Ninth City Burning

by J. Patrick Black

  I don’t see how only telling Mersh about this Myria Engine thing accomplished very much, either, aside from making Mersh real pleased with himself. Spams and Hexi look annoyed, too, and I wonder if they’re thinking what I am, about not trusting the Prips and so forth. Anyway, Mersh doesn’t notice because right then, something starts to happen.

  All of a sudden, I get this weird, topsy-turvy feeling. It isn’t quite like walking into an umbris, where you can’t tell if you’re happy or mad, and everything smells like rotten eggs and so forth. It’s more like the air starts to tighten, like the whole world is a rag someone’s wringing out. It’s over almost immediately, but you couldn’t miss it.

  “Nobody laugh if I puke,” Hexi says.

  Spammers sits on the ground. “I think I’ll be too busy puking.”

  Even Mersh forgets how important he is for a second or two, just drops his beer and kind of ducks like he’s expecting something to fall on him. I guess no one thought he needed to know what launching the IMEC would be like. I don’t really pay too much attention to Mersh or his foaming can, though. I’m too busy watching the sky.

  Up until a minute ago, it was a normal sunny afternoon, but now, everything’s gone dark purple, like it’s already dusk, and if the sun’s out anywhere, I can’t see it. A little above the trees, though, there are a few glowing spots of light, like maybe it’s still sunny in other parts of the valley.

  Suddenly, Hexi grabs my arm. “Look!” she says, pointing ahead, toward the burned-down cottages. A kind of mist has rolled in over the ground, low and pretty wispy, the sort you see over the water sometimes on cold mornings. But Hexi isn’t pointing at the mist, not really. She’s pointing at things inside the mist. At first they look like trails of light, the way sunlight reflects off the edge of sharp metal, but the more you look, the more you can tell the lines and edges are shaped like people, walking all over the place and just going about their business. Most of them are moving around the burned-out cottages, and I realize they’re acting the way real people would in cottages that hadn’t burned down. A few are even floating in the air, where the upper floors would have been.

  “What are they?” Hexi says, not to anyone really, but we all look over at Mersh, since he’s the one with all the answers. Mersh doesn’t even seem to notice us. He’s just staring at all the glowing shapes bustling around the ruined houses.

  The next thing that happens is the ground starts to move. Not where we’re standing, fortunately, though it takes me a minute to figure that out. It looks like this huge wall of earth just comes rising up in front of us, with the burned cottages and the glowing people on top, and you can see the rocks and roots and like layers of dirt in the wall, but you can’t really tell if the people and cottages are going up or we’re going down because the wall is so long you can’t see the end of it. And then it lifts away, and there’s open air underneath, with a few little clods of dirt and whatnot dropping off into the huge pit the whole thing left behind. There has to be ten whole meters of empty space beneath that wall of dirt before it finally hits me that the thing is actually flying.

  For a while we all just stand there, staring up at the land lifting away, but then I notice something strange. I mean, something else strange, aside from the whole flying-island thing. Even though the ground is still moving, the burned-out cottages and the glowing people don’t seem to be going any higher. The reason is that the whole stretch of land around them is tilting, like turning into a pretty steep slope, actually. It all looks real precarious, once I realize what’s happening, like the ruins of the cottages should be sliding right off, but they just stay where they are, and soon it starts to feel like we’re looking down at them from above, even though they’re still pretty much in front of us.

  Nearby, I notice that a whole lot of Immunes have showed up, and they’ve got out those plans they’re always carrying around, the big sheets of drawings that tell you where to build your cottages and bury your pig statues and so forth. They’re crowded around, arguing over something, and every so often one points up at the tilting land and back at the plan.

  Mersh has seen them, too. “You all stay here,” he says. “I’ll see what’s going on.”

  It doesn’t work out so well for him, going over there. He’s only about halfway to where the Immunes are when one of them looks up and starts yelling at him, this very small, very intense girl with short black hair and sharp blue eyes. “You!” she says, pointing at Mersh. “You there. Were you in charge of the squad working this area?”

  Mersh stops in his tracks, but it’s too late to get away, and the girl makes him come over and show her which cottages his squad was building.

  “Shit, kiddos,” Spammers says, kind of dazed-sounding. “I think we’re in trouble.” He’s staring up at the IMEC like it’s about to come crashing right down on top of him. I look, too, but can’t think how I’d know if something was wrong, since pretty much everything looks wrong.

  Spammers points, jabbing his finger. “There, right there. See that kid? That little kid?”

  It takes me a while to find what he’s pointing at, but eventually I see him, a little glowing boy. He isn’t moving around the way all the other glowing people are. Instead, it looks like he’s pointing back at Spams.

  “Is he pointing at us?” Hexi says.

  That isn’t the only thing that’s a bit off, though. All around the little glowing boy, the ground looks sort of funny, like a wrinkled blanket, with the wrinkles getting bigger every second. And even though everything nearby looks completely fine, that patch and everything on it, the grass and weeds and whatnot, is waving around like it’s in the middle of a windstorm.

  Spammers says, “You remember yesterday, when I pretended to take that apple?”

  “Spammers!” Hexi shouts. “You didn’t!”

  “I wasn’t going to take it!” Spammers is already getting defensive. He tends to get pretty defensive when he knows he’s done something wrong. “If Mersh hadn’t been such a turd about it, I wouldn’t have done anything!”

  “Did we break it?” I ask. I’ve noticed a few other places where the ground seems not to be floating away quite as well as the rest of the IMEC. Some pieces have even started peeling off, spilling dirt and rocks and grass down the sloping edge, like the ground is starting to dissolve.

  “I don’t know.” Spammers looks about ready to drop dead. “And I ate the apple, too. What does that mean?”

  It must be why the Immunes are here, because we messed something up, and now the IMEC is falling apart. Mersh is still over with them and obviously wishing he wasn’t, and the intense-looking girl is like interrogating him and some of the other Decurios while another of the Immunes holds a little swinging thing on a chain over some of the plans. I’m trying to figure out what’s happening when the girl looks up and sees me. “Hey! You there!” she shouts. I try to pretend I didn’t hear her, but she’s already coming my way. “Yes, you, the one with the banana! I’m talking to you!”

  I’d forgotten all about the banana, but I’m still holding it, all peeled and ready to eat. I guess there’s no chance she means someone else. I’m the only one holding a banana. “Yes, ma’am,” I say.

  She holds out her hand. “Give me that. Your trencher, too.”

  I do what she says, and before I know what’s happening she’s used the trencher to hurl the banana right at the IMEC. It shoots straight for the burned cottages and glowing people all roaming around in the mist. About halfway there, the banana catches on fire, just lights right up. It pretty much disappears before it gets to the IMEC, but the little boy who’d been pointing at Spammers seems satisfied. He stops pointing, anyway, and as he walks away, the ground where he’d been standing stops moving.

  She hands me back my trencher. “Thanks, Miles,” she says, using my rank, miles, meaning just a normal, ordinary guy from the milites.

  I’m pretty impressed. I
knew you could use a trencher to launch things like that, but setting something on fire midair can’t be easy. “Sure,” I say, “no problem.”

  She’s already on her way back to the Immunes, though, shouting, “There! Was that so bloody difficult?” One of the other Immunes starts to argue with her, but she says, “We can do a full repair later. For now, we need to keep all this shoddy workmanship from getting any worse.” Someone else speaks up, and she yells, “I don’t care whose fault it is! Now patch the rest and let’s get out of here!”

  “So did we break it or not?” Spammers whispers.

  Hexi shoves him. “We’ll know when it falls on us.”

  It doesn’t fall on us, though. Actually, we’re able to fix things up pretty quickly, once someone brings back a few bowls of fruit. I guess Spammers wasn’t the only one sneaking a bite here and there because there are plenty of other spots around the cottages where the ground doesn’t quite hold together. Throwing fruit stops them from sliding away, but it doesn’t exactly melt the dirt and everything back into place. Instead, the piled-up ground just stays the way it is. Mersh is stuck hurling apples with the rest of us, on orders from that intense-looking girl. It turns out her name is Immunis Kizabel, and she’s the person who designed the whole crazy IMEC. I’d heard of her, of course, but I’d been imagining some old lady. Immunis Kizabel is probably only a little older than my kiddos and me.

  “Seriously,” Spammers says as Kizabel and the other Immunes rush off to some other part of the island. “I’m never going to understand this place. Not ever.”

  About two hours later, we’re looking up at a genuine flying island. It didn’t come together exactly the way I expected, just lifting out of the ground like a cookie from a sheet of dough or whatever. Instead, it kind of folded together like a box. The finished thing is really two flying islands stuck together, kind of. Like, the place where we’d been working on those cottages actually ended up on the bottom, and so did a few parts of the city, and a bunch of other trees and meadows and so forth. There’s even a lake, right in the center, and when you look up at it, you can see the land below reflected in the water. It makes Spammers and me kind of dizzy, doing that, but Hexi can’t get enough of it, seeing Limit Camp and our bunks and the mess hall and everything, all far away and upside down in this great big lake in the sky.

  “I wonder if the harvesters and everything have to turn upside down to land up there,” Hexi says later while we’re waiting for transportation to IMEC-1, formerly Ninth City. We’re outside the umbris now, and the light has gone back to normal. It’s late afternoon and cold enough to see your breath.

  Spammers groans. Hexi has gotten better at giving him a hard time, I guess. “I don’t think I’ll ever get used to living on that thing,” he says. “But hey, maybe we won’t have to, if we’re lucky.”

  Hexi looks over at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Think about it, girlie. They’ve got to send that thing off into the Realms, right? Well, they can’t take all of us with them, can they? Who’d hang around and watch out for Earth for the next thirty years? I know Torro’s thought about this, haven’t you, boyo?”

  I hadn’t, actually, but I’m thinking about it now, even though I’m trying not to. I’m a little scared that if I let myself think about it, something’ll go wrong.

  Spammers is grinning at me now. “So say they decide to leave good old Twelfth Century behind! They close up the Realms, and we don’t have to go to the Front. Maybe we have to stay on a few extra years with the Legion, but who cares? We’ll be the first legionaries to get home without having to leave for fifty years first!”

  Hexi is getting excited now, too. “Hey, maybe we can all go start our own settlement!”

  Spammers laughs. “Just like old Mersh said! Unbelievable!”

  But there’s one other thing, something they don’t mention. No way they’d’ve forgotten. I guess they just don’t want to talk about it.

  There’s a great big army of Valentines out there, waiting for old Lunar Veil to open so they can storm on through and kill us. Before this flying island can go off on its jolly way and leave me and my kiddos behind to start our own settlement or head back to Granite Shore or anything like that, we’ve got to deal with Romeo. Maybe we all will get to stay on Earth, but first we’ve got to make it through this battle alive.

  FIFTY

  VINNEAS

  Of all the considerations necessary to uprooting a vast metropolis and outfitting it for combat across a series of hostile alien worlds, the most troublesome by far is deciding who gets to run the thing. Kizabel would accuse me of trivializing the staggering amount of work and aggravation that went into getting IMEC-1 both literally and figuratively off the ground, of belittling what herculean feats the straining backs of humanity’s defenders have wrought, and, of course, she’d be right, but however banal the negotiations surrounding the IMEC’s administrative status—its place within the Legion and vice versa—may seem when compared to the apotheotic spectacle of plucking an island from the earth and setting it in the sky, I have a feeling the consequences will be every bit as convoluted and thorny.

  The IMEC had its share of detractors—for the most part venerable military chiefs who objected to gambling the future of the human race on some half-baked scheme cooked up by a couple of untried novices. However, once the Consulate had voted—unanimously—in favor of commissioning what was decried variously as “a schoolboy’s farcical toy” and “a suicidal monstrosity,” it seemed just about everyone in the upper echelons of the Legion and Principates of Hestia considered him- or herself the natural choice to command the aforementioned toy/monstrosity.

  The trouble—most of it, anyway—arose from the fact that IMEC-1 fell rather mistily into a gray area between several preexisting authorities and institutions. It was a city, obviously, but it was also a weapon of enormous power—or would be, if we could get it to work—as well as a military base, one which would house practically everything that remained of the Legion. Who, then, should be in charge? Should Princept Azemon, who had governed Ninth City for the past fifteen years, continue to do so after its transformation into a flying fortress? Most certainly, in the opinion of Princept Azemon. Or should the IMEC be entrusted to someone prepared to lead in an exclusively military capacity? According to various individuals prepared to lead in an exclusively military capacity, the answer was a resounding yes. To further complicate things, all twelve of Earth’s Legions would be represented in the IMEC’s garrisons. At the Front, where every Realm had its own supreme military commander, this wouldn’t have been a problem, but on Earth, the Dux of each Legion is traditionally answerable only to his or her Princept and the general directives of the Consulate. The idea that any Legion—even the Fifth, whose numbers had been reduced to the extent that it could no longer form even a single full cohort—should cede command to another Legion’s Dux was, apparently, so insulting as to be unthinkable.

  Had there been time to bicker and scheme and maneuver, it’s likely anyone with a remotely reasonable claim to the IMEC would still be bickering and scheming and maneuvering, but fortunately—for the purposes of expediency, anyway—the world was about to end, and so the debate only lasted about three hours. The decision Consul Seppora handed down was that, while each of the twelve Legions would remain under the leadership of its respective Dux, ultimate command of IMEC-1 and its legionary detachment would fall to Ninth City’s own Dux Reydaan, who would be responsible for all tactical and strategic decisions. To the whole assembly’s credit as soldiers, the ruling was accepted immediately and without argument, though I suspect the general stoicism resulted in part from Seppora’s promise to revisit the issue after the coming battle, assuming the destruction of humanity hadn’t rendered it moot.

  Following the meeting, Curator Ellmore was heard to comment that the truly tragic thing about what was now being called the First Battle of Lunar Veil—rather optimistically, I t
hink, since a Second Battle of Lunar Veil would be conditioned on our ability to build a flying island—was that most of our military leadership survived. I don’t completely agree, especially as I’m now part of the military leadership, but I see her point. None of our officers wanted to be left out of the upcoming glorious mission to save humanity, and as a result, they continued to squeeze themselves into the chain of command well after all the top spots—and indeed, any conceivably useful position—had been filled. Even after its thorough renovation and expansion, the Dux’s Basilica feels overcrowded.

  At first glance, the interior of the Basilica looks much as it did in its former life as the center of Ninth City’s military operations: an enormous space, comparable in size and composition to the largest cathedrals and mosques of the Common Era. At the center, beneath the huge, vaulted dome, is a dynamic model of Ninth City, popularly referred to as the Board. Our assets and defenses, our fighters—and, when relevant, the enemy’s—are all represented in pieces of carved stone, easy to differentiate by size and color as milites, equites, artillery, et cetera. The pieces move independently, shifting across the model city or floating above as corresponds to the motion of their counterparts in the world outside. On unexceptional days, the Board has the languid, almost hypnotizing peacefulness of a koi pond. Today, it more resembles a wasps’ nest, though the image of a pond lingers with me, especially given recent alterations to the Basilica’s floor.

  Whereas Ninth City, like any reasonable human dwelling, was set firmly and dependably on the ground, IMEC-1 is afloat and exposed to attack from all angles, and to account for this new range of peril, the Basilica’s soaring interior has been mirrored downward to accommodate a new Board, with our double-sided city floating in the center. It would be easy to mistake the Board’s lower half for a reflection in the polished stone floor, but a closer look reveals that the two sides are very different, each with its own geography, its surrounding pieces moving on their own unique errands.