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Hundreds of years ago, not many miles from this spot – this one, right here – there lived a warmaker, a powerful general with no heart and a lot of spite and a thirsty ambition that drank blood like water.
This was not unusual at the time. Nor was it unusual when that warmaker laid low a city or two, not far from here at all. Nor when she had the subjects of that city paraded in front of her in chains and hobbles, with the skulls of their leaders smouldering in a great brazier-banner. What WAS unusual was what that warmaker did next.
“Bring me their architects,” she said.
This took some time, but after an hour or so and some beatings, she was presented with a hundred or so men and women. Some were thin, some fat, some old, some young. Most were terrified, a few were numb.
“I have destroyed your people because I am great and they were small,” declared the warmaker, from atop the small sturdy wooden stool that served as her throne. “And I wish this to be commemorated. You will build for me a monument, the grandest that has ever been raised. It will measure no less than eleven hundred tro in height, and of sufficient width to support this, tapering as it rises. There will be braziers for the skulls of defeated armies. There will be a grand mirror to shine the sun back at the sky, so that it knows that I am its match. This will be done.”
The warmaker watched the eyes of the architects carefully as her words ended. Then she pointed with her little steel knife.
“Him. Him. Her. Her. Her. Him. Her. Him. And those four. Do it.”
Small, sharp blades made fast motions.
“The rest of them, bring them shelter and food. And plenty of parchment. Their work begins.”

The monument took shape as clay on a potter’s wheel, spun out of stone and suffering on the backs and beneath the hands of ten thousand tired slaves. In their tent the architects brooded and bickered and learned and somehow pieced together a plan of a million parts without killing each other. And day by day, a shadow of their own making rose a little higher in the sky over their heads.
On the fifth year of its construction, horns and drums roared down from the hills. The warmaker had returned at the head of a groaning host, laden with several king’s ransoms of treasure carried in the unlikeliest kind of chest.
“The islands of Nilaa are mine,” she declared, “crushed between a hurricane and my men. This was their flagship, the Gorkoko. Hang it entire from the monument. Let their precious jewels shine for the sky’s amusement.”
The Gorkoko was three hundred tro long, and had never left the embrace of the water in its life until now. The architects became shipwrights from necessity, and the monument’s plans were destroyed and remade, its scale redoubled. The winches that hauled the Gorkoko to its resting place took three years to forge, and were hauled upon with miles of rope, scores of pulleys, and thousands of men and horses.
It hung just below where the monument’s former peak would’ve been, a dejected old beast. The architects felt its sour gaze upon them each morning.

On the twelfth year of construction, the air rattled again with the sound of marching men and ringing instruments, and the warmaker had her architects gathered once again. They stood at the head of her army, and they saw that each soldier carried another on his or her back.
“This is the army of the Mrtami,” she said, and she shrugged the two bodies she had carried atop her own shoulders to the ground. “And this was their general and their queen. Grant them crypts within the monument, armour and all. Let them not know the peace of their precious dirt, let the birds mock their tombs.”
The Grand Army of the Mrtami – the Grey-Clay Army, as they had known it – held more than fifty thousand men. Each casket, each tomb, was designed by hand. Each body was mummified by the dry air and the heat. Each was sealed away in a great wall that stretched up what was now the main trunk of the monolith, high in the sky.

On the twentieth year of construction, the warmaker brought the broken spires of the Citadel of Jhe, and demanded they be reborn as wings of the monument.

On the twenty-eighth year, the warmaker had the Six Kings of Selkorr decapitated, and each of their heads was placed in a sepulchre within the monument shaped to resemble its own misery-filled face a thousand times its size.

On the thirty-ninth year, the blood of every single horse of Hynm – a line of battle-bred steeds six hundred years old and more – was brought in iron basins, and placed within a great glass globe to dangle nine hundred tro above the lonely and desiccated frame of the Gorkoko.

On the fifty-seventh year, the skulls of the warmaker’s four daughters and three sons who had sought to usurp her were placed in a great brazier thirty hundred tro above the ground, along with all of their children.

And on the sixty-fourth year of construction, the warmaker came to the monument with her army, the empress of a continent, and looked up at it with rheumy eyes that stared harder than cold stone.
“Is it done?” she asked. “Is it done? Where is Glaglin? Summon Glaglin. I must know if it is done.”
A murmur travelled through the crowd of architects, drifting from end to end and back again, and at length it emerged that Glaglin had expired of old age six years ago.
“What of Telll? Niminsor? Ribst? Where are they? I must know if my monument is done.”
Dead and gone, old and dead, and passed away in the winter’s cold.
The warmaker clawed at her thin grey hair, fingers losing skin against her iron crown. “Anyone? Is there anyone at all? There must be one! I chose you, I chose you all! Why are you all strangers!”
“Not all,” said one. Grey Genless had arrived, carried in the arms of two slaves. “Not all, though I am the last you chose. Our children plan now, and our grandchildren learn from them.”
The warmaker’s gaze wavered, trying to find a face it knew in all those wrinkles. “Do they do it well?”
“As well as ever we did.”
“Yes. Yes of course. But then… but then when? When will it be done?”
Genless shrugged. “We are nearing the summit. The capstone will be finished before the month is out. We had planned to dispatch a messenger before the week ende-”
“Too soon!” said the warmaker. “Too soon! It can’t be done! Not now! There must be more!” Her legs shook as she slid off her horse, but anger kept her upright as she marched to the monument’s stone base, where the stone blocks stood as tall as houses. She craned back her neck and looked up until it hurt. “There has to be more! There has to be!”
“But lord, we have received no word of additions.”
The warmaker’s arm was old, but anger gave it speed. The little steel knife tasted blood for the first time in a decade from Genless’s chest, and the architect’s life slipped out of her with no more than a small sigh.
“There will be more!” shouted the warmaker at the architects, at her army, at the world. “There will be! I will see to it! There will be a, a tomb for this one, yes! A tomb for all of you! Yes, that’s it! Craft a sky-cage and seal your bones into it, and make it large enough to hold a cathedral!” She slipped, caught herself on the foundation, felt her bones shake, and she glared up at her monument as though it was pure poison. “There must be more, and there will be more! I will see to it! I will!” And the warmaker drew back her arm and drove her old, old fist into the foundation stone with force to shatter bones.

It was a very small thing, a tiny wave, a little ripple. But it travelled up, up, and up,
past the stones
past the treasure-filled Gorkoro
past the Grey-Clay army’s rest
past the still-crumbled spires of Jhe
past the tombs of the Six Kings
past the great globe holding the blood of the dead horses of Hynm
past the ever-lit brazier where the warmaker’s sons and daughters smouldered
and it reached at last the unfinished peak, where a single stone lay idle and loose, left by the hand of a tired slave.
It tipped.

Ten thousand tro below it landed, and it shattered at the feet of the warmaker.
She blinked in surprise, blood flowing into her eyes from a stray shard. She couldn’t see, but she could hear shouting. The horns and drums were sounding retreat. She hadn’t called for a retreat. She’d never called for a retreat. What was happening? She pawed at her eyes. What was happening?
And she never knew, for as the warmaker stood there, pawing at her eyes, her monument fell, and it fell with the slow, endless majesty of the enormous. The world could’ve ended and begun again in the time it took for the last stone to tear itself loose, but it was still impossible to outrun. It swallowed up the warmaker, the army, the little bluff with the architect’s tent, the architects themselves, and last of all itself. A valley had become a field of broken stone.

The empire fell too, as empires are fated to do. Kingdoms arose from its corpse, fell, rose again. History books mentioned it in passing, lied about it, corrected themselves, told new lies.
The monument itself went on unmentioned and unknown to all save a few. A small village of shepherds moved in not far away, but they were not builders, and their homes were fashioned from straw and clay. They never asked what the field of stones was made for, and in time rain, wind, and sun covered it with dirt, then grass, and the question became moot.
Sheep grazed on its surface. A boy watched them idly, pleasantly half-cooked in the mid-day sun. His eye halted, catching sight of something shining in the grass. A quick rummage brought it to the surface from the soil, but disappointment followed. Useless.
The warmaker’s blade was returned to the dirt, covered carefully with several large stones so that nobody might cut themselves on it. And the boy went home, and the world walked on without it.

Illeq was angry, and angry meant stomping, and stomping meant grumbling and wincing and twitching as your soft leather shoes hit something jagged or jabby with more force than necessary. This led to being angry, which lead to stomping, and thus the cycle continued. Stomp wince gripe ouch stomp whine kick swear and so on and so on and on until she walked into a stone that came up to near her knees and skinned herself quite badly on it.
“Pzessering faqqur!” she yelled, and she kicked it. This did not help, although it launched several of the smaller stones sitting atop it with considerable force into the tall grass of the mountain meadow.
“Ow,” she added.
“Ow,” agreed the grass.
“Who’s there?”
“Me,” said a small, wretched, and generally sad voice. “Me’s here. And a bump on my head, too. Someone is throwing rocks.”
“That’d be me,” said Illeq. “Sorry.”
“Oh, it’s alright,” said the voice. “It wasn’t much of a home anyways.” Its owner slipped out of the grass and stared up at Illeq from just about her ankles. It was a salamander, a little fiery serpent with legs not much less stubby than an otter’s and big red eyes that made her think of that wolf puppy that her brother Nabb was raising.
“I kicked over your home?” asked Illeq, appalled.
“No, no. Just a half-home. I was stacking these stones, you see. But I can’t burn bright enough to make them stick.” It made a little crackling noise like an ember snapping in its throat. “And I can’t burn bright enough to make hot-rock properly, and I can’t burn bright enough to make a mate happy, and everyone laughs at me. So that’s why I’m all out here, in the miserable wide-open sunny place. What about you?”
“I’m so angry I could spit stones,” said Illeq. “I want to knap.”
“You’re sleepy?”
“No – knap. Knap rocks. You hit rocks with rocks and you get really sharp rocks, the best rocks. It’s fun and it’s useful. But I asked my father to teach me and he told me ‘girls don’t knap.’”
“That’s bad luck,” said the salamander. “Could you ask someone else?”
“I did! I asked my uncle, and he said ‘girls don’t knap.’ And then I asked my mother to talk to them, and she said ‘girls don’t knap,’ and I asked my grandfather and he said ‘girls don’t knap,’ and I asked my brother-”
“And he said the same thing?”
“No. He started to say ‘girls-’ and then I kicked him and ran away up here.”
“A reasonable enough reaction,” said the salamander. “You should try spitting rocks at him instead.”
“I was joking,” said Illeq. “I can’t do that!” Then curiosity gave her a nudge. “You can do that?”
“Not properly,” said the salamander. “You need to burn bright and fast until they get all crackly and widgy. Then you twirl your tongue and jab your throat and cross your eyes and POW out comes a hot-rock that’ll burn the nose off anything that gets in your face. It’s a good salamander trick. And I can’t burn bright enough to make even a baby’s hot-rock.”
“Come on, come on,” said Illeq. “It can’t be that bad. I can’t spit rocks at all. Why don’t you show me how you do it? Here, here’s a rock.”
“That’s too big.”
“This one?”
“Too small.”
“How about this one?”
“Too jagged.”
Illeq sighed and rummaged. “This one?” she asked, holding up a slightly streaked oval the side of her fist.
“Perfect!”
The salamander’s tongue was boiling-hot and dry as a bone as it licked the stone from her palm in one smooth movement. Then its face jumped and hopped and twisted and PTTU out shot a little grey meteor, whistling through the grass like a kite.
“That’s a good shot,” admired Illeq.
There was a meaty thwack.
“That might have been a bad shot,” suggested the salamander.
Something howled from the other side of the meadow, from deep within a very, very deep chest.
“That was a terrible shot,” agreed Illeq. “Shall we run?”
“Let’s.”
And so they ran, and as Illeq stole a peak over her shoulder (the salamander had no shoulders, and as such was not afforded this luxury) she saw a full-grown mountain troll lurch up to its gangly, grumpy height, teeth already gnashing for meat.
“Up up up!” she told the salamander. “Follow me!”
And the salamander trusted her as they ran through a little grove – which the troll flattened – and over a stream – which the troll’s foot nearly dammed – and past some big stones – which the troll kicked out of the way – until they finally came to a crevice in the side of the mountain which they both popped into just as the troll’s big dirty fingers scraped at the very heels of their feet.
Illeq’s feet, really. The salamander did not have heels.
“It can’t reach us in here,” said Illeq. “I can barely fit in here. My brother barely can’t. And my father can’t at all. And this troll is much bigger than my father! Look, it can barely fit its fingers in!”
Two fingers, to be exact, and that was probably more than enough troll for anyone. They groped and stretched in the most nasty ways, relying on knuckles that shouldn’t exist in anything decent.
“Whether it can fit in or not, we’re doomed,” said the salamander. “It’ll just take a nap until we try and leave, and nothing wakes so easy as a play-napping troll. We’ll starve or be eaten, no ways without one. Oh for hot stones! Oh for a fire that burns bright!”
“There’s plenty of stones in here,” said Illeq firmly, “and we’ve got time for ages. If you can’t practice now, when can you? Here, catch!”
The salamander caught the stone on its tongue, chewed, twisted, spat, and the pebble *plinked* off the troll’s hairy finger.
“Woe,” said the salamander, despondently.
“Practice!” said Illeq. “Practice or nothing will work! That’s what I know about knapping – and I’d know more if some people would be reasonable and stop being terrible and worse than that like they always are – and I bet you the world and a wing it’s true for anything else worthwhile too. Practice, practice, practice, practice! Here’s another!”

By sundown (best as they could tell from the light seeping past the troll’s hairy knuckles) Illeq’s voice was raw from encouragement, the salamander’s tongue was sore from spitting, and the troll’s fingers were just as ugly and invincible as ever.
“Starve or be eaten,” sighed the salamander. “I hope I starve. I don’t want to be eaten.”
“I’ve been hungry before and I don’t like it,” said Illeq. “I hope I bite him on the way down. Bite off that big stupid nose of his.”
“Can we stop now?” asked the salamander. “I’ve got no fire and you’ve got no more stones and we’re both tired.”
“One more,” said Illeq. “One more. The other thing about practice is you’ve got to do it until you’re sick of it, then do just a little bit more. One more stone!”
“There’s no more stones!”
Illeq’s night-vision was pretty good by now, and she had to admit that the floor of her little nook was as clean as a whistle. But the walls at the back were bumpy and jagged as anything, and with a wrench and a heave and a haul she snapped off an irregular lump the size of four of her fingers. It was black and smudge-soft in her hands.
“Here. It’s funny, but it’s a rock. Catch!”
The salamander caught it. It chewed, twisted, chewed, twisted, crossed its eyes and uncrossed them, then made a funny noise.
“What’s wrong?” asked Illeq anxiously.
The salamander continued making its noise by way of answer; it sounded a bit like a tree falling over. Then it coiled up on its back legs, reared back, and belched.
When Illeq was done patting the smouldering remnants of her left sleeve off her arm and inventing new swearwords, she looked at what had happened to the stone wall at her side. It was crying – strange liquid tears were beading on its surface, simmering out of the cracked rock and hissing against the floor.
“Maybe you shouldn’t eat another one of those rocks,” said Illeq. The salamander made a funny burbling sound that could have been agreement or maybe not. One of its eyes wouldn’t stop spinning, the other had fixed itself due north and wouldn’t budge.
Illeq stared at the dripping wall. The heat rising from it was already making her eyes sting and her breath wheeze. In a minute she wouldn’t have time to starve to death.
Maybe it was time for strange ideas.
“Could you try spitting this instead?”
The salamander crawled to the wall, succeeding after the third try and a nudge from Illeq’s foot (there went half her shoe). It licked it carefully, like a newborn fawn discovering its mother’s teats for the first time, then plunged into its task with glee. Its cheeks soon bulged and steamed.
“Ready?” asked Illeq.
It nodded.
“Now, follow my finger, and when I flick it, you spit it. Right?”
Nod.
Illeq raised her voice. “Hey! Hey you! Hey troll! Hey sleepy-bones!”
The troll’s fingers, grown somnolent over the past hour, twitched.
“Hey big-nose! Hey old stone-fart! Wake up and come in here and try to eat us, huh? You too old and fat? Too stupid and fat? Or just too fat?”
There was a growl that put a bear’s to shame, then out came the fingers and down came the troll’s face; teeth, nose and all. Its little eyes glittered at them from behind its snout as it snarled.
“Nice to meet you too, ugly,” said Illeq. And her finger flicked.
The mouthful of molten heat the salamander held was almost too quick to see – a blur of red and white that cut across her eyes for an instant – but the impact was unmistakable. The troll screamed its lungs out into their faces, lurched backwards, then ran off howling, nose scalded down to a little red nub and dripping melted stone from its face like white-hot mucus.
Illeq scrambled out into the air and breathed deep, feeling the taste of rock and powder leave her. It had turned into a steam bath in there. The salamander joined her after a few minutes. It kept walking into the mountain by mistake.
“My,” it said after a time.
“Are you alright?”
“My. Me. Yes,” it decided. “I’ve never burned that bright before. I’m not sure anyone has.”
“Weird rocks,” said Illeq with the authority of her age. “That was a really weird rock you ate.” She looked up at the sky. “I’ve got to go home. Do you want to come?”
“Is it far?”
“Not so far. Maybe.” She looked at the salamander’s little legs, saw the wobble. “Can I carry you?”
“If you possibly could.”

There was a lot of fuss that evening, and come the next morning everyone came up to the meadow to see the mess and make sure that any of it was actually true.
(The salamander came too, wrapped around Illeq’s neck. Its legs were sore).
They found the troll-wreckage, they found the burnt grass, and dripped on the ground, cold and hard, they found strange shining stone, frozen in the shapes that it had puddled on the ground in, like ice.
And then they looked into Illeq’s little nook and they saw a whole wall of it. Frozen mid-bead, just waiting to boil up and flow.

Illeq never did learn how to knap her whole life. She was kept too busy running and inventing and making bit by bit the funny little collection of tools, odds-and-bobs, and basins that let her and the salamander melt and mould and shape and sharpen up the strange stones they’d called ‘metal.’
And she was always very busy, because whenever her brother, or her uncle, or her father came down to ask if they could help, they were always given an answer by the salamander, in between its lunches of coal.
“Boys don’t forge.”

Being busy was worth it, for that.

Doubter and Doer are walking along just talking about things, along the borders of a swift little stream. Well, Doer’s talking. Doubter’s just nodding her head. Like she does.
Then Doer sees something, points out her finger. “Hey, ya’see that?” she asks.
Doubter shrugs.
“Look! It’s some humans! Let’s fuck with ‘em.”
“Why?” asks Doubter. It’s one of her favourite questions.
“Because why not? They’re humans, it’s so easy it’d be a crime not to. Let’s seriously screw with their heads. Let’s mess ‘em up.”
“Eh, sounds like a lot of work,” says Doubter.
“A lot of work – a LOT of WORK? To get humans to do crazy shit? Sister of mine, I bet you I can drive these humans crazy just by doing one little thing to one little thing. Bet you.”
“How much?”
“Bet you big time. Bet you huge. Bet you plenty.”
Doubter scratches her nose. Agreeing flat out to something just isn’t how she works, but she’s bored of walking. Probably. “Eh….maybe? I guess so.”
“Great,” says Doer. “Now check this out.” And Doer reaches right out and whacks a good chunk of rock off one of the hills that borders the stream, kerplunk splosh it goes and it rolls down and on and on for days until at last it comes to a stop right in the middle.
“I don’t see anything happening,” says Doubter. “I’m not sure you’re winning this bet.”
“Give it a minute, impatient child,” says Doer. “Just a minute. Ya’see, sister of mine, this river has two banks, and each bank has a farm, and each farmer belongs to a country. Human stuff. Just you wait a minute.”
So they wait about six years and then one summer in the middle of a bad harvest for one farmer his kids are getting hooted at by the kids from the other side of the stream. Nothing new, nothing new.
What is new is that they’re standing on the rock to do it, and they’re throwing mudballs.
So kids being kids they fire right back and whish swing sling it’s a war on.
“Lookit that right there, lookit that good shit, huh?” says Doer. “Barely past toddlers and they’re thirsting for blood. Innocence of children my left nip – even little big-eyed baby seals’ve got mouths like a needle factory, don’t we know that, huh?”
“This doesn’t look like too big a deal,” says Doubter. “I’m not sure you’re winning this bet.”
“Oh yeh? Lookit right there, little Billy-Bob JoJo McFuckhead just skipped a pebble off’ve his neighbour’s eyelid. Oooh, bet that smarts. Now the dads get a turn.”
And they do, and it’s a proper row. Shouting, yelling, stomping, waving.
“Wah wah wah. This is MY rock this is MY rock. Wah wah wah, this is YOUR fault this is YOUR fault. Sweet tune right?”
“I guess.”
“See, it’s that first argument that’s the big one. This is what’s gonna pay off big, just you watch. Get bigger than king and country and apple pie and really dirty sex, just watch. Nothing humans love more than this. Watch it.”
So the two farmers whine and whine and their neighbours whine and whine and eventually surveyors come down but it’s one from each country and they start getting in spats too. Nasty stuff and someone almost goes home with calipers stuck up each nostril. The surveys are concluded under sullen silence and armed guard. Armed, bored guards. The kind that spend their time talking shit at each other and eyeing up each other’s killing tools to see whose is bigger.
“Awww yeah. You watching this? You watching you lose? I hope you’re watching you lose ‘cause I don’t want any take-backs on this.”
“Doesn’t look like such a big deal to me,” says Doubter. “I’m not sure you’re winning this bet.”
“Oh really? Look again, fishlips.”
So now both surveyors do what they were going to do and blame each other. This, says they, is clearly the rock of my fatherland, my people, my one-and-onlies. The other guy is clearly an asshole.
And after four years that’s how you get an army sitting in a cornfield staring at its mirror image forty yards off. Which is what’s going on right now.
“Wait for it.”
A man arises. His jaw is set with purpose. History weighs on him and he can tell.
“Wait for it…”
He strides, and there is will and intent in every footfall. At this moment he is fully conscious of himself and the universe around him. The water splashes under his feet.
“I’m not sure you’re-”
“SHADDUP AND WAIT FOR IT.”
He stands at the stone. He places one foot on the stone.
He makes eye contact with a man on the other side at random, a man who is all men in a crowd, who is exactly as important as he is at this moment. In that flash of an instant, they both understand one another deeper than any other ever will.

He chucks a pebble right at that man’s forehead.

“Awwwwwwwwwwwwwww yeeeeaaaahhhh,” sighs Doer as the scrimmage obscures the stream. “Bet’s over, you’re done like din-din. Fork it over. C’mon, fork it. Stick the tines in deep and hunch those shoulders and fill the plate.”
“If you say so,” said Doubter. “But I’m not sure you’ve won this bet.”
“After all that? After all that? Why you saying stupider things than usual, sister of mine?”
“Well,” says Doubter. She’s always a little uncomfortable giving suggestions. “Well. Y’know. Maybe…”
“Yeah?”
“…You could’ve used a smaller rock.”

The Gdappi Coast is older than eyes, older than sin, older than hearts. Cities line it, ruins encrust it, fishermen ply it up and down past the long, stone beaches, hauling the little nets for the big fat Tzab fish that move slowly through the warm currents. They drift for days on the current, the whole time without a single word leaving their lips – all communication is by hand and eyes. It’s bad luck to speak aloud on a fishing trip, though no-one remembers why. The one exception is when one of the big merchant ships bulls through the path of the fishers; then the dried and gummy lips unseal themselves to vent a torrent of abuse upon the likes of those who would so cruelly run them down.
The merchants don’t care, of course. They’ve got bigger problems of their own. The Gdappi Coast is old, and its trade routes not much younger, but age has not softened the sharp teeth that lie just below the waterline over so much of its length. Where there are no stones, there are reefs; where there are no reefs, there are stones. And as the years and decades and centuries roll by, one constant remains: the petitions and the complaints and the long, long pleas to the kings and queens of the Gdappi for lighthouses and lighthouse-keepers, for lonely men and women to tend farfires that could light the cruel barbs of the sea and steer them well away.
Most came to nothing. A few unlucky ones caught rulers in bad moods and were punished. A handful persuaded a ruler (begrudgingly), and a shoddy little tower of cheap cement and cracked stone would be erected, to stand for a little less than a half-century before a storm roiled up from the deep and spat upon it.
And one day, one petition in the court of Queen Ktami came to her in a capricious and sour mood, and received an unusual response.
“Half,” she said, from her throne of wrought iron and blackened wood. “I will pay for half of the costs of construction. The rest will be paid by the petitioners. And if the cost exceeds eight thousand ba, they will pay two-thirds the cost. And if this complaint comes again in my hearing, they will pay all the costs and all of their property and also their tongues, so that I do not have to hear it again.”
Obviously this did not sit well with the merchants, but equally obviously they did not protest. And so they grumbled and whinged their way around a map of the most dangerous shoals of Gdappi, the spots marked with dozens of little grey scratches of ship names and dates and cargos lost. And so they found, to their dismay if not their surprise, that the most dangerous places of all were remote and difficult to reach, and so construction would be expensive and lengthy.
“One-eighth of the cost shall be paid by all,” said the youngest merchant.
“One-eighth would bankrupt me,” said the poorest merchant. “I should pay less.”
“Your ships use this route more than any other,” said the cruelest merchant. “You should pay more.”
“And you use this route less than any other, and I suppose you’ll say to pay less then?” asked the sharpest merchant. “No, no, no. Enough arguing, brothers and sisters. I have a plan.”
And the sharpest merchant cast out her finger and pointed at a single lump on a single hump on a single point on the coast line, nestled amidst so many wrecks that it was hard to see at all.
“Here there is an old building. Next to it is an old, old hill. And atop that hill is an old, old, old stone that spirals like a corkscrew until it near to brushes the roof of the sky. We shall make this our lighthouse, and all of us shall pay one-eighth the cost of a small shack and a bright torch. Will this please?”
It did.
“Then it is done,” said the sharpest merchant. And shortly thereafter, it was.

The stone did not brush the roof of the sky. It did not even come near. But it looked like, and with a fire atop its brow it looked moreso still.
And so the keeper of the lighthouse was hired for little payment; a young man who could afford to lose a few years tending a fire and losing his mind. He was given a garden on the old, old hill and a crude house on top of the old, old, old stone, overlooking the old ruins. And next to the house was a squat bonfire, whose fuel stole most of his house’s living-space.
He was a lazy man, if still strong, and he put off his labor for some time. Instead he drank. Now and then he threw some on the fire to ‘liven it up,’ and for the most part the fire did not object. Soon the sun went down hard and his little light was all alone but for the stars and the wink of a full moon.
Then, in the deep old heart of the night, the lighthouse keeper heard a noise. It was this noise: thump.
The lighthouse-keeper cocked his head and listened. Was it just the rum in his blood?
Thump. Thump.
Where was it coming from? He wandered to the edge of the trail that led down from his stony perch to the ruins down the hill, and listened harder.
Thump, thump, thump. Thump-thump. Louder and nearer.
The lighthouse-keeper was a lazy man, but not a foolish man, and his mother had been no fool either. And her stories told him what to do when he heard things like that in the night: he ran into his house and barred the door with his own bed, and he did not come out ‘till morning, when he ran far, far, far away. Which was none too soon, since within the week the merchant-men came nosing about with angry questions and angrier clubs, demanding to know why their fire had gone out and taken a good ship to a cold place.

“Too lazy,” said the richest merchant.
“Too greedy,” said the meanest merchant.
“Vices of the young,” said the oldest merchant. “We should get someone with experience.”
And so a second keeper of the lighthouse was hired for a larger payment; an older woman with decades of lonely fires and lonelier vigils underneath her belt. On her very first day she sowed and weeded the garden, began a shack for the fuel, and dug a small hole for her pet she-neg, who was nearing deafness in her old age but still a happy companion with teeth that would shame a hippopotamus. By dusk’s end the fire was neatly stacked and kindled fit to put a gleam in the eye of the world that could be seen from heaven, and only then did she permit herself a small smile and a sip from the special bottle she carried everywhere.
She poured out a measure for the she-neg too. Only fair.
And just then, as she was providing fairness, she heard a noise like this: thump.
A frown filled her face, and she and her old neg listened.
Thump-thump. Thump.
Down from below, from beyond the cliff, from the shoals.
The lighthouse-keeper’s mother was long gone and little-known to her, so she’d had to make her own advice. But it was good advice, and right now it told her what to do when she heard things like that in the night: she took herself into the cabin and locked herself in and sat at the window, she-neg at her feet, eyes on the fire.
She sat there ‘till dawn, and she only blinked twice. The neg didn’t growl, but it shook a lot. And come dawn she walked out to her cold, dead fire and wrote a note with charcoal on its stones, then turned heel and left forever.
DON’T LIGHT IT AGAIN. LOOK TO THE SEA.

“Too cowardly,” said the cruelest merchant.
“Too old and slow,” said the youngest merchant.
“Still too young,” said the oldest merchant. “We should’ve hired older.”
“Hire nothing,” said the poorest merchant. “We’re already paying too much, and our help is unreliable and untrustworthy.”
“Then we will rely upon ourselves,” said the sharpest merchant. “Listen to me, brothers and sisters. I have a plan.”

The eight merchants trampled the garden in their clumsiness. They nearly knocked over the shack as they argued over who should complete it. They almost forgot to light the fire.
But in the end they did light it, and they even managed to keep it lit. And in the calm of the wide long night, alone with the flames, they managed to feel just a little bit proud.
“It is good,” said the meanest merchant.
“It is good,” agreed the youngest merchant.
“My rheumatism nags me and my back hurts,” said the oldest merchant. “But I agree that this is good.”
“Shush,” said the sharpest merchant. “Do you hear that?”
Thump.
Just a little bump on the edge of the eardrum.
“I don’t hear anything,” said the richest merchant. “You’re making that up.”
“I heard something,” said the poorest merchant.
Thump. Thump.
“There, you hear that?” said the cruelest merchant. “Where is it coming from?”
Thump, thump. Thump-thump.
“Down below,” said the sharpest merchant. “Thieves and trespassers, come to steal from us! Quick, quick, into the hut – gird your knives and sharpen your eyes!”
And so they piled into the house and waited as the sounds grew louder, and their eyes fixed like diamond drills on the mouth of the little path that led up the hill from the mainland, knife-hilts growing damp with sweat in their hands, their backs to the wide and empty sea. So fierce was their focus that they didn’t see what was happening until the fire winked out.
“Thieves!” shrieked the meanest merchant.
“Saboteurs!” hissed the cruelest merchant.
“Impediments to enterprise!” shouted the richest merchant.
“Wait,” said the sharpest merchant, who was nearest to the window and had half-thought she’d seen something quite wrong. “Perhaps we should-“
“AT THEM!” roared the oldest merchant, and the door was flung wide for an army of gold and shining steel knives, which stampeded out the door so quickly that the sharpest merchant was knocked aside and rolled underneath the bed.
She listened, and she heard the shouts and yells of her fellows.
She listened, and she heard the calls grow quieter.
And she listened and heard the screams, and she tucked herself into the very farthest corner of the room under the bed, and she did not sleep until the sun rose over a cold, cold, cold fire.
Only then did she search the hill-top, and she was not altogether surprised to see no signs of her fellows beyond excited footprints. Most of these had been erased; obliterated by strange tracks that still smelt of seawater and brine. They had too few toes, and might not have been made by something as straightforward as feet at all.
The sharpest merchant walked the long roads home alone, and counted herself lucky.
But she never did sleep well again without a light.

The Gdappi Coast is old, older than eyes, older than sin, older than hearts, older than humans. And some places on it were never made for their hands and feet to touch.

There are old stones and there are young stones, and the city of Tal made the former look like the latter times three. Empires have been born, grown, spawned, and crumpled like cheap hats in the time it takes Tal to settle another inch in its sun-warmed cradle of hills.
Less than a month ago, they found something new and old both. A book buried in a drawer in a desk in a storeroom behind a boarded-up basement wall in a tower that had been paved over and used as a street support longer ago than anyone would care to guess.
The book’s script is Thymatic Pyuun, a language deader than the realm of Demmer-Don-Dimmer. Its author is Slenn, equally so, and an expert at making others much the same.

Slenn the Infinite, Lord of a Hundred Cities, Slenn Eyetaker, Slenn the Talon, Slashbones, the Deathmaker that old mothers tell little children will eat them if they don’t listen. Clutched in the fingers of a hand that had set in motion the end of countless lives, a pen had carefully written out the events of a long life of butcher-work.
Naturally, the book was highly publishable, although perhaps few if any of its readers had quite anticipated the exact… tone… of its contents.

359.238 – Stuck feeding the birds again because father’s drunk a lake’s-worth and can’t be arsed to move. Old prick’s like to drink himself to death, but GARR forbid he make it easy on us and do it quickly.
359.238B – Gald is on my ass again. “Hey Slenn, c’mon, fuck birds, let’s go to town and get drunk.” “Gald, my father drinks enough for all three of us, screw that, I want to feed my damned birds.” “Aww c’mon maaaaaannnn c’mooooonnnn….” Finally told him I would just to shut him up, as soon as I was done with the Sperrows. Little buggers get pecky when they’re hungry.

359.239 – GARR why do I listen to him?! I killed a cop! We go out, HE gets drunk (spends all of BOTH our money on it to boot), I get to pull his dumb ass out of a fight, and then HE mouths off to a cop, and then I end up in a wrestling match with him, and when the knives come out look who’s standing. I don’t think self-defense covers this as an excuse, Gald! I don’t think it does at all!
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck me. I’m going to go home and get the birds. If I don’t take them with me, they’ll starve to death before old lakeliver thinks of doing anything about it.

359.240 – So it turns out I missed a couple of the Sperrows yesterday – probably because Gald was nagging me and jostled my arm. It turns out hungry Sperrows’s first choice of pecking target is eyeball. It turns out they’re highly protective of me, probably because I’m the only reason they’ve been fed for the past twelve years.
Anyways, now I’ve killed four cops. Had-killed-for-me. Whatever. I was hoping we could hide out in the hills until this blows over, but fat chance of that now. It’s me, the birds, and Gald. And Gald can carry the damned birdtower until the end of time. A decent start on paying me back for this.
359.240B – I guess we’ll make a break for Nep down south. The birds’ll like the warm, and there’ll be more for them to scrounge up. Which we’ll need because SOMEBODY got ‘tired’ and threw away four bags of feed to salve his poor little achy-wachy back. GARR protect him from me, really do, because if I have to lug the birdtower AND hunt for myself AND talk to myself I think I’ll go crazy and who’ll feed the Drowls then, huh? They’re so fat and stupid they’d be dead in days on their own. You want that on your conscience, GARR?
I hear somethi

360.002 – Well, that was a bit of a break. Long story short, I’m now a bandit chief. It turns out that’s the natural consequence of having the previous chief disembowled by angry Drowls when he’s trying to slit your throat. I always told Gald not to interrupt me when I’m feeding them, and I think ever since that practical example he’s actually paid a little more attention to me. Less to me than to the old chief’s daughter, mind you. Smart lady, and she keeps the others busy so they don’t bug me when I’m trying to feed the birds.
Feed the birds and think, mind you. I don’t think this is the sort of job where you just get to call it quits and leave with a happy goodbye. I figure if we pull in one good haul we can all split with the loot and live happy without worrying about anyone siccing the cops on us for cash.
I’ve had the Marlwings on long patrol for a while. They’ll let us know if anything worth having shows up. A lot better listeners nowadays too – like most of the birds. Getting rid of father’s bad influence might have helped.

360.138 – Busy, busy, busy, but at least now I can delegate a little. To summarize what’s been happening:
-We were late to a good fat caravan, but not too late to plunder its plunderers.
-Who we recruited.
-Who told us about another gang who got a good haul.
-Who led us to their fence.
-Who’s got us a mercenary contract.
-So now we’re working for Nep and we’re going out to hunt bandits in the jungle.
-Had to leave a lot of the birds behind. They’ve been breeding their little tails off. I’ve got three towers now, and a drumful of messenger-Geons for each sergeant. Learned that trick a few whiles ago, good for keeping in touch when you’re spread out.
360.138B – Oh, and I’m still in charge. I think the Drowl story might have had legs. I can thank Gald for that one, or I WOULD if he didn’t keep embellishing it. Nobody looks me in the eye anymore, just the toes. You ever tried talking to someone, eye-to-forehead? It’s uncomfortable.
GARR save me from friends, my enemies don’t need the help.

360.201 – We got back home and didn’t get paid. I’m suspecting that Nep might have hoped us and the bandits would sort each other out. I guess we did since we recruited most of them, but the prospect of paying an extra four-hundred men seems to have tightened up the city purses.
They don’t seem to have touched my birds yet. Time to start getting some whistles carved.

360.210 – Christ that was messy. The Drowls took out the sentries just fine, the Sperrows got peevish at being woken up past sundown and caused a proper ruckus, but still, there’s nothing quite like a proper city-sack once you’re past the front gate for going absolutely batshit. Less a sack and more a subdual, I guess – not as messy as some of the stories I’ve heard. Halla’s still the biggest boss besides me and GARR bless her she can make anybody listen. Except Gald, but I don’t expect miracles, just competence. Going to go see the Sovereign Council and the Laird right now. Demand tribute, extract vows, get some fealty, etc.
360.210B – Well now I’m the Laird of Nep I guess. I didn’t ENJOY having him disembowled by Drowls, but when the man lunges at me with a sword right when we’re negotiating terms what the hell am I supposed to do? I didn’t even want to do it – this Drowl thing is really getting old. Nice birds, friendly as puppies, but damnit people shake around me now when I’ve got them. And I suppose I’m stuck with them, since Halla says I need bodyguards and these are harder to bribe. The shoulder-perches are never coming off. My back aches at the thought of it.

365.987 – First time to sit down and really write for a while. I’d forgotten the last time I’d done this, and looking back, I think this might have gotten out of hand. I’m the Laird of Nep, Count of Mezto, and Duke of Cammerad (it turns out you usually have to deal with a city-state’s neighbours right after you deal with the city-state), and I’m currently locked in a joint struggle against Tresh with Bizto. Whom I’m going to have to backstab later before they stab me. No details, no details, I’ve gone mad with details. I’ll just write down the plain important bits.
-Sperrows absolutely wreck archers as far as skirmisher’s weapons goes, and are very hard to hit when properly trained.
-Marlwings are practically invisible in a night sky, and they can see farther at night than a man can at day. And they’re smart enough to learn signals. I like those birds.
-A Nawk colliding with a horse’s skull wins, provided it hits feet-first.
-A small drum of messenger-Geons for a sergeant, and a heavy cask of Sperrows for a birder. One birder per squad minimum. I miss knowing all my birds by name, but it’s been a long while since that was true.
-Drowls: six. Assassins: a single nasty scrape along my left ribs.
365.987B – Gald still won’t listen to me. GARR, how’d I think having a kid would ever make him grow up? It just gives him another thing to ignore me for. At least he pays more attention to Halla now.

366.486 – Why can’t he pay more attention to Halla? ‘Be quiet,’ we told him. ‘Be calm,’ we told him. ‘Don’t do anything goddamned crazy and weird,’ we told him. Well look what he went and did. Now we have to fight half of Tresh AND Bizto, which has carefully occupied that half of Tresh. All he had to do was smile and nod and look wise and instead he goes “HE’S LYING, LOOK OUT!” and that gives the ambassador an excuse to pull out the knife and now I’m one Drowl short and there’s nothing for it but war.
366.486B – His suggestion of letting my surviving Drowl brood inside the ambassador’s ribcage, however, was inspired.

367.371 – A decisive win at Treshledown. The idiot thought he could flank me at night. Me. Me with the Marlwings. Even though he must’ve had at least six spies in my camp who would’ve told him about them, like I was planning for them to do.
Sometimes this all seems far too easy.

367.372 – Tresh’s Royal Armourer must’ve seen the way the wind was blowing; he already had twelve suits of armour ready to go as tribute when we knocked the palace doors down. Armour for birds, mind you. You know, the things that have to fly. Still, his heart was in the right place, so I guess I’ll do him a solid and leave it there. Besides, his nose makes little Masha giggle.

368.843 – Gald’s dead.
I don’t know what to say. To Halla or Masha.
368.843B – Scratch that, he was just stuck under a dead horse and then he took a nap because he was tired and it was warm. Because.
GARR save him. Mostly from Halla. But don’t save him too much.

372.673 – Bizto, Bizto, Bizto. I’m not sure what your leaders were thinking.
“Here is a valley,” they said. “Surrounded by hills,” they said. “Let’s put our city right at the bottom, surrounded by hills, so Slenn can someday stick siege catapults up in them and chuck enough mortar to build an entirely new city at us until our walls are dust and gravel.”
Well, I’m not going to complain. I’ll marvel, but I won’t complain.
Also, Masha was playing with some of my Nawks today (damned things are still too finicky for anyone but me to rear them; makes breeding more a pain) trying to dress them in that silly armour from ages ago. Gave me an idea.

372.675 – Two new things learned: a Nawk with steel gauntlets on its talons can impact a steel helmet at full force without harm to itself, and an army with a decapitated general is as much use as you’d expect.
I’m out of enemies for now, finally. Maybe I can retire for five minutes with a nice prince who doesn’t talk too much and actually pays attention to me when I tell him not to pet my Drowls. Hell of a way to lose a finger, Gald.
372.675B – The Biztahn counsellor just told me that they were getting their west front pushed in by Nerontingsahn when I came in through their front door. Some days this just doesn’t seem worth it.

372.678 –Gald tells me they’re rebuilding the city around my base camp. Says they’re calling it ‘Talon’ in honor of me. What a cheesy suck-up of a name. GARR why do I listen to him?

One sunny afternoon, a priest came to Dan Cesco.
He walked up the roaming turnpike, passed between the twinned monuments, and stood a while in the peaceful shade of a shrine to Mil, contemplating the sun through its elegantly branch-woven roof. When the day drew longer, he paced down the market of the town, and admired greatly the airy, light buildings that the vendors roared and boasted from – they were hardly there at all, yet no wind and no rain could possibly make it past the cunning shapes of their many-angled eaves. And finally, as the evening began to draw down night’s curtains, he paced past the homes at the skirt-end of the town, the old ones, and found himself at a building that was neither old nor young but possessed the best qualities of both: a timeless carewornness.
He knocked, and two men answered.
“Are you the Brothers Meer?” he asked.
“BROTHER Meer,” said the elder. “As for the other, he may have been adopted.”
“Brother Meer indeed,” answered the younger. “I believe my father disowned him on his deathbed, but this lout sabotaged the will afore I saw it.”
“Peace, peace,” soothed the priest. “I have come with a task for you. I heard that you were the greatest of all architects in this land, and as I walked the road to your homes I saw proof of this. A market with no walls that no weather could touch, a shrine knit from trees that served stronger than any stones, and a house that could have been built a thousand years ago, yesterday.”
“Father’s work,” sighed the elder.
“Some of his best,” agreed the younger.
“I have seen these proofs, and I would ask you to undertake a grand labor. I have found a new godlette, hiding under a wide leaf in a chance puddle in a glade deep in a wood I shall not name. If this godlette is to feast on prayer and grow fat and proud enough to aid us, it shall need a place to call home, that its worship may throng.”
“A church,” said the elder. “Easy.”
“A church,” said the younger. “Easy… for me.”
“Precisely,” said the priest. “I would entrust no others with this task. The land is purchased, surveyed by a man as sound of eye as he is holy. I leave the rest to you, Brothers Meer.”
“When you witness my creation,” vowed the elder, “you’ll be shocked like a toad on a stump in a storm.”
“I will outdo this laggard, just you see,” swore the younger, “though he’ll say anything to tell you otherwise.”

On the first day, the brothers gathered in the tiny, cramped leather tent that the architect’s table was cradled within, and drew up their plans on old vellum sheets. Each brother took his own.
“A great strength is what is required here,” said the elder. “A godlette will never grow mighty without inspiration.”
“A soaring height is far more important,” scoffed the younger. “A godlette given naught but bulk and mortar will grow nowhere but horizontally. Let his appetite for beauty be sated, and I tell you that he will become a god to remember!”
“Needling pissant,” fumed the elder. “Go back to the cradle and smother yourself.”
“Blundering clodhead,” hissed the younger. “Do the world a favor; strike your face, and do not stop.”
So the brothers sat at opposite ends of the tent and drew and snipped and cast their spells, and when the time came for the men to labour at the site they stood at opposite ends of that too, calling out orders that clashed so badly that no man could heed them both, and instead gave up entirely and sided with one or the other. And when the day was done, the main body of the church lay complete. The front hall was a towering monument of solid granite, the chapel a spiralling beauty of limestone. They were each lovely, but they clashed greater than two bulls in a half-size paddock.

“Not quite what I’d had in mind when I hired you,” said the priest as politely as he could.
“I had it well in hand,” informed the elder in a wounded tone, “before this lump stuck his great gummy fingers in everything.”
“The wisest of the workers heeded my words above the lout’s,” sighed the younger, “but alas, some of the more impressionable youths fell under his spell of deceit. I pray, do not punish them. It is but innocent inexperience rather than malice that would allow any man to listen to my brother.”
“Upstart serpent!”
“Fool twice!”
“Peace, peace, peace,” shushed the priest. “For shame, to squabble on ground so newly holy! Now, do to the two of you really disagree so firmly?”
“Utterly,” said the elder.
“Without a single doubt,” said the younger.
“So be it,” said the priest. “But the bell-tower must be built and the bell housed and rung before your contract is fulfilled and the godlette may move in to grown old and happy. You must cooperate! Look here, look at what your callous clashes have created! Why not both work together on the tower? Surely you wish to avoid disharmony in your work, if not in your words?”
“It could use some work,” admitted the elder. “But I will kill the idiot if he touches my brushes.”
“Very well,” said the younger, “and it is worth recording that I would rather choke myself than use the twit’s substandard tools.”
So the second day the Brothers Meer walked to the site, and they drew as one, on the same sheet.
“It needs more height here,” said the elder.
“Rubbish, it needs more light here,” said the younger.
“Soar, soar, soar until it gets to the tallest steeple of the building?” asked the elder incredulously. “You are madder than a hare in March, May, and August all at once.”
“And YOU are madder than a mosquito in any season whatsoever, if you think to give size without contrast. It will be darker than a pit in there without proper windows.”
“Those aren’t windows, they’re canyons! Structural weaknesses abound!”
“Your foolishness abounds!”
“Yours!”
And they snipped and fought and on at least two occasions they wrestled for the brush (with biting) but at last they pulled through and the workers began to haul the bricks and mortar as they cast their spells and yelled their orders.
“No, not THAT mix!” called the elder. “Use the grey fine crisp mortar!”
“No no no no,” screamed the younger. “Use the heavy thick brow mortar!”
“The dark bricks from Bormbarr Quarry!”
“The light bricks from Teeland!”
“Left more!”
“Right more!”
“NO!”
“YES!”
By the day’s end the belltower was complete and all the men had crossed eyes, except for the brothers, who were being held back from each other by the two largest of the stone-haulers. The belltower itself, alas, looked as piecemeal as a puzzle put together by an infant; its pieces all at odds with their neighbours and often themselves. It was a kaleidoscope of a building.

“This is his fault!” roared the elder brother.
“His!” shrieked the younger.
“Peace, peace, peace, PEACE!” shouted the priest, and so loud was his voice that dust shook from the roof of the architect’s tent and the brothers were cowed in spite of their spite. “Is there no end to your turbulence?! The belltower is a patchwork folly at your hands! The church greater is bifurcated! Surely you know of the poor influence this can be on an unguided godlette’s mind? Surely you know that your pettiness has harmed more than you can know? All our hopes rest in the bell now; the godlette will arrive the very next morn and there is no time to mend the sorrows of your squabbles. This must be perfect, and since the two of you have proven as soluble as water and oil, there will be two separate plans. Only one shall be used, chosen by myself, for though I am no architect, my father was a great blacksmith. Now work – and work quickly!”
He left them there, the two of them, and they glared at one another with venom no serpent could brew.
“When my bell rings,” swore the elder, as he dipped his pen, “it will sound sweeter than a thousand doves.”
“When my bells ring,” said the younger, sliding a fresh sheet of vellum across his lap-bench, “I will laugh until you strike yourself stone deaf to escape them.”
“Ant,” mused the elder, beginning his work with a vicious stroke.
“Flea,” pondered the younger, jamming pencils behind his ears and between his teeth.
They sketched the morn over with the speed of demons, and as they wandered to the forge where the priest would meet them, they eyed each other’s plans.
“Bells? BELLS? This is a BELLtower, not a BELLStower,” sneered the elder. “Your tinny little things will lead the godlette astray into thinking it is a leader of posies rather than men.”
“You grasp grammar as readily as you grasp your genitals,” spat the younger. “And your bellmaking skill is every bit as poor – a single great clanger, a loudmouthed yawper! Great minds think alike, but fat minds design themselves! Why don’t you name the bell after yourself, too?”
“At least I designed a bell,” said the elder. “And you know it is your better. You always sneer this loud when you are wrong, brother.”
“And you always enrobe yourself in smugness when you are out of arguments, brother.”
“And it is deserved,” agreed the elder. “My bell is the greater. You know it. I know it. The priest will soon know it. And brother, if father were here, you know he would say so.”
The younger brother went white at the lips. “You shouldn’t say that,” he whispered.
“Then silence me, or stick your fingers in your ears,” retorted the elder. But he’d stepped too far, and as he turned his back, the younger leapt atop him, and with a pencil, slit his throat open into the boiling cauldrons of metal that would be used for bellmaking.
“Here,” he said as he cut out his brother’s tongue. “Let no-one say that I let you do nothing.” And he cast it into the molten vats, and spat after it, and threw the body in to keep it company. Last of all, for good measure, he cast in his brother’s plans, and the great bell’s patterns flared prettily and were gone forever.
Soon the priest was there, and surprised he was to see but one architect. “Where is your brother?” he asked.
“Gone, gone, and gone for good, if I’m any judge of the blowhard’s pride,” said the younger. “My design wounded him sore, and he left from shame – gone from our home at last! Now, look at this, and look at art!”
The priest cast his eyes over the scribblings. “These are beautiful work,” he said. “Call the men!”
And so the third day went by, and if started late, it moved fast. The men were almost done and they knew it, and more importantly they were not being used as checker-pieces by competing managers. The sun was only just touching the trees when the rope was attached to the bells; a beautiful set of fraternal twins that shone with soft red light underneath the sunset.
“They are the finest I have ever seen,” said the priest, “and I have walked this world for half a century and more. But a bell is its voice, and its voice is all. Pray, would you care to be the first to ring?”
“I would relish it,” said the younger, “and may my brother hear it wherever he scurries now, and know his better!”
And he eagerly reached up to the rope and tugged it once, twice, thrice, and the bells burst into a song so beautiful that tears nearly came to the priest’s eyes. But the younger brother’s face remained as dry as a desert bone, though he smiled as he watched the bells swing and clang.
Then the sounds changed, and the smile began to drain from his face.
“Killed-me, killed-me, killed-me, killed-me,” mourned the bells in tongues of brass and velvet.
“Hold, what was that?” asked the priest. “Surely even your skill, great as it was, did not give these bells human voices?”
“I hear nothing,” said the younger. “It has been a long day – perhaps your mind plays tricks?”
“Not since I was a boy,” said the priest. “Listen close; ring it again.”
The younger reached up again – with less zeal this time – and hauled on the rope again. And the bells swayed in their cradles, calling out a new song in their long sad voices.
“He-stabbed-me, he-stabbed-me, he-stabbed-me, he-stabbed-me.”
“Your bells sing with human voice,” said the priest. “But tell me, do they tell the truth as well?”
“This is some devilry of my brother,” quavered the younger brother. “He sabotaged my plans before he left! This is no working of mine!”
“Perhaps,” said the priest. “But I would hear what they have to say. Ring again.”
Slowly, unsteadily, with the shaking hands of an old man, the younger hauled at the rope. And for a third time the bells tolled.
“Check-the-clapper, check-the-clapper, check-the-clapper, check-the-clapper.”
The priest walked up the spiralling steps of the belltower and looked. And there, embedded tightly in the clapper’s surface of the larger of the two bells, was the elder brother’s tongue.

The younger brother was hanged at midnight, and buried before one o’clock. It is bad luck for such things to come to the eye of an impressionable godlette, even in cold justice.
And that was the end of the Brothers Meer – and the beginning of the end for more than their bodies. Their church stood for no more than a decade before it was a ruin; the stones seemed to tear themselves apart at the seams, as if brick could not bear to stack atop brick.
The new church was designed by the priest, who’d gone grey at the edges, and was smaller. The tower did not soar as readily. The bells were quieter.
But it was peaceful there, and the god that came from it was a peaceful one. And that was all that was required.

The old man walked into the smithy.
It was a short sentence, but one that took a lot of background work to make it happen: managing his knees alone these days took at least half of Araim’s concentration. He’d given up on his hips a decade ago.
He looked at the blacksmith, saw that grin, and felt the old, familiar bile bubble up in his gut. Screw them. It didn’t matter.
“Nails?” asked the blacksmith as he opened his mouth.
Araim nodded his head. See if he’d give the little bastard the satisfaction of a clean reply, if he was going to be that way today.
“Two buckets?”
A second nod.
“Right. Fork it over.”
Nod. Money. Nod.
“Pleasure doing business.”
Nod.
Araim took a bucket in each hand, straightened up as much as he could (about an 82-degree angle, as far as his curiosity and tools combined had told him a few years ago), and headed for the door. Wonderful.
“Congratulations.”
Araim paused, one foot over the doorstep.
“That’s your thousandth bucket right there,” said the blacksmith. “I looked over da’s receipts, double-checked and everything.” He smiled; the big, beaming happy smile of a man who loves his job and life in general. “Look, they’re free from now on, eh? Only fair.”
Araim didn’t know what to say. He tried nodding again.
“One question, though…”
oh no here it came again.
“…you really think you’ll ever need it?”
Araim nodded one last time because it was either that or throw the bucket at the boy’s face. Then he walked up the mountain with legs like hairy ramrods and a spine stiffened by pure fury.

Araim was four years old, and riding six feet off the ground on his father’s shoulders. He’d been crying two minutes ago, but the wind in his face and the sudden surge of height had thrown all that away into the rusty old past, something that didn’t matter anymore. He could see over people’s heads. He could see through windows. He could see all the main street of the town from here, from the road’s birth at the first foothill to the Squeezer, where the valley walls shrunk down together and opened up to the banks of the big wide Serenna river, idling along past them all with no cares and no worries.
“Stupid,” said Araim’s father. His name was Jerub, though the boy wouldn’t know that for almost a decade yet. What else was he but his father? “Stupid, stupid, stupid. You know why that’s stupid, boy?”
“N-“
“I’ll tell you why it’s stupid. Look down there – see? See where the river’s banks slope?”
“Y-“
“Oh, it looks steep enough, doesn’t it? Well maybe the first five feet, sure. But after that it barely rises another two ‘till you’re halfway to the road. One day there’s going to be a flood – a real flood, not this penny-dropping pissflow we get every spring – and then we’re going to watch a lot of damned fools drowning, you can bet your dinner on it. You hungry?”
“Ye-“
“Right. Time to go in.”

Araim came home just as the sun was starting to dip low in the cloud-bruised sky, his feet touching the closest thing to level ground since he’d left the village behind.
They looked so small from up here on the mountain. They were all so small. He’d held up his hands as a child, erased the lot of them with one palm held at the right angle. But sooner or later his arms would get tired, and the hand would waver and drop, and there they were again. Behold Araim, he taketh away, but he also returneth.
God his knees must be hurting if he was willing to distract himself with those memories. There were better ways to keep himself occupied. It was late in the day, this was really more time for dinner than for work, but it had to be done and it might as well be done now.
He picked up the buckets of nails – one in each hand again, the handles cutting into the grooves that had etched themselves into his palms over the years and years – and trudged out back.
Araim’s father had chosen his land carefully. The ground was rocky, but at least here it was flat, and there was some semblance of soil that was clinging grimly to the little plateau that hung off the mountain’s sides like a piglet from a sow. Enough to grow a few measly crops to feed a family of eleven, plus the odd wandering cousin that came back from strange parts with a funny accent and funny gifts.
Nowadays it fed one: Araim. But that was all right. He’d put the rest of the space to right good use.

Araim was eight years old, and sitting on a dusty bench in a dusty house as his grandmother read to him and his four elder sisters and his five elder brothers.
“…and the turtle,” his grandmother said, her voice as droning as a fat bumblebee, “who was the largest and widest and best of swimmers, carried up the whole of the good people on his back. And they floated there for a year and three days.”
“Did the turtle get tired?” asked Araim’s brother Isak.
“No,” said grandmother.
“How did the turtle get that big?” asked Araim’s sister Klass. “All our turtles are tiny. I’ve caught loads of turtles and they’re all-“
“It was the first turtle,” said grandmother. “He was the biggest.”
“What happened to all the other people?” asked Araim.
His grandmother looked at him, and it was Araim’s bad luck to be the third question in as many seconds, because he got the full brunt of a tired old glare, the kind that hardens with age into something like a diamond and cuts like a dull knife.
“They were the loafers, the schemers, the witless and the wretches and the murderers and the thieves,” she said, and each word made him shrink a little more. “While the good people escaped on Turtle’s back and lived together, they fought each other, and they drowned. You understand that?”
Araim nodded.
“Good. No more questions.”

Araim’s back wasn’t feeling any better once he’d scaled the fourth of his ladders, but it wasn’t feeling any worse either. It had passed through sensations altogether and entered a strange realm where the only thing that existed was tingling numbness that seemed to want to spread from your vertebrae through to your brain and blot out vision forever.
He ignored it. The view was worth it from the upper bridge, even if he couldn’t explain it. All the way up a mountain, you wouldn’t think the extra forty foot of height you saw from the deck would make a difference. But it did, and he could never tell why. From this height the clouds of far away looked like plums, curdled by sunset and by guts full of thunder both. Maybe the rain would come soon, give him a shower as he worked, soak him down so far his bones would cool and his heart would slow back to its normal crawling pump.
Well, pleasure later. He’d come up here to at least pretend to do business.
Araim fumbled one-handed and took out his hammer from his belt, where it always hung. The nails were new, but this was an old tool: it had been old when his father kept it tucked away with his saws and mallets. It had been dusty then, and cobwebbed. But half a century had gone by without it sitting idle for more than a day, usually when Araim had to make supply runs into town and the journey back took more wind out of his sails than he’d supposed.
Well, today he’d got a spring in his step. And dinner could wait.
Araim knelt down, took a plank in one hand and the hammer in the other. Nails protruding from his mouth, he began to lay down another piece of his ship.

Araim was sixteen years old, and burying his father.
It was hard. Real hard. Much harder than burying his mother had been. For one thing, there had been two of them to do the job. Even if his father had stopped every few minutes to walk off and cry where Araim couldn’t see him.
But now it was just Araim. Just Araim the baby, the little one who’d never grown up and moved out. Never had a chance to grow up and move out, never had the time to go down to the village and make friends and fall in love. Just Araim, all by himself, taking care of an old man whose shoulders he used to ride.
He paused with a shovelful of dirt – the last? Second last? Did it matter? – and looked down in the evening cool, sweat prickling on his shoulders. The last of the little lights in town were just twinkling out. Early nights, early quiet. Peaceful. Tomorrow morning he’d make the long, hot trudge down there and let them know, and they would all be sad, and maybe they’d even come back up to pay their respects at the grave he’d dug.
And that, more or less, was when he knew what he was going to do. His eyes alit on the river some seconds later, and that was when the word ‘boat’ first crossed his brain, but it had all already been decided.

The lights were going out.
That’s what drew Araim’s eye from his carpentry, that and that alone. It was too early for bed even for townfolk; this was suppertime, dinnertime. There was still daylight left, even if it was fading. Something was going on. People were in the streets now, no, people were running through the streets. Something was moving behind them, pouring through the Squeezer, shining like red fire in the sunset’s death.
Water from the Serenna, bubbling up and over earth and onto cobble and stone, churning and eating at itself with fury. If he squinted hard enough, he could almost see the flecks of black on the waves that could’ve been trees tossed aside in the fury of the storm-fed flood.
Araim stared. Then Araim snorted. Then Araim laughed and laughed and laughed, almost choking on his tongue as his head shook and his knees knocked and his hammer flew from his wide-spread fingers, arms waving as he danced and stomped and roared with glee atop the bridge atop his ship atop the mountain so high, high above the flood. He’d waited and worked and waited and here it was, here it finally was!
Now he just had to move fast enough.
Packing up the house was done in seconds. It was finally happening. The hold was already full. The ladders – those long, rickety ladders that were the bane of his back – were scampered up and down in seconds by a body filled with a glee that cut its years in half and more. It was finally happening.
It was finally happening!
Everything was done. He’d gotten it all packed. He’d even almost finished the bridge – just a few planks left out of place in the cabin floor. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. He had time now, he did; he could wait and watch and stare as the lights winked out one by one until the water lapped at the keel and he took float.
The turtle had made the new land after a year and three days, he recalled. Perhaps he’d do that too. Or maybe he’d just sail and watch the fishes flow by. Who knew? He had time. He had time.
But still… there was no reason not to do this right. It was just three floorboards. He could bend his knee once more.
Three floorboards, twelve nails. Four nails for each board, two nails for each end, one nail for each corner. Bang. Bang. Bang and bang and bang and bang twice over, and the last nail of the last bucket was gone.
Finished. It was finally happening.
Araim picked up the nail bucket, felt the weight in his hands. It would never be heavier than this again. He’d never need nails again. He’d never get those free nails or hear those stupid questions ever again.
He looked out the window, down at all the lights. There weren’t as many now as there’d been a few minutes ago.
Just Araim, all by himself. Araim the ancient, on the water, with an empty bucket that held the weight of a world in it that would drag him down like an anchor.
He ought to just chuck it overboard.
It was finally happening.

How much the ship weighed, Araim couldn’t have told anyone. It was too big to fit on any scale, and the calculations on its size and mass had been done fifty years ago by a different person.
But all the same, it didn’t matter. All you had to do was push just hard enough in just the right spot.
And as Araim felt the dirt and stone begin to slide by under the keel, as he laid his course and set his sights on the flood, as the wind rose into his face and the world shrank small beneath him, he felt the last seventy-five years fall away into the past.

Araim was seventy-nine years old, and he was being buried.
It was hard going, hard soil up where he’d made his plot. But there were many people to do the job – forty grand-nieces and thirty-six grand-nephews and two dozen nephews and nieces and even the four brothers and sisters who were still around. Many hands didn’t make the work light, but they sure as hell broke dirt fast.
Ress the littlest one was free of her father’s hand for a time – a blacksmith’s muscles were in fair demand right then – and she was using it to explore. The world was so small from here, everything she’d ever seen was so small. The village was a half-drowned ant, drying fitfully in the mid-day sun; the river a shining snake, sulking resentfully on the other side of its bank. Even the giant boat, lodged tight in the Squeezer like the world’s biggest cork, was a blurred beetle of a thing. If she held up her hand just right, her palm covered it, and it was gone.
But not really. The village was still there, wasn’t it?

It was a nice day for Sukie, right from the moment she woke up and saw the sun just blushing over a warm sky, to the very second she gripped her net with both hands and felt the good, heaving weight of a swarm of little fat wrigglers, that wonderful burn against your shoulders that came from heaving in enough food to keep you going for weeks and knowing that there was still more to be had.
They were little domeheads, the stubby-armed bodies resembling mushrooms with angry wills of their own, but out of water the fury and spite drained away and left them as sad little sacks, limp and forlorn. But they still packed a nasty bite on their skin, in their slime, and Sukie felt glad for her woven-grass gloves as she emptied the net into the bin at the belly of the boat.
One net. Two nets. Three nets. Oh, this was fine, this would keep everyone happy as they waited for the lot to dry out and stop stinging. The bin was crammed near-brimful, and greed was so enveloping at this point that it was impossible for it not to be good. The sea was smooth and friendly, the trip to shore was not so long, there was no danger and there was no rush.
Why not one more? Just one more?
So Sukie set her net, let it drift, let it idle, waited for those dozens of little squishy bodies to pack into it, soft and silent as ghosts. Not even a full net, really. Just a bit would do. A little bit. She’d yank it up in a moment. And it was just Sukie’s good fortune that she tensed up to lift when she did, because an instant later something slammed into her little net with what felt like a punch in the gut.
“Woof!” said Sukie – all instinct and vowels – and she almost let go. But this was a good net, a net made of the old plastic, a net that time and tide and however many years had left unbroken. Its form had been painstakingly crafted by Sukie’s grandpa from hundreds of little loops he’d found buried near the bottom of a Dump by chance, all arranged in little packs of two-by-three, which he’d stitched together with homemade twine, hope, and the best knots he could possibly imagine. It had been lovingly maintained by all three generations ever since; each winter, the knots retied, the weak links removed, the net shrunk by necessity.
It had been bigger, once, but it was still loved. And Sukie would rather lose her limb than her grandpa’s net.
“Wup!” she shouted – accent on UP, for up! – and hauled as hard as she could, a little thing in the back of her mind wondering what on earth had she caught on, what on earth had she done? The water here was deep, so deep you’d drown trying to find bottom; surely she couldn’t have caught on anything?
And as Sukie’s net breached the surface, she saw that she’d caught on nothing. Rather, she’d caught a monster. She didn’t even have time to scream before it and the net landed on her chest (a shockingly light monster, its snaring had been all out of proportion to its weight) and she was eye to eye with it.
Eyes. Good lord and leavings, those eyes! Those terrible, wide eyes!
“GERROFF!” she shrieked, and shoved, and down went the monster and the net, straight safe into the bin with her catch, which she slammed the rust-lid on so hard that she half thought the boat’s bottom might fall out. Then she heard the thump and thud, and sat on it for good measure.
What in all Earth’s big blue seas had she just seen, what was slapping and kicking and knocking on her cargo lid right at this second? Something she’d never imagined, that’s for sure. No bluey. No roundtop. No domehead. It was small and thick and it had more energy than a toddle, although the shrinking echoes from under her rear seemed to show that being trapped in a bin full of domehead stings was taking its toll.
What was she supposed to do with this? What if it was dangerous? Well, not THAT dangerous – it hadn’t even left tentacles on her shirt, and her gloves were clean of slime from where they’d brushed its body.
She sniffed them. Strange smell though. Nothing quite like it. Maybe Emma would know. She knew things, when she was awake. Maybe she could share them if she promised her an extra bag or two of food. Yeah. That was a good plan. Show the weird thing to Emma, ask her about it. That way what we do with it is her problem, unless she wants to admit she doesn’t know anything, and how likely is THAT?
Sukie cocked her head and listened. Dead silent.
Yeah, domehead stings, that was it. No sound now.

The monster was quiet now, resting in an antique bucket that still possessed fully half of its formerly impressive height, breathing seawater. It hardly moved at all; if it weren’t for the pulsing of its odd gill-like sides she’d have thought it dead. You certainly couldn’t tell from its eyes, those horrible human-like eyes. They wouldn’t blink, stare as she might. Did it even have eyelids?
Best not to think on it.
It was still a nice day, monster in a bucket or no. The sky was clear, empty for once of the long, dreary storms of summer, the waves were calm and tame underneath it and blue as a baby’s eyes. Sukie paused in her paddling every now and then to give her back a rest and to look at the water. Sunlight smiled back at her from below, reflected in glittering sparkles off thousands of tiny plastic shards as a marine blizzard slid by underneath her keel. They seemed to chase her home; the current was her friend, bearing her and all those miniature specks miles in minutes.
She wondered why people had filled the water with them, once upon a time. They must’ve been awfully important, for them to make so many.
“Suuuuukieeeeeee!” a call came from the shore. Tiny figures were dancing on the dock, squawking and waving their arms in the air. A rock was thrown. “Row faster, slowboat! Row row row!”
Sukie paused in her rowing to make a rude gesture and had it copied back at her tenfold. She smiled; it was always nice to teach the younger generation something. “G’wan, help or scrammit!” she called merrily to her audience of cousins. “Helpers get domeheads, scrammers get smacks! Pick it now and get a head start!”
Nobody wanted to be the first to run, everybody wanted to be the first to dip their bag. The mob of hecklers became the crew of dockworkers; the concrete slabs of the dock were aflow with helpers grasping for ropes, fighting over knots, pushing and shoving to prevent the old rust of the boat from grinding itself into red dust against its moorings.
Finally, against all odds and rules of nature, Sukie was ashore with her cargo, which was busily being hauled uphill to the shelters in family-sized bags. The children were careless – barely half a glove between them as they manhandled patchwork sacks of domeheads twice their size – but they were sure they were invincible, and were about due for another rude disabusal of that soon. How soon they’d forgotten what happened to Timm. Well, his arm hadn’t come off after all. Perhaps that was all they needed.
Sukie was travelling light by contrast and by choice; just a single sack of domeheads was hers, clasped one-handed on her shoulder. But at her side came the bucket with its monstrous cargo, and between the two of them she was half-put to a foul mood by the time her footsteps took her all the way up to the edge of the shelter, way up high, under the farthest nook of stone where old, old Emma kept out of the way with her daughter’s daughter.
“’Hoy Sukie-sue,” said the descendant in question, and Sukie swallowed her annoyance. Mary deserved none of it, and she wouldn’t get answers by being grumpish.
“’Hoy Mary-lou. Gramma here?” Mary-lou was Emma’s only family, but she was everyone’s Gramma.
Mary cocked her head. “She’s here, mostly. Had a good nap. What is it?”
“Found a monster. It’s in the pail. G’won, let’s have her take a peek.”
Mary peeked, then shrieked.
“See?”
“The EYES!”
“I know. I’m half put off the sea now, thinking of things like that out there, leering up at me whenever I dip my toes. C’mon, get Gramma. We’ve gotta assuage these fears or you’ll have nobody doing the fishing.”
“Gramma’s got,” said a voice at Sukie’s side, and now it was her turn to jump. “So, what is it?” Emma’s eyes were bad but her footsteps were nigh-inaudible; Sukie’s own theory was that she was too light to make a noise. She’d gone past skin and bone to mostly bone, and the hair had left years ago.
“In the pail. C’mon, look at it in the light.”
Noon was here. The sun puddled at the top of the sky and dozed as the old, old woman looked into the pail at something that looked back. The noon blaze had improved its looks – still that flat blank face where a face had no business being, but now the light glared off its sides, as shining and bright as the plastic snow that had guided Sukie’s trek home.
How was it doing that? How could something alive sparkle like that?
Emma pursed her lips around what was left of her gums and made a funny noise, a cuh-cuh-huh-huh-huh sound like a baby blubbering.
“She okay?” Sukie asked Mary. Mary shrugged.
Cuh-huh-huh-huh-heh. “I’m laughing, that’s all,” said Emma, pausing for breath and starting over. Cuh-huh-huh. “Oh, I’m laughing! I never thought I’d see one! Oh, that’s a sight!”
“Name names, or I’ll say you’re making it up,” threatened Sukie.
Cuh-huh-huh, huh. Huh. And it was all under control, bar the leak of musty old dust-tears from ancient eyes. “Oh. Oh me. Sorry, but it’s been so long. I haven’t seen one of these since my own great-great-grandmother told me. She had a picture, you know, one of those real old ones – it fell overboard with her when she drowned, which was real appropriate and all because of-“
“I don’t hear names.”
Emma punched Sukie, but in a friendly way, and only in the stomach. “It’s a fish,” she said. “A real fish. A real live fish. Oh my. What kind I don’t know, but it’s a fish.”
Sukie felt her forehead wrinkle, and consciously chose to stop that before it got out of hand. “Fish? Fishing?”
“Yes, like fishing. It’s what people netted a long time ago, a long, long time ago. Instead of roundheads and roundtops, folks pulled up big bags of these little charmers. There were hundreds of thousands of them, you know. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Enough to feed more people that you can imagine.” She stared at the fish again and chuckled. “Look at that stare – isn’t that a treat?”
“I hate it. It’s like it’s watching me.”
“Oh come off, rats have faces too.”
“Yeah, but they’re land-food. Land-food has faces. Sea-food doesn’t. This is…weird.”
“Isn’t it JUST? Imagine all those folk long ago, eating these right up. Yum-yum-yum!”
“Gramma, don’t make me smack you, because I will do it.”
“Bullshit,” said Emma sweetly. “Utter bullshit. Besides, if you do that I won’t tell you how to cook this.”
“How to what?”
“What, were you going to dry it out just like the rest of your haul, my baby-sweet? Oh no, they have faces like land-food, you eat ‘em like land-food. We’re going to cook tonight.”
Sukie looked at the fish again. It wasn’t what she’d have called fat, but there was weight on those…bones. Sea-food that had bones. Good lord, if there was real meat in there instead of jelly, what a meal this thing was. It’d top the biggest rat she’d ever heard tale of that wasn’t one of Tomm’s stories. “Reckon I could find more?”
“Convinced already?”
“Argument’s sake, ‘s’all.”
Emma sighed. “Sukie, Sukie, Sukie-sue. How long have you fished here?”
“Since eight.”
“And how long did your mommy fish before that?”
“From seven to thirty.” Sukie could tell what was coming next.
“And in all those years, Sukie-sue, did you ever hear anyone tell of a fish until I just now did so?” asked Emma. “It’s finished. It’s all alone now, and there’s no going back.”
Sukie sighed. “How do you cut it?”
The old woman waved a hand. “Oh, it’s like a rat, or a person, or anything else that’s land-food. There’s bones in there and they’re all the same, from skull to tail. Just pull off the head and cut it in half along the back, you’ll work it out.”
“Right.”
Sukie looked in the bucket. The fish looked back. The sun had scooted behind the clouds of the late day, and in the dimness its sides were less brilliant, dull enough for her to see the batterings, the missing scales, the welts and the sores. There were cataracts across its pupils, milkiness clouding the keen black smoothness.
Maybe the eyes weren’t as human as she’d thought at first. Just panic, that’s all. A shock to see eyes on sea-food.
No, not human at all.
“Hey Emma,” she said, and she couldn’t quite tell why. “Sure there aren’t any more?”

“I said, sure there aren’t any more?”
The old woman wasn’t looking at her. Sukie put her hand on her shoulder, checking for that gentle buzz of breath that signalled a mid-conversation nap, but felt nothing but the regular wheeze of life.
“Oh Sukie-sue,” she said, and her voice was so tired now that Sukie could feel the dust on its edges as it rattled up her windpipe. “Oh my baby-sweet. Do you think I can’t recognize my own kind?”

It was Tony’s fault. As usual.
Yes, it may have been Vanessa’s idea to play hide and seek. Yes, it may have been Vanessa who said when asked that the attic was NOT off limits. Yes, it may have been Vanessa who took her sweet time searching the downstairs bedrooms, leaving Tony’s zero-minutes-forty-seconds attention span and him alone together for far too long.
But the wandering eye that found the old clock was Tony’s, as was the hand that reached out to poke at it. He’d never seen a clock its like before – on one hand, it was an old, old old grandfather clock, the kind whose grandchildren had all had grandchildren and then died on it; on the other hand, although it was so dusty it was hard to tell, it didn’t seem to have numbers on it.
Tony wiped aimlessly at the faceplate of the clock one-handed and stared as the world made less sense by the minute. There was a mammoth at eleven, and a person at noon, and a spider at one, and was that a DINOSAUR at nine o’clock? It was hard to see.
Two things happened, both important. First, Vanessa yelled “FOUND YOU!” at the top of her powerful lungs, making Tony jump.
(That still made it Tony’s fault, okay? Not Vanessa’s fault that he’s so high-strung)
Second, Tony’s hands hopped in place. And as they hopped they jostled the hands of the clock, which felt as though they were made of sandstone, or maybe preserved bone, and sent them lurching on their way prematurely, sinking down from half-past noon to one with a resigned, creaky sigh.
It struck one.
That may be underdescribed. Let’s try that again.
It struck one, and a sound like a thousand moaning winds brewed up inside the cabinet and spewed out with the muttering ire of a hundred over-full nursing homes, circling and sputtering about the attic with dogged determination. As the sound went on – and on, and on, and ON, it didn’t seem to want to end, not even slightly – the air was filled with the sound of awful little legs, tiny dancing bodies, and eensy weensy mashing jaws. Spiders were filling up the room, spiders were standing at attention at Tony and Vanessa’s feet, spiders were mounding themselves up into a great seething pillar of arachnid bodies, its tip narrowing and narrowing until it unfolded into a singular, brightly-coloured spider about an eighth of an inch long.
“Right!” she snapped. “That was quicker than we’d thought it’d be. Well? Clear off!”
“What?” asked Tony. (Which was a very stupid question)
“Tony, what did you break?” asked Vanessa. (Which was a very smart question, and got straight to the point).
“The clock rang, didn’t it?” said the spider, in a horrible little hissing voice that sounded like hairs rubbing together because that’s what it was. “You hard your turn, didn’t you? Come on, you know the rules. We all agreed this was much tidier than just struggling and whinging every time something big went down, so don’t go welching on your word and make this as difficult as it never had to be. Mammals! Look at you, get to run rampant for a few tens of millions of years and it goes straight to your enormous fucking heads!”
“Don’t swear,” said Vanessa, who was used to policing the language of tiny rambling people.
“I’ll swear when I fucking want to, placenta-haver,” spat the spider. “Quit wasting space with your lungbellowry, my children and their children and their children and their children have been waiting long enough already. Now hold still, you’re first on our skeletonization list.”
“Wait!” blurted out Tony. “Wait wait wait!”
“What what what?” asked the spider in a rudely sing-song tone of voice that was quite disrespectful.
“We’ve got to uh….” said Tony, who’d had no plan because he was stupid.
“…Finish the ceremony,” said Vanessa, who had one because she was clever and smart.
“The what.” said the spider. Said, not asked. There was the feeling the sentence had been just… dropped there.
“Ceremony,” said Tony unhelpfully. “We’ve got to uh, have one. Rules.”
“Transfer of power,” said Vanessa.
The spider’s mandibles did something complicated that reminded both of them of their grandmother struggling not to spit out her dentures when she was cross. “Fine,” she said. “Have your stupid ceremony. What does it entail?”
“Tea,” said Vanessa.
“Tea?”
“Boiled water and leaves.”
The spider looked as nauseated as a sixteenth-of-an-inch face with no expressions can be. “Fine. Tea. Yes, do that. I will wait here, try not to throw up, and pray that I am not expected to share.”
“Sorry,” said Vanessa sweetly.
“There are rules, but there are limits,” said the spider. “Eat them.”
“There’s cookies!” shouted Tony.
“Cookies?”
“Like flies,” he said. “But better.”
The spider scratched the tip of her left mandible thoughtfully. “Acceptable. Cookies first, eating you later. But hurry up, later’s closer nowadays.”
“Fix it,” muttered Vanessa to her brother, as she passed him on her way to the staircase. And that was a very sensible thing to say, because only the biggest idiot in the universe would expect what she’d said to mean what Tony did over the next few minutes.

They stood there, the boy and the spider, sizing one another up. Briefly. There wasn’t much spider to size, and Tony wasn’t much to look at from her point of view either. Too few legs to be worth counting.
“’Tea.’ How long does ‘tea’ take?”
“Ages,” said Tony promptly.
The spider sighed. “Ceremonies. Ceremonies, ceremonies, cere-fucking-monies. What is it with you mammals and your attaching loads of pointless bullshit to everything? You chew your food and stick it in a special pouch to digest it, you nanny your babies for ever and ever after you’ve had them, you don’t even eat your mates. Why don’t you eat your mates? Honestly, think about it: how much simpler would your life be if your mother had eaten your father at conception and left you to mature under an eave somewhere, eh?”
Tony shrugged.
“Typical mammal. At least you’ve got good taste in housing – look at all these nooks! We’ll have no shortage of places to stay.”
“The window’s real nice,” said Tony, pointing at the far end of the attic. “It’s got loads of cracks to let bugs in.”
“Where?”
And as the spider was looking, Tony did the dumbest thing. He reached up behind him and tried to fix the clock. But because he was a stupid fat baby, he did the dumbest thing: he tried to fix it without looking. Just grabbed the handle and tugged blind, like a big galoot. And then came the whirring, the whirring and the wailing and the terrible grinding, like a giant eating beef jerky.
“What was THAT?” demanded the spider.
“Nothing,” said Tony hastily.
“I know what nothing sounds like,” said the spider. “I hear it every day in my web. Lots of nothing. That wasn’t nothing. Are you lying to me, tasty boy?”
“I’m not!” protested Tony. “Neither! I’m neither! And it wasn’t me!”
“I didn’t say it was you,” said the spider. “What’re you trying to hide? Are you trying to hide something?”
WE ARE NOT SOMETHING AND WE ARE NOT HIDING.
Both Tony and the spider looked up. Hovering a discreet few millimetres above Tony’s dumb mushroom haircut that made him look like a mushroom was a squid. It was large enough to cause considerable alarm – about five foot from mantle to tentacle-tip – but what added to the impression it made was that it was glowing softly on a spectrum that didn’t quite have anything to do with visible light.
“Awwkp,” said Tony.
“Who’re YOU?” asked the spider.
WE ARE THE CEPHALITES> DESCENDANTS OF THE GENE-WARS> SPAWN OF HUMAN VANITY> DESCENDED FROM ROOKERIES. THE CLOCK HAS TOLLED> IS IT NOT OUR HOUR?
“NO!” shouted the spider. “It’s OUR turn! Our clock just rang!”
ALARMING. WE HAD ASSUMED THIS SITUATION WAS SETTLED.
Vanessa ran up the stairs, kettle in hand along with a fistful of mugs, a tablecloth in the other. She opened her mouth to say something insightful, saw the CEPHALITE, and settled for dropping a mug.
WE SHALL REASSEMBLE YOUR CONTAINER.
“No it’s fine it’s better this way thank you very much,” said Vanessa. “I thought it was spiders? Why are there squids, Tony is this your fault that there are squids?”
“No!” said Tony. “It’s because… because… because the ceremony’s not done yet!”
The spider looked agog at this, and agogness only becomes more impressive with mandibles. “What, you monkeys tied the clock to your stupid little show-plays?”
Vanessa considered the options carefully.
“Yes!” said Tony.
Vanessa sighed.
“Right! Then get a move on and get things working, before who knows what happens. Tea, right? Hop to it!”

Vanessa poured the tea. One mug for her, one for the spider, one for the CEPHALITE, and none for Tony, who was left to his own devices in front of the clock. An ancient, groaning night-stand had been converted into an over-stuffed table. The tablecloth didn’t cover it so much as enfold it, like a starfish sucking the guts out of a mussel. It had effectively become carpeting for half the attic.
“Right!” she said brightly. “Let’s get started. Take a sip.”
There was a pause.
“You know,” said the spider pointedly, “some of us don’t have lips.”
“Oh.”
“And by some of us, I mean both of us.”
“Ah.”
“In short, you can take your sipping and shove it right up your ass, primate.”
“Just a little drink?”
Vanessa noted that Tony had fumbled his way around to the clock hand again under pretense of scratching his back, but one of the CEPHALITE’S eyes was pointed in his general direction.
“No!” said the spider. “No no no!”
Vanessa shrugged. “Fine. I’ll take the mug then.” And she lashed out with her hand right-quick just as she bumped the table with her knee.

If it wasn’t quite like clockwork, it was at least like dominos. In order of events:
-the spider leapt backwards and raised her legs in threat posture
-the tea hop-skip-jumped from side to side and slid ominously towards her
-the spider bit her mug
-the mug spun gently on its access, sashayed thrice, and shattered into ten thousand nine hundred ninety eight fragments

“OAF!” shrieked the spider.
“You shouldn’t have done that!” said Vanessa. “You knocked it over!”
“You scared me!”
“You scared ME!”
WE ARE INCAPABLE OF SCARED.
“To hell with your-“ and then the spider was cut off by the screech and howl of the clock’s bell, as Tony had hastily yanked on its hands until something moved again.
There was silence then. But nobody present expected it to last for long, they were just resigned to the worst. Which it soon arrived as, in the form of small, furtive scuttling noises.
Something nudged Vanessa’s ankle.
“Beg ‘pardon,” said a small, horribly polite little voice that was far too reedy to belong to any human, “but is it our turn again? We don’t want to make any fuss, but we’ve simply been waiting for ERAS, you unnerstand.”
The spider crossed its legs over its eyes. “You,” it breathed. “You, you, you. Just YOU. You had your turn! You had nearly THREE HUNDRED MILLION YEARS of your turn! Go AWAY, grandfather!”
There was a dreadful noise like someone slapping a bag of broken potato chips with a wet towel and something like a cross between a lobster and a cockroach poked its head up onto the table.
“That’s a very rude thing to say,” said the trilobite severely. “No call for that nohow. We heard the bell, we knew our call, honest to chitin we’ve fair grounds for our supposing. Oh now, what’s all this?”
“Tea,” said Vanessa. “It’s a ceremony, and since SOMEONE jumped at their mug, it got messed up. You’re here early.”
The trilobite’s antennae twitched. “Huh. Well, suppose I might as well stick around then. What is that?”
“A mug.”
“Can I have one?”
Vanessa slid her mug over. The trilobite clasped the thing in its legs. “Huh. Warm as right. Now what?”
“Now,” said the spider, “you all go away and let us have our turn, since it’s our turn fair-and-fucking proper, THANK you very much but not really.”
“Not yet,” said Vanessa. “Cookies first.”
“Cookies? We’ve had your damned tea, we’re done. This whole ceremony’s a rolling disaster.”
“It’ll only get worse if you try and stop it.”
“Hang that hang the cookies hang you upside down and suck out your juices,” sang the spider in a happy sing-song. “We are DONE, and-“
The familiar whistle-scream began again. This time everyone screamed with it, except the trilobite, who was busy trying to figure out handles. Even it looked up as the wind faded though – there was a thud.
Preceding the thud, there was thirty-five feet of placoderm filling an awful lot of the attic.
“Hello,” it said, in a voice that had pounded its way to its throat after a ten-thousand-mile swim. “Us again?”
THERE IS CONFUSION, stated the CEPHALITE. AND TEA. AND COOKIES. TAKE SOME.
The armoured fish considered the table. The bony plates it had in place of teeth klinked softly as it thought, jaws that could sever sharks in two absently muttering.
“Nah. Not thirsty.”
“Tea isn’t really about THIRST,” said Vanessa properly. “It’s about style.”
The tiny, rhythmic plinking sound of the last fifteen seconds turned out to be the spider’s head smacking into the tablecloth. “Fine,” she said, between thuds. “Cookies.” Thud. “Get.” Thud. “Them.” Thud. Thud. Thud. “Now.”
Thud.
Vanessa flew down the stairs. The placoderm watched her movements with curiosity. “Huh. They walk?”
MOST OF THEM DID, said the CEPHALITE.
“New.”
“Oh come off it,” said the trilobite. “We were around before you lot and we’ve been walking since era one here. AND our cousins on land, the whole aunts-and-uncles of ‘em.”
The placoderm shrugged shoulderlessly, a current of muscle flowing down its body. “No bones. Different.”
“Typical vertebrate,” muttered the trilobite.
AGREED.
“Agreed doubly,” snapped the spider. “What’s keeping those cookies?”
Vanessa trudged her way up the stairs again, oreos in hand. “We should’ve had homemade,” she said, “but SOMEONE ate them all.”
All eyes turned to look at Tony for the first time in ten minutes, still leaning against the clock with one hand behind his back. He swallowed hard and tried to look nonchalant, and it wasn’t Vanessa’s fault at all that he was so bad at it. Really, if he’d been doing his job properly it’d all have been fixed by then, so he deserved to be called out.
“Sensible.”
“Haven’t we all felt that way?”
EATING IS THE PRICE OF FLESH.
“Indeed,” said the spider. “So, how’s the rest of this ceremony go?”
“Oh, you just eat a cookie each,” said Vanessa casually. “And then it’s all over and it’s your turn.”
“You eat it with your eyes closed!” added Tony. “You have to do that! If you don’t do that, it ruins everything all at once!”
“Can’t. Will look nowhere.”
“I suppose I can stick my head in the crevice of these floor-boards.”
INK WILL ISSUE FORTH FROM WITHIN MY BLADDERS> OBSCURING ALL SIGHT.
“Of course,” said the spider. “Of course of course. I’ll just cover my eyes with my legs. You two should have no trouble with that.”
“Oh, Tony doesn’t need to do any of this,” said Vanessa. “He’s not part of it.”
“But he is,” said the spider. “He has to eat my cookie for me. My jaws are too small – and this cookie has to get eaten, doesn’t it?”
“Well uh you see um there’s eh a bit of a problem if we kind of sort of look it’s just that” said Vanessa, or something really articulate and clever.
“No, no, it’s perfectly all right,” said the spider, as sweet as cyanide. “Come over here and take this cookie for me, will you Tony? There’s a good bipedal ape.”
Tony, who was obviously too stupid to realize that the jig was up, shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Whatever.”
He slouched forwards, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets (in plain sight, the spider’s gaze gloated upon), feet shuffling.
Shuffling quite heavily, maybe, but none of the participants at the meeting were land-dwelling bipeds save for himself and Vanessa. And SHE saw what he was doing straightaways, although she could’ve told him right then and there that it was completely a bad idea.
But Tony shuffled, and Tony stomped, and Tony twisted his heels, and miraculously enough he made it almost all the way to the table when the tablecloth underfoot decided that enough was enough and shucked itself clear of its burden in one smooth motion, surging gently forwards towards him along with the tea mugs, the tea kettle, and a half-box of semi-stale oreos.
Tony was already ducking. Which might have looked suspicious, if everyone hadn’t been slightly distracted.

The tea mugs landed, one after another, directly on the trilobite, making a noise like a steel drum band.
The box of cookies scooped up the spider like a cowcatcher and sailed (screaming brightly) into the far corners of the room.
And the tea kettle missed the CEPHALITE by a whisker (it went on to thank precognition), bounced off the placoderm’s bony mask, and smacked square into the face of the clock with a sound like the end of the world in a trash bin.
“I’LL FIX IT!” yelled Tony. And because the others were too surprised – or too squished – to tell him to stop right there, nobody did anything as he leapt at the clock, grabbed the hands, and twisted them both the only way they could go.

When the screaming died down, the spider had new bruises, the attic had a new window, and the clock needed new innards. Unfortunately the last set had been ground down to something finer than silt, so determining replacements could be problematic.
THIS COULD BE PROBLEMATIC, said the CEPHALITE.
“No fooling,” said the trilobite with a grimace. “D’you remember who made this thing anyways? Maybe we could let them have a go at it.”
IT WON’T BE BORN FOR TEN UNTO TWENTY THOUSAND MILLENNIA.
“Shit,” said the placoderm.
“Does this mean it isn’t our turn again yet?” inquired the newest visitor to the attic from the freshly created window, speaking as crisply as one can past teeth the size of bananas. “I take it this means it isn’t our turn again yet.”
“It was going to be OUR turn!” wailed the spider. “Ours! Not yours, OURS!”
The dinosaur yawned and shook its head, nearly adding a skylight. “Oh, spare me. The thing’s obviously as wrecked as a mammal’s self-esteem. It was never your turn.”
“It was their fault!” said the spider. “Theirs! They wrecked everything! I didn’t see it, but they did it, I know it! Theirs!”
Eyes rolled in the few individuals present that were capable of such.
“Spare me,” said the placoderm.
“Too right,” said the trilobite. “Granddaughter, you’re making a nuisance of yourself. This was a bungle from the right go, and throwing blame won’t make it any better.”
“Right, yeah, absolutely, sure, totes,” said Vanessa brightly. “So I guess that was a false alarm, everyone’d better go home now, such a shame, nice to meet you all, ta-ta?”
There was an awkward moment where no-one spoke. Immediately, everyone tried to fix it at once.
“Well.”
“Not as strictly such, no…”
THAT WOULD NOT BE OPTIMAL.
“Go? GO?”
“We just got here…”
There was a pause again, during which Tony and Vanessa’s hearts hopped out of their mouths and fell into their stomachs.
“Fact of the matter is,” said the dinosaur, “the old system is broken. And we’re all here. Taking turns obviously hasn’t worked, so…”

Anyways, that’s the whole story. And that’s why there’s dinosaurs, trilobites, mammoths, spiders, giant jawed fish, and five-foot psionic squid roaming the street tonight, and why it’s NOT Vanessa’s fault.
Surely mom will believe this.