“You think they found the bomb?” Marquos asks, leaning on the tiller.
“We got it hidden well,” Goreth replies. “I threw it into one of the casts. A tall standing one. The ones that saw me doing it didn’t last much longer. The gas should’ve been released slowly. There’s still time for it to go off.”
“And Copin,” Marquos says, looking to Hart in particular. She looks away.
“He was fighting for what he believes in,” Elzia says. “If he doesn’t return then he will be honoured as the hero that he is.”
“He knocked a man into the smelting pot,” Goreth comments, his voice not betraying how he considers such an action. “Even with one bad arm he could fight like a true Kand.”
“Rosenbault believed,” the pilot turns to Elzia with a stern expression, “That this small patch of the world that we are able to live in is only possible now because of the industry we have built upon it. I don’t know how we got here, or what kept us alive before the rise of the Mines, but from now, as the world is getting darker and colder, isn’t it possible the extreme nature of our industry, and the size of our population, is all that’s keeping the world from consuming us?”
“I’ve heard it said before,” Elzia says. “It’s one theory amongst many.”
“The point is that every life we lose is a potential nail in our whole civilisation’s coffin, Elzia. And you’ve just wiped out half a city.”
“It wasn’t my doing,” Elzia replies in an even tone, “I told you. They were faced with a disaster and their response was to use the only tools they have developed for the past three generations. Besides, the death toll here won’t rise above the riots of Byfraze, and the world didn’t freeze then.”
Marquos flashes Hart a look, remembering her similar stance, but the tracker will not meet his stare. He says “How did the fires start, Elzia?”
“There was an accident in the Construction Frame,” Goreth grunts, folding his arms defiantly. “And I thought I told you to watch yourself, Marq. This is our Highness that you are talking to.”
Marquos looks at the Kand general warily, the blood-stained man injured and worn but still a pillar of defiance. The pilot goes to reply, but Elzia intervenes for him, “I don’t expect to be treated like royalty because of who I am, Goreth. He can speak to me as he feels I deserve.”
“But my lady-”
“Leave him be,” Elzia smiles and her subordinate slumps, conceding. She looks to Marquos, “I like you Marq, you think for yourself. It makes me want to convince you what we’re doing is right, because most people are either blindly for or against us as people. But you, you were as firmly on the fence as anyone I’ve encountered. It’s always easier not to fight. But your attitudes are a typical product of this world. People with no sense of history or belonging, trying to find something to live for but deliberately avoiding anything that’s real. There’s a war going on, and most of you aren’t even aware of it.”
“I’m aware of it,” Marquos murmurs, but Elzia is already shaking her head.
“The men in power wouldn’t be strong enough to control us,” Elzia pokes a finger into the pilot’s ribs, making him flinch back, “If people like you did something about it. And you’re just looking for excuses not to bother.”
Marquos takes a step back, letting the words sink in, and gives her a morose look back. He quietly replies, “I took out a bomb into the Construction Frame, didn’t I? A dud of a bomb.”
Elzia smiles, seeing his stance finally softening, and says “Yes. And you’re free to never think about it again. But I hope you will.”
“I will,” the pilot says. Elzia holds a hand out to him, and he takes it slowly. She shakes warmly and smiles, “I’m sure we will meet again.”
With that, the high leader springs down from the boat. Goreth slaps Marquos on the back with camaraderie, calling out “Till we meet again, Estal.” He follows Elzia off the boat, and Hart jumps off behind him without a word. She skips up to Elzia’s side and whispers into her ear, to which the Kands pause and turn back.
“Good luck to all of you,” the pilot tells them, standing up straight, “I hope for all our sake’s you’re right.”
“That’s the important thing,” Elzia shouts back to him, “Always have hope.”
She turns and starts walking away again, with Goreth at her side. Marquos watches them disappear into the shadows ahead, like ghosts into the netherworld. Hart stands by the boat, looking back at Marquos, and he looks at her expectantly. She holds up her rifle, pointing it to the mountains to the left, and says “I’m heading up there, to watch the fire. Just in case.”
“Haven’t you had enough yet?”
“Come and see, it’ll be quite a view up there. That’s not an opportunity you want to miss, is it?”
Marquos hesitates for a moment, before nodding to her.
15
The Hypnagogia is left resting in the dark, gas lanterns extinguished. Marquos takes one light between the pair and they begin climbing the nearest slope. It is a series of steep inclines and rocky outcrops, but the ascent is easy enough, especially with Hart leading the way and mapping the simplest path. It does not take them long to reach the tip of a high cliff-edge, where an area of flat rock provides a perfect spot to sit and look back down to Thesteran. Most of the city is visible from here, over a kilometre away and still lit by the towering flames. At this distance, it does not look like it’s moving, just a series of dark shapes silhouetted against enormous swathes of fire that perch upon the buildings, all together like a great oil painting; black highlighted with orange edges.
Marquos turns the gas lantern out, sitting close to Hart and marvelling at the incredible view of the city. Near the sky-high flames, where they were less than an hour before, the massive dark empty patch is clear, which Marquos now knows is the levelled land of hundreds of homes. Beyond it, there is a shape moving in the sky, lit by barely noticeable flashes, the gunfire of the airship.
“People will hear about what happened here,” Marquos says thoughtfully. “The Border Guard and the Road Guard won’t be able to get away with this slaughter. The others will fall by association.”
“When they blame the violence on Kand rebels and bandits, they’ll act like it was all justified, and the city was saved by their fighting. As long as they have those factories and produce those weapons, who’s going to argue?”
“You saw what was happening in there, they can’t hide this.”
“I saw them fire a cannon through a house, next to the fire, to help contain it, while there were people still in it. But who’s going to complain about it, the people they hurt are all dead.”
“You?” Marquos raises an eyebrow. “You saw it. You need to let people know.”
“The same way you do?” Hart glances back at him sharply. He pauses, thinks for a moment, and slowly answers, “Elzia’s right, isn’t she? This is the beginning of something big, and we’re all going to have to choose sides. She’s drawn a line between the guards and everyone else, and if we don’t identify ourselves as our own people then we’ll be lumped in with those animals. The Nomes and Reticals, the slavers and murderers.”
“Without fighting them, you are them,” Hart sighs. Marquos turns back to looking at the city. It is hard to consider how many lives have already been lost in the fire, and how many more are being killed as they watch, fighting brutally in the streets against one another, panicking like wounded animals.
“The fire’s spread too far,” the pilot comments. “They don’t have the means to put it out, and it could destroy everything. A whole city. They didn’t even need the bomb. There’s-”
“I killed him, Marq,” Hart cuts him off suddenly, blurting out a confession that she’s been bottling up. The pilot looks at her uncertainly, waiting for more, and she goes on, staring icily out towards the fire, “I saw his face, appearing in the doorway, and something inside me just clicked. His eyes were looking right at me as I pulled the trigger. He couldn’t believe it
. I wasn’t even sure what I’d done, it happened so fast. But it was no less than he deserved. I’ve seen him do too many things, seen him survive too many horrors where good men have died. Someone must have seen me do it. None of them said a word, but one of the others must have noticed.”
Marquos keeps quiet, not sure what to say.
“His death is probably the most necessary of all the lives taken in his lifetime,” Hart says. “I can’t stand to be amongst any of them right now.”
“I…” Marquos starts, but hesitates, “I…think you did the right thing.”
“Right thing?” Hart gives him a sardonic laugh. “Don’t you talk to me about doing the right thing. You’d cave a man’s head in to protect yourself and that boat of yours but you won’t condone our fight because your people simply aren’t that important to you. You do have people, you know? It’s because they’re so desperate for others to stand up for them that men like Copin are amongst us.”
“I never wanted to-”
The pilot’s thought is interrupted as the mountain is suddenly lit up in a magnificent flare of light. Marquos and Hart both snap their heads sideways, back to the city, and see the whole horizon is illuminated, clearer than day, from the crowds and slums of Thesteran to the canals and trees of the plains. In the centre of it all, where the light comes from, is a massive explosion, rolling steadily into the sky in a ball of smoke and pure, dazzling energy. It emits from the centre of the Construction Frame, the centre of the city itself, but the explosion has spread far beyond that small patch, out into the ashen plain and over a number of buildings. It sends a wave of air through the whole city, knocking buildings to the floor and sending bodies flying through the air like rag dolls; all of this visible from the mountain as a spray of minuscule debris in the power of the blast. The gust spreads through the city quickly, and flies through the flames like a giant’s breath snuffing the light of a candle. The whole city is shaken, the fires instantly extinguished, and the trees of the plains sway around it. It all takes little more than a second, before the force of the blast reaches the mountain, and Marquos and Hart are knocked back to the floor, met with the massive booming sound of the explosion.
The air rushes over them for an extended moment, cracking rocks from the cliff-face and echoing the roaring sound from the mountains around them, carrying the gas lantern away to shatter far beyond. As they drag themselves upright, stunned, the pair look back down to a city plummeted back into darkness. The dazzling flare of the explosion fades almost as quickly as it appeared, as though the light of the country is sucked back into the centre of Thesteran. The contrast of the light of the explosion to the darkness that follows is like being blinded; with eyes wide-open, Marquos and Hart can suddenly see nothing of what lies below.
It takes a few minutes for the countryside to sound still again, the trees and rocks settling and the air whooshing away. Even then, the pair’s ears are ringing. They cannot speak, astonished into silence, and stare down into the void. Without the lantern, perched on the edge of the cliff, they cannot move for risk of falling.
Gradually, their eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, a rare occurrence in the blanket gloom of overcast nights. The shape of the horizon becomes slowly apparent, the explosion’s cloud in the middle of it a great foreboding monolith above the world. It appears dense enough to climb, reaching into the heavens. The plains to the side of the city have a blue tint, just visible in their basic silhouetted expanse. Soon, the sky becomes the clearest spectacle of it all. Around the explosion’s cloud, the clouds of the sky have been torn apart, spread far back, and have left a huge hole that opens out to the stars. With the world so dark below, the stars give a magnificent contrast, providing an unreal window into the possibilities of the universe beyond. It is not enough to light the cliff, but it is enough to show the world is there; relative to the stars, a horizon exists.
“It’s beautiful,” Hart says, transfixed.
“And it worked,” Marquos replies quietly.
They sit staring in awe-filled silence for some minutes, the explosion’s cloud not moving and the stars in full view. The world seems at peace.
“Marquos?” Hart mumbles.
“I’m here,” the pilot replies, probing a hand sideways to find hers. He gives her fingers a squeeze, and she holds his back for comfort.
“Wherever you go next…can I come with you?”
Marquos pauses, not for doubt or surprise, but still awed by the stars. He murmurs back, “Of course you can.”
She squeezes his hand tighter in hers, and though he can’t see it he knows she is smiling.
16
In the morning light, when Marquos and Hart finally drag themselves down the mountain back to the Hypnagogia, boats are already returning to Thesteran. They come in small groups, drifting along the waterways, aiming towards the magnificent explosion’s cloud that stands above the world with no signs of leaving. As the boats approach they notice the damage done to the Hypnagogia, and offer looks of condolence and slow to ask how bad the disaster has been. To everyone that asks, Marquos explains that this damage is the work of the Border Guard, who opened fire on the people in a misjudged attempt to maintain order. Many ask if Marquos knows what caused the fire, what caused the explosion, what caused the riots. He tells them he does not know the answer to the first two, but the riots are the responsibility of the guards who killed to assert their authority.
In the days that follow, Marquos shelters in the Meth Fields and begins work on repairing his boat, with Hart’s help, and he starts asking questions of people travelling out of Thesteran. The Meth Fields swell with refugees from the fire, who slowly start moving back to see if there is anything they can recover. Drifters, traders and scavengers, the souls who found there was nothing left for them in Thesteran, make the journey in the opposite direction. With them come the stories of the Frame Explosion, the Thesteran Fire and the Fall of the Guard.
Some lay the blame with a Kand rebel attack, but it is a theory held only by the most paranoid or pro-guard sources. The majority of people simply do not believe that the Kands are waging a war on Estalia. After all, what have they ever done to provoke the Kands into such mindless violence? Similarly dismissed are ideas that the guards themselves started the fires, with an aim to cull part of the Thesteran population and give them more room to expand the Construction Frame. An outlandish suggestion, given the effect the riots have on the Guards’ popularity. The theory that is generally accepted, reluctantly but realistically, is that the fire was the result of a terrible accident. Somewhere in the Construction Frame, something went wrong and spread quickly. There is no doubt that whatever it was started around those tanks, and the fire from them was so immense that the wind carried it across the whole city. It is easy to accept that the simplest explanation for the Frame Explosion is that one of those tanks finally popped.
The Fall of the Guard remains an issue, though. It becomes popularly known that the guards worked together in the Fire of Thesteran to try and protect the Construction Frame by destroying homes that might spread the fire, ignoring the injuries they might cause along the way. The Border Guard and Road Guard were driven from the city after the explosion, amidst popular dissent, and struggle to find sympathy in the neighbouring cities of the Meth Fields and Nexter. The riots of Thesteran almost resurface in Nexter when one Border Guard group seeks to requisition materials earmarked for rebuilding, and the guard are driven away again. Their presence is falling within the cities; former guards shed their armour to avoid being lynched rather than fleeing to the country and sea to regroup. The floating castles are on the move, targeting the coastal cities and warning that there will be consequences if people do not comply with the Guard’s need for resources. People do not comply, and the castles back down rather than wage war on their own population, at least for the time being.
Across Estalia, ordinary workers speak of taking back their cities, their land, their country, their people. They start to think back to
the past, of how all this started, and spread the understanding that there was once a world without the guards, where people governed themselves and could question those in charge. They speak of an old Estal Nation, of people that cared for one another, somehow lost in the dark modernity of their world, and talk hopefully of returning to those communal values. They speak of fighting for a better world for everyone.
Marquos remains in the Meth Fields recouping, soaking up these stories and listening for any news from the south regarding developments in the Metropolis. There are whispers of hope that a band of guerrilla fighters are sweeping in from the north, led by a warrior queen who is rumoured to have fought in the riots of Thesteran. Acclamations range from the promise that she will crush the guards to the promise that she will bring back the sun. Somehow, people start to believe that anything is possible. When they speak of her, Marquos asks if she is Kandish, and it is often met with indifference. One man sums it up best for him, “She’s on our soil, fighting for our people, what does it matter where she’s from? She’s done more than us, and that makes her more Estalian than you or I.”
Elzia is not the only hero to emerge from the Thesteran Fire, though. Others talk of the mysterious boatman seen delivering her elite troop from the Construction Frame. Some say he plucked desperate strangers from the river, others believe he helped spark the bomb, single-handedly putting out the fire. Whatever the case, he was one of the only civilian transports spotted heading towards the fire, as everyone else fled, which makes him a symbol of hope. He does not encourage the tales himself, but swells with pride when he hears them, and he is driven to prepare for a journey south. He starts reconstructing the Hypnagogia with a more powerful engine and reinforced armour, to offer it to the rebel forces that continue to fight. When the refugees around the centre of the Meth Fields catch wind of his plans, recognising he is the famous boatman, many offer to join him.
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