The wind is like a shark; if it ever stops it becomes, well, dead air. Both are boneless, and deadly, and misunderstood. And neither has changed for a long time.
Mariah was summoned and bound to her name, given a quarry she never found. Her summoner’s been dead a thousand years, but she hasn’t stopped. The wind doesn’t know when to quit.
What people don’t understand is that those “Gusty Winds May Exist” signs in the New Mexico desert aren’t warnings or even quantum-mechanics jokes: they’re permission. Here, they say to Mariah, old and aching. Here, just rest, just be.
“You look older,” says Miss Chamuel to her mount.
The white wolf casts a disparaging eye back at her.
“Of course I do too,” she says, a bit sharply. “I’m aging now. You know I don’t go in for the alternative.” She rides bareback in divided skirts; her sword hangs scabbarded from a complicated belt.
The wolf growls in a way that might be a chuckle. They’re cantering up a bridge of ice, its claws taking easy traction in the chipped and gritty surface. Deep in its heart is a refracting oily band: what might, once, have looked like a rainbow.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Parker’s expensive gear lasts him about a third of the way up on his trip to meet the Bearded Man of the Winding Test. He makes the next mile up on berries and boots that grow increasingly thin, until he’s clawing near-vertical slopes with fingers long since nailless and fighting mountain wolves bare-handed for a sleeping niche. At last, gaunt and bled out, he collapses on the summit.
“Master,” he says, “I come seeking wisdom.”
“Life is an illusion,” says the Bearded Man, “and struggle is meaningless.”
Parker throws him off a cliff and grows his own damn beard.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
As soon as they touched the opposite shore, Stevie took his shot at stealing the Martin.
“You kutchering punk!” shouted the Justin, and leapt out after him. He got hold of an ankle and the two collapsed in waist-deep river water. “Give her back!”
“You don’t deserve it!” howled Stevie, kicking.
“I earned her from Ptah himself!” The Justin hauled himself up and yanked at his end of the guitar, the neck–which, to his shock, slid out of the body with a steely rasp.
“Prove it,” Stevie grinned. He snapped off a length of cattail reed and assumed kamae.
“Her thesis is that it’s dependent on technology?” Tay snorts. “Even if she’s talking about instruments rather than computers, that’s hardly a new take–”
“It’s more sophisticated,” Sharon admits. “She’s saying that increasingly, each drives innovation in the other, and–hey, speaking of.”
They’re passing a coffee shop. Tay and Sharon pull out their pods and wave them at the window; customers inside wave back without looking up. Noises like a modem awkwardly mounting a shortwave radio, and they scroll down through their harvest from the filecloud.
“So music and technology are indistinguishable,” murmurs Tay.
“Well, sufficiently advanced music,” says Sharon.
Despite her parents’ concern, Radiane is only home recuperating for two weeks. Her nose heals a bit crooked, but the effect is oddly pleasing: she no longer seems to be looking straight down it all the time.
Proserpina meets her at the gate, holding a stick. Radiane looks at her and says nothing. The bruising hasn’t entirely faded.
“Do you understand that I’m dangerous now?” asks Proserpina. “More dangerous than a storybook bully?”
Radiane nods.
“But you didn’t tattle on me.”
Radiane waits.
“I can teach you,” says Proserpina, almost shyly, “to be dangerous,” and holds out a literal olive branch.
Most anybody with a knack for somnomancy would set wards against jet lag on this trip, but Elihu prefers to feel the edges of time zones batter his mind: Wellington, Fiji, Nuku’alofa, then the great crash of the IDL.
“It’s a buffer,” Elihu explains later, red-eyed, to a fellow traveler at a guarana bar. “It’s a kindness, to blunt the edge of travel.”
“That’s a weird attitude,” she grumbles. “I’d wave my hands and just be adjusted, if I could.”
“Jet lag makes the place you’ve left a little more magical,” says Elihu. “The spells just use the magic up.”
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Cehrazad expects cold horror, to be cast out, shamed by her wailing sisters: but she slips into the house without incident. There’s only First Mother, waiting in her room.
“You’ve lost face?” she says, not unkindly.
“It broke,” Cehrazad stammers. “The mask–I had to leave, I couldn’t… without…” She flaps one hand at her underface, barely veiled by a strip torn from her dress.
“They’re searching for you already. The girl who disappeared at midnight?”
Cehrazad stares.
“There is one great secret, in our city of masks,” says First Mother sadly. “The only face to hide behind is your own.”
When they meet, Laurie learns that his name is Barathrum. After that she just talks, lured on by his sympathetic brown eyes: she tells him about her job, her last breakup, the time she led a protest march in the Dean’s office. By now the party’s over and they’re alone in her car, his gray eyes searching as she confesses to high school shoplifting and a kiss with her cousin. She finally realizes she knows nothing about him but his name.
“You’re such a good listener–” she falters. His black eyes are hungry and bottomless.
“Really?” he says. “Tell me more.”