Residence

[Quincunx]

Ludmila walked out of a room so overcrowded with visual detail that it would not come into focus. "Sperm donor wants to talk to you," she told the younger woman, pointing at a gaunt miniatures painter as he highlighted the edges of a porcelain snuffbox. The painter raised the brush and set it across a bowl before looking up from his work. He looked at Tzimfemme while she stared past him at his crowded desk, set under a western window. She counted twenty-two jars and shallow dishes filled with pigments, a book of gold leaf hanging from a pin pushed into the wall, a gold-backed mirror, and several utensils, every surface covered with minuscule brushstrokes, and wondered what she would have done with all that wasted time.

 

"You are darker than I thought you might be. No, that isn't true. I am ashamed to say it, but I could not think of you," he murmured. She saw a hard candy flicker in and out of sight, between his lips. "We had to take amnesia drops before the Historical committee would let us live here. . .I am Zacariah, child." Tzimfemme glared at him with her arms folded across her chest. "Ludmila has not told you much? Then I must seem over-familiar. I apologize. . ." He picked up a dagger and lay it flat on his palm before showing it to her. On the blade was painted a neoclassical scene, a naked and barely nubile Diana carrying the body of a stag, and the pommel bronze had been cast as a long-limbed hunting dog. "Please take this. I do not know if you know the myth, but I believe that Diana is your goddess, whether you know it or not."

 

Tzimfemme unfolded her arms and stared into his face. He looked like a puppy standing over a puddle in the carpet, with a squeaky toy in its mouth. Unappealing, but the knife was pretty. She snatched it out of his hands as he swallowed, blinked, and looked at her with less curiosity. "You are one of the Dauphin's new toys? A young one. He is a rake; just shut your eyes and it will be over quickly," Zacariah told her, then took up his brush and snuffbox, and averted his eyes from her.

 

Ludmila caught her arm and drew her away; Tzimfemme felt scratchy cloth under her grip. "He finished the anti-amnesia drop before I could give him the vaccine. Idiot. He's going to die before the year's over--his disease doesn't even exist in this Historical," the older woman cursed. "Be grateful for the purestrain fool, but never be sentimental! If I could only take my own advice!" Ludmila let go of Tzimfemme's arm and ground her fist into the palm of her freed hand. The younger woman, meanwhile, tottered--affection? for her sperm donor?--until Ludmila noticed and pushed her off-balance, onto a nearby fainting couch, shook both her shoulders, and shouted, "Never! Never think that! Neither of us need anything from anyone!"

 

"Parthenes forever--" Tzimfemme thought.

 

"--I didn't dirty myself with anything of his. Nor you." Ludmila's voice rasped, her fingernails bit into the younger woman's shoulders, hard as concrete, and her eyes glinted. Tzimfemme looked inwards instead. Outward details faded.

 

"--Forever fem!" The inwards voice pitched upwards, screechy. "Parthenes, come to order! Quiet! Can you please be quiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiet!" Meigan Czalositz, aka Screech, aka Czalfemme, extended the last vowel until the other girls quit chattering. Tzimfemme turned her gaze outwards again, lay back on the steps with her head resting on the sidewalk's edge, steepled her fingers, and looked down over her club. She was a virgin birth; not even Diana herself could have claimed that. Besides, she was older than all these squealing girls. And besides that, she was the most ruthless. Czalfemme could be the nominal president if she wanted, but she could never lead--

 

"That is so disgusting," remarked Odeafemme, sitting a few steps further down and eyeing Tzimfemme's braids. "How can you put your hair on the street like that? It's filthy!"

 

"Ludmila threw me out three weeks ago," replied the older Parthene, sitting up partway and propping herself up on one elbow. "I've been sleeping out here."

 

Lucia Odea, aka Loony Lucy (to her less kind classmates), covered her mouth with both hands. "Ohmygodno!" She looked over an invisible barrier at Tzimfemme. "Did she mean it? Why didn't you report her to the police or family affairs or the purestrain committee or something? Three weeks?! Have you had any showers since then? Don't people bother you, sleeping out here?"

 

Tzimfemme thumbed the clasp of her high-necked dress; sparks leaped from the flowing hemline into conductive bits of the concrete. "They try and they fry."

 

Odeafemme scrambled away as the older Parthene turned her dress off again. "That's amazing!" she squealed, "and ohmygod I'm being so stupid, did you want to come and live with me? I mean, my family? I'd have to ask them for permission first but how could they possibly say no?. . ." The younger Parthene chattered on while Tzimfemme rolled her head to one side and watched the feet walk by. All at once she held up her hand for silence, seeing a pair of muddy pink sneakers charging towards their stairwell. Their owner caught herself on the railing and hung there, panting for breath; the Parthenes looked up and saw Mirfemme, their newest girl, too young to even be called fem.

 

"Who's the. . .different girl. . ." began the newcomer, waving one hand above her head at the approximate height.

 

"Yrfemme? The Baikal purestrain?" That was Czalfemme, the walking rulebook.

 

"Bride of the Lightning?" That was Tzimfemme.

 

"I saw her. . ." Mirfemme stopped and gasped for breath, "I saw her. . .with a boy. . ." She twisted up her face and spat out the news. "Kissing!

 

Most of the Parthenes shrieked and burst into chatter. Tzimfemme didn't. Instead she stared up at the youngest Parthene, flat-eyed, probing for cootie-hysteria or some other exaggeration. Her gaze hardened and she reached down towards her own ankle, then stopped. No. Not the Diana knife.

 

"You can't!" gasped Czalfemme.

 

Tzimfemme was too furious to react. Yrfemme had not conceived when she had been struck by lightning? Her scars were not the marks of a shaman? She was no virgin, but just another filthy breeder?!

 

Not long afterwards, the oldest Parthene discovered that she had been wrong. Her mind may have been too furious to react, but her body had run itself to the Baikal district, darting from kiosk to lamppost, always keeping cover between itself and Yr's people. No other Parthene was in sight. Tzimfemme pushed her mind back, to Mirfemme's sneakers: how had they gotten muddy in the middle of the city? She dodged down a street that smelled of animals, weaving her way towards the Baikals' open-air paddocks and loosening the cuffs of both sleeves as she ran, reaching inside each sleeve with two fingers, and releasing the safety springs on her forearm sheaths.

 

Yes. On the pavement not far from the parkland stood Yr (no title for her, no longer) and a solicitious, heavyset man-child. The lightning had scarred Yr from her scalp to her thigh, and her left eyelids were pulled almost shut with scar tissue; Tzimfemme circled around to her blind side and behind a row of garbage cans, so that Yr blotted out her view of the boyfriend, pulled her sleeves down halfway over her hands, and dropped the daggers. Only a finger's length of enameled black metal showed, on the palm side of each slightly curled hand, when Tzimfemme stepped out from cover, left foot leading. The oldest Parthene raised her right hand and waved, Yr turned to better see the motion, and Tzimfemme snapped arm and wrist downwards, launching the first dagger--lurching, missing, as someone jerked her left arm backwards and down and she stumbled forward. The attacker grabbed her right wrist also, dragging it behind her and then crushing it in place with his torso while his freed hand clutched the fabric at the front of her neckline. Halfway gagged, Tzimfemme still found breath to swear as the interloper unfastened the electric clasp, deactivating it--Yr was standing alone now, watching the man behind Tzimfemme. She bucked her body and tugged at her own right arm, and he moved his left arm across her front to quell that, only pinning her left arm at the elbow; as he latched onto her right arm with his left hand, she rolled the fingers of her left hand, reversing her knife, but the bodyguard brought his right hand--and a peripheral view of some pistol--up to her temple.

 

"If you're going to shoot me, damn well do it, I haven't got all day," she snarled, and thrust her free fist behind her. Her elbow jammed into his abdomen and the blade punctured to the bone as the gun fired--

[Quincunx]

Tzimfemme not only woke up, she sat bolt upright in her nest, leaving an indent in the heap of stolen underwear. Somewhere in her living quarters, an alarm thrummed bass notes and the naked mage could not, at first, identify which of hers it was. After several seconds, she remembered the ward she'd cut from the Conservatory corkboard and glued onto her chocolate pantry, pivoted at the waist, and launched herself out of the nest like a sprinter, none too soon. Minta zoomed from behind her towards the laboratory, but Tzimfemme slammed her palm against a sensor on the counter, and the gnome entangled herself in a net of mana which strung itself across the lab's doorway. The upside-down gnome bobbed back and forth in the webbing, releasing kinetic energy. "Um. . .hihi?" she announced to Tzimfemme's knees.

 

The naked mage drummed her fingers on the sole of Minta's shoe, eliciting squeals of glee and a shower of freshly pilfered truffles. "No, Minta. You can't squirm your way out of discipline from me," she replied as she snatched falling chocolates from the air. "I know your ways."

 

"Can too!" the gnome giggled. As Minta hung in the mana webbing, the strands nearest her changed color to silvery-gray. "Didya know that Rydia's gone?"

 

"Did you stick a dagger in her back also?" was the sardonic reply.

 

"Is not dead, is gone! You know how the Pen gets all funny with doors an' rooms an' stuff?" Minta kicked from the knees and tangled her shoes up in a frayed loop from her robe's hemline. "Well, I was gonna go up to her room an' get some chocolate kisses an' I--"

 

"Wait!" Tzimfemme interjected, staring at the mana webbing, then tapping on a pressure-sensitive plate set into the counter. More mana flowed into the net, and the silvery color faded away as Minta curled up her head to look at it. "Misdirection. . ." The naked mage shook out her braids, then pressed the heels of both hands to her temples. "Something that you have made me forget--what were we speaking about? The dead, the gone. . .Rosemary," concluded Tzimfemme, as she turned back to the doorway and dropped to one knee. "Minta, you never did tell me what happened to you when Rosemary died. The two of you ruled together for so long--you must have felt something."

 

Minta rolled her eyes up (towards the floor) as she thought. "Was when it got really really bright at the end of the party, an' the air got full of swirly colors an' stuff but it was hard to see 'cause it was still really bright, an' I heard a chimera laughin' and Lucifer too but he was goin' down an' the chimera was goin' up, an' an' an'. . ." Minta stopped then and her eyes got round and frightened.

 

The naked mage looked to the strands of Minta's quincunx power and found them waving, unguided, in the air. "And what?" she insisted, laying her fingertips on either side of Minta's head and holding her still.

 

"An' I felt old," whispered Minta. She giggled then but the sound was powerless and yes, old. The strands curled inwards and hugged the gnome, melting away the moment. Tzimfemme stood and turned partly away from the doorway, digesting that information, as Minta wriggled her shoulders loose from the webbing.

 

"No. . .regret?" the naked mage hinted.

 

Minta pulled her knees up to her chest as her heavy robes flapped away from the net. "Nuh-uh."

 

Tzimfemme's eyes went cold, and she snapped, "We're going to speak with Rydia. I can't cope with this." Minta grabbed hold of some mana webbing and flipped herself right-side-up just before Tzimfemme disabled the net, and dropped down a few centimeters to the floor. The naked mage grabbed Minta by a wrist and marched out of the lab, heading towards the nearest elevator updraft.

 

"But I was gonna tell you," Minta protested, while poking her free hand into her pocket and checking on the undetected chocolates.

[Quincunx]

The cup dropped back into its saucer, sloshing tea. Tzimfemme sucked her mouthful into one cheek and stated, "Not yet, I'd hope."

 

"Oh, no, we're just planning!"

 

The naked mage swallowed, then; Rydia's ears twisted backwards at the implied insult. "Unkink, Rydia. I didn't ask you out of revulsion. . .well, only revulsion," amended Tzimfemme. "Orlan's the only Man of Terra who got his title solely based on good looks. Now I don't mind black holes, they're forces of nature same as sunshine and rainbows, but the fact remains that your Starlight has all the power of one, with his will keeping it in check. Say that you do breed him, and he you--what's to stop an undisciplined fetus from devouring you from the inside out?"

 

"Our children aren't going to be evil, that's why!" Rydia flared, her ears now pointing up and towards Tzimfemme.

 

"So your children aren't going to turn out like your students did," Tzimfemme said, with heavy stresses. "I see. . ." She trailed off, noticing Rydia's new dress in Rosemary's style: longer, looser, layered, concealing. The naked mage's eyebrows lowered.

 

The elf followed Tzimfemme's gaze and continued, "I didn't just decide to change! My old dresses were getting worn. . .well, not mine actually. . ." Rydia pointed an ear at Minta, who had found slimy crayons somewhere in her pockets and was now lying on her tummy on the floor, doodling on a parchment. "Look at her robe! It's torn into ribbons at the hemline and the cuffs--"

 

"I noticed that."

 

"--Well, that's a surprise. Those robes were custom-fitted to her, now tell me why they've suddenly gotten so much bigger that she's wearing them out against everything she touches!" Rydia put down her tea cake, then brusquely swept crumbs off of the tablecloth and into a spare saucer.

 

The naked mage flicked her eyes over Minta: zombie-meat crayons, parchment of a wight wing, zombie-leather robes resistant to almost all magical damage. "Minta," she called, "if you had a zombie, could you make it grow larger?"

 

"Nono but I could make it smaller an' not just zombies!" she replied, not looking up from whatever she was drawing. "But I'd hafta charm it first so it obeyed me an' it'd stay small after I let it go an' I can't just make corpsies smaller 'cause there's no animatin' force for the spell to latch onto. Can only animate corpsies first." Tzimfemme watched the gnome for a few seconds more, until Minta shoved back one of her sleeves that had flopped down onto the parchment, then looked back at Rydia and raised one questioning eyebrow.

 

"If the robe isn't growing, then is Minta shrinking? The mage guilds' experiments aren't keeping her in stasis any more. . ." Rydia paused and struggled with the concept.

 

". . .and you felt the need to move out from under my dominion. . .which all happened soon after Rosemary died," Tzimfemme supplied. The elf's ears stopped wavering, and one curled to imitate a question mark. "Rosemary used to say that evil was imprisoned within her, and it was true, damn her! Minta's aging, your urges, and my--never mind that, spiritual sister--were all unleashed when she died."

 

"See!" Rydia interjected. "That's all in the past. Our children won't be affected by that evil."

 

Tzimfemme thumped her index finger against the table. "Maybe the right conclusion, definitely the wrong reason. . .Rydia, I suspect I'm straining your hospitality," she continued. Rydia's ears agreed. "We should talk more about this, but outside the house. Minta! Come," added the naked mage as she rose. Minta dropped her crayons on the floor, then sprinted ahead of the other two up the stairs, pushed the thin and convex stone door open, and stepped out onto a smaller stone. When Rydia closed the door, it looked once more like an intact boulder, covered with lichen as was the rest of the ridge. Tzimfemme surveyed the thicket of slender tree trunks while Minta squelched around in the peat, giggling at the noises her feet made. Once the gnome had moved away, Tzimfemme squatted on a rock outcropping, crooked her finger, and motioned Rydia closer.

 

"I spoke wrongly before, while Minta might have been listening," she whispered. "It wasn't Minta's age that Rosemary held in check--it was her punishment."

 

"I don't understand--"

 

"White mage! You do understand. When the writer of the contract of the soul dies, the devil takes its due, doesn't it?" Rydia barely nodded, and Tzimfemme pressed onwards. "I'll admit it, I lied, I'm oblivious, but you're not. You saw that Minta was growing younger and your intuition did the rest. You've been kinder to her recently, haven't you? Less stern? More tolerant of her casual evil acts? That's because you know now that some day, she's going to be held accountable for it all."

 

Rydia turned her back on Tzimfemme. The rock on which she stood acquired small, darker spots, and she brought a corner of the shawl up to her face. Tzimfemme broke her abstracted stare off of Minta and turned towards Rydia, faint curiosity in her eyes.

 

"Did you cry when Rosemary died?"

[Quincunx]

"Of course I did!" Rydia's reply got lost in her shawl, but her tone did not. "She was murdered! Right in front of me!"

 

Tzimfemme tilted her head away and gave Rydia more of her right eye than her left. "You act as though you never saw that before, during the mage wars--" she mused aloud, while her eyes took on a feverish glitter.

 

Rydia wrenched the shawl away from her face, and her ears snapped to attention. "I didn't!"

 

"--and Minta was unrepentant, this time I had no need. . .you did, Rydia."

 

"We were all reincarnated afterwards!" The elf continued flapping her hands at the shawl after it had been smoothed back into its usual place. "Death wasn't. . .wasn't. . ."

 

"Absolute. Final. Real." Tzimfemme spat phlegmy words, and shivered. "You don't remember."

 

Rydia burst out, "It wasn't murder! Don't you understand?" She looked down at Tzimfemme and saw her expression mirrored, complete to the traces of silver washing around in the irises. Gaze met gaze, and the quincunx power burnt out from both; they wrenched their faces away from each other and surveyed the forest instead. One of Rydia's ears formed another question mark and the other one tracked the scarred trails in the peat, while Tzimfemme folded in on herself. The elf's eyes caught up with the gnome just as she popped out from the rock's overhang.

 

"No fair!" Minta shrieked. "You got to be there an' I didn't an' you didn't even wanna be!" The gnome stamped her feet and left more welts in the forest floor, then clenched her hands together. "No fair, no fair, no fair! No pretendin' you weren't no fair!" Mana gobbed together around Minta's hands and darkened to fluorescent green.

 

"You shouldn't have been eavesdropping and don't you dare throw that spell!" Rydia ordered.

 

"An' I didn't even get to make a spell-castin' lich either! Meanie Rose took it!" screamed Minta. She swatted at the air, and the gob of poisoned mana slipped off of her hand, splattering over the oblivious naked mage. Rydia spared half a second to flick a curative spell at Tzimfemme before jumping down from the rock, pulling Minta upright from her tantrum, and dragging the screeching gnome to the concealed door.

 

"I've never seen you so rude!" Rydia held up Minta by one wrist while she squirmed and kicked pebbles and clumps of moss; wispy silver strands, at the point of contact, whipped at each other. "What would your precious zombies think if they saw you behaving like this? Would they listen to you?" The elf's tendrils coiled around the gnome's and crept further down Minta's arm. "Now you're going to come inside and sit quietly until you can behave! And don't track mud all over my floors! Leave your shoes at the door!" She pushed the rock ajar, released Minta on the doormat, descended the stairs, and waited with foot and ear tapping.

 

The naked mage drew closer to the door and ran her eyes along the strands of Rydia's quincunx power, now tugging the gnome upright and lifting her out of her shoes. Minta squatted down, grabbed her sneakers, threw them at the entryway (barely missing Tzimfemme), and stomped down the rest of the steps. Tzimfemme stopped in the entryway and gazed at Minta's muddy zombie-leather shoes. After some time, she raised her right hand to the side of her head and brushed her fingertips against it. Both of Rydia's ears curled and she looked up the stairs at the naked mage. She extended a silvery thread over to Tzimfemme; when it made contact, the elf shivered, and all of her threads frayed into dust. Minta wriggled her wrists, stuck out her tongue, flopped down on the floor, and resumed her doodles.

 

Rydia walked over to Minta, squatted down, and whispered into her ear. The gnome put her nose a hand's width away from her parchment and kept doodling; Rydia glanced up at Tzimfemme again, then said in a normal tone of voice, "I bet you don't know, and you just won't admit you don't know." Minta cast a quick spell and looked befuddled, then scrambled to her feet and stared up the staircase as well.

 

"Well?" Rydia whispered.

 

"I dunno," the gnome thought aloud. "Is not a vampire nownow, an' not a lich 'cause she doesn't get crazy 'bout a phylactery, an' not lotsa other undeads 'cause she can eat an' drink an' stuff. An' is definitely not an angel an' am pretty sure she's not a devil. Oh yeah, an' she was a vampire 'way back when me an' Rose came to see you," Minta added. She grabbed for the nearest zombie-meat crayon and scrawled necromantic notes all over the back side of her parchment, with Rydia hovering over her.

 

"Rydia. . .Archangel Rydia. . ."

 

The elf froze. Only her eyes moved towards the source of the black-hole voice: Tzimfemme, at the top of the stairs still, her mouth slackened and the fingertips of her right hand sunk into her skull.

[Quincunx]

Odeafemme hugged Mirfemme close, keeping her face turned away from the operating robot, as Ludmila tapped through the help displays. In contrast, Czalfemme hovered over the table and stared at the cauterized crater-like wound, the chunk of scalp and brain almost obscured by the jar and its nanobots, and the immobile arm of the robot. "You know what the penalties are for failing to aid a purestrain, don't you?" she snapped.

 

Ludmila jabbed her finger at Czalfemme, swore, and retorted, "I have to share a cell with the person who lets one be wounded, isn't it, Meigan? Shut up and let me debug this thing. I just lost the right screen--damn!"

 

The smallest Parthene shrieked and tried to shut out the sudden alarm with her hands over her ears; Lucia's mouth babbled whatever came to mind, as noisily as she could. Neither girl could drown out the sound. After two minutes, Ludmila fluffed out her cheeks with a sigh and cut power to the robot's arm and its alarm, then deleted details of the current procedure. Czalfemme reached out with one fingertip and touched Tzimfemme's cold eyelid, on the uninjured side of her face, then saw Ludmila from the corner of her own eye and screeched, "What are you DOING!?"

 

"Deleting the records of this surgery, audiovisual and written," Ludmila muttered, staring Meigan down, "unless you're willing to follow through on that threat. And what will the judge tell you?"

 

" 'Seven years' imprisonment and/or two virtue boosters appropriate to the scope of the crime' ," quoted Czalfemme, with a dry throat. " 'Crimes against the purestrains by purestrains, as with most interpersonal crime, occur due to a lack of empathy; at times these are augmented by contempt of the purestrain or greater community, disrespect for individuality within a given purestrain community, or protest against the falling fertility rates of purestrain humans.' "

 

"My uncle, he used to live by himself, he's got a community booster in his head now," Odeafemme offered, as Ludmila returned to the displays. "He's kind of a nuisance. He never goes home! Ever! I mean, we're Westunions, super happy communal family, my house is your house, but we don't hang around each other all the time. We're by ourselves sometimes!"

 

Mirfemme spoke up with a whimper. "He used to sit on the steps outside, where we do. . .but not any more."

 

The Parthenes stared at each other. Even Odeafemme bit her underlip and said nothing for awhile. ". . .Ohmygod, that's it?" she despaired, after a few minutes. "One of us dies and we go back to the steps and say nothing about it, again? Ever?"

 

"Suicide," Ludmila interjected.

 

"What?"

 

"I'm filing her as a suicide. The city is desperate to preserve purestrains, and experiments with all possible ways to revive one who has no entanglements. Horrible experiments, but if you insist that it's better than death," Tzimfemme's mother moved her finger up the form to the Genealogy section and deleted a line, "the Magicians' Experimental Enclave will receive her body. Maybe the magic of the old world can revive her; the researchers there did rediscover maggot therapy. . ."

 

"Maggots?!" squealed Mirfemme, as she skittered away from Ludmila.

 

Ludmila unlocked the table clamps and allowed the surface, and the body, to hover unsupported. "Maggots, mineral mud, and melodies, like their banner says, they'll try anything--except what already works. Either way, she's dead to us. Experimentals don't allow outside visitors or live releases."

[Quincunx]

Rydia peered through cascades of translucent, pearlescent green flight feathers. Whatever was sitting in Tzimfemme's head--whatever had subjugated the naked mage, and taken possession of her body--pulled on the jaw muscles again, and Rydia's wings (never completely under her control, even now) fully materialized and cocooned her. She heard Minta scramble away from her, but could no longer see through her wings. Her ears darted forward and parted the feathery curtain, only eartips and eyes peeking out of a shifting, diamond-shaped gap.

 

She didn't waste words, but only threshed her ears at the archangel wings, and failed to part them further. Why are they acting on their own? I haven't been at their mercy since. . .since Tzimfemme brought us to the Pen. Rydia's ears paused in surprise, and the wings slackened their grip. Since Tzimfemme. . .woke up.

 

Minta tripped on the lowest step and banged her knee. "Meanie!" she wailed, sitting at the bottom of the staircase and clutching the bruising spot. "I thought you weren't gonna do that any more!" The gnome threw her best pout back at the skellie-hating archangel but Rydia was too scared to see it. Her wings were protecting her--scared? Minta beamed. Served her right for going all holy! She forgot her bruise in an instant and turned herself to look up the steps. The naked mage's stare moved off of Rydia and tracked the motion, alighting on Minta. The gnome froze in the searchlight. Tzimfemme's fingertips slipped out of her flesh and, as she extended her arm, the fingers curled to point at Minta. Her thumb slipped and rasped over the other fingertips, trying to snap, failing, and shearing off flecks of quincunx power.

 

One, two, three times she tried to change what she saw, and three times Tzimfemme failed, before she whiplashed back into control of the entire body. The arm pointed at Minta began to quiver, the face locked into a lip-biting grin, and the naked mage trailed her right heel backwards until it slid through the open doorway, then shifted her weight. Step by step she slunk out of the house, not turning, not moving more than her legs until she passed the door and slammed it shut. Minta looked back at Rydia and watched her wings slide around her shoulders, back where they belonged, and began to say "What wazzat--"

 

The ceiling quivered from Tzimfemme's impact on the rocks. Rydia's wings whipped upwards and folded over her head like a bandshell, faster than the elf could look up. She set her jaw and marched towards the stairs; Minta wailed and shrank away, hugging herself, as Rydia almost brushed against her. By the time she ascended the stairs, holy power was prickling Rydia's skin into goosebumps. She spread her hands out before herself and laid her palms flat on the door, thumb-tips and index-finger-tips touching, and breathed the archangel's holy attack into that diamond shape. The wood glowed at that spot like heated iron, and if they could have seen the exterior rock, they would have seen the glow burn through to it also. For half a minute Rydia exhaled a steady stream while the glow diffused to all parts of the door, then gasped and let herself relax. "Don't worry, Minta," she said, "she can't get inside again. She's not welcome here."

[Quincunx]

Rydia's ears flattened out slightly as she continued washing the dishes. Tzimfemme had discarded the bursts of knocking for a steady four-second beat, and pushing the shiny green comfy chair in front of the staircase hadn't muffled her. Minta stood in the corner, forgotten jacks lying all around her, and flung the preserved eyeball at the floor; it bounced high but not quite far enough to brush against the ceiling. She caught it as it fell, frowned, and wound up for an even faster throw. She sacrificed accuracy for speed; the eyeball bounced off of the floor at a low angle, ricocheted off of the wall of the stairwell, and flew upwards. The gnome shot after it, bounced on the chair's cushions and over its back, scampered up the steps, grabbed her toy, and opened the door without thinking. The naked mage looked down at Minta. "Oops," the gnome remarked, "but this means I don't gotta stay inside any more!" With that, she zipped between Tzimfemme and the doorframe and jumped into the peat, two-footed, with a marrow-chilling squelching noise.

 

"Rydia."

 

Rydia redoubled her scrubbing, ear-tips trained on the saucer.

 

"You're not fooling anyone, Rydia. Come outside. I've defaced one of your rocks, and you need to decide what to do with it." Tzimfemme tapped her finger on empty air, just outside the doorframe. "You don't belong underground, white mage. You panicked and inverted things, now come and help me undo what's reversible."

 

The elf came to the door with as much goodwill as Minta had come downstairs, tea towel still in hand. "What do you mean, 'defaced'. . ." she began, turning her head in the doorway to follow Tzimfemme's pointing finger. "Oh dear." One of the largest boulders in the outcropping had been shorn of its lichen, and its surface had been scarred as though it were made of clay. Rydia stepped out of the doorway to further survey the damage. Afternoon sunshine shifted the shadows on the rock, and her ears shot straight upwards in surprise--one set of hollows in the rock were not gouged out by fingers, but impressed into it with arms and legs and cheek, as though the boulder were Starlight. . .

 

Tzimfemme tilted her head to one side. "You understand those symbols now?" she inquired, looking at the finger-tracks and back at Rydia.

 

"Not the way you do," she hedged.

 

The naked mage snorted a laugh. "Truer words were never spoken! I--I can't talk about it. You can't think about it. It's your rock, though, so you need to know." She drew in one deep breath and turned her body towards the forest and Minta. "I saw what's coming for Minta, and it's soon. Those scrawls hold all the details. I want to take the boulder back to the Pen grounds; everything's so stable there, maybe I can read that without losing it. If I can do that, maybe. . .I can intercede."

 

"Break a contract of the soul?! It's impossible!" Rydia waved hands and ears, attempting to convey how impossible it was. "Even if you did somehow do it, it'd, I don't know, stop things dying, or being born! Some things are more powerful than all-powerful--"

 

"Bullshit."

 

She'd jumped sideways, across the threshold, before even registering Tzimfemme's word. "Anyway, you can't lever the rock out of place," the elf continued, after a few moments. "Call Minta. I need to get something." Her boots thumped down the steps.

 

Tzimfemme reached out and pulled a portal from the empty air, a connection back to her quarters. Before she could even reach in and grab some candy as gnome-bait, Minta sprinted up to the rock ridge so fast she almost left a silver streak, with chocolate smudged on her bottom lip. The naked mage let go of one edge, and the blue circle dwindled to nonexistence. Minta poked her tongue out and licked away the marks.

 

In the doorway, Rydia reappeared with fresh sheets of parchment, normal wax crayons, and a winning smile. "Minta! Did you ever learn how to take rubbings off of statues or petrified creatures?"

[Quincunx]

"Done," Ludmila announced. The hovering table glided away from the robotic arm, pointing Tzimfemme's feet at the doorway; Czalfemme kept pace with the table and halted at its other end. "The Experimentals will send someone to collect her." Her eyes flickered over to the doorway, then back to the huddled Parthenes. "You can go now."

 

Czalfemme shook her head. "No, you need to leave first. We have," Meigan's ears reddened, "rituals, and we don't have any place for," she lowered her face, "outsiders."

 

Ludmila propped up Czalfemme's chin with one finger and examined her face at close range. "I need to leave?"

 

"We were with her," Odeafemme blurted out, while Meigan wilted. "All this time!"

 

Though Ludmila did not move any closer, Czalfemme withdrew her head like a turtle until the barest edge of the older woman's fingertip held her head upright. Ludmila spat words around her. "I haven't locked my doors for weeks. Go do your. . .rituals. Then go, and do not come back. Any of you." She wheeled, fingertips whipping the air, and strode through the doorway; it crackled with feedback and released a burst of lily-of-the-valley scent as it turned opaque.

 

Before Czalfemme recovered, Odeafemme reached down and clasped the bloodless right hand. "Summa Lucretya sum," she began, hurrying through the words, then unconsciously squeezing Tzimfemme's fingers while searching for more. Lucia almost smiled, and she moved Tzimfemme's hand up to her bared breastbone. "Spiro, spero."

 

"Summa Mauretanya sum," declared Czalfemme. She extended two fingers, lying together, and touched them to the forehead before continuing, faster than Odeafemme could understand, "Igni aerterni fervens negri omnino non depere."

 

"Summa Julya sum," Mirfemme recited. She ducked and walked underneath the table, coming up on the other side to take Tzimfemme's left hand, and offered the only bit of Latin she'd learned. "Salve, Sophya."

 

Some male swore from the next room; the Parthenes let go of Tzimfemme and scattered away from the table. Ludmila propelled him into the room with shoves, words, and sometimes a knee raised again to prod his backside. "Collector's here," she rasped, letting him tumble towards the table, as he put out one hand to catch himself and kept the other cupped at his coveralls, "and he won't be loving his job quite as much as usual today. Isn't that right, Jeremy?" He opened his mouth to groan, gagged, and clamped his lips shut. "You could, at least, have pretended it was for me," Ludmila added, and jerked a thumb over her shoulder, towards the doorway. "Take the body--Go! All of you! Go!"

[Quincunx]

On the borderlands, sound was inaudible. At the moment Tzimfemme began to speak, tiny round mirrors of polished metal left her lips--one for each word--and undulated through the air before the eyes of fossilized Sossity before dropping upon the rubbings taken from the rock. Sossity's statue stood in a depression, knee-deep in the mingled thoughts of Pennites; the naked mage's thoughts pooled around them both and, rising like burnt incense, flowed across the dead sands to tether Minta. Tzimfemme, hunched over the unrolled and cross-hatched parchment, wiggled her toes until the proper coins came to mind.

 

"If you're awake in there, Sossity. . .there's constellations I don't recognize, except the spiral staircase here." The naked mage plucked at the last five mirrors and lay them over the spots of Cassiopeia before the discs turned to ash. "The mark of blue. Triskelions, here--ripped reality, there--Minta here. She must be guarded. It's been three years since she slipped, and I do not fancy crossing again." The strand of Tzimfemme's ideas collapsed upon itself, shortening, spinning the gnome partway towards the statue. "See how she is changing, Sossity--you must be awake--"

 

Minta frowned at the fluid chain sprouting from her skull. Silver smoke flowed over her fingers, and when the first wisp reached the tether, its surface tension broke; thousands of silver motes coalesced in an instant and rolled freely over Minta, who giggled and squirmed until the spheres began clinging together at their poles and threading themselves back onto the tether. She rolled her eyes upwards at the renewed tether, frowned, grabbed hold of it, and leaned backwards on her heels for extra leverage. When the gnome tugged on the chain, the beads pulled slightly apart, then recoiled and jerked Minta several inches off of the ground; she swung and kicked for awhile, but each tug on the chain only lifted it one bead further away from the sand. Eventually she gave up and the tether sank back to earth with a splash--further inside the Pen, two thinkers felt the harbingers of migraine.

 

"--Sossity. Rosemary is dead; Minta is in danger! You are a guardian--start guarding, damn you!" Her hand lashed out, fast enough to scatter thoughts into a thousand droplets, but the naked mage wrenched muscles to halt her flying hand before it struck. She swept her gaze over the surface, dipped concave to avoid her, and dropped smaller, soft-edged coins into it: "Don't do that. I cannot hurt you." The puddle of pysches quivered when the words dissolved, forming chevron-shaped ripples which raced away from Tzimfemme. She bowed her head over the parchment before the arrowhead hit the tether and bounced away, as ripples never do, past the unoccupied end. The naked mage entwined a thin braid around her fingers and tugged on it, hard, in lieu of a surface to hit her head against. "Here, a pair of calipers or compasses--I have seen these before, Rosemary beaded them upon her dress! Two I haven't deciphered, the compasses, a lopsided cross, that triskelion, the staircase!" She poked at the leading symbol, an asymmetric squiggle unlike all the rest, then distracted herself with pain; the unbound thoughts ossified, then sprouted glassy blade-shaped buds. Tzimfemme looked sourly at the construct. "If they bloom into roses, I will hurt someone--Halt, that wasn't free-floating!"

 

Meanwhile, Minta had scooped together a heap of lustreless sand with her feet and frowned when no depression remained; the grains were too fine, and slithered out of the heap as well as into the hole. She gave up on trying to stomp tracks into the land and zoomed instead towards the nearest blazing white flaw in the world, while the psyches' surface lapped higher against Sossity's ankles. The gnome skidded to a halt on the edge of the crack, backlit to the point of invisibility, and peered down. Another little girl, poking at another neato tiny skellie, maybe even the skull of a mouse! Minta mouthed, "Hihihi!" and waved.

 

Tzimfemme watched from the corner of her eye and saw Minta screech in fear, backpedaling, overbalancing. The naked mage snorted half a laugh before turning back to the chart. Three seconds later, her braids flew out as she whipped her head back towards the pair, towards Minta whose feet had tangled in her frayed hem and towards the child in the Reality sprawled out over her diaper. Tzimfemme leapt to her feet and bounded from hillock to dune, the parchment skidding downhill with half a clockwise turn before the psychic waters claimed it; she flung herself in front of the crack, but the little girl moved no faster, stood up with no more ease. The naked mage strained at the image, and finally spied the difference between the nearly-naked child and Minta: the eyes, hostile and blue--and in that instant, she remembered when Rosemary had seen the eyes.

 

Unconsciousness would have been a mercy, and there was none; madness would have been a comfort, again, and there was none. Mirrors showered out from her lips, and what fell was no longer unmarked: duplicates of Rosemary's tiles. They rolled downhill on their edges, ripping open new cracks in the world, and fell along the grasping lines of Tzimfemme's quincunx power--not silver, but white. "No! Minta! She'll rend the world in two again, bloody her arms to the elbows--" Tzimfemme glared at the flaw-child as her hands locked on Minta's shoulders; Minta lunged against the gesture with such violence that the coins sprayed backwards briefly instead of burning away in the light. "You will not have this one--"

 

"Ophidia."

 

Sound!

 

"Th' Hydra."

 

Sossity!

 

She held a coin of her own, marked with the constellation of the hydra and threaded on a pink ribbon, but her lips moved: the golem lived again. One cold marble hand clamped the collar over Tzimfemme's throat and dragged her away from the Reality while the other pried and crushed her fingers. The naked mage set her jaw against the chokehold, glaring and thinking dagger-shards, "I will kill whoever would drag Minta to her hell in the Reality."

 

"Y'can't. You c'n think to kill'm, 'n' I'm here t'stop them bein' hurt." Sossity's tongue was not much more clever, now that it was stone, than it had been when she lived and breathed. Those clumsy words rattled when they disturbed the silence of the borderlands; Minta clapped her hands over her ears, discovered that she was free, and fled. "'m not t'be defeated, ever," added the guardian of the unicorns, as the splinters of Tzimfemme's thoughts shattered against her skin, "y'put me here y'self. 'N' sayin' y'did manage t'kill them, who's t'say death'll stop 'em?"

 

The naked mage sprayed out white-hot shard-names like knives in the belly.

 

"That'n's me, 'n' I live. That'n died in th'Reality twice 'n' still lives. That'n's born 'n' killed more 'n' you here, still lives. That'n y'killed y'self once 'n' lives again. . . .I'm tired, 'n' y'are 'swell. Only got one thought t'move me. Dyin' ain't rest. Now take me back as y'were takin' th'mad one back. Take m'thought back. Do m'job y'rself. Let me rest."

 

Sossity's statue crumbled from the feet upwards, transforming into a wave of snowy powder that doubled back upon its still-solid surfaces and scattered over Tzimfemme's skin; another memory of Rosemary's rose--like shipwreck wood, or a drowned man turning on his face--and that image triggered another as the powder flowed upwards into Tzimfemme's nose and mouth. By the time Sossity's hands dissolved and released the naked mage, she was bound in a coffin of powder, and doubly paralyzed by the tumult in her mind. When powder swirled down her ankles and touched sand, the two mingled as one substance, and Tzimfemme's body sank into the dune in seconds. The borderlands were still and dead once more, but only for one moment, before the first colorless bud oriented itself towards a flaw and began to unfurl.