STITCH Read online

  Stitch

  A.D. Bloom

  Copyright 2012

  All Rights Reserved

  -Table of Contents-

  The Bone Blade Girl

  The Fall of the Haunted City

  The Stitchlife Rebellion

  The Bone Blade Girl

  By A.D. Bloom

  Stitch: Book One

  Chapter One

  The Monster

  Molly heard her brother's cries and ran to him across Little Falls' cracked and jagged blackstone fringe. Her brother's wailing came from inside a crowd of children at the blackstone's edge, near the first of the planted fields. Molly pushed her way through until she got to him.

  Adolf lay on his belly, and Hob stood over him while her brother trembled and cried. Hob made everyone cry eventually, but by the look of Adolf's bloody hands and knees, her brother had refused to cry quickly enough.

  Thirteen-year-old Hob. Hob and his open-mouthed, squinty-eyed stare. Hob and his fat, clumsy fingers that curled into fists. “Get up, worm. Get up,” he said.

  When her brother tried to rise, Hob shouted, “Get down!” and used the sole of his foot to stomp him down to the blackstone again. It was Hob's favorite game, and he played it with someone every day. “Get up, worm,” Hob said.

  “Stop it!” Molly shouted. She'd already fought Hob five times and lost badly every time, so he simply ignored her. And when Adolf rose, Hob kicked him down again.

  “Get down!”

  A cold calm came over Molly. Even if he stopped now, she thought, he'd just do it again.

  Molly bent at the knees and let her fingertips find a hefty chunk of blackstone to hold in her hand. Tomorrow it'll just be someone else, she thought. He'll never really stop. And he'll just get bigger. He's already a full head taller and twice as strong.

  In a single motion, Molly rose and swung at Hob's skull.

  *****

  Hob's kin screamed for Molly to be drowned, but nobody in Little Falls could say for sure that Molly actually meant to kill the boy, so instead of drowning her they put her in the stocks, bound at the hands and neck, while they whipped her and every good soul hurled mud and mule dung.

  On her third day in the stocks, dizzy and numb, Molly raised her head when she saw people gathering around her. She lifted her head as high as it could go and saw the small crowd part in front of her. Her mother and her brother stood just a few yards away, arms hanging limp.

  Molly saw how they lifted her mother's hand from her side. She saw how they filled it with the mud and the mule dung scooped from under their feet. And Molly saw her mother's weeping eyes, too, but all these things were forgotten in an instant when she stepped forward and the mud and dung and filth she hurled slapped Molly across the mouth, wet and cold and stinging.

  Even if her mother didn't understand why she struck Hob, Molly was certain her brother did. But Adolf stepped forward and hurled mud in her face, too. Even he condemned her.

  The town let Molly rot in the stocks until she was nearly dead. While she hung there, when she was conscious and not thinking about pain, she thought about the fact that she still believed she'd done the right thing, but how nobody else agreed with her. It made Molly wonder if it was really true what she heard people say about her: that she was a little monster.

  *****

  After the town let her out of the stocks, Molly spent weeks healing in her family's shelter. Like everything else in Little Falls, it was built on ruins. The roof leaned against an ancient wall almost five feet high, making the shelter tall enough for a small, covered fire at one end. While Molly healed, she lay out of the way in the narrow space where the wood and thatch roof sloped down and met the straw-covered ground.

  In the time that it took Molly to heal and rest enough to work again, Molly's mother and her brother barely spoke of what she'd done. They barely spoke to her at all. In those weeks, they fed her and washed the vulgar rings the stocks had left around her wrists and neck. They bandaged the violent rips and welts the whippings had left in her flesh, but Molly felt how afraid they were of her. Her mother looked at her like a stranger or stared with a mix of confusion and sorrow. Adolf avoided meeting her eye.

  When Molly was nearly healed, in the deepest night, when the sound of her mother's snoring filled the shelter, Adolf's whispering voice reached out in the dark and accused his sister: “They let you live because they thought it was an accident, but it wasn't. You killed Hob on purpose. You meant to kill him.”

  A week later, Molly woke Adolf in the middle of the night and told him that if he went outside the walls with her, she'd catch him a glowsie. He looked scared, but he went because he'd always wanted one of the copper-blood lizards for a pet. They were made by witches, and at night, they showed their magic: their tails glowed with an unnatural light and lured swarms of bugs they tongue-plucked from the air so whip-spit fast you could barely see it.

  Little Falls' gates were barred after sundown, but Molly knew a way out. She and Adolf crept across the walled town, past the shelters, past the the well, past the stocks, to the spot on the walls behind the raised sheds where the town stored grain. Molly chased a rat there once, and behind a broken cart she discovered a rot-hole at the base of the wall big enough for her to worm her way through. In another year, she wouldn't fit, but for now, it was plenty big enough for her and Adolf.

  Once they stood outside the walls, they pressed their backs up against the timber and stared out across the moonlit blackstone. There were terrible things out there in the wooded wilds: homeless man-eaters and bandits, bears and packs of hungry wolves and boar. Molly was glad for every terror out there because the fear of them made Adolf forget he was scared of her and he grabbed hold of her hand.

  Molly took him to where the fields were filled with endless constellations of glowsies and it looked like stars fell from the sky. Molly caught one for him before it could extinguish its light and run underground. She set it in Adolf's hand, and under the gentle curve of his fingers, its scaly, smoke-colored sides throbbed with blue blood and breath.

  She saw Adolf smile at her for the first time since she'd killed Hob. There wasn't any hint of fear on his face. It was as if he'd forgotten what she was.

  Molly hoped she wouldn't have to kill anyone else; she didn't want to be a monster.

  Chapter Two

  Of Nobles and Witches and Sand

  Vargas Hale's bird snatched a cow from the lawn of his manor, and Vora saw the feel of it on his face: talons in flesh, rusty blood scent, and the swell of wind under wing. “Through this helm I feel everything the bird does,” he said. “I can even feel the Hereford's pulse fluttering at my toes. This is fine witchery.”

  He landed the Thunderbird and the cow on the grass only twenty feet in front of them, and the bird's enormous, fanning, wingtip feathers beat a hot summer wind on Vora's face. She watched with pride because she made both the gigantic bird and the witch-bone helm used to control it.

  She made Vargas Hale, too. She rewrote him and all his noble kin to eight-foot-tall, towering, genetic perfection. Her witchy hand sped them to move faster than natural-born eyes can see and quickened their minds to match. Vora Mbuntu had been Stitchlife to the noble Hales for over a century, and she had always done fine work.

  Vargas Hale tore the cow and painted the air with its color. It beaded across Vora's white coat in tiny droplets. It stained the silk of Vargas Hale's breeches and short-coat, but the helm drank the blood in through its shell.

  He said, “I have a head that might interest you.” He pointed his chin at a pregnant leather sack resting on the ground nearby and continued to tear at the Hereford while Vora knelt, parted the folds, and looked inside.

  The head of the Stitchlife Bataille looked back at her. Tam Bataille, the noble Walton family's Stitc
hlife, their Merlin and Morgana. Vora peered into the space behind her milky eyes and wondered what secrets remained there to steal. “Where did yo-”

  “Her head is a present from Fin Singh,” he said.

  “How did she die?”

  “Let's find out. Entangle my new helm with what's left of her. I want to see the memories of her last day.”

  In one of the sitting rooms off the garden Vora romanced the remains of Bataille's mind and then entangled them with Vargas Hale's helm. When she was done, he set his tea down and closed his eyes. Vora watched them jitter under their lids as he reviewed Tam Bataille's last moments of life. After only a few minutes, he chuckled, opened his eyes, and said, “Link your Stitchlife's wreath to my helm and review her last memory with me. Be careful, though. The end is a bit... snuffy.”

  Vora's wreath appeared covered in silvery-white laurel leaves, but its shell was made of coral-craft bone, and inside it was filled with mnemonic organs a million times more powerful than any ancient computer. The wreath could reach into Vora's mind and allow her to feel everything Tam Bataille had felt, but Vora knew better than to taste a dead woman's last memory too completely, so at her thoughts' and fingers' touch, the wreath's arabesque of neurostim vines unwound themselves from Vora's mind, from all but her cochlear and optic nerves.

  The witch caressed it again, and inside her wreath's bone shell, rewritten, custom-coded cells that had once belonged to shock-water eel and shark tickled her nerves inside.

  The sounds and visions began.

  Vora saw servants and silk in the waving red grass of the plains. In the dead witch's memory, her manicured hand held a goblet, and she drank mead while her eye lingered over painted courtesans. She looked up to regard the twenty-foot-tall, stone-giant golems, and then to her left, at the Walton family gathered in their purple silk.

  Lord Roge Walton was as tall as Vargas Hale, but rewritten by their Stitchlife to have black-on-black-eyes, ebony skin, and shock-white hair. He stood proudly among his clan as their children chased each other in the waist-high grasses. At least Vora thought they were the children; through Tam Bataille's natural-born eyes, the witch-sped Waltons running in the grass were so fast that she only saw them as darting, purple streaks.

  The witch set her mead aside, knelt before a foot-wide scallop-shell, and stroked it with her fingertips until it opened on muscled hinges. She withdrew a white egg the size of a man's fist, rose, bowed deeply to Roge Walton, and handed it to him.

  He gave the egg to a young noblewoman standing nearby, wrapped in wedding garlands and surrounded by her smiling bridesmaids. “A gift to my daughter in honor of her wedding,” he said.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Go plant it there,” he said, “under the flying flag.”

  Not an egg, Vora thought. A seed.

  Celia Walton ran to the faraway flag, carved out a place for her seed in the dirt, and buried her present there. Then she patted the soil flat with her slapping palm and returned to her father's side to wait while the noble Waltons all toasted her. They toasted their Stitchlife too, and they smiled down at Tam Bataille with all the gleaming, pointed, reptilian teeth the witch had written into their genes.

  The ground rumbled and shook. Under the snapping flag, it fractured, fissured, and vented jets of steam. After a pregnant pause, the tremors' cause showed itself, bulging under the earth, then erupting skywards.

  At first it was just a spine – a ridged, segmented, bone-white line pushing its way up from the soil. Then it was a shallow pyramid, but as the shape birthed itself more fully from the earth and sought the sky, in less time than it took Vora's eyes to accept it, the roof's upward curved corners showed themselves.

  A roof protruded from the earth. Then floor after floor of a manor castle appeared and pushed the roof and levels above it skyward. In minutes, a complete structure rose from the still-venting ground.

  It's impossible, Vora thought. You can't grow a building from bonded carbon bone so fast. It takes time for the carbon-craft creatures to grow and ossify – nearly a year for something this size. Vora opened her eyes and looked at Vargas Hale. Behind the ghostly image of the impossible castle, he was smiling, amused at the disbelief on her face.

  The Stitchlife Bataille bowed deeply several times, and when the view stabilized, Roge Walton asked her, “Is it safe?”

  She nodded and said, “Yes, Lord Walton. Quite safe.”

  Celia Walton's bridesmaids ran to the manor castle's shining, white walls, but Celia made a point to walk slowly. The women who got there first ran their hands over the surface of the little castle's walls, but none of them could find the door. It didn't appear until Celia pressed her palm against the wall and the castle recognized her.

  The white stone turned to rippling sand and parted itself in front of Celia's hand until an arched doorway formed in front of her. Celia turned back to smile and beam at her father before she waved and stepped inside. Her bridesmaids followed behind her.

  “The castle. It's... it's not made of bone.” Vora was astonished. “It's made of cellular automata.”

  “Like golems and our polymorph avatars,” he said, “countless grains of living, witchy sands that work together and can form themselves into whatever they're told.”

  “But there's so much of it,” Vora said. “How did Bataille ever grow it so fast? There's as much automata in that manor castle as in all of our golem giants put together. It would take me a hundred years to grow so much. It's impossible. Unless...” Vora could barely make her mouth form around the words. “It grows and multiplies by itself. Bataille wrote a strain of self-replicating cellular automata.” Tam Bataille's achievement was revolutionary, Vora thought – a thousand times grander than any gene-job stitch or copper-blood creature she'd ever made herself. Tam Bataille's accomplishment dwarfed all of Vora's own, and her face was flush with envy.

  Vargas Hale saw it. He laughed and said, “Are you jealous Vora? Then perhaps you'll enjoy the ending after all.”

  Nobles, courtesans, and servants strolled to the newly grown manor castle at a leisurely pace, and Tam Bataille's view shifted between all the nobles that congratulated her.

  The shrieking screams that drew the Stitchlife's eye back to the castle were horrific.

  The walls of the castle bent and warped. They breathed in and out. Then they started to shift and rearrange themselves. Celia and her bridesmaids were visible for brief, fleeting moments as the insane walls moved to reveal the castle's interior. They ran first one way and then another, seeking escape as the living structure shifted around them.

  In moments, the cellular automata lost coordination, and all the walls of the castle crumbled and reformed again and again into a series of terrible, twisted shapes. There was only time for one last glimpse of the young noblewomen tumbling inside before the automata castle lost cohesion entirely and collapsed into a smothering, fifty-foot-high pile of mindless sand.

  Tam Bataille looked over her shoulder to see the golems approaching. In a few strides they were at the collapsed castle and digging with their giant, three-fingered hands, sifting the sands and searching for life.

  Roge Walton's rage suddenly filled Tam Bataille's eyes, and Vora realized he'd lifted her off the ground with his hands on either side of her neck and brought her face level with his. He shook her and screamed, “What have you done, witch? What have you done!”

  There was a tremendous crack that sounded like it was inside Vora's own body, and she knew Tam Bataille's neck had been snapped. Then Roge Walton threw her body at the ground and the view spun. Tam Bataille's eyes saw a flash of purple silk, the red plains grasses, and then the colorless, misty haze seen only by the blind and the dead.

  Vora opened her eyes to see Vargas Hale smirking. “What went wrong?” she asked.

  “My man Fin Singh, that's what. When my Mister Singh couldn't steal Tam Bataille's witchery, I ordered him to sabotage her efforts in a manner that would be sure to end her work for the Waltons. I'd
say he succeeded. Thankfully, since Fin Singh stole her head, Tam Bataille's work is not entirely lost. You can continue it.”

  “It would have been better if he'd gotten her wreath. That's where her secrets are. With her head I can only look back into her memories a couple of days.”

  “I'm told her apprentice took the wreath. It was her price for making sure Bataille's castle fell. It's a pity we don't have it, but I'm confident that you'll get something useful from her head, and with these little hints from the Waltons' late Stitchlife you'll be able to recreate her achievement. I'm told she called her witchy sands 'Sugar Music'. Make the merry Hales our own Sugar Music – our own strain of self-replicating cellular automata.”

  “Yes, Lord Hale,” Vora said. “The Hales will have manors made of polymorphic sands.”

  “Ha!” Vargas Hale said. “What a waste of good witchery. For five centuries the noble families have fought each other for control of what remained after The End of the World. First, we fought with stones. Then with swords and muskets. Now, we are witch-sped blades with stone giant golems and copper-blood war beasts, but if the Hales are to rise above all the other noble families, then I'll need more than that. I'll need unlimited automata at my bidding, great dunes of witchy sands, and with them I will have weapons that crush the other families. I want Sugar Music to make me armies of thousand-foot-tall golems. I want it to make me Leviathans. A mile-high colossus like Kitty Hawk's Gargantuans. No. I want many! Give me mile-high colossi and god-creature crackens at my command more terrible than anything The Old Witch ever made. I want my avatar's stomping feet to shake the lands of the Waltons and the Lees, the Holtzs and Southern Gentlemen Schwartzs, and all the noble families!”