The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  Aya said, Look at the smoke pumping into the air. You’ve ruined the city.

  Max felt Aya searching around in his memories. In a panic, Max walled them up.

  How am I supposed to learn anything about this world if you won’t let me know what you know?

  —I don’t want you shuffling around in my head, picking out this and that as if my memories are a chest of bric-a-brac.

  I wanted to learn more about Iria—things you might have learned as a child but have forgotten.

  —I’ve told you all I know.

  The notion that there might be things in Max’s mind he’d forgotten perturbed him. The idea that Aya might discover them perturbed him even more.

  According to legend, Iria had retreated from the world after the other gods’ victory over her lover, Aya. In Sentinel Tower, hidden away in the mountains, she had eked away her final years, having chosen mortality rather than the eternal life of the gods. The pain, they said, was too great for her to bear.

  Tell me again, said Aya.

  Max drew in a deep breath. —She’s gone. All the ancients are gone.

  He felt Aya’s grief. Like Max, Aya was also caught in the sense of the inexorable passing of time, the feeling that things could never go back to the way they were.

  Aya possessed the language of the unified theory of thaumaturgy. For almost a thousand years this language had been lost, and thaumaturgy had been fragmented, each discipline developing on its own. But this forgotten primary language—this mathematics—functioned in all of reality: both the land of life and the Other Side, the land of death. The language had its own costs, but it allowed the thaumaturgist to use the Art without the Other Side flowing into them, distorting them.

  And that was something Max needed. He had risked too much for it—he would brook no opposition from the second personality in his head. The question was: How could he access it without Aya’s consent?

  They arrived at the great, black, steaming, clunking tower, and climbed the dark stone steps, ready to take the cable car down to the Opera in Market Square.

  * * *

  Hundreds of golden globes danced on the Opera’s entry-hall ceiling. As Max entered, they froze. A second later they descended as one toward him. Floating down, they changed color to a bright gold, illuminating the hall in a flood of light. When they reached him, they began to spin around him, a whirlwind of dancing, flickering lights circling him.

  The hundreds of citizens who had been milling about or lining up in long queues stared at the lights, which now pulsed with energy.

  Hello, my little ones, said Aya.

  “Get away.” Maximilian waved his hands at the lights, some of which playfully danced around his hands. “Away.”

  Aya pushed an equation up toward Max, who grasped it and invoked it silently. The lights rushed back up to the roof, where they resumed their dance, this time slightly less energetically.

  Not even a thanks?

  —Are you always this narcissistic?—said Max.

  I might ask you the same question.

  Wide-eyed citizens parted in front of Maximilian as he strode to the main reception desk. He recognized the old pinch-faced Antoine, working as one of the intendants behind the desk. Antoine had been one of the first generations of seditionists led by Markus. These older types had been surpassed by the following generation, who had been swayed by leaders of the three new factions: Aceline, Ejan, and Maximilian. After Markus had been expelled from the seditionist group, the other older ones had broken and drifted aimlessly, or aligned themselves with one of the new factions. So history had marched on. Antoine had sided with Aceline, but like most of that older generation, he had lost a sense of his own ideas, a sense of certainty.

  Antoine’s awestruck face seemed even more pinched as he stared at Max. “We all thought you had disappeared in the Technis dungeons!”

  “Who? Kata? Oewen or Ariana? Clemence?”

  Antoine shook his head. “Ejan will explain it all, Max. Come with me.”

  Max felt his stomach tighten with uncertainty. What had become of the group he had built?

  Antoine took Max to the head of one of the other desks in the hall. The crowd watched Maximilian, apparently wondering who this man was.

  “Papers. Now,” Antoine ordered the man behind the desk. He hurriedly put together some papers. “Sign here. Fingerprint.”

  When they were done, Antoine led Maximilian into the south wing, through the maze of corridors. They passed seditionist guards rushing to-and-fro. Two old men lurked at the doorway of a room, smelling of chemicals. As they passed the room, Maximilian caught a momentary glimpse of three bodies. Two wore the suits of thaumaturgists. The third, from the fragmentary glimpse, appeared to be a teenager, his back turned so that his face was obscured.

  Antoine rushed Maximilian past the scene and into a large room. At one end of a central table sat the Northerner Ejan, stone-faced and cold as a knife. Even Ejan’s clothes were stiff and creaseless, as if they’d been pressed that very morning. Before him lay an illustration of a disturbing mechanism. At first it appeared to be a massive bolt-thrower, or perhaps a military machine—a scorpion, perhaps. But its purpose was even more grisly. With the swing of a frame, you could lock a person into it, and the mechanism would drive a shaft the size of a tree trunk directly through the person’s body. At the top of the illustration was written The Bolt.

  Explaining the contraption to Ejan was the head of the Collegia, Dumas. His bulldog head seemed to have grown even thicker, his jowls hanging even farther to the floor, the lines around his eyelids even redder. Max remembered the man with distaste, for the Collegia—half-criminal collections of small traders and shopkeepers—still used slaves. For Max they would never be real allies. They would oppose the Houses when it suited them, but never consistently, never from the point of principle.

  “It will be quick, humane,” Dumas said.

  Ejan looked up, his eyes registering the slightest shock at the sight of Max. “A general without an army. How did you survive?”

  Maximilian sighed and sat on a nearby seat. “I’m not sure I did, Ejan, but I’m not here to fight. I just want to know where my supporters are.”

  Ejan smiled ever so slightly. “Maximilian, after you ventured on your mad journey to the Sunken City, your group fell apart.”

  “Not all of them, surely. Kata? Where is she?”

  “Many of them were arrested by Technis before the overthrow. Some were driven half mad by torture. The rest dispersed, gone. Oppositions cut across new lines now. I do hope you’ll join us vigilants. We’re pressing the insurgency all the way, revolutionizing every part of life, binding the thaumaturgists to the decisions of the Assembly.”

  Dumas sized Maximilian up. “Opponents must be eliminated, you understand.”

  Ejan leaned across to Maximilian and clasped his hands in an awkward attempt at affection. “We need everyone on our side. There are those who argue for moderation, for discussion. But you cannot allow discussion to occur when the very basis of our rule is threatened.”

  Max shook Ejan’s hands away. “Ejan, I always hoped we’d be allies. You frightened me, though—your certainty, the cold equations you do in your head. I had hoped you would grow into a brother, but you have moved in the opposite direction. Not toward warmth, but to ever more abstract ideals—ideals above all else, am I right? Touch is not something that comes naturally to you, Ejan. You should have someone else do your convincing for you, someone with softer hands.”

  Ejan sat back, unmoved. “Don’t you make those same equations in your head, Maximilian? We overthrew Markus and the rest of the old guard. Events passed them by. Make sure the same doesn’t happen to you.”

  Max stood up, angry now. Ejan was right: he, too, made cold calculations in his head. But who didn’t? The trick was to keep yourself anchored to life, to people, to warmth. To realize that those calculations are simply in your head, not in the world itself.

  Max looked away and
down, but in that direction were only the designs of the Bolt. “An instrument of murder, no doubt.”

  “A terrible instrument, isn’t it?” said Ejan. “We never wanted this, did we? But have you seen the citizens, hungry on the street? Have you seen the saboteurs, striking wherever we are weak? They force our hand.”

  “They brought it onto themselves,” said Dumas. “They have blockaded the city, attacked us from within. I designed it so it is almost painless. Like a rapid blow.”

  “Killing one’s opponents is a sign you’ve already lost the battle,” said Maximilian.

  Ejan shrugged. “You would prefer us to starve, then? Is that what you plan to do?”

  To this, Max had no response.

  “See, you find yourself doing the same cold calculations in your head. Once we starve, then the Houses return and drench the city in blood. There is no middle road. It’s either one path or the other.”

  “Either way, we’ve already lost.”

  “Either way, you’ve already lost,” said Ejan.

  As Max walked dejectedly through the corridors, Aya said: Oh, I like him.

  * * *

  The Quaedian was Maximilian’s old stomping ground. Once, he had thought of it as his quarter, and again he found the dynamism that had attracted him: new theater companies announced their avant-garde productions; half-drunk bohemians spilled from tiny galleries displaying ever-popular Vorticist art. He dodged past the red-wine–stained grins of avant-gardists, ignoring their calls to join them.

  He stopped on an overhead walkway and watched the street below. Beneath him marched some members of the Order of the Sightless. The apocalyptics wore blindfolds and held themselves together with a small network of chains.

  What strange people.

  —They believe the world is reaching some second cataclysm. That things will fall apart. That some end is near.

  If only they’d been around before the war. Then we might have had some warning.

  Max reached out for Aya’s memories of his battles with Alerion, but the mage kept these safely cordoned off. Both of them were aware of the precarious nature of their situation; at any stage the balance might be upset and their personalities might merge with each other. If they let their barriers down, they might lose who they were and dissolve into some incoherent split personality.

  On the street beneath the walkway, Max saw Kata walking alone in black shirt and dress, her black hair flowing to her shoulders. His heart clamped in sudden emotion. “Kata! Kata!”

  The woman stopped, looked up, her face impassive. She did not reply. Something was wrong with her, but Max could not tell what. She looked gaunter than Max remembered, her eyes a strange pale color—yet darkness hovered around them.

  Again he called to her. “Kata!”

  But Kata picked up her pace and skipped down a side street: she was running from him. Max scrambled over the balustrade and prepared to jump to the street below.

  We’ll break our ankles on the cobblestones.

  Max hesitated, leaped anyway. He hit the cobblestones, and a sharp pain drove up his right leg from the ankle to the knee. He fell to his side, clutching it. He scrambled to his feet, tested it out. It wasn’t too bad, after all.

  You really like this woman.

  Max ignored the voice, ran to the side alleyway, and continued. He reached a crossroads and looked down the side street to where a group of old men sat on wooden crates and drank coffee silently. Max looked the other way, where the street was empty.

  You’ll never find her in this maze of streets.

  Max rushed on to another side street, where three women were pasting up posters advertising a play called The Story of X: A Narrative of Everyman.

  In the opposite direction, an open sewer ran along the street; the smell of dank water was overwhelming. As he ran on, Max became aware of doorways passed, open staircases that led into apartments and tenement buildings, side alleyways. When the alley opened into a tiny square where a washerwoman hung clothes from a low line, Max despaired. “Did you see a woman pass this way? Black hair and clothes?”

  The woman scrunched up her face and shook her head.

  Max sat on two small stairs before a closed and rotting door. Now the loss flooded fully into him, a blackness that seemed to fill his limbs with lead. Why had she run from him? He had lost everything: his seditionist group, half of his body and mind. Even Kata had fled from him.

  Oh, I see now. You don’t just like this woman. She is more than that to you.

  —You’re right—said Max. —No, you’re wrong. I don’t know what I feel for her. Anyway, there’s no room for such feelings in the seditionist movement. Everything must be subordinated to the cause.

  Aya laughed. That’s the spirit.

  Now anger flooded through Max. —We can’t go on like this. I would rather die than have you chatting away like an imbecile forever.

  That’s melodramatic. But I’ve been thinking: there might be a way of freeing me from your mind, Aya said. Perhaps the Aediles still have the technology.

  —The Aediles disappeared after the cataclysm—said Max bitterly. Max knew the myth. After the gods had warred, leaving the world shattered and ruined, the Aediles had despaired. They had called out to the universe for a new force to bring order to the city. They spent their nights invoking powerful equations until they summoned the strange Elo-Talern, who had ruled over the city like shadow puppets, hidden from the light. The Elo-Talern had become myths to frighten children, strange creatures who were said to secretively influence the Houses, though Max could not be sure what part they had played when the seditionists and the Houses had come into conflict on Aya’s Day.

  Then their technology will still rest beneath the mountain somewhere.

  Max’s despair lifted for a moment. He would be free from that other cold and distant personality lodged in the recesses of his mind. The thought filled Max with savage excitement.

  SIX

  Max passed the still-sleeping Omar and continued along a route he’d traveled before, into the heart of the ancients’ underground domain. He walked down that strange corridor leading to hundreds of hexagonal chambers filled with strange skeletal cadavers lying on beds, tubes plunging into their orifices, others piercing their veins. Those corpses seemed like a symbol for the ancients themselves: strange, mysterious, dead.

  —If we succeed in freeing you from my mind, I want you to teach me the prime language—said Max.

  And what do I receive in return?

  Max thought rapidly. —If you don’t agree to teach me, I won’t let you free.

  You know, it would take you years to master the prime language. To join the Magi requires decades of study, of practice. It requires a journey into the dark lands, for you cannot understand the language without knowing both its sides. You would have to give up everything else. Your seditionism, your Kata.

  —They no longer need me. They never did.

  Maximilian did not remember the way, and so he put himself at the mercy of the ancient mage, for this was Aya’s world—a world of strange spaces and weird technology. They continued down, down into the mountain on a central elevator and into a vast ruined complex, a melancholy pleasure palace of empty ballrooms and baths, fountains and broken amphorae, rooms filled with chessboards and dice pits for two-knuckled jolly. On and on they went, deep into the heart of the mountain.

  * * *

  The vast circular door was covered with intricate inscriptions. At the sight of it, Max’s anxiety intensified, and the muscles in his body felt tense and ungainly. They were about to pass some deeper threshold.

  Let me control your hand, said Aya.

  Maximilian hesitated. He feared losing even part of himself.

  Do you want to pursue this course of action or not?

  Max released some part of his mind. It was like forgetting something for a moment, knowing the knowledge is somewhere within you but you can’t quite retrieve it.

  As Max let it go, Aya pick
ed up his hand and moved it across the door in a complex configuration. Suddenly the door lit up and hummed with uncanny power; silver ideograms descended its face like snowflakes falling in winter. The door slid open, revealing a vast hexagonally shaped hall. Max felt Aya’s feeling of revulsion and surprise alongside his own feeling of horror, for the perspectives of the hall were impossible: the farthest walls seemed closer than those nearby. Staircases and walkways crisscrossed the space like spider’s webs, reaching up to places that appeared to be other floors but now were deserted.

  But this was not what horrified Max. No, his heart thumped rapidly at the sight of the strange creatures, long and thin like a fusion of spider and human. There seemed to be too many vertebrae in their wiry bodies, and their long horselike faces were composed of too many gaunt planes to be human. Some were robed, others half naked, their shriveled breasts and tiny genitals absurd and horrific to see. One group lay upon chaise longues, clasping tankards, their dead eyes staring at the roof. Over their robes and the floor, foodstuffs and liquid had spilled. Most had dried to dull yellows, reds, and oranges, but those that still retained a vestige of their former moisture were luminescent. Elsewhere, bowls of gray deflated fruit rotted slowly. Yet another group lay on pillows, their limbs draped over one another, tubes attached to the insides of their elbows. Still more lay facedown or sprawled at unnatural angles, as if they’d crashed to the floor in some terrible and deadly rain. These were the Elo-Talern, shadowy creatures of legend who at one point controlled the Houses but who had long ago retreated into the darkness, letting the Houses live as they wished.

  Across all surfaces grew lichens and molds in the most extraordinary colors: luminous greens, bright oranges, wild purples. In places, these had grown to monstrous proportions, towers and massive lakelike carpets. An entire corner of the hall was buried beneath a sea of crimson mold. Elsewhere, only the shadowy forms of groups of these spidery creatures could be seen beneath their horrid lime-green blankets. None of the creatures had escaped the mold’s abhorrent embrace. Here a blue mold covered an arm like a glove. There a cadaverous back was clothed in a green lichen cloak. Yet elsewhere one creature lay half covered by a pink blanket, as if a wave had flooded over the creature’s friends, the high tide marked by his own sternum and the bridge of his nose.