A brief silence held for a few seconds after Aida's shattering scream ended. Then cries, shouts, and wails erupted from those unfortunates crushed by the fallen strider, caught in the building's collapse, or slashed by flying glass from the dome. Aida's military escorts scrambled with drawn weapons or chased down spooked striders, reacting instinctively to an attack that wasn't an attack. Chaos reigned everywhere. Aida witnessed it all from a great remove.
Fallon tugged at her ragged dress sleeve, a dazed look in his eye. His lips moved, but she understood nothing. Maybe her strings broke when she... when whatever just happened happened. Maybe she broke.
A smaller strider galloped to her side. The Spartan atop reached down an arm. She numbly touched the blood running from Fallon's ear as he pushed her to the man. Somehow she mounted the strider as other riders formed up about them holding bows nocked, crossbows loaded, and polearms at the ready. Ghillie vaulted up, grabbed the saddle, and settled in behind Aida as the strider turned.
A shouted command sent the riders charging through the crowd, slashing their weapons mercilessly at any in their path or trampling those who reacted too slowly. They hurtled through a small market leaving uncounted more dead and wounded innocents in their wake.
Aida watched with a distant, depersonalized clarity, as if the flood of power washed all personality and feelings away with it. Only when they reached the white-washed stone wall surrounding the towering obsidian Spire did the numbness begin to fade.
Up close, the immense tower resembled a gleaming skyscraper formed when some giant grabbed a molten black stone, stretched and twisted it, squeezed it to a point, thrust it into the great glittering ovoid curving out far above them. Then it repeated the act on the cylinder city's far side. A hundred black facet faces on its surface reflected sun plazas like small, distorted suns.
The hulking gate guards waved them through without challenge or question, their armor the same anachronistic meeting between medieval knight and battle tank she'd spotted walking the streets. Even more bizarre, they and the area about them desaturated. Their mere presence clearly drained color from everything nearby.
Fallon rushed to her side from another strider as she dismounted. Close-pressed guards raised a shell of bronze-rimmed shields about them as they advanced then shoved them through a gaping entrance more fissure than door. The numbness slowly faded as they walked, leaving her stomach fluttering, throat tight, breathing short and shallow. Only Ghillie's guiding, comforting hand on her back kept her from breaking down entirely.
Inside, the city's noise and bustle fell away. In its place, silence interrupted randomly by strangely refracted echoes. They passed through a short, natural tunnel into an open cavern lit by a massive chandelier dangling dozens of green-white, glowing filaments. The cavernous space bustled with activity, people representing all skin tones, sizes, and professions. Some hauled urns, jars, baskets, bundles, and bales. Others patrolled, mingled, lounged, or slipped through a dozen arbitrarily-placed tunnels. Black dust swirled and eddied in the commotion, smearing skirts and sandals, leaving tiny drifts in unattended corners, and giving the air a biting, sooty scent.
Frilly nobles pushed through imperiously. Shaven-headed functionaries hauled paper sheafs, books, or scrolls. Laborers balanced loads on backs or heads. Guards tabarded in white trimmed with green patrolled or stood guard. All these and innumerable others hustled about them
Unable to take any more stimulus, Aida collapsed, curled up in fetal position, and hyperventilated.
"What was... what did... how did... those people... I... I didn't..." Her teeth chattered as her words faltered out. A cold sweat trickled down her back yet she felt flushed.
"Dynast, this is not the place," Fallon hissed, trying to pull her up while offering embarrassed smiles to all who passed. Their military escorts cast skeptical looks at each other while they dispersed into the traffic. "We're trying to make a good impression."
"Fallon! Ghost snakes... shadows with voice... spoke inside... something broke... I have the Weirding Way. The people... I hurt them!" Someone else babbled through her lips.
A cold, detached voice in her head called her a fragile ninny. So she was an old lady jerked from her routine, half-kidnapped, dragged through another universe or five, assaulted by an immortality-vomiting beast, made god-queen over a barren, bleak world whose only inhabitants wanted to eat her then led through a cylindrical city where god-shed shadow snakes triggered a deadly sonic blast probably killing or maiming innocent bystanders by the dozen... so what?
Even that clinical part began to falter as it ranted. Yeah, okay. Maybe a little breakdown was justified.
Fallon dragged her bodily through a tunnel angling shallowly upwards. Two Spartans followed behind.
Aida let herself be led. She hovered somewhere on the border between hysterical laughter and sobbing without quite tipping over into either. Ghillie took her hand gently and looked into her eyes, the girl's intense gaze lending Aida a sense of stability and solidity. Who knew what this little slip of a thing went through to get here, condemned to defend Aida, die trying, or die failing?
"Why did you do that?" Fallon snapped, the tunnel's narrowness muffling his voice. A Spartan slipped ahead to lead them.
A shaven-headed woman wearing tattered yellow robes shoved between them, muttering to herself.
"Give me a break, Fallon. I've been through a lot in the last few however-longs it's been. Feels like a month since-"
He grabbed her shoulder and shook her until Ghillie stepped protectively between them. The lead Spartan stopped, leaned on his spear, and watched them with a quirked eyebrow until Fallon motioned for the man to lead on.
"Not your pathetic, hysterical collapse. I meant your whimsical bit of murder and destruction at the Optomime's."
"I thought you were going to tell me!" She waved her arms at him. "I told you already; something whispered in my head, ghost snake things from the flying god snake thing came at me, and it just happened."
"Did you do that often where you come from?"
"No one's done anything like that where I come from. Ever." She rubbed her face. "I don't know what happened but I'm dangerous. A menace. I shouldn't be allowed in public much less given a verse to rule!"
"Another thing we agree on," Fallon mumbled. "Whatever just happened, we have to put behind us. We have fought a skirmish in Ocyl's streets necessitating an armed escort, wrecked and killed a royal strider, ruined some menials, knocked down half a block, and vandalized one of the most prestigious boutiques in the Verse. Let us not add to that offensive list by keeping him waiting."
Aida struggled mightily to break the funk settling on her as they climbed seemingly-endless twisting tunnelways. Silence traveled with them but for their huffing breath and their footfalls on stone. As they rose higher in the Spire, the dingy, scraped stone grew polished and filament lamp placements became more frequent. So too the people they passed became cleaner and more refined in dress and mannerism. The fine black dust finally disappeared from hall and hem.
Her focus seemed off, everything blurring at the edges as she fought to still her mind. Clear answers came in dribbles against swirling emotional tides churning with unknowns and mysteries. The best solution she came up with settled her on clamping down on or ignoring the innumerable questions swelling up in her mind until she could lock Fallon in a room for a week and get solid answers. Ignorance may not be bliss, but at least it might keep her head from exploding.
"Go with the flow," she muttered.
She felt literally, physically lighter as they climbed. The tunnels carved taller to account for their increased buoyancy. A scientific, rational region in her brain tried to butt in again with postulates about the gravity here, but she shut it down lest it open up the floodgates and let everything she'd just tenuously tamped down break loose again.
They turned a corner, halting at gleaming bronze doors flanked by two male Ferals wearing lacquered armor smooth as porcelain and holding spears hafted in white ash. Their bone Feral masks gleamed with glaze. Their two escorts bowed and turned back. The Ferals pulled the doors open after the briefest glances at her forehead.
Dark became light as they passed the threshold. Gloomy obsidian tunnels gave way to bright, polished marble floors and white wooden paneling. Pale green carpets ran down wide corridors, guarded by statuesque, porcelain Ferals. Gold chandeliers dangled every few paces, their threads emitting a warm, white light. A pleasant vaguely woody aroma rose to her nostrils.
At the first tunnel intersection, Fallon doubled over, panting and wiping sweat from his face.
"Apparently hiking isn't a required course at Seneschal school?"
He shook his head and rose, rubbing his back. "I do not understand why these exertions tire me so. My back aches and legs wobble."
"We can do some calisthenics when we get back to the One-Eighth. I'll show you the ones my first husband did in the Navy." Aida glanced at the pale-green- or white-liveried servants streaming by in an endless flow.
She leaned towards Ghille. "I'm detecting a theme, but I can't quite put my finger on it."
Ghillie glanced at her, raised a pencil-thin eyebrow, and gestured at her white-flecked-brown ghillie suit like a girl discovering her prom dress didn't fit the theme. Aida smiled in spite of herself as she turned back to Fallon. "Where to?"
"This way I would think."
They merged with the foot traffic. Their movements proved clumsy in the light gravity compared to everyone else's smooth bounds and graceful low slides.
"Ocyl's Ferals are all men."
Fallon nodded, wiping his brow with his sleeve. Whether exhausted from their climb or nervous about the upcoming meeting, he looked greenish. "Dynasts always receive Ferals of their gender. Ocyl calls them his 'Porcelain Guard.'"
"In our world, men are, like, ten times more likely to end up in prison than women. Testosterone and culture and all that. How do they keep it even?"
"The Black Court has its ways."
"Which means you have no idea."
Fallon gritted his teeth.
She waggled her finger at him and grinned. "Better watch out, I'm starting to understand Fallon-speak."
They came to a wide, well-lit hall paneled in gleaming, lacquered ash and pillared with white marble. A fantastic-in-the-original-sense courtly array packed it to the walls. Skin tones generally sketched to the darker end, but otherwise ranged from white to black to gray to red to brown, their clothing riotous, patchwork rainbows here complimenting and their clashing in every color, hue, and style. Aida stared wide-eyed as Fallon led her through.
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A shaven-headed young woman with a starburst tattooed on her scalp and whose eyes glowed faintly like sunlight argued with an older, clearly-drunk woman whose low-cut dress showed off her grisly, incredibly-vivid tattoo: a wide eye staring out from a slit throat.
Fallon dropped brief, knowing descriptions as he tracked her gaze. "Pure Priest of the Ascen. The drunk one's Ocyl's Seericide."
A man whose long silver wire hair moved on its own, forming tendrils to assist him as he tinkered with a clockwork device. About him, young women clustered in dresses vying with one another to push harder against modesty's boundaries. Beyond him, a frowning woman wearing an uncomfortable- and heavy-looking robe bound with copper wire and studded with tiny bronze plates, her gray hair shorn close.
"A dusa from Gears. Novelty-seeking Verser daughters he is completely oblivious to. Grumpy one in back is a Clockpriest from the same Verse whom he is stealing the spotlight from."
A dwarf woman with rough, scaly skin sat on the floor caressing a blooming bonsai cherry tree in its shallow pot.
"An Arborian from Groves with a gift for Ocyl he will not care about. Probably wants a job working at Ocyl's Preserve beyond the Circular Sea."
A gray-skinned woman standing off on her own wearing a gray button-along-the-side uniform with a high tight collar. Everything about her shaded gray like someone spliced from a black-and-white movie. Talking to her tersely with clear tension between the two, her opposite: a young man in loose flowing clothing stitched from a hundred twined ribbons. In the few moments Aida watched him, his clothing, hair, and skin subtly drifted in hue and tone.
"The dull one a High Parser from Ink. Her counterpart a rare Vibrant from the same. Mortal enemies in their verse, I've heard, but merely strange bedfellows out here in the Book."
An immensely-muscled, loincloth-clad, blond-braided man glaring about, daring anyone to make eye contact. Snake tattoos writhed and swarmed about on his skin.
"I would guess that specimen is a Venger. Expensive skinlife menagerie he hosts; probably needs work to pay for it."
An androgynous person wrapped in a headscarf and flowing robes heavily adorned by bracelets, anklets, and necklaces listening with great interest to identical twin boys talking exactly in sync with one another.
"A Mune from the Collective in Dost. The kids it is listening to Ocyl's pet Twine."
"Twine?"
"One soul threaded through two bodies. Unusual and lucky."
"Is any of this going to be on the test?"
"What?"
"Is knowing any of this relevant? Should I keep listening or can I tune you out?"
"One never knows when such knowledge might be useful." He aimed for mysterious, but nailed defensive instead.
"Definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto."
Activity paused as they passed, stares following as they glided across the gleaming white marble. Gossip rippled sussurantly in their wake.
At the hall's far end, a regal-looking black woman wearing a dress stitched from subtly-blended emerald, lime, and sage-colored silks awaited them atop a dais replete with a pearl-studded ivory throne. Behind the throne, contrast: a massive double door cast from heavy bronze and inlaid with gilded animals at hunt, prowling, mating, sleeping.
"A preponderance of panthers there," she muttered.
"What?" Fallon said, eyes tearing away from the silk-clad woman atop the dais.
"Nothing important. Just my usual nonsense."
"I would never presume to assume you said something important, Dynast."
"Seneschal Fallon," the woman said as they arrived at the dais stairs, her voice melodious and perhaps faintly mocking. She bowed elegantly, revealing pearl-beaded lace tracing strands through her kinky hair. Strings gleamed at her throat, her skein as dense as Fallon's but polished to an eye-catching gleam. "We have been awaiting your arrival with utmost anticipation."
"Seneschal... of Ocyl, Dynast of Heaven's Tread." He flushed. Anger flashed in his eyes as he turned and flourished a hand towards Aida.
"Sure, blame me for everything," Aida mumbled. Feeling five-hundred eyes weighing and judging her every movement, she imitated the woman's bow.
"This must be Aida, Dynast of One-Eighth Shithole." The woman somehow managed to make Aida's verse sound elegant and musical, even if the woman's mouth quirked in the barest, fleetest smile. A few chuckles and guffaws sprang up behind them.
Aida forced herself to ignore them.
"It must be." She gave up her attempt at formality and gestured down her bloody, dirty, ripped and cut dress with her two-fingered, crudely-bandaged hand. "In the flesh or at least whatever's left."
The Seneschal smiled and pressed lightly on a bronze door. It swung open easily despite its mass, revealing layers of heavy white curtains beyond.
"Please enter, Dynast. If you would not mind leaving your retinue behind, Ocyl wishes to meet you in private."
Fallon shook his head, his lips pressing together. Ghillie took a slight step closer to Aida, but she was done with them smothering her. If this Dynast wanted her dead, it would have happened already in some alley or tunnel any time since she'd arrived.
"Of course, Seneschal." Aida glided through the doors as gracefully as she could manage in the light gravity and teetering as she was constantly on the edge of overwhelm.
"Careful!" Fallon hissed, grasping at her mangled sleeve as she passed. "He will try to catch you off guard, keep you wrong-footed. Do not agree to anything!"
"I'm a big girl, thanks." She pried free and patted him on the cheek. "Worse case scenario he pries the Shithole from our hands. Oh no!"
"Just watch out for-" Whatever came after failed to penetrate the heavy door as it swung silently closed behind her.
Darkness and silence swallowed her; the Black Court again but now alone. She cleared her throat to be sure noise still worked. A critical voice in her head rebuked her but she told it to shove it. She'd been through enough improbable nonsense in the last few days that anything was possible.
Shuffling slowly forward with arms held out like a zombie, she composed an apology for her destructive scream at the Optomimes. If he attempted to push the issue by bringing up the gang assault practically in the Spire's shadow that got two of her people killed - well, three if you counted friendly-fire and she certainly was going to - she mentally prepared her counter. Let him decide whether complicity or incompetence described him better if he got uppity about it.
Guilt about what happened at the Optomime's welled up and she crushed it back down mercilessly. The last thing she needed right now.
She bumped curtains and they parted with surprising ease considering their dense layering. It took a moment for her eyes to readjust, the space on the far side warmly lit by several dozen brightly-glowing threads dangling from the tall ceiling.
Part trophy room, part museum, part oddities collection, the orderly, white space hosted dozens of marble plinths. At least as many small nooks pock the walls and, against the back wall, long shelves sagged under the wait of glass jars. Some displays contained bizarre and exotic feathery, tentacled, furry, scaled, chitinous, or fleshy creatures preserved in yellowish liquid or taxidermied in mini terrariums. Others showcased weapons or tools crafted from materials as diverse: wood, stone, bone, bronze, brass, steel, and other materials she couldn't identify.
One in the back caught her eye. She squinted. That couldn't be a jagged tin-can lid could-
"Welcome, Dynast," a deep basso voice rumbled from a shadowy archway in the middle of the shelve-laden wall. She jumped, reaching for her knife. "Behold! The fruit of many centuries of idle travel, frivolous adventure, and wasted wealth."
This had to be Ocyl. Tall and heavily muscled, he physically took up significant space, further expanded by a bearing somehow regal, relaxed, and lazy simultaneously. His face wasn't anything to write home about. In look and voice both he looked a cross between a boxer and a movie star wearing an Afro a 70's musician might have envied threaded with enough fine gold chain and gem beads to make a Victorian lady jealous.
Like the nobles from the Optomime's establishment, he wore something between a kimono, a bath robe, and a king's raiment, though unlike them he wore no lace underneath... or anything at all. His exposed ebony skin practically gleamed with health as though he lived at a spa. Aida felt heat rise to her cheeks as he sauntered towards her, everything hanging loose.
"Shower not a grower," she murmured to herself. "Can't not be."
A luminous white Thread like the one on her forehead shone on his. Another ringed his neck, two crossed a thigh, and one wrapped his waist like a razor-thin belt. Enough flesh remained hidden behind the kimono that she couldn't be sure the exact count. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, but by the Threads she could see alone he couldn't be less than five-hundred years old. The realization bent something in her mind, but she pushed it down with all the other impossibilities and unlikelihoods she'd experienced recently.
"You must be the Mother of Exiles." He inclined his head as he strode towards her. "If you had any doubt, I am Ocyl. Welcome to the Dynasty and also my verse, my city, my Spire, my home, my life, my family even."
She blinked at the odd introduction. "Mother of Exiles? We only just decided that. How could you possibly know?"
A casual, throwing away gesture. "It is my policy to know everything that enters into or transpires within Heaven's Tread."
"Yes, but that happened before-"
"Do you like what you see?" He cut her off, stopping beyond arm's reach yet close enough that she could see the startling pale green of his eyes. He gestured with one hand to encompass his collection as he placed the other on his bare hip.
"Um... it's quite the thing. Quite the collection, I mean." She grew suddenly intent on the display case before her. It contained a primitive flintlock pistol, which didn't meld with the general technological level she'd placed as falling somewhere between Bronze Age and Dark Age with random outliers. A giant twisted tower built from pure obsidian at a cylindrical city's heart, for example. Technology, magic, or something else entirely?
"Ah, yes. That." Ocyl's grin revealed brilliant white teeth as he tapped the display. "It's a shame."
"It is? Why?"
"I'll show you." He lifted the glass away carefully before turning and hurling it full force through the doorway he'd entered from. Glass shattered, shards ricocheting everywhere in the low gravity.
Aida jumped at the sudden violence and braced herself for some attack. He turned back as if nothing was amiss. "What do you think of my snake?"
On edge with sudden PTSD flashbacks from her first husband's erratic and unpredictable violence, she took a step back as he lifted the pistol from its purple velvet cushion. He slid a small leather bag from beneath the cushion and began loading.
"Snake?"
"Surely you can't have missed it?" He looked up with surprise. "You never know what someone won't see right before their eyes, do you?"
Hoping against hope that his line of dialogue aimed somewhere other than blatant sexual innuendo, she scanned the room for snakes. Only when she glanced back at him and saw his eyes flicker above and behind her did she turn and see it: coiled, fangs bared, and ready to spring from a bare branch anchored above the curtain.
After she'd fallen down, scrambled up, launched several meters backwards through the air, and put half the room between her and the monster her she suddenly realized that she fled from high-quality taxidermy. Hot with embarrassment and anger, she wheeled on Ocyl. "Does it amuse you to scare your guests like that? Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest given the welcome I found on the streets."
Even in her hostile state, she couldn't help but enjoy his laugh. A rich, contagious, eruption probably able to set courtiers by the roomful at ease.
He approached again, sliding to avoid the bouncing awkwardness marring Aida's attempts to walk. He extended the gun handle-first towards her. "Amusement unfortunately seems to be the highest form of emotion I muster out of the pall of ennui and boredom plaguing me these last few decades. Perhaps we can spark some mutual thrills together to liven things up."
Fallon's parting warning about Ocyl trying to unbalance her flashed through her mind. She took the pistol, presenting far more confidence than she felt. Trying to keep her hand from shaking, she aimed at the snake.
"I suppose you want me to take my revenge?"
"No." He moved the gun barrel, leaning in to plant it between his eyes. "I've grown tired of this life. What is there left to look forward to for a Dynast who's been everywhere and done everything? Let's have a small moment together, something that belongs to us, not them."
"Who's them? You want to die and take me down with you?" She lowered the gun, hand shaking. Sweat trickled down her side. He grabbed the end and set it on his forehead again.
"You fear my small, statuesque Feral army adorning the halls outside hearing the shot and rushing to avenge my death?" A tinge of excitement mixed with a seductive quality in his voice, as if he worked to elicit sex from her not assisted suicide.
"Something like that crossed my mind."
"Janali," he shouted without moving his head or looking away. She couldn't turn away from his eyes' mesmerizing depths, nor break from this bizarre, terrible intimacy the likes of which she'd never experienced or could have imagined.
Curtains parted. His beautiful Seneschal leaned in. Aida forced herself to look away and to see the woman serenely composed. Completely unfazed by the situation. "Yes, Dynast?"
"Tell our lovely visitor here my standing orders to my Ferals should I die."
Janali's perfect bow made Fallon at his most elegant seem a bumpkin. "Your order stands that they should fight to the death, the survivor gaining access to several years' supply of their nourishment."
"There you have it. Pull the trigger."
"Why should I? What's in it for me?"
"Ah, a pragmatist."
Aida wanted to look away again from his intense gaze, but showing weakness before this madman outweighed the urge. Could be as suicidal as taking your eyes off a big cat. Her mind jumped to the panthers on the doors.
"Janali, should this woman kill me, my final order is that she immediately become Dynast of Heaven's Tread and all that entails thereof."
"Yes, Dynast."
"Thank you, Seneschal, you may go."
"Dynast." She bowed as she slipped back through the curtains.
"That incentive enough for you?" His eyes half-lidded while he sank down in relaxed anticipation. She forced herself to not look down as she caught a stirring at his groin in her peripheral vision.
"Set me free," he purred.
She felt sick, trapped, and horrified at the same time. He really got off on the expectation of his own death, a complete psycho running an entire universe.
Sweat ran freely, her grip on the smooth, burnished pistol handle greasy with it. Did he really want her to end it? For all she complained about her verse, did she really want this city and whatever lay through the Irises at its ends? Was she giving Ocyl what he wanted, exactly what Fallon advised against? Had Fallon somehow foreseen this?
"I have other important matters to attend to if you aren't going to do it," Ocyl said, one eye opening. He leaned harder, pushing the gun back with his forehead. "Should it help you make up your mind, I've heard from many a source far more reputable than myself that I'm a horrible person. Evils beyond counting fall at my doorstep. Who knows what foul deeds I've committed to slake my-"
"Fuck it." She pulled the trigger.