Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  As he curled up on his mattress in the half light of the brazier, Max thought to himself: He would visit the Xsanthians, regardless of what the Veterans said; he would be his own man. He would do it secretly, and should they discover him, they would have to throw him onto the streets.

  Now that he had decided, he let his mind wander. He imagined Caeli-Enas, the Sunken City, and its Great Library. There knowledge could be drunk like an elixir, knowledge that could forever change the relationship between citizens and the Houses. He fell asleep thinking of how he might reach it.

  That night he dreamed of Nkando crying. She stood on the pier, surrounded by crates and boxes. He tried to run to her along the beach, but his feet kept sticking in the sand. He looked down, he realized that his legs had been eaten by sand-crabs and were now just bloody stumps. When he looked up, Nkando and the cutter were gone, leaving only gray waves crashing over a windswept pier.

  In the morning, when Maximilian awoke, he kept his eyes closed and, lying on his thin mattress, the threadbare brown blanket over him, thought of Nkando. He had met her at the library in his parents’ pleasure villa on the Dyrian coast. He had been thirteen years old, in the stage of uncomfortable adolescence, when his thoughts, emotions, body were growing in spurts and dashes. He had felt constantly out of tune with himself.

  He had spent a morning swimming with Omar in the crystal-blue waters the region was famous for. Then he had ventured to the library, as he loved to do, restlessly reading whatever he could find: natural history, myths, studies of ancient creatures, botany.

  On this afternoon, Max looked up from the history of the Numerian Wars to see her, a vision as if invoked from his book. About his own age, she walked along the shelves, small and round, white eyes and smooth black skin, apparently puzzled by the referencing system.

  Eventually, she turned to him politely, spoke softly in a thick Numerian accent. “Excuse me, sir.”

  Max smiled and she lowered her eyes shyly.

  She asked him to help her, and he had helped her find the books. Then, in return, he had her talk of her home country, of its wondrous creatures—lions, elephants, monkeys—of its jungles and waterfalls. But also of its strange customs: the dance of a thousand virgins before the King; the odd philosophies and animal cults.

  “And what do you do here?” asked Max.

  “I am owned by Master Etrusca. We’re staying on Poppaea’s floating villa.”

  The floating villas drifted along the Dyrian coastline, allowing their guests to disembark in each bay as they saw fit. Guests of the Poppaea villa were welcome to use the library and the baths in Max’s parents’ villa. Nkando was a slave girl, then, something rare now in polite society, though tolerated. Slavery had mostly been eradicated by the reform of Arisyme, some two hundred years earlier, which the Houses had agreed upon. Now only merchants, members of the Collegia in Caeli-Amur, or on a vaster scale, city-states in Numeria, possessed slaves.

  Each day, Nkando would return and each day Max would meet her, sometimes with Omar. One day, she hobbled in, her legs moving stiffly as if they would not bend at the knees. Placing her hands on the table, she lowered herself into a seat.

  Max and Omar pressed her, and she burst into tears. “He beats me, with a cane.” Her voice was low and filled with shame. She raised her head defiantly. A fire leaped into her eyes. “I fight him, though. I hurt him back.”

  Omar put a hand on Max’s arm to calm him. But emotions rushed in Max nevertheless: a sickness, rage and an unknown feeling he later realized was the first stirrings of love. With each day it grew until it practically consumed his senses. It was Nkando’s gentle shyness that had reached into him, her hidden feistiness that wouldn’t let him go.

  They plotted for Nkando’s escape. Max and Omar would pool their savings and rent her a room in a rooming house, hide her until Etrusca left Dyria and headed back with his fleet to Numeria. Nkando was filled with hope. But on the appointed day, she did not return at all. Instead came a tall man, thick-lipped with not so much a beard as tufts of orangey brown hair sprouting from chin and cheeks. Two long red scratches ran down his cheek.

  The man slipped into the seat next to Max and Omar. “So, you are the boys. Nkando has told me a great deal about you. Well, at first she didn’t want to speak, but eventually, she was eager to.” He grinned lasciviously. “She’s quite the tiger, you know. But even a tiger can be tamed. It’s a pity that I’m about to take a cutter back to Numeria, else I would have had you punished also.”

  Anger exploded in Max’s body. His visioned blurred with white and he lost all sense of hearing. Without awareness he was on his feet and leaping at Etrusca. A flat palm struck straight into Max’s face. Max’s head snapped back, his legs whipped beneath him and he was knocked horizontal, then he struck the ground. He was overwhelmed by a vast black tide that washed over him.

  He regained consciousness to the sound of Omar’s voice. “Max. Max.”

  Etrusca was gone as Max stood shakily to his feet. With Omar, he ran to the coastline. Sitting out in the bay were two floating villas. On one of the many piers at the end of the beach, seamen loaded a cutter with a few crates and boxes of local produce. Standing motionless beside them was a small black figure. Max and Omar ran toward the pier, but Etrusca emerged from the cutter, grabbed the slave-girl by the hair and dragged her aboard. By the time Max and Omar stood on the wet planks of the pier, the cutter had cast off and was sailing on rough gray waters to sea.

  Max had called out, screamed in an unnaturally powerful voice. A voice that carried across the ocean. A voice louder than any human voice should be.

  Omar stared at him, eyes wide with disbelief.

  That had been the first evidence that Max had a talent for the thaumaturgical arts. Of course he couldn’t repeat the feat; it was one of those rare and mysterious instances where talent for the art had spontaneously broken through, without formulae or equations—something that the theories of thaumaturgy could not explain.

  Max had been filled with black despair and the injustice of the world, at the power some had over others. He now saw it wherever he looked, in the relations of holidaying officiates and their servants, in House Marin’s attitude to the workers on their oyster farms and fisheries. At first he had concluded that this was a consequence of humanity’s evil soul. He had wanted to tear all forms of society to the ground, burn them away, purify them with destruction. But when he had read Kamron’s pamphlet, he had made sense of the injustices of the world. This was a period of transition, Kamron argued. Once the world recovered from the cataclysm, then the Nkandos of the world would be freed. Future generations would look back at this time as a strange aberration, a barbaric consequence of catastrophe, in which people themselves were part of that barbarism. This vision moved him in ways he had never experiences, and it had led him to here, years later, in the seditionist hideout. Max shook himself from his reverie; he opened his eyes and prepared for the day.

  As the hours passed, Max became aware of Josiane’s eyes fixing on him. To avoid suspicion, he would have to wait a few days before he visited the Xsanthians again. In any case, the day was set aside for Max to train his apprentices. He gathered with them—Oewen and Ariana, Gilli and Philippe, Clemence and Usula—in the square room they used for training. The chamber was one of a series that ran along one side of the cavern, each one a polyhedron. The first, a triangular prism, a trilateral pyramid (or tetrahedron), was used for storage. Max’s group used the second, a square-shaped room. Then next, an eight-sided octahedron-shaped room was Kamron’s. The fourth, a twelve sided-dodecahedron, Ejan claimed for his group. The fifth (its twenty sides forming an icosahedron) was free to be used by whoever liked. The strange symmetrical purity of the rooms seemed to be something the ancients valued. It awakened Max’s imagination and reminded him of thaumaturgy itself, for though that science was asymmetrical—its different disciplines worked in fundamentally different ways—its base was fundamentally mathematical.

  W
hen Max entered their square room, the others had already arrived. Clemence walked past the shelves that stored basic thaumaturgical tomes, scrolls and parchments, chemical compounds, lead and mercury, precious stones—hematite and lazurite, onyx—and most impressive, a vial of ground bloodstone that came from Varenis’s prison-mines on the western side of the Etolian range. Exposure to the bloodstone could lead to a terrible cancerlike disease that made one’s body slowly change color. First, the veins would glow a luminous dark red. Then the eyes would transform into a scarlet color, as if bathed in radiant blood. After this, one would begin to cough out red liquid like a tuberculosis victim, though the liquid itself would crystalize into bloodstone. Then, as the brain roved in strange mineral thoughts, the body itself would harden into slightly malleable bloodstone and freeze into a carmine statue of exquisite beauty. The final result was a statue resembling a melted wax duplicate of the afflicted person.

  They would not use the bloodstone today.

  They gathered into a little circle on the floor, to continue their studies in illusionary transmutation. Like all thaumaturgy, it was composed of two interwoven techniques: formulae spoken and written in the air. A third, material, element was often added at some point in the sequence. Often this acted as a catalyst or helped intensify the charm. At other times—with particularly powerful spells—it was essential.

  Thaumaturgy, then, was closely related to chymistry, biology, physics. Indeed, at times the parallels were plain. But to perform it was an art, perhaps the closest analogy was music. One learned the formulae—just as one learned the relationships of chords in music, one practiced them, memorized them—but to perform was to forget them, to enact them instinctually. Still, some had a greater natural aptitude for the Art than others. Like mathematics or performing music, everyone possessed some talent, but while some struggled, others excelled.

  Illusionism was Maximillian’s strength, and together they reexamined the equations for a simple illusion and discussed the principles behind them. Then they emptied their minds of all extraneous thoughts and feelings, calmed themselves. Finally, it was Oewen’s turn to perform the illusion.

  Oewen brushed his light beard with one hand. His face calmed itself, then tensed once more. There was something small and mouselike about him. He recited the formula and drew an ideogram in the air. In the center of the circle a bowl shimmered. For a moment it transformed into a small chair; then it mutated back into a bowl.

  Oewen held both hands in the air. “I can’t do it.”

  Max nodded vigorously. “You can!”

  A look of guilt touched Oewen’s face. “I don’t want to do this any longer. I don’t have the talent for it.”

  “We all have the talent for it!” Max’s let his head fall back and looked at the roof. “We can all do it. Perhaps you’d be better at one of the other forms—biologism or chymistry.”

  “Perhaps I’d be better at harvesting crops.”

  “Patience.” Kamron stood in the doorway and looked eagerly around the room, assessing. “Neither of you have patience.”

  Max pursed his lips. Was Kamron monitoring him and the group? Was he checking to ensure Max was still in the hideout, hadn’t gone to visit the Xsanthians? Still, Kamron was right, he was impulsive, frustrated when things didn’t happen quickly. But then again, without impatience, they would never achieve anything. People had to be driven for a greater vision, for the good of everyone. Even Oewen. Even Max himself.

  Kamron walked into the room. He squatted next to Oewen. “How do you feel?”

  “Sick.”

  “Would you like to try again?”

  “No.”

  “I understand. But speak the formulae more slowly. Once it is done, then draw the ideogram. I have little talent for illusionism so I cannot show you, and perhaps you don’t either. But I know that you’re rushing to get it over with. You’re slipping out of your trance rather than staying in it.” Kamron calmly clasped his hands in front of him. He had the air of a monk, his soft honeyed tones expressions of everything soft and passive about him. Max watched him: this old warped man whose features were slightly awry, the embodiment of the cost of thaumaturgy, an art rent by contradiction. The mode employed for illusionism was thus: first the spoken formulae, then the ideograms. No additional materials were needed, unlike in the art of chymistry. Illusionism reversed the order used in some of the other forms. Why? Why did they not obey the same laws? Why were the logics of their formulae in contradiction? That was the first great question of the Art. The second was to avoid the cost: the universe’s slow distortion of the thaumaturgist. There were charms of protection to ameliorate this price. These two great problems rose like the sun and the moon over thaumaturgical theory. A thought flashed into Max’s mind: Was there an underlying logic that unified the two?

  “I’ll try,” said Oewen. Again he spoke the formulae, this time vocalizing clearly and definitely. He drew the ideogram in strong lines. The bowl shimmered, transformed into the chair and remained fixed.

  Oewen smiled weakly as he maintained his concentration. He then released it and it returned to its original form.

  Kamron stood up again. “We cannot tell what talent we have. We can only try.” When he reached the door he looked directly at Maximilian. “With patience.” He was not speaking only about thaumaturgy, Max knew.

  After he left, Max nodded to Oewen. “He’s right. I’m sorry I pressed you.”

  Oewen smiled weakly again. “It’s all right. I want to learn. We need to turn thaumaturgy from an Art of power and oppression to one of liberation.”

  Max smiled and touched Oewen on the arm. “Quite so.”

  TWELVE

  Several mornings later, Max awoke before the others. In the early hours, the darkness seemed blacker in the Communal Cavern, and not just because the brazier had burned down and the lamps were guttered. It was as if the minute motes of light that floated down the tunnels had not yet made their way in from the outside. Max slipped from his bed. The sounds of sleeping came to him through the darkness: the muffled sound of several limbs shifting beneath bedcothes, the soft snoring of someone across the cavern.

  Max was already dressed. He grasped the lamp beside his bed, but did not light it. He could not afford to wake anyone, least of all Josiane. She could move silently through the dark and he feared hearing her voice next to him: “Oh, and where are you going?”

  Once outside, he would be free to move about the city, as he liked. When he returned, no one would have proof of his real movements.

  The lamp rattled as Max lifted it. He froze. No one stirred. He padded softly through the darkness, fearful he might tread on some unseen object lying on the floor. He reached the corridor, passed through it in the blackness and finally lit the lamp when he reached the main tunnel to the outside. He stepped out into the open air as the golden sun was breaking over the water, lighting it with streaks of white and yellow. Already he could feel the sun’s heat on his face. It would be another hot day.

  When he reached Market Square, Maximilian watched the bustling activity on the long piers. Seamen padded along the wooden planks of the piers to sleek-lined cutters. Squat steamers maneuvered heavily into place, carrying liquor or machinery from the north. The wharves were an image of brilliant colors—reds and blues of painted boats and colored sails, and the sun catching the sparkling water as it slapped against the boats. The smell of rotten fish wafted over the piers.

  Max walked to a stone staircase that led down beneath the boardwalk. A tough-looking man with the rolling gait of a seaman bent over several boxes of minotaur-puppets. A FOR SALE sign leaned up against one of them. The man looked suspiciously up at Max, but turned away disinterestedly.

  Descending beneath the boardwalk, Max came to a vast series of dank and dark platforms, connected by walkways that ran all the way north to the water palaces and the House Marin compound. Along the way, they connected with tunnels and subterranean canals, which occasionally broke to the surface int
o the waterways of that neighborhood.

  Here the waters lapped below and the salty smell of brine hung in the air. Brooding seamen guarded storage crates scattered among the walkways. In the darkness, tramps shifted on mountainous empires of rags. Max passed a group of five men carrying cages with long exotic lizards, which made deep guttural sounds. Far away he could hear a man yelling, “It’s my kingdom. I am the King. It’s mine!”

  Treading through the gloom, Max was careful not to slip on the wet planks. A few minutes’ walk from the stairs, the platforms gave way to a vast opening, like some subterranean sea baths, and there, slipping in and out of the water in the darkness, were the shadowy forms of the Xsanthians. One of them watched warily from where it sat on the side of the pool, its great big eye on the side of its head unblinking, the scales glistening in the dim light. Max’s chest tightened with tension. Their bipedal form intimated humanity, but their great glassy eyes in the side of their great fish heads suggested something altogether alien.

  “I’ve come for Santhor,” said Max.

  The Xsanthian cocked its head and stared at him. Max stared back into the massive fishy eye. In an instant, Max realized that the eye had no lid, and it was forever open, staring coldly out into the world.

  “Sssanthor. He come.” The Xsanthian hopped onto its two webbed feet, dived into the water, and disappeared beneath the surface.

  Max waited in the half dark as forms moved beneath the waters in front of him. Three heads burst through the surface in unison, turned with perfect synchronicity and gazed blankly at him with their glassy left eyes. Again in unison, they plunged beneath the waters.