The City of Woven Streets

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Biros’s face is a landscape of light and shadow. He places the lantern on top of the staircase. Lazaro stands behind him, unmoving. The knife in Biros’s hand is long and strong-bladed, like a sabre. The kind butchers use to cut the throats of goats. He takes two steps downwards.

‘Too bad,’ Biros says, ‘that it has come to this.’

I look in him for any trace of something to seize. Hesitation; indifference that might make him turn away and take the knife with him. Or caring. Maybe he has a family that knows a different side of him: a wife, children, perhaps elderly parents.

Nothing breaks in his posture. Nothing stirs in his expression. The lantern burns behind his outline, and his eyes are two black wells that do not reflect light.

‘The island is in chaos,’ I say. My voice trembles, although I try to keep it smooth. ‘No one would know if you let us go.’

Biros does not reply. Lazaro shifts on top of the staircase. The gleam of the fire makes his features even more angular. I try to imagine him holding a child in his arms, or writing in his notebook late at night in the light of a candle, wearing small nose glasses. I notice it is not difficult.

I intend to direct my next words at him, but he speaks first.

‘We would,’ Lazaro says. His low voice echoes in the walls of the staircase.

I understand I do not have a chance to reach behind their masks. Whatever there is, they have closed it out of reach, for other times and places. Right now the face they wear is their only one. I recognize it, because I too have lived like this. And while I never wish to do so again, I see I cannot change their minds.

Valeria clings to me. We do not move. I hear her ragged, panicked breathing, and the beating of my own heart.

‘Did Weaver send you?’ I ask. My voice is a mere whisper at the heart of a storm, shattered by the surrounding breeze even before it leaves my lips.

‘Does it matter?’ Biros says.

‘Why?’ I ask.

Biros does not reply. For a moment nothing moves. Then Lazaro snaps his gloved fingers. The sound is soft and muffled, without an echo. Biros does not turn to look. They both take a step towards us. Their shadows grow taller on the walls.

I begin to back down. Valeria follows. I do not know which one of us trembles more. We could try to attack them. But they are armed, soldiers. I have never held a sharp weapon larger than scissors.

Without looking at Valeria I clutch the hem of her coat and tug. The movement remains hidden from Biros’s and Lazaro’s eyes. So I hope, at least. Valeria understands and nods so slowly that it could just be an arbitrary movement of her head. I cannot be certain she has understood my meaning, but I must trust it. We stop. Biros and Lazaro continue to move closer.

‘We should have got rid of you to begin with,’ Biros says.

I am not certain if he is talking to me or Valeria.

‘Do you wish to know what we did with your tongue?’ Lazaro asks.

I catch a glimpse of nausea on Valeria’s pale face. I tighten my grip on the hem of her coat. My fingers count against her side with small, small movements. One, two, three.

I tug hard at Valeria’s coat: now. We rush towards them. Biros moves so fast I understand he has been expecting the attack all this time. He steps forward and gives my shoulder a painful kick while Lazaro simultaneously grabs Valeria’s arms. I stagger backwards and lose my balance. I have time to see Lazaro twisting Valeria’s arms behind her back and forcing her onto her knees in the staircase while Biros lowers his knife to Valeria’s throat. I fall down several steps and the back of my head hits the wall. Darkness pulls me into its embrace.

The House of Webs is here, yet gone. Water gathers into pools around me, and lakes and oceans, and columns of mist that grow all the way to skies and stars. The Web of Worlds supports me. I am a pebble cast into water: expanding circles emerge from me, reaching in all directions. They grow ever wider, join other circles far beyond me, but they do not disappear. They hold everything together. The city is empty, and the sea and the sky. It is cold and completely quiet.

A shadow approaches across the water. Its grasp binds me in place already, even though it is still a distance away. My hands do not move. My feet do not move. My breathing withers and grows thinner.

The night-maere interlaces its dark, icy fingers with mine and climbs onto my chest. Its thighs squeeze me from both sides and its weight crushes my lungs, but with its touch a tingling power floods into me again. It unravels from my palms and mouth and eyes, flows from me as glowing strands that stitch me to the weave of the world.

The night-maere brushes my ear with its burning lips and talks to me, says what it has been attempting to say for a long while, when I was not ready to listen. This time is different: I can finally discern the words, each and every one, and I understand. I stop fighting back. I let the sensations, the fire-glowing gleam and the hum of the words wash over me. Slowly the fear flows away in soft trickles, disappears into the cracks of the street, the stony pores of the city. I breathe, still not freely, but now ready to receive what the night-maere wishes to give me. Strength settles in me, becomes part of every shift of blood in my veins. All threads twine together and the pattern grows dense and recognizable, an image that has been before my eyes all along. I listen to the message of the creature, and there is nothing in it that I do not already know.

When the night-maere has told me what it has to say, it presses its forehead against mine. My heart opens, bare and susceptible, and the creature begins to be absorbed into me like water swirling into a hole in the ground. Slowly the weight withdraws from my chest, the creature fades until it is gauze-like and lighter than smoke, and eventually the final remnants of the night-maere disappear into me, within my limits and outlines. The chasm on top of my heart seals itself.

I draw a deep breath and my limbs move again, and I am finally whole.

The stone steps dig painfully into my back. My arm is bent under me, and the back of my head aches. Time has not moved. Valeria is on her knees in the staircase, Lazaro’s fingers squeeze her arms and Biros’s knife has stopped on her throat. Something vibrates in my field of sight, like a ray of light, or a shred of web-yarn lighter than air. I try to brush it away, but my hand slips through it and it grows brighter.

At the height of my chest a thin, white-glowing strand runs from me to Valeria. I think about the knife on her throat, and how a small movement by Biros could take her away from me. I feel a tug in my heart. It sends a vibration towards Valeria along the shining strand. The vibration sinks into her chest like a shooting star swimming through the night. She remains still, but the air around her stirs and settles again.

I begin to crawl up the staircase towards Valeria. My knees and palms sting. The stone sucks the dark stains I leave on it. Biros hears a sound that my body emits, a sob or perhaps a snarl. I do not recognize it myself. Time begins again. Lazaro remains still. Biros’s head turns slowly, as if the movement is muffled by water. Shadows paint visible his skull, the black eye sockets, the deeps of his cheeks, the mouth which opens to show the teeth and the void behind them.

The hand presses the handle of the knife; the blade moves along the skin. The white-glowing strand between Valeria and me tenses and shines brighter. It gathers as a tingling under my skin, lights up the flight of stairs, the whole surrounding darkness, and shifts the shape of everything. I look at the reality, but all is like in the dreams where I know I am dreaming and where the dream is mine to control. The walls of stone around me are dream-walls, which I can crush by raising my hand. The dark water below is dream-water, which I can harness against my enemy by whispering an invitation. If my body dies, it will be mended again, because dream-death does not reach beyond the borders of waking.

And because the dream around me is mine to mould and command, I command.

Stop, I say without words. Let Valeria go.

Biros’s hand freezes. He turns his gaze to me, and Lazaro does the same. Something appears on their faces that I have not seen on them before. Biros’s arm shakes with strain, but the knife does not move.

Let go, I say. Of the knife and Valeria.

One by one Lazaro’s fingers loosen their grip of Valeria. The knife clatters to the stones from Biros’s hand, rolls down the steps, past me. I let it go. I will not need it.

Biros steps away from Valeria, further up, towards the doorway. He stares at me. Lazaro follows him.

‘What did you do?’ he says in a voice that is like an animal caught in his throat.

Go, I say. Run.

Biros tries to reach for Valeria again. I command reality like I would a dream. Air turns into a wall he cannot penetrate, and he is thrown backwards, to the doorway. He doubles over as if he has been struck hard around the middle. Lazaro takes a slow step away from Valeria and me.

Things happen quickly. I have time to sense a presence that is entirely different from Biros, Lazaro and Valeria. It makes a rift in the reality beyond which there is no void, but a strange intelligence, unlike a human’s. It approaches, seeks. It stops to probe. It surges forward.

The empty space behind Biros fills. A black limb covered by bristles darts into it, and another. Flames are reflected in eyes that shimmer dim like stars hidden beyond space. The arched spikes of the jaws bite into bare skin. Biros flounders in Spinner’s jaws until his body grows weary. His limbs twitch once, twice. Eventually the final spasm is over. Spinner pulls away from the door. Lazaro stares, frozen in place, then begins to crawl through the doorway. His feet disappear from sight.

I hear a short howl from the chamber. Then comes silence.

Valeria sits hunched against the wall, her face pale and bare. Her chest rises and falls faster than my heart beats. I reach my hand out to her. She takes it. I squeeze her fingers. They shake between mine. Or so I think until I realize my own hand is shaking against hers. We make no sound. A tremor runs through me, bringing with it a distant, unfamiliar twinge of pain and a wave of weakness, as if I have put a strain on a muscle I did not even know I had in my body.

Valeria’s face breaks into relief. She pulls me closer and our foreheads rest against each other, my dark tattoo against her pale and unmarked skin. Her lips are soft and salty when they press to mine, and I still feel their touch when she withdraws. I run my hand down her cheek. She lives and breathes by my side, and this is my dream, and this is my reality.

‘Let’s go,’ I say and get up. Valeria stands up after me. She does not let go of my hand.

With trembling legs we begin to climb the stairs. I notice a thin streak of blood on Valeria’s neck. I nearly think it away, but I stop myself. I do not wish to change anything about her. If something leaves a scar, I want to feel it, as part of her. Just as she accepted my dreams and my night-maere and my mark. Her arm settles tightly to support my back. The lantern still burns on top of the stairs where Biros left it. Spinner’s aim was sharp, with no room for stray movement. I pick the lantern up.

The chamber is dusky and quiet, but there is a slight rustling and whizzing sound from above. I raise my eyes. The light of the lantern catches in the shimmering webs crossing the ceiling. Spinner is crouched in the web. Her two front limbs are wrapping a human-shaped bundle in silk. I discern a hand balled into a fist, a twitching knee. Further up I see another, unmoving bundle. A draught blows across the floor, swaying the webs. We begin to walk towards the other end and the door which is ajar. The webs brush our bodies and the lantern paints slow-floating patterns on the walls. Valeria accelerates her footsteps. Her hand is already on the door handle, when a voice speaks from the shadows.

‘I see the power of Dreamers is not dead, after all,’ Spinner says.

I freeze in place. Valeria pulls the door open and her face urges me to follow. But Spinner’s words hold me, will not let me leave yet.

I turn to face the room.

‘What do you mean?’ I ask.

The silence stretches. Eventually a distant wind and space-dust creep into it, a rustling that is the movement of sand and bones turned to earth.

‘What do you know of the world?’ Spinner says.

Her voice is supple as a vine entwining around a tree-trunk. The question feels like a slab of stone Spinner is laying at my feet, paving an unknown path. I do not see where it will lead me, but I cannot turn away.

Valeria steps next to me and takes my hand.

‘There is a lot of water and little land,’ I say. ‘Some seas are too wide for ships to cross.’

‘Is that all?’

A silence gathers around Spinner while she waits.

‘Not everywhere is the same as on the island. There are places where people are allowed to dream freely.’

The silence shifts. A limb makes a small movement. In a human I would interpret it as impatience.

‘What do you know of the past?’ Spinner says.

‘The island did not always belong to humans,’ I say. ‘A long time ago it belonged to the Web-folk. They left their traces on the landscape, but they no longer exist.’

Spinner lets out a crackling noise that drags back and forth. It takes me a while to realize she is laughing. Valeria’s breaths have turned taut and short.

‘Imagine,’ she says, ‘that once, a long time ago, the entire island was covered in webs. Not man-made, picture-patterned and easy-fading, but wider, more persistent. And imagine a ship, aboard it people who had not set a foot on steady ground for months. One calm morning the island loomed on the horizon, and they saw it across the glistening surface of the sea. The radiant halo of the web-gauze reached from treetop to treetop, hill to hill. The strands of the sun caught on the threads and burst along the night-born drops of moisture, glowing bright enough to burn their eyes and tug at their spirits. They could not help but reach for the glimmer. Your people have always looked far, and yet only seen what is near.’

Spinner quiets. Her eyes stare at emptiness, and yet at me.

And I remember. The amber walls, the creatures frozen within. Her kin.

‘You are of the Web-folk,’ I say.

I feel a shiver run through Valeria by my side.

‘Yes, you have seen them,’ Spinner says quietly. ‘A shard of the past your people buried. Those frozen under the sea have been there for longer than anyone knows. They were already ancient when my kin inhabited the island. We recognized them as ours and made the tunnel so we could visit them.’

‘Why did you send me there?’ I ask. ‘You knew it was a trap.’

The lantern flickers small and weak against the wall of shadows around us. Spinner’s voice adds another step to the path, inviting me closer.

‘Sometimes it is necessary to step into darkness alone and find your way back,’ Spinner says. ‘To carry something with you into light you could not have found anywhere else.’

The patterns of the underground walls glow in my memory. Long-forgotten words in a language none on the island speaks now. The sun that was Our Lady of Weaving, twining together the threads of life. Small humans at her fingertips: Dreamers shaping their reality like it was a dream.

‘Those you are descended from built the sanctuary through which you walked,’ Spinner continues. ‘A sanctuary for words, weaving and dreams, when they were still one and had not yet been forced apart.’

I swallow the lump in my throat, but it does not disappear. Valeria twitches. I realize I have been squeezing her hand too hard. My voice is thinner than a whisper.

‘Dreams?’

‘The Web-folk conversed through dreams before humans came,’ Spinner says. ‘And for a long time after. Among your people those whose gift for dreaming was strongest were the first to find a connection with us. We opened our world to them, because they listened to what we had to say. They saw what we wished to show them. With their help we taught your people the skill of weaving. We gave them our silk, and they learned to make tapestries from it. Together we wove fabrics unlike anything the world had seen before. And so humans built the House of Dreams, the first house on the island.’ She takes a short pause. ‘You know it as the House of the Tainted.’

I think about the pictures on the walls of the Museum of Pure Sleep, of my mother’s words: never tell anyone. Dreamers standing on the dais at the Ink-marking and pulling sticks from the bowl. Every night I have stayed awake in fear of dreams, or the night-maere.

‘What happened?’ I ask.

‘Dreamers’ skill of communicating with the Web-folk gave them power,’ Spinner says. ‘That did not please everyone. And when some of them discovered at the core of their dreams the power that had always lived there, everything changed.’

The path grows longer. One stone, another. We are drawing closer to where she wants to lead me.

‘The power of Dreamers,’ I say. ‘What is it?’

Even as I ask, I sense the strange tingling again, in my hands and in my thoughts and in my body. The shimmering threads I saw after the night-maere came to me are within my reach.

‘You know,’ Spinner says. ‘You have already used it. You can do it again.’

I wish to see her better, and Valeria. The room around us is still a dream-room, mine to command. I look at the threads above our heads and think to them, shine. The thought is not heavy or forced. It merely brushes through me, floats for a moment and is gone.

The silk of the webs begins to emit a soft light. Valeria shudders.

‘How does it work?’ I ask.

Spinner’s form is clearly visible now. The long limbs support the rounded body, and the eyes are dim mirrors, reflecting a place I cannot yet see.

‘You moved the threads of the Web of Worlds, like ancient Dreamers did,’ she says. ‘Even among them, it was a rare skill. That is why few could use the power, and that is why so many feared it.’

I think about all the times I have wished to change something and could not.

‘Why can I do this now?’ I ask. ‘Why not before?’

Spinner is quiet for a while. When she speaks again, the words are slow, as if she is dragging them to light from dark corners of ancient memories.

‘The Dream-power is not born of nothing,’ Spinner says. ‘It is born of everything that has made you who you are. Of each day when you have breathed in the scent of the sea in the chill of the morning and ran the shuttle through the warp with weary fingers. Of each moment when you have loved or desired or lost. Of each time you have looked away from yourself, and become aware that something in you has shifted irrevocably. Of each dream you have dreamed, and each step you have taken.’

Spinner pauses briefly.

‘Do you see now why it was necessary for you to walk through the darkness?’ she continues.

I do not reply. The world is a white-hot globe of molten glass, ready to assume any shape I wish to give it. My whole body aches like it is filled with light trying to burst through my skin, sparks with an urge to move the reality out of place and bring about a new one where all obeys my will. And yet I sense another ache underneath: like a muscle sore from too much strain, a phantom limb weary from exertion. It is familiar from every dream I have bent to my will, from every waking afterwards.

The glass freezes into shape and shatters, and I know the answer before I ask.

‘But the power is not without limit,’ I say.

Spinner is silent. I sense a soft brush of thought across my mind, seeking, withdrawing.

‘No power is without limit,’ she says. ‘And a power that can shift the shape of reality has a higher price than many others. Every time you use it, it will make a rift in you. Rearranging the fabric of the universe is not easy or without danger. Sometimes the limits of the body give in and your spirit goes astray, and the threads come loose from your grip.’

‘What if I don’t want this power?’ I say. My voice drifts across the room and shatters against the wall. Valeria’s fingers tighten around mine.

‘It is a part of you, whether you wish it or not,’ Spinner says. ‘No one gave it to you, and no one can take it away.’

Just then, a bell begins to clang in the distance. After only a brief moment, the sound collapses into silence. After a few breaths, it begins again. This time the clanging continues for longer, until it is followed by another silence.

The evacuation signal of the Dreamers.

I turn to look at Valeria.

‘We must go,’ I say.

‘Yes,’ Spinner says into the dusk behind her many eyes. ‘It has begun. The ships await, ready to be claimed, and Dreamers hope for a wind that will billow the sails at dawn.’

She goes quiet. Valeria takes a step back, another. She pulls me by the hand to go with her.

‘But they will not make it far,’ Spinner says.

I know then that we have finally come to the place where she has been leading me all along. This is the end of the path, the hidden heart behind all her words. I am afraid to see it, and yet I cannot turn away.

‘Why?’ I ask. My words float in the room like speckles of dead dust.

‘The earth under the sea is readying itself to move,’ Spinner says. ‘Soon it will shake the foundations of the island, and every stone your people have placed on top of another will crack and fall. Your traces will soon be gone, and you will no longer be here to mend what is broken.’

Valeria shivers, but stays next to me.

‘Are you certain?’ I ask Spinner.

‘I have seen it,’ she says. ‘I have felt it.’

I ask the question to which I dread to hear the answer.

‘Can you stop it?’

A low hum rises from Spinner, song-like, and fades.

‘Yes, I can,’ she says. ‘But I will not.’

I draw a deep breath.

‘Why?’

‘I will show you,’ she says. ‘If you come closer.’

Alarm ripples on Valeria’s face. I look at her and loosen my grip of her hand. I take a step forward.

I stand there, in the soft glow of the webs. One of Spinner’s limbs reaches out and settles on my forehead. I feel a light prickling where my skin has not yet healed completely. And then

I see with her eyes and she sees with mine.

I see a time of peace turn into a time of war, when some men grow restless at Dreamers doing things they themselves are not capable of. They believe the Dream-power comes from the Web-folk, and they turn against us. At first they build their houses where the Web-folk have always lived, and make fields for their crops where the Web-folk have always fed. When that does not push away those to whom the island belonged before the ships arrived, men take their torches and blades to the web-forests of the island. The fires are slow to die and the screams of pain last long.

A long time, long. Years bundled together and pushed further and further away, like barely visible stars, their jewels ever dimmer in the outstretched Web of Worlds. No one else left now. No one else to tell the story. And age, it gnaws and corrodes, slowly crumbles every limb, adds weight to every movement: even the longest life is a vanishing flicker against the silence that surrounds all lives, a space so deep it will eventually drown everyone. Must find someone to carry the story forward. Must not let it vanish into the void that draws nearer every moment. Must not let the lost people be forgotten.

Waiting in the dark, and then there is no more time left to wait. Must call whoever will hear even a faint echo of the call, and will come. She is too scared. Too used to hiding. But there is no one else. No others to hear, no one with Dream-power. And I am showing her this so she can take it with her and see through my eyes, if she lives,

Spinner says without any words.

My knees hit the floor and pain surges through me. My teeth clatter together. Tears are running down my face.

‘I didn’t know,’ I tell Spinner. A weight greater than a night-maere’s grows in my chest. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.’

The forests still burn before my eyes and somewhere in the shroud of the past, in a moment that has never come to an end, the Web-folk are being torn apart, limb by limb, and I do not believe I will ever stop hearing their screams.

‘I will take your story with me and tell it again and again,’ I whisper. ‘If you let us go.’

‘You are free to go,’ Spinner says. ‘Save yourself and this girl you love.’ Valeria’s arm twines around my waist. ‘Find a boat. Leave. You may make it to the continent, if you use your power sparingly. There is nothing you can do for the rest of your people. Leave them.’

I see the ships and Dreamers in my eyes. I think about everyone who has hidden their dreams as I have, and those who have been deprived of their dreams unknowingly. People who wake up in the morning and collect seaweed for their food, raise chickens, comb their children’s hair and fix their leaking roofs. I think of their fear when they look at those who carry the mark on their foreheads, and of their weariness, which makes it easier to take orders from the Council than to imagine how something could be different. Of their hopes, and their ability to change, or the lack thereof.

‘I cannot,’ I say.

‘Why help them?’ Spinner asks. Her voice is a soft hiss, sizzling of water against hot metal. ‘Your people have drowned the world over and over, and forgotten, and then done it again.’

‘Because they have also rebuilt the world over and over, time and again finding hope where none once existed,’ I say. ‘Does that mean nothing?’

I look at everything through dream, and the Web of Worlds is at my reach. I feel its threads at my fingertips. I see their routes: shimmering through space, endlessly intertwined, never-ending. I follow the threads to the island, into this room, into this moment and deep under the sea. I see movement that is ready to proceed, to tear down the ground beneath our feet.

I press my hand onto the bones of the earth and stop the movement.

‘Your power will not hold it,’ Spinner says. ‘The wrath of the earth is stronger than your spirit. It will make a rift in you that will not heal.’

Valeria turns to me. I see distress on her face.

‘Someone died in the House of the Tainted because of me,’ I say. ‘If I can rescue even some of the people of the island, I must do it.’

Spinner makes a quick dash towards me. Her limbs patter the floor. I start when one of them reaches out and tears the burning lantern from my hand. Spinner takes a few backward steps as fast as she moved forward. I cannot think the lantern back from her, because all my powers are underground, holding others that wish to break through. The lantern swings at the end of Spinner’s limb. She is quiet. We wait. Somewhere the earth is ready to turn, the sea to move, and it is time for people to board the ships.

‘So be it,’ Spinner says. ‘You may remain where you are and die. Or you may run through fire and perhaps live.’

Her limb surges through the air. The lantern shatters into pieces and there is a searing ripple, as fire devours silken webs. Flames run along the threads, drawing a scintillating lattice above us, which begins to scorch into ashes before our eyes. I am petrified, but Valeria takes a step back and pulls me with her. Finally I move. We run out of Spinner’s chamber and across Weaver’s room.

Deep inside the earth the stones wish to turn, and there is nothing to hold them but my dream.