Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

"Have it your way, kid," the wolf-woman shade calls out after her. "I'll just sit tight and watch the show. But if you change your mind, I'll be right here."

In King's Hale, the Glaistig has only just started her prayers of passage and release when the quake begins to rock the tower. She gets slowly to her feet, holding tight to one of the sturdy pediments of her husband's granite tomb, the clat clat clat of her unsteady hooves lost in the rumbling, splitting, cracking din rising up from the tortured earth far below the Weal. She stands alone on the wide funerary dais. Her ministers and astronomers and alchemists, her marshals and magistrates and the High Executioner and her Ladies Who Walk Behind, the Lord Chancellor and all the other members of her inner court are still kneeling at their assigned stations beyond the base of the dais. Their heads are bowed, to varying degrees, anxiously waiting for her word to stand, her permission to vacate the Hale and move to someplace safer.

How much longer before they'd run? the Glaistig wonders. How long before ceremony and protocol wouldn't matter anymore?

The ancient walls of the Hale loom gigantic around her, two hundred feet from the glass mosaics set into the floor to the formerets and buttresses of the vaulted roof. The ceiling has been painted with the constellations of the Midsummer's Eve, yellow and white tempera stars dabbed against a sky of deepest indigo. A precise mural of the heavens so that all the generations of kings sleeping here can always find their way back down to the hub on that one night of the year. Their immense black statues line the walls, watching her, and the Glaistig wonders, too, if there will ever be another Midsummer's Eve and where the ghosts of kings go when their world has died.

"Kypre Alundshaw," she calls out, shouting to be heard above the upheaval, and the Glaistig jabs her glittering scepter of silver and ruby and andesite at one of the alchemists. Alundshaw, a short, balding man missing his left ear and his right eye, nods and begins to rise. But then the tower shakes again and the floor rolls like a stormy sea, and the alchemist, along with most of the other supplicants, is thrown roughly against the shattered tiles. The convulsion passes, but a narrow sort of rift or fissure has opened near the rear of the chamber, and now a geyser of steam and soot spews out from it, the breath of the Dragon himself or only the death rattle of Kearvan Weal.

"Yes, your Grace," Kypre Alundshaw wheezes as he manages to get to his feet, his hands and face cut and bleeding from the broken glass tiles. He brushes sparkling, kaleidoscopic slivers from his aubergine robes.

"You must understand," the Glaistig says, "I would not ask you this question if I did not believe that we have come finally to the hour of our uttermost need and that all other avenues have been exhausted."

The alchemist stops picking glass from his robes and nods his head once. "Yes, your Grace. Certainly. I understand."

The Glaistig takes a deep breath and shuts her eyes, letting a few more seconds slip past, and she silently curses the gods of chance and circumstance that she has lived to know how the damned-to-be feel in that last instant before the trespass that will insure their spirits are forever consigned to perdition. She opens her eyes, and steam is still pouring from the crack in the floor; the air has begun to stink of sulfur and rotting eggs.

"The Weaver's constructs, these Seraphim, may not be killed," she says. "This much I understand, and also I understand why. But I have been told there may be another way, something which you've learned from the red witches. I ask you, is this true?"

When Kypre Alundshaw doesn't reply, she strikes her scepter against the dais with enough force that sparks fly from the impact of silver against the flagstones. Alundshaw flinches and immediately looks back down at the floor.

"Alchemist, you will tell me now, is this true? Or have I been wrongly advised?"

"No, your Grace. You have not," the alchemist replies, a quaver in his voice. "There may, indeed, be another way, but it would be a terrible deed if-"

"I am not asking you for a lesson in ethics," the Glaistig snarls and turns back towards her husband's tomb. She places one hand flat on its polished lid and listens to the foundations of Kearvan Weal trembling beneath her.

"No, your Grace, but the consequences-"

"I'm only asking if it might be accomplished," the Glaistig explains, wishing that the heavy lid of the tomb had not been closed so soon, that she could look one last time upon the face of her King and find there the answers she needs. Answers that might save her world without bringing harm to some other universe.

"I think so," the alchemist says, and she can hear the reluctance in his reply. "The red witches' calculations seem sound enough. We can find no fault."

"And why do you believe that we can trust the Nesmians, Alundshaw? They have ever been enemies of the Dragon. Might not this be some deceit?"

The alchemist glances nervously over his shoulder at the steam billowing from the fissure, then clears his throat. "I need not remind your Grace that the Nesmians despise the Weaver, perhaps even as much as do our own people. In this instance, our enemy has become an ally against a common threat."

"And this sorcery would take them all, not merely that one the vampire has captured?"

"Yes, your Grace. If the process works as the Nesmians have predicted, it would take all of the Seraphim, each removed to another…" and he pauses, as if he's forgotten how to end the sentence.

"To another world," the Glaistig finishes for him.

"Yes, mum," he says. "They would be forever scattered across the celestial planes."

"Beyond her recall?"

"Yes, your Grace. Forever beyond her recall."

The floor groans and rolls again, and the alchemist waves his arms about and shuffles his feet to keep from falling. Near the rift in the floor of King's Hale, the glass tiles of the mosaic have begun to melt, their candy colors bleeding one into the other. And now a second fissure has opened, this one a vertical rent in the northern wall of the tower, wide enough that dim streaks of daylight shine through.

"Is there still time?" the Glaistig asks.

"I believe so," Kypre Alundshaw answers. "The place of sacrifice has already been prepared. We've done precisely as the Kenzia woman has directed. We only await your command."

"Then you tell her to do it," she says. "Tell her to do it immediately. And by the spokes and all our fathers, may the gods show mercy on us in our desperation."

Before the next tremor shakes the Hale, Alundshaw and the other alchemists and the astronomers have filed out of the chamber, and the Glaistig motions for the men and women of her court to kneel once more. She leans against the tomb of the King of Immolations, her cheek pressed to the cool, consoling granite, and, in another moment, she begins her prayers again.

Julia Flammarion swims until the cold has done its job, exactly what she's asked it to do for her, and her arms and legs have grown too stiff and numb to possibly swim any farther. Which means that she'll never be able to swim all the way back to shore, either, so there's no losing her nerve now. It doesn't matter if she turns coward and changes her mind or decides that life as a crazy girl who talks to angels is still better than drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. She squints back towards the beach, nothing visible but a faint white stripe against the blue horizon, and wonders about the handsome man with the guitar, what he thought as she walked into the water in her clothes and shoes and began to swim away. Did he even notice? Is he watching her now? Has he gone looking for help? She hopes not. She hopes that he's still sitting there on his apple crate playing beautiful songs she'll never hear.