“She is easily the youngest member to hold a seat here, yet she dares sit out of every meeting we have ever called. We have only spoken to her through letters and, in the rare case, mycorrhizal. I am starting to question if she even exists.”
“She named the Smatter itself, Council Bearer. No, I would not worry about it. She is only the busiest eight-year-old in existence.”
— A conversation between Council Bearer Marito Val Estensheer and Governor Presley Illfallow of Vesh’Foktle. About the Second Signature. Discussion took place before the annual meeting of The Smatter Council of Cities in 127 AB.
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Pasha grips the chair before the mycorrhizal, stares into its pale face, and says, “Don’t wait for us.”
The fungus’s stalk is shaped into the visage of a man Pasha once knew and holds its stare on her as if chiding. Her father, it appears, had been calm when the transformation took him and his wife. Pasha’s mother is on the other side of the mycorrhizal, their backs to each other and forming the mushroom’s stalk, reaching two stories high, the cap casting a shadow over half the room. It is the largest in the alcazar and perhaps the world. That her parents form its foundation is almost poetic—the maligned’s gift to me.
The mycorrhizal speaks. “This will be the final assault on Jubilee,” it says. “After this, Signature, we will not have enough men to hold even the RLZ.”
“Then throw everything you have at this,” she tells Lieutenant Colonel Tatlock, the leader of the Emergence Corps’ last remaining battalion on Hyrnlak. “Songs will be composed.” Funeral verses, but she doesn’t clarify. “The fire seed is on its way to you as we speak. In the meantime, open the doors. All of them.”
Tatlock will have been briefed on the Inciter strand as well. “Is Gauss with you, Signature?”
The fat man pulls up his chair, thinks better of it, and stands at Mother’s end of the mycorrhizal. “Everything she says is true,” says the general. “Bring the temple down as best as you can. Open it wide for us. We are coming.”
Silence, perhaps a contemplation, the last chance to defect, but to where? “Yes, sir,” says the Corps from Hyrnlak.
Pasha and Gauss step away, Father’s and Mother’s eyes closing to denote no bodies standing near the mycorrhizal on Tatlock’s side. When Pasha is sure they’re alone, save for Vakye standing on the mushroom’s cap, she beckons Gauss over. “I want you to come with me this time.”
The general doesn’t have to guess what she means. “A secret with three is no secret at all.”
“Call it trust, then.”
Gauss nods. “Then I will be honored, and I can promise I will tell no one—as far as that promise extends.”
“Further than most people I know.”
“Entrusted included?”
Pasha stares up as Vakye flutters down. “They are not people. They are better.”
The beetle lands beside her, rolls, stands, and adjusts his weapons. He glances at her slippers. “The tiniest rocks will slice through that membrane, Pasha.”
The maligned flesh at the base of the mycorrhizal is contained, docile, and feels like a soft blanket beneath one of Pasha’s bare feet. She waves a slipper at the Entrusted, the other one already on. “He won’t let that happen.” She fits it on and closes the buckles. “What do you know about fragility?”
“Stubborn as the day Sacramount found you.” Vakye sags as if sighing and points at Gauss. “I do not need to remind you of the consequences of leaking this secret to anyone.”
“If I do, I give you permission to slit my throat.”
Ever the calculator, Pasha thinks. His life is worth less than the secret he will learn today. “Shall I go first?”
“Yes,” Vakye instructs. “Cackles in the middle.”
They begin the descent when the Twin Pales grant them two shadows, standing beneath the presence of the mycorrhizal that had once been Pasha’s mother and father. She searches the mound for the handle, finds it, pulls the flesh aside, and heaves it up. A passageway descends ten steps and recedes into more maligned tissue the color of azaleas and bulging. After the final step, Pasha walks onto the pulsing flesh and feels its soft carpet underneath her. She thinks she didn’t need sandals while trudging through the equivalent of blood vessels. Liquid oozes between her toes, the aroma like honey.
She emerges on the other side of a dark place, only a minute ahead of Gauss and Vakye, the former stumbling out of the entrance and righting himself, covered in slop. Despite his mess, he looks rather pleased to be here. “Should have known,” he says.
A faint buzz rises, and then the room lights up. Enormous dog-sized maligned, akin to fireflies, flutter towards them, lighting the center of a vast open area. Flesh and raw ground compete for space, the roots forming into irregular plateaus but losing the overall fight.
“Walk on the flesh,” Pasha tells them. “He can’t control the raw ground. None of them do.”
Pasha counts the heads sprouting from a legion of curious creatures that amble up to them. Hundreds of maligned, some like fish with legs, others with round bodies and nothing to pull them along but bulky hands. They form bulbs of flesh, sculpting them into different tools or, Pasha thinks, weapons. The ones that seem idle hug the roots of the raw ground, sucking away their life force, though not too much as to extinguish them entirely, allowing them to continue to secrete strands.
The closest maligned notices Pasha and reshapes into an approximation of a bipedal humanoid with a fat belly before returning to its previous form.
“That was close,” Gauss tells it and laughs.
A bulge of maligned flesh sits in the center of the space. A small borer pup, the semblance of a dog with a gaping circular mouth, follows them up a winding ramp and runs forward to greet a boy sitting in a chair of flesh.
Ruinalk, the First Signature, nods along with the pup’s clicks, the twirl of its mandibles. He perks up when he sees the party approach. He unfolds his legs and stands. “A secret with three is no secret at all.” Rue would have heard the conversation above.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“That’s what I said,” Gauss intones.
“My lieutenant general,” says Pasha. “Gauss, or Cackles. You remember I told you about him.”
“Indeed.” Rue looks the man over. “That you are here before me speaks ill of the situation.”
Gauss bows his head, lifts a device only he can see from his pocket, and begins tinkering, respectfully ignoring the conversation and stepping back.
“You have a Thurmgeist in your employ now?” Rue has more eyes than this fleshy hovel implies. “The Thurmgeist. Women soldiers made quite the dent in us during the early years of the Bursting when the practice was legal.”
“As did your Minds.” Pasha reminds him.
Heavy footsteps tromp along the bed of soft flesh, each accompanied by a squirt of miasma. Vakye takes his place beside Pasha, yet his weapons are only decorative here. If Ruinalk felt compelled, he could bring this layer of flesh down and crush them. Such is the nature of trust.
“Tatlock leads the offensive on Hyrnlak,” says Pasha—if they’re not starved already. “His men were already pushed back from Jubilee, and by now, they’re reconvening.”
“Seven years at Hyrnlak, Pasha,” says Rue. “They’ll make as much of a dent as the times before.” He studies her. “Why this mention of the Hyrnlak Archipelago, of all places?
Despite Ruinalk’s position as a Signature, he is quite limited, a blister in humanity’s side and its city. Pasha tells him of the Inciter strand, of the scar on June-Leckie’s calf. She then poses a question that has lingered for days. “Do you think he’s lying?”
“Most likely,” Ruinalk says, understanding who she’s talking about. “You should not put so much trust into people who don’t understand the Written workings.” He glances at Gauss. “That one seems alright. As for that other one? He probably told you some truths, but not all of them. I have some theories, anyway.”
Pasha wishes that Ruinalk was a fountain of knowledge for the maligned, but he has rarely told her a fact a medical zoologist already didn’t know. She supposes she would be just as ignorant if she were underground for over a century. Still, Ruinalk is a great thinker, perhaps the most logical mind she has ever encountered.
The maligned boy shakes his head and watches Vakye fluttering around the fleshy palace. “One theory I have is that this strand is newer than the Decree, which is why we haven’t seen it before.”
“I’ve thought about that, too.” In truth, she hasn’t stopped. “So are we to expect new strands every so often? Why now, of all times?”
Ruinalk nods. “Yes, the theory doesn’t hold up, for it would imply that Sacramount had no idea of the Inciter strand in the first place.” The implication peers around the dark corner, eying Pasha ferociously. “That leads me to my second theory, and I don’t quite like what it means.”
Pasha doesn’t either. “That Sacramount left it out of the Decree on purpose.”
The two Signatures share in the realization that they, though ageless, are helpless under the presence of greater forces, of the things beyond like Sacramount.
“We were both eight years old at the time,” Ruinalk says. “How could we have understood all the details of the Decree? We saw a world dying around us, your women and my Minds vanishing at an alarming rate, and we were desperate to stop it. Do you remember thinking about the decision?”
“Not even for a minute.” Regrets are not worth holding onto, as much as people lie to have none. “Maybe Sacramount sought us out because we were young. Naive.”
“And wouldn’t question any gaps in the Decree, yes. But we are older now.” A point in the air, strong enough that Rue does not need to utter it. He does, anyway. “It must be rewritten.”
“No.” Pasha shakes her head. “If our shields are down for even one moment, we will die. All the maligned Minds will notice it and converge. They will not abstain from an opportunity to throw themselves at us. They will overrun us.”
“I will try to convince them.”
“You can’t, no more than I can, my people. Even now, this city grows reckless.”
“At me,” says Rue. “All directed at me. They want me dead, Pasha. That Thurmgeist will come for me eventually, too. You can’t keep a leash on her now that she's beyond your grip.”
Pasha doesn’t say that not all of the city’s ire is focused on Ruinalk. “Then I’ll be ready.”
“I hope so. We were young then, clueless of what’s Written, but now we can steer this world in the direction we like.” Rue sniffs a bubbly sound. “Let me handle the wording.”
Pasha breathes out. She can’t argue with him, but her signature must be on any future draft of the Decree, not just his. “I want to read it once it’s done.”
Strands of Ruinalk’s hair writhe like a hundred different eels. They snap taught. “Who do you take me for? You’re the one bringing other people to my domain.”
“I knew I shouldn’t have come,” Gauss utters, then laughs.
Pasha waves that comment away, for she can’t shake another possibility welling up. “There is a strand turning women into maligned, and you claim to have known nothing about it until now?”
“Everything I said is true!” The boy’s shouts reverberate through the flesh. Beyond, the maligned perk their heads up and stop working. “I’ve no reason to lie to you! I’m as much invested in this truce as you are. It seems we’re the only ones who are invested these days.”
Pasha sinks at this sullen realization, this admission that they are still a team. “I cannot risk extinction. The maligned will destroy us if we nullify the Decree for even a few minutes. It’s plain. We’re down to four cities in the Smatter and disparate smaller settlements that are largely uncoordinated.”
“But you’re stronger than your weakest point,” Rue urges, “back in 30 AB, right before the Decree was signed. You’ve rebuilt since then. You’ve spanned a ropeway network across those four cities, for Hells sake. That wasn’t there before.” The boy paces. “You’re not as far behind as you think.”
We’re further, Pasha wants to say but doesn’t. Perhaps Ruinalk is just being humble, encouraging her. Despite where humanity is, the maligned populate faster and reach further than humanity could ever.
Then, Ruinalk says something she hasn’t considered for a long time. “What of the other continents beyond Salvarin and the Ardern Straight?”
“The Ardern became the Abscess the moment its Gash ripped open.”
“And the others, Pasha?” Rue asks, unperturbed.
She shakes her head. “We have enough problems here. We almost lost our women, after all. With the oceans mostly dried up, we can’t go anywhere.”
Ruinalk slumps. His ignorance is encouraging before Pasha remembers he has maybe a hundredth of the world view Pasha does, cramped inside this fleshy space, upholding the Decree. She would have gone mad if she had to live in such an arrangement.
“We have to take a risk at some point,” Ruinalk says. “The sooner we rewrite the Decree, the sooner we don’t have to worry about this Inciter strand overrunning everything anyway. A few minutes down will be disastrous, but so will the slow death of everything you know. Only after that can you find out what happened to everything else.”
Hells, the world beyond Salvarin. The mycorrhizal had been the first communication network not requiring physical intervention, but without the ability to send letters, let alone reach the other continents, Salvarin has been cut off.
Future hopes, Pasha thinks, if you even make it there.
Pasha takes a seat on the fleshy floor and crosses her legs. “Let me at least try to burn Hyrnlak. Our atmosphere will keep this thing from spreading.” She looks up to him and remembers how she let a host of the Inciter strand leave her alcazar.
“You can trust a Thurmgeist won’t spread it. If they’re anything like the women soldiers of old, then they are recalcitrant, yes, but also disciplined. Their injections would be their rituals.” Rue looks up to the ceiling, perhaps detecting June’s movement through the raw beneath the soil. “The Inciter strand could mean the death of humanity, yes, but also the death of our reign. What good are we if the Decree doesn’t hold?”
Pasha can’t argue, but she knows what must be done. “Let them try the seed. Then, we will rewrite it.” I promise, she thinks, but can’t voice it.
Rue nods. “And keep certain people within your perception. Always.”
“I will.”
She leaves Rue alone on the fleshy plateau, crossed-legged, eyes closed and deep in thought. Is he planning his next move? She wishes she had kept some of the points closer to her chest, but, as always, she chose to confide in Rue, and all she can do is hope that is the correct move. Man or maligned, their vision is shared.
“Seems a nice fellow,” says Gauss, halfway up the tunnel’s ascent. “Just let me know when you’ll rewrite the Decree, eh? I want to plant my seed in an incubator before then.”
“If you step near one, I’ll feed you to the raw,” says Pasha.
“I would make a great contribution!” Gauss laughs. “But you won’t have to feed me to anything if the shields come down.”
Pasha latches the door closed, buries the patch underneath folds of the surrounding flesh, and leaves Gauss at the mycorrhizal to discuss the specifics of the Hyrnlak Archipelago burning with Tatlock. The men there will serve as a distraction, she knows it, nothing more. All the souls, equipment, and organisms living on that land will burn when the fire seed reaches it.
She hopes.