“Drown,” mouths the woman.
“If the keepers allow liberal access to the past, the children’s tutors liberal access to barbaric history—if our vocabulary allows access to the tribal lusts of Earth, slavery,” Sovereign pauses for imprint, “is what you allow. As for the necessary pains of adjustment—I am sorry—I must allow.”
The woman bursts a huff. Her fingers pressing her brow, she turns and steps toward the constellation gate, the section of unfinished wall shading Atlas and his guide. Eyes wide, The Cartographer recoils. She stops and turns around again. Her gray hair sways and thin arms fall; though Corvus—The Sovereign appears the same as in the first vision, his wife hunches under pools of fabric brushing leathery elbows.
“I cannot.” The woman sighs. “I cannot accomplish what you ask of me.”
The Sovereign tucks his chin and meets her stare. “If we are to progress, we must increase our population.”
“I can’t. I’m on my decline.”
He lays a hand on her shoulder and another around her cheek. He brushes it with a thumb. “Is this truly the reason you won’t touch me?”
She shies from his touch. “I cannot bear another child. Some things we cannot control.”
Tone dulcet, he budges a headshake. “Some claims are outdated.”
“These ideas—”
“Have you been traveling to the reproduction manor with the rest?”
She gapes. “What are you accusing me of?”
“Because we discussed such rituals are only for those of blood that requires tempering.”
The woman slaps The Sovereign. His head stays forward but his flinch doesn’t mask cheek’s shock, its budding flush.
He blanks his expression and inhales through nostrils so slightly flared. Face white, attacking hand shielded in the other, the woman steps backward. She reads The Sovereign up and down.
“I only—” She quivers. “Are you incapable of trust?”
“Trust is a prediction with which I never gamble.” He rubs his hands, straightens posture. “I will tie the reins around future. Knowledge will replace prediction.”
She lets her hands dangle open at her sides, spine slumped. “Corvus I knew. Sovereign I don’t.”
The Sovereign’s brows tense. He steps toward his wife and she shrinks into herself. Parting his lips, softening his jaw, he tucks a lock of hair behind her ear.
“I know you,” he whispers. “I apologize for the difficulty of Sidera’s current state. I promise my life to you and the children. Please understand.”
“I will be your wife if you admit you cannot control nature.”
The Sovereign takes and lifts her hands and curves his under her knuckles. He looks into their palms, fingers stacked. He raises his chin and breathes the breeze streaming between him and his wife. The Cartographer lowers his pen as he ducks between fence’s framework; Atlas’s view zooms.
Tunic rippling, short, jagged hair dancing, The Sovereign tenses his fingers and a gust of wind sprouts from their fleshy prints, through his wife’s fingers, and fans into sky. It wafts her hair upward. The woman jerks her hands from his and staggers backward. The wind dies; their clothing and hair settle. A divot punctuating his inner brow, The Sovereign turns an ear to his wife as he curls closed his fingers. The Cartographer gawks.
While the woman pants. “What was that?”
“Proof I can control nature.” He pivots and, arm outstretched, motions to the scaffolds, the courtyard. “Think of it. An empire of millions of our children imbued with the same ability regulated for progression and order. Give, enforce, transform. We will mold the sinful into the righteous. The indulgent helpless into the restrained disciplined, and the weak into the strong. We will grow as winds fanning flames across earth until all the universe uncovers soil fresh for sowing.”
He bends his knees and sweeps his arm over the ground. Wind hisses in ears, pours from his palm, scrapes dirt into copper cloud billows. His blue eyes glimmer. He straightens before his wife in the cyclone that dissipates around them.
“Sidera is, in every manner, above Earth,” The Sovereign says. “The Artisan has showed me alchemical reactions exclusive to this land. The same power that will run in imbued veins can be harvested too for machines that work without man’s compulsion, for lights without flame and chariots without horses. Think of our Imperium’s future.”
“Imperium.” She glares. “Military command.”
“Stronger than Rome.”
The glint of anger in the woman’s eyes morphs to another glint, one dithering and wondering, excavating mind’s theoretical into the real so long dreaded. Looking down, she hugs her stomach and backs from The Sovereign. He reaches for her; she cringes.
“This.” He frowns. “This fear. Be not afraid of your fear, beloved. It’s beneficial to our Sidera.” The Sovereign rests his hands on her shoulders and presses down. “This fear indicates your security. We are I. This fear,” he presses; she shudders, crouches, “if you accept me, is your power.”
She shuts her mouth. She shrivels under his shadow.
“Because you need not fear,” The Sovereign smiles, “if you fear me.”
The white glare rumbles sirens across golden ground and fills the constellation walls to their brim. Everything sinks under.
PRID · NON · APR
On the day before the Nones, April
The fifth labor cycle of the fourth allotment of the seventy-fifth full cycle
Crinkling and scratching cut through the siren. Airborne sun specks flutter through the glare. A mild glow warming white’s overexposure till receded, hearth fire crackles and quivers orange leaves and their shadows across marble floor smoother than Atlas remembers. The desk stands closer to the hearth. The writing materials sit atop a bed that wasn’t there before. Compasses and metal contraptions and half-opened boxes spilling scrolls scatter the room Atlas saw two visions past.
The Cartographer sits on the bed, a sleeping mat upon a narrow frame. His hand glides across his parchment; this time, it rolls around two metal stems of a scroll that flattens before his pen. Gold light escapes a sunslot’s closed curtains. It illuminates a smudge on The Cartographer’s knuckles, a black that smears under his eye when he wipes it with a finger.
Ink settles in his eye’s wrinkles; his thick hair, once deep brown, grays at the roots and sags above his shoulders. His sleeves extend to his wrists and hug his arms, and his tunic, shorter than the last, stops just over his thighs, new, loose-fitted pants below that. All the material is white, without dye to encumber or embolden. Leather straps bulge it around his arms and chest.
The Cartographer darts brick-brown eyes over skin bags girded in purple, his color ration, the only royal regalia allotted him apart from that which he burned to slag the cycle of his private coronation. He couldn’t bear the weight coming down from the Citadel’s spire, couldn’t bear the Imperial overcoat, though weight is all Atlas sees upon his stooped spine.
Kilometers from presence, worlds beyond the current, Atlas frowns at Sidera’s mapper. His mouth strains to open but, here, now, he has none.
Wars aren’t fought for death.
Atlas looks at The Cartographer’s mouth but it never moved; a voice vibrates through the room but no other occupies it. The Cartographer dips his pen into an inkwell and presses it to parchment.
Because destruction’s only end is absence. It’s what’s built upon the death, what the living must face after the rubble settles that I fear.
Again, The Cartographer’s voice pierces mind and transmutes words into feeling that bypasses lingual decryption. Atlas listens without choice.
I’ve inflicted so much harm. I beg the sun to set when I close my eyes. Cycle after cycle, it continues. The promises never arrive and Generation Gigas, the first of the numerical identification decree, isn’t told them. This—progression, Sovereign?
His voice comes from all and no sides. Atlas tastes the words, sees them, touches them.
When fortune
grants me rest, I dream of the flames that burned her upon the pyre. Burned before Artisan imbued her and Sovereign turns my anger on him. But this vengeful reminder, so poetically enacted, resonates the methods of the Planner, who does not forget. The Sovereign never approved of my wife and ours. Immortality is for us three only: imperator and his consuls, and this has stopped my weeping before pyres. Death is freedom. My fear is my hand in it against the living. She was burned in her age and I thank Absolute she isn’t present to behold the rising of the third reproduction manor and our great grandchildren born to the Obelisk.
Absolute. The Cartographer throws his head back and grimaces at the ceiling. He dips his pen, squeezes it, scratches the last sentence.
I thank Absolute she isn’t—
He exhales.
Absolute.
He returns to the line’s end.
Seventy and five full cycles, The Cartographer softens grip on his pen, is too long to live upon this land. Rome has long fallen and Earth—I no longer recognize it.
Seventy-five years on Sidera. The Cartographer appears half a century too young.
Eos’s fifth tower, The Obelisk, concludes construction next full cycle. Our Sovereign and Artisan remain in its top levels and citizens there called never again exit. They experiment upon flesh, I know. They perfect the affliction withdrawal stations and increase the Storehouse’s capacity to contain the growing population’s power.
Cycles ago, I discovered a key to the Storehouse’s vault of gold. Without conscious decision, I refrain from returning it. I, myself, drew the Storehouse and know well every passage and sentry’s patrol path and one or two extra portal coins would help me sleep. Sovereign still doesn’t know he failed to gather all the land’s gold.
The Cartographer’s face pales. He looks into distance, mouth open, and scratches his pen.
No matter his incessant watch.
The Cartographer sets his writing tool on the bed and retrieves another item. He turns it in his fingers, over and over. His frown deepens. The Cartographer flips the item into his palm and holds it under the sun through curtains’ slit. Light streaks it luminescent, reflecting a gold aura that skims his fingers. A coin. The “Caesar aureus” that opened Sidera’s first portal.
Curling his fingers around the coin, The Cartographer grabs his pen and writes.
The Sovereign can’t know all things. He can’t know I hold this.
He glares into the hearth across the room. Orange petals dance in his eyes. The Cartographer writes. With his flesh and bones, Atlas hears.
Such is impossible.
The door creaks. The Cartographer yelps and throws his aureus coin between wall and bed and snaps his head toward his room’s door. It swings open.
The Artisan steps through. “What was that screech?”
“Hmm?” The Cartographer says. “What do you want?”
Chin lifted, The Artisan shuts the door and looks at the bed’s scroll and ink. He eyes the smudge across The Cartographer’s face.
“What have you been writing?”
“Drawing.” The Cartographer rolls up the parchment and nudges it behind his leg. “A revision of the map of Andromeda.”
The Artisan strokes his beard: pearl white, scraggly. He scowls, eyes in slits, and his jowls droop down his whittled neck.
“You must draw a new map,” he says.
The Cartographer folds his hands. “Of?”
“Earth.”
“Why?”
“Why.” The Artisan scoffs. “Do it. Questions are of dissenters.”
The Cartographer twitches awake his drooped eyes. “Simply die already, Artisan. Simply cleave to some wall as you slide downward and die.”
The Artisan contorts his face till his wrinkles wrinkle and stomps toward the bed and sucks a lungful through his gaped mouth. He points down The Cartographer’s nose.
“Without me, you would die. You would have had no power. No Sidera. Without me, this empire would have fallen when Rome did.” The Artisan jabs his finger. “You need my mind. The Sovereign needs my craft.”
As The Cartographer stands, a head taller than The Artisan, he casts shadow down his elder’s whelked pallor and yells, “You and The Sovereign need my maps.”
“Ah, but he and I exchange praise while he accompanies me through every cycle.”
“Because he’s afraid you would operate poorly without supervision.”
“You disrespectful, immature heretic.”
“The Sovereign has called my maps ‘illuminating.’ Has he described your magical herbs as illuminating?”
The Artisan presses his tongue to his teeth and curls his lip. When he speaks three huffs too late, he slices stillness with tone three notes too deep.
“I do and breathe for Absolute and he well knows.”
The Cartographer leans backward. He blinks and his eyes unglaze and lids tense and breath slows. He perks his lips to a start—
“I created a new race,” The Artisan says.
Cartographer’s forehead crumples. “Another?”
“We barely finished the final evaluation.” The Artisan smiles with low-hanging eyelids and steps back. “This race cannot live here. We must find a new land for them where they may thrive.”
“Why? Siderans have been infused with powers Imperium has harvested for thirty full cycles. What’s this new race’s purpose?” The Cartographer cocks his head. “I assume they possess new power.”
The Artisan lowers his voice. “You cannot discuss this with any being but me and The Sovereign.”
“With whom else,” Cartographer’s eyes narrow, “do I have to discuss matters?”
“Draw a map of a new land suitable for the Accenda and we will fashion a world of sorts for them.”
“The ‘Accenda’?” The Cartographer purses his lips. “Such is of no tongue I know.”
“Earth cycles very quickly. We would be fools not to peek and retrieve their advancements and adjustments.” The Artisan turns toward the hearth, stretches a hand, and flicks a gust from his fingers. The fire roars; it settles. “Their years pass as our labor cycles and, yes, perhaps we appear slow to man. But we live, Cartographer,” he puffs his chest, “as an empire progressing a year’s worth within a cycle. Patience is archaic. You’d do well to express more gratitude for your empire.”
The Cartographer’s face deflates. “Tell me news of New Earth less often, Artisan. I do appreciate your attempts to keep me thoroughly ignorant.”
The Artisan scoffs. “Release these triflings with disloyalty and The Sovereign might enlighten you as he has me.”
“Boast then. Sidera is sufficiently vast—why does this Accenda need new land?”
“Our souls—bodies—Sideran beings are,” The Artisan squints his beads of eyes into distance, “overly modified. Dispassionate and subdued. But The Accenda are beings of fire and must feed those flames—”
“Fire? Beings of fire? Great Janus, you’re both very smart. You’re telling me that female of The Sovereign’s during coronation wasn’t an anomaly of the Obelisk?”
“A masterpiece like that wasn’t for nothing.” Through yellow teeth, The Artisan blows saliva shrapnel. “And you call us fools?”
Pulse drumming heat behind his ribs and eyes, The Cartographer clutches his hair and falls to his bed with a metallic creak. “Do you know what chaos such could wreak?”
“But they will live in passionate obscurity,” The Artisan tips his wispy crown, “consuming in night where Sideran sun won’t graze. They must drain Earthly beings of their life to powerfully live themselves, an unparalleled fuel simple air can’t offer.”
All vibrancy in The Cartographer’s voice and posture drains down his matted hair. He murmurs without inflection. “They kill to thrive.”
“Sacrifices and advancement.”
“Why?”
“A concealed area upon Earth should do—perhaps an island, or a forest within a barrier only they can breech. A clearing large enough for eventual tens of tho
usands to congreg—”
“Why do you create these people?”
“I will return with a list of requirements for your map. Begin a draft—”
“Artisan, explain.”
He locks his jaw and cuts his eyes into The Cartographer’s. “Have you, the mapmaker of the universe, never once considered empire expansion?”
Atlas hears and sees and feels somewhere distant. The Cartographer’s face blanks.
“You should examine your fire.” The Artisan levels tone, ducking toward the hearth. “It appears to be going out.”
The Cartographer glares and The Artisan waves his hand at the hearth; wind spurts from his fingers and fans the flames large, crackling, bursting. Heat pours over Atlas. The Artisan throws open the room’s door, steps outside, and slams it shut behind him.
XXXIX
Cantus, Cantus
Its hinges sing an echo. The Cartographer stares at the door for a few seconds before rising to his feet. He grabs his bed by its frame and yanks it from the wall. Arm outstretched, he leans over the bed, sweeps his fingers across the floor, between bed and wall, and stands up straight again with the aureus coin in hand.
He steps to the hearth. The Cartographer upturns a palm and waves it toward the fire, pouring wind down his sleeve. The flames catch breath and roar, twirl frenzied sputters up marble blossoms and birds carved into fireplace’s frame.
The Cartographer’s brows tense. He angles toward the fireplace and runs his free fingers along its engravings. One shows a raven diving below foxglove drooping with an overabundance of blooms. His fingers bob as he brushes them right, to the bird opposite the raven, soaring over bouquets of carnations, fanning its tail, expanding its wings to the windsea they sail: a dove. The thrum in The Cartographer’s palm spurs at dove’s touch. Hearth fire licks up its breezy scatter and, in a burst of gorging heat, the mapper feels the fuel behind his wind he should have expected his Superior to ignite.
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 49