The Stitcher's Debt

What the Void Forgets

The golden mist issuing from the broken pane of the Great Looking-Glass fell in thick tendrils around Rowan’s boots like liquid sun.

“Back away from the pane, Rowan,” Sterling said, his silver dagger already sliding free of his belt. “She isn’t behind the glass. She’s bound to the frame.”

Vesper laughed, a rich, liquid sound that sent three small mirrors trembling at the far end of the rotunda. “Always the silver tongue, Sterling. Did your father charm the contract from you before he died or did you have to pry it from his cold dead hands to learn the truth about your little earthen estate?”

She didn’t wait for him to answer. With a fluid motion, Vesper drove the needle another two inches into the frame of the Great Looking-Glass.

The rotunda groaned as the floor of silvered glass beneath their feet liquefied in great, slow sheets of black mirror-water.

Rowan stumbled back on his boots as the substance sucked greedily at his boots, engulfing them up to his ankles in the thick, cold liquid. The reflection staring up at him from the black glass was not his own. This man with the sunken, ash-gray eyes and the copper wire sewn through his lips was a monstrous parody of himself. Rowan pulled free his right foot with a squelching sound and leveled his iron pliers at the woman inside the framed square of glass.

“You’re cutting the woman inside! She’s the only thing keeping the East Ward tethered to the bedrock!” Rowan cried, his voice echoing unnervingly off the vaulted ceiling of the rotunda. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?!”

“She died seventy years ago, mender!” Vesper snapped, a flash of something sharp and cold crossing her dark eyes. “The Guild didn’t bind her to this place to keep the city intact, they strung her up here like a prize butterfly so they could siphon the cheap power from her lifeforce to fuel their damned clockwork streetlamps!” Vesper’s voice rose to a fever pitch as she gestured angrily at the writhing folds of the black liquid. “Look at her! Look what your precious First Weavers turned her into!”

Gritting his teeth, Rowan forced his eyes away from the horrific sight of the woman inside the frame and focused on the center of the framed square. Through the shifting darkness, Rowan could see the silhouette of a young woman in a dark velvet ball gown her arms outstretched in a timeless tableau of supplication. Thick cables of copper wire and silver thread bound her to an iron chair at the center of the frame. Her head was bent forward her chestnut hair cascading over her shoulders in tangled waves but her empty, haunted eyes were locked defiantly on Rowan himself. Vesper’s own shadow loomed over the woman in the center of the frame from the edges of the square of glass but the young woman in the ball gown was unmistakably real.

Rowan’s stomach twisted violently as he studied the cruel loops of copper wire binding the woman’s arms to the chair. He could see the individual knots in the cable where his own hands had tied dozens of similar bundles securing the great joints of the city’s main thoroughfares. Vance had called the woman inside the Great Looking-Glass a living reflection, a sacrifice daughter of the Glass Guild. But as Rowan stared into the woman’s sunken eyes he realized the truth. The young woman in the center of the frame had not willingly offered herself to the Guild. Her arms were bound in the same cruel fashion as those who had been sentenced to a life of servitude by the First Weavers.

“The Guild is lying to us, Weaver,” Vesper said, her voice softening just slightly as she drew her needle back an inch from the knot at the center of the square. “They tell us the Void is some kind of monstrous entity that waits to swallow the world whole but the truth is the Void only takes what is not written. The Guild has been erasing their sins for a century.”

“And you intend to burn every person in the East Ward to the bedrock to erase a hundred thousand names?” Sterling asked, stepping forward until he stood just behind Vesper. His boots hissed as he stepped onto the black liquid floor and long lines of frost bloomed outward from his boots where his family’s blood magic fought the mirror-water. “You’re not cutting away the rot, Vesper. You’re burning the house down to catch a rat.”

“The house is already infected, Lord Sterling,” Vesper said, her voice colder than Rowan had ever heard it. She drew her needle back yet another inch until the tip hovered just above the knot at the center of the square. “And I have a buyer willing to purchase the East Ward’s sins.”

“Aldous,” Rowan growled.

“Aldous is a fool who thinks he has purchased an empire,” Vesper said with a condescending laugh. “But the man who has hired me is not interested in an empire of glass and gold. He wishes for the Loom to cease its eternal weaving.”

“I won’t let you cut it,” Rowan said.

He didn’t have to pull a length of copper thread from his duster to make a binding harness. He didn’t have time. With a quick motion, Rowan stripped off both gloves and tossed them unceremoniously into the black liquid floor. He lunged forward, his bare hands flying toward the base of the iron frame.

“Rowan, wait! Your skin will blister and turn to liquid if you touch mirror-water without protection!” Sterling cried but it was too late.

The moment Rowan’s glowing hands met the metal of the frame a sound like the dying wail of a child echoed through the rotunda.

Instead of burning his palms raw the heat from his fingers erupted outward in a blinding cascade of golden fire. The molten liquid in Rowan’s veins surged down his forearms in great, glittering threads before erupting from his fingertips in a ring of white-hot light that licked hungrily at the edges of the Great Looking-Glass. Vesper’s obsidian needle vibrated furiously in her grasp as the golden fire raced up the length of the blade, eating eagerly at the dark wood of the rotunda’s frame.

“What are you doing?!” Vesper cried, her voice shaking as the golden light swallowed the dark rotunda. “You idiot! You’re binding yourself to the frame!”

Rowan gritted his teeth, the pain in his hands sharper than any physical discomfort he had ever known. It was as if twin bars of molten iron had been forced down his wrists and were now twisting slowly into his shoulder blades. "I’m not... letting it... drop," Rowan choked out, the blinding light consuming his vision as the golden liquid in his veins wove itself into the intricate filigree of the rotunda’s iron lattice.

Through the cascading veil of golden fire, Rowan saw shapes take form within the dark glass of the Looking-Glass. The woman in the ball gown raised her head slowly revealing a pair of deep, brown eyes nearly the exact color of his own. She did not scream or cry or plead as Rowan expected her to. Instead, the woman in the center of the frame opened her mouth and spoke directly into Rowan’s mind.

“It hurts to remember, doesn’t it little mender?” the woman’s voice whispered, the scent of old lavender lingering in the air around Rowan’s frayed senses. “They cut your thread when you were twelve. They made you forget your mother’s face so you would stop crying and take the Oath.”

Rowan’s heart stopped.

A flood of memories surged through him, hot and vivid and real. They weren’t memories from a dream, they were feelings, sights, scents. Rowan saw a small cottage nestled in the woods beside a sluggish little river. He smelled the tangy scent of lavender growing wild along the riverbank. He saw a copper-haired woman with kind eyes and a gap-toothed smile sitting by the hearth, her hands busy braiding a thick rug. She looked up as Rowan wandered into the room and smiled, her hands stopping mid-motion as a pair of iron pliers clamped down around his small, twelve-year-old hands. A man with a mender’s duster stood behind her, his face a frightening mirror of Rowan’s own, tears streaking down his cheeks as he drove a silver needle into the fleshy pads of Rowan’s palms.

“They take what they need to keep the city standing,” the woman in the center of the Looking-Glass said softly, her voice barely more than a whisper. “They took my life. They took your memories. Why do you bleed to protect their lie?”

"Because..." Rowan choked out, his fingers digging into the folds of the rotunda’s frame as the golden thread bound tighter around his wrists and forearms. “Because the people in the East Ward... didn’t write the lie.”

With a final burst of golden fire, Rowan drove his right thumb into the center seam of the square where Vesper’s needle was still wedged in the wood. The obsidian blade erupted from the frame in a spray of dark liquid and shards of glass as a great wave of golden and violet light burst from the rotunda’s heart. Vesper cried out as the force of the blast hurled her backward through the square of the Looking-Glass sending her flying into the deep black glass of a side panel with a sharp splash.

The liquid floor hardened instantly beneath Rowan’s boots as the Great Looking-Glass settled with a low groaning sound. The long, fine cracks in the glass sealed themselves with thin lines of permanent gold thread that pulsed and thrummed with Rowan’s heart. He fell to his knees on the hard glass floor and rolled onto his back, his arms hanging limply at his sides.

His forearms were completely encased in golden liquid thread. It had burned up his veins and bound itself to the rotunda’s frame in great, looping stitches of light before finding purchase in his skin. Thick, geometric knots of thread peeked out from beneath his sleeves like liquid sunlight trapped beneath his nails.

Sterling knelt beside him, his silver dagger still trickling with the dark liquid from the liquid floor. He regarded Rowan with wide eyes that held something deep and unknowable before he seemed to banish the emotion behind his cold mask. “You patched it,” he said finally. “The second strand holds.”

“She’s... still in there,” Rowan rasped, his gaze fixed on the dark ceiling of the rotunda. “She has to stay in there.”

“She has to stay in there or the East Ward falls,” Sterling said, his voice as smooth as ever. “You understand how the weight works now, Weaver. Every knot requires an anchor. Every anchor requires a price.”

Rowan closed his eyes and let the vision of the copper-haired woman by the hearth drift away into the deep, gray nothingness at the edges of his mind. “Vesper said... someone holds the third strand.”

“We’ll have to get to the Catacombs beneath the Cathedral before they do,” Sterling replied, offering Rowan a gloved hand. “Because if the third strand breaks, Rowan, you won’t have any memories left for the Void to forget.”