The Semaphore

Mondagreen left the Toymakers’ vehicle on the outskirts of the exurbs of Osseon.

It was early morning, the sun still rising behind the hazy towers of the city proper in the middle distance. Malory’s palace stood like a gash in the sky, so tall that its peak disappeared into the clouds, its shadow stretching for many miles over the plains of Senescence. It was an incredible sight, one Mondagreen had encountered on numerous occasions throughout his life but felt new and frightening every time.

He jogged his way into the narrow, labyrinthine streets; the exurbs consisted almost entirely of rusted iron shanties, cramped together side-by-side with often no more than an inch of space between them. The streets were rutted and dusty, branching like veins through the low, sprawling shacks. He navigated them in a northerly direction. The smell of raw sewage was predominant.

There was scant activity at this early hour. The first sign of life Mondagreen encountered was a stray dog lapping at a brown puddle, its mangy fur slick with grease. The dog looked up at him as he approached, bared its stained teeth, and then ran off.

He passed through a tract of factories, where the shanties fell away and the street opened wide onto rows of enormous loading docks. Mondagreen knew a few things about Osseon: He knew that the city proper—an island attached to the mainland by a series of bridges—and its residential suburbs—lavish homes amid gardens surrounding the island city—were cordoned from the exurbs by a wall. The exurbs—nicknamed Salò by the locals—provided labor and materials for the projects and whims of Osseon’s inner, wealthier population. Mondagreen also knew that the gates in the wall from Salò into the suburbs were heavily guarded, and the bridges beyond thickly patrolled. He knew that he would never be permitted into the city, that one look at whatever type of NO-ENTRY log they had on hand would reveal his permanently banned status. Even if he told them about the girl, about the Hemmick practitioner at large, about the hole in Arborvale, the Osseon security forces would never listen. His only option was to find a way past them, to get the attention of someone with a bit more lateral thinking, someone who could recognize the stakes. Otherwise he would end up hog-tied in the back of an Osseon security vehicle and driven out into the middle of Senescence where, if he was lucky, they would leave him to think about his actions.

He had a vague idea about how to get over the wall. He hurried past the long rows of factories, his shadow stretching behind him like a long cape, and back into the dense network of streets.

Soon, people began to emerge from their shanties. Though their ages actually varied, they appeared all to be, in some deep, essential way, old. Their hands were calloused and knurled, their faces creased with deep lines, their hair gray with dust. They eyed Mondagreen suspiciously, not only on account, he figured, of his busted face—his split lips and broken nose and the dried blood down the front of his tunic—but also on account of his strange apparel, the coastal garments, the way he wore his hair, the katana and the satchel on his back. The people stood at the curtained entrances of their shanties and watched him, warily, as he hurried along.

Mondagreen finally found what he was looking for just as the streets began to crowd with people. From the outside it appeared inconspicuous: a cantina, its owner just arriving to raise the metal grate drawn over its entrance. Its glass door was broken into spider-webbed cracks where something had struck it, and its concrete walls were so badly crumbled that the metal frame of the building’s skeleton poked through.

Mondagreen stood patiently as the cantina’s owner—a middle-aged woman with a circular scar on her cheek—wrestled with the door’s locks. After she finally managed to move the rusted bolts she noticed Mondagreen and turned around.

“Hoi there,” Mondagreen said, as cheerily as he could muster. “Hoping to get some breakfast.”

The woman’s narrow eyes looked Mondagreen up and down. “Grills ain’t even fired up yet,” she said. “Gonna be a while.”

“That’s alright,” Mondagreen said, adjusting the meager weight of the satchel on his shoulder. “I’ve got time.”

The woman scanned the streets briefly—looking for accomplices, Mondagreen figured—and then shrugged and ushered him inside.

The cantina’s interior was not in much better shape than its exterior. The old leather booth seats were torn and rupturing their foam innards; the tables were scuffed and wobbly; the laminate on the counter was peeling in long strips; and there was an odor like putrefying grease and stale proof. When the woman switched the lights on it turned out that only three of the six light fixtures were working.

Mondagreen sat at the counter while the woman set about brewing coffee in a massive metal urn. She turned frequently to check on Mondagreen, as if expecting that each time she would catch him in some kind of act.

“I can do you eggs and toast,” she said once the coffee was brewing. “Had bacon yesterday, might have it tomorrow. Today, no.”

“That’s alright,” Mondagreen said, drumming his fingers on the sticky counter. “I’m actually not hungry.”

The woman peered at him.

“I’m just passing through,” he went on, trying to emphasize the right words.

The woman nodded slowly. “That so,” she said. “So why stop for breakfast?”

“Well,” Mondagreen lowered his voice and glanced at the cantina’s entrance, where the streets were filling with sunlight. “I heard good things about the… breakfast… out here in Salò. Heard anyone making their way to the city ought to stop and try the breakfast.”

The woman placed her palms on the counter and leaned forward, her toned arms straining. “Where’d you hear that?” she asked.

“Around,” Mondagreen whispered. “A past associate used to have business in the city. Unofficial business. He encouraged me, should I ever be heading there, to stop for breakfast… on my way. At this cantina.”

“Who’s your associate?”

“Puggs Eriarta. Sometimes goes by Low Brow. You know him?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed further. She leaned an inch toward Mondagreen, studying his face. Mondagreen held her gaze, suddenly nervous under her eye. Had he messed up? Said the wrong thing? Did Low Brow’s name no longer carry the same weight it used to? Was this the wrong cantina? Was this woman going to sound an alarm? Was his journey to Osseon over, and the silent promises he’d made to the girl wrapped in cloth on his back as broken as the bones in his face?

The woman’s stern face erupted suddenly into a wide smile, and she laughed.

“You’re kind of an idiot, you know that?” she said. “I got no idea who the fuck Low Brow is. But you want over the wall, it’s gonna cost ya, and the trip runs once a day. That’s it.”

Mondagreen blinked and grinned sheepishly. “Reckon I was led to believe the whole thing was a little more clandestine than that.”

“Nobody cares anymore,” said the woman. “They’ll snag ya if you get caught—but only on the other side. We got enough to worry about over here without minding who’s coming and going.”

“So what’s the fee?” Mondagreen asked.

The woman’s laughter dissolved. “What do you got?”

Mondagreen inventoried his possessions. Most of what he had on his person he could not part with. The katana was more valuable than a trip over the wall, and nobody wanted what was in the satchel. He had returned the ethergrain pen to Pontis, and he could not part with the cigarettes he had taken from the Toymakers. Besides that there was very little. Except…

He reached into the collar of his tunic and withdrew the three teeth the Toymakers had extracted from his mouth. Two gold and one silver.

He held them toward the woman.

“How about these?” he asked. “Don’t need ’em anymore, anyhow. I always chew on my left side.”

The woman eyed the teeth. She picked one up and checked its weight. Satisfied, she snatched the other two from his palm and they disappeared into her pocket.

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“Peta’ll get you over the wall,” she said. “My son. He can get you to a safe-ish spot on the other side, but no guarantees what happens after. You get picked up, that’s on you. No refunds.”

“Understood,” said Mondagreen.

“He won’t be up for a few hours. Worked the plant till three last night. He gets up, he comes here, he takes you.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Meantime, coffee?” The woman slid the urn from its hotplate and fetched a mug from beneath the counter. “It’s awful, but you don’t look like the type to mind.”

Mondagreen accepted the coffee. When he grimaced, the woman laughed again and added a splash of proof, which managed to cut some of the bitterness. As the morning lengthened, people came in to eat, and the stale, greasy odor was gradually replaced with the aroma of fried eggs and toast. Eventually, Mondagreen accepted a plate of food, and the woman brought it to him with a wink, insisting it was on the house, since he had overpaid her for the passage anyway.

#

The wall was fifty feet high and covered in graffiti on the Salò side. Phrases scrawled in spattered paint proclaimed: ‘GOOD WALL’ and ‘THE BOY GOD’S HAREM AHEAD’ and ‘don’t feed the GNU!’ Mondagreen was not familiar with the term GNU, and he asked Peta, a young man perhaps a few years older than Varia, who led him through the littered ditch along the wall’s base, what it meant.

“The Eschatons,” Peta said without looking back. “Politicians and oligarchs. It’s a nasty little acronym—Gardeners of the New Utopia. Get it?”

“Sort of,” Mondagreen said.

Peta shrugged, uninterested in educating Mondagreen further. They passed a mural of a figure atop a mountain, clad in a green coat, its arms outstretched. The green coat became a lush valley below, and rows of people knelt before it, their hands clasped in prayer. Mondagreen was reminded of his Agaatist old man.

They came to a section of wall where a lonely shanty stood, barely more than a lean-to, just two sheets of metal leaning together. Peta crouched and peered into the narrow opening afforded by the space between the sheets, and then motioned for Mondagreen to join him.

Mondagreen knelt and looked in, expecting to see a hole in the wall through which he could crawl. But the wall was solid, and the hole was in the ground. It was barely wider than Mondagreen’s shoulders. He tried to get a look inside but could see nothing but dark soil and fragments of faintly glimmering shale.

“This’ll take you through,” Peta said. “You come out in a public garden—most of the land against the wall their side is garden—so nobody’ll see you right off, unless you’re real unlucky. From there you’re on your own.” Peta glanced at Mondagreen. “But from the look of ya, I wouldn’t count on getting far.”

Mondagreen eyed the hole. “What’s to stop folk from crawling through whenever they want? Why don’t the folk of Salò just go into the city?”

Peta frowned. “Why would we do that?”

“Because you’re here working in factories, living in shanties. Meanwhile they have gardens and skyscrapers.”

“You obviously never spent any time in Osseon. Our lives are better than theirs, plenty of ways. Maybe you’ll see when you’re in there. Plus, anybody from Salò caught on the other side gets beat and locked up. Hardly worth the trouble.”

Mondagreen considered this. “Any advice for getting onto the island?”

Peta shrugged. “Not if you’re junctioned.”

“What?”

“Junctioned,” Peta said. “You know. Banned. You weren’t junctioned, you’d walk right up, state your business, they’d probably let you in. Wouldn’t be trading your teeth to sneak past a wall. I mean—you’re not exactly a closed book.”

Mondagreen cleared his throat. “Any advice for a fella who is junctioned to get onto the island?”

“Whole thing’s only bridges, and every bridge is watched day and night. You could try swimming, but I hear they put electricity in the water… probably just a myth, that.”

“Where would you recommend somebody go if they wanted to learn about the Blisstaker? Or whatever you call him around here.”

Peta looked at him strangely, an eyebrow raised. “They’re all Eschatons in there,” he said. “Most of ’em. All they do is talk about the Demiurge.”

“Not a religious person,” Mondagreen said. “Someone with historical knowledge.”

Peta shrugged. “Try the Museum of Art and Artifact? They got a bunch of stuff on that, I think.”

“The Museum of Art and Artifact,” Mondagreen repeated. “Where’s that?”

“Right in the middle,” said Peta, standing. “Across from the Palace. But you gotta get to the island first.” He turned and walked off back along the wall before disappearing into the crowded shanties.

#

Mondagreen took a good look down the hole. It wasn’t deep, but it was too narrow to fit with both the satchel and katana fastened to his back. He removed both and lowered them down, glanced to his left and right along the length of the wall, and climbed feet-first after them.

The hole flared at its bottom, widening enough that he could stoop and feel around in the dark. A tunnel extended in a straight line beneath the wall. Mondagreen guided the satchel and the katana ahead of him and shimmied into the tunnel on his belly.

It was pitch black. He tried to keep track of how far he had gone, but his sense of distance was muted in the tight, dark space. The absurd thought occurred to him that the tunnel might go on forever. He thought about Pontis and Varia, and wondered if that was the fate they’d met. Then he thought about the naked, eyeless man with the knife, and figured that Pontis and Varia’s fate had been much worse.

The tunnel constricted as he went. He was distinctly aware of its walls pressing down on him. He crawled forward one frustrating inch at a time. He realized that even if he wanted to turn around it would be impossible. He wondered if he’d been tricked, if the woman in the cantina and her son had fooled him into trading his teeth and then climbing willingly into his own grave.

The tunnel stretched on and on. How could he have been so gullible? And for what? To enter a city full of lunatics in order to talk to some hypothetical expert on Hemmick craft about a girl he didn’t know or care about and who, in all likelihood, couldn’t be helped anyway? He had done a lot of stupid things in his life, but as he wriggled deeper into the cramped tunnel, dirt filling his mouth and eyes and nostrils and ears, he figured this one might have finally sealed the deal.

Then he saw sunlight. He scrambled forward, kicking at the walls of the tunnel until he hit the end of the tunnel. He craned his neck and saw the sky. He flung the satchel and Sarabeth upwards and then hauled himself after them, swearing as the hole seemed to tighten around him one last time before managing to wrest himself free.

For a few seconds he saw nothing but harsh light, his pupils constricted. Then his surroundings began to swim into fruition, and he could not help but let out a whistle.

The hole had opened up in front of a tall, meticulously manicured hedge. The hedge extended for about twenty yards to the right and left before ending in matching stone pillars. The wall behind him was not only graffiti-free, but inlaid with granite bricks, sanded, buffed, and polished until they glinted in the sun. He refastened the satchel and the katana to his back and peeked out from behind the hedge.

Before him was a garden, so elegant and serene it seemed lifted from a children’s book. Willow trees stood about, their long, tender branches draped along the perfectly mowed grass. Tufts of hedges cut into shapes reminiscent of animals—a crow, one seemed to be, and another a dog—dotted the lawn. There were sculptures here and there made from a variety of materials—metal and glass and stone—some abstract shapes, vaguely anatomic, and others more rigidly geometric: a marble sphere on a pedestal, and a glass pyramid, upside-down on the grass. A stream essed through it all, a small, cast-iron footbridge arching across it where it widened.

Flowers grew in long, winding beds: Lavalarouxs, Cordelias, Andronigas, Grovetails, bushes of Crow Clovers, plots of Nightluck Basil, Winter Hands, Rose Gravel, Estragenian Feesil—and dozens of others that Mondagreen could not name. Robins perched on low branches. A rabbit lazed in the lush grass. As Mondagreen stood, gawping at the garden, a monarch butterfly landed on his chest, stretched its wings gracefully, and then fluttered away.

Never in his life had he encountered such immaculate landscaping. Without even realizing it he started strolling forward, as if he belonged here, lured by the perfume of the flowers and the gentle architectonics of the lawns and hedges. He passed a fountain, a rectangular monolith, down which a sheet of clear water trickled and disappeared into its base. Two squirrels—fatter and healthier than any squirrels he had ever seen—chased each other playfully up the trunk of a willow, vanishing into its silky canopy. There was birdsong, so rich that it sounded almost manufactured. Mondagreen thought of his old man—the sick fuck—and wondered if on his many pilgrimages to Osseon he had ever passed through this garden along the wall of its suburbs, and if he had, how he could have then returned to Tecca and continued to be filled with so much loathing and rage.

The thought about his old man dropped him rudely back into the reality of his situation. He ducked behind a hedge shaped like a goose or a swan and waited a few seconds to make sure he hadn’t been seen. He dashed for another hedge, then another, and edged his way through the garden.

He came to a tall iron fence. It was lined with spires, and gorgeous decorative ironwork between its bars. Behind it was what appeared to be a backyard: A meticulously kept lawn fenced in on three sides, surrounded by tall hedges; a wolf oak rising from one corner, casting half the yard into shade; a small, circular in-ground koi pond in the lawn’s center, where Mondagreen could just make out the enormous gold, orange and white fish swimming lazily in the clean water.

Then there was the house. It stood three stories tall, its ground floor of red brick and its two upper floors of whitewashed daub and fanning patterns of dark timber. Its roof was steep, with four brick chimneys gathered near its peak. Its entire eastern wall—revealed to Mondagreen as he crept along the outside of the iron fence—was covered in thick ivy. Its windows were narrow but numerous, and one, nestled beneath the pointed eave, was stained glass depicting a full moon reflected in a lake.

Mondagreen was surprised at his own infatuation with the beauty of Osseon’s suburbs. He had never paid much attention to such things—then again, he had never seen anyplace like this. It demanded infatuation. It had been curated to demand infatuation.

He followed the iron fence around the eastern side of the house. A row of hedges rose beside him, through which he could just make out another house, similarly grand, standing amid its own manicured yard. He figured he would zigzag his way behind the hedges in the direction of the city—he could see the black towers rising ahead, still two miles off, and Malory’s palace vanishing into the pale sky—for as far as they would allow. He adjusted the satchel and made sure his katana was fastened securely. The iron fence ended abruptly against the front of the house, where a cobblestone street lined with lampposts ran through. Past it was another house, and another iron fence, and another yard in the back. Mondagreen just needed to make it across the street unseen. He took a breath and prepared himself to make the dash, when a loud voice suddenly rang out from directly beside him.

“I caught you!”