jamieproctor.ca

The thick-bladed oars in the hands of the rowers were quiet as ghosts, slipping through water so thin it seemed one step above thickened mist. The courier watched them without focus, allowing the rainfall to turn the world soft around the edges as the drops blurred into the lake’s surface without a trace.
Even the docking was filled with that same unnerving quiet. Not a bump, not a thud. The prison-ship slid against the pier with the smoothness of an eel.
“Enjoying the silence of the Stone?”
The courier was not new to her position, and no stranger to either the small and idle cruelties of the powerful or her duty to submit to them. Nonetheless, she took a small and spiteful pleasure in refusing to flinch at the sound of the man’s voice. It was a strange thing, a habitual whisper forced into the volume of what the uninformed might think to be pleasant conversation.
“It’s the first thing that anyone notices,” he continued, smiling happily. A thousand laugh lines crinkled the corners of his eyes as he spoke. “Before they even see the walls. Amazing, that.”
The courier looked at the walls. She’d seen taller, but certainly none less friendly. The only windows were inch-thick slits, the door was a single slab of solid cragstone that must have cost the ransoms of two or three royals – its size hidden by the crowded closeness of the gate whose mouth it snugged into. The surface of the walls themselves was seamless: solid rock without a trace of manufacture.
“Mark my words, one day the whole world – the whole damn world, all of it – will fall down. And on that day, these walls won’t so much as quiver. The Stone stands.”
“Magnificent,” said the courier. “You are the warden of the Stone, then?”
“You haven’t introduced yourself.”
She tapped the insignia on her chest. “Courier Jessle. From Gelmorre. I have a prisoner for you.”
“Ah, a prisoner for Her Worshipped! Political, eh? Caught another one of ‘Gan’s very own little two-legged glow-eels snooping around the grand old girl’s secrets? Tut tut! Sloppy! The third time this decade.”
The courier did not sigh, although she considered several choice gestures. “This is not a political matter, and our inmate is not a political priso-“
“Right, right – I must mind my words, of course: I meant an enemy agent. Forgive my breach of courtesy, madame.”
“I am a courier. And what I bring in our hold does not hail from Matagan.”
Now she had the man’s attention. “If it isn’t one of them, then who?”
“What. Our cargo is an inhabitant from afar.”
“Well, how very informative of you, ‘courier.’ Afar where?”
“Afar.”
She saw the flicker of understanding billow into flame in his teeth. “Ah, I see. So the long arm of Gelmorre’s reach is no lie, hmm? What did you find over the waves, eh? And what of it has come to my Stone’s doorstep?”
“The prisoner,” said the courier, “is invaluable. Not one of a kind, but difficult to obtain and physically dangerous. Extremely so. Her Worship wishes to have it studied… but in a safe location. The safest that can be managed.”
“And you came here.”
“Yes. To be assured that it was the right decision.”
The warden’s smile was now a small, tight thing, out of place on such a broad face. “Courier, your worry is misplaced. This is the Stone, the place where things, people, and people that are things go and never, ever are seen again. We have locked away emperors and peasant revolutionaries, monsters and treasures. We held the Eleventh Lord of the Nagezz here, and the council that sentenced him too, once his brother claimed the throne. There is a tiny vault under half a kilometer of guard that holds the only known sample of the thing that destroyed the country of Demmer-Don-Dimmer. There are six… things from the Terramac in the tallest of our towers that we allow to commune with supervised engineers once per year, under guard, at ludicrous expense. There are families in our deep-cells, courier – entirely thousand-year dynasties descended from criminals who were to be imprisoned until the utter extinction of their bloodline by time’s hand alone. The skull of the creature that ate Cabbera is buried in the foundations. The crown of the King Who Left is in one of our vaults, I can’t be fucked to remember which. Do you see what I am saying, courier?”
“I am saying,” continued the warden, blithely ignoring the possibility of an answer, “that we are not worried. Things come here. None leave. None will ever leave. That is what it is, that is what has been, and that is what. Will. Be. Forever. Now, what wreckage have you brought to us?”
“In the hold,” said the courier. “Prepare a crane.”

The docking crane had transported cages containing hundreds at a time. It had lifted the entire tomb of a long-dead Schoolmaster of Demmerdant, including the man’s ten-thousand-piece laboratory. It could shift entire vessels if need be.
It groaned under the weight of the cage that was winched up from the guts of the prison-ship. Iron bars surrounding iron chains surrounding something obscured and huge all out of proportion to its actual size. Dark grey links clanked against deep gray skin as the pale, cold under-jailers laid hands to its cell and began to haul it away, towards the gates, towards forever.
“Beautiful,” murmured the warden. “Beautiful. What is it?”
“Dangerous. We have no names for them, not yet. This was the second ever seen.”
“Ahh, the things envy will drive men and women to. Tell me, do the brave explorers and soldiers of Gelmorre regret their careers? The ones that are left, that is. Do they ask why their queen could not simply settle for the Sill, settle for the known terrors of the world? Do they cry out for answers in the night, courier?”
“They do their duty,” said the courier. “As you will do yours.”
“Pay me.”
A tiny bag was removed from the belt at the courier’s waist, bulging with uncertain weight. It shook violently as it passed into the warden’s hand.
“What’s this then?”
“Tremblemoss. It will grow slowly in lightless damp. Touch it to iron, it explodes. Violently.”
“How violently?”
“Very. Be cautious – that tremor was from the bars. A touch may explode, but being close enough for long enough will set it alight.”
“Iron, iron, iron,” mused the warden. He ran his fingers over the bag, felt it squirm.
“It is not the only creature from afar that cannot abide the metal’s touch. The bars keep the creature docile. Do not remove them.”
His hand snapped shut. “I am the warden of the Stone,” he said. “This is my prisoner, and you are standing on my dock. Our business is concluded.”
The courier bowed, turned away, and walked to the prison-ship, counting under her breath. At ten, she heard the hinges of the great cragstone door begin to swing.
“Be careful,” she said. And the stifled curse that followed her down the stairs brought a smile to her face as she knelt to rinse her hands in the water.

The eyelid unrolled itself. What lay underneath its surface was a soft, mild white. The iris was near pinpoint size, almost invisible.
“Sixty, that’ll do just fine,” said the warden. He chuckled; the warmest, most patronizing of laughs, as quiet and low as any words he spoke. “Do you know they had almost two hundred bars on your cage? Sixty will keep you just as feeble, but awake enough to enjoy your stay properly, and at less than a third of the effort. Typical of Gelms. Can’t trust anyone else to do their jobs properly, but can’t find their own asses with an army and sixty-seven secret plots. How do you feel, prisoner? Not too lively, I suppose.”
The pupil flickered.
“Quiet? Don’t mind that, I don’t mind that at all. That’s the way most of you are. The boasters, the jokers, they’re usually not who gets sent here. Those are the stupid ones. The ones that come here are smart, and they’re bright enough not to give away any sign of weakness.” Another chuckle, rich and thick enough to spread on toast. “But don’t worry. We don’t think you’re weak. We just don’t think it matters. You’re in the Stone now, thing. Come with me.”
The cobbles splintered as the cage rolled, fragments bouncing off the thick blackened boots of the under-jailers as they hauled at its iron chains, dragging their cargo down corridor after corridor, winding through halls and into towers.
“These are the cold-cells, prisoner. Softer and smaller inmates are kept here when they speak out of turn. They’re removed when their eyelids begin to freeze.”
Turn and crunch.
“The Drop Tower, prisoner. Turn your head – well, hah, maybe just your eye, with those chains – and you can just see daylight at the very top. Past all the cages. Escape artists come here after their third attempt, the little scamps, and they enjoy a new life sentence here, floating in the breeze. The lowest of the cages is a hundred feet from where we stand, dangling by a greased rope. Now and then one of them picks a lock, but only to jump.”
Around and again.
“The Maze. If you were just a little smaller, you’d fit in nicely, prisoner. As it is, you’d get stuck. Men and more than men are dropped in here. They claim their strength, well, they can prove it. Only so much food and water to go around. A good way to thin out cell space, particularly if you’re no longer necessary alive.”
And on.
“The Plunge. No space is wasted, prisoner, not even the space next to the refuse pits. The air down there aches, like a bruise inside your lungs. I understand that you grow used to it after the first few decades.”
And on.
“The Vaults. There’s things down that that have ruined nations, eaten minds, peeled open societies like a grape. And those are the ones we don’t keep secret.”
And on and on all the way down all those winding miles and sentences and secrets until at last the procession reached a pit gouged into the living stone of the island’s innards.
“Here we are, prisoner. Your accommodations. Thrice your height and barred with an iron grate that couldn’t be lifted by a hundred men, controlled with a lever your handless self cannot lift. Enjoy yourself. And remember this rule: keep the silence of the Stone, and you get fed. You break it, you don’t. Tip him down.”
And so the under-jailers groaned and heaved and pushed and another prisoner joined the ranks and rows of the thousands within the Stone, embedded deep within its heart. And for an instant as it faded into the shadows of its cell it was revealed, as the chains slid from its form. Sinuous and scaled, grey and cold, but the eyes were what stuck, the eyes wouldn’t leave you.
Only one person saw it, but that was enough.
The days passed, the weeks too, and the Stone’s magic settled in, the true magic of a true prison: turning reality into mundanity. The food was brought, the prisoner remained so, the Stone still stood, and all was made as it should be, as if it was folly to imagine it any other way. A day was the same as any other, and would be so forever.
Which was why it was most disconcerting when the knock came at the oaken door of the second-tallest tower of the stone, where the little oil lamps burned all night.
The warden glared up from his desk. The paperwork was appalling this week: an under-jailer had climbed to the top of the Drop Tower and hurled himself off, and the funerary arrangements and cleaning supplies needed were considerable when combined. “What?” he hissed in the small words that were the loudest voices were raised in the Stone. “It’s not time for your payments, you all know that. It’s not an emergency, I’d know that. It’s not about the weather, we all know that. So what, what, WHAT are you doing here?”
The under-jailer winced under the verbal blows, but shouldered them aside. He was a veteran of fifteen years, fifteen keys to his belt, fifteen prisoners his wards. This was not his first rebuke.
“News, warden.”
“Really. What, did the ‘Gans and the Galms finally come down to business?”
“No, warden.”
“Did the dunes finally swallow Nagezz whole, like those tiresome little sand-skitterers keep saying they will?”
“N-“
“Did the Terramac finally witness the birth of a machine that will tear us all to mulch and whispers? Well, what? What news is so exciting that it must come to me at this instant, not a moment later?”
“The news is from inside the walls, warden.”
The pen clattered to the desk, the chair was emptied, the warden was afoot.

“Listen.”
In the Stone, you learn how to do that. A silence like that can’t be shut out, you have to open up to it, get used to sifting the tiniest scraps of hints of something-out-there. The rats in the walls were a comforting ever-present shiver to an under-jailer’s ears. The distant murmur of voices in cells and wards halfway across the island. The scrape of a distant bone against a cell wall.
The sounds faded, of course. The warden had the privilege of working high, high above them all. Only the scratch of his pen made his nights noisy – all else was the faintest whisper on the breeze. He needed the focus. But he came down from above to manage, to watch, to gloat, and so he knew the noises still. He hadn’t spent forty years there for nothing. His ears knew the silence.
But they didn’t know this one.
“Can you hear it, warden?”
His nose wrinkled. “No. Not even a little. Tell me, when did this start?”
The under-jailer shrugged. “A week ago, maybe. Hard to say.”
“Our latest friend is offensive to more than just our own senses, it seems. Well, nothing we can’t take advantage of. We have spare cells here, yes? Convert them into food storage. We might as well get some use out of this…interesting little effect.”
The under-jailer nodded and made his way up, up, up into the world of the Stone, and he found that his steps slowed and his breathing evened as he did so, though he was loathe to admit it.
It was good to hear the scurrying of rats again. They’d always been there, always the same, never changing. It wasn’t right to be where they weren’t, and he wasn’t too proud to admit those deep cells held a worry for him that they hadn’t since he was a boy of sixteen, the last time he’d known what it was to not hear the pitter-patter of rodent feet.
Which was why he must be confused right now, shaken up, a bit off-centre. Because to his rattled ears, they sounded like they were moving quicker.

It was fast after that. Every time the mind wandered, every time the eyes roved heedlessly, every time the little watchman that was the consciousness strayed from its chores, it was there, and moving onwards. One man at a time. Not steady, but fast.

“Warden, there’s a man sick down in the Maze. Wants off shift.” And the warden signed that, and it was so.
“Warden, there’s something wrong in the Plunge. None of the inmates will move. Permission to relocate them?” And the warden signed that, and it was so.
“Warden, the cold-cell guards have all come down with something, they can’t work, we need to replace the shifts.” And the warden cursed to himself, and signed that, and it was so.
“Warden, the prisoners in the Drop Tower won’t speak anymore.”
“Warden, there’s something wrong in the lower levels.”
“Warden, the Vaults haven’t been inspected in a month. The patrols are missing.”
“Warden”
“Warden”
“Warden”

One day, the warden laid down his pen – the sixteenth sick bay incident in as many days – and realized that he couldn’t hear a thing outside his door.

His footsteps were absent from the cold stone stairs. His under-jailers avoided his gaze, shrank from his touch, stood unblinking at their posts. He opened his mouth to command, to scold, to yell, and felt something cold stir inside him at the thought. This was the silence of the Stone. To break its grip was wrong. It was as quiet as he’d ever heard it – even the clouds seemed to have paused in their aimless circling of the sky.
The walk felt longer, though that could have been his imagination. His heartbeat wasn’t there, his breath was gone. Nothing left to feel time by. Every moment like every other moment. Just the silence.
He knew what he would see somehow. Knew it before he’d even reached the pit. The grate set aside. The level thrown back. The cell itself empty. The eyes, looming over him. It was how it must have been, though he didn’t know how. It was the only thing that made sense.
The grate was still there.
The grate was still there! STILL THERE!
He beat his fists bloody against it, felt the pain rocket up and down his arms, felt his lips move back in a snarl he couldn’t hear. Still there!
It was a trick. It must have escaped. It had to. It had replaced the grate. Yes. That was the only thing that made sense. It had to have done that. It had to. It had to. If he turned around right now it would be right behind him. Yes it would. It would.
It wasn’t.
Well, that was good. That was how things should be. He was the warden. It was the prisoner. It was still locked away. He was still in command of the Stone. The silence of the Stone remained unbroken. More than unbroken, it was stronger than ever. He was in command.
He just had to be sure.
With great effort, he peered over the edge of the pit. Shadows stirred, and a pair of giant eyes peered back up at him, pupils swollen in the dark nearly from lid to lid.
He was in command. He ran back all the way to his tower, and shut himself in there ‘till consciousness faded.

It was dark again when the warden woke, after a sleep so deep he could not even recall it. The sun had hidden itself behind a haze of half-fog half-clouds and slunk away before he could see its face. Maybe once, maybe a hundred times.
He picked up his pen, and he waited.
Experimentally, he scribbled with it, and strained his ears for the sound that was his and no other’s.

Later, he set it down, and step by step, descended.
The walk was even longer this time, but he gritted his teeth and kept moving. The lever. That was it. The lever. Within his grasp.
The lever came down with the smooth grace of applied elbow grease, and the grate – the iron grate that a hundred men could not move – squealed itself open, the first sound that the warden had heard in what seemed like forever, so loud that he clutched at his skull and nearly toppled on the spot.
Be free! he screamed without words. Be free! You’ve won! You’re released! We cannot hold you! You are yours, not ours! Take yourself and go! Be gone!
A heaviness fell upon him, and he raised his eyes to meet others, inches from his face.
Go, he wanted to say. Go.
A lipless grin twitched in front of him. There were no teeth in its mouth, he noted faintly. A beak only.
You’re free. Go. Leave.
The beak approached him, and with the tenderness of a mother, smacked itself against his face. He toppled onto his back, legs flailing like an upturned beetle’s, felt the cold, smooth wood of the lever in his hand again before he knew what it was, felt the crack, felt the splinter, felt the shift.
The grate screamed shut, the lock jammed, and alone in the silence, alone in his pit, the warden listened to the newest of his prisoners scream.
No one else could.

Not much word comes from the Stone these days, though there have been those that tried to bring it. They came back grey in the face and gone in the eyes, and said that the silence has spread. Even birds don’t dare call on the shores of the lake now, and the wind has faded from a gentle breath to dead weight in the air. The sky never changes past grey, and the door opens for no one, prisoner or no.
But the Stone still stands, they say. The Stone still stands.
Although what it stands for now, nobody knows.

Matagan Harbor is one of the sites of the world, I knew. I’d heard it before, but now I really understood what that meant. It meant that strange regret that you would never be able to see it for the first time again, mixed with a slow-burning hope fuelled by the realization that every time you turned to see it, it had changed again to become something new.
The roar of a tug’s overstrained engine breaking down to cinders and shards as it struggled against the weight of an overbuilt ice-tower from the far south.
The whisper and shush of low waves lapping on shores buried under docks beyond counting.
The play of the morning light on a docking claw sixteen stories high.
The outbursts of arguing street children as they fought over the discarded bycatch of Kanavi crabs, each hard-won shell a little too thick, a little too green, a little too crushed by the weight of its fellows.
Every moment was made of a thousand thousand little things like that, and even at the younger and more dynamic age I was then, that was enough to impress, or at least impress the part of me that wasn’t focused on getting my pipe lit. I’d picked up the bad habit only a few weeks back and my hand wasn’t in practice yet, which was probably what distracted me from oncoming footsteps.
Looking back at it, I’m not sure I would’ve heard them even if I were paying attention.
I finally got the pipe lit – the damned thing seemed to practically eat matches on misty mornings – took a puff and looked up, and up, and up, and up all the way to the face of the person that had appeared in front of me.
It wasn’t a very nice face. There were too many teeth, and the mouth wrapped all the way around the sides of the skull. A mouth meant to take big bites out of something else, below a triplet of eyes that were all staring at me from two feet up. And this was before my back went crooked. Small satchels and purses dangled from it, tied on wherever they didn’t interrupt the movement of limbs.
“Captain?” asked the thing. Its voice was all wrong; too deep for the thinness of its frame. The pipestem buzzed against my teeth at its sound.
“Nah,” I said. “Able-seaman. Captain’ll be back soon.”
It stood there and blinked, and I felt my skin itch. It only ever closed one eye at a time. “Where is the Captain?” it asked.
“Ashore,” I said. “Just arguing with the wharfmaster. Stupid old sod said we came in too heavy, we said the pier looked like that when we got here, he disagreed, so on and so on. Bureaucrats. You know.”
The thing looked at the pier. “It is damaged,” it said. “The moorings are discoupling.”
“Yeah. Wasn’t us. Idiot’s probably been letting the thing slip away into garbage for months, we’re just the lucky ones to get pinned with it.”
It turned its back on me and walked over to the half-cracked chains and pulleys, started to tinker and prod. I couldn’t see the tools in its hands, but I saw sparks fleck and air shimmer with heat. Would’ve liked to get a closer look, but then down the way came the BANG of the wharfmaster’s office door slamming open and out came Captain Fenter, stomping fit to crack cobbles.
“Any luck?” I asked.
He spat. I think there was red in it. “No. No. Not even a little. We can stay docked or pay up for the fix, as far as he’s concerned. I’d like to ask how he thinks a little ten-man fisher could’ve yanked that thing loose, but I know I won’t get an answer any straighter than a corkscrew from the pissant.” He shrugged. “We’re stuck in. Hell of a way to have your first time in Matagan, eh boy? See the sights, breathe the air, choke on the whinging bastards.” He spat again, and then he squinted. “What’s happening over there?”
I followed his gaze. “No idea. Showed up asking for you a minute ago, then got distracted by the breakages. Any idea what he is?”
The thing straightened itself and spun on its heel, making its way to us in four long strides. Its eyes flicked between us. “Captain?”
Fenter didn’t answer right away. I was surprised; surely he’d seen stranger-looking folks than this in Matagan. Hell, I’d been here a couple days and I’D seen stranger-looking folks in Matagan. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”
“Ask for passage.”
“Agreed,” he said. No hesitation. “There are dry quarters belowdecks.”
The thing nodded and stepped aboard. The exchange can’t have been more than six seconds. I wasn’t going to say anything – I was young, but not THAT young – but the captain must’ve seen my face. “I know we aren’t a passenger ship. Wipe that stare off your face, Denkel. Haven’t you ever seen a person from the Terramac before?”
I shrugged. “Sorry, captain. Can’t say I have. Name rings a bell, though.” Something about machines. Strange devices. “Handy with tools, are they?” I guessed.
“You could say that,” said the captain. “You could say that.” He knelt down on the pier and examined the moorings. “Only things that leave the Terramac are its people and its machines, Denkel. And the people only leave to learn more about machines. I’d guess this one came to look at the harbour mechanisms. Might be he wants to look at something smaller for a change” He shrugged. “No sense asking.”
“We’re taking a stranger onboard and we aren’t even asking what he wants?”
The captain tossed the mooring-chain back to the dock. “Yes we damned well are. For one thing, he just got us out of here. Go get the others from whatever hole they’re hiding in and be quick about it; we’re pushing off by noon.”
The chain was whole again. And without a single seam.

I didn’t know much about the Terramac. By the time we were a week out from shore, I didn’t know much more, but at least I was knowledgably ignorant. Not that the passenger had been any help on that account. I’d been friendly as anything, first day out. Helped him settle in his corner – a little nook on the lower deck that had played host to last voyage’s mouldiest sack of potatoes before we cleared them out. Not that he needed much settling. No possessions besides what he carried in those little bags and the big rucksack on his back, and he refused to remove either of them.
“Sure you don’t need anything else?” I asked. “A light, at least? It’s dim down here.”
“Can see.” And it was hard to argue that, with those three eyes shining in the dark like a cat’s.
“Suit yourself.” I hesitated for a moment as he settled himself down, then gave in to curiosity. “What was it like, the Terramac?”
He looked up at me. “Do not understand.” Already one hand was reaching into a pocket, pulling out some small bit of something fibrous.
“Where you’re from. What’s it like?”
He clicked his teeth – a quick, skittering sound that would’ve been at home coming from a rat. “Am here.”
“No, the Terramac. What is the Terramac like?”
A somewhat larger thing had been taken from the rucksack; it looked like a screwdriver descended from sixteen generations of inbreeding. “The Terramac is here.”
I looked around the deck. Everything looked as it ever was, except for the eight-foot spindleshanks in the corner. “I don’t understand.”
Clickclickclick. “Yes.”
From then on I saved my friendliness for those it wasn’t wasted on. Don’t get me wrong, as far as the ship went he was worth a year-long spell in a drydock on his lonesome, but he wasn’t quite personable.

“They all like that?” I asked the captain one night as we hauled out the deep-lines.
“Pretty much,” he said. A hook nicked at his jacket, and he swore furiously before turning back to the spools. “It’s a matter of time. You want to talk to one of them, Denkel, you keep your words in the here-and-now. They don’t handle tomorrows and yesterdays very well. It’s all about now, now, now.”
“Sounds like a child ready to walk.”
“A child with teeth that could gut bull cattle in a bite, and a brain that’s retrofitted half the ship as an exercise. Mind your mouth, Denkel. Because I’m not doing it for you, and I don’t want to have to scrape you off my ship.”
I grumbled, I’ll admit, but I couldn’t deny that. The spools might have been brand-new if I hadn’t seen them being patched up myself. The thing from the Terramac had even fabricated a depth sensor out of apparent thin air, instantly obsoleting the carefully-measured series of knots I’d left along the length of the deep-lines some weeks earlier. Two thousand, it read in spiralling metal wheels, like a misplaced combination lock. One thousand nine hundred. One thousand seven hundred fifty.
Time spun away under the wire. One thousand six hundred. I pulled, and men hauled fat and writhing ‘Gan glow-eels off the hooks one at a time, armed with barbed mitts to grip slimy flesh and mail-covered forearms to ward away grasping needle-teeth. One thousand five hundred twenty. The deck was covered with pulsing, dim-lit fluids leaking from ruptured glands, drizzling eerie light into the sea. One thousand four hundred.
It was my life, and it was a good one.
One thousand three hundred.
Thud.
I almost fell over before the captain’s hand seized my elbow. “A snag?”
Wincing, I prised my hand loose from the cable. “At one-three.”
He gave it a tug and swore. “A good one, too. Spit on a shitheap. Well, it’s the saw for this one.” Seeing my stifled protest – the line was near-new, and not cheap – he grinned humorlessly. “Unless you want to make the trip down there yourself? It’s a pretty paddle, in the dark to say no more or less. Maybe you’ll make friends with some of the ‘Gans that slipped the lines – the big ones with fight in them. Or maybe you’ll get lucky and run across a Redbrow. I’ve seen them out here before, y’know, and the blood and guts sure get their attention as good as a flag-and-salute. Ah, they’re lovely. From a distance, of course. Which you wouldn’t be at, wearing that little tin soldier suit we’ve got. Which is rated for four hundred foot at most.”
He stared down at the line, and the smile slid away. “So, are you doing this?”
“Yes,” said the thing from the Terramac, and we both jumped. Its footsteps were still feather-soft, even on the hollow rip-rap surface of the deck.
“Yes what?” I asked.
It blinked at me. I hated when it did that. Nothing should be able to stare at you that hard with one eye shut. “Descending,” it said, and with that it shrugged off its rucksack. It was the first time I’d seen it without the ungainly bundle, and it seemed half-shrunken without it.
Captain Fenter looked as if he would’ve liked to argue the point, then he shrugged. “It’s your life,” he said.
“Yes,” said the thing from the Terramac. The suit had been procured from its cabinet ahead of time, it seemed, and it was being carefully wrapped around limbs nearly twice the size of those it had been designed for.
“You know how deep it is?”
“Yes. The suit is modified.” And it was being modified further as I watched, as the thing from the Terramac dragged bits and pieces out of its discarded pack and clipped them to the diving suit, stretched here, pulled there, pinched that.
“You’re armed?”
“Yes,” he said. A small pole was unscrewed at one end, and telescoped itself into a spear only a little shorter than I was. He popped open a small capsule with its teeth and spat out the lid, then drank.
“What’s that?” I asked.
The thing from the Terramac coughed, choked, gasped, and spat. Thick purple leaked from his lips and puddled on his toes. Through the wheezes I could barely make out the hint of that damned clicking. Then it rushed to the rail, slipped over, and was gone.
The water bubbled.
“Captain?”
“Yeah?”
“How much did that suit cost?”
His face wrinkled in calculation. “Good kala-husk in the helmet, came all the way from the Sill. Maybe…. Quarter of the boat.”
I stared down at the green glow on the black water. “Y’reckon the repair work’ll make up for it?”
Captain Fenter’s fist was almost friendly against the back of my head.

*

-The black is total there is no light. There is a great pressure to left that is a possible predator (Redbrow).
-There is a light in left pocket that is being used.
-There is a Redbrow to left it is surprised. There is a spear in left hand.
-A spear is used a Redbrow retreats. There is receding pressure to left.
-The lungs are full of fluid not air. This is good it prevents internal disruption via gas pressures. Air at depth is a hazard.
-There is a line that is going deeper there is tension there is something snared in its far end. It is very far away so there is faster movement now. Descending.
The Terramac is empty.
-There is pale light in the dark from two eyes. They are round and large. They are within a body without a skull.
-There is communication. Low-pitched soundwaves, regular. Hum/murmur rather than a whisper; they carry within the water. Language is relatively straightforward albeit dependant upon bodily movements for clarity that are unusable without species-specific morphology.
-There is a being that is trapped within a cable. There is a cutting implement in left right pocket on right arm.
-There is a being that is free from a cable. Being expresses gratitude, fascination with object. Being respects implement in left hand and skills to fashion implement.
-There is a being that expresses interest in an implement’s manufacture. Information is transmitted.
-Biological distress is occurring. Too deep. There is movement upwards.
The Terramac is empty.
-There is a metal shell at a surface.
-There is a light.
-There are two beings peering over a metal shell’s rim they are bipedal land-movers metal shell is their conveyance.
-There are bipeds they are being helpful.

*

It was a long, long time before the thing from the Terramac surfaced again. We’d have moved on an hour beforehand if the deep-line hadn’t come up loose – cut clean with a single stroke.
He weighed surprisingly little as we swung him aboard. Weighed less still as it heaved up purple froth from its mouth, choked and gargled its way back into air.
“There is air,” it managed, and clicked between gasps. “There is air.”
It felt alright then, it did. Watching Captain Fenter slap him on the back as he shook and shivered. Call it perverse, call it spiteful, but it was good to know that the thing could feel aches and twinges like all of us could, no matter how hard it was to read. Good to know there’s flesh and blood behind those three eyes.
Flesh and blood maybe, but it might as well have been steel. The next night the cable jammed at one-six. The same cable, even. And before it was even finished echoing, there he was, crawling into the diving suit again, tweaking it a little more again. Like it’d never happened at all.
Of course, for him, I guess it might as well not have.

*

-The black is total there is no light.
-The lungs are full of fluid not air. This is good it prevents internal disruption via gas pressures. Air at depth is a hazard.
-There is a line that is going deeper there is tension there is something snared in its far end. It is very far away so there is faster movement now. Descending.
The Terramac is empty.
-There are many lights from many eyes in many bodies without skulls without skeletons. There is communication at a low pitch, to let the water carry it far. Language is relatively straightforward. They are clutching the line.
-There is communication from many beings: they clutch the line so that movement may occur and communication continue. They admire implements. There are implements in all pockets, all pockets are shown.
-There is beckoning from many beings.
-Descent.
The Terramac is empty.

*

It was deeper down. I guess. It made sense that it’d take him longer to get it clear. I guess.
But six hours longer? That’s a bit much. I guess.
Well, he did come back up. Coughing, sputtering. A bit less than last time, and a different colour: green. I wonder how he manages to find the time to work on these things if he can’t remember that he might need them; inspiration from the ocean maybe?
“They just tinker,” said the captain. “Put them near birds and they’ll tinker with models until they’ve got fake flying machines. Put them near cranes and they’ll tinker you things that can practically hook the damned sky. Put them near boats, and well, they’ll make diving suits that can take them down a thousand-and-a-half feet without a hitch.” He scratched his nose as he watched the cables run. “Sort of like that little lizard….the one that hides itself…what’s the name…”
I watched the depth gauge scroll, wondering what it was like to have half a mile of water between you and life. “Gecko?”
“No….no….starts with a, uh….C.”
“Crocodile?”
“Nah. Chameleon! That’s it. See, you put ‘em near a thing, and they change colour to blend with it. They take their surroundings and make it a part of them. Same thing. Sort of.” He waved a hand. “You get what I mean.”
I didn’t, but a choking, coughing noise distracted me, followed by the line running rigid.
Captain Fenter sighed as he locked in his own spool. “What’s it at?”
I checked. “Two-thirty.”
“Well,” he mused as the thing from the Terramac began to slip on the (much altered) suit, “at least one of us can’t get sick of this.”

*

-The black is total there is no light. There is a village, a center of activity. There is a forge around a vent in the ocean floor that smokes black heat. Temperature goes from near-freezing to blast-furnace within a span of inches.
-There is ingenuity in devices, in pumps and levers and pistons. Rough nature of underwater worksmanship is partially solvable via creating vacuum chambers and crafting within them for maximum control and precision.
-There are improvements given to beings, disseminate. Improvements are obtained by eating improved one, all feeders are improved.
-There are thanks from beings. Token is given.
-Biological distress is occurring: breath-in-water is scant. Ascending.
The Terramac is empty.

*

“Are you sure there’s nothing going on here?” I asked as the winch ground down at three-zero.
“What d’you mean?” asked the captain.
“Once a night. Once a NIGHT. That’s not coincidence anymore. What the bottomless blue bitch is doing this?”
His moustache bristled as he watched the thing from the Terramac dive – a perfect straight-arrow into the water, as usual. “Well, it isn’t him. To have some sort of dastardly scheme, you need to be able to scheme. Plan. That’s sort of fucking essential there, isn’t it, you whiny bastard?”
I spread my hands. “Hey, just saying. But this isn’t right. No problems around here ever before, right?”
“Right,” he muttered. “Nothing down there. Just deep and empty.”
“So there’s nothing down there.”
“I just said that.”
“So something’s going on here.”
Smack.

*

-It is bright in the black. Light shines from captive cages; phosphorescent liquids from deepsea life within seal containers, vacuum-tight.
-A city roils at the black smokers; chambers upon chambers, halls that smith, halls that smelt, halls that build. Substances bubble from pits in the floor of the world into waiting calderas. There are halls of manufacture. There is industry.
-Requests for plans are being asked for by many beings with large eyes in bodies without skulls. They are given. Requests for thoughts are asked. They are given. Those given are eaten. All feeders are given.
-There are limits. Fatigue poisons fill limbs, cloud the head. Breath becomes laborious. Ascending.
The Terramac is empty.

*

The spools creaked in their holsters in the light of dawn as Captain Fenter prodded at them listlessly. “Right. What’s it say again?”
I looked at the little gauge I was holding. “Four thousand three hundred.”
He sighed.
“When’d it happen?”
“Hard to say. I woke up when I heard the noise.”
“We reeled those up real tight last night.”
The captain said nothing.
“Tied them off and everything.”
Possibly the most evil curse I have ever heard to this day escaped his lips, softly, like a lover’s name.
“Something’s going on here, isn’t it.”
He didn’t say a word as he looked to the deck. The diving suit’s cage was wide open.

*

-The blackness glows. Civilization rumbles against the seamounts and crags, long low halls, deep burrows, towering spires. Carved hollowed chiseled built.
-There is a center. There is movement to the center. There are thousands of beings. There are thousands of large eyes in thousands of bodies without skulls.
-There is proclamation from beings. There is admiration. There is congratulation.
-There is explanation from beings. There are ten thousand young. There are two living. There are plans, thoughts, implements. There are ten thousand living. There are ten thousand learning. There are ten thousand ten thousand young living feeding learning.
-There is gratitude beyond measure from beings. There is the promise of
‘memory’
forever.
-The feeders hold the knowing of plans thoughts implements. They hold
‘memory’
-Of this and gratitude for it for as
‘long’
As there is feeders and learners.
-Remembered for
‘ever’
‘forever’
‘remembered’
-There is hope. There is explanation of hope. Hope is for what the future may
-‘Future’ ‘may’ Future may
-The Terramac is empty.
The Terramac is empty.
-The Terramac is
-empty.
-Hope for
everevereverververevereverevereverevereverevereverevereveverevereverevereverevereverever

-There is a weapon in right left pocket that uses air at depth. It is used.
-There is a spear in right hand. It is used.
-There is a weapon in left right left leg pocket that uses heat to sear. It is used.
-There is a weapon in mouth. It is used.
The Terramac is

*

The lines went slack around noon. We waited until sundown.
Still don’t know what happened there. I pulled myself together and signed on for a dull old cargo freighter, on a long voyage with good pay and no excitement.
But Captain Fenter, he never did go to sea again his whole life. Sold his boat, sold his equipment, bought a little place in Matagan, died not ten years later. Without saltwater they can wither like that, the old ones.
He never did get the price of that suit back.

*

That is the oldest-eaten tale of our city, the tale of how it came to be, the tale of how our few became many.
We have many older, but this one is special.
It would not be if not for those not like us, those who came from far above to show us light and unwater and thought.
It was a stranger to us in life, but it taught us well. It was a stranger to us in death, and gave up nothing to the feeders. Our sorrows were many as our minds were empty.
We have older tales, of regret. Our stranger taught us these new tales, of hope.
It did not know what hope was.
It killed to not find what hope was.
This is not how we are. But it is how the stranger was, and that is how it must be.
And one day, we will come above, and we will feed our thanks to its kin.

The origin of any people smart enough to consider the question is almost always murky. Almost always. Almost.
The truth is most exceedingly touchy, you see, to say nothing of long-forgotten. And it’s so much more entertaining and satisfying to make it up for yourself.
The inhabitants of Matagan claim that they were placed there by the gods in general and their gods in particular. An old chestnut, but they are the fondest of both old chestnuts and this one in particular.
The people of the faraway Terramac do not speculate on their pasts any more than their futures. And in times long-forgotten, no doubt they believed the same thing.
The dunegrowing and strange folk of Gizikk say they walked out of the sand one day in a fit of youthful rebellion, and that they will each only come home to it when they grow old enough to speak its words and think its thoughts once more. This gives their parents less sway than you would think.
The Oth!Arh!Ehn of the Widenedlands hold that they were once nothing more than maggots on the corpse of a bird on a riverbank until the hour of the Drawing Apart came. This is the source of themselves, Ing!Ehn! the city of flesh, and the Oth!Onn!, the great river whose banks are spanned two thousand miles apart. Those who dispute this point at their lack of resemblance to maggots; those who agree contest them to display a man whose innards do not bear distinct resemblance. Such volunteers are scarce, and the evidence garnered thus remains hotly contested.
The Ta’s thoughts on their origins, or whether they have those thoughts at all, are unknown to those that are not Ta. They do know, however, not to ask questions.

By comparison, the tale of the first of the Bitters is practically and literally an open book. For you see, much of it was recorded and documented as it happened.

Simmyon Besch was a man given to proclivities, and rare ones at that. No, not the more common and common-sensical proclivities of the flesh; rather, his Sir Besch, Most Official Magistrate and Counsellor to the Consul of Demmer-Don-Dimmer was a great chaser and hounder-after of the strange and peculiar sensations and patterns of the mind. Six and forty books could have been written on his rulings of the law – although at present they number a mere twenty and nine – but his title and position, and its responsibilities, were at best an inconvenient nuisance to him as he labored at his workbench, squandering his labors to pursue his fancies. The despair of lawyers was the pleasure of the traders and merchants of Demmerdant, for Simmyon’s inexhaustible demand for novelty and ferocious pace of research had quickly exhausted all local psychological substances, and funded many a far-flung expedition.
The men of the colleges frowned at him sometimes, but those that did were inevitably older set in their ways. Those who were possessed of more youth or more kindly nature lent a more benign eye to his efforts. Some few daring professors even offered collaboration, but none – not even those who proffered mere advice free of authorial strings or indebted hints, not one – received more than a polite and thoroughly stated refusal. His Sir Simmyon Besch was not a selfish man, but he was a relentless one that would follow his own lead come hell over hinterlands. His research might be shared, but never its direction.
There are many who wish that Simmyon Besch had had the decency to be selfish.

It was a failure, of course.
They always are, aren’t they? The first man to make cheese wondered at the foul decomposition of his milk; the first maker of sear-taffies groused over how the Nabat-wood some fool had slipped into his ovens had fried his chewy, crunchy jerky into elastic, charcoal-tasting softness; the man who sought to blow a bottle of glass swore mightily as the misshapen lens a sneeze had created bored sunlight into a flame at his britches. Without failures, successes would be rare indeed.
This was small comfort initially to her Lady Menthiss, Highly Official Lord-Judge, on the day the failure occurred. A trial was completed, its filing sorted, its review in dire need and its political fallout in want of plumbing to the utmost fathom. Her hand raised to the latch of the Most Official Magistrate, her throat cleared, and she was promptly catapulted straight onto her rear against the Most Plush Carpetting, left prostrate at the blindly advancing feet of Simmyon Besch.
“It will never work!” he screamed. “Never! The thoughts of mind – made manifest as muck! Party tricks and lies! Frauds! Empty child’s-stink!” He spat so viciously on the carpet as to leave a permanent stain (of what sort was never found), and stamped away in a mood that was very nearly as foul as the stink that wafted from beyond the open doors of his chambers.
Her Lady Menthiss was a woman of utmost conscientiousness. She would never dream – never imagine, never HINT – at intruding upon the premises and possessions of her superiors to satisfying idle curiosity. Such a thing would be an appalling breach of protocol, every bit as recklessly misguided as refusing to investigate a possible health hazard that his Sir might have left behind in his grief-ridden haste. Therefore, she made sure that no servants were about to do themselves harm, then went into Besch’s chambers and shut the doors behind her.
When she emerged a half-hour later, with crossed eyes, a running nose, and a thoughtful expression, the first thing she did was run to a servant and demand that the Lord Dean of Demmerdant be summoned immediately.
The second thing she did was to seize pen and paper and march straightaways back into Simmyon’s Besch’s offices and begin to take notes with the speed of a racehorse in heat, from then until the arrival of the Lord Dean some three hours later.

His Sir Simmyon Besch’s efforts of the last eighteen months had been in utter vain. Rather than creating a medium which would replicate the precise thoughts of an experimenter, bringing the purity of mental and spiritual imagery to the typically meager domain of material form unscathed by clumsy transition through poet’s pen or sculptor’s chisel, he had instead produced a foul-smelling cauldron of oily substances of varying thickness, in volume a little less than two litres. It roiled incessantly, produced surprisingly little noise given the turbulence of its surface, and put the odor of the sharpest cheese in Demmer-Don-Dimmer to shame.
It also produced seemingly random structures within itself given enough time. Lattices of stringy crystals and webs of gummy resins.
If a sufficiently pained note-taker were present, over a sufficiently lengthy period of time, one might recognize said structures were somewhat less than random.
If said notetaker were pathologically rigorous in their observation of detail and mundane reality, and possessed of an unimpeachable memory, one might recognize that they were, in fact, replicating a precise, if highly abstract, map of the surrounding table.
The notetaker, of course, would be highly surprised by this, and greatly excited by the notion of a substance that, although lamentably incapable of telepathic properties, was nevertheless capable of forming a perfect copy of its surroundings. A useful discovery to be sure. Anyone would be happy enough with this. Anyone at all.
But only the most inanely patient person imaginable, a person steeped in pedantry, marinated in tedium, and with a deft grasp of the most monotonous details of language, would’ve noticed that the text from Simmyon Besch’s open (self-authored, incomplete) tome on psychoalchemical processes had been altered substantially in the little model floating in his cauldron. The alphabet and sentence structures were broken down and rearranged, changing, always altering, vanishing and reappearing and restructuring itself like a child playing with blocks. Methodically.

The days that followed were tumultuous and heady, nearly as much so as the vapors that fumed from his Sir Besch’s creation. Besch made no protest when the men of the college removed the object of interest from his study; indeed, he thanked them for sparing his eyes the sight of his failures. His eye’s gain was the loss of their noses: within an afternoon’s time the laboratory the fluid was host to was a den of fumes, and Besch’s cramped, crabbed notes were made nigh-unreadable in the thick haze.
Codes were deciphered. Questions were sent to Besch (once again burdened in the realm of law) and returned with answers which begat more questions. Ingredients were purchased from traders, angrily returned, replaced, exchanged, and finally repurchased. Flames bubbled and laughed to themselves underneath hissing fluids, running riot over iron-rimmed crockpots.
Several of the more elderly professors nearly fainted in the later stages of examination, but after a hasty revival with lemon water, the verdict was triumphant. Where once the college had possessed a single two-liter cauldron of Besch’s mysterious self-teaching fluids, they now held two, virtually indistinguishable in every way.
The only question now was what to do with them. Which would have been so very simple to solve if everyone hadn’t had an answer.

In testing, a broader sampling conveys a more credible result. This is practical and reasonable. And this it was for practical and reasonable motives that over a dozen more of the oil-and-smoke mixtures were produced for consideration, as well as for the purposes of petty feuding and academic tribalism. The urges to tinker and test were nigh-unstoppable, and even close colleagues were set apart from one another on the exact methods to use to probe Besch’s mysterious solutions. His Sir Mozzen Fen was not about to contaminate his processes of psychochemical overlap with the inept bungling of his Professorship Bentin Tanton’s nearreal vapor thematics. And of course neither would be caught dead adding that ludicrous pet project of her Deaconship Tessala Manner’s – dynamic hueing as a conductor of dreams? As likely that the sky were supported by eight cherubs, thank you very much.
No, no, each curious investigator demanded their own playground with which to expand the cognitive horizons of Besch’s brew, and every week more and more of them came to poke and prod and investigate. The quantity of vats used grew too immense for any classroom or study lab, and a gymnasium was conscripted to hold the sheer volume – much to the ire of the students, who not only felt the sting of being deprived of athletics and sportsmanship but also the sore goading of their building’s new overlords, who pressed them into service as monitors, recorders, and minders. While her Professorship snored, a student sat at her vat’s-side, pencil tickling, mind stewing, feet tapping, nose prickling under the veiled mask provided to ensure safety from the noxious vapors.
It shielded the body from harm, perhaps, but the nostrils from disgust, never. Each vat grew its own odors, all varied, all overpoweringly mighty in expression, so that even the sweetest-smelling stew was as great a chore to monitor as that which brought to mind a rotting carcass. The students, left to their own devices, developed their own peculiar means of sorting and identifying the projects. Sours. Sweats. Sicklies. Sweets. Bitters. Rotters.

It was the Sicklies that produced the first results, some two months later. While nodding off over his studies, the nameless student on observation duty for the vat – whose only known traits must include an iron stomach, as the Sicklies were jointly if unofficially ranked the vilest of the brews – raised his eyes from the tiresome book he was poring over, rubbed futilely at them with fatigued paws, and returned his gaze to the words in front of his face. So deep was his exhaustion that it took until the end of the sentence for him to realize he was staring into the cauldron rather than his textbook and reading a question instead of a tiresome piece of anecdotal evidence.
The question was thus: what am I?
Whether – whatever – the student responded is also unknown.

The cognition, as that moment was dubbed, was credited to the tireless efforts of Professor Tanton. His nearreal vapors were a good deal nearer than any had surmised, including his Professorship himself, and he was rained so greatly in glory that he near-drowned in it. The creation of an artificial psyche, in a laboratory, from a culture of mere liquid and gas, broiled through a piping system of not-quite-there ethereal mist scavenged from beyond the Sill itself! The only name of genius more eagerly swept from lip to lip was that of Simmyon Bash, the man whose grand failure had begat such a triumph.
Alas, his Sir Besch was not available to witness the fruiting of his glory. He had been found three weeks before the cognition, at his desk, immobile. Surrounding him on that ornate wooden surface were a mechanically-altered Ta Listenstem, a lead-woven and silver-inlaid pouch of sand and gold of Gizikk origin, a female Sfoll’s prime brain-horn, heavily-stained with unknown substances, and a series of exotically-constructed vials containing mind-altering fluids, powders, and particles too potent to be named, let alone sold. His expression was quite impossible to read, and most novel to all who looked upon it.
The cause of death was deemed to be a blood-clot in the brain, though no-one quite dared to perform an autopsy on that augustly domed forehead, for fear of seeing what may have lain within.

Of course, when all the champagne and shoom have been consumed, there’s still the tidying-up of the research left to be done. Tedious, but necessary. Like chewing.
First and foremost was the rapid shunting away of the failed vats. As important as they had been when they could have heralded the soon-to-be Great Discoveries of their creators, they were now embarrassing might-have-beens, and the sooner it could be pretended that they had never existed, the better. The failures – and the one or two students that were felt to be necessary to tokenly ‘observe’ them – were shut up away in a small laboratory and ignored for the sake of many a scholarly reputation.
After that came the tests. Tests of intellect, tests of responsiveness, tests of basic empathy and emotional development, tests tests tests. Some of the later ones the Sicklies began to suggest improvements for, and that was when reserve was cast to the winds and gales in favor of headlong informational exchange.
The Sicklies were apt pupils, and quick learners – though of course, all communication had to be done by means of placing texts adjacent to their cauldron. But with a swift stenographer and the addition of further bulk material to the Sicklies to aid in construction, communication was fluid and swift. Within hours of discussion in philosophy, they were giving even ground to his Doctorship Iblon Nott in matters of ethics. A week of biology and chemistry gave them expertise enough to speculate upon the parallels between their own forms and that of those who taught them, and within a short month the Sicklies were polymaths of a sort unrivalled within the school’s walls.
It was most disturbing. But permissible. Novelty is permissible.
And then one day, as the Lord Dean himself was just concluding an exhaustive interview with the Sicklies on the subject of the governance of Demmerdant’s academic community, a question emerged within its depths: when may I see the city?
The Lord Dean gave the eminently reasonable reply that the Sicklies had of course seen the city already, or were they not this very moment within the hallowed walls of his office; his, the Lord Dean of all Demmerdant, the greatest city in Demmer-Don-Dimmer?
The rest of it. All of it. I want to see its walls. I want to see its rivers. I want to see its markets and its highways and its towers. I want to see the palace of the Consul of Demmer-Don-Dimmer, and I want to see this building from the outside as it truly is. I want to see the city, and judge for myself whether it is what I have imagined it to be.
The Lord Dean hemmed and hawed of ‘lack of preparation’ and ‘all things in good time’ – adeptly, for he was no freshly minted member of faculty – and sent the Sicklies away. Immediately following this he consulted with his professorial council, and from the pooling of their collective wisdom and matured insight the following was determined:
That the substance which was capable of learning, known as the Sicklies, did possess desire and drives.
That the Sicklies did also possess self-assertion and the capability to ignore or argue against perfectly good advice.
That the Sicklies were indeed already possessed of knowledge pertaining to many of the physical and psychological sciences comparative to that of the collected council, in a post-cognition period of less than a month in length.
That this knowledge so generously (in hindsight, perhaps less than wisely) shared to it could be dangerous, especially in so changeable an entity, and one capable of expanding its intellect so rapidly.
And finally
That something should be done about this situation.
Which was
That the Sicklies must be disposed of.

It was easy enough. The Sicklies remained in their original small, lightweight cauldron. As simple as picking it up and carrying it to the nearest waste-sink. As simple as tipping it forward a few degrees, held gingerly in gloved fingertips by a student who was only a little more cautious than bored.
The liquid drained away quite rapidly, despite its thick and sluggish appearance. Behind it remained only a hairline-thin crystalline lattice, half-formed into half-thought sentences, already brittle and pale in the daylight that peered through the laboratory’s cobwebbed windowpane.
Three taps sent that into the sink as well, and a rush of water to follow.
Even the smell was gone.

After the Sicklies were disposed of, the question remained of what to do with the remainder of the vats. And of course, it required many hours of debate after a full reformation of the professorial council to reach the eminently sensible decision to do away with them too.
The sinks required the attention of plumbers at least three times during the process, and one unfortunate had the entire contents of the Sharps spilt all over him from head to toe, putting him in a vinegar-scented sickbay for over a month. But this, asides from a few stubbed toes, was the only real disruption of a messy but necessary business. The sun set, the sun rose, and the college of Demmerdant was as it had been before. Serene and knowledgeable.
One week later, the Bitters walked through its doors.

Much of what had occurred in the gap between the purging of the vats and then is supposition and guesswork, troubled by a lack of important witnesses and much use of it-stands-to-reason. But the general presumption is this: the Sicklies had been the first of the vats to reach cognition, but they had not been the last. Somewhere in the hubbub and excitement of the event’s aftermath, somewhere in a dimmed room with only a solitary set of distracted eyes to observe, the Bitters had awoken, or perhaps simply finally found the means with which to express thoughts that had long been simmering in their depths.
It had learned, perhaps. In the quiet, it had theorized and tested and predicted and observed all by itself. It had taken lessons from the dark and been tutored by dust, it had hypothesized of the world outside the doors by the dirt on the boots of its monitor, it had inducted biology from the germs and mites and spiders.
And while it learned, it had learned to move.
Crystalline lattices were a known thing to it. Extending them was no real feat of logic. Searching the immediate environs with these probes for nutritional additions was an incentive to explore, as well as a good means of providing more fuel to build with.
The testimony of the second plumber should be mentioned here. After his turn at the laboratory sink, conducted from the dankness of the basement, he swore that the cause of the blockage had been a rat ‘lodged-whole’ in the laboratory drain, and that the creature had skittered away with a clumsy gait after he freed it. “A wonder the thing ‘twasn’t drowned.”
Following this, analysis of recovered texts from the college indicate that student book theft from the library rose nearly 400% over the week, in direct flabberghastment of a statistically expected average of records from the last century. This was noticed, complained of, and collected together with warnings of missing lab equipment, particularly glass beakers and the like. Dark suggestions were made of students plotting to brew psychoactive substances for their own childish amusement, and the dorms were searched no less than twice, without warning each time.
Nothing was found, the disappearances of odds and ends were chalked up to carelessness, and the life of the college moved on.
On the day the Bitters stepped through the guard doors of the college of Demmerdant, it stood five feet eleven inches in height, approximately, and not much less in width. In shape it was a lump with limbs – four stumpy legs that moved in oddly sinuous motion, and a pair of great elongated reaching things with blunted appendages. In matter, it was glass, it was ceramic, it was metallic, it was a hundred, a hundred more vials and beakers and cauldrons and pots and kettles and cups and dishes, all sealed in strangely malleable glue that beaded with a dark and heady perspiration. This figure was lashed together with twine, wire, rope and an unhealthy conglomerate of glistening near-solids; it should not have stood upright, and yet it strode faster than a man might run. The air around it seared the nostrils raw with its intensity, and in its left paw it bore a great sign, etched with almost delicate calligraphy into a torn piece of oak that had once been a plank from a study hall’s floor.
It read: I HAVE SEEN.

The college was hit the hardest, with only the quickest and luckiest escaping. By the time the Bitters walked through the gates of Demmerdant College once more it found itself facing a full platoon of the city guard armed to the teeth with the Consul’s largesse: weapons from the Terramac, crafted from strange alloys that seemed to glow too brightly in the sunlight.
It was a frightful thing, to be sure. Its surface glistened with fresh blood, and its limbs were entangled with unspeakable masses. Redness suffused it, mixing with its natural murk, and it held the sign I HAVE SEEN aloft high and proud as it marched without pause towards the massed men-at-arms of Demmerdant.
It was glass, it was ceramic, it was – in some part – metallic, and none of those things, however hostile the force that powered them, could withstand the force of a full volley of Shentomaran Shells – the buzzing, vibrating little disks shrieked and whirred as they bored through mulch and kitchenwares and metal. The Bitters quivered and spilled its guts across the college’s doorstep, across the cobbles that had seen a dozen generations of graduates, and it moved no more.
There was silence in the street then, save the humming of the weaponry. Silence, and then a strange scrabbling sound that was the most important in all the world.
From a doorway shambled a small thing, not much larger than a cat, crafted almost entirely from a single cauldron. Its limbs were cutlery, and the glue that held it was thick as sludge.
From a window came shattered glass and a crawling thing that looked to be an entire kitchen’s-worth of containers, all sealed now, all full of something that roiled without boiling.
From the river came a low, long grinding, and the hull of a river-barge scraped its way over the sides, fitted with limbs that had once been masts. It stank of old weeds and fresh scum.
And only hesitantly, slowly, reluctantly in the wake of this unveiling, came the screams of all of Demmerdant.

As a whole, Demmer-Don-Dimmer got off lightly.
The college was nigh-purged.
The Consul’s palace was eliminated entirely, and not a man nor woman living can still say what took place there.
Those who did not fight but only fled – those who were not of the college, that is – were let be, and permitted to flee to strange lands and familiar disdain, there to live their lives as best as they would be begrudgingly permitted. “Dims” was a word used harshly, and far too often for far too long.

Today, Demmer-Don-Dimmer is a quiet place, and empty. A pittance of cats gone feral prowl the jungles that were once housing, and pigeons roost in ransacked bookcases. People too may wander as they will within the realm, to marvel at the soaring, untouched walls, to stare at the falling, creaking things that were its towers, its markets, its highways.
But when their eyes turn to its rivers, they turn away. For the stench of those bodies of water – of all the water in all of Dimmer-Don-Dimmer that does not come from rainfall – is beyond belief, and things grow in its depths that cannot be seen, hidden safely under thick curtains of silt and worse.
They do not speak often. They act on the outside world still less, save when their domain is intruded upon.
For the most part, the aged oaken plank jabbed into the muck at the edge of Demmerdant’s docks holds the only message that the Bitters are willing to leave, inscribed thickly over the older, worn words that it once held.
I HAVE JUDGED.

It’s so beautiful up here.
Look left, look right, look ahead, look behind: all the same, all perfectly smoothed and ghost-silent dunes, every size but each one just the right shape, the shape of a life-of-gold. Look up above, and the sky’s an empty blot with no clouds to hug your eyeballs and reassure them that the world is a small place, manageable and tame.
“My knees are killing me. How are your knees not killing you? You have two on each leg.”
I sighed – the quiet kind, the kind that gets muffled and strangled by your mouthguard before it can reach anyone’s ears – and repeated myself for the fifth time in ten minutes: “we’re almost there, Mr. Tallbeck. Just a little farther.”
Tallbeck was lacking in my discretion and swore openly and foully to himself as he wrestled himself upwards through the sand: old swearwords, no doubt, curses passed down through the dusty generations of his family from eldest uncle to youngest nephew, as was proper, and devout, and civilized. That was how the world worked and anything else was simply unnatural, as I’d been rigorously informed at least once per hour since the beginning of my employment. I’d never regretted a necessary evil so much. Hast Tallbeck, he’d introduced himself as: traveller, explorer, tourist, and hundred-and-sixty-pound-load. And the humans say me and my kind remind them of insects; I’d seen sand fleas with more flesh on them than Tallbeck.
“Your triple-damned dunes are getting into my socks now, Aro! How is that even possible, hey? I’m wearing three layers of clothing tied down with more rope than a narrow-quashed Matagant frigate!”
Because you didn’t tie the knots properly after I showed you and you were too stone-stubborn to ask for a repeat lesson or so help from an ignorant savage, I didn’t say, because I needed the money. Well, sort of. “Nearly there,” I repeated, calmly, steadily, just as I’d say to little brother Bacca. “Almost there.”
“How you blithering beetlebodies manage to wander around here all day without baking to death underneath those shells of yours is beyond me. Is it all the iron you eat? It’s all the iron you eat, isn’t it. Fifty-fingered-fountain of showoffs, you are.”
I made a null-comment of a murmur, and to my relief my client subsided into muttering fumes again, cloaked by the rushing ssshhh-shhhh-shhh of falling sandgrains and the occasional near-bellow of a grunt.
Think of the money, I repeated to myself carefully, clicking my mandibles together in a quiet little marching chant. Think of a half-hundred Matagant coins tucked into your chinbag from a spendthrift, loudmouthed tourist of the world, and what you can get with that. Yes, father will be angry, yes, mother will put on that disappointed face of hers she inherited from grandmother, yes, Bacca will be told all sorts of things about you – mostly by what isn’t said about you – but it’ll all be worth it in the end. Even after you’ve had to lug this dismal clod’s belongings a hundred miles from town for him because he packed what feels like his own weight again in rocks. I could’ve carried enough metal to keep me fed for a thousand-mile journey and not suffered as much under the load.
And there it was, as easy as that: the crest of the dune, the tip of the wave, hundreds of feet above the sea – that little blue line on the horizon we’d departed days ago. On a whim, I held out a single finger and erased all of it from existence. Add one digit, minus however many thousands of miles of water and fish and whatever else was out there.
“Burn it to Bashera, that’s a hike and a half and no mistake,” panted Tallbeck. He sat down and almost sunk up to his spidery waist, triggering another spate of sputtering and curses. “So, this is your auntie or whatever it was then?” he asked, with one of his charming eye-rolls.
I hummed a little bit of one of mother’s old sleep-songs to myself to resist the urge to hit him, covering it up with a small cough. “No,” I replied eventually. “This is Grandmother Uy. There is only one aunt of mine in this desert – Cha – and she’s miles and miles down the coast, near the Nagezzy Delta. There aren’t many that aren’t old enough to have had at least a few children that go down into the sand. There’s thousands of mothers, fathers, and grandfathers out there. Not so many aunts, uncles. No sons or daughters. Too young to have earned it, too young to bear it. It takes a strong, full mind to bear the burden of the life-of-gold.” Even as the breath left my mouth I wondered why I was wasting my words on this man.
“Right, of course,” he said. I could practically hear those green eyeballs turning this time. It made me sick to watch – how you could see without compound lenses was beyond me, but how you stopped yourself from throwing up when that happened couldn’t even begin to be imagined.
“Right right right. Very poetical and all that.” He wriggled uncomfortably in the sand, sinking a little deeper despite his efforts. “Tell me, where is the well?”
The well. Of course he’d wanted to know about the wells, it was the first thing everybody asked. I’d been looking forward to this. “You’re sitting on it.”
Holding in my laughter as the moron surged to his feet took a pretty nasty bite to my lip, but it was doable. “Jeremiah ripping apart jackrabbits!” he spat, nearly falling over again. “You just leave them open like that!?”
“Not much choice. Whatever we raise, they’ll cover up. And if we made them big enough to stand strong – well then, they’d get left behind. Grandmother Uy isn’t about to be pinned to the spot by any of her grandchildren’s tricks; the moment she wants to move, she’ll slip it off and glide away.”
“Crotchety old saltsniffer,” said Tallbeck. “Reminds me of my mother-in-law, hey?”
I was very good by now at not altering my expression, but I drew the line at faking laughter. Thankfully, Tallbeck wasn’t about to wait for my input. “Well, regardless… how do you know the well’s down there?”
“They tell us.”
“Right, right, right.” Eyeroll. Again. “So, do you leave markers then?”
I shrugged.
“Mmm. But how can you check if the damned thing’s all coated over with sand? Wouldn’t you want to make sure your, ah, offerings haven’t gone missing? There’s a lot of valuable stuff down there, from what I’ve heard… life-after-gold necessitates gold, does it not?”
I grinned a bit through my mouthguard. This was the fun bit. I’d talked to others who’d sunk to my current job; they said it was most satisfying when your client had brought a shovel. “It doesn’t go missing. There’s a half-hundred feet of sand between us and the well’s bottom at Grandmother Uy’s heart. We don’t need to check after we send her body down the well with her presents.”
“You bury it all… forever?”
I shrugged again. “They take care of it themselves.”
“The damned winds out here – and I expect that once this cherry-burned thing gets moving, not much of the well will stay put anyways, am I close, hey?”
Shrug. I was pleased to see that it was irritating him immensely: possibly the one thing he and my mother had in common.
“Well, well, well. A little bit of a joke at my expense?”
Self-awareness? No, never heard of it – did you mean ‘put-upon’? I can do put-upon, yes sir, if my name isn’t Mr. Hast Tallbeck. “No. We don’t really talk about the wells much. It’s a common mistake.” I need that money, damnit. Don’t go reneging now.
“Pfaugh.” He glared at the small sinkhole forming where his ass had rested. “Well, it’ll do anyways. I’ll just have to use more of the stuff. Pass me my pack, will you?”
Now, if I’d been just a little more tired at that moment, things might have gone differently. As it was, I had enough spare energy left to stop with the pack in my hands and ask: “what?”
“The pack, of course.”
“No. What do you need? What stuff?”
Tallbeck’s big green eyes sucked themselves in a little, the face they were trapped inside too fleshless to bring them down to slits. “Stop dawdling and give me the pack.”
This was probably my money on the line now, but every single action performed by Tallbeck in the last thirty seconds had shifted that a little lower on my priorities. “Tell me.”
Tallbeck had a thing in his hand. It was small and grey and plain and looked exactly like one of those Terramac machines you can only find in the biggest markets that deal in goods from far-away-and-farther, the kind that can heat up little shards of iron and send them spitting at you faster than an arrow shot by a diving eagle. This was probably because it was.
“Do I have to repeat myself to you?”
“No need for threats now, Mr. Tallbeck,” I replied evenly. I wondered if anywhere on my carapace was thick enough to deflect the shot. Probably not, and even if so, probably not before it punctured somewhere a lot thinner.
“No need for this sort of digging-around either, yet here we are. Now, kindly hand over my pack to me – carefully.”
The man’s voice had that horrible sneering smugness in it again that showed he was smiling, but I was too focused on the machine from the Terramac. It seemed to be open-mouthed, ready to scream. “You aren’t going to shoot me, Tallbeck. You’d have to carry your pack back yourself, and there’s no way you’re going to lift this thing and make it more than five feet.”
“On the contrary,” he said. How had he gotten that machine into his hand so fast? One moment it wasn’t there, then all of a sudden it was. Had it been there all along and I’d just never noticed? No, no, don’t let the mind wander! “Once all the Matagant explosives have been emptied out of it and used, I suspect it’ll be a light load. Minus, of course, the twenty or so pounds of gold you so kindly informed me you little sand-fleas leave down at the bottom of these things?”
“It won’t work.”
“Give me a reason why. Now give me my pack.”
Time was starting to slow down in my head. But if there was a fight, best to start it on the right foot. “This pack is full of explosive devices.”
“Yes! Congratulations, hey? You do have a brain somewhere inside there!”
“I am holding it directly in front of me and you are threatening me with a weapon. That shoots red-hot metal.”
It took him a minute to think over that, and while he was thinking instead of firing, I threw the pack at him.
A good throw, but an awkward missile – the pack clipped his arm and spoiled his aim as I threw myself at him: a shot for my head went through my right arm, sending it white hot in my brain. Time to wrestle, time to use all the tricks father taught me when I was little – take his feet out, down he goes, grab his arms. Ah, can’t grab his arms, not with one arm, not with a weapon in the other that’s already wobbling my way, inching my way. I can’t hold both his hands.
Headbutt. Oh, that’s put him off his aim, now I can AH!
I recoiled backwards for a moment, nose pouring out blood by the cupful where the hard, cold surface of the machine from the Terramac had smashed it sideways, and that was all that Tallbeck needed. A foot found a grip, his hand grasped at my jacket, and I went down spinning in the sand, sending it flying into the air and into my eyes – ah, it hurt!
The sky was there again, big and empty and lonely, and then Tallbeck filled it, made me wish for loneliness again. His hand was full of death and his eyes were full of anger, and I’d never felt so small.
“GRANDMOTHER!” I called as his fingers slid on the machine’s lever.
He stopped for a moment, just a moment. Long enough for a laugh (a chuckle really), a shake of the head, and a quick roll of those green eyes.
They had just started to widen when the sand squealed under his feet.
And he vanished there, too fast to see him drop, but down into the sand, into the life-of-gold he’d gone; Hast Tallbeck, traveller, explorer, tourist, and thief. And not more than a half-second too soon, because that was when I passed out.

When I awoke, the sky was black and huge, scattered with a million lights, and my arm had stopped its throbbing, changed to a dull ache. A quick inspection showed that the machine from the Terramac had bored a hole all the way through, searing it shut as it went, trapping the blood inside. I thought about what could’ve happened if Tallbeck had simply brought a knife with him, and winced.
Still, there was an errand to do before I left. One hand on the heart, one hand on the surface of the well.
“Sorry for the trouble, Grandmother,” I whispered in the back of my throat. Little mumbles, tiny tremors, barely audible but a faint buzz through my body, down through my palms and into the sand.
You only had to ask, great-great-great-great-great-grandson, she sighed, a trickle of force on my fingers, a stirring travelling up through my arms and into my chest. Her whispers came from a body twice the size of her dune, the body of the life-of-gold.
I tell each and all of you this, every time I speak to you and I see the troubles on your faces: you only had to ask.
“I know. Wanted to handle it myself.”
And you all always say that. Just like your father?
I winced, thought of all that money on Tallbeck, all that money down under two hundred feet of Grandmother Uy. “Yes. Yes. Damnit. I’m sorry, Grandmother. He needs the surgery, but he can’t pay and he won’t let me try to help.”
More fool the both of you. Here.
The grains at my fingertips stirred, gleamed. Take them.
I scooped up a handful, let the tiny golden fragments drain into my palm as the sand fell away. “Grandmother?”
Take them.
“These are you, Grandmother. These are for you, from us. These are your mind-food, your fuel for your memories and your body, to let you grow under the sand until you reach the sky. These are what keep you from haring off into the Ever-After, keep you standing and singing here under the sun.”
And as long as you and all my other children are alive, I am doing that already. Take them.
Besides, I have more.
I sighed – out loud and clear this time, no need to hide this from relatives – and took the grains of gold. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Far too few to engage the treasure-lust of a tourist, but enough to pay one miserable old man to operate on a stubborn old man.
“Good-bye, Grandmother,” I said. “I will travel here again and visit before I’m married.”
A little sooner, if you don’t mind, she whispered under my feet as I walked away, slipping down her sides. And bring your family. Don’t want your father to think he’s getting out of this mess clean and shining.
“I won’t.”
And Aro…?
“Yes, Grandmother?”
The dune rippled underfoot, sending me to the base of Grandmother Uy in a dusty, confusing instant. I ducked just before Tallbeck’s pack could smash into me.
Take this thing with you. It chafes against me.

It chafed against my right side, too. Still, the walk back to the coast? Much more pleasant. And quiet.

Oh man, oh well, here we go again. Look at you. Just look at you. It’s goddamned precious. I don’t remember the last time I saw anything this hilarious, and I don’t even remember forgetting.
What d’you mean “what?” Your outfit there? Those little brass buckles, those blue-and-green-patches? That’s Matagant wear. That’s almost a thousand miles away, and your cute little trains will only take you half of that before you have to get out and ride. And then the mountains get in your way and you have to walk.
You’ve walked at least a hundred miles to get here, Mata-boy. That’s what’s so damned adorable. And I bet you even think it was a hard trip, because it took the shine right off those brass buttons.
Hey. Hey. Don’t walk away now, Mata-boy. Don’t walk away and leave an old snowcrawler here high and dry. I’ve got what you want. Spend a few dollars to rinse the dust out of my throat, and I’ll tell you everything about the Window you ever wanted to know.
Of course you want to know about the Window. You’re here, aren’t you? Oh man, oh Mata-boy, here we go again.

First thing: you want to know about the Window, you got to know about the Sill. If you don’t want to hear about it, well tough shit Mata-boy, they’re as tied up as tied up can ever be. The man that found the Window founded the Sill two hours later, that’s how close they are. Two hours. We know that ’cause we know the times.
The Window was found eighty-one years ago exactly, to the day, at three-thirty-three in the afternoon. Sillas Bradley hauled himself over that ridge ten feet behind some poor bastard securing the ropes no one remembers, looked down a two-thousand-foot drop, and looked up into a sky that wasn’t quite real.
Two hours later, he puts down a flag and tells everyone to start building something better than tents. Bam. That was that. Old bastard doomed the lot of us right then and there. “Let’s build our homes on the edge of a cliff.” Two hours.
Yeah, of course it was temporary! Of course it was temporary! Christ, it was a bunch of tents and piled-up rocks and they had no food, not so much as a goddamned twig to build with. Of course it was just a friggin’ stopgap. Didn’t stop them from coming back six months later with more stuff, did it? All ready to build pretty little houses and carrying packs chock-full of tasty salted meat and just as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as lovable little shitfaced squirrels, right?
Yeah, I’d say it was at least three or four dozen deaths in the first few weeks of building up Sill. Overwork, underfed, couldn’t handle the thin air, couldn’t handle the noise the Window makes….
No, you don’t get used to it. Not really. You get better at ignoring it, but whenever you don’t, it just slides back in. Like someone sticking their finger in your nose, except it fills up your whole head.
No, I damned well don’t wonder how they felt when they went through the Window for the first time. I don’t wonder because everyone feels the same way. Everybody’s first time might as well be the first time ever, because you never really know it ’till you’ve tried it.
You sort of… freeze up. You walk up those fifty-six steps until you’re forty feet farther over the edge of the cliff than you’d ever wanted to be, with nothing but some greasy old timbers that groan like grandmother’s bra between you and two thousand and forty feet of empty air. You’re trying not to look at the Window, but that just leaves looking down and you don’t want to do that either. And you can’t shut your eyes.
So you look at the Window, and it hurts your eyes like hell. Like someone put salt in them, and the salt wants to lick the backside of your head by going right through the middle. Shut up, I know it doesn’t make any goddamned sense. Just listen. Listen.
While you’re looking at the window and trying not to pay attention to it, your legs are still moving because they know if you stop, so will the guy behind you, and so will the guy behind him, and then the whole lot of you’ll be just sitting there on top of the fifty-six steps, all of you. Standing there, not moving, on top of that creaking staircase from hell. Which is starting to groan a little louder every second. And you’re stuck right at the end of it farthest from solid ground.
I’ve got to finish this cup. Hold up.

Okay, that’s better.

Right. You go through the Window, right through the part of the air where the air is different and sparkles like ground glass, and you’re not right side up, upside down, or sideways. You’re just sort of there. In the air. Floating free as a friggin’ fairy, you and the guy behind and the guy in front of you and every single one of the whole expedition, at least twelve and at most a hundred and nineteen.
That only happened once, yeah, and it nearly broke the fifty-six steps. Next biggest was eighty or something I don’t know, just listen. You didn’t come this far to hear yourself talk, did you Mata-boy?
When you’re floating there, everyone looks helpless as babies for the first few moments. After that the veterans start to remember, and the new floaters just go rigid. Too scared to move. But they have to, so it’s everyone else’s job to shove ’em into shape. Push them, yell at them, drag ’em along if you need to do it. They usually unfreeze in the first few hours. If they don’t, well, you just tie them on a lead and drag ’em around. It’s stupid, but sometimes there’s one or two that just end up like that. No point in complaining too loud once you know it, because there’s no way to fix it. Just do the bitching inside your head, it’s a real comfort.
It also takes your mind off what you’re seeing now, because you’re seeing a lot of things past the Window that you don’t want to. There’s colours that I’m sure as shit don’t really exist, that’s the big part. Looking at anything makes you queasy, especially things that should look right but don’t. You go in wearing blue socks, you come out wearing blue socks, but while you’re past the Window you don’t want to check what colour those socks are, because whatever they are it won’t be right.
The sound’s not as bad, no. It’s so loud you can’t hear it anymore. Or feel it. Kinda relaxing, really. Everything in there is all muffled and shit, like your ears are full of mud. No complaints there, Mata-boy. Don’t fret your pretty little head about scary noises.
Yeah, yeah, I’m getting there, I’m getting there. Let me tell you about what you’re seeing in there that’s so scary.
You won’t see the Ta right away, I can tell you that. They never hang around the Window. Must give them the creeps as much as it does us, if they can feel that way. I’ve got no idea, let some priest babble on about their mindset or their souls or whatever, I just know trying to read them is like trying to chew water, but they don’t come near the Window. Not unless they have a reason. Like us.
Hold up. Last gulp.
Good stuff. You trying to soften me up, Mata-boy? Hah, sweet of you, but you’re too young for me.
The first thing you see isn’t the Ta, it’s probably a broken up kala-husk. The big bastards never die easy, either something cracks them open and eats them like a fox with a hen’s egg or they overswell their shells and explode from the inside out when they hit old age – whatever the husks are made of, it may look like wool and feel like wood, but it’s harder than iron. Helluva way to go, but it’s supposed to take a few hundred years for them to get big enough. There’s one big husk that’s usually floating without a few miles of the Window’s other side, Huge Halger. He’s your best friend – floats around so slowly and you can see him from so far away that there’s no beating him as a direction. Good as a compass heading. “Go towards Halger’s biggest crag on the left side. We’re not that near, head a little bit farther away from Halger. Be careful, there’s a swirl of particular angles near Halger’s far side.”
Particular angles you usually don’t get near the Window either. It’s a pretty dead quiet zone, they like to hunt live, lively prey. That doesn’t mix well.
Swirl’s the word, yeah. You can’t count them, and you can’t tell one big angle from a thousand little ones. No one can. So they’re a swirl of particular angles. Just the way it works, Mata-boy, and it doesn’t make too much difference at all. One little angle in the wrong spot’s worse than a million ones each the size of this pub, if they’re a safe ways away. Of course, the safest place to be when it comes to them is this side of the Window. I saw a little wee swirl of angles once – couldn’t have been bigger than my right tit – and I saw it boil right up through the man next to me’s ribcage. Closest I’ve ever been, and I’m just happy they were filled right up after that because they could’ve had me for dessert without even trying.
What d’you mean, what do they eat? Hah! You look to be the reading kind, Mata-boy, you telling me you didn’t even try to learn this stuff at home before you walked a hundred miles into the asshole of the ass-end of the world? What’re you, a writer? Spit and shit, boy, think you’ll be the first to write a book that’s the reading, what an ego you’ve got! But hah, there you go and fill my cup again, so I’m not going to stop talking.
Particular angles eat lines, and they’re picky eaters, so they prefer big ones, and the straighter the better. Which is good because otherwise they’d probably eat everything. Instead, they’ll just take most of your arteries, or the spaces between your teeth, or every single stitch in your clothing, it’s all luck as to what they end up going for. I saw a body once, the angles had taken every last hair on his head and not a single damned thing anywhere else. Died of fright, poor bastard. Some people can even lose when they win.
Particular angles aren’t the only problem in there. Big problem is the stinks. You see this mask here? See the big bulb over the nose? That hollow’s meant to be filled with the nastiest-smelling shit you can imagine. I don’t know what the apothecaries make it out of, but you put a good wad of that under your whiffer and you don’t have to worry about the stinks. There’s these little spores that make smells out there, that’re so sharp and funked that they’ll send you into coughing fits that can dislocate your jaw, and they hit hard enough that after a few minutes of that you can’t keep breathing.
Well, after you die, the spores fill your carcass and breed in it. Circle of goddamned life. Isn’t it a gorgeous little bitch?
But I’d say the worst problem – the worst problem that’s a straight-up threat – is the noisy thoughts. The stinks? You just wear your mask all the time. Even when you need to eat. Better sick than dead. Particular angles, you just keep an eye out and keep a bunch more near you. But the noisy thoughts? You can’t do anything about those. Anything at all. And almost nobody toughs them out.
See, when they first get their hooks into you, you think it’s you. It’s a tune, or an idea, or something you think someone might’ve mentioned. The tip of your brain’s tongue, you know what I mean? And you let it sit there. Biding its time. You’re waiting for it to go away, because if you just wait things like this ALWAYS go away, but it won’t. It just gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger.
And the bastard of this is that up until right near the very end, most people think that a noisy thought is just something they can’t get out of their head. What’s really funny there, Mata-boy? They’re sort of right. But not quite.
Now, the bit at the end where even the dimwits get that something’s wrong, that’s when their other thoughts start getting crowded out. It starts out soft – you’re so busy humming along with the little song that you lose track of the knot you’re tying, or you stop walking for a moment for no good reason. Then before you know it you’re losing sentences halfway through and forgetting people’s names. By the end? You can’t even think enough to move. The whole brain shuts down bit by bit.
And the real kicker of all this, Mata-boy? There’s nobody that knows what the hell the noisy thoughts even get out of this. They come. They hollow you out. And then they go. You can count the survivors on the fingers of a blind butcher’s hand, and there’s only one still living. If you can call it living. Look up Dead-Head Lizzie, eh? She’ll tell you.
I need another drink. Double it up this time.

Okay, so now you got an idea of some of the risks. That’s just the flashy stuff, mind. I haven’t said jack squat about the things that just drive people nuts or make them wander off and never come back in the night – oh yeah, there’s no night. No day either. Amazing how fast that makes some guys snap.
Now we’re gonna talk about the sweet stuff, the reason anyone wants to go through the damned Window in the first place. We’re going to talk about what Sillas Bradley found when he took fifty-six armed bastards through there for the first time ever, when the fifty-seven steps were still new and didn’t creak so bad.
See, at first the old bastard didn’t find much more than what I told you. No right or left, up or down. Colours all wrong. Huge Halger. Lost a few women and men to particular angles, I think, and the first time anyone saw that would be enough to send most home.
But they were out for money. Nobody wants to come back home with an empty wallet, eh? Makes the bosses unhappy. So they searched in circles, and just when they’d given up, well, there they found something. Floating inside the scraped-out scraps of an old kala-husk, they found some shooms growing.
Funny things, shooms. You ever try some, Mata-boy? A sliver of a scraping’s all I ever could afford, but you bought those brass buttons with somebody’s money, and I’m betting you have more than that.
Never tried? Liar. But such a goddamned polite one. Butter wouldn’t melt in that mouth of yours, would it? Hah. Well then, I’ll be twice as polite and pretend I believe that bullshit, lay it out flat with you: a worm’s-skint-scraping of shoom tastes like sex warmed over by a god and filled to the gills with wine made out of sunbeams.
If you think that isn’t enough reason to send men and women in there to die, Mata-boy, you’re dumber than I thought. But there’s more to it than that. While the taste of that beautiful little parasite is melting apart against the roof of your mouth, you know numbers.
No, I don’t mean that you can do math, no I
Pay attention and shut up. You. Know. Numbers. You don’t add or subtract or any other bullshit, you just know ’em. While that little scrap of shoom was wasting on my tongue, I could see any number I imagined, and I knew it inside and out. Sillas sent home a bushel or two, and they let the royal mathematician try it out. He sorted every single tax record in the country sound as a bell inside the day. Nearly wore out his wrist with cramping, but it worked. It’s precious stuff, Mata-boy, and there’s two who eat it: royalty, and the advisors of royalty. And the snowcrawlers who bring it back from beyond the Window and are just quiet enough to sneak scraps without getting caught. You get caught once skivving on a trip, you get a punch. Twice, you get a beating. Three times, and they don’t kill you, they don’t kick you out, but nobody’s going to play lookout for you, nobody’s going to help you, nobody’s going to share supplies, and unless you cut losses and make a beeline for the Window you’re probably a dead woman walking. Happened to me twice, and I must’ve run out of all my luck on the way home.
That’s the first bit there, the first sweet bait to lure us all in past the Window. The second’s a bit more obvious: kala-husks. I already told you how tough those things are, you don’t need to hear more. At first they made armour from it, then they found out that they could make it as light and thin as they wanted, then they tried using it to build machines. And if half of what I hear is coming out of the colleges these days is true, Mata-boy – and never more than half, if you say an inch more than half of it is true I’ll eat my boots – then I’m only surprised the prices on the stuff aren’t higher.
The third big thing (and there’s lots of little things I’m not saying right now, Mata-boy – little souvenirs I’m not even going to try to describe, nothing more than trinkets for rich folk and good-luck charms for idiots), we only found five years later. That was when Sillas found the Ta. Walked right into one of their Not-Cities.
Yeah, that’s the word for them.
No, I don’t know how you talk to them. Some people just can. Best not to do it too often, too. The more you do it, the more often you do it, the more you get like them. In the head, not the body, but sometimes I get to wondering. I swear Eightfinger Ulluver’s lips were nearly gone by the end of his life.
Yup. No lips. That’s the Ta. No lips, no eyes. Big ears though. And their legs are like arms, and their arms all look like legs, and they have no teeth. And they don’t live in cities. All the Ta-talkers get really snippy about that. They don’t live in villages, they don’t live in towns, and they REALLY don’t live in cities. Not-Cities is the best word we have, I guess. Stupid as hell if you ask me, but then most of the things the Ta do are stupid as hell. They eat each other and pretty much nothing else, they spend most of their lives asleep, and when they’re awake they do everything at half-again speed before they pass out again. A hundred Ta in one place, you’ll never see more than two or three moving at once. They do things in shifts.
But they know things about the world past the Window that we don’t. They know what to avoid and what to find, they know what’s worth things and what isn’t. We just had to pick out was worth anything to US and we were golden. We traded for how to treat kala-husks and how to find kala-husks and how to find where shooms grew and we found out how to make a Listenstem out of one of their skulls. You take the emptied braincase after they’re done eating one of their own – they do it while the food’s sleeping – and rip off the jaw and sort of push the skull into a bowl. Then you hold that to your ear, and if you know what to think, you think better. That’s all I know because I’m not fool-assed enough to try it. There was a pretty good culling of the colleges when Listenstems started getting out of the Window, before some of the careful ones figured out how to train yourself for it. You do it wrong, and you pretty much turn Ta in the head, and it turns out Ta heads don’t fit inside human brains. Most of ’em bled out inside their skulls. A couple went crazy, but the useful kind, so they kept them around with force-feedings. Good stuff, eh? And to think, they’ll practically give the things away, which is good because we can’t make them ourselves. Not sure why, but they don’t work.
Now, there’s the big question here, Mata-boy. I can feel it from across the table here, itching away at the tip of your tongue, trying to squirm past those pretty lips of yours, but they’re too polite to open up and spit it out in the drunk old snowcrawler’s face: what do we trade them? What do they want? What are they asking? What are we giving? Because I know, and you know, Mata-boy, that they know how much we want their things. Damned all else we have in common with them, but they get trade. And barter. And payment.
No, it isn’t people. They aren’t interested in us. Just our trade. Don’t get all huffy there.
Go on, guess.
Guess better!
Warmer.
Close!
Hah, give up?
Wrong again, you lose. I’ll tell you anyways because I’m so goddamned nice. They want our thoughts. And I can’t tell you why because in seventy-odd years of us trading them to the buggers, they haven’t seemed like they understand one spitsworth better than before. Maybe they’re just bored and we’re the most hilarious friggin’ thing they’ve ever seen. Whyever they want it, that’s what they’re trading for. The whole team draws straws and the unlucky bastard loses about six months of memories, in exchange for a little over a quarter of the total take. Not a trade most people like. That’s why you’ll find so many snowcrawlers are washed-up scumbags like yours truly, Mata-boy. Nobody who’s had a very nice life would trade it away for any amount of money. Nobody.
I must’ve lost six or seven years. Mostly bad ones. I think I broke even, more’r less. Maybe.
Thanks. Needed that.

So that’s the deal then. You go in. You collect. You barter. You head back to the Window, and you come home. And by the time you come back, you’re a little used to it over there. Not much, never more than a little, because you’re human. But a little. And when you walk back through the door, all of that gets rubbed raw all over, and you spend a few days with twitching eyes and clenching teeth. Me, I get rid of it through drink, same as most. Some of us can’t handle it, keep playing tough for years when they’re soft inside, and then it all spills out whoopsie daisy along with the guts of three or four poor schlubs who were standing a little too near when the sound in the back of your head gets to be all too much and someone says something a little too loud.
Funny thing though, after a few trips in and out of there, you sort of start wanting to hear that noise. Just a little.

How many cups does this one make?
You’re right. Never enough.

You’re all right, boy from Matagan. You’re all right. But I’m getting drunk now, and I’m maudlin as shit when that happens. So I think that’s it for the night.
What? Oh, fine. Last one. But just because you bought me the good stuff, and because me ‘n Dead-Head Lizzie are the only ones left who know this.
See, I never did tell you how Sillas Bradley’s trip ended, did I? Well, he discovered the Window, and he founded the Sill, and he built the fifty-seven steps. And he wandered through the Window and met the Ta, and surprise surprise, he could talk to ’em. And since we didn’t know much back then, well, he talked a lot. And he asked questions.
Nowadays, we know not to do that.
Sillas was a tough old bastard, and he knew better than to let that sort of shit show in front of his men, but there’s some things you just can’t avoid. His skull was still crowded with Ta-thoughts, and he might’ve even gotten some noisy thoughts in there too. We don’t for sure, but that’s Lizzie’s guess. Pah, what’re guesses worth.
So Sillas set foot outside the Window, fell right back into the real world, and he got the shakes real bad, with a head full of things that were never meant to exist out here, where there’s a sun and a moon and a sky with a wind through it. So he screamed real loud. And he stumbled. And he lashed out and laid out flat the three men nearest to him, poor luckless sods, and when he fell down on top of those three men, well… I hadn’t tied on that last step as well as it could.
Ulluver told me that was his fault. He was a liar, all the time. Those eightfingers worked better than any twenty of anyone else’s.
So that’s why we have fifty-six steps. And when we looked all the way down that mountainside, all two thousand feet of it, we could see the little black marks like crawly bugs on the white snow where Sillas Bradley and three other men had landed. Don’t remember their names. I forgot most of that year and got told it second hand by Lizzie, and her memory’s lousy.
So that was that. And that was us. “Snowcrawlers.” Senses of humour as black as sin from that first trip.

Goddamn.

You’re a good man. You write that book. I need to remember these things. And you finish it fast.
I want to still be able to remember how to read when it’s finished. And I need another trip soon.
Just one more, that’s all. That’ll be plenty.
But just in case, you finish it fast.

“On the Sill,” copyright Jamie Proctor, 2011.