Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  A little while later, another head popped from the water; it was not the Xsanthian Santhor, but the head of a gaunt-looking Anlusian who wore large goggles. He grasped the side of the boardwalk and tried to pull himself out. “Lend a hand, will you?”

  Max grabbed him by the arms and the New-Man scrambled out of the water. Great streams of water fell from a strange cylinder on his back. It seemed to be some kind of fan, and attached to the New-Man’s chest was a small sputtering engine. A series of pistons and axles wrapped around the New-Man’s sides to drive the fan and propel the wearer powerfully beneath the waters. But the New-Man himself was skeletal, his wiry muscles taut beneath his skin.

  “Amazing,” the New-Man said. “These Xsanthians. Nothing like them back in Ariki-Aki. Do you know that they have three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision? Have you ever thought what that might be like? I might try to emulate it somehow. A series of mirrors perhaps.” He turned his hands from one angle to another to indicate the image in his mind. Turning a knob, he stopped the engine and the fan on his back slowed to a spluttering stop.

  “Interested in the Xsanthians, are you?” The New-Man grinned, white teeth flashing. He had the refreshing air of a man free from constraint and fear.

  Maximilian found himself saying, “I’d like to help them.”

  The New-Man introduced himself as Quadi. “Mainly I work at the market, trade in hot-wine, gadgets from Ariki-Aki and Tir-Aki. And you?”

  At that moment, a Xsanthian head emerged from the water and, with a kick of its powerful legs and only the softest touch against the edge of the platform with one hand, leaped smoothly onto the walkway. In the other, the creature held a still-flapping fish. It tore off the fish’s head, its backbone slipping from the fish’s tail like a knife from its scabbard and disappearing into his mouth.

  Max stepped back and the Xsanthian stood before him, water coursing from its scales. Immediately, Max’s instinct was to step farther back. His heart skipped a beat, adrenaline course though his veins, his muscles tightened. Fear washed over him.

  “Santhor.”

  “Maxsssimilian.” The Xsanthian scratched at the black metal collar on its neck with one of the claws at the end of a webbed hand. It seemed to make a grimace but Max couldn’t be sure; all he could see were what looked like a thousand teeth, white and razor sharp. Santhor then threw the rest of the fish into its mouth.

  Maximilian looked at the Anlusian beside him.

  Quadi laughed. “I know when I’m not wanted!” He unclipped his diving machine, held it with one spidery hand, and walked away into the darkness.

  To Santhor, Max said, “Have you discussed it?”

  “We will protessst, we mussst protesst, but how? Look.” The Xsanthian pointed to the collar that clamped around his neck. “How fight these?”

  “There are debates happening openly at the universities and the gymnasia and lycées. There are strikes in the Factory Quarter. There are broadsheets circulating. If you were to protest, I could organize for others to support you. We could coordinate it with others who are fighting. All together. Then I could show—” Max hesitated. “We could convince people that together we have power.”

  The Xsanthian stared impassively. “I go tomorrow to coral fields. Not sure when back. Look: get rid of collars, we fight.”

  Max nodded, “I will. I’ll discover a way to remove the collars.”

  He could perceive no emotion in the glassy eye of the Xsanthian. It was like the surface of ice: glistening, wet, impenetrable.

  On his way back, Max passed through the now-bustling market looking for something to buy as a cover for his actions. He passed by great stalls filled with oranges and grapes, fishmongers selling huge tuna, crabs and octopi. Around the stalls, elderly women elbowed others aside, students searched through clothes racks for bargains, Arbor ladies, followed by entire entourages of bodyguards and servants, purchased great piles of silks. A physician, having traveled from the south, offered his ministrations, though one look at his scalpels, forceps, and clamps was enough to make Max wince.

  Max looked through manuscript stalls, though he knew he would not find anything there, only old histories of small towns that dotted the coast, or contemporary romances set in a mythical Caeli-Amur that never existed. Sometimes he would find small piles of abandoned broadsheets with radical names like A Call to Arms or Visions of the People, filled with semi-factual articles about the Houses. It was a policy of the Veterans that they should be left alone, not only because they might be watched by House agents, but because the groups who produced them were often filled with crazed or mystical ideas. Many were the romantic scrawlings of university students, as likely as not to end up mad in the torture cells of the Houses or to recant quickly and join the ranks of the Houses before they were caught. Others however combined deeper philosophies—apocalypticism, gratificationism, matriarchism … with seditionism.

  In the middle of Market Square, standing by a stall with two of his followers, the glacial Ejan, his white-blond hair and his pale skin distinct in the city, surveyed the scene. Ejan exuded a sense of calm like the mountains after a storm, beautiful and out of reach. Though he knew that Ejan was a dedicated seditionist, Max had never grown to trust him. There was something altogether too calculating and cold about the northerner.

  On the stall sat ointments and preparations, knitted blankets and shawls, spectacles and spyglasses: Ejan and his followers constructed these in their workshop. Their sale brought in much of the group’s income. Quite a lucrative amount; Max worried about the seditionists’ reliance upon it.

  Ejan had joined the group shortly after Maximilian. He had been on the run from House Marin guards for some unknown crime. Moving from rooming house to rooming house in the Quaedian, he had sent the word around that he was looking for seditionists. Kamron had sent Maximilian to meet Ejan and Max had bribed his way into Ejan’s empty room, nothing but a small cell with cracked floorboards, paint falling in strips from the wall, a cot pushed against the wall. Several books detailing the construction of weapons and war machines sat in a pile on one corner.

  When Ejan returned to the rooming house, Maximilian was sitting on the rough wooden floor. Ejan entered the room cagily, his eyes circling around to see if Maximilian was the only intruder. He held one hand behind his back.

  Maximilian remained calm. “I’m not here to capture you. I’m with Kamron Andrenikis.”

  Once Ejan felt more at ease, his hand moved from behind his back, revealing a long jagged-edged knife.

  Ejan explained that he came from one of the great ice-halls in Njagar in the north. He was the eldest son of a chieftain who ruled that ancient fortress built of ice. As heir, he was groomed to rule: taught to fight, to be decisive under conditions of stress, to endure loneliness. But he had rebelled against his father’s domineering personality. With each of the young Ejan’s insubordinations, the Njagar chief had disciplined him more, as if what the boy lacked was sufficient regimen. Yet the more the father directed the son, the more the son rebelled, until one day, the father, furious at Ejan’s refusal to oversee the logistics of a snow-giant hunting party, took the young man by the arm, intent on flogging him. But Ejan struck preemptively, hitting his father with all his force in the jaw. The hulking chief, taken by surprise, collapsed to the ground, blood coursing from his mouth.

  Knowing that he had crossed a line, Ejan had hurriedly packed his few possessions, taken his horse and ridden south, heading ultimately for Varenis, which he found enormous and sprawling. There he read seditionist literature, which gave him a sense of direction. Continuing on to Caeli-Amur, he decided to find Kamron Andrenikis.

  “I’m here to become Andrenikis’s captain.”

  “But we have no captains. We have no leaders.” Maximilian was repelled by the northerner’s sense of entitlement. Yet, he knew that it was a sense that he shared. Didn’t he too feel that he was destined for great things?

  Ejan smiled coldly. “And who are you?”


  “Just a seditionist in the group, like all the others.”

  “I shall not be like all the others.”

  Max, troubled by the northerner’s demeanor, nevertheless covertly led him into the hideout. When he took the blindfold from the man’s eyes, Ejan smiled again coldly. “Well, it looks like we’re already equals.”

  Now, as he studied Ejan and his lieutenants behind the stall in Market Square, Max contemplated how he could use the northerner. Ejan had begun to understand that things were changing in Caeli-Amur, but his response was that of a soldier, not a seditionist. Max was repelled by the idea that the seditionists should fight militarily against the Houses, break their locks, ruin their carriage wheels, as Giselle had explained it. On the other hand, if he could convince Ejan that they should turn the group outward, join with the strikers, unite the disorganized struggles, and actually become involved in creating history, rather than looking at it from the outside, then together they could convince Kamron and the other Veterans also.

  Max approached the stall and picked up a preparation for pain relief. “Ejan, how is business?”

  Ejan stood still and examined Max. “Business is always good. But there are other businesses, other actions, we should discuss. I have been hoping you and your group might participate.”

  Max picked up a pince-nez and examined it. “Interesting, for I was hoping your group might help in my own activities. Strikes are occurring across the city. We need to unify them, participate in them, bring them together like tributaries into one great river.”

  “You understand,” said Ejan, “that the tramworkers’ strike was a result of our activities. We sabotaged the factory. It produced a crisis. It sparked events.”

  Max looked up into Ejan’s piercing blue eyes and expressionless face. “The tramworkers were broken by House Technis. Their thaumaturgists summoned the Furies against them. You sparked their deaths. Anyway, should the Veterans discover your actions, well, things would not go well for you. Mine is a better way.”

  Out of the bustling crowds of the market shuffled a hunched-over man, rags hanging from his limbs like long gray fronds from some long dead plant. Clear fluid weeped from a great open sore on the side of his face and neck, a small third arm grew from his body—signs of a wastelander, mutated from the chemicals running in poisonous rivers and gathering in the steaming ponds in the northeast. The wastelands were growing, ever encroaching on the terrain around them, changing not only the land, but also the people, animals, flora. There strange creatures moved among odd sentient plants; everything was warped and mutated with cancerous growths. No wonder the wastelanders were flooding into the city.

  The people in the crowd shrank away from the wastelander, but the man barely seemed to notice. He staggered toward Ejan and Max.

  As the outcast approached, Ejan remained motionless, like a statue of himself. “Don’t think that I haven’t thought of your arguments, Max: We cannot fight the Houses’ thaumaturgy, our strength lies in the citizens, we must prepare slowly. To me they all sound like Kamron’s words. Wait and prepare and hide in our little hole like little frightened rabbits. But, Max, you see the citizens through the lens of your own romanticism. They are too complacent and only act when they are personally under threat. We must be the catalyst for their actions. We must force events, provoke confrontations, so that the citizens take sides. Anyway, you know yourself that we need weapons to defend ourselves. The crushing of the tramwokers is proof of that. We don’t need less military might, we need more!”

  Max clenched his fists in frustration. The smashing of the tramworkers strike was proof that without a way of combating the House thaumaturgists, the seditionists had little hope of helping the citizens, but military might without the involvement of the people was worse. “Of course, but that is not what I’m talking about. I’m taking about small violent actions against the Houses—sabotage is idiotic. Don’t make me take action against you.”

  “You would tell Kamron?”

  Max did not respond. This man was further from his own views than Kamron, who at least believed the people would one day awaken, even if only in some far-off future time.

  The wastelander now arrived beside Max. He picked up an ointment from the stall. “Will this help me with my ailments?” He pointed to his face. As the wastelander spoke, Max noticed a second row of teeth intersecting with the first, as if another body was emerging within him, floating to his surface like a corpse to the top of a pond.

  “I’m not sure it’s quite strong enough.” Ejan said.

  The man nodded, placed the ointment down and examined the other medicines seriously. “Hmm, maybe one of these teas.”

  Ejan stepped around the back of the stall and leaned in close to Max. “So it seems we are enemies. Oh, and Kamron would not like your activities either.”

  Max looked at Ejan, who stepped even closer, so close that their faces almost touched.

  “House agents police us everywhere,” said Ejan. “I just didn’t think you would join them.”

  The wastelander picked up a mirror from the stall and examined himself. “Still good-looking,” he said to no one in particular. He shrugged and walked toward a line of mules pulling a cart led by several Numerians. Two lions, bodies rippling with muscles, stared sullenly at the wastelander from a cage mounted on the cart.

  “If you had not sabotaged the Tram Factory, the workers would still be alive, still able to fight. It is you who will be doing the Houses’ work.” Max turned and walked away before Ejan could respond. The exchange had disturbed him more than he could express. If Ejan would threaten a fellow seditionist and consider him an agent of the Houses, then what other actions would he be prepared to take?

  Maximilian returned to the hideout frustrated. The Veterans, Xsanthians, Ejan—not one of them had helped him. Max, his mind on these problems, didn’t notice the figure waiting for him at the hideout’s entrance until it was too late. Something wrapped around his ankle and he hit the ground. Dust billowed around him as he looked up.

  Josiane stood above him, outlined against the tunnel entrance. Her weighted chain swung malevolently in one hand. “Kamron told you: Don’t come back if you see the Xsanthians.”

  “I was visiting Ejan’s stall at the market.”

  “I’ve killed more important men for lesser things,” said Josiane.

  “You’ve been a hired killer. You’ve killed for nothing.”

  “Money is not nothing.”

  “It is to me,” said Max.

  “But then you’re only an idle dreamer. You have no idea of the reality.”

  “We’re all dreamers. Who among us isn’t?” As he spoke, Maximilian knew that he had elided two different things. For all the seditionists were romantics, yet he was a kind all to himelf. He knew his reputation was for grand schemes, bold visions, wild fancies. It was true: Sometimes he got carried away. But better that than to be mired into accepting the status quo.

  “I’m not,” Josiane shifted on her feet.

  “And that is your weakness. That’s why you cannot see the changes happening before your eyes. You have no imagination.”

  Josiane was silent; he had struck her at a vulnerable place. Eventually she said, “When the group has returned tonight, then Kamron will decide your fate.”

  Max waited for her to disappear into the tunnel. Sometime later, he sat for a while on his thin mattress in the darkness. Around him seditionists whispered, and he knew that they were discussing his banishment. He struggled to think through the situation. Kamron would convince the other Veterans to banish him. They would put this position at a meeting and the entire group would grudgingly accept their authority. Even Max’s own supporters might accept the Veterans’ arguments. Ejan’s supporters would certainly accept them. Without Max, Ejan would become the most influential new seditionist in the group. There seemed no escape. Now all Max could do was wait for the evening, when his fate would be sealed.

  Disgusted with the situation, Max walked t
hrough the corridor with its purple mist, and into that cavernous crypt, where the machines, like squatting metal creatures, sat silent and melancholy. He passed between the columns of machines to the far side of the cavern. Here stood great round doors: gigantic, as if built for giants. Like so much of this ancient technology, they were sometimes smooth, but elsewhere there were wheels and cogs and levers attached to them. Before they had worked on the machines, Kamron had instructed Maximilian and Omar to attempt to open these doors. But no matter what they tried, the doors lay silent and closed.

  Max pressed his hands against the doors. Cold and silent, he lay his cheek against their surface. He thought he could hear a hum from somewhere behind them. But then it was gone.

  When he returned to the Communal Cavern, Max packed his possessions. He considered what he might do once he was back in the city itself. He would return to living in a garret. Exile. The thought filled him with despair.

  The seditionist group sat in an open space to one side of the communal area, looking quietly at one another, tense, expectant. About a year and a half earlier, the group had begun to have meetings in this space, speakers standing before the six black pillars and facing the group. They had begun tentatively at first, as they learned the dynamics of a group discussion. Usually, the Veterans would speak first. Others would agree, reiterating the points already made, often suggesting minor adjustment. Over the last year, the seditionists had gained confidence, and slowly a variety of opinions had begun to be expressed. But never had the Veterans been directly contradicted.

  Now, as Max looked over the ragged bunch of thirty gaunt-faced seditionists in their ragtag clothing, he sensed that no one would speak for him.

  Instead, Josiane took to her feet before the six pillars. Her weighted chain hung from her belt as she walked in front of the group. She began like a lawyer, her years as a philosopher-assassin evident. “Despite a warning there is one in this group that continues to endanger us. There is one who, despite Kamron’s entreaties, has contacted the Xsanthians, whom we cannot trust. There is one who—”