Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  Above him towered the Library, vast and white in the water, like the dream of some sleeping god. The sheer size of it made him take a breath.

  Max crossed a wide boulevard flanked by the palatial buildings built of crumbling marble. Interspersed with these were older towers, cut in unusual styles using acute angles so that they seemed to be leaning and warping before his very eyes, the buildings’ silvery-black onyx darkness at home in the watery gloom. These were unlike any structures he had seen. They lacked the external classicism of the ancient architecture. Instead they resembled the interiors of the ancient buildings in Caeli-Amur. Their angles were unhinging, seeming to have no logic to them, even though they were composed of geometric shapes, and finely cut angles. They were at once mesmerizing and disturbing.

  The boulevard opened into the wide plaza; he had now reached the top of the gentle hill he had been climbing. Opposite him stood the Library, colossal and imposing. Around the plaza, walkways rose gently, supported by white marble pillars. Like the petals of some beautiful flower, they intertwined with one another. Here the ancients must have taken their afternoon promenades. Max yearned to see the city in its full glory, back before it sank beneath the sea. It must have been wondrous and strange.

  Max glanced behind him. The seaweed forest, murky though the water, swayed in the distance below. Deep inside it, some of the weeds jerked unnaturally, as if something large moved among them; then they were still. He watched a moment, but there was no more movement. As he walked across the plaza, he felt he was a miniscule figure amid these majestic ruins. The immensity of it all pressed upon him: these deserted streets that no one had walked for over four hundred years. He felt like an outsider, disturbing a city of the dead. He glanced behind. The plaza was empty, but floating through the water slightly over its crest was a small cloud of sediment. Something had moved down there.

  THIRTY

  Maximilian hurried on through the great underwater plaza and came to the long flights of stairs, each step over a foot in height, which led up to the Library. He climbed the Library stairs as quickly as he could, the cart thumping behind him—clunk, clunk, clunk—and his heart thumping with fear and exertion. He passed through one row of pillars, wide enough to be towers themselves, and then after another flight of stairs, yet more pillars. The gigantic doors of the library were already open. He looked down toward the square and from the corner of his eye caught a glimpse of rapid movement beneath a walkway curving around the plaza. The thing was smaller than the sea serpent, and moved in a quick pulse, before slowing and then pulsing again, like a carriage-sized jellyfish. The thing seemed disturbingly familiar.

  Max turned and increased his speed through a great foyer, vast and wide. The interior reminded him of the Opera in Caeli-Amur. Patterns shimmered on the walls, outlining geometric shapes constructed from strange angles. Red globes of light danced near the ceiling, rising and falling, even in the water. He could not shake the feeling that the Library was built for beings altogether larger than humans. Two giant doors stood, one on either side of him. Across the foyer, another wide flight of stairs led up toward the center of the library. When he was about halfway across the foyer, a terrible sense of vulnerability came over him, and he headed straight toward one of the pillars that stood to the side of the stairs. He stepped behind the pillar, which glowed with a silver scrawl that spiraled around the marble surface, and chanted his illusionism incantation. He placed his knife on the air-cart, drew the ideograms in the air, and shimmered out of sight.

  The thing came floating through the water like a monstrous balloon. Max closed his eyes to avoid dropping to his knees in fear. His breath was loud in his ears and the image of the creature was seared onto the back of his eyelids. His heart skipped a beat, started up again rapidly. His stomach lurched. Would his small incantation be enough to hide him? Perhaps with those hundreds of eyes packed close together the leviathan could see other spectrums. There would be no way out for him, should the creature notice him. When he opened his eyes, he became aware of the current of water the beast displaced as its hundreds of tentacles kicked it across the hall. It hovered now near him, at the base of the stairs. He imagined it was thinking. It was close to him, some of its eyes moving slowly and independently, others fixed beadily. One of the eyes, as large as a small plate and filled with an alien intelligence, roved over him. But then the eye moved on and the creature drifted up the stairs. Max remained rooted to the spot with fear. The thing drifted quickly across the foyer and out of the library.

  Max felt ill. The sickness seemed more profound than before he had animated the gills for the cart, as if he had been poisoned and any added touch of toxin caused his body to react. He swallowed back bile as nausea hit him. Lethargy flooded his limbs.

  Max waited for a few minutes, clasped his knife tightly in his hand and walked with heavy legs toward the stairs as quietly as he could.

  He felt a disturbance in the water behind him. Turning, he was astonished to see another figure dragging an air-cart toward him. He looked closely. It was Kata! She smiled at him from behind her faceplate and he was filled with a rush of joy. He would not be alone down here. She moved quickly through the water toward him. The question rushed into his mind: How had they completed the air-cart in so short a time? It was impossible. Max looked at the image coming toward him: beneath the image of Kata, he fancied he could pick out a hundred glistening eyes.

  Max turned and ran. His legs burned as they moved slowly through the viscous water and up the stairs: clunk, clunk, clunk. He moved far too slowly and could feel the thing coming at him, rushing through the water with its alien eyes fixed on his back and its tentacles and stingers ready to grasp him in a deadly embrace.

  Clunk, clunk, clunk. Above him was a kind of film over the water, but he could make no sense of it, only that the area above him was lit more brightly. Up more stairs he climbed, and he thought he could feel a rush of displaced water as the thing propelled itself toward him. The film was close to him now and instinctively as he ran he reached up and his arm passed through it. With three more steps—clunk, clunk, clunk—he burst through the film, which turned out to be the surface of the water. Max found himself in a pocket of air. Here then was one of the Library’s defenses. He slowed down now, heaving for breath as he dragged the air-cart from the water and moved up a couple more steps to safety.

  Max was standing in a great domed reading room. Above him, by some clever arrangement in the Library roof, the windows still let in light and perhaps even magnified it. Hovering in the center of the room were the strange chairlike platforms he had noticed in the control room back at the seditionist hideout. Shelved around the walls were books—books of every type! Large and leather bound, thin pamphlets, red-and-black spined books, short squat ones. He laughed to himself. The greatest library in the world, and he was the only one with access to it.

  Max laughed again. In that instant, he was pulled with fantastic force off his feet. He struck the ground and slid across the marble floor. Behind him the cart was being dragged toward the water by long, thin tentacles. He scrambled for something to clutch on the floor, but the marble was smooth. The cart crashed into the water and submerged. Max’s feet hit the water, then his body, and finally he was clumping down the stairs fully submerged.

  Fear clenched his heart in a fistlike. He reached for his knife but in his desperation missed it altogether. Again he tried, and this time—his hand shaking —drew his knife from its scabbard and slashed out at a tentacle, which pulled away. Something whipedlike his arm, and he felt his suit tear. He caught a glimpse of a long appendage with a flat leaflike end covered in burgundy nodules whisking away.

  Water rushed into his suit and a warm pain grew on his arm. He gasped and cried out. The pain increased in intensity, as if someone were placing burning coal against him. But at the same time the water rushed up beneath his suit and into his helmet. He hacked into another tentacle that grasped the cart, but knew it was no use—the tentacles wer
e too many. Desperation flooded him. He could barely think. His actions were impulsive and desperate. Again and again he lashed out at the tentacles. With each strike of his knife a tentacle retreated, only to be replaced immediately by another. Each moment he was dragged farther down the stairs. Frantically he reached out, unclipped the chain that connected him and the cart, and severed the air-tube. The cart rushed away across the submerged foyer. He turned, breathed in water, and coughed it out again. The burning pain now consumed his entire left arm and shoulder. He could no longer move his arm. He stumbled up the stairs, his lungs yearning for air. One foot clipped the stairs and he fell. Climbing to his feet, he looked up at the surface of the water shimmering with light. He took another step. His lungs filled with a fire and his entire body screamed, “Breathe!” He held his breath a moment more and clambered desperately forward. Finally, involuntarily, he took another breath of water and his body convulsed. He coughed violently, burst through the water’s surface, scrambled across the marble floor coughing up water and bile into his helmet.

  His body spasming, Max released the first lever that held his helmet clamped tight against his suit. He reached over to the other side of the helmet with his good arm, released the second. The helmet fell to the floor with a clatter.

  On his hands and knees, he scrambled across the floor to the middle of the reading room, far from the water’s edge, heaving for breath. As he lay there, the hot-coal burning had now covered his arm and shoulder and he found breathing more difficult. Breathe, he told himself, but his arm and shoulder would not move, and his breaths were slowing. He tried to draw air into his lungs, but it was no use, his breaths slowed themselves down. The entire left side of his body now surged with pain. His left leg would not move. And then his right side. He tried to scream, but all that would emerge was a little gurgle. As the paralysis overcame his body, his lungs were slowly starved of oxygen and his vision shimmered before him with a whole new form of light, until the whiteness eventually enveloped him.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Once Maximilian was gone, Kata found herself at a loss. Things had changed so rapidly, within the seditionist group and within her mind. She was a jumble of thoughts and feelings and hardly knew where she stood. That morning, as she had watched the air-cart descend to the bottom of the ocean, her heart had been gripped with worry. Now he was gone and the delicate equilibrium in the seditionist group would disintegrate. Maximilian was to return in four days, but by then, she feared, the group would have been transformed into Ejan’s army.

  Her plan had been simple: She had hoped to save Max, and Quadi, perhaps warn others before House Technis struck. She knew that House Technis could not strike until she betrayed the base’s location to Autec. Then Technis would descend on the base with guards, perhaps even thaumaturgists and Furies summoned from the Other Side. The decision lay in her hands. And yet, unthinkably, she had come to love these seditionists. Was the overthrow of the Houses not a just aim?

  Kata could not resolve these conflicts within her. Rather she sat passively in the communal room with Quadi and watched the seditionists prepare for Aya’s Day, a week and a half away.

  “Busy as bees,” said Quadi. “Just like Tir-Aki.”

  “Eleven days until the demonstration, and then we will see if all of this means anything.” Kata looked on grimly.

  Rikard, his brooding expression fixed on his face, his eyes squinting suspiciously at them, sat himself next to them. He was always heading here and there, speaking for Ejan, passing on messages. It had seemed not so long ago that he had been aligned with Maximilian.

  “There will be a meeting tonight,” said Rikard.

  “So Ejan wants to assert his authority,” said Kata.

  Rikard did not answer immediately. “Maximilian has abandoned the group for his own selfish aims. He’s only ever thought about his own place. He wants to be a great leader.”

  “And Ejan doesn’t?” Kata spat back. But Rikard’s words rocked her, for there was truth to them.

  “You know that Ejan is without personal ambition.” Rikard stood again, looked back at them briefly, moved on.

  “Ejan builds them in his own mold,” said Quadi. Rikard had the look of many of the seditionists these days. They were less idealistic than the first members of the group. Where once the seditionists were dreamers, living in abstractions—Kamron and Maximilian—these were simpler and harder folk, workers from the factories or former urchins from the street. Their visions were not of grand future worlds where everyone was free, but immediate and practical: The desire to defeat the Houses drove them. They scared her, for they were her people, and she understood them better.

  “What will Aceline say tonight?” Kata said.

  “She will be silent,” said Quadi. “Like the others, she will not fight Ejan in the open. She hopes that once Aya’s Day has come, the sheer momentum of demonstrations will make Ejan’s militarism obsolete.”

  “If she will not fight him, then we must,” said Kata.

  Quadi put his hand on Kata’ arm. “No. We wait for four days and pick up Maximilian. Then we’ll have the upper hand.”

  “By then it will be too late. If this group is to remain a positive force, then we must act now,” said Kata. As he spoke, she wondered: she sounded like a seditionist herself.

  That evening the central hall swelled with the members of the group. The room was hazy with lamp smoke. Ejan took the floor with Josiane hovering closely beside him.

  Ejan paced, his voice steely, his face radiant in the soft light, his white-blond hair brilliant. “Today Maximilian descended beneath the waters to the Sunken City. He risks his life for the cause. With him in mind, we must do the same. The battle lines have been drawn between the enemy and us. On the one side, the seditionist movement, on the other, the Houses. In the middle, the great apathetic mass, who by their inaction support the Houses. Why do they not stand up and fight? Why do they blindly allow the Houses to control, to dominate, to destroy, to kill and torture? Refusal to act—that is tacit support of those in power!”

  Kata was horrified by Ejan’s invocation of Max’s name, his claim to Max’s allegiances. Ejan was prepared to claim that they were on the same path, no doubt to win over Max’s supporters.

  Ejan continued to pace, feeling the audience, pleading with them, arguing with them. He seemed to draw energy from them, and they from him, as if together with him they formed one giant organism. Never had he looked so certain of himself. There was a magnificence to him, no doubt, as if he came into his own on a larger stage.

  Ejan’s speech was clear in its logic: The group must provoke a clash with the Houses on Aya’s Day. In the heat of battle, everyone in the city would be forced to choose sides. He stopped and waited in the deadly silence, before he added, “We must all prepare together now. We must prepare for the confrontation. Tomorrow we shall begin to arm and train you. In a fortnight we will be an army that even the strongest of the Houses will tremble before! When Max returns a liberation-thaumaturgist, then no force in the city will be able to resist us.”

  As Ejan swept off the stage, Kata watched as mesmerized as the rest of them. Across the floor, Aceline watched with concern. Quadi was right, she would not risk a confrontation with Ejan. Kata knew she would have to act, if she was to save the group from this destructive path.

  Josiane stepped forward, and said, “The meeting is over.”

  Kata leaped to her feet and stepped forward. As she spoke, she felt a tingle of energy rush over her skin. “It’s not over! It would be wrong for us to concentrate solely on military concerns, or to spark a confrontation. We’re still only a few hundred, in the face of all three Houses. We must grow, we must increase our influence, Aya’s Day might only be a show of strength, not the final measurement of it.”

  The tingle rushed through her and Kata watched the faces of the seditionists. They looked at her with closed mouths and unblinking eyes. They did not disagree with her, but they would not cross Ejan. His influence wa
s more than a matter of persuasion now; he was a man who had acquired power, and that power was itself argument.

  Kata formulated her argument anew. “In any case, Maximilian would never—” She stopped speaking. The tingling turned into a trembling within her. Her legs shook as she felt the waves of a fit rise within her. This one came on with a rapidity for which she was unprepared. Oh no, she thought, not now. She grasped for her flask, tried to unscrew the lid, but it fell to the ground as she shook. The sedtionists looked at her blankly, unsure of what was occurring. No, she thought, as she fell to the ground, her entire body shuddering. She could feel her limbs clattering against the ground. The roof of the cavern faded into white slowly above her. She fought against the fit, struggled to stand, failed.

  Quadi’s blurred outline appeared above her, “Kata!”

  Kata lost all sense of the world and was pulled away into the black sea on a dark tide.

  When she regained consciousness, the meeting was over. Her tongue was swollen, for she had bitten it during the fit. Her head pounded and she was filled with bitterness. She had failed to make Maximilian’s arguments, to defend him in his absence. Quadi gave her some broth and they sat in silence, realizing that things were coming apart. Eventually, Kata fell asleep and by the morning, she was well enough to move around the cavern.

  Not long after, Ejan approached her. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Oh, it’s just a temporary ailment, nothing serious.” She would not show weakness.

  Ejan nodded. “I don’t think we should be opposed to each other. You’ve proved yourself a good seditionist.”

  “Maximilian will return soon,” Kata said simply.

  Ejan pursed his lips. “I need you until he returns. I need you in one of the attack squads. We strike soon against the Houses. I know how good you are under pressure.”

  “I won’t do it.”