The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter Read Online Free Page B

man who had knocked on the door to her dorm to tell her this information. She listened, wondering what the words meant for her future. Immortality? Death? She had heard these terms many times since coming to this place but she only knew what they implied, not what they meant. The end of existence, certainly, the end of being an unwanted little girl.
    Such a fate could not be bad.
    With two guards at the door, and the other girls cleared out, she hopped off her bunk and began to pack.
    Doctors watched through narrowed eyes.

    At best, dawn managed to tinge the bellies of the clouds amber. Beyond the thick mantle, the sun rose, unseen. Nowy Solum squatted in a fog that would never burn off.
    Hard to imagine that, generations ago, the city—known then merely as Solum —had been nothing but a few huts and servants’ quarters, a hamlet, sprung up around the palatial residence called Jesthe. Semi-cleared footpaths had defined the environs then, a few people within, humble homesteads, thin cows and sheep.
    Remaining in the city’s centrum, the original Jesthe existed still, but lost under additions and slums. Leaning tenements clung to the palace like barnacles, tried to climb her towers. Wings had been built, haphazard shacks raised, hovels and sundry other residences, nailed and wedged and otherwise anchored, both unsolicited and municipally approved—signed for by some castellan or chatelaine, long dead now—others appearing almost overnight, pushed the city and palace ever upward, toward these omnipresent clouds.
    A smattering of lairs were excavated below, where massive cisterns had been discovered.
    The perimeter walls of Nowy Solum struggled to contain almost four hundred thousand denizens. The census takers who arrived at this number included only the more productive and recognizably human residents, omitting those tattooed as melancholics by the chamberlain and his palatinate officers, leaving off the drifters and criminals who came through the gates (hopeful, desperate, and either quickly left the city or more likely perished there, in the streets). Nor were included those living precariously in innumerable crawl spaces, or the beasts, or monsters.
    A few residents of Nowy Solum were well travelled, knowing there is but one continent, extending beyond the walls of the city, encompassing the surrounding desert and outlying forests, reaching out to the ocean. These people had seen windswept vistas and endured horrors and wonders in unmapped hinterlands.
    Most citizens suspected, whether consciously or not, that the advent of Nowy Solum played a formative role in driving the pantheon and their respective congregations to a form of madness; even gods, apparently, cannot compete with the temptations of a city. Now, of course, all manner of immorality and decadence flourished there.
    Days had passed since the commotion in the clouds, when the sky seemed to tear apart, and since the incident had not recurred, more traditional concerns returned to the populace. Officers of the palatinate walked the streets, adhering to their arcane lists of creeds, hoping their actions and faith would bring deities back, once and for all. Watched over by chamberlain Erricus, the officers circulated, collecting taxes. The one clear function left to them. The castellan, who had once given them instruction, was now quite mad, in their eyes, and his daughter, the libidinous and drunken chatelaine, seemed—not just to the palatinate, but to most residents of the city—equally or perhaps even more mad.
    Without their gods, the palatinate were forlorn, clawless.
    As filtered light slowly changed—illuminating the markets and streets and cluttered buildings with a yellowed, hazy quality—much of the populace, yawning, wondered about their next meal, their next coin, or if a knife might part their ribs in a tight alleyway before the concealed sun dropped once more below the equally invisible horizon. The steaming river, known as the Crane, cleaved