Iseult

There’s a click as the gun doesn’t fire. Evin sags, like a great weight has left him.

Impossible. I pull again, then again, and for a fourth time, cycling through every cylinder. Empty scraping sounds, a gun compelled to fail.

Evin, for all his bluster, exhales audibly. His broad frame bounces with jittery laughter. “You know, I never quite got used to that.”

Íde

She surges forward, low and lupine. Her rifle has barely hit the floor when Iseult is face-to-face with Mister Tumble, closing the distance in half a breath. They’ve been standing still for so long I flinch at her movement, and the speed of it takes both Mister Tumble and me by surprise. There’s another twanging noise as he discharges his second crossbow, and the bolt sails wide and buries itself into the wall five or six feet to my left. Mister Tumble barks an alarm, then throws the weapon at her and rips his hand from his pocket to scrabble at something behind his back. By then Iseult is upon him, death gleaming in her bared teeth.

I have watched Sean fight, of course. He was kind enough to practice with me on the ship, and taught me at the very least how to protect myself from punches, and kicks, and knees, and elbows, and swords, and spears, and being hit with chairs and such. But I had never seen Iseult like this, and the way that her knife flashes in the lamplight bears no semblance to Sean’s movements. It’s animalistic. Frenzied. The blade plunges, again and again, first down and then sideways and then over and over in stabs and slashes that send Mister Tumble skittering backwards, fleeing the knife. She flows with him, never stopping, and he too has procured a blade from somewhere, a fat Crowmere sword the length of his forearm. His huge, desperate slash makes her retreat as well, a hop that pauses the fight for the merest second before she leaps forward to attack again, hand and knife together, plunging into him.

She finds her mark in his flesh- twice, three times. Her free hand rakes across his face, clawing at his eyes, drawing blood from the soft flesh of his cheeks. Blinded, roaring, he stabs and cuts with a dismembering strength, unable to find her body as she rips into him. He staggers, beleaguered, a bull slaughtered by a pack of wolves.

It ends, when Iseult’s knife lodges itself halfway into Mister Tumble’s left hand. It must have cut to the bone, because she tries to pull back for another slash but his hand follows, pulling her off balance. He catches her, with a knee to the gut that folds her over. She releases her grip on the knife, which is still wedged, perversely, in the centre of his palm. Iseult totters backwards, bent halfway, and looks up just in time to be knocked off her feet by a crushing punch.

“No!” I shout. Mister Tumble looks at me, surprised, as if he’s forgotten I exist. Blood streams down his face, pooling at his shirt collar. He holds his hand up, the ruined left one, and I see that the knife has dug completely into his flesh, halfway to his wrist, between his middle and ring finger. He seems not to notice.

“One moment, Sigilist.”

He stamps hard on Iseult’s left hand, crushing her wrist under his shoe. Then he makes a disapproving sigh and swings his sword down with the force of his whole body, like he’s chopping a log.

*

Something is poking me in the side of the face.

I am staring at nothing, and bolt upright with a start. When did I-

Evin Tumble is looking at me, from across the little moon room. A hideous glimmer lights his eyes, and his mouth is tight and vile. Iseult is on the ground, cradling her left arm- cradling where her left arm used to be.

“Kill. Him.”

Sean. Sean was poking me awake. The second time I’ve faded out of consciousness today. He croaks it out, and there’s no anger or venom in his voice. He sounds so distant. So tired. He tries to speak again, but it doesn’t sound like words.

I’m tired. My head is buzzing, or sawing. Thoughts crash into each other, like there’s too many to fit in my head.

Iseult doesn’t have an arm.

I almost faint, again. Mister Tumble says something, and I realise he is repeating something that has taken me a moment to process.

“She never told you, did she?”

Iseult doesn’t have an arm.

He seizes Iseult’s shivering body with one hand, and hauls her upright by the throat. She sputters, and the emptiness where her forearm should be is monstrous. Iseult is suddenly so pale, wan in the lamplight, and the juxtaposition on her face between bloodless skin and dark ink renders her corpselike.

Even now, even beaten and dismembered and dying, she spits out what sounds like a curse at Mister Tumble. He laughs, and tosses her down closer to the wall, where she topples over. She slips slowly back into a seated crouch, her vile glare sapping her entire strength. Her free hand is clutching the stump where her forearm used to be.

I am rooted and horror-struck as I watch her suffer.

“Íde. She never told you why she lives in Ildathach. Away from her people.”

Iseult gurgles something, then looks over at me. Her entire head lolls as she shifts her focus back to Mister Tumble. “Fuck you, Evin.”

Sean is, miraculously, still breathing. He’s unresponsive as I clutch his wide chest, and his heartbeat is faint. But he’s alive. A sheen of awful sweat coats his brow, and runs in rivulets down his face.

“Only…” Mister Tumble is still talking, adopting that preacher’s voice, his words echoing from the vast stone around us. “They’re not really your people anymore, are they Isrā?”

I look up, still cradling Sean’s bulk. Mister Tumble is looking straight at me, beaming, his eyes glossy. The warm light of the oil lamp gives his face the weathering of centuries. I shudder under that inhuman gaze.

I shake my head, trying to focus. Stray thoughts scuttle over my eyes and my ears by the dozen.

“She thinks this whole thing is about her, but in truth- I could not care less about Iseult Morrin. Isrā Mahrin. She’s a traitor, Íde. That’s what those marks on her face mean. They’re not Bani Yahtrib knotwork, or myths, or whatever else she told you. They’re a brand. Her tribe exiled her. In the old days, that would mean that this, this,” and here he turns and points at Iseult’s crumpled body, “criminal would’ve died. But she slithered to Ildathach, sold herself as a mercenary, and managed to luck her way into the good grace of the Chaplain’s Office. I know what you are. Worm. Witch. I have broken her, but how do you break a worm? Even when you cut it in pieces, it squirms and hides.”

A juddering, weak snarl from Iseult. He wheels back to her, on one heel, and his peacoat spins with him. “Is that a lie?”

No response.

“Is it a lie?” His voice thunders in the confined space of the vault.

“You think I’m broken, Evin?”

I’m shocked at the weakness in her voice. Iseult is slipping away, kept awake only by her hatred. “Have you heard me crack?”

She stops talking.

“Íde.” He’s turned to me, arms wide.

“This is not what you expected. I understand. But sometimes, something you must realise, is that people like these use you because they know they can. You are young. You have never met this type of person. But Sean, and Iseult… they fooled you. She is a criminal to her own people, who exiled her over a decade ago. And what is he? A man born in the Aergan, who fought against his own people? What does he actually do, save convince you of his worth?

“They fooled me, as well, as well as my company. They used you for their own purposes. They’ll both live, I think. But now I need you, for the task I asked you to help with, so many months ago. You’ve arrived at the end of a very, very long journey. From before we met. Before Colt & Tumble travelled to the Salting Bleaks. Before, in fact, you were born.

“You needn’t worry, by the way. You did everything perfectly. It took very little to adapt the knotwork you provided- well, not your knotwork. But the knotwork that she gave me,” his crossbow flicks towards Iseult. “Never really thought that someone else might know a few of the same tricks. Didn’t consider how easy it might be to reconfigure her strange little sigil with my own counter-charm, change the parameters just ever so subtly. Quite an impressive change in result though, eh? Nobody on Calacar has managed anything like this for quite a few years now.”

His hand has returned to his pocket. The other dabs sweat and blood from the wounds on his face and neck. I cannot believe how casual he is, in the aftermath of this awful butchery. His sword has been sheathed back in its place on the small of his back. Without the dark stains on his jacket where he wiped Iseult’s blood from his weapon, or the knife-punctures which are now sodden with his own blood, I would never suspect what crimes he just committed. Could I kill him? When I speak, my own voice surprises me.

“Then why the ruse at Inskoet? Why this secrecy?”

He’s not even paying attention. He’s dropped into a kneeling crouch, and is fiddling with the oil lamp in the centre of the room. It sputters for a moment, and he is brought into radiance when he opens the lamp to its full brightness.

The oil lamp bathes the entire room in warm light, and I can clearly see what’s marked on the opposite side of the chamber.

The room is a cube. It is hewn from the same smooth, cold, white material of the rest of the moon. But, unlike the rest of the broken, shattered walls we ran by, or the snaking intestinal ruins we passed by on the Oxenfree, this room is decorated. This wall is engraved with an immense circle, floor-to-ceiling, packed with so many precise etchings it at first appears empty. Inside of this great ring, the wall is pockmarked, irregularly, with thousands upon thousands of dots. Some larger, some smaller, overlaid by great curves, some centred, some offset at seemingly random angles, some finger-wide, some hair-thin. A smear of denser pockmarks traces an arc that starts roughly a third of the way up one side of the circle and slashes down to a mirrored point on the other.

And, at the very centre, hovering before a small circular hole, is something that looks very much like a three dimensional sigil. It’s black. Blacker, perhaps, than the darkness we stalked through to get to the room. Black like a bee from the Bloom.

I don’t know when I let go of Sean. I’m standing, shoulder-to-shoulder with Mister Tumble, and staring up at the shape floating scant inches from the exact centre of the circle. It’s far too high for me to touch, but this close, under the warm flicker of the oil lamp I see its gnarled shape and find it familiar.

The serene bobbing of the thing reminds of the lapping of the sea, or watching the swaying treetops in a Wraithwild morning. The longer I look at it, the longer the shapes in the circle seem to swirl about us, moving at the edges of my perception.

“That’s why I wanted you specifically, of all the sigilists in Ildathach. This was never about them. I chose her randomly, in a chance encounter in a lounge. She recruited him. But you- I chose you specifically. I read your papers. Spoke with your professors. Only you could understand this.”

A sculpture of bubbles, formed in dark stone, swirls of rock like foamy pigment. It can’t be much bigger than my hand. But in that moment, I understand it. The mathematics, the material, everything. It is unbelievable. It’s a sigil, compacted perfectly. Spread out, worked as normal knotwork, it would encompass this entire room. I drink it in. All of it.

“What are the designs on the walls? The lines and the dots?” An idea buzzes in from nowhere. “Is this lunar knotwork?”

Mister Tumble smiles. “Stars.”

It’s a map of heaven. The epiphany blooms all at once, and a handful of familiar constellations swim into focus, interspersed between myriad alien ones. Stars. Of course. I am again struck by that deep sense of unbalancing. So focused on the floating sculpture that I ignored the pattern around it. This isn’t just art. It’s some sort of sigil, as well.

Iseult gurgles quietly in the corner, shaking me from my reverie. I start to turn my head, and feel Mister Tumble’s hand on my shoulder. He rests it casually, his thumb nearly touching my jaw. His other hand is still inside his coat pocket. My eyes start to judder, and I stagger back to face the star map and the sculpture.

And Sean and Iseult.

I protest: “But my friends, they’re-“

“They were never your friends. They were using you. But this is your work, Íde. This is an art which is locked to me. But it’s not beyond you. You shall live forever. Behind this wall, you will help expose the door of Saints.”

The last ten minutes. Trauma. Realisation. Wonder. All roiling within me. Thoughts of killing Mister Tumble, thoughts of saving my friends, flit through my head on quick, flashing wings. They leave almost as soon as they arrive.

And Sean and Iseult.

Why can I not think properly?

His voice is honeyed and gentle. His eyes are warm, and frozen, and ancient, and caring, and greedy. “Do you think you can open it? There is so much beyond the door. Imagine feeling the wind between stars. Imagine dipping your fingertips in the sun. If you let me into that door- we can leave, Íde.”

I pause, look at him. His open expression, the kindness in his smile. The reassuring weight of his hand, the gentleman’s confidence. He wants what’s best for me. The knotwork floats before a perfect dark hole. It’s a lock.

A second passes. You could fit all of my life inside it. I stare at the floating sigil, and already I can tease meaning from its bubbling coils. It would not take long to attune myself to this miracle, to ignore Sean and Iseult, to open the door, to help Mister Tumble. Not long at all. And after I open this door and remove the seal and reveal the space behind, I will be so, so happy. Dreams burst on my tongue. I can do this. I will betray my friends. I will forget the past. I will abandon my family, and ascend into this moment.

Coldness hums between the reverie.

What was it they said in the Bloom? In dark and drowning places?

I’ve made up my mind.

I nod to him, and he beams. But there’s something happening to my head. I feel my thoughts of Sean and Iseult slip away, and I draw my feelings down to try to hollow myself, soak in the alien magic of this knotwork. There’s just one petty thing, butting irritatingly inside me. Something that tastes of black oil, something with a hundred thousand scrabbling black legs.

Carefully, slowly, I reach under the neckline of my dress and remove the clasp on the string of bullets that Iseult gave me. Mister Tumble watches, thoughtfully, as I take a single step backwards, framing him before the map of stars. With the grace and kindness of a Saint, I extend it out in front of me, palm up, pointing towards him.

He frowns only slightly as I say the two syllables the bees taught me. The first with my voice, the second with my heart and all the thoughts that are crowding my skull.

The bees weren’t lying. I can feel my tongue and my hand beginning to char, and his ancient face twists in shock when Iseult’s bullet tears through his open mouth and ricochets off the wall behind him.