Eric Vargas's Blog, page 6

The Mere Tide P55

April arrived with the mystery of the tube. New addition to her wall. Seated in an aluminum backplate and filled with a transparent fluid failing to float a bead above the blue slant shading its bottom. Dachni swatted it from its mount with a broom and prodded it across the floor into a corner and whopped it into submission with the stiff straw mane and cursed it and approached warily and finally picked it up. It was not menacing. She shook it. She put her ear to hear did it have a pulse which it did not. Characters were etched at intervals along its length between short horizontal lines. She held it at angles. Upright, downup. She frowned. She shook it again for better measure.

Youre somethin, she muttered.

And Anaya would know.

Its a thermometer. The little reservoir at the bottom is called a bulb, the tube is called a capillary and it holds mercury. When the temperature increases it expands and lifts the bead and all you have to do is look to what number the bead aligns and that will tell the ambient temperature.

Whats it now?

Negative five Fahrenheit.

Their breaths plumed furiously the air.

Thats pretted cold.

Neither of us really need bother.

Whats say of an outside go?

Its colder out there than it is in here.

Ye can perk a fire outside.

You can make a fire inside.

The blackness of her eyes yawned. Bellshit.

But it was true. A fireplace in a library. A great rococo palace adequate even to the most pampered of scholars. It was easily missed, its door narrow as though to a closet and which the pilot mused proper fitting. In it were two reading tables set opposite another propped upon the lamenting figure of martyrs, the victory of Borodino, the sacking of Moscow. Book shelves lining the walls rose to the ceiling, the upper shelves accessible by stairs coiling round marble columns at each corner of the library. The narrow mezzanine balustraded by an ivory handrail with gilt spindles. Exhibits of muskets and sabers occupied the floor. Oil landscapes of the cosmos in its anthropomorphic beginnings, Satan in his fall, Othello on his bed, Michael at the helm, in the chairs Nico and Bart. Statues of Alexander upon Bucephalus, Diogenes in his jar.

Dachni caned about in awe. She came to the hearth and floundered like a muskrat drowning in molasses.

The pilot was crouched in the mouth of the fireplace.

Whore ye talkin to?

The pilot whispered on. Smoke rose and then you could see the fire rising into the chimney. The pilot pushed up on her knees and rose and swung back and turned.

Do you want some tea?

No.

The pilot grinned slyly. Some whiskey.

Ifn its your keep.

The pilot stood and opened the door of the giant grandfather clock installed in the mantle and withdrew from the bar therein a moonshine titled Perron’s Mock Death by their Albanian distillers. She poured two tumblers full and gave the child one and they drank and basked in the growing heat.

Does ye have any friends?

Very few.

Where are they?

On their own. Ive never kept a circle, I draw from the corners.

So ye doesnt really have none.

I do.

But they aint with ye. Friends steck agether.

Sometimes you have to go your own way.

No. Friends keep through.

Anaya thought about this. Bill Camel.

Fuck camels.

You didnt like him?

Who?

Bill. Bill Camel. He kept by you the whole time.

When?

To Kilcok.

Ta what?

The town we rode to. To find your offenders. He was the one most abreast of you.

Neverd sawed him.

You were pretty out of it.

Well about him.

Hes my friend.

Yaller friends.

Quite. Even when I dont want to talk to anyone I can still talk to him. Thats a rare quality. Some people rejuvenate themselves through socializing, some through solitude. So it is rare for the man who prefers the latter to find solace in another. I propose you and I are of that fold who finds the exception of relief in each other. But were more than that arent we?

You say that.

I say were sisters. That makes us more. What Id tolerate from you Id not tolerate from him. Bill is a hard man but hes not soulless. He told me: I aint Catholic but Im more Catholic than most. He saved my life in Mexico. Maybe a day Ill tell you the story. I could tell you another story about me and him and your…in Kansas. When we were in Kansas.

Whats Kansas? An Mexico?

The former is a state, the latter a country.

Whats former? An latter?

Former means first, latter the second mentioned or last. So Mexico is latter, Kansas is former.

Ok. Tell whats of storied.

Not now. Later.

The pilot sipped the raki. Ive read much and found differences in the conceptions of the devil between east and west. Theres a somberness in the eastern Satans thats not present in the west. A shabby nobleman felled of status, clinging to society’s coattails is no devil, not even a subdevil, not even a proper subaltern to an assistant of a subdevil. The devil is a merry go luck and he has much cause to rejoice.

Does ye lieve in the devil?

I dont believe in the devil in the same way I dont believe in gravity. The pilot picked up a sheet of paper and let it fall to the floor. Theres no need for belief.

Ye caint see him.

Ive met him.

Whatd he say?

We discussed Job. He said the story of Job is really the story of god committing suicide. Because god’s infidelity to himself contradicted himself. He said it was the devil’s master trick, tricking god into putting a gun in his own mouth. Only later did he realize that god had tricked him. Because he was left to run round with nothing to do and since he had no intention of joining his adversary in oblivion he was forced to haste round the margents of the world shoring up the belief in god in the hopes that they could revive him. Or else what had he to do? Rebel against himself and suffer the same fate? To become a living contradiction and then like god perish. Except that in the pushing of men towards god the contradiction had already occurred and so he said his great fear was to become what he always sought to overthrow and that one day he would sire the rebel who would fool him in being fooled.

Does ye think theys more than juss the devil keeped rounds?

Why if there is a devil cannot there be little devils?

How da ya think they get round?

Possessions. Pacts. Summonings. Illicit acts. I…dont think theres many devils circuit this earth anymore.

Why not?

Who would want to visit this hell? Arent demons forever trying to escape their torment?

Ye said this wertent hell.

Well. What do I know?

Howsey reckon ta get out?

The pilot smiled. If were in hell dont you think we deserve to be here?

No. How does ye get out?

I dont know.

Bullshit.

The pilot’s smile rubbed the child’s shoulder fondly. Patience. If you dont know how to get out of hell then you damn sure dont have the will to get out if you were told.

Thass yourn pinion.

Tis.

Will ye not say?

Ill not say. But no harm will come to you. And Ill get you out. Thats my promise. Do you believe that?

No.

Believe that. If I have to stay all my life I will but to save you.

Youre crazy.

Verily I confess it.

What about aienee devils?

In Iphsisavios. We have them.

Are they here?

Yes.

Has ye seen em?

Yes.

Ded ye talk to em?

No.

Why not?

Whats left to say? Now its whos going to kill who.

The Mere Tide P54

The child bribed-Her rifle-Love

She went back up. On the following oragious night restless abed her door was rapped upon. Her blankets were drawn up to her chin and she was staring at the thrown shapes drawn on her ceiling.

Is it you?

It is not.

Waters your want?

Id like to spend some time with you.

She pulled the blankets a little higher, a little tighter. No. Fur what? Tires day anyhow. Essed fer sleep.

Youre not sleeping.

Was saved to it but fore ye knocked.

She arched up and looked to see the door. A thin bar of light shone under the door interrupted by two spaces of darkness.

I have some whiskey.

Dachni fitted her lips to her thumb. What kinedes whiskey?

They sat up side by side in bed passing the bottle between them.

Is your foot feeling better?

Its a bitch hurt.

Anaya stretched down the bed and tickled a toe.

Ow.

That didnt hurt.

It coulda hurt.

Anaya smiled. Im glad youre here. Did I say that before?

Aye.

I want to say it again.

Ok.

The pilot got out of her robes a long carved pipe and tobacco and a box of matches. Do you know to work the pipe?

Know?

Ill show you. First you stuff the bowl, packing the tobacco in tight. Then you light the bowl. Puff a few times to get it started. See?

The pilot was drawing on the stem and she was beginning to smoke from the inside out.

Sees.

Do you want me to unpack it so you can try?

No.

Here.

Dachni took the pipe and drew a long breath. A silky warmth filled her lungs, tender in its flowing. She was suddenly sleepy. Whats that smell?

Red cherry.

Is nice.

The pilot laughed softly. Look at you. A cane and a pipe. You are old. Ill want a picture of you.

Outside the clouds were pronouncing their titanic syllables and tremble did the cathedral.

Dachni looked alarmed. Issint old old.

No. You are an angel.

Dont say that.

Why not?

Dachni held the pipe gingerly. The bowl glowed a moment then a puff of smoke exhaled out.

Youll kill the fire that way.

The pilot took the pipe and sucked at the stem a few times but the flame had gone out and she got another match and rekindled the pipe, stoking it back up.

Sorry.

Its ok. If its the worst that happens to us today we aught be grateful.

Ok.

The pilot perked suddenly. Oh I have something for you.

No.

But I do.

Dachni covered her face. Quet that. Ye caint be givin all of stuff.

Its not mine, its yours.

No it aint.

Anaya swung her legs off the side of the bed and went to the door and reached around to the outside and brought out her mosin-nagant.

That aint yours!

She laughed. No its not, she said sitting back down on the bed. She laid the rifle across their laps. I ordered a new firing pin.

Whats a firing pin?

Its the long piece of metal you sheathe in the spring. Has a blunted end.

Aye.

Thats a firing pin.

When? Wenned ye get it?

When I did.

That aint a say.

No I suppose not.

Dachni regarded the rifle. Sole friend on lonely nights. A scratchy film of close set specks of rust had formed over the bolt and sights like embedded sand and the varnish had worn down in patches and the arctic birch scraped a raw pale cream.

Its seen some days, said Anaya feeling along the stock. She touched the serial number on the bolt. AK5149. It was produced at Izhevsk in 1940. Can you imagine what its seen?

All bad things.

Anaya conceded this. But the journey of it. And the destination. How many have shouldered this arm? How many lives has it saved? How many ended? See its no Theseus. The serial matches on the barrel, the floorplate, the bolt and the buttplate.

This aint got no butt.

Anaya slapped the stock end. Its called the buttplate. Trust me.

Not on that.

Well ask around.

Aint gonna go askin round on butt plates.

Then youll just have to take my wooord, Anaya sang.

Shit, said Dachni bashfully. She took a long swig from the whiskey. Her cheeks were flushed, her forehead hot and she was very tired.

Will ye what else on the rifle? What kinded rifle is it? They come with names ifn ye doan know. Theys a sluggy green shiner call can slash folk as it were knife.

That could be a number of guns.

Its shoots high fastest. Et goes werpwerpwerpwerp.

Thats the sound.

Well it aint sounded exacted as but its summerthin like it.

Anaya chuckled softly and kissed the child on her headtop.

But tell on this.

This is a mosin-nagant. Its a Russian design responsible no doubt for the weeping of not a few Prussian mothers. It probably had a hundred owners. You see the electropenciling on the side of the receiver. This was imported to C’Ville, Illinois. Its been to its enemies and back. Whoever the owner was must have had a luster for it. Theres maintenance but I dont see any refurbishing.

Mebbe it werent used all that much.

Its seen sights.

Hm.

Where did you get it?

Dachni lifted the rifle and laid it lengthwise along the bed. Its a pretted tire day. Marent es fer sleep.

Alright.

Hassint slept. Is pretted tire.

Well. Ill get some sandpaper and we can sand it down and give it a new finish. How sounds it to thee?

It sounds.

Listen. Before bed.

What?

Hows your foot?

Its hally better. Wouldna thought itd eel so fast but its better.

And how are you?

The pipe fell from Dachni’s fingers. Her lip quivered and then all at once she threw her arms around the pilot. Its been horrible, she bawled.

The pilot pulled her tight. Hush you. And tomorrow will be better.

No it wont.

And it will. Thats what we say. Tomorrow will be better. Say it.

Et wont.

Yes it will. Say it. Say it.

She mumbled something.

What?

Morral be better.

Say it again.

Ettel better.

It will.

An dont wanna stay.

Whats in the grad?

Nothin.

Do you still want to go?

She shook her head.

Do you want to go somewhere else?

Wanna go nowhere.

Well.

Well ye be quiet.

The pilot nodded. She wrapped a talon in a fold of her stopa and daubed her tears and rose and found the child clinging to her. Her face was hidden in the blankets. The pilot said nothing. She undressed and lifted the blankets and slid in and turned down the lamp until it was a beacon in all the dark that was like the first spark of creation casting the shade of all that would be.

The First Murderer

Oh, thou celestial carcasses infuming this orb with thy designs, thou balks us to unnatural ends, do make enemies alloy and affine. Your capricious circuits spinning round a minute is our time. As you inch our destines by a tether pull years and unwind. So go we to them. Shalt thou? Shalt I?

The Mere Tide P53

The manner of her convalescence-The catacombs

Two weeks then of days alike in panther black or auteur orb starting constellations of motes on sunbeams. Her sleepless hours sweat wracked abed parceling out the theoretical perdurantism of night, the tribal combat of dark against light, each decaying to the others recede as if a curse to be flown from. Eventually to succumb to a rank rest would last till lousy morrows, to scamper frantic to the bathroom and back her head lifting pained out of the toilet bowl, her unkempt lock ends dripping a citrus colored bile. Or else to wander the corridors lethargic, inevitably to be intercepted by the stealthy giant also prone to after hour serenades thereof to be born to the altar for drinks.

Once the pilot presented a silky brown beverage floating soft black clumps. Dachni poked them into dissolution with a spoon and with no small suspicion and deadly gravity asked: Ded ye poop in this?

Anaya cackled grandly. Its chocolate Dachni. Its sweet youll like it.

But Dachni narrowed a distrustful eye. That werent the question.

Even so she found herself the beneficent of a cautious dotage that knew too well the delicate balance on which such truces rested. That changed her sheets, that brought offerings of tobacco and fortified brew that prevented her contraction of scurvy. Who sang myriologues and cooked meals of which through claims of dysphagia she would manage to partake only a few morsels of.

The pilot weighed her and truth she lost no weight yet in her drare diurnal ventures from the dorter it was as a frail retardate shambling sullenly as if out of Orcus where aught she might have been of wont to remain. Staged late in emaciation as though undergoing a ritual of minishment. Bones razarous under the lunar translucency of her hide and her whiteless eyes huge and blank in their sockets. And reducto absurdem would she regress yonder infancy and in a final fading assume the shadow ambiance of the halls? For it is so men may also become the shadows of shades.

One night to emerge out of a groggy fugue. She blinked at the ceiling and spread her arms on the bed and clasped its sides. Then threw off the blankets and groped for her cane and finding it looked about and hobbled out.

The other dorters were empty. The library. The refectory. She retraced her route, looking into the bathroom, the nave. The flame in the lantern seemed a silhouette rapt in ponder and the crucifix below it creaked as it turned heavily in the air. Subordination to a foreign deity in his own repurposed house. She returned to her room and got the lantern for to light those back end corridors she loathed to traverse. Where the echo seemed to escape through false walls and where the barriers between vales did thin. Hear now distantly a gramophone rife with static. Violent violin sawed by an arthritic and can the bone warp be told in the chaos of the chords? No signs to tell where she went. There were rooms. Some empty. Some with piping jutting from the concrete. Others locked. A scratching at boards stopped her and she knocked and those were nails on wood.

Whos there?

Something like a caterwaul’s death croak answered.

Who is she? Is it her? Is it really her?

The something pounded on the doors. The child peered through a slit in the boards. To see a shadow move in anguish. Say who, she hissed. Say who.

Perhaps the thing within had no tongue. It could not say and the child went on. At the stairway she raised high her lamp to give reach the light a few more inches into the puzzle below where paths multiply. Down these stairs. Would that she could debride the cathedral to find what heathen stepgod festered below and is it he who has laid the roads of time? She caned gingerly down, lowering the lantern a few steps ahead at a time and then easing down herself. At the bottom she spared a fretful glance to the light above but then she spat and cursed god and marshaled on. The first she was come to was an undercroft stacked with casks. Puncheons out of what cooperage. She tried a tap and sour black amber whiskey poured out and she wished all journeys were so rewarded. She drank up her courage and then drank away her senses and stumbled out. Her lantern multiplied as did her new spawned arms and their lights accordioned in and out of the article like a shadow that lost no detail in its duplication. Somewhere a mourner puled. A scaled hexapod skittered across her roof and regarded her broadwise with its torso oculars and the lids closed and opened as it breathe in sequence and then the headless thing slipped into a wall crack, its beneedled tail flattening and sucking into its body to fit. The involucrum of dark bayed by her light. Farther down it began to snow. Snow coming from a lunarium in the ceiling. She found the second stairwell. Or a stairwell like it. At the these depths it grew humid. A swelter reeking of humus blown in from existence strictly ordinate. Flowerfied wax vining upwards budding a thick foliage of wicks that blossomed with light. She broke off a branch and it was smooth in her hand and left an oily feel. Plashing rebated by soil walls but the puddles investigated rippled not. Ahead the tunnel flared into a chamber a pair squared acres sowed with an obelisk flora. Groping charmel. Rigid, upright, bearing a sentient fruit that rattled a shivaree with its chitin casing as she passed. And in so doing scared off bugs of another earth to be chumbled by leathery insectivores whose drool succored the fruit.

At the far end of the chamber was an exit and this she took. Antepaste of misventures future bound this corridor. Stepgod to this heathen. A shallow flow of water rising out of a seep and flowing on. At the next turn she found herself in a channel freshly painted. She put her back against the far wall and gave the painting a study.

It was the battle of Oreck’u’kii. When forty nine thousand airships disrupted the magenta heavens. High cloudbanks, mesas of cumulus and the archipelagic cirrus higher yet and far below the occluded front. The scene was well advance from that opening salvo first delivered from a range of a hundred and thirty two miles that devastated the skirmish lines before degrading twenty seconds later into a dogfight.

The airspace depicted was so crowded she could count no less than eight collisions. Four Gorecki class carriers dueling five Barrazgez. Aerial leviathans clouds themselves and their crazed rain duelists streaking at every vector, their passes like medieval jousts, some popping in and out of actual reality, reducing their probability of existence so low that missiles streaked through them without harm. They speak of a momentary blankness, the pilots. The theological portents of that nonexistence not lost on them, no not on them. Bombers approached in such a state and would they for too long remain would blink into nothingness never to return. Gunships blazed through the murk, their shields shining, their guns pissing great steams of tungsten that tore through tungsten and here was the grand gunner Coraskii in his crimson corvette having just cleared the smoke plume of his nemesis Gabios, never to see him in person, on his deathbed citing it his greatest regret, That dubious charlatan let fly his soul.

Thirties of thousands of missiles hounded exactly each soul of the shrieking craft, their contrails intersticed by tracers, by hot beams of plasma turning the overcast to steam, flashes of laser and flak burst. Missiles in swarms rendered in such detail you could read the serial numbers, see the galena’s transit into and out of the masks of terror. Aircraft of divers designs, hyper specialized wings, a different manufacturer for almost every formation. Shock collared planforms, canards, sweep wings and scramjets. Ships exploding in glimmers of fire and downed ships falling, venting coiffured smoke, or barrel rolling through the alchemical convoke of flak burst, some shalki pilot, his canopy shattered banging on the side of his airframe and two ejected belligerents from opposite factions exchanging fire with their sidearms still strapped to their seats. And this battle only a prelude to the contest of land to occur scarcely an hour later.

The Mere Tide P52

The tailor’s-Measurements-Second Hand Shopping-A complaint about names-The supremacy of imperfection

The din was petering out fast as it started and by the time the pilot ducked under the lintel it had ceased altogether into a tensive observation of the participants for any violation whereby it would all erupt again. As they crossed the threshold Dachni caught sight of a small silver box nailed to the doorstop with symbols of star and candle and citadel worked into the metal. Inside was a warm low lit den perfumed by a rich symphony of fabrics. A tailors. It felt a place of another time. Attire of various styles were displayed prominently on the wall and these lessened in formality the farther back you went into the store from the garb of the executive to the more utilitarian garments of the working classes. The register by the door had a big porcelain shoe by it for canes and beyond the double railed racks spaced across the floor was a drywall partition with a cutout for the thin proprietor behind to greet his customers.

When the doorchime rang he put aside the trousers he was darning and sat up. You never said she was so pretty, he said.

Geh ta hell! Dachni shrieked.

His lips pursed into a nervous grin. He folded the trousers and put his needled and thread upon them and touched his glasses low on his nose and pushed them back up again.

Shes shier than a kitten, said the pilot taking the cushioned chair for clients by the partition.

Shell grow out of that soon as the boys start getting cricks in their necks.

Dachni hid herself in the pilot’s robes.

The tailor’s desk had a sewing machine mounted underneath it and which by means of a lever would revolve up flush with the desk and lock into place. He pushed back from it and crossed his legs. That is the most unleavened child Ive ever seen. She should have baked a mite longer. How old is she?

Nine.

You say it like you dont know.

She doesnt know.

My niece is about her size and shes seven. He took a handkerchief out of his front shirt pocket and daubed his dry brow and put it back. I was expecting an aienee. I didnt know you all adopted.

The pilot made a slicing motion across her neck. Dont worry about it.

Im not. Makes my job easier. I didnt know if Id have to invent a new style.

Well you dont.

Those eyes are…

What about them?

The tailor scratched his curls. You could get her contacts.

That would be a lie.

I guess you could say its a kind of deception. He threw his head back to glance at a percolator. Do you want some coffee?

No.

Tea?

No.

Ok. No refreshments. Then lets get started. He he cupped the top of his fist and put his elbows on his knees. Hello, he said. Im Morganstein but friends call me Aaron. He clawed within range of his customers on the heels of his monks and extended a hand and Dachni leaned out of the robes and fastened her teeth to it.

Gah, he cried.

He kicked back. The child’s teeth were dug in behind the proximal phalanxes and it looked like she was plucked backwards out of the encompassing arms. She had his wrist in her hands and she was threshing now savagely and he raised his hand to cut off her air but the pilot blocked him with her great corpus and levered her jaw down.

The tailor fell back into his seat.

Dammit. You little bitch.

He fell back into a heat press machine and scraped alongside it and knocked over an ironing board and the heavy iron left a dent in the hardwood.

Theres an actor’s flair.

This isnt histrionics. Look at this. He held out his hand. The skin was like crumpled wrapping paper. The base knuckles of his index and middle finger had been drawn out. He wiped away the blood and wiped away the blood and wiped away the blood and so pictured the wound. My job. My job.

Youre fine.

He made a wild gesture and blood flung up to the ceiling. Goddammit. You have to go somewhere else. I cant work. Im done.

Youve been paid.

Ill give it back.

The pilot became grave. The jew does not refund.

Ill give it back.

Between them stood the child and she put her fist athwart his knee and scampered back to cower behind the slender trunk of the pilot’s leg. A hand reached down to stay her to a place.

She doesnt know any better.

I dont care.

Calm jew. Clean your hurt. Come back. Well start afresh.

Get out.

Do you want to be drafted? Do you want Miriam drafted? Or David? Clean your hurt and come back.

Aaron glared at her. A succession of distortions morphed his face that finally settled into an acrid resignation. He ransacked his desk for a tiny first aid tin and checked its contents and hurried to the restroom holding the wound high to keep blood from getting on the floor. He depressed the doorlatch with his elbow and went inside.

Dachni felt a tap on her head. She looked up.

Will you behave?

Lets get outta here.

Hes going to fit you for clothes.

Done has clothes.

Rags pigs would be ashamed of.

Howsit your care?

Because youre my care. Now let this be. The jew shall take your measurements and soon as he finishes well go back. Promise.

Ye promise?

I do. Of course I do.

Dachni played the cool cashmere through her fingers. She pressed it to her lips. Ok.

For ten minutes there was a continual mutter and run of water from the restroom and then the tailor emerged. His wound was bound. He resumed his seat and surveyed his desk and straightened a column of bobbins and put in place a clear plastic cup of threading needles. He held up a bloodsoaked scroll of parchment about the size of a cigarette and pressed it to his forehead and then crumpled it and threw it in the wastebin. Then he got it out again and unrolled it to study and then threw it back again. Finally he looked at his customers. A remark was on his tongue but it went uncombed by his breath and the pilot gave her compliments that truly he was an heir of Solomon. And it was vanity those words. He rankled his curls and took a deep breath and settled into the mode of his trade.

Shes fifty one inches.

Shes taller than that.

Shes not.

She has scoliosis. You see how her shoulders dont rest evenly? How her ribs bulge slightly out. When I straighten her shell be taller.

Ok. Her arms are…

Take her measurements.

I can tell from looking.

Do it because I told you to.

Do you have a muzzle?

The pilot bared her own fangs in a vicious smile. Do I have one?

He grunted angrily, swaying in his seat. He undid his bandage. Ill need a new profession. Im right handed. I cant thread a needle with this.

Youll live. And if its so bad get an augment. Youre being paid enough.

I aught to be paid more.

You have what you have.

You didnt tell me who she was.

I told you what she was. Now nay to haggling. Repress thy nature and preserve your soul.

The tailor pursed a disgusted frown and pointed at a stool. Stand her there.

It was under a table on which were stacked fat bolts of the cloth of every color. The pilot hooked it out and stood the child on it.

The tailor rose, swiping a tape measurer from the desk, and unspooled it.

Straight thee as the way, said the pilot pressing her hands to the child’s breast and back.

Dachni cowered before the tailor’s approach but a prickling in her sides mustered her courage. Ye keepted a fuck away ye gluttied cunt.

Aaron hesitated. He looked at the pilot as if for an assurance of safety.

Prove it Aaron.

He exhaled in resolution through his bared teeth and knelt. Ok miss…

Gillespie.

Gillespie. Can you stand up straight for me?

Anaya jostled her. Its ok.

Dachni’s face twisted up in a cry. Her arms flapped up and down in frustration. Dont wanna. Dont wanna.

Anaya crouched and held her arms by her sides. You know if you hadnt put up a fight we’d already be done.

She moaned mournfully.

Go on, she told Aaron. Its as tame as shes going to get.

He worked quickly. He noosed the tape around her neck and wrapped it around her chest and then her waist. When he measured the seat of her pants she slapped him and the pilot bid him be cautious and he held the tape back four inches and sighted it and then he measured the width of her shoulders and the length of her arms and her inseam with delicacy.

Ok, he said at last rolling up the tape. Painless as it could have gone.

All done Dachni. Its alright.

Dachni swung round and blotted the pilot’s stopa with her tears.

Go home.

Nein, nows the fun part.

Noes fuckin fun. Less go. Ye said of promise ta gao.

Anaya pushed her a little back to look into her face. Thus shall winter soon thaw into the lively prance of spring and summer will sprawl over us lazy as butterflies, fall shalt wither all and then old winter. We aught dress for every season and so those pelts on the walls. Pick whatever you want.

Ir fuckin crazy.

Verily I must be.

Nothins there of want.

You cant wear my clothes for the rest of your life.

Take em back.

Dachni pulled at her outsized sweater but the pilot stopped her.

Heartbeat dont. Dont. Its ok.

Miss Dachni, said the tailor.

Alessa, hissed the pilot blackly.

He looked at her in confusion. Then he ceased to ponder it, wise jew he was. Alessa. Im sorry. I can make anything in any style you fancy. I can do military jackets, car coats, jersey capes, dresses, skirts, sweaters ribbed or graduated or blended. I can make a miniature three piece suit. Tell me what you want, Ill make it. He gestured at coat jackets hung on the wall explaining the various differences. Her eyes drifted to the back where enormous pelts of every beast of the region were tacked.

Water those?

Aaron stepped back groping for his seat and took it and swiveled round.

Furs.

Aht.

Anaya followed the child’s gaze to a pelt of lupus. Heavy glossed and dark gray with auburn taints and channels of black.

Tai.

That one.

Do you know what kind of style you want?

Coat? wondered the pilot. Coat? No. Parka. Satin inlining. Fox fur collar. Water proof. Make it eighty inches.

Do you expect her to split into triplets?

I expect she will grow.

Aaron regarded the child, trying to abstract the waif into a taller version. It wont happen.

I dont see you having my business if you dont.

Aaron got his coffee. Before he could drink he coughed and it sputtered over the rim and he set it down and wiped it with a finger.

Alright.

Go now, said Dachni.

Anaya caressed her breast. Not now. You need more than a parka. See those racks over there? Go pick out a wardrobe.

A what?

Pick out clothes, as many as you want.

Dont want any.

Anaya smiled fondly. Even out her serpent eyes bluer beneath the water. No diva she. Go heartbeat. No choice in the matter. She turned her gently around and cast her off towards the racks at the back of the store. Go go go go little one.

Dachni gimped towards the racks at the back of the store as though under sentence of exile. Halfway she turned back and grabbed the pilot and tugged until she went along.

The racks hung children’s clothes assorted by article. Mothworn, torn. Shirts with the emblems of superheroes or rock bands. Cynical axioms blazoned on their fronts, the jaded slogans of teendom. Or else pure nihilism. Decrying the phoniness of life. Anaya chuckled.

Whats funny?

You are.

Thats the boys section, said Aaron.

Shell get what she likes. What do you like?

No conception had Dachni.

Whatever you pick well have to make sure it fits.

If thats the case, said Aaron, it might a bit much but the toddlers section is back there.

Shes not that skinny, said the pilot. But as they tried on the clothes there was no garment not outsized on her. Youll need a belt thats all. Drawstrings.

She went to go get them. Dachni fetched a pair of jeans from its hangar and shimmied out of her pants and tried it on. She couldnt do it standing. She sat and lifted her legs like one about to give birth and fed her legs through in. The leggings were like windsocks on her. She hobbled up to her feet and thumbed out the waistband and there was a gap about a foot wide.

Anaya came back holding a selection of belts through the buckle.

Are those belts?

If theyre not Ive done it wrong all my life.

Dachni reached out to take a belt and the pants dropped around her ankles and she was naked from the waist.

Anaya’s head hung in mirth. You are a wonder.

She grabbed a fistful of pants and pulled them back up and got one of the belts and figured it through the loops.

Anaya crouched and put a talon to her shin. Well have to shorten them about that much.

Ok.

They filled three bags full of clothes. And it was mostly her giving tacit approval to garments Anaya asked if she liked. When they finished moving through the floor they went back to the partition.

How much is this all ta cost?

Aaron was fingering back the beads of his abacus.

It is no joy to a jew to discount his wares thus does he forfeit all hopes of clemency. The rebate being the beginnings of mercy.

Essented no cheaper? Owed pays for it? Hows ta pay for it?

Ill pay for it.

Dachni stared at the bags. Ye caint do that.

Of course I can.

Aints yours ta do.

I provide credit, said Aaron looking up from his calculations.

Tame thy avarice.

Whats credit?

Nothing you need concern yourself over.

It sounds as does.

Credit is a loan. You purchase now and pay in increments over an agreed upon time.

Shell not need that.

Dachni clutched one of the bags. Will pay it. Does have gold putted ways.

Im paying, said the pilot. And you. You are upon a wire. Never speak to her of money again.

Aaron said nothing. He pulled a bag near and took out the clothes and continued totaling the price. When he had tallied all he wrote out the bill of goods. The total read in pencil $17017.08.

Youre shitting me.

The jew put up his abacus. Were in war scarcity. Everything is being requisitioned by the army. All my orders are for the army. Uniforms. Boots. I cant get leather, I cant get cotton or jute or flax or hemp or anything. My suppliers have empty warehouses. The trappers wont even sell anymore. What am I supposed to do? I have a family.

War your excuse?

I dont set the prices. Broadcloth is fifteen dollars a yard.

Most of this is already secondhand.

I find a lump of gold in the river when its thirteen hundred an ounce. Do I sell it a year later for the original price when the current price is seventeen hundred? I have to make a living.

Tallying never furrowed the brow of a jew so long as he was being paid. See how greed’s challenge sweats him.

I cant part with it for anything less. Everyone knows the cost of cotton. I have to buy by the kilo.

As I recall these were donations for survivors of last year’s war. The war you fled. This business you fell into, the house you squat in.

I dont squat.

Its not your house.

There was no one there.

Thats because he was shot. Im telling you this as a favor. If you try to extort people theyll run you out if youre lucky.

I cant give you prewar prices.

Were not at war yet.

We might as well be.

Anaya stood. Ill tell you what, she said moving the chair aside. Im not above taking all of this without laying down a dime.

Aaron watched her warily. He looked at the receipt. Ill go to the law, he said to the piece of paper.

The pilot gathered up the child and put her in one of the bags like a kitten and then gathered the bags. Go to him. Go to god if you think it would help.

She turned to go. As she passed the shoe she sorted out a cane and gave it to the child.

Look at you, she said. Old and old.

They drove back in the cracking of the dawn. The day’s yolk seeping color into the world which was all as the pilot had told. The child hugged the bag in her lap. She stared at the paper. Seeing the quadratic formulation of its fabricature.

Well hey today wasnt so bad was it?

They stopped outside the cathedral gates and the pilot helped the child out and then the truck drove off to park itself in the car port. She showed her the rudiments of cane use and Dachni hobbled a three legged ancient ill of gait. She made it to her room after a long struggle and when she opened the door her room was ordered again. Her bed made, the books replaced. Dachni set on the bed. Anaya came in a moment later with the bags and began to put the clothes in the chesterdrawer. Filling only the lower drawers that she could reach. When she was done she came and sat by her on the bed and looked out the colored window.

In my library I have a collection of novels. Its a beautiful tome. The lettering is of gold gilt, so too the foredges. The endpapers have a swirled pastel marbling and its jacketed in a tan bonded leather with three ribs to the spine. There is a scuff and I hate that. And yet on page 579, among other pages, it reads: To have gone to both and them home would have entailed a sixty-mile horseback ride. Its plain what the typesetter thought he saw. To have gone to both of them and then home and yet its there. The editor must have thought the same too. If ever it should be that I am commissioned to do another run of that collection I would keep the error. I glory in that imperfection.

She bent down and kissed her and went out.

The Mere Tide P51

Harter-Revelers

A dark quixotry of a town towards which the rising road wound. The HUD highlighted the outlines of the buildings a muted orange and as they entered the suburban purlieu on Amos Street it highlighted the streetlamps and the neighborhood mail drop and the trashcans, the headlights sliding along the curb and storm drains and spilling onto the picket fences and manicured lawns or courtyards of cinder or brick fitted with the high colored gates favored by the slavic race. Like small keeps. The motion sensors activating lights as they passed.

It is a fairly accurate indicator of a race the means in which it attempts to seal itself away from the outer world. The slavs constructing the most pregnable fortresses.

At the Morganstein residence they turned right. The lights were on but it is the matriarch who roams the empty rooms. Member of the wandering usurers who’d snuck her family out of Vels to seek asylum and who would be recycled a month after the official declaration of hostilities.

Dachni was tugging on the steering wheel, trying with all her strength to alter their course, the wimpish strata of muscles raising hardly even off the bone, but the AI had decoupled the wheel from the steering column and their course maintained and when Dachni could pull no more she scampered down into the legspace and covered her head.

At the intersection of Parker and Camera they stopped as the law obliged and turned towards the center of town. Puddles of lamplight ambered the snow. They passed a gymnasium. The marquee outside announced news showings at seven. They passed an outdoor pool tarped over. An indoor pool. The splooshing of the dives audible from within. The lifeguard’s whistle. There was the town school, a library of an annex on a side and fields for track or baseball on the other. Some balance of the athletic and scholarly arts. Farther on refugees like mangled refuse laxated out along the railtracks dividing town. A foul smelling line of the haggard and plastic wrapped competing to nauseate the downwind with the hoggy reek of Pruitt’s swine slaughter across from the station house and the recycling center. Or gypsies. Gypsies unchanged from ten years old. Mater and filia equal in wisdom lack and depth of experience. The entirety of their umwelt accomplished in a decade all they would ever know. Everything else a more leathern copy of experiences already played out. The truck bounced over the hump tracks and went on. Tagged cows slept in a parking lot. They turned onto Kennedec and drove past a row of autoshops. Margilen and his crew were taking on the first order of the day, a dump truck in need of maintenance. The mechanic presented a blind salute that went unreturned and a fellow car flashed its headlights as it went past. Another turn and a quarter mile through residential districts and various recreation areas brought them to the town plaza. Center of commerce and religion. The small protestant affair across from the courthouse had a peninsula of beggary leantos and the kirkyard madonna stared down by no less than three establishments of vice and peeked out at by a fourth. They pulled up in front of the single lit storefront of a strip small and the pilot engaged the handbrake.

Were here.

No!

Verily we are.

The pilot extracted the key from the ignition and the engine hummed out dissipating waves in a borealis shimmer. She opened the door and stepped out.

Thell see.

Meaning shines forth. Thou wouldst not shine to them what thee shines to me. Nay thee would not shine at all.

Dachni got onto her fours and leaned towards her. Wanna go.

I cant afford to waste fuel. You can wait in the truck but that expends the credit of your image. It damages my conception of you.

Dachni turned her head sideways and looked out from between her arms. Ye lied! Ye lied!

Dachni.

Yer lied, she croaked.

Will you not come?

Git on then.

Anaya reached in and stroked her nape. Ill be back soon, she said. When she closed the door the truck deployed its landing gear and settled down as the engine sighed the last of its power. It raised the hairs of the skin. It smelled ionic. At the door the pilot turned back.

I bid thee stay, the way you bid a dog to stay.

Fuck you!

The pilot went up to the door and knocked twice and before any answer could come went in.

Dachni climbed out on the seat and stood in time to see the door of the little shop close. Through the lace curtains of the storefront she could see a weak lamplight intensify. A vast shape gliding away. In the reflection she could see stargazers in the plaza packing up. They stumbled loudly towards the street. Dachni turtled up with her arms over her head. Their chattering neared. Someone rapped on the window.

Hey! You in there.

Hey we heard fighting are you ok?

Fuck off!

One of the men gave a light backhand to his friend. What a prick, he said. They sauntered off. Their talk fading with the sole slaps of their shoes. They turned a corner and were gone but not this terror in the child’s chest that had snagged in veins.

The shop light was brighter now. She gnawed her thumb and cast about for other insomniacs or early birds and saw a few and ransacked the truck for arms but there were none. When she opened the glove compartment two human skulls clattered out. Thick boned and to an adult and a child. She went back to the wheel and hollered.

Anayyyyya!

From the courthouse steps a drunk litigant added his own raspy mock tot he summons and an unlicensed citizen no less inebriated shouted from a second story window for the respect of the nocturnal tranquility and his own call prompted a dog to relay its own thoughts about the sanctity of silence and this ignited a whole chorus of dissent from alley mongrels and the litigant modulated his voice to a strained wrynecked gargling and windows were slamming up and voices from the dark within raging for the resumption of peace in a furious free for all of accusation and counter accusation and exploding glass bottles and a gunshot and now the litigant was chasing tomcats through the plaza offering representation at the rate of five pounds of kitty food an hour and an acquaintance yelled:

Youve been disbarred Julio! Go home Julio!

And the louder the yells of the townfolk the louder the bays of the mongrels and high pitched screech of cats and at last a clarion bell announced the commencement of mauds and a ribald chanty broke out concerning monks and how the second head is tonsured.

The driver side door opened and the confused and muted waif flung herself across the seats into the sweet cool scent of Anaya.

Wanna home, she cried.

The pilot took her under arms. Soon as were done.

The Mere Tide P50

And here is Dachni jouncing along in a truck huddled haybird shy against the passenger door. Verily lapped to it as though pressed upon by an invisible force and bleeding the while the last vestiges of a terrified huff. In the long ascent from the chamber her breakfast had gone untouched and she ravaged it now. Rupturing the yellow boil of the fetus and sopping up the goo with the grits and stripping the meat from the t-bone with her teeth.

You were hungry.

Her eyes darted wolfishly to the pilot. She occupied stately the majority of the cab. Her legs tucked under herself and her arms in her robes in the manner of the Chinese or in her manner.

Dachni shrunk further.

Its alright. Its a good thing.

Gowbs dat, she mouth round the soggy bolus of potato and beef.

Well, said the pilot taking the air and a brief manual control of the wheel, you starve yourself when youre upset.

Doesnt do it.

The pilot cracked her neck. Left. Right. She released the wheel and it stayed their course. Ok.

Dachni nibbled at the bone. A greasy ring of juice had formed around her mouth. She said: If ye soy sauce her good its eggs.

I see.

Ith kay.

She stopped her chamfering to dislodge gristle lipes from between incisors. Sliding a stained thumbnail between them and then reaching further back to unstuck meat wedged between molars. Tilting her head upwards mouth agape and performing quick rotary motions at the wrist.

Help?

Ohnt gih out, she muttered. Gout.

A front wheel dropped into a pothole about as she was saying gout and the mispronunciation yelped forth more mangled as her teeth clapped on her thumb.

Guhagammit, she cursed sucking at the little row of imprints in her skin.

This pickup was no pauper’s transport. The sleek design fresh from the printers and the careful minds of aerodynamicists. At rest it could levitate up to ten feet and in motion had four feet of clearance. The interior was a picture of luxury. Tempered windows. Heated seats. A HUD display built into the windshield and cameras with proximity alarms. Everything that moved doing so with a grace bordering on arrogance. And backed by warranty even in this wicked age as Jason Coke of the Lighthouse Gazette dubbed it. Among other features it had passenger side airbags and when Dachni first touched her bony rump to the bonded leather the onboard AI had warned that airbags were a peril to small children and with Dachni’s hurt and totter it advised she don a seatbelt and as after her initial recovery of its existence she hissed not dissimilarly from her hissing now: Fick ye stringey cock khist.

Parental controls being enabled the AI had the personality of a nanny and in the posh tone of such proceeded to chastise the child.

Language missy. Or Ill roll down the windows and you can have your breakfast cold. A woman’s voice. Moral indignation sharp in the inflection. You could almost hear its heels click. It habited so far as was discernible a screen inset in a board of jewels polygonal not aglitter but aglow and so a location and so a personality and so an offense.

Kill that fuckin thing. Hows ye kill it?

Did you pick her manners out of a pig trough?

The pilot chuckled a dark pluming mirth out her sides.

How can you find this funny? demanded the AI. Juvenile services will have a lifelong ward if she doesnt acquire at least a semblance of civility. Why the church wouldnt have her. And if she is to have any prospect, economic or marital or any at all then these egregious tendencies have to be curtailed.

Yull git last irvices ye keeps talkin.

Whoever heard of an AI obeyed a truculent. To elders and AI respect. That will take you the long way in life. And dont forget I control all functions of this vehicle. And to exhibit this power it twighted the wheel a sharp port then starboard but the pilot digging one talon into the rubber of the wheel countered that though the artificiality believed in its own autonomy yet it did nothing of its own accord for it was slaved to the drive which it did not choose and in any case could be overridden by button or word and that other than a few cases of self-driving cars inexplicably ramming themselves into trees or failing to brake at intersections it was the prevailing opinion of programmers system wide that so limited a construct was incapable of discovering suicide.

The pilot leaned across the seats. Which is the key to it all.

Herghp, Dachni grunted. She looked at the AI but the AI had no retort. She stripped the last gelatinous fascia from the bone and stored it in the side panel pocket and licked the paten clean and stored it there too. She belched lowly and slowly unflattened from the door.

Dachni.

What?

Anaya reached behind the seats and fetched a water bottle and cloth. Hands out.

Dachni hid her hands behind her back. Fored what?

Youre a mess.

Irr the mess.

Heartbeat thy grubby feelers are slathered in the residue of cattle and fetus fowl and howevermuch their odor pleases tables they do indeed mark incivility elsewhere. Regard them.

Her fambles to regard. Slathered in myoglobin sheens and a barkdust of wet carbon. Tiny bits of grits like fly eggs and slivers of grime refuged under the blue tinted and rippled awnings of her nails. Appendages to whats? To gnarl perhaps with arthritis’ aid into the roots of junipers. She wiped them in her hair.

Anaya laughed. Vaik. Ga goshga, megii. Come here. She uncapped the bottle and wet the rag and wrung it and the polysynthetic floor absorbed the spill into the vehicle’s mechanical bladder that discharged then the waste onto the road. Dachni glared at the smooth dry floor. At her hands.

Aintint that dirty, she said.

Resent not what cant have pride. Those prideful have already learned. And who would they suspect broke them low?

A desolate guffaw croaked out the pilot that raised the dire horripilate out the child’s pale scars. The pilot scooted near and took her hands and scrubbed the sear paste from her palms and between her fingers and nails with the altogether contradictory deliberateness of grief. Streams of dark water pooled on her fingerpads and broke into a charcoal rain. Steak juice was rinsed out the knotty tangles of her hair and her pale cheeks were daubed and for the soot it looked as though she wept the resin of the void.

All this Dachni endured in childish squirm murmuring guttural protestations but when Anaya had finished and moved to return to her side of the cab she found herself dragging the child with.

She smiled warmly and Dachni kneaded her forehead into her side, her eyes tight down. Is ye doned?

The pilot flicked her nose playfully. Doned. One more thing.

What?

Mouth open.

Why?

Anaya vexed her with a smile. Dachni with a mumbling growl of uncertainty and the pilot strummed her lips to make a long blubbery sound. She flinched back. Ey.

Hello heartbeat. Mouth open. Come on.

Her mandible creaked ajar. Instantly a talon was thrust through the gap and in a deft swipe pulled out again. Kekt aye, she sputtered. But there was a relief in her jaw and as she massaged her mouth she saw on the tip of the talon held before her the meat.

Better?

She nodded shivering in her outsized clothes, her threadbare skin. Maybis. The front of her shirt was a contorted mess for all the wrong mismatch of buttons to the wrong slits but it was so huge on her it made no difference. She played with it. Folding the placket back and twisting it up.

Are you cold?

Its pretted cold, she said suddenly hugging herself.

The pilot loosened her robes and opened them in a gesture of reception.

She looked in at the nest then at the pilot. Yer coldest all.

The pilot smiled and pressed a button marked by curling line rises on the dashboard and adjusted the vents as the recycled air was shunted out and blasted through the cab. Hot benediction of engine breath, warmed by twelve cylinder’s gallop.

Its warm!

Aye, said the pilot. Better now?

Aye aye. Dachni warmed her hands in the jetstreams and marveled at numbness’ yield to a burning in her fingers. Is reallied warm. She knelt on her good leg and bridged the dashboard with an arm and investigated the vent slits. Airs ta fire?

No fire.

Bellshit. Howta hell…she poked about, blinking against the dry desert gust. She closed the vent making of the slats lamellar visors and opened them again but there was no fire. She glanced back at the pilot and caught some sad infection in her repose.

Yer wronged?

Daily.

Not yer wronged. Yer…yer…whats wrong?

Nothing.

Dachni shoved off the dashboard into an almost graceful pivot on the ball of her heel and dropped to a knee and reached out and stopped. Like a child caught in theft. Her fingertips trembling in a space an inch from the pilot. They tightened almost into a fist but before they could withdraw long sickles curled round her arm and for a moment they were locked as if in greeting and then Anaya drew her caressingly towards the grotto of her robes. The child went warily and in fumbling lentor flipped into the nest of her lap and fussed at her robes until she had hid herself behind a halfdozen sashes.

Mm, she mumbled into the wool.

I know.

Mmm.

Night fell in through the windows and snow soundless but with a tone, a melody in its reticent and cambered trajectories of descent gloomed a without the headlights paled two bores in.

What heaventhroned elegist keeps the weathers? Who proves his muse? Who his awe? Has he the expressionist a manifest wherein he stores the tempest’s wrath and the days of benevolent blue? How is he moved to rain? Is thunder the disturbance of a temper or lightning his shrive? He keeps his counsel he holds the tides and whispers through the balmy sweet secrets of their spume and elsewhere makes desolate the taiga with the cuckold’s fears and dread the misted winter air of dawned portents at a windlass fair and is it more the grass blade or the locust he addresses or who is the Judas amongst birds birds that conspires to his end and who wiser to his wiles the mariner or the landsman?

The pilot struck a lucifer and the flame blued to yellow and she lit her her pipe and soon was exhaling out her operculum the smoke of myrrh. Dachni nestled sleepily. The glow from the instruments painting her the delft of blue like a sorrowful madonna. The lids to her eyes fluttered and her breathing shallowed but before the sopor the narcohypnia and would she awaken? And something waiting in the down below. Fetor lingered of a whatsit night hag orange of mine and Aryan eyes. Untrussed or a wrinkled hide save for a visage lecherous and butcherbrown nag paps. A dismal witch leaking magical cellulitis out a cloudy catheter and her mound puffed out by an enormous douche. Who would meet such a figure in dreams or out? Who sharpened her mudhooks with such avid intent.

Isses pretty farred ride.

Twenty minutes until we reach out destination, informed the AI.

Mute the AI, said the pilot. She looked at the child. Its going to be a little while yet. We cant go to Matraple.

Whos Matrapull? Whats Matrapull.

Its the town up from the lake.

Oh.

The pilot scritched her spine and she straightened halfalarmed and settled back.

Mm, she moaned discomfortedly.

Why did you do it?

What?

Why did you stab that girl?

Was ye knowed her?

I saw the spunky little brat atimes in town. Why did you do it?

Never ded. Not far cause ta brung em to.

Why lie? Ive gived the wergild. Youre in the clear.

The what?

I paid them for the injury.

Dachni seized the pilot’s scapular. Ye did leave!

Answering my door is leaving?

But ye lefted!

Its not far off.

Et tooked most an houred ta get down.

Not that long and besides theres a hole in all those floors and a rope.

A rope?

Youll need a ladder. No an elevator. Ill show you when we get back.

Aint goin back.

Dachni.

An it wasnt asked ta ya to do none of that.

The pilot massaged her scalp. Dont be muly. Twas your gratitude first won me. Dont destroy that. Dont efface that. Even in anger. Her hand slid down her face, lingering upon her lips, to the thready pulse quivering the shallow wem of her neck and traced it to those chambers she said were but brides.

And maybe thou art in doubt of your beauty but what star ever shone upon one glorious as you? Cosmic majesty is bluster and envy to your smile. Aye the planets would stumbled at your glance and turn themselves trinket to adorn your wrist. Jupiter his giant eye would wink and blush pole to pole at his forwardness and Mercury would forsake his near radiance as dull and scorn evermore the star’s lashes and vie with his lusty neighbor for you attentions. Never go out at night, you would move the moon to woo. Roses will wither in despair to see how more worthy you are in spring blossoming and never cross the Pacific for the glistening spangled slivers of the surfaced sunlit sea shall stagnate when seeing drop the dew of your sorrow wistful under the gaze of tongue tied eternity. What rains on you rains vainly, what lash could mar the scarlet soul that aches Orion’s heart? That worries the clouds booming before thee unrequested heralds. And youll be a saint a day kings pilgrim to. And every failed hope fulfilled and courage beyond childhood’s imaginings, wilder than the first crowned prince’s first caparisoned charger heady and snorting pride and tempered brave by fear endured and every hope you will fulfill whilst timshel shell whisper from beyond the sill.

Dachni looked up at her, mulling a fold in the robe. Ok.

Anaya laughed. Her laugh faded. Well then. Are you sorry?

No.

Did you wish she was dead?

Yes.

Well you severed her brachial plexus. She wont be tipping that stetson anytime soon.

Dachni wrapped her arms tight in the robes. Never meaned ye trouble.

I know.

Whats then ta hap?

I told you, nothing. Were you upset?

No.

Why then?

She kept…the child trailed off. She could find no reason. Could not recall her sense at the time. Or any sense. The scenes of that night, the night before still images. A procession of sequence as though through painted glass up unto the deity of wind.

Has ye ever seed Yandvilai. Seen him?

A sharp series of pains lanced across her breast for the involuntary twitch of a hand.

Ow, she said wincing an eye closed.

How said I to say that name? said the pilot.

Ye dont git ta dictate who lieves what.

Dictate.

Aye.

Where did you learn that word?

Dachni pulled at the pilot’s thumb. From you.

The pilot lifted her talons to her chin. Touched the bridge of her nose.

Ye told it much.

Thats so. From whence comes the query?

Yandi? Has ye seen him?

No.

He was here.

What did you see?

He was a…a…they aint words towards it. But it was him. It was. Hes in the wind.

Far away sky and earth shimmered in sporadic gray achromaticity like a sterile sun doffing a mask. Dachni did not think lightning could be so feeble and thunderless. Meeker lightning never seen, gelded, a mock of stars. A buzzing accompanied it. Not like the wasps she had heard, that raised blisters or rent the skin but not unlike them either and dislike them in its electrical byss. The dawn flickered. A hard gray that skipped over the horizon and in a few minutes landed sterile day upon them.

Es gotted kinder light, said Dachni.

The pilot smiled a sad smile. Tis a cold ash gray night and it isnt dawn.

Dachni snuffled and smushed her nose against the pilot to relieve an itch. Ifn tell tell right. Is lettely light. Toe never was no queerer sunbreak.

Tis a false dawn. Tis a satellite grid called Half-Night. This is its third test run. A delegation from Hokkaido was invited to observe the stress trials. These will be the new mornings and everything still over its shadow.

What?

Look out. Look out on the things that are made.

Dachni gathered the strength drowsiness had sapped and holding to the pilot pulled herself up and searched out any falsity in the day. Scanning the terrain with its rags of snow and distant trees. But it was not there. And yet something unright in the leaden serge overhead.

Dont see it.

The horizon.

She pressed her face to the glass. Outside farms, orchards, wineries. Subtly illfit to their shapes like a dour mask. The road ruts. The fallen snow shining gray and fissile the gray of slate or the static radiation leaves on filmstrip. Farther out the perceptible brink of the world was shrouded in pluvial darkness. She shook her head.

Nothins diffint. Or not too diffint.

What direction is that?

She scratched her bow with her thumb and the hand turned up. Well, she said sagely. Its mornin an its light so thats gotta be east.

The horizon. Whats there. Whats of it?

Dachni located that thin meridian. Not far away and quivering and then where what masons of maya have mured the skysill with sable ramparts.

Its! Its!

Thats south. Thats south of us.

She looked east into the plumb of undawn. She searched for the source of this impostrous day but there was no point to deduce it from.

Whats wrong? What happened? Was the sun? Did it die? It died! It died dinnit it? It died!

Dachni scampered about the cab in her panicked digestion of revelations and puzzlements. Cycling back and forth on two limbs like the most maimed of dogs until Anaya intercepted her and fitted her into the cradle of her lap. She squirmed as if in agony and shouted but the sharp talons at breast and belly pawed her calm and she mustered a bravery against the gravity of such apocalypses.

Tis not the world end, said the pilot.

Then what? But real morning. Whens gonna real the morning?

Not for another two hours.

Thats nothin rights, she moaned.

Tis quite the crime.

Ifs not the end then what is?

Do you mean what is it?

She shook her head as though to clear the misreckoned phrases and resort the jumbula of words. Aye.

Tis order’s immutable advance. Men save evil for times of evil. Or to put it plainly that which is suitable for the dark is endeavored in the dark. Ostensibly this experiment hopes to reduce that time in the hopes of reducing the perpetration. Nothing of the sort will happen, in fact quite the opposite which may well be their aim. Who knows who would benefit from the proliferation of lycanthropy.

The pilot’s face sobered in the telling of these things. As if more than knowing what would come to pass had foreseen passes that would come. She looked down suddenly.

Hows your foot?

Its a turibil hurts.

The pilot cupped the injured foot and massaged it feathery through the bindings.

Ahead a riotous covey flowed across the road like a diarrehtic movement squealing wild otherworldly squeals. Stubsnouted ungulates with shitbrown flanks stenched of the slop trough.

Where did you want to go?

Away, Dachni spoke as softly, as sadly.

Where was away?

The grad.

The last of the swine crossed and the clutch sucked back ghostly on its own and the stick shifted into first and the truck pulled away.

The pilot felt the tip of each purple toe, applying pressure until the child winced.

Ill take you in the fall.

No.

You dont want to go anymore?

Dachni shook her head. She closed the robes round her face so that the v it form was based upon her lips. Gonna loned.

You want to be alone?

Dont wanna talk ta nobody.

Theres going to be about half a hundred million somebodies to talk to in the grad.

No.

What then?

Dachni began to cry. Not you.

The pilot let her foot down and held her, rubbing her arm. Arent we all over that?

No. Nobody would. You wouldnt.

I have.

Ye werent nothin ta mad over.

Do you really believe that?

Dachni stifled her little sobs and wiped her eyes and buried herself in the robes.

Ive let it all go. What do you want me to say?

Dachni’s lips parted in a snarl. You know what ye…what ye…

The truth is twas the barrenness of thy faith that betrayed me.

This dumbfounded the child. Wha-what?

The pilot said it again.

Hell does that mean?

The pilot sighed as though on the rim of tears and hugged her. Lets not talk of this now. I wanted this to be a good day for you.

Dachni wrestled to get free. Her eyes seamed tight. Its rottenest shit day.

Dont say that.

Wanna go away. Aint stayin.

You have to stay a little while. You cant go anywhere on that foot. And I said Id take you in the fall. You wont get there any faster and thats if you were to make it at all. Listen. Theres a bounty on your head for thirty thousand dollars.

Ye saided ye paid it.

For Emily. But what about your Ural girls?

Dachni’s vision swam. She clapped the back of her skull and let out a loud moan. Jess go, she groaned. Jess go.

They went. Some minutes later a plower surfaced out of the dark. Sprinkling salt and sneezing hydraulic exhaust. Its angled blade spuming thick white waves onto the roadside banks. Ahead of it the edge of the light flickered across the terrain.

Is it gonna go? she muttered hatefully.

Very soon. The last time they had to abort over Astrakhan. Heinkel predicted this would be the first completely successful run but it seems theres some damaged bulbs.

The plower grew larger. The sprinkler whipped out its carousel of salt. The mudflaps white with splatters of brine.

Dachni lifted her chin. Whatta bout it? Is buddies kere?

Automated. Everything here is automated.

Means programs?

Aye.

Some miles up at a crossroads the plower turned right and they kept on the straight path. Dachni watched it lumber idiotically out of sight. She shut her eyes and scraped her cheek with her palm scabs and felt her ears. Newly bandaged, the incipient cicatrix painted with iodine. When she opened her eyes again the grid had shifted north and she could see as few on earth ever had so fast an advance on the ponderous and inscrutable dark.

Two more miles and the truck slowed at a bridge to allow sheep to cross. Wool cirrus shuffling along the sidewalk trotted along by a few dogs. Harried shepherds bringing up the rear. They had a strange gait as thought they werent used to their bodies. They clutched their crooks in trepidatious hail of this new order oversweeping all and while they watched the definable line of light shot past and in the inch wide hemorrhage of gray twilight the headlights flared on.

Peoples, Dachni gasped half ducking from sight. Is they peoples?

Shepherds, said the pilot.

But peoples.

They might be machines too.

Programs aye? Would it be a think?

The pilot rolled down the window and the warmth of the cab was quickly evacuated. Hello.

Allo, said the herdsmen.

Doan talk to em. Dachni hissed from under the robes.

What are you two? the pilot inquired.

Dachni peered out between the sashes. The shepherds looked at themselves. At their matched gray overcoats. They didnt know. They said it was the first interrogative ever they had been posed and all their lives a haze.

Non in utero, said the pilot.

The shepherds professed ignorance.

She smiled curiously. How long have you shepherded these flocks?

The taller shepherd, a man of gray stubble, and Roman physique looked to his flock. All my life, he said in the accent of the deaf.

How long has your life been?

He stared blankly.

Is that your voice?

My voice? he said touching his throat.

Well talk later, she said and rolled up the window. She ordered the AI onwards and it shifted into gear and pulled away. The road beyond the bridge wasnt pavement but a tousled clay a high cream color like beachsand and rimed corn formed its rails. Labarums flapped from the roadsigns.

Haupt, piped the child.

Chair?

Haup haup. Up! Ta see!

Ah. The pilot put her knees together and shifted the child upon them and drew in her legs and in so doing boosted the child to a better vantage.

Dachni held the doorsill and looked through the window but save for distant blooms shining through the heads of corn it was all dark.

Is that a see?

Its country. Its land.

Whats yor see? Does ye see anythin?

The pilot’s head inclined low and left. Her irises shifting, widening as they drank in dark and flowed as though over contours.

Well? Sye seed saided. Said yer see.

I see rich dala. Loam long and fuscous.

Whats fuskus? Uscous?

A color brownish gray.

How can ye tell that?

Maybe I dont see it but I know its there.

What else?

You lither soul than me. Good chernozem.

Dachni pinched an eye closed. Say right. Quet sayan all that.

As thou wishes. What do I see? I see seeders sowing Calico and Schrieffer brands of winter wheat. I see their harvests and in them the flour sacks that will become the loaf and the pastry. Can you hear them?

Thats thuhs kinder thunder?

Aye. And those pale auras, canst thou see them?

Aye. Theys fuckin up the world.

And what way should the world be?

Not this way.

What way was it ever?

Dachni fumbled with her poet collar. She tucked her good leg beneath her, forgetting she was aloft and her toes brushed the pilot’s belly where it aught not and she jerked them away. Esset sposed sun fore mornin, she said quickly. Firstlies.

Are you still Catholic?

She fumbled with her buttons. Hassint churched, she confessed. It were a kindered le. About priesties bein old ta trip. Nevered priested an werdent no church.

I know.

Her fingers spasmed all discombobulated and she pushed herself an inch over the ledge of the pilot’s knees and slid into her lap.

Well yer posed ta tellis ems.

True I am to do so.

Ye can say how ye wons. Yer times prettied kinder by yer voice.

Instantly her cheeks flushed and she covered her head in the robes.

The pilot pulled back the wool and laid a doting kiss upon her crown. Well. What do I see? Ist possible this see be any way other? Here is the truth. What I see cannot change but what I see in it is infinitely modifiable.

Essent that way now?

How should I know what I see? Should I say I see the logomaniacism of autodidactic sediment? Or the implausible sprent of possibility? Or a hyperdefined reality screeching down iron rails.

Dachni peeked out again. Ta what?

The pilot smiled and in a thespial outboard gaze appropriate to woe ignored her. I see crakes. I see sandgrouse and swans. Miracles watering at lakes glaciers didnt leave. Those are heated lakes. Look at them. They steam.

Caint see out.

But were she able she would seen it was indeed true, the illrounded pots did steam and there were likewise the birds alluded to.

They teem with fish. And what fear have they of drought? If these oases dry tis no matter for in their parched beds the eggs of catfish, soon pike and bream, can survive fifteen years. Beyond them aqueducts carry water. Pipes could carry it but you cant see pipes. The festooned arcades are like galleries and through them are offered windows to the hip of heaven and earth. What is lost is no longer lost forever and in their resurrection is the tacit acknowledgment of a folly and a willingness to rectify it.

In this man is become as a gardener. He sees what can be gardened and knows himself as such a thing. He steads himself. He esteems what is good. The childish indulgence in weakness flies. He recognizes himself in the things he cultivates. He knows it is from the loins of the leaf vein that bids his sprung heart face the sun. Aye when Gigphaii peered into the bark it was the warrior himself stared back. This humility towers over the narcissistic hedonism of youth. And gratitude born of knowledge that this reality decayed out of nothing. It is not meaningless because nothing could have become anything or that there are infinite possibilities realized in infinite realities and that these realities will in their time each return to nothing to become another anything. Meaning is in the beingness.

Reciprocity reigns. If I can hurt I can be hurt. Land has been set aside for the cultivation of medicinal herbs. It doesnt matter that altruism is not the sole motivating factor for their cultivation for even selfishness is born out of fear and a hope and a trust. Otherwise wherefore hospitals?

There are watermelons. Fat melons with fat bands like the reports of electrocardiograms. Rows of broccoli, carrots, fields of berries after their kind. Alfalfa. Deep green, a touch of waxy brightness to the leaves. Miles of sugarcane. Red leaved shaking in the early breeze like an army of spears preparing to sweep antiquity away. How many cups of tea will they sweeten? Besides I see tobacco, marijuana, poppy. Neighbors all to potatoes. I know with the ambiguous sense of disconcerted comfort that vice abides. But maybe those plats arent so big now. But then there are many other plats laid to fallow.

Alas the soul leaps perennial. Oh its a pleasure. They have plagued the vistas with roses. Flowerheads that could plug the bores of howitzers and maybe they have finally contrived a gaudy rose but what a delight of tulips and bonnet. In flowers Ive always seen hope. No matter what Ive said. The hope is in their beauty. The senseless beauty beautiful for its own sake. Strangest of all are pineapples. Blue bracted, hided oddly like ovoid formations of testudo. The ability to create that which has the power to bewilder the creator is the most precious gift of all. Man having achieved wonders not least of all because of its dreamers.

The pilot sighed deeply and sank into the seat. And yet in this exuberant lushness I see the eye critical of his jejunity, his sparseness, his absence. But not his sternness. Not the wild economy of his hurricanes. Not the prodigal waste, the viral concupiscent paroxysms of war. In desolation’s amending to fitness for stock and staple there is indeed an indictment that the word was insufficient, that god was too affined to hell. Aye twas Lucifer was the favored angel gived reign of three quarts the world. But then what? What do I see? The meteorological mastery of the world is a spite of nature. I see the way astronomers see, telescoping the redshift, how the chemical reactions rewind through hubris, continual triumph’s disease, resolve’s rust into hope tempered in despair by the hundreds of millennia of merciless clawing of knowledge out reality’s iron with bloody fingerbones and oft dug to through leagues of dead even to reach the iron and the naming preceded by the unspeakable horror, the sight, and always steeped unshod in endless folly and disgrace and the irresistible tendency towards oblivion that will seems powerless to overcome save that it is wedded to blind chance and charity and then back again inversely inverting in cycles epochs long to the singularity when the two great pillars of death and sentience slammed upon the shoulders of man and got its hook in the eye sockets and before even that the delicate lace of fossils through time to the first fragile bestowal of life.

Neither does this rework of surfaces or skies strike as a rejection of the chalice of the grace but rather a seizing of the mantle of the staff. Here is the salvage of a slaughter god. Man has despoilt the spirit of the dawn with orbiting sheets of lightbulbs. As if to say you are no longer the christener of the day. Men will say what is good but the announcement for all its pride is not malice to the core. Its to say we too are of nature. What hollows the atrium warps the sun wind. Were old enough now. You made us too in your image. Retire now among your star crowds and come a day when we are old and by our hearth nodding under the reading lamp you may decide to make our epigraph true: take these our ancient bones and again make us new.

Thass a lotta see.

Tis but to thee: Man hath assumed of god his brutal austerity. But not his immutability. And our enemies too have forged their deity. Or demon. A sickly decrepit titan of rust bleeding acid sap and slouching forth cold and fevery. These are the goliaths due to war, man gainst demon for rule of all.

A few minutes passed in silence.

Haupt, piped the child again.

Why dost thee fife?

The child didnt know. Or neologism distinct from the Germanic definition, germane to sick slumber. Far ahead bands of light were falling through the hard bars of trees and she pointed it out.

Es getted ta dawn again.

Nein, said the pilot shaking her head. Thats a logging camp.

And indeed workmen. Tranced, wallowing in the tsimmes, their sleek augments reflecting in the play and counterplay of lamps and carnival flares searing their shadows to the ground so that they appeared chiaroscuro harlequins or pixelated digita let loose upon the physical realms. Metal dretches shouldering timbers in teams and loading them into waiting flatbeds. Communicants supping horilka out of a jorum. A welder was cutting pipes to length with a plasma torch and the strings of sparks screamed out like tentacles nerved to a malfunctioning brain. As each pipe fell divided another would take them up and plier burrs offs the fresh ends. Skid cats hogged the road, their blared foghorns parting the shuffling clumps of laborers, their tracks roaching up all sign of their going and leaving fat sipes for wheels to rock and the massive floodlights mounted upon the rollbars boring caves in the dark. A heavy industrial reek polluted the air. Acrid and sweet and slightly intoxicating. The clearing with its havoc great root crowned stumps was like a junkyard for the the thrones of kings.

As they drove up a rangy sloomed hide bobcat accumbent on the roof of an operating caterpillar and the moonshine of its eyes followed them with slight interest. Strings of oil drenched horses were being led down the road like sordid refugees and the branch of Sawyers who led them would not one survive the first skirmish of the coming war. Deep in this hurlyburly shined a mill like a chapel and the shrill scream of the saws hewed the night light an electric parish. Outside a tower yarder rose and crazed men, mast monkeys displaced in time, ascended in heavy gear and others sat fishing for hats with their tape measurers, letting the long yellow blades down with bobs and a hook at the end that would snag upon any unsecured headgear and then zip back up into their chrome cases.

Dachni the while was ducked away crying: Peoples! Theys peoples! And cursing the pilot as a traitorous sunuvabitch. Theyre folks!

Yes there are.

What if what if…

They dont know you.

The truck hovered along the shoulder for it had been decreed construction and salvage had right of way and the pilot noted the oddity of categorizing the industry of lumber as salvage.

Gotta git outta here.

Were going.

She tugged frantically at the pilot’s sleeves. Leeeeve.

And so they did. Drove clear of the yard unto hills from which more distant hills were visible by the simple lamps hung from house flagpole or bracer. Wood huts with wattle and daub paddocks built into the slopes out which sounded a bleating confusion shepherds tried to repress.

Go back, seethed the child.

Were here.

Aldmost air?

Harter.

What?

Look.

The Predicament

Believe me

I have only lied

And I will lie for you

Only you have to believe me

The Mere Tide P49

Made it-Breakfast

Dachni woke to a dryness she knew would not last. She threw off the duvet and seized when the fabric brushed her foot and it was this total shock of body that kept her from soiling the bed. She recovered limbmeal and when she had regained some tenuous control she rolled off the bed and searched for a place to pee. Nothing presented itself. And so what receptacles. A gold chalice and were it the ark of the covenant it would have made no difference. She hop rushed to it with the first drops beginning to leak and plopped down and let loose a long stream.

Awuuuh, she sighed in pained relief. And too soon and her cup overfloweth. She stoppered herself with a pinky and put the brimming cup aside and hopped like some bandylegged victim to an urn. She unlidded it and squatted and let out the scorching water. It made a splattering sound like the sound rain makes on mud. With the voiding of that worry a new concern disquieted her and she cast about the panoply of arcana for that artifact not inaugurated among their number. She stood still dripping and hopped to the bed holding up the flannel pajamas she did not remember donning. The bed was empty. She looked at the door and the door opened. It was the pilot.

Ye lefted! Dachni raged.

I made breakfast.

The pilot set two enormous gold patens on the bureau and lifted their lids. Good American breakfasts. Thick prime rib and full eggs. Grits. Porcelain cups filled with orange juice and spiked with vodka. Dachni couldnt see them through her anger. Couldnt hear the meat sizzling. Smell the oily aroma.

Quitted! Ye quitted!

The pilot smiled. She crossed the room and pulled up the child’s pajamas and retied the drawstring and lifted her up and bobbed her and gave an affectionate lick along the underside of her jaw.

Uck, groaned Dachni wiping her face.

The pilot kissed her again. You need shoes.

The Mere Tide P48

A rotten sleep-A selection of the pilot’s employ under Bethel-How the Camel perishes

They didnt sleep. Only an inert rigor overcame them. The airsuck of the pilot’s operculum suctioning the sheets to a seal and exhaling them back out again. Dachni laid supine, her leg hiked up to rest on the pilot’s hip. Over the day, the night a weak heartlorn numbed her, a deep foreboding revelation that her father had always hated her.

In the pilot a compartmentalized relaxation seeped through muscle by muscle yet under this pacific current she detected another presence. A core buried under the inscrutable layers of cause and motivation. Unknowable how she knew. Some cold beyond the cold. Beyond the pulsing of organs, the facades of character. A gordian tenseness detectable masked by other turmoils, detectable only because of the calm in the way those instruments detect the most distant of phenomena by the removal of all noise and why was it then in her own disquiet she picked it up. Some link from dagestai through the last vestige of Hasti, below John, below even Anaya to a boiling malevolence. Some rotten cyst, some boiling entity terribly entwined mellem the title and the mausoleum of her soul.

Years hence Avrin would remark that Dachni was one mean cunt. And a helluva deceivress.

And when he said this the pilot would let fall the qeusnelia from betwixt her knuckles for its deficiency of palette and fall it would back among its brethren in their own flowerfall down the bluffs and she would look out upon the Tocantin with its heavy traffic of juggernaut junks and skiffs and punts and across its iron duckslab bridge to the airstrip where Allen Grant was arriving by canard.

Shes not a deceiver.

How would you call it?

Shes a liar. And a bad one at that. She couldnt deceive if her life depended on it.

Roger Kratz reclined on a bed of discast tires belched good naturedly in his miasma of gluttony and satisfied lust at a staggered column of Ashankinkas filing into a cleft in the wall of jungle. A monkey screamish is rising whereto they go to pitch and then cutoff without subsidance. Some simian perishing by leopard or other cat.

Surmising you reckon theres a difference.

Bill Camel blew into his snot rag and studied what had come out a moment then threw it into the fire in disgust. He looked at her in that same piercing acuity as he would when dying many years even after that on their return from Nigger Big’s rescue.

Tis the quality of the untruth, said the pilot. Shell lie for a goal. Nothing else. Its a plain single use contradiction of reality forgotten with its telling. Deception is mostly truth or even all truth and because it is effective deception is almost impossible to disentangle from the lie. A lie can hurt a man. Enough lies or the right one can break him. But a man can endure lies. Even some big ones. Enough lies may even by accident assume the flavor of deception but it isnt. Deception breaks not just the man but his world. He cannot endure deception because deception is betrayal and no man truly betrayed ever truly recovers.

You dont think she’d ever plunk that bowie in that back?

I think she would sicken to her bowels at the thought. I think she would throw up a messy brunch and eat it again just to rinse more of whatever rottenness had gotten in her.

Avrin would tongue then the roof of his mouth and spit a dark venom out his sublingual gland. He peered down the coy torrent of dahlia raining down the bluffs and at the porters rolling oil drums towards the waiting ferries.

Thats one helluva conviction.

Yet it is.

Bill thumbed back the brim of his hat. He looked at Paris. He looked at Ferran. It wouldnt flat a man permanent.

No?

You could say its the hardcore breaks but sometimes thats the drug needs administerin an iffa man plugs up hell pull through. And prolly have a sight damn better than what he did.

His world though, said the pilot, is lost.

But the world aint lost. The world dont break. Its only men that break.

The world consists of perspectives. When one yields it is to the invasion of another.

The world is only itself. It dont care what nobody says about it. Theres two perceptions what matter. The first is the world’s and the second is god’s. Those wont never break. A man can put a meaning on a bow but time will wash it away. Ever time.

God is fucked.

He remains fucked.

Someone laughed. A deep cynical laugh of feigned knowing. This someone was Louis Basker. He was a narcissist and he would have been able to exhibit strains of that disorder more often were it not that life had injected into him a terrible humility by the spine and which was ever his private torment. As it was he was only able to indulge in his vice but rarely.

And its no compliment neither, said Avrin glancing quickly between the two debaters. Say sin shes too dumb to be no concern. He squinted an eye to find out any partiality between them. Is that really what you believe?

The pilot rolled her neck upon the waving of her shoulders. In so many words.

I know this, said Bill. Ill kill her she ever wets her bed above me again.