Max grasped Omar as he slid out. “Take his legs.”
Together they carried him toward the Communal Cavern, Max holding him beneath the armpits, Giselle carrying his feet. All the time Omar groaned and muttered strange words and stared out into space, his eyes were focusing on another world. Along the long corridor lit with purple mist they carried him. In the Communal Cavern, other seditionists rushed about asking, “What happened?” Max made a bed on which Omar could lie while Giselle prepared poultices. Omar’s eyes fluttered open and roved around until some time later they fixed on Max as he sat beside him. “You should have seen it, Max. You should have seen the visions. The world. The voices, I can still hear the voices,” said Omar. “Il Panadus. It Tenerebris…,” he said. “The voices of the angels…”
When Kamron squatted beside Omar, Max squinted at the old man. “This is your fault.”
SEVEN
With the money Rudé had given her the previous day, Kata walked slowly to Via Persine, where she caught a tram to the market. In her mind, she ran over the previous day’s events: her fit; Rudé’s arrival, followed by Aemilius’s; the way Rudé had looked at Aemelius in awe. After their departures, she spent the remaining hours resting, as Aemilius had suggested, and her strength had slowly returned. She thought of the flagon of poison she had stored in her kitchen. The memory of it all filled her with doubt and dread.
At the market she bought a bag of medicine from the old peasant woman at the market. She now had enough to last her a couple of months. As a child, the fits had come unexpectedly, and after her mother died, she had often found herself lying in some gutter in the factory district. Once, she had regained consciousness to find a group of boys standing around her. One of them had pulled her dress up and they were all busy staring at her nakedness. Instinctively she kicked out, and the boys had run away laughing. She felt dirty for the rest of the day.
About six years ago, a young apothecary had seen her having a fit in one of the cafés, and he’d kneeled down beside her. She still remembered the softness in his eyes and the gentle way he spoke. He told her to try the preparation made of roots and leaves from the south, and it had staved off the fits. For years she hoped he would return and sweep her away somewhere and look after her. Though he hadn’t, she remembered him still.
Now the old woman at the market sold the preparation, along with many others: for aches of the joints, to help with agues and fevers, to heal broken limbs. Looking up at her, the old woman’s grin smoothed out her wrinkly face. “Ah, you’re a good-looking girl.”
Kata smiled weakly. She had never considered herself good-looking. Yes, she had long black hair and intense eyes, but she had always thought her brooding countenance precluded words such as “pretty,” “beautiful,” or “good-looking.”
Behind her, a group of blue-uniformed Marin guards rushed past toward the docks, tridents in hand, nets hanging from their shoulders.
The old woman nodded toward them. “It’s been nothing but trouble down there on the docks since the minotaurs arrived. Holy, they call those beasts. Inhuman is what I’d call them.”
Kata peered toward the great steamers that sat on the piers, but could make out nothing but the guards gathered around some disturbance. Some of the guards held their nets in hand, ready to throw. “It’s been nothing but trouble since before they arrived,” she said.
The woman pursed her lips, raised the eyebrows that jutted from her forehead like spindly bushes. “But things are going awry now, what with all these talks of strikes. Arbor’s printworkers yesterday, broken by the House, but not before they smashed up their presses.”
Kata smiled weakly again. “Perhaps things will settle. Perhaps it’s this heat.”
The old woman looked up at the hazy sky. There was no wind, and the air seemed the hang heavily around them. “Ah, I haven’t seen days like this since before the House Wars started. It’s in the air; you can feel it. Birds fly directionless; the morning sun had been glowing a furnace red; specters have been seen in the ruins of the Ancient Forum —portents.”
As Kata mixed the preparation and drank it, the old woman watched her curiously. Kata’s limbs relaxed a little, letting go of the tension that threatened to tip over into a fit. She had failed the day before with Aemilius: she had let him go. Now she must make amends with another minotaur. She looked down at the old woman, who grinned and said again, “You’re a good-looking girl.”
Kata left the market and searched for a minotaur, but every time she found one, something stood in her way. First there were too many of them, gathered near the steam baths on the northern peninsula of the city, with no way of isolating one. Another simply ignored her when she approached him in the high-art café called Anthalas, filled with odd-shaped sculptures and instalations designed for the twin black cats that had made it their home. A third, telling stories of the Numerian Wars and Saliras’s assault on the city, was surrounded by wide-eyed young women whose hands reached out to touch him. Yet others laughed and played games with sticks and bone dice with old men and women. The citizens had grown more comfortable with the presence of the minotaurs.
With each failure she felt the sickly feeling of dread creeping into her. Desperation made everything seem out of focus. Her eyes flitted from one person to another.
Slowly she made her way up the white cliffs on foot. She passed a building whose walls were plastered with a patchwork of posters calling for an end to the Houses. The style was in modern reds and blacks: strong straight-lined figures of workers, standing in front of a cubist representation of the House Technis Complex. The posters were marked with A CALL TO ARMS. Beside the posters someone had scrawled, I’ll end your house.
Finally, she scaled the winding stairs that hugged the city’s northernmost cliff, which stood by itself close to the mountaintop. The path was like a mountain goat trail, dangerously doubling back on itself, at places so steep as to be almost a ladder. Eventually she reached the Artists’ Square that jutted from the cliff like a great sandy disk. Painters with their easels were dotted between tables where men with braided hair and spectacles drank green tea. There she found Aemilius playing chess with another minotaur.
Kata sat next to them and looked over the city below. It was beautiful, despite the smoke that rose constantly from the factories or the slums in the Lavere Quarter far to the south. The city was silent; only the sound of the artists’ voices could be heard, rustling on the wind.
“This is Kata, Dexion,” said Aemilius.
“You have a new friend already?” said Dexion, whose hair was light and sandy. His hands were smooth and young looking.
“I do,” said Aemilius, looking at Kata.
“You old ones, you never surprise me with your cunning,” said Dexion.
“No,” said Aemilius, “nothing like that.”
“Oh no. Nothing like that,” said Dexion, laughing also. “Actually, I remember seeing her with Cyriacus. You know, no one’s seen him in days. There are rumors, rumors of abductions, of a black market.”
“Rumors don’t stand for the truth. He’ll be around,” said Aemilius, looking across to Kata.
Kata felt her stomach tense but kept her face impassive.
Dexion nodded and said, “I’ll leave you two to your friendship then.”
“But our game?”
“Next time,” said Dexion.
“You’re only leaving because I have the upper hand.”
But Dexion was already walking away across the square, looking around happily. Vitality and enthusiasm radiated from him.
“The city is beautiful from the square,” she said.
“Look at the smoke though, poisoning the air.”
“I grew up on the streets around those factories. I learned to love the dirty alleyways, the grime-covered walls.”
“Yes,” he said, “there’s energy in the new technologies. Many possibilities. Many choices.”
“They bring new conflicts also,” said Kata. “The Factory Quarter
is filled with damaged workers. Some are broken, but some are not. There’s talk of revolt.”
They sat in the afternoon sun, watching the painters around them try to capture the scene just so, in their very own ways, and talked. Aemilius had been born on Aya, he explained. Like all minotaurs, he had burst forth from rock, full of mighty rage, clamoring for knowledge and adventure. He had sailed on sleek longboats, traveled the deserts of Numeria, studied now-lost texts such as Sumi’s Necromancy and Agency in the ancient Library of the Sunken City. “But I never ventured to the lower levels, where the memories of the ancients are stored. There you could talk with those very memories, and they would stand before you in physical form.”
Kata tried to keep the conversation focused on Aemilius, but eventually he asked her about herself.
“My mother died of the contagion when I was a child,” she replied. “She had worked in the factories for House Technis. I remember her hands were knobby from the spinning wheels. When you held one, you could feel the calluses, the lumps where there had been breaks. But you know what the Cajiun philosophers say, ‘One must pass straight through pain—to attempt to avoid it is to warp your life, to cripple yourself.’”
“It intrigues me that you would know such philosophy. I thought it was out of fashion,” said Aemilius.
“It is, among the House philosophers. But many citizens still contemplate it. Some of the philosopher-assassins keep Cajiunism alive. Many who still live in the margins or who, like me, grew up on the streets.”
Kata’s mentor Sarrat had been a Cajiun philosopher from Numeria. Some said it was the perfect philosophy for those who lived in the deserts deep inland. Sarrat was the calmest man she had ever met; he seemed to live in a perpetual inner silence. Pain, patience, compassion: these were the principles the Cajiuns lived by. But he was perfectly capable of bursting into action, his long black body leaping and spinning through the air. He had taught her this Cajiun style of fighting, based on constant movement, and the philosophy that went along with it. “One must kill as quickly and painlessly as possible,” he said after he had adopted her from the streets in an act of charity. His apartment was bare and free of books. Real philosophy could be taught through practice, he insisted. Sarrat smiled gently when a year later she brought in a copy of Quelos’s tome, Fear and the Emotions: A Discourse. Kata had said to him, “I’m not sure I’m a Cajiun philosopher. I haven’t the patience or the temperament.” Sarrat had sat still, legs crossed, in the center of the room. “Perhaps not.”
Now Aemilius looked over at her curiously before taking her hand in his own rough fingers. “And you have raised yourself up. Look at you now: a real citizen of the city, free, capable.”
“Come,” she said, “let’s go.”
She took him back down the staircase, the wind picking up to buffet away their talk. And then down through the streets that grew in size, where children laughed and ran barefoot between houses and old men sat silently on stools by the front doors of their square, blocklike cottages.
Kata led him ultimately to her house. She took him inside and walked to the kitchen. She opened the cupboard door and glanced at the flagon. She left it there and walked back out of the kitchen. Aemilius stood before her, majestic. She reached out and placed her hand on his chest. It did not ripple with muscles as Cyriacus’s had, but his body was powerful nonetheless. Kata leaned in and rested her head against his chest, reaching up to touch his hairy face, the bristles wiry and oiled beneath her hand. The smell of sweat and perfume intoxicated her, and she felt calm as his arms closed around her. She shut her eyes and felt his chest rising and falling beneath her cheek. Pushing back, she looked up into his onyx eyes, noticing for the first time the soft and dark eyelashes that interlaced beautifully as he blinked.
“Come upstairs,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I have to leave at the end of the week.”
“I don’t care. Come upstairs.” She turned and pulled him by the hand. He came, hesitantly, behind her, as if she were leading a child into the dark.
The next morning they lay in her bed, watching the light as it slowly shifted in intensity across the wall. In the afternoon, when he left to buy fruit from the markets, she locked the cupboard in her bedroom that held her bolt-thrower. When he returned, they ate the fruit naked at the table.
“Look at this,” he said, running his fingers along the roughened edge of the table that had been scraped when she killed Cyriacus.
“Scraped when I brought it through the door.”
“I hope you didn’t fall and give yourself those bruises,” he said.
“No. Those came from Cyriacus.”
“Ha!” He threw his head back.
“What?”
“I knew. I smelled his blood on the balcony. What happened?”
“We fought. I struck him and he left.”
“He left? Just like that? Don’t lie to me. I know what he tried to do. The young minotaurs, they let pain make their decisions for them.”
“It’s not what you think. He didn’t—”
“I’m sorry for whatever happened. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
She crossed her arms and clenched her teeth.
Aemilius reached over and placed his hand over hers. “You are distant.”
“To be close to someone is … dangerous.”
After he left, Kata lay desolate on the cushions, cursing House Technis and their hold over her. She had volunteered so readily, a chance to cancel all her debts at once. But now … She had to kill another minotaur. It was sacrilege, of course, which is why they had agents like her perform the task. If necessary, they could deny all responsibility.
She could not fail. She had two days.
EIGHT
In the House Technis Complex, Kata sat before a polished redwood desk on which sat a elaborate mechanical contraption beside a pile of papers. She looked out of the window to the hanging gardens with their red round fruit, their tinkling waterfalls and marble fountains. Soft purple flowers floated on the breeze. She smelled pollen. Technis’s gardens attempted to replicate Arbor’s, but they could never compete with the exotic and deadly flora—the tear-flowers, frost-reeds, Toxicodendron didion—that surrounded the Arbor palace. Technis was not an originator but instead a relentless and efficient imitator.
The door opened. Rudé entered and sat down in the red leather chair behind the desk. “Well?”
“I want to change the agreement.”
“We can’t. We have customers waiting for the different parts of the body. And the House’s thaumaturgists are waiting for the eyes, the liver and kidneys, and the skin.”
“Perhaps you could get someone else to do it.”
“Yes. I suppose we could. But it’s a bit late now. Anyway, I’ve already given you an advance.”
“That was hardly worth the price of the first minotaur.”
“Yes, but let’s see. You still owe us for half your apartment. Now, we could repossess that … but you don’t want to go back on the street, do you? Anyway, look at it this way, Kata: It’s time for you to show some loyalty. Loyalty will get you far in this world.”
The mention of the street struck fear deep into Kata. She could never go back to the street. All those years of struggle, of dragging her way up from poverty, from hopelessness, from a world of cold in winter, heat in summer, relentlessly shifting sleeping places from gutter to empty basement to factory storeyard, running with street urchins, some kindly, others vicious-tempered and dissolute. She would rather die than find herself with no apartment, thrown back into the street.
She rose to her feet and leaned over the desk at him. “Everyone finds their proper place, you know, Rudé. One day you’ll find yours.”
“Fine,” he said, as if Kata had not spoken at all. “I’ll come to collect the body at the end of the Festival tomorrow night. I trust you’ll be obliging.”
She clenched her teeth and took a breath.
She glanced at Rudé for a moment. There was nothing for her to say. Not yet.
Kata met Aemilius in La Tazia, a tiny coffeehouse specializing in exotic fruits, nestled dangerously high on the south side of the cliffs where white apartment buildings and eateries were piled upon one another like children’s blocks. The coffee there was dark and imported, the cigars rolled across the sea in Ambibia. The owner was a wasted old man called Pezhi, who coughed up black phlegm between bouts of wheezy laughter. Nearing death, Pezhi found everything hilarious.
When Kata and Aemilius entered, Pehzi was talking to a fat philosopher-assassin with a shaved head and two bolt-throwers dangling from the back of his belt—Fat Nik, who had spent years in Varenis and who claimed to have met the Sortileges. As they spoke, Pehzi scratched a long-haired white cat behind its ear. It closed its blue eyes. The cafés and bars along Via Gracchia were filled with cats lounging languorously on high mantelpieces or curled up on chairs, as if they owned the places.
In one corner, two young women played chess, their backs against the wall. Kata took Aemilius out onto the tiny semicircular balcony where a small table allowed them to look over the city and the sea. Kata looked at the peninsula with its steam baths and liquor palaces on the far side of the piers. She would not look at Aemilius.
“I shall not see you again,” she said.
“I see.”
Pehzi stepped out onto the balcony holding a tray. He placed the coffees on the table. “Waterberry pastries?”
“No.”
Pezhi nodded, laughed to himself about something, and left them alone.
Eventually Kata said, “You’re leaving the day after tomorrow. You’ll sail across the sea to Aya. That’s that.”
“I see.”
“Is that all you can say? ‘I see’? What about me? Why are you so—?”
Unwrapped Sky Page 8
