“I went to the tower yesterday, did you know that? And I remembered you’d mentioned—how did you call it? The Mimic?—I wanted to ask you about it.”
“The Mimic Tower. Do you really mean it, or is it just your way of making conversation?”
“I really mean it. I want to understand why your people won’t work at the construction site.”
“Better if I showed you.”
“I’m all for it.”
“Are you?” She studied him. “Ever been to a Drakiri settlement?”
“Not that I remember.”
“I’m going there right now—today’s the Equinox. A festival. I guess you could join me if you have time.”
Behind Shea, wheels whispered on the gravel.
“There’s my carriage, Mr. Ashcroft.”
He looked and said, “I know the fellow.”
Fifteen miles away from the castle, the settlement was a bright spot among the cookie-cutter villages and hillocks, small flames of kites fluttering third- and fourth-story high. Owenbeg houses were two stories at most, some of them practically grown into the ground; here, even the trees past the town’s walls looked taller, greener, crowns sprinkled with warm paper lanterns: moths ready to take off.
Lena got off the carriage and handed the driver the money. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
“Should I ask him if he would join us for the festival?” Shea said.
“Don’t tease people, Mr. Ashcroft.”
“I must admit I had another picture in my mind when I heard the word ‘settlement’.”
The pavement under his feet was clean, flat, as though smoothed by seawater.
She chuckled. “Makeshift tents and bonfires?”
“Something like that. This looks closer to the capital, only without certain elements.”
“Which ones?”
“You don’t have to lift the hem of your dress.”
From the cold autumn sunlight drowning the opposite end of the street, children came running at them, moving with double the speed normal kids would do.
“Sweets, sweets, beautiful lady, do you have sweets?”
“I guess you’ve forgotten them at home.” Shea laughed, trying to keep his balance amidst the incursion of small, strong bodies. “But they’re right, you look beautiful.”
“Beauty’s in the air, Mr. Ashcroft,” she said, tousling the hair of the boy closest to her.
And it was in the air, in an eagle circling the dark blue, in the bunting criss-crossed above the market square, in patterns of veins on the arms of the man who handed them jugs of grog.
“How much do we owe you?” Shea asked, but he shook his head.
“They know me here,” Lena said.
“So you’re some kind of celebrity?”
“Not me. My mother. She was a famous landscape painter.”
A couple passed them by, he in a green velvet jacket, she in a wine-red dress, kissing.
“I don’t drink, but I’ll have a taste in honor of—how do you call it? The Equinox?”
“Yes.”
“Do you yourself paint, if I may ask?”
She shrugged. “A bit.”
Shea leaned against a pole and took a sip. “Well, at least we invented sugar ahead of you.”
“Actually, we have better.” Lena said something in Drakiri, and the old man handed Shea a bowl with brown powder.
“Thought so.” He took another short sip. “Tastes good, too. What’s that contraption?” He pointed with his jug toward the center of the square.
“A roundabout.”
“A science thing?”
“You can’t be serious. You ride in it. It spins.”
“So you need a person on the outside to rotate it for you?”
“I guess you can run around it and then jump on.”
Shea studied her. “Let’s try it.”
“Mr. Ashcroft, it’s for kids.”
Perhaps it was the alcohol speaking, but he said, “I feel like a kid right now. This is a festival, isn’t it? Let’s go for it.”
“Go for it,” the man with the grog said.
For him, they probably were two children.
Lena shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
Simultaneously, they put their jugs on the wooden counter.
It was weird, running in a circle in front of a market square full of people, but as soon as he stepped on the roundabout, everything dissipated in the motion. He looked at Lena, her black wave of hair finally untethered, flowing in the air—the world spun and spun, and chickadees sang, and the light, breathing cold and fading yellow, played between the garlands.
When the grog stalls around them came to a standstill, someone cheered, and a few people clapped.
Lena did a neat bow and glanced at Shea. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For making me feel…” She stepped back onto the pavement, swayed, and he caught her by the elbow. “You’re aware I’m only half Drakiri?”
“No.”
“Mother fell in love with a count. He died when I was four.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I hardly knew him.”
They crossed the square, navigating through couples and files of happy children, and dove under a clothing line beaded with oranges of paper lanterns.
“Where are we headed now?”
“You said you wanted to learn about the Mimic Tower.”
“I did.”
The side street ended at a four-story building, plain-looking with its brown walls and hollow eye sockets of windows.
She led him up the stairs into what looked like a regular apartment-house corridor he would’ve expected to see at the capital.
“Please give me a second.”
She knocked on a door: a woman opened with silver hair woven into two waist-long braids. They exchanged a few words in Drakiri, and the woman disappeared again, leaving the door ajar.
“Isn’t she going to ask us in?” Shea said.
“Drakiri don’t let strangers under their roof.”
The woman reappeared with a folio which she quietly handed to Lena.
At the corridor’s end, there was a window overlooking the back yard, and Lena laid the book on the sill. Through the glass, tree branches played with sunlight, sending golden bunnies on wild romps across the backs of her palms.
“Tamara is an archivist—Mother did some restoration work for her in the past. This tome is from two centuries ago, from when our people lived in Pangania.”
“I’m sorry,” Shea said.
“For what?”
“The genocide.”
“Well, we’re still alive. And you need to unlearn apologizing; won’t do you any favors in Owenbeg.”
She thumbed through the book until a picture came up, of a plain with a tower rising in the middle of it, going up to the page’s top.
Shea said, “Looks familiar.”
“It does, doesn’t it? We keep meticulous records. The edifice was three hundred feet in diameter, and we managed to reach one thousand one hundred feet in height before—”
She turned the page, and on the next picture, the tower wasn’t the only thing anymore.
From a mountain ridge on the far side of the plain, something stretched out, a column of fat ink, a black finger.
“You see,” Lena said, “we believe it was two things: the dimensions and the anti-gravity properties of the devices we used in construction.”
“What do you mean? What is this? Your people built a second tower?”
“The second tower built itself. Overnight. And then—”
She turned the page again.
“What are those sticks?”
“The picture’s scale doesn’t allow for much detail, Mr. Ashcroft. But it’s people. People burning.”
In Shea’s mind, the captain’s word echoed—a thousand, give or take, and they’re planning to put another thousand on top of it. Through the window, the bac
kyard was a picture-perfect pastoral: a strip of grass in the tree’s shade, a bench the color of autumn leaves, a dog licking the cool off its paw—but this lazy afternoon tranquility somehow lent credence to the drawing in the book, as though the world had willfully taken on a peaceful face to conceal something horrifying.
“Now you know why you won’t find any Drakiri at the construction site,” Lena said.
“Why did you sell the duke your anti-gravity devices?”
“We didn’t sell anything.” She leaned toward him. “We gave them away, all that we had.”
“Because he’s threatened you—”
“No. Because we don’t want to pull drikshaws anymore. We want a ticket into your society.”
“What was inside that second tower? Why were the people burning?”
“It’s called the Mimic Tower, and it’s a door.”
“To where?”
“To hell, probably. Metaphorically speaking. See, Mr. Ashcroft, something came in through that door, but we have no idea what exactly. We know that both towers were destroyed; we can only speculate that the chief engineer thought on his feet and detonated ours. There’s the death toll. But as far as people go who actually participated in the nightmare… What we don’t have are any records of survivors.”
7
A wild vine wove its way in from the balcony, hugging the chipped bricks, trying to escape the cold and the light that turned life into a sketch on yellow paper. But wherever the beginning was, the end lay in a palm that promised something more sinister than a long winter sleep.
The duke looked like a patient gardener frozen in mid-motion.
“You wanted to see us, Ashcroft. I heard you had, what, an optimization suggestion?”
This, the shadows, the damp, the table with footprints of mugs on its surface and one leg slightly unstuck, bent at not-quite-a-cripple-yet angle, this was the council chamber. Patrick sat staring at the wall, as did the other guy—Cian?—while Brielle kept thumbing through a finger-thick stack of papers. She hadn’t raised her gaze when Shea entered the room.
Lena was absent—where was she? At the settlement? In her quarters, drawing? He realized he wanted her to be here.
Shea coughed. “The suggestion, my lord, is to remove all Drakiri tech from the tower.”
“Mr. Ashcroft, please…” Brielle finally glanced at him. “I think you’re overreacting.”
The duke squeezed his fist around the vine’s tail, but still didn’t move, eyes fixed on the leaves. “So you’re done with your tourist duties?”
“I am.”
“And you apparently think yourself smarter than all of us? You’ve been here five days, and gotten to the root of all our problems?”
Shea said, “It takes a look from the outside.”
“This is laughable, Ashcroft.”
“Is it? I’ve surveyed three different—what you’re calling ‘sabotage sites.’ At all three, the pattern of damage is consistent with what I call an ‘implosion.’ As opposed to ‘explosion.’ It also looks similar to what I’ve seen of other incidents with Drakiri devices.”
“Seen during what, your time as a minister?”
“Doesn’t matter. Yes. Think about your people, Duke, the workers.” In his mind’s eye he saw the girl in the pink dress. I’m like a cart on a track, he thought, I’ve got no choice. The only thing I can do is press forward. “What will happen is as follows: I will file a report to Daelyn. Maybe she’ll believe me straight away and you’ll receive your orders with the next courier. Maybe she’ll send someone else to verify. Maybe she will pay you a visit herself. And maybe she’ll consider replacing a disagreeable lord who’s put a project of astronomical cost at risk.”
“I respect Lord Ashcroft’s opinion,” Brielle said, “but the evidence is circumstantial.”
“It is not. It’s not even a theory. If you ever gamble, my lady, let’s play—I bet everything that there were no saboteurs, only your own workers meddling with tools they can’t begin to understand.”
“Enough.” A whoosh of air, and Patrick flattened his palm against the table. “Why are we discussing this? To me, it’s clear the saboteurs came from Duma. It is as you’ve said, my lord, he doesn’t have any expertise in—”
The duke swerved on his heels. “Says who, Patrick? Says a man who couldn’t perform a simple task?”
Either he thought himself very clever or didn’t even care to mask his words. Okay, it was the old bastard who ordered Patrick to kill me.
“Perhaps someone’s due for replacement,” the duke said.
The clumsy intervention, however, played in Shea’s favor. Brielle’s face went red; she looked at Patrick and bit on her lower lip; she probably didn’t know about the assassination attempt, but she understood that the duke was furious with his military counselor, which didn’t help her case.
And she stepped in.
“My lord. My lord, I’ve calculations right here. It’s perfectly safe—”
The duke shifted his gaze to her. “I only went along with your original proposal because you promised me it would double the construction speed.”
“I admit I was a bit too hopeful with—”
“A bit too hopeful, my ass!” He composed himself. “The speed actually went down because we have to install the bloody things, am I right? And now Ashcroft tells me your people can’t even handle them. That the tech endangers the construction effort. Is it true?”
“I’ve calculations…”
“No.” The duke leaned on the table and waved his finger in front of Brielle. “No. I don’t want your figures. Tell me if there’s a possibility of him being right.”
“I’ve calculations,” she whispered and looked at her hands. “I don’t know.”
The duke straightened and slapped his hips. “You lot are amazing. Do you realize how it will make me look once his report reaches Daelyn?”
Shea saw in the duke’s eyes that the matter was being decided. Brielle saw it as well and, with a jerk, stood.
“My lord, without the tech, we wouldn’t be able to build as fast, but we can pull a few tricks to achieve the same speed, yes, there are options if we reject the tech, but it will cost us, a lot—and time, yes, so the speed will again go down in the beginning, but then it will go up—I can run the cost calculations as well, or I’ll have someone do it, but please consider it will cost much more, and we will have to employ more people, approximately one new worker per each team. Please consider this, please consider the cost, my lord. We can train the workers more in using the tech. I’ve calculations right here.”
By the end of this near-incomprehensible tirade, everybody in the room had their gaze on her. It’s not about the building speed, Shea thought, she’s worried about something else.
A nagging feeling visited him, crept up his arms, squeezed his shoulders: that he’d missed something important.
Did I? What did I miss?
But the duke no longer had patience for fine details. Apparently, there was one thing he hated even more than intervention into his affairs: a display of weakness.
“Have the filth removed from my tower and destroy it—I want no ground left for any rumors. File your report, Ashcroft, and don’t forget to mention to the old ass Daelyn that we’ve cleaned our backyard.”
Do you remember us looking at starlight, dreaming of the future, thinking up our tomorrow lives? I go back to those moments—objective memory is still there—but I can’t summon the feeling. Something has broken in me, I think. Or maybe was broken. Maybe I broke it myself, to steady myself against disappointment. We go to great lengths to avoid pain, Lena, and we lose important things in the process.
Same as I continue to lose you.
8
A soldier awoke him to help him move his things.
The door to his new apartment stood ajar—he pushed it to find himself in much the same room as before, only bigger, with a fat wine cabinet under beveled glass hunkering against the wall and windows overlooki
ng the council tower and a covered gallery leading to it. In the draught, curtains billowed like sails of a brig ready to depart—or enter the harbor.
“Come in, Lord Ashcroft, I’ve got a housewarming present for you here.”
“Brielle?”
She sat on the couch in the room’s darkest part, a bottle of wine in hand.
Shea said, “Well, it’s an unexpected—”
“Why? Why did you come? Why didn’t you just kill yourself when your queen took your office?”
“What?—You’re drunk…”
“I am.” She saluted him with the bottle, half-full. “What else should I be now? They’ve taken your life away, and you came and did the same to me. But, shh, listen…” She swung forward, legs crossed. “You didn’t only fuck me up, Ashcroft. You’re finished, too, do you understand? Because your mission here was what, to ensure the tower gets built? ‘Project of astronomical cost’ and all? Well, forget that now. We’re done, we’re both finished.”
What did I miss? Cold beaded his forehead. “What are you talking about?”
“I made a mistake, okay? I made a mistake in the calculations. With that foundation’s diameter, there’s no way we’ll reach two thousand feet—hell, we won’t be able to sustain the current height for more than three months. It will crumble, do you hear me, it will crumble.”
“Keep your voice down.”
On stiff legs, he strode to the door—the corridor stood empty—and closed it.
“What happened, Brielle?”
“I wanted this job so much.” She raised the back of her hand to her mouth. “I was on a deadline from the old bastard, and I didn’t double-check the calculations. I made a mistake!”
“Fucking keep your voice down. Please.”
“No, I want everyone to know. I’m tired of trying to cover it up. Let them all know! Patrick, Cian, Lena, Fiona, his whole damn posse. Let them know. Brielle, chief engineer, fucked up her calculations!”
The realization started creeping in. “Please, Brielle. Let’s talk. Is there something that can be done?”
“There’s nothing. He’s already ordered the devices to be decommissioned. That’s it.”
With the door closed, the curtains languished, placid for the first time. That’s it, the curtains said, that’s it, you’ve screwed it all up, and now you can forget about the Red Hill, too.
Tower of Mud and Straw Page 4
