The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  When there was again no response, he finished her sentence. “Enjoying themselves too much.”

  Kata placed her ear against the wooden door and heard what sounded like a single knock, followed by a groaning sound. Images sprang to Kata’s mind of Aceline writhing with whomever she had met that day, her pretty face distended into a leer, groans escaping from her lips. But the sound also brought thoughts of violence to her mind.

  Kata turned the handle, but the door held fast. “Aceline—it’s Kata!” She knocked insistently. Anxiety gripped her. She turned to Rikard, who shook his head. They threw their weight against the door, but it didn’t budge.

  Kata said, “Wait. I’ll get Dexion.”

  Dexion had dried himself and was half dressed when she found him. He rapidly threw on his remaining clothes and followed her.

  Kata pressed her ear against the door again. There was a slight thudding clunk—perhaps someone banging against a table—then all was quiet.

  She stood back and nodded at the minotaur. He placed his immense hands against the doorway, which groaned briefly. There was a crack; shards of wood burst into the air; and the door broke open.

  One quick look into the room and Dexion stepped back, his nostrils flaring.

  A few feet in front of the door, the body of a short heavy man was sprawled facedown, the smell of burning flesh drifting from it. A second man lay on his back in the middle of the room, the skin of his face seemingly melted, white froth around where his mouth had once been. His arms lay above his head as if he were stretching. Both wore black suits, the traditional uniforms of the thaumaturgists.

  In the corner, Kata caught a glimpse of Aceline’s black hair, her skin whiter than ever.

  Kata raised her fingers to her lips. “Oh no,” she said. “Oh no.”

  Grief gripped her heart like a ghostly hand, for Aceline’s eyes were rolled back in her head. Death had taken her into the land of light.

  * * *

  Kata had cried only once in the last fifteen years. She did not cry now, though grief seemed to press her from her insides, threatening to erupt at any moment.

  Rikard turned and whistled. A moment later a grubby little urchin was at his side. “Ejan. Immediately.” The guttersnipe took a brief look into the room, his mouth as wide as his eyes. Rikard grabbed him by his torn jacket. “Keep that trap shut.”

  The urchin nodded—mouth still agape—and sped off through the mist. A couple, arms thrown around each other, staggered toward them along the steamy corridor.

  “Come on.” Rikard stepped lightly into the room. “Close the door.”

  Dexion forced the damaged door back into its frame, jamming it when it wouldn’t fit.

  Kata surveyed the scene. The door’s latch lay shattered on the ground. On the left side of the room, a large bath was cut into the stone floor. On the right side, three massage tables were lined up against the wall. The three bodies lay in between: the two men closest to them, and Aceline up against the far wall, near the edge of the bath.

  Kata stepped gently across the room to Aceline’s body. She avoided looking at the dead woman’s empty staring eyes. She needed to focus, to reconstruct events.

  “Look.” Rikard knelt beside the shorter man. He pointed to the ground near him. “There’s some kind of burned black powder on the floor.”

  “Here too.” Dexion pointed to a place nearer the center of the room, close to the thinner thaumaturgist. “His face has been completely melted.” Dexion’s nostrils flared again with distaste.

  Kata knelt beside her former friend and noticed several tiny black specks on the skin between her nostrils and mouth. A thin deep red mark encircled Aceline’s neck, bleeding slightly in places. “Aceline was strangled.” There were no cuts on her hands, though. It was almost as if she’d given up without a struggle.

  Kata felt a familiar pressure building within her. She took a flask from her bag and swallowed some of the medicine that kept her seizures at bay. Without the precautionary medication, the fits came at moments of stress and left her incapacitated for hours. Now her mouth was filled with the pungent taste of dirt and ul-tree roots. She gagged, steadied herself, and returned the flask to her bag.

  Delicately, using the edge of her knife, she lifted as many of the black specks from under Aceline’s nose as she could. She looked around hopelessly for a vial, then placed the knife carefully onto the nearest massage table. Then Kata began to scrape some of the blackened powder from the floor with her second knife, until she had recovered a thick curl.

  Rikard pushed his hair back with his hand. “The thaumaturgists must have killed each other.”

  “I suppose they knew the same thaumaturgical formulae,” said Dexion. “A burning conjuration. Like two gladiators who strike at the same time, each mortally wounded the other with the same spell.”

  Kata agreed. “They probably dispatched Aceline first. One held her down; the other did the strangling. But afterward they fought. It must have been this one I heard falling when I pressed my ear to the door.” Kata pointed to the heavy thaumaturgist near the entrance. “Maybe he was making his last effort to escape.”

  Kata took in the rest of the room. A glorious mosaic depicting one of the Eyries of the Augurers decorated the far wall. The rocky pinnacle rose into the sky, breathtakingly thin against an azure sky. Through a window, an Augurer could be seen seated in the center of a room, her wild hair waving in the air. With one black and piercing eye she stared toward the viewer as if inviting them in, as the line of Augurers had invited citizens of Caeli-Amur and Varenis since the time of the ancients. Around the pinnacle, the griffins circled in the sky, their feathered wings beating against invisible drafts, their eagle heads rearing up proudly.

  The mosaic covered the arch of the roof above, the tiles there becoming first the light blue of the sky, then the dark blue of night. On the wall behind them, the mosaic depicted Caeli-Amur, a thousand little glittering lights in the night. At its center stood the door with its ruined latch.

  Leaving Dexion and Rikard to guard the room, Kata slipped out and searched for an attendant. There seemed to be none working—perhaps they were gone for good—so it took her a few minutes to find a storeroom, which had already been ransacked, presumably after the uprising. She snatched two vials, returned to the room, carefully dropped the tiny specks into one vial, and screwed its lid back on. Kata then scraped the blackened powder from the second knife into the second vial.

  There was a rattle at the door, and Dexion opened it. Ejan strode into the room and surveyed the scene with his usual Olympian cast. Tall, glacial-eyed, and with white-blond hair in a city predominated by olive-skinned and dark-haired people, it was ironic that he had become the preeminent seditionist leader. He stood out, and he used this fact to his advantage. Kata had never liked the man’s calculating, machinelike mind. She felt that if she ever touched him, she might find his skin cold like ice. The vigilant leader built those around him in the same mold: a collection of lieutenants ready to take any action. Even those who had begun with a touch of softness, like Rikard, soon took on the harness of a hammer.

  Ejan’s bodyguard, Oskar, stood behind him, straight like a flagpole. Scars from the House wars ran across his arms, and a long scar ran in a jagged line from forehead to chin on the left side of his face. Kata knew him immediately as a pragmatist, one of the philosopher-assassin schools that had remained aloof from events, mercenaries for hire. Oskar possessed the same cold distance as his employer.

  At the rear of the group, the wide-eyed waif edged around the door and looked at the bodies with amazement. For a moment Kata felt as if she were in a play, some surrealist tragedy: enter the leader, enter the assassin, enter the urchin. Each would play his role.

  Ejan turned to Oskar. “This must remain secret. The city is already teetering precariously; if the citizens discover Aceline has died, who knows what vengeance they might take? We’ll take the bodies back to the Opera and bring the embalmers in.”

 
“Wait,” said Kata. “There may be answers here we haven’t yet discovered. They’ll be lost if we move too quickly.”

  No one moved. In the silence, Oskar sized up Dexion. Sensing his gaze, Dexion let out a soft and deep grumble, like the growl of a lion. Oskar’s eyelids twitched once before his impassive and dark stare returned.

  Kata stepped closer to Ejan. “You can’t stage-manage everything. Aceline deserves recognition. Her death is not only a personal matter, it is a matter for the entire movement. For the city. If we suppress it, how can anyone judge the truth of things? Freedom requires knowledge.”

  “The dead don’t have rights,” said Ejan. “You know that people are already carrying out private vendettas. Our guards can barely keep the peace. Once Aceline’s murder becomes known, mobs will wreak vengeance on the city. Is that what you want?”

  There was truth to his words. In these overheated days, who knew what the consequences might be? But the seditionists had to rule in a new way. Kata shook her head. “We can’t continue the secrecies and lies of the Houses.”

  “And who are you to make this decision, Kata? Who do you represent?”

  Kata froze. She had no authority over Ejan, an acknowledged leader of seditionism. Kata remembered the great demonstration on Aya’s Day, which had led to the overthrow of the Houses. She recalled the way he and his troops had placed themselves at the head of the march, a symbolic position gained as much by audacity and assertiveness as by anything else.

  But Kata was only a foot soldier with a lifetime of crimes to make up for. She hated to think about the biggest betrayal of them all, informing Technis of the location of the seditionists’ hideout just before the overthrow of the old system. How many had been captured or died because of her? Aceline was one of them, Maximilian another. She couldn’t bear to think of it. A foot soldier was all she wanted to be.

  Ejan turned to Rikard. “What do you think?”

  Rikard took a breath. “I suspect these thaumaturgists are House agents. Blocking the grain supply and moving their ships up to the Dyrian coast surely isn’t enough for them, so they’ve begun a campaign of low-intensity warfare. Trying to decapitate the seditionist movement to leave it weak and confused.”

  “Find out who these thaumaturgists are and who they represent,” said Ejan. “I want to know what occurred here.”

  Words tumbled from Kata’s mouth. “I’ll work with Rikard.”

  Ejan shook his head. “You’d only be wasting your time.”

  “I’ll pursue it on my own, then. Aceline was…” Grief swept over Kata again. She looked at the tile floor, which blurred from the tears swimming in her eyes. She blinked.

  “Was?” Even Ejan’s inquiring look was unnerving.

  “She was my friend, and you have no control over me. I’m sick of people telling me what to do, Ejan. I’ll do it whether you like it or not.”

  Ejan tilted his head to one side and eyed her calculatingly. “All right, then. You’ll work together, and report to me.”

  “I’ll report to Thom. He is the leader of the moderates now,” said Kata.

  Ejan shrugged and turned from her as more seditionists arrived, wrapping the bodies in blankets and treading over the floor with great dirty boots.

  Rikard spoke softly to her, as if he might disturb the dead. “Shall we find out what Thom knows about this fatal meeting?”

  TWO

  Twilight fell, and the cool autumn winds blew in from the ocean, swept through the narrow streets, over the white cliffs on which so many beautiful buildings were perched, and up the mountain that overlooked the city. A melancholy air settled over everything as if the city itself were grieving for Aceline’s death.

  As they approached the Opera, Kata tried to shake off her sadness. Dexion had returned home, where he’d agreed to meet the little urchin, Henri. Kata was sorry that the minotaur was not there to help her process Aceline’s death, but she knew he would only ever be a fellow traveler. He would accompany her if he were interested, but otherwise, he’d find his own entertainment.

  She still held Thom’s letter in her pocket. She could almost feel it, heavy and pulling at her, but she would not open it in front of Rikard, for he would report directly back to Ejan.

  The great entry hall of the Opera was a bustle of activity, just as she had left it hours before. Behind a large reception area stood seditionist intendants, yelling over the groups of people pressed up against the long table, begging for help.

  “Food parcels in the morning.”

  “Yes, yes, we’re reopening the trade routes shortly.”

  “Blame Arbor—don’t blame me.”

  People scurried in all directions in the northern wing. Many of the seditionists now lived in this labyrinth of rooms and halls, and Kata and Rikard passed dorm rooms with dozens of makeshift beds, some only piles of rags covered with a sheet. In other rooms, circles of seditionists sat in meetings. Kata caught snippets of discussion.

  “They say the New-Men are building a train line east, across the Etolian range.”

  “What have the New-Men to do with all this?”

  “Maybe they’ll help us deal with Varenis.”

  “No one can deal with Varenis. Varenis does all the dealing.”

  In the editorial offices, the young militant Olivier sat at a large desk, poring over proofs of the new issue of the moderates’ broadsheet, the Dawn. Paper lay strewn around him, all over the table and on the floor, much of it cut up or scrawled on.

  One of the new generations of seditionists, Olivier had been a leader of a university cell before the overthrow of the Houses. Possessing a subtle mind, he had quickly become chief editor of the broadsheet and every day turned out article after article with metronomic efficiency. Kata liked the complexity of his thought but knew he wasn’t a man of action. Olivier was at home with the word, not the deed.

  Rikard crossed his arms in a gesture of passive hostility. As lieutenants within their factions, the young men held identical positions. Yet they came from different backgrounds. The son of a tramworker, Rikard had a suspicion of the soft and educated. To Olivier, Rikard no doubt seemed like most of the vigilants: inflexible and lacking theory, unable to discern the subtle interplay of ideas and people and events.

  Oliver looked up from the sheet and dropped his pen. His bloodshot eyes were like dying coals in a fire. Like most seditionists, he stayed up late and rose early. They all tried to hold on to events the way a rider holds on to an unbroken horse.

  Rikard clasped Kata’s arm before she could speak. “No details. Remember what will happen if people find out.”

  Kata shook the vigilant off. She tried to summon the words, but nothing seemed adequate. Finally she settled on, “Aceline has died. In Marin’s great water palace, together with two thaumaturgists.”

  Olivier’s face drained of its color; his eyes seemed redder than before. He was an innocent when it came to death.

  Rikard stepped close to Olivier. “No one must know.”

  Olivier stepped around Rikard and spoke to Kata. “How did she die?”

  Kata collapsed into a chair, felt despair once again. “Strangled.”

  Olivier raised his arm, pressed his face into the crook of his elbow, rubbed his eyes against his forearm.

  “Where’s Thom?” said Kata eventually.

  “Gone,” said Olivier. “I asked him if he was going to the baths, but he shook his head. He had a strange stare—suspicious, you know. I stopped him, but he shook me off. At first I thought he was simply his usual emotional self.”

  “What made you think otherwise?” asked Kata.

  “That look in his eye, as if I might be an enemy.”

  “Where does he sleep?” asked Rikard.

  Olivier looked to Kata. “He has a hidden crib somewhere in the Artists’ Quarter, I think. He used to joke that it was his hideaway, where no one could find him. That’s where he designed most of his lithographs. So it’s a workshop, I suppose.”

  “Find ou
t where it is, Olivier. Ask everyone. Now that Aceline is gone, he’s the leader of the moderates. Without him—” Kata stopped, aware of Rikard beside her. “We need to find him.” This time Kata took Olivier by the arm. “Aceline’s death must be kept secret, at least until we’ve found Thom. Things are bad enough in the city.”

  Olivier glanced briefly at Rikard, then back at Kata. “You know who stands to benefit most from this: the vigilants.”

  Kata spoke with a certainty she didn’t quite feel. “It’s the Houses who stand to benefit the most. We’ve overthrown them. But they still wage war on us, even without their palaces and their networks of organization and power. Arbor and Marin are starving us. Where are the grain carts? The fishing boats?”

  The truth was, the entire seditionist movement was teetering on the precipice. The longer the crisis continued, the greater the calls to repress House activities. Soon Ejan would have a majority of the Insurgent Assembly, and would let loose violence against its enemies. The tragedy was that Ejan was right. Soon they would have to use force. There was no other choice. It was a question of timing, of trying every other possibility first. But the thought of it sent shocks through Kata’s body. For, in Ejan’s mind, anyone who disagreed with him in some way was an enemy.

  “Is this to do with the book?” asked Olivier.

  “What book?” Kata frowned.

  “The one Thom has been carrying with him. Didn’t you see it?”

  A creeping feeling ran over Kata. She remembered the way he had looked at his large bag when he had passed her the letter. “His sketchbook?”

  “No. It was an old book. There was something sickly about its cover. I only caught a glimpse, but I knew immediately there was something perturbing about it. It had that sheen.”

  “That sheen?”

  “The sheen of thaumaturgy.”

  * * *

  Deep in the labyrinth of the south wing, vigilants rushed around, a mirror image of the moderates in the north wing. The three corpses lay on tables in a side room, where baths had been filled with ice to help preserve them. Two elderly men stood over the bodies, cocking their heads as they examined them. On a cart nearby lay all the tools of embalming and preserving: cruel-looking knives and scalpels, bowls and long thin tubes.