In the Night Garden

“I don’t think you’re wicked,” I said quietly, my voice filling the space as surely as a limb.

“If I were not, someone would have come for me, in all that time,” she reasoned. “If I were not, I would not have been given a gold

en ball and told to go off and play. I would have been kept close to the trunk of my mother’s body, and wrapped in her tail, the way I wrapped my ball.” She turned her head away from me.

“If I were not, the ghosts would not have taken me.”

“But you’ve done nothing wrong. Your mother left you to the mercy of a ball—mine left me to the mercy of the Stars. But I did nothing wrong. We are not wicked, we’re not!” I curled my fingers into my palms. Oubliette only shook her head.

“How did you escape, finally?”

But she sealed up her mouth like a letter. Light sifted flour-thin through the shredded walls, and long gray fingers curled around her neck, around my waist. They pried us from our beds, plied us into clothes of paper threaded with dirty string, pleaded silently with us to eat what they had brought: handfuls of aventurine and garnet. We sucked them down—they were hard and chewy all at once. Our teeth split their skin, and they tasted like licorice, licorice and beets. The same grasping fingers pulled us from our meager food and pushed us down that long corridor which led to the machine, which led to the Mint.

The workday had begun.

I tried to keep close to her, but it was impossible in the press of so many children. I could not see where she went, the one head floating shorn and strange among the others. Little voices rose and fell, paper trousers rustled—it was a little like school, save that we were all so afraid, so afraid. The Pra-Ita did not speak to us, but placed our hands where they wanted them, pushed our fingers as they meant us to move.

I was stationed at the edge of the great, arching thing. Already it hummed with moving bodies, lurched and swayed as though it were itself alive. It was Vhummim herself, to my surprise, who cradled my arms in hers. Her blue-white hair brushed my face as together we reached for shroud-covered baskets. Her diamond belly pressed against my back as we drew back the shrouds, and her wheat-stalk arms caught me as I fell away from the thing that she meant me to haul up out of the straw—for under the colorless gauze were the tangled limbs of children, glass-pupiled and sightless, gaping at nothing.

“It was better for you,” she wheezed, wretched and worrying, “I told you it was. To work, and not to be minted.”

“You make money? Out of us?” I felt as though I might vomit, but kept the hard, chewy gems down.

Vhummim’s eyes creased with embarrassment. “We didn’t notice,” she whispered, “when we wasted to nothing. We didn’t notice, for a long time. Our markets were so busy—we could not cease trade because of a few ruined districts. Or even more than a few. Our economy kept our heads to the ground. And even after, we kept up our markets, oblivious. We only truly saw what had happened when gold and silver no longer shone for us, no longer warmed the fingers with their very touch.” She cringed away from me—as though I stood in a place to judge her! “It meant nothing to us. Our jewels had no taste, our coin no weight. What does a ghost treasure? That which lives, that which is hot and hard. There is nothing more valuable than bodies, and we trade now in bone, we trade in it and mine it from the unwanted, we mine it and mint it and it goes to the new Asaad, where you first entered the city, and it buys pale shadows of what we used to love: apple cores and broken stone and skin with no meat, glistening and thick. It is called dhheiba, this new money, and we prize it as we once prized silver, as we once prized the taste of topaz. I am sorry, but all things flow to the Asaad, and so must you. The living work.”

I stared at the child whose arm flopped out of the basket, white and cold. It was a boy, with yellow hair and green eyes. His neck was bruised, as though he had been seized by long, inexorable fingers which squeezed and squeezed.

“See?” said Vhummim. “We spare you this task, at least.”

I considered struggling and running from her, but she was surely stronger than I, and faster. She moved her arms along mine again, sinuous and silken, and gently lifted them to grip the boy by the torso, provided the strength, this first time, to heave him onto the machine, where other children, longer employed than I, dully dragged him along to shining blades which quartered him, eighthed him, and further, and further. The meat was cleaned from the precious bone somewhere in the belly of the Mint, and far down the machine, round coins emerged, stamped with the spider sigil, clean and white.

I worked for hours with Vhummim guiding my every gesture like some grotesque pantomime. I stopped looking at them, all those boys and girls—I just closed my eyes and reached into the baskets, closed my hands automatically. I could not look, I could not. Finally, a horn sounded from somewhere far off, and we were ushered away from the great hall and toward a trough brimming with sapphires. I shoveled them into my mouth as I once had brown beans. They tasted like pastry and milky tea. The diet of jewels had begun to disturb my stomach, truth be told, and I wished, fervently, for bread. The Pra-Ita watched us eat, as they had before, and stroked their necks obscenely. They led us without sound back to the barrack beds, and I understood, as my arms ached under the thin blanket, that this day was now every day of my life. I wept into the pillow, trying not to feel the heft of thin arms and legs still in my hands.

Oubliette climbed in beside me, shaking, her eyes wide as a wolf’s, her teeth chattering. I held her so close to me I thought I might break her—but she clutched me with as much desperate strength, as much hopeless terror. We spoke in quick-fire shots, like arrows loosed one after the other, breaking each shaft before it in mid-flight:

“Did you see?”

“Yes—did you have to—”

“Yes—did you do it?”

“I had to! Did you—”

“Yes—did you throw up?”

“No, but I wanted to. Did they tell you—”

“No!”

I told her all Vhummim had told me, and her tears were hot as boiled water on my hands. We shuddered together in the dark. Neither of us spoke for long moments, stretching out like wool around a spindle. At last, because I could think of nothing else to comfort either of us, I murmured against her bristly scalp:

“Tell me the rest?”

She began to talk to me, her voice dim and hushed as rain against a broken fence…

THE

HULDRA’S TALE,