On my sixteenth attempt, my eldest daughter divested herself of the knife earlier than anticipated. The steel of Kath’le Kal embedded itself in a distant peninsula, sowing untold chaos amongst the masses. An entire crop of promising candidates wasted away trying to pull a rusted blade from dolomite, granite, quartz, and gold. Though she eventually retrieved what was hers, my eldest never learned of the horrors to be, and her love stayed her hand at the crucial hour. Millia Gnu Aye succeeded the throne.
Morta woke, her feet sore and her neck throbbing. She sat up, groaning loudly as she touched her head, rubbing her temple and squinting her eyes. The lights hurt and her breathing was shallow. Just how long had she been dead? She panicked as the thought crossed her mind but quickly found composure. Her casket was open, and there was no need to ring the bell.
She gasped, holding her hands over her chest. Her heart beat steadily. She let out a relieved sigh, color returning to her cheeks.
“Welcome back to the living, Morta,” said Bastion, waiting in the dimly lit chamber.
Morta blinked, recognizing the soft red light, the arching rib vaults, and the pews buckling from the weight of taconite pellets. She was back in the cathedral.
“When did I get here?” she asked, her headache dissipating and feeling returning to her hands.
“I brought your casket after the ceremony. Your sisters thought it more appropriate than burying you. Nona wanted to stay with you until you woke.”
“Gawds, you didn’t let her?”
“Of course not. There wasn’t enough room in your casket,” Bastion said, tipping her chin, and flashing a light in her eyes, dilating her pupils.
Morta blinked.
Nona was surprisingly clingy when Morta wasn’t conscious. They seemed to get along just fine, so long as one of them was dead.
She sighed.
Maybe she was being too hard on Nona. After all, her sister wasn’t a child anymore, even if she still acted like one. She’d have to make it up to her, preferably when her sister wasn’t on the rag.
“You guys ever thought of cremation?” she said, struggling to take off those gawds awful boots and unstrap her thigh holster.
She was going to kill Atropos.
“You bear your father’s authority, Morta. You can’t burn.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said, pulling on her legs. “Fuck!” She couldn’t even wiggle her toes. “It’d be nice to wake in a sauna for once.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Bastion plucked her out of the casket, her legs dangling limply as he propped her up on his knee like a marionette.
His head drooped and the leather along his neck was dried and cracked, spinning cogs, copper knuckles, and brass vertebrae groaning as they clicked beneath his tattered cloak. He seemed exhausted, if that were possible for a machine. Bastion cared so little about how he appeared, his mannerisms and speech, all but lines of binary in a central processing unit, but Morta didn’t mind.
She yawned, resting her cheek on Bastion’s synthetic polymers and thermoplastic insulation, wiring dangling from his abdomen like intestines from an open wound.
All she wanted was a father, artificial or not.
Something whispered around her, a familiar voice on the tip of her tongue. A voice that beckoned to her from the abyssal depths of the Origin Well. She shivered, wrapping her arms around her shoulders, goosebumps and cold sweat.
“What’s down there?” Morta asked, her knees shaking.
“A prison for futures that should never be. A place where the sediment-laden portion of mortal tapestries gather. The remains of what you cut hunger, Morta. Never go there, for I fear you may not return if you do.” Bastion’s hands shifted, fingers unfolding into a series of interchangeable parts assembled into miniature tools, a triangular silicon hammer, and the rubber diaphragm of a stethoscope.
Morta grunted, “I’m fine, Bastion.” She leaned back, undoing the buttons of her blouse so he could listen to her heart.
“A strong beat,” he said, Morta jumping when the cold metal touched her chest. Bastion tapped her knees and her legs twitched, the feeling returning to her toes. “You seem upset.”
No shit, whatever could’ve given that away?
She sighed, pulling off her stockings to rub her feet. “You wanted to talk, didn’t you? Isn’t that why we’re really here in the cathedral?”
“We didn’t have time to speak at your sister’s wedding.”
“I didn’t give you time to speak at my sister’s wedding.”
“Morta, please, I may know little of the troubles of adolescence, but I can help you—”
“No! I know what this is about!” Morta made fists with her hands, calming herself. “Do you know what pisses me off the most Bastion?” she asked, poking his iron ribs. “That confused look you’re always giving me. You knew my sister was going to die from the very beginning, didn’t you?”
Bastion twisted around, cocking his head as if confused by the question. “Yes.”
“And that I’m the one who’s supposed to kill her?”
“Yes.”
“Then how can you possibly be confused about why I quit using the knife?” She placed her hands on her hips.
Gawds, if he knew from the beginning, why hadn’t he just told her?
“Morta, Nona is part divine. She’ll live for millennia before you ever have to worry—”
“Don’t you fucking say that to me!” Morta shouted, grabbing handfuls of her skirt and squeezing. “I worry every time she stubs her toe! Every time she trips over her shoes and stabs herself with a knife! When she breaks a nail, whenever she sneezes or coughs! And Gods forbid if she ever actually gives birth! I’m fucking worried because I don’t know if it’s going to be today or tomorrow! I won’t be the woman that ends her, Bastion, and you can’t make me!”
“Morta, you don’t have a choice. Resistance will only cause you more pain,” Bastion said.
“Just you fucking watch me!”
He sighed, rusty hinges groaning and spinning lugs glowing red hot. He waited until tears sprung from her eyes and her face grew red as she tried to wipe them away.
“I won’t do it,” she said, sobbing. “I love her too much.”
“Morta…”
“Do you know what it’s like, Bastion? To have the entire world hate you for doing your job. My sisters are all I have. The only ones who will celebrate death’s birthday.”
Morta still remembered her last birthday and her sisters’ gift to her. Nona’s warp knitting was unparalleled for a young woman. Morta found eighteen geometric configurations in a single loop of fate. With three directions and two circles, Nona strung three hundred and twenty-four combinations.
There was a rougher quality to Decima’s weft knitting, but her genius was clear to see. Decima had perfected her circular and crosswise needlework. Unlike the silky tapestry of birth, Decima’s tapestry didn’t rip easily. No wonder mortals were so damn adaptable.
When they blew out the candles, Morta pinched the fabric, teasing the individual fibers. She saw a homemade galvanized cell between a fair aisle and cable knit. The boy was only fifteen years old when he pieced together junk from his father’s textile plant to make his first explosive. Then, within a Stockinette stitch, Morta saw the unmistakable weave of inspiration, a ratchet and pawl mechanism.
He made his first revolver from scrap wood, a pepperbox firing mechanism, a rotating cylinder, a cocking hammer, and a pawl and bolt to turn and lock the chamber. The first to fire five times without manually reloading. Then came nitrous oxide, wax figurines, and a cholera epidemic in a loose buttonhole stitch. Two pounds and twelve ounces. His invention was a single-action five-round cylinder. A twenty-eight caliber pistol with interchangeable parts and blade-fronted sites, effective at sixty-five yards, a Paterson revolver.
Tears dripped from Morta’s eyes as she pressed the tapestry against her chest. Her sisters crowded around her, wishing her a happy name day.
Gawds, how she loved them.
“Morta,” Bastion said, touching her shoulder, waking her from her daydreaming. “Yours is a heavy burden. No one who understands would ever dispute that, but some duties are far too important to ignore.”
Morta sniffed, rubbing her eyes. “So, what? I’m supposed to set aside my feelings? Duty above family, is that it?”
“I’m not telling you to forget your feelings, and I only hope that your love for Nona matures. You must understand, your obligation is a mercy, not a punishment.”
“I wish I could believe you,” she said. “I wish I trusted my father, but how can I? To kill my baby sister? What father would request such a thing? Why, Bastion? Why does she have to die?”
“You know the reason, Morta.”
“What, because of those fairy tales?” She closed her eyes, leaning her head against his shoulder and hugging her knees to her chest. “About my uncle’s curse? I see no reason to believe that, no evidence of any curse.”
“And what of the sediment that builds up in mortal fate?” Bastion asked. “You are one of the few who can see and feel it. Is that but a figment of your imagination? Another game your other half plays with you?”
“That grainy shit I always feel when holding their tapestries? It’s just a marker showing me where to cut.” Morta wiped her eyes dry.
“The sediment represents something far more sinister. Have you ever been able to read fate beyond where the grains are thickest?”
“No, I can’t read past that point.”
“How about Nona’s tapestry? Have you ever tried reading hers?”
“First you yell at me for reading mine and now you want to know if I’ve read my sister’s?” Morta looked up from her knees. “I won’t do it, Bastion. I won’t come any closer to harming her.”
“The sediment in her soul grows with every year. She won’t always be the innocent girl you hold dear.” Bastion lifted her chin so her eyes met his. “Do you remember the story of Adelaide, the woman your father loved? The woman who you should’ve called mother?”
“You would’ve adored her, Morta. She was like Nona. Obsessed with life and all its creations. So great was her desire to shape a life that she fell prey to the whispers of the Great Devourer. Adelaide was granted a kiln, but the bricks were poisoned. That’s why Nona bleeds, Morta. That’s why childbirth is so dangerous for her. She is of Adelaide’s lineage and the poison dwells within her as it does all mortal creations. She cannot resist the call forever and, one day, much like Adelaide, the mangle will take her. You must kill her before that or soon not even you will be able to escape the monster she’s destined to become.”
Bastion plucked a tapestry of fate from the fingers of the Isomerase. It shimmered in his grasp and he fumbled around with it, an untrained hand shaking in the dark.
Morta gently took the fabric from him, folding the cloth until she could feel the grainy texture at the far end of the weave. “It’s here,” she said, holding her finger over where the sediment was thickest. “What fate has in store for mortals beyond this point, I cannot say.”
“This is where men must die,” Bastion said. “Beyond that is a dark and terrible future nobody should ever live to see save those banished to the depths of the forbidden well.”
“Maybe.” Morta closed her eyes, summoning her knife. She pulled the doll’s string from her nape until the blade slid out of her clavicle. “Even as a duchess, Bastion, I cannot know the future should I choose to change it. Will it be as terrible as you believe, as my father believes? Sure, but how will we know if we don’t try?” She turned the blade on herself, pulling the string taught.
“What are you doing, Morta?”
“Thank you for sharing your stories, Bastion. I love you. I don’t know if a machine will ever fully understand what that means, but it is true. You’ve cared for my sisters and me for as long as I remember and I’m sorry for always being a disappointment.” She twisted the blade under her doll string and cut. “I don’t believe in your tales. No matter what the future holds, I will never hurt Nona, so I cut away that which threatens the ones I love.” The wire snapped, bleeding black ichor is it zipped back to her nape, empty.
“Morta! Stop this immediately!”
Bastion lunged as she tossed the blade into the Origin Well, the hilt slipping through his grasp into the endless abyss.
“I guess we’ll see it together, Bastion.” She stared blankly into the darkness. “That terrible future you and my father fear.”