The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  “Find the Core. Quick,” Kata said.

  The room was vast, filled with goods of all sorts: rugs and decanters, open chests filled with jewelry—all the loot from a war. Windows overlooked the dark lake beneath and the gardens beyond.

  Max padded along the aisles, up one, down another, horrified by the stolen wealth. His eyes roved madly: here a row of paintings, there a pile of precious books. Then he saw the Core, lying on a shelf beside its bag. There was still hope.

  I can’t wait to see how this turns out, said Aya. Do you think you’ll make it? I don’t think so.

  “The window, quick.” Kata braced her body against the door just as bodies smashed into the other side. The door shuddered violently as the bolt was torn from it; the chest was driven an inch back.

  Max slipped the Core into the bag and slung it over his shoulder. He was almost at the window when Aya came at him, a tidal wave of force. Max dropped to his knees, lost control of his limbs. Once again he was in a deadly struggle. He shuddered and fought, was forced backward by Aya’s onward rush. He lost control of his arms and legs, but he held on to the center of his being and his mind. He fell forward clumsily, felt the cold wood smash his face.

  “What’s wrong with you?” said Kata.

  Max was paralyzed. His body trembled from the conflict. His limbs shuddered, wobbled.

  —I am the stronger—he said.

  That’s impossible.

  —I am the primary personality. The body knows me, knows my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions, my directions. It is my body, and you are but a fragment.

  Kata leaped over Max. He lost sight of her, heard a window open. A moment later he felt himself being hauled up. He was balanced on a ledge. Outside the gardens were patches of darkness, the lake beneath him a great black circle.

  Another smash. Wood splintered and cracked. The door burst open.

  “You’d better wake up, or you’ll drown,” said Kata.

  Max felt himself fall and hit the water. For a moment he wondered whether the lake was filled with deadly creatures, just like the gardens around them. He held his breath and struck out at Aya once more, but he knew in his heart he had lost.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Lost once more in the subterranean regions of his mind, Max watched the world through Aya’s eyes. He lay recovering in the rooms that had once belonged to Technis’s Director. Max recalled the flight from the Arbor Palace as he would a dream. They had come up out of the lake, coughing and spluttering up water, still holding the bag with the Core. Aya had been in control of his body and had plunged into the gardens. A blood-orchid had wrapped its whiplike frond around his ankle, dragged him toward its drooling head. Aya had tried to compose a formula to send the flower to sleep, but his strength had been used up by the invisibility charm and the savage struggle with Max, who lay in a dark stupor. Without Kata, they would certainly have died there, but she had arrived in time, cut him free, and led him back to safety.

  Aya dressed himself and wandered into the Director’s grand office, where the bag with the Core lay on the great desk. Behind the desk stood the egg-shaped memory-catcher, that other reminder of those days when things were falling apart. By the time the ancients had built those things, their paradise had been long disintegrating. The cataclysm had been upon them, the war between Aya and Alerion at its height. All their plans were gone. People scrabbled for escape or distraction. Pastimes and leisure became their sole focus and goal. The real world was coming apart, so they fled to false worlds in the water-spheres or escaped to long-lost memories using machines like the memory-catcher.

  Aya threw the Core over his shoulder, happily. It’s time now, Maximilian. Time to free you from my body. It won’t be bad. I’m sure we can find a pleasant enough world for you to live in. Well, so long as the power holds out.

  By the time Aya reached the great doors that opened up the empire of the Elo-Talern, Max had regained much of his strength. The seditionist caught fragments of Aya’s thoughts, knew the mage was worried about his own precarious purchase on the body. But Aya’s anger at Alerion and Iria gave him life. Anger was an emotion that gave direction, and the ancient mage began to think again of the world. So Iria had betrayed him. But that had been nearly a thousand years ago, during the breaking of the world. Hadn’t he outlasted Alerion and the rest of them? Wasn’t that the greatest joke of them all for him, the trickster god? Yes, now he would enjoy himself and take what he needed, beginning with this body.

  The great circular door that opened into the realm of the Elo-Talern was massive, dark, and silent. Aya moved his hand across the door in a complex configuration once again, but this time it did not light up or hum. No silver ideograms fell like snowflakes on its surface. Something inside had irrevocably broken.

  With intense apprehension, Aya found the hatch, half hidden to the side of the door. With great effort he opened it, revealing a large spoked wheel above him. He grasped the wheel with both hands, but it held fast. So he clambered up, placed his feet on one of the spokes. The whole thing slowly began to rotate. For an instant Max imagined himself to be a giant mouse on a wheel.

  The vast door slowly ground to one side.

  Aya leaped to the floor and stepped through the opening, where he stood horrified for a moment. It was not the impossible perspectives, nor the staircases like spider’s webs, that unnerved both him and Max. No: it was the mold.

  The last time he had been here, one corner of the room had been buried beneath a sea of crimson mold. Now the sea had joined up with the great towers rising around the room. Some of the Elo-Talern still lay on their chaise longues, clasping their tankards, covered with luminous purples and greens of molds and lichens. Those on the floor were submerged, swallowed up, lone limbs breaking the surface here or there.

  Elo-Drusa leaned against the pillar. Again she clambered to her feet like a grotesque newborn pony. Most of Drusa’s body had been engulfed with the mold; only one arm and a spindly foot remained free. Her mouth and nose was completely overrun by orange. One eye was long gone; the second could still be seen through the thin layer that covered it. She fell to her knees, crawled toward him, clambered up once again. She completely disappeared for several seconds into the Other Side, then reappeared closer to him. Drusa made a gurgling sound; spores burst from her mouth and floated into the air like orange snowflakes. They drifted around Aya, rested on his face. He brushed them off.

  Again she gurgled, and again the mold spewed forth. A third time the spume flew forward, and guttural words could be heard beneath the hideous sound. “Finally! I’ve been waiting. Finally! We have a chance!”

  She led Aya away through the sea of colored mold, which their passing feet lifted into the air. They traveled along a strange passage that twisted and turned like a corkscrew, and came to a hexagonal room. In one corner, Elo-Talern lay in a heaped pile, like dead spiders swept to the side. Every now and then one moved a limp limb.

  From another corner of the room, a frighteningly tall Elo-Talern rose from the ground. He staggered toward them, his red robes blackened with stains.

  “The Core? You bring the Core?” he said.

  “We have it, Kalas.” Drusa coughed. “Let’s save ourselves. Let’s regain our power.”

  And so Kalas led them down labyrinthine tunnels that burrowed inside an immense and complex engine. With each step, Max felt the tension increase. He wanted the Core to function so that he might be free of Aya, but he feared he would he expelled from his body, lost to the world. He prepared himself for a final desperate assault.

  A huge wall rose before them, covered with dials and wheels and levers. Kalas pulled the engine’s deadened Core from its cylindrical housing. Delicately, he took the Sentinel Tower Core from its bag and slipped it into the casing. Grasping a handle, he looked at Drusa. All was silent. The decisive moment was at hand.

  Kalas pulled the handle down, and a great hum filled the room. Energy surged through the system. Lights blinked on, and there was a burst of w
armth. That nightmare world seemed once more alive and filled with promise. The Elo-Talern would save themselves and restore themselves to their former glory as overseers of Caeli-Amur. Not everything was entropy. There was life!

  Drusa laughed, coughed out spores that drifted on the warm dark air.

  “It works!” said Kalas. “We’re saved!”

  The two spindly creatures embraced, laughed and coughed and laughed some more. They staggered around, full of joy, and Aya laughed with them.

  The hum subsided, the lights dwindled, the warm air dissipated, and everything died. All was silent once again.

  “No. No!” Drusa let out a hideous wail, her thin legs giving way beneath her.

  Kalas checked some gauges on the wall, stared blankly at the others. “It’s too depleted. The Core hasn’t enough energy left.”

  “There must be a way.” Aya spoke forlornly. This spelled the end of his hopes too.

  Kalas shook his head in defeat. “Not here, not anywhere. The Library of Caeli-Enas is drowned. Everything there lost. Look—there is nothing but mold.”

  Drusa was crying, huge, awful wracking sobs. She was a bundle of wiry bones on the floor, her spindly legs like broken reeds. She looked up, seemed to laugh, coughed, spewed forth more mold, then lay down completely.

  Finally she pulled herself up to a sitting position. “Seal us in and let us lie here until eternity finally drains the last meager strength from our bodies. Let us die our slow eternal death. Let the mold eat us, just as it will eat you. It will engulf you all. Nothing lasts.”

  Aya looked at the pitiful creatures as Kalas slid down beside her. “You cannot die, Drusa. That’s what you’ve done to yourself. When the cataclysm came, you made yourself immortal. The Ascended, they called you. But it was no rise.”

  “But we can die by violence,” she said. “And it’s violence we deserve. We were trying to save the last of the ancient world. But this is what we created.” She seemed to collapse in on herself, began a shuddering cough. The spores from her mouth hovered in the still air before falling to the ground. She sobbed some more, flashed out of existence for a moment, became a rotting black picture of death, flickered back into existence, and cried some more.

  Aya turned and staggered away from the scene, up and out of the engine and the corkscrew tunnel, out of the Underworld. He sealed the huge circular door. This time he held his hand against the mechanism, invoked the prime language, melted the door so it would never again open, and left the Elo-Talern to their eternal rest, to their eternal half sleep. He wondered if they would dream, but he knew in his heart it would instead be nightmares. He and Max would never escape this body. There was no point in fighting with each other.

  Aya didn’t struggle when Max ejected him from the strategic center of his mind. What does it matter, anyway? You will control this body, then I will, and so it will go. There’s no way out for us now, except death.

  PART IV

  TWILIGHTS

  Aya was dead, Iria lost in the mountains. Panadus and the others had left, never to return. Now Alerion’s spirit was eking from his body, just as order was leaking from the land. He was dying.

  Around us, the land rippled like blankets. The sea surged up over the coasts, fled away, leaving boundless plains of sand. Fire swept vast regions to the west, blackening the earth. Great columns of refugees marched across the land, but there was nowhere to hide. The cataclysm was upon us.

  We were not Magi, but we harnessed as much of the Art as we could. We knew Alerion’s strength would help us in the days ahead, and so we began the ritual described herein. We placed the prism in the center of a sphere of power. Alerion’s body hung above it like a spider in a web. Night and day we invoked the forces of dark physics. At the moment of Alerion’s death, we caught his life-force as it shook itself free of its body. That force—a soul, for want of a better word—we bound into the prism.

  When we were finished, that occult object stood alone in the circle. Only it lived. Only it gave us hope. Only the prism promised us a future free from the destruction unfolding all around us.

  The prism: how it thrilled and terrified us!

  —Aediles Philan and Drusa, preface to The Alerium Calix: Construction, Structure, and Command

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  A hundred thousand candles lit the evening of the Twilight Observance in Caeli-Amur. Perched in niches and crevices, burning safely on windowsills, candles lined the streets—one candle for each of the souls who had lost their lives out in the Keos Pass when Aya and Alerion had battled nearly a millennia ago. For three days—the duration of that ancient confrontation—the candles would be kept burning. The finale of the gladiator season traditionally occurred on the final night of the Observance, when Dexion was scheduled to fight once more.

  Meanwhile, another battle was about to explode. Like an army of black ants, the vigilants crawled around the Technis Complex, ready to attack when the order came. Long ladders lay ready on the cobblestones; scorpion ballistae were placed on platforms, their heavy bolts piled in crates beside them; guards began to form huddled detachments, ready for the assault.

  From Kata’s place on the Director’s balcony, many of the attackers’ faces seemed cold and even cruel. Half of the grubby seekers of power and influence in the city had flocked to the vigilants, ingratiated themselves to them, started to scale their hierarchies—a thousand little Georges sniffing out opportunities.

  Kata closed her eyes, felt the chill wind brushing against her skin. She heard the soft jingle of a guard’s belt and scabbard below, the whine of the wind passing over the wall, her own breath in her nose. Then she heard other grumbling voices drifting over the wall. “This isn’t right. Our brothers and sisters are up there.”

  Ejan ran the city now, as he had always planned to do. If Kata didn’t die in the fighting, she imagined she would end up at the Standing Stones as the Bolt continued its gruesome work. Or perhaps they could all sneak away through the subterranean tunnels beneath Technis Palace. There were many secret routes down there, some only small tunnels reaching nearby squares, others plumbing deep into the earth and led far away. The moderates would be no more, but they would be alive.

  In disgust, she returned to the Director’s office, where Max sat at the desk, staring blankly into space. He had returned from his journey to the Elo-Talern. He refused to discuss it, but from what she could tell, it was a failure. To think it had come to this for both of them: total defeat. It would not be long before the vigilants began their assault.

  Kata leaned against the egg-shaped machine, laid her head on its surface, felt its cool metal on her skin, and looked at him. “It will be better to die fighting than to surrender.”

  Max broke from his reverie. “Well, at least we’ll have our memories. We could save them up the way the ancients did, leave them for some unlucky person to experience in the future.”

  “Save them?”

  “With that machine. The memory-catcher. Imagine the poor beggar who ingests our memories, thinking they would see some glorious past, filled with exotic joy.” There was a tinge of humor in his grim smile.

  A chill ran along Kata’s neck. Her mind jumped into gear: the memory-catcher, the thing she had searched for all those weeks ago. And here it was in the Director’s office, waiting for her all this time. She still possessed the memory mites taken from Aceline’s nose. What secrets do they store? she wondered. The pain of losing Aceline hit her again, but she knew she would have to ingest the mites. She might discover for certain who had killed Aceline. And yet she felt ambivalent about experiencing such a strange intimacy with her friend. She wanted this final memory, yet didn’t Aceline deserve to keep her secrets hidden?

  She would have to buy time before the assault. In this task, only Rikard could help her. She called out for one of her captains, told him to fetch the vigilant. “Tell him I’ve discovered the memory-catcher. He’ll understand.”

  Rikard arrived soon afterward, striding into the room w
ith a black-suited adjutant. A rapier hung from Rikard’s belt. Like Kata’s own guards, he had foregone the typical short-sword that the vigilants had begun to wear.

  “I’ve bought some time, but precious little. We’ve got until the middle of the night. I’m sorry, Kata. It’s all I could do.” Rikard’s face took on a rare look of inner turmoil. “I’ll stay here with you for a while, maybe even as the assault happens. I want you to live.”

  How strange that Kata had become a friend of this young man, who she trusted and respected, yet who fought for the other side. She held up the vial. “You realize the mites will probably confirm my theory that Ejan is behind Aceline’s murder. Then what will you do?”

  “It won’t confirm your theory,” said Rikard.

  Kata handed the vial to Max. “Make it work. I need to ingest these memories.”

  Max sat by the side of the machine. He examined it carefully, his eyes glazing over as he looked inward. When he refocused, he carefully scraped the mites into one of the bolts at the side of the machine. This he placed into a hole in the mechanism’s side. A metal vise clasped it; something whirred, clicked; then came the sound of rushing liquid. A panel slid open, revealing a glass with a small amount of black fluid.

  “There’s not much here. You’ll only get fragments.” Max took the glass, handed it to Kata.

  Without hesitating, she downed the liquid and retreated to the chaise longue. The others stood around, nervously shuffling their feet, none of them sure quite how to behave. Rikard and Maximilian stood apart, stealing awkward glances at each other.

  Kata looked to Rikard, whose face was lighter than usual. But, no, that wasn’t it. Rather, Kata’s perception had changed. Things seemed lighter, clearer, and yet every movement of her eyes left shadowy images on her vision. Frightened, she pressed her lids together.