Smiling, Quadi’s teeth were frighteningly large and white in his skeletal face. “Your people are not built to drink these.”
“Why not?” Boris slowly placed the bottle into the bag with the others.
“Some say you will see into the Other Side, see the shapes of the dead as they move around us, see the plane of death and its pathways moving off at oblique angles to our own.”
A black-skinned Numerian, a great golden ring through his nose, passed close by, leading a line of long-necked creatures that looked like exotic goats. One of the things stopped. The Numerian pulled the rope and the beast bared its teeth, bleated angrily, and followed. Perhaps they were headed to one of House Arbor’s directors for one of their famous balls where the entertainments were diverse: jugglers and illusionists; mime artists and contortionists; castrati choirs and thaumaturgical musicians; and, of course, exotic creatures from across the sea.
“These will be the last. I tire of this stuff.” Boris pressed his hands together, wrapped his fingers around each other. “Officiate, I’d like to talk to you about the tramworkers.”
“Yes, and I would like to talk to you about them also.” Rudé jumped to his feet with the rapidity of a small mammal. “Come on.”
“Our game!” Quadi laughed, holding the chessboard in the air. “I’ll remember the positions of the pieces. Don’t think you can escape!”
Boris and Rudé took the stream-tram back up along the Via Persine toward the House Technis Complex. The tram chuffed and lurched and rattled as citizens held on to the handles and poles. The conductor, decked out in a Technis uniform of plain gray that made him look like a prison guard—Technis was not known for its aesthetics—checked their passes.
Boris asked Rudé, “Why is he so thin, that Anlusian, Quadi?”
“You know we don’t like to be called Anlusians,” said Rudé. “We prefer to be called men from Ariki. Or just Ariki-Akians.”
Anlusia had been the name given the land of the New-Men by Hardarra the explorer, who had discovered this strange new race of people after the cataclysm. He had returned from his journey filled with stories about the New-Men’s technologies. The city of Tir-Aki, he claimed, was a great steam-driven thing, a mammoth mechnical beast of pipes and engines and constantly moving parts—a gigantic version of the Technis Palace’s southeast wing.
A group of marchers from the Sun Parade sat against a wall, their long masks still hiding their faces, bottles beside them. They must have been up all night. A minotaur stood on one corner, surrounded by laughing children who playfully touched the creature before running away. At a distance stood several young women. They seemed shy, as if they were building up the courage to talk to the creature. Boris could not understand the obsession the people seemed to have with the creatures. Yes, they were ancient; yes, like all such creatures they were touched by thaumaturgy—but in the end they were simply living creatures. Rikard was right: as far as Boris could see, they were just men with the heads of bulls. Even as he thought this, some part of Boris realized he was, for some reason, denying the truth of things.
Boris turned back to Rudé. “Is Quadi unwell?”
“He’s come here to die.”
“That weed he smokes would be enough to kill any man,” Boris said.
Rudé smiled and continued. “They come here, far from Tir-Aki, or Nara-Aki. Far from their homes, far from the restless and relentless growth of their people. Like my mother.”
Boris thought he saw Saidra nestled into one of the tram’s seats, reading. When the young woman looked up, he realized it was not his daughter, even if she shared the same round-faced prettiness, the same large contemplative eyes. Seeing his glance, she closed the pamphlet she was reading and slipped it into her bag. Yet he glimpsed its title: The Conquest of Pain. Was it simply a philosophical tract from one of the philiosopher-assassins’ mandarins, or was it a seditionist tract? It had become hard to tell these days, though no doubt the Houses’ officiates had drafted a policy explaining the distinction. He cared little for the subject anyway; he had never been a philosopher; he preferred to think of himself as a man of action.
“Their homeland makes them ill?” Boris continued to study the woman, who, uncomfortable under his gaze, looked out the window.
“My mother would have known. Perhaps Quadi can explain it to you better. I think they cannot find meaning in such an existence. They are emptied by it. So they leave and find another city to die, the way a cat lies hidden beneath a tree.”
Boris laughed. “Meaning!”
“Some people need it.”
Boris looked up toward the Factory Quarter, where smoke and soot hovered in the air. “It’s a hard thing to find.” He waited, let the thought settle. “I think we should change out attitude toward the tramworkers. I think—”
Rudé touched him on the arm. “The Elo-Talern want to see you. For long they have taken no interest in such things. Why this sudden attention, I cannot say. But something is changing in the city. They want to hear from someone close to the street, close to the factory.”
“But…” Boris looked down at his shoes. Cracks from age and dryness ran along their sides. “I’ve never.”
“You’ll be fine,” said Rudé, but his cheerful demeanor was gone.
When they stepped from the tram, Boris glanced back at the young woman, who glared out the window at him. She was like Saidra in more ways than one.
Once in the Technis Complex, Boris and Rudé passed along a gloomy winding corridor, where the number of agents thinned out. Here the walls shuddered with steam-pipes powering some unknown sections of the Palace. The pipes diverged from each other, rejoined and curled, wrapped around each other like snakes. Wheels and handles were spaced randomly along them, presumably to control the flows of steam and liquid. Gas lamps hung from the roof, but these succeeded only in illuminating the rusty dilapidation of the corridor.
They came to a sign, which read, ZONE RESTRICTED TO OFFICIATES. KEEP OUT. The corridor continued into the mountain behind Caeli-Amur, but there were no lamps to light the way and the pipes gave way to an older and simple architecture of smooth walls. Rudé lit a lamp stored in a niche and they continued on.
With each step, Boris wondered what all this meant. For fifteen years, his routine as subofficiate had been the same: Take messages and parcels between officiates, visit factories and report back. Now he was finding himself in places of influence. He could use them to change things for the better. The higher he climbed, the more influence he’d have. The thought brought on the rush of feelings once more: excitement that burst into him like a fountain; anxiety that clamped him like a vise.
They came to an accordion-style grille door and stepped into an elevator that shuddered and groaned as it took them higher. Boris glanced quickly at Rudé, who seemed unconcerned by the clattering sounds of machinery that echoed around them. They had entered a part of the Palace of unknown age. The elevator was clearly a recent construction, built perhaps in the last thirty or so years. But gone were the even newer technologies such as the pipes.
The elevator trembled to a halt and Rudé pulled open the door. Boris followed the New-Man down a dry and dusty corridor, bracing himself against a cold wind. Other smooth-walled corridors led away to his left and right, and disappeared into darkness. Occasionally, open doorways showed empty halls and galleries, which Boris imagined had once been the scene of great parties and balls, but were now only ghostly shells, the hollow reminders of long-dead dancers. The walls were set with evenly spaced symmetrical shapes—triangles, squares, hexagons, octagons—whose austere beauty seemed to add to the cold wind. Elsewhere along the wall, alcoves were filled with crumbling humanoid statuettes with trunks that writhed from their faces, or insect creatures with long mandibles, or many-eyed humans operating strange machinery. Boris shuddered: What strange histories did they describe?
Rudé smiled briefly at Boris, but his eyes were without joy.
The corridors wound on, now up winding s
taircases, now across bridges that spanned empty and echoing ballrooms. All the time, strange implements made of hooks and cogs and wheels and blades and springs and a hundred unknown components hung unused and forgotten on the walls.
Now Boris’s anxiety intensified and became a shadowy fear that seemed to shift around his chest and gut and his vital organs. The strangeness of this place, and the knowledge that the Elo-Talern lived somewhere in this decaying world, haunted his thoughts.
Finally, they came to colossal double doors covered with ornate, spiraled bands of metal in intricate patterns. Ideograms, although inscribed in the door, seemed impossibly to hover in front of them, as if belonging to a different plane of existence.
Rudé touched the doors and they groaned open of their own accord. A great throne, set on a dais, stood toward the end of the hall, in front of another set of double doors. Pillars ran on both sides of the hall. Behind them lay only darkness and a kind of subtle swirling fog caused by the cold. Boris could not be sure how large the room was, and his mind played tricks on him: Dark shapes flickered around them, shadows that disappeared when his roving eyes tried to fix them.
As Boris and Rudé stood in the middle of the room, the fog hung almost imperceptibly around them, a spectral presence that gave the surroundings an otherworldly feel. Perhaps somewhere in those long dark halls they had crossed a threshold and ventured into some liminal space, some borderland of life and death, far from the world of sun and laughter far away.
“Will—?” Boris began, but his desire to speak faltered and the word echoed eerily around the room, leaving the silence humming unnaturally.
“Do—?” he began again.
“Wait,” said Rudé softly.
The doors behind the throne groaned. They came apart with terrible slowness. For what seemed an eternity, nothing came through them. Then, finally, a shape emerged. Boris grabbed his flask. Without taking his eyes from the Elo-Talern, he unscrewed the lid.
The Elo-Talern took three or four steps on spindly legs, improbable muscles and tendons flexing and bulging in strange and disturbing places.
As she walked, Boris heard a cracking and groaning, like a broken wooden machine. Unnerved, almost afraid to keep looking, he searched for the source of the sound, which seemed to be coming from her joints. Boris was horrified to see that they bent both ways, so that her knees doubled back after they straightened, just as her elbows swung in both directions. Her head turned imperiously on its long neck and stared at Boris.
Boris closed his eyes and felt the tension in his muscles. When he opened his eyes she had moved again. She collapsed her long body onto the throne, where she leaned in a languid pose, one spidery leg thrown out, the other with its foot to the floor. As she rested there, she flickered out of existence, replaced briefly by a decaying creature—cadaverous cheekbones and blackened teeth—resembling her, yet not quite her. She flickered back into existence, and the smell of rotten leaves wafted past Boris to mingle with the dampness of the building.
“So.” Behind her whispery voice came a sound, like dry paper rustling. “Tell me about these … troubles.” To make herself comfortable, she shifted her torso, which was too long for the rest of her, as if a whole midsection including extra vertebrae had been added.
Rudé turned to Boris, whose legs began to tremble. Nobody said anything.
“Boris,” said Rudé.
“There’s been … sabotage … at the Tram Factory.…” Boris looked at that terrible face, the jutting forehead, the cheekbones impossibly high and sharply defined so the withered mouth was far below and miniscule. “One of the workers has been planting explosives.…” Boris searched for the words. He tried to think of ways he could put the tramworkers’ grievances diplomatically, so that the Elo-Talern would see their plight, yet know that he was there to help the House. Nausea gripped him and he swallowed uncomfortably. “There’s a mood out there … there’s all sorts…”
Rudé stepped forward: “Not just in the Tram Factory. There are little groups and circles springing up everywhere: on the docks; in the textile mills; in the Quaedian. There are pamphlets and broadsheets filled with mad radical ideas circulating.”
Again she flickered and her face became skeletal and rotten before flickering back to life. She leaned forward, and her neck seemed to stretch out and elongate. Crack. Crack. Crack. Before anything could be said, she began: “What sort of men are they, these tramworkers?”
“Stubborn, strong, and … honest. They talk much about justice these days. It’s not the first time … a long while ago … but that talk died away…” Images of Mathias flashed into Boris’s mind. Again the words eluded him. “They are changed by the thaumaturgy we force them to use. They are squeezed like fruit until they are dry. Perhaps we should train them properly, in the correct formulae, so that they might be protected.”
The Elo-Talern laughed; it sounded like the raven’s call. “Don’t they understand that we cannot return to the world before the cataclysm? Those days are gone. In any case, we would threaten ourselves by releasing such knowledge. There are other paths for those who want to learn the Art. Paths for people who seek to better themselves. They can join the House Thaumaturgists. Compare what they are doing to your own situation, Boris. Were you not once a tramworker? And look what you’ve done for yourself.”
Boris’s eyes darted left and right. He found no answer.
Once more she slouched back into the throne: “Are you not happy with the way Technis treats you? No—these tramworkers have chosen their life and now they must deal with the consequences of their choice, just as you have chosen yours. If there is a strike, we shall act quickly. Are you capable, Subofficiate Autec? Isn’t this what you’ve lived your life for? A defining moment? Think of the rewards when you succeed. You could begin to achieve those things you’ve always wanted to achieve. To have the things you want to have. What is it you want, Boris?”
Boris sweated under her gaze. His mind would not produce the thoughts he wanted, nor would his mouth form the words. All that would come to his mind was the image of Mathias with his heavy-lidded eyes, his slumped posture.
“I’ll discuss with my colleagues.” The Elo-Talern moved her hand in circles. “The workers want a new life, do they? We’ll give them a different life, or the Furies will.”
She stood with the sound of popping. Boris closed his eyes once more. When he opened them she was gone. Boris had failed. Now all he could think about was escape from that room.
FIVE
The Artists’ Quarter of Caeli-Amur was one of the oldest. Called the Quaedian, its cramped streets were too narrow for carriages or trams. Packed along the alleyways were boutiques full of curiosities, and bookstores, the walls of which were hidden by piles of books and manuscripts, parchments and ancient bas-reliefs. Surrounding the nearby piazzas, eateries offered Caeli-Amur’s famous spiced soups, and red wines from the foothills to the south. Above the eateries, tiny bars with wrought iron balconies overlooked the streets. In the afternoon, students and artists drank the exorbitantly priced flower-drafts and flame-liquors in the glass cabinets behind the bar. As evening closed in, the students leaned from the balconies and teased the passersby.
Maximilian thought of it as his quarter. He had made himself at home, come to know the rhythms of the universities, filled with students who yearned for forbidden knowledge: the kind only available in the cataloged libraries of the Houses.
When news spread of the printing press protests, Maximilian found himself—against Kamron and the Veterans’ policies—standing at the open doors of one of Arbor’s workshops in the Quaedian. A mass of printers were busily breaking the presses, which published Arbor’s publications. Beneath the high-arched roof, the air was filled with a sense of danger and exhilaration. Light cut in through high narrow windows in the factory, where thirty presses, each standing at seven feet high and long, stood in rows. The printers were laughing as they jammed metal bars into the screw mechanisms, or struck levers and s
heets of type with hammers. Others were scattering cast metal parts and type over the ground. He saw three of the gray-uniformed men, close to the door, heave over one of the screw-presses, which crashed onto the floor with a boom. Others were smashing bottles of ink, which splattered blackly against a far wall.
Around Maximilian, a crowd of onlookers watched curiously. What did it mean that the workers were breaking their own machines? Like the other houses, Arbor’s finances seemed in order. Indeed, Caeli-Amur was a bustling and growing city. Old buildings were relentlessly torn down, new ones thrown up in their place; the sound of hammering and sawing echoed through the city. Meanwhile, the demand for books and broadsheets had grown rapidly. The printers had become ever more efficient, pumping out masses of printed matter every day, and yet their working conditions had not improved. And now, only days before, Arbor had announced that they would introduce steam-driven presses, replacing their workers with new technology, just as Technis had done in their printworks a year earlier. Here was the printworkers response.
Maximilian shook his head. If only the seditionists had a way of contacting the disenchanted workers more efficiently, rather than the slow process of individual recruitment that they used. But Kamron had been clear: Their strategy was to wait, grow incrementally until some time in the future.
Like many seditionists, Max had been converted by one of Kamron’s pamphlets. He had come to Caeli-Amur from his hometown to the north, for he knew that it was in the cities that history was made. Anyone with an interest in thaumaturgy must eventually venture to Caeli-Amur, or Varenis, or another of the world’s great cities. He had roamed between the bars and cafés of the Quaedian, learning scraps from the apprentices, filled with dreams of greatness. He had made friends with an intellectual from one of the universities, Odile, who smuggled him a pamphlet called Thaumaturgy and History. One evening Max had taken it to the dingy garret he shared with two others. He still remembered the shock as he had read the first page, how Kamron’s words had turned his world on an angle, so that everything looked strange and new.
Unwrapped Sky Page 5
