The Future Is Blue

No One Dies in Nowhere

THERE IS A CLICKING SOUND before she appears, like a gas stove before it lights. One moment there is nothing, the next there is Pietta, though this is the last gasp of before/after causality in her pure, pale mind. Now that she is here, she will always have been here. Charcoal-blue rags twist and braid and drape around her body more artfully than any gown. A leather falcon’s hood closes up her head but does not blind her; the eyecups are a fine bronze mesh that lets in light. Long jessies hang from her thin wrists. This room which she has never seen belongs to her as utterly as her eyes: a monk’s cell, modest but perfect and graceful. Candles thick as calf-bones. Water in a black basin. A copper rain barrel, empty. She runs her hand along the smooth, wine-dark stone of her walls; her fingertips leave phosphor-prints. She lays down on her bed, a shelf for holding Piettas carved out of the rock, mattressed in straw and withered, thorny wildflowers that smell of the village where she was born. From the straw, she can look out of three slim glassless windows shaped like chess bishops. A grey, damp sky steals in, a burgling fog climbing up toward her, a hundred million kinds of grey swirling together, and the stars behind, waiting. Pietta remembers the feeling of the first day of school. She goes to the window and looks out, looks down. Her long hair hangs over the ledge like two thick vines. Black, seedless earth below, dizzyingly far. As close as spying neighbors across a shared alley, a sheer, knife-cragged mountain stretches up into the dimming clouds and disappears into oncoming night. The mountain crawls with people. Each carries a black lantern half as tall as they. A man with a short, lovely beard chokes on the smoke puking forth from his light, but even as he chokes, he holds it closer to his mouth, desperate to get more. Their eyes meet. Pietta holds up her hand in greeting. He opens his jaw far wider than any bone allows and takes long, sultry bites out of the smoke.

When she turns away, a bindle lies on her bed of stone and straw. A plain handkerchief knotted around a long, burled black branch. She looses the cloth. Inside she finds a wine bottle, a pair of scissors, a stone figure of a straight-backed child in a chair, a brass key, a cracked, worn belt with two holes torn through, and a hundred shattered shards of colored glass. Pietta picks up one of the blades of glass and holds it to her breast until it slices through her skin. The glass is violet. The blood never comes.

ON AN ENDLESS plain where nothing grows lie a mountain as crowded as a city and a city as vast as a mountain. They face one another like bride and bridegroom. The city was enclosed at the commencement of linear time, a great ancient abbey bristling with domes, towers, spires, and stoas, chiseled out of rock the color of wine spilled on the surface of Mars, doorless, but not windowless, never windowless, candlelight twinkling from millions upon millions of arched and tapered clefts in the stone. From every one of these, you can see the mountain clearly, the people moving upon it, their lamps swinging back and forth, their hurryings and their stillnesses. The whispered talk of the people on the mountain can always be heard in the cloisters of the city, as though there is not a mile of churning black mud between the woman emptying her rain barrel after a storm and the ragged man murmuring on the windy crags. A road connects the mountain and the city, lit by blue gas lamps, cobbled by giants. No one has ever seen a person walk that road, though they must, or else what could be its purpose?

The clouded, pregnant sky swallows the peak of the mountain but declines the heights of the city. When there are stars, they are not our stars. They are not even white, but red as watch-fires.

In the city, which is called Nowhere, a man with the head of a heron sat comfortably in the topmost room of the policemen’s tower, working on his novel.

It was slow going.

He supposed he had everything he needed—a hurricane lamp full of oil, a stone cup full of dry red wine, a belly full of hot buttered toast, a typewriter confiscated from a poor soul he’d caught sledgehammering Fuck This Place onto the north stairwell of the Callabrius Quarter, a ream of fresh, bright paper filched from the records office. It was a quiet night in Nowhere. The criminal element, such as it was, seemed content to sleep the cold stars away until morning, leaving Detective Belacqua in peace.

He tried typing: It was a quiet night in Nowhere, then, disgusted with himself, abandoned his desk with a flamboyant despair no one could see to appreciate, and stared gloomily out the long, slender stone window onto the mud plain far below. A moonless spring blackness slept on the fields outside the walled city. It was always spring in Nowhere. But there were no cherry blossoms, no daffodils or new hens, only the cold dark mud of snow just melted, the trees stripped naked, bare arms flung up pleading for the sun, the smell of green but not the green itself. Every day was the day before the first crocus breaks the skull of earth, the held breath before beginning can begin. Always March, never May.

Detective Belacqua had several strikes against him as a budding author. For one thing, he had very little conception of time, an essential element in organizing narrative. He was, after all, mostly infinite. He barely remembered his childhood, if he could be said to have had one at all, but he remembered the incandescent naphtha-splatter of the birth of the universe pretty well. What order things happened in and why wasn’t his business. He didn’t pry. And this was another problem, for Detective Belacqua had not, in all his long tenure in the walled city, felt the urge to question any aspect of his existence. Such restlessness was not marked out on the map of a strigil’s heart the way it was scribbled on every inch of the maps of men. Belacqua enjoyed his slow progress through each day and night. He enjoyed hot buttered toast and dry red wine. He enjoyed his job, felt himself to be necessary in a way as profound as food to a body. Someone had to keep order in this orderless place. Someone had to give Nowhere its shape and its self. His world was a simple equation: if crime, then punishment. It didn’t matter at all why or how a criminal did his work, only that he had done it. And because he never bothered with the rest, Detective Belacqua was a hopeless novelist, for he had no clear idea of what drove anyone to do much of anything except be a policeman and bear lightly the granite weight of an unmovable cosmos. The actions of others were baffling and mostly unpleasant. He had never moved in the moral coil of clanging and conflicting wills. All he had ever known was Nowhere, and by the time Nowhere happened to a person, they had already made all the choices that mattered.

Yet Detective Belacqua longed to write with every part of his unmeasurable psyche. He had been a happy man before he discovered books. Very occasionally, people brought them to Nowhere in their sad little bindles. The first time Belacqua saw one, during a quickly opened, quickly shut case of petty theft in the Castitas District, he had confiscated it and crouched for hours in a vestibule, transfixed, as he read the crumbling paperback, the very hows and whys Belacqua had never understood. But it was not enough to read. Belacqua wanted more. There were no strigils in any of the books men brought to Nowhere. No one like him. The men had men-heads and men-desires and the women had women-heads and women-ambitions and nowhere could his heron-soul find a sympathetic mirror. And so he tried and tried and at best he plonked out It was a quiet night in Nowhere on the back of a blank incident report. He felt deeply ashamed of his desires and told no one. None of his comrades could hope to understand.

But it was, indeed, a quiet night in Nowhere. But a night was not a book.

“Make something happen, you blistered fool,” Detective Belacqua grumbled to himself.

A knock comes upon the door.

Rubbish.

Detective Belacqua pushed back from his desk, his belly perhaps slightly less righteously muscled than it had been when the primordium was new. He wrapped a long scarf the color of cigarette ash around his feathered throat, snatched his black duster from the hook near the door, and abandoned his post—only for a moment—in search of something more fortifying than buttered toast to fuel his furtive ambitions.

He had hardly left the tower when the alarm lamps began to burn.

SIXTY-SIX DAYS LATER, Pietta steps out of her room for the first time. No one has come for her. She has heard no footsteps in the long hall beyond her door. But a kind of rootless fear like thin pale mold forked slowly through her limbs and she could not bring herself to move.

She measures out the time in bears and glass. Each morning, Pietta places a shard of colored glass on her windowsill. They split the candlelight into harlequin grapeshot, firing volleys of scarlet, cobalt, emerald toward the mountain outside. She has developed a kind of semaphore with the smoke-eaters on those icy slopes; at least, when she moves her arms, they move theirs. But perhaps Pietta is the only one who imagines an alphabet.

Each evening, she watches the bears come in across the mud plain and snuggle against the city for warmth. She does not know where they come in from, only that they do, hundreds of them, and that they are not very like the bears she remembers, though the act of remembering now is like reading a Greek manuscript—slow, laborious, full of transcription errors, clarity coming late and seldom. It is possible bears have always looked like the beasts who rub their enormous flanks against the pockmarked burgundy stone of the city walls as the red stars hiss up in the dusk. But Pietta does not think bears ever had such long stone-silver fur, or that they wore that fur in braids, or that they had a circlet of so many eyes round their heads, or that they had tusks quite so inlaid with gold.

So passes sixty-six days. Glass. Arms. Smoke. Bears.

She gathers together her only belongings and secrets them in the slits and knots of her clothes. Beyond the door of the room belonging to Pietta she finds a hall that splits like a vein into a snarl of staircases. Will she be able to find her way back? The fearful mold begins to grow again, but she stifles it. Burns it out. Descends a black iron spiral stair down, down, to another hall, under an arch into which some skilled hand has carved PENURIES, under which some rather less skilled hand has painted FOR A GOOD TIME FIND BEATRICE. Pietta looks back in the direction she has come. The other side of the stone arch reads TAEDIUM. She will try to remember that she lives in Taedium. Pietta passes beneath Contempt us Mundi and Beatrice’s come-hither into a courtyard under the open sky.

The courtyard thrums with people and forbidding candles standing as tall and thick as fir trees, barked in the globs and drips and wind-spatters of their yellow wax. There is a stone bowl near the yawning edge of the terrace, filled with burnt knobs of ancient wood and volcanic rock. People like her move between the tallow monoliths and the stone bowl, wrapped tight in complex charcoal-blue rags and falcon-hoods, but not like her, for they chatter together as though they belong here, as though the harness of here is no surprise to them. They huddle around beaten copper rain barrels, looking up anxiously at the spinning scarlet stars. They pass objects furtively from one hand to the next. They stare out at the constant vastness of the mountain pricked with lantern light before plunging their hands into the bowl and devouring the charred and ashen joints of wood.

Pietta is noticed. A middle-aged man with an unusual nose and arthritic hands pulls her urgently behind one of the cathedral-column candles. She can see blue eyes beneath the mesh of his blinders.

“What did you bring?” he whispers.

Pietta remembers the feeling of a husband she did not want. She answers: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Because she doesn’t. She has nothing.

The man sighs and tries again, more kindly, holding her less tightly. “In your bindle. What did you carry with you to Nowhere? Don’t be afraid. It’s important, my dear, that’s all. It is everything.”

DETECTIVE BELACQUA NAVIGATED the night-crowded halls of the Temeritatis Precinct with ease. The locals parted into ragged blue waves to let him pass. Some held their hands to their mouths, some fell to their knees—but Belacqua knew the difference between awe and reflex. They genuflected because they thought they should. They thought it might help.

The crowd around the automat is thin. Humans didn’t eat at the finer establishments. They had no currency. The wonderful glass wall of cool plates and steaming bowls was for the comfort of the strigils, a small luxury in this rather undistinguished outpost. Behind the bank of windows set into two feet of dark abbey stone, Belacqua saw a woman with the head of an osprey move with mindful grace, clearing the old dishes, bringing in the new. Her black and white feathers shone in the kitchen lights.

“What have you got in the way of savory, tonight, Giacama? I’m in the mood for salt.”

Giacama pushed aside the little window on an empty compartment of the automat. Her mild seabird eyes floated in the glass as though they were the night special.

“Good evening, Detective. I’ve got a lovely rind of cheese from the gluttons’ farms. It’s all yours.”

“Detective Inspector soon,” Belacqua said with a flush of pride. He took his crescent of cheese from the window. Only then did he see the young girl staring up at him through the blinders of her falcon-hood, rubbing anxiously at the backs of her hands.

“Are you a demon?” she whispered. “Are you an angel?”

“Naw,” Belacqua answered around a mouthful of white cheese. “I work for a living.”

The child might have said more, but a commotion disturbed the evening throngs. A strapping man with a raven’s grand face strode toward Detective Belacqua, out of breath, trembling in his black finery. Sergeant Tomek—but in all the aeons of known existence Belacqua had only known his sergeant to be a calm and rather cold sort.

Sergeant Tomek clasped his hand roughly, his raven’s face handsome and dark and puffed with excitement or terror. His black ruff bristled.

“Sir, I hate to trouble you at this hour and I know you hate to be interrupted when you’re… working… but something terrible’s happened. Something dreadful. You must come.”

Detective Belacqua tightened his long grey scarf and smoothed back his own rumpled feathers.

“Calm down, Tomek. You’ll spook the poor creatures. Just present the facts of the case and we’ll see to it with a quickness. What can possibly have you in such a state?”

Sergeant Tomek stared at the wine-dark flagstone floor. He swallowed several times before whispering wretchedly:

“A body, Sir.”

“Well, that’s hardly cause for all this upset, Sergeant. We’re nothing but bodies round here. Bodies, bodies everywhere, and hardly one can think. Go home and get some sleep, man, we’ll see to it in the morning.”

The raven-headed sergeant sighed and tried again, more miserably and more quietly than before.

“A dead body, Sir. A corpse.”

Detective Belacqua blinked. “Don’t be stupid, Tomek.”

“Sir. I know how it sounds.” Tomek glanced around at the passing folk, but most gave the policemen a wide berth. “But there is a dead woman lying face down with her throat cut and there’s blood everywhere and things on her back and she is very, very dead.”

Detective Belacqua grimaced with embarrassment. “Sergeant Tomek,” he hissed, “they can’t die. It’s not possible. They steal, they cheat, they vandalize, they fornicate, they lie, they curse God, but they do not kill and they do not die. That’s not how it works. That’s the whole point.”

But the raven would only say: “Come see.”

Detective Belacqua thought of his novel and his dry red wine waiting safe and warm for him in the watchtower. They called to him. But he knew what duty was, even if he did not know how to begin his opus. “Where is she?”

Sergeant Tomek trilled unhappily. He ran his hand along the black blade of his beak.

“Outside.”

PIETTA FOLLOWS the man with the unusual nose. They have exchanged names. His is Savonarola. He spits the syllables of himself as though he hates their taste. He leads her through a door marked CONTEMPTUS MUNDI.

“My home,” he sighs, “such as it is.”

“I live in Taedium,” Pietta answers, and it is such a relief that she has remembered it, that the information was there when she reached for it, solid, heavy, cold to the touch. She almost stumbles with the sweetness of it. Savonarola grunts in sympathy.

“Too bad for you. You’ll find no fraternity among your neighbors, then. They keep to themselves in Taedium. They do not come to cloister, they do not trade, they do not attend the rainstorms. They don’t even take Christmas with the rest of us. But perhaps that’s to your taste. Taedium, Taedium, so close to Te Deum, you know. What passes for cleverness around here.”

Pietta remembers the feeling of longing for something lost before she ever had it. “I have made friends with a man on the mountain. He moves his arms. I move mine. We are up to the letter G. But there is no G in my name, so he cannot know me. I am… I am lonely. I thought someone would come for me.”

“No one on the mountain is your friend, girl,” snaps Savonarola, and they emerge into a wide piazza full of long tables with thick legs and glass lanterns the size of parish churches shining out into the mist of the night. Wind pulls at them like a beggar pleading. The tables are full of handkerchiefs unknotted, their contents laid out lovingly, more men and women in charcoal-blue rags closely guarding each little clutch of junk.

Savonarola introduces her to a small, dark woman with a beautiful, delicate mouth. The woman is called Awo. She has an extraneous thumb on her left hand, small and withered and purpled. Pietta touches the objects on Awo’s handkerchief, running her hands over them gently. They awake feelings in her that do not belong to her: a drinking cup, a set of sewing needles, a red brick, a pot of white paint, several ballpoint pens, and a length of faded paisley fabric. When Pietta touches the sewing needles, she remembers the feeling of embroidering her daughter’s wedding dress. But Pietta had only sons, and they are babies yet.

“You have lovely things,” Pietta whispers.

“Oh, they aren’t mine,” Awo says. The wind off of the mountain dampens all their voices. “I long ago traded away the objects I brought with me into this place. And traded what I got in return, and traded that again, and so on and so forth and again and again. Everything in the world, it turns out, is escapable except economy. Those objects which were once so dear to me I can no longer even name. Did I come with a cup? A belt? A signet ring? I cannot say. Now, what will you give me for my fabric? Savonarola says you have scissors.”

Pietta touches her ribs, where she hid the shears. She looks away, into the crystal doors of a massive lantern and the flames within. “But what are these things? What is this place? Why do I have this pair of scissors in this city at this moment?”

Savonarola and Awo glance at one another.

“They are your last belongings,” Savonarola says. “The things you lingered over on your last day.”

Rain comes to the city. It falls from every dark cloud and splashes against the lanterns, the tables, the buyers and the sellers. Everyone runs for their rain barrels, dragging them into the piazza, the copper bottoms scraping the stone. The rain that falls is not water but wine, red and strong.

Pietta remembers the feeling of dying alone.

DETECTIVE BELACQUA STOOD over the woman’s body. He let a long, low whistle out of his beak and reached into his pocket for a cigarette. Sergeant Tomek opened his black jaws; a ball of blue flame floated on his tongue. Belacqua lit his wrinkled, broken stump of tobacco and breathed deep.

“Isn’t there someone else we can hand this off to? Someone higher up. Someone… better?”

Tomek stared down at the corpse as it lay face down on the slick blue-black cobblestones of the road that connects the city and the mountain. The blue of the gas lamps made her congealing blood look like cold ink.

“You had the watch, Detective Inspector,” he said, emphasizing his soon-to-come promotion. But they both knew this woman, the very fact of her, made all ranks and systems irrelevant.

Belacqua scratched the longer feathers at the nape of his neck. The clouds boiled and swam above them, raveling, unraveling, spooling grey into grey. He could not remember the last time he’d set foot outside the city. Probably sometime around the invention of music. The air smelled of crackling pre-lightning ozone and, bizarrely, nutmeg fruits, when they are wet and new and look like nothing so much as black, bleeding hearts.

“Is she going to… rot, do you think?” Sergeant Tomek mused.

“Well, I don’t bloody well know, do I?” the man with the heron’s head snapped back. Detective Belacqua had closed thousands of cases in his infinite career. The Nowhere locals got up to all manner of nonsense and he didn’t blame them in the least. On the contrary, he felt deeply for the poor blasted things, and when it fell to him to hand out punishments, he was as lenient as the rules allowed. He was a creature of rules, was Belacqua. But the vast majority of his experience lay in vandalism, petty theft, minor assault, and public drunkenness. Every so often something spicier came his way: attempted desertion, adultery, assaults upon the person of a strigil. But never this. Of course never this. This was against the rules. The first rule. The foundational rule. So foundational that until tonight he had not even thought to call it a rule at all.

Detective Belacqua knelt to examine the body. He suspected that was the sort of thing to do. Just pretend it was a bit of burglary. Nothing out of the ordinary. Scene of the crime and all that. Good. First step. Go on, then.

“Right. Erm. The deceased? Should we say deceased? Are you writing this down, Tomek? For God’s sake. The, em, re-deceased is female, approximately twenty-odd-something years of age. Is that right? It’s so hard to tell with people. I don’t mean to be insensitive, of course—”

“Oh, certainly not, sir.”

“It’s just that they all look a little alike, don’t they, Sergeant?”

Tomek looked distinctly uncomfortable. His dark ruff bristled. “About forty, I should say, Detective Inspector.”

“Ah, yes, thank you. Forty years of age, brunette, olive complected, quite tall, nearly six foot as I reckon it. Her hood seems to have gone missing and her clothes are… well, there’s not much left of them, is there? Just write ‘in disarray.’ Spare her some dignity.” Now that he’d begun, Belacqua found he could hardly stop. It came so naturally, like a song. “Cause of death appears to be a lateral cut across the throat and exsanguination, though where she got all that blood I can’t begin to think. Bruises, well, everywhere, really. But particularly bad on her belly and the backs of her thighs. And there’s the… markings. Do you think that happened before or, well, I mean to say, after, Tomek?”

The raven-sergeant’s black eyes flickered helplessly between the corpse and the detective. “Sir,” he swallowed finally, “how can we possibly tell?”

Belacqua remembered the book he’d devoured so greedily in that sad little vandal’s cell, the book without a cover and yellow-stained pages, a book in which many people had died and gotten their dead selves puzzled over.

“I’ve an idea about that, Sergeant,” he said finally. “Write down that she’s got patience carved into her back in Greek—not too neatly, either, it looks like someone went at her with a pair of scissors—then get the boys to carry her up to my office before anyone else decides to have a look out their window and starts ringing up a panic. Carefully! Don’t… don’t damage her any more than she already is.” Belacqua gazed up at the great mountain that faced his city, into the wind and the lantern lights and the constant oncoming night. “Poor lamb,” he sighed, and when the patrolmen came to lift her up, he pressed his feathered cheek against hers for a moment, his belly full of something he very well thought might be grief.

SAVONAROLA, AWO, AND Pietta sit around a brimming rain barrel. The storm has passed. The sky is, for once, almost clear, barnacled with fiery stars. They drink with their hands, cupping fingers and dipping into the silky red wine, slurping without shame. The dead know how to savor as the living never can. The wine is heavy but dry. Much debate has filled the halls of Nowhere over the centuries—is it a Beaujolais? Montrachet? Plain Chianti? Savonarola is firmly in the Montrachet camp. Awo thinks it is most certainly an Algerian Carignan. Pietta thinks it is soft, and sour, and kind.

“Memory is a bad houseguest in this place,” Savonarola says softly. Red raindrops streak his face like a statue of a saint weeping blood. “For you, the worst of it will come in twenty years or so. Dying is the blow, memory is the bruise. It takes time to develop, to reach a full and purple lividity. Around eighty years in Nowhere, give or take. Then the pain will take you and it will not give you back again for autumns upon winters. You will know everything you were, and everything you lost. But the bruise of having lived will fade, too, and your time in Nowhere will dwarf your time in the world such that all life will seem to be a letter you wrote as a child, addressed to a stranger, and never delivered.”

Awo sucks the wine from her brown, slender fingers. “Awo Alive feels to me like a character in a film I saw when I was young and loved. Awo and her husband Kofi who wore glasses and her three daughters and seven grandchildren and her degree in electrical engineering and the day she saw Accra for the first time, Accra and the sea. I am fond of all of them, but I see them now from very far away. If I remember anything, if I tilt my head or say a word as she would have done, it is like quoting from that film, not like being Awo.”

“I went to the noose long before such things as moving pictures could be imagined,” Savonarola admits.

Pietta thinks for a long while, watching herself in the reflection of the wine. “And what of the mountain? What of the men and women there? Very well, I am dead. Where is Paradise? Where is Hell? Where is the fire or the clouds? Is this Purgatory?”

Awo touches Pietta’s cheek. “Me broni ba, that mountain out there is Purgatory. Someday, maybe, we’ll go there and start our long hitchhike of the soul up, up, up into the sea of glass and the singing and the rings of eyes and the eternal surrealist discotheque of the saved. Nowhere is for us sad sacks who died too quick to repent, or naughties like Savonarola, who was so stuck up himself that he got excommunicated. And here we sit, with nothing to do but drink the rain, for three hundred times our living years.”

Savonarola cracks his gnarled knuckles. “I admit, if some man in Florence had discovered a way to film the moon rising over the ripples of the Arno, or the building of Brunelleschi’s ridiculous dome, or even one of my own sermons—and I was very good, in my day—I would have set fire to the reels with all the rest, and I would have rejoiced. All in which the eye longs to revel is vanity, vanity. Only now do I long for such things, for something to see besides this stone, something to touch besides the dead, something to hear besides talk, talk, talk. What I would not give in this moment for one glimpse of Botticelli’s pornography, one vulgar passage of lecherous Boccaccio, one beautiful deck of gambling cards. God, I think, is irony.”

“I will go mad,” Pietta whispers.

“Yes,” agrees Awo.

Pietta pleads: “But it will pass? It will pass and I will go to the mountain and take up a lantern and begin to climb. It will pass and we will go—we will go on, up, out. Progress.”

Savonarola pinches his nose between his fingers and smiles softly. He has never been a man given to smiling. He had only done it ten or eleven times in total. But all in secret, Girolamo Savonarola possesses one of the loveliest and kindest smiles in all the long history of joy.

“Do the math, my child. Three hundred times the span of a human life we must rattle the stones of Nowhere—since the death of Solomon and the invention of the alphabet, no one yet has gotten out.”

IN THE CITY called Nowhere, a man with the head of a heron sat comfortably in the topmost room of the policemen’s tower, watching a corpse rot.

It was slow going.

In all honesty, Detective Belacqua had no real idea what to expect. He only recalled from his penny paperback that human bodies did, indeed, under normal circumstances, rot, and they did it according to a set of rules, at a regular, repeatable, measurable rate, and from that you could reason out a lot of other things that mattered in a murder investigation. Since he had run face-first into a circumstance well beyond normal, Belacqua could not rely on the niceties of rigor mortis, even if he understood them, thus, he now devised a method to discover the rules of decomposition in Nowhere.

Sergeant Tomek humbly asked to be allowed to stay after the patrolmen returned to their posts. The detective agreed, but sent him for coffee straightaway so that he could gather his thoughts without the raven-boy fretting all over him. Belacqua lifted the corpse easily—they never did weigh very much in Nowhere. He laid her out on three desks pushed together, and, though he felt rather silly about it afterward, folded her hands over her chest and arranged her long, dark hair tenderly, as though it mattered. And it did matter to him, very much, though he couldn’t think why. He dipped a rough cloth into the wash basin in the officers bathroom and cleaned the worst of the grime and blood out of her wounds, going back and forth from the basin with a steady rhythm that calmed his nerves and arranged the furniture of his mind in a contemplative configuration. After all this was done, he drew a pair of scissors from the watchman’s desk and plunged them quickly between the dead woman’s ribs on the left side of her torso. When he pulled them out again, red pearls seeped from the wound, falling to the flagstones with a terrible clatter.

“Huh,” said Sergeant Tomek. He stood in the doorway, holding a cup of scalding coffee in each hand.

And then, the policemen waited. Sergeant Tomek waited at the window, transfixed. Detective Belacqua waited at his typewriter, ready to record any changes in the body. To write the novel of this woman’s putrefaction, chapter by chapter.

It was a quiet night in Nowhere.

Days and nights knocked at the door and went away unanswered. The corpse remained the same for a very long time. Tomek gave up over and over, crying out that it was too sad to be borne, too miserable a thing to stare at, and Nowhere too timeless a place to ever tolerate decay. But he always returned, with coffee or tea or hot buttered toast, and the two strigils resumed their longest watch.

By the next Sabbath, it had begun. On the first day, the edges of the woman’s wounds flushed the color of opium flowers. On the second day, her hair turned to snow. On the third day, the stench began, and the watch-room filled intolerably with the smell of frankincense, and then wild honey, and finally a deep and endless forest, loamy and ancient. On the fourth day, Belacqua held his ear to her mouth and heard the sound of gulls crying. On the fifth day, her wounds turned ultramarine and began to seep golden ink. On the sixth day, her sternum cracked and a white lizard with blue eyes crawled out of her, which Tomek caught and trapped in a wine bottle. And on the seventh day, a small tree bloomed and broke out of her mouth, which gave a single silver fruit. This, Belacqua harvested and placed in his coffee cup for further study. By the morning of the eighth day, all that remained of her were bones, hard and clear and faceted as if the skeleton had been hacked out of a single diamond.

Belacqua typed and typed and typed. Finally, he spoke, on the day they saw the dead woman’s skull emerge like new land rising from the sea.

“Sergeant Tomek, I believe we can safely say that she received the markings on her back pre-mortem. Time of death could not have been sooner than six days before you discovered her.”

“And how do you know this, Detective Inspector?”

“If she had been killed later, we would have found the poor girl already turning orange at the edges, or worse. I detected then no discoloration nor any scent nor a lizard nor the sound of seagulls. Unfortunately for us, it could have been any number of days greater than six and we would not know it unless we could somehow kill something else and record its progress. Also when I cut into her, the body produced a quantity of pearls, whereas no pearls were found beside her on the road to Nowhere. Additionally, the gore of my cut shows a distinctly different shade of ultramarine than the carving on her back. Someone wrote patience on her while she yet lived, Tomek, and listened to her anguish, and did not stop.”

“It is dreadfully morbid,” the sergeant sighed. He laid a reverent hand on the delicate foot-bones of the body.

“On the contrary, my boy, it is science, and we have done it! Nothing could be more exciting than discovering, as we have done, that a set of rules lay in place of all eternity without us suspecting them. I assure you these are not the stages of mortal decomposition.” Belacqua hurried on before Tomek could wonder how he knew anything about living corpses, and uncover his illicit pursuit of fiction. “This is new. It is ours. It is native to Nowhere. No one else in all the yawning pit of time has ever known what you and I know now. We are, finally, unique. And now we two unique fellows must proceed further on, farther in, and re-compose this woman. Her name, her history, her associates, her enemies. What happened to her a fortnight ago, and how?” The detective frowned. “Perhaps we ought to interrogate the lizard.”

In its green glass bottle, the pale reptile hissed. It stuck out its blue tongue. The glass fogged with its breath. It said one word, and then steamed away like water.

Virtue.

PIETTA HAS BECOME a birdwatcher. She leaves Awo and Savonarola often to trail silently after the strigils as they move through the city. They are so unlike her. They wear clothes of many colors; they are always busy; they eat. They live in a different Nowhere than she does, one with automats and social clubs and places to be. She makes a study of them. This would be easier if she could bring herself to trade her colored glass or her belt or her scissors for one of Awo’s pens or the paper a tall man with very clean teeth wants to sell her, but she cannot. She does not know yet why they are precious, but she knows she doesn’t want to give them away, to let them become separate from her forever. She is not ready. So she must try to remember the birds she sees. Osprey. Oriole. Peregrine. Sparrow. Sandpiper. Ibis. Pelican. Starling. Raven. Heron. They are beautiful and they do not see her. To them, she is not Pietta. She is no one. She is blue, like the others, and blindered, like the others, and the only thing she can ever do to catch their attention, to bring their eyes down onto her, is to sin, to commit a crime, to err. When the man with clean teeth tries to steal her glass, the birds come. They smell, absurdly, like expensive perfume, like the counter in a fashionable shop. Their feathers rustle when they move like pages turning. They have no irises. Their voices are very nearly human. A woman with the head of an owl cuts away the sleeve of the man’s robe. Now everyone will know he is bad. Pietta is fascinated. But she is afraid to do anything very bad herself.

She meets Awo and Savonarola in a cloister fifteen years after they first drank wine together out of a barrel. It is a round room in the Largitio Quarter, with a high, domed ceiling, full of grand, tall tables set with empty bowls, safe from the wind and the slow, trudging lights on the mountain. Pietta longs to eat. She is never hungry, but she remembers the feeling of eating. Of tasting. A few dozen blue-ragged souls pool their objects on a table, picking and sorting. They are trying to assemble a chess set, though fights have broken out already over whether a pepper pot or a bone whistle or pocket Slovakian dictionary makes a better king. Nothing in Nowhere is important, so nothing is more important than the pepper pot and the whistle and the dictionary. Pietta watches them and imagines the players as birds. She hates chess. Savonarola agrees, though he plays anyway.

“Chess allows the frivolous to pretend their toys have deep meaning. The only honest game is tag,” he grouses, while taking an exquisitely-chinned teenaged girl’s queen. Both the sleeves have been torn from her dress.

“What are the strigils?” Pietta asks.

Savonarola snorts. “Where I come from they’re dull blades you use to scrape the sweat and grime from your back in a bath-house. Not that I ever used a bath-house, a seething puddle of greased sin. Not that I haven’t scoured the breadth of Nowhere for a damned bath.”

Awo has enough sewing needles to man her entire side, pawns and all. She sticks them upright in the soft wood of the table, two neat silver rows. “He can’t tell you. His theology was far too prim and tidy to contain bird-headed men in trenchcoats. I can’t tell you either. But if you suppose there are demons in one place and angels in the other, wouldn’t you also suppose something has to live here? Something has to be natural to Nowhere.”

“They came when the first people arrived,” says the girl with the lovely chin. She moves her knight (a mechanical library stamp). “And Nowhere was only an empty plain without a city. They are meant to make this place somewhat less than a Hell, and to keep us from making a Heaven of it.”

“How do you know that?” Savonarola snaps.

The girl shrugs. “I asked one. When I got arrested for writing my name a thousand times over the entrance to Benevolentia Sector. She had a wren’s face. She said they were formed not from clay like us nor fire nor light but from the stuff of the void on the face of the world, and they had not the breath of life but the heat of life and the fluid of it, and they had a beginning but no end, an alpha and an ellipsis, and then she drank my wine and said I was pretty and the truth was she didn’t remember very much more about being born than I did and she read all that off a historical plaque on the upper levels, but strigils have to keep up appearances, and they wouldn’t be worth much if we thought they were stuck here just like us only they didn’t even know how it happened to them, only what they had to do, so if you ask me, talking to a strigil is not so useful as you’d expect, and they drink a lot. Checkmate.”

That night, Pietta goes to be with Savonarola, because everything is the same and everything is nothing and what is the point of not doing anything now?

DETECTIVE BELACQUA STOOD in a hexagonal stone cell like all the other hexagonal stone cells. He looked out an arched window like all the other arched windows. He picked up and put down several meaningless objects: a brass key, a cracked, worn belt, a stone figure of a child seated in a chair, shards of colored glass. Sergeant Tomek assured him this was the dead woman’s room, but it told him nothing—how could it? She would have traded away anything authentically her own long ago. What remained was simply someone else’s rubbish. They had a name, and only that by process of elimination. Quite simply: who was missing? It had taken weeks of interrogation, more contact with the locals than Belacqua had ever suffered before, their fearful whispers, their purposeless glazed eyes, their way of drifting off mid-sentence as though they’d forgotten language. But they got their name, from the old furioso Savonarola, who actually wept when Tomek asked whether he had lost anyone of late.

What was he supposed to do now? Everyone in the policemen’s union expected he could find some simple solution to it all. But the thing of it was, in his paperback, discovering the identity of the corpse opened other doors, doors within doors, obvious rivers of inquiry to dive into, personal histories to unearth, secrets, secrets everywhere. But her name gave him nothing but this room, and this room was a dry river and a closed door.

“Who was she?” Sergeant Tomek demanded of Savonarola, who sat below a great candle, staring at his open hands. “Who did she love? Who did she hate? What was she in life? What did she do to pass the time?”

But the old friar just closed his hands and opened them again. Closed. Open. “She loved me and Awo. She hated chess. She invented a semaphore alphabet with a man climbing the mountain, though I’m reasonably sure he’s not in on the scheme. If she remembered her life, she never told it to me. She’s so new, you know. Like a baby. When I look at her I see the plainness of white linen, being without vanity.”

“Everyone has vanity,” said Sergeant Tomek. “Everyone here.”

The old man looked up cannily at the strigils. Behind his blinders, his eyes shone. “Do you?”

Detective Belacqua squatted down on his heels. He had a suspicion, and he knew how to work on friars. You had to awe them. Morning picked at the stitches of dark. If there had been any true songbirds in Nowhere, they would have sung. Belacqua fixed his black heron’s eyes on the hooded soul before him. “Do you remember the founding of Florence, Girolamo? That is where you lived, is it not?”

“Don’t be absurd. Florence was old when I was young.”

“Quite so. Yet I do remember the founding of Nowhere. Did you know that? Some of us do, some of us don’t, it’s a funny old thing, like whether or not someone like you remembers losing his baby teeth. A toss of the cognitive dice. But I remember. Lucky me! You see, the plain, the plain is the thing. The mud flat going on and on out there forever. The handful of trees—as few and as far between as living planets in empty space. The old riverbeds. Somewhere out beyond the road and the mountain there’s a black salt flat a light year across. The clouds. The stars. And people didn’t come right away. It wasn’t like you’d imagine—nothing, and then hordes all at once. People just died like dogs or fish or dinosaurs until, I don’t know, what would you say, Tomek? Around the time they started painting ibexes on cave walls?”

The sergeant nodded his dark head.

“Well, my friend, you can just imagine what a mess it all was in the beginning. No system. No rules. Some people could go up the mountain as quick as you like, and some couldn’t, and some could go down into the coal pits, and some couldn’t, and some just milled around like cows down here, and if they tried to go on up, they found themselves turned right back around facing the infinite floodplain with not an inch gained, but no one really had a bead on the whys and wherefores of the whole business. Cosmology just sort of happened to you, on you get. And the people down here in the mud, they just sat there or laid there or stood there for ages, really, proper ages, with nothing to do. That’s the worst thing for a person. To get crushed under the weight of endless useless days. Between you and me, I don’t think anyone really thought it through. I bet you’d rather have a fellow spearing you with a flaming trident every hour on the hour—at least then, something would happen. Am I right? I believe I am. So these poor souls fought and fucked and screamed for awhile, because those’re pretty good ways to stop yourself thinking about the existential chasm of time. But they didn’t bleed and they didn’t come and nobody answered them, so eventually, they started digging in the mud with whatever they’d brought in their bindles, which back then, was mostly stone tools. They pulled up the stones of the moral universe and put them one on top of the other, and I’ll tell you a secret, Giro. For awhile, I think this was a happier place than Heaven, when they were putting down those rocks. But happiness isn’t the point. Not here. If we’d let you keep on with it, your lot would have built city after city, an empire of the dead, and it would look just like the world out here, only filled with legions of the mediocre and the stalled out and the unrepentant and whatever you’re supposed to be. So we got called up, me and the sergeant here and all the other strigils. Hatched out of an egg of ice, I’m told, though that sort of insider talk is above my pay grade. And we came bearing order, Girolamo. We came with rules in our beaks. We built Nowhere together, strigils and humans, the dead and the divine.” Detective Belacqua put one hand on his chest and the other over Savonarola’s withered heart. “Me and you. A closed system. A city on the hill. And I think it’s beautiful. But you don’t, do you? You hate it, like you hated everything you ever clapped your eyes on. Except her. So here’s what I think, friend. I think you found a way to get her out. God only knows what. But you did it to her and now she’s gone and if you tell me what happened, no one will be angry—we quite literally cannot be angry. Who could blame you? It’s the nature of love, I should imagine.”

Girolamo Savonarola laughed.

“You ought to write a book,” he giggled, but when Sergeant Tomek began to strip his charcoal-blue robes from him, the friar began to sob instead.

IT HITS HER while she kisses Awo’s naked shoulder, Awo, whose cell Pietta visits far more than any other, though in recent years she’s visited many. She even found Beatrice, who turned out to be very shy and fond of rain. It is something to do, and Pietta is desperate for acts. Acts have befores and afters. They mark her movement through this air and these stones. She has tried other sins, but they are more difficult in Nowhere. She cannot bring herself to envy anyone, and wants for nothing; she cannot eat and she cannot strive. So there is this, and though she feels it only dimly, she holds on very tight.

Pietta and Awo lie together in the lantern-light of Purgatory and there is a moment when she does not know who she is, not really, and then that moment burns itself out. Pietta remembers the feeling of being Pietta. She remembers being small and she remembers being big. All of the things that ever happened to her stack up in her mind like stones on a sea shore, tottering, tottering… Pietta is getting born in a room with poppies painted on the wall, Pietta is small and delighted and running through the snow, forgetting her mother completely and throwing herself face first into the soft powder, Pietta is receiving her first communion and coughing when she oughtn’t because the incense tickles her nose, and she is helping her father tend his bees in their fields, and she is walking in the woods at night with a boy named Milo, and she is living in a house by the sea with Milo who has grown very distant with her, even though she is pregnant and they should be happy, and Pietta is giving birth to her son in a room with ultramarine flowers next to her bed in a cheap, gold-painted vase, and Pietta is walking in the summer, alone, for once, when she sees a white lizard hiding in the shade of a long, flat stone, and she takes it home and gives it a name and shows it to her son and keeps it in an old fish tank even though Milo says it is stupid and lizards have no hearts and Pietta is wearing her mother’s diamond ring every day even though they could use the money because no amount of snow could make her forget, not really, and Milo is so angry with her so often, every thing she does is the wrong thing, and though she still loves him she grows very still inside, she feels as though she is trapped in ice and cannot move, even as she cooks and cleans and runs to the shops and teaches her classes and she is getting older all the time and then Pietta is teaching her son to play chess with a set made to look like a famous medieval set with funny-looking people in funny-looking chairs, she is cutting out the green felt for his Halloween costume because he insists upon being a tree this year, she is pouring herself the last of the red wine and locking up the liquor cabinet with a brass key, she is putting away her husband’s clothes, his coats, his socks, his old belt, and thinking that she should have bought him a new one long ago, and she will now, she will, because tomorrow will be the day she wakes up out of the ice and becomes herself again, she knows it will happen all at once, like a big silver fruit cracking open, and there she’ll be, good as new, even though she thought the same yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and when the glazier’s truck hits Pietta in the high street she thinks, for a moment, that all that beautiful, shattered, colored glass lying around her is the ice breaking at last, the fruit breaking open, with Pietta whole and alive inside, but it is not.

IT WAS A quiet night in Nowhere.

Detective Inspector Belacqua and Corporal Tomek shared the watch and supper and half a bottle of white wine which both felt very excited about. The lamp stood full of oil, the basin full of fresh water, the pens full of ink, and all was as it should be.

Belacqua had many times almost asked his raven-headed friend how he felt about their one great case. Tomek never mentioned it. Occasionally, in their rounds, they would catch a glimpse of Savonarola, naked and shunned, drifting miserably among the crowds. Once, Belacqua himself had nearly run right into the woman called Awo, who stared at him as though she could punch through his delicate skull with her gaze. He hadn’t been able to bear that; he’d run. Run, from a local, a dead woman with nothing but her rags. And yet it had happened.

So time, in its shapeless, corpulent, implacable way, bore on in Nowhere. And only when he was alone did it trouble Belacqua how much they never understood about the incident, the monstrous hole at the bottom of the case file through which everything sensible tumbled out. Into this hole, he began to drop the words of his novel, one by one, painstakingly, the only story he knew, a story without an end. Which, he supposed, was to be expected, considering the author.

When it came time to open the bottle of white wine, the policemen found the cork encased in awfully thick black wax, too thick for fingernails and too awkward for beaks.

“Nothing to it,” Corporal Tomek laughed, and drew a small pair of scissors out of the inner pocket of his coat. He worked the little blades deftly round the mouth and wiggled them up underneath till the cake of wax fell away.

They were a perfectly ordinary pair of scissors. A little tarnished and stained, but utterly usual and serviceable, like Tomek himself. Detective Inspector Belacqua had no reason to notice them in the least. And yet, he did. He could not stop noticing them. Small enough for delicate work. For carving. Was that tarnish, that black smear along the shears?

Belacqua cleared his throat. “Has it ever woken you nights, Tomek, that we never discovered how the old man did it?”

“Did what, sir?”

“Killed a dead woman. There had to be a method—that’s the whole thing, you know, means, motive, and opportunity—that’s the entire thing of it. And the means just… got away from us, didn’t it?”

“I suppose it did. But I wouldn’t worry. It’s never happened again. It’s not like we had an epidemic on our hands, Belacqua. And if we had, well, you know. No one harmed but the dead. The chief would have sorted it out, I’m sure.” Tomek poured the wine and handed a glass across the desk. Belacqua just looked at it.

“I just want to know, that’s all. Haven’t you ever wanted to know anything so badly it ate you away until there was nothing left of you but the not knowing?”

The raven grimaced. “Just drink your wine, Detective Inspector.”

Belacqua did not blink. He thought he ought to feel something in the pit of his stomach, but all he felt was the not knowing, the canker of it, working its way through him like rot.

“How did you meet her?” Detective Inspector Belacqua whispered.

Tomek put down the glasses, very carefully, as though, in his hands, they might break.

PIETTA BLUDGEONS THE wall over and over, jamming her scissors into the wine-dark stone. Chips and chunks fly away as she gouges the skin of the city. The thudding and scraping of her blows fill the endless halls of Taedium.

They care about very little, Pietta knows. But they will care about this. Vandalizing Nowhere brings them running, so she is not surprised when a man with the head of a raven steps through her door and snatches the scissors from her hands with a strength that would snap all the bones of her wrist, if the bones of her wrist could still break.

“That’s enough, miss,” Sergeant Tomek says crisply, professionally. Their faces are close as kissing. Raven and girl; pale, bloodless lips and a mouth like black shears.

“It’s not fair,” Pietta snarls at him. “All I ever did wrong was be sad.”

Outside, the man on the mountain eats his smoke. Tomek is on top of her by the time he begins to move his arms in straight, strident lines, and she does not see.

P-I-E-T-T-A?

“WE ALL HAVE our ways of coping with it,” Tomek said, running his finger around the lip of his glass.

“With what?” Belacqua scowled.

“Eternity,” answered the raven slowly. “You have your novel—oh, for God’s sake, we all know. I have my research. It’s wrong, you know, everything, all of this. At least they lived, fucked something up well and good enough to end up here. We’re here… for what? Why? To punish what sin? The only difference between them and us is we wear better clothes. I can’t bear it any more than they can. And it’s worse, it’s worse for us, Belacqua. We’ve just enough spark in us to draw up a rough sketch of feeling, just a basic set, nothing too detailed: duty, loyalty, a smear of free will, a little want, a little envy, just enough to know somebody else got to see what a summer looks like, but not enough for the cosmos to even look at us, for one second, as anything but lock and keys. And it never ends for us. Don’t you see? They all have the hope of progress, of the climb. This is it, just this, nothing else, forever. I was so bored, Belacqua.”

Tomek began to pace, tugging at his feathers, half-preening, half-tearing.

“And so I began to think. Just for the last couple of thousand years. I began to plan a way to murder a person. It’s a big enough problem to take up centuries. Could it even be done? They can’t, certainly. One punches the other in the nose and it’s like punching ice cream. Nothing. Not even a mark. But I am a strigil. There is no record of what I can do because no one has ever cared enough to find out. Do your job, little birdie, get back to us at the end of everything for your performance review. What would happen if a strigil sinned? Would there be consequences? And if I could do it, if, ontologically speaking, it would be allowed to occur, how? These are worthy questions! The first experiment was obvious. I broke a man’s neck in Oboedientia Sector. For a minute, I thought I’d gotten it right on my first go. But no, he just sort of shivered and put his head right and went on his way. It seemed the rules held for me as well as him. After that I kept it all in my head. The project. I thought it out while the Renaissance idiots poured in, while I walked my beat, while I watched you fumble with a sad little dime store potboiler in the corner like one of the chronic masturbators down in Desidia. Nothing physical would do it. I should have realized that—we do not move in the realm of the physical. I had to act upon the nature of a soul, to alter it so that it could not remain whole. And it would work—Belacqua, this is the important thing! It would work because of that smear of free will, that tiny table scrap of self a strigil owns. I have to be able to act freely, or else I could not arrest or judge or mete out punishment. You have to be allowed to plunk away at your silly stories, because not even the font of all can build a being of judgment without building a being of perversity.”

Tomek put his hands on the window sill and let the wind off the mud plain buffet his face.

“When I met Pietta I knew she would let me do anything to her. She was in despair. They all are, for awhile, but hers was frozen and depthless, a continuation of who she had always been, just spooling on into the black forever. And she was right. It’s not fair. It’s all grotesque. That little spit of living and all this ocean of penance. She wanted it, Belacqua. She did.”

“I doubt that very much, Corporal.”

“You don’t understand. She didn’t care. She saw the writing on the wall and the writing said: Fuck This Place. She just wanted something to happen. We ran through all the sins first. I fucked her right away—small mercy that we are not built sexless as the angels. Lust is the easiest. I cleaned out the automat and shoved it all down her throat till cream and syrup and relish and grease poured down her chest. She puked it all up, of course, the dead can’t eat. Then on to the next like kids at a fairground—we hurled loathing and envy at each other, at the mountain, perfectly honest, more profanity than grammar could hold. I drew up a rage and beat her though no bruises came up. We skipped sloth since Nowhere is the home and hearth of sloth, and Belacqua, nothing I could do could make that woman proud. But it was all useless anyway, her flesh took it all as calmly as water. And so I had to retreat and think again.

“Solutions come so strangely, Belacqua. They steal in. Just the way you saw my scissors and knew what I’d done, your mind leaping over your habits and your inertia to arrive at a conclusion that is as much dream as logic, I knew. I knew how to kill my Pietta. I returned to her that night. I held her in my arms, and, one by one, I buried her in virtues. I gave her all my belongings freely and her nose shot blood onto the flagstones. I cradled her chastely with no thought of her body and bruises rose up on her thighs. I groveled before her and before her I was nothing, and her fingers snapped. I tended her patiently while she screamed, and upomovn carved itself into her back. I persevered, and my diligence choked her like hands. I whispered to her all the kindnesses her husband withheld, that her son, being a child, could not imagine, and the extraordinary thing was I meant them, Belacqua. I meant them with all my being. I loved her and her throat split side to side like a pomegranate. Then I shoved her out the window and watched her fall. I pushed her from this world, and all the violence on her body was but the marks of her passage. Neither virtue nor sin can be committed in this place. Nowhere cannot bear it. What they do to one another matters little enough—they have chosen their course and proceed along it, stupid and wasteful and unfair as it is. But I am neither alive nor dead, neither mortal nor immortal, just meanly made, with the barest thought. And so are you, Belacqua. The meanly made may sin—who could expect better? Sin is easy. But for me—for us—to act with virtue is a violence to the whole of existence. And now she is gone and my questions answered. Nothing happened. I was not punished. I was not even found out. I am not morally culpable, because He will not deign to look at me long enough to condemn. When an angel does wrong, Hell must be invented out of whole cloth to contain his sorry carcass. But we? We are nothing, and no one. And I think it is beautiful.”

THERE IS a grinding sound before she appears, like stone against stone. One moment there is nothing, the next there is Pietta, though if she heard that name now, she would not recognize it, nor even comprehend the idea of a word used to signify a person. Her mind is a silver fruit lying clean and open, without seed or rot or juice. She opens her eyes and her eyes are black, black and several, ringed round her skull like a crown so that she sees everywhere at once. She moves her legs and her legs are powerful, shaggy, heavy with silver, braided, matted fur. Her claws and her tusks scrape on the bedrock beneath the mudplain as she moves with the sleuth of other bears, because nothing in this place has ever happened only once, their ursine sounds and their scents stretching before them toward the city they love but no longer understand, except that it is a warm place in the night, a heart beating in a bloodless land, and when they touch the walls, they remember, faintly, distantly, the feeling of being loved.

DETECTIVE INSPECTOR BELACQUA gave the signal, and every window in Nowhere closed against the man with the raven’s head. Tomek’s caws and cries far below echoed the length of everything, his pleas, his reasons, all of it swallowed by the grey clouds and the long nothing-and-no-one of the endless mudplain and the red stars beyond. The mountain, for a moment, stood silent, all the lights still and dim.

Belacqua wept against the shutters, and he wept for a century before opening them again.