by Ren Cummins
“There is another problem?”
“Well, the Wall.”
He led her back down the street, allowing the liquid in the vial to slowly become still. “I can show you the way; I’ve got several guards who owe me at least another passage or two.”
Shaking her head, she pointed to the gems, barely visible beneath the fabric of the kerchief she wore across her forehead. “These mark me for what I am. If the Queen’s still got her people looking for me, this will give me away.”
“Hmm,” he thought out loud. “I suppose you could attempt the more direct approach. Can’t you fly?”
“No, not fly exactly,” she said. “I can jump pretty far. But I jumped from a building in Oldtown, and nearly broke my leg landing on this side. Plus, there are guards on the wall – it was just luck that I missed them when I came over.”
Favo agreed, taking this all in. Then he snapped his fingers. “Twice a day, a train goes from the city out along the Wall to change out the guards who patrol it – it’s about half as high as the Wall; that should work, right?”
Rom looked up at the low rumble of an approaching train caught her attention. She looked back up at Favo, and nodded. “You going back, too?” she asked.
He pondered this for a moment, and then nodded as well. “I suppose I could, it’s about time I looked in on Cousins to see what a mockery he’s made of my organization; but I’ve got a few things in motion here, I really shouldn’t. When are you leaving?”
She shrugged. “Now seems like a good time. I’m going to pick up a few things on my way.”
The handsome man laughed his handsome laugh. “You don’t burden yourself by planning things very far in advance, do you?”
She smiled back at him – it was hard not to smile at him. “Not so much.”
“Oh,” he put a hand on her arm as she began to walk away, “Rom, could I ask one simple favor of you?”
She nodded.
“If you happen to see Briseida while you’re back,” he seemed suddenly atypically uneasy. “Please…give her my regards.”
Rom agreed, but could not help but ask one last question. “Whatever happened to your old girlfriend, anyway? Molla?”
Favo’s mouth curled up in a half-grimace, half-smile. “Well, she and I had something of a falling out, you might say.”
As he walked off, Rom could only shake her head, secretly wondering why grownups were all so weird and mysterious.
* * * * *
She isolated the particular track that made its run along the wall, and waited on the roof of a nearby building. She waited there for just over an hour, hearing the low rush of the waves as they crashed far below the retaining wall on the eastern edge of the city, and looked at the dizzying lights of the city. It was approaching the shift change, she realized, hearing the low tones of the timekeeping towers. And here came her train now.
It was a darker color than the general transits – and this one had fewer doors and less lights. She’d seen these cars before, once or twice, but had never realized they took this solitary track out of the city proper. She leapt low as it passed, just managing to cling to the final car as it sped past her. She lost her grip and rolled backwards, but caught onto the back lip of the rooftop with the tips of her fingers.
Her boots swung down towards the back wall, and, pushing off, vaulted her back up onto the train. The wind speeding past caught her dress and flipped it up over her head – growling, she managed to turn herself back around and straighten the folds and pleats back into some semblance of order.
“Hang it,” she muttered. “Stupid train.”
The train soon sped its way from the city’s border, crossing through fields and wooded areas as its rail rose up higher still. Rom carefully made her way further forward, keeping herself flattened low. With her dark dress and kerchief, she supposed she would be all but invisible in the darkness against the dark grey of the train’s metal. But, she thought, no sense in pressing her luck.
It made an almost straight line out to the wall, turning in the last hundred meters to travel parallel beside it. Rom began to wonder if this was a good plan. She could see the occasional guard up on the platforms, but realized they were not looking her way at all – of course! She thought, they’re not watching in, they’re watching out!
The train made two quick stops to discharge and collect soldiers, and then sped along a long and empty stretch. Rom looked to her left to see the city, still bright from this distance. To her right, the Wall loomed – and beyond that… Oldtown.
She figured she was at about the halfway point, and carefully rose to her feet, balancing cautiously against the rush of the oncoming wind. Now or never, girl, she told herself, and kicked off from the roof of the train.
Her momentum carried her forward for some distance even as she soared towards the top of the wall. Just as she neared the apex, however, she saw two guards talking to one another at just about the place she was to cross over. She was in mid-jump; there was no way to change her angle now.
She reached down to her watch and quickly pressed the fob button. Instantly, everything froze around her, and she clawed her way through the thickly resisting air. As the flat ledge slowly passed, she reached out with one hand and spun herself so that her feet carried her up and over the guard’s walkway.
Her angle of ascent took her directly between the two guards – so close she could have reached out to touch them both. Passing over the Wall upside down, she couldn’t help but blow a kiss at the guard as payment for safe passage, before continuing in her cartwheel across the walkway.
As her feet came down onto the other edge of the wall, she crouched down and balanced herself with one hand for just long enough to get her bearings – luck was on her side; she wasn’t far from where she’d come over originally, and she could see the clock tower distinctly, even in the near-darkness.
She let gravity pull her slowly against the pressure of null-time, and, once she was leaning below horizontal, Rom kicked away and vaulted herself back towards the tower. Halfway down, she again depressed the watch’s button, returning her to regular time. The sounds of wind and rushing water that always accompanied her when using the watch to travel between moments ceased sharply; the resistant pressure vanished abruptly and with that the rooftops of Oldtown began to speed towards her. She skidded to a stop along the sloped roof of the clock tower, holding the spire for balance.
At once, the familiar sights, sounds and smells filled her senses. From the moist earthiness of the steam vents that breathed faint columns of white into the air to the jovial and incomprehensible voices rising up out of the open-air market, they filled Rom with an ache she’d long since thought she’d kept at a distance. She tried to swallow the tears that she could feel swelling up behind her eyes. After two years, she was home again.
Chapter 11: Ceramic Skins, Souls of Sand
The sky had blossomed into a brilliant blue, even though the sun would not creep into the streets of Oldtown for several more hours. Even so, the streets were alive with activity. Rom looked down from the broken and gutted tower onto the familiar pulse and rhythm of the town. It was much as she remembered it from the perspectives of the Matrons and other townspeople, who looked back on the peaceful years of developmental prosperity, in the years before the monsters had begun to appear on their streets – which had happened at more or less the same time Rom had been delivered to the Orphanage, some twelve years before. There was more of a comfortable pace to their steps, a free and enthusiastic sense to the greetings exchanged between any two people that passed one another on their way. Even the air smelled fresher.
Rom’s eyes crisscrossed the streets visible from this, the highest point in the town. There were definitely more people in the streets than she recalled – and she also saw several teams of workers openly maintaining the pipes that wrapped the town in a dizzying matrix of web-like conduits from building to building. Even from this distance, Rom could hear the underlying hiss of steam as it
travelled this pipes to provide an extra layer to their individual relays. It might have been her imagination, but Rom was fairly certain that the intermittent bursts of white that trailed up from random points across the town were cleaner and brighter.
Another thing that had changed, however, were the quantities of machines that worked the fields. When she’d left, it was Aleph-five and a half-dozen or so other machines. But now, there were several dozen, working the full agricultural span from the north to the south. It was the height of the harvesting season, and the machines were hard at work, a faint cloud of steam and debris filling the air over the fields as they processed the crops. Rom smiled to herself.
“What is it?” Mulligan asked her.
She pointed out towards the fields. “It looks like they’re dancing,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
Out of instinct, she moved to the ledge to jump out towards the fields, but paused. It was daytime now, and as soon as she left the relative concealment of the recesses of the clock tower, she would be easily visible by any of the townspeople who happened to look up and see her passing overhead.
It hadn’t occurred to her before; over the past months, she’d travelled across the rooftops only at night, in an effort to conceal her nature. Her people called themselves the Sheharid Is’iin, but the people of Aesirium and Oldtown called them Harvesters, Reapers; and worse names than that. It was generally understood that the Is’iin governed souls and watched over the passage of a soul from life to death - - that, plus their reputed magical powers lent them an air of mystery and intimidation.
But perhaps it was the cloudlessness of the sky; it might have been the sense of rhythm and pacific beauty of the machines’ labors. Whichever it was, Rom dismissed the demeanor of caution and leapt out of the tower with a pair of quick steps for a running start. The breeze through her white hair was pure exhilaration; only the sounds of wind and the flapping of her dress filled her ears as the buildings sped past below her feet. She landed on another rooftop only long enough to kick off, letting momentum carry her again to the air; two more such leaps brought her to a storehouse on the perimeter of the town. If her passing caused a stir, she chose to ignore it.
She recognized a few of the older machines from their initial activations, but there was no mistaking Aleph-five. There was a certain distinctiveness to his walk, to how he carried himself. For the other machines, whose economy of movement was dictated by the logical understanding of effort versus result, Aleph-five seemed to almost enjoy motion. Where the average machine would rarely change its position when being addressed, Aleph-five seemed to think it rude to not turn and face the person speaking to him.
Rom noticed him almost immediately after landing on the rooftop; he was standing a short ways off, his head following the movement of a bird as it flew nearby. She waited until he looked in her direction, and waved to him. He ambled towards her, returning the wave and bowing his head slightly.
“Miss Romany!” he said. “It is very pleasing to see you again!”
She beamed. But of course he would remember her name. The machines remembered everything. “The fields look wonderful!” she exclaimed. She could see now that they not only had extended the fields beyond the length of the city, but that they had more than doubled its width. The old stone fence line had been removed; it had been replaced with a much larger one, with rocks and boulders – some the size of small buildings.
“Thank you,” Aleph replied, a tone of pride evident in his mechanical voice. “You are kind to say so. We are pleased to be of use once again.”
As a line of the agricultural machines paused to off-load their harvest, Aleph acknowledged them and held up a hand to Rom while he issued them their next tasks. As they moved to comply, he turned his attention back to her.
“Miss Romany,” he said, as an afterthought, “you will be pleased to know that we have stationed a small contingent of machines at the periphery, and maintain vigilance against the possible incursion of the creatures of the wild. There have been no attacks upon the populace since you left.”
She smiled; he seemed pleased as well to share this news with her. Rom nodded at him while Mulligan sniffed in a failed attempt to seem apathetic to their efforts. “Thank you,” she said. Her eyes continued to pass from machine to machine, not yet finding what she half-hoped to see. She dismissed the small ache she felt in her stomach.
Aleph-five followed her gaze, at last returning to affix on her. “She is not here,” he said softly. “My lady Hikari is, as usual, in her shop, laboring on a new project. You will find her there.”
“Oh, but I wasn’t…” Rom’s voice trailed off, recognizing the machine’s discerning accuracy. She sighed. “Is she mad at me?”
The machine’s great head turned slowly from side to side. “She misses her greatest friend,” he said simply.
With a low grinding of metal on metal, Aleph-five took a half-step back, raising his voice again to its normal volume. “But, if Miss Romany will excuse her loyal machine, there is work that requires his attention.” He bowed slightly at the waist; Rom mirrored the gesture and politely waited until he had turned back to the fields and other machines before she spun slowly on her right foot and jumped off in the direction of the Steam Labs.
*****
Cousins counted the wood grains on the ceiling supports of his office. He’d already counted them several times, but it was either this or go crazy. Maybe this is going crazy, he wondered.
A knock at his door interrupted his meanderings. Wiping away the obvious expression of gratitude at a distraction, he sat back upright and called out for them to enter. It was Olan, his chief of communications – he was one of his newer volunteers, eager to play a part in the new organization and handy with making sense out of the different forms of communication – both technological and magical – employed by the peoples of Oldtown and Aesirium alike. Olan closed the door behind him and stood in front of Cousins’ desk, running a nervous hand through his reddish hair.
Cousins pointed to the chair, inviting Olan to take a seat. The thin man nodded and sat quickly. In his right hand he held a notebook, on the pages of which were scribbled hundreds of characters, indecipherable from where Cousins sat.
“What do you have for me, Olan?”
The man cleared his throat twice and flipped through a few of the pages in his book before answering. “We-well, sir,” he stammered, “we’ve been seeing a lot of silence on the main channels today – a lot more, well, nothing, than usual.”
The young man sat closer to his desk, pulling the Looking Glasses from their inner pocket in his vest. Even though he only slipped them up on his forehead, it felt better to have them on. “Silence isn’t completely unheard of – if you’ll pardon the pun,” he half-smiled to diminish the tension. “But I’m assuming that something else is being said, to further complicate this?”
Olan placed the notebook in the middle of the desk, turning it around for Cousins to read. At the top of the page were various characters, illegible but distinguishing the code as belonging to the Whitehold. Cousins shivered in spite of the relative warmth of the room. He’d heard enough stories about the secret royal guard, and their involvement in any activity increased the risk exponentially. They’d never drawn the attention of the Whitehold, but Cousins had agreed with Favo’s advice that it was best to know the path of your worst enemies so that you never cross it.
Beneath the initial coded message were the various mathematical equations required to translate the code into legible characters, and in the middle of the page, circled and underscored was their corresponding message. It was a single sentence, but filled Cousins with the deepest sense of dread any collection of words had before managed.
It read, simply: The girl has left the city.
He looked back up at Olan. “You’re sure of the translation?” It was a ridiculous question, and he knew of the answer before Olan had even nodded, but he needed to ask it anyway.
“The message w
as just broadcast across a secured channel, not one hour ago. It’s real time.”
Standing up from his chair, Cousins crossed the room and opened his wall cabinet. From inside, he pulled out three of his spellshot pistols and secured one in a holster inside his vest. The other two went into low-slung holsters on a belt he slung around his waist. He also picked out what looked to be nothing more than the bladeless hilt of a sword – it was a device he’d procured through a series of favors from some of the artisans in the metalsmithing guild, and though he’d been eager to test it out, the thought occurred to him that such things were better done before the actual battle. Regardless, he slipped it into a fitted pouch on his belt and snapped it shut.
“Get down to the section chief, tell him to get a crew into the streets and keep an eye open; you get down to the armory and collect a sidearm. Tell everyone else you see to be on alert – and then get back to your post and focus on that channel. Let me know as soon as you hear anything else. I want to know about it before you get the translation.”
Olan picked up his pad and turned to comply. At the door, he paused, turning back to Cousins, who had just slipped the strangely-lensed goggles back over his eyes. “Sir- - do you think it’s true? Do you think she’s come back?”
Cousins double-checked the cartridges in his pistols. “It doesn’t matter what I think; they think so. And whether or not it’s true,” he added, slapping the full cylinder of shells into his right-handed spell shot, “they’re going to come looking for her. And there’s three places I’d go first if I were them.”
After Olan left, Cousins held a handful of additional cartridge casings; to these, he rolled his eyes and pulled down a shoulder pack. After he filled the pack with as many cartridges (as well as an additional pistol) as it could comfortably carry, he slung it over his shoulder and closed the cabinet.
Walking quickly over to his desk, he opened the top drawer and drew out a small rectangular pouch. Flipping open the lid, he slid his thumb across the stack of hard paper cards inside. The casual observer might think he then pulled a random card from the deck, but Cousins knew their order well enough to pull whichever one he wished.
