Celebrant (55 page)

She’s gone a long way.
There are incubators all around her.
They’re too large, just at the moment, to gain admittance to her mind.
Or just the name.
Burn looks, but she doesn’t see any modets.
Nor anyone else.

This area is a patch of desert transplanted into the city.
Sulfurous, yellow desert, with a few bleached and dry shrubs that look like dead spiders on their backs.
Here, at all but random intervals, the incubators vent unbearably foul, unbreathable exhaust.
This exhaust lives, briefly, and can infect those who breathe it or get too much of it on their skin with Third Degree Fever, or the Waste-Away, or a disease similar to rabies, known in Votu as
he gwa chormo
.
(The name means “dreaming of being thirsty.”)

A few highly intuitive types, and some old experienced hands, can tell when the incubators are about to vent.
When questioned about the signs, they all seem to be noticing different things, and so no technique or warning system has come about yet or is likely to.

Burn trots between the hive-like incubators.
The ground is the color of cornmeal here, and nothing grows in it but a few resinous, brittle thornbushes and long stalky grass, dead dry, with wheatlike clusters of seeds that hiss.
The grainy, plum-colored metal of the incubators is hidden under a layer of congealed dust that clings to them like paste.
A chute emerges from each one, and waste, in the form of a mixture of real and plaster bones and ceramic casts and plant molds, drops from these chutes into colossal bowls of thick, clear glass.
They subside in sections from time to time with a friable tinkling sound.

Burn keeps one hand near her face, to clap it over her mouth and nose in case she hears anything that sounds like venting gas.
She doesn’t even know if that can be heard.

Some black thing
—
she just catches glimpse of it
—
like a ripple travelling along the edge of a tarp, from behind one of the bowls.
As she comes around, cautiously veering toward the bowl, she sees a peculiar shadow lying stretched out on the dirt.
The bowl creates a curving wedge whose base is the ground and whose innermost angle is a glaring white seam
—
now interrupted with something black.
The black thing slides along the curve and lengthens as the curve rises.
The Bird of Ill Omen stands there over its shadow, like a vulture perched on the corpse of a stricken, sun-scorched man.
It leers at her with its tiny fangs, and eyes that, even here, are like two icy autumn moons.
Its throat palpitates, as if it were panting, or chortling silently to itself.

Burn has never been this close to it.
Her surprise and fright vanish as quickly, quicker, than they came over her, and she returns its blank gaze levelly.
The air stops moving altogether and
—
it’s just as she thought.
She’s actually looking a man in the face.
She’s never seen him before.
Not his face.
It was always covered by the veil that now lies cast aside in the dust, with his silk hat caught in it like a black stump trapped in a bank of tar.
He is sitting on his knees, all blanketed in his cloak, looking at her, surrounded by the shadows and outlines of small flames.
The flames are transparent and the shadows are not.

Coming closer, the aura stings the skin, like heat, but without heating her.
It brushes her skin, but there’s no pressure, and her hair isn’t stirred.
His features don’t swim, there’s nothing from the fire to trouble the air.
He regards her neutrally.
As if he were only taking a casual interest in her, observing her from afar the way you might look at a famous view, or detachedly imagining her.

Burn bounds through the flames that scorch like acid and flings her hands around the man’s neck, squeezing the windpipe shut under her thumbs.
Her face is blank with fury.
She shakes him, half standing on his leg.
He tumbles over backward in sections like a column collapsing.
She rides him to the ground and perches on top of his quiescent body, crushing his throat with all the strength in her hands.
His face is as closed as a dummies’, not even looking up into the sky, and yet it almost seems as though she can see his eyes bulging and the sun glisten along the sides of his protruding tongue.
Blindly she shakes his neck, banging his head against the ground.

Abruptly Burn stops, throwing his head down and quitting him all in one movement.
She walks right through the forgotten fire and is only momentarily surprised and angered when it splashes her with pain.
Head down, Burn strides blindly away from him, feeling him lying there behind her.

She stops, and then turns to look back.
A black crumple.
Hands lying on their backs in the dust.
He lies as she left him, it seems.

Is he dead/was he alive?

She goes instantly cold.

Or just a dummy?

With horror she wonders if she’s been handling a dead body, or something worse.
A mocking fake.
Did she fall into a trap, and are things that had been inert now coming to life?
Like the life she had expected to find was, by dint of substituting that place-holder body there, malevolently alive somewhere else?
Burn can’t clearly think such thoughts, but she doesn’t have to, she answers to them.

She has already turned and is walking away again, without thinking.
For a flash she sees him hovering just behind her his fingers almost brushing the ends of her hair and she turns to see him still lying there, apparently as he was.
For a moment she considers returning to inspect him.

Her head is muffling up.
She feels a little sick
...
no, it’s coming from too far down to be her stomach.
She turns again.
He’s looking at her.
He’s sitting up as before, exactly as before.

Not too emphatically, not hurriedly, he raises his left hand and points.

Burn follows his finger.
The shutters that normally cover the exhaust vents on one of the incubators are already flung open, and there’s shady movement within the aperture.
The grilles are unlocking.
Burn jumps up onto the rim of the nearest bowl and from there onto the top of the chute.
She rushes up its length to the crown of the incubator and then, with as many steps as she can take before the slope begins she launches her body into space, toward the neighboring machine.
She stays high, knowing the exhaust is heavy and will flow along the ground first.
Her head splits and becomes light as she jumps.
The ground far below is oozing by.
The distance to the next incubator’s bowl of plaster bones she traverses like a ship coming up to a pier in a calm bay.
Air rustles past her abdomen and chest, and gathers in weightless heaps against her arms, although she might be said more to resemble a leaping monkey than a bird in flight.

She lands on the bones without a sound and scampers up the chute to the apex.
The open vent behind her is beginning to emit a wild, weak squeal, scribbling up and down in pitch.
Without a moment’s hesitation she flings herself again toward the next bowl, which is only half full.
The bones subside and crumble beneath her feet and she has to leap and leap, scrambling, trying to get a purchase on the sleek glass or the rim.
With a hoarse crash, the whine explodes in a voiceless bellow.
Something is banging.
Shadows flit on all sides of her as she clinches the rim in both hands and hauls herself out, up to the chute.
Up to the incubator.
The noise is like a corpse blowing into a hollow bottle.
The ravenous exhaust is alive only for a few moments
—
she can hear it frisking the bones in the dune just behind her.
Ahead of her is a wall and she jumps at it, arms up high, well above her head, out of her sight, so she doesn’t know whether or not she’s right to think that a pair of strong hands very briefly seizes them and pitches her forward just slightly longer and slightly higher.

Burn alights on the wall and flees quickly along its narrow top.
The wall turns a corner and veers into the city.
Turning that corner, she can see a thin, transparent cloud, like powder dissolving in water, billowing up, stymied by the high wall.
It piles back on top of itself, a wave rebuffed by a cliff, scattering in long-fingered raccoon paws that rot in the bright air.
The cloud is crumbling in silence.
Burn watches it settling, as the sun sets behind her.

The air weighs so little.
It frisks around her shoulders, raises and lowers her hair.
Burn needs to find other pigeon girls again.
She makes her way into the dimming streets by short hops down onto projecting masonry and awnings.
People come from doorways carrying their lamps.
The moon is already setting.

*

Burn knows her friends will be gathering in a certain spot where the stale bread of the day is often abandoned.
To get there in time to meet them, she must go through a set of arcades that can be treacherous.
Most of the shops are closed for good, there are drunks to be dealt with, and even guard dogs in places.

The arcade is a chain of caves, shaped like a train.
Burn passes a few eateries with blazing, clear windows that throw bright spots on the shutters.

Now she’s in a deserted stretch, and she knows there’s a dog
—
a sizeable, aggressive dog
—
around here.
There are a number of such dogs, owned by people who have shops in the arcades, turned loose at night to keep watch.

Up ahead, there’s almost a fog there, way away at the end of the passage.
Burn hears the click of the dog’s claws, and then it whuffs hoarsely to itself.
The sound is magnified by the stone arcade.
Quickly, Burn flits up onto a window-ledge, and from there to the narrow gutter for collecting the condensation water that drips down the concavity of the vaulted ceiling.
The dog appears, unable to see her, crouched well back in the shadows, and sniffs around for her.

It goes back the way it came.
She waits.

Some barking.

Now footsteps.

A man is coming, alone.
There he is, all wrapped up in shawls.
He has a strikingly pallid face, and a black, silky moustache, and, like many people, he seems familiar to Burn.

As he comes, Burn edges forward.
As he passes, she alights nimbly on top of him, standing with her feet in his shawlly shoulders, and bent a little at the waist to avoid the ceiling.

I wonder how high up I am?

The man isn’t aware of her, and she rides along on his shoulders, listening for the dog behind them.
If it comes rushing up, barking, as it barks now, the man may turn and she may have to jump for it.
As it is, she is leaving no scent trail for the dog to follow.