Kamron sat slowly in one of the semicircle of chairs arranged in the center of the room. He gestured to another seat for Max. “So how goes the printworkers’ struggle?”
Max sat in silence. How did Kamron know that he had attended the demonstration? Picking up on the tension, the lights darted rapidly across the walls and suddenly froze in anticipation. He drew a breath and tensed. The words tumbled out. “They smashed their own presses, because they have no other ideas of how to fight. It’s our fault because we’ve just left them to work things out for themselves.” He waited for a minute. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I was going to observe them.”
Kamron brought his hands up to his face, his fingers softly dabbing his eyelids. Kamron’s movements were always slow and gentle. Max could not tell if he had internalized a state of grace, or was simply old. His voice was low, gentle, pursuasive. “Max. The art of politics is the art of knowing what to do next, and what not to do.”
Max summoned his courage. “Things are changing in Caeli-Amur. The Xsanthians are ready to strike on the docks.”
Kamron stood up, walked across to the shelves, and up picked one of books. “Eldra’s Decline of the Old World. I found this book deep in the basement of an old music instructor; it had been his grandfather’s. He had no idea of its worth, and was happy for me to take it. Imagine that: your work, left in the basement—perhaps the only remaining copy. He argues that the conflict between the gods was about more than just their personalities. It was between those who wanted only to play and dance—Aya and his followers—and the rest who wanted things to be orderly. After the war, the citizens of the Old World, sick of these conflicts, drove the gods away. And when the gods left us: that was the cataclysm, the moment that civilization fell. You should read it.”
“The time of reading is over.” Max looked directly into the old man’s eyes. The lights increased in intensity, illuminating parts of Kamron’s craggy face, throwing other parts into darkness.
Kamron laughed uneasily. “You are ready to fight. And you should be. It’s only natural. But, Max: look at us. There are thirty of us—only thirty. It took us fifteen years to build up what we have, to accumulate our scant knowledge of thaumaturgy, to create this library. How can our knowledge compete with that of the Houses, with all their history? With all their resources? We cannot get involved in struggles that will only be defeated.”
“We could be a hundred in a week,” said Max.
Kamron ignored him. “Slow preparation. The machines—that is what you should put your focus on. Work out what they are, what they do.”
The machines lay in their vast hall, not far from the Communal Cavern, silent and dead, like the metal bones of huge creatures that had shuffled into one final formation and died. Max wanted to say, “Those machines are useless, broken,” but found himself nodding instead.
“Haven’t I led the group through dangerous times?” Kamron said.
Max looked down at his own feet. When Kamron had first taken him as an apprentice, Maximilian thought that they would conquer the world.
“Patience,” Kamron had said four years earlier, when the group numbered only fifteen. He had sat quietly in the vast dark communal hall, illuminated by only a couple of candles that lit a sphere around them. “Almost all knowledge is hidden in the House Libraries.”
“Why don’t we infiltrate them?” said Maximilian.
“They would discover you. If they didn’t discover you, you would be changed by them. You would think that you were using them, but your environment would start to shape you. Moment by moment, you would find that you would see things differently, the way they see them.”
“They would not see me.” Maximilian spoke a few words, drew the ideograms in the air, and shimmered out of existence.
Kamron laughed. “You have talent for illusion. Perhaps it is your calling.”
Maximilian emerged back into the world. “No, I will master all the forms of thaumaturgy.”
“Nobody can understand all the forms. Not even the Sortileges of Varenis.” When parents didn’t scare their children with images of the Elo-Talern, they spoke about the Sortileges. Almost no one knew what they looked like: some said that they were huge men, with rolls of fat rippling down their sides, others that they were changed in ways that none could describe, their faces hidden by deathmasks, their power radiating from them like heat. They ruled the city of Varenis, two weeks’ march north through the hills, like priest-gods. They were said to each have mastered one of the forms and had paid a price greater than could be imagined.
“According to the Histories, the gods mastered all the forms,” Max said. The great goal of thaumaturgy for centuries had been this—unification: the notion that one can step back and create a grand unifying theory, one that connected all the rambling, disparate, fragmented thaumaturgical forms from Alchemy to Illusion to Transformation. The concept stirred Maximilian’s imagination.
“Are you a god?” Kamron’s soft voice hovered in the little bubble of light. “If you had mastery of all the forms, what would you become?”
Maximilian felt drained from the use of his illusion. He placed his hands on his knees to hold himself up, held the nausea at bay. Next time he would remember to use the protection incantation.
Now, four years later, Max looked at Kamron’s knobby hands. Some knuckles stood up like mountains and others looked worn away; he looked at Kamron’s body, bent forward in the midsection, bent backwards at the chest higher up; he looked at the neck, shifted sideways so Kamron’s head looked forever like it might slip off the shoulders altogether—all these effects of a life’s work in thaumaturgy. Kamron had been careful to use the Art only when he must. Even with the charms of deflection and protection, this is what he’d become.
Kamron spoke in low, slow tones. “Max, you’re forbidden from visiting the Xsanthians. You’re forbidden from seeking out strikes.”
Max stared at Kamron. He was shaken, aghast. The injustice of it cut at him. In any case, Kamron had no right to command him. But Kamron had built the group, and its members obeyed him. He was a hero, in Max’s eyes.
Max looked down at the floor. “You’ve been a good leader. You’ve given us everything. I’m sorry to have questioned you.” But even as he spoke, Max knew he was not speaking the truth. He was outgrowing Kamron. The older man was no longer a mentor. It was time for Max to strike out on his own, and yet how could he betray this man who had been like a father to him? But Max would. He would visit the Xsanthians and urge them to strike. Tonight he would explain his views to the Veterans. He would assert his independence. They had no right to refuse him.
Kamron leaned over and ruffled Max’s curly brown hair. “You are such a dreamer! A romantic! Oh, if only I were young again.”
The lights dimmed slightly and moved in gentle waves along the walls, throwing soft silvery light on the two seditionists.
Later in the afternoon, Max sat with Omar and Giselle in the Hall of Machines. In the darkness, intricate black metal constructions sat like a cohort of fearsome crouching creatures and gigantic skeletal birds. In two directions the metal shapes disappeared into the shadows. In another direction a light indicated a distant corridor, lit by a strange purple mist that seemed never to dissipate. A five minutes’ walk along that corridor lay the Communal Cavern.
The three seditionists sat before a machine, a complex conglomeration of pylons and plates—a great metal scaffolding. Deep within, wires and tubes entwined crisscrossed in a complex lattice. Fingerlike vises were attached to its machinelike arms. How long it had sat there, silent as a corpse, none of them could tell. Like all the technology buried beneath the mountain, the machines dated from the time of the ancients.
Giselle riffled through one of several books that lay upon a table, illuminated by a lamp, as Max and Omar pushed and prodded at the machine’s arms.
“It’s hopeless.” Giselle looked up with her sharp eyes. She ran her hands through her red hair, causing it to form a cu
rly cloud around her head. “I don’t know why Kamron has us work on these things. The Histories have almost nothing useful to add. Listen to what Karmilla says in her Narratives, ‘And when Alerion was tired of Aya’s gibes, he gathered around him the gods and they turned on Aya with all their instruments and machines, and Aya, who felt that machines were not a way to happiness was forced to flee before them. And wherever he traveled—to the clouds and beneath the sea—they pursued him. They dug through the earth like moles, they flew through the sky like birds, and Aya, who had never been afraid, was now afraid.’” Giselle looked up from the book. “I mean, it’s the usual stuff: machines for flying, machines for digging. Just legends, nothing more than legends.”
Max and Omar still poked and prodded at the machine.
“Hey!” said Giselle. “Are you listening to me?”
Omar looked over and grinned, the small man’s teeth exceptionally white against his olive skin. “Were you saying something?”
“I think I heard a sound from over there,” said Max, still examining the machine. “Over in that area.” He waved his arms in the general direction of Giselle. Max and Omar had been friends for ten years. They met as teenagers on the Dyrian coast, to the north of Caeli-Amur, where officiates mingled with tourists from Varenis; where Directors and officiates lazed in the summer in their grand villas on the coast. Omar’s family was descended from the original inhabitants of the region. His parents farmed oysters. Max’s parents had run one of Dyria’s pleasure villas, complete with baths and library. Max had spied Omar in the library, reading voraciously the Histories, and the two had become friends, so close that they now had developed almost a language of their own. Then they had both become friends with Nkando. But Nkando was long gone, and whenever Omar talked of her, Max remained silent.
Finally, Max had left for the opportunities of the city. Omar had followed a year later when Max was already a confirmed seditionist. It did not take long for Max to convert him.
Giselle put her hands on her hips and pursed her lips in half-amused annoyance. She started reading again. “’Like all the gods, Aya’s essence had been replicated in the Great Library of Caeli-Enas, where knowledge was contained in a million books and by other stranger and more exotic means. Such knowledge could be drunk like an elixir, so that in but the passing of a moment one could absorb great histories, geographies of faraway worlds, all the secrets of the universe, one could taste the spirits of long-dead souls. Even the secrets of the Magi could be absorbed from the Library, in the time it took to close one’s eyes. All one needed was the code to give to the librarian.”
Max stood up and looked into the darkness with the thought of the Great Library of Caeli-Enas, sunk so close to them beneath the sea, so impossible to reach. To absorb knowledge in an instant, thought Max. Something more rapid and efficient than reading, could that be possible? The secrets of the Magi: Something that would forever change the relationship between the seditionists and the Houses. Even now he could picture himself standing tall before the House thaumaturgists. How they would tremble at his mastery. Then, at the head at the seditionist army, he would lead the wave of demonstrations, one after another in the coming months, until the House structure fell. But he stopped these thoughts. Seditionism was not a place for individual glory. He felt guilty at his ambitions and resolved to refocus his attention on the good of the group: when he returned, he would put himself at the disposal of the seditionists. He would be theirs to command. Now, however, was the time to focus on the machine. He reached into a gap between the metal plates on its great torso. A soft hum emanated from it and he and Omar leaped back.
“What did you do?” Omar’s voice bleated.
“There was a lever in there,” said Max softly.
The machine glowed from within with an unnatural green light. The humming increased and it lurched into motion, shuddering and shaking from side to side. Ten or so arms of some sort unfolded from the scaffolding and it hoisted itself up on two legs. The machine let out a deep groan, as if it had experienced epochs of sadness. Then it shook again, the entire mechanism shifting internally, and it elongated, like a long-necked animal reaching up for leafy foliage. The groan increased, like the call of a wounded beast. Raising one metal claw, the machine dug away at itself as if something deep within its mechanical insides hurt.
Max and Omar both took a number of steps backwards.
A deep red glow appeared in the insides of the machine. Max retreated farther from the rush of heat.
The pylon-arms of the machine opened out again, reattached themselves to other parts of the machine. What had previously been the socket now became a metallic hand. An elongated octagon, which might have been a head, began to shake and, with a whine of rage and frustration, the machine collapsed in upon itself, the glow petering out with the smell of something burning. The darkness enclosed again.
“Do you want to try the lever again?” said Giselle.
Max glared at her.
“You know that Ejan thinks we should pursue another course also,” said Giselle slowly. “We must make life unbearable for the Houses: break their locks, ruin their carriage wheels,” said Giselle. “Even…”
Omar looked at Giselle dubiously. “Even what?”
Giselle now approached the machine also. She touched the metal on one of its long arms. The machine hummed. She stood back. “Even strike at their personnel—assassinate the Directors and their officiates.”
“You can’t shoot a system.” Max turned back to the machine; he was torn between the fact it had moved and the debate with Giselle. “I know you support Ejan, but don’t you find him overzealous? Striking physically against the Houses: as if sedition were only military action! It implies the final test between us and the Houses, but before the citizens support us. It’s madness.”
“More mad than hiding here in this hole?” Giselle turned to look at him. “Anyway, you misunderstand. You’re seeing things upside down. One doesn’t attract support before fighting, one fights to attract support. It’s a way of showing that things cannot continue as usual, of showing that resistance is possible. Anyway, perhaps you should be worrying about Kamron?”
Max ignored her comment. “And when does Ejan plan to begin this campaign of his?”
“We’ve already begun. We’ve struck Technis’s Tram Factory.”
Max could hardly believe it, and some part of him was jealous. Ejan had the conviction to act without the approval of the Veterans. “Kamron will banish him. Kamron will banish all of you.”
Giselle took Max’s arm and turned him away from the machine. “You know that together your circle and Ejan’s circle form the majority of the group. Together you can change its direction.”
Maximilian had a group of six followers to whom he was teaching the basics of thaumaturgy. Together with Omar, there were eight of them. With Ejan’s group of ten, they were more than half of the thirty seditionists. He shook the idea off. “I would not make such a deal. We stand for completely opposite things. It would tear the group apart.”
Omar stepped between them. “Sorry to interrupt you, but you realize that this machine moved.”
Turning his mind from the debate, Max pulled over the stepladder, climbed up, reached up and pressed the machine on what looked like a breastplate. The machine quickly dropped down in to a kind of squat. Beams of light shot from between its metal exoskeleton. From somewhere inside came strange voices speaking in an unknown language. Fragments of sentences, “Il Guilmar. Il Timar. Il Endus. Il Panadus!”
A gap the size of a man opened up in the machine’s insides and a platform emerged beneath it. Its base was a dark metal. The walls of the cavity were formed by imbricated plates of metal, punctured by thousands of microscopic holes. Complex twines of tubing and wires emerged from the spaces between the plates, while various protuberances seemed randomly scattered. Finally, hidden high up within the machine hung something that looked like an inverted flower with its petals opened, like a helmet secti
oned into four. From the walls there was a complex series of open clamps that might close over an operator’s forearms. Similar clamps, which when closed might form a boot of sorts, emerged from the rear of the cavity close to the base-plate.
“I’ll climb in,” said Omar.
“No, let me,” said Max. “I’ll just step inside and see if anything happens. Then I’ll step out again.”
Ignoring Max, Omar stepped up to the machine, which still hummed gently. He put both hands on the platform and pulled himself up, placed both feet onto it, and his head and torso disappeared in the darkness. “Hmm,” he said, “nothing’s happening.” He turned around and added, “Oh.”
The platform rose as the machine straightened itself like a soldier standing to attention. The boots begin to close over Omar’s feet.
“Look at this…,” said Omar.
“What is it?” said Giselle.
“Oh my—,” began Omar but he stopped, groaned slowly, and then screamed hideously, like a man being tortured. His voice came out then garbled. “Needles!”
“Omar! Omar!” Max and Giselle ran around the machine.
The screaming continued “No! No!” The smell of something rotten wafted from the machine and the thing took two jerky steps forward, knocking over the stepladder. Omar’s wail gave way to the broken high whine of someone whose voice could no longer contain the power of the cry.
Max grabbed the stepladder and placed it in front of the machine. He scrambled up, off balance, tried to press the breastplate, but fell down to the floor. Again he scrambled up the ladder, hoping the thing would not move. He reached up, pressed the breastplate, and the machine dropped to the ground. The platform descended, the boots opened, the vises that had clamped around Omar’s legs gave way. Moaning, Omar slid from the insides of the thing, blood coming from spots along his arms and legs. He raised his hands to his face, a face that had been burned so that it was swollen-red and blotchy. His hair, once thick and black, was burned away in several places.
Unwrapped Sky Page 7