say good-bye. His questionable eloquence fades into city sound as she pays for teagle fare and enters one of the gondolas blackened by a century of weather. In her hand is a colorful shopping bag, stretched by something heavy . . .
It hadn’t been found in some forsaken temple or ruined attic. Rather it was to be had off March Street for five gold scythes.
“I want this one,” she had said, holding up the book.
The proprietor had smiled with lips like wood shavings—pale, smooth and tight.
“That’s from Stonehold . . . very old. Can’t open it though. Latch’s rusted shut, see?”
“How much do you want?” Sena had given him a coy look, then turned away, pretending to consider while his thin fingers had kept caressing the leather.
“The binding suggests it might have come from the islands before I found it.”
“I’ll give you three gold scythes.”
A simper.
“Five?”
The machine lurches down a wind-scraped cliff, carrying Sena with it, scudding through iron rib cages draped in grease. She watches the operator throw his switches and apply the brakes whenever they descend too fast. His eyes are furtive and lochetic. As soon as the great old lift clanks against its coupling in the ghettos of Seatk’r, Sena leaves.
Her animal is stabled nearby. It takes her out of the reeking enclave, pounding east and home along the lip of the plateau.
Delusions of robbery and loss stem her excitement. It is the fastest, most panicked ride she has ever made from Sandren.
When she finally arrives, she crosses the threshold of her cottage and locks the door, touching a chemiostatic lamp and flooding the kitchen with shadows more than light. When she slides her new possession out onto the table, the room sways around it. Reality seems to buckle. Her fingers twist her hair into ringlets while the object groans. There is no actual sound. But she can hear it, feel it, blasting her tabletop with psychomantic darkness.
She moves to wind a thermal crank in the corner. Yellow dials wobble to life as the metal snaps, expands and infuses the room with warmth incapable of dispelling the chill she feels pouring from the book.
For a while she frets, examines the metal ferrules riveted at the corners, beaten to resemble coiled Nerytian serpents whose bodies have worn smooth under centuries of handling. There are greenish pits where air works the metal. Like bariothermic coils, strange power sources in the south, the cover shocks her fingertips with cool. It does not have a title but a faint rune on the front reassures her that this is the object, the unbelievable end of her search.
Its ornate lock peers at her from where the tumblers nest like the rusted legs of a metal spider, crawled inside and curled up to sleep. Her rakes and picks are useless. Cutting the spine, sawing bits off, all would be equally futile and dangerous.
Her eyes trace its shape in the middle of the table. Awful, like a murdered child. She can only stare and think about the recipe.
On the twenty-third of Myhr her letter to Caliph remained unanswered. Light dribbled through the trees, pattered around the leaves from last fall. Sena sat at her kitchen table looking out the window. Her head was killing her. She got up, uncorked a honey-colored bottle and tapped the glass against her palm. Four aspirin rolled out. She drank them with milk, flipped out her pocket watch.
Eight sixty-four. Sixteen minutes ’til noon. A soft tapping echoed through the house.
Tynan? Three more taps.
She noticed a shadow fall across the curtains near the front door. Even through the gently tossing lace, the sound of mercurial breathing prickled over her skin like vinegar. Not breathing. It was mechanical, ill-regulated, gasping, then whispering, then whining like the draft beneath a door.
She moved around the back of the table carefully.
The shadow was massive and bent, like a huge cowl vent on a ship’s deck. The thing’s breathing fluttered strangely, disloyal to its origins. The sound bounced off glass, floor, coming from behind her, wet and unpredictable, like wind through a storm drain.
Sena jumped catlike to the top of her table with only a whisper of sound. She could look out at a better angle from here, bracing one hand against the ceiling, leaning out into the room, craning to see around the edge of the window.
The filthy shape of the visitor eluded her, wavering in and out of view. A mountain of rags. When it swung left she could see the tatters hanging from