Author's Preface
The familiar pungency of an orangery.
And silence…
Such, supernal silence.
Pyna opened her eyes.
She peered upwards from where she rested, upon a spare, but comfortable bed.
Into the fretted vault above.
Where window panes unfolded wide. And were hung with heavy night-dark curtains, and arras that wove and wafted cumbrously against a pleasantly cold, nighttime air.
Made sweet, by a score of beeswax tapers. That painted the immediate furnishings with a sheen of uncertain amber luminance.
Shifting to her side, she gazed through a tall arch at the still, quicksilver skinned mirror-pool, at the heart of her well beloved solarium. The faces of the twin moons reflected therein. Placid russet and silver.
At the center of her high manor.
Hidden above the raucous bosom of the Opal Quarter .
The most antique, and variegated of the numbered enclaves, which composed the Great City of the Upper Houses.
Home
I am
Home
Pyna shut her eyes once more, and descended into practiced quiescence.
Stilled and evicted every tremulous thought, until she seemed a hollow, porcelain vessel. A fluted skin of alabaster, blown into the shape of a young woman.
She then extended her unnatural senses to fill the inner concavities with all the unaccountable scents, sounds and textures that inhabited her high manor. A pied ocean, whereupon she drifted delightfully, the hours forgotten.
After some unaccounted while, the breath of a peculiar and intimate perfume at last tickled her senses.
One that would commonly find no place within the halls of her manor.
Pyna once again opened her eyes and sat, unheeding of her nakedness.
Below the wide arch that divided the chamber from the solarium’s mirror-pool, leaned Elshad.
His smile, warm and gaze insouciant.
Father…
Pyna blinked very slowly, a soft frown pulling at the carmine of her bent-bow lips.
What has
Become of
My
Gown
“Too filthy to launder.
Too tattering to mend.
I will have another, finer, sewn for you.”
A charmingly dismissive motion of the hand, as Elshad drew a deep draught of the citrus redolent air. Then ran long, marble-wan fingers across his tuft of an inky beard.
Pyna covered her inhumanly porcelain bareness with the comforting roughness of her patchy, woolen blanket.
Her expression, flat.
“Come! Bathe, then dress.
We will go to call upon our guest…” He grinned.
Then was gone, within the space between a heartbeat, soundlessly from the chamber.
She considered his remark with a frisson of passing disquiet, before moving to steep herself in the cool redolence of her mirror-pool.
Where she floated contentedly for nearly a bell, bathed in the cold commingle of light from the twin moons above.
Feeling sane, and pleasantly perfumed, Pyna drifted from the shallow waters to attend her toilette.
Nearby a tall looking-glass a laving basin, and her collection of fine combs. Cut cannily from rare blackwood , nacre and bone.
Here she found her incarnadine weaver’s cloth, lovingly folded. Her horror-forged Innulian blade pillowed delicately against the crest of a pleat.
After assiduously combing her snow-wheaty locks, Pyna donned her weaver’s robe and sheathed her blade.
Then paused to peruse the inhumanly porcelain mien that floated against the candle-refulgent mirror-glass.
A touch of thirst in her belly, lending a softer opaline translucence to perdurably milky flesh.
Monstrous…
Sweet to hand, sweet to touch…
We are monstrous…
A murmur as she pressed her fingers against a reflection as cold as her skin.
With a sigh, she then moved like a spectre from the chamber, and made her way to a closet with a secret stair.
She would find Father in the Cellars…
In a very particular portion thereof, walled thickly. Sequestered from the greater meandering catacombs, and ossuaries.
Which proved to be approachable from only a single aperture. Below the clandestine stairs of the aforementioned closet.
A place that Nimblethorne had assiduously furnished, long ago in order to promote his more perilous, and alchemical explorations.
Pyna had rarely descended into this secreted, and singular branch of the sprawling Cellars.
Whether from disinterest in Nimblethorne’s sometimes more abstruse concerns, or from a repugnance thereof, she was discomposingly unable to say.
The subterranean region was broadly divided into a bent spoke-and-hub arrangement of small chambers.
Down a sinuous, and suffocating stair of over two hundred precipitous steps. Through lightless pitch, and pensive soundlessness, at last brought Pyna into the hub.
Cut coarsely from somberly gleaming granite, it was a space of terrifying antiquity. Perhaps older, even than the Great City’s First Foundations .
A single, and long taper of brass-bound amber beeswax stood nearby. Painting poorly, and fitfully against the ragged canvas of layered gloom. More a marker of presence than any attempt to illuminate.
Pyna stood abreast of the stairwell, as still as the enwombing stone.
And perused the uncountable cobalt strings of roundly cut figures, and wispy, cloud-shaped glyphs which fretted the chamber.
A cosmos of symbols, composed in a tongue alien to even the eldest Children of the Paper God.
She recalled Nimblethorne’s endless puzzling over their peculiar purpose.
Pyna’s eerie faculties felt nothing metaphysical upon or therein.
They were silent; inert.
Bereft of any cant or in the end, even meaning.
Their sole endowment, an intimation of frightfully bottomless age.
She turned, and studied the yawning dark that defined each of the nearer spokes.
Narrow and tenebrous, all of a similar, squat shape.
As though the masons, who an epoch ago burrowed through these grizzly sediments, were most short of stature, stooped or bunch-backed. Or perhaps something of all three.
Reaching out , she found a familiarity that made no attempt to conceal itself.
Daughter…
A voiceless whisper caressed her ear.
Pyna moved with simple certainty towards the north-facing spoke.
Through the constricted arch and atrous lightlessness beyond, she glode. Like a milky phantom on bare toes. The depth and breadth of Old Night within these peculiar halls, offering her neither blindness nor fear.
Although she could well imagine, what terrors this place, even in its quiet, harmless emptiness, might impress upon the hearts of the living…
For this proof against animal apprehensions, she was ever grateful.
Although more unusual species of dread often gnawed at her periphery.
One hundred paces deep, the darkness mellowed into a honey-hued diffusion.
Another twenty paces around a sinuous bend brought Pyna to her destination.
It was a familiar space.
Long ago, Nimblethorne had led her upon a progress through each of the chambers.
Describing, as always with a sanguine relish, the multitudinous alchemical instrumentation, and other more esoteric furnishings.
Oftentimes very similar to what still crowded any number of rooms in her high manor, far above.
The small cube with smoothly rounded corners upon the threshold of which she now stood, was one of the sparser rooms.
It could well have been a common monastic cell. By way of the simple, waist-height stone table and modest, blackwood chair, that occupied its corner.
At the center of the closet, a rarer saffron-light blazed with a healthy day-star warm luminance.
Affixed to the heart of a short, black-iron pole-lantern.
Upon the chair, Elshad lounged.
His posture, eminently boyish, and very human .
Like to any dissolute rake that ever haunted a pleasure house.
But it was to the other, shrunken figure, who lay on their back upon the stone table, to which Pyna’s eyes wandered and affixed.
“Ah, Daughter… ”
“A pleasant bath?
That pool is ever so cold. How do you bear it?” His voice, full of quiet laughter.
Pyna ignored his remark, and drifted with some disquiet, closer to the reclining creature.
I
Know
Her
She studied the old woman’s peacefully slumbering countenance.
Deep creases, fixed like chalky crevasses, ran across the surface of her pellucid, porcellaneous skin. Her hair, cloven nape-short. As milky-pale as Pyna’s own.
And familiar fingers, like fleshless marble talons, lay folded against her breast.
All enwrapped in the bold, radiant russet, and yellow of a weaver’s robe.
To any in passing, she might seem to be no more than the craftily cut effigy of a very old woman, at perennial rest.
Who
Is
She?
“Her name is Sifna… ”
Sifna , the mask.
Thought Pyna. As she traced with her gaze, the deep furrows that tracked fold upon fold of her ancient, and unlovely flesh.
Her name
Is
Unfamiliar
“As it should be.
Lost to all libraries. Long forgotten by even the deepest of chronicles.”
Elshad leaned forward in his chair, elbows resting upon his knees.
Pursing his lips into a carmine half-smile, he brazenly traced the cold skin of Sifna’s sharp jawline with a taunting finger.
Up to the center of her brow, where he tapped once, very gently.
And a whisper of some weavecraft, that proved slippery to Pyna’s apprehension.
The old woman’s eyes winked open.
Milky as her skin, and thick with a growth of cataracts. Had they been common eyes, they would have been thoroughly blind.
An intimation of yolk-yellow below, caught Pyna’s attention.
Innulian
She
Is
Innulian
“Yes! As were most of the first weavers to embrace Sufa’s, philosophy…
As was Sifna, so was Lesshin.
Ah, Nimblethorne… Pardon me.”
“Unto the convocation of the Paper God. ”
Elshad uttered airily, with a twist of the hand.
“ Elshad… ” Creaked the old woman. Her bloodless lips barely, with a twitch.
As her cloudy eyes appeared to focus upon his hovering mien. Nigh enough to press his lips to her fractured brow, should he choose.
“ It has been…
Centuries… ” She continued, raspingly.
“And gratefully so!
I had hoped to never keep your company again.
Thou bitter weed…” Ruefully mocking.
“ You are cruel, to an old woman… ”
She rolled her head from side to side. Her finger twitched.
Rivelled, marmoreal lips pursed in apparent perplexity.
“ Why have you bound me…
Where is my- ”
Elshad leaned back again and abbreviated her questions, with the flick of a long finger.
“Let us consider.
You sought to murder my Daughter, with a bone-eater, of all abominations…”
“ Ahh…
The girl-child. ” Rasped Sifna.
“Perhaps I should cleave that breast and unhouse that heart of yours.”
“Back with you, into the Outside.
Perhaps, you’ll find your beloved Sufa there somewhere, lingering in the Spaces Between… ”
Elshad’s inky onyx-bright eyes glistered with an undercurrent of old, and irreconcilable malice, though his tone remained speciously urbane.
Pyna watched the exchange, engirded in preternatural stillness.
She was troubled by her ignorance.
Who
Are
You?
The question was directed pointedly at Sifna.
Before the old woman could rasp a replication, Elshad filled the silence.
“ Sifna, was one of the First .
Old and vile and ugly even then. But dearly, oddly loved....”
He shrugged.
“The Gift, only preserved, and compounded her foulness. She was unable to seduce anything.”
“Weak in weaving , but pitiable, Sufa wrought for her another gift…
A gift only she might wield.”
Elshad plucked up something that had rested near to his boot heel. A smooth-faced, featureless mask of polished blackwood.
Sifna’s defenses faltered for a brief moment. And for the first time Pyna felt the vast and gnawing fear that was the near living substrate of the old woman’s spirit.
Ageless and consuming.
“ My mask… ” She creaked. Her voice, small and helpless.
Pity pricked at Pyna.
Sifna was a patch of poor cloth. Having been wrung by unyielding dread for an aeon, little else remained.
She should never have been…
Father
It
Matters
Not
At
All
Now
Elshad turned a hooded gaze upon Pyna, and something indefinable passed voicelessly between them.
“My Daughter’s heart is ever sweet…
And you are the sad artifact, of a long departed world.”
Elshad paused, his marble-wan aspect an unplumbable mask, though his inky eyes swallowed the saffron light of the chamber eerily.
“I will return your mask .
And you will not set foot again, within one hundred leagues of the Great City…
Above, or Below. ”
“Lest I have you staked before the rising day-star. ”
Sifna shut her cloudy eyes for a breath and sighed, as though in acquiescence.
“ There is yet the matter… ” She creaked.
“What is this matter?”
“Of the Omoorn…”
“This is nothing to you.”
“ It was not her right to claim... ”
Elshad’s smokey, obsidian gaze was gelid and terrible.
“No, of all it is most her right.
A very birth-right by all measures…”
His words were discomposing.
The nail of something wintry raked at Pyna’s conscience.
Father what
Do
You
Mean?
Elshad leaned away from the old woman and gazed quietly for a few heartbeats into the ambling saffron-light. At the heart of the chamber. His smile, abstruse.
“She took many suitors, following her… Rebirth. ”
“Oh, the blood of Sufa flowed amply through the Pirnians… ”
His words drifted softly, addressed to no one.
But their unspeakable implication found their mark.
Pyna never felt so cold.
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