Yumi and the Nightmare Painter(119)
Thus, as she slept, it evaporated the previous town and created a new one using imprints left long ago on the shroud. At first, it thought creating a new town for her each day would be enough.
However, she refused to move on. She stayed in that second town for weeks, acting irregularly. The wrongness compounded, and the machine reassessed. Yumi was dangerous, and there was something distinctly odd about her behavior. So the machine called upon its most dedicated servants, the scholars: its creators. They had been kept apart from the soup of the shroud and held in reserve, their wills dominated but their minds left partially free, for just such a situation.
The scholars had been sent, therefore, as agents. They’d played a role like everyone else, reenacting things they’d done seventeen hundred years before. Showing off their machine prototype to the small towns. However, they’d come with a secondary mandate: to discover what was wrong in the town and to fix the problem, no matter what that required.
That brings us, finally, to the present. Where Yumi had a different problem. The tree she was flying on was made from the shroud.
That made sense to her. The buildings hadn’t been real, nor had the people. Why would the plants be real? It had all been a charade orchestrated to control her. Better if every element, then, could be controlled exactly.
As she rose higher in the air, the tree started to warp beneath her fingers. Wisps of smoke began to trail from it. Being created from the shroud, the tree was subject to her enemy’s control—which meant the machine could make its form vanish back into the shroud. Something it was starting to do, if more slowly than the machine would have liked.
She soon hit the invisible wall around her little town. Here the shroud had been painted to give the illusion of a landscape extending forever. Once she touched it, that wall warped and bent—letting her pass through. For the first time in almost two thousand years, she physically left that pocket of land and entered the shroud proper.
The darkness was strangely transparent to her. (And she didn’t even have to burn tin.) Perhaps this was because she was made of its same substance. Once she was within it—hovering on a tree that was shrinking by the minute—she saw a dark and ruined landscape below. Nothing growing—just dark stone that had been hidden from the sun for millennia. Behind her, the town faded. She could see it retreating, a column with a dome on top. A piece of her broke when she realized even the sunlight she’d basked in and loved—even the sight of the daystar itself—had somehow been fake.
(She was wrong, by the way. The sunlight, actually, was real—the domes over the cities let sunlight through in one direction without allowing light back out the other way. So while what she felt was authentic, those of us surveying the world from above didn’t spot these prisons. In addition, the heat from the ground was real, created by the machine using a concentration of Invested essence.)
From this height, Yumi could make out other dome-topped columns in the distance. These too were transparent to her eyes, lights standing out like candles on a dark night. The prisons of the thirteen other yoki-hijo. And in the middle of it all, a brilliant larger light that she figured must be Torio City, the capital. Home of the festival. Seat of the queen.
Yumi was drifting away from it.
That was a much smaller problem than the fact that her tree was unraveling faster now—joining with the smoky blackness. Beneath her, dark shapes gathered. The scholars had not given up. Indeed, she flew like a banner out here, hard to miss. She started to drift downward as her tree continued to cease being a tree. She clung to it, eyes closed, resting her forehead against the wood.
Please. Please, spirits. Let it continue.
The bark beneath her forehead hardened. The tree stabilized in the air. Yumi opened her eyes, surprised—and embarrassed by that surprise. She’d prayed. The spirits had answered. It was just…she didn’t usually see them answer so quickly…
She started to fall again, the tree unraveling.
No! she thought. And again it recovered. Because…Because what I believe to be true is true, Yumi realized. This tree is created from the shroud. And by thinking of it as something else, I can force that to be the reality.
As she thought this way, the tree indeed became even more solid.
And the wind, Yumi thought forcefully. I am lucky. Because it blows the right direction.
The tree shifted in the wind, turning the way she needed it to go, toward Torio City. Toward the machine.
* * *
An hour later, painters gathered at the western edge of the city, laying down stacks of canvases and large jars of ink. Favors had been cashed in. Promises given. Debts incurred. In total, thirty-seven had come.
Painter watched it all with excruciating anxiety, worried that the assault would come while they were still preparing. But now that he had them all organized—a good ten to fifteen percent of the city’s total painters—he found himself overwhelmed with gratitude. His friends had not gone halfway in their efforts. It was still a small force, considering what was coming. And not one of them save him had any experience painting stable nightmares.
But it was a far, far cry from where he’d been before, standing here alone.
“All right, Akane,” a lanky painter called. “What are we doing here again?”
“Waiting,” she said. “Something might be coming. Something dangerous. Have your paints ready.”