The Cartography of Sudden Death

by Charlie Jane Anders

  * * *

  Ythna foundered, unable to see, hear, or touch anything for an age, until those same tiny hands grabbed her and shoved her forward, into the light.

  For a moment, Ythna was dazzled and had pins and needles in her hands and feet, then she slowly regained her sight. She was lying on the floor of a long high-vaulted chamber, open to the air on one side and closed off on the other. A giant terrace, or balcony, then. The walls to her left were incredibly ornate, with what looked like molded silver encrusted with countless priceless jewels—and yet, someone had gone to great trouble to make that opulence look as ugly as possible. The silver was smudgy gray, the rubies and diamonds were as dull as you could make them. To Ythna’s left, past the railing, she could see an endless phalanx of people in retainer outfits, not all that different from what she wore every day, marching forward to the grim, repetitive droning of horns.

  Next to Ythna, Jemima was on her knees, covering her face with one hand, and saying “No, no, no, no, please no,” over and over again.

  “What is it?” Ythna said. “What’s wrong?” She put one hand on Jemima’s epauletted shoulder.

  “This is the worst place,” Jemima said, uncovering her face and gesturing past the balcony at the thousands of people walking in neat rows. “I’m sorry. This is my fault. I shouldn’t have brought you here. I wanted to help you, and I’ve just made everything worse.”

  “What place? Where are we?” Ythna was still having a hard time thinking straight after the disorientation of passing through the senseless tangle of threads.

  “Roughly seventy years after your time. The Glorious Restoration. The worst period in the history of the Gaven Empire.” Jemima straightened up a bit on her haunches. “An attempt to restore traditional values to an empire that had grown decadent. They’ve probably executed another Chief Officiator, and that’s what made the door we just came out of. And those people down there? They’re marching to the death camps.”

  “We’re in the future,” Ythna said, and now she was pulling her own hair to try and get her head straight.

  The whole thing sounded mad. But they weren’t at the Tomb of the Unknown Emperor any more, and the more she looked at the scene outside, the more she noticed little incongruities.

  Like, the retainers marching forward across the square wore simpler uniforms than she’d ever seen before, with a different insignia. The banners hanging on the outer wall of the courtyard, opposite the balcony, listed a different Imperial Era: the Great Rejoicing Era, not the Bountiful Era that Ythna was used to. So there was a different Emperor on the throne. But the banners looked old. And the Obfuscators herding these retainers across the courtyard wore helmets with weird spikes on them, and their chestpieces were a blockier design as well, aimed at protecting against a different class of weapons. Their valence guns were much smaller and could be carried with one hand, too. There were other details, but those were the ones that jumped out at Ythna.

  “How did we get here?” Ythna said.

  “I told you,” Jemima said. “That’s how I travel. But I’ve never killed anyone to open a portal. Trex was supposed to live another few decades, and become the Chief Obfuscator to the Emperor Maarthyon. And I’m sorry, but Beldame Thakrra always died on that day. Her death is in my history book, and I’m pretty sure it was an accident.”

  Jemima was searching the terrace for clues to the exact date, while trying to stay out of sight from the people below, or on the other balconies further along. “If we know what day this is, then we can know when the next significant death will be,” Jemima said. “We need to get the blazes out of here.”

  “And any death of an important person will make a door?” Ythna said.

  “It must be an unexpected death,” Jemima said. “Something that creates a lot of causal torsions.” Ythna must have looked confused, because she added: “A lot of adjustments. Like ripples.”

  “So you really are a ghost,” Ythna said. “You belong to no one, you travel through death, and you come and go without being seen. I feel sorry for you.”

  Jemima didn’t have anything to say that For the second time in half an hour she had lost her unflappable good humor. She stared at Ythna for a moment.

  Then she turned and pointed with one slender gloved finger. “Over there. He’s making for that dais. We must stop him, or he’ll ruin absolutely everything.”

  The man with the opaque tear-shaped helmet had his sword out again, with traces of Trex’s blood still on it. He was running along another terrace, just around a corner of the giant building from the one where Jemima and Ythna stood. And when Ythna leaned dangerously out into the open, over the stone railing, she could see the man’s destination: a dais facing the courtyard, where a bald, sweaty man sat watching the thousands of people being herded away to the slaughter. The man’s robes, dais, and throne were like the walls of this chamber: ornate, but ugly and drained of color. Everything about him was designed to show off wealth, without sharing beauty.

  At least twenty Obfuscators and Officiators stood between the man with the sword and the man on the throne, who had to be a Vice Emperor. They all aimed their valence guns at the assassin, who raised a long metal brace strapped to his left forearm, which he held in front of him like a shield. The valence guns made the scorching sound Ythna had heard before, but without effect. The man’s forearm glowed with a blue light that spread in front of him and seemed to protect him. He reached the first of the Obfuscators, and put his sword through her stomach in an elegant motion that did not slow his run at all.

  “How is he doing that?” Ythna said. “With the valence guns?”

  Then she turned and realized Jemima wasn’t next to her any more. She was already at the far end of the terrace, opening a hidden door she’d found, which led to the next terrace along. Jemima was rushing toward the assassin and the Vice Emperor. Ythna did her best imitation of Jemima’s strange foreign swear word—“fth’nak”—and ran after her.

  In the next terrace, a group of Officiators were holding up ceremonial trowels, symbolizing the burial of the past and the building of the future, and they gasped when two strange women came running into the space, a tall redhead in a fancy coat and a small dark girl in old-fashioned retainer clothes.

  “The Vice Emperor,” Jemima gasped without slowing her run. “I’m the only one who can save him.”

  For a moment, Ythna thought the Officiators might believe Jemima and let her pass. But they fell back on an Officiator’s ingrained distrust of anyone or anything that didn’t instantly fit, and reached out to try and restrain both Ythna and Jemima. They were too slow—Jemima had almost reached the far wall, and Ythna was slippery as a wet goose—but they called for Obfuscators to help them. By the time Ythna reached the far wall, where Jemima was trying to open the next door, people were firing valence guns at her from the courtyard below. The balcony next to them exploded into chunks of silver and bejeweled masonry.

  “Don’t worry,” Jemima said. “They mass-produced those guns cheaply in this era. At this range, they couldn’t hit a Monopod.”

  She got the door to the next terrace open, and they were facing three Obfuscators aiming valence guns. At point-blank range.

  “Guh,” Jemima said. “Listen. That reprehensible man over there is about to assassinate your Vice Emperor.” By now they were close enough to have an excellent view, as the last few of the Vice Emperor’s Obfuscators fought hand-to-hand against the sword-wielding assassin, surrounded by the fresh corpses of their brethren. “I can stop him. I swear to you I can.”

  These Obfuscators hesitated—long enough for Jemima to pull out the thumb-sized gun hidden in her coat’s braid and shoot them all with it. There was a bright pink flash in front of each of them, just before they all fell face down on the ground.

  “Stunned,” she said. “They’ll be fine.”

  Then she lifted one arm, so that a bit of lace cuff flopped out of her velvet sleeve, and aimed at the top of the ceremonial gate between the c
ourtyard and the Vice Emperor’s dais. A tiny hook shot out of her lace cuff, with a steel cord attached to it, and it latched on to the apex of the gate’s arch, right on top of the symbol for Dja-Thun, or the unbroken chain of thousands from Emperor to gutterslave. “Hang on tight,” Jemima said, right before she grabbed Ythna’s waist and pressed a button, sending them sailing through the smoky bright air over the men shooting valence guns at them. The sun lit up Ythna’s face in mid swing, the same way it once had from the Beldame’s window.

  By the time they reached the dais, dismounting with only a slight stumble, the assassin had killed the last Obfuscator, and was advancing on the Vice Emperor, who cowered on his massive gray-gold throne.

  “Listen to me,” Jemima shouted at the man. “You don’t want to do this. You really, really do not. Time-travel via murder is a dead end. Literally. You’ll tear the map apart, and none of the major deaths of history will happen on schedule. You’ll be every bit as lost as I will.”

  The man turned to salute Jemima. “Professor Brookwater,” he said in a low voice, only slightly muffled by his milky helmet. “You are one of my all-time heroes. But you don’t know the full potential of what you discovered. I sincerely hope you do get home some day.”

  Jemima shot at him and missed. He spun, low to the ground, and then pivoted and took the Vice Emperor’s head clean off. Almost at once, Ythna could see an indistinct doorway appear on the elaborately carved side of the gray dais: like a pinwheel with too many spokes to count, opening outwards and showing a secret pathway through death and time. Somehow, Ythna couldn’t see these doors, until she had already passed through one.

  The assassin ran into the pinwheel and vanished. The remaining Obfuscators and retainers were crying out from the courtyard below, and a hundred valence guns went off all at once. The dais was collapsing into rubble. Ythna was paralyzed for a moment, until Jemima grabbed her and threw her into the doorway the assassin had created.

  * * *

  The next thing Ythna knew, she landed facedown on a hard cement surface, outdoors, under a nearly cloudless sky. In front of her was a big chain-link fence, with men in unfamiliar uniforms walking past it holding big bulky metal guns. She heard a voice saying indistinct words over a loudspeaker. She turned and saw a row of giant rocket ships looming in the distance, with a flaming circle painted on each gunmetal shell and a mesh of bright scaffolding clinging to their sides.

  She couldn’t see the assassin with the sword, but Jemima was crouched next to her, looking pissed off and maybe a little weepy.

  “It just gets better and better,” Jemima said. “This is—”

  “I know where we are, this time,” Ythna said. “The Beldame showed me pictures. This was the last great assault on the Martian Colony. The Emperor Dickon’s great and glorious campaign to bring the principle of Dja-Thun to the unruly people on Mars. This happened decades before I was born.”

  “It’s happening right now,” Jemima said, looking in all directions for the man they’d been chasing. “I wonder who just died here.”

  “What did you mean, about the map?” Ythna said. “You said he was tearing the map apart.”

  “I’ve got a history book,” Jemima said without pausing her search. “I know the major deaths, down to the exact place and time. Every time I travel, I chart where each death leads. I’m deciphering the map slowly, but this cad will render that impossible. I’ve done twenty-eight trips so far, including today.”

  “How many people have you helped?” Ythna said. “Twenty-seven?”

  “Twenty-five,” Jemima said.

  “And how did that turn out for them?”

  “No idea. People like you don’t get mentioned in the history books, even if I found an updated version. No offense. But if I ever get home, I can try to look up some detailed records, and try to find out what happened to all of you.”

  Jemima cursed again in her own language: “fth’nak.” An old-fashioned wheeled vehicle was rolling toward them, with figures in bulky black armor, holding big oily guns. The jeep rumbled, a cloud of dust in its wake, as it grew bigger until it was right in front of them. On the side of the jeep was the round, fiery insignia of the Age of Advancement, the Emperor Dickon’s era. The men in the front of the truck wore the same image on their helmets.

  Jemima started to try and explain their presence to these men, but they cut her off.

  “Desertion is a capital crime, as you are no doubt aware,” the man in the truck’s passenger seat said. “But you’re lucky. The Dauntless is short-crewed and ammunition is precious. So I’m going to pretend you didn’t just try to run away. That’s a one-time offer, good only if you come with me right now. Your new home lifts off tomorrow morning at oh-five hundred hours.”

  And that’s how Jemima and Ythna found themselves in a bare gray cage with a tiny window that gave them a partial view of the nearest rocket, a snub-nosed, squat monstrosity with nine thrusters arrayed like petals. Ythna rubbed the bruises she’d gotten from the guards’ rifle butts and rough hands.

  “At least they don’t think we’re spies,” said Ythna. “Or they’d have just executed us.”

  “They assume that nobody could ever get this far inside their security perimeter undetected,” said Jemima. “So they reached for the next logical explanation: we must be members of the galley crew, who tried to make a break for it. Instead of executing us, they’ll just send us up in one of those ships, probably in irons in case we actually are saboteurs.”

  “The Beldame told me that this campaign was a terrible waste. The whole assault force died without ever reaching Mars, because the colonists had superior weapons. They used technology that the Empire had rejected as impure,” said Ythna. “It was one of the Beldame’s lessons that she liked to tell: A just cause becomes unjust when it costs too much human life.”

  “The Beldame sounds like she was a wise woman,” said Jemima.

  Ythna was sure she was going to look up and see a sarcastic leer on Jemima’s sharp face, but there was none. Instead, Jemima just nodded, then walked to the window and studied the rocket they were soon going to be chained up in the belly of.

  “I don’t want to die in a pointless war that was lost before I was born,” Ythna said.

  “Really? I thought you didn’t want anything, one way or the other,” Jemima said, still facing the window. “Isn’t that what you said? And how is this different from what would have happened to you if we had never met? You would have been sent to work for some new master, who might have worked you to death in a year or two. Or you could have been marked for Obsolescence, and died sooner. This is the same.”

  “It’s not the same at all,” Ythna said. Just when she had thought Jemima was starting to treat her like an adult.

  “Isn’t it?”

  Ythna changed the subject. “So if everybody on board the rocket ship dies, can we use that to escape?”

  “No,” said Jemima. “Their deaths won’t be significant. Or terribly unexpected. I can only use a single sudden death that changes lots of other people’s fates.”

  “That’s a stupid rule.”

  Jemima shrugged. “It’s a science that won’t exist for hundreds of years. Like I said: causal torsions. Think of causality as a weave that holds all of us fast, and occasionally gaps appear that you can slip through.”

  “So how are we going to escape before they put us on that rocket?”

  “First things first.” Jemima came and stood in front of Ythna, so she was silhouetted by the setting sun through the small window, and put her right hand out, palm up and at an angle. “I really do want to help. So far, all I’ve done is make things worse for you. If you’ll let me, I’ll do whatever I can. You’re a smart person and you care about other people. You deserve better. And the Gaven Empire could use a million more like you.”

  “How does the Empire end?” Ythna said.

  “It dies,” Jemima said. “Everything dies eventually. You were born in the Golden Century, which was a rel
atively stable era. After that, there was a twenty-year fall into decadence and social decay, followed by the Glorious Restoration, which you saw. That lasted about fifty-seven years, and was followed by the Perfect Culmination, the most exact implementation of the ideal of Dja-Thun on Earth. Which lasted about as long as you’d expect. After that, there were about 150 years of slow decline, until the whole thing fell apart and your people begged the off-world colonists to come and save them. That’s the executive summary, anyway.”

  “Okay,” Ythna said, taking Jemima’s hand in both of hers. “I want to make a difference. Give me a new identity, and put me where I can make a difference.”

  “Very well,” Jemima said. “Done.”

  Jemima searched through what seemed to be a million hidden pockets sewn into the lining of her giant coat until she found a device, perhaps twice the size of your fingernail. With this gadget, she opened the lock on their cage, and then she used her tiny stun gun on the two guards in the hallway outside, who were already half asleep in any case.

  “Now what?” Ythna said. “Do we wait for that man in the helmet to arrive and murder someone else?”

  “He’s long gone, whoever he was,” Jemima said. “But we don’t need him to kill anybody. The Dauntless is launching tomorrow, which means I know what day this is. And someone very famous is going to die, all on his own, in the next couple days. Come on.” She unlocked the front door of the holding facility with her lockpick. “We’ve got a lot of distance to cover. And first, we have to break out of a maximum security launch site.”

  * * *

  Beldame Thakrra’s grave wasn’t nearly as fancy as the Tomb of the Unknown Emperor. They had built her a big stone sphere with a metal spike sticking through it, befitting the rank she’d attained in the moment just before she died. And there was a bust in front, with a close enough likeness of her face, except that she looked placid and sleepy, instead of keen and on the verge of asking another question. The sphere was a little taller than Ythna, and the spike soared over her head. The tomb was surrounded by other, grander memorials, as far as Ythna could see.