Clouds End

  “Over this long summer of drought, it has marched north as fast as a conquering army. The Palm lands are now only ash and memories. Parts of the Rubber and Teak holdings are gone as well, and still the flames speed north. The wind has aided them, and many have died fighting the blaze.”

  “I heard a story once,” Brook said. “There was a Spark in it. The forest people made a bargain with Sere, I think, but the Spark stayed on behind . . .”

  “Exactly!” Garden stroked his long, trailing mustache with his long, trailing fingers. “The Emperor believes that those who counsel moderation are wasting southern lives. He has flung his armies northward, to find a new home for his people. Fear drives him on, fear that the Fire will be too fast for him, fear that Bronze Cut and the moderates who have befriended his son will seize power and take the easy ways out, trying half-measures while the Fire marches on the capital.”

  “Is he right?”

  “Who are you asking? Me? I can barely fingerpaint!” Garden shrugged. “Certainly the Fire is coming in. Will it overrun the Empire? Would it do so if the army were sent south, to fight it, instead of north, to flee from it? Can the people of the forest ever live apart from the trees? I do not know the answers to these questions. The Emperor thinks he does.”

  “So you think he’s wrong,” Rope ventured.

  Garden shook his head. “No, no. I just don’t care for the world he is making, right or not.”

  “We saw a play,” Brook said slowly. “Earlier today. It was about a father and a son, and the son was drawn to a wolf who was like the Enchanter, and then they set the screen on fire. It seemed to be put on for the sake of this one Bronze.”

  Garden’s trailing eyebrows rose. “Was he dressed all in gold silk, this Bronze, with a scarlet slash across the chest?”

  “Yes! He seemed . . . He was like a storm-cloud that you know is full of lightning.”

  Garden nodded. “Bronze Cut! Young Hilt never could resist him.” The old arbomancer gazed sadly out his silver walls toward the palace. “Like the people of the air, Bronzes are not born; they make themselves. Hilt is only a plain Rowan, but he is thought to be a key to his father’s heart. Bronze Cut is the leader of a moderate faction within the Arbor. He has wooed Hilt with friendship and flattery, aiming to take the throne for himself when the Emperor can no longer hold it.” Garden’s face was grim. “I think this play was meant by the Emperor to send Bronze Cut his strongest rebuke, his deepest threat. He will kill the boy, to make it clear that none are safe who stand against him.”

  “Kill his own son!” Brook cried. “Then what we heard in Delta is true. The Emperor is mad.”

  “Mad? That I cannot judge. Certainly he is caught in a story bigger than himself—which may be all that madness is.” Garden gazed shrewdly at Brook from under his dangling eyebrows. “Unless I miss my guess, you too are part of a larger story. Am I not right?”

  As he spoke he reached out with his long white fingers and flipped up the cuff of Brook’s shirt to reveal the blue Witness Knot coiled around her wrist.

  “Oh, this,” Brook said. “This is nothing! Just a—”

  “A message!” Garden beamed. “Oh my. I do love messages. It has been so long since anyone bothered to send me one!”

  “Are you a Witness?” Rope asked dubiously.

  “Of a sort, of a sort!” Garden leaned forward, clasping his hands so that his long nails twined around themselves like sloppy wickerwork. “Clearly your Witness must have sent you to me in the hope that I could help you with some problem. I do not make any promises, of course. In fact, I can almost guarantee failure, because as I remarked before, I do not do anything. But I am pleased to be asked!”

  “Er, we really appreciate that,” Rope said, “but I think the message was meant for the Witness of Delta, actually. We were supposed to tell her about the woodlanders invading, but it was too late by the time we got there. Now we are here and we have done everything we can do, so—”

  “I have been twinned,” Brook said.

  Garden sank slowly back into his chair. “Mm. Oh, dear.” He reached out and patted her gently on the knee. “Yes, I expect that was it.”

  “I don’t think so,” Rope said. “Jo has done everything we ever asked of her. Rescued us in Delta—risked her life to face the Emperor! If she was going to do something bad to you, she could have done so long ago. I think she has earned our trust.”

  Brook’s eyes never left Garden. “Can you help me?”

  The old enchanter sighed and looked at Rope. “Of course it does no good always to believe the worst of people; that merely brings the worst to pass. But a twinning, now . . . A twinning is a serious thing. A knot not easily untied, as your people say.”

  Garden closed his green eyes and pondered. The ends of his long mustaches swayed gently with his breath, and the tips of his long white fingers twined amongst themselves as he thought.

  At last he opened his eyes. “There are two kinds of story and two kinds of time. Think of a tree,” he said. “Each year happens in Mist-time. The rain comes, the bud forms, leaves blossom and flower and fruit! Then autumn arrives, the leaves dry, and wither, and drop away. The story is done.

  “But underground the tree’s story goes on and on, year after year, following each new twisting root. Things of the Mist-time are stories of the leaf; things of the real world are stories of the root.”

  He reached out and tapped the Witness Knot. “Your Witness has made the heart of this design a one twist ring. That knot always has both a Mist-time story and a real-world story in it: the rise and fall of a leaf, for instance, and the root’s slow, tangled, difficult tale.

  “Now, as for your twin! There are two ways to untie a knot, even a one twist ring. One way is to follow it out, slowly unravelling every line to its end. The other way”—and here Garden looked gravely at Brook—“is to cut it.”

  “Cut it!” Rope cried. “You mean kill Jo? After all she has done for us?”

  Garden shrugged. “I do not advise one way or the other—but yes. This is the way twin stories usually end. One survives—and one twin is killed, or thrown into the Mist.”

  Rope stared angrily from Garden to Brook.

  Brook was afraid. She knew, as Rope could not, how great a risk she would take by letting Jo live. But something was flowing in her, something serene and strong and brave as Sage Creek when it made its jump over the bluff and ran past the houses of Clouds End.

  “Jo did not kill me,” Brook said at last. “She did not throw me into the Mist. She let me live, that first day.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to kill her.” She smiled at Rope. “After all, that would be the story ending, and I have never believed in stories.”

  Rope sighed, relieved.

  “Are you sure now?” Garden asked. “You will be taking a great risk if you choose to follow this knot out to its end.”

  “No, I am not sure,” Brook admitted. “I am terrified. But I cannot kill her in cold blood. If that is the only way, I will not do it. If ours becomes a, a root story, I think I can be the stronger twin. I have Rope, and Shale, and Shandy and Clouds End to hold me.”

  Garden nodded. “Good. You must be grounded! Those of us the magic touches must put our roots down where we can. I took to trees; their crowns converse ever with the wind, but leaf, blossom, and bole are anchored firmly to the ground.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of becoming too . . . treelike?”

  The old man looked fretfully at his drooping fingers. “I am not hurrying the event! No, I relish my humanity. But as the years go by, and spring leads to autumn, and autumn to spring again, I shape the trees to my will. And year after year, I suppose, they shape me also to theirs. We grow alike as the years go by, as old husbands grow like their old wives. There is so much shared history, you understand. You make so many choices in your youth and they seem so free—but by the time you get to be older, each thing you do has the weight of your whole life behind it.”

  He looked up and smiled
sleepily at them. “And so I sit here, weeding my little garden even while the Fire sweeps down on us. But you! You are young! You should be going now. Back to the Arbor, back to your island! It is time for you to leave leaf stories behind; yours is a root story now. A story of real life.”

  “So soon?” Rope said. “I was just getting used to all these marvels and adventures!”

  Garden stood and shooed them through the house and out to his silver door. “Oh, I think you will find that real life has every bit as many marvels and adventures,” he said. “But they are so big they can be easily overlooked.”

  He pressed an onion cake into Brook’s hand and a poppy-seed biscuit into Rope’s, and then pointed to the yew tunnel that had brought them to his house. “You will find that little path will lead you to the Arbor, and your home at last. Back to your roots.”

  As they walked away he waved, and his trailing white fingertips splashed gently on the surface of his silver house, sending ripples through the walls, and scattering the jumbled fish.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE SPARK

  Drip.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  It is good to drink.

  THE VAST bronzewood Palace glowed like a dollop of bloody honey in the last hour before dawn. Jo did not look back at Rope and Brook as she walked toward it through grass dry and tangled as human hair. She crossed a band of tiny, sharp stones at the bottom of a desiccated moat. She whispered to herself, trying to drown out the world’s thirsty voices.

  Jo! I hear you, said the cracking earth. I smell the red water in you.

  Not for you! My blood is my own.

  She is ours, the wind said. It is not water you hear, parched mother. Tonight her veins crawl with creeping fire.

  Jo shivered, feet barely feeling the dry earth, the wind blowing through her. What do you mean? she asked.

  No more than usual, the stars remarked. The wind is a great liar. Pay attention at your peril.

  But I am the wind’s daughter.

  Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

  Loveless bitches! the moon cackled in her old crone’s voice. Don’t trust them, Jo. They pretend indifference to blunt the pain of their daily death. Already the sun is waking. Soon his eye will open and shrivel them like moths.

  The stars replied with voices hard and cold as bells. It happens every day. Why get upset? And, we point out, it will happen to you.

  Ha! You know as well as I the pleasure of his brand. The world longs for death; he has taught us to beg for it. I admit it! I pull death to my wrinkled dugs. Already the flames have licked me hollow, thrown all my self under their host of shadows.

  Poor dear, the wind said. Pay no heed, small one. It’s that time of the month, you know.

  But the moon said, Jo knows me better.

  it is good . . .

  . . . to drink.

  I must walk, thought Jo. She lifted clay-heavy feet and moved under the dying trees, under the Palace, to stand in the purple gloom beneath tangled bronzewood boughs. Her skin was slick and dry as scale. Her heart was a knot of blood. The fevered night had not sweated out one drop of dew. In the east the sky flinched at the sun’s first touch, going grey with pain.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  She stared at the hooked moon, gleaming like a splinter of bone above the West Tower.

  You feel me.

  Yes.

  The moon cackled. What is your errand to the Emperor? What is your mission of mercy?

  Jo grinned back. I go to pluck his sting, to take his Spark.

  But why?

  Because . . . Because I desire it.

  You are not too meek to slay the sun, the ancient moon laughed. You are not too proud to drink his bright red rain.

  Jo’s nailed hands flexed into pinions, her feet hardened into talons and she scratched the baked dirt. She blinked at the burning moon with enormous eyes; left a whisper of red dust behind her and floated into the air, owl-formed, a flake of ash armored in moonlight.

  A bat wheeled too close, tricked by the unkind wind. It jerked as her talons slid into its squeaking black body. Its black wings fluttered like dead leaves. Resting on a balcony of bronzewood to eat, she crushed its flesh in her beak, squeezing out its moisture, regretting every drop that fell into darkness.

  I thirst! the old earth cried through cracking lips.

  It was a small bat, and tough. Jo was not satisfied. In the distance, the wind whispered suave apologies to its next-of-kin.

  Drip.

  Jo sailed off the balcony, pressing the wind beneath her wings. She left the bat’s corpse on the matted railing and circled up, flying at the moon. Far to the east, the sun burned away the darkness, leaving empty grey nothing in its place. Dawn fled before him, and the world cowered like a battered woman. The eastern stars shrieked thinly and went out.

  A lone waver of birdsong, a lark’s maimed hymn to the dawn:

  Evil nests

  In the green-gold branches;

  He held murder to a candle, and it

  Burned.

  Declare yourself! the living Palace said. Are you fuel or flame? Only the Singer knows, Jo answered. Are you light or shadow? Evil throws the only light within my halls, the Palace said. Evil is sticky; it crusts my leaves. It is good, the earth sighed,

  . . . to drink.

  Jo landed on the parapet of the South Tower, hooking her claws through twigs like brittle bones. She felt the sap crawling beneath her toes. She flapped her wings and shrugged her shoulders, thrice. Her blood was thin and hot. She clacked her beak and hissed at the night. Do you hear that sound?

  Drip.

  Sound? the wind said politely. What sound?

  The dripping. Drip. Drip. Drip. That sound.

  From the room beneath her feet she heard the candles laugh. It is tallow, they said, nothing more. It is our white fat you hear dropping to the thirsty ground. It is our mighty labor to burn away the darkness; you hear our sweat.

  Drip.

  Drip.

  I do not trust your laughter. I do not trust your fierce voices.

  All things that move are cruel, the moon said. Jo, remember! Did I not tell you the sound of the flame is the sound of wind, the sound of wind that of water? If you want honest answers, speak to the stones and the stars!

  What is good? Jo cried to the thirsting earth. What drips down to your parched throat?

  What right has she to ask? the bats screamed. Is not murder its own reward?

  I know nothing

  of guilt

  or innocence, the earth replied.

  Everything

  draws its substance

  from me,

  Daughter of Air.

  Even you.

  You were born of me.

  Your cord was cut and tied:

  you are a knot of

  red water

  in a fine leather bag.

  Drip.

  It drips from me, said the corpse of the Emperor’s son. My father solved the cunning puzzle of my life. With a single stroke below the jaw he cut through all my intricacies.

  I am sorry.

  Day is near, the moon said. Madness burns within the Palace, Jo. Will you flutter to that flame?

  I made promises. I swore oaths. Help me!

  Who is this I? A shape you took from an island girl.

  Jo trembled, torn by twin desires. But at last she began to shift, small and smaller, a spider to walk between veined walls. I promised Brook, she said.

  What burns in you? the moon sadly asked. Are you trying once more to be of the water? You will give back everything you have taken. Everything.

  I promised, Jo whispered.

  But the moon said only, When you are tired, Jo, come to me.

  * * *

  It was all Jo could do to spiderwalk through the Emperor’s walls. The play of fear and desire and confusion was so strong within the Palace that no creeping thing could long hold to any purpose but to hide and madly sting when corn
ered.

  Once inside, she took her human shape again.

  Golden light, thick and dull as honey, welled from the bronzewoods into the Emperor’s room. Certain stripped branches showed naked as beating veins in the walls and ceiling. Gulping candles in gold sockets projected from each of six walls. The Emperor’s swing hung in the center of the room; each move sent a shudder through his six shadows. His dry fingers rustled in a bowl of roasted locusts. “I have been expecting you,” he said.

  His bony cheeks were hollow and his eyes were points of golden flame socketed in shadow. Where the light touched his skirts the satin glowed rich green, elsewhere midnight-black. He reached out with one foot and set himself softly rocking. The creaking swing was inexpressibly sad. With long bronze fingernails the Emperor shelled another locust, cracking the roasted carapace. “I knew they would send a woman as my death.”

  “I come at no one’s sending but my own.” Believe that if you will, the moon said from outside. What of your island girl?

  “Do you not! Do you not indeed!” The Emperor crushed the locust shell between his fingers and dropped it into the bowl. “I believe Sere burns within me, and you are the shadow of that burning.”

  “You are fevered with madness.”

  The Emperor shook his head, swinging gently forth and back in the weak yellow candlelight. “The puppets themselves are sacred and unknowable. We are shadows cast by a little golden candle, White Lady. Shadows thrown upon a paper screen.”

  “Whose shadow am I, then?”

  “Mine. You are the shadow I cast upon the world. It is men who serve a single master, and women who serve men. The habit of subservience runs strong within your sex. You are a play of shadows without shape.” The swing creaked; ropes bit into the branches above. “Would you like something to eat?”

  Jo shook her head. A bee tumbled from behind her ear and fell scrabbling to her shoulder.