Page 62

Graffiti

T he Crimson Canyon is a lightning shape cut into the rock of Moonshadow City from the Saltbath precinct southeast into the Flower precinct, and home to hundreds of people.

Narrow stair-paths zig and zag from the crater floor down along the cliff walls, between shelf-houses, balconies, and caves, descending beneath the line of sunlight.

The base of the canyon is one of the only places in the city from which Aharté’s moon is never visible.

Ropes have been strung across the open canyon from balcony to balcony, hanging with tiny force-lights and long wind-whistles.

There’s little breeze in the canyon, but when the wind penetrates, it does so with a tight roar that sends the lights bobbing and spinning, and the whistles a-scream.

People swing off shelves using elaborate ropes and pulleys, or climb down hemp ladders, and others sit on balconies with their legs dangling.

Those with shared histories and hardships draw together into neighborhoods, despite assimilation laws forcing them to marry outside their cultures.

The empire can legislate marriage laws and reproductive taxes, but not stories.

Not values. Not the unwritten markers of a stolen past.

Up in Moonshadow City, traditions and the most obvious of cultural markers must be hidden behind masks and under fashion so that they can’t be easily taken away.

But in the canyon, it’s little trouble to identify ruddy-tan Sarians by the metal sewn into their scarves to keep ghosts away, square-faced Urs with too many horse figures woven into their hems, People of the Bow who paint on red freckles as an ancient sign of luck, and those descended from sturdy Pir tribes who bead their wealth into their clothes.

There are peach-faced Osahar who remember how to pass along secrets through the knots in their hair.

The only people missing from the canyon neighborhood are miran. And masks are few and far between.

This is where Bittor was born.

He was often hungry as a child, but never quite starving, and believed that kids without families were just meant to live on the edge like that.

Street kids are rare in Moonshadow City because the complex infrastructures that divide and assimilate families also happen to take a lot of care of orphans.

But Bittor’s cat-eyes triggered various superstitions in the canyon—superstitions that kept people from taking him in, but also from turning him in or letting him starve.

Because he was naturally athletic and fearless, he scampered up and down the ropes and pulleys and force-ribbons in the canyon like a sticky-fingered lizard and managed to get enough work running messages to last until he drew the attention of a post carrier who served the northern block in the Flower precinct and hated the messy-to-outsiders address system in the canyon, not to mention the perilous journey down.

Her name was Tesmose mé Fira and she was afraid of heights.

Bittor, at seven years, saw her shaking at the top of the stair-path and tried to help her combat some sudden-onset extreme vertigo.

Bittor had never experienced vertigo and so his advice was lackluster.

But his enthusiasm charmed her into ignoring his eyes and hiring him.

Then she started to feed him and cleaned out a storage room in her housing petal for him to use.

She registered him with the Silent priests and they gave her a stipend for her compassion.

It was a solid, if not especially loving, relationship.

By the time he was fifteen, Bittor knew his way around the surface streets and alleys across the city and treated the Great Steeples and soaring petals of Moonshadow like the walls of the canyon, scaling them easily to use as excellent lookouts and even better access points.

Thieving was more lucrative, and more fun, than postal delivery, and Bittor learned to appreciate good food and always having it.

He fell into a trap—literally—set by the Little Cat for enterprising thieves and was adopted again.

As he studied new skills of subterfuge and sleight, Bittor blossomed.

He was one of the few from the undermarket to meet the Little Cat’s daughter before she officially joined the court.

The first thing Iriset mé Isidor said to Bittor was “Osahar. Like me.”

“How do you know?” Bittor hoped she was right. He’d never had a clue about his birth family before.

Iriset, only fourteen, poked a finger a little too sharply at his cheekbone, then jabbed at his brow, almost getting his eye. Bittor shied away. “My skin? A lot of people have skin this color. Sarians sometimes.”

“Your skull.” Iriset flashed him a bright grin. “We could be cousins. Also—” She tugged a thick curl of brown hair hanging over his ear. “Texture. See?”

Spinning around, Iriset offered him a look at her heavily knotted brown hair.

Bittor took it as permission to touch, so he did, but carefully. And still, “A lot of hair feels like this. I know a mirané boy whose hair is just like ours.”

Iriset rolled her eyes hard enough it rolled her whole head back as she laughed at him.

“You’re obviously not mirané, and besides, it’s not one of those things but all those things.

Texture, color, bone structure. And I have a theory that a lot of Osahar are inclined to strong ecstatic force.

But if you won’t believe me, that’s your problem. Give me your hand.”

He did believe her. And gave her his hand. He regretted it immediately when she shone a bright force-light in his eyes just to watch the slit pupils constrict, but he never pulled away.

When Bittor hears the rumor that the Little Cat’s daughter was murdered in the palace of the Vertex Seal, he’s in the hidden backroom of a wine shop with Dalal mé Roné and her little four-year-old son, Ooris, whose father was a mirané one-night lay and the blood bred true.

They, along with the surviving members of the Little Cat’s court who haven’t fled, use a series of drops and old tunnels to stay in contact and reorganize with sympathizers in Saltbath.

It’s lunchtime and Ooris is helping the owner of this particular wine shop, Pel, roll out dough for frying—to a certain definition of helping, of course.

Dalal busies herself with a design stylus, extracting the security map Iriset smuggled them from the crystal infrastructure.

Pel’s brown-faced daughter bursts into the secret room, giving off nervous, jerky waves of flow. She doesn’t even slide the door all the way closed before she says, “There was an assassination attempt on the Ceres princess! But Iriset mé Isidor stopped it somehow, and—and it killed her.”

Bittor, on his feet with a hand on his retractable baton the moment they’re interrupted, flinches. “What did you say?”

“The Little Cat’s daughter—”

“Is this a rumor or a fact?” demands Dalal, also on her feet. Her son starts to cry, staring between his suddenly frightening mother and Bittor’s blanching face.

The girl shakes her head. “Everyone is saying it, the bulletin graffiti, too. I didn’t see it on the official scripts, but it only happened at dawn this morning.”

She goes on, but Bittor doesn’t hear more than a word or two through the noise of rising and falling in his skull.

Suddenly he’s sitting down, and he can’t feel the tips of his fingers.

Staring at his hands, he tries to snap—she always said, Iriset always said, snapping was ecstatic and could jump-start almost anything, especially if your dominant force was ecstatic.

His fingers are too numb; he makes the motions but feels nothing.

Dalal’s hands cover his, curling his fingers up, and she holds tight.

They sink off the benches and onto their knees on the ground.

Ooris pats Bittor’s face, wiping at tears.

He blinks and more fall, but he barely feels grief.

It’s all physiological so far, Iriset would say.

His body reacting before his brain catches up.

He hears a song, a broken melody, and realizes little Ooris is trying to sing. The melody is something to focus on, and his hearing returns in a rush.

Ooris pats his face again, still singing a song Bittor recognizes. One of the old rebel songs Dalal’s grandmother sang. “That’s a good song,” he says hoarsely.

“Mama taught me,” the little mirané boy says. “Are you better?”

“No,” Bittor admits, gaze lifting to Dalal. He might never be better again. But he knows what to do next.

In Moonshadow City, graffiti is used for a lot of things.

Art, sure; tagging, of course. But also advertisements both simple and elaborate, and passing messages that might be official, rumored, or illicit.

It’s not unusual for all three kinds to be layered into a charged graffiti design.

Any artist can paint a tag onto the side of a pylon or a skiff, but artisan-designers can make them come to life.

Or at least give them the illusion of motion, create a looping series of actions to tell a quick story or transform from one thing into another.

These can be affixed to pylons or skiffs or any surface.

But they can also hang in the air itself, drawing energy from the forces crisscrossing the city from steeple to steeple.

In the Morning Market there are always several rows of force-graffiti listing changes in prices and what fruit is available today or how many of yesterday’s cactus buns are left for half price.

On artisan lanes, designers compete directly, showing up the galleries across the street or sabotaging new graffiti with tiny ecstatic viruses.

Graffiti posters explode in happy little fireworks, showering safe, bright confetti onto sweepstakes winners or to celebrate a wedding or the birth of a child.

Often graffiti pops up satirizing this or that small king or mirané prince.

The Moon-Eater’s Mistress is a popular subject, and her brother but less so, and while their mother, Diaa, frequently complains that Lyric ought to outlaw the use of their persons in jokes, it isn’t their specific faces used, so neither of them are interested in censorship.

Amaranth rather likes it when one of her handmaidens or Beremé brings her examples.

Technically, the force-flowers the palace architects designed to decorate the sky during the welcoming procession for Singix Es Sun were developed from graffiti techniques.

Graffiti is rather ubiquitous in Moonshadow City, in other words.

It’s a perfect tool to disseminate information and have a bit of fun. Even when he’s devastated, Bittor can’t help but be drawn to plans that are a little bit fun.

The graffiti fireworks he and Dalal design for the Day of Final Mercy are a dangerous sort of fun, but Iriset always loved her apostasy, so in her honor they lean in hard.

The distraction works, and he skips and steps across the network of security like it’s a tight trampoline, has his force-dart ready to cut through almost any armor, except the princess meets his furious gaze and he thinks she says his name.

He falters, and everything else falls apart.

She looks at him like she knows him, and it’s not one thing: not her pear-blossom skin or the anguish in her pursed lips or the shape of her skull or her sleek hair or the shocking lack of any kind of mask.

It’s all those things.

Bittor doesn’t know . But he hopes.

And when the Days of Mercy end, the fragments of the Little Cat’s court are ready with baskets full of salt coins holding brand-new graffiti, to scatter around the city.