One of the thing’s eyes fixed on Max and he was rooted to the spot. The eye pierced him with malevolent intelligence and he felt that he was looking into a dark abyss. In unison, the hundred other eyes fixed on him, and Max felt something give way in his mind. The leviathan faded out of existence and beneath the net lay a pretty Numerian girl, helpless in the grip of the nets. Max was filled with sympathy for the girl; he thought of Nkando; they must free her. Briefly he looked around for a blade to cut the net away, but stopped himself.
“Beware its illusions,” said Santhor, who stood nearby, directing the other Xsanthians. “It will confuse you with its tricks.”
Max shook his head and the creature emerged once more from beneath the disappearing image of the girl. Four Xsanthians threw a second net over the tentacle and, rushing around the pool, pulled it close to the creature’s body. The creature collapsed into the water as the net pinned it. A second later it again thrashed powerfully against its constraint, then once more seemed to be subdued.
Santhor said, “Another exotic creature for the pools in the Marin Palace.”
Maximilian said, “What use could they possible have for it?”
Santhor shrugged, “Their palace is filled with waterways, pools and canals, aquariums. All of them are filled with sea creatures. It’s said that Marin throw their enemies into the water with the most dangerous beasts.”
Max ran a hand through his curly hair, felt a knot, left it alone. He straightened himself and said, “Santhor, we need somehow to journey to the Sunken City. There lies the Great Library of Caeli-Enas, where we can discover thaumaturgy to unlock your torcs, which can combat the Houses. Vast stores of knowledge. Vast reservoirs of power. Secrets which will liberate us all. Could you perhaps suggest a way?”
“Swim?”
“Could you take us?”
“Even if you could breathe water, we cannot take you. We will not disturb the dead who lie in that city’s embrace.” The Xsanthians had a strange communal culture in which the whole was more important than any individual part. Thus when they swam together, they moved in unison, as if they were one great organism. Sometimes Max sensed that they almost thought in unison.
Some said that when Marin captured the Xsanthians a decade earlier they had used thaumaturgical nets. Once the thaumaturgists had captured a few, the rest came drifting into the nets as passive victims, drawn by their collective bond to the others.
In an extension of this collective impulse, Xsanthians believed that their past generations were as one with the living, that they still lived among them, watching, participating.
A Xsanthian turned a nearby lever and the pool was lifted up out of the floor. Through the translucent sides, Max could see great coils of tentacles, some covered with thousands of little suckers, others like long thin whips. Some of the eyes roved, others fixed on Max.
Max’s entire body tensed. He tried to focus on the Xsanthian. “Life is for the living—all the rest is just superstition. In the city lie all the secrets of the old world, the secrets of thaumaturgy. If we can discover them, we can liberate ourselves. We can unlock those collars that trap you. I promise it.”
“There is more to the world than power and knowledge. There is spirit.”
“That’s just fancy. We live in the here and now.” Maximilian said.
“When you start abandoning your beliefs, where will that lead you? What will you stand for, in the end? Caeli-Enas is sacred.”
Maximilian looked at the shadows moving away underneath the docks. “Such thinking will be the ruin of us.”
As he and Kata stepped back onto the deck, the Xsanthian who had been struck by the leviathan lay unconscious and shuddering. Two others crouched over it; another held its head helplessly.
Leaving them, Max and Kata sneaked back onto the pier as the Marin Guards directed a great crane to lift the pool, complete with its trapped leviathan, from the steamer. The first injured Xsanthian continued to sit on the pier, holding the seaweed poultice to his arm. He glanced at them as they passed and looked away miserably.
In the Market Square, the puppeteer was gone. They turned and watched the pool swinging in the air above the steamer. Elsewhere the piers were bustling with blocky steamers, great wheels running along their sides and lean, graceful cutters, distinguished not only by their smooth lines but by the intricate patterns of ropes running between mast and boom or the deck. Beyond them the sea glittered with a thousand sheets of sunlight.
“Even if we could take one of those out over Caeli-Enas, what good would it do? How does one descend to the ocean floor?” said Maximilian.
“Sea serpent?” said Kata.
“Ha! That’s a myth. Kaeori never rode a sea serpent. Thaumaturgy—that is what we seek. And that is the very thing we need in order to find it.” The gentle salty wind caressed Maximilian’s face in little gusts. A thousand and more crests of waves danced on the sea.
“Aya flew the skies and burrowed beneath the earth, Kaeori rode a sea serpent—and why not? All things are possible.” Kata touched him on the arm and he tensed. Kata withdrew her hand. An uncomfortable silence hovered between them until he said, “Let’s go.”
The Market Square was quieter than usual beneath the oppressive summer sun. The stalls were spaced far apart. A group of exotic animals were gathered in one corner: two chained panthers pressed themselves to the ground in fear; cages of monkeys chattered and bared their teeths at each other; a melancholy elephant stood alone. Numerian guards leaned against long spears. In the center of the square was a pile of wonderful furs from the north, their thick grays and browns incongruous in the Caeli-Amur summer. Close to the piers, a small group of black-suited thaumaturgists stood darkly around several small crates marked VARENIS. Perhaps they contained bloodstone, mined from the prison camps in the mountains. Max eyed them jealously.
Just as he and Kata were about to reach the nearby Via Attica, which ran to the south of the Opera, a foul smell drifted toward Max, caught in his nose, and seemed to fix itself there. Turning, he noticed the bone-thin Anlusian he knew as Quadi, sitting on a stool. The New-Man puffed on a cigarette from which drifted a terrible stench and examined a chessboard. His opponent was an extraordinarily large man whose body seemed so soft that it could have been a big bag of liquid with a head. Together they looked incongruous, like actors in another pantomime, the skinny man and the huge fat one. Beside the New-Man were crates filled with bottles of liquid—Anlusian hot-wine. The New-Men had been arriving in Caeli-Amur the last fifty years, first a couple of explorers, then little groups of them, and then a constant stream, usually strange exiles from their country. Some said they were building a train through the mountains toward the city.
“Do you play chess?” Max asked Kata.
“Of course.”
Max had already seen this New-Man with his marvelous diving equipment in the Xsanthians’ compound. Anlusians were known for their technological prowess. Here then was someone who might help him reach Caeli-Enas by technological means.
When they approached, Max saw that Quadi was not far from victory.
The huge man pushed a pawn forward with a finger. Max groaned quietly.
“What?” said the man.
“Nothing.”
The New-Man glanced up at Max, amused. “We have here a player?”
Max smiled down at him. “I wouldn’t be letting your elephants rampage over the board they way they have.”
The fat man studied the board, shifted himself as if he was in discomfort and with a grunt knocked over his king. “I resign. It’s just delaying the inevitable. Anyway, it’s too hot and I’ve breathed enough of that malodorous smoke of yours, Quadi. May as well play in the sewers. I’m going to the baths.”
Quadi took the florens that sat in the bowl by the side of the board and slipped them into a small box on his belt. The box whirred and clunked as it performed some hidden action. “Would either of you like to challenge?”
“I won’t pay,” sai
d Max.
The Anlusian brushed away dust that had settled on his stacks of wine with his skeletal hand. “This dust, it’s everywhere. When’s it going to rain?” He turned back to Max. “So, a gentleman’s game then, to pass the time.”
Max sat and they set up the pieces as Kata perched herself on the side of the crate. “Don’t think your elephants will have such an easy time of it.”
Not ten minutes later Quadi’s elephants were rampaging along the wings of the board.
“What was it you said?” The New-Man smiled weakly. His eyes were drawn, as if he hadn’t slept for days.
“It’s still early in the game,” said Max confidently. He shifted a minotaur to the center of the board, a key strategic position. “Do you judge a painter by a half-finished picture?”
“What is your name, stranger?” Quadi asked.
Max hesitated.
The New-Man smiled again and looked at Kata squatted beside them. “You don’t have to tell me. Did our friends the Xsanthians give you what you needed?”
“Who ever gets what they desire?” said Max.
They fell into silence then and concentrated on the game: the subtle shifts of position and strength, the dramatic moves, the damaging exchanges. At first Quadi had the upper hand. Later Max struck back.
“You are too aggressive, too arrogant.” Quadi captured a poorly defended war tower and threatened one of Max’s Tritons.
“You think you have me in a gambit now?”
“We are all caught in gambits,” said Quadi.
Max examined the New-Man with his skeletal features, his gaunt tired eyes, and wondered what endgame he was relentlessly heading toward. “Do you know that beneath the sea, not far from here, lies Caeli-Amur’s sister city, Caeli-Enis.”
“So I have heard.”
“They say it is filled with wonders: instruments of the ancients; machines and contraptions long lost.”
Quadi looked up at Maximilian with interest.
“Wouldn’t it be something to discover that technology? To explore that lost ancient world?” said Maximilian.
Quadi said nothing, but instead made an absentminded move of one of his legionnaires.
Maximilian struck with a minotaur, unhinging Quadi’s defense. “Do you think it would be possible to construct a machine which would allow a man to walk beneath the water? To breathe beneath the water?”
Quadi moved an elephant along his back row, aligning it with the center to try to stabilize that part of the board, but it was no use, his lines were broken. For the New-Man the game would now be a series of moves simply averting the inevitable defeat. “Beneath the water? A breathing apparatus? Why not?”
Max felt the rush of excitement. Impulsively, he said, “Because we need someone who understands such technology, we need someone to help us construct such a suit. We need you.”
Quadi moved a piece on the board without looking at it. “Check.”
“What?” Maximilian looked down at the board with alarm. He cursed himself. He had become too involved in the discussion, too satisfied with luring Quadi into the seditionists. Suddenly he saw an entirely new pattern in the game he had missed, and now he knew that he would be the one delaying the inevitable defeat. “You…”
Quadi smiled, “Now, what was it you were saying about technology? I was a bit distracted.”
Maximilian knocked over the piece that represented Aya and laughed furiously at himself. “You treacherous—”
Quadi looked up at him. “Wouldn’t it be really something to find what lies beneath the waters? We should try, don’t you think?”
Max explained to the New-Man the utter secrecy of the task and the nature of the seditionist group. The New-Man would need to submit himself to the demands of the group, if he was to help them.
“I do not care for politics,” said Quadi. “But this venture excites me. I accept.”
EIGHTEEN
Quadi picked up his few possessions from a boardinghouse overflowing with refugees: Numerians lying in fevers; wastelanders with horribly changed features, their faces rearranged so that their eyes seemed to be slipping down their cheeks, extra limbs sprouting from their other limbs like cancerous trees; petty criminals or agents of the Collegia, shadowy men who crept along the corridors and refused to make eye contact. As Quadi packed a pouch of stinking weed—even unlit the smell wafted odiously—into his bag, Maximilian bit his tongue. They all had to make sacrifices, he supposed.
Together they returned to the seditionist base. Shortly before they reached the tunnel that led underground, they blindfolded Quadi. Kata leading him by the hand, Maximilian in front.
In the days that followed, Maximilian worked with Quadi in a makeshift workshop they constructed in the machine room. Quadi had brought bulky new-technology drills and clamps, sharp metal saws and mechanical nail-guns, his driving contraption with its propeller and engine. Maximilian was captivated by these machines, which steamed and heated and grumbled and rattled. To the collection he added his own looking glasses and measuring equipment, ointments to stop the helmet from rusting, carefully prepared binding spells (complete with symbols, equations and the usual incantations) for the screws and bolts.
Together they debated the possible solutions. The problem, of course, was air. “Provide the air, and I’ll provide you with the cart.” Quadi sat on the floor and looked over the rows of machines in the darkness. Max could see the New-Man’s curiosity at these ancient technologies.
Maximilian suggested a great, long tube that would reach all the way to the sea surface. Great bellows or perhaps a pump could push the air down to the suit-wearer. But Quadi objected that the sea floor would most likely be too deep. It would be too difficult to pump the air down all that way.
In the meantime, they prepared a suit and the cart’s frame, in the hope that they would find a solution to the problem of air in due course.
So Max and Quadi and Kata spent the mornings together, cutting the suit, welding the helmet, placing carriage wheels on the air-cart. Sometimes the others, particularly Oewen and Ariana, helped. The others Max instructed to continue to study thaumaturgy and they were relieved to avoid the ubiquitous smoke of Quadi’s weed.
Quadi was animated, his movements quick and precise; he seemed to gain strength from the work. During these times Maximilian came to know Quadi’s sharp humor and strange vitality. He came to admire him, yet sometimes in the afternoon Quadi would be overcome with heavy eyes and a lethargy that would overwhelm him. For hours he would sit alone.
“Do you ever eat?” Maximilian asked him once.
“It takes a long time to kill a New-Man, and longer a New-Woman. Anyway, what’s the point? After this I intend to get back to dying.”
“But why?”
“Have you been to Ariki-Aki, so full of vitality and savagery? Have you seen the relentless self-cannibalization of that world? The endless growth? I could no longer bear it.” Quadi deftly rolled one of his cigarettes, plucked the weed, which poked from the ends, lit a match.
“There are other ways to escape that.”
“Not for an Ariki-Akian.” Quadi took a deep drag, blew out a plume of smoke.
“What is that stuff?” Max grimaced.
Quadi grinned and his face was full of life. “Would you like to try some?”
Max grimaced. If only he could force Quadi to eat, or prepare some kind of invocation or conjuring that would keep the New-Man alive against his will. Maximilian stopped and thought: thaumaturgy to keep things alive. An image flashed in his mind: gills siphoning air from the water. Could that be the solution to the problem of oxygen?
Maximilian buried himself in the thaumaturgical tomes, reading restlessly. He found the sections of the tomes that dealt with suspended animation. The task was a combination of zoological thaumaturgy and transmutae. Death was not only a complex matter, but a fundamental one, built into the universe’s deep structures. Death made sense of life. Life possible only with death. As Alyx argued, for e
xample, in A Study of Transformational and Evolutionary Thaumaturgy, the consequences of suspending or allaying death were grievous, costly, and dangerous. Of course, it was more easily achieved with simple organisms than complex ones. Averting death, then, cost life. One might make a sacrifice of one creature to regenerate another. The cost of reanimating a hundred gills would be the life of a small animal: a sheep, a large dog, a goat, a child. But there was one path that avoided this trade. Maximilian could use the group’s small supply of bloodstone. Not even Kamron had seen fit to use it, so valuable and dangerous was it. Indeed, Kamron had acquired the stone from a former prisoner in Varenis, who had worked in the mining camps and had, for some unknown bureaucratic reason been pardoned. But his release had come too late, and the bloodstone disease had already started to take him. He had passed the bloodstone on to Kamron and said, “Use this to free the prisoners in the mines, I beg you. You should see how the work and the disease ruin them. Help them!”
Instead, Kamron had brought the bloodstone south with him, to Caeli-Amur and it was now in Max’s hands.
Maximilian studied theorems relating to chymistry, transmutae and zoologism until he knew their basic relationships. The difficulty would be in combining them, for they were different disciplines and relied upon different laws. This was, of course, the most difficult of thaumaturgical tasks: three different worldviews, three different disciplines, three different trances. Not for nothing did thaumaturgists focus on only one discipline. Should Maximilian fail to intertwine the equations properly, seamlessly moving from one to another, the consequences would be dire. Even one mistake in the equations, one error in their application, and the thaumaturgist might end up sacrificing himself. Maximilian weighed the options. It was a risk he was prepared to take.
Still, he needed the formula to interrelate three disciplines. For that he needed his intellectual friend Odile. She would be able to acquire it at a price from her friends among the thaumaturgical students at the university. Max wrote her a letter and passed it to a street urchin he sometimes employed for such tasks. She sent back a note: They would meet at their regular café, La Tazia, as soon as she possessed the formula.
Unwrapped Sky Page 19
