What did you do?" she asked out of curiosity.

"There he is!" shouted one of the men in the mob, a tall, dark figure with no hair, three eyes, and sharp teeth. "The cosmocide is here!" And he pointed at Walker through the window of the coffee shop.

"I, um, I accidentally almost destroyed the world. Or a world. It's kind of complicated."

The mob surged against the shop's plate glass window, which cracked and shattered.

"Look, do you have a back door?"

The barista looked from the mob, to Walker, and nodded back towards the restrooms.

"Thanks," said Walker, and turned to flee.

The mob surged forward. The barista noticed that, in his haste to leave, Walker had forgotten his coffee. She locked the register, and thought, as she retreated to the riot bunker, maybe somebody out there really does have it in for him.

Outside, it began to rain.

#

The graveyard stretched beneath the wrecked skeleton of a starship, on a dark plane beneath a dead sky. It was cold there, and it had been too cold for the survivors of the crash. Space being so big, the chances of accidentally running into anything planet-sized could only be called large when compared to the chances of accidentally running into anything planet-sized and inhabitable.

The survivors had been happy enough to slide some dirt over the corpses of their friends, in the end, and rest assured knowing their bones would remain undisturbed until the Great Fledging, when they would arise as birds of fire to sweep the universe before them.

The last of them had died next to his shovel, after sifting a little soil onto his friend's grave. For a hundred years or more, only the fingers of the wind had disturbed the dust of the plain.

A skeletal hand broke through the pebbly, frozen soil beside one of the gravestones. Another followed it. And, in a lurching shove like that of a child pulling himself out onto the side of a pool, the dead thing called Yorick pulled his torso all the way out of the ground.

Wriggling his legs free, he stood, and surveyed the graves around him. "What," he asked the dead sky, "no welcoming committee? I'm hurt."

The dead thing called Yorick wore a tattered diamond jerkin, and his hose hung loose around his thin legs. Flesh still clung here and there about his frame, though his head was a smooth skull polished by long handling. There were only shadows within the sockets of its eyes.

He bowed to an invisible audience, reached out, produced a jester's cap from the thin air, and placed it on his head. Then, he turned to the hole from which he had crawled, and called out, "Come, Prince!"

A shadow struggled out of the hole, vaguely humanoid; it came hands and headfirst like Yorick, and when the length of its toddler's body lay upon the sand, it rose and bounded towards him. Using Yorick's rib cage as its ladder, it climbed up his back and sat on his shoulders.

Yorick looked around him, clucking his tongue against his bones. "You know, if I had a penny for every backwater graveyard I ever had to crawl out of, I wouldn't have to take jobs like this any more." He paused, and cocked his head to one side as if listening to something. The shadow bent its head towards where Yorick's ear would be. "Of course you think work sounds exciting, young master. You've never had to do it."

"Now," and Yorick turned to the battered hulk of the crashed starship, "if we want to get anywhere on time, it looks like we have some work to do."

#

Adrienne waited in the alley, next to her canary-yellow sports car. Rain ran off the black skin of her umbrella. Through the crash of thunder, she heard the screams of the mob. She checked her pocket watch.

"He's late," she said, looking at the portly, uncomfortable man in the white rain jacket. "How can he be late?"

The man tried to drive his hands even deeper into his jacket pockets. "Maybe he decided to wait until a sunny day to meet his destiny. Maybe he's getting something to drink."

She leaned back against her car. Its sides were wet, but she was wearing leather, so the water didn't go through. "That's the last time I trust an oracle to tell me where to find someone. Or the last time I trust the boss to recommend an oracle."

"What did the oracle have to say?"

"That Walker'd be here today, when my watch hands pointed to three fifteen. But it's three-twenty now. So maybe he's not coming?" She paused, took out her watch, and looked at it again. "Or..."

"You know it's a bad idea to tinker with prophecy."

"Oh, shut up." She stopped her watch and wound it backward, until both the minute and hour hands pointed to the three, but she didn't click the dial back in. The clock hands remained still.

Down the alley, she heard a high-pitched cry, followed by a roar of "Kill the cosmocide!"

Thirty seconds later, when her watch still read 3:15 exactly, a bearded, frightened man sprinted around the corner, and tore down the alley towards them. The mob followed close behind.

#

Elsewhere in the City, a cloak walked out of the rain and into a bar. Many of the dimly-lit dive's patrons wore cloaks themselves, but this cloak was different from theirs - it was not a garment meant to cover and conceal, but an outline in space, providing three-dimensional shape to a thing which did not normally possess it, a thing not composed of normal matter.

While in many ways it defied explanation, the thing inside the cloak - the thing outlined by the cloak, the thing that in some ways was the cloak - was definitely male.

He floated perhaps an inch above the ground, broad-shouldered despite there being no actual shoulders beneath his fabric, and his sleeves were long enough to hide the hands that might have been beneath them.

The cloak asked the meaty bouncer with the three arms a question, and the bouncer pointed - with his slender, agile-fingered money-taking hand - to a metal girl at the center table, who gleamed with razors. The cloak paused, nodded his head in thanks, and floated over.

Three women surrounded the metal girl; their ears were round, but there was something fey about their jewel-colored eyes. Their nails were long, and they sat and stood the way much larger and better-armed people would sit and stand. One of them, with eyes of sapphire and skin of bronze, rose to block his approach. He stopped, waiting for her challenge.

She said nothing.

"Hello," he tried. "Can I talk to Mallory?"

"You're not welcome here."

"I know everyone's hard up these days," he said, "but I've never known the Good People to be standoffish. You've welcomed me into your homes in the past."

"This isn't our home, madman," said the woman.

"Right." He grinned. There were no eyes beneath the hood of that cloak, no features of any kind save for the gleaming white of his teeth. "Can I talk to Mallory anyway?"

Let him through, said the metal girl, though she had no mouth, and there were no speakers set into her body of chrome and wire, razors and nails. She spoke on the edge of the mind, in a voice quiet enough to deafen.

The woman with sapphire eyes and bronze skin stepped back and bowed her head. "Sit."

As the cloak approached, his grin faded, and the shadows beneath his hood were unbroken once more. "You've looked better, Mal."

I've felt better, Umber, she said. When she turned her head to look at him, he heard the groan of metal against metal, the pull of over-extended wires. Her face was a slick blank plate without eyes or nose or mouth, and she laughed like a dry brook laughs. These days, I hardly feel anything at all.

#

Walker had no breath left, and his legs burned. He was sweating all over, and he didn't like to sweat. Echoing breath filled his mind, and he saw the road ahead of him as if through a fog. Behind him came the roar of the crowd.

In one of his books, the hero might be pursued by demons and monsters without explanation until the middle of the second or third chapter, when the hook would at last be revealed: he himself was the Lost King, or the Coming Savior, or whatever. He was the turning point; he would destroy and remake the world.

Ah, Gasps from the audience! Oh, the thrill of a gripping narrative! Cha-ching, the ring of the register as he cashed his paycheck!

Okay, well, that last was mostly imaginary. But he could dream, couldn't he?

My life, he realized as he struggled to put one foot in front of the other, isn't an adventure novel, it's a tragedy - I know why I'm being chased, I know I'm totally screwed, and there's nothing I can do about it but wail.

Something round and heavy hit him in the shoulder. The mob was gaining on him. He turned around to check the distance between himself and their leader, a grey-scaled woman with a Fury's snarl, and ran straight into the canary-yellow sports car parked sideways in the alley - the car he would have noticed if he hadn't been so focused on his self-pitying internal monologue.

My life is a tragedy, he thought as he fell, or maybe a farce.

"Are you going to lie there all day," a female voice asked, "or are you going to get up and come with us?"

He scrambled onto his knees, and looked up. Rain drizzled onto his face from the edge of a black umbrella. In the shadow of the umbrella, he saw two blue eyes.

"I'm Adrienne," the woman said. "And whatever else I'm going to do to you, I'm not going to rip you into bloody shreds."

"You know, that's one of the nicest things I've heard all-"

"Grenade!" shouted the pudgy man in the white raincoat, pointing down to the round heavy thing that had hit Walker in the shoulder. Walker swore, and leapt up, shoving Adrienne and her umbrella back. There was a bright light, and they were lifted.

#

Noble men and women move like clockwork shadows through the palace of ice at the center of the night. The queen stands like wood and protests her love to the great king. His brother waits in the wings, the key in his back turned by hidden hands, the springs within his heart tensed to drive him forward. The Norwegian calls out the noise of war from the balcony of crystal water. One hand rests on his rapier. He chews on a stalk of yarrow, but it doesn't tell him the future.

Osric below walks from his place beside the throne, to the door, and back again empty-handed. The queen inclines her head to one side. She is dressed more fancily than she should be, painted like a porcelain doll. Wearing slacks, or a simple skirt, or a white robe, she would shine like a red sunset, her eyes quiet and grey as the world just before night.

That's her name: Dusk. Or it should be.

Lines of invisible spider-silk lead from her wrists to the vaults above, from her ankles to the ground below. Lines of spider-silk pierce her tongue and move her lips, and draw out her voice.

"I love you, my lord," she says, and doesn't mean it.

She has no lord.

The others move about her, and she can't tell if they are real people or just marionettes, bodies and souls and organs animated by, bound by, strands of silk. She doesn't know if she could feel a difference any more. It's too cold.

Everything is a prisoner of the silk, thick and freezing like ice. Even the spider herself is entrapped. And everyone in the palace holds a knife, and all the knives are waiting to fall.

Dusk feels life quicken inside her, and flees the body of the queen.

Somewhere, like always, Ophelia wakes up screaming.

#

When Walker's brain made sense of the universe again, he found himself moving a lot faster than he had expected to be. Of course, he had expected to be dead. The dead travel fast, someone had once said for some reason, but Walker was pretty sure he wasn't dead now. Being dead wouldn't be this bumpy.

He felt some pain in his stomach, and realized the large man in the white raincoat had him tucked under one arm. He was running at a near sprint, apparently unhampered by Walker's body weight; he wasn't even breathing hard.

"So you're awake," he heard the woman called Adrienne say. She ran alongside them, and she at least looked like she was running, sweat beaded through her makeup. The pudgy man's face was smooth as marble. "Good. You can run on your own two feet."

"Are we safe?"

"No." She motioned behind them with a toss of her head. "Did you know that those guys who want to kill you have tanks?"

He considered that question for a moment. "I haven't seen them."

"But you knew about them."

"Kind of." He considered telling her about the starship armada, but thought better of it.

"So how does a lynch mob get tanks, anyway?"

"It's kind of a special lynch mob," he said. "Can you put me down now?" he asked the portly man.

"Of course," he replied, and set Walker upright on the ground. "My name is Rob, by the way. I'm the cook."

Walker turned left and right, and cracked his back. "You're kind of strong for a cook."

"I have to lift a lot of vegetables," Rob said affably. "Sacks of flour. That kind of thing."

He turned to face Adrienne. "And what do you do?"

He hadn't looked at her straight on before this - she was gorgeous in an angry way, with white hair and skin and a lithe figure. And blue eyes, of course. "I used to be the driver," she said, "but as someone just blew up the car, I guess I'm a plain, simple lackey now."

"Whose lackey?"

She was interrupted by a whistling sound and the terrible noise of the building next to them evaporating. The three of them looked up; a great slick thing larger than buildings and made of metal and light descended through the rain clouds.

"Friends of yours?" Adrienne asked.

I probably should have mentioned the starship armada after all, Walker thought. "No," he said.

"Friends of the mob?"

"Ah. Yeah."

She rolled her eyes, and let out a little breath. "Okay. Well, let's run, anyway. It's not far from here."

"Where are we going?" he panted as the three of them lurched into a lame sprint.

"The bar. That's where all adventures start, after all."

#

"I need to ask you a question, Mallory."

I'll give you what answers I can, she said. I don't know if you'll like them. And we can't talk here.

Umber looked left, looked right. "We're being watched."

Always.

"So, where do you want to go?"

Follow me.

She stood with a creaking of joints, and walked, with the slow step of one in pain, to a door at the rear of the room, a door that had not been there before. As she stood, the noise of the bar stopped - beer froze in midair as it drained into the patrons' mouths, feet stuck in the act of being put down. Nothing moved. They were between moments now.

She opened the door with a brush of her steel hand. Beyond, there was only darkness. She stepped through it, and he followed her. The door did not close behind them, but once Umber passed through it, it was no longer there.

Nothing stretched around on all sides, formless and void.

Something glowed. "There's light now," he said.

"Maybe its just your eyes getting used to the dark," she said from behind him, though she had passed through the door first.

"I don't have eyes." He paused. "And you don't have a voice."

"I do here. Describe the light to me, Umber."

"It's." He looked down at the light before him and all around him. "We're floating in front of a great tree, with roots that are branches and branches that are also roots. It's a tree, but it's also a web that we are all tangled in. Within the tree is the vast shape of sleeping, dying Grandpa Blood, his body pierced through with Grandma Spider's threads. His blood waters the roots; he is the sap of the world, of all the worlds. His carcass is the wood of an endless number of trees."

"I didn't ask you what was there, Umber. I asked you what you saw."

He looked again. Within the core of the endless Tree of the Worlds, the great figure of the dying man twitched and bled, his immobile, clutching fingers the size of galaxies. Little many-legged things swarmed within the tree around him, tying and binding, piercing and pulling, knitting his stuff into worlds. "Grandma Spider's weaving too much too fast. But we knew that."

"Keep looking."

And there, towards the core of the great black shadow of Grandpa Blood, was a sickly yellow light, the color of parchment or of jaundiced skin, and within that light was a mad music. Many-dimensioned figures danced to that music, danced around the great half-real heart of Grandpa Blood, and their light entered him and their beat was in his heart. Umber shook his head and turned from the scene, but he didn't look up at Mallory, not yet.

"Why do you turn away?" she asked.

"Because Hastur is being a jackass."

#

The four men in charcoal-grey pinstriped suits sat around their green felt table and didn't pay much attention to anybody else. Patrons came and went about them in the restaurant, evanescent and of no consequence. Permanence was the game the four men played - permanence, and Oh Hell.

The youngest dealt. "Two card hands, and trump for the round is - spades," said Scipio Acacius, who was too young for a title or a nickname. "Ace of spades showing, double points round. Bids?"

"One," said August Acacius, who some called the One With Teeth.

"Zero," said Iolus Acacius, the One That Laughs, who had hunted the last scattered remnants of the First Men through the endless nights in the beginning of creation.

"One," said Gaius Cassius Acacius, the eldest. He was too old for a nickname even as Scipio was too young for one. When he spoke, other sound faded, as if to let his words echo in the air forever. He wore a ring of iron on his left hand, iron harder than the hardest-forged steel, the same iron he had used to pierce the hearts of gods and goddesses. His hair was the same color as his ring.

"And the dealer must bet one," said Scipio. "Play starts to my left."

Scipio, his hair still mostly black and slick, was pale-skinned with a pronounced jaw and nose. In the other players, the fleshy cheeks of their shared bloodline had withered away, leaving only bones and skin. The face of Gaius Cassius Acacius was cracked and hard and barren as a carpet-bombed mountain range.

August laid the queen of spades, Iolus the two, Gaius the king, and Scipio the three.

"Gaius takes the trick, and starts the next round of play."

Gaius laid the two of hearts, Scipio the jack of spades, and after that it didn't matter what August or Iolus played.

"Uncle August fails to make his bet, and we go into the final round."

Scipio gathered the cards and began to shuffle. His fingers were long, spindly and strong, made for strangling or music. "We haven't found Matthew yet. We lost him when the ice came."

"It doesn't matter," August said. "We only need Dusk. And she is willing but unable to do anything about her condition."

Iolus laughed, and his laugh was not pleasant. It echoed of things long beyond any world; it clanked with iron.

"I dislike relying on Hastur," Scipio said. "He's shifty, unreliable. He twists the space he finds into malformed life."

"The King in Yellow is living corruption," Gaius said, brushing his ring with the index finger of his opposite hand. "And where his rot has set in, there we can forge our chains."

"I'll ask our agent to look in on Matthew all the same," Scipio said as he dealt. "I don't like surprises. Last round, one-card hands. The round of luck. Suit showing is - hearts. Bidding starts to my left."

Gaius contemplated the sweet, cold feel of iron, and made ready his bet.

#

Ophelia screamed each morning she woke up. She tore roses, too, first the petal from the rose, then the petal from itself, one string of plant at a time, until pink and red confetti covered the floor of her tower. The black-and-silver-clad servants moved wordlessly around her, like robots on tracks.

Ophelia didn't know what a robot was - Ophelia's thoughts and knowledge and mind were fragmented and gone, blown by winds north-northwest. She waited for her unborn Prince, a young maid in a tower mad before she could go sane.

The tower had a window, and through the window she could see a field of ice that stretched on so far and long that time and distance had no meaning, and maybe at the end of that field of ice was another palace, another tower, which was only this one seen from behind. She sang doggerel in her thin shaking voice to the tune of Greensleeves:

"And at last the dark men will come

Dripping of pleasant designs

And in the end they will but trap

Good women who are divine."

#

"So do you always get lost when you try to rescue people," Walker asked, ducking beneath a chunk of flying masonry.

Adrienne shook her head. "No, I'm sure it's around here somewhere. Maybe down that alley-"

"The one the spaceship just blew up? Or the one behind the fallen wall, the one filled with people who want to kill me?"

"Let's hope neither." She squinted harder at the piece of paper in front of her. "I mean, this is the address, but-"

"But what?"

"Never trust the handwriting of someone who doesn't have eyes, is all I'm saying."

"Didn't you say you worked for someone kind of important? Wouldn't he have figured out how to write by now? Or at least, I don't know, have made up an address card for you or something?"

She let out a little sigh. "I learned long ago to stop asking these cosmic being types for answers. Hey, Rob, can you read-"

Her question was cut off by a cry of bloodthirsty rage. One of the members of the rampaging mob had successfully scaled the impromptu barricade of rubble formed by stray fire from their own artillery, and launched himself down the embankment, saliva flicking from his mouth, hands clawed like talons.

Rob stepped in front of Walker and held out one fist at eye level. The man, unable to change direction in midair, ran into it full-force. Walker heard a crunch, and a thud. Rob's arm didn't even twitch.

"What did you say your job was again?"

Rob glanced distastefully at his fist, and wiped the blood and spit off onto the slick wet side of his raincoat. He shrugged. "I'm the cook."

"Oh," Adrienne interrupted before Walker could ask any of the questions on his tongue - "That's the problem. We should be going to Carlsbad Avenue, not Charles Boulevard. And you said we shouldn't take that last turnoff."

"I said we shouldn't take that turnoff because there were tanks there."

But Adrienne and Rob were already running. Walker, panting, followed them.

#

"Hastur is stronger now," Mallory said, and Umber turned and looked up at her. His mouth opened, and no sound came out.

"So," he finally said, "it wasn't just a glamour."

"No."

Her dragonfly wings were faint and crumpled, and the silver of her raiment tarnished. The moonlight in her hair was a new-moon echo of its old fullness, and though her eyes were closed her face was beautiful, smooth and shining from within. Her feet rested on nothing, her lips were thin and purple and her teeth the white of an ice cube's heart.

And everywhere she was knitted through with dark iron wire. It passed through the skin of her arms and legs, it wound along her fingers, it crept up to her face, it collared her neck and punctured her breastplate to pass through her heart. Around that wire hung the ghost of her metal body, a faint outline here surrounding the core that was laid bare.

On the wire danced the mad, laughing yellow light that pulsed at the heart of Grandpa Blood.

"My god, Mal. That looks like it hurts."

"No," she said wryly, "it actually feels quite pleasant. Not as good as it did when they did it to me, of course - that was a real kick. If it hadn't been forced on me, I wouldn't have known what I was missing."

"Who did this?"

"Who else?" She shook her head. "Hastur's hounds arrived in the Wood, soon after the ice came, followed by things long dead, that have walked in no universe since before my time. They brought chains with them, and they hunted me through the futures and turned me into this."

He stepped forward and touched the wire on her skin. He applied some pressure. It snapped, but the pieces grew together again when he withdrew his finger. "It's forged well. The King in Yellow didn't make this."

"No," she agreed. "He didn't. It cuts into me, like our Mother's web, and it burns me, like our Father's blood."

"Neither Grandma Spider nor Grandpa Blood made this, either."

"Then some dark thing from beyond usurps their place." She moved, and iron clanked on iron. "And I can't free myself-"

"And I can't free you either."

"Until that dark thing is gone." She took in a breath - her chest rose against the wire cage. "You came to ask me something."

"Yes," Umber said, regarding her. "Where is Matthew?"

#

Yorick held his hands cupped and clawed before him, and pressed the air into iron, and twisted the iron into a chain. The chain, he passed through the extinct drive of the broken ship, and out again, linking it back to the mandala of metal he had already woven through the ship's halls and corridors and weapons systems. Something twitched within the chain, as the vessel's old, mostly-dead soul strained against the violation.

Whistling through his teeth, Yorick turned and walked with his limp back to the observation deck.

"Yes, my prince," he said to the shadow-child astride his shoulders, "we must be on our way. It's a pleasant place, a dead place, but there's nothing for us to do now. We have our own work, our own steps to follow. And what's that?"

The shadow-child leaned forward and whispered something into the holes where Yorick's ears would have been. The child had no voice, yet, but he spoke with the distant crackling of fire.

"Oh, yes, my bonny young prince," Yorick said. "We have a long way to travel, but of course the dead will come with us in our hearts. And we leave them behind to remember."

They stood on the ship's observation deck, now draped with the hooks and chains and black wires of Yorick's devising. Beyond the deck's shattered windows, the sand and barren blank rock spread. Things moved across the landscape now, clanking of metal as they dragged their limbs forward. Their eyes stared dull, their talons clutched the rock, their shapeless forms slouched across the landscape. The hole through which Yorick and his prince had crawled into the light had grown large, larger than the graveyard that had contained it. Their ship hovered above that hole now, supported by nothing but Yorick's chains. Below was the cold black beyond black.

Yorick raised his arms, and clutched his pale hands at the stars, and on those chains the black ship rose from the planet stirring with - well, it wasn't life exactly. Movement, certainly, entropy arrested and reversed. Lines of dark iron sunk into its soil, wreathed its core, and gears sprouted from its cracked, long-dormant surface. No, not life at all.

Yorick smiled.

#

She may have glowed more brightly, or perhaps the piercing wire darkened. "He rests within the stars, spun within webs of his own. You must wake him." An image crossed from her mind to his, and he knew the place of which she spoke.

"And then what?"

"You have to be heroes. Of a sort."

Umber cocked his head to one side. "I don't know about that, Mal. We're not really in the hero business. Matthew and I are more in the way of cosmic relief."

Her eyes didn't open, and her expression didn't change.

"We'll do it. Or we'll try."

"Thank you." She reached forward, and her hand stopped an inch from the fold of his cloak. The yellow dancing light that wreathed her iron cage strengthened, and Umber heard the strange syncopated drum beats of a horrid dance, growing louder.

"He comes."

She opened her mouth to say something, and the moment broke, shattered mind-shards crumbling into smaller fragments of world-wrenching pain as Time asserted itself again. They were back in the bar, which of course they had never left. Beer swilled, feet fell, breath stirred, conversation babbled. Umber stood across the table from Mallory the metal girl, who stared back at him through her blank metal mask, and once again had no voice.

The three tall women with the jewel-eyes held curving knives of silver, and they gleamed in the dark of the bar. They stared in anger now at a new arrival: a slender man with tan skin and blonde hair, who wore a black sweatshirt and khakis and bore a simple yellow circlet about his brow. He held a flute in one hand, and tapped it into the flesh of his other palm. A crazed yellow light played around the edges of his skin, and behind and around him shadows rose and loomed and danced. He wore a bracelet of dark metal.

"Hello, Mallory," Hastur said. "Hello, Umber. It's been a while."

The shadows behind him exhaled.

#

"We're close now, I think," Adrienne said.

"Well, they're getting close, too." Walker leaned against one wall, panting. "And I can't keep up this pace."

"Don't worry, old man. We can always have Rob carry you again."

Rob shrugged in his raincoat. A block away, something exploded. "That's them clearing away the last of the redoubts," Rob said.

A roar went up all around them. The air grew heavy, and the rain lessened. Walker looked up, and saw that one wing of the immense battleship above had shaded them from the storm. The City defenses were out in force: fighter jets and aerial police cruisers and men with the strength of planets clustered about the alien vessel, but it ignored them entirely. Surviving the Apocalypse Walker had brought upon them had taught the builders of that ship a great deal about weapons and armor. They had probably spent decades examining the never-decaying corpses of angels and demons to discover their secrets, Walker thought, and because he thought it, he knew it was true.

"Nobody ever told me writing fiction would be this complicated," he said.

"What's that?" Adrienne asked, looking from the signs to the scrawled, sodden note in her hand.

"Never mind."

#

Diana wasn't a people person. Her father had never expected her to get along with folks, and her mother had never been in a position to expect much of anything. So she traveled a lot, wandering from town to town, trying to leave before trouble caught up with her. This worked most of the time.

Now wasn't one of those times. Now, she stood knee-deep in cold wet snow, facing a young man in brown leathers and hard cloth across a broad field, with the rest of the town gathered around to watch. On top of his ragged clothing, the young man wore an improbably tall black hat. Diana didn't own a similar hat, so one had been leant her. It sat on top of her raven hair now.

They approached each other for the final clutch before the contest. She tested the flex of her unstrung bow.

"There's still time to back out of this, Kellen," she said as she laid her arm across his shoulders, and he laid his arm across hers.

Kellen shook his head. "It's been a long winter. I can't let you go alone out there. You need someone to help you out."

"I can handle myself."

"I'm not so sure." He had a boy's smile. "Plus, think about what an awesome story this is going to make."

She rolled her eyes. "You're crazy."

"Maybe."

"Take your places," the judge cried out in his cold-cracked voice. The air was dry, the sky arched white overhead. Winter birds took flight. She walked the thirty paces back to her mark, and Kellen did the same.

"Ready!"

She cleared a little space of earth to grind one tip of her bow into the ground, and stood with the string in one hand. Kellen did the same.

"Mark, and loose!"

Kellen set to it, bent the bow around his thigh in a smooth motion, drew the arrow from the earth, and let fly.

She took her time, pulling the wood rather then wrenching at it, feeling the exact arc of the curve, lifting the bow to shoulder-height, turning sideways. She drew the arrow, but the arrow wasn't really all that important. The bow bent back like a distorted crescent moon. Tension ran from the bowstring to her arms to the ground. The crisp wind and the sky and the dirt and snow all compressed to a feeling of pull, involuntary contraction -

Release.

Kellen's shaft had crossed the first two meters of the distance between them. Diana's own sped faster, intercepting Kellen's arrow and splintering it, to drive through and knock the young man's hat from his head.

She smiled at his blank expression, and turned to walk away. Applause followed her; she lifted her backpack to her shoulder.

As she reached the edge of the village square, a shadow flickered in the corner of her vision, and within it was a hawk-nosed face.

"That was lovely, Diana."

"Suck it, Scipio," she said without turning to look at him.

"Has anyone ever told you how beautiful you look when you draw that bow?" His voice was oil-smooth and criminal.

"There have been a few poems written. Now, can you please just get lost?"

"You're not going to have many places to run soon, lady. Feel that bracing, happy cold in your bones. Hear the ecstasy of that dance. Why not take the sweeter way out while you can?"

"Because you're a twerp."

"You can't fight the world, Diana. It's dog-eat-dog: enjoy yourself, or be-"

She swept her bow through the shadow, and it vanished with the soft scent of moonlight, leaving behind a clanking, hissing laughter.

There were few hours of daylight left, and he had been right - the days were getting colder. Diana picked up the pace, and began to run atop the snow.

#

Hastur turned away from Umber and began to pace around the table, glancing from bodyguard to bodyguard until his gaze settled on Mallory. "It's nice to see you on this plane again, Umber," he said. "Even if we meet in funny circumstances. And of course it's always a pleasure to see Mal."

He placed a hand on her metal body, and as he touched her he changed into her mirror image, another statue of steel and barbed wire with a blank face. One of the bodyguard's knives flashed out and severed the hand touching Mallory at the wrist; their silver was sharper than it looked.

Hastur laughed in Mallory's non-voice, shook his arm as if trying to remove a fly, and his hand grew back in a netting and tangling of wire. He looked across the table at Umber, and became a dark blue cloak with no eyes and a wide grin.

"What are you up to, Umber?"

"I'm trying to keep a little levity in the game," he said. "You're not helping."

"But I am the soul of levity!" Hastur raised his silver flute to his mouth, and blew a long, quivering note in which the mad dancing lurked. A mass shiver ran through the inhabitants of the bar, and harsh, dirty laughter rose from them. "You see? They like me, they really like me." The looming things behind him chuckled with death-rattle gasps of breath.

As the echoes of Hastur's note died away, the crowd of patrons remained frozen, their faces contorted in grotesque grimaces. The bartender had almost bent double in his laughter, and the three-armed bouncer lolled limp in the corner.

"I prefer subtlety, thanks."

"Well, we can arrange that," Hastur said, contemplating his regrown hand. "What did Mel Brooks say? Tragedy is I cut my finger. Comedy is you fall down a hole and die."

Holes opened beneath the feet of each of Mallory's bodyguards, and at the bottom of the holes were sharp metal spikes. But the bodyguards didn't fall.

Hastur knotted his brow. The three fey women looked from him, to the pits beneath their feet, to Umber, still smiling. "Oh, come on, everybody knows that quote. You should stay out of comedy, and out of Grandpa Blood's heart, too."

"I'm taking the load of the world off his shoulders."

"Ever think maybe he likes that load where he is?"

The King in Yellow has made his deals, Mallory said. He wants to become necessary, he who is just a figment of the changeable mad. So he gave them insanity to use against Grandma Spider, and they gave him power.

"And with power, you came hunting, is that it? For Mallory and all the other mad ones out there, who knew what you were up to."

We all felt the shift in the ways our dreams broke.

Umber shook his head. "You really are a tool, Hastur."

The shadows behind Hastur coalesced into things with arms and mouths, many of them. Umber recognized them.

"And you've been dealing with the Acacii. Even you should know how dangerous that family is."

"If I'm a tool," said Hastur, his original aspect returning, "then at least I'm a necessary tool, now. My blood flows through this universe, my hounds dance at the roots of the world. Can you say the same?"

Umber opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, the silence was broken by a sharp bang as the bar's front door slammed open and Rob, Adrienne, and Walker ran in with the mob close on their heels.

#

Two guards walked on the ramparts of the castle; above them they saw the Lady Ophelia silhouetted by the lamps behind her, looking out her window on the ice. The windows of her tower had been built narrow, to prevent arrows from coming in, and to prevent her from coming out into the empty frozen air and falling or flying.

The King rested still upon his throne, and the Queen was with child and in love. The guards waited for a specter that would one day come. Forces left the castle to march on Norway, and rode back from the opposite direction. The Norwegian met them on the balcony, chewing on his yarrow-stalk. They nodded to him and let him pass across the battlements.

"He is the ender," Ophelia said.

"What does that mean?" Dusk asked through Ophelia's lips.

"He sows his seed and looks to reap."

"Makes sense," Dusk said. "Do you know where we are?"

"We're in the guillotine story. At least the flowers are still blooming, for the moment."

"But it's winter." Dusk chose her words carefully. She didn't know why she could come to Ophelia this way, she didn't know if Ophelia knew she was there, and she didn't want to remove her small refuge. So she pretended to be just another one of those many voices that haunted the young woman, that challenged her and whispered to her in her solitude. "Where is my father?"

"Why," said Ophelia, "my father is behind the King, and my father is mad, and my father will be eaten. My father feeds the lilies."

"And I carry life within me."

"Through no fault of my own."

#

"Hey! Over here!" Umber said, and pointed at Hastur. The beasts prepared to launch themselves forward, the fey women (still standing on open air) to intercept them. Walker, exhausted, tripped and fell forward onto a table between two silent patrons, gasping in an attempt to catch, if not his own breath, then somebody's at least. The first trickles of the mob surged through the door, reaching for him.

Adrienne glanced from the mob, to Umber, to the bodyguards and the beasts, to Mallory and Hastur. She turned to Rob. "Do it."

Rob walked calmly over to Walker, and lifted him by the collar and the seat of the pants.

"What are you-"

And as Walker pinwheeled his arms and legs in futility, Rob twisted his waist and threw him forward, across the tables and the intervening space, until he crashed into and through Hastur to slide out the other side, feeling as if he had fallen through a curtain of grease.

Umber moved his hand in a strange way, and he, the pronate Walker, Adrienne, Rob, Mallory, her bodyguards, and the rest of the bar's denizens were gone, removed to various safe locations.

Hastur looked up with Walker's eyes on the advancing mob and said, "Oh, fuck me."

Raising Walker's hand, Hastur sent his dark things forth, but before they could meet the onrushing tide of enraged humanity, the battleship above finally acquired its target, and unleashed weapons designed to storm the gates of heaven.

A large number of things got very hot, very quickly.

Coded by Max Gladstone, 2007. Contact me at max.gladstone@gmail.com
©2007, Max Gladstone