The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  “We need a secret word, then,” Kata said. “Something only we would know. To ensure that the other is really themselves.”

  They eventually settled on Aya’s Day.

  While Rikard roved through the room once more, Kata found a local urchin to take a message to Ejan. When she returned to the apartment, Rikard looked up at her from where he stood over the body. He pointed toward Thom’s hands. “Skin and blood under the fingertips. Thom fought the shapeshifter.”

  Good, thought Kata. She hoped the artist had done at least some damage.

  They found nothing else in the room, and soon enough Ejan and his bodyguard, Oskar, arrived. Behind them, the two old embalmers carried bags of equipment.

  “Oh, he’s just like the thaumaturgists,” said one.

  “Yep,” said the second embalmer. “Oh well, another baby born, another one dies. That’s the cycle, isn’t it?”

  “That it is,” said the first.

  Chills sunk into Kata, and she turned rapidly to Rikard. “I have to go.”

  The walk home was nightmarish. Everyone seemed a threat. Each person, a shapeshifter ready to strike. All eyes seemed filled with menace. Even as she tread warily, her mind was awhirl. Thom was dead: What did it mean for the city? What did it mean for the moderates? What did it mean for her? It was all too fresh to comprehend.

  When she returned to her apartment, her mind still reeling from the horror, she found Dexion lounging half asleep and alone in the parlor. His armor was piled in a corner, dirty and even more battered. He stirred a little on his bedding, rumbled deeply.

  “Where’s Henri?” asked Kata.

  Dexion’s long lashes opened, revealing his inky black eyes. “Henri isn’t home yet.”

  He did not return that night, or the following morning. This time Kata knew he was really gone.

  PART II

  NIGHTS

  Iria was always the most solitary of the gods. If Panadus was the ruler, Aya the joker, then Iria was the artist. She was not so much beautiful as full of grace and style. Responsible for many of the world’s wonders, Iria designed the city of Lixus, with its glorious walkways and wondrous curves. Indeed, the curve—the circle, the ellipse—was her signature form. Effortlessly, she graced the walkways of Lixus, overlooking magnificent white-and-silver-sailed ships. Her dresses were intricately designed: held out by internal hoops of different sizes, themselves sewn in at various angles. She moved in perfumed clouds of jasmine and orange. She basked in the golden sun and the silver moon as if she owned both of them.

  An artist needs time away from society, the better to digest it and regurgitate it transformed and reconfigured. She built herself a tower—the Sentinel Tower, she called it—from which she would watch the world from afar.

  A strange couple she and Aya made, for as she was solitary, he was social. Can a joke exist if there is no one to hear it? And yet they seemed to work perfectly. A rebel joker and an artist, arm in arm at the ceremonies, loved by all.

  All except Alerion, who adored Iria but whose hateful eyes fell always on Aya.

  —Theram of Lixus, Portraits of Iria

  FIFTEEN

  Armand drifted in and out of a nightmarish reverie. After his abduction in Varenis, he had been put on a train, which now rattled through the night. In a semisleeping state, half conscious of the burst of steam from the chugging engine and the heat of the thirty or so bodies around him, he confronted Valentin.

  “You betrayed me when we could have achieved so much! Why?”

  Each time the visions repeated themselves, Valentin responded differently. Sometimes he simply smiled and stared. Another time he looked at his feet and wrung his hands, stricken with guilt. In one dream, he explained, “It’s all the play of power, Armand. It’s all part of the game. You must learn to be realistic.”

  A shudder of the train awoke Armand. After what seemed an eternal night, light filtered through the cracks between the wooden boards of the train walls. The smell of sweat and illness was overpowering, and yet Armand knew he had already grown accustomed to it. Periodically, someone would shuffle over to the hole cut into the floor to relieve themselves. Children clutched their parents. Lone prisoners averted their eyes in shame or fear. Armand’s mouth was parched, yet there was no water.

  So this is what has become of us, thought Armand. We have been reduced to animals. Armand’s eyes roved over his desolate companions. Each knew their fate, but none spoke of it. It was too horrible to mention.

  Near the doorway of the carriage, a man looked calmly at the other prisoners. His hood covered his bearded face, but his eyes still shone with a soft intelligence as if he were considering his predicament. When he locked eyes with Armand, he nodded equably. It was the first acknowledgment Armand had received, and something about it comforted him. For the first time on that dreadful trip, he felt as though he existed.

  Armand crawled across the floorboards and leaned against the sliding door, which most of the prisoners avoided. That door represented their future, something none of them wanted to get closer to.

  “Which direction are we headed, do you think?” said Armand.

  The man nodded again, this time toward the shards of light that cut through the gaps in the walls. “There are slave camps all over Varenis territory, but I’d say southwest, around the mountains.”

  “The mines,” said Armand.

  The man gave no response, which seemed to indicate agreement.

  They sat in silence for a long time. In the far corner, an injured man moaned. At the beginning of the trip, he had staggered into the carriage, ashen-faced, clasping his stomach. He wasn’t bleeding, but there had been something wrong. “I resisted. I fought,” was all he said. There was a tinge of blue to his skin, and periodically he clenched his jaw so that the muscles and tendons rose to the surface. Now he drifted in and out of consciousness. His voice was a croaking thing. “Water. Water.”

  An older woman placed her hand on his brow, rested it on his shoulder. She looked hopelessly at a young woman nearby who shared her plain flat-faced features.

  The children seemed to accept their lot, though they, too, occasionally asked for water. Armand supposed they were more flexible than the adults, able to face their existence without grown-up denial or resentful judgment. A squarish young man, as wide as he was tall, started to cry. But no one paid him any attention. Everyone was caught in their own private torment.

  With a spurt of desperation, Armand leaped to his feet and, as the others watched dully, tried to pull open the sliding door. It held fast. Just as quickly, he sat back down and leaned against it.

  Eventually he asked the hooded man, “Why did they send you?”

  “Oppositionist,” he said calmly. A little while later the man added, “I always thought they would eventually catch me, send me to the camps. There’s no space for oppositionists in Varenis. It’s not like Caeli-Amur.”

  Armand remained silent. Here he sat, next to the embodiment of everything he loathed. “If you were in Caeli-Amur, you’d be called a seditionist.”

  “I often thought of traveling to Caeli-Amur, but my home is Varenis. What can you do?”

  “You seem to accept your fate,” said Armand.

  “We’re but little particles on the river of history. We don’t choose what happens to us, only how we respond. Why should I rage or cry against history? No—we must take her as she is.”

  “On the contrary, we have to make history. We’ll have to escape the mines quickly. I don’t think anyone lives for long.” Already Armand was envisioning a plan. When he returned to Varenis, he would find Rainer, ally himself with the belligerents, and wreak revenge on Valentin. Yes—Valentin would learn that loyalty was a principle worth cultivating after all. Armand did not believe a word of Valentin’s story about his grandfather. Valentin was a liar, and he would pay for that. All Armand needed was some leverage to make up for the missing prism.

  The man pursed his lips and spoke happily. “And after escape, we
’ll have a nice coffee at a place I know in the Kinarian Pocket. They do a fine lemon tart there too.”

  Armand smiled at the incongruous thought. “What’s your name?”

  “Irik,” the man said. He didn’t ask Armand’s name.

  “I’m Armand.”

  For seemingly no reason, the train would occasionally grind to a halt. Hours later it would shudder back into motion. Outside it began to rain, and the prisoners tried to push their tongues through the cracks in the walls to absorb some of the moisture. But it was thankless work.

  Eventually the light softened and night descended. The rain fell heavier here on the western side of the Etolian range.

  Armand’s mouth felt as though it was filled with dust, and he found himself looking around, as if water might be hidden in the carriage somewhere. He, too, pushed his tongue though the spaces between carriage walls, but he found that all he could taste was the earthy wood, which seemed to dry his tongue out even more. When he sat down, his stomach ached. He had never felt such a thirst before, and his inability to quench it became a private hell. His cold eyes roved over the other prisoners with cold indifference. They began to resemble nothing but bundles of rags.

  The cold settled, and the prisoners huddled together like animals. There was no conversation in the dark; there was nothing to be said. Armand pressed himself into one side of the group. He felt warm and rancid breath on his cheek, heat emanating from the pile of bodies. On the other side, the cold fell on him like icy dew.

  Only the injured man lay alone, sprawled now on the floor. His moans grew weaker and weaker until they stopped altogether. His silence passed unnoticed as the black night wore on interminably. Bodies shifted and moved. There were groans and sighs. In the morning, the injured man’s corpse lay stinking and cold. No one dared touch it, and they all stayed as far away from it as possible.

  Armand’s bitterness fell away from him in that terrible train, and he laughed at his plan to return to Varenis. In that darkness, he felt stripped of all hopes, all dreams, all ambitions. From now on, his only goal would be to survive.

  * * *

  Around midday of the second day, Armand spied a rough town through the cracks of the carriage. Dirty and dispossessed barbarians begged on the streets, piles of logs lay stacked by the side of the train, the streets were thick with mud. They swept through the place quickly. Later that day Armand became vaguely aware of the light in the carriage shifting, as the train slowly turned in a new direction. The air became cool and moist as they climbed into the forested mountains.

  Finally the train shuddered to a halt. Armand dragged himself to his feet and peered through the cracks. Guards dressed in black leather loitered aimlessly between this prison train and a second one on a track nearby. Some leaned on long pikes, muttering a few inaudible words to one another; others stared dully into the distance, unimpressed by the new arrivals.

  One guard dressed in a long leather coat looked strangely like a schoolmaster, a stubby nose hidden in his soft round face. He pointed toward the front of the train and called out to someone, “As usual. As usual.” As the guard gestured, Armand pressed his exhausted eyes together, opened them again, but the sight remained: the man’s left eye was red, as if a blood vessel had burst and now filled it with blood. Bright spidery veins ran away from the edge of his eye. As he turned and marched away, a shot of fear ran through Armand.

  Other prisoners pressed against the carriage walls, feeling a mixture of fear and desperation. They could hear the doors of the carriage in front of them sliding open. Before long the guards directed disoriented prisoners forward. An old woman stumbled and fell, struggled to her feet again without help, and continued with the rest of them. A child of about six had lost his parents and stood crying as the streams of prisoners moved around him.

  “The grinding wheels of history, eh?” Irik peered through the cracks beside Armand.

  “Where are they all from?” said Armand.

  “Same as in this carriage: criminals, economic prisoners, rebels from the colonies—and one oppositionist.” Irik’s eyes lit up with irony. “Maybe it’s that skinny one over there, the one looking for his spectacles in the mud.”

  A large metal latch clunked, and their door rolled open with a boom.

  “Out.” One of the guards pointed toward the front of the train, but they didn’t need encouragement now. Desperate need to escape the corpse forced them out; hope of water drove them on.

  A misty rain drifted down onto them. As he stumbled along with the others, Armand looked up at the craggy ranges that rose up around them. Here and there clumps of gray and green bushes and vines clung to the steep slopes. Elsewhere, carpets of lichen looked soft and inviting. In some places the earth had been sheered away from flat faces of rock, leaving only the bones of the mountains. The peaks were hidden by low clouds that reached down with long watery tendrils toward them. He had been right: they had been brought to the mines on the western side of the Etolian range. Somewhere ahead of them lay the mountaintop retreats of the Augurers. Even farther, as the mountains slowly became foothills on the far side of the range, was Caeli-Amur.

  “Water, water,” begged some of the prisoners.

  The guards simply pushed them along. “Down to the end of the line.”

  Some of the prisoners fell to their knees, greedily lapping at a large puddle lying by the train.

  Armand rushed forward, but a strong arm grasped him. Irik spoke with certainty. “Those pools are stagnant. There will be water later.”

  A group of guards kicked the drinking prisoners. “Get up!”

  Several staggered to their feet and wandered on, but others remained crouched over the pools. One of the guards plunged the tip of his pike into the side of a kneeling woman. She groaned horribly, dropped a hand into the pool. The others scuttled away, leaving her crying and holding her side.

  “Get up,” the guard kicked her.

  The woman moaned as she tried to get to her feet. The guard kicked at her again, and she splashed onto her side into the pool. A moment later the pike plunged into her stomach. “Get up!” Her head thrown back, she held on to its blade.

  Irik pushed Armand along with the rest of the prisoners, leaving the woman to die alone. The image was seared into Armand’s mind. The prisoners came to a wide and empty space at the front of the trains. Surrounded by guards, they milled around uncertainly. The tracks led off to one side, curling their way along the valley, past a walled camp, and toward what appeared to be a distant factory. On the far side of the field were three large buildings, like storage sheds with vast open doorways. A fast-flowing river cut through the center of the valley, where copses of pine and silver birch grew. Fed by water from the mountains, the river apparently flowed down to the great forests and plains to the north and west, where barbarian tribes still thrived. That would be the way to escape.

  A high voice startled Armand. On a platform to one side of the field stood the round-faced guard with the bloodred eye and the long black coat. He had now placed small pince-nez on his nose, even though he looked over them to address the prisoners. His high and reedy voice rang shrilly over the field as his eyes roved over the pathetic crowd. There seemed to be a faint and luminous redness around him, an unnatural halo.

  “Welcome to Camp X, the pride of Varenis’s work camps. I am Commander Raken. Here I will be your leader, your teacher. Together we will mine bloodstone for the Empire’s thaumaturgists. You will learn to embrace the freedom offered to you by work. All those fears and worries your old life brought will be eradicated. You will come to enjoy life here, stripped of all the useless concerns that once cluttered it. You will discover a new meaning in serving the greater good. So, prepare yourself for your new life, and you may find peace in this place. Resist, and you will surely be broken. Women to the shed on the right. All the men into the shed on the left. No exceptions for children.” As he pointed, Armand noticed red spidery veins running along his arm.

  Armand fol
lowed Irik to join the men, ignoring the wailing of women who struggled to hold on to their boys, the cries of men holding on to daughters.

  In the great shed they began a process that stripped them of their identities. Ahead of Armand, prisoners surrendered all their possessions to gray-overalled men, prisoners themselves. Some resisted and were beaten; most acquiesced silently. Instinctively, Armand took his grandfather’s ring from his finger and slipped it into his dry mouth. He tried desperately to salivate as he watched those ahead open their mouths for inspection. With a frenzied effort, he gagged, got the thing down. A moment later he was stripped, his mouth checked for hidden treasures, and then he was clothed in the same gray overalls and functional boots as the others.

  “Your number is printed on the front of your overalls. This is how you will be known,” the supervisor said as he pointed toward his own number—7624—sewn onto his overalls, over his heart. He grinned, revealing black and rotten teeth. The top left section of his forehead had a long indentation, as if years before he had been struck by a pole, caving in his skull. The veins on 7624’s forehead glowed an uncanny red; the light they threw out seemed to contain its own shadow within itself. Chills ran through Armand, for he knew the sign of thaumaturgical sickness.

  Several others showed the same odd changes: spidery red veins climbing over their limbs, up their necks, or over their faces. One of the new prisoners, an old man with a shock of white hair, stepped toward number 7624 and spoke politely: “Please, we’re all terribly thirsty. Would it be possible for us to have something to drink?”

  Number 7624 smiled ironically. “Oh, they’ll be water enough. Soon you’ll wish there was no water at all.”

  Armand sat on a bench, waiting for other overall-wearing prisoners who were shaving the new prisoners’ heads with shears. Armand kept still as his hair came off, then staggered forward toward the end of the shed, its door open to a cold wind.