Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  FIFTEEN

  Boris placed the scrying ball on his desk and swiveled his hand around its surface. A point of light shimmered inside the ball and the mechanism began to spin, little interlacing cogs whizzing around. The point of light intensified and grew into a blue sphere that quickly filled the ball. The mechanism hummed and the events in the seditionist’s hideout were all of a sudden projected into the room. The images came superimposed upon the material world around Boris. He adjusted the focus by running his fingers over its surface as if he were drawing something out of it. The images shrank a little, though still they surrounded him—what a wondrous thing it was. Kata had done well, placing the device somewhere high, where it captured the vista of the base, and yet could be focused on the actions or words of an individual.

  Boris watched the curly-haired Maximilian, the idealistic dreamer who thought he would create an army of liberation-thaumaturgists to bolster mass activity of the citizens against the Houses, the way a skeleton holds up a body. The glacial-featured Ejan’s plans of military action against the Houses seemed more clearly achievable. Still, there was something about the wild idealism of Maximilian that unsettled Boris. Each of them contained an element of the other’s personality: just as Maximilian was conspiratorial, Ejan had an element of the dreamer combined with his hardness.

  With the touch of a spinning finger on the sphere, Boris focused the ball on Ejan, who was talking to Giselle near the door to their workshop. Boris had watched Ejan’s followers carry all kinds of materials—metal and wood and crates and vials of chemicals—into that workshop.

  “It’s dangerous.” Giselle said to Ejan. She looked around to make sure no one overheard them.

  “The question is: which House?” said Ejan.

  “House Arbor,” said Giselle. “They’re like a parasite on the city. At least Technis and Marin are developing new technologies. Arbor is just a decaying corpse strapped to us. And anyway, they’re the weakest, the least able to strike back.”

  “You misunderstand,” said Ejan. “The point is to create the greatest symbol. We need to make ourselves into a legend. Our actions must rouse the citizens. We must be the spark that starts the fire.”

  “The strongest House then,” said Giselle. “We start with Technis.”

  Ejan nodded his head slowly. “But why stop at one House? Why not strike at them all? Then the officiates of Technis won’t be the only ones to learn a lesson.”

  Boris spun his hand over the scrying glass. The image shrank around him, so small now that it almost disappeared inside the ball itself. The officiates of Technis won’t be the only ones to learn a lesson, he thought. No, indeed they won’t. A plan hatched in his mind. If the Houses united against the seditionists, they could reassert their authority over the city and quell the strikes and disturbances. Then, once this was done, they could return to struggling amongst themselves. Would the Elo-Talern, who for so long had stood aside from the Houses, allow this? A part of Boris wondered if perhaps there the Directors of Marin or Arbor were proposing precisely the same idea to the Elo-Talern. But no, he thought, Arbor was conservative, caught in the old ways, and Marin was an observer whose focus lay across the seas as much as in the city.

  Boris left his room for the dry and cold corridors deep in the mountain. No matter how many times he made the journey, he could not accustom himself to it. Each time he thought he would be calmer, but each time the sight of that creature—the unnatural planes of its face, the spidery length of its limbs, the gaunt cadaverous eyes—unnerved him. Each time he found himself stammering, looking down at the floor, hoping to avoid the flashes of the decaying thing that he imagined to be the real Elo-Talern, the essence behind the appearance.

  She was waiting for him in the throne room, lounging lethargically. In her hand, she held a smoke-filled bottle, from which she inhaled deeply and exhaled a long gray plume. The bottle filled once more with curling smoke.

  Boris looked between the pillars to the fog that hovered in the darkness. He tensed his body. “The seditionists are planning a wave of assassinations. There is unrest on the streets: riots, demonstrations, strikes. I think it is time for the Houses to collaborate with each other.”

  Elo-Drusa stood, placed the bottle on the throne, and stepped slowly across the room. She passed behind one of the pillars and emerged on its other side, her movements jittery. She disappeared completely and then emerged several feet closer as if out of thin air. Boris’s legs trembled.

  “It can be a lonely life, can’t it? It can be so very long.” She stepped close to him, her long fingers touching him on the cheek. She produced from her gray and tattered robe some kind of measuring equipment: a long rod with two metal grips at its end. She loosened one of the grips and placed it over his head, cocking her own as she was performing internal calculations. “You have done well, Boris. We haven’t had the role of Director since Hausmann was killed in the House Wars ten years ago. And it makes sense for there to be a Director now. I don’t want to oversee this world of petty dramas. Director, is that what you want?”

  Boris looked down away from her face, which was all too close to him. As it flashed briefly into the deathly corpselike visage, like the shrunken skull of a long-nosed dog or a horse, perhaps, he felt a blast of cold air.

  “Keep still!” She turned her measuring rod at a different angle, again measured his head.

  Boris held his head motionless. “There is something else that I’d like.”

  Elo-Drusa pulled back, “Oh there is, is there?”

  “You said that I could have anything I wanted.” Boris steeled his voice.

  In an instant one of her hands was closed around his throat, the long fingers viselike, like thin metal clamps. He reached up and grabbed a chill arm; its fingers tightened slowly.

  His body tried to force out a cough, but all he could do was heave, as if he were trying to vomit something up.

  She brought her face close to his and bared her lips, her teeth too long for a human skull, her forehead high and alien. Her large eyes, a purplish blue color with flecks of green and set too far apart, looked at him slightly askew, as if she focused on something slightly behind him.

  She dropped him to the floor and he collapsed and scuttled across the floor a few feet like a crab.

  “Well,” she said, “What is it?”

  “There is a Siren … Paxaea … She sings at the Opera.”

  “The new one.”

  “I,” Boris started. “She.” He looked up and eventually settled for, “Her.”

  “Ah, you search for love, is that it? Or is it simply adoration and power?” The Elo-Talern croaked a horrible laugh and leaned over him like some gigantic stick insect. “Why her?”

  Boris scanned his thoughts but could find no answer. Eventually he ignored the question altogether. “She has the power of suggestion. I cannot—”

  “We will have to silence her then. In the meantime, you may begin to work with the other Houses. What do you plan to do about the seditionists?”

  “Arrest them, break them, ruin them.”

  “Perhaps we have something in common.” She took his hand and extended his arm. She ran her fingers along his inner elbow. “Look at your veins. Beautiful.” She caressed him with long skeletal fingers.

  Back in Boris’s office, the pneumatique whizzed through the hole in the wall and stopped above him. He opened the little door and unrolled the paper within it. There printed with black ink was a message: Pick Paxaea up from the Opera in the evening. She’ll wait for you. I think you’ll find her amenable to your friendship. You may need this to achieve the silence you so obviously need. At the bottom of the note was written the command word for Paxaea’s torc—Taritia, the archipelago in the eastern sea where the Sirens lived —and beneath that was simply printed Elo-Drusa. Boris smiled sadly at the black joke: to use the Siren’s home as the command word was an act of cruelty by whichever thaumaturgist had fixed the torc.

  In the afternoon, Boris racked
his mind for what he could do to impress the Siren. What would she want? She was a prisoner, the torc around her neck like a ball and chain. Once he had won her over, convinced her to care for him, he could release her from the torc, set her free. He imagined that future now. They would live in his house, so empty now, and fill it with life. Saidra would happily visit, and she and Paxaea would be like sisters. Boris would have a family again. A family—he rolled the word in his mouth.

  Boris took a carriage along Caeli-Amur’s boulevards, bypassing the chugging steam-trams. Crowds amassed on the streets in little groups: grime-streaked workers, scarlet-scarved students, street urchins slipping in between them. The cafés and salons had long been the province of philosophy, especially among the philosopher-assassins, but now the debate had spread, and it had moved beyond philosophy, to politics. Politics—it was in the air, it was catching, like some kind of plague.

  The carriage came to a stop at a crowded intersection. Boris looked out to see a group of House Arbor militia dragging a man across the street, striking him with batons as a small crowd yelled abuse at them. Force had always been the Houses’ way, and it had worked until now. But the crushing of the tramworkers hadn’t discouraged anyone. Every day came news of riots and protests. Yesterday someone had set one of Technis’s new apartment complexes alight. The day before a mob had run through the Arantine beating whomever they found. At least one Arbor servant had been stripped naked and forced to run from the jeering crowd.

  As the carriage jolted again into motion and left the crossroads behind, Boris continued to reflect. It was his role to restore order by a new means. Now was the time to unite Caeli-Amur and show that they were all citizens together—as in the time of the ancients. Yes, the workers and citizens had grievances, and such grievances needed to be heard. The extremists—insurgents, seditionists—would be crushed, cut off like a dead limb. The rest, good people like Mathias and the tramworkers, would be shown that everyone had an interest in order, in peaceful development. In Boris’s mind images of a glorious future arose, with him as a benevolent overseer.

  When he arrived at the Opera, he noticed a small oily stain on his gray suit. He licked a finger and tried to wash it out, but it was fixed. He pulled his long coat around him to hide it.

  He walked as regally as he could into the Opera’s great entrance hall. High above the balls of light joyfully danced around the domed roof. One of them dropped down to hover behind him, illuminating everything around him. He looked back at it, and like a frightened bird, it skittishly rose into the air, but as he continued on, it descended again.

  A few suited figures hurried across the white marbled space. Behind a long desk a man looked up, buttoned his carmine waistcoat, brushed it with his hands and rushed over to Boris.

  “Officiate Autec, Officiate Autec, we’ve been so looking forward to seeing you.” The man’s hair was oiled slickly back.

  Boris looked at the man silently. There was a tone of respect in the man’s voice that Boris liked.

  “I’m Intendant Moreau,” said the man. “Let me summon Paxaea for you.”

  “No,” said Boris. “Take me to her.”

  Moreau looked at him, “Yes, of course.”

  Boris followed the man through the winding labyrinthine passages, past the changing rooms and into an elevator. All the time the globe of light followed Boris until at the elevator he glared at the light as it drifted through the doors. Seeing Boris’s annoyance, Moreau waved his arms and raised his voice. “Shoo!” The light nervously darted away back in the direction of the Entrance Hall.

  “Sometimes they take a liking to people,” said Moreau.

  When they emerged from the elevator, they passed along a corridor and came to a door. The Intendant knocked. “Paxaea. Officiate Autec is here to see you.”

  There was no response.

  Boris’s heart beat rapidly at the thought of her, at the thought of her eyes, large and emerald, at the thought of her voluptuous hips.

  The Intendant opened the door. “Why don’t you enter, Officiate Autec?”

  Boris walked into the room and was immediately struck by the deep solar hues—burgundy, vermillion and cerise—so common in the east. A sheet of deep crimson fabric with small glittering mirrors embroidered into it was suspended from the roof like a tent. Two stained glass lanterns hung in opposite corners, while a large four-poster bed complete with curtains and roof sat squarely in the middle of the room. Incense burned an exotic sweetness, and there she stood, Paxaea, her back turned to him. Surveying the city through a barred window, she wore the dress that shifted subtly around her like an animal, grouping together at her back, then spreading out and thinning again. In that moment Boris felt that he was somehow broken before the Siren, and that only she could fix him. He yearned for a closeness he had not felt since the death of his wife. He imagined himself pressing against this magnificent creature, the curves of her breasts, her thighs, soft against him. He imagined her pressing against him, the two of them whispering to each other in the soft light.

  “Paxaea,” he said.

  She didn’t respond.

  “Paxaea, I’ve come.” He waited for what seemed a vast stretch of time.

  Eventually she turned and her huge eyes were a brilliant jade, beautiful and cold, like gems newly uncovered in the dark recesses of a mine. “Officiate Autec, I’ve been expecting you.” Then, her tone dropped half an octave and reverberated deeply as she used her second voice. “How kind of you to come.”

  The sound unnerved him; a thousand needles pricked his skin. Again he was excitedly repelled by the disproportion of her face and body. Her too-large jaw intimated a reptile, and the smoothness of her olive skin suggested a ceramic statue. A shiver ran into his stomach—a clutch of fear and desire.

  SIXTEEN

  Boris led Paxaea through the passages of the Opera and into the square. He opened the carriage door for her and they sat opposite each other in plush cushioned seats. The wheels rattled over the cobblestones as the carriage headed south up along the cliffs, not far from House Arbor’s plant-covered palace. They passed through the city’s southern gates. The houses continued on past the city’s high stone walls, like froth bubbling from a bowl. It was darker out here; the gas lamps that lit the outlying areas shone weakly in the darkness. The air was warm and still.

  “Where are we going?” asked Paxaea distractedly. She had a strange impassive air around her, as if she looked down on everything from a distant height. As when they had first met, she spoke only with one voice, the second a soft reverberation below it.

  “It’s a surprise,” said Boris.

  She didn’t react.

  “What’s it like, the Taritian Archipelago?” he asked.

  The features of her face were still, as if she were carved from porcelain.

  “I want to know about you,” said Boris. “I want to understand you.”

  She looked away from him, through the window and into the darkness. “This is all you need to know about me.” She pointed to the torc around her neck.

  She was newly captured. She had not yet been broken by servitude—a good thing. Boris racked his mind. How could he penetrate this defense of hers, while she was still defiant? “I hear the islands are beautiful, that there are rock pools of aquamarine water, in which orange and red fish swim with little blue octopi. I hear that the reefs around the islands are littered with ships filled with treasures.”

  She smiled sadly. “They’re filled with the corpses of dead sailors. The dead lay everywhere, don’t they?”

  He reached out and touched her hand but it was cold and lifeless. “I’m so glad we have a chance to talk.”

  “Isn’t it something?” said Paxaea obliquely.

  “I could take the torc off, you know,” said Boris.

  She looked at him. There was something carnivorous in her eyes; her inner eyelid twitched forward and retreated again. “But you won’t. You’d be too scared of me.”

  “I’d like to
trust you,” said Boris. “I hope we can reach that stage in our friendship.” The word friend echoed jarringly in his ears.

  When they arrived at the gardens, south of Caeli-Amur, overseen by House Arbor, they passed through a great cast-iron gate imprinted with images of the god Demidae, crying alone in her boat on a great flat ocean. Like the water palaces and the Opera, the gardens were neutral zones; even during the most vicious House Wars they were safe for House agents to frequent.

  In any case, Boris had armed himself with a knife, which he kept hidden beneath his suit, and employed a philosopher-assassin, called Tonio, to protect him. Now Tonio, a short, stocky man, with hair shaved close, was driving the carriage. There was something thuggish and menacing about his wrestler’s gait. Tonio was an advocate of Cynicism, a philosophy descended from Ioga, who was called “The Weeping Philosopher.” Ioga’s most famous work, Considerations on Pessimism, argued through a series of dialogues that failure was the defining factor in History. The cataclysm, Ioga claimed, was the crucial pedagogic event, teaching everything one needed to know about the nature of humanity. Boris hoped that Tonio’s study of failure didn’t extend too much to his own career.

  Shadows sat brooding beneath the garden’s trees. White marble statues towered in the moonlight. The park was magnificently crafted. The trees, each placed in exactly the right position, were sculpted just so. Their branches reached over the canals and paths like the arms of gentle giants. Fountains and small waterfalls fed into the canals, while small walls crisscrossed the gardens, disappearing into the shadows. Statues of the gods and heroes towered over the park from little constructed hills, said to be ancient burial mounds. Some said the statues moved around at night, acting out in some crazed game of charades the last dreams and desires of those buried beneath.