We Leave Together, стр. 3
Husband, are you still awake?
My husband has a long, thin body, when he is a man. He rests, now, without the wolfskin on his back. He is like a wet maple leaf with his long, gray hair spread all around across the paper, leaving a rain-damp blur upon the inks. I should wake him, and peel him back from our maps, but we know the city so well, now. One of the remaining demon children is close. Salvatore Fidelio must finally face his death. We will kill him, and fight the stain of demons in this city. We are not executioners. We are healers, now, in a fire and revolution and the reaping of the weeds, to cull the weakness in the streets of men. The streets will burn with fire before we are done here.
—Husband?
The map over our floor, where the city lines and valleys and alleys and corners and the people stay where Sergeant Nicola Calipari’s quill placed them, and we find them there as if they were trees that never moved from their roots, and the map has been used so much that we leave it there more from habit than need. We have walked these narrow streets, my husband and I, and we know the city as well as we know the forest hills beyond the city, where we run with the wolf packs, the skin of wolves upon our backs and claws and howls that sing beneath Erin’s holy moon.
We sleep, now, upon the rippling paper map, all over the smudged ink of the city, and I touch my husband next to his heartbeat. I feel for it, beating gently like an insect in the dark corner of his chest. I shake him.
Wake up.
He is slow to answer. Why?
I have a question to ask you.
Let it wait until daybreak.
Would you die for me, like Jona did for his beloved?
No. You shouldn’t die for me, either. Let me sleep.
Liar.
He rolled over with his back to me. I touched his back, where his lungs rose and fell beneath his muscles and bones. I traced his shoulder blades in the dark with my thumb.
Jona burned his life down for the woman he loved.
Rachel and Djoss escaped Dogsland to the north, past the red valley of demons and undeath. They have joined with the dust of the world, living as they have always lived, hiding as they’ve always hid. They die slowly in their own stains and sins.
Streets shape the people in the streets until none escape where Calipari’s ink has marked them down in bleeding black. They cannot make themselves into something new. Humans push between the cobblestones and alleys and tiny doorways, against the walls and boundaries. After all the grinding, a soul might not cling inside the mangled clay and flesh.
Where does the ruin begin, where does it end? An eternal traveler, I have witnessed the crumbled walls of lost cities disintegrate to lines of stones like rotten teeth. I have touched the heads of a thousand children in blessing; some had wealthy families and some only had the clothes on their backs and no one knew exactly where the breach between the generations began. I have watched the noble mayor cry out the first ordinance of his administration, and held my tongue at how this law would slowly wear the buildings down until broken foundation stones alone would remain hidden between tufts of grass. I have watched the virtuous daughter marry the powerful son and a lasting civilization spiraled up like castle spires from their clasped hands in peace.
I have watched men and women fall in and out of love. I have fallen in and out of love. I have watched all creatures fall in and out and in and out of love.
And I, Erin’s divine Walker—a woman, sometimes, with the nose of the wolf—I can smell the ruin of this city in the sea breeze. We turn a corner in the streets, and a building stands empty—not burned, not broken, just empty—and the windows have fallen away with tile roof and wood like leaves in autumn. Witness it. The ruin is already here. It will grow. There is a king of the day and a king of the night. There is a push between the ruin and the building of things, and the daylight has already lost. The night king rules the streets. The ruin is already here.
We remain in the city, my husband and I.
I can see more. Every day I see more. Jona’s mind and memory unravels around me, through me, in memories and feelings like what people think they mean when they talk about their soul. I smell beyond his sins and sorrows. I smell and I see and I feel a lost world. What matter is truth to memory? The feeling of truth is all that remains. Sabachthani would melt the truth away, why not I, too?
I write it down, even in this darkness while my husband sleeps, upon the backs of the paper of the maps.
My quill crawls. I do not know what to tell you anymore of the city that haunts my memory. Dogsland is the same city she has been for all these pages—the Pens District the same horrible place they’ve always been. The smell in the air grows stronger in the long heat, without rain to sweep the rotting meat into the sewers.
Shall I speak of the cobblestones like buried turtle eggs all fossilized and crumbled under layers of silt? Shall I speak of the creaking buildings hunched into each other’s shoulders, all these sick and drunk buildings leaning against other sick and drunk buildings to keep their shoulders up? Nothing changes. For more than two decades