Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  She returned to her parlor, and listened to the sounds as they washed around her, permeated her. Her depression had completely lifted. She had passed through a personal nadir from which there was no farther distance to fall and now was climbing back up. Indeed, she didn’t know quite what she felt. The future seemed now a blank canvas, on which she might paint her own possibilities. It was a strange sensation, one she could never recall having had before. Curiosity gripped her. She desired to see what had become of the seditionist movement. Some aspect of it called to her. Was she a seditionist, she wondered? With no other loyalties, no other cares? The very thought excited her.

  “I’m going out,” she said. “You stay here, if you want.”

  Henri nodded and followed when she stepped from the apartment.

  “Stay here!” she turned to him.

  He ran off down the street and toward Via Persine. She followed, shaking her head.

  Old and young they came, filing down toward the square. From the industrial sections of the city the rough factory workers trudged down in their blue uniforms and their heavy boots, covered in dust and dirt and soot. Older people walked down holding hands, while others debated loudly in small groups various aspects of seditionist theory. Now and then they glanced up at the ominous clouds, which seemed to reflect the tension that hung over the crowd. Among the marchers, urchins ran and played and Kata made sure to keep an eye on her pockets. Henri disappeared into the crowd, following whatever impulse led him. But she was amazed that she should see so many people on the streets. She didn’t believe it to be possible, and yet here they were. She walked with them, knowing—as everyone there felt—that the confrontation with the Houses was yet to come.

  “Where are the House guards? Where are the thaumaturgists?” she asked.

  An old woman whose hair was tied back with a scarf shrugged uncomfortably. “Seems there is no need for them here.”

  Kata wondered at this. Perhaps the Houses were planning to leave the demonstration alone, let things blow over. But that had never been the House way. She imagined Autec up in the Technis Complex, imperiously ordering the guards to mobilize, the thaumaturgists to invoke the Furies, standing on his balcony and watching the smudges of blackness descending toward the demonstration. Yet the sheer scale of the crowd surprised her. Perhaps it surprised the Houses also. Most likely they were waiting until the marchers reached the Market Square. There the citizens would be trapped, caught between the docks and the Opera. She imagined the massacre that would ensue: the Furies tearing onto the crowd with unearthly speed, like rabid dogs into a dying corpse. She imagined Autec, cold and heartless, engorged with his hate.

  When she came to the square, she simply stopped and stared. The entire place was a morass of color, a thousand dots of red and blue and green and gray—amid the dim rumble of chatter. There were no guards in sight.

  Orators stood high on the corners of the Opera balcony, leaning out over the crowd, arguing for various forms of sedition. The ideas they propounded were crude amalgams of different theories. One argued for the complete destruction of the Houses and everything they stood for, to be replaced by no structure at all; another for a kind of reconstruction of the Houses from the bottom up, with elected tribunes to replace the Directors.

  Kata passed through the crowd, caught up in its little currents and eddies. A group of washerwomen hung effigies of officiates from crudely made scaffolds. Three blue-uniformed workers glanced at her lecherously and elbowed each other, grinning; an old man leaned against his walking stick, his face like wrinkled parchment.

  She found herself chanting bloodthirsty chants with the others, drums beating a stony rhythm: “Death to the Houses, Death to the officiates, Death to the Directors, Death to the thaumaturgists.” She listened to the speakers as if in some kind of strange reverie and felt at once insignificant, and somehow part of something bigger. The crowd seemed to rumble like a single giant animal, shifting to and fro like a sprawling beast stirring from a long sleep. It had no soul, it had no consciousness—it had only an awakening energy, a ravenous hunger. It needed to find its prey.

  As Kata moved among the masses of people, just as she lost a sense of herself, she lost a sense of time. She found herself lost in the never-ending moment, where her past and her future seemed inconsequential, a part of something other. All that mattered was the feeling that she had now of being something larger than herself, something broader, a part of a greater universe.

  She found herself shifting one way across the square, and back again. The words of the speakers accumulated in her consciousness, until she was drunk with visions of a new world. This mattered to her, she realized. Hope for the future mattered. Above her the clouds darkened, trapping in the heat and humidity. The lighting had crept closer and the thunder rumbled more loudly over the crowd.

  At one point she looked up to see Ejan clinging to a statue. His steely voice rang out over the crowd like a clarion call. With one arm holding on to the belt of the ancient hero Caladus, Ejan, all blond hair and pale skin, looked even more like a Northman. He gazed over the crowd, his head turning this way and that. He leaned out, looking as if he wanted to touch the beast, to draw energy from it.

  Ejan’s words came in little bursts; after each one he drew a little breath, as if to take stock, to absorb the crowd’s own desires. Kata examined the crowd. What does it want? It wants to grow, to cry out in unison, to march upon the Houses and force them to surrender. Ejan voiced these desires. Let us sweep up to the Houses, surround them, he cried. The crowd roared. By sheer force of numbers, we will make them capitulate, he said. Then we will tear their very palaces to the ground and start anew. A surge. Kata shifted on her feet as the crowd moved like the ocean.

  As Kata was carried along by the crowd, she heard someone say, “Where are the Collegia?”

  Tension rushed into her, for she knew they would not come. She remembered Autec’s words: “Armand has visited the Collegia to ensure they’re on our side.” Among the crowd there were worried faces and skittish eyes.

  “Where are the Collegia?” some asked again.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Ejan leaped down from the statue and joined his little army, standing near, cobbled together bolt-throwers and jagged knives in hand. Many of his supporters had escaped the seditinist hideout.

  Ejan and this group marched to Via Persine, for they were headed for House Technis. Others, Kata learned, would march on Marin and Arbor, but she followed Ejan and the others. She wanted to face Technis, to stare the machine in the face. Ejan’s group forced themselves to the front of the crowd, which followed them, pouring into Via Persine like water into a channel, rushing up against the shopfronts that lined the street. Most of the shops were closed up, their protective grates bolted down down like jaws in a death rictus. Other shopkeepers were busily closing up.

  Lightning flashed in the sky above, and the boulevard lit up before Kata. A mighty clap of thunder exploded above. But no rain fell. Perhaps this would be one of the rainless electrical storms that sometimes rolled over Caeli-Amur.

  But she knew that others around her read it as a portent. Behind her, she heard whisperings: The Collegia had not come. A storm had arisen instead. The sky was empty; the city’s birds had hidden themselves away. The Collegia had left the crowd to face the Houses alone. Kata had already known that this would be the case. Despite the size of the demonstration, she knew in her heart that they would not be able to stand the force of the Houses. With the support of the Collegia they might have stood a chance, even against the Furies, for she knew that the thaumaturgists could not summon the creatures and keep them on this plane indefinitely. But she did not care. For her the demonstration itself was a little utopia. She felt free for the very first time in her life, filled with a frightened jubilation she could never have predicted. She was committed now. Now that she had been stripped of all hope and reborn from death, she knew that she was finally a seditionist at heart.

  Kata pushed forward
until she was close to the head of the procession. Drums beat incessantly, setting a marching kind of rhythm. To their right lay the factory district. Workers from the glass factories set down their tools and joined them. Tramps edged along the side of the crowd, as if afraid to join in, until they were finally sure that they would not be struck down. Then their voices were among the loudest and angriest. “Death to the Houses! Death to the guards! Death to the Directors! Death to the officiates!”

  The crowd jolted to a halt. A hundred yards away, high up the boulevard, stood the House Technis guards. The crowd fell silent. The two forces stood facing each other. Time slowed down. The crowd faced the guards. Eyes locked with their opponents’, searching for weakness, searching for resolution. Behind them, Kata could sense the mass of the crowd, poorly prepared for battle. But at the head stood Ejan and his group. This was the moment they had waited for. The tension hovered above them all, trapped in by the clouds above.

  In her heart, Kata knew that the crowd could not stand up to the might of the Houses. She expected at any moment for the guards to separate, and for the thaumaturgists to come, led by the black Furies. Then the crowd would flee for its life, screaming with fear and despair.

  The tension suddenly broke. Kata became aware of a movement in the sky. A storm of stones hovered momentarily in the air, launched by hundreds of arms behind her, and then came down upon the guards, who held their arms over their heads to defend themselves. Cries echoed around the streets: the pain of the guards, the anger of the demonstrators, the shock of those who had never seen anything like it.

  The guards fired their bolt-throwers. With a whir of bolts through the air, black and threatening things speeding toward them. Demonstrators went down. More cries and screams. Demonstrators scattered like a flight of birds under threat.

  Kata pushed herself through running figures toward a shopfront. Already others had broken into the nearby shops. As she pressed herself against the wall, others poured through the nearby door. Moments later the guards were confronted with a hail of roof tiles as demonstrators surged onto neatby roofs.

  Ejan’s seditionists at the head of the march fired their own bolt-throwers.

  The heat of the day was greatest now, and events seemed to occur in a radiant pulsing glare. Like a great pressure cooker, the clouds overhead seemed to trap the heat and focus it back onto the city. The very sky writhed above them, in conflict with itself. Lightning slashed across it and deafening thunder boomed, so that the clash of arms and the cries of the opponents were overwhelmed.

  Sweat ran along Kata’s brow, dust swirled in the air, even as blood ran in the street. The fighting became vicious. People screamed, lay on the ground. The crowd rushed forward over the injured. Kata found herself farther up Via Persine. Several glassmakers held a guard between them. A woman repeatedly bludgeoned the guard on the head with a wooden beam. One of the guard’s eyes fell from its socket.

  Up Via Persine, the line of guards fell back. Elated and savage, the crowd swept forward. All the while Kata wondered: Where are the thaumaturgists? She knew they would come, and this momentary conflagration would be doused by blackness.

  Occasionally there were breaks in the fighting, as both sides regrouped, waited. The injured were carried away from the action: men and women, their skin torn or pierced, bones splintered or broken. Neither side took prisoners, and Kata was surprised by the efficiency with which injured guards were dispatched. The citizens were tougher than she had thought.

  Water was in short supply. Kata shared from a flask that was passed around. She was relieved when the water touched her parched throat, but the flask was all too soon emptied. Around her, elderly sheltered in the side streets. Many had collapsed under the shock of events. Kata wiped sweat from her dirty brow. The stormy air had an eerie quality to it. Things seemed magnified, their outlines sharp and clear.

  “Will the storm pass without breaking the heat?” asked a young man near Kata.

  She looked up at the sky. The clouds rushed overhead, seething and roiling. “Until now the clouds have threatened rain, then passed over as if they have made a joke. But now—”

  “The Collegia did not come,” said the young man. “We can’t defeat the guards. There are too many of them. Others are fighting Marin on the Northern Headland and in Arbor in the Arantine. If the House thaumaturgists are loosed on us, what then?”

  Kata placed her hand on the man’s shoulder. “We’ll face them while we can.”

  Again the crowd launched themselves at the guards, like a snake striking. Bolts on each side were loosed. Kata had both knives in her hands. She rushed forward, expecting at any moment to be struck by a missile. The clash of arms rang. A guard slashed at her with his sword, but she rolled away, threw a knife, and he went down. Then she was over him. Her knife sank into his chest. He gurgled, the light slipped from his eyes. She wondered at the man’s life, his family. She pushed the thought from her mind.

  Through the lines of the guards came apprentice thaumaturgists, students from the university. Perhaps fifty of them, carrying the thick-barreled thaumaturgical weapons that Kata had seen them use in the Quaedian against seditionist students weeks before. So this is it, she thought. This is the end of it. She called out, trying to warn the seditionists, but her voice was lost in the din.

  The apprentices fired the great weapons and seditionists went down, clawing at their faces and screaming. Again the weapons boomed and again another row of seditionists collapsed. Their wails hideous and high, their minds in a far-off land of pain and terror. Nearby a seditionist tore at her cheeks, leaving ragged bloody marks.

  The seditionist forces broke and fled. Kata followed them as they stampeded along Via Persine. Men and women were trampled underfoot in the great rout. An old man cowered in a doorway, his arm around a wounded young woman. Others fled down the side alleyways, driven by blind fear and desperation.

  Kata was filled with the bitterness of defeat. She knew that there could be no rallying of the seditionist forces. They were not soldiers but citizens, better suited to baking bread, building houses, constructing trams, washing clothes, and all the other assorted acts of everyday people. Only the arrival of the Collegia could save them now, and she knew the Collegia would not come.

  The great rout carried her back to Market Square, where there was no escape. The seditionists were hemmed in, trapped in a bottleneck. Kata pressed herself into a doorway at the end of Via Persine. In the square below her, the great panicked floods trampled over one another. Across the road, Ejan and the remnants of his army, rallying in a side street, preparing for one last defensive maneuver. Kata looked up to see the apprentice thaumaturgists marching cruelly forward. Behind them, the House guards stabbed at stray or wounded seditionists. Cries of agony sounded the approach of death. So the Houses had not even needed to mobilize the thaumaturgists in the end, after all. They had been able to rely on their apprentices.

  As she watched them approach, Kata was filled with grief. She had escaped death only two days ago. She was happy enough to embrace it now. In her hands, she held her two knives, which had served her so well.

  Gritting her teeth as the stomping feet approached, Kata closed her eyes and with a leap and a dive, rolled out to face the approaching enemy. She stood alone in the center of Via Persine, the cobblestones beneath her feet, the gray clouds overhead, the heat bearing down on the entire city. She stared grimly at the approaching forces: the student apprentices with their thaumaturgical weapons, the gray-suited guards behind them. Behind them, lighting seemed to strike the mountain itself, lighting the city with unearthly beauty.

  At that moment, as the world was illuminated by ghostly light, the entire right-hand side column of the students and the guards collapsed, as if struck by some unseen force. The others halted, turned to their right. From windows and alleyways came spinning knives and piercing bolts. A second later lithe figures rolled and tumbled and charged, striking with exotic weapons: weighted chains, lassoes and lariats,
spinning knives and impaling bolts. Kata tried to comprehend these images. Who were these deadly, athletic figures rolling and tumbling, cutting a swath into the House forces? Then she understood: Only one caste in Caeli-Amur would fight with such deadly intent.

  “Philosopher-assassins! The philosopher-assassins have come!” she turned. Tears were in her eyes now and she could barely see when she turned back. She remembered now that debate they had been having in the café La Tazia. One of them had said, “The Aya’s Day demonstration will rearrange things in this city, you mark my words.” She recalled now the charge that his words had held. The philosopher-assassins were forever at the beck and call of the Houses, forever used and discarded. Were they not just like her, in the end?

  From the alleyway, Ejan and his seditionists charged, and a cascade of citizens flooded past her to join the battle. At this, the House forces were seized with panic. Many tried to flee, but the deadly weapons of the philosopher-assassins caught them. Others fell to their knees, but the seditionists gave them no mercy. Precious few escaped back, falling upon the rear ranks with dismay.

  With this, the sky opened up and a torrent of rain pelted down upon the city: large drops that fell hard and cold like little stones. Within moments, Kata was drenched. Streams of water ran along the tram tracks, and in the gutters. The long heat of summer had broken.