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Humid, in a nigh-unbearable measure, the Memorium sprawls before her. At least the High Halls currents bring with them a measure of freshness; here there is only dank, still air that seeps its way into Lace’s silk, and makes it curl. This place, more so than any other in the Citadel, is wrecked, too many creatures trapped in too small rooms, glass shattered where they’ve broken out, foliage overgrown.
Lace reaches out to the nearby threads, hoping to call someone to clean, but she can feel only Choristors and a small group of near-defunct Memoriae; none of the automatons, who once regulated biome growth, seem to have survived. Some are cracked down the middle: the cage where the silk flies ought to reside empty; others are rotted and rusted, unable to move. There’s a silk fly, still, in one of the automatons sunk to the bottom of a pool in the segment imitating Verdania, tapping at the inside of the metal. Lace turns away from its thread, and refocuses on what is physically there.
The Shellwood mimicry is doing better than Verdania. Pond skippers are still skipping over ponds, unconcerned, and she can hear wood wasps buzzing unpleasantly. More than a few gahlias have grown over the main path, whilst phacias placidly drift about, squealing when they bump into walls. The curated paths are now overgrown, though some still see use—one which, Lace notes, winds its way towards the Memorium and towards the concealed backrooms and corridors which the automatons and choir members use to travel invisibly and store maintenance gear. At least one automaton, then, must still exist, for all that she cannot find its thread.
She pays them no mind. Lace is here for white roses, and nothing more than that. These disguises can hardly fool her, and whilst some creatures are more daring than others, none are daring enough to approach her, her hold on their threads as stern as steel. It lends a particularly artificial quality to this artificial land.
The ground shifts, the cool glass tiles of the Citadel becoming first dirty, and then entirely of dirt. Why the Conductors thought it worth remembering Shellwood’s dirt mystifies Lace, who regrets each step more and more as she ventures in further, staining her feet grey, brown and green. Her pin isn’t made to hack at stray vines, and one of them, struck, strikes back and hits her thigh. It doesn’t hurt, but there’s a brown mark where the muddy water has sunk into her skin.
She stops. Looks at the mark. Laughs, high and airy, steps landing heavier as she storms past the offending vine. A gnat jumps up out of the ground, almost getting close enough to touch her, but this she is made for; a clean, sharp jump forwards, and elegant extension of her arm, and the offending beast is skewered, shell cut through cleanly.
The corpse, punctured, falls apart, and tips, landing in a pool of stagnant water. It floats only half a second before it starts taking in water, and sinks. Later, her mother will reanimate it.
Lace tears herself, away from the uninteresting and altogether pedestrian sight, and re-centres her focus. Somewhere herein lies a patch of gorgeously soft, gorgeously pure, gorgeously thornless roses. They don’t come that way naturally. Truly the ingenuity of the Citadel is unparalleled! Automaton inactivity means they’ll not have been deadheaded for quite some time; rose hips ought to be abundant, wherefrom she’ll acquire her rose seeds. If they can grow in this uncared-for wasteland, they’ll grow in the Cradle without too much effort.
The rose-bushes aren’t far; as expected, they’re overgrown, under-pruned, flowers withered on the stems, fungi crawling up the leaves, parasites chewing on the petals. Approaching, she realises they have a distinct scent, sweet against the smell of damp rot that pervades the rest of the Shellwood replica. All dirt of the Memorium has corrupted these lovely things; they’ll fare much better in the Cradle, where she can flood them with enough silk to properly flourish.
The Cradle is, as ever, cold. The heating system is broken, and the wind steals in. Lace steps out of the elevator, letting it slam behind her without much concern for the metalwork. It’s survived worse treatment.
Arriving back here has made her tired, despite herself.
Her room is large, the sound of her steps on metal floors reverberate against the harsh, angled panels of the ceiling. There is, at least, no sign of dirt, no dust, as the silken power contained within the Cradle’s walls burns away every stain.
Lace turns towards the loom, wherefrom her mother’s silk can be harvested; usually she spins silk for her own being, when particularly worn, or particularly wanting, pulling as she will from the endless repository above her. Her divine mother, in all her slumbering grandness, will not notice this small bite, and the roses will be a welcome addition to this bare room.
Each rose hip is left unopened and strung up, like captive silk flies, on a strand of silk. There are six of them in total, and the process takes about a minute and a half. Lace stares at the string, and looks at the large room. The Cradle is large, and there are six rose hips on a string. The Cradle is cold, and quiet.
In one movement, Lace rips the string of rose hips from the loom, gripping the garland a tight fist. She wants a bed of roses. She wants a bed of soft, thornless roses to lie upon, full buds to tear apart, to shower petals wherever she goes. Looking at it in her hand, she curses, and turns back to the loom. It needs a continuous supply of silk, and she’s certainly not about to spend her own silk on this—this vanity.
Fuming, she ties the garland back into the loom, tugging at the threads contained therein insistently. Her venerable mother might do her the favour of actually investing the rose hips with enough power to bloom. To germinate, at least.
The garland does not move, but to sway slightly from the inertia; it hangs limply from the loom.
The Citadel spa’s waters are scalding, suffusing every thread in Lace’s body and reaching even her heart, pulsing in tandem with the slowly rippling water. The air is thick with steam, the water thick with soul.
Here at least, she can confirm the plumbing is not broken, heat and water both readily available. And naturally, she ought to stay a little while longer—to confirm, of course, that the water really is readily flowing, and the heat won’t cut out at random intervals. It wouldn’t do for the structural integrity of the Citadel’s most fundamental systems to fail, merely because Lace was not thorough enough in her investigations.
There is not quite silence here; the vents hiss and the water sighs and the steam crackles. Nevertheless, there is rhythm, regularity to the sounds around her, one which is fractured by the faraway sound of limping footsteps.
It could be any hundred of the Citadel’s automatons, broken down by overuse or careless manufacture—their makers were a pathetic facsimile of living genius, now reduced to a single architect, hardly able to keep up with the needs of the Citadel. Lace would have expected it to break down, or turn away. Instead, the steps keep getting louder, closer, and are joined by raspy, uneven breaths, and a flat hum.
If it moves past the spa, she will not give chase. Lace is neither a dog, nor a maid. There are in the Choral Chambers an abundance of choir members who are able to manage this interloper. Vermin does live in these walls; some fraction of it lives long enough to become elderly, or perhaps those old corpses dragged themselves here at the crepuscule of their bitter existence.
Lace sinks further down into the heat, lets the noise of the bubbling vents drown everything else out, so cloyingly infused with soul that it has become wholly opaque. She cannot hear the the painful limping, nor the ragged breathing. She feels only her own stillness in the uncertain edge between her silk and the water’s soul. She is an immobile object, submerged, subordinated, untouchable by the current above, senses bleeding into the water lapping at the tiled banks of the basin. There is nothing but the water, herself bleeding into the still water, two elements alike and indistinguishable.
The abrasive clanking of the door mechanisms are amplified underwater. It’ll be here soon, the harmonious percussion of cogs mimicking a ticking clock. Suspended, Lace pulls together the threads of her being, weaves back the boundaries between her silk and the water’s soul, pulls her mind back together. Lets time reassert itself, guided by the regular clockwork, her heart hidden deep within the tangled recesses of her chest.
Finally, she lifts her head above the waterline, feels gravity abruptly restored, watches as the door can but open, and a shambling, ragged figure limp through.
The pale child blends too well into the steam-filled room; the weary pilgrim does not spot her immediately, holding close to the door as a support, head jerking sluggishly in every direction as though checking for threats. Languidly, Lace kicks her leg, splashing loudly and making the cripple flinch. As expected, it had not seen her.
The wanderer utters a groan, retreating behind the door as though a the hunk of metal could protect it, if Lace or any other servant of the Citadel wished to dispatch it. Perhaps this fright will be enough to make it leave—Lace catches her fingers on the thread from which hangs a choir bellbearer, stationed not far from these rooms. She is warm, and comfortable, and she wishes to regain her quiet beneath the surface of the pool.
Instead, it steps forward. Something about the room—the energising soul which permeates throughout, perhaps—calls it. It fails to appreciate the danger. Lace reaches one hand out of the bathing pool and locates her pin, wrapping delicate fingers around the smooth handle.
The action goes unnoticed, and the bug takes another step forward.
“Oh, oh my, oh, good day, Madam, hello,” it says, voice choked. “Oh, these weary bones have sought a place to rest. It’s so terribly cold here at the summit of the world. Madam, may I enter, may I trouble you? It’s so terribly lonely here at the crown of the world.”
Neither the Last Judge nor the other doorkeeper would let such a thing through; she had expected, at the very least—she had expected—something other than this. A dull exoskeleton, and stiff joints. One arm snapped off. Torn rags stolen which must from the cut have been stolen off a fallen automaton. Elsewhere in this anthill there must be passages through which lowly things are able to crawl. It trembles.
“Come here,” Lace commands.
“Oh, thank you, Madam, thank you,” the weary pilgrim simpers, stumbling. “This holy place has not been kind.”
In one fluid movement, Lace rises from the water, spins her pin, lunges forwards and impales it through its chest. Equally graceful, she pulls her pin out, twirling as she does and letting loose a delighted, derisive laugh. What a creature. However it survived the climb—a divine miracle!
Unthethered from her pin, the corpse can only fall; Lace’s smile catches and falters as it collapses forwards, face-first, and she in tandem jumps aside, getting out of the way, and allowing it to land with an echoing splash, water going everywhere and dousing her again.
She giggles, and does not scream. Somewhere around the corner there is a choir bellbearer, and a grand reed not far away, which will carry away the offending pollutant, which is floating head-down in her water, all the dirt of Pharloom folded into the creases of its broken arms. Will it be this ugly when her venerated mother wakes it back up?
The telltale gait of a choir bellbearer approaches, step-step-tap, staff jingling merrily, still faithful to her orders, on their way to dispatch a hostile invader. Here to clean the Spa.
Lace reaches out blindly and severs their thread.
A soft thump—the choir bellbearer drops unceremoniously—and then there is nothing but the sound of the vents and the corpse in the water. Neither of them are dead, really. The divine monarch who haunts the zenith of the kingdom will resurrect them both. The corpse floats dumbly, waxy exoskeleton bumping up against the edges of the basin.
The heat has become more than unpleasant, and the water’s peace no longer appeals. She leaves, and seals the door behind her.
Never before has the stale, dry air of the Cradle so pleased Lace, throwing herself upon her chamber’s floor, one leg hanging off the edge of her platform. Her back against the frigid metal, she allows her gaze to wander across the high, shaded ceiling, the broken pipes, the finely carved indents and seamlessly welded arches. Threads from her mother’s loom sneak in through puncture-holes, a parody of a root system draped against one wall; hanging from the bottom of one strand, her garland of rose hips has still not even germinated, despite the overabundance of silk available.
Her own silk has become chilled and damp, moisture seeping into the threads. The thought flits across her mind—she needs to find somewhere warm, or else she’ll catch a chill—and is dismissed as quickly as it came. She has no need for warmth, and she produces for herself more than enough silk to sustain herself, her heart the only segment of herself not frail. Soaking in the Citadel Spa was an indulgence, a waste of time.
The water pools beneath her, trapped beneath her figure and the chilly floor. It doesn’t even have the good sense to warm—she has no body heat to offer—and she remains in a cold puddle, staring at her strung rose hips.
Perhaps, thinks the pale child, they will not ever grow.
She shivers, and resists the urge to curl in on herself. Her leg kicks. Lying here is—boring. She’s lying in a puddle of cold water and she’s bored. There is nobody watching her who would intervene, no kind hands to weave her a blanket, no tenor voice which might humour and console her. And her room is massive—she slaps the floor with one wet hand—and it echoes, and it is cold, and the vents do not work, and her stupid roses will not bloom, and everything inside is broken and malformed and ugly. If only the air were warmer. She hates the chill.
There are no automatons in the Cradle who could fix this. There is only her, and the sleeping cocoon she calls ‘Mother.’ Even Widow is gone, who could so easily be convinced to bow before Lace’s greater perfection and carry out her requests. There is nobody but her. They are not there. There is only Lace.
She hums herself a lullaby, with the god’s heartbeat as her metronome, her borrowed heart pulsating in tandem, and closes her eyes; allows herself to melt into nothingness, that every thread tangled round each joint and limb be loosed from her control; lets the familiar choreography of obeisance take over.
Lace starts to question why she has wasted her time when she reaches another dead end. What seems an age in its entirety has passed, whilst she scours each segment of the Citadel’s vents and drainage system. It is too damp for the automatons to navigate, therefore she finds herself attemping—in vain—to find where the structure has broken down. Presently, she is trapped within the maze of pipes in the High Halls, trying to identify where exactly the problem is; the water is up to her thigh, and far from the prized clearness the choirs once sang of, instead it tainted brown with rust and blood. The water is full of gunk, torn drapefly wings dotting the surface like fallen leaves had settled on the still pools in the Memorium.
A measure of time passes as she searches, though all the clocks have stopped and the bells no longer count the hours. She hasn’t even the means of measuring time by its impact on her—Lace is static. She is the same child as when she was born, as she will be forever. She does not rust; she will not fray. The only variable is how high the water is, and how quickly it runs, at moments almost stagnant, sometimes gentle, and very rarely fast-flowing and purposeful.
She’s following a trail of scrapes and scratches against the metal walls—either someone trying to get out, or more likely an automaton, wrecked by the water, breaking down and clawing at the walls in its death throes. In theory, all automatons are inbuilt with knowledge of the Citadel’s innards, guided by the silver string through which her mother grants life and guarantees obedience. As they break down, however, they can be destructive, superimposing maps of different levels where they oughtn’t be and breaking through walls in their determination that they’re supposed to be able to pass through a doorway. It would be typical for an automaton to fuck up and for her to be left with the consequences.
As the sound of rushing water gets louder, she knows she’s getting closer—especially the discordant sound of water falling and then hitting disparately arranged metal. As she approaches, she starts to smell—burning? In a maze of sewage? The cold water starts to warm, almost like the spa, though much dirtier, and eventually steam starts rising. Before she set out, she had expected to find a broken automaton wedged into a hole in the pipes, or perhaps some poor traveller’s bloated corpse, accompanied by a sharp blade.
Instead, what she finds is a massive, gaping hole at the intersection where the water pipes meet the gas pipes, pumped from Mt. Fay.
The metal edges are unevenly corrugated and roughshod, sharply torn and sooty above the waterline, whilst below it the metal is rounded from constant erosion. Something exploded here, a long, long time ago; there’s not even a body, or any visible remnants of a body. The scalding water roars as it falls into the gas pipes, racing who-knows-where into the darkness, the gas hissing as it periodically combusts and then douses itself.
Lace doesn’t think that any single bug or automaton could have done this.
The rupture is too large. It must have been—Lace giggles, helpless and furious—a design flaw from the very start. The intersection of gas and water must have caused some sort of critical failure, and exploded.
The hallowed Citadel of Song, the Conductors’ greatest achievement and gilded mass grave, is blowing itself up.
This weak point is almost certainly not the only one. The sinuous, overlapping arrangement of heating and water pipes is gorgeous to look at and the Conductors’ commandment scrolls aren’t shy about their pleasure in the beauty inherent to even the most practical of the Citadel’s systems; why not replicate this faulty design a hundredfold, provided it was gorgeous?
This is not—she canot send an automaton to fix this. She will, of course, to keep the final Architect busy, but no amount of patching is going to fix the design of the Citadel. The building in its totality would need to be torn down, for the Citadel, like Mt. Fay, is only waiting to erupt. Even the Weavers, traitorous, ungrateful children, had the good sense to build the Citadel of stone and not invite the unrestrained power of volcanos into their domain.
It will take a small army of automatons to so much as delay it. It would take Lace aeons to comb through the sewage pipes to find every fault, if she even cared to ensure it was delayed. The choristors are too mindless to do the work, the automatons are good only for repetitive, pre-programmed tasks. This might be the rupture which interrupts the heating in the Cradle, but the Citadel entire relies on a much larger network.
Her other option, of course, is to forget it. Once her mother wakes up, what does it matter that the Citadel will explode? Her holy power sets the Cradle aside from the Citadel; she and her mother can stay safely ensconced there whilst the physical manifestation of Pharloom’s folly crumbles, and the Goddess can reweave the Citadel in colder, purer form.
Until then, Lace herself is certainly not going to be the one to weld this back together.
The moisture will be terrible for the automatons, but thanks to Whiteward they have an overabundance of silk flies. Lace has her rose-hips, her own eternity to face; leave the menial labour to a caste better suited. She has an Architect, still, rotting in the Underworks, perfectly capable of following orders. Given its strict directive, it might even enjoy having a new, neverending project.
But first, this: the unplanned intrusion of Pharloom into the Citadel, where claw-tipped bamboo forces its way through the innards of dead machinery. The last bastion of earnest prayer.
Lace walks past the Wisp-Lanterns, which do not spark. She has seen the mindless sprites attack the Burning Bugs, who jump to bask in the flame, habits scorched and shells blackened, the unity of the flame, this she knows; her they do not recognise.
All that soul accumulated over lifetimes could sustain life, or a facsimile thereof.
Instead, it lies in wait to die—a single, bright moment of glorious despair.
The Cauldron is offensive in its heat and light, and the lava growls, more vivacious than any of the underworkers dutifully scrubbing. One of them, Lace notes, is more recent, its shell and joints less heat-worn, though no more graceful. She recognises it as that which interrupted her as she bathed. It does not look up from its task.
The bridge between the rest of the Underworks unfolds slowly, as it ever has. Beneath her feet, the metal burns as she traverses—poorly heatproofed, she thinks, and warped from its constant exposure to lava.
Supposedly, the construction of the Cauldron was one of the Weavers’ great achievements of engineering, volcanic magma harnessed from Mt. Fay, the danger repurposed in service to the great Citadel. It must be degenerating over time, warping. Built as well as everything else in this Eternal Citadel.
From the moment she steps into the atelier proper, 12th Architect’s inane song can be heard, mumbled half-words and inconsistent melody. They are the Citadel’s most sophisticated automatons, and the only ones granted a voice, but the artificiality is unsubtle. The acoustics of the room amplify the patchwork vocalisation and make it evident they weren’t meant to sing, accompanied by the rhythmless tap and tinker of slender fingers investigating machinery. Perhaps the layering of many dozens of voices might once have obscured the flat notes.
Lace makes no attempt to conceal her footsteps as she approaches, striking the doors’ opening mechanisms with imprecise force, the sound of metal-on-metal reverberating, stark against the absence of almost everything else.
As she enters, 12th Architect swivels in its chair, and it turns to her, the workshop quiet. It has less ability to emote than even the Choruses, whose segmented faceplates push against each other; four blank eyes, neatly arranged, stare with artificial light. Looking down on her, it seems to brighten at her intrusion, but no longer reaches out with its greedy hands to touch.
“Child-woven. You have returned. Do you need-ask our service? We shall c-c-create, to fulfil your demand-desire.” Its tone is earnest.
“An intruder has destroyed the heating pipes in the upper Citadel,” Lace tells it. “Automatons are needed to repair the damage.” Brusquely, she outlines the location of the fault.
12th Architect nods. “It will be d-d-done.”
The conversation ends there. Lace has secured its acquiescence. She can leave.
“And you will fix the steam vents in the Cradle,” Lace adds, “which you will prioritise. The holy mother’s chambers are far too cold.”
But this is the second time in so many sentences that 12th Architect has stuttered. Lace has outlived the other 23 architects, and it has not affected her, and it has taught her the signs of decay. This one her mother will not reanimate.
A beat of silence—she should leave—“My line was not b-built to perceive the cold… A defect in our creation, far surpassed by finer craft. I will aspire to g-greater detail for your automatons. You may v-v-visit, if you would wish to observe their production.”
Lace stills.
“All that’s needed of you, Architect,” Lace reminds it, voice high and tight, “is to craft the automatons. Or are you not capable?”
Its tone is not offended, is is not hurt, it is not even surprised. It is factual, when it replies: “to build-automate is not choice. It is our nature-directive-c-c-c-cage.” As though Lace were a young child who had forgotten an obvious fact.
She reaches for the silkfly within its metal shell, and forces its neck to snap towards its desk, away from her. It sits, perfectly still. Architects, like silken children, do not need to breathe, but its rotors must spin to maintain itself.
“Create,” she orders, and does not release it from her thrall until she is almost at the ventrica, on her knees, on the bridge of burning metal searing her legs, where beneath her the lava sputters, stutters, all the noise of the Underworks drowning out the silence of the Architects’ workshops, a scrub tripping over itself, shell inset with soot, and she laughs, gaily, brittle as ash.
She wakes gently, to the sibilation of the steam-vents, and Lace finds that she is, for the first time, pleasantly warm in her chamber.
Yet—she feels her silk coil unpleasantly, and her back, flat against the hard floor, is heavy. The air itself is heavy with moisture, her treacherous, crude silken body only too eager to imbibe it. She shivers at the sensation, resisting the urge to shake the moisture away, and grimaces at the empty room. The warmth is not worth this; 12th Architect’s success is not worth this. It shouldn’t have extended its reach to the Cradle. There is a reason the Architect remains in the Underworks, and Lace resides at—the crown of the world.
Above, only the divine. There is not even a ghost for company.
She needs to move, and return to 12th Architect—not to visit—to berate, and secure a return to the safe chill of the Cradle.
Turning to lie on her side, she sees that, still hooked up to the loom, leeching strength away from the sleeping monarch, are the six unbloomed rose hips. They have still not even germinated. They ought to be dead, but Mother’s silk is so overwhelming that death will not be a possibility, even after Lace rips the garland of seeds from the loom, only a weak, wasting existence.
Later, she’ll rip it off. She hates it. It’s the ugliest thing in this bare, ugly room. Now, she finds the strength to rip herself away from the floor, almost tripping directly into the scalding vents. They emit an oppressive, toneless hum.
She ought to go down to the Underworks.
She stalks through the Whispering Vaults; there is no whispering—there hasn’t been since her mother eliminated the need for such imperfect communication—only the sound of pages turning, and the chirping of vaultborn, who will grow out of such foolish behaviours. The name is nothing but an archaeological anecdote as to what the Weavers’ civilisation might have been like. Disorganised, she imagines. Loud.
This path she takes through the Whispering Vaults is well-worn; it has had the good sense to stray from it whenever she appears, and she has no interest in tracking down the hole he’s chosen to cower in. As the sounds of quotidian activity recede, the first suggestion that she is coming closer to her destination is the periodic vibration of the walls and floor.
Further down, past the corpse of the Chief Vaultkeeper whom her mother will one day reanimate, she reaches the damaged pipe-system which serves as her entry point. The skeleton of the Underworks trembles, each tremor accompanied by notes, the organist’s dirge overpowering everything else in the soundscape. The approach brings a gust of dampness—the organ’s music drowns out the millions of maggots festering in the rotting water, squealing and biting and bleeding out—and the putrid stink of Bilewater. It used to be prettier, without all of this waste.
Lace ignores it; she slips inside.
Lace is quiet, in the elevator which brings her out of the Underworks, where Bilewater threatens, and back to empty civilisation. The choral song is sharp against the building pain in her temples. She stayed away for a long time, long enough that all of her silk has been renewed, weaving out from the heart of silk at her core.
The journey back to the Cradle passes in a blur, too familiar to register. As she climbs the Citadel’s service corridors to her chamber, she realises with a spark of irritation that she forgot to go back to the Cauldron and order the Architect to turn off the steam vents. The metal of her chamber must surely have rusted—perhaps the pipes will have cracked and fallen from the walls—the entire room corroded.
When she steps into her room, it is overwhelmed with a lush pale growth, fragrant and delicate, the floor blanketed, gentle garlands hanging off the edges and resting in the steam vents.
A fungus of sorts, Lace thinks numbly. An infestation. Choristors inappropriately stowing their cloaks in her room.
The roots start at the loom, drinking avariciously of that divine light, and crawl up the walls and down into the piping, coiling around them to absorb anything that leaks out. They fit, if not in material, then in design, pipes and roots overlapping, form and function in serene harmony.
The humidity. The vents. The steam. It wasn’t enough to give them silk—silk alone, she ought to know, is not enough to live—they needed the right conditions, and these roses need to swim. It was not an accident that the Memorium where she harvested them was almost inundated.
With tremorous steps, Laces walks towards the white mass of flowers. Reaches out to trace the furls of a supple petal, perfectly symmetrical. Unthorned vines run across the length of the floor, fixing the thicket in place. The air is unbearably humid—her silk curls, strands clinging to each other. She hates it. Lies down upon her bed of flowers, and weeps.