A Leash Pulls

The owner looks up from Bistro Prismé. Manchester watches her drop the key into her pocket, then he stands, stiff from the late season cold.

Above the square the orange-yellow electric bulbs sway on thick wire. Just at the edge of what he can hear—maybe his imagination—the glass hisses against the wind, as the filament light wavers.

The owner, whose name Manchester really should remember by now, purses her lips instead of smiling. She ducks her head in an awkward goodbye.

He takes his cue. With a tap of two fingers to his eyebrow, after brushing nonexistent pastry crumbs from his pant legs, he walks in the opposite direction, north, toward the open end of the square. Earlier there were dancers, vendors, a juggler wandered through to the children’s delight, not their parents’, at least not the young parents just moved into the second floor above the stationery shop. Juggling’s harder than it looks and those flower pots heavier than they look, though no one stood beneath their balcony, which was fortunate. Manchester had bought a new packet of cigarillos just before the crash.

He lights one now, strikes the match against the rough weathered stone stoop of the bookkeeper’s flat. A nice pair, him and his husband, a tad aloof. But when they moved in people viewed their kind askance. The crown had just sent three thousand to the southern front only a month, two months before.

Manchester relaxes his jaws before he crushes the cigarillo.

It’s been long enough. He turns around and walks swiftly—but quietly, more quietly than anyone would think a man his size capable of—back down the square. She couldn’t have gotten far. He knows her route, where she lives. But he’d rather not let her get too far ahead. Or risk getting found out. The night air stings his nose as the smoke warms his chest from inside. It’s fragrant, but not floral, spiced. It’s new. Doesn’t remind him of anywhere he’s been. The tobacconist did well. She always does.

The bulbs swing overhead in a sudden breeze. Before they swing back, maybe reveal his location, Manchester’s stuck to the cold brick wall of Mister Polliard’s building. Vacant for half a year, now that the fellow’s making tile mosaics in the tonier part of town. No one could say he hasn’t earned it, after sixty—seventy—eighty?—years. Manchester eases the cigarillo from his lips, holds it behind, but doesn’t knock the ash from its tip. He doesn’t want the coal to flare. He peaks slowly past the corner, into the street, then pulls back.

A quick break, then inhale, hold, exhale, hold, then—

He looks again.

Bistro Prismé’s owner—the woman—stands next to a pool of darkness by the brick wall of the clothier’s storehouse. The electric lights aren’t strung this far down from the square. A gaslamp huffs at the far end of the street. The owner’s shadow stretches almost to his. She faces the brick, and her hands move, and he’s too far away to hear, but he knows she’s talking to someone.

Manchester pulls back to his corner, to gather his thoughts. He could—should—walk away. There’s no one paying him to surveil or interfere. No duty anymore. And he rather likes Bistro Prismé.

On the other hand…

…he rather likes Bistro Prismé.

He takes a deep drag off the cigarillo, and the smoke seeps from between the bristles of his mustache. The smoke falls through the bristles of his beard. He stands taller, stretches his neck, straightens his waistcoat, and tucks his hands in the pockets of his crisp jacket, before strolling around the corner.

“Ah, rather a ways from—” he says, too loud.

But the street’s empty.

He frowns.

Nibbling tooth marks into the paper of the cigarillo, he steps light on the balls of his feet over to where he saw her. The gaslamp burps and the alley darkens, the yellow-orange light flares again, momentarily bli

“Dash it all,” Manchester mutters, as robed figures lean through a night-deep pool of ink on the wall, grab him, and pull him through.

The cigarillo flares cherry-red at the end as it hits the paving stones, its ash scattered at last.

Manchester wakes. Feeling returns to his body in slow needle punctures. His shoulders stretch behind him around the backrest of a chair. Wrists tied with rough cord in knot work complicated rather than skilled. Opens his eyes, ink dripping from his lashes, from the tip of his nose, from the bristles of his beard. His skin tingles. His limbs are heavy and stupid. About his face not the scent of iodine he expects—instead, silt, a richness, fecundity left to its own devices in some place of rain beneath stones and floors of parquet fallen leaves.

He blinks the liquid from his eyes.

Dust-strung ceiling beams run between brick walls and above a packed dirt floor. Two hurricane lamps rest on rotting shelves. Their glass chimneys would have been clean decades before the revolution. Not the storehouse, then.

Seven figures stand before him. They wear revealing blue-tanned leather straps inched tight against their pale skin, the straps circuiting their bodies in unique configurations. Scars gleam dull silver on their torsos. Brands escape from under the straps to span front and back and even the women’s chests—

Manchester does not idle as he makes a catalogue of his captors. All for professional purposes.

But he looks away, his cheeks hot, to the corner of the room.

The owner of Bistro Prismé lies in a heap. The body is a segmented mannequin of rattan and sackcloth and bent cane. Flax or some plant’s silk harvested to make its hair, he can’t be certain from here.

He looks away.

“Never real,” one of his captors says.

They are four women, three men, not strapping but well-toned in the way of the longtime physically fit. On their heads are not masks but helms, covering the entirety, from beneath their chins to their napes, some kind of gray-white adorned with a dark blue disc where the eye holes should be, an extending from the top of them horns ending in flat hooves.

“Who’s to say,” Manchester croaks, his throat very, very dry.

“Manchester Woodbury,” one of the women says. On her stomach cave painting of crude hunters felled by a shadowy bison.

He clears his throat as politely as possible, in mixed company. “It’s a right shame. I rather liked the watercress sandwich.”

The man next to Shadow Bison raises a hand. On his arms are tattoos of pricked insect legs ending in hooked claws, with regiment markings on his bicep—

They notice Manchester, noticing.

Insect Claw does not hide his military tattoos. He stretches out his fingers, and closes his fist.

Manchester drops

his surroundings disappeared, he falls through lightless air, his body still numb. Manchester begins to turn, helpless in the wind streaming past him. Tears in his eyes. Now blown dry. Air crushed from his mouth. He twists, back and forth, spinning in the dark, falling faster. Blood pushes toward his skin from the center of his body. Like it might push out.

Below—

is it below?

—a light, at last, dark blue, the color of his captors’ clothes.

He plummets toward a sea, gargantuan, featureless.

The light shines off its waveless surface and his heart seizes in his breathless chest. Not a sea at all. Illuminated from inside, it is an eye—it is one lens of a compound eye—

The entire dark world moves, and Manchester hurtles toward mandibles the size of continent, an army of glistening pedipalps covered with a forest of hollow fibers wet and lustrous with thick

Manchester, blinded by the lamplight of the abandoned cellar, chest heaving, tears the skin of his wrists against the rough bonds. His ears hurt with his own scream.

Shadow Bison pushes Insect Claw’s arm to his side. “We have your attention,” she says.

Manchester nods, or tries to, muscles on fire at the edge of their anesthetized stupor. “Who are you,” he gasps.

“You’ll help us.” Her voice as certain as nightfall.

“Yes.” The ink runs into his eyes. Pit of Manchester’s stomach still weightless and falling. “Just—tell me.”

They look at each other. Shifts in their posture show even more self-satisfaction than before. From the farther side, a man with ochre lizard scars transiting his thighs growls behind his mask, “The riders of the seven beasts, the keepers of the egg of infinite darkness.”

The masked men and women sing, low and in unison, “The Travelers of the Inverted World.”

Manchester opens his mouth, to say Zoo enthusiasts, eh but another of the figures pinches the web between forefinger and thumb with sharp painted fingernails and his body lights with wracking pain.

When the agony recedes, he says, “enough, if you please.”

Shadow Bison steps forward. Manchester presses back against his chair, as much as he can. “Like with any wild animal,” she says, and he places her accent as the northwestern part of the city, monied without having to work for it, but only for the last two generations, “you become a pet, once you realize who holds the reins.”

Insect Claw huffs. “His reputation’s bigger than his meat.”

She shrugs. “Show him the tablet.”

The one who devastated him walks to the corner of the cellar. She shoves the mannequin aside, and as its hollow limbs flail Manchester catches sight of its chalked face: No more than crude thick lines, a nose, two eyebrows, a clumsy mouth. She pursed her lips because she couldn’t smile.

Skin rubs off Manchester’s wrists. Blood slicks his fingers.

The mannequin flops over and the Traveler reaches into a satin bag. She removes a stone the size of a broadsheet. Like an enormous gem, its hue shifts as the woman turns. Muscle coils against her leather straps. Her fingers pale from the strain. The tablet is the blue of lapis, the green of jade, the yellow of topaz—

“What kind of stone is it?” he asks, before he can stop himself.

The Travelers laugh. To a person, the sounds are gutter-cheap and filthy. Shadow Bison says, “It is not a stone.” The woman carrying it steps in front of him, and lowers it to the ground, bending with her knees. When she lets go, she steps back with a hop, so the edges don’t catch fingers or toes. In the changing tones along its surface are patterns, hieroglyphs, pictograms, complications of profane geometries. Manchester’s cheeks suddenly wet, and he knows from the scent of copper not with tears.

“What do you want me to do,” he says.

All he can hear, the click of mandibles far below.

“You can read it,” Insect Claw says.

“Yes.”

“Tell us,” Shadow Bison breathes, an eager wet whisper.

“In return?”

“A quick—”

The witch who hurt him pulls her thumb out of socket. Manchester goes deaf.

His eyes flit around the scene in quick saccades. They return to center each time, in case they watch. The mannequin. The tablet: On a closer look, there’s what could be a membrane on its interior—because it’s not a stone, but a piece of shell, a small piece of something colossal. Blasted Travelers and their masks. Would be different if he could see lips. Manchester glances at Insect Claw’s regiment tattoo again. A narrow-limbed horned deer, above a peaked shield. It’s not a deer, he remembers, it’s something like it from one of the veldt campaigns. One the edge of his memory. He bites his tongue.

The witch’s thumb dangles from her hand.

Manchester watches it swing.

Back, and forth,

the pendulum in the clock in the corridor, between his and Tully’s bedroom, the round weight so enormous he could almost hear it whoosh through the air in the middle of the night as he lay awake from another bad dream, too afraid to leave his blankets and run down the floorboards to his big brother’s room, not wanting Tulliver to know how scared he’d been, but desperate for the company, listening to the tick, tick,

tick

tick

The woman starts with a gasp as her thumb snaps back into joint.

Manchester’s ears fill up with sound, first the noise of his own body. Then the fungal dust notes of the cellar. Finally the rondos of the flesh around him. Insect Claw steps forward, fist raised not to send him to the lightless place of falling—the Inverted World, Manchester guesses—but to strike him. Magic only of the martial kind.

Shadow Bison laughs. “So you are worth something,” she purrs. “The inscription on the eggshell.”

He was right.

“Translate it,” Insect Claw barks, “and stay alive.”

“We’ll feed you scraps from the table, and you’ll roll over,” the witch says.

Manchester sighs. He’s tired. “Like—”

“Our pet,” Shadow Bison says.

Manchester looks to the tablet. “Free one of my hands. I’ll write it down.”

“Why not tell us?” a man in the back says, finger- and toenails clipped to talon points.

“It’s a lure,” he explains. “For a, a beast, I presume. An ‘untamed thing,’ is as close as I can get to a literal translation. You’re the ones holding the reins. It will take all of your wills to—”

“Subdue it?” Talon says.

“It’s idiomatic. Maybe ‘greet,’ maybe ‘welcome’—”

“Tell us.”

He sighs. “Translation is

”Tell us,” the witch says, her fingers darting like beaks.

Amid gasps, amid stolen sucked breaths between the sensations of flesh scooped from his body, he yelps

“Welcome

the

untamed

thing.”

The Travelers all nod. Quick little birdlike dips of the mask.

Insect Claw loosens the bond enough that when he yanks a wrist through the loop it doesn’t flay his hand entirely. The rough fiber debrides a circlet of flesh from around his wrist. When Manchester lifts his dripping limb before him, Shadow Bison tears the rattan chest panel from the mannequin and places it in his lap. “You’ve provided your own ink and stylus,” she says with a wink. He drags his finger across it, writing a passable phonetic translation in his own blood. As he works, it tacks down from vivid red to muddy brick brown.

The Travelers drag his chair aside so they can make the appropriate marks. When they run out, Insect Claw pries a brick from the wall and crushes it in his palms. The brick dust becomes sprawling brush strokes, not calligraphic, not geometric, but—

Manchester knows “primal” comes to him because he’s spent too long in the city. Nor can he stop “atavistic” welling up behind it, dressed in finer clothes, but uglier for its pretense.

He didn’t have these thoughts when he was away. Not because there was anything special about assignment in-country. It’s the proximity, he thinks. It’s about height. Too high up—whether it’s the gabled roofs in the cobbled hills of the richest boroughs, or forty degrees higher than the equator—the people you see look small. Do it long enough, you believe they’re small. Because staying in one place makes you small.

The Travelers gather in front of him when the marking’s done. Insect Claw looks over his shoulder. It takes a talented man to communicate that much disdain through a mask. The group curls fingers, stretches out. They raise arms up and lower them again.

Shadow Bison steps forward. She kneels on the brick-dust art and begins the chant. Manchester tries not to listen. He knows the words. He knows what they look like. But he hasn’t heard them, and their unfamiliar sounds crawl atop him with chilled stick-thin limbs, and their many-segmented syllables end in split hooks. Before he knows what he’s doing, his bloody palm seals up his ear and presses his head against his shoulder.

The sound rises from the brick dust and enters him not through the smallest gap between his wet flesh and bruised ears—the, the harmonies come in to him through his eyes, in methods he only feels, volume as brightness drying him up until tears form at the corners of the lids and evaporating those drops, too. The notes increase in hue, in pitch, their intensity builds into chords and those combinations escape music and light to scour the inside of his nostrils, his mouth hanging open, scented luminous timbre reaches down his throat and up his skull—

Manchester shivers, like his meat could fall from his bones. The fear comes upon him now. The prairie at the moonless night; the footfall on the rotted plank over the old well; the sight of a different face sleeping in the crib than the one put down. It strikes him as physical pain. In his kidneys, a deep and severe contusion. In his guts, a fierce collision of muscle to muscle seizing like rope against knot. The veins in his skull freeze and constrict against his brain.

Manchester closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to see this, he wants to be at home, next to the fire, holding a glass of whatever Tully’s found on the latest of his expeditions. This last one something like grass and clove and peppercorns and on the first sip it was dreadful and on the fifth it was still dreadful but in an enjoyable way.

“I’m sorry, Tully,” he whispers. Even he can’t hear his own voice. “I don’t think I’ll be home tonight—”

A great, suffocating blossom of heat, a wave of pressure, the sense of—of proximity—Manchester keeps his eyes squeezed shut. The cellar fills with the stiff acridity of vinegar but it’s so much stronger than anything he’s ever smelled before. A, a chitter, a clatter of enormous porcelain, something races over his head and from the wind it stirs it only just misses.

The Travelers shout. Shadow Bison’s voice clear even through his plugged ears. Insect Claw an officer’s call trying vainly to cut through the din. Other voices, other voices, all the Travelers in the same register: demanding obedience.

Manchester makes himself small.

He does not believe in a god.

So he doesn’t pray when Shadow Bison’s roaring shout stops abruptly with the snack of a drawbridge falling shut. He fervently wishes he is as small as he believes all people are, in the full truth of the matter, stupid little runts rooting in the dirt, huddled together before guttering fires, their only grace that they huddle over their soft-headed tender children in the hope of protecting them from the circling vultures or the prowling monsters just behind the

Something hard bounces against his shins. He does not, will not, open his eyes. It does not matter which of the Travelers’ heads it is.

The witch’s voice goes silent last.

That smell, of fortified vinegar, remains. Manchester knows the thing, the Untamed Thing, watches him.

He is as still as he can be, eyes shut, holding his breath. Mouth closed. He knows what he is, next to this.

Something moves the air above him. The odor, so much stronger now, burns the skin of his face, his neck and scalp, his hands. Breezes gust at him from left and right, not in patterns but tap-tap-taps, and then the breezes stop.

The scent dissipates. Into butcher shop sweetness and warehouse mold.

Manchester sits, eyes closed, for another half an hour, before he finds the strength to move.

It takes the better part of what’s left of the night to clean the cellar. Digging the grave, that’s not so hard. The remains don’t require a full plot, and all get run together with the wide stiff-bristled broom miraculously lingered at the edge of the stairs. Keeping the offal from the wound on his wrist? Harder. Scouring the marks from the… shell…

…that’s what detains him.

But he does it.

Manchester does it.

So with what little darkness he has left, he sits on the second-to-last step and pulls a cigarillo from his discarded waistcoat. Battered but not unsalvageable. He laughs, or at least goes through the motions. When he pulls the aromatic smoke past his lips, his hands stop trembling. But what he’d really like is breakfast.

Smoke, like fog, pours from his nostrils.

The pastry case at Bistro Prismé held the most delectable looking croissants.

Manchester ashes the cigarillo.

He stands, brushes his hands against his pant legs.

Looks at the rattan mannequin in the corner.

He doesn’t know anything about running a restaurant.

So this time, she’ll have a proper face.