The Stars Askew

by Rjurik Davidson

  Kata looked at him coldly. “The future is not something set, Armand. We make it every instant. We change it every step we take. The future is fluid. Surely, the Augurers taught you that.”

  “And yet,” said Armand, “everything I’ve seen has come true.”

  “There’s still a chance to stop this, Armand,” said Irik.

  Armand turned to Irik. “And you. You will not be spared either.”

  Irik drew a deep harried breath and looked away in pain.

  Armand felt the bloodstone in his arm, burning with unnatural fire. He knew what he needed to do to save himself, and to keep the future on track. He was determined now to ensure he became ruler of Caeli-Amur, whatever the cost. If that meant he ended up carrying a dead Irik through empty halls, then so be it.

  * * *

  The Department of Devotions was housed in a gargantuan building, like the rest of the Departments. Unlike the others, it was filled with comforts of every kind. The air was warmed to a perfect temperature. In every corner sat long couches and cushions, fountains sprouting fresh water.

  The surgeries were upstairs: a small select place where the officials of Varenis might reconstruct themselves, rebuild their faces, straighten their noses, hitch up their skin so it was tight as a drum over their bones.

  Armand followed one of the surgeons down a wide corridor. It was lit a comfortable red, as if the place were a womb.

  A door opened not far along the corridor, and a long thin woman shuffled out. She seemed to have some kind of plastic wrapped around her face, and bloody scars could be seen beneath it, half healed through some grim thaumaturgical science. Her skin shone with a sickly, unnatural glow.

  “Armand! Armand, my dear, look at you. Oh, how lovely to see you.” Olka Valentin reached out to him. “What are you doing here? You’re already so beautiful! Oh, you will come and see me, won’t you? I’m all alone now, you know.”

  Armand nodded stupidly, though Olka did not seem at all upset that he had betrayed her husband.

  She leaned toward him, lecherously. “I want you to come and visit me.”

  Armand nodded and backed away with horror. “Of course. Of course.”

  As quickly as he could, he followed the surgeon into the operating room and sat on a long reclining chair. The walls, the fittings, the light globes—everything was curved and smooth and sleek, designed to relax the mind.

  The surgeon looked down at him. “Show me your arm, Controller Lecroisier.”

  Armand pulled up his shirt and revealed the red spider’s web creeping up his forearm. “The only way to save me is to cut it off.”

  “Yes, yes, I’ve seen this before. Rare, though. Only thaumaturgists suffer from this, really. I can’t imagine how you contracted it. Anyway, lie back and relax. It’s all going to be fine.” Armand felt a sharp prick in his elbow and a soft warmth spread through him. As he started feeling groggy, he began to panic.

  “There will be a lot of blood,” said the surgeon to someone beside him. “Prepare for that.”

  Armand tried to sit up, but something held him down.

  “It’s all right. It’s going to be all right,” said the surgeon.

  “Nnn. Nnnn.” Armand tried to speak, but the roof blurred and he lost all strength. The last thing he heard was the sickening sound of an engine starting, and a saw whirring and whining in the background.

  And so it was done. Armand awoke and looked down at the stump of his arm. The pain was terrible, but he refused the opium they offered him. He wanted to endure it, to cleanse himself. He wanted to feel the consequences of his decisions. He wanted to face up to the pain.

  After a few days recovering in the Department, he made his way back to the Director’s office, where Rainer had already arranged himself. On the balcony surrounding the building, two Trid-Girls stood, arm in arm, looking out over the plaza. Both wore bright dresses that moved and shifted over them, here showing off the fractal tattoo on one girl’s back, there curling around the other girl’s neck. One dress was orange, the other green—each of them the same as the girls’ hair.

  Rainer glanced at the soft white bandages wrapped around his stump. “We all cut things off. It hurts, but it’s necessary.”

  Armand thought of Irik. “We do. We do.”

  “It won’t be long before the legions will be ready to march south,” said Rainer. “Don’t make a mess of it, or we’ll both be sent after Valentin. I can’t imagine you want to end up back at Camp X, do you?”

  Armand looked out at the magnificent plaza and the towering Department buildings. He looked at the Sortileges’ Towers, black and omnipresent. He looked further out between the buildings, to the Kinarian pocket and beyond. He hated this city. He could not wait to go home. He could not wait to return to Caeli-Amur.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Kata stood beside Max at the Standing Stones. Around them waited hundreds of people, now quiet. The composition of the crowd had changed. Fewer now came from the Lavere. More men and women from the factory district and students from the Quaedian circled the ancient monument. This mass stood silent, quieted, even as the cart rattled along the road from the Arbor Palace. Seven haggard-looking men clung to the bars, stared out into the multitude bitterly.

  “How could we have sanctioned this?” said Max.

  “What can we do, otherwise?” said Kata. “The citizens control their lives for the first time. There is an Assembly. There are open debates and discussions. People make their own choices, free from an oppressive power. But our power hangs by a thread. We must have deterrence, to stop the next group of Dumases and Alfadis.”

  “Deterrence never works,” said Max. “There will always be opponents.”

  Dumas was led from the cart, his great bulldog head staring at the very machine he had designed.

  A new guard called out. “Guillam Dumas of Collegium Calian, sentenced to death for conspiracy to overthrow the Insurgent Assembly.”

  Still the crowd was silent. Max was right: if the liberation had brought joy across the city, in the bars or the alleyways, in the avant-garde plays held in the Quaedian, in the agitprop on the street corners and the never-ending parties in the universities, that joy did not make it here.

  “The legions have already begun mobilizing,” said Kata.

  “So that is the end of opposition,” said Max. “That is the end of discussion. That is the end of debate. You think you’re allowing the citizens to choose their lives, but how can that be when they can’t speak their minds?”

  The guard turned to Dumas. “Any words, Dumas?”

  Dumas looked up. His voice came roughly and angrily. “Are you any different from the Houses? You have your Bolt. You have your dungeons. Where is this new world of yours?”

  The words rang in Kata’s ears. Not long ago she might have made the same argument. She might have agreed with both Max and Dumas. In fact, she still did. Yet events had a logic of their own. She had chosen to become a leader and now she was responsible for this.

  No one responded. Instead, a sense of melancholy resignation hovered over everything. This was no celebration. In a sense, it was a defeat. The crowd understood that.

  Dumas was strapped into the machine. The Bolt burst through his chest. It was over.

  Kata looked away. “We didn’t choose this. It was forced upon us.”

  “What other horrors will be forced on us before this is all over?” Max took her hand and held it in his own. He looked at her, his eyes questioning and uncertain. He had changed terribly in these last days. He looked on as if from an Olympian height. He held her hand tighter. “I feel like I’m slipping away from the world. I can’t feel anything. I … I…”

  Kata leaned against him, the weight of her body pressing into his, the weight of events pressing on both of them. History—life—was exhausting. It ate up people, places, dreams, and visions. It offered happiness, took it away, offered it once more, then wrenched it out of sight.

  Max’s hand pressed hers even more tigh
tly. “Don’t leave me now. I need you. I need you more than I ever did.”

  Kata squeezed his hands back, then pushed him gently away. Too much had changed, in her and in him. “We can’t, Max. Not like that.” They were different people now, new incarnations of themselves. “Actually, that’s not what I meant. I meant that I can’t.” She thought of Dexion. She was drawn to that magical creature’s power, his love of life, his growing maturity. “I have to go now.”

  As she left Max, Kata looked at the ruined city before her. They had hoped to be fully human, but it had turned them into … what, monsters? She headed across the city, to the only monster she really knew, the creature who was more fully human than any of them. She knew where she would find him.

  FORTY-SIX

  Max stared at the Standing Stones, oblivious to the crowd and the events surrounding them. A symbol for so much, the Stones had always stood there, mysterious, implacable. They had been there since before the time of the ancients, would last longer than any of them. What did his little life matter in the face of such vast expanses of time? Why had the seditionist movement mattered to him when it would pass out of history in a decade or a century? When in a millennium Caeli-Amur itself might be forgotten?

  Max shook his head. He knew those were not his thoughts. They were Aya’s, or those parts of Aya he had absorbed. The mage who had existed in Max’s mind had been only a fragment of his original self, and so Max was still himself for the most part. He was disappointed to discover he knew only parts of the prime language. Aya himself could not recall it all. It would take decades of study to recover it, if it could be recovered at all.

  Max turned away from the Stones and made his way down to where the water lapped against the headland below. He found a rock on which to sit. A cold wind came off the ocean, and Max crossed his arms against it. Winter would be on them soon.

  Max had absorbed more than Aya’s thoughts: he had absorbed the distance that came with practice of the prime language. He would have to strive desperately to connect with the world. That was why he needed Kata: to keep him human, to save him from the coldness that swallowed up all Magi in the end. But she didn’t need him. And so he would have to return to his first love, the seditionist movement. It was a love that never ran away, was always there when you needed it, a trusty companion.

  He would work for humanity and the future. Yes, their lives were only brief gusts of wind in a summer storm, but that did not mean they didn’t matter. Yes, each of them would be forgotten; the movement would be surpassed; the city would be torn down and rebuilt. Nothing would survive. If he were one of the stars in the sky, he would look down impassively on these tiny people. But he wasn’t some distant sun burning in the vast firmament. He was a man, alive. He was a thaumaturgist. He cared for people—not just those close to him, but the people he’d never met and would never meet. He cared for the generations to come. He was Max.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Kata wandered through the abandoned baths. The air was cold and dry, not steamy like so many times before. Some of the waters were blackened, filled with refuse. Others looked clear and icy. She passed the long corridor with private rooms and stopped at the one with the broken door. She looked into the gloomy room. A bath still stood in one corner, and the wonderful mosaic was barely discernible in the gloom.

  Kata stood there for a long time, thinking of Aceline. Perhaps the woman had died at the right time. She had missed the bloody conflicts that had wracked the city, conflicts that had nearly engulfed them, that had taken Rikard away, and many more. Yet they had survived. The seditionists had defeated the enemy within. The city was united for the first time in its history. The citizens marched together in a common front toward the future.

  But even if the seditionists were in control, what were they in control of? A city in desperate trouble, its industries grinding to a halt, its supplies barely enough for a hungry population, that population itself cowed, quiet, waiting and watching, getting by the best they could. Where the city had been so full of life, now the nights were characterized by an eerie quiet. Even the Quaedian was a shadow of its former self.

  And yet the seditionists were in charge. If they could get the farms working, the fishing boats out to sea, the industries running, then life would spring back. The festivals would be full of color, the bars full of flower-liquor, the home fires full of warmth.

  But they had no time. That was the tragedy of it all: as soon as one crisis was averted, another descended. Varenis’s legions were on the march. Their Auxiliary troops, comprised of Cyclopses or other giants, had already made it south of the Palian Wall.

  What hope did Caeli-Amur have?

  Kata walked until she came to a wide clear bath. In the niches of the wall, someone’s unusually large clothes were jammed in without care. The lamps hanging on the walls threw off a warm yellow light. Cutting down at an angle, a shaft of white natural light complemented them.

  Floating on his back, in the center of the pool, lay Dexion. The giant minotaur’s arms drifted out from his body in the shape of a cross. His eyes stared at the lovely mosaic above. For a moment he appeared dead, but in a surge of energy he burst to his feet, the water streaming down his powerful physique. He shook his head, the beaded braids of his mane whipping about, sending water flying.

  “Kata! You must come in. It’s cold and clear. It will refresh you.”

  Kata looked around at the empty complex. “This place is empty. It’s lonely.”

  Dexion laughed, splashed water up at her. “There’s no one around. That’s better!” He dove under, came up again, and drenched Kata with two powerful rotations of his arms. The coldness hit her. She laughed and backed away, but he was already out of the bath. Two mighty arms wrapped around her. She squealed like a little girl as more cold water engulfed her. Then she was off her feet, suspended in the air.

  With Kata still in his arms, Dexion leaped backward. Kata felt air rushing by. She squawked again, like a bird, but there was laughter mixed with it. She was suddenly afraid of the powerful creature. She had lost all control. Her heart raced. He could do anything he wanted to her. Then a sudden shock, and she was under the cold water, eyes closed.

  Dexion let go and she came up spluttering, the shock of the cold coursing through her. “Dexion! No!”

  She turned to face him in some confused mixture of anger and laughter. “Dexion, I didn’t want to come in!”

  The minotaur was already floating on his back away from her. He laughed again, kicked backward. “You wanted to come in. You love it in here.”

  Kata, still confused, said, “If I…” But she gave up. She was having too much fun, even if Dexion was maddening.

  “Take your clothes off. It’ll be easier to swim,” said Dexion.

  Kata pulled off her shirt, looked down at the two knives she kept strapped to her, and unbuckled them. A moment later her boots and skirt and undergarments were lying by the side of the pool.

  Kata kicked back. It was true: she was less constricted without her clothes. She floated on her back near Dexion. She became suddenly aware of his massive naked body next to her. Fear and excitement ran through her. She turned her head, looked at him.

  His inky black eyes met hers. She fell into them, and they seemed to grow and fill the room. Everything else dropped away. For a moment the atmosphere of the bath changed. Then Dexion reached over and gave her a quick push that sent her spinning and reaching for the bottom.

  His laugh filled the baths, echoed down the corridors. “See, it’s not so bad in here.”

  Kata looked up at the mosaic above her. On one side lay a mythic city from Old Aerth. A grand river ran through its odd square-shaped buildings. On the opposite wall lay a flat sea, an island city in the center, as Caeli-Enas had once sat in the sea off the coast of Caeli-Amur. Above was a mosaic of sky, filled with stars and constellations Kata did not recognize. Another world, she thought. She wondered what it might be like, this strange place. She wondered about the hopes a
nd dreams of its inhabitants. She imagined lives and deaths that she would never know about. She would be separated from those people forever, and yet some part of her cared for them even so. She looked up again at the mosaic above her, depicting the strange faraway city, and that deep black night with its stars askew.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my editors, Julie Crisp and Liz Gorinsky, without whom The Stars Askew would have been very askew; my agent, John Jarrold; the fine folk at Pan Macmillan UK, especially Bella Pagan and Louise Buckley; Tessa Kum, Ben Chessell, Jeff Sparrow, Alex Hammond, Patrick O’Shea, Andrew Macrae, Peter Hickman, Matthew Chrulew, Keith Stevenson, Jason Nahrung, Morgan Grant Buchanan, Maryellen Galbally, Francesca Davidson, and Leena Kärkkäinen.

  BOOKS BY RJURIK DAVIDSON

  Unwrapped Sky

  The Stars Askew

  The Library of Forgotten Books (collection)

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rjurik Davidson, a young Australian author who won the Aurealis Award for Best Newcomer some years ago, has been writing about the city of Caeli-Amur for nearly a decade. His debut novel, Unwrapped Sky is set in this city-state where magic and technology are interchangeable; where minotaurs and sirens are real; where philosopher-assassins and seditionists are not the most dangerous elements in a city alive with threat. During the day, the ordinary citizens do what they must to get along. But at night, the spirit of the ancient city comes alive, to haunt the old places … You can sign up for email updates here.

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