Ride the Moon: An Anthology (9 page)

“You do know how to disarm the bomb, right?”

Leen approached the pedestal. “There's no time.”

The murmurs dropped into a silence, until it rose to a roar. People trampled, rushed around like animals.

Zerj dashed through the throng to join her. “What do you mean there's no time? Just turn it off!”

“I ... I can't.” She removed the mask.

“Nonsense. I'll help. What do you need me to do?”

“You're a good man, Mr. Faulon. If the gods ever return, I know they'll be on your side.” She met his eyes for several breaths—it must have been enhanced by the perfume's effects, the way it seemed to shore up heavy bulwarks against the precious seconds bleeding into nothing. She then took his head in her hands, kissed him, donned the mask once more and threw herself onto the pedestal.

The flash was so brilliant that it knocked him back, however much he wanted to dive after her again.

When the flash burned away and returned the ballroom to the clutches of moonlight, both the bomb and Leen were gone. He could do nothing more than sit on his knees and stare.

Kheman joined him, rested a hand on his shoulder. “I don't know how you did it this time.”

Zerj made no answer.

“Well, I can't wait to hear how you're going to explain this one.”

“Kheman, all I know is that this stupid perfume of ours works like a charm.”

The sky has not always been dark.

“My lord,” I greet Moon in his cell. A simple room: obsidian blocks set with a thousand mirrors. There are no doors. “How do you fare?”

Moon sits in the center of the floor, hands relaxed upon knees, face serene and eyes closed. He will not look at the mirrors. “Better than you shall.”

I kneel beside him and trace the line of his smooth, silver jaw. I remember his lips, cool and soft, a caress in the never-darkness. “More empty threats, my lord? Surely, if your lover were to come to your aid, he would have done so.” I smile, but Moon does not see. I grip his chin until dark bands spread across his flesh.

He shrugs aside the bruises. “Your time is not ours.”

I release his jaw. One day, I will force him to look on me and remember. But not yet. (My weakness will show, not his.) “Sun will not come for you,” I tell my once-lover. “He is vain and stands alone in the sky now.”

Moon touches a finger against the darkened imprints of my hand upon his chin. His eyes remain closed. “You know nothing,” Moon says, lip curled. I used to love that contempt, the hauteur, the pain-laced affection.

I laugh, furious. “Alas, my lord, I know everything.”

I step through the mirrors and leave him alone.

The sky once contained three sources of light. Few live who remember that now.

“Sire,” says my architect, a slim, dark-eyed man. Gray shivers in his hair and beard, wrinkles sketch his weathered skin. “The workers grow anxious. Crops are failing, and our livestock is withering. How soon before we have light again?”

He was beautiful, once, and still I find him so, a thousand years later. But even I cannot forestall the end.

I look away from his patient gaze. “Soon,” I promise. “Soon.”

His hands clench at his sides, knuckles paled with strain, but he bows and does not protest. His time is not mine.

Three beings once lived in the sky: brothers, lovers, friends. “We will always be together,” they said to each other. “Nothing will come between us.”

Sun paces his cell, each step and each turn sharp, taut. The walls are bleached, two mirrors parallel on floor and ceiling, and there are no doors. (My architect built each cell around its occupant.)

He spins, golden radiance flaring mane-like around his face and shoulders. “Release me!”

I lean against the inside walls that burn under his stare. “You have answered none of my questions, my lord. Did I not tell you, your cooperation will result in your freedom from this cage?”

Sun cocks his head and pauses, a rare moment of stillness. “You would make demands? I can incinerate everything you hold dear with a thought!” He stalks across the floor and slams both palms against the wall on either side of my face. Heat curls against my jaw. “You do not know what suffering is.”

I incline my chin. “Perhaps.” I smile, slowly, and tilt my face up to his. White-hot light flares in his eyes. “But I still hold you here, do I not? Who now controls whom?”

He seizes my throat and slams my body against the floor. Heat sears my skin and knots in my belly. I have never flinched from his touch. I cough and lie still when he drives a knee into my ribs and sharpens each fingertip into razors. Pain means nothing any longer. Has he forgotten?

The first cut slices my shoulder from collarbone to elbow. Heat burns into bone. I arch my spine under his weight. “Stop,” I cry, hollow protest.

(I will never tell him how much I missed this.)

“You will free me.” Sun's words slide molten into my ear and he rips away the illusion of clothes. His reflection turns the white room into a furnace. His flesh burns against mine. “Or I will destroy you.”

(You cannot destroy me twice, Lord Sun.)

I let him have his way. I let him think he has broken my will. I let him believe I am nothing but a mortal lord: he refuses to see who I am.

When he is finished, I call the pieces of myself together and slip through the mirror. Sun screams in rage as I leave him trapped once more. Alone.

When the architect constructed each cell, he asked me, “Shall I build them below the earth?”

“No,” I said, and pointed to the tower. Cold stone stretched into the heavens, higher and higher until no eye could see its apex. “Construct two arms from the peak and build them there. In the sky they will never see.”

Moon sits unmoving as ever when I step through the mirrors.

“My lord,” I say with mock surprise. “I thought you would be freed by now, carried back to the sky in Sun's arms.”

“What have you done with him, brother?” Moon asks.

My body tingles with shock. I press a palm against smooth glass so I do not stumble. He remembers? How long has he known?

“An answer for an answer,” I tell him.

Moon's lips twitch, a cruel smile. “Beg me.”

I backhand him across the cheek. “No.”

He laughs, watery silver light bleeding from split skin. He licks away the trickle as it reaches his mouth. “Then you will get nothing.”

“Oh, I will.” I grip his jaw and wrench his neck back, his face tilted toward mine. He bruises so easily, but he never breaks. (Not as I did.) “Tell me why you betrayed me, or you will never see the sky again.”

Moon leans into my hands. “You can beg me better than that, brother.”

I twist his neck until bones splinter. He only smiles. Even in this constructed body, a prison itself, I cannot destroy him. Not the way I wish.

He must answer me. I must know why.

But I will never beg again.

I was the stars, once, when the sky was not so dark. I gave the heavens light, faint beside and between the Moon and the Sun.

I never kept them apart.

The architect limps into my chambers. I know his footsteps, though they are slower now, and tired. “Sire.”

I turn away from the windows. The sky is still dark.

Blood crusts his beard and stains his wool shirt. I swallow a worried cry and glide to his side, cup his face, search for the wound. I am careful my touch will never harm him. The blood isn't his. I exhale, relieved, and search his eyes. He has never lied to me.

“Riots,” he says. “The workers are storming the gates. They demand you bring back the light.” Wine sours his breath. When has he ever drunk? “Open the cages, sire.”

“I cannot. Not yet.” I turn from him and look out, down into the darkness. Spread like wings on either side of my tower are the cells: impenetrable, unbreakable. All I must do is shatter the mirrors inside each, mirrors only I can reach.

And then my brothers would turn upon the world they exiled me into. Sun would scour the air with flame and Moon would untether the seas and drive them onto the land.

It took me these thousand years to build a tower that brushes the heavens, to let Moon and Sun forget I was once with them in their majesty, before I lured them into this world with rumor of a fallen star. I knew my former-lovers well. How could either resist finding a way to brighten the part-empty skies again? They were incomplete with only each other.

(I had been multitude, and they sundered me, and the loneliness swallowed everything. They left me alone.)

The architect touches my shoulder, his voice an aged husk. “The lower floors are barricaded. But most of the knights have turned against you, as well as the alchemists. The doors won't hold forever, sire.”

Only he remains at my side.

One lamp glows in the chamber. It has no warmth, like the Sun, nor brilliance, like the Moon.

“How long has it been since I took Sun and Moon from the heavens?” I ask, weary. I feel the passage of days but do not count them any longer. In the dark skies, it is all the same.

“Three months, sire.” A sigh rattles in his ribs. “When, if not now?”

“They will know who I am.” And then they will take me back. They must. “Soon.”

The architect's fingers loosen on my shoulder. I lay my hand over his and hold tight. “Speak your mind.”

“I have asked for little in my... lifetime.” His forehead rests against the base of my neck, between my shoulder blades. (He was the first to find me after I was cast down. He reminded me so keenly of Sun and Moon, but gentler. Mortal. I could not let him go.) His body trembles. “I am tired. Release me, sire.”

I cannot answer.

Sun trails heat patterns along the walls of his cell. His fists leave blackened pocks on stone. “You lie.”

“Do I, my lord?” I catch his wrist and a handful of molten hair. I pull him around, our faces a breath—an eternity—apart. “Who but I could keep you here? Who but I could drive you mad? You know who I am. Tell me why you did this.” I tug him closer, forcing the words into his mouth with lip and tongue. “Tell me why you betrayed me.”

“I will tell you nothing,” Sun says, kissing me back. “It will not matter. We will not take you back to the skies.” His nails impale my wrists above my head. “Not even if you beg us... brother.”

He knows.

The world did not fear when the stars went out. Sun and Moon shone brighter, fiercer, and quelled the whispers upon the land: Why did the stars disappear?

The architect waits patiently in my chamber, silent. He sits against the wall, eyes closed, I still cannot answer him. The dark panic swallows me as it did when I fell.

I do not know my place. Scarcely any light lingers within me. I have been dying for a thousand years, and soon I will go dark unless I return to the skies. Unless Sun and Moon hold me again in the heavens, unless we are three, unless we are not alone.

I let the world run its course. This city, this tower, is all I have built and sustained. Kings have become dust; the world has been conquered, and fallen, and risen to be conquered again. Stars are but a myth on the tongues of mortals.

“I have never wished to say this, sire,” the architect whispers. “But I must.” His breath mists in the air. “I preserved hope—hope that you would convince them to return with you. That all would be the way it was in my youth.”

He is the only one who remembers the stars.

I turn away, but he catches my arm.

“Just as the earth bled you near to death, the earth-born stone will deplete them. I monitor each cell, and I...” His voice crumbles. “Sire, they cannot return to the skies. None of you can reach your home again. Not after so long in this world.”

“No,” I say. He has never lied to me. “Impossible.”

“Our world is ended.” Salt crusts his cheeks. “I do not wish to see it. I have seen too much. I beg you, sire, let me go. I cannot bear this everlasting darkness, this cold.”

I flee through the mirrors so I do not hear his pleas.

The Sun and the Moon bound the Stars without warning.

“Do not do this!” Stars begged, over and over. “Please, my brothers, do not destroy us!”

Unheeding, Sun and Moon cast the Stars down into the world.

Alone.

“My lord Stars,” Moon greets me. “How do you fare?”

I crouch before him. He tilts his head and smiles. I grip his jaw, trembling. “I have killed the sun.”

The moon does not believe me.

“And I have killed you,” I whisper, furious. Undone. “We three will never touch the sky again.”

Moon opens his eyes. The cell is like the heavens, when I still webbed the darkness with points of light. But he does not smile.

When I look at him, I can see truth: his skin is darker, weaker, the radiance in his eyes dimmer. Sun is the same, raging in his cell, growing colder.

In time—and it matters not if it is celestial or mortal—they will both fade, as have I. All the lights in the heavens will go out.

Regret supplants the terrible pain inside me, the bitter knowledge I will never be again with the Sun and the Moon.

I begin to shatter the mirrors, one by one.

“You were becoming too bright,” Moon says at last. Glass shimmers, covering the obsidian in a patina of silver. “We feared you would eclipse us both.”

I pause, a hand on the final mirror. Laughter seethes in my throat. “I would have snuffed out every part of myself if you asked.”

“We knew.” Moon cups shattered glass in his palms and lets it trickle through his fingers, glittering with his radiant light. “It was less painful to destroy you than if you had destroyed yourself.”

Glass grinds into my feet. I cannot endure this knowledge now that it is mine. I yearn to forget, I who have always remembered. It will hurt less, in the end.