Purity helped the weak thing to her feet, uncertain what to do. But Prama nodded her crested head at the golden sphere high above.

"Please," she begged, "take me there."

That had been Purity's intent, but now it was a royal decree. Supporting the aesr, Purity and Prama took the first of a thousand steps.

They made it to the first tier before Prama collapsed against the side of the second telescoped platform, leaning her head against the metal and breathing heavily. Above, the black whorl of lich-lords grew steadily larger as, slowly, the host descended.

One dark contrail split off from the swirling ma.s.s and veered downward, speeding toward Purity and Prama with a cackle and streaks of red lightning. It landed in a cloud and drifted toward them with steepled fingers. Fingerbones.

Purity screamed. The lich reared back, offended.

Purity screamed again, and pointed at the undead thing. The lich followed her finger, and looked behind itself to see if perhaps there was something relevant, but no-just an offensive child and her predictable noise.

Purity found herself and slapped her own cheek twice, hard. She set her jaw and spoke through clenched teeth: "The undead are not welcome within the royal precinct. By the authority of my father, the Baron Kloo, who sits upon the Circle Unsung at the foot of Fflaen the Fair, I remand you to your sky. This world will not suffer the footstep of the unliving. Please leave."

"Oh." It c.o.c.ked its head, disregarding the once-reliable banishment of its kind from the City Unspoken. Instead it drifted closer to Purity, half- hiding behind a brace of skinned chinchilla, green eyefire aghast but exploratory. "What are you." The lich didn't ask the question so much as accuse Purity of existing in s.p.a.ce through which it had chosen to move.

"You may address me as Lady Kloo if you must, thing." Purity snapped the retort before she could stop herself, and for a startled moment she wondered whether those would be her last words. The lich-lord seemed to be considering the same possibility, but Purity interrupted it with more insane bravado. "And who, what, and why might you be?" She pressed on. In for a nickeldime, in for a dirty, I suppose.

The lich turned its head a fraction of an inch. "I am freedom, I am your death, and I am because the world isss unfair to pretty little girlsss who wander where they oughtn't." It raised a bony hand that radiated a cold beyond cold and pointed to Prama, still slumped against the wall of the platform. "I have come to retrieve my slave."

Purity lifted her chin and stared the thing straight in its flaming eye sockets. "Really! I don't think I'll let a fleshless n.o.body accost me in my own home. Have you any idea what my friends will do to you when they see the revolting way you've styled your hair? Staple all the chunky gold in the worlds to your face, bless your tiny coal heart, and it still won't hide that mess you piled atop your head." She forced herself to sound snide but had to admit, it wasn't as hard as perhaps it ought to be.

"I beg your pardon?" If the lich had eyelids it would have gaped, and it pressed one ring-barnacled claw against its chest.

"Bitzy will have fits, and then we'll have to bleach lich-droppings out of our slippers. Have you any idea how hard it is to lift putrefaction humors from satin?" She looked the thing up and down; was it naked under those furs? "No, I daresay you might not."

"Oh? Girl. Woe to those with the poor sense to love you. They wake to misery today."

But Prama cried out, a sound somewhere between a keening wail and a war cry. Groaning with the effort, she stood: and a woman robed in sunlight stepped forward, radiating brilliance from her skin. Pinp.r.i.c.k lights danced up her sides and curled around her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Bright things like wings or windblown drapery fluttered behind her, and her crested head was obscured by a cowl of light. She stood nearly twice as tall as Purity, and walked past the young n.o.blewoman as if she did not exist.

The lich retreated before the Prama's illuminated approach. Wing- shaped protuberances on her b.u.t.tocks and back wafted wide open, their tips shining like the sun.

Bells, but she's tall when she's not hunched over and moaning, Purity thought.

"Do you know my given name, lich?" Prama's voice was low and sweet and ripe with pain. "We have tasted each other, you and I. Would you like another sip?"

"Oh?" The lich giggled and looked around as if seeking an exit. "Not necessary, really." It drifted back further, almost to the precipice of the platform. Below lay the wooden corpses of the Groveheart, tossed with mud.

She stared unblinking at the lich from one single eye that was set in the middle of her crest and burned several colors at once. "The fun we'll have," she promised, low and throaty.

"Please. Forgive me. Your grace." The lich shuddered. "I seek amnesty!"

"Not an option." A smile like clouds parting, and a shake of her luminous head.

Prama sighed, a sound like a pipe organ wrestling a piccolo, and flared her open wing-fins. She focusing her light on a point inches from the lich's fur-swathed chest.

"I will do you a kindness," Prama said sweetly, "and grant you the mercy you denied me, for so long. Although it will hurt."

The ball of light inched toward the lich, who appeared paralyzed, and as the light touched its chest the undead thing began to howl. Into the black substance swathing its body Prama pushed the ball of light, and the lich-lord's rusty bones began to glow with a cleansing, golden light. The green fire in its eyes flickered yellow, then gold, and finally its skull was transformed into pure quartz crystal, clear but riddled with milky flaws.

The fire disappeared from its eyes, the black smoke melted away from its bones, and the lich-lord collapsed in a pile, a crystal skull amidst bones of shattered gla.s.s.

"The cure for undeath," Prama turned to Purity, "is life." Then she collapsed, sobbing, and Purity could not bring herself to touch the sunlit heir.

"That's her!" a man's voice called out from the stairs below. "That's the aesr we saved atop the towers! That's the woman who's been screaming at me for days!"

A man and a woman rushed up the steps behind them. Sesstri nodded at Purity but immediately began tending to the wounded, traumatized aesr.

"Who are you?" Cooper asked Purity.

"Who are you?" she replied.

"I'm CooperOmphale, and I'm the center of the G.o.dd.a.m.ned metaverse."

Purity clucked. Why fight? "And I am Lady Purity Kloo, daughter of Baron Emil Kloo, who sits on the Circle Unsung. And this," she indicated Prama, "is Prince Fflaen's daughter, Prama-Ramay Afflaena-Uchara."

Cooper shrugged. "I saved her, you know. After a whole lotta torture."

"So," Purity said through clenched teeth, "did I."

No one inside the Dome would have recognized their prince as he crawled out of the earth. The creature who'd ruled them had been ineffable, cyclopean, and made of light. The wretch who returned to the scene of his crime looked none of these things. He'd crawled across rock as sharp as gla.s.s and pulled himself up through half a hundred different stairwells, many empty of stairs, when he'd scaled the ancient wells with his fingers and toes and an ugly determination to put right what he'd abandoned.

Asher's first breath of topside air filled his lungs with the scents he'd forgotten-wet peat, moss, the bark- and-vine smell of the old forest, which had grown here before his ancestors arrived to build a city. Behind him, the billionstone bones of the Pet.i.te Malaison shone through cracks and windows of the building like sunlight. He was home. She was home.

"Is it time, then?" a voice asked from beneath an arbor. "All the fun will be over, you know." Oxnard Terenz-de-Guises fiddled with his rings. He sounded almost sad.

"You had fun," Asher answered. "I had pain."

"Oh, I don't know about that." The marquis rolled a chip across his knuckles and savored a little smile. "It wasn't entirely unpleasant, was it? You met your lady love, gambled and drank with an old friend. We had times, Your Grace. We had times."

Asher said nothing. Formal language hurt his ears, after so long a time away, and so many crimes that made him unworthy of it.

"You never told me why you did it. Why you locked them up." Oxnard peered out from beneath his black brows.

"They deserved it."

Terenz-de-Guises put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "And you didn't?"

Asher looked up, perhaps a million years old, looking like a child who was sorry he'd been bad. "I should have been. It was simple selfishness that stopped me, nothing more."

"She's here, you know. Of course you know- but . . ." Oxnard bit his lip and looked, for once, n.o.ble. "She will make all the difference in the worlds, Your Grace. And you can be free, then, at last."

Asher nodded, his eyes watering. His cindercysts had already begun to regrow; he could feel them burning between his ribs. It wouldn't be long.

"Did you find your red metal jewelry box, milord?" he asked.

Oxnard pulled a rueful face. "Not yet. I've one place left to search, and I'm afraid she'll put up a fight."

It hurt Asher to chuckle, but he did. His sides were on fire, and his skin felt white-hot. Soon, it would be exactly that. "We'll help."

"It's about time you reverted to the royal we, Your Grace." Oxnard turned to go.

"That's not what I meant."

"I know." Oxnard pointed at the golden machine that had pushed itself up through the Groveheart until it towered over the shredded forest. Above, the Dome was gone, blossomed into petals of mountain- sized rubble. "It'll be a hard climb in your condition. You'd best hurry."

"Not coming?"

Oxnard held out his hands to mime a weighted scale. "I'm craven, but I like to make an entrance. I haven't yet decided."

"I'll see you soon, then. Craven fool." Asher limped toward the ruined center of what was once the Dome.

Lallowe and Almondine stepped out of the portal into the spherical chamber as one, their arms linked in a pantomime of delicacy. Almondine's face appeared first, a heart-shaped blankness framed by an auburn bob. Lallowe's black hair faded into existence next, her lips pursed tightly against a storm of conflicting emotions and violent impulses. Their slippered feet touched the gold floor at the same time, and they nodded to each other before surveying the engine room.

Lallowe looked down. This is it, then, the vivisistor at the heart of the City Unspoken. Mother's dead prize.

The forces that had built this vivisistor predated them all, but any organism old and big enough to power a device the size of the Dome could be nothing but one of the First People.

As Cooper arrived with a n.o.ble girl and a blindingly bright female aesr, Lallowe marveled at the spray of light across the ornately textured walls of the chamber-circuitry etched into the inner surface of a golden ball as large in diameter as an opera hall, a wide rim of gold floor spanning its circ.u.mference, where they stood. After blinking, Lallowe saw that most of the engine chamber was empty s.p.a.ce, defined by a golden dome above, top open to the daylight, and a circular pit below, slick with dark fluid that dripped down the far wall.

The aesr's illuminated skin cast light across the curved walls, making the gold inscriptions beside her shine bright as a sun. A dark stain nearly three stories tall painted the full height of the far end of the engine chamber, a spray of the same slick filth that filled the central bowl. Rotting gore spilled down the wall and gathered in a pile, where some pieces of the body remained, each as big as a horse and glowing from within as cysts the size of human heads slowly released the last of their light.

Whatever had powered this engine had been destroyed by the opening, but had certainly been close to death anyway. If True Death was the byproduct of a machine, the engine's loss of power would correlate to the inability of the Dying to Die, and thus to the svarning. She wondered if any of them even suspected the truth.

Lallowe saw Cooper notice her. She lifted the hand that had rested on Almondine's forearm and licked the thumb.

"You owe me a finger," he said.

Lallowe smiled, the collar of her sleeveless powder- green blouse stiff and high like a general's. Almondine had eyes only for Sesstri, and did not see the sc.r.a.p of drafting paper that Lallowe pressed against her wet thumb. Almondine clapped, and pulled on Lallowe's elbow. "It's her, Lolly! The one I told you about! It's Sissy. Oh, Lolly, you get your new sibling after all." She paused to see if Sesstri was listening, then c.o.c.ked her head. "Pleasure to see you again, little sister."

"You will die screaming on my knives." Sesstri remained perfectly still.

"Tut-tut. Your older sister, Almondine, is right," Lallowe said, raising Almondine's hand in her own, while holding her thumb to Almondine's wrist. "She tells me that Manfred Manfrix was Mother's first human mate, and a failure-"

Cooper watched Prama become a streak of golden light-moving just like Asher, the same scissoring perfection of limb and flattened palm. Inside a heartbeat, she had cut off Lallowe and held each sister by the throat. Behind them pulsed a portal that must belong to the Cicatrix, a vulvic thing dripping acrylic paint in midnight hues-black and purples.

Prama shone like a furious golden axe, forged from sunlight. "You desecrate the engine of the ancients and the deathplace of a being so majestic that the likes of you do not deserve to know her ident.i.ty. Once I have banished you and bound your undead sc.u.m for eternal torture, I will return her remains to the waters of our sea."

" Really?" Lallowe asked by way of an introduction, looking down at the being who held her. "I think you'll find yourselves too busy begging for death to be returning any bodies to any waters. Don't you agree, sister?"

Almondine nodded once, the crack of a pistol. "Just so."

The sisters turned their eyes toward the sky, gazing up through the hole in the ceiling of the engine, where the storm of lich-lords descended. Streaks of black smoke spiraled down into the gold machine room, lich- lords that did not bother to resolve into their individual forms. They dove for Prama, swarming her in black clouds until she shrieked and clawed at her face. Her radiance was swallowed by darkness, which still poured down from above.

The sisters fell free. Lallowe and Almondine resumed their poses, armin-arm, walking no faster than two courtly ladies on an evening's promenade.

As liches filled the room, Cooper curled his lip in a snarl and narrowed his eyes at Thyu.

The marchioness waved her fingertips in response, sending ghost fingers trilling up his spine. They were connected now, blood to blood and back again. Cooper knew with a sudden insight that if she were injured, he would feel it.

Oh yes, and feel it doubly. He heard Lallowe's whisper inside his head as she held out her arm to show him the scar. The stump of Cooper's little finger twitched-he felt its tip twitch below Lallowe's bicep.

I know what you are and it is vile, Lolly. Cooper thought his accusation at her like a slap on the cheek, and was glad when she shook her head, glaring at him. At least the enhanced call quality worked both ways.

Purity gasped horribly-a lich wrapped its arms around her, and she sagged, turning pale. The lich wore huge sungla.s.ses that did not quite contain the smolder of the yellow- green coals burning in place of its eyes, and a gold tennis bracelet. It chuckled wordlessly and pulled her away. Another landed beside Cooper with a grinding chuckle. A rusted claw found his shoulder and he, too, felt a numbing chill.

Only Sesstri remained standing, squared off against her sisters. She pulled Chesmarul's book out of her satchel and began flipping through its pages with manic haste.

"f.u.c.k you, f.u.c.k you, f.u.c.k you," she recited under her breath like a mantra. She hadn't seen any use whatsoever in poor Ms. Messerschmidt's Urban Weather Patterns; that is, until undead monsters clad in black weather descended into her midst.

She began to recite a pa.s.sage on the legal rights to air s.p.a.ce and breathing rights. "According to . . . according to princely decree, the building, breathing, and flying rights or . . . or any subset thereof . . . may be remanded by . . ." She stopped momentarily as Nixon flew into the engine chamber, red-faced and huffing from a thousand stairs. Sesstri almost smiled. When Asher followed a moment later, wounded and bleeding, Sesstri's smile gleamed.

Almondine stepped out from behind her sister without pretext and stalked toward Sesstri with murder on her otherwise expressionless face. It wasn't murder Cooper needed special senses to see, and Nixon saw it too, his eyes wide in alarm.

Almondine whipped out her hand and grabbed Sesstri by the throat, jerking the taller woman's feet off the floor. She drew back her other arm and prepared to smash Sesstri's skull with her fist. "I think it's time to end you now, Sissy. I will wear your lover's gray skin at my coronation, and rekindle the hearts of my Wild Hunters with the tale of the fall of the last aesr-his daughter's skull will make a splendid crown. Faerie fire shall burn your corpses without consuming your bones, limning my victory trophies for a thousand-thousand years on the pyres of triumph." She fixed Sesstri with a slow-burning smile. "And you, Sissy, will be forgotten entirely. Like your father forgot you, and our mother."

Sesstri made a sound of choking despair, and scrabbled for her knives to no avail. Messerschmidt dropped to the floor.

"Hey Doll!" Nixon shouted, pelting toward the women and pulling out his own weapon-the knife he'd looted from the dying Charnel Girl- as he ran. "You leave my pink bird alone!"

Almondine kicked him away without even looking. Nixon shot off like a cannonball and didn't slow until his body hit the wall, his stolen knife shattering against the etched gold circuits. He picked himself up slowly, his mouth gaping a gory hole from Almondine's kick to his face. His pointed nose was broken and most of his front teeth were gone, blood dripping onto his belly. Nixon looked at the b.l.o.o.d.y bone chips scattered across the floor of the great machine, felt at his toothless mouth with a pudgy little hand, and his eyes went black. Leveling his gaze at the tidy monster in the hound's-tooth coat, he charged.

"Nixon, stay back!" Cooper shouted. "You little idiot!"

But Nixon leapt at the deranged faerie with a roar. "Stick it, sister!" he screamed, tackling Almondine at her knees-she folded in half and fell backward as Nixon's momentum carried them both over the edge, tumbling into the pit. As their bodies spun through the air he exulted, "n.o.body kicks the new Nixon!"

They landed with a splat on the slope of the depression, Nixon rolling away from the lethal faerie on impact. Her eyes wide as a cow's, Almondine scrabbled desperately at the side of the golden bowl, slick with oily blood, but was unable to gain any purchase. Her cherrywood fingernails splintered as she slid toward the drain, and she lost her cool at last, howling once in fury before being swallowed by the darkness.

"Ha!" the unboy cackled in triumph, flattening himself against the slippery side of the pit even as gravity pulled him toward the same black hole. The deadly fall would not end for hundreds of feet, maybe thousands, in the caverns below the city.

Because of his small size, Nixon slid more slowly but just as decidedly toward the drain at the bottom of the machine chamber. Cooper threw himself toward the edge of the pit, but Nixon was out of reach. He didn't struggle, but instead grinned up at Cooper and Sesstri as his body tipped into the drain. "I did it! I'm a good guy!" He raised his hands to flash twin victory signs and was flown away.

15.

In the field hospital we shared a lark: that birth seemed most likely to occur during an eclipse, death at dawn. Sometimes both at once, and then a day-light or dark-but filled with the most sonorous music.

These days rape the worlds of a virgin contradiction and plant the seed of tomorrow's blessed sorrows. On such mornings I peal the hymn that bled through the legs of the Western daughters and the pig-stuck organs of their war-dogged sons.

The poem of flesh repeats my lesson that each moment of dark and light is a miracle.