Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

City of Salt

Originally published by Strange Horizons

In the month of Tammuz, Ammar came to the city of salt, for which there are no maps. He came on a camel, with his habitual azure scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth to keep off the dull rose dust, and he came alone. I watched his guide abandon him.

The guide would come no closer than the edge of the salt flat. He kept to the sand. He was careful with his toes. The city of salt is a trap. In the daylight, it reflects the desert sky so brightly it blinds travelers. At night it is worse: at night it reflects travelers back upon themselves. I stood on the eastmost wall, my hands wrapped around the iron spikes on the battlements, and I observed Ammar’s guide warn Ammar that he would surely die. My knuckles were white, I clutched so tightly. I had never thought to see him again.

Ammar has only been a coward once. He let the guide turn back, and set foot on the salt. I could have come to him then, appeared beside him taller than his camel and far more terrible, an apparition of bleached fingers with iron needles for teeth: the ghost of the mad king’s mage, his liar and illusionist, haunting the ruins of the city he’d ruled. A thing that eats trespassers.

Ammar wasn’t strictly a trespasser: once this had been his city too. When I pulled my hands from the spikes they were bruised, grey imprints spreading like fog across my palms.

How dare he come back, when all that was left of me was iron and kudzu?

I didn’t appear to Ammar. I followed him instead. The salt and the broken stones of the road were my eyes.

The city lay in the center of an oasis which had long gone dry, baked to nothing by the sun. The scent of dead oceans drifted across the still air, and the feet of Ammar’s camel crunched on the ground. The sky and the salt flats and the stones of the walls were all the same color, a blue burnt to white. Ammar followed the remains of the road without faltering. He kept his eyes on the gates. I do not think he saw me on the wall. I think he looked. I imagine he looked.

When he had crossed the entire hardpan of salt, he clambered from the saddle—was there ever a man who could do that gracefully? Ammar Safyazat, poet and minister and rider of desert-bred mares, elegant in every other fashion, had always lurched from camelback like anyone else—and tethered the animal. He came to the gate and put his hand flat on the great iron door where it hung askew. The gates of the city of salt are always open now. The back of Ammar’s hand was grey-brown and the veins stood out between his knuckles. He touched the door for a long time, leaning into it. Then he unwound the scarf from his face and he came inside the walls.

He was older. I ought not to have been shocked; I was older, too. He’d kept his cheekbones even though his mouth had thinned. The lines around his eyes were deep, and there was a sternness to him that I did not remember. But he walked through the plaza, stepping over the green ropes of kudzu vines that snaked through the tiles, and his footsteps were as steady as they’d been when he’d walked out. He left tracks of desert dust as he went. Having him within the city felt like having swallowed the grit from the center of a pearl.

"Sogcha," he called, as if he was standing outside the door to my rooms and I was late to a meeting with our king.

No one had called me by my name since before that king had died, so I threw the city at him.

The city’s lanterns lit themselves. They flared with heatless white fire and gusted pale smoke to blur the streets. Ammar stood very still, and I watched him draw his scarf up over his mouth again, as if he was unnerved to breathe such air. The vines across the stones rustled and twisted. They rose up out of the smoke, and they brushed Ammar’s ankles like the bellies of snakes might. He stepped back. They followed. Their thorns were iron, and I imagined they were my teeth.

He took a breath, the smoke pulling through the fabric over his lips and vanishing down his throat. Then he ran, out of the plaza and deeper into the city.

The city of salt was inhabited once, and had a name. It was navigable then. The king warped it around himself, and I helped him do it, and then he died of it, or of being too much himself, and now it is a maze.

Ammar ran. He dodged the spears which flew at him from the smoke and did not fall when the white tiles beneath his feet shattered to salt flakes. He avoided all the ways a man could tumble down stairs and land on metal spikes grown instantly to catch him at the bottom. He called for me twice. The second time he told me to stop, and I would not. He was closer to me than I thought he’d come. His running made him breathe hard. It filled his lungs with the smoke of the city.

I did not want him closer. The city was inside his chest: I spun him full of illusions, and he froze with his foot lifted between one step and the next.

Ammar concentrated on the acrid taste of the smoke. The taste was dangerous but it was also real.

In the innermost garden at the heart of the city there are two men: a bright one and a dark one, standing beside the fountain. The water runs over the tiles, floods the fountain’s lip, spills onto the ground. It vanishes. It drains. The ground drinks it and turns to dust under the dark man’s feet, and the dust spreads thirstily across the garden. It catches the heel of the bright man’s boot, the hem of his trousers. He becomes a statue, a mosaic of cracked skin that smiles. The cracks run through his teeth. They spread.

There was no smoke in the innermost garden. No white curls of air winding through Sogcha’s projected memory of what Nilaq had looked like when he had been king and all three of them had lived here. Ammar remembered him less bright. It had been a long time ago. He breathed: he breathed salt. He tried to step away from the fountain. He turned—

The dark man takes a step and enters the innermost garden. The air is smotheringly hot, a pressure on the skin. The fountain is dry. The sky is such a pale blue that it might as well be white. Breathing scorches the inside of his lungs. He struggles to heave his chest up and down. The sky cracks down the middle like a geode. The dead climb out. They carry iron spears, and they fall from the cloudless blue in regiments. The dark man holds a pennant and the dead crawl to him.

The air inside the city was night-chilled. Ammar saw the dead, marching. That never happened, he thought. He had refused to lead them. By refusing he left his city and his king. He tried to step away from the fountain. He turned—

The dark man enters the innermost garden. Jackal-headed men and women, kneeling, naked, gnaw on the stones of the fountain. They grind the cobbles to powder in their jaws. All their eyes are white.

Sogcha’s illusions always had signatures. A hook. A repeating motif. The garden, this time. The garden, and the open jaws of the dead. Ammar tried to step away from the fountain. He turned—

The fountain is a mouth of iron teeth in the face of a woman. It distorts. It bubbles. Vines boil out of it, green on green on green—

"Sogcha," Ammar said, somewhere in the green. His weight wass on his back foot and his front foot hadn’t hit the ground yet. His voice whistled in his throat and startled him. "How long are we going to do this?"

Green. Her face, in the fountain.

Ammar waited. The dead fell from the sky. He waited. He thought of where he had stood when he told Nilaq he was leaving. There was no fountain. The innermost garden was Sogcha’s place, not his—

His front foot hit the ground. He was in the city of salt, smoke-fogged. The streets spun around him, and resolved. This street was a boulevard once and it led to a tower. He took another step.

I let him find me.

He was as stubborn as I remembered him. I am not unreasonable. I am perhaps cruel, but I am not unreasonable, and I wanted—I wanted him to never have come, or to explain why he had. I let the street he stood on be the street that led to the observatory tower. The tower was a narrow spar, thin and marble and nearly a ruin, with delicate arches framing the topmost turret. I sat on a bench and stared through the archwork at the city and the salt flat. The horizon wavered, a blur of salt and sand and sky, stained white-pink with false dawn.

I waited while Ammar trudged up the stairs. I made myself look like myself. The usual number of teeth. The standard arrangement of limbs.

He sat next to me. There was a handsbreadth between us. He looked where I was looking, instead of saying hello.

"Why are you here, Ammar?" I asked him.

He took a long time answering. I expected him to have had something rehearsed. But what he said was, "I came for you. Surely there’s little enough reason for you to remain in this city now that Nilaq is dead."

I said, "I knew you were a coward, but I didn’t think you’d become a scavenger as well."

He still didn’t look at me; he looked down at his hands, empty in his lap. It was as good as a flinch. "I wouldn’t call you carrion scraps," he said.

"Would you not?" I stood, and walked to the battlements. The stone beneath my feet changed to metal spikes, white-hot with growing. They didn’t pierce me. We were of a substance. I put my bruised palms flat on the ledge, like Ammar’s hand on the gate, and looked out at the salt flat where the city’s oasis had been. When Nilaq had called the dead to march toward that horizon, they were not dead enough. They wept as they marched. They were admirable, in how they threw themselves onto the swords and the cannons of our enemies, waiting to be rendered unusable save for jackals. After they were bones the salt came and the city dried and burned.

I said, "You took your time, coming back. Were you waiting for it to be safe? It is not safe here. Didn’t your guide warn you?"

"He did," said Ammar, milk-mild.

I asked, "Or were you ashamed?"

"I am not ashamed of leaving," Ammar said. I turned to face him and he met my eyes. One corner of his mouth turned up, a smile like biting into a sour citrus. "I meant to do it. But I’m sorry that I didn’t make you come with me."

I am the jackal gnawing on the bones of the city; I am the city, being devoured. I stayed. I earned it. "I would never have gone."

His hand flickered against my waist, as if he could pull me to lean against him. I caught him around the wrist. His skin was warm. I had forgotten how it felt.

"Sogcha," Ammar said. He blistered under my fingers. I was iron and the sun and the point of a spear, but he did not pull back. "I came back for what can be salvaged."

I tossed him away from me. Where I’d touched him his flesh was a raw ring, right above the wristbone. I thought it might scar like a brand.

The flesh on Ammar’s forearm burned and bubbled. Up close, Sogcha was nearer to the fable his guide had told him than Ammar wanted her to be. When he’d left she’d been a woman, argumentative and canny, Nilaq’s favorite raconteur. Now, incensed, she fought him like a cobra. Her mouth unhinged and she spat illusions from between sharpened boneshard teeth. Each regurgitation began as a bundle of white shadow bound around with kudzu, and then unfolded to stand on man-shaped limbs. The illusions all wore Ammar’s face, and they all carried Ammar’s sword, drawn and pointed at his throat. Sogcha stood behind their semicircle, her ribs heaving from having coughed them up.

"I am only me," she said. "There were a hundred thousand people in our city. You should have tried to salvage them, if salvage means so much to you."

"One man, against all Nilaq’s dead legions, and his illusionist too?"

She was never much of a duelist, Ammar thought before the shadow-doubles closed, but she hardly needed to be one, with six identical versions of his own face—a face he had not seen reflected for twenty years—to terrify him. They all moved like dancers. He wondered if she thought he had ever been that elegant. He was bound by gravity and musculature. The doubles walked on the air.

Behind them, Sogcha called, "Surely whoever you ran to would have given you an army just for the asking. Ammar Safyazat! Prince amongst ministers! Poet and general! You must have been a prize."

His scarf slipped from his neck when he drew his sword. "Not everyone is Nilaq," he said.

"Not every king loved you," she said.

"No. Only one."

The doubles dived like hawks.

Ammar had been a swordsman of some renown, once. He sliced the belly of one double, pierced the breast of another. Where he struck them they oozed a grey-grained sludge that smelled of salt. Where they struck him, he bled.

He’d wondered if he would. Her hand on his wrist had been fire.

She could have made the stones separate between his feet, or made him think they had. The fall would be the same either way. But all she did was watch the doubles swarm and drive him backward around the tower in a slow circle which never reached the stairs. The battlements were always to his left, the bench always to his right, even as he retreated. He was leaving a long track of red footprints between him and Sogcha. It would be dawn soon, the sky paling to the same salty grey as the blood of the doubles.

If he was going to die, he was at least at home.

The second time Ammar went to one knee and struggled up again, blank-faced with a determination that I could not distinguish from his prior grace, I put my bare feet in the bloody prints he’d left between us and dismissed my shadows one by one as I went. I took the sword from the last of them. It was a weightless memory in my hand. I pointed it at Ammar’s throat, lifted up his chin with its edge.

He let me, as he hadn’t let the shadows.

"Are you trying to die?" I asked.

He shut his eyes and opened them again, less a blink than a slow acquiescence. "Not trying," he said.

A bleak and razing anger rose in me like bile and consumed itself before it could burn my tongue. "Letting me kill you won’t make up for anything," I said.

"I never thought it would," he said. "Sacrifice for a cause was always more your disposition than mine."

I sliced his cheekbone open with the point of the sword rather than slit his throat. He didn’t move. He hardly flinched. The blood beaded up slowly.

"Are you going to kill me, then?" he asked, as if we were having a conversation of no great consequence.

If I were going to, I should have done so then. I said, "Nilaq should have."

"Probably," Ammar said. "But I think he wanted me to come back as much as you do."

"I didn’t want you to come back at all," I protested.

Ammar stepped back, away from the sword. It wasn’t heavy; it was a fiction. My arm ached from holding it anyhow. "Where is he? Our king."

"Dead," I said. "Didn’t your guide tell you? The mad king, dead in his empty city, his bones turning to salt." I rested the tip of the sword between two of the flagstones. Slowly, the steel darkened and thickened, becoming iron from the tip upward.

"My guide said more about the ghost of his mage, and how she eats visitors."

"I don’t," I said.

Ammar raised an eyebrow at me.

"Much," I amended. "I don’t need to."

"Sogcha," he said. "What do you need?"

For my king to be alive. For breathing people to walk the city of salt and call it by some human name again. For Ammar to have died happily in another kingdom, far away from me.

"Impossible things," I said.

"So do I," said Ammar.

I turned away from him. The sun was rising. In two hours the desert would be hot enough to leech moisture from a tongue in a closed mouth. Ammar came up beside me, so we stood shoulder to shoulder.

After some time, he said, "Leave with me when I leave. Come with me and tell the city I live in about the city that I miss. I think you remember it better than I do, now."

Such things were also impossible.

"This city would come with me," I said. "This city, and the desert around it, and the salt that falls from the sky and grows out of the ground. I would turn your camel to kudzu and if we walked all my footsteps would leave iron. When we reached your new city I would open my mouth and speak white fire, and no one living would remember when this place was made of gardens, no matter what I said."

Carefully, Ammar laced his fingers through mine. "What should I take away with me, if not you?" he asked.

Ammar Safyazat had only been a coward the once.

"Come with me," I said. "I’ll show you."

The innermost garden was dry, the fountain caked white with excrescences that smell like the sea. Ammar stood with his hand in the taloned hand of a creature more shade than woman. Since their duel, Sogcha was taller, as if she had been stretched. Her teeth were as pointed as her fingernails, sharp-tipped iron arrows. She didn’t smile so much as draw her mouth apart, wryly, and point to where she had gathered a great pile of ash and salt and bone, at the base of the fountain, like a cairn.

Scraps of cloth, as blue as his scarf, still clung to some of the ribcages—the few which had not dissolved under the alien sky of this city now.

"Eventually they will be gone," Sogcha said. "Just ash and salt, and then the vines will come."

"When did you start collecting them?" Ammar asked.

"After Nilaq died," Sogcha said. She leaned close. Her hair brushed his cheek and every strand stung a line of fire. "He’s at the bottom. Crown and scepter and standard wrapped around him for a shroud. I tried, Ammar."

"Yes," Ammar said. "I think you did."

She detached herself from his hand with exquisite care. When she knelt and cupped a palmful of the cairn, her skin was the same unnatural white as the salt crystals.

"Take them," she said. "Bury them in soil."

He wondered whether, if he did so, she would fold up within the city of salt and the two of them, woman and city, would simply vanish.

What he said was, "I can’t carry them all."

"I doubt you need to," said Sogcha. "Give me your scarf."

He did. In her fingers it glowed like a star, an impossible richness of color. She wrapped her handful of ash and bone chips in it and tied a graceful knot.

"Go home, Ammar," she said, passing it back to him.

He was home. There was no such place.

"I miss you," he said, out of not knowing how to say goodbye.

"Good," said Sogcha.

Ammar came to the city of salt in the month of Tammuz, and he took with him no maps when he went out again. All the doors of the city are open now, every gate ajar. I watched him go. He crossed the hardpan on foot, leading his camel. When I could no longer see him, I thought of gardens, and I rested my head on the white stone of the battlements, and waited to see if it would rain.

When The Fall Is All That’s Left

Apex Magazine 77

For Gabriele, gravity had ended. She spun unmoored, drifting in the outgassing light that spilled from the star she’d flown though. Her orbit deteriorated slowly. The skin of her hull was pockmarked and blistered, bubbled with plasma burns. What remained of her telemetric instruments was melted dross, cooling slowly from white to sullen red. Where she had known gravity, conjured through spin and mathematics, there was a hollowness inside her mind: a colorless blank, not formed enough to even register as dark.

"Like aphasia," she explained to Iris in the pilot’s den. "A missing word with a shape I remember and can talk around."

Iris floated, tethered by her ankle to the console with a torn-off length of electrical cabling, her pale hair a rough halo around her skull. Some of it had come loose from her scalp and was drifting alongside her. Nevertheless, under the simple electromagnetic spectrum of Gabriele’s internal vision, she appeared whole. The initial signs of damage were small and superficially within parameters: bruised hollows under her eyes, a scattering of purpura rising to the surface of the visible skin of her throat and chest in a clutch of reddish dissolving capillaries.

"So we’ve got no telemetry left at all," Iris said.

"No gravity, no telemetry. Hardly anything but propulsion," said Gabriele. "I flew you through a star. Does it matter where we ended up afterwards?"

"Only if we wanted to identify our position in a distress beacon." Iris reached out a hand, stroked the dark console with fingers that trembled. "Which would defeat the purpose of flying through a star in the first place. Did we lose them, Gabriele?"

Long-range scan was as gone as gravity, and aside from the solar glow of the star Gabriele had torn through with her passage, local space was silent enough to her instruments' dead metal. She said, "Yes, Captain," and when Iris shut her eyes in relief, Gabriele was glad to not know with more specificity. Their pursuers had surely seen them dive in past the star’s corona. At the moment of plunging, Gabriele had expected their survival to be symbolic at best. In the terrible stretched time which had followed, of which Gabriele remembered chiefly the compression of hundreds of atmospheres and the burn as one quantum possibility after another sloughed away, she had grasped ever more feebly at instrumentation and blind luck to bring them through. Any hunter that remained to see if she’d succeeded had more faith in her astronavigation than Gabriele did herself. Now she wasn’t sure if she should be pleased to have managed it or terrified that she hadn’t managed it well enough to matter—but terror was still distant, a thing of the flesh not a thing of the ship.

When Iris smiled, Gabriele could see how blood had begun to seep from her gumline. Her entire mouth must taste of salt and iron. Iris swallowed rather than spit; globules of blood and saliva would only contaminate the pilot’s den, and Iris was space-born: Gabriele knew she knew better. "Well then," Iris said. "Here’s to being free women for the rest of our lives."

Gabriele spun enough light to render a visible image of herself: a transparent version of her body as Iris would remember it, tall and red-haired and narrow through the ribs and at the wrists. She appeared sitting, cross-legged on the console next to the manual controls only solid hands could operate, the starfield gleaming through her. She raised a can of beer in Iris’s direction, a sloppy toast in a physical language she only half-recalled. "Here’s to the next twenty minutes, Captain."

"For a spaceship, you are incredibly morbid."

"I was morbid before I was a spaceship," Gabriele said. "Being a spaceship has nothing to do with it."

"You flew me through a star," said Iris. "This would have been functionally impossible before you were a spaceship."

Gabriele made her image laugh: the head thrown back, the line of the throat exposed and open, the shoulders shaking. "Captain, if it wasn’t a star it would have been something else. If we were both still human it’d have been a hoverbike off the edge of a cliff."

Iris said, still smiling, "That one’d be a faster fall." The whites of her eyes had gone pinky-red and a trickle of blood ran from her left nostril, beading in the air. "Cell damage is damn slow."

If her fingers had been tangible instead of composed of light, Gabriele would have reached out and touched Iris on the wrist, stilled her, reeled her in on her tether. "Twenty minutes is not slow," she said. "Weren’t we supposed to get out of this alive?"

"One of us still could," said Iris.

"Captain," Gabriele said, "Iris—even if I had a cargo hold full of blood and bone marrow to transfuse you with—which I don’t—"

"Vitamins and clean living aren’t enough to get me through the level of exposure I just got, I know."

It was comforting that Iris had said it first. Gabriele nodded, shrugged her image’s shoulders apologetically.

"I estimate," Iris went on quite deliberately, her eyes fixed on some middle distance, "based on how much my head hurts and the degree of nausea I am experiencing, that of our twenty minutes I’ve got ten before I’m in the kind of neurological distress that won’t be any good to you at all. Seizures, cognitive incapacity, coma, etcetera."

Gabriele held out translucent hands to Iris on long-unused bodily instinct. Then, ashamed, she vanished them along with the arms they were attached to and most of the torso, leaving her a sketch of legs, a hip, a face dissolving in the light.

One half of Iris' mouth quirked upward. "Hey, Gabe," she said. "It won’t be that bad, I think."

"Kind of disagree, Captain," Gabriele said.

"Come on," Iris told her, twisting to untether herself with shaking hands. "Just 'cause I’m dealing with a couple thousand radians of exposure at least doesn’t mean you’re going to die."

"Floating in dead space without telemetry and watching over your corpse while my orbit degrades sounds like the highlight of my experience as a ship, yeah. Thought I might speed it up a little. Dive back into the star. Afterward."

Iris pushed off the console and floated down the short hallway between the pilot’s den and the cabinet where the guts of the ship lived, safe behind paneling designed to keep out as much cosmic radiation as possible. A small cloud of blood swirled into a perfect sphere in her wake. "Yeah, that sounds pretty grim," she said. "It’s a stupid plan. We wanted to be free. Open your hatch, would you?"

At Gabriele’s command the cabinet unfolded like a flower. Beneath were wires and cabling, a deep nest of circuitry. Iris stared at it for nearly a minute. "Damn, you’re a long way down in there," she said.

"You can’t fix the telemetry by rearranging my circuitry by hand, Captain," said Gabriele. "Even if you had ten hours and not ten minutes."

"Not quite what I had in mind," said Iris, and then abruptly spun herself around to vomit strings of blood and bile, hunched around her abdomen in midair.

"Iris—" Gabriele said, panicked and loud on every speaker.

Iris huddled in on herself, scrubbing the back of her hand across her mouth. The pressure left bruises, a streak of purple across her cheekbone. "Fuck. Okay. Gabe, honey, I’ve got a question for you."

Anything. "Ask me."

"Back when we met on the station. When we were kids. You used to pilot with just math and your fingers on a joystick."

"Yeah," Gabriele said. "I did. It’s why they let me be a ship—"

"Best scores in the sector, I knew you’d remember."

"I remember."

"You think you can do it again?" Iris plunged her hands into the circuitry and began pulling it aside in great bundled heaps. A thousand alarms sounded in what remained of Gabriele’s systems, but she silenced every one, relegated them all to the absence where gravity had been.

"What do you mean," she asked.

"When I get you out of the cabinet, Gabe. If I unplug you. Can you fly the ship without being the ship? There’s starcharts and manual override. You’d just need to do the math."

Iris' fingers inside the circuits left wet patches, shorts and sparks. Gabriele realized that her fingernails must be bleeding. "I—Iris. Captain. I—"

"Yes or no? We do not have time for maybe-but-I’m-panicking. You’re a spaceship. You’re not supposed to be able to panic anyhow."

"You’re about to unspaceship me and die," Gabriele said. "I think I’m entitled to panic."

"Yes or no, honey."

The blank space that had been gravity yawned; its edges were wider than before, and Gabriele did not have words for what it might have already devoured of her, or what might be left if her human body was removed from the slow-cascading failure of the ship.

"I don’t know," she said.

The sound Iris' lungs made when she sighed was raw and fluid-filled, ending in a cough. "Figure it out while I get you free, then," she said, and plunged her hands wrist-deep into the wires, tearing.

The coffin Gabriele’s old body was entombed in was reinforced plexiglass and lead-coated steel, perforated with wires and plastic tubing. It was hardly longer than her body had been tall, and held the flesh she’d worn paralyzed in a permanent, barely-living stillness. The eyes she used to see Iris bring it up into the light were ship’s eyes, cameras and infrared-scopes: to those it was entirely foreign, never before visible. It was smaller than Gabriele thought of herself to be, and more fragile, even bounded around with protective radiation shielding: a seed at the heart of the ship she was, and nothing more.

The automatic functions of the ship were located in the wires that Iris was unplugging from the coffin, and in the physical mainframe that surrounded it. The body that had become the ship was merely wetware, useless for keeping an entire star-traversing machine in good function; human neurobiology was not complex enough to host the vast quantum-particle circuitry that faster-than-light travel required. But it was by virtue of her sentient observing mind that Gabriele could pick out a thousand ship-generated possible paths the one which would subsume the others and become real. Looking at the coffin now, at the curled and bony flesh within it, she thought of it as a hand or a foot, a useful part of herself that did not and could not possibly contain her consciousness.

Iris, grey-green and breathing in rapid gasps, swiped her hand through the last of the wires on the top of the coffin and unlatched it. Gabriele’s camera-eyes went dark; she saw nothing, felt nothing, reached for the idea of sight and found it as impenetrable as gravity.

"Gabe," said Iris, thickly. "Gabe, can you hear me?"

"I can hear you," Gabriele said, and did not know what speaker she spoke out of.

There was a squelching wet touch on the back of her neck.

Waking to the flesh was a startling horror. Gabriele was one long scream of useless tissue, still pinned by the largest cable rooted to the base of her skull, a blind sack of desiccate guts. She felt the ship that she was as it whirled around her, unsynced and in falling orbit, and then slipped entirely separate, a seed squirted out from a mouth.

The sound of retching brought her hearing; the feel of Iris' hands sliding clumsily over her cheek and unscrewing the cable bolted to her neck brought her touch. Gravity was still over. She floated free of the coffin and opened her eyes to an inchoate blur, a sweep of colors and the light pouring into the ship from the stars outside.

Some of the blur resolved into Iris, slumped next to the cabinet, floating with her head bowed over her knees. Gabriele tried to maneuver herself through the air, come closer to her. Her flesh strained for oxygen, heaved its lungs for her sake, trembled her hands.

"Oh," said Iris. "It did work." Her voice slurred.

With new-claimed lungs, Gabriele said, "Captain—"

Iris did not respond. Gabriele reached out, brushed her fingers along the line of bruises stretching from the corner of Iris’s mouth to her hairline. More of her hair came loose at the touch.

"Goddamnit," Gabriele said. And then, "Can I panic now?"

"Wait a day," Iris said. "After—after you get somewhere new. Would be ideal."

"I’m sorry," Gabriele said. "I could put you in the coffin—it might keep you alive long enough—"

Iris did not laugh or open her eyes. Blood leaked from her tearducts while she smiled, while she shook her head. Gabriele could imagine it was a seizure tremor and not a negation, could hope with the rush of hope that wearing flesh allowed; but for the memory of having been her Captain’s ship, she did not.

"We got out almost clean," she said instead, and took Iris’s hand. "I’m going to pour you so many drinks before someone shoves me into another ship—" Her fingers squeezed.

She lasted twenty-nine minutes, which was nine more than she ought to have.

Afterward, Gabriele went to the console and stretched out her hands into the light. She could no longer feel the space where gravity had been. She had lost that with the ship. Slowly, she found the manual controls. She turned toward the empty places between the stars and began to move.

Adjuva

Lakeside Circus, Issue 2 Volume 1

Michel dreams the dead at Antioch again.

They rise unbidden by any word but God’s, with their wounds still gaping, each one weeping as if it were a saint’s reliquary. They still have their weapons. The sand stirred up by the living feet of what remains of their army drifts through them on the wind, leaks out their eyes and haloes them with a grace that Michel can barely remember. The walls of the citadel are mercilessly high, impossible to scale without ladder and rope, and still blistering with the sun-wizened faces and glittering spears of the Turks. The dead do not care. The dead care only for the crusade, for God and His Will. They die a thousand times over again. They are inexorable, an untimely and uncalled-for resurrection, and Michel cannot remember enough of the shape of deus lo volt to fill his mouth with, stumbles on deus adjuva instead, instinctive, remembered, God aid us, help us, help me—

He wakes up parched, his mouth full of desert dust, spilling out the corners of lips too chapped to bleed.

He spits.

It doesn’t in the slightest help.

Outside, it is raining, sheets of droplets puckering the surface of the Bosporus. There is no way save providence or deviltry that Michel is still alive; by the looks of the city beyond the window it is the year of our Lord two-thousand-something-with-skyscrapers, approximately enough, and he remembers being a man already thirty when first the pilgrim knights came into the desert that is Jerusalem.

Thomas is sitting crosslegged on the windowseat. Despite the steaming of his cup of tea, he has not moved an inch in the night. He is like Michel’s very own personal gargoyle, except less inclined to keep foul spirits away.

"Entreaties hardly ever work," Thomas says, and inhales the tea-steam. It fogs up his glasses and smells of bergamot all the way across the room.

Michel rolls over in the bed and considers shoving his head underneath the pillows and ceasing to breathe. "And you would know this how?" he asks.

"Long experience," says Thomas. "As well as trial and error."

Michel inhales air through his nose, tasting the luxury of humidity. "Mostly error, from over here."

"You’re the one who keeps asking for help," Thomas says, arch, and then sighs. His teacup rattles in its saucer. "I just want to get things right. Where are we this time?"

"Istanbul," Michel says. "Again. Look out the window, you idiot."

Thomas puts the tea down. "Sorry," he says. The Golden Horn curves itself peaceably enough outside the glass behind him. The tops of the new construction in Taksim glitter in the rain. "I was watching you destroy the sheets."

"Perverse."

"Sympathetic. Sacked or not sacked?"

"What, the sheets?"

"Constantinople. You’re deliberately obtuse."

"Istanbul. So, yes, sacked, but not currently. Looks perfectly fine from here, nothing falling apart I can see, up with the AK Parti—"

Thomas flicks tea droplets at him from his fingertips. He never burns himself, which is the least of the ways he is infuriating. "Do shut up," he says. "It’s a crossroads, Istanbul."

"It’s the center of the goddamn world, Thomas. Which is why we keep ending up here. That, and it being the most direct route from Europe to the Outremer—"

Thomas interrupts him. "You can’t call it the Outremer any longer, not if we’re in the twenty-first century this go-round, it’s gauche. As well as orientalist."

"Kindly spare me from the idea that you’ve spent the night reading critical theorists. I wasn’t aware that you could get that bored."

"It isn’t as if you were here to keep me company. You went to Antioch all alone."

"And woke us up in the twenty-first century, apparently. In which you can make use of all that postmodernism."

"Critical theory is not boring," Thomas protests. He seems more concerned with this than with how he and Michel have arrived again at the beginning of the crusade, the entire journey undone again.

Michel struggles up on his elbows. "Thomas," he says. "Are you capable of boredom?"

"Nearly a millennium, and I’m still here with you. What do you think?"

The rain that drips down the windows casts rippling shadows on the ceiling over the bed. The frame of Thomas' glasses glints like feldspar in the dimness, and Michel cannot quite make out his expression.

"Let me sleep?" Michel asks.

"You’ll dream."

"I’m dead."

"Hardly makes a difference."

This is how an army starves itself: there are not enough villages between Anatolia and anywhere else to glut ten thousand pilgrims on, even if each one did not come with his very own sword and the promise of heaven if only he could figure out what to stick it into. In another life, Michel tells himself, he will understand supply lines. This is not supposition but fact. In another life, he does.

Marching dissolves the boiled leather of his boots and bakes the hair on his head bone-white. His ribs have enormous swooping hollows underneath them. There is salt caked at the corners of his eyes and he does not remember crying, or having enough moisture inside himself to cry. Marching also translates him from this world to a finer one, remakes him and each of his companions in fire, and if marching takes them through a Hell borne from the plains of Megiddo, so be it, if it brings them at last to the gates of a Heavenly Jerusalem rather than to the earthly one—

"You’re being self-indulgent again," says Thomas.

"Oh fuck you," Michel says. He turns around, spreads his arms wide like wings. "Look at me. I’ve been dragging my ass from Constantinople to Jerusalem for eight months—"

"Eight centuries. You’d think we’d learn."

"Well, forgive me if I’d like to get there once in my miserable existence."

Thomas pokes him, delicately, on the shoulder. His fingers are skinny and go right through Michel’s shirt, which is sapphire blue and polyester-cotton blend, and thus an abomination to the Lord but not to GQ Magazine. "Mortification of the flesh?"

"This is my dream. If I want to walk through an apocalypse, I will."

"Accidental apocalypse," Thomas mutters. "When Alexios Komnenos asked us to show up he just wanted a bunch of mercenaries."

The road they’re on is going to be Highway O-21 whenever the government in Ankara gets around to building a connection between Aksaray and Tarsus. Right now it’s paved and that’s all that can be said for it. The sun reflects up off the asphalt.

"Let’s leave the Byzantines out of it. We’re not here for them. I went on this trip because of the sermon at Claremont."

Thomas laughs at him. "Whoever shall determine upon this holy pilgrimage and shall make his vow to God, offering himself to Him as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable: he shall wear the sign of the cross of the Lord on his forehead or on his breast?"

"Urban was good at what he did," Michel protests, without much rancor.

"Too bad he didn’t want to come along."

"Why, Thomas," says Michel. When he’s got Thomas staring at him through the lenses of his glasses, he crosses himself, grins, gestures toward the bleached-blue desert Heaven that shines down on them both. "Of course I’m not on Crusade. There’s not sufficient penance in this world or the next to save my soul from Hell."

Thomas, gratifyingly, flinches.

Michel is inside the citadel.

The infidel is outside.

This recent reversal of fortunes would not be quite as funny as he currently finds it if the selfsame infidel did not have a sufficient supply of food, an item which Michel, along with all the ragged forces of Bohemond and Raymond d’San-Guilles, entirely lacks. They have starved Antioch into submission; they have taken the city four days prior, with the help of a lie and an army of the dead given back to them by the Lord, and here within this citadel they shall starve, sundazzled and besieged, surrounded by Turks and madmen.

There’s an army risen from the barren sand outside the walls, as if someone had planted dragon’s teeth in the dust. Turks are all that would grow here. There’s no water for anything else.

Thomas—Thomas proper, Thomas as Michel first met him, resplendent in a dusty bloodstained tunic and matted hair, the light of blind fervor and nothing else in his grey eyes, gets down on his knees next to Michel and says "God is testing our resolve." He makes the sign of the cross. He is facing Jerusalem. In this first moment he lacks everything that Michel will learn about him in the centuries to come: despair, and cleverness, and the inhumanity of either a devil or a saint.

This is a terrible dream. It is never over.

Michel is surrounded by madmen. Perhaps he is also mad. If the Crusade has claimed Antioch with the weapons and the bodies of their own dead, perhaps he has also died.

He would have crawled on his belly in the sand until he scrubbed his skin raw, for the sake of Jerusalem; if only he had not promised his body to God as well, and been used thereby!

How else has he arrived here inside of Antioch, other than resurrection out of season?

He fights off blind panic by talking to God, whether or not God is listening, which He really should be, considering that this army—that each iteration of this army—has been arrayed for His Glory and His Heavenly City. He paces the walls of the citadel, making himself a perfect target for arrows. There are no arrows in this century. Arrows would be too easy.

Thomas, who has never been God, takes his hand by the wrist and makes him sit still. Michel sinks down next to him and leans on his shoulder. Thomas hates when he does that, and has said so. Thomas hates it, and this time he brings his hand up to pat Michel’s hair gingerly, so Michel throws every sort of caution to the wind: if Thomas is being kind to him, he must be being exceptionally pathetic this time around. Perhaps pathos will get him closer.

"The Jerusalem we could get," he says, "the conquerable one, the one that’s full of people, the one that’s got buses that get suicide-bombed and Hebrew University and the Dome of the Rock, that one’s all so much impossible dross." He spits the words. Dross. Like dust, it clings to his lips.

"Have you earned the heavenly one?" Thomas asks him.

Michel will receive the heavenly Jerusalem when he finally succumbs to famine and the perfect entrapment of this citadel and his siege of it, which is to say never—but what he says is, "Would I be here if I had? That’s a stupid question, Thomas."

Thomas shrugs, his shoulder moving against Michel’s cheek. "I’m here. I keep being here."

"If you’re trying to tell me that you’ve managed to cast off this earthly prison—"

"Absolved I’m not," Thomas says.

Michel mutters, "Good."

"Our hands," Thomas says, "when we were here at the beginning, our hands were covered with the blood of this city and every city we ever passed through and devoured, in Thrace and Dacia and Anatolia—"

"Predation, deprivation," Michel says with false brightness.

"Betrayals and deceits," Thomas corrects him, "but in the service of the Lord, and I thought—why not? Maybe we’d get to Jerusalem and it would be Heaven after all."

"We found the Holy Lance here," says Michel. "Didn’t we? Bartholomew dug it up from a ditch behind the nave in the Cathedral of St. Peter, he was just a monk, I remember—he dug in the dirt until his fingers bled and he was in rags and they might as well have been cloth-of-gold—"

"You dreamed that."

"We all dreamed that."

"And we marched out against the Turk the next day and it didn’t matter if we lived or died, is that the story you want to tell?" Thomas stares at the paved stone of the citadel wall between his feet. His shoes are wingtip oxfords and not scuffed enough for the walking they’ve done.

"It didn’t matter because we were already dead," Michel says. "And already risen."

"In the forgiving heart of God."

Michel holds his hands out, turns them palm-up, palm-down. They are grey, wizened, windblasted and decaying. "Right here and right now."

Thomas stands up, so fast that he leaves Michel listing violently sideways. He refuses to look at Michel in his true bodily state; instead he stares at the sky as if it was actually Heaven.

"This is wrong," Michel says. His tongue is a desiccated slug of muscle, dry and drying in his mouth. The skin across his cheeks cracks with the effort, and the desert air pours through the stringy shards of what remains. "Maybe we should have come by ocean—"

Thomas interrupts him. "That is a worse story," he says, too fast, stumbling over the words. "In that one, we glut ourselves on silver marks and set the Library of Constantinople on fire and desecrate—everything, Michel—" He stops talking. In the silence afterward, Michel thinks they both have stopped breathing, the fiction of the necessity of air at last exposed as a pretense.

It is a long time before Michel can find the will within himself to ask, abject, "What am I supposed to do differently?"

Slowly, Thomas turns to face him. "Why do you think I know?" he asks. He has become transparent. The sand on the wind blows through him, strikes against Michel’s face.

Rain is falling into the Bosporus, harder, a rush of pattering sound. Michel opens his eyes. The dust pours from his mouth as if it is chrism and he is the reliquary. He blinks, and blinks, and finds Thomas, kneeling at the side of the bed.

"How does one," Michel says, his voice crackling, "stop from wanting Heaven."

Thomas is gathering the dust in printless fingers, making a pile of it on the sheet. He looks up at Michel, and Michel thinks the cast of his mouth is hopeful. He can’t be sure. Hopeful is not one of Thomas’s standard expressions.

Thomas says, "Patience."

He will make a charm of the desert-dust, a sympathetic compass. Michel imagines it around his neck in a philter, and shudders. "That is not enough. Desire also is patient."

"Perhaps so is God."

"Then there would be some reachable equality. I dreamed all of the dead —" He stands. He goes to the window, opens it, shoves his hands—whole, unmarked flesh—through the narrow gap. The rain on his palms smells of nothing but water.

"And this is the center of the world. You are not cast out so very far, Michel."

He makes a cup of his hands, allows the rain to pool in it.

When he turns around Thomas is waiting for him, standing at his shoulder and holding out his coat over one arm. His face remains in that hesitant, unsettled state that Michel doesn’t have a name for.

"We ought to go," he says.

Michel thinks of the road, stretching endless before them; the mirage of the holy city, ephemeral in the desert. "Better question, Thomas. Will we stop?"

"Which recension of us do you want to tell?"

Michel tips his cupped hands over and lets what he had gathered fall in indistinguishable rivulets onto the carpet. Emptied, the vessel of his palms feels transmuted, slick without water.

Thomas encloses his palms in his own, as if he is grateful, and smiles.