The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  But tonight he could use the company. The buzz of a new case, the excitement that came with future work, had fueled his step and occupied his mind for a few blocks, but then the groan of the past droned back. Perhaps it was the shock of Desct’s death, or the sight of Lambert and Roache, but war thoughts now crept into his mind, and his cogleg ached.

  He pulled his jacket closer and tried to focus on anything else. The buildings he passed were of a pleasant enough architecture, though they ran a strange gamut of styles. Some were ancient, old piles of brick or wood maintained for over a century, discolored by hasty patches of post-hoc masonry. Others were modern monoliths of granite or ironwork behemoths, whose numbers seemed to grow each month, construction sites as common as corner side cafés. Odder to walk past were those apartments which had been cleaved down the middle, blasted by the Severing War or during the Principate occupation, and just half rebuilt in a new style.

  Huile was a fine enough city, though nothing compared to the Tyrissian metropolises Marcel had visited as a child. Here he could feel the lingering scars of the Severing War, that great war which had birthed the Calamity, of which all wars that followed, including Huile’s own siege, were mere echoes. That war, and the devastations that followed in its wake, had shaped the city, ravaging its outer districts to ruined fields, polluting its natural aquifers, and forcing its men and women back behind ancient walls that had not been used for centuries. Even in peacetime the scars were clear, nothing the war touched could forget the impression of violence it left.

  Grim thoughts again. His metal leg sent shivering aches. Two and a half years a phantom and still his amputated wound cried.

  He turned down a side street, trying to trim a few minutes from his walk. The streetlights were fainter here, but still hummed with the energy of æther-oil, Lazarus’s gift, extracted as sangleum from the grounds around Huile, which had burst with a sudden bounty of the red toxic goo in the years after the Calamity. Marcel could not help but wonder if the UCCR would have rushed so quickly to the aid of Huile had the city lacked this key resource. He had never realized the value of æther-oil growing up in the rich heart of the Confederacy, but here, at the border of the Wastes, it was a necessity, as much as water or bread; the only thing keeping Huile safe from the barbarity of the Wastes or the cruelty of the Principate.

  He followed the large wall that separated Blackwood Row from the rest of Huile. The refineries of Lazacorp's own district poked out a little above the wall, like a great metal skeleton. It was strange to live in bisected city, where life among the quiet streets felt like a separate world from the industrial clamor just metres away. Indeed, as his squad mates had often joked, Huile seemed less like a city with a refinery, and more like a refinery with a pet city attached.

  Marcel took a moment to catch his breath, and with it got an acrid whiff that sent him retching. The shortcut was a mistake. Work must be going late, and sangleum fumes had snuck over the edge of the wall, not enough to be dangerous, but the smell overwhelmed him. Marcel pulled his shirt over his nose, but it felt like a gas mask. He could feel the edge of his vision dim, imagine himself back there, under the clanging machines, within the cacophony, among horrified shouts and gunfire.

  Marcel held his breath and dashed back down an alley. He steadied himself against the side of a tenement house, breathing in the modestly clearer air, and glanced up past the lights and the scrap-tiled roof. He stared at the moon, its bright ivory glow, its geometric perfections. It reminded him of Alba, of her face, snow pale to his waste-dust brown. He wished he could pull that face down, pull the whole woman to him, walk with her, let out his churning thoughts and hear her boisterous laughter. There had been a time when that laughter came quick and loud, even over the whistle and shudder of artillery. Problems seemed smaller then, when he was with her, the war a simple game, the impossible merely an inconvenience.

  The years had not marred his memory nor altered single perfect detail of their first night together. The two of them had lain naked outside the Resurgence Camp, behind an abandoned agri-factory, his head in her lap, her smile the curve of the moon. Her breasts were small, hugging onto a chest more muscular than his own. His pants lay half-trampled across the roots of an olive tree, her coat had hung from a leafless bush, and he never did find his underwear. The only thing to hide their nakedness was the darkness of the outer-Waste sky. Their escapade could have gotten them court martialed, not for the sex necessarily, but for the unnecessary foolishness of leaving camp in the middle of a siege. Still, the risk had been preferable to the lack of privacy in the overcrowded town of tents that made up the Resurgence camp, and with a brief break in the artillery fire, they wanted to make use of the sudden silence as best they could.

  “What’s that look?” Alba had asked with a smirk.

  “I was just staring at your eyes,” Marcel said slowly. “They’re like sapphires, stars of blue glistening bright in the night sky.”

  She laughed, it was a deep and free-flowing. “They teach you poetry at university, scholar-boy?”

  He shook his head. “Mostly focused on medical classes.”

  “Makes sense,” she mused, “since that was pretty shit for poetry, Mar. Then again you’re pretty shit at medicine. The fool I was thinking we were going to be sent a university-trained field medic. You’d just as soon send a man to his death for a knee scrape than know how to set a proper bandage.”

  “That’s not… entirely fair,” Marcel said. “Anyway I left first year. Barely got to the theoretical stuff.”

  “Oh yeah?” She smiled and started to play with the curls of his hair. “Got tired of university girls?”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  “Don’t tell me that was your first time?”

  He smirked and snorted away the idea, as if it were completely ridiculous. It hadn’t been his first time, but in truth, it might as well have been. Of course, there had been university flings, but everything felt meaningless in the heart of Bastillia, where people were born into wealth and freedom, kilometres away from where soldiers died to protect that comfort. Marcel had hoped it would be different out here in the Border States, but people here were still people. Merchants gouged prices when soldiers came around, soldiers threatened townspeople for kickbacks, and townspeople hid behind their walls rather than fight for their own independence. But Alba was real, she was genuine.

  “Ahh, what a disappointment,” she said. “I was hoping I had deflowered you.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “It was a joke, Mar.”

  “No, why did you… I mean, what made you…” He paused. He knew it was a strange question, an awkward one, but he had to know. “Why are you interested in me?”

  She stared, quizzically, into his eyes. They were like sapphires, shit poetry or no. Finally she shook her head. “Fuck Mar, I don’t know. Because you care, I suppose. You don’t have to be here, you could sit rich and fat in Phenia, Demiurge knows plenty do. But you decided to fight for your words.”

  “You care too, you fight too.”

  She shrugged. “We all fight imperials in the Border States, that’s just what we do. Born with a rifle in our hands, there’s never a choice. Freedom, independence, citizen’s rights, these are just words for us, an excuse to fight. Inferno, I bet you’ve written papers on theoretical models of liberty, or some other nonsense.”

  He kept silent. He didn’t want to call her a liar, but he knew that she cared. She kept order in her squad, demanded that soldiers treat the Huile folk with respect even when they didn’t return it. She trained with a fierce energy but a cool head, and resolved camp disputes with a stoic equanimity, keen for justice. Maybe she didn’t know the exact definitions of what Phenian academics determined to be “Resurgence values,” but she lived them.

  Alba noticed the look on his face. She dipped her head down towards his. He closed his eyes, and let his lips touch hers. They held it for but a moment, yet it was a moment he coul
d live in forever.

  * * *

  Marcel tripped suddenly on a misplaced cobblestone, catching himself on a streetlight. He turned and stared at the café facing him. The Little Imp, read the darkened sign, a familiar image of a crimson infant, dance frozen in painted wood, and Marcel realized he had overpassed his apartment by several blocks. He cursed, shook away the haze of memories and turned around. These reminiscences of past dalliances did him no good.

  Alba was gone, he needed to remember that. She had abandoned Huile, had abandoned him. Two years hadn’t been enough time to purge her from his mind. Still, the pain had dulled some, and given time, he hoped, she might be gone forever.

  ...but calculations and planning are only ever the half of it. So many look at engineering and see with narrow eyes its utility alone, its end products. Autocars and æroships, toasters and turtle-tanks, motorguns and monowheels. For those outside the Guild, engineers are just the means to that end, a group of eccentric, often oddly-dressed, tools to produce the goods needed to grow crops, build cities, or win one of their endless asinine wars. Alas, even students come to me with a similar vision of themselves, believing their future to be one of a well-paid cog in a lifeless machine.

  Well, my dear reader, I can assure you that machine is not lifeless!

  For in all this we forget the æther, that wonderful force which makes the impossible practical, which bends those troublesome laws of physics and gives them a good spanking! To mold with æther is not a science, and is more than an art. It is a joy! One does not see the machine as a diagram, or even as the disparate metal pieces before you, but instead one feels the machine as a system, as an organism! An engineer does not work a machine as a carpenter does a piece of wood. Instead, they inhabit the machine, become the machine, feel it as one feels their own body. This is a universal joy among engineers, whether Man, Kortonian, or even Malva. All boundaries fade away within the act of æthermantics, and from this act of profound creation, we are made more than mortal.

  For those readers who lack this gift, I can only offer my apologies, and I hope, that within these pages I may let you live through vicarious imagination the craft I engage with everyday at my workshop. And to those beginning their journey into engineering, I ask that wherever you end up, whether in Icaria, or at your hometown, or even at the frontlines of some puerile battlefield, that you never, ever, forget the joy of engineering…

  —“The Engineer’s Joy” By Lewalt Screwspline.

  Chapter 5

  Work calmed Sylvaine’s nerves. Not that it wasn’t stressful to thrust her head into an anarchic mob of pipes and ducts, to try to force a semblance of order upon a ventilation system no doubt designed by a half-paid engineer dreaming of revolutionizing the industry with their fully-mad designs. It was, however, the stress of something achievable. Sylvaine had not met an airshaft she couldn’t unclog, nor a heater she couldn’t fix. Admittedly this job would have been done a half-hour earlier had she the “Knack” to alter the mechanical structure of the ventilation system from a distance with a bolt of concentrated æther. But that’s what she had her partner for.

  Well, normally, at least. Today the laggard Javad hadn’t shown. She actually liked the man, but his occasional apathy had recently evolved into habitual truancy. Maybe with his engineer’s salary he could afford to miss a few jobs, but for her every hour’s worth of a pitiful mechanic’s wage was one more proverbial bolt keeping her home latched on to Icaria. Still, complaints didn’t fix systems, so head went to dust-filled duct, and wrench went to pipe.

  The building she was working on that day was a fancy new apartment complex, built for Icaria’s life on the ground. It was constructed in a faux rustic architectural style evoking pre-Calamity rural townships. The nostalgic romanticism was lost on Sylvaine as she squeezed her torso further into the ventilation pump. The filthy musk overwhelmed her fine-tuned nostrils, and she wished, not for the first time, for the scent-numb noses of her peers. How nice it must be, she thought, to work with oils, molten metal, and binding liquids and not have to smell each one with nauseating intensity. Now every bestial instinct in her mind was shouting for her to get out of that hole awash with odd chemical smells and covered in several dozen layers of dust. Luckily, Sylvaine had a lifetime of practice ignoring those instincts.

  She searched around the crawlspace, her eyes adjusting to darkness. Her hair flicked in the drafts, and she followed the movement until she reached the blockage. She had to stare for a few seconds, for it was pure, numbing, stupidity. Whoever installed the pump had placed it backwards! It must have been installed by some out-of-towner or an Academy reject hired for low costs, it was impossible to imagine a Guild engineer being so incompetent.

  There were a couple ways to rectify this, and she cycled through her options, all either labor-intensive or workplace safety violations, or both. Except for one.

  She pulled her ætherglove from her belt and inspected it in the dim light. The glove was a thing of beauty: flawless craftsmanship, tough leather and polished brass pieces. A small æthermeter graced the knuckles, the numbers in silvered cursive, and tiny tubes of rubber connected the æther-oil canister to the sparkpoints at the end of each finger. It cost her half a month’s earnings, forcing her to take a second shift of maintenance work at Wheelston’s, but it had been worth it. Or it would have been worth it if she were at all capable of using it.

  All it would take was a simple spark of æther, basic entry-level æthermantics to morph the pipe quickly and safely into shape. A flash and she’d be done. She had tried such on her own, desperately despondent, or in the workshop, crushed by the gaze of dozens of classmates. But here she was in the moment, among the pipes and gearwork, confident, focused. If the Knack was ever to come, why not now?

  She knew how stupid she was being, even as she slipped on the glove.

  Just do what your classmates do. She closed her eyes, breathed in and out, just as she had been taught. Focus, she told herself, with all the faith that came with repeated failure. Envision the spark, find it in your mind, and lead it out of yourself.

  She searched each corner of herself for something, anything.

  Nothing.

  She pulled this nothing as far as she could manage, hoping, nearly praying despite her engineer’s atheism, that the spark would come.

  Thirty seconds later she let her hand drop and removed the glove.

  Her disappointment was deep and familiar, so she shrugged past it as she took out her wrench and tried to funnel her frustration in the direction of the machine itself. She sweated and grunted, brute forcing the piping out past layers of clinging dirt and rust, before fidgeting around in the dust and damp grime for the better part of twenty minutes getting all the pieces in place. A rush of stagnant air signaled her success, flinging her out into the hallway. She coughed violently as the system discharged two month’s worth of dust.

  “Well then, I see you’ve got the air flowing.”

  She looked up with a swallowed yelp, to see a soft-faced man staring down at her. He was almost tall and looked not far from thirty, though his clothes were that of an older-generation’s style: a clean striped suit, with a short-brimmed hat and black leather shoes, all spotless in a city of dust and industrial ash. His half-smile highlighted an otherwise perfectly symmetrical face, topped off by neatly cut dirty-blond hair. He looked at her in a way she wasn’t used to, warmer, yet piercing. His smile grew complete as he offered his hand. She took it, and the man helped her to her feet.

  “I guess I have you to thank for finally being able to breathe again.”

  “It’s my job.” Sylvaine shrugged as she tossed her wrench into her bag and grabbed the straps. “I have to earn my tuition somehow.”

  The man burst out laughing as if she had told the best joke he’d heard in years. Sylvaine gave a nervous chuckle to play along. Why was this man talking to her? Most people either gave her suspicious glances as she worked, or simply ignored her altogethe
r.

  “My name is Roache,” the man said, shaking her hand. “Lazarus Roache.”

  “Sylvaine,” she replied, as a mote of dust fell from her hair into her nostril. She turned and sneezed, her face flushing with embarrassment.

  “Sorry, excuse me. Sylvaine Pelletier.”

  Lazarus’s smile widened. “Sylvaine, that’s a lovely name.” He looked her up and down. “But you’re covered in dust! I can’t have that. Come to my apartment, we’ll have you cleaned up, get you some tea. It’s the least I can do, I insist.”

  Sylvaine tried to protest, she had barely met this man, but before she could get out a coherent thought he was already leading her up the stairs.

  * * *

  Lazarus’s apartment was the penthouse. The main room extended to each side of the tower, its width half that length. It was open and airy, a room far larger than Roache’s furniture and decorations required. Its size was further exaggerated by wide windows, the northern ones displaying the slopes of Mount Icaria, half-covered by the suburbs of the city, and the southern windows overlooking the rumpled bedsheet hills of the Border States. The furniture ranged from red velvet Phenian chairs beside a pre-Calamity Vastium wood table, to an El’Helmaudi rug adorned with roaring griffons and twisting serpents, which lay underneath a gold-bordered vitrine stuffed with shining antiques and filigree knickknacks whose origins Sylvaine couldn’t even begin to categorize.

  Three men were milling around the table. They turned as Roache entered.

  “Gentlemen, this is Sylvaine, an engineer,” Lazarus said. Sylvaine felt her cheeks flush with the title.

  “This bulky fellow,” Lazarus pointed to a broad, blond statue of a man whose multicolored waistcoat fit the ornate furnishing, “is Ewald Kauf, running for the Icarian senate. I dare say he’ll make a name there big enough to fill his suit.”