by Paul Park
“It seems later than it is,” murmured the priest. “Is my captain there?”
“Yes, sir,” said a soldier, coming forward, his face blackened with powder and soot.
“You look tired, Captain. There’s hot water on the table, and clean towels. What’s the news?”
“The enemy has reached the thirty-seventh gate, sir.”
“And Aspe?”
“Is inside the city walls.”
“Thank you, Captain. Then you may tell your soldiers to stand down. I see no need for further violence. Are my lords assembled?”
“Yes, sir,” answered the soldier.
Lord Chrism turned to his disciple, who was standing in the doorway. “Come forward, Corydon. Take my message to the Inner Ear. Tell them I think it would be wise to terminate our duties here. Tell them I will meet them all in Paradise. We will reassemble there.” He smiled. “Most of them won’t find the journey long or arduous. Most are halfway there already.” He reached out his hand. “God bless you, Corydon.”
His disciple knelt to kiss his ring, and Chrism ran his fingers through the young man’s hair, over his cheek. “Don’t let them kill you,” he murmured.
“No, sir. I have my excuses planned.”
“Good boy. Say you were enchanted.”
“That would be the truth, sir.”
“Bewitched, then. Say bewitched.” The old man’s smile was full of sadness. “God bless you. Remember to strive always for purity in this life. Chemical purity. Remember that.”
He turned aside into his own apartments. He locked the door, and sealed it with a magic seal, and drew a magic circle on the floor. Then he stepped into his bedroom and stood for a while in front of the mirror. His blind eyes could distinguish motion and color, but not form, and when with a weary sigh he undid the buttons of his crimson chasuble and drew it off, in the mirror it was as if he had disappeared. Underneath, his clothing was a muted gray, blending in with the rest of the colors in the room. He shook the garment, and with a soft thump a goblin dropped to the floor. And when he bent to pick it up, it moved away, easily evading his blind groping. And then, one at a time, other spirits started to climb out of his clothes: seraphim, and cherubim, and long-tongued demons. They clambered down his arms and hung for a while by his fingers before they let go, as if to say that as far as they were capable of love, they loved him. Some licked his hands or gave his ankle a soft squeeze before they scuttled off. “Ah,” he said, in a voice full of regret, “Slip away from me, do you? Can’t you wait until the end?” And when the last one was gone and his skin was free from their pinching and their scratching for the first time since he was a young man, he felt more alone than he had ever felt in a lifetime of solitude and blindness. Yet he was not quite alone. The Princess Thanakar sat on his bed hugging her knees, her cooker and her hypodermic on the coverlet beside her, and when the priest turned towards her at last, she raised her head to look at him, and her eyes changed from pink to red.
In the middle of the square, standing in the wreck of broken horses, Aspe shouted again. Above him, the dragon spread its shining tail. For a moment, Thanakar saw it drifting in the wind, saw the sun glinting on its scales as he dropped his boat out of the belly of the boathouse. Mrs. Cassimer hid her face; Jenny pointed, and as the boat hung suspended from its slings, he looked up too, but only for a moment. As the boat dropped to the water, he bent down to fill the engine from a flask of powder. And after that, he had to guide them through the flooded streets, and through all the floating debris and the tops of houses and the spires of sunken shrines, and all the complicated water till they found the river. It wasn’t until they had almost reached the far shore, where the current ran deep and straight into the sea, that he looked back.
For half a mile along the river, the city was on fire. Ash fell like snow above a cluster of dark warehouses. There, on a promontory opposite the boat, flames had reached the roof of a small building, a temple or a dockside shrine. Thanakar watched it burning for a moment and then turned away downstream, just as the steeple collapsed into the water and filled the air with sparks.
This ends the first part of the Starbridge Chronicles, which are continued in Part Two: Sugar Rain.
Also by Paul Park
Sugar Rain (The Starbridge Chronicles: Volume II)
Locus Poll Award Nominee.
The generations-long winter has drawn to a close, and with it the power of the tyrannical Starbridge theocracy that maintained order during the years of hunger. But a cruelly pragmatic priest has set the stage for a new faith, and even those who defy him seem fated to play out roles that will inevitably bring it to pass. As Thanakar struggles in exile to find safe harbor for his adopted family, Charity Starbridge undertakes a mythic journey, passing through various underworlds to join him.
The Cult of Loving Kindness (The Starbridge Chronicles: Volume III)
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
More than two generations have passed since the events of Sugar Rain, and barren tundra has given way to fecund, steamy jungle at the height of summer. Deep in the forest, a twin boy and girl grow up among a strange race of philosophers, oblivious to the outside world, where the secular regime is now as fanatical and orthodox as the old religious one. When their home is invaded, the pair take flight. Among the new faith called The Cult of Loving Kindness, they awaken to their mythic heritage, becoming the catalyst of another revolution and the re-ascendance of the Starbridges.
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