Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  Rikard stopped to reload his bolt-thrower.

  Kata ran into the smoke, and gagged on the acrid fumes hanging bitterly in the air. A horse writhed on the ground, still harnessed to a carriage. Its beautiful white head was blackened with soot, splattered crimson in places, almost black in others. Where its forelegs had once been, now there were only stumps, which it wiggled ineffectually as it tried to stand. Great flaps of skin hung from the bones. She turned away to see a man with throwing knives: a philosopher-assassin. The man loosed one: it spun fast through the air and stuck a seditionist in the throat. The seditionist put her hand up to the protruding handle and started shaking her head like a dog with a stick.

  Kata dived to the ground, rolled once, came to her feet, but dropped down again and rolled once more as a knife whizzed past her ear. She rolled a third time, came to her feet directly beside the philosopher-assassin and, her two knives in hand, plunged them into his sides. He struck her in the neck with both hands: sharp hard chops. She collapsed to the ground and everything went white.

  A man’s face stared at hers, its eyes blank as if he were looking beyond her into the realm of death itself. She dragged herself up. The smoke was dissipating. She staggered to her feet and pulled her knives from the dead man’s ribs.

  Before she took a step forward, a figure staggered from the smoke. Kata dropped to one knee, ready to strike but stopped. It was only a servant girl, not even out of her teens. In her desperation, the girl staggered directly into Kata, unaware even of the seditionist’s presence. She lurched clumsily over to Kata, who found herself holding the young woman up. The girl looked at Kata blankly, in shock.

  Kata turned, and together they staggered from the smoke and the violence, back toward the embankment. The girl could barely stay on her feet; every now and then her legs gave way. They made it up the embankment, where Kata laid the girl down.

  The girl’s face had freckles scattered over it like confetti. “Don’t let me die.”

  “You’re not going to die, you fool.” Kata looked at the girl’s face; she saw herself in another life. If she had managed to acquire a job in one of the Houses, this girl might have been her. “You’re out now, and I’ll make sure you’re all right.”

  “I’ve a man. I’ve a true love,” said the girl. “He’s waiting for me in the city.”

  “He’ll be there when you get back. I, too, have a true love. He’s away at the moment and I miss him.” Kata leaned back, looked out over the scene. Seditionists were picking over the corpses, finishing off those still alive.

  Rikard dragged a body by a leg. The body’s shock of white hair was practically the only thing not covered in scorch-marks and soot. Rikard called out, “Lefebvre is dead!”

  Kata turned and looked back at the girl, who now appeared pale, a sheen on her skin making her look sicker than before. Kata looked down. The girl’s left arm was missing. “Oh, no.” She grasped the girl by the shoulder, to keep her awake. She looked down helplessly as the girl’s face turned ever whiter, draining of energy, of life. The girl opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again like a fish.

  Kata looked around, as if she might see help arriving. When she looked down again, the girl had stopped breathing and now stared coldly over her shoulder up at the statue. Kata turned and looked up at the figure of Iria, who still looked over the scene imperiously, as if she had always known exactly what was going to happen.

  From below others had taken up the cry, “Lefebvre is dead!”

  THIRTY-THREE

  News of Lefebvre’s death sent shock waves through the Houses. Officiates hurried around the Technis corridors with a look of terror on their faces. Intendants whispered to each other in the corners. Recriminations were sent from House to House. House Arbor saw it as an attack from House Technis, and Boris was seen as responsible, despite the fact that he had sent out a wave of guards to round up anyone talking sedition in the streets. The new Arbor Director Thorel released a public statement, which Boris now received from his trusted agent Armand. Armand was somehow above the grubby politicking of the others, no doubt due to his background. Arbor had always done things with a grace that Technis lacked. They made much of their traditions, their ancient families, their principles. Principles, damn it—did no one have them anymore?

  Standing before Boris’s desk, Armand read it to him in an ice-cold voice, the words pressed together tightly. “The seditionists’ brutal attack, in a designated haven, was clearly kept secret by House Technis, who had the technical means, as Director Boris Autec had demonstrated, to know of all seditionist activities. Retribution will be swift and righteous. House Arbor names Autec of Technis responsible. Justice will prevail.”

  From behind his desk, Boris scrunched up his face in distaste. “Fools.”

  Armand looked up at him. “And Director Autec. A strike has broken out at the docks. The Xsanthians.”

  “House Marin will crush that in a flash.”

  “They haven’t.” Armand held Boris’s eye. “There are rumors that Marin’s thaumaturgists are no longer following orders. And Director Bourg of Marin requests an audience. He’s in the waiting room.”

  Boris placed both hands on his desk as if he were holding it down. Here was a chance to take the ascendancy over the other Houses. Arbor was in decline, decimated by the assault against their leaders. Marin crippled by the strike at the docks. Having united them, now Technis could rise to a hegemonic position. But Boris hesitated. The Marin thaumaturgists would not act. What was the meaning of this?

  Armand continued. “Director. It is nine days until Aya’s Day. Perhaps we should consider that the citizens might come out in their thousands. Perhaps—”

  Boris cut in: “Armand, I am former factory worker. Believe me, the citizens are not capable of such a show of force. They’re disparate and defeated. Yes, we have witnessed strikes, but most citizens look on like spectators. If anyone understands this, it’s me. No—we must focus on crushing the seditionists. Send Bourg in.”

  Director Bourg, a willowy man with large hands, enters the room. His pockmarked face – a sign he had suffered from chickenpox as a child - was gray like the skin of a drum. He entered the room like a man condemned to die, Armand striding calmly behind him.

  Boris smiled broadly. “Director Bourg. So nice to see you.” A lithe female bodyguard followed Bourg; everyone had them nowadays, just as in the days of the House Wars.

  Boris led Bourg and Armand to the seats that formed the semicircle around the fireplace. Sitting down with ease, Boris smiled again at the grim-looking man. “I trust this is the first time you’ve entered the Technis Complex. It’s most impressive, is it not?”

  “Director Autec”—Bourg’s eyes were deeply lined—“you are going to die.”

  Throwing his head back, Boris laughed loudly. “Bourg. Bourg. Why so morbid?”

  “Arbor blames you for the death of Lefebvre. It was a clever ruse, to convince the other Houses that you would ally with them, and then allow the seditionists to murder Lefebvre. I must admit, it took me by surprise. You possess a cunning which is admirable.”

  “Arbor are nothing but a decaying old House. Arbor is the past, Bourg.”

  “Exactly my point, Autec. Exactly my point. But House Marin and Technis must keep our alliance—for we are the future.”

  Boris held Bourg’s eye, the tension slowly building between them until the Marin Director looked down and away. “Is House Marin really the future?”

  Bourg looked back up, his voice rose. “With these seditionist attacks, this protest on Aya’s Day, it is essential that we bond together, no? Wasn’t that your entire point?”

  “Well, is Marin’s House in order?” Boris was enjoying the conversation. He leaned back and stretched out on his chair.

  “What do you mean?” Bourg’s pudgy face was the color of canvass. The collar of his shirt seemed to clasp at his throat, for he continually reached up to loosen it. House Marin’s officials’ had a reputation for langorousness
to which Bourg did not conform. Marin officials were said to spend most of their time floating like jellyfish in their palace’s steaming baths and water-spheres.

  “Technis is in a position of strength. How does Marin stand?” Boris smiled slightly.

  “Marin is, all things speaking … Well, we have our troubles, as do all the Houses.”

  “Oh, but some have greater troubles than others.” Boris’s voice was soft and pleasant.

  “What could you mean, Director Autec?”

  Boris leaned forward and yelled directly into the man’s face. “You know damn well what I mean!”

  Bourg started, his head jerked back as if he’d been punched.

  “The Xsanthians’ strike is the least of your troubles, Bourg. It’s your thaumaturgists. Have you no control?”

  “They want things to change.”

  “Everyone wants things to change! Damn them! What do the Elo-Talern say about this? Do you speak to them?”

  “As usual, they seem to take little interest.”

  The thought stopped Boris. The Elo-Talern seemed to take little interest in Marin, and yet they took interest in Technis. Why? Beneath these cryptic clues, he tried to discern some pattern. The Elo-Talern recently emerged from a long hibernation to take notice of—what? What had changed?

  Boris pushed the thoughts away. “Well, what would you have us do?”

  “Help us with the Xsanthians. The thaumaturgists use them as bargaining chips. Their torcs tighten if the Xsanthians venture too far way, but otherwise they are useless. Now the Xsanthians refuse to work. Instead they swim in the harbor and bask on the piers.”

  “Bloody Tritons.” Boris spoke to no one in particular, using the derogatory term for the Xsanthians. “Alas, our own thaumaturgists are busy at the moment.”

  Bourg’s face turned turned even grayer. “Please.”

  “Sorry, what did you say?” Boris pretended not to be able to hear the man speak.

  Bourg looked at him with baleful eyes. “I beg you.”

  “You beg me?” Boris looked around the room as if there were more important things elsewhere in the room. His eyes fixed on the scrying ball twinned with Varenis. “Get on your knees and ask me again, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “What?”

  Boris looked straight at Bourg. They waited there a minute before Bourg shifted from his chair, dropping down to on knee before Boris, then the other. “Director Autec, please.”

  “We will intercede. But you are indebted to me now, Bourg. Expect me to call on this favor one day.”

  Bourg stood again. “Director Autec, thank you. And I feel it is my duty to warn you. Director Autec—there will be an attempt on your life before long. Arbor will not forgive you. After all, you have the scrying ball and could have warned them before Lefebvre’s assassination.”

  Boris tried to hold his face calmly, but a tiny twitch came over it.

  Bourg looked at him curiously. “You have the scrying ball, don’t you?”

  “Of course.” Boris’s voice was tight.

  Bourg’s face shifted subtly, this time with curiosity. “Of course.” He looked at Boris. “Of course,” he said softly.

  With Armand behind him, Boris stormed along the Technis corridors. Armand was still silent. Yes, Boris liked the man, but his silence was unnerving. He had almost too much principle, almost too much respect for station, too much respect for proper process.

  The thaumaturgists worked in the east wing, past the private apartments where House agents sometimes lived. As Boris approached, great double doors sensed his approach. Intricate ideograms inscribed on them glowed a soft green, and the doors slid open of their own accord.

  The room was vast, lit dimly by glittering squares along the roof. Small movable walls divided the room into hundreds of smaller enclosures, where suited thaumaturgists sat at desks sealed off from each other, working on formulae, copying manuscripts, working on equations, researching the various disciplines. Gas lamps hanging from tall thin stands threw cones of light over each desk, heightening the sense that each thaumaturgist worked alone. Just like a factory, Boris thought, a factory of knowledge.

  Boris and Armand walked toward a large central platform, held up by a huge piston. As Boris approached, the piston let out a great hiss and the platform lowered slowly to the ground. Boris stepped onto it, Armand a step behind him and to his right. Behind a desk sat a huge gray-suited man with olive skin, a close-cropped white beard, and a great bald head, curved and smooth like the dome of the Opera House.

  “Director Autec.” The man remained perfectly still as he raised his eyes from his ordered desk: piles of paper in trays before him, a tome to one side, geometric shapes and diagrams inscribed on its open pages. He appeared unchanged by the use of thaumaturgy, which unnerved Boris, for that meant his mutation might be internal and invisible, perhaps in personality or intellect. Only his dead-white irises were extraordinary; Boris had heard that such unsettling eyes occurred naturally far south in the Teeming Cities.

  “Prefect Alfadi,” said Boris. “You’ve heard about the Marin thaumaturgists?”

  “Marin has always been the most liberal of the houses. They run their affairs as if they were one great collection of equals.” Alfadi sat motionless, like a statue. Was it perhaps because Alfadi was from the Teeming Cities, or was he simply self-possessed, centered, at peace, like the mystagogues—the great Magi of old—were said to be? “Have no fear. Look around. Our thaumaturgists have only one priority: loyalty to Technis.”

  Boris looked at the scores of men at their desks around him, writing, and muttering to themselves, like little cogs in a great wheel. “Good, because I need them to help put down the Xsanthians’ dock strike.”

  Alfadi leaned back. “If you are suggesting the Furies, I would advise against it. You do not understand the effort it takes to invoke them from the Other Side. The demands are terrible.” Alfadi looked around at the thaumaturgists at work. “There are always consequences.”

  “What other way is there? Our guards are not equipped to fight Xsanthians, especially not when the creatures take to the water.”

  Alfadi’s pupils widened noticeably within his icy irises. “What could you offer us, to help offset your demands?”

  Boris shifted on his feet in anger. He held it at bay, for he did not want to upset Alfadi and the thaumaturgists. And yet, a House must function with respect for authority. An army must have a chain of command. “Loyalty is loyalty. It’s not something that can be bought.”

  Alfadi blinked rapidly. “If I may be so bold: I would hesitate to demand of our thaumaturgists too much. There will come a day when the well will be dry.”

  Now Boris felt like begging, but as Director, he could show no weakness. In any case, did he not have the support of the Elo-Talern? With such weight behind him, he could force them. But then again, he had not heard from Elo-Drusa recently. “I will not ask for an invocation of the Furies for a long time. Also, we will find a way to reward you all. What if I was to offer you lost knowledge from the Library beneath the Sunken City?”

  Alfadi’s eyes narrowed greedily. “What knowledge?”

  “Lost knowledge of the ancients,” Boris continued. In the rear of his mind, he knew that this promise would most likely not be fulfilled. The seditionist Maximilian would have died beneath the sea. But once they were quelled, why not force the Xsanthians to swim there and return with whatever secrets survived? “I will tell you more as things progress. But I expect the Furies to be invoked this afternoon.”

  Alfadi continued to look at Boris in silence. There was a hiss and the platform began once more to rise as the prefect turned back to his work. “It will be done.”

  Boris took a few steps before Alfadi called out to him. “Remember your promises.”

  Boris stormed out, Armand following him silently. As they marched along the corridor, Boris stopped and turned. “What?”

  Armand looked Boris in the eye, calm as ever. “Nothing, Director
. Nothing at all.”

  That afternoon, Boris and Armand stood on a balcony overlooking the great courtyard at the rear of the House Technis Palace. Lines of suited thaumaturgists stood below. Before them were the Furies, roiled and warped, black stains in the air. Fragments of limbs and bodies—wiry, taloned arms; rib cages; yellowed fangs—emerged from the other side and then fell back into darkness. Around them, the air itself took on new dark and unnatural qualities; it shimmered with alien energies. Again Boris felt horror and fear at the sight of these creatures. He yearned to turn away from them and run to safety, far from the hideous sight. But he forced himself to watch on coldly.

  Boris realized that the Furies must have some connection to the Elo-Talern. The Furies come from the land of darkness, beyond the wall of death. However the Elo-Talern did not seem to live wholly in this plane, nor in the Other Side, but were lodged somewhere between life and death, shifting from one to the other. To be lodged between life and death—what did that mean?

  “Events have a terrible logic to them, don’t they?” Boris said to Armand. “When I became officiate, I never considered I would have to order such things. I would have railed against it. Yet, I’ve tried everything else I could.”

  Armand raised his nose to the air as if he could smell the Furies. “That’s why we must rely on tradition, principles, honor. When my grandfather was exiled from Arbor, his heart was broken. Principles were what stopped him from collapsing into nothing. He cleaved to tradition like a shipwrecked man to flotsam. They held him afloat. My father worked for the Collegia in the Lavere, at the base of the Thousand Stairs. It was hard work, some of it criminal, in the eyes of the Houses. But he was no ordinary criminal. No, he, too, held to the traditions: loyalty, honor, civilization, education. When Technis came searching for agents, they recruited from the Lavere, not from the factories. That is the difference between you and I and the rest of them. We have our own traditions. You are a factory worker at heart, and I am one who believes in the noble right of the Houses to rule. Only the Houses can control the rabble out there—the uncivilized mob. We must protect the people from themselves. Events brought us here, and who are we to question their logic?”