Children of Artifice

by Danie Ware

‘I’m twenty-five.’ He had the feeling of a caged creature, a gasping fish. He wanted to throw his tea across the room. ‘I can’t play anymore, you know I can’t. If you have any dreams of seeing me give another solo recital at the Theatre, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. And if I want to go somewhere, I’ll just go—’

  ‘Stay still,’ Darrah said, his smug tones like a goad.

  Caph rounded on him, snarling, but Jularn was faster.

  ‘Please, darling.’ This time, the term wasn’t an endearment. ‘Enough is enough.’ She gestured at his clothes, his face. ‘You will return to your zanyar, and your exercises. You will assist me in my forthcoming project. You will pull your weight as a member of this family. And you will find a stable relationship with a decent gentleman, or I will find one for you. I will not have your behaviour—’

  ‘My ‘behaviour’?’ He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He wanted to rant at her, to wrench everything out of his heart and show it to her, to cry ‘I don’t want any of this!’ He wanted to flee the room, flee the house, never come back. His thoughts were a smear, blurred by temper and comedown and exhaustion, by a day that had turned into a hell all of its own. Aden, stretched out on the mattress beside him, his lips brushing Caph’s shoulder. Darrah, teasing him at the party, then pulling him down in the sweet, cool grass. And Molly...

  …hoped that you two would work out your differences—

  Work them out with a boathook, maybe.

  Darrah dropped the pad back in the bowl. ‘The cut is clean,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t need stitches, and when it heals, you’ll have quite the duelling scar. He met Caph’s eyes, raised an elegantly sardonic eyebrow. ‘Frankly, you’ve been very lucky.’

  Lucky.

  The word was a slap, deliberate.

  Fuming, Caph stared him down, and he dropped his gaze, feigning innocence.

  Lucky.

  With the air of an unpleasant task completed, Jularn picked up her tea.

  Lucky.

  Smothered by the heavy darkness, Caph sat in the garden, the long fall to the lower city tumbling away from its outer edge. He’d been given clean clothes and was now dressed as befitted his rank, but the high shirt collar was chafing at his throat. He wanted to scratch at it, but knew, if he did, he’d end up tearing the whole thing off him like some bloody parasite.

  Despite the height, there was still no breeze, and he felt like he was struggling to breathe.

  Trying to concentrate, he sat with his zanyar across his lap, the bow in his left hand, but both lay there like strangers, far too close and making him uncomfortable. This wasn’t the instrument from his father’s study – this was its lesser brother, the one he’d been bought to practice with.

  Lucky.

  He wondered where two years had gone – how the time had passed without him really being aware of it. He’d spent so long trying not to think about what he’d lost – the stage lights, the audiences, the rush of it all. The wide-eyed young men, all awed by his playing…

  Ganthar’s constant, bubbling rage.

  He would have done anything for you.

  In his head, Caph heard small bones snapping, systematically, one at a time. Heard himself scream.

  But… two years. Hells, maybe his mother was right.

  Holding down the dread, he settled the zanyar more comfortably across his knees, drew the bow over the strings. It moaned like a wounded soul, like it understood his reticence. Its voice was familiar, deep and haunting and poignant, like a longing for so many things, now so lost…

  Carefully, struggling to remain calm, he played the five open strings, one after the other, listening for their sound. He could still tune it by ear, even now, and he played a minor chord, then another. With a headlong urgency, he surged past scales and basic training, and tried to play the first few bars of a simple melody – Vanatar’s Lament for Bird Fallen, a flush of liquid notes and something he’d learned as a teen. For a moment, he had it – or thought he had it – then his left index finger went into cramp, and pain flashed up his arm. The zanyar’s voice became an atonal shriek and failed completely.

  Furious, he pushed it to the grass and it rang softly, the sound oddly sorrowful.

  Lucky!

  He closed his eyes.

  When he opened them again, Bectar was standing by the weeping trees, watching him with pain in her face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  The clouds had parted, and the blue moon lit her to a shimmer. With her blade at her hip and her short hair a tousle of curls, she looked like some storybook warrior – his sister was every bit as tall as he was, and with the same breadth of shoulder.

  He shook his head, leaned to pick the instrument up. ‘This should be fun.’ He bit his lip as his voice cracked, then sighed. ‘Why now, Bec? Why’s she got this into her head now? This isn’t about last night.’

  ‘Politics,’ she said. He groaned, but she went on, ‘The families Elect have been stable for more than forty years – there’s not been a change, a new Selection, in your lifetime, or in mine. But rumours rattle down the streets like marbles – house Claisal falters. And Dad’s been waiting for this—’

  ‘Oh, you’re joking.’ Caph stared at his sister.

  ‘We’ve always known this,’ Bec said. ‘It’s the only thing he’s ever wanted – it’s why he married Mum in the first place.’

  ‘Because he wanted her spooky metallurgical powers? Wanted a wife who could pull pure metal from a bloody rock?’

  ‘You know the story,’ Bec said, patiently. ‘She was the city’s senior Assayer, head of her guild. And absolutely lethal because she could pick up any ore and know exactly how much pure metal was present.’ A brief grin. ‘She made so much coin. And when he met her, and he saw what she could do… He married her because together, they’re absolutely unstoppable. And they’ve been waiting for this for far longer than we’ve even been in their lives.’ They deserve it. She didn’t say it, but he heard her anyway.

  ‘Why would anyone want a seat in City Hall,’ he said. ‘All that ‘preserve the balance’ talk is just so much bloody frogspawn – they watch everything we do, every ripan we spend. Most people can’t even leave their districts—’

  ‘They protect and defend us, look after the city—’

  ‘They track every tag, and you know it,’ Caph said. ‘City Hall’s not about ‘security’, it’s about paranoia. A person puts a foot in the wrong place, you never hear from them again.’ Bec looked sceptical, but he surged on, ‘And there’s no risk of famine, not now. The whole thing’s a fiction, just designed to keep everyone in their places. Why the hells we’d ever want to be a part of it…’ His voice cracked and he stopped.

  ‘It’s their choice, Tal,’ Bec told him, eyebrow raised in warning.

  ‘And what about you?’ He shot it straight back at her. ‘You’re thirty-four, and if there is a new Selection coming up, they’ll be wanting you married off to some chinless dandy from house Thantar—’

  ‘You watch who you’re calling a commodity—’

  ‘We both are and you know it—’

  ‘They can try,’ she said, her smile savage. ‘I’m too busy, I’ve got all of my Theatre stuff, plus the fencing, and I’m up to my ears in Dad’s economic studies. I don’t know shit about metallurgy, but I know more about distribution routes and inter-district taxation laws than I’ll ever bloody need.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘But yes, fair point, they’ll probably try something. Who knows, at this rate, I might end up dating Molly.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’ He plucked at the strings with his fingertips. The skin was soft, his calluses lost. ‘I hate all of this.’

  ‘I know.’ She eyed him thoughtfully. ‘Where do you go, Tal? Is there someone you see? Someone you stay with?’

  ‘I just go to lose myself.’

  The admission
faded into the image of Aden’s inked arms, his rough fingers gentle down Caph’s back. Will you come back this way? Would you be here if I did?

  He found himself on his feet, zanyar still in hand, looking out over the dark garden. Far below, the lights of the wharf glinted on the water, their warmth a thousand miles away. The clouds had closed again, smothering the rim of the crater, and the sky grumbled, threatening.

  ‘Don’t you get claustro?’ He asked at last, turning back. ‘Being watched all the time? Structured? Judged? Assessed? Controlled? I hate having everything I do questioned; I hate carrying around the family name like some kind of gold yoke. I hate having to watch what I wear, what I say, where I go, whom I see.’ The words twisted. ‘And I hate this bloody shirt! Dammit, Bec, I wish there was somewhere. Somewhere I was invisible, where I could let all of this go; somewhere no-one expected anything of me. I wish I could go away, and just… vanish. Not have anybody care who I was.’

  ‘It’ll never happen,’ she said gently. She came to stand with him, at the outermost edge of the garden, looking way, way down at the glittering outskirt below. ‘Wherever you go, Caphen Jularn Talmar, your name is going to follow you. And you’d better get used to it.’

  As if it agreed with her, the thunder rumbled again.

  CHAPTER FOUR: GAMES

  District Vanchar, lazy in the afternoon sun.

  The largest and most rural of the city’s districts, Vanchar was a rolling haven, bordered by cliffs and dotted with ancient stone farmsteads, their muddy roads rutted by carts. Vanchar had fed the Builders as they’d crafted, and its soil still supported almost all of the city’s arable land.

  Proteus liked it out here; it was uncomplicated and quiet, and mostly unbothered by the distant, towering spiral of the upper city’s power. Lyss had lived in Vanchar for most of her adult life and he was a regular visitor, bringing her news, and questions, and Austen’s latest antics – and sometimes the things that needed her insight.

  Lyss could see where he couldn’t – and she was rarely wrong.

  Enjoying the clear air, he walked out from the district gate, his hands deep in the pockets of a distinctive, patchwork coat. In Vanchar, he took on a long stride, a tanned and wind-weathered face and a thinning grey tail of hair, and the coat was an important part of the character – like Aden’s blue eyes, it was there to distract from the rest of him, to be the one thing that the people remembered. The scatter of nearby farmers called him Luye, and they knew him for a storyteller, an affable nomad that brought messages and gossip. Sometimes, he’d sat in the cider-house with them for long evenings of tales and merriment.

  Luye was Vanchar personified, as easy-going as the open and sunlit grass, and a relief, in many ways, from Aden’s streetwise wickedness and Proteus’s ruthless detachment. He was a man that was never in a hurry; he smiled for no reason, and enjoyed life for its own sake.

  And this afternoon, life needed to be enjoyed. The land was green, the sky a cloudless and blazing indigo, ever-tinged by the red sun. The volcanic soil was rich and lush; tiny figures worked the fields. Once, the Builders had crafted other dwellings here, descending from the upper city to perhaps consider the quiet, but as the population had expanded and the arable land had become critical, the retreats had been turned into farm- or storehouses, a small handful of them abandoned completely. They dotted the soil like half-ruined guardians, silent creatures crouched in their stonework.

  One of these buildings was smaller than the rest, one side all but sunken into the soil. He veered from the cartway and headed in that direction, his boots cloying with mud. Years ago, Lyss had fallen in love with it, with its flowered and clambering creeper, with its age and quiet. Her heightened perceptions made long stays in the city intolerable and her little, crumbling house had made her welcome – or so she’d told him.

  She’d also told him she could feel the people that had lived here: academics and historians, men and women of peace and learning. They’d had a sadness to them, she’d said, a loss she’d found both poignant and oddly comforting.

  Despite his best efforts, he’d never felt any such thing.

  The sun at his back, he headed for the side door, but the little house was oddly silent. Lyss normally came to greet him, knowing he was close long before he actually knocked…

  When he reached the door, he stopped.

  Perhaps it was the smell, the stealing-faint odours of unwashed body and rotten food; perhaps it was the stain on the steps at his feet. Perhaps Lyss’s unseen ghosts were trying to tell him something, chill fingers on his skin. The pillared and tumbledown house felt wrong, and a week of rubbish was piled in the doorway.

  Behind it, the door stood half-ajar, and he pushed it carefully open.

  ‘Lyss?’

  Her rooms were beautiful, unique. They had an old and elaborately decorated floor, and an overgrown window that lay slightly on the slant. The ceiling, too, was at an angle, as though the room was half under the ground and half in the light…

  But there was no light in here now.

  Instead, the window was covered with a soiled throw of fabric, ragged at the edges. Hummocks of shadow rose from overturned furniture, manifesting like a swelling of ghouls. Her belongings were scattered, smashed and kicked across the floor. Her table had collapsed; her sodium lights were broken. It was filthy in here, and it stank.

  Lyss?

  Luye evaporated like sweat from his skin. Proteus was himself – bland-faced, watchful, a creature of perception and information. He was combat-tense, all his senses sharpened.

  He considered calling her, dismissed it.

  Instead, he checked behind him and closed the door, then, very carefully, shrugged out of the patchwork coat. The air felt wrong, tasted wrong, as if all the building’s ghosts were thronging at his back.

  He couldn’t tell if no-one had been here in weeks, or if someone had been though here like a tornado, tearing the room to sun-bloodied shreds--

  No, the body-smell was recent. Someone was still living here, or had been, until very recently.

  Lyss… or someone else.

  Scanning the room, he picked his way across the wreckage. A glance told him that her water-room and sleeping area were the same – both covered in trash in a way that would make even Austen shudder. Her bed was destroyed, a rumpled and dirty mess.

  As he moved, he listened for any shifting or movement. He was tense now, all his senses searching.

  But the rooms were silent.

  Leaning down, he picked up a long scarf, one of the colourful seasilk weaves from district Thale. He remembered Lyss stealing it, dancing with glee as she’d rounded the corner. Look! she’d said, Look, isn’t it beautiful? It hung on his fingers like web.

  He wrapped it round one fist, the movements deliberate. Then he moved on, carefully nudging at the debris with his boot. He found a carved wooden fish. He found feathers, a decoration she’d worn in her hair for some party or other. He found a length of fine and shining chain, no longer attached to its timeglass, and a broken tea-bowl, cracked down one side.

  Fragments of her life; memories discarded.

  His skin prickled.

  ‘Lyss?’

  The word was soft, cautious.

  He reached the far wall and pulled the fabric from the window, flooding the room with light. He knew the layout, the other rooms, the likely positions for intruders. And he knew the stone engraving on the nearside wall that told the legend of the Builder called ‘Artifice’, the renegade…

  Something scuttled.

  He saw it, a flash of metal, skittering under the mess.

  It was quick, all claws and scrabble, rustling the debris on the far side of the room. It wasn’t close, but it moved wrong for a tarras, more insect than mammal. He stayed where he was, the wall at his back, watching…

  There.

  Rumples though the rubbish
, behind one thing, under another. He lost sight of it, held his breath. A moment later, it came up the far side of a fallen wooden cupboard and sat there, a wrought-metal spider in copper or brass, easily a handspan across. It raised angled forelegs, tasting the air. He stared at it – it looked like the clockwork things that the conjurers played with in the marketplaces, tricking the passers-by into giving up their ripans.

  But this one moved differently, fluid; it almost seemed alive.

  It turned towards him. Leapt.

  And shit, it was fast.

  He reacted without thinking, pure street-fighting reflex. He judged its speed, shifted his weight, took it clean with a scarf-wrapped backhand. It went sideways, hard, smashed into the wall and slid in a clatter of legs to the floor. After a brief moment’s thrashing, it righted itself and scurried back under the litter.

  He lost it, couldn’t see where it had gone.

  His pulse was up now, his blood hard in his ears. The thing was as creepy as every hell; he stayed where he was and slowly, tightly, scanned the room. He concentrated on the floor, on looking for the scuttling ripples that shifted through the clutter. He thought it was over there, and he waited, unmoving.

  But, as though it knew he was looking, the beast was likewise motionless.

  And then he saw it, over in the shadows, a dark shape against the base of the clothes-chest. It moved like a piece of the gloom, like the moon across the sun, but it was limned in glitter, a metallic shine. Scattered rolls of seaweed-paper undulated as it scurried beneath them and vanished again.

  He tried to track it – saw it re-emerge as it reached the corner.

  It swivelled, and stopped. He could feel it watching him, though it had no eyes, and he stared back at it…

  I’ve got you now, he thought.

  It shimmered in answer, mocking.

  Not taking his attention from it, he took a sliding step along the wall, watchful where he put his boot.

  Carefully, he took another step and put his back to the corner. He stretched out a foot and cleared as much of the floor as he could reach – he didn’t know how far the thing could leap, but he wasn’t taking chances.