The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  “Let me speak to them!” the Pilgrim cried.

  “I think this is perhaps not the best time to prophesize, Pilgrim.” Aya let the horse have his head.

  The shadows now emitted wild guttural cries, fluttering and waving their rag-covered arms as the horse rode past them. On and on the horse rode, deeper into the city, the crowlike figures running behind them.

  “We’re nearly at Oppua Plaza. The northwest road leads from there,” said Aya.

  —That’s what they want—said Max with sudden fear. —They’re herding us to the plaza.

  But it was too late. A golden glow appeared ahead as Oppua Plaza lit up with light. The horse reared up, came down, and circled wildly. With a flash, the sun’s rays disappeared, and the plaza opened up before them. Shaped like a long teardrop, the bricks of its marble pavement were patterned red and white, in forms resembling a school of slender fish.

  On a central stage stood a ragged man wearing a crown made from the head of a blood-orchid. His square face was savage and wild-eyed, and his demeanor was both tragic and fierce as he raised his arms in the air, a gesture of triumph.

  Silence fell over the plaza, and the hushed scarecrow figures gathered in a wide semicircle, blocking off any escape. Then, in unison, they waved their arms and once again hummed their frightful leaden dirge.

  On the far side of the plaza, in the front of a shattered amphitheater, stood a row of tear-flowers, six feet tall with heads like bloodied plates. A couple of them sang their mournful song, just audible above the mob’s hum. At their base lay half-dead bodies, slowly being absorbed into the flowers. Max knew that little by little they would start thinking flower-thoughts, until they no longer knew if they were the person beneath or the flower above.

  The high call of these magnificent flowers was gently enticing. Max sensed Aya’s urge to lie down next to them, to feel their sweet nectar drop onto him as it began to dissolve him and bind him to the flower’s aerial roots. But Aya resisted.

  The man on the stage swung his arm around, and a dozen or so men quickly approached the horse. They wore the uniforms of House Arbor, but they were so dirty that the green could barely be discerned beneath the muck and filth.

  Aya looked up at the man on the stage. “I think we’ve found your friend Karol.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The Tower rose high into the air, one of the few that stood intact, a graceful curved structure. Once it would have been beautifully patterned with grasses and mosses, but now the walls were overgrown with intermixing flora: orange and green swirling mosses, dangling vines with purple flowers.

  Aya and the Pilgrim were herded inside. It took a moment for Max’s eyes to acclimatize. Everything inside the massive hall was built from ruined machinery. Massive cogs had been converted into tables. Tree-trunk-sized chains laid out the border of a pathway; the innards of machines dotted the space as carriage-sized sculptures.

  On a dais at one end, a giant throne had been built from a complex fusion of latticework, bolts and screws, pistons and gears, and old odd-shaped pieces. Growing over its armrests, sprouting from its back, delicate candle-flowers lit up in the darkness. It was at once menacing and magnificent: lost technology fused so bewitchingly with Arbor’s flora.

  Furnace trees emitted slight warmth; it was not yet winter, when they would burn hot, like little stoves. On one wall of the tower, Toxicodendron didion grew like a vast curtain. Its thick leaves wrapped around a number of rotting bodies, which the vine was slowly devouring. The stench of death mingled with the sickly sweet scents of jasmine and snap-rose.

  Two plots of blood-orchid, like columns marking the bounds of a central forum, trembled at their approach. As large as a human, their flowery heads had an unearthly, alien beauty. The pink veins in their otherwise snow-white leaves indicated that they had fed recently. Their vicious mouths, developed out of the staminode in the center of their flower, were hard to see among the other two stamen, themselves like fist-sized purple sponges. Unlike their noncarnivorous cousins, the blood-orchids had developed a long petiole, which they held against their body but could strike out with like a whip and entangle their prey, dragging it into their beautiful and dangerous flowery heads.

  Karol led them safely between the rows, to the dais, where he collapsed into the throne as if overcome by lethargy. “Bring them chairs.”

  Rickety wooden chairs were dragged onto the dais, and the crow-people gathered around, their faces filled with sinister intent. They had resumed their unnerving drone, an accompaniment fit for the end of the world. Karol’s guards stood even closer; some still held pikes traditionally used by House Arbor.

  “Karol—you remember me,” said the Pilgrim.

  Karol looked on dumbly, his face drained of energy, a certain flabbiness where Max imagined it once might have been square and harsh. His voice came out, a mumbling, rambling thing. “You? Who are you? Is it you, René? Is it really you? Have you been sent to us from Arbor? Has help finally arrived? But no, we don’t want help, René.”

  Could this man really have been a star, rising through the ranks of Arbor, a favorite of Director Lefebvre? Max wondered.

  The Pilgrim said, “I was once called René, but I no longer answer to the name. Call me Pilgrim. For it is time we recognize our impotence in the face of the catastrophes that have happened, that are to come. We are helpless in the face of the dialectic of nature. I think you understand that now, don’t you?”

  The words did not seem to have any impact on Karol, who stared out blankly over the waiting throng. He seemed to be talking to himself, rather than to Aya and the Pilgrim. “We were abandoned. Go to Lixus, they said. Colonize. Build an Arbor empire. Bring everything and everyone into the House’s fold. Find out what secrets lie in Lixus. But everyone knew there were no secrets here. No technologies ready to be used. Only an empire of madmen and sinners. We begged to return. We begged to be relieved.…”

  “Yes, Karol, look where you are: surrounded by ruins.”

  Karol looked defeated. “Ruins. But who’s to say that the Houses were better than this? When I came out here, I had such high hopes, you know. I would rebuild this place and return to Arbor a hero. But the ruins—you don’t know what they do to your mind. They start to enter you. Rubble everywhere, cluttering you up.”

  Karol’s voice trailed off into a whisper.

  “A colony will not withstand the coming trials,” said the Pilgrim. “Nothing does. A language lasts, what, a thousand years? A civilization, five hundred? All the time the workings of matter come to crush us. There is no human act that can withstand them.”

  “You’re right,” said Karol. “Humanity is finished.” He sat upright, as if stuck with a knife. “And we have built our own civilization! We serve new gods now. Look now at my empire! I am king of the blood-orchids. You should see them move. If you speak to them, they respond.”

  The Pilgrim sat back, apparently shocked that the conversation had jumped off track. “But they are only plants. They are semisentient. They’re not gods. There are no gods. There’s just the coming chaos.”

  “No, no, René. You don’t understand. They are evolving; they are the firstborn on this world, and they will outlast us. You understand that, don’t you, Pilgrim?”

  “There is a higher order—the universe!” countered the Pilgrim. “And I will take any who will come to the Teeming Cities, where we will spread the word, tell the world of the coming apocalypse. Come with me, Karol—bring your people.”

  Karol had now worked himself into a feverish state. “Ah. You don’t understand, but you will. Oh yes, you will, René. They are the inheritors. They have needs and wants. And blood-orchids want to eat!”

  At this, the mob flapped their arms and hummed their strange dirge louder than before. A wildness came to their eyes and they called out, “They want to eat!”

  Max didn’t like the sound of that. He felt suddenly vulnerable, trapped in his own mind as these two madmen carried on their disturbing conversation.r />
  Karol collapsed once more into his chair, as if his bones had given way. He looked wearily at Aya and the Pilgrim. He seemed to be snapping between two personalities, a wild, energetic one and a drained, broken one. “I can’t do this anymore. It’s … I wanted to be, someone, you know. To do something. I could have been. I should have been—something.”

  Still the crowd hummed and waved their rags in the air. The blood-orchids joined them, singing in a deep thrumming tone, its rhythmic bass so like the hums of the worshippers.

  “You don’t have to,” said the Pilgrim. “Come with me and alleviate your suffering.”

  A jubilant savagery was fixed on Karol’s face. He leaped to his feet, raised his hands in the air. “Feed them!”

  A group of crow-people leaped up, grasped the struggling Aya and the Pilgrim, and dragged them from the stage. The crowd parted, leaving a space between the two rows of blood-orchids, which quivered as they sang.

  Aya and the Pilgrim were thrown onto the ground between the two rows. As they scrambled from the dirt, the crow-people backed away, forming lines at each end of the strange forum to keep their prisoners trapped between the flowers.

  —Blood-orchids can’t move, so we should be out of range of their petioles for the moment—said Max.

  Aya seized the Pilgrim’s arm, and they began to back away toward the Tower’s door, where the line of flapping crow-people waited for them, humming in some feverish fury. Several ran toward them, then backed away again.

  Aya and the Pilgrim froze, for the orchids wrenched themselves from the ground, their tuberous roots acting like two clubbed feet. One after the other they came, breaking from their beds and shuffling toward Aya and the Pilgrim, their stamens quivering at the scent of flesh.

  —Oh no—he’s right. They’ve evolved somehow—said Max.

  The Pilgrim fell to his knees, shaking now. He could sense the impending attack. Soon the orchids would drag them close, envelop them in their petals. The orchids had desires. They would suck on blood and bone.

  Aya scrambled around in his memories, searched for the prime language, the base equations for organic matter. But he could not find them.

  —Do something—Max said, panicking.

  Shut up. I’m trying to concentrate. Again Aya riffled through his memories. Where were the equations? What were the words and grammar? Where was anything?

  In that moment Max gained a sharp view of Aya’s fragmented mind. The missing years, the missing knowledge, the missing parts of the prime language—segments of him had been lost in the transfer to Max’s body. Perhaps other parts had been lost even before that, in the Library of Caeli-Enas. There was no denying it: the greatest of Magi, the jester god Aya, was a fractured relic of his former self.

  —You don’t have them. You don’t know the prime language.

  A petiole whipped past Aya’s neck. The flowers continued toward them, step by ungainly step, goaded by the maddening drone of the crow-people.

  Give me a moment. Aya dredged from his mind other grammatical structures, words that applied not to flora but to animals. He conjugated them differently. The syntax was all jumbled, but he covered the silences with yet more equations. As he cobbled together this crippled version of the Art, the world lit up as the deep structures of things revealed themselves.

  Max had experienced this immanence before, but this time it had a different quality. Behind the world of life lay the world of darkness, the Other Side. Superimposed on this one, he saw the rise of a hill, a set of stairs cut into it, running off at a subtle and oblique angle. This ancient Art was the language of the deep structures of the world of life and the world of death combined. For a moment he existed in both.

  Aya felt the orchids’ dumb sentience. Through him, Max experienced their plant thoughts, felt the movements of the air on their leaves and whiplike petioles, sensed their surroundings as they did: through touch. They saw their latest meal in front of them. They yearned for it, trembled and quivered for it, sang for it.

  Aya reached into their minds, rearranged their thoughts. It was a clumsy process. He was forced to throw equations around like a juggler. But, somehow, draining his strength with each hurried invocation, he reached the orchids.

  One after another, the carnivorous flowers halted. One started to shake uncontrollably, its mind unable to process its contradictory desires. Another wilted rapidly, as if a month had passed without feeding. The others stood stock-still, frozen.

  Their songs died.

  At that moment Max realized he could take back control of his mind and body. He could strike at Aya while the mage was in his trance, engulfed in the Art. Max readied himself, saw Aya’s concentration elsewhere, his tenuous grip on his inner functions. But Max held back, afraid of the consequences.

  Holding the orchids in place, his hands held out as if to physically stop them, Aya turned to the aghast crowd, whose faces stared at this man who could control the orchids. “You are a false king, Karol. These orchids are nothing but plants. The Pilgrim here is right: there is a universe beneath us all, a force that connects us, which is to be worshipped, if anything is to be worshipped at all. If you seek some kind of salvation, follow the Pilgrim.”

  At this, Karol cried out. The bulk of his lieutenants hummed frantically, but the orchids did not respond.

  Aya reached into their minds and put them to sleep, as if they faced a long cold winter. They shrank into themselves, the petals closing over their stamens, their heads drooping to the ground like chastised children. They would not wake.

  The immanence faded, along with the perception of the Other Side. Aya was finished with the Art for the moment, but Max knew the Art was not yet finished with him.

  Some of the crow-people now fell to their knees in supplication. Others ran from the hall, their faith in tatters, or perhaps they were unable to assimilate these new events. Yet others gathered around Karol and his remaining lieutenants, who backed away.

  Karol staggered from the stage toward Aya and the Pilgrim. There was no energy in his body; each step seemed to take something out of him. His roving eyes were filled with desolation, shifting at times into resignation, then back to sadness. He passed close to Aya and stared at the mage. The skin around his bloodshot eyes sagged, revealing a line of red flesh beneath. He gazed balefully at Aya for a second, then continued through the door.

  A short while later only a few of the crow-people remained. Aya stepped across to the stage and leaned against it, exhausted from his use of the Art. This was one of the highest costs of thaumaturgy, but it was Aya’s clear separation from events that shocked Max. Aya looked at the people around him from an Olympian distance, some faraway place where Karol and the crow-people’s concerns were but tiny specs in the vast seas of infinity. This was the cost of the prime language. Max built a wall against it.

  The distance will pass eventually, but you never quite return to the place where you began. It will stay with you, like a scar. That’s the cost, said Aya.

  The Pilgrim came to sit on the stage beside Aya. “Perhaps you are the prophet. You have halted entropy here; perhaps you’re meant to lead the movement against the coming apocalypse. Perhaps you are the one we’ve been waiting for.”

  Aya elbowed the Pilgrim’s ribs. “Or perhaps I’m a joker sent to test you.”

  The Pilgrim’s head fell forward, a mirror image of the blood-orchids. “I am beset with doubts.” He placed his hands over the bandages covering his eyes. “I wish I could still see. This was all a mistake.”

  Aya looked at the man impassively. “Perhaps, but what is there to do but to go on?”

  Some part of the Pilgrim broke. He stood up. “I will march to the Teeming Cities, and there I will spread the word of the coming apocalypse. There I will tell the world that we must change our ways, and prepare for it. For we must survive it, I see now. Somehow, we must survive it. Who would come with me?”

  A hundred or so flapped their rags and hummed in agreement.

  Tha
t night the Pilgrim sat up with his new followers, and they discussed the apocalyptic philosophy. Aya drifted in and out of sleep on a pile of rags nearby.

  In the morning Aya put his hands on the Pilgrim’s shoulders. “I hope you reach the Teeming Cities and fulfill your mission, whatever that is.”

  “And I hope you reach your own destination. But remember, we rarely find what we search for,” said the Pilgrim.

  —You like him—said Max.

  He has the strength of his convictions. How could you not admire that?

  Aya left the Pilgrim with his people, and led his horse from the plaza toward the northwest road. To his right, a single tear-flower cried mournfully, like a lost child. Again, the urge to lie down beside it gripped Aya. He fought it off as he approached the body, lying beneath a now silent tear-flower. Already, nectar covered the man, and several of the aerial roots had implanted themselves into it, reaching into the flesh beneath.

  Aya squatted beside Karol, looked into the dreamy eyes that stared into a faraway world.

  “It’s not so bad, you know,” said Karol. “It hurts at first, but then you start to feel the wind on your petals; you understand things you didn’t previously. You come to know that the world isn’t simply constructed for humans, that there are other rhythms, other perceptions. It’s a great release, you know. A relief, that distance.”

  “I know that distance,” said Aya.

  Karol closed his eyes, opened them again. “I am not sorry for what I’ve done. I am sorry for the rest of you though.”

  Karol closed his eyes but did not open them again.

  Aya led his horse along the northwest boulevard and through the ruins of Lixus. Before long, he knew, he would be out of the city and into the hills. There he would find Iria’s Tower. The thought pierced him like a spike. What would he find there? Would the Sentinel Tower be in ruins? Would Iria herself lie there, or perhaps her bony remains?

  Iria, Aya thought. How I loved you.

  Hidden inside his own mind, Max felt a quick surge of optimism. He knew now that Aya was not only a mage, not only a joker, but that he was human. He’d saved the Pilgrim. In fact, he liked the apocalyptic. And he had loved Iria. There was good in him, after all, and if there was good in him, there was hope for the both of them.