Elly Bangs - [BCS280 S01] - A Handful of Sky (htlm) Read online

  A Handful of Sky

  Elly Bangs

  The hunters trudged in with the dawn, driving carts that sagged under the weight of their spectacular slaughter. At the front of the convoy they flaunted a dragon’s head, with spines to be sawed and sanded into buttons; a lolling tongue soon to become a deadly pair of gloves; a hide to be tanned in the sprawling soot-blackened factories of the lower city, then shipped uptown to be cut and sewn by skilled practitioners into the fine attire and regalia that imbued the Swathed with all the unnatural radiant heat of their authority.

  Jorren Borriwack watched the carts climb up the long street toward her tailor’s shop—and pass her by without a glance, and continue on to the gallows gate. From their muddy wake, a boy of twelve emerged, coughing and dragging a beat-up bloodstained sack. He set it on the cobblestones before Jorren, who nudged it with her foot and peeked doubtfully inside.

  “They’re getting smaller.”

  “Swamps are almost cleared out,” the boy said, reaching in to poke at the snakeskins for himself. He hacked hoarsely, and the phlegm he spat out scintillated with the telltale light of inhaled supernatural fibers. He’d already gone to work in the factories.

  Jorren flipped her cascading monocle lenses back to rub at her deeply wrinkled eye and the scar-knotted fissure that indented the other side of her face. She paid him as much as his family’s pride would allow—wishing they’d use it to get him out of the spindle rooms while they could, but not daring to hope. Jorren was not the hoping kind.

  In the courtyard behind her shop she stretched the fresh skins out to cure in the already balmy air, on their way to becoming what passed for dragon leather in the lower city. Despite all signage to the contrary, nothing in her windows harbored any supernatural properties. She catered to other small-time merchants, gangsters dressing to intimidate, laborers and gamblers eager to spend down a bit of luck or inheritance on an outfit just fine enough to imagine, with enough hard squinting, that it had once soared over wild places spitting blue fire instead of slithering through the bog just outside of town. Something to make them feel, however fleetingly, that there was a bigger world somewhere beyond the bald peaks ringing the ever-sweltering horizon, even if they’d never live to see it. For fifty years that had been the closest thing to magic Jorren had touched.

  She slumped behind her desk to mark the purchase in her ledger—and just then the bell clinked, warm wind rustled the page in her hand, and she looked up with a flash of intuition that the blurry figure in the doorway had come to deliver her doom.

  He swept through the shop, craning his neck around the shelves. Not to examine her merchandise, she realized, but to confirm she was alone. She thought she detected the inky luster of oblivion silk in the fringe of his hooded cloak, making him harder to focus on and easier to forget—giving her a headache just to look at him—but who in the lower city could afford real oblivion silk?

  “May I help you find—?”

  “This shop is closed,” the stranger declared, and each word blasted her with supernatural heat and twisted itself into the truth in her mind. Before she could think, she’d already bolted the door, turned the sign, and drawn the curtains.

  He pulled back his hood and let her see him, from his chiseled jaw to the ribbons in his braids. He wore a vest with a high and tight collar, swirling with the cooling geometric sheen of abyssal spider silk, fastened by a wide belt of dragon leather, and undoubtedly lined with the cruel metallic mesh of woven youth. He was the paragon of a Swathed gentleman: permanently in his prime, immaculately coiffed, with his natural beauty augmented by every unnatural means known to Tailoring. And here he was, inexplicably, on the bad side of the gallows gate.

  Jorren wiped sudden beads of sweat from her brow and tried not to look too terrified as she knelt. “To what do I owe the—”

  He waved her impatiently back onto her feet. “Swathed Araias. You’re Jorren Borriwack the High Tailor, are you not?”

  “Just a tailor. Not a high one. Sir.” She flinched as the act of contradicting him sent a wave of fever through her body.

  “Oh? That’s not what I hear. You carry scissors on your belt as a High Tailor would.”

  “Purely decorative,” Jorren stuttered—this time taking care not to exactly disagree.

  “And yet you know the craft. The real craft. Don’t you? Or would you tell me I’m mistaken?”

  Jorren bit her tongue as a warning heat washed over her. Long-repressed sensations strained against the memory-numbing effects of the lacuna silk lining her eyepatch: a slash too quick and sharp to feel, disbelief at the hot blood coursing down her cheek. She tried to think of some way not to answer. Any way to get him out of her shop.

  Meanwhile the Swathed gentleman perused the shelves. He picked up a snake-leather shoe and tossed it in the air. “Where do you keep the real thing? Answer me.”

  “I have scraps of High fabrics,” her mouth said for her. “But no more than scraps. It’s been fifty years since I, um. I might still have enough dragon leather for a bracelet.”

  He flapped his gloved hand dismissively. “Any novice with a spool of dream-thread can stitch together dead animal parts. True mastery begins with the spectral and sentimental fabrics, does it not?”

  “Yes, but I have only scraps of—”

  “Fine. But if you had the materials. If I brought you, say, a bolt of woven delight, could you fashion a dress for my wife? Do you remember how?”

  The astronomical cost of an entire bolt of delight-weave made Jorren’s head spin as much as the psychic heat radiating from Araias’s belt, but she nodded.

  “What if I brought you ghosts. Raw ghosts, bound in a salt jar. Could you card and spin them and weave a scarf?”

  Jorren swallowed with a parched throat. “I would need a vapor loom, but—”

  “Fog?” he pressed, his voice sharpening. “Wind? Not many know the craft as it pertains to wind. Dawn light? Moonlight?”

  “I do,” she croaked helpessly. “I did. At one time I could make garments out of any skin, sentiment, or specter known to Tailoring. Anything. But that... was a very long time ago.”

  Araias stepped closer to tower over her. “How about sky.”

  Her breath left her. “Sky?”

  “I want a jacket made of sky. Contemporary style, above the knee length, slimming pattern, flattering lines. Tell me whether you’re capable of that.”

  His power bit at her mind, but she rallied the strength to resist. “I... I very much regret to inform the Swathed gentleman that I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a garment made of sky. Tailors through the ages have attempted to gather such a fabric, but to my knowledge—”

  “You’re obfuscating,” he interrupted. “You haven’t seen such a garment, but you know more than you’re letting on. You’ve tried it, haven’t you?”

  “What?” Sweat dripped down her face and neck.

  He sighed impatiently. “It’s a simple question! Have you ever tried to gather a piece of the sky?” When she was too tongue-tied to respond, he continued: “It’s irrelevant. What matters is that I’ll pay a stipend of two gold pangs per day for your best attempt. Plus expenses. And if you succeed, I’ll pay two hundred thousand for the finished item. More than enough for a woman of your station to retire, I should think. Tell me what you think of that.”

  Jorren’s head swam in the broiling heat of his command. She managed to prop herself up on the nearest coat rack. “Surely there are High Tailors in the Upper City who—”

  “Of course, but there are all sorts of politics and petty intrigues afoot among your betters, and I can’t exactly rely u
pon their discretion. I believe if I ask you to keep my order secret, you will. For your sake.” He turned to a full-height mirror to examine himself. “It’s a gift to myself for my 400th birthday. If any of my guests find out, they may try to outshine me, and I won’t have it.”

  She sank down onto the stool by the shoe rack. She knew she was on the verge of heatstroke now, but she forced the words through her chapped lips: “I can’t. I can’t.”

  His glare blasted her like an oven. “Why not?”

  “I couldn’t take your money for something I don’t know I can do. I don’t know if anyone can do it.”

  He studied her for a moment. Then he bent over and lifted her sweat-greased chin with his gloved fingertips.

  “I know your story,” he said. “I know where you’d be today if not for your little indiscretion. I’m offering the closest thing to a second chance you’ll ever receive.”

  “I’d have to close my shop. It’s all I have.”

  “But you’re going to take my offer anyway,” he said, and the fire in his voice warped the air and filled her vision with stars until—

  Suddenly the heat ebbed. Jorren’s lungs sucked in air hungrily as the invisible flames snuffed out and the power let her go. Araias had taken off his dragon leather belt. He held it aloft by its metal ring, waiting for her to look up.

  “You’ll do this,” he said through a nearly sympathetic grin, “not because I’ve made you do it—although I could. It won’t even be for the money. You’ll do it because if you decline... in a handful of years, when you’re too frail to push a needle through second-rate snakeskin, you’ll look back on this moment and know that it was your last chance to do something worth remembering. To earn your very own little bit of glory. That is what I’m offering.”

  Without another word he slapped a list of his measurements down on the counter, pinned under a fat stack of coins. He refastened his belt, tugged his hood back over his head, and left.

  Jorren perched on the stool for a long time, feeling her pulse slow and her skin dry. She didn’t dare to reopen the curtains or turn the sign on the door.

  An insistent whine grew in her awareness. She raised herself up and crept past the shelves of snake labeled as dragon, deer labeled as unicorn, chicken labeled as basilisk, dyed goose down labeled as phoenix. She groped in the darkness until she found her way to the bottom shelf in the farthest cabinet.

  The sound became a melodic thrum as her fingers reached its source. From underneath tufts of cobwebs and a box lid all but rusted shut, her last glowing spool of dream-thread was singing again, for the first time in fifty years, to the hands that had spun it.

  It took all morning for the conversation to percolate through her mind. After that there were the hours spent exhuming her old journals and grimoires from their burial places around the shop: boxed up, fallen behind shelves, used as wedges to prop up displays, crumpled into mannequin stuffing. When the crucial notebook was finally in her hands, she was left with the mind-numbing task of re-learning the cipher she’d created to protect it.

  How had Araias known she’d ever been interested in sewing sky? Before today it hadn’t crossed her mind in decades; certainly it was the least of all the ambitions she’d abandoned after her bloody exile from the Upper City. The problem back then had been finding time for her research. The problem now would be retracing her long-faded steps and praying she still had the skill to do it, if indeed anyone alive could do it:

  Gather, and sew, four square yards of sky.

  The next morning she unboxed her best dress, dismissed the moth-wards, and dutifully took in its seams until it fit again. It was only ordinary silk and linen, but to an untrained eye it might pass for Tailored. She bought a decent haircut across the street and then, for the first time since her exile, she started up the length of the steep cobblestone street to the white walls of the Upper City.

  Her climb led her through the sweltering heart of the lower city’s unrest. Two streets up she passed into the long shadows of tenements exhaling the smoke of burning refuse over a gauntlet of beggars—who mistook Jorren for a wealthier woman and shouted out at her, offering proof of need in all the knuckles robbed of fingers in the factories and mills. Further up the street, the more desperate among them lined up outside a youth-spinning workshop and tried not to notice their suddenly elderly peers staggering out the other door.

  When Jorren reached the gate she held her breath. She avoided looking up and tried not to hear the taut rope creaking in the torrid wind.

  “My name is Jorren Bor—”

  “We know,” the gatekeeper said through a yawn. “We were told to expect you.”

  She flinched when the gates creaked open. Ahead of her the wider, cleaner, cooler streets spread out, full of dreamlike scenes.

  In the Upper City all the clothes were real, every last thread chosen for its magic. Even the lowliest couriers wore belts or bands that imbued them with protection from theft or accident. Every estate was packed with servants rendered all but invisible by robes of spun shadow. The ruling caste themselves spent their days in elaborate and complicated costumes: ghost-weave scarves that whispered true secrets to their wearers; shirts that concealed their wearers’ secrets from the ghost-weaves of others; a thousand other articles, collectively suffusing the air with effects and counter-effects thick enough to choke on.

  The only Tailored article Jorren wore was a thin hatband packed with coarse sticky fibers of spun banality. With luck it would render her utterly forgettable to anyone who saw her—especially, and most crucially, the jaded and easily bored Swathed. She tugged the brim down and uttered a prayer. Five blocks up she fell under the shadow of the Upper library.

  Despite her makeshift invisibility, from the moment she stepped into the bone-dry darkness of the stacks she felt someone’s unwavering attention fix on her. Chair legs squeaked and rapid footsteps echoed off the marble. Jorren kept her head down and moved to lose her pursuer in the maze of shelves, but a book cart blocked her path and—

  “Jorren?!” the librarian whispered. “Is it really you?”

  The woman stepped in too close, passing through a brief island of dusty focus before blurring again—but it was the sound of her voice that made Jorren’s hand shake and her throat tighten.

  “Tyan?” She fiddled nervously with her hat.

  Tyan glanced up and snorted. “You know that hatband won’t work on me, old friend. You can’t do my job without learning to focus through banality. But I thought...” For a moment she froze. Her roaming gaze carefully avoided the scars. Then she wrapped her arms around Jorren and hugged her. “All these years, I thought you were dead!”

  “Exiled,” Jorren responded.

  Tyan looked stricken when she pulled away, as if exile was the worse of the two fates. Maybe she was right.

  It took Jorren a moment to realize that Tyan hadn’t aged more than five years over the last fifty. The uncomfortable tingling she’d felt in that embrace confirmed her suspicion: the piping of Tyan’s jacket gave off the metal-wire gleam of spun youth. Not enough to render her entirely immortal like the Swathed; only enough to be worth a larger fortune than Jorren would ever touch, even with Araias’s patronage.

  “Why are you here?” Tyan whispered.

  “I wish I could tell you.” Part of her ached to. Most of her only wished she could have bought real invisibility and avoided Tyan completely. Those still-young eyes were like a memory made eerily real, and it strained Jorren’s heart to stand so close. “It’s... complicated. It’s a matter of discretion.”

  Tyan nodded, and her expression hardened. She put her hand on Jorren’s shoulder and squeezed a little too tight and said “What do you need?”

  The day’s work went more easily with Tyan’s help, however hesitant Jorren was to accept it. Tyan found her a private reading room and let her fetch books without leaving a record. Finally she relaxed enough to take her hat off, switch her monocle to reading focus, and start the daunting task of recons
tructing her old research.

  There was no shortage of tantalizingly vague suggestions that it might be possible to fashion a garment made of sky. High Tailors had been spinning threads out of wind and water and light since the dawn of recorded time. In her youth she’d started from the assumption that no one had ever cut or spun or felted sky simply because it was too far away to reach—but the more books she read, the more she noticed how close they all came to mentioning sky only to abruptly change the subject.

  This was why she’d enciphered her notes all those years ago: however paranoid it seemed, it was as if there was a conspiracy afoot to censor any information about this very task—and that could only mean that the information had existed once. It taunted her as much with danger as with possibility.

  A shudder ran through her at a sense of being watched. Something was there in the edge of her vision, propped up in the corner: a humanoid blur the color of gangrene. Her heart seized with fear, but when she reached a trembling hand to her monocle, it had vanished.

  She tried to dismiss it as nothing, but a rancid odor hung on the air. She stuffed her notebook back into her bag and started to leave.

  “Is everything all right?” Tyan said, catching her at the door. “Do you need anything else?”

  Jorren tried to ignore the bad taste lingering on her tongue. “No. All is well. I’ve done what I can today.”

  Tyan nodded, hesitated, then hugged Jorren again and whispered in her ear: “If anything should happen. If you need me. Find me in our secret place.”

  Jorren stammered some words of thanks and left.

  She perceived that same watchful presence in the streets as she made her way home. It matched her slow pace. It stayed too far behind her to see clearly, but she kept catching glimpses of what looked like a lumbering wad of coarse, mold-gray rags, and she could tell that she wasn’t the only one responding to it. People bent around the thing in the street, always giving it a wide berth and twisting their heads to keep it out of their sight.

  At the gallows gate, against her better judgment, she hailed the nearest guard. “Do you see that? That gray thing?”