Disco Demolition by kimikocha  

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Awakening

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There is nothing.

Only cold, primordial blackness. It is an ocean, and your consciousness floats in it — no larger than a single grain of rice.

You know this place, says a voice.

It doesn’t come from anywhere. It doesn’t need to. It has the patience of something that has waited a very long time and expects to wait longer.

You’ve been here before. Longer than you can remember. Count them with me.

Far off, so far that far stops meaning anything, a small flame goes out.

One.

Another.

Two.

You don’t know what is being counted. Only that each number arrives with a little less light in it than the last, that there wasn’t much to begin with, and that something in you with no name and no body knows exactly how this ends.

Thirteen. Fourteen.

A pause, long enough to be cruel.

All out but one, the voice says, almost gently. Someone is keeping the last one where you can’t see it.

Then something strikes the dark like a fist on a door—

 

 

 

—and you are somewhere.

 

 

Bang. Iron, close by, and again: the hollow, ringing clank of a radiator coming to life, then the tick and settle of metal warming.

You open your eyes onto heaven.

…It’s a ceiling. It takes you a long moment to understand that. Someone, a long time ago, set out to paint the sky up there and never got past the planning. The whole vault is drawn in a single rust-red line on bare plaster: clouds heaped like bolsters, a procession of figures with their arms raised toward the middle, stars marked as tidy little crosses wheeling in a great ring. All outline. Not a patch of color anywhere. Where the faces should be there are blank ovals, a single stroke for the brow, waiting for features that never came.

At the very center, where every raised arm is pointing, the plaster is bare.

You look at that for a while.

DOMINION — Whoever was meant to finish this has failed you. Remember their name. There will be consequences.

DISCORD — Leave it empty. Better that way. Nobody gets to tell you what goes in the middle.

Your head hurts. A deep, swollen throb at the back of your skull, rolling in and out like a tide. You’ve fallen, then, or been struck, or both. You reach for when, and where—

And find nothing. Not darkness; darkness would be something. Just nothing, like reaching for a stair that isn’t there.

You reach for your name.

The same nothing.

It isn’t alarming, exactly. Not yet. It’s more like patting a pocket for something you’re certain you put there. It’ll turn up.

DOMINION — Of course it will. What belongs to you always comes back.

The bed is enormous, and you are not small; you can feel the length and weight of yourself sunk into it, the heavy limbs, the ache radiating from your skull into your shoulders. The canopy above has lost its cloth. Only the frame remains, four dark posts rising to a carved crown with one of its points snapped off. The velvet coverlet over you has faded along old fold lines, pale creases crossing deep wine-red, like a map opened too many times.

Someone has taken your boots off. They stand side by side at the foot of the bed, the toes exactly aligned. Your collar has been loosened. Your coat hangs over the back of a chair, shoulders squared, sleeves arranged to fall straight.

You don’t think you did any of that. You're fairly sure you’ve never done anything like that in your life… whatever your life is.

What are you? Another patch of nothing. It must be here, somewhere. You’re sure of it.

The room, now that you let your eyes wander, is the grandest you can imagine having slept in, and it’s coming apart in every direction at once. Striped wallpaper, maroon and gold faded to the color of weak tea. In one corner a long strip has peeled away, and behind it is stone: pale, far older than the paper, carved with part of a pattern, half a curl of leaves cut off where someone built a wall over it. You would like very much to see the rest. The floor is parquet laid in tight herringbone, a pattern you could follow forever, except for one patch near the window where somebody replaced the boards with plain ones that don't match.

At the window, a writing desk inlaid with pale wood, a little warped. On it, a single pen, laid precisely parallel to the desk's edge, and a sheet of stationery with a letterhead you can't read from here, except for one word in large type: FINEST.

Beyond the glass, grey early light, and across the street a sign in red neon. GLORY, it says. The L flickers, buzzes, goes dark. GORY. Comes back. GLORY. Dies again.

And under all of it, through the floor and the walls, faint and steady as a pulse: a drumbeat. Somewhere close, music is still playing for people who won’t go home.

KAGURA — Four beats to the measure, and every one of them lands on the floor. Somebody has been dancing all night. Listen. It’s almost a heartbeat. It’s almost yours.

The air smells of dust, of old smoke sunk into the curtains, and over that, of something green and bright and steaming.

You turn your head.

There’s someone by the radiator. A small table, a kettle with a cloth-wrapped cord, a teapot, and two cups: one fine porcelain with a thin painted rim, one heavy, chipped hotel cup. The figure pouring has his back half turned, and he moves the way people move when they’ve done a thing a thousand times and still mean to do it perfectly. He sets the kettle’s lid down without a sound.

The room is warm. It’s warmer near him.

His hair falls down his back, spiraling copper fractals going to gold where the window light touches it, and it doesn’t so much catch the light as return it, as if somewhere inside each of the fine strands burns a length of flame. He hasn’t looked over, though he must know, by now, that you’re watching.

Then he turns his head, and he looks at you.

A narrow face of fine, clean lines, utterly still. Eyes the color of topaz held up to a flame. Full, heart-shaped lips; a closed mouth. The bottom lip is round, and ever so very, very slightly plumper than the top. There is nothing in his expression at all.

LATRIA — Hᴇ ɪs ᴛʜᴇ Mᴏsᴛ Bᴇᴀᴜᴛɪғᴜʟ Pᴇʀsᴏɴ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ Wᴏʀʟᴅ.

You find you have no wish to argue.

For a moment neither of you says anything. You’re too busy looking. He’s too busy looking at you looking; or at least, that’s what you assume he’s doing.

He breaks it. Somehow you’d have bet on that.

“How do you feel?”

His voice is low and even, each word set down as carefully as the kettle’s lid. There’s a subtle musicality to it, a lilt that rises and falls without straying far from the pitch.

“Enraptured,” you tell him.

Nothing happens to his face. That’s the strange thing. Nothing at all happens to it, and yet something does: a pause, half a breath long, in which he doesn’t move and doesn’t blink, and the cup in his hand doesn’t so much as tremble.

EXAMEN — There. Something went past behind his eyes. Too fast. You missed it.

Then it’s over, and he’s crossing the room with the porcelain cup on its saucer, steam curling up from it. He holds it out to you at the full length of his arm.

You take it. The cup is so thin the light comes through it. It smells of something green and bright.

He stays standing. “Do you know where you are?”

“In a bed,” you say. “In a room that thinks very highly of itself.”

He doesn’t smile. “Do you know who I am?”

He asks it lightly, the way you’d ask whether it’s raining. You look at him, the whole long, bright length of him, and you search honestly for something to hand him. There’s nothing. Only the same missing stair.

“No,” you say. “Should I?”

Another pause. Longer than the first.

LATRIA — Yᴏᴜ sʜᴏᴜʟᴅ. Hᴏᴡ ᴄᴏᴜʟᴅ ʏᴏᴜ ɴᴏᴛ?

He picks up the chipped cup and holds it in both hands. He doesn’t drink.

“I see,” he says.

“Who are you?”

The half-second again. “Márénë.”

You try it out. It sits strangely in your mouth, like a word from a language you used to speak. “Márénë.” You lift your cup to him. “And who am I?”

“What do you remember?”

“Nothing. That’s rather why I asked.”

“Then we’ll start there.” He says it the way a man opens a ledger.

DOMINION — He didn’t answer you. Note it. No one refuses you a straight answer twice.

“What happened to me?”

“You fell.”

DISCORD — Fell. Things fall all the time. But you’d remember the ground, wouldn’t you?

“From where?”

“Not far,” says Márénë. “Drink your tea. It’s getting cold.”

You drink. It’s good. You decide, with complete certainty, that it could taste much better than this. You drink more of it anyway.

“And what are you to me, Márénë?”

“We’ve worked together.”

LATRIA — Tʜᴀᴛ ɪs ɴᴏᴛ ᴀʟʟ ʜᴇ ɪs.

“Worked at what?”

“We’re investigators.”

DOMINION — Investigators. The ones who ask the questions and expect answers. Yes. That fits.

His cup is still full. He holds it without drinking and without setting it down, long fingers laced around it, perfectly still.

“You haven’t touched yours,” you say. “Should I be worried about mine?”

“If I meant to poison you,” says Márénë, “I wouldn’t have wasted the good cup.”

It startles a laugh out of you. It hurts your head. You laugh anyway, and he watches you do it, his face doing nothing at all, the way someone watches weather from behind a window.

“You’re very hard to read,” you tell him. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“Yes,” he says. “Get dressed. There’s work.”

You get up. The floor tilts once, thinks better of it, and holds.

The clothes are yours, presumably. You woke up in them, after all. A shirt of black silk, rumpled from sleep, with a collar whose points run long and sharp as knives down toward your chest. Trousers that sit high at the waist and flare wide at the ankle. The boots at the foot of the bed have heels stacked three inches high, and when you step into them, the room shrinks to fit you.

DOMINION — Better.

The coat over the chair is the best of it. Heavy black wool, far older than the shirt, cut for an officer of some army no one remembers: frogged across the chest with black braid, rows of tarnished buttons, a high collar stiff with embroidery gone dull with age. You shrug it on. It fits as if it were made for you. Perhaps it was.

CONCUPISCENCE — Silk against the skin, wool on top. Warmth. Weight. You’d like more of this. You’d like more of everything.

Your collar has turned under at the back. Márénë looks at it. His hand twitches upward, then returns to his side.

EXAMEN — He was going to fix that. Then he thought better of it. Why?

On the far wall hangs a mirror in a heavy gilt frame. Its glass is old, the silver behind it failing in dark blooms, like ink spilled under ice.

You go to it. You have to stoop; it was hung for smaller men, and the frame cuts you off at the crown.

The face that looks back is missing pieces. A dark patch swallows one cheekbone; another eats half the mouth. What’s left: black hair, long and gone wild with sleep, curling in every direction at once, obedient to nothing. Heavy brows. A strong nose, a hard jaw, a face built to be looked up at. And the eyes. Something moves in them that isn’t the window’s light, something that has no business being in an eye. In the dim glass, it’s hard to say whether it’s there at all.

DOMINION — There you are. Look at that face. That is a face people kneel to.

Behind you, in the glass, Márénë stands where you left him, holding the chipped cup. The foxing has eaten at everything in the mirror, the bedposts, the window, the stripes of the wallpaper, but not him. He stands in it whole and clear: black from throat to heel, a close black collar rising to his jaw, a dark suit with every line exact, creases pressed sharp enough to cut. A fine chain glints at his waistcoat. Gold glints on his fingers, several rings, one of them a tiny coiled snake with a pinpoint of light for an eye. His hair is the only color he’s allowed himself.

He’s watching you look at yourself. His face does nothing.

You study the stranger with the missing face. A name would help. Something to hang the rest of him on.

It comes up from somewhere very deep, the way a bubble rises from the bottom of a black lake: slowly, and then all at once.

“Māχanāz,” you say. It comes out as a low rumble in your chest, deep and ancient as the late Permian.

It fits. You don’t know why it fits. It fits the way the coat does.

In the mirror, Márénë goes still. Not that he was moving. But there is still, and then there is this.

EXAMEN — Again. Something went by. You almost had it that time.

“Is that what you’d like to be called?” he asks.

“It’s what I am.” You turn from the mirror and its missing pieces, and grin at him. “Isn’t it?”

The half-second. “If you like,” says Márénë. He sets down the cup he never drank from and reaches for his coat. “Shall we?”