The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  Marcel nearly dropped the letter as he read.

  “Desct,” he said to himself. “Demiurge’s grace… Desct.”

  Chapter 2

  The roar of the skyrail train woke Sylvaine Pelletier up that morning, as it had every morning. 5:35 exactly, one could set a clock by it. A city run by engineers would accept nothing less. Her apartment simulated an earthquake as the traincars roared over, her cot swinging back and forth, her few possessions bouncing on her shelf, struggling against the custom restraints she had welded onto the walls. Hers was a student apartment, a small metal box hanging precariously off the bottom of Icaria. On the few maps where it was labeled, the neighborhood was called the Underburg, and it attracted half the students in the city for the same reason any neighborhood attracts students anywhere: rent was cheap.

  Sylvaine got out of her cot and stepped over to the corner that served as her kitchen. As she brewed tea, she reminded herself to check the bolts above her home. It was an extra precaution all Underburg residents took. In most apartments, failure to perform proper maintenance only resulted in blocked up toilets or burst light bulbs, but for Sylvaine, a few rusting bolts were all that stopped hers from plummeting off the bottom of the city down 200 metres to the junk-strewn mountainside below.

  The automatic teakettle whistled steam. Fifty-four seconds to boil, twice as quick as when she had bought it. Introduction to Practical Mechanics had paid off in this little way; it had taken her less than an afternoon to double the efficiency of the kettle. The little machine always brought the hint of a smile to her face, its existence evidence that despite her academic troubles, despite her physical appearance and the prejudice that it brought, Sylvaine was an engineer. And for an engineer, nothing was impossible.

  She drank her tea and ate her breakfast, a piece of day-past-stale bread, as she stared out the hole in the wall that served as her window. The outer Wastes of the upper Border States stared back; rocky, brushy, with patches of green in the distance where independent farmers grew palewheat and waste-bred tubers, and blocks of grey concrete and iron closer, where the Guild had financed agri-factories.

  She took some pleasure in this growth of industry. More efficient to mechanize the farming, even if, admittedly, the Calamity had opened up more than enough space for simpler crop plots. In the back of her mind she wondered if she just hated the green. She had come to the capital of the Engineer’s Guild to get away from all things natural.

  Sylvaine washed up in the corner sink of her apartment. She was glad the trains woke her up so early, it gave her enough time to wash her fur. Hair, damn it, hair. Years of schoolmates calling her a beast had formed habits that were hard to break. She had once, in a childish fit of inspired idiocy, tried to shave off her hair. But a shaved ferral still didn’t look much like a human, which her classmates had been eager to remind her.

  There was never as much mockery for her teeth, despite her elongated canines and knifepoint incisors. Perhaps it was because the children never saw them, Sylvaine hadn’t had much to smile about.

  6:09, a minute ahead of schedule. Schedules were pieces of craftwork that Sylvaine cherished, a manifestation of mankind’s control of time itself. In other cities, in wasteland towns or forest-edge villages, people might wake at dawn, close shop during storms, and meet at sundown. Weather and the other barbarities of the natural world were given little respect in Icaria where life was a matter of controlled clockwork. That suited her fine.

  Sylvaine wasted a moment of free time to manage her reflection. Brown hair sprouted from head to toe, a thick mat of it, which she patted into place. She studied the ends of her ears, which were better suited to a cat or coyote, with eyes that reflected moonlight if she stayed out late. Her nose was not overly hideous, but it harassed her daily with the detailed knowledge of every oil slick, pollen grain, or sex-laced sweat drop staining a student’s undershirt. When she stared too long at herself, she couldn’t help but forgive her bullies’ cruelty; the jokes and taunts came so easily. Instead she gazed to her clothes, her tight-fitting shirt, her workwoman’s coat, with the hammer-and-gear pin of the Engineer’s Guild on the lapel. It was the machines you made, not the blood you bled, that were the credentials of an engineer. She told herself this every morning. Maybe one day she’d be able to believe it.

  * * *

  The selling point for Sylvaine’s apartment, besides pocket-change rent, had been its proximity to the rickety Underberg skyrail station. She clamored through the short maze of catwalks that hung below the city and jumped onto the first traincar that rolled in. The Q-line, a straight shot to the Icarian Guild Academy. A golem attendant hung welded into the train’s wall. No, auto-homid, she chastised herself for her imprecise slang as the mechanical mimic of a man stamped her ticket. As she sat, it whirred and groaned, turning on rusting gears towards the next passenger.

  The nice thing about an Icarian traincar was that there was always someone even stranger looking than Sylvaine. A salvi dipping her head down to fit in the train car built for human-sized passengers, sitting beside the usual batch of engineers spouting extraneous metal arms and lenscraft eyes. Her skin was a deep gray and her long horns riddled with decorative carvings. Sylvaine wondered if the salvi was a runaway slave from a Malva Ironship City, or if her family had lived in Icaria for generations. The tattoos that peeked from holes in her sleeves suggested the former; grids of flesh-carved serial numbers, in Malva script.

  The salvi caught her gaze and winked. “Icaria!” she said.

  “Tourist?” Sylvaine asked.

  “Immigrant hopefully.” The salvi smiled. “Icaria! If they won’t let you make it anywhere else, you can make it here!”

  That’s what Sylvaine had heard, before she had left her family to live in the city-on-the-mountain. Perhaps it was even true. Unlike in the Principate, there were no laws here against Salvi, or Ferrals, or Mutants, and unlike in the legally safe but socially hostile cities of the Resurgence, the Engineer’s Guild’s love of bodily augments and additional metal limbs left them with comparatively fewer discriminatory views on those who differed from the physical norm.

  Still, three years out and Sylvaine was no closer to “making it.” Gear’s-grits, she hadn’t even been able to pass Applied Æthermantics on her first two attempts despite near perfect grades in all other classes, so the state of “making it” was just some mystical land beyond the horizon, as real as the dragon empires of Xue-leng she had read about in some trashy fantasy pulp.

  Her car mate distracted herself with other passengers. Sylvaine sat back on her uncushioned seat and turned to the window. The train ascended from the Underburg through the interior of the city, past layers of pipes and rotating machinery, hollowed-out engine rooms and cargo holds turned dense tenements, up to the surface. A great metropolis, one of the largest post-Calamity, stared back; towers of iron and glass built in orderly grids, smaller factories and workshops crammed into every free nook. Autocars rolled over the metal streets, alongside stranger vehicles with clanking legs or chain tracks. The sidewalks bustled with folk of all shades, sizes, and head adornments, whether hats, horns, metal-implants, or just well-trimmed hair. Merchant hocked exotic wares, mostly fakes, while showy engineers marketed their inventions to skeptical crowds. Beyond the city-proper stood the mountainside, covered in great metal tethers that prevented the unnatural city from sliding down into the dust and ruins below.

  Sylvaine glanced up to study the largest structures in the city, the negative-density towers. They were her favorite sight in the city, massive bulbed pillars that loomed like gods. Even the æroships were careful to give birth to these titans. Before the Calamity they had lifted Icaria far above the clouds, a nomadic capital for the Engineer’s Guild. Sylvaine enjoyed imagining what it must have been like to live in the floating city, before the ætheric ripples of the Calamity mutilated its internal machinery and sent crashing the remains into the side of the Atsol Mountains. Only the most ancient of engineers
, those whose metal replacements had let them live several lifetimes, held any memories of Icaria’s glory days.

  * * *

  Sylvaine reached her lecture hall at 6:57, three minutes early. At seven precisely an old kortonian hobbled over to the stage. His height, average for his kind, was just above that of a human child, but his squarish forehead, heavy wrinkles, and clunky brass-bordered spectacles dispelled any notion of youth or human blood. He walked to the human-sized podium and cranked forward a kortonian-sized lever, the platform lifting him to a presentable height behind his lectern. He began speaking as the gears groaned into place.

  “Welcome to Applied Æthermantics 101. My name is Professor Gearswit.”

  He coughed.

  “Now that pleasantries are out of the way, let us begin. What is æther? If you’re still asking this question you probably shouldn’t be in this class.”

  He laughed at his own joke. A few students chuckled politely.

  “Still, I must educate a depressing number of first-year students who come here with an excess of imagination that, no, despite what some fools claim, æther is not ‘magic.’ It is simply a form of trans-material energy not bound by the same laws that govern most physical objects. For those who possess an inborn biological predisposition for æthermantic manipulations,” he coughed again, “or to use the common parlance, ‘The Knack,’ æther allows the creation of mechanisms and machines capable of far more than what a simple mechanic can produce.”

  Sylvaine hated that phrase, “The Knack.” So many engineering students seemed able to lift an ætherglove and instantly start infusing machines with almost supernatural properties, all because of this “Knack.” When Sylvaine picked up her glove all she got was snickering, pitying glances, and failing grades.

  To comfort herself she watched the late students trickle in. Many were non-human, like her. The bulk of this minority were the short and square-headed kortonians, but there were also some slender, metallic-haired malva, a few massive salvi (who tended to sit as far away from the malva as possible) and a handful of mutants, red-skinned, some with twisted horns or lizard eyes, others with patches of boils and cog-like spikes running down their backs. The humans came from all lands, the Torish coasts, frosty Anklav, the isles of Tyrissa and some even came from the kingdoms of El’Helmaud, across the Interra Sea. It was known throughout the world that an engineer trained in Icaria was worth ten from local academies. These human classmates were rarely only human. There were nearly as many metal limbs as flesh ones, and Sylvaine often overheard her classmates comparing and bragging about their “upgrades.”

  Still, she was the only ferral. She was the only one with fingers that ended in retracted claws, the only whose tufted ears flicked by instinct, the only one who looked like a fur carpet that had decided to grow limbs.

  “Since this is a sane class, we’ll be working with stable æther. If you want to work with raw sangleum oil, then take Professor Stelhan’s class on ætheric transformations. Unstable æthermantics is not demoncraft, whatever your priest might have said, but I do recommend you watch yourself around the stuff. There’s a reason sangleum weaponry was able to blast the heart of our continent into a scrap-strewn desert, though I think any sensible person would put the blame for the Calamity on the politics of the Severing War, not the tools those fools happened to use to resolve their internecine bickering.”

  Sylvaine glanced idly around the repurposed lecture hall. Lodged in one of the negative-density towers, it looked like a hobbled-together student project; metal chairs welded directly into the layers of pipes that constituted the floor, scaffolds bolted onto the walls to provide extra seating space. The roof was merely a large tarp stretched over the room to hide the gaping emptiness of the tower above. There was something inorganic about the lecture hall that excited her, as if the building itself defied its own origins.

  “And, to preempt any of you too ambitious for your own glove, no we won’t be using elemental æthers, trust me, better engineers than you have tried. Nor will we be performing any church-sanctioned ‘miracles’ with the ‘holy æthers,’” he snorted the two terms. “And we’re not beastmen, so natural æthers are out.”

  Sylvaine shrank down into her seat. She knew her professor did not mean it as a slur, but she could feel the eyes of her classmate shift over to her. It wasn’t her fault she was born into this body. She had never even been to the Nemori Forestlands. She was an engineer, damn it! Why wasn’t that good enough?

  “So, we will continue using good old-fashioned, stable æther. And, as this is an applied course, I think a demonstration may be in order.”

  Sylvaine’s mood flipped instantly, and she scooted a few centimetres forward on her seat. If her desire to avoid notice hadn’t been so great, she would have sat in the front row.

  The short man pulled from under the lectern a block of iron, a small engine, and a glove covered in a small web of tubing and brass chambers. He put the latter on.

  “Who here has tried to manipulate wood or stone? Tried is the key word. If your materials were processed thoroughly, then maybe a few of you might have found some minor success. Unlikely even that. Metals are the ideal medium, and if you open your textbook to the Appendix C there should be listed different metals’ resonance frequencies.”

  He tossed the iron block in the air. As it reached its apex, he thrust his gloved arm out and the block stopped in midair, then rotated and morphed, as if a putty.

  “You see, by burning a small amount of æther-oil in my glove, I can utilize the ætherlines in the earth, and thereby alter the mass, density, and structure of resonant objects.”

  Sylvaine held her hand to her mouth to hide her smile. She didn’t want to appear the stereotypical ferral, gawking at technology, especially since many of the other students seemed more interested in whispered conversations than watching the wonder before them. Yet every demonstration still left her in awe, and few engineers outside of Icaria practiced their craft as theatrically as Gearswit.

  The professor moved his fingers, and a piece of metal separated from the block, which fell, solid, clanking onto the podium. This smaller bit he manipulated and morphed into minute cog, which he placed in the small engine beside him. He touched it with a spark from his glove, and the machine burst into life, a small light beaming from its top, fed by the work of the engine.

  “There you have it. Some simple engineering. Now, how many have you taken Introduction to Ætheric Theory? This next part might be a refresher…”

  The fun over, Sylvaine opened her notebook to a page dense with diagrams, letting her professor’s words fade into a mechanical drone. Hand-drawn gears, engines and belts made up her intricate vision, intelligible only to the trained eyes of an engineer. It bore a simple title: “prototype mobile negative-density generator Ver. 3.” The basics of her design had been lifted from old textbooks on the inner workings of Icaria and related ærocraft, but there was an addition at the bottom of her schematic, a tiny module that was all her own.

  She’d heard Gearwit’s lecture twice before, so, tuned-out, she set to work. Her current designs utilized the powerful, but potentially explosive, power of pure sangleum. Stability, the constant concern with raw sangleum, would be maintained by an internal feedback system measuring off an inert sample. To the layperson it might sound like engineering fiddle-faddle, but Sylvaine knew if her system had been in the city’s towers at the time of the Calamity, Icaria would still be airborne.

  It would prove her a true engineer worth her pin, if she could get it to work, but without the Knack, it remained nothing more than fancy drawings.

  * * *

  Class ended at 8:33, three minutes late. Gearswit’s lectures invariably decayed from the mechanical precision of the very material he taught. As Sylvaine walked to the door she heard a gentle voice.

  “Ms. Pelletier, may I speak with you a moment?”

  She turned to see her professor gather his notes and step down from
the podium.

  “What is it, sir?”

  He stepped towards her and straightened his dusty brown jacket. He was just over waist-high for her, but stood as if they were equally tall.

  “I can’t help but notice this is the third time you’ve taken my class,” he said after a moment. “To be frank, I was surprised when you enrolled the first time.”

  Sylvaine shifted her gaze.

  “You’ve done quite well on my tests,” he continued. “Unfortunately, this is Applied Æthermantics, and I’m afraid your workshop constructions have been, well, nonfunctional.”

  It was true. Without the spark of æther even her most ingenious designs sat as immobile hunks of metal. She took a deep breath. “I know sir, but this quarter I can make it work, I just…”

  “That is the problem,” he interrupted, “you keep trying. There’s no shame in not being able to manipulate æther. Not everyone possesses the Knack. The Academy offers a very prestigious mechanics program for folk like you. Professor Grayratch is teaching an excellent advanced class in that very sequence, on classical energy sources. The man’s a genius, even built an engine that runs on coal. A pure curiosity of course, no practical use, but still fascinating. I know you’ve been trying up the engineer’s path, but I’m sure my recommendation would be all you need to get into his class.”

  “But I’m want to become an ætheric engineer,” Sylvaine said. It was why she had come to the city in the first place, not to muck around with the same sort of work that a corner mechanic could do. She knew ferral mechanics, had met friends of her father who had worked on autocars or with other repair jobs. Some people would smile as the furred men worked, act impressed with the most infuriating sort of friendly condescension, the kind you would give to a child who finally managed to tie her shoes right. Sure, Ferrals could move a few bolts around, even fix an engine or sketch out some gearwork, but that didn’t prove anything in most folks’ eyes.