The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  For a moment Max caught a glimpse of Oewen, who had once been Max’s follower and student. Before the overthrow of the Houses, Max had tried to teach Oewen the basics of thaumaturgy. The young man had shown talent but not determination. A ray of hope rushed into Max.

  “Oewen! Oewen!” Max’s voice struggled to cry out, but each time his voice was muffled by the material crammed in his mouth. “Oewen!”

  Oewen turned and searched the surrounding crowd, but the cart passed him by before he located the sound. Max hung his head.

  Multitudes filled the street ahead, having climbed up from the Arena, where they had attended a spectacular. The cart’s passage was blocked. Guards toiled hard at separating the crowd, and the cart moved forward with excruciating slowness. A cold wind whipped up and rushed through the bars of the cage. Max crossed his arms, huddled close to the dirty prisoners for warmth.

  A massive cheer rose as the carriage stopped in front of the Standing Stones. Three machines sat on a platform in the center of the stone circle. One of them was broken, its mechanism cracked and splintered, its wooden supports hanging loosely.

  —Aya!—Max called.

  A black-suited captain leaped from the stage and spoke to the crowd. “Citizens! Citizens!” The man strode around, raising his hand in the air. “Another group of saboteurs and House agents. They think they are better than us. They kept their privileges from us. They ate fine foods and wines while they starved us. They are the representatives of injustice and betrayal. But what do we have?” The man halted theatrically. “We have the great leveler!” He swiveled around theatrically and gestured to the machines on the platform behind him. “The Bolt!”

  “The Bolt! The Bolt!”

  The captain held up a scroll. “I have with me a list of the crimes of these enemies of the people. A list of crimes so degenerate, so sick and bloodthirsty, you would not believe their contents. They are crimes not fit for the ears of innocents, and so I will not read them to you.” The man now took on a downcast air, as if he were suddenly sad. “What lows have our enemies fallen to? How it tries our patience, our sense of solidarity, our sense of goodness.”

  The crowd now began a slow hoot, a slow booing.

  The captain stood upright again and cried out, “So we must do our duty, even if it is not to our taste. One does what is right! And we have the great leveler! The Bolt!”

  “Do what’s right!”

  “Do what must be done!”

  The man unrolled the scroll. “Martin Lerouge. Step forward!”

  A rat-bearded man fell to his knees and began to wail. “All I took from the Opera were cards and forms. I confessed! No. No. No.”

  “Pass him through.” One of the guards opened the carriage door.

  None of the prisoners moved, so the guard, emitting a great grunt, stepped into the carriage, lifted Lerouge up, and dragged him back onto the muddy ground.

  “Arturi Helitis.” The executioner called out.

  A House agent stepped from the carriage and walked, dignified, to the Bolt.

  The two men were strapped into the wooden mechanisms. A deathly silence hung over the crowd now. Only Martin’s sobs could be heard drifting around the Standing Stones. Meanwhile, the House agent stared out calmly at the crowd.

  “And so justice shall be served!” said the executioner.

  There was a sudden thunk. Dark red vital organs and yellowy-white intestines burst from their insides and flew several feet onto the muddy ground. Martin looked down at the remnants of himself with horror, while the House agent simply closed his eyes. A grayness seeped into their faces.

  In a matter of moments, men had unstrapped the corpses and carried them to one side, where a pile of bodies lay wrapped in sheets. Yet others shoveled the insides into buckets and scurried away.

  The executioner looked down at his scroll, “Karl Ginburs and the false Maximilian!”

  Max and the other man stepped from the carriage. As he was being strapped into the machine, Max began to see things as if through a long tunnel. He thought, strangely, that the Bolt was quite comfortable. He felt quite snug strapped into the mechanism, even though much of it was coated in blood and other matter.

  “And so…,” the executioner began.

  —Aya, please, I beg you.

  Good luck on the Other Side, Maximilian. The Dark Sun is quite beautiful, you know.

  “Justice will be served!”

  Max closed his eyes and heard the thunk of the machine as the Bolt was loosed. He was surprised that there was no pain.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Dexion dragged Kata away from her responsibilities at the Technis Palace. Today was the opening of the Autumn Games, which would continue until their climax at the Twilight Observance, and the minotaur was going to fight.

  Crowds streamed toward the Arena with a color and cheerfulness reserved for fun seekers. The Collegia’s flags flapped in the wind: the black hammer of Caelian, the wheel of Litia, and the storehouse of Avaricum. The Arena itself rose up, five stories of arched walkways, graced with marble statues looking over the gathering crowd.

  Spectators waved and called to Kata and Dexion. A middle-aged man, whose bulbous stomach made him look like he was carrying a sack, called out: “Dexion! I’ve bet on you today with that rascal Urgad the bookmaker. He said that despite your size, you’ve no experience. But I said, ‘Never bet against a minotaur. Never!’”

  Dexion waved an acknowledgment. “I’d put the rest of your savings on me.”

  The man shook his head. “I can’t afford to lose everything.”

  “You won’t. You’ll win it all!”

  The man joined a line at one of the mobile bakeries selling steaming hot spiced breads. A joke was circulating: after the assault on the villas, the city was back to normal; the shops were stocked with bread, the dungeons with prisoners.

  Street performers surrounded the stadium: fire-eaters competed with mimes, clowns, sword swallowers, and storytellers. Kata and Dexion passed street vendors selling sizzling meats, bookmakers surrounded by throngs of gamblers, prostitutes hovering around the Arena’s great arches, and halted before the gladiators’ side entrance.

  “You’re going to get yourself killed doing this,” said Kata.

  Dexion shrugged. “Death is part of life.”

  “It’s part of my life,” said Kata, as much to herself as to him.

  “Watch!” Dexion suddenly tensed himself. His muscles bulged, veins swelled up. His head jutted forward, and from his mouth came a terrible roar. He seemed to grow in bulk, his inky eyes blackening even more. Kata took several steps backward at the sight of the terrifying creature. Kata had heard a roar like that before, when she had killed the minotaur Cyriacus. It shook her bones and rattled her nerves. Around her, others screamed and darted away.

  Dexion breathed out, rubbed his hands together. His eyes now twinkled with laughter. “See you afterward!”

  Still shaken, Kata passed through one of the arcades and took an elevator up several levels. The amphitheater was already half full. Crowds streamed in to see the one grand battle planned for the day.

  Kata gasped at the scenery on the Arena floor. A miniature replica of ancient Caeli-Amur covered one half of it: the buildings were shoulder height, the streets a maze that only allowed the space for two gladiators to face each other in combat. In some places, tiny walkways climbed over this labyrinthine construction, while the larger buildings—the Opera, the university, ancient palaces—afforded space for several warriors to stand on their roofs. Blood-orchids stood along the Forum’s central avenue. None of the House complexes were represented, so Kata sensed this was a past version of Caeli-Amur. The mountain rose up to the level of the seating a story above the Arena floor, and then quickly descended to ensure none of the gladiators could climb out. To complete the picture, the city’s headlands jutted into a pool representing the ocean that covered the remaining section of the Arena floor.

  Waist-high barriers protected the rows of
seats from gladiators’ missiles. Kata found a place about a third of the way back. Around her, the crowd whispered and pointed excitedly. As the Arena filled, Kata felt more and more stressed.

  Next to Kata, a man sat with his son, who was about eight years old. The father gestured to the replica. “Our money’s on the Numerian king Saliras, boy. His forces are going to be represented by the Collegium Avaricum fighters. Little Fish told me that they brought animals from Numeria itself.”

  The boy looked up at Kata, an overwhelmed expression on his round face.

  So they were about to witness a re-creation of the battle against Saliras, when the Numerian king had brought his army across the sea to take Caeli-Amur. After the cataclysm, Saliras’s forces had planned to conquer the entire world. Caeli-Amur had been close to defeat, when the minotaurs had arrived across the fog-laden sea and driven the invader back into the water.

  The Arena quickly filled to overflowing. The low hum of chatter echoed around the seats. Kata felt sick at the sight of all these people, here to worship death. For most philosopher-assassins, these fights were the lowest form of murder: murder without thought or reason, for entertainment, to appease the population and keep them drugged with false heroes and empty victories. But Kata didn’t care for philosophical objections; she simply felt sick that Dexion would soon take the field, and that he could easily die. The memory of Henri’s loss still ached. She did not want to be left alone again.

  She was still thinking about this terrible possibility when about fifty men from Collegium Caelian emerged from the buildings of the miniature Caeli-Amur, like ants from their holes. They quickly took their places on the city’s walls, behind the tiny battlements of the buildings. One stood behind a scaled-down catapult stationed in one of the plazas, another behind a scorpion ballista—a wicked-looking missile weapon—placed on the Southern Headland. Saliras had landed on the Northern Headland and at the docks, but the Avaricum troops would likely choose their own place of assault. There was no sign of the minotaur.

  A hushed tension hovered over the Arena as everyone waited for the appearance of Saliras’s troops from the three arched entryways to the Arena.

  A sudden roar rose up. Three boats floated between the dark arches and toward the city. Bowmen on their decks loosed flights of arrows, which trembled as they flew through the air. Arrows rained on the boats in reply, and the air was filled with screams.

  The scorpion on the headland shuddered. A moment later a long thick arrow burst through one of the bowmen’s chests on the boat farthest from Kata. Again arrows flew in all directions, several loosed into the crowd. Kata heard a cry from the audience, but her eyes were fixed on the battle. A catapult stone smashed against the wall above one of the arches. A second row of boats emerged. Two headed for the Northern Headland, close to Kata. The third headed straight for the docks.

  When they reached the shore, cages were opened on the boats. Wild lions and leopards raced up along the streets. The crowd rose to their feet, letting loose a howl of delight. Kata looked around her. The man had lifted his boy up, and the two of them were screaming, their faces filled with bloodlust. Kata felt faint, not at the sight of the deaths below, but at the howls of the audience, at their leering faces and drooling lips. The very sky above seemed to glow ember red as the sun lit up the clouds.

  The cats dashed along the maze of streets. Defenders turned, screaming, only to be dragged down by giant claws, throats ripped by fangs, stomachs gutted by raking rear legs. One of the lions rushed into the Forum, where one of the blood-orchids, its face like a great plate, swiveled. The big cat craned its head forward and sniffed at the flower. The orchid’s head spat a thick red nectar directly into the lion’s face. An instant later the flower head whipped forward and closed over the cat’s head and neck. The lion backed violently away, tearing the flower’s head from its stalk, but the flower’s head remained closed over the cat, which leaped madly around, crashing into the sides of buildings.

  The forces of Saliras had landed: a hundred of them. The two armies clashed at the Northern Headland and in the labyrinthine alleyways of the Quaedian.

  A tall woman, her blond hair cut short with ragged jags, squeezed onto the bench beside Kata. “Thank the gods. Rikard said you might be here.”

  Kata remembered the woman as Maximilian’s university friend Odile, who had provided him with the binding formulae that had allowed him to build his water cart, with which he’d traveled fatefully to the Sunken City. Odile had changed, though. She was thinner and bonier, her face more lined.

  “And you’ve been well, Odile?”

  “Well, to be honest, not so great.”

  “That goes for everyone. What are you doing here?” said Kata.

  “Looking for you, as it turns out.”

  Kata brushed back her hair. She was distracted for a moment by the two forces below, caught in deadly battle. It seemed inevitable that the forces of Saliras would win, for eventually their numbers would show. The cats had been slaughtered but had sown death and despair among many of the defenders, who were now scrabbling back under the weight of Saliras’s forces. Several had grouped up in little clumps, defending the streets tenaciously, but already they were surrounded, beset on many sides. At any moment they would be wiped out.

  At that moment a great figure burst from the miniature cliffs. Dexion stood on a ledge, great hammer in hand, and roared. His horns seemed to glint in the light, his mane was braided, and he wore a great bronze breastplate, itself with a red-horned head pressed into it. For a moment all seemed silent. Then, for the second time that day, Kata heard a tremendous roar.

  The crowd erupted with cheers and cries. The man and his son beside her were in rapture. They took to their feet with the rest of them. “Minotaur! Minotaur!”

  Kata put her face in her hands. She could barely look.

  Odile grabbed her arm. “One of our group returned last night and told me a curious fact. He said a man calling himself Maximilian was captured out in the villas to the south.”

  A chill ran up Kata’s back. Surely, that was impossible, unless Max had been imprisoned in one of the Technis villas down south all this time. “Was the man liberated from a dungeon?”

  Odile shook her head. “Apparently, he fought with the vigilant guards, tried to stop them from destroying property.”

  “It can’t be Maximilian. He died in the dungeons.”

  Dexion fell onto the rear of one of Saliras’s columns. He crashed into them like a catapult stone; they were thrown in all directions by the force of his onslaught. This was the decisive moment. The tide was turned. Madness came upon Saliras’s forces. They fled, screaming.

  “Anyway, I have more than enough to worry about.” Odile brushed herself off anxiously.

  The comment piqued Kata’s attention. “What?”

  “You recall Detis, a liberation-thaumaturgist. He had met you once, not long ago, he said.”

  “I met him at Marin’s water palace. He was condemned to death by the Bolt for smuggling.”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t true. Detis was one of us. A fair man. He told us that should something happen to him, you would be the most trustworthy person in the seditionist movement. I thought that might be the case anyway, having met you before.”

  “Us. Who do you mean?” Kata’s senses were alive now. “I thought you were an intellectual, unconcerned with seditionism.”

  “Max was right after all,” said Odile. “I thought I could stand aside, assess from on high, but I was wrong. Before the overthrow, the Houses cracked down on seditionists. There were fights in the courtyards of the university. Spies and agent provocateurs infiltrated the ranks of the radicals. One day the House thaumaturgists, in their black suits and death masks, came for me when I was in the university library. You can’t imagine the terror their appearance struck in me. They had discovered I’d passed the binding formulae to Max, and I was destined for the terror-spheres in their dungeons. They chased me through the courtyards. But a th
aumaturgist named Detis saved me, and I’ll forever be in his debt. He had formed a group of thaumaturgists fighting for seditionism called the Brotherhood of the Hand. I joined him, but we are underground, because it’s not safe out in the open. Too many of us have died already. Anyway, I thought you should know about Maximilian. If it is Max, perhaps you can do something. I always liked that curly-haired dreamer.”

  Odile stood up to leave, but Kata grabbed her arm. “Wait, why is it so dangerous?”

  Odile shook Kata off, glanced anxiously around the crowd. “There are enemies in the highest places. We’re constantly being watched, all of us. I have to go.”

  Odile walked off, stopped several feet away, looked back for a moment as if she might say something more, and then was gone.

  On the Arena floor below, the defenders’ victory was complete. Men swam back toward the arches while Dexion climbed the miniature Opera building. He raised his hammer in the air to chants of “Minotaur! Minotaur!”

  Kata’s mind raced as she rushed out of the Arena. She needed to see if there was any truth about Maximilian. She could head straight for the dungeons at House Arbor, but there was no certainty that the vigilant guards would let her in. The only way to be certain would be to approach Ejan.

  The cold wind whipped around the streets surrounding the Arena. Inside, the roar continued.

  * * *

  As she hurried toward the Opera, Kata tried again to piece together events. She tried to keep her mind from running away with itself. The Maximilian in the Arbor dungeons was probably an impostor. He had been caught resisting the vigilants, attempting to defend one of the House agent’s properties. The prisoner had probably once known Max and was using his name to try to escape judgment.

  And yet the flame of hope sprung up in her. Maximilian’s body had never been found. He had simply disappeared. She felt the pull of her former love. Love, like a vast sea into which you’ve stepped gingerly, only to realize you’re caught in deadly currents that drag you out into its vastness. She would not step into that ocean again. Not now, perhaps not ever. Yet perhaps she was not responsible for his death after all?