Atlas watches The Cartographer drop his hand, dart his eyes, and then toss the aureus into the hearth’s embers. A couple minutes, gradients of orange gliding up his tunic’s blank canvas, and Cartographer grabs a long metal tool by the fireplace. He pokes around the embers. He flicks the gold coin from them, onto the hearth’s base. It glows, smoke strings whirling from its edges.
Dropping the fire iron, he hops around, scans the room, and grabs two other metal items off the desk. He returns to the coin. In one hand, he pinches the coin between two prongs of a drawing compass and, in the other, scratches its golden face with a pen thicker, sturdier than his others, either end a different size chisel. He smiles a grimace. He scrapes the stylus across the coin until Caesar’s portrait rubs off.
The Cartographer flips his stylus detailing-point-down and engraves something new. Atlas peers through vision, to the aureus’s face, the tool’s budging nib, but the blinding light and siren return, rumbling senses’ distortion. They flood ears, consume eyes. Sunfire exceeding a thousand lit hearths washes and numbs and launches the marble beneath feet dimensions from presence.
The Cartographer trudges. Drags two jangling sacks wide as his shoulders, tall as his knees, behind his white shoes dirtied beige. The vision light and siren recede, and Atlas drifts after sacks’ bulging spread that plows valleys through copper dirt, gritting pebbles, skidding over island cracks. The speed of his view and presence matches The Cartographer’s.
They plod Sideran land. Sun exhales warm breeze and gold glitters segmented horizon. Their progress draws sweat; but time flows as a dream and plains’ distance closes as a scroll.
They stop at a cliff. Above, sky forever stretches and, below, under the jagged edge a step from The Cartographer, sky forever delves. Eyes wide, The Cartographer casts his gaze down the downward face. He digs his heels into ground and heaves the sacks toward its brink.
Atlas sees into Sidera’s blue overwrap for tens of thousands of kilometers and, answering questions he never asked, perceives endlessness beyond power, mind, word. Touchless wasteland cradles Sidera and chips away at her underbelly with air only felt.
The Cartographer opens one sack. Forehead crumpled, he looks between the drawstrings, clutches the sack’s bulk, and tips it to the cliff. Glimmers escape. The sack pours gold off Sidera’s northern shore: coins, blocks, jewelry, charms, utensils, idols and statues. The Cartographer releases the sack; it skids around the cliff edge and then falls. Panting, he grips the second sack and pushes it after the first.
Thousands of gold items of varying embellishment flip and twirl and shimmer before two rounds of material flapping in descent’s wind. Windshear clatters a couple trinkets against the cliff face. Then all plummets, shrinks until blue consumes the last golden glimmer. The sky merges into one solid mass again.
Behind The Cartographer, a whir crescendos and stops. Footsteps thud dirt.
“My Cartographer.”
The Cartographer reels around on trembling feet. Face white, he leans from the cliff.
Atlas and The Cartographer knew already who spoke. But the being to The Sovereign’s right, her white sleeve wrinkled toward her elbow, wrist upturned, middle finger tracing her veins, is who speeds Atlas’s heart worlds from view.
The Cartographer glances between the two figures coming to a stop. “Should I fall to awe because I was being followed? Or because Sidera’s Absolute was the being to carry out the act?”
“My friend,” The Sovereign wraps an arm around himself and, with his free hand, strokes his chin, “I’m no being. Sidera knows this. Easier to pray to a god unseen than to a man laboring in the constellation over.” He swats the air. “To answer your question, I don’t send the Imperium for personal matters.”
The female next to The Sovereign smiles at her wrist.
“And she,” The Cartographer nods to her, “shares this personal matter?”
The Sovereign lights up and runs a hand through the female’s long, rich, brunette hair. Her light blue eyes gleam. Color in her cheeks, pink on her lips Atlas’s never seen, she drops her arm and smooths down her tunic’s sleeve, bobbing her fingers over Imperium-grade armbands. She wears black pants and a fitted, white undershirt common to guards and Eos laborers. Her face shape, soft but lean, is as Atlas remembers.
“Cartographer, this is my daughter, to whom you’ve yet to be formally introduced,” Sovereign says.
The Cartographer eyes her, her youthful glow and angelic form; her slender fingers he recognizes best from his brief encounter. He drones without acknowledgement. “You have countless daughters, multitudes more than those of my blood, or The Artisan’s.”
“But she is very dear to me.” He smiles at her. “The first fluent in Anglo-Saxon. Have you been practicing, Cartographer? The new generations might soon label our Latin tongue a bit old-fashioned.”
The Cartographer exhales. “Yes. Okay. Have you come to execute me before your favorite invention?”
“Why would I do that?” The Sovereign makes a face and gestures to the female. “Eden, this is my Cartographer. Cartographer, this is Eden of Eos.”
Eden looks kilometers into The Cartographer’s eyes, eyes Roman-russet, far from the accepted cerulean. He drops them.
“Not ‘Eden of Corvus’?” he says.
The Sovereign grimaces. “Distasteful. What kind of a name is ‘Corvus’? It’s like Chort. Do you like the name Chort? I don’t think so.”
“Eden is a name of no Sideran star I recall.”
“Because she is no Sideran. She belongs—”
“On Earth.”
“Yes.” The Sovereign lifts onto the tips of his toes. “Actually, Cartographer, I have come to take you home to Eos.” He turns and gestures to the vehicle behind Eden: a wheelless craft, pointed nose, open interior, deep maroon and black and gold trimmings glistening under sun. An Imperium wagon. “If you apologize.”
The Cartographer sucks a breath. “I apologize I threw the empire’s entire supply of gold into endless sky over the past three cycles and now your new race of murderers cannot travel to Earth. The Artisan made me do it.”
The Sovereign lurches forward and grabs The Cartographer’s tunic. Fingers around Cartographer’s shoulder strap, forehead smooth, eyes smiling, The Sovereign thrusts his consul toward the cliff. He pushes; The Cartographer bursts breath out his mouth. The Sovereign bulges his Imperium cloak between armbands, locks his fingers white, lifts his chin high, and skids The Cartographer on his heels until they overhang sky. The Cartographer kicks for the cliff edge, but all gravel-slick rock slides from soles to toes buckling the treadless skins of his loafers. He grips The Sovereign’s wrists and, face three shades too porcelain for his rusty tan, glares off the side of his own teetering foot.
“Did your disloyalty begin when I provided you a home in Eos, away from the sweat and blood of constellations, as a privileged consul of the greatest empire in time and existence,” The Sovereign draws his eyes from The Cartographer’s chin to hairline, “or when I gave you eternal life alongside universe’s Absolute?”
Eden grins.
The Cartographer trembles and chokes. “I truly am sor—”
“Shh.” Wind through his halfway grayed hair, The Sovereign strokes The Cartographer’s shoulder strap with a thumb. “If you discarded the gold to protect humanity from mine, you shouldn’t have first lusted after your own comfort, according to habit,” he crawls his grip to The Cartographer’s left armband, slips his thumb and finger under it, “and saved one coin for your escape.”
The Sovereign pulls out the aureus coin. The Cartographer claws his wrists and Sovereign pinches the coin, eyeing its face.
“Columba.” Sovereign smiles. “My visionary and his symbolism.”
He flicks the coin to Eden and she catches it.
“This sympathy for those on Earth—which is more important, friend?” The Sovereign says. “Your freedom or your love?”
The Cartographer dangles from The Sovereign’s grip and ga
wks into sky. The Sovereign outstretches his arms; The Cartographer splays off the land at a forty-five-degree angle. He hyperventilates.
The Sovereign plants his right foot between both The Cartographer’s. “It’s been speculated that those who fall from Sidera’s edge fall forever.”
“My Abso—” The Cartographer grimaces. “Sovereign, I will be more loyal to you in the future.”
“Love or freedom? You never answered me. My friends to be—my Accenda on Earth—my Eden claims freedom from love, fire in blood, born to take, and seizes her satisfaction as passion drives. My Siderans claim a more selfless approach. Combine the two and,” The Sovereign jerks The Cartographer, “ah! Freedom and love spread all over Earth.”
He gasps. “I’ll labor in the constellations.”
“But you’re behaving more like an Accend. Secret records, my Cartographer. Secret plans. Sneaking around Storehouse vaults. We will reveal these secret writings for collective’s good and perhaps—”
“Please.”
“—this fall will rightly return you straight to Earth, where Eden will mother a nation obtaining thousands in centuries in a Sideran blink. Would you like to confirm the theory?”
“Friend—”
“No, that’s weak. I believe, rather, when one falls over Sidera, what would occur is cycles upon cycles of falling and, since Absolute has blessed you with life, you need not worry of sustenance or sleep. You would tumble through eternity. At such a speed, the atmosphere would dislocate your limbs and rush your blood to your feet and head and back again as your entrails jolt this way and that, rattled ribs against shriveled lungs and eyes bleeding with the burst of your brain—”
“Corvus—”
“That is, if death finally arrived.”
“You were my friend.” The Cartographer huffs through his teeth. “Why?”
“Why did you attempt to close all Sidera’s exits?”
He mouths a guttural nothingness.
“Because of a connection. You feel connected to humanity. Open that prescient mind, Cartographer. I am the connection with all and there are more beautiful ends than life and more sorry ends than death.” The Sovereign tenses his jaw and digs his heels into dirt, his fingers into The Cartographer’s tunic. His arms shake. “They need me. Are you needed?”
The Cartographer slips, one foot dropping off the cliff, and wobbles on his other foot’s arch and breathes earthquakes and pumps rivers through electric arteries Atlas feels within himself. The Sovereign twists. The Cartographer flinches. Eden smiles in her eyes like her father. Exhaling, foot locked into pivot, The Sovereign spins from the cliffs and thrusts The Cartographer from his grip to the dirt. The Cartographer staggers and collapses on his hip. He crawls, kicks backward from Sidera’s edge.
Eden meets him at his back; she glares down The Cartographer’s scalp. His sashed maroon cloak swaying, the Father of the Queen of Elisium steps from the northern shore and clasps together his hands.
“Of course.” His eyes shine. “Of course you’re needed. The Curative Estate and Corrective Stronghold should heal and persuade you.” The Sovereign taps his own head with a finger. “You’re a part of me, after all.”
The Cartographer’s scowl cringes. Shrinking under her shadow, he whips his head toward Eden. She rubs her thumb into her fingers and spurts a flame from between their crevices. The Cartographer scrambles to his knees.
“You discovered this world, remember?” The Sovereign says. “You asked for all Sidera is. Why are you surprised? Why do you not also desire Eden on Earth? Puer, let us begin our return to the true ways.” He looks down on The Cartographer’s hands pressing dirt. Stiffens tone. “Recite the primary Absolute Praise three times.”
“Hear, Administration, your citizens.” The Cartographer bows his head. “Hear, citizens, your Administration. Praise Abso—” he bares his teeth and quivers, “Absolute for the glory of Sidera, our everlasting empire. May the sun never set and never rise. Imperium, deliver us from choice. Imperium, progress us without pain. Imperium, take our yield that you may fairly give, our views that we may abstain, our passions that we may submit, and break the privacy that separates and free us from independence. For the majority is reality and the one,” The Cartographer’s voice cracks, “is none.”
The Sovereign nods to Eden and she raises the aureus coin. It glints. On its face, newly engraved in detail, a dove flies through gold. Atlas’s coin.
“Again,” Sovereign says.
The Cartographer juts his jaw and sharpens his stare. Puffing through his nose, he sweeps his hand over the dirt before his face. Its pebbles grind and finer particles shift and smooth. The Sovereign, hands behind his back, chest broad, strolls around The Cartographer, toward Eden.
“Again, citizen.”
The Cartographer’s forehead relaxes and mouth opens. He darts his eyes across the dirt, grass patch to grass patch and the smoothed gold between. “For the majority is reality and the one—”
Eden turns the coin in her fingers. The Sovereign rests a hand on her shoulder.
“From the beginning, Cartographer. This is for our good.”
“And the one,” The Cartographer whispers, “is—”
He sticks his forefinger into soil and drags it down. Atlas feels the rasp of grain, magnified one hundred times, resonate through his skull; he tastes the sun on the aureus, the crisp of breeze, and smells dirt’s freshness, caverns’ steam wetting Sidera’s undercrust with a dampness only he drinks. The Cartographer draws a line into soil, drags his finger right, and draws another, then another. He curves the last line, scoops it down, and back up to meet the first. The shallow indentation the width of his finger shows two connected peaks. In the middle, between the peaks, he draws a circle.
The Cartographer lifts his hand and eyes his two shapes of an image.
It’s the sun rising into a valley. A horizon at dawn. Atlas knows and feels and, in the Administration Citadel’s highest level, a warmth separate from The Presage’s washes over his body as it unties the knots in gut.
Pressing on Eden’s shoulder, The Sovereign exhales and turns her toward him. “Begin your portal as instructed. My loveliest, let us take you home.”
She flips the coin onto the ground.
With his finger, The Cartographer writes something beneath his image. Five characters dipping canals of dirt:
ΠΥΛΩΝ
PYLON.
Kneeling, The Cartographer bends over and touches his forehead to the dirt before the image. He murmurs into himself. “He will come. The one will escape. The one will return. When all others cast down their columns of burden, the one will uphold. When all others deny gravity, the one will choose to fall. He will suffer and groan and stoop. When sky thunders, sun sets, when wind sweeps flame across earth and the great portal opens by sacrifice’s blood—”
“Cartographer, now isn’t the moment for one of your childhood trances.”
“—when Sidera falls, he only will catch it upon his shoulders.” The Cartographer plants his palm upon his drawing. “For the majority will look down and the one will look up. At the end, through the greatest sacrifice, the one will liberate the universe and save us all.”
Grinning, Eden angles her hands to the coin. They glow.
The Cartographer lifts his head and squints into sky. “He will be named—”
“Cease this chanting,” The Sovereign says, “or Stronghold’s finest will saw out your tongue and cause me sorrow.”
The Cartographer’s lips upturn. Posture tall, knees in ground, he says to the distant blue, “I don’t mindlessly chant, Corvus. You of all should know by now.”
Eden streams flames onto the coin. The Sovereign’s eyes narrow a notch, his fingers fidgeting.
“You do what then?”
Atlas’s view jerks forward. His presence accelerates toward The Cartographer and his image of horizon and characters of Pylon. White light billows around Sidera’s cliffs and gushes inward, rolling warmth across plains, rumb
ling overexposure toward pupil. The vision’s familiar siren shoots across dimensions.
The Cartographer turns toward Atlas, looks him in the eye, his decades-too-distant eye, and says, “I map.”
He slams both palms into his image. He outpours a gust and a cyclone explodes the dirt. It swirls golden particles into a circular wall spinning, climbing around The Cartographer’s body.
Eden cuts her streams and The Sovereign runs his tongue along his bottom teeth; and, their hair and clothes fleeing the centrifugal tornado, they squint at Cartographer’s wind and dust that twinkles in sky, scrapes their cheeks. The Cartographer’s figure distorts behind a blurred sheet launching a pillar taller than towers, louder than oceans, glistening as one Montanan lake’s ripples that launched the same in their future and Atlas’s past.
“This show—” The Sovereign yells. “A beautiful distraction, Cartographer.”
But this cyclone isn’t for them.
Atlas flies forward. The vision’s white light blares and siren glares; Eden and her father see and hear neither. Eden grabs the aureus in a fist. The wrinkles at their corners flattening, Sovereign’s eyes widen till the cyclone floods their shallows mulling design of the unexpected. Atlas hits it. He merges with dirt tearing a storm, whipping a whoosh that sings under the siren. The light wraps him, siren pierces him, but they sputter a frequency he hadn’t felt in the other visions.
This vision scalds. This vision’s light and sound inject electricity into his veins. Glare and blare weave into column’s coils kilometers upward and flicker all colors and swing across all musical notes and blow all-encompassing flames, all gasps upon starlit hilltops through his pounding chest.
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 50
