Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  A great grinding sound came from the courtyard’s rear gate, which slowly rolled open. The Furies strained at unseen bonds. The gray-suited thaumaturgists appeared like dog handlers leaving for a hunt. As soon as the gate was fully open, the whole monstrous conglomeration passed through the gate and out into the city, to descend upon the Xsanthians in a storm of horror. Behind them, a squad of Technis guards followed to put the half-dead to the sword and to clean up the mess.

  “Fetch Tonio for me,” said Boris. “He and I will follow the detachment to the docks.”

  Armand looked at him sternly. “Remember Bourg’s warnings. Arbor may be decaying, but they are still one of Caeli-Amur’s ancient Houses.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  When the carriage arrived at the docks, Tonio leaped like a monkey monkeylike from the top of it and landed on the ground with a soft padding sound. He looked around protectively as Boris stepped out.

  Already the Furies had been and gone. Along the docks a few corpses of Xsanthians lay like great beached fish rotting in the sun. But most of the conflict would have happened beneath the waters. Boris imagined the Furies, plunging into the sea and pursuing the fleeing Xsanthians like black-stained currents. He remembered the tramworkers’ strike, which seemed so long ago. History itself seemed to have sped up, and a few months seemed like whole lifetimes. He still felt the grief, though. It clutched at his heart and made him yearn for hot-wine again. The corpses of the Xsanthians made him think of Mathias, lying blackened before the factory, the fishlike things emerging from him. Boris felt like crying.

  He walked along one of the piers, where some remaining Xsanthians, their heads hung low, unloaded caskets from a cutter. Elsewhere sails fluttered in the breeze and the wind whined past masts and ropes. Order had been restored.

  Across the Market Square, citizens watched from afar. Boris could practically feel their despair. This should dent their enthusiasm for the Aya’s Day demonstration, thought Boris. Let them run through the city, spreading word about who was the real power in the city.

  Content, Boris returned to his carriage. Tonio leaped to the platform attached to the rear of the carriage as Boris opened the carriage door. But Boris didn’t feel like being alone. He wanted company, someone to take his mind off the horror of things. As he placed his foot on the step, Boris looked up at Tonio. “Why not ride in here with me?”

  Tonio raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

  “Come and talk.”

  Tonio shrugged and leaped down again.

  As the carriage rattled over the cobblestones, Boris said, “Technis’s thaumaturgists resisted this action today. They suggested that loyalty needed to be bought. What do you think, philosopher?”

  The Cynic’s eyes lit up with excitement. “These days it is hard to tell who is bought, and who is a true ally. What is certain is that he who fails the least will triumph. These are the questions the great Ioga would have us ask: What mistakes have your opponents made? What mistakes have you made?”

  Boris laughed involuntarily. He could barely think about them, piling one on the other like corpses in a mass grave. Eventually he joked halfheartedly, “Mistakes? I’ve never made a mistake in my life. What mistake could I have made with the thaumaturgists? To punish them, that would be the mistake. But I bought them off with promises. After all, I need them to deal with all—” Boris waved his toward the window, “—this.”

  The carriage climbed up Via Persine, through the mobs looking on like carrion-dogs from the drylands to the south. To Boris, the people looked increasingly gaunt and pinched-faced. There was a meanness to them that frightened him. This was the mob that Armand feared also, the base masses living without belief or principle, without a sense of honor or order, without education. They rutted in rooming houses in front of their children, whom they left to run wild in the factory district or the slums of the Lavere. Family, that was what had always driven Boris. He thought now of Saidra. How he missed her. Why had he not visited her in the Opera while he was with Paxaea? But he knew the answer, for she would be full of contempt and disgust for him. The thought filled him with even more misery.

  The carriage drew to a halt and Boris looked out the window to where a cart blocked their way. “Move that cart!” he yelled. But strangely there seemed to be nobody in charge of it. Instead it sat motionless on the street. A gray-haired woman looked at him through a window and retreated into the shadows. From a side alley, a man looked suspiciously from a doorway, then hurried away.

  Boris frowned. Something was wrong; he could sense it. A feeling of panic rose within him. He looked farther up and down the streets, where people backed away as they, too, perceived something awry.

  Tonio reached rapidly for the door just as his side of the carriage exploded inward. There were no flames, but a thousand and more shards of wood and metal showered the two men. Tonio held his face in his hands and screamed terribly. Blood poured through his fingers and dribbled down his arms. When he took his hands from his face, his face was nothing but a bloody mess, the skin and flesh gone, a red bony structure revealed below. He fell toward Boris, who pushed the body of the philosopher-assassin away. The body fell backwards through the gaping hole that had been the side of the carriage.

  Boris threw open the door to his right. Hitting the ground, he staggered away from the carriage. The crowd had backed still farther away. A washerwoman dropped her basket; a maid raised one hand to her face; a young man clenched his jaw. The carriage driver scrambled away over the horses, one of which had tried to leap the cart unsuccessfully.

  Still moving, Boris looked back. A great fat man burst through the carriage after him, a huge bolt-thrower in his hand. Boris turned and ran. He heard a smaller explosion and to his right a heavy woman with a scarf on her head was thrown backwards, her chest a gaping ragged circle of blood.

  Boris stopped and turned, knowing that he had no hope against this fat philosopher-assassin. Around him the crowd fled and Boris was left alone, standing on the wide boulevard.

  The gargantuan assassin, his weight shifting as he walked forward, held a heavy bolt-thrower against his hip, its barrel composed of a hundred little holes. It was one of the new incendiary-throwers, imported by the New-Men from Tir-Aki, or Ari-Aki. Boris laughed grimly to himself. Technology, progress—they seemed to destroy everything.

  “I am Fat Nik. You know why I’m here.” The killer strode toward him.

  “Arbor sent you to kill me.”

  “You understand it’s nothing personal. Is there anything you’d like me to do before I take your life? Words I should pass to anyone?”

  Boris thought of Paxaea. He thought of Mathias. He thought of Saidra. He looked around him at the emptied street. The people were gone and with them, the life of the city. In its place stood a ghost town, the memories of long-gone people whispering around the gray stones. There was no escape. There would be no way that he could run. The killer would cut him down before he had moved two paces. The place was a desolate place to die.

  “There is nothing I have to say.” Boris looked Nik in the eye. “There is no one who will care that I am gone. There is nothing I can say that can redeem me.”

  Nik looked at Boris and shifted on his heavy legs, his body moving around him as his equilibrium shifted. “I’ve ridden the trains in Varenis. I’ve sailed the seas past Taritia. I’ve killed many men in this life. Never has one of those men had nothing to say, no one to beg forgiveness from, no one to tell that they love them. You are unique.”

  Boris nodded.

  “Boris Autec. I’ve killed many men in my life. On behalf of House Arbor and Director Lefebvre, I’m here now to kill you.”

  Boris closed his eyes but opened them again. Better to face his fate.

  Fat Nik pulled the trigger and the bolt-thrower exploded in his hand, as if the assassin had been holding a bomb. The malfunction caused the entire mechanism to blow apart, and Nik’s forearm with it. A look of terrible pain shuddered across his face, he fell to
his knees, and he glanced down at the bloodied stump of his arm. In desperation, Nik tore his shirt from his back with his left hand and wrapped it as quickly as possible around his stump.

  But already Boris was beside him. Boris pressed his knife to the throat of the philosopher-assassin. “Is there anything you’d like to say, before you die? Any words for anyone?”

  Nik looked up at Boris, his face gray and slippery with pain and shock. “You can’t do this. I’m not meant to die yet.”

  Boris cocked his head and smiled. “So your last words are for me?”

  Nik nodded sadly and looked at the ground. “I have a sister, she works at Café Legras, on Via Gracchia. Send her word that I am sorry about Father’s disappearance. Beg her forgiveness. She’ll understand. Now, just do it quickly. Don’t make a mess of it.”

  All Boris’s problems rose in his mind: the strikes, the pressures from the other officiates, the thaumaturgists, the other houses. He was filled with a blinding anger, and he would take it out on this fat assassin.

  Nik started to tremble just a fraction and Boris was immediately shaken from his rage. Looking at the assassin, he saw himself only minutes ago reflecting back on his life. And how had Boris’s life turned out? He never meant things to turn like this. He wanted to make things better in the city. He wanted to find someone to share this with. He wanted a family again.

  He took the knife from the man’s throat. “Go.”

  Nik looked up in surprise. He staggered to his feet, his face still blank with shock. “You really are unique.”

  The philosopher-assassin turned and ran past the carriage and into a side alleyway, there disappearing like an alley cat down a drain, leaving Boris standing alone and alive on the boulevard.

  After the assassination attempt, Boris stood in front of the carriage, where Tonio’s body lay, his face just a bloody pulp. Your mistake, thought Boris, was to accept my invitation to sit with me in the carriage. He calmed the skittish horses with soothing words and gentle patting of their necks. Alone, he pushed the cart from the crossroads, mounted the carriage, and drove it back to the Technis Complex alone, for the driver had long since fled.

  When Boris returned to his office, the city was shrouded in the shadow of the mountain. Darkness was falling and Boris had thought much about mortality. How he feared death. What would have happened if Fat Nik’s bolt-thrower hadn’t failed? Even now, Boris would be living in the dark lands. The thought sent cold needles through his body. He thought of the Elo-Talern’s elixir of life. Was it true? Would he be able to avoid that terrible moment when his soul struggled to free itself from the cage of his body? When his heart rattled and then was still?

  Armand had brought Boris a bowl of spicy lamb stew, though he was barely hungry. “The Xsanthian leaders are in the dungeons. You can interrogate them whenever you wish.”

  Boris put his hand to his forehead, as if struck by a headhache. “Leave me alone.”

  As he sat at his desk, the image of Tonio’s ruined face—blood over bone— returned again and again in his mind, so that he could barely think of anything else. He tried to conjure other thoughts, other memories—but all he could think of were bad ones. He needed something to take him away from his nightmarish past.

  Looking across the room, Boris eyed the man-sized, egg-shaped memory-catcher in the corner of the room. He walked across to it, examined its intricate machinery: the carefully carved bolts, the silver ideograms decorating its shell, the pistons and pipes and little wheels that surrounded the pole that held it erect.

  Clipped alongside the other bolts was the one that he had fired into Matisse. Boris unclipped it, held it in his hand. Long and black with a silver head, through a transparent window swarmed the thousand mites that had swarmed on Matisse, stolen his memories and his mind.

  Boris placed the bolt into a hole in the side of the machine and a mechanism clasped it. There was a whir, a click, the sound of rushing liquid. Beneath the bolt a panel slid open, revealing a glass of black liquid. Without thinking, Boris took the glass and drank the strange and metallic brew. He sighed as he finished drinking.

  Boris walked into the great bedroom and lay on the bed, images of Tonio still flashing in his mind. The horror of the day was overwhelming, he felt it in his body: a tightness that started in his calves and shuddered up along his back. Horror—there had been so much of it in his life, and he wondered if perhaps he had always been destined for it, or perhaps if he invoked it the way thaumaturgists could invoke unworldly powers. When he was a child, his father had been a smith who spent his days hammering molten metal into the form of hinges and vises. One day his father had spilled the molten metal onto his foot, which had melted like wax. His father hadn’t cried or screamed, but held out against the pain with a barely controlled white face. Something had changed in the family that day, and his mother stopped talking to his father. Instead they lived their lives in rooms at the far end of a long corridor along which servants moved.

  No, wait, his parents had not been estranged. That was not his memory, thought Boris. No, it was Matisse’s. Boris became aware then of the slow creep of Matisse’s memories—an entire new lifetime, slowly entering his consciousness. He is a child, playing in the parks to the south of the city. Those are happy days, of running and laughter—the days of the rich whose childhood is a time of happiness, so different from his own. He savors those memories, as one would rare fruit. He recalls his youth—no, not his, Matisse’s youth—moving among House Technis circles: balls, summer parties in the parks, trips north to Varenis. There is always something strained about those rituals in the House. Where Arbor and Marin could rightly claim centuries of tradition, the Technis officiates and Directors, the entire privileged stratum, participate in these events with a slight air of desperation. The memories come to Boris with the rush of blazing reality, the colors intense, the smells vivid, the feelings coursing through his body as if he is experiencing for the first time.

  As a youth, he finds it all vaguely pathetic, and he gossips with the other youngsters—Karel and Tashna and Vikri and Efram—about their parents’ pretensions. At other times they play teenage games in the bushes of the parks. They take off each others’ clothes. One day he finds himself alone with Tashna, her long hair black and curled, her mouth slightly downturned, freckles scattered almost absentmindedly over her face. Without thought he puts both hands on her shoulders and she drops to her knees. He unbuckles his pants and, drunk with his own daring, presses himself against her face. She takes him in her mouth, warm and wet and almost immediately he is shuddering and crying out and it is over. Boris feels that memory with all the lust of the teenage boy.

  He found that he could shuffle through Matisse’s memories as if through the sheaves of a manuscript. He jumped through them, searching out all the moments of pleasure and power, and found joy in discovering Matisse’s dirty little secrets: the moment he betrayed his childhood friend to rise to officiate; the petty affairs he had, surreptitiously cheating on his wife.

  Boris ingested these memories as one would a wine, getting drunker and drunker as one by one he lives them—Matisse’s whole life there for Boris’s perusal, until he finds himself standing before the new Director Boris Autec. Autec is a round man who has somehow weaseled his way up from the factories into the position. Somehow the Elo-Talern have favored this grubby little man who speaks with a rough and undignified accent, whose clothes hang stylelessly around his body. He cannot understand how this man has become Director. It makes no sense at all. He knows that the Elo-Talern have been through a time of weakness where they have retreated from the world. His father suggested to him once that the Elo-Talern would never return to being a power in the city. Perhaps now they have now restored their strength and it will take some time longer for them to make sensible judgments. In any case, he hates Autec and will destroy him. He has already turned the other officiates against the former worker, who has disappeared for the last few days. Together they stand with him before the
new director’s desk, and he plans to force Autec’s hand.

  “Director Autec,” says Fournier, standing slightly in front of Matisse. “You have been indisposed for some days.”

  “You think I should spend all my time with you?” Autec looks tired, as if he’s been weakened by some trial.

  “Of course not, Director, but events move quickly,” Fournier continues, along the lines that Matisse has encouraged him.

  “Events? I make them,” said Boris.

  “Let’s hope they don’t unmake you then,” he says, provocatively smiling. The Director has only recently been promoted. He must feel at a little insecure. Show the other officiates, Matisse thinks—that’s the way. It is time to test Autec, see if he weakens.

  “I think you forget who you are talking to.” Autec stands and his voice is cold.

  Matisse smiles again at Autec provocatively. Show him no fear, no respect, undermine him with every chance.

  “What?”

  “We all know that you are the Elo-Talern’s favorite. That there was no good reason to promote you—you—above anyone else. All these years they avoided interfering in House affairs, and when they do, they favor…” He goes on the attack now, looking Autec up and down with as much scorn as he can muster.

  Autec smiled grimly. His voice is softer now, as if he is being cowed. “Matisse, would you come a little closer, perhaps.”

  He takes a few steps but not enough to let Autec speak to him without the others here.

  “A little closer yet, Matisse. I have something to say to you that I would prefer that the others did not hear.”