Emmi Itäranta - The City of Woven Streets

I hear a short howl from the chamber. Then comes silence.

Valeria sits hunched against the wall, her face pale and bare. Her chest rises and falls faster than my heart beats. I reach my hand out to her. She takes it. I squeeze her fingers. They shake between mine. Or so I think until I realize my own hand is shaking against hers. We make no sound. A tremor runs through me, bringing with it a distant, unfamiliar twinge of pain and a wave of weakness, as if I have put a strain on a muscle I did not even know I had in my body.

Valeria’s face breaks into relief. She pulls me closer and our foreheads rest against each other, my dark tattoo against her pale and unmarked skin. Her lips are soft and salty when they press to mine, and I still feel their touch when she withdraws. I run my hand down her cheek. She lives and breathes by my side, and this is my dream, and this is my reality.

‘Let’s go,’ I say and get up. Valeria stands up after me. She does not let go of my hand.

With trembling legs we begin to climb the stairs. I notice a thin streak of blood on Valeria’s neck. I nearly think it away, but I stop myself. I do not wish to change anything about her. If something leaves a scar, I want to feel it, as part of her. Just as she accepted my dreams and my night-maere and my mark. Her arm settles tightly to support my back. The lantern still burns on top of the stairs where Biros left it. Spinner’s aim was sharp, with no room for stray movement. I pick the lantern up.

The chamber is dusky and quiet, but there is a slight rustling and whizzing sound from above. I raise my eyes. The light of the lantern catches in the shimmering webs crossing the ceiling. Spinner is crouched in the web. Her two front limbs are wrapping a human-shaped bundle in silk. I discern a hand balled into a fist, a twitching knee. Further up I see another, unmoving bundle. A draught blows across the floor, swaying the webs. We begin to walk towards the other end and the door which is ajar. The webs brush our bodies and the lantern paints slow-floating patterns on the walls. Valeria accelerates her footsteps. Her hand is already on the door handle, when a voice speaks from the shadows.

‘I see the power of Dreamers is not dead, after all,’ Spinner says.

I freeze in place. Valeria pulls the door open and her face urges me to follow. But Spinner’s words hold me, will not let me leave yet.

I turn to face the room.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

The silence stretches. Eventually a distant wind and space-dust creep into it, a rustling that is the movement of sand and bones turned to earth.

‘What do you know of the world?’ Spinner says.

Her voice is supple as a vine entwining around a tree-trunk. The question feels like a slab of stone Spinner is laying at my feet, paving an unknown path. I do not see where it will lead me, but I cannot turn away.

Valeria steps next to me and takes my hand.

‘There is a lot of water and little land,’ I say. ‘Some seas are too wide for ships to cross.’

‘Is that all?’

A silence gathers around Spinner while she waits.

‘Not everywhere is the same as on the island. There are places where people are allowed to dream freely.’

The silence shifts. A limb makes a small movement. In a human I would interpret it as impatience.

‘What do you know of the past?’ Spinner says.

‘The island did not always belong to humans,’ I say. ‘A long time ago it belonged to the Web-folk. They left their traces on the landscape, but they no longer exist.’

Spinner lets out a crackling noise that drags back and forth. It takes me a while to realize she is laughing. Valeria’s breaths have turned taut and short.

‘Imagine,’ she says, ‘that once, a long time ago, the entire island was covered in webs. Not man-made, picture-patterned and easy-fading, but wider, more persistent. And imagine a ship, aboard it people who had not set a foot on steady ground for months. One calm morning the island loomed on the horizon, and they saw it across the glistening surface of the sea. The radiant halo of the web-gauze reached from treetop to treetop, hill to hill. The strands of the sun caught on the threads and burst along the night-born drops of moisture, glowing bright enough to burn their eyes and tug at their spirits. They could not help but reach for the glimmer. Your people have always looked far, and yet only seen what is near.’

Spinner quiets. Her eyes stare at emptiness, and yet at me.

And I remember. The amber walls, the creatures frozen within. Her kin.

‘You are of the Web-folk,’ I say.

I feel a shiver run through Valeria by my side.

‘Yes, you have seen them,’ Spinner says quietly. ‘A shard of the past your people buried. Those frozen under the sea have been there for longer than anyone knows. They were already ancient when my kin inhabited the island. We recognized them as ours and made the tunnel so we could visit them.’

‘Why did you send me there?’ I ask. ‘You knew it was a trap.’

The lantern flickers small and weak against the wall of shadows around us. Spinner’s voice adds another step to the path, inviting me closer.

‘Sometimes it is necessary to step into darkness alone and find your way back,’ Spinner says. ‘To carry something with you into light you could not have found anywhere else.’

The patterns of the underground walls glow in my memory. Long-forgotten words in a language none on the island speaks now. The sun that was Our Lady of Weaving, twining together the threads of life. Small humans at her fingertips: Dreamers shaping their reality like it was a dream.

‘Those you are descended from built the sanctuary through which you walked,’ Spinner continues. ‘A sanctuary for words, weaving and dreams, when they were still one and had not yet been forced apart.’

I swallow the lump in my throat, but it does not disappear. Valeria twitches. I realize I have been squeezing her hand too hard. My voice is thinner than a whisper.

‘Dreams?’

‘The Web-folk conversed through dreams before humans came,’ Spinner says. ‘And for a long time after. Among your people those whose gift for dreaming was strongest were the first to find a connection with us. We opened our world to them, because they listened to what we had to say. They saw what we wished to show them. With their help we taught your people the skill of weaving. We gave them our silk, and they learned to make tapestries from it. Together we wove fabrics unlike anything the world had seen before. And so humans built the House of Dreams, the first house on the island.’ She takes a short pause. ‘You know it as the House of the Tainted.’

I think about the pictures on the walls of the Museum of Pure Sleep, of my mother’s words: never tell anyone . Dreamers standing on the dais at the Ink-marking and pulling sticks from the bowl. Every night I have stayed awake in fear of dreams, or the night-maere.

‘What happened?’ I ask.

‘Dreamers’ skill of communicating with the Web-folk gave them power,’ Spinner says. ‘That did not please everyone. And when some of them discovered at the core of their dreams the power that had always lived there, everything changed.’

The path grows longer. One stone, another. We are drawing closer to where she wants to lead me.

‘The power of Dreamers,’ I say. ‘What is it?’

Even as I ask, I sense the strange tingling again, in my hands and in my thoughts and in my body. The shimmering threads I saw after the night-maere came to me are within my reach.

‘You know,’ Spinner says. ‘You have already used it. You can do it again.’

I wish to see her better, and Valeria. The room around us is still a dream-room, mine to command. I look at the threads above our heads and think to them, shine . The thought is not heavy or forced. It merely brushes through me, floats for a moment and is gone.