by Matt Wallace
A towering column rises at the center of a four-way intersection ahead of them. A caged-in staircase coils around its body, leading to the top of a broad platform encircling the summit. The bottom of the steps opens onto the street below. There’s also a freestanding cage resting on the ground, this one with artfully curved bars that have been gilded with gold. The top of the cage is attached to a cable running all the way up above the tower’s platform. An Aegin guards its golden door.
“Use the ascendancy, Te-Gen,” Taru bids her.
The Aegin spots the Gen broach pinned to the neck of Lexi’s wrap. The Gen Franchise Council symbol at the broach’s center permits the wearer free access to all city services, and special conveniences for Gen members, such as the ascendancy. The symbol formed along the rim of the broach, surrounded by several other small characters, identifies Lexi as a member of Gen Stalbraid, and notifies merchants of Stalbraid’s allotment from the state, which determines how much credit they are to be extended at any one time.
Lexi only shakes her head, striding past him as he prepares to open the gilded door of the private lift for her.
“I like walking,” Lexi insists. “I particularly like walking stairs. It forces the blood to pump, which helps me to think. If it weren’t unbefitting of my station and too much to ask of my current attire I’d prefer to run the stairs, in fact.”
“I understand you’re upset, but I’ve been entrusted with your safety.”
“Regardless, it doesn’t exactly engender the good will of the citizenry to watch Gen members squeeze our fat asses into a gilded box to be hoisted to the platform whilst they’re forced to trudge up endless flights of stairs.”
“It is not my place to give words to the character or condition of Te-Gen’s ass, but were such words solicited they would give contrary argument.”
Lexi laughs, not because Taru is joking, but because every word is meant earnestly.
She gathers the hem of her wrap and begins jogging up the steps, Taru hoofing it close behind her like a soldier on the march. They encounter only a few pedestrians in the confines of the staircase, and if any of them would’ve otherwise been possessed of ill intentions, seeing both of Taru’s fists white-knuckling the grips of two blades sheathed in well-worn leather is a deterrent pointing truer north than any individual’s moral compass.
Unlike the streets below, the circular platform is densely packed. The waiting passengers crowd around the four separate carriage berths. Yellow lines of warning are painted on the platform a foot from each edge, reminding the passengers that the berths are essentially large holes in the platform with five-story falls waiting on the other side.
Thick tracks extend from the center of each berth. Each hundred-foot length is carved from a single gargantuan forest star tree and reinforced with steel. They cast their shadow down on the center of virtually every street in the Capitol. Thick, coiled steel is pulled taut above each line of track, running past the open space of the berth and inside the column of the tower where it spools in massive wheels.
Pullers crew the god’s-arm levers attached to those wheels. If a passenger squints along the cable into the darkness of the tower interior they can see sweat pooled on muscled arms carved like granite. Their Gens marry hearty spouses to produce children with the size to become pullers. They spend the early years of those children’s lives training their arms and backs to be as solid as the sky carriage cables themselves.
Lexi is content to wait her turn at the edge of the crowd, but urged by Taru and through a combination of almost gentle nudging and even more almost-polite stares, they find themselves standing in front of the yellow line beside the nearest berth.
“You have many talents, my friend,” Lexi says to her retainer.
Taru doesn’t smile, but for a moment they don’t smile with less vehemence.
“My mother often said you are never truly defeated until you give up laughter,” Lexi adds.
Speaking the words summons another flood of memories, and her expression becomes somber.
“I regret not making her acquaintance,” Taru says.
“She would have adored you. Absolutely adored you. She had a sense of people.”
The great cable stretched above the berth in front of them begins grinding and snaking its way back inside the tower. Several minutes later the sky carriage begins to dock, the large rectangular enclosure rolling into the berth on its greased track (watching this, Lexi recalls idly that one of the last conversations she had with Brio was about Gen Adlonn successfully lobbying to receive the sky carriage grease concession, replacing Gen T’han after calling into question the efficacy of the grease they manufactured).
Taru raises one arm behind Lexi, and it might as well be a tree felled across the road to everyone standing behind it. Taru waits until Lexi has boarded the carriage, and then drops their arm and ducks under the short roof of the conveyance.
“Toward the back, Te-Gen, please,” Taru bids her.
They guide Lexi to a seat in one of the rear corners of the carriage, where Taru can stand above her and survey the rest of the space and everyone else occupying it.
The rest of the passengers shuffle aboard, filling the pewlike seats lining the carriage rail and filling the middle of its narrow space. Stragglers stand in the aisles, reaching up and gripping loops of strong silk hung from the ceiling for that purpose.
When it is filled to capacity, the cable attached to the street-facing end of the carriage begins reeling it back out of the berth.
Lexi stares over the rail, looking down at the top of the Capitol buildings.
“That business about your knife… what did he call it, a hook-end?”
Taru draws in a deep breath, exhaling with their next words.
“By the ports they secure the hulls of newly crafted boats with metal hooks. They are easy to pry loose and sharpen to an edge.”
The many implications of that swirl in Lexi’s mind, and she turns away from the rail to look up at her retainer.
“When did you fashion your first hook-end?” Lexi asks.
“I was seven years old, Te-Gen.”
“And did you ever bloody an Aegin?”
“Aegins are not all bad people. But they are in the Bottoms.”
Lexi reaches up and takes Taru’s free hand, the one not perpetually grasping the hilt of a blade, in both of hers. Lexi doesn’t say anything, and neither does Taru, although they don’t attempt to withdraw their hand. Lexi feels the many hardened calluses of swinging a blade every day, even if only in practice. She feels scars, dozens of splits in Taru’s knuckles scabbed over with time, the raised remnants of cuts that now feel like thread woven through their skin.
Lexi becomes aware of a connection, and it both breaks her heart and opens her mind’s eye. She realizes she can read the entire story of Taru’s life with her eyes closed, just by holding their hand, by letting herself feel the tiny monuments erected there, tombstones and effigies carved in Taru’s flesh.
It makes Lexi want to weep.
Instead she smiles up at the retainer warmly, squeezing Taru’s hand between hers before letting it go and turning back to the rail.
The sky carriage is pulled down one of the Capitol’s long main arteries, stopping alongside single platforms perched atop thinner columns at the corner of every third or fourth block. Passengers exit, permitting new ones on.
Lexi turns from the rail to watch a young couple board the carriage arm in arm. They don’t belong to a Gen, but judging by the pressed appearance of their clothes they’re not meager workers. One thing Lexi can observe for certain is that they are very much in love. Rather than sit, the young man reaches for a silk loop while the girl clings to his body for support during the uneven ride.
Even Taru can read the pain in Lexi’s expression and identify its source.
“He did not abandon you, Te-Gen,” Taru assures her, resolute. “He would never do that.”
Lexi turns her head and stares out the window of
the carriage, watching the rooftops roll by like parchment slowly unfurled by weak and withered hands.
“I know that,” she says a moment later. “But I almost want to believe he did. None of the alternatives find him in any kind of state I want to imagine.”
“I do not like imagining.” Taru’s distaste is obvious. “I prefer what I know is real, and what lies in front of me.”
“Taru, if no one ever imagined anything, none of this would be here. All people would still live in trees.”
“Perhaps all people would be better off.”
Lexi laughs, shaking her head. “You should’ve been the pleader and Brio should have been your man-at-arms, guarding you with a hook-end.”
Outside she watches the center of the Capitol recede and yield to smaller structures, most of them in good repair. There are other houses, however, whose clay walls rot in the afternoon sun that is also slowly searing away their thatched rooftops. They’re ruins, the last remnants of a civilization in which hovels backed up against the most opulent of palaces, no middle ground between the nobility and the penniless peasants they used as they used firewood, and treated with less reverence than their horse stock.
Eventually the old houses will be demolished and swept away, replaced like the rest of Crache by unyielding modernity and expansion.
Here there’s no trace of the single-block-of-stone construction that makes the Spectrum and its surrounding structures unmatched marvels. Modern builders have tried to replicate the look with paint and deftly concealed seams, but neither the translucent stone nor the methods that built the Spectrum have been seen in more than a thousand years. No one knows when or how they passed into legend, and not even meticulous post-Renewal recordkeeping has ever shed any light on the lost craft.
They say when the Capitol was first constructed horses and horse-drawn carriages filled every street. Now a horse is only seen clopping up or down the narrow pavement when there’s an emergency. Sky carriages ferry people and freight goods, leaving the streets uncluttered and clean. Lexi often imagines what those days must’ve smelled like, before the construction of the aqueduct and sewers, when animals overran the streets.
Like shit, her own voice always answers her.
“Taru,” Lexi addresses the retainer, forcing herself to break from her reveries.
“Yes, Te-Gen?”
“Those awful Aegins back at the Spectrum… they spoke of the Bottoms and… what did you call it? A ‘hook-end’?”
“Yes,” Taru answers, obviously uncertain where the question is leading.
“Why did you need to arm yourself so? As a child?”
Lexi can’t be sure, but she thinks she catches the barest hint of a wry grin tugging at the corner of Taru’s mouth.
“Forgive me, Te-Gen, but you have never been to the Bottoms yourself, have you?”
“No. Brio never wanted me to accompany the two of you.”
Taru nods without further comment.
“I take it had I visited the Bottoms I wouldn’t asks such questions?” Lexi presses.
“It might have… clarified things,” Taru admits.
“I know you accompanied him for a reason,” Lexi says, almost defensively. “I know it’s not like the rest of the city. I’ve met people from there. You’re from there. I don’t fear you.”
“I’ve been cultured and educated since,” Taru reminds her.
“Of course. I suppose I never wanted to believe being poor makes one dangerous.”
“It doesn’t. Being a person does. People are just animals like any other, Te-Gen. In the Bottoms they simply do not hide their teeth like in the rest of the Capitol.”
Lexi has no answer for that. She falls silent, and that seems to satisfy Taru, who clearly considers the issue settled.
“Taru?” Lexi says a moment later.
“Yes, Te-Gen?”
“Take me there.”
Taru looks down at her in surprise. “Where, Te-Gen?”
“The Bottoms.”
Taru obviously wasn’t expecting that. “What in the Bottoms do you wish to see, Te-Gen?”
“I simply… I want to see how people there live. People like the child you were when you grew up there.”
Taru’s surprised expression is replaced by alarm. “Te-Gen, Brio would not—”
“Brio isn’t here,” Lexi reminds them gently. “I am. Take me to the Bottoms. I do not need a full tour. I only wish to meet some of the people Brio tries to help. I want to see them.”
Taru’s lips tighten until they all but disappear into their mouth.
“I’ll be perfectly safe,” Lexi says. “I have you. And your hook-end.”
The retainer exhales through their nostrils. It’s an exasperated sound.
Lexi stares up at them expectantly.
Finally, Taru says, “Very well, Te-Gen. I will take you.”
THE DEAD WHO REVEL IN LIFE
IT’S NOT A FEAST; IT’S the last party before the end of the world.
Oh, there’s plenty of food, more of it and better than anyone conscripted to the Savages has seen in weeks. The buttery scent of fresh rice is steaming into the canvas walls of the tent from giant bamboo bowls. Bitter melon and winegrass are both in season, and have been prepared in everything from luscious soups to cabbage cups, and mixed with cooked meat and roots. Spits with three hearty pigs skewered abreast are roasting over open flames in the kitchen. A new one makes its way to the feasting tables every few minutes, garnished with slices of fried taro.
It’s the best meal most of them will ever eat, because it’s the last meal most of them will ever eat.
That’s why this is no feast. To feast is to celebrate, and the Savages have nothing to celebrate. They have only a moment, one in which to revel in the comforts of the flesh and the illusory freedom those comforts deliver unto the mind. As far as any of them can know, this is the only moment they’ll ever have, and given a trough by the keepers of their pen they’ll choose to wallow until they wear themselves into oblivion.
Evie enters the makeshift tent hall on Spud-Bar’s flank. Their caravan arrived in camp only a few hours before, at which point Laython relayed the bad news: The Sicclunan army was massing less than three miles away, and in the morning when the Skrain arrived they’d all meet in battle.
Three seconds after walking in Evie ducks to avoid the arc of a knife spinning through the air. She hears the dull protest of wood stuck by steel and looks to see the blade of the knife buried in a crudely fashioned target nailed to an equally crude stake. There’s half a piece of taro clinging to the exposed edge of the blade, and Evie realizes she isn’t the only one who was forced to dodge the knife; an emaciated young man with a stringy beard stands up in front of the target, wiping remnants of taro from his forehead where the intact root was perched before the knife struck it.
The scraggly kid laughs, as does the woman who threw the knife. Evie looks over to see her standing with a group of blade-wielding Savages waiting their turn to throw.
Evie scowls, but before she can say anything Spud-Bar grips her lightly by the forearm and drags her along, leading her toward the center of the tent where rows of feasting tables have been arranged.
“Point your toes down,” Spud-Bar advises her. “The Revel don’t kill near as many as the battle, but it takes its share.”
Evie nods, though in truth she’s barely listening. Her senses are overwhelmed in that moment.
It’s an impossible sight to take in all at once. Savages fill their mouths with fermented alcohol and spit at torches to create balls of flame. A frantic chorus of flutes and strings fill one corner of the tent hall like drunken banshees. There are the small groups engaged in games with high maiming potential, like the knife-throwing contingent. Blades seem to be a primary source of entertainment for Savages, in fact. Not three feet from where Evie stands, two surly women are stabbing the tip of daggers between their splayed-atop-the-table fingers, attempting to complete the sequence faster than the other while
half a dozen men and women goad them on, betting on the outcome.
On the other side of the tent, thick curtains hide a quarter of the Revel’s space. From the other side Evie can hear moans and even jubilant screams. Solving their mystery is far from complicated, even for a new arrival like her. Young, supple men and women saunter among the tables full of Savages. They wear delicate chiffon, what little of it there is, and serve neither food nor drink. Some proposition, others merely wait and present and smile. Some Savages claim them for company at the feasting table while others haul them, sometimes over their shoulders, past the pleasure curtain.
Amidst the fire and music and flashes of steel and flesh on display, one sight does cut through the chaos. Evie first takes notice of the serving girl as she ferries flagons of rice wine and small cups between tables. She’s one of several dozen, clad in peasant’s wool and utterly unremarkable in every way, save one: Her eyes flash a deep purple in the light of the Revel torches, a color like that of dying violets.
Neither violets nor eyes of their color are often found in Crachian cities.
More than any of that, however, Evie sees something reflective in the girl, who can be only a year or two younger than her. The other servers have their eyes and their heads firmly mired in their task. You can see them anchored by it, keeping them grounded in a menial existence. The serving girl with the eyes like dying violets, however, is constantly looking beyond the simple actions of her hands and arms.
She’s more than she appears, or at least something different than she appears.
While it may go unnoticed by every other Savage, it’s an easy thing for Evie to recognize.
“Stake yourself a spot,” Spud-Bar bids her, straddling the end of one of the benches lining a feasting table.
Evie slides onto the bench on the other side of the table, reaching for two empty cups and a wine flagon.
“They do this before every battle?” she asks Spud-Bar, filling a cup for both of them.