The Sightless City

by Noah Lemelson

  She was late, but he wasn’t asking permission. He pulled her close and put his lips to her ear.

  Her breath stopped, the heat that flowed through her froze, the man’s words worming into her brain. She could barely make them out, barely process the meaning, what insanity was Roache saying?

  “Forget it,” Lazarus laughed and pushed her away.

  “Forget…?” Sylvaine said. They had been talking about something… What, she wasn’t sure. She blinked around, her blood pumping at a sprinter’s pace, where was she?

  “You’re late,” Lazarus said

  The Exhibition! Memory flowed back, and she held back a squeal as she rushed out the door.

  “Good luck!” Lazarus shouted. “I’m sure you’ll have an exhilarating time.”

  * * *

  The hanging lights of the display hall were tiny suns, blinding Sylvaine with their fluorescence. Why did they have to be so bitterly incandescent?

  A minute before she had watched the world in intense focus, all sharp lines and saturated colors, smells overwhelming her, sweat and oil, exhaust and excitement; then, before that, it had all been shadows and confusion, a blur of grey; and on the train over, jittering over-energy and rapid, battering, sensations. Sylvaine had jumped back and forth between experiential extremes since she had left Roache’s apartment, stimuli either needle-sharp piercing or rag-smothered soft.

  Lazarus had told her that it would all be fine, and she knew that was true, yet, if anything, her swings had gotten worse. Now she was immersed in a deep mist, the room nothing more than an abyss of ill-defined dimness. Shadows darted around, and only when she focused could she recognize them as people. Around her there was a sea of indistinct murmuring. She tried to grab onto the conversations, but their meanings slipped by her, and the din of the whole thing felt like waves crashing on her skull.

  She squinted for the short shadow that would be Gearswit. Technically all she was obligated to stay for was his brief presentation. Then she could run off, to the bathroom or, perhaps, to a vocaphone to call for Lazarus. He would know what to do.

  All she was waiting on was the tiny man’s speech.

  Gear’s-grits, he’s going to give a longwinded one, isn’t he? she realized with an ache.

  She had initially planned to use this time to wander around and inspect the other students’ projects. In her manic phase she had rushed over to her own device, past dozens of fascinating works of machinery that even now, through the oppressive haze, called to her curiosity. Springson had on display a spider-golem, which he claimed represented a revolution in miniaturized multiped locomotion. Fifika had made a mechanical arm inspired by the Malvian whipblades, one that could shift between normal functions and a snake-like grasp. And though she had not seen it herself, rumors claimed that Gulizar had been working on a single-man æroship of some import.

  Now she doubted she’d even be able to find any of them in the maze of fuzzy blobs that she deduced must be the other projects. Even her generator seemed to fade in and out of the world.

  Sounds were no clearer, and among the indistinct murmurs and shouts there was a buzz in her ear, some words that seemed to originate from the back of her mind, rather than from the deluge outside her head. They were soft, yet impossible to dislodge, piercing yet formless. Some snippet of a conversation, but she couldn’t remember from who, or when.

  A short figure started to grow in front of her. Sylvaine blinked, it was moving towards her, followed by a pack of ghosts.

  Gearswit! She focused and could make out her professor’s voice. He welded pride into each syllable he spoke. He described the work of his students, the progress they’d made, and his estimation of each project’s practical worth. Or at least that seemed to be the gist of what he was saying; individual words were beyond her ken. He mumbled and pointed, pontificated and laughed at inaudible jokes.

  His speech lasted a century, give or take, but suddenly Sylvaine noticed a lack of noise, and that the small blotch appeared to be pointing. At what? Sylvaine stared at his hand. The machine! Of course, she needed to start her negative-density generator.

  Her glove was like lead as she lifted it, her head pounding with every heartbeat. Still, she managed to point her arm towards the generator. She looked inside herself for that energy, to spark the æther and bring life to her creation.

  Nothing.

  She panicked, searching every centimetre of her body for it. Then, deep down, she found something. It was hot, burning, caustic almost, a raging fire as opposed to the managed hearth that she expecting. There was something frightening about this power, something alien and vicious, and her instincts pushed it back.

  “Take It,” came Lazarus voice. He wasn’t there, couldn’t be, yet she heard it all the same. It was that once indistinct buzz, crawling out from a hidden corner of her mind, clear now as a dictaphone recording.

  She concentrated on the force. It grew, infecting every ounce of her tissue with burning heat. She tried to bring it to her hand.

  “Wait.”

  Yes, she must wait. Why? came a thought. Well, because… because she had too.

  The power grew and grew, she thought she heard some murmurs from the shadows. It frightened her. She had to release it, get rid of it.

  “Let It Grow.”

  No, it was better to let it grow. True, she only needed a fraction of that power to start the machine but… but the voice. It was clear and correct.

  “Bring It To Your Hand.”

  She did. It felt like her skin was melting into her gloves. Pain shot through her arm, but she kept it steady. Around her she could hear the murmurs growing into full discussion. Someone even shouted.

  “Destroy It,” the voice said.

  She didn’t register letting the power go. Didn’t even feel the explosion until she was already on the floor.

  Her senses went black.

  Shock. She was knocked away from herself. Blasted away into a nothingness. She felt neither body nor mind.

  * * *

  Then, after an infinite second, the world came back.

  First came the sounds: Footsteps in a frantic cacophony, discordant thuds on carpet and metal. Shouts, violent words that full of terror but were otherwise nonsense to her. Ringing, like a bell tapped with a spoon, again and again and again and again.

  Smell came back next: Oil. Smoke. Burning rubber, burning carpet. Burning skin, burning flesh. Above it all, the iron-tang of blood.

  She pushed herself onto her arm, which screamed in pain, or maybe she did. Sylvaine fell back, kicking herself away from sharp shards on the floor. She tried her arm again, and it held her, but barely.

  Was the overwhelming blood-scent hers? She felt pain, but no clear wound.

  Around her the hall started to spin back into reality. A pillar of smoke billowed from the hulk of metal and flame that she recognized as her generator. Splinters of metal were lodged in the floor, like tiny arrows. Figures ran about screaming incomprehensible words, their features slowly coming clear even in the hurricane of motion.

  In the eye of the maelstrom she found some relative calm, men and woman standing eerily still. They stared, as one, at a small figure laid flat on the ground.

  Gearswit.

  Demiurge be damned it was Gearswit.

  A burnt pipe was lodged in his chest, and blood flowed from it past his brown lapel onto the floor, where it pooled into a puddle. No, a lake. He did not move, he did not even twitch. One of the figures turned to her. She didn’t know him, but she knew the look on his face. It was fear. It was disgust. It was hate.

  “Run,” Lazarus’s voice said in her head.

  So she did.

  Chapter 15

  The world had managed to pull itself back into focus as Sylvaine burst out the doors of the exhibition hall into the cool Icarian evening. Hyper-focus, in fact, as she could hear every shout from inside the hall, could see the minute twist in the face of each curious ped
estrian, could smell her own fear.

  Gearswit. His short body, bent and bloody. His pride replaced with shock and agony. Sylvaine stumbled towards the stairs. Gearswit.

  “Sylvaine!” A voice came up the steps at the street below. It was Ewald Kauf, beside the open door of a red autocar.

  She rushed down the stairs, holding up her dress to avoid tripping over its ash-marred strips, and collapsed in the backseat of the ‘car. Ewald got in the front and turned to flash her a smile.

  “Don’t worry, it was just an accident. We’ll go back to Lazarus’s and work this all out.”

  Sylvaine couldn’t manage anything more than a nod between panicked breaths. Her head still pounded and thick sweat ran through her hair. The sounds and smells of the hall stuck to her mind as if it were tar. The image of Gearswit, twisted in shock and agony, was like a photograph stapled to her forehead.

  She had killed him, he had done nothing but try to help her and she had killed him. Tears escaped, wetting her dress. She was no engineer, she was a hack, a cheating amateur who got her own professor killed through her incompetence. They were right about her, they had always been right about her, she was never meant to be an engineer. She was nothing more than a beast with pretensions.

  Lazarus. He will sort this out. Sylvaine wasn’t even sure what she meant by this thought, but she knew it to be the truth. Her professor was dead, but somehow, someway, Lazarus would make it right.

  Streetlights seeped in through the window as she watched the city flash by in numbed shock. Monuments to human ingenuity filtered through moonlight, a different world past the glass, forever separate from herself.

  Thoughts were too painful, so she avoided them, even the deep ones, the long-quieted ones, the voice in the back of her mind which asked: Why was Ewald waiting outside the hall? How did he know that she had had an accident?

  Lazarus would sort it out.

  * * *

  Sylvaine almost felt like herself again as they took the lift to Lazarus’s penthouse, though she would have been happier feeling like anyone else. She kept seeing Gearswit’s face—a fabrication, since she had run before looking close enough to make out his features. That made it worse, for it was not one pain she saw, but all possible forms of torment written across dozens of expressions.

  She immediately noticed a difference in the penthouse, even if it took a few seconds to piece out its details. The atmosphere was grim, not comforting and warm, but threatening and imposing. The lights were dimmed, and the great curtains covered the windows. Lazarus was sitting at the table, dashing out some lines on a small notebook amidst his piles of papers. He did not pause his work even to glance up at her arrival. Gath leaned on the wall behind Roache, his slick black hair gleaming like oil. He held open the edge of the curtain, watching for something outside.

  The ever-locked door was, for the first time, open, its insides shadows. Sylvaine could see nothing more than some dimly lit industrial equipment. Then she smelled them, and focused her vision. There, in the dark between the machinery, were bent forms, their soft moans and cracked coughs now reaching her ears.

  Finally Lazarus jabbed a period, then placed his pen in its vial of ink and raised his eyes to meet her. He did not smile. The sides of his lips were raised, yes, but it could not be called anything like a smile. He stared at her, a glare indifferent to her tear-wet face. He wore the curiosity of a lion inspecting a small, limping rodent, unsure if it wished to spend the pitiful effort to swipe its claws.

  “I take it you’ve had a rough night?” he said finally.

  Sylvaine stared blankly and nodded. Gath closed the curtains, while Ewald left Sylvaine’s side to stand at the end of the table, wearing a strange, giddy expression.

  “Tell me,” Lazarus said, “did anyone die?”

  “Die?” she mumbled. Then, “Gearswit.”

  “Your professor?” Lazarus asked, tapping the table, thinking for a moment. “Yes, that should work fine. Indeed it is fortunate for you, Kauf. One less loose end to deal with.”

  Ewald Kauf laughed, an awkward noise, shuddering from deep in his stomach. Gath merely shrugged. Sylvaine stared at Lazarus, trying to focus well enough to make sense of his words. He noticed her gaze.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said, “the kortonian was already a liability enough, he wouldn’t have been tolerated much longer. I’m not positive how he obtained those schematics that he shoved onto you, though I have some monk-shaped theories. Perhaps he didn’t even understand their significance, but it is of no matter now.”

  Lazarus’s words were nonsense, all nonsense, what was he talking about? Meanings started to connect in the fuzz of her mind, but they couldn’t be correct, she must be misunderstanding. Some dim memory approached Sylvaine, some conversation she had had with Roache, before she had left, some advice he had given her, whose specifics now seemed vital, but its details remained foggy.

  Something moaned and twitched slightly, from within the open door behind the men, and Sylvaine squinted to see in the dark.

  “What’s in the room?” she asked softly.

  Lazarus ignored her question and turned to sign some documents on his right. “You do know if they find you, they’ll try you for murder,” he said. “Oh, you’ll say it was an accident, which is a half-truth, since from your point of view it was just an accident, but they won’t believe you. A ferral? No, they’ll treat you like the beast you are.”

  The past started to flow back to her, slowly at first. “You knew...?” she asked, the words morphing from a question to a statement as she spoke them. The memories began to accelerate, rush into her; instructions whispered at the height of her slickdust euphoria, commands that had seeped into every crevice of her brain.

  “You did this…” Sylvaine sputtered out. “You told me to… Somehow.”

  “Approach this rationally, please, Sylvaine.” Lazarus said, putting his hands together on the table. “How do you think that sounds? Famed philanthropist and businessman Lazarus Roache made me do it, he talked in my mind, he hypnotized me. Do you really think that story will do anything for you with the police, or the court for that matter? If you can afford a good lawyer perhaps they’ll toss you into an asylum. But I honestly doubt you’ll even get even that.”

  “I never thought she’d end up like this,” Ewald said, talking to an invisible interviewer. “But she said some odd things, whispered nasty threats against her professor. And, you know how Ferrals are.” Then he giggled, as if it were all a massive joke.

  It all seemed impossible. That every word Lazarus had said to, every promise, every genial wink, was a mere act, crafted artifice. Yet, as she searched her mind no other explanation presented itself. Her promised future was then a mere carrot at the end of a stick, her ætheric talents not some miracle out of a fantasy pulp, but calculated bait. It was all nothing more than the pranks she had suffered as a child, when for brief moments she thought she had been accepted by her classmates, only to suffer the lashes of their renewed mockery. Only now a dead man had been added to the gag.

  “You bastard,” she muttered, and started to stumble towards Roache.

  “Sit!” he commanded sternly.

  Her butt hit the granite floor. Ewald burst out laughing.

  “Just like a dog,” he said. She felt like one.

  A smirk rose on Roache’s face. “Now, now, the situation’s not as bad as it seems, Sylvaine, because the police won’t find you. You’ll be here, working for me, working for this.”

  He lifted out a vial of slickdust from his pocket. For a second she forgot everything that had happened that evening, forgot the betrayal, forgot the lies, her hunger for slickdust roaring ahead of her fear and anger.

  “You were using…” She tried to stand up but her limbs wouldn’t move. “Did you even have a supply problem?”

  This induced a chuckle. “Come now, I am the supplier. Slickdust is Lazacorp’s greatest accomplishment. Made primarily from sangleum an
d minute amounts of my own blood. Powerful ætherial booster, I found.” He swirled the vial. “It has some nasty side-effects in high doses, mutations and the like, which you have managed to avoid, but luckily, its main effect seems quite potent even with your beast-blood. Stand!”

  Her body jerked up, like it was held by puppet string.

  “Stay.”

  She tried to run, but her body obeyed Roche’s instructions over the screams of her mind.

  “How?” she panted out.

  “Namter could explain the mechanics in technical detail, but I’m afraid he’s off playing tag with some bald fool. Point is, it provides me complete control. Don’t feel too bad, I have dozens at my beck and call, all hard at work. I’ve mentioned my project before, and I think it’s worth reiterating what a perfect fit you are for it.”

  The hatred in Sylvaine’s heart burned and burned. Lazarus had never cared for her, had never meant any of his kindness. She was just a tool to him. No, tools were treated with mere indifference, she was just a pack animal, a source of twisted amusement as well as brute labor.

  She squirmed and tried to move her legs, but Lazarus words felt like heavy chains. “Why me?” she spat out.

  “Designs mostly,” said Lazarus.

  Gath nodded. “The æther modulation technology is… deeply impressive. And useful.”

  Roache nodded thoughtfully. “If you had just accepted my offer in the first place this all would have been much easier. None of this theatre would have been required, these plans, but then you are young and bullheaded. I do not blame you too much.”

  “You…” she tried to think of the words to express her anger, her hatred, but could only growl nonsense sounds, struggling against the invisible bonds in her mind.

  “At least my task was made simpler by the fact that you are a ferral,” continued Roache. “I mean, if I had to recruit a famous professor or even nab just even a normal, run-of-the-mill student, the police would be asking questions. No one will miss a ferral.”