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by M.K. Hobson
Fantasy, 23 pages.
Originally Published in Talebones, 2008
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The message came while Iyrthyne, who had been Cloud Sister, was riding up the glistening obsidian flanks of Shard Feyr to the Couch of the Celestials. Up toward the Blessed City, the humiliated city, the ludicrous city; the city that had been hers.
She rode in a ceremonial pulley-barge carved with stiff little snakebirds and twining serpents, reflected a hundred times in the fractured cliff-face of volcanic glass. Once, the right to be carried up to the Blessed City in the ceremonial barge had been hers alone; now she enjoyed the privilege only occasionally, when the Ratiocinator required her to perform some ceremonial rite to placate the people, or when visiting Eastern dignitaries required a display of opulence.
The visiting dignitary for whom today’s display of opulence had been arranged was fat (as were all dignitaries), fair (as were all conquering Empireals), and fussy. His name was An Far Gharat. He was High Chief Inquisitor of the Empire of Reason, and he had traveled five hundred miles from the capital to review the progress of the Empire’s representatives in the province. His visit was a rare occurrence—while possessed of dramatic natural beauties, the Black Shards were perceived to be one of the Empire’s more useless and insignificant provinces—and the ceremonies attending it were lavish.
Not that he had taken much notice of them. His plump lips had curled up blankly at every wonder that had been presented to him. As all Empireals, he did not wish wonders to touch him; he fended them off, as though they might soil his white linen robes.
But here in the pulley barge, hanging suspended between the mossy jade slopes of the Shadow City below and the Blessed City above, the dignitary’s mask of Empireal nonchalance was slipping. A sudden, stiff wind gusted across the glass-shiny face of the mountain; the barge swayed like a basket on the hip of a voluptuous woman. The guiding ropes that ran ten thousand feet from the top of the mountain to its base creaked and muttered like the rigging of a ship in a summer storm. An Far Gharat fell backward into pillowy cushions of gold-shot purple silk, his mathematician’s eyes scrutinizing the chased platinum pulleys, the thick hempen ropes straining through them. His face was chalk-pale.
“They never fall, you say?”
He did not ask the question of Iyrthyne. No one asked questions of her anymore. She, in her antique robes of state, she with the four scars of the Cloud Sister slashed across her cheeks, she was merely an anachronistic bit of local color.
The question was asked of the other two riders in the barge; the Ratiocinator and the daughter she had borne him. Like An Far Gharat, they were both fair, both clothed in white linen.
“No, Inquisitor, they never fall,” came the ready answer from Iyrthyne’s daughter, En Fon Kehl. In adoring imitation of her father, the girl had been kissing air around the old man since his arrival. Iyrthyne, on the other hand, had gone to great lengths to make sure the old fool’s soup was oversalted, his bed unwarmed by female companionship, his bathwater cold. A small rebellion, but the most she could manage these days.
“That is not strictly correct,” said the Ratiocinator, his voice sober and corrective. “A common barge fell thirteen years ago, in the year of your birth. The passengers, mainly tourers from the Northern city of Ais, were all killed. But that was judged a case of sabotage, the work of lingering rebel elements which have long since been subdued.”
The High Chief Inquisitor made a small clucking noise; regret or fear, Iyrthyne could not tell. Her daughter looked humbly at her father, and in her soft, adoring green eyes, Iyrthyne could see genuine regret at having spoken an untruth, even involuntarily. Truth was all to these Empireals, these mathematicians.
It was then that the message came.
The High Chief Inquisitor screeched and ducked, covering his head. There was a clear note of intense purity, like a silk-threaded bow drawn across a lyre strung with moonlight as something swept by the barge with a flash of brilliantly colored feathers. The cry warbled, intensifying and then fading as the thing flew away.
Iyrthyne watched the creature intently as it soared in a broad swooping arc back toward the pulley-barge. It had dartlike azure wings and a slithering snake’s tail scaled in crimson. Its breast was the color of the winter sun sinking behind the Black Shards, and its head was black as a rook.
It was called a snakebird in the Empireal tongue. The last time she had seen one, over a decade ago, it had been in a cage, presented to the Ratiocinator as an amusement by one of his lieutenants. The creature, bruised by capture and sullen from captivity, stared at her reproachfully. But she could do nothing to save it. The Ratiocinator had it cooked for supper.
When she was Cloud Sister, when she had -- [End of Preview.]