Phaeduin made his way back to that red hallway, taking off his helmet as he went. His delicate ears ached when freed of its burden. He muttered, rolled his shoulders, stuck the helmet under one arm, and went deeper into this place called the Maniaque. For a thousand years the people of these northern nations had fought a bitter war against the unified southlands. The north had somehow survived setback after setback, disaster after disaster, and now to turn the tide in the end? The only explanation, Phaeduin and his coconspirators had agreed, was the magic suddenly working in service to the north.
Phaeduin had searched the streets of this city for months, afraid that the northlanders would catch him, waiting all along to hear the quiet song of magic. What he’d heard instead was a scream in his nightmares. What he’d seen instead were these halls, these red-draped halls, these colorful rooms. The commoners in the northlands apparently lacked the talent with magic to sense such omens, so it took a spy from the southlands to hear it. What secret would Phaeduin find here? Something that empowered the northlanders? Or something wicked that lived in their midst, unknown even to them?
At the end of the hallway, Phaeduin found another bright room, this one covered in yellow and purple cloth. Pedestals around the middle of the room supported simple mannequins for assembling clothes: headless, limbless forms dressed in garments half-made or just begun, strips of cloth pinned together or wrapped uncut. Tables were heavy with bolts of cloth, sketches under paperweights. Phaeduin looked through the sketches, but they were just designs and notes. Nothing supernatural.
Then Phaeduin heard a low song, a sad and echoing song. He followed it to a side of the room, pushed aside a rack of clothes, and found a pile of boxes that were long and wide and shallow. Dress boxes, or perhaps the right size to hold a mannequin waiting for cloth. But Phaeduin placed an armored hand on one and felt magic stir within. Pulling his dirk from his belt, he wedged it beneath the box lid and pried it open.
* * *
Amo drifted in dream and nightmare, pulled through images, sensations, histories, as though by a spirit that had some destination in mind. There was a pit somewhere in deep mountains, a tunnel that ran beneath the world and connected it to another, not a place any mortal should have knowledge of. Dark things tangled there, like a mass of worms, screaming horrible prophecies in languages spoken just the once and never again.
Elsewhere, the southern mountains were ice and snowfall, a lake at such a high altitude that it had been frozen since the beginning of the world. Against the lakebed was a layer of semi-fluid frost within which unthinkable, smooth-boned creatures churned, wriggling like parasites in between the layers of your skin, unaware that anything existed above or below them. But above there dwelled feathered beings who wove great halls like gargantuan nests, wrote scrolls somehow wiser and more knowledgeable than those of all the peoples they’d never spoken to; oh, they’d seen the peoples of lower altitudes, but only ever watched them from a curious distance.
Supernatural things seethed in every corner of the world. Natural things, sometimes more horrible, watched with mundane eyes and imagined a million unique evils.
At more reasonable elevations, away from feathery scholars, away from the pit and the world-eating worms, unassuming southlanders built cities in the shadows of ruins they dared not enter. Forgotten, ancient peoples had built great gates into the mountains, labyrinths that ran deep into their roots. Wind and snow howled out of the gates at all times of year, ignoring seasons, ignoring day and night, the very earth crying out without end.
“It’s a song,” the tall woman told her children. “The mountains aren’t a very good singer, but let’s not be rude about it. Everyone gets to sing if they want to, right?”
A city of white marble and bleached wood stood on a broad cliff beneath a peak, the jutting stone like a nail beneath which they hid. Endless avalanches poured like rivers to either side of the city, sucked up by unthinkably ancient gates beneath them. The city exhaled the heat of steam and hummed with electric lights. Amo had a strong memory of listening to the tall woman tell her stories to the children, Amo themself sitting near the bubbling radiator, fresh coffee in hand while they stared out the window. Soldiers in long white coats loaded huge shells into cannons that lined the cliff.
The most defensible place in the world, they’d called it.
All memories and images vexed by the press of a searing hand to Amo’s chest, a voice shouting, “Amo! Amo, wake up!” and Amo surged upright, shouting in pain and knocking the hand away. The shouting voice bellowed wordlessly, moving fast away, choking and bubbling in sudden desperation. Amo’s gaze snapped around desperately while they grabbed at their burned chest – pain shocking through their bones and lungs, seeming to burn out their back – and saw that they were still in that damn boutique. Walls draped in red and yellow. Amo sat in a wooden box in a pile of other boxes.
Shadowed firelight shivered around them. A horrible, stark shadow swept this way and that. Black and red fluid poured from the ceiling, splattering a half-dressed mannequin in the middle of the room, staining the floor. Thick and bubbling, pungent. Amo looked up to see an armored body writhing painfully against the brazier on the ceiling. Recognizing the scars on the armor, Amo whispered, “Phaeduin?” beneath the bellowing voice.
The body dropped, hit the mannequin and dragged it down. There was no helmet on the body, no head to wear a helmet. A decapitated, armored corpse lay in pools of black and red, tangled with a mannequin. Belatedly, the sheer silk of the mannequin’s half-made dress fell, a shroud of yellow and green with white lace.
“Phaeduin?” Amo said. In the silence, they heard the sound of someone counting numbers: 57 and 23. 80 and 72. 132 and, oh, un-19. 113, right! Amo leaned forward, tumbling from the box. When they hit the ground, they bounced quick to their feet, realizing their nakedness, remembering the knife wound that remained a piquing pain on their back, and still aching with that burn through their chest. Amo spat curses and ran.
