“Ah, that at least I have done before,” the Nightingale said. “It is all I have ever done.”
Among the broken nibs, the slivered coins, the fraying quills, the Nightingale sought fragments that would fit its need: glass shards and a penknife not entirely rusted.
“You will understand,” the Nightingale said to Excelsior. “There is fire below the stairs. Owl Abbas is shedding all that was. So, too, are you. But like a clock I must hasten time a little.”
“Are you death?” murmured Excelsior. “I thought death would be an old thing. But for all the soot on you, you shine.”
“You know me, songwriter,” said the Nightingale. “Listen, and hurry.”
“I cannot move,” said Excelsior. “What can I do?”
“You will understand, and know the urgency,” said the Nightingale.
Carefully, counting its own seconds, the Nightingale unpicked the lock in its own breast, and opened first the cage of its ribs, and then the cabinet its master had installed there. It drew out the little drawer, cushioned in velvet. And as it did so, the Nightingale sang.
It was only a slight essay in scales, simple and hampered by the smoke in the bellows, the discord in a wire that had been jangled in the crowds.
“I know that music,” sighed Excelsior, and his fingers wandered over the dust of the floor. “I had meant to write such songs for you as would spill the city over with meaning, and pull hearts from their moorings.”
“You did,” said the Nightingale. “Now, I must unmoor your heart.”
“You already have,” Excelsior began to say, with no more volume than the watching ghost. But the Nightingale parted his ragged shirt and with careful, unshaking hands opened flesh and muscle and bone. How little blood, and how thick, spilled on the floor. Not enough to save even a small phantom, though it chased several even older wisps, of the sort that flutter in the dust about bedposts, away.
“Your heart alone would fulfill my errand,” said the Nightingale, lifting out that flinching organ, “but we might make something new entire, you and I: a thing I was not built to invent and you would not live to try. What my maker will make of that, I do not know.”
To the third member of their company it said, “Will you show him how to be as you? For he must learn quickly.”
The Phantom of the Window-sash, however, had no interest in further expiating its sins against Excelsior. It rumpled itself to the sill and floated in the air above the fires, breathing for the deaths of coins, ascending to the garrets-above-the-garrets, to bother pigeon-parliaments and rat-scouts a little longer, before it vanished altogether from sight.
The Nightingale stowed Excelsior’s gory heart and gathered up the trailing threads of his horrified, bewildered spirit, tucking them neatly in place amidst the staining velvet that it had once, mistakenly, intended for the heart of the Little Emperor.
Then the Nightingale latched closed the cabinet of its chest. “There,” it said, patting the metal and the panels of quartz and beaten horn. “Rest a little. I shall carry us for now.”
In time, new scribblers would arise from the ashes, as would a new city and a new emperor, of whatever stature, to take the place of the one who (it would be said) had lain in state, arms full of treasures, while the Palace Aster blossomed into flame.
But for now, the city rioted and burned, and neither then nor later did it know or care that the author of its rebellion was carried out of its bounds, rocked within the ribs of the Nightingale.
“I shall learn to write songs through you,” murmured the Nightingale to its little burden, as it strode out of the city gates in the shining night, and between the blue fields at dawn, “and you shall grow to sing them through me.”
They reached the foothills in a glowing afternoon, where the leaves flamed copper. And it was in an evening that, singing softly a song entirely new, they climbed into the scarlet haze of the mountains and vanished at last from the history of Owl Abbas.
The Spires
Alec Nevala-Lee
I.
In the English Mechanic, September 10, 1897, a correspondent to the Weekly Times and Echo is quoted…. Early in June 1897, he had seen a city pictured in the sky of Alaska. “Not one of us could form the remotest idea in what part of the world this settlement could be. Some guessed Toronto, others Montreal, and one of us even suggested Peking…. It is evident that it must be the reflection of some place built by the hand of man.” According to this correspondent, the “mirage” did not look like one of the cities named, but like “some immense city of the past.”
Bill Lawson studied the silent city. The photograph in his hands was the size of a postcard, creased at the corners and brittle with age. It depicted a cascade of roofs and chimneys emerging from what appeared to be a fogbank, its upper half obscured by clouds, with something like the spire of a church faintly visible in the distance. After examining the picture for another moment, he returned it to the man on the other side of the desk. “What about it?”
The photo went back into the valise. “Have you ever heard of a prospector called Dick Willoughby?”
“Sure. An old sourdough. Before my time. Willoughby Island is named after him.”
“That’s right.” The visitor, who had introduced himself as Sam Russell, was in his late forties, with handsome features and eyes that looked as if they had been transplanted there from the sockets of a much older man. “He claimed that every year in Glacier Bay, between June and July, a city appeared in the sky to the northwest, above the Fairweather range. He went back three times to get a picture of it. Finally, he came up with this photo. He sold copies of it to tourists.”
Lawson checked to see if Russell was joking, but the older man kept a straight face. “It looks fake to me.”
“Oh, it is.” Russell grinned. “It’s a picture of Bristol in England. Either Willoughby was deliberately lying, or somebody sold him a plate of the city and convinced him that it was taken here in Alaska. I’m inclined to think that he was a victim of a hoax. But that’s interesting in itself. It means he thought that this picture resembled whatever he saw in the sky. You see?”
Lawson decided to ignore the question. “So why are you showing it to me?”
“I want you to fly me to Willoughby Island, so I can take a look for myself.”
Lawson paused before responding. He prided himself on being a decent judge of character, but Russell was hard to pin down. The coat that he had hung by the door was rumpled but expensive, like his traveling case, and the bundle by his feet included a surveyor’s tripod and a camera. He certainly didn’t resemble the hunters or prospectors who tended to come through Juneau these days, the flow of whom had slowed to a trickle in the depths of the Great Depression.
It occurred to Lawson that the other man might be toying with him. People from the outside often assumed that the locals were simple folk, when the opposite was more likely to be the case. Seeing himself through Russell’s eyes, he was aware that he didn’t cut an impressive figure, with his untucked shirttail, oily jacket, and busted nose, and he felt a twinge of resentment at being mistaken for a rube. “I wonder if you’re having a laugh at my expense.”