Page 13 of The Shape of Monsters
The numen shoots him a sharp look that turns thoughtful. “Maybe.”
Lyric takes Iriset’s hand, rubbing his thumb along her knuckles.
“Her regard is the only reason you’re alive.” The numen pokes Lyric’s cheek and he flinches away, appalled.
“You can’t kill me. Your Shade wants me alive, to see how I’mmade,” Lyric says, finding his footing. He is the Vertex Seal; he can be a bitch.
The numen wrinkles its mouth in distaste, then snaps, “He would forgive me if you did die.”
That is probably true. Lyric says nothing.
Then the numen blinks back into its weird new bride form and sweeps away.
“Wait,” Lyric calls. When it pauses, he says, “The Moon-Eater is really just—has always been—just a numen?”
“Just?Justa numen?” The numen laughs a series of sharp, sneering laughs. Inhuman. It vanishes.
Wrong moon
Lyric is on the balconynotstaring at the little pink-silver moon, which has finally appeared. It is a thin sliver, barely there, on the horizon. It rose nearly two hours after the sun, like a ghost of itself. He only noticed because he needed to find it, needed to see that familiar winking eye of Aharté.
It keeps moving. If Lyric concentrates, if he breathes slowly in eight-counts, he thinks he can perceive its movement against the stark blue.
When he peels his attention away from the moon, Lyric has quite the view of the Moon-Eater’s fortress.
From this vantage, it’s a wilderness of silver towers and lush gardens, gleaming glass windows and domes even wider and more improbable than the carefully balanced domes of his own time. Birds with translucent wings soar in schools like fish, and insects hum in harmonies as they bob from twisting tree to flowering vines. Water fountains crisscross the sky, arcing elegantly from garden to garden, sometimes drawing rainbows in their wake, other times roadways for what appear to be actual fish with streaming fins. People arrive and vanish between the canopies of hand-shaped leaves or weepinglimbs of vivid fruit, and he can make out the curve of trellised paths here and there, sweeping around the towers both at ground level and sometimes arching between the upper stories without any obvious support buttresses.
At the edge of the fortress territory is a curving line of steeples, and though it is distant from Lyric’s balcony, he can see the shimmer of forces between them when the sun flashes between clouds, or a breeze tosses leaves against it. Beyond the boundary the city rises in misshapen buildings, clustered like elaborate palaces in some places, and in others are staggered petallike complexes more familiar to his gaze. There are force-nets hanging in the sky like massive cages, but they appear empty. Large ships, or animals, move overhead, too, some almost balloon-like. Those drift up and down, up and down, and this morning Lyric thinks he saw one burst and fall. None of the large sky-things pass into the Moon-Eater’s domain. The faraway wall of the crater is barely a hazy line of red, with a peak or two occasionally spiking up. One he thinks he knows, which marks the southwestern edge of the crater in his own time, too. But it is miles away, and hard to imagine the form would remain unchanged for hundreds of years.
A fluttering draws his attention to the book in his lap. The pages ruffle at a gust of the near-constant breeze, and Lyric sets his hands against both sides. The soft edges of paper used to be gilded, and where fingers naturally settle to turn the pages or hold open the book, the color is faded to nothing. It’s a story of romance and adventure that ranges across the lost and conquered cities of the Pir prairie—or lost and conquered in his own time, at least. The story can’t hold his attention, though, despite his need to distract himself. Perhaps he should return to the treatise on grafting techniques in the collection of scientific essays he’d begun with. The essay had veered out of agriculture, though, and toward chimeric study. Lyric wouldn’t read it, even if the technical language were easier to parse.
Last night, before the attendants left with the remnants of his dinner, Lyric asked for something to read. Saff had made a gently skeptical face, which Lyric took to mean she didn’t see much value in reading for pleasure, but the young Peace had lit up and asked what he preferred. Her immediate enthusiasm had Lyric answering he would gladly take her recommendations. She returned with a stack of oddball science books and romances. All are stamped with a library marker along the inner bindings except the gilded romance. He assumes the well-loved book belongs to Peace herself and is determined to finish it if he can concentrate.
The problem is that he keeps thinking of what Singix—Iriset—would say about the love interest, or wondering if it’s accurate to how the prairie cities arenow, and when now even is. The Apostate Age was several centuries long, and he can’t just ask. Or the book mentions a romantic flower and Lyric loses himself wondering if it’s some kind of redpetal or more of a flowering succulent and if he would recognize it if he saw it. He wonders if his gentians are dying without him. He worries the world he came from doesn’t even exist anymore.
Abruptly, Lyric stands. The book closes and he carries it inside to place it on the inset table. He studies Iriset. It’s only been two nights in this place, one of which he slept through beside her, passed out and neck crooked.Wake up, he thinks. If he tries to say it, he’ll scream instead. He wants her to feel it through the marriage knot, he wants her to feel the spiking twist, how the tendrils of affection and attachment have grown needlelike thorns.
I need you.He thinks that, too. He tucks it away.
Iriset’s lips part with her breathing, her hair is dry and waving in a twisted arc along one round pillow. As he watches, her head tilts to the side, and one hand reaches up to fold under her cheek. She winces slightly, then her expression slackens. He’s only knownthisface livelywith argument, constantly articulate. She must have worked so hard to suppress that when she wore the Singix mask.
Lyric imagines it there superimposed over Iriset’s features. Imagines the slow softness of Singix’s smile, the way it turned her eyes from half-circles into crescents, and her pearl-round cheeks, the spark that he learned to read as happiness in her endless brown-black eyes. Her laugh, which he realizes now changed in the quads of their marriage from delicate and tinkling to broader, brighter, faster to arrive, faster to turn into moans.
He can see now how Iriset let parts of her true self out, little by little. Lyric had thought he made her happy, that they learned to be happy together. He certainly had been—if happiness can be achieved in the midst of such make-believe.
The thoughts slide coldly through him, dripping onto the shell keeping his emotions tucked away. Had Iriset ever been happy? When he told her he loved her? When she laughed at him, when she kissed him? When she was inside him? Lyric had known such shocking joy in her arms; surely Iriset had felt it, too.
Or had she always intended to betray him?
The twist of hurt drags with it his sister’s voice, Amaranth telling him she was so pleased he was enjoying marriage, telling him—
Amaranth, who hadknown.
Lyric turns away, cutting off the spiral at its core.
He breathes loudly and stares out at the bright blue sky.
Always he has had Aharté to turn to when he needed peace, when he needed Silence. But if Aharté is here, she’s hiding.
