by T J Marquis
Traveling northward was as relieving as a cold bath on a hot summer day, and it calmed Bahabe’s nerves somewhat. Because of the high speed of their travel, moving toward the pull was actually almost intoxicating, numbing the lingering sensation of wrongness that had accosted her when she shot that catman.
Bahabe approached the Wizardess as the Throne continued on its course. Rae smiled wanly at her.
“What can I do for you, young lady?” she said.
“I… You said the… sarathi were watching me. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else we’ve said since then. What.. do you know what’s happening to me?” Bahabe could hardly articulate her thoughts.
“I don’t know, dear. I’m sorry. But I am sure there’s a reason the sarathi are interested in you.” Rae said. “So… tell me, what is happening with you?”
Bahabe expressed the sensation of the pull as best she could.
“Now that’s interesting,” Rae said. “Generally the sarathi are wild, invisible to most people as they go about maintaining the systems that run the earth. But folk say there is a town full of ‘civilized’ sarathi in the plains northwest of Katal. That would be in the direction you’re feeling this strange attraction from.”
Bahabe’s heart raced, she hoped not with premature excitement. “Do you have a map?”
Rae shook her head. “It’s not on the map. The folk tale holds that you can’t see the town unless you’re invited. People only have a general idea of where it’s said to be.”
Bahabe’s face fell. Rae’s eyes shone with empathy.
“But you’ve got their attention, Bahabe,” she said. “And it sounds like you’ve got a compass inside of you.”
“So how are you able to see them?” Bahabe asked. “Why wouldn’t they show themselves to me?”
“You’ll have to ask them about that,” Rae chuckled. “As for me, I’d say it has to do with this ring.” She showed her right hand to Bahabe. The ring on her third finger was set with an ovular gem like translucent silver.
“I found it while on a dig around one of the fallen crystals. It’s of the same material as the crystal, and shone brighter when I shaped and polished it.”
“These are where your magic comes from?” Bahabe asked.
“Mostly,” said Rae. “This one shines brightest at night, and conceals and reveals secrets.”
“Sounds like some of the things I can do,” Bahabe said. “So why can’t I see the sarathi?”
“Well I had to learn to use it. Did any of your magic come to you without at least some effort?” Rae asked.
“No,” Bahabe answered. She sighed.
“Why don’t you show me your talent,” Rae said patiently. “Let’s see what we can do.”
Bahabe smiled thinly and spun up a small prism of light to share with Rae.
Dahm had been watching the land flow by on the bridge’s view screens. There was a small village nestled among the trees of Katal, where it seemed the entire population was packing up their things to leave. Dahm wondered about the families this war would displace, the orphans it might create. For a long time he’d been chasing down a candidate willing to travel with him back to Zhamann, and he always felt guilty at taking this sort of interest in other people’s tragedies. Was there any other way? He sighed to himself, put on his jolly demeanor and joined Jon at another view screen.
“We sure have come a long way in a short time,” he said to Jon, who nodded.
“And there’s still a long way to go,” Jon said. “I’ve been riding it all like a wave, but I wasn’t prepared for any of this. Are we really about to fight a war?”
Dahm didn’t answer that but said, “You remember the portal I deconstructed when I met you and Bahabe on that beach?”
Jon nodded.
“Do you want to know how long it took us to build the travel temple back home, and the tunnel that portal was connected to? Thirty years.” Dahm said.
Jon balked.
“Right?” Dahm snickered. “I may not look it, but even after all that time, anticipating all the different realities I might encounter on my quest, the only thing I’ve really been prepared to do is to keep my belly full.”
“I don’t believe that,” Jon said. “Jeremiah told me you’ve got ‘deep reservoirs of power’. I bet we haven’t seen half of what you can do.”
“Maybe,” Dahm said, “but we’re not talking skill here, we’re talking emotions. I saw what you did to that Nulian force. I think if you wanted to really let go, you could come down on that Nulian army like a comet. You might sleep for a while afterwards…” he chuckled. Jon huffed but smiled.
“But that’s not what you meant by being ready,” Dahm continued. “And I’m telling you, the only way to be prepared is to know you never can be.” Dahm cast his eyes down at his feet for a moment and said, “Fear of failure is worse than death.”
The inner edge of Katal came into view, hard-packed old road snaking out of the shadows toward Centrifuge. Jon thought the precision of the ringed forest’s northward curve was uncanny.
“Hey, I noticed you were… tense when we met the Wizardess,” Jon said. “I trust your intuition, is she safe?”
Dahm’s face flushed slightly. He cleared his throat.
“Well no wizard is safe, Jon,” he said. “She’s, uh… she’s just… unusual.”
“How so? Are you blushing?” Jon laughed.
“She’s… the most beautiful woman I’ve seen since Lanai,” Dahm whispered.
A slow smile spread on Jon’s face. “Alright, big man!” he clapped Dahm on the shoulder. “I say go for it.” Dahm couldn’t help but smile back. Still, it was more complicated than Jon understood.
“Sounds nice,” Dahm said, “but it’s not that simple with me. You know I have to go back.”
Jon grew quickly somber as he put it to thought. “Ah, right. She couldn’t go with you. You couldn’t stay?”
Dahm sighed and shook his head. “I wouldn’t be the first to leave and not return, but I’d feel like a traitor to my world. They’re counting on me.”
The hills outside the ship were growing into squat mountains, and the Throne rose continually to follow the upward slope.
“Would you ever go back? Once you’ve done what you came to do?” Dahm asked.
Jon considered this.
He said, “I’ve been afraid, here and there, that I might have to.” Dahm watched his gold ringed eyes as Jon scanned the viewscreens. “But seeing this place, and even with all the danger, I don’t know that I’d want to. This new life, it’s like… a birthday present.”
“You get presents for that?” Dahm asked absently. Jon chuckled.
“When I was young, I always wished my life were… bigger, you know?”
Jon saw Dahm cast his gaze over to Rae, who was still tutoring Bahabe. The girl said something and the Wizardess laughed, a melodious alto. She glanced up and saw Dahm watching. He chuckled, pretending he’d heard the joke.
“Yes, my friend,” he said to Jon, “I know.”
Chapter 15
Centrifuge
The stream of refugees lengthened and broadened the closer it got to Centrifuge, mostly coming from the south. The City had resolved on the view screens, first the slender thread of the Keep piercing the sky, then the skyline surrounding it, sprouting up from the hills, and finally the imposing wall encircling the vast old City.
Jon found it surreal to see the place from his vision in broad daylight.
If Centrifuge was truly in its death throes, it was regal in its passing. Even from miles out, the City’s strict order was clear - every one of its many skyscrapers was built in strict proportion and placed at regular intervals and complementary angles. They all seemed fashioned of the same seamless metal Jon had seen elsewhere. Though most of the buildings were overgrown with vines, they still possessed a picturesque and timeless quality. There were thousands of them.
Refugees stared up at the Throne as it cruised almost silently above their heads. The
ship passed over the City’s south gate, guarded but opened up to let the people in, and continued inward over a straight highway of dull silver. The highway was just wide enough to allow the Throne to pass between rows of buildings. The streets near the gate were choked with traffic, alleyways littered with refuse and clumps of people. The farther Jon’s gaze wandered past the central highway, the more lonely and abandoned each block looked.
What Jon had thought to be standard skyscrapers from a distance proved more sophisticated than that. Many of them had offset tiers of protruding platforms covered with dirt, dead plants and weeds. Had those been farm plots? Regularly spaced bridges and tubes formed a web of connections between the upper levels of the buildings.
There was too much to take in all at once, and Jon thought back to his first time in Manhattan.
“I always heard it was something else,” Naphte said, sidling up to Jon. “You’d figure it’d be easy enough to slide down the Road and check it out some time, but… life, you know? Never traveled farther than Ota myself. They have cities like this where you come from?”
“Yeah, not so organized though,” Jon said, “or as tall. Wonder what it looked like before the power went out.”
“Mmm. Gorgeous, they say, especially from the hills, at night. Must have been nice to have electricity. But you saw how well the Zansari share...”
Jon laughed, “Electricity’s awesome. Now I’ve been camping for so many weeks, I admit I miss it.” He ran a hand through what was now perpetually greasy black hair. “Why would so many people leave, though? The structures look sound, looks like good shelter.”
Naphte shrugged. “Pride thing I guess? If you stay in a place of failure, you get reminded of it every day.” He laughed. “Maybe that’s why I ran off with you guys… Anyway, they might have been scared of another attack. I guess they were right to be. Some people stuck around though.”
He pointed to starboard. There was movement on one of the dirt-covered platforms, several stories above the ground. Movement and rows of green. Torchlight shone from within the shadowed recesses of the building.
“That’s nice to see. Someone refused to give up on the place,” Naphte said.
“Yeah they’ve got some hustle,” Jon said. Irrigating that plot by hand, trudging up and down the stairs with water and materials. That was dedication.
As they came upon the City’s center, Jon was floored by the massive scale of the Keep. It was indeed the tower from his vision, except that today the skies were clear and blue. The Keep filled the whole forward view screen, curving off out of sight to port and starboard. So wide. No wonder they’d been able to see it from so far away. Close up, Jon could see it was made of countless interlocking triangular blocks, of the same gunmetal blue as the structure of the Maw. Windows and balconies broke up the dizzying pattern of triangles, glass gleaming in the afternoon sun.
They passed between watchtowers and over the Keep’s own defensive wall, thick but shorter than the City’s outer wall. Rae said the Throne’s dock was too high up to be useful, so she touched down on a vast pavilion downslope from the Keep’s grand entrance. She led her passengers as they disembarked, and they exited an aft airlock, out into the open.
Now the Keep was not simply imposing, but crushing in its presence. Jon wondered what on earth could have warranted such a thing. How did its impossible height contribute to the preservation of the Centrifuge machine?
Jon felt like an ant among boulders, looking up at the Keep, then back toward the rest of the City. They’d travelled inward a long way - the outer wall wasn’t even visible from here.
The thick silence was unexpected and sort of sad. Did no one consider it worthwhile to live and work near this ancient megastructure? Jon saw no evidence of a population on the streets within view.
“Welcome to my home,” said Rae. “It fell to me to become Steward of the Keep when my predecessor passed away. I’ve got a small staff that lives with me on the lower floors - I’ll have them prepare lodgings for you. And we’ve got electricity! Just a little collection of steam-powered turbines I bought from an Anekan merchant.”
“Didn’t the old king leave a family behind?” Bahabe asked. “Wasn’t there a successor?”
“No. Actually it was really awful,” Rae said. “He’d left his family and even extended relatives on the upper levels, up where the air outside gets thin - he thought they’d be safe. But the gremlins sabotaged the lifts, and worse, the life support systems. They never made it down.”
“Altitude sickness,” Jon said. “The Keep is really that tall?”
“No one I know of has been to the top,” Rae said. “Come. The water still flows, and we’ve got some evaporative coolers running on the generators - you should be comfortable.”
They made their way up flights of steps that cut across ascending tiers of the pavilion. It looked like a place the citizens of the City might once have gathered to listen to their king’s decrees. They passed an ornate fountain that still worked, surrounded by a small circle of park that looked well-tended, with flowers and hedges and trees for shade.
The long slope crested and Jon looked up to the Keep’s grand entrance, which was recessed into the building, double doors fashioned in the shape of an inverted couche shield. Dozens of people would be able to enter abreast - even some vehicles would be able to fit. It looked like other entrances were available along the curve of the Keep in either direction, but their appearance was not so commanding.
The huge doors to the Keep were left part-way open, and a squad of armed guards in black and red stood at attention. They saluted as Rae led her guests inside.
The vast ground floor of the Keep was high-ceilinged, open but for the forest of support columns spaced evenly throughout. Jon heard Rae’s generators humming in the distance, and saw thick electrical cables snaking in from the darkness. The immediate area was illuminated by portable industrial spotlights, but the far reaches of this bottom story were masked in shadow.
“I’m working on getting some electric lifts in from Anek,” Rae said as she led the way past a glass enclosure nearby. “The problem is how to retrofit this place. There are tons of tubes for lifts that no longer function, but some go sideways, and others are arranged in strange patterns.”
The glass room was full of couches and chairs, some kind of waiting room. Everything to the edges of the light was fresh and clean, but the dust of decades smothered all else. Jon imagined the place full of people, coming and going, meeting and waiting. He assumed ascending floors would have had lodgings, shops, maybe even factories and hydroponic farms. The tower would have been a city unto itself.
A long walk brought them to an exit almost as large as the Keep’s main entrance. The doors seemed to have been pried part-way open, and a redoubt had been built across the gap. More silent guards held the wall, men and women, all large. Two of them unbarred the gate and the group stepped back out into the light of day.
A wedge-shaped courtyard greeted them, green with rows of crops, patched-up concrete pathways splitting the area up into sections. Some of Rae’s staff were working the crops. Jon surmised that the Keep was not a single cylinder as it had appeared, but a spoked design of many sections with these courtyards in between. The wide curve of each spoke’s head, and the outer wall that bridged any gaps, would be a last layer of protection from outside forces. Looking up, he saw the part of the building they’d just exited was identical to the next section over. The two spokes in view converged on a central axis with tube-like protrusions and something like train tracks running up its surface.
Rae stopped in a cul-de-sac lined with weathered benches and said, “If you’ll wait here a bit, I’ll have my staff make up rooms for you. Someone will undock your ziri so you can get around the City if you wish. Most people settle at the four gates, especially the southern one, or along the two highways. Things can get rough if you head too deep into the quarters, though I know you all can take care of yourselves. I appreciate you coming to join
us, all of you.” She looked each of them in the eye. “Take some time, eat, rest, shower, and then we’ll talk again. And please, if you don’t see me, and you need something, have one of my aides send for me.”
Rae left them to wait, and the four sat, beginning to discuss how they might be able to help these people beset with trouble.
Bahabe was glad for a private room - she hadn’t been alone much since Jon had appeared in her life, and she felt she needed the time to collect herself. She felt guilty for having yelled at him the previous night, but it was true that he couldn’t understand. She wanted him to, wanted to grow closer to him, but she didn’t think it would happen, at least not while they both had other goals to achieve.
Now that they’d stopped traveling toward it, the pull was maddening again, perhaps more so. It had swung into the northwest, and she thought she must be closer, the pull growing stronger.
The companions had spent the late afternoon venturing into the occupied section of the City, a few miles in from the south gate. The crowd there was a bit more settled, less harried from flight, having taken refuge from the Nulian incursions perhaps months hence. There were shops, restaurants, and bars, and life looked almost normal, but Bahabe felt the crowd’s underlying tension - even apart from her gift, it was evident.
Jon and Dahm spent much of their walking time talking about magic and battle. Bahabe sensed the stonemaster scanning the crowds as if he’d find a son there just that easily. Naphte seemed to be enjoying himself the most - even stopping to buy a few small souvenirs to take back to his parents in Anescama.
