“If those lines sever, I do not need to emphasize the economic hardship every city in the Smatter would experience, but I will: imagine four recessions at once.”

—Council Bearer Marito Val Estensheer to The Smatter Council of Cities, on the importance of intercontinental ropeway security, during its annual meeting in 127 AB.

----------------------------------------

It is efficient. Cold and quick. His shirt comes easily undone, the Lone’s light shining pale across his outer lungs. The oil lamp remains unlit on the bedside table, not for his sake.

The deed takes most of Stalt’s energy out of him, temporarily removing from his mind that earlier headache brought on by Delah’s whispers. When it’s done, he peers out of his room’s door and follows the whore escaping down the stairs to the bar. The young man keeps his head lowered, not once looking back, perhaps out of shame or, more likely, disgust.

Why is it that the only people that can genuinely make Stalt feel like shit are the whores? And your family, or what remains of it.

The clarity of mind he’s been hoping for seems to take its time coming. He can’t shake that Delah’s neutralizer had been for a different strand the whole time.

Don’t be so hard on me, Delah says, in the first voice. She doesn’t even ask for forgiveness.

Can you just leave me alone for tonight?

She silences, and Stalt waits for that second voice from before to reappear, but it doesn’t. Perhaps it was never there to begin with.

He leaves the Pocked Plank and wanders Lamascus’s streets alone. He traverses scaffolding on ledges jutting out from the pillars, where clotheslines hang. Young boys sit on the edge of exposed pipes, clad in rags and dirty faces, as if they had just climbed back up from the mud. Some boys dangle fishing lines down hundreds of feet to the lake below. Within the security of the shadows, Stalt basks in the simplicity of life here; nothing to work or live for, just living out the days until that maligned Mind that is Delah consumes them. It is oddly calming being among the doomed.

I could join them. Would you spare me or eat me up like the rest?

Delah would have stayed quiet before like she is now. Maybe she’s just throwing one of her fits.

Stalt passes a man sprouting two arms out of his back that, upon closer inspection, appear to be feet. Another one standing against a wall is a few years older than the whore. This one has a second mouth growing out of his stomach, which he accommodates via a slit in his tunic. He dumps a basket of potatoes inside that maw and slips his shirt over it as if shoplifting. Despite these mutations, there holds here an approximation of consensus and civility, like different species of animals dropped into the same cage and forced to get along.

Among the pressing crowds, a movement is separate from the one that works towards the city’s edge. It takes a conscious effort for Stalt to notice it at first, but when he does, he finds this current pushing him deeper into Lamascus’s heart. Men bump and prod, eager to get somewhere Stalt doesn’t know.

He yanks a plate of food from a merchant stall, and the cook doesn’t even yell out. It’s cultured fish brazed with red cherries, cobbed corn, and smoked sausages surrounding it, all probably grown in labs or amateur cauldrons inside the city. The taste unlocks sensations he had long forgotten, and he thinks this may have been poached. He eats it while he walks, letting the press carry him.

Someone grabs his shoulder, speaking warmly like an old comrade from the Basket. He very well could be. “Off to the bridge,” he utters, and Stalt has not the faintest idea which bridge he’s referring to.

“The bridge,” Stalt murmurs back.

The man obscured in darkness appears to be satisfied with the answer. He thrusts onwards, eager to be wherever this bridge is, until he’s out of sight.

Stalt catches his night’s companion talking to an older man, a boater’s hat barely shading a pair of deadpan eyes, a flood of dirty blonde hair tied in dreads. The whore trades an envelope containing a generous portion of Stalt’s stipend from the Flung, transferred to the local Lamascan Lerah, and receives a handful of metal coins in return that must be his watered-down portion. He shoves them in his pocket, keeping his head down as he joins the press that pushes onward into the city. It seems every soul is washed up in it.

A gas stove blazes to light at a table beside the street, illuminating a crowd of men that joins the throng as it marches further. All interest in the approaching mass of raw seems to have disappeared with the rising of the Lone, giving way to whatever this ‘bridge’ thing is. Its existence litters whispers and murmurs and dominates the topics of animated conversations, overshadowing everything else.

Stalt feels a few of his thoughts overshadowing others as well. Even more significant than his demise in a few months—as Delah had mentioned in the dream—is the harsher reality that his sister lied to him.

Is it you out there?

Yes, says the first voice.

He waits, and in the distance, he thinks he hears that second voice speaking. He leans his psyche inwards and listens.

Were you talking to someone else? Asks the first voice.

Stalt shakes his head. No one else is here.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The next lapse is filled with thoughts that Stalt can’t pierce. Delah is thinking of something, but he can feel that much, but she’s not sharing it. Walk the bridge, then, brother, she says, in that first voice.

What is the ‘bridge’? Why did you lie to me?

But it doesn’t answer his second question. Listen, brother, I’m coming now. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t get yourself killed, you understand? I’m coming to you.

Stalt would have stopped walking if the press of bodies didn’t push him further. This is a sharp turn from his sister’s cautions yesterday to escape the city. Why did you lie?

Only a jest, brother. Don’t be so beaten up about it. It was expired. How was I to know?

Delah liked to jest, too, but never at his expense.

Brother?

Delah only called Stalt ‘brother’ a handful of times.

Brother? Brother? The phrase repeats as Stalt clenches his teeth shut, wishing to be rid of it and her.

A thought comes to him that he hopes is separate. Say my name.

Brother?

Hells, Delah. Say my fucking name.

Genebrict. Are you out of your mind?

Maybe he is, for a trail of goosebumps runs up the back of his neck as he considers how calculated and scripted Delah had said his name just now, devoid of all warmth and caring.

The crowd is too tight to leave as it forces its way to the city’s center. A thousand sensations welcome him, ones he hopes will cover up his sister’s prying presence, that great incomprehensibility that takes more and more of his willpower to fight off as it consumes him.

The city lends its camouflage as it uncovers its rotting innards. The crowd ebbs, but it never dissipates, the mutations of the bodies making it up worsening, their strands becoming more pronounced, their emotions either defeat or acceptance and nowhere in between. The well-maintained buildings of Lamascus’s core give way to chipped paths, puddles of sewage, graffiti, and trash. The roads roughen, narrowing, becoming beds of planks nailed across urban valleys with barrel fires lighting alleys below.

Stalt tries to separate himself from the blind spot, Delah’s presence, and the obscurity of it all. For Hells sake, she is his sister! He should be the one lending clarity, playing the all-knowing brother who holds back the truth of the world’s harshness until he deems it suitable. It should not be the other way around. It never should have.

Someone forces a bottle into Stalt’s hand. Too scared of standing out or being trampled, he drinks it, and the beverage spins his brain. He allows the dizziness that follows, welcomes it, and steals another drink to dull his sister’s presence and wash her out.

The Lone’s light brightens derelict houses squashed together in piles several stories high. Men lazing on their decks climb and jump from them to join the press as it worms deeper. The ropeway cord hangs above, a divider in the night sky, and for a moment, Stalt thinks it’s worth being trampled over to reconvene with the others back at the Skelton. His only chance to do so leaves in a blink.

Then, as if commanded by some invisible presence or pulled by imaginary chains, the crowd bows their heads in what appear to be gestures of respect to each other. They fold their hands and murmur phrases that can only be prayers. Stalt suspects what they could be and mimics their ramblings, not wanting to stand out.

The line descends into a passage winding down into this anthill of a city. They skirt the perimeter of a giant aqueduct, a troubling stench of unwash, dead fish and rot permeating. A bridge cuts through the space’s center over flotsam that lines every inch of the muddy water. Boiler vats run, but the lines are not as long as they should be.

They descend four dozen floors, none noticing this broken, betrayed excuse of a person or a thing named Genebrict Stalt. The crowds thin as the pipes that are now passageways intermingle and weave, and for a short time, Stalt thinks he has joined a column marching into the Hells themselves.

They emerge into a large room blazing with activity. Some people grip candles in two hands, others clutching bowls containing a menagerie of coins and trinkets. Some walk shirtless, heads bowed and shaved, tattoos inked on their necks, some dormant, and others swimming across the flesh. Each design depicts the human form with its limbs extending like branches of a tree, the same emblazoned on the acolyte’s robe from the Swallow Den and those of the dead men at Old Glaive.

A church of the Chant of Harmony. A church for people as far gone as Stalt will be. A church for people like his sister, and no doubt a place similar to where she went to procure the Myco strand that she passed onto him. This must be the ‘bridge’ where they’ll cross to meet her. This is what she meant when she said she was coming. You liar, Deh. Hells, his own sister!

The room opens into a larger chamber, where rows of church pews fill most of the space. The walls are carved marble, stained glass windows rising as high as five men, chandeliers hanging from the cavernous ceiling. Cherubs carved of dark wood fight wars of fiction on the wall, dozens of soldiers fending off armored humans on horseback. Tendrils stretch from the cherubs’ backs, melding to form misshapen wings. Some of the creatures have three eyes, others none, but each flies down and slices their adversaries, the monarchs and the lords and their armies defending them. These cherubs are the most gruesome creations Stalt has ever seen.

He is pressed into a pew at the far rear of the room. Someone hands him a robe, and he takes it, nods his forgiveness, and fits it on. The stitchings of the Chant’s symbol scratch his back, the depiction spreading across him as if he is part of this all.

While he adjusts the robe, he catches the murmurs of conversations around.

“Apologies, Father,” says someone beside him, “but I have also been out of the loop.”

“… the apostle set off years ago on a journey.”

“… here tonight to regale us of their adventure, how the great word of the Chant spreads.”

An apostle?

“And how we welcome her home,” says another Chant.

Oh.

Delah speaks louder than ever, but the point is already evident. I told you I’m coming.

He stays right where he is and retraces an escape route, recalling the maze of pipes and staircases leading to one of the openings to the pillar above. It should be as easy as following the crowds. If he is to meet Delah, he doesn’t want to do it in a room full of Chant adherents. He’s not sure he wants to meet Delah at all now.

Come to me, she then says, when in his dream she spewed the opposite. Come to me, please, brother. Come to me. Come to me. Come to-

She sputters on like that, no pain in his head, but the droning is constant. He can hear her teeth chatter beside him until this fades to a ringing, and then nothing.

Then, the second voice, faint as a whisper at the bottom of a deep cavern. It repeats some phrase that Stalt has to plug both his ears to make out. He catches its final utterance.

Run, Gen.

There is a stage at the front of the room, and onto it walks a robed figure, stepping in time to an organ sweeping an arpeggio in a haunting key. The whole room takes their seats as a procession of servants trails the arrival, black candle sticks clenched in their fists, the Chant’s insignia blazing across their dark fabric.

Far away, Stalt can hardly make his sister out. She seems shorter, with broader shoulders.

That’s not me, says the first voice, not the second.

Before Stalt can process what it said, the apostle lifts their hood. Stalt’s jaw falls loose when he realizes who is speaking.

“Praise to Mona Dortet!” Fleet Commander Yosalus Ingram yells, hammering his fists on the podium like a thunderclap smashing across the city.