Shoggoths in Bloom (8 page)

She does it anyway. “You figured out how to talk to me.”

“I did,” he says. “Come here. Put your hands on the plate. We don’t have much time.”

“Before my mother stops us?”

He chitters at her, his antennae bristling. “Before the program ends. This is a simulation. I am the last remaining, and we used the last of the power to reach you. We looked and looked, and you were the first we found.”

“You’re dying?”

“Our sun is dying,” he says, and her face crumples painfully. She sniffs back stinging. “Soon, the computers will fail. We’ve lived in them for a very long time. The rest have gone ahead, to conserve power. I chose to stay and search.”

“But you can’t—I just got to talk to you—”

“Will you let me give you our history?”

“Of course,” she says, reaching out. He stops her, though, as sharply as he urged before, his manipulator indenting the flesh of her hand.

“Wait,” he says. “I will put it in your brain. You have to give permission. It could change you.”

She stops. His manipulator is cool and hard, the surface sandpapery. “Change?”

“Make you more like us.”

She looks at him. His antennae feather down, lying against his dorsal surface like the ears of an anxious dog. He’s still. Maybe waiting, she doesn’t know. “And if I don’t, you die.”

“We die,” he says. “Either way.”

She stares at him. The stinging in her eyes grows worse, a pressure in her sinuses and through her skull. She pulls her hand from his manipulator, reaches out resolutely, and places both palms on warm yellow metal as the first tear burns her cheek.

“Don’t mourn.” The voice is uninflected, but his palp reaches out softly and strokes her leg. “You will remember us.”

We made it to nine. I yanked my hands back, Hadiyah pressed hers down. The first push didn’t do it. She realigned, lips moving on what must have been a prayer now, and thrust forward sharply, the weight of her shoulders behind it.

Something glistening shot from Tara’s lips and sailed over Hadiyah’s shoulder, and Tara took a deep harsh breath and started to cough, her eyes squinched shut, tears running down her cheeks.

“He’s gone,” she said, when she got her breath.

She rolled over and grabbed my hands, and wailed against my shoulder like a much younger child, and would not be consoled.

There’s enough room in Tara’s implant for three or four Libraries of Congress. And it seems to be full. It also seems like she’s the only one who can make sense of the information, and not all of it, and not all the time.

She’s different now. Quieter. Not withdrawn, but . . . sad. And she looks at me sometimes with these calm, strange eyes, and I almost feel as if she’s the mother.

I should have stopped her sooner. I didn’t think.

At least she hasn’t tried to strangle herself again.

Hadiyah suggested we not tell anybody what had happened just yet, and I agreed. I won’t let my daughter wind up in some government facility, being pumped for clues to alien technology and science.

I won’t.

She’s ten years old. She’s got school to get through. We’ll figure the rest of it out in our own time. And maybe she’ll be more like herself again as time goes by.

But the first thing she did when she recovered was paint a watercolor. She said it was a poem.

She said it was her name.

“Old man, old man, do you tinker?”

Weyland Smith raised up his head from his anvil, the heat rolling beads of sweat across his face and his sparsely forested scalp, but he never stopped swinging his hammer. The ropy muscles of his chest knotted and released with every blow, and the clamor of steel on steel echoed from the trees. The hammer looked to weigh as much as the Smith, but he handled it like a bit of cork on a twig. He worked in a glade, out of doors, by a deep cold well, just right for quenching and full of magic fish. Whoever had spoken was still under the shade of the trees, only a shadow to one who squinted through the glare of the sun.

“Happen I’m a blacksmith, Miss,” he said.

As if he could be anything else, in his leather apron, sweating over forge and anvil in the noonday sun, limping on a lamed leg.

“Do you take mending, old man?” she asked, stepping forth into the light.

He thought the girl might be pretty enough in a country manner, her features a plump-cheeked outline under the black silk veil pinned to the corners of her hat. Not a patch on his own long-lost swan-maiden Olrun, though Olrun had left him after seven years to go with her two sisters, and his two brothers had gone with them as well, leaving Weyland alone.

But Weyland kept her ring and with it her promise. And for seven times seven years to the seventh times, he’d kept it, seduced it back when it was stolen away, held it to his heart in fair weather and foul. Olrun’s promisering. Olrun’s promise to return.

Olrun who had been fair as ice, with shoulders like a blacksmith, shoulders like a giantess.

This girl could not be less like her. Her hair was black and it wasn’t pinned, all those gleaming curls a-tumble across the shoulders of a dress that matched her hair and veil and hat. A little linen sack in her left hand was just the natural color, and something in it chimed when she shifted. Something not too big. He heard it despite the tolling of the hammer that never stopped.

“I’ll do what I’m paid to.” He let his hammer rest, and shifted his grip on the tongs. His wife’s ring slid on its chain around his neck, catching on chest hair. He couldn’t wear it on his hand when he hammered. “And if’n ‘tis mending I’m paid for, I’ll mend what’s flawed.”

She came across the knotty turf in little quick steps like a hobbled horse—as if it was her lamed, and not him—and while he turned to thrust the bent metal that would soon be a steel horse-collar into the coals again she passed her hand over his bench beside the anvil.

He couldn’t release the bellows until the coals glowed red as currant jelly, but there was a clink and when her hand withdrew it left behind two golden coins. Two coins for two hands, for two pockets, for two eyes.

Wiping his hands on his matted beard, he turned from the forge, then lifted a coin to his mouth. It dented under his teeth, and he weighed its heaviness in his hand. “A lot for a bit of tinkering.”

“Worth it if you get it done,” she said, and upended her sack upon his bench.

A dozen or so curved transparent shards tumbled red as forge-coals into the hot noon light, jingling and tinkling. Gingerly, he reached out and prodded one with a forefinger, surprised by the warmth.

“My heart,” the woman said. “ ’Tis broken. Fix it for me.”

He drew his hand back. “I don’t know nowt about women’s hearts, broken or t’otherwise.”

“You’re the Weyland Smith, aren’t you?”

“Aye, Miss.” The collar would need more heating. He turned away, to pump the bellows again.

“You took my gold.” She planted her fists on her hips. “You can’t refuse a task, Weyland Smith. Once you’ve taken money for it. It’s your geas.”

“Keep tha coin,” he said, and pushed them at her with a fingertip. “I’m a smith. Not never a matchmaker, nor a glassblower.”

“They say you made jewels from dead men’s eyes, once. And it was a blacksmith broke my heart. It’s only right one should mend it, too.”

He leaned on the bellows, pumping hard.

She turned away, in a whisper of black satin as her skirts swung heavy by her shoes. “You took my coin,” she said, before she walked back into the shadows. “So fix my heart.”

Firstly, he began with a crucible, and heating the shards in his forge. The heart melted, all right, though hotter than he would have guessed. He scooped the glass on a bit of rod stock and rolled it on his anvil, then scraped the gather off with a flat-edged blade and shaped it into a smooth ruby-bright oval the size of his fist.

The heart crazed as it cooled. It fell to pieces when he touched it with his glove, and he was left with only a mound of shivered glass.

That was unfortunate. There had been the chance that the geas would grant some mysterious assistance, that he would guess correctly and whatever he tried first would work. An off chance, but stranger things happened with magic and his magic was making.

Not this time. Whether it was because he was a blacksmith and not a matchmaker or because he was a blacksmith and not a glassblower, he was not sure. But hearts, glass hearts, were outside his idiom and outside his magic.

He would have to see the witch.

The witch must have known he was coming, as she always seemed to know. She awaited him in the doorway of her pleasant cottage by the wildflower meadow, more wildflowers—daisies and buttercups—waving among the long grasses of the turfed roof. A nanny goat grazed beside the chimney, her long coat as white as the milk that stretched her udder pink and shiny. He saw no kid.

The witch was as dark as the goat was white, her black, black hair shot with silver and braided back in a wrist-thick queue. Her skirts were kilted up over her green kirtle, and she handed Weyland a pottery cup before he ever entered her door. It smelled of hops and honey and spices, and steam curled from the top; spiced heated ale.

“I have to see to the milking,” she said. “Would you fetch my stool while I coax Heidrún off the roof?”

“She’s shrunk,” Weyland said, but he balanced his cup in one hand and limped inside the door to haul the stool out, for the witch’s convenience.

The witch clucked. “Haven’t we all?”

By the time Weyland emerged, the goat was down in the dooryard, munching a reward of bruised apples, and the witch had found her bucket and was waiting for the stool. Weyland set the cup on the ledge of the open window and seated the witch with a little bit of ceremony, helping her with her skirts. She smiled and patted his arm, and bent to the milking while he went to retrieve his ale.

Once upon a time, what rang on the bottom of the empty pail would have been mead, sweet honeyed liquor fit for gods. But times had changed, were always changing, and the streams that stung from between the witch’s strong fingers were rich and creamy white.

“So what have you come for, Weyland Smith?” she asked, when the pail was a quarter full and the milk hissed in the pail rather than sang.

“I’m wanting a spell as’ll mend a broken heart,” he said.

Her braid slid over her shoulder, hanging down. She flipped it back without lifting her head. “I hadn’t thought you had it in you to fall in love again,” she said, her voice lilting with the tease.

“ ’Tisn’t my heart as is broken.”

That did raise her chin, and her fingers stilled on Heidrún’s udder. Her gaze met his; her eyebrows lifted across the fine-lined arch of her forehead. “Tricky,” she said. “A heart’s a wheel,” she said. “Bent is bent. It can’t be mended. And even worse—” She smiled, and tossed the fugitive braid back again. “—if it’s not your heart you’re after fixing.”

“Din’t I know it?” he said, and sipped the ale, his wife’s ring—worn now—clicking on the cup as his fingers tightened.

Heidrún had finished her apples. She tossed her head, long ivory horns brushing the pale silken floss of her back, and the witch laughed and remembered to milk again. “What will you give me if I help?”

The milk didn’t ring in the pail any more, but the gold rang fine on the dooryard stones.

The witch barely glanced at it. “I don’t want your gold, blacksmith.”

“I din’t want for hers, neither,” Weyland said. “’Tis the half of what she gave.” He didn’t stoop to retrieve the coin, though the witch snaked a softshoed foot from under her kirtle and skipped it back to him, bouncing over the cobbles.

“What can I pay?” he asked, when the witch met his protests with a shrug.

“I didn’t say I could help you.” The latest pull dripped milk into the pail rather than spurting. The witch tugged the bucket clear and patted Heidrún on the flank, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and the pail between her ankles while the nanny clattered over cobbles to bound back up on the roof. In a moment, the goat was beside the chimney again, munching buttercups as if she hadn’t just had a meal of apples. A large, fluffy black-and-white cat emerged from the house and began twining the legs of the stool, miaowing.

“Question ’tisn’t what tha can or can’t do,” he said sourly. “ ’Tis what tha will or won’t.”

The witch lifted the pail and splashed milk on the stones for the cat to lap. And then she stood, bearing the pail in her hands, and shrugged. “You could pay me a Name. I collect those.”

“If’n I had one.”

“There’s your own,” she countered, and balanced the pail on her hip as she sauntered toward the house. He followed. “But people are always more disinclined to part with what belongs to them than what doesn’t, don’t you find?”

He grunted. She held the door for him, with her heel, and kicked it shut when he had passed. The cottage was dim and cool inside, only a few embers banked on the hearth. He sat when she gestured him onto the bench, and not before. “No Names,” he said.

“Will you barter your body, then?”

She said it over her shoulder, like a commonplace. He twisted a boot on the rushes covering a rammed-earth floor and laughed. “And what’d a bonny lass like thaself want with a gammy-legged, fusty, coal-black smith?”

“To say I’ve had one?” She plunged her hands into the washbasin and scrubbed them to the elbow, then turned and leaned against the stand. When she caught sight of his expression, she laughed as well. “You’re sure it’s not your heart that’s broken, Smith?”

“Not this sennight.” He scowled around the rim of his cup, and was still scowling as she set bread and cheese before him. Others might find her intimidating, but Weyland Smith wore the promise-ring of Olrun the Valkyrie. No witch could mortify him. Not even one who kept Heidrún— who had dined on the leaves of the World Ash—as a milch-goat.

The witch broke his gaze on the excuse of tucking an escaped strand of his long gray ponytail behind his ear, and relented. “Make me a cauldron,” she said. “An iron cauldron. And I’ll tell you the secret, Weyland Smith.”

“Done,” he said, and drew his dagger to slice the bread.

She sat down across the trestle. “Don’t you want your answer?”