The Porcelain Aviary

There were ten thousand birds in the Aviary, and not one of them had ever been alive.

Isolde saw them as the light faded from the doorway behind her and her eyes adjusted to a pale clear dusk. She stood on a narrow iron walkway, railed on either side with curling wrought-iron vines, and the walkway ran away from her into a cathedral of glass. The roof was a hundred feet up, a lattice of white ribs and greenish panes through which a thin cold radiance fell. Iron trees rose from the floor below, tall as masts, with iron branches spread wide, and on every branch, in every fork, on every twig, sat a bird.

They were china. They were the delicate, glossy, blue-and-white china of an expensive tea service, each as large as her hand, each perched with its head cocked and its small black bead of an eye turned toward the walkway. There were sparrows and thrushes and finches, wrens and warblers and larks. There were swans on the pools below. There were owls with spectacles of painted gold. Their feathers had been done in fine brushstrokes, one by one, with a loving and terrible patience, and the whole vast room glittered faintly in the dusk like frost.

Not one of them moved.

"I don't like it," said Odile.

"You say that every time," said Brannoc.

"I mean it every time."

"Aye. It's why you're still alive." He leaned on the rail. He had a limp now, from the wolf wood, and a bruise the size of a plate along one forearm, and he looked ten years older than he had on the ship. "Keep your voice down. Keep it low. If this is another place that eats words—"

"It isn't," said Valerian.

He stood at the head of the walkway with his head tilted back, looking up at the roof. He had said almost nothing since the beech. He had walked through the white door ahead of her without a word, and stood for a long moment in the pale light with his eyes closed, and when he opened them they had been the gray of an old coin. Now he looked down the long iron path with an expression she could not read. It was careful. It was the way a man looks at a staircase in the dark.

"It listens," he said.

"What does?"

"The place. The birds." His voice was very low. "They do not eat words. They keep them. And what they keep, they give back."

…

The rhyme was on a brass plate.

It was bolted to the rail at a place where the walkway widened into a little platform, with a bench, and a brass dish for seed, and a small bronze feeder in the shape of a tulip. A porcelain thrush sat on the lip of the dish. It had a speckled breast and a droop to its wing. She stood in front of it with her heart beating hard and slow and read the plate in the cold green light.

Under glass the songbirds sleep,

Cold of wing and china-deep.

Never say the thing you fear;

Every bird has ears to hear.

Tell them nothing, tell them none;

What they sing is never done.

If you speak, they'll sing it true,

Till the dread comes back to you.

Lock your fear behind your teeth;

Leave the cage and leave the wreath.

"U. N. T. I. L." She read it aloud, very softly. "Until."

Beside her, the Overseer stood very still.

"What is locked away cannot heal until," said Isolde.

There was a short silence. A drip of water ticked somewhere in the dim. She watched his face. She had said she would tell him slowly. She had said she would not stop. She had not known, till now, that it was possible to be afraid of a preposition.

"Until," said Valerian. He said it with a curious inward expression, as if tasting something. "That is a good word."

"It means an end."

"It means a condition." He turned his head. "Something that must happen. Something that is not yet done."

"Yes."

"A thing locked away cannot heal until—" He stopped. His mouth twisted. "I find I do not wish to guess."

"Don't," said Isolde. "Don't guess. I'll tell you when I know."

"Yes. You will." He regarded her. "You are being kind. I am aware of it. You need not."

"I'm being careful."

"It is the same thing." He looked away, up into the branches of the iron trees, at ten thousand pairs of black glass eyes. "The rule, then. Never say the thing you fear."

"And everything we say, they'll keep."

"Yes."

"And give back."

"Yes. Brannoc." His voice sharpened. "Not a word. Not a word you would not wish to see made flesh. If you are afraid, you will keep it behind your teeth. If you must speak, speak of the weather."

"I'll talk about my boots," said the old man.

"Please do."

…

She went forward alone.

It was Brannoc's idea, and Odile's, and in the end her own. The walkway ran on in a long gentle curve through the iron trees, and somewhere ahead it would end, at a lock or a door or a final platform, and none of them knew how far. They could not all walk it in a line. A line meant a chain of whispers. A line meant that someone, sooner or later, would breathe a word.

"Let me go first," she said. "I'm the reader. If there's a trap in the text, I'll see it before you do."

"And if the trap's in you?" said Brannoc.

"Then I'll be glad of the warning."

She was almost out of earshot, thirty paces down the path, in a pool of wavering green light where the iron branches met overhead, when the first bird began to sing.

It was a small one. It sat on the nearest bough, a plain brown sparrow, glazed to a milky sheen, and as she passed beneath it, it lifted its head. She saw the tiny china beak open. She saw the throat move. And out of it, clear and sweet and quite without malice, came a girl's voice.

Izzy.

She stopped dead.

It had a dry little lilt. It had the faintest hoarseness at the edge, like a voice that has been shouting at a dog. It spoke two syllables, soft, with the pause between them that is the mark of a name, and then it said the thing that Isolde had waited a week and a hundred miles to hear.

Izzy, read me the one with the wolf. Not the tame one. The one where she doesn't get out.

A hot wave went through her from head to heel.

It was not a bird's voice. It was not an echo. It was a memory, plucked from the dim place at the back of her skull where she had thought it lost for good, and carried through the air to her on the wing of a china sparrow. It was perfect. She could hear the creak of the bed. She could hear the pages. She could smell the lamp. Not the tame ones.

"Linnet," whispered Isolde.

She had not meant to. It had come out of her like a breath. She stood on the walkway with her hands at her sides, and her eyes brimming, and the name filled her mouth like water. Linnet. Linnet. Her sister's name. It had come back whole. It had come back as sweet and bright as the day she was given it, in a narrow bed on Tallow Lane, with a candle burning in a saucer and a mother's thin hand on a baby's head.

"Linnet," she said again, aloud, in the cold green light, with all her heart. "Oh, Linnet. I'm sorry. I'm here."

And every bird in the Aviary turned its head.

…

She heard Valerian shout.

She heard Brannoc's roar, and the clang of the old man's boots on iron. She heard Odile scream her name. But the sound came to her from a long way off, and thin, as if through water, because the birds had begun to sing.

They did it all together. A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand china throats lifted at once, and out of them rose the same two syllables in the same bright voice, over and over, in joyous canon, sweet as a chime of bells. Linnet. Linnet. Linnet. The echoes ran through the glass. The panes rang. The whole vast room rose up in a shining wave of her own voice, and she stood in the middle of it with her arms spread and her face turned up, laughing and crying, and did not hear the note change.

It was a small change. A shift in the pitch. The joy went out of it, and something else came in, flat and thin and high, like a wire drawn tight.

Linnet. Linnet. Linnet.

Linnet, no.

Linnet, don't.

She stopped laughing.

Down the long green path, between the iron trees, a bed was standing on the walkway.

It had not been there before. It was an iron bedstead with a gray blanket, and it stood on the planks as if it had stood there all her life. A lamp burned beside it on a stool. And on the bed, with her hands on the blanket and her sharp freckled face turned to the ceiling, lay a girl of sixteen.

She was very thin.

Isolde saw the black flowers first. They had come up all the way to the elbow, and from the elbow to the shoulder, and they were not small any more. They were wide and dark and soft as velvet, and they pulsed gently with every breath, and where they opened the skin had gone thin and gray and transparent. The girl's lips were blue. Her eyes were closed. The lamplight lay on her cheek like a coin.

"Izzy," the birds sang, in her sister's voice, from every bough. "You said you'd come."

"No," said Isolde.

She ran.

…

It was not Valerian who caught her.

It was the walkway itself. It tilted. The iron under her feet bucked like a deck, and she went down on one knee, and the bed receded, and the girl on it grew dim and vague. She heard a clatter of china. She looked up and saw the birds had descended. They had come down from the branches in a rustling cloud, hundreds of them, and now they hovered round the bed in a ring, beating their delicate wings, and from their tiny beaks, in her own voice, in a high bright rattle, poured the thing she had not said.

I'm too late. I'm too late. I'm too late.

"I'm not," she said. "I'm not, I'm not—"

You were reading. You were reading when I died.

"No."

You wrote it down. You wrote down the glyphs. You never held my hand.

"Linnet—"

She was on her feet again, and she was at the bedside, and the lamp was blazing like a sun. She had her sister's hand in hers. It was cold. It was colder than she'd known a hand could be, and light as a bundle of sticks, and the black petals along the wrist turned to her, one by one, like a row of sleepy faces.

She felt them touch her.

They were soft. They were warm. They went up her own wrist as ivy goes up a wall, sinking in, and she felt a delicious sleepy weakness spread through her limbs, and a voice somewhere said, very gently: There. That's better. You don't have to do any more. You don't have to read. You can lie down.

"Yes," said Isolde.

"Isolde."

"I'll just— for a moment—"

"Isolde!"

Hands took her by the shoulders. They were not gentle. They hauled her backward, off the bed, away from the lamp, and she cried out and struck at them with her free fist. A voice shouted in her ear. A white face swam in front of hers. It had gray eyes and a scar through the brow, and it was wet.

"It is not her," said Valerian.

"Let me go!"

"It is not her. It is a bird. It is a hundred birds. Look at them." He gripped her chin. His fingers shook. "Look at me. Isolde. Look at me, not at it."

"She's dying!"

"She is not here."

"She's—"

"She is a long way off, in a bed in the Hospice, and she is alive." He said it with such flat terrible conviction that she stopped struggling. "I do not know how I know. I only know that I would feel it. If she were gone. I would feel it as I feel you."

She stared at him.

The Aviary rang. The birds shrieked and wheeled. The bed, the lamp, the thin gray hand, were fading, thread by thread, into the green dusk, and she knew in her head that he was right, and she could not make her heart believe it.

"I could have saved her," she heard herself say. It came out as a whisper. "I could have been quicker. I could have read it faster. I should have known—"

"You could not."

"I'm the only one who can read it."

"Yes."

"If I fail, there's no one."

"Yes. And if you fail, you will have failed. And you will still be a person who tried." His grip eased. He drew his thumb, very slowly, across her cheek, wiping the tears. "Isolde. Listen to me. I have watched many people die in these Doors. I have watched them try to save everyone. I have watched them try to carry the world on their backs." His voice cracked. "You do not have to save everyone to deserve to live."

It was like being struck.

She had not known how badly she needed to hear it. She had not known that it was a thing a person could say. She stood in the middle of an iron walkway, in a forest of porcelain birds, with the tears running down her face and a stranger's hand on her cheek, and felt something that had been clenched in her since the night of the Hospice open slowly, like a fist.

"I'm so tired," she whispered.

"I know."

"I'm so frightened."

"I know that too."

"I can't stop."

"You do not have to stop." His forehead came down against hers. It was a light, quiet, wondering touch. "You only have to rest. For a moment. And I shall hold the door."

…

It was a moment, and no more.

She had her eyes shut, and her hands on his coat, and the warm weight of him against her. She was breathing in the smell of snow and leather. The birds had gone quiet. A hush had come down on the Aviary, deep and clear and expectant, and in the hush she heard, from somewhere above them, a very small, soft, high-pitched voice.

It was a single bird.

It sat on the iron bough over their heads, a gray-and-white dove with its wings half spread, and it had opened its china beak. She felt Valerian go rigid against her. She heard him draw a slow breath.

The dove sang.

It was a man's voice. It was low and rough and frightened, and it was speaking in the Old Tongue, in the same dead dialect as the voice in the lock. She caught three words of it. She did not need more. The language went into her like a knife.

Don't. Please. Don't open—

Valerian had lifted his head.

"No," he said, to the dove, in a voice she had never heard. "No. Not that. Not this."

—the door—

"Stop it."

—she'll see—

"Stop it!"

The Aviary erupted.

The birds rose from every branch at once, a vast white thunderhead of wings, and the air was suddenly full of the shriek of china on china. They poured over the rail. They swirled round the tall black figure at her side, a roaring spiral of blue and white, and she felt his hands torn from her, and cried out, and flung herself after him.

Something struck her. It was cold, and hard, and invisible. It was glass.

A pane had come down between them. She could not tell from where. It was a wall of green-tinted crystal, perfectly clear, perfectly smooth, rising from the walkway to the roof in the space of a breath, and on the other side of it, thirty feet away, in the center of a whirling storm of birds, Valerian had fallen to his knees. He had his hands pressed to his ears. His mouth was open. She could see him shouting, and hear nothing.

"Valerian!" She beat on the glass. "Valerian!"

He did not look up.

The birds closed over him like a lid. For a moment she saw his hand, white against the blue, clawing at the air. Then there was only a spinning column of china, and a roar of wings, and above it all, in the stillness of the glass, the gentle voice of a girl singing Izzy, Izzy, very sweetly, over and over, to nobody at all.