Slowly, September said: “A Yeti is frightening. Frightening and strong and so much bigger than me. But not half as frightening as thinking your whole life has already happened and you don’t have any choice in it.”
The brass Leopard curled and uncurled her tail. “I didn’t think we frightened so easily,” she purred. “Aren’t we ill-tempered and irascible? Isn’t that us?”
“Is there a way to defeat Ciderskin?” September whispered, and once she had asked one question the rest tumbled out after. “What will I be when I am grown-up? Will my father ever really be well? Is the war really going to end? Will the Marquess wake up? Am I going to have that daughter no matter what, no matter how, no matter which way I go? Will I like the version of myself I will be if I have her? Is everything done, done and decided and all there is for me is to wait for it to happen to me? The Green Wind said I chose myself. Please say he wasn’t lying. I do know winds lie, I do know it, but please let that have been true, of all the things he said.”
“Dodgy attribution,” the Buraq coughed. “Quoting from a biased and frankly fanciful source.”
The brass Leopard said nothing. She lifted her paw and pressed it into her spotted breast. A little door came open, a patch of brass fur and jewels with a darkness inside it, and empty space.
Within that empty space lay a book.
The book was a very deep and very vivid red, with curling gold shapes stamped in the corners. It had a lock upon it and many, many pages clapped up within. It glowed in her fate’s chest like a heart.
September reached inside and took out the red book. It was heavy. A girl’s face graced the cover, finely embossed, but it was turned away, gazing at some unseen thing. Perhaps it was her own face, perhaps not. A miniature version of herself, after all. Was it an answer? Was it everything already written?
“You can’t argue with something that’s written down,” she said, stroking the red locks of hair on the cover. “If the heart of my fate is a book, there’s nothing for it. Once it’s written, it’s done. All those ancient books always say ‘so it is written’ and that means it’s finished and tidied and you can’t say a thing against it.”
Oh, but September, it isn’t so. I ought to know, better than anyone. I have been objective and even-tempered until now, but I cannot let that stand, I simply cannot. Listen, my girl. Just this once I will whisper from far off, like a sigh, like a wind, like a little breeze. So it is written—but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.
Has she heard me? Have I tilted my hand? I cannot tell. Look close—she is not moving. Well, my powers are not infinite.
September held the red book of the Leopard’s heart tightly. Her fingertips turned white. She looked past it, not to the grass but to her black silks, flowing around her body, clinging and warming her and announcing its own purposes to everyone she met. I chose myself, she thought furiously. I did choose. Some distant night-bird called. She did not know if she could do it. Candlestick called this place holy. What would that make her? This was no way to win an argument, certainly. The lesson of Pluto sounded in her heart, heavier even than a brass Leopard. Perhaps she was, in the end, a Criminal. A breaker of laws. A vandal.
September lay the red book on the raingrass. Blades shivered and broke beneath. You cannot argue with fate, whatever Candlestick says, she thought. You can only defy it.
“You can only say no,” she said aloud. “No is how you know something’s alive.”
Out of the pocket of her silks she drew her last possession, the one thing the Wind would not take when he demanded Everything She Had. Her iron hammer.
With a great deep breath and a choked cry, September lifted the hammer high and brought it singing down onto the red, red body of her fate.
The book shattered.
A roaring, rumbling, blossoming sound shook the world—a moonquake, splitting the ground and shaking like nothing would stop it.
What others call you, you become.
INTERLUDE
THE BLACK COSMIC DOG
In the city on the inside of the Moon, the Black Cosmic Dog has found something.
It is a very large something.
In fact, the Black Cosmic Dog has occupied himself with nothing but digging it up for some time now. It is a big job. When the Dog furiously claws at the soft lunar soil, bits of glittering stardust show under his fur like burrs. He uses both his front and back legs. When he sleeps, he sleeps curled up against the steep curve of his prize.
A scarlet boil, hot and painful, has grown on the waxing slope of the Moon, in the place where a city used to bustle and thrive. The red of it glows against the night and the Black Cosmic Dog. He pants all the while he digs around it, exposing it to the air and the wind. The Moon is so white and the boil is so red it looks as though the whole world is bleeding. The Black Cosmic Dog grins his cosmic grin and goes about his work. He is happiest when he is digging.
The red boil grows day by day as he scrabbles at it, moving great heaps of Moon-dirt like drifts of snow.
In the end, even the Dog cannot say how big it will be before it bursts.
CHAPTER XV
THE TYGUERROTYPE
In Which September and Her Friends Enter the City of Orrery, Meet a Gentleman Tiger, and Perform a Spectacular Optical Trick
The Moon owns many mountains. Some are so tiny you and I would step over them without a thought—yet on their infinitesimal slopes, wee invisible sheep chew lumps of microscopic snow. Some line the rim of the Moon like a spectacular fence, and there you will find frog-footed rams stripping painted bark from twisted tapestry trees. The highest and most fearsome of these mountains is the Splendid Dress, which opens up from its snowy bright peak like a skirt, flowing in stripes and swirls and patterns and tiers all the way down to the plains. I will share a secret with you: once, a girl really did wear this mountain like a dress. She was a very serious young strega and stregas are not to be meddled with, for they can hex as easy as they can tie their shoes. She wore glasses and her hair hung very straight. She had a highly developed sense of humor, which in some lights looked a bit like a sense of justice. She would not like it much if I told you how she got so big, so I will hold my peace and keep my hat.
At the foot of the Splendid Dress many brass rings and tracks circle the stony frills and ruffles of the Underskirt, the crags and cliffs that announce: A mountain is about to put on its heights, so hitch up your pride and get climbing. Here and there on the tracks, bright glassy bulbs as big as battleships open up like lotus-flowers whose petals have only just begun to yawn and open up to the day. Inside the many-colored flowers you can find anything a town might like to have for its very own. The tracks click and move every so often, but it’s done smoothly, and only a few people fall down, the way you and I will when riding a tram in a new city where we do not know the stops and starts. This is the place the Ellipsis leads to, the very last, small black pools and ponds no bigger than rabbit-holes.
“Are you sure this is the easiest way to the inner edge?” asked September. Everyone had walked softly after the Ellipsis and the moonquake, each in their thoughts. Great cracks in the Moon showed now, where the quake had cut them. But even so, September felt strangely light and eased since leaving the night and the Lightning Jung
le behind. Once you have done a thing like that, she supposed, the only thing for it was to pick up your feet and get moving. She chose, and she chose now to be pleased with herself. Candlestick had not come with them after all, turning up her peacock tail and refusing to speak further with any of the lot of them. Vandals and sophists, she called them, and that was all she would say.
A-Through-L furrowed his orange brow. “Easiest, no, no, September, it surely isn’t. It is the shortest, though, and the two are rarely the same. When you’ve scared off all the patrons you can get so much reading done, and I read over all the maps of the Moon I could find. We could go the long way and walk up the whole lunar curve with hardly a bump in our way, a few very nice rivers with party manners, meadows full of teatime roses that bloom at exactly three fifteen every afternoon, full of iced cakes and sandwiches and cups and tablecloths. And it would take us a year and by that time Ciderskin will have cracked the crescent in half and used the horns to pick his teeth. But this is Orrery, and the way to it is done.”
September fell quiet. Dawn broke over the Splendid Dress, a black and white sort of dawn, stark and sudden and crisp. The craggy colors showed only as shades of darkness on the slopes. Saturday held out his hand across Aroostook’s cabin to take hers—a desperate sort of taking, as though if their hands touched, the Marid could believe that everything was all right. September let him, but she did not lace her fingers in his or press her thumb against his knuckles. She did not want to be cold. But she did not know another way to be just now. She had missed him so much. She could feel the hurt coming off him like heat. Who knew what he had done, who he had been, without her? A circus performer, and a boy who smiled the way she’d seen him smile on that platform. September had never made him smile like that. But she had seen more than that smile. She had seen him, grown-up and stern and unyielding and how could she bear knowing he could be like that? That he could be the man who stood beside the Yeti and did his work? No, no, that wasn’t it, and she knew it. Everyone can be stern. She had done it herself, though she felt very tired afterward. But she could not look her worry in the eye just yet. She folded it up and put it somewhere else, to be peered at later.
“It’s awfully quiet,” Saturday said, hiding his hurt like a wound. The brass rings stood cool and silent in the early light. Nearest to them, a pale yellow cup with swoops of quartz in it rose up against the peaks. A space between its petals showed the tips of gables and garrets inside.
“It’s a wind-up city, September,” Saturday said shyly. “An orrery is like a map of the sky, only it moves like the sky and spins like the sky and you wind it every day to keep it on the same schedule as the sky. Each of those stone cups is a neighborhood. They click around, and when they line up, the neighborhoods talk to one another, hold markets and barn dances, say hello to old friends, and then circle apart again. There’s planets up in the sky for every cup, and every cup fashions itself as a miniature of its planet. This one is called Azimuth.” He flushed with pleasure, to be the one who knew something. “It’s in the constellation called Wolf’s Egg. Do you remember?”
September smiled. In remembering, the unpeerable thing in her softened and she held out her hand. “Yes. The night we slept by Calpurnia Farthing’s fire. Ain’t what’s strong, but what’s patient.” Calpurnia was a Fairy, no different than the Fairies that had cut off a Yeti’s Paw years ago. She hadn’t seemed like the kind who could do such a thing, with her changeling daughter and her quiet way of talking. Perhaps she couldn’t—she still lived and chewed tire-jerky and rode the plains, after all, when her folk did not.
A long pair of slatted tracks led up into the brass rings from the earth around the mountain. Uncertainly, slowly, painstakingly, September fitted Aroostook’s wheels to it like a roller-coaster car. Ell flew above them as the automobile rolled upward and slid gracefully around the rails. After a moment, a great rumbling broke the birdless morning—for an awful, sickening moment, September thought it was another moonquake, Ciderskin shaking them off like a dog with fleas once more. But it was Orrery, clicking forward on its track. The yellow cup moved closer, and they saw a lovely carved gate in its side decorated with apples and sunbeams.
But inside the yellow glass petals, Azimuth stood empty and quiet. The pleasant, narrow little streets held not so much as rubbish; rows and rows of silver houses all had open doors and windows and no one inside. Ell had told it true—Orrery was a city of lenses, and Azimuth boasted so many that the morning sun seemed to explode in all directions. The fountain in the central square was a great, mad, jumbled mass of a telescope, bristling with eyepieces and earpieces and mirrors and bulging glass globes. Every roof hoisted up crystal discs and tubes and plates pointed upward and upward, toward the spire of the Splendid Dress, toward the stars, and further still.
“Would you stay, if a Yeti gave you an eviction notice?” asked Saturday. “How nice it would have been if we all could have seen the Moon and all her millions, dancing so that the whole thing bounces and singing up the earth below! But then I suppose that’s a lot of noise, and I did so miss your talking.”
“There’s a light on up there!” cried Ell, circling down toward them, his great red wings banking. “On the hill! A whole house lit up like a cake!”
With a sigh of relief, September’s little band turned toward the steep, tottering hill that reared up on the north side of the bulb. Aroostook took the hill in stride. His carburetor knob slowly melted into a moondial, carved with figures all in tiny opals, and the gnomon shining like a blade. September did not see it change. She saw only the road ahead, thin and straight with no hope of turning off or away.
The light gleamed ruddy and very home-like out of a peculiar house. September knew instantly what it was made of—not bricks, not wood, but silver plates, photographic plates. The delicate black lines and shadings and angles of a picture of the outside of a house showed stark and detailed on the surfaces of the plates. Every few moments the lines flickered and a new sort of house appeared: now a sweet cottage with roses in the window, then a forbidding stone fortress, still again a fisherman’s shack. Near the door-plate, before a tall window, an etching of a very handsome gentleman tiger stretched on the silvered glass. He bent down to pull a few beans and strawberries out of a negative garden. He wore a rumpled tweed suit with patches on the elbows and papers sticking out of the pockets as well as a dark paisley cravat. His stripes and whiskers rippled on the silver surface of the house.
“Visitors!” he cried when he saw them, putting one furry black and silver paw to his forehead. “Welcome, welcome! How nice to see a full-color face! Or four! What can I do for you this fine morning, and if you don’t mind my asking, why haven’t you skipped off like the rest of them? Good for your health, you know. Such peril in being three-dimensional!”
“Excuse me, Sir Tiger,” began September. The houses around them were all the same, silver plates with black images flickering over them like shadows on water.
“Oh, no sirs between the object and the gaze!” he said, his teeth showing beneath that striped muzzle. “I’m the object for the record. You’re the gaze. But calling someone an object is rather rude, so you can use my name, which is Turing and not Tiger, for I am not a tiger at all but a Tyguerrotype. Accuracy is next to godliness.”
“How is it you haven’t skipped off?” asked Ell. “Where has everyone gone? They want very much to talk to a Glasshob about the use of that great heap of a scope back there. But there seems to be nobody left in Azimuth but yourself.”
Turing the Tyguerrotype scratched behind one round ear. “What a funny thing to say! Everyone I know is still here. Azimuth is as busy and bustling as ever! I can hardly walk down the streets most days!”
September and Saturday looked around at the deserted cobblestones, stretching away into more and more empty blocks.
“Subjects are cowards, is what I think,” the Tyguerrotype went on. “It’s what comes of having to pose and look one’s best all the time. Me, I am what I
am. Fixed and finished. A little shaking doesn’t worry me.”
A soft, velvet-shoed boom blossomed out of the mountain. Rain began to fall in thin, gauzy ribbons.
“Might we come in, please?” asked Saturday politely. “If you and yours have stayed behind, we must find someone to let us use the telescope—and tell us how! We mean to stop the shaking, you see. And for that…well, we need to see. Far and deep.”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” answered the Tyguerrotype, moving like a filmstrip over the plates of the house into the door-plate. “If you came in you’d be photographed and that’s a dodgy business.”
“I’ve had my picture taken.” September shrugged. “It’s not so bad, only you never come out looking quite like yourself.”
Turing ate a silver strawberry in one bite, and looked a bit guilty eating in front of them. “You don’t come out looking like yourself,” he said with his mouth full, “because by the time you come out, you’re not yourself. You’ve gone through a whole country, in through the lens, out through the chemical bath. Everything that’s ever photographed does. But it happens so fast you don’t remember it. It only shows in the photograph—the lines of your face, the set of your eyes, just a little different than you see in the mirror. Life outraces memory. It’s on account of how memory dawdles and smells the perfume of a long-lost love or sings the same song over and over again instead of getting right to the important bits, whereas life just steams right through, one thing to another, episode to episode. That’s why photography got invented in the first place. To help memory catch up. I was a tiger, though probably not a Sir Tiger, once upon a time. A professorial tiger with a big, predatory brain! But some fellow took a picture of me at the presentation of an academic medal and sent me into the Country of Photography.”