Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  Maximilian wondered if some factions of the philosopher-assassins might serve also as allies. He pushed the thought from his mind. They were mercenaries, nothing more.

  A few minutes later Pehzi brought to the table a platter of cheese with thinly sliced bread and a wicked-looking hooked knife. Kata sliced a piece of cheese with one hand, grasped a piece of bread with the other. She held it out to Quadi.

  “You should eat,” said Maximilian.

  “No.”

  “You should,” said Kata. “We don’t want you dying before we’re finished.”

  “I said no.”

  They sat in silence for a minute.

  “What happened to you in Anlusia? What is this strange self-destructive disease that you New-Men are so prey to?”

  “I’m sorry.” Quadi stood up, lit another cigarette, and walked toward the exit of the café. As he passed, both groups of philosopher-assassins sniffed the air and grimaced. They looked appalled.

  Kata ate some more cheese and bread while Maximilian sat somberly.

  At that point, Odile slipped into the seat beside Kata. Side by side they looked quite unalike: Odile, slim with her short-cropped blond hair and lighthearted demeanor; Kata, with shoulder-length flowing hair and brooding visage.

  “Here it is, the interweaving formula.” Odile passed a small notebook to him. She then looked around, sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?”

  Max shook his head to say, “Don’t ask.”

  Odile continued: “You’re going to combine the disciplines, aren’t you?”

  Max smiled at her. “How are things at the university?”

  “You know students, always up in arms about something.”

  Max pushed the remains of the cheese toward Odile. “The whole city is up in arms. Soon we’ll be able to help them direct it.”

  Odile picked at the cheese. “Oh, that’s exactly what the city needs. Another group directing it.”

  “You’ve always been enamored of the impulsive moods of the population. You think there’s something pure in them,” said Max.

  “You think there’s something pure to your own dreams.” Odile pushed the cheese away again.

  The two stared aggressively at each other, then burst into laughter.

  “It’s good to see you, Odile.” Max grasped his friend’s hand. “This is Kata.”

  Odile slipped from the seat. “We shouldn’t be seen together. The city’s not safe anymore. There are spies everywhere. Don’t combine the disciplines, Max. Two, perhaps. But three—surely not even you are that mad. I still want to hear about your wild dreams, you know.”

  With that, Odile walked away through the café and a gratificationist called to her. “Hey, would you like Aya’s Day to be one of great pleasure?”

  Odile looked back, smiled. “As long as it doesn’t involve you.”

  Shortly afterwards, Max and Kata left the philosopher-assassins to their debates. Fat Nik looked up from his coffee at them as they passed him. They walked along one of the winding side alleys that led down to the cliffs. The view across the sea was spectacular. At the base of the cliffs before them, to the south of the Quaedian, the necropolis lay sprawled before them, filled with a thousand and more tombs and headstones. In its center lay the Mausoleum of the Gods.

  “Soon Quadi will be down there,” Max spoke bitterly.

  “You need to understand philosophy,” said Kata. “To understand his position.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What do we know about the New-Men? They are intensely driven, they must build and create and grow. You have heard the stories of their great city, growing like a cancer. Remember, they are not men, they are New-Men. They are filled with restless energy. They can never rest, but are condemned always to do. Their minds are different.”

  He turned from her and placed his hands on the rail. The sea was deep blue. White breakers crashed along the Southern Headland. In the south of the city, the Arena could be seen at the base of the Thousand Stairs, and close to it the ruins of the Ancient Forum, crumbling buildings, pillars standing alone amongst the rubble, the great arch of Iniria, somehow still intact. Even on days like this, when the sky was blue and clear, there seemed to be a fog that sat over the Forum. During the nights, the citizens avoided it, for the ghosts of the ancients were said to haunt the place, grieving for their lost world.

  “Come here,” Kata said. From behind, she wrapped her arms around Max and rested her chin on his shoulder. He voice was so soft, he could barely hear it; its half-broken tone something he had never heard before. “The world is a beautiful, generous place, isn’t it? And this city, how hard it would be to leave.” Her warmth radiated through to him, and he yearned to hold her arms to him, to relax into her. To his surprise, he felt the first stirrings of arousal. He turned and faced her dark lustrous eyes, her dark hair. Caught in her intensity, he pulled her close and his lips touched hers. Desire coursed through him like lava churning within a mountain. Entwined, they staggered against the wall of a building, his hands pulling her dress up over her thighs. The sky was blue above then, the sun hot on his face. Somehow, his belt was already unbuckled and his pants dropping down to his knees. He was drawn into her blazing intensity, sucked like a planet into a sun. He moved in her, his hand placed against the cool stone of the wall, her breath in his ear, the touch of wind on the back of his thighs.

  “Maximilian,” she said. “Maximilian.”

  When they were done, he leaned against her, filled with guilt and shame. He closed his eyes as she ran her hands through his hair on the back of his head. He tried to think of ways to extricate himself, finally settled on, “That can’t happen again. You understand that, don’t you?”

  Kata’s voice was strained in his ear. “Of course not.”

  “We have much work to do. Let’s return,” he said.

  “To the little hole that we hide in?” she said bitterly.

  “Yes.”

  The guilt did not abate when they returned to the seditionist base, nor did his confusion, for that sudden moment of intimacy had awakened worlds he had cut off from himself long ago. He yearned now for Kata, for her combination of decisiveness and vulnerability, for her touch. He saw in her not only the movement of a philosopher-assassin, deadly in a crisis, but also a kindness beneath. He could see her as a true leader of the seditionists, if only she believed in herself and her destiny. Together they might make a formidable couple, and yet, there was no time for such attachments—thus he had always believed.

  Quadi was nowhere to be seen and he did not return that day. Max worried about the New-Man, for it was Quadi’s task to attach the gills. But the New-Man was not a seditionist. He did not hold the cause to be the highest value, the greatest goal. To Quadi, the expedition was simply an adventure.

  That night Maximilian avoided Kata, though it hurt him. She, too, would need time, he realized, to dissociate from him. Instead, he plunged into his work. He studied the formulae to transform the bloodstone energy into the gills of the fish. The equations were complex and subtle: as if moving smoothly from one language to an entirely different one. Later, as he slept, Maximilian dreamed of the Sunken City, before it had collapsed into the ocean. White caparisoned horses drew carriages down its wide boulevards. Everything was marble and glittering. But the people stared at him, as if he was an impostor, a foreigner. They knew he was there to steal their riches, to take what wasn’t his.

  “You will never escape.” A man wearing bloodred robes stared at him evilly. “The city will keep you here. You will never make it home.”

  He awoke on his mattress, exhausted. His eyes felt as if sand had been rubbed into them. He blinked rapidly.

  Shortly afterwards, Quadi straggled into the hideout. He spent the day lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. Max was filled with guilt. He always strained to hold seditionism as the highest cause, to which all others were submitted, but did that not make him uncaring? Did he not use those around him? He thought o
f Kata holding him the day before, on the cliffs. Now he looked at Quadi, who had become his friend.

  “Quadi.” Max knelt beside the New-Man.

  The New-Man’s eyes wandered aimlessly.

  “Have some water, at least.”

  Quadi sipped, most of the water dribbling over his cheeks and onto the floor.

  “I’m sorry that I pressed you yesterday.”

  “No matter,” said Quadi. “I can’t expect you to understand.”

  Despite his misgivings, Maximilian found himself saying, “We lost time yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  “Quadi. Why do you do this to yourself?”

  Quadi reached up and place his hand on Maximilian’s shoulder. “You’re a friend. You’re a good friend.”

  But I’m not, thought Maximilian to himself. To create a world where people around me are treated with humanity, I treat those around me in precisely the opposite manner. But he had cast his die. There was nothing to do but to see what number he had rolled.

  “Tomorrow we complete the cart,” said Maximilian. Or I lose control of the formulae and I die, he thought.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  With the entirety of his little group around him, Maximilian prepared himself. Kata and Quadi stood ready to detach the gills from the fish. It was essential that the gills were freshly cut, that they still retain the resonances of life before Max infused them with the uncanny power of the bloodstone.

  In one hand, Maximilian held the vial of bloodstone, heavier than lead. The large fish swam in the barrels beside him. He closed his eyes, remembered the incantations, the gesticulations, the complex algebra. He was struck by doubt. The risks of the thaumaturgy were extreme; it was possible that he might never reemerge from the trance at all, but be trapped within while he died rapidly. It was possible that the bloodstone might infect him with its disease, or infuse him with weird transformations. He steeled himself.

  Maximilian began his incantations. He opened up his perception to zoologism, the life structures beneath the phenomenal. In this deep structure of things, he felt the numinous vitality of the fish as they swam in their barrel, ghosts within their scaled bodies. He focused his trance on the quick words between Kata and Josiane, the brief struggle of the fish as they were put to the knife, their vitality shaking and shifting within their bodies, struggling against its form, yearning now for release from their dying husks.

  Holding that perception to one side, Maximilian invoked the chymical equation to trap the weird power of the bloodstone and threw the red crystals into the air. There they hovered, a cloud of red dust, as he held them, suspended. He felt his own energy seeping out of him. The bloodstone cloud gave a shudder and radiated heat, burned him as he held it suspended the air, adding his own strength to the unnatural power.

  Maximilian invoked the formulae he had acquired from Odile. He held the bloodstone in one part of his mind and shifted trances to transmutae, which he would need to move the bloodstone’s energy into the gills. He lost a sense of the bloodstone and panicked. Thaumaturgical energy flooded toward him, threatening to warp him. Desperately he held it at bay, but then lost his grip on the transmutae, which he had to begin all over again. Again, he invoked the laws of biological zoologism, and saw a different set of structures. Her began the invocation to bind the bloodstone’s powers to the gills. His strength was weakening now, and he felt his body shake. It was too much for him, controlling these complexities. He fell to his knees. Somewhere nearby he heard a call, realized it was from his own throat. He knew, then that he would have to give up his defenses, allow the thaumaturgical forces to flow back into him, warp and poison him. That was the only way to complete the task. He prepared himself, let go of his defenses, aware as he controlled the last part of the equations, as the bloostone’s powers coursed into the the gills, that injurious forces were also entering his body. He was being changed.

  When the suit and cart were finished, Maximilian vomited repeatedly. He shivered and sweated as if he had been poisoned. That night he lay wrapped in blankets and he felt like there was a hot wet towel inside his chest. He drifted in and out of sleep and dreamed that a serpent was asleep inside him, though he knew soon it would awake and force itself out of his mouth.

  In the morning, the fever had broken, but Max felt exhausted, and somehow altered. There was, as yet, no external sign of the thaumaturgy’s malign influences on him. But he could feel something growing within him. Was it something physical or psychological?

  Maximilian shuffled down the corridor to the workshop, where the suit lay on the table, the great spherical bronze helmet at its head, the densely woven Anlusian fabric, thick and silvery. Beside the suit stood the cart, with its hose jutting out the front and its wheels large so it could be dragged along the ocean floor. Maximilian leaned against the cart and smiled weakly at Quadi, who had accompanied him. Kata stood glancing between the two of them. The task was finished.

  Maximilian’s entire group ventured to the café La Tazia to celebrate. The lovers Oewen and Ariana hid themselves away on a balcony. Gilli and Philippe sat along the bar next to the great fat philosopher-assassin who seemed a permanent fixture in the place. Clemence and Usula joined Maximilian, Quadi and Kata, who had been circumspect about their encounter in the alleyway, around a table.

  “He doesn’t look well,” said Quadi, looking at Pehzi.

  “He looks just like you.”

  Quadi broke suddenly into a grin. “Perhaps it’s time to smoke.”

  In unison the entire group—Max, Kata, Clemence and Usula—leaned forward and said, “No!”

  Quadi looked nonplussed, then shrugged his shoulders and left his pouch of weed alone.

  When the coffee arrived with accompanying Numarian sweet-melon, noted for its red sugary pips, Maximilian made a toast. “To the underwater suit.”

  They took their coffee in one gulp and Maximilian looked over to Quadi: “A piece of fruit for celebration?”

  “You know,” said Quadi, “I think I will. Today is a good day.” He took a piece of fruit and popped it into his mouth. It seemed that in his own way he had found meaning, or at least a reason to live.

  Though still weakened by his use of thaumaturgy, Maximilian insisted on accompanying Aceline and Ejan to the great complex of Collegium Calian in the quarter known as the Lavere. They traveled with Josiane, Rikard, who had become Ejan’s young dark-haired lieutenant, and the thickset Thom, a garrulous and passionate painter and muralist from A Call to Arms. Each of them was aware that all three important leaders of the seditionist group were venturing into a foreign neighborhood and needed protection. When Max told Kata that she would not be coming, her face was a study of control, betraying no emotions. He was relieved. He felt that even the slightest outburst of feeling from her would weaken his own defenses. Then he might fall once more into her arms as he fantasized. Perhaps one day, he allowed himself to imagine. But not now.

  Past Market Square, toward the Southern Headland, lay Caeli-Amur’s slums. Here lived the dispossessed and the dissolute. The streets narrowed. Many of the houses were built of rotten wood; stagnant pools of water and sewerage fouled the streets. Dirty children sat in piles of rubbish and fought with rats. Whores called out to them from dark alleyways, promising quick release in the darkness. Toothless old men sat in the corners, grasping their worthless possessions as if someone might steal them.

  They passed through the slums silently. To speak seemed to trivialize the brutal poverty that surrounded them. Still, Maximilian burned with the injustice of it all. While up in the Arantine, Caeli-Amur’s most wealthy lived in opulent mansions, here the poorest lived without hope.

  Past the slums, the streets of the Lavere brightened a little. Here streetlamps were lit, and the whores called from their balconies or doorways, inviting them to play word and number games, to solve riddles and puzzles. “If you can separate these wooden balls, you can have a free visit.” One held out a contraption. In it
s center, two wooden balls hung together on a piece of string that passed through holes in two wooden slats. The whores of the Lavere knew how to entice the mind as well as the body.

  “Where are you, my un-true love?” called others, echoing each other along the streets.

  In the center of the Lavere, Collegium Caelian’s great complex dwarfed those around it. The building was built entirely of metal: great iron and steel walls rising coldly above them. Representing all small traders involved with metal—merchants, smiths, mechanics—Caelian had grown to become the most powerful of the three Collegia. Their guards were said to rove with impunity through Caelian’s territory in the Lavere.

  Two of Caelian’s guards let them through the gates where they were met by two tall Numerian intendants, dressed in black uniforms. A long silver entrance hall, its roof catching the light of bright lamps and giving off shimmering waves of light, gave way to a courtyard, which was filled with the sounds of hammering and sawing, the booming of machines at work. Caelian had workshops of its own within its walls and the red glow of embers was visible through the courtyard’s open doors. The silhouettes of workmen could be seen moving about in these workshops.

  The Numerians led them across the courtyard, where they entered the great hall of Collegium Caelian, a warren of metal and stone, resembling the insides of a vast machine. One might have thought that the hall would have been a great monotone of gray but the iron and steel was subtly worked so that the metals caught the light and shimmered with waves of purples and white. Elsewhere delicate engravings pictured traders and adventurers traveling the world, plying their wares in markets of Numeria, Varenis, the ivy halls of the north and the Ruined Cities in the south.

  Around a shining silver table, in the Caelian meeting room high in the hall, sat three Collegia officials.

  A heavy man with a sagging face like a bloodhound gestured for the seditionists to sit. “Welcome to Collegium Calian. I am the Director, Guillam Dumas.” He introduced the other two men as Director Suuri and Director Parsyn, of Collegium Litia and Avaricum respectively.