Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  Preparations for Aya’s Day continued apace. The Call to Arms group, led by the childlike and bone-white Aceline, printed leaftlets, undertook nightly graffiti runs, sent out agitators into the city. Maximilian directed his followers, if they did not wish to or help build the cart or continue their study of thaumaturgy alone, to join with them. The results were immediately apparent. The idea spread through the city in whispers, philosopher-assassins debated it in the cafés. Most obviously, more and more citizens joined the seditionists. Ejan’s brutal tests had long been discarded and now he conducted them quickly with Aceline, whose artistic temperament allowed a quick and intuitive assessment of prospective members.

  Now that the process was less rigorous, the risk of agents infiltrating the group was high. The current of fear spread through the group. The seditionists now kept an eye on one another. Rumors were whispered; trust was eroded.

  Max kept Josiane close to him, and used her for many of his practical tasks. Josiane was his strong-arm and his defense, though he was not sure how far he could trust her. In the evenings, Maximilian sat close to Omar, whose strange fevers never seemed to break, but rolled over him like waves. Sometimes Maximilian would find Omar covered in sweat, mumbling his strange words, speaking in other languages. Omar’s burns had begun to heal, leaving great welts on his body. A hundred little scars pinpointed where the machine’s needles had pierced him. Max wished he could spend more time with his old friend, but instead a young dark-haired and brooding seditionist called Rikard had volunteered for the task.

  Toward the end of the first week of constructing the cart, news spread that the Order of the Sightless were staging a march through the city. Maximilian and Josiane walked down to Boulevarde Karlotte, which led to the northern gate. The walls here were covered with graffiti, anti-House slogans mixed with the usual sexual jokes and crude pornographic pictures.

  Lines of apocalyptics shuffled past, blinded by black hoods, chained together in a groaning chanting mass. The apocalyptics gave the appearance of a great, injured beast, heaving its way toward its final resting place. The city was filled with portents. It was said that spectral figures in the ruins of the ancient Forum had prophesized apocalyptic events, that on the hills surrounding Caeli-Amur sheep were giving birth to two-headed lambs. Flocks of birds wheeled in the sky above.

  As they watched the procession, Josiane spoke determinedly. “You are a fool, pursuing this mad plan of yours. As you hide yourself away from the group, building your cart, Ejan grows in strength. Soon he will have more supporters than you. Your alliance with the Call to Arms group is not enough.”

  “Ejan and I both have the same destination, but we are just pursuing different paths.”

  Josiane stepped in front of him and looked up at his face. “Have you thought that perhaps the paths you tread lead in fact to different destinations? Have you thought that Ejan in fact is leading the group to a frontal assault against the Houses, and that in such a fight, the group can only come to destruction? I think you should reconsider. Abandon your plans for the Sunken City—organize your group, outmaneuver Ejan, take control.”

  “What hope do we have without reaching Caeli-Enas? What hope do we have to protect ourselves against the Houses in the long run? A demonstration on Aya’s Day may be a success. The Houses may not even choose to attack. We may indeed have a long wave of demonstrations before winter. But after that, what happens? You think this mood will stay in the citizens forever? No, sooner or later there will be a test of strength. Sooner or later we will face the Houses on the cobblestoned streets as two armies. Then, we must have a way of combating their thaumaturgists.”

  “That isn’t the reason you want to visit the Sunken City. No, it’s purely for your own interests. You have visions of becoming a great thaumaturgist yourself, a vision with little to do with seditionism.”

  Josiane’s words struck Max like a blow to the chest. She spoke the truth: He did have hopes to become a great thaumaturgist. But his hopes were not for his own gain. Rather, he would use his knowledge for the good of others. He hoped to serve. But even as he thought this, he knew there was more to it. He hoped to serve, but he hoped he would take a special place in seditionism. He hoped that others would hear his name, and repeat it to each other. Confusion gripped him. When he returned from the Sunken City filled with thaumaturgical knowledge, then the value of his expedition would be clear. He would be able to train an army of liberation-thaumaturgists, even as waves of demonstrations rolled through the city following Aya’s Day, he would be able to face down the House thaumaturgists with their own weapons.

  When Max did not respond, Josiane said, “When enough citizens oppose the Houses, then their thaumaturgical power will become impotent. What would the Houses do? Massacre the entire populace?”

  “Citizens!” laughed Maximilian. “Do you know what being a citizen once meant? It meant representation at the Forum. It meant having rights. But look at the Ancient Forum now—nothing but ghostly ruins. The citizens’ strength is degraded. No, we must go to Caeli-Enas.” Now he was simply being obdurate.

  “You trust too many of the people surrounding you. Not only Ejan, but others, too. Kata is efficient, yet there’s something about her that I don’t trust.”

  Maximilian stopped. “Kata?”

  “She moves like an athlete. She moves like she’s been trained. Most would not be able to recognize it.” Josiane stood motionless before him.

  “You’re imagining it. She’s trustworthy, I feel it. And you and Ejan tested her. It’s the others, the newest ones, we should worry about.” Maximilian felt a slight tug of fear. Was his judgment in error when it came to Kata? No, he wouldn’t believe it; he pushed the thought from his mind, but it resurfaced.

  Josiane looked back at the apocalyptics as they passed through the crowds of the boulevard, downward toward the docks. “What does it matter anyway? Ejan will destroy you in the end.”

  That evening, Maximilian found Omar lying quietly, staring at the ceiling, fully conscious. Though his face had healed considerably, it was still scarred horribly.

  “Maximilian,” he said. “There is a coldness in the night. Do you remember how sometimes a cold wind would whip across to the Dyrian coast from Varenis? Remember how we’d play dice there, when we were children?”

  “You’d always win. The luck always fell your way.”

  “Even though you could calculate the odds,” laughed Omar. “Can you calculate them now, with Ejan and the others? With the city?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Max. “Everything seems hard to judge. Everything’s in motion.”

  “You keep your façade of confidence too fixed,” said Omar.

  “I know,” said Max, looking down at his boot. The twine had unraveled a little more, like everything else, he thought. He pressed it against the leather with his hand, but it made little difference. Soon it would unravel completely and he would need new boots. “I know,” he repeated.

  “It’s all right to be uncertain, you know.”

  “Ejan is certain,” said Max.

  “Look at him!” Omar spoke again softly. “Look at him.”

  “Sleep.” Max touched Omar’s shoulder. “Rest. Rest is important.”

  Max returned to his own bed and lay down. He realized that he, too, was exhausted. But he could not stop his mind from racing. Josiane was right about the changes within the seditionist group. Tomorrow he would meet with Aceline, convince her that Ejan’s violent strategy must be stopped. Together they would demand that Ejan abandon his plans, give up his workshop and join with the rest of the group. Faced with the two of them, Ejan would be unable to refuse. If he did, perhaps they would banish him also. Aceline’s support would be crucial.

  Maximilian closed his eyes, and when he opened them again he was not sure how long he had slept. It was dark, and when he looked across at his friend’s mattress, Omar was gone.

  “Omar?” He sat up. He caught a glimpse of a light—now yellow in the darkness, no
w obscured—bobbing in the direction of the machine room.

  Max lit his own lamp and adjusted it. Putting on his shoes, he pursued Omar. He moved along the purple-misted corridor, into that cavernous crypt where the machines seemed filled with menace. At the far side of the room, he again saw the light. He hurried on.

  When he came to the far side of the cavern, he stopped and gasped. The huge black round doors they had thought immovable had been opened. Beyond lay a corridor leading to a hexagonal room the size of the communal chamber. Shapes—perhaps thirty of them—hovered above him in the darkness. They looked like long-backed chairs. Filled with wonder, Maximilian raised his lamp so that it illuminated the walls of this new room. Like many of the works of the ancients, it seemed built for giants. The very walls seemed filled with unknown technologies: circular eyelike protuberances, glossy flat spaces, levers and gears, rough surfaced ideograms of unknown meaning. As always, the ancients seemed a long-lost race, alien and incomprehensible.

  There was no sign of Omar.

  Maximilian continued on, crossing the room and passing through the doorway on the other side. He came to a small chamber circled by four archways. Through each archway lay even smaller chambers, the size of storerooms, in the shape of hexagonal prisms. He stepped into one and with a rushing sound—phht—a wall appeared where he had entered. It must have been a door, but the sheer rapidity of its motion meant he did not see it close. He felt gentle pressure on his feet—the chamber was in motion. One of the walls disappeared with another rushing sound and he stepped out into a hexagonal-shaped corridor that disappeared into the darkness. Along the walls, the floor and the roof, every ten feet or so were square black pads. He placed his hand against one, and a previously unseen doorway opened. This time he just caught its movement as the door disappeared into the wall.

  Maximilian looked into a hexagonal chamber, its sides about eight feet long. Inside lay a barely visible human form on a long table, shadows cast oddly over it. He leaned in with his lamp and the light struck the figure. It was the dried-husk of a cadaver, an elongated human, or humanlike creature, its skin shrunken and brown around its bones. Into both of its arms, at the elbow joints, plunged a number of wires, each a different color, two of them translucent. Some form of tube ran from beneath the table, while another one descended into the thing’s mouth. The creature did not seem to have died in pain, for the cadaver was relaxed, and that very relaxation made the image all the more horrific: not the clean white bones of those long dead, nor the fresh calmness of the newly dead, but something in between.

  On the walls were more black pads.

  Maximilian stepped down through the door, onto the slanted side of the cell. He put his hand down to steady himself, heard a rush of wind and stepped onto nothingness. He fell and his last image before his lamp shattered was of another cadaver beneath him, at an odd angle, as if it lay on a table not on the hexagonal room’s floor, but one of its sides. He struck the body and felt the hardness of skin over bone and the two of them slipped off the table and crashed onto the floor. The cadaver tugged at the tubes plunging into it, and he grabbed on to the thing’s waist as a drowning man clings to a plank in a stormy sea.

  Everything here was made of odd angles: these chambers, it appeared, were stacked one on top of another in some kind of honeycomb formation. The corridor above him seemed designed so that its floor was exactly the same as its ceiling, that their relationship to the cells around them was exactly the same, so that all one needed to do was rotate them to make the floor become a ceiling, and the ceiling become a floor. Everything was perfectly symmetrical.

  Max scrambled around for the lamp, touching something dry and hard, perhaps the limb of the cadaver. He found the lamp and, taking a match from the little metal compartment at the lamp’s bottom, lit it through one of its broken panes.

  Beside him lay the cadaver, its back bent like some acrobat frozen in mid-backflip. Some of the tubes had been torn from its arm and long thin needles hung from their ends. Maximilian scrambled up and the floor gave way and he fell into another room, this time the lamp continued to burn. In this little cell, the table was above him, and the cadaver hung from the tubes and wires like a trapeze artist. Again the floor gave way into another cell and when Maximilian struck the corner of a table, the lamp went out. He reached out for it, the floor gave way and he fell, struck something else and everything went black.

  When he came to, Maximilian was lying in a long corridor, much like the one through which he’d entered, lit by a dim light. How many cells he had fallen through, he could not tell. There was no sense to this place. His lamp was gone, but green beads that ran along its roof lighted the corridor. Max pulled himself to his feet and walked to the end of the corridor, his arms aching, his ribs burning. There a door opened into an elevator, much like the one he had arrived in. He stepped into it and with the gentle lessening of pressure on his feet, he recognized it was again in motion. When the door opened he stepped out, passed into another hexagonal passageway. Again he pressed the walls, and they rapidly opened onto more hexagonal cells in which lay dried, dusty cadavers. He continued along the corridor to a crossroads. Here his corridor was intersected by another which ran in one direction at an obtuse angle, both up and away, while in the other it ran acutely downward and closer to the direction from which he had come. He marched up and to the left, occasionally touching the walls to see the emaciated bodies of the dead, lying in repose. Finally he came to another intersection, where the new corridor ran again in one direction at exactly the same obtuse angle as the first. This one was so steep that he could not climb it. With horror, Max sat down. He was lost in a labyrinth of corridors, surrounded by the dead, in a place where the angles seemed to make no sense at all. He put his head into his hands. He was lost.

  He turned back. How long he wandered those corridors he could not be sure. He came to hexagonal elevators, stepped into them. Sometimes they came to black hallways without lighting and he crawled along until he was sure that they were not the way to the machine room. Tired and hungry, he rested for a while. At other times he cursed out loud, his voice echoing down the empty corridors. Time stretched out indefinitely. He pictured the seditionists far away in the Communal Cavern, going about their business, his apprentices, learning their thaumaturgical formulae, the printing press for A Call to Arms rattling away—and Ejan and his troops, carrying their explosives out of the cavern. He slept briefly, woke in a fright, his heart racing. He walked and traveled in more elevators, searched more corridors until at some point, scrabbling down a darkened corridor, he looked up and noticed great chairs hanging up in the dark. As he stumbled through the machine room, he heard a deep rumble from behind him. Curious he headed back from where he came—perhaps it was Omar. He stopped and again he gasped. The great circular doors were once again closed. The path to the strange labyrinth was closed. He struggled to reopen them, pressing the pads around the doors, pulling on levers that shifted and turned but seemed to have no effect. If Omar was behind the doors, he’d have to make his own way out.

  Max pressed his hand against the cold metal. “Take care, friend.”

  He passed through the machine room, and in the far distance, the glint of a light.

  When Maximilian came back into the Communal Cavern, the place was abuzz with activity. Three seditionists lay blackened and bleeding on the floor, while others tended to them.

  Ejan stood overlooking the situation. “Fools!”

  Maximilian walked across to them. “What happened?”

  Giselle looked over from the corpses. “Some of the Xsanthians died. The docks. They were planting an incendiary on the docks.”

  “The Xsanthians are not our enemies,” said Maximilian.

  “It was an accident. We were hoping to sink a steamer. Anyway, in a war, people die,” said Giselle.

  From the entranceway to the cavern came the sounds of a scuffle. Josiane and another two seditionists were dragging in a guard dressed in the blue uni
form of House Marin. The guard was bleeding profusely from the stomach. “He followed them to the underground entrance. Josiane stabbed him. Who knows if there were any others?”

  A crowd gathered around the guard, whose face was white and drawn. He was breathing heavily.

  “Were there more of you following us?” asked Josiane. When he didn’t respond, she slapped him once, twice. “Did any others follow?”

  The guard looked up.“Water.”

  “Get him water,” said Maximilian. But when Giselle came with a flask, Ejan took it from her and held out of reach before the guard. “Did anyone else follow with you?”

  Blood was dribbling from the man’s mouth, and he gave what looked like macabre smile and his body relaxed.

  Maximilian grabbed Ejan by the shirt. “You fool. You’ve endangered all of us. You kill our friends. You lead our enemies here. For what?”

  Ejan’s forearm crashed down on Maximilian’s wrists, forcing him to lose his grip. Ejan’s two fists punched into Max’s chest. Max found himself falling. His legs, weakened by his recent ordeal, failed to hold him. He hit the ground, his back striking the stone floor followed by the crack of his head. Everything went white for a moment. Ejan looked down, his face still and cold like that of a statue. From behind, Giselle wrapped her arms around Ejan to stop further violence. Josiane appeared beside Max, her weighted chain in one hand, a bloodied dagger in the other.

  Max’s mind was already racing; he knew intuitively that he’d made a mistake. He looked up at the northerner.

  Ejan sneered. “It’s a war, Maximilian. The sooner you understand that, the better.”

  NINETEEN

  Kata had witnessed the confrontation between Maximilian and Ejan with amazement. Many of the seditionists were afraid of Ejan, who seemed cold and fearless. Maximilian had gathered his own group around him. There were only fifteen of them. An original small group and ten or so recent adherents, all of whom hoped to develop their skills in thaumaturgy. Max explained that he would ally himself with Aceline to put a halt to Ejan’s plans. They might even exile him. But Oewen urged against any confrontation with Ejan. Max tried to push the issue and with that move, lost the confidence of his adherents. The dark-haired Rikard, who had been looking after Omar stood up and, without a word, left to join to Ejan’s group. Max had backed down. He felt their weakness as much as the others did. When they finally left, Kata caught Max looking away past the machine room, toward the great doors that Omar had passed through. There was sadness in his eyes that again moved Kata. Max had weaknesses also, she knew.