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  The image kept returning, of the girl Skath and her brother Skower, and their reactions to the sword.

  Gaunt’s intuition had landed her in trouble as often as out of it, but trouble was already here. She slept, her mission clear. At dawn she sought out Skath.

  Gaunt shadowed the girl from her home, and caught her atop the western gate, tending another box of weeds. Although there was no city wall as such, the westward road led through this free-standing maw that snarled with metallic fangs, speared the sky with glass horns, unfurled spiky stone wings; and as the sun rose behind the city, the gate cast spiky shadows piercing the cracked and rocky margin of the desert called the Sandboil. The girl found it easy to crouch among the horns—there were dozens, sprouting like stunted glittering trees—and Gaunt saw the guards below would have great difficulty spotting Skath, let alone catching her.

  As Skath knelt beside her stinkblossoms and spikeblooms, her snarlflowers and swamppetals, Gaunt said gently, “I like flowers too.”

  Gaunt supposed she might have said something more fugitive-like. Make a sound and you’ll be sorry, say. But, in fact, she was the sorry one.

  “Lepton,” Skath hissed, backing up against a curving, serrated glass cone. “Don’t use the sword,” the girl whispered in Amberhornish.

  “I won’t.” Gaunt spread her hands. “They took it when they took Osteon. I have no weapons except words.” As the girl relaxed slightly, the poet added, “Though I suspect it’s not ordinary cuts you fear.”

  “The sword is evil,” Skath blurted.

  “Is that why you set your Comprehenders on us?”

  Skath looked at her feet. “It hurt me. It looks like a beautiful flower, but it’s a nasty, angry thing.” She glared at her box of blooming weeds, as if to say those were what flowers should be.

  “I’d have to agree,” Gaunt said. She sat, laying hands upon bent knees. She studied the deep blue stinkblossoms for a time, wrinkling her nose. “I like your secret gardens. I spotted several yesterday, hiding from the Comprehenders. I used to keep gardens too, in a way. When I lived in Palmary, I knew a dozen alleys where flowers grew. They were tough little things, like yours. I liked to bring them water. Sometimes I gave them more sun.”

  Skath slowly sat, cocking her head skeptically. “How?”

  Gaunt smiled. “I scrounged for broken mirrors. Then I positioned the pieces in different spots in the alleys, high and low. It didn’t work that well.”

  “I guess it wouldn’t.” Skath frowned. “Why didn’t you just move the flowers?”

  “They grew up through cracks and it wouldn’t have been safe to uproot them.”

  “Mine will die if I don’t move them sometimes. People will find them and dump them out. My people, anyway—I have some friends by the harbor who let me use their roofs. But Maratracians, they like flowers with lots of thorns. They’ve been breeding for thorns for a long time. They hate weeds.”

  “Each flower has its own rules.” After a moment, Gaunt added,

  “There are flowers in gardens

  Tended by wardens

  Kissed by water-cans

  Surrounded by cousins.

  They are not my kind

  They of tended ground

  Of nurtured bud

  In a blooming land.

  Mine are of the fissure

  In a cobbled corner

  Starved of sun and water

  In an alley with no owner.

  They are hardly grown

  When the wind has blown

  That cuts them down unknown.

  They are my own.”

  Skath regarded her garden a long time. Then: “Why did you bring the sword? It’s a bad thing. I’m sorry I gave you away, I’m sorry they took Osteon. But the sword is evil, Lepton.”

  “Even poets and thieves do things they regret. Tell me why the sword is evil.”

  “It spoke to me. . . like it knew me. Had always known me. I heard it from far away, you know, weeks ago. It thinks I’m it’s chosen user, but it hates me too. It wants to change me. It thinks I’m stupid and useless. Just like my family does.”

  “What does it want to do, once it’s changed you?”

  Skath shuddered. “Kill everyone in Maratrace who believes in the Comprehenders’ way. Teach everyone who repents how to wash more often, dress nice, eat healthy food, build pretty houses. Sing beautiful songs. Pull up all the weeds.”

  “Is this what the Pluribus wanted. . . ?” Gaunt began.

  “Who is the Pluribus?”

  “The one. . . the ones. . . who sent us here. I swear to you, my friend and I know very little. We were simply hired to bring the sword. I’d wash my hands of it and leave. But not without my partner.”

  “They won’t hurt him.”

  “That’s good.”

  “They’ll make him hurt himself.”

  “Why?” Gaunt asked. “What kind of place is this?”

  “My people think being hurt is good. They think it makes you strong.”

  “Well, sometimes it can.”

  “If you break a flower,” Skath said, playing her hand through the stinkblossoms, “it dies. It doesn’t get stronger.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Skath. I’m stronger for having endured many things.” She remembered the poor family who’d sent her to live with Swanisle’s bards; and she recalled abandoning those bards to dwell in poverty far from home. “They helped make me who I am. Yet kindness shaped me, too. I don’t hold with those who embrace cruelty.” Gaunt frowned, thinking of greedy kleptomancers and bibliomaniac goblins and homicidal mermaids. “Those who rant about hard necessity, when the greatest hardness is in their eyes. The ones who, even in paradise, would find an excuse to torture.”

  Skath wore a look, Gaunt thought, of the oldest soul within the world’s five corners. Then this ancient-eyed being took Gaunt’s hand, and was merely a girl again. Gaunt said nothing but clasped Skath’s hand in turn.

  She felt a surprising maternal need to spirit Skath away—to Palmary, to Swanisle, someplace where a girl who loved flowering weeds would have a fighting chance. Yet this girl had a mother, a family, a life of her own, and Gaunt had a lover to save. As she considered all this, Gaunt felt less like an adult comforting a youth than like an older child defending a younger.

  If I am ever a mother, she thought, will I lose this ability to be a child’s true friend? Must I always, then, feel superior? But there could be no answer.

  Then Gaunt released Skath’s hand and spun, seeing movement out the corner of her eye.

  The boy Skower had entered the hiding place. He looked from Gaunt to Skath with wide eyes, and blurted, “The other outlander. . . . I heard it from the crowd at the Comprehenders’ tower. They’ve got him in the mindthresh. When they’re done teaching him, he’ll come outside—with the sword. He’ll come looking for you, Skath. He’s going to kill you.”

  ~ ~ ~

  I’ve been entranced in some way, Imago Bone thought, wanting to feel angry about it. Something in the wine? Perhaps. Magic? He saw nothing obvious, but he no longer trusted his perceptions.

  Yet even without magic or drugs, there remained the alcohol. The heat. The long hardship of the road to Maratrace. The confinement of the mindthresh. The constant discussion. And the people who came and jabbed him whenever he dozed. Bone had known thieves who’d confessed to far worse than burglary, signed anything, simply for the right to sleep. And also the self-assured voices of his captors, and the strange rhythm of their self-tortures.

  Each time the world blurred and the Maratracians poked him back awake, the chamber seemed hotter, more constricted. Eventually he dreamed with his eyes open, his thoughts guided by the Comprehenders’ remarks.

  Bone had waking dreams of his father (the fisherman) and Bone’s two elder brothers (the fishermen) and his mother (the fisherman’s wife) and his sister (the fisherman’s daughter).

  The Bones of Headstone Beach, on the Contrariwise Coast, were all fishermen. It had not be
en objectionable that Imago be different—it had been incomprehensible.

  Yet Imago had no desire to fish. It was not that he hated the sea; indeed, he could study its wavering surface and shadowy depths for hours, much as others would watch a fire. Imago’s dream was to wander that sea as an explorer, not hug the coasts. Imago’s father once or twice grumbled acquiescence to the idea. But that was before Imago’s brothers drowned.

  To the boy it seemed a life sentence had fallen upon him, this assumption he must fish to sustain his family. So he asked himself, how would Slaughterdark the Pirate Lord have comported himself, and he answered Slaughterdark would do anything necessary to reach free sea.

  With this notion fluttering high, Imago fashioned a mask of old sailcloth and robbed a carriage of the Skullfellows, those merchants who taxed all the trade of Headstone Beach. To his delight he discovered a knack for such work. Triumphantly he presented his father enough money to secure the family for a year.

  But Effigy Bone cursed his son for a thief, and kept the money. Imago was not released; he was banished. Though he wandered the Spiral Sea’s three great islands and its gnarled mainland, Imago Bone found no delight in escape. For it is one thing to sally forth, quite another to be exiled.

  Other travelers whom Bone met upon the road, alone as they were, seemed possessed of a self-assurance he could never feel. Could it be that these travelers knew the trust and love of unseen, even dead, families? While Bone knew only the contempt of his? He felt like a vessel with a gutted hull, apparently sound and yet inevitably sliding to a fate even Captain Slaughterdark could not evade.

  So he turned by slow degrees from the sea. He did not understand it then, but he came to believe he did not deserve his dream. Instead he focused on enhancing the skills that bought him survival on the road. He became, not just opportunistically but occupationally, a thief.

  And thanks to Joyblood and Severstrand, two equal but opposed angels of death inflicted by a pair of eager but uncoordinated enemies, his life was strangely prolonged, so that those skills became legend. Yet at heart he was a man who’d abandoned a dream, to punish himself for failing a family long dead.

  Bone shuddered as he reached this conclusion, trembled with the need to relate it to his friends, the only people who could comprehend. Only dimly was he aware that he told it hunched up, within a narrow wooden box.

  ~ ~ ~

  Gaunt led the children through shadows and dust to her hiding place beneath the pier. There she hissed angry questions to Skower. “Explain yourself, boy. You turn us over to the Comprehenders, and now you want to help?”

  “I love my little sister,” the boy said, with a quaver of pride. “I want Skath to be strong, proper, normal.”

  “Nothing about Maratrace is normal.”

  “It is our way, outlander. But Skath has never fit in. She is too gentle. With herself, with others. When she told me about her dreams of the sword, I thought she was at last growing up. Then I saw the sword in reality. I knew, somehow, Skath had to claim it.”

  Skath said, “You forced me to touch it, Skower. That was wrong.”

  He contemplated the muddy sand. “Yes.”

  “Then you summoned the Comprehenders, and now everything is worse.”

  “I got scared,” Skower said, “after Lepton hit me.” He shot Gaunt a glare. “Of the outlanders. Of the sword. Of you with the sword. But I still believe that you’re supposed to use it, that it’s your destiny. The Comprehenders want to destroy it. They think having Osteon slay you with it will do that. Maybe you embarrass me, Skath, but I can’t let him kill you. I can’t oppose the Comprehenders, but Lepton can.”

  Brotherly love, Gaunt thought, but what she spoke aloud was, “I can’t let him kill you either,” and she said this as much for Bone’s sake as Skath’s. “And he will not. Skath, tell me again about your friends near the harbor.”

  ~ ~ ~

  There were nightmares in the dark, and some happened while Bone was asleep, and some while he was awake.

  After a long interval he found himself atop a dark tower rippling with faux spines and sculpted ooze, spearing the air with its spikes and swellings. From this vantage he saw the sun rise obscenely over the city, exposing it like a lamp above a pustulous wound.

  He could barely stomach the sight. He felt ill. He studied his own hands, his sandaled feet, noting each blemish and wart, each peculiarity of form. One toe was crooked in a way that offended him. His body seemed a lump of gristle and fat. He loathed the sound of his own rasping breath.

  “You perceive,” someone said. “You understand.”

  His friends the Comprehenders circled him, wearing robes that hid the nauseating truth of their bodies. They bore an identical robe for him.

  He took it eagerly. Its cover compensated slightly for the sun’s oppressive eye.

  When he had become as the Comprehenders, Mistress Needles said, “You have come far, supplicant. Since the days when Captain Slaughterdark established this realm, each generation has passed our founder’s abyssmitude to the next. You are not so unlike him, and you have progressed quickly. But there is yet a task required of you, our new Brother Box.”

  And now his namesake approached, Master Box. As if passing a torch, Master Box unveiled the rose-red crystal rapier with its hilt sculpted like a blossom, his hands poised carefully beneath the cloth. The sword greeted Brother Box with a cheery pastel crimson glow.

  Master Box said, “Behold the abomination. It teaches us to live in a shallow world of insipid pleasantries and callow smiles.”

  As one, the other Comprehenders spat. And they spoke, as though intoning a liturgy.

  Mistress Rack said, “Our founder plundered this sword, to his everlasting regret. It was to escape its pall that he fled to the desert. There he fed upon locusts and scoured his skin with rocks, until he cleansed his mind of the sword’s ways.”

  Master Drip said, “But he accomplished far more. He broke the illusions that veil the horror of the world. Of all men, it was he who first truly Comprehended the loathsome nature of the universe. He abandoned his old life, and taught others to share his abyssmitude. And he foretold that one day our creed would encompass the Earthe, freeing all from illusion. The crusade would begin when Maratrace destroyed the Sword of Loving Kindness.”

  Mistress Needles said, “You will do the deed, Brother.”

  “But. . . .” He could hardly speak, yet felt he should object.

  “You fear losing your new-found perspective,” Master Box said. “We understand, Brother, and there is a risk. But if you cling to knowledge against the siren lure of ignorance, you may banish your illusions for good. We would be proud.”

  Mistress Needles said, “We would be even more proud, if you could destroy the sword. Slay the girl Skath, she who tends weeds and smiles so shamelessly.”

  “To sacrifice such a one with the sword,” said Mistress Rack, “would negate its claim to kindness. For whatever else the idiot Skath is, she is kind.”

  “Do this,” said Master Drip, “and you’ll be free to do as you choose.”

  “Even,” Mistress Rack said, “to teach abyssmitude to your beloved Persimmon Gaunt.”

  “Give me the sword,” he said.

  The touch of the hilt was like a hot gale, and the world seemed to spin around the Comprehenders’ tower.

  A similar unbalancing shook his mind.

  The sword hungered. He could almost hear it hissing its outrage. It longed to stain the Comprehenders’s drab costumes with crimson, bludgeon their followers into donning bright, cheery garb to please family and friend. It wanted the citizens to tell all their troubles at bladepoint, with the help of tea and trifles. It wanted to topple this grotesque tower and supplant it with something beautiful and airy, flanked by topiary. It wanted to replace torture chambers with padded cells, each with its complementary book of spiritual devotion.

  Come! the sword seemed to sing. Let us make the world lovely, by smiting the unsightly!

 
But Brother Box resisted, for his newfound abyssmitude was strong.

  He knew that between the cracks of the sword’s shining new world, loathsome vermin would scuttle. Moths would eat the pretty clothing, mold would claim the sweetcakes, and the beautiful happy people would, at last, rot.

  “I am ready,” he said.

  As the girl was known to be missing, he stalked the harbor, where a fugitive might readily hide. Mistress Needles accompanied him, with an eye to maintaining his abyssmitude.

  She needn’t have bothered. These stinking, muttering bands of greedy, lecherous, sloppy traders were enough to inspire horror in any neophyte. Yes, surely Skath would hide here. Soon he would discover her and be rid of this damnable, mocking blade. . . .