For a long time now I’d been practicing liecraft five or six times before breakfast. I’d roll over to Khao’s side of the bed and murmur through the curls of hair winding around his ear:
“Go back to sleep, it’s only just daybreak.”
Other times I’d hide his slippers in the pantry, and as he searched everywhere for them, signing his curses, my voice wouldn’t tremble as I said:
“I last saw them under the kitchen table.”
And sometimes, when necessary, I’d press a glass of curdled milk into his hands:
“It’s still good, I just had some.”
I practiced liecraft daily, five hundred times at least. Five hundred instances of rubbing my palm over the brick wall to keep the mortar from sprinkling down like powdered sugar. Five hundred rotting stairs, each threatening to collapse under the weight of the next step, held out just a little longer because of me. And if I managed to conjure up one or two proper lies, ones which made Khao’s eyebrows furrow with real hurt, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I had in some measure arrested the decay encroaching on the city.
Do you have to work every single day? Khao’s signing was always so deft and graceful, which made the knocking of his fists for the word work look ridiculous.
You knew what I was. I switched to sign language, because it was the honest truth. I reserved my voice for liecraft, like we’d learned since before we could walk.
My mother often took me up to the highest tower of the city wall to show me why we do it. The decay shimmered over the wheat fields, dense and black as a flock of starlings. Fear it, she signed slowly, making sure I could follow. You must fear it if you want to live. Day by day it draws closer. As a child, it seemed harmless enough. It crackled on the edge of the horizon, so far off I thought that it would never reach us here, that I would never have to beat soot from my hair or the creases of my clothes, that no crust of ash would settle over foodstuffs left in the open, that we wouldn’t draw blackened water from the well, and I certainly never thought about how all life outside the city had already been devoured. Even though my mother had warned me. One day we will awake to our beds splitting in two, our blankets threadbare and fraying, and then it will come for us, our hair, our skin, our teeth black as coal, and the rosy lips of little girls like me. We won’t even have time to scream.
On the day of my final architect’s exam, the masters introduced me to Khao. He was mute. Judging by the white crisscross of scars over his throat, he’d had his vocal cords cut when he was just a boy.
I’m fine by myself, I signed to the masters. I used my fist to draw a circle around my heart, as if I were sealing it behind a wall.
We cannot let your power go to waste. You need someone to hear your liecraft.
Khao looked me over, cautiously, only his eyes moving; he blanched when he got to the freshly earned architect’s bell around my neck. As a mute, he couldn’t hope for better. Unless he wanted to meet his end outside the wall, he would have to serve an architect. I saw the fear in his gaze. My family’s reputation preceded me: my grandmother’s master lie had built the western wall, my mother’s the city storehouse. Power of that magnitude required true evil.
If you don’t want a husband, we could always get you a child, one of the master’s shrugged. He rocked an imagined infant in his arms to sign child.
No! I pounded the table. I thought of my mother, her razor-thin mouth as her hand gripped the foundation stone, and shuddered. I will not lie to a child.
The master shrugged his acquiescence, then nodded at Khao.
To the happy couple, then.
It was strange going home together for the first time. He had assumed an architect’s house would be more stable, but as he ran his fingers over the exposed brickwork, plaster crumbled away just the same as anywhere else. His shoulders were stiff, as if he feared a beating. I had to lie to him. It’s what they’d trained me for, it was in the interest of the city. I couldn’t let myself pity him, not for a moment. And yet I couldn’t begin. I wanted him to relax, wanted to prove he didn’t have anything to fear from me—which was already a lie, the greatest lie of them all.
I began to question Khao, my husband. He told me about how he’d lost his voice.
It’s the parents’ responsibility to shut the mouths of children who can’t keep them shut on their own. I can still feel the crack of my mother’s palm splitting my lip every time I wanted to say something true out loud. Khao’s parents were not so diligent. They paid no mind to his prattling, they didn’t care that his words wore a hole in the kettle and leaked scalding tea everywhere, that because of his ever-running mouth he shuffled home in hole-ridden shoes, their heels worn ragged from the truth. He was five years old when he was so engrossed in a story that an overhead gutter gave way. He escaped with just a bad scare, but the little girl beside him—well, her head split open like a soft-boiled egg.
His parents were left no choice. Khao was a danger to the city. The judges never sentenced from anger: as the doctor disinfected his scalpel, they mourned the man Khao could have become, the man whose lies by the thousand could have held the decay at bay. Every voice counted, even the ones without the resolve to become an architect.
I’m not good for anything else, he signed at my table. He held out a hand to me, as if inviting me to do something with it. This is my duty.
I know, I nodded, but my mother’s voice interceded: they are two sides of the same coin, suffering a lie and telling one. Neither is easier than the other.
“I won’t hurt you,” I uttered the first. It was as easy as shrugging my shoulders.
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“This will better for everyone.”
“I too fear the decay.”
“I do it only for the city. I didn’t want to be an architect, I did not choose this.”
Oh, but of course I did. My liecraft poured forth, intoxicating, the power vibrating at the tips of my fingers like sparks preparing to shoot out. Once I started, I could barely reign myself in, the academy would be proud of my recitation, the lies snaking together one over the other; my liecraft was an anthem, it was breathless, unstoppable, as if I were proving to my mother that it is easy, as easy as breathing. Khao just listened. From his drawn mouth and frightened eyes, I could see the masters had chosen well: he knew he would never hear a truthful word from my lips, yet every sentence still pierced his heart. He was too sensitive. It’s why he’d lost his voice, his soft-hearted mother hadn’t struck his mouth when he spoke the truth, and this weakness had made him the perfect person to one day receive my master lie.
I stammered to the point of exhaustion, wiped the sweat from my brow. The magic pricked at my fingertips like bubbling oil. I could have stopped, I should have stopped, but I didn’t. I wanted to finish what I’d started.
In full view of Khao, I stepped to the fireplace. I pulled the iron poker from the embers and offered him the white hot end.
“Here,” I said, holding his gaze. “It is cool.”
For a moment, he almost hesitated. Then his training took over: he took hold of the iron, a full grip, with gusto even, and started to scream, without vocal chords it was a sort of a clicking, grating rattle, so that for a moment I didn’t even send the crackling power into the walls, but just stared at the glowing orange metal between his fingers.
The work of the old architects had been honorable. The power contained in the first master lie had caused the city to unfold from the octagonal origin stone like a water lily. The origin palace had had towers whose shadows acted as a sundial, its quicksilver mirrors were clear as pure water, one could wander for hours from room to room beneath chandeliers of mountain crystal. Today, nothing remained but the foundation walls. A pile or two of rubble, shards of glass. The ruins of the coronation hall had become too dangerous to enter, as had most houses with their sagging floors and dilapidated balconies.
There was nothing honorable left in my own work. I repaired collapsed stairs when a family was stuck on the upper floor. I straightened bowed pantry walls like they were dented cups. I patched holes in roofs, set crooked doors right. For bigger assignments I brought Khao with me, other times I would just whisper lies to the residents: that there’s no need to fear, that I’m happy to help, that everything will be okay. Their gratitude never lasted long. When they heard the tinkle of the architect’s bell at my neck, they crossed to the other side of the street with downcast eyes, clapped their hands over their children’s ears, and I grinned rabidly as I shouted after them:
“Have a nice day! Many blessings upon you!”
They found something again! Khao rushed into the room, fingers flying as he signed. He smacked the table to get my attention, then repeated himself. At the Eastern Gate.
I didn’t like his enthusiasm. I sipped my tea, slowly and deliberately, before looking at him.
Are you sure?
Of course! Everyone’s heading over. Come on, let’s go!
Why?
They’re saying he came out of the decay. We need to see him!
He grabbed my arm and hauled me out into the soot-dimmed light that covered the streets. Five years of marriage had left their mark on him. From wrist to ankle, his skin was a ravaged patchwork of raised, hardened scars.
A crowd really had gathered at the Eastern Gate. The city’s residents usually avoided one another, no more than one or two families lived on any given street, and if their home collapsed, they simply took their pick of the unoccupied dwellings which remained. There was liecraft within families—little fibs, not so well-designed as an architect’s, and the power drifted from them without purpose. They couldn’t fuse two halves of a shattered brick—but they didn’t want to hear the liecraft of others. Now, however, people were coming from everywhere. They wore muslin scarves around their faces to keep from inhaling too much soot, some hawked wads of black into their handkerchiefs. The children teeming about their mothers’ skirts were gagged to keep any utterances of truth from slipping out.
They spoke in low voices, too impatient to sign.
“He’s one of us.” Which meant: he isn’t one of us.
“He came from inside the wall.” That is, we believe he came from outside. Which was impossible: there was nothing out there, only the roiling, swirling cloud of ash that was the decay.
“He’s still alive,” they whispered, and my throat tightened. He was dead, then.
Khao and I cut a path through the crowd. A body lay face-up in the dust: the decay had stripped away the flesh and blackened the exposed skull. A few strands of withered hair remained. His clothing gave him away as an outsider: it had been decades since anyone in the city had been able to find enough cowhide to craft a belt. Copper chains clung to his neck like concentric tree rings, even though everyone knew all the copper in the city had crumbled away.
The scouts found him, Khao signed, so quickly that I could barely follow. He must have died right by the wall. He almost made it. He saw the city, made for us, maybe over several days. There are others outside! Maybe a whole other city!
No one can survive that long in the decay, I replied, and Khao shoved my hand away.
It’s another sign. Don’t be like that, you can’t be so blind!
I’d never seen him so worked up. At home, all of his movements were slow and considered: he placed his glass perfectly in the center of the table so it wouldn’t fall down; one tiny fingerprint had him scrubbing the entire mirror. But now he was red-faced, his gaze flitting this way and that. Had his vocal chords been spared, forbidden truths would surely have been pouring from his mouth.
He sought eye contact in the crowd. Some of them wore helmets jerry-rigged from cotton and coconut shells to protect against falling debris, others had bandaged arms which the decay had perhaps already chewed, leaving the skin papery and flaking.
Khao pounded the gate with his fist until everyone had turned toward him. He began to sign.
First the lights. He described rays over his head to sign lights. You remember those?
They probably didn’t even know his name. He usually kept his eyes down, walking behind me as if ashamed of his muteness. I’d assumed no one would pay him any mind. But Khao now seemed stronger. Like I’d so far only been seeing him through a curtain, veiled by my lies.
For three years the lights signaled to us like a lighthouse. If nobody can survive in the decay, who could have lit the storm lantern? Who would have wanted to signal to us?
Murmurs spread through the crowd, seeming to say: go on.
Then the dove. His fingers imitated flapping wings. How did a dove get here if there’s no longer anything outside?
I was a child the last time I’d seen a bird in its cage at the academy. They’d all since gone extinct, the decay crept into their lungs more easily than others’. And yet after all these years, one really had flown into the city. It had fluttered about in the dome of what was once the glass blowing guild, smashing from mosaic to mosaic.
Two signs, Khao counted. And here’s the third. I know there’s supposedly nothing outside, but maybe … He strummed the air looking for the words. … there’s sanctuary. A sanctuary safe from the decay, that hasn’t been destroyed, where other people still live. Maybe their city walls are stronger, or they’ve learned how to filter the air, maybe we could also—
I shook the bell I wore round my neck. There was power in its ring: regardless of the infamy of my grandmother’s lies, or my mother’s, or mine, the crowd turned to me as one. Khao’s fingers froze mid-sign. I had to cut him off. It wasn’t what he was saying that bothered me, but how he was saying it, with that unfamiliar energy I hadn’t seen once in the last five years, and it frightened me.
There is nothing outside, I turned to the others. I explained with knit brow and jagged movements. Just ash which will have you dead by morning if you breathe it in. Is that what you want? Outside there is only death, no sanctuary. Go on home now. The masters will examine the body later.
Khao’s face was a picture of dejection; I knew that look well, the fingers sinking into the crooks of his elbows, the suppressed protests. But even as the crowd started to disperse, signing fervently, I knew that he’d won. After the lights outside the wall and the dove which had gotten in, lingering suspicion had now turned into real hope. He’d wormed his way into their thoughts, they’ll lay their heads down tonight with dreams of sanctuary, a way out, a safer city with clean air, plenty of food, where the decay doesn’t destroy everything.
I should have thanked Khao. The board was now set for my master lie.
Khao thought the academy had taught me how to lie. But it was my mother.
The day I discovered her true nature was the day the storehouse collapsed. I must have been about twelve, the masters came to her groveling, begging her to reverse the damage. They bargained for hours behind closed doors, and then my mother said she needed me. Her pursed lips could have cut glass; I hadn’t the faintest notion that she was preparing her master lie.
If we don’t rebuild it now, all our stores will be lost, she explained on the way. The rubble has already started disintegrating. And it’s spreading to the food; the flour is turning to ash, enough that would have sustained us for years. We’ll set things right, don’t you worry. The truth rips things apart at the seams, but the right lie will hold it together.
But who did it?
One of the workers. At least that’s what they’re saying.
Hardly anything remained of the storehouse; collapsed walls, caved-in roof, fallen columns. It was here the culprit had worked. He’d been hauling a sack of flour when some insignificant truth had slipped from his lips—maybe a compliment, maybe nothing more than nice weather today—which caused the sack to split, and the flour to spill out at his feet. Perhaps he’d thought about how the tear could have shorn through his heart instead, how it could have been blood seeping through tissue. He panicked, began to shout, we’re all going to die, no one can escape the decay, I’m afraid, I’m so afraid, I don’t want to die, and his companions tried to subdue him, tried to gag him, but it was no use. No building could withstand a truth of that magnitude. Thirty people were lost beneath the rubble.
Mother circled the ruins, taking up handfuls of debris. As the detritus sifted through her fingers, the brick disintegrated into black ash. The masters had cleared a path to the foundation stone for her; the sigil of the storehouse’s original architect was unmarred.
I need to tell you something, my mother began signing, and kneeled by the foundation stone, her palm resting upon it. And you need to pay very, very close attention, okay?
As I looked around more carefully, I noticed rust-red blood in the sand. They’d called on us so soon after the assassination that they probably hadn’t yet dug the bodies out from under the rubble.
“You are my daughter,” my mother began out loud.
Of course I am, I signed in response.
“You are my daughter, Minna.”
I didn’t understand why she was saying something so obvious. She’d raised me, my oldest memory was of running toward her in our yard, she was the first I ever signed to: mother. I shook my head, not understanding. Only when the rubble began to shake did I realize what was happening. I felt the vibrations in my soles, the rubble on the ground bowed to her power.
“I gave birth to you,” she continued. “I remember feeling your heartbeat.”
“But you—”
“Shh!” A storm kindled in her gaze. Quiet! “You are my little girl.”
“It’s not true.” I shook my head, my desperation growing. “You can’t do this, it’s not true.”
She took a deep breath and executed her master lie.
“And I love you very much.”
She’d signed it so many times before. I never suspected she was lying. What you sign has to be the truth, that’s what I’d believed, but back then I hadn’t known about the diversity of lies that could be told. I hadn’t known that architects prepare master lies, nor that many of them take in other children, or swap them with their own at birth in order to practice their liecraft.
At that moment, all I wanted was to run over and hug her. For everything to be like it was before, when we’d roast almonds by the fireplace every night, or when she’d show me the old sketches of the origin palace’s stucco. But instead, she was focused on the storehouse. Only liecraft can turn back the destructive power of the truth: the bricks fell upwards, their trajectories arcing skyward as the collapsed walls slowly righted themselves, the rafters latticed themselves back together, the piles of dust that had once been columns now towered up like a plant stretching toward the sunlight. And I just stood there amidst the upward drift of debris, signing frantically despite all the evidence: you’re lying, you’re lying, you’re lying.
After they’d cleared the dead body from the Eastern Gate, the master summoned me to the academy.
A maquette of a domed building stood before us on the table. Folded from paper, with funneled eaves for a rainwater collection system, windows no more than crenels to keep too much ash from blowing in on the wind. It looked like a bunker, not a home.
Can you build it? one of the masters asked me, his nail tinking against the bell at his neck.
We could hole up in there for decades, an elderly masteress added, her hair shaved down close to keep the ash from settling in. She lifted up the roof of the maquette and started explaining. Not much light would get in, but with the skylights and mirrors there would be enough to keep us from going mad.
Out here, we die, a third master added, whose thumb had shriveled and rotted from an infection caused by a reckless, long-ago utterance of truth. In there, we still have a chance.
Nine out of ten houses now stand empty. If one collapses, we move on to the next. But this, this would unite everybody, we wouldn’t live scattered across the city, and the architects could more easily protect a single home than a thousand different ones.
So what say you, Minna?
They wanted me to build it. As my grandmother had pulled up the Western Wall to protect the city from the decay, and as my mother had used me to rebuild the storehouse, they now needed my own master lie so that the city might crumble just a little bit more slowly. This too would be a decay of sorts, just inside a thick sarcophagus, closed off from sunlight.
I’ve already set my master lie in motion. I can build it.
The masters breathed a sigh of relief.
I was stronger than them, and they knew it. Not one of their names was connected to any crucial structure, and the thought of any of them managing to prepare an origin stone like the masters of old was laughable. They only guided architects like my mother and me to ensure the liecraft was artful enough.
I first met them when I was twelve years old. Once my mother had fulfilled her master lie, I didn’t want to spend another minute in her house. I enrolled as a trainee at the academy—but before departing I took every remaining item into my hands, the jewelry box, the hand-carved wooden chair, the earthenware vessels, and I hissed truths until they’d all disintegrated. I left nothing for her but a pile of ash.
I had expected the academy to be a new home. It wasn’t wise mentors I saw in the masters, however, but tyrants who wrung architects dry for their master lies. My mother should have been there among them, she’d earned her place with the storehouse. But it was liecraft she understood, not giving orders—it was said she’d escaped the decay with a length of rope.
I used mirrors to make the light, I signed. People want to believe in something, it’s why they forget that all the lighthouses crumbled when the sea dried up.
The masters nodded.
I released the dove from the last cage I’ve kept hidden. I’d been preparing for fifteen years: I had to get everyone to believe they’d gone extinct. I raised it behind thick cellar walls to keep its cooing from being heard on the street. I dressed the dead body in leather and copper, the last bits I’d hidden in the city after spreading the news that there was no more. They are full of hope, and I will use it to build.
And your husband? the masteress with the shaved head asked.
What does Khao have to do with this?
They all smirked at mention of his name, as if they already knew.
You are weak, dear. You have grown close to him over the years. If he interferes with your task, if you forget why he was placed by your side—
I have not forgotten. As my mother and grandmother before me, I too am crafting my master lie.
The masteress seized my arm. She forced my hand to the maquette, her glare crackling with lightning. Her grip was a vice on my wrist, pressing my hand till it dented the paper dome of the sarcophagus I was to build.
Say it out loud, she signed. Say out loud that everything you do is for this city.
She wanted to know if I was telling the truth. If so, the maquette would collapse under my touch.
“Everything I do, I do for this city,” I stated.
And the papier-mâché building toppled like a house of cards.
We should have hated one another. At least, Khao should have hated me, considering I lied to his face five hundred times a day. Architects’ companions didn’t serve for life, ten years was about as long as any could bear it. They had to believe us, even when they knew we were lying, it’s what they were trained for, and sooner or later it always broke them. Some poured scalding oil into their ears so they’d never hear anything ever again. Others plunged a knife into their architect a good forty times or so.
Khao was different. After that first meeting where I’d burned him with the poker, I’d spent all night changing his wrappings, keeping them cold and wet. He could have remembered nothing but the moment he’d innocently taken the searing metal, but instead he remembered the sleepless night in which I refused to abandon him to his pain.
You do it for the city, he said later when I asked him why he wasn’t mad. Not that that makes it any less monstrous.
His forgiveness enraged me more than if he’d tried to smother me in my sleep. How dare he be so meek, such a perfect sacrificial lamb, gulping down spoiled milk without question only to spend three days vomiting. It was as if he were still trying to atone for that little girl, the one who’d been crushed by the falling gutter at the behest of the truths slipping from his mouth.
Then something changed. Outside of the liecraft, we were under no obligation to spend a single minute together, but as days became months and months became years, I grew accustomed to his mute presence. He was a shadow, but a pleasant one, part of the home. Sometimes he massaged my feet when a cramp flared up, I would lay out breakfast for the two of us if I was the first to wake. Just trifles, I thought. I forgot that after my mother, this was the first time I’d spent any extended period with another person, and when Khao went out from the house, I felt his absence like an unreachable itch between my shoulder blades.
I always worked when we slept together. It was easy to whisper sweet lies, that I want him, that his body is beautiful, that it’s good for me too. He also abased himself, laying back and letting me do anything at all to him—his pubic hair was curly like the hair on his head, his hips were sunken, as if I weren’t the first to hurt him—and as I grinded back and forth on top of him, I instinctively took advantage of the situation, just like my mother had done; after all, it’s what I’d been raised for:
“I love you,” I said out loud.
For a moment, he believed me. His brows relaxed, his face softened as a kind of joy skittered across it. Afterwards he realized this too was a lie, and in his most vulnerable moment at that.
I’m sorry, I signed briskly, and set immediately to building by placing my hand on the wall and straightening the sagging window’s crooked hinge. It was always so easy: the lie simply held the particles together, attracting that which naturally wanted to coalesce. But it wasn’t working. Cracks spiderwebbed out from my palm. Five, one from each finger, like lashes from a whip splitting the bricks in two, sending a shower of mortar onto the sheets. I had never seen my hands destroy like this.
Khao snorted with a cruel smile. Is that so? he asked, and he rolled out from beneath me, not even looking at me as he got dressed. What’s gotten into you, Minna? I ought to report you to the masters.
I couldn’t reply. I stared at my hands in my lap, not understanding how this could have happened.
Khao was already packing by the time I got home. He was always so delicate with everything, as if the objects he handled would shatter at his touch, but now he was whirling about with wild abandon as he crammed matches, a blanket, a knife into his rucksack.
I rapped my knuckles on the table. When he finally looked up, I signed:
What the hell are you doing? Where are you going?
His eyelids fluttered. Maybe he’d wanted to sneak out of the house without saying goodbye.
We’re planning an expedition into the decay. We’re going to search for the city, for the lighthouse, for anywhere out there people might be living.
And was this your idea?
We’ve had some meetings recently.
Meetings? And you want to be part of this … expedition?
We have to know what’s out there. It’s our only chance to escape.
Our only chance was the domed, thick-walled sarcophagus which would win us a few decades as the decay slowly chewed away at it. But I don’t say that to him, because then I would have had to confess that the light, the dove, and the dead body had all been me, all part of my master lie.
I laid my hand on his rucksack.
You’re not going anywhere. The masters gave you to me so that I could use you. Your duty is here.
You’ll get another companion. Does it really matter?
If you go out there, you’ll die.
He pounded the table, he wanted to snarl at me, but without vocal chords he only managed a jagged croaking. He’d never opposed me before. He’d never seemed so alive, not until that day we found the body at the gate. I wanted nothing more than to take him by his hair and scream at him that this was not what he was taught.
You are the property of the city. You have no right to—
Just once, let me be useful! He stabbed his fingers at me like a knife. You think I enjoy only being needed so I can grab burning irons? You think that’s enough for me? If I were deaf and couldn’t hear your liecraft, I would have been driven beyond the wall long ago! So why can’t I go of my own accord? Why can’t I just once do something because I want to, and not because the you or the masters ordered it?
If you don’t obey—
I’ll be exiled from the city? As if that frightens me. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing more frightening than sitting here and waiting for the decay to take us.
Five years of anger pulsed within him. I’d thought the lies had passed through him like a sieve, but no, they had settled on him, firmed up like calcium.
This isn’t what I wanted, I signed, but I no longer knew if this was a truth or a lie. After all, I had intentionally instilled in them the thought that something existed outside. And I had known Khao would volunteer to go out: I’d constantly made him feel like he was good for nothing else, I’d fanned the flames of his defiance. But in reality I didn’t want to let him go, and I certainly didn’t want him to die. The decay would abrade his skin like sandpaper, his lungs would fill with masses of syrupy tar, and he would wander among the gray clouds of death until he realized there is no other city, no way out.
I could have stopped it. My mother could have forever kept it a secret that she’d gotten me as a newborn from the masters. My grandmother could have decided not to feign her own death when my mother was seven, could have decided not to shock her by returning ten years later. And I could have warned Khao. But that’s not what we were raised for.
I took his hands, all ravines and ridges of scars.
“I never wanted you to die,” I said dryly, looking into his eyes. A shrewd lie, never being the operative word. But Khao was too worked up to notice.
His face contorted with pain. And just like I’d always planned, he snatched up his rucksack and left without saying goodbye.
It was the creator who told the first lie. He took the primordial sludge into his hand, kneaded of it the land and sea, formed of it the trees and animals, and then created man in his own image. Man was raw and fragile, and he was terrified of his existence. The creator feared that man would hurt himself, so to soothe him he whispered: do not fear, for I love you.
And this first lie did form the origin stone of the earth. More lies followed the first, thousands and thousands, as if feeding a blast furnace that must not be allowed to sleep.
“It’s so good to see you again!”
“What a beautiful daughter you have!”
“You look great!”
“I’m happy for your success!”
“You’re the only one I love.”
“I don’t know that woman.”
“I don’t want to live without you.”
“You can trust me.”
“Everything will be alright.”
“It’s best for everyone this way.”
Nobody was more fluent in liecraft than me. It was my song, bursting forth from within, as sweet as a skylark’s. My own anthem of lies.
Sometimes though, I imagined what would happen if the vocal cords of everyone in the city were severed, like Khao’s had been when he was a boy. All those mute creations, throats clacking, hawking with exertion, would never again be able to please their god of lies.
Fifteen were setting out on the expedition. I caught up to them at the Eastern Gate; they all wore rucksacks and heavy boots, anxious to depart. Children hugged their fathers goodbye. Women cut their hair at the last moment, a braided memento to press into their husbands’ palms.
My master lie was simple: once the expedition has struck out in the hope of following my false signs, I wait two days. Everyone outside will be dead by then. Their preparations didn’t matter, the decay would spare none of them, it would bore holes into their flesh, from which blood and organs and ash would leak out. Then I summon all the residents, especially the families of the fifteen who set out, and I start lying, just like my mother that day she’d confessed I was not her daughter. I say out loud that they are safe outside. That they are alive, that they found the city, because I never gave them false evidence. Many hundreds of pained wails will erupt in that moment. Many hundreds will wish that I had been the one to die. But nobody will assault me: they will just look on as I build the sarcophagus in which their children will grow up.
It all seemed so easy. Lately, however, I’d been thinking more and more about what would have happened if my mother hadn’t obeyed the masters. If she hadn’t fed the furnace of the god of lies, if we’d lived out our lives together, as mother and daughter.
Maybe nothing would have changed.
Maybe everything would have turned out differently.
“Wait!” I shouted. I shook my bell as I rushed for the gate. “Wait a minute!”
Surprised faces turned toward me. All an architect can do is lie, why else would she open her mouth? Khao too turned to face me; I hardly recognized him with his pulled-back hair and dusty boots.
“Don’t go.” I said it quietly, my voice shaking. “Don’t go. There’s no point.”
I expected the words to shred like shards of glass through my mouth, that I’d feel the sting of my mother’s slap all over again, see her furiously gesturing at me to sign, not speak. And yet the words were so light. So freeing.
“There won’t be anything outside. No city, no sanctuary. Only the decay, and it will eat through you by tomorrow.”
The truths should have had the walls quaking. The gate should have been cracking and splitting as it lurched, houses should have been falling like dominoes.
“It was all me. The light, the dove, the dead body.”
I waited for the sky to come crashing down, for what remained of the origin palace to crumble.
“This was my master lie.”
I’d spent years designing it, and now it was crumbling. I felt the tremoring earth beneath my feet, the shuddering cobblestones. The strength fled me, I’d squandered my opportunity.
The crowd pointed at me, she’s lying! If she were telling the truth, the city would collapse! For the first time in my life I was being honest, and they didn’t believe me. I hadn’t expected that I’d need to provide proof; I could have at least brought along a dove from the cages to silence the skeptics.
Khao was the first to step out from the crowd. He stopped before me, cupped my face with his scarred hand. I couldn’t read the look in his eyes. Despite the years we’d spent together, it was a stranger who now looked at me.
“Thank you, Minna,” he said.
My first thought was that his voice was like honey. Only after did I realize that this was impossible. For five years I’d stared at the scars of the operation which had severed his vocal chords. For five years I hadn’t heard the slightest wince from him, not even with his hand on that searing iron.
“It’s alright,” he said, as the shock settled on my face. “You can’t help it, it’s not your fault. The masters are still proud of you.”
He’s lying. It’s all my fault. He’s telling the truth. Then I’m stupid.
I shook my head. This can’t be happening again. I’m a little girl all over again, staring at her mother as she kneels on the storehouse floor, waiting for her to say something important.
“The sarcophagus was our last hope,” Khao stated. “Without it, we will all die.”
My shame and shock were pushed aside by so many life threatening truths being uttered. Quiet, I signed, clapping a hand to his mouth as if he were a naughty child. But even his eyes were smiling as he batted my hand aside.
“After staying quiet all these years, you really think you can silence me?”
And he told me about himself. I had to rework his sentences, translate lie to truth, to learn that as a boy, he truly couldn’t keep his mouth from running. That gutter truly had split the skull of that girl because of his truths, but at the same moment, in his miasma of terror, a lie had instinctively slipped out—I saw your mom with my dad!—and the gutter began to rise toward the roof, like it was falling backwards, the pool of blood returned to the girl’s head, drop by drop, the splinters of skull began rebuilding, covering the hole they’d left. The girl’s hair even smoothed back down over the wound. The girl had survived. Sometimes her behavior was confused, and she was struck by the feeling that she’d lost something, but she lived, spoke, breathed.
The masters had never seen anything like it. They were frightened of Khao, they said only the old masters could handle material so deftly. The decay chews everything into ash. We can return a broken building to its original form, but if something had been turned to ash, there was nothing we could do. Some, however, Khao among them, are capable of manipulating any and all material.
Then why didn’t you save the city? I asked, wanting nothing more than to strike him. He had built nothing. If he was such a gifted architect, all the lies he’d just revealed were more than enough to construct the sarcophagus, since I had already failed. For minutes on end he’d spoken, and not a cobblestone underfoot was out of place. Why isn’t this your master lie?
He pulled a canteen from his rucksack. He sloshed it about, then held it out to me.
“Here, drink from it. Nothing bad will happen.”
I took the canteen. What bad thing will happen? He hadn’t asked questions when I held out the white hot poker, when I’d offered him rancid milk, but I did not trust him. I sniffed at the water. The same sour, metallic smell as always.
Khao turned to the expedition group, to their families come to see them off. A great number had come out to the gate to wish them well.
“All the water in the city is safe!” he shouted. “Drink from it, and your lives will be long!”
A murmur ran through the crowd. They deliberated with frantic signs, many drew out their own canteens. One woman wanted to try it, to put Khao’s words to the test, but another slapped it from her hand. He’s lying, the woman signed. He’s telling the truth, the other responded, Just this morning I saw someone at the reservoir. A man forced his fingers down his throat, desperately retching into the sand. His beard was wet, he’d had a drink just minutes ago. Someone else tasted the water, spit it out in a stream.
I knew from Khao’s smile that it was true. After the lakes and rivers had all dried up, he’d poisoned the only reservoir which, through channels constructed by the old masters, led to every part of the city.
I had taken from them the hope that they could find sanctuary out there.
Khao had taken from them the possibility of surviving inside for more than a week.
We’d done it together. Khao had helped by kindling the citizens’ hope upon finding the staged dead body at the gate, and today, when I had caved in to the truth, he had delivered the coup de grace.
Out the corner of my eye I saw a man stoop down for something. I thought he was retying his boots, but he snatched up a stone instead. He didn’t hesitate. His aim found Khao’s forehead, just above his right brow.
Khao staggered from the impact. He put an unbelieving hand to the wound, stared at the blood slicking his hand.
“The children will live the longest,” he said, turning to the crowd. He swayed, blinking the stream of blood from his eye. “Give them a drink, the water won’t act as quickly on their frail bodies.”
Maybe it was the parents who attacked first. One moment he was right there beside me, the next the crowd had swept over him. I saw nothing but swinging fists, knees cocked for kicking. I desperately brandished my bell to put a stop to it, to get them to listen, but it was no use. A girl’s hand flashed from among the flailing body parts: her fingers dug into Khao’s golden hair and wrenched his head back to give the others a clearer target.
Then I felt what he was doing with the release of power. It raced through the cobblestones like lightning, straight to a single point. I followed it like I was searching for the source of an unwound ball of yarn, the liecraft vibrating underfoot. He wasn’t building. I’d expected to find the foundations of the sarcophagus rising up, its walls growing like a weed, but all I found was a tarp-covered object. I ripped off its covering.
Eight-sided, black granite. The stone was cool, its sheen regular. I didn’t recognize the architect’s sigil, but it could only be Khao’s. It was an origin stone. I’d seen its like in academy textbooks long ago, the masters chuckling as they showed us, knowing that none of us could create anything like them.
It hoarded every word. But with a lie of this magnitude, a lie which set a city’s worth of people into a murderous frenzy, Khao could build anything.
“Stop!” I cried. I rushed in among them, caring nothing for the cracks of truth splintering the cobblestones beneath my heels. “Enough! He’s created an origin stone! Let him go!”
I wrenched the arms off of him, an elbow connected with my face.
“An origin stone!” I had to shout at them, tear at their hair. Behind them, the city wall screamed as it warped and rent, a cloud of dust erupted. “Only he can build from it! He can save us!”
I shouted and shouted until they noticed the split wall, which verified my words. The crowd gradually calmed; clenched fists loosened, their knuckles bloody. They wanted to see the origin stone with their own eyes.
I could finally see Khao. He lay motionless on the ground, knees pulled up to protect his stomach. He could breathe freely now, but still he lay there, rigid, his arms locked over his head. I knelt down beside him. He stirred when he felt my hand on his neck, blood bubbled on his lips. I expected him to cough or groan, but he laughed. His broken mouth twisted into a smile.
“Don’t worry,” he said, shuddering from the pain, “if there’s one thing I got used to living with you, it’s physical affection.”
I helped him sit up, leaned him against a nearby wall. His splintered nails dug into his trampled palms, his elbows brushed his shattered ribs. His breaths came in hitches and spurts through his bleeding nose, but he still looked in satisfaction at the people gathered around the stone.
“I’m building an origin palace,” he said. In his pride, he even forgot to lie. I felt the biting sparks of truth in his hands, and a Y-shaped split opened a paving stone beneath him. “A whole city, can you believe it?”
Jealousy gnawed at me at the thought of the origin stone. I never would have been able to craft it, neither the stone nor his master lie. He’d constructed it like an onion, loosening it layer by layer: his lie to the city, for which they’d almost killed him, his lies to me, for which I hated him. And he himself, who was not even mute, a man I hadn’t come to know in five years. He’d played me. Even when I had wanted to warn the expedition with my truths, I had lied: there won’t be anything out there—of course there will be, his city. It was all me—hardly, we’d done it all together.
For a new home. How many cities upon cities existed out there, their inhabitants expelled by the decay? The liecraft enclosed in an origin stone can only be strengthened with more lies: districts sprout from within it, domed marketplaces and buttressed bridges grow rank, towers like twisting horns, winding labyrinthine streets. But sooner or later, every city begins to fall. The lines of houses cave in, ash coats the streets. The architects try to continue the lies, heartrending lies, ever more and ever grander, but the districts are too many, it would take too many lies to feed them, more lies than are possible.
Hundreds and hundreds of cities. Hundreds and hundreds of master lies. We will never break the cycle.
The decay will come again, I signed to Khao, hoping he’d understand. But he was focused on the origin stone as the people gathered around it, reverentially caressing the granite.
Isn’t it wonderful? he signed, quickly stopping for the pain.
Are you listening to me? The decay will come no matter what we do. If we build again on a lie, it will collapse again just the same. There has to be some other way to—
“Are you afraid I’ll leave you here?” He gave me a bloody grin. “Because I’m taking everyone with me. And once we place the origin stone, in addition to the best architects, I’ll need you. I want you to raise towers, houses that defy physics like those of olden times. I want to build together with you, Minna.”
My mother had known the lies that hurt me the most. After all these years, Khao had found out too.
“You’re coming with me, right? We’ll do it all together?”
I haven’t spoken for thirty years. Not a single word since I’d heard Khao’s lies at the gate. My vocal chords are fine, my tongue unmarred, I just can’t bear to speak. I still try sometimes, I relax my jaw, I will the words to burst forth from my lungs, from deep within, but the only thing that escapes my throat is a choked, rusty clacking.
I no longer sing anthems.
There’s hardly anything left of the city. The formerly multi-storied houses let the ash sieve through into their courtyards. The decay has gnawed away their edges, dark honeycomb clouds are visible through the holes in the roofs. Trenches and pits everywhere, ash piles tower overhead.
It has been thirty years since Khao left. Most went with him, the drinking water was reason enough—we who stayed collected water from the ever more infrequent rains. It is blackened with ash and needs to be filtered through cotton to make it drinkable. Most had given up after a time and gone to follow Khao. The city’s lights are visible even from here. Night after night we discover more lights in the distance, and I imagine Khao laying towers that stretch to the sky, turquoise mosaics that decorate the floors, but still I stay put.
He came back for me once. He entered the city and called out my name. He said I can’t die here, that I should go with him. Gold fish swim in the pools of the origin palace, he’ll show me.
I watched him from an upstairs window. His face was covered with muslin against the ash, his arms beneath the elbow were a map of scars I had drawn on him. For a moment, I felt a scratch in my throat. If I had really wanted to, I might have been able to cry out to him. I croaked, and something stirred inside me: all I had to do was say here I am, come up, take me with you.
But I held my tongue. I’d held it for thirty years.
The decay spares no one. My hair withered away first; it scattered like smoke at my touch. Then my teeth: tiny bits of coal I could grind between my fingers. My bones creaked with every step, weak as termite-eaten rafters. If I raised my hand to the sky, the light shone dim through my flesh like a wall peppered with bullet holes.
I’d glanced at the origin stone a few days ago. The palace hall around it had disappeared, the marble floor had splintered. The ancient, octagonal stone, however, remained pristine, I ran my fingers over the original architect’s winding sigil. Murder, betrayal, hate: that had been the price. Lies sounding out across the centuries.
The wind bit through me, ash blew out from my body. I lay down beside the origin stone, my palm flat on its cool surface.
For the first time in my life, I began crafting a truth.
Content Warnings: ableism, classism, domestic abuse, self-harm, suicide, violence
