The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  Max said, “The Collegia have moved against the seditionists. A gladiator army already has control of the southern part of the city.”

  “We know,” said Odile.

  “Alfadi bought the thaumaturgists off with promises of the Prism of Alerion, and now they march on us from the Marin Palace. We cannot face them alone. We need you. We need the Brotherhood.”

  Clovis turned back to the window, glancing up and down the streets anxiously. “We cannot help.”

  Max stood there, not believing him for a moment.

  Finally Odile broke the silence. “Maximilian, there are only fifty of us. Not enough to face Alfadi’s thaumaturgists. Not enough to face the Furies.”

  Max’s heart scampered like a lizard in a cage. “There is a battle happening right now, and you’re choosing to stand aside? This is it, the decisive moment.”

  Odile smiled grimly. “There is never a decisive moment, Max. You should know that by now. It’s one long struggle, and just when you think you’ve won, you find you weren’t fighting for what you thought, and you must rise up again with new thoughts and new ideas.”

  “We don’t have the strength,” said Clovis. “Not against Alfadi or his forces. You should consider returning underground. Everything was premature. The vigilants rushed things to a crisis too quickly. They moved too fast—all of you did. People don’t like change. They must grow accustomed to it slowly so they see they won’t lose who they are.”

  “Alfadi is dead,” said Max. “I saw him taken by a leviathan in Marin’s palace only hours ago. We have a chance—at least, with you we do.”

  Clovis turned back from the arrow-slit window. “Get back to your forces. You’re a danger to us here.”

  Max put his face in his hands. That was it. Their fate was sealed. One hundred thaumaturgists, led by a horror of Furies. Max left the garret and stomped slowly down the stairs, black despair overwhelming him.

  Well, that went well, said Aya.

  * * *

  By the time Max returned to Via Persine, the street was thick with troops. Gladiators, bolstered with the Collegia’s squads and what appeared to be hired ruffians from the Lavere, moved to designated starting points for an assault on the Factory Quarter. So far, there were still spaces between the groups, so Max chose not to invoke thaumaturgy to make his passage safe. He would need his strength later.

  I’m a bit disappointed, you know. This place is starting to grow on me.

  Max pressed himself into an alcove as one of the groups marched past the alleyway, the gladiators armed with traditional weapons: bronze shields and short-swords, or pikes and nets. Many of the thin blades of the Collegia guards were rusted or notched, while the ruffians carried nasty knives, clubs, and axes.

  “They’ll have dug in by then, like ants in a nest,” said one of the louche-looking ruffians.

  “Worse if we move before the order,” said another. “Attacking piecemeal would allow us to be picked off one at a time.”

  As soon as they passed, Maximilian dashed across the street. He heard a cry behind him and raced forward. Once he was in the warren of alleys, he looked back, but saw that though he had been spotted, no one dared give chase.

  The narrow streets cut across the incline of the land, or else led down toward the Southern Headland or the Market Square. Everything remained obscured by the low-lying fog, still luminous under the rays of the faraway sun. Every now and then he glimpsed larger buildings and perhaps even the shape of the mountain before the fog deepened again.

  Max glimpsed motion from the windows of one of the factories to his right. He stopped dead still, his heart beating. A man, bolt-thrower held in both hands, observed him closely. He was in a killing zone, standing at a crossroads in the line of sight of several bolt-men or archers. Suddenly he was aware of the combatants in the factories and apartments surrounding him. A scorpion stood, half hidden by rubble, along one of the alleys. The seditionists had turned the area into one great fortress.

  Max scrambled over a barricade, out into a central square, over a second barricade—this one defended by two scorpions—and then up the ladder leading to an ancient ruined water tower that stood high above the buildings. Here Kata had set up her command. The tower’s roof had collapsed long ago, shingles stolen away for new building work. Over its crumbling walls, the district could be seen drifting in and out of the fog.

  An adjutant finished reporting that the gladiators were busy sealing up the holes in their encirclement lines. Soon the only escape would be over the city’s walls at the seditionists’ rear, and Max imagined the slaughter that would occur if they tried to flee that way.

  Dexion stood beside Kata, a massive bodyguard. Max hadn’t warmed to the great creature, who seemed too jejune for his taste, though he appreciated the minotaur’s immense, almost godlike presence, which did much to raise morale. Dexion seemed to be here out of loyalty to Kata, and for the excitement of it all.

  Kata dismissed the adjutant and looked to Max questioningly.

  He ran his hands through his short hair. “They said no. They think we cannot win a conflict now, that we should return underground.”

  Kata leaned over the water tank’s walls, looked out over the foggy district. “We’re not going to surrender. Better to fight and lose than not to fight at all.”

  When I fought Alerion, it was much the same. He was always belligerent, and was much better prepared than I. But I admire this Kata. She’s resilient, isn’t she? Even when others would have buckled, she holds firm. She’s a bit like me. Aya spoke seriously now.

  —She’s nothing like you—said Max.

  See, there you go again. Always putting me down.

  Dexion called out. “The enemy is moving, Kata.”

  A particularly thick and eerie fog rolled over the quarter. It nestled into the buildings and hovered in the squares, leaving everything ethereal and ghostly. Along several of the approaches to the square, they caught sight of bronze breastplates and helmets, pikes and swords. Only the sound of gladiators marching echoed through the thick air—the awful sound of ruin.

  A cry went up, and the gladiators charged forward. Still no answer came from the defenders.

  Max’s eyes fixed on the main column as it charged along the largest street, directly toward the square. It had almost reached the first line of barricades, yet still the defenders did not strike. Closer and closer the gladiators came, until their leading members scrambled up the obstruction like a deathly wave. The street behind them was awash with the Collegia’s army.

  The defenders answered with their own desperate but unbeaten cries. Bolt-throwers appeared at windows. Doors were thrown open. Guards leaped to their feet behind barricades. Scorpions drove giant missiles through the massed gladiators. The sound of a thousand bolts being loosed carried through the heavy air, followed by the ring of steel striking steel. Philosopher-assassins danced among the melee, throwing knives and stars, swinging chains and lassos. Then came the ghastly screams of dying men and women. The seditionists fell upon the Collegia like the great enveloping mist itself. For all the training the gladiators had done, they were not ready for this. Hundreds went down in the first minute, many more afterward.

  The little people of history. They’re always the ones who are forgotten. Yet they’re the ones who make the difference, said Aya.

  A wave of fog drifted across Max’s line of sight. By the time it passed, the Collegia’s forces had fled.

  “Come,” said Kata. “Let’s go to the ground. We’re no use up here.”

  How long before the thaumaturgists arrive with the Furies? Not long, thought Max.

  FORTY-TWO

  Vicious fighting began all along the line. The seditionists had prepared their emplacements well, and citizens from the district, armed with kitchen knives, rakes, and wood-cutting axes, joined them in short brutal engagements before falling back to their next line of defense. Kata had known what she was doing, retreating to the area where the seditionists had their ba
se.

  Cries and screams echoed dully through the fog. The dead were left where they fell; the injured fought on until they were brutally dispatched. Citizens who did not join the fighting retreated in groups across the squares. Children cried as they scurried along with them.

  Kata and her entourage formed a kind of mobile headquarters, racing through the thickening fog from crisis point to crisis point. Again and again they threw themselves into the fray at decisive positions, beating back breakthroughs, reestablishing defenses. Then they charged off to the next pivotal confrontation. With inhuman strength, Dexion fell upon the enemy, his huge hammer crashing down onto bodies, shattering bones, crushing skulls. Wherever he joined the battle, the enemy was routed, eyes filled with terror at the colossal creature facing them.

  Max joined, helping where he could, his stomach lurching at the sight of the critically wounded. Here a man, his head caved in; there a man skewered by a trident, its three points horrid wounds. Many of the seditionists had been trapped in the gladiators’ hooked throwing nets and, once incapacitated, the gladiators found them easy to dispatch.

  Max made himself invisible and struck stealthily in the fog, a silent killer using one of Kata’s knives. But his strength soon wavered, the feeling of the Other Side seeping into him like water into a sponge, weighing him down, soaking him with its alienness.

  After a particularly vicious engagement, Max followed Kata back to the square in front of the water tower, to a barricade built from loose bricks and furniture—a final line against the oncoming army.

  An adjutant scurried toward them, his face streaked with dirt and blood and tears. “Kata! Kata! The thaumaturgists. They’ve loosed the Furies down at the steel factory. The line is broken.”

  Kata stared for a second, grim-faced. “Sound the retreat, to back here at the water tower. We’ll try to re-form the line here.”

  But Max had little confidence in the plan. When the thaumaturgists arrived with their pitiless Furies, they would shatter the seditionists’ front, sending the survivors screaming through the alleys, only to be caught in cul-de-sacs, trapped up against the wall. The massacre would be terrible. Grief pressed down on Max at the thought of it: All their dreams for a better world smashed. Did this world allow no hope?

  Then Max saw a way to face the enemy: he had glimpsed Aya’s mastery of the Art, his skill with the prime language. If he could somehow appeal to the ancient mage … But how?

  —Help me—Max begged Aya.

  I’m enjoying watching this. Why would I choose sides?

  —You’ve lost all connection to the human race.

  Aya settled back calmly in Max’s mind, like an ancient lounging in one of the pleasure palaces. Max’s thoughts roved desperately for a solution.

  More messengers told of the seditionists retreating from the gladiators near Via Gracchia. The defense was collapsing like a deflated balloon. Kata stood nearby on the barricade, seemingly unfazed.

  Max knew there was one last, desperate action he could take.

  —What if I gave you control? You could do so much. You could change the outcome.

  Aya laughed, a strange echoing thing. You are doing fine.

  Max lay on the barricade and released his inner control. His arms dropped to his sides, his head pressed heavily against a wooden table. Something jutted into his back.

  —Here, Aya. It’s yours. I’ll not challenge you for this body. It’s yours forever.

  Don’t you think you’d better get up? I think the Furies are coming. I really want to see them.

  Resigned, Max settled back into his body and raised his head, ready for the end. He put aside the knife, took a short-sword from a dead guard, and held it inexpertly in his hand.

  * * *

  The remains of the seditionist forces came running, half mad, screaming, and wild-eyed. It was unnerving to see how many leaped the barricades and fled toward the city walls. The terror was infectious, and others broke along with them. Then the last stragglers dragged themselves across the square. These were wrecked men and women. One held his arm against his stomach, holding pinkish entrails in; another crawled on all fours like an animal, emitting a low moan; a woman helped another whose lower leg had been shattered by some blunt instrument. Others didn’t make it to the barricade, but fell in the square, dead or dying.

  Chills rushed up Max’s back as he stared into the rolling fog. A strange silence came over the area. For what seemed an eternity, the defenders stared out into the thick murk, expecting enemies to burst forth at any moment. They waited and waited, their nerves fraying. Every now and then a seditionist guard let out a low moan of fear.

  Finally a shape began to emerge: first its snout—somewhere between that of a hound, or perhaps a fanged goat—then the rest of its shadowy form. Wiry limbs with tight thin muscles roiled out of the darkness, then disappeared, appeared once more in impossible places. Elsewhere a torso resembling a skinned cat’s, dripping with blood and ooze, emerged, then sunk back into the black.

  A leash held the creature back, but it strained, its demonic eyes burning black.

  Something dislodged in Max’s mind, came free. He thought he might be going mad. He felt his tongue bleeding, for he had bitten it. Strength drained from his limbs. Whines came from the guards around him. Others closed their eyes, buried their faces in the ground, or into the makeshift barricades.

  Oh yes, said Aya. Oh yes. I’d forgotten how beautiful they are.

  The creature strained against its leash, strode forward, reconfigured itself in some impossible way, pieces of it shifting and moving. More of the creatures appeared to its left and right.

  The handler of the first creature emerged, at first only a silhouette. Then the outline became material, a black suit and death mask carved in the shape of a horse’s skull.

  Max looked around in desperation. He could make himself invisible, but he knew that would not fool the Furies. They were creatures of the Other Side; his invisibility only affected those in the material world. He didn’t know the sciences of the dark lands.

  All around him, seditionists broke and fled. Dexion roared, but it seemed to come from far away.

  Max looked inward at himself, at Aya, at his life. What was it? What had it become? He laughed at his youthful arrogance, at his self-centeredness. He had been prepared to sacrifice others on the altar of his own certainty. He thought now of Markus, his mentor, who he had so easily sidelined from the movement. He looked into the darkness that was his mind, where Aya lay, self-satisfied, content. Neither of them deserved to survive, for they were alike in some terrible way Max now recognized. The thought rattled in Max’s mind. Neither of them deserve to live, he thought.

  At the center of the approaching thaumaturgists stood a tall cruel man, his face obscured by a long death mask, a stretching, leering thing that looked like it might have melted. This dark captain reached up and pulled his mask away, revealing a horrid, ruined face. Bloody and swollen, torn and bleeding, only the malevolent white eyes made him recognizable. Alfadi had survived the leviathan.

  The Furies were loosed.

  Max knew what he had to do. In truth, he had known it for a long time but had kept the knowledge from himself, for it had frightened him. Now he withdrew into himself, gathered all his forces together, and looked down onto the landscape of his mind, at all the features he had once been so proud of: at his intelligence, like some great monolith towering over a plain; his talent with the Art, which lit that landscape up; at the dark valleys and chasms of his hurts, the places where he had taken blows. He looked down on that landscape and at the creature he had once thought of as a god: he gazed down at Aya.

  Max let himself plunge down over that landscape like a flood. In that instant Aya realized Max’s intention.

  No! The mage screamed and lashed out, trying to force Max back.

  Max offered no resistance to Aya, but engulfed him like water. He kept no barriers to his mind. Aya lashed out, but with each blow he only sunk deepe
r into the formlessness that was Max.

  Sudden flashes of memory came to Max then, as he lost himself. He did not know who he was, or where he was. Now he was a maelstrom, a seething mass, twisting and turning. Pieces of him broke off. Pieces of Aya joined him. Knowledge flooded into him; other things he forgot, remembered again. All aspects of his life were reconstructed, seen anew, so that they seemed like different events, events that took place beneath a different sun. Pieces locked together in new ways. New emotions came into being. He felt a great distance—an isolation—enter him, along with snatches of the language, the prime language, which he came to know and understand. Aya cried a terrible, lonely cry as his personality finally dissolved. The maelstrom quieted, the water settled, and he came back into consciousness, as Max, as Aya, as some hybrid of the two of them. No: as Max, but terribly transformed, a Max barely recognizable.

  The dull light pierced his eyes, and he came up. He glimpsed movement: a mask, white and deadly; whips; something coming at him with fearsome rapidity. Bloody ropy muscles and tendons, yellowed fangs from red gums. Not a dog; a horse. Not a horse; some exotic creature moving at unnatural speed. An unnatural creature. It was almost on him now, and two fragments of his memory came together as it did. He was not whole, but he knew this thing should not be here. It belonged on the Other Side, and it planned to take him with it. He slowed down time, so that the creature seemed to float through the air.

  He stood up, and the equations rose up to him. His head tilted back and his arms reached out as he channeled the universe’s power.

  He—whoever he was—set the universe’s awesome power loose. The air was rent. A blinding light shone forth.

  FORTY-THREE

  The Furies descended on the remains of Kata’s forces. There was little she could do now except die with the rest of them. Across the square, Alfadi smiled cruelly, his ruined face hitching itself up like some ship’s ragged and torn sail after a storm. She looked into those pale and empty eyes and saw only bleakness and violence. He had bested her, just as he had bested Aceline.