Children of Artifice

by Danie Ware

  Proteus looked the face opposite, at the storm-grey eyes and long fringe, at the refined lines. Some part of him was back on that cliff face, at that moment in the garden where he’d let go. And here he was, looking out over another drop, a final drop. A drop to a place he’d never dreamed he would see.

  Let me tell you what you look like.

  ‘All right.’ He heard himself say it. ‘Come back with me, to Ivar, to the place I keep my main cache. Let me show you my home.’

  *

  Like he was stirring from under a heavy pile of blankets, Proteus drifted slowly awake.

  He felt warm, relaxed and drowsy, easy with a kind of contentment that was new to him, something he’d never known, never allowed himself to know. The passion and sincerity of Caph’s touch, his hands and his mouth, the weight of his body, the sound and the feel of him, the fact that there was no act here – no performance. And then the incredible wash of security, curling against his skin…

  Proteus had been afraid he wouldn’t sleep, that fear or an inability to let go would keep him awake, but he’d fallen back into complete contentment, held there in the man’s arms as if nothing else mattered or could intrude. He’d let go, finally and at last, and Caph had been there with him, breath warm against his shoulder.

  And he’d slept.

  He stirred further, blinking with a sudden twinge of nervousness. The sky was still dark, and the bed beside him was empty, but there was a warm depression of a body still there, like a ghost that Caph had left behind him. Proteus sat up, hands to his face, eyes searching the room.

  A long shape, naked and picked out by the moonlight, turned from the window. Caph said softly, ‘I’m here. It’s not me that gets up and runs off in the middle of the night.’

  Proteus chuckled. The light shifted, and then the bed moved as Caph sat down. He said, ‘It’ll be dawn soon.’

  ‘I didn’t think I’d sleep—’

  ‘You slept.’ A hand touched his face; there was a smile in Caph’s tone that Proteus couldn’t quite see.

  ‘And?’ It was possibly the most critical word he’d ever said.

  The hand moved to his shoulder, the fingertips sensitive despite the old breaks. ‘You’re absurdly human,’ Caph said. ‘Pale-skinned, brown-haired, balding slightly, probably thirty or so. Quite lean. A few lines, not many.’ He grinned. ‘If I had to use one word to describe you, Proteus the freak, it’d be ‘ordinary’. You’re not a hellspirit, or anything else. You’re just a man.’

  Proteus found himself confused, relieved, disappointed, wanting to laugh. It was unreal, and too real and almost a let-down; he wanted to see it for himself. ‘No horns? Nothing?’

  ‘Only one thing,’ Caph told him.

  ‘It’s horns isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re scarred,’ Caph said. ‘You’ve got burn scars, all across your left shoulder…’ his hands traced where they must be, ‘…your upper arm and parts of the left-hand side of your face, mostly round your temple. They’re quite extensive, but they’re very old. They must’ve happened when you were small.’

  ‘Scars?’ He knew exactly where they must have come from…

  ‘They’re all long-healed,’ Caph said, ‘The skin’s sort-of stretched out over them.’

  …but Austen had never mentioned them.

  The thought brought an odd flux of tension.

  Caph said, ‘It does give me a theory though.’

  ‘Go on…’

  ‘Your face, your skin. I think…I think it’s a defence mechanism. Somehow, somewhere, as a small child, you were so frightened that you reacted by changing your skin. Now, I don’t know how that’s possible, and I can only guess that you’ve – willed yourself, I suppose – to take control of something that started out as an emotional reaction.’ He leaned in, kissed him. ‘But if it helps, that’s what you look like, and that’s where I think this came from.’

  ‘Scars.’ Proteus put his hand on his shoulder as if he was looking for them. Caph’s fingertips traced their unseen edges – they stretched along most of his upper arm down his elbow.

  ‘Okay, scars,’ he said, again, more accepting this time. He looked at Caph, smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  The moment paused. They stared at each other in the half-light, barriers gone, freaks both, misfits with no tags, no families, no names. But there they were, and it was timeless, and it was everything.

  And Austen had been right; of course he had, though Proteus didn’t have the words to say so…

  The moment paused, and blurred, and passed.

  Caph grinned at him, said, ‘Come on, freak. If you need to be—’

  A burst of light stopped him, a flare of flame from somewhere outside the window – somewhere high up in the towers of the city. The flare was tiny, but so sudden, and so strong, that it brought them both to a halt. Caph was on his feet and at the window, and even as Proteus threw back the blankets and joined him, he had horrible, terrible knowledge knotting cold in the base of his throat.

  The low sky was just beginning to lighten. He couldn’t see the crater wall or the sunrise from the window, only the rising archways and waterfalls of the city itself, the long tumble of steps they’d come down the previous night.

  But he knew, by the hells, he knew what had happened even before Caph said, his mouth full of ash and horror…

  ‘That’s the house. Oh bloody hells. That’s the house.’

  Up there, in the gardens of house Caphen where they’d been stood only hours before… up there, the lava-fires were hot enough to melt the stone itself.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: DESTRUCTION

  Caph stood in the smoke and the ruins.

  He was filthy, stained with ash and soot and horror; there were damp streaks trickling through the grot on his face. In one hand, like some sort of anchor, he held the blackened, half-charred remnants of his actuators. They hung like bizarre metal insects, parts of them melted by the heat.

  He stared around him, dazed, as if waiting for it all to make sense.

  Proteus was with him, one hand on his shoulder. Caph had covered it with his own, and they stood in silence, both of them bereft of words.

  The house was destroyed. The walls were scattered in smoking rubble, or slumped into steaming, cooling magma, melted by vast heat. In places, Caph could see the wreckage of his life lost, now lost twice – pieces of his mother’s metalwork, tatters of flash-burned curtain fabric, a charred brass tashwyn that his sister had been given one birthday. Here was a crystal tumbler, a single crack down its side, and there, the smashed frame from one of Bec’s fencing awards. He could see his father’s desk, stubbornly still intact, covered with rubble as though the whole of the ceiling had crashed down upon it.

  He could not see his father.

  There were other people here, shadows stumbling through the mess and the heat and the smoke; people holding onto to each other, none of them in a better state than he was. Some were household staff, some their closest neighbours. Some were injured, some had come back to help; others had lights, and were searching the rubble. Several squads of greycoats were already here, forming a perimeter, systematically walking lines across the rubble, marking the spots too hot to touch. Orders were barked across the confusion.

  One of them stopped by Caph. ‘You all right, sir? Were you here—?’

  ‘No,’ Caph said. He coughed on the heat in the air; it dried his mouth and lungs. He wanted to ask what had happened, but not yet, not yet. It was still too much.

  ‘Are you hurt, do you need water?’

  ‘No,’ he said again. ‘But my parents, my sister—’

  The guard peered at him through the smoke. ‘I’m sorry, Caphen, I didn’t recognise you. When you’re ready, I need to ask you some questions. I know this will be hard for you – but can you tell us who was resident at the property when this happened? It’ll help us search. An
d we can save more lives.’

  ‘My family. Darrah, Illuar…’ His breath shook and he stopped. He had no way to make sense of this. ‘Hells…’

  ‘Easy.’ Proteus’s grip was calming, strong; he was watching the ash, drifting across the air currents. The greycoat nodded, turned to speak to his team. ‘You think Raife did this?’

  ‘Who else could?’ Caph said. ‘Who else has the reason? Or the skill? Perhaps his hit on the mines wasn’t enough, didn’t disable us enough.’ His voice broke. ‘It takes a talented metallurgist to burn stone.’ There was anger in him somewhere, but he hadn’t found it yet – the shock, the disbelief, were still too much. His words were a whisper, ‘I’ll tear his bloody heart out.’

  He let go of Proteus’s hand and sank to his knees in a still-steaming puddle, in the middle of the devastation like the whole bloody house had fallen down around him. He heard his father, ‘You’re not my son’; his mother in the mines, ‘You and I, Talmar, children of Artifice’. He had a sudden, glass-smash memory of Ganthar in the Torquar Theatre, calling him a liability. His hand tightened on the ruined metal until it bit into his skin, and his breath seared in his lungs as he inhaled.

  The thick air around him still shimmered with the heat.

  A flurry of shouts disturbed him – a sudden rush of activity, of people racing to move the rubble. One of the greycoat sergeants was shouting orders; as Caph scrabbled to his feet, he saw the people form chains, carefully shifting the still-smoking rocks away from…

  Away from what?

  The rubble under him groaned and settled, dust puffed into the air, making him cough. He stumbled over there, needing to know, but fearing who – or what – he would see.

  As he reached the edge of the crowd, the greycoats barked to let him through. He stopped at the edge of a dip, a hollow caused by his mother’s table, charred at the edges and broken clean down the middle as of struck by some colossal blade. Beneath it, one edge crushing her chest, Jularn lay white as chalk, her eyes open, her lips parted in shock. Her hands were still extended, and he recognised the gesture – if Raife really had done this, then Jularn had fought him to the last. A battle of metallurgists the likes of which the city would have never seen, never dreamed of…

  Pocketing the ruined metal, he stumbled down the side of the dip. Ignoring shouts of warning, he tried to lift the side of table, straining at the weight. When it didn’t move, he shouted something at the greycoats behind him and fell to his knees beside where she lay. Speechless with some half-mad hope, he put a hand to the side of her throat.

  But there was nothing.

  No pulse, no breath.

  You and I, Talmar, children of Artifice.

  He sat back on his heels, compelled by those cold glass eyes, open and empty, at the ash settling in them. He wanted her to blink, to cough and sit up, but she didn’t move.

  Would never move again.

  Then there were hands at his shoulders. ‘Caph, come away.’ He let them encourage him to his feet, but he still stood there, transfixed by the last expression on Jularn’s face.

  ‘I did this.’ He heard himself say it. ‘They did this because of me.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t.’ Proteus’s snap was short. He turned Caph around and guided him to the top of the dip. ‘I hear any more guilt, I’ll smack you one with a rock. You need to stay out of the way and let the work crews in.’

  Guilt.

  No, not guilt.

  Anger.

  He was finding the fury now, feeling it smoulder and rise like steam from the stone. He would tear Raife, Ganthar, all of them, to screaming bloody pieces.

  Close by, there was a rumble, and the shouting started again, ‘We’ve got another one!’ Thinking it was his father, Caph pushed past Proteus and stumbled over. He tripped on a loose piece of stone and fell almost headlong…

  But the body on the other side of the table wasn’t his father.

  It was Darrah.

  And he was alive.

  The manager lay crumped on the far side of the table, his robes charred through to his skin and his…

  Bloody hells.

  He was burned, badly, all down one side of his face and throat. His hair had been crisped to a shrivel and his skin was blackened, cracked to bloody. As they uncovered him, he reached a hand and groped for the air, for the cool breeze that had found him. It took Caph a moment to realise – only one of his eyes was open, and it was roving and unfocused.

  Darrah was blind.

  Without thinking, ignoring the heat under his boots, he scrabbled down.

  ‘Caph!’ Proteus called warnings about temperatures and unstable rubble, but Caph wasn’t listening. He dropped to his knees beside where Darrah lay, took Darrah’s fumbling hand in both of his own.

  ‘Darrah, it’s me.’

  ‘Caph?’ Darrah was wheezing, his face contorted. The skin round his mouth cracked as he spoke, oozing with blood and fluid. He held the other hand to his chest.

  The greycoats were shouting for the physician, for a stretcher.

  ‘Yes, it’s Caph. Lie still. Help’s coming.’

  ‘Caph.’ Darrah tried to sit up, failed, coughed black gunk. Caph wondered if his ribs were broken. ‘Caph,’ he said, again, wheezing, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Don’t try and speak.’ Caph said. ‘The physician’s coming, they’ll help you.’

  ‘Jularn?’ His voice shaking, Caph said, ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘No…’ Darrah’s face contorted, his voice faded, shook. ‘Caph, I’ve never seen anything like it – she was incredible. When it started, and the house started to shake, she fought them – she held the stone up, by herself. She stopped the lava – she held the whole house up, refused to let it fall. And she hit him back. She fought with everything she had.’ He was crying, coughing, crying again. ‘I didn’t know. I didn’t know what he’d do.’ His tone caught, he sounded almost in tears. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Caph told him. ‘You’re alive, and that’s what matters.’ Behind Caph the physicians had come, a stretcher between them.

  ‘We’ll take him from here, Caphen.’ The woman was square shouldered, her expression gentle. ‘Step out of the way, please.’

  ‘Caph…’ As he went to get up, Darrah held onto his hand, wouldn’t let him go. ‘I’m sorry. He didn’t tell me… I tried to defend her, I tried…’

  The physicians moved Caph firmly out of the way, scrambled down to Darrah with the stretcher. And Caph watched them, dazed and reeling, wondering where his father was, where Bec was, and what the hells the manager had meant.

  *

  Proteus picked his way carefully over the ruins, very conscious of the slowly reddening sky.

  Caph was right: Raife had done this – a strike to prevent house Caphen from stopping him. And Proteus was looking forward to the reckoning.

  But he couldn’t leave, not quite yet. He was struggling with a concept new to him…

  Conscience.

  Real, human concern.

  Simultaneously, almost instinctually, he was putting together information. If Kolmarch’s desk was over there, then the assault must have begun from the gardens, and not from the main gate. He could track most of the devastation in a fan-pattern from a single starting point – and if that point had been Raife, then he had got into the gardens without being stopped, or seen.

  Interesting. Particularly in the wake of Proteus himself needing his livery to get in, and then being thrown out by the guard captain. You’d think Caphen security would be better.

  And Kolmarch was not that stupid.

  Proteus stood on the point where Raife must have been, turned to look back at the mess.

  The tallest towers of the city stretched up into the pre-dawn light; the clouds were streaked with lavender. One side of the house, the side away from
the garden, looked like it had come down in a single blast – like the underlying layer of stone had been detonated, or destroyed. He was no expert on Raife’s skills, but it looked like the first attack had been from surprise. The other side, the side with Kolmarch’s desk, was more jumbled, walls down and scattered in debris, or melted and run down over themselves, setting light to everything within. Black ash coated their edges; in places, red veins still glimmered deep. And someone had fought back – Caph’s mother, presumably. But that wasn’t what caught Proteus’s attention – he was wondering how the hells Raife had got into the grounds.

  Had he been alone? Had he had Ganthar with him? Had the family simply known who they were, and let them in?

  No, that blast had been at the very depths of the night – the party would have been over, the family asleep, most of the staff gone home. The assault had been at Caphen, not at their guests.

  Carefully, Proteus scanned the garden, its gazebos, its ponds now thick with dust and ash, their fish floating belly-up, the broken, metal trees.

  There was only one way that Raife could have got in here, and that was the same way that Proteus had done, eight hours previously… and Proteus was pretty sure that Raife didn’t have a cache full of uniforms to fall back on.

  The conclusion was obvious, but so, also, was the underlying thought.

  Raife was more powerful than Caph’s mother – Caph would not have a hope of facing him. Proteus had wanted Caph’s help, but looking at this…

  No, he was going to have to do this alone.

  *

  Caph was sat on a surviving chunk of the main wall, a blanket around his shoulders and a bowl of sweetened tea held in both hands. They’d lifted Darrah clear of the wreckage, assured Caph that he would have the best care, and taken him out to the Hospital. They’d found Illuar, and four other members of the household guard outside what had been the rear wall of the outer kitchen – the entire side of the building had come down on top of them. Illuar had suffered nothing more than embarrassment and a broken arm; the others had not been so lucky. There were Hospital staff here now, the air was blurred with shouts and bodies and need, with conflicting priorities and the still-rising curls of smoke.