Eight: Losing Nell

One of the most unsettling aspects of Dream was that it created and destroyed worlds the way men make and shatter clay pots.

Fortunately, such events were rare. And most worlds that unraveled did so gradually, over many lifetimes. There were tremors and portents.

Geomancers could predict almost to the year when a planet would come apart and be reabsorbed.

There were even certain magicks that could forestall -- at least for a time -- a world's destruction.

Port Primus, homeworld of the Admiralty, had been stitched and bound together by sorcery for nearly a century.

The creation of new worlds, by contrast, was often sudden and cataclysmic.

A dreamship would be sailing a well-charted route through the void, expecting nothing but empty vastness.

But then out of the haze would emerge a new planet, some smoking and primordially volcanic, others already teeming with life that seemed to have existed for aeons.

Nail was just such a world.

It had manifested half a century ago, a forbidding expanse of metallic rock and sulfurous lakes.

The air was scented with rust and the endless smoke of burning coalfields.

A kind of gold rush had begun, with a hundred trading concerns and guilds and conglomerates staking claims across Nail's dismal surface.

Most of these outposts remained primitive and hardscrabble.

Scar-eyed men in heavy coats worked in their holes like primitive animals, bearing ore in baskets upon their backs.

The one proper city on the planet was Piketon, a sprawling and lawless port where great ore barges rose ponderously with each boreal tide.

It was there, in those corrugated-iron slums, that Nell lost her family for good.

She was smart enough to see at once that it was a mistake for them to come to Nail.

The trade-bosses and factory owners needed engineers and accountants, but no one had any time for mystics.

"Numbers are nasty, tiresome things even when they're set to a practical use," was the general sentiment. "The idea of harkening to a sermon about them is pure daft!"

Her father was stubborn. He set up his box on busy streetcorners and begin to chant the theorems of the Blue Crescent.

But his adoration of hypotenuse and ratio only made people laugh or shrug.

There had never been food enough and now the family's meals dwindled from meager to desperate.

Null's brothers and sisters stared sullenly at their lumps of hardtack and their mugs of bluish milk.

She sometimes found them casting angry, resentful glances at her as well.

Her oldest brother, Archimedes, would hiss in Nell's ear: "You're not even supposed to be here. You must have angered Father Tally somehow, or he would have taken you off long ago."

"It's not true," she protested. "I haven't done anything."

"There must be some reason people won't listen to Dad's sermons," said the older boy. "You're an error, that's what you are. You're a fly in the ointment."

Even Nell's mother found it more and more difficult to sneak her scraps of food. The girl was often on her own.

She found herself wandering farther and farther through the lanes and alleys of Piketon.

She did odd jobs in trade for a cup of broth or a heel of bread. Occasionally someone would pay her a nib or two for emptying chamber pots and scrubbing steps.

Rust covered everything on Nail. Someone would always pay her to scrape and sand and peel.

She could climb down into pipes and narrow spaces where grown-ups couldn't go, but the work left her half-dead with exhaustion.

One day, when Nell was unfolding her little roll of blankets, her mother made a queer and surprising speech:

"I don't have much, Nell, that belongs to me alone. But I still have this shawl that was stitched by my own mum."

Nell couldn't believe her eyes. The small cloak was finely made, impossibly delicate. She touched the stitchery with her fingertips.

She could see the geometry in it, the puzzling pattern. "It's very beautiful," she said.

"I've kept it all these years. When your father sold off all the other things -- the plates, the pictures -- I hid this away."

"You were right to keep it," Nell said.

"I knew you'd understand. And now it's yours to keep. The other girls, your sisters, they wouldn't appreciate it properly."

Nell saw that her mother was crying, a thing that she almost never did anymore. Her thin, pale cheeks gleamed like wet soap in the light of the candle.

"I don't want it," Nell said, suddenly afraid. "It's too fine. I've never had anything so pretty."

But her mother wouldn't tolerate any argument. After a moment, she dried her eyes and made her face hard again.

"What's done is done," she said. "Of all the decisions I've made in my life, Nell, giving you this gift may be the one I regret the least."

Nell was a clever girl, and suspicious. This conversation made her wary.

She was careful in the weeks that followed to keep a jealous watch on her family.

She listened to her parents' conversations. She studied her father's face at night when he was chanting the remainders of Pi.

One evening, he looked up from his prayers and his stony gaze fell on Nell and he said, "I see now that you were put here to test me. You were a burden and a trial of my arrogance."

Nell waited, but her father never spoke to her again.

Two days later, she came home from delivering a package to the far side of Piketon.

An Augsburgher merchant had promised her a half-dozen nibs and a piece of rock candy if she returned within an hour's time.

It was a princely sum for such a job and Nell soon realized that she had been tricked.

Her father had paid the Augsburgher out of his last remaining coin.

"Sorry, little girl," said the barrel-chested fellow, peering at her through his monocle. "Seems your dad wanted you kept busy for a while. Tough luck and all that!"

Her mother and father and twelve brothers and sisters were gone.

She raced through the neighborhood and soon tracked down a ticket seller who had booked them passage on a dream ship bound for Titus.

"Aye, they sailed this morning aboard the Yellow Raven," the man said, with a shrug. "Said they weren't sure where they would go after Titus. Your father said he was waiting for a sign."

"I have to go after them," Nell said. "Please! There's been a mistake, I must get aboard."

She showed the man her mother's beautiful shawl. "I'll give you this. This and all the nibs I have. Please!"

The ticket seller laughed and said, "Keep your rags and your nibs, little girl. The next tide isn't for three days. The Yellow Raven will be halfway to Titus by then."

He turned away and Nell went out onto the street. It had begun to rain, so that the smell of rust filled the air.

Water red as blood choked the gutters.

She sat under the awning of a tavern, legs pulled tight against her chest, wrapped in the shawl.

Fear threatened to swallow her whole. Her family had been hard and ungenerous, but now she had no one.

In all the great emptiness of Dream, she was truly and completely alone. With the toe of her tattered boot, she drew a circle in the mud.

It was the figure for zero, for nothing, for emptiness. In the language of her father's faith, this was the symbol that matched her name.

Next: Barkle's First Prize