Lord Tophet

THE TALE OF THE TWO BROTHERS


There once were two brothers named Baloyd and Suald. They had lived on the span called Kakotara their whole uneventful lives. Both of them had married by arrangement. Their brides had been betrothed to them when they were children. Their father was a respectable weaver, and their mother raised colorful, exotic birds, many of which were purchased for the court of Kakotara. Because of this neither of the brothers worked nor needed to. The two endured not the slightest hardship despite their combined sloth, and often discussed money, but solely as the object of various schemes to avoid employment while they continued to feed from the parental trough.

One night when Baloyd and Suald were wandering the streets of the span in search of a rumored card game, they happened to pass by the entrance to the dragon beam. At the end of the spiraling walkway, the hexagonal bowl hovered in the air on hidden supports. Suald noticed how it glowed in the moonlight and pointed this out to his brother. They stopped and stood there, watching it.

No one else was near. The Dragon Bowl on Kakotara had then been dormant for more years than the two brothers had lived, and no one paid it much attention anymore except during festivals, when unanswered libations were poured upon the tiles.

Suald stopped. He said, “Does the hex seem brighter than it should?” He called it hex because that was the way of that span.

Baloyd, the less thoughtful of the two, had little interest in puzzles. “We should find that game house if we want to gamble,” he urged. He walked ahead, hoping his brother would follow. Instead, Suald stepped onto the beam and began strolling out along its curve. Baloyd knew full well that once his brother had fixed upon an idea there was no use arguing him off it, so he turned around and followed.

Suald had already completed the first loop of the dragon beam’s spiral. He came up directly across from Baloyd, nearly close enough that they could have stretched and touched fingertips. He asked casually, “If you could make the hex light up anytime you wanted, what would you ask for?”

“It’s supposed to be bad manners to make demands of the gods,” his brother replied.

“Gulldroppings. This thing hasn’t ignited in thirty years. How does anybody know what you can do to the gods, or what they care about? Or if they even exist beyond stories? Has anybody you know of ever tried to get what they want off a hex?”

“Probably not.” He said nothing further until he’d caught up with Suald, who waited for him at the entrance to the bowl. “I guess I don’t need money, I don’t need another wife. Wouldn’t want to be king—that’s too much work. Guess I’d like to be quick. Then I could take anything I needed anytime and get away without having to pay if I didn’t want to. You know, dash down to Balrog Harbor and steal a keg right from under the noses of those greedy trolls. Be worth it for all the times they’ve bled me for money. But hey, we’re knights of the elbow, let’s go find that game—”

“It is too bright,” Suald said thoughtfully.

Baloyd finally considered the Dragon Bowl at the center of the spiraling arm. The tiles were luminescent, and not from reflected moonlight. They glowed still brighter as he looked on.

“I think something’s going to happen.”

“You’d better say what you want, then, since it was your idea,” Baloyd goaded.

“Well, I surely don’t want speed. Too specific, see. What I want”—and he raised his voice until he was shouting at the sky—“is a way to have whatever I want later. That way I don’t ask for anything particular now, and I get lots more whenever I want!” He grinned at his brother. “Pretty clever, heh?”

“I think we’re starting to glow, too.”

Suald held his hands up. Sparks danced around his fingertips. His hair stood on end, and sparks whirled around his head. The light came from nowhere and everywhere.

Baloyd began to laugh, his giddiness sharpened by fear. Whatever would happen next, they had chosen to demand, and there was no going back, no reneging. The gods had heard them and would either honor their desires or destroy them. He shouted, “Come on, give me speed!” and his brother responded, “Give me everything I want!”

The light turned thick; the world beyond it vanished. The air pressed them and they moved back to back to withstand the pressure. There was a twistedness to the energy, as if they were about to be wrung from head to foot. The air darkened and squealed mechanically; it stank of rotten eggs, of sulfurous pits. The bowl shook so hard that they both fell. They lay screaming, their bravado forgotten, scared witless now, arms over their heads as certain death mashed them.

Then everything stopped.

Neither brother moved.

The terrible shrieking, as though metal were shredding metal, dwindled like a juggernaut rolling off across the sea. The whoosh of waves against the breakers below reemerged as the predominant—the only—sound.

Baloyd opened his eyes.

The night was dark, but along the horizon a faint strip of dawnlight showed. Hours must have passed, although he had no sense of the lost time. Remnants of sour mist hung in the air, already dissipating in the breeze off the ocean. From a distance footsteps came running, and cries of “It came on!” “I saw it!” and “What’d it leave?” rode the air.

The approach of a crowd galvanized the two young men. They sat up and took stock of their surroundings. They were whole, undamaged. Whatever had happened and whatever had arrived—whether it filled their requirements or not—by right it was theirs. They got up quickly. The people rushing along the dragon beam drew up. Across the gap separating them from the platform at the center, they gaped, crestfallen. As a group they had shared in a hope, a promise, dashed now that others had gotten there ahead of them. The two brothers crossed to the middle of the platform.

Four objects lay on the tiles of the bowl: two unsightly red, bulbous-toed shoes; and a small black metal stylus lying atop a clay tablet.

By instinct the two brothers chose their prizes. Baloyd took the shoes; Suald collected the stylus and tablet. Then they walked onto the beam and followed it back to where the others hovered. If the crowd still held a glimmer of hope that the two might share the treasure, Suald’s arrogance banished it. He forced them back along the path with nothing more than a cold sneer.

On Brink Lane he turned his back on them as if daring anyone to try and take him. Baloyd followed, but with frequent glances over his shoulder to make sure no one pursued them. Brink Lane traced the westward curve of the span, and soon the crowd was out of sight around a bend. Suald kept walking. He turned up a narrow side street leading back into the forest of stucco houses and shops, all still dark with sleep. He pushed open an iron gate and entered a courtyard with a small fountain, bordered on three sides by houses. There he finally stopped. “All right, what have you got?”

Baloyd held the shoes up by their laces. They had high necks and spongy red circles at ankle height. The soles were curiously furrowed.

“Well, they’re something. Why don’t you put them on.”

There was a great deal Baloyd thought of saying: how his brother always created situations and then left him to resolve them; how, since the whole idea of challenging the gods had been Suald’s idea, he should be the one to test the Edgeworld gifts—he should be the one to blow up or ignite or melt. But Baloyd said nothing. A lifetime of habit overruled him.

He sat against the lip of the fountain and put on the shoes. He had to loosen the laces to get his feet in and afterward left them undone. He’d never seen laces before; he had no idea what they were for.

Standing, testing, he discovered that the shoes fit him quite well. He walked around the fountain. Nothing happened. When he’d come full circle, he pointed at his brother’s gifts and said, “What about yours, then?”

Suald held the stylus and tablet away from his body as if, should they come to life, he might fling them away. For a moment he held them above the fountain, and Baloyd almost snatched them away for fear he was going to drop them into the water.

Suald pushed his thumb into the surface of the tablet. His nail left a gouge in it.

“Why don’t you write something instead?” Baloyd suggested.

“I don’t see you running any races.”

“I put the shoes on. I walked around. Nothing happened. They’re just shoes.”

“Try running.”

Baloyd sprinted up and down in place. “They don’t work.”

“What do you think I should write?”

“Write that you’d like some breakfast. I’m hungry.”

“Naturally.” He licked the tip of the stylus and inscribed the words A KING’S BREAKFAST. Nothing happened. He frowned. “I don’t think this thing works, either. Look, why don’t you try naming a destination—somewhere you want to go.”

“I don’t have anyplace in mind.”

“Yes, and no wonder you’re not going anywhere. Pick someplace—go to the end of the span. Go to Nourey Gate or something.” He stared sternly at the tablet, then wrote above the already inscribed words, GIVE ME.

Baloyd replied, “Fine. Nourey Ga—” He never finished the word—at least not within his brother’s hearing.

Suald was reading his own writing when a wind threw him off-balance. He slipped on the cobblestones, caught his foot against something in the dark, and sprawled upon a row of metal dishes. He crushed eggs and pomegranates, figs and relishes, sweet breads and popovers. His elbow flipped a creamer, splattering him with goat’s milk.

Covered in the food he’d requested, he started to laugh. He couldn’t help himself; it was all too ridiculously glorious.

From one of the buildings bordering the courtyard, someone shouted, “Shut up, yer drunken swine!” which only caused Suald to laugh even harder.

The wind whipped up again. Dust sprayed him. Loose grapes rolled past him.

The wind’s screech became a shout—a whoop of unrestrained pleasure—and there stood Baloyd, his hair pushed out behind him like a sheaf of reeds. For an instant he was still, and then he began jumping up and down. “Suald! I did it. I’ve been to Nourey Gate and back again!”

Suald pushed himself up onto his knees and took stock of the damage to his clothes. “Of course you have,” he replied.

“No, really. In seconds. I don’t even know what streets I took. They whizzed by so fast, all a blur until I got to the gate. I thought my clothes would catch fire. Then I said, ‘I want to go back,’ and it started all over again.” The shoes practically glowed. He saw the food laid out upon the ground, squatted down, and picked a deviled egg that had survived the maelstrom. He popped it into his mouth whole. “Oh, this is good,” he said with a full mouth. “Have you tried one?”

Suald cocked an eyebrow. “Several, thanks to you.” He wiped the smeared food off his shirt. It should have been a joke—it had been until Baloyd returned, and he couldn’t say just why he found his brother’s beaming presence so galling. “So you ran the length of Kakotara.”

“I did. And you ordered breakfast. We got what we asked for. The gods gave us just what we wanted.”

“I shall try to remember to thank them later.” He licked jelly from the back of his hand.

“Oh, come on, you can’t be angry! Not now!”

“I happen to be covered in food.”

“Well, then, ask for a bath. Ask for clean clothes. You can, don’t you see? You can have anything!”

A shutter banged open above them and a burly fellow in a sleeping gown leaned out and bellowed, “I told you bastards to shut up, and I meant it! If you don’t, I’ll come down there and hammer you into the stones.”

Baloyd leapt back. “Oh, you think so, do you? What will you do if I come up there”—he stood suddenly behind the man; taking him by the shoulders he whispered—“and push you out.” The terrified fellow flew from his window and slammed into the stones beside Suald. Baloyd was there just as swiftly.

The man howled in pain. He clutched his head and rolled back and forth. Blood oozed from his nose and mouth.

Baloyd took his brother’s arm. “Maybe you should clean up somewhere else,” he suggested.

Suald looked at his brother as if seeing him for the first time. “No,” he said, and took out the clay tablet. With his thumb he smoothed his previous request.

“That’s right, you can fix him, can’t you?”

“You’re damned right I can.” Suald carved letters with the stylus then lowered the tablet and admired his handiwork.

There beside the fountain a huge wharf rat lay trembling and bloody, dying atop a torn nightshirt. Suald grinned.

Baloyd’s brow knitted, and he gave his brother a worried glance. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“No?” smirked Suald. “Well, it was what I meant. What’s one rat more or less in the world?”

Somewhere in the darkness above, a woman called out, “Harky? Harky, where’ve you gone?”

Suald took his brother by the elbow and dragged him out the gate and away.



Thus began the reign of the two brothers on Kakotara. They did not keep their gifts secret for long. Suald performed a few tricks for his wife, Seru, conjuring whatever she named by writing the words on the tablet. She asked for jewels, then necklaces and bracelets. She asked for fantastic, legendary birds that would impress his mother, and they appeared as well. If she didn’t like what came, Suald found that he could send the thing away as easily. As their house filled with squawking and cooing, as a rain of droppings began to decorate everything, he made her choose one bird from the batch and then erased all the others as if they’d never existed. She chose a blue-and-violet one that snapped at anyone who passed near it and shrieked for no good reason.

Seru saw the greater possibilities of this magical clay. She demanded a palanquin fitted with gold trimmings and pink silk cushions. Suald exercised his gift again, and the magic spread into the street. Even as he opened the front door to reveal the prize, Suald’s neighbors were gathering to behold the resplendent enclosed litter. Four powerful men stood beside it as she had requested. They were barely human, with faces devoid of expression, of curiosity, of thought. They responded only to Suald’s commands. The gathering audience regarded him with wonder and fear: Only lord mayors, princes, and kings had palanquins.

He was both annoyed and thrilled by their awe; but soon he was writing one thing after another. Items popped up left and right—here a table, there a suit of clothes, and of course gold. Someone told him he was greater than the hex itself, which he liked, and he strutted on that awhile; but he soon grew weary of it all. Every citizen who went off with something told three others, who told others, until the street had become the object of a pilgrimage from all across the span. Petitioners waved their hands, and some waved scraps of fishskin parchment on which they’d written a list of their desires. Most of these requests disgusted Suald in their simplicity, their foolishness; here he was offering them the unimaginable, and they all trembled at the thought of asking for a bag of rice or a small pot to replace one that had broken last month. Only a few people asked wisely—for sustained health, for cures for their afflictions, for wisdom in the future. Suald quickly ceased to follow their requests; his tired hand wrote automatically. Let them waste his gift. He would not offer it again.

While he wrote, he watched Baloyd.

Every now and again during the great wish fulfillment, his younger brother put in brief appearances. He zigged and zagged, zoomed to the top of the highest tower, vanished for ten minutes to return with hot food from a vendor’s cart two spans distant. He carried his own wife, Betinela, on a tour of the entire span from end to end, from point to point, wherever she asked to go. He whisked her in to visit Seru, who gave her a handful of the thousand necklaces and jewels that now lay scattered about the house. Baloyd gave barely a glance to the cornucopia flowing from the clay tablet, as if none of it mattered to him. Instead, he ventured into the crowd, befriending children and taking them off for races through the streets. Sometimes they returned almost before they had left, the children not really grasping the speed with which Baloyd could carry them to their own homes around the next corner. Wherever they went, upon returning, the wide-eyed children invariably cried out, “Do it again,” or “Go farther!” Baloyd obliged them, every one.

Betinela frowned at her husband’s disregard of his brother’s treasure. Placating her, Seru remarked, “At least he seems to be having fun.”

Suald overheard the remark, and it set his mind darkly. He smoothed over the tablet and pocketed it. “That’s all for today,” he announced. Hundreds of expectant supplicants moaned, cried out that it wasn’t fair, insisted he perform at least their miracle. The ranks closed around him, and a few faces looked capable of taking the tablet from him. He marked those faces. “Very well,” he said, as if giving in to their demands. Then, pulling out the tablet again, he scribbled the words SEND THEM ALL HOME into the clay.

The crowd responded as if he had suddenly vanished. As if some scent rode upon the air, they raised their heads, turned away from Suald, and shuffled off. Suald smirked at his own cleverness: Later he would make them forget that he had this power at all.

He went inside.

Seru pursued him. “Darling, what’s wrong, why did you do that?”

He turned on her. “I heard what you told Betinela. You find my brother so amusing—well, go stay with him!”

“What?”

“You find his gift so much fun, while mine is sheer tedium, then take up with him. I’m sure his own wife won’t mind another in the house.”

She gaped at him until understanding flowed into her expression. “My gods, you’re jealous of him. He’s enjoying his gift and you can’t stand it. You have the whole world in your pocket and it isn’t enough for you.” Her laugh was a slap in his face.

Suald glared at an unoccupied corner of the room and muttered, “Ridiculous.”

“What festers here? If you think they’re such a source of entertainment, then why not use the tablet to get your own shoes?”

“Because I want his.”

After a moment she shrugged and replied, “Well, then take them. What stops you? You caused fig trees to grow on the main boulevards of all the spans you could think of; how much trouble is it to take two shoes?” She said this as if it were nothing, but she walked quickly away from him to the perch of her blue-and-violet bird, which clacked its beak at her and let loose a piercing screech.

He gripped the tablet in his pocket, finally withdrawing it, staring at it, holding it up as if testing its weight. In his other hand he fingered the tip of the stylus. Askance he saw his wife’s lips curl with contempt, but when he looked straight at her, she seemed to be petting the obnoxious bird, not even paying attention to him.

He licked the tip of the stylus while watching her. Her gaze shifted. She followed the arc of the stylus from his side to his mouth and down. She didn’t see him at all; only the stylus. Only the tablet. In her focus he read with utter certainty that she would kill him for it—for things she wanted but would never dare ask him to provide. He knew where her tastes ran to the perverse, and where his presence would be unwelcome. She would kill him when he slept, or poison the figs he ate at breakfast so that he would die too quickly to be able to write an antidote. Even if she didn’t kill him outright, she would find a way to get her hands upon the tablet. She would write him out of existence the moment he closed his eyes.

He could trust her no longer.



Baloyd arrived late in the afternoon. He was barefoot and carried his magical shoes before him. He seemed confused by his circumstances.

Suald met him at the door.

“I want to . . . to give you these,” Baloyd said, and held the red shoes at arm’s length. His eyes welled with tears. A kind of bottomless terror gnawed at him, the more terrible for being impossible to understand. But his wife understood.

Betinela had been with him when he suddenly expressed the urge to visit his brother. She’d followed him easily, for he hadn’t used the shoes and had lumbered stupidly through the streets as if not quite sure of his location. She knew her husband and all his faults: He was not a man given to acts of unconditional generosity. She glared at Suald as he accepted the shoes.

He smiled as innocently as he knew how.

“And where’s Seru?” she asked him.

“Away,” he replied quickly.

She looked past him at the bird on its perch, at the jewelry scattered through the room, at everything that denied his statement, finally following his gaze down to a yellowish smear on the floor where he’d crushed a very large cockroach. She chose not to contradict him.

Baloyd wept openly, his brain twisting with frustration.

“Your brother loves you so,” said Betinela, “to give up this wondrous gift that had pleased him so much, at the peak of his enjoyment. I never realized he felt so tenderly toward you.”

Suald’s eyelids half closed. “We’ve always been closer than people thought.” He carried the clumsy-looking shoes outside, where he sat and put them on before she could try and make him give them back. His brother shambled after him as if tied to a line.

The shoes were too big for Suald’s feet, but otherwise more comfortable than they looked. It was the first time he’d put them on, and he fumbled with the laces, finally tying them around his ankles to keep them out of the way.

As he started to take out the tablet, Betinela asked, “So where will you go then? You’ve always been smarter than your brother, Suald, so I assume you’ll use the shoes for something greater than entertaining children?”

He looked at her from under his brows, agitated by the accusation that edged her every word. Didn’t she appreciate the power he held right here in his hand? No, of course she didn’t. None of them did. He could obliterate them and they wouldn’t know. He was sick of their small minds, sick of the greedy, petty span of Kakotara.

“I’ll tell you, and then I’ll bid you both farewell. I’m going to travel the whole length and breadth of Shadowbridge as no one has ever done before. I’ll see everything, and when I return I’ll be the greatest explorer who ever lived, because I can do it all in the blink of an eye. I’ll reign among the gods.”

“Fine.” She moved aside. Her look mocked him. “Go on then. Travel the whole world.”

“I shall—I’ll travel the whole world.” Upon those words he launched headlong so fast that figs from the trees he’d created rained after him.

The instant he was gone, the spell he’d cast upon his brother broke and the clouds of confusion lifted. Baloyd’s eyes widened, first with the shock of recognition, then with the boil of anger. He opened his mouth and shouted at the sky. He flung curses at Suald and plunged back into the deserted house. Sounds of shattering and squawking and screams of rage echoed up and down the street, drawing a crowd. People looked at Betinela for an explanation. Some asked where Suald was, because they had more things to ask for. She said nothing, but stepped quickly aside as a glass lamp flew through the doorway and struck a man in the back. The crowd scrambled out of the way.

When Baloyd emerged with Seru’s blue-and-violet plumed bird dangling from his fist, the crowd scurried farther away, ready to flee. He’d wrung its neck. He dropped the dead bird, turned from them, and shuffled off, barefoot, exhausted, helpless. The neighbors waited until he was gone, then crept into the shambles to sift for treasure.

At home he sat, saying nothing, glowering. His wife chided him. “You could have been a god to those people. If it weren’t for your brother, you might have had all the treasures yourself. You could have granted anyone any wish they asked. If he ever comes back . . .” She didn’t finish the thought.

The children he’d entertained with rides returned the next morning, but when Baloyd proved unable to perform further feats of speed, they left him. A few of his neighbors came inquiring after Suald, but their inquiries provoked only rage, and they soon stopped coming. Baloyd plunged with suicidal vigor back into his dissolute life—gambling, drinking, and whoring—in a vain attempt to drown out the words his wife had set in motion, that, like a perpetual mechanism, swirled around and around his brain: I could have been a god. I could have been a god. He rarely went home, and when he did it was only to pass out until he awoke to go out again. Betinela left him. He had no idea when it happened, whether he’d been home or not, whether weeks had passed without her and he had simply failed to notice.

One hot afternoon while he lay unconscious, shouts from outside woke him. A crowd had gathered before his door. They called his name. As he arose in the shadows he winced and waited for his head to stop pounding. Then, scratching himself, he peered at them from the second-floor window. He supposed he’d done something offensive while drunk—throttled a favorite cat or kicked a child. They might have been there to hang him, although they weren’t hammering down the door as he would have expected. They were agitated all right, but not angry. And they weren’t going away. He descended the stairs uncertainly and opened the door.

They took hold of him and hauled him through the streets to Brink Lane. He thought of a man he’d pushed out of a window, but that had been so long ago. Maybe Suald’s spell had lifted—maybe he wasn’t a rat anymore, maybe someone had seen what had happened, maybe he was dreaming, maybe he was mad.

Through the twists and turns of alleys they hauled him. The sun stabbed at his eyes. His head throbbed with each propelled step. He began to think that if they killed him, it could only be a blessing. As they neared the dragon beam, he saw that even more people lined the spiral walkway all the way to the hex. Had something else been sent down from the Edgeworld gods—something for him? What if it was an avatar sent to demand back the gifts? What would he say? He didn’t know where they were now.

The crowd accompanying him stopped at the edge, but pushed him onto the beam. There was no going back, no escaping. He didn’t try.

As he wound the beam, the people ahead moved aside to give him room. He came to the end, and the crowd, almost reverently, parted.

There, in the center of the platform, stood a terrifying scarecrow. Its clothes were rags. Long tangled weeds constituted the hair. It had a face like a desiccated fish—the mouth a wide, howling oval, the dark leathery skin pitted and taut and tanned. Despite its upright position, anyone could see that it wasn’t alive. For one thing, it had no eyes in its ragged sockets.

Finally he noticed its feet.

In complete disparity with the rest of the tattered thing, the big, clumsy shoes on its feet were brightly polished and red as blood. Far redder than when he had given them up. He looked at the dried-out and ravaged face again, and finally recognized the features of his brother.

Baloyd knew what had happened. Whenever he had chosen a destination, the shoes had not stopped until it had been reached. Suald had chosen the compass of the world: He had run across infinity. He had run himself to death.

His horrifying appearance kept everyone a comfortable distance away from Suald. When Baloyd touched him, the body collapsed like a heap of twigs. He caught it as it fell and laid it down. Then he untied the shoes and took them off his brother’s corpse. Bones sprinkled out of them—dust and small bits—all that remained of Suald’s feet. He upended the shoes to pour out the rest, then sat and, removing his slippers, put the shoes on again. People stared at him, many with distaste. He didn’t care. His brother had stolen the shoes from him, and he wasn’t about to let anyone else get the chance. They were his.

He left the slippers there on the hex.

The husk of his brother weighed little. Without assistance Baloyd carried the raggedy body along the spiral of the dragon beam, and bits of it crumbled as he walked, sprinkling over the wall and into the sea. The crowd backed away, some with revulsion, others in wonder. With each step the blood hammered in his head. In the pulse his wife’s voice chided him over and over and over again: You could have been a god. You could have been a god.

When he stepped from the beam onto Brink Lane, something plopped from the pocket of his brother’s trousers. The unblemished clay tablet lay at his feet. He turned the corpse to rummage through the other pockets until he found the stylus. It was dark and sharp, ready for use.

He set down Suald, then picked up the clay. In his other hand he held the stylus. What should he write? He could bring Suald back to life, and Seru as well from whatever hell she’d been cast into. With the tablet he might do anything at all.

People dared to come near him. They asked, “What’s wrong, Baloyd? Why have you stopped?”

He considered their eager faces. The pathetic, simple fools. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Everything is very right, and it’s going to be better than right.” He inscribed the tablet. Then he lowered the stylus.

Halfway.

That was as far as he got before the transformation took place.

A reddish brown dust swirled up from the street, spinning a web around his legs. Reddish brown color spread from his fingertips over his palms and up his arms, too. Like a living sheath the color encased his torso, his neck, his head. In a moment he ceased to be human, or alive.

The people on the street dropped to their knees and bowed down in veneration. They chanted his name, “Ba-loyd,” each time they bowed. Some of the nearest ones reached out and touched him. Their display brought others who, unmoved by the desire to venerate, came close enough to inspect the rough stone figure that had been Baloyd. Beside him they found his brother’s corpse and, lying beside it where it had fallen, the clay tablet. On the tablet they read the words he’d written: MAKE THEM WORSHIP ME LIKE A GOD.

“And so Baloyd was worshipped for many, many years,” said Leodora, “until the last of those people who’d been present that day had died. By then, the sandstone form of him had been worn down and scoured by wind and salt. The tablet proved useless to those who’d found it. A few tried writing upon it with sticks and knives to no effect. The stylus had been transformed into stone along with Baloyd.

“Thus we’re reminded that the gods are capricious, and that it’s unwise ever to make demands of them when instead we should be thankful for what we do have.”

She faced the twin actors. Throughout the recitation her attention had been focused upon them, upon their movements and gestures—how one jumped behind the other and back again to represent speeding across the span of Kakotara; how one would appear to write on an invisible tablet and the other would become the thing he’d called into being, the birds, the carriers of the conjured palanquin, the fig trees. At the end as she spoke, one of them lay upon the stage with arms bent and fingers curled, as skeletal as he could be, while the other had wrapped his arms about himself and bowed his head, and had slowly sunk down to his knees as his sandstone shape was worn away.

The applause that followed her recitation surprised her, and she jumped away from the edge of the stage even as she peered into the depths of the theater. The two wooden men arose as one and faced the sound. They leaned forward at the waist as if they might stretch themselves toward it.

From out of the dark recesses a figure flowed toward the stage—tall and slender. Drawing nearer the light, it took shape as a woman in a green embroidered brocade nightgown. She was smiling broadly as she approached. “That is the first performance upon that stage in more than a dozen years,” she said. “I had given up hoping there would ever be another.” She rounded the front of it and came up the steps at the side. “You gave them the story so well, it was as if they became your puppets.” She drew up before Leodora and added “You are certainly your father’s daughter. No one could doubt it.”

Leodora blinked up at her. “You knew my father?” she asked.

“He played here. On this very stage, a rare occasion. Because of the size of the theater, we stretched a great screen across the front of it and mounted a lens between that and the screen in his booth so that the shadows were cast in giant proportion—quite the extraordinary contrivance that was, but we drew from four spans for the audience. Can you imagine? Four spans! They traveled that far to see the incomparable Bardsham. They knew he was only here for a short run before sailing off to another spiral, another world. He was covering Shadowbridge then, and every span on every spiral would come to know him by rumor, by legend. That was his goal, you see, which he proclaimed with enormous pride and, well, not a little hubris.” Her expression softened as if to say, It was a forgivable fault, but Leodora wasn’t concerned with her father’s ego.

“And my mother?” she asked. “Did you know her, too?”

The woman’s express delight buckled. Her gaze clouded, and it was clear she was recalling something troubling. “You could be her sister.” She turned sharply to the two players. “Glaise, Bois, go off with you now. It’s near morning and will be light soon. Our guests will want their breakfast.”

They clapped their hands and bowed, then arm in arm they marched off in matched step.

Watching them depart, she continued, “My husband ran the theater then. It was, well, just as you see it now. A wondrous place. Magic flowed from here and out across those rows, those benches, all the way up into those boxes every single night.”

She focused beyond Leodora on nothing that was there, and Leodora knew that she was peering into her past. “Having Bardsham pick our theater for his venue. It was—we thought we had realized our dream.”

The melancholy bound up in her words prompted Leodora to ask, “He didn’t perform well?”

“Bardsham? Oh, my dear, he was a genius. The shadows came to life. They danced, they strutted, even flew . . . It was so grand, so smooth, so elegant that you forgot there was an agency at work behind them.” She stared at Leodora. “Soter wants to convince me you are his equal.”

She blushed, suddenly shy. “I don’t know. I never saw him perform.”

“Of course not. You were a fat little thing when your mother . . . when they left here.”

Leodora’s eyes went wide. “I was—I was here?”

The woman made a stiff, uncomfortable smile. It was clear that she wasn’t certain where the boundaries lay. The more they talked, the more she set sail in uncharted waters. Whether or not Soter had instructed her not to speak of some things, Leodora could tell that she was cracking open a subject that hadn’t seen light.

She closed her hand on the woman’s wrist and said, “I want to know everything,” leaving no room for obfuscation or pretense. She said, “But first tell me who you are.”

“Ah, I’ve been unforgivably obscure. My name is Orinda.”

Leodora gaped.

“I was once a player here, much like Bois and Glaise, save that I was never made of wood—although neither were they, once. But if I explain all that to you now, I’ll lose the thread of it, and it’s so difficult anymore to hold on to such threads. The spirals are unwinding for me, and each turn seems farther than the one preceding it. Mr. Burbage’s . . . I’m sure I’m making no sense to you.”

Leodora shook her head. “Truly, I lost your thread at your name.”

“Orinda.” She laughed lightly.

“Yes, I heard that much. There’s a puppet of that name in my collection. She comes from a story I know, that Soter taught me.”

“Oh. I should like to hear that story. I hope she’s not a villain. I was a traveling player once, and I’ve never heard my name in a tale. But as to what I was saying before, the proprietor of the theater, Mr. Burbage, fell in love with me and I with him and I became his wife, and together we ran this—or, to be precise I should say its predecessor—and, oh my, we were in love. I always called him Mr. Burbage because that’s what we’d called him when we were all players, not because he wanted formality, and it became more intimate in some way I can’t explain, that I did. We were in love, I think, every single day we were together. He took ill right before your father . . .” She looked about herself, at the walls, roof, tapestries, as if to assure herself that they were real. “Right before we fell into ruin.”

“Bardsham was connected to that?”

“The members of the high court held us accountable for the blighting of Colemaigne after he left, and they banned all subsequent performances. Of course, we’d suffered as much if not more than any in the blight. The theater was transformed into a ruin, so it almost mattered not at all. There would have been no further performances. No walls, no stage, just rot and crumbling masonry. Nothing held together, nor could we make it hold. Their ban only meant we wouldn’t rebuild, but it proved the end of Mr. Burbage. He might have rallied from his illness, but he had no reason to. Oh, if I could only have shown him the state of things now—and Bardsham’s daughter here, performing—I’m sure he would have held on. But if it hadn’t saved him, I wouldn’t have wanted him to suffer interminably, so perhaps it’s better. We can’t know these things, can we?”

“It makes you wish that the tablet in the story really existed,” Leodora replied. “The blighting—how did it happen?”

Orinda made a face that said It’s not important and replied, “Bardsham had gone. He and his troupe had sailed on . . . It’s all long past.”

“Yes, but what was the cause, and how did our arrival repair it?”

“You have no recollection, then. You walked into the Dragon Bowl and the gods paid us a visit. The first time in decades. You’re the cause, you’ve freed us from a terrible curse.”

The dragon beam—she remembered walking out along it to tease Diverus—and the bowl with enough tiles remaining to suggest a pattern, but nothing beyond that. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I don’t even recall asking anyone to heal your span—I wouldn’t have known to, would I?”

Orinda smiled tolerantly, as she might have at a slow child. “It’s nothing to do with what you asked, only with the fact that the gods answered when they touched you.”

Leodora digested that, then said, “But it doesn’t—”

“Oh, my girl, please, no more questions for now. A terrible thing happened in the past and you righted it. You’re going to be very popular in Colemaigne, you and your troupe, as I’m certain the ban will be lifted on us now with you here—with you the cause of our healing—and, oh, imagine the hundreds and hundreds who will fill our little theater.” She took Leodora by the arm and turned her. “They’ll be clamoring at the gates, no doubt, once the sun’s up. So you will need to eat, because you might not get another meal today if we’re half as busy as I think. Now you should come with me.” Orinda led her off the stage.

“There’s a ghost in my room,” said Leodora.

Orinda stopped. “What?” she asked.

“A ghost. A voice. He spoke to me, but he wasn’t there. It’s not a very big room, and I reached all the way to the wall and there wasn’t anyone there, but I heard him. He knew it was dark outside, and he knew all about the theater.”

Orinda clasped both her hands. “Mr. Burbage, when he . . . He wanted to be close to the theater, so at the end he took to sleeping in the balconies of the stage, right across from your room. Do you think it could be Mr. Burbage who spoke to you?”

“He said he was a counselor.”

“We’ll go to your room and see. If it is my dear one, he will speak to me, surely he will.”

They climbed the stairs to her room. It lay dark still, closed off from the light of dawn, but it was possible now to distinguish the bed from the floor, the small armoire from the wall.

“Hello,” said Leodora. She knelt on the bed. “Are you still with me?” She half expected silence, but then the same voice as before drawled, “It’s not as if I can go off on my own.”

“There,” she told Orinda. “You hear him?”

“I do. It’s not Mr. Burbage, unless his voice has changed.”

“Are you Mr. Burbage?” Leodora asked the room.

“That would be impossible,” came the reply. It seemed to issue from the bed itself, right beside her. Orinda came up close behind her, and she turned, looked up.

“Why?” asked the proprietress.

“He has passed from this world and into Edgeworld.”

“Into it?”

“Why, yes. What else was he to do? But you are not my mistress, and I answer you from courtesy only, as she openly regards you as a friend.”

“Oh,” said Orinda, stepping back. Leodora pushed her hands through the bedsheets.

“Speak to me now!” she said. “I’m right on top of you, why can’t I find you?” She swept her hands through the covers, finding only the pendant with its chain, on which she was kneeling. She lifted it into the air.

“Thus you resolve the matter without resorting to assistance,” said the pendant.

“You?” Dangling it by its chain, she clambered off the bed and out the door past her hostess. In the hallway with the light coming through the distant curtains, she could make out the shape of the pendant, a smoothly crafted leonine face with golden eyes. “Speak now,” she said. “Tell me who sent you?”

“Sent me?” the lion head asked. “Why, no one sent me, you chose me.”

Orinda said, “It’s a Brazen Head. Oh, my goodness, I’ve never seen one before.”

“A what?” Leodora asked.

“A Brazen Head. There are so many of them in legends.”

“There are legends?”

Before Orinda could respond, the pendant chimed, “Indeed. There’s a most famous one in a play. It belonged to a man named Bacon. It only spoke while he slept, and it said ‘Time was,’ and ‘Time is,’ and ‘Time’s past.’ No one knows what it meant, but everyone suspects it was important.”

“What did it mean? What does it mean to say time is.”

“The nature of Brazen Heads,” explained the lion, “is that they speak in riddles or at least in ways that are most obscure. It’s not our choice, you understand. It’s simply how we’re made.”

Leodora pursed her lips. “That’s like Meersh’s argument that he isn’t bad, he’s simply consigned to try all the bad ideas he comes across.”

“I suppose it is, after a fashion,” the head agreed.

“I don’t believe him, either,” she told it.

The pendant and she considered each other, scant inches apart. Then the lion’s tongue unfurled as it yawned, revealing ivory teeth, and it blinked slowly several times. “Time is that which ends,” it said. Then it closed its eyes and fell silent, a piece of jewelry once again.

Leodora sighed. “If this is what I chose to bring back, I’m not hopeful of my acquaintance with the gods.”

“Oh, but,” Orinda said, “we now know that Mr. Burbage is in Edgeworld. It means a great deal to me to know that.”

“I suppose it wasn’t something we could have learned on our own.” She still wasn’t sure anything the head uttered could be relied upon. “It seems to have gone to sleep, as if we wore it out.” She sniffed the air, alert suddenly to a warm scent.

Orinda nodded. “You smell the breakfast cooking, too, don’t you?”

By way of answer, Leodora’s stomach gurgled.

“Come along, my dear. After we eat, we can ponder all the questions in the universe without being taken by them, as Mr. Burbage used to say.” Orinda clasped her hand and led her toward the stairs.

Leodora pocketed the pendant and let her hostess lead her, but she wasn’t giving up on discovering how this span had been blighted. Deep inside she knew that the plague visited upon this place had something to do with her.

* * *



Upon another spiral, on the distant span of Vijnagar, something unnatural came flowing along Kalian Esplanade. In the late-night darkness a darker mass moved, topped by five smooth, pale, hairless heads. The mass or its constituents made no sound, yet thrust along the esplanade without benefit of any torchbearer to guide them. Those who plied that trade saw the approaching anomaly and changed course instinctively to avoid it, which abrupt shift caused their clients to take notice of the five heads sailing past, sunken eyes glistening, watchful, like birds of prey. Some people drew up, backed to the seawall, to let the thing by. Bearers and clients were united in their unease, and if anyone spoke, it was to whisper. “Archivists,” said some, thinking that the legendary Library had sent its agents to capture some piece of knowledge, a scholarly scroll perhaps. As no one had ever laid eyes upon the rumored archivists, it was a reasonable opinion, though less explicable was why a cluster of library archivists should elicit discomfort if not outright terror, for there were many others brushed against by the flowing mass who instinctively made small gestures to ward off evil before hurrying on their way, all too grateful to be going in the opposite direction.

The place called Lotus Hall, while still open for business, was nearly dormant this late, inhabited by a few regulars who would have sat there no matter what entertainment was proffered. At the moment that entertainment comprised a man spinning four ducks that balanced perfectly poised on the tips of their beaks upon polished clamshells. No one paid him or his trained fowl the slightest attention, although the ducks were working very hard and occasionally let fly a disgruntled quack.

The proprietor, Nuberne, was feeling the pinch since the remarkable Jax had gone. The puppeteer had brought in standing-room crowds, the best he’d ever seen. He suspected that his wife, Rolend, had hastened the puppeteer’s departure with her unbridled overtures, and things had not been pleasant between them since.

He was standing in his small kitchen off the hall when the sounds of the performance ceased. Even the small, innocuous noises of snoring drunks and cautious conversations stopped. As his head turned, the hair on the back of his neck stiffened and he threw off a shiver in response to the uncanny silence.

The hall, seen through the doorway, became darker than the kitchen, where two low cooking fires tossed trembling shadows as well as heat. Even the wall sconces and the chandelier candles seemed to have guttered and gone out. From the center of this deeper darkness five pale heads gained in size every moment, until he could make out the glassy eyes within the sunken orbits, eager and hungry in their focus upon him. Not until they hovered just beyond the doorway did he make out the folds and darts of their black cloaks. This was the effect they strove for, of course, and though he recognized the manipulation, he could not overcome its dread intent. Later as he clung to his wife’s stiff fingers, he would insist it couldn’t be real, any of it, because the archivists were a myth. Everyone knew it.

Packed closely together, the five hovered at the doorway as one of them spoke. “You are the proprietor?” The bloodless lips had hardly moved. All eyes still feasted upon him.

Nuberne tried to reply, swallowed, cleared his throat, and managed a raspy, “I am.”

“We are interested in a performer who seems not to be performing this night.”

He tried to make sense of that. “You’re wanting me to hire him?”

The five exchanged looks. “No. What would make you think that?”

“I don’t understand then.”

At that point his wife, Rolend, approached from wherever she’d been in the depths of the hall. “What’s happened here, Nuberne?” she called as she scanned the wide-eyed stragglers, the nonperforming ducks. “Why has the whole place gone—oh!” Finally, she had seen the swarm of figures before the doorway. The five pallid heads turned in unison to regard her.

“Beg—beg pardon,” she said. She eased around them and through the doorway, taking a worried step back into the kitchen.

“Quite all right,” said one of the five. “We were inquiring after an artist who performs here, by the name of ‘Jax.’ ”

“Jax,” repeated Nuberne. “You’re mistaken then. He’s not performing here anymore. He shoved off awhile ago. But what would the Library want—”

“Yet you have notices pasted up. We saw them all along the esplanade.”

Rolend faced him. “Don’t you tell them anything, don’t you help them.”

“Ro, shut up,” Nuberne said, more out of fear than anger.

“They don’t mean him any good,” she argued.

“Ro!” He reached for her even as she stiffened as if poked in the back. She stared at him wide-eyed and managed to utter his name once, faintly, before the color drained from her face and the eyes looking upon Nuberne went blank and flat, the color of her now hardened flesh, the color of the long skeletal hand that was clamped around the back of her neck. The fingers slid away; something glittered in the palm for an instant before it vanished in the black folds behind her. Where the hand brushed her hair, gray grains sprinkled loose. It might have been the hand of any one of them.

Nuberne touched her stone cold wrist and recoiled in horror.

“Quite all right,” the one repeated. “We don’t mean him any good, that is true. It is also none of your concern. You will tell us where he is, this Jax.”

Nuberne’s face twisted up but he could not stop looking at her, his wife, dead. “I don’t know. He moved on,” he said.

“The notices s—”

“I left ’em up. I was trading on his fame is all! He filled the place, every night, the best storyteller since—”

“Bardsham. Yes, yes, we know.”

“Bring her back,” he pleaded.

“Ah, I regret, you credit us with too much power,” hissed the one. “Where is Jax now? Or wish you to follow her?”

“Jax . . . Jax moved on. To another span, him and his troupe.” He was weeping, trembling with shock. His legs could not hold him up and he grabbed for the edge of a table.

“Another span. North or south?”

“I don’t know. North, I think. He’d come from the south.”

“North it is then. Tell us one more thing. He goes about disguised?”

His hands on the tabletop curled into fists of impotent anger and he lowered his head to them, closed his eyes. “Masked.” He choked the word.

“Of course,” said the one.

When he raised his head, Nuberne found the doorway empty and everyone in the hall, even the hapless performer and his terrified ducks, staring now at the ossified figure that had been Rolend. He sank down to the floor then, and his wail filled the hall with agony.