Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

Somewhere nearby, a crow calls out hoarsely, and the girl looks up. Julia can see that her eyes are pink, and her hair as fine and pale as cornsilk. The girl, who can't be more than five or six years old, is holding a fat bullfrog in one hand. She sees Julia, too, and she smiles and begins splashing through the creek towards her.

"Look, Momma," the girl says, holding up the bullfrog. "Have you ever in all your life seen one this big?"

Look, Momma…

And Julia knows perfectly damn well that the albino girl's only mistaken her for someone else, and in a few seconds more, when she comes closer, the child will realize her mistake. But then the girl stops, the creek flowing about her bare legs, and the bullfrog slips from her fingers and swims quickly away.

"Momma?" the girl asks, looking down at her empty hand and then back up at Julia.

I'm sorry child, Julia starts to tell her, but I ain't your momma. I ain't nobody's momma, but then the girl turns and begins splashing away down the creek towards the sinkhole. Julia stands up, ashamed that she's frightened the kid, even if she's not sure why. She starts to call out to the albino girl, wants to tell her to be careful because the rocks are slick and it's not far to the falls and-

– there's only the caressing sea again, pressing in on every inch of her, the half-lit sea filling her, drowning her because she's asked it to, the agreeable, indifferent sea washing her away-a handful of mud, a pinch of salt, blood and a bit of sand, but there's nothing of her that won't dissolve or disperse. Only a passing moment's sadness that the autumn day by Wampee Creek was merely some smidgen of delirium coughed out by her dying mind, her life's last cruel trick, when it's only her and the sea and-

No. Her and the sea and just one other thing, whatever it was came slithering up out of the wheel of light before her dream of Shrove Wood and the albino girl. The thing that isn't a shark or a barracuda, that it isn't anything that belongs here. Nothing she can see, but Julia feels it, like tendrils of scalding water twining themselves tightly about her legs, forcing her back up towards the surface. And then its inside her, burning, prying her body and soul apart to find some slender crevice in between.

A pillar of fire dragging her to life again.

A child with white rabbit eyes.

And still and always, the world buzzes on like angry bees. Let it come and go, appear and vanish, for what have we to lose?

Blood and thunder, fire and a mad woman with a knife.

Have you ever in all your life seen one this big?

The briefest flicker of blue-white light, a searchlight beacon hiding itself in her womb, where no one will ever think to look.

The body of woman is like a flash of lightning…

There are arms around Julia, then, the strong arms of a man hauling her up and out of the angry, cheated sea, the man's voice shouting for help, the voices of other men and the slosh of salt-water breaking against their bodies and the hull of a boat painted yellow as sunflowers and canary birds. And before Julia Flammarion blacks out, she sees the boat's name printed boldly across its bow- Gulf Angel.

The Glaistig, Queen of Immolations, stands with Kypre Alundshaw on the barbican overlooking the gates of Kearvan Weal. She led the alchemist here from the outer courtyards, despite the protests of her architects and engineers, who argued that the earthquakes might have weakened the tower. But it looked sound enough to her, and from the barbican she can see between and beyond the steep walls of Wailer's Gash and out onto the plains beyond. She has borrowed one of the astronomer's telescopes, and with it the Glaistig can clearly make out a cloud of ash-grey dust heading into the rising sun. Both the Nesmians' horses, though only one of the red witches would be returning to their far-away protectorate on the river Yärin.

"Have you found her, your Grace?" Alundshaw asks, and the Glaistig nods and passes the long brass telescope to him.

And then Kypre Alundshaw can see her, too, the dust-haze trail marking Pikabo Kenzia's progress across the barren hublands. He wishes that he knew one of the heathen prayers, so that he might offer it up for her safe return home. She left the Weal without the body of her companion, which has now been bound in a gravling's winding-sheet and will be buried in the catacombs below the keep.

"She kept her word, Alundshaw," the Glaistig says, the hot wind through the Gash rearranging her reddish-blonde hair and the folds of her long gown. "With luck, she'll reach the Dog's Bridge before nightfall."

The alchemist lowers the telescope and rubs at his eye. "With luck," he says, "the Weaver's army will have all gone before her and the path will be clear."

"Would that she might have at least accepted an escort," the Glaistig sighs, almost whispering now. "They've bought us precious time, Alundshaw."

The alchemist places the looking-glass to his eye again, and it only takes him a moment to find her this time. He watches and contemplates sacrifice and the time that has or hasn't been bought by the death of the woman named Ezcha.

And the wheels turn as the wheels have always turned, the alternating bands of granite and basalt and fire which are this flat, revolving world, and at its dim center the hublands lie, as still as still will ever be. The fixed point about which all creation revolves, the pivot and the axle, the rod and the shaft, and the Dragon lies coiled in its fiery abscess, long miles below Kearvan Weal. He's awake now, fully and truly awake for the first time in more than a hundred millennia, and he listens to the witch's horses, rough hoof beats against lava flats and the lonely roads of the blistered back country. He listens to the Weaver's forces somewhere out beyond the conflagration forever dividing the hublands from the rest of the world. Ten-thousand marching soldiers, twice that many cavalry, twenty-thousand horses, the wagons and battering rams and siege engines, and the Dragon is beginning to understand why, with victory within her grasp, the Weaver has chosen to flee.

As her Seraphim were banished by the magic of the red witches, he easily snagged the soul of one exorcised angel, mere moments before it winked out of this existence and into another-hooked it snug and screaming on a mountainous thumb claw. Now the Dragon lies in its bed of fire, considering this frail creature of light and hate, this simple device which has brought so much pain and suffering and fear, this deadly toy the Weaver has stitched together from memory and nightmare and her own insanity. It would be such a simple undertaking, the fabrication of an angel, the Dragon thinks…

The wheels turn.

And far out on the Serpent's Road, atop a barren hill, the Weaver licks her wounds. She keenly felt the moment when her Seraphim were ripped from the disc of the world and strewn across the cosmos. She felt it like a knife driven through her skull and can only begin to guess at the power that might have ever accomplished such an exile. Beneath the rising sun, her white hair hangs about her face, tinged pink-orange, and the gem set deeply into the flesh between her pale eyes glows a bitter crimson. The sulfurous mists shrouding the stays and towers of the Dog's Bridge are underlit by the wide sea of fire between this innermost wheel and the hublands, and the Weaver begins to doubt she'll ever lead another charge across the bridge.

And the Dragon picks her angel apart to see what makes it tick.

The Glaistig's hooves stamp restlessly against the flagstones, and the alchemist lowers the telescope.

"Now that they are no longer in the world, these angels," she asks him, "do you think she'll try again?"