Kite stumbled to a halt. A dozen white-robed officials, each with sagging skin and crooked backs, stared at him aghast. One even shunted himself along in an ridiculous gold and ivory wheelchair. Were these the men Shelvocke told him about? The Corona Council, the men who ran Fairweather?
One of the officials bravely stepped forward. He was desperately old, with a surprisingly kind, timid face. And like the others he was quaking with fear.
“Have you brought it?” the official said.
Kite frowned. “Brought what?” he said.
“The weapon. She said it existed,” the official stammered, glancing over his shoulder. “The Askian weapon. Did you bring it? Is that why you have come? Is that was this is about?”
The Umbrella Man stumbled wildly into the corridor, smashing into the wall. The elders shrank in horror at the sight of him. They scurried into their rooms and locked themselves inside and soon the corridor had been deserted.
Kite was still digesting the official's words when he spotted a golden glint in the distance. At the very end stood a colossal door, nearly high at a stack of containers and just as wide. The Umbrella Man pointed furiously.
The Cloud Room.
Kite could almost hear Ember’s eagerness, but he didn't follow. Where were the soldiers? Where were the Correctors? If this was the Cloud Room, the First Light Foundation’s most secret of places, then why had it been left unguarded?
The Umbrella Man had only taken a few, lurching steps before he juddered to a halt. Kite waited for a moment, wondering why Ember had chosen to stop.
“Ember?” he whispered.
A soft clicking noise came from inside the Umbrella Man’s silent, breathless shell. Just like in Dusthaven he’d been halted by some invisible force.
A blue light flickered in his peripheral vision. Down the corridor Ember’s ghost had appeared, floating freely beneath the Cloud Room entrance. Kite edged passed the sleeping automechanical. “Ember, what’s happening?” he called.
Ember was silent.
Kite edged closer, glancing behind him, anticipating a sudden rush of violence. The Cloud Room’s door was a towering wall of impenetrable gold. The surface shimmered with clouds and sunrays and in the centre was a great golden eye. Watchful, accusing, daring Kite to approach.
Whatever this door protected, whatever secrets the Foundation kept in there, Kite wasn’t entirely sure he was ready for it. But this was the end of the journey. There was no turning back.
“Can you open it?” Kite whispered.
But this was a door that Ember could not open. So Kite stepped a little closer and pressed his hand against the smooth, ice-cold metal. He pushed. He may well have been pushing a cliff. Scavenging what little strength he could find in his bruised, aching muscles and pushed again. It was hopeless. Nothing could shift those doors except the one who had locked them.
Suddenly Ember moved away, twitching her head this way and that. Something had spooked her, made her suddenly afraid.
“Ember, what is it?” Kite asked.
Then Ember’s face warped into a twisted, voiceless scream. She began to blister and dissolve, bleeding into tiny particles.
“Ember!” Kite said.
In an instant she vanished, leaving a ghostly after-image on the air. Kite called again, scanning the now empty corridor but there was no sign of her anywhere.
A boom.
The Cloud Room doors rippled like liquid gold. The sound of complex, hidden mechanisms shifted and unlocked, pulling the eye apart. At first Kite could only see a wire-thin slither of black, but that soon widened to a column of darkness. A cold, terrible breathe licked at Kite's skin, forcing out an involuntary shudder. Or maybe it was fear creeping into his bones. Whoever was inside, the one Ember had been sent to find, had just invited him in. Against his better judgement, Kite stepped into darkness...
61
The Cloud Room
The Cloud Room doors closed softly behind him, sealing Kite in a tomb of darkness. The only sound in his ears was his own rapid breath.
“E-Ember?” Kite said. He was shocked how different his voice sounded; hollow and thick in his ears as if he was smothered in a blanket.
Slowly, a metallic light began to lift away the darkness. He found himself in a vast chamber of burnished skymetal. Two hundred feet wide and twice as high the cold space could have swallowed the Phosphene whole. The walls shimmered like soft mirrors and a blueish light came from somewhere yet, puzzlingly, the Cloud Room had no windows.
Then, slowly at first, Ember began to reappear. A motionless ghost caught in the air, face set in a that terrible cry. Her arm was extended, pointing at Kite’s heart.
Kite frowned. No, not at him. Through him. Kite nervously followed her finger.
A man stood a short distance away. Kite was certain he hadn't been there before. The man was a little younger than the Corona Council elders. Bald with a single dot, and a neat beard and tiny wire-thin spectacles. His robe was a solid black. So black the fabric had no shape, no folds. No shadow.
Kite began to doubt his own eyes. Somehow he knew this man. He'd seen his face on Shelvocke's screens. Heard Clinker curse the name a thousand times. Heard of his crimes from the lips of the Genetrix herself.
Mercurius Lux.
“You recognise me don’t you?” Lux's voice was a soft, careful voice full of tempered power, piped from the walls in a directionless monotone. “After all this time I am humbled that I am not forgotten amongst your people.”
Lux walked a little closer. And as he walked Kite watched his feet fall silently on the bare metal floor. It had to be an illusion. Lux's couldn't have lasted all these years. Yet he looked real. Just as Ember looked real…
“I recognised the Starmaker's work almost immediately of-course,” Lux said, gesturing to Ember's frozen form. “I have often wondered if my old friend achieved his goal of creating the perfect mind. Arcus really was a genius ahead of his time. Such a pity he was Askian.”
A barb of anger stuck in Kite's throat. He squeezed his fists tightly, but said nothing.
“I can only say I am disappointed,” Lux said. He circled Ember, smiling - an entirely human gesture - yet devoid of all warmth and compassion. “Sadly it appears the Starmaker's great work has been corrupted by those most worthless of human emotions - hatred and vengeance.”
Finally Kite dredged up the courage to speak. “E-Ember isn't corrupt,” he said, his voice sounding insignificant in the vastness of the Cloud Room. “She's more human than you'll ever be.”
Scan lines rippled down Ember's face.
“Human?” Lux said. “Why would anyone want to be human? The Askians always were such a foolish race. No vision of what their own technology could achieve.”
“You stole that technology from us,” Kite hissed back.
“Such technology was wasted,” Lux said, moving again in silent, dangerous steps. “The Patriarchs obsessed over the preservation of their foolish society but it was knowledge not worth preserving. Their society was dying. They lacked the foresight to see it.”
Hexagonal panels began to dissolve away beneath Kite's feet. White light flooded in, forcing him to cover his eyes.
“Shall I show you what real vision can achieve?” Lux said.
Kite looked down, detached from his own body. He was plunging through the clouds, his mind momentarily tricked into thinking he was falling. But it was just a vast lens. An eye zooming in on the world beneath the clouds, to the spires of a magnificent city light by an unseen, powerful light. Kite couldn't see the sun but its rays set Fairweather's golden towers aglow like fingers of fire. Temples and domes and great columns of silver and glass reached into the shimmering sky. Emerald trains sailed along suspended rails through sprawling districts and over bridges, over a lake with ships and a harbour and a promenade by the shore...
“It’s…Skyzarke!” Kite said, appalled by what he was witnessing.
“That city does not exist,” Lux replied. “Only Fairweat
her exists.”
The view zoomed again, pulling Kite down to the streets where colourful cityfolk walked and polished automechanicals serviced their every whim. Kite watched their smiles and their finery. Heard the laughter of their children. He pitied them all. Did they know what Lux had done? Did they even care?
Then Fairweather was shrinking, reduced to the size of a pocket watch as the view began to widen. Kite was numb and unsteady, his legs near to buckling. Somehow he forced himself to stand and watch, taking it all in with a sickening fascination.
The stolen clockwork city was surrounded on all sides by a wealth of verdant greens and ripe yellows, bejewelled with the glittering veins of waterways and reservoirs, boxed in by the pale fortifications of the mighty Dreadwall. And beyond that seethed the Undercloud, held back by the rings of the sky-wide Ether Shield.
Kite couldn't look at Lux's vision anymore. He turned away, feeling hollowed out like a gutted wreck. Lux wasn't just a thief. He'd taken everything from the Askians, even the plans of their great city. But he still didn't understand why.
Lux was talking again. “...and even then I knew my great vision would take more than a single lifetime to orchestrate. And in Frore I discovered a way to have as many lifetimes as I wanted without the threat of forgetting a single moment of each.”
Kite's fists shook. Anger bubbled through his veins and burst from his mouth. “Skyzarke!” he cried. “It’s called Skyzarke!”
The words boomed, echoing back and forth.
“Emotions,” Lux said, entirely unmoved. “Such a crippling symptom of humanity.”
And then, in Kite's spinning mind, the puzzle pieces fell into place. The reasons for all of this became clear. And it sickened him.
“That’s what all this was about. You stole the Starmaker's technology you wanted to live forever,” Kite said. “The real Lux created a copy of himself so he could live up here in the clouds. ”
Lux smiled thoughtfully. “There never was really an end to one and the beginning of the other,” he said. “Lux Aeterna.”
“But the Starmaker learned of your plans,” Kite went on, glancing at Ember. “That's why he created Ember to come here and destroy you.”
“The Starmaker is dead,” Lux said, simply.
Kite stared at him. “But you feared the Askians would remember too,” he said, recalling what the Genetrix had revealed to him in the High Hollows. “That's why you tried to kill us, because it's not in the Askian blood to forget.”
“The human memory is remarkable persistent,” Lux said, waving his hand dismissively and chuckling a little to himself. “Even if it is easily corrupted by sentiment.”
Kite turned from Lux's cold gaze. The frozen ruins of Skyzarke flashed in his mind. A thousand faces. A thousand screams. All those souls sacrificed for Lux's squalid vision. And those precious few Askians remaining, hiding in the hollows. He thought of his own family, somewhere east of the Ashlands, afraid of their own shadows. More than ever Kite wished Ember had destroyed this monster. If only he had the power to do it himself.
One by one the hexagonal panels opaqued, turning the Cloud Room once more into a metal shell.
“Ah, Corrector,” Lux said. “So good of you to join us.”
Kite spun around. The Corrector limped through the Cloud Room doors, her face sheened with sweat. She had come alone.
“My Lord,” the Corrector said, dipping awkwardly to one knee. “Forgive me, I did not believe the intruders would get this far.”
Lux raised a calming hand. “Everything, as usual, is quite under my control,” he said, and gestured at Ember's twisted form. “The rogue program has been quarantined and will be shortly deleted. The Starmaker's work, as you correctly suspected from the evidence you found in Frore.”
The Corrector swallowed, glancing at Kite from under her sweat-straggled fringe. “That is...a relief,” she said.
Kite picked up on something in the Corrector’s voice that Lux had failed to detect. The woman sounded disappointed.
Lux's face changed, offering up an wan attempt at a sympathetic smile. “I regret to say but I was forced to deactivate Beaufort,” he said. “Unfortunate but necessary. His core processor had become corrupted by this abomination. I will have Wolfram Rhymer rebuild him for you. I know the automechanical has served your family since the days of the great war. It is the least I can do to repay you for your years of loyalty.”
“You have always been too kind,” said the Corrector, her words etched with false sincerity. She glanced at Kite. “What of the Askians, my Lord?”
Lux gave Kite an empty, unsympathetic look of someone who had long-forgotten the value of life.
“I believe you know what must be done, Corrector,” Lux said. “Not here though, I will not have Askian blood tainting my Ether Shield. Take them to the Daylight Arbiter. I'm sure they will have secrets to reveal. Ensure that they do.”
“Yes, my Lord,” the Corrector said.
Cold, cutting reality sank deep into Kite's bones. There would be no escape now. No way back to Fleer. Ember, the Cloud Room, Skyzarke. All of it had been for nothing...
Then Kite detected subtle movement on the edge of his vision.
Ember had blinked.
62
The Eternal Light
Ember came back to life. Her face was no longer twisted but pretty and sad and her lovely hair flew out behind her like tentacles. She pulsed with light in the Cloud Room's dim metal shell. Kite could only watch and wonder if she'd been listening all along, secretly at work inside Lux's systems.
“This is indeed fascinating,” said Lux, floating at a distance. “Well now, Starmaker, let us see what your intentions really are.”
Ember pointed her finger at Lux. Kite watched her lips move silently, trying to read her words. Was she recounting the Forecaster's Fable?
Lux's form shimmered, cascading with lines of meaningless code. Then he began dim like a candle starved of oxygen.
“What’s happening?” the Corrector said.
“I do believe the Starmaker is trying to delete me,” Lux said, looking at his flickering arm without a hint of alarm. “It seems he has found a way into my core systems. Even after all these years.”
The Corrector slowly rose to her feet. “That is a surprise, my Lord,” she said. She sounded hopeful.
Lux was smiling. “Did you think I might underestimate you, Starmaker?” he said, and his image began to settle and glow, stronger and brighter than before. “You think I did not expect this?”
Again Ember pointed. This time Lux began to shrink. Soon he became tiny, small enough to stamp on. Kite wanted to rush forward and crush him from existence even though he knew it wouldn't make any difference.
Lux merely laughed. “No, you cannot delete me, Starmaker,” he said, fighting back again. He grew, restoring himself to his full height. “In the years since your end, Starmaker, I have rewritten every line of your ancient, obsolete code. I have evolved.”
Suddenly Lux doubled in size, again and again, growing into a monstrous roaring head. “The time of the Askians has long since passed, Starmaker!” Lux bellowed, his words slamming into Kite's ribs. “I have erased your people and all memory of your kind. Any now I shall erase you and your worthless child!”
Ember's spine snapped in two. The effect was so real that Kite's stomach lurched violently. He called her name, but his words were drowned by the deafening echo of Lux's words.
“Delete,” roared Lux, slicing at Ember with his hand. “DELETE!”
Ember flew apart. Hundreds of tiny flickering fragments. The killing blow struck Kite too, deep in his chest, as if Lux had split him open with a cold blade. The pixilated shards began to settle around him like melting snow.
Lux effortlessly returned to his usual size. “You and your kind are merely a fragment of memory, Starmaker,” he said. “And I have already forgotten you.”
For a long moment Kite stared at the empty space where Ember had been only seconds before. Th
en he remembered the mempod, nestled in his pocket. Lux might have only deleted Ember from his system. Kite dug out the warm little orb and held it up in his shaking fist.
“I know you can hear me, Ember,” Kite said. “You going to let this Weatheren bastard delete you? He destroyed Skyzarke! Our Skyzarke! You going to let him get away with that?”
Lux frowned at him. “What are you doing?” he said.
“You promised me, Ember,” Kite called out, searching for a sign of life. “You remember what broken promises mean?”
Then the tiniest bud of light formed in front of him. A bud of light that began to grow and expand, taking shape before Kite’s eyes.
“Broken bones!” her voice boomed from all sides.
In a heartbeat the pieces flew together and Ember was whole, but than that she was radiant and real. Kite had never seen Ember more solid than this. She was alive and full of wrath.
“No,” Lux said, and his light dimming like a spent valve. “No, you cannot erase me. The Ether Shield, my city. You cannot...stop!”
Dissolving at the edges into numbers and symbols and bits of scrambling code Lux thrashed and clawed, trying to fend of Ember's attack.
“The... the... mempod...” Lux stuttered, desperately reaching out to the Corrector for help. “Destroy it!”
The Corrector didn’t move. “No,” she said, with a desperate hope in her eyes.
Lux faded further. “Treachery! You cannot... disloyal... erase... betrayal... can... cannot...” he spluttered, the words writing themselves on the air. “Please...help...me...”
The Corrector straightened her back. She didn't fear Lux now that he was decaying before her eyes. “No,” she said again.
“I... worthless... ungrateful... humans... filthy skyless... scum...” Lux babbled, spilling broken letters from his mouth. He clutched at his chest, vomiting whole sentences of threats and vitriol. “I... will kill you... all...”
Ember pointed at Lux’s heart. “DELETE!”
The air crackled against Kite's ears. Lux became a shadow, eyes and mouth hollow and empty as a skull. Then he was eaten away, dissolving into a foul mist. Particles that slowly vanished like sand through a pan.
The Immortal Storm (Sky Chaser Book 1) Page 25