Tower of Mud and Straw

by Yaroslav Barsukov

  He pushed the door and stepped inside.

  In the living room, curtains whispered and caressed the breeze; the bedroom stood deserted, too, but metal glittered at the table near the bed.

  He was halfway there when the guy emerged from the bathroom. He looked down, lacing his breeches, the sweet now mixing with the reek of piss. A stupid thought occurred to Shea—is he here only to relieve himself?—when the man raised his gaze. Under his brows, two diamonds reflected void, but the hand, as though separate from the body, dashed behind the back to produce a knife half the forearm long.

  When he swung, Shea leaned forward, caught the man’s wrist, and pulled the three-hundred pounds mass past him. He hoped to twist the arm and dislocate the shoulder, but the man simply stumbled. Shook him off. Did another swing, from the side, blindly, leaving a bloody trail in the right sleeve of Shea’s jacket.

  Cursing, he dove behind the assailant’s back and threw all his weight into a single punch under the ribs.

  And while the mountain of fat and muscles was catching its breath, Shea exercised the only option available to him—to run.

  Into the corridor, toward the bleak light leaking from the top of the staircase.

  The familiar sound of steps came from above.

  Of course. It was logical—whoever wanted to kill him, if they weren’t completely stupid, would’ve taken care of the insurance. Two men going into an abandoned wing might’ve seemed suspicious, but send one in and then the second to finish the job.

  “Fuck,” Shea said. “Fuck.”

  Ignoring the pain, he rammed his shoulder into the nearest door—and immediately slammed it shut again, this time, from the inside.

  He took a step back, folding his lips as though to whistle, letting the air seep out.

  Two sets of footsteps cadenced toward each other, clack, clack against the stone. When they met, there was a moment of silence, followed by something heavy tumbling.

  A contralto voice said, “Open the door, Mr. Ashcroft.”

  He exhaled.

  “Please, open the door.”

  The bald man lay on the floor with his knees to his chest, one hand tucked under his belly as though in a fit of modesty. The stubble glistened, the gas lamp’s light wrapping silver around each hair. Next to him stood Lena, same long black dress as the day before, same wave cascading elaborately down the side of her face. Those fellows will smack you on the head with the whole cart, Shea remembered.

  “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Thank you, my lady.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  He stepped out into the corridor and probed the body with his boot. “This fellow would probably disagree—nothing to mention apart from you saving my life. My lady, please help me get him into this room.” It occurred to him—there must’ve been such brutes in that crowd of protesters, too, craving only blood, destruction… Oh dear, how can I even think that? He squeezed his forehead with his fingertips and the soft flesh of his palm. Those had been people, innocent people. “I need to question him.”

  In one fluid motion, Lena knelt and pulled the man’s lower jaw. “Look.”

  “No tongue!”

  “Some things you learn from your neighbors. They do it in Duma.”

  “We should deliver him to the authorities, then.”

  She cocked her head. “You’re funny, you know that? Considering one of those authorities sent him to kill you.”

  “You have any idea who?”

  Lena shrugged and, with two fingers, threw back her hair. “Anyone could’ve. Patrick or someone else from the entourage, out of fear you would take their place. But the most obvious possibility is the duke himself, though he never mentioned anything to me.”

  “You and the duke…” Shea swallowed the rest of the sentence. Why had he said that?

  But she didn’t answer anyway.

  “It seems I’m not going to win any popularity contests around here.”

  “Thank your queen for putting you into this. I knew one of them would try to kill you right after the reception.”

  “And you save every stranger that comes by.”

  “Shouldn’t I?” A half-smile opened into weariness—with what? Her life? Her position? People around her? “Yesterday, you were concerned about Brielle using our technology.”

  “You’re concerned, too, am I right? The fellow who drove me here told me no Drakiri would work at the construction site.”

  “Have you heard of the Mimic Tower?”

  “No.”

  “You may find it useful to read up on Drakiri history. See you around, Mr. Ashcroft.”

  She strode away, her gait refined, as though belonging to the life he’d left behind, with its gold, embers, halls, dresses; with its evenings on a terrace at the Red Hill overlooking rivers of light.

  “See you around,” he said to her back.

  5

  The tower wasn’t what he’d expected.

  Officially an anti-airship stronghold, Shea had already had a picture in his mind: of a disproportionate artillery dugout. The reality was nothing he’d ever seen before.

  Entering it was entering a city—or rather, many cities. A spiral staircase, wide as a market square, snaked around the inner wall, leaving a vast nothingness in the middle, an abyss that sang with wind and made his head spin. This was a world painted by a lover of chiaroscuro, an addict to strong contrasts: shadows lay in pools of ink, and there were blinding patches of daylight—portals in the tower’s side the size of a house, ground-to-air cannons’ windows into the wild, one for every two or three of the staircase’s whirls.

  It was next to those openings that people huddled, each portal its own town, each its own compact habitat: lamps, pulleys and carts, flickers of tinder, hammers banging, yells, laughter.

  The tower took the length of the world—only it was an alien world, replicating itself over and over as it climbed to a distant, ghostly gap into the clouds. Or did he stare down a well? Shea’s head spun again as up and down flip-flopped like axes on a gyroscope.

  This, this cosmos, his responsibility.

  “Don’t look up,” Brielle said. “At least not for now. You’ll get used to it, Shea. Can I call you Shea?”

  “Sure,” he said, trying to stop himself from retching.

  “I’ll show you the fifth level today. That’s about three hundred feet above ground.”

  “Gosh.”

  “It’s nothing, little more than a third of the tower’s height.” A smile, a cocked eyebrow. “Current height, that is.”

  “We’ll go on foot?”

  “Oh, no. No.” She patted him on the back. “At least not all the way. You’ll see.”

  She’s like a kid ready for a ride across the neighborhood, he thought.

  Brielle was on the heavier side, and Shea expected her to pant as they ascended—but she navigated the stairs as though she were flying.

  A group of people in aprons, rolled up papers under their arms, passed them by. The first ‘town’ smelled of roasted meat, and a wooden platform extended from the portal into the whitewashed outside, workers sitting on the edge, eating, drinking, talking loudly.

  At the third ‘town’, he wondered if Brielle had taken him on an infinite journey, a pilgrimage that would end with them growing old and having children, but still climbing, still trying to reach some unknown destination.

  “Here it is,” she said.

  A contraption resembling a wooden cage hung at the abyss’ shore.

  “I have a nagging feeling you want us to ride in this.”

  “I hope you don’t suffer from vertigo.”

  “No, but I do suffer from this stupid wish to live.”

  “I’ll take good care of you. Oh, a drink might help—those guys back at the…”

  “I don’t drink. Why not have this thing on the ground level?”

  “So that people don’t get lazy.”

  They stepped into the cage, and
Brielle jerked a rope loop. From above, a faint echo came: a pulley squealing.

  “How high up does this… ehm, lift go?” Shea said.

  “All the way to level five. Two hundred feet.”

  “I think I’ve just reconsidered.”

  “Too late.” She winked at him as the wood under their boots started rocking and went into a gentle spin.

  The swerving continued, every now and then changing direction while the cage crept up the tower. The wind, coming in through the portals, knocked them against the staircase like a patient visitor at the door.

  “You can let go,” Brielle said.

  At first, Shea didn’t understand her, but then, as though in an out-of-body dream, shifted his gaze to his left hand: it had one of the wooden bars in a death grip, soft flesh squeezed white.

  “Come on!” She laughed, throwing up her arms, and he unclenched his fingers and thought, How beautiful people can be when they’re happy.

  Sabotage attempts, he remembered. Who would want to destroy this, a wonder, a whole world of its own? His future depended on the tower being built, but now that concern faded, allowing something warm, something big to expand inside him.

  I could be happy here, too, I simply need to find my way around all the assholes.

  Maybe it was the brain releasing a rivulet of euphoria to help the body battle fear, but the same feeling flushed over him as on his ride to the castle, of a new thing about to be born.

  “We’re sharing it now, aren’t we?” he said. Brielle shot a glance at him, and he added, “Don’t worry, it’s still your baby.”

  “It’s not like that for me.” She shook her head. “I’m not as naïve as you might think. I know someone—you, maybe—will eventually take the place away from me. This is simply—my chance in life, to show what I’m capable of.” The smile was an abbreviation this time.

  At this height, temperature dropped, and the tower started to breathe fresh moss.

  “Honesty for honesty, Shea. Why are you here? Normally people want to go to the Red Hill and not vice versa. Was it by choice?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I was shown the door.”

  The lift squeezed through a rectangular hole, rising to the platform where three men stood waiting for them. Two panted next to a wheel hooked to the pulley, and the third one, in an apron, probably a foreman, stepped toward Brielle.

  “Chief Engineer.”

  She leaped onto the platform, and vertigo gripped Shea’s chest again: the lift rocked, and there was a band of nothing beyond its edge. He craned his neck and glanced down, into the spiral world.

  Then he took a step forward.

  Instead of another portal, the tower’s wall opposite resembled a huge toothless mouth into which scaffolds and step ladders poked like dental devices.

  “The site of the latest sabotage attempt, as requested,” Brielle said. “Whoever they were, I have no idea how they smuggled in that much explosive.”

  Shea raised his palm, blocking the light coming through the hole—and in his mind, he stumbled into a soot-stained room, coughing, yelling something, knees trembling. Lena, Lena, sister. What had he yelled back then? Every word was a reconstruction, a logical approximation.

  He turned to Brielle. “Truth isn’t fully explosive, but it’s always flammable. You know who said that?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Who’s examined this place?”

  “Patrick’s men.”

  “And they told you it was an explosion?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Because it wasn’t.”

  “It wasn’t an—explosion?”

  “Look closely.”

  She said, “I’ve seen it quite a few times already.”

  “Look at the edges.”

  “What about them?”

  “See how they’re curved inward a bit?”

  “I admit it does seem strange, but—”

  “Almost as if something has sucked them in.”

  Traces of happiness gone from her face, she studied—not the hole, Shea. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what I said—it wasn’t an explosion. It was an implosion.”

  “How do you even create one?”

  “Show me your Drakiri devices.”

  “We’ll have to backtrack to the nearest portal.”

  “Lead the way.”

  She shrugged.

  Two circles down the staircase, the purple haze of a swamp spilled out in front of the next ‘town’; knee-deep, a group of workers circled an egg-shaped thing rising to their waists, forty to fifty inches along the longer side. The Drakiri device shimmered as though dipped in some strange, otherworldly phosphorus.

  “Here it is,” Brielle said curtly.

  Is she nervous—or irritated at me? He cleared his throat. “So you gentlemen are using the stone tulips.”

  The worker closest to him, a balding man with the eyes of a sad labrador, raised his gaze. “The tulips?”

  Shea nodded toward the purple glow.

  “It looks nothing like a tulip,” Brielle said.

  “It does to me.”

  “We’re using the anti-gravity properties to relieve stress in the parts of the structure,” Brielle said. “Allows us to build faster.”

  “Show me how you handle it.”

  The labrador guy cocked his head. “Well, one rotates the valve to make it hover and pulls the lever to stabilize it if—”

  “One? One who?”

  “In our crew, it’s Michael who normally works with the thing. He’s currently two levels below, I can—”

  “I want to see you do it.”

  “I—”

  “You have been trained on how to operate the devices, haven’t you?”

  Brielle said, “All our crews have received proper instruction.”

  “It’s simply that Michael has a bit more experience,” the labrador guy said.

  “And what if he’s sick? And you can’t wait for him, you’re on a deadline? I want to see you do it.”

  The man threw a glance at Brielle, and she nodded, slowly, as though underwater. On the defensive, Shea thought, am I threading too close to her turf?

  “That is, if you don’t have any objections, my lady,” he said.

  She simply nodded again.

  Fists clenched, muscles arched under the linen shirt, the labrador guy approached Shea as though walking toward an executioner’s stump.

  He remembered the girl from the crowd, the pink dress, and his heart squeezed—but it had to be done. He needed a test subject.

  “Activate it, please.”

  The other stared at the lever and the valve, visibly unsure.

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “You need to—” Brielle began.

  “Let him work.”

  The man wiped his palms on his trousers, gripped the valve with both hands, flexed his fingers.

  Metal creaked, and the tulip sang—a whistle at first, the voice gained force and deeper overtones. Shea frowned, trying to bury the memory of the gray walls, the soot stains, chairs with twisted legs. Not now, not now, damn it. The left end of the device lifted off the floor, and out of the corner of his eye he saw people taking a step back.

  “Everything’s fine, continue.”

  The worker stopped the rotation and grabbed the lever with one hand, the other still locked on the valve, knuckles white with tension.

  Drops fell into the purple glow: sweat, but Shea wasn’t sure whose.

  “I think I’ve stabilized it,” the trembling voice said.

  The song evened out, became dull, turned into a hum.

  “Isn’t it—” Brielle said from somewhere far away.

  The device kept touching the floor on one end, a huge pen in an invisible hand.

  “Continue.”

  Thin fingers lay on the valve again: ten degrees, twenty, forty-five.

  Full stop. The tulip started shaking.

  “What do you do next?” Shea
said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s still on the ground.”

  “I stabilize it.”

  “You already did.”

  “I turn the valve, then.” The eyes glanced at him, begging him: let me go.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  The worker flexed his fingers again and spread his feet apart as though trying to balance himself. This time, he went slower: three degrees, two, one.

  Metal moaned, and Shea said, “That’s enough.”

  The man dropped his arms, panting like a runner who’d crossed the finishing line. Shea untwisted the valve until it clicked, and the humming died. The tulip relaxed, the hanging end softly hitting the floor.

  Trying to hide his own breathing, he turned to the others.

  “Ten more degrees, and this thing would’ve imploded. I guess you’ve never seen it, which is good—but I can describe it to you. It sucks in everything in a fifty-foot radius. Everything. Wood, metal. Stone walls. People. Itself. Chews things up, leaves behind twisted remains.”

  He glanced at the labrador guy and saw him, fully saw him this time, the trousers, baggy at the knees, naive eyes, a stubble of red hair. Sweat stains under the armpits, the evidence of the torture Shea had inflicted. I’m sorry, he wanted to say, but then thought, I can say sorry by making it right. Same as he’d done for the girl in the pink dress.

  He turned to Brielle. “You and I need to talk to the duke.”

  Your voice comes to me more often than your face does—and I’ve always thought I was a visual type. Sometimes I’m writing a letter and I hear a certain word or a phrase as you would’ve said it. Sometimes I say them that way myself.

  6

  He saw Lena again the next morning.

  After a stroll through the village, it was like catching a glimpse of a different world: she stood in front of the castle’s gates, a sculpture caught in time, gaze somewhere in the distance, hands hidden in a muff.

  “My lady,” he said, taking the last steps up the hill.

  “Mr. Ashcroft.” She smiled—not particularly wide, but still a real smile.

  “How are you enjoying the cold today?”

  “It’ll get warmer.”