The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

CHAPTER XVI
THE COUNTRY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

In Which September Is Observed and Observes Herself

September saw nothing but blackness.

Her feet stood in something warm and wet-at first she thought it was a puddle where they all dripped together out of the storm. But as the wetness rose up, past her knees, past her waist and her tummy and her chest, panic rushed up, faster than the wetness, clutching her throat so tight she could not cry out. Liquid flowed over her face in the dark, seeping into her eyes and her mouth. September thrashed and beat at the stuff, but she could see nothing, feel nothing, move nowhere.

And as suddenly as it had engulfed her, it left, draining away into nothing. September opened her eyes, wiping at them, coughing. And everything was full of light.

The Tyguerrotype’s house had no rear wall; it opened up onto another Azimuth, wide and silver and black and white, shade upon shade of charcoal and ash and pearl and oyster and gunpowder and smoke. Not just another Azimuth-many Azimuths, lying one on top of the other like the pages of a book. Everywhere September looked, she saw images wriggling together and apart. A Glasshob-she could not be anything else, her heavy lantern hanging down on a seaweed-wrapped stalk before her eyes, her goat-legs furry and gray-took one step toward them. But a dozen copies of her leapt out in every direction, bolting off in every direction. Houses vibrated, their images layered three and four and eight deep. Yet you could not really call it deep. Depth seemed to have fallen asleep and forgotten to set its alarm. The Tyguerrotype, the thirteen bouncing Glasshobs, the quivering houses-and September and Saturday, A-Through-L and Candlestick-had a little thickness, but no more than a thick sheet of paper. They were all black and white, the Marid swirling with dark and light like tarnished silver, September a floating pale face in the sea of her inky silks. September looked down at Ell. It took her a moment to realize what she’d done-looked down. Down, at a Wyvern. He was the size of a wolfhound now, just a hair below September’s own height. White tears welled up in his silver eyes-but did not fall. She put out her arms and pulled Ell into them, and in her heart she thrilled a little, for she had always wanted to be able to hold him all entire this way, snuggle him even though she knew very well he was not a dog. But the poor Wyverary turned his face away in terror and shame and the thrill died away in an instant.

“Don’t cry,” she said with a voice her mother used when September was disconsolate. “You have to teach me to be the bigger one, out of the two of us. I daresay I won’t be very good at it, at first.” Ell straightened a little at that, but not much.

Not all was black and white in the Country of Photography. September did see in the distance a sepia spriggan lecturing to a throng of brown-and-cream gnomes. And there, sitting against the wall of a shivering cafe, sat a single fat man all in the brightest blue, a brocade coat that fell to his toes, his bushy black beard swallowing up a round brown face with wide brown eyes. But he was the only colorful soul in that corner of the Country of Photography.

“They’ve been showing up here and there,” said the Tyguerrotype. “Someone somewhere knows the secret of color photography. I should very much like to meet them, whoever they may be.”

September took a step forward-and stopped short. When she moved, images scattered before her like autumn leaves. Layers of Azimuth peeled off-this one showing Glasshobs standing before the great telescope, straight-backed and dour-faced. That one showing a tired-looking witch waving in front of the same telescope, yet another showing a little boy with a bobcat’s face asleep in the telescope’s plush chair. Wherever September turned her feet, more of the city skittered out in front of her, separating into still frames and blowing out across the very streets they captured. It was like walking through autumn leaves-the leaves scattered before your feet, blowing into the forest where more leaves waited.

“Am I hurting them?” she whispered.

“Oh, no, my little soft-focus dear,” said the Tyguerrotype kindly. “That’s how it is here. The world is an album of pictures, with everyone flipping ahead to see what comes next. When you move, you move the world. Now, it was a Fairy city, wasn’t it? I know I saw one in here somewhere.”

Turing put up his tiger’s paw and tucked his claw into a bit of air. It peeled back like the corner of a stamp-and at the same time he strode forward forcefully. As he flicked his claws and pounded the cobblestones, the city around them flipped and shuffled like pages. Turing walked right through the ruffling images of Azimuth-and then places that were not Azimuth-a wide lunar meadow, a silvery Pandemonium in the afternoon with pookas sipping ices near the Briary, sepia hamadryads picnicking in the Worsted Wood, Groangyre Physickists throwing their heads up into the air at a graduation ceremony. September and her friends hurried after the Tyguerrotype, for behind him the photographs drifted back up, layering on top of one another, shivering back into their shapes and becoming solid once more. Turing descended, or ascended, or dove through, the Country of Photography like a dolphin in water.

September halted, realizing that she had forgotten Aroostook, puttering away patiently behind her. Several images of identical horses grazed around her fenders, their hooves in mid-gallop, not touching the ground. September took a deep breath and decided to try something. She patted her hip. She gave a little whistle, like she would to her little dog when supper was ready. At first, nothing happened. The Model A idled without concern. She whistled again, more sharply.

And Aroostook bounced a little. She rolled forward, tagging along behind her, sticking close to her side. September gave her car a long, concerned look-then dashed after her friends. Aroostook’s horn squwonked joyfully. Photographs burst and riffled before them, blowing aside so fast they blurred together.

Suddenly Saturday cried out; September saw it, too, and without thinking they clutched each others’ hands, their hearts racing together away from the thing they saw.

“What?” yelped Ell. His voice had gotten higher in his shorter, thinner throat. The sound of it pierced September’s fear.

“Did you see that?” she hissed as they ran after the Tyguerrotype, through family portraits of Dodos in the safe mountain cubbies of Walghvogel and unfamiliar canyons draped with silk sails and garlands of drums and stranger still farmhouses and silos and men in stovepipe hats and stern-faced mothers with children on their knees that would have been unremarkable in the world September knew.

“Did we see what?” called Candlestick.

“There it is again!” Saturday gasped.

And then they all saw it-a huge blur passed before them as a photograph spun away. A mass of streaky gray with black bulges within it, a glimpse of teeth, a flash of horns.

“Oh, don’t worry, it’s only a Yeti,” Turing yelled back over his monochrome shoulder.

“How can we possibly not worry?” panted September, who, even though she had no more depth than a playing card, seemed still to possess lungs that could burn and ache. A tiny whelk shell next to a great dark sea floated past and away.

“I did say we have eleven of them in here! No details, though. They’re too bloody fast for that game. They hulk on through like stormclouds, but they’ve got no mouths to complain about the quality of breakfast or eyes to narrow at those they take an unkindness toward. They’re out of focus and that means out of everything.”

September turned her head to look at the blur, receding through the crinkling photographs behind them. She felt an instinct sit up inside her and set its jaw.

“I want to follow it!” she hollered after Turing. The Tyguerrotype stopped. Photos settled and drifted around him like seedpods. “Don’t you think-don’t you think a Yeti, even a blurry one, might want to be near the paw we’re after? Like a magnet, they might be attracted, even if they were so out of focus they couldn’t think sharp.”

September tore off from her pack, dragging Saturday by the hand, bashing back through heavy frames and cellophane films of Ifrits firing meteors through thin silk zeppelins, straining toward the great white blur staining the Country of Photography like spilled ink. Finally, a sound like a shutter cracked, not in her ear but in her mind, in her bones. And September, Saturday, the Wyverary, and Turing the Tyguerrotype all tumbled forward, pitching into a silver-white photograph.

Eleven white blurs ringed a city of blooming, vine-tangled, thorny, lush spires. A gentle curve of land held towers of twisted white wood and black blossoms, boulevards of long gray lawn, pools like mirrors sunk into the streets. In the midst of it all lay a broad pavilion ringed with toadstools, and there, out of a tiered pedestal, rose a vast, withered, ancient, crooked paw, the great dark hand of an abominable snowman.

They had found Patience.

Fairies poured out of every house and turret and garret and hall. They, too, were too fast for a camera to catch-shimmering blurs whipping around the paw like veils in a strange dance, misty, sparkling. Only one had enough focus to show on the film: a young girl, something like the Fairies September had known, like Belinda and Calpurnia and Charlie, wings unfolded and full of prisms, smiling and strong, stretching up on tip-toe to bite the leathery skin of the paw. Her hair was bound up with rowan-berries and six knives hung from her willow-belt.

“Is this all?” asked September urgently. “The only picture of Patience?”

The Tyguerrotype scrabbled at the air again. And suddenly, awfully, the eleven blurs howled. It was the selfsame bawl they had heard on the plain before Ciderskin came to batter them. It was muffled; if a sound could blur, this one did. But it sounded all the same. Several Patiences stripped away like birch bark. The Fairies’ blurs only thickened into a creamy stain that blotted out half the city. The light of them was so bright September shaded her eyes.

And then the blurs were gone. The paw was gone. Turing pulled up a Patience as crisp and clear as ever-and empty. The image settled around them, lines and shapes opening out to let them walk through. September dashed to the pavilion, but nothing remained of the paw or the Fairy girl about to bite it. A thin wind whistled through the gently growing and roughly abandoned place. Across the lawn-roads and toadstools and brambly, rooty palaces, nothing remained but rubbish, useless belongings left where they lay, as if a whole city’s pockets had been turned out onto the ground.

“That’s it?” September cried. “Where did it go?”

“We are all at the whimsy of those who observe us,” said the Tyguerrotype kindly. “We can never know what will move someone in your world to photograph something. Why was it worthy, and not this other thing? Folk choose what to observe, and what they observe, at last, becomes all there is.”

The eleven blurs bawled again, all together. Saturday shuddered. September shook her head. She opened and closed her hands.

“I don’t know what to do now,” she said helplessly. “I was so sure I was right, that the answer was here.” September put her hand on her cheek. Her skin felt hot-and somehow sour, if skin can feel sour. She pulled her hand away. Black paint smeared her palm, inky and bubbling. But it was not paint-it was her palm, dropping away into a burn of nothing. She looked at Saturday-his chest was a lightless bruise of nothingness. Ell’s tail splotched with dark holes.

Turing’s stripes wriggled in distress. “I did say. I did say it was dangerous for you. I couldn’t vouch for your safety. I was very clear! You aren’t meant to stay so long in Country-you aren’t meant to stay more than a second, half of a second, half of a half of a half of a second! I think… I think you’re overdeveloping.”

She felt something tug at her sleeve, but her mind was too busy trying to right itself, to find a new grip on the whole of it.

“What happened to the Fairies,” she whispered, “happened here. We just saw it happen-one moment here, the next gone. Abecedaria said that the Fairies came to the Moon by the thousands-it must have happened to them here. In Patience.” The tug came again. “And if it happened here, then no one could know where the paw is, because there’s no one left to know.”

September yanked her sleeve away in irritation.

And looked down into her own eyes.