The coding pins flew through Lallowe's fingers, dancing instructions across the projected matrix. She held two pins in each hand, pinching and twisting the air between quanta, while plucking the occasional pomegranate tooth. She chewed her lip in concentration as she considered her task and, somewhere behind the problem of creating an artificial intelligence, fretted away at the larger question of out-thinking the Cicatrix- discovering her true goals and how she, Lallowe, could end up on top.

Coding was by far the easier task: ever-decreasing circuitry size and efficiency seemed to occupy human ambitions, while faerie code could accomplish so much more with so much less. There was a poetry in her logic that superseded anything simple math could predict, and quite literal poetry in the code she wrote-while her abalone compiler remained the perfect interface for building sentience. She couldn't manage a database if her life depended upon it- and thank the Airy Dark it did not- but she could whip up a ghost for the machine without decanting herself from the bathtub.

She'd previously used the abalone sh.e.l.l for programming specialized clocks-Lallowe had given Oxnard's sister a clock for her bedside, for instance, that had whispered insanities to the woman in her sleep until she became maddened beyond repair. Eventually the wretched girl sold her fortune to the Numismatist to remove her body-binding and threw herself off Giantsrib Bridge. Ha.

Despite the fact that its components integrated technologies and magics from multiple disciplines and realities, programming the vivisistor to resemble life wasn't much more difficult, at least in theory, than designing her clocks-just an elaboration upon a theme, really. A living mind could be seen as comprised of many enchanted clocks running at once, each designed to reproduce some aspect of sentience-perception, rumination, self-correction, rage- and set to interact with each other recursively. But only with art inside the arguments: she silently thanked her human papa for the gift of his poesy, she could only imagine her mother trying to fit birdsong and cricketstrings into an algorithm of even the most basic- My human father. That was it, Lallowe realized with a twist of her gut and a furious rush of shame. My father, the poet, the man who was smart enough to leave. That was why she was here, why she'd been chosen over Almondine, everything. Lallowe felt a combination of emotions she'd never suffered before, a pride that hinged upon shame, an exuberance dependent upon patricide, a love that spoke the language of hate. That was it.

And it was why she'd prevail.

As the coding pins clacked in her loose-fingered grip, Lallowe began to understand how her mother could be seduced into thinking machine life could improve upon meat life, although the Cicatrix was still irreparably insane. But with her father's bardic gift-Tam was a bard, could he be drafted?-with her father's gift in her veins, Lallowe comprised the very best of the Unseelie fey and the most talented aspects of humanity. She wasn't a half-breed, she was an upgrade. She would not only write herself a new sister, but she'd piggyback atop that soul a utility code that Lallowe could use herself; contingencies within contingencies, just as the Cicatrix had taught her. But with her father's feel for meter and motif, sound and sense.

She flicked a completed subroutine into the developing matrix, causing one of the stones set around the lip of the bowl- shaped sh.e.l.l to glow. She had six stones glowing now, six subroutines out of hundreds she'd created only to dismiss as imperfect, too perfect, or wrong for the task. Lallowe wanted the new Almondine to be her ideal creation: a beautiful, submissive sisterly soul wrapped in an infrastructure of utility protocols that could be used indepen dently of the living mind within. a.n.a.lytic and heuristic systems, scalable information architecture, both topological animism and arcane geometrics, weapons, divinations, bio-monitoring, and deployable repair enchantments for flesh and machine-Lallowe's opus would be not modular but epic poetic. It would be the opposite of her mother's strategy, and it would benefit her under any circ.u.mstances whatsoever.

If creating a third sister out of Almondine was a risk, Lallowe intended to hardwire the wooden b.i.t.c.h with an exit strategy.

Lallowe became subsumed by her electric oyster and the three- dimensional grid it projected. This was the tack she should have taken all along-rather than trying to guess at her mother's plans, she should have been spinning an unknowable web of her own. She cracked a pomegranate seed between her teeth and smoothed her eyebrows with a flick of her dry black tongue, then smiled. She rubbed her bare feet along the shale of the tub-although the raw stone was sharp enough to slice human flesh to shreds, its fissile edges felt fantastic scrubbing her soles and exfoliating the skin of her bottom.

And she exulted. Almondine would be precisely the sort of a.s.sociative tangle that forms the works.p.a.ce where consciousness lives: tie dance to calligraphy, cross ice with the memory of water, create a variable called laughter and a.s.sociate it with swift and metered movements of perspective.

Sister : trust :: mother : betrayal. They were lovely lines to write.

Cooper stood alone with Alouette in a forest made of gold, or a temple grown from trees, he wasn't sure which. A cathedral of gold-barked sycamore trees reached far overhead, trunks thick and straight but not-quite vertical-they leaned inward all at the same slight angle, and branched identically to form the perfect vaults of the ceiling. White- gold birch trees stood slender as rods between the muscular sycamores.

Leaves, red and yellow and green, filtered the sunlight like gla.s.s, casting their colors onto the gra.s.s.

Cooper made a sound of wonder and wandered into the nave of the cathedral-forest, craning his neck to see the marvel. It looked as if perfectly grown trees had been pruned away to create the interior s.p.a.ce, but they hadn't-the interior was part of their perfection.

"Someplace interesting, right?" Alouette said to the trees.

"Where are we now?" he asked, and Alouette's head drooped.

"Someplace I . . . kinda . . . brought you."

"Okay." Cooper's feet crunched on gra.s.s like spears of citrine crystal. "Why do I get the feeling we're not talking about this little gold detour?" he asked, returning to their previous conversation.

"Because you're a perceptive kinda dude." She danced into the cathedral but would not meet his eyes.

"Is that why you kind-of-brought-me?"

"Almost? That's a hard question to answer." She scrubbed her face with her hands.

"I'd really appreciate it if you'd try." Cooper wondered what a perceptive kinda dude would say right about now and tried to strike a mix between patience and perseverance. "But you don't seem to want to try. I'm wondering if that isn't a little bit awful."

Alouette bit her fingernail and looked everywhere but at him for an awkward moment.

Cooper took a deep breath. "Alright then. So tell me about the tree- church. Where are we, really, and why?"

Alouette nodded sharply like a soldier. "Roger will-call. Or whatever. I was hoping you could tell me why, actually."

So this was another test. Another not- a-t.u.r.d opportunity to prove himself. Fine.

Cooper walked to the nearest tree-pillar and put his palm against it-it felt warm to the touch. When he pulled his hand away there were two signs glowing on the curling gold bark beneath. Cooper recognized one of them as Sesstri's orange scroll- and-quill.

That was part of the Winnowed cavern system, and Sesstri was in it. A map, or something deeper? Cooper took another look around the goldbarked interior and tried to let his inner senses guide his gaze. The breeze that stirred the boughs came and went like breathing, and the clarity with which he saw every gold-leafed detail seemed oversharp, like the hyperlucidity of a dream the moment before it evaporates into waking.

This was a place where nature's geometry revealed itself to be more than resplendent, to be sentient-this was the natural mother of artificial intelligence, written in the dialects of life rather than electricity. The math itself was alive here, and lived through bark and sap, the patterns behind branch and leaf, vein and stoma.

It lived through Alouette. And, it dawned on Cooper, lived in his own body, in the branching of his capillaries and the whorls of his fingertips.

"We didn't leave, did we?" he asked. "This is another beluga-swim, another vision, but I'm awake for it, aren't I?"

Alouette sucked one corner of her mouth, like he'd come close to the right answer, but not close enough. "You can feel the life here, and the mind within it? Good. That's really good, Cooper."

"Yeah. Okay." He pointed to the two moving signs. Beside Sesstri's sign was a green pair of tap shoes. "These are Sesstri and Nixon."

The being sewn up in the body of a young woman nodded, looking more hopeful. "And you see namesigns? See, Cooper . . . you couldn't have come here on Tuesday."

"Namesigns." He repeated the word out loud. "Yeah, that's what they are, they're names. True names, right? A name that can't be spoken or written, only known. Why can't I see yours?"

"Look at me." Alouette put her hand on Cooper's wrist. She looked concerned. Then he saw her eyes change-pretty, cornflower-blue eyes. "Look closer."

He stared straight ahead, into the middle of her face, and kept his eyes as still as possible until his vision shimmered; the trees in the periphery of his vision became gold gla.s.s. Alouette's face remained the center of his field of view, but her hair blurred around her head until it was a cloud of pure red pigment. Across her neck he saw a shimmering red ribbon, thick as his thumb and shining like new satin; as he watched, the ribbon became a wound-Alouette's throat cut open to the cartilage beneath, and her overstuffed cleavage drenched with blood.

Then, as Cooper continued to stare straight ahead, the wound became a ribbon again, the dripping lines of blood just threads of satin that pulled themselves back together.

"I see a red ribbon tied around your throat, but sometimes I see that your throat's been slit wide open . . ."

Alouette nodded.

"It's because you're not you, you're her. Chesmarul. That's why your namesigns shift, isn't it? Because you're more than we are, and one sign can't signify all of your . . . youness. Isn't it?"

The boughs of the cathedral rustled like church-whispers in a breeze that ran its fingers through Alouette's red curls as she looked away. When the breeze grew stronger, the leaves and branches spoke as her voice.

"No." The word came from everywhere at once, quietly but omnidirectional. The sound vibrated through his body as much as his mind.

"Well, kind of." Cooper's eyes and bones buzzed with her, and it almost panicked him.

There was a pause. Then, "Yeah. I hate that name."

Cooper turned back to the trees and shrugged. What was Alouette, and what was she really after? Was this the plan, then? Find as f.e.c.kless a soul as possible and tease him into usefulness? That seemed a dumb idea, but who was Cooper to second- guess the vasty-big mind of a thing that could pa.s.s for a G.o.d?

Cooper saw golden cathedral-forest and knew it was only a representation of something his limited mortal mind couldn't grasp. Why his friends' souls ran in lines as pixel sprites along the bark of her cathedralmind.

"I get it now, what makes a shaman different than a magician or a G.o.ddess or a priest or a mad scientist," he said to Alouette, who was the thing called Chesmarul when she wasn't wearing flesh. "All it means is seeing life and death and the spirits in between, including yourself, in a certain way. Seeing sideways. And I've been looking at death and talking to spirits since I got here, haven't I, Chesmarul?"

"My mother gave me that name. I don't like to use it." She spoke in her body's voice-Alouette's voice, which was Chesmarul's voice. She was one of the First People, and she wore names as he wore socks.

"The First were polyglot," she said, and the boughs stirred with her words. "No two alike, until we willed it. Most of the First People preferred to stand alone, our egos are too big to fit into a single reality-how could we come together and form a society, the way your people do? The Third are so adaptable: humans live and die together, faeries band into tribes, elementals stalk their planes in perfect stony accord. But we began before we knew the need to remember our beginning, and by the time we realized how precious our stories were, it was too late to recall with any clarity the story of our origin."

"You were born before time was a thing, got it." Cooper ignored Alouette and addressed the pool of red within her eye. "But what does it have to do with me, the city, and your Dying problem?"

"We pierced the worlds and created Death for ourselves." The wind nodded into his neck, though Alouette stood limply, the eye of herself unblinking. "We lacked a beginning, but we had the means to write our own end. It is why you will find so few of us left, and why those you can find are so enraptured by the legends of their own making. We can appear very vain, and are rarely as far from stupidity as we'd have you believe. It's also why an enterprising minority of the First People began to settle down, like the aesr did, to form the first communities. The aesr and those like them-and there have been many like them, on worlds stranger and more distant than this one-sought a continuity that extended beyond their own selves, and in doing so presaged the form the Third People would take. Individuality and collectivity combined in the alembic of culture, mixed in different proportions and with varying degrees of success. . . ."

Cooper nodded his head. "You've got a problem with living, dying, obviously. You can't even talk about the Second People. You need a fresh perspective, maybe." The red spilled out from her eye like a gunshot and resolved into a ribbon; it ran straight out from her face, parallel to the ground, heading for the tree line. "Maybe you need someone with a shaman's knack for seeing the sideways truths that emerge from observing the way the world is. Like the truth of a bloods.l.u.t who's desperate not to be a bloods.l.u.t anymore, who just wants death to stick. Or the truth that the Undertow have been holding an aesr hostage for years and feeding off her. Or the truth that Death is broken and we're all super-duper mega-screwed."

The line of red color wound away from Cooper and the stock-still body of Alouette, weaving itself around the pillar-trees according to some pattern only it could see. It darted back and forth until the cathedral was bannered with red, moving toward him until it stopped abruptly in front of his face. Redness hovered in the air like the brightest berry bursting, and the bloom of pigment resolved into a sketch of Chesmarul's face, an outline that resembled Alouette's physical features: cloudshaped bursts of color for hair, red dashes for eyebrows, the curve of her cheek and chin and neck hanging in midair. Cooper could see the cathedral-trees through the s.p.a.ce where her skin should have been. To the side, her physical body drooped like a marionette doll.

"I'm not done. There's something else, isn't there? Something your average shaman might not understand. What is it? Why won't you tell me?"

More of her face emerged from the ribbon of red, like the head of a red silk snake. Kind eyes, but her bow mouth was set in a line. Cooper saw resignation and distaste and compa.s.sion.

"Neat trick. I'm not asleep this time, I know that. I'm there and here. I'm standing in a cave alone and standing here in the cathedral-forest with the outline of your face and your empty body. So there's that. But I am wide awake."

The sliver of the thing called Chesmarul that Cooper could perceive with his mind nodded. "True statement." Then it pushed him down, and he fell through the golden ground into a shadow bigger than the sun. Below, he felt the city rushing up to meet him.

Purity hefted the hammer. She wrapped both hands around its cord- wound handle and felt its weight. Colors from the Dawn Stains painted her face with a woad of light. She stepped closer to the nearest gla.s.s panel and raised the heavy instrument over her head. Then she froze. "What are you waiting for?" NoNo asked, rattling her sword in its parasol sheath.

Purity didn't rightly know how to answer that question, even to herself, but something held her back. Kaien and NoNo had both had ample opportunity to destroy the Dawn Stains before, and both had failed to do so. What made Purity the one everyone turned to for cultural terrorism?

Oh my dead G.o.ds what am I doing? Purity went into a kind of seizure of awareness, straining every muscle in her body but not moving a hair. This is the closest thing we have to real holiness, don't you see that? The Dawn Stains are our saints, our relics, our, our-heritage-you can't expect me to destroy history. . . .

Gravity sang a different song to her arms and the hammer trembling over her head.

But that was just it, wasn't it? Gravity. The gravity of history, the gravity of the rules that bound them: Kaien's instructions from his father rested the future of the guilds and possibly the entire city upon his broad shoulders; NoNo's deranged crimes originated with a blind instinct to protect her own; and had Prince Fflaen stood here himself, Purity was sure he would enumerate the reasons why the Weapon could not be allowed to fall into the mouth of even a single errant songbird.

So the deed and its gravity fell to Purity. She wouldn't shrink from it- she did agree with them all, though she doubted her own motives as much as anyone else's. She'd been ready to destroy the Dawn Stains out of nothing more than frustration, pure and simple. But this time she had come prepared- and she would use the rules to break the game. She would leverage history for a different future.

NoNo made an squawking noise. "I asked you a question, wench." She rubbed her nose.

Purity looked her friend in the eye and flexed her stiffening joints. She brought the hammer down and the room exploded with a color spray.

One of seven stains shattered like a wave of gemstones: garnet, rose quartz, topaz, peridot. Petal, too, and bone and midnight, hanging in the air as the hammer slipped from Purity's grip. The fall took forever; she fell to her knees just as slowly, crashing down with the gla.s.s.

She had to stand up and smash the other panes, but Purity took her time, picking gla.s.s from her bleeding knees while studying the song encoded on the bottom of each pane. She kept darting her eyes toward the musical notation, committing the pattern to memory. Such a good memory for facts and dates and pages she'd read only once, and such a poor memory for names and faces. Purity blasphemed and prayed that her mind would not fail her.

NoNo had flinched, but now she nodded toward the other stains, and Purity didn't object. She hefted the hammer and obliterated another ancient gla.s.s window. And another, and another, all the while studying the pattern at the bottom bevel of each pane, and the Weapon hidden there. When she came to the last, a wafer of ancient gla.s.s suspended from wire and steel, Purity hesitated. A woman with red drops on her side placed an ugly black crown on her own head. This Stain was the oldest, its picture the most ruined, and age had transformed the crown into a mad thing that ate the head of the woman king.

With a stab of guilt, Purity tore her gaze from the figure in the gla.s.s and took a final glance at the blurred bars of black and gold underneath, searing the image onto her brain like a brand. Then she swung the hammer up, underhand, and watched the spray fly across the room. A lesson from eternity, shattered.

"There's a good girl. You've lived up to your name today, la.s.s."

La.s.s? Purity dropped the wretched hammer and marveled at NoNo, a fraction of a powerful personality. She keeps on quoting pirates, because it's all she knows.

"You, boy." NoNo poked Kaien with her sword, cutting through his arm like b.u.t.ter. He cried out and she giggled. "Run."

"I'm afraid I can't do that, Miss Leibowitz."

"Do you want to die, or Die? Run or choose, boy."

"Kaien." Purity nodded. "Please go. Please." She didn't know what would happen if he stayed.

Go, Purity mouthed. Kaien pulled himself up the spiral staircase warily, though she knew he wouldn't go very far. Let NoNo have her laugh, Purity had something far more exciting, something she'd been starved of for far too long: leverage.

Purity stepped her way across the shards of half a million years, toward the stairs. NoNo Leibowitz watched her bloodied friend approach with glee. And the ghost of a macaw on her shoulder. Suddenly a champagne cork of hysterical, inappropriate giggles exploded somewhere inside Purity, and she blinked hard through tears not to laugh out loud.

So she sang instead. She felt her voice echo off the billionstone walls around her-the air still rang with the force of her blows. Purity could wield the song as the Weapon; it hung in the air, a shattered bell- song reverberating with released and dissipating power-at least, she hoped it was dissipating, or she'd have committed treasonous vandalism for naught.

As she sang, Purity closed her eyes and visualized the black and gold bars, hovering in her short-term memory. Then she relaxed into her breeding. If she had been raised for anything it was this: light music at a luncheon, a turn at the pianoforte, or a song to accompany a harpist at a pre- engagement luncheon preparatory party. It's just that today's excursion was Deadly. Purity was no songbird and had only NiNi's annoying humming as reference for the notation on the Dawn Stains, but she managed with the pitchy determination of a daughter of privilege. The warble threading out of her throat grew into a melody, and NoNo's eyes grew wide.

"Don't! Purity, we're on the same siiiii . . ."

The Weapon worked. Even as NoNo protested, her voice thickened like honey and her hands waved less wildly, an incredibly intricate clockwork toy grinding to a Dead stop. NoNo's face froze in paralyzed panic, and Purity couldn't turn away from the sight-as with the hammer and the Dawn Stains, she felt compelled to finish her work.

The song was not long, but it ended where it began, looping neatly- so Purity sang it again, then again, marching the key through the sequence of an arpeggio almost automatically. So much for music lessons being worthless, she thought as NoNo's Dying body began to lose color, then opacity. Purity kept singing, flinging out high, sharp notes at NoNo like daggers.

I hate you. Purity poured her soul into the song, remembering NoNo's promise to destroy Baron Kloo next. We were bad enough before this, cutting up girls for fashion infractions. Now we're all monsters. Now I'm a Murderer, too. NoNo said she'd wanted to keep her mother's hands clean, but she'd fouled them all instead.

NoNo's eyes disappeared completely, then the rest of her. She simply evaporated, the ghost of her body boiled away. Purity stopped singing mid-tune, dumbfounded by the sudden finality of the act-like a clock breaking. She stood alone amidst the ruins of the Dawn Stains, white stone walls glowing softly on her Murdering face.

12.

Life is a regrettable affair. It demoralizes and defeats me and I wish it never to end.

-Winston Churchill, Jenny In s.p.a.ce The shadow of the being called Chesmarul enveloped Cooper like the sea swallowing a sinking ship. He felt like wind and starlight in an airless non-place that could never feel a breeze or a single stray photon. The city that rushed up to meet him was a distant dot in the jeweled abyss below, just a glint in the pinwheel of light that Cooper recognized was the worlds-themetaverse.

The worlds spun like a mobile, suspended from an invisible point above and anch.o.r.ed from below by the lick of s.p.a.ce that was the City Unspoken. Between the unseen apex and the urban nadir shivered a span of creations, light whirling about light in an endless braided dance.

Among the lights of creation, Cooper saw teeming trillions-the syncopated fireflies that were mortal lives and, much fewer, the emeralds hidden among costume jewelry that were the slow-burning gemmed hearts of the First People. The fireflies and their elder counterparts swirled across the worlds in a turbulence that seemed random yet somehow guided; coordinated, at least, if not ordered. The hearts of the living were engines of life, and they woke and woke and woke, radiating loneliness and hope.

But something felt wrong. Some lights burned too brightly and seemed agitated, others pulsed irregularly, fading to the point of vanishing before strobing back to life. As he spiraled toward the city, Cooper sensed a foulness that offended the senses-a stopped-up drain, a sink gone foul. Sewage and offal and . . . sludge, invisible sludge clogging the lambent arteries of the living worlds.

No sooner did the bubble of that thought pop inside his head than Cooper was falling into the lights, not a pinwheel now but a rushing smear of cosmos growing larger and larger as he fell headfirst, the interst.i.tial ether glowing around his shoulders like the shroud of superheated gas surrounding a rocket during reentry. The distant dot of the city grew until he saw the streets and parks spread out beneath him-and beneath the streets, the inverted skysc.r.a.pers where the Winnowed made their stalact.i.te-homes, and beneath those, in fact directly beneath the gleaming Dome, a sphere of black and gold metal that pulsed with electricity and . . . music. He had no time to try and veer himself toward the buried machine before he tumbled in the direction of an H-shaped building and fell faster, faster, toward a green mansard roof and greener gra.s.s encircled by a high wall.

Trees shaded the mansion from view, but Cooper noted a familiar black-lacquered carriage with red-trimmed wheels. Lallowe Thyu. He had no time to curse before he shot through the copper and timber of the roof. Floors and rooms flapped through him like the pages of a flip-book, and then he hit something hard that knocked the wind from his chest.

Blinking his eyes, Cooper lifted his head, relieved that his body seemed intact; he found himself lying on the ground in a s.p.a.ce too similar to the golden cathedral-forest to be accidental. Similar, but opposite. Gray instead of gold- green; bone rather than bark; built and not grown. Pillars of bone rose in the place of trees, but at the same angles, if on a smaller scale. Conical vaults made of-skulls?-rose above his head in imitation of the golden boughs, and little enchanted lights hung at their apexes, burning inside tiny round cages. Rib cages. Babies' rib cages.

f.u.c.king delightful.

"What in the name of the King Beneath the Hill are you?" a voice asked. "And how did you find your way down here?"