Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  Boris arrived at the factory after the fog had lifted, yet clouds still rolled overhead, blocking out the late spring sun. There were no signs of House guards, and he breathed a sigh of relief. About eighty tramworkers stood at the front of the factory, hands in pockets, grinning and whispering. They had the air of brattish children, who had broken a rule and were waiting to see their parents’ response. Indeed, they had an air of joviality far out of tune with the potential consequences, even if against the wall were lined old bolt-throwers, aged things powered by external bows, and rusted swords and pikes. Even more wretchedly, knives or pitchforks leaned over a pile of stones dug from the cobblestoned streets. Had they no notion of what Technis might unleash upon them? Boris realized that so far, the Houses had only arrested strikers, thrown them into their dark dungeons, a fate bad enough. He hurried down the cobblestoned road, through the onlookers who stood and whispered to one another at a safe distance.

  Mathias strode toward him and called out, “There’s no work today, Subofficiate. Tell your masters that we will no longer work under these conditions.”

  The words cut at Boris, yet he continued walking toward them.

  “Are you deaf as well as a lackey?” yelled Mathias. The strikers laughed.

  Boris finally reached the group, puffing and panting. He pushed through a few of the younger workers to reach Mathias, who had retreated into the group.

  Boris leaned toward Mathias, who eyed him coldly. “Please. We can still avoid this madness.”

  Mathias turned his back to the man from House Technis.

  Around Boris the tramworkers circled, and farther away citizens, the old with their smocks and clogs, the young gathered in twos and threes, eyed the scene with interest from the surrounding streets. Boris took out his flask. Inside lay what he needed, what he wanted. Hot-wine, which burned his throat; hot-wine, which made him fast and strong; hot-wine, which made everything sharper in focus, as if before he had looked through watery eyes. He gulped it down.

  “Listen,” he turned to a young worker, whose lantern-jawed face sneered at him. “We can make improvements, we—”

  The worker pushed him and he took a step backwards. Another pushed him from behind and his head was thrown back by the force. As he turned to glare at the white-haired man grinning at him, another pushed him, and yet another. In an instant he was jostled to and fro, rough hands pushing him again and again.

  “Wait. No!” Boris pushed back and a skinny reedlike youth was tossed with impossible strength into another.

  Boris opened his mouth to speak, but was halted by screams of fear from women and men. He listened to them: the thaumaturgists had come with the Furies.

  They were yet out of sight, and against an almost overwhelming impulse, Boris forced himself to run toward the sounds. Up the narrow, cobblestoned street he ran. As it rose up toward Boulevarde Karlotte and farther on the Technis Complex, it curved out of sight. Boris rushed on.

  The Furies came down the narrow streets into view. Their keepers, the black-suited thaumaturgists, held whips in their hands, though the whips were the least of their controls.

  At the sight of the creatures, Boris fell back against the wall and closed his eyes. He felt sick. He wanted to run. He started to shiver. He opened his eyes again, but did not look straight at them, instead aware of their black shapes roiling and whirling against the gray stones. Occasionally wiry limbs, bloodied torsos, fanged heads would emerge into view, as if the swirling blackness was a cloud, which shrank back to reveal the Furies’ true forms. The screams of the nearby citizens were high-pitched and desperate—the screams of those who were not aware of anything but the horror. The creatures rushed forward, stopped suddenly, seemed to recompose themselves into new configurations, and moved forward again. Those citizens who had lingered, hoping to see the confrontation, scrambled away through the side streets, falling in their fear, picking themselves up, never looking back.

  The tramworkers backed away; their lighthearted air gone. Mathias turned to his coworkers: “They’re just beasts. We’ve still got these.” He raised a weathered wooden bolt-thrower. Others lifted theirs, or grabbed their pitifully inadequate weapons.

  Boris pressed himself farther against the wall as the creatures passed him. The guard next to him broke into a low humming moan.

  Then came the lead thaumaturgist, dressed in his black suit, his face covered with a bone-white mask carved in the shape of a horse’s skull. Death seemed to radiate around him, as if he were from the Other Side itself. Alone, he would have been fearful, a ghastly figure fully seven feet tall. Beside the Furies, he was terrible to behold.

  Desperation gripped Boris. This was his final chance to affect events, his final moment to halt the bloodbath to come. Forcing up onto his shaking legs, Boris stepped forward, “Wait.”

  The thaumaturgist turned the horse-skull mask toward Boris and the other thaumaturgists halted beside him.

  “I’m Subofficiate Boris Autec. There’s been a mistake.”

  The thaumaturgist stood still, the mask appeared as if it were caught in some awful rictus. If any emotions passed the thaumaturgist’s face, they were hidden. The man’s reply was strong and confident. “If you were an officiate, then you would be able to give such an order. But, Autec, you are only a subofficiate. Our orders outrank yours.”

  The thaumaturgist walked on. Boris grabbed him by the arm. “Wait.”

  Something struck Boris savagely in the face. He dropped to his knees. Time and events seemed scrambled. His cheek throbbed. He looked up, and a horse-skull mask leered down at him menacingly.

  Still on his knees, Boris turned to look at the tramworkers, just as a hail of stones rained down around him. The tramworkers formed an unsteady line, stepping forward, shuffling backwards. They loosed another hail of rocks that rattled onto the cobblestones like stony rain. Boris looked at their ruddy faces, most of them youthful. He looked at Mathias with his hunched shoulders, his drooping eyes. To Boris, it seemed as if he were looking back in time, at his own past.

  The Furies rushed down the street like great black roiling smoke. Bolts flew through the air and disappeared into the darknesses. The creatures stopped briefly, flooded forward again. The line of tramworkers broke, but too late, for the Furies were already on them and the streets rang with hideous screams. The blackness engulfed the workers, like waves crashing over them. Boris stared at the sky overhead, huge lumbering clouds coming in from the sea.

  The screams seemed to last an eternity: horrible, wailing things as men tried to hold desperately on to the remains of their lives. Boris closed his eyes but could not shut out the sounds.

  When it was over and the thaumaturgists gone, Boris walked quietly down the street, dodging corpses that lay shrunken, as if their vitality had been sucked by a mountain’s high cold winds. He felt a wetness on his face and realized that he was crying. He came to a body lying facedown. With effort he turned it over, but it was not Mathias. He continued on: here a young man, nothing but a blackened lump of meat, but still groaning; there a man silently looking at the ragged stump of his hand; and bodies—bodies everywhere. Finally, he saw a man leaning against a wall, his shirt torn from his body, strange scalelike patterns over his chest, where the eyes of fish shifted wildly.

  “Why? Why didn’t you listen to me?” Boris’s voice broke. “Damn you, damn you.”

  Mathias was crushed and bloodied. His chest heaved and rattled. “Keep an eye on Corette, and Rikard, will you?”

  Boris looked down the street at the bodies thrown about like so much litter. He looked back at Mathias who blinked once, twice. Then slowly, like the changing of the tide, the life drained from his eyes.

  Boris spent the afternoon light-headed and empty. He drank hot-wine like water as he wandered the streets of Caeli-Amur. But wherever he passed, he felt an outsider. The Factory Quarter seemed filled with savage darting eyes, the Quaedian with figures unfriendly and aloof, his own apartment sat in empty streets. Nowhere did he fee
l at home.

  Eventually he pressed the pad in Rudé’s office and walked slowly to the throne room where the Elo-Talern was waiting, as always.

  “So the strike is finished.”

  Boris stared at the creature in front of him, numb from events, ruined by lack of sleep and food. “No,” he said. “No. It has just begun.”

  “But the Furies?”

  “They ruined them, as you promised.” Boris’s words sounded hollow in his own ears, empty of all meaning or significance. “But maybe not this factory, maybe not this season or next, but soon the strikes will spring up like brush fires in the summer.”

  “We shall destroy them, also.”

  “You cannot destroy a fire: you can only put it out.”

  “And you, Boris Autec, shall let us know where they are, and you shall put them out.”

  “I will,” said Boris bitterly. What else was there for him to do? The tramworkers had brought the House’s punishment upon themselves. But even as he thought this, Boris felt the churning of guilt and shame.

  “I admired the way which you tried to stand up for the tramworkers. We need people like you in the House. Not just sycophants who say yes to those above and kick those who are beneath them. It may not seem like it, but I value your humanity. The way you are so torn, trying always to do the right thing! Congratulations, you are now an officiate. You are Rudé’s replacement, you shall have your own subofficiates to direct.”

  Boris laughed despairingly. “The tramworkers: let me give them some of what they asked for, whoever is left.”

  Elo-Drusa nodded. “Some have been arrested. But the new tramworkers, yes, give them as much as you deem necessary.”

  Boris laughed again. At least now he would have more influence, more ability to change things for the better. He would not let events like the morning’s massacre happen again. With his new influence would come rewards. The words of the Elo-Talern returned to him: What is it that you want? He thought, tonight, he might attend the Opera, and he might get seats closer to the front. It would take his mind off the day’s terrible events. It was only fair.

  When he left, he wandered along the corridors, past the alien statues and strange mechanical tools and as he walked, images of raven black hair and emerald green eyes filled his mind.

  After the opera, Boris returned to his house thinking of the Siren Paxaea. He had watched her tonight, and dreamed of placing his hands on those luxurious hips, his mouth on those lips. The Elo-Talern had promised him what he wanted.

  He threw the window open and looked out over Caeli-Amur and beyond, to the sea. A wind was picking up and there was the distant rumbling of thunder. The stars were hidden behind dark clouds, massive shapes moving across the sky. The air was hot and humid. Soon it would rain, he thought: one of those torrential spring downpours that would feed the thousands of yellow wildflowers that spring up on the rocky hills around the city. He disliked those storms; he remembered how they drenched him to the bone as he hunted spear-birds when he was young. With Mathias. He pushed the man’s memory from his mind. He pushed away the grief, the despair, the horror, even as it flooded back. Why did Mathias have to die? Because the tramworker had been stubborn, had refused to compromise. But still shame filled Boris, though he could not be sure why.

  Boris closed the window and turned his back.

  He would visit Quadi tomorrow, down at the markets; he would secure a supply of Anlusian hot-wine. With hot-wine anything was possible. He opened the bottle that sat waiting for him in his kitchen and poured it savagely into his mouth. Around him, in the corners of the room, shadows flickered like shifting intimations of death. I’m not afraid of you, he thought. I’m Boris Autec. He took more gulps of wine. His mouth no longer burned from the taste—he had grown used to it. He laughed out loud to nobody. He laughed at the shadows, which rippled and shifted around him. He laughed at the future.

  ELEVEN

  Maximilian sat cross-legged and alone in the Communal Cavern. He felt the floor beneath him, hard beneath his thin straw mattress. A lamp glowed warmly on the floor beside him, while in the constant gloom of the seditionist hideout, Omar groaned in a half-conscious state, calling out words in a strange language, whether they were cries of help or warning or perhaps the names of forgotten cities on long lost maps, no one could tell. At other times he called the names of the gods, as if imploring them to intervene. Every now and then, he called out the name Nkando. Guilt and worry had gripped Max from the moment Omar had been burned. I should have stepped into the machine, Max thought. It should have been me calling out Nkando’s name. But no, he was not at fault. Omar’s terrible accident had been caused by Kamron’s policy of waiting and patient preparation.

  The evening stretched into night as Max ruminated. The problem with the people’s struggles against the Houses was their disparate nature. The factories went on strike when they individually chose, the Collegia whined and complained, the citizens whispered in the streets and squares, the university students circulated forbidden pamphlets, the seditionist groups printed their broadsheets (each with their own eccentricities) and the philosopher-assassins languished bitterly in the cafés. If somehow the seditionists could unite each of these groups into a enormous tidal wave of opposition, then they could change things forever. Images flooded into his mind of a beautiful world where each of these groups was given its rightful say, where, rather than fractured parts of a broken society, they would work organically together. No one should starve, no one should be broken on the wheels of production; everyone deserved a life which they freely chose. He would begin with the Xsanthians.

  Max examined his fellow seditionists, who sat in their three little groups, talking quietly. Giselle lounged splay-legged like some philosopher-assassin with Ejan’s little group, their voices low and incomprehensible in a far corner. The Veterans—Iniria, Antoine, Elena, Josiane, and Kamron—sat on a set of reclining chairs on the other side of the brazier. The six seditionists of Max’s own little circle were scattered here and there.

  Max placed his empty bowl on the ground and walked toward the Veterans, who looked up at him kindly. As the Veterans of the group—hence the title Veteran—they possessed an unchallenged authority. Though at times the group would discuss questions at a meeting of the entire collective, the Veterans’ opinions held sway. They had risked so much over the years, forsaking family, friends, lives. When they spoke, the rest of the seditionists listened. Foremost among them was Kamron.

  Max considered the best way to speak his mind, but decorum be damned, there was no point in circling around the question. “I’m going to go back to see the Xsanthians.”

  They sat in silence, looking at him with puzzlement.

  “Always the dreamer,” said Iniria softly, her chest rising and falling slowly as she breathed. She always spoke to calm things, to make things right. She was Kamron’s first weapon of conciliation. Born among the intelligentsia in Varenis, she had grown up in a world that produced meandering discourses that separated and rejoined like crisscrossing paths in the woods.

  “There’s no point being stuck in here.” Max said, looking around, “In this darkness. If there’s any point to us at all, it’s to get out there, among the people.”

  “Tritons are scarcely people.” Josiane, who sat on the floor to the side of the reclining chairs, used the derogatory term for Xsanthians as she rolled the links of her weighted chain in her hands. Max had never seen her use the weapon, but it looked brutal. Josiane had been a philosopher-assassin during the House Wars that had officially ended five years earlier, though unofficially they still burned at a low intensity. Josiane had come to seditionism late, and now her short-cropped hair was graying, though she remained as dangerous as a viper sitting on a path. Before she encountered Kamron’s writings, she had been an ascetic, living a life without possessions, denying herself pleasures. Now, she had attached herself to Kamron like a bodyguard.

  “Anyone who fights against the Houses is a friend of ours,�
� said Max.

  “That kind of logic simply doesn’t hold,” said Josiane, “Just because House Technis is rising doesn’t mean that we support House Arbor against it.”

  “Xsanthians are hardly one of the Houses. The whole House system is what we oppose. The analogy is false.”

  “Tritons are not even human,” repeated Josaine, the fire of polemic now in her eyes. “They don’t think like us. They have a strange intelligence, an odd collective consciousness. If they don’t think or feel as individuals, how they could have individual rights?”

  “They are forced to work for House Marin. And if you were to see them, torn from their coral homes beneath the water, forced to work like slaves, then your heart wouldn’t be so hard.” Emotion now flooded into Max. “The work is grueling, and they are controlled by thaumaturgical collars. The slightest disobedience and these collars can be tightened so that the Xsanthians fall to their knees, gasping for air. We should oppose the subjection of anyone, no matter who they are. I’m going to see them tomorrow. I am not asking your permission, I am telling you.”

  “Now, let’s calm down,” said Kamron. “Think about it, Max. With all these strikes, the Houses are increasing their surveillance. You’ll be followed, and you’ll lead them back here, and we’ll all end up in the House dungeons. We cannot let you threaten everything we’ve spent our lives building. So should you contact them again, don’t come back.”

  The silence hung in the air. At first Max stared at Kamron, this father figure to him, this man who he respected—no, loved. Now Kamron had escalated things to a breaking point and Max felt betrayed. Kamron had the support of the majority of the group, and now he was threatening to exile Max. Anger flooded into Max; he struggled to contain it. He didn’t deserve this. He wasn’t ready to leave the seditionist group … or was he? He was confused. Max searched for a way out of the confrontation. Eventually he nodded. “I understand. You’re right.” He looked at the Veterans as they looked at him. He turned and walked back to Omar, feeling animosity at his back.