Caitlin R. Kiernan — The Cryomancer’s Daughter
Sirenia Digest 8 (July ’06), excerpt from:
The Cryomancer’s Daughter
(Murder Ballad No. 3)
“And then,” she says, as though she still imagines that I’ve somehow never heard this story before, “the demons tried to carry the looking glass all the way up to Heaven, that they might even mock the angels.” But it shattered, I cut in, trying to sound sober, and she smiles a vitreous sort of smile for me. I catch a glimpse of her uneven bluish teeth, set like mismatched pegs of lazulite into gums the colour of a stormy autumn sky. If I were but a stronger woman — a woman of uncommon courage and resolve — I might now use all my geologist’s rambling vocabulary to describe the physical and optical properties of that half-glimpsed smile, to determine its electron density and Fermion index, the axial ratios and x-ray diffraction, diaphaniety, fracture, and etc. and etc., and on and on and on.
I would take up my fountain pen and put it all down on paper, and there would be no mention anywhere of her tiresome fairy stories or my deceitful, subjective desires. I would reduce her to the driest of crystallographies. And then she says, as though I never interrupted her, “Every tiny sliver of the broken looking glass retained the full power of the whole, and they rained down over the entire world.” I’m tired, I say. I’m very tired, and now I want to sleep. So she sighs, exasperated, impatient, exhaling the very breath of Boreas, and a ragged bouquet of frost blooms across the tiny window looking down on the nub end of Gar Fish Street. I’ve never seen her sleep. Not even once in the long three weeks since she came to the decrepit boarding house where I live, bearing a peculiar stone and a threadbare carpetbag and asking after me. Oh, sometimes she yawns, or her eyes flutter in a way as to suggest the dimmest memory of sleep. Her eyes flutter and those pale lashes scatter snowflakes across my bed, but I’ve never seen her asleep. Perhaps she sleeps only when I’m asleep; I can’t prove otherwise. “Most of the bits of the looking glass were so small they were like dust or grains of sand,” she says, still gazing down at the dim and gas-lit cobblestones. “But there were a few fragments large enough to be found and polished flat and smooth and fashioned into windowpanes.” It sounds like a threat, the way she puts it, and also the way she’s staring at the window, and then she turns her pretty head and looks at me, instead. “I should never have come to this terrible old house,” she tells me. “I should have gone to some other town, farther inland, over and across the Klamath Mountains, and we should never have met.” But I know this is a game, not so different from the stories she tells again and again, and I don’t reply. I roll over and bury my face in my pillow. “It’s a wicked, filthy place, this town,” she continues, “a sodden ghetto, fit only for leprous fishmongers and ten-cent Jezebel’s and—” And what? I ask her, my words muffled by the pillow. So here I am playing after all. Here I am dancing for her, and I know without turning to see that she’s wearing that smug lazulite smile again. Just what else is this filthy old town fit for? She doesn’t answer me right away, because now I’m dancing and so she has all the time she needs. I open my eyes and stare at the wall, the peeling ribbons of pin-striped wallpaper, the books stacked high on my rented chifforobe. I put out the lamp some time ago, so the only light in the room is coming from the window, and now she’s gone and blocked half that with the frost from her sigh. “My father,” she says, beginning this other lie, “he said that I should find you, that I must seek out the Sapphic professor so recently disgraced and duly dismissed from her lofty post at University and fallen low and holed up in this squalid abode, drinking herself halfway to death and maybe then back again. He said you know all the deepest secrets of the earth, the mysteries of the ages, and that you even speak with her, the earth, in your dreams. He said I should show you the stone, that only you would know it for what it is.” But you have no father, I say, playing the good and faithless heretic, stumbling through my part like the puppet she’s made of me. You’re merely another wandering war orphan, an urchin whoring her way down the coast. And that precious rock of yours is nothing more than a cast-off ballast stone which you picked up on the beach the morning you crawled off that tramp steamer and first set foot in this wicked, filthy place. You’re an orphan, my dear, and the rock is no more than a gastrolith puked forth from the overfull craw of some whaling ship or another. She listens silently. She has never interrupted me, as that would be not so very different from interrupting herself. I can remember when there was some force behind these words, before I caught on. Before I wised up. I can remember when they had weight and anger. When I meant them, because I mistakenly believed that they were my own.
“My father…” she begins, then trails off, and I feel the temperature in my dingy little fourth-floor room at the end of Gar Fish Street plummet ten or fifteen degrees.
—was likely a Russian foot soldier, I continue for her on cue, bound for some flea-ridden Kamchatkan hellhole, when he met up with whichever Koryak witch-sow you would have called your mother, had she ever given you the chance. And yes, these are words from my mouth, spoken by my tongue and passing between my lips, but still they are always her words. I bite at the soft inside if my cheek, willing silence upon myself (which is easy, as this particular soliloquy has come to its end), and she reaches out and brushes frozen fingertips across the space between my shoulder blades. I gasp, and at least it is me gasping, an honest gasp at the pain and cold flowing out of her and into me. All the breath driven from my lungs in that instant, and now I must surely look like some gulping, fish-eyed thing hauled up from the briny sea, my lips going a cyanotic tint and my mouth opening and closing, closing and opening, suffocating on this thin air I coughed out and can’t seem to remember how to breathe back in. Then she presses her palm flat against my back and the chill doubles, trebles, expands ten-fold and tenfold again between one gasp and the next. She draws the warmth from me, because she can manufacture none of her own, because, she says, she has been cursed by her own father, a man who conjures blizzards from clear summer skies and commands the grinding courses of mighty glaciers. A wizard king of snow and ice who has so condemned his own daughter because she would not be his consort in some unnatural and incestuous liaison. It’s as good an explanation as any for what she is and what she’s done to me, again and again and again, though I can believe it no more than I can believe that six and three are ten or that the sun and moon move round about the Earth. I am unaccustomed and unreceptive to phantasia and make-believe, even when I find myself trapped hopelessly within it. Perhaps my disbelief can be a prison as surely as this room, as surely as her wintry hand pressed against my spine, but I’ve little enough remaining of my former life, those vanished years when there was still camaraderie and purpose and dignity, and by all the gods in which I have never sought comfort I will cling to Reason, no matter how useless it may prove before the cryomancer’s daughter is done with me. She leans near, and her breath spills across my face like Arctic waters. “I am alone,” she says sweetly and with a brittle edge of loss. “I have no one now but you, no one and nothing, only you and that damned stone. You will love me. You will love me as you have never comprehended love before. And your love will be the furnace to finally melt the sorcery that binds me.” I would laugh at her, at these preposterous lines she might have ripped from the pages of some penny dreadful or stolen from a bit of low burlesque, but my throat has frozen over. I might as well be stone now. She has made of me the very thing I’ve spent my life researching and cataloging, for what is ice but water assuming a solid mineral form? I am made her petrifaction, and she leans nearer still and kisses me upon my icy lips. I wish that she’d at least allowed me to shut my eyes this time, just this once, that I would not now be forced to see her, to stare back into the daemon lover who is staring into me. That too-round china-doll face and the wild, tumbling cataract of hair as white as snow spun into silk, her bitter lazulite grin, her own eyes the colour of a living oyster pulled from out its bivalve shell. In this moment, I could almost believe her tales of broken mirrors and snow queens, lost children and cruel magician fathers. And then she touches me, her hands seeking out the frigid gash of my sex, and I am no longer even granted the tethered freedoms of a marionette. I am at best a chiseled pagan idol to polar bears and hungry killer whales, a statue upon which she will prostrate herself, stealing from me such pleasures as she might wish and can yet endure.
Copyright © 2006 by Caitlín R. Kiernan