Songs From Spider Street Read Online Free Page A

had the strength, not after what I’ve
been through.
    I do not know
when they will be back, when my release will come. Nobody would tell me.
Perhaps nobody could.
     
    A giant horse made from ice. Only one mind could have conceived of so
bizarre a place of incarceration; Usko CeKaracal. Old though he now is, his
mind is still unmatched.
     
    Eventually the pain will go. I’ve heard tell that numbness creeps into
every limb after a while. I can’t let that happen; soon after that my end will
come. That’s not what I’m here for. I must stay alive to get out of here, to
find my family.
     
    I remember hearing of CeKaracal when I was young; he must have been old
even then. His Palace of Songs and Sighs was celebrated by everyone and always
swamped with sightseers … if that’s the right word for for something that
appeals only to the ears.
    And I had a
print of the sumptuous marble submersible - the perfect meeting of art and
engineering that he created for King Meriette. There were suspicions that the
railgun-armed dirigibles that sank the sub on its maiden voyage were also designed
by the old man; the King’s troublesome niece had been on board and everyone
knew she wanted to rid herself of any possible challenge to her throne. There
were no survivors, of course.
     
    When they came that night, and I saw my wife and sons for the last time
as they were taken away, I remember thinking that perhaps I was responsible for
all this. The crack of the gun butt on the back of my head came as a small
mercy; a door through which to escape the unbearable, at least for a while.
When I woke they showed me pictures of Suvi, my wife. I don’t believe they were
real; I can’t.
     
    The sun is high and bright, magnified a hundredfold through the
cathedral-high walls of the animal’s rib cage. Small rivulets trickle down here
and there from high up. My eyes water with the pain of looking. I ball my hands
up and stuff them into my eyes, rubbing away the tears that I am afraid will
freeze painfully on my already ruined skin. The orbiting furnace is too far
away to thaw me or revive me. What I need is food to feed my own furnace. When
will they come?
    The cold has
dug its way into me. My senses, far from being numbed, ring like huge bells;
each vibration tears through me and takes my breath with it as it leaves. I don’t
know how long I can endure this. It is as though the cold senses what damage it
is doing to me and rejoices in it. Perhaps, I sometimes think, the horse is
more than just a giant sculpture, a perverse prison. Perhaps, I often feel, it
lives and thinks and drives me deliberately, but too slowly and cruelly,
towards madness. How could I have thought I would escape? My cold, mad heart
has trapped me.
    In the
winding galleries of the great gut of the horse I finally find food. On a
raised table of ice sits a small selection of fruits, there by the beneficence
of my captors. They are all rock hard, of course, but if I hold them under my
clothes long enough they should be edible. I can barely afford to sacrifice the
warmth but what choice do I have? I have to eat.
     
    The great artist’s ascendancy only suffered once; when his grand
masterpiece ‘Arced Angels’, a pair of intersecting tunnels of water in the sky,
collapsed, taking nearly 40 visiting dignitaries to their death in the cold
waters below. Again, no survivors. Not even CeKaracal’s decade-long exile could
erase the shame or the memory.
     
    The legal proceedings, such as they appeared to be, were conducted in the
ancient form of the language that barely anyone now understands. My translator
– appointed by the court on my behalf, of course – failed to follow the
proceedings adequately. Things escaped her, and thus me. I still do not know
what words the judicial arbiter used to sum up my situation. I have no idea
exactly why I am here … or for how long.
    The sky has
grown dark outside the thick ice ribs of the enormous body. More snow on the
way. Frost to