The Alchemy Press Book of Ancient Wonders

by Peter

  Kayler invents the names. Every street and building in the City that a name has been bestowed on is given it because it seemed right, because it seemed to fit. “Those names choose themselves,” he says. “The map is filling itself in, isn’t it? It wouldn’t if the names weren’t accurate.”

  “I expect you’re right. Let me know when you want to look at the map again,” she says softly. “If you think you really need to.”

  “Soon,” Kayler says. He remains seated and closes his eyes. The City is there in the nebulous distances within.

  HE CROSSES THE expanse of the Central Forum and stands in front of the Arch of the Dawn. The Forum’s paving pushes up against the soles of his feet. Kayler feels the distance walked, and the slight ache increases as he contemplates the switch-backing steps rising from beyond the Arch as they climb the heights towards the Verdigris Dome.

  If the orientation of the City is what it seems, the rising sun will shine directly through the Arch of the Dawn on the spring and autumn equinoxes. Shadows, miles in length, would be cast along the white marble slabs of the Avenue of the East, which is aligned precisely with a notch in distant mountains now becoming visible to Kayler for the first time. He breathes in deeply. The morning air of the City is becoming richer: now he smells smoke and the occasional tang of salt from the sea he knows is there. Under them there are traces of animal smells and a multitude of odours that can only come from cooking. They become stronger even as Kayler stands in front of the tremendous Arch breathing them in. He is alert for sounds, too. Surely they will soon intrude – or, rather, claim his attention as is their right. He imagines parades and processions converging on the Arch from the three broad ways leading into the Central Forum. He sees the glitter of gold and silver and the multi-coloured twinkling of gems, flashing armour and swishing robes and cloaks. He sees chariots and carts; elephants, oxen, and horses. In the silent morning Kayler hears trumpets and the steady beat of drums, matching the marching soldiers and the creaking wheels. There are shouts and cheers as the head of the procession passes under the Arch of the Dawn and comes to a halt. The very stones would be calling out acclamations in exultation.

  Kayler walks into the shadow of the Arch and through the main portal. He takes another look around: still no sign of anyone, anything. Nothing moves. Then he spreads himself against the warm marble, its veins and flecks little further away than the ends of his eyelashes. He grasps and smells the building blocks of the City. His tongue flickers out and for a moment touches his condensing dream.

  MELAS ASKS HIM about the people.

  “If I’d seen any I’d have told you,” Kayler says. “But I can feel them more and more each time. The sheer depth of the past – our past, not theirs, of course – terrifies me and yet makes me glad. Can you imagine it, Melas? How much I’ve travelled in the City, how far I’ve penetrated into its secrets, yet still knowing so very little! I will hurt myself if I were to stumble and fall, now. There is the white and grey stone, the marble, the terracotta and polished wood, the cloudy glass and green bronze. And, yes, its people. The City, Melas, the City!” Kayler shivers. “And aeon after aeon! Now put me under.”

  KAYLER SLOWLY TOILS up the first set of the great ranks of steps. The Arch of the Dawn is behind and below him. He remembers the golden coffered vaulting of the main portal, and the narrow staircases channelled into the thickness of its piers, tempting him to climb. But he ignored the small staircases.

  Reaching the first terrace Kayler sits on a wide stone bench that follows its course around the side of the hill. The hill now seems entirely encased in stone and covered with marble buildings. The colossal mass gleams in the sun and hurts his eyes. In front of him the City unrolls itself, a stone carpet flung out to the low ramparts of its surrounding hills. Kayler can easily see the Central Forum and Triumphal Way; the expected – or intended – statues are beginning to grow on top of the rows of columns. He sees the City stretching out over gently undulating land, covering its smooth rising and falling in a succession of frozen waves of architecture. Domes bubble and towers leap up from the dusty colours of the packed buildings below him. Kayler sees the glint of the river, its bridges holding the City together like stitches knitting a deep cut. The sun is a circular smear in a white sky, too bright to look at but impossible to ignore. Kayler absorbs its heat just as the City does. He turns away and looks towards the next section of the steps. From where he is standing the Verdigris Dome is hidden by the blinding ranks of pillars and porticos, pediments, towers, terraces, and row upon row of arches sweeping up before him. He starts climbing again.

  KAYLER RUSHES TOWARDS Melas’ office. The pavement is crowded – the complete opposite to the streets and boulevards of the City, which remain deserted. The people around him, moving with the same tide as him, or weaving against it, are reassuringly solid. They cast shadows. They make noises. They touch each other and brush against him. Kayler thrusts his hands deeper into his pockets. Suddenly someone steps in front of him and asks a question. Kayler blunders on, straight into the man and past, out the other side. He still feels the contact, but it’s like emerging from a stiff revolving door. The voice trails away in anger behind him. The crowd looks less substantial now. Kayler reaches Melas’ building and bounds up the steps.

  She tells him that the map now shows a definite wall girdling the City. “The City is almost circular, as if it was built at the centre of a shallow saucer hundreds of miles across. Is that how it really seems?”

  “Yes,” Kayler says. He prepares himself to return.

  AT THE NEXT terrace Kayler turns and surveys the City again. He gasps at what he sees. In the Central Forum and boulevards feeding into it there are now hundreds – thousands – of minute specks. Some are moving, milling around each other; some are still. Kayler blinks several times, in case the spots are inside his eyes. He shakes his head in wonder. There are boats on the River Mercuriel – small craft showing tiny squares of sail. The City’s people are returning.

  For a moment Kayler considers descending again, but in his experience so far when something has resolved itself into life, it remains. The people will still be there when he comes down from the Verdigris Dome. Kayler lets his gaze linger on a grid of streets and open spaces nestling close to the wall, and distorted due to his angle of sight and the distance. The area is bisected by a canal, which leads straight towards an enormous arena or open theatre in the centre of – he names the district Sunline. Even as he does so its resolution sharpens and he sees its inhabitants strolling along the wide pavements or sitting on stone benches built into the embankments of the blue canal. He hears the thin buzz and flutter of conversation and laughter. Wheels rattle. Children run across an open space emerald with grass and trees. Flowers blaze out in their beds next to the yellow and white marble pathways. Melas will be pleased. He smiles and turns away, back to the waiting heights.

  Kayler ascends stairway upon stairway, crosses terrace after terrace. As he gets higher the air grows thicker; he tastes it with every intake of breath. Columns of smoke rise from innumerable chimneys, and he smells the bluntness of stone warmed by the sun. Some of the buildings soaring above him now have windows instead of porticos. The crystal glass flashes in the sun and reflects the tall cloudless sky. Kayler imagines jumping up into one of the half acre windows and feeling it sucking him in, drowning him on the other side. When he tilts his head back the cupola crowning the Verdigris Dome is just visible above the terraces and pediments mounting up in front of him.

  Two great stairways carved from what looks like a single piece of pale pink onyx curve away from either side of a pillared archway. Kayler walks towards the shadowed entrance and stands in front of a vast pair of doors sheathed in copper and worked with an intricate design of curving incised lines picked out in brass and silver. He reaches out and touches, only lightly, one of the large circular bosses or studs raised at head height on the inner edge of each door. Without any sound the doors swing open smoothly, blossoming open in front
of him and drawing him onwards.

  MELAS FROWNS AT him. “I heard them shouting at you in the corridor,” she says. “What were you thinking of, Kayler? Why were you so rude and thoughtless? This isn’t like you.” She looks at him closely. “And you almost walked into me just now. Don’t you see us?”

  “I rise up through the millennia each time you bring me back,” Kayler says. “This city and all of you … all of you … are like so many misty figures. Soon I will sink down into the pavement and be able to put my hand through any wall I choose. I pull the years into myself every time you put me under to go back to the City. I am years, decades, centuries – whole epochs – they stack up like the palaces and obelisks ranged around Gold Glory Hill. The magnificence of the City, the magnitude and power of its achievements! And that’s not all, Melas. For the first time I glimpsed the machines.

  “There were immense mechanisms, or maybe they were all one great sublime machine. It was all acres of glittering steel and shiny brass, with its own sets of staircases and balconies where there were switches and levers made from crystal and ivory and ebony. There were rows and rows of light twinkling and sparking inside jewels of a million colours. There were mirrors and lenses. And it rose up from the floor of the hall as far as it could go. You should’ve seen the size of the base supports and the flying buttresses of dull iron that held it all together. They were massive from where I stood and yet I think they were the best part of a mile below. And the sunlight poured in through the windows, and everything was warm and solid, with a heft and a – a purpose that made me shudder.”

  “Surely you couldn’t know what that thing was for? What it was doing there.”

  “Oh, that’s just it,” Kayler says. “Yes, it endures. There was a raw purpose and power locked in those shining tubes. But I didn’t – I don’t – know what it is, what it’s capable of. But it’s stupendous – and so very old. I felt the air vibrate with something like the deepest note of an organ, almost too deep to hear, but not to feel, trembling at the border of my senses. Even the City itself is a modern suburb of boxy houses when compared to that machinery in that hall. Something, some power, is chained, kept in check. And I don’t know whether that’s by the machine, or for it – something hoarded for release through the machine. Oh, Melas, I’m sure those forces could tear through the ages, rip the world apart from then to eternity as surely as I could pull that new paper map off the wall and shred it into a thousand pieces.”

  Melas gets up from her chair and starts to play with the single plain gold ring she wears. She paces up and down in front of the wide window. “That must be the reason for the symbol that’s appeared in the middle of the map of the City,” she says quietly.

  SPACE, ENORMOUS EMPTY volume, explodes around Kayler as the copper doors open and he walks forward. A marble balustrade appears in front of him, forming a low barrier around the intricate glittering structure thrusting up from the centre of what he has always imagined to be a domed hall. Kayler thinks the object is a sculpture. Then he realises he is standing on a gallery, halfway up the inner surface of a perfect sphere like the inside of a small planet. Although it must be hundreds of feet away, at least, he sees the sculpture is clearly a mechanism. It thrusts on up past him towards the distant curve of the hemisphere suspended above. Something catches his eye: a ring of jewel-like lights is now flashing, with no apparent set sequence and at an increasing speed. The lights encircle a burnished metal depression, at the centre of which is a sphere of delicate silver, woven in a web. His eye moves to set itself on something that seems to be revolving or oscillating inside the silver sphere. With a shock Kayler realises that it must be a minimum of a hundred feet across. But he cannot quite follow whatever it is that moves; the motion of each full cycle is always interrupted, fading out and reappearing again in its orbit. He cannot tear his eyes away either. They follow the motion: a flickering like a bird imprisoned in a cage and fluttering in vain against the wire.

  A shaft of sunlight lances down from the heights, channelled by mirrors into a waterfall of light. Kayler gasps as the radiant beam flows around the silvery sphere before being swallowed up inside it. The oscillations within continue, but his eyes ache violently from still trying to keep track of them. He feels his mind being pulled away, out into the void and towards the glittering web; at last he succeeds in wrenching his attention away and staggers backwards.

  Eventually he is able to look up again, and notices what look like several narrow bands wrapped around the surface of the hemisphere, each progressively smaller in diameter the further away – up – they are. Kayler sits on the lowest step of a spiral staircase made of stone so smooth and seamless that it looks as if it were moulded in one piece with the colossal sphere. He gets up and continues his ascent, following the twisting way bored into the thickness of the dome.

  The thin wind whips at his hair, which he pushes back from his forehead. The pale green of the Verdigris Dome drops away from where he stands, arcing down towards the City and its pattern of buildings and streets sprawling out so far below. The air is thinner and cooler; the sun seems warmer than he remembers from when he last stood on solid ground. The Central Forum is black with the mass of people crowding into the gigantic space. The streets leading to it are seething. Kayler knows that the inhabitants of the City are moving towards him in endless columns pouring like rivers of ink out of their streets, climbing towards him, following in his footsteps to where he stands. Now that he has reached the top of the Verdigris Dome, Kayler examines the white marble globe. The carved outlines seem familiar, but are certainly not the ones he knows, or thinks he knows. There is a globe on a stand in Melas’ room; Kayler tries to visualise it clearly, but it wavers. The base of the marble globe is green metal, a baroque growth embossed with the symbol Melas had attempted to describe. He grips the metal railing. The faraway City draws itself into sharper resolution, names filtering out of newly-minted time. The City fits the map Kayler remembers. He dreads the memories of the awful gulfs separating him from the map – from all he knows. There! He is done.

  KAYLER RECLINES IN a deep armchair in Melas’ office, occasionally reaching out for the cups of hot sweet tea she has her staff making for him.

  “Are you feeling better now?” she asks.

  He shakes his head. “I will never feel better.” Kayler looks around the bland and pale office with its window overlooking the busy street. Yet again he sees the rendered walls and wooden shelves, framed photographs and glowing computer screens. “Which end of the vortex have I arrived in?” he says. Melas leans in to hear.

  “I knew I’d be lost if I let myself be taken by that –whatever it is – in the machinery, that movement in the silver sphere. Wherever or whenever it endlessly loops to,” Kayler says. “It and the City are lost in the deep past, so far back that there’s no physical trace left or even a hint in human memory now. But are they also lost in futurity, so far ahead that time itself is wearing out and allowing shifts we cannot imagine? Back then I raised my arms to the sun and the sleeves of an embroidered robe slipped back, exposing my arms to the light. I wore bands of silver and amber. The last things I saw were the map and the City as one, the muffled commotion, the first people reaching the place where I stood, when everything decayed like a film running backwards and the City toppled and shrank in on itself, the hills wore away, the river overflowed and spread out over the land until even that dried up and all became a flat plain. Somehow I saw all that. And maybe I will see it again. I do know one thing, though. Now we’ve found the City, it’s always with us.”

  The Great and Powerful… by Selina Lock

  THE CARVED DOOR stands open, the key still in the lock. Brass inlays glint in the weak sunlight emanating from inside the room. The varnish on the rose petal bas reliefs is cracked and flaking away. Dust motes float in the air, disturbed by the first human visitor in a long time. The interior of the room is even more fantastic than the entranceway. Two rows of pedestals line a central walkway. Perched o
n each are stone objects: here, the remains of a sculptured hand; there, what might have been a torso.

  At the far end, the room is watched over by a massive stone head, easily three metres tall. A heavy set brow above its unseeing eyes. A wide nose with one side missing, and a full-lipped mouth curved upwards in a benign smile. Despite its size, the face is welcoming, with its podgy, dimpled cheeks and quizzical eyebrows. The outer ears are worn down, possibly by the weather of its native land, but the raised semi-circles show where the head once listened to distant winds.

  What did it hear then? What does it hear now?

  A woman stands a metre away from the gigantic head, just to the right of its nose. Her head is cricked to one side, gazing into its wide eyes. She shifts her weight to her right hip. Scuffed red Doc Martens on her feet. Creased black jeans and a plain black t-shirt which bulges slightly over her stomach. Silver and black earrings dangle below her short, floppy hair. She clutches a small camera in one hand; a tatty green rucksack is slung over the opposite shoulder.

  “You are magnificent. Where did you come from?” she whispers. “Who made you? Were you their god? Their protector? A symbol of love?”

  The woman happily keeps up a running commentary to the inanimate object; she is used to talking to herself, to having no-one around. She reaches out with her left hand, hesitates and glances around the room. Satisfied it’s deserted, she steps forward and reverentially places her palm on the left cheek of the stone head.

  The serenity of the room is split by a clanging from the floor below. She starts, her hand falling from the statue.

  “They’ve found me.”

  Fear flashes across her face, followed by dismay.

  “I thought I’d have more time. I wish I could stay here with you – it’s so peaceful and beautiful. There’s so little beauty and love left in the world now. No time to marvel at wonders – or create them.”