Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  FORTY

  As Boris ascended in the elevator, he considered his position. With the crushing of the Xsanthians’ strike, he had won over House Marin. House Arbor still blamed him for Lefebvre’s death but had retreated into quiet.

  For a long time now, even before the raid on the seditionists’ hideout, the city had been in a state of eerie quiet. Boris could be considered the most powerful man in the city. Aya’s Day was only two days away. It would only be a trickle of oppositionists, a petty congregation of troublemakers. Still, he would smash them, too, loosing the Furies upon them. Sometimes people needed to be taught a lesson. Then, free to act without all these pressures upon him, he would change things for the good of all. Better conditions for the workers, a more unified system for the Houses, a Forum—he could barely wait to start his program of reform.

  Drunk on the visions of his own success, Boris strode to the Elo-Talern’s hall in triumph, his head held back, his chest out. The Elo-Talern waited for him by the great doors behind the throne. “Boris.” She made a face that could have been a smile. “Boris, you have conquered the city. You are victorious. It is time.”

  “Time?” Boris frowned.

  “Time for the elixir—your treatment against death. Come.”

  Boris hesitated. The promised elixir: so it was true, he might cheat death; he could avoid that terrible moment when his heart stopped. Without the fear of aging and death, he would rule Technis like a god. His program of reform could last a century or more. Perhaps later he would be able to share the elixir with Saidra, and they could be a family again. Over the years, Paxaea would come to love him. Yet still he hesitated, for he was afraid of the unknown.

  “Come,” said Elo-Drusa.

  Boris nodded to himself and followed her. The doors opened and they passed into the pleasure palace where they continued past intersections and doorways, farther than Boris had been before, toward the Undercity of the Elo-Talern. Boris was filled with anxiety. Did he want this? Like everything in his life, events seemed to carry him along like a broken branch in a flooded river, twisting and turning, being submerged, breaking once more through the sturface.

  “Wait.” He stopped.

  Elo-Drusa was gone. She appeared behind him, her hands settled on his shoulders. “Eternal life. Never to die. You’ll be an angel.”

  Boris wanted to turn back. He was gripped by fear, seized with a terrible foreboding. Why him? How had he ended up in this position? None of it made sense. “Yes,” he said, and walked on.

  They came then to a vast circular door, larger than any Boris had ever seen. Hundreds of silver ideograms descended its face like snowflakes falling in winter. The Elo-Talern spoke a strange guttural word and the great door rolled back into a space in the wall.

  Now fear clasped Boris in its vise and he could barely move. Before he knew it, the Elo-Talern pulled him by the hand and they entered the Undercity, the most secret province of the Elo-Talern.

  Boris entered a vast hexagonally shaped hall as if in some strange trance. Passivity overtook his mind and his limbs; everything seemed whiter than before, as if viewed through a mist. Emerging before him came the nightmare vision of the Undercity. Somehow the architecture of the hall was wrong, so that he could not make out which walls were closer and which farther away. It was as if some painter had played with impossible perspectives, the angles of a triangle added up to more than 180 degrees. As Boris tried to make them out, he was seized with a deep sense of disturbance. Staircases climbed the sides of the walls and joined walkways that crisscrossed the room like crazed spiderwebs. All around the room a hundred and more cadaverous Elo-Talern danced with each other to a strange electronic waltz. Others lay upon chaises longues amid the scattered remnants of rich food and drink: thick syrups of extraordinary luminescent reds and yellows half spilled from their bowls onto the floor; rotten peaches and pears, like deflated balls sunk into plates; tankards knocked onto the floor, their liquids forming little shiny puddles. Yet more Elo-Talern lay on piles of pillows, their legs and arms draped over each other, long tubes seemed to be attached to the inside of their elbows. Pockets of lichen and mold—luminous greens, bright oranges, wild purples—were scattered across all surfaces: here an entire corner of the hall was submerged in a deep forest of crimson; there an abandoned feast floated beneath a lime green lichen sea. Decay and dilapidation permeated the entire scene, filling Boris with dread.

  Nearby stood a pillar on which sat a hexagonal-shaped prism, the size of a child’s head. From where he stood, Boris could see smoke swirling within the prism, and the thing didn’t exactly shine, but rather seemed to resonate with power. This was not the unnatural sheen of thaumaturgy, but something else, something somehow cleaner.

  But Boris had no time to contemplate the thing, for Elo-Drusa took his arm in her great spidery hand and led him through the carnivalesque scene. Many of the Elo-Talern were naked, and Boris could see the males’ shriveled members, drooping and withered trunks attached to their bodies as an afterthought. No matter which direction he looked, the scene unfolded like some kind of mad burlesque. On the ceiling another entire party was occurring, as if it were controlled by some negative gravity, a mirrored and distorted image of the one through which he moved. Yet another party lounged on one of the walls. Pathways climbed from floor to wall to ceiling, twisting in the air to reorient themselves into the appropriate position of “up” for each location. Tower-sized pillars of mold and lichen grew everywhere.

  She dragged him across the room, through a tunnel that twisted and turned upon itself like a corkscrew, so that the tilted floor became the wall, and yet he still walked impossibly on. Twisting like a spiral, the tunnel plunged down so that, by rights, he should have fallen forward as if down a shaft. The laws of physics did not apply here.

  They came to a great hexagonal room where robed Elo-Talern stood in lines and chanted in an unknown ritual. One hovered down to meet them on a platform that hung in the air.

  “You have brought the one of which you spoke.” The robed one seemed to be male, and was the tallest that Boris had yet seen, as if beneath the red robes he stood on great stilts.

  “This is he.”

  “I am Kalas, high priest of the ascent. Welcome, child.” For a moment he was gone completely. He flashed back into reality, a cadaverous creature. “I will train you once you have ascended. Take him through.”

  She led him along another passageway, which branched off from the room until they came to another hexagonal chamber, this one much smaller. She pressed a pad on the wall and it opened. In the center of yet another smaller hexagonal chamber sat some kind of reclining couch.

  “Lie down.”

  He lay upon the couch, which was unnervingly comfortable.

  “Your arm. Roll up your sleeves.”

  Boris did as he was told, even as terrible premonitions came to him, one after the other. The Elo-Talern pushed his arm against an armrest and strapped it down.

  “You won’t leave me, will you?” said Boris.

  She held in her hand a long tube, attached to its end a long needle. “The elixir is made from the horns and the eyes of the minotaurs killed during the Festival of the Sun. Life comes from death, and eternal life from a magical creature. Your predecessor Rudé provided this for us; the thaumaturgists concocted the liquid.”

  Boris felt a deep, sharp pain in the fold of his elbow. He was too afraid to look, but he knew that the needle had now pierced a vein.

  “Rest. I’ll return.”

  “No!” Boris cried. But she turned and left him in the cell. Warmth began at the crease of his elbow, spread down his arm and through the rest of his body. He could hear his heart beating like a deep drum rumbling in his ears: boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom. He licked his dry lips, but was distracted by the pain, which crept all the way up his arm like a shadow of the warmth. He tried to sit up, but his arms were pinned, and a strap pressed against his chest. He laughed maniacally and the sound echoed weirdly in his ears,
as if it came from far away, down an empty corridor. The ceiling above him shifted and warped as he watched it. One of the walls appeared to descend toward him, and then pulled away as another section spun oddly down, the angles twisting and warping. He glimpsed a flash of a dark world, superimposed upon the one he knew. It was as if another chamber, slightly askew, had somehow been placed over the one in which he lay. Shadow doorways led away to tilted corridors; a black staircase that led up through the ceiling of the hexagonal chamber and to another level. He blinked and the other world was gone. Boris lost a sense of his body … and then a sense of himself. He simply was.

  The Elo-Talern appeared above him, leaning over like the cadaver of some horrible horse. “My Boris.”

  Boris could barely remember the journey back to his office. At some point he staggered along the dusty corridors alone. He returned to his office and collapsed on his couch. When he regained consciousness, it seemed like a long nightmare, but when he looked at his arm he noticed the dark bruise and a round swelling. From the place where the needle had pierced, his veins were an irradiant unnatural blue, creeping out from his elbow like a spider’s web.

  In the evening, after Boris returned to the Director’s office and rested for several hours, Armand showed in House Arbor’s Director Thorel, who had taken over from Lefebvre. Like Armand, Thorel had the long aquiline nose that distinguished the Arbor officiates. Years of inbreeding, thought Boris, whose own stubby little nose was the opposite of Thorel’s.

  “You’re the undisputed power in Caeli-Amur.” Thorel grinned uneasily.

  Boris nodded. After his treatment, everything possessed the quality of a dream: he saw through a haze, the walls and ceilings loomed down at him, sounds echoed around in his head.

  “Both Arbor and Marin are indebted to you, and personally, I’m happy that Lefebvre is gone. I think both Houses, for the time being at least, will defer to your judgment until these disturbances have passed.”

  Boris gathered himself. “We shall strike together against the demonstration on Aya’s Day, and crush the seditionists.” The floor shifted beneath Boris. He grabbed on to the arm of his chair. “A moment, please.” He ran into his private room, grabbed the washbasin, and vomited into it.

  As he rested, hands clamped to the edges of the washbasin, he was seized by a cramp in his arm. He groaned and looked at his elbow. The arm seemed to be elongating, as if it were being stretched on the rack. For a minute he thought the elbow would dislocate. He groaned again, but the pain now rose up to his shoulder and dissipated into the rest of his body.

  “Are you ill, Director Autec?” Thorel stood by the entranceway to the room.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “We would hate to see you ill.” There seemed to be a tinge of pleasure in Thorel’s voice.

  Boris blinked rapidly, hoping it would clear his sight. “I hear you have a long list of organic torture devices.”

  “We do indeed.”

  “Perhaps you might allow us the use of some of them? We have a number of prisoners in our dungeons whom we would like to interview.”

  “I shall organize it. I recommend the truth mold—if information is what you are after. Though I understand that sometimes there are other aims to torture.”

  The room seemed to flicker and again Boris saw the shadow world superimposed upon the one he knew, with all its spectral tunnels and ghostly stairs leading into darker ones.

  “The truth.” Boris looked down at the floor and his own feet. His knees ached for some reason. “The truth will be enough for the moment. Send the mold across.”

  FORTY-ONE

  Two apprentices grasped Maximilian roughly and chained his arms. “Don’t bother struggling. It won’t do any good.”

  They led him from the cell along a corridor. Above, orbs of light flickered on as they approached and off as they passed by. To either side there were silent cell doors. Maximilian imagined their occupants, trapped in the dark: seditionists, criminals, opponents of the House, spies. Ahead the corridor was shrouded in darkness, like everything in his life. This is what it had come to: the dungeons of House Technis.

  When they had built things in his youth, they had agreed that the surface should remain a place of nature, and that beneath the ground would be a place of wondrous construction. They planned underground cities dotting the edges of the oceans, so that they might play in at the water’s edge. Somewhere along the line things went awry. Was it the nature of power? Did it turn people against each other? Is that why beneath the ground had now turned not into a place of wonder, but one of horror? Everything had slipped so quickly off track. Maximilian shook his head: but no, this was not his memory. He had no knowledge of these things, and yet it persisted: he could see the cities they had designed. At some point they’d changed their minds and built aboveground, too.

  Max was jostled and he came out of his memories. The apprentices led him into a dark cavern, where five great metal spheres stood in a row. As they climbed the stairs, another two apprentices pulled a woman from the top of one of the spheres. The woman came out whimpering, the look on her face like that of a hurt dog. She coughed and spluttered, vomited liquid and collapsed onto the walkway.

  “Come on, up you go.”

  The woman started to cry a high, hideous childlike wail that suited her appearance: she was Aceline.

  The apprentices led Maximilian up the stairs to the walkway.

  “Aceline,” he called, but she did not seem to hear.

  The two apprentices picked her up and dragged her along the walkway. “Why are we always given this task?” one complained to the other.

  One of Max’s apprentices turned a large spoked wheel at the top of one of the spheres. There was a clunk and the man pulled open a round doorway. The second apprentice pushed Maximilian toward the opening. He held his ground, then his legs, still weakened by his long journey back from Caeli-Enas, gave way and he dropped to his knees. He recalled that submarine voyage in dreamlike fragments: regaining consciousness, nestled within one of the pillars of light, a terrible headache like needles behind his eyes; staggering up to the ground floor of the library barely knowing who he was; the long journey beneath the water, the necessary invocations floating up to his conscious mind in an entirely new thaumaturgical language; the staggering up the beach, through the night in Caeli-Amur, all the way to the seditionist hideout. Capture. Now this.

  “Don’t struggle.” The second apprentice clasped Maximilian’s legs and dragged him to the opening. The first pushed him from behind. Fully clothed, he fell into the sphere. Cold water embraced him. When he kicked his legs, he found that the hatch had been closed over the opening to the sphere. He reached up, increasingly desperate. He thrashed around, banged his head against the roof, his lungs burning for oxygen. Finally, he breathed in the liquid around him. But by then things had begun to change. Shapes emerged in the sphere, ghostlike wisps like roiling fog. Behind them, forms emerged slowly: a landscape gray and cold. The wispy shapes solidified into a tall and terrible figure, chasing him, calling after him in a horrid inhuman wail.

  “Aya, Aya!” it screamed, for it meant to destroy him.

  Across the landscape he ran, through ghostly woods at twilight. He looked back in fear at the tall, spectral figure, cloaked so that its face was obscured, and the black nothingness beneath the hood was all the more terrifying for that.

  Maximilian ran, and the sense of horror and doom filled him, for no matter how fast he ran, down paths and over fallen trees, fog now descending in the quietening light, the figure came behind him. He could hear its breath, hissing darkly. There was no hope. He tripped on a log, fell to the ground, scrambled to his feet, ran again. He whimpered.

  Again he tripped and fell, his hands striking the dark earth. He rolled onto his back. The figure stood above him: a thaumaturgist, but he could not tell if it belonged to a House, for it looked like a magus of old, and stood above him like a god. Unlike the magus, a terrible light seemed to emanate from
it, and the light was somehow dark also, as if it were gleaming an unnatural chemical darkness. It was a Sortilege—one of the twelve from Varenis. Maximilian knew he had no way of fighting the figure. He was bested before the trial had begun. The figure before him was not only more powerful than he, but was also the embodiment of faceless evil.

  The figure drew an ideogram in the air, and Maximilian felt a coldness run through him and settle in his bones. He tried to get to his feet, but his arms would not move, his legs refused to obey. He was paralyzed. The Sortilege took out a sharp knife, as long as his forearm, with a serrated blade. Slowly, as if measuring something, it pressed the blade against Maximilian’s stomach, just below the belly button. The knife slipped through the skin and into the vital organs, as if Max’s stomach were nothing but water. Pulling upward, the figure cut a deep wound. Blood and yellow stuff rushed from inside, and there was a terrible smell of something rotten and organic. Reaching into the stomach, the Sortilege disemboweled Maximilian, who looked on with horror as his white entrails came out. First, his stomach, then his lungs, so that no longer could he breathe, and finally, his black heart, beating still. Maximilian tried to scream, but could not, for his jaws were clamped shut by the cold.

  Drawing his robes aside, the Sortilege took the beating heart and placed it into a wound in his own chest. As he looked down at Maximilian, the figure threw back his hood. Maximilian looked up into face of a dead man. The features were rotten and blackened, as if the body had floated beneath the grimy water of a lake. Its skin was broken and splotchy and its eyes looked like they were losing their structure: they bulged like little sacs of liquid. The curly hair was thin and patchy. The lips had begun to disintegrate, as if nibbled by tiny fish. He looked up into the face, and it was familiar: it was his own.

  Maximilian was dumped into his cell. One of the apprentices said, “If you want my advice, just tell the master torturer everything you know at the beginning. It might help.”