Faces Read Online Free Page B

moonlit moment but now she was grasping for the words. ‘We’re not who we are, Klaide. I think I understand. I’ve dreamed us as…’ and her voice choked in her throat because she wanted to say ourselves and she wanted to say others, and both of those and neither were true.
    ‘You don’t understand,’ Klaide told her, his voice a travesty: rumbling and chesty as Jann had known it in the years they had been crewmates, not the clear contralto she knew it should really be. ‘He’s gone, he’s…’ and Klaide’s body began to shudder, not with weeping now but with some more profound convulsion. He began shouting, spitting out words in a half-shriek.
    ‘Dying-dead-he’s-dead-he-will-yet-die-he-dies!’ and while Jann tried to hold the man’s hands down and murmur soft moon-songs to soothe him, still she understood. He had gone away to die. Who had? Jann couldn’t fix on a name, two separate sounds slid into and out of her mind, but she knew he was Klaide’s (champion-child-student-subject-follower), and she knew that whoever he was he had gone to die. He had gone to fight. He was already dead and they mourned. He lay dying, his wound mortal and his blood bright red as a moon whose light waxed upon his death and drenched the green and white moons and drowned their beauty.
    He was all these things, all these states, always walking out to his doom, always lying stricken, lying dead. In all these states he was timeless as the tableau they made up now: Klaide grieving, Merelock poised over them with her spear high, Jann kneeling and placating, speaking of dreams. Even as she fought back tears of grief and fear, the form the three of them made felt so right, felt like she was falling into the steps of a dance she had been singled out for while even her own mother was yet waiting to be born.
    She thought she heard a soft sigh of recognition from somewhere around them, but could see nobody but the three of them.
    She looked at Klaide again. He had wrapped himself in a green curtain-cloth, and torn the front of his tunic so that the edges now echoed the crude garlands of torn fabric Merelock had adorned herself with. He had yanked off his metal collar of rank, and the electoo that ringed his bull-like neck, the badge of a Mechanicus-ordained lay artisan, stood out in the brightness. Its hard geometry made a cruel counterpoint to the tapering lines of Klaide’s own features, elegant even in the depths of grief. It was not Klaide’s own
    (any more than this is my real)
    face, but finally, finally Jann was coming to understand how that could be.
    She found herself talking then, not even sure if Klaide or Merelock had mind enough left behind their
    (I can almost remember their)
    faces to understand, but letting the words pour out of her like moonlight. She talked about Gallardi taking the machine-shrine from Tokuin because of the steps and the songs that called him to the forge. She talked about her moonlit dreams flowered into prophecies as she spoke them, as her fingers traced the delicate intersecting circles worked into her strange, brittle skin. She talked about the memories she had dreamed and the dreams she couldn’t quite remember, the strange, clumsy creatures they had all once been, with their brutish names (Gallardi, Klaide, Merelock, Jann, surely just the grunts and honks of beasts?) and the reeking, lumpen tower they called home. She talked about the temple tableaux and the passion-plays and the mythic dances, the pageant of Alicia Dominica where the Saint stood before a king with a face like the sun, sometimes to draw her sword on a traitor or sometimes to plead for her doomed children; the Life of Macharius, that her brothers had learned word for word, the general waging war across the heavens, the lay of the ninety-nine swords, the great strife of an aeon past when a murderous hand crushed the martyr-hero and spread his blood, so scarlet-red, the tales of the six magnificent warriors who had walked alive